I used to believe that the presence of the furin cleavage site on the spike protein was basically concrete evidence that it was a natural virus that was modified in a lab somewhere. I still think it’s theoretically possible, but the evidence that we now have points to that being less likely.

There definitely is an injection if 12 nucleotides into the spike gene, but the injection is out of frame (meaning that the round peg didn’t totally make it into the round hole). If it were engineered that way, that would amount to it being done the hard way just for the sake of making it difficult.

I’m not an evolutionary biologist, biochemist, or anything like that (just a bachelor’s in bio now working in the film industry), so I really don’t know if it’s within the realm of possibility that this out-of-frame nucleotide injection could just be the result of sloppy copying over the course of many infections, or not.

Conservatives have successfully gained control of the critical levers of political power in the US, so now they’re focusing taking control of the culture as well. They will fail in that. But, in the meantime, they’re going all-in on culture war, because they’ve gotten most of what they want politically and economically.

Protesting is useless. Run up to the Iraq war saw the largest protests in history all over the world, and they did nothing.

China has to step in, and that won’t happen for years.

I personally have checked out from following the Ukraine conflict.

Monkey puzzle and sequoia