For the Record: The Lab Leak Theory

 

Wait, Andromeda strain was a coronavirus? Why weren't we informed?!

Shorter Monsignor Douthat: The real reason it's important to find out if Covid leaked from a lab is I really want it to be true. https://t.co/artuHtCc5I

— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 30, 2021

That's really about the size of it:

Yes, if we never figure out the truth of Covid’s origins, the dangers of media groupthink will be the only lesson we can draw for absolutely certain. But if we could find out the truth, and it turned out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology really was the epicenter of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the revelation would itself be a major political and scientific event.

Scared Senseless

Photo via LaffyTaffyDaphne.

David F. Brooks ("Liberal Parents, Radical Children") has been chatting up people who run organizations in blue states:

When I meet someone who runs an organization in a blue state, I often ask: Do you have a generation gap where you work?

I don't know why he only "often" asks the question. It would have more statistical validity if he asked it every time. We can't really tell whether the answer represents anything.

Is he doing a formal study of people who run organizations in blue states? Is he comparing them to people who run organizations in red states? Does he ask the red-state bosses if they have generation gaps, or not?  If not, why not? If yes, why doesn't he tell us. I mean, if there's a generation gap in blue states but not in red states, that's interesting. But if there are generation gaps in both kinds of states, then maybe it's just normal. I'm saying, how are we supposed to read this information?

Also what kinds of organizations? Any kind? Baseball teams? Garden clubs? Nonprofit companies? For-profit companies? Newspapers? Political parties? Labor unions? Lay confraternities? Sororities? Well, something like that; he's studying certain types of corporate entities, that do certain types of business:

Singularity Watch redux: The Trump

Kwakiutl shaman, 1914, via Retronaut.

Back when the blog was very young, in early 2012, I had a prophetic vision I haven't come back to, of a kind of Singularity, not the well-known Singularity of science fiction in which computers attain consciousness, but a socioeconomic Singularity in which it would be the corporate entities, networks of organic parallel processors, that would become conscious and autonomous things—or were perhaps already there, only too vast and from our microscopic point of view too disorganized (like a molecule from the perspective of an electron) to see.

Only I couldn't quite figure out how they would interact and communicate with each other or with us, other than by the patterns of their spending and receiving money, the only activities a corporation really undertakes on its own power, as opposed to the jobs done by the employees (it was the advent of electronic program trading, carrying on financial transactions thousands of times per second without direct human involvement, along with the concept of the corporation as person with First Amendment speech and religious rights, that got me onto the train of thought).

Anyway there's another and maybe simpler possibility, arising out of a very quirky detail in last night's statement from the Trump campaign:

It burns

Update: The Googlebot was just reading this two-year-old piece (January 9 2013), and when I took a look at it I felt like running it again.

HOUSTON, April 23, 2028--

Speaking yesterday in 120-degree heat on the beach where the former port of Galveston can still be seen poking out of the gentle Gulf surf, Rep. Barbara Bush (R-Tex.) laid into President Kirsten Gillebrand and the Democratic Party for what she called decades of neglecting the environment.

"They knew," she said. "They knew what was happening. For 30 years they watched our weather get hotter and stranger every year and they sat and regulated, and regulated, and regulated some more. Did they give the free market a chance to come up with a solution? No, they knew better."

In this presidential year, Republican candidates have rapidly begun to coalesce around the theme of global warming, a process many scientists believe is caused by human activity. "Some call it manmade climate change," proclaimed the front-runner, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, "but I call it government-made."

While Ms. Bush has largely blamed burdensome government regulation for the climate crisis, Mr. Christie focuses on the tax system. "Let's face it," he remarked, "the stupidity of these jackasses is just incredible. By taking money from those who could be installing solar or wind power on their estates and giving it to people who can barely afford to pay their utility bills, they are just literally burning mountains of coal. And how many times have you seen some punk in the bodega buying charcoal briquets with his mom's food stamps?"

Image by Toxel.com.

Inspired by Dr. Turk.