• Posted 12/19/2024.
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    I am still waiting on my developer to finish up on the Classifieds Control Panel so I can use it to encourage members into becoming paying members. Google Adsense has become a real burden on the viewing of this site, but honestly it is the ONLY source of income now that keeps it afloat. I tried offering disabling the ads being viewed by paying members, but apparently that is not enough incentive. Quite frankly, Google Adsense has dropped down to where it barely brings in enough daily to match even a single paid member per day. But it still gets the bills paid. But at what cost?

    So even without the classifieds control panel being complete, I believe I am going to have to disable those Google ads completely and likely disable some options here that have been free since going to the new platform. Like classified ad bumping, member name changes, and anything else I can use to encourage this site to be supported by the members instead of the Google Adsense ads.

    But there is risk involved. I will not pay out of pocket for very long during this last ditch experimental effort. If I find that the membership does not want to support this site with memberships, then I cannot support your being able to post your classified ads here for free. No, I am not intending to start charging for your posting ads here. I will just shut the site down and that will be it. I will be done with FaunaClassifieds. I certainly don't need this, and can live the rest of my life just fine without it. If I see that no one else really wants it to survive neither, then so be it. It goes away and you all can just go elsewhere to advertise your animals and merchandise.

    Not sure when this will take place, and I don't intend to give any further warning concerning the disabling of the Google Adsense. Just as there probably won't be any warning if I decide to close down this site. You will just come here and there will be some sort of message that the site is gone, and you have a nice day.

    I have been trying to make a go of this site for a very long time. And quite frankly, I am just tired of trying. I had hoped that enough people would be willing to help me help you all have a free outlet to offer your stuff for sale. But every year I see less and less people coming to this site, much less supporting it financially. That is fine. I tried. I retired the SerpenCo business about 14 years ago, so retiring out of this business completely is not that big if a step for me, nor will it be especially painful to do. When I was in Thailand, I did not check in here for three weeks. I didn't miss it even a little bit. So if you all want it to remain, it will be in your hands. I really don't care either way.

    =====================
    Some people have indicated that finding the method to contribute is rather difficult. And I have to admit, that it is not all that obvious. So to help, here is a thread to help as a quide. How to become a contributing member of FaunaClassifieds.

    And for the record, I will be shutting down the Google Adsense ads on January 1, 2025.
  • Responding to email notices you receive.
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    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

New virus created in a Boston lab - 80% fatality potential

WebSlave

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So, what the hell were they thinking?




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WTZo9ieBKY

Here is a perfect example of human beings acting like a tribe of monkeys trying to figure out how a lighter works while standing among enormous leaking tanks of gasoline. :face_palm_02:

Personally, I think they should just nuke that lab and everyone involved.

And just think what publishing their paper did. Anyone malicious entity interested in creating a perfect doomsday biological weapon now has a template of how to do exactly that.

Way to go you damned idiots.
 
Just a thought, hopefully incorrect, but if the creators already have the appropriate vaccine on hand prior to release, creating more virulent diseases might be an enormous economic incentive.
Could that happen? Hopefully not, but when it comes to money, people sometimes make unethical choices.
 
So, what the hell were they thinking?

They were investigating the role of the spike protein mutations in the ability of Covid variants to evade immune response so that we can design more effective vaccines and better understand the inevitable future mutations. So, they were engaging in scientific research in order to plan ahead for future expected disease developments, and likely to gain deeper understanding of the workings of viruses generally.

Here's the paper:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.full

Abstract:"The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1) is highly transmissible, even in fully vaccinated individuals, and causes attenuated disease compared with other major viral variants recognized to date1–7. The Omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of these phenotypes3,8. We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S."

What the sensationalized media reports minimize or don't mention at all is that the original Covid19 strain was shown to be 100% fatal to mice in similar tests -- so this version is actually less virulent. Interestingly, the reports that seem ashamed of this fact seem to be...uh...on one side of the political fence mostly.

Someone who understands how people tend to respond to percentages and probabilities can be a very effective deceiver. That's why the news reports don't say "this new strain is 20% less virulent than the original strain", even though this is more suitable for a news article since it contains more information than the "80%" claim; it contains two facts in one simple to comprehend passage. The problem with the "20%" locution is that it isn't scary.

As an interesting aside, the original news ("news") report that blew this up (link to Daily Mail) wouldn't display at all on my very secure Firefox browser; I had to use an out of date version of Safari with no tracker blockers installed to view it.

Don't believe everything you read out there, folks. There are a lot of reasons for a lot of people to scare you into believing things that simply aren't true. ;)
 
So, your opinion is that an artificially created virus from an already artificially created virus that combines the increased infectiousness of the Omicron variety with the much more lethal original Wuhan strain is of no concern?

We will have to agree to disagree on that one.

In MY opinion, humanity is just lucky that the SARS-CoV-2 virus did not retain it's original lethality during the mutations that made it much more contagious. And here we have some bozos in a lab trying to do just that.
 
The claim that the virus was artificial is pretty much toast at this point based on multiple criteria. For a overview of the pro and con arguments see

Yee, Shermaine et al. “SARS-COV-2 as an artificial creation: scientific arguments and counterarguments.” Journal of medicine and life vol. 14,1 (2021): 118-120. doi:10.25122/jml-2020-0175
free access at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7982270/#ref-list-1title

Ed
 
So, your opinion is that an artificially created virus from an already artificially created virus that combines the increased infectiousness of the Omicron variety with the much more lethal original Wuhan strain is of no concern?

I'm of the opinion that focusing attention on details of research that promote a specific political agenda, while ignoring the goals of that bit of research and also being ignorant of scientific methodology generally is of much more concern than the controlled development, for specific and limited purposes, of a theoretically easy to distribute and quite lethal agent (of which the world already has plenty, and one sort of which the agitator in chief over in Russia is threatening to release unless we all keep our heads screwed on tight).

I'm of the opinion that "nuke that lab and everyone involved" isn't nearly as humorous or harmless as it might have been intended, given the state of things in the US (which are spilling out into countries that have historically been a lot more mentally stable than US) and the seemingly increasing tendency of folks with weapons to use them to make themselves famous and/or take the edge off their mental illness.

I'm of the opinion that calling people who are playing a central role in keeping us out of a dystopian plotline "bozos" is unwarranted and hurtful. Research of "bozos" like that have kept me alive on occasion, and also and more importantly have done the same for those few people I care about dearly. Without those sorts of "bozos", I and many of us might be very alone right now. I'm of the opinion that they deserve public and private recognition and praise for these reasons.

I'm of the opinion that in an ideal society, discussions and decisions about which research to pursue would indeed be public ones. It is also a fact that the US is roughly as equipped to do this as a roomful of toddlers are to design the replacement for the James Webb Space Telescope.

For Pete's sake.
 
And just think what publishing their paper did. Anyone malicious entity interested in creating a perfect doomsday biological weapon now has a template of how to do exactly that.

The knowledge on making a doomsday microbe has pretty much been available to anyone capable of reading a microbiology textbook, and a good blender. It's basic microbiology knowledge that bacteria readily pick up and incorporate DNA from the environment so if you have a bacteria you want to modify say E. coli to produce the exotoxin from Clostridium botulinum (botulism causing bacteria), you filter out enough botulinum and blend them up to break up the cells freeing and breaking up the DNA, and add it to the E.coli cultures. Then you just need to screen and repeat the E.coli cultures until you get the results you want and introduce the resulting bacteria to your target population.
The reason it hasn't happened is because it's inefficient, extremely expensive, and once released can't be restricted to a specific target.
Modifying a viral pathogen has more layers of difficulty (not as much since the advent of crisper but still a pain) as you need to also be able to culture cells in which the virus can reproduce.

Ed
 
I an unconvinced of your opinions to be swayed to think anything contrary or altering to my original statements expressing my own opinions.

To those having faith in government based and funded reports, and the agencies involved as well as the general unbiased accuracy and honesty of the mainstream media, well, more power to you. I do not share your faith and trust. Whether that be ignorance on my part, or yours, could certainly be subject to some debate, of course.

Perhaps relevant, or perhaps just as a potential irrelevant aside (depending on your own perspective), I STRONGLY recommend interested readers to take the time to obtain and read the book The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I believe it may open your eyes somewhat, or keep them closed, again depending on your own personal perspective of the details covered. IMHO, of course.
 
One of the reasons I trust the peer reviewed science is that the researchers who do the reviews are not necessarily in the same country and are kept anonymous from the author(s) so it makes the arguments that the papers represent the government's positions because of funding a bit of folklore.
It's easy to dismiss a paper listed and accessed via a government site without reading it because you're biased against the government but the researchers aren't US researchers and are very unlikely to be funded by the US government.
Are you suggesting that all of the world governments are funding research for the same results which would mean that an overreaching global government is already in place so why tolerate any dissent?

Ed
 
One of the reasons I trust the peer reviewed science is that the researchers who do the reviews are not necessarily in the same country and are kept anonymous from the author(s) so it makes the arguments that the papers represent the government's positions because of funding a bit of folklore.
It's easy to dismiss a paper listed and accessed via a government site without reading it because you're biased against the government but the researchers aren't US researchers and are very unlikely to be funded by the US government.
Are you suggesting that all of the world governments are funding research for the same results which would mean that an overreaching global government is already in place so why tolerate any dissent?

Ed

Perhaps you missed my suggestion about that book to read?
 
I didn't miss it, I let it go by because the author has an issue with well documented information (using only slight hyperbole) on the scale of claiming atoms don't exist... Accepting him as an authority is like accepting an actor without any paleontology but played one in a movie is now an expert on the topic.
He's nothing more than another charlatan who has glommed onto the current zeitgeist as a money maker. Comparing his credibility to real peer reviewed papers is incredibly inappropriate.

Ed
 

Its not really that balanced an article as the facts are not reported without qualifiers to shift the article towards negative position.
As an example the fact that the University has high security (biohazard 3 and 4) is paired with being one mistake away from an escaped virus. These labs have multiple procedural steps with redundant backups to prevent a release so it is much more than one mistake. It would take multiple mistakes plus in conjunction with mechanical failures for there to even be a risk of release. The author downplays the safety of the lab to paint more of a negative picture.

For those without a science background there are some popular books that paint a more neutral picture without dumbing down the risks, off the cuff try "Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World."

Ed
 
I didn't miss it, I let it go by because the author has an issue with well documented information (using only slight hyperbole) on the scale of claiming atoms don't exist... Accepting him as an authority is like accepting an actor without any paleontology but played one in a movie is now an expert on the topic.
He's nothing more than another charlatan who has glommed onto the current zeitgeist as a money maker. Comparing his credibility to real peer reviewed papers is incredibly inappropriate.

Ed

So, in a nutshell, no you didn't read the book, yet are willing to dismiss it out of hand in a prejudicial manner. Is that it? The book documents nearly all pertinent statements made with footnotes and appears to be well researched. And from what I have seen and heard personally from multiple other sources, appears to be dead on concerning not only the statements made, but also with implied concepts of how the pharmaceutical industry, notable private sponsors and government are working together. It is a VERY well written text that people should read, if for nothing else but to get a different perspective that perhaps they have never considered before.

As for "peer reviews", you seem oblivious to the possibility that "peers" are as corruptible as anyone else. You are apparently ignoring the power of what large sums of money can do to people's scruples.

But that is your opinion, and I am fine with you holding them dear. I am sorry, but I just do not share your world view.
 
The claim that the virus was artificial is pretty much toast at this point based on multiple criteria. For a overview of the pro and con arguments see

Yee, Shermaine et al. “SARS-COV-2 as an artificial creation: scientific arguments and counterarguments.” Journal of medicine and life vol. 14,1 (2021): 118-120. doi:10.25122/jml-2020-0175
free access at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7982270/#ref-list-1title

Ed

Just to bring you a bit up to date....

GOP Senators: COVID-19 'Most Likely' Leaked From Wuhan Lab
 
Quite frankly, I believe there is too much money involved with this whole COVID situation, along with too many people willing to accept large sums of money in lieu of being concerned with maintaining their integrity to expect that a true black and white image will appear.

And then you will have people who will make claims to increase their public profile, that become shaken by conflicting evidence, who will fight to the death to defend those claims rather than take a hit to a reputation hinging on their clinging to their position.

So that stew becomes a feeding trough for theories and speculations that will be pushed or pulled, depending on how much money is spent in order to promote a narrative with plausible deniability, and how many reputations can be built or destroyed by large stake holders involved.

All this does is to breed distrust and loss of confidence in the people trying to sift the wheat from the chaff seeing active efforts made to make both seem identical. Which may very well be the goal. Best way to destroy a society is to destroy trust in the government running it. It has worked before, and will work again. All that is needed is a suitable catalyst to get the attention of the teeming masses to have a focus forced upon them.

We are living through "interesting times".
 
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