Every single takedown of the lab origins of covid seems to use this photo, which shows a level-four facility with full precautions in force. But a far more likely lab escape scenario is the non-bunny-suit area where live bats were kept. newrepublic.com/article/162689…
Bats being bats is a perfectly plausible explanation for where we got covid, but were they first brought to a Wuhan lab, or did they expose someone elsewhere who just happened to come to the one city in Asia with a world-class coronavirus laboratory?
The endless confusion over "natural origin" vs. "lab origin" is a false dichotomy, since all the sane scenarios involving the latter also imply the former. We really need more details and not more J-school probabilistic reasoning to get closer to an answer here.
The Wuhan BSL-4 photograph of Dr. Shi is right up there with the Florida beach Grim Reaper as the most misleading photo to come out of the pandemic
Caption on left: Dr. Shi does pioneering research nowhere near where they keep the live bats.
Caption on right: Idiot sits in chair
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I'm looking forward to the rise of centrally administered anti-ransomware software, which corporations will install on every vulnerable client.
There's a nice long history here that information security people who know more than me can expand on. Software to prevent sensitive data being sent outside of the organization, for example, is one of the favorite targets of people trying to get such data.
Provoking China to waste enormous resources on a space station and giant military is a fantastic way to get them to burn money they might otherwise use to embarrass us with a green economy or higher standard of living. globaltimes.cn/page/202107/12…
I know that the giant military is supposed to be used to scare Taiwan, but the idea that after a 40 year hiatus the PLA is going to go from getting its ass kicked by Vietnam to pulling off Normandy II strikes me as a stretch.
(In fairness I also believe that the US Army would fail in an amphibious invasion of Taiwan)
It's going to be fun when ransomware strikes a cryptocurrency. Some of the software this grift is built on is not at NASA avionics level of correctness, and there sure is a lot of money for the taking.
So-called "stablecoins" in particular (since they're backed with non-pretend assets) are just a progressive lottery for whoever can hack a cryptocurrency exchange or mining client fast enough.
The logical endpoint is to have smart ransomware contracts that live on yet another blockchain, to make it more difficult for authorities to shut down these attacks. And then metaransomware can attack that, recursively, until we reach full employment.
"The U.S. has asked Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to take in about 9,000 Afghans who assisted with the American occupation." There are over 18,000 of these applicants, over 50,000 family members, and they deserve US green cards, not this weak shit. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Creating a large refugee group of the people who helped us most in Afghanistan, rather than simply welcoming them to America to our mutual benefit, shows the ineradicable xenophobia at the heart of all US policy in the Islamic world.
We know what happens when you let Syrians, Palestinians, Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis etc. become Americans. They build a new life, work their asses off, and help family back home like anyone else. Treating them like dangerous bacilli who must not enter US borders is disgraceful
Someone needs to have the moral courage to restore the 9/11 status quo ante for passenger screening, or we'll be taking our shoes off and getting lotion confiscated down to the seventh generation.
My favorite example of TSA bullshit is the six-seat planes that fly to the town near my mom. The "checked" and "carry-on" bags go in the same compartment, and you sometimes physically sit in the co-pilot's seat at the controls, but they will make you throw out a bottle of water.
I love that the vertical moon dildo is still the official landing plan. This configuration was rejected in the sixties because the moon is lumpy and standing a pencil on its end is not the stablest way to land, but now we have computers and Elon says it's okay.
The last time NASA flew a new design of spacecraft was 1981, and that lack of experience in the current generation of managers (whose careers were shaped by the orbiting bureaucratic Habitrail of ISS) is really showing in the Artemis missions.
The plan as I best I can understand it right now is to fly people around the moon (Apollo 8 reenactment), then put a space station up sort of nearish the moon, and then make all later astronauts change planes there to use the space dildo to land on the lunar surface.