NASCAR officials postponed the Daytona 500 to Monday afternoon, following a series of rain delays shortly after President Trump appeared at the race, told drivers to start their engines and rode a ceremonial parade lap in his presidential limousine, “The Beast,” on Sunday.

The race will resume Monday at 4 p.m. ET, officials said.
...
The delay undoubtedly dampened the excitement prompted by Trump’s dramatic entrance on Air Force One, which performed a flyover and landed just a few hundred yards behind the track. The president’s motorcade arrived minutes later to loud cheers. Both entrances were broadcast on giant video boards around the superspeedway.

Trump, serving as the grand marshal for the Daytona 500, became the second-ever president to deliver the Great American Race’s iconic command, “Gentlemen, start your engines!”
President Trump, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, giving the instructions “gentlemen, start your engines,” before the start of the Daytona 500.
...
With first lady Melania Trump by his side, Trump addressed the crowd, calling the opener “a legendary display of roaring engines, soaring spirits, and American skills, speed and power that we’ve been hearing about for so many years.”

“For 500 heart-pounding miles, these fierce competitors will chase the checkered flag, fight for the Harley J. Earl trophy and make their play for pure American glory,” Trump continued. “That’s what it is: pure, American glory.”

Posted by Drew458     on 02/17/2020 at 11:13 AM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff • Patriotism •  
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Well no kidding, again

Chinese Report: Kung Flu may have come from virus lab in Wuhan

Tell us what we all figured out at least 6 weeks ago.

Chinese scientists believe the deadly coronavirus may have started life in a research facility just 300 yards from the Wuhan fish market.

A new bombshell paper from the Beijing-sponsored South China University of Technology says that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WHCDC) could have spawned the contagion in Hubei province.

‘The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus,’ penned by scholars Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao claims the WHCDC kept disease-ridden animals in laboratories, including 605 bats.

It also mentions that bats - which are linked to coronavirus - once attacked a researcher and ‘blood of bat was on his skin.’

The report says: ‘Genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis (intermediate horseshoe bat).’

It describes how the only native bats are found around 600 miles away from the Wuhan seafood market and that the probability of bats flying from Yunnan and Zhejiang provinces was minimal.

In addition there is little to suggest the local populace eat the bats as evidenced by testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors.

Instead the authors point to research being carried out withing a few hundred yards at the WHCDC.

One of the researchers at the WHCDC described quarantining himself for two weeks after a bat’s blood got on his skin, according to the report. That same man also quarantined himself after a bat urinated on him.

I am not sure how honest a news source the UK Daily Mail is. About average I’d guess, although they run a whole lot of tabloid level stuff.

I saw this news at ZeroHedge the other day, a web site that has gone over the tinfoil edge.  Ok, I want to believe they’ve gone over the edge, after reading a very long, very detailed, but generally only lightly referenced paper there the other day. It traced (and connected all the dots of) viral research back to (Wiki link) psychotic war criminal Dr. Ishii, Unit 731, and the death camps in Japan in WWII to the US military germ warfare programs of the 50s to specifying all the crop and livestock attacks the CIA made on Cuba. the disease attacks in Central America, how the Army released Lyme disease from Plum Island, how Hantavirus was used in the Korean war and may have been engineered to kill Native Americans, and on and on. Mentions in detail that even today there are companies contracted with our government growing anthrax and other diseases thousands of liters at a time. A tiny part of that massive essay was that yes, the Wuhan virus was engineered almost right next door to the wet market, and even names the researchers involved. Horry Clap. And this 2 hour read was really only about bio-warfare efforts in our country. God knows what goes on in China and Russia and elsewhere.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/17/2020 at 10:25 AM   
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It’s A Sign

A gigantic swarm of locusts that belong to a plague that has ravaged millions of acres of crops across east Africa has been spotted reaching the Chinese border.

Billions of the insects have destroyed food supplies across Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia in what has been described as the worst plague for decades.

With vast swathes of the population in the region already facing food shortages due to poverty, the United Nations has warned action must be taken to avoid another “shock” to the region.

But footage has now surfaced showing thousands of the locusts seemingly reaching the border of China, adding yet more problems to a country struggling to contain the deadly coronavirus.

The clip is believed to have been taken on the Xinjiang border in the east of the country on February 15.

It shows the blue sky filled with the locusts as far as the eye can see. The plague has flown across the Red Sea into Europe and Asia in recent days.

Pakistan – which borders China – recently declared a national emergency over the locusts.

Great, locusts in southern Europe. At some point the colder northern climate will stop them, but all around the Med it’s nice and warm all year long.

Xinjiang is the far northwest corner of China, the empty zone where less than 10% of the land is habitable. It’s a huge area, bordering Mongolia, Kazahkstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, with microscopic borders with Russia and Afghanistan as well. Relatively no one lives there; population is just 30 people per square mile. In China. But that low number coupled with the huge area means it has a population of over 23 million. This is where the Uighur people live, those not in concentration camps; the Islamic Chinese who are more ethnically Turkish and Mongolian than Asian Chinese.

Perhaps China will release hundreds of thousands of ducks and chickens to eat the locusts and grow fat. It’s been done before, but birds can only eat so much.

Meanwhile, add famine to pestilence and death. That leaves only one more horseman to go.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/17/2020 at 09:54 AM   
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   Saturday - February 15, 2020

babies and bullets

Ok, this started out as a post of two weirdo Leftist news items ...

Former Colorado Springs Mayoral Candidate And Her Daughter Arrested For Attempted Baby Kidnapping And For Drugging Infant’s Mother

A former Colorado Springs mayoral candidate and her 16-year-old daughter have been arrested after allegedly drugging a woman in an attempt to steal her newborn.

Juliette Parker - who ran for mayor in 2019 - was charged with multiple felonies after she and the unidentified minor were detained Friday at her home on the 4100 block of 220 Street East at around 2.30pm.

Parker was charged with a count of assault in the second degree and attempted kidnapping, according to booking records.

A release from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department state that the pair were arrested following an extensive investigation and after reports that they may have been posing as newborn baby photographers.

Operating under an alias, Ms. Parker pretended to be a photographer taking free baby pictures to establish her portfolio. She made several visits to one home, taking plenty of pictures of the kid but also selfies of herself and the baby. And then her daughter fed the new mom a laced cupcake ...

Parker received about a third of the votes for mayor in 2019. I never heard of her before today, and the only thing I noticed is that she has an extensive chest tattoo featuring a bunch of birds. Research shows all the Colorado candidates were labeled as Independents.

~~~~

Alabama Forced Vasectomy Bill

Alabama State Legislator Rolanda Hollis (D) has introduced a bill requiring all men who father 3 children, and all men over the age of 50, to have a vasectomy. This bill will go nowhere, but she introduced it as payback for the State’s recent abortion law, which would limit abortion to within a 10 days of conception, or in cases of ectopic pregnancy, or in cases of “lethal anomaly” of the fetus. The Republican governor, Kay Ivey signed the bill into law in May 2019 knowing full well that it would be shot down. The federal courts almost immediately did just that, blocking it in October 2019 before it went into effect.

Since 1837 Alabama has been dominated by Democrats in their legislator and governor, except for a few years after the Civil War, but has had a Republican governor since 2003 and Republican dominated houses since 2011.

So this is empty virtue signalling. Every one of these laws has been throw out AFAIK.

~~~~

But then I wondered, why is it that a blanket SCOTUS decision abort abortion can not be infringed upon in any way shape or form, yet the Second Amendment, which pre-dates even the Supreme Court, and specifically says it can not be infringed, is subject to all kinds of limitations all over the nation?? Abortion - which many people consider to be murder - is sacrosanct, but the right to protect yourself from being murdered is open to constant (always negative) interpretation. Go figure. It must be raycism at work again. Or Trump. Or Climate Change.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/15/2020 at 01:36 PM   
Filed Under: • Abortion • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • FREEDOM • Guns and Gun Control •  
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Trying To Deal With Losing (without losing it too much)

We had yet another piss poor performing night at bowling league last night. We lost all the games, again. We have only won 1 game in the past 5 weeks. 1 out of 15. 6% success rate. That is horrible.

What’s worse was that we played ex-teammates Joe and Dave’s team last night. We’d beat them 7-0, 7-0 the first two times we went up against them this year. But last night ... phooey. We limped along, they had a better than average night, and they took all 7. Oh well.

My average is down, but just a little. I threw a 506 series last night, about 6 pins under average per game. Even with a super clean ball, and what felt like a decent release and accurate targeting I could not get the ball to do a damn thing. I don’t get it, and that’s very frustrating.
When I get frustrated I try harder. Trying harder makes things worse. Tension, extra effort in the wrong direction, etc. Need to relax and focus on the basics, and let the ball do the work. Have to be friends with the ball. Have to be the ball.

Lane conditions last night were very bad. Confusing. We usually bowl on freshly cleaned and oiled lanes, and need to wipe our balls down after every shot throughout the night. Last night, nothing. Even our teammate, a beginner and a bit of an oblivion, remarked how his ball was coming back dry. And yet the back ends were dead. That means ... well, the lanes are usually only oiled about 2/3 of their length. Call it 40 feet out of 60. The last 1/3 is cleaned, but the surface is “dry” so that your ball can get traction and hook to the inside. There are a zillion different oil patterns that can be applied; the lane cleaning machine is computerized and very precise. In theory. Patterns run from very short and light - 33 feet of hardly any oil - to very long and heavy - 45 feet of an oil flood.

Our center does not post what oil pattern they are using. Maybe that’s because no one asks for it, but I think such knowledge could be useful. No, we have to “read the lanes”, which is a skill you develop over time, by gauging how your ball reacts when you throw it. Of course, for that analysis to have any meaning whatsoever, you have to have a highly consistent release, almost like a robot, which few of us with less than semi-pro averages do.  So it’s a chicken-egg death spiral thing. And that can really bum a guy out.

I really hope I didn’t bite people’s heads off last night. Pretty sure I didn’t. But by the time the night was over I was in an angry black mood. I was tense, depressed, on the edge of exploding for hours afterwards. Yeah I know, it’s just a game. Relax and have fun. I try, and usually I do. But it is competition, and I’m very tired of losing all the time, week after fucking week.

The lane cleaning machine does not clean all the way up to the foul line. It can’t; if it did it would wind up spraying cleaner an oil on the end of the approach which could create a dangerous condition. So the first half a foot or so up by the foul line at the end of the approach is often pretty foul. A thick black line of built up crap across each lane. God forbid that the employees use a mop or something first, and wipe that slop up. Hell no. You just have to learn to throw your ball over it, so that it doesn’t contact the lane until it’s couple feet past the line. But in my dark mood this poor work offended me. Do your damn job right for once. But they never do. That area doesn’t get cleaned for years I swear.

I also found myself annoyed by the lay down the guy on the other team was throwing. The idea of bowling is that your ball shouldn’t hit the lane until after it’s past the foul line. Putting your ball down on the approach will transfer oil and dirt from your ball to the place where people are walking. This makes the approach grubby, sticky, or slippery. Possibly dangerous. It is a thoughtless or inconsiderate or selfish or passive aggressive or just plain stupid thing to do. Ok, maybe if your ball touches down just at the line, or maybe 3 inches before it. That’s one thing. K was dropping his ball FOUR FEET before the line. Thank heaven there was no oil last night, or there would have been a lot of slips and falls. K’s bowling irks me anyway, always has. He’s one of those backup ball throwers, which I think is just plain weird, although I’m seeing more and more of it. Everybody goes easy on K because he’s simple minded, but enough is enough. Don’t shit the approach up with your dumbass throw, and don’t endanger other people through your thoughtless actions.

Yeah, I’m still a bit cranky. Maybe I can find a big bunch of sugary carbs for breakfast. And then I want to dig out my low power balls and go back up there and practice the basics. After I run my strike ball through my cleaning machine, just to see if anything comes off it. Which I doubt. It’s always so easy to blame the lanes, blame the balls, blame your teammates ... but it’s usually you who are the problem. So achieve a happy mellow zen state of grace, and practice the basic things. That way I can have confidence that my own stupid isn’t making things even worse.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/15/2020 at 07:15 AM   
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   Friday - February 14, 2020

Action, Reaction

The Perils Of Putting All Your 100 Year Old Eggs In One Basket

Gas prices are down 25¢ here in the past 10-14 days, from about $2.50 to $2.25. And that includes NJ’s former Governor’s gas tax, which is now up to 27¢.

Why is the pump price falling? Because there’s a fuel glut, because global demand is down. Because the world economy is slowing down for a short while, because of the viral situation in China. Which has now gone into “military emergency” mode.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/05/coronavirus-global-economy
https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2020/02/13/coronavirus-outbreak-exposes-chinas-monopoly-on-u-s-drug-medical-supplies/
https://prospect.org/world/coronavirus-outbreak-china-economic-red-flag/

And this is our own damn fault, as decades of the “nationalism bad” and “greed at any cost” movements have transferred a massive amount of global production to China. Hardly anything you can buy isn’t made in China or with stuff sourced from China. Except for Henry Rifles and gasoline. Everything in your life, no matter where in the First or Second World you live.

So if China slows down for a bit, or shuts down for a bit ... or if it shuts down forever ... the rest of us are left in the lurch.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/14/2020 at 01:38 PM   
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Carbon Dioxide Is Good, M’kay?

Spy satellites and computers are awesome. They see everything, every minute of the day, year after year. And all that lovely data is wonderfully crunchable, being transformed into simple graphs and color charts that the rest of us can instantly understand without having to wade through millions of pages of data. Simple comparative spectral analysis: what frequency of light was most reflected off the this area today, compared to this time last year and the year before? And the result is ...

From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25 2016.
***
The greening over the past 33 years reported in this study is equivalent to adding a green continent about two times the size of mainland USA (18 million km2)

White areas on the map are primarily deserts and frozen continents. The Arctic is not shown because it isn’t land; it’s ice sitting on the ocean. No land, no leaves, so it isn’t part of the picture. That’s the literal-ness of computers.

Plenty more on the topic at Power Line Blog and Watts Up With That.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels have risen 25 parts per million in that time period. From 3.9% (3.9 parts per 100 = 39,000 parts per million) to 3.9025% (39,025 parts per million); a quarter of a one hundredth of a percent. 0.0025%. HOW DARE YOU !!!!

And the plants are eating it up all over the place. CO2 makes them happy.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/14/2020 at 12:56 PM   
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   Thursday - February 13, 2020

well no kidding

There are no people with kun flu in North Korea. No living ones at any rate.

North Korean official reportedly executed for breaking coronavirus quarantine

A North Korean official who returned from China has reportedly been executed for going to a public bath in violation of his quarantine – while experts express doubts about Pyongyang’s claim that the hermit kingdom doesn’t have a single case of the coronavirus.

The trade official, who had been placed in isolation after traveling to China, was arrested and immediately shot for risking the spread of the deadly disease, the Dong-a Ilbo news outlet in South Korea reported.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has vowed to “rule by military law” against anyone who leaves quarantine without permission.

There are probably no living North Koreans with pneumonia, flu, or the common cold either. Or not for long. 

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2020 at 06:07 PM   
Filed Under: • Commies • Health-Medicine • Tyrants and Dictators •  
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A&R Thursday Part 2

World’s Oldest Story And Least Mobile People

More than 37,000 years ago a volcano erupted in Australia. The lava flow buried some of the people who had been living there for tens of thousands of years, buried their homes as well, along with an axe, a tool that they may have invented. Their culture had a strong oral tradition, passing along stories word for word across the generations.

Their descendants still live there, and still tell the story of when the fire gods got angry. However, since that event they no longer build stone houses, because it’s just not worth it if the gods are going to come mess with them anyway.

And somewhere along the way, call it 6,600 years ago, they learned an easy way to keep fresh meat at hand, so they didn’t have to hunt much and nobody starved. They caught and raised eels. And they still do that today.

In Australia, the onset of human occupation (≥65 ka?) and dispersion across the continent are the subjects of intense debate and are critical to understanding global human migration routes. New-generation multi-collector mass spectrometers capable of high-precision 40Ar/39Ar dating of young (<500 ka) samples provide unprecedented opportunities to improve temporal constraints of archaeological events. In southeastern Australia, a novel approach to improving understanding of occupation involves dating key volcanic eruptions in the region, referenced to stone artifacts and Aboriginal oral traditions. The current study focuses on two monogenetic volcanoes in the Newer Volcanic Province of southeastern Australia: Budj Bim (previously Mount Eccles) and Tower Hill. Budj Bim and its surrounding lava landforms are of great cultural significance and feature prominently in the oral traditions of the Gunditjmara people. Tower Hill is of archaeological significance due to the occurrence of a stone tool beneath tephra. 40Ar/39Ar eruption ages of 36.9 ± 3.1 ka (95% confidence interval) and 36.8 ± 3.8 ka (2σ) were determined for the Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanic complexes, respectively. The Tower Hill eruption age is a minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria, consistent with published optically stimulated luminescence and 14C age constraints for the earliest known occupation sites in Tasmania, New South Wales, and South Australia. If aspects of oral traditions pertaining to Budj Bim or its surrounding lava landforms reflect volcanic activity, this could be interpreted as evidence for these being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence.

This was during the last Ice Age, tens of thousands of years before it ended. Sea levels were at their lowest ebb ever, and possibly plate tectonics were slightly different. It was almost possible to walk the thousands of miles from Thailand to Australia, only needing some kind of boat or raft for a few short journeys island to island. This trek probably took many generations, but once these folks arrived they put down roots and never went elsewhere ever again. Well, mostly.

Australian archaeologists have discovered a piece of the world’s oldest axe in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia.

The axe fragment is about the size of a thumbnail and dates back to a Stone Age period of 45,000 to 49,000 years ago—at, or very soon after, the time humans arrived on the continent, and more than ten millennia earlier than any previous ground-edge axe discoveries.

The University of Sydney’s Professor Peter Hiscock is the lead and corresponding author of a new analysis of the fragment published in the journal Australian Archaeology. He said the axe revealed that the first Australians were technological innovators.

The axe fragment was initially excavated in the early 1990s by lead archaeologist Professor Sue O’Connor from the Australian National University (ANU) among a sequence of food scraps, tools, artwork and other artifacts from Carpenter’s Gap, a large rock shelter known to be one of the first sites occupied by modern humans.

“Nowhere else in the world do you get axes at this date. In Japan such axes appear about 35,000 years ago. But in most countries in the world they arrive with agriculture after 10,000 years ago,” Professor O’Connor said.

In 2014, as further study was being carried out on the objects dug out of the site, Professor Hiscock’s team discovered a small fragment of a polished axe, recovered from the oldest levels of the site.

New studies of the fragment have revealed that it comes from an axe that had been shaped from basalt then polished by grinding it on another rock until it was very smooth.

Ok, inventing the axe - a sharp rock on a stick - is great. And not getting buried by a lava flow is great too. But sooner or later you want to eat something, and have a place to stay in that’s out of the weather. And she wants sushi. So what’re you gonna do?

How about aquaculture? Dig a few miles of canals, connect them to the local river, figure out how to build weirs, catch a bunch of migrating eels, and let them live in the canals until you’re hungry. Which is what they did, at least 6,600 years ago. And then sit back and enjoy the easy picking protein for the next 6,400 years. Sweet. Let’s build some houses; we’re staying.

An Aboriginal aquaculture farm that is older than the pyramids, the Acropolis and Stonehenge has been awarded World Heritage Status by the United Nations.

A complex system of weirs, channels and dams at Budj Bim, in southwest Victoria has become the first World Heritage site in Australia to receive the coveted UNESCO protection solely for its Aboriginal cultural importance.

The Gunditjmara people began to engineer the land around Lake Condah, which lies on a long-extinct volcano, about 6600 years ago in order to catch kooyang eels.

The eel farm was given World Heritage Status at a meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan on Saturday.

The area was still in use when those white devils showed up around 1840; journal entries of the time showed that they knew these water works were for eel farming. But they drained the lake and damned the streams anyway, because ...pphht, natives, who cares, amIright?

The sophisticated system supplied the settlement with enough food to sustain them year-round and also to undertake trade.

The site features the remnants of about 300 round stone huts that are the only remaining permanent houses built by an indigenous community in Australia - busting the myth that all Aboriginal people were nomadic.

Gunditjmara brought water and young kooyang eels from the creek to low-lying areas through hundreds of metres of excavated channels

The C-shaped basalt block structures up to 4 metres across appear to be house foundations and are clustered in the same area as the fish traps. 

Monash University indigenous archaeology professor Ian Niven wrote in The Conversation of the 1841 visit to the site by Australia’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson.

Robinson described Budj Bim as: ‘an immense piece of ground trenched and banked, resembling the work of civilized man but which on inspection I found to be the work of the Aboriginal natives, purposefully constructed for catching eels.’

European settlers then altered the flow of Lake Condah’s waters by installing drainage channels in the 1880s and 1950s, obscuring its cultural history until heavy winter rains in 1977 revealed how some Aboriginal-made channels fed water and eels into natural depressions. 

Pretty cool. But wait, there’s more! The recent brush fires all over Australia have revealed other canals, showing that the eel farm was a good bit bigger than thought.

Australian bushfires destroyed a large area of land and vegetation, but that has revealed extensive water channels built by indigenous Australians thousands of years ago, to trap and harvest eels for food, in the state of Victoria. 

According to UNESCO, the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape is considered to be one of the world’s most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems, consisting of dams, channels and weirs.
...
The existence of the aquatic system has been known to the archaeologists and it was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, in July last year. More sections of the water channels were revealed when the fires ravaged the state in December 2019.
...
Gunditjmara representative Denis Rose, project manager at non-profit group Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, told CNN that the system was significantly bigger than what was previously recorded.

“When we returned to the area, we found a channel hidden in the grass and other vegetation. It was about 25 meters (82 feet) in length, which was a fairly substantial size,” CNN quoted Rose as saying.

New structures appeared when the landscape burned. According to the Aboriginal Corporation’s website, the aquaculture system, which is part of the Budj Bim National Park, was built by the indigenous population using the abundant volcanic rocks from a now-dormant volcano in the area.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2020 at 01:27 PM   
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A&R Thursday Part 1

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2020 at 01:25 PM   
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weather, gak

It’s been November here for about 3 months now. Chilly and damp, sometimes windy. We haven’t had much actual snow, and only a week or so of sustained sub-freezing weather, but it’s been very rainy. It’s rained every day for the past 3 weeks, I’m certain. And we’re having another downpour right now.

My arthritic knees want to be warm and dry, not cold and damp. 

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2020 at 12:25 PM   
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Whistling Past The Graveyard

I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna, I don’t wanna, I won’t ... ach crivens, I have to.

•   China is switching to a new and faster method to identify infected people, which will skew the numbers a bit until it becomes more widely used. Hopefully this new method is more accurate, and concomitant with greater reporting transparency. IOW, stop fudging the published data.


•   In the meantime, reports surface that Chinese men are 9 times more likely to get it than Chinese women. Smoking and other bad habits may be factors, like diabetes and eating rice.


•   Asians - Chinese specifically - appear to be more susceptible overall.



The conspiracy squad is getting really amped up. How amazing is it, that after a generation or so of China’s One Child policy that saw a huge spike in the numbers of surviving male children, that a winnowing disease that seems to target those excess males shows up, just a few blocks from the top bio weapons / virology research lab in the country? Seeded of course, with bio agents stolen from Canada a couple years back, and also perhaps with this Boston area college Leiber/Zaosong/Chinese military thing ...

[ January 28, 2020 ] A Harvard University professor and two other Chinese nationals were federally indicted in three separate cases for allegedly lying to the US about their involvement with China’s government, the US attorney for the district of Massachusetts announced Tuesday.
...
Dr. Charles Lieber, 60, who is the chair of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, is accused of lying about working with several Chinese organizations, where he collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chinese entities, US Attorney Andrew Lelling said at a news conference.

According to court documents, Lieber’s research group at Harvard had received over $15 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, which requires disclosing foreign financial conflicts of interests.

The complaint alleges that Lieber had lied about his affiliation with the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and a contract he had with a Chinese talent recruitment plan to attract high-level scientists to the country.
He was being paid $50,000 per month by the Chinese university and given $1.5 million to establish a nanoscience research lab at WUT, the complaint said.

CNN has reached out to an attorney for Lieber. In a statement, Harvard called the charges “extremely serious.”

“Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is conducting its own review of the alleged misconduct,” the university said in a statement. “Professor Lieber has been placed on indefinite administrative leave.”

In a separate indictment unsealed Tuesday, Yanqing Ye, a 29-year-old Chinese national, was charged with visa fraud, making false statements, conspiracy and being an unregistered agent, the US attorney’s office said.
Yanqing had falsely identified herself as a “student” on her visa application and lied about her military service while she was employed as a scientific researcher at Boston University, according to the indictment. She admitted to federal officers during an April 2019 interview that she held the rank of lieutenant with the People’s Liberation Army, court documents show. Yanqing is accused of accessing US military websites and sending US documents and information to China, according to documents.

Last week, a cancer researcher, Zaosong Zheng, was indicted for trying to smuggle 21 vials of biological material out of the US to China and lying about it to federal investigators, Lelling said.
Zaosong, 30, whose entry was sponsored by Harvard University, had hidden the vials in a sock before boarding the plane, according to Lelling.

[ sarc ] As a precaution against further incidents, DHS and FAA have now banned socks from all international flights. [ /sarc ]

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2020 at 11:30 AM   
Filed Under: • CHINA in the news • Corruption and Greed • Health-Medicine • SPOOKS •  
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The Law Applies

Weinberg’s Second Law: “If builders built buildings the way that programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”

case in point

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2020 at 11:21 AM   
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Another Lesson For Virginians

Virginia Legislates Giving Its Electoral Votes To Popular Vote Winner

The Virginia House of Delegates has passed legislation seeking to award its electoral votes to whomever the wins the popular vote.

House Bill 177 passed with a 51-46 vote in the Democrat-majority House after being handed off by the Privileges and Elections Committee last week. Should the Senate also approve, Virginia will officially become part of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

“Under the compact, Virginia agrees to award its electoral votes to the presidential ticket that receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia,” a bill summary states.

If the state of Virginia survives this term, they’ll never elect Democrats again. That is, unless Virginia has been taken over by rabid Leftists, which is likely the case. One of the problems with a rapidly dynamic population, a One World situation, is that no one assimilates anymore. Whatever it is that has made Virginians Virginians seems to be getting lost.

Yes, this is insanity, a complete renunciation of one of the bedrock principles of America. Which is why it has been a Leftist pipe dream for ages. It’s a good thing that your state is disarming you as fast as they can too, trashing another bedrock principle. Much easier to stomp on people if they can’t fight back.

So let’s see what happens. I mean, come on. This is Virginia. Why would they want the right to vote in the first place? Why would they want their voice to be heard? If the State signs such an act into law and applies it, then, de facto, every citizen in Virginia has been disenfranchised. However or even whether they have voted is meaningless. The State will hand out their electoral votes to whoever got the national popular vote regardless.

Congratulation Virginia citizens: you elected a crop of commies and now you are all slaves. Well done.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2020 at 10:30 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • FREEDOM •  
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