Da Corona

[Kulaf]

Greenwald hasn't been with the Intercept since Oct. of 2020. Personally, I think the Intercept is trash, but the information they received from a FOIA request stands on its own regardless of who wrote the article.

I follow Greenwald because he is an honest journalist.

[Ddrak]

Oh, he's definitely honest. I don't think you'd find any influence that would have him publish anything other than what he actually thought. I've just found him a little too over-zealously anti-US-establishment to read consistently any more.

Forgot he left The Intercept. My bad. I don't really dislike The Intercept, but I just find they sometimes try a little hard to make mountains from molehills. Then they go and write articles like the one I linked above that I actually found pretty insightful.

Dd

[Ddrak]

On COVID itself, the situation in Australia is getting "interesting".

Up until June, we basically had no COVID. The state (NSW) that was trumpeting itself as the "gold standard for managing the virus" then went and completely failed to handle their first serious outbreak and has now immediately switched to claiming the "gold standard for living with the virus". They've then exported it south to Victoria who also lost control and north to my state (Qld) where we squashed it with a one-week hard lockdown and are basically back to fully open internally with fairly hard closed borders to infected states.

The federal government totally screwed the pooch on vaccine rollout, so we're barely at 40% nationally with everyone in charge tacitly acknowledging that a tidal wave of virus is going to hit at some point but somehow pretending things will all be rosy by Christmas, because somehow getting to 80% will magically make everything better (contrary to their own modelling).

My state has the lowest vaccination rate, largely from apathy, because we've been so successful at keeping it out - literally 2000 cases in total.

There's also a federal election due sometime in the next 6 months, and the PM is going to have to try to time it so there's not a massive wave of pandemic that he'll take significant heat over.

Grab some popcorn. Fun ride is about to start.

Dd

[Kulaf]

I follow Avi Yemini, so I have been keeping tabs on Aus.

Washington state is sitting just shy of 70% right now on vaccinations. Governor Inslee (worst asshole ever) tried to flex on the government workers union and mandate all government workers get vaccinated. They told him to pound salt and threatened to walk out, so he caved.

[Ddrak]

Interestingly unions over here are generally supportive of vaccine mandates. Most real opposition is basically apathy, with only a tiny minority of active opposition.

Dd

[Kulaf]

That's how governments want their people, disinterested and accepting.

[Kulaf]

https://www.dailywire.com/news/damning- ... =dwtwitter

“New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing ‘novel chimeric spike proteins’ of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China,” The Telegraph reported. “Papers, confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration, show they were hoping to introduce ‘human-specific cleavage sites’ to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells.”

[Kulaf]

I heard an awesome quote by an unnamed AUS man:

The hardest part of 2 weeks to flatten the curve is the first 18 months.

[Kulaf]

More evidence that China has withheld information from the WHO and the world on when the virus was first discovered:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -case.html

PCR test kit orders DOUBLED in Wuhan seven months BEFORE first reported Covid case in fresh evidence that China covered up early spread

[Ddrak]

PCR test kit orders doubled in 2015. They were only up 50% in 2019. If you're going by value, then look at 2011 - a 4x increase!!! Weak evidence of anything really. Increasing trend over 12+ years is increasing... Cherry picked data point is cherry picked.

What would be more interesting would be to actually see what virus the probes in the PCR kits were for, or if they were PCR or RT-PCR kits.

We also have a whack-job scientist who wanted to play with MERS. How many other proposals does DARPA reject? It's all cherry picking to support a predetermined conclusion. That's not how research works, unless you're just going for hype instead of fact.

Interesting the flip from "definitely escaped a lab" to "seeded in bats in caves" though.


Australia looks like it will hit well over 90% vaccinations, with some areas above 97%. Outbreaks are stalling. People are staying out of hospital.
Vaccines work, as we knew from the beginning. Mandates are keeping people safe, and employers are avoiding lawsuits by providing safe workplaces. Idiot anti-vax nutjobs are being sidelined and ignored.

Dd

[Kulaf]

We also have Peter Daszak the president of EcoHealth Alliance, the company that funneled gain of function research money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same man who gathered scientists to pen a letter condemning the idea of a lab leak, also being appointed the sole U.S. investigator of whether anything happened to release Covid on the world from the Wuhan Institute of Virology by the World Health Organization who has been covering for China the entire time.

But nothing to see here, just move along.

[Ddrak]

We also have Peter Daszak the president of EcoHealth Alliance, the company that funneled gain of function research money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same man who gathered scientists to pen a letter condemning the idea of a lab leak, also being appointed the sole U.S. investigator of whether anything happened to release Covid on the world from the Wuhan Institute of Virology by the World Health Organization who has been covering for China the entire time.

But nothing to see here, just move along.

Impossible to tell what's going on. Just because someone doesn't want a (perceived) hostile entity investigating them doesn't actually mean they did something wrong. I don't think anyone expected China to allow the US to send whatever investigators they wanted in, any more than the USSR would have after Chernobyl.

Like I said - I'm going with the Intelligence assessment because they'll have access to a bunch of stuff we'll never know about, and have no good reason to misdirect that I can think of. Naturally occurring mutation, probably spread all by itself. Outside chance a lab leak from a collected specimen. Not engineered.

Dd

[Kulaf]

Well we know how well our Intel communities "assessments" are......*cough* Iraq *cough*

They tell the President, and especially the MSM, what they want to happen.

There are more former Intel operatives working directly in the media than ever before:

James Clapper (CIA) - CNN
Andrew McCabe (FBI) - CNN
James Baker (FBI) - CNN
Josh Cambell (FBI) - CNN
Asha Rangappa (FBI) - CNN
Steven Hall (CIA) - CNN
Phil Mudd (FBI/CIA) - CNN
Susan Hennessy (NSA) - CNN
Samantha Vinograd (NSC) - CNN
James Gagliano (FBI) - CNN
John Brennan (CIA) - MSNBC
Frank Figliuzzi (FBI) - MSNBC
Chuck Rosenberg (FBI) - MSNBC
Jeremy Bash (CIA) - MSNBC

[Ddrak]

The Iraq assessment wildly conflicted between agencies, and had some fairly low probabilities expressed. The COVID origins one has general agreement between the dozen or so agencies, with minor disagreements on the lab leak hypothesis (most think it not possible, some rate it probable). The agencies did learn a lot about how to communicate from the Iraq mess.

Makes a lot of sense for people to move to journalism from intelligence. Essentially the same work, but better pay. No idea if it's more or less common though. Rules are a lot looser these days about being able to say you used to work for them.

Dd

[Kulaf]

Watch out for any digital app acting as a vaccine passport:

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/statu ... 51470?s=20

[Ddrak]

Best solution is to just copy the EU's method - digital signature in a QR code. Can verify offline from a plain image or paper copy (with appropriate ID) without privacy issues of a server tracking you.

Dd

[Kulaf]

Even the Washinton Post Editorial Board is starting to wonder WTF is going on:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ned-wuhan/

[Kulaf]

https://www.newsweek.com/how-dr-fauci-o ... ts-1652002

The documents, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, show that the NIH was funding research at the Wuhan lab that involved manipulating coronaviruses in ways that could have made them more transmissible and deadly to humans—work that arguably fits the definition of gain-of-function. The documents establish that top NIH officials were concerned that the work may have crossed a line the U.S. government had drawn against funding such risky research. The funding came from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Dr. Fauci heads.

Jimmy Dore's coverage:

https://youtu.be/pckSLm6Fgis

[Kulaf]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -2020.html

Nothing to see here but a bunch of the top virologists in the world privately saying the odds of a lab leak was 60-40 for, while publicly lambasting anyone who would dare suggest such a thing.

Professor Eddie Holmes, from the University of Sydney, said he believed there was a 60:40 chance of a lab leak.

In total, a dozen scientists in the UK, US and Europe — including Britain's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance — were included in the email chains in the first week of February.

Dr Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, responded: 'From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site.'

Professor Bob Garry, also from the University of Texas, said he could not 'figure out how this gets accomplished in nature'.

[Kulaf]

More on the financial incentives doctors have to ignore alternate treatments regardless of efficacy or patient/family wishes:

https://aapsonline.org/bidens-bounty-on ... -covid-19/

Creating a “National Pandemic Emergency” provided justification for such sweeping actions that override individual physician medical decision-making and patients’ rights. The CARES Act provides incentives for hospitals to use treatments dictated solely by the federal government under the auspices of the NIH. These “bounties” must be paid back if not “earned” by making the COVID-19 diagnosis and following the COVID-19 protocol.

The hospital payments include:

A “free” required PCR test in the Emergency Room or upon admission for every patient, with government-paid fee to hospital.
Added bonus payment for each positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
Another bonus for a COVID-19 admission to the hospital.
A 20 percent “boost” bonus payment from Medicare on the entire hospital bill for use of remdesivir instead of medicines such as Ivermectin.
Another and larger bonus payment to the hospital if a COVID-19 patient is mechanically ventilated.
More money to the hospital if cause of death is listed as COVID-19, even if patient did not die directly of COVID-19.
A COVID-19 diagnosis also provides extra payments to coroners.