The China Connection

A farmer in China's province of Inner Mongolia was recently diagnosed with Bubonic Plague.

That's shocking to us, but hardly surprising. China has been exporting plagues for millennia.

Of the more than 20 pandemics in recorded history, and even a few prehistoric plagues discovered by science, the great majority have originated in China. The path of contagion into Europe typically followed trade along the Great Silk Road.

Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes Plague, is endemic to China. Three major outbreaks, in 541, 1432, and 1855, killed millions. The second, a.k.a. the Black Death, may have killed as much as one half the population of Europe. The 1855 outbreak, which killed at least 12 million people, was finally only declared inactive in 1981, but remnants still pop up from time to time.

Since the 1890s new kinds of zoonotic diseases have come out of China. The newcomers have been associated with swine, birds, and now bats. They generally tend to be types of influenza passed from animals to humans. Because they originate in other species we have no natural immunity to them. Because they mutate often, a vaccine developed one day may not work the next. And because they spread quickly and easily, treatment programs tend to lag a few steps behind the contagion.

So, Diogenes, why this textbook-dry commentary on disease?

Because, dear reader, even though plagues have indeed killed an untold number of people, the "primitive" cultures that dealt with them, having no medicine, no idea of germ theory, and little idea of hygiene, were many times able to slow and even stop the spread of disease. How?

Isolation. The doctors of ancient and medieval times, having no means to cure their patients, watched them closely. They discovered that people who congregated in groups tended to become infected, while non-social individuals did not. They advised families and heads of villages to watch for symptoms and as quickly as possible when a symptom appeared, to close the afflicted person away from others. It took years for the information to get out and for it to spread, but it proved an effective technique.

This is a lesson we have only just relearned; we call it social distancing. There is no indication that medieval doctors suggested wearing masks, but people in the presence of illness frequently covered their mouths and noses against the stench, which may have had some prophylactic effect.

We know about germs, and anyone who has had an 8th-grade health class knows how diseases can be spread. The unpresident clearly missed that lesson.

The Dolt-in-Chief wants schools to open in the fall. He and his Republican minions want to pretend there is no contagion. In the midst of a pandemic that has infected 3 million Americans, he gathers or hires groups of people to sit in close proximity, without masks, to listen to him speak drivel and blather. He continues to deny the reality of this plague.

Someone should sneeze on him.


--- Diogenes, 7/8/2020 

Putting The Hate On Trump (Repost)

(Diogenes is temporarily involved in other pursuits. In his absence we will be reposting some of his more popular pieces.) ---RB

 

I hate Donald Trump because he makes me want to do violence.

I have held to a nonviolent philosophy for my entire adult life. I have never aimed a weapon at anything more threatening than a field target; I was last drawn into a fistfight when I was 17; I have no wish to harm anyone.

And I want to punch Trump's lights out.

I have dreams of throttling him, my hands around his neck, beating his head against the wall while he sings The Beatles' song "I'm A Loser." I want to rip that orange obscenity from his head and shred it with my teeth. I want to throw him into a pool full of crocodiles. I want to wash his lying, profane mouth out with lye soap. I want to tie him to a chair, tape his eyes open, and force him to watch a video loop of President Obama scolding, "Donny, you've been a bad boy." I want the Statue of Liberty to spank him, and the ghosts of Lincoln and Jefferson to haunt him forever. I want a personification of the COVID-19 virus to chase him naked through the streets of Manhattan. I want him to know himself for the fraud and freak show he is, no more worthy to sit in the Oval Office than slime mold. I want him reincarnated to a place where he is the only white person and the rulers are violent, misanthropic women. I want him to know the bone-chilling, knee-collapsing, bladder-emptying fear of authority felt by the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. I want a hundred afarit to drag him into the earth. I want him to know exactly what Putin, Xi Jinping, and Erdoğan actually say about him. I want him tarred and feathered and ridden out of DC on a rail.  I want to tattoo 666 on his ass. I want him to know his biography is full of blank pages. I want him afflicted with boils and unscratchable itches. I want the unspeakable beasts of Chthulu to find him. I want the Holy Bible to burn his blaspheming hands. I want his libelous tongue to cleave to the roof of his mouth. I want him placed among the traitors in the mouth of Satan in the deepest pit of Hell. I want him mute. I want his image expunged from every public place and his portrait never placed in the Gallery of Presidents. I want him forgotten. I want his legacy to be shame. I want him to know just how much he is hated. I want him to be bullied and intimidated. I want him ostracized. I want him humiliated. I want him to cry.

During the Thug-in-Chief's first campaign I sometimes asked rhetorically, "Will someone take this bastard out and shoot him?" I was advised by cooler heads to tone it down, and I did. No more. There are not enough denunciatory, damning, condemnatory, insulting, judgmental, censorious, reproaching, disparaging, derogatory words in all the English language sufficiently to describe him, nor any punishment he does not deserve.

He has defiled, flouted, soiled, profaned, fouled, besmirched, sullied and dishonored the office of President, the laws of this country, the Constitution, the legacy of the Framers, and the idea of democracy itself.

He is a cancer and a plague on freedom and on our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

He must be stopped, deposed, and extirpated.


--- Diogenes, 7/6/2020

One Angry Man

Here we are in the silly season, when political campaigns begin ramping up and candidates strive to present their best sides and demonstrate their good qualities.

Alas for unpresident Donald Trump, who has neither a good side nor any good qualities. He lacks jollity, folkishness, charm, and he sure as hell lacks presidentialness.

All evidence suggests he has only one emotion: anger. He seems incapable of responding to anything positively. He can bring anger out of an audience like a camp meeting preacher can bring out the spirit.

The problem is, you can't build on anger. Anger builds on itself with no mitigation, manifests as hate, and will ultimately always end in violence, the last resort of the incompetent.¹

We should be concerned about where that anger goes. It obviously gets poured out on those around him--the press, his staff, even COVID-19, which he hates because he can't control it. He carries so much anger that he radiates it.

Some of that anger must surely be turned inward, and that is Freud's definition of depression. If Trump is angry with himself and has become depressed he is far more dangerous than your everyday angry man.

On July 3 and 4 he delivered similar speeches at gatherings meant to observe Independence Day. They were, of course, campaign speeches and were of such hyperbolic demagoguery as to stagger the mind.²

Both presentations were belligerent in nature, effectively declaring war on his newest shadow enemy, the "Fascist Left." In both speeches he reached astounding new heights of hypocrisy, reflecting his acts and policies back on this ghost entity, shamelessly blaming the left for his own bad deeds, and attributing the effects of his policies, his racism, and his xenophobia to this phantom fifth column.

The Hypocrite-in-Chief has finally found a speechwriter who can make him sound almost knowledgeable about American history. He merged bellicose harangues with attempts to show his understanding of American history and diversity, peppering both addresses with names of African Americans and women, gracing a few with his only adjective, "great." 

Military power was a major focus of both speeches, as he read off lists of America's increasing military arsenal. All that was missing was a parade of weapons, à la Soviet May Day parades.

Lacking the intellectual capacity to channel his anger into something non-destructive, a depressed Trump is likely to strike out at virtually no provocation, and he has lots of weapons to play with.

We should be very concerned indeed.


--- Diogenes, July 5, 2020


¹ Attributed to Isaac Asimov.
² July 3 transcript: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-transcript-at-mount-rushmore-4th-of-july-event
   July 4 transcript: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-salute-to-america-speech-transcript