Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
Your staunch defence of Biden is so out-of-character for a normally sane-to-the-point-of-slightly-boring persona such as yourself, I detect a hint of Trump Derangement Syndrome
It's great that Biden beat Trump. It's great that Trump is no longer president, That doesn't mean Biden is "great". Indeed Biden can be bloody awful (and he is) and still be an improvement on Trump
It's not so much that I think Biden is great as that I think people are getting suckered by the blob. The instant collapse of the army reveals that the whole war was not just failed but fraudulent. Now the exact same people responsible for it are talking as if there was some other way, but when you press on any of it it turns out to be either bullshit, a euphemism for continuing the war forever or require powers of prediction that nobody had.
The treatment Biden is getting reminds me of when Naoto Kan, who spent much of his life campaigning against the Japanese bureaucratic-industrial complex, ended up in charge of the country at the point when the chickens finally came home to roost and one of the nuclear power stations blew up. When a nuclear power station is exploding in real time all the options are bad, so the people responsible for this state of affairs all made solemn briefings - including outright lies - about how it was Prime Minister's fault. The left also bought into the prime ministerial incompetence story for completely opposite reasons - for instance he (rightly) didn't want to evacuate the whole of Fukushima so they associated him with the nuclear village.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
You have to remember as well, nobody in China will risk speaking truth to power even if they do know. See the outbreak, the original whistleblower got punished and we know from leaked documents as it was reported up the chain, at every level, the first instinct was to try and bury the severity of it for as long as possible, because of fear the party would blame and pubish them.
Of course
The saddening thing is the cowardly silencing of WESTERN scientists and politicians and the complicity of our supposedly brilliant science journals, esp the Lancet. They were part of this Chinese conspiracy. Shameful
You left many major media outlets out of this.
These are the people whose job it is supposed to be to speak truth to power.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
No there is the leak from the G7 in June where he assured the other nations....
Obviously they're not going to be providing personnel to protect the British Embassy in the event that *the entire Afghan army collapsed, the president buggered of to Tajikistan with a plane full of money and the Taliban took control of the entire country*. The British can't have taken them to mean that, they don't have cornflakes for brains.
I am surprised that you attempt to excuse Biden, when he betrayed undertakings he gave to the G7 and Nato in June in a meeting the record of which has been released, and he directly reneged on his undertaking thereby dramatically changing the outcome
Biden is responsible for this mess
What specifically are you saying he promised to do?
I am surprised you ask the question as it has been posted on here a few times but I post a further reference on his betrayal
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
No there is the leak from the G7 in June where he assured the other nations....
Obviously they're not going to be providing personnel to protect the British Embassy in the event that *the entire Afghan army collapsed, the president buggered of to Tajikistan with a plane full of money and the Taliban took control of the entire country*. The British can't have taken them to mean that, they don't have cornflakes for brains.
I am surprised that you attempt to excuse Biden, when he betrayed undertakings he gave to the G7 and Nato in June in a meeting the record of which has been released, and he directly reneged on his undertaking thereby dramatically changing the outcome
Biden is responsible for this mess
What specifically are you saying he promised to do?
I am surprised you ask the question as it has been posted on here a few times but I post a further reference on his betrayal
Obviously banging on about Brexit is bad because it is.. But can someone sympathetic with his EU membership views explain why and how Al Campbell thinks it should be in the title of this piece?
"Another story that should have the B-word in the headline yet it doesn’t even appear in the very long story. What is it about the Beeb and the phobia of using the word BREXIT? —- Abuse leaves hospitality staff at 'breaking point'" https://twitter.com/campbellclaret/status/1429022544460398595
Could it be because the staffing shortages have been made a damn site worse by all the european workers having to go home?
So many have gone home that out of the 30 thousand Romanians we were going to get, 920 thousand applied to remain.
The argument goes
"Only (real amount/10) are going to come here, what's the problem?"
then, a few years later
"The economy couldn't survive without (real amount)"
So the people in charge, and their supporters, never have to admit they got it wrong
...oh, right, and the staff shortages in large areas are examples of our economy surving very well?
An economy grows and thrives by workers within the economy. If we don't have the workers we will not grow fast enough to pay our furlong debts.
And the answers are capital investment, worker training and higher pay.
Which leads to increased productivity and a growing economy.
Yet some people prefer the twin exploitations of lower pay and higher house prices.
It doesn't matter what the pay rate is, whilst we have a large part of our younger workforce doing worthless degrees at University, we aren't going to fill the gaps in hospitality or even seasonal work in the lush fruits farms etc. As an older guy myself, I am fed up of receiving rejections from various industries due to my age, so we can't fill the gaps either.
If 1961 is your birth year, could you do please refer to yourself as a middle-aged guy? I have a valid reason for this request
Thanks
Fair enough. In my defence i did say "older" not old.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
Its alright Kinny mate.
We know who you think the enemy is.
"Kinny"?
No, not keen. Lacks gravitas. If we're doing variations my favourite is Kuntibula, or just shorten that to Bula if it's too much of a mouthful.
Re the serious point, Trump was a menace, a real menace, and I was afraid he'd get another 4 years to cement his project of gorging his ego and despoiling everything else. I masked this fear with the TrumpToast mantra, succeeded in convincing myself that the American people would not, could not, shit on their own carpet a second time, but the truth is that despite the happy ending, or more accurately the relief of it, those Trump years have left their mark on me, I'm jumpy, I can't face the prospect of him coming back, I don't even want to contemplate him running again with a serious shot.
Thus I'm extremely sensitive about posts which seem to just possibly imply that Joe Biden messing up this or that or the other shines any sort of (by comparison) redemptive light on Donald Trump.
"At least with Trump, you ..."
"Trump was a total fucking dickhead but ..."
"I couldn't stand Trump but you know what ..."
These are the sort of sentiments that upset me and will be doing my best to stamp on.
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
No there is the leak from the G7 in June where he assured the other nations....
Obviously they're not going to be providing personnel to protect the British Embassy in the event that *the entire Afghan army collapsed, the president buggered of to Tajikistan with a plane full of money and the Taliban took control of the entire country*. The British can't have taken them to mean that, they don't have cornflakes for brains.
I am surprised that you attempt to excuse Biden, when he betrayed undertakings he gave to the G7 and Nato in June in a meeting the record of which has been released, and he directly reneged on his undertaking thereby dramatically changing the outcome
Biden is responsible for this mess
What specifically are you saying he promised to do?
I am surprised you ask the question as it has been posted on here a few times but I post a further reference on his betrayal
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
Your staunch defence of Biden is so out-of-character for a normally sane-to-the-point-of-slightly-boring persona such as yourself, I detect a hint of Trump Derangement Syndrome
It's great that Biden beat Trump. It's great that Trump is no longer president, That doesn't mean Biden is "great". Indeed Biden can be bloody awful (and he is) and still be an improvement on Trump
It's not so much that I think Biden is great as that I think people are getting suckered by the blob. The instant collapse of the army reveals that the whole war was not just failed but fraudulent. Now the exact same people responsible for it are talking as if there was some other way, but when you press on any of it it turns out to be either bullshit, a euphemism for continuing the war forever or require powers of prediction that nobody had.
The treatment Biden is getting reminds me of when Naoto Kan, who spent much of his life campaigning against the Japanese bureaucratic-industrial complex, ended up in charge of the country at the point when the chickens finally came home to roost and one of the nuclear power stations blew up. When a nuclear power station is exploding in real time all the options are bad, so the people responsible for this state of affairs all made solemn briefings - including outright lies - about how it was Prime Minister's fault. The left also bought into the prime ministerial incompetence story for completely opposite reasons - for instance he (rightly) didn't want to evacuate the whole of Fukushima so they associated him with the nuclear village.
You are making my argument far more eloquently than I am. The Afghanistan war has shown itself to be an enormous grift by the US foreign policy establishment. The near instantaneous collapse of the Afghan army reveals it wasn't just mostly a grift but entirely grift. All that money achieved nothing at all. Now they are scrambling to screech hysterically about Biden to distract from this fact they were engaged in a massive fraud.
Obviously banging on about Brexit is bad because it is.. But can someone sympathetic with his EU membership views explain why and how Al Campbell thinks it should be in the title of this piece?
"Another story that should have the B-word in the headline yet it doesn’t even appear in the very long story. What is it about the Beeb and the phobia of using the word BREXIT? —- Abuse leaves hospitality staff at 'breaking point'" https://twitter.com/campbellclaret/status/1429022544460398595
Could it be because the staffing shortages have been made a damn site worse by all the european workers having to go home?
So many have gone home that out of the 30 thousand Romanians we were going to get, 920 thousand applied to remain.
The argument goes
"Only (real amount/10) are going to come here, what's the problem?"
then, a few years later
"The economy couldn't survive without (real amount)"
So the people in charge, and their supporters, never have to admit they got it wrong
...oh, right, and the staff shortages in large areas are examples of our economy surving very well?
An economy grows and thrives by workers within the economy. If we don't have the workers we will not grow fast enough to pay our furlong debts.
And the answers are capital investment, worker training and higher pay.
Which leads to increased productivity and a growing economy.
Yet some people prefer the twin exploitations of lower pay and higher house prices.
It doesn't matter what the pay rate is, whilst we have a large part of our younger workforce doing worthless degrees at University, we aren't going to fill the gaps in hospitality or even seasonal work in the lush fruits farms etc. As an older guy myself, I am fed up of receiving rejections from various industries due to my age, so we can't fill the gaps either.
And you think the answer to the young doing worthless degrees and age discrimination in employment is to get more low paid immigrants to exploit ? Where incidentally are all these extra workers going to live ?
Notice that every whine about there not being enough workers comes from southern England - the place where people cannot afford to live because of housing unaffordability.
Until southern England rids itself of its putrid obsession with house prices its going to have the twin problems of employment and housing.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
No there is the leak from the G7 in June where he assured the other nations....
Obviously they're not going to be providing personnel to protect the British Embassy in the event that *the entire Afghan army collapsed, the president buggered of to Tajikistan with a plane full of money and the Taliban took control of the entire country*. The British can't have taken them to mean that, they don't have cornflakes for brains.
It's also worth pointing out that the Americans told Western civilians in Afghanistan to leave IMMEDIATELY on August 7th. So it's not like they didn't have warning.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
Your staunch defence of Biden is so out-of-character for a normally sane-to-the-point-of-slightly-boring persona such as yourself, I detect a hint of Trump Derangement Syndrome
It's great that Biden beat Trump. It's great that Trump is no longer president, That doesn't mean Biden is "great". Indeed Biden can be bloody awful (and he is) and still be an improvement on Trump
It's not so much that I think Biden is great as that I think people are getting suckered by the blob. The instant collapse of the army reveals that the whole war was not just failed but fraudulent. Now the exact same people responsible for it are talking as if there was some other way, but when you press on any of it it turns out to be either bullshit, a euphemism for continuing the war forever or require powers of prediction that nobody had.
The treatment Biden is getting reminds me of when Naoto Kan, who spent much of his life campaigning against the Japanese bureaucratic-industrial complex, ended up in charge of the country at the point when the chickens finally came home to roost and one of the nuclear power stations blew up. When a nuclear power station is exploding in real time all the options are bad, so the people responsible for this state of affairs all made solemn briefings - including outright lies - about how it was Prime Minister's fault. The left also bought into the prime ministerial incompetence story for completely opposite reasons - for instance he (rightly) didn't want to evacuate the whole of Fukushima so they associated him with the nuclear village.
You are making my argument far more eloquently than I am. The Afghanistan war has shown itself to be an enormous grift by the US foreign policy establishment. The near instantaneous collapse of the Afghan army reveals it wasn't just mostly a grift but entirely grift. All that money achieved nothing at all. Now they are scrambling to screech hysterically about Biden to distract from this fact they were engaged in a massive fraud.
But both can be true. The whole war was perpetuated, to an extent, by a military-ind complex that wanted money and state departments wanting clout, AND Biden has clusterfucked the Withdrawal
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Somehow, I don’t think either would help Labour.
What might help Labour is a massive economic crisis where some very difficult decisions are required.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Daszak is British. You are spouting a load of conspiracy theory bollocks, as usual.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Somehow, I don’t think either would help Labour.
What would help Labour is a massive economic crisis where some very difficult decisions are required.
It would not be rational for this to help Labour, but politics isn't rational. It is not likely that Labour can get 326 seats - not 15% likely even after the current debacle. But for them to do so requires a mixture of Labour being better than now and Tories being worse than they have been. The Tories are making every effort to do worse ATM, and in politics everything is relative. labour's chance is higher than it was.
Yes, economic crisis would take the matter further. But even a few dead UK citizens in Afghanistan could be enough to turn a tide against the Raab/Boris hegemony. Black swans may be around.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
You certainly have the zeal of the convert when it comes to EUrophobia.
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
Your staunch defence of Biden is so out-of-character for a normally sane-to-the-point-of-slightly-boring persona such as yourself, I detect a hint of Trump Derangement Syndrome
It's great that Biden beat Trump. It's great that Trump is no longer president, That doesn't mean Biden is "great". Indeed Biden can be bloody awful (and he is) and still be an improvement on Trump
It's not so much that I think Biden is great as that I think people are getting suckered by the blob. The instant collapse of the army reveals that the whole war was not just failed but fraudulent. Now the exact same people responsible for it are talking as if there was some other way, but when you press on any of it it turns out to be either bullshit, a euphemism for continuing the war forever or require powers of prediction that nobody had.
The treatment Biden is getting reminds me of when Naoto Kan, who spent much of his life campaigning against the Japanese bureaucratic-industrial complex, ended up in charge of the country at the point when the chickens finally came home to roost and one of the nuclear power stations blew up. When a nuclear power station is exploding in real time all the options are bad, so the people responsible for this state of affairs all made solemn briefings - including outright lies - about how it was Prime Minister's fault. The left also bought into the prime ministerial incompetence story for completely opposite reasons - for instance he (rightly) didn't want to evacuate the whole of Fukushima so they associated him with the nuclear village.
You are making my argument far more eloquently than I am. The Afghanistan war has shown itself to be an enormous grift by the US foreign policy establishment. The near instantaneous collapse of the Afghan army reveals it wasn't just mostly a grift but entirely grift. All that money achieved nothing at all. Now they are scrambling to screech hysterically about Biden to distract from this fact they were engaged in a massive fraud.
I wouldn't know how much was fraud cf vested interest and incompetence but the substantive point holds. That Western Constructed Afghanistan collapsed so quickly after 20 years of the Construction Process shows the Project wasn't viable.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Somehow, I don’t think either would help Labour.
What would help Labour is a massive economic crisis where some very difficult decisions are required.
It would not be rational for this to help Labour, but politics isn't rational. It is not likely that Labour can get 326 seats - not 15% likely even after the current debacle. But for them to do so requires a mixture of Labour being better than now and Tories being worse than they have been. The Tories are making every effort to do worse ATM, and in politics everything is relative. labour's chance is higher than it was.
Yes, economic crisis would take the matter further. But even a few dead UK citizens in Afghanistan could be enough to turn a tide against the Raab/Boris hegemony. Black swans may be around.
I think the government’s handling of the COVID crisis has been pretty poor. But I don’t think it hurts them that much because people probably think Labour wouldn’t have done any better.
Basically, for a crisis to hurt the government, it needs to have an impact on people in their 40s. That’s why Black Wednesday was such a disaster for the Tories. Obviously the interest rate rises never happened, but the fact the government was happy to do that to home owners showed that they were completely out of touch.
I doubt Afghanistan will shift many votes. Labour took us in, after all. The single biggest risk to the government is the BoE feeling the need to put up interest rates. A run on the pound is the black swan that should scare the government the most.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Most people are honest and assume other people are like them. And most people have not directly encountered corruption before. They hence underestimate just how causal and rampant it is in some sections of Western professional life.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
You certainly have the zeal of the convert when it comes to EUrophobia.
Not really.
Just asking a fair question and do you agree with it
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
No there is the leak from the G7 in June where he assured the other nations....
Obviously they're not going to be providing personnel to protect the British Embassy in the event that *the entire Afghan army collapsed, the president buggered of to Tajikistan with a plane full of money and the Taliban took control of the entire country*. The British can't have taken them to mean that, they don't have cornflakes for brains.
It's also worth pointing out that the Americans told Western civilians in Afghanistan to leave IMMEDIATELY on August 7th. So it's not like they didn't have warning.
Yup, after telling them to get out of there back in May.
One small mercy to be thankful for here is that the Afghan government had the presence of mind to collapse a couple of weeks before withdrawal had completed, instead of, as a lot of people seem to have expected, fighting for a few months or a year and then losing. If it had happened at the same speed but a month later, most of the people they're currently shipping out would still have been there, but to rescue them the Americans would have had to shoot their way in, deal with the world's biggest ever hostage crisis, then shoot their way out again.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Daszak is British. You are spouting a load of conspiracy theory bollocks, as usual.
I think Leon's point is that it is slightly odd to have someone on the international investigation who was heavily involved with one of the potential causes. And Daszak was heavily involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By all means he could give information to the investigative team; having him on it was not good.
Put yourself into Daszak's position. If you knew - or suspected - something had happened that caused the pandemic and millions of deaths, would you openly admit it, or try to cover it up? Human nature - and his subsequent actions - lean towards the latter.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
what is at either end of this wall? sounds a bit Maginot.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
what is at either end of this wall? sounds a bit Maginot.
I'm not sure why the EU would criticise a wall, unless it was built to stop free movement within the EU.
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Daszak is British. You are spouting a load of conspiracy theory bollocks, as usual.
And you're a fucking moron who can't google for 3 seconds
He was born in Ukraine, lived in Britain, and has lived in America for many years, and now refers to himself as "American"
"American on World Health Organization coronavirus investigation team dismisses US intelligence Peter Daszak suggests President Joe Biden was only sceptical about the WHO’s trip to Wuhan because he ‘has to look tough on China’"
"The lone American on the World Health Organization coronavirus fact-finding mission in China dismissed US intelligence on the virus’ origins and urged the Biden administration to trust the WHO’s work amid criticism that the organisation is insufficiently independent from Beijing."
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
what is at either end of this wall? sounds a bit Maginot.
Apparently it is a land wall upto where the river is the border
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Daszak is British. You are spouting a load of conspiracy theory bollocks, as usual.
I think Leon's point is that it is slightly odd to have someone on the international investigation who was heavily involved with one of the potential causes. And Daszak was heavily involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By all means he could give information to the investigative team; having him on it was not good.
Put yourself into Daszak's position. If you knew - or suspected - something had happened that caused the pandemic and millions of deaths, would you openly admit it, or try to cover it up? Human nature - and his subsequent actions - lean towards the latter.
He should have not been on the team.
Yes, Leon’s point was surely conflict of interest. Which is not unreasonable to ask surely ?
A European centred defensive alliance isn't credible without the participation of the UK.
We provide about 25% of its military punch across the whole EU, and an even higher proportion of its expeditionary capability.
Unlike for shellfish, sausages and financial services, where the EU can really shut us out if they want to, they cannot do so on any military structure because they need what we have. Therefore, they have to deal with us in real-politik as opposed to pompously insisting we help bring to life their federalist fantasies.
I think being run by the EuCo is an even bigger handicap than not having the UK involved.
The battle will be lost whilst they spend a month playing a game of musical chairs.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Daszak is British. You are spouting a load of conspiracy theory bollocks, as usual.
I think Leon's point is that it is slightly odd to have someone on the international investigation who was heavily involved with one of the potential causes. And Daszak was heavily involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By all means he could give information to the investigative team; having him on it was not good.
Put yourself into Daszak's position. If you knew - or suspected - something had happened that caused the pandemic and millions of deaths, would you openly admit it, or try to cover it up? Human nature - and his subsequent actions - lean towards the latter.
He should have not been on the team.
Yes, Leon’s point was surely conflict of interest. Which is not unreasonable to ask surely ?
No his point was that anything Rassmussen or Daszak have even said on the subject should be immediately dismissed, presumably just repeating some tin-foiled hatted loon on Youtube.
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
No it is darker than that
So much western science is now funded by China, or dependent on China, there is a growing reluctance to anger China, let alone blame it for a global plague
The Lancet, which published that notorious letter (concocted by Daszak) trying to crush the lab leak hypothesis, has very strong links to China and is reliant on Chinese support. Horton, the editor, is basically a Chinese puppet
Meanwhile, imagine you're a virologist. If you pipe up and say "Actually it probably was a lab leak" you are endangering your entire career, because you endanger your own science. Virology will be fucked if lab leak is proved. So everyone will hate you, your peers will disown you, your friends will shun you. China might try and kill you. Who knows
So it's much better to keep your head down and say nothing or just mutter about pangolins, which most of them did
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
what is at either end of this wall? sounds a bit Maginot.
Apparently it is a land wall upto where the river is the border
There are layers of defences already in place or being hastily thrown up right now. As well as the Greek walls, their aggressive pushback tactics against the boat people trying to get out of Turkey are well-documented. Moreover, the Turkish Government is also under mounting pressure from an immigration weary populace, and is trying to wall off vulnerable sections of its border with Iran.
Any large migrant outflows from Afghanistan are going to come up against more determined efforts than ever from the states further West to keep them out.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Daszak is British. You are spouting a load of conspiracy theory bollocks, as usual.
I think Leon's point is that it is slightly odd to have someone on the international investigation who was heavily involved with one of the potential causes. And Daszak was heavily involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By all means he could give information to the investigative team; having him on it was not good.
Put yourself into Daszak's position. If you knew - or suspected - something had happened that caused the pandemic and millions of deaths, would you openly admit it, or try to cover it up? Human nature - and his subsequent actions - lean towards the latter.
He should have not been on the team.
Yes, Leon’s point was surely conflict of interest. Which is not unreasonable to ask surely ?
No his point was that anything Rassmussen or Daszak have even said on the subject should be immediately dismissed, presumably just repeating some tin-foiled hatted loon on Youtube.
Or, I have read tons on this subject, and I now really know what I am talking about, and you, quite simply, do not. As we see here
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Daszak is British. You are spouting a load of conspiracy theory bollocks, as usual.
I think Leon's point is that it is slightly odd to have someone on the international investigation who was heavily involved with one of the potential causes. And Daszak was heavily involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By all means he could give information to the investigative team; having him on it was not good.
Put yourself into Daszak's position. If you knew - or suspected - something had happened that caused the pandemic and millions of deaths, would you openly admit it, or try to cover it up? Human nature - and his subsequent actions - lean towards the latter.
He should have not been on the team.
Yes, Leon’s point was surely conflict of interest. Which is not unreasonable to ask surely ?
No his point was that anything Rassmussen or Daszak have even said on the subject should be immediately dismissed, presumably just repeating some tin-foiled hatted loon on Youtube.
His point is exactly that, because of the massive conflict of interest. His point is both correct and very, very easy to understand.
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
You certainly have the zeal of the convert when it comes to EUrophobia.
I'm vaguely wondering about the other 160km of the Greece-Turkey border.
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
Your staunch defence of Biden is so out-of-character for a normally sane-to-the-point-of-slightly-boring persona such as yourself, I detect a hint of Trump Derangement Syndrome
It's great that Biden beat Trump. It's great that Trump is no longer president, That doesn't mean Biden is "great". Indeed Biden can be bloody awful (and he is) and still be an improvement on Trump
It's not so much that I think Biden is great as that I think people are getting suckered by the blob. The instant collapse of the army reveals that the whole war was not just failed but fraudulent. Now the exact same people responsible for it are talking as if there was some other way, but when you press on any of it it turns out to be either bullshit, a euphemism for continuing the war forever or require powers of prediction that nobody had.
The treatment Biden is getting reminds me of when Naoto Kan, who spent much of his life campaigning against the Japanese bureaucratic-industrial complex, ended up in charge of the country at the point when the chickens finally came home to roost and one of the nuclear power stations blew up. When a nuclear power station is exploding in real time all the options are bad, so the people responsible for this state of affairs all made solemn briefings - including outright lies - about how it was Prime Minister's fault. The left also bought into the prime ministerial incompetence story for completely opposite reasons - for instance he (rightly) didn't want to evacuate the whole of Fukushima so they associated him with the nuclear village.
You are making my argument far more eloquently than I am. The Afghanistan war has shown itself to be an enormous grift by the US foreign policy establishment. The near instantaneous collapse of the Afghan army reveals it wasn't just mostly a grift but entirely grift. All that money achieved nothing at all. Now they are scrambling to screech hysterically about Biden to distract from this fact they were engaged in a massive fraud.
But both can be true. The whole war was perpetuated, to an extent, by a military-ind complex that wanted money and state departments wanting clout, AND Biden has clusterfucked the Withdrawal
It's not either/or
How are you supposed to manage a smooth withdrawal when the people you are transferring power to just give up and leave the country? The Afghan national government and army were such paper tigers it was always going to be a cluster fuck. A well managed version of this was impossible.
I don't know if its been commented on here already, but Australia have just reported there largest number of cases of COVID for any day of pandemic so far: 894 cases. (and a 62% Week on Week increase)
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
Your staunch defence of Biden is so out-of-character for a normally sane-to-the-point-of-slightly-boring persona such as yourself, I detect a hint of Trump Derangement Syndrome
It's great that Biden beat Trump. It's great that Trump is no longer president, That doesn't mean Biden is "great". Indeed Biden can be bloody awful (and he is) and still be an improvement on Trump
It's not so much that I think Biden is great as that I think people are getting suckered by the blob. The instant collapse of the army reveals that the whole war was not just failed but fraudulent. Now the exact same people responsible for it are talking as if there was some other way, but when you press on any of it it turns out to be either bullshit, a euphemism for continuing the war forever or require powers of prediction that nobody had.
The treatment Biden is getting reminds me of when Naoto Kan, who spent much of his life campaigning against the Japanese bureaucratic-industrial complex, ended up in charge of the country at the point when the chickens finally came home to roost and one of the nuclear power stations blew up. When a nuclear power station is exploding in real time all the options are bad, so the people responsible for this state of affairs all made solemn briefings - including outright lies - about how it was Prime Minister's fault. The left also bought into the prime ministerial incompetence story for completely opposite reasons - for instance he (rightly) didn't want to evacuate the whole of Fukushima so they associated him with the nuclear village.
You are making my argument far more eloquently than I am. The Afghanistan war has shown itself to be an enormous grift by the US foreign policy establishment. The near instantaneous collapse of the Afghan army reveals it wasn't just mostly a grift but entirely grift. All that money achieved nothing at all. Now they are scrambling to screech hysterically about Biden to distract from this fact they were engaged in a massive fraud.
But both can be true. The whole war was perpetuated, to an extent, by a military-ind complex that wanted money and state departments wanting clout, AND Biden has clusterfucked the Withdrawal
It's not either/or
How are you supposed to manage a smooth withdrawal when the people you are transferring power to just give up and leave the country? The Afghan national government and army were such paper tigers it was always going to be a cluster fuck. A well managed version of this was impossible.
Well - for starters - how about listening to the advice he was given and get most of the people out before the military ......
I don't know if this has already been discussed on here since Delta really took off, but the Governor of Louisiana noted that 28% of all new COVID cases in the state are children in the 0-17 age cohort. In Kansas, ICUs are at 100% capacity at the 6 largest hospitals.
When is the JCVI going to realize that the balance of risks for the 0-17 group has now shifted decisively in favour of vaccination for this group and act accordingly, at least for the 12-17 group? The UK has had a spectacular success story on vaccines so far, but this inaction on vaccinating the youth is entering the incomprehensible realm for me now.
Trump was America First, Biden appears to be Only America.
The lack of even name checking the likes of UK and France last night was telling....Biden saying only America can airlift people out of Afghanistan. I am sure all the special forces from UK, France, etc on the ground in Afghanistan really appreciate this take.
For all the demerits of Joe Biden - and I am seeing some - I would counsel most strongly against even the slightest temptation to doubt that every single aspect of American governance one could care to mention would not be significantly worse if Donald Trump were still directing things from his romper pen.
As i stated last night, everybody dealing with Team Trump knew they were totally unreliable and unpredictable....whatever he saw on Fox News that morning could easily result in a massive lurch to a different position and whoever you were dealing with could be fired tomorrow because they told Trump something he didn't like. The thing is the international community knew this and handled everything with buyer beware.
Biden was supposed to be the return of the professionals and even if Uncle Joe was sleepy and well past his best, the government would be stuffed full of reasonably compotent appointees who you could plan to come to agreements which wouldn't be vaporware. This Afghanistan business looks like it isn't the case and caught out not just the Brits but other international partners.
What seems to have caught everyone off-guard, particularly the former Afghan government, is that Biden did what he said he was going to do. They all seem to have expected that he'd do the same as Obama and Trump and get briefed on all the different kinds of chaos that could happen during the withdrawal, think about how they were going to look on telly, and kick the can down the road to the next unlucky president.
Your staunch defence of Biden is so out-of-character for a normally sane-to-the-point-of-slightly-boring persona such as yourself, I detect a hint of Trump Derangement Syndrome
It's great that Biden beat Trump. It's great that Trump is no longer president, That doesn't mean Biden is "great". Indeed Biden can be bloody awful (and he is) and still be an improvement on Trump
It's not so much that I think Biden is great as that I think people are getting suckered by the blob. The instant collapse of the army reveals that the whole war was not just failed but fraudulent. Now the exact same people responsible for it are talking as if there was some other way, but when you press on any of it it turns out to be either bullshit, a euphemism for continuing the war forever or require powers of prediction that nobody had.
The treatment Biden is getting reminds me of when Naoto Kan, who spent much of his life campaigning against the Japanese bureaucratic-industrial complex, ended up in charge of the country at the point when the chickens finally came home to roost and one of the nuclear power stations blew up. When a nuclear power station is exploding in real time all the options are bad, so the people responsible for this state of affairs all made solemn briefings - including outright lies - about how it was Prime Minister's fault. The left also bought into the prime ministerial incompetence story for completely opposite reasons - for instance he (rightly) didn't want to evacuate the whole of Fukushima so they associated him with the nuclear village.
You are making my argument far more eloquently than I am. The Afghanistan war has shown itself to be an enormous grift by the US foreign policy establishment. The near instantaneous collapse of the Afghan army reveals it wasn't just mostly a grift but entirely grift. All that money achieved nothing at all. Now they are scrambling to screech hysterically about Biden to distract from this fact they were engaged in a massive fraud.
But both can be true. The whole war was perpetuated, to an extent, by a military-ind complex that wanted money and state departments wanting clout, AND Biden has clusterfucked the Withdrawal
It's not either/or
How are you supposed to manage a smooth withdrawal when the people you are transferring power to just give up and leave the country? The Afghan national government and army were such paper tigers it was always going to be a cluster fuck. A well managed version of this was impossible.
Whose fault is it that the Afghan national government and army were such paper tigers?
Are a couple of possible black swan sightings coming into view? No black swan is required for the Tories to lose their overall majority, but it is required for Labour to get to 326 seats (about a 15% chance last time I looked, which in general until recently looked on the high side).
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
Greece has built a 40 km wall and patrol strip to keep out those in distress, but no criticism from the EU
You certainly have the zeal of the convert when it comes to EUrophobia.
I'm vaguely wondering about the other 160km of the Greece-Turkey border.
Plus the Turkish coastguard helps migrants get across to the closer Greek Islands....
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
Again, a bit of a misunderstanding
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
I don't know if this has already been discussed on here since Delta really took off, but the Governor of Louisiana noted that 28% of all new COVID cases in the state are children in the 0-17 age cohort. In Kansas, ICUs are at 100% capacity at the 6 largest hospitals.
When is the JCVI going to realize that the balance of risks for the 0-17 group has now shifted decisively in favour of vaccination for this group and act accordingly, at least for the 12-17 group? The UK has had a spectacular success story on vaccines so far, but this inaction on vaccinating the youth is entering the incomprehensible realm for me now.
Adam Finn has been very active warning of the dangers of excessive vaccination recently
I wonder if Kiwis know that their capital is on South Island?
I haven't read their article but if they are not aware that wellington is on the north island, it does not boad well for the depth of the rest of the article.
Perhaps it was a typo and was meant to be 'Wellington AND the south Island' but you do have to wonder about the profe reader?
I wonder if Kiwis know that their capital is on South Island?
I can tell you Mrs Stodge is apoplectic in her rage and has promised never to read the Daily Fail ever again.
To be fair, some parts of that last sentence are both exaggerated and inaccurate - she actually laughed.
The problem in NZ is the virus got a vital 3-4 day head start from "Patient Zero" travelling round and it's currently spreading through the Auckland school system.
Some on South Island are arguing they should have their Level 4 restriction lifted but I suspect that ship (or ferry) may already have sailed but to date I don't think any cases have been recorded south of the Cook Strait.
The US has advised citizens not to travel to Kabul airport because of possible security threats at the gates
But Joe assured everybody the nice Royal Mounted Taliban were letting everybody through.and there were no issues for citizens. Just preflight passport check, covid test and on the plane like going on a week holiday to Greece.
The unopposed appointment of Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP as new leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats was about item no 15 on the news yesterday. Talk about picking a bad day for that announcement! Totally drowned out by Afghanistan, the SNP/Green government launch and lots of other things. The brief clip of his annoying pseudo-oration was a real stinker.
For a small party, the SLDs used to have a lot of talent. These days they are in the same boat as Scottish Labour: a talent desert.
Funnily enough, Tory leader Douglas Ross is fast overtaking SLab MP Ian Murray as the sanest and most persuasive Unionist spokesperson. Never thought I’d see that!
By far the best and most credible recovery for the Unionists would be a resurgence of the old coalition pals SLab and SLD. Judging by their two new leaders that ain’t happening any time soon.
It will be interesting to see how the all new Starmer Labour party copes with such ideas. Labour were happy with the idea of the LibDems propping Labour up but having then propped the Tories up it was Consternation and Uproar.
Supposedly Labour have moved towards support for proportionate voting systems. If they have then they will have to accept the idea of coalitions and some of those won't involve Labour. Are they grown ups now or illogical partisan hacks?
My guesstimate:
Labour Party in England 40% grown ups 20% illogical partisan hacks 40% Citizen Smiths
Welsh Labour 50% grown ups 30% illogical partisan hacks 10% Citizen Smiths 10% last of the true Britons
I think your Orange Lodge figure is too high. Most of them vote Conservative and UNIONIST. I would go for 3% Orange Lodge, 67% illogical partisan hacks.
Reading an interesting piece this morning, there seems to be an argument developing it would be better for us all to have Covid via the Delta variant than to continue trying to avoid it (and presumable later variants) by vaccination.
The gist seems to be for those doubly vaccinated Coronavirus remains much less of a risk and the protection afforded through infection is greater and longer lasting than the protection afforded by vaccination alone. This seems connected to the way the virus acts and the way a vaccine acts.
Am I convinced?
The issue is even for some of those who are doubly vaccinated, a bout with coronavirus may not be entirely straightforward and it seems on paper a huge risk for many of the very elderly.
Now, we have the "well, they're all going to die soon" argument but on that basis none of us would bother as we're all going to die sooner or later so I think we can swerve that.
I understand the scientific theory and argument - it's a variation on herd immunity but it's a herd immunity with the comfort blanket of vaccination to ensure a much greater risk of survival for larger numbers.
I don't know if this has already been discussed on here since Delta really took off, but the Governor of Louisiana noted that 28% of all new COVID cases in the state are children in the 0-17 age cohort. In Kansas, ICUs are at 100% capacity at the 6 largest hospitals.
When is the JCVI going to realize that the balance of risks for the 0-17 group has now shifted decisively in favour of vaccination for this group and act accordingly, at least for the 12-17 group? The UK has had a spectacular success story on vaccines so far, but this inaction on vaccinating the youth is entering the incomprehensible realm for me now.
The past few months UK vaccine programme had turned into a no rush type approach. The JCVI saying they need to wait for more data, that isn't a matter of waiting a few days, its can kicking....when we have 60m doses coming and no reason to wait. The potential downside of jabbing is waste, the downside of not jabbing is 10,000s of extra hospitalisations and deaths.
I wonder if Kiwis know that their capital is on South Island?
I haven't read their article but if they are not aware that wellington is on the north island, it does not boad well for the depth of the rest of the article.
Perhaps it was a typo and was meant to be 'Wellington AND the south Island' but you do have to wonder about the profe reader?
Or it was meant to be from the north of the island to the south of the island, all referring to North island. But major fail in the proofing department.
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
Again, a bit of a misunderstanding
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
That is also a possibility
The gain of function research is the most worrying. There should be a global moratorium on it declared immediately. Wheeling out a quote from Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" as it feels quite prescient on this kind of research.
The method that would have been used is infecting humanised mice with the bat virus and then allowing it to mutate in them until it was able to achieve humanised mouse to humanised mouse spread. Someone would need to set out to make the bat virus transmissible between humans and one of my university friends was saying it would need thousands and thousands of lineages to arrive from where the bat virus started to the original SarsCov-2 that we saw in Wuhan. He was very sceptical about the idea that the gain of function from the nearest known relative to COVID-19 to where is is today could have occurred in a single host animal and then infected someone randomly.
The more likely scenario and (what he's convinced me on) is that it was that the scientists set out to make a human to human transmissible coronavirus similar to Sars so they could research a potential generalised vaccine against SARS like viruses in the future. From there he said that Chinese labs are all pretty terrible and have very, very poor safety so a humanised mouse to human transmission was very likely once it became possible and then from there the scientist(s) would have been unknowingly spreading it in Wuhan.
I still can't get over this insane idea, apparently being bruited by Channel 4 tonight, that the novel bat coronavirus now ravaging the world, which emerged in Wuhan China, apparently came from the only lab in the world researching novel bat coronaviruses, which is in Wuhan China.
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?
Everyone knows it came from a golden panda which had gay cosplay sex with a spiny anteater living in a bat foster family who then gave the virus to a dwarf coalminer, who was caught in an eerie whirlwind and transported 1000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan wet market where he coughed on some hens
It was always viable. The rock solid case on the Chinese authorities lying through their arse about the original breakout in Wuhan in particular its timelines, the nature of the disease and the casualty rate leaves open the possibility that they were covering up a serious mess of some sort. Its not a big leap.
My hunch right now is that the Chinese still aren't sure where it came from (and, like us, probably never will be now) but they are very very suspicious that it came from the lab - as in, at least 90% likely. Maybe 98%.
Hence the stymying of all investigations (even those into the market were hampered) it is better for them if no one knows for sure.
But they can't stop westerners finally realising "OK, it almost certainly came from that bloody lab"
Did you see the recently posted paper (preprint) which did a genetic and distributional analysis which pointed to the markets? AIUI the genetics of emergence in two wet markets, with two strains very closely related (couiple of RNA base changes, I think) suggested a source such as a consignment of beasties in a lorry, ergo cross-contamination, some of which went to one market and some to the other.
[Was on PB: but possibly when you were offline the other day.]
It was written by Angie Rasmussen. So it must be immediately discounted
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
Given your knowledge of this what is your view of the part the WHO has played ?
The only American invited to join the WHO team investigating Covid in China was - this is no joke - Peter Daszak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He says the team found no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology was implicated in a lab leak.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
Daszak is British. You are spouting a load of conspiracy theory bollocks, as usual.
I think Leon's point is that it is slightly odd to have someone on the international investigation who was heavily involved with one of the potential causes. And Daszak was heavily involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By all means he could give information to the investigative team; having him on it was not good.
Put yourself into Daszak's position. If you knew - or suspected - something had happened that caused the pandemic and millions of deaths, would you openly admit it, or try to cover it up? Human nature - and his subsequent actions - lean towards the latter.
He should have not been on the team.
Yes, Leon’s point was surely conflict of interest. Which is not unreasonable to ask surely ?
No his point was that anything Rassmussen or Daszak have even said on the subject should be immediately dismissed, presumably just repeating some tin-foiled hatted loon on Youtube.
Isn’t the point more Daszak has a possible conflict of interest ?
The unopposed appointment of Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP as new leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats was about item no 15 on the news yesterday. Talk about picking a bad day for that announcement! Totally drowned out by Afghanistan, the SNP/Green government launch and lots of other things. The brief clip of his annoying pseudo-oration was a real stinker.
For a small party, the SLDs used to have a lot of talent. These days they are in the same boat as Scottish Labour: a talent desert.
Funnily enough, Tory leader Douglas Ross is fast overtaking SLab MP Ian Murray as the sanest and most persuasive Unionist spokesperson. Never thought I’d see that!
By far the best and most credible recovery for the Unionists would be a resurgence of the old coalition pals SLab and SLD. Judging by their two new leaders that ain’t happening any time soon.
It will be interesting to see how the all new Starmer Labour party copes with such ideas. Labour were happy with the idea of the LibDems propping Labour up but having then propped the Tories up it was Consternation and Uproar.
Supposedly Labour have moved towards support for proportionate voting systems. If they have then they will have to accept the idea of coalitions and some of those won't involve Labour. Are they grown ups now or illogical partisan hacks?
My guesstimate:
Labour Party in England 40% grown ups 20% illogical partisan hacks 40% Citizen Smiths
Welsh Labour 50% grown ups 30% illogical partisan hacks 10% Citizen Smiths 10% last of the true Britons
SLAB, you may be right from your perch in Sweden 😀. Welsh Labour, I don't think so.
Llafur:
20% grown ups -- in which category we can put the uninspiring, but reasonably sincere, Drakeford
70% self-interested -- In Wales, there is no working economy. Many hundreds of millions of pounds of public money is used in providing sinecures for Labour cronies, in return for which these people support Labour in any way they can. In the South Wales Valleys, the choices for life improvement are either (i) emigration, (ii) a life of crime or (iii) a life in the Labour party. A typical specimen is the vacuous Sophie Howe, the very well-paid Future Generations Commissioner. Sje tweets every now and then, for ~100k a year.
10 % failures -- normally English. These are people like Jane Davidson, who have no connection to Wales, failed to have a political career in England because of general incompetence & fuckwittery, and so moved to Wales, where they prospered in the low-grade atmosphere of Llafur. It is Small Pond Syndrome.
Llafur has literally got only ONE thing in its favour.
It is not the Welsh Conservative Party.
That one thing has enabled it to remain in power for 20 years.
My current perch is in Scotland.
I defer to your far greater knowledge of Welsh society and affairs. However, an objective observer could perhaps guess that you vote Welsh Conservative 😉
Shame PC never managed to be the “Not The Welsh Conservative Party”.
While we've all heard the stories of the anguish of the hospitality industry and not least from @Cyclefree, there's an issue or two at work here.
Back in the day, there was some sense of local planning or co-ordination between the number of beds in a coastal town like Newquay or St Ives and the number of tables/places to eat. There was an attempt to plan capacity and work out when a town was "full".
2021 seems to show this no longer exists - having encouraged the confined to let themselves go, there's been an almost migratory instinct to head for the coast (all coasts, well, most) and especially to Cornwall.
The county isn't just full - it's bursting at the seams - and the inevitable capacity issues in terms of tables and food have come to the fore.
I can understand hospitality wanting to "catch up" on the disaster that was 2020 but as is ever the case, famine is now followed by feast. Had it been possible to have a more planned and phased re-opening of the coast to accommodate suitable numbers of visitors so much the better but as we have a Prime Minister who measures his own wellbeing in terms of keeping everyone "happy", those who fail to achieve the replete measure of happiness are of no interest.
The unopposed appointment of Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP as new leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats was about item no 15 on the news yesterday. Talk about picking a bad day for that announcement! Totally drowned out by Afghanistan, the SNP/Green government launch and lots of other things. The brief clip of his annoying pseudo-oration was a real stinker.
For a small party, the SLDs used to have a lot of talent. These days they are in the same boat as Scottish Labour: a talent desert.
Funnily enough, Tory leader Douglas Ross is fast overtaking SLab MP Ian Murray as the sanest and most persuasive Unionist spokesperson. Never thought I’d see that!
By far the best and most credible recovery for the Unionists would be a resurgence of the old coalition pals SLab and SLD. Judging by their two new leaders that ain’t happening any time soon.
It will be interesting to see how the all new Starmer Labour party copes with such ideas. Labour were happy with the idea of the LibDems propping Labour up but having then propped the Tories up it was Consternation and Uproar.
Supposedly Labour have moved towards support for proportionate voting systems. If they have then they will have to accept the idea of coalitions and some of those won't involve Labour. Are they grown ups now or illogical partisan hacks?
My guesstimate:
Labour Party in England 40% grown ups 20% illogical partisan hacks 40% Citizen Smiths
Welsh Labour 50% grown ups 30% illogical partisan hacks 10% Citizen Smiths 10% last of the true Britons
I think your Orange Lodge figure is too high. Most of them vote Conservative and UNIONIST. I would go for 3% Orange Lodge, 67% illogical partisan hacks.
I rather suspect the, erm, orange "juice" is made with a rather stronger mix in certain places than in others. I also wonder if you were actually right maybe 10 years ago but that the Orange vote has since moved over to the full cream [edit] British nationalism of SCUP.
I wonder if Kiwis know that their capital is on South Island?
I haven't read their article but if they are not aware that wellington is on the north island, it does not boad well for the depth of the rest of the article.
Perhaps it was a typo and was meant to be 'Wellington AND the south Island' but you do have to wonder about the profe reader?
Or it was meant to be from the north of the island to the south of the island, all referring to North island. But major fail in the proofing department.
Actualy, yes I think you are right, 'to Wellington at the south end of the North Island' is probably the corest thinking.
Perhaps the bigger question is or should be, will the NZ lockdown in force at the moment, work? Looking at Australia with a similer number of people vaccinated, and a lockdown, but cases are still rising, all be it from a low start in both nations.
is Delta so transmissible that in a population will 20% fully vaccinated and a lockdown it still spreads? and if so what to do: A more strict Lockdown? or keep the lockdown in place to limit spread while they finish the vaccinations? 4 months, 5 months, 6 months?
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
Again, a bit of a misunderstanding
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
That is also a possibility
The gain of function research is the most worrying. There should be a global moratorium on it declared immediately. Wheeling out a quote from Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" as it feels quite prescient on this kind of research.
The method that would have been used is infecting humanised mice with the bat virus and then allowing it to mutate in them until it was able to achieve humanised mouse to humanised mouse spread. Someone would need to set out to make the bat virus transmissible between humans and one of my university friends was saying it would need thousands and thousands of lineages to arrive from where the bat virus started to the original SarsCov-2 that we saw in Wuhan. He was very sceptical about the idea that the gain of function from the nearest known relative to COVID-19 to where is is today could have occurred in a single host animal and then infected someone randomly.
The more likely scenario and (what he's convinced me on) is that it was that the scientists set out to make a human to human transmissible coronavirus similar to Sars so they could research a potential generalised vaccine against SARS like viruses in the future. From there he said that Chinese labs are all pretty terrible and have very, very poor safety so a humanised mouse to human transmission was very likely once it became possible and then from there the scientist(s) would have been unknowingly spreading it in Wuhan.
My guess is that your friend is exactly right. And yes, the goal was a ‘universal’ vaccine.
Here is Peter Daszak openly admitting the WIV was using humanized mice.
‘Ibelieve it means more than the regulatory definition. Wiki describe GOF as also increasing host range... Daszak with NIH funding ran potential pathogens through humanized mice thereby adapting viruses to human cells and thus doing GOF. Yes... it's a broad term.’
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
Again, a bit of a misunderstanding
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
That is also a possibility
The gain of function research is the most worrying. There should be a global moratorium on it declared immediately. Wheeling out a quote from Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" as it feels quite prescient on this kind of research.
The method that would have been used is infecting humanised mice with the bat virus and then allowing it to mutate in them until it was able to achieve humanised mouse to humanised mouse spread. Someone would need to set out to make the bat virus transmissible between humans and one of my university friends was saying it would need thousands and thousands of lineages to arrive from where the bat virus started to the original SarsCov-2 that we saw in Wuhan. He was very sceptical about the idea that the gain of function from the nearest known relative to COVID-19 to where is is today could have occurred in a single host animal and then infected someone randomly.
The more likely scenario and (what he's convinced me on) is that it was that the scientists set out to make a human to human transmissible coronavirus similar to Sars so they could research a potential generalised vaccine against SARS like viruses in the future. From there he said that Chinese labs are all pretty terrible and have very, very poor safety so a humanised mouse to human transmission was very likely once it became possible and then from there the scientist(s) would have been unknowingly spreading it in Wuhan.
There has, of course, already been a moratorium on gain of function research, in the shit storm that followed Ron Fouchier's remarks at the Malta conference in 2011. There was a very good and productive international conversation at the time, which produced sensible recommendations.
The same is not true of virus hunting. I think it is time to have a global moratorium on this until there has been a full international discussion, involving stakeholders outside the scientific community, and some form of 'if and how we do this' agreement has been reached.
Right - I'm now more confused than someone trying to make sense of an STV ballot paper.
There seem to be three "theories" out there:
1) It's all natural - the virus jumped from bats or pangolins to humans at the Wuhan live-food market. Some people seem wholly unconvinced.
2) The virus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan virology lab and the Chinese are trying desperately to cover it up because they don't want the rest of the world either asking why their bio-containment regime was so poor or seeking reparations.
3) It was a deliberate leak of a virus so see how the world would or could respond. The Chinese have suffered much higher levels of fatalities than has been widely reported but don't want the world to know this and have observed the creation and distribution of various vaccines with interest.
It's all about "face" with China - as long as they can save face, they'll be okay. What they don't want is anything which makes them look foolish or negligent in the eyes of the rest of the world or, in the case of the CCP, among their own people.
The unopposed appointment of Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP as new leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats was about item no 15 on the news yesterday. Talk about picking a bad day for that announcement! Totally drowned out by Afghanistan, the SNP/Green government launch and lots of other things. The brief clip of his annoying pseudo-oration was a real stinker.
For a small party, the SLDs used to have a lot of talent. These days they are in the same boat as Scottish Labour: a talent desert.
Funnily enough, Tory leader Douglas Ross is fast overtaking SLab MP Ian Murray as the sanest and most persuasive Unionist spokesperson. Never thought I’d see that!
By far the best and most credible recovery for the Unionists would be a resurgence of the old coalition pals SLab and SLD. Judging by their two new leaders that ain’t happening any time soon.
It will be interesting to see how the all new Starmer Labour party copes with such ideas. Labour were happy with the idea of the LibDems propping Labour up but having then propped the Tories up it was Consternation and Uproar.
Supposedly Labour have moved towards support for proportionate voting systems. If they have then they will have to accept the idea of coalitions and some of those won't involve Labour. Are they grown ups now or illogical partisan hacks?
My guesstimate:
Labour Party in England 40% grown ups 20% illogical partisan hacks 40% Citizen Smiths
Welsh Labour 50% grown ups 30% illogical partisan hacks 10% Citizen Smiths 10% last of the true Britons
SLAB, you may be right from your perch in Sweden 😀. Welsh Labour, I don't think so.
Llafur:
20% grown ups -- in which category we can put the uninspiring, but reasonably sincere, Drakeford
70% self-interested -- In Wales, there is no working economy. Many hundreds of millions of pounds of public money is used in providing sinecures for Labour cronies, in return for which these people support Labour in any way they can. In the South Wales Valleys, the choices for life improvement are either (i) emigration, (ii) a life of crime or (iii) a life in the Labour party. A typical specimen is the vacuous Sophie Howe, the very well-paid Future Generations Commissioner. Sje tweets every now and then, for ~100k a year.
10 % failures -- normally English. These are people like Jane Davidson, who have no connection to Wales, failed to have a political career in England because of general incompetence & fuckwittery, and so moved to Wales, where they prospered in the low-grade atmosphere of Llafur. It is Small Pond Syndrome.
Llafur has literally got only ONE thing in its favour.
It is not the Welsh Conservative Party.
That one thing has enabled it to remain in power for 20 years.
My current perch is in Scotland.
I defer to your far greater knowledge of Welsh society and affairs. However, an objective observer could perhaps guess that you vote Welsh Conservative 😉
Shame PC never managed to be the “Not The Welsh Conservative Party”.
I said which way I voted at the last Senedd elections
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
Again, a bit of a misunderstanding
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
That is also a possibility
The gain of function research is the most worrying. There should be a global moratorium on it declared immediately. Wheeling out a quote from Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" as it feels quite prescient on this kind of research.
The method that would have been used is infecting humanised mice with the bat virus and then allowing it to mutate in them until it was able to achieve humanised mouse to humanised mouse spread. Someone would need to set out to make the bat virus transmissible between humans and one of my university friends was saying it would need thousands and thousands of lineages to arrive from where the bat virus started to the original SarsCov-2 that we saw in Wuhan. He was very sceptical about the idea that the gain of function from the nearest known relative to COVID-19 to where is is today could have occurred in a single host animal and then infected someone randomly.
The more likely scenario and (what he's convinced me on) is that it was that the scientists set out to make a human to human transmissible coronavirus similar to Sars so they could research a potential generalised vaccine against SARS like viruses in the future. From there he said that Chinese labs are all pretty terrible and have very, very poor safety so a humanised mouse to human transmission was very likely once it became possible and then from there the scientist(s) would have been unknowingly spreading it in Wuhan.
There has, of course, already been a moratorium on gain of function research, in the shit storm that followed Ron Fouchier's remarks at the Malta conference in 2011. There was a very good and productive international conversation at the time, which produced sensible recommendations.
The same is not true of virus hunting. I think it is time to have a global moratorium on this until there has been a full international discussion, involving stakeholders outside the scientific community, and some form of 'if and how we do this' agreement has been reached.
But then wasn’t GOF basically out-sourced to China, with an added bit of terminological exactitude, to avoid this moratorium?
‘The real dark days at Kabul airport are still ahead. UK government source: “People are going to get left behind. It’s a question of how many. It could be thousands. I don’t think people have realised the extent of the risk.”’
‘The real dark days at Kabul airport are still ahead. UK government source: “People are going to get left behind. It’s a question of how many. It could be thousands. I don’t think people have realised the extent of the risk.”’
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
Again, a bit of a misunderstanding
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
That is also a possibility
I get that. Linking something you disagree with and/or dislike with something extreme and lurid is a classic way to discredit. I can imagine it happened in places. But you're not telling me Trump and Trumpery wouldn't have profited from the widespread belief that China attacked America with Covid. It would have. That's why he pushed it in his trademark 'nudge/wink' fashion. So, the fear of that, of the possible repercussions if it took off, was imo a factor in what looks now like an underestimate of how likely it is that the pandemic was caused by a lab accident rather than via natural zoonosis. That's all I'm saying. And also let's remember that natural origins remains four square in the frame. It'd be easy to think otherwise if one read only your posts on this topic.
@ramsaysky says the situation at Kabul's airport is "utterly horrendous", and that 'hardened soldiers' told him its the "worst thing they have ever seen in their entire career"’
I wonder if Kiwis know that their capital is on South Island?
I haven't read their article but if they are not aware that wellington is on the north island, it does not boad well for the depth of the rest of the article.
Perhaps it was a typo and was meant to be 'Wellington AND the south Island' but you do have to wonder about the profe reader?
Or it was meant to be from the north of the island to the south of the island, all referring to North island. But major fail in the proofing department.
Actualy, yes I think you are right, 'to Wellington at the south end of the North Island' is probably the corest thinking.
Perhaps the bigger question is or should be, will the NZ lockdown in force at the moment, work? Looking at Australia with a similer number of people vaccinated, and a lockdown, but cases are still rising, all be it from a low start in both nations.
is Delta so transmissible that in a population will 20% fully vaccinated and a lockdown it still spreads? and if so what to do: A more strict Lockdown? or keep the lockdown in place to limit spread while they finish the vaccinations? 4 months, 5 months, 6 months?
One thing to bear in mind is many more people live on North Island than on South Island.
More than three quarters of NZ's population is on the North Island and while Christchurch is NZ's second city, it trails more than a million behind Auckland which has a population of about 1.5 million.
For contrast, the population of South Island is about the same as that of Surrey.
Surrey occupies 642 square miles - the South Island 58,084 so the population density numbers are contrasting - Surrey has 1,900 people per square mile, South Island has 20.
I wonder if Kiwis know that their capital is on South Island?
I haven't read their article but if they are not aware that wellington is on the north island, it does not boad well for the depth of the rest of the article.
Perhaps it was a typo and was meant to be 'Wellington AND the south Island' but you do have to wonder about the profe reader?
Or it was meant to be from the north of the island to the south of the island, all referring to North island. But major fail in the proofing department.
Actualy, yes I think you are right, 'to Wellington at the south end of the North Island' is probably the corest thinking.
Perhaps the bigger question is or should be, will the NZ lockdown in force at the moment, work? Looking at Australia with a similer number of people vaccinated, and a lockdown, but cases are still rising, all be it from a low start in both nations.
is Delta so transmissible that in a population will 20% fully vaccinated and a lockdown it still spreads? and if so what to do: A more strict Lockdown? or keep the lockdown in place to limit spread while they finish the vaccinations? 4 months, 5 months, 6 months?
Delta is so transmissible that you'd need about 83% of the entire population - not eligible population - to have natural or acquired immunity for vaccination alone to stop its spread. Vaccination, even in the UK, needs to be supplemented with other social measures, such as good hand and respiratory hygiene, masking, social distancing, and some engineering/environmental measures such as physical barriers and ventilation.
However, given how transmissible Delta is, I doubt we can have lockdown severe enough and complied with to stop Delta running its course. The best we can manage is to flatten the curve so that hospitals are not overwhelmed. In this regard, countries/states with high vaccination rates are sitting relatively pretty. I do not expect Delta to be a major health crisis in the UK or Maryland, for example, in the same way it is currently in Trumpistan.
While we've all heard the stories of the anguish of the hospitality industry and not least from @Cyclefree, there's an issue or two at work here.
Back in the day, there was some sense of local planning or co-ordination between the number of beds in a coastal town like Newquay or St Ives and the number of tables/places to eat. There was an attempt to plan capacity and work out when a town was "full".
2021 seems to show this no longer exists - having encouraged the confined to let themselves go, there's been an almost migratory instinct to head for the coast (all coasts, well, most) and especially to Cornwall.
The county isn't just full - it's bursting at the seams - and the inevitable capacity issues in terms of tables and food have come to the fore.
I can understand hospitality wanting to "catch up" on the disaster that was 2020 but as is ever the case, famine is now followed by feast. Had it been possible to have a more planned and phased re-opening of the coast to accommodate suitable numbers of visitors so much the better but as we have a Prime Minister who measures his own wellbeing in terms of keeping everyone "happy", those who fail to achieve the replete measure of happiness are of no interest.
Feeding a starving man a banquet never ends well.
It’s not all one way traffic. We booked a restaurant in Windermere for 6.30. All confirmed. Turned up. The manager was off and a temp Manager in. He had us down for 8.30 and they were full so we would have to come back at 8.30 not feasible with the elderly in-laws.
We also went to a restaurant where the locals were clearly prioritised over us.
But most places have been great to go back to.
I’m sure there are problem customers but there are some piss poor establishments too who have pretty poor customer care.
‘The real dark days at Kabul airport are still ahead. UK government source: “People are going to get left behind. It’s a question of how many. It could be thousands. I don’t think people have realised the extent of the risk.”’
Can't be right, Joe told us all that the nice men from the Taliban was letting everybody through....
In fairness, and I am not saying he deserves much, what Biden said is that US passport holders were being let through check points by the Taleban but could not get through the crush of several thousand Afghans who are surrounding the airport. What the US seems to have done is arrange a pick up point outside the airport and then helicopter them in from there.
We must be facing the same problem: how do those we want to get out get to the airport and how do we winnow them out of the thousands, probably tens of thousands, desperate to leave?
@ramsaysky says the situation at Kabul's airport is "utterly horrendous", and that 'hardened soldiers' told him its the "worst thing they have ever seen in their entire career"’
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
Again, a bit of a misunderstanding
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
That is also a possibility
I get that. Linking something you disagree with and/or dislike with something extreme and lurid is a classic way to discredit. I can imagine it happened in places. But you're not telling me Trump and Trumpery wouldn't have profited from the widespread belief that China attacked America with Covid. It would have. That's why he pushed it in his trademark 'nudge/wink' fashion. So, the fear of that, of the possible repercussions if it took off, was imo a factor in what looks now like an underestimate of how likely it is that the pandemic was caused by a lab accident rather than via natural zoonosis. That's all I'm saying. And also let's remember that natural origins remains four square in the frame. It'd be easy to think otherwise if one read only your posts on this topic.
Natural non lab zoonosis is still clearly possible. I’d never deny that. But it’s not ‘four square in the frame’, to my mind it’s about 5-10% likely, now
I look forwards to the C4 documentary tomorrow. Reviews say it demolishes the scientists who have been playing down the lab leak theory and presents compelling evidence of how the virus may have been developed at the WIV and then accidentally leaked into the wider population.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
The interesting - to me - thing about this programme is that it is saying what was unsayable as little as a year ago. Considerable effort was expended by science, the media, big tech, and so on, to try to silence any suggestion of a lab leak. Why? In darker moments last year it felt like a big conspiracy to keep the world permanently locked down, but really I think the truth is slightly more mundane - aside from those with something specific to hide, they were driven by the force of believing themselves to be the good guys. And in doing so felt no compunction at all about wildly overstepping the mark.
I plan to watch that prog. As to why there was reluctance to allow "lab leak" to gain traction, I think one factor was the fear it would be conflated with the more lurid "bioweapon" theory. Donald Trump was whipping up an atmosphere of paranoia and sinophobia around the pandemic to distract from his negligence. If he'd managed to convince his public that China had engineered Covid and launched it on America, got himself reelected on this basis and in such an atmosphere - well you do the math as they say.
Again, a bit of a misunderstanding
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
That is also a possibility
The gain of function research is the most worrying. There should be a global moratorium on it declared immediately. Wheeling out a quote from Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" as it feels quite prescient on this kind of research.
The method that would have been used is infecting humanised mice with the bat virus and then allowing it to mutate in them until it was able to achieve humanised mouse to humanised mouse spread. Someone would need to set out to make the bat virus transmissible between humans and one of my university friends was saying it would need thousands and thousands of lineages to arrive from where the bat virus started to the original SarsCov-2 that we saw in Wuhan. He was very sceptical about the idea that the gain of function from the nearest known relative to COVID-19 to where is is today could have occurred in a single host animal and then infected someone randomly.
The more likely scenario and (what he's convinced me on) is that it was that the scientists set out to make a human to human transmissible coronavirus similar to Sars so they could research a potential generalised vaccine against SARS like viruses in the future. From there he said that Chinese labs are all pretty terrible and have very, very poor safety so a humanised mouse to human transmission was very likely once it became possible and then from there the scientist(s) would have been unknowingly spreading it in Wuhan.
There has, of course, already been a moratorium on gain of function research, in the shit storm that followed Ron Fouchier's remarks at the Malta conference in 2011. There was a very good and productive international conversation at the time, which produced sensible recommendations.
The same is not true of virus hunting. I think it is time to have a global moratorium on this until there has been a full international discussion, involving stakeholders outside the scientific community, and some form of 'if and how we do this' agreement has been reached.
But then wasn’t GOF basically out-sourced to China, with an added bit of terminological exactitude, to avoid this moratorium?
GOF research is somewhat akin to abortion. If you force it underground, it will be done without the safeguards. Far better not to make it next to impossible to do in the West, and let it proceed with adequate approval processes (including not just risk, but ethical considerations), risk management and precautions, and oversight.
‘The real dark days at Kabul airport are still ahead. UK government source: “People are going to get left behind. It’s a question of how many. It could be thousands. I don’t think people have realised the extent of the risk.”’
It's so confusing. I was under the impression before that refugees reaching the West was considered a nightmare. Is the nightmare now that refugees may be unable to get to the West?
As Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, Islamist groups waging insurgencies in Africa were quick to celebrate.
"God is great," a media outlet linked to Somalia's al-Shabab wrote in response to the takeover.
Elsewhere, the leader of al-Qaeda affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) used his first public message since 2019 to congratulate the Taliban.
"We are winning," Iyad Ag Ghaly said, drawing comparisons between the withdrawal of foreign troops in Afghanistan and France's decision to reduce its military presence in West Africa's Sahel region.
And it is not just Africa's Islamist fighters who have been seeing parallels with Afghanistan.
From Somalia in the east to Nigeria in the west, newspapers have published articles and citizens have taken to social media to share their concerns.
If a wake-up call was needed for African governments heavily reliant on foreign support in their fight against Islamist insurgents, then the Taliban's seizure of Afghanistan is likely to be i
Reading an interesting piece this morning, there seems to be an argument developing it would be better for us all to have Covid via the Delta variant than to continue trying to avoid it (and presumable later variants) by vaccination.
The gist seems to be for those doubly vaccinated Coronavirus remains much less of a risk and the protection afforded through infection is greater and longer lasting than the protection afforded by vaccination alone. This seems connected to the way the virus acts and the way a vaccine acts.
Am I convinced?
The issue is even for some of those who are doubly vaccinated, a bout with coronavirus may not be entirely straightforward and it seems on paper a huge risk for many of the very elderly.
Now, we have the "well, they're all going to die soon" argument but on that basis none of us would bother as we're all going to die sooner or later so I think we can swerve that.
I understand the scientific theory and argument - it's a variation on herd immunity but it's a herd immunity with the comfort blanket of vaccination to ensure a much greater risk of survival for larger numbers.
I don't know.
Can't see it. Even if you do get Covid after being double-vaccinated, you STILL aren't immune, it's just that much less likely, for an indeterminate while. And you still risk being screwed by long Covid, or worse.
‘The real dark days at Kabul airport are still ahead. UK government source: “People are going to get left behind. It’s a question of how many. It could be thousands. I don’t think people have realised the extent of the risk.”’
Reading an interesting piece this morning, there seems to be an argument developing it would be better for us all to have Covid via the Delta variant than to continue trying to avoid it (and presumable later variants) by vaccination.
The gist seems to be for those doubly vaccinated Coronavirus remains much less of a risk and the protection afforded through infection is greater and longer lasting than the protection afforded by vaccination alone. This seems connected to the way the virus acts and the way a vaccine acts.
Am I convinced?
The issue is even for some of those who are doubly vaccinated, a bout with coronavirus may not be entirely straightforward and it seems on paper a huge risk for many of the very elderly.
Now, we have the "well, they're all going to die soon" argument but on that basis none of us would bother as we're all going to die sooner or later so I think we can swerve that.
I understand the scientific theory and argument - it's a variation on herd immunity but it's a herd immunity with the comfort blanket of vaccination to ensure a much greater risk of survival for larger numbers.
I don't know.
Can't see it. Even if you do get Covid after being double-vaccinated, you STILL aren't immune, it's just that much less likely, for an indeterminate while. And you still risk being screwed by long Covid, or worse.
It also runs in the face of the research I have seen that double vaccination provides longer lasting protection than natural infection, and the concomitant advice that those who have had COVID should also get vaccinated.
And this is without getting into considerations of the cost of long COVID if we went the "let 'er rip" route.
I wonder if Kiwis know that their capital is on South Island?
I haven't read their article but if they are not aware that wellington is on the north island, it does not boad well for the depth of the rest of the article.
Perhaps it was a typo and was meant to be 'Wellington AND the south Island' but you do have to wonder about the profe reader?
Or it was meant to be from the north of the island to the south of the island, all referring to North island. But major fail in the proofing department.
Actualy, yes I think you are right, 'to Wellington at the south end of the North Island' is probably the corest thinking.
Perhaps the bigger question is or should be, will the NZ lockdown in force at the moment, work? Looking at Australia with a similer number of people vaccinated, and a lockdown, but cases are still rising, all be it from a low start in both nations.
is Delta so transmissible that in a population will 20% fully vaccinated and a lockdown it still spreads? and if so what to do: A more strict Lockdown? or keep the lockdown in place to limit spread while they finish the vaccinations? 4 months, 5 months, 6 months?
I expect Greater Sydney at a bare minimum to be in lockdown for a very long time; it's already been officially extended right the way through to the end of September, and I reckon they'll be stuck at home for the rest of the year at least. If the New Zealanders can't stamp out Delta very quickly then they - whether the whole nation, or the bulk of it (North Island sealed off as a plague encampment) will succumb to the same fate.
The failure of the antipodean vax drives leaves them at the total mercy of Delta. If they can't stop it from spreading then they daren't let go of the lockdowns before they've got as many people as possible double-jabbed, or they'll end up suffering a death tsunami that's proportionately worse than what we had last Winter. The problem being, of course, the sheer length of time it'll take to get the vaccinations up to speed: I haven't read much about the situation in New Zealand (although they are rumoured to be even further behind than Australia,) but I know that Australia has a very long way to go, a limited supply of Pfizer, the reputation of AZ has been trashed so that a great many people refuse to have it (even if the public health authorities haven't already banned its use in their age group,) and vaccine refusal overall is significantly more prevalent there than it is in the UK.
Reading an interesting piece this morning, there seems to be an argument developing it would be better for us all to have Covid via the Delta variant than to continue trying to avoid it (and presumable later variants) by vaccination.
The gist seems to be for those doubly vaccinated Coronavirus remains much less of a risk and the protection afforded through infection is greater and longer lasting than the protection afforded by vaccination alone. This seems connected to the way the virus acts and the way a vaccine acts.
Am I convinced?
The issue is even for some of those who are doubly vaccinated, a bout with coronavirus may not be entirely straightforward and it seems on paper a huge risk for many of the very elderly.
Now, we have the "well, they're all going to die soon" argument but on that basis none of us would bother as we're all going to die sooner or later so I think we can swerve that.
I understand the scientific theory and argument - it's a variation on herd immunity but it's a herd immunity with the comfort blanket of vaccination to ensure a much greater risk of survival for larger numbers.
I don't know.
Can't see it. Even if you do get Covid after being double-vaccinated, you STILL aren't immune, it's just that much less likely, for an indeterminate while. And you still risk being screwed by long Covid, or worse.
I must say it's difficult to understand quite what the argument is for getting it sooner rather than later - particularly given that the more people who get it, the more likely vaccine-resistant variants are to evolve.
Unless it's just that the government isn't going to bother to give booster jabs. Which is equally incomprehensible.
‘The real dark days at Kabul airport are still ahead. UK government source: “People are going to get left behind. It’s a question of how many. It could be thousands. I don’t think people have realised the extent of the risk.”’
Right - I'm now more confused than someone trying to make sense of an STV ballot paper.
There seem to be three "theories" out there:
1) It's all natural - the virus jumped from bats or pangolins to humans at the Wuhan live-food market. Some people seem wholly unconvinced.
2) The virus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan virology lab and the Chinese are trying desperately to cover it up because they don't want the rest of the world either asking why their bio-containment regime was so poor or seeking reparations.
3) It was a deliberate leak of a virus so see how the world would or could respond. The Chinese have suffered much higher levels of fatalities than has been widely reported but don't want the world to know this and have observed the creation and distribution of various vaccines with interest.
It's all about "face" with China - as long as they can save face, they'll be okay. What they don't want is anything which makes them look foolish or negligent in the eyes of the rest of the world or, in the case of the CCP, among their own people.
I think 3 is the lest likely, given Chinas esperance with SARS and I just cant see them doing this.
1 and 2 are both possibilities, but I leaning to 2. why? not because I have a good understudying of viruses, I don't, or because I have seen any conclude evidence, I haven't. but because of the appeance of a cover up. the CCP and organisation that is influences like the WHO, and people it employees have, IMO tryed to use undue methods to eliminate the theory, which to me is suspishase.
That seed, I'm not hard over and could be easily persuaded,
I think there are multiple reasons to be seriously worried by CCP, Hong Kong, the Uieage concertation camps, threats to Taiwan, repeated spying and braking intellectual property rights, human rights and a scary influence on supposed neutral institutions from the Olympic committee to the WHO are moor than enough reason, I don't what to fall in to the trap of saying the CCP are bad for all these other reasons so I will assume that are also responsible for COVID, because I don't know that, but I do suspect it.
Reading an interesting piece this morning, there seems to be an argument developing it would be better for us all to have Covid via the Delta variant than to continue trying to avoid it (and presumable later variants) by vaccination.
The gist seems to be for those doubly vaccinated Coronavirus remains much less of a risk and the protection afforded through infection is greater and longer lasting than the protection afforded by vaccination alone. This seems connected to the way the virus acts and the way a vaccine acts.
Am I convinced?
The issue is even for some of those who are doubly vaccinated, a bout with coronavirus may not be entirely straightforward and it seems on paper a huge risk for many of the very elderly.
Now, we have the "well, they're all going to die soon" argument but on that basis none of us would bother as we're all going to die sooner or later so I think we can swerve that.
I understand the scientific theory and argument - it's a variation on herd immunity but it's a herd immunity with the comfort blanket of vaccination to ensure a much greater risk of survival for larger numbers.
I don't know.
Can't see it. Even if you do get Covid after being double-vaccinated, you STILL aren't immune, it's just that much less likely, for an indeterminate while. And you still risk being screwed by long Covid, or worse.
I must say it's difficult to understand quite what the argument is for getting it sooner rather than later - particularly given that the more people who get it, the more likely vaccine-resistant variants are to evolve.
Unless it's just that the government isn't going to bother to give booster jabs. Which is equally incomprehensible.
It seems the JCVI are the ones who are anti a widespread booster campaign.
Comments
The treatment Biden is getting reminds me of when Naoto Kan, who spent much of his life campaigning against the Japanese bureaucratic-industrial complex, ended up in charge of the country at the point when the chickens finally came home to roost and one of the nuclear power stations blew up. When a nuclear power station is exploding in real time all the options are bad, so the people responsible for this state of affairs all made solemn briefings - including outright lies - about how it was Prime Minister's fault. The left also bought into the prime ministerial incompetence story for completely opposite reasons - for instance he (rightly) didn't want to evacuate the whole of Fukushima so they associated him with the nuclear village.
These are the people whose job it is supposed to be to speak truth to power.
Honestly, if you know this saga as well as I do, and all the players, there are some people who are so tainted by their early involvement in the conspiracy (and that is what it really was) everything else they say and do must be ignored, if you want to stay lucid
There's a metric shag-load of evidence against her. She has published paper after paper and quote after quote trying to rubbish the lab leak theory (some of them quite mad), she has tried to silence those who promote it, she called people bigots for suggesting it (and tried to get them banned from social media), and, oh look, here she is wanting to have a big old party in a bat cave with Peter "Gain of Function" Daszak, the man who wrote the first letter in the Lancet, saying lab leak theories were racist conspiracies, while saying he had no "Conflict of Interest" yet omitting to mention that he was co-chief of of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
That's the same Daszak who has now been disgraced and had to recuse himself from any more investigations
That's Rasmussen's good friend
https://twitter.com/DrLiMengYAN1/status/1347584302738001924?s=20
https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1428805059870068740?s=19
No, not keen. Lacks gravitas. If we're doing variations my favourite is Kuntibula, or just shorten that to Bula if it's too much of a mouthful.
Re the serious point, Trump was a menace, a real menace, and I was afraid he'd get another 4 years to cement his project of gorging his ego and despoiling everything else. I masked this fear with the TrumpToast mantra, succeeded in convincing myself that the American people would not, could not, shit on their own carpet a second time, but the truth is that despite the happy ending, or more accurately the relief of it, those Trump years have left their mark on me, I'm jumpy, I can't face the prospect of him coming back, I don't even want to contemplate him running again with a serious shot.
Thus I'm extremely sensitive about posts which seem to just possibly imply that Joe Biden messing up this or that or the other shines any sort of (by comparison) redemptive light on Donald Trump.
"At least with Trump, you ..."
"Trump was a total fucking dickhead but ..."
"I couldn't stand Trump but you know what ..."
These are the sort of sentiments that upset me and will be doing my best to stamp on.
He has utterly failed on that undertaking as the world can see
Notice that every whine about there not being enough workers comes from southern England - the place where people cannot afford to live because of housing unaffordability.
Until southern England rids itself of its putrid obsession with house prices its going to have the twin problems of employment and housing.
lol
I think WHO was naive and weak rather than deeply corrupt. They depend on China for so much, they allowed themselves to be manipulated. To their credit they have now grown a pair, to an extent, the head of WHO now says lab leak is perfectly plausible (not "extremely unlikely" as per Daszak's report) and their team is now revealing how they were fooled and subverted by China, when they visited, and one of the other lead investigators now says a lab leak is he most likely origin - probably a lab worker in the field in Yunnan, perhaps, getting bitten or whatever
US/UK withdrawal from Afghanistan as such will not be a black swan event, but two possibles that could be are:
a) The UK fail to get out even a small number of UK nationals (which may include for example ex service people working for charities and NGOs) who subsequently get killed/imprisoned etc.
b) Say 2-5 million Afghans start appearing all over Turkey and Europe, millions of them trying to get to UK or Germany and claiming to be a special case.
I still think 15% is a bit high, but not as much too high as it was.
It's not either/or
What might help Labour is a massive economic crisis where some very difficult decisions are required.
Yes, economic crisis would take the matter further. But even a few dead UK citizens in Afghanistan could be enough to turn a tide against the Raab/Boris hegemony. Black swans may be around.
If it's true then every single scientist involved in the cover up needs to be put up on charges. All of the ones who signed that letter to the Lancet should lose their funding. Get the politics out of science.
Basically, for a crisis to hurt the government, it needs to have an impact on people in their 40s. That’s why Black Wednesday was such a disaster for the Tories. Obviously the interest rate rises never happened, but the fact the government was happy to do that to home owners showed that they were completely out of touch.
I doubt Afghanistan will shift many votes. Labour took us in, after all. The single biggest risk to the government is the BoE feeling the need to put up interest rates. A run on the pound is the black swan that should scare the government the most.
Just asking a fair question and do you agree with it
One small mercy to be thankful for here is that the Afghan government had the presence of mind to collapse a couple of weeks before withdrawal had completed, instead of, as a lot of people seem to have expected, fighting for a few months or a year and then losing. If it had happened at the same speed but a month later, most of the people they're currently shipping out would still have been there, but to rescue them the Americans would have had to shoot their way in, deal with the world's biggest ever hostage crisis, then shoot their way out again.
By all means he could give information to the investigative team; having him on it was not good.
Put yourself into Daszak's position. If you knew - or suspected - something had happened that caused the pandemic and millions of deaths, would you openly admit it, or try to cover it up? Human nature - and his subsequent actions - lean towards the latter.
He should have not been on the team.
He was born in Ukraine, lived in Britain, and has lived in America for many years, and now refers to himself as "American"
"American on World Health Organization coronavirus investigation team dismisses US intelligence
Peter Daszak suggests President Joe Biden was only sceptical about the WHO’s trip to Wuhan because he ‘has to look tough on China’"
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3121390/american-world-health-organization-coronavirus-investigation-team-urges
"The lone American on the World Health Organization coronavirus fact-finding mission in China dismissed US intelligence on the virus’ origins and urged the Biden administration to trust the WHO’s work amid criticism that the organisation is insufficiently independent from Beijing."
Saj opening another new hospital!
"Peter Daszak is a British-born American PhD who’s spent a career discovering dangerous viruses in wildlife, especially bats."
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?extid=SEO----&v=1911597215638647
Not that it really matters. He should not have been anywhere near the Lancet letter, nor the WHO investigation
The battle will be lost whilst they spend a month playing a game of musical chairs.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9914039/New-Zealand-considers-splitting-TWO-country-records-21-cases.html
So much western science is now funded by China, or dependent on China, there is a growing reluctance to anger China, let alone blame it for a global plague
The Lancet, which published that notorious letter (concocted by Daszak) trying to crush the lab leak hypothesis, has very strong links to China and is reliant on Chinese support. Horton, the editor, is basically a Chinese puppet
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/lancet-editor-s-chinese-propaganda
Meanwhile, imagine you're a virologist. If you pipe up and say "Actually it probably was a lab leak" you are endangering your entire career, because you endanger your own science. Virology will be fucked if lab leak is proved. So everyone will hate you, your peers will disown you, your friends will shun you. China might try and kill you. Who knows
So it's much better to keep your head down and say nothing or just mutter about pangolins, which most of them did
Any large migrant outflows from Afghanistan are going to come up against more determined efforts than ever from the states further West to keep them out.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/australia/
When is the JCVI going to realize that the balance of risks for the 0-17 group has now shifted decisively in favour of vaccination for this group and act accordingly, at least for the 12-17 group? The UK has had a spectacular success story on vaccines so far, but this inaction on vaccinating the youth is entering the incomprehensible realm for me now.
Sounds familiar for some reason
"The delta outbreak spread from Auckland on the North Island to Wellington on the South Island via a plane flight"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9914039/New-Zealand-considers-splitting-TWO-country-records-21-cases.html
I wonder if Kiwis know that their capital is on South Island?
Some of the people desperately trying to silence the "lab leak" hypothesis early on, DELIBERATELY conflated it with the bioweapon theory - "are you really trying to tell us the Chinese engineered a lethal virus then launched it on the world, OMG you're racist and mad, of course it came from natural zoonosis, probably in the market"
They did this because that way they could smear the entire lab leak hypothesis by linking it with more extreme fringe theories. This is what happened. Go and read the science literature and social media of the time. Whereas in fact most people were merely suggesting a basic lab leak - a scientists bitten by a bat, a spilled test tube in Wuhan, someone leaving a door open, a simple accident - which is and remains far more likely
However there is now the complicating issue of Gain of Function, which grows in salience the more we learn of what they were doing in Wuhan. Again this does not mean "deliberate leak of engineered killer virus". It does mean that the accidental leak might, very sadly for all of us, have involved a virus which had already been altered so as to be especially virulent for humans. That is the science they were doing at the WIV
That is also a possibility
Perhaps it was a typo and was meant to be 'Wellington AND the south Island' but you do have to wonder about the profe reader?
To be fair, some parts of that last sentence are both exaggerated and inaccurate - she actually laughed.
The problem in NZ is the virus got a vital 3-4 day head start from "Patient Zero" travelling round and it's currently spreading through the Auckland school system.
Some on South Island are arguing they should have their Level 4 restriction lifted but I suspect that ship (or ferry) may already have sailed but to date I don't think any cases have been recorded south of the Cook Strait.
But Joe assured everybody the nice Royal Mounted Taliban were letting everybody through.and there were no issues for citizens. Just preflight passport check, covid test and on the plane like going on a week holiday to Greece.
Revised guesstimate:
Scottish Labour
20% grown ups
67% illogical partisan hacks
10% Citizen Smiths
3% Orange Lodge
Reading an interesting piece this morning, there seems to be an argument developing it would be better for us all to have Covid via the Delta variant than to continue trying to avoid it (and presumable later variants) by vaccination.
The gist seems to be for those doubly vaccinated Coronavirus remains much less of a risk and the protection afforded through infection is greater and longer lasting than the protection afforded by vaccination alone. This seems connected to the way the virus acts and the way a vaccine acts.
Am I convinced?
The issue is even for some of those who are doubly vaccinated, a bout with coronavirus may not be entirely straightforward and it seems on paper a huge risk for many of the very elderly.
Now, we have the "well, they're all going to die soon" argument but on that basis none of us would bother as we're all going to die sooner or later so I think we can swerve that.
I understand the scientific theory and argument - it's a variation on herd immunity but it's a herd immunity with the comfort blanket of vaccination to ensure a much greater risk of survival for larger numbers.
I don't know.
The method that would have been used is infecting humanised mice with the bat virus and then allowing it to mutate in them until it was able to achieve humanised mouse to humanised mouse spread. Someone would need to set out to make the bat virus transmissible between humans and one of my university friends was saying it would need thousands and thousands of lineages to arrive from where the bat virus started to the original SarsCov-2 that we saw in Wuhan. He was very sceptical about the idea that the gain of function from the nearest known relative to COVID-19 to where is is today could have occurred in a single host animal and then infected someone randomly.
The more likely scenario and (what he's convinced me on) is that it was that the scientists set out to make a human to human transmissible coronavirus similar to Sars so they could research a potential generalised vaccine against SARS like viruses in the future. From there he said that Chinese labs are all pretty terrible and have very, very poor safety so a humanised mouse to human transmission was very likely once it became possible and then from there the scientist(s) would have been unknowingly spreading it in Wuhan.
I defer to your far greater knowledge of Welsh society and affairs. However, an objective observer could perhaps guess that you vote Welsh Conservative 😉
Shame PC never managed to be the “Not The Welsh Conservative Party”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58149364
While we've all heard the stories of the anguish of the hospitality industry and not least from @Cyclefree, there's an issue or two at work here.
Back in the day, there was some sense of local planning or co-ordination between the number of beds in a coastal town like Newquay or St Ives and the number of tables/places to eat. There was an attempt to plan capacity and work out when a town was "full".
2021 seems to show this no longer exists - having encouraged the confined to let themselves go, there's been an almost migratory instinct to head for the coast (all coasts, well, most) and especially to Cornwall.
The county isn't just full - it's bursting at the seams - and the inevitable capacity issues in terms of tables and food have come to the fore.
I can understand hospitality wanting to "catch up" on the disaster that was 2020 but as is ever the case, famine is now followed by feast. Had it been possible to have a more planned and phased re-opening of the coast to accommodate suitable numbers of visitors so much the better but as we have a Prime Minister who measures his own wellbeing in terms of keeping everyone "happy", those who fail to achieve the replete measure of happiness are of no interest.
Feeding a starving man a banquet never ends well.
Perhaps the bigger question is or should be, will the NZ lockdown in force at the moment, work? Looking at Australia with a similer number of people vaccinated, and a lockdown, but cases are still rising, all be it from a low start in both nations.
is Delta so transmissible that in a population will 20% fully vaccinated and a lockdown it still spreads? and if so what to do: A more strict Lockdown? or keep the lockdown in place to limit spread while they finish the vaccinations? 4 months, 5 months, 6 months?
Here is Peter Daszak openly admitting the WIV was using humanized mice.
‘Ibelieve it means more than the regulatory definition. Wiki describe GOF as also increasing host range... Daszak with NIH funding ran potential pathogens through humanized mice thereby adapting viruses to human cells and thus doing GOF. Yes... it's a broad term.’
https://twitter.com/quisp1965/status/1418018821235900416?s=21
The same is not true of virus hunting. I think it is time to have a global moratorium on this until there has been a full international discussion, involving stakeholders outside the scientific community, and some form of 'if and how we do this' agreement has been reached.
There seem to be three "theories" out there:
1) It's all natural - the virus jumped from bats or pangolins to humans at the Wuhan live-food market. Some people seem wholly unconvinced.
2) The virus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan virology lab and the Chinese are trying desperately to cover it up because they don't want the rest of the world either asking why their bio-containment regime was so poor or seeking reparations.
3) It was a deliberate leak of a virus so see how the world would or could respond. The Chinese have suffered much higher levels of fatalities than has been widely reported but don't want the world to know this and have observed the creation and distribution of various vaccines with interest.
It's all about "face" with China - as long as they can save face, they'll be okay. What they don't want is anything which makes them look foolish or negligent in the eyes of the rest of the world or, in the case of the CCP, among their own people.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3532953#Comment_3532953
‘The real dark days at Kabul airport are still ahead. UK government source: “People are going to get left behind. It’s a question of how many. It could be thousands. I don’t think people have realised the extent of the risk.”’
https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1428999693305094148?s=21
@ramsaysky says the situation at Kabul's airport is "utterly horrendous", and that 'hardened soldiers' told him its the "worst thing they have ever seen in their entire career"’
https://twitter.com/skynews/status/1429005438448717831?s=21
Many now being crushed to death
https://apple.news/A0qjOyJP8RmKfxpY2xjoeYw
More than three quarters of NZ's population is on the North Island and while Christchurch is NZ's second city, it trails more than a million behind Auckland which has a population of about 1.5 million.
For contrast, the population of South Island is about the same as that of Surrey.
Surrey occupies 642 square miles - the South Island 58,084 so the population density numbers are contrasting - Surrey has 1,900 people per square mile, South Island has 20.
It's a big empty place.
However, given how transmissible Delta is, I doubt we can have lockdown severe enough and complied with to stop Delta running its course. The best we can manage is to flatten the curve so that hospitals are not overwhelmed. In this regard, countries/states with high vaccination rates are sitting relatively pretty. I do not expect Delta to be a major health crisis in the UK or Maryland, for example, in the same way it is currently in Trumpistan.
We also went to a restaurant where the locals were clearly prioritised over us.
But most places have been great to go back to.
I’m sure there are problem customers but there are some piss poor establishments too who have pretty poor customer care.
We must be facing the same problem: how do those we want to get out get to the airport and how do we winnow them out of the thousands, probably tens of thousands, desperate to leave?
"God is great," a media outlet linked to Somalia's al-Shabab wrote in response to the takeover.
Elsewhere, the leader of al-Qaeda affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) used his first public message since 2019 to congratulate the Taliban.
"We are winning," Iyad Ag Ghaly said, drawing comparisons between the withdrawal of foreign troops in Afghanistan and France's decision to reduce its military presence in West Africa's Sahel region.
And it is not just Africa's Islamist fighters who have been seeing parallels with Afghanistan.
From Somalia in the east to Nigeria in the west, newspapers have published articles and citizens have taken to social media to share their concerns.
If a wake-up call was needed for African governments heavily reliant on foreign support in their fight against Islamist insurgents, then the Taliban's seizure of Afghanistan is likely to be i
And this is without getting into considerations of the cost of long COVID if we went the "let 'er rip" route.
The failure of the antipodean vax drives leaves them at the total mercy of Delta. If they can't stop it from spreading then they daren't let go of the lockdowns before they've got as many people as possible double-jabbed, or they'll end up suffering a death tsunami that's proportionately worse than what we had last Winter. The problem being, of course, the sheer length of time it'll take to get the vaccinations up to speed: I haven't read much about the situation in New Zealand (although they are rumoured to be even further behind than Australia,) but I know that Australia has a very long way to go, a limited supply of Pfizer, the reputation of AZ has been trashed so that a great many people refuse to have it (even if the public health authorities haven't already banned its use in their age group,) and vaccine refusal overall is significantly more prevalent there than it is in the UK.
In short, they're stuffed.
Average of the 6 latest polls published over the last 3 days:
Liberal 32.8%
Conservative 31.9%
New Democratic 19.8%
Bloc Québécois 5.7%
People's Party 4.4%
Green 4.3%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2021_Canadian_federal_election
Unless it's just that the government isn't going to bother to give booster jabs. Which is equally incomprehensible.
https://ibb.co/25kR1xz
1 and 2 are both possibilities, but I leaning to 2. why? not because I have a good understudying of viruses, I don't, or because I have seen any conclude evidence, I haven't. but because of the appeance of a cover up. the CCP and organisation that is influences like the WHO, and people it employees have, IMO tryed to use undue methods to eliminate the theory, which to me is suspishase.
That seed, I'm not hard over and could be easily persuaded,
I think there are multiple reasons to be seriously worried by CCP, Hong Kong, the Uieage concertation camps, threats to Taiwan, repeated spying and braking intellectual property rights, human rights and a scary influence on supposed neutral institutions from the Olympic committee to the WHO are moor than enough reason, I don't what to fall in to the trap of saying the CCP are bad for all these other reasons so I will assume that are also responsible for COVID, because I don't know that, but I do suspect it.