There is an article from the Brookings institute that supports your position-
"In 2006, President Victor Yushchenko attached high priority to securing a NATO membership action plan (MAP). By summer, Kyiv looked on course to attain a MAP when alliance foreign ministers met that December. Curiously, Moscow did not come out hard against the idea. The prospective MAP derailed, however, after Yushchenko appointed Victor Yanukovych as prime minister. During a September visit to Brussels, Yanukovych said he did not want a MAP. The proposal died given the divided position of Ukraine’s executive branch.
Yushchenko called for a MAP again in January 2008, this time with the support of Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and Rada (parliament) Speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk. Moscow came out in full opposition. When Yushchenko visited the Russian capital that February, he had to stand alongside and listen to President Vladimir Putin threaten to target nuclear missiles on Ukraine. Instead of lobbying allies to support a MAP for Kyiv, Washington waited until the April Bucharest summit, where President George W. Bush attempted to persuade his counterparts to grant Ukraine (and Georgia) a MAP. However, a number of allied leaders by then had made up their minds and opposed the idea. Concern about Russian opposition undoubtedly played a role."
There are a lot of moving parts that I find really interesting. The successes and failures of the players that led up to the war, as well as the domestic and global changes brought about in consequence (Is China doing more than "watching the tigers fight"?) affects the world.
I'm not well-versed in this area, but from what I've been reading, it doesn't look as if NATO simply acceded to Russia's demands- From the NYT in November of 2008:
"At a NATO meeting in Bucharest, Romania, in April, the United States failed to persuade NATO to offer the usual application process, known as a membership action plan, to Ukraine and Georgia. Instead, NATO leaders agreed that one day each country would join, without committing to a timetable."
(Edit: I haven't been able to find much to relate the failure to convince to an accession to Russian demands.)
I get what you're saying about being disinclined to accommodate after Russia's adventure in South Ossetia / Georgia in August of that year; the Nov 2008 article focused on the US push for NATO membership:
"The United States has started an unexpected diplomatic initiative in Europe, urging NATO allies to offer Georgia and Ukraine membership in the alliance without going through a lengthy process and fulfilling a long list of requirements, NATO diplomats said."
I need to take the time to find more unbiased information on the conflicts of the region over the past 15-20 years. It's complicated, with a lot of issues in play that seem to go back at least a century. My knee-jerk, scratching-the-surface opinion is that while I believe Russia is ruled by oligarchical mobsters headed by Putin, I can understand, if not sympathize with, their reaction as Western powers have established footholds in bordering countries.
Honest question, for I don't know the answer: If NATO had dissolved 30 some-odd years ago, and the US had fallen from a world to regional power (albeit with nuclear weapons), and then the Warsaw pact had established bases in Canada and Mexico, would outcomes be more or less stable?
William Burns, the current Director of the CIA and former ambassador to Russia, would disagree with you.
"In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” "
Could the system that disables a vehicle when impairment is detected also be triggered remotely in vehicles that are always "connected"? If so, under what circumstances could this take place?
The WEF puts a lot of work into creating outcomes that track with its philosophies; it is playing the long game and strategic decisions -are- being made at get-togethers like Davos. Potential Young Global Leaders are vetted and recruited, among other things.
Klaus Schwab, 2007:
“What we are really proud of now, is the young generation. Like Prime Minister Trudeau, the President of Argentina, and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday, I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau, and I know that half of this cabinet, or even more than half of this cabinet, are actually Young Global Leaders of the world.”
From the WEF Young Global Leaders website:
"Our growing membership of more than 1,400 members and alumni... Aligned with the World Economic Forum’s mission, we seek to drive public-private co-operation in the global public interest."
I'd like to know exactly what Klaus and the WEF leadership consider to be "global public interest".
I've listened to several speeches from both him and his advisor Yuval Harari and at first glance Klaus's preference seems like some version of tightly controlled, top-down corporatism.
I found a number of statements made by Harari to be particularly disturbing, including one he made in a session (paraphrased here) that they don't need most of us (which begs the question who the "public" is in "global public interest"). If you hold that personal opinion, fine, but when you're closely allied with an organization whose stated intention is to reshape how the world works, that places the "opinion" into a different context, regardless of whether it could be acted upon or not. There's more from him about genetic superiority, blah blah... In my opinion, he's a scary guy.
I like to think of it as wishful thinking. I fantasize about winning the lottery, too.
>> The question is simply whether the level of corruption reaches the level...
Yeah, agreed. I couldn't point to a single instance where an attempt to eliminate corruption did not eventually spawn unintended (bad) consequences. Working to manage it seems to be the best alternative.
Right wing, left wing, meh. To me (i.e. Opinion), it's difficult at times to distinguish between the two when looking at the highest echelon on each side.
I think my slide into cynicism regarding humans who achieve power, regardless of their stated political philosophies and alignments, started after finishing "The Dictator's Handbook". I read here some posts advocating getting rid of this or that, or saying we should do it "this way", but even though I agree in a wishful kind of way, it's just not how human beings are wired... No matter how virtuous a system may be, it seems to take only the inevitable one or two odd instances of corruption to start the rot that will bring it down.
Could be wrong, and not about to get into a back and forth about the politics involved, but I thought that Deputy Assistant Director Strzok was removed from the Mueller investigation and eventually canned from the FBI, and FBI attorney Lisa Page was let go because of the content of the messages between them regarding Trump and Flynn that surfaced during the course of some hearings.
If memory serves, another FBI lawyer plead guilty to altering a document sent to the secret FISA court so a false justification would exist for someone in the new administration to be surveilled. I think the lawyer got a suspended sentence instead of prison.
Not focused either way on Trump, just thought that there actually was something to the GPs post.
Edit: Wasn't it Zuckerberg himself that said the FBI reached out to him about limiting the visibility of certain news?
I didn't lie on my tax returns, either. In 2011 the IRS kicked off an audit, saying that I owed a little more than $50k in unpaid taxes because of inappropriate deductions. (The auditor was a contractor, who's company I found out later, was paid based upon "successful" claims against taxpayers after an audit.)
After contacting the accountant that does our taxes and asking her to represent us, she showed up in the guy's cubicle, filed the paperwork for dispute, and started the audit process.
A week after she showed up to represent us, we received a letter from the IRS stating that we now owed north of $100k. Felt like intimidation to me. After a week of our accountant going over each and every scrap of paper with this guy, turned out that the IRS owed us $2300, which we agreed to give to our accountant for representing us. The contract auditor, according to our accountant, was belligerent and abusive. (edit- we wouldn't have had a chance against this guy without our accountant)
Yes, there are plenty of people that lie on their returns, but I've come across many, many stories like mine as well. Telling the truth on a return is no guarantee that the IRS will not audit you, and I believe that uncalled-for audits are much more prevalent than is generally believed.
(Edit) Not exactly the same thing, but when you say "... because I don't lie on my tax returns." it reminds me of "If you've done nothing wrong, you don't have anything to worry about".
The question I ask to both of those statements is "According to whom?"
Yet it is axiomatic that there exist powerful groups of entrenched scientists that do oppose challenges to dogma without any semblance of due diligence. While many examples exist, two immediately come to mind- a researcher, Jim Allison, at my own institution who recently won a Nobel after decades of having the core tenets of his research marginalized.
"When I first came to Berkeley in the 1990s, for example, they were in the midst of trying to redefine modern biology, and certain very powerful people there did not even want there to be a department of immunology. They felt that immunology was not a real discipline because it didn’t deal with the static, fundamental processes of biology that apply to everything."
Those "very powerful people" were, in point of fact, scientists.
Barry Marshall faced years of ridicule for working to validate the hypothesis that many, if not most, cases of idiopathic gastric inflamation and lesions were a direct result of H. Pylori infection. Again, the hostililty from the entrenched scientific community was well-documented. He eventually won a Nobel as well.
Many factors other than "science" have played a role in the spirited defense of dogma by experts. Researchers are as susceptible to all types of bias, logical fallacies, desire for power and money, etc. as anyone else.
This clearly isn't always the case, but often enough that the moment someone says "...because I'm an expert therefore I say this is so." without supporting evidence that may be examined -and- debated, the veracity of their statement and motive in making it are suspect.
I am honestly not debating any issue with you. I was pointing out that the statements you have made in posts above are supported, in those posts, by nothing more than your assertions. They are in effect tautological, nothing more.
While you propose some good points that would otherwise be interesting to debate, without supporting evidence these points are nothing more than strongly held opinions, cleverly defended. In this case, there is nothing to be gained on either side through the debate of opinions- other than satisfaction from preening in the light of one's intellect or the presentation of a clever argument.
Sudosysgen, while a number of your assertions would be interesting to debate, they have been very broad and without supporting evidence, which makes any meaningful discussion beyond trading opinions impossible.
>> The immune system doesn't lead to variants, randomness + time does.
I disagree. It has been shown over many years of research that viral mutations may be driven by both antigenic drift as well as selective immunological pressures, with the question being more the degree to which these factors influence mutation in different viral species.
Not to present an argument against vaccination, rather an argument against making blanket statements that fail to accurately represent the current state of collective knowledge on the subject, to wit: We do not know with any certainty the degree to which either of these factors drive SARS-CoV-2 mutations. A naked statement that the un-vaccinated population drives the mutation rate of this virus is nothing more than speculation; issues surrounding a field of study as incredibly complex as this may not ever be definitively put to bed through analysis of (conflicting?) study outcomes- let alone through arguments made in the commons of popular science.
I don't argue that emerging SARS-CoV-2 mutations are driven more by one factor or the other, I argue that we do not know the degree to which mutations are driven by 'random' antigenic drift vs selective pressures. Unfortunately, the issue has been politicized to the point where study outcomes that suggest dominance of one over the other are likely to be attacked or even ignored, regardless of the strength of study.
Citations? Efforts to find evidence here prioritized time invested over strength- this may not represent the best arguments out there, however it took only a scant few moments to gather, and points to a much larger body of literature supporting the position that both antigenic drift and selective immunological pressures drive viral mutations (SARS-CoV-2 being no exception) and that we do not know the degree to which each is a factor... and therefore stating OR implying that the un-vaccinated population drives the viral mutation rate in this pandemic is inaccurate. Once again- we simply do not know.
CF
"Given that the antibody response to the spike protein is so focused, could mutations in these restricted sequences lead to a less efficacious vaccine, if the human immune response is specific to the vaccine sequence? These mutations might be driven by antigenic drift, or by selection, either during natural infection or due to the vaccine itself. When a virus is grown under the selective pressure of a single monoclonal antibody that targets a single epitope on a viral protein, mutations in that protein sequence will lead to the loss of neutralisation, and the generation of escape mutants. This sequence of events has been shown in the laboratory for polio, measles, and respiratory syncytial virus,7 and in 2020 for SARS-CoV-2.8"
McCarthy, K. R. et al. Recurrent deletions in the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein drive antibody escape. Science 371, 1139–1142 (2021).
Plante, J. A. et al. The variant Gambit: COVID’s next move. Cell Host Microbe 29, 508–515 (2021).
Ravindra Gupta, Steven Kemp, William Harvey et al. Recurrent independent emergence and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Spike amino acidH69/V70 deletions, PREPRINT (Version 1) available at Research Square https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-136937/v1(2021).
You're conflating two posts- each is taking a different position.
The OP mentions "...the league of superwealthy philanthropists like Bill Gates and George Soros who leave their lengthy, extraordinarily and unforgivably damaging lives of evil...". He was referring to his belief that there is an evil group of wealthy people- and that this group includes Soros as well as Gates. My post gave examples of controversy surrounding Soros, with the admonition that these should be discussed instead of being labeled then memory-holed because of the man's ancestry.
In the OP's post, Soros was included as a member of a group- without mention or implication of any member's ancestry or race. The accusation of anti-semitism regarding the post, based only on Soros having been included in a list of "bad" superwealthy people, lacks any support other than Soros's inclusion in the list- which itself is not even "thinly veiled" evidence of anti-semitism.
The application of the label "anti-semitic" to either post is an over-reaching use of the term, and this over-reach very likely contributes to an increase in real anti-semitism.
Anti-semitism exists and is reprehensible. That having been said, using it hand-wave away what could be legitimate examination and discussion of a person whose behavior may be controversial is dangerous- and could encourage true anti-semitism. Over-use of accusations of anti-semitism in such a way that discourages discussion encourages bigots to say "All <insert a people> are <insert a pejorative>", particulary if the discussion topic is a figure whose actions may be controversial at times, such as Soros. I'm focused on Soros here because he came up in discussion; this is but one example of over-use of claims of racism, anti-semitism, etc. being used to stifle legitimate discussion.
I can remember 4 controversies surrounding Soros off the top of my head. There is (or there should be) room to discuss the statements below without redirecting off-topic by raising a curtain around the subject through claims of anti-semitism:
* In the late eighties Soros was convicted of insider trading by some French regulatory authority. If memory serves, his appeals of these convictions failed. Some people claim the conviction and fine was politically motivated, some claim the conviction was true as written.
* In 2009 a Hungarian agency fined Soros Fund Management LLC for manipulating values of Hungarian OTP bank stocks. The same arguments were made for/against the justice of the conviction.
* There are claims that Soros took advantage of the British screwing up when they pegged the Pound against the Deutschmark under the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and that he gamed a lot of value from the British economy as a result. I probably don't have the details right, I've heard people say that he sucker-punched the British, and others say that it actually helped the Brits in the long run.
* There are claims that in the 90's Soros manipulated the Maylaysion economy, society and currency for his profit, and that many suffered as a result. Some believe Soros had nothing to do with the Malaysion troubles and call this a conspiracy theory- it's still worth discussing.
My point is that the use of labels that identify real problems to distract from or avoid altogether a potentially controversial discussion has the potential to make [real] racism, [real] anti-semitism, etc. much worse, and should be avoided.
> That's why when consensus exists about something, you should respect it. There is quite a large consensus about this one.
Respecting a consensus is reasonable. That having been said, I would be interested to hear what the virologists to whom you refer think about Ralph Baric's work. Ralph Baric is a very well-known virologist specializing in corona virology. His group synthesized quite a few SARS-CoV variants, a number of years before SARS-CoV-2 made its appearance. While there's no proof that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, there are quite a few studies describing the synthesis of different SARS-CoV variants, some quite dangerous.
"Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B)"
EDIT: jeduehr, given your background in virology, I would be interested in any technical critique you may have regarding the Yuri Deigin article referenced in my post below.
"In 2006, President Victor Yushchenko attached high priority to securing a NATO membership action plan (MAP). By summer, Kyiv looked on course to attain a MAP when alliance foreign ministers met that December. Curiously, Moscow did not come out hard against the idea. The prospective MAP derailed, however, after Yushchenko appointed Victor Yanukovych as prime minister. During a September visit to Brussels, Yanukovych said he did not want a MAP. The proposal died given the divided position of Ukraine’s executive branch.
Yushchenko called for a MAP again in January 2008, this time with the support of Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and Rada (parliament) Speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk. Moscow came out in full opposition. When Yushchenko visited the Russian capital that February, he had to stand alongside and listen to President Vladimir Putin threaten to target nuclear missiles on Ukraine. Instead of lobbying allies to support a MAP for Kyiv, Washington waited until the April Bucharest summit, where President George W. Bush attempted to persuade his counterparts to grant Ukraine (and Georgia) a MAP. However, a number of allied leaders by then had made up their minds and opposed the idea. Concern about Russian opposition undoubtedly played a role."
There are a lot of moving parts that I find really interesting. The successes and failures of the players that led up to the war, as well as the domestic and global changes brought about in consequence (Is China doing more than "watching the tigers fight"?) affects the world.