BOURBON VIRUS: It doesn’t come in a bottle. Sadly, this is a real pathogen (a thogotovirus). A woman in Missouri died from Bourbon virus in late June. Bourbon virus is likely tick-borne. It was first discovered in Bourbon County, Kansas in 2014. There have only been five confirmed cases, but the CDC is trying to learn more about the virus.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: My latest NY Observer essay: Options for dealing with North Korea’s ballistic missile threat.

RELATED: North Korea’s Hwasong-14 ICBM, which was test fired on July 4.

U.S. EXPEDITIONARY SEA BASE DEPLOYS: The USNS Lewis B. Puller is a mobile, floating forward staging base.

The huge ship

…is 784 feet long and has a 52,000 square-foot flight deck. It serves as a logistical hub for other ships with fuel and ammunition storage and repair facilities.

Its helicopter facilities and storage capacity make it ideal for humanitarian and disaster relief support alongside conventional military operations.

The Puller will be permanently stationed overseas to allow continuous suport for other deployed ships. Crew rotations would take place in theater.

Yes, it is named after Lientenant General Chesty Puller.

HE WASN’T STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES, BUT HE WAS STUCK: A contract worker got stuck in a Corpus Christi, Texas, bank ATM machine.

Shocked customers at a Texas ATM got more than cash from the money machine when a technician trapped behind it slipped notes through the receipt slot begging for help, police said…“He left his phone in his truck, he’s installing a new lock on the door, and he gets locked inside the building where the ATM is,” Officer Richard Olden of Corpus Christi Police told KRISTV.

Stuck inside an ATM with the overdrawn blues again? Let’s agree he had the blues.

MY LATEST NY OBSERVER ESSAY: Options for dealing with North Korea’s ballistic missile threat.

VERY RELATED: Chinese trade with North Korea up ten percent this year.

LIU XIAOBO DIES IN CHINESE HOSPITAL: A deserving Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Chinese human rights prisoner Liu Xiaobo died Thursday at age 61 following a high-profile battle with liver cancer that made his death as controversial as his life.

Liu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who spent his last eight years as a prisoner of conscience, passed away at a hospital in Shenyang, China, where he had been moved from his prison cell in the final stage of his illness.

I wrote a column about him in 2010.

Liu long ago joined the distinguished line of brave men and women trapped in police states who choose, in the name of liberty, to confront their nations’ authoritarian ideologies and instruments of terror. Many of these heroes die unheralded in a jail or an alley or a ditch. The tyrants erase their memory and hide their sacrifice.

He was a courageous man. His memory will be preserved.

SIX OPTIONS FOR DEALING WITH NORTH KOREA: My latest New York Observer essay. So far “Return Of Serve” has gotten the most buzz.

RELATED: Hawaii needs missile defense right now. For the record, THAAD has had 14 intercepts in 14 operational tests.

BUT BUT BUT LEFTIES ARE FOR THE PEOPLE: Former leftist president and left-wing icon, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has been convicted on corruption charges. The conviction was announced on Wednesday. A judge sentenced Lula to nine and a half years in prison. Lula will appeal the sentence. Brazil’s current president also faces corruption charges.

KIM JONG UN THREATENS TO TURN THE U.S. INTO “A PILE OF ASH”: Yeah, the usual verbal threats, but his missile technology is improving and he’s acquiring nukes. We’re going to have to act.

RELATED: Japan is purchasing Norway’s Joint Strike Missile. It’s a small, smart cruise missile with a 250 kilometer range. Japan will deploy the JSM on its F-35s. It’s yet another weapon in the U.S., Japanese and South Korean arsenals, (like the U.S. Army ATACMS), that is capable of turning North Korean missile launchers and similar targets into piles of ash.

BOUGHT FOR 100 EUROS, SOLD FOR 45,000: The flea market typewriter turned out to be a WW2 German Enigma cipher machine.

Cristian Gavrila, the collectible consignment manager at Artmark, told Reuters: “The collector bought it from a flea market. He’s a cryptography professor and… he knew very well what he was buying.”

Great find, great story.

FOR WORRIED READERS IN ANCHORAGE, HONOLULU AND POSSIBLY SAN FRANCISCO: My latest New York Observer essay. Six policy options for dealing with the fat kid, his noxious North Korean regime and his ICBMs.

ARMY TACTICAL MISSILE PREP IN KOREA: Great photo of a U.S. Army MLRS battery firing an ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) precision surface to surface missile. The rocket battery is deployed on a beach in South Korea. In 1997 I participated in a Ballistic Missile Defense Organization exercise. The exercise included using ATACMS to destroy a a couple of mobile SCUD launchers — before the launchers erected and fired their missiles. ATACMS has a range of over 160 kilometers.

RISE OF THE GIANT RANGEOMORPHS: As scary as an Al Gore or Michael Mann global warming climate change horror story. They lived in the ocean. They looked like plants. But they were probably animals, with ecophenotypic plasticity.

Ecophenotypic plasticity refers to changes in an organism’s form (or phenotype) wrought by environmental influences.

Rangeomorphs lived 570 million years ago, but ecophenotypic plasticity isn’t over ’til it’s over. The 21st century is plagued by new forms of ecophenotypic plasticity. For example, Hillary Clinton looks like an animal but she’s really a plant with political ecophenotypic plasticity. CNN looks like a news network but it’s really an ecophenotypic plastic banana Democrat propaganda machine. I could give you other examples but I’d rather pour myself a shot of bourbon.

HEY: OK, I added the O. Typo, not bourbon.

WORRIED ABOUT NORTH KOREAN ICBMS AND DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO?: Six course of action options for Trump to consider.

U.S. MAY HAVE HAD LIVE VIDEO OF KIM JONG UN VISITING A MISSILE LAUNCH SITE: That’s the claim in this Business Insider report. And if you can see him you could strike him with a precision munition. The implication is the U.S. had a surveillance drone over the test site.

The report concludes with this:

Perhaps rather than kill Kim and trigger a North Korean response, which could be massive, the US elected to signal to him that the best path to regime security would be to stay indoors and not play around near dangerous rocket engines, which have a habit of blowing up.

Now what we need to acquire is some very intimate video, something more risque than walking around a missile launch site while smoking cigarettes.

RELATED: Option 4, Decapitation, discussed.

GOING BALLISTIC ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA: Kim Jong Un has gone intercontinental ballistic. The essay examines several options for dealing with the rotund dictator and his regime.

TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY: Check out July 11, 1872.

Battle of the Hotel d’Europe, Alexandria: the American Consul and his party have a shoot out with some former Confederate officers serving in the Egyptian Army, everyone demonstrating bad aim

An odd historical sidelight.

Some background on the consul in question, George Harris Butler– who was a questionable fellow.

USN ISSUES SPECS FOR A NEW GUIDED MISSILE FRIGATE: It will have the Vertical Launching System for air defense missiles and be capable of independent operations.

RELATED: The Navy’s frigate controversy.

ANOTHER COFFEE UPDATE: Caffeinated or decaffeinated, it doesn’t matter. Coffee is associated with lower mortality rates. Two or three cups a day reduces your chance of death 18 percent.

RETURNING NORTH KOREA’S SERVE: Trump’s anti-missile missile option.

TRUMP’S SIX OPTIONS FOR DENUCLEARIZING NORTH KOREA: None of them are good.

FROM NORTH KOREA TO ANCHORAGE AND HONOLULU: North Korea’s Hwasong-14 ICBM. A Hwasong-14 was test-fired on July 4th.

NORTH KOREA CALLS U.S. PRACTICE BOMBING RUN A “PROVOCATION”: Pyongyang is referring to this B1-B exercise.

RELATED: B1-B at Nellis AFB, Nevada. The exhaust looks like a mirage.

THE DEVIL’S HENCHMEN: What to do with the corpses of Islamic State fighters? A gritty tour of hasty grave sites and wadis with scattered bones outside of Mosul.

AUSTRALIA CONSIDERING TRADE SANCTIONS ON CHINA OVER NORTH KOREA?: The Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is clarifying an earlier statement by the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce. Australia doesn’t support sanctions against China but against Chinese companies that violate UN sanctions on North Korea. But the subject has been raised. Beijing will read it as a diplomatic signal.

On July 6 Joyce, commenting on North Korea, said:

“The United States is not going to allow the capacity for a despotic dictator from North Korea to fulfill his rhetoric and develop a nuclear warhead that could hit the US or its allies — for which, we are one.”

Joyce said North Korea is testing the resolve of the U.S. and in his opinion “that’s a very foolish thing to do.”

Well, it’s a foolish thing to do when Donald Trump is president. If Barack Obama were still in charge — perhaps not so foolish.