Comment by bsimpson
4 hours ago
I saw a post about this on Reddit this morning. Haven't looked into it further, but people were claiming that there are versions of this plague that have been modified to release other toxins. It's effectively a bioweapon: they cure you for the plague, which kills you with the poison it contained.
There are some that had been modified to release endorphins!
>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."
> . . .
> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."
The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".
Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets, so I'd like to see a reputable source. (Having said that, bacteria upregulate selected interleukins to reduce inflammation, so maybe this is a game of telephone based on some actual Soviet effort to increase virulence, just not "euphoria.")
I believe the same thing is also described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohazard_(book)
> Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets, so I'd like to see a reputable source.
Where was this claimed? Do we have any definitive confirmation of the Roswell incident anyway?
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This sounded so ridiculous that I had to check. The book is Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. This unflattering contemporary review, retrieved from the Wayback Machine, has an excerpt:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110713153629/https://www.washi...
The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue work in eugenics. . . . in secret, in the Soviet Union.
Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. . . .
> Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets
And people take her seriously?
Endorphins make you happy as you are. Endorphins have sedative effect. Morphine is a similar substance and it is a sedative, all opioids are.
What makes one socialize is dopamine [1]: "Hypomania, manifesting with feelings of euphoria, omnipotence, or grandiosity are prone to appear in those moments when medication (dopaminergic medication - thesz) effects are at their maximum."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_dysregulation_syndrom...
This dopamine dysregulation occurs naturally in people with toxoplasmosis.
This kind of mistake - mistaking dopamine and endorphine, - strongly suggests a fake. I know of one such fake from the former employee of my friend, you can read his account here [2]. My friend was a lead of the "secret" laboratory (next to Kitay Gorod metro station in the center of Moscow, in an institute that needed no documents to enter) that researched how "psychics" and "healers" achieve their results.
[2] https://lit.lib.ru/t/torin_a/text_0100.shtml (it is in Russian, but language is not a barrier at all nowadays)
The laboratory researched what these "extrasensing people" do and found nothing - given very little training an ordinary men can do the same and even better. At the end of USSR, there was a string of visitors from USA there in the lab, and one of those visitors successfully persuaded US government to open similar research program, according to [2].
The fearmongering of "endorphin-producing bugs that make one socialize and spread" looks like, well, fearmongering to obtain funds for Big Pharma's government contracts, etc. It messes up two very different neurotransmitters, a mistake that real scientist would not make.
Reminds me of a David Brin short story.
I think you will like "Our Neural Chernobyl": https://lib.ru/STERLINGB/chernobyl.txt
(the link is a translation to Russian, I was unable to find the original text in English)
Also consider that toxoplasma changes rat's dopamine serum level to such extent that they stop fearing cats. The same happens with humans, changes in dopamine serum level are so profound that toxoplasma-infected people become more appealing than regular people.
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Better than rt though
Those two things are not alike, and the claim about Wikipedia is a blatant lie ... certainly it is vastly more reliable than you are. Other comments from you:
> there is a gatekeeping cretin in his basement hitting refresh to make sure he controls the world's definition for egg salad.
> Wikipedia is filled with ministers of truth.
Permanently muted and dismissed.
Regarding Reddit, there is a lining of truth behind his claim (despite possibly being a troll based on account age). Someone years ago made a well written post about it on reddit (yes I know, kind of ironic)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274
Things have certainly changed since the introduction of AI, but I still believe the status quo is mostly the same regarding people who create content or write content and people who passively consume it.
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