The On-Going Pandemics

 In 2006 I was on a holiday  in Cancun Mexico when I saw, on a Mexican News channel that an outbreak of Avian Flu had been detected in a chicken farm there. I thought not much of that until the next year when there were troughs of disinfectant for  air travelers to walking through to prevent then 'importing' germs and questions about visits to farms, whilst away. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-23/thanksgiving-turkeys-never-cost-so-much-as-bird-flu-ravages-us-flocks

That didn't impress me much and if the price of the Christmas gobbler was higher than usual in 2007 I didn't notice it.  When I did notice it was in 2020 - when the birds all disappeared.

I live in a small Ontario town near a Great Lake, in the kind of mixed forest habitat almost any bird could find a home.   I've never not not noticed any birds.  Their pre dawn 'tweets' and 'whistles' are,  often,  the harbinger of a beautiful day in any of the three pleasant seasons. The chickadees frolicking in snow covered cedars and the sudden descent of a 'covy' of snow buntings cheer the greyest of winter days.  As I sit at my computer  I can generally hear some indication that there are 'feathered friends in the area.  For the last three hours all I have heard is a dog barking. 

I remember the last time  noticed a bird, a sparrow, on my front steps - but that had to be three weeks ago.  It is only now beginning to get cold at night  and there should be birds still around.  My wife tells me that there are birds,  she says she saw a large flock of Canada geese near the dog park this week.  I'm going to look.

My son spilled  tub of cracked corn all over the trunk area of an SUV he was prepping to return.  He had left that one day too long, after a trip to our local park with his kids, to feed a population of wild and domesticated  waterfowl.  He was told that wasn't happening as the flock had been euthanized last week - including the 'decorative pheasants'  and peafowl that decorated the area. 8 Mute Swans, part of a 'heritage flock' donated to our city in 1915, by her late Majesty's Grandfather, were in isolation and being monitored for avian flu.  The rest had been 'culled'. Similar operations have been done in farmyards and industrial poultry farms in our area, apparently since last spring. 

https://www.bayshorebroadcasting.ca/2022/09/22/harrison-park-birds-ducks-and-geese-euthanized-due-to-avian-flu/

Perhaps premature, but 'heartening' Fordguvermint:  https://www.wattagnet.com/articles/45326-avian-flu-recovery-is-now-well-underway-in-ontario

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/bird-flu-uk-poultry-cull-defra-b2167370.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/14/unstoppable-bird-flu-epidemic-causes-growing-alarm-among-dutch-farmers

Apparently too,  since 2006 the avian flu has become cyclical, like the human kind, except we haven't devised a vaccine for birds or any way to give that to them.  So mother Nature has her way with them. Some do survive.

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-bird-flu-outbreak-chickens-burkina.html

Apparently Avian flu isn't a big killer of humanity - yet.  There were 14 people infected on that 2006 farm in Mexico. And hundreds of people have been infected since. One of the latest being a worker in an  NYC animal shelter who contracted the flu from a sick cat.  Apparently cats, dogs and other animals can catch avian flu, ir has been known to kill juvenile animals. 

https://metro.co.uk/2022/08/30/experts-say-bird-flu-outbreak-in-humans-on-the-horizon-17264972/

Last winter China had a double whammy - swine flu eradicated their pork population last Fall and an outbreak of  bird flu was 'named' as the official source of the most recent go round.  You'd think that such a large population of hungry people would be very careful with animal health.  I think they may be getting there. The Chinese curt-off Canadian pork products completely last year and this year they are refusing to import chicken from three Canadian provinces.  No doubt Don Trump's trade policies are paying off bigtime, making the Chinese safer. 

But Bird flu is just another 'problem' interfering with feeding the growing World population.  Something tells me it will still be a problem when we hit the UN 'goal' of  "SUSTAINABLE Development" in only  8 short years.    

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/un-sustainable-development-goals-progress-report/

I want to take a look at the Sustainability Plan in a future Tweet. The UN general Assembly has met this week, among other things, to receive the progress report.   The other things may be trumping the report.

 Lord love the proverbial duck,  as an American Caesar once intoned:  "I have returned!" 

The last post I made was 'only' in 2018.  Reading that, it's amazing to note how little we've learned, or changed. The lesser angels of our nature, the demonic, seem more at work now, than they were a mere 4 years ago. And they were going great guns then, too. 

But a diversion to explain why to-day was THE day. 

 I blogged once, back then, about 'Twitter' -  to me an new,  interesting   'multipartisan' way of sharing  views and opinions  on all the latest news, my main focus, and other interesting  humanities.   

When I started Twitter I had the standard '0' followers and by the time I 'lost' my account I had aggregated some 2500 or so.  No 'great shakes' in a vehicle where a rock star can garner a quarter million followers in a fortnight and Joe Biden (who was he in 2018?)  can slobber over a couple of million with every tweet.   But I enjoyed it until, first, some Windows update required me to log into Twitter with information I no longer remembered. My Browser had been doing that automatically for a number of years and then it stopped.

About 4 months ago I had to create a new Twitter presence.  With that entity I was actually able to 'see' my former existence but, of course, couldn't do anything but that,  just see it.  Twitter 'help' wasn't much help, at all. They have a different focus.  

I found that out yesterday morning when I saw the 'Permanent Suspension" notice appear on my latest  existence.   Twitter,  like other such internet 'social media'  has to have rules . I've violated a number of those in a number of vehicles - with various imposed penances and one similar 'permanent' ban (for offending 'the military honor' of a jackass US Navy vet I thought was 'fibbing'). They still    Civilians can't say anything to vets, because they lack 'the shared experience'. That's a value we all share.

And Twitter's values we all share too, if we want to remain in 'the nest'. Most of the time Twitter will tell you what you've done and give you a lesser penalty for pleading guilty and removing it. When it comes to a permanent ban there are 5 parameters they consider, Your guess which one or ones, you've messed up. 

 Creating another 'personality' is definitely one I  fess up to, but I think that's explained above. If you can't access it,  you can't delete it either. So I wanted to Tweet and set up a second account to do that. I wasn't using two accounts. 

Anther parameter is 'repeated violations'. In the 4 years of Tweeting I've 'repeated' infractions three times. I think that's rather fair,  for I have rankled people and ruffled feathers - if responding tweets are any indicators. 

A third parameter is 'repeatedly' harassing or targeting individuals & groups or because of their national racial  liguistic, gender, sexual   etc etc etc  characteristics.  Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! - there are a limited quantity of those and I could have offended many but I 'harass' Ukrainians only because they're 'blockheads' and 'nazis' and 'murderers' not because I dislike them - - I know a few: some ARE assholes some are ok and at least one - Canada's 'pet'  Juliette - was just dandy!.  I react to the things they post or things I can back up that they (some of them) do. 

I receive notice that no further 'appeal' is available. We're done with Twitter until Gabriel toots his   last tootle. 

Blogger is a more permanent record, it would appear. I have been told that those thousands of Tweets made are all 'available' - there must be machine code involved, as I was often challenged to locate a tweet I had made hours ago, let alone days, weeks, months or years ago. (Needed in evidence of a point to be proven,)  It's nice to see old Blogs here  -  like Facebook posts of some  teenaged 'indiscretion' - waiting to 'torpedo' you  with  Border Security.    Tweets would take far less time.

So that's why I'm back . 

It will be interesting to see how much more, or less time I spend   venting - one topic at a time.

Trying This on For Size Again

It's been a while.  

It's been experiential.  

It's been an intermittent saga, tracing a convoluted trail to getting my Blogger account back ( "You should write all this shit down",  comes to mind).  

I don't, indeed, know if I have my 'Royal Canadian" back.  

Blogger's letting me write this and I'm hoping  that technology hasn't advance so much that I'm not able so see it, and those years worth of former blogs.

 Wish me Luck, if you're reading this?

I have more stories to tell.