Was Farrakhan paying by the word for this gushing puff piece?

So you’re fighting propaganda with propaganda? Let’s take your stats of China poverty stats at 1% versus 23% for Hong Kong. You don’t list any sources. Searching on my own, I could find a World Bank poverty line of 0.7% for China — at less than $1.90 a day. There’s no comparable stat listed for Hong Kong. The number at less than $5.50 a day for China was 27%. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty

But countries also set their own national poverty lines. This is relative wealth, and a completely different measure from World Bank dollars. Here I can find something more along the line of 20%. Source: https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/hkstat/sub/so461.jsp

Also, you make the claim that Hong Kong’s wealth had nothing to do with capitalism, but merely as being a gatekeeper into the Chinese market. But you completely ignore that China’s own economic developed soared when they opened up investments and followed a free market capitalist approach. That’s not to say China doesn’t run their own brand of capitalism, but it’s a far cry and opposite approach to their attempts at communism.

Yep, I saw this as a young adult and didn’t even remember there was a Jewish element to this movie. I remember admiring the protagonist seeking to uncover the scheme (though wondering what authority he actually had investigating this — was it even a crime?), disliking the rich Van Doren, and sympathizing with Stempel. The only Jews I really despised were the show runners, and I didn’t even remember them as Jewish thinking back on this movie. I really liked the movie, though, at the time.

Black Pilled has some good videos going over (((Hollywood))) propaganda in films. Seeing old movies with new eyes.

So you’re going to completely ignore all the economic development that started with China’s “special economic zones”? Planned economies suck. It was proved over and over again in Marxist country after Marxist country in the twentieth century. Your blinders on this issue is embarrassing.

As for the poverty stats, YOU MISSED MY MAIN POINT. It wasn’t to dispute the poverty rate of children in Hong Kong. It was to find a comparable stat for China, instead of your unsourced “1%”. The only stat I could find regarding China poverty that comes close to 1% is a different measure of poverty, as I explained in my comment.

You really are a hack.

So can we get a clearcut answer or not: Does China have a million Uyghurs in “re-education” camps?

“Which explains why other ethnic demographics are hardly ever given any meaningful attention by the two-party, two-race establishment.”

What fucking planet are you on? During debates, Democrats were competing as to who could out-Spanish each other. They all raised their hands for giving illegal immigrants health care. Democrats are a monolithic block in not enforcing the border, going so far as to thwart any attempts at enforcement. Oh, so you aren’t mentioned in reparations? Boo hoo. Enjoy your welfare, free school, and clogging of our emergency rooms to get basic healthcare.

Yes, goy-kaffir, Europe and the Americas are so much better after their Muslim enrichment. You have no choice but to submit.

Where’s this “climate emergency”? I mean outside of the usual stories that blame every weather event on global warming, and you can find the same scare stories going back a century (Tony Heller videos are very informative here). Marxism had its chance in the 20th century, and it FAILED MISERABLY. All it showed was that the pigs at the top benefited like monarchs, while the masses were treated like ants to be crushed underfoot.

Funny how you lick one-party, authoritarian China’s boots. Why don’t you compare their response versus South Korea? China initially covered up the problem. They punished leakers. Then after they admitted the problem, they acted in draconian fashion, locking down cities, including welding the doors to apartment buildings shut. Now we see riot videos out of China, overturning police cars, by the citizens tired of being locked in. Do you really believe China when they say they defeated the virus?

South Korea, on the other hand, tested the crap out of people and only quarantined those who were positive or in direct contact of those testing positive.

Yep, despite being a nice theme for a film, Gattaca was really dumb. Some other really dumb things besides the ones you mentioned: He scrubbed his skin maniacally before going to work so as not to give off flakes — but you shed tens of thousands of skin cells every hour. The medical science was so advanced that they could EXTEND HIS LEGS via a home procedure, but they couldn’t fix his heart?

Umm, did you ask yourself why Nigeria, and not all African countries? You found a unicorn, and think it’s valid to explain all race and IQ genetic gap theories. Apparently scrabble is insanely popular in Nigeria. Scrabble is just another board game and not taken seriously in most Western countries. And in other areas, you rely on the same methodology. Highly selected migrants can outperform the general population of whites in the UK. You can slice and dice the statistics all you want, but it’s a highly selected population. But you’re going to think that settles the case, while ignoring the vast amounts of evidence in the opposite direction. But I wonder if that data is still holding up, given recent mass migration? You can find who is committing the spike in murders in the UK, can’t you?

The simple fact is she probably felt immune because she was never arrested the first time Epstein was back in 2006, and it looked like she was going to avoid arrest the second time.

Chabad is bad news. They preach Noahide laws for non-Jews. That is, Jews are to be the ruling class, and all non-Jews must follow second-class citizen laws. Jared Kushner is Chabad, by the way.

Matthew is obviously derivative of Mark. If you handed that in to a professor, you’d be rightly flunked out for plagiarism.

Whilst the Israelites were the chosen people, they lost it.

So a Jewish god invented by Jewish people to justify their supremacy, conquest, rape, slavery, and genocide of other people in the area.

I don’t know if you have heard of the new covenant?

A re-invention of a Jewish god as not being a Jew supremacist is somehow more legitimate? Even Christians want to see Israel restored to Jews to fulfill endtime prophecies.

Agreed. Saw it in college, because you know, college, where the twisted and weird is celebrated. Even then I found it repugnant and without any redeeming values.

Oh noes, not the “jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams” meme. The fire was hot enough to soften the beams to the point where they lost their structural integrity. The whole argument is a waste of time that focuses on fringe theories of HOW, that distracts from the known WHO. Hint: Dancing Israelis.

@Majority: You’re comparing a modern experience of your time on “the Rez” versus the warrior tribe that existed before being conquered. Those who continued to fight were killed off. Those who accepted their fates on the reservations were not.

Are these authors paid by the word?

@Majority: Cool story, bro.

Nor does China opposes the USA in the geopolitical arena, as it studiously avoids getting involved in unnecessary conflicts with foreign countries.

That might change as China has been empire building as of late. They’ve got their fingers in a lot of countries, giving out loans and building out infrastructure on foreign soil in return for ports and resources. What if a populist nationalist decides that China is a foreign devil, leaching off their people, and decides to nationalize what China owns? Also throw Taiwan into the mix (China still lays claim to it), and China’s aggressive island building in the South China Sea. Maybe cooler heads will prevail, but with global empires come global wars.

AS cannot bring himself to say that Muslims did 9/11, without the caveat that Israel knew and said nothing.

The Dancing Israelis are a documented fact. They celebrated the destruction of the towers, and were caught with cash and plane tickets to leave the country the next day. At the minimum they knew about it. At the worse they took part in planning it. Denying documented facts shows you aren’t interested in truth.

The Jews are always very successful, always have been educated and talented in various fields. That and their divergent faith from Islam and Christianity, the inability to accept Jesus or Mohammed combined with jealousy is what this hatred is all about.

Uh huh. So it’s never about how they behave? Kicked out of over 100 countries, never their fault? Jews are nation destroyers. They are always prominent in subversive movements.

The Jewish religion is a supremacist religion, based on a “Chosen People” with a “Promised Land”. Promised to be favored among all nations. Self-serving nonsense.

I don’t think she was a hypocrite. She suffers from the same flaws that will eventually doom our country – empathy and an instinctive preference for the individual and anecdotal over the general and statistical.

That doesn’t explain why she kept painting blacks in the most favorable light and whites in the worst, a complete inversion of how she felt privately. A dishonest hypocrite.

Nothing wrong with striving for a better world.

There is when you’re inverting reality. That she acknowledged it in private but portrayed the opposite in public is what makes her a dishonest hypocrite. People like her, and people like you excusing such nonsense, is what gives us Clown World.

“About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too […] If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute.”

Well, Baldwin was sometimes sincere. He, perhaps the most influential black literary figure of the last century, confessed in Notes of a Native Son that blacks feel alienated and inferior no matter where they travel in the modern world. Each black person, he mourned, is but a “stranger in their village,” a global village shaped by others—especially by whites.

He wrote:

For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive. (Notes of a Native Son, p. 164)

There’s more to the Chauvin / Floyd story that will probably never see the light of day. Chauvin knew Floyd as both of them worked as bouncers at a local club. It is likely that Chauvin was involved in the “drug trade” along with Floyd and that Floyd was probably going to “drop a dime” on Chauvin if he were arrested.

The simple fact of the matter is that if Floyd had not resisted arrest, he would either be alive today or officially dead of a drug overdose. I knew from the beginning that we weren’t seeing the whole story and that he had likely resisted arrest. But it took [i]months[/i] for the body cam footage to come out, and other footage that was available “mysteriously” cut off between the time he was initially approached and the time he ended up on the ground being knelt on. Remember that he complained he couldn’t breathe while they were trying to get him to stay in the car. It was his continued struggles that caused him to end up on the ground being restrained.

Why do they need to retake Taiwan? It has effectively been an independent country for over 70 years. If they really want peace and trade with the world, let bygones be bygones and normalize relations. But they act like petulant children that want ALL the marbles.

But it’s an absolute lie that Taiwan “has effectively been an independent country for 70 years”. Absolute revision of history. Nobody in Taiwan was talking about independence until the 21st century. It was always expecting to retake Mainland China – until it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.

Taiwan and China have effectively been independent countries for 70 years, despite what any side has laid claims to. And given that Taiwan knows they are never going to retake China, there is only one belligerent party that insists on taking over the other.

If you want a divorce it costs you.

There was a cost. They lost all of mainland China and have been relegated to an island.

There is no way on God’s green earth that the PRC will allow the US to turn Taiwan into another Japan and have weapons threatening the PRC. You can’t remotely be serious. That is not even logical.

Just like Japan, it’s that way already. But do you think at this late stage in China’s ascendancy that Taiwan would be anything but suicidal to initiate a war with China? It’s only China’s continued belligerence to Taiwan, and inability to accept their independence, that forces Taiwan to try and keep pace to prevent an invasion. If China normalized relations and accepted their independence, they would probably become allies, much like the UK and the US are traditional allies, despite the US being forged in a revolutionary war.

Frankly – if they really want to make it happen they should offer to pay for all the national loot taken to the island???

It’s ridiculous demands like this that prevent peace. The Communist party got all of mainland China. Crying over “loot” from 70 years ago is petty and stupid. If China really wanted to be considered peaceful and not empire building, they would stop huffing and puffing about petty shit like this, which I wonder if this is an actual demand from within China that you’re parroting.

Mainland China (People’s Republic of China or PRC) and Taiwan (Republic of China or ROC ) are both two types of China. It is more like North Korea and South Korea. So for the PRC, it is like unification of China, just like how DPRK (North Korea) wants an unification of Korea or like how Vietnam and Germany were unified.

No shit. You aren’t offering any new insights here. But Taiwan is geographically separated from mainland China and has been under independent rule for over 70 years. Rather than forcing reunification, both sides (especially Communist Party China) can just agree to go their separate ways instead of trying to force the issue. Perhaps if the two systems harmonized at some point they could be reunited, but as it is right now it’s the Big Bad China that insists on bullying and bribing everybody else into submission and insisting that Taiwan is rightfully theirs. Please Remain Calm tries to act magnanimous and peaceful on the world stage, but they throw their weight around when it comes to their back yard.

They were both shelling each other well into the 1970’s. (PRC fishing people were even killed by ROC (Taiwan) forces into the 1980’s.)

I’m talking about the situation in 2021, and you’re dredging up stuff from the 1970s and 1980s. And despite whatever was said or happened during that period, nothing changes what is true: they have been effectively ruled as independent nations for over 70 years. You can keep on huffing and puffing all you like, nothing changes that.

That’s not how it works. With no formal treaty you don’t get to keep the island. just like without a court order you don’t get to keep the garage to the house.

How it works is how people are willing to have it work. That’s what is under discussion. You want to make excuses for Communist China’s continued belligerence and insistence that Taiwan is theirs. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The decision is entirely theirs to make. There are plenty of times in history where conflicts end after a period of no significant change in outcomes, and both sides just agree on the status quo, and let bygones be bygones.

So was the Monroe Doctrine petty and stupid??

I said “petty and stupid” in response to a demand for payment for “the national loot taken to the island” from 70 years ago. I asked if that was YOUR petty and stupid demand, or was this something being parroted out of mainland China.

The Monroe Doctrine is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. There is plenty to critique about US imperial policy, so if that’s your excuse, then you are admitting that China is just another imperialist wannabe now that they have grown strong (ironically, through capitalism and trade with the West).

So the guy whose bio proudly proclaims his life of biker gangs and overseas whoring wants to stamp out illegal drug use. Rebel and adventure seeker no more, he wants the world to settle down with him.

You cant talk about 2021 u less you talk about what led up to this.

Which I did. Seventy years of being effectively ruled as independent nations. Nothing you dredged up changed that. But you think dredging up stuff from the 1970s or 1980s excuses current day China’s belligerence.

Now I know you are a troll. Claiming the Monroe Doctrine means nothing?

Now I know you are a troll, because I said no such thing. Or maybe you are just too stupid to read and comprehend.

Just to correct your incorrect premise which is causing all this confusion in your mind: the ROC in Taiwan is not and has never been an ‘independent nation’ by law or in fact because of the legal and political status of the ROC as the government of Taiwan which is part of China.

The strawmen continue. You’re talking about legal status and other paper niceties, while I’m talking about effective, de facto reality. Seventy years of being effectively ruled as independent nations.

The Taiwanese are racially/ethnically, linguistically/culturally, socially/culturally and legally/politically CHINESE.

Nobody here has said otherwise about their ethnicity. So fucking what? Did that stop the US from breaking away from England? Another strawman.

No war needs to take place between the PRC and the ROC as both sides on the Taiwan Straits are CHINESE who want to unify Taiwan with China.

If they really wanted to unify it would have already happened. And Taiwan wouldn’t be buying billions of dollars in weapons to defend against Communist China aggression.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person … may be admitted to become a citizen …

I like how two people “disagree” (HammerJack, TWS) on an easily verifiable fact of history.

Unfortunately, non-white aliens could be admitted for another 18 years. Not to citizenship, of course, but if they were that useless, they should never have been admitted at all.

I presume that clause was there because of the slave-holding states.

The more accurate word is closer to “autonomous” rather than “independent nation”.

More parsing of paper niceties than what’s actually occurring on the ground.

Taiwan has total power over its domestic affairs, slightly more power but very close to Hong Kong.

Hahahahahaa, Hahahahahahahaha. Are you fucking kidding me? Hong Kong is under the thumb of mainland China, who has been tightening their grip in steady fashion. When push comes to shove, it’s mainland China that decides. They are in military control. They may let them operate autonomously as they please, but ultimate power resides in mainland China.

However, it has little or no power in international diplomacy, signing treaties, or joining, voting, participating in UN or other international organizations, conducting joint military exercises, … etc.

Taiwan is part of the WTO under a special label (a fig leaf to appease China). Taiwan also maintains treaties with other countries. They have bought billions of dollars in military supplies from the US. Despite unofficial recognition to appease China, they are effectively an independent nation, and have been for over 70 years.

A married couple who was separated is still legally married.

You’re really boring and pathetic. Reaching for further and further strained analogies isn’t helping your case. We’ve already discussed direct analogies in history dealing with actual countries.

And whether you like it or not the UN and majority of the world recognize Taiwan as Chinese territory and Beijing the rightful government.

Which means jack shit when Taiwan has been de facto governed as an independent country for over 70 years, including having a strong international economy and their own military. China could agree to an independent Taiwan tomorrow and the whole world would agree. So it’s only China’s continued belligerence that prevents this from happening.

You said the Monroe Doctrine is another ball of wax… But it’s not.

You keep on dropping the context, because it makes you look petty and stupid, as I said. The original context was your (parroting mainland China’s?) demand for Taiwan to “pay for all the national loot taken to the island”. Rather than address the pettiness and stupidity of your demand, you changed the argument and compared it to the Monroe Doctrine. I rightly pointed out that policy is a quite different issue, and that your appeal to an obviously imperialistic policy by the US just shows that China wants to be an imperial power.

It is exactly what you accuse China of doing – except I gave you direct contrast as to why China is not the imperialist.

YOU used an appeal to the Monroe Doctrine as a defense of China, not me. That’s a self-own on your part.

“what’s actually occurring on the ground” is that Taiwan is not allowed to do a lot of things that a normal independent nation can do.

So you claimed last time, but I disproved it. They have treaties, a strong international economy, belong to the WTO, and their own military. There are many fig leaf paper formalities that other countries adhere to appease China, but that doesn’t change what I just said.

Whatever you like to believe about Hong Kong does not matter. A lot of things Taiwanese can do, Hong Kongers can also. That is “what’s actually occurring on the ground.”

But as the latest protests showed, at the end of the day mainland China has the final say. They are only allowed as much freedom as mainland China decides to give them. THAT’S the reality on the ground.

That is due to hegemonic power of US – nothing to do with Taiwan nor China. It has no effects on the balance of military power on “what’s actually occurring on the ground”.

Lulz, you’re living in fantasy land. The US doesn’t force Taiwan to buy military weapons. Taiwan buys them because they don’t want to be taken over by Communist China.

It is very clear that you are pushing a string for Taiwan’s independence. Good luck with that. China will decide when, how and what way to unite with Taiwan – there is simply nothing you or anyone else can stop that.

All I’ve said is that China is the belligerent party that insists on taking over Taiwan, but they don’t have to be. If China wants to swing it’s big dick around and be an imperialist country like the US, they can do so. Maybe everything will work out fine. Or maybe not.

Taiwan can’t express its voice in UN

Who cares about a single vote in a shitty organization where only a handful of players matter anyways? But they are part of the WTO.

can’t sign multilateral trade treaties like RCEP

Out out appeasement to China, but they still sign treaties with other countries. But what about all the restrictions that North Korea and Iran are under because of the USA? Are they not independent countries?

“a strong international economy”, Ha? What to do with being an independent nation?

Are you really this stupid? How many places run their own economy with their own currencies and conduct international trade that aren’t independent nations? You can point to Hong Kong, which was independent of China until relatively recently. The “one country, two systems” is a holdover that China allows for now.

many countries allow local regions to have military (e.g. US National Guard)

The primary purpose of the Taiwan military is to rebuff being taken over by Communist China.

That does not negate the statement that most of the things Taiwan is allowed to do, Hong Kong is allowed too.

“Most”, that is, they are not an independent country.

Of course, US does. You are the one who live in fantasy land if you believe Taiwan can say “no” to US (haha, Japan can’t even do that).

Give me a break. Taiwan has Big Brother right next door they can go running to for protection, but they don’t want Big Brother. Indeed, they fought a war with Big Brother and retreated to their own island to survive without being under the rule of Big Brother. THAT is why they buy military weapons, not because the US forces them to. What a clown you are.

Taiwan buys them because they want the fantasy of ability to resist taken over by Communist China – fixed that for you.

Why hasn’t Communist China done it? Why didn’t they finish the job 70 years ago? Are they so kind and generous?

No, you are the one who is the belligerent party by going halfway around the Earth to interfere with domestic affair of another nation that you know little about.

Politics is international. Anybody can call it like they see it. If Biggus Dikkus commie China wants to swing their big dick around, they are free to do so, and we are all free to comment on it.

Typical clown who has no real life experience shaped by geopolitics and war but calls issues related to it as petty. Sophomoric…
So is repeating the same point because you don’t have an actual counterpoint aside rom what you hear on talk radio.

You’re projecting. I repeat myself so much because your arguments are so bad, full of strawmen, misdirection, and denial of reality. When you brought the petty and stupid argument about demanding payment for “all the national loot taken to the island”, rather than acknowledge your pettiness and stupidity, you made yourself look MORE stupid by bringing up the imperialistic US Monroe Doctrine in a non sequitur, and then defending the Monroe Doctrine while at the same time claiming that China is not being imperialistic. Yes, you really are that stupid and petty.

All independent countries do, about 200 of them. Furthermore, Taiwan itself also cares VERY MUCH – they fought hard to keep the UN seat, didn’t they? So I have already proved to you there are things that independent country can do but Taiwan can’t, even if they want.

You’re making a lot out of little. In day to day terms, the seat means practically nothing. Of course Taiwan would want the official recognition, but they carry on anyways, despite what others officially recognize.

North Korea or Iran is not part of US, so US is obviously asserting extra-territorial jurisdiction. Everyone agrees about that.

Err, what? Except a lot of countries go along with US sanctions. It’s the same situation as with China and Taiwan. Nobody forces countries to go along with US sanctions, but they do so out of appeasement. Even China has gone along with sanctions on North Korea from time to time.

So nobody accuses China of asserting extra-territorial jurisdiction – a “niceties” your clearly don’t understand again.

Puh-lease. Everybody plays along with paper formalities to please China, but unlike North Korea, Taiwan has a strong international economy, and unlike Hong Kong, they have their own military and purchase weapons despite China jumping up and down. And China knows if they went in militarily to take over Taiwan they would risk war with the US and international condemnation, in addition to any military losses they would incur.

ad hominem already?

Cry me a river. I received plenty of them already in this discussion from your fellow compatriot, and I let it slide. If I call you a clown you get the explanation as to why along with it.

Yes, they are. They treat Taiwan as part of China.

*snicker* Ohhh, how “kind and generous” of them.

Of course, you can choose to be belligerent to China. So stop your hypocrisy that China is the belligerent one.

“They cry out in pain as they strike you.”

I’m not the one insisting on taking over somebody else’s territory and destroying a status quo after 70 years of independent rule. All I did is comment on China’s unnecessary and destructive aggression, and you guys wail and gnash your teeth in indignity.

“Settlers”?

If you really want to piss them off, call them occupiers.

For you not to know that reparations are often a part of war settlements but to call someone else stupid is the height of irony. The fact you call war reparations petty shows you know nothing of how the world works.

Having never recovered from the self-own of bringing up the Monroe Doctrine, now you triple down on your pettiness and stupidity. Only a petty and stupid person would demand “war reparations” to agree to the status quo after winning a revolution 70 years ago that relegated the losing side to an island off the coast.

Sarcasm doesn’t play well in Clown World. Half the people won’t get that you’re being sarcastic, and parroting their hysterical narratives in a serious tone just normalizes their lunacy.

Regardless of details that are to complicated for this small brain of mine: the mortality is low, has always been low and by no means justifies the measures taken.

Agreed. But even though the risks were overblown, that doesn’t mean the whole thing is a psyop. Machiavellians never let a crisis go to waste.

If I were to accept the bioweapon/lab leak story, I would have to accept that the virus is a real danger, which it is not.

No, you don’t. The simplest answer is that a novel coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan lab. The same lab that has been doing gain of function research on coronaviruses since at least 2015: “Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.”

Now, the virus hit old and sickly people the hardest (no surprise), but it wasn’t the world-ending threat it was made out to be. Of course it was scary when it first came out, and there were a lot of unknowns about the true mortality, but we have a lot of data by now, and even with overcounting, it just isn’t that scary. But what is scary are these labs running around doing gain-of-function research and creating the next pandemic. This one wasn’t that bad, but what about the next one?

Can anyone enlighten me, why it is unthinkable that the bioweapon/lab leak story is just part of the psyop??

You can think whatever you like. I keep it in the realm of possibility, but I think the simplest explanation is a lab leak.

And the most likely answer is that it did not.

Did you read the Nicholas Wade article? Where’s your refutation of all the points raised?

For the simplest and probably most correct answer, see Post 169 by “As I see it”.

It’s dumb. The virus was already spreading in Wuhan well before it hit the US. Iran was hit early and can be traced to Chinese projects with Chinese workers in Iran. Same thing in northern Italy. Nursing homes make the news because of their high death totals because of the elderly, many of whom only last a year or two before exiting stage left anyways.

All the evidence points to a lab leak out of Wuhan.

LOL

By refusing to consider the possibility that the virus was in the U.S. before it was in China (and that it therefore could’ve originated in the U.S.), Wades’s article refutes itself. It’s nothing more than a propaganda piece.

By refusing to consider the FACTS laid out in the article, your comment refutes itself. You offer no evidence, refute no evidence, other than the possibility that it could have been in the US first, despite the overwhelming evidence ground zero was Wuhan, the same city with the virus lab conducting Frankenstein research on SARS.

The Wuhan ‘strain’ is different from the Italian ‘strain’ which disproves the two ‘Out of Wuhan’ theories, either the Wuhan Wet Market or Wuhan Lab Leak theories.

Nonsense. Viruses are highly mutable. People populations are incubators for virus evolution. The strain is from the original.

Besides, all flights from China had been banned from Italy, USA and much of the Western World as early as Feb 1st 2020, with the few cases of the Wuhan ‘strain’ contained by then as arriving passengers from China were screened and quarantined prior to the flight ban.

You mean as LATE as Feb. 2020, considering this virus was already spreading in China in November 2019. Too little, too late.

The big elephant in the room about which no one is talking about is that IQ tests don’t measure pure, raw, Intelligence, as no one can define what exactly Intelligence is and when they try they always carry to their definition their own cultural bias, so at the end all what an IQ measures are skills, natural or even acquired with age, experience and practice.

You’re behind the times. General intelligence has been refined to a “g factor”, and it is highly predictive of outcomes with regards to intelligence as you’d expect it to be. It’s just amazing to me how people deny reality. Do you really not know dumb people that have a hard time learning new things or figuring things out? Do you really not know smart people that are the opposite? It’s beyond mere practice and culture.

The billionaires have been too greedy. I want the state to whittle them down.

The SAME state that enforced lockdowns of small businesses, which made the billionaires richer in the first place? If you want to argue it was local states that enforced lockdowns, not the feds, both parties are in lockstep with enriching billionaires.

The REAL story isn’t in Fauci’s emails. It’s published out in the open. Fauci argued in a 2012 journal paper that the benefits of gain-of-function research would be worth more than the risk. Something like Covid-19 leaking from a lab was the EXACT scenario worried about when gain-of-function research was going on, and was debated in the scientific community. And gee, there’s a lab in Wuhan doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, and the virus looks exactly like it would if you engineered a bat coronavirus to be more infectious to humans. Do you believe THAT is a coincidence?

That billionaires got rich from the crisis and authoritarian governments and other various actors used it to their benefit is to be expected. “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

How did you know that the ‘virus looks exactly like it would if you engineered a bat coronavirus to be more infectious to humans’?

Read the Nick Wade article for details, but in short: The furin cleavage site. The only SARS virus to have this particular trick to make it adept at infecting humans, and a method that has been used in the past to do gain-of-function research, including by the head researcher at the Wuhan Institute, Shi Zheng-li. Also, the codons (amino acid encodings) are distinctly human.

Human coronaviruses such as 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1 which cause flu-like symptoms have been around for decades. As ALL human coronaviruses originated from bat coronaviruses which spread through intermediate animals, does that mean they were also ‘engineered to be more infectious to humans’?

We traced the evolution of previous bat coronaviruses outbreaks, SARS and MERS, and saw how it progressively became more infections to humans. SARS2 came out of Wuhan perfectly adapted to humans, and no progression has been found.

Why are you guys so obsessed with Wuhan?

Because that was ground zero for the infection. That’s also the location of the Wuhan Institute doing dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. The real question is why you guys are so obsessed with NOT looking at Wuhan as the most obvious source. I guess Unz’s theory that the US deliberately released a virus in China like a bunch of morons, expecting no blowback once it reached the shores of the US, makes you blind to the most obvious explanation.

How come you guys are ignoring the Italian ‘G’ strain which emerged in Lombardy during the last week of February 2020?

Because virus strains happen, as viruses mutate quickly. But it’s still a variant of SARS2. I’m pretty sure I explained this to you before in comments on another story.

Here’s a video interview of Nicholas Wade who admitted that there is NO evidence whatsoever to prove his ‘personal opinion’ that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was likely ‘man-made’ in a lab which then ‘escaped’ from the Wuhan Institute Virology:

This is a very dishonest reply. You never address the evidence given that it is human-engineered, mainly the furin cleavage site and the human codons. Instead, you link to a 30 minute video without providing any timestamps and lie about what was said.

Nick said there was no direct evidence, for either theory (timepstamps 11:19 and 32:44). In the case of natural theory, we would expect intermediate hosts and to find a progression of the virus, as was done for the original SARS and MERS. For the lab leak theory, we would have to have unfettered access to the Wuhan lab records, which China is not allowing — rather the opposite, those records are under seal. Expecting the Chinese government to acknowledge it came from a lab, if that is the case, is ridiculous.

A direct quote from 32:44:

“As I say in the article, there is no direct evidence for either theory, so there is no proof for either theory. But if you take the available evidence and say which theory explains it better, well on present evidence, in my view lab escape explains it better. So that’s what I think is the more probable outcome based on what we know so far.”

The question is, why are you lying and so keen on discounting the lab leak theory?

Nicholas Wade is not even a trained virologist but a science writer.

Ad hominen attacking the messenger, not the argument. Any science writer can do the research and discover the arguments made by people who do have credentials and relay the arguments. If the argument he made was wrong, then say how it is wrong. But you don’t do that. And if you want the qualified expert who shares the same opinion, we have it:

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”

Ground zero? Just because China was the first to discover SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan does not mean that the Wuhan strain was the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2.

Wuhan was ground zero for the hospitalizations and subsequent outbreak, which just happened to be the same city hosting the lab that was conducting gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. Weird how you try to handwave that away by supposing the virus came from elsewhere, without ever addressing the positive evidence we have.

In fact, multiple strains of SARS-CoV-2 were later discovered within months of each other in Lombardy, Italy and Daegu, South Korea whose phylogenetic analyses show them to be sibling strains to the Wuhan strain which implies that the Wuhan strain is NOT ancestral to the other strains. Then there are also scientific evidence which show the presence of Covid-19 antibodies in wastewater and blood samples all over the world throughout 2019 BEFORE the viral outbreak in Wuhan, thereby disproving the premise that the Wuhan strain is the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2.

Link your evidence. Hospitalizations followed Wuhan, not the other way around.

Just the opposite as SARS-CoV-2 has been found to mutate SLOWLY, at the rate of two character mutations per month. The Italian strain contains the D614G mutation which the Wuhan strain didn’t have.

Slowly doesn’t mean not at all. Italian hospitalizations followed Wuhan months later. The key word is strain. Where’s your reference claiming that D614G is not derivative of the virus out of Wuhan? You’re talking about a single amino acid change.

Phylogenetic analysis show that the Italian strain containing the D614G mutation did NOT descend from the Wuhan strain which does NOT contain the D614G mutation. Both are sibling strains which implies they must have evolved naturally from a common ancestral strain, thereby disproving both ‘Out of Wuhan’ theories — either the Wuhan ‘lab leak’ theory or the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market theory — as the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

Cite your claims.

I am not in a position to say that the furing clevage site and the human codons provide scientific evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 is ‘human-engineered’.

Then why did you ask for evidence if you aren’t in a position to analyze it? Why did you pretend it didn’t exist instead of acknowledging it and admitting your inability to analyze it? And why do you act like you are in a position to analyze scientific evidence when it argues in favor of natural origins?

And most importantly, why did you lie about what Nick said in the video link you gave?

It’s because you have a pro-China agenda. You lied for Mother China. You got caught, red-handed.

Neither does Nicholas Wade in the linked video interview in which he repeatedly says that there is ‘NO DIRECT EVIDENCE’ to prove his PERSONAL OPINION about the Wuhan strain being ‘human-engineered’ which allegedly leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Why are you ignoring the scientific opinion of eminent virologist, Nobel prize winner, and former head of the California Institute of Technology, David Baltimore?

Caught again.

Coincidence is not causation.

It can be. If somebody was standing next to a smashed shop window, and he had blood on his hands and was holding a rock, you could argue that it was mere coincidence. Maybe he had another reason for holding that rock, and maybe his hand was bloody because of another reason. It could all just be a terrible coincidence. But the evidence can also lead to the truth, that the person holding the rock with a bloody hand next to the smashed window was the one who smashed the window.

And so given the evidence, which you at first ignored, downplayed, misdirected, and smeared through ad hominen, the Wuhan lab is a prime culprit. Same city. Doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. Doing this research in not even the highest levels of safety. And the danger was warned about in advance, years before. And in the eyes of experts, the virus looks engineered, unlike any other coronavirus and no evidence for natural evolution. China prevents access to records that would tell us if it escaped from a lab. But we’re all supposed to just shrug our shoulders that this is a mere coincidence?

Caught again.

Just because Wuhan was the first to discover the viral outbreak by reporting the Wuhan strain DNA to scientific authorities worldwide does not prove that the Wuhan strain was the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2.

Again ignoring that Wuhan was ground zero for the outbreak of SARS2 hospitalizations.

Caught again.

Since the DNA samples of those multiple strains are available for phylogenetic analyses, that scientific evidence is sufficient proof to determine whether SARS-CoV-2 originated in Wuhan or not. Here’s the proof:

https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yxmpjqkdzvr/

I asked you to site the reference for your scientific claim that “Phylogenetic analysis show that the Italian strain containing the D614G mutation did NOT descend from the Wuhan strain which does NOT contain the D614G mutation”. What you have cited is an article on Reuters that states,

“The analysis shows there are currently seven main strains of the virus. The original strain, detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, is the L strain. The virus then mutated into the S strain at the beginning of 2020. That was followed by V and G strains. Strain G mutated yet further into strains GR, GH and GV. Several other infrequent mutations were collectively grouped together as strain O.”

Your reference refutes your claim. Caught again.

I won’t be replying anymore if all you have is the same old garbage. Your propaganda and lies have been refuted. Mother China should be embarrassed.

Apparently I added my last reply as a new post, instead of attaching it as a reply here. This is a courtesy notification. I wouldn’t want you to think your propaganda and lies went unrefuted.

Did you take look at the phylogenetic graph in the reuters article linked in my last post?

Yes, and I quoted text from the accompanying article which explains the graph and refutes your claim. Your very source says the opposite of what you claim.

We’ve established already that you are a liar for China, and also that you say you aren’t in a position to evaluate scientific evidence when it shows human engineering, so the only determination that remains is if you are again lying, or are you really this incompetent that you can’t understand your sources, even when I directly quote from them.

What part of the quote do you not understand? Is it the word “mutate”? Is it the word “original’?

“The original strain, detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, is the L strain. The virus then mutated into the S strain at the beginning of 2020. That was followed by V and G strains.”

Furthermore, scientific studies showing the presence of Covid-19 antibodies as early as September 2019 in blood samples collected from patients in Italy proves that the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2 had been circulating in Europe BEFORE the Wuhan outbreak in late December 2019.

And yet the hospitalization outbreak in Italy occurred after Wuhan, suggesting that such results are misleading. But there’s also indications that the virus was already spreading in Wuhan in September 2019, so pointing to the same date in Italy doesn’t rule out Wuhan:

https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-data-suggests-coronavirus-hit-china-earlier-researchers/story?id=71123270

The graph also show ALL the strains having descended from a ‘common ancestor’ which represents the ancestral strain. That ‘common ancestor’ is NOT the Wuhan ‘L’ strain as clearly seen in the phylogenetic graph.

You misinterpret the graph, and ignore the text which shows you are wrong, which I have already pointed out to you twice now. The L strain was the original strain, and the variants came later. You have yet to provide a single scientific reference which claims otherwise. The one reference you did provide explicitly states the L was the original, and G a variant. In addition to being a proven liar, you’ve already admitted you aren’t competent enough to analyze scientific evidence, so you are in no position to be interpreting graphs in a manner that reach conclusions opposite to the accompanying text.

What you fail to understand is that the virus had been circulating for months in Wuhan before being recognized as an epidemic, and samples come late and sporadically in the process. If you had a perfect record of the virus, you could lay out every single mutation in a perfect tree. Because the record is sparse, you are left with gaps and theoretical common ancestors.

You also ignore, time and time again, that the Wuhan hospitalizations were ground zero, and other strains and other hospitalization crises came after Wuhan. Only a dishonest and dimwitted China propagandist tries to peddle the theory that the outbreak occurred at any other location than Wuhan.

Nowhere I have read anything about the Iaranian strain of the virus… Do you both have an explanation?

Probably because Iran is a small country in a larger region, and unless there’s a particular strain that originated in Iran that comes to dominate, there would be no reason to talk about an “Iranian strain”. That said, there are scientific papers that analyze genetic sequences coming out of Iran. For example:

“Profiling of Initial Available SARS-CoV-2 Sequences from Iranian Related COVID-19 Patients”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7481902/

“Variation analysis of SARS-CoV-2 complete sequences from Iran”
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.23.427885v1.full.pdf

Forgive me, my second question to antibeast and chrimony was badly framed. It seems you are ‘fighting’ over which state actor would be responsible, right. It can’t be France, neither Canada so it would be the US of A or PRC, right?

Putting aside blame, the most basic question is where the virus came from. The two main theories are that it came out of nature and that it was engineered in a lab. You can dissect those theories further, which gets into questions of blame, such as if wet markets in China are to blame, or which lab, and was it a leak or a deliberate release, etc.

My main argument has been that the virus was leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, and “antibeast”, being a propagandist for China, argues for the natural origin. The thing is, when it comes to blame, if it leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, that doesn’t mean China is solely to blame. The gain-of-function research (they take viruses found in nature and make them more deadly to humans — yes, that’s insane as it sounds) going on in Wuhan, China was initiated in the US, and spread to Wuhan from there. The US was also funding the Wuhan lab to do this research. It has been for years warned that this research was dangerous and should be stopped. Fauci argued that the benefits of such research outweighed the risks. The theory is that these viruses will emerge from nature, and so to be prepared we have to engineer and study them first!

None of this is a “conspiracy theory”. It’s undisputed facts on the ground.

You didn’t do your homework.

No, in addition to being a proven liar, and having already admitted that you aren’t competent to analyze scientific evidence, you are an obstinate propagandist. You keep trying to draw a conclusion that is the opposite from the one stated in your source, which I have repeatedly quoted to you. Rather than go around in circles repeating myself, I leave you to your propaganda.

the massive outbreak that hit Iran’s political elites had no apparent connection to China or Chinese whatsoever

Really? Let’s compare your claims to this Reuter’s article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-iran-qom-idUSKBN21K1NO

Now, I am completely open to the possibility Reuters gets things wrong either by accident or intentionally, but the same can be said of you. You obviously have a hammer and have gone looking for nails.

Quotes from the Reuter’s article in italics:

“Qom, among Iran’s most important cities, has close links to China and is home to many Chinese. Iran’s health minister has publicly said that the virus is believed to have arrived from China by a merchant from Qom, who died of the virus.”

“Wuhan and the Holy City of Qom are over 3,600 miles apart, a pretty long distance for an accidental lab-leak to jump.”

Apparently planes don’t exist in your world.

But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak.

So a full two months after Wuhan. Why did the spooks wait so long? It also hit Italy hard in February too. But you ignore that, because it doesn’t match the narrative.

Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior.

Do you think that it was an election season might have something to do with it? Do you think the religious practice of people licking shrines in Qom might have something to do with it? https://nypost.com/2020/03/02/iranians-licking-religious-shrines-in-defiance-of-coronavirus-spread/

Reuters article: “And, when the authorities did become aware of domestic cases of the flu-like virus in early January, they didn’t announce the news until weeks later, out of concern that releasing detailed information would unsettle the public ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for February 21, according to a senior official with direct knowledge of the matter.”

Wuhan lab is located 20 miles(!) from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which was the earliest epicenter of the Wuhan outbreak. A distance of 20 miles seems pretty far for an accidental lab-leak.

So they don’t have cars, highways, and mass transit in Wuhan? A twenty mile trip into the city of Boston was nothing when I worked around there.

There’s also this from Nicholas Wade’s article:

“Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus’s origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe.”

Your focus on a deliberate “bioweapon” obscures the Occam’s Razor and much more dangerous position: That scientists in the US and China were funding and conducting gain-of-function research for years, and it was warned about for years how dangerous this research was, and the exact scenario of a lab escape causing a worldwide pandemic was feared. The Wuhan lab was doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Wuhan was the epicenter of novel coronavirus outbreak. Gee, what possibly could have gone wrong?

300 military personnel is not “cover”. It is a prime target for surveillance.

US citizens can easily visit China whenever. The very least likely time for the US to release a virus would be when there were 300 of their own military personnel there, being surveiled intensively.

That’s like trying to anonymously pee on your friend’s floor, just as you’ve told him you’re going to the loo.

The crux, and only really good part, of Ron Unz’s argument, is actually strong circumstantial evidence that the Americans didn’t do it!

US citizens can easily visit China whenever. The very least likely time for the US to release a virus would be when there were 300 of their own military personnel there, being surveiled intensively.

Even worse, you risk your soldiers mixing in with the population and bringing the virus back home, which apparently occurred for the US and Canada, at the minimum. The whole suggestion is idiotic if you think it through.

https://prospect.org/coronavirus/did-the-military-world-games-spread-covid-19/
https://www.rebelnews.com/covid_coverup_trudeau_govt_helped_china_hide_origins_of_covid_19

They kiss the shrine and don’t lick it just like the Christians or the Jews.

Kissing a shrine during a pandemic is bad enough, but apparently some religious idiot made a point of licking the shrine on video in an act of defiance.

Italy is home to the largest Chinese diaspora in Europe, officially circa 350,000 people, but in reality much more, considering that thousands overstay their visas. Of those, the majority is concentrated in the region of Milan and Venice, the two principal hotbeds of earliest Covid19 outbreaks in Italy. So cross-border contamination is much plausible.

In other words, a sane explanation for why it hit Italy hard early, which had nothing to do with a targeted “bioweapon” attack.

More importantly, Italy is the only European country to have broken ranks with the NATO-led world order, and has officially joined China’s “Belt and Road Initiative“, a transformational economic and geopolitical project that will re-shape the world. So deliberate contamination by the US NeoCon crazies would be equally plausible.

You mean even more stupid, because now instead of just targeting Iran and China, you also targeted a country in Europe with a virus. Using a virus as a bioweapon is an incredibly stupid idea, and even military brass know this.

The most obvious explanation is staring Ron Unz and his supporters right in the face: that dangerous gain-of-function research on coronaviruses was occurring at a Wuhan under lax security, the epicenter was Wuhan, viruses have been known to escape from such laboratories — the source was likely the Wuhan lab. And if you really want to drag the US into this — congratulations, they initiated and funded this research in the US before funding it in Wuhan! But instead of screaming at the top of their lungs that this insanely dangerous research needs to be sensibly shut down, everywhere, they insist it’s the sole responsibility of neocons as part of a shadowy bioweapon attack on China and Iran. Give me a break.

You’re making yourself look ridiculous.

Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment. You think the US did the most idiotic thing ever, and used a virus as a bioweapon against Iran and China, under the “cover” of 300 US soldiers in China, which then more than likely brought the virus back to the US and Canada. And you believe this instead of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where novel coronaviruses were being engineered in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. And rather than lend your voice to shut down highly dangerous research, you’d rather try to drag people into a stupid conspiracy theory that takes the heat off of people like Fauci and Peter Daszak. Un-fucking-believable.

It’s one thing to throw an idea out there, but it’s another to keep peddling it despite all the flaws that bury the Occam’s Razor key to this whole fiasco. You have no shame.

According to Wikipedia, Iran has a total Chinese population of 2000-3000, one of the smallest in the world, and I’d assume that the overwhelming majority are concentrated in the huge city of Tehran rather than in the Holy City of Qom

Do those numbers include Chinese workers? I guess you know better than Iran’s health ministry then:

““Since those infected in Qom had no contact with the Chinese… the source is probably Chinese workers who work in Qom and have travelled to China,” she added.” https://eurasiantimes.com/chinese-workers-suspected-of-bringing-coronavirus-in-iran-neighboring-balochistan-on-high-alert/

Also from the Wikipedia article you reference:

“Most modern Chinese expatriates work on construction or other engineering projects; a few run import/export companies or other small businesses. Large-scale investment projects are also becoming more common; businessmen from Zhejiang began building Iran’s first Chinese trade complex in 2006. The 330,000 square-metre site in the south of the country, located five kilometres from Khorramshahr and twenty kilometres from the Iraqi border, is expected to contain 1,500 businesses and cost RMB600 million to complete.”

If back in 2019, some experienced epidemiologists had been told that a disease epidemic, whether natural or caused by a lab-leak, had broken out in Wuhan, China, and were asked to predict where it would next randomly spread, I think Iran and Qom would have probably been towards the bottom of the global list, let alone the Iranian parliament and political elites.

Chinese workers and religious practices (gatherings and kissing shrines). You never address these.

That’s very interesting. I don’t think it’s ever been solidly established exactly when the Iranian outbreak began, and I’d always assumed it was around mid-February. But according to that Reuters report, it probably began in early January.

And it probably began in Wuhan in September or October. They were welding people into their apartments by December. No matter how you slice it, it hit Iran full force two months after Wuhan. Why the delay?

So America assassinated Iran’s top military commander Gen. Soleimani on January 3rd, and probably just a couple of days later, Iran was hit with a deadly, mysterious viral illness. What a strange coincidence…

If the government was the target, why did it take until February for them to start dropping? Occam’s Razor says they caught it from the virus circulating among the populace, during an election season. But you have a hammer, and will continue pounding screws, won’t you?

Sorry dear, but this comment brings absolutely nothing to the discussion.

Sorry moron, but your comment brings nothing to the discussion. It just continues peddling a stupid conspiracy theory that flies in the face of the most obvious facts on the ground. You’d rather turn a blind eye to insanely dangerous research (in which both the US and China share culpability) just so you could keep your precious conspiracy theory that blames the US alone, and leaves the people responsible for the research untouched.

No. The simple, sensible and safe way for US research authorities to exculpate themselves from any hypothetical error made at the WIV would have been to simply state the true facts.

They remotely funded a valuable Health research, as did other Western nations, they did not manage it in the field, so cannot be held responsible for any wrongdoing happening as a result.

It wasn’t “valuable” research, it was insanely dangerous research that was at one point prohibited for good reason. But Fauci argued it was “valuable” and funded it through a proxy group to spread this research to China. That’s why Fauci and Peter Daszak were so intent on burying the lab leak theory. They have blood on their hands.

Since your name wasn’t familiar to me, I assumed you were just a pro-Israel activist-type, but checking your commenter archive, you seem more anti-PRC, possibly Taiwanese.

If you want to put me in a box, I’m pro-truth and pro doing what is right. That’s why I’m willing to criticize the US just as much as China on this insanely dangerous gain-of-function research that was initiated by the US and funded by the US, and spread to China with US support. Do you not have anything to say about this research?

I always thought the Wuhan lab being near the epicenter was highly suspicious, and of course I had heard the earlier stories about how the virus looked engineered, but I did not realize until the Wade article about the gain-of-function research that had already been going on for years, the funding, the furin cleaving site, the opinion of expert virologists, the years of warning about this exact scenario, etc. How anybody can look at what all has come out, and care only about a speculative “bioweapon” theory in the face of that, is unconscionable.

Either way, your views are hardly surprising.

In what manner? That I can see a screw and bring a screwdriver to a table, and not a hammer? When your article first came out with the bioweapon theory, I considered it plausible. But giving it further thought and the full weight of all the facts we know now, I consider it wildly speculative and dismissive of the Occam’s Razor solution, that it was a lab leak.

And you don’t seem very good at separating factual information from the opinions, propaganda, and speculation contained in news stories.

Are you looking in the mirror? Your entire theory is based on speculation, and fits in line with anti-US propaganda.

Let’s focus on the facts:

Oh, you want to focus on the facts that have already been hashed over? Ok, but let’s mention these facts first:

o Wuhan was the epicenter of the novel bat coronavirus, both in time and place.

o The Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, which made these viruses more pathogenic to humans.

o The research was not done under the highest safety levels.

o Coronaviruses have leaked from labs before.

o Several virology experts are under the opinion that the virus looked engineered for humans.

o Unlike SARS and MERS, no intermediate or evolutionary hosts have been found.

Should we a) first suspect a leak out of a Wuhan lab? Or b) go for a speculative theory that the US deliberately leaked a virus as a bioweapon under the “cover” of 300 US soldiers in China for military games (and said virus ended up going back to the US and Canada when these soldiers returned).

(1) After China, the next major Covid outbreak took place in Iran

It went to Italy at the same time. And it was two months later.

with their political elites hit especially hard.

Two months later. After having circulated in the population. During an election season. In a city where religious gatherings and the kissing of shrines are common. Do you care to explain the delay? Or acknowledge the circumstances that could have helped it spread?

All the subsequent major early outbreaks took place in countries and regions with enormous numbers of Chinese, who were the obvious vector, but Iran has an absolutely minuscule Chinese population.

You relied on residential numbers without knowing anything about non-residential workers.

(2) Iran is honeycombed with American and Israeli spies and terrorist-cells, who for years have successfully carried out numerous high-profile assassinations and major acts of sabotage.

Yes, and? Then why the two month delay between Wuhan and Iran? And why do you think the US needed the “cover” of 300 soldiers for military games to release the virus in China? The spooks couldn’t buy a plane ticket or use the US embassy? Do you realize how ridiculous YOU sound?

The Iranian Covid outbreak seems to have begun almost exactly around the time that American assassinated Iran’s top military leader.

Then why did it take for late in February to have an impact? Do you think anything through?

None of that proves anything, but it would seem *extraordinarily* suspicious to any reasonable observer.

If all you have is a hammer, then yes, everything looks like nail. But for such a suspicious fellow, you seem awfully nonchalant about a lab conducting gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in a city where a novel bat coronavirus emerges.

Meanwhile, you note that Iran has important business and industrial relations with China. But that’s true of nearly all the countries in the world. For example, it’s been widely reported that a million Chinese currently work in Africa, yet there weren’t any early outbreaks there.

Religious gatherings and shrine kissing. Cultural practices. It’s also a winter virus. Blind luck. Any number of reasons. But you can’t explain the two month delay if Iran was deliberately targeted with a bioweapon.

There are more than 5 million Chinese-Americans, a good fraction of whom are China-born and retain close ties to that country, and they were an important early vector for our own outbreaks, yet these occurred long after the one in Iran.

You’re wrong. Since you quoted Wikipedia as a source earlier, I’ll do the same:

“On February 6, the earliest confirmed American death with COVID-19 (that of a 57-year-old woman) occurred in Santa Clara County, California. The CDC did not report its confirmation until April 21,[18] by which point nine other COVID-19 deaths had occurred in Santa Clara County.[51] The virus had been circulating undetected at least since early January and possibly as early as November.[52] On February 25, the CDC warned the American public for the first time to prepare for a local outbreak.[53][54] The next day, New York City saw the sickening of its “patient zero”, Manhattan attorney Lawrence Garbuz, then thought to be the first community-acquired case.[55][56][57]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_States

Most of your points support the artificial virus theory, which I fully endorse.

And yet you don’t answer the main question I posed to you regarding this:

“If you want to put me in a box, I’m pro-truth and pro doing what is right. That’s why I’m willing to criticize the US just as much as China on this insanely dangerous gain-of-function research that was initiated by the US and funded by the US, and spread to China with US support. Do you not have anything to say about this research?“

I checked, and although my numerous Covid articles from the last 14 months had together attracted around 10,000 comments, not a single one of those came from you, so it’s possible that you haven’t bothered reading them.

As I’ve already said, I read your original article positing the bioweapon theory, and I considered it plausible at the time, but after further thought and given new facts, I rejected it in favor of the Occam’s Razor lab leak scenario.

If not, you really should, because they directly addressed many of the issues you’re currently raising, and it’s pointless for me to just repeat my arguments in this thread.

This is a copout. You’ve spent several posts trying to argue your case. Handwaving at your rather wordy articles to bolster it now is weak sauce. But I did read over the original one again, and I read the most relevant recent one for this discussion, which covers the Nicholas Wade article, and bemoans that he doesn’t go into bioweapon theory:

https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-truth-and-the-whole-truth-on-the-origins-of-covid-19/

The only line of evidence not already discussed here worth bringing up is what you consider the “smoking gun”:

“According to these multiply-sourced mainstream media accounts, by “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency was already preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. Yet at that point, probably no more than a couple of dozen individuals had been infected in that city of 11 million, with few of those yet having any serious symptoms. The implications are rather obvious.”

Except I already shared a link showing that hospitals in Wuhan were unusually busy around September/October, so it’s quite possible they picked up on something. And considering that we’re talking about spooks, it’s also quite possible that they picked up on chatter that might have accompanied a lab leak.

By the way, not even once do you mention the phrase “gain-of-function” when discussing Nicholas Wade’s bombshell article. That’s the whole damn story.