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Posted

I think several governments are, but they are careful with releases for political reasons. 
 
News organizations? The biggest are parts of media conglomerates that count on Chinese revenue. 

Posted
  On 12/30/2022 at 3:33 AM, Bevo said:

It was the lab, but nothing will come of it - not even a reprimand. The world's leaders are pussies.

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You volunteering to invade?  Stop buying products from that country?  

Posted
  On 1/6/2023 at 4:07 PM, Nivek said:

You volunteering to invade?  Stop buying products from that country?  

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I think a reprimand would be a nice start. But buying fewer products and moving manufacturing slowly to other areas would be a good second step. The products are generally crap anyway.

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Posted
  On 1/6/2023 at 4:11 PM, Bevo said:

I think a reprimand would be a nice start. But buying fewer products and moving manufacturing slowly to other areas would be a good second step. The products are generally crap anyway.

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Seems to me the first part is short term touchy feely crap.   Long game is to continue to influence China into becoming more economically dependent upon the West to prompt more internal change without firing a shot.   

Posted

We should offset our Covid related costs against the trillions of US debt China holds.  At least negotiate a reduction.  Many say that it would completely screw the US in the credit markets.  Well, don’t release (negligently or otherwise) a global pandemic and you’ve got nothing to worry about.  

Posted (edited)
  On 1/6/2023 at 4:50 PM, HouTex said:

We should offset our Covid related costs against the trillions of US debt China holds.  At least negotiate a reduction.  Many say that it would completely screw the US in the credit markets.  Well, don’t release (negligently or otherwise) a global pandemic and you’ve got nothing to worry about.  

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I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but just to clarify, China holds a little less than $1T of US national debt-- around $968B to be more precise  They're the second-largest holder, behind Japan who holds $1.24T.

China's holdings represent about 3% of the total national debt which is not insignificant, but I feel like a lot of people believe China owns far more of the US national debt than it actually does.

But that still doesn't alter the fact there is risk associated with defaulting on some of that debt as some type of reparation or adjustment against COVID expenses.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124#:~:text=The public holds over %2424.29,and holders of savings bonds.

 

 

Edited by utee94
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Posted
  On 1/6/2023 at 6:55 PM, utee94 said:

I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but just to clarify, China holds a little less than $1T of US national debt-- around $968B to be more precise  They're the second-largest holder, behind Japan who holds $1.24T.

China's holdings represent about 3% of the total national debt which is not insignificant, but I feel like a lot of people believe China owns far more of the US national debt than it actually does.

But that still doesn't alter the fact there is risk associated with defaulting on some of that debt as some type of reparation or adjustment against COVID expenses.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124#:~:text=The public holds over %2424.29,and holders of savings bonds.

 

 

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China is the second-largest FOREIGN holder, I meant to say, behind Japan.  The US holds the majority of its own debt in various ways that we probably shouldn't get into on this thread. :)

 

 

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Posted
  On 1/6/2023 at 4:50 PM, HouTex said:

We should offset our Covid related costs against the trillions of US debt China holds.  At least negotiate a reduction.  Many say that it would completely screw the US in the credit markets.  Well, don’t release (negligently or otherwise) a global pandemic and you’ve got nothing to worry about.  

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So your justification for the US fucking itself over in the credit markets is that China released a virus? Am I reading that correctly? 

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Posted
  On 1/6/2023 at 6:55 PM, utee94 said:

I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but just to clarify, China holds a little less than $1T of US national debt-- around $968B to be more precise  They're the second-largest holder, behind Japan who holds $1.24T.

China's holdings represent about 3% of the total national debt which is not insignificant, but I feel like a lot of people believe China owns far more of the US national debt than it actually does.

But that still doesn't alter the fact there is risk associated with defaulting on some of that debt as some type of reparation or adjustment against COVID expenses.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124#:~:text=The public holds over %2424.29,and holders of savings bonds.

 

 

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I haven’t tracked it recently but when I looked at the amount that China holds early in the pandemic I thought it was in the 3-4 T range.  I could be wrong.  Still, it’s a start. Why pay those assholes anything. 

Posted

At one point we had a damn good thread with good posts about what was going on concerning COVID. Updates, non-partisan news, stories, coordination (got me to help a Chicago hospital to buy pizza for the nurses.)

Wonder what happened to it? Oh yeah......

 

Posted
  On 1/13/2023 at 5:42 AM, TwiceHorn said:

That seems to me to be a partisan political screed as much or more than any serious attempt to address any of this.

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Seems the new Congress is off to a great start.  In general I agree there should be as extensive an investigation as feasible into the origins of Covid, but in practice I don’t really see The Lancet / NYT / etc somehow breaking down the walls of communist China to find proof of origin and ‘hold them accountable’.  
 

So…good luck y’all?  Get yourself to Wuhan and start banging on the door of the lab…I’m sure it was just US journalists that needed convincing to really figure it out this time.  

Posted
  On 12/29/2022 at 2:41 PM, Kennythetiger said:
“Before Covid” and “After Covid” are probably measuring sticks for time for our generation. They sure are for me. 

I used to mark my career as pre 911 and post 911; now it's pre covid and post.
Posted
  On 1/13/2023 at 5:42 AM, TwiceHorn said:

That seems to me to be a partisan political screed as much or more than any serious attempt to address any of this.

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I saw it last night while dicking around on my phone.  I had a hard time reading it TBH because the PDF renders the text too small on my phone.  Still, I figured it was germane to the topic of this thread.  I looked at the list of people at the end who signed the letter honestly don't know who most of them are.

Posted

Huh?  Do you folks not know what the word germane means?  Or are you trying to be snarky in asserting that a letter regarding the origin of covid isn't on topic for a thread about the origin of covid?

Posted
  On 1/7/2023 at 1:43 AM, HouTex said:

I haven’t tracked it recently but when I looked at the amount that China holds early in the pandemic I thought it was in the 3-4 T range.  I could be wrong.  Still, it’s a start. Why pay those assholes anything. 

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Because not doing so will fuck US citizens, Einstein. Jesus, it burns in here.

Posted
  On 1/13/2023 at 6:08 PM, Eastwood said:

I think China played the primary role in COVID destroying the world as we know it, but we’ll have to be more patient than the excruciatingly patient Chinese to punish them. China essentially boiled the American frog over the last 4 decades by taking advantage of our “perpetual growth paradox” approach towards business. Substantial year over year growth became the expectation for American businesses and China was a conduit to lower costs, so we started relying heavily on them for manufacturing to the point where even components in critical military equipment and infrastructure are made in China with unknown hardware backdoors that could shut that equipment down if a hot war broke out.  
 

China is our friend as much as a drug dealer is to a junkie. They kept life cheap long enough for us to get addicted. The solution is to use the same “boiled frog” approach toward breaking away from them, but at a quicker pace because the Chinese government is temperamental and prideful. The moment they catch on that significant change is occurring, they’ll turn the screws on us in an attempt to inflict as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. There is no diplomacy, there are no beneficial deals to be done. It’s a deal with the devil every time, so we need to find Jesus, so to speak. The moment we stop playing ball is the moment they turn overtly hostile, economically first. But if we can position ourselves well enough, we mitigate the damage and let them flail until they burn out, much like post-Soviet Russia has been doing. 
 

It needs to be done, but we still lack the willpower, both politically and economically, to do it. To borrow from a popular phrase uttered during the last major global conflict, we’ll do the right thing after exhausting all other options. 

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There is no action required here other than to extract what we can while China's own existential demographic issues inexorably play out.  

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Posted
  On 1/15/2023 at 2:59 PM, J.R. said:
There is no action required here other than to extract what we can while China's own existential demographic issues inexorably play out.  

This. It took decades for China to become the particular entity and problem that it is today. It will take decades for them to change materially, to our betterment and their detriment. The demographic crash is coming, and they can’t stop it.
Patience, young bull….let’s WALK down there and screw ALL of them.
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Posted
  On 1/15/2023 at 3:41 PM, Brisketexan said:


This. It took decades for China to become the particular entity and problem that it is today. It will take decades for them to change materially, to our betterment and their detriment. The demographic crash is coming, and they can’t stop it.
Patience, young bull….let’s WALK down there and screw ALL of them.

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I dont think it will take decades.  The next 10 years will be rough on them, but do agree with the sentiment.  Almost always better to walk down there and make sure you dont miss any choice meat.

Posted
  On 1/15/2023 at 4:25 PM, J.R. said:
I dont think it will take decades.  The next 10 years will be rough on them, but do agree with the sentiment.  Almost always better to walk down there and make sure you dont miss any choice meat.

Unwinding major manufacturing and supply chains that took 40+ years to get to this point won’t change in 10 years. Too much capital invested. You have to let that investment depreciate enough on its own (which takes time) before it’s worthwhile to move the next iteration somewhere else.
And don’t think China will LET it go that easily. They need the inflow of $$$. Western reshoring is an actual national security threat to them; they won’t accept it quietly.
Posted
  On 1/15/2023 at 3:41 PM, Brisketexan said:


This. It took decades for China to become the particular entity and problem that it is today. It will take decades for them to change materially, to our betterment and their detriment. The demographic crash is coming, and they can’t stop it.
Patience, young bull….let’s WALK down there and screw ALL of them.

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It's all fun and games until that crash causes them to lash out by invading Taiwan or something worse. 

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Posted
  On 1/15/2023 at 5:21 PM, HornOnTheBayou said:
It's all fun and games until that crash causes them to lash out by invading Taiwan or something worse. 

Correct. Meaning, while it’s fun to bash China, and smart to decouple from them to a degree…you can’t flat-out attack (militarily or economically) a country with a billion+ people and a very large economy without some serious fallout.
Realpolitik should be the order of the day.
Posted (edited)
  On 12/29/2022 at 7:26 PM, FartingMonk said:

That's why our vaccine was damned near 95 percent effective and everyone else's was shit.  We got lucky right

 

America we're just so fucking smart.

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Wh were are you getting the 95% effective data from?

Edited by SHOOTER12
Posted
  On 1/8/2023 at 7:10 PM, Samson's Wig said:

 The Mexican border is begging for a 1,951 mile long manufacturing region. 

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I mean, I'm a big proponent of moving as much manufacturing as we can to Mexico, but have you ever driven through the border area? From Nuevo Laredo to Monterey there is basically nothing but scrub brush. You need towns and cities full of people to support manufacturing. 

 

As far as the origen of the virus and China goes, I feel like at best they were negligent and were lax in their lab procedures. There needs to be some sort of response from the international community to pressure them to get their crap together or it will be sort of like Russia annexing Crimea. It will only be a matter of time before something else escapes a lab and it could be much worse.

Posted
  On 1/6/2023 at 6:55 PM, utee94 said:

I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but just to clarify, China holds a little less than $1T of US national debt-- around $968B to be more precise  They're the second-largest holder, behind Japan who holds $1.24T.

China's holdings represent about 3% of the total national debt which is not insignificant, but I feel like a lot of people believe China owns far more of the US national debt than it actually does.

But that still doesn't alter the fact there is risk associated with defaulting on some of that debt as some type of reparation or adjustment against COVID expenses.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124#:~:text=The public holds over %2424.29,and holders of savings bonds.

 

 

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Not talking about china or default risks but generally With respect to the idea that “US debt load doesn’t matter” idea the categories of holders makes that more evident. The volume of debt held by mutual funds, local governments, and individuals effectively makes the US debt operate like a high yield savings account. That makes the US government and its bonds more like a bank than a debtor. I’ve always kinda known that but until I focused on that break down it didn’t really hit home. 
 

nice share thanks. 

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Posted

Alas, finding out will just get harder. A predictable, but unfortunate, development. 

 

WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of COVID-origins investigation

Text:

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Posted
  On 1/13/2023 at 1:16 PM, bernorange said:

I saw it last night while dicking around on my phone.  I had a hard time reading it TBH because the PDF renders the text too small on my phone.  Still, I figured it was germane to the topic of this thread.  I looked at the list of people at the end who signed the letter honestly don't know who most of them are.

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That's fair.  It's an ostensibly neutral think tank with a conservative bent, not MAGA Q lunacy.  But still.

Posted
  On 2/14/2023 at 8:50 PM, bernorange said:

FWIW:

 

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So, he writes several things in there that I've seen disputed, or at least their importance disputed, by multiple sources.

"SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site (FCS) not found in any other SARS coronavirus."

"In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 contained many highly unusual features most consistent with genetic engineering."

"The FCS has a red-flag of codons optimized for humans, not for bats."

Below I'll provide a few sources that have disputes these statements.

  Quote

Harrison and Sachs (1) make a serious accusation against scientists at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) based on an eight-amino-acid sequence similarity between the furin cleavage site (FCS) of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Spike and one of the FCSs of human amiloride-sensitive epithelial sodium channel α subunit (ENaC) (2). Both proteins have the sequence RRARSVAS (Fig. 1A). Harrison and Sachs cite work on rat ENaC from UNC (3, 4) and suggest that the UNC and WIV coronavirologists may have mimicked human ENaC FCS to make SARS-CoV-2 more infectious for lung epithelia.

Numerous features of SARS-CoV-2 FCS demonstrate that it was not engineered to mimic human ENaC:

• Alignment of the nucleotide sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike gene with the closest known coronavirus Spike gene from Laotian bat coronavirus BANAL-20-52 (5) clearly shows that four extra amino acids (PRRA), not eight, were added to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein (Fig. 1B).

• There was an insertion of 12 nucleotides into the Spike gene (Fig. 1B, box) (6). This nucleotide insertion is out of frame (6, 7).

• The insertion adds a proline not present in ENaC.

• Except for one codon (cgu that encodes arginine 685), each of the codons for RRARSVAS is different in human ENaC and SARS-CoV-2 (Fig. 1B).

• Five of eight amino acids (RSVAS; underlined in Fig. 1A, red box in Fig. 1C) in or near the ENaC FCS sequence shared with SARS-Cov-2 Spike are present in Spikes of sarbecoviruses, such as BANAL-20-52. It would be illogical to use the FCS from ENac rather than from a FCS of another coronavirus.

Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C).

After commenting about the “unusual nature” of the SARS-CoV-2 FCS, Harrison and Sachs (1) then argue the opposite. With regard to our earlier publication (7), they write, “In fact, the assertion that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 has an unusual, nonstandard amino acid sequence is false.” We made no such assertion. Rather, we noted that the SARS-CoV-2 FCS is “suboptimal.” We also noted, correctly, that placing the insertion out of frame would be “an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering.”

The immediate proximal ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 did not come directly from a bat to a human, but first evolved in an intermediate host. Two related lineages of SARS-CoV-2—lineage A and lineage B—first infected humans via the wildlife trade at the Huanan Market in Wuhan (9, 10). For the ENaC hypothesis to be true, UNC or WIV researchers would have had to possess the direct SARS-CoV-2 progenitor isolated from another animal—not a bat.

 

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https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119

  Quote

Similar to the closely related SARS-CoV, the cognate receptor of the SARS-CoV-2 spike is angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)1,10. While the SARS-CoV S1/S2 junction is well characterized as being cleaved by serine proteases or cathepsins, the SARS-CoV-2 spike, similarly to the more distantly related Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV), contains a polybasic CS, characterized as being a suboptimal furin CS6,11,12,13. This polybasic CS is absent from the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, although similar polybasic CSs are found in more distantly related coronaviruses

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-w

  Quote

The spike protein is a focused target of COVID-19, a pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. A 12-nt insertion at S1/S2 in the spike coding sequence yields a furin cleavage site, which raised controversy views on origin of the virus. Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165

  Quote

 

Like MERS-CoV (but not SARS-CoV), SARS-CoV-2 was found to carry a furin cleavage site (NSPRRAR↓SV) because of a 12-nucleotide insertion (Coutard et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020), which has led to speculation that this cleavage site may be artificial. However, analysis of coronavirus sequences has shown that natural evolution of the furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 S protein is highly probable (Wu and Zhao, 2020). The furin-cleavage motif of SARS-CoV-2 S protein is recognized and cleaved during virus packaging, which can promote viral infectivity as a result of the conformational change required for exposure of the protein’s receptor-binding domain (Wrobel et al., 2020; Peacock et al., 2021). Another study has suggested that co-expression of neuropilin-1 (NRP1), which is known to bind furin-cleaved substrates, with ACE2 and TMPRSS2, can also enhance SARS-CoV-2 infectivity (Daly et al., 2020).

Evidence obtained from both in vivo and in vitro studies has confirmed that the furin cleavage site plays key roles in SARS-CoV-2’s infectivity and pathogenicity. Several studies have shown that the site promotes the S protein’s mediation of virus–cell fusion (Cheng et al., 2020; Hoffmann et al., 2020; Xia et al., 2020). A mutant that lacks the PRRA motif reportedly has higher replication rates than wild-type in Vero E6 cells, but lower rates in a human respiratory cell line (Johnson et al., 2021). In vivo experiments indicate that loss of the furin cleavage site in the S protein considerably attenuates the pathogenesis and infectivity of SARS-CoV-2, by reducing its replication rates in early stages of infection in both hamsters and K18-hACE2 transgenic mice, which express human ACE2 (Johnson et al., 2021). Moreover, Peacock et al. (2021) found that mutant SARS-CoV-2 with a deleted furin cleavage site had low replicability in the upper respiratory tracts of model animals (ferrets) and was not transmitted to cohoused sentinel animals (Peacock et al., 2021). Thus, presence of a furin cleavage site in S protein is crucial for replication (Papa et al., 2021), pathogenesis, and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (Johnson et al., 2020). This might explain why SARS-CoV-2 has higher transmissibility than SARS-CoV.

 

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https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.649314/full

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Posted (edited)
  On 2/14/2023 at 10:52 PM, Dahobbs said:

So, he writes several things in there that I've seen disputed, or at least their importance disputed, by multiple sources.

 

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I agree that those particular aspects have been disputed. Also none of those aspects are really essential to the contrast between the outbreak pattern associated with spillover and a focal lab breach. Those specific items get more to evidence of specific types of lab manipulation, which I think is distracting and non-essential to the lab release origin. Any thoughts on the contrasts made between the H5N1 and SARS-Cov-1 spillover events and the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak in the thread?

Edited by Anastasis
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Posted
  On 2/14/2023 at 11:06 PM, Anastasis said:

I agree that those particular aspects have been disputed. Also none of those aspects are really essential to the contrast between the outbreak pattern associated with spillover and a focal lab breach. Those specific items get more to evidence of specific types of lab manipulation, which I think is distracting and non-essential to the lab release origin. Any thoughts on the contrasts made between the H5N1 and SARS-Cov-1 spillover events and the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak in the thread?

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I agree with what you say here. Lab release and lab manipulation are two distinct areas of inquiry. It makes sense to not conflate them, even though there may be some overlap. You're much more a subject matter expert than I am, so I'm happy to leave more of the hard science questions to you. The most I can say on the last point is that there does appear to be a lot of evidence consistent with a lab release. It certainly shouldn't be discounted out of hand. But, just like some of the statements above, his statements on spillover have a similar certainty that doesn't seem warranted by the known facts. For instance, he says "These pathogens have to spillover many times before they can get a foothold in a new host population. In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 took off immediately upon entering humans." Given our lack of insight into China during the beginning of the pandemic, it isn't obvious to me that we can know that. There may have been sputtering starts many times in China in 2019 before the real explosion of cases. He may ultimately be right. But right now I view any claims by him with skepticism because it appears he is playing a little loose with the facts. 

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Posted

Yeah. I think that bringing up stuff about the cleavage site or the codons is just distracting from what are pretty compelling circumstantial evidence regarding the lab leak. There are reasonable points to be made on both sides of those issues, imo. But I am not an expert in any way on that.  FWIW, I still don't think that we are dealing with bioengineering necessarily here, despite the fact that WIV was proposing exactly the types of research that could result in a SARS-Cov-2 like virus in the years leading up to the outbreak. I still think that the most likely scenario is collection of viruses from nature, some light lab manipulation consistent with culturing and passage, and an accidental lab leak. It is the best fit of all the data points, at least imo.  

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Posted

Sorry fellas. We’ve tried everything, and are all out of ideas. 
 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y
 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

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Posted

WSJ: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a?mod=hp_lead_pos1

 

 

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Posted
  On 2/26/2023 at 6:10 PM, Horn of Gabriel said:

WSJ: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a?mod=hp_lead_pos1

 

 

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Well There It Is Jurassic Park GIF

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