“Men bileve not lyghtly hym whiche is knowen for a lyer.”
William Caxton — English merchant, diplomat, and writer (1422 – 1491)
April 30 2020 — There is a first time for everything. Today, I will post a cartoon based on the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf“, one of the best known Aesop’s Fables. I wish the kids a good time and I hope that the adults will appreciate the story. Yours Truly, L. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY
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“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” — Richard Feynman
UPDATE (May 26 2021) — The idea that the pandemic emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory from the start.
Since a few days, the same theory is now taken very seriously as top scientists make it clear that this hypothesis is not only plausible, it is the most likely.
Once again, we must ask why the MSM have been so wrong? How and why did this happen?
TIMELINE
Tuesday May 11 2021 — Dr. Anthony Fauci finally acknowledges that scientists may ‘have been too definitive’ in previous public statements dismissing the Lab Theory.
Sunday May 23 — Wall Street Journal report that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had symptoms consistent with Covid-19 and were hospitalized in November 2019.
Monday May 24 — Support is growing in Congress for a probe of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Democrats had previously dismissed the lab leak theory as a GOP talking point. But lawmakers from both parties are now giving the scenario renewed consideration.
Monday May 24 — CNN reveals that the Biden’s administration has shut down a closely-held State Department effort launched late in the Trump administration to prove the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab
Wednesday May 26 — The president announced that he had ordered the intelligence community to “redouble” efforts to look into the situation to “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” and report back in 90 days.
In 1958, Feynman was about to be appointed on Eisenhower’s President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), a very high-level advisory board created in the wake of Sputnik when a 9-page letter written directly to J. Edgar Hoover — dated August 8, 1958 — described him as ” either a Communist or very strongly pro-Communist — and as such as a very definite security risk.”
This despicable and coward attack against one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century was most unfortunate for there are no doubts that Feynman would have been very useful to the US President.
I believe that, soon or later, Feynman would have told the president what he used to say to his students. A story is not true or false because it is told by your friends or your enemies.
From his first day in office as Director of the CIA, I have pointed out the many lies of Mike Pompeo. Obviously, I was fully aware that Pompeo is not very credible.
However, as I explained in this post written more than a year ago, this fact was not in itself a reason to dismiss the Wuhan Lab theory as a conspiracy theory when it was, and still is, the most likely scenario.
Such behavior is totally childish. Sadly, I do not expect better from most journalists. The Iraqi WMD fiasco and the Steele dossier are recent evidence that they will never learn.
But, when I heard that Joe Biden — the president of the United States — had decided to shut down the investigation into the Wuhan laboratory, I was hugely disappointed.
His presidency is still young, but this is an unforgivable mistake that may seal his legacy. Obviously, someone has given POTUS a pretty bad piece of advise…
Asked if he thought that the French Revolution had been a good thing, Mao replied that it was too early to tell.
We are still early in the game, and the history of this pandemic has yet to be written. But I would tend to agree with this prediction. [Origins of COVID-19: Who Opened Pandora’s Box at Wuhan – People or Nature? — NICHOLAS WADE MAY 09, 2021]
“The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.”
Remember Feynman… Do not be a slave of your emotions. Enjoy them, but always dominate them. Never let your feelings do your thinking!
And if I may add one piece of wisdom: Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who found it.
Be suspicious of everything, but don’t doubt yourself. After all, it is “better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.”
Facebook (May 26 2021)
Quo vadis? — So, yesterday (May 26 2021), Joe Biden has ordered the US intelligence community to intensify its efforts to study the origins of coronavirus, adding that it will continue to press for China to participate in a full investigation.
“I have now asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days.”
“As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China.”
In his statement, Biden said the majority of the US intelligence community had “coalesced” around those two likely scenarios but “do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other”.
“The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of Covid-19,” Biden stated.
Obviously, the Biden’s administration was forced to backpedaled and the statement is no more than a rushed decision taken to limit the damaging effects of a childish mistake.
Actually, the text is not even logical. No matter what, the truth will prevail. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the US IC uncovers no new information over the next 90 days.
The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months.
If, three months from now — 19 months after the outbreak of this pandemic — neither the original bat population, nor the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, has been identified, then we will know that the likelihood of the natural emergence theory is about nil.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. And that is even more so, if the last standing theory is in itself highly probable!
PS — More than a year after having written this post, my advise to the US IC remains the same. Who is patient ZERO?
END of UPDATE
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”
David Baltimore — Virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology
1975 Nobel Prize for his work with viruses
Yesterday Old fable — The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his town’s flock.
When a wolf actually does appear and the boy again calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm and the sheep are eaten by the wolf.
In later English-language poetic versions of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy.
Today — Do you trust Pompeo now?
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is now urging China to tell the truth about the Coronavirus pandemic.
According to Pompeo, Beijing’s delay in sharing information about the virus has created risks to people worldwide that had “truly put thousands of lives at risk.”
“My concern is that this cover-up, this disinformation that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in, is still denying the world the information it needs so that we can prevent further cases or something like this from recurring again,” Pompeo stated on March 25 2020.
On April 29 2020, Mike Pompeo pushed China again to provide the world access to its virology labs in Wuhan, saying the world needed to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic originated there and that Beijing had an obligation to be transparent. [News conference at the State Department]
“We still haven’t gained access, the world hasn’t gained access to the WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology) there.
We don’t know precisely where this virus originated from.
There are multiple labs that are continuing to conduct work, we think, on contagious pathogens inside of China today and we don’t know if they are operating at a level of security to prevent this from happening again.
The Chinese Communist Party tells us they want to be our partners. (…)
There is a continuing obligation on the part of reliable partners to share this information.”
I am glad that Pompeo has finally realized that lies kill people. Better late than never…
But I am not entirely sure that Pompeo is the best person to point the finger at the Chinese disinformation programme.
PS — Just in case Mike Pompeo reads this blog, I will advise him to find an answer to these three questions. Q1 — Why have the Chinese authorities rejected the help and supervision from five French scientists as it was originally decided when the project of the Wuhan lab was agreed between the two countries? Q2 — Where are the 4 French mobile P3 laboratories that are currently unaccounted for? Q3 — Who is patient ZERO?
“What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”
Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo — Texas A&M University (April 15, 2019)
The Boy Who Cried Wolf | Aesop’s Fables | Story Time for Children
REFERENCES
The Boy Who Cried Wolf — Wikipedia
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COVID-19 — The Boys Who Cried Wolf [Is Pompeo telling the truth about the Wuhan Lab?]
COVID-19 — The Boy Who Cried Wolf : Is Pompeo telling the truth about the Wuhan Lab? [UPDATE : A lesson from Richard Feynman (Physics Nobel Prize 1965)]
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