I'm very sorry to keep posting about this. It's just fascinating to me to see all these spineless bureaucrats play follow-the-leader.
It is encouraging to me that we weren't so far down the liberal media rabbit hole that it was ever unthinkable to most of Hubski the virus could have come from a laboratory. As I've said before, us scientists need to find a way to Make Uncertainty Sexy Again, when appropriate. Too bad that position almost always pits us against pretty much the entire establishment and the idiots shouting the loudest.
It helps to not see it as "us vs the idiots." Part of the problem is scientists using hermetic lingo like "reasonably supported" or "within measurement error" to describe results with certainties over 4 sigmas. There's an instinctual need to precisely qualify this shit and won't even say our shoes are tied without checking each foot twice, but expecting anyone to be on the same wavelength here is a game lost at a start. That's like a lawyer being exasperated with 'the stupids' who need word salads like "appeal to reject motion was positively passed with a negative result" explained. Any random event defying a four sigma-strong hypothesis is about as likely as getting a straight flush, but nobody says it like that. For what it's worth, I'm mostly lost enough to just belive what b_b or c_hawk say on the topic, but I'd be way more sceptical if I didn't know (trust?) they know their shit.Make Uncertainty Sexy Again, when appropriate.
Too bad that position almost always pits us against pretty much the entire establishment and the idiots shouting the loudest.
"Miracles" (The Dunning-Kruger Song) Insane Clown Posse Bang! Pow! Boom! (2009) Psychopathic This, to me, is the ultimate harm wreaked on the public by social media in general and Youtube in particular: prior to "any joker with a phone is an expert" there were actual experts. They could be enticed to share their expertise through vetted channels, supported by the Fairness Doctrine, to enrich and improve the intellectual development of the populace. The minute it became "who looks like a scientist" instead of "who is a scientist", however, the narrative went from "I don't understand it but someone does" to "I don't understand it therefore no one does" You can read in a book how magnets work. You can write it as a haiku: Electrical, physical Not magic, science But unless you are willing to accept the possibility of expertise into your life, the world shall remain a terrifying void of superstition and supposition. This is the key problem the CDC has: they were the acknowledged experts, and they squandered that expertise. Team Trump knew this: in a world without experts, anything they said could be true. In the immortal words of Stephen Colbert, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" so the more the fascists can dissolve reality, the stronger their standing. Stop the steal, bitch.Forces related
...and...SCENEIt’s unfortunate that the lab-leak hypothesis has been muddled up with the intentional-bioweapon hypothesis in 16 months of tortured and politically driven rhetoric. That has given way too much credibility to the latter and not enough to the former.”
If you haven't read it, Biohazard is a really good book about the Soviet Bioweapons program. Terrifying. But it speaks to the science that goes into engineering diseases, and what some of these diseases were post-engineering, including the bureaucracy within the departments and the absolute ineptitude with them. It speaks about a few known leaks that happened too. I used to think it was totally impossible, but after reading that book it became a lot more plausible.
I read The Dead Hand, which was mostly nukes, but touched on bio plenty to leave a lasting impression. Bioweapons are worse tactically and strategically than nukes, so the fact the the Soviets had a program up to and perhaps beyond the collapse of the empire says way more about their bureaucracy and decision making than it does about their military prowess. China is a lot of things but they're not stupid enough to have a bioweapons program, and they're doubly not stupid enough to have a bioweapons program at a facility that was receiving US government funding. This is sloppiness all the way down. Fauci knows it, and Collins knows it. They're just too chickenshit to say anything about it.
Dead Hand is policy. Biohazard is bureaucracy. Dead hand is John Toland, Biohazard is Joseph Heller. I thought about that one a lot. It took a few more books for me to come up with the theory that the Soviets knew down to their very bones that they were absolutely 100% fucked in any nuclear exchange, knew down to their very bones that the Capitalists were going to go for it any minute, and knew that no amount of deterrence was going to keep them out of the shit so they might as well take out as much humanity as they can. It's all I got. You don't get as balls deep in biowar as the Soviets did without some real fatalism. Oh fuck yeah they are. Remember: the only humans on earth are the Han Chinese. • The Chinese Ministry of Defense’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology (IME) in Beijing is acknowledged as a biodefense research facility. • The Lanzhou Institute of Biological Products (LIBP) has been identified as a vaccine producer. We believe that LIBP has several BL-3 laboratories and dual use capabilities. From 1993 to the present, military scientists have published in open literature the results of studies of aerosol stability of bacteria, models of infectious virus aerosols, and detection of aerosolized viruses using polymerase chain reaction technology. Such advanced biotechnology techniques could be applicable to the development of offensive BW agents and weapons. Facilities in China that may have legitimate public health and commercial uses could also offer access to additional BW-enabling capabilities. Now - that's not to say that COVID is a deliberate agent. But the Biological Weapons Convention allows errrrrrrrrrbody to do pretty much whatever cockamamie "defensive" research they want. The USSR was "defensively" cooking up something like 2000 tons of anthrax a year, for example. What I love is the massive influx of probiotics in the late '90s early '00s are a direct consequence of the industriousness of the Soviet biowarfare program goin' all swords to plowshares. No Dannon Activia without Vektor - they had a couple strains that were literally named after the first researchers that accidentally killed themselves with them. I dunno man the whole point of "wolf warrior diplomacy" is "they won't take you seriously if you aren't an aggressive dick." Nonetheless: So here's the question: what would you do? 'cuz I think we're at that point where we're starting to recognize we gotta do something about China... but we're also recognizing that there's nothing lightweight to do about China. Historically speaking, this is why we kick the can down the road.I read The Dead Hand, which was mostly nukes, but touched on bio plenty to leave a lasting impression.
Bioweapons are worse tactically and strategically than nukes, so the fact the the Soviets had a program up to and perhaps beyond the collapse of the empire says way more about their bureaucracy and decision making than it does about their military prowess.
China is a lot of things but they're not stupid enough to have a bioweapons program,
China has a number of civilian and military facilities that could be associated with an offensive BW program. For example:
and they're doubly not stupid enough to have a bioweapons program at a facility that was receiving US government funding.
This is sloppiness all the way down. Fauci knows it, and Collins knows it. They're just too chickenshit to say anything about it.
Do go on.What I love is the massive influx of probiotics in the late '90s early '00s are a direct consequence of the industriousness of the Soviet biowarfare program goin' all swords to plowshares. No Dannon Activia without Vektor - they had a couple strains that were literally named after the first researchers that accidentally killed themselves with them.