Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
if it came from a lab, we would know about it
How? The Chinese have destroyed all their samples.

Thanks for the psychoanalysis though, its really helping.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-09-23 03:34:15)

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uziq
Member
+492|3422
ok cool. down the rabbithole you go of wuhan lab conspiracy theories, then. even the american intelligence agency flat-out denied that hypothesis. why would they play down and reject any lead that they could use against their chinese enemies?

are you into moon landing conspiracies too? you'd have thought the russians would have blown the whistle on that, similarly.

An analysis published in Nature Medicine on 17 March discusses several unusual features of the virus, and suggests how they likely arose from natural processes. For starters, when performing experiments that seek to genetically modify a virus, researchers have to use the RNA of an existing coronavirus as a backbone. If scientists had worked on the new coronavirus, it’s likely that they would have used a known backbone. But the study’s authors report that no known viruses recorded in the scientific literature could have served as a backbone to create SARS-CoV-2.

To enter cells, coronaviruses use a ‘receptor binding domain’ (RDB) to latch onto a receptor on the cell’s surface. SARS-CoV-2’s RBD has sections that are unlike those in any other coronavirus. Although experimental evidence — and the sheer size of the pandemic — shows that the virus binds very successfully to human cells, the authors note that computer analyses of its unique RBD parts predict that it shouldn’t bind well. The authors suggest that as a result, no one trying to engineer a virus would design the RBD in this way — which makes it more likely that the feature emerged as a result of natural selection.

The authors also point to another unusual feature of SARS-CoV-2, which is also part of the mechanism that helps the virus to work its way into human cells, known as the furin cleavage site. The authors argue that natural processes can explain how this feature emerged. Indeed, a similar site has been identified in a closely-related coronavirus, supporting the authors claim that the components of SARS-CoV-2 could all have emerged from natural processes.

The analyses show that it is highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was made or manipulated in a lab, says Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, and the lead author of the paper. “We have a lot of data showing this is natural, but no data, or evidence, to show that there’s any connection to a lab,” he says.
my question to you is: why do you, the man of science, not read the research? why do you only spout baseless conspiracy theories without any evidence? that's, well, a bit unscientific, isn't it? isn't entertaining beliefs without fact a sort of ... religious attitude? why don't you read Nature for your covid information? that's very odd to me.

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-23 03:55:40)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

It's like something from the Twilight Zone, experts and science publications increasingly discredited by members of the public on the say-so of lay dimwits. "They don't know what they're doing any better than the rest of us!"

Chills.

I also guess the FBI and CIA and NSA etc. don't know what they're doing because they're *checks notes* in on a gigantic Democratic conspiracy.
uziq
Member
+492|3422


totally normal country. everyone in this video is fairly infuriating. got to love how the 3%'er 'general' is just a fat redneck.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW



2:13-ish

So yeah, President "Get rid of the ballots" Trump. I know, he was probably making a tasteless, sarcastic quip. But ffs, I want him out.

"The Republican party has shrugged it off" is a good way to put it, and I can't see it swaying many Trump dedicates.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i was reading something apposite this morning on my saturday morning LRB routine. not really any new analysis but a neat summary of where we're at, culturally.

The US offers a disturbing model of what can happen when political and media interests converge. As the investigative journalist Jane Mayer detailed in a piece for the New Yorker last year about the relationship between Fox News and the present White House, Murdoch and Trump found common cause in the creation of eye-catching and lucrative news content. What Murdoch wanted from Trump wasn’t policy favours or ideological conformity – the main fear surrounding Murdoch’s influence in the UK over recent decades – but higher ratings, something that Trump has resoundingly delivered. In return, Fox has given Trump an endlessly supportive platform and sure-fire lines to take.

As America teeters on the edge of authoritarianism, with barely a murmur of protest from the Republican Party, one wonders at what point the seeds of the current disaster were sown. When did the American right first take the path that has led to a third of Republican voters believing the QAnon conspiracy theory that the president is battling a global network of Satanic child sex traffickers that connects Hollywood, the Clintons, Pope Francis and the Rothschilds? What went wrong, to allow a Republican president to claim without fear of censure that his electoral opponent is controlled by people in the ‘dark shadows’, that ‘anarchists’ are now governing major US cities, and that nobody is going to ever know the real result of the election (but that he’ll definitely win)?

Various origin stories could be told, but the middle years of the Clinton presidency – when Newt Gingrich declared a permanent war of attrition against the White House – stand out as a moment when a new madness was unleashed. It was in 1996 that Fox News was launched, feeding the rage of the American right with a daily catalogue of the damage their liberal, atheist, cosmopolitan enemies were seeking to inflict on the traditional American way of life. This rage has been a resource available to every Republican politician since, whether or not they chose to exploit it. The difference with Trump was that he didn’t just exploit it: he amplified it.

Britain may comfort itself that it is a long way from the political abyss that America is now staring into. But elements of the same delirious conservative resentment are nevertheless at large, invigorated by Brexit and accelerated by social media. A British equivalent of Fox News, wherever it may come from, would have its own distinctive character – less evangelism and more Elgar, fewer guns and more poppies – but the commercial and political logic would be the same. The ratings for Fox News’s live coverage in October 2018 of what Trump referred to as the migrant ‘caravan’ travelling from Mexico exceeded the peak pre-election ratings of October 2016. This year in the UK, Nigel Farage, by dint of the zero-budget method of tweeting from the White Cliffs of Dover, managed to lure teams of news reporters out into the English Channel to capture live footage of asylum seekers in dinghies. Think what could be done with a dedicated TV news team.

The conservative press and its online outliers (such as Breitbart and Spiked) have already done the job of establishing the issues that suck in attention: traditions being ‘banned’, identities ‘threatened’, histories ‘rewritten’. The notion of a ‘woke’ conspiracy linking universities, the BBC, the Remain campaign and what the Home Office recently referred to as ‘activist lawyers’ is too popular and too lucrative to be abandoned, no matter what policy reforms may be made to broadcasting, higher education or immigration. If anything, this monster thrives on an absence of effective policy, which nourishes the sense that ‘the people’ are still having their wishes obstructed by unelected elites. The thought that has taken hold among the new generation of conservative gurus, such as Tim Montgomerie and the former May adviser Nick Timothy, is that liberalism (sometimes confusingly equated with Marxism) is so powerful a force in British public life as to be impossible to dislodge, despite Brexit and ten years of Conservative government. Cultural defeats are intoxicating, politically potent and, above all, great for ratings.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18 … short-cuts

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-26 05:28:16)

uziq
Member
+492|3422
i think this is ron paul having a stroke live on air?



where's jay when you need him.
Superior Mind
(not macbeth)
+1,755|6662
I don’t doubt that Trump will kick and scream thru any outcome of the election. However I don’t think Don was responding to that particular question of whether or not he will peacefully transfer power in the way everyone is suggesting. The reporter, by not saying specifically “would there be a peaceful transfer IF Biden wins,” Trump responded in a way to show his confidence in his win.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Trump's SCOTUS pick is a Catholic extremist. That's good.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Superior Mind
(not macbeth)
+1,755|6662
She seems like she could be your type. Paralyzed upper lip. Unchanging glare. Volunteer school principal.

Last edited by Superior Mind (2020-09-26 19:41:39)

SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
I got the NYT alert on my phone

\_/

This won't change any of the minds of his supporters.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Surely it takes a true genius to be a successful billionaire businessman and pay no taxes?

At this point I'm sure Trump owes billions to Putin and other oligarchs which he has no prospect of repaying.

He needed to become President for the lifetime Secret Service protection alone. How far does that extend though? What happens when grandkids and nieces start getting novichoked and disappeared?

Maybe he thinks he'd be safer in Israel, maybe from the US taxman, maybe not from Putin.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I got the NYT alert on my phone

\_/

This won't change any of the minds of his supporters.
what i find really interesting is the cognitive dissonance of people like jay, the petit-bourgeois aspirational type. jay was constantly full of piss and vinegar about his tax contributions, his taxes were too damn high, etc. and yet simultaneously always prepared to make excuses for the 'wealth-creating, hard working, success story' billionaire class. how many times has jay said something like 'stop talking about the billionaires, their lives don't harm you at all'?

meanwhile trump has paid peanuts in tax for the last 2 decades, practically less than a family living in a trailer park. and jay still complains bitterly about the tax burden he is shouldering just to maintain his facsimile of middle-class life on long island. you seriously can't make this shit up.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
One day Jay's cognitive dissonance will cause his head to explode.

[  ] When he gets sick and needs the state to provide his medical treatment

[  ] When his jewish business partner robs him and does a bunk out of reach in Israel

[  ] When the Republicans admit they were Russian stooges all along and the low tax small government scheme was a plot to weaken the country ripe for invasion and allow the select few to pile gold on the dark side of the moon

[  ] When he has three teenagers as much trouble as he was all under the same roof at the same time
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
It could all happen at the same time of course
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unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

A big chunk of right-wing personalities have a ton to say when it comes to moochers who "don't pay their taxes." I think at this point they're so used to tax loopholes existing for the extremely wealthy that the hypocrisy just goes in one ear, tunnels down a well-worn tube around the back of their brain, and shoots out the other side of their head.

"A billionaire paying less in personal taxes than someone barely making it? Eh."
uziq
Member
+492|3422
to say nothing of the fact that a quadruple-bankrupt could still use his 'personal name' to leverage $400,000,000 in loans.

a single bankruptcy for a regular middle-class american would be a disaster.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

Honestly I could see that in a Trump tweet in response to virus-stricken, financial hardship. "I don't like people who go bankrupt."
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Well people who go bankrupt are losers, who likes losers?
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uziq
Member
+492|3422
i do think the NYT speculation that trump only ran for president to buoy his brand and make money has some credibility.

if you see the video footage of him receiving the news of victory on the night, when he's sat with pence an ivanka, surrounded by his team ... well, it is not the look of a happy man.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
All he wanted was the 'former presidential candidate' tag, everything else has been a mistake.
If he hadn't been elected maybe he could have scraped through with his businesses and paid off the Russians, probably not.
Now he needs to be President for life or he's dead, same as Putin.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422

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