Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Okay, so which stations are going to get an increase in services into and out of New Street as a result?
Good question, to which the honest answer is I don’t think it’s been decided yet. The growth is in towns to the north (where I live) so obvious candidates would be Lichfield/Sutton Coldfield, Cannock/Hednesford and Codsall (which is west rather than north). But that may change by 2027.
Again, we come back to capacity. It takes a lot longer to turn around a Pendolino than to turn around say a class 323 and they’re a lot longer than local trains as well. So taking seven platforms (probably six in full use) out of New Street might free up the equivalent of twelve platforms for local services.
New Street is also a massive bottleneck in the whole UK rail system, with so many lines going through the station. It’s not possible to expand it, as it’s surrounded on all sides, the new station half a mile away at Curzon St allows much easier access for the HS2 platforms and tracks.
Also, let’s not forget it’s a shithole. It must be the most horrible railway station of any major city in Europe. When I lived in Aber, I used to change at Wolverhampton to avoid getting off at New Street. (Helpfully that was where most services finished anyway due to delays at New Street.)
A new station close by will be much better. I’m not sure it’s even half a mile away.
Apparently it’s a bit better now, they built a new concourse a few years ago to replace the horrible old ‘60s one on top of the tracks, but there’s still no space. I had to change there from Aber, as I was getting a connecting train that didn’t stop at Wolverhampton. There might have been the occasional bus for that last part of the journey to Birmingham, there was always some sort of work going on or an incident that took out half the platforms at NS.
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
What does Dominic Cummings think? Remember he thought Boris foolish to oppose Rashford on school meals. Has HMG again tied itself to a politically damaging position with little if any upside?
Is it damaging to say we should look after people in the UK and help abroad as we're able to do so?
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Okay, so which stations are going to get an increase in services into and out of New Street as a result?
Good question, to which the honest answer is I don’t think it’s been decided yet. The growth is in towns to the north (where I live) so obvious candidates would be Lichfield/Sutton Coldfield, Cannock/Hednesford and Codsall (which is west rather than north). But that may change by 2027.
Again, we come back to capacity. It takes a lot longer to turn around a Pendolino than to turn around say a class 323 and they’re a lot longer than local trains as well. So taking seven platforms (probably six in full use) out of New Street might free up the equivalent of twelve platforms for local services.
Sorry for the slow reply - work intervened. I notice that there's no mention of HS2 freeing up capacity for the cross city line on Wikipedia:
Greek intelligence: at least 3 people were tracking Protasevich throughout Athens and Crete since his arrival on May 9 until May 23. “It is clear as we gather CCTV footage they were being tracked by intelligence professionals carrying Russian passports.”
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Okay, so which stations are going to get an increase in services into and out of New Street as a result?
Good question, to which the honest answer is I don’t think it’s been decided yet. The growth is in towns to the north (where I live) so obvious candidates would be Lichfield/Sutton Coldfield, Cannock/Hednesford and Codsall (which is west rather than north). But that may change by 2027.
Again, we come back to capacity. It takes a lot longer to turn around a Pendolino than to turn around say a class 323 and they’re a lot longer than local trains as well. So taking seven platforms (probably six in full use) out of New Street might free up the equivalent of twelve platforms for local services.
New Street is also a massive bottleneck in the whole UK rail system, with so many lines going through the station. It’s not possible to expand it, as it’s surrounded on all sides, the new station half a mile away at Curzon St allows much easier access for the HS2 platforms and tracks.
Also, let’s not forget it’s a shithole. It must be the most horrible railway station of any major city in Europe. When I lived in Aber, I used to change at Wolverhampton to avoid getting off at New Street. (Helpfully that was where most services finished anyway due to delays at New Street.)
A new station close by will be much better. I’m not sure it’s even half a mile away.
Apparently it’s a bit better now, they built a new concourse a few years ago to replace the horrible old ‘60s one on top of the tracks, but there’s still no space. I had to change there from Aber, as I was getting a connecting train that didn’t stop at Wolverhampton. There might have been the occasional bus for that last part of the journey to Birmingham, there was always some sort of work going on or an incident that took out half the platforms at NS.
It really isn’t. True, the entrance is shinier, but the platforms are still vile.
“Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.
“To clinch the case, a team led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country3. “The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,” says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions4,5, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs1.”
From the 2017 article, regarding SARS1: "Another outstanding question is how a virus from bats in Yunnan could travel to animals and humans around 1,000 kilometres away in Guangdong, without causing any suspected cases in Yunnan itself. That “has puzzled me a long time”, says Tu."
So the best identified source of SARS1 is 1000 miles from the first detected outbreak, just as it is 1000 miles from first detection of the Covid-19 outbreak. Mysteries in both cases (but in the latter case there's a possible vector via transport to the lab in Wuhan). But if such a jump was possible in the first case it was also possible in the second, without the lab. That's why the evidence is not compelling for me, although the lab explanation is certainly plausible.
Edit: Sorry, miles/km difference. But stil large distances
Possible, as ‘Tu’ says, but puzzling. This is more evidence AGAINST natural zoonosis
The (reasonably well demonstrated) existence of an (unknown) path from a bat cave to humans 1000km away with no plausible link to the lab in Wuhan for SARS1 is evidence against the existence of an (unknown, non-lab) link between a bat cave and Wuhan for SARS2?
I can't help feeling that you have already decided.
It's pretty bizarre to assume that there's only one cave in China capable of supporting bats with coronaviruses. Since we know that they live across much of SE Asia. And that coronaviruses, in extreme variety, are endemic in bats.
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
That would be the Conservative Party you are describing, with its own moral superiority complex. The 0.7 per cent of GNI (gross national income) commitment, which btw surely does provide some measure of what we can afford, was made by a Conservative Government and was a pledge renewed in the 2019 manifesto of this Conservative Government.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Okay, so which stations are going to get an increase in services into and out of New Street as a result?
Good question, to which the honest answer is I don’t think it’s been decided yet. The growth is in towns to the north (where I live) so obvious candidates would be Lichfield/Sutton Coldfield, Cannock/Hednesford and Codsall (which is west rather than north). But that may change by 2027.
Again, we come back to capacity. It takes a lot longer to turn around a Pendolino than to turn around say a class 323 and they’re a lot longer than local trains as well. So taking seven platforms (probably six in full use) out of New Street might free up the equivalent of twelve platforms for local services.
Sorry for the slow reply - work intervened. I notice that there's no mention of HS2 freeing up capacity for the cross city line on Wikipedia:
If you're getting rid of those services to make way for more local trains, what do the people of Coventry do if they want to go to London?
There would still be plenty of fast 110 mph trains through to London (Milton Keynes would be the same) plus I am assuming the Voyagers from Holyhead would take that route too.
It’s also not far from the HS2 junction at Solihull.
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
What does Dominic Cummings think? Remember he thought Boris foolish to oppose Rashford on school meals. Has HMG again tied itself to a politically damaging position with little if any upside?
Is it damaging to say we should look after people in the UK and help abroad as we're able to do so?
Depends on what narrative sticks.
Plenty of people are happy for there to be no such aid, others would like it reduced or reformed to be more effective, some would like a lot more given. So there's no automatic upside or downside.
For all its flaws I'm inclined to retain it, but it can be argued the other way in a reasonable manner - but if it looks callous or vindictive then it can indeed damange the government.
Typical, you go away from the screen for just 5 minutes and something less likely than a bug eyed alien coming up the Thames on the back of Nessie occurs.
An astonishing data security blunder saw the personal data of Special Forces soldiers circulating around WhatsApp in a leaked British Army spreadsheet.
The document ... contained details of all 1,182 British soldiers recently promoted from corporal to sergeant – including those in sensitive units such as the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/uk_special_forces_data_breach_whatsapp/
Wouldn't have happened if the information had been held in a filing cabinet in a locked room.
Yeah, no one has ever left paper files anywhere, or had documents stolen from locked rooms before. Just think of all the double agents during the cold war, for starters!
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
What does it matter what the public wants or the country needs when it comes to elected politicians Pandering to charities, quangos, lobbyists and vested interests. When you read these organisations making total unverified claims via press release that these ‘cuts’ have caused all manner of death, devastation and disaster it is meekly accepted by the press and Recycling the press releases.
Of course part of it is some of Boris’s enemies using it against him and fair play to them for that.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
As much as Southgate says the fans don't understand, I think there is a misunderstanding from the authorities and the media about the feeling amongst fans. The whole BLM stuff has been pushed so hard by the media, Sky still flash it up on their coverage, I don't think they have quite realised that a lot of people aren't on board with wanting anything to do with a campaign they see as a political organisation many values they don't support.
Its a bit like Brexit, the media couldn't / can't work out how people could be for such a thing, they must all be racist Knuckleheads.
They might claim taking the knee isn't BLM, but that is what it is associated with now, and why the NFL moved for something very different.
An astonishing data security blunder saw the personal data of Special Forces soldiers circulating around WhatsApp in a leaked British Army spreadsheet.
The document ... contained details of all 1,182 British soldiers recently promoted from corporal to sergeant – including those in sensitive units such as the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/uk_special_forces_data_breach_whatsapp/
Wouldn't have happened if the information had been held in a filing cabinet in a locked room.
Why is there even a spreadsheet on that?
Presumably it was a list of pay grade adjustments for the HR department. Should have been market Secret though, and carefully controlled. There’s bloody good reasons we don’t name service personnel, apart from a few senior officers not on frontline duty.
The 2007 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak occurred when the discharge of infectious effluent from a laboratory in Surrey led to foot-and-mouth disease infections at four nearby farms.
One thing that has been doing my head in for the last year or so is the number of people who think lab accidents are rare. A few minutes Googling can bring up huge lists of serious lab accidents all over the world. China itself has had many serious lab accidents, and those are of course just the ones we know of.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an objective seeker-after-truth.
We've had that godawful Daily Mail expose that "proved" it was "physically impossible" to be natural due to four charged components in a row. Which was plain wrong, to the point where whoever wrote it was either fundamentally ignorant of the subject or deliberately trying to mislead (it took moments for those who did know anything about the subject to point to several thousand such occurrences in the human genome alone.
We've had people breathlessly telling us about "gain of function" because scientists study change of host range, change of transmissibility, and change in antigenicity. But as a category, it sounds like "make viruses worse!" and SARS-CoV-2's lengthy presymptomatic period and duration of infectiveness and viral load (the things that make it bad for us) aren't usually studied in that section. Those who aren't expert in the subject can wrap them all up together and assume that "gain of function research going on here" means "anything that makes viruses bad, must be biological warfare."
Being able to switch on and off functions like that would take a level of knowledge way beyond anything we've ever seen. Not impossible, but has been pointed out, we'd see other capabilities go hand-in-glove with that - such as a skillset with mRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
I tend to the point of view of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is, most often but least dramatically, the right one.
Given SARS type viruses have already been pinned down in the past to civet cats, camels and bats and have been proven to have made the leap to humans, it seems eminently logical and more plausible than anything else that SARS-Cov-2 would be the same. Someone was butchering an infected wild animal somewhere and, in the process of eviscerating it, they breathed in some splatter from an infected lung. And thus a pandemic was born.
In any case, other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? What we need is prophylactic treatments (vaccines) and symptom relief. It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from. It's here. We have to deal with it.
An astonishing data security blunder saw the personal data of Special Forces soldiers circulating around WhatsApp in a leaked British Army spreadsheet.
The document ... contained details of all 1,182 British soldiers recently promoted from corporal to sergeant – including those in sensitive units such as the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/uk_special_forces_data_breach_whatsapp/
I don't find any data 'blunders' astonishing - given how insecure people in general are, and I include myself, I'm astonished it doesn't happen a lot more often.
Remember that one with, I think, the MoD redacting documents, but you could copy paste the redacted part into a fresh document to reveal it?
An astonishing data security blunder saw the personal data of Special Forces soldiers circulating around WhatsApp in a leaked British Army spreadsheet.
The document ... contained details of all 1,182 British soldiers recently promoted from corporal to sergeant – including those in sensitive units such as the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/uk_special_forces_data_breach_whatsapp/
Wouldn't have happened if the information had been held in a filing cabinet in a locked room.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
There’s no way the current gestures last more than a week into full crowds. They would be better off going back to the old “Kick it out” campaign.
So are we thinking that NZ will bat into tomorrow before the declaration?
Without Trent Boult, their attack might themselves find taking wickets quite hard. As a result, I’m thinking they will want to bat twice to give them some respite.
An hour after tea today is when I’d expect Williamson to declare if they’re still batting.
I think Wagner will be a nightmare on this pitch. Unlike the England attack he will really mix it up a bit.
He’s a very fine bowler. But Southee is a Robinson-style bowler. De Grandhomme isn’t a strike bowler, and Jamieson with all his exciting height and pace has AIUI never bowled at Lord’s. I’m thinking this pitch is slow which won’t help Santner. So I’m wondering how much support there will be.
So unless England bat like complete idiots, it would be better to budget for a hard couple of days, bat two sessions and then bowl last on a worn pitch.
And also - although it slightly contradicts my point above - remember Williamson is quite attacking. He likes to get on with a match. Get them in tonight and have two goes with the new ball, will likely be his thinking.
So I stand by my prediction. Declaration an hour after tea, unless there’s a dramatic collapse.
Now you see the mistake you have made there...unless England bat like complete idiots....and England really don't bat deep at all with this team.
Which is depressing considering we only have four bowlers - and Root as the spinning all rounder...
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
There’s no way the current gestures last more than a week into full crowds. They would be better off going back to the old “Kick it out” campaign.
No, i think they are going to double down on it. And then there will be rules that you are ejected for doing it and it will be a big bust up.
Its like Brexit, the authorities can't envision how anybody could not be totally on board with their opinion, other than racists, which is why they are doing it.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
I think it unlikely most are aware of the wider politics of organisations. I think it more likely those booing, even if containing some pretty nasty folk as a minority, would mostly simply dislike such displays (notwithstanding there were always banners about Kick it Out and so on) right as they are waiting for the match to start.
I think FrancisUrquart sets out why it is more complex than commentators and media would like it to be, however. Certainly when it first happened some of the responses to some mild booing was hysterical.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an objective seeker-after-truth.
We've had that godawful Daily Mail expose that "proved" it was "physically impossible" to be natural due to four charged components in a row. Which was plain wrong, to the point where whoever wrote it was either fundamentally ignorant of the subject or deliberately trying to mislead (it took moments for those who did know anything about the subject to point to several thousand such occurrences in the human genome alone.
We've had people breathlessly telling us about "gain of function" because scientists study change of host range, change of transmissibility, and change in antigenicity. But as a category, it sounds like "make viruses worse!" and SARS-CoV-2's lengthy presymptomatic period and duration of infectiveness and viral load (the things that make it bad for us) aren't usually studied in that section. Those who aren't expert in the subject can wrap them all up together and assume that "gain of function research going on here" means "anything that makes viruses bad, must be biological warfare."
Being able to switch on and off functions like that would take a level of knowledge way beyond anything we've ever seen. Not impossible, but has been pointed out, we'd see other capabilities go hand-in-glove with that - such as a skillset with mRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
Adding to that, a recent paper suggests the potential likelihood of direct bat-human zoonotic origins.
Spike mutation T403R allows bat coronavirus RaTG13 to use human ACE2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.31.446386v1.full.pdf ...Although the S protein of the closest related bat virus, RaTG13, shows high similarity to the SARS-CoV-2 S protein it does not efficiently interact with the human ACE2 receptor2. Here, we show that a single T403R mutation allows the RaTG13 S to utilize the human ACE2 receptor for infection of human cells and intestinal organoids...
A good example of the overreaction of punters to events. When England took the 4th wicket just now, their odds on Betfair Exchange changed from 20 to 10. Far too much change for just one wicket in the circumstances.
Except the New Statesman figures include students amongst the figure for 'excluding retirees.'
As I showed last night IPSOS Mori had the Tories winning all classes amongst over 65s in 2019 and the Tories won ABs, C1s and C2s amongst 35-54s with Labour winning DEs amongst that age group.
Labour won all classes amongst 18 to 34s though so it is really only students and under 35s not yet on the property ladder Labour won, once workers neared 40 and got on the property ladder they voted Tory (with only those low paid workers or the unemployed still in social housing or renting over 40 in social class DE sticking with Labour).
Blair of course even managed to win retirees over 65 in 1997 41% to 36% for the Tories and in 2001 he only lost them by 1% to Hague and in 2005 by just 4% to Howard. Even Brown only lost them by 13% in 2010 and so it really is a particularly post Brexit phenomonon.
For example Boris beat Corbyn by a vast 47% margin amongst over 65s in 2019 compared to the 24% margin Cameron beat Ed Miliband by in 2015 amongst retirees
The comparison is quite useful in itself.
But I think it will help perpetuate this idea that over time, demographics favour Labour as older Tory voters die and younger Labour voters turn 18.
Of course if that had been the case, Labour would have had a majority from at the very latest 1992.
Generally the average voter votes Labour from when they get their first vote as they leave school and continue to vote Labour as they attend university, if they do and through their 20s when they are renting free and single and early 30s. By their mid 30s if they are married and have bought their first property they start to consider voting Tory and by the time they reach retirement age in their 60s they will likely own their own home outright and continue voting Tory at every general election until they die
Although your analysis is correct, these patterns are not inevitable.
There's an assumption on here that those who are retired vote out of narrow self-interest, and of course many do. But it's worth remembering that retired people usually have kids, maybe in their 30s/40s, and often grandchildren. It doesn't take that much for older people to be persuaded that what may be in their own narrow self-interest is actually not in the interest of their kids or grandkids, especially if they see their kids prospects being tarnished by specific policies. I make no claim to nobility, but when I come to vote, given that I am comfortable retired, I'm more interested in what the offer is to my offspring and to the public good than to me personally.
Yes and they may also help their children get on the property ladder by giving them some money for a deposit to buy their first property too, thus turning their children into Tories by their 40s
I hope this is not an automatic effect because I've just given my son some money to help him buy a house. I'd never have done this if it's going to turn him into a Tory.
Is it too late to add a condition to your gift? Namely, your son agrees to only vote by post, and gives you the right to 'supervise' his completion of the ballot.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
I think it unlikely most are aware of the wider politics of organisations. I think it more likely those booing, even if containing some pretty nasty folk as a minority, would mostly simply dislike such displays (notwithstanding there were always banners about Kick it Out and so on) right as they are waiting for the match to start.
I think FrancisUrquart sets out why it is more complex than commentators and media would like it to be, however. Certainly when it first happened some of the responses to some mild booing was hysterical.
If you watch a lot of the coverage it is absolutely unrelenting...BLM flashed up all the time and now with BT and their social media campaign in conjunction with a bad faith "charity" (who aren't they are political).
Now you could say there is a problem, but I think a lot of people don't think the UK is anything like the US, so BLM isn't applicable and that yes players get abuse on social media but it is a tiny minority i.e. doesn't require BT to push this agenda every single ad break...when most people juat want to sit down and watch some footy and escape from the pandemic.
The NBA tried this and lost loads of viewers. The NFL went a different route and retained them.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
Wheng I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
Doing it on the basis of economic inactivity is clearly invidious and overlooks that many younger people are similarly inactive, as others have said.
The best argument in favour would be to weight votes by average remaining life expectancy, which would upweight the votes of the young on the grounds that they will suffer the consequences of today's policy decisions for much longer.
Yes the heart of the argument is that it tends to make government policy rather short termist and not put enough emphasis on things like global warming and environmental factors. I am not sure that is entirely accurate but it is what is contended.
If they ever get around to replacing the Lords, it would be interesting to play around with getting better representation in the political process for groups underserved by one person one vote. This is after all the same premise for bishops sitting in Parliament. The inverting demographic period is an obvious target.
But what about going a step further and having a ring fenced lobby empowered on behalf of those not yet born? I call it the Cathedral Lobby, in place to ensure proper attention on big challenges and opportunities for human civilisation that are a) highly likely to occur, b) are improbable in our lifetime, and c) will take a multi generational effort to confront. Climate change broadly fits this of course but also supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, shifting global polarity, solar weather, AI, bioengineering etc... And on the opportunities side, interstellar probes (and travel), terraforming, AI, bioengineering, fusion and Dyson spheres etc...
Politics as it exists is just so mundane.
Surely once we have an alien dictatorship we will look back on the present as the good old days?
I don’t proffer any opinion on whether we will shortly make “contact” with aliens, or whether they will begin (or already are) interfering with life on Earth.
Only to note that the critical mass of opinion in the US security establishment has publicly moved towards a position that we are likely not the only technological beings on Earth.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
As much as Southgate says the fans don't understand, I think there is a misunderstanding from the authorities and the media about the feeling amongst fans. The whole BLM stuff has been pushed so hard by the media, Sky still flash it up on their coverage, I don't think they have quite realised that a lot of people aren't on board with wanting anything to do with a campaign they see as a political organisation many values they don't support.
Its a bit like Brexit, the media couldn't / can't work out how people could be for such a thing, they must all be racist Knuckleheads.
They might claim taking the knee isn't BLM, but that is what it is associated with now, and why the NFL moved for something very different.
I remember when Millwall fans booed they made a statement, largely ignored, that their objection was BLM was a Marxist organisation as the old BLM organisation was and still is.
When some of the English rugby players of Pacific ancestry stood they were castigated too.
It’s like many debates these days, if you are not fully 100% signed up,to the prevailing orthodoxy then you are automatically an enemy of the cause. The trans minefield is another such issue.
As for Brexit they still don’t get it and never will.
Who are these pensioners not paying council tax? Asking because I want to make sure my parents aren't missing out on something.
Ultimately, the problem is that no democracy has ever gone down the road of only letting net tax payers vote. Should those employed in the public sector get a vote?
Even if such a method was decided upon, what is net?
I've been working over twenty years now and I'm not convinced I'm a net tax payer. Sure I pay VAT (well, sorta), PAYE (well, sorta), council tax, road tax etc but what do I get back out of the system? I don't claim any benefit at all, but I do make use of state owned roads, my bins get collected and the street is lit at night. What value would I place on these?
You aren't being raped or murdered by either invading armies or hordes of thugs. You are able to buy stuff in the shops without having to take a wheelbarrow full of fivers. You can say what you like about the state without being hauled off for random torture or murder by security police. You benefit from a nation that is (largely) healthy, educated and productive.
To name a few. You are very much a net tax payer - and the freedom to pretend that you are not is also what benefit you get from paying your taxes.
One reason I am very passionate about the NHS is just how much I have taken from it. A whole litany of interventions over my 48 years, two of which would have carried me away before my time, and several of the others would have been life changing. And the price to me? Other than prescriptions, nothing, nada - at the point of care. In no way will I ever pay enough tax to cover it. The flip side is that for many, they will pay more in tax to the NHS (indirectly) and never use it. But it is an amazing thing we have done.
Yes, people who go on about the NHS being a tiresome religious cult don't get the difference it makes when you really need it. I did once meet a lady who said she didn't see why she should pay tax for the NHS since she was perfectly well - the arguments seemed so obvious (Count your blessings, and are you sure you'll be well forever?). Does anyone with insurance complain that it's wasted because the house didn't burn down this year?
Obviously there's scope for different systems to deliver the same effect. But living in a country where you always have to be scared that you'll get a disease and not be able to afford to be treated must be very scary.
I'd also add that we shouldn't expect it to be perfect, and shouldn't expect frills on the service. Its a great, mostly functional service. I have no complaints. If you want attractive surroundings, and quality catering, and decent internet and TV etc, then pay the money (if you can) and go private.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
There’s no way the current gestures last more than a week into full crowds. They would be better off going back to the old “Kick it out” campaign.
No, i think they are going to double down on it. And then there will be rules that you are ejected for doing it and it will be a big bust up.
Its like Brexit, the authorities can't envision how anybody could not be totally on board with their opinion, other than racists, which is why they are doing it.
Of course, what they should do and what they will do are likely to be very different.
I think they’re going to be quite shocked at the reaction, to what’s become a very political campaign.
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
What does Dominic Cummings think? Remember he thought Boris foolish to oppose Rashford on school meals. Has HMG again tied itself to a politically damaging position with little if any upside?
Is it damaging to say we should look after people in the UK and help abroad as we're able to do so?
Depends on what narrative sticks.
Plenty of people are happy for there to be no such aid, others would like it reduced or reformed to be more effective, some would like a lot more given. So there's no automatic upside or downside.
For all its flaws I'm inclined to retain it, but it can be argued the other way in a reasonable manner - but if it looks callous or vindictive then it can indeed damange the government.
There are a couple of issues, one to do with Aid, the other to do with the Johnson style of government.
The problem with a sudden cut in any budget is that you end up having to cut the things you can cut quickly, rather than the things that might be best (or least bad) to cut. Even if it's reinstated, some of the harm will have been done by now.
Second, the PM is developing a bit of a reputation for making noises about being tough on spending, then being forced into retreating in a messy way. Free school meals was the most memorable example. I assume a retreat on school catch-up is lumbering over the hill. Partly, it's undignified. Worse, savings are going to have to come from somewhere. If I were Rishi, I'd be beginning to feel a bit pishied off about it.
But that's the trouble with populists. After a while, they run out of other people's money.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
I think it unlikely most are aware of the wider politics of organisations. I think it more likely those booing, even if containing some pretty nasty folk as a minority, would mostly simply dislike such displays (notwithstanding there were always banners about Kick it Out and so on) right as they are waiting for the match to start.
I think FrancisUrquart sets out why it is more complex than commentators and media would like it to be, however. Certainly when it first happened some of the responses to some mild booing was hysterical.
If you watch a lot of the coverage it is absolutely unrelenting...BLM flashed up all the time and now with BT and their social media campaign in conjunction with a bad faith "charity" (who aren't they are political).
Now you could say there is a problem, but I think a lot of people don't think the UK is anything like the US, so BLM isn't applicable and that yes players get abuse on social media but it is a tiny minority i.e. doesn't require BT to push this agenda every single ad break...when most people juat want to sit down and watch some footy and escape from the pandemic.
The NBA tried this and lost loads of viewers. The NFL went a different route and retained them.
I don’t have BT, just out of interest what charity is it ?
2.1m people remained on furlough at the end of May, down from 2.6m two weeks prior (i.e. immediately before the easing of restrictions).
I think that is broadly as expected. I don't think it is particular spectacular and I think the government will be hoping that the easing means significant further returns to work in the first half of June.
It does however reduce the extent of the scheme and burden on the taxpayer to its lowest level so far, basically equivalent to its previous low in October 2020.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
As much as Southgate says the fans don't understand, I think there is a misunderstanding from the authorities and the media about the feeling amongst fans. The whole BLM stuff has been pushed so hard by the media, Sky still flash it up on their coverage, I don't think they have quite realised that a lot of people aren't on board with wanting anything to do with a campaign they see as a political organisation many values they don't support.
Its a bit like Brexit, the media couldn't / can't work out how people could be for such a thing, they must all be racist Knuckleheads.
They might claim taking the knee isn't BLM, but that is what it is associated with now, and why the NFL moved for something very different.
I remember when Millwall fans booed they made a statement, largely ignored, that their objection was BLM was a Marxist organisation as the old BLM organisation was and still is.
When some of the English rugby players of Pacific ancestry stood they were castigated too.
It’s like many debates these days, if you are not fully 100% signed up,to the prevailing orthodoxy then you are automatically an enemy of the cause. The trans minefield is another such issue.
As for Brexit they still don’t get it and never will.
The one that really confused the blue checkmarks, the white rugby player refusing to take the knee, they all piled on....then they commentary team had to make an announcement that he doesn't agree with BLM so won't be partaking, but you should know he has adopted black son, so perhaps maybe stop the online "abuse".
On Worldometer, China, with a population of 1,400,000,000, is at number 98 in terms of cases, just behind Montenegro (population 622,000)
In terms of deaths, China, population 1,400,000,000, is in 61st place, just behind North Macedonia (population 2m)
Is this credible? Not really. As we’ve often discussed, China must be simply under-counting. Right?
Well maybe. But what if China isn’t undercounting, particularly? After all, their economy has bounced back, it has already regained all lost GDP, and they are living fairly normally, unlike us. Their behaviour speaks of a genuinely flattened pandemic
How have they done this? Are they superhuman? One answer could be this: they knew exactly what virus they were dealing with. They knew how it spread. They knew how to quarantine against it. They knew all the protocols, they maybe had therapeutics (vaccines even?) ready to go. Because they engineered the damn virus in the first place. In the Iab in Wuhan. Possibly as a bio weapon
The argument against this is the early chaos we saw in wuhan and hubei. But that only argues for an inadvertent leak, rather than deliberate release. It still came from the lab
Anyone still arguing for natural zoonosis has to explain China’s phenomenal ability to contain this virus, almost as if they were forewarned
I don't think they have really contained it though. This outbreak in Yantian had to be reported as it resulted in significant delays to shipping coming in and out. How many similar recent outbreaks have there been in the interior?
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
Maybe the rebels think that manifesto commitments should be adhered to. Tory manifesto, 2019:
We will proudly maintain our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on development, and do more to help countries receiving aid become self-sufficient.
A very good review paper on emergence of bat coronaviruses in human populations.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8005542/ ...SARS-CoV has emerged as a human disease in Guangdong, Southern China, in November 2002. The location and time of the original transmission from animal to human is not known and SARS-CoV was found in wet markets in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in masked palm civets (P. larvata) and raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides) (Tu et al., 2004; Webster, 2004; Song et al., 2005). However, these two markets were the only places where SARS-CoV was found in small mammals. It was not found in any other masked palm civet samples from farms in Guangdong, Henan and Hunan (Tu et al., 2004). Although no virus has ever been isolated outside the two markets of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, a massive culling of civets was carried out to eradicate the “source” of infection (Tu et al., 2004; Watts, 2004). SARS-CoV-related viruses were isolated from Chinese rufous horseshoe bats R. sinicus. However, these viruses were not the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV and civet viruses. Following the emergence in Guangzhou, SARS spread in the urban human population mostly around the Hong Kong bay, Taiwan, and Canada, killing 8,422 persons for a death rate of 9.6% (Chan-Yeung and Xu, 2003). Bats were designated as “reservoir” for SARS-CoV, but the exact path leading to the emergence of SARS in the human population has never been elucidated. Masked palm civets, who were pointed out at responsible for human infection, seem to simply be parallel hosts that were infected in these two markets along with humans (Tu et al., 2004; Li et al., 2005a). Furthermore, civets were successfully infected experimentally with human isolates of SARS-CoV (Li et al., 2005a; Wu et al., 2005). The virus were most likely imported to the markets from an unknown place by an unknown intermediary, which could potentially be a human being...
... Viruses very closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been isolated from Rhinolophus bats, i.e., R. affinis and R. malayanus, from Yunnan (Zhou P. et al., 2020; Zhou H. et al., 2020). However, just as for SARS-CoV, the time and location of the initial event of emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the path from bats to humans remains unknown. In both SARS and COVID-19, the main drivers for disease emergence are human activities. A reasonable hypothesis is that the SARS-CoV-like and SARS-CoV-2-like viruses were circulating at low levels in the wild without being detected and that these viruses triggered an outbreak in densely populated cities with high population mobility after amplification in wet markets....
On Worldometer, China, with a population of 1,400,000,000, is at number 98 in terms of cases, just behind Montenegro (population 622,000)
In terms of deaths, China, population 1,400,000,000, is in 61st place, just behind North Macedonia (population 2m)
Is this credible? Not really. As we’ve often discussed, China must be simply under-counting. Right?
Well maybe. But what if China isn’t undercounting, particularly? After all, their economy has bounced back, it has already regained all lost GDP, and they are living fairly normally, unlike us. Their behaviour speaks of a genuinely flattened pandemic
How have they done this? Are they superhuman? One answer could be this: they knew exactly what virus they were dealing with. They knew how it spread. They knew how to quarantine against it. They knew all the protocols, they maybe had therapeutics (vaccines even?) ready to go. Because they engineered the damn virus in the first place. In the Iab in Wuhan. Possibly as a bio weapon
The argument against this is the early chaos we saw in wuhan and hubei. But that only argues for an inadvertent leak, rather than deliberate release. It still came from the lab
Anyone still arguing for natural zoonosis has to explain China’s phenomenal ability to contain this virus, almost as if they were forewarned
I don't think they have really contained it though. This outbreak in Yantian had to be reported as it resulted in significant delays to shipping coming in and out. How many similar recent outbreaks have there been in the interior?
A taxi driver tested positive, he was taken off to a government ran isolation area for 21 days as were all the people who had used his taxi, including a teacher who my friend works with.
All the children and the families that she had come into contact with are all now in state ran isolation camps.
My friend thankfully had not come into contact with her before she was isolated.
Maybe the Chinese just have ultra tight and highly enforced procedures that our government chose not to adopt to keep the virus under control.
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
Maybe the rebels think that manifesto commitments should be adhered to. Tory manifesto, 2019:
We will proudly maintain our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on development, and do more to help countries receiving aid become self-sufficient.
Given how some have hated it for so long I'm astonished it has not been reduced long before now. There's nothing magical about 0.7 vs, say, 0.5, and I'm not averse to government's changing things from manifesto commitments - given the last year and the mountain of new spending, they probably should change quite a few things. But whether it is the right idea, and even if so done appropriately, as stuartinromford points out, are seperate to that.
An astonishing data security blunder saw the personal data of Special Forces soldiers circulating around WhatsApp in a leaked British Army spreadsheet.
The document ... contained details of all 1,182 British soldiers recently promoted from corporal to sergeant – including those in sensitive units such as the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/uk_special_forces_data_breach_whatsapp/
Wouldn't have happened if the information had been held in a filing cabinet in a locked room.
Why is there even a spreadsheet on that?
Presumably it was a list of pay grade adjustments for the HR department. Should have been market Secret though, and carefully controlled. There’s bloody good reasons we don’t name service personnel, apart from a few senior officers not on frontline duty.
All commissions, appointments, promotions, etc. are in an MoD supplement in the London Gazette every week.
On Worldometer, China, with a population of 1,400,000,000, is at number 98 in terms of cases, just behind Montenegro (population 622,000)
In terms of deaths, China, population 1,400,000,000, is in 61st place, just behind North Macedonia (population 2m)
Is this credible? Not really. As we’ve often discussed, China must be simply under-counting. Right?
Well maybe. But what if China isn’t undercounting, particularly? After all, their economy has bounced back, it has already regained all lost GDP, and they are living fairly normally, unlike us. Their behaviour speaks of a genuinely flattened pandemic
How have they done this? Are they superhuman? One answer could be this: they knew exactly what virus they were dealing with. They knew how it spread. They knew how to quarantine against it. They knew all the protocols, they maybe had therapeutics (vaccines even?) ready to go. Because they engineered the damn virus in the first place. In the Iab in Wuhan. Possibly as a bio weapon
The argument against this is the early chaos we saw in wuhan and hubei. But that only argues for an inadvertent leak, rather than deliberate release. It still came from the lab
Anyone still arguing for natural zoonosis has to explain China’s phenomenal ability to contain this virus, almost as if they were forewarned
Did you see that Peru have just admitted that their previous figures were nonsense and the true death toll is about twice what they were reporting before? They're now at the top of the list for deaths per capita. The same sort of thing is probably true for China, although on a bigger scale.
Who are these pensioners not paying council tax? Asking because I want to make sure my parents aren't missing out on something.
Ultimately, the problem is that no democracy has ever gone down the road of only letting net tax payers vote. Should those employed in the public sector get a vote?
Even if such a method was decided upon, what is net?
I've been working over twenty years now and I'm not convinced I'm a net tax payer. Sure I pay VAT (well, sorta), PAYE (well, sorta), council tax, road tax etc but what do I get back out of the system? I don't claim any benefit at all, but I do make use of state owned roads, my bins get collected and the street is lit at night. What value would I place on these?
You aren't being raped or murdered by either invading armies or hordes of thugs. You are able to buy stuff in the shops without having to take a wheelbarrow full of fivers. You can say what you like about the state without being hauled off for random torture or murder by security police. You benefit from a nation that is (largely) healthy, educated and productive.
To name a few. You are very much a net tax payer - and the freedom to pretend that you are not is also what benefit you get from paying your taxes.
One reason I am very passionate about the NHS is just how much I have taken from it. A whole litany of interventions over my 48 years, two of which would have carried me away before my time, and several of the others would have been life changing. And the price to me? Other than prescriptions, nothing, nada - at the point of care. In no way will I ever pay enough tax to cover it. The flip side is that for many, they will pay more in tax to the NHS (indirectly) and never use it. But it is an amazing thing we have done.
Yes, people who go on about the NHS being a tiresome religious cult don't get the difference it makes when you really need it. I did once meet a lady who said she didn't see why she should pay tax for the NHS since she was perfectly well - the arguments seemed so obvious (Count your blessings, and are you sure you'll be well forever?). Does anyone with insurance complain that it's wasted because the house didn't burn down this year?
Obviously there's scope for different systems to deliver the same effect. But living in a country where you always have to be scared that you'll get a disease and not be able to afford to be treated must be very scary.
I'd also add that we shouldn't expect it to be perfect, and shouldn't expect frills on the service. Its a great, mostly functional service. I have no complaints. If you want attractive surroundings, and quality catering, and decent internet and TV etc, then pay the money (if you can) and go private.
It was an interesting shock to the system to see how my wife handles the NHS for our children and her family in general.
She moves appointments between hospitals, looks up the references for consultants, checks everything... In general treats it as a service where you, the customer have to be on alert to get the best.
She comes form a country where the poor get... something. For real medical treatment you pay.
The interesting thing is the shock she generates among ordinary people. The medics seem to regard her polite requests as reasonable.
The 2007 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak occurred when the discharge of infectious effluent from a laboratory in Surrey led to foot-and-mouth disease infections at four nearby farms.
One thing that has been doing my head in for the last year or so is the number of people who think lab accidents are rare. A few minutes Googling can bring up huge lists of serious lab accidents all over the world. China itself has had many serious lab accidents, and those are of course just the ones we know of.
Many moons ago when I was inter-railing around Europe I had asked if I needed a smallpox jab - "no, its been eradicated, no need" - and then this happened:
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
Maybe the rebels think that manifesto commitments should be adhered to. Tory manifesto, 2019:
We will proudly maintain our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on development, and do more to help countries receiving aid become self-sufficient.
Because nothing has happened between now and 2019, eh?
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
Wheng I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
Doing it on the basis of economic inactivity is clearly invidious and overlooks that many younger people are similarly inactive, as others have said.
The best argument in favour would be to weight votes by average remaining life expectancy, which would upweight the votes of the young on the grounds that they will suffer the consequences of today's policy decisions for much longer.
Yes the heart of the argument is that it tends to make government policy rather short termist and not put enough emphasis on things like global warming and environmental factors. I am not sure that is entirely accurate but it is what is contended.
If they ever get around to replacing the Lords, it would be interesting to play around with getting better representation in the political process for groups underserved by one person one vote. This is after all the same premise for bishops sitting in Parliament. The inverting demographic period is an obvious target.
But what about going a step further and having a ring fenced lobby empowered on behalf of those not yet born? I call it the Cathedral Lobby, in place to ensure proper attention on big challenges and opportunities for human civilisation that are a) highly likely to occur, b) are improbable in our lifetime, and c) will take a multi generational effort to confront. Climate change broadly fits this of course but also supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, shifting global polarity, solar weather, AI, bioengineering etc... And on the opportunities side, interstellar probes (and travel), terraforming, AI, bioengineering, fusion and Dyson spheres etc...
Politics as it exists is just so mundane.
Surely once we have an alien dictatorship we will look back on the present as the good old days?
I don’t proffer any opinion on whether we will shortly make “contact” with aliens, or whether they will begin (or already are) interfering with life on Earth.
Only to note that the critical mass of opinion in the US security establishment has publicly moved towards a position that we are likely not the only technological beings on Earth.
It’s odd how few of you find this interesting.
What I find interesting, possibly because my daughter recently had me read her sociology essay on the topic, is how the way that these stories are considered now because it is being defined as a "security" issue rather than a "little green men" issue. What her essay was about was how the same happened with immigrants who were converted from "economic migrants" into potential terrorists with the same effect on the way that they are portrayed in our media.
Post 9/11 or 7/7/15 in this country no one is allowed to take security any way other than absolutely seriously, regardless of the evidence of the risk or lack of it. There is no evidence at all that these aliens, if they exist, are a security threat and a moments thought would suggest that anyone capable of coming thousands of light years or from other dimensions is probably not that worried about the exact capabilities of one of our fighters but now we are supposed to be worried.
If there are aliens here I really don't see why they would not make themselves known by landing on the White House lawn. I therefore think that there probably aren't but you cannot rule out the possibility that their thought processes are so different that that was not the obvious thing to do.
And in the meantime I am having fun gently mocking the idea.
On Worldometer, China, with a population of 1,400,000,000, is at number 98 in terms of cases, just behind Montenegro (population 622,000)
In terms of deaths, China, population 1,400,000,000, is in 61st place, just behind North Macedonia (population 2m)
Is this credible? Not really. As we’ve often discussed, China must be simply under-counting. Right?
Well maybe. But what if China isn’t undercounting, particularly? After all, their economy has bounced back, it has already regained all lost GDP, and they are living fairly normally, unlike us. Their behaviour speaks of a genuinely flattened pandemic
How have they done this? Are they superhuman? One answer could be this: they knew exactly what virus they were dealing with. They knew how it spread. They knew how to quarantine against it. They knew all the protocols, they maybe had therapeutics (vaccines even?) ready to go. Because they engineered the damn virus in the first place. In the Iab in Wuhan. Possibly as a bio weapon
The argument against this is the early chaos we saw in wuhan and hubei. But that only argues for an inadvertent leak, rather than deliberate release. It still came from the lab
Anyone still arguing for natural zoonosis has to explain China’s phenomenal ability to contain this virus, almost as if they were forewarned
I don't think they have really contained it though. This outbreak in Yantian had to be reported as it resulted in significant delays to shipping coming in and out. How many similar recent outbreaks have there been in the interior?
A taxi driver tested positive, he was taken off to a government ran isolation area for 21 days as were all the people who had used his taxi, including a teacher who my friend works with.
All the children and the families that she had come into contact with are all now in state ran isolation camps.
My friend thankfully had not come into contact with her before she was isolated.
Maybe the Chinese just have ultra tight and highly enforced procedures that our government chose not to adopt to keep the virus under control.
I can believe that to a degree, but to the point where in a country that size no one has reportedly died of Covid in nigh on a year or more? No, I don't buy it being that successful. Even in China masses of people cannot be controlled that well, or be that disciplined to prevent it, even if they actively want to be.
New - 30 Conservative MPs have now signed an amendment to stop aid cuts, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and ex cabinet minister Damian Green, and others including Tim Loughton, Johnny Mercer, Nus Ghani and Bob Seeley https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1400391811449847816
I'm told they have the numbers - and the government will reverse this without it going to a vote.
Terrible. All these virtue signalling prats who want aid based on our own GDP and not based on what is best for others, what we can afford, or ensuring that the developed world together pays. Should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they're so full of their own moral superiority complex.
Maybe the rebels think that manifesto commitments should be adhered to. Tory manifesto, 2019:
We will proudly maintain our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on development, and do more to help countries receiving aid become self-sufficient.
Because nothing has happened between now and 2019, eh?
And yet while you, and indeed I, may be comfortable with that argument, I bet it would be easy to find an example of a government minister defending still doing something on the basis of it being a manifesto commitment, implicitly suggesting they should still be maintained.
An astonishing data security blunder saw the personal data of Special Forces soldiers circulating around WhatsApp in a leaked British Army spreadsheet.
The document ... contained details of all 1,182 British soldiers recently promoted from corporal to sergeant – including those in sensitive units such as the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/uk_special_forces_data_breach_whatsapp/
Wouldn't have happened if the information had been held in a filing cabinet in a locked room.
Why is there even a spreadsheet on that?
Presumably it was a list of pay grade adjustments for the HR department. Should have been market Secret though, and carefully controlled. There’s bloody good reasons we don’t name service personnel, apart from a few senior officers not on frontline duty.
All commissions, appointments, promotions, etc. are in an MoD supplement in the London Gazette every week.
You learn something every day.
Presumably there’s a few pseudonyms in there, or some regiments that don’t publish things?
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Okay, so which stations are going to get an increase in services into and out of New Street as a result?
Good question, to which the honest answer is I don’t think it’s been decided yet. The growth is in towns to the north (where I live) so obvious candidates would be Lichfield/Sutton Coldfield, Cannock/Hednesford and Codsall (which is west rather than north). But that may change by 2027.
Again, we come back to capacity. It takes a lot longer to turn around a Pendolino than to turn around say a class 323 and they’re a lot longer than local trains as well. So taking seven platforms (probably six in full use) out of New Street might free up the equivalent of twelve platforms for local services.
Sorry for the slow reply - work intervened. I notice that there's no mention of HS2 freeing up capacity for the cross city line on Wikipedia:
If you're getting rid of those services to make way for more local trains, what do the people of Coventry do if they want to go to London?
There would still be plenty of fast 110 mph trains through to London (Milton Keynes would be the same) plus I am assuming the Voyagers from Holyhead would take that route too.
It’s also not far from the HS2 junction at Solihull.
The WMT services are stoppers so presumably you'd retain some fast paths for New Street - COV - EUS.
And that's the first time I've heard any suggestion that Coventry might be served by HS2.
On Worldometer, China, with a population of 1,400,000,000, is at number 98 in terms of cases, just behind Montenegro (population 622,000)
In terms of deaths, China, population 1,400,000,000, is in 61st place, just behind North Macedonia (population 2m)
Is this credible? Not really. As we’ve often discussed, China must be simply under-counting. Right?
Well maybe. But what if China isn’t undercounting, particularly? After all, their economy has bounced back, it has already regained all lost GDP, and they are living fairly normally, unlike us. Their behaviour speaks of a genuinely flattened pandemic
How have they done this? Are they superhuman? One answer could be this: they knew exactly what virus they were dealing with. They knew how it spread. They knew how to quarantine against it. They knew all the protocols, they maybe had therapeutics (vaccines even?) ready to go. Because they engineered the damn virus in the first place. In the Iab in Wuhan. Possibly as a bio weapon
The argument against this is the early chaos we saw in wuhan and hubei. But that only argues for an inadvertent leak, rather than deliberate release. It still came from the lab
Anyone still arguing for natural zoonosis has to explain China’s phenomenal ability to contain this virus, almost as if they were forewarned
Did you see that Peru have just admitted that their previous figures were nonsense and the true death toll is about twice what they were reporting before? They're now at the top of the list for deaths per capita. The same sort of thing is probably true for China, although on a bigger scale.
For Peru, the mortality rate as great as that of the 1918 pandemic in the UK.
I doubt that of China is anywhere near that, since we have evidence of how intensively they have reacted to local outbreaks. What is the true rate is anyone guess, though. (And, of course, they have surveillance systems far more intrusive than those in S Korea, and we've evidence of how successfully they can work from there.)
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
I think it unlikely most are aware of the wider politics of organisations. I think it more likely those booing, even if containing some pretty nasty folk as a minority, would mostly simply dislike such displays (notwithstanding there were always banners about Kick it Out and so on) right as they are waiting for the match to start.
I think FrancisUrquart sets out why it is more complex than commentators and media would like it to be, however. Certainly when it first happened some of the responses to some mild booing was hysterical.
If you watch a lot of the coverage it is absolutely unrelenting...BLM flashed up all the time and now with BT and their social media campaign in conjunction with a bad faith "charity" (who aren't they are political).
Now you could say there is a problem, but I think a lot of people don't think the UK is anything like the US, so BLM isn't applicable and that yes players get abuse on social media but it is a tiny minority i.e. doesn't require BT to push this agenda every single ad break...when most people juat want to sit down and watch some footy and escape from the pandemic.
The NBA tried this and lost loads of viewers. The NFL went a different route and retained them.
I don’t have BT, just out of interest what charity is it ?
Glitch...it is run by a Seyi Akiwowo, a Labour councillor / worked for the party....and although the charity says we are trying to "end online abuse", you don't have to look hard to see all she bangs on about is colonialism, BLM, etc etc etc and her demands for what social media companies should be doing is often bonkers / totally skewed e.g. called for any image or video of black people being "brutalized" to be banned on social media. Not all violent incidents, not what about context i.e. is somebody exposing wrong doing or a crime, no ban all ones of just black people.
The lady is first and foremost an activist and campaigner. Fine, but the spin is Glitch is just here to support you.
Its is like Matt Zarb-Cousin, former Corbyn right hand hand, yes he is a former problem gambler, but he pops up as I run a support charity, but his motivate is based on seeing all that all gambling is bad, it should be basically banned, but wrapped up in think of the children stuff.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
Wheng I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
Doing it on the basis of economic inactivity is clearly invidious and overlooks that many younger people are similarly inactive, as others have said.
The best argument in favour would be to weight votes by average remaining life expectancy, which would upweight the votes of the young on the grounds that they will suffer the consequences of today's policy decisions for much longer.
Yes the heart of the argument is that it tends to make government policy rather short termist and not put enough emphasis on things like global warming and environmental factors. I am not sure that is entirely accurate but it is what is contended.
If they ever get around to replacing the Lords, it would be interesting to play around with getting better representation in the political process for groups underserved by one person one vote. This is after all the same premise for bishops sitting in Parliament. The inverting demographic period is an obvious target.
But what about going a step further and having a ring fenced lobby empowered on behalf of those not yet born? I call it the Cathedral Lobby, in place to ensure proper attention on big challenges and opportunities for human civilisation that are a) highly likely to occur, b) are improbable in our lifetime, and c) will take a multi generational effort to confront. Climate change broadly fits this of course but also supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, shifting global polarity, solar weather, AI, bioengineering etc... And on the opportunities side, interstellar probes (and travel), terraforming, AI, bioengineering, fusion and Dyson spheres etc...
Politics as it exists is just so mundane.
Surely once we have an alien dictatorship we will look back on the present as the good old days?
I don’t proffer any opinion on whether we will shortly make “contact” with aliens, or whether they will begin (or already are) interfering with life on Earth.
Only to note that the critical mass of opinion in the US security establishment has publicly moved towards a position that we are likely not the only technological beings on Earth.
It’s odd how few of you find this interesting.
What I find interesting, possibly because my daughter recently had me read her sociology essay on the topic, is how the way that these stories are considered now because it is being defined as a "security" issue rather than a "little green men" issue. What her essay was about was how the same happened with immigrants who were converted from "economic migrants" into potential terrorists with the same effect on the way that they are portrayed in our media.
Post 9/11 or 7/7/15 in this country no one is allowed to take security any way other than absolutely seriously, regardless of the evidence of the risk or lack of it. There is no evidence at all that these aliens, if they exist, are a security threat and a moments thought would suggest that anyone capable of coming thousands of light years or from other dimensions is probably not that worried about the exact capabilities of one of our fighters but now we are supposed to be worried.
If there are aliens here I really don't see why they would not make themselves known by landing on the White House lawn. I therefore think that there probably aren't but you cannot rule out the possibility that their thought processes are so different that that was not the obvious thing to do.
And in the meantime I am having fun gently mocking the idea.
It is childish to presume they would land on the white lawn (or tiannamen square). And if they are here, they have more likely than not been here since before recorded human history.
Your point about the security argument is highly relevant though. It has been deliberately presented in this way to try and force sleepy policy makers to take note. I wrote here many months ago that there was no bigger issue than the Congressional security committee admitting the US did not have control of its own air space. And even then most here yawned.
Now attention has been grabbed and the report (reports) in progress, we must hope it moves with haste out of the realm of the Defense and security establishment into the civilian realm.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check.
Now, you're pretty good on maths and data, but compared to the actual women who has done fifteen years of research on novel bat coronaviruses, I suggest you know the cube root of fuck all, on this particular topic. You just waffle on.
She's the expert, and she thought it might have come from her lab, because the coincidence was otherwise too great
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an objective seeker-after-truth.
We've had that godawful Daily Mail expose that "proved" it was "physically impossible" to be natural due to four charged components in a row. Which was plain wrong, to the point where whoever wrote it was either fundamentally ignorant of the subject or deliberately trying to mislead (it took moments for those who did know anything about the subject to point to several thousand such occurrences in the human genome alone.
We've had people breathlessly telling us about "gain of function" because scientists study change of host range, change of transmissibility, and change in antigenicity. But as a category, it sounds like "make viruses worse!" and SARS-CoV-2's lengthy presymptomatic period and duration of infectiveness and viral load (the things that make it bad for us) aren't usually studied in that section. Those who aren't expert in the subject can wrap them all up together and assume that "gain of function research going on here" means "anything that makes viruses bad, must be biological warfare."
Being able to switch on and off functions like that would take a level of knowledge way beyond anything we've ever seen. Not impossible, but has been pointed out, we'd see other capabilities go hand-in-glove with that - such as a skillset with mRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
I tend to the point of view of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is, most often but least dramatically, the right one.
Given SARS type viruses have already been pinned down in the past to civet cats, camels and bats and have been proven to have made the leap to humans, it seems eminently logical and more plausible than anything else that SARS-Cov-2 would be the same. Someone was butchering an infected wild animal somewhere and, in the process of eviscerating it, they breathed in some splatter from an infected lung. And thus a pandemic was born.
In any case, other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? What we need is prophylactic treatments (vaccines) and symptom relief. It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from. It's here. We have to deal with it.
The simplest explanation is that LeadronicT is off on one again....
Now imagine if they didn't just give Wood the ball when it wasn't a pudding....waiting 16 overs yesterday to get him into the attack was crazy....then bowling him into the ground with a soft ball.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Okay, so which stations are going to get an increase in services into and out of New Street as a result?
Good question, to which the honest answer is I don’t think it’s been decided yet. The growth is in towns to the north (where I live) so obvious candidates would be Lichfield/Sutton Coldfield, Cannock/Hednesford and Codsall (which is west rather than north). But that may change by 2027.
Again, we come back to capacity. It takes a lot longer to turn around a Pendolino than to turn around say a class 323 and they’re a lot longer than local trains as well. So taking seven platforms (probably six in full use) out of New Street might free up the equivalent of twelve platforms for local services.
Sorry for the slow reply - work intervened. I notice that there's no mention of HS2 freeing up capacity for the cross city line on Wikipedia:
If you're getting rid of those services to make way for more local trains, what do the people of Coventry do if they want to go to London?
There would still be plenty of fast 110 mph trains through to London (Milton Keynes would be the same) plus I am assuming the Voyagers from Holyhead would take that route too.
It’s also not far from the HS2 junction at Solihull.
The WMT services are stoppers so presumably you'd retain some fast paths for New Street - COV - EUS.
And that's the first time I've heard any suggestion that Coventry might be served by HS2.
There are plenty of LNWR services that are fast after Rugby. There’s an hourly service from Crewe to Euston that really kicks on after Rugby having been quite slow up to then.
As for Coventry, the release of capacity means other stations are set to open/reopen:
Plus, as I have said, it isn’t far to Birmingham Interchange which is near the NEC.
I don’t think there would be any significant time saving from Coventry, because the services will either be a bit slower (more will be 110 mph as against 125mph) or you’ll have to get to the new station to hook up with HS2.
The urban area most likely to lose out significantly from HS2 would actually be Milton Keynes, which isn’t near an HS2 station and probably would see slower services at about the same level of frequency to London.
An astonishing data security blunder saw the personal data of Special Forces soldiers circulating around WhatsApp in a leaked British Army spreadsheet.
The document ... contained details of all 1,182 British soldiers recently promoted from corporal to sergeant – including those in sensitive units such as the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/uk_special_forces_data_breach_whatsapp/
Wouldn't have happened if the information had been held in a filing cabinet in a locked room.
Why is there even a spreadsheet on that?
Presumably it was a list of pay grade adjustments for the HR department. Should have been market Secret though, and carefully controlled. There’s bloody good reasons we don’t name service personnel, apart from a few senior officers not on frontline duty.
All commissions, appointments, promotions, etc. are in an MoD supplement in the London Gazette every week.
You learn something every day.
Presumably there’s a few pseudonyms in there, or some regiments that don’t publish things?
I would think so. There's plenty of mistakes too. When I cleaned out my mother's house after covid got her I found she had every LG that mentioned me. Including one that names me as the Naval and Air Attache to the British Embassy in Rome which is a job I applied for and conspicuously failed to get due to "disciplinary" issues. LOL.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an objective seeker-after-truth.
We've had that godawful Daily Mail expose that "proved" it was "physically impossible" to be natural due to four charged components in a row. Which was plain wrong, to the point where whoever wrote it was either fundamentally ignorant of the subject or deliberately trying to mislead (it took moments for those who did know anything about the subject to point to several thousand such occurrences in the human genome alone.
We've had people breathlessly telling us about "gain of function" because scientists study change of host range, change of transmissibility, and change in antigenicity. But as a category, it sounds like "make viruses worse!" and SARS-CoV-2's lengthy presymptomatic period and duration of infectiveness and viral load (the things that make it bad for us) aren't usually studied in that section. Those who aren't expert in the subject can wrap them all up together and assume that "gain of function research going on here" means "anything that makes viruses bad, must be biological warfare."
Being able to switch on and off functions like that would take a level of knowledge way beyond anything we've ever seen. Not impossible, but has been pointed out, we'd see other capabilities go hand-in-glove with that - such as a skillset with mRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
I tend to the point of view of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is, most often but least dramatically, the right one.
Given SARS type viruses have already been pinned down in the past to civet cats, camels and bats and have been proven to have made the leap to humans, it seems eminently logical and more plausible than anything else that SARS-Cov-2 would be the same. Someone was butchering an infected wild animal somewhere and, in the process of eviscerating it, they breathed in some splatter from an infected lung. And thus a pandemic was born.
In any case, other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? What we need is prophylactic treatments (vaccines) and symptom relief. It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from. It's here. We have to deal with it.
Yes, I encounter this opinion a lot
"Does it really matter where it came from? Only 3.5m have died. Who cares. it probably came from the market anyway despite the total lack of evidence. Give China a break. Let's crack on with sorting out the vaccines and forget all about it XIE XIE"
Another one down and we are almost into the tail. I think England are going to find batting on this a lot harder than we were assuming up to an hour ago. But they are back in the game.
Asked about John Swinney’s comments suggesting new variants could potentially be more harmful to children and leading to more hospitalisations, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said today said it had “seen no evidence of this to date”
Asked about John Swinney’s comments suggesting new variants could potentially be more harmful to children and leading to more hospitalisations, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said today said it had “seen no evidence of this to date”
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an objective seeker-after-truth.
We've had that godawful Daily Mail expose that "proved" it was "physically impossible" to be natural due to four charged components in a row. Which was plain wrong, to the point where whoever wrote it was either fundamentally ignorant of the subject or deliberately trying to mislead (it took moments for those who did know anything about the subject to point to several thousand such occurrences in the human genome alone.
We've had people breathlessly telling us about "gain of function" because scientists study change of host range, change of transmissibility, and change in antigenicity. But as a category, it sounds like "make viruses worse!" and SARS-CoV-2's lengthy presymptomatic period and duration of infectiveness and viral load (the things that make it bad for us) aren't usually studied in that section. Those who aren't expert in the subject can wrap them all up together and assume that "gain of function research going on here" means "anything that makes viruses bad, must be biological warfare."
Being able to switch on and off functions like that would take a level of knowledge way beyond anything we've ever seen. Not impossible, but has been pointed out, we'd see other capabilities go hand-in-glove with that - such as a skillset with mRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
I tend to the point of view of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is, most often but least dramatically, the right one.
Given SARS type viruses have already been pinned down in the past to civet cats, camels and bats and have been proven to have made the leap to humans, it seems eminently logical and more plausible than anything else that SARS-Cov-2 would be the same. Someone was butchering an infected wild animal somewhere and, in the process of eviscerating it, they breathed in some splatter from an infected lung. And thus a pandemic was born.
In any case, other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? What we need is prophylactic treatments (vaccines) and symptom relief. It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from. It's here. We have to deal with it.
Yes, I encounter this opinion a lot
"Does it really matter where it came from? Only 3.5m have died. Who cares. it probably came from the market anyway despite the total lack of evidence. Give China a break. Let's crack on with sorting out the vaccines and forget all about it XIE XIE"
You are not alone in finding it remarkable. If it were established that this was an accidental leak from a biological weapon our relationship with China would have to change so fundamentally it would come seriously close to war. If.
The only one she didn't meet personally was LBJ - though Princess Margaret met him at the White House - strained relations at the time over Vietnam & Wilson's refusal to join in...
2.1m people remained on furlough at the end of May, down from 2.6m two weeks prior (i.e. immediately before the easing of restrictions).
I think that is broadly as expected. I don't think it is particular spectacular and I think the government will be hoping that the easing means significant further returns to work in the first half of June.
It does however reduce the extent of the scheme and burden on the taxpayer to its lowest level so far, basically equivalent to its previous low in October 2020.
Hi The White Rabbit,
Thanks, but I must be looking at different numbers to you.
The update that I have just looked at that came out today. covers the period up 30 April and has 3.4 million people on it. a decrees of 900,000 from a month earlier which is itself a 400,000 decrees form a month before that.
Given the rate of decline, if that continued (which they may well have) then the numbers you have should be about right, but do you mind me asking where you have got them form?
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
"Conflicts of interest, in part from large US gov't grants supporting controversial virology research, known as "gain-of-function," hampered U.S. gov't investigation into #COVID19 origins, and legit. questions on #LabLeak hypothesis, at every step. /2"
"In a 12/9/20 @StateDept meeting, officials say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome att'n to U.S. gov't funding of it. /3"
"Four former State Dep't officials told @VanityFair they were repeatedly advised not to open a "Pandora's box." DiNanno said: “smelled like a cover-up, and I wasn’t going to be part of it.” /5"
I feel sorry for the Zoonati on here. They face an ever bigger wall of evidence and they have to bang their tiny heads against it
Jessica Watson @drjessicawatson · 12h Test and trace won’t trace contacts unless you know the persons surname. I offered first name & tel number but computer system required surname so I was advised to call the person myself! It’s pretty tough to phone someone who is on holiday & tell them to self isolate!
FFS. The system must have a surname. Who designs this crap for billions of our money????
"Former @CDCgov director @redfield_dr got death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN he believed #COVID19 had lab origin. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told @VanityFair . /7"
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
OMFG she didn't find proof that her lab had killed 3.5 million people? WOW
BTW the miners you cite who died. They died of a strange pneumonia which, it is now believed, were possibly the first cases of Covid-19. The Wuhan lab falsely claimed they died of a fungus
The number of people testing positive for coronavirus in England has risen by 22%, reaching the highest level in six weeks.
A total of 17,162 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the country at least once in the week to 26 May according to the latest test and trace figures.
That is a rise of more than a fifth on the previous week and the highest number of people to test positive since the week to 14 April, PA Media reports.
Meanwhile the number of rapid Covid-19 tests carried out in England has fallen to its lowest level in six weeks.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an objective seeker-after-truth.
We've had that godawful Daily Mail expose that "proved" it was "physically impossible" to be natural due to four charged components in a row. Which was plain wrong, to the point where whoever wrote it was either fundamentally ignorant of the subject or deliberately trying to mislead (it took moments for those who did know anything about the subject to point to several thousand such occurrences in the human genome alone.
We've had people breathlessly telling us about "gain of function" because scientists study change of host range, change of transmissibility, and change in antigenicity. But as a category, it sounds like "make viruses worse!" and SARS-CoV-2's lengthy presymptomatic period and duration of infectiveness and viral load (the things that make it bad for us) aren't usually studied in that section. Those who aren't expert in the subject can wrap them all up together and assume that "gain of function research going on here" means "anything that makes viruses bad, must be biological warfare."
Being able to switch on and off functions like that would take a level of knowledge way beyond anything we've ever seen. Not impossible, but has been pointed out, we'd see other capabilities go hand-in-glove with that - such as a skillset with mRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
I tend to the point of view of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is, most often but least dramatically, the right one.
Given SARS type viruses have already been pinned down in the past to civet cats, camels and bats and have been proven to have made the leap to humans, it seems eminently logical and more plausible than anything else that SARS-Cov-2 would be the same. Someone was butchering an infected wild animal somewhere and, in the process of eviscerating it, they breathed in some splatter from an infected lung. And thus a pandemic was born.
In any case, other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? What we need is prophylactic treatments (vaccines) and symptom relief. It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from. It's here. We have to deal with it.
Yes, I encounter this opinion a lot
"Does it really matter where it came from? Only 3.5m have died. Who cares. it probably came from the market anyway despite the total lack of evidence. Give China a break. Let's crack on with sorting out the vaccines and forget all about it XIE XIE"
The wet markets appear to be the source of amplification, not original transmission.
As for giving Xie a break, you're just trying to imply anyone sceptical of you pet theory is a supporter of the regime, which is standard bollocks on the message board you seem to be sourcing your arguments from.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an objective seeker-after-truth.
We've had that godawful Daily Mail expose that "proved" it was "physically impossible" to be natural due to four charged components in a row. Which was plain wrong, to the point where whoever wrote it was either fundamentally ignorant of the subject or deliberately trying to mislead (it took moments for those who did know anything about the subject to point to several thousand such occurrences in the human genome alone.
We've had people breathlessly telling us about "gain of function" because scientists study change of host range, change of transmissibility, and change in antigenicity. But as a category, it sounds like "make viruses worse!" and SARS-CoV-2's lengthy presymptomatic period and duration of infectiveness and viral load (the things that make it bad for us) aren't usually studied in that section. Those who aren't expert in the subject can wrap them all up together and assume that "gain of function research going on here" means "anything that makes viruses bad, must be biological warfare."
Being able to switch on and off functions like that would take a level of knowledge way beyond anything we've ever seen. Not impossible, but has been pointed out, we'd see other capabilities go hand-in-glove with that - such as a skillset with mRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
I tend to the point of view of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is, most often but least dramatically, the right one.
Given SARS type viruses have already been pinned down in the past to civet cats, camels and bats and have been proven to have made the leap to humans, it seems eminently logical and more plausible than anything else that SARS-Cov-2 would be the same. Someone was butchering an infected wild animal somewhere and, in the process of eviscerating it, they breathed in some splatter from an infected lung. And thus a pandemic was born.
In any case, other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? What we need is prophylactic treatments (vaccines) and symptom relief. It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from. It's here. We have to deal with it.
Yes, I encounter this opinion a lot
"Does it really matter where it came from? Only 3.5m have died. Who cares. it probably came from the market anyway despite the total lack of evidence. Give China a break. Let's crack on with sorting out the vaccines and forget all about it XIE XIE"
The wet markets appear to be the source of amplification, not original transmission.
As for giving Xie a break, you're just trying to imply anyone sceptical of you pet theory is a supporter of the regime, which is standard bollocks on the message board you seem to be sourcing your arguments from.
You now have to explain away that enormous Vanity Fair article. This will require some reading, which you apparently find hard, given that you know so pitifully little about this disease, from the Yunnanese miners to the nature of the Wuhan research.
But I recommend it, that's how I know so much more than you. I read a lot
Another one down and we are almost into the tail. I think England are going to find batting on this a lot harder than we were assuming up to an hour ago. But they are back in the game.
NZ bat deep. Jameson is very competent with the bat.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
OMFG she didn't find proof that her lab had killed 3.5 million people? WOW
BTW the miners you cite who died. They died of a strange pneumonia which, it is now believed, were possibly the first cases of Covid-19. The Wuhan lab falsely claimed they died of a fungus
So you believe her when she says she was worried it came from her lab and then don't believe her when she says it didn't.
I thought she was 100% reliable and everyone else didn't know what they were talking about.
"Conflicts of interest, in part from large US gov't grants supporting controversial virology research, known as "gain-of-function," hampered U.S. gov't investigation into #COVID19 origins, and legit. questions on #LabLeak hypothesis, at every step. /2"
"In a 12/9/20 @StateDept meeting, officials say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome att'n to U.S. gov't funding of it. /3"
"Four former State Dep't officials told @VanityFair they were repeatedly advised not to open a "Pandora's box." DiNanno said: “smelled like a cover-up, and I wasn’t going to be part of it.” /5"
I feel sorry for the Zoonati on here. They face an ever bigger wall of evidence and they have to bang their tiny heads against it
That’s a fascinating thread especially those claims of death threats and ostracisation. Of course there was pushback on this theory for many reasons and trump offering it was one.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an objective seeker-after-truth.
We've had that godawful Daily Mail expose that "proved" it was "physically impossible" to be natural due to four charged components in a row. Which was plain wrong, to the point where whoever wrote it was either fundamentally ignorant of the subject or deliberately trying to mislead (it took moments for those who did know anything about the subject to point to several thousand such occurrences in the human genome alone.
We've had people breathlessly telling us about "gain of function" because scientists study change of host range, change of transmissibility, and change in antigenicity. But as a category, it sounds like "make viruses worse!" and SARS-CoV-2's lengthy presymptomatic period and duration of infectiveness and viral load (the things that make it bad for us) aren't usually studied in that section. Those who aren't expert in the subject can wrap them all up together and assume that "gain of function research going on here" means "anything that makes viruses bad, must be biological warfare."
Being able to switch on and off functions like that would take a level of knowledge way beyond anything we've ever seen. Not impossible, but has been pointed out, we'd see other capabilities go hand-in-glove with that - such as a skillset with mRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
I tend to the point of view of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is, most often but least dramatically, the right one.
Given SARS type viruses have already been pinned down in the past to civet cats, camels and bats and have been proven to have made the leap to humans, it seems eminently logical and more plausible than anything else that SARS-Cov-2 would be the same. Someone was butchering an infected wild animal somewhere and, in the process of eviscerating it, they breathed in some splatter from an infected lung. And thus a pandemic was born.
In any case, other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? What we need is prophylactic treatments (vaccines) and symptom relief. It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from. It's here. We have to deal with it.
Yes, I encounter this opinion a lot
"Does it really matter where it came from? Only 3.5m have died. Who cares. it probably came from the market anyway despite the total lack of evidence. Give China a break. Let's crack on with sorting out the vaccines and forget all about it XIE XIE"
You are not alone in finding it remarkable. If it were established that this was an accidental leak from a biological weapon our relationship with China would have to change so fundamentally it would come seriously close to war. If.
Delicious sentence:
"other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from."
Only a tiny number of people care about the origins of this virus which has killed millions and shattered the global economy, and they are all "breathless conspiracy theory fantasists"
England's PCR tests at two month high The number of people in England going for PCR Covid tests is the highest it's been in two months, Test and Trace figures show.
One million PCR tests were taken in the week to 26 May. This is the highest total since the week to 24 March - and is up 3% on the previous week.
PCR tests are swabs taken at a testing centre rather than at home. They are processed in a laboratory, and are used mainly for anyone who has Covid-19 symptoms and to confirm a positive rapid test result.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
OMFG she didn't find proof that her lab had killed 3.5 million people? WOW
BTW the miners you cite who died. They died of a strange pneumonia which, it is now believed, were possibly the first cases of Covid-19. The Wuhan lab falsely claimed they died of a fungus
So you're now arguing Covid-19 was around in 2012 ? I am giving up arguing with you on this, as your Covid stories are so protean, it's like wrestling with an octopus coated in lubricant.
The number of people testing positive for coronavirus in England has risen by 22%, reaching the highest level in six weeks.
A total of 17,162 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the country at least once in the week to 26 May according to the latest test and trace figures.
That is a rise of more than a fifth on the previous week and the highest number of people to test positive since the week to 14 April, PA Media reports.
Meanwhile the number of rapid Covid-19 tests carried out in England has fallen to its lowest level in six weeks.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
OMFG she didn't find proof that her lab had killed 3.5 million people? WOW
BTW the miners you cite who died. They died of a strange pneumonia which, it is now believed, were possibly the first cases of Covid-19. The Wuhan lab falsely claimed they died of a fungus
So you believe her when she says she was worried it came from her lab and then don't believe her when she says it didn't.
I thought she was 100% reliable and everyone else didn't know what they were talking about.
I believe her when she makes claims that are verifiable and hard to fake: when she heard of Covid she thought it maybe came from the lab and she rushed back to check. That must be a matter of record. There would be multiple witnesses, many non Chinese
When she says that after frantic searching she didn't find anything in the virus archives (never released to the public), we have no way of knowing if this is true, That's when the fog of bio-war descends. The lab deleted so much data, and is still hiding so much more. A year later
The number of people testing positive for coronavirus in England has risen by 22%, reaching the highest level in six weeks.
A total of 17,162 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the country at least once in the week to 26 May according to the latest test and trace figures.
That is a rise of more than a fifth on the previous week and the highest number of people to test positive since the week to 14 April, PA Media reports.
Meanwhile the number of rapid Covid-19 tests carried out in England has fallen to its lowest level in six weeks.
Half term effect?
Or people have just stopped reporting them because or the government’s highly dysfunctional reporting website.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
OMFG she didn't find proof that her lab had killed 3.5 million people? WOW
BTW the miners you cite who died. They died of a strange pneumonia which, it is now believed, were possibly the first cases of Covid-19. The Wuhan lab falsely claimed they died of a fungus
it's like wrestling with an octopus coated in lubricant.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
And, regardless of the message, people don't like to be incessantly preached at - particularly in their leisure time.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
I think it unlikely most are aware of the wider politics of organisations. I think it more likely those booing, even if containing some pretty nasty folk as a minority, would mostly simply dislike such displays (notwithstanding there were always banners about Kick it Out and so on) right as they are waiting for the match to start.
I think FrancisUrquart sets out why it is more complex than commentators and media would like it to be, however. Certainly when it first happened some of the responses to some mild booing was hysterical.
If you watch a lot of the coverage it is absolutely unrelenting...BLM flashed up all the time and now with BT and their social media campaign in conjunction with a bad faith "charity" (who aren't they are political).
Now you could say there is a problem, but I think a lot of people don't think the UK is anything like the US, so BLM isn't applicable and that yes players get abuse on social media but it is a tiny minority i.e. doesn't require BT to push this agenda every single ad break...when most people juat want to sit down and watch some footy and escape from the pandemic.
The NBA tried this and lost loads of viewers. The NFL went a different route and retained them.
I don’t have BT, just out of interest what charity is it ?
Glitch...it is run by a Seyi Akiwowo, a Labour councillor / worked for the party....and although the charity says we are trying to "end online abuse", you don't have to look hard to see all she bangs on about is colonialism, BLM, etc etc etc and her demands for what social media companies should be doing is often bonkers / totally skewed e.g. called for any image or video of black people being "brutalized" to be banned on social media. Not all violent incidents, not what about context i.e. is somebody exposing wrong doing or a crime, no ban all ones of just black people.
The lady is first and foremost an activist and campaigner. Fine, but the spin is Glitch is just here to support you.
Its is like Matt Zarb-Cousin, former Corbyn right hand hand, yes he is a former problem gambler, but he pops up as I run a support charity, but his motivate is based on seeing all that all gambling is bad, it should be basically banned, but wrapped up in think of the children stuff.
It is incremental steps with this sort of thing. The limiting of odds on fixed betting terminals will not really achieve a great deal so they will demand ever increasing draconian steps. It won’t be a case of the policy isn’t working let’s find one that does. Pressure groups always trot someone with a sob story out to tug at the heart strings. The alcohol Prohibitionists do the same.
We are facing a ban in online ads for so called junk food dressed up as protecting kids but will harm many small businesses and artisan producers. Even the advocates of it say the policy will only remove around 3 calories a day from someone’s diet. However it is presented by the advocates as taking the equivalent of skips full of doughnuts out of kids diets.
The media present it unchallenged.
As for Glitch, that sounds pretty par for the course these days sadly. You’d think these TV companies would do some proper diligence.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
As much as Southgate says the fans don't understand, I think there is a misunderstanding from the authorities and the media about the feeling amongst fans. The whole BLM stuff has been pushed so hard by the media, Sky still flash it up on their coverage, I don't think they have quite realised that a lot of people aren't on board with wanting anything to do with a campaign they see as a political organisation many values they don't support.
Its a bit like Brexit, the media couldn't / can't work out how people could be for such a thing, they must all be racist Knuckleheads.
They might claim taking the knee isn't BLM, but that is what it is associated with now, and why the NFL moved for something very different.
I remember when Millwall fans booed they made a statement, largely ignored, that their objection was BLM was a Marxist organisation as the old BLM organisation was and still is.
When some of the English rugby players of Pacific ancestry stood they were castigated too.
It’s like many debates these days, if you are not fully 100% signed up,to the prevailing orthodoxy then you are automatically an enemy of the cause. The trans minefield is another such issue.
As for Brexit they still don’t get it and never will.
It's really hard work to explain this to anyone on the other side of the fence these days.
You have to choose you analogies and language with great care, and they really have to repsect you a lot to listen.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
OMFG she didn't find proof that her lab had killed 3.5 million people? WOW
BTW the miners you cite who died. They died of a strange pneumonia which, it is now believed, were possibly the first cases of Covid-19. The Wuhan lab falsely claimed they died of a fungus
So you're now arguing Covid-19 was around in 2012 ? I am giving up arguing with you on this, as your Covid stories are so protean, it's like wrestling with an octopus coated in lubricant.
A disease highly similar to Covid was noted in the miners. This is just a fact
"In 2012, six people at the Mojiang mine, in Yunnan province, experienced a pneumonia-like illness after removing bat feces in their area. Overall, three of the men had died after experiencing fever, dry cough, and other symptoms also typical in COVID-19 patients."
So how did it get from there to Wuhan?
Oh
"The miners were treated with similar therapies used today for SARS-CoV-2 infection... The samples sent to the Wuhan lab were studied in 2018 and was concluded to come from a horseshoe bat."
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
I think it unlikely most are aware of the wider politics of organisations. I think it more likely those booing, even if containing some pretty nasty folk as a minority, would mostly simply dislike such displays (notwithstanding there were always banners about Kick it Out and so on) right as they are waiting for the match to start.
I think FrancisUrquart sets out why it is more complex than commentators and media would like it to be, however. Certainly when it first happened some of the responses to some mild booing was hysterical.
Kick it out is neutral.
BLM comes with things like iconoclasm and finger-pointing over "white privilege".
What’s he highest score by a New Zealander on debut? I want to say 214 by Matthew Sinclair?
Not the happiest of precedents for Conway because after that and another double Sinclair ended up being like a poor man’s Chris Martin, but still the target to go for.
Gareth Southgate says "some people aren't understanding the message" after fans at the Riverside Stadium jeered when players took a knee before England's friendly win over Austria.
When the stadiums are full again next seasons, I think there is going to be a big bust up.
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
Or perhaps some fans don't like the politics of BLM.
I think it unlikely most are aware of the wider politics of organisations. I think it more likely those booing, even if containing some pretty nasty folk as a minority, would mostly simply dislike such displays (notwithstanding there were always banners about Kick it Out and so on) right as they are waiting for the match to start.
I think FrancisUrquart sets out why it is more complex than commentators and media would like it to be, however. Certainly when it first happened some of the responses to some mild booing was hysterical.
Kick it out is neutral.
BLM comes with things like iconoclasm and finger-pointing over "white privilege".
Funnily enough, lots of people don't like that.
Kick It Out is also about changing football and the behaviour of football fans - thankfully we don’t hear monkey noises shouted at black players any more.
BLM is aimed at wider society, which is why it doesn’t fit in the context of football.
Mr. Leon, it's not exactly common knowledge, and names in other languages often have multiple spellings in English. I wasn't having a go at Mr. B. My own knowledge of Chinese is limited to about four words.
Mr. Royale, quite. The political lecturing isn't what people want from sport, or the coverage thereof.
Comments
Cue plenty of blue tick sports hacks and commentators, on twitter, like Paul Hayward ranting about it being sickening etc etc as if booing is defecating on the memory of George Floyd and the fight for racial equality.
People are well within their rights to boo. Doesn’t make them the next Tommeh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-City_Line
A big question for me, is what happens to Coventry? At the moment it gets a very good service to London:
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/detailed/gb-nr:COV/to/gb-nr:EUS/2021-06-03/0100-0059?stp=WVS&show=pax-calls&order=wtt&toc=VT
If you're getting rid of those services to make way for more local trains, what do the people of Coventry do if they want to go to London?
https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1400362889702150144?s=20
It’s also not far from the HS2 junction at Solihull.
Plenty of people are happy for there to be no such aid, others would like it reduced or reformed to be more effective, some would like a lot more given. So there's no automatic upside or downside.
For all its flaws I'm inclined to retain it, but it can be argued the other way in a reasonable manner - but if it looks callous or vindictive then it can indeed damange the government.
I will need to try that again.
Of course part of it is some of Boris’s enemies using it against him and fair play to them for that.
Its a bit like Brexit, the media couldn't / can't work out how people could be for such a thing, they must all be racist Knuckleheads.
They might claim taking the knee isn't BLM, but that is what it is associated with now, and why the NFL moved for something very different.
Given SARS type viruses have already been pinned down in the past to civet cats, camels and bats and have been proven to have made the leap to humans, it seems eminently logical and more plausible than anything else that SARS-Cov-2 would be the same. Someone was butchering an infected wild animal somewhere and, in the process of eviscerating it, they breathed in some splatter from an infected lung. And thus a pandemic was born.
In any case, other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? What we need is prophylactic treatments (vaccines) and symptom relief. It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from. It's here. We have to deal with it.
Remember that one with, I think, the MoD redacting documents, but you could copy paste the redacted part into a fresh document to reveal it?
Its like Brexit, the authorities can't envision how anybody could not be totally on board with their opinion, other than racists, which is why they are doing it.
https://twitter.com/Holbornlolz/status/1400350872069148672/photo/1
I think FrancisUrquart sets out why it is more complex than commentators and media would like it to be, however. Certainly when it first happened some of the responses to some mild booing was hysterical.
Spike mutation T403R allows bat coronavirus RaTG13 to use human ACE2
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.31.446386v1.full.pdf
...Although the S protein of the closest related bat virus, RaTG13, shows high similarity to the SARS-CoV-2 S protein it does not efficiently interact with the human ACE2 receptor2. Here, we show that a single T403R mutation allows the RaTG13 S to utilize the human ACE2 receptor for infection of human cells and intestinal organoids...
A good example of the overreaction of punters to events. When England took the 4th wicket just now, their odds on Betfair Exchange changed from 20 to 10. Far too much change for just one wicket in the circumstances.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/cricket/test-matches/england-v-new-zealand-betting-30406706
Now you could say there is a problem, but I think a lot of people don't think the UK is anything like the US, so BLM isn't applicable and that yes players get abuse on social media but it is a tiny minority i.e. doesn't require BT to push this agenda every single ad break...when most people juat want to sit down and watch some footy and escape from the pandemic.
The NBA tried this and lost loads of viewers. The NFL went a different route and retained them.
Only to note that the critical mass of opinion in the US security establishment has publicly moved towards a position that we are likely not the only technological beings on Earth.
It’s odd how few of you find this interesting.
When some of the English rugby players of Pacific ancestry stood they were castigated too.
It’s like many debates these days, if you are not fully 100% signed up,to the prevailing orthodoxy then you are automatically an enemy of the cause. The trans minefield is another such issue.
As for Brexit they still don’t get it and never will.
I think they’re going to be quite shocked at the reaction, to what’s become a very political campaign.
The problem with a sudden cut in any budget is that you end up having to cut the things you can cut quickly, rather than the things that might be best (or least bad) to cut. Even if it's reinstated, some of the harm will have been done by now.
Second, the PM is developing a bit of a reputation for making noises about being tough on spending, then being forced into retreating in a messy way. Free school meals was the most memorable example. I assume a retreat on school catch-up is lumbering over the hill. Partly, it's undignified. Worse, savings are going to have to come from somewhere. If I were Rishi, I'd be beginning to feel a bit pishied off about it.
But that's the trouble with populists. After a while, they run out of other people's money.
2.1m people remained on furlough at the end of May, down from 2.6m two weeks prior (i.e. immediately before the easing of restrictions).
I think that is broadly as expected. I don't think it is particular spectacular and I think the government will be hoping that the easing means significant further returns to work in the first half of June.
It does however reduce the extent of the scheme and burden on the taxpayer to its lowest level so far, basically equivalent to its previous low in October 2020.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3135479/china-container-port-expects-delays-after-coronavirus
https://twitter.com/CameronDLWalker/status/1400410028155281410?s=20
We will proudly maintain our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on development, and do more to help countries receiving aid become self-sufficient.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8005542/
...SARS-CoV has emerged as a human disease in Guangdong, Southern China, in November 2002. The location and time of the original transmission from animal to human is not known and SARS-CoV was found in wet markets in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in masked palm civets (P. larvata) and raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides) (Tu et al., 2004; Webster, 2004; Song et al., 2005). However, these two markets were the only places where SARS-CoV was found in small mammals. It was not found in any other masked palm civet samples from farms in Guangdong, Henan and Hunan (Tu et al., 2004). Although no virus has ever been isolated outside the two markets of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, a massive culling of civets was carried out to eradicate the “source” of infection (Tu et al., 2004; Watts, 2004). SARS-CoV-related viruses were isolated from Chinese rufous horseshoe bats R. sinicus. However, these viruses were not the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV and civet viruses. Following the emergence in Guangzhou, SARS spread in the urban human population mostly around the Hong Kong bay, Taiwan, and Canada, killing 8,422 persons for a death rate of 9.6% (Chan-Yeung and Xu, 2003). Bats were designated as “reservoir” for SARS-CoV, but the exact path leading to the emergence of SARS in the human population has never been elucidated. Masked palm civets, who were pointed out at responsible for human infection, seem to simply be parallel hosts that were infected in these two markets along with humans (Tu et al., 2004; Li et al., 2005a). Furthermore, civets were successfully infected experimentally with human isolates of SARS-CoV (Li et al., 2005a; Wu et al., 2005). The virus were most likely imported to the markets from an unknown place by an unknown intermediary, which could potentially be a human being...
... Viruses very closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been isolated from Rhinolophus bats, i.e., R. affinis and R. malayanus, from Yunnan (Zhou P. et al., 2020; Zhou H. et al., 2020). However, just as for SARS-CoV, the time and location of the initial event of emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the path from bats to humans remains unknown. In both SARS and COVID-19, the main drivers for disease emergence are human activities. A reasonable hypothesis is that the SARS-CoV-like and SARS-CoV-2-like viruses were circulating at low levels in the wild without being detected and that these viruses triggered an outbreak in densely populated cities with high population mobility after amplification in wet markets....
A taxi driver tested positive, he was taken off to a government ran isolation area for 21 days as were all the people who had used his taxi, including a teacher who my friend works with.
All the children and the families that she had come into contact with are all now in state ran isolation camps.
My friend thankfully had not come into contact with her before she was isolated.
Maybe the Chinese just have ultra tight and highly enforced procedures that our government chose not to adopt to keep the virus under control.
She moves appointments between hospitals, looks up the references for consultants, checks everything... In general treats it as a service where you, the customer have to be on alert to get the best.
She comes form a country where the poor get... something. For real medical treatment you pay.
The interesting thing is the shock she generates among ordinary people. The medics seem to regard her polite requests as reasonable.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-45101091
Countries started asking for proof of vaccination (which almost no one had) - fortunately none of the ones I was travelling through....
Post 9/11 or 7/7/15 in this country no one is allowed to take security any way other than absolutely seriously, regardless of the evidence of the risk or lack of it. There is no evidence at all that these aliens, if they exist, are a security threat and a moments thought would suggest that anyone capable of coming thousands of light years or from other dimensions is probably not that worried about the exact capabilities of one of our fighters but now we are supposed to be worried.
If there are aliens here I really don't see why they would not make themselves known by landing on the White House lawn. I therefore think that there probably aren't but you cannot rule out the possibility that their thought processes are so different that that was not the obvious thing to do.
And in the meantime I am having fun gently mocking the idea.
Presumably there’s a few pseudonyms in there, or some regiments that don’t publish things?
And that's the first time I've heard any suggestion that Coventry might be served by HS2.
I doubt that of China is anywhere near that, since we have evidence of how intensively they have reacted to local outbreaks. What is the true rate is anyone guess, though.
(And, of course, they have surveillance systems far more intrusive than those in S Korea, and we've evidence of how successfully they can work from there.)
The lady is first and foremost an activist and campaigner. Fine, but the spin is Glitch is just here to support you.
Its is like Matt Zarb-Cousin, former Corbyn right hand hand, yes he is a former problem gambler, but he pops up as I run a support charity, but his motivate is based on seeing all that all gambling is bad, it should be basically banned, but wrapped up in think of the children stuff.
Your point about the security argument is highly relevant though. It has been deliberately presented in this way to try and force sleepy policy makers to take note. I wrote here many months ago that there was no bigger issue than the Congressional security committee admitting the US did not have control of its own air space. And even then most here yawned.
Now attention has been grabbed and the report (reports) in progress, we must hope it moves with haste out of the realm of the Defense and security establishment into the civilian realm.
(edit) Or maybe it is ?
OMG, it might have come from my lab
THIS And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check.
Now, you're pretty good on maths and data, but compared to the actual women who has done fifteen years of research on novel bat coronaviruses, I suggest you know the cube root of fuck all, on this particular topic. You just waffle on.
She's the expert, and she thought it might have come from her lab, because the coincidence was otherwise too great
It came from the lab, very probably
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
Welcome to PB!
As for Coventry, the release of capacity means other stations are set to open/reopen:
https://coventryobserver.co.uk/news/revealed-new-station-plan-for-coventry-outskirts-new-homes-and-warwick-university-in-time-for-hs2/
Plus, as I have said, it isn’t far to Birmingham Interchange which is near the NEC.
I don’t think there would be any significant time saving from Coventry, because the services will either be a bit slower (more will be 110 mph as against 125mph) or you’ll have to get to the new station to hook up with HS2.
The urban area most likely to lose out significantly from HS2 would actually be Milton Keynes, which isn’t near an HS2 station and probably would see slower services at about the same level of frequency to London.
"Does it really matter where it came from? Only 3.5m have died. Who cares. it probably came from the market anyway despite the total lack of evidence. Give China a break. Let's crack on with sorting out the vaccines and forget all about it XIE XIE"
Asked about John Swinney’s comments suggesting new variants could potentially be more harmful to children and leading to more hospitalisations, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said today said it had “seen no evidence of this to date”
https://twitter.com/ChrisMusson/status/1400415434256572424?s=20
Like Gavin Williamson only more so.
Weird to think he was once the SNP’s leader. No wonder they were so happy to welcome back Salmond.
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1400412531705929729?s=20
The only one she didn't meet personally was LBJ - though Princess Margaret met him at the White House - strained relations at the time over Vietnam & Wilson's refusal to join in...
Thanks, but I must be looking at different numbers to you.
The update that I have just looked at that came out today. covers the period up 30 April and has 3.4 million people on it. a decrees of 900,000 from a month earlier which is itself a 400,000 decrees form a month before that.
Link Hear:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/coronavirus-job-retention-scheme-statistics-3-june-2021
Given the rate of decline, if that continued (which they may well have) then the numbers you have should be about right, but do you mind me asking where you have got them form?
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms….
…Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
"BREAKING: my months-long
@VanityFair
investigation on #COVID19 origins is live. Interviews w/ over 40 people, review of hundreds of pgs. of U.S. gov't docs. incl. internal memos, meeting minutes, email correspondence, found.... https://vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins /1"
"Conflicts of interest, in part from large US gov't grants supporting controversial virology research, known as "gain-of-function," hampered U.S. gov't investigation into #COVID19 origins, and legit. questions on #LabLeak hypothesis, at every step. /2"
"In a 12/9/20
@StateDept
meeting, officials say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome att'n to U.S. gov't funding of it. /3"
"Four former State Dep't officials told
@VanityFair
they were repeatedly advised not to open a "Pandora's box." DiNanno said: “smelled like a cover-up, and I wasn’t going to be part of it.” /5"
I feel sorry for the Zoonati on here. They face an ever bigger wall of evidence and they have to bang their tiny heads against it
https://twitter.com/KatherineEban/status/1400403622786224129?s=20
Jessica Watson
@drjessicawatson
·
12h
Test and trace won’t trace contacts unless you know the persons surname. I offered first name & tel number but computer system required surname so I was advised to call the person myself! It’s pretty tough to phone someone who is on holiday & tell them to self isolate!
FFS. The system must have a surname. Who designs this crap for billions of our money????
"Former
@CDCgov
director
@redfield_dr
got death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN he believed #COVID19 had lab origin. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told
@VanityFair
. /7"
https://twitter.com/KatherineEban/status/1400403626594549766?s=20
BTW the miners you cite who died. They died of a strange pneumonia which, it is now believed, were possibly the first cases of Covid-19. The Wuhan lab falsely claimed they died of a fungus
A total of 17,162 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the country at least once in the week to 26 May according to the latest test and trace figures.
That is a rise of more than a fifth on the previous week and the highest number of people to test positive since the week to 14 April, PA Media reports.
Meanwhile the number of rapid Covid-19 tests carried out in England has fallen to its lowest level in six weeks.
As for giving Xie a break, you're just trying to imply anyone sceptical of you pet theory is a supporter of the regime, which is standard bollocks on the message board you seem to be sourcing your arguments from.
Pleased to visit Indonesia, which has huge potential to be a climate leader on the world stage
See some parts of the visit here
https://twitter.com/AlokSharma_RDG/status/1400331415661678592?s=20
We are delighted to host Professor Robert Frost FBA, FRSE
(University of Aberdeen) for the RHS Prothero Lecture 2021
The Roads Not Taken
Liberty, Sovereignty and the Idea of the Republic
in Poland-Lithuania and the British Isles, 1550-1660
Now there is a title of pure genius.
But I recommend it, that's how I know so much more than you. I read a lot
Good luck, old boy
Jameson is very competent with the bat.
I thought she was 100% reliable and everyone else didn't know what they were talking about.
I’m not convinced either way but am open minded.
"other than satisfying breathless conspiracy fantasists' need for bolstering their self-belief, what use does any of this speculation have to the general population now? It doesn't matter to any but a very small number of people where the damn bug came from."
Only a tiny number of people care about the origins of this virus which has killed millions and shattered the global economy, and they are all "breathless conspiracy theory fantasists"
The number of people in England going for PCR Covid tests is the highest it's been in two months, Test and Trace figures show.
One million PCR tests were taken in the week to 26 May. This is the highest total since the week to 24 March - and is up 3% on the previous week.
PCR tests are swabs taken at a testing centre rather than at home. They are processed in a laboratory, and are used mainly for anyone who has Covid-19 symptoms and to confirm a positive rapid test result.
I am giving up arguing with you on this, as your Covid stories are so protean, it's like wrestling with an octopus coated in lubricant.
When she says that after frantic searching she didn't find anything in the virus archives (never released to the public), we have no way of knowing if this is true, That's when the fog of bio-war descends. The lab deleted so much data, and is still hiding so much more. A year later
Or both.
We are facing a ban in online ads for so called junk food dressed up as protecting kids but will harm many small businesses and artisan producers. Even the advocates of it say the policy will only remove around 3 calories a day from someone’s diet. However it is presented by the advocates as taking the equivalent of skips full of doughnuts out of kids diets.
The media present it unchallenged.
As for Glitch, that sounds pretty par for the course these days sadly. You’d think these TV companies would do some proper diligence.
You have to choose you analogies and language with great care, and they really have to repsect you a lot to listen.
"In 2012, six people at the Mojiang mine, in Yunnan province, experienced a pneumonia-like illness after removing bat feces in their area. Overall, three of the men had died after experiencing fever, dry cough, and other symptoms also typical in COVID-19 patients."
So how did it get from there to Wuhan?
Oh
"The miners were treated with similar therapies used today for SARS-CoV-2 infection... The samples sent to the Wuhan lab were studied in 2018 and was concluded to come from a horseshoe bat."
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200817/Startling-report-suggests-COVID-19-may-have-first-appeared-in-2012.aspx
Yes, please stop arguing with me. You are so badly-informed it is pointless
BLM comes with things like iconoclasm and finger-pointing over "white privilege".
Funnily enough, lots of people don't like that.
Not the happiest of precedents for Conway because after that and another double Sinclair ended up being like a poor man’s Chris Martin, but still the target to go for.
BLM is aimed at wider society, which is why it doesn’t fit in the context of football.
Mr. Royale, quite. The political lecturing isn't what people want from sport, or the coverage thereof.