Links for you. Science:
A GOP lawmaker thinks rise in Lyme disease is due to a secret tick experiment. A scientist squashes that idea.
Successive Norovirus Outbreaks at an Event Center — Nebraska, October–November, 2017
Michael Collins Is the Forgotten Astronaut of Apollo 11. He’s Perfectly Fine With That.
USDA squashed the report farmers needed to plan for the climate crisis, and we’re all paying for it
Giant jellyfish the size of a human spotted by divers off English coast
Other:
America’s Indefensible Defense Budget
Moderate Democrats Warn That AOC Is Distracting From Their Nonexistent Message (“If your mission in politics is to cower from controversy — even on issues where your party has a clear advantage, and your constituents have a vital interest — then you shouldn’t be surprised when people aren’t interested in all of the nothing that you have to say.”)
Pelosi needs to get her House Democrats on the same page, and we’re not talking about ‘The Squad’ (it’s always the conservative Democrats who are the problem. Always.)
Notre-Dame came far closer to collapsing than people knew. This is how it was saved.
Steve Buckhantz Deserved Better
Continuing Coverage of the Q Street Barbies Continues – “Celebrating the moon landing”
On Medicare for All, Bernie Is Ready to Rumble
Banks Again Hoist on Their Cost-Cutting Petard: Burgeoning Credit Card Fraud
We can either choose Trump’s vision of America, or John Paul Stevens’s
How Morgan Harper’s Ohio Primary Challenge Explains the House Democratic Meltdown
In D.C., 5,500 students are homeless. The city is helping some of them take their first steps to college.
The American Right Defines Patriotism As Complacency About Racism
What we can learn from the revolutionary passport that helped 1920s refugees
Democrats’ Minimum-Wage Bill Is as Dead as Impeachment in the Senate. Why’d It Get a Vote?
The U.S. Women’s Soccer Team doesn’t just tolerate religion, it embraces it
We Have a Dental Care Crisis. Medicare for All Could Solve It.
Nancy Pelosi Has Lost Control: New York’s corrupt machine is running its own show for House Democrats
I think the most important thing a Democratic presidential candidate cna do, right now, in defense of immigrants is to announce that there will be criminal prosecutions of the rank and file employees of ICE and CBP who are running these camps.
What Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes say about our era
Sanders toughens his critique of Biden, signaling more clashes ahead
*** A GOP lawmaker thinks rise in Lyme disease is due to a secret tick experiment. A scientist squashes that idea. ***
For starters, that Warmongering Post headline is deceptive. Since the amendment was PASSED by voice vote, half the Representatives present in the House voted in favor of it.
Secondly, the author Morgan Krakow is a 2019 Journalism graduate from the University of Oregon. She is hardly likely to know very much about the convoluted history of US biowar efforts. Her fluff piece focuses on the opinions of a Michael T. Osterholm.
“there’s just no credible evidence”
“no basis in fact”
‘the science fiction of these issues overwhelms the truth’
“Osterholm said that ticks would be an ineffective biological weapon and that there are much more effective options”
A Wiki check of Lyme disease told me the bacteria which causes it is in the Borrelia genus, and names as vectors ticks and lice. Down in the Borrelia Wiki there is another disease named, and THIS one would surely have interested any theoretical biowar researchers.
^^^ Mortality rate is 1% with treatment and 30–70% without treatment. Poor prognostic signs include severe jaundice, severe change in mental status, severe bleeding and a prolonged QT interval on ECG. ^^^
Mind you, that’s the natural variety of the germ. With a little bit of lab work, Relapsing Fever might become a real winner. I obviously don’t know what – if anything – happened with the Lyme disease outbreak. What I DO know is that the US government has done terrible human experiments with LSD, VD, and plutonium. It’s no stretch at all for me to imagine they released a bunch of ticks carrying a “harmless” Borrelia type as a surrogate for the vastly more dangerous Relapsing Fever variety. For reasons it doesn’t mention the WP wants to kill this inquiry.
*** On Medicare for All, Bernie Is Ready to Rumble ***
There is an awful lot of ‘throwing stuff at the fan’ going on about what Bernie wants to do with Health Care. Part of the spin is to convince people Medicare For All is the same as Single Payer. Some more of it is that Bernie is a secret supporter of SP and always has been. So what is his problem with calling it that? I found a couple of stories about the smoke and fog. The first defends his tactics of confusion.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/06/19/bernie-sanders-created-confusion-about-single-payer-health-care/
The second is a bit less friendly.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/kip-sullivan-on-why-the-bernie-sanders-bill-is-not-single-payer.html
*** What Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes say about our era ***
A demonstration the WP can produce great stuff every now and then.
Sigh. Where y’all been since the 80’s? That’s when I first heard that Lyme disease was unleashed on Connecticut by the Russkis, from a submarine…
Life’s too short for this crap.
*** Continuing Coverage of the Q Street Barbies Continues – “Celebrating the moon landing” ***
A few years ago I was tasked with disposing of a relative’s Barbie doll collection. The market at the time was much better than that of today, so I was able to recover most of her investment, even after allowing for inflation. In the process I learned more than I cared to about these things, and generally came to despise them. I made an exception for one called “Arctic Barbie”, and in the end I put the unopened box first into a plastic bag, then into the deep freeze. (to halt inevitable disintegration of the plastic) I liked the way they put a genuine Asiatic face on the head of the doll, and this one could be a background for a 2-minute talk about anthropology to a girl or boy. Stuff like how a person as tall and thin as the doll would be at a disadvantage in the high arctic in ancient times.
This link has made me rethink my objection to some of the Barbies. To a kid over 10 years of age I’d have no problem gifting that Astronaut doll, or even better, the model whose head was modeled after a real astronaut. Ditto for the firefighter, pilot, baby doctor, and marine biologist. All fully clothed, very professional looking, and no highlighting of the impossible body shaping.