Anyone who wants something extra to feel anxious about should read the hot zone by Richard Preston. It’s about Ebola, not plague, but it’s. . . alarming. Ebola is a virus, not a bacteria like plague, but the difficulty of containment even in secure labs, and the possibilities of mutation - as far as I know, they’re not dissimilar. Especially if a government lab has been fucking around trying to weaponise it, as I suspect happened here.

I’m guessing they made an extra feisty version. Otherwise, break out the antibiotics, no need for death or massive quarantine…

Ivermectin manufacturers are rubbing their hands and upping production.

“Mah freedom!”

It’s funny how often you see this mistake made in articles about diseases. Like, people think bacteria and viruses are the same sorta nasty so what’s the big deal? FFS - the word ‘antibiotics’ ought to give them a clue that these things are treated very differently.

My guess is yes, since she died. I’m pretty sure that it’s pretty trivial to cure plague these days, just using antibiotics. Since she died, and there’s a big quarantine, that suggests the possibility that they’ve been fucking with the bacteria and made it extra spicy. It’s so obvious that governments will do this - just because - that Stephen King wrote the stand back in the 70s.

‘Significant injuries to both arms’ makes it clear they didn’t have a fuckin clue how to find a vein. They were jabbing away, and it sounds like they injected into tissue. A junkie would have done a better job. That statement is very rarely true, and it’s a sad indictment of their competence.

Or heroin. In the past I’ve overdosed on heroin a couple of times and it is quick and painless. And it’s not as though it’s difficult to source.

That said, I’m also against the death penalty until we can come up with a system that correctly identifies the guilty 100% of the time. I doubt that’ll ever be possible.

You could probably cram a small child in there.

Didn’t know there was a term for not having an internal voice. I’m actually kinda glad I don’t have one, seems like it would get annoying. I can make one when I try, but wouldn’t want that shit going on all the time.

It’s increasingly difficult to identify what is ‘alive’, these days, with people creating synthetic cells and whatnot. And there was always the question of viruses. I can imagine a similar difficulty with defining consciousness and intelligence. The Turing test fell by the wayside a long time ago. There’s got to be more to it than saying “I am conscious!” - you can get a computer to do that with a single line of code. Where does the real definition lie? Fucked if I know.

Time to call the great innovator, Donald trump.

Hmm that’s not a bad idea actually. . .

What I miss most from reddit is probably askhistorians. . . Such an incredibly wide and authoritative accumulation of knowledge and skilled interpretation. Ah well.

Yeah, I also find a lot of my most useful and specific web searches take me to reddit. Unfortunately, I don’t see a solution. Hopefully a similar depth of information will start to accrue here, but if it happens it’ll happen slowly. And it’s hard to search.

I prefer the more salacious ‘Rodgered’ or ‘spanked’.

At least where I live, what they cost is ‘way too much’. You can get a meal from a decent restaurant for the same price, and their burgers have shrunk considerably.

Not that I needed another reason to avoid McDonald’s. Tastes nice, but the burgers have become tiny, and their food gives me the shits.

Yeah, I understand the Martian dust is kind of extremely carcinogenic too. And it’s so fine you just can’t keep it out.

I’m a bit surprised they’ve gone with piracy as an excuse - usually it’s “Think of the children!” Maybe they’ve finally figured out that we already know that republicans are thinking of (molesting) the children so they’ve fallen back on “You wouldn’t download a car”.