Alan Greenspan is *literally* running MSNBC’s coverage here https://t.co/3eXve9fxFq

— Mike Elk (@MikeElk) April 2, 2020

Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:

i love this one for many reasons but especially because the premise is that it's cool and good that the US is keeping its coronavirus vaccine research secret

One reason for that is, one or more U.S. agencies almost certainly possess research on creating a deadlier coronavirus, following NIH's announcement in 2017 that a ban on such research had been lifted. They're likely using that research to work on a vaccine, and anyone hired by the big papers for health reporting already knows it.

I doubt that SARS-CoV-1 research is where SARS-CoV-2 came from, but I don't think the CDC wants talk to start again about its double trouble in 2014—when the CDC exposed lab workers to live anthrax the agency said was "inactivated" by sending it to a lab unequipped to handle live samples where workers without protective gear hit it with a fan to loosen flakes, less than two weeks after the agency had contaminated a lightweight H9N2 influenza sample sent to a USDA poultry research lab with a deadly H5N1 strain. They also found that year that the NIH itself had possession of live smallpox in a lab near Washington, something that was supposedly only stored at two highly-monitored, internationally-known sites, one at CDC labs in Atlanta and one by its counterpart in Russia.

Those 2014 woes were what led to a moratorium in the U.S. on research creating deadlier coronavirus as part of a larger subset of viral diseases, but thanks to the efforts of the NIH and its federally-funded academic cohort, the moratorium ended in 2017. Again, I don't see any strong evidence that U.S. work on deadlier coronaviruses led to COVID-19, but the agencies involved probably don't want attention shifted away from the current mainstream-media-tended conspiracy theories about China and back toward themselves, and we're all aware of the ways that U.S. national-level reporting on federal agencies safeguards access to its sources within those agencies.

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

the epoch times is falun gong and pushes a lot of weird conservative conspiracy stuff

They have a related video and T.V. arm called New Tang Dynasty Television which produces various shows like "China Uncensored" hosted by this hired geek:



Also giant spider tanks:



A related channel that focuses on U.S. domestic stuff and holy shit look at that dude's face:



Some news about this outfit from last year. By the way, they've recently been flooded with cash:

Facebook has banned The Epoch Times, a conservative news outlet that spent more money on pro-Trump Facebook advertisements than any group other than the Trump campaign, from any future advertising on the platform.

The decision follows an NBC News report that The Epoch Times had shifted its spending on Facebook in the last month, seemingly in an effort to obfuscate its connection to some $2 million worth of ads that promoted the president and conspiracy theories about his political enemies.

"Over the past year we removed accounts associated with the Epoch Times for violating our ad policies, including trying to get around our review systems," a Facebook spokesperson said. "We acted on additional accounts today and they are no longer able to advertise with us."

Facebook's decision came as a result of a review prompted by questions from NBC News. The spokesperson explained that ads must include disclaimers that accurately represent the name of the ad's sponsors.

The Epoch Times' new method of pushing the pro-Trump conspiracy ads on Facebook, which appeared under page names such as "Honest Paper" and "Pure American Journalism," allowed the organization to hide its multimillion-dollar spending on dark-money ads, in effect bypassing Facebook's political advertising transparency rules. Facebook's ban will affect only The Epoch Times' ability to buy ads; the sock-puppet pages created to host the new policy-violating ads were still live at the time of publication.

...

The religious group that quietly operates the paper believes in a coming judgment day that will send communists to hell and says Trump is helping accelerate that timeline.

Since 2016, The Epoch Times' revenue more than doubled, and the reach of its online content rocketed past that of every other news organization, attracting billions of views across its many platforms. It also became a player on the conservative media stage, securing interviews with Trump Cabinet members, loyalists and family members, as well as members of Congress and Republican media stars.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200107141211/https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/epoch-times-begins-hiding-its-connection-huge-pro-trump-ad-n1045416

Not that it makes much difference. Every major news outlet in the U.S., Democrat or Republican, is either directly blaming China or slinging mud at them.

The Falun Gong's have also promoted the "CCPVirus" hashtag. That seems less common than Americans just calling it the "China virus," but a central part of the Falun Gong's strategy is to construct a palingenetic myth with themselves placed at the center of an ancient Chinese culture threatened by the Communist Party. I think that's the basic message of their traveling roadshow, Shen Yun, where dancers will be twirling around until some other dancers representing communists (wearing black) run out on the stage and symbolically beat them up.



So, presenting themselves as anti-China per se or anti-Chinese is not going to work for them, but the American media writ large and its political class don't feel the need to make these distinctions at all. Anyways, in the bloody shoot-em-up war games I play like Rising Storm 2: Vietnam there I'll see "CCPVirus" tags sometimes in front of people's names, so it's clearly having some effect. It'd be worth looking into it but I think some of the people around Trump, like Steve Bannon, were effective at manipulating gaming communities inclined to reactionary and nationalistic politics and I imagine there's work being done there now to promote the notion that China wants to ban or censor their video games or whatever, and with Bannon now making slinging mud at China a full-time job.