Lucky Lusitano: Did anyone miss this lovely piece by @c_smrstik, which we published yesterday? On Sundays, we only publish beautiful stories about the world's beauties and pleasures: claireberlinski.substack.com/p/lucky-lusita…
It is obviously no longer Sunday, but if like me you woke up, looked at the news, and felt tempted by horror and despair, take a break and read this. Remind yourself that calm, peace, and harmony are also aspects of the world--
and these aspects are as real, and as true, as its cruelty, murderousness, and suffering.
It is not the worst of all possible world's. It isn't the best, but it certainly isn't the worst.
And in one small corner of Portugal--seen by @cosmo_globalist's own correspondent--it seems that in fact, tout va pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes.
"worlds." No apostrophe. But that wasn't even the worst of all possible typos.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I should stress that I don't disparage the effort to learn as much as one can about virology, or complex human conflicts. To the contrary. There is, however, a specifically modern personality who drives me berserk: Someone who isn't humbled by what he doesn't know.
e.g., people who venture bold new theses in virology without grasping that never having so much as looked at an organic chemistry textbook probably forms an impediment to their ability to improve on the consensus view.
I have nothing against autodidacts, and arguments from authority are fallacious. But people who don't realize they're not yet in possession of the tools they need fruitfully to add to the store of human knowledge--but who insist upon trying anyway--really are a public menace.
Okay, I think I'm figuring this out. The cool resides in split-second micro-expressions that are dissonant from the body-language, overall. Let me show you what I mean. I'll present them first without commentary. Look first at this, A on the left, B on right.
And @robert_zubrin makes the extended case for nuclear in our essay of the day, and it's a humdinger:
"Per unit of energy, there is no safer source. Nuclear power is not only safer by far than fossil fuels—even excluding the claim that fossil fuels will wipe out the human race—but safer than wind, safer than hydropower, and safer than solar."
"Well, maybe the thing that just leveled San Francisco was an earthquake, or maybe it was a nuclear bomb. What difference would it make? There's nothing left here but a smoking crater, anyway."
Come on. Depending on the scenario, the implications are *massively* different.
If this leaked from a lab, and if this can be demonstrated even to a preponderance-of-evidence standard, it demonstrates that we must urgently prioritize the creation of a global biosecurity regime, one organized around laboratory safety.
There should be one anyway. But if he's right, and if the world were widely to understand that the pandemic emerged from a laboratory mishap of the kind Wade describes, there would be overwhelming public pressure on governments everywhere:
This is true, and as @hlshaken said, the implications of this for our society are devastating and go far beyond this. If we now undergo some kind of Kuhnian Revolution and reevaluate our understanding of the pandemic's origins,
everyone who was involved in trying to obfuscate or delay the issues has some serious explaining to do. At least to him or herself. There's only so much pressure we can put on our institutions before they collapse, and we can't have much by way of a modern liberal democracy--
if collapse in scientific probity and journalistic integrity (or at least diligence) completely collapses.