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Lisa Domshy's avatar

Great article again. I was under the belief that Biden was supposed to be a one term president but obviously I was wrong. I felt so disheartened after watching the debate that we didn’t renew our annual travel insurance and are just getting it one trip at a time to travel to the US. Still hoping for the best but planning for the worst.

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Roy Brander's avatar

I do not enjoy WWN or anything like it. Justin, if you do like that stuff, do not read Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World". That was the world when there was nothing BUT the equivalent of WWN - news was altered for maximum interest and enjoyment, so the tale-teller would get another beer. A world of superstition, lives lost from ignorance, paranoia.

That's still the problem with "journalism" versus "science". Scientists have learned from bitter experience that you let the data lead, and be humble with your theory in the face of data. Journalists like to find a narrative and stick to it, pretty much like a medieval jongleur enriching the tales from the next shire. (Right-wing journalists are still sticking to the "trickle down" narrative, the underlying prior assumption in all their analysis.)

I think a scientist would sign off on the high probability that whether the virus got loose in Wuhan because it leaked out of a lab, or got loose in Wuhan because it came out of a wet market ... it got loose FROM Wuhan, into the world (unlike SARS being contained in Toronto!) because of the secrecy, desire to cover-up, and suppression of medical response, by the current Wuhan and China governments. It's their fault, either way. So the question is frankly boring.

Biden is almost certainly the same guy that gave an interview to TIME.com at the end of May, and will probably repeat that feat tonight on ABC. The rest is imposed narrative. Biden does need, preferably tonight, to say that he can't work nights any more, should mostly stick to a 40-hour work week. Then say that this should be enough, with good staff work - that other presidents besides Reagan and Trump only worked about 20 hours of real, non-schmoozing work in a week.

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