Apparently the conspiracy theory du jour is something about ticks and Lyme disease?

[conuly]

Either the US government is so incompetent that they're wildly releasing disease vectors all over the place with no plan of containment after the experiment runs it course, or they're so diabolically in control that they can keep the lid on massive conspiracies that run decades and must involve thousands of people.

You cannot have it both ways, folks. One or the other.

Comments

[wpadmirer]

Oh yeah. It's a Pentagon experiment that got out of control.

Yeah, right.

[conuly]

I'm not a huge fan of the military-industrial complex, and I agree that they can be both inept AND evil, but c'mon now.

[movingfinger]

If the Pentagon is responsible for the deer overpopulation, then for once letting them kill something would be the right solution.

Yes, I am bitter about the lilies/malva/lupins/honeysuckle/roses/etc.

[malada]

Deer overpopulation? Bring back the wolves!

-m

[conuly]

Indeed, there are few of life's pesky social problems that couldn't be solved by adding new large predators.

[maju]

Deer are the bane of my life and the reason we can't have nice things (in our yard).

[dewline]

In this matter, inept is enough to cause a lot of people a lot of grief. If it's confirmed as fact.

[gatheringrivers]

heh!

I worry LESS about lyme disease, and MORE about the alpha-gal allergy problem from other ticks. I'm not saying Lyme disease isn't crappy, but AFAIK, it doesn't create anaphylactic food issues.

[siderea]

This isn't an either-or sort of thing. You get to be worried about both at the same time.

Also the other six tick-borne diseases in the US!

But wait - there's more! That list doesn't seem to include SFTS, the disease fatal in 15% of cases which is borne by the tick which just showed up in the US for the first time.

Or the fact that, really, alpha-gal is a two-fer, because the same species of tick also carries the Bourbon virus.

But don't worry, if that's not enough, there will be more. Probably soon.

Honestly, I've been having trouble keeping up with all the different tick-borne illness news over the last four weeks.

[gatheringrivers]

Well, there's my "standard" level of worry, which is "Hey, this sucks, let's do what we can to NOT get it, learn how to avoid it, or learn what can be done if we do get it". This is a good chunk of things (not just tick diseases), and it's where my research skills come in handy. :)

(So far I've seen Permethrin recommended to treat clothing and areas to prevent ticks. Well, I already HAVE permethrin, and quite a bit of it still, because of all the fleas I've been dealing with. Just means I spread a little more around a larger area on the next run.)

Then there's the "catastrophic" level of worry - This is where I stick the Alpha-Gal problem: If I catch that, my diet is severely effed up beyond all hope. And I've got enough food issues already, I don't need "Oh, you can't have beef/pork/lamb/(other food mammal meat) *ever again*" on TOP of them.

[siderea]

Well, yes, I'm in that boat too. The thing that's latently terrifying about alpha-gal allergy is that we live in a society in which not eating meat is seen as virtuous, and "giving up" meat is seen as not that big a deal, so consequently alpha-gal allergy is seen as quirky and slightly unfortunate, and not, you know, life threatening to people who need to be able to eat those things for medical reasons. Ours is not a society which takes such things seriously, so we're on our own.

[gatheringrivers]

Pretty much, yea.

Someone with the alpha-gal allergy, as near as I've been able to determine, can only have egg-laying land critters (birds and reptiles come to mind) and fish afterward.

Thanks to my egg donor's abusive ways, fish is not an option for me 99% of the time. (It has to NOT smell or taste "fishy" else I'll get nauseated, and if bad enough, throw up. Most places in my area are not THAT careful with how they treat fish.) I have actually tried alligator within the last few months, and that falls under the same fishy problem unfortunately. :(

Which means I'd be down to.....birds and whatever vegetables/fruit I can find that won't set off my other issues.

Wheeeeeeeee. :(

I've already had a go-round with someone who's vegan, and who insists eating meat is cruel and inhumane. I explained all of my issues to them, and they still do the equivalent of looking down their nose at my "barbaric ways", lol

(I might have a smidge more respect for them about it if they weren't busy waving around PETA pamphlets that use 30-50 year old pictures from before more recent animal welfare related changes in the feedlot systems...)

[smokingboot]

Of course they can! Departments, you see, departments...

[siderea]

???

All I'm seeing in my filter bubble is that there's a suspicion - I don't know on what basis - that there was military experimentation on weaponizing ticks, and that they escaped containment.

There's nothing in that that on the face of that is contempt-worthy. It may not be true, but it's hardly ridiculous. We know for a fact that our military has experimented with weaponizing both diseases and wild animals, and we also know our military sometimes fucks up. I don't know if there have been any military failures of biologics containment, but the private sector gave us gypsy moths.

Is there more to it than that?

[conuly]

Ah, what I've been seeing is that they deliberately released the ticks in order to see how they'd spread throughout the US... with, evidently, no plan for solving the problem this causes.

[siderea]

While that seems unlikely, "Hmm, how about we just don't tell these guys they have syphilis and effectively deny them treatment for forty years just to see how the disease progresses" also seems stupid, but was actually a thing that actually happened, so, you know. The most outrageous thing about what you're describing as a conspiracy theory is that it's alleged to have been perpetrated against whites.

We are talking about the government that nuked native peoples and its own soldiers in the name of science, the government that exposed it's own soldiers to Agent Orange.

The fact that something would be very dangerous and dumb and there's no obvious plan for remediation is not, on the face of it, an argument that it's an implausible course of action for our government to have taken.

It's 2019. It's way past time for people to stop sneering at things for being "conspiracy theories", when we know for a fact there have been all sorts of ghastly conspiracies responsible for considerable body counts.

Especially where the DoD is concerned.

[conuly]

Listen, I'm sure the government and/or DoD can be super evil, like a supervillain but with less class. I mean, I have been reading the news lately.

It's the combination of incredibly good secret keeping PLUS incredibly bad experimental design that gets me. I mean, how often can that happen?

Yes, Tuskegee - but that secret came out after forty-odd years, and it was a surprising long-runner in the world of evil conspiracies. I just don't think this tick thing could've outlasted that.