Thought for the Day

[Nick Danger]

You don't seem to understand how probabilities work.

Funny, that's what they said to me last time I went to Vegas.

Trust me, Bronco, I'm much thinker than you smart I am. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal evidence. You gave yours and I was giving mine.

I don't really trust any of the numbers that get thrown at me about this thing - from any source. The problem with lying government is, you never really know when they're lying and when they aren't. The problem with medicine for profit is, you never really know whether a doctor is being paid by the government or Big Pharma or SuperHospoCorp for his opinion or if he's actually giving sound medical advice.

And let me ask you something, Bronco, and I want you to give this some serious thought, try to look at it from all angles - There is a LOT of evidence that this virus was cooked up in a lab in China. There is scientific evidence and eyewitness testimony. There's a Chinese lab technician in hiding.

So where's the outrage? Where's the investigation? China is the 2nd-richest nation on the planet. They've stopped calculating the global cost of Covid-19 in trillions because it has entered the realm of incalculable.

I've read stories before, in American newspapers, about men going to prison for decades for stealing $10, or $4, or $37, or whatever. We are not a forgiving society. But China owes the world...well, what do they owe the world? And we're not even TALKING about it anymore? "Oh yeah, China inflicted this on the world by negligence at a minimum, and possibly even on purpose, but we're just gonna let that go."

Uh-uh. Doesn't work that way unless there's a larger picture. Globalist conspiracy IMHO.

[filghy2]

While I don't know filghy's exact latitude and longitude I would say this is extremely unlikely. I live in a county with 1000 new cases per million and so while I'm fairly certain I haven't gotten it I can't guarantee I won't. Curious how many new cases there were yesterday where filghy is from....

No new cases for the last 6 months, apart from a few people returning from overseas who went into quarantine. But according to Nick's idiot logic that can't possibly be right, so they must be faking the data.

[filghy2]

In my defense, Flighty, I can only say that I absolutely did NOT foresee the global pandemic or what my friends and I like to call the Retard Riots..

You are like the man who refuses to take out insurance, then when he is ruined says in his defence that he didn't expect his house to burn down. You want to claim good luck to your credit, but make excuses if you get bad luck.

Sensible people know that bad things can happen, even if they can't predict them exactly. That is why sensible people don't make over-confident predictions.

Sensible people also have plans for how to respond to unfortunate events. The possibility of a global pandemic was not unpredictable, as experts have been warning of it for many years.

[Stavros]

I don't really trust any of the numbers that get thrown at me about this thing - from any source. The problem with lying government is, you never really know when they're lying and when they aren't. The problem with medicine for profit is, you never really know whether a doctor is being paid by the government or Big Pharma or SuperHospoCorp for his opinion or if he's actually giving sound medical advice.

And let me ask you something, Bronco, and I want you to give this some serious thought, try to look at it from all angles - There is a LOT of evidence that this virus was cooked up in a lab in China. There is scientific evidence and eyewitness testimony. There's a Chinese lab technician in hiding.

Nick, your posts are rather like watching The Third Man, or Tom Cruise in Collateral dismissing human endeavour as having the importance of a fly on the back of an elephant. The statistics are there to try and give an accurate profile of how the virus has affected us, and it is no surprise that some sectors of the population are more adversely affected than others, because just about every epidemic and pandemic has recorded the impact poverty has on disease, in terms of illness and death. Frank Snowden's Naples in the Time of Cholera (1995) is an exemplary study of its kind.

But what your cynical post also asks is for your view on vaccinations. Immunology has been one of the most successful branches of medical science, eradicating Smallpox, all but eradicating other diseases such as Polio, Measles, Tuberculosis, and so on, to the benefit of mankind in general. In the UK the NHS has administered millions of doses of vaccines in early childhood to late maturity and it costs the patient nothing because they pay or have paid for it through their National Insurance. And yes, the Pharmacauetical Companies make billions in profit, but they are also among the very few industries that spend vast amounts of their own profits on R&D where in most industries this is farmed out (Computing is the other top ranked R&D industry).

I might be wrong, but why would you support vaccinations of any kind? We fall sick, and we either recover or we die, that seems to be your position. Florida has a Governor who seems to think there is little or nothing that can be done to tackle Covid-19. Result?
1.74 Million infections, 26, 821 deaths. Tough shit?

As for the Wuhan Lab theory, the question is, why? Labs in many countries, including yours, have been conducting experiments on bats and other creatures to help tackle zoonotic disease, it is not part of a weapons programme.

We are an enquiring species, and have developed the science that has proven illness and disease can be resolved or even eliminated. I see that as a cause of comfort and celebration, as the demonstration that for all its flaws in morality and behaviour, we humans can do good things that benefit us all, just as we need to show more care for the planet we live on. You can dismiss that as 'Virtue Signalling' if you choose to, but to me, like music, good food and human company it is what gives life its meaning and purpose, all of it threatened by Covid-19. And if the politics was so simple -'let the virus take its course', are you going to take responsibility for the millions of deaths and infections with long term complications that is just as likely if not more so, to damage the economy? I am at least fortunate that you are not in government.

[broncofan]

I'm kind of at a loss Nick with your last post. This is not even close to the first zoonotic disease and also not the first disease to be subject to conspiracy theories about its origins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis

There have now been three deadly coronaviruses that have infected humans in the last 20 years. There was Sars-1, which is so closely related to the pathogen that causes covid that I heard a biologist estimate that their lineages may have separated as recently as 800 years ago.

There was also MERS or Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome which originated in camels in Saudi Arabia and can infect humans. It is extremely deadly but it has an r0 of less than 1 which means even when it spills over and kills people it eventually burns out.

Since both Sars-1 and Sars-2 originated in China I guess I can ask you how you account for MERS? Is Saudi Arabia in on the conspiracy or is it mere coincidence that it's in the same class of virus as the other two?

Why didn't China let Sars-1 spread if they created it? Why is it so easy to account for the ability of the government to suppress Sars-1 but not Sars-2? We know why public health efforts are easier in the first case even though the virus is more deadly.

If we accept that Sars-1 was not created in a lab (given that China suppressed it and they'd have no incentive to suppress a virus they cooked up as a biological weapon) and MERS was not created in a lab doesn't it make it look like there's a trend for coronaviruses to mutate and infect humans?

You sound like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani with their conspiracy theories about the election. I do think we should investigate the virus' origins because we'd like to know the cause.

[filghy2]

Why didn't China let Sars-1 spread if they created it?

The argument that China created this deliberately to damage their opponents is particularly silly. If so, why would they have launched it first in their own country?

There's no doubt that China has behaved poorly in terms of transparency, and continues to do so in limiting the WHO investigation. However, what are people who say they should be held accountable for the costs really proposing - that we invade the country and force them to pay reparations?

Anyway the US hardly has clean hands when it comes to inflicting harm on other countries by deliberate choice or by negligence. How much harm has been caused by the decision to invade Iraq on false pretences? How much harm was caused by the global financial crisis, which originated in the USA?

[broncofan]

I agree there is no way to make them pay and possibly no reason to. They might not have been negligent. Had the virus originated anywhere else can we be certain it wouldn't have left the country?

They have behaved poorly in terms of transparency in the aftermath and it is probably to suppress information about when they knew there was a problem v when they let everyone know.

I don't know enough about international law to know whether there's an enforcement mechanism but I do think if it's found to have originated in a wet market China has less grounds to claim maintaining these markets is only a domestic matter. That's a hell of a negative externality for a non-essential food source. Wouldn't the rest of the world have some grounds to insist they stop butchering food in a way that risks the creation of zoonotic diseases, at least prospectively?

[broncofan]

I don't really trust any of the numbers that get thrown at me about this thing - from any source. The problem with lying government is, you never really know when they're lying and when they aren't. The problem with medicine for profit is, you never really know whether a doctor is being paid by the government or Big Pharma or SuperHospoCorp for his opinion or if he's actually giving sound medical advice.

When I listen to medical experts it's not based on blind faith. Typically they can provide reasons that are coherent and the research that underpins their views is peer-reviewed. It reminds me of when other liberals were saying they would not take a vaccine that was approved under Trump. I thought, even if you don't trust the agency that approves it there is data available that is not always easy to interpret but not overly difficult either. There are experts at our universities who could offer opinions about safety and effectiveness. One should start with experts because they can help you interpret data and the consensus among experts is usually correct. But you should also try to understand their reasoning.

In the mind of a conspiracy theorist everyone is disqualified by bias of some sort. People can have minor conflicts that do not affect their conclusions. I think disclosure laws are important and if someone has a conflict I'd like to know about it. Occasionally a conflict is so significant that a person should avoid being involved in something. But this idea that you can't trust anyone because everyone has a conflict (is it the same conflict?) and even the data is unreliable is intended, whether consciously or not, to avoid acknowledging truths you don't want to acknowledge. It might irritate you to hear what you are unintentionally doing but the majority of scientists don't have an agenda other than advancing human knowledge.

[broncofan]

People can have minor conflicts that do not affect their conclusions.

Not to mention the fact that someone with a bias can bring to light a fact that you initially don't trust but which can then be independently verified. Facts exist independent of their source.

Once a fact can be independently verified any bias is irrelevant but conspiracy theorists will still argue one person's proximity to something or other has a magical effect that puts everything under a cloud. It's not logical but to them nothing ever has to do with what is true but rather what "they" do or don't want you to think.

[Nick Danger]

Not to mention the fact that someone with a bias can bring to light a fact that you initially don't trust but which can then be independently verified. Facts exist independent of their source.

Once a fact can be independently verified any bias is irrelevant but conspiracy theorists will still argue one person's proximity to something or other has a magical effect that puts everything under a cloud. It's not logical but to them nothing ever has to do with what is true but rather what "they" do or don't want you to think.

What is a "conspiracy theorist," Bronco? Me? No, I'm a mechanic. I do have some theories though, about some of the things that happen in the world, and sometimes those theories involve multiple people executing some evil plan for profit, which meets the qualifications for a "conspiracy." But nobody pays me to do that, they pay me to be a mechanic.

It's interesting to me when people weaponize those words. If you are a "conspiracy theorist" you are automatically suspected of mental illness. Never mind that many so-called conspiracy theories have proven to be true as time passes and the conspirators die off. JFK? Is that a "conspiracy theory?" Because as even the government itself has admitted at this point, Oswald didn't act alone. The Military-Industrial Complex, conspiracy theory, or has 70 years of continuous warfare finally convinced people that there actually IS a not-entirely-public group of powerful people intent on keeping this country at war for profit? FBI complicity in the 1993 WTC bombing - conspiracy theory, or proved true by the New York Times in this article - https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/31/n...-dealings.html ?

I guess my real question is, when did gullibility become a virtue? How does NOT believing a steaming pile of lies make me the sucker?

Perfect example, the Sandy Hook incident. I can tell you with near 100% certainty that no children were killed in this incident and in fact, the entire incident was completely fabricated, never happened at all, was entirely staged. How can I say this? Because I've studied the matter at length. I've seen the Robbie Parker video in which he is enjoying a nice belly laugh before stepping up to the podium, completely changing his facial expression, and discussing the slaughter of his daughter less than 24 hours prior. I've seen video of parents who had supposedly just lost their children to a crazed killer, yet somehow not a single tear was shed. I saw these same parents being interviewed on television immediately after the event, and every single one of them immediately wanted to advocate gun control - not a SINGLE PARENT was of the opinion that it would have been better if someone at the school had been armed and able to address the problem of the lone gunman, they were ALL gun control proponents, to the extent that the issue of gun control was more important to them than grieving over their lost children. I watched as the Connecticut legislature IMMEDIATELY sealed all records of the event, so that at this point, it is no longer even possible to prove that these children existed, let alone that they were murdered. I saw the famous "firehouse circles" video in which paid actors walked in a continuous circle into, out of, around, and back into the nearby firehouse in order to portray the image of a lot of activity. I saw the indisputable hard-drive evidence that the news story about the event in the local paper was written THE DAY BEFORE THE INCIDENT.

I saw all this, I saw a motive for staging exactly such an incident, I saw tons of evidence that it was indeed staged, and I determined it was not real.

Now, I am not theorizing about a conspiracy here. I KNOW it didn't happen, and every single solitary piece of evidence that still exists about this thing (which of course doesn't include bodies of victims, the body of the alleged perpetrator, the school itself, the weapons used, or even a single reliable piece of eyewitness testimony) agrees with me.

In the real world, I'm absolutely correct about this thing, and I can prove it to a much greater extent than you can try to prove me wrong. But in THIS world, the one we actually live in, I'm considered to be the crazy one. All the world's dipshits are aligned against me - of course it really happened, didn't you read the government story? What are you, a crazy conspiracy theorist?

It's funny in a clownish way, but ultimately those who speak out against "conspiracy theories" are merely stupid, easily manipulated, and live in constant fear of any data that doesn't confirm their own media-centric world view.

There is a "They," Bronco. The government does lie. The media lies. People lie. For reasons. And some other people prefer sifting through all these layers of bullshit and trying to parse out those reasons over silent acceptance of the lies. Those people are your "conspiracy theorists." Or, as some of us prefer to be called, your mechanic.