Eleftheros

Surely there's a YouTube video somewhere with instructions.

Several posters did write extensively discussing the possibility of a lab leak over the past 3 years. You will not find any remaining examples of those discussions.

If it comes to court, the beak will surely chuck out the case.

It's for actions like this that someone invented the political term "astroturfing".

As it wasn't me who inserted 'Starmer' into this thread, it would make a lot more sense if you leveled your accusations of "conspiracy laced whataboutary" at somebody else rather than me.

Why? I have said nothing about Starmer, and I have no interest in doing so. I simply pointed out that laws in the UK can be applied retrospectively under "parliamentary sovereignty". How does that equate to "conspiracy laced whataboutary", whatever that may be?

That is a convenient fiction. The application of ex post facto law, as it is technically known, is permitted in the UK (and many other countries, though not the US) under the doctrine of "parliamentary sovereignty", which allows Parliament to pass any laws it wants. This has been used on a number of occasions. (You could argue that the Nuremberg Trials were an application of ex post facto law as the Nuremberg Charter was not signed until after WWII ended. The concept of "crimes against humanity" did not exist until then.)

It's bound to be - Covid-19 is a virus, not a bacterium. It could be a strategy that has gone viral, I suppose.

Ultimately, it must be the politicians who are held responsible. They are the officials elected by the people to govern and must be responsible to the people. That said, anger should be directed at anyone who had a hand in this appallingly damaging farce.

Pakistani media says that 400 of its citizens were on board, of whom at least 298 were lost. That represents slightly over half of the passenger complement, which has been estimated at 750.

These people get on a dodgy fishing trawler in Libya which they know to be massively overloaded, and when the predictable catastrophe occurs, their relatives immediately start blaming the coastguards in European countries over "inconsistencies in their accounts". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/17/greece-shipwreck-survivors-anger-fury-coast-guard-questions It's a tragedy, but perhaps the relatives could look closer to home for the responsible parties. If your family members knowingly put their lives into the hands of people traffickers, then the tragic consequences are nobody else's fault.

It's a pity he never made Fawlty Towers the Movie - he had some typically Cleese humorous ideas for how it would go, but for some reason it never got made.

Why do governments spend so much money and time fighting their "War on Drugs", while relegating the "War on People Traffickers/Illegral Migration" to a few virtue signalling statements? Because narcotics mainly affect the submerged lowest 10% of society (whom the elites love), while illegal migration hurts mainly the workers and middle classes (whom the elites hate).

They are also banned from leaving the country (males 18 - 60).

It's clear that the politicians and bureaucrats were not at all worried personally by the Covid virus. You only have to look at the list of lawbreakers who thought that safety measures were for others and not for them. Among the ones who were caught in the UK were: Boris Johnson (continual party) Rishi Sunak (partier) Matt Hancock (seedy affair) Jeremy Corbyn MP Margaret Ferrier MP Stephen Kinnock MP Gavin Williamson MP Nicola Sturgeon Catherine Calderwood (Scotland Chief Medical Officer) Dominic Cummins (PM's political adviser, drove the length of the country Neil Ferguson (predicted 500K deaths but was convinced he would not be one of them). The grand prize, however, goes to Justin Trudeau, who took his family on a lakeside holiday while everyone else was locked down, and justified it by saying he was an "essential worker". Priceless.

Well, the amounts of money thrown at this problem over the past 50 years are eye-watering. But I would say you are right in that there has been no concentrated effort, or even the political will to achieve that. Most western governments would rather gargle battery acid than enable their citizens access to cheap, reliable, and clean energy.

"Fusion energy is 20 years away from being a reality. And always will be." - attributed to some expert. I know it's a tough problem, but really the fusion industry has made astonishingly slow progress..

Quite right. Fighting climate change does nothing except cost money. And the people who pay that price are the poor, through higher electricity/energy prices, more expensive food, and restrictive regulations on energy consumption.

Spare a thought for the Bangladeshi workers who have to make their living taking honey from bees' nests in the tropical swamps of the Sundarbans, with its snakes, mosquitoes, leeches, tigers, leopards, centipedes and scorpions. For many of the villagers, it is the only way to make a living: no honey, no money.

You got that right. He sure is very ole.

Which one? There are dozens of obnoxious buffoons at the higher levels of the US political system.

With 86% of Democrats in favor, and 67% of Republicans against, the "one thing they can all agree on" is that tribal politics is more important than the merits of the case.

Looking at that statement in the context of the past 3 years, I expect that Feynman is rotating quite rapidly in his grave.

Thailand doesn't have a good record in quickly learning about huge mistakes.

"Mistakes were made, lessons have been learned, and changes have been mad to ensure this can never happen again, but we should not assign blame to any individual." Since that is almost bound to be the eventual conclusion, more or less, of this vast bureaucratic exercise, it would be better to save millions of pounds and just forget the whole thing. Except, of course, the politicians want to say "Look, we held an inquiry!", to which the best response is "Who paid for it?" We already know that the sorry collection of placemen and party hacks who have crawled into Westminster aren't fit for anything more challenging than sweeping the streets. Why spend millions more to confirm that?