Today, I need to address yersinia pestis, which (as you likely know – it’s all over the news) is best known as the bacterium which causes Bubonic plague, which is spread by infected fleas (mostly from rodents which may still be alive.) The bacteria enter through the skin, get into the lymphatic system. When they reach a node, they cause swelling – forming the “bubo” (Latin for owl – which makes sense if you look at the body contours of an owl at rest) after which the plague is named. But the same bacterium also causes two other kinds of plague – named by how they enter the body and/or where they settle and produce symptoms: Septicemic plague, which also enters through a flea bite, but goes into the blood stream instead of the lymphatic system, and is often spead by handling dead small mammals – and Pneumonic plague, in which the bacterium enters into the respiratory system and settles in the lungs. This third one, Pneumonic, is the only form which is airborne. It is also the one which a lab tech in Russia recently died from. We don’t know for sure how far it has spread – or how far it could spread. Plague vaccine is a thing – but given the hostility of the current regime to vaccines, I would not expect it to be easy to obtain. If you have any masks left over from CoVid, I resommend keeping them and getting them out to be handy. There are many sources on the Russian incident, easily found through searches. I also went to Wikipedia to clarify the differences between the forms and look for vaccine information (a page which was just updated Monday – and there was still a note on it that it needed updating – so events are moving fast.) At least, since this is bacterial, there are antibiotics which stand a solid chace of defeating it if prescribed and adninistered in time.
https://www.military.com/bill-would-block-navy-from-replacing-doris-
Well, this is encouraging. It was one of the stars in the Vote Vets Daily Four Star. Not that such a bill has a chance against the Canteloupe Caligula – but it’s good to know how many people care.
More on AI here. Frank interviews Mark Fallon, an investigative journalist for Mother Jones, on the connection(s) between AI and mass shootings.
This from Robert Reich is the real question, isn’t it. I very much fear the answer is no. I fear that the permission to revel in their hate, and in the expression of it, is too addictive a drug to be able to reverse in the next 40 years – or in the next 400 years. Sadly, Lyndon Johnson was right. (How he managed to accomplish the transformation himself is inxplicable.) I do not want to suggest that anyone(anywhere) should get addicted to anything – yet I do think that anyone who has never been addicted to anything can really grasp what we are up against. It’s not something a person can simply decide not to do again and then never do it again. It’s a battle every day – a battle for which one must stay motivated even when one doesn’t feel motivated. Richard Rogers, bless him, was wrong. One doesn’t need to be carefully taught to be a racist (or sexist, or whatever.) The ads I’m seeing on YouTube ahead of the midterms, claiming that public schools now have curriculum requirements that include explicit sex would curl your hair.) One needs to be carefully taught from birth not to be a racist. That’s why the desegregation of schools was the first and largest signpost of inclusion – and why it was fought so hard by white supremacists – and essentially incapacitated by them, starting through workarounds. OK, end of rant -but, sadly, not the end of the hate.
