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Fauci had no problem selling the natural origins story days after knowing scientists had pointed out, what they thought at the time, was a likely lab origin. The similar finds in nature took awhile to come out, not days. I will admit things could have changed, but there is no public information that gives a reason why Fauci sits on a conference call where scientist identify how it makes sense it was of lab origin in Wuhan and then day's later he's pointing to The Lancet article which admonishes 'conspiracy theorists'. And if you want to take Fauci on his current word, he claims he was always open to both natural and lab origins, but again, that's not what he was saying publicly early on and for quite a while after. If that can be shown, that would be a good thing. But if the experts convince everyone not to look there, maybe it's never shown. I guess we can hope if it was lab leak, internally they decide to do something different in the future. There certainly is an argument I'd be willing to accept where our virus research experts would work to correct that better than government oversight could do.

There is apparently enough evidence to lean towards likely, where just until recently all the top experts either said everything pointed to natural or simply avoided the question. Did Fauci actually say it was absurd to think the lab leak was an option...no, he was very careful in how he said stuff. But up until recently he would blow off the question, discuss how natural transmission happens, or 'own' Rand Paul instead of giving us his honest opinion, which again, we know now based on his initial emails that his first thought was lab leak, which counters everything he pushed towards the media.

Sometimes a story just stinks, think Jussie Smollet. One of the few labs that specialize in Covid research AND has access to bats in a region 1000 miles away where we believe this originated from is where this pandemic starts. But quickly folks with motives (research community) claims it must be the wet market, which even at the time it was not believed they sold bats or pangolin (and later confirmed). Doesn't mean it didn't jump via another animal, but again that means it jumped naturally along this 1000 mile path and just happened to start in Wuhan. None of that is proof alone, but just like Jon Stewart pointed out on Colbert, it's those things that make you go 'hmm'. And again to focus on motives, emails show Fauci and other colleagues initially thought it could be a lab leak, but framed the storyline that it was absurd to think anything but natural. I know you think I both sides everything, but seems to me there were some motives there too.

I contend you're either trying to continue the mockery as you refuse to believe you may have been wrong this entire time or you simply don't understand what believing something with low confidence means. They could have come out and said they don't know, they could have said low/medium/high confidence that it was natural. They claim they have intelligence which pushed them towards declaring it was likely a lab leak. Rather there is some other counter evidence they don't believe strongly enough but warrants not claiming medium/high or simply don't have enough evidence, again, they are leaning towards lab leak. Not long ago merely suggesting this put you on the same level as people that believed in Jewish space lasers. To note folks, you can still believe the Orange man is very bad AND that this virus came out of a lab that just happens to investigate/research the exact thing we're dealing with.

I had a sarcastic response written up, but probably not the best way to approach it. In short, while absolutely correct that dealing with the problems is one of the main responsibilities, wouldn't trying to prevent it be another? And I'm not even necessarily against gain of function research as I have trust in the idea that those doing it, are trying to prevent some of the same issues we saw with Covid. That said, some decent regulation like maybe step one, we don't assist that work being done in China. It is very important to have a government that can safely and quickly provide the best resources to have us better prepared for train derailments, school shootings, and pandemics, but I definitely feel it's just as important to see if we can do something about preventing them in the first place, which means understanding why they happen.

Actually it was Dept of Energy and reported by WSJ, or at least where the guy I posted saw it. I saw in a NYT article that 4 intelligence agencies already had this conclusion with low confidence and the FBI has it with medium confidence. Fauci is now 'open' to it, which anyone that read his initial emails knows he immediately thought it was likely a lab leak. Crazy to think lab leak proponents were on equal footing with election deniers not too long ago.

Graphite is like Cowbell, you can never have enough.

While I love football, I'm far from able to truly give an intelligent thought process on who's the best player based on what scheme we're using them in. That said I found another mock draft site outside of PFF and it can be ridiculously fun at times (and I'm confident highly inaccurate). I got Carter after dropping back to 14 or 15 the other day. I have to believe this would be a good draft: https://www.profootballnetwork.com/mockdraft/ Trades left me with the following: #18 Joey Porter Jr. #25 Trenton Simpson #46 JL Skinner #48 Keion White #55 Bijan Robinson Also picked up Minnesota's 1st and 2nd round 2024 picks, Atlanta's 2024 3rd rounder, and New England's 2024 4th rounder.

Musk has done some things right, it's ridiculous the disdain and poo pooing of his business record in the last year. He also isn't Gates or Wozniak. Tesla has always been ridiculously over valued and the mantra that it's not a car company but a tech company is a bit silly. That said, I doubt too many on this board would think Jim Farley is an idiot and many think Ford is ahead of the other two Big 3 folks because of Farley's major push to be more of a 'tech' company, at least in the way Musk would argue. There is a bit of childness attitude with him as well. If he sees an opportunity for a joke, he's going to take it, without thinking about the actual power and manipulation that can be done based on it. And he's absolutely shown a bias and he absolutely is in a better position with Tesla if China is happy with him. For someone like me that thinks Twitter is a much bigger player in news / news distribution than most of you, this is beyond frightening for me.

I suspect only parts of the 1st at that.

I don't think Washington has a higher ceiling, but absolutely agree he fits the team better. Additionally we could use those earlier picks for Defense which is a much more pressing need.

I mean, is it possible to use that word incorrectly in a sentence?

Obviously the military was on special alert and Biden has Secret Service, but that still takes some balls to go to Kyiv. I'm honestly surprised he was even allowed too and the idea of it wasn't shuttered by Secret Service themselves. I just jumped on Twitter to see the response and it's 'oh, he'll go to Ukraine but not East Palestine'. I mean, I guess it's about the best misdirection you could try right now, but at some point you have to admit and admire the balls of this. Props to Joe.

Yeah, i've been reading about the Wagner push for the past several weeks which has been moving the lines, albeit extremely slowly. I guess I was expecting a large scale assault on multiple fronts and possibly even from the Sea in the south. If this is it, sounds like the plan is to use bodies to exhaust ammunition from Ukraine.

I would have agreed with you if I saw this post yesterday, but from my Sunday morning news shows, It seemed like it was a known consensus that we are now in the Russian offensive and that it started a week ago and making very small gains with major losses. Seemed like a complete flip from everything I've seen the last few weeks.

This Twitter outrage and insistence on overthinking every little change is somewhat unreal. SMS 2FA is still exponentially better than just username/password. There are better options which this change is clearly trying to push most users towards while at the same time saving money on SMS charges. 2 big issues though, 1) paying users may simply want to use a method they are used to rather than adding/syncing another application to their login process and 2) just my guess, there are locations that are restrictive on some of these security applications that do allow Twitter. Forcing users away from SMS 2FA could push paying customers off of the platform. In short, this change gives paying users an option rather than forcing them to do what they are going to have their non paying customers.

At least per his definition women get 20-49 to be in their prime. Being a baseball fan, guy's prime is 27.5 - 30, unless they are still in the minors, which means they are over the hill around 25.

I would love to be in these strategy rooms with these potential candidates. I would like to think there is enough smarts behind the scenes in the party to realize there is no win option in 2024 and that the debate is run to help build momentum for 2028 or if you run against Trump, you risk alienating a certain percent of GOP that won't vote for you in 2028. Sadly I suspect too many of these folks think they can win with this party and with Trump hanging around.

The first article from the Free Press mentioning the shooters name ended with a blurb that he was born in the same town in New Jersey that the Whitmer kidnap plotting ringleader was born in. What relevance does that have?

One of the additional perks of coming down to see the grandparents when I was growing up was it meant a trip to Buscemi's on our way back home.

Glad to see her chief of staff is choosing not play Weekend at Bernie's anymore..

Don't forget Cloverleaf. I'm sad to say i've never been to Loui's, so I can't compare to that, but Cloverleaf is a great bar/grill setup. The original Buddy's is also quite a bit different than any of the other Buddy's in the suburbs i've been too in terms of feel.

1 mentally ill person and 9,999,999 Internet trolls.

There are a lot of rumblings that Putin wants to do it around the 1 year anniversary date which would be later this month. Wish I would have saved it, but I saw a twitter thread about a week ago from an ex US military person analyzing what that would look like. He wasn't confident if Ukraine would hold them back or if Russia would overrun them in the south and east, especially if Russia threatened another attack on Kyiv which would force Ukraine to move forces to protect it. What he was confident of though is that Russia's already bad logistical planning is using even older equipment now. If it holds up enough to lead to some big gains, he doesn't think even Wagner will be able to stop Ukraine from doing what it did late last year and taking it all back fairly quickly.