We will do this again

An American history told in guns, germs, and CO2

It doesn’t make sense if you don’t appreciate our history with this sort of thing.

Right now, the United States is averaging a little more than 65,000 new cases of the novel coronavirus each day, a staggering number that seems even more ridiculous when put in context. The current US population is around 330 million people; Canada, with a population about 1/9th the size, has seen around 380 new cases a day recently. Per capita, we’re doing about 20 times worse than the country right next door, something rather tragicomically illustrated this weekend by Canada’s wholly understandable decision to bar their sole Major League Baseball franchise, the Toronto Blue Jays, from playing games in Toronto during the sport’s impending restart — because they’d have bring teams in from the States to do so.

It seems unfathomable that a nation as supposedly wealthy and advanced as this would be doing so poorly by a metric that nearly every other nation on Earth is currently measuring better on. That is,…