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Ever since President Joe Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate reports that the Covid-19 virus might have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, commentators have argued over what difference it makes if the theory turns out to be right. Here’s why the answer matters: The discovery that the virus had a human origin would give the coronavirus saga what it’s lacked: a villain.
And that’s a problem.
If a virus that has killed nearly 600,000 people in the US and close to 4 million around the world turns out to have escaped from a laboratory in China, the formless fear that has immobilized most of the world for the last year and a half, at last given a target, might coalesce into fury.
objective truth, you will like Charles Murray s new book, pub date June 15:
Murray writes two distinctly different kinds of book, long and short. In the long books (most recently
Real Education, are more journalistic and less challenging for a reader not well-acquainted with statistics.
(And I just noticed, looking up
Real Education for the link, that its full title includes the word reality, just as this new book s title does. Charles Murray, like your genial diarist, clings to a fusty, absurdly old-fashioned belief in objective reality quite independent of our feelings, wo wo wo feelings.)
This latest Murray book is one of the shorts: 125 pages of main text, with three pages of introduction, twenty pages of endnotes, four pages of maps, and a five-page index. There are several tables and a small handful of graphs (this one my favorite);
The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Dark Skies wants to legislate against light pollution in the UK, and create laws that protect Britain s night sky.