Zoraptor

To be fair, ivermectin isn't just a livestock dewormer, it's also a registered human therapeutic in widespread use. Much like HCQ it's at least unlikely to cause much in the ways of adverse effects, except for not working as a covid treatment, and is an infinitely better suggestion for treatment than, say, sodium hypochlorite. And to be even more fair, the stage at which you're likely to be self administering ivermectin is the stage at which you're unlikely to need to be on alternative medications that do work like dexamethasone (ie, on O2 or full on ventilator).

For the sake of referring to the primary source, and since the declassified summary of the US Intelligence investigation into the origins of covid-19/ SARS-CoV-2 is pretty short: Actually short enough that it barely requires a tldr ("we don't really know much, it's not a bioweapon though). (weirdly hard to find a direct link to the report summary, despite it being fairly important. I had to go through Science, none of the mainstream media seemed to want to link to it)

I've seen people say that they used a Ginsu, and therefore any civilian deaths had to be from secondary explosions and not the 'fault' of the US. I tend to doubt that though since they said they were after multiple suicide bombers which you'd usually use an explosive payload on. Even if it were the fault of the US technically there would likely have been more deaths if the suicide bombers had been allowed to deliver their bombs, and it's hard to see how they could have avoided any civilian casualties in a city such as Kabul. So long as the intelligence was good and they were suicide bombers it would be a 'genuine' example of collateral damage and minimising harm. That would prove it came from the lab, if it did, but the reverse is pretty much impossible to prove because anyone who wanted to believe otherwise would simply decide that the Chinese hadn't released everything or had released falsified information. It doesn't even matter if they find an intermediate host as they did with the civet for SARS1, all that will mean is that the Chinese must have known about that instead, and got the virus from that source and not bats. So even if it didn't leak there's no reason for them to release information when whatever they release will be used to 'prove' they actually did leak it. SKY UK is most definitely Rupert Murdoch, he owns a shed load of British media (including the Times and The Sun, plus SKY). The only Sky that isn't Murdoch is the one here in NZ, which he sold his share in about 20 years ago. Medium Confidence is an intelligence/ analytical term that doesn't really mean the same thing as it means to the lay person. That's why I mentioned the 'intelligence' about the $600 million dollar ventilation system and the sick workers. Technically, such information gives medium confidence, so long as you believe those reports are credible*. Of course, making a 1000 fold cost overestimate is not in itself the height of credibility, and it's hardly impossible let alone unlikely that people would get flu at the tail end of winter wherever they worked; but if you believe that is credible evidence despite that then you can assign it medium confidence. 7/8 groups didn't think it was credible, but one did. OTOH, until a zoonotic link is found anything leading to that conclusion has to be Low Confidence, because it's fundamentally incomplete information- there is no direct zoonotic link as there is for SARS1 (civet) and MERS (camel) and there being a coronavirus crossover event roughly once per year for the past 20 years is not in and of itself evidence that it happened a 21st time in the case of SARS2. *There's tons of examples of bad Confidence assignations in Intelligence- one prime example would be the mobile BW labs that Iraq supposedly had before Gulf War II. Completely fabricated and they didn't exist in reality, and all the actual intelligence resolved to a single source in Curveball, which should automatically have dropped the Confidence shown.

Not as plausible, WIV was definitely studying coronaviruses and that's where the outbreak was first detected. Otherwise though, Murdoch media unsurprisingly has a bit of a slant. One analysis group- out of eight- said it may have been a leak. Somehow I knew they'd abuse the use of 'low confidence' categorisation too, though I hope the dissenters' medium confidence isn't based on the laughable numeric 'error' that had the Wuhan Institute of Virology spending $600 million on a ventilation system*. Or on a few people who worked there supposedly getting covid like symptoms- or if you prefer flu like symptoms- in winter. *That was the small matter of twice the amount it cost to build, well, the entire building. Unsurprisingly the real figure was... $600k.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand: One Person Shows up at Anti-Lockdown Protest in Auckland Kind of wish they'd keep the old title about police breaking up a one man protest. (We did have a larger protest right at the beginning, maybe a few dozen people. Not the brightest bulbs deliberately and pointlessly getting themselves arrested when the courts are running on an essential basis and you tell the bail hearing you'll offend again, hoping to act like you're Nelson Mandela on Robben Island but forgetting that you won't have internet access sitting in a police cell...)

Almost all of ISIS-K's funding is funneled through Pakistan from wealthy Gulf donors because it's a neighbour, but its ultimate source is mostly rich Gulf individuals with a dollop of fake charities and the like. Pakistan as a country doesn't support them, the Taliban would have to go far further off the reservation than they have- probably pal up with India or similar, so not likely given Modi's bigotry- for Pakistan to back anyone else. They're still Pakistan's pet project. Also, Pakistan is not completely moronic, and backing ISIS in any way would be a very very obvious own goal waiting to happen. While no doubt there are plenty of sources saying that Iran supports the Taliban that is ludicrous, they have a cold détente based on both wanting the US out. They also have a limited budget, and far more friendly groups to fund (in Afghanistan and elsewhere) than the Taliban, and not just the Hazara. There are also 'sources' saying that Iran funds ISIS, and no doubt rain on your wedding day/ 1000 forks when all you need is a knife/ meeting then man of your dreams then meeting his wonderful wife are all despicable Iranian plots in the mind of someone at the CIA. I mean, funny how "Russia is putting bounties on US soldiers stuff" disappeared entirely after the election, having done its job of embarrassing Donald Trump and reinforcing the Russiagate conspiracy theory... Well OK, there was a barely reported hearing in which it was labelled as 'low confidence' (spook code for 'a load of old bollocks'). Both the Taliban and ISIS-K get/ got a decent amount of internal funding too, from intimidation and drugs. Be interesting to see if the Taliban goes back to a zero drugs policy now they're in power again or not.

Pretty recognisable render of Felicity Kendall, and greatly raises my hopes for a Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin The Goodies game eventually getting made (include Kitten Kong, specifically, pretty please).

Watched the trailer, not as bad as I expected to be honest. That 'banter' is 100% going to get very very old very very quickly though. Then again the only trailer I've unequivocally liked in the last past year or so was the Outer Worlds 2, for taking the mick out of all the other trailers I've watched that feel like they were extruded from plastic in some sort of generic CGI sweatshop where every smidge of imagination gets rewarded via cattle prod. OTOH, Epic Exclusive --> entertainment from all the toys being tossed from cots.

I didn't have much hope for a Saint's Row reboot when they're saying it'll be toned down- I mean, what's Saint's Row without the massively OTT, well, everything? A GTA clone, and not a particularly good one. There's a reason the SR nostalgia starts with the silly SR2, not the po faced 1. Modern [video game] writers only know how to write themselves? Slightly less facetious, and I'd stress that I haven't seen the video, but a lot of game writers seem to be obsessed with trying to write the next Firefly without having a scintilla of the writing talent of Joss Whedon or Tim Minear- so they end up writing people who are obnoxious knobs, instead of endearing obnoxious knobs, and the 'banter' feels incredibly forced. I could also very easily imagine writers having to do 30 minute powerpoint presentations on their proposed characters and plot to run past PR and upper management...

Dunno if the 2k thing makes much of a difference as it'd fundamentally be a pretty expensive license that requires lots of money to be made somehow- and the non 2k Marvel Avengers is a microtransaction engine with attached gameplay*. I'd expect Firaxis to at least make a better game out of it, but I can't see anything Marvel (excluding loss leaders, ie console launch titles) not being absolutely riddled with mtx. *and in a cautionary tale, it's also one of if not the biggest bomb of the last few years. Should have made another Deus Ex instead of that garbage, eh Squeenix?

Double post, but completely separate subtopic... Support for lock down/ elimination strategy remains strong here as 84% of New Zealanders support current lockdown (10% opposed). Mostly posted because there's an awful lot of foreign media coverage and social media suggesting we're getting lockdown fatigue when in reality we aren't because we haven't been in actual lockdown since May, have functionally zero unemployment and a housing bubble economy that is doing very well. Oh yeah, that's May 2020; apart from a few weeks of lockdown lite. Bit of an eyeroller when you see criticism coming from countries with deaths per million in the 1000s when ours is... 5.

For the lab/ man made theory specifically the above video is best since it sums up the earlier theories at the start then deals with the more recent stuff. (I'll admit to a bit of bias since pretty much every objection he's raised is one I've raised too and he has about as much respect for 'scientific' articles leaked to the Daily Fail as I have. I did find 4 positively charged amino acids actually in SARS- CoV2 though, even better, in a sequence it shares with SARS-CoV1)

Is that Daniel Bryan Bryan Danielson about to tell me that both pictures were staged? (100% better staging from the US, the Taliban look like a bunch of unenthusiastic cosplayers)

That's just the Brits saying that it's the neighbours' problem now. Taliban rebranding is mostly Qatar's doing. They've tried to do similar with other groups like Jabhat al Nusra in Syria to make them more palatable to western sensibilities.

Rank and file ANA was pretty well infiltrated by the Taliban too- that's always been a problem; if you have a nominal strength of ~350k and it's 'really' about half that if some random turns up you're not quite sure whether it's one of those ghost soldiers actually turning up or not. Certainly the top end of the ANA- the Commandos- fought very hard and was high quality, but it was a very top heavy workload for them. Near exact same thing happened with the US trained/ supported Iraqi response to ISIS in Iraq (ie not the PMU/ Hashd militia but their formal army) where the exact equivalent Golden Division did a massively disproportionate amount of the fighting, and suffered pretty ludicrous losses (~40% in the Battle of Mosul alone), while the rest of the army had plenty willing to fight but they mainly ended up actually doing the fighting with the PMUs because the formal army was... awful, as an army. Indeed, if there's one thing that shows that the US/ NATO didn't learn the lesson from ISIS in Iraq* it was that the exact same mistakes made with the western trained army there existed and were repeated with the ANA, including only having one formation capable of genuine offensive actions. The main difference being the religious divide that meant that ISIS had no attraction to or ability to infiltrate shia areas, and that the Afghans never got time to properly organise a PMU equivalent when their formal army fell apart. *Or Syria; while not western trained the situation in Syria was similar prior to 2015. They only had one formation capable of significant offensive acts ('Tiger Forces') and while they had plenty of people willing to fight the army as a whole was unreliable, leading to a lot of informal loyalist militia doing the actual fighting while army units were badly led and tended to fall apart if anything went wrong. As much as Russian intervention made a difference the development of 3 or 4 formations that could reliably launch attacks to take the strain off was at least as large a factor since it meant the Tiger Forces weren't constantly being moved from crisis to crisis In the end Trump's set date did nothing, since Biden ignored it. Arguably Biden's set date did nothing either since the whole thing fell apart 4 weeks before it passed. I've always found that sort of thing disproportionately annoying. It's the diplomatic equivalent of #StopKony2012.

Myocarditis rather than pericarditis? Doesn't matter anyway, the answer is that if you run a study on ~40,000 people and a side effect only occurs at a 1/100,000 rate the chances are that no one gets the side effect in the study. But that's true whether the study is expedited or long term. If you're giving it to 500 million europeans you statistically Expect 5000 people to get it, but againm that's irrespective of whether it was approved fast or slow. They do stop studies when possibly related serious effects show up, eg they stopped the AstraZeneca covid vaccine when someone in the phase 3 trial developed neurological symptoms, but that was eventually shown to be unrelated. Indeed. For anyone who doesn't know the 'original' 'scientific' 'antivaxxer' Andrew Wakefield got his MMR vaccine --> autism paper published in The Lancet. And he, of course, wasn't really antivax since he was himself, coincidentally, trying to patent individual vaccines.

XeSS? ... Guess everybody at Intel pronounces Xe as 'ex ee' and nobody pronounces it as 'zee'.

4 new Tomb Raider releases: Legend, Anniversary, Underworld; Game of the Year (Reboot). Can get the 7 games available for a smidge over $10 total.

High viral load not necessarily correlating with symptoms and being found even in asymptomatic cases seems to be a bit of a 'delta thing'. Delta has caused high viral loads (usually still a-/ low symptomatic) even in (some) vaccinated people. Trouble with proving transmission from those people is that trying to isolate high viral loads but a-/ low symptomatic people as vectors when you can practically guarantee anyone has also been exposed to some random hacking their lungs out, and the contact tracing is either non existent or swamped.

But how can you continually smooth those skirts? RIP in peace any thoughts of a faithful book adaptation. Guess at least we may still get some braid tugging.

Anyone overly worried about the vaccines' emergency approval should just pretend it's a response to an earthquake instead and ask if they'd be shocked and appalled at how normal bureaucratic procedure isn't followed after one of those. There's a massive amount of bureaucracy that gets sidestepped in any emergency response. After an earthquake you don't want people living in tents for years because you're holding planning meetings, receiving submissions, then counter submissions, then writing the costs of repairs to water and sewerage into next year's budget and gazetting that for comment as you'd normally do. You side step all of that due to it being an emergency and fix the infrastructure without it being budgeted; but keep the stuff that is really important ie repairs and rebuilds must still be done to safety standards so next time there's an earthquake the house doesn't kill anyone living there. There are of course reasons for the extended time frame and extra bureaucracy which occurs under 'normal' circumstances but those reasons are extra safeguards for when there's the luxury of little time pressure.

Children under 12 are specifically excused from wearing masks here since it can be impossible to get them to keep them on. We now have 7 cases here, fortunately all the exposure sites are very low risk like, uh, a pub and restaurant while watching the All Blacks, a school (teacher), hospital (vaccinated nurse) and a casino. Not their fault of course since they wouldn't have had a clue about being infected. Oh well, time to tackle my gaming backlog plus get the garden organised for spring, for the next 3+ weeks. May I also say a fulsome 'thank you' to Gladys Berejiklian (premier of New South Wales in Ockeronia). I know New Zealand was once part of her state and is listed as a State itself in the Ocker constitution, but I would have been perfectly happy if she hadn't included us in her plan to spread delta throughout the commonwealth. And she had the fricking index case there and did nothing for over a week.

She's not wrong. Niqab/ burka is cultural, not religious, and you're only 'meant' to cover the hair (indeed the specific Koranic guidance is that you're not allowed to cover the face during the Hajj, so niqab/ burka are banned there).

From the 'aged like milk files: Ashraf Ghani: fixing failed states Ashraf Ghani: Preparing for a Syrian Transition but unfortunately this masterpiece from all the way back on Feb 15 1989 doesn't seem to be available online...

You can make a vaccine that theoretically works in an afternoon- that's literally how long it took to do the theory on the Oxford vaccine, literally on a napkin. It's always the trials that take the time. Most big name viruses have a vaccine unless they're too mild or rare to care about, HIV would be the biggest one that doesn't, but that's also an unusual virus in that it specifically targets the immune system itself. The directed response to a novel pathogen (eg a new virus) takes time, that's why vaccines exist since they stimulate the immune system, and make it so the pathogen is recognised. It's also why vaccines don't work immediately. It would be incorrect to say that there's no immune response prior to that though, there's a swag load of responses you inherently get to anything new (including things like pus around wooden splinters), they're just not directed specifically at it and thus less efficient.