Dumbfuck in charge

[twocoach]

If there is praise to be gained, he will try to be the one receiving it.

[HouseDivided]

He is such a disgusting human being.

And yet you can't look away. You need to learn to do what I do when Dowdy or The Waitress appear on the screen - turn to something else. You'll be happier.

I could ignore him when he was the piece of shit on a terrible TV show. But he is the President now so I need to pay some attention to what he is saying. I can't just ignore him.

It’s not hard. I ignored BO for eight years.

[Shirley]

It looks like I might have to start watching the White House Daily Propaganda Briefing again, now that the press has finally grown a pair and don't appear to be buying the pathological liar's crap so much anymore. My hat is off to both of these "nasty women":

[Shirley]

[Geezer]

Thanks to you 60 some million dumbfucks that thought it wise to put this idiot in the White House.

[twocoach]

And yet you can't look away. You need to learn to do what I do when Dowdy or The Waitress appear on the screen - turn to something else. You'll be happier.

I could ignore him when he was the piece of shit on a terrible TV show. But he is the President now so I need to pay some attention to what he is saying. I can't just ignore him.

It’s not hard. I ignored BO for eight years.

I doubt that very much.

[sdoyel]

30% of Americans believe this Coronavirus was created in a lab.

100% of that 30% are Republicans.

[jhawks99]

Thanks to you 60 some million dumbfucks that thought it wise to put this idiot in the White House.

We would be much better off with President Kaine right now.

[chiknbut]

And yet you can't look away. You need to learn to do what I do when Dowdy or The Waitress appear on the screen - turn to something else. You'll be happier.

I could ignore him when he was the piece of shit on a terrible TV show. But he is the President now so I need to pay some attention to what he is saying. I can't just ignore him.

It’s not hard. I ignored BO for eight years.

Hilarious.

[DCHawk1]

30% of Americans believe this Coronavirus was created in a lab.

100% of that 30% are Republicans.

Oh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... naviruses/

[chiknbut]

I'm sure the true conservative constitutionalists are clutching their pearls right now.

[twocoach]

30% of Americans believe this Coronavirus was created in a lab.

100% of that 30% are Republicans.

Oh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... naviruses/

And?

Were those State Department cables out of the ordinary or do they flag dozens of labs like this as safety concerns every year? There are dozens more questions along that line that I would hope are being asked and researched.

[zsn]

30% of Americans believe this Coronavirus was created in a lab.

100% of that 30% are Republicans.

Oh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... naviruses/

Am I missing any detail that it was “created” in a lab? There was a paper in Nature Medicine a couple of weeks ago essentially providing unequivocal evidence that this virus wasn’t man made and that versions of it were likely circulating around for a couple of years. Also they suggest that the wet market wasn’t the likely “origin” but one large node, among other nodes

[Mjl]

From the article itself:

"As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals"

[twocoach]

30% of Americans believe this Coronavirus was created in a lab.

100% of that 30% are Republicans.

Oh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... naviruses/

Am I missing any detail that it was “created” in a lab? There was a paper in Nature Medicine a couple of weeks ago essentially providing unequivocal evidence that this virus wasn’t man made and that versions of it were likely circulating around for a couple of years. Also they suggest that the wet market wasn’t the likely “origin” but one large node, among other nodes

Just because it wasn't likely created in a lab doesn't mean that it couldn't have been released accidentally from a lab with poor safety precautions that was studying it.

And the flip side is that just because a lab with poor safety precautions was studying it doesn't mean that it is the source of it being released.

Do I trust our State Department to follow up on those cables? No. Do I trust any portion of this administration to accurately investigate the origins of this? No.

I don't know who the ultimate investigator of the origins of this is but I hope the Trump administration has as little to do with it as possible.

[PhDhawk]

Twocoach is right!

That Nature Medicine article doesn't absolve the Chinese lab of all wrongdoing. It shows that the virus was not man-made by the standard cloning techniques used.

It doesn't mean that they didn't contaminate the area and seed it with bat coronaviruses that then got in an intermediary animal. (It's pretty well established that viruses jump from one animal to humans through an intermediary animal, such as a pig).

It also doesn't mean they weren't doing other experiments that caused the problem. For example, you could passage different viruses through non-host animals, recover the virus, and then test for infectivity in human cells, again recover and enrich the virus, and then that virus got let out or was released. You might do something like this to test for rate of jump of a virus from different intermediaries to humans, or you might want to discover alternate sequences in the gene encoding the protein mentioned in the Nature Medicine article that allow a virus to become a human pathogen. Or you want to create a human pathogen and not have it be traced back to you, by easy sequencing methods (the kind used in that paper).

In a vacuum, I think the most likely scenario is that this happened naturally. But goddamn it seems weird that there's a lab like that, that close to the wet market, in a country like China. It's worth at least more scrutiny.

The Nature Medicine essentially rules out that they were engineering bioweapons and had an accidental contamination. It doesn't rule out all possible scenarios.

[ousdahl]

all possible scenarios?

[Shirley]

[zsn]

Twocoach is right!

That Nature Medicine article doesn't absolve the Chinese lab of all wrongdoing. It shows that the virus was not man-made by the standard cloning techniques used.

It doesn't mean that they didn't contaminate the area and seed it with bat coronaviruses that then got in an intermediary animal. (It's pretty well established that viruses jump from one animal to humans through an intermediary animal, such as a pig).

It also doesn't mean they weren't doing other experiments that caused the problem. For example, you could passage different viruses through non-host animals, recover the virus, and then test for infectivity in human cells, again recover and enrich the virus, and then that virus got let out or was released. You might do something like this to test for rate of jump of a virus from different intermediaries to humans, or you might want to discover alternate sequences in the gene encoding the protein mentioned in the Nature Medicine article that allow a virus to become a human pathogen. Or you want to create a human pathogen and not have it be traced back to you, by easy sequencing methods (the kind used in that paper).

In a vacuum, I think the most likely scenario is that this happened naturally. But goddamn it seems weird that there's a lab like that, that close to the wet market, in a country like China. It's worth at least more scrutiny.

The Nature Medicine essentially rules out that they were engineering bioweapons and had an accidental contamination. It doesn't rule out all possible scenarios.

I'm sorry if it appears that I suggested any scenarios different from what you and twocoach present. In fact, you two accurately capture what my views are given what we know today. I also think that the Chinese govt is intentionally complicit in some sort of coverup trying to contain the culpability of their citizens (whether such culpability is intentional or not).

It's not unlike a sitcom situation where some hapless guy is trying to be nice to his wife and wants to cook dinner. While doing so he lets the pan of oil sit on the stove a little too long, it catches fire. He then tries to put it out by himself (hilarity ensues) and ends up setting the counter on fire, then the curtains and then the whole apartment (hilarity stops ensuing) and then the entire block. If he had only called a neighbor or gotten help in some way.

The intention of my post was in response to the context of where this article link was first posted.

[Deleted User 289]