Welcome to your Monday open thread. The election is less than 24 hours away! VOTE!!!! Tell all your friends to vote, otherwise I’ll come over to their house and drink all their beer and I won’t share it!!! I know our commenters will back me up here, they’ll help bogart non-voters beer, right guys?
This is a really cool science story. Researchers have determined the exact pathogen for the Black Death plagues of the 1300s and its origin in China. Science rocks!
One team of biologists, led by Barbara Bramanti of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and Stephanie Haensch of Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, analyzed ancient DNA and proteins from plague pits, the mass burial grounds across Europe in which the dead were interred. Writing in the journal PLoS Pathogens this month, they say their findings put beyond doubt that the Black Death was brought about by Yersinia pestis.
Dr. Bramanti’s team was able to distinguish two strains of the Black Death plague bacterium, which differ both from each other and from the three principal strains in the world today. They infer that medieval Europe must have been invaded by two different sources of Yersinia pestis. One strain reached the port of Marseilles on France’s southern coast in 1347, spread rapidly across France and by 1349 had reached Hereford, a busy English market town and pilgrimage center near the Welsh border.
The strain of bacterium analyzed from the bones and teeth of a Hereford plague pit dug in 1349 is identical to that from a plague pit of 1348 in southern France, suggesting a direct route of travel. But a plague pit in the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom has bacteria of a different strain, which the researchers infer arrived from Norway.
It’s really quite amazing what they can do with DNA analysis these days. I love reading stories like these.
While we weren’t paying attention David Broder has completed his transformation into a crazy person. He’s a neocon now.
Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.
Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.
I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.
Hey, he’s not saying starting a war with Iran is a good idea, only that it’s good economic policy. (Yeah, because war with Iraq and Afghanistan have been great for our bottom line.) Plus Broder is falling for the Republican silliness that somehow money spent to support WWII was not government spending. But he probably has a point, blowing up other countries is about the only money Republicans are willing to spend. Roads and bridges could collapse here for all they care.