Coronavirus Could Break Iranian Society: The government has refused to impose quarantines and is encouraging people to visit the city of Qom, the center of the outbreak.

The Atlantic ^ | February 27, 2020 | Graeme Wood

[C19fan]

Picture the following sacred but unhygienic scene: Pilgrims from a dozen countries converge on one small city. They stay in cramped hotels, using communal toilets and eating meals together. For their main ritual, they converge on the tomb of a woman, the sister of a holy man, and as they get closer, they feel with rising intensity grief over her death and the deaths of her kin. The grief is a commandment: Each tear, according to one tradition, will be transformed in the afterlife into a pearl, and an angel will compensate them for their tears with a bucket of pearls that will be signs of their devotion when they arrive at the gate of paradise. But for now the bodily fluids are flowing, wiped away occasionally by bare hands, and the crowd is getting denser. A metal cage surrounds the tomb itself, and when the weeping pilgrims reach it, they interlace their fingers with its bars, and many press their face against it, fogging up the shiny metal with their breath. Some linger for minutes, some for seconds. In a single day, many thousands pass through the same cramped space—breathing the same air, touching the same surfaces, trading new and exotic diseases.

[buffyt]

I loved John Candy! Miss him!

[buffyt]

100%. so many things we do to ourselves that are bad for us.

[fishtank]

I post stuff like that , more so now because of spell check....

It changes from something right to some5ing wrong.

.... but I learned a new word last week:

“Pentation.... when a coworker “wanted” to write “penetration”....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentation

Pentation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The first three values of the expression x[5]2. The value of 3[5]2 is about 7.626 × 1012; values for higher x are much too large to appear on the graph.
In mathematics, pentation is the next hyperoperation after tetration but before hexation. It is defined as iterated (repeated) tetration, just as tetration is iterated exponentiation.[1] It is a binary operation defined with two numbers a and b, where a is tetrated to itself b times. For instance, using hyperoperation notation for pentation and tetration,
2
[
5
]
3
{\displaystyle 2[5]3} means tetrating 2 to itself 3 times, or
2
[
4
]
(
2
[
4
]
2
)
{\displaystyle 2[4](2[4]2)}. This can then be reduced to

[fishtank]

“One Child Nation” ... Covid-19 Style

[calenel]

“The Chinese would love to lose 100,000,000 people out of their own country.”

They might like to dump all the old folks - and this virus might do that for them - because their one child policy left them without enough working age people to support their useless eaters. However, this virus seems to be able to kill people of any age and has taken out some of the still useful ones. If this was a weapon directed against their own people, the Chinese seriously miscalculated and when the Chinese find out there won’t be a CCP much longer after that.

I’m gonna stick with lab malfunction. Even if this was intended as a bioweapon, they didn’t intend to release it where and when it got loose.

[SunkenCiv]

Jimmy Carter hardest hit! Almost sounds like the mullahcracy doesn't even care about Iranians. /s

[dirtymac]

Agreed

[EQAndyBuzz]

The left is taking this right from Teddy’s playbook. Remember four days into the Iraq war we were in a quagmire?