You Have to Understand Priorities

It didn't take long:  ebola is Bush's fault, ebola is a result of budget cuts, ebola is a result of sequestration.

Twaddle.

To begin with, Republicans gave the CDC more money this year than Obama had put in the budget.  And CDC and NIH have had plenty of money to do studies on such things as why lesbians are fat.  So Democrats can stuff it.

And we didn't have a vaccine available because we've never needed it. It's something that a western country is going to be reactive to, not proactive to, because it's a relatively recent disease and has been restricted to Africa, particularly where bush meat is eaten.  I can't blame them - drug development is an incredibly expensive business and who ever expected Americans to get so stupid that they'd put people in charge who would fling open the doors to something like ebola?

It's frightening people so badly that they are forgetting that another disease is paralyzing and killing our children.  Enterovirus D68 is much more widespread than ebola and it's playing at being a polio relative. Tuberculosis and whooping cough are on the upswing.  Know how you die with tuberculosis?  You basically slowly drown in your own blood.   And, by the way, did anybody notice that the Africans that scared the heck out of a flight recently WERE sick with things like typhoid?  Typhoid.  We're flying typhoid into the country.

Ebola is a horrible disease and people are rightly frightened by it.  It's right up there with smallpox and bubonic plague on my list of ways I don't want to die.  When monkey ebola broke out at a lab in Reston, VA, repeated efforts to de-contaminate the building failed.  I believe that they finally just closed the building and eventually tore it down. 

None of these would be able to ramp up if we had done exactly what we did until generations were born who didn't know what it was like to lose family members to scourges like polio and tuberculosis, who don't understand that that our freedom from horrific disease isn't shared by third would countries.  And they decided that it was hunky dory to just throw the doors wide open and let those diseases flood back in, now into a country with 300,000,000 citizens with lessened resistance to them. 

And yes, the CDC will lie to us about it if they get orders to do so.  High up agency heads are political appointees.  They'll do what they are told.

A little over 100 years ago a well-traveled rat took shore leave from a ship docked in San Francisco. He brought yersinia pestis, plague, with him.  San Francisco's China Town was a warren of rickety buildings and rats loved it.  Soon pneumonic plague was breaking out.  A major part of the Chinese neighborhood of Honolulu had been burned in 1900 in an attempt to kill off an outbreak of bubonic plague and the San Franciscan Chinese did not want to take the chance of the same happening to them, so they tried to hide it, even going so far as propping dead victims up at the family table to make it look as if they were still alive.  Once it was clear that there was an outbreak, the city fathers fought the medical specialist sent to deal with it tooth and nail.  They feared that if word got out that plague was in the city it would adversely affect the city's booming business.  Then came the great earthquake of 1906.  The city was filled with crowded, unsanitary tent camps and oh how the rats loved that.  Their populations boomed.  Anyone who has been on the west coast of California is probably familiar with the cute little ground squirrels that are common there.  Plague happily hopped from rats to the ground squirrels.  And it didn't take long for it to spread east, where it is now endemic in the American southwest.  All because politicians didn't want to impact city business.

So, CDC, NIH, and priorities.  People need to understand that the first, the very FIRST priority of any government agency is to exist.  NOT to do a particular job - to EXIST.  If the job gets done, good.  But that's not the agency's PRIMARY task, no matter what it says in its founding legislation.  So agency heads work to keep the agency relevant and that means looking for projects that will catch the eye of the people in control of their budgets.  Which is how mission creep happens. 

Which is how millions of our tax dollars are used on nonsense studies and then those that waste the money scream that they don't have enough money. 

Hissy Fit

It's been a tough Spring.  To begin with, it was cold late into the season.  And we've had rain.  Lots of rain.  So the seasonal clean up got a late start.  Much sad for a person who loves flowers.  My iris beds will not bloom this year because they are still pissy about me digging them all up and splitting the roots because they were too crowded.  And a bunch of them flat out didn't make it - winter was hard enough that the deer ate them, which is very unusual.  The hydrangias were killed nearly to the ground - they had to be cut back to about 6 inches and there will probably be no bloom there this summer.  And my bee balm.  Well, I stared and stared and hoped and hoped at that area that has been full of bee balm for years but nary a sprout came up. Completely killed.  Sigh.

On top of the damage left by one of the most miserable winters in decades, we now have a plague that gives locust a run for the money in destructiveness.

Cankerworm.  Inchworm.  Looper.  My name for them can't be used in polite company.  Ravenous.  We have them by the millions.

And they are stripping everything they can get to: trees, bushes, flowers - they don't differentiate.

Trees that were leaf covered two weeks ago are stripped bare.  The increasing acreage of denuded trees is more and more visible on the mountain slopes as you drive from town.  It has sounded like rain 24/7 at my house for nearly two weeks now.  That would be their poop coming down in a constant patter.  They are ballooners - their webbing is everywhere and you can walk into a wall of ballooning caterpillars.  I come in from working and my hair is full of the grainy little stuff and I spend the rest of the evening picking the damned little worms off my neck and arms as they appear from wherever they hid to hitch a ride.

And somehow finding them destroying my peony flowers, buds and all, was the last straw Saturday and I found myself standing in my yard screaming "DIE DIE DIE DIE YOU MISERABLE THINGS!!!" and stomping around in a furious, frustrated frenzy.  Fortunately, the neighbors weren't home at the time to see it.