Thursday, June 10, 2021

So It Was Probably A Lab Leak

Within a matter of a couple weeks, the Overton window of COVID's origin has shifted, from Facebook completely banning the lab leak theory to just about everyone saying, well, it's a possibility, and well, it does seem credible, but of course, it was just an accident, it wasn't deliberate.

Wait a moment. Let's take a look at this kind of accident. On March 6, 1970, members of the Weather Underground were building a bomb in Greenwich Village when it accidentally went off, killing three. But that's OK, it wasn't deliberate, it was just an accident. On August 21, 1945, physicists playing around with the plutonium core of a nuclear bomb in Los Alamos mistakenly dropped part of its shield, causing a criticality incident that killed one physicist and exposed others to dangerous radiation. But that's OK, it was just an accident, it wasn't deliberate.

Nobody seems to want to ask what's behind this kind of accident. It seems to me that in our examples, people were messing around with material they knew -- and which any sensible adult would conclude -- was part of a highly destructive final product. In one case, it was clearly part of a larger terrorist plot. In the other, it was part of a project deemed essential to national security. But the mistakes were integral to the nature of the devices, they just didn't occur exactly as intended.

We now have video of Peter Daszak, whose EcoHealth Alliance launders US grant money to Chinese gain-of-function labs, explaining that gain-of-function is exactly what they were doing:

“Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS. We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we… Well I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people.

“You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers,” he adds.

So it sounds more and more like US government agencies were knowingly sending what the NIH director estimates were hundreds of millions to Daszak and his "colleagues in China" to play around with some extremely dangerous stuff. There was a lab leak, but it wasn't deliberate. Huh? Why were they funding this kind of work in the first place? What was the intent?

Commentators have pooh-poohed the idea that this might have been some kind of weapon -- they ask why China would want to kill millions of its own citizens as well as millions of others worldwide. It's a good question.

But visitors here know I'm fascinated with pieces of pop culture that are also perceptive indicators of what may really be going on. Animal House is one very good example. The Fringe TV series is another. It merges classic mad scientist stereotypes with real-world figures like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy Leary and comes up with theories of how the world works that we can't just completely toss out.

So the Overton window is open just wide enough at the moment to allow us to think the Wuhan lab leak was just an accident, but that's OK, it wasn't deliberate. But one implication of even this is that the US and China were working jointly on a very big project to develop a virus with the potential to kill lots of people. An accident with a beta version, as far as I can see this, did escape from the lab and kill lots of people. The production release will probably be even more deadly.

Harvard graduates will sneer, as they already have, that China won't build a weapon that would kill millions of its own people. And why would the US countenance such a thing, much less fund it?

Fringe has a possible answer, another merger of the mad scientist stereotype with real world figures like J Robert Oppenheimer, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Howard Hughes, the reclusive multidimensional tech magnate William Bell. In Season Four, Bell plots to create a new third alternate universe that suits his vision of what a universe should be, but to do this, he needs to destroy the two existing alternate universes, one of which is ours. In other words, to someone like William Bell, apocalyptic destruction isn't a bug, it's a feature.

So shy would US and Chinese elites collaborate to kill many millions of people worldwide with a technologically enhanced superbug? Don't neglect that radical environmentalists currently believe there are already far too many people in the world, and Planned Parenthood isn't up to the job of reducing population to the levels we need for true sustainability. We're in William Bell territory here, but that doesn't mean it's just a wacky fantasy. We've already seen how quackery can drive civilized nations off the rails in the real world. What do people like Gates, Zuckerbrg, and Musk really believe about where world population should be headed? If they're serious about lowering it by, say, 95% or more, even gas chambers and ovens will be far too inefficient.

A new Black Death would do a much better job. People come out of Harvard believing crazy stuff. We need to keep this in mind as this scandal develops.