State of the Discussion

Everybody knows that *MY* industry should be protected somewhat against malevolent actors who are abusing "so-called" free trade.

It's those other tariffs that are bad. It's in Adam Smith!

My 2 cents: he's starting to get worried that this is weakening him so much that congress won't be able to get their clowns in order to pass his tax cuts and safety net evisceration budget. So he's pausing to try and get the big victories through congress first.

ThTh3: multiple government agencies have already announced that it came from a lab leak.

Granted, these are intelligence agencies and not scientific ones... but we've got multiple agencies that have already announced their conclusions (to this point).

That's one hell of a strong signal to undecideds and weak Republicans. "Hey! This guy feels about markets the way that *I* do! He's even willing to take on his own side!"

I’m not the one who introduced the term “cold” to the conversation.

Sigh. Alright, man, onto the next conversation, where maybe you'll decide to be a productive participant, or maybe you'll do this sort of sh*t. See you there.

Ah, I remember the "Covid is just a bad cold" argument. It's always nice to see it again.

As for whether the report is "important", well, that's not a term we've seen defined quite yet. I might use the term "evidence that covid was at the games in question" but, if pressed, I'd have to admit that it was not proof.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/opinion/trump-tariffs-rationale-power.html

"The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams, hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

This simple fact of the president’s psychology does more to explain his antipathy to international trade and enthusiasm for tariffs and other trade barriers than any theorizing about his intentions or overall vision. It certainly is not as if he has a considered view of the global economy. It is not even clear that Trump knows what a tariff is."

What's great here is your logic:

Syllogism 1:
If a report is required by law to be released, it is important.
This report was required by law to be released.
Therefore, this report was important.

Syllogism 2:
If a report was not required to be released, but is important, it should be released.
This report was not required to be released, but isimportant (per syllogism 1).
Therefore this report should have been released even though it was not required by law to be so.

If you read the report, or even just the sections I quoted above, you'll see that it says nothing that could possibly lead anyone to conclude that U.S. military personnel contracted COVID at the World Military Games in Wuhan in 2019 without a great deal more evidence. It mostly just looks like about the number of people you'd expect got colds. It just so happens that they got colds a couple months before a worldwide pandemic with cold-like symptoms originated in the place they were. It's weak even as circumstantial evidence goes, if you take 2 seconds to think about it. But you're thinking like a conspiracy theorist, so 2 seconds is more than you have to spare.

So in addition to reconfirming the laziness of conspiracy theory thinking, we have another common feature: draw a conclusion from false information, and when the information is shown to be false, continue to the maintain the conclusion as though it had been proven anyway.

Thanks for the link... and yes, the Neo-Liberal shills are shilling and to my point, I think they are pursuing intra-Dem fights with the new and likely effective anti-Trump packaging.

Which is to say that the Party realignment (and role reversals) continues apace:

"Not long ago, the political logic of rejecting free trade made a certain degree of sense for Democrats. But events have a way of changing political logic. A trade-skeptical message that worked perfectly well five or 10 years ago is going to sound awfully out of touch after Trump is done turning tariffs into a synonym for catastrophic ineptitude."

The context for his ending the argument thus is spelled out earlier: we (Dems) can't have a 'subtle' or 'nuanced' trade policy or talk about competence in deploying such a policy -- we must abandon all things to oppose Trump and any future policy that might be tainted by Trump. And by the way, my favored policy is the way we should abandon those things.

Electorally, he might even be right -- as we discuss above, Trump often poisons things he touches... it's one of the reasons not to support Trump. So taking opposing positions definitionally isn't a bad electoral strategy.

But, I honestly do think that abandoning 'good' or 'subtle' or 'nuanced' positions just because Trump bigfooted some of them isn't in anyone's long-term interests.

And finally, on a purely electoral note... adopting the opposite of some of your formerly held positions often works at cross purposes with a) your ability to talk to them, b) being perceived as sincere, c) how the new things work with the old things that are still important, and d) how realignment can cross pressure individual reps whose constituencies still adhere to the 'old' party alignment.

Anyhow, this is what I was saying in that there's a lot of pressure to simply become market fundamentalists and abandon positions that were 'reasonable' 5-yrs ago because of optics.

Unfortunately the Trump effect is bad in so many different ways, it's hard to settle on a single one to hate. But one thing I'd personally avoid is simply taking the opposite stance; sometimes it really is better to acknowledge the point and give the opponent a noose of how he's doing it is worse than how you'd do it.

Not doing that is kinda how the R's got Trump in the first place.

I realize that, post-February 2020, we're all virologists and epidemiologists now, but man, I really suggest reading some of the actual research by virologists and epidemiologists. I even linked a Nature write-up of a recent (published in February) study on the origins of the virus above. It's a good place to start.

The article you posted, by a yellow rag, says they were required by law to release the report, but it references a law that says no such thing (the quote in the article is "publicly available on an internet website in a searchable format," but their link to the law actually takes you to the same report, and the part of the law that has that quote is actually about other reports related to Wuhan and the DOD (I've included the entire section of the law below). In other words, you don't know that they were required by law to publish it, and the yellow rag you linked to doesn't seem to know either.

It seems more than likely that the report came out, it was a big ol' nothing burger (because that's what it is), and they just sent it on the Congress along with a bunch of other stuff without thinking about it further.

The other feature of the conspiracy theorist is laziness: he or she is willing to accept, without question, the mere conjecture and outright misinformation of any publication that says anything that confirms their conspiratorial suspicions, but he or she is unwilling to do even basic checking of the facts and assumptions presented in said publications, despite the fact that it takes mere minutes to do such fact checking most of the time.

The committee directs the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives not later than January 1, 2022 describing:
(1) All contracts the Department of Defense signed with the
EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates by year from 2012-2021 in
spreadsheet format, to include purpose, location where contract was performed, cost, metrics, contract number, contract oversight organization, and whether any funds were provided ultimately to the Wuhan Institute of Virology;
(2) Whether any DoD-funded research projects involving
EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates were performed in China or
in support of research performed in China, and if so, a
description of the projects, the work performed, and the risk
assessments DoD used to evaluate the project;
(3) Whether DoD issued any awards to the EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates that are not available on USASpending.gov;
(4) Whether the Department sponsored any classified
research involving EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates; and
(5) Copies of the agreements, initial research reports, and
all progress and final reports from the EcoHealth Alliance or
its affiliates.
This report shall be submitted in unclassified form and
made publicly available on an internet website in a searchable
format, but may contain a classified annex.

He saw a really funny and insightful meme and wanted to share it.

I was hoping it was the Trump as Voldemort image where Voldemort has bad hair and is yelling "MAKE HOGWARTS GREAT AGAIN!" but Trump as Kim Jong Orange is good too.

With memes that good, you don't even need an argument.

They were required by law to release the report in 2022. The report, for some reason, was not released until this year.

"Did they try?"

Perhaps they were inept. Perhaps they forgot. Perhaps the person who was supposed to do it was a Trumpist who refused to get the shot and then died of Covid.

"Have you ever seen a report like this before for any sort of event?"

No, I have not. Perhaps those other reports were supposed to have been released but weren't for one reason or another.

I have not made any assumptions about the report, just the whole "this was supposed to have been released but wasn't" assumption.

I don't have a conclusion yet, but I am looking forward for the day that new evidence comes out that doesn't inspire "you're just looking for evidence that confirms your biases!" defenses.

Maybe an intelligence agency will come out and say "our intelligence indicated the marketplace but our report was squashed".

Then you can see who points out that intelligence agencies are not scientific agencies.

ThTh6: this really sounds like they just made some edits to a few genes (14?) in modern wolves, ignoring whatever other genetic differences there are between modern wolves and a species that last had a common ancestor millions of years ago, and called it a dire wolf. Maybe this is the first step in a more complex attempt at resurrecting extinct species, but right now it looks like they just have some slightly genetically modified wolves, not anything like actual dire wolves, to this lay person.

What makes AI good at microcode is less that it's good at microcode and more that processors are now so powerful that they don't need good microcode to run sufficiently well for the purpose.

Why doesn't it exist in the United States? Was that a decision by the people who worked there to stop working there, or was it a decision by the people who owned the factories to close them and go somewhere cheaper?

"Keep manufacturing domestic" used to be a left-wing, pro-labor position!