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At Quip, we aspire to build a new class of productivity tool that every person at every company enjoys using every single day. When you have a small team and a bold mission, the only way to make meaningful progress is to focus on the activities that give you a lot of leverage as an engineering team.We still have a long ways to go, but here are some of the principles and processes that I’ve seen pay off big dividends for our team so far:1. Build once, use multiple timesGood abstractions are important whenever you’re building software, but good abstractions that work across platforms are particularly essential for our small team. We support 8 different platforms for our product: Web, Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and Apple Watch. If we had to rebuild the product from scratch on each platform, we wouldn’t get very far. And so we’ve invested significant energy toward libraries and architectures that let us build something once and use it multiple times.For example, we use Protocol Buffers extensively for data storage, in-memory data structures, and cross-platform communication. This lets us do things like read Protocol Buffers out of MySQL [1], transform the data on our Python web servers, then send them to our native clients built on top of languages ranging from C++, Objective C, Java, or C#, and even pass those same data structures down to our JavaScript editor — all via auto-generated data serialization code, with strongly typed data structures, and over strongly typed communication channels. If we had used language-specific data structures or even JSON, handling data through those various steps would be much more tedious and error prone.The theme of “build once, use multiple times” shows up in many other places as well. We share the same C++ library for synchronizing data and supporting offline access across our desktop and mobile applications. All the document editors across all devices run on the same JavaScript libraries — we then layer in native hooks and platform-specific optimizations to make experiences feel polished and performant. Our Web, Mac, and Windows desktop applications share the same React UI code, styled to look native to each platform. [2]These technical investments by no means solve all the challenges associated with supporting many platforms, but they do help eliminate large swaths of work.2. Leverage in-network referrals for hiringQuip is by far the most senior team of people that I’ve had the fortune to work with. On engineering, most people on the team have 6+ years of industry experience, and more than half have 10+ years.With that industry experience comes a great luxury that’s often hard to come by at small startups: we’re able to work and execute independently on hard problems. We can trust that everyone is generally doing the right thing. We haven't needed to spend nearly as much time so far training new hires, as compared to a team of more junior engineers. We’re also able to avoid some mistakes that we might’ve made earlier in our careers — it might be obvious, but it’s significantly easier and faster to build an A/B testing framework or a monitoring system your second or third time around. The industry experience lets us shift more of our energy and risk-taking toward challenges specific to the product.To build that team, we’ve taken advantage of in-network referrals. Many Quip engineers are people that someone else on the team had worked with at previous companies, and that has cut down on a lot of risk and noise in the hiring process. Even if you're just starting out in your career, this highlights the importance of keeping in touch with people you enjoy working with, since there’s a decent chance you might find opportunities to work together again in the future.3. Invest heavily in toolingTools amplify your output, and their benefits also stack and compound over time. So we build lots of tools to help us develop faster: dashboards that aggregate and cluster errors with helpful stack traces, tools to debug and inspect the state of our app, commit hooks to analyze code and catch common errors, and many other scripts to automate tedious tasks. We graph loads of data, from performance metrics to retention rates, so that we can understand what’s going on. We build internal tools for our customer support and business teams so that they can help address any customer issues quickly.This focus on tooling has also helped us to reduce our operational overhead. Continuous integration keeps our build healthy, and push-button deployment scripts streamline our releases. Fine-grained alerts that can be easily tuned, for instance to only page on-call engineers during business hours, help reduce stress. As a result, pager duty at Quip has typically been uneventful compared to other startups — I’ve gotten paged in the middle of the night only two or three times in the past year. All those investments let us spend more time building and scaling the product rather than just maintaining it.4. Put more wood behind fewer arrowsWe have lists and lists of features and improvements that we’d love to build, but we have limited time and resources. It's important to focus our energy on key milestones and to aggressively prioritize features and bug fixes so that we don't spread ourselves too thin. What we don't build is just as important as what we do.Both quantitative and qualitative user feedback has been extremely valuable on that front. For A/B tests, we’ll work hard to decompose ideas into smaller testable hypotheses that we can measure and validate to reduce wasted effort. For features, we might build a minimal viable product and then run user tests to collect any initial feedback about what’s confusing and what works. Or we might roll out a feature to a few customers and then work closely with them to understand what they like or don’t like. For example, when we launched our Mac and Windows apps, we rolled them out in multiple phases to employees and alpha and beta testers, based on their desire to be early adopters and their tolerance for bugs. Their feedback (on Quip documents of course) helped us focus on building out the features in the desktop apps that users cared the most about and punt on the longer tail of issues.5. Reduce the friction of communicationEmails and meetings are typically two of the biggest energy drains for engineering teams. So at Quip, we generally avoid them. We don’t use email internally in engineering for any communication, aside for managing GitHub code reviews and certain classes of alerts. During most weeks, engineers have roughly an hour of scheduled meetings: a 30-minute weekly all-hands meeting where we share updates and show off new demos, and then perhaps a small project meeting or a 1:1. Instead of holding a meeting (with all the associated overhead of scheduling and where discussions tend to expand to fill the allotted time), we’ll hold ad-hoc discussions as necessary to build alignment and get things done.The bulk of our communication, unsurprisingly, happens through Quip. The product is how we collaborate across the company, and we use it every day, for everything. We use Quip for design documents, product task lists, customer support, and chat. We set up internal integrations for Pager Duty, Zendesk, Twitter, Jenkins, Stripe, Crashlytics, Github, and more so that it’s easy to for the entire team to discuss events as they arise. If a user tweets a bug at @QuipSupport, someone scanning our Twitter chat channel within Quip can @mention an engineer in Quip and ask whether it’s a known issue. If the Customer Success team or a salesperson wants to pass along a feature request from a customer, she can add it to a feedback document or task list, and any stakeholders can chime in or prioritize the request. We even have a document shared with a nearby sandwich and salad shop where we type in lunch orders, and the wonderful folks there deliver them to our office every day at noon.Communication is often the first casualty of a team's growth, and integrating Quip into all our workflows has greatly reduced the friction of communication. It's helped us work together in a way that wouldn't have have been possible with traditional methods like emails and meetings. It's also helped build a culture of transparency across the company. Information in email tends to get lost or isolated to a handful of recipients. In contrast, our Quip documents become a growing repository of knowledge for everyone on the team, and the comments and discussion alongside each document provide any historical context so that we're all on the same page.We’ve made a lot of progress so far, but we also have a long and exciting road ahead of us, with plenty more to learn about how to keep our team effective as we continue to grow. We’re up to 13 engineers now, including the 2 co-founders. If you’re a great engineer and the idea of changing the future of how people work together excites you, we’d love to talk with you. Reach out on our jobs page, or message me on Quora or at [email protected].[1]: For our MySQL data storage, we use a design similar to FriendFeed’s schema-less MySQL design, except that we store data as Protocol Buffers instead of pickled Python objects.[2]: Bret Taylor wrote a more in-depth technical post on our shared C++ and React architecture: React with C++: Building the Quip Mac and Windows Apps.

One of my favorite interview questions for engineering candidates is to tell me about one thing they liked and one thing they disliked about the engineering culture at their previous company. Over the course of a few hundred interviews, this interview question has given me a sense of what good engineers look for and what they're trying to avoid. I also reflected back on my own experiences from the past six years working across Google, Ooyala, and Quora and distilled some things that a team can do to build a good engineering culture:1. Optimize for iteration speed.Quick iteration speed increases work motivation and excitement. Infrastructural and bureaucratic barriers to deploying code and launching features are some of the most common and frustrating reasons that engineers cite during interviews for why they're leaving their current companies.Organizationally, quick iteration speed means giving engineers and designers flexibility and autonomy to make day-to-day decisions without asking for permission. While I was at Google, any user-visible change to search results, even for low-traffic experiments, required Marissa Mayer's approval at a weekly UI review. Needless to say, while this allowed Google to protect its search brand, it significantly hampered innovation. Optimizing for iteration speed also means that there are well-defined processes for launching products, so that cancellations don't happen unexpectedly after significant time investment.Infrastructurally, optimizing for iteration speed means building out continuous deployment with a fast deployment process, high test coverage to reduce build and site breakages, fast unit tests so that people run them, and fast and incremental compiles and reloads to reduce development time. Continuous deployment, where commits go immediately to production, deserves a special mention. Prior to using it at Quora, it would've been hard for me to internalize that the benefits it provides toward iteration speed outweigh the risks of site breakages, at least for small engineering teams. People are more excited about features and incentivized to fix bugs because changes see live traffic quickly. It's also significantly easier to reason about and pinpoint the source of errors for a narrow window of committed code rather a week or more's worth of batched changes.Team-wise, fast iteration speed means having a set of strong leaders to help coordinate and drive team efforts. Key stakeholders in a decision need to decide effectively and commit to their choices. To borrow a phrase from Bill Walsh, a leader who coached the 49ers to 3 Super Bowls, strong leaders need to "commit, explode, recover," which means committing to a plan of attack, executing it, and then reacting to the results. A team crippled with indecisiveness will just cause individual efforts to flounder. [1]2. Push relentlessly toward automation.In his tech talk "Scaling Instagram", Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger cited "optimize for minimal operational burden" as a key lesson his 13-person team learned in scaling the product to tens of millions of users. [2] As a product grows, so does the operational burden per engineer, as measured by the ratio of users to engineers or of features to engineers. Facebook, for example, is well-known for touting scaling metrics like supporting over 1 million users per engineer. [3]Automating solutions and scripting repetitive tasks are important because they free up the engineering team to work on the actual product. Ensuring that services restart automatically if possible when they fail and that services are easily and quickly replicated at peak traffic is the only sane way to manage complexity at scale. In the short-term, there's always the tempting tradeoff of applying a quick band-aid manually rather than automating and testing a long-term fix.Etsy's motto of "measure anything, measure everything" [4] and its support of open-source monitoring and charting tools like graphite [5] and statsd [6] highlight an important aspect of automation -- that automation must be driven by data and monitoring. Without monitoring and logs to know what, how, or why something is going wrong, automation is difficult. A good follow-up motto would be to "measure anything, measure everything, and automate as much as possible."3. Build the right software abstractions.MIT Professor Daniel Jackson captures the importance of software abstractions well [7]:"Pick the right ones, and programming will flow naturally from design; modules will have small and simple interfaces; and new functionality will more likely fit in without extensive reorganization. Pick the wrong ones, and programming will be a series of nasty surprises: interfaces will become baroque and clumsy as they are forced to accommodate unanticipated interactions, and even the simplest of changes will be hard to make."Part of what allowed thousands of engineers to build scalable systems at Google is that really smart engineers like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat built simple but versatile abstractions like MapReduce [8], SSTable [9], protocol buffers [10], and the like. Part of what allowed Facebook engineering to scale up is the focus on similarly core abstractions like Thrift [11], Scribe [12], and Hive [13]. And part of what allows designers to build products effectively at Quora is that Webnode and Livenode [14] are fairly easy to understand and build on top of.Keeping core abstractions simple and general reduces the need for custom solutions and increases the team's familiarity and expertise with the common abstractions. The growing popularity and reliability of systems like Memcached, Redis, MongoDB, etc. have reduced the need to build custom storage and caching systems. Funneling the team's focus onto a small number of core abstractions rather than fragmenting it over many ad-hoc solutions means that common libraries get more robust, monitoring gets more intelligent, performance characteristics get better understood, and tests get more comprehensive. All of this helps contribute to a simpler system with reduced operational burden.4. Develop a focus on high code quality with code reviews.Maintaining a high-quality code base increases the productivity of the entire engineering team. Cleaner code is easier to reason about, quicker to develop on, more amenable to changes, and less susceptible to bugs. A healthy code review process makes this possible.Establishing a process for timely code reviews, whether pre-commit or post-commit, improves code quality in a few ways. First, the peer pressure of knowing that someone will be reviewing your code and that committing poorly written code will likely let down your teammates is a strong deterrent against hacky, unmaintainable, or untested code. Second, code reviews provide opportunities for the code reviewer and author to learn from each other to write better code.If the code reviews are easily accessible to other members of the engineering team, then the reviews also bring along the benefits of a) increasing accountability for reviewing code in a timely manner, b) allowing team members -- particularly, newer ones -- to model off of others' good code reviews, and c) speeding up the dissemination of best coding practices.Counter-arguments that nimble teams don't have time to spend on code reviews ignore the technical debt that can easily accumulate from poorly written code. Ooyala, in its very early startup days, used to optimize for cranking out as many features as possible, with an absence of code reviews; the result was that while the initial product may have gone to market more quickly, the resultant code became painful to modify, and we spent over a year just rewriting brittle code to eliminate technical debt.Google, at its size, does pre-commit code reviews for all code, but smaller teams don't need to be as comprehensive or strict, and not all code needs to be reviewed with the same rigor. Ooyala later adopted post-commit reviews over email for core or risky changes while I was there. At Quora, we currently conduct all code reviews in Phabricator [15], mostly post-commit, and apply different standards for model or controller code and view code; for sensitive code or for code from newer engineers, we'll either do pre-commit reviews or try to review them within a few hours of the code being submitted.5. Maintain a respectful work environment.Respect among peers forms the foundation for any type of open communication. A place where people feel comfortable challenging each other's ideas is one where sound ideas get forged through debate. A place where people easily get offended is one where crucial feedback gets withheld.In 1948, Alex Osborn outlined the familiar brainstorming approach that's been popular in work environments for the past few decades, where participants come together, set aside criticism and negative feedback, and collectively pool together creative ideas without fear of being judged. [16] Respectful deferment of judgment is key to this type of brainstorming session. Recent psychology research has started to overturn Osborn's approach, suggesting that encouraging debate in brainstorming sessions actually helps to avoid groupthink and generates more effective ideas. In light of this research, a respectful environment becomes even more critical so that attacks are directed toward ideas rather than being ad-hominem. [17]Engineering often spans a wide range of areas (systems, machine learning, product, etc.) and not everyone has the same expertise in each area. A strong team in fact probably ought to have individuals who are uniquely strong in certain areas even if they end up being deficient in others. This sometimes makes it tricky for say, a systems engineer to evaluate the proficiency of a product engineer, but it's important in a healthy engineering culture to respect those differences and to not judge solely based on your own strengths.6. Build shared ownership of code.While it's natural for individuals to become proficient in various parts of the code base or infrastructure, no one person should feel that they own or are the sole maintainer of any one piece. While having individuals become experts that own certain areas for a year or more might increase effectiveness in the short run, this approach ends up hurting in the long run.Organizationally, shared code ownership provides three benefits. First, keeping the bus factor [18] greater than one relieves stress from the maintainer and reduces risk for the team in case the maintainer leaves. It also makes it difficult for that one person to take worry-free time off. I sure don't miss the days when I was the sole maintainer of Ooyala's logs processor and got texted by pager alerts while hiking on volcanoes in Hawaii.Second, shared ownership empowers engineers who aren't knee-deep in the particular area to contribute fresh insights. It frees engineers from the sense that they're stuck on certain projects and encourages them to work on a diversity of projects, which helps to keep work interesting and boosts employee learning and motivation. In the long run, it reduces organizational risk that some engineer feels stagnated and decides to leave. [19]Third, shared ownership also sets the foundation for having multiple team members swarm (a technique from agile development) together on a high-priority problem when necessary to finish a strategic goal more quickly. With siloed ownership, the burden typically falls on one or two people.One mistake that many engineering organizations make too early on is dividing the entire team into subteams with tech leads when the team's still small. Subteams build walls of ownership that reduce incentive to cross those walls, since individuals will likely be assessed by their subteam's objectives. Ooyala had subteams while I was there, and one thing I missed out on was the opportunity to work with some folks on other teams; they've since adopted an agile development process with a much larger focus on shared code ownership that I've heard has made large strides in work happiness and productivity. One aspect of Quora that I've loved is that we've emphasized projects over teams, and I've had an opportunity to work on projects ranging from user growth, machine learning, moderation tools, recommendations, analytics, site speed, and spam detection.7. Invest in automated testing.Unit test coverage and some degree of integration test coverage is the only scalable way of managing a large codebase with a large group of people without constantly breaking the build or the product. Automated testing provides confidence in and meaningful protection against large-scale refactorings that are required to improve code quality. In the absence of rigorous automated testing, the time required for manual testing either by the engineering team or by an outsourced testing team easily becomes prohibitive, and it's easy to fall into a culture of fear for improving a piece of code just because it might break.In practice, automated testing is a requirement for making continuous deployment work as the team grows. Codebase size grows over time as the product grows, but average familiarity with the codebase by team members decreases as new people join. Testing and validation are most easily done by the original code authors when the code is fresh in their minds than by those who try to modify the code months or years later. Encouraging a strong unit testing culture shifts the validation responsibility toward the authors.8. Allot 20% time.Gmail found its roots in Paul Buchheit's 20% project, and he hacked together the first version in a single day. [20] Google News, Google Transit, and Google Suggest also started and launched as 20% projects. I used 20% time while at Google to write a python framework that made it significantly easier to build search page demos. While Google's 20% time may be less productive now than during the early days of the company [21], the notion of letting engineers spend 20% of their time working on something not on their product map remains a cradle of innovation for smaller engineering organizations.Ooyala didn't officially have 20% time while I was there, but I took some anyway and wrote a command-line build tool for Flex and Actionscript that sped up the team's build times, just as Adobe's Flex Builder tool chain started to degrade, and the tool's still in use today even though the engineering team has nearly tripled in size. Atlassian adopted 20% time after experimenting it for year. [22] A variation of 20% time that Facebook's fond of and that Ooyala added later is periodic hackathons -- all-night events where the rule is that you can work on anything except your normal project. [23]Top-down approaches to product planning, while necessary for focusing the overall direction of the company, can't account to for the multitude of ideas that might arise from engineers closer to the ground. As long as engineers are accountable for their 20% time and focus on what can be high-impact changes, these projects can lead to large steps forward in progress. Without official 20% time, it's still possible but much more difficult for engineers and designers to try out crazy ideas -- the dedicated ones basically have to find weekends or vacation days to do it.9. Build a culture of learning and continuous improvement.Learning and being sufficiently challenged are requirements for what psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of "flow", where someone is so completely focused and motivated by what they're doing that they even lose track of time. [24] The direct and immediate feedback loop provided by faster iteration cycles is another requirement.Weekly tech talks provide forums for engineers to share their designs or what they've built, creating an opportunity for engineers to take pride in their work and for the team to learn more outside their immediate scope of work. Documenting processes internally like how a email service works or how to make ranking changes to a search service also empowers engineers to learn and explore new things on their own, nicely complementing 20% time. At Quora, we do this by running an internal instance of Quora where we ask product- and development-related questions.A corollary of building a culture of learning is focusing on mentoring and training to make sure that everyone has the basic algorithms, systems, and product skills necessary for success. The more an engineering organization grows and the more effort gets spent on recruiting (particularly college recruiting), the more effort needs to be invested into mentoring and training. It might seem burdensome for a single mentor to spend an hour per day for a new hire's first 4 weeks on the job, but that investment represents less than 1% of the total time that hire will spend in a year and has significantly high leverage in determining whether the person is set up for success.10. Hire the best.Hiring the best is the foundation for many of the other philosophies listed. It's hard to respect someone if you think they're a B-level engineer. It's hard to give someone autonomy in product development if you don't trust their product instincts. It's hard to recognize the right abstraction to build without enough engineering experience. It's easy to fall into a trap of building something complex without other smart people to challenge your ideas and drive you toward simplicity.There's a saying around Silicon Valley, coined by Steve Jobs, that "A players hire A players. B players hire C players." [25,26] Focusing on recruiting and hiring the right people is hard but critical to effectively growing an engineering organization. Yishan Wong, who previously was an engineering manager and director at Facebook, argued that hiring has to be the number one priority for everyone in the engineering organization, not just for managers, but for engineers as well. [27] He also quite rightly points out the difference between "hiring the best" and "hiring the best candidate that you've interviewed."In the early days of Ooyala, we were so overwhelmed with the queue of inbound customer work that we nearly caved in to lowering our hiring bar so that we could hire enough people to get all our work done. I'm glad that we didn't, as the technical debt from lower quality code and weaker engineers on the team would've ended up hurting the team and the product.Building a good engineering culture is certainly a lot of work, but the resulting work environment is well worth it.Looking for more best practices in engineering? Download a free, sample chapter of my book, The Effective Engineer. It's based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at the top tech companies around Silicon Valley and packed with lessons, stories, and actionable insights on how to make you and your team more effective.--------[1] Bill Walsh. The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership http://books.google.com/books?id=shUB6M9IzZcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bill+walsh+score+takes+care+of+itself&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MA-gT96-LeaJiAKXwJSmAQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=explode&f=false[2] Scaling Instagram.http://www.scribd.com/doc/89025069/Mike-Krieger-Instagram-at-the-Airbnb-tech-talk-on-Scaling-Instagram[3] Scaling Facebook to 500 Million Users and Beyond. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=409881258919[4] Measure Anything, Measure Everything. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/[5] http://graphite.wikidot.com/[6] https://github.com/etsy/statsd[7] Daniel Jackson. Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-abstractions[8] http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html[9] What is an SSTable in Google's internal infrastructure?[10] http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/[11] https://thrift.apache.org/[12] https://github.com/facebook/scribe[13] http://hive.apache.org/[14] http://www.quora.com/Shreyes-Seshasai/Posts/Tech-Talk-webnode2-and-LiveNode[15] http://phabricator.org/[16] Alex Osborn. Your Creative Power. http://www.amazon.com/Your-Creative-Power-Alex-Osborn/dp/1569460558[17] Groupthink. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all[18] What is "bus number" and why do you want it to be greater than 1?[19] How do experienced engineers at startups avoid stagnation due to the overabundance of operational issues?[20] Communicating with Code. http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html[21] How does Google (company)’s Google Innovation Time Off (20% time) policy work in practice?[22] http://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/life[23] Inside Facebook’s final Palo Alto Hackathon. http://gigaom.com/2011/12/16/exclusive-inside-facebooks-final-palo-alto-hackathon/[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)[25] What is an "A Player"? Steve Jobs is always emphasizing that “A Players” only want to work with “A Players.” What are the attributes of said people?[26] What I learned from Steve Jobs. http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2011/10/what-i-learned-from-steve-jobs.html#axzz1unynLRLT[27] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-hiring.html

WARNING: The following is graphic information. References to Rape, murder, torture, suicide, and gruesome imagery are part of this answer. Discretion is advised. I do not recommend children 16 (perhaps 18) or under should read this.Thanks for the a2a. I’ve been asked this question here several times. I’m going to give you the most detailed answer on Covid-19 that I have written to date. The answer is a simple, “No.” I’m going to quote from an article in the “Geopolitics” that was written by Joseph Siew. It was written earlier last year, but I believe the information is reliable still.As of 6th April 2020, there are 338,899 Americans confirmed infected with the Covid-19 and 9,679 deaths as a result of the infection. That is 4 times the number of infected in China. The number of confirmed cases is only constrained by the availability of test kits and medical personnel. This would mean that those infected with Covid-19 could be in the millions in US alone! One would wonder how did this number balloon from a mere double-digit cases to hundreds of thousands tested positive? How could there be hundreds of thousands of cases when America is thousands of miles from the suspected origin (China) of the Coronavirus? There are only two possibilities; 1) either America is the real sick man; or 2) the virus originated from US and has been around for quite some time. I believe that the latter is the case.I do too. One thing about me that I do not often reveal is that I am a student of “conspiracy history,” as it’s not always a popular subject. I believe America (and other nations) have a very long history of covering up the facts of history. (See Operations: Paperclip, COINTRLPRO, Mockingbird, Bluebeam, MKUltra, MKNaomi, The Church Committee Papers, etc. for further reading on American conspiracies that have been proven true.)In fact, I believe the history leading to COVID-19 goes back much further and did happen to be in China. Let’s go all the way back to the Second Sino-Japanese War that merged into WWII. In Manchuria, Japan invaded. They blew up their own railroad and blamed it on China, using it as a pretext to invade the Manchurian Provence. Tragedies occurred in the Second Sino-Japanese War such as the Rape of Nanking (Nanjing) and the bombing of Shanghai on Bloody Saturday.(This baby girl survived the Bombing of Shanghai and was reunited with her father. I believe her mother may have died during the bombing.)But I specifically want to talk about the Tragedies of Unit 731. It was officially known to the world as “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army (関東軍防疫給水部本部” but it was a cover story.Originally set up under the Kenpeitai. military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shirō Ishii, a combat medic officer in the Kwantung Army. The facility itself was built in 1935 as a replacement for the Zhongma Fortress, and to expand the capabilities for Ishii and his team. The program received generous support from the Japanese government up to the end of the war in 1945. —WikipediaThe reality was much more sinister. Dr. Shiro Ishii was the Japanese version of Dr. Mengele. The facilities were used for biological weapon production, testing, and deployment—on Chinese civilians. Yes, Human Experimentation against the will of the test subjects.Additionally, the biological weapons were tested in the field on cities and towns in China. Estimates of those killed by Unit 731 and its related programs range up to half a million people.—WikipediaBut probably the worst part was that men, women, children, and even infants were rounded up and held prisoner at Unit 731. Dr. Shiro Ishii, with full knowledge and permission from the Japanese government used these people to act out his most depraved, sinister, and torturous fantasies in the name of Science.There was nothing, literally nothing, off limits.Prisoners that had been forcefully infected with the plague (yes, that plague) were then forced to rape women prisoners, and then they were forced to abort so the officers could conduct experiments on the fetuses at various stages. These Comfort Women would not survive. Babies that were allowed to carry to term were immediately taken from their mothers and used in live experiments. None of the babies survived.People were subjected to extreme temperatures. The officers induced hyperthermia on prisoners and then subjected them to boiling hot water.The affected body parts were left untreated so they would become infected and fall off—if the victims didn’t die first.Unnecessary surgical procedures were performed via vivisection—surgery while the patient/victim is awake with absolutely no anesthesia or analgesia.The used prisoners in experiments where they were tied down and bombs loaded with plague infected rats were dropped. These were eventually dropped on civilian populations in China.Other photographs. Don’t look away. I want you to understand the depths of depravity that took place. You will understand in a moment why my anger is directed at Japan and the United States.(These photos were found on WW2wrecks, Google, and Wikipedia. If any pictures presented here are not from events at Unit 731, I apologize, but I did attempt to use only photos labeled from Unit 731.)As WW2 came to a close and imminent arrival from Soviet forces were realized, the Japanese covered their tracks. And unlike Germany’s Auschwitz, not one single soul left at Unit 731 survived of the prisoners. Those that had not already been killed were killed in the hours leading up to the Soviet arrival.Ministries in Tokyo ordered the destruction of all incriminating materials, including those in Pingfang. Potential witnesses, such as the 300 remaining prisoners were either gassed or fed poison while the 600 Chinese and Manchurian laborers were shot. Ishii ordered every member of the group to disappear and "take the secret to the grave".[77] Potassium cyanide vials were issued for use in the event that the remaining personnel were captured. —WikipediaNow you may be wondering why this has anything to do with the US and COVID-19.The researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation.[7] —WikipediaThat’s right. The white hats let the black hats go free of any punishment, imprisonments, or accountability. Who would authorize such a horrible miscarriage of justice?!On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii, can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as war crimes evidence".[7] Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as communist propaganda.[9] —WikipediaGeneral Douglas MacArthur, a man I once respected, let the demons of hell go for some files of information that we would use at Fort Detrick for Biological Warfare experiments. You may honor his name if you wish, but you will do it will full knowledge of what he allowed to go free.Sanders' duty was to investigate Japanese biological warfare activity. At the time of his arrival in Japan he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was.[52]Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing the Soviets into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans. The Japanese wanted to avoid prosecution under the Soviet legal system, so the next morning after he made his threat, Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan's involvement in biological warfare.[78] Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants:[79] He secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation.[7] —WikipediaIt gets worse. I’m sorry to say, but America was only getting started. You see, we didn’t even use much of the information the Japanese provided at first.From 1948 to 1958, less than 5% of the documents were transferred onto microfilm and stored in the National Archives of the United States, before being shipped back to Japan.[87] —WikipediaAmerican researchers deemed the documents of little use, their procurement based on the assumption that the lack of ethics restraints in the experiments conducted would lead to results of value having proved false. However, America was determined not to let it go; they were not done with Dr. Ishii:US President Harry S. Truman secretly sent a scientific team to Japan on a secret mission, led by Carl Compton, then president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to meet the former founder and leader of the 731st Army, the “demon doctor” Ishii Shiro…In April 1947 Dr. Norbert Fell of Fort Detrick was ordered to go to Japan again to investigate, and in the June 29th issue of the “Summary of New Information on Biological Weapons in Japan,” he stated that “the experiments currently being studied at Fort Detrick have been done by the Japanese, and there are many new studies, including the effects of fungi, bacteria, and nematodes on grains and vegetables in Manchuria and Siberia.” …The report is said to be 60 pages long and includes research on the amount of infection or death caused by anthrax, plague, typhoid fever, paratyphoid type A and B, dysentery, cholera, nasal gangrene, the mode of infection, bomb tests, spray tests, stability, etc. The report is now in the United States National Archives (290/03/19/02).Beginning on 29 October 1947, Dr. Edwin Hill of Fort Detrick began 76 interviews with key members of the 731st, covering plant, animal, human experimentation, various viruses and the use of biological weapons in warfare….The Edwin Hill Report was presented on 12 December and in it, the report strongly defended Ishii’s petition for exoneration. All interview transcripts and materials are in the United States National Archives.—MediumBut interviews weren’t enough. We would write what the British Guardian refers to as a “Black Moral Check.” Not only would Ishii gain his freedom, he would be put on the US payroll, working at Fort Detrick, Maryland to ensure that his legacy lived on. Just as we had done with Project Paperclip and the Germans, we imported this Japanese monster too.Yet the United States not only helped Ishii and his colleagues escape a war crimes trial, many historians suspect that Fort Detrick hired Ishii to research biological weapons for the United States. —MediumSee also:Japanese Ishii Shiro, who had conducted human experiments in Manchuria, was later hired by the US as a biological weapons consultant.—The British GuardianIt was not mere speculation. General Willoughby sent a secret telegram to Washington admitting that it was imperative that we do it to safeguard the efforts already put in. In other words, “We can’t let go of our Japanese asset.”(Copy of Willoughby’s telegraph that is not such a secret now.)We excused this atrocity by calling it a matter of National Security. Sound familiar? How many other travesties have been committed and covered up due to National Security? Only God knows.Thus, after carefully considering the importance of the 731st’s experimental results data to “the national defense and security of the United States,” General Herbert of the SWNCC wrote in an August 27 memo suggesting some changes to the final position paper, including the following: “The current data … do not appear to be sufficient to sustain the war crimes charges against Ishii and his colleagues.” The memorandum is now in the United States National Archives (250/68/05/03).—MediumIshii’s legacy certainly would live on at Fort Detrick, and Fort Detrick would become infamous indeed. The official name of the Fort Detrick Biological Laboratory is the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. MKNaomi became the operation to follow MKUltra to deal with biological weapons and warfare.MKUltra had been blown open in the 1975 Church Committee hearings. The Church Committee was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Internal Revenue Service. MKULTRA was ordered to basically cease and desist. So what’s a corrupt organization to do? Project MKNAOMI of course. While Project Naomi had existed since the 1950s, it would now take over the biological weapons aspect of MKULTRA.This is a declassified document from MKULTRA and MKNAOMI. I circled in blue for you the words “Fort Detrick” so that you can see for yourself how it all ties together.Surveillance, testing, upgrading and the evaluation of special materials and items were also provided by MKNAOMI so as to ensure that no defects and unwanted contingencies emerged during operational conditions. For these purposes the U.S. Army's Special Operations Command (SOC) was assigned to assist the CIA in the development, testing and maintenance procedures for the biological agents and delivery systems (1952).—WikipediaIn other words, part of MKNAOMI was to ensure nothing “emerged” and for proper maintenance of biological agents. Well, someone failed at their job, because quite a bit has escaped from Fort Detrick. They made headlines in 1989 for the docu-book “The Blood Plague” which researched Fort Detrick’s involvement with Ebola. Yes, that fun filled time of terror a few years ago when Ebola was popping up around the world? Guess who pioneered work in it? Fort Detrick.They made headlines again when a Fort Detrick scientist was accused of being behind the 2001 anthrax by mail scare. He “committed suicide” before he was arrested.From 2011–2016 petitions were circulated calling for the closure of the facility after the neighborhood surrounding it experienced a cluster of extremely rare cancer.Fort Detrick’s weapons have seeped underground and severely impacted our lives. This irresponsible behavior has affected thousands of people and has given my family, friends and neighbors a rare form of cancer. It has taken more than 2,500 lives.—excerpt from the petitionResearchers would later find leaks of Agent Orange, anthrax, weaponized botulism poisoning and radiocarbon xiv near Fort Detrick.Interestingly, most of the above were studied at Ishii and his colleagues’ 731st unit. This is also detailed in the above-mentioned article by American journalist John Powell, “Japanese Bacteriological Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of War Crimes”: “Apparently, researchers at Fort Detrick learned a great deal from their Japanese counterparts… one researcher called the report (obtained) ‘priceless’. The biological weapons later developed by the United States were extremely similar to those already developed in Japan, for example, infecting the spore virus with feathers was one of Ishii’s ideas, and later, feather bombs became the basic configuration in the American biological arsenal.”That would not be the end of their leaks. In 2019, two leaks during July and August caused the CDC to issue Fort Detrick a “cease and desist” order. The letter, sent in July would not be enough to stop the August leak. After that, Fort Detrick was closed and that sounds nice until you realize closed means relocated. To another military base.What is even more worrying is that this base, located in “sweet air” Maryland, has taken over the “research results” of the 731st Army, which has done the most harm to the Chinese people, and what it is used for, we do not know. The “real-world experience” of its virus leak is even more chilling. Because here are preserved other viruses that are much more worrisome and dangerous than the new crown virus.—Mediumthe US cover-up of Ishii et al.’s war crimes and Fort Detrick’s takeover of the 731st, in an age when important national politicians are free to make unfounded and random disinformation, how many people will see the truth even if it is true? Perhaps, as British virologist Dr. Alastair Hay wrote in Nature in 2004, “Unfortunately, few Chinese scholars working in this field have access to the relevant archives.”Coincidentally the 2019 flu season was especially deadly in the United States. Japan would pick up on this and question it on their National news.In February, Japan’s TV Asahi News fired the first shot when it questioned America’s 2019 deadly flu season. The news channel hinted that at least part of those who contracted the “flu” were actually Covid-19. Of the 26 million infected with flu in 2019, at least 14,000 were killed. Since the medical expenses in America are way too high for many, 1/3 of the Americans have no medical insurance. Anyone with flu like symptoms were declared as flu. Therefore, it was absolutely valid to question the flu figure. —-Geopolitics, Joseph SiewThe CDC director later had to concede that some of those deaths could have been Covid-19. Interestingly enough, Taiwan would conduct its own investigation and it reveals the following:On 27th February, a top virologist and pharmacologist from Taiwan presented his findings on national TV, that there were altogether 5 strains of the SARS-CoV-2, A, B, C, D, E and the relationships amongst the various haplotypes; A being the original or the grandfather of the 5 strains, B is a mutation of A and so on and so forth. Surprisingly, America has all the 5 strains of the virus. China, on the other hand, only has strain C, which is the son of B and grandson of A. In other words, the Taiwanese expert concluded in their findings that America is most likely the origin of the coronavirus because the location with the greatest diversity of the virus is the source. —-Geopolitics, Joseph SiewHe goes on to document that Chinese National Hero and doctor, Zhong Nanshan is quoted as saying, “though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China,”Then why did China end up coming forward to the world about COVID-19? If it really started from a leak in Fort Detrick how did it get all the way to China? Excellent question.Later in October, more than 300 US soldiers and personnel travelled to Wuhan, China, to participate in the Wuhan Military World Games 2019. And during this time, the soldiers were mainly housed in a hotel within walking distance from the Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, initially speculated to be the place that the virus first spread. At least 5 soldiers were reported sick with flu like symptoms during their stay in Wuhan. —-Geopolitics, SiewSo let’s recap. July and August saw leaks at Fort Detrick, and in October members of the US military, for the first time, participated in military games in Wuhan, where they visited the place suspected to start the outbreak: the seafood market. US military members came down with “the flu.” Now we are at December 2019.Then, in early December, sporadic cases of pneumonia that were resistant to antibiotics began to appear in Wuhan. On the 31st December, China CDC informed WHO country office of cases of unknown pneumonia detected in Wuhan. The response by China was one of the fastest, and it led to Beijing making a decision, in January, to lockdown Wuhan and Hubei where Wuhan was located. Other major cities also executed very strict movement control of residents. —-Geopolitics, SiewFebruary each year is when Chinese New Year is celebrated. Do you understand that Chinese New Year is when the largest global migration of people takes place? Every year. Chinese people from all over typically return to their families to celebrate together. The fact that this street in Wuhan looked like this during the busiest travel season for China tells me that President Xi, Beijing, and the Chinese CDC acted appropriately. Once they detected Covid they shut everything down.From the above timeline, we could see a more probable reason why if US is the source, and in particular, Fort Detrick military lab, then it would be easy to explain why the East Coast is now the epicenter of the pandemic, with the west coast relatively untouched. It would also explain why the 2019 flu season was exceptionally deadly. And why with all the precautions taken by the west, e.g. cutting the flights, and the travel bans of Chinese into the country, did not stop the spread of the virus, because the source was never China but USA. —-Geopolitics, SiewPresident Trump began his campaign, not only for reelection but a smear campaign against China, calling it, “the Kung Flu” and the “China virus.” A veritable Cold War has been going on between the US and China and Chinese Americans are suffering racism and attacks like never before. People have refused to believe China’s retelling of events, demanding an investigation. When the WHO investigation did take place, people still refused to believe China.(The WHO arriving in Wuhan)They spent two weeks in China investigating COVID-19 to determine if the Wuhan lab was the location of the outbreak and said, “It is extremely unlikely that COVID-19 started in a lab.” This was reported in Fortune Magazine.(Fortune’s Headline)It is my belief that either by accident or intent, the US spread COVID-19 in China. I hope it was accidental, but with the climate so hostile toward China right now, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it were done intentionally.Either way, China has possibly been victimized by Dr. Ishii twice. Once from Unit 731 and twice through his legacy at Fort Detrick and it’s subsequent outbreak. To add insult to injury, the perpetrators (US) have accused the perpetrated (China). It would seem it has all come full circle for China. But China is no longer weak, Japan has never apologized, and the US has not admitted its crimes. What should China do, I wonder, about Japan and the US? President Xi has been gracious. And wise. He allowed travel back to the US for those in China who were from America and concerned. In other words, he sent the virus right back to where it came from. Good for him.