the flying NAFTA capitalist piggy flu

[click image]

A few months ago, people in the Perote Valley of Veracruz, Mexico began getting ill, coming down with the flu. At the same time quite a few people were becoming ill with an atypical pneumonia that was killing them. Not just in Veracruz, but in a few other areas too. There was a report that as many as 200 were dead of it in one hospital. This report, coupled with the fact that about 60% of the population of the area surrounding a factory pig farm owned by Smithfield Foods was ill, triggered an alarm at a "biosurveillance" startup firm known as "Veratect". They had been notifying WHO and CDC of these unexplained pneumonia deaths and the off-season flu outbreak for a couple of weeks, but I think it was the report of 200 dead in one hospital that prompted them to send out a SERIOUS hey-no-kidding alert to the agencies. The agencies then leapt on it and inside a week labs in both Canada and the United States identified it as a completely new strain of virus.

Given the virulence of the outbreak in Perote and the wild number of pneumonia deaths almost certainly of the same virus, later proven to be of the same virus, it would have been a capital offense had they not made a big hairy deal of it immediately, even though they had been spectacularly late in making a big hairy deal of it as it was.

The locals had been grousing about the filthy conditions from the pig farm, and I have posted photographs of them, so we know they weren't just being mean to the gringos. There was a lagoon filled with pig excrement, pig blood and pig corpses that filled the air with a spectacular stench and out of which huge swarms of huge flies were hatching. Now that it appears the virus -- at least when it doesn't turn into pneumonia -- isn't that deadly, we can speculate that fly vectors were spreading the virus to every conceivable surface, and even delivering a worse load with their bites. This accounts for the far worse concentration of cases and number of deaths from this disease in Mexico, PRE OFFICIAL COUNTING.

What may account for the sudden drop in concentration and death rate, post-counting, is that the scene with all the sick people near the pig farm caused Smithfield to clean up their farm and the lagoon and spray the living fuck out of the fly swarms coming from them, because, of course, it can't have been mistaken, even by them, that they had unleashed a virus that was spreading rapidly in the human population. They kept a clamp on it for as long as they could and did as much mitigation, and cleaning up of evidence as they could, before you ever even heard of this flu. That would be the images of stacked pig corpses you saw at a link on one of my posts, at a link from a Wired post.

So. By the time bloggers managed to make it impossible for the media and the agencies to continue ignoring this pig farm and the sick population surrounding it, the farm was very possibly completely rid of all diseased and dead swine and the flies had been sprayed dead long since. Still, despite the agencies' word that they would investigate this pig farm, it appears that what they meant by that is they would ask Smithfield to report on its testing of its own facility. I'm not 100% on this... just about 95% on this. If there is evidence of independent testing by WHO, I'd LOVE to see it, even though it will certainly have been done LONG after the damning evidence was cleaned up.

As it stands, even in off season for flu in the Northern Hemisphere, there have been outbreaks all over the world and increasing numbers of officially confirmed cases. I don't know what percentage of cases get officially confirmed, but I know from the officials that it is small. So whatever their numbers are, it's much less than actual. It doesn't seem to be as severe where the viral load in the atmosphere is not as strong, and the virus itself may have mutated into a weaker strain already, but it transmits well between people, and it pops up where there has been no connection to other victims of this virus. It may mutate yet again, to either stronger or weaker. It may come back as seasonal flu.

What we know for close to certain right now is that it has not been as deadly around the world as it was in Mexico, and it has not been as deadly in Mexico since Smithfield did its cleanup and spraying.

I have been through an incredible number of media accounts, agency updates and blog posts to be able to present this much. I want to talk about some of the things I've learned about people and about our government in this adventure. I think it's going to turn up right here in a little while, but if not, it will be coming in another post soon to come.

____________________________________________________________________

One of the main points I want to make is to Danny, who seems convinced this whole media blitz about the pandemic was done to distract us from the torture prosecution question. It was done because there was a really scary virus that popped up around a factory pig farm in Mexico, Danny, and it got away from them because a huge food corporation didn't want anyone to know, or be able to prove, what they'd wrought. The agencies, not just in Mexico, not just in the United States, but even the international agencies, also did not want Smithfield to catch the blame for it and they were murderously slow to get this in the news so people stood a chance of protecting themselves from what might have been at least as deadly as the 1918 pandemic.

Viruses being how they are, we're still not out of the woods, but it at least looks as though the worst may be over. The worst could have been, from early indications, the uncounted deaths and monster concentrations of illness in Mexico before we were even told about it, something like 60% of the world population sick from it and 25% of us dead of it. I know that's probably a lot of people's fondest wish for the planet right now, but few of them want to be in the 60%, let alone the 25%. Had they not made this a huge international media blitz, they might have been responsible for the deaths of somewhere nearing two billion people.

____________________________________________________________________

In fact, they might have been, might yet be, responsible for them anyway, because every step along the way has been filled with an outright psychotic attention to the capitalist imperatives being shot to hell by this virus. They even stopped calling it "swine flu" in order to take the heat off the pork industry. This was their stated goal in so doing. I'm not making that up. Despite everything we know about the flu and its weird genetic makeup and what species can share what viruses, despite knowing that whatever else was true about this virus, in this mix of virus DNA, the swine to human and human to swine and human to human ability of it to spread was already well documented scientific fact. The bird flu thing they have been hassling us about since the SARS scare has been all about worrying that it could get into our food, or the food of our food, and mutate into being transmissible to humans. That may have been what just happened.

It could be that mad scientists are making these horrifying viruses, knowing as they do that the way our poultry and meat and dairy and even often fish is raised for market now is not just perfect for profit maximization, but perfect for pandemic maximization as well, and they're trying to get the jump on the diseases that could strike at any moment from these insane practices, being as how THAT is vastly easier than getting the monster corporations to STOP POISONING US TO DEATH WITH THEIR PROFIT OBSESSIONS. It could be that one or some of those mad scientists were using Smithfield pigs to test their virus and vaccine thing and it got away from them.

It could be that ground up sick birds got put into food for pigs that were suffering from a human flu at Perote or anywhere their pigs could have come from, and its genesis was "purely" "natural"... and its spread being the same kind of "pure" and the same kind of "natural".

It doesn't matter whose fault it was, anyone's or no one's, that this virus got to pop up in the Perote Valley. It did and the filthy conditions and capitalist coverup are what allowed it to spread across the globe. The reason there has been no emphasis on containment of the virus, blocking entry or exit from infected areas, is that the infected pork products and packaging have already spread to all corners of the globe. Nobody in the Obama Administration, or in the Mexican government, where they depend so heavily on the factory farms and meat packing, wants you to think this. And, evidently, they have quite enough pull with the World Health Organization to keep that downplayed and barely discernible by their reports. There have been moments where it's plain that pressure from other countries has made them not step so far afield from this, but, in general, they've managed to strike a balance that doesn't scare the masses away from pork products. China, Russia and Ukraine seem to have blocked imports to guard against it... maybe too late, but last time I looked at the maps these countries looked amazingly clear of cases and suspected cases. So, make of that what you will.

____________________________________________________________________

It creeps me out how many people are pissed off that this was/is no big deal and are grouchy about being bothered with it. It is HUGE and has implications that span our entire way of doing things, capitalism itself, and human life on earth itself. At the same time, if this virus had blasted out and killed millions as it certainly had the potential to do, these same people would have had shit fits about the media and the agencies not doing enough to protect us... if they were still alive.

That is extremely shallow thinking. And it's part of what is so deadly about all of this. People who can't think any more deeply than that perhaps should die in a flu pandemic so that the survivors might breed to make a species that doesn't let things get this psychedelically and suicidally stupid anymore.

____________________________________________________________________

It creeps me out that so many people across the globe are all squirrelly about pork to begin with. That would be heavily to Jews and Muslims out there. Yo! Your poultry, your fish, your dairy products, your meat, your air, your goddam water, ergo your fruits and vegetables are just as unclean. Period.

____________________________________________________________________

It creeps me out that there are so many people out there making so much hay out of theorizing Bond villain plots behind every single rotten thing that happens that they are incapable anymore of digging for truth. They can only dig for things that seem to confirm their Bond-villainesque imaginings.

____________________________________________________________________

I know Obama is brand new and hasn't had time to affect the comportment of careerists in the federal government, but all his shiny new Secretaries of this and that have been stolidly engaging in the careful preservation of corporate dignity and making whole press conferences out of saying nothing at all except WASH YOUR HANDS. So you will pardon me if I state that I am creeped to the max by Obama's seamless allegiance to the fascist forces. If you are wondering why I've been going on so many mini film festivals here lately, this would be why. It's terrifying. Okay?

Obama's complete allegiance to plutocrats scares the living pee out of me. I'm so nearly unremittingly about to powderize from the frustration of this stuff that I need to distract myself to get control of it again. This falls under the heading of my ongoing struggles with the one of the ten perfections most maybe impossible for me to master, and that would be the perfection of:

P A T I E N C E !!!

____________________________________________________________________

Even more horrifying is the fact that I know the powers that be know minutely, and rely on completely, our tendency not to want to dwell on anything ugly or scary for sustained periods, our slavish aversion to the suffering of having to think too hard or too deeply, of having to get outside our carefully conditioned and cultivated preconceptions to DEAL with reality, let alone even have to glimpse it. We are addicted to grasping for everything that feels good, everything we want, and pushing away everything that feels bad, everything we don't want. We are SO hypnotized by this obsession, we can't even tell what's wrong with it.

Well, right here, kids, is something wrong along the lines of a mass extinction event. The way we farm our food and pollute our planet and let greed becloud our thinking and our actions even in the face of clear and present danger and let plutocrats and religious fanatics do all our thinking and planning and executing for us is, in fact, a mass extinction event waiting to happen. It just came very close to happening.

We already know most of the ways to prevent this from happening, but now it takes dismantling almost everything and replacing it with clean and sustainable means, whether or not it can provide outrageously high profits to a few.

You're not going to do it, are you?