Mainstream institutions doubted the FBI had solved the 2001 anthrax case. Either way, revelations that emerged about U.S. Government bio-labs have newfound relevance.
"We do not know for sure if the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, another lab, or jumped from animals to humans."
I'm reminded of a courtroom murder trial where the prosecution has laid out all the compelling evidence but the defense keeps shrieking "but no one saw him shoot so we can't be sure!" That's what all these "we do not know for sure" sounds like to me.
It's pretty apparent what happened. There was gain of function research, indirectly funded by the US with direct knowledge from Fauci, who kept alive a loophole allowing this research. Lackluster safety conditions (cited by US investigators pre-pandemic) meant a manipulated virus escaped and jumped to a human host, giving us the three lab researchers hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms as reported in the WSJ, which was shortly followed with the mysterious 17 days cell-phone blank out surrounding the lab (suggesting an intensive cleansing going on). The Chinese authorities thinking they'd controlled the escape sighed with relief and said nothing to the larger world, then two months later all hell broke loose. Beijing, knowing immediately what to look for, clamped down on Wuhan severely and all travel from Wuhan to the rest of China, which meant a rapid spreading virus was controlled and didn't emerge elsewhere in a country with one of the world's largest and heavily used train network, but still allowed international travel, which allowed COVID to spread to the rest of the world. The rest, we know.
There are two real questions here:
1. To what extent were US fed scientists/NIH involved in this gain of function research and to what extent they tried to cover it up in early 2020.
2. To what extent were the US intelligence and science communities deliberately refusing to openly discuss a lab escape and instead doubled down on the naturally occurring stance solely out of hatred of Donald Trump and an overwhelming desire to not do anything to bolster Trump's presidency or to provide him with any form of support or legitimacy. And this carried over to their allies in the mainstream media, who were desperate to defeat Donald Trump. Is all this "new" information coming out now only because Trump has been safely defeated?
The first is understandable. People screw up. A complicated, multi-layered byzantine bureaucracy makes mistakes. None are evil people.
The second is much more problematic. Deeply problematic for a liberal democracy.
I think your comment is very well-argued. But I also think that, when journalistically speaking, it's important not to ratify claims as true until there is *conclusive* (rather than persuasive) evidence for them.
People also need to keep in mind that this new Covid virus origin interest is probably designed to deflect from other issues like Fauci's email dump. We all know that China is not going to cooperate so what's really going to happen? However, we have emails to and from Fauci that show that Covid was known early on that it spreads via aerosol and non-N95 masks don't work and that asymptomatic people don't spread it.
In reality, the lockdowns were a complete farce and caused incalculable damage. Effective non-vaccine treatments were reviled. Lying about vaccine side effects. These were human rights crimes.
Agamben in france wrote on this in early 2020. DEr Babette Bqabich of Fordham University a tenured professor posted his paper wsaying Covi8d was laboratory manufactured and he got it from the lab in France that isolated the AID virus. BABICH HAD IT DELETED FROM HER FACEBOOK PAGE WAY BACK THEN AND SHE WAS FURIOUS! Th9is clued us in on the comi9ng cenwsworship. I constanbtly get censor3e3d from face4book and toeday sill have 1 more week to go from my 30 days obliteration there. I keep refusing to censor myself and try to. be more subtle. I say to myself constantly "Shakespeare ended the "Divine Right of Kings" right under Eliz I's nose and would have been beheaded if she had had a clue.
Isnt it really a foregone conclusion that tweaked viruses are the potential weapon of the future? Bioweapons are so effective to be considered. They do depend on free international airplane travel tho. So this new "passport vaccine " thing makes sense to me that they would push it. It is an incredibly easy and timely way to begin #THEGENETICBOMB! Something that techno-scientific researchers have desired for decades: to augment the human genetic code and design humanity. This is the coming horror keeping me from feeling things may turn out ok.
The lockdowns au contraire were extremely effective. But that's what you wanted them to be effective for! CLASSICAL CONDITIONING is very effective. Remember Little Albert and the White rabbit toy and the very loud noise! BTW that baby grew up to be a fugged up adult man who died rather young. Now the question is, "What were the MASKS REALLY for?
I hope we have become radicals very fast over this. Our govt is waging war on us and #TheAdministrationofFear has been accomplished. We are have been occupied. This makes us either collaborators or resisters. Again Virilio who grew up as a child under Nazi occuation in Nantes France when you didn't know whether your next door neighbor, the baker, your teacher, et al was a collaborator or a resister. Sozhenitsyn never finishes this subject in his 6 volume Gulag work referring to the USSR.
I concede the fact that "rebuttal" was the wrong word. Perhaps part of my brain was trying to say just that, by inserting the scare quotes, before my running-off-with-the-mouth part of my brain had its say.
China will geopolitically do better with a heavy-handed suppression than they would from any confession - And absent a confession what would be sufficient to offer a conclusion? What smoking gun can determine if its animal or human error?
At this point I'd distrust any Covid 18.5's that were suddenly discovered in a bat or pangolin. But I'd also distrust paperwork about the researchers who got sick since its so unlikely they'd escape.
I think the only conclusion we'll see is that the USA has become really broken intellectually, particularly the politicians and the media (since they're meant to inform the rest of us when its still current!). We all should have been getting mad about this a year ago, but now it's too late.
We must help him then. I am one. Greenwald is THE LAST MODERN JOURNALIST STANDING OF INTEGRITY and are you under the. impression that post modern journalists do not have integrity? Well some dont but the really great ones are philosophers and THEY DEFINITELY DO!
The claim that Covid was leaked from a lab that was engaged in gain of function research will most likely NEVER be conclusive (the evidence is destroyed). How about a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard?
According to Virilio THERE WILL NEVER BE PROOF of accidental/deliberate and this is the strength of this globalized strategy. It was set up to become ambiguousfrom the very beginning as was the anthrax trial run as boot csmp for the future. Read Virilio and his study of Einstein on this in #The Information Bomb.
Gain of function research has always been thought to be potentially dangerous, because of the possibility that accidents happen, and the virus could escape from the lab causing a pandemic. Fauci's position on that a number of years ago was that the risk was worth it, and many didn't think it was. I doubt if this was deliberate, and what happened was why many felt it was too dangerous. I truly believed from the beginning it came from the Wuhan lab, and since no intermediate host has been identified after a year it more or less confirms what many suspected, an accident in the lab. I think many people have an idealistic view of science, and this just can't be an accident, but if you are familiar with the history of science, the mistakes, the denials, the beliefs that turned out to be false, well, this is just another very big mistake.
Fauci Shi, et al. accepted the risk-- on everyone else's behalf; they were wrong. No, it may not be a deliberate release and I doubt that it was, but there is still culpability for what was clearly a deliberate line of research with a wanton disregard of foreseeable consequences.
At least as important is that Fauci seemingly has no problem continuing the same kinds of research even AFTER this disaster. The mere fact of the pandemic does not seem to be enough to make Fauci and others rethink. It is clear that future action must be deterred by imposing consequences. As GG says in his book, however, the US has rather gotten out of the habit of "imposing consequences" on its elites. Unless the people make the system act, it will just issue the same "looking forward not backward" tripe it has for several decades. There are, however, millions of people worldwide, nearly 600,000 in the US, who can no longer "look forward" to anything at all. We owe it to them to seek justice.
Even if it was not a deliberate release from the lab, China still allowed international travel while blocking travel within the country. Aka they figured they would let it spread everywhere because that would end up helping them anyway. That’s why China needs to be held accountable by the entire world via tough tariffs and sanctions.
Don't imagine that China is some absurdly efficient, competent villain. Xi Jinping never heard of of the WIV 15 minutes before he needed to anymore than G.W. Bush knew anything about New Orleans area damns. They are all just reacting to the loudest explosion. It's comforting to believe otherwise, perhaps, but it's not the truth.
There was a ban in 2014 and then it was lifted a few years later, and some scientists justify the risks, like Fauci and some don't, and say the risks outweigh any benefits. I agree with the latter. I don't know if you can really assign culpability to Fauci, since there is justification for what he believes, however labs notoriously make mistakes, get careless, and something like the Covid 19 pandemic happens. The US also supported and funded it, and therefore culpable as well. The US developed bombs, and dropped them on Japan, yuck. The health care profession in this country is the third largest killer of people. First comes heart disease, then cancer then carelessness, or medical mistakes. When I was a kid I read the Cry and the Covenant about the life of Dr Ignaz Semmelweis. He said the leading cause of death of women who were tended by physicians when delivering their babies was because doctors didn't wash their hands and they contracted child bed fever as a result. and they died. Did they listen to him, no. Because I am in science, I have no glorified view of it, and personal beliefs, and profit get in the way of the truth too often.
Well if you cannot blame Fauci then logically you cannot blame Hitler either. To manufacture a super killer virus to "be able to make a vaccine to stop it IN CASE it was ever made to be used against us" is like a child's excuse of doing something forbidden. It was forbidden by TREATY but treaties with the US are........oh just ask Native Americans what they are worth. And do ytou REALLY believe the US govt waws doing it for PROTECTION from an enemy? Hey I've got a great bridge to sell ya.............
I think the takeaway that you got from Sammelweis' story, sadly, is that because the medical community can acknowledge its mistakes (in the distant past) it is somehow much better now, if imperfect.
Btw, the physical quantity Entropy does not limit mankind. We just need to acquire ever better ability to control energy and its use to make the "rest" of the Universe even MORE chaotic (hence satisfying Entropy's mandate).
"it's important not to ratify claims as true until there is *conclusive* (rather than persuasive) evidence for them."
I agree with that. Finding "conclusive" evidence as to how the virus spread, to the extent one can, is important.
As a separate matter, this whole affair is just one more exhibit in the now-conclusive evidence that we live in an Orwellian state, where false is true, and where persuasive evidence cannot be discussed if it conflicts with the (false) state-sponsored orthodoxy.
I would like to find out how this virus was unleashed, and there is no conclusive evidence on that subject just yet. But, our speech these days is controlled by state-sanctioned corporations. "State-sanctioned" because they are monopolies that the State will feign objection to but, ultimately, will help entrench. They do nothing because these state-sanctioned monopolies serve the interests of the ruling class.
And so it is. We have conclusive evidence that we live in an oppressive, Orwellian "democracy," where we pay homage to free speech, but it is only homage. In real life, we claim that governments are the only actors who may not impinge free speech, so if private, state-sanctioned monopolies do it, there is no problem.
Your First Amendment rights are not implicated when Big Brother is a state-sanctioned corporation.
Your Fourth Amendment rights are not implicated when you've signed away all privacy in the form of a User Agreement. The government can't directly collect data about you without a warrant. But why bother with that when you can just ask your state-sanctioned friends for the info?
This comment is one of the, if not the most, profound and cogent responses to Glenn's wise admonition that "it's important not to ratify claims as true until there is *conclusive* (rather than persuasive) evidence for them." It is akin to the proverbial 'breath of fresh air" to read a honestly critically opinion, one not seasoned with hyperbolic partisan rhetoric and "alternative facts".
Read this article, it's illuminating and it doesn't resort to kneejerk TDS stupidity. Grassroot normies are outdoing "investigative reporters" who end up just reporting on the research or, even worse, ignore it. Sad times for "journalism".
I am reading it right now and so far it's a decent article but why does the author claim Trump was an "accomplice" to Daszak? Trump and his supporters were the one who was saying that he had seen intelligence of it being from a lab. The author is claiming the exact opposite:
"For a long time, Daszak was astonishingly influential. Few in the media questioned him or pointed out that his career and organization would be deeply damaged if it turned out his work had indirectly played a role in the pandemic. His unwitting accomplice was Donald Trump, who embraced the theory, turning what should have been a scientific question into a political one. When the Trump administration canceled EcoHealth Alliance contracts that would have spent millions on new virus research, 60 Minutes ran a segment that painted Daszak as a martyr to the right-wing conspiracy machine. For right-thinking people everywhere, it seemed like an easy call: The enemy of my enemy is my friend: thus, the lab-leak theory is bunk."
You don't get it because you don't grasp how shameless the argument is.
This is what he meant: Whenever Trump declares a position on an issue, most of the media instinctively declares the opposite must be true. Hence, if Trump turned out to be correct, it's his fault that everyone else took the wrong position.
To be fair I don't think this particular author endorses that argument. But this is the tack now taken by many writers in the MSM, including that Vanity Fair report which generated much of the recent attention to the COVID 19 origins debate.
In globalization we now live in a time of lightning fast communication when synchronous emotional reaction can be used by the mass media to whip up the dish they want to feed you by the VELOCITY they can speedily circulate the emotional frenzy they wish to inject you with rather than any reasonable discussion of the facts. It is not even persuatsion. It is pure PROPAGANDA of an immense power we have never experienced before with people who are influenced by the IMAGE not the WORD all their lives. We are living in GLOBALISM now. And must deal with itws finitude. Progress is finished. The planet is too small and we know it now.
I see your point Glenn. Persuasion slides into propaganda - as CNN showed us during the campaign. But there is really no such thing as conclusive evidence to ratify claims.The only proofs are in. pure mathematics. In theorems. Which is exactly how #NassimTaleb beat #Monsanto in court on #Roundup and #GMO seeds in South America I believe. Forget. Anyway Monsanto could not disprove a mathematical theorem based on The Precarity Principle of Do No Harm to be proven first instead of after damages and endless lawsuits. Did you notice how fast all the class action lawsuits came out against RoundUp so fast. There is no defense against a mathematical theorem.
Question number two seems self evident to me that they had TDS to the point where all of us could be sacrificed if it would get back at Trump (if they acknowledged it was a lab leak they may have taken different approaches to contain and treat it). The worst thing for me personally to come out of this pandemic is my complete mistrust of ALL government agencies now. I used to trust the CDC, FDA and WHO for that matter - not any more to the point where I believe actual malevolence if it will make them a buck somehow. It is a very sad state of affairs.
How did Big Tech switch from a libertarian mindset to Fascism--and I don't think that's an exaggeration at all--so quickly? Were they coerced by the state actors? Or was it organic?
You don't need to wear a tinfoil hat to believe that the CIA is using Facebook, Twitter, Google (GOOG) and other social media to spy on people. That's because the CIA publishes a helpful list of press releases on all the social media ventures it sponsors, via its technology investment arm In-Q-Tel.
I don't know, but I worked for Big Tech in the 1990s and no one is more shocked and surprised by the change than I am.
Keep in mind, back then Big Tech produced infrastructure. Today they are part of the media and entertainment industries. That might explain . . . something.
It wasn't so fast. You could feel it happening during the 00s. The Iraq war had its impact - things like Abu Ghraib and the like. The 08 meltdown had a bigger one.
It could be as simple, and profound, as, we all want to be liked, so whatever we read or say on social media, and websites, even as good as Glenn's website is, are we not influenced by wanting to be "liked" for what we say? Or duel with our words and put down those of whom we disagree, without really listening to what they are saying?
The Stanford Anthropologist Rene Girard (who passed away a few years ago) describes this as "mimetic desire", which really is an analysis of Cain's violence toward his brother Abel rooted in envy.....we see, we desire, we want to possess, we are jealous of the other, we proscribe subhuman characteristics to the other, then if easier means don't work, we destroy the other. Those with the superior technology, historically, destroy the weaker or the defenseless, and control the narrative.
As a teacher, I recognize, how many violent acts by students start with comments made on social media. How many mass shooters did not post ahead of time their complaints and violent desires? How, then, is cancel culture not just a less violent form of this tendency, egged on by social media, and multiplied by Big Tech's need to get clicks and likes for their advertising?
Paine was betrayed by our "founding fathers' after financing the Revolution with monies from his publication Common
sense. Nice thanx eh. It was Adams who reluctantly went to France to save Paine form the guilotine for doing the same thing in France that got rolled back
Welcome to #Virilio! The Media is a vast institution to CONDITION your thinking to align with the dominant govt's ways of programming you to think alike - for the masses. It is massive, powerful and you cannot escape it if you watch it regularly. Stay away.
People and celebrities were openly talking about and some wishing for the assassination of DJT without ANY pushback or outrage by the MSM or even the cultural elites. A public play depicted him being stabbed to death and it played to a cheering audience. A sick "comic" even held up a mock severed head of Trump while many in Hollywood smirked and cheered. With this level of hatred on public display would it be hard to believe that that many of the individuals working within the government would resort to getting rid of Trump "by any means necessary." All without one bit of self reflection or consideration as to what they have done.
Remember the disgusting comments last year when his brother passed away from long brain stroke issues and twitter mob was piling on with disgusting comments?
Or the “immigrant loving” late night tv hosts made fun of Melania for her accent? Or called Ivanka a c**t on live tv?
A great deal of the nastiness directed toward Trump is simply the 'what goes around comes around' law of life. Trump smears and denigrates anyone who doesn't line up to kiss his ring. And since he's a tweetaholic, his vitriolic venom has massive coverage. I'm not saying the more disgusting push-back is acceptable, just to be expected. Your last sentence is Trump to a T. I don't feel sorry for him.
Trump only punches those who deserved it. He punched the media, the intel agencies, Pelosi, Adam Schiff, RINO republicans etc goons. They all deserved it. They called him a Russian asset, tyrant, nazi and other names. They called his daughter a "c**t" and daily made fun of his wife's accent for 5 years. You wanted him to just take it without punching back? You wanted him to bend over and get fkd like Bernie did twice? How pathetic.
I followed Trump carefully during his quest for the nomination and presidency. He did not ONCE criticize Bernie. He knew jBernie was coming from his heart, his beliefs and only when he caved did Trump take a shot at him. He also said when critiquing Hillary for her cheating emails to get Bernie that 2016 was Bernie's time and she took it from him. But he let them didn't he. Trump refuses to cave on any of it and they are completely unused to that kind of standing up for personal integrity no matter what. CNN is at a loss as to what to. do with Trump even now. I like seeing them lie and lie and am amzed how few even notice or the fact that the heads on TV keep on refusing to publicly acknowledge that the facts are going way against them. But I iknew all this long ago and tho I am surprised it has come out this fast I shouldn't be as #Virilio is the great theorist on SPEED and TECHNOLOGY the MEDIA and VELOCITY! MY MIND IS CAPTURED!
Not to excuse him but it is almost impossible to maintain your sense of cool when the entire world has been mobilized in a hate synchronous velocity of venom against you, one person. Trump is not a literate responder and instead reacts. He needed someone at the WH to teach him verbal judo. I offered but was not taken up on it. I did the best I could to help him get nominated and then to beat Hillary. Why? Because I knew his DISCOURSE was going to bring the house down but I did not anticipate the fury and completeness of this crash. Now we are prey in a war devised by our present govt.
Not just TDS, though that was a factor. A lot of careers depend on gain-of-function and related research. It's a rare virologist who will condemn it - though there were, and are, a few brave souls. They deserve medals.
Virilio: "All technology creates its own accident." And in 2002 he was instrumental in the MUSEUM OF ACCIDENTS showing in Paris. A beautifuyl book accompanies this with his theoretical essay on accidents. It is FOREGONE that an ACCIDENT of this sort WILL happen. Deliberately on purpose as a Freudian might say, of "Mom, I didn't mean to knock over my milk at dinner!"
I saw it at 4 as my dad loved Disney in the late 1930's. I was frozen scared watching those brooms multiply. That scene is inscribed in my mind jand certainly apllies to other things, Those brooms metastisized way out of Mickey's ability to stop the flooding. Then I saw it again in the late 1960's high on mushrooms. A DIFFERENT FILM! Disney had a filthy mind making a film like this for children. All unconscious of course. Disney had no idea of his unconscious predilections.
But it seemed like you were saying that the "planning" that seems to exist today is really just being claimed by or of opportunists, that there really is no planning at all in the arc of current events, so the "cancers" of today really have just been recently discovered and diagnosed. I actually am attracted to this way of looking at it, the more i think of it.
Have I completely mis-interpreted your lovely phrase, "...its implications metastasized into something planned decades ago" ?
During this time I was working out every night at Planet Fitness formy mile on the treadmill. A screen is built onto it to amuse you while you walk or run. So for over a year I got 20 minutes of TV and I am someone who doesnt even own a TV and I only see it in public places. OK so far? I was fascinated with the strategy I was reading for getting Trump. FBI, Ukraine, Russians interfering with the election, etc. I was the last generation to grow up as a child list4ening to radio programs just for us. The VOICE had to be perfect to be believable. RADIO is a HOT medium TV is a COLD medium - reading thru McLuhan. TV is completely different and not nearly as emotionally potent as the listening ear. I can listen to Trump's voice and I know he believes what he says even when he is awfully wrong IMO. Biden is simply a liar who believes in nothing and so are the Clintons and Congress. AOC was very good in the beginning but she is fragmenting now to keep her position. Bernie was good in 2016 but caved after he conferenced with Obama. Do I have any PROOF? Not a shred. For me it is just a matter of "knowing." And recently #Virilio has captured my thinking for what I expect tobe a very long time. You cannot write the way he does without thinking so clearly that it hurts. He has said that he does not think we will win. Neither do I and haven't for a very long time. It is no use my getting in discussions/arguments jwithj cjommenters who think it is fixable. I do not think it is and I do not BELIEVE that it is. So why do I keep writing and commenting. I dont know.
It went from "hate Trump" to stealing the election and now to us. Smashing small biz and stretching their strength against big corporations. Am reading #TheeInformationBomb now and feeling terrible.
I STILL DIDN'T REPLY TO YOU. Actually a mistake can lead to your embellilishing your thinking and upping your game. Anthrax was a beginning but nowhere anything like Covid. So what is the difference. SPEED AND VELOCITY of the message into a GLOBALIZATION of synchronicity of emotional contagion around the world. And now we see that GLOBALIZATION has revealed to us how "small Planet Earth" really is. As Virilio says, "Progress is no longer possible." The Earth is too small for progress. How CHILLING that is. Globalization is the finitude of the Planet Earth. Now we have experienced it. Whether we acknowledge or deny the experience with all its horrifying feelings. Is it any wonder the young who sense this are drugging themselves to oblivion. It is true. It is now a new world. And we know it whether we know we know it or not. We live on a very small planet where space has shrunk and time goes at the speed of light while we sit still in INERTIA. I am terrified. But I am also 87 and very happy about that.
My reading of the Nicholas Wade article is that the gain of function research wasn't indirectly funded by the US at all; it was nothing less than a US project! Nicholson Baker suggests in his New York Magazine article the work was moved to Wuhan only when gain of function research was banned in the US.
In April of 2020, when my mother heard on Fox News that the Chinese had engineered the virus, I said, not so fast. I sent her a copy of the 20 November 2015 article, "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence" to show her that the US was working the with the Chinese on this disaster. At the time I noted this correction about the funding:
In the version of this article initially published online, the authors omitted to acknowledge a funding source, USAID-EPT-PREDICT funding from EcoHealth Alliance, to Z.-L.S. The error has been corrected for the print, PDF and HTML versions of this article.
Yep so the two established parties get all the benefit. The right yells about China and the left yells about government control of every day life to combat the very virus both groups were probably somewhat complicit in somewhere up the food chain.
The fact all this happened right before the elections was not lost on me.
As far as I'm concerned, both major parties are right-wing.
You could offer your definition o fthe Right. (There is something to be said for try to conserve what is valuable, like the environment, but most "conservatives" aren't doing that.)
It's true. So why blame Chona. This kind of research to "protect" us from a major plague attack? Or to research a virus AS A WEAPONB OF MASS DESTRUCTION that has turned on us. Illegal toconduct this research in the US and better by far to be able toblame China for any "accident".
"GAIN OF FUNCTION" is a MASK conceptual camouflage to befudge our minds as to what it really is and was. A tweaking of a virus to make it more deadly. If you call it by its name it stings and pierces. Gain of Function deadens the meaning and turns it into meaninglessness because what is GOF anyway mommy?
GAIN OF FUNCTION is a nice new label to hide what it really is eh. Like going over the Rainbow Bridge whan your beloved dog dies. It's called a euphemism
Abject stupidity and carelessness can have evil consequences, especially when potentially life-saving information is deliberately not shared with others who might become infected.
I don't get it either. COVID-19 is a bat coronavirus with modified spike protein that allows it to enter human cells. It originated in Wuhan China. There are no horseshoe bats in Wuhan, China. What there is is a biolab where there were specifically attempting to engineer bat coronavirus with a modified spike protein that allowed it enter human cells. The probability that a virus would randomly emerge out of all the places in the world, right next door to a lab that was attempting to engineer that precise virus is so vanishingly low that it is an effective impossibility. Add to the that the large and completely fruitless effort to find evidence of natural evolution that was so easy to do in past outbreaks.
Imagine if a private individual had been trying to engineer COVID-19 in his house and people in the same town started dying from it. His guilt would be considered a certainty. The only question from a court would be intent.
Effective propaganda has made people are so scared of being labelled "conspiracy theorists" that even journalists who have done good research on this and have all the information necessary always feel obliged to say they "don't know" where it came from.
The likelihood that COVID-19 came from a lab is much, much greater than that George Floyd died due to malice on the part of a cop and not a drug overdose...
"I am a 'conspiracy theorist.' I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you don't think so, then you are what is called an idiot. If you believe stuff but fear the label, you are what is called 'a coward."' - David B Collum
The term "crackpot conspiracy theorist" is well-known. I think the flip side deserves its own term: "crackpot conspiracy denialist", with "crackpot" referring to "denialist". There are instances when denial of the possibility of a conspiracy is itself a crackpot statement.
It's a thousand miles from the bat caves in Yunnan to Wuhan in Hubei province - and no trail of infections. However, we KNOW, because they bragged about it, of a vector: the scientists who collected bat viruses in Yunnan and brought them to Wuhan to .,, experiment on. So even if it's a natural virus, which hasn't been found in nature, the lab is the ONLY plausible vector. Yes, they may eventually find this coronavirus in bats in Hubei - but it's less and less likely.
Of course, this is besides the American money and the research program at U. of N. Carolina. The director's name is Baric, and he should be much more on the carpet than he is.
As for number 2 and the motives of intelligence/scientists, I'd guess it had less to do with Trump than keeping the money flowing to research they were deeply invested in, financially, professionally and perhaps ideologically.
No, but Trump was the perfect cover....squirrel, squirrel.....look over there. Fauci will have a lot to answer for if he actually allows a journalist to ask really tough questions. And more power to Rand Paul for actually holding him accountable.
What I hope everyone has finally learned (but I doubt they have) is that the media and the DNC will literally let America get destroyed if it means they can spite orange man or their political opponent. And if someone hasn’t realized this yet, then they are officially terminal brain dead.
As Patrick points out in this clip, 911 was an event which brought the entire America together. Covid could have been the same where everyone could have come together and investigated the cause. But nope. DNC wasted 1.5 years coordinating with social media to name call everyone who was pointing out the obvious.
Actually, we don't know if the virus "escaped" or was released. We will probably never know, but if it "escaped," the organizers of Event 201 were awfully preternaturally prescient. Oh, and somebody should at least mention Graham McQueen's book The 2001 Anthrax Deception.
I don't think those anticipating an outbreak were particularly "prescient" because it was always entirely predictable. The real question is why the CDC and WHO were so flummoxed and unprepared when the inevitable happened.
Their failure can't be chalked up to merely "the fog of war" and uncertain facts. The whole purpose for the existence of these well-funded institutions was to plan ahead for exactly this scenario. But they just started flailing and making ad hoc politically motivated decisions as if they had never thought this stuff through at all. It's as if the Soviets had invaded at the height of the Cold War and the Army announced that it had forgotten to plan for that contingency.
The entire response reminded my of Russia's response to their nuclear disaster. Warned ahead of time but when it happened they all ran helter skelter pointing fingers and covering asses while workers and innocent individuals died by the scores. Just multiply that disaster by whatever number you wish and the response to this virus was pretty much the same. Bureaucrats, politicians and the media are pretty much the same world over. Useless turds when it really counts.
Then go on FB to get to know #NassimTaleb. He is a REAL mathematician in statistical THEOREMS. We have been educated to paste all data on the Normal Distribution Probability Curve. Nassim will teach you about FAT TAILS and the exponential curve. I knew as soon as I case was in CA and one I think in FL from the Chinese infection that it would multiply like ants. That was in Jan 2020 for me and my favorite gf bus driver said the same. So both of us knew but what could we do. Dr. BabetteBabich of Fordham osted on her FB page that Agamben of France had published that it was laboratory tweaked gott4en from the lab in Paris that isolated the AQIDS virus. DELETED FROM HER FB POSTINGS. We can draw many different conclusions by reading all this in different ways.
It was obviously created in the lab, but it was almost certainly not released deliberately as the researchers would want to release it on their own doorstep. There are also many plausible accounts of lab researchers randomly getting sick over a period of time.
I checked up on this after the comment, and can now say I think it's very unlikely that China had any intention of wishing the virus to spread. China shut down Wuhan / internal flights *and* Wuhan/international passenger carrying flights at noon 1/23/20. Based on analysis of satellite tracked flight paths, and International Civil Aviation Organization manifests, there is one unresolved passenger - otherwise all that left after that date were empty planes other than pilots and cabin staff. The guy in the following link was main source for the story when Trump first referenced it, and he's quite defensive. But read to the end, and think you will agree its a nonissue versus other controversies.
China's stats came out in January. As expected OLD people with underlying medical issues died at high rates. But OLD people without underlying medical issues had low deaths, 11 - ELEVEN! - on the page I looked at! Rare deaths among children but underlying medical issues were there. I thought their stats were very honest and informative. CNN paid no intention. CNN is a PROPAGANDA WAR MACHINE as the media for the masses always has been and not just in the US.
A government that cared about its own people far more than the CCP does would not want it released in its own country. A government that is willing and able to carry out draconian measures for eradicating a virus locally after allowing it to spread to rival nations, on the other hand...
The CCP doesn't care about it's people. That's right. But releasing it in the enemy country would be so much more effective. The Chinese have very advanced technologies for distribution of bioweapons which would have been entirely wasted here. And regardless of the CCP, the top scientists wouldn't have wanted to kill their mums.
While I wouldn't put it past them to deliberately release a virus. All the signs in this case point to it being a cock up.
Techno-Science is what you mean. And it isn't going to save you. It is go8ing to industrialize your body like it does everything else. Techno-Science has been salivating over the population/genetic bomb ever since Einstein announced it. You think all this "HEALTH" Experimentation is really about helping you live a heathier longer life without illness? Hey I have this great bridge..............
The govt is a MACHINE. Machines do not care about people. EVER! Does your car care about you when it gets a flat tire and you die with your heart attack on the way to emergency with no time to spare? Where doews all this ideology come from when jpeople talk about MACHINES.
We will never know. It makes nosense to keep commenting forever about deliberate or accidental. That is the way we are diverted from delving into the REAL.
Curiosity killed the cat. To do this will be to interpret back and forth to the moon. This will keep you in the BINARY DISCOURSE which will lock you in to a forever game of ping pong. IF you atudy Foucault on DISCOURSES Binary is the DOMINATING DISCOURSE of the STATE and the determined wish is to keep you in it to occupy you and distract you. European universities now are swtudying DISCOURSES as major subjects for advanced degrees. Think Trump for a minute. He changed the Institutionalized Political Discourse of the US and look what happened. Galileo did it and the Catholic Church was going to burn him up. Discourses are dangerous. They change the thinking of a culture on a dime.
We dont need to know nor will we ever know. This strategy was designed with deliberate/accidental as part of the strategy. Read Virlilio's #TheInformationBomb based on Einstein's thinking and naming it.
The point I’d differ with you on is regarding your second item. I think you’re being too generous in giving the Intelligence community the benefit of the doubt of covering up an innocent accident. I don’t have evidence for this other than history repeating itself, but I’d argue the leak was likely caused/made possible by the Intelligence community in the first place.
A president improving/normalizing relations with North Korea, Russia, China? And he’s castigated and called a sympathizer with North Korea, dubious/totally false intelligence leaks to embroil him in Russiagate scandal, US funded bio weapon leaked from Chinese lab? It’s also like someone on the inside knew exactly how to subvert everything he was doing.
Bay of Pigs, Lee Harvey Oswald set up as Soviet defector, CIA sponsored coup (against presidents will/knowledge) of South Vietnamese client government that destabilized the country to postpone a planned troop withdrawal until mere weeks after he was “mysteriously” assassinated thus reversing withdrawal and installing a new, hawkish president ensuring over a decade more of Vietnam quagmire and war?
It’s 1963 and JFK all over again. Trump will be lucky if he escapes with just an election loss and we’ll be lucky if we escape with just a pandemic - and not driven headlong into a nuclear/biological war to end humanity by the insane blood thirsty psychopaths that *actually* run this country.
The virus was all over China, not just in Wuhan, likely spread by travelers before the lockdown went into effect. And then the US, among others, demanded "our people" be allowed to leave the country unvaccinated. How about we just agree the entire handling of this mess was an international clusterf*** of major proportions and stop looking for some comic-book villain to blame so we can all feel noble and justified?
Once it became clear there was no way to hide the epidemic, the Chinese were open and upfront about it, which is more than can be said for the US media and both the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government. Both know there was a highly virulent strain of SARS on the loose by the end of last January, and yet both deliberately chose to keep silent about it for most of two month until the problem was everywhere.
And in those two months, members of Congress in both parties cashed in on the event and increased their bank accounts. So, spare me the insistence it's essential we know where the virus came from. Why aren't the media looking into why our government chose to delay telling the people they were in literally mortal danger?
Why is the rage against the Chinese? Why isn't the rage against the FUNDERS of this research with grant money from the US. It was being. done. IN CHINA because US laws forbid it according to international treaty. Asik Native Americans how much integrity is resent in a treaty with the US? So park your money in a safe heaven. Park tyour research in China so if an "accident" happens you have a good, no excellent, country to lay the blame on.
Why does righteous rage against one deny the same towards the other?
It seems to me it comes down to what is in the human heart, and Fauci and the CCP are two peas in the Authoritarian Socialist pod. Why shouldn't both be the enemy here?
Is it that Fauci pretended to be oh so concerned? And Hitler was open and deliberately intentional about killing Jews. He said that if he had to do it over he would have worked them to death instead rather than gassing them so fast.
Where's all the investigating journalists now? This is outrageous and here I am reading this on Substack!!!!!! Not the NYT WAPO ETC ETC....Thank you AGAIN GLENN! you're truly an amazing journalist!
I'm not a mathematician, and I realize coincidence and causation are not synonyms, but that this novel coronavirus broke out within a few mile radius of a lab that was creating novel coronaviruses, at the time it was creating novel coronaviruses, makes it quite outrageous that such certainty was deployed in denying a link -- let alone how outrageous it was that so many people bought that certainty without question.
Just don't forget to wear your two masks, close your business, abuse your customers, give up your civil rights, dob in your friends n neighbours, and do any other batshit* crazy nonsense some talking head tell you to do because experts.
You meant the 60s. The 90s were the ah feel yore pain neoliberal Clinton years when from the gitgo he/they did the greatest damage to the USA since the civil war — from the racist Biden predator crime bill of 1994 to nafta to the copyright act and repeal of the Glass Steagsll new deal era bank regulation bill which led to ...
Just received my Babylon Bee t-shirt "I Identify as Vaccinated". Should I wear it boldly to the wedding in which I'm required to wear a mask all night if I'm still unvaccinated or should I rip open a shirt to expose it while on the dance floor? So many options.
After all these repeated lies and deceit from the “experts in scientific community”, I am really motivated to inject myself with something to possibly prevent a virus created by the “experts” with a 99.9% survival rate. Why won’t you drumphtards just trust the science?????!!!
We 100% know that the FBI will lie to achieve their goals. From the WSJ 1/29/21: "Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.....admitted to falsifying evidence submitted to the court for a warrant to spy on onetime Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page."
In that article we see what price Clinesmith pays: "Federal Judge James Boasberg spared Mr. Clinesmith prison in favor of 12 months probation and 400 hours of community service. The judge said the evidence persuaded him that “Mr. Clinesmith likely believed that what he said about Mr. Page was true.”
This would be like me embezzling millions from Jeff Bezos, I get caught and plead guilty, and the judge (I sure hope it's a FISA judge) giving me no time because "Mr Bulger likely believed that he believed it true that he deserved the money more that Jeff Bezos".
It's over for me, and for many. These institutions are irredeemable, incapable of any self-policing. I used to believe the "it's only a few bad apples at the top" storyline but the rot is too pervasive, across too many separate institutions both here and abroad, for honorable employees to overcome. Sadly reminds me of the Catholic Church, and other organizations where the only people that would ever be allowed the power to clean it up will either be kneecapped by the resident gatekeepers, or else were complicit as well and were appointed to showtrial a few sacrificial lambs.
I keep asking my Russiagate-peddling Democrat friends since when they (and the fake resistance Left) learned to love and trust the CIA and FBI. Never once I got anything close to an answer. The best was 'I can't talk about that'.
“But what we do know for certain” is that the American people have been and are being constantly and needlessly lied to by their globally corporate owned government and their globally corporate owned media. And anytime anyone speaks out with a logical, natural assumption, like, “Gee, I wonder if Covid -19 is a man-made virus since the epidemic started in a place that has a Level 4 virology lab,” they are silenced (and they self-silence) with the label “conspiracy theorist.” Maybe if we weren’t constantly being lied to (and the government and the media often caught out in these glaring lies– like the way Americans bought into the lies leading up to the Iraq war – and then the media confessing years later that they were “duped,’ Oh, right…) then maybe we would have some level of trust. As it is currently only 25% of Americans trust their government and only about 40% of Americans trust the media.
As for me? My trust level is close to zero on both counts.
What a crazy system. We vote middlemen into office in order to beg them for favors like telling us the truth. We don’t need middlemen.
Americans deserve the truth and they should demand it.
I will say that's one thing good that has come out of the past few months, I no longer give a flying f*** what people say when I question the narrative. I think that has happened to a lot of people. Go ahead and call me a conspiracy theorist and I'll show you how the conspiracy theorists have been right more than any mainstream media source in the past year so they can piss off. The more people speak up, the more they lose their power.
"I am a 'conspiracy theorist.' I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you don't think so, then you are what is called an idiot. If you believe stuff but fear the label, you are what is called 'a coward."' - David B Collum
Democrats are some of the dumbest smart people I've known. Though I don't subscribe to the Right's ideas, I can understand some of their sentiments; said Democrats are the biggest snowflakes I've ever seen.
From 'finally our country is back' on the day the death-rattle was inaugurated to the ' I can't talk about this anymore' (i.e. Biden laptop).
Just remember that some of the brightest minds and smartest people go to work for companies which spend every minute of their existence to figure out how to place an ad in front of your eyes for 1 more second. That's how you know that some of the dumbest smart people end up controlling your speech too.
Oh, that's the constant question in my mind - how do people justify things they do? Do they question anything? Do they think they are contributing to the overall good? There are hopeful signs when Googlers rebel and protest against military contracts, etc. But I don't think that's a majority.
The manipulation of one form or another has always been going on. With the current reach of internet it's times gazillion. And it won't go away, just get more sophisticated and subtle as the rebellion against in-your-face kind is stirred up.
I use "stirred up" intentionally. Most folks don't notice or care if they are manipulated. But if it becomes fashionable to rebel they will. And so the manipulators will adjust. And so on.
Just examine the certain experimenter here in this forum. He (or she) keeps putting up absurd statements which lots of seemingly reasonable characters swallow up and take at face value and start arguing. That is a great illustration.
I was just talking to a work colleague and he agreed there's a problem with truth and institutions, and similarly doesn't trust the govt or media. BUT he said that he didn't have a problem with the 'noble lie' argument because his distrust, of ~40% of our country, was much deeper: people who are so irrational and angry and harmful that given the truth would have attacked and done harm to asians Americans and Asian expats in the US. If they had known that the lab in china was the likely cause.
I think we agree on the most important point: It doesn't really even MATTER if Fauci is responsible for Covid19. By funding dangerous research in a Chinese lab, he's essentially putting a gun to our heads and pulling the trigger. This is MORE than enough AT LEAST remove him from any position of authority, right? Even if (maybe) the gun was empty this time?
The coverup that came later from the entire "in" group is ALSO enough to get him removed from any position of authority. How does this guy still have a job? Why is he not asking questions in front of the senate about how he lied?
Does WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING not matter anymore? Does the media just get to create its own reality that we have to accept?
The sudden about face by MSM and the Tech oligarchs might indicate they are using the Wuhan lab to camouflage something more insidious, illegal or pointing in a more politically harmful direction. Beware of thinking you know the answer. Something does not smell right. We knew the original story was BS- but this story is not definitive or proven. Remain thinking and stay alert.
Without having to listen to the whole thing, is the idea that the threat of an anthrax was not considered serious enough to maintain the spending on defense against it and the Oct 2001 attack was deliberately aimed at changing that risk assessment and to keep the money flowing?
Jen is good and smart enough to not state that as conclusive and I may possibly be slightly misrepresenting it because I think I listened to it four or five years ago but it’s a pretty compelling thread/explanation given the timing and circumstance. Check out the whole episode and podcast. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
The most appalling part of this sordid affair is the complete failure of our media. Pretty clear they serve as propaganda agents for the modern administrative state.
What we have now, I'm not sure what box it fits into but it's collaboration between the media, the administrative state (FBLie et al), multinational corporations, and elements within both political parties, but primarily Democrat.
I'm not a political scientist but it sounds like fascism to me.
Why has the CIA's on-a-leash corporate media changed its course? Is the cat out of the bag or is this just another Orwellian fear tactic (maybe another create-a-boogieman and war-is-the-only-option maneuver)?
For over a year now our media has been conflating "created in a lab" with "released from a lab". They kept telling us that all their "experts" say that the virus wasn't "created in a lab" or "man-made", so, therefore, it could not have been "released from a lab". And not once did I ever hear them say something like "even though the virus wasn't created in a lab, it still could have been accidentally or intentionally released from the lab."
And now that Greenwald has shown us how the US Army was involved with the anthrax scares, should China's claim be considered? Last year, they claimed that the US Army released the virus at the 2019 Military World Games which were held in Wuhan. We need to get some real fictitious facts, so I think we should create something like the 9/11 Commission. (Is Building 7 still a conspiracy fact?)
The incredible thing is that the whole "wet market" thing was actually the most RACIST theory out there. The real pitch to the American people was that, well, the Chinese have different (read: backward) standards for cleanliness - and they eat weird food, so... that's how this global plague started.
Instead of:
This highly technical lab doing progressive 21st century virus research, which wasn't at all possible 2 decades ago had a mishap which leaked the bioplague into the world...
It's almost how people are afraid to say anything about BLM-protest related violence, but the Proud Boys are worth condemnation beyond reproach. Why are people afraid of calling out ALL of the violence, not just that by some (white) people?
But first you must realize that everything is precisely opposite what the woke leftists claim. It's intuitively obvious that
Identity politics is the ideology of bigotry
Anti-Racism is literally Racist
And the fact that these duplicitous low-lifes claim to be successors to Dr King and the civil rights movement? Nauseating
BLM is a Marxist insurgency group by the admission of its founders. The real insurrection happening in this country rioted on the streets of the USA last summer and this movement now attempts to indoctrinate school kids into their Racist ideology even in elementary school
January 6th is just a convenient misdirection to confuse the people about what's really going on
Woke Communism is still communism and it has exactly nothing legitimate to offer any Western Liberal Democracy. The only thing it offers is the elimination of human rights, human prosperity and will eventually bring death and destruction to the masses for the benefit of a few elitist party members
Study the genesis of critical theory and you'll find this is not hyperbole
There is one significant difference this time. This time the Communists seem to be in league with the globalist mega-capitalists corporate elites. Seems against natural law but it's happening nonetheless
It's all spin. They knew it was going to come out eventually. The FOIA releases are the beginning of offering up a sacrificial lamb - Fauci. I believe there are plenty of others who helped mastermind this thing, including those of "both" parties. State media will do the same thing the FBI did/does - make a few pronouncements and move on.
You could be right, but this might be more than just spin. Because couldn't the CIA/US Government have classified and withheld Fauci's emails? I'm not sure but I think Obama's executive order 13526 could keep almost any info from being released. And if that's the case, why has the CIA allowed us to see these emails (now)?
You are correct to ask. Information is an asset that they use. There is no reason to doubt that the intelligence agencies engage in propaganda domestically. Every leak and every confirmation from them must be treated as having an ulterior motive.
Never thought I would be a conspiracy crank, but such is the way of things.
Fauci served his purpose, in 2020. He's now more famous than the guy the Blob put in office. People trust him more than President Uncle Joe. Can't have that anymore.
"February and March of last year — at the time that Fauci and others were dismissing any real possibility that the coronavirus inadvertently escaped from a lab, to the point that the Silicon Valley monopolies Facebook and Google banned any discussion of that theory -- Fauci and his associates and colleagues were privately discussing the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as part of a U.S.-funded joint program with the scientists at that lab."
I vividly remember this censorship. The timeliness of the pandemic from the establishment's point of view seemed too good to be coincidental in the same way the jailhouse "suicide" of pandemicist Bill Gates' elite-blackmailing buddy did. The Romans asked the question, "cui bono?" for a reason. Asking that question proved reliable over time. Woke, censoring nannies argue not censoring what goes against their self-serving, "fact checked" narratives is "dangerous," but censoring what might be the truth is far worse. The public as a whole is fully qualified to figure out what's true and what's not when presented with the unfiltered facts, even when peppered with lies.
The public-opinion nannies arrogantly believe they're better than the plebs, that the ends justify the means. Repressive regimes through the ages used censorship to snow the public, to hide what might be or was in fact true, but the public tended to be smarter than the powers that were in the long run. In no case I can think of did this ever work out well for the repressors. The censor-monopolies believe they're smart censoring unapproved thoughts and opinions "for your own good," but they're playing with fire.
The fine line between "offensive" and "defensive" bioweapon research had frankly never occurred to me before and it is pretty scary if you think about it.
For example, it is said that bioweapons are useless because they will just end up infecting the country that releases them. But what if the country (or some non-state actor) simultaneously engineers a new deadly virus *and* the protective vaccine? In that case, they could vaccinate their own population and then launch the virus on the rest of the world. They could also use access to the vaccine as leverage to extort compliance with their geopolitical demands.
Perhaps "gain of function" research is inherently dangerous. But maybe we still need to do it preemptively in order to pre-develop vaccines for the "gain of function" bugs that someone else might be secretly developing. If nothing else, there is definitely a good science fiction novel in this scenario.
Very intriguing article. Glenn connects dots in interesting ways that would never occur to our group thinking media establishment.
That ambiguity makes it extremely difficult to tell the one from the other before or even after the fact. So, given that, by what objective standard do you judge proposals or the legality of research?
Yes, and 1) how can you have one without the other?, and 2) one is the "defense" of the other, especially in our (still) mutually-assured-destruction days.
Fauci’s is a liar, an incompetent, a sycophant and a tyrant. He was despised in the 80s and early 90s by all of us doing AIDS research in South Florida. Absolutely a despicable governmental parasite.
It was NIH funded research (meaning the Chinese government was probably not funding it), but they were not using sufficient biosafety protocols at the Wuhan lab. The aim of the research (the NIH grants are public knowledge) was not to "weaponize" the virus, it was to study "spillage" from animals to humans. If it were for bioweapon development, it would have been a secret DARPA or similar grant.
This is the best article I have seen on it so far. The human-preferred codon in the furin cleavage site between the two spike proteins is the most difficult to explain fact if the origins were natural.
>"It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed,..."
Do you know who sealed them ... the article doesn't say?
I've been following Shi Zheng-li, the 'Bat Woman of China' and lead researcher at Wuhan lab, since early last year.
In June of last year Shi was very coy about GOF research (Shi didn't call it that then) conducted at the Wuhan lab, couching it as simply a method of getting out in front of recent natural selection coronavirus outbreaks - SARS1, MERS, etc.
More recently, Shi has admitted she was concerned about the potential COV-2 may have originated in/escaped from her lab, but that a search of her records indicated the genetic sequence of COV-2 did not match anything she was working on. .. and that she was greatly relieved.
*the media, such as it is, is still plugging the natural selection scenario .. . "About 70% of new infectious diseases have come from animals, including Covid-19, Sars, bird flu, Ebola and HIV." .. . God only knows why?
"We do not know for sure if the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, another lab, or jumped from animals to humans."
I'm reminded of a courtroom murder trial where the prosecution has laid out all the compelling evidence but the defense keeps shrieking "but no one saw him shoot so we can't be sure!" That's what all these "we do not know for sure" sounds like to me.
It's pretty apparent what happened. There was gain of function research, indirectly funded by the US with direct knowledge from Fauci, who kept alive a loophole allowing this research. Lackluster safety conditions (cited by US investigators pre-pandemic) meant a manipulated virus escaped and jumped to a human host, giving us the three lab researchers hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms as reported in the WSJ, which was shortly followed with the mysterious 17 days cell-phone blank out surrounding the lab (suggesting an intensive cleansing going on). The Chinese authorities thinking they'd controlled the escape sighed with relief and said nothing to the larger world, then two months later all hell broke loose. Beijing, knowing immediately what to look for, clamped down on Wuhan severely and all travel from Wuhan to the rest of China, which meant a rapid spreading virus was controlled and didn't emerge elsewhere in a country with one of the world's largest and heavily used train network, but still allowed international travel, which allowed COVID to spread to the rest of the world. The rest, we know.
There are two real questions here:
1. To what extent were US fed scientists/NIH involved in this gain of function research and to what extent they tried to cover it up in early 2020.
2. To what extent were the US intelligence and science communities deliberately refusing to openly discuss a lab escape and instead doubled down on the naturally occurring stance solely out of hatred of Donald Trump and an overwhelming desire to not do anything to bolster Trump's presidency or to provide him with any form of support or legitimacy. And this carried over to their allies in the mainstream media, who were desperate to defeat Donald Trump. Is all this "new" information coming out now only because Trump has been safely defeated?
The first is understandable. People screw up. A complicated, multi-layered byzantine bureaucracy makes mistakes. None are evil people.
The second is much more problematic. Deeply problematic for a liberal democracy.
I think your comment is very well-argued. But I also think that, when journalistically speaking, it's important not to ratify claims as true until there is *conclusive* (rather than persuasive) evidence for them.
People also need to keep in mind that this new Covid virus origin interest is probably designed to deflect from other issues like Fauci's email dump. We all know that China is not going to cooperate so what's really going to happen? However, we have emails to and from Fauci that show that Covid was known early on that it spreads via aerosol and non-N95 masks don't work and that asymptomatic people don't spread it.
In reality, the lockdowns were a complete farce and caused incalculable damage. Effective non-vaccine treatments were reviled. Lying about vaccine side effects. These were human rights crimes.
Agamben in france wrote on this in early 2020. DEr Babette Bqabich of Fordham University a tenured professor posted his paper wsaying Covi8d was laboratory manufactured and he got it from the lab in France that isolated the AID virus. BABICH HAD IT DELETED FROM HER FACEBOOK PAGE WAY BACK THEN AND SHE WAS FURIOUS! Th9is clued us in on the comi9ng cenwsworship. I constanbtly get censor3e3d from face4book and toeday sill have 1 more week to go from my 30 days obliteration there. I keep refusing to censor myself and try to. be more subtle. I say to myself constantly "Shakespeare ended the "Divine Right of Kings" right under Eliz I's nose and would have been beheaded if she had had a clue.
Isnt it really a foregone conclusion that tweaked viruses are the potential weapon of the future? Bioweapons are so effective to be considered. They do depend on free international airplane travel tho. So this new "passport vaccine " thing makes sense to me that they would push it. It is an incredibly easy and timely way to begin #THEGENETICBOMB! Something that techno-scientific researchers have desired for decades: to augment the human genetic code and design humanity. This is the coming horror keeping me from feeling things may turn out ok.
The Covid pandemic is a gift that never stops giving.
Yes.
The lockdowns au contraire were extremely effective. But that's what you wanted them to be effective for! CLASSICAL CONDITIONING is very effective. Remember Little Albert and the White rabbit toy and the very loud noise! BTW that baby grew up to be a fugged up adult man who died rather young. Now the question is, "What were the MASKS REALLY for?
YIellow Stars began the same way in Germany. No big deal at first so they wore them.
Ofc. But that part of what makes comments so great because we're not journalists!
Based on the current disgraceful people who are called "journalists", I wouldn't want to be called one.
At least not without the immediate feeling of needing to defend oneself against an unjust accusation!
Learn to think like a journalist.
Oh hell no! :) I leave factual rigor to Glenn, Matt and the gang, thanks.
Never a good idea not to think for yourself.
That's right. Division of labor and all that.
Every worthwhile journalistic effort begins with skepticism. We are a band of skeptics here.
I hope we have become radicals very fast over this. Our govt is waging war on us and #TheAdministrationofFear has been accomplished. We are have been occupied. This makes us either collaborators or resisters. Again Virilio who grew up as a child under Nazi occuation in Nantes France when you didn't know whether your next door neighbor, the baker, your teacher, et al was a collaborator or a resister. Sozhenitsyn never finishes this subject in his 6 volume Gulag work referring to the USSR.
And continuously. And be quick to revisit.
But speculating (i.e. NOT being a journalist, in the forum anyway) is okay, too.
Speculating is a beginning. A hunch. A guesstimate. A hypothesis. Then you become a detective.
Live to speculate! Speculate to live!
Very well put. I could not agree more!
Yes, so I hearted both M. Thomas AND GG's "rebuttal." I think your take on it makes this consistent.
Rebuttal? I took that to mean: "You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJFiByfiRTA
I concede the fact that "rebuttal" was the wrong word. Perhaps part of my brain was trying to say just that, by inserting the scare quotes, before my running-off-with-the-mouth part of my brain had its say.
I keep trying to imagine Glenn Greenwald doing his best Ian Richardson impersonation. :)
The Netflix/Spacey version of that classic TV Drama was dismal from the get go. It was like TV designed by algorithms.
China will geopolitically do better with a heavy-handed suppression than they would from any confession - And absent a confession what would be sufficient to offer a conclusion? What smoking gun can determine if its animal or human error?
At this point I'd distrust any Covid 18.5's that were suddenly discovered in a bat or pangolin. But I'd also distrust paperwork about the researchers who got sick since its so unlikely they'd escape.
I think the only conclusion we'll see is that the USA has become really broken intellectually, particularly the politicians and the media (since they're meant to inform the rest of us when its still current!). We all should have been getting mad about this a year ago, but now it's too late.
I was paying attention and very mad about it.
Yes, the so-called fourth estate has failed the public it is supposed to be serving. All that is left is for enough people to say, "enough."
Glenn, Glenn... you'll never make it as a post-modern journalist with an attitude like that!
We must help him then. I am one. Greenwald is THE LAST MODERN JOURNALIST STANDING OF INTEGRITY and are you under the. impression that post modern journalists do not have integrity? Well some dont but the really great ones are philosophers and THEY DEFINITELY DO!
The claim that Covid was leaked from a lab that was engaged in gain of function research will most likely NEVER be conclusive (the evidence is destroyed). How about a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard?
I do not believe anything the govt tells us. Do I thinkt hey were not making a deadly virus as a weapon?
According to Virilio THERE WILL NEVER BE PROOF of accidental/deliberate and this is the strength of this globalized strategy. It was set up to become ambiguousfrom the very beginning as was the anthrax trial run as boot csmp for the future. Read Virilio and his study of Einstein on this in #The Information Bomb.
Gain of function research has always been thought to be potentially dangerous, because of the possibility that accidents happen, and the virus could escape from the lab causing a pandemic. Fauci's position on that a number of years ago was that the risk was worth it, and many didn't think it was. I doubt if this was deliberate, and what happened was why many felt it was too dangerous. I truly believed from the beginning it came from the Wuhan lab, and since no intermediate host has been identified after a year it more or less confirms what many suspected, an accident in the lab. I think many people have an idealistic view of science, and this just can't be an accident, but if you are familiar with the history of science, the mistakes, the denials, the beliefs that turned out to be false, well, this is just another very big mistake.
Fauci Shi, et al. accepted the risk-- on everyone else's behalf; they were wrong. No, it may not be a deliberate release and I doubt that it was, but there is still culpability for what was clearly a deliberate line of research with a wanton disregard of foreseeable consequences.
At least as important is that Fauci seemingly has no problem continuing the same kinds of research even AFTER this disaster. The mere fact of the pandemic does not seem to be enough to make Fauci and others rethink. It is clear that future action must be deterred by imposing consequences. As GG says in his book, however, the US has rather gotten out of the habit of "imposing consequences" on its elites. Unless the people make the system act, it will just issue the same "looking forward not backward" tripe it has for several decades. There are, however, millions of people worldwide, nearly 600,000 in the US, who can no longer "look forward" to anything at all. We owe it to them to seek justice.
Even if it was not a deliberate release from the lab, China still allowed international travel while blocking travel within the country. Aka they figured they would let it spread everywhere because that would end up helping them anyway. That’s why China needs to be held accountable by the entire world via tough tariffs and sanctions.
Don't imagine that China is some absurdly efficient, competent villain. Xi Jinping never heard of of the WIV 15 minutes before he needed to anymore than G.W. Bush knew anything about New Orleans area damns. They are all just reacting to the loudest explosion. It's comforting to believe otherwise, perhaps, but it's not the truth.
I only meant China shouldn't be held accountable if the virus escaped by accident from the lab, if indeed it happened, and I believe it did.
There was a ban in 2014 and then it was lifted a few years later, and some scientists justify the risks, like Fauci and some don't, and say the risks outweigh any benefits. I agree with the latter. I don't know if you can really assign culpability to Fauci, since there is justification for what he believes, however labs notoriously make mistakes, get careless, and something like the Covid 19 pandemic happens. The US also supported and funded it, and therefore culpable as well. The US developed bombs, and dropped them on Japan, yuck. The health care profession in this country is the third largest killer of people. First comes heart disease, then cancer then carelessness, or medical mistakes. When I was a kid I read the Cry and the Covenant about the life of Dr Ignaz Semmelweis. He said the leading cause of death of women who were tended by physicians when delivering their babies was because doctors didn't wash their hands and they contracted child bed fever as a result. and they died. Did they listen to him, no. Because I am in science, I have no glorified view of it, and personal beliefs, and profit get in the way of the truth too often.
Well if you cannot blame Fauci then logically you cannot blame Hitler either. To manufacture a super killer virus to "be able to make a vaccine to stop it IN CASE it was ever made to be used against us" is like a child's excuse of doing something forbidden. It was forbidden by TREATY but treaties with the US are........oh just ask Native Americans what they are worth. And do ytou REALLY believe the US govt waws doing it for PROTECTION from an enemy? Hey I've got a great bridge to sell ya.............
I think the takeaway that you got from Sammelweis' story, sadly, is that because the medical community can acknowledge its mistakes (in the distant past) it is somehow much better now, if imperfect.
" the possibility that accidents happen". No, CERTAINTY. Entropy is relentless, and people are weak.
24/7 vigilance is very difficult to actually achieve.
Btw, the physical quantity Entropy does not limit mankind. We just need to acquire ever better ability to control energy and its use to make the "rest" of the Universe even MORE chaotic (hence satisfying Entropy's mandate).
If your saying that accidents happen, and things tend to move in the direction of chaos. or disorder, okay.
Yes Sun Tsu says it is certain and Virilio confirms.
I have replied to you Fran on my new newsletter FOCUSFREE
"it's important not to ratify claims as true until there is *conclusive* (rather than persuasive) evidence for them."
I agree with that. Finding "conclusive" evidence as to how the virus spread, to the extent one can, is important.
As a separate matter, this whole affair is just one more exhibit in the now-conclusive evidence that we live in an Orwellian state, where false is true, and where persuasive evidence cannot be discussed if it conflicts with the (false) state-sponsored orthodoxy.
I would like to find out how this virus was unleashed, and there is no conclusive evidence on that subject just yet. But, our speech these days is controlled by state-sanctioned corporations. "State-sanctioned" because they are monopolies that the State will feign objection to but, ultimately, will help entrench. They do nothing because these state-sanctioned monopolies serve the interests of the ruling class.
And so it is. We have conclusive evidence that we live in an oppressive, Orwellian "democracy," where we pay homage to free speech, but it is only homage. In real life, we claim that governments are the only actors who may not impinge free speech, so if private, state-sanctioned monopolies do it, there is no problem.
Your First Amendment rights are not implicated when Big Brother is a state-sanctioned corporation.
Your Fourth Amendment rights are not implicated when you've signed away all privacy in the form of a User Agreement. The government can't directly collect data about you without a warrant. But why bother with that when you can just ask your state-sanctioned friends for the info?
Orwell was too modest in his warnings.
Re: Laramie
This comment is one of the, if not the most, profound and cogent responses to Glenn's wise admonition that "it's important not to ratify claims as true until there is *conclusive* (rather than persuasive) evidence for them." It is akin to the proverbial 'breath of fresh air" to read a honestly critically opinion, one not seasoned with hyperbolic partisan rhetoric and "alternative facts".
As Usual,
EA
Re: Glenn Greenwald
Your cogent distinction between "conclusive" (rather than persuasive) is persuasive, counselor.
As Usual,
EA
Glenn,
Read this article, it's illuminating and it doesn't resort to kneejerk TDS stupidity. Grassroot normies are outdoing "investigative reporters" who end up just reporting on the research or, even worse, ignore it. Sad times for "journalism".
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke-wuhan-lab-story-embarrassed-media-1596958
I am reading it right now and so far it's a decent article but why does the author claim Trump was an "accomplice" to Daszak? Trump and his supporters were the one who was saying that he had seen intelligence of it being from a lab. The author is claiming the exact opposite:
"For a long time, Daszak was astonishingly influential. Few in the media questioned him or pointed out that his career and organization would be deeply damaged if it turned out his work had indirectly played a role in the pandemic. His unwitting accomplice was Donald Trump, who embraced the theory, turning what should have been a scientific question into a political one. When the Trump administration canceled EcoHealth Alliance contracts that would have spent millions on new virus research, 60 Minutes ran a segment that painted Daszak as a martyr to the right-wing conspiracy machine. For right-thinking people everywhere, it seemed like an easy call: The enemy of my enemy is my friend: thus, the lab-leak theory is bunk."
You don't get it because you don't grasp how shameless the argument is.
This is what he meant: Whenever Trump declares a position on an issue, most of the media instinctively declares the opposite must be true. Hence, if Trump turned out to be correct, it's his fault that everyone else took the wrong position.
To be fair I don't think this particular author endorses that argument. But this is the tack now taken by many writers in the MSM, including that Vanity Fair report which generated much of the recent attention to the COVID 19 origins debate.
The victim becomes the aggressor. Inversion.
YES. Just as Karoke produces some great singers. Aned grafitti gave us Basquiat!
In globalization we now live in a time of lightning fast communication when synchronous emotional reaction can be used by the mass media to whip up the dish they want to feed you by the VELOCITY they can speedily circulate the emotional frenzy they wish to inject you with rather than any reasonable discussion of the facts. It is not even persuatsion. It is pure PROPAGANDA of an immense power we have never experienced before with people who are influenced by the IMAGE not the WORD all their lives. We are living in GLOBALISM now. And must deal with itws finitude. Progress is finished. The planet is too small and we know it now.
I see your point Glenn. Persuasion slides into propaganda - as CNN showed us during the campaign. But there is really no such thing as conclusive evidence to ratify claims.The only proofs are in. pure mathematics. In theorems. Which is exactly how #NassimTaleb beat #Monsanto in court on #Roundup and #GMO seeds in South America I believe. Forget. Anyway Monsanto could not disprove a mathematical theorem based on The Precarity Principle of Do No Harm to be proven first instead of after damages and endless lawsuits. Did you notice how fast all the class action lawsuits came out against RoundUp so fast. There is no defense against a mathematical theorem.
Not strange. Hiding in plain sight? Or not.
Keep msg Tucker as I thinkhe does work at this.
Google is always burying things that dont make money for google
Question number two seems self evident to me that they had TDS to the point where all of us could be sacrificed if it would get back at Trump (if they acknowledged it was a lab leak they may have taken different approaches to contain and treat it). The worst thing for me personally to come out of this pandemic is my complete mistrust of ALL government agencies now. I used to trust the CDC, FDA and WHO for that matter - not any more to the point where I believe actual malevolence if it will make them a buck somehow. It is a very sad state of affairs.
I've always distrusted the government. Now I distrust the media and Big Tech too!
Well done!
How did Big Tech switch from a libertarian mindset to Fascism--and I don't think that's an exaggeration at all--so quickly? Were they coerced by the state actors? Or was it organic?
Facebook got huge amounts of money from the CIA.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-cia-seriously/
You don't need to wear a tinfoil hat to believe that the CIA is using Facebook, Twitter, Google (GOOG) and other social media to spy on people. That's because the CIA publishes a helpful list of press releases on all the social media ventures it sponsors, via its technology investment arm In-Q-Tel.
Amazon also got a 600 million deal with the cia back in 2014.
I don't know, but I worked for Big Tech in the 1990s and no one is more shocked and surprised by the change than I am.
Keep in mind, back then Big Tech produced infrastructure. Today they are part of the media and entertainment industries. That might explain . . . something.
Well #Snowden was under its influence for a very long time and awoke slowly didn't he?
It wasn't so fast. You could feel it happening during the 00s. The Iraq war had its impact - things like Abu Ghraib and the like. The 08 meltdown had a bigger one.
Why they 8imprison and assassinate journalists all over the world.
It could be as simple, and profound, as, we all want to be liked, so whatever we read or say on social media, and websites, even as good as Glenn's website is, are we not influenced by wanting to be "liked" for what we say? Or duel with our words and put down those of whom we disagree, without really listening to what they are saying?
The Stanford Anthropologist Rene Girard (who passed away a few years ago) describes this as "mimetic desire", which really is an analysis of Cain's violence toward his brother Abel rooted in envy.....we see, we desire, we want to possess, we are jealous of the other, we proscribe subhuman characteristics to the other, then if easier means don't work, we destroy the other. Those with the superior technology, historically, destroy the weaker or the defenseless, and control the narrative.
As a teacher, I recognize, how many violent acts by students start with comments made on social media. How many mass shooters did not post ahead of time their complaints and violent desires? How, then, is cancel culture not just a less violent form of this tendency, egged on by social media, and multiplied by Big Tech's need to get clicks and likes for their advertising?
Read Virilio carefully and I think you will begin to understand the answer to your excellent question
About time. Thomas Paine warned us all those years ago.
Love me some Paine!
Paine was betrayed by our "founding fathers' after financing the Revolution with monies from his publication Common
sense. Nice thanx eh. It was Adams who reluctantly went to France to save Paine form the guilotine for doing the same thing in France that got rolled back
I am familiar with this history, and thank you for mentioning it!
Thomas Paine is a true American hero. I urge everyone to go back and reread him.
You should distrust media and Big Tech, as well as the government.
Stay alert. Use your bean.
Absolutely. We are the prey in an invisible war. Reread Sun Tsu
Welcome to #Virilio! The Media is a vast institution to CONDITION your thinking to align with the dominant govt's ways of programming you to think alike - for the masses. It is massive, powerful and you cannot escape it if you watch it regularly. Stay away.
People and celebrities were openly talking about and some wishing for the assassination of DJT without ANY pushback or outrage by the MSM or even the cultural elites. A public play depicted him being stabbed to death and it played to a cheering audience. A sick "comic" even held up a mock severed head of Trump while many in Hollywood smirked and cheered. With this level of hatred on public display would it be hard to believe that that many of the individuals working within the government would resort to getting rid of Trump "by any means necessary." All without one bit of self reflection or consideration as to what they have done.
This was what Virilio names as "the hate machine" of the media. And it is nothing new at all
Remember the disgusting comments last year when his brother passed away from long brain stroke issues and twitter mob was piling on with disgusting comments?
Or the “immigrant loving” late night tv hosts made fun of Melania for her accent? Or called Ivanka a c**t on live tv?
It was all so unbelievable. Juvenile, uncalled for and utterly pathetic.
A great deal of the nastiness directed toward Trump is simply the 'what goes around comes around' law of life. Trump smears and denigrates anyone who doesn't line up to kiss his ring. And since he's a tweetaholic, his vitriolic venom has massive coverage. I'm not saying the more disgusting push-back is acceptable, just to be expected. Your last sentence is Trump to a T. I don't feel sorry for him.
Trump only punches those who deserved it. He punched the media, the intel agencies, Pelosi, Adam Schiff, RINO republicans etc goons. They all deserved it. They called him a Russian asset, tyrant, nazi and other names. They called his daughter a "c**t" and daily made fun of his wife's accent for 5 years. You wanted him to just take it without punching back? You wanted him to bend over and get fkd like Bernie did twice? How pathetic.
I followed Trump carefully during his quest for the nomination and presidency. He did not ONCE criticize Bernie. He knew jBernie was coming from his heart, his beliefs and only when he caved did Trump take a shot at him. He also said when critiquing Hillary for her cheating emails to get Bernie that 2016 was Bernie's time and she took it from him. But he let them didn't he. Trump refuses to cave on any of it and they are completely unused to that kind of standing up for personal integrity no matter what. CNN is at a loss as to what to. do with Trump even now. I like seeing them lie and lie and am amzed how few even notice or the fact that the heads on TV keep on refusing to publicly acknowledge that the facts are going way against them. But I iknew all this long ago and tho I am surprised it has come out this fast I shouldn't be as #Virilio is the great theorist on SPEED and TECHNOLOGY the MEDIA and VELOCITY! MY MIND IS CAPTURED!
Not to excuse him but it is almost impossible to maintain your sense of cool when the entire world has been mobilized in a hate synchronous velocity of venom against you, one person. Trump is not a literate responder and instead reacts. He needed someone at the WH to teach him verbal judo. I offered but was not taken up on it. I did the best I could to help him get nominated and then to beat Hillary. Why? Because I knew his DISCOURSE was going to bring the house down but I did not anticipate the fury and completeness of this crash. Now we are prey in a war devised by our present govt.
Not just TDS, though that was a factor. A lot of careers depend on gain-of-function and related research. It's a rare virologist who will condemn it - though there were, and are, a few brave souls. They deserve medals.
Virilio: "All technology creates its own accident." And in 2002 he was instrumental in the MUSEUM OF ACCIDENTS showing in Paris. A beautifuyl book accompanies this with his theoretical essay on accidents. It is FOREGONE that an ACCIDENT of this sort WILL happen. Deliberately on purpose as a Freudian might say, of "Mom, I didn't mean to knock over my milk at dinner!"
I think it started to get Trump and then its implications metastasized into something planned decades ago.
Understanding as cancer?!
Or cancer cells mimicking? Like Mickey Mouse and the water and brooms in Fantasia that scared me so when I was 4.
Btw, I think my Mom wouldn't let me see Fantasia until I was older!!
I saw it at 4 as my dad loved Disney in the late 1930's. I was frozen scared watching those brooms multiply. That scene is inscribed in my mind jand certainly apllies to other things, Those brooms metastisized way out of Mickey's ability to stop the flooding. Then I saw it again in the late 1960's high on mushrooms. A DIFFERENT FILM! Disney had a filthy mind making a film like this for children. All unconscious of course. Disney had no idea of his unconscious predilections.
But it seemed like you were saying that the "planning" that seems to exist today is really just being claimed by or of opportunists, that there really is no planning at all in the arc of current events, so the "cancers" of today really have just been recently discovered and diagnosed. I actually am attracted to this way of looking at it, the more i think of it.
Have I completely mis-interpreted your lovely phrase, "...its implications metastasized into something planned decades ago" ?
During this time I was working out every night at Planet Fitness formy mile on the treadmill. A screen is built onto it to amuse you while you walk or run. So for over a year I got 20 minutes of TV and I am someone who doesnt even own a TV and I only see it in public places. OK so far? I was fascinated with the strategy I was reading for getting Trump. FBI, Ukraine, Russians interfering with the election, etc. I was the last generation to grow up as a child list4ening to radio programs just for us. The VOICE had to be perfect to be believable. RADIO is a HOT medium TV is a COLD medium - reading thru McLuhan. TV is completely different and not nearly as emotionally potent as the listening ear. I can listen to Trump's voice and I know he believes what he says even when he is awfully wrong IMO. Biden is simply a liar who believes in nothing and so are the Clintons and Congress. AOC was very good in the beginning but she is fragmenting now to keep her position. Bernie was good in 2016 but caved after he conferenced with Obama. Do I have any PROOF? Not a shred. For me it is just a matter of "knowing." And recently #Virilio has captured my thinking for what I expect tobe a very long time. You cannot write the way he does without thinking so clearly that it hurts. He has said that he does not think we will win. Neither do I and haven't for a very long time. It is no use my getting in discussions/arguments jwithj cjommenters who think it is fixable. I do not think it is and I do not BELIEVE that it is. So why do I keep writing and commenting. I dont know.
It went from "hate Trump" to stealing the election and now to us. Smashing small biz and stretching their strength against big corporations. Am reading #TheeInformationBomb now and feeling terrible.
I STILL DIDN'T REPLY TO YOU. Actually a mistake can lead to your embellilishing your thinking and upping your game. Anthrax was a beginning but nowhere anything like Covid. So what is the difference. SPEED AND VELOCITY of the message into a GLOBALIZATION of synchronicity of emotional contagion around the world. And now we see that GLOBALIZATION has revealed to us how "small Planet Earth" really is. As Virilio says, "Progress is no longer possible." The Earth is too small for progress. How CHILLING that is. Globalization is the finitude of the Planet Earth. Now we have experienced it. Whether we acknowledge or deny the experience with all its horrifying feelings. Is it any wonder the young who sense this are drugging themselves to oblivion. It is true. It is now a new world. And we know it whether we know we know it or not. We live on a very small planet where space has shrunk and time goes at the speed of light while we sit still in INERTIA. I am terrified. But I am also 87 and very happy about that.
My reading of the Nicholas Wade article is that the gain of function research wasn't indirectly funded by the US at all; it was nothing less than a US project! Nicholson Baker suggests in his New York Magazine article the work was moved to Wuhan only when gain of function research was banned in the US.
If true, these facts alone are pretty damning.
In April of 2020, when my mother heard on Fox News that the Chinese had engineered the virus, I said, not so fast. I sent her a copy of the 20 November 2015 article, "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence" to show her that the US was working the with the Chinese on this disaster. At the time I noted this correction about the funding:
In the version of this article initially published online, the authors omitted to acknowledge a funding source, USAID-EPT-PREDICT funding from EcoHealth Alliance, to Z.-L.S. The error has been corrected for the print, PDF and HTML versions of this article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
Yep so the two established parties get all the benefit. The right yells about China and the left yells about government control of every day life to combat the very virus both groups were probably somewhat complicit in somewhere up the food chain.
The fact all this happened right before the elections was not lost on me.
Democrats are not the Left.
Bush, Cheney isn’t the Right.
As far as I'm concerned, both major parties are right-wing.
You could offer your definition o fthe Right. (There is something to be said for try to conserve what is valuable, like the environment, but most "conservatives" aren't doing that.)
Correct. It is just a MASK for the mask lovers
Were we working with the Chinese or were we just paying the Chinese $$$$$$$ for doing it for us?
It's true. So why blame Chona. This kind of research to "protect" us from a major plague attack? Or to research a virus AS A WEAPONB OF MASS DESTRUCTION that has turned on us. Illegal toconduct this research in the US and better by far to be able toblame China for any "accident".
"GAIN OF FUNCTION" is a MASK conceptual camouflage to befudge our minds as to what it really is and was. A tweaking of a virus to make it more deadly. If you call it by its name it stings and pierces. Gain of Function deadens the meaning and turns it into meaninglessness because what is GOF anyway mommy?
GAIN OF FUNCTION is a nice new label to hide what it really is eh. Like going over the Rainbow Bridge whan your beloved dog dies. It's called a euphemism
The entire thing is so fucked.
The whole concept of pure leaders is a myth.
Abject stupidity and carelessness can have evil consequences, especially when potentially life-saving information is deliberately not shared with others who might become infected.
I don't get it either. COVID-19 is a bat coronavirus with modified spike protein that allows it to enter human cells. It originated in Wuhan China. There are no horseshoe bats in Wuhan, China. What there is is a biolab where there were specifically attempting to engineer bat coronavirus with a modified spike protein that allowed it enter human cells. The probability that a virus would randomly emerge out of all the places in the world, right next door to a lab that was attempting to engineer that precise virus is so vanishingly low that it is an effective impossibility. Add to the that the large and completely fruitless effort to find evidence of natural evolution that was so easy to do in past outbreaks.
Imagine if a private individual had been trying to engineer COVID-19 in his house and people in the same town started dying from it. His guilt would be considered a certainty. The only question from a court would be intent.
Effective propaganda has made people are so scared of being labelled "conspiracy theorists" that even journalists who have done good research on this and have all the information necessary always feel obliged to say they "don't know" where it came from.
The likelihood that COVID-19 came from a lab is much, much greater than that George Floyd died due to malice on the part of a cop and not a drug overdose...
"I am a 'conspiracy theorist.' I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you don't think so, then you are what is called an idiot. If you believe stuff but fear the label, you are what is called 'a coward."' - David B Collum
The term "crackpot conspiracy theorist" is well-known. I think the flip side deserves its own term: "crackpot conspiracy denialist", with "crackpot" referring to "denialist". There are instances when denial of the possibility of a conspiracy is itself a crackpot statement.
“I am a conspiracy analyst”: Lionel Media dotcom
Journalists are quite selective when in comes to positions where they feel obliged to say they "don't know".
It's a thousand miles from the bat caves in Yunnan to Wuhan in Hubei province - and no trail of infections. However, we KNOW, because they bragged about it, of a vector: the scientists who collected bat viruses in Yunnan and brought them to Wuhan to .,, experiment on. So even if it's a natural virus, which hasn't been found in nature, the lab is the ONLY plausible vector. Yes, they may eventually find this coronavirus in bats in Hubei - but it's less and less likely.
Of course, this is besides the American money and the research program at U. of N. Carolina. The director's name is Baric, and he should be much more on the carpet than he is.
As for number 2 and the motives of intelligence/scientists, I'd guess it had less to do with Trump than keeping the money flowing to research they were deeply invested in, financially, professionally and perhaps ideologically.
No, but Trump was the perfect cover....squirrel, squirrel.....look over there. Fauci will have a lot to answer for if he actually allows a journalist to ask really tough questions. And more power to Rand Paul for actually holding him accountable.
I want to see Fauci before Rand Paul put under oath and lawyered up.
He deserves a trial and then GITMO.
I agree. It was a classic Cover Your Ass.
What I hope everyone has finally learned (but I doubt they have) is that the media and the DNC will literally let America get destroyed if it means they can spite orange man or their political opponent. And if someone hasn’t realized this yet, then they are officially terminal brain dead.
As Patrick points out in this clip, 911 was an event which brought the entire America together. Covid could have been the same where everyone could have come together and investigated the cause. But nope. DNC wasted 1.5 years coordinating with social media to name call everyone who was pointing out the obvious.
https://youtu.be/OaDLVO5FFN8
Actually, we don't know if the virus "escaped" or was released. We will probably never know, but if it "escaped," the organizers of Event 201 were awfully preternaturally prescient. Oh, and somebody should at least mention Graham McQueen's book The 2001 Anthrax Deception.
I don't think those anticipating an outbreak were particularly "prescient" because it was always entirely predictable. The real question is why the CDC and WHO were so flummoxed and unprepared when the inevitable happened.
Their failure can't be chalked up to merely "the fog of war" and uncertain facts. The whole purpose for the existence of these well-funded institutions was to plan ahead for exactly this scenario. But they just started flailing and making ad hoc politically motivated decisions as if they had never thought this stuff through at all. It's as if the Soviets had invaded at the height of the Cold War and the Army announced that it had forgotten to plan for that contingency.
The entire response reminded my of Russia's response to their nuclear disaster. Warned ahead of time but when it happened they all ran helter skelter pointing fingers and covering asses while workers and innocent individuals died by the scores. Just multiply that disaster by whatever number you wish and the response to this virus was pretty much the same. Bureaucrats, politicians and the media are pretty much the same world over. Useless turds when it really counts.
Excellent comparison!! The common thread is State corruption and failure.
A number of Russian engineers stayed wi3th the reactor until the very end dooming themselves.
There are good people in every political system.
And there are good cops. But they gt marginalized fast. Didn't take AOC very long did it.
It's silly to keep supposing every major disaster is due to a big oopsie and not to malfeasance.
But bad actors are also frequently incompetent in executing their malevolence, so it can be very difficult to differentiate between the two.
Ha! We're damned if they succeed, and damned if they don't!!
It doesn't matter. Accidental is built into the strategy.
Deliberate/Accidental are ambiguities built right into this strategy of #TheAdministrationofFear.
The beauty of the strat3gy is that you cant know.
Then go on FB to get to know #NassimTaleb. He is a REAL mathematician in statistical THEOREMS. We have been educated to paste all data on the Normal Distribution Probability Curve. Nassim will teach you about FAT TAILS and the exponential curve. I knew as soon as I case was in CA and one I think in FL from the Chinese infection that it would multiply like ants. That was in Jan 2020 for me and my favorite gf bus driver said the same. So both of us knew but what could we do. Dr. BabetteBabich of Fordham osted on her FB page that Agamben of France had published that it was laboratory tweaked gott4en from the lab in Paris that isolated the AQIDS virus. DELETED FROM HER FB POSTINGS. We can draw many different conclusions by reading all this in different ways.
Maybe the flailing was camouflage?
It was obviously created in the lab, but it was almost certainly not released deliberately as the researchers would want to release it on their own doorstep. There are also many plausible accounts of lab researchers randomly getting sick over a period of time.
Regardless- China not blocking international travel but blocking it inside was deliberate action on their part to let it spread.
Entirely correct.
Or perhaps they just did not want to kill their economy.
I checked up on this after the comment, and can now say I think it's very unlikely that China had any intention of wishing the virus to spread. China shut down Wuhan / internal flights *and* Wuhan/international passenger carrying flights at noon 1/23/20. Based on analysis of satellite tracked flight paths, and International Civil Aviation Organization manifests, there is one unresolved passenger - otherwise all that left after that date were empty planes other than pilots and cabin staff. The guy in the following link was main source for the story when Trump first referenced it, and he's quite defensive. But read to the end, and think you will agree its a nonissue versus other controversies.
http://www.niallferguson.com/blog/six-questions-for-xi-jinping-another-update
China's stats came out in January. As expected OLD people with underlying medical issues died at high rates. But OLD people without underlying medical issues had low deaths, 11 - ELEVEN! - on the page I looked at! Rare deaths among children but underlying medical issues were there. I thought their stats were very honest and informative. CNN paid no intention. CNN is a PROPAGANDA WAR MACHINE as the media for the masses always has been and not just in the US.
A government that cared about its own people far more than the CCP does would not want it released in its own country. A government that is willing and able to carry out draconian measures for eradicating a virus locally after allowing it to spread to rival nations, on the other hand...
They would if they saw it as a way to blame Trump and destroy him.
The CCP doesn't care about it's people. That's right. But releasing it in the enemy country would be so much more effective. The Chinese have very advanced technologies for distribution of bioweapons which would have been entirely wasted here. And regardless of the CCP, the top scientists wouldn't have wanted to kill their mums.
While I wouldn't put it past them to deliberately release a virus. All the signs in this case point to it being a cock up.
Yep.
As I've said elsewhere, technology in the hands of the free West will save the world; in the hands of Authoritarian Socialists, it will destroy it.
Techno-Science is what you mean. And it isn't going to save you. It is go8ing to industrialize your body like it does everything else. Techno-Science has been salivating over the population/genetic bomb ever since Einstein announced it. You think all this "HEALTH" Experimentation is really about helping you live a heathier longer life without illness? Hey I have this great bridge..............
China has a huge over population bomb waiting to go off. Is that a variable you might consider?
That is your reading. It is credible.
The govt is a MACHINE. Machines do not care about people. EVER! Does your car care about you when it gets a flat tire and you die with your heart attack on the way to emergency with no time to spare? Where doews all this ideology come from when jpeople talk about MACHINES.
Wow what ideology you still hold dear.
We will never know. It makes nosense to keep commenting forever about deliberate or accidental. That is the way we are diverted from delving into the REAL.
I disagree. I think it is important to continue to seek understanding in all aspects, including those that may never be fully known.
Curiosity killed the cat. To do this will be to interpret back and forth to the moon. This will keep you in the BINARY DISCOURSE which will lock you in to a forever game of ping pong. IF you atudy Foucault on DISCOURSES Binary is the DOMINATING DISCOURSE of the STATE and the determined wish is to keep you in it to occupy you and distract you. European universities now are swtudying DISCOURSES as major subjects for advanced degrees. Think Trump for a minute. He changed the Institutionalized Political Discourse of the US and look what happened. Galileo did it and the Catholic Church was going to burn him up. Discourses are dangerous. They change the thinking of a culture on a dime.
Perhaps a culture, at times, needs to change "on a dime."
We dont need to know nor will we ever know. This strategy was designed with deliberate/accidental as part of the strategy. Read Virlilio's #TheInformationBomb based on Einstein's thinking and naming it.
No we will never know
Doesn't matter.
Great comment! Glenn has the best reader's!!!! TY
I wouldn't go that far, Linda. I'm one of his readers, and I'm certainly no bargain.
Well, this comment was a pleasure!
We will never know. Accidental is built right into this strategy. Deliberate/accidental are impossible to be sure of. Extremely clever. EXTREMELY!
Exactly! Thank you Thomas for summarizing in a clear, efficient way what most likely happened.
Super well-said.
The point I’d differ with you on is regarding your second item. I think you’re being too generous in giving the Intelligence community the benefit of the doubt of covering up an innocent accident. I don’t have evidence for this other than history repeating itself, but I’d argue the leak was likely caused/made possible by the Intelligence community in the first place.
A president improving/normalizing relations with North Korea, Russia, China? And he’s castigated and called a sympathizer with North Korea, dubious/totally false intelligence leaks to embroil him in Russiagate scandal, US funded bio weapon leaked from Chinese lab? It’s also like someone on the inside knew exactly how to subvert everything he was doing.
Bay of Pigs, Lee Harvey Oswald set up as Soviet defector, CIA sponsored coup (against presidents will/knowledge) of South Vietnamese client government that destabilized the country to postpone a planned troop withdrawal until mere weeks after he was “mysteriously” assassinated thus reversing withdrawal and installing a new, hawkish president ensuring over a decade more of Vietnam quagmire and war?
It’s 1963 and JFK all over again. Trump will be lucky if he escapes with just an election loss and we’ll be lucky if we escape with just a pandemic - and not driven headlong into a nuclear/biological war to end humanity by the insane blood thirsty psychopaths that *actually* run this country.
Your last paragraph well describes why we are where we are, and conclusive enough for me. History is a great teacher and predictor of things to come.
How is the news reported by Reuters that Spanish scientists found traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewer sample explained?
The virus was all over China, not just in Wuhan, likely spread by travelers before the lockdown went into effect. And then the US, among others, demanded "our people" be allowed to leave the country unvaccinated. How about we just agree the entire handling of this mess was an international clusterf*** of major proportions and stop looking for some comic-book villain to blame so we can all feel noble and justified?
Once it became clear there was no way to hide the epidemic, the Chinese were open and upfront about it, which is more than can be said for the US media and both the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government. Both know there was a highly virulent strain of SARS on the loose by the end of last January, and yet both deliberately chose to keep silent about it for most of two month until the problem was everywhere.
And in those two months, members of Congress in both parties cashed in on the event and increased their bank accounts. So, spare me the insistence it's essential we know where the virus came from. Why aren't the media looking into why our government chose to delay telling the people they were in literally mortal danger?
Why is the rage against the Chinese? Why isn't the rage against the FUNDERS of this research with grant money from the US. It was being. done. IN CHINA because US laws forbid it according to international treaty. Asik Native Americans how much integrity is resent in a treaty with the US? So park your money in a safe heaven. Park tyour research in China so if an "accident" happens you have a good, no excellent, country to lay the blame on.
Why does righteous rage against one deny the same towards the other?
It seems to me it comes down to what is in the human heart, and Fauci and the CCP are two peas in the Authoritarian Socialist pod. Why shouldn't both be the enemy here?
Is it that Fauci pretended to be oh so concerned? And Hitler was open and deliberately intentional about killing Jews. He said that if he had to do it over he would have worked them to death instead rather than gassing them so fast.
They all are for me. Every last fuggin one of them
The SPECTACLE conceals the REAL. That's what it is supposed to do.
Where's all the investigating journalists now? This is outrageous and here I am reading this on Substack!!!!!! Not the NYT WAPO ETC ETC....Thank you AGAIN GLENN! you're truly an amazing journalist!
You mean the incurious stenographers in the national media? Don't hold your breath.
They are out assisting OJ find Nicole and Ron's real killers.
Tucker covered it last night on his show in depth.
Or when institutions do things for appearance rather than for the common good.
An opinion but better than nothing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/opinion/media-lab-leak-theory.html
Thank you! A former NYT science journalist for 50yrs said this "The lab had safety measures consistent of a dentist office" that's terrifying.
Here's the motherlode: https://usrtk.org/biohazards/origin-of-sars-cov-2-gain-of-function-readings/
The Village Voice died a long time ago. Sy Hersh is tool old and depleted.
I'm not a mathematician, and I realize coincidence and causation are not synonyms, but that this novel coronavirus broke out within a few mile radius of a lab that was creating novel coronaviruses, at the time it was creating novel coronaviruses, makes it quite outrageous that such certainty was deployed in denying a link -- let alone how outrageous it was that so many people bought that certainty without question.
It's outrageous . . . but it's really just another case of private interests controlling the public discussion in ways that obscure their private interests. Matt Taibbi's review of Dennis Kucinich's book a couple of days ago covers this dynamic in detail: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/interview-with-dennis-kucinich-on?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxOTcxNDg2LCJwb3N0X2lkIjozNzA4NTI2MiwiXyI6ImoycEExIiwiaWF0IjoxNjIyNzY2MTU2LCJleHAiOjE2MjI3Njk3NTYsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xMDQyIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.JDVYAMAgmBvPQtC3k9sVjeLJ4IGpIrVh81A1jBe02_g
I lost all respect for Kucinich when he dropped his Medicare for All bill and took a ride with Obama on Air Force One and got his hat.
Kucinich is no Paul Wellstone.
Maybe so, but my point was more just about the way corrupt, private interests are able to assert themselves inside of the political and media system.
“Tom cotton keeps spreading a conspiracy theory which has already been debunked by the scientific community” - media back then. Legit.
Just don't forget to wear your two masks, close your business, abuse your customers, give up your civil rights, dob in your friends n neighbours, and do any other batshit* crazy nonsense some talking head tell you to do because experts.
*if you'll pardon the pun
oh yeah, and let them stick that newly-redefined vaccine (in reality an untested gene therapy) in your veins, too.
Because God forbid any of the children of the revolution would disobey an order from a bureaucrat.
The liberal battle cry of the 1990s: "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!"
The "liberal" battle cry of the 2020s: "Fuck you! Do what they tell you!"
You meant the 60s. The 90s were the ah feel yore pain neoliberal Clinton years when from the gitgo he/they did the greatest damage to the USA since the civil war — from the racist Biden predator crime bill of 1994 to nafta to the copyright act and repeal of the Glass Steagsll new deal era bank regulation bill which led to ...
Yeah Clinton was vile. But the rank and file 'liberals' actually were still liberal back then.
I was referring to song lyrics for "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine.
Rage is Leftist ... the last liberal was Mondale.
And Paul Wellstone
Just received my Babylon Bee t-shirt "I Identify as Vaccinated". Should I wear it boldly to the wedding in which I'm required to wear a mask all night if I'm still unvaccinated or should I rip open a shirt to expose it while on the dance floor? So many options.
Shouldn’t go to such wedding lol
it's his wedding.
Too funny!
Thanks. I'm here until Tuesday. Try the veal.
After all these repeated lies and deceit from the “experts in scientific community”, I am really motivated to inject myself with something to possibly prevent a virus created by the “experts” with a 99.9% survival rate. Why won’t you drumphtards just trust the science?????!!!
Thank you for bringing back the Anthrax story. I really appreciate your work, you should be cloned.
The lab is working on that right now.
We 100% know that the FBI will lie to achieve their goals. From the WSJ 1/29/21: "Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.....admitted to falsifying evidence submitted to the court for a warrant to spy on onetime Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page."
In that article we see what price Clinesmith pays: "Federal Judge James Boasberg spared Mr. Clinesmith prison in favor of 12 months probation and 400 hours of community service. The judge said the evidence persuaded him that “Mr. Clinesmith likely believed that what he said about Mr. Page was true.”
This would be like me embezzling millions from Jeff Bezos, I get caught and plead guilty, and the judge (I sure hope it's a FISA judge) giving me no time because "Mr Bulger likely believed that he believed it true that he deserved the money more that Jeff Bezos".
It's over for me, and for many. These institutions are irredeemable, incapable of any self-policing. I used to believe the "it's only a few bad apples at the top" storyline but the rot is too pervasive, across too many separate institutions both here and abroad, for honorable employees to overcome. Sadly reminds me of the Catholic Church, and other organizations where the only people that would ever be allowed the power to clean it up will either be kneecapped by the resident gatekeepers, or else were complicit as well and were appointed to showtrial a few sacrificial lambs.
I keep asking my Russiagate-peddling Democrat friends since when they (and the fake resistance Left) learned to love and trust the CIA and FBI. Never once I got anything close to an answer. The best was 'I can't talk about that'.
Agree 100%
“But what we do know for certain” is that the American people have been and are being constantly and needlessly lied to by their globally corporate owned government and their globally corporate owned media. And anytime anyone speaks out with a logical, natural assumption, like, “Gee, I wonder if Covid -19 is a man-made virus since the epidemic started in a place that has a Level 4 virology lab,” they are silenced (and they self-silence) with the label “conspiracy theorist.” Maybe if we weren’t constantly being lied to (and the government and the media often caught out in these glaring lies– like the way Americans bought into the lies leading up to the Iraq war – and then the media confessing years later that they were “duped,’ Oh, right…) then maybe we would have some level of trust. As it is currently only 25% of Americans trust their government and only about 40% of Americans trust the media.
As for me? My trust level is close to zero on both counts.
What a crazy system. We vote middlemen into office in order to beg them for favors like telling us the truth. We don’t need middlemen.
Americans deserve the truth and they should demand it.
I will say that's one thing good that has come out of the past few months, I no longer give a flying f*** what people say when I question the narrative. I think that has happened to a lot of people. Go ahead and call me a conspiracy theorist and I'll show you how the conspiracy theorists have been right more than any mainstream media source in the past year so they can piss off. The more people speak up, the more they lose their power.
"I am a 'conspiracy theorist.' I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you don't think so, then you are what is called an idiot. If you believe stuff but fear the label, you are what is called 'a coward."' - David B Collum
Democrat trust in media is at an all time high of 76% while Republican is at an all time low of 10%:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx
Democrats are some of the dumbest smart people I've known. Though I don't subscribe to the Right's ideas, I can understand some of their sentiments; said Democrats are the biggest snowflakes I've ever seen.
From 'finally our country is back' on the day the death-rattle was inaugurated to the ' I can't talk about this anymore' (i.e. Biden laptop).
Just remember that some of the brightest minds and smartest people go to work for companies which spend every minute of their existence to figure out how to place an ad in front of your eyes for 1 more second. That's how you know that some of the dumbest smart people end up controlling your speech too.
Oh, that's the constant question in my mind - how do people justify things they do? Do they question anything? Do they think they are contributing to the overall good? There are hopeful signs when Googlers rebel and protest against military contracts, etc. But I don't think that's a majority.
The manipulation of one form or another has always been going on. With the current reach of internet it's times gazillion. And it won't go away, just get more sophisticated and subtle as the rebellion against in-your-face kind is stirred up.
I use "stirred up" intentionally. Most folks don't notice or care if they are manipulated. But if it becomes fashionable to rebel they will. And so the manipulators will adjust. And so on.
Just examine the certain experimenter here in this forum. He (or she) keeps putting up absurd statements which lots of seemingly reasonable characters swallow up and take at face value and start arguing. That is a great illustration.
"Just examine the certain experimenter here in this forum."
Are you stalking/harrassing me, M. russian_bot?
Indeed. provide stimulus. measure, adjust.
"We vote middlemen into office in order to beg them for favors like telling us the truth." Perfect!
From the polls I've seen 40% is way high for trust in the media.
Democrat trust in media is at an all time high of 76% while Republican is at an all time low of 10%:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx
wow
I was just talking to a work colleague and he agreed there's a problem with truth and institutions, and similarly doesn't trust the govt or media. BUT he said that he didn't have a problem with the 'noble lie' argument because his distrust, of ~40% of our country, was much deeper: people who are so irrational and angry and harmful that given the truth would have attacked and done harm to asians Americans and Asian expats in the US. If they had known that the lab in china was the likely cause.
I think we agree on the most important point: It doesn't really even MATTER if Fauci is responsible for Covid19. By funding dangerous research in a Chinese lab, he's essentially putting a gun to our heads and pulling the trigger. This is MORE than enough AT LEAST remove him from any position of authority, right? Even if (maybe) the gun was empty this time?
The coverup that came later from the entire "in" group is ALSO enough to get him removed from any position of authority. How does this guy still have a job? Why is he not asking questions in front of the senate about how he lied?
Does WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING not matter anymore? Does the media just get to create its own reality that we have to accept?
And how much U.S. technology was transfered in the process!?
Here I thought RussiaGate could not be topped for Big Brotherism.
Lol at “remove”. And here I am dreaming of the older tactics. GITMO if those aren’t allowed.
The sudden about face by MSM and the Tech oligarchs might indicate they are using the Wuhan lab to camouflage something more insidious, illegal or pointing in a more politically harmful direction. Beware of thinking you know the answer. Something does not smell right. We knew the original story was BS- but this story is not definitive or proven. Remain thinking and stay alert.
Drumming up hostility toward China?
One may argue that would be appropriate?
Maybe. Depends on whether there's any substance behind it. Maybe some massive tariffs, in conjunction with domestic tax cuts, or something.
Agreed. I think M. Quadriped's instinctual skepticism is warranted, especially considering the "lock-step" nature of the change.
Is it too tin-foil-hattish to suspect the feds did the anthrax to help get the Patriot Act through congress?
I would not doubt it for a minute.
It was to renew a contract for anthrax vaccines that were collecting dust on shelves
https://congressionaldish.com/cd105-anthrax/
Without having to listen to the whole thing, is the idea that the threat of an anthrax was not considered serious enough to maintain the spending on defense against it and the Oct 2001 attack was deliberately aimed at changing that risk assessment and to keep the money flowing?
If so, two birds with one stone eh?
Jen is good and smart enough to not state that as conclusive and I may possibly be slightly misrepresenting it because I think I listened to it four or five years ago but it’s a pretty compelling thread/explanation given the timing and circumstance. Check out the whole episode and podcast. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Thanks, I will.
Ah - the "never let a good crisis go to waste" approach.
The most appalling part of this sordid affair is the complete failure of our media. Pretty clear they serve as propaganda agents for the modern administrative state.
Our media is more concerned about Joe Biden's ice cream and his cat.
Did you see the video of all the “journalists” swooning over Biden driving a truck?
It would only have been newsworthy if the DMV had been on hand to take his driver's license away.
He should have been pulled over and cited, except the media would have called in BLM to riot. They NEED a story, after all.
We've known that since 2016 and the Russia Hoax.
What we have now, I'm not sure what box it fits into but it's collaboration between the media, the administrative state (FBLie et al), multinational corporations, and elements within both political parties, but primarily Democrat.
I'm not a political scientist but it sounds like fascism to me.
Why has the CIA's on-a-leash corporate media changed its course? Is the cat out of the bag or is this just another Orwellian fear tactic (maybe another create-a-boogieman and war-is-the-only-option maneuver)?
For over a year now our media has been conflating "created in a lab" with "released from a lab". They kept telling us that all their "experts" say that the virus wasn't "created in a lab" or "man-made", so, therefore, it could not have been "released from a lab". And not once did I ever hear them say something like "even though the virus wasn't created in a lab, it still could have been accidentally or intentionally released from the lab."
And now that Greenwald has shown us how the US Army was involved with the anthrax scares, should China's claim be considered? Last year, they claimed that the US Army released the virus at the 2019 Military World Games which were held in Wuhan. We need to get some real fictitious facts, so I think we should create something like the 9/11 Commission. (Is Building 7 still a conspiracy fact?)
The incredible thing is that the whole "wet market" thing was actually the most RACIST theory out there. The real pitch to the American people was that, well, the Chinese have different (read: backward) standards for cleanliness - and they eat weird food, so... that's how this global plague started.
Instead of:
This highly technical lab doing progressive 21st century virus research, which wasn't at all possible 2 decades ago had a mishap which leaked the bioplague into the world...
It's almost how people are afraid to say anything about BLM-protest related violence, but the Proud Boys are worth condemnation beyond reproach. Why are people afraid of calling out ALL of the violence, not just that by some (white) people?
IMHO that's simple enough
But first you must realize that everything is precisely opposite what the woke leftists claim. It's intuitively obvious that
Identity politics is the ideology of bigotry
Anti-Racism is literally Racist
And the fact that these duplicitous low-lifes claim to be successors to Dr King and the civil rights movement? Nauseating
BLM is a Marxist insurgency group by the admission of its founders. The real insurrection happening in this country rioted on the streets of the USA last summer and this movement now attempts to indoctrinate school kids into their Racist ideology even in elementary school
January 6th is just a convenient misdirection to confuse the people about what's really going on
Woke Communism is still communism and it has exactly nothing legitimate to offer any Western Liberal Democracy. The only thing it offers is the elimination of human rights, human prosperity and will eventually bring death and destruction to the masses for the benefit of a few elitist party members
Study the genesis of critical theory and you'll find this is not hyperbole
There is one significant difference this time. This time the Communists seem to be in league with the globalist mega-capitalists corporate elites. Seems against natural law but it's happening nonetheless
James
It's all spin. They knew it was going to come out eventually. The FOIA releases are the beginning of offering up a sacrificial lamb - Fauci. I believe there are plenty of others who helped mastermind this thing, including those of "both" parties. State media will do the same thing the FBI did/does - make a few pronouncements and move on.
You could be right, but this might be more than just spin. Because couldn't the CIA/US Government have classified and withheld Fauci's emails? I'm not sure but I think Obama's executive order 13526 could keep almost any info from being released. And if that's the case, why has the CIA allowed us to see these emails (now)?
You are correct to ask. Information is an asset that they use. There is no reason to doubt that the intelligence agencies engage in propaganda domestically. Every leak and every confirmation from them must be treated as having an ulterior motive.
Never thought I would be a conspiracy crank, but such is the way of things.
Fauci served his purpose, in 2020. He's now more famous than the guy the Blob put in office. People trust him more than President Uncle Joe. Can't have that anymore.
I see where Amazon and Barnes and Noble have cancelled his book deals
Actually, his name is Bill Gates.
The cat is out of the bag. In the US, defending China is political suicide.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/06/02/most-americans-now-believe-coronavirus-originated-
“Most Americans (58%) now put the origins of COVID-19 in a Chinese laboratory”
Those are rookie numbers!!!!!
Limited hangouts perhaps?
"February and March of last year — at the time that Fauci and others were dismissing any real possibility that the coronavirus inadvertently escaped from a lab, to the point that the Silicon Valley monopolies Facebook and Google banned any discussion of that theory -- Fauci and his associates and colleagues were privately discussing the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as part of a U.S.-funded joint program with the scientists at that lab."
I vividly remember this censorship. The timeliness of the pandemic from the establishment's point of view seemed too good to be coincidental in the same way the jailhouse "suicide" of pandemicist Bill Gates' elite-blackmailing buddy did. The Romans asked the question, "cui bono?" for a reason. Asking that question proved reliable over time. Woke, censoring nannies argue not censoring what goes against their self-serving, "fact checked" narratives is "dangerous," but censoring what might be the truth is far worse. The public as a whole is fully qualified to figure out what's true and what's not when presented with the unfiltered facts, even when peppered with lies.
The public-opinion nannies arrogantly believe they're better than the plebs, that the ends justify the means. Repressive regimes through the ages used censorship to snow the public, to hide what might be or was in fact true, but the public tended to be smarter than the powers that were in the long run. In no case I can think of did this ever work out well for the repressors. The censor-monopolies believe they're smart censoring unapproved thoughts and opinions "for your own good," but they're playing with fire.
The fire of popular and righteous backlash. The entire federal government needs some serious blowback from the People.
No need to limit it to federal!
Well, even the worst State govt. has competition enough.
I remind myself always that time and nature are implacable authorities and they always punish liars.
The fine line between "offensive" and "defensive" bioweapon research had frankly never occurred to me before and it is pretty scary if you think about it.
For example, it is said that bioweapons are useless because they will just end up infecting the country that releases them. But what if the country (or some non-state actor) simultaneously engineers a new deadly virus *and* the protective vaccine? In that case, they could vaccinate their own population and then launch the virus on the rest of the world. They could also use access to the vaccine as leverage to extort compliance with their geopolitical demands.
Perhaps "gain of function" research is inherently dangerous. But maybe we still need to do it preemptively in order to pre-develop vaccines for the "gain of function" bugs that someone else might be secretly developing. If nothing else, there is definitely a good science fiction novel in this scenario.
Very intriguing article. Glenn connects dots in interesting ways that would never occur to our group thinking media establishment.
I can't see a meaningful difference between bioweapons research and medical gain of function research either.
With respect to pathogenic engineering, If you build it, people will die.
That ambiguity makes it extremely difficult to tell the one from the other before or even after the fact. So, given that, by what objective standard do you judge proposals or the legality of research?
Yes, and 1) how can you have one without the other?, and 2) one is the "defense" of the other, especially in our (still) mutually-assured-destruction days.
Fauci’s is a liar, an incompetent, a sycophant and a tyrant. He was despised in the 80s and early 90s by all of us doing AIDS research in South Florida. Absolutely a despicable governmental parasite.
Are you sure you're not holding something back? (wink, wink)
For those interested, this is the most complete account of the lab leak hypothesis over at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
It was NIH funded research (meaning the Chinese government was probably not funding it), but they were not using sufficient biosafety protocols at the Wuhan lab. The aim of the research (the NIH grants are public knowledge) was not to "weaponize" the virus, it was to study "spillage" from animals to humans. If it were for bioweapon development, it would have been a secret DARPA or similar grant.
This is the best article I have seen on it so far. The human-preferred codon in the furin cleavage site between the two spike proteins is the most difficult to explain fact if the origins were natural.
Interesting article. .. I'm still perusing.
>"It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed,..."
Do you know who sealed them ... the article doesn't say?
I've been following Shi Zheng-li, the 'Bat Woman of China' and lead researcher at Wuhan lab, since early last year.
In June of last year Shi was very coy about GOF research (Shi didn't call it that then) conducted at the Wuhan lab, couching it as simply a method of getting out in front of recent natural selection coronavirus outbreaks - SARS1, MERS, etc.
More recently, Shi has admitted she was concerned about the potential COV-2 may have originated in/escaped from her lab, but that a search of her records indicated the genetic sequence of COV-2 did not match anything she was working on. .. and that she was greatly relieved.
*the media, such as it is, is still plugging the natural selection scenario .. . "About 70% of new infectious diseases have come from animals, including Covid-19, Sars, bird flu, Ebola and HIV." .. . God only knows why?
Also, it official .. . UFOs are real!
Wow! I hadn't heard of the last of this info. Thanks, M. bah!
Is Shi a GodXi believer, or just controlled? Where is she now? When was the last she (Shi) was heard from?
The Epoch Times did a very well documentary of this lab leak theory as well as Dr Shi last summer. Worth a watch.
Shi-eesh!