Number 5. The Irish Star. Map shows deadly fungus spreading across the U.S. with experts worried.
Fresh from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, that architect of the Great 2020 Not-Wuhan Coronavirus Free World Election Disruptor comes a new threat to freedom-loving people everywhere, but especially in red states, the deadly Candida Auris Fungus.
Deadlier than Alec Baldwin with an unloaded single-action Pietta Colt .45 knockoff, this new FUNGUS is now officially AMONGG us. Over 2,000 cases appeared in the U.S. in 2022, and now there are what the news calls “hundreds” — yes! “hundreds!” — of actual cases in 6 states. Eighteen other states have “some cases” brewing (if you go back 10 years and add them all up). Combining the real cases with the maybe-cases, that means half the country is at risk.
(Because I am a math whiz in addition to a top-shelf podcaster, I can tell you that 2,000 cases out of 330 million Americans is a percentage that starts with a decimal point and has maybe 6 zeroes before you get to an actual number. Which means the risk of getting Candida Auris is something akin to the probability of fully charging up your EV during your lunch hour in a Chicago blizzard.)
Interestingly, 3/4 of the maybe-affected states are politically red, putting them most at risk and therefore most in need of draconian measures to keep those masses of red voters from gathering at Defcon 5-level danger zones like Trump rallies and polling stations.
According to The Irish Star, the best place to contract the Candida Auris Fungus is at your local hospital. Good to know, notwithstanding your local hospital is also probably the best place to contract anything else, since that’s where the sick people are.
Here at The Alligator Blog we only curate the best, most reliable information that you may not find anywhere else.
For example, the Irish Star web page that displays the Candida Auris Fungus article also features headlines about a time traveler from the year 2671 who is warning of unthinkable disasters in 2024; and actual video footage of a UFO caught firing a laser weapon at a missile carrying a nuclear warhead; and a director of the World Health Organization (WHO?) urging Davos conferees to sign a treaty in preparation for an as-yet-unseen Disease X, which will threaten all mankind, starting with MAGA supporters. They hope.
Bitcoin, the new currency which has libertarians cheering, bankers lobbying, politicians salivating and cartels quietly capitalizing has created some bad blood in rural Texas. Which does not sound like something safe to do in rural Texas.
The Bitcoin mining operation at Granbury, Texas, near Ft. Worth, is composed of hundreds of computers operating at light speed. Computers need cooling fans, and those used at Granbury are giant, in order to keep the systems running.
Nearby residents have measured the noise level in their front yards at about 80 decibels. For comparison, which may mean nothing to you but does to me (and it’s my podcast, after all) a 1966 Mini Cooper running turnpike speeds in high gear at 4,000 rpm generated above 70 decibels inside the cockpit.
That’s pretty loud, and made my AM radio almost worthless.
I’m sorry, did someone say something?
Granbury-ites claim the noise is present at a constant level, 24/7, and sounds like jet engines ready for takeoff. It makes it impossible to sleep, and causes other health problems.
Some of you may not understand what Bitcoin mining is, so I will explain it to you. I can do this because I just read C. J. Box’s latest Joe Pickett novel and learned all about it.
Bitcoin is a digital currency, like a, well, like a piece of information that you can’t see or touch, but which you can spend on things you CAN see and touch. You get Bitcoins by having a computer do lots and lots of computations solving, you know, formulas and things, and after you do enough of those, out pops a Bitcoin. Which you cannot see or touch.
The faster your computer is, the faster you can produce those… those things. So if you have two computers you can do twice as many. In Texas they do things real big, as we all know, so they have really big computers, and lots of them, and they get really hot, so they need big Texas-sized fans to keep them COOL.
Which makes the next-door neighbors really HOT. (See what I did there? Clever, huh!)
Anyway, I know it’s really complicated but I hope that clears it up for you. The Bitcoin people are getting rich while staying cool and the neighbors are getting hot while staying poor.
And it’s all a big mess and I hope the city council figures it out.
Number 3. Bloomberg News. New York City is considering a crackdown on laundry pods.
It’s another city council story.
Speaking of solving the biggest problems we face, the New York City city council has taken up a measure to eliminate the use of those little plastic pods of soap used in your washing machine and dishwasher.
It seems they are manufactured with polyvinyl alcohol, or PVA. Polyvinyl alcohol comes from petroleum, of course, like virtually everything else in this country, and the skin of those laundry pods is made from it. When the wash cycle starts, the PVA dissolves into the water.
And that’s where the trouble begins.
When the wastewater gets to the water treatment plant, the little microscopic chunks of PVA are so small they do not get screened out, and therefore mix with the now-fresh water that is released. People drink it, and thus ingest the plastic.
The article does not say what happens next, probably because no one knows, but the specter of New Yorkers swallowing hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic in their drinking water has got to be bad.
Wait… lemme think about that a second. Well, yes, of course, it would be bad to poison those people that way. Even if they’re from New York.
The EPA heard a complaint about this, but in a highly controlled scientific test where one of their janitors was ordered to stir up a laundry pod in a quart of water with a spoon, he said, “Look! It dissolved!” And then the EPA board dismissed the case.
Which is why it was brought before the New York City city council. Because if anyone can get to the bottom of this, the New York City city council can. In fact, New Yorkers have always said that in a race to the bottom, the New York City city council will always win.
Number 2. Reuters. Crowd sets Waymo self-driving vehicle on fire.
Now, from the other end of the country, things warmed up in San Francisco during the Chinese Lunar New Year party.
Nobody knows how to party like San Franciscans. When a self-driving Jaguar I-PACE EV moved down a street in Chinatown, some happy, carefree partiers celebrating the New Moon Year playfully broke out a window and tossed a cherry bomb inside the car.
The car had no riders at the time, and by definition had no driver, so it was all harmless fun.
Others joined in. The two most useful tools to the crowd were skateboards, used to break out more windows, and cell phone cameras, used to film the event and upload it to TikTok.
More fireworks were piled in, and soon they had a real old-fashioned bonfire going, fueled by thousands of pounds of impossible-to-extinguish lithium battery.
Waymo, which owns the car and is owned by Google which is owned by Alphabet, said, Not to worry, it was just harmless fun. Riding in our cars through neighborhoods at night without a driver who knows when to drop the hammer on the gas pedal and di di mau out of harm’s way is a perfectly safe way to spend an evening.
Nobody was hurt in this incident, unlike the one last week where the bicycler was run over, or the time a few months ago where a pedestrian was dragged 20 feet.
Number 1. Weather dot com. Chernobyl’s mutant wolves pave the way for a cure to cancer.
Please try to keep up with this one. It could be important.
When the biggest nuclear explosion ever went off in the power plant at Chernobyl in what we used to call The Ukraine in 1986, it saturated the surrounding area that we used to call farmland with all kinds of deadly radioactive, er, radioactivity.
After subjecting about a quarter of a million loyal and slightly uninformed Ukrainian workers to clean up the mess, and get themselves completely saturated with radiation, the Soviet government declared the place off-limits and quit letting people in.
It was called the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) and was a thousand square miles that became uninhabited. In Kansas Flint-Hills-speak, that’s 640,000 acres, or about 5% of the total pasture land used for cattle in this state.
Because we have all seen things like World War Z and Road Warrior and The China Sin-drome, you would think there would be nothing left alive in the CEZ.
It turns out you would be wrong. Researchers from Princeton found a pack of wolves roaming freely in the CEZ, whispered them gently into their lab, put a GPS around their necks, sucked some blood out of them and then turned them loose. The GPS had a dosimeter attached (Amazon advertised “Those who bought THAT also purchased THIS”) and it allowed the scientists to discover how much radiation the wolves had absorbed.
It turns out they had 6 times the legal limit, and before they were all fined in an international court at The Hague for Carnivoring Under the Influence, the scientists figured out the radiation had mutated a special wolf gene that suddenly became resistant to cancer.
I think I read this plot once before in a Dean Koontz novel.
So now the CDC is mandating Wolf Gene Vaccinations be administered to all preschoolers and air travelers with vaccine passports… wait… I am getting my stories mixed up.
Anyway, the Princeton researchers will go back and find the wolves again and use them to discover the secret cure to cancer, compliments of the Russians who built a nuke plant without a containment dome. Which we thought at the time was a stupid idea. And actually, we still think so.
They’ll go back just as soon as COVID stops being a threat, and as soon as the war in what we now call just Ukraine is over and we all make nice again.
And that is The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, February 16, 2024.
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The Alligator News Roundup