Best of the Web:


Sherlock

Best of the Web: China rejects WHO's second phase investigation into leak of coronavirus from Chinese lab, suggests looking at US military labs

Ken Moritsugu
Associated Press
Thu, 22 Jul 2021 17:16 UTC
Zeng Yixin
© AP Photo/Mark SchiefelbeinZeng Yixin, Vice Minister of China's National Health Commission, speaks at a press conference at the State Council Information Office in Beijing, Thursday, July 22, 2021. Zeng said Thursday he was taken aback by the World Health Organization's plan for the second phase of a COVID-19 origins study.
China cannot accept the World Health Organization's plan for the second phase of a study into the origins of COVID-19, a senior Chinese health official said Thursday.

Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the National Health Commission, said he was "rather taken aback" that the plan includes further investigation of the theory that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab.

He dismissed the lab leak idea as a rumor that runs counter to common sense and science.

"It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan," he said at a news conference called to address the COVID-19 origins issue.

Comment: See also: Inquiry into Covid-19 lab leak won't bring out the truth, it will deepen the deception

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Beaker

Best of the Web: 'You don't know what you're talking about!' Fauci loses it with Sen. Rand Paul over Wuhan lab-funding accusations


RT
Tue, 20 Jul 2021 17:28 UTC
Fauci/Paul
© Reuters/J. Scott ApplewhiteDr. Anthony Fauci • Senator Rand Paul
White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has told Kentucky Senator Rand Paul "You don't know what you're talking about," after Paul accused him of lying about his alleged role in controversial virus research in China.

Questioning Fauci during a Senate Health Committee hearing on Tuesday about the government's coronavirus response, Sen. Paul (R) implied that Fauci lied to Congress in May when he said that the National Institute of Health (NIH) did not fund so-called 'gain-of-function' research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, believed by many to be the source of the coronavirus pandemic.

"I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement," Fauci replied.

Paul presented a 2015 academic paper that asserts such research did take place at the Wuhan lab, and was partly funded by the NIH. One US scientist has reviewed the paper and concluded that the research within "seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function," — but that it did not lead to the creation of the novel coronavirus. The term 'gain-of-function' refers to modifying and increasing the transmissibility of animal viruses to better study their effect on humans.


Comment: Gain of function...it is or it isn't. Fauci did not qualify his retort. He shot verbal bullets knowing this would be the dominant press clip, regardless if Paul was right or not.

See also:
Rand Paul: I will be seeking a criminal referral against Fauci for lying to Congress

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Magnify

Best of the Web: Beijing renews its call for Fort Detrick biolab probe as 4.7 million Chinese petition WHO to search for Covid origins in US


RT
Wed, 21 Jul 2021 19:17 UTC
swab test
© cnsphoto via REUTERS
The Chinese foreign ministry has backed calls for an investigation into the Fort Detrick biolab as an origin of the Covid-19 pandemic after 4.7 million Chinese petitioned the WHO to send experts to the Maryland facility.

Speaking on Wednesday, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that the Chinese people had delivered a clear message in signing a petition, created by state-run news agency The Global Times, calling for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the Fort Detrick biolab.

"In less than five days, about five million people participated. The rising numbers represent the aspirations of the Chinese people and show their anger at some people in the US for political manipulation through the issue of traceability," he stated.
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Bullseye

Best of the Web: The Cult Dynamics of Wokeness

James Lindsay
New Discourses
Wed, 21 Jul 2021 18:43 UTC
cult member woke
© Nafis Abman/Pexals
You must understand racism and admit that you cannot understand racism. You must admit to your complicity in racism and pledge to do better knowing that it is impossible to do better. You must be an ally but accept that you will always do your allyship wrong.

Before I got involved in studying Critical Social Justice like I do now, I mostly studied the psychology of religion. I took particular interest in the more authoritarian and cultish elements that can spring up within otherwise more reasonable faith traditions. Cult indoctrinations, in particular, tend to follow very predictable stages. First, there is initiation; then there is indoctrination; and then there is reprogramming. These three phases are distinct and must be understood on their own terms.

I. Cult Initiation

One thing I learned through all that study is that most fundamentalist religious (in the colloquial, not technical sense) and cult conversions, especially in adults, occur by using doctrine to resolve some core emotional vulnerability. That is, cult doctrine, and I include extreme fundamentalist interpretations of religious doctrines as cultish, exists to resolve a particularly powerful emotional vulnerability in an unhealthy way (this adds another layer of defense for responsible faith, which does so in a healthy way to the degree that it does the same things).
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Boat

Best of the Web: At least 25 dead in Chinese province's heaviest rains in 1,000 years

Ryan Woo and Stella Qiu
Financial Post
Wed, 21 Jul 2021 11:13 UTC
A woman has been pulled out of floodwaters in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, which has been battered by heavy rain and flooding.
A woman has been pulled out of floodwaters in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, which has been battered by heavy rain and flooding.
At least 25 people have died in China's flood-stricken central province of Henan, a dozen of them in a subway line in its capital that was drenched by what weather officials called the heaviest rains for 1,000 years.

About 100,000 people have been evacuated in Zhengzhou, the capital, where rail and road transport have been disrupted, while dams and reservoirs have swelled to warning levels while thousands of troops launched a rescue effort in the province.

City authorities said more than 500 people were pulled to safety from the flooded subway, as social media images showed train commuters immersed in chest-deep waters in the dark and one station reduced to a large brown pool.


Comment: See also: Chinese subway passengers trapped by rising floodwaters as torrential rain pounds Henan province - 8 inches of rainfall in an hour

Interested readers in these types of events might also like to see the increasing number of such reports globally in recent times at our dedicated floods section.

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Eye 1

Best of the Web: Shocking leaked files once again expose BBC as insidious UK foreign policy tool

Kit Klarenberg
RT
Tue, 20 Jul 2021 09:00 UTC
BBC sign logo
© ReutersBBC Broadcasting House offices and recording studios seen in London
A newly released raft of government papers has revealed the British Broadcasting Corporation's extensive involvement in spreading pro-London, pro-EU, and pro-NATO messaging across the Balkans.

In February, classified documents revealed that BBC Media Action (BBCMA), the 'charitable arm' of the British state broadcaster, was embroiled in a number of clandestine operations to "weaken the Russian state's influence," funded by the UK Foreign Office.

The exposure raised serious questions about the BBC's international reputation as a 'neutral', 'objective' purveyor of news, and what implications its murky relationship with Whitehall has for its output more widely. A further tranche of leaked files, related to covert UK actions in the Balkans, amply reinforces that the organization serves as a cloak-and-dagger device for achieving London's foreign policy goals.


Comment: It's only really nations in the West that wrongly believe the BBC is 'objective', but, increasingly, even British citizens are denouncing it as the propaganda arm of the government.


Comment: See also:

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Cloud Precipitation

Best of the Web: Two dams collapse following torrential rain in China's Inner Mongolia


RT
Mon, 19 Jul 2021 10:36 UTC
mogolia flood
© Getty Images / CostfotoHulunbuir, Inner Mongolia, China, July 18, 2021.
Two dams in Inner Mongolia's Hulunbuir have collapsed following torrential rain, according to an announcement from China's water ministry on Monday, citing concerns about the safety risks of aging infrastructure in the region.

The two dams failed on Sunday afternoon after a torrential downpour saw 87 millimeters of rainfall in the area over the weekend and 223 millimeters at a nearby monitoring station. As one of the dams reached maximum capacity, water came over the top before the entire infrastructure was washed away in minutes, resulting in substantial damage.

A video shared by a Chinese individual online shows the moment that water breached the banks of a dam and began flooding out of the reservoir.

Comment: The dams may be in need of repair but it's likely that, as we're seeing all over the world, the sheer amount of rain was a significant factor behind their collapse: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Syringe

Best of the Web: Gotcha, suckers! On 'Freedom Day', UK govt declares mandatory vaccinations for all adults "anywhere large crowds gather"

Heather Stewart
The Guardian
Mon, 19 Jul 2021 19:58 UTC
boris johnson
Days after the French govt declared mandatory vaccinations for 'anyone in contact with the elderly or frail', the British govt has declared likewise for 'anyone anywhere large crowds gather'...
Vaccine passports will be compulsory to enter packed venues such as nightclubs in an extraordinary U-turn announced by Boris Johnson hours after clubs were allowed to open for the first time in 16 months.


Comment: Extraordinary only to sleeping people.


In a move that provoked an immediate backlash from Conservative backbenchers and the entertainment sector, the prime minister said that from late September, once all adults have had the chance to receive two jabs, Covid vaccine certificates would be made mandatory in England.


"I should serve notice now that by the end of September, when all over-18s will have had their chance to be double jabbed, we are planning to make full vaccination the condition of entry to nightclubs and other venues where large crowds gather," he said.


Comment: Forget the nightclubs part - that's just the crack-in-the-door through which this will be expanded out to all activities.


Unlike at pilot events, where customers have been allowed to show evidence of a negative test, they will have to prove they have been double-jabbed amid concerns in government about vaccine uptake among young people. Some 35% of 18- to 30-year-olds are unvaccinated, he said.

Addressing younger people directly, Johnson said: "Some of life's most important pleasures and opportunities are likely to be increasingly dependent on vaccination."


Comment: The quiet part is: "That's why we're targeting those opportunities first. We'll get you all in the end..."

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No Entry

Best of the Web: The demonization of the unvaxxed

Karen Hunt
OffGuardian
Sat, 17 Jul 2021 06:45 UTC
The Plague
© Eugen Dashine | @ Deviant Art MeethOs
"Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison."

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
In The Silver Chair, book 6 of CS Lewis's magnificent The Chronicles of Narnia, the first pages describe a "mixed" school, meaning for boys and girls, that was...
not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it. These people had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked. And unfortunately what ten or fifteen of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others. All sort of things, horrid things, went on...[and] the people who did them were not expelled or punished. The Head said they were interesting psychological cases and sent for them and talked to them for hours. And if you knew the right sort of things to say to the Head, the main result was that you became rather a favorite than otherwise."
The school is called Experiment House and it's a drab, dull place where, even though it gives the appearance of "everyone doing what they liked," it's really a place where everyone must fit in and those who don't are singled out and persecuted.

The two heroes of the story, Scrubb and Jill, don't fit in at all, and are being chased by a group of bullies when they come up against the wall at the back of the garden. They are trapped, with nowhere else to turn. In the wall is a door that is always locked. But on this occasion, it opens.
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Black Magic

Best of the Web: Britain to launch covert special forces operations against Russia & China, military chief tells media


RT
Sat, 17 Jul 2021 19:36 UTC
britain army flag
© Reuters / Ints KalninsFILE PHOTO.
The UK Special Forces are about to concentrate on some new covert counter-state tasks with a focus on Russia and China, Royal Marines Brigadier Mark Totten revealed to the Times.

The British Royal Marines are to take over some of the "traditional" roles of the nation's special forces units - the Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS) - as they are preparing for some new "higher risk" counter-state tasks, Totten said.

The brigadier himself is in command of a 4,000-strong "future commando force" that is about to share the burden of the special forces such as in maritime counterterrorist missions or some "partnered operations" that involve some "higher risks."


Comment: Firstly, if they're telling us, it's likely they've been at it for a while now. Regardless, if Britain's recent incursion into the Black Sea is anything to go by these operations will probably be unimaginative and executed shockingly poorly.


Comment: A month or so after the Biden administration made the strange announcement that it would launch a series of cyberattacks against Russia, a number of high profile hacks against American businesses occurred. Notably, despite US media claiming that Russia was to blame, the source of attack likely came from within the CIA. And so, bearing that in mind, and the fact that Russia and China are already well aware of what the Brits have likely been up to for a while now, who is this warning really intended for?

See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Perfidious Albion: If Russia is a Rogue State, What is the UK?

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