it's fucking 459 mother fucker
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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So... Philip K Dick was right then? The Roman Empire never ended and we are living in black iron prisons! I just started reading Valis a few days ago.
In the mirror universe in Star Trek, Earth is ruled by what's essentially a continuation or successor to the Roman Empire, called the Terran Empire. They're fascists who colonize space and subjugate alien races.
What if, all this time, Star Trek did predict the future, but we didn't realize we were actually living in the mirror universe? It would explain why the Irish unification of 2024 didn't happen. 
the roman empire never ended, it just became the catholic church
Isn't it more spread by body lice than fleas? body lice actually live on clothing, and are relatively easy to control since you just need access to consistent laundry (they're nowhere near as hard to get rid of as bedbugs or even head lice). You pretty much only see this in the 21st century when there's a severe lack of housing and access to hygiene in general. Usually seen in refugee camps, concentration camps, prisons, homeless encampments, etc
The last sentence is an apt description of large parts of socal yes
You may have heard of the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Well, you're living in the Late Silicon Age collapse.
You see, metal never changes (ignore Uranium etal please).
Silicon is actually a semi-metal...
Unless you ask an astronomer, then everything but hydrogen and helium is a metal
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct. This is annoying because I do work in both astronomy and condensed matter. So I have to be careful of context for using words like metal.
Still not a metal according to astronomers.
Shaping up to be a really fun summer
April just started.
April just started.
We are barely a quarter of the way through this year.
I need to finish those AR builds
Now all we need is an antibiotic-resistant strain of yersinia pestis to really get shit started
I coincidentally remember reading something about natural parks in California being one of the few places in the West that were confirmed to have squirrels infected with this bacteria. 
Rodents in arid parts of the southwest in general are a reservoir population for it. People occasionally get infected from contact with them or things like dried rodent waste becoming airborne as dust when disturbed.
I'm not sure why it's so regional though. Maybe it doesn't spread as well in wetter or colder places with the rodent densities that currently exist for some reason? It's kind of weird that rats carried it all around the world hitching rides on damp, cold ships and now its range (in NA) is seemingly restricted to a hot, dry region far from any coast.
I remember some YouTube video that went over a paper on the natural range of the plague initially. The very first case the researchers think they found was in a trade stop village somewhere in Central Asia (like one of the more westward -stans I forget which) so the drier climate thing tracks with that... I guess???
You're right though that feels super weird.
Trying to look it up, it seems like the reservoirs for it are rodent species that don't just almost immediately die from the infection which happen to be ones that thrive in drier, warmer climates (although not exclusively: outside the US the main concentrations of reservoirs seem to be in the DRC, Madagascar, and Peru), while the kinds of rodents that thrive in urban areas are themselves way more vulnerable to it and die too fast to be reservoirs (this would be why the big historic plagues burnt themselves out relatively quickly: they wiped out their own vector enough that they stalled out and stopped rather than becoming endemic).
Since someone else mentioned prairie dogs, I'll add that it's apparently a big problem for those since they're in the same range as its reservoirs but aren't resistant to it so it can wipe out their colonies if they start to suffer an outbreak of it.
Oh that's really cool! Thanks for looking it up, hard hitting science hours over here 
Prairie dogs carry it