{"id":207167,"date":"2026-03-06T10:09:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T10:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/207167\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T10:09:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T10:09:16","slug":"anyone-else-worried-about-the-new-virus-thats-hitting-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/207167\/","title":{"rendered":"Anyone Else Worried About the New Virus That\u2019s Hitting California?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Estimated4 min readThis Week in the Laboratories of Democracy<\/p>\n

(Optional Musical Accompaniment<\/a> to This Post)<\/p>\n

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what\u2019s going down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin\u2019 gets done, and where people are crazy and times are strange.<\/p>\n

First, an update on our favorite candidate in Tuesday\u2019s primary elections: Judge KP George of Fort Bend, Texas. He\u2019s the guy who flipped parties and became a Republican shortly after he was indicted for financial crimes, thereby reversing the usual trajectory of GOP crimes in office. Evidently, it didn’t help much. From Houston Public Radio<\/a>:<\/p>\n

George, elected as a Democrat in both 2018 and 2022, switched political parties and joined the GOP last summer in the wake of multiple criminal indictments. County prosecutors have accused him of money laundering and working with a former staffer to fake racist attacks against his own campaign. George received 8.4% of the vote Tuesday to place last in the five-candidate Republican primary. Former Sugar Land City Council member Daniel Wong won the race outright with 54.1% of the vote.<\/p>\n

Oh dear. Didn\u2019t even make it into double digits. Good luck in court, KP. You sit over there now, though.<\/p>\n

Let us move on to California, where we are meeting a new disease<\/a> just in time for Secretary Roadkill to tell us that the cure can be found in certain mushrooms native to the Marquesas. From the Los Angeles Times:
<\/p>\n

A respiratory virus that doesn\u2019t have a vaccine or a specific treatment regimen is spreading in some parts of California\u2014but there\u2019s no need to sound the alarm just yet, public health officials say.<\/p>\n

Except for the ever-constant alarm over the fact that our national public-health infrastructure is in the hands of crackpots and lunatics.<\/p>\n

A majority of Northern California communities have seen high concentrations of human metapneumovirus, or HMPV, detected in their wastewater, according to data from the WastewaterScan Dashboard, a public database that monitors sewage to track the presence of infectious diseases.<\/p>\n

Turns out it has come to call <\/a>up here too.<\/p>\n

According to Stanford University\u2019s WastewaterSCAN, new data shows the spread of human metapneumovirus throughout New England. WastewaterSCAN analyzes wastewater samples from sewage treatment plants to detect infectious diseases and inform public health responses at the local, regional, and national levels. … HMPV symptoms include cough, fever, nasal congestion, and shortness of breath. Infected people can spread the virus for up to a week after symptoms first appear, according to the Mayo Clinic.The virus can also lead to severe but less-common conditions, such as Asthma attacks, middle ear infections, and bronchiolitis\u2014infection in the small airways. It also can trigger croup, the \u201cbarking\u201d cough. The CDC says HMPV virus can also lead to mild illness in healthy children. The first human case of the HMPV was confirmed in 2001 in Holland, according to the Mayo Clinic. It has since spread all over the globe.<\/p>\n

So has ignorance. Is that a cause or a symptom?<\/p>\n

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Gum Rockrose Cultivator Friedman of the Algarve brings us a tale of Oklahoma and the Commonwealth (God save it!) joining hands in a very bizarre news story. From NonDoc:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Massachusetts man indicted in Oklahoma County with sending a letter that impersonated then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters sent a letter to Attorney General Gentner Drummond and media members today promising to plead guilty and asking for the attorney general of Tennessee to charge him for a 2024 arson where a trailer full of Bibles was burned outside a controversial pastor\u2019s church. Owen Thomas Cunningham emailed his letter to Drummond\u2019s communications team, nine media outlets and two members of the Wilson County Sheriff\u2019s Office in Tennessee where Cunningham took credit for the burning of a trailer filled with \u201cabout 200 Bibles\u201d outside of Global Vision Church in Mt. Juliet on Easter morning. <\/p>\n

Lost yet? There\u2019s more. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs a left-wing political activist who fears prison less than he fears false Christians and\/or white supremacists, I am happy to learn that there continue to be American law enforcement officials who are still interested in prosecuting white native-English-speakers, like me, for their crimes,\u201d Cunningham wrote to Drummond on Sunday.\u201cIs there any chance you could reach out to your counterpart in the state of Tennessee, A.G. Jonathan Skrmetti, and urge him to follow your lead, and get him to issue an indictment for the religiously motivated anti-Christian hate crime, of arson, which I committed in Mt. Juliet TN in March 2024?\u201d Cunningham wrote to Drummond. \u201cI allege that I am the person who perpetrated this act of anti-Christian arson, and I could have substantiated this to the Sheriff\u2019s Office of Wilson County TN, by sharing details of the crime that were not released to the public. The law enforcement officials of Wilson County TN seemed more interested in holding the investigation in permanent limbo, neither interviewing any persons of interest, nor declaring the charges dropped. It seems, alas, law enforcement officials in Tennessee are not as competent and dedicated as their colleagues are in Oklahoma.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Cunningham is from the Commonwealth (God save it), so understandably he might believe this kind of finagling is how politics and law enforcement are supposed to work. I\u2019d like to personally welcome politicians from Tennessee and Oklahoma to Kerry Corner.<\/p>\n

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"4 min readThis Week in the Laboratories of Democracy (Optional Musical Accompaniment to This Post) Being our semi-regular…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[95586,7,9,8,47544,95587,9569,9568,95585,95588],"class_list":["post-207167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-about-that-new-virus-in-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-content-type-news","tag-contentid-414fb8af-b384-4292-bec0-ca3951c34263","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-locale-us","tag-shorttitle-so","tag-subsection-politics-with-charles-p-pierce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}