I’m told that this absolutely cursed image might be racist. I didn’t know that genocidal dictators with exceptionally thin skin and Pooh Bear like characteristics were a race... It makes a certain amount of sense, but I have questions.
Winnie The Pooh is close to home for me. 100,000 years ago, when I was a kid, my parents would take me to Hollywood Video, a video rental store, and let me pick out a couple movies from the kid’s section. We had rules; After the movie, you always rewound. Watch the movies that night, not the next day, because when they had to go back, they had to go back. I don’t know how typical this was, but I had the penchant to rent the same movie a dozen times once I got it in my head that I liked it, and Winnie the Pooh and The Honey Tree was on the list. I mist have watched that movie 50 times, much to my parent’s dismay. Winnie The Pooh is also Canadian. The character is very roughly based on a WWI CAVC mascot who was named after the city of Winnipeg.
From Wikipedia:
Upon the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Lt. Harry Colebourn of The Fort Garry Horse, a Canadian cavalry regiment, volunteered his service. On 24 August, while en route to Valcartier to report to the Canadian Army Veterinary Corps (CAVC) as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, he purchased a young bear cub for $20 at a train stop in White River, Ontario. The bear's mother was probably killed in the spring of 1914 when the cub was very young and could most easily have become socialized to humans. The name of the hunter who sold the bear and who presumably provided the bear's early socialization is undocumented. Colebourn named the bear "Winnipeg", "Winnie" for short, after his home city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnie accompanied him to Valcartier and all the way to England, becoming the mascot of the CAVC and a pet to the Second Canadian Infantry Brigade Headquarters. Before leaving for France, Colebourn left Winnie at London Zoo.
Damned bear did almost as much international travel as I have.
Xi Jingping, who bears much resemblance to the bear of very little brain, is much less beloved. And hello Chinese censors! Fuck you.
Enough Nostalgia! On to the Meat and Potatoes!
Now… Before we get much further: I’m not going to link to any document from the WHO. This isn’t because I don’t want to link to them, it’s because the pages aren’t there anymore, or if they are the links will inevitably break. The World Health organization has a practice of deleting old records the moment new information becomes available, and while I can to an extent understand the practice; They don’t want WHO letterhead on bad information… It makes it really hard to refer to them. May and June of 2020 the WHO and the CDC had a running-gun battle, contantly flip-flopping on whether or not your pets were a possible vector for Covid. Perhaps unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, this led to a not-insignificant number of American households either putting down Daisy, abandoning her, or leaving her at an animal shelter. You’ll never find a direct link to any of that on the WHO’s website, but if you do a Google search, you can read the confusion between the lines of other orgs that reported on it.
The reason we’re talking about this is because the World Health Organization, or WHO, is exceptionally deferential to the petty dictator from China, despite having a mandate for neutrality, and very little direct monetary reason to do so. Say what you want about the CCP: They work smarter, not harder. Why buy an organization when you can just buy their leader?
And if those links for funding weren’t clear: The first link was to a download for the 2020-2021 budget, where China is being assessed for 12% of WHO’s assessed funding, and America is being assessed for 22%, good luck trying to explain that assessment. The second is a more general link that you can dig into if you’d like.
Books will be written on the WHO’s deference to China. And while some of the deference was on petty social issues, some of it is of grave import… The WHO, at China’s direction, dragged their feet at properly diagnosing the virus, referring to it as a pneumonia for months until tens of thousands of migrant workers had entered Italy, and they couldn’t keep the lid on it as foreign labs started to study the novel coronavirus. I don’t know if we could have completely kept a lid on Covid, but we sure as hell could have slowed it down and better prepared the world for it. It’s possible that we could have had the vaccine months before we did, and imagine the lives that would have saved. This is Li Wenliang: The doctor who discovered Covid, and was put into a jail cell by Xinnie the Pooh when he tried to tell people, where he eventually died from Covid complications.
Juxtapose this absolute chad of a hero with Anthony Fauci for just a second. Let that sink in. And Fuck Evil.
Xi has more blood on his hands than any other human being alive. Period. And the WHO carrying water for him is disgusting.
The Wuhan Flu
As the pandemic was started, the WHO, who have a mandate for world health, not one for social justice, basket weaving, or carrying water for genocidal maniacs, made the choice to start running interference on the name of the virus. Despite centuries of history of naming diseases out of the rough area they came from, or from a symptom-describing nickname, it became an imperative that we not call the disease that came from Wuhan Province, China, The Wuhan Flu, or the China Virus. In fact, it was…. You guessed it… Racist. Just like how West Nile was racist, and Ebola is racist, and… Oh. Wait. Weird. But to be fair, even if they’re not racist names, “China Virus” was perhaps poorly thought out. Not only does it not rhyme, but so many major pandemic-level diseases come out of China that a single one of them being called the China Virus is exceptionally presumptuous. Although this one did take the cake.
The Lab Leak Theory
The WHO also ran interference on the lab leak theory. It was also apparently racist. That last link is satire, if it’s not abundantly clear, the subheader of “It’s imperative that we bring this debate back to the very not-racist theory that exotic eating habits are to blame.” is kind of on the nose. But there were people actually making the “racist” argument, and the WHO was right in the middle of it, and again… even if some of these clowns delete their records, the internet remembers. It was always novel to assume that a lab leak theory was somehow more racist than the assumption that unsanitary conditions in Chinese cultural centers (wet markets) bred up the virus, but these guys were there.
And to be clear: I believe the lab leak theory is the most likely explanation on Covid’s origin. Jon Stewart did a bit on the Colbert Report that went a little famous because it bucked the narrative… Jon’s take was that having “Wuhan Institute of Virology” basically across the street from the wet market the virus was supposed to have come from was a coincidence to end all coincidences. That’s fair… But my take is a little different: If this was actually a virus that naturally emerged, after two years of searching, you would expect to have found either the virus or antibodies in the wild. To date, Chinese researchers have been utterly unable to find a single small woodland creature, bat, or pangolin with so much as a single Covid antibody. 40% of American deer tested had Covid antibodies, but 0% of Chinese bats, who were supposed to be the originating species? Part of the narrative on why the lab leak theory was racist was there was no evidence that it was true, and people were assuming it was based on racial bias. Gag. Me. With. A. Spoon.
And Now: The Xi Variant
Not every variant gets a letter, I’ll explain that later. They couldn’t possibly, there are thousands of variants, and only 24 Greek letters. Which is why it’s… strange, shall we say, that the WHO has quietly skipped some letters. Here, let me give you the Greek Alphabet and see if you can tell which ones they skipped:
Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon Zeta Eta Theta Iona Kappa Lambda Mu Nu Xi Omicron Pi Rho Sigma Tau Upsilon Phi Chi Psi Omega.
Which the WHO has used thusly:
Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon Zeta Eta Theta Iona Kappa Lambda Mu Nu Xi Omicron Pi Rho Sigma Tau Upsilon Phi Chi Psi Omega.
Their stated reasoning is that “Nu” is too similar to “Mu”, despite being pronounced very differently, and that “Xi” is a common last name… Again, despite being pronounced very differently. I suppose it’s probable that Xi didn’t directly request this (although he could have) and it’s possible that the WHO didn’t have Xi in mind as they did this (although I believe this the more likely of the options), but even if this was just non-racist leanings of some very concerned WHO officials… These, again, are non-medical considerations. This is unusual behavior for a health organization. And frabjous day! It just so happens to benefit Tedros’ benefactor. They could have, if they wanted to, avoid the obvious appearance of impropriety. At a time when organizations are facing a credibility crisis, choosing to appear beholden to the political interests of a tin pot dictator is… Really fucking dumb.
But Wait! There was a Lambda Variant?
Oh yes! I said I’d explain this. Now, if you know your Greek alphabet, you may be thinking, “I haven’t heard one iota about the kappa variant, or the xi variant, or about eight other variants that have come since delta.” (I can’t take credit for that, it came from here).
From the same source:
While not every one of the thousands of COVID-19 variants gets a Greek letter, the list of them has piled up to omicron, the 15th symbol on the Greek alphabet. Alpha, beta, gamma delta and omicron are all currently labeled as “variants of concern,” the highest alert level from the World Health Organization. There are two other ranking stages underneath that one: “variants of interest” and “variants under monitoring.”
Basically… They only give letters to special variants, variants that are particularly communicable, or vaccine resistant, or have stronger symptoms. Iota was the label given to the variant that swept through New York in the winter of 2020-2021 and is assumed to have a higher infection fatality risk. Lambda is a Peruvian variant that we think might be vaccine resistant, but hit a transmissibility wall as Delta claimed a lot of vulnerable people.
Kappa, like the delta variant, kappa was first detected in India. By the end of May 2021, barely six months after it was found, it had spread to 41 countries. The WHO labeled it a variant of interest in April, but shifted it down to a variant under monitoring in September. An Oxford study found AstraZeneca and Pfizer’s vaccines were effective against it, and Moderna announced a small study found its vaccine was also effective against it.
Xi (or Omicron) is very similar to Kappa. It has an unusually high number of Spike proteins, which mean that it might slip by vaccinations and be more communicable, worse, it came from South Africa, which has a very low vaccine penetration rate, which means that it will spread very quickly. It is not, however associated with a high IFR, in fact the symptoms seem very mild, as Covid Variants go.
So… Why are we hearing about Xi (Omicron) when we didn’t hear about Kappa? Kappa didn’t hit Lambda’s Delta wall, it’s suspected that it had a higher IFR rate. It spread to 41 countries in less than 6 months. And those 41 countries included America, Canada and Great Britain. Why are we hearing so much concern from the media? Now? On this? I think it’s fairly obvious that this is politically motivated, that there are midterms on the horizon, Biden’s numbers are in the tank, and fear is a powerful motivator.
I’m willing to entertain alternatives, if you have any. In the meantime:
If I had to see this, so did you.