Viralammo:

“We are not just battling the virus, but also conspiracy theories,” a spokesman for the Wuhan Institute of Virology has said. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice.”

He was trying to squash an idea that has been growing in popularity ever since the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus outbreak began: that his Virology Lab, at the heart of Wuhan, might be responsible.

In a way, he was right. In a time of crisis, the last thing anyone would want to do is spread fear — especially if it’s based on nothing but a baseless rumor.

But when you start looking into those claims that the epidemic that’s already infected almost 250,000 people across the world started in a Wuhan Virology Lab, it starts looking like something other than a conspiracy theory. It starts looking like an explanation that holds up unnervingly well — and that, if we take the time to look into it, could help prevent something similar from happening again.

The official story is that 2019-nCoV started in a seafood market in Wuhan. Unclean animals sold there were carrying the virus, Chinese scientists have suggested, and, as a result, some unlucky shoppers ended up becoming patient zeros for a global crisis.

You’ve probably already heard that explanation before, and there’s a good chance you’ve accepted it as a fact — but there are some glaring problems with it.

For one thing, the first patients with 2019-nCoV have no connection to the market whatsoever. They lived nearby, and they appear to have spread the disease to people who went there — but the real patient zeros never actually stepped foot inside of it.

Also, 2019-nCoV is believed to have originated in bats — and this was a seafood market. Nobody was selling bats inside of this market. Bats just aren’t something people in Wuhan normally eat.

Even China’s scientists have started backing away from this theory. To quote one directly:

“It seems clear that [the] seafood market is not the only origin of the virus… But to be honest, we still do not know where the virus came from.”

A lot of people have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is just a 30 minutes drive for the seafood market. But if that’s not close enough for you, there’s another lab that researches bat coronaviruses that’s even closer: The Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention.

It’s not just on the other side of town. It’s on the other side of the street.

RTWT

Harvard2thebighouse takes on Nature magazine’s claim that the Wuhan Virus could not possibly have been deliberately manufactured in a Communist Chinese Biological Weapons Laboratory.

Maybe you shouldn’t blindly believe everything you read? Even if the source has a pretty solid reputation?

Nature magazine has censored over 1,000 articles at the request of the Chinese government over the past several years. And it seems pretty clear that their recent article, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” is just one more example of their influence. China bought off the head of Harvard’s chemistry department, you don’t think they could buy off run-of-the-mill research scientists scrambling for tenure and funding and publication? It’s absolutely horrific that so many scientists and researchers are taking part in what’s really clearly a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, and willfully spreading a smokescreen about something that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions more across the planet.

And while the mainstream corporate media mindless regurgitates claims from the Chinese government that are falsifiable with the simplest of google searches, allowing the public to be lulled into a false sense of security and complacency, and Reddit rapidly censors and moderates anything that might indicate that this virus leaked from a Chinese lab and so the Chinese government is to blame for this pandemic – sites like ZeroHedge, that have been at the forefront of keeping the lines of investigation open, have been banished from Twitter and marginalized.

Detailed rebuttal follows.

Interesting read.

HT: Kimball Corson.

The Delahaye 145 that Dreyfus drove in the 1938 Pau Grand Prix.

“In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler funded the most powerful racing program in the world. An American heiress, a Jewish driver, and a struggling French automaker banded together to defeat them on the racetrack.” Road and Track.

In 1933, the newly-elected leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, announced that the Third Reich would dominate the Grand Prix. After the government poured funds into Mercedes and Auto Union, their top drivers Rudi Caracciola and Bernd Rosemeyer swept the field in their supercharged Silver Arrow race cars.

A woman named Lucy Schell decided that something had to be done—so she launched her own racing team. A dazzlingly fine driver in her own right, Lucy had cash to spend, reasons of her own to challenge the Nazis, and the will to claim her place in a world dominated by men. For a car, she chose the most unlikely of manufacturers: Delahaye. Managed by Charles Weiffenbach, the old French firm was known for producing sturdy, staid vehicles, mostly trucks. Racing seemed like a path to save the small company. For a driver, Lucy recruited René Dreyfus. Once a meteoric up-and-comer, he had been excluded from competing on the best teams in the best cars, all because of his Jewish heritage.

Triumph over the Nazis promised redemption for all of them. If it was to happen, the opening race of the new formula Grand Prix season in 1938 would provide their best chance.

— excerpted from the new book Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best.

RTWT

Chadwick Moore has America pegged.

When something truly unnerving arrives, like a global pandemic, America serves up just the right pitch of high-octane, Hollywood disaster-flick pandemonium to make the whole thing a bit zanier and more camp. The world depends on us for that. We invented the genre. China may have unleashed a deadly and mysterious new virus but Americans have long infected the planet with our sense of drama.

That’s what we do. Americans are in the business of entertainment, not only with our films, but our politics, vapid celebrities, and gregarious displays of mass hysteria when a crisis hits. Or, when there’s no crisis at all — like a vote recount, a sex scandal, or the release of a new iPhone — America remains Earth’s favorite reality TV show.

We can’t help it. We’re exhibitionists by nature and a highly theatrical, expressive people. When a camera is rolling, average Americans, more than other nationalities, know the game, and we’re ready to perform. Local news stations across the US provide the world with its greatest viral video stars. If you doorstep a stranger in Possum Gulch, Arkansas, at a Gristedes on the Upper West Side, or outside a housing project in Nashville, Tennessee, chances are you’re going to meet a real character who’s eager to put on a show. We’re that way off camera, as well. I recall, in my early twenties, living in a cramped London flat with four Brits and three Americans. If we all were gathered in the common room the Brits would sit back, utterly amused, and watch the Americans interact, as though we were a sitcom. ‘You’re like an episode of Friends’, one said. ‘You’re like cartoon characters’, another said. We know, thanks!

RTWT

HT: Karen L. Myers.

A contemporary problem described in the style of the great Australian bard, Banjo Patterson.

HT: Vanderleun.

A virtual choir of 36 women all recorded separately at different times and in different locations.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Antique un-PC ad showing Uncle Sam, holding a proclamation and a domestically-made product, kicking the Chinese out of the United States.

Andrew A. Michta also thinks that China’s behavior has been bad enough and her responsibility for the current international pandemic so great that all this should result in a complete reordering of our economic relationship with China.

It won’t be easy or painless, but the role China has played in exacerbating the fallout from the coronavirus crisis ought to force Americans to fundamentally reconsider the relationship.

I flew back from Washington DC to Munich just a day before the travel embargo from the Schengen zone to the United States came into effect. As I watched anxious gate agents, tense flight attendants, and passengers eyeing each other with suspicion, I could not help but think that what I was witnessing was the beginning of a radical recompilation of the mistaken notions that for the past three decades have shaped U.S. and European economic policy, and indirectly, international security. The idea that the People’s Republic of China can become a responsible stakeholder in the international community—that it can “be like us”—is being laid to rest behind the masked faces of petrified Westerners scurrying through airports to get home.

Amidst the 24/7 breathless media coverage and calls for politicians to “do something,” one fundamental question still needs to be addressed forthrightly and in the open: Who did this to us and what to do to prevent it from happening again?

The question about assigning agency and blame is pretty straightforward to answer: The communist Chinese state, which for more than three decades has been draining capital and knowledge from the West, benefiting from our greed and myopia, has just let loose a virus that in the coming months is about to effectively paralyze Europe and the United States and bring severe pain, both human and economic on the world. The “eruption at a wet market” explanation for the virus has to be questioned until we know the full story, if for no other reason than the fact that Beijing suppressed data for two months when the coronavirus first appeared, and even to this day refuses to come clean as to exactly what happened. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now spinning propaganda stories that both seek to somehow pin the blame on the United States, and that try to frame their bungling, denial-ridden, heavy-handed reaction as some kind of model for the world.

As a result of all this, the West is now shutting down, at least for a while. The ultimate cost to the world, in terms of new government debt, failed businesses, and human lives and suffering, is difficult to quantify at this point. But there are indications that the fallout from the Wuhan Virus could be transformative.

We must acknowledge our own complicity in what is now unfolding. The belief that globalization, through the radical centralization of market networks, was the unavoidable path forward has been exposed as a grave, near-delusional miscalculation. The offshoring by corporations of supply chains to China has not only eviscerated communities that were previously reliant on manufacturing jobs, but has also brought with it an unprecedented level of vulnerability and fragility to our economies. The populist revolts that have wracked Western democracies for the past several years are in part rooted in the pain that these dislocations have caused. Worse yet, for the past three decades, this offshoring process has favored an adversary that is determined to replace us as the hub of global economic and military power and place itself at the new normative center of the world.

Should the fallout from the Wuhan Virus prove to be as damaging as it looks like it might be, the first casualty should be China’s quest to become the premier manufacturing center for the world.Should the fallout from the Wuhan Virus prove to be as damaging as it looks like it might be, the first casualty should be China’s quest to become the premier manufacturing center for the world. Few corporations will want to again risk being caught in a situation where their entire supply chain has been locked into one country—much less a palpably hostile dictatorship. The subsequent era will, I hope, be one of strategic reconsolidation, with a special focus on onshoring critical supply chains that have been moved to China. Even the siren song of potentially-vast consumer markets in China may end up being more than offset by the trauma we are about to face.

As the dust settles, the United States should be taking a hard look at streamlining our federal and state regulatory framework, tax structure, and all other outstanding obstacles in order to encourage U.S. businesses to come back home.

RTWT

Coiling Dragon Cliff Skywalk, Tianmen Mountain, Hunan Province, China.

In late January, China’s embassy in Denmark demanded an apology from daily Jyllands-Posten after it published a cartoon of the Chinese flag with its five yellow stars represented by coronavirus particles.

Tell douchebag modernist composer John Adams to go write a new opera, Kira Davis predicts that era created by Nixon’s opening to China and of the export of industrial production to China and American reliance on cheap Chinese labor is over.

Because this is 2020 and the whole damn world seems to have gone insane overnight, we are now being told that referring to COVID-19 as anything related to China or the Chinese in any way is “racist” and xenophobic or some other bad thing. Even though this virus originated in China. Even though either their food choices or their government is responsible for unleashing this on the globe. It makes no sense, but none of this is making much sense right now. It certainly feels like we don’t have all the information and that’s worrisome given the level of response we’ve been seeing from our government. There is a lot that we, the people don’t know.

But we do know one thing right about now. One thing is becoming more and more clear with each passing moment.

When this is all over we are f***ing done with China.

RTWT

HT: Vanderleun.