A colleague sent me this article:

SARS Covid-19


From above sciences paper (Journal of Virology)


What is the source of 2019-nCoV, and did a key intermediate host play an important role in the current 2019-nCoV outbreak? Similarly to SARS-CoV, 2019-nCoV most likely has originated from bats, given its close phylogenetic relationship with other -genus lineage b bat SARS-CoV (Fig. 2). Moreover, 2019-nCoV likely recognizes ACE2 from a diversity of animal species, including palm civets, as its receptor. In the case of SARS-CoV, some of its critical RBM residues were adapted to human ACE2, while some others were adapted to civet ACE2 (26); this type of partial viral adaptation to two host species promoted virus replication and cross-species transmission between the two host species.

In the case of 2019-nCoV, however, there is no strong evidence for adaptive mutations in its critical RBM residues that specifically promote viral binding to civet ACE2. Hence, either palm civets were not intermediate hosts for 2019-nCoV, or they passed 2019-nCoV to humans quickly before 2019-nCoV had any chance to adapt to civet ACE2. Like SARS-CoV, 2019-nCoV will likely replicate inefficiently in mice and rats, ruling them out as intermediate hosts for 2019-nCoV. Moreover, we predict that either 2019-nCoV or laboratory mice and rats would need to be genetically engineered before a robust mouse or rat model for 2019-nCoV would become available. Pigs, ferrets, cats, and nonhuman primates contain largely favorable 2019-nCoV-contacting residues in their ACE2 and hence may serve as animal models or intermediate hosts for 2019-nCoV. It is worth noting that SARS-CoV was isolated in wild palm civets near Wuhan in 2005 ( 9), and its RBD had already been well adapted to civet ACE2 (except for residue 487). Thus, bats and other wild animals in and near Wuhan should be screened for both SARS-CoV and 2019-nCoV. [My Bold]

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So it is not lions, tigers and bears - but Bats, Cats, and Ferrets; and possibly Pigs.

People have wants and not just needs.

Supermarkets. Pharmacies. Hospitals/Doctor's offices And liquor stores. Is what all it all boiled down to which is slightly amusing.

Below are a few excerpts from Invisible Cities*, by Italo Calvino :

KUBLAI: Perhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars, nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; as they sift through a rubbish heap, piling up rusted flotsam, scraps of cloth, wastepaper, while drunk on the few sips of bad wine, they see all the treasures of the East shine around them.

POLO: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Kahn’s palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.

______________________________

Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city’s present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars.

In its centuries of decadence, emptied by plagues, its height reduced by collapsing beams and cornices and by shifts of the terrain, rusted and stopped up through neglect or the lack of maintenance men, the city slowly became populated again as the survivors emerged from the basement lairs, in hordes, swarming like rats, driven by their fury to rummage and gnaw, and yet also to collect and patch, like nesting birds. They grabbed everything that could be taken from where it was and put it in another place to serve a different use: brocade curtains ended up as sheets; in marble funerary urns they planted basil; wrought-iron gratings torn from the harem windows were used for roasting cat-meat on fires of inlaid wood. Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors’ Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice’s former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriated to the inhabitants’ needs than it had been before.

______________________________

When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk in a semicircle and you will come into view of Moriana’s hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloth, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, blind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.


* Wonderful and captivating metaphors and symbolism of our earthly paradise that all you non-essential and slovenly humans should forever burn into the shambles of your desiccated minds. Enjoy.

I recently posted this in a few threads so it might as well go here too:

They ONLY have wants. You might not want to starve, but you certainly don't need to.

I certainly don't need to starve. I need to not starve. Or else, I would starve. I also wouldn't like to starve but that is beside the point.

People always whining about "needing" to breathe too.

I need to Boogie Oogie Oogie.




PairTheBoard

This is my favorite adult swim episode of any show that has been on there, and that song always reminds me of it as you can easily see why. Lots of famous people in this episode.

vampire altar boys:
https://www.adultswim.com/videos/luc...ire-altar-boys

In short, around half of us are going to get it anyway. Most will have little to no symptoms.
It will all balance out when we look back in a year's time at the numbers between countries no matter what we do.
The imperial model was based on a system where the ICU beds were static, not being increased as they are in most places. The exit strategies will be gambling with lives to see what works and what doesn't. Of course, the obvious ones like personal liberties, and the economy.

He admits Sweden did fail the elderly living in nursing homes at the beginning.


The same channel has a professor on defending the lockdown as a guest also.

Three o'clock in the morning
You get a phone call from the queen
With a hundred heads
She says that they're all dead

She tried the last one on
Couldn't speak, fell off
And now she just wanders the halls
Thinking nothing
Thinking nothing at all

Once there was a man
Who had a little too much time on his hands
He never stopped to think
That he was getting older
But when his night came to an end
He tried to grasp for his last friend
And pretend that he could wish himself
Health on a four-leaf clover



https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0ELoepTCM

I hear alcohol sales have spiked in correlation with this pandemic. I've never been so sober. I drink when at my happiest.

A little drink goes well with exploring the inner empire of one's home and brain during social isolation just as long as it stays a little drink...

When i open a red win i always leave 33% of it for cooking later. Its better usage for it. Steaks taste better.

Elon Musk is a jackass dildo moron calling lockdown fascist. Yes because not having 30000 more people in each of 5 big states die for like 150000 more is fascist, production lines promoting virus daily to families everywhere is no problem. He should go work in the same line as his factory or is the risk of ruin of going to Mars at the pace of 50 years later than possible too huge a problem? Another mfer that thinks he is brilliant in total bliss of his bs luck and how many people he used in his life...Flamethrowers...

Cow Parsley time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthriscus_sylvestris

Is quarantine wearing on anybody else? Found myself hiding in a corner (paper and markers) following along with my girlfriends group art online class, making an abstract something. I made something alright, pretty sure its nothing, but I can't let go the feeling that its something. Anybody got a reasonable opinion on the worth of abstract art. I mean I am foolish enough to appreciate my own, and those demons stay for the moment, but to propagate this endeavour?

Italian parsley is the way to go, only way to make an all amatriciana sauce...

last spam

Elon Musk just tweeted "Tesla stock price is too high" thus tanking his company's stock price. What a maroon.


PairTheBoard