Zoraptor

Bit of a better/ more relevant illustration: the vaccine undergoing trials in the UK at the moment is sarscov2 antigens (proteins) engineered onto a benign virus in order to promote an immune response. Indeed, the antigen chosen is the spike protein the video found so suspicious. Oh dear, he's endorsed flushing your lungs with plain old detergent instead I'm afraid.

The US navy is in the SCS very regularly. They even toodle past China's self proclaimed island bases regularly, and US planes fly through China's ADIZ very regularly. Occasionally you get incidents over it like the mid air collision off Hainan (?) some years ago, but generally it's a big nothingburger. The US tends to ignore others' self proclaimed territorial waters, and always has. (The only unusual thing is that the US has two carriers in the nearby region effectively out of action due to coronavirus. 99% of the time fleet movements aren't any sort of prelude to war, they're just rotating assets.)

I'm not going to watch a 54 minute video. Turns out I might listen to (most of) it while I do other things though. TLDR; the science is not all that compelling. The video is rather like the presentation of evidence for WMD in Iraq from old asterisks Cheney; you can make it seem compelling by removing every bit of equivocation or counter evidence. It still may have come from a lab, but it isn't anywhere near proven. 1) No full tracing of origin is to be expected. In the early stages you're looking only at data only from cases serious enough to have been treated in hospital for pneumonia, which make up a small number of covid19 cases. Non severe cases would be treated as if it were flu or the cold, ie stay home for a bit or tough it out, forget about it a week later. Since only a small proportion require hospitalisation you'd have the large majority of cases being silent ones making tracing extremely hard. 2) Assuming an animal origin bats are probably the ultimate source, but may not be the proximal source. 3) 100% gene sequence similarity may mean that it's under very strong selective pressure, ie the env protein and virus simply won't function properly with significant alterations. There's a reason we still share 50% of our genes with bananas, as an illustration. 4) Natural strains don't infect humans but it has the spike protein of SARS (1) which did, therefore... what? SARS did infect humans, it just had very low transmission rates. 'Natural' animal viruses most definitively do infect humans from time to time- if they want to leave out SARS because sinophobia there's also near relative MERS (ex camellids) or the less related SIV which seems to have crossed into humans at least 11 (!) times in the creation of HIV. Or Ebola/ Marburg. All of which are ssRNA viruses. 5) No, bat coronavirus having spike proteins that can infect humans does not mean there's no intermediate host full stop, it means there doesn't have to be an intermediate host. 6) Meta: isn't it nice of the Chinese to have left all these breadcrumbs, and in articles to journals like Nature or Science to boot. 7) Yes, amazingly scientists do build viruses out of bits of other viruses to test what they do and have done for rather a long time. It's even a suggested (approved now?) mechanism for gene therapy in humans. cool) No, that does not mean that sarscov2 is artificial. Classic non sequitor, we show this and that, therefore you can draw a conclusion that does not actually follow the data gained from this or that. You've already admitted that SARS1 infected humans and working in mice != working in humans. 9) My god, they experimented on mice! And planned to on primates! In a research lab! I'm, uh, flabbergasted at this, er, revelation. What next, some poor innocent fruitflies or a big toad? 10) Retrovirus that infects humans has similarity to another retrovirus that infects humans, that's... not exactly surprising. 11) Suspicious that the lab kept quiet- but I'd bet it would also be 'suspicious' if they said anything too. 12) And we're off into direct sinophobia not related to the coronavirus which I can't be bothered listening to for 15 minutes. Sheesh, I think the Chinese government are complete garbage but anyone naive enough to think that the US government isn't doing exactly the same sort of biological experiments is naive, and didn't watch the same video 5 minutes earlier.

Less life threatening but there's also foot lesions showing up as a symptom, especially in younger and otherwise asymptomatic cases. That would more typically be seen in something like chickenpox. That would be the use case that seems most likely from its current uses, certainly, but even there the troubles with using it are multiple. Fundamentally, not many young people are badly effected, so there's little need for a preventative at this point. If things get bad with the young they seem to get bad very suddenly, but hydroxychloroquine is used to treat slow acting chronic autoimmune problems like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, not a very rapidly accumulating positive feedback loop. HCQ is an immunosuppressant so is potentially of use against the immune system freaking out, but you don't really want to give immunosuppressants to people who would otherwise very likely clear the infection quickly as you raise the chance of the infection lingering and potentially doing more direct damage itself, let alone any potential side effects of HCQ itself. And as above it does treat chronic autoimmune problems, specifically cases where the immune system attacks its own host (more or less) directly, whereas a cytokine storm is a very acute runaway positive feedback loop aimed at least in covid19 or 'Spanish' flu type cases at attacking a genuine invader- so while they are both problems with the immune system the mechanisms by which the problems occur are significantly different. I almost mentioned that as a potential use, but decided it was simply too marginal a possibility and would be functionally misleading. That probably was the thought behind it being mentioned in the first place- end of the day though treatments based either on existing antivirals or existing methods of treating more similar secondary effects are more likely to be useful. It does have to be said that Trump did not pull its name out of the blue and it was suggested and has been tested as a treatment by actual doctors. If it weren't for Trump trying to hype it as a miracle cure it would be in a 'worth a try, I guess' sort of category; unfortunately it seems to have been used mostly so Trump can claim that everything will be all right real soon now, trust him.

Yeah, you aren't going to give an experimental hail mary treatment to non severe cases. But even with that proviso the results and others like it still aren't good for it as a treatment. Trouble with the hype for hydroxychloroquine has always been that's unlike some of the other hyped possibilities (like anti HIV drugs; whose target is an RNA virus like sarscovfefe too SARS-CoV2 is as well) there's absolutely no intrinsic reason why an anti malarial should be effective as an anti viral agent, especially against a virus that uses RNA. Even though the results for it are intrinsically biased they are enough to show it isn't reliably a cure, let alone a miracle cure that will stop the virus in its tracks.

US wholesale oil prices suffer a ~300% (no typo) drop over the course of a day. In theory at least they will now pay you 30 odd dollars per barrel, to take it away.

Court documentation (pdf), specifically #40

No worries, I'm here to help, and am happy to fix any and all faulty opinions you have for you free of charge. FYI, the father says he did refer the police to the doctors' report, but they outright refused to check. Which is eminently believable since their stated and official position is the narrow 'no positive test means no covid19'. No there isn't. They may be more accurate than the PCR tests, but the only test for which stats are available shows a bit better than 90% accuracy, and even that is questionable due to being Chinese. There are multiple cases of countries rushing use of literally useless antibody tests, eg Britain. (Even if they were reliable a positive test for antibodies does not necessarily make you immune anyway. The close relative to SARS-CoV2 that causes one version of the common cold grants very short lasting immunity, one of the reasons people get multiple colds a year, year after year)

Coincidentally I saw Glass last week, and also enjoyed it a lot. Kind of wish I'd waited until I'd managed to track down a copy of Unbreakable after finishing it since I probably missed out a bit on the background stuff (I did see Split a couple of months ago, and liked it way way more than I expected to).

That was pretty much exactly my thoughts on Picard as well, though I'm not quite as effusive about the earlier episodes. From what I've seen of Kurzman that's if not a deliberate policy then it's all his projects are capable of- and it's the absolute scourge of nuTrek, Picard and Discovery having potential to be a lot better is what ultimately made them so disappointing. The writers are able to write scenes that when taken independently are reasonably well written, generally well acted and exciting enough to maintain interest. The trouble comes when they try to tie them together into a coherent whole, and find the cool scenes can't be made to fit together in a way that makes sense, and they simply don't have the dramatic fortitude to do anything with genuine emotional weight unless forced so settle for a bunch of emotionally manipulative twaddle instead.

It's definitely about whether they count clinical diagnoses as confirmed or not. That's how the police will be determining whether she's making it up, or not. They would- and did, per the article- have checked the official figures and seen no one officially had C19 in the county, they would not and could not have asked any specific doctor- and, officially, the hospital would not have had any confirmed cases if they asked there. If a doctor's diagnosis is not enough to officially determine someone has covid19 and a positive pcr is required then, officially, she would not have C19 even if she actually did, and a doctor said she did. And that is what the police base their accusation on. Police everywhere have a long history of insisting that scientific tests are infallible, because they are what a lot of their convictions are based on and any suggestion they're not leads to endless appeals. In this case the scientific test should never even make it into court as proof she didn't have it, because it demonstrably gives false negatives when people definitively are infected with SARS-CoV2. Digging in their heels even when contradicted by a doctor is perfectly in character though, because defences always have a crack at the 'scientific' evidence with their own doctors and scientists. Plus, of course, police have a distinct tendency to believe in their own infallibility, even when presented with concrete evidence.

Eh, you can have evidence that there are no cases- you just cannot have proof. There not being any confirmed cases in the area is evidence there aren't any, though per below it certainly isn't proof in the case of covid19. I still disagree with Skarpen anyway though, since... Testing is a bit of a clusterasterisk, since the PCRs seem to give up to 30% false negatives. Some places are allowing clinically diagnosed covid-19 cases into their stats while some require a positive PCR. With a clinical diagnosis but no positive PCR she'd be included in stats here, but in many other places she'd not be. It's definitely heavy handed trying to demand her silence, barring some other unknown factor like her having a history of false claims. If she did have a clinical diagnosis as claimed then there's no way she's spreading panic or anything else that might be actionable. But, I'd also give the police rather more leeway at least for their initial actions than I normally would, as the reputation for scientific tests and the PCR tests they might be familiar with (ie DNA fingerprinting) is that they are highly reliable to near completely infallible.

Taiwan should be safe so long as China and the US/ Trump are actively fighting an economic war. I'd be more worried about Trump forcing China's hand by recognising Taiwan as independent (without a very detailed plan of how to deal with the consequences) than him abandoning them. That's exactly the sort of stunt he'd pull. China, much like the USSR, gives most of its 'aid' effectively 'in kind' rather than in cash. Big infrastructure projects funded by China, and using mostly Chinese labour much as the soviet aligned bloc got soviet or Cuban engineers for their projects. In many ways that is a lot better than the old IMF/ WB model of giving countries wodges of dosh that inevitably disappeared into various Mobutu types' swiss bank accounts instead of being spent on what they were meant to, leaving the leaders as billionaires when inevitably deposed and their countries with nothing except being permanently indebted, and forced to run their economies as dictated by the IMF- debt trap neo colonialism, as absolutely deliberate policy. Of course the Chinese model isn't disinterested benevolence either and is mostly Chinese money paying Chinese workers for projects that benefit China (and secondarily the host country), but I'm always amused at 'Chinese debt trap in Africa' type articles railing against what the west has done for the past 70 years because now it's the Chinese instead; and at least the infrastructure gets built and the Chinese can't walk away with all the ports, roads and power stations they're building.

First couple of seasons of 24 are pretty good. After that it very rapidly succumbs to threat inflation and scenario repetition. It was still (mostly) entertaining though even when it was stupid.

Because I forgot to mention it previous, the WHO definitely did make one major mistake that should not have been made- opposing travel bans up to at least early February. On that, Trump definitely has a point, and also a point against most Democrats. In hindsight travel bans were the bare minimum that should have happened, and the WHO recommended against them despite acknowledging a month earlier there was human to human transmission. The troubles with that are that the US still hasn't provided any evidence, let alone proof, for their accusations against Huawei. As such, it's being treated by everyone else as being part of Trump's trade war with China- and since he's simultaneously fighting or threatening to fight trade wars with just about everyone else there's no goodwill or benefit of the doubt. Instead, you have Europe wondering if Trump will decide that Airbus or BMW should be the next target after Huawei and China and not wanting to encourage him. Huawei is the typical Chinese loss-leader-to-drive-others-out-of-business (then jack up prices and drop down quality) model of Chinese company, but that isn't the same as it spying. There would be few people (maybe just Sarex) on this forum who'd be happier than I to see NATO fold. But NATO is irrelevant as a counter to China anyway, as it is explicitly a greater North Atlantic 'defensive' pact with its members literally half a world away from China. I tend to agree that the US should pull out of it or reduce commitments to it because I think NATO has long outlived its supposed purpose- but if that happens it will massively reduce US influence, and that has to be accepted as an obvious consequence beforehand. If you want quid pro quo for being in NATO and the largest contributor you got the return in soft power. If Obama claimed Huawei was spyware he'd be taken more seriously than Trump because Obama didn't spend his term(s) deliberately setting diplomatic fires everywhere. A leadership that everyone dislikes has a lot more difficulty getting its way than one that people want to believe is acting in their interests. The anti China treaties are with the likes of Japan, ROK, Philippines, Australia; ie greater Pacific countries. Trouble being that Trump has managed to have problems with every single country on that list too, except Australia. So much so that the Philippines- hardly friendly with China- kicked the US out wholesale a few months ago. Any China containment strategy also requires at least the tacit support of both India and Russia (who can being along ex soviet 'stans) to be effective.

Trouble is, some in the US would withdraw from NATO because others aren't pulling their weight, then wonder why Europe doesn't pay any attention to them and won't support them any more and rail about how US influence has dropped without drawing any connection between the two. And the US can always unilaterally reduce military spending, if she wants to. Nobody wants China to be the sole superpower, that's a false dichotomy. It is a potential result of Trump continually taking enormous dumps on former friends and international institutions for naked domestic political purposes though. If people end up actually taking China's side against the US what does that say about the diplomatic abilities of the US? These things don't happen in a vacuum, they happen as a consequence to deliberate US policies. Trump and Pompeo have asterisked off literally everyone who isn't Bibi Netanyahu, many multiple times on multiple issues. The ongoing collapse of US soft power is an inevitable consequence of that. It may play well to elements of the US domestically, but all the extortion, amnerican exceptionalism and unilateralism doesn't play well with anyone outside the US.

I always find it amusing that the US insisting on something clearly political isn't a bad thing when others doing the same thing is. An organisation bowing to pressure for the US is fine, bowing to pressure from anyone else is the sign of a flawed, corrupt organisation. Meanwhile members of Trump's admin are bringing in wheelbarrows of cash to Florida to make sure that the fricking WWE is labelled as 'essential' and not subject to lockdown; which about sums up how things work and the expectations of Trump's America. You can also pretty much guarantee that the people complaining about the WHO now would be incandescent with rage if a similar approach to that they wanted taken with China were taken with the US. Indeed, we can already see that, China doesn't want it called the Chinese or Wuhan virus, the US does, China doesn't want Taiwan mentioned, the US does, and toys will come out of cot when either doesn't get their way. WHO ain't going to call it Wuhan Flu because you call it SARS-CoV2 or Covid-19 or even generic old coronavirus for a reason- it's a coronavirus, not a flu. Flu is a, uh, orthomyxovirus, generically influenza/ flu (for good reason) and while they do share similarities with coronaviruses like ssRNA they are taxonomically different. Ironically the most prominent and deadly example of actual influenza was Spanish (sic) Flu which very likely originated in... the US and definitely didn't originate in Spain. The US had relatively speaking plenty of time to prepare for covid19, the failure to do so effectively is largely on Trump downplaying everything (with a hearty dollop left over for D and other orange man bad types grandstanding on issues where Trump did do the right thing, like banning travel). China's behaviour has- as pretty much always- been awful with a policy of deliberate lies throughout but the WHO cannot simply invade China to get the true picture. They have also consistently been misquoted by Trumpians trying to run interference. Eg they did not say there was no human to human transmission, they said there was no evidence for it at that time (because, basically, China was lying about it- but they also had no particular reason to doubt them given that other recent coronaviruses with animal origin like SARS or MERS do have very low infectivity). The WHO issued a directive saying there was definite human to human transmission in early January iirc, about two months before Trump started taking covid19 seriously. On a broader front and the broader issue, the US cannot complain about China's growing influence while simultaneously withdrawing from everything and anything half way multilateral they feel like because it isn't a tool for the US, Obama derangement syndrome or simple hubris. That just leads to handing China influence by default giftwrapped on a silver platter. One of the reasons there's so little international support for 'Wuhan Virus' is that pretty much everyone international literally literally hates Pompeo and Trump, and the US has already burnt through almost all of the goodwill that could have got support from Europe and others. No one wants to allow Trump the cover of blaming China, and given the low regard China is held in that really says something about how the current US admin is viewed.

There's a recent Nature article on a similar method. (Which may well be based on the research in/ approach from the webmd link, though I skimmed the references and didn't see a direct link immediately I didn't read through carefully)

I'd disagree with it for a completely different reason- it absolves the Democrat Party for selecting a rubbish candidate, and Hillary for losing to Trump. Fundamentally, in a democratic system you're not obligated to vote for rubbish just because garbage is worse; and doing so is precisely how you make sure that you will always be presented with two bad choices. That approach also destroys confidence in your political system far more effectively than anything else, nothing breeds indifference like being told you have to vote for two choices neither of which you want. Hillary lost to Trump. She lost because she didn't get enough votes where it counted. If she'd have run a competent campaign and been a better and more appealing candidate she'd have won. Those who voted for someone they actually wanted over someone they didn't should take no blame; those giving it to them don't actually believe in a free vote, they believe in a controlled one.

You do have to be online to play Elite Dangerous. That was a minor scandal, as it was kickstarted as having a DRM free option and initially they refused refunds based on its always online status. Both I-Wars are good, and 2 in particular has graphics that stand up very well for an early 2000s game. 1 is a bit more on the sim side of the scale, with 2 being a bit more arcadey (but still on the sim side overall). They were running out of money when making it, so the story in 2 basically implodes in the 2nd half. Everspace is pretty good as well, it's further onto the arcade side of the spectrum than the sim side. Sort of like a space flight version of Faster-Than-Light is probably the best description. While low budget/ kickstarter level it's also quite pretty.

Stirling Moss Tim Brooke Taylor (from covid19) Loved The Goodies as a kid. Time for a Kitten Kong rewatch, at very least.

So, is the US economy open for business again now? I seem to remember Donny promising Easter as the day the magic would have happened by. Buy a bandana and use that, it's about as effective as anything else which doesn't have proper fitting and a proper filter while also being washable/ sterilisable multiple times without the elasticised straps perishing almost instantly. They also make it look like you've joined a cool post apoc street gang while you wait in line to buy your eggs and flour.

Noscript can do that. No idea if it's available for anything other than Firefox though. Given the first scripts I nuke are always fb and greater google services I'd imagine they wouldn't want it on chrome. Only drawback is that most of Raithe's and GD's funny stuff posts show up as a long string of numbers only with fbcdn blocked. (Though should be noted that nuking js on firefox did not also nuke the torygraph's paywall, for me at least. Even the 1-2 punch of private window and nuked js didn't work. Though that may well be my ISP caching the crap out of things to lower its record throughput...)

Dunno, Biden is in the susceptible demographic for c19. Doch, ist Prussen. But proper Old Prussian, not those genocidal g*rmanic manlet 'teutons'. Pity the Poles didn't finish the job properly in the 15th century and spare the rest of the world centuries of harm.

The epidemiologists will be providing a bit more guidance than washing hands, but yeah, while they will have aspects of general population modelling and the like economic modelling won't be their job. There should however be economists doing their modelling as well and if the governmental organisations are competent they should be doing so alongside and in cooperation with the epidemiologists to show the potential effects of each policy and potential best recovery options. My presumption is that most of them are coming up with the same general result: you can have a very severe, quick but hopefully one off effect; or you can spread the effect out over time and hope it isn't as severe overall- and not much else as the situation is both unprecedented in modern times and we simply don't know how c19 and its effects/ treatments will evolve over time. And as much as it isn't a health modellers job to make economic policy it also isn't an economic modellers job to make health policy. Except, maybe, in the US and Brazil. Eh, I'm not sure even competent politicians can really do much else at this point. Several countries have ended up where they are- big example being the US- specifically because politicians have ignored advice from experts in favour of 'saving the economy'/ their poll numbers. I'd give the early effected countries' politicians some extra leeway too; it's often difficult to know which experts to listen to at the best of times, and human nature means that most of the time people listen to the view that tells them everything will be OK over the one preaching doom and gloom, especially when going for the doom and gloom incorrectly means losing your job. Then again our PM* has taken responsibility for almost literally everything politically and done very well out of it, politically, while following the advice of the bureaucrat (a scientist, not lobbyist or career aparatnik thank science) in charge of responding, with the health minister being entirely sidelined from the response and just running the admin. I'd imagine the situation is different in places where c19 has made it to epidemic status and glaring and obvious mistakes have been made as very few politicians are ever going to willingly own a mistake if they can avoid it. *and praise science that she won, and not Ximon Brudges who thinks driving ten hours in a lockdown to attend a fricking video conference is 'essential' work. The essential part is, in actuality, him being able to stand in front of press cameras in person to mumble his stupidities.