Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Monday, March 13, 2023
·
14 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Is anyone surprised that the Silicon Valley Libertarian bros are stridently demanding big government bail them out?
@MarkedMan:
Nope.
There are all sorts of rather obvious things that very often get overlooked, and one needs them to be pointed out.
For instance, the bubonic plague is a disease of rodents. That is, rats, voles, mice, etc. are the primary host the bacterium Y. pestis has evolved to infect.
This leads to a less obvious question: does plague kill rats and mice as effectively as it does humans?
I assume the answer is not, as rodents have had far longer to evolve protections against this pathogen. I also assume if rats had perished in large numbers, there’d have been far fewer of them carrying fleas and passing them to humans.
Trump is trumpeting the notion that Ron DeSantis and Disney conspired to make DeSantis look tough. It’s all a hoax!
@CSK: I admit DeSantis does seem like a Disney villain, so there’s that.
Colorado is going the way of California. Good.
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-colorado-gops-slow-rolling-maga-suicide/
I expect Arizona will follow over the next two years.
@Kathy:
Complicated question. Plague is endemic in the rodent population in the western US. Mortality rate in an outbreak in prairie dogs can run as high as 90% of those infected. But prairie dogs don’t travel very far in their lifetime, even less so when they’re sick, so outbreaks tend to damp out. Under the right conditions, though, the die off can be quite large. In 2015 a plague outbreak in the prairie dog population in a portion of NE Wyoming reduced one area occupied by prairie dogs from 25,000 acres to 125.
A few years ago I read a paper by an historian and an epidemiologist. The historian specialized in reconstructing the spread of plague across various cities from the surviving records. The epidemiologist specialized in modeling the spread patterns caused by particular transmission vectors: rats, fleas, lice, people coughing, etc. The conclusion was that the spread of the Black Death within individual cities was by human lice.
@Kathy:
The bubonic plague most definitely kills rats but that isn’t helpful because their fleas, which are the vector to us, jump off when the rats die and cool off and immediately hop around looking for new hosts.
@Michael Cain:
That’s about the only kind of question in biology.
BTW, if prairie dogs are native to the Americas, then they’ve had very little time to evolve resistance to plague. I was thinking more about city rats in Europe and Asia.
At that, the first widespread outbreak in Europe was the Plague of Justinian* in the mid-500s CE. It might have been new to the rats and other rodents in Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa.
Nothing about biology is ever simple.
*Justinian was one busy Byzantine Basileus. His reign included the first plague pandemic, the Nika revolt, the attempts (rather successful short term) to reconquer Roman provinces in Africa and Europe (including Italy), the compilation of Roman law, and the building of the Hagia Sophia
Woody Guthrie’s family tells Josh Hawley ‘This Land Is Your Land’ not for use by ‘insurrectionists’
Announcement of the AUKUS Pact in considerable detail in joint press conference by Albanese, Biden and Sunak.
– Australia will build a new fleet of eight nuclear-powered submarines in the Osborne yards in Adelaide to begin service in the 2040s; programme cost up to $368 billion by 2055.
– The SSN-AUKUS design will be based on the prelim design work done for the UK next generation SSNR. The UK will now use the same design. US will provide the reactors and fuel for the Australian boats, apparently.
Query: seems a bit odd, assuming the design is based around the UK RollsRoyce reactor. Assume US reactor design can be modded to fit?
No details on weapons/sensors etc.
– UK will acquire at least 9 SSN-A but may build up to 19! That will be a major step up in UK naval power; possibly aiming a long term “two ocean navy” plan? UK boats will have RR reactors, and presumably BAE weapons/sensor systems.
Possible co-operation with USN on joint operable weapons?
– Interim plans: As of this year, Royal Australian Navy sailors will be posted to US and UK submarine bases. Australian shipyard specialists will receive training in US and UK shipyards. $8bnto be spent on preparing the Adelaide shipyards.
From 2027, USN and RN will station nuclear subs at a RAN base in Perth, Western Australia which Australia will spend c $1bn upgrading.
‘Submarine Rotational Force-West’ will see up to four USN Virginia-class & one RN Astute rotated through Perth.
In the early 2030s Australia will buy three American Virginia-class subs, with option for two more.
We just had a short, light rain.
I know it can rain any time out of season, but not much. We also had some rain Saturday and Sunday. Three straight days with some rain months before the rain season strikes me as really odd.
Personally, I don’t mind. It brings the temperature down a bit. But, I’m a bit worried. First we had warm temps early in March, which felt like an early spring by 2-3 weeks. now we’re getting rain daily, which is like early summer by 3 months.
“NYT-War Crimes”
@Kathy:
As an addendum to my previous post, cats don’t help much either. They get the plague. Kill a rat, get its fleas, and carry them right to their humans.
Dogs are, however, mostly immune.