Morning Belz, May 10
Links.
A dive on covid’s origin (don’t rule out lab escape) — Nicholas Wade*
Black (slightly) & Latino (significantly) voters swung right in 2020 — Catalist
Tighter UK border controls empower French smugglers — Guardian
The closed-border coronavirus trap — South China Morning Post
Fertility rates, which are important, are hard to write about — Noah Smith
Bernie Sanders on Dems losing working class voters — Axios
A history of MS-13, America’s most notorious gang — NY Review
Elon Musk’s opening monologue — Saturday Night Live
*seems to me this is a classic example of how Trumpism (and anti-Trumpism) poisoned the national discourse. He called it the “Wuhan virus,” so anybody blaming the lab was labeled xenophobic or racist, but the reality is we have no proof it was natural, and as the piece above lays out, there are clues pointing to lab escape. And this Peter Daszak fellow sure doesn’t look great.
Newest video — on guns, freedom and responsibility — is here. Check it out!
Quote
“The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghenies, north by the British dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets, and which includes part of Virginia, part of Tennessee, all of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Territories of Dakota, Nebraska, and part of Colorado, already has above 10,000,000 people, and will have 50,000,000 within fifty years if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more than one third of the country owned by the United States—certainly more than 1,000,000 square miles. Once half as populous as Massachusetts already is, it would have more than 75,000,000 people. A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the great body of the Republic.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1862
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