A Dreadful Horseman

It should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse has been loose in North Korea.  Well at this point I think even Famine should be retching his guts out on the ground.  The starving, oppressed, enslaved people of North Korea have been reduced to cannibals.  To find sustenance they have resorted to eating their children.  Yep even eating the corpses of their children.

Now I have a question all you world leaders and beautiful people who are always screaming about some calamity across the globe.  What are you going to do with North Korea?

Actually that is a rhetorical question.  They will do nothing because to do something truly constructive requires real effort. 

For the world leaders, they would have to admit how badly they have fumbled North Korea all these years.  For Beijing to allow its useful toy to be deposed.  Jimmy Carter to admit fault.  Madeline Albright to take her basketball and go home.  Things that will never happen because that would mean admitting they are not perfect.

For the pretty people its even worse.  To work on something besides keeping fit, eating their organically grown vegan overpriced food, wearing fabulous clothes, ride in limos, and go on talk shows.  Something selfless instead of selfish.

What a horrible brutish world exists in North Korea.  And the ones who clamor for Syrian intervention won't say the same thing about North Korea.  Pox upon them and their works.

Black Friday 2011

Since this is Black Friday when screaming hoards of bargain shoppers have besieged major retailers since the wee hours of the morning, I decided to be a bit green and lessen the traffic gridlock while tackling the very smelly issue of Occupiers and their bodily wastes. So now on CafePress at the Sufa Shop is the above bumper sticker. Can buy 1, 10, or even 50 of them. And can even order them with a clear background, which will be better for the rear window of a protestor's SmartCar or Volt. {the previous sentence is defined as humor, please be responsible with the bumper stickers.} Just buy one please. Thank you.

Zuccotti Flotsam

For such a small area in a very large metropolitan area, the protesters at Zuccotti Park managed to produce a staggering amount of waste. If this place had been allowed to lay fallow and become an archeology site in the future, one wonders what those scientists would think of what we call 'Modern' people?

Twenty-six dump trucks of material was hauled off. Impressive for a mere two months of occupancy. So far two smashed guitars and a bent laptop computer have been identified. Also spoiled food and human waste have been discovered in the mountain of waste. To prove how dangerous this waste is, used hypodermic needles have been found along with broken glass.

I earnestly pray the ten sanitation workers are being extra careful. Getting pricked by a dirty needle is not something I want to face. But they are doing their jobs because the protesters were too lazy. For this these sanitation workers have my utmost respect.

If I was an archaeologist excavating Zuccotti Park in the future, I think I would have but one conclusion of the inhabitants. I would think I had found evidence of a feral wasteful primitive tribe of savages.

The Hard Call in 2011

Yesterday I wrote about the impeding health crisis that is festering inside the Occupy Atlanta and Occupy Wall Street camps. As the day went on, I could not leave alone what I wrote and its implications. And my sense of deja vu kicked in as I remembered I had wrote a post on pandemics.

In 2008 I wrote The Hard Call. In it I discussed pandemics in fiction and reality in relation to new guidelines that were being formulated on who to save in case the whole world was struck by something akin to the Spanish Influenza outbreak. Since I wrote that post, the original news article link has vanished so I found another one that reports the same information. The guidelines boil down to trying to save the people most needed to rebuild a civilization. People over 85 would be out of luck which promoted some civil rights lawyers to get annoyed.

Tuberculosis and Norovirus are airborne diseases. Both cities in question are dense urban areas. Alarm bells are going off in my head. First because of the facts I just listed. Secondly because both cities are major airline hubs so infected people could get on planes and carry their illness to cities as yet untouched. We have been worried about H1N1 leveling the world, it frightens me to think of these Occupy protestors as two-legged versions of the rats who brought the Black Death to Europe. But that possibility exists.

I earnestly hope the people in New York City, Atlanta, CDC, FEMA, DHS, and the White House are podering this possibility. And that they are doing things to correct it before a pandemic erupts and the hard call has to be made on who lives.

Masque of Zuccotti

A grim milestone has been reached in the various Occupy tent cities. In the months they have existed, at least seven people have died so far.

How much longer must the impending health disaster called the Occupy movement continue? Yesterday I alluded to the TB outbreak in Atlanta, Mut on her blog notes the strain of TB is highly drug resistant. Which means the longer the protesters huddle in their clump of tents in poor weather the greater the number of casualties. The irony is the Center for Disease Control is headquartered in Atlanta, GA, the organization that will be tasked to contain and cure the outbreak. CDC has been reporting, as of 2010, an overall decline in TB cases in the United States to include fatalities, I wonder how long that trend will last if TB spreads from beyond the protesters' encampment?

Zuccotti Park in New York City is facing a far more insidious disease than the current Zuccotti Lung- Norovirus. Zuccotti is not the best place to live now, with Norovirus it will be far worse as the protesters will suffer vomiting, stomach pain, and diarrhea. People will be spreading the misery around since a person with Norovirus is infectious from the moment they contract it to as long as two weeks after the symptoms have passed. And it spreads quickly in closed environments like nursing homes and cruise ships.

“Pretty much everything here is a good way to get sick,” said Salvatore Cipolla, 23, from Long Island. “It’ll definitely thin the herd.”

I wonder if Salvatore Cipolla will be so blase and sanguine when he becomes just another statistic hacking his lungs onto the sidewalk or into the shrubs? This New York Times article is not painting a pretty picture of the protest folks. People just throwing their trash anywhere is indicative of the mindset of so many protesters, once something has stopped satisfying their immediate need they discard it without a thought to consequences. Read the whole article, its appalling what is going on in that park.

The following fact I am breaking out into a separate paragraph because it needs to be highlighted to show how skewed the priorities of the Occupy Wall Street crowd are. The OWS command tent has electricity or how else could the world watch their Livestream broadcast. Their generators are even run on bio-diesel to calm their qualms of mistreating Gaia. But the above New York Times article says the OWS medical tent has NO electricity so doctors and nurses strap flashlights to their foreheads.

For The Occupiers

Since the weather is turning colder, I decided to make a de-motivational to commemorate the coming of the snow and freezing rain. I do hope the Occupy crowd bundle up or move back home before the hypothermia and frost-bite get them. Though it seems lice and TB are already claiming victims, it seems to be the return of the Dark Ages. And next there will be calls of 'Bring out your dead!' unless something changes.

Fools Rush In Where Scientists Warily Tread

I remember reading a collection of science fiction short stories at my aunt’s house as a child visiting one summer. My uncle had passed away by this time and both were WWII AAF veterans with a house in Florida. I think the author was Leigh Brackett, but it has been so many years and she got rid of the books since so that I cannot attest to such. But this one story has stuck with me, more so than Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring ever has. The story was called The Gone Dogs.

This was a future world where humans had made contact with aliens who have shared technology with Earth. Suddenly a disease erupts that is wiping out all domesticated dogs and this sends the people into a panic. After frantic efforts to save some dogs in a remote robotic controlled super kennel, the truth is learned as to what caused this plague. A rancher, using his alien supplied gene-splicer, decided to wipe out the coyote. Alas his coding was not up to snuff and his pet virus jumped to dogs with human beings as carriers. The last dogs on Earth die when a woman, deranged with grief over the death of her dog, breaks the quarantine and infects the last of Earth’s dogs.

Pretty scary stuff packed into a story that is now 40+ years old, back when people were just teasing out the first bits of information about DNA and genes. In fact it is far more frightening than some later literature written by Michael Crichton. One does not need a Tyrannosaurus-Rex sized warning to realize amateurs playing with recombining DNA is something to be avoided.

I should amend the above statement with a caveat; people with a healthy dose of common sense would avoid doing such. But people in this story from the Associated Press seem to be missing that needed dosage.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.
In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

Needless to say, I am very much concerned. Even if their project is successful there is the problem of this living creation not mutating into something lethal. And what of their failures, are they following proper procedures like incinerating them at a very high temperature or are they merely pouring them down the drain and hoping its all good?

What a ‘brave’ new world these people are ushering in. The world will not end with a bang, but with a whimper or even a bio-engineered sniffle.

The Hard Call

End of the world scenarios have always been popular in fiction. On film from George Pal's When Worlds Collide and War of the Worlds to Night of the Comet to Armageddon to all the remakes of I Am Legend, the film vault is fairly full. The book side is also pretty full. From H.G. Wells comes such as War of the Worlds and the Time Machine, Dean Ing's Pulling Through, Crichton's Andromeda Strain, David Brin's The Postman, and John Ringo's new novel The Last Centurion; all talk in various ways about the end of the world.

The United States government has spent a fair bit of time and money pondering end of the world scenarios and how to survive them. This used to fall under Civil Defense and it concerned shelters and food supplies in case of disasters like nuclear attack. Remember 'Duck, roll, and cover?' I don't but have seen those films. While the various government entities at all levels also looked at how to protect the infrastructure from any kind of attack. Now all of this is rolled into two organizations: Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

One of the greatest threats to modern Western civilization though is not nuclear weapons or terrorists, but something far smaller. As prosaic Earth germs devastated the Martians in War of the Worlds, more lethal such bugs can wipe out the human race if given the right circumstances. In Rainbow Six, its a genetically modified version of Ebola that almost does it. The Andromeda Strain was of alien origin. Brin's hero is in one of the last militia levees trying to protect grain silos after such bio-weapons as the Super Mumps have run their course. Ringo's new novel is about a new version of Bird Flu that has jumped to humans in mainland China that races around the world bringing civilization to its knees. All this is of course fiction.

Reality can be far more horrific. The Black Death that knocked Europe to its knees was pretty grim with some villages becoming ghost towns with nothing alive and bodies left to rot where they died. This was the setting for Masque of the Red Death. Or in a fit of gallows humour, Monty Python has someone calling out 'Bring out your dead.' The Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919 swept the world killing some 20 to 40 million people, far more deaths than was experienced by all combatants in World War I. And estimated 675,000 Americans died of the Spanish Influenza out of an estimated population of 104,550,000 people or almost 0.65% of the US died. If this flu struck the current US population of over 302,200,000 then over 1,964,000 would die if that 0.65% mortality rate held true. But that historical mortality rate might not hold true since the modern world is far more mobile than it was in 1918. In 1918 the fastest transit system was still the ship, in 2008 it is the airplane and we can span the globe in mere hours versus days in 1918. As SARS proved how fast such can spread with air travel.

So where is all this heading you ask? Well the US government in conjunction with doctors and others have decided to take a frank look at how to respond to a modern pandemic. More specifically on who to try and save, this is what the military calls triage and dates to Napoleonic times. You separate your casualties into three broad categories: those who will die no matter what you do so you set them aside to die, those who are in grave danger but can be saved if operated on quickly, and finally those who are wounded but not severely and can wait for treatment. Now apply this to a modern flu pandemic wracking the whole country or even the world and look at who can best serve saving civilization if the resources are applied to saving them. This is what this study set out to do.

Naturally the lawyers are already tossing sand into the gears of this study and its recommendations even before its officially published. To quote Gostin, public health law Georgetown, "The recommendations would probably violate federal laws against age discrimination and disability discrimination." Gostin and others like him would handcuff all the doctors and nurses to force them to employ what could be scarce resources upon people with incurable cancer or mental illness while possibly letting otherwise healthy people die. All in the name of legally imposed fairness amidst a pandemic. The world would end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

To quote Dr. Asha Devereaux who lead the task force, compiling the list "was emotionally difficult for everyone." And as she later adds: "You never know," Devereaux said. "SARS took a lot of folks by surprise. We didn't even know it existed."

This is why I call this post The Hard Call.

Update: Thanks DiabloVision for catching my math goof: 0.65%.