pandemic porcine pusillanimity

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Influenza A(H1N1) - update 10

2 May 2009 -- The situation continues to evolve. As of 18:00 GMT+1, 2 May 2009, 16 countries have officially reported 658 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection.

Mexico has reported 397 confirmed human cases of infection, including 16 deaths. The higher number of cases from Mexico in the past 48 hours reflects ongoing testing of previously collected specimens. The United States Government has reported 160 laboratory confirmed human cases, including one death.

The following countries have reported laboratory confirmed cases with no deaths - Austria (1), Canada (51), China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (1), Costa Rica (1), Denmark (1), France (2), Germany (6), Israel (3), Netherlands (1), New Zealand (4), Republic of Korea (1), Spain (13), Switzerland (1) and the United Kingdom (15).

Again, I want to stress to the people who are convinced this is a lot of media hype signifying nothing much, distracting from the real work that needs to be done to put torturers behind bars and solve the financial crisis, etc., that these numbers reflect only the number of mostly outrageously belated confirmations of the new illness. They continue to ignore most of the reports about the illness and death in Mexico from before the strain was identified, and those were terrifying numbers. And, in a great number of cases, the testing has taken and is taking place too late in the illness to confirm it at all. So the numbers you see at CDC and WHO are already, on their face, much lower than actuality. In some places they still don't have the means to confirm it even though they could have any number of sick people. There is a possibility that this has already or will soon spread to populations that can't combat it, in their bodies or in their societies.

I hope it's just a nasty bug that kicked up out of the filth in La Gloria, took its toll and hasn't got the legs to press further into the global population. Viruses arise and decline and die all the time. Viruses also mutate, and some of them outrageously quickly, which can make them into more deadly, less deadly, not deadly at all, to not even pathogenic particularly and dead themselves. There are viruses that mutate so quickly and repetitiously that you can't mount an effective immunity to them, like Hepatitis C -- the number of letters affixed to the word "hepatitis" nowadays is starting to look as if to exhaust our alphabet.

My point is: we don't know what kind of "legs" this virus has or will have, both because we never can completely know with a virus AND BECAUSE WE HAVE DROPPED THE BALL WITH THIS ONE, don't have a quantum of the information necessary to assess it cogently. What we have is a bunch of people in public life who have access to mass communication and they are filling every outlet for it with almost exclusively hot air. I'm hoping they're only making do with this until they can race up to speed on their monstrous failures, but am cognizant of the fact that they may all feel that this PR blitz IS the performance of their job responsibilities.

Who cares how much money Rummy is making on it? Seriously, next to your failure to wash your hands while running your scandalized nerve movies, how much does that matter?

The United States is based solely on the premise of good faith action. If the people and the officials live and govern in good faith, we survive. If not, we die. Part of our death, here, is the complete loss of faith in good faith action in our government. The answer, of course, is not to resolve to have faith in it because that is merely blinding oneself to actuality. Not helpful, not even to those who choose to make it easier on themselves this way. It doesn't get easier. They just dig themselves a little more deeply into the delusion of a type of safety, and don't take into account how much more vigilantly they must defend their "position" thereafter. The only means forward is the reinstitution of good faith action across the boards. It has to happen on the individual level and on the national level.

Criminals are in complete control of our government. They will not give up the control by any of the prescribed means. Those doors have long been closed. Where there is sufficient outcry, they redouble their efforts to produce the illusion of a solution. When they succeed in deluding, or just wearing out, enough people, things proceed as they wish; to wit: making the United States government enforce their criminal activities.

Smithfield Foods is taking advantage of this perk right now, but that's not any different than, say, Halliburton or Blackwater/Xe, or the banks. There is no upper limit to the number of deaths or lower limit to the depths of suffering they will cause and ignore in the pursuit and protection of their profits, and, obviously, no excuse too shameless to use along the way.

They will NEVER stop until they are stopped.

Peaceful means will NOT stop them.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to meditate on the universes of meaning inhering the definition of "delusion". Delusion is a belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by reality. Maybe concentrate the hardest on the part about it being impossible to raise an ugly reality into a beautiful one if your firmly maintained impression or belief isn't even based on it.

A hint you might find liberating: very, very often, popular belief is in fact contradicted by reality, so taking refuge in the popularity of a belief is most usually cause for great suffering, and often deadly.

I'm not talking about something trivial here.