Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Monday, March 29, 2021

Stupid Leaders: China Ed.

A joint World Health Organization-China report on the origins of the coronavirus says it most probably jumped from animals to humans via an intermediate animal host, downplays the possibility it leaked from a lab and suggests next steps in a complex search mired in controversy, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post.

The report, set to be released Tuesday, offers the most detailed look yet at what happened in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and early 2020. However, the findings are far from conclusive and will be overshadowed by questions about China’s lack of transparency — and the WHO’s apparent inability to press for more.

The story goes on to retell the fact that the Chinese initially tried to hush up reports of the Covid virus, including arresting those first reporting it.

That's an important bit of the story that cannot be overtold. The instinct of the Chinese buraucracy is to cover up shit. This isn't a fature of the Communist party, it's the way things have been for over a thousand years. Nobody curries favor by making the emperor look bad.

But the problem here is that by not being fully transparent, by insisting that things be approved by the politruks, the Chinese are iving oxygen to the QAnon-grade conspiracy theorists.

3 comments:

Jones, Jon Jones said...

Local officials tried to cover it up until Beijing got a sniff. By the third week of January the DPRK deployed the army to put a hard shut on the border. If memory served China published the genomic sequence of 1/10 of 2020. See if you see what happened to the coverup crew.

Ten Bears said...

Near earth gravitational object (asteroid) about the size of a bus flew by last week, a near miss, as these things go, and I noted it's passing as a metaphor in there, somewhere: This isn't the one that kills us all, but the next one might be ...

dinthebeast said...

This is where we're at now: The goddamn Chinese can't even just be the vicious goddamn Chinese without our own meatheads turning it into a conspiracy that they use to hamstring our official response.
Propaganda is dangerous.

-Doug in Sugar Pine