Horrifying if True

A new report from a military expert at DARPA strongly suggests that SARS - COV2 originated in the Wuhan Virology Lab, funded by NIH/NIAID under Dr. Fauci, who  funded a proposal to Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, to be carried out at Wuhan, one that DAPRA had turned down as risky gain-of-function research. The virus itself is purported to be an intermediate step in a living vaccine designed to be released in the wild to treat disease in bats.

Red State, US Military Report States COVID-19 Was Created by a US-Funded EcoHealth Alliance Program at Wuhan Institute of Virology

Maj. Joseph Murphy’s report has been posted in its entirety by Project Veritas and can be read at this link.)

As we previously reported, on Monday night Project Veritas released a new report announcing that they’d obtained US military documents proving that Dr. Anthony Fauci had lied to Congress and, more specifically, “never-before-seen documents regarding the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, vaccines, potential treatments which have been suppressed, and the government’s effort to conceal all of this.”

One document, an August 13, 2021 report on Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) letterhead from the Commandant of the Marine Corps Fellow, DARPA to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense carries the subject line: “SARS CoV-2 Origins Investigation With US Government Program Undisclosed Document Analysis.” The analysis reports that the 2018 EcoHealth Alliance coronavirus research proposal that DARPA rejected because it was too risky and likely violated the gain of function research ban was then funded by NIH/NIAID and carried out, and that SARS-CoV-2 – a/k/a COVID-19 – resulted from that research and escaped in August 2019. 
. . .

SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus. It was created by an EcoHealth Alliance program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as suggested by the reporting surrounding the lab leak hypothesis. The details of this program have been concealed since the pandemic began. These details can be found in the EcoHealth Alliance proposal response to the DARPA PREEMPT program Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) HR00118S0017, dated March 2018 – a document not yet publicly disclosed.

The contents of the proposed program are extremely detailed. NIH/NIAID lays out step-by-step what the organization intends to do by phase and by location. The primary scientists involved, their roles, and their institutions are indicated. The funding plan for the WIV work is its own document. The reasons why nonpharmaceutical interventions like masks and medical countermeasures like the mRNA vaccines do not work well can be extrapolated from the details. The reasons why the early treatment protocols work as curatives are apparent.

SARS-CoV-2’s form as it emerged is likely as a precursor, deliberately virulent, humanized recombinant SARSr-CoV that was to be reverse engineered into a live attenuated SARSr-CoV bat vaccine. Its nature can be determined from analysis of its genome with the context provided by the EcoHealth Alliance proposal. Joining this analysis with US intelligence collections on Wuhan will aid this determination.
. . .
SARS-CoV-2, hereafter referred to as SARSR-CoV-WIV, is a synthetic spike protein chimera engineered to attach to human ACE2 receptors and inserted into a recombinant bat SARSr-COV backbone. It is likely a live vaccine not yet engineered to a more attenuated state that the program sought to create with its final version. It leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves, but it was not ready to infect bats yet, which is why it does not appear to infect bats. The reason the disease is so confusing is because it is less a virus than it is engineered spike proteins hitch-hiking a ride on a SARSr-CoV quasispecies swarm. The closer it is to the final live attenuated vaccine form, the more likely that it has been deattenuating since initial escape in August 2019.

The report has some other interesting morsels, 

Ivermectin (identified as curative in April 2020) works throughout all phases of illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response. Of note, chloroquine phosphate (Hydroxychloroquine, identified April 2020 as curative) is identified in the proposal as a SARSr-CoV inhibitor, as is interferon (identified May 2020 as curative).

A technological challenge as difficult as inoculating bats in China would be tried at DARPA first. The massive, “Manhattan Project”-level of information suppression executed by the government and the Trusted News Initiative indicates that it would be covered-up if something bad happened. The lab-leak hypothesis and squabbling between Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci indicated that the cover up was more localized. Further, an actual cover-up would be more disciplined with its paperwork. So, I presumed that unclassified files would be concealed on a higher network and found them where I expected them to be. I understood what they were and their content, pushed the files off-site, and compiled this report.

My caveat is that we have to take the word of a rival governmental agency, DARPA, which, of course, likely resents another agency doing work they they consider to be their bailiwick. I hope this is too important a matter for interagency squabbling. The fact that the author is a temporary DARPA fellow, now employed elsewhere.

If true, Dr. Fauci and Peter Daszak quite literally have the blood of millions on their hands.

Bonus, Sundance at CTH has a video of  the Heated Exchange Between Senator Rand Paul and Notorious Liar Dr. Anthony Fauci

So, What Else is New?

From Stacy McCain, New Yorkers Are Infecting America

Yesterday, we took note of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis imposing a two-week quarantine on visitors arriving from New York-area airports. New York City is the epicenter of the Chinese Bat Soup Flu pandemic, with more than 17,000 reported cases — including more than 3,000 added in just the past 24 hours. Two states, New York and New Jersey, account for 65% of reported cases. This is a risk to the rest of America:

The White House’s coronavirus response coordinator said Tuesday that anyone who has recently left New York should self-quarantine for 14 days in an effort to slow the spread of the virus in the US.
“To everyone who has left New York over the last few days, because of the rate of the number of cases, you may have been exposed before you left New York,” Dr. Deborah Birx said at a White House press briefing, adding that “everybody who was in New York should be self-quarantining for the next 14 days to ensure that the virus doesn’t spread to others.”
“No matter where they have gone, whether it’s Florida or North Carolina or out to the far reaches of Long Island,” Birx said.

So, this disease that began in Communist China because people eat bats there has now moved to New York and is spreading across America. We’re destroying our economy — spending trillions of dollars for an emergency rescue bill — because of bat-eaters and New Yorkers.

Densely packed, extremely progressive New York City leads the way with many things. Not all are good.

Also,  ‘Chinese Bat Soup Flu’ Update

Hat-tip to Kurt Schlicter for giving this pandemic a memorable name. It’s going to get worse — perhaps a whole lot worse — before it gets better, but in the meantime, we can figure out what went wrong, and caution about what’s still going wrong. The first and most important thing President Trump needs to do now is to halt domestic flight departures from New York City-area airports. . .

I gonna stick with WuFlu

DC to Go Bats?

Little Brown Bat about to eat a moth

No, not just the impeachment. WaPoo, Endangered brown bat may become DC’s official ‘state’ mammal

A small, brown endangered bat would become the “official state mammal” of America’s capital city, under a proposed ordinance that will get a public hearing in January.

The idea was proposed earlier this year by several Girl Scout troops after they studied the little brown bats, according to a D.C. Council statement.

Rachel Jones built and installed a bat house on the
 Gravette AR Nature Observation Trail as part of her
Girl Scout Gold Award Project.

“The Little Brown Bat has good friends in the Girl Scouts of the Capitol Hill Cluster School,” the legislation says.

The creatures, known to scientists as Myotis lucifugus, typically grow to about 3.5 inches (8 centimeters) tall with a wingspan of up to 11 inches (27 centimeters). They are found in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program . Though small, the bats can fly up 22 mph (35 kph) and can eat up to 1,200 bugs per night, accord to the legislation.

Brown Bat with White Nose disease

The little brown bat population has been hurt by a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome. The disease kills bats by increasing the amount of energy used during hibernation, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Not to mention wind mills...

The International Union for Conservation of Nature considered the bat endangered as of last year. There were likely more than 6 million of the little brown bats before the infectious fungal disease was discovered in the U.S. in 2006, according to the organization’s website. Since then, there’s been a 90% decrease in the known numbers of hibernating little brown bats in Canada and the U.S., it says. It predicts there’s a 99% chance the bat will be extinct in the northeastern U.S. by 2026.

Well, there are certainly worse things the D.C. City council could be doing. And probably are.

Wind Power is for the Birds

Or rather, not for the birds, although it seems to be good for the lizards that the birds eat: Wind Farms Kill Off 75% Of Buzzards, Hawks And Kites That Live Nearby

Wind turbines are the world’s new ‘apex predators’, wiping out buzzards, hawks and other carnivorous birds at the top of the food chain, say scientists.

A study of wind farms in India found that predatory bird numbers drop by three quarters in areas around the turbines.

This is having a ‘ripple effect’ across the food chain, with small mammals and reptiles adjusting their behaviour as their natural predators disappear from the skies.

Birds and bats were assumed to be most vulnerable to the rise of the landscape-blotting machines.

But their impact is reverberating across species, experts warned, upsetting nature’s delicate balance.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru studied lizard and bird populations at three wind turbine sites in the Western Ghats.

They found almost four times fewer buzzards, hawks and kites in areas with wind farms – a loss of about 75 per cent.

And without buzzards, who would eat all the dead deer on the sides of the roads?

In areas without turbines around 19 birds were spotted every three hours, while nearer to the machines this number dropped to around five.

This led to an abundance of the fan-throated lizard, a species only found on the Indian sub continent and a favourite snack of the predatory birds. The reptile also had lower levels of the stress hormone corticosterone and this changed how it lived.

 Lower cortisol! I'm so happy for them!

For instance, humans were able to get much closer than usual before they ran off, as without predatory birds around, they had become less fearful.

The analysis has implications for wind farms all over the globe – including Britain, where the top predators include many birds of prey such as owls and eagles.

Study coauthor Professor Maria Thaker said: ‘We have known from many studies that wind farms affect birds and bats. ‘They kill them and disrupt their movement. But we took that one step further and discovered that it affects lizards too. ‘Every time a top predator is removed or added, unexpected effects trickle through the ecosystem.

Wind Power is Batty

Taking a break from election related news to bring this article from this morning's Washington Post: Wind farms might be killing many more bats than we realize:

Wind farms have a long-documented history of killing hundreds of thousands of birds and bats each year. As it turns out, the bat toll may be higher than previously estimated.

In a study published Monday, researchers in the United Kingdom found that environmental impact assessments — the main tool used to predict the ecological effects of a new energy development — commonly failed to predict the number of bats that would have fatal collisions with wind turbines’ spinning blades. Even in the few cases where researchers said early assessments accurately predicted the danger to bats, efforts to mitigate those risks often did not succeed.

How about stopping all wind power generation at night? I mean, who needs electricity at night, after all?

“The findings highlight the difficulty of establishing with certainty the effect of major developments before they occur,” co-author Fiona Mathews said in announcing the results, which were published in the journal Cell Press.

Mathews, a mammalian biologist at the University of Exeter, and several colleagues surveyed 46 wind farms across the U.K. over the course of a month to estimate bat fatalities, relying heavily on search dogs to locate fallen bats. They then compared their findings from each site to the environmental assessments they were able to access. In most cases, the pre-construction assessments had not accurately predicted the risk of bat fatalities. And even where companies had put in place mitigation measures to try to steer bats clear of the turbines, the researchers found that bats were still killed.

Bats are a largely unseen and overlooked but very important part of our ecological system, largely for their control of insect populations. In the era of Zika, are we prepared to sacrifice more of the natural insect control for a few percent of the national power generation

Stick to Astrophysics, Neil

Biology is obviously above your pay grade: ‘Do You Even Science, Bro?’ Neil DeGrasse Tyson Tries To Crap On Batman, Beclowns HIMSELF Instead

If Batman wants so badly to be a bat, he might be more intriguing if (like Marvel’s Daredevil) he were also blind, like a Bat

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 25, 2016

But, bats really aren't blind, that's just an old wive's tale:

See those eyes? They're there because they function. In many species of bats, they work quite well.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson wears his Ph.D. like a wizards robe, and thinks he's infallible, but like all scientists, he has a narrow range of knowledge, and outside that he's got feet of clay and a mind full of mush, just like everyone else.

A Harbinger of Spring . . .

Like the Swallows Returning to San Juan Capistrano,  the bats returning to the guano laden Carlsbad Caverns from their Mexican winter vacation, or Bill DeBlasio dropping and killing the groundhog on Groundhog Day:

1,700 Private Jets Fly to Davos to Discuss Global Warming

A squadron of 1,700 private jets are rumbling into Davos, Switzerland, this week to discuss global warming and other issues as the annual World Economic Forum gets underway.

The influx of private jets is so great, the Swiss Armed Forces has been forced to open up a military air base for the first time ever to absorb all the super rich flying their private jets into the event, reports Newsweek.

“Decision-makers meeting in Davos must focus on ways to reduce climate risk while building more efficient, cleaner, and lower-carbon economies,” former Mexican president Felipe Calderon told USA Today.

You could try phoning it in. I even hear they have picture phones these days, if you need to see the people you're talking with.

Davos, which has become a playground of sorts for the global elite, is expected to feature at least 40 heads of state and 2,500 top business executives.

Former Vice President-turned-carbon billionaire Al Gore and rapper Pharrell Williams will be there as well; each plans to discuss global warming and recycling respectively.

Another big theme of the mega-rich confab will be combating “income inequality” and how the world’s rich can pay their fair share to reduce the gap between top earners and the lower class. Admission price for Davos: roughly $40,000 a ticket.

Ah yes, that time of the year the ultra wealthy "leaders" of the world get together to enjoy the luxury of a posh Swiss ski resort, burning tons of jet fuel to arrive, and then propose policies to prevent the rest of us from enjoying the full benefits of civilization.

No word yet on whether the topless ladies of Femen will grace the proceedings the way they did in 2012 and 2013. We can always hope.

Stupid Bats Can't Tell the Windmills From The Trees

Bats are hit by a hard one-two punch: Deadly windmills and white-nose disease

For two months, Cryan, a research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey, led a team that watched the behaviors of migrating tree bats near wind turbines. They set up thermal video surveillance cameras to study them night after night in an attempt to discern why up to 900,000 bats are killed by windmills each year.

In the end, they came away with a simple conclusion. Migrating bats that are vision-challenged seem to think wind turbines are trees.

“The way bats approach turbines suggests they follow air currents and use their dim-adapted vision to find and closely investigate tall things shaped like trees,” said Marcos Gorresen, a scientist at the University of Hawaii and a co-author for the recently released study.

Long-distance migrating bats, such as the hoary bat, tend to socialize and roost in trees, as opposed to hibernating bats that fly short distances to group in caves. For migrating bats, it seemed to hardly matter that wind from the turbines could toss their little bodies. They fearlessly dived toward the spinning blades of three research wind turbines for various reasons.

And bats don't even seem to need to be hit by the turbine blades to be killed. Just being struck by the pressure waves nearby is enough to  burst blood vessels in the their lungs and cause them to drown in their own blood.

If wind turbines weren't a preferred method of power generation by the environmental movement, they would be making far more of a fuss about these deaths.

Is this the end of wind power? No, but it should call into question how wind power projects are sited. I suspect that good wind power sites are also on bird and migration routes because animals have evolved to take advantage of favorable winds in migration. Wind power proponents will either need to find a way to discourage the animals from approaching the spinning turbines, or site the turbines in less favorable locations.

More dead bats is bad news, particularly at this time of year. Around the end of the month, hibernating bats will start flocking back to caverns, where a lethal disease called white-nose syndrome lurks.

The disease will almost certainly kill tens of thousands of them, as it has every year since it was first detected in New York in 2006. The disease has claimed at least 7 million bats, wiping out about 90 percent of bats in the Northeast, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate two years ago, and has spread to 25 states and several Canadian provinces.

The one-two punch of wind turbines and white-nose syndrome is an ecological disaster that hits farmers in the wallet, said Cryan, the study’s lead author. Bats that eat bugs by the metric ton are worth about $3 billion a year in pest control for U.S. agriculture, according to a separate report that Cryan also helped write in 2011.

That's Just Batty

Source

Wind Turbines Blamed in Death of Estimated 600,000 Bats in 2012

Wind turbines killed at least 600,000 -- and possibly as many as 900,000 -- bats in the United States in 2012, researchers say.

Writing in the journal BioScience, the researchers said they used sophisticated statistical techniques to infer the probable number of bat deaths at wind energy facilities from the number of dead bats found at 21 locations.

Source

There's nothing sexier than a woman holding a dead bat, is there?

Bats, which play an important role in the ecosystem as insect-eaters, are killed at wind turbines not only by collisions with moving turbine blades but also by the trauma resulting from sudden changes in air pressure that occur near a fast-moving blade, the study said.

Study author Mark Hayes of the University of Colorado notes that 600,000 is a conservative estimate -- the true number could be 50 percent higher than that -- and some areas of the country might experience much higher bat fatality rates at wind energy facilities than others.

And currently wind power provides a small fraction of US power needs.  If it is to become a major supplier of power for the states, as the Obama Administration cuts back coal plants, the number of bats (and birds) killed by wind turbines will have to rise dramatically, or find a way to solve the problem.  I've seen no evidence that is likely to happen soon.  Wind power operators are all ready getting their "superspecial permits" to kill endangered species ready for the next few years.

Primary energy sources of the US,  Wind in included in "other Renewable"

With bats already under stress because of climate change and disease, in particular white-nose syndrome, the estimate of wind turbine deaths is worrisome, he said -- especially as bat populations grow only very slowly, with most species producing only one young per year.

600,000 probably really isn't a large number for bats, but as noted in the article, bat populations are already under heavy pressure from a disease, and also probably as a result of human induced habitat changes, and don't need the additional losses if wind power expands as posited by renewable advocates.

Maryland Offshore Power Faces Headwinds

Expiration of federal tax credits not likely to hamper O’Malley’s efforts

Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) plans to reintroduce a bill to fund an offshore wind farm — legislation that has twice failed to make it out of the General Assembly, according to an administration spokeswoman.

“We’re hoping to introduce something similar to last year,” spokeswoman Takkira Winfield said last week, noting that the details of the bill still are being ironed out.

On Thursday, O’Malley sent a letter to President Barack Obama (D), encouraging him to look to Maryland for examples of clean energy, including the governor’s offshore wind proposal. “Maryland has chosen to aggressively develop our vast offshore wind resources,” O’Malley wrote.

The effort is complicated by the possible expiration of federal wind energy tax credits that, if they expire, would hit the industry hard, advocates say.

The production tax credit, which gives energy companies 2.2 cents for every kilowatt hour of wind power produced for the first 10 years, is slated to expire New Year’s Eve. “Don’t throw wind power off the fiscal cliff,” Lucy Bannon, field organizer for the nonprofit advocacy organization Environment Maryland, said at a news conference Nov. 28 in Baltimore to urge Marylanders to support wind power development.

Wind power has had plenty of opportunity to mature into a reliable power source (the Dutch have been using it for centuries now), and it simply hasn't.  It suffers from problems of  being intermittent,  requiring some kind of backup (coal, gas or nuclear most likely), or some massive form of power storage capacity which isn't on the horizon as of yet.  It has some problems with killing "charismatic megafauna" (birds and bats), which may or may not be an issue offshore.  I don't mind offshore power installations, but allow them to compete in the market with other forms of power, and let the consumer decide.

Let the tax credit expire.  Are you against more revenue or something?

Birds, Bats, Slow Wind Power Generation in Maryland

Turbines would be slowed to kill fewer endangered bats

Maryland's first industrial-scale wind energy project would be required under a federal plan issued Monday to slow down its turbines at certain times of the year to reduce the number of endangered bats that might be killed by the long, spinning blades.

Exelon Power, which owns and operates the 28-turbine Criterion wind project in Garrett County, also would have to protect one or more bat caves in other states to make up for any federally protected Indiana bats its turbines might harm.

The tiny, insect-eating Indiana bats, which are found across the eastern United States, have been officially listed since 1967 as in danger of disappearing. Biologists say their number has become even more depleted in the past half-century as a result of human disturbance of their caves, pesticide poisoning and a recent disease, white-nose syndrome.

It's kind of ironic that wind power, long touted as one of the great sources of renewable energy, is being cut back due to environmental concerns.  It almost makes you think somebody just doesn't want more energy produced.