The Ashes of Pestilence

Light Conspiracy Monday

The title points towards fiction, and part of the article is a byproduct of a conversation with my friend

First Contact Newsletter

(who is considerably more active on Twitter), but I decided to go further, and the end result is a mixture. So, let us start with the light conspiracy, which has ground into a meme (cultural gene).

At the start of the year, a massive fog took hold of large portions of the United States, which prompted a fog warning for 12 states. To increase rumor and suspicion there was also heavy fog in Canada. On my last hiking trip, the entire region experienced uncharacteristic fog, even on my birthday, uncharacteristic thick fog could be seen in my state, the fog is entirely weather-related, but. There is always a but.

Certain memes permeate the human gestalt and like retroviruses get reactivated under specific circumstances, so is there a “meme” responsible for the widespread fog virality ? Besides the trauma induced by the multiple pandemics (viral, propagandistic, etc, Operation Sea-Spray, when the U.S. Navy biological warfare sprayed 2 bacteria over San Francisco Bay to determine how vulnerable coastal cities were to bioweapon attacks. The two bacteria are important, one is Serratia Marcescens, and the other is Bacillus Globigii.

The owner of a lab in Florida ran a couple of experiments and published his findings

Thefogexperiment 1

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His tests found only one pathogen, to be specific, a bacteria — Serratia marcescens which belongs to the Yersiniaceae family. Yersiniaceae has a few members, but it has one rockstar, Yersinia pestis, infamously known as the Black Death. The conspiracy angle here is two-fold, first.

AstraZeneca suddenly decided to start working on a Black Death vaccine in case a superstrain of the Black Death emerges, this was one of the oddest news articles since the start of the year, because as of right now, this isn’t an issue, it won’t be an issue unless “made to be one”.

Specific strains of Serratia can be used for agricultural and forestry pest control and under specific environmental circumstances it can travel through small particulates. FYI it is commercially available, it is not merely hypothetical. Serratia is a opportunistic infection in humans, it is only really a problem if your immune system is weakened.

If you use Google, it will automatically use its Large Language Model to give you an overview of the most significant results to your search, while it will often “hallucinate”, sometimes it isn’t the case. As of today, most LLMs are trained on, quite literally, the entire corpus of human knowledge, every word ever written by mankind, and some more, thus sometimes the models will “connect dots” that don’t make much sense for the vast majority of people, especially experts who are often specialized and somewhat myopics.

This is what is called “Emergent knowledge”, a new understanding that arises from the massive amounts of data the models are trained on, allied with its architecture and massively parallel processing. This type of knowledge is cross-domain and often lies in the “long tail” of probability distribution. This leaves us with the second part of the conspiracy, what were those Chinese ballons doing really (a question raised by 1st Contact).

Dispersal of Serratia can occur naturally, but it is entertaining to think about other scenarios. I cited dust storms for a real reason. Dust storms have been researched and studied for their peculiar ability to carry all sorts of things on their microscopic particulates.

A significant association of dust events with infectious disease outbreaks was found in 10/12 (83.3%) reports. The infectious diseases that were mostly investigated with dust outbreaks were pneumonia, respiratory tract infections, COVID-19, pulmonary tuberculosis and coccidioidomycosis.

Desert dust outbreaks are vehicles of a significant number of pathogenic or opportunistic microorganisms and limited data indicate an association between dust events and infectious disease outbreaks.

In general, increased endotoxin levels were related to the severity of the sandstorms

Right now, sadly, California is being ravaged by a historical fire (by gross incompetence of all levels of government, from local to State level) but financial loss is not the only problem. The Amazon and a few of our biggest rural states often suffer massive fires, sometimes natural, sometimes arson for land grabs, but we have known for a while that forest fires increase respiratory disease incidence. It is estimated that Amazon fires can cause 15 million cases of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases per year.

• In a population-based, retrospective study the authors found that in the months following wildfire smoke exposure, Californian hospitals saw an increase in fungal infections (coccidioidomycosis).

• Another study found a similar trend “Months during which large wildfires occurred within 200 miles of a hospital were associated with an increased risk of invasive mold infection, aspergillosis, and coccidioidomycosis but not with candidal infection”.

• Fungal spores can travel long distances in the smoke.

The Nothern Hemisphere is in the middle of Winter, there are so many respiratory infections, and other types of diseases increasing in numbers it is hard to keep track, adding the smoke and small particles from the fires, and it can make a bad situation worse, overwhelming the healthcare system, local or otherwise, and even after almost 3 years, we are still in a severe drug shortage.

Hopefully, this helps inform any person living in California or neighboring states on taking some precautions to avoid developing any disease or becoming sick. I will address all the other weird infectious disease things in another article, maybe soon, maybe after the brain article.

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