Morning Reading – Wednesday, January 06, 2021
Today is the day when the U.S. Congress officially counts the Electoral College votes for the presidential election. We are finally here. We are hoping for a rational process today!
Did the Coronavirus Escape From a Lab? – New York Magazine
What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.
Covid-19: U.S. Has Been Down This Vaccine Rollout Road Before – Bloomberg
Just as the U.S. is now struggling to distribute Covid-19 vaccines, so did the nation struggle in the mid-1950s to distribute the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. There were shortages, mistakes and self-inflicted impediments. In some ways, the parallels are striking. To delve into the history of the polio vaccine is to realize that it has lessons for the here and now.
My January 6 Trump Protest Nightmare – The Atlantic
He could have said, “Any mass gathering right now is going to put police officers and Secret Service agents at much greater risk of getting sick or dying.” But he values the lives of others too little to have done so. He chose instead to feed his own ego at the price of American carnage.
Opinion | Jeff Flake: ‘Trump Can’t Hurt You. But He Is Destroying Us.’ – The New York Times
Today, the American people deserve to witness the majesty of a peaceful transfer of power, just as I saw, awe-struck, two decades ago. Instead, we find ourselves in this bizarre condition of our own making, two weeks from the inauguration of a new president, with madness unspooling from the White House, grievous damage to our body politic compounding daily.
Opinion | Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech? – The New York Times
The essence is that the business model of advertising added to the editor-free world of the internet, means that it pays for them to make us crazy. Think about the comparison to the processed food industry: they, like the internet platforms, have a business that exploits a human weakness, they profit the more they exploit, the more they exploit, the sicker we are.
The Electoral College Isn’t Supposed to Work This Way – The New York Times
“The possibility that politicians of either party could change an election’s outcome through postelection manipulation of the Electoral College is destabilizing. And the idea that the vice president, sitting in the chair as presiding officer of the joint session of Congress to “count the electoral votes,” could decide on his own to ignore electors certified by the states and replace them with impostors certified by no one leads straight to the end of democracy.”
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