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goDel

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Posts posted by goDel

  1. Great read! The quote you posted doesn't do it justice though, imo. It ironically reads like any other "30-word Facebook post". Without any hint of self-reflection. But again, it doesn't do it any justice.

    The TLDR version: US is too hellbent on independence, so it might be better to move towards a union of states. Similar to the EU. 

    Or my interpretation: the US sucks at governing the US.

    Not saying I agree. But it's an interesting read nonetheless.

  2. 2 hours ago, rhmilo said:

    The clapping thing has me furious. The same people who clap for health care are the people that for ten years have been voting for the party that has has been making cuts in health care budgets, to the point where at the height of the crisis people had to be sent to IC units in Germany, and that will do it again at the next election because the prime minister looks so good on tv.

    Talking about the Dutch situation? 

  3. Best to you, poly. I hope you can take some positives from your experiences. Or perhaps, that you can work through them so they don't keep you down and consider them useful. I'm sure a lot of people are very thankful for your efforts. Take care.

    • Like 1
  4. Try "The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia" by  Aleksandr Dugin.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

    Doesn't help you create fake accounts. Just provides some geopolitical background.

    If you're looking for help to create chaos, you're on your own.

    ?

    Quote
    • Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]

     

    • Like 1
  5. 1 hour ago, Gocab said:

    Thanks, I've not seen this reported by any news sites that I read regularly, but I know the president was fast to play that angle, so that's why I was sceptical, because, you know he does nothing but lie.

    There's some reporting at NYT

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-protests-white-supremacists-antifa.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

    Conclusion: concrete evidence "something" is going on, but unclear what groups and why. Still under investigation. Antifah seems like a red herring. But we don't really know at this point.

  6. Faster!

     

    1 minute ago, Gocab said:

    Thanks, I've not seen this reported by any news sites that I read regularly, but I know the president was fast to play that angle, so that's why I was sceptical, because, you know he does nothing but lie.

    I hope you're not thinking I take my cues from Trump....

    *triggered*

    • Like 2
  7. 1 hour ago, Gocab said:

    I think the outside groups talk is just a ploy to deligitmize the protest.

    Not so fast. Firstly it was about what is happening specifically during the nights. Second, it's not a ploy to degilitmize these protests when there's people coming in from outside the state with what appear to be completely different intentions. Should we simply ignore that? The core of these protests seem to be peaceful and aimed at police violence against black people. But a number of people appear to show up with completely different intentions.

    OK, nothing is happening. It's all fake news. Believe no one. Sure. That's also a way to deal with it.

  8. Although I'm hopeful for a "turn the tide" kind of development, I'm very sceptical. Can write a whole post about why, but I don't want to depress people. So I'm just keeping it to: don't keep your hopes up to high.

    Some reporting here that the nightly riots appear to be done by outside interest groups. Unclear which. Both signs of radical leftists and extreme right. Smells fishy. Couple of groups want to see the US burn. And it has nothing to do with racial inequality either, I'm guessing.

  9. 39 minutes ago, dr lopez said:

    i'd like to date AOC. after seeing her bf i know she goes for totally below average guys. i have a chance

    prolly smarter than you though. she likes brains on her average looking bf.

  10. 50 minutes ago, ghsotword said:

    Not all genomes that are sequenced get uploaded to public databases. Also, the time interval from sequencing a genome to uploading it to public databases can be quite long, e.g. one year. Besides this, researchers often want to delay the uploading of a newly sequenced genome to public databases until they have written up a research paper that goes along with the genome.

    So the one virus that leaked just happened to be one of the newer/unpublished ones? The likelihood is shrinking and shrinking.

    Is this really a scenario worth investing your time/energy? I think it's a waste of time. Gonna be difficult to keep this secret if it indeed leaked. There's also the possibility of extraterrestrials leaking this in Wuhan to consider. Seriously...

    200.gif

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1
  11. On 5/25/2020 at 10:18 PM, ghsotword said:

    Well, already before the COVID-19 pandemic happened, it was public information that the Wuhan lab was researching bat coronaviruses, and even working with mutant coronavirus strains. The Wuhan lab had published research papers on these topics. For example, they were co-authors on this paper from 2015: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/. So it is not possible for them to completely deny that they were working with bat coronaviruses. If they were guilty of leaking the virus from the lab, the best they could do to cover it up would be to say that they were worried that it could have come from their lab but then they checked the sequences and they didn't match.

    Nobody denied they were researching bat virusses.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/

    (first published in march)

    Quote

    Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7

    Quote

    As a laboratory investigating CoV, we first used pan-CoV PCR primers to test these samples13, given that the outbreak occurred in winter and in a market—the same environment as SARS infections. We found five samples to be PCR-positive for CoVs. One sample (WIV04), collected from the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF), was analysed by metagenomics analysis using next-generation sequencing to identify potential aetiological agents. Of the 10,038,758 total reads—of which 1,582 total reads were retained after filtering of reads from the human genome—1,378 (87.1%) sequences matched the sequence of SARSr-CoV (Fig. 1a). By de novo assembly and targeted PCR, we obtained a 29,891-base-pair CoV genome that shared 79.6% sequence identity to SARS-CoV BJ01 (GenBank accession number AY278488.2). High genome coverage was obtained by remapping the total reads to this genome (Extended Data Fig. 1). This sequence has been submitted to GISAID (https://www.gisaid.org/) (accession number EPI_ISL_402124). Following the name given by the World Health Organization (WHO), we tentatively call it novel coronavirus 2019 (2019-nCoV). Four more full-length genome sequences of 2019-nCoV (WIV02, WIV05, WIV06 and WIV07) (GISAID accession numbers EPI_ISL_402127–402130) that were more than 99.9% identical to each other were subsequently obtained from four additional patients using next-generation sequencing and PCR (Extended Data Table 2).

    Also note how genomes get registered in a database. And the paper was published the 3rd of februari. Open access. So, if it was a so-called bioweapon, they put it out in public space. A lot of transparency for a secret/self-made weapon, don't you think?

    Quote

    Sequence data that support the findings of this study have been deposited in GISAID (https://www.gisaid.org/) with accession numbers EPI_ISL_402124, EPI_ISL_402127–EPI_ISL_402130 and EPI_ISL_402131; GenBank with accession numbers MN996527MN996532; National Genomics Data Center, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (https://bigd.big.ac.cn/databases?lang=en) with accession numbers SAMC133236–SAMC133240 and SAMC133252.

    And another publication from 2015 about changing an existing virus.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

    Quote

    Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats1—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells and in vivo, and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against SHC014-CoV. Together, the strategy translates metagenomics data to help predict and prepare for future emergent viruses.

    There's really no secret here.

    Around here, experts report the virus is highly likely originated from nature. And given the transparency, I can only assume they're right. Perhaps it escaped from the facilities in Wuhan. But if they were researching this specific virus, I'd expect the genome to be present in a database.

    • Like 1
  12. 17 minutes ago, KingBo0 said:

    This has got to be the most irritating video I have ever watched. I'm hoping this bastard is just misinformed, and isn't being willfuly ignorant. He says so many dumbass things and blames "the liberals" for the lockdowns. Why can't people on either side stop thinking every choice the other side makes is bad? I don't understand how anything will ever get done when people like him, with tens of thousands of subscribers, go around encouraging you to go out and basically willfully perpetuate this virus. It's so frustrating.

    Good example at what you can do with a bunch of half-truths. Especially with some predispositions, like his blatant anti-government stance, or the comment about the radical left.

    The frustrating thing is that it isnt stupid either. Its an example of taking a certain set of facts, some half facts and some personal opinions, and a bunch of self serving logic. You see it often on all sides of the debate. What you rarely see, is some argument where someone believes something and addresses potentially damaging information going against their own beliefs. (Remember dunning-kruger and the self doubt you develop when getting more skilled?) Instead its this pseudo lawyerly argument where the goal is to build your own argument and destroy the counter argument. It becomes toxic when people with different beliefs are labeled as radical, or stupid or whatever. Any other argument is either considered logically invalid -before the argument is being heard- or morally invalid -to justify you dont have to actually listen to them. The impossible thing is that it often requires a level of expertise people rarely have to recognize where things are presented skewed, or the logic is just wrong. Thats when emotions take over and it often ends in a shouting match. Weve all been there.

    My personal pet peeve is the argument this virus is way less deadly and the odds of people dying are some small number and all that, so lockdowns should be ended. Or some scientist who crunched the numbers and "proved " lockdowns don't work (https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/22/there-is-no-empirical-evidence-for-these-lockdowns/ ). There's always some type of logic resulting in some generalised blanket statement. In a situation with many unknowns and high risks (in terms of lives, economies and anything you can reasonably bring to the argument). Without any regard of the local context. And the point i'm currently making is no exception either. 

    Most difficult thing apparently, is to trust your authorities in times like these. And go with the flow of what your government has made up to be the best for all. Thats not to say people cant or shouldnt be critical. But that is to say some level of cooperation is critical to keep society going in times like these. Even if you don't agree.

    Central government isn't perfect, but can create some order in all the chaos. If people don't cooperate, it only creates more chaos. And theres always going to be a percentage who don't. And a percentage who do (like maniacs). The majority is somewhere in the middle. The people who kinda cooperate. A lot of central government is about moving this majority into the rightish direction. Or rather, to keep them where they naturally are. As the majority naturally defines societies order. It's often a mostly immovable object.

    I'd love to see an analysis about societies where governments are showed to follow these majorities. In a couple societies lots of people went into a personal lockdown out of their own before their central government were even willing to do so. It's interesting to see how societies can control and define their governments. 

    Sorry for this useless rant. :S

    • Like 4
    • Thanks 1
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