come here Logan
Despite being a life-long avid gamer, I still canât tell that from Every Other Video Game Ever Made.
I remember youâd run in this like smooth way and the enemies would run similarly. It was at a friends house though so I didnât play it a whole lot
Probably pushed the fps up to 31 or something
i think this country (maybe the world) has been slowly kindling to its flash point. All thatâs needed now is that little spark to set it all ablaze. Something like this could be it
The wall street journal has a long article about this today.
The Wuhan Lab Leak Question: A Disused Chinese Mine Takes Center Stage The Wuhan Lab Leak Question: A Disused Chinese Mine Takes Center Stage - WSJ
Mostly, it talks about a guano mine full of coronaviruses, and whether there might have been an accidental leak of a virus collected by the Wuhan virus lab. And how china is being secretive about all of this. But it also says:
Gain-of-function experiments would leave clear genetic signatures in sequences of the virus showing that part of it was inserted in a laboratory, many molecular biologists say. Other scientists say more modern techniques can leave no trace.
(âGain of functionâ experiments are experiments in which scientists artificially combine pieces of different viruses to create one thatâs more infectious. They are controversial, with the defenders saying itâs a way to predict future pandemics and develop vaccines.)
So, what Iâd read is that âclear genetic signatureâ part. And if there is a signature, hundreds of land around the world would have seen it. Iâm quite surprised to read that some scientists think it could be done without leaving that splice-mark.
Of course, it could certainly have been an escape of a natural virus they had collected. The WIV denies they had a virus close enough to covid to mutate into it. But they have been really secretive. They used to have a database of their virus catalog on line, but took it down in September 2019.
Many scientists are eager to examine the WIVâs once publicly available database of some 22,000 samples and virus sequences, including 15,000 from bats. The database was taken offline in September 2019. Dr. Shi told the WHO-led team in February that the database was taken offline after being subjected to more than 3,000 cyberattacks.
Apparently, there was more interest in the scientific community in pressing the WIV and China harder, until Trump started spouting his âchina virusâ rhetoric. Which is probably a shame. There was a team:
Before the WHO-led teamâs visit to Wuhan, some of its members said they too were skeptical about the lab hypothesis. Such accidents are extremely rare compared with the number of spillovers from human-to-animal contact, they said, but they were open-minded.
But China didnât actually give them much access. Maybe thereâll be more research, now. And escape from a research lab has a lot of policy implications.
Sounds like people out collecting samples from diseased animals may have gotten infected. That doesnât seem that difficult. So not a lab escape as much as a product of lab business.
This seems more Occamy.
Maybe, one thing I learned from all this is that lab escapes are horrifyingly common.
So much so I think the early dismissal from the WHO (particularly Daszack) makes my tin foil hat buzz like a bee.
Did you read this?
Pre-COVID article:
Bolded mine:
Reviewing the incidents, it looks like there are many different points of failure â machinery thatâs part of the containment process malfunctions; regulations arenât sufficient or arenât followed. Human error means live viruses are handled instead of dead ones.
Sometimes, these errors could be deadly. âIf an enhanced novel strain of flu escaped from a laboratory and then went on to cause a pandemic, then causing millions of deaths is a serious risk,â Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, told me.
Itâs not that thereâs a high rate of mistakes in these labs; the rate of mistakes is actually quite low. But itâs one thing to run a one-in-thousands chance of killing a handful of others from a mistake â the odds we face over a lifetime of driving. Itâs another thing entirely to accept a similar probability of killing millions of people.
The cost-benefit analysis for pathogens which might kill the people exposed or a handful of others is vastly different from the cost-benefit analysis for pathogens which could cause a global pandemic â but our current procedures donât really account for that. As a result, weâre running unacceptable risks with millions of lives.
The 1979 and 2014 incidents grabbed attention because they involved smallpox, but incidents of unintended exposure to controlled biological agents are actually quite common. Hundreds of incidents occur every year, though not all involve potentially pandemic pathogens.
So, not common, or quite common? Everyone gets their own truth in an article like this.
The WHO has been terrible from the start. They fought against the âairbornâ hypothesis tooth and nail, and are a principle reason why we had the stupid â6 feet and wash your hands, but donât wear a maskâ thing.
Yeah, itâs not a great article. I think itâs more telling to just note that there have been a ton of lab infections throughout history.
Unintended exposures are not outbreaks as I would guess most occur to lab personnel and are handled by lab protocol thus no risk of leaving the facility or even the secure area. Think of them like a fall from height for a worker but he was wearing his harness no one was injured so he might make a note of it then go about his day.
@Lucy, have you seen discussion of the no-see-um techniques developed by Dr. Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina who trained Dr. Shi of the WIV?
Here is an interesting article:
https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d
If you want to test whether or not itâs possible that a bunch of Chinese scientists created an apparently natural super-virus from a lab, before accidentally releasing it, all you need to do is find a Chinese lab that studies bat viruses, and ask the scientists there to create an apparently natural super-virus, before accidentally releasing it. QED.
I donât like that article, because it is pretty sloppy about differentiating between âvirus was created by Chinese labâ and ârandom virus collected by lab accidentally escapesâ. And the latter has always seemed pretty likely.
There seems to be disagreement as to whether a created virus could look natural. A year ago, pretty much everyone said ânoâ. Now there is disagreement. I donât know enough about it to have an informed opinion of my own, and find the change disturbing. (I looked at the link to âno-see-umâ, and donât feel that the link answers that question.)
So Iâm in âwait and seeâ mode.
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âŚ4 more months, some more news.
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The earliest COVID-19 genome was deleted from the NIH database, at the request of the original researchers. One of the sleuths? noticed it mentioned in a research article, and then found it buried in Google Cloud. The data wasnât very informative, though it adds another red flag to a ridiculously long list of red flags, and points away from the popular Seafood Market outbreak claim.
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A bat corona-virus was found in a cave in Laos, that is 96% similar to COVID-19 (which is about as similar as the ones we know about in China, but still ~50 years or so distant in terms of random mutations). More significantly it has a very, very similar furin-cleavage-site (which is the key to COVID-19). So similar, that they seem likely related. If nothing else, itâs an example that those amino acids might have evolved naturally.
(Though it still doesnât explain what a bat virus was doing in Wuhan.)
- Just recently, a rejected 2018 DARPA grant-proposal was leaked. The proposal (from Baric, Shi, Daszak, etc.) called for UNC to create bat-coronaviruses. Specifically the idea was to go out to the caves in Yunnan, collect 3000 bat samples to isolate viruses, scan their DNA, use modeling to identify novel cleavage-sites capable of interacting with furin, and insert the cleavage site into SARs like viruses, produce the viruses, and test their ability to infect humanized mice.
(Note, a lot of that stuff in the proposal is not really new. But it mostly blows away certain technical counterarguments, ie. âwhat? virologists inserting whole furin-cleavage site, ridiculous! impossible!â)
Itâs also a good reminder that the US is very much part of the politics here.
Also, for anyone who has too much time to kill, hereâs a boring debate between the two sides.
Here is an NPR article arguing there is additional evidence against the lab leak hypothesis.
There will probably never be definitive evidence, so prior belief will probably remain important to peoples conclusions on the subject.
I need to know more about this 
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