Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's weird how many smart people still haven't realized they are being lied to by the legacy media and establishment figures. Even after repeatedly discrediting themselves. Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't perfect either, but they are more reliable and honest. Taibbi is still the investigative journalist he's always been.
They say it is always easier to con intelligent people, because they don't think they are capable of being fooled.
First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
561–570 of 792 posts
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
among the "mistakes" Taibbi recently "owned up to" when you say "among" do you have other examples? or if this is your only example can you explain why "It's clear that was not a mistake"
Taibbi deliberately edited the text he was quoting in a way that changed its entire meaning in order to support the claim he was making. And after having the "mistake" pointed out, it was weeks later that he "just discovered" his "mistake". The article at Techdirt I linked explains this, along with how Taibbi misrepresenting 22 million tweets one Election Integrity Partnership report tracked for their own work as bei…
Regardless of if they were mistakes or not, there is more than enough found in the Twitter Files to be concerned about. It would have been much more interesting to hear Medhi discuss the substance of Tabbi's work. Instead he tried to discredit everything by cornering him on air with small details that Taibbi clearly wasn't prepared to fact check live.
Given the timeline of events in reporting on the Twitter Files, it seems likely that Taibbi et al were working long hours, digging through thousands of emails and messages, trying to piece together what was happening at Twitter over the previous 4 years. Typing one letter wrong in an acronym, among hundreds of acronyms they had been seeing in emails, doesn't surprise me. They were essentially live tweeting their research.
Also, Taibbi and others responded to this claim that he exaggerated the 3000 tweets as 22 million tweets. https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1644111356709289993. It was not 3000 tweets but rather 3000 URLs that they targeted for removal by removing any tweets containing those URLs. Seems like many reporters are making mistakes to support their preferred claim here.
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
>eager to say that the US Congress and the CIA can't be trusted. This is a truth universally accepted, no? I mean maybe not by some actual, genuine believers in totalitarianism but surely there aren't many of those? Surely? You never trust people with power. You trust a system of checks and balances precisely because of this. You could even found a nation on that and expect continued support of it.
Sure, but the same people who frequently say this also cite the CIA's declassified MK-ULTRA documents as if they are unimpeachable fact (and not possibly falsehood or strategic disinformation). At the end of the day, the average forum skeptic trusts the CIA more than most normal people do. I think trusting in our system of checks and balances is a reliable way to avoid the infinite regress of Pyrrhonian skepticism, b…
No. A thousand times no. No damn way.
Don't trust, observe, verify. That is the /whole/ point of it. Like really, all of it. Compromising that system is the first hurdle of any person or group seeking more unchecked power. Don't trust, verify.
Without commenting on mk-ultra or any other specific thing. You assess the source. In so far as possible you assess the motives. You see who gains and loses by the release of the info and so on.
CIA says russia blew up its own pipeline. Gonna have to see some pretty good evidence of that to overcome the obvious necessary scepticism. Leaked cia doc says no russia did not. Already more plausible without knowing /anything/ else about it and I am expressing no view here about that incident or the existence of otherwise of documents. Yep both could be completely false. So you move on to corroborating evidence, multiple sources etc.
Moreover citing "the same people" without sourcing is weak as water. There are as many views as there are people to hold them. Inside the cia they will not be of one mind in their thinking.
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's weird how many smart people still haven't realized they are being lied to by the legacy media and establishment figures. Even after repeatedly discrediting themselves. Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't perfect either, but they are more reliable and honest. Taibbi is still the investigative journalist he's always been.
They say it is always easier to con intelligent people, because they don't think they are capable of being fooled.
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just don't buy the international conspiracy to block ivermectin. I've considered it and discussed it with my poor father who became convinced by Fox News and endless Facebook forwarded postings. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of drugs and substances that have an antiviral effect. Ivermectin was one that was tested and there were some early results that were positive but then later with more thorough testing…
People were blocked from getting ivermectin prescriptions. Doctors were told not to write them. Pharmacies were told not to fill them. There was no conspiracy. It was done completely openly. It was just decided by "the scientists" and effectively banned from the mainline medical system. Any doctor working in a network healthcare system (most of them) was basically told they could not prescribe it. Given it's long his…
It astounds me how so many people continue to buy into the mainstream covid narrative. It just doesn't make any sense. Just doesn't add up. It never did.
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#566I don't trust this article at all . > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the pub…
“EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community,” the CDC claims. When diseases and public health threats emerge, “EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.” https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0212-cdc-telebriefi... Transcript of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Response Telebriefing Print Press Briefing Transcript Friday, January 17, 2020 https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0117-coronavirus-sc...
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this similar to how the US used to mandate that civilian use of GPS was off by a certain amount?
It wasn't a pre-set error, rather each satellite was originally configured to broadcast a low-precision coarse signal and a high-precision signal and the high-precision signal could only be decoded using an encryption key. They later released the encryption key when civilian applications took off.
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#568[flagged]
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd think nobody would be enough of a wacko to say this. You'd be wrong, there was at least one wacko saying it.[1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/06/18/trump-su...
He said they may have done so and that there's a chance it was intentional, which is entirely true and quite a reasonable thing to say. He acknowledges that it's unlikely, and he doesn't think that they would do that or that they did. But it is absolutely possible . You'd have to be crazy to think it wasn't possible. The same article says: > As the pandemic began spreading in earnest in the United States, President T…
It took me five more seconds of googling and I found "Nearly 30% think China likely to have spread Covid on purpose, UK poll finds."[1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/09/29-of-britons-...
Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data? Assuming experiments had been completed by then they'd have, what, some figures for how infectious it was in humanized mice. Maybe months down the line they'd've written a paper showing that this splice made…
Re: most of this: an actual virologist has responded and explained the data that would have typically been collected and how it would have helped. To the last point though: > They weren't working on that. Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?
I think they're looking at the best case scenario. Yes, if people were studying the virus then they were hoping to learn something about its effects on humans. But whatever experiments they were performing were presumably in-progress rather than complete, and the odds that they were working on antibodies or the like are pretty narrow.
> Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?
What they were working on was public record dating back to years before there was any reason to hide anything. And it makes very little sense to work on a vaccine for a virus that doesn't exist in the wild.