Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
At best he was misled by their incompetence. That's at best. It doesn't speak to much professional pride to put up with that.
It's bizarre. He's been humiliated by Johnson but seems happy to take it. Perhaps there is simply no integrity left anywhere near the top of the British state.
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
They are leading this evening's news. What is there to say? We have a dishonest freeloading and corrupt Prime Minister and EVERYONE and his dog knows it. What can any of us do about it except ignore authority which the jury in Bristol shows we might be starting to do.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
Missing the point spectacularly once again, it's not if she could, it is a case of should she?
As an aside, if she's so wealthy, why is she leaching of the taxpayers at nearly 100 million quid a year with the Sovereign Grant?
Make her pay her own way.
She's a pauper. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is worth 4 billion, as is the Prince of Liechtenstein, if not more. Poor old Queen Beatrix is worth even less.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
Missing the point spectacularly once again, it's not if she could, it is a case of should she?
As an aside, if she's so wealthy, why is she leaching of the taxpayers at nearly 100 million quid a year with the Sovereign Grant?
Make her pay her own way.
She's a pauper. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is worth 4 billion, as is the Prince of Liechtenstein, if not more. Poor old Queen Beatrix is worth even less.
Its a good job he had a snafu with his change of phone....
This paragraph at the very bottom of Geidt's letter to the PM seems very important. He says that if he'd seen the WhatsApp exchange he likely would have found that the PM didn't follow the rules on declaring his interests.
That’s a bit of a shitty statement to include… if he had done this then he would have broken the rules but o can’t prove that he did do this do I’ll just throw it out there…
Everyone knows the truth in any case. Not just broken but smashed to smithereens.
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
As highlighted earlier, people have had very different experiences transferring WhatsApp data between phones.
It might come down to a simple issue: if it is a government phone, it should be up to the government to change him to a new phone, ensure everything is backed up and correctly transferred. If it's a personal phone, he should not be conducting official business on it. If it's party business, it's a grey area, but it should probably be on a personal phone.
The news is wall to wall Jonson playing fast and loose with the truth. What little space there is left is devoted to the sexual deviancy of the Queen's son.
As a country we don't look very classy at the moment.
Even as an off shore theme park
I have no idea which news you are watching but it is wall to wall NHS in crisis, covid/omicron, the US insurrection, Djokovic quarantine with a report on Geidt saying Boris has offered a full apology
I suspect covid and it effects on peoples day to day lives is taking their attention right now and as far as Andrew is concerned I think he has lost all support in the population, but there is a considerable amount of sympathy for HM
My son and his wife have tested positive in the last 24 hours and so many people are falling victim to omicron now that we have to hope it is near its peak
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
Quick overview - Macron wins if Pécresse doesn't come second in the first round. If she does, Macron loses.
Of course. If he's in a run-off with Le Pen, or even more so Zemmour, he's home and dry. If he's up against Pécresse in the second round, it's not so obvious.
Do we have any insight on whether Mme Pécresse is more or less pro-UK than Macron?
Obviously it would be nice to have someone in the Elysee who likes us!
None of them like us particularly.
Zemmour regrets D-Day and regards it as an Anglo Saxon invasion of France.
Le Pen is instinctively protectionist and anti-free trade. She doesn't dislike us, but we'd constantly be butting heads as France attempted to export goods to the UK that had been subsidised by the French state.
Macron is a cock. I don't think he actually dislikes the UK, but he sees political mileage in being seen to fight us.
Pécresse is probably little different to Macron. She's rarely missed the opportunity to be rude about us.
Phew. We can rely on continued normal relations then. 🙂
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
Our armed forces swear loyalty to the Queen not the PM, the PM might send them to war but only as chief minister of her government
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Oscar-nominated director Peter Bogdanovich has passed away at the age of 82. He was responsible for films such as 'The Last Picture Show,' 'Paper Moon,' 'What's Up Doc?' and more: http://thr.cm/VKy2SSB
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
Missing the point spectacularly once again, it's not if she could, it is a case of should she?
As an aside, if she's so wealthy, why is she leaching of the taxpayers at nearly 100 million quid a year with the Sovereign Grant?
Make her pay her own way.
Because she gets a profit share from the estates that her ancestor handed over to the states.
I’m sure she would happily swap the Sovereign Grant for the Crown Estates (which had £269m profits last year)
Quick overview - Macron wins if Pécresse doesn't come second in the first round. If she does, Macron loses.
Of course. If he's in a run-off with Le Pen, or even more so Zemmour, he's home and dry. If he's up against Pécresse in the second round, it's not so obvious.
Do we have any insight on whether Mme Pécresse is more or less pro-UK than Macron?
Obviously it would be nice to have someone in the Elysee who likes us!
None of them like us particularly.
Zemmour regrets D-Day and regards it as an Anglo Saxon invasion of France.
Le Pen is instinctively protectionist and anti-free trade. She doesn't dislike us, but we'd constantly be butting heads as France attempted to export goods to the UK that had been subsidised by the French state.
Macron is a cock. I don't think he actually dislikes the UK, but he sees political mileage in being seen to fight us.
Pécresse is probably little different to Macron. She's rarely missed the opportunity to be rude about us.
Funnily enough, I think Le Pen might be the friendliest to us.
She is naturally anti-EU and, while she wouldn't Frexit, I think she would see us as a useful ally to stop Germany pushing France.
I also think she and BJ would be pragmatic when it came to joint issues including the Channel crisis.
Le Pen has publicly praised the decision to build migrant centres near France's neighbours. She supports encouraging migrants to "self deport".
In France, there is no "Channel Crisis", there are merely people they don't want in France, choosing to leave France. There is literally not a single centime of benefit to a French leader in preventing migrants from jumping on boats and heading to England (or buses and going to Belgium).
True but - at the risk of outraging a few here - the more pertinent question is whether she wants any migrant centres in the first place. It is one thing when they are already, another when you have the option to close and deport.
I'm sure that's right... but that's also a fault line running down Europe's more populist political parties. The Lega Nord are normally big supporters of Le Pen, but also make a big thing about how Northern European countries need to take their fair share of refugees. You see similar dynamics in the East.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
I think officials having given up resigning over this stuff. It makes not a jot of difference - Boris's henchmen just smear them anyway - so they may as well stay in post.
Indeed. He’s a Tory, and trying to walk the tightrope between expressing appropriate discontent at the way he has quite obviously been misled, and lighting another bomb under the already lame duck PM.
With Boris having expressly denied at PMQs yesterday saying something that was then posted up with video proof to the contrary on Twitter minutes later, he is sinking, not waving. But I suspect Tories will wait and let him carry the can for the hundreds of defeated councillors that May is going to bring.
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Not Sure Why Canterbury Is Listed, It's pretty pleasant, affluent and in the last year has been relatively free of tourists.
Leicester is ranked lower than Abingdon??
The latter is perfectly pleasant in my experience.
Leicester is the dullest city in the UK, a sort of inherently boring place.
Yes I was surprised to see Abingdon. I worked there for a year in the early 90s and thought it a very pleasant place. If its position is justified it must have taken one hell of a dive.
There are two theories about Abingdon. One is that the council wanted to turn it into a shithole and the other is that they did it because they are fucking useless.
In act of supreme stupidity, they contemplated selling the old Town Hall - aside from the fact that it's the town museum, it's the symbol of Abingdon. Imagine selling Tower Bridge, in London.... or Big Ben. Or selling the Castle in Edinburgh...
Some locals came up with a cunning plan. Immediately the idea was publicly mooted, the local Freemasons said they would buy it. They didn't have the money, but several of the councillors were big into anti-Masonic stuff. So instantly the idea of selling the Old Town Hall was off the agenda. Forever....
It's also the answer to a geography quiz question.
Which county town of one county is now in another county?
Kingston-upon-Thames. (If you define county town as 'where the council offices are located')
Not any more. County Hall is now located in Reigate.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
At best he was misled by their incompetence. That's at best. It doesn't speak to much professional pride to put up with that.
It's bizarre. He's been humiliated by Johnson but seems happy to take it. Perhaps there is simply no integrity left anywhere near the top of the British state.
One evening in the Reform Club, Geidt bet Boris he could get him out of any difficulty whatsoever, and Boris said: I accept the bet. Since then they have been all around this issue in 180 days.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
FWIW I think the lab leak theory is all too plausible. Not intentional, but a fuck-up, unsafe working practices leading to an infection (possibly asymptomatic) then spread in the local community. Did it definitely happen? I don’t think we’ll ever know.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
But in the City on a Thursday evening, pubs that would usually be heaving resemble those of a small town on a Tuesday afternoon. So the work from home directive is definitely having an impact on behaviour.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
Well I can think of someone who's reached the (nearly) top and had to stop, and he and his wife would totes be up for the Head of State lifestyle.
The advantage of a constitutional monarchy is that you don't elect the HoS. Because if you do elect the Head of State, the people who run for the job are generally the sort of people who shouldn't be let anywhere near the role.
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
At best he was misled by their incompetence. That's at best. It doesn't speak to much professional pride to put up with that.
It's bizarre. He's been humiliated by Johnson but seems happy to take it. Perhaps there is simply no integrity left anywhere near the top of the British state.
One evening in the Reform Club, Geidt bet Boris he could get him out of any difficulty whatsoever, and Boris said: I accept the bet. Since then they have been all around this issue in 180 days.
Their snouts are deep in the trough, these crooks don't resign , they just keep filling their pockets, no principles or morals.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
People who get angry at it are the ones who are shit scared about the world not being as cosy as they thought (naive) or the ones fearful of relations with China heating up (prescient).
I have noticed the same reaction in some people to any discussion at all about UAP. Visceral anger. It’s rather interesting.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
David Attenborough?
Who is about as old as the Queen.
However if we had an elected president as a P5 permanent UN Security Council power we would have an imperial presidency along US and French lines.
So we would have had President Blair and would now have President Boris Johnson
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
At best he was misled by their incompetence. That's at best. It doesn't speak to much professional pride to put up with that.
It's bizarre. He's been humiliated by Johnson but seems happy to take it. Perhaps there is simply no integrity left anywhere near the top of the British state.
One evening in the Reform Club, Geidt bet Boris he could get him out of any difficulty whatsoever, and Boris said: I accept the bet. Since then they have been all around this issue in 180 days.
Their snouts are deep in the trough, these crooks don't resign , they just keep filling their pockets, no principles or morals.
Each generation has that moment of awakening when they realise that the UK is run by corrupt troughers, same as everywhere else. You’re brought up thinking there’s something special about our democracy but there’s not
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
David Attenborough?
Who is about as old as the Queen.
However if we had an elected president as a P5 permanent UN Security Council power we would have an imperial presidency along US and French lines.
So we would have had President Blair and would now have President Boris.
Well, why do we alreadzy have a HoS as old as SDA?
Royalty should be retired at age 67, like the rest of us.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
People who get angry at it are the ones who are shit scared about the world not being as cosy as they thought (naive) or the ones fearful of relations with China heating up (prescient).
I have noticed the same reaction in some people to any discussion at all about UAP. Visceral anger. It’s rather interesting.
There is also a subset of lefty anti-lab-leaker who somehow links the theory with Trump, and thus (in the UK) with Brexit, so it conjures the same kind of allergic, hysterical abhorrence. It is all seen as one big horrible thing that is Wrong With The World and caused by Nigel Farage or something
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
David Attenborough?
Who is about as old as the Queen.
However if we had an elected president as a P5 permanent UN Security Council power we would have an imperial presidency along US and French lines.
So we would have had President Blair and would now have President Boris.
Well, why do we alreadzy have a HoS as old as SDA?
Royalty should be retired at age 67, like the rest of us.
In which case Charles would never be King as he is already over 70 and William would be King
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Because every nation needs a Head of State to head the executive branch of government
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
At best he was misled by their incompetence. That's at best. It doesn't speak to much professional pride to put up with that.
It's bizarre. He's been humiliated by Johnson but seems happy to take it. Perhaps there is simply no integrity left anywhere near the top of the British state.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
You just keep on pumping every long-shot conspiracy theory that you come across during your inebriated evening surfing sessions. One of them just might be true, but all of them won’t be. When you sober up perhaps you might prioritise the various ways in which all human life will meet its doom?
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
I think it’s probably a lab leek if that helps and supports you 🙂
But then I still think Omicron was bred in mice and deliberately lab leaked, so don’t know if that makes me a creditable supporter.
Here’s a question for you Leon, if it was a lab leak, will we ever know for certain? Unlikely own up from Chinese, but will any government of the world ever have enough evidence to be able to prove it? Would it be sensible for them to do that? If we are both right on this Leon, it’s never going to get confirmed is it?
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
Well I can think of someone who's reached the (nearly) top and had to stop, and he and his wife would totes be up for the Head of State lifestyle.
The advantage of a constitutional monarchy is that you don't elect the HoS. Because if you do elect the Head of State, the people who run for the job are generally the sort of people who shouldn't be let anywhere near the role.
Boris would be up for President, Head of the armed forces and all the glamour and Buckingham Palace etc. Carrie would be up for First Lady.
He could then leave Rishi to do most of the boring domestic policy stuff as PM
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Nah, not angry, just bemused why you think that your own belief on the probability of it being true is something the rest of us should weight more heavily than the opinions of the people who actually investigated it and understand it, rather than quote bits from twitter and wikipedia.
We will never know the truth, it is unknowable, as there is significant benefit to create misinformation both suggesting it was a lab leak, and it was not a lab leak. Perhaps a few hundred people in China might know the truth, if that, perhaps no-one knows for sure, the rest of us should just accept it as unknowable. If we really want to assign probabilities to it we should go to the investigators and experts.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
David Attenborough?
Who is about as old as the Queen.
However if we had an elected president as a P5 permanent UN Security Council power we would have an imperial presidency along US and French lines.
So we would have had President Blair and would now have President Boris.
Well, why do we alreadzy have a HoS as old as SDA?
Royalty should be retired at age 67, like the rest of us.
Charles won't be able to do that- and frankly, he's been waiting so long that he deserves a go. I can imagine him retiring after a decade or so, and William moving to a more "normal" retirement age.
If not, the Royal Family risks turning into a queue of people waiting for their day in the Sun long after their bodies and minds are really up to it.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
FWIW I think the lab leak theory is all too plausible. Not intentional, but a fuck-up, unsafe working practices leading to an infection (possibly asymptomatic) then spread in the local community. Did it definitely happen? I don’t think we’ll ever know.
Yes, accidnetal lab leak seems most plausible to me.
What I have objected to in the past is the batshit "deliberate lab leak" and "experimental bat sold at the wet market by lab worker" theories that have both been enthusistically pushed on here.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
Well the Vatican City has the Pope who is neither Emperor, King or President but he is generally considered to be a monarch effectively
The assertion that England is actually England & Wales at cricket always troubles me.
That is indeed officially the case. But we are not called England & Wales and nobody outside of hushed southern British cricket circles thinks of us as such.
Wouldn't it be better for Wales just to have their own team? It would be competitive –probably better than Scotland's.
Meanwhile, I maintain that it remains bonkers that TeamGB exists purely for the Olympics, when Scotland and Wales are our (sometimes bitter) rivals at every major team sport.
Lots of proud Welshmen have played for the England cricket team. Tony Lewis, Steve Watkin, Matthew Maynard, Robert Croft, Simon Jones, etc.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
All power corrupts, but someone must govern.....
I'll do Lord Protector
My mission statement - peace for the ages. But first, a wild five minutes....
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
So Le Pen is the only pro-Brexit candidate in the race?
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
They may well have been researching COVID and it may have leaked, but you specifically said it may have been a biological weapon so my challenge of why they would have been developing a COVID virus as a weapon stands. as it would attack their own population. The fact that you think it is an accidental release is irrelevant.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
People who get angry at it are the ones who are shit scared about the world not being as cosy as they thought (naive) or the ones fearful of relations with China heating up (prescient).
I have noticed the same reaction in some people to any discussion at all about UAP. Visceral anger. It’s rather interesting.
There is also a subset of lefty anti-lab-leaker who somehow links the theory with Trump, and thus (in the UK) with Brexit, so it conjures the same kind of allergic, hysterical abhorrence. It is all seen as one big horrible thing that is Wrong With The World and caused by Nigel Farage or something
Weird
It upsets some people to realise that the world (and human beings within it) are nuanced. Trump had many of the wrong policy prescriptions but he did identify a lot of legit problems. And because they think him a bigot or a misogynist or whatever else, they can’t stand the idea of being on the same side of an argument as him. I have even heard people say “well X can’t be true because Trump said it”.
Probably because the stories we tell our children are all about goodies and baddies. So Trump (correctly) identifies the threat to the West from China. Everyone then takes the opposite view that the China Communists are misunderstood and have a more desirable system of economics and governance than us.
Goes the other way of course. Trumpites assuming everything the wokesters say must be wrong and everything Trump says right. Crowds booing him for having the vaccine is some interesting psychology on display right there.
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
So Le Pen is the only pro-Brexit candidate in the race?
Zemmour is also no EU fan but a Gaullist who is no Anglophile either
Its a good job he had a snafu with his change of phone....
This paragraph at the very bottom of Geidt's letter to the PM seems very important. He says that if he'd seen the WhatsApp exchange he likely would have found that the PM didn't follow the rules on declaring his interests.
That’s a bit of a shitty statement to include… if he had done this then he would have broken the rules but o can’t prove that he did do this do I’ll just throw it out there…
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Yes, from a British point of view it is very hard to know who would be the least hostile. Allies, eh?
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
So Le Pen is the only pro-Brexit candidate in the race?
On the contrary, Brexit made sure that even Le Pen had to tack back to supporting the EU.
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
I think officials having given up resigning over this stuff. It makes not a jot of difference - Boris's henchmen just smear them anyway - so they may as well stay in post.
Indeed. He’s a Tory, and trying to walk the tightrope between expressing appropriate discontent at the way he has quite obviously been misled, and lighting another bomb under the already lame duck PM.
With Boris having expressly denied at PMQs yesterday saying something that was then posted up with video proof to the contrary on Twitter minutes later, he is sinking, not waving. But I suspect Tories will wait and let him carry the can for the hundreds of defeated councillors that May is going to bring.
How’s Lib Dem intelligence on the May council elections?
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
As per Jon Stewart - “There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh, I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean?"
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
FWIW I think the lab leak theory is all too plausible. Not intentional, but a fuck-up, unsafe working practices leading to an infection (possibly asymptomatic) then spread in the local community. Did it definitely happen? I don’t think we’ll ever know.
IMO, lab leak is very likely. Smallpox leaked from Univ of Birmingham in 1978, and I believe the mechanism by which it leaked is still obscure.
When faced with a choice between cock-up & conspiracy, choose cock-up every time.
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
I think officials having given up resigning over this stuff. It makes not a jot of difference - Boris's henchmen just smear them anyway - so they may as well stay in post.
Indeed. He’s a Tory, and trying to walk the tightrope between expressing appropriate discontent at the way he has quite obviously been misled, and lighting another bomb under the already lame duck PM.
With Boris having expressly denied at PMQs yesterday saying something that was then posted up with video proof to the contrary on Twitter minutes later, he is sinking, not waving. But I suspect Tories will wait and let him carry the can for the hundreds of defeated councillors that May is going to bring.
How’s Lib Dem intelligence on the May council elections?
Hopefully more clued up than LibDem intelligence on the 2019 GE.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
I cheated and looked on wikipedia. Could only see only two republics with a head of state not called President, not counting NK.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
All power corrupts, but someone must govern.....
I'll do Lord Protector
My mission statement - peace for the ages. But first, a wild five minutes....
I suppose if Britain wanted to be contrary it could become a republic with an elected head of state, but call said figurehead the King or Queen anyway?
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
North Korea is a MONARCHY run by the House of Kim. Discuss!
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
People who get angry at it are the ones who are shit scared about the world not being as cosy as they thought (naive) or the ones fearful of relations with China heating up (prescient).
I have noticed the same reaction in some people to any discussion at all about UAP. Visceral anger. It’s rather interesting.
There is also a subset of lefty anti-lab-leaker who somehow links the theory with Trump, and thus (in the UK) with Brexit, so it conjures the same kind of allergic, hysterical abhorrence. It is all seen as one big horrible thing that is Wrong With The World and caused by Nigel Farage or something
Weird
It upsets some people to realise that the world (and human beings within it) are nuanced. Trump had many of the wrong policy prescriptions but he did identify a lot of legit problems. And because they think him a bigot or a misogynist or whatever else, they can’t stand the idea of being on the same side of an argument as him. I have even heard people say “well X can’t be true because Trump said it”.
Probably because the stories we tell our children are all about goodies and baddies. So Trump (correctly) identifies the threat to the West from China. Everyone then takes the opposite view that the China Communists are misunderstood and have a more desirable system of economics and governance than us.
Goes the other way of course. Trumpites assuming everything the wokesters say must be wrong and everything Trump says right. Crowds booing him for having the vaccine is some interesting psychology on display right there.
Or you and Leon are just a bit nutty seeing conspiracies and woke everywhere.
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
So Le Pen is the only pro-Brexit candidate in the race?
On the contrary, Brexit made sure that even Le Pen had to tack back to supporting the EU.
Same in Sweden: the Sweden Democrats never mention it these days. Their erstwhile English pals are just seen as an embarrassment.
Not Sure Why Canterbury Is Listed, It's pretty pleasant, affluent and in the last year has been relatively free of tourists.
Leicester is ranked lower than Abingdon??
The latter is perfectly pleasant in my experience.
Leicester is the dullest city in the UK, a sort of inherently boring place.
Don't insult Foxy please.
I am pretty thick skinned!
Leicester is almost proud of its reputation for being boring, indeed the city council once ran a marketing campaign of "Boring Leicester".
The city's motto is "Semper Eadem" which translates as "always the same", though probably better translated as "always consistent"
I have been to a fair number of the higher ranking shit places to live and would agree that they are worse. England is full of dull, down at heel cities and towns, but I am rather fond of my adopted city, warts and all.
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Yes, from a British point of view it is very hard to know who would be the least hostile. Allies, eh?
France is generally the most anti British of the other G7 powers, whoever is President
The bit that leaps out of me is how everything in Scotland is now prefixed with Scottish....
That's something that is going to be very hard to fix but continually reinforces that all services are Scottish - without revealing that they only exist because of cross subsidies from other parts of the UK*. Which means it's easy for the Scottish Government to play their rulebook of celebrate success and blame London for the failures.
* for MalcolmG and co that isn't an invitation to insult or call me wrong - it's a simple fact of life that Governments borrow money.
The interesting thing about this is how pervasive this is even outside of politics. "National" newspapers prefix "Scottish" before their name. If you talk about "the FA" or the "Premier League", you will be understood as talking about the English FA and English Premier League even if you're in Scotland. Scotland is constantly "othered", even by itself. In fact, it's ironically one of the things that unites people from England, Scotland, and beyond: England is the UK, and Scotland is an awkward add-on that sort of is and sort of isn't England.
All bodies with "Scottish" or "Scotland" that I am aware of have a specific Scotland remit. The SFA looks after football in Scotland; Scottish Water only supplies water to Scotland; NHS Scotland looks after healthcare in Scotland. UK wide bodies such as DHSS and HMRC don't have Scottish versions. Arguably the health service in England should always be referred to as NHS England, Forestry Commission as Forestry England and so on, but it's a bit haphazard.
NHS used to apply only to England + Wales. We had the Scottish Health Service. Nice and clear. Till a Tory SoSfS changed the name deliberately to muddy the waters.
I did not know that! I had assumed the National Health Service was national. Hadn't realised that NHS Scotland is not and never has been part of the "NHS" as that is and always has been just England and Wales.
I have so much to learn about my new country...
Also the Highlands and Islands Medical Service, state run medical care, was started in 1912. I believe its precepts and experience were studied before the set up of the NHS.
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_royalty_by_net_worth
It might come down to a simple issue: if it is a government phone, it should be up to the government to change him to a new phone, ensure everything is backed up and correctly transferred. If it's a personal phone, he should not be conducting official business on it. If it's party business, it's a grey area, but it should probably be on a personal phone.
I suspect covid and it effects on peoples day to day lives is taking their attention right now and as far as Andrew is concerned I think he has lost all support in the population, but there is a considerable amount of sympathy for HM
My son and his wife have tested positive in the last 24 hours and so many people are falling victim to omicron now that we have to hope it is near its peak
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
I’m sure she would happily swap the Sovereign Grant for the Crown Estates (which had £269m profits last year)
With Boris having expressly denied at PMQs yesterday saying something that was then posted up with video proof to the contrary on Twitter minutes later, he is sinking, not waving. But I suspect Tories will wait and let him carry the can for the hundreds of defeated councillors that May is going to bring.
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Don’t worry, Novax will be at SW19 in June.
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
I suspect the powers that be will NOT want to make an exemption for such a high profile antivaxxer.
Piers Corbyn will want to greet him at the airport with a garland = public security risk.
But in the City on a Thursday evening, pubs that would usually be heaving resemble those of a small town on a Tuesday afternoon. So the work from home directive is definitely having an impact on behaviour.
The advantage of a constitutional monarchy is that you don't elect the HoS. Because if you do elect the Head of State, the people who run for the job are generally the sort of people who shouldn't be let anywhere near the role.
I have noticed the same reaction in some people to any discussion at all about UAP. Visceral anger. It’s rather interesting.
Being a newbie, I have just a humble 14, 000 or so
100,000! If each comment took you an average of, say, three minutes to conjure and type, that means
100,000 x 3 = 300,000 minutes. 208 days. Given that we spend 8 hours sleeping, you have spent a year of your conscious life commenting on PB.
A YEAR
However if we had an elected president as a P5 permanent UN Security Council power we would have an imperial presidency along US and French lines.
So we would have had President Blair and would now have President Boris Johnson
Needless to say discipline wasn't difficult.
"Sir has a dalek!"
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jan/06/the-doctor-who-treasure-trove-in-a-northumberland-village-cellar
Royalty should be retired at age 67, like the rest of us.
Weird
I share your pain. That's quite a sobering statistic
But then I still think Omicron was bred in mice and deliberately lab leaked, so don’t know if that makes me a creditable supporter.
Here’s a question for you Leon, if it was a lab leak, will we ever know for certain? Unlikely own up from Chinese, but will any government of the world ever have enough evidence to be able to prove it? Would it be sensible for them to do that? If we are both right on this Leon, it’s never going to get confirmed is it?
He could then leave Rishi to do most of the boring domestic policy stuff as PM
We will never know the truth, it is unknowable, as there is significant benefit to create misinformation both suggesting it was a lab leak, and it was not a lab leak. Perhaps a few hundred people in China might know the truth, if that, perhaps no-one knows for sure, the rest of us should just accept it as unknowable. If we really want to assign probabilities to it we should go to the investigators and experts.
If not, the Royal Family risks turning into a queue of people waiting for their day in the Sun long after their bodies and minds are really up to it.
What I have objected to in the past is the batshit "deliberate lab leak" and "experimental bat sold at the wet market by lab worker" theories that have both been enthusistically pushed on here.
I'll do Lord Protector
My mission statement - peace for the ages. But first, a wild five minutes....
Probably because the stories we tell our children are all about goodies and baddies. So Trump (correctly) identifies the threat to the West from China. Everyone then takes the opposite view that the China Communists are misunderstood and have a more desirable system of economics and governance than us.
Goes the other way of course. Trumpites assuming everything the wokesters say must be wrong and everything Trump says right. Crowds booing him for having the vaccine is some interesting psychology on display right there.
Working in house is the best.
When faced with a choice between cock-up & conspiracy, choose cock-up every time.
Yes 5/6
No 6/5
Leicester is almost proud of its reputation for being boring, indeed the city council once ran a marketing campaign of "Boring Leicester".
The city's motto is "Semper Eadem" which translates as "always the same", though probably better translated as "always consistent"
I have been to a fair number of the higher ranking shit places to live and would agree that they are worse. England is full of dull, down at heel cities and towns, but I am rather fond of my adopted city, warts and all.