Tags
André Carrilho, Culture Jamming, Ebola, End-Stage Capitalism, Jani Leinonen, Ron English, The Onion, Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian
Capitalism’s onward march to self-destruction (by Polyp):
Poignant Ebola cartoon by André Carrilho:
In Our Dreams We Have Seen Another World:
Culture Jamming by JANI LEINONEN:
Culture Jamming money:
More culture jamming with Ron English:
Bon appétit…
Irresponsible parenting in 21st century end-stage capitalism:
R. Crumb has this down way back in the late 1960s. He now lives in France with this family.
LikeLike
Yes. Have you seen the excellent documentary of him?:
LikeLike
And the later 1994 doc ‘Crumb’:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1fd_1313364103&comments=1
LikeLike
Here’s a fun way to have fun while preparing for the apocalypse: http://www.idahozombies.com/
LikeLike
It’s been a while since Bill Maher was right on:
LikeLike
“The war industry is in its twilight right now.”
He’s right about the beheading videos as well.
“…the Clintons, Bill and Hillary Clinton, are two of the most fierce projectors of the politics of the American empire, and they also have very close relationships with some of the most nefarious characters from the Bush family… Hillary Clinton is a fierce neoliberal who believes in backing up the so-called “hidden hand of the free market” with merciless, iron-fisted military policies.”
LikeLike
And yet Eric Prince was on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show not too long ago getting the royal treatment. AND our True Detective dark & doomy hero, Matthew McConaughey is now pimping Lincolns on the TV. Trump was right; they own everyone.
LikeLike
“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”
~ Frederick Jameson, FUTURE CITY
LikeLike
Nothing lasts forever. I have no idea how long capitalism will be around, but the foundations of Globalization are so rotten and unstable that it could fall tomorrow and it would be no surprise. Except on the MSM “who could have ever saw it coming?” and/or “it was a software error!”
LikeLike
So, here are with old Goodman with Scahill (he’s almost a regular on the show. When’s the last time Goodman had John Pilger on and did the show even cover the new film “Kill the Messenger” about Gary Webb. After driving Amy into Manhattan from an event in Flushing Meadow park while I was running the WBAI first LAB a while back I got a front row seat to get a sense of her stunning personality.
It’s very different when you’re no longer part of the audience, but are outside and interacting with those at the front of the room.
And we’re still supposed to take what Scahill says and place him on a pedestal. What’s good for the goose is still good for the gander. Sorry. I find it hard to believe that he’s involved with the Intercept as a founder and never thought to check up on the actions of the man funding this news site.
How, rapidly we do forget. So, Pierre Omidayr’s involvement with the funding of the revolution groups in the Ukraine gets swept under the rug. It’s almost analogous of Hearst’s involvement in promoting news to inflame emotions so we’d get involved in WWI.
I think we forget that back in the day not all newspapers where anymore open and honest than Fox news was today. It was an M&A world which enabled them to amass great power and wealth. We imagine that all newspapers were better, it was only that there were more small enterprises that were still independent, but that wasn’t going to last forever.
It was advertising that lead to the great wealth of Hearst and enabled these papers to garner such a lofty position. How else could artists such as Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Harold Gray(Orphan Annie), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates) and quite a few others be paid salaries in the hundreds of thousands (and this during the depression). People have forgotten that comic strips and their creators were celebrities on the level today such people as Oprah and George Clooney are seen. Hard to believe isn’t it. In only a century.
LikeLike
I suppose it’s a case of not throwing the baby out with the bath water. Scahill’s analysis is still valid. Were Scahill’s previous employers as clean as the driven snow?
LikeLike
We’ve (you and i) have gone over this territory before. Doesn’t matter if Schill’s analyis is valid (which I think it is) or that his previous employers aren’t any more clean (although I’m not sure Omiydar isn’t responsible for more deaths than they were considering what’s occurred in the Ukraine).
I agree that nobody’s employee’s are clean and I’m not suggesting anyone’s is. What troubles me is the inability for us to be critical thinkers and put information into a larger context. I run into people who put people such as Scahill (a true narcissus from my observation, again my time at WBAI and other groups) and Goodman onto pedestals within factoring in that they are as flawed as the system they are criticizing. You cant’ imagine what is was like interacting with the WBAI audience (let alone the candidates, staff and on air prima donas) while running the election. People don’t want to look any further than skin deep.
Amy is a goddess doing everything right. Not true. I know people who have left DN due to being unable to work within what to many would be an oppressive, controlling regime. I just take each piece of information and add it to the tapestry. People seem to need to believe completely in others and be led instead of being a voice at the table.
Just between you and I (and whoever else is here). I’m not in agreement with you regarding what occurred on September 11. Too many questions for me in areas that few look towards. Yet, I’ve continued to read and participate in your blog. Wish Brutus would too. I know Moore and u left and i’m not sure they even stop by anymore.
Remember my views are band from the Scribbler’s site as being too radical. It saddens me and yet is funny. Like a Grimm’s fairy tale.
I remember the discourse when Paul Getty accused me of hating children. That was a red herring to distract from the larger conversation I was attempting to have. It’s why I just posted that link to the article by Michael Lewis about sending your children to work on Wall Street.
There isn’t anything job today that I could think of (maybe really small farms, maybe, I don’t know anymore) that wouldn’t contribute damage, but on a spectrum Wall Street is far and away one of the worst offenders. And this I know of what I speak. After runs at E.F. Hutton, Smith Barner, Merrill Lynch, First Boston, Shearson Leahman Hutton and DTC I realized early in the game that brokers are a con job, like snake oil salesman.
It’s not that I disagree with the baby and bathwater analogy. It’s my firm belief that we need to understand all this in context. So, I think Scahill has information that is valid, but we need to understand he’s still standing on quicksand himself and is not above the fray.
LikeLike
Human’s have an amazing ability to compartmentalize even the most conflicting of positions. Scahill & Goodman are reformers. They have to be because collapse and starting over (if they survive) ends their careers. That’s not allowed. How many people considered successful or who consider themselves successful can admit whats coming? Way less then the small handful of regular folks that see and admit it.
LikeLike
PMB says: “Just between you and I (and whoever else is here). I’m not in agreement with you regarding what occurred on September 11.”
That’s a far cry from concocting an elaborate conspiracy of planned demolition of skyscrapers, don’t you think?
If anyone wants to know where I’m at with such conspiracy theories, you can read here.
Also, I’ve never written down explicit rules of discussion for this site, but I’m in complete agreement with the rules that Polyg has set down for the use of his artwork:
I think my cartoons appearing on a page imply I have given them my support, and so… I do NOT allow them to be used in ANY WAY by any groups supporting, promoting or advocating any of the following –
9/11 ‘inside job’ conspiracy theories.
‘Chemtrail’ conspiracy theories.
Anti vaccination hysteria.
Climate change denial. (Unlikely, but weirder things have happened)
Holocaust denial.
Sites that stink of anti Semitism or that identify the Jews as the ruling power elite. (No problem if it’s just harsh criticism of Israeli foreign policy.)
Sites using relentless criticism of Islam as a front for racism, eg the EDL.
The following individuals (and their supporters) are explicitly barred from using my work, nor do I want it appearing on sites promoting them –
David Icke
Natural News
Alex Jones
Rense
‘Davo’ Dees
If any of the above do use them, I will take action against you – it’s surprisingly easy, and I’ve successfully done it in the past. I’m an angry and intolerant person, so don’t bother – you’ll regret it.
LikeLike
R. Crumb on the U.S. economy back in 1994. Well said.
LikeLike
Sadly,
I’ve saw the film when it first came out. Interesting and sad. Very revealing about he family, especially about the fate of his brother. I wonder if Crumb has read any of Allison Bechtel’s work. Crumb never did work as self disclosing as hers back then.
From this clip it doesn’t seem that Crumb understands that we live on a finite planet and that capitalism and consumerism is at the core of the issues we face. . I’m not sure Crumb read either the “Limits to Growth” or “Overshoot.”
Anyone interested in signed and numbered editions of the Complete Crumb or the Crumb Sketckbook? Low numbers. Pristine condition. I can get them for you easy. Smoke a little weed and read this stuff and you’ll be on cloud 9 for days or weeks.
LikeLike
Spoken like a true capitalist.
LikeLike
Today is the 55th anniversary of my birthday.
I’ll be brief.
I have a deep emotional attachment to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
At the same time, I have a deep familial attachment to the St. Louis Cardinals.
After much soul searching and many fine ales, I have resolved this conflict.
My personal philosophy now goes something like this….
GO HONG KONG!!!!
P.S.
Thanx for the R.Crumb documentary. Very meaty.
Fondly,
Golda Meir
LikeLike
LikeLike
Few people articulate the current state of affairs as well as George Monbiot:
…what we see now is something new: a speed of destruction that exceeds even that of the first settlement of the Americas, 14,000 years ago, when an entire hemisphere’s ecology was transformed through a firestorm of extinction within a few dozen generations, in which the majority of large vertebrate species disappeared.
Many people blame this process on human population growth, and there’s no doubt that it has been a factor. But two other trends have developed even faster and further. The first is the rise in consumption; the second is amplification by technology. Every year, new pesticides, new fishing technologies, new mining methods, new techniques for processing trees are developed. We are waging an increasingly asymmetric war against the living world.
But why are we at war? In the rich nations, which commission much of this destruction through imports, most of our consumption has nothing to do with meeting human needs.
This is what hits me harder than anything: the disproportion between what we lose and what we gain. Economic growth in a country whose primary and secondary needs have already been met means developing ever more useless stuff to meet ever fainter desires.
For example, a vague desire to amuse friends and colleagues (especially through the Secret Santa nonsense) commissions the consumption of thousands of tonnes of metal and plastic, often confected into complex electronic novelties: toys for adults. They might provoke a snigger or two, then they are dumped in a cupboard. After a few weeks, scarcely used, they find their way into landfill.
In a society bombarded by advertising and driven by the growth imperative, pleasure is reduced to hedonism and hedonism is reduced to consumption. We use consumption as a cure for boredom, to fill the void that an affectless, grasping, atomised culture creates, to brighten the grey world we have created.
We care ever less for the possessions we buy, and dispose of them ever more quickly. Yet the extraction of the raw materials required to produce them, the pollution commissioned in their manufacturing, the infrastructure and noise and burning of fuel needed to transport them are trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate than the stuff we produce. The loss of wildlife is a loss of wonder and enchantment, of the magic with which the living world infects our lives.
Perhaps it is misleading to suggest that “we” are doing all this. It’s being done not only by us but to us. One of the remarkable characteristics of recent growth in the rich world is how few people benefit. Almost all the gains go to a tiny number of people: one study suggests that the richest 1% in the United States capture 93% of the increase in incomes that growth delivers. Even with growth rates of 2 or 3% or more, working conditions for most people continue to deteriorate, as we find ourselves on short contracts, without full employment rights, without the security or the choice or the pensions our parents enjoyed.
Working hours rise, wages stagnate or fall, tasks become duller, more stressful and harder to fulfill, emails and texts and endless demands clatter inside our heads, shutting down the ability to think, corners are cut, conditions deteriorate, housing becomes almost impossible to afford, there’s ever less money for essential public services. What and whom is this growth for?
It’s for the people who run or own the banks, the hedge funds, the mining companies, the advertising firms, the lobbying companies, the weapons manufacturers, the buy-to-let portfolios, the office blocks, the country estates, the offshore accounts. The rest of us are induced to regard it as necessary and desirable through a system of marketing and framing so intensive and all-pervasive that it amounts to brainwashing.
A system that makes us less happy, less secure, that narrows and impoverishes our lives, is presented as the only possible answer to our problems. There is no alternative – we must keep marching over the cliff. Anyone who challenges it is either ignored or excoriated.
And the beneficiaries? Well they are also the biggest consumers, using their spectacular wealth to exert impacts thousands of times greater than most people achieve. Much of the natural world is destroyed so that the very rich can fit their yachts with mahogany, eat bluefin tuna sushi, scatter ground rhino horn over their food, land their private jets on airfields carved from rare grasslands, burn in one day as much fossil fuel as the average global citizen uses in a year.
Thus the Great Global Polishing proceeds, wearing down the knap of the Earth, rubbing out all that is distinctive and peculiar, in human culture as well as nature, reducing us to replaceable automata within a homogenous global workforce, inexorably transforming the riches of the natural world into a featureless monoculture…
LikeLike
Yet, didn’t Monbiot have a stroke, brain tumor, or an aneurysm within the last few years. I thought so when he recanted about Peak Oil. Doesn’t he now wholeheartedly support nuclear (especially after Fukushima)? But, hey none of us are perfect and who am I sit in judgement here.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/peak-oil-we-we-wrong
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/03/21/going-critical/
But, doesn’t Oprah have the right to spend about 15K a month to keep her lawn bright green and healthy (depends on your definition of health). So, what if just some hundred or so miles away people cant’ get any water out of their tap. This is America after all. The land of opportunity, just ask pretty much any cab driver in NY and they’ll tell you it’s the greatest country on the face of the planet.
I’m just waiting for the great exodus of Hollywood and it’s entire entourage to start leaving the state. I wonder where will Hollywood II wind up, Nebraska or Kansas. Maybe those states aren’t the best to choose from as we’re depleting the Ogallala Aquifer at such a rate that they may be SOFL (S–t Out of Luck) withing 25 years.
Maybe not even in the continental U.S.A. Imagine if Hollywood relocated to an Island. Not so hard to imagine considering the level of intellect of those running the business; but not a real good long or short term plan as that piece of real estate will probably be underwater pretty soon; but they’ll get it at bargain basement prices.
And every time I check Mark Evanier’s (comic book and television writer) site to see if he’s willing to acknowledge how serious the situation is in CA (Evanier was born and raised in CA (or has lived there from a very early age) and just raves about it) from the drought, or that the size of the plastic gyre in the pacific can now be seen from CA, or the vanishing marine life or the radiation from Fukushima, he goes on and on and on about the latest release of the Dick Van Dyke show on blueray (of which he owns all versions of these DVD sets) or the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (it sure is).
Mark continues to travel all over the country to those comic book conventions (that are more about entertainment than about comic books themselves). There’s one coming close to your area soon (check out Wizard World or Comic Con). You can go inside if you’ve got the cash for the price of a ticket (be warned if you make it a family outing you’ll have to mortgage something to afford the event plus food) and get crushed in the crowds or just walk around outside to see the huge lines waiting to get in (for many it’s well over an hour’s wait in line).
Hey, I wonder if we’ll have crowds like this when we open the Soylent Centers much like the one Eddie G. (Sol) checked himself into towards the end of Soylent Green. After much thought I’ve finally come to the conclusion that this was one of those rare cases where the changes made for the film created a better story than the original Harry Harrison novel. Although there’s still plenty of holes and inconsistencies in the script. W\hat’s powering those huge earth movers and trucks (obviously there’s still some oil extraction and refining going on to provide the fuel for those vehicles; imagine the EORI at that point, probably well into negative territory)?
LikeLike
Epic. Point well taken on Monbiot. He’s far from a deep green ecologist.
Message to the world:
When in catastrophic overshoot, stop digging.
LikeLike
I like that.
“When in catastrophic overshoot, stop digging.”
Maybe you could ask Stephanie McMillian to draw a cartoon with that as it’s theme.
LikeLike
I’ll draw it.
LikeLike
As techno-capitalist carbon man continues working to destroy all life on the very planet that gave birth to him, he arrogantly looks to the stars to escape his crimes:
…Though we are still in the infancy of space travel, he says, “At our current rate of technological growth, humanity is on a path to be godlike in its capabilities.”…
…Musk’s initial plan hinges on a debut mission to Mars currently slated for the mid-2030s, when the planet’s orbit will align it optimally with Earth’s. He envisions a colony up and running by 2040, comprising a community of settlers who would fund the roughly $500,000 voyage themselves.
“It’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff,” he says, “like when people moved to the early American colonies.”
All told, transporting 1 million people to Mars by the year 2100 would likely require 100,000 spaceship trips — including both humans and cargo, Musk says. And in order to accomplish this, he is working on a “reusable rocket” called the Mars Colonial Transporter, according to Aeon, which differs from traditional launch systems that expend upon deployment…
…But even still, once we’ve arrived, the picture of colonial life on Mars looks rather bleak in Anderson’s view. With deadly climates (even in a spacesuit), colonists would likely live underground in windowless caves, where homesickness, anarchy, cannibalism or a whole host of other communal breakdowns could soon set in.
That said, Musk said he would only take the voyage to Mars himself provided “I could be confident that my death wouldn’t result in the primary mission of the company falling away.”
After all, the way he sees it, it’s a mission in which the very fate of humanity is hanging delicately in the balance.
LikeLike
“But even still, once we’ve arrived, the picture of colonial life on Mars looks rather bleak in Anderson’s view. With deadly climates (even in a spacesuit), colonists would likely live underground in windowless caves, where homesickness, anarchy, cannibalism or a whole host of other communal breakdowns could soon set in.”
So, why bother going to Mars at all I wonder. If you just stay here and hang around here a bit longer you’ll have a front row seat to all that and more, much more.
I’m reminded of a Steve Ditko – Stan Lee story from Amazing Adult Fantasy #7, Dec 1961 called “The Last Man on Earth.” Plot was one where guy builds himself a reallly expensive bomb shelter and sits out what he thinks is a mass atomic war. Only it wasn’t and he winds up being the last man on earth (I won’t reveal the plot twist for those who want to read the story. Hey, imagine there actually was a time when Spider-Man didn’t exist.
I’ve given up trying to figure out how to put video or images into my posts. If anyone wants to point me to simple place to get the html code that would be appreciated.
This might have been the splash page Mike display a few posts ago. Ditko at his prime, before he was taken in the cult or Ayn Rand. A criminal is a criminal for the rest of his life. Too bad that Ditko devolved into seeing the world so simplistically. Wonder what he thinks of those in our government who haven’t been convicted, but are still criminals.
LikeLike
I’ll look into the codes tonight and post them, but gotta get shut eye for now — working night shift.
LikeLike
Here is the code to type in:
LikeLike
“God-like”, that’s great. Couldn’t our moronic techno-messiah come up with something better than that? How about a “God-like” time machine to transport a terminator back in time to kill the first Elon Musk type apes that sent us down this cancerous technological path. That’s right America, let the dopamine flow freely, Elon Musk is here to deliver you to the promised land, I mean a desert that makes Death Valley look like an absolute paradise. Oh well, American citizens are too damned stupid to know the difference between their right and left hands. Go ahead little techno-boy, your flock awaits.
LikeLike
Ebola compared to historical epidemics and wars
As hideous as Ebola is and as horrible as the straight-line logarithmic projections look for the coming year, it isn’t as bad as some things that have fallen on humanity. If the efforts to stop this deadly disease are successful in the next few months it won’t impact humanity greatly, but if it isn’t contained by April next year it may go unchecked until it runs its natural course. That could happen, and if it does it will be the greatest disaster ever. The reason is that if everyone is exposed and catches it, and half die, that would be three billion people. That is not impossible, and the bubonic plague may have killed half of the world’s population by about 1350. The figures are very vague, but there were vast numbers of people killed. These days we have better means of coping with disease, and apparently the transmission is well known and thus easily avoided. The present Ebola strain requires direct contact with bodily fluids from a very sick person, so that is easily avoided, except for family members and medical staff. The recent Hajj to Mecca by many Africans and their mixing with two million people may be a turning point for humanity.
Click to enlarge:
Logarithmic charts are good for showing biological growth, which is how Ebola behaves, and we humans are now its food. To bring Ebola infections back to zero requires every example of it residing in humans to be destroyed. This disease has a wild reservoir, possibly in bats or primates, and every few years there is a single transfer to humans. If that transfer is in a remote village, many of those people die, and the disease dies with them, but in this case the disease has spread to larger cities and people are infecting other people. Presently there are over seven billion people on Earth, so the disease has plenty of population to infect if it gets the chance. The sooner it is totally stopped the better, because it only takes a single case to get it going again. Presently there are about seven thousand known cases, and that is difficult, but if the straight-line logarithmic projections above are accurate, by April there could be seven million cases, and that would probably make it impossible to stop, and the disease would run its course.
The chart above gives some perspective on the disasters that have come to humanity. There are many more, but these are the worst ones. They are derived from List of wars and Anthropogenic disasters by death toll, on Wikipedia and a List of epidemics. The oldest one listed on the chart is the Yellow Turban War ending in 205, which killed 3 million people, but there were only 250 million people in the world at that time, so for comparison with the present 7 billion people they are divided by 250 million and we get a multiplier of 28 times as many people now as then. So a dotted line is placed on the chart representing the relative deaths today compared to those of that ancient war, and that gives almost 100 million. The number used in the calculation was the lowest given in the chart; if the highest had been used it would be 196 million. These are dreadful numbers, but by looking at the chart it is easy to see they have been greatly exceeded by the Plague in 1450 and by the voluntary actions of the Mongol invasions, and Tamerlane, and by involuntary diseases like the flu of 1920.
The authorities tell us not to panic, that this disease is being controlled, but the only time a disease like this one is under control is when it is totally stopped, and gone, and at present it is still on the logarithmic growth line. I posted last week some things that can be done to slow and eventually stop this disease. How to prevent Ebola, the common cold and infectious disease.
LikeLike
For the R. Crumb fans, click here.
LikeLike
MORE CLIMATE UNDERESTIMATION
Different depths reveal ocean warming trends
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29474646
Quantifying Underestimates of Long-term Upper-Ocean Warming
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/about/staff/Durack/dump/oceanwarming/
LikeLike
The work of Cheyenne Randall:
LikeLike
Been moving house.This should get me back into the swing of things. 🙂
LikeLike
…
Why did WHO react so late?
On the one hand, it was because their African regional office isn’t staffed with the most capable people but with political appointees. And the headquarters in Geneva suffered large budget cuts that had been agreed to by member states. The department for haemorrhagic fever and the one responsible for the management of epidemic emergencies were hit hard. But since August WHO has regained a leadership role.
There is actually a well-established procedure for curtailing Ebola outbreaks: isolating those infected and closely monitoring those who had contact with them. How could a catastrophe such as the one we are now seeing even happen?
I think it is what people call a perfect storm: when every individual circumstance is a bit worse than normal and they then combine to create a disaster. And with this epidemic there were many factors that were disadvantageous from the very beginning. Some of the countries involved were just emerging from terrible civil wars, many of their doctors had fled and their healthcare systems had collapsed. In all of Liberia, for example, there were only 51 doctors in 2010, and many of them have since died of Ebola.
The fact that the outbreak began in the densely populated border region between Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia …
… also contributed to the catastrophe. Because the people there are extremely mobile, it was much more difficult than usual to track down those who had had contact with the infected people. Because the dead in this region are traditionally buried in the towns and villages they were born in, there were highly contagious Ebola corpses travelling back and forth across the borders in pickups and taxis. The result was that the epidemic kept flaring up in different places.
For the first time in its history, the virus also reached metropolises such as Monrovia and Freetown. Is that the worst thing that can happen?
In large cities – particularly in chaotic slums – it is virtually impossible to find those who had contact with patients, no matter how great the effort. That is why I am so worried about Nigeria as well. The country is home to mega-cities like Lagos and Port Harcourt, and if the Ebola virus lodges there and begins to spread, it would be an unimaginable catastrophe.
Have we completely lost control of the epidemic?
I have always been an optimist and I think that we now have no other choice than to try everything, really everything. It’s good that the United States and some other countries are finally beginning to help. But Germany or even Belgium, for example, must do a lot more. And it should be clear to all of us: This isn’t just an epidemic any more. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. We don’t just need care personnel, but also logistics experts, trucks, jeeps and foodstuffs. Such an epidemic can destabilise entire regions. I can only hope that we will be able to get it under control. I really never thought that it could get this bad.
…
Do you think we might be facing the beginnings of a pandemic?
There will certainly be Ebola patients from Africa who come to us in the hopes of receiving treatment. And they might even infect a few people here who may then die. But an outbreak in Europe or North America would quickly be brought under control. I am more worried about the many people from India who work in trade or industry in west Africa. It would only take one of them to become infected, travel to India to visit relatives during the virus’s incubation period, and then, once he becomes sick, go to a public hospital there. Doctors and nurses in India, too, often don’t wear protective gloves. They would immediately become infected and spread the virus.
The virus is continually changing its genetic makeup. The more people who become infected, the greater the chance becomes that it will mutate …
… which might speed its spread. Yes, that really is the apocalyptic scenario. Humans are actually just an accidental host for the virus, and not a good one. From the perspective of a virus, it isn’t desirable for its host, within which the pathogen hopes to multiply, to die so quickly. It would be much better for the virus to allow us to stay alive longer.
Could the virus suddenly change itself such that it could be spread through the air?
Like measles, you mean? Luckily that is extremely unlikely. But a mutation that would allow Ebola patients to live a couple of weeks longer is certainly possible and would be advantageous for the virus. But that would allow Ebola patients to infect many, many more people than is currently the case.
But that is just speculation, isn’t it?
Certainly. But it is just one of many possible ways the virus could change to spread itself more easily. And it is clear that the virus is mutating.
…
LikeLike
I think if this happened 25 years ago it would already have been dealt with. Corrupt, bloated, inept bureaucracies run by careerists are merely symptoms of a unmanageable level of complexity. When the head of the CDC publicly speaks about protecting the airline industry and the economy; well there is a fucking careerists if I ever saw one. Doesn’t the gov already have a bunch of departments who’s sole purpose is to worry about the economy? The economy is none of the CDCs damn business. If not Ebola now, then one of the other ones later; it’ inevitable.
LikeLike
LikeLike
Looking forward to a new essay written by Darbikrash whom we have not heard from in some time.
LikeLike
LikeLike
Capitalism and Ebola:
…The World Health Organization put the health risks bluntly in a report earlier this year on the threat of antibiotic resistance.
“A post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st century,” the organization warned…
…Dr. Frieden, the public face of the Obama administration’s Ebola response, said the virus “poses no significant threat” to the American health system, and there was “no doubt” that health officials would corral a virus which has killed about half the people it has infected this year.
In a lengthy discussion with the Washington Examiner, Frieden rejected the idea that the United States might experience a crisis resembling the one in West Africa, where 1.4 million are expected to be infected by January. Many Americans are unlikely to find those words comforting.
A recent federal audit found that the Department of Homeland Security is ill-prepared to handle pandemics, and noted that most of the agency’s antiviral drugs are due to expire next year. The audit also found shortages of hand sanitizer and protective gear…
…Millions of Americans are already feeling the effects of antibiotic resistance. Health officials and drug companies are years, if not decades, behind the evolution of mutating bacteria.
Antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis, malaria and some sexually transmitted diseases now exist. Experts fear that gonorrhea could become untreatable. Hospitals are recording rates of resistance to treatment of up to 60 percent, according to health professionals.
“We could face a situation where we have larger numbers of people with cancer, diabetes, very common problems, who will then develop infections that can’t be treated,” warned Arthur Reingold, head of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.
“Any individual could get an antibiotic-resistance infection. It’s the luck of the draw,” added Maryland Secretary of Health and Mental Hygiene Joshua Sharfstein. “There’s an expectation that if you get an infection there will be a medication to treat it. Instead, a lot of people are dying.”…
…Drug manufacturers have shown little interest in developing new antibiotics, preferring to focus on high-profit chronic problems such as cholesterol, diabetes or arthritis. It’s a better business model, they say, to make products that won’t lose their effectiveness and don’t require expensive new testing.
Vaccinations to combat the new strains of bacteria are also nowhere near wide-scale production.
Lawmakers want drug companies to produce new antibiotics, but not too many of them because overdependence is the cause of the current crisis.
If a pharmaceutical company spends hundreds of millions of dollars on a new drug, it requires mass sales to recoup the costs of research and development. But the need to sell a lot of any drug runs contrary to the need to prevent patients being prescribed antibiotics unnecessarily and thereby speeding that drug toward the day when it becomes ineffective…
…too many public health systems wait until disaster strikes before laying the foundation for a large-scale response to an obvious threat.
“We could have made a stockpile of vaccines,” said Joseph McCormick, regional dean at the University of Texas School of Public Health Brownsville Regional Campus, who was involved in investigating the first recorded Ebola outbreak in 1976. “Why didn’t we do that? We depend on drug companies, and they depend on making money. There’s no market…
LikeLike
Like every other disaster, we were warned from day 1. Selman Waksman and his team (the inventors) warned of all of this at the beginning of anti-biotics. I read somewhere that the same unknown mechanism in anti-biotics that allows cows, pigs and chickens to get fatter without increasing calories could be happening in humans that have been eating them. There could even be a multi-generational effect, so even kids and grand kids who eat little or no industrial meat are still suffering the effects of obesity. So once again it’s a win win for big pharma.
LikeLike
idunno what i like more,
doomer art or the peak mining video
thanx fer the orwk
LikeLike
LikeLike
LikeLike
Yuk, yuk…
LikeLike