Let's be clear: We drove under a manned machine gun nest when I went to my oboe lessons in 7th grade. We drove under unmanned machine gun nests whenever we needed to go to the mall in Santa Fe. Of course, during the '50s my English teacher and her friends used to flirt with the guards by whispering to each other in Russian under the tower, while the guards used to flirt back by shooting into the bushes. And of course, DOE's response to the Global War On Terror was to shut the entire 11-mile road to the public. You're right, though - machine gun nests or no, I sold books to visiting Soviet physicists every other week or so, right up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And we knew lots of physicists who traveled to the USSR, China, you name it. Prior to Wen Ho Lee there was a lot of intellectual exchange. Which leads directly to your next point: Right I mean you say that now but obviously since the US was funding gain-of-function research in a Chinese lab known to fall far short of published BSL requirements, it can't be all that bad, can it? Right? I mean... especially if our tax dollars helped to make it happen, right? That's kind of like lamenting what the recession "did" to subprime lending or what the opioid crisis "did" to pharmaceutical pain management.I was more thinking about the Manhattan Project days, when even mail was read by sensors before coming or going.
I believe that in this case the coverup is not worse than the crime if the only crime is the simple leak. The crime is beyond punishment, as it has been known a long time, and even reported in Shi's own work, that you shouldn't really be messing with SARS.
“If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”
I maintain that the Loose Change-sized hole in September 11 is the CIA scrubbing all evidence that Osama bin Laden was ever on their payroll. 'cuz let's be frank. The CIA would have to be real dumbasses not to have bin Laden on the payroll before Khobar Towers, and real dumbasses to retain any evidence of it after. I also think MBS knew there was a bin Laden-sized opening at the CIA and took it.
Yeah lost in all the discussions about poor defenseless journalist Jamal Khashoggi is the fact that he was the nephew of Adnan Khashoggi, the most famous arms dealer in the history of arms dealing (up until Nicholas Cage did a passable impression of Viktor Bout in Lord of War). Allegedly, he helped his friends Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos plunder the Philippines of some $160 million by fronting for them in illegal real-estate deals. When United States authorities attempted to return some of the Marcos booty to the new Philippine government, they discovered that the ownership of four large commercial buildings in New York City—the Crown Building at 730 Fifth Avenue, the Herald Center at 1 Herald Square, 40 Wall Street, and 200 Madison Avenue—had passed to Adnan Khashoggi. On paper it seemed that the sale of the buildings had taken place in 1985, but authorities later charged that the documents had been fraudulently backdated. In addition, more than thirty paintings, valued at $200 million, that Imelda Marcos had allegedly purloined from the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, including works by Rubens, El Greco, Picasso, and Degas, were being stored by Khashoggi for the Marcoses, but it turned out that the pictures had been sold to Khashoggi as part of a cover-up.