.......We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”
In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a cult out of the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general
But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?
The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.
• The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.
Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.”
Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”
Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.
Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.
New post from another thread:
Grace wrote: ↑Fri Jun 04, 2021 11:08 am
The e-mails that came out earlier this week revealed Dr. Fauci knew more about the origins of the Covid 19 than he revealed in his public statements. Fauci also was behind “gain of function” research in the USnited Sates and China. Fauci also knew that hydroxychloroquine worked effectively against Covid 19, yet he claimed otherwise.
IMO Fauci is a sociaopath with no regards for human life. I wouldn’t put it past him to have welcomed the virus as a means of population control.
One last thing, as crooked as Fauci is, I am surprised he didn’t follow crooked Hillary Clinton’s method concerning the e-mails and delete them.
There is no pleasure, only grief, to be found here.
Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists
Members of Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour express regret about ‘unethical’ methods
You have to have a subscription to read the rest, but I listened to someone read this and discuss it last night. Yes, they used fear to control people.
1 x
Try hard not to offend. Try harder not to be offended.
I think I am funnier than I really am.
Dr. Steven Quay and UC Berkeley emeritus professor of physics Richard Muller explained in The Wall Street Journal that the genomic structure of COVID-19 was unlike anything discovered in nature, which is the strongest evidence the coronavirus was altered in a lab.
The two explained that in gain-of-function research, a spike protein is altered for the purpose of making a virus more transmissible or lethal. A specific genomic sequence, CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”), they said, has “never been found naturally” in “the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2.” They explained that natural processes could not create a sequence combination if it “isn’t present in any other virus.”
The two wrote:
Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.
Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
There is additional scientific evidence that points to CoV-2’s gain-of-function origin. The most compelling is the dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.
Both of those were confirmed to have a natural origin; the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral “improvement” took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.
Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread. Science knows of only one way that could be achieved: simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research. Mice that are genetically modified to have the same coronavirus receptor as humans, called “humanized mice,” are repeatedly exposed to the virus to encourage adaptation.
1 x
Try hard not to offend. Try harder not to be offended.
I think I am funnier than I really am.
Robert wrote: ↑Sat Jun 05, 2021 9:25 amYou have to have a subscription to read the rest, but I listened to someone read this and discuss it last night. Yes, they used fear to control people.
I did not read the article due to the paywall, but how dare they use fear to control people? I mean...what kind of group would do that?
Sudsy wrote: ↑Mon Jun 07, 2021 10:57 am
A picture of naked bodies ?
Famous medieval depiction of hell. I can find another one. There are plenty.
So how do we filter these from our viewing ? There are folks here that try to avoid such scenes of nakedness.
I see an administrator has turned the image into a link. The point wasn't the nakedness. It was that Christianity has been using fear as a motivator for 2,000+ years. Fear is a very good motivator and common advertising strategy. Including in the area of public health. These are the new mandatory FDA cigarette labels which go on all cigarette packs. I'm not sure why it was scandalous to use it for Covid.
0 x
A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
Famous medieval depiction of hell. I can find another one. There are plenty.
So how do we filter these from our viewing ? There are folks here that try to avoid such scenes of nakedness.
I see an administrator has turned the image into a link. The point wasn't the nakedness. It was that Christianity has been using fear as a motivator for 2,000+ years. Fear is a very good motivator and common advertising strategy. Including in the area of public health. These are the new mandatory FDA cigarette labels which go on all cigarette packs. I'm not sure why it was scandalous to use it for Covid.
I am likely regarded as less conservative in my Christian practise than many here and that was my attempt to be more conservative. I had to jump at the opportunity. I see it is now a link but probably needs a viewer warning label.
All joking aside, but not my tendency to rabbit trail, it is interesting how the early church evangelized as we read it in the NT. Fear of eternal, conscious torment in hell was not a tactic used by the apostles. Although I agree that for much of the age of grace, hell fire was often used as a motivator and my father was a hell fire street preacher, I personally don't think fear of ECT should be the motivator to receive the Gospel but rather the emphasis on what Jesus has done to offer us the gift of eternal life. We have been offered the gift of eternal life instead of eternal death. But thats another topic.
Big picture: As vaccinations and other measures have helped bring Covid-19 under control, governments across the country are working to open things up, cautiously.
Can we now say that some of the fears people expressed about government control were overstated? If not, what would you need to see to believe that this is not an attempt to create a dictatorship?
I had to jump at the opportunity. I see it is now a link but probably needs a viewer warning label.
