ZeroHedge "reporting" on Coronavirus is an evil disgrace
And that's at best.
At worst, they might be/have been the deliberate initiators of a disgusting hoax that both deceives their readers and defames a scientist who has nothing to do with the coronavirus, or bats, or bat viruses.
To begin with, they weren't banned from twitter because they were telling uncomfortable truths, or even because they "doxxed" the researcher at the Wutan level 4 facility. They were banned because they libeled the guy, based on no actual evidence of any kind, and then to make it worse, they published his contact info and encouraged their readers to harass him. It was pretty straightforward stochastic terrorism. Here is 100% of the actual information connecting that guy to the 2019-nCoV:
A. He works at the Wutan Level IV lab
B. He studies coronaviruses that infect bats
C. His lab is 7 or 8 miles from the "fish" market that has been marked as ground zero
D. 2019-nCoV appears to be a bat-hosted coronavirus.
That is it. 100%. From that, ZeroConscience directly accused him of:
A. Working to weaponize the bat viruses he was studying.
B. Releasing, accidentally or deliberately, one of his samples into "the wild".
And then they suggested that their readers contact him and demand the truth.
Let me be clear about this: If they had done anything like that to anybody working at any significant research facility in the US or Canada, they wouldn't have been just banned from twitter, they would have been sued by his employers into tiny little bits of humiliated regret.
Second, they have invoked the "Winnipeg connection", both directly, and in the various kookarama sources that they cite and link to. These sites imply that because a coronavirus was sent to Winnipeg from the Netherlands, there is a high likelihood that somehow 2019-nCoV was engineered from that virus. Yeah, no, they have a "reason" for saying that: Last year there was a scandal involving samples of two pathogens that were sent from the Winnipeg lab to the Wutan lab. In that context, the sites assert as fact that "the virus" was "smuggled" to Wutan from the Level IV lab in Winnipeg; and they repeatedly assert as established fact that the researcher who shipped them is a Chinese spy. Again, these assertions are supported by not one single actual fact that has ever been presented to the public by anyone involved. Here is 100% of the relevant information that has been made public by anyone with any first-hand knowledge:
A. The coronavirus shipped to Winnipeg from the Netherlands was a different strain from either the bat viruses being studied at Wutan, or from the apparent bat virus known as 2019-nCoV. All by itself, this simple fact completely moots the "winnipeg connection" thread, but nonetheless, know further that:
B. The two pathogens sent from Winnipeg to Wutan weren't "smuggled" -- they were sent with the full knowledge of the relevant authorities.
C. Neither of the two pathogens involved in the Winnipeg/Wutan scandal were coronaviruses
D. The entire scandal revolved around one missing piece of paperwork -- the one that would have stipulated whatever Intellectual Property rights were held over the pathogens, and by whom. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that the pathogens were "stolen", a word that appears repeatedly in Kookarama.
E. Neither the researcher nor her husband, both of whom were indeed escorted from the premises, was ever accused of espionage by any Canadian authority. As far as anyone knows -- certainly as far as anyone with any firsthand knowledge has ever said -- they were given the boot because she violated the paperwork protocols in a field where violations of paperwork protocols are viewed as Extremely. Serious. Matters.
Now, don't misunderstand what I'm saying. I am not saying that we know the whole truth of the Winnipeg/Wutan scandal. I kinda doubt it, really. What I am saying is that nobody who knows anything about it has said Word One to the contrary. Which means, any remotely controversial or interesting other thing you may have read about that scandal is just something some jackass made up out of nothing. Out. Of. Nothing.
And finally (at least with respect to my own patience in the matter), there is the issue of the "preprint article" supposedly submitted by some big-shot researcher. To quote a c99p contributor:
And you did not likely find the published conclusions of a top Chinese scientist that the novel coronavirus probably came from a laboratory in Wuhan (or that a laboratory just 300 meters from the Wuhan fish market kept bats and was researching bat viruses) covered by the MSM, unless it was to mock it as conspiracy theory - but there is is on Zerohedge.
Feel free to follow that link if you want to either make yourself stupider, or alternatively to learn something about the manipulative rhetoric of people who are lying to you in order to make you stupider.
[SIDEBAR: I don't want to pick on the c99p poster who wrote the above paragraph, but nevertheless: When you have just read about some guy you've never heard of before, and you have exactly one source of information for what little you know about him, and that source is itself, to be polite, "controversial" with respect to its reliability and credibility, it's not really appropriate to prefix the guy's name with a qualifier like "top". In doing so, you are representing to the community that this is an established truth. Well, it's not -- at least not based only on the ZH article. I wouldn't have been entirely surprised to find that he didn't exist at all (though it turns out that he does. poor bastard. whether he's a "top Chinese scientist," i'm not prepared to judge.). ]
For your sakes, I'll save you the click to ZeroEthics and throw down a few excerpts. I haven't bothered to copy in any of the hotlinks in the original. Don't worry, you aren't missing anything.
... the mainstream media, whose purpose is similar to that of Beijing in minimizing public concerns and panic even if it means fabricating reality, presses on with the popular theory that the virus emerged from the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan (we recently showed why this appears very unlikely) while branding anyone who suggests that the coronavirus might have originated as a bioweapon developed in a secretive Wuhan lab as deranged conspiracy theorist (a propaganda approach first popularized in the 1960s by the CIA to discredit controversial views).
...
That has now changed, however, with what may be a "smoking gun" report, first noted by Harvard to the big house, from a scientist at the prestigious South China University of Technology in Guangzhou China. A pre-print published by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, titled "The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus" whose abstract is the following...
Okay, and no you don't have to pay me, or even thank me, but here's your first lesson in deconstructing bullshit rhetoric: If some emmeffer decides to throw the word "prestigious" in front of some institution that you've never heard of, he's probably scamming you. The "prestigious" SCUT is certainly a large university, and it's pretty well-regarded for its engineering programs -- which seem to get ranked, by those who rank such things, somewhere in the mid-to-high double digits, worldwide. However, overall SCUT gets ranked in the 350-450 range. I don't know. Maybe other folks have a different definition of "prestige" from mine.
Contrast that with Harvard University -- which just yesterday was confirmed to be, by c99p acclamation, insufficiently credible in the realm of certifying the quality of its own graduates, for anybody to ascribe any merit at all to one of its more notable, of late, alumni -- is almost universally ranked as #1. Not in the US, but in the whole fucking world. My own alma mater, for that matter, typically ranks in the low double-digits for its engineering program (from which I hold a degree) and mid-double-digits overall, worldwide.
Anyway, per ZeroTruth:
Who is Botao and should anyone listen to him? Well, yes: this is what we find about the research group of the Harvard post-doc:
The Xiao group study mainly in the fields of cellular and molecular biomechanics, single molecule biophysics and engineering. Current research areas are: protein-ligand interactions, DNA and RNA assembly, high-throughput nanometer measurements and manipulation, mathematical modeling and quantitative analysis. The experimental techniques include: magnetic tweezers, optical tweezers, biomembrane force probe, fluorescent microscopy, genetic engineering, and chromatography. An project example is using high-throughput single molecule techniques to study the modulation of protein drugs on interactions of integrins and their ligands such as TGF-beta. We also study von Willebrand Factor and glycoproteins on platelets. We collaborate with a number of well-known universities and institutions, and a few enterprises. Our research will be of relevance for the prevention and treatment of cancer, immune and cardiovascular diseases.
That's kind of cool. I mean -- if you have the background to understand those credentials, you'll know that what it means is that he does research that is only peripherally related to the evolution and epidemiology of viruses, but hey, whatever. What really matters isn't whether Dr Xiao has worthy credentials with respect to commenting on bat viruses. What really matters is that this is a hoax.
If you try to follow the link to the supposed preprint at ResearchGate, you'll be out of luck, because no such page exists. But that's okay -- it definitely did exist -- you can in fact find it in the Wayback machine. Not that you need to, because the helpful folks at ZeroCred pasted the whole thing just in case. Just in case what? Well ...
And until we eagerly await the answer, here is the gist of Botao's paper, which we repost here just in case it does disappear after all (ResearchGate link here):
Whew! Way to go, intrepid emmeffers! You saved this critical info that the eebildoers forced ResearchGate to retract -- maybe even forced Dr. Xiao to retract. Guys with dark glasses and skinny ties showing up at the lab, and all that. Or something. Who knows. Anyway, the ZeroSense writer grossly underrepresented the content that they had preserved -- it isn't the "gist", it's the entire article. And that's great, because it takes about 30 seconds perusal to realize that Dr. Xiao did not write this thing, that it is not and never was a preprint of anything that was ever going to be submitted to any journal of any kind, and that "the work" was not funded by "the National Natural Science Foundation of China" (which may or may not even exist, but probably does) because, most significantly, it contains no science of any kind. I don't mean it contains "bad" science. I mean, it contains no science. There is nothing in all of it that even pretends to be an analysis of the molecular biology of the 2019-nCoV pathogen. Nothing. Nada.
This is a nasty and unconscionable bait-and-switch, published by somebody exactly and only so that a whole lot of people would start flinging it, like so much monkey-poo, all over the intertubes. They invoked Xiao -- well, actually, they libeled him, by evilly representing him as the author of this content-free dumpster full of feces -- so that they could prate about the prestigious SCUT and brag on Xiao's credentials as a researcher in certain aspects of molecular biology; but there is no molecular biology in this sad document, which is really just a restating of a bunch of stuff we all already knew, if we were paying attention; Especially if we were paying attention to ZeroMarbles and the various sources on which they rely.
And that is why it ended up being redacted from ResearchGate -- because either Dr. Xiao contacted them and said, "HEY!! THIS ISN'T ME", or somebody at ResearchGate took at look at it and realized it was a hoax.
Which brings us back to that very nice little bit of prescience on the part of ZeroResponsibility, grabbing all that text before the nefarious forces of the New World Order could flex their eebil muscles and have it snatched back out of the sphere of public knowledge.
Yes.
A very nice little bit of prescience.
** For the sake of anyone who doesn't believe my characterization, I may paste in the content of the hoax preprint in a comment below. However, it will take a while to get it formatted to any reasonable degree.
Also, as a final note, although I stated categorically that Botao Xiao didn't write this abortion, I admit that it's possible; which is to say, it's possible that he's out of his mind and decided to commit professional suicide by attempting to publish a brief tract of ascientific blather. Yup. It's possible.
Comments
heh, what is the meaning of "doxxed"?
Is that a word from the dialect of my passed away Cameroonian husband's tribe?
The articles become unreadable for the readers who haven't been affected yet by the snark virus and their martyrical fighting researchers of the non-snarky virus.
I am trying to read here through the EB and all other essays concerning the virus thingie. It is almost impossible to follow through.
Just saying, I appreciate all of the writing, but it's a bit too voluminous and verbally flowery. How are we going to understand what has been said? I would need a week to 'get' the 'scientific' snark dialect.
https://www.euronews.com/live
"Doxxing" means
to publish someone's real name and contact information so that malicious internet people can harass them. See also "swatting", which is to report a nonexistent crime to the notoriously trigger happy American police in the hope that they will respond by "going in with guns blazing", literally attempted murder.
On to Biden since 1973
thx, I appreciate the translation! /nt
https://www.euronews.com/live
Small words / short sentences version:
a. ZeroHedge's reports about the COVID19 coronavirus are a pack of lies.
b. ZeroHedge wasn't banned from twitter for telling dangerous truths, they were banned for telling dangerous lies
c. If you are reading an article about COVID19, and you see the word "Winnipeg", the article is probably a pack of lies.
d. If you are reading an article about COVID19 and it contains the words "Wutan", "Virology", and "bioweapon", the article is probably a pack of lies.
e. If you are reading an article about COVID19 and it contains the terms "Chinese scientist" and "preprint", the article is probably a pack of lies. The story about the important Chinese scientist releasing a "preprint" of a paper where he proves COVID19 must have been created in a lab is a hoax. You can find copies of the preprint online. The document is a fake, a childish imitation of a science paper.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
EXCELLENT information!
Too bad the TFG crowd will totally ignore it. (TFG: Too Far gone).
Whoa, cowboy
Well, the offending poster would be me. Allowing that Zero Hedge may have over or mis-stated something in their
"Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?" article, I still contend there is useful and relevant information therein - and, in general, I find more useful and thought-provoking material on that site (on a whole range of topics) than I do anywhere else on the Internet.
And I would rather try to sift out what is valid/useful/timely/germane/plausible there from what isn't than engage in diatribes.
I am definitely not a scientist, but I also believe that you don't - as an eminent Jewish philosopher once put it - need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and that there is significant substance to ZH's articles.
For one thing, I doubt that many people knew that bat coronaviruses were being researched in Wuhan,not only by the Dr. Zhou, but by a whole team led by him, or that bats' immune systems allow them to harbor highly pathogenic viruses without becoming ill themselves, and that this makes them interesting subjects for virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists and such-like.
Looks like they were planning on adding to their team, too. Anyone with PhD level background in related fields interested in relocating to Wuhan can check the WIH's help wanted posting (from Nov. 2019) here.
The ZH article also quotes from a bio/press release on Zhou (Jan. 2020, still up on the WIV site) that
(Zhou)
And where do we find Shi Zheng-Li? Well, among other places, collaborating with researchers from the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, Department of Epidemiologies) working on stuff like
"SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronavirus pose threat for human emergence" (published Nov. 2015).
In which they (spoiler alert) engineer a chimera virus based mainly on a SARS-like bat virus with features that enhance its infectivity, virulence, tropism (ability to attack a broader range of cells) and resistance to preventative and therapeutic measures. That just *happens* to target the same cell receptors that COVID-19 does.
Like I say, I'm just an ignorant layman, but something about the above seems kind of familiar somehow.
You can go on Google now and find lots or articles on the recently-decoded spike proteins of COVID-19 and how that is going to lead to early vaccine breakthroughs - but little about how they vastly enhance the infectivity of the virus and even less about how those structures are typical of HIV and Ebola but not previously known to (naturally) occur in coronaviruses. Hmm..
Regarding the second article, suggesting that a Wuhan lab was the source of the virus, you admit, Rip that you've got no proof that Xiao was not the source of the article nor that it was withdrawn voluntarily nor that it was even factually incorrect.
You say there is no molecular biology content in the article and that it is all stuff we already knew.
Well, I can't conclusively say that the virus came from a Wuhan lab (then again, the article doesn't say that either). I can say that I didn't know there was another lab besides the WIV (the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention), in immediate proximity to the fish market that was keeping bats and engaged in bat research, as the article claims. Nor that the first coronavirus cases among medical personnel came from a hospital (Union Hospital) just across the street.
Hey, I don't *know* that now, and I'm willing to listen if you've got something that suggests that there is something factually wrong or implausible with the above.
How about letting us know that you think *is* a plausible explanation for what happened - even the Chinese media is backing off the "started in the market" claim.
BTW - if some people are willing to risk literal "suicide" by standing in front of tanks or posting to social media is it impossible that someone in a position to do so would take a similar risk in order to reveal an important truth - or a corrupt and incompetent government's lies?
The medical clinics in Wuhan have misleading names
The Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are at the same location - about 8.6 miles from the fish market.
There are seven "Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention" clinics in Wuhan. These all appear to be clinics serving the citizens of the city - not research centers. There are several located in the general area of the fish market which led to the false statements - "several hundred yards, across the street". All these clinics were involved during the outbreak of the disease because that is their purpose. It was these clinics (plus hospitals) that originally reported the rapidly rising number of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan.
You might want to have a care, being that you
did, after all, choose to characterize someone about whom you knew literally almost nothing as a "top Chinese scientist". I will refrain from characterizing that choice, but it doesn't reflect well on your discretion.
In fact, his web page hasn't been updated in 3 years, he's only ever published 8 or 9 papers, and has published nothing -- nothing -- since 2016. Moreover, notwithstanding the ignorance-based interpretations ZH and others have offered up about this supposed preprint, the important author would be not the first listed, but the last -- in this case, apparently a guy who is a cardiologist at a hospital in Wuhan. I wonder whether he even knows he's being defamed all over the world, right now, since he's not the one they singled out.
Either way, the important point is that it isn't a real paper. The professional suicide element refers, not to him speaking some sort of truth to power, it refers to the non-paperness of this thing. To repeat: There is no science -- not one word of original investigation or analysis relating to COVID19. It reads like any other CT blog entry. No scientists in full possession of their faculties would ever submit such a thing, anywhere, regardless of its political implication.
It. Is. Not. A. Scientific. Paper.
Sure, it looks a little bit like one. Somebody did a decent job of copying and pasting the format from some other article (likely one by B. Xiao, since it contains his contact info, grant info, etc.), read up on a handful of barely-related material, blathered a few paragraphs of nonsense, added the stylistically correct citations, and lyingly misrepresented it as something that someone with an actual scientific career had submitted, somewhere, with the expectation of eventual publication.
But that is all that is there -- a facsimile that superficially exhibits the conventional forms. Anybody who spends any amount of their lives reading scientific papers would look at this pastiche and laugh. It would be like handing you a book and telling you it's a novel, but when you open it up, you discover that each chapter is the text from a different one of those dozens of informational brochures you see at the doctor's office. You would start reading the first chapter, say to yourself, What the hell?, flip through a few more chapters, and say, confidently, Whatever the fuck this thing is, and regardless of the reason it was created, it sure as fuck is not a novel.
It is a hoax. A con. A bogosity. A fake. A phony. An illegitimate attack on the public mind. A foul and anti-human assault on Spiritus Mundi. Somewhere in sands of the desert a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
I share their indignation.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Slow down! Slow down!
I really want to understand what you are saying, but please put it in the vernacular. You know, for us simple folks who were just music teachers.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
but that's not as much fun.
and under no circumstance will i attempt to translate Yeats, from whom I stole those lines about the body of the lion and the indignant desert birds and all that.
but okay, as to the rest, I will try.
a. the Chinese researcher who supposedly wrote that preprint has no particular professional credibility. the place where he works is not prestigious, and his scientific record barely exists at all. that doesn't mean that he doesn't know what he's talking about, but it does mean that anyone who spews out the line that this guy is some kind of expert is wrong. to be generous.
b. scientific papers usually have a list of two or more authors. the first name in the list is that of "The First Author". This is normally the person who did the bulk of the work. (When two people have collaborated significantly on a paper, there can often be a negotiation over "who gets First Author". Rarely, there are "co-First Authors", except there really aren't, ever, because someone is still First in the actual list, which is why Paul McCartney decided after a few decades to recredit some of those songs as McCartney/Lennon, and for that matter why those assholes Henley and Frey arranged to have the credit on Hotel California revised to list them before Felder.) Others who contributed bits and pieces are then listed in an order typically chosen by the First Author.
And then, finally, there is "The Last Author". The Last Author is normally the "Principal Investigator" -- the person in whose lab the work took place, who approved, oversaw and directed the research, and usually also worked with the First Author to obtain the necessary grant funding.
The hoax "preprint" article lists Botao Xiao as First Author, and Lei Xiao as Last Author. For whatever reasons, the hoaxers chose to emphasize Botao Xiao rather then Lei Xiao. There are multiple Lei Xiaos found as authors in the "Pubmed" database, but we are presumably dealing with a guy who is a cardiologist at a hospital in Wutan. How or why he might come to be the Last Author on a "paper" written by a university professor from somewhere else is ... well, the obvious reason would be that someone found his name as an author on some paper and appropriated it for this hoax. The hoaxers and/or those taken in by them -- and I don't know which of those categories includes ZH -- don't seem to mention him at all.
c. As I tried to explain with an analogy, the preprint that we're being shown simply is not a scientific paper. It just isn't. Show it to any scientist. They'll laugh. I can't deconstruct it to show you why. It's just the fact of the matter. Yes, someone apparently uploaded it onto ResearchGate. My own guess is that the reason they chose Botao Xiao for First Author was because his was the first ResearchGate account that they successfully hacked. Later, it was deleted. I don't know whether ResearchGate could or would tell you why, if you asked them. The only record of it having been there is through The Wayback Machine.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I'm With You Blue. I Think I'm a Card Carrying Member of the
TFG crowd.
I appreciate ZH's coverage on this topic. This essay seems a bit over the top to me, more like a screed than an essay. The idea that this is a completely natural disease given all the circumstantial connections and attributes of the disease strains credulity.
And ZH was friggin' pulling the fire alarm on this WAY early on. If only the WHO and CDC were nearly as "alarmist" they might have shut down travel when China quarantined 1/2 their population. I think I might be done here.
I've been ripped for heterodoxy to the accepted AGW storyline, much like you were here. Perhaps by the same user. Not a fan.
Anyway, I just wanted to show my support for your position and actions. And to stand up to what I believe to be over the top -- can you even call it rhetoric?
It was a nice run.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Don't leave
I've read and appreciated all the essays on the virus. I like hearing multiple points of view. It is hard to know what to think, but it will be much harder with fewer voices.
The key word here being "circumstantial"
With a fertile imagination, and a filter pre-disposed towards such things, I understand how your credulity has been strained. But in view of the absence of the scientific facts, my own incredulity has been strained at the instinct of ZH to essentially yell fire in a movie theater when we have very little facts about this virus.
There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier
Hi, Anja -
If you want more, or a better presentation of scientific facts than Zero Hedge has done, you might want to check out this from much more comprehensive report from Great Game India
Great Game India is even worse.
They are among the sites, for example, where you will see it stated as a fact, rather than a made-up-from-nothing point of hysteria, that a coronavirus was "stolen" from the Winnipeg BSL4 lab and "smuggled" to Wuhan. They never present any evidence that a coronavirus, stolen or otherwise, ever made its way from Winnipeg to Wuhan -- not even bogus, hoax evidence. They just state it in passing, as if it is now something that everyone knows to be true, when in fact it is something that nobody has any reason to even think might be true.
Indeed, it appears that GGI is in fact ZH's source for most of the pack of lies that ZH represents to its readers as important and useful information.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Your voice is just as important as UR
I echo what granma says. Don't leave and especially because of what's written here. From past run ins with him he will never consider that he might be wrong and others right. Just read his sigline. Anyone who isn't open to new views on things..well closed minded rings a bell.
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
I'm just
glad I have a full box of Fentanyl patches left over from my wife's cancer. If I get the virus, I'll just slap on a couple patches and die peacefully. I can't "afford" to do anything else...I'll just have to make sure someone takes care of my cat.
As far as ZH is concerned, YMMV (your mileage may very). They, to me, seem a bit skewed to the right. They are a lot better at the "financial" analysis, than the "political" analysis, imho. But if you want "Deep State conspiracies", then ZH is the place for that. (imho)
To really go off the deep end into CT territory, this could be an "engineered" virus to wipe out a good portion of the population, to drastically reduce the population and carbon emissions at the same time. (I just finished watching the series 12 Monkey's so...)
C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote
ZH doesn't always engage in reality
ZH is full of die-hard Trump supporters who believe in the Deep State BS going around.
It's also full of operatives...
probably FBI, running honeypots. The tell is the insane posts about violent civil war with the left, wishing death upon anyone to the left of Steven Miller, immigrants, gays, on and on. Any sucker that up votes those whackadoo comments certainly go on at least one list.
I don't know how else to explain how ZH gets away with allowing that kind of rhetoric. And the whole concept of a "fight club" is, IMHO, the stupidest basis for a website. But ultimately it's all about eyeballs and clickbait, much like rubbernecking a car wreck.
That's not just ZH
ZH is representative of a lot of the Trumpian right these days. They are detached from reality.
And not just the right, either.
And not just the right, either. I've seen this same nonsense on certain "centrist" websites, and so have you. They may self-censor to avoid mentioning violence, but the nonsense is there for those with eyes to see.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Back in the 70's and 80's
the domain of crazy was dominated by the right.
But sometime in the 90's (about the time the right went full batshit insane) the liberals started getting goofy too.
Since then the liberals have tried to catch the right in craziness, but the right-wingers always manage to stay a little bit more crazy.
ZH is certainly capitalist and Trump-friendly
but they're a strange mix. Their regular commenters are the scruffiest things around, openly racist, sexist, and antisemitic, often trying to outdo one another in sheer obnoxiousness -- and yet strangely "religious." The Fight Club thing is intentionally man's man macho stuff, trying to be a magnet for men who are fed up with feminism.
But ZH also runs pieces by Caitlin Johnstone and CJ Hopkins and sometimes even by Glenn Greenwald and Whitney Webb. They and their rightwing commenters show respect and appreciation for Julian Assange, Seth Rich, and Tulsi.
Their headlines are generally alarmist and/or depressing, but they manage to be up-to-date on most things political and economic. Their head honcho is the son of an eastern European publisher/journalist. They do a very good job on the mechanics of reporting, editing, and publishing and they seem to take pride in their work.
Lurking in the wings is Hillary, like some terrifying bat hanging by her feet in a cavern below the DNC. A bat with theropod instincts. -- Fred Reed https://tinyurl.com/vgvuhcl
Never read the comments at ZH
There is no redeeming value in the comment sections.
The political articles aren't much better. The bad ones out number the good ones by at least 5 fold.
However, the economic articles can sometimes be brilliant. You just don't want to invest based on the advice.
I can be pretty gunshy about strong claims regarding the
nefarious activities of the intelligence services, but let's face it: Given their ideology, perverted ethics, and objectives, if they weren't running honeypots all over the internet, they wouldn't be doing their jobs. I assume they're running porn sites all over the place, including kiddie porn -- and the latter, not so they can prosecute, but so they can blackmail.
It's just the sort of people that they are. Why wouldn't they be doing this?
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
The internet...
is the perfect conduit for self incrimination. The IC would be remiss in not using it.
They would be very bad at their jobs, that's for sure.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
You are not making
any distinction between the articles on ZH and the comment section. Which can be vastly different.
Naturally, any site becoming popular that strays off-message from the elite-authorized party line is a target for shadow banning, having search results buried, de-platforming and and organized troll attacks.
Without the latter the peasants might see through the phony left-right paradigm and get serious about storming the palace. Disrupting dialogue is *important* (to those who want to hang on to their Teslas, Gulfstreams, private islands & such).
To reiterate - there is a lot of this in the comment section - but there are also thoughtful and well-argued comments from a variety of perspectives, too. I'll take that over the ideologically pure blue cocoon of DK anytime.
BTW - if you're not "on a list" you're not trying very hard.
I agree the ZH article is terribly misleading
If one reads the articles that are linked, for example, what they say is something completely different from the ZH summary. Bats were not genetically engineered, the Chinese scientists simply looked at STING-dependent IFN activation in bats and found that there was a sequence alteration that explained why bats can coexist with the corona viruses. This is important research and it makes sense to study corona viruses of bat origin where they actually occur.
Agreed, except...
If you're going to play Dr. Frankenstein with potentially pandemic causing viruses, then you'd better be damn sure of your lab security.
And let's not forget: the Chinese don't exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to escaping viruses.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
Def, for sure.
And I want to be very, very, very clear: I am not making any strong claim about whether or not this thing came from nature or from nurture. It's clearly possible that it slipped out of the Wutan Virology BSL4.
I'm just saying that ZeroHedge's coverage is a pack of lies.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Reading ZeroHedge...
is a continual exercise in picking peanuts out of poop.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
Yeah, well, I got better ways to spend my time.
I wouldn't have ever read any of it, if it hadn't tunneled its way from over there to over here, and I wouldn't have written one word about it, except that I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on this board with the domain-specific knowledge to call certain bits of it into question, so who else is gonna? Which is to say: It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it. (Maybe PriceRIP could, but he's expressing a general exhaustion with such exercises.)
After this little explosion dies down, I'll probably revert to my resolved lurkerism.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I"m betting that
ultimately it will be found that this nurtured virus was accidentally released into nature from a bio research lab in Wutan. This would also not exclude the possibility, which would never be officially acknowledged, that the virus actually was a result of a secret Chinese bioweapons program.
I don't assert this as fact, but merely something which shouldn't be dismissed out of hand for no good reason. My hunch is the real truth is too embarrassing and politically unpalatable for the Chinese authorities to have to admit, and that, once again, the Truth will be rather slow in getting its boots on.
My two cents. I have no opinion on the ZH article and commentary above as I didn't read it.
No, *bats* weren't
genetically engineered - did ZH ever say that?
But bat SARS-like coronaviruses *were* to enhance their infectivity and allow direct cross-species infection.
Chapter and verse in this report by Great Game India
the above from the abstract to
"SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronavirus pose threat for human emergence" (published Nov. 2015).
Which, at the time drew warnings like this:
You have misunderstood that paper.
I started working on a full explanation. I may or may not find the time to complete that explanation, but the quick point is this: You got it exactly backwards. They did not engineer a bat coronavirus to make it more infectious. Rather, they took just the "spike" from a bat coronavirus and spliced it into a specialized not-batty version of SARS virus that had previously been engineered exactly to facilitate these sorts of studies. The immediate goal was to determine whether the bat virus's ACE2-binding "spike" was similar enough to its "ortholog" in SARS, that the SARS virus would still be infectious to human and mouse cells. If so, then the bat virus itself could represent a possible cross-over threat.
Their conclusions were that:
1. SARS virus with the bat version of the ACE2 receptor could still infect mouse and human cells
2. The chimeric virus was less infectious than the engineered not-quite-wild-type SARS
3. The symptoms of infection in living mice were less severe.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
The ZH article betrays much ignorance
It is not clear that they are informed enough to even know what they mean, and the article is hardly coherent. However, one of their conclusions certainly indicated that the bats would have to be engineered, something that has not been done to my knowledge.
I don't think the virus is a bioweapon.
But I do think it was likely lab created and escaped.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
If I had the free time, I would take a closer look at
the published genomic sequences, do a little research, and try to come up with an independent assessment.
I'm considering asking one or two people with whom I have a passing acquaintance what they think/know. Unlike the mysterious Dr. Botao Xiao, they are actually world leaders in the molecular biology of human pathogenic viruses.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Sounds like a good idea.
The more people talking about this the better.
I can't speak to the hard science, but given all the circumstantial evidence it's kind of hard not to peg the bio-lab as the prime suspect.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
These people will know whatever is known.
It's only a question of what they have permission to talk about.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Well, if you have the opportunity
By all means try running run this by them.
Longish, but... here is one small referencing one of the articles I quoted from the abstract of - conducted by researchers from the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Virology Institute (had to cut some graphics and explanation showing comparative lesion effect (SARS and the engineered novel virus) on the lungs of mice:
Cheers,
BR
I don't need to run that by them, because I know what their
response would be. They would agree that there was a real risk -- I agree that there's a real risk -- but they would disagree with Ebright's view that, "The only impact of this research is the creation of a new type of unnatural risk in the laboratory."
Which doesn't make them right and him wrong, it just means that people's opinions will differ -- obviously, after all, the UNC researchers also disagreed with Ebright.
Note, incidentally, that Shi Zhengli's only contribution to that paper was sending the UNC group the "plasmids" with just the "spike" from the bat virus. And the chimeras that the UNC experiment created were very different from COVID19 virus.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd
What about the other guy from Wuhan performing the pseudotyping experiments?
And does it really seem likely to you they didn't do some further experimenting in their own lab? Free from burdensome restrictions and negative press?
they who?
if you mean Shi Zhengli, yes of course she does "other" experiments in her lab. that's what scientists do. then they write up the results, submit them to journals, and hope they are accepted for publication -- because that's how scientists win status, respect, and grant money. and Shi Zhengli has published plenty of papers -- three of which I read last night. "free from burdensome regulations"? do you have any idea of how tightly controlled a BSL4 lab is? Nothing goes into or comes out of the freezer without being tracked.
Shi Zhengli's entire life's work has been studying these wildlife viruses that might, under the right conditions, cross over into humans. she's been warning people forever that these idiotic open markets where people sell captured wildlife for food are insane, because they're basically big fat petri dishes where viruses from all different species get to mix and mingle in ludicrously unsanitary conditions.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd
And if it does turn out this 'escaped' from the lab, I think we can all side with Ebright's case after a multi trilion dollar global economy meltdown and thousands of lives lost.
I'm interested in the science of the article that @BlueRepublic linked to. Do the gene sequencing arguments hold water in your opinion?
Which specific paper are you talking about?
There have been several referenced at this point.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd
Not exactly a paper but this one.
https://greatgameindia.com/covid19-files-scientific-investigation-on-mys...
Also by burdensome regulations I meant this type of thing, not necessarily labs procedures and protocols.
https://www.nature.com/news/us-suspends-risky-disease-research-1.16192
As I noted elsewhere GGI is the garbage pile
upon which ZH has built much of its garbage reporting. They say all sorts of very inflammatory things, often with hotlinks that, if you follow them, turn out not to support the inflammatory statements.
Look, this is just like arguing AGCC: The liars can make up stuff all day long, and it makes no sense for an army of independent agents to take up the burden of debunking them in a thousand different venues, one idiocy at a time. I am certainly not willing to be one of those agents -- I've already invested what would amount to a couple of thousand dollars' worth of my time if I were selling my services. I don't begrudge that, as long as I believe it's doing somebody some good, but I've largely made my case. Anyone on this board who is going to be influenced by my arguments, in either direction, has what they need to draw their conclusions -- and indeed, probably has drawn their conclusions. I have one remaining significant post that I might complete, just as a matter of recouping sunk cost, but I have no intention of running down every rabbit hole in Kookarama just because folks here keep pointing at them and saying, "What about that one?"
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Okay, good on "burdensome regulations" ...
"burdensome" being ironic understatement for an outright ban.
I have plenty of reservations in general about the ethical wild west of science that exists in some places on the other side of the pacific.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I absolutely agree that IF this escaped from the lab
(no evidence of any kind, other than "proximity" of the lab to the outbreak), there will be hell to pay, and I will be among those advocating for accountability.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Wow, someone fucked up
Might also explain the massive and rapid quarantines. Kind of have to show you did everything possible to try and contain it. A truly Epstein level of coincidences surrounding this.
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China
Xing-Yi Ge - performed pseudotyping experiments;
Zhengli-Li Shi - provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids.
You say, "Wow, someone fucked up."
Then you post links to two journal articles in which there are no fuckups reported, and whose results/investigations are not directly connected to the COVID19 virus.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd
Yes I'm jumping to conclusions. You are right, no evidence of fuckups. Just evidence of capabilities and expertise tied to the Wuhan epicenter and warnings about potential dangers into this type of research. Too many coincidences for me. Hopefully we find out.
And thanks for your work on this!! Appreciated!
And no, this is not an "Epstein" level of coincidences.
The reason people in Wuhan and elsewhere have been studying these viruses is precisely out of concern that mutated versions could emerge as human pathogens. It's not a coincidence that they identified potential threats, and those threats then manifested themselves -- at least, it's not a coincidence if you believe that the scientists weren't wasting all of their time and effort to begin with, because such a crossover would never have happened.
Yesterday, Anja observed that ZH and their ilk are shouting fire in the theatre. I thought about that for a bit, and came up with a slight modification to that analogy. What's happening is that ZH, GGI et al are standing outside a burning theatre, and as the panicked, emotional, crazed patrons come trampling each other out of the theatre doors, ZH et al are pointing at the firefighters and screaming, "THEY MUST HAVE SET THE FIRE!!! WHY ELSE WOULD THEY HAVE ALL THAT GEAR??!!? IT COULD ONLY BE BECAUSE THEY KNEW THERE WOULD BE A FIRE!!!"
It's breathtakingly stupid, and would be fit for nothing but mockery, were it not also fiercely dangerous.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd
Point taken. I get what you are saying.
Okay.
I'll take a breath and calm down. I wasn't expecting to wake up this morning and find myself plunging back into this.
I'm gonna go play hockey -- last day we'll have good outdoor ice here -- and sell girl scout cookies with my daughter.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Maybe the ZH article doesn't hold water
But it's highly suspicious that this started literally on the doorstep of one of the world's leading experts on the topic. As mentioned earlier this isn't the first time there has been a mishap.
https://qz.com/1805422/wuhan-virology-lab-unable-to-quell-china-coronavi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli
Interesting take but it does reference debunked ZH article.
https://archive.is/QIBmE
I grant that it's at least "suspicious".
(I don't know about "highly".)
But then I never said it wasn't. The only point of my essay is the one summarized in the title: ZH's reporting is a pack of lies.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I'm a bit puzzled about your inclusion of the qz.com link
and the wikipedia link, which your comment framed as if anything in either of them supported claims -- or even suspicions -- that the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Nothing does. So ...?
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd
I thought they both added a little more context and information I hadn't seen before.
The wikipedia mentions the patent application for the gilead drug which was one of the questions for Zengli at the end of the removed Medium blog post. Also her comment that "The novel 2019 coronavirus is nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits" doesn't exactly inspire confidence in rational thought.
I thought the QZ article was a little ambivalent in its conclusions, it didn't make a great case that the conspiracy theories were wrong.
To the contrary, her statement that
"The novel 2019 coronavirus is nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits" is perfectly rational (although it does employ the common metaphorical device of anthropomorphizing "Nature").
If you lie down with dogs, you're going to get fleas -- literally. Bringing all sorts of wild animals -- live wild animals -- into large open public spaces, where they might be sold alive to be taken home and butchered by the customer, or butchered then on the spot by the vendor, is a recipe for disaster. There will be aerosolized blood, urine, saliva, and feces everywhere. The different species of animals will be sharing their bugs with each other, and with the customers. On an individual scale, only a fool would even consider entering such a place. On a population scale, only a foolhardy society would permit such a venue to exist.
Smallpox, cowpox, chickenpox, bubonic plague -- these are all diseases that at some point crossed over into humans because we kept close company with the animals that hosted earlier strains of those pathogens.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd
Ok, I'll buy that explanation and see this as a rational statement. Makes sense.
But she is also claiming this as a scientist in regards to the 2019 coronavirus and the evidence is lacking. There is no scientific evidence that this originated in the seafood market and claims of the Pangolin as an intermediate host are spurious. She needs to prove that case here. And it would be the ultimate of ironies if her life's work ended up causing the very thing she was most worried about. That would be pretty tough to accept.
Okay, let's be real.
You have no idea about what she has and hasn't "proved" about one claim or another, because you aren't reading any of the science (apart from maybe the titles and abstracts from a few papers), you're reading the polemic bullshit from garbage sites like GGI, written by people who couldn't read the science if they had any desire to.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
free speech zones
Thou dost protest too much
The free speech zone created by the local government at the 2004 Democratic National Convention
I have no idea what this means ...
... and so, in keeping with the spirit of ZH reporting, I will
furiouslyfeverishly endorse it.The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
This whole coronavirus thing
This whole coronavirus thing has me confused. I'm getting emails from my kids school to "be prepared" and "stock up" while also hearing that 70% of people infected have only normal cold/flu symptoms. WTF is going on here is what I want to know. Killing old and/or immunocompromised people is not uncommon for a serious virus (ie flu), so what is going on here? So far it's been reported that children have a low mortality rate. Seems suspicious to me. Is this thing engineered to effect the old? Get rid of the system drainers (ie: the old), while protecting the young? This whole thing just doesn't make sense to me.
If it was easy, everyone would do it.
Was the 1918-1919 "Spanish Flu" engineered to kill old people
Honestly, nearly all respiratory viruses affect older people more severely than young people. There is no evidence that this virus was engineered at all.