johnnycaffeine

I still think 4% is pretty decent. Good article here from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on how this sort of lab work happens all the time. Lancet article here. It wouldn't surprise me if a a lot of stuff, more than we realize, came from a lab. However, it can be scientifically very difficult to settle an issue, as evidenced by a lot of the debate about whether Covid had a zoonotic origin or came from the Wuhan lab, with good arguments on both sides.

The organizations listed in the Resolution Criteria tend to be very conservative in their pronouncements, so I think unless something is extremely clear, even if it in reality did come from a lab, this would likely end in No.

Passage of time.

Not quite ready to zero anything out, but there's a good article here explaining how it's going to take years for Russia to rebuild its military in the wake of the Ukraine conflict. So I'm not sure April 2027 is a timeline I would think that this could plausibly occur.

Start with the base rate. One of the past 10 years has had construction of a Chinese base initiated in Africa, which means maybe 17% as the base rate for the remainder of this question. I adjust upward maybe 5% overall, due to my sense that US diplomatic pressure on potential host countries is not as much as it once was, due to the cutoff of a lot of the foreign aid that was propping up various regimes. 

Thinking about the base rate, adjusting for factors such as ECOWAS focusing on coup prevention reducing it, but at the same time political crisis in Mozambique and a new travel advisory for Guinnea-Bissau warning of political instability . 

There was some initial promise a few weeks ago, but negotiations seem to have gotten bogged down. The Ukrainians and Russians are well-entrenched, and it's not clear to me that either side has a lot of incentive to have a ceasefire. Russia by all accounts is driving a hard bargain. Ukraine so far is able to keep Russian forces at bay as long as it gets the materiel it needs.