Roman Wilderness

Bush Culture Of Fear: 10 Mullahs And A Sound Truck

2006-04-09T06:29:00.000-07:00

Bush administration 'secretly plans air strikes' as it seeks regime change in Iran

By Raymond Whitaker

Published: 09 April 2006

The Bush administration has sent undercover forces into Iran, and has stepped up secret planning for a possible major air attack on the country, according to the renowned US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

While publicly advocating diplomacy to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, Hersh reports in the next issue of The New Yorker magazine that "there is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush's ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change".

One former senior intelligence official is quoted as saying that Mr Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a potential "Adolf Hitler". According to a senior Pentagon adviser on the "war on terror", "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war". The danger, he adds, is that "it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability".

One option under consideration, Mr Hersh reports, involves the possible use of a B61 nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb against Iran's main centrifuge plant, at Natanz. Last week the Federation of American Scientists alleged that a weapons test to be carried out in the Nevada desert in June was designed to simulate the effects of just such a bomb. Conventional explosives would be used, it said, for "a low-yield nuclear weapon ground shock simulation against an underground target".

The US Defence Threat Reduction Agency told The Independent on Sunday that the test, codenamed "Divine Strake", was intended "to assess the capability of computer codes" to predict the effects of the explosion. The experiment aimed to improve "warfighters' confidence in their ability to plan to defeat hardened and deeply buried targets". It did not refer to tactical nuclear weapons like the B61.

According to Mr Hersh, some officials are shocked at what they describe as "operational" planning which goes far beyond the usual work on hypothetical scenarios. One former defence official is quoted as saying the planning was based on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government".

Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way, Mr Hersh reports, including "simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions" by US navy aircraft operating from carriers. Undercover units are also said to be working with ethnic minorities in Iran, including the Kurds, Baluchis and Azeris. While one goal was to have "eyes on the ground", the broader aim was to "encourage ethnic tensions" and undermine the regime.

Britain and other European states support the need for a military option to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons, The New Yorker article says, but want nothing to do with regime change. "The Brits think this is a very bad idea, but they're really worried we're going to do it," Flynt Leverett, a former member of the US National Security Council, is quoted as saying.

Critics of military action against Iran point out that it would convulse world oil markets and could lead to retaliation in Iraq. Mr Hersh says he was told by a Pentagon adviser that the southern half of Iraq, where Britain's 8,000 troops are based, would "light up like a candle" in the wake of any strike on Iran, while a general said that, despite the British presence, "the Iranians could take Basra with 10 mullahs and a sound truck".

The greatest disquiet within the military is said to be over the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran. Some planners argue that it would be impossible to be certain that underground facilities such as those at Natanz had been completely destroyed unless a nuclear "bunker-buster" was used. Mr Hersh says he was told by a former senior intelligence official that some officers had talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the war plans failed.

The Pentagon adviser warns, as do many others, that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world. "What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?" he asks.

Mr Hersh reports that the White House refused to comment on military planning, but insisted, as did the Pentagon, that a diplomatic solution was being sought with Iran. The CIA said there were "inaccuracies" in his account, but would not specify them.

Read Source Article:Independent

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Bird Flu Survival: Meat Prices Double In Iraq

2006-03-23T06:51:00.000-08:00

BAGHDAD, 23 March (IRIN) - Red meat prices have doubled in Iraq as demand has increased, following a ban on imported chickens announced after the death of two Iraqis from the H5N1 avian virus.

This has left many Iraqis unable to afford meat in their daily diet.

But the government says the ban was essential to stop the spread of the virus.

"We were accepting imports from very few countries," said Ra'ad Hamza, a senior trade ministry official. "But with the virus spreading to other continents, we can't be too sure about our safety."

According to Hamza, chickens were still being imported from Brazil and France up until Wednesday. But with recent reports of the flu in France and the rapid spread of the virus globally, imports from both countries have been halted, even though Brazil has not reported any cases. Iraq has been importing around 90 percent of its poultry needs since the bird flu outbreak.

Butchers countrywide have raised their prices for red meat. "We're selling lamb for double the price since the problem began," said Abdul Jabbar, a butcher in the capital, Baghdad. "For us, it's very good business because there are no chickens." The average price for a kilogram of lamb has jumped in recent weeks from the equivalent of US $4 to US $8.

But with most Iraqis reliant on monthly food rations, many people say they have little choice but to give up eating meat. "My family never went a day without eating meat," said Abdul Sattar, a Baghdad resident and father of four. "But now we can't afford it due to the huge price increases."

Some 2.5 million chickens have been culled since the first human case of bird flu was reported on 19 January in the northern governorate of Sulaimaniyah. Since then, a 15-year old girl and her uncle have both died due to contact with infected fowl.

Read Source Article: Reuters

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Bird Flu Survival: Deep Lung

2006-03-23T06:30:00.000-08:00

Researchers have suggested why the H5N1 bird flu virus has so far been inefficient at infecting people and unable to spread between them.

In papers published tomorrow (23 March) by Nature and Science, they say the virus may be physically unable to reach vulnerable cells deep inside human lungs.

Although H5N1 is very good at spreading through large populations of birds, it has infected fewer than 200 people since 2003.

The virus has killed about half of those infected and could spark a devastating human flu pandemic if it mutates to spread easily between people.

For this to happen, it would need to be able to attach to, infect and replicate in human cells. After multiplying, coughs and sneezes would spread the virus to other people.

But this week's findings show that the virus is rarely able to attach to cells in the upper respiratory tract.

What's more, it seems that mucus could be trapping the virus, which is then expelled before it can replicate, says Thijs Kuiken of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands.

While H5N1 cannot enter cells close to the nose and mouth, both Kuiken's team and another led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, found cells deep inside the human lungs that the H5N1 virus can bind to — if it is able to get that far.

This fits neatly with observations made during autopsies of people killed by the virus: that most damage was deep in lung tissue.

Read Source Article:SciDev.net

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Bird Flu Survival: Generic Tamiflu Created

2006-03-22T05:55:00.000-08:00

Scientists in Vietnam say they have successfully extracted a key substance from a local plant to make a generic version of Tamiflu, the drug used to treat the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Researchers say they used star anise, a plant used to flavour food, to extract shikimic acid, a key ingredient in the anti-viral drug.

Vietnam's Chemistry Institute says the breakthrough means it will be able to produce a generic form of Tamiflu in an emergency.

Star anise is extracted from the star-shaped fruit of a tree found in China and Vietnam.

The scarcity of the plant has been blamed in part for a global shortage of Tamiflu.

Worldwide demand for the drug surged last year, when dozens of countries ordered the drug for their national stockpiles.

Read Source Article: Australian Broadcasting Agency

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Bush Goober Dribbles The Following Snot Bubbles: "We Can Win War"

2006-03-21T12:57:00.000-08:00

My Fellow American Sheep,

I read this funny article in the New York Times today. It said that Bush thought that war, or whatever it is that is killing all those folks and inflaming the world...I'm sorry I am a little confused, yeah let's just call it a war, for the sake of argument. So that guy that calls himself the president? Yeah...he's asking us to believe in the war...believe in the war...believe in the war...believe in the war...we can still win he says...we can still win he says... we can still win he says...we can still win he says...he says he's spending his "political capital" on the war...he says he's spending his "political capital" on the "war"...he says he's spending his "political capital" on the war. Finally though, he did say something that rang, dimly, true..."Nobody likes war," he said. "It creates a sense of uncertainty in the country. War creates trauma."
.

By JOHN HOLUSHA
New York Times, Published: March 21, 2006

Declaring that the war in Iraq can still be won, President Bush continued his effort today to convince the public that the war was necessary and worth the sacrifices involved.

He acknowledged that the war was cutting into the "political capital" that he claimed after his re-election in 2004. "I'd say I'm spending that capital on the war," he said.

During an hourlong televised news conference at the White House, Mr. Bush asserted that terrorist groups still wanted to use Iraq as a safe haven to launch attacks on the United States and that the continuing attacks on American troops and Iraqi security forces were part of an effort to drive the United States out of the country before a stable government could be established.

"If I didn't believe we could succeed, I wouldn't be there," Mr. Bush said. "I wouldn't put those kids there."

Vice President Dick Cheney echoed Mr. Bush's basic themes in remarks to a military audience at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. "Progress has not come easily, but it has been steady, and we can be confident going forward."

Mr. Cheney said American troops and Iraqi forces trained by Americans "played a vital role in maintaining public order" following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra last month.

"There is no doubt that the situation in Iraq is still tense," he said.

Mr. Bush acknowledged that the length of the war, now entering its fourth year and the number of American deaths over 2,300, had contributed to his falling approval ratings and made Republican members of Congress nervous as the fall midterm elections approach.

"Nobody likes war, he said. "It creates as sense of uncertainty in the country. War creates trauma."

Mr. Bush once again refused to set any timetable for the full withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, saying any such decision will fall to "future presidents and future governments of Iraq." This seemed to suggest that American forces would be in the country until 2009.

Mr. Bush defended Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, even though some critics have called for his resignation, citing his performance in handling the military occupation of Iraq. "I don't believe he should resign. He's done a fine job," he said noting that Mr. Rumsfeld had directed that fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan while reforming the structure of the military.

He denied suggestions that his administration came in office spoiling for a war in the Middle East as a way of stabilizing the region by injecting democracy. "I didn't want a war," he said. "To assume I wanted a war is just flat wrong."

Mr. Bush said he had sent a message to the leaders of Iran not to interfere with events in Iraq. He said the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, had initiated contact with Iranian officials at his instruction.

"He asked whether or no it made sense for him to be able to talk to a representative in Baghdad," Mr. Bush said. "I said absolutely. You make it clear to them that attempts to spread sectarian violence or to maybe move parts that could be used for I.E.D. is unacceptable to the United States."

Roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D., have been responsible for many American casualties in Iraq, and there have been charges that insurgents using them were supplied from Iran.

The news conference came a day after Mr. Bush traveled to Cleveland to give a speech and answer questions about the war and other issues. Today, he said, "I can understand how Americas are worried about whether or not we can win."

He said most Americans wanted to see a victory, "but they are concerned about whether or not we can win."

The president again said he did not believe that Iraq was sliding into sectarian civil war, as a former Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said over the weekend.

"We all recognized that there is violence, that there is sectarian violence," Mr. Bush said. "But the way I look at the situation is, the Iraqis looked and decided not to go to civil war."

He said an Iraqi government of national unity was in the process of being formed.

Mr. Bush also commented on domestic issues, acknowledging that his plan to revamp Social Security "didn't get done." He said that Congress was reluctant to address an issue of such political sensitivity and that it had to be addressed on a bipartisan basis.

He also rejected suggestions that amnesty be granted to illegal immigrants who have been working in this country for a long time and raised families here. Those people, he said, "have to get in line" to apply for legal status.

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Bird Flu Survival: You Are On Your Own

2006-03-21T05:46:00.000-08:00

Saying they want to inspire preparation, not alarm, three cabinet secretaries said Monday that the dangerous strain of avian flu is likely to make its first U.S. appearance in wild birds migrating from Asia to Alaska.

"It is increasingly likely that we will detect a highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian flu in birds within the U.S. borders, possibly as early as this year," Interior Secretary Gale Norton said.

The virus, which has appeared in Europe, Africa and Asia, can spread from birds to people, though there's no evidence it can be transmitted from person to person. Most human cases so far were in people who had close contact with diseased poultry, or virus-contaminated bird blood or droppings.

"At this point, if you're a bird, it's a pandemic," said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. "If you're a human being, it's not."

But he presented a far grimmer view Monday than Norton or Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns.

This strain of avian flu is highly lethal and there is no human immunity, he said. It has killed at least 98 people worldwide since 2003 and has a mortality rate of about 50%.

Genetically and in the symptoms humans get, it looks very similar to the Spanish Influenza of 1918, he said, referring to a pandemic that killed at least 20 million people in two years.

Leavitt said the government has learned from its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, but his examples suggested the response to a flu pandemic would be even worse.

After most natural disasters, health-care workers can come from elsewhere in the country to staff clinics in the affected zone. But a pandemic strikes everywhere, and each area needs all the resources it has. It also lasts longer -- a year to 18 months, he said.

Cities, schools and churches need to develop response plans, he said. Businesses, he said, should consider how they would keep going if a significant number of employees are out for weeks at a time.

"Any community that fails to prepare with the expectation that the federal government will, at the last moment, be able to come to the rescue will be tragically wrong," he said.

The government is stockpiling Tamiflu and other antivirals, and it is supporting the development of flu vaccines, he said. It is also gathering masks and ventilators, he said.

But "there is no way in which 5,000 different communities can be responded to simultaneously," he warned.

Read Source Article:Detroit Free Press

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Iraq War Enters Fourth Year

2006-03-20T06:34:00.000-08:00

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Bird Flu Survival: A Normal Hardworking Man

2006-03-20T06:27:00.000-08:00

An Italian lorry driver who made a living out of transporting dead chickens brutally killed his wife and daughter and then committed suicide after running out of business because of the bird flu scare, daily La Repubblica reported on Tuesday.

Claudio Rubello, 49, used a bricklayer's hammer to kill his wife and his 10-year-old daughter Jennifer in their sleep. He then seriously injured his two teenage sons before killing himself with a kitchen knife.

Witnesses say Rubello had fallen into depression after being told his services would no longer be required.

"He was very worried because we had told him that we would be needing much less of him because of the crisis that has hit our business," a former colleague in the road haulage business that used to employ Rubello told La Repubblica.

Neighbours described him as "a normal, hardworking man" but were said to have become unhappy that he would park his car full of dead chickens near their homes, La Repubblica reported.

Read Source Article:News 24

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BEST OF ROMAN WILDERNESS: The Spin Is Spinning Out Of Control

2006-03-20T00:32:00.000-08:00

Originally Published: 11/09/05

OK, HERE IS THE THING…America is going insane. It is starting to remind me of the few days after 9-11. This shit is getting close to being a fucking full scale NATION WIDE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. And these morons that are “in control” continue to fucking CRANK UP THE FEAR further and further each day. It’s like our whole society is being interrogated in some CIA secret prison and they are bombarding us with Clockwork Orange montages of our own imminent deaths while they whisper, “buy more,” in our bleeding ears.

As my step mom said to me tonight, “I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. I thought I would be dead way before society fell apart this much. I would hate to be 20 right now.” Tell me that’s not why the great Hunter S. ended it all, God Rest.

I mean so much is happening each day on the few tiny topics I have chosen to discuss that I would need a fucking staff to even basically monitor all the bullshit that is going down. Six months ago I was sending out an e-mail like once a month. Now it’s true that I have my ear to the ground a bit more than I used to, however…I can see that the spin spins so fast now that it is simply SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL.

short list of fear:
Iraq War*
Terrorism
Katrina*
Bird Flu*
Global Warming (newly revisited post-Katrina)
Oil Shortages*
Torture in secret CIA prisons* (coming to a town near you?)
Class riots in France (coming to a town near you?)

Let me know if I am missing anything, but look at that fucking list. Those are all current news stories in the press on a daily basis…this week. Oh hey, I almost forgot…weren’t we investigating the president? That's the Real Story.

Why won't someone do a story on HOW THE FEAR MACHINE WORKS and play that on Wolf Blitzer's "THE SITUATION ROOM."

Ready, here we go...

Show Description off of the CNN website: “Each week in “The Situation Room,” a Security Council convenes to look at the issues that affect your safety. The CNN Security Council draws together a panel of regular and guest contributors who have all served in the highest levels of government and the military. Together they will give you the most informed and useful analysis of the security issues facing the country.”

Wolf begins: “So gentlemen isn’t it true that both government and the media use fear as a way to make shit loads of money and control the populous?”

William Cohen, former Defense Secretary begins: “Well no Wolf I don’t see it that way at all, we believe that the public should be as informed as possible on all the events that concern them…without of course jeopardizing national security.”

Wolf: "Since there is no other journalist present, I will answer with respect to the media. Listen folks, we are just servants of the public, providing useful information the public WANTS and NEEDS to know, like that nuclear bomb they have recently discovered inside my asshole."

Retired General James “Spider” Marks, US Army: “You have a nuclear bomb inside your asshole?”

Wolf: “Yes sir, right now as we speak the area is being evacuated and an Anti-Terrorist bomb squad is sending in a robot to probe my anus with tiny fiber-optic cameras. We have to take a break but when we return we’ll go live inside a my asshole to try to diffuse this impending threat to national security.”

Cut to Commercial.

LED tickers in time square read: TERRORIST CELL DISCOVERED OPERATING INSIDE WOLF BLITZER’S A-HOLE. RUMSFELD ADMITS TO HOLDING CONTROLLING INTEREST IN SEVERAL MAJOR SAUERKRAUT FIRMS.

OK a deep breath and now we will continue…

The news story about Kimchi curing birds with the bird flu virus broke THIS MORNING! BY THE END OF THE MOTHERFUCKING DAY sauerkraut was SELLING OUT with some Midwest stores experiencing an 850% increase in sales of MOTHERFUCKING SAUERKRAUT!!!

My dad broke this story to me and I laughed at him & told him to stop making shit up.

Imagine my surprise...

Americans are in full panic mode, my friends.

When people start stockpiling Sauerkraut…indications are that they have totally lost their minds.

They are making us fear our thanksgiving turkey and forcing us to eat sauerkraut!

That, my fellow sheep, is a sign that THIS country is about to explode.

People just can’t take this much fear for this long...they just can’t take it.

The media and goverement are creating unheard of levels of fear in the public and the public knows that much of it is just spin in order to take attention away from issues that threaten the government...but now the now spin is spinning out of control.

They need to legalize pot, like yesterday.

.

I will, your loyal late night watchman, be filing these reports later on:

Kimchi…NO YOU FOOLS IT’S NOT SAUERKRAUT!!!

Men’s Health issues a dubious Burd Flu Survival Kit that gets picked up on the wire and spit out on your breakfast table tomorrow.

What OSHA and the CDC say about the Bird Flu

Rioters in France are not terrorists fighting for Jihad?

(*) Can be directly or partially attributed to the Bush Administration.

.

Bird Flu Survival: British Plan 'May Spread Virus'

2006-03-19T19:23:00.000-08:00

The Times March 18, 2006

By Dominic Kennedy

Summary: British measures to deal with an outbreak have been attacked as likely to promote wider infection.

FARMERS will be free to move birds out of areas hit by avian flu, with permission from a vet, under British plans to deal with an outbreak of the disease.

Britain successfully urged its European partners to agree reforms aimed at helping the poultry and game bird industries to survive the arrival of the virus. Farmers, the countryside lobby and veterinary surgeons have broadly welcomed an approach promoted by the Government as flexible, based on risk assessment and helping to keep rural Britain open for business.

The Times has learnt that Britain successfully proposed easier movement of birds at a crunch European Commission committee meeting last month agreeing a common response to bird flu. Supporters of organic and sustainable farming yesterday accused ministers of a “daft” change designed to help trade which risked repeating the swift spread of foot-and-mouth throughout Britain.

If bird flu is found in poultry, a series of exclusion zones for protection and surveillance will be thrown around the affected farm. Under old rules, the movement of birds out of these areas was restricted to poultry for immediate slaughter.

Under Britain’s EU presidency, Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, chaired a Council of Ministers meeting last December which agreed to ease bird movements.

When experts met to discuss avian flu in Brussels last month, Britain won unanimous backing for its proposal to put these opt-outs into effect.

Europe’s leaders are haunted by the outbreak of bird flu in the Netherlands in 2003, which resulted in 31 million birds being slaughtered and heavy financial losses.

A Commission spokesman said: “Rule changes were requested by a number of member states, including France and the United Kingdom, to reflect their farming practices.”

Europe agreed that ready-to-lay pullets, turkeys for fattening and other poultry or farmed feathered game could be moved out of surveillance zones 15 days after an outbreak. A vet would have to give approval and the birds would need to be kept under surveillance, away from other poultry.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in a consultation letter, said that it was keen to introduce the new regime swiftly. “It offers us more scope for control of disease based on risk assessment of the actual situation faced at the time and is therefore more permissive than the previous Community legislation that it replaces.

“Because we wish to have these up-to-date provisions in place so we can make use of the flexibility they provide, we are looking to have the legislation in place as soon as possible.”

In an assessment of the impact of the rules, Defra highlights the benefits to the poultry industry, which farms 137 million birds, and the game industry which keeps 30 million.

The National Farmers’ Union, which had been urging freer movement of birds, welcomed the reforms.

“Within the poultry industry, we need to keep movements going otherwise it would just collapse overnight,” a spokeswoman said.

But Richard Sanders, policy researcher at Elm Farm, which promotes green farming, said that restrictions on movements were vital. “It doesn’t seem to be particularly sensible to be talking about a more lax regime,” he said. “Everything should be done to be careful.”

Read Source Article:New York Times

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Bush Culture Of Fear: The Early Years Of A Long Struggle

2006-03-19T13:38:00.000-08:00

Intellectual poverty is the most striking quality of the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy statement, issued on Thursday. Its overall incoherence, its clichés and stereotyped phraseology give the impression that Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and his fellow authors assembled it from the boilerplate of bureaucratic discourse with contempt for the Congress to whom it is primarily addressed.

It reveals the administration's foreign policy as a lumpy stew of discredited neoconservative ideas with some neo- Kissingerian geopolitics now mixed in.

The statement's only visible purpose is to address a further threat to Iran, as its predecessor, in 2002, threatened Iraq. The only actual "strategy" that can be deduced from it is that the Bush administration wishes to rule the world. The document is nonsensical in content, insulting to other nations and unachievable in declared intention.

If people read it to find a statement of American foreign policy's objective, they will learn that the United States has "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Good luck.

The document's foreign readers will have two reactions. The first will be that it can't be serious. The second will be that it has to be taken seriously since these people have spent three ruinous years in a futile effort to control Iraq; they must be assumed capable of doing the same thing again to Iran.

An annual national security statement was demanded by Congress in 1986 legislation. The present document is the first since 2003, when an American policy of military pre-emption was proclaimed - subsequently implemented in Iraq. This document reiterates the pre-emption policy, warning that "we are in the early years of a long struggle" like the Cold War.

One asks if its authors foresee a 50- year struggle against Iran? Or with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Iraqi desert and Osama bin Laden in his cave in Waziristan? Or against febrile and fanaticized young Muslim men in European ghettos, already repudiated by the immigrant populations from which they come? Surely the great American nation will have better things to do during the next 50 years.

While Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's former deputy, was preparing the strategy statement (or signing off on it), Rice was in Indonesia to "expand a strategic partnership" with Jakarta, a visit described by officials accompanying her as a signal of American "interest in building up [Indonesia] as a major commercial and military power ... to help counter the growing influence of China."

A few days earlier, Rice and President George W. Bush were in India on the same mission, making a "historic" gesture that conferred on India a nuclear partnership with America and authorized it to keep its nuclear weapons. This was also as meant to check China.

Speaking to the International Institute for Strategic Studies just three years ago, Rice condemned "balance of power" politics as outmoded and dangerous. She said: "We tried this before; it led to the Great War."

In a few weeks, President Hu Jintao of China will be at the White House for a long-delayed meeting. Possibly he in turn will be offered a strategic partnership, provided that Beijing obeys the new U.S. National Security Strategy, which tells China to "give up old ways of thinking and acting ... and [make] the right strategic choices for its people." Until China takes this advice, the strategy statement menacingly adds, the United States will "hedge against other possibilities."

The president and the secretary of state have been trying to manipulate the Asian power balance against China. At home, Stephen Hadley and colleagues have told us that the effort in Iraq has been worth it because now "tyrants know that they pursue weapons of mass destruction at their own peril." (One has also learned that those who pursue nonexistent weapons of mass destruction also do so at their peril.)

In addition, we are told that the United States today "may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," and that it reserves the right to take "anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack." Whose attack? Iran's? Under what conceivable circumstances would Iran attack the United States, even if it possessed nuclear weapons?

Finally there is North Korea, which the national strategy document seems to assume already has nuclear weapons. Pyongyang is simply enjoined to "afford freedom to its people," and the North Koreans are warned that the United States will protect itself "against adverse effects of their bad conduct." The Iranian government in Tehran will surely note that pre-emption is not mentioned in connection with North Korea.

Read Source Article: William Pfaff/ Times Herald

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Bird Flu Survival: Swine Flu 1976

2006-03-19T06:31:00.000-08:00

On the cold afternoon of February 5, 1976, an Army recruit told his drill instructor at Fort Dix that he felt tired and weak but not sick enough to see military medics.

Within 24 hours, 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis of Ashley Falls, Mass., was dead, killed by an influenza not seen since the plague of 1918-19, which took 500,000 American lives and 20 million worldwide.

Two weeks after the recruit's death, health officials disclosed to America that something called "swine flu" had killed Lewis and hospitalized four of his fellow soldiers at the Army base in Burlington County.

The ominous name of the flu alone was enough to touch off civilian fear of an epidemic. And government doctors knew from tests hastily conducted at Dix after Lewis' death that 500 soldiers had caught swine flu without falling ill.

Any flu able to reach that many people so fast was capable of becoming another worldwide plague, the doctors warned, raising these questions:

Does America mobilize for mass inoculations in time to have everybody ready for the next flu season? Or should the country wait to see if the new virus would, as they often do, get stronger to hit harder in the second year?

Thus was born what would become known to some medical historians as a fiasco and to others as perhaps the finest hour of America's public health bureaucracy.

Only young Lewis died from the swine flu itself in 1976. But as the critics are quick to point out, hundreds of Americans were killed or seriously injured by the inoculation the government gave them to stave off the virus.

Among other critics are Arthur M. Silverstein, whose book, "Pure Politics and Impure Science," suggests President Gerald Ford's desire to win the office on his own, as well as the influence of America's big drug manufacturers, figured into the decision to immunize all 220 million Americans.

Still, even the partisan who first branded Ford's program a fiasco, says now that it happened because America's public health establishment identified what easily could have been a new plague and mobilized to beat it amazingly well.

To understand the fear of the time you have to know something about the plague American soldiers seemed to bring home with them after fighting in Europe during World War I.

It got its name because it was a brand of flu usually found in domestic pigs and wild swine. It was long thought to have come, like so many flus, out of the Chinese farm country, where people and domestic pigs live closely together.

How the swine flu got to Fort Dix in 1976 still hasn't been tracked down. At the time, Dix military doctors knew only that a killer flu had made it to the base and that they were lucky more men hadn't died or been sickened seriously.

Weeks after Lewis died, doctors from the Centers for Disease Control and other federal public health officials were meeting in Washington, trying to decide if they should recommend the government start a costly program of mass inoculations.

One doc later told the authors of "The Epidemic that Never Was" that he and others in on the meetings realized there was "nothing in this for the CDC except trouble," especially because a decision had to be made fast to get the immunizations manufactured by the fall.

"...The obvious thing to do was immunize everybody," the doctor said. "But if we tried to do that ... we might have to interrupt a hell of a lot of work on other diseases."

The doctors knew they faced complaints if the epidemic broke out and vaccines weren't ready, as well as criticism if they spent millions inoculating people for a plague that didn't happen.

"As for 'another 1918,' 1 didn't expect that," the doctor continued in the book. "But who could be sure? It would wreck us. Yet, if there weren't a pandemic, we'd be charged with wasting public money, crying wolf and causing all the inconvenience for nothing ... It was a no-win situation."

By mid-March, CDC Director Dr. David J. Sencer had lined up most of the medical establishment behind his plan to call on Ford to support a $135 million program of mass inoculation.

On March 24, one day after a surprise loss to Ronald Reagan in the North Carolina Republican presidential primary, Ford decided to make the announcement to the American public.

Another big hurdle was the drug makers, who were insisting the government take liability for any harmful side effects from the vaccine. During congressional hearings in the spring and early summer, lawmakers heard some naysayers who noted that the swine flu of last winter never got beyond Dix and that only one death had been reported.

The president and his experts prevailed, however, and on Aug. 12 Congress put up the money to get the job done. The mighty task was put into the hands of a charismatic 33-year-old physician for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Dr. W. Delano Meriwether, a world-class sprinter who still competed in track meets.

Now he was in a race for life, or so he thought. Meriwether was given until the end of the year to get all 220 million Americans inoculated against swine flu.

By Oct. 1, the makers had the serums ready and America's public health bureaucracy had lined up thousands of doctors, nurses and paramedics to give out the shots at medical centers, schools and firehouses across the nation.

Jim Florio, then an ambitious rookie Democratic congressman supporting Jimmy Carter for president, didn't use the situation to take a shot at Ford. He lined up and was the first Jersey resident to take the inoculation.

Within days, however, several people who had taken the shot fell seriously ill. On Oct. 12, three elderly people in the Pittsburgh area suffered heart attacks and died within hours of getting the shot, which led to suspension of the program in Pennsylvania.

Jersey pressed on with inoculations, however. Through the fall, even as more bad reports about the side effects of the vaccine came out, thousands of mostly older people in Greater Trenton lined up outside health centers, schools and firehouses to get the shot, sometimes waiting for an hour.

One of them was Lawrence's Mary Kent, a 45-year-old mother of two teenage boys who couldn't tie the ribbons on Christmas presents only days after she got her shot at the Trenton War Memorial in early December.

On Dec. 16, increasingly concerned about reports of the vaccine touching off neurological problems, especially rare Guillain-Barre syndrome, the government suspended the program, having inoculated 40 million people for a flu that never came.

By year's end, Jack Kent knew his wife was seriously ill and started reading all about the side effects of the president's flu inoculation, especially nerve problems like those his wife was experiencing.

Even before Mary Kent died an invalid at age 51 in January 1982, Kent had joined the hundreds of Americans who filed suit against the government on behalf of children left without a parent due to fatal side effects from the swine flu vaccine.

The swine flu case of 1976 forever reduced confidence in public health pronouncements from the government and helped foster cynicism about federal policy makers that continues to this day.

Read Source Article:PAUL MICKLE / The Trentonian

Life On Earth Radio Swine Flu Program

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Culture Of Fear: Israel

2006-03-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

Eight months ago it was the staging point for the uprooting of Gaza's strong and thriving Jewish community, the first ever unilateral surrender of parts of its divinely-mandated homeland by the nation of Israel.

Now Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, situated adjacent to Gaza in the Western Negev, is in the midst of a nightmare after lab tests confirmed at the weekend its poultry stock is infected with the deadly H5N1 virus - better known as "the bird flu."

Jewish National Front Party leader Baruch Marzel says the correlation is no coincidence.

As reported by Israel's Ynet, Marzel wrote to the heads of Ein Hashlosha Sunday, charging:

"The kibbutz was used to house the expulsion headquarters because of greed, and therefore the bird flu outbreak happened there of all places."

While the secular liberalism that rules much of Israel today rejects the notion of a sovereign God interfering in the affairs of men, the precedent for such supernatural retributive action was set long ago:

"Because you [Jehoram, king of Judah] have not walked in the ways of Jehoshaphat your father...but have made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to play the harlot...and also have killed your brothers...who were better than yourself, behold, the LORD will strike your people with a serious affliction." (2 Chronicles 21:12-14)

The people of Israel suffered similarly for King David's sin of ordering a census and taking pride in the number of his men:

"So the LORD sent a plague upon Israel from morning till the appointed time. From Dan to Beersheva seventy thousand men of the people died." (2 Samuel 24:15)
Foretelling the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel for its innumerable transgressions, the Almighty declared through the Prophet Micah:

"Therefore I will also make you sick by striking you."

Bird Flu Survival: Russian Leader Claims USA Is Waging Biological Warfare Using Bird Flu

2006-03-18T06:54:00.000-08:00

Russian Communist leader sees
U.S. behind bird flu outbreak

MOSCOW. March 14 (Interfax) - Russian Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov has blamed the United States for the spread of avian influenza, or bird flu, in a number of European countries, including Russia.

"The forms of warfare are changing. It's strange that not a single duck has yet died in America - they are all dying in Russia and European countries. This makes one seriously wonder why," Zyuganov said at a press conference at the Interfax main office on Tuesday.

Zyuganov said that he has good knowledge of war gases as he dealt with them during his army service.

"I tested all kinds of war gases at a range myself," he said.

Asked to be more precise as to whether he believes the bird flu outbreak could be a deliberate attack by the U.S., Zyuganov answered positively.

"I not only suggest this, I know very well how this can be arranged. There is nothing strange here," he said.

Read Source Article: Interfax

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Bird Flu Survival: Assessing Bird Flu

2006-03-18T06:20:00.000-08:00

CLICK MAP FOR LARGER IMAGE

An outbreak of highly contageous bird flu that began in Southeast Asia three years ago, has now spread to Europe, the Middle East and West Africa. More than 200 million domestic birds have been killed to halt the advance of the virus, called H5N1. Ninety-eight people, who probably contracted the disease through contact with domestic fowl, have died.

Read Source Article:Washington Post

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Bird Flu Survival: T Minus Two

2006-03-16T14:14:00.000-08:00

THURSDAY, March 16 (HealthDay News) -- A newly developed molecular technology has identified certain mutations that the avian flu virus might undergo to unleash a human epidemic, researchers report.

The key is a mutation in the hemagglutinin molecule -- the "H" in the H5N1 designation of the bird flu virus -- that sits on the surface of the virus and is the primary target of the immune system's protective antibodies.

Besides giving insight into just how H5N1 might change, the finding could help scientists recognize important viral mutations early on and alert health officials to the potential for a pandemic.

"We looked at the structure of the H5 hemagglutinin from a recent bird flu isolate in Vietnam," said Ian A. Wilson, professor of molecular biology at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, Calif. That virus, which was found in a boy who died of bird flu in 2004, was similar to the one that caused the 1918-19 "Spanish flu" pandemic, which killed an estimated 20 million to 40 million worldwide, he said.

"Although this is an avian [bird] virus, similar to the 1918 virus, what we are really looking at is how a virus crosses the species barrier," Wilson said.

In principle, it's a substantial barrier. The bird flu virus attaches itself to cells in the intestinal tract, while the human flu virus attacks cells in the respiratory tract.

However, a previous study showed that only two mutations were needed to transform the bird virus to one that could infect humans, Wilson said.

Read Source Article: Forbes

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Bird Flu Survival: Tuna And Milk

2006-03-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

We may not know which of the deadly strains of the bird flu will eventually hit the U.S.But Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt is offering a rather specific warning about how to prepare for the disease. He urges Americans to buy extra cans of tuna and powdered milk and stash them under the bed to get ready.

It's not the first thing you might think of to protect yourself against a potential pandemic. "Let me acknowledge that no one in the world is prepared for a pandemic," Leavitt said this weekend at a conference in Wyoming. "When you go to the store and buy three cans of tuna fish, buy a fourth and put it under the bed.

When you go to the store to buy some milk, pick up a box of powdered milk. Put it under the bed. When you do that for a period of four to six months, you are going to have a couple of weeks of food, and that's what we're talking about."

Leavitt, on a nationwide tour to raise awareness on the Avian flu, is raising some eyebrows.Some people that CBS 5 talked to said it reminded them of former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge saying duct tape and plastic wrap were supposed to protect us from Anthrax.Now, tuna and powdered milk are being offered as solutions for the Avian flu.It's a good reminder we should always be prepared for an emergency, says Art Reingold of the U.C. Berkeley School of Public Health.

But in preparing for a bird flu pandemic, Reingold says he'd like to see the federal government focus on preparing a vaccine, which is still years away and getting more money to local authorities.

"There really is not a strong enough public health infrastructure either on the laboratory side or the epidemiology side or the other aspects of public health that will be important," Reingold said.

"If you have a vaccine to help the pandemic, that's going to be way better than saving tuna and dried milk."

Read Source Article: CBS 5

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Bird Flu Survival: Beef! How Low Can You Go?

2006-03-15T08:22:00.000-08:00

THE SATURATED FAT IN hamburgers is more likely to do the American public harm at this point than the tiny probability of getting the human variant of mad cow disease. But the discovery of a third infected cow in the U.S. this week serves as a reminder that this country is not magically protected against the deadly affliction, partly because federal officials aren't following their own recommendations for keeping it out of the food supply.

Japan has again blocked U.S. imports of beef, not because of the discovery in Alabama but because cow parts it had banned — such as brains and spinal cords, the most likely to harbor the disease — still recently found their way in. The lesson: Assurances and half-measures by the federal government aren't enough to safeguard beef supplies.

Creekstone Farms in Kansas has always had a simple answer to pleasing the jittery Asian market — test each and every head of cattle. But instead of applauding the company's safety-minded enterprise, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is actually blocking the beef producer, saying that only the government is authorized to conduct tests for mad cow.

That's typical of the laggardly, incoherent federal response to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. A year ago, the USDA rejected the idea of using the Western blot test for mad cow, saying it was unnecessary. After a wary administrator ordered a test on a cow last spring and it came back positive, the agency suddenly changed its tune.

The Alabama cow is believed to be at least 10 years old, which would mean it was born before the government's 1997 ban on the gruesome and disease-spreading practice of using the remains of cows as an ingredient in cattle feed.

Yet the Food and Drug Administration, after announcing in 2003 that it would ban such practices, still allows cattle blood to be fed to calves and bovine remains to be fed to chickens (after which the leftover feed is scooped off the floor with the chicken manure and added — you guessed it — to cattle feed). Not only does that make a mockery of the ban, it goes against the common sense that a grazing herbivore wasn't meant to be a cannibal.

Likewise, nearly three years ago, the Bush administration planned a national tracking system for cattle, similar to what McDonald's Corp. already has in place. Yet the Alabama cow was at its current home for about a year, and officials are scrambling to find out exactly how old it was, where it had lived, the location of cows that might have eaten the same feed and so on.
The government had some good ideas more than two years ago for preventing the spread of mad cow. It's time they got implemented.

Read Source Article:LA Times Editorial

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Government Surveillance: The Erosion Of Privacy Tends To Happen Incrementally

2006-03-14T18:25:00.000-08:00

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A federal judge said Tuesday he intends to require Google Inc. to turn over some information to the Department of Justice in its quest to revive a law making it harder for children to see online pornography.

U.S. District Judge James Ware did not immediately say whether the data will include words that users entered into the Internet's leading search engine.

The legal showdown over how much of the Web's vast databases should be shared with the government has pitted the Bush administration against the Mountain View-based company, which resisted a subpoena to turn over any information because of user privacy and trade secret concerns.

The Justice Department downplayed Google's concerns, arguing it doesn't want any personal information nor any data that would undermine the company's thriving business.

A lawyer for the Justice Department told Ware that the government would like to have a random selection of 50,000 Web addresses and 5,000 random search requests from Google, a small fraction of the millions the government originally sought.

The government believes the requested information will help bolster its arguments in a pornography case in Pennsylvania.

The case has focused attention on just how much personal information is stored by popular Web sites like Google and the potential for that data to attract the interest of the government and other parties.

Although the Justice Department said it doesn't want any personal information now, the victory would likely encourage far more invasive requests in the future, said University of Connecticut law professor Paul Schiff Berman, who specializes in Internet law.

"The erosion of privacy tends to happen incrementally," Berman said. "While no one intrusion may seem that big, over the course of the next decade or two, you might end up in a place as a society where you never thought you would be."

Google seized on the case to underscore its commitment to privacy rights and differentiate itself from the Internet's other major search engines Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Time Warner Inc.'s America Online. All three say they complied with the Justice Department's request without revealing their users' personal information.

Cooperating with the government "is a slippery slope and it's a path we shouldn't go down," Google co-founder Sergey Brin told industry analysts earlier this month.

Even as it defied the Bush administration, Google recently bowed to the demands of China's Communist government by agreeing to censor its search results in that country so it would have better access to the world's fastest growing Internet market. Google's China capitulation has been harshly criticized by some of the same people cheering the company's resistance to the Justice Department subpoena.

The Justice Department initially demanded a month of search requests from Google, but subsequently decided a week's worth of requests would be enough. In its legal briefs, the Justice Department indicated it might be willing to narrow its request even further.

Ultimately, the government planned to select a random sample of 1,000 search requests previously made at Google and re-enter them in the search engine, according to a sworn declaration by Philip Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley who is helping the Justice Department in the case.

The government believes the test will show how easily it is to get around filtering software that's supposed to prevent children from seeing sexually explicit material on the Web.

Read Source Article: Associated Press

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Bird Flu Survival: Spreading, Growing

2006-03-13T17:40:00.000-08:00

Reuters - Sun Mar 12, 2:32 AM ET An Indonesian man uses his mouth to clean his chicken after a cockfight at a traditional market in Sukoharjo, Indonesia March 12, 2006. Bird flu has killed its 22nd human victim in Indonesia, a 12-year-old girl, according to tests by the World Health Organisation's Hong Kong laboratory, an Indonesian health ministry official said on Friday. REUTERS/Andry Prasetyo

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Bird Flu Survival: Promote, Consume

2006-03-13T10:41:00.000-08:00

People pick up fried chicken during a fair to promote the usage of chicken in New Delhi, India, Sunday, March 12, 2006. The bird flu outbreak has sent demand for chicken, eggs and other poultry products plunging nationwide, although experts say bird flu cannot be contracted from eating properly cooked food. Producers have been forced to lay off thousands of workers, threatening India's fast-growing 600 billion rupee (US$13.6 billion, euro11.4 billion) poultry industry. (AP Photo/ Mustafa Quraishi)

Bird Flu Survival: C.R.E.A.M

2006-03-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A deadly bird flu pandemic will likely cause significant harm to the global economy with widespread disruptions in work places, trade and payment systems and could prompt a surge in demand for cash, the International Monetary Fund warned on Monday.

"If the pandemic is severe, the economic impact is likely to be significant, though predictions are subject to a high degree of uncertainty," the IMF said in a preliminary assessment of the economic risks if bird flu, currently affecting mainly birds, started to spread from person to person.

"Once the pandemic has run its course, economic activity should recover relatively quickly," the global lender said.

The H5N1 strain of the deadly bird flu virus has spread into Europe, Africa and resurfaced in Asia, with Myanmar and possibly Afghanistan also reporting infections.

The World Health Organization has confirmed that 176 people have been infected with bird flu around the world since 2003, and 98 have died. So far, the virus remains in birds, but experts fear it could change into a form easily transmitted from person to person and sweep the world, killing millions.

The IMF said the biggest impact on economic and financial activity will come from high absenteeism, as people stay home to deal with infections or to avoid them.

It also warned there may be disruptions to global trade and transportation as countries impose restrictions on exports to control the spread of the virus.

The fund said capital flows to emerging markets may be temporarily reduced and some governments may be forced to draw on their reserves to ease balance of payments pressures.

It said capital flows to emerging markets may be affected "as a result of some combination of possible operational disruptions in the financial systems, loss of confidence in more vulnerable countries, and abrupt shifts in risk preferences."

It said commodity prices could decline amid weaker aggregate demand and warned there may be supply disruptions for key commodities such as oil.

"Although these effects are likely to be temporary, asset price declines could put the balance sheets of some financial institutions under stress and they may face challenges in meeting regulatory norms," the IMF cautioned.

"Market operations could become more disorderly in the case of a breakdown in the trading infrastructure, leading to limited or intermittent trading," it added.

The fund said increased spending on health and public safety would likely put pressure on government fiscal balances and monetary policy may need to be eased temporarily.

"In response, allowing a temporary easing in the fiscal stance would be appropriate in most cases," it said, adding that central banks should ensure they have enough cash on hand to deal with a possible surge in liquidity demand and shock-related price increases.

Read Source Article:Reuters

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BEST OF ROMAN WILDERNESS: Drunken Monkey

2006-03-11T19:39:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted: November 02, 2005

GREAT SCOTT FELLOW AMORICONS!!! Again, we have the Drunken Monkey Style of George Bush politics this week. Look at how he, in control of his masters, consistently makes mistakes but somehow keeps grabbing power. Harriet Miers for instance. He not only nominates someone that he knows the left will hate but also the right will hate. She knows she has no chance. She’s a sacrificial born again lamb. Then the White House waits. They wait until they know when the special investigator will announce the indictments against his goons. Where is Cheney? Deep in a bunker, completely out of the spotlight. Then once they know when the indictments are to come down, he asks her to step down. This allows him to “bounce back” this week with nice funeral for Rosa Parks (he doesn’t hate black people!) and a new Supreme Court nominee that that the right wing loves and the left hates but they are now at least happy it won’t be Miers. It’s all about dominating the news. Drunken Monkey style. They are using the public’s perception of Bush as a bungler to their advantage. Today the news isn’t about the Scooter, it’s about the new judicial nominee-who will almost certainly be vetted. It’s all a matter of taste of how corrupt you think government is, but surely we can all agree…OUR SHIT BATH HAS NOT YET BEGUN. WE HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO SMELL THE FECES THAT LIES UNDER THE CARPET IN THE OVAL OFFICE. WE ARE ABOUT TO EXPERIENCE SELF INTERESTS INTENT ON WORLD DOMINATION UNLIKE ANYTHING SEEN SINCE WELL…you know the rest. HONEY POT BURGLING BABY RAPERS...etc. No Drunken Monkey Style?

THE BIG QUESTION LOOMS!!!!!

WHY WERE THERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN THE SANDBOX? Do you know how easy it could have been to have some CIA operatives plant a smallpox lab somewhere in Iraq? Why not do it? It would have made things so easy. But in a way, by there not being any WMD’s it makes Bush look oddly...HONEST, but BUNGLING. He’s a dumb ass, but he meant well. I mean for me, that is the thing that I keep coming back to. That is the real telltale sign of a power politic that is really thinking several steps ahead of the public and the media. Our government has planted evidence well on several occasions. Why not do it now?

ANOTHER QUESTION…

For the some reason Osama Bin Laden was allowed to escape? See a great film called the September 8 Tapes. Just google it, then watch it with the director’s commentary. They interviewed several Afghani militia men that were told by American military commanders to allow Osama to escape into the hills. When he is dead, the war on terrorism is dead. With him dead, there is no war on Iraq. It makes Bush look like a fool that we can’t find Osama, but it allows further goals to be achieved in THE agenda.

AND NOW MY DISMAL FORECAST…

I feel that what was left of our limping democracy is now forever gone. I HOPE TO HELL I am WRONG. But given the two recent elections, given 9-11 and the fallout, the day to day operations those in power…yeah, the writing is on the wall. I would say we are now walking a dark road and by the time we get to the next Presidential Election…it will be too late.

THE BIRD FLU PANDEMIC

PLEASE think this one over. I’m not going to spell it out for you, but in it lies one of the scariest scenarios I could ever conceive. It’s unlike me not to be able to have conceived a scenario this bad. But this one took me by surprise and now scares the chicken shit out of me. A few weeks after Katrina, George Bush announces that he has recently READ A BOOK. Since when did he have time to read a book and I CANNOT RECALL HIM EVER SPEAKING OF READING A BOOK. But he read a book that told the story of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic in which 20 million died world wide. We were at war at the time with Germany. Ship loads of troops would leave our shores and arrive in Europe half empty, the dead men buried at sea. A half million Americans died in two years. OK I WILL SPELL IT OUT, GODDAMN IT. Bush announces that he wants new military powers so that he can quarantine areas that are most infected…cities. RED STATES. BLUE STATES. He has just ordered a new supply of vaccine, enough to give to…government officials, police and health care workers. Not you. Not me. Just play that one out for awhile, let it float over your tongue, taste it like a good 30 year old scotch sipped in soft leather chair, your little dog Scottie at your feet, the view of the Potomac out your window. Tell me it doesn’t taste like goodness. Tell me it doesn’t taste like Martial Law.

JUST FORGET…

Just forget I said any of this, go back to your life and forget about it. It’s all OK. We still live in a Democracy and next election we will vote the dog humpers out. It will all be OK. No really I mean it. It will all be OK. I have just been ranting, just to get out THE FEAR. Just to rid myself of the poison. Hug your children, your lover, your cat, your pillow…and forget. So will I. Because we still do live in America, there is still beer at the deli. Fast food on the strip. There are still supermarkets and health food stores and bowling alleys. It’s all OK. The steaks still do taste good in the Matrix, and I am going to eat one. This will be the last time I write anything of the sort. Bluebirds will chirp in the morning and the darkest fears will be shunned by the light of an American day. And that’s just it. No matter what happens, Americans came here with nothing, stole what they could and built a paradise. We can do it again if we need to. If we want to. Next time I would go with direct elections, free health care and most of all corporate reform.

.

Bird Flu Survival: Under 40 At Most Risk

2006-03-11T04:39:00.000-08:00

With the World Health Organization set to announce the 100th death from bird flu any day now, data compiled by the Toronto Star lead to one particularly compelling question: Why does the H5N1 virus attack the young?

The Star's analysis shows that all but six of the 97 people who have died globally so far from bird flu were under 40. People, in other words, with the strongest immune systems and not, as one might expect, the elderly and those already sick. The median age was 19, and a quarter of them were under age 12.

Children, teenagers and young adults are the unfortunate victims of the deadly H5N1 bird flu sweeping through poultry farms in Asia, Africa and now Europe.

Hooked up to breathing tubes and dialysis machines in local hospital beds, bodies soaked in sweat, and blood oozing from their nostrils and mouth, they have a mere 50 per cent chance of pulling through. The rest die in a matter of days.

Any day now the World Health Organization will announce the 100th death from the bird flu that re-emerged in late 2003.

The 97 deaths in the third wave are now spread across seven countries — Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Turkey and Iraq. The infection rate is already double this year over last, with more than three human cases a week as infected birds spread the virus further afield.

"A lot of the human cases of bird flu have occurred in people under 25 and we're still not exactly sure why that is," said the WHO's Maria Cheng.

A recent news report saw 15 Iraqi children running through an area where thousands of culled chickens were dumped, tying them to sticks and waving them in the air.

A 14-year-old Turkish boy and his two sisters, 15 and 11, died in January after playing with the head of an infected chicken the family slaughtered and ate. And an 8-year-old Turkish girl died after kissing and hugging her dying pet chicken.

Cheng said there may be other cases in which people became infected through human-to-human transmission, but there isn't enough evidence to prove it. There may also be many less severely ill people going unnoticed.

"But we haven't seen any substantial change in the virus and that is really the trigger we're watching for."

Read Source Article: Toronto Star

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Bird Flu Survival: Canada Prepares

2006-03-10T06:53:00.000-08:00

OTTAWA -- Health and security workers at airports and other key sites might refuse to work during a bird flu outbreak, complicating efforts to handle such a crisis, a Canadian government intelligence report warns.

The report says the entire country would probably experience "shortages of everything from fresh food and health supplies" due to worker sickness and fear of public exposure, the Canadian Press news agency reported Thursday.

The prospect of front-line staff at border points and airports staying home is among the worrisome scenarios flagged by analysts bracing for a possible flu pandemic.
The news agency told The Associated Press that it obtained the federal Transport Department report under Canada's Access to Information Act.

The assessment was completed in late last year was distributed to federal security and transportation officials as well as select U.S. government and private-sector personnel.
The World Health Organization has warned of a serious possibility of a bird flu pandemic.

Because vaccines would not be available for months after the pandemic emerged, many quarantine officers and security officials, such as airport passenger screeners, might refuse to work, knowing that they would be exposed "to higher risk of infection and death," the report said.

A major disruption, or even temporary collapse, of Canada's transportation system could lead to widespread shortages of essential products, including food, soap, medicines and fuel, making recovery more difficult.

Read Source Article: Washington Post

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Bird Flu Survival: Cat To Cat Possible

2006-03-10T06:26:00.000-08:00

A cat was sent to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in Hong Kong Wednesday. It is the only cat surrendered to the society since reports surfaced of H5N1 virus infecting cats in Germany and Austria, SPCA spokeswoman Rebecca Ngan said Thursday.

According to Ngan, the cat brought home a dead bird from the garden one day and the owner was pretty scared about that so she surrendered the cat. The cat is in a good healthy condition now, Ngan said.

Hong Kong scientists urged checks on dead and sick cats so as to prevent the transmission of H5N1 virus to humans Wednesday, while the Hong Kong government proposed to tighten the demerit points system on licensed food among the rising threat of a bird flu outbreak.

Several cats in Austria and Germany were found with the dangerous H5N1 virus later, and Dutch scientists have evidence that cats can spread the virus to one another in the laboratory. Meanwhile, Thai scientists have found that dogs and cats there also could be carrying the virus.

University of Hong Kong chair professor of microbiology Yuen Kwok-yung warned Wednesday the cat cases showed that these mammals are vulnerable. He said cats that strayed in villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong had a higher chance of contact with bird carcasses which increased their risk of bird flu.

"Dead or sick cats, which are wandering around in villages outside people's homes, should be collected for testing," he said.

Read Source Article: People's Daily

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Bird Flu Survival: Countries Reporting Confirmed Occurence Of H5N1 Avian Influenza In Poultry And Wild Birds Since January 2006

2006-03-08T20:23:00.000-08:00

Click Image to enlarge

Bird Flu Survival: Ground Zero Alaska

2006-03-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

March 8 (Bloomberg) -- Avian flu is likely to spread to birds inside the U.S. by midyear and could produce an epidemic among humans ``at any time,'' said the United Nations official who monitors global efforts to fight the disease.

Wild birds migrating over the Arctic Circle from Africa and Europe in the next few months would carry the H5N1 virus to Alaska, said the official, David Nabarro, a physician with the World Health Organization. The virus would probably be carried to the rest of the U.S. six months later when other birds that picked it up in Alaska migrated south.

The prediction, the first by a top global health official pinpointing when birds carrying the flu will reach the lower 48 states, was buttressed today by U.S. officials who said testing for bird flu will expand dramatically.

``The focus is on Alaska and the Pacific flyways near Alaska,'' said Frank Quimby, a spokesman for the U.S. Interior Department. ``It's a breeding ground where birds from Asia and North America go in the spring, and mix together.''

Read Source Article:Bloomberg

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9-11 Documentary: A Must See For All Roman Wilderness Visitors

2006-03-07T02:20:00.000-08:00

This doc gave me THE FEAR bad enough to post it immediately. Please take a look and think for yourselves. Don't listen to me...make a decision for yourself!!! Listen to your own inner voice, your instincts...your guts.

Keep your wits about you, your spirits up...and THE FEAR at bay.

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BEST OF ROMAN WILDERNESS: The Smell Of Wolf

2006-03-07T00:48:00.000-08:00

Originally Published: October 11, 2005

Dear All,

They must think that we the sheep people, as we are
called in security screened Washington chambers, are
incredibly stupid!

But even sheep can smell a wolf.

I mean, the SMIRKING LOW IN THE POLLS president gives a
speech making a case for the war in Iraq and on the
SAME DAY there is a "specific" threat in NYC, linked
to an covert terrorist operation in Iraq. Take the
subways people because this is bullshit.

Baby strollers...ooooooh those terrorists are evil.
Hmm, have terrorists ever used baby strollers before?
Who are you scaring when you say, "baby strollers."
Spin, Spinny, spin, spin. If the threat is real,
then the spin is even more evil.

They've got a live shot on now of people going in and
out of the subway. Someone needs to run down there to
City Hall Station an flip off that news chopper.

Bush went on to describe his enemy, but actually
described his presidency...

BUSH: "We are facing a radical Ideology with an
inalterable objectives-to enslave whole nations and
intimidate the world. A focused ideology a set of
ideals that are evil-but not insane." The Bush
Policies in a nutshell.

The president, then attempted to bring back the Cold
War, for which he obviously pines. He said our
islamic enemies had to be fought back or we would be:
"enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments
in the region and establish a radical islamic empire
that spans from Spain to Indonesia." Is he seriously
trying to say that the Middle East might become an
"Evil Empire." I mean, these people could never form a
major power like Cold War Russia...they can't agree on
how to tie thier shoe laces.

Someone PLEASE tell me that it's just me being
paranoid, but is it possible that with a President who
is willing to falsely threaten New York City's young
mothers and their babies to give himself a boost in
the polls, also could have done other mischievous
things? Paramount to treason just me saying it. But
thoughts rush through my mind and my paranoias are
coming true at an alarming rate.

George the Second then chided spoiled rich kid Osama
Bin Laden, saying: "He assures them that this is the
road to paradise, though he never offers to go along
for the ride." I wish Bush could go for a ride on a
New York Subway right now.

The bird flu story and the need for greater military
powers in situation of Quarantine: FOLLOW IT CLOSELY.
Think it over and look at the post-Katrina timing.
Think of it's purpose, if abused by people in power.

The smell of wolf is everywhere. Do you smell it? Or
am I crazy.

-THE FORECAST

BEST OF ROMAN WILDERNESS: "The Fear"

2006-03-07T00:30:00.000-08:00

My Fellow Edge Of The Herd Sheep,

Yeah that's you. If you were in the center of the herd you wouldn't be coming here. In celebration of the six month anniversary of Roman Wilderness, as well as to re-acquaint new visitors, The Forecast will be re-posting a few useful gems.

-THE FORECAST

Bird Flu Survival: Culling All Cats

2006-03-06T13:32:00.000-08:00

Austria said Monday the H5N1 bird flu virus had been found in infected cats in the south-eastern province of Styria, while Poland and Serbia on Monday both confirmed the presence of the deadly bird flu strain in wild swans.

In Austria, a statement from the office of Styria\'s governor for agriculture, Hans Seitinger, said there had been \'two or three\' positive results of tests on cats, and that the animals were still alive.

The report came a week after a dead cat discovered on the German North Sea island of Ruegen was found to be infected with bird flu in the first confirmed case in Europe of a mammal contracting the disease.

Cat owners in high-risk areas in Germany have been ordered to keep their cats indoors, but in Austria, the president of the Federal Veterinary Chamber, Walter Holzhacker, said he saw no great danger.

Read Source Article:M&C News

Bird Flu Survival: Rapid Massive Bird Deaths In Burkina Faso

2006-03-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

Recombinomics March 5, 2006

The small village of Bazoulé, located at 30 km with l`ouest of Ouagadougou, knew last month a mysterious disease which made important devastations among the farmyard poultries.
In addition to chickens, the village recorded the massive death of ducks, guinea fowls, turkeys, pigeons and even of vultures for the same period.

According to victims', two minutes suffice for this disease to kill chicken and it takes thirty minutes to decimate all the poultry d`une farmyard, whatever its importance.
The usual chief of Bazoulé, which lost on this occasion more than 300 gallinacés, finds that this disease is different from the ordinary disease of chickens.

C`est what explains can be the fear of l`infirmier of the village, Souleymane Kanfando, which compares this disease with the aviary influenza and which, in addition to the pigeons and the vultures, lost in a few hours l`essentiel what composed its farmyard.

The above translation suggests bird flu has arrived in Burkina Faso. The rapid massive deaths in many species, including waterfowl, is characteristic of H5N1 bird flu. The location of Ouagadougo is also suggestive of bird flu. To the east H5N1 has been confirmed in Nigeria and Niger. To the west birds have died in Mauritania and WHO is investigating bird deaths to the north in Mali.

Burkina Faso is in Black Sea Mediterranean flyway, which includes Siberia, Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, and Niger, all of which have reported large outbreaks of confirmed H5N1. The location is also close to the East Africa West Asia flyway as well as the East Atlantic flyway.

The confirmed outbreaks in Africa suggests H5N1 infections is widespread throughout the continent. But the convergence of three major flyways in western Africa suggests H5N1 infections in that area may be highest.

This convergence will lead to extensive missing of various versions of the Qinghai strain. Currently only a partial sequence of a Nigerian isolate has been made available. Other isolates from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa has not been made available to the public. Many sequences are being hoarded at the WHO website, which is password protected.

Read Source Article:Recombinomics

Bird Flu Survival:$53B Chicken Industry

2006-03-05T06:36:00.000-08:00

PHILADELPHIA - From his poultry shop in Philadelphia's low-income Kensington neighborhood, Tony Tranh sells about 300 live birds each week, mainly to poor Asian and Hispanic immigrants.

He used to sell 600 live chickens, guinea hens, ducks and pigeons a week, but that was before the avian flu scare.

"The people are scared," said Tranh, the owner of Mac's Poultry.

Not without reason. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture temporarily closed two of Philadelphia's five live-bird markets last year after mild strains of avian flu virus were detected during routine inspections. Those strains were different from the lethal H5N1 strain and posed no threat to humans, the agency said.

But as the deadly H5N1 strain moves through Europe and parts of the Middle East and Africa, U.S. and state agriculture officials are taking no chances. They've increased avian flu testing at live-bird markets in 21 states, including Pennsylvania.

Cost of fear could be big money

The heightened surveillance comes as the United States prepares, beginning in April, to ramp up avian flu testing of wild birds that are making their seasonal migration through Alaska after wintering in Asia.The nation's $53 billion chicken industry also began a self-funded effort to test all commercial chicken flocks for avian flu before the birds are sent for processing.

Officials hope that these early detection efforts will help avert an H5N1 outbreak that could devastate the nation's health and economy.

U.S. chicken sales haven't been affected by the flu scare, but a recent survey by the Harvard School of Public Health found that 46 percent of people would stop eating chicken if bird flu hits the American poultry industry.

Those concerns, in part, helped spark the industry's nationwide testing program, which began in January. So far, 94 percent of the commercial farms that raise chickens for large companies such as Tyson and Perdue are participating. Those farms account for nearly all the chicken sold in the U.S., Lobb said.

Read Source Article: Charlotte Observer

Bird Flu Survival: Dora Akunyili

2006-03-05T06:32:00.000-08:00

Akunyili‘s TV appearance boosts chicken sales

The television appearance of Dora Akunyili, devouring chicken and canvassing for its safety, is having some positive impact on the level of consumption of the bird which became 'untouchable' following the discovery of bird flu in Nigeria.

The Poultry Association of Nigeria (PAN) recently enlisted the support of NAFDAC director who tried to persuade consumers that bird flu has no dwelling place in a well cooked chicken and egg.
A cross section of the residents who spoke to our correspondent in Lagos on Tuesday, said they were convinced that properly cooked chicken were safe for consumption.

A manager in one of the restuarants near National Theatre confirmed that the demand for chicken has improved in the past few days after Akunyili's appearance and re-assuring statement.

Resident, Mrs Yemisi Olukemi, claimed that a disease akin to bird flu had been in country for a long time.

"If you live in the villages, you would realise that it is a norm. It is a natural thing that happens to the chicken.

Sometimes you see the infected chicken bringing out whitish fluid from its mouth" she said.

"Over the years in the village, when such a chicken is discovered, our parents would ask us to slaughter and cook it for a long time. We did eat and did not die," Olukemi said.

Read Source Article: The Tide

Bird Flu Survival: Give It Away Now

2006-03-05T06:06:00.000-08:00

Residents of the northern Greek city of Thesssaloniki line up for a free chicken lunch provided by city authorities on Wednesday, March 1, 2006, to boost the local poultry industry which is hard hit by recent cases of bird flu reported in wild birds in Greece. A logo on the municipal worker's apron read 'Eat Greek Chicken.'

Bird Flu Survival: Pakistani Protest

2006-03-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

Pakistani poultry traders eat chickens to show that there is no danger eating chickens during a rally in Peshawar, Pakistan to codemn killings of their chickens. Authorities killed 15,000 chickens in northern Pakistan after poultry at two farms were tested positive for the H5 strain of bird flu, an official said. (AP Photo/Mohammad Zubair)

Bird Flu Survival: Stage Set For Another Federal Blame Game AKA Katrina Part 2

2006-03-04T07:47:00.000-08:00

ESTITHACA, N.Y. -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that America is not ready to handle a widespread outbreak of avian flu and that all levels of government appear to be trying to pass the buck.

"The United States is not ready to handle a potential bird-flu pandemic," she said.

"The president's strategy is underfunded and poorly constructed," the former first lady added during a visit to Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine. "It is no strategy to say we're going to expect the states to handle this. And, it is no strategy to say the state is going to expect the counties to handle this."

"I don't know what the next lowest level is, but I suppose the counties could then try to pass it off to the villages, the hamlets, the towns and the cities," she said. "We need a national strategy."

Last month, state Health Commissioner Dr. Antonia Novello unveiled a bird-flu plan that would vest counties with much of the decision-making power on how to handle outbreaks.

"We're giving counties the power to do things, but not without our supervision," Novello had said.

Clinton, who is running for re-election this year and is a potential 2008 Democratic presidential contender, used the opportunity to press for support for legislation she is backing that would require a national tracking system so officials know exactly where vaccines are located for avian flu and other infectious diseases. "There doesn't seem to be as much urgency in Congress as there should be," she said.

Telling Cornell researchers the work they are doing on avian flu is "absolutely essential," Clinton said, "Most experts with whom I have spoken think it's only a matter of time before it hits our shores."

Read Source Article: Newsday

Bird Flu Survival: Bird Flu Psychosis

2006-03-04T05:12:00.000-08:00

LONDON: A French mayor banning chicken from school canteens, Germans abandoning cats by the hundreds, Greeks and Italians virtually axing poultry from their diets are all signs that a worried Europe is inching toward what some have called a bird flu psychosis.

Europe’s poultry industry is counting the multi-million-dollar cost of the spread of bird flu in lost sales yesterday after US agencies urged more funds to fight a possible deadly human pandemic that could kill millions.

As the world took steps to try to prepare for such an outbreak, Romania detected new cases of the deadly H5N1 virus in a village west of Bucharest and Switzerland found more bird flu in wild birds and Turkey in poultry flocks.

China issued a national bird flu warning that migratory birds returning during the spring could cause more human cases.

“There are some places where prevention and control efforts have weak links,” Chinese Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu told a cabinet conference. China has had 14 human cases of people infected with H5N1 bird flu, eight of them fatal.

H5N1 has killed birds in more than 30 countries stretching from South Korea to Germany and into Nigeria and Niger. It has spread to 14 new countries in a month, and infected 174 people, killing 94 of them.

Scientists say H5N1 is mutating steadily and may eventually acquire the changes it needs to be easily transmitted from human to human. Because people lack any immunity to it, it could sweep the world in a matter of weeks or months, killing tens of millions and bringing economies to their knees.

The US Congress has approved $3.8bn of the $7.1bn President George W Bush asked for last year to prepare for a possible pandemic.

France’s poultry sector, the biggest in Europe, is now losing 40mn euros ($48mn) a month as bird flu hits sales at home and abroad, French officials said.The French government has said more than 40 countries have restricted imports of French poultry following the outbreak of H5N1 at a turkey farm in the east of the country. There have also been around 30 cases in wild birds in the same area.

In Greece, consumption has plummeted by 75% in three weeks, according to the country’s largest poultry farmers’ association. “If sales continue falling at this rate, poultry farms may have to close,” association head Spyros Nonikas told AFP yesterday.Fearing a public panic, Nonikas has urged the Greek broadcasting regulator to ensure that TV channels are “more moderate about what they say on this issue”.

In Italy, where poultry meat sales have dropped off by 70% since an H5N1 outbreak among wild, migratory birds, many butchers have simply stopped selling chicken and duck altogether.A special hotline set up by the ministry of health is fielding an average of 3,000 calls a day, many asking about the risks posed by pets following the confirmation on Thursday that a cat in Germany was killed by the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, the first European known case in a mammal.

In Germany itself, hundreds of cat owners have abandoned their pets, and some have sought to have them put down, the German animal welfare society said.“Nationwide, several hundred cats have been left with us. People are scared their cats have bird flu,” a spokesman for the group told AFP.Yesterday, a case of bird flu was confirmed only 20km from Berlin, according to the agriculture ministry of the neighbouring state of Brandenburg.Germany’s poultry industry has lost more than 140mn euros since last autumn because of bird flu, with demand down around 20% from previous levels.

In France, mayor Joel Boutier of Groslay, a small town north of Paris, banned chicken from school dinners “following numerous appeals from worried parents,” he said.The ban provoked angry reactions from poultry producers.Martin Malvy, president of the Midi-Pyrenees region which includes a major chicken farming area in the Gers department, wrote to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin asking him to condemn the measure as “inopportune and unjustified”.

Romania detected H5N1 in domestic birds yesterday in a village 80km west of the capital and in a wild goose in the city of Buzau.Avian flu has been found in 40 villages and a small Black Sea resort since the virus was first detected in the Danube Delta in October. Birds have been culled swiftly and Romania has not reported any cases in humans.

Turkey has confirmed three new cases of the H5 strain of bird flu among poultry in an area to the west of Istanbul and said culling of birds was under way. Samples from the infected ducks and chickens were being tested for H5N1.Four children died of H5N1 in eastern Turkey in January, the first human fatalities outside east Asia. Eight other Turkish people who tested positive for H5N1 have since recovered.

Switzerland, which on Wednesday said that it had found its first case of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus in a wild duck found in Geneva, discovered four more cases of H5 bird flu in wild birds, the federal veterinary office said yesterday.The H5 virus was found in two dead ducks in Geneva, and in a duck in Ramsen and a coot in Stein, two places near the German border. The birds were being tested for H5N1.

Read Source Article: Gulf Times/AFP/Reuters

Bush Culture Of Fear: Cavuto

2006-03-03T06:23:00.000-08:00

Bush Culture Of Fear: Benjamin Franklin Spinning In His Grave

2006-03-03T06:02:00.000-08:00

With 16 provisions of the act set to expire next week, the bill would make 14 of them permanent and extend two others by four years.

The bill would also provide fresh tools to combat terrorist financing, protect mass transit, secure ports and curb abuse of methamphetamines, a highly addictive drug.

The version approved by the House included a number of changes to better safeguard privacy. But Senate Democrats, joined by a handful of Republicans, demanded more.

"I applaud the Senate for voting to renew the Patriot Act and overcoming the partisan attempts to block its passage," Bush said in a statement issued during his trip to South Asia.

"The terrorists have not lost the will or the ability to attack us," he added. "The Patriot Act is vital to the war on terror and defending our citizens against a ruthless enemy."

Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who led the opposition to renewal, predicted that more safeguards would eventually be adopted.

"This fight is not over," Feingold said.

Read Source Article: Boston Globe

Bush-Katrina: Why Did Bush Do Nothing? When the Army Owns the Weather

2006-03-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

When the Army Owns the Weather
By Bob Fitrakis, Columbus Alive. Posted February 5, 2002.

Evidence of the Pentagon's interest in manipulating mother nature abounds. How come the public knows nothing about it?

Humans have long sought to control the weather. Early people learned how to make fire and modify their micro-environments; rain dances and other rituals to alleviate droughts are part of our folklore. So news that the government is engaged in secret experiments to control the weather should come as no surprise -- especially after a long history of "cloud seeding," "atom splitting" and cloning revelations.

In fact, a vast majority of people would be shocked to learn that this orphan of the cold war is still in practice. As the U.S. and former Soviet Union spent trillions of dollars on their militaries, their commitment to mutually assured destruction led to extensive experimentation with the use of weather as a weapon. In 1977, the Saturday Review cited a CIA report hinting that the U.S. government already had the power to massively manipulate the weather for war purposes.

As the Soviet Union disintegrated, a 1993 Isvestia article suggested the U.S. might want to partner with the Russians in peddling their top-secret technology to the world. Oleg Klugin, a high-ranking KGB officer, bragged of his involvement in geophysical weapons research to a London newspaper. The grid patterns of jet chemtrails now spotted throughout the Western world are likely the application of these technologies to new military and civilian uses.

The military is not attempting to hide its long-term goals. "Weather is a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025" is a white paper that can be found on a Pentagon-sponsored website. The paper’s abstract reads: "In 2025, U.S. aerospace forces can ‘own the weather’ by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies towards fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighters tools to shape the battle space in ways never before possible… In the U.S., weather modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications."

Wired magazine wrote about the paper and extensively quoted physicist Bernard Eastlund in its January 2000 article "Activate Cloud Shield! Zap a Twister!" The article detailed the military’s plan for "made-to-order thunderstorms" and "lightning strikes on demand."

Eastlund managed programs for Controlled Thermal Nuclear Research for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1966 to 1974; he was a key researcher in the 1980s’ Strategic Space Initiative (aka Star Wars). Since 1996, Eastlund served as CEO and president of Eastlund Scientific Enterprises Corporation. The company boasts on its website that it specializes in "weather modification" and "tornado modification" among other high-tech services.

Eastlund considers the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska a smaller version of what he envisions for weather modification. In response to Michael Theroux of Borderland Sciences -- who asked Eastlund whether the HAARP station could affect the weather -- Eastlund replied: "Significant experiments could be performed… The HAARP antenna as is it now configured modulates the auroral electrojet to induce ELF waves and thus could have an effect on the zonal winds."

At the Space 2000 Conference and Exposition on Engineering, Construction, Operations and Business in Space, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers, Eastlund outlined his plan for zapping tornados with an electromagnetic radiation beam from the proposed Thunderstorm Solar Powered Satellite he’s developing with the help of the European Space Agency and Jenkins Enterprises.

U.S. patent number 6315213, filed on November 13, is described as a method of modifying weather and should concern the public. A scientist from Wright Patterson Air Force Base acknowledges that planes are spraying barium salt, polymer fibers, aluminum oxide and other chemicals in the atmosphere to both modify the weather and for military communications purposes. The patent abstract specifically states: "The polymer is dispersed into the cloud and the wind of the storm agitates the mixture causing the polymer to absorb the rain. This reaction forms a gelatinous substance which precipitate to the surface below. Thus, diminishing the cloud’s ability to rain."

Answering the age-old question, Who’ll stop the rain?: Apparently our government and a few of their closest friends in the military industrial-complex. The emergence of Edward Teller promoting this startling technology is more than scary. (Teller was the father of the H-Bomb and grand promoter of Readi Kilowatt, our perky little radiation friend from the ’50s; one of his bright ideas from the ’50s was to create harbors by nuking our own coastline.) The April 24 New York Times reported that Teller "has promoted the idea of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to counteract global warming." The computer simulations on the use of aluminum oxide to counter global warming come from the Lawrence Livermore Weapons Laboratory, where Teller serves as director emeritus.

There should be little doubt that this would be a priority for the government -- or for for-profit military contractors. While 2001 was the second-hottest year on record (1998 holds the record as the hottest year), the nine hottest years on record have occurred since 1990. But why would the government conduct anti-global warming experiments in secret?

Investigative reporter William Thomas holds that there’s a link between the recent increase in asthma, allergies and upper respiratory ailments and the chemtrail spraying. Sound crazy? Remember, it sounded absurd when reports first came out that the government had conducted radioactivity experiments on U.S. citizens and released radiation from nuclear plants to test the effect on civilian populations. It sounded bizarre when news first filtered out that the government was engaged in the MK-Ultra mind-control experiments using LSD. The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency admit they were responsible for many of the UFO sightings in the 1950s in order the explain away experimental military technology.

From public documents to mainstream news accounts, the record is filled with reports of weather-modifying technology left over from the Cold War. Now we have a right to know what, if anything, the government plans to do with it.

http://www.alternet.org/story/12342/

Katrina-Bush: Why Did Bush Do Nothing? BBC Reports On USA's Weather Control Technology

2006-03-02T15:52:00.000-08:00

Thursday, 2 August, 2001, 01:45 GMT 02:45 UK
US makes 'weather control powder'

Scientists hope to reduce the effects of hurricanes
By BBC Science's Julian Siddle

A company in the United States claims it has invented a powder that can be used to remove clouds from the sky and even stop the development of hurricanes.

They say the new product could help many areas of the world that are subject to extreme weather conditions.

The Florida based company, Dyn-o-mat, used a military aircraft to drop four tonnes of its powder on to a developing storm cloud.

The cloud disappeared from radar screens, which were monitoring the experiment.

Officials from the company, which produces materials to absorb pollutants such as oil and acids, say they used a specially developed powder that absorbs large quantities of water.

'Completely safe'

The water is then turned into a gel before falling out of the sky.

The company says the gel is completely safe, bio-degradable, and breaks down in seawater - though they refuse to say exactly what is in it.

Among the applications that it envisages for the powder are clearing away clouds before sports fixtures and constraining the development hurricanes.

The company believes that a tightly controlled jet of the powder aimed at the hurricane would cut it into smaller pieces, making it far less threatening.

The US Government has already expressed interest in the new product, and the company says it could be useful worldwide.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1469610.stm

Karina-Bush: A Manmade Storm? Scientific American Magazine Article

2006-03-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

FROM: Scientific American Magazine…

September 27, 2004
Controlling Hurricanes
Can hurricanes and other severe tropical storms be moderated or deflected?
By Ross N. Hoffman

Every year huge rotating storms packing winds greater than 74 miles per hour sweep across tropical seas and onto shorelines--often devastating large swaths of territory. When these roiling tempests--called hurricanes in the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific oceans, typhoons in the western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean--strike heavily populated areas, they can kill thousands and cause billions of dollars of property damage. And nothing, absolutely nothing, stands in their way.

But must these fearful forces of nature be forever beyond our control? My research colleagues and I think not. Our team is investigating how we might learn to nudge hurricanes onto more benign paths or otherwise defuse them. Although this bold goal probably lies decades in the future, we think our results show that it is not too early to study the possibilities.

To even consider controlling hurricanes, researchers will need to be able to predict a storm's course extremely accurately, to identify the physical changes (such as alterations in air temperature) that would influence its behavior, and to find ways to effect those changes. This work is in its infancy, but successful computer simulations of hurricanes carried out during the past few years suggest that modification could one day be feasible. What is more, it turns out the very thing that makes forecasting any weather difficult--the atmosphere's extreme sensitivity to small stimuli--may well be the key to achieving the control we seek. Our first attempt at influencing the course of a simulated hurricane by making minor changes to the storm's initial state, for example, proved remarkably successful, and the subsequent results have continued to look favorable, too.o.

To see why hurricanes and other severe tropical storms may be susceptible to human intervention, one must understand their nature and origins. Hurricanes grow as clusters of thunderstorms over the tropical oceans. Low-latitude seas continuously provide heat and moisture to the atmosphere, producing warm, humid air above the sea surface. When this air rises, the water vapor in it condenses to form clouds and precipitation. Condensation releases heat--the solar heat it took to evaporate the water at the ocean surface. This so-called latent heat of condensation makes the air more buoyant, causing it to ascend still higher in a self-reinforcing feedback process. Eventually, the tropical depression begins to organize and strengthen, forming the familiar eye--the calm central hub around which a hurricane spins. On reaching land, the hurricane's sustaining source of warm water is cut off, which leads to the storm's rapid weakening.

Dreams of Control
Because a hurricane draws much of its energy from heat released when water vapor over the ocean condenses into clouds and rain, the first researchers to dream of taming these unruly giants focused on trying to alter the condensation process using cloud-seeding techniques--then the only practical way to try to affect weather. In the early 1960s a U.S. government-appointed scientific advisory panel named Project Stormfury performed a series of courageous (or perhaps foolhardy) experiments to determine whether that approach might work.

Project Stormfury aimed to slow the development of a hurricane by augmenting precipitation in the first rain band outside the eye wall--the ring of clouds and high winds that encircle the eye [see "Experiments in Hurricane Modification," by R. H. Simpson and Joanne S. Malkus; Scientific American, December 1964]. They attempted to accomplish this goal by seeding the clouds there with silver iodide particles dispersed by aircraft, which would serve as nuclei for the formation of ice from water vapor that had been supercooled after rising to the highest, coldest reaches of the storm. If all went as envisioned, the clouds would grow more quickly, consuming the supplies of warm, moist air near the ocean surface, thus replacing the old eye wall. This process would then expand the radius of the eye, lessening the hurricane's intensity in a manner akin to a spinning skater who extends her arms to slow down.

The Stormfury results were ambiguous at best. Meteorologists today do not expect this particular application of cloud seeding to be effective in hurricanes because, contrary to the early beliefs, the storms contain little supercooled water vapor.

Chaotic Weather
Our current studies grew out of an intuition I had 30 years ago when I was a graduate student learning about chaos theory. A chaotic system is one that appears to behave randomly but is, in fact, governed by rules. It is also highly sensitive to initial conditions, so that seemingly insignificant, arbitrary inputs can have profound effects that lead quickly to unpredictable consequences. In the case of hurricanes, small changes in such features as the ocean's temperature, the location of the large-scale wind currents (which drive the storms' movements), or even the shape of the rain clouds spinning around the eye can strongly influence a hurricane's potential path and power.

The altered version of Hurricane Iniki veered off, so that Kauai escaped the storm's most damaging winds.

The atmosphere's great sensitivity to tiny influences--and the rapid compounding of small errors in weather-forecasting models--is what makes long-range forecasting (more than five days in advance) so difficult. But this sensitivity also made me wonder whether slight, purposely applied inputs to a hurricane might generate powerful effects that could influence the storms, whether by steering them away from population centers or by reducing their wind speeds.

I was not able to pursue those ideas back then, but in the past decade computer simulation and remote-sensing technologies have advanced enough to renew my interest in large-scale weather control. With funding support from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, my co-workers and I at Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), an R&D consulting firm, are employing detailed computer models of hurricanes to try to identify the kinds of actions that might eventually be attempted in the real world. In particular, we use weather-forecasting technology to simulate the behavior of past hurricanes and then test the effects of various interventions by observing changes in the modeled storms.

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Calming the Tempest
To explore whether the sensitivity of the atmospheric system could be exploited to modify atmospheric phenomena as powerful as hurricanes, our research group at AER conducted computer simulation experiments for two hurricanes that occurred in 1992. When Hurricane Iniki passed over the Hawaiian island of Kauai in September of that year, several people died, property damage was enormous and entire forests were leveled. Hurricane Andrew, which struck Florida just south of Miami the month before, left the region devastated.

Surprisingly, given the imperfections of existing forecasting technologies, our first simulation experiment was an immediate success. To alter the path of Iniki, we first chose where we wanted the storm to end up after six hours--about 60 miles west of the expected track. Then we used this target to create artificial observations and fed these into 4DVAR. We set the computer to calculate the smallest change to the initial set of the hurricane's key defining properties that would yield a track leading to the target location. In this early experiment we permitted any kind of possible artificial alteration to the storm system to take place.

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As a test of the robustness of these results, we applied the same perturbation to a more sophisticated, higher-resolution version of the model. We obtained very similar results, which show that our experiments are reasonably insensitive to our particular choice of model configuration. After six hours, however, damaging winds reappeared in the altered simulation, so additional interventions would have been required to keep South Florida safe. Indeed, it looks as if a series of planned disturbances would be required to control a hurricane for any length of time.

Who Can Stop the Rain?
If it is true, as our results suggest, that small changes in the temperature in and around a hurricane can shift its path in a predictable direction or slow its winds, the question becomes, How can such perturbations be achieved? No one, of course, can alter the temperature throughout something as large as a hurricane instantaneously. It might be possible, however, to heat the air around a hurricane and thus adjust the temperature over time.

Our team plans to conduct experiments in which we will calculate the precise pattern and strength of atmospheric heating needed to moderate hurricane intensity or alter its track. Undoubtedly, the energy required to do so would be huge, but an array of earth-orbiting solar power stations could eventually be used to supply sufficient energy. These power-generating satellites might use giant mirrors to focus sunlight on solar cells and then beam the collected energy down to microwave receivers on the ground. Current designs for space solar power stations would radiate microwaves at frequencies that pass through the atmosphere without heating it, so as to not waste energy. For weather control, however, tuning the microwave downlink to frequencies better absorbed by water vapor could heat different levels in the atmosphere as desired. Because raindrops strongly absorb microwaves, parts of the hurricane inside and beneath rain clouds would be shielded and so could not be heated in this way.

------

Another potential method to modify severe tropical storms would be to directly limit the availability of energy by coating the ocean surface with a thin film of a biodegradable oil that slows evaporation. Hurricanes might also be influenced by introducing gradual modifications days in advance of their approach and thousands of miles away from their eventual targets. By altering air pressure, these efforts might stimulate changes in the large-scale wind patterns at the jet-stream level, which can have major effects on a hurricane's intensity and track. Further, it is possible that relatively minor alterations to our normal activities--such as directing aircraft flight plans to precisely position contrails and thus increase cloud cover or varying crop irrigation practices to enhance or decrease evaporation--might generate the appropriate starting alterations.

What if Control Works?
If meteorological control does turn out to work at some point in the future, it would raise serious political problems. What if intervention causes a hurricane to damage another country's territory? And, although the use of weather modification as a weapon was banned by a United Nations Convention in the late 1970s, some countries might be tempted.

Before those kinds of concerns arise, however, our methods would need to be proved on atmospheric phenomena other than hurricanes. In fact, we believe our techniques should first be tried out in an effort to enhance rainfall. This approach could then serve as a test bed for our concepts in a relatively small region that could be instrumented densely with sensors. For such reduced size scales, perturbations could be introduced from aircraft or from the ground. If our understanding of cloud physics, computer simulation of clouds and data assimilation techniques advance as quickly as we hope, these modest trials could be instituted in perhaps 10 to 20 years. With success there, larger-scale weather control using space-based heating may become a reasonable goal that nations around the globe could agree to pursue.

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000593AE-704B-1151-B57F83414B7F0000

Katrina: Video Shows Bush Knew

2006-03-02T01:09:00.000-08:00

Officials Detailed a Dire Threat to New Orleans

By Spencer S. Hsu and Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 2, 2006; Page A01

A newly leaked video recording of high-level government deliberations the day before Hurricane Katrina hit shows disaster officials emphatically warning President Bush that the storm posed a catastrophic threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and a grim-faced Bush personally assuring state leaders that his administration was "fully prepared" to help.

The footage, taken of a videoconference of federal and state officials on Aug. 28, offered an unusually vivid glimpse of real-time decision making by an administration that has vigorously guarded its internal deliberations.

Reactions to the tape, which was obtained by the Associated Press, varied widely -- reflecting the intense debate that has brewed for six months about who should be held accountable for an initially flaccid government response to the catastrophe.

Democrats said the tape shows Bush being warned in urgent terms of the potential magnitude of the storm, making it less defensible that the administration did not act with more dispatch to be ready.

White House officials said the footage reinforces what they have said to critics: that the president, at his Texas vacation home, was fully engaged from the opening hours of the emergency, while leaving operational decisions to the agencies in charge.

Bush was dialed into the conference Sunday at noon Eastern time from a meeting room at his ranch in Crawford, with Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin at his side.

"I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm," Bush said, gesturing with both hands for emphasis on the digital recording. Neither Bush nor Hagin asked questions, however.

Then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael D. Brown, who joined the call from Washington, and Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, briefed participating federal and state officials in explicit terms.

"This is, to put it mildly, the big one," Brown said. "Everyone within FEMA is now virtually on call."

Brown warned that thousands of New Orleans residents were gathering in a shelter of last resort at the Louisiana Superdome, which he said was about 12 feet below sea level.

"I don't know what the heck we're going to do for that, and I also am concerned about that roof," Brown said. "Not to be kind of gross here, but I'm concerned about [medical and mortuary disaster team] assets and their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe."

-----------

Brown, in an interview yesterday, agreed that Bush was engaged in the emergency but said the president was overconfident of FEMA's capabilities. He dismissed as "baloney" assertions by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that "a fog of war" impaired decision making in Washington.

"There was this fog of bureaucracy," Brown said, repeating his call to restore FEMA to independent, Cabinet-level status outside the department. "People either didn't want to know about it, or didn't want to deal with it."

Brown said the video showed "I was doing everything I could," whatever his mistakes. "My entreaties to the White House about the problems that FEMA was having were falling on deaf ears," he said. "They thought I could always pull a rabbit out of the hat."

In New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) was visibly shocked when shown the recording by reporters.

It "seems they were aware of everything . . . that we would need lots of help," Nagin said after a post-Mardi Gras news conference. "Why was the response so slow?"

When the video ended, Nagin turned away and said, "Oh, God."

Democrats in Washington issued statements newly critical of the government response.

Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) expressed alarm at "what the president actually knew and when he knew it."

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), ranking Democrat on a Senate panel investigating the storm response, said the video underscored the committee's findings that "government at all levels was forewarned of the catastrophic nature of the approaching storm and did painfully little to be ready."

Read Source Article Here: Washington Post

Bird Flu Survival: Let Them Eat Chicken

2006-03-01T17:57:00.000-08:00

Pakistani poultry traders eat chickens to show that there is no danger eating chickens during a rally in Peshawar, Pakistan to codemn killings of their chickens, Wednesday, March. 1, 2006. Authorities killed 15,000 chickens in northern Pakistan after poultry at two farms were tested positive for the H5 strain of bird flu, an official said. (AP Photo/Mohammad Zubair)

Bird Flu Survival: 1983-84 H5N2 outbreak

2006-03-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

A different strain of bird flu hit Pennsylvania 20 years ago. The 1983-84 H5N2 outbreak resulted in the destruction of approximately 17 million chickens, turkeys, and fowl in the Northeastern United States in containment efforts. The economic impact was intense - the final cost was nearly $65 million, but thankfully, no lives were lost. Today's state health officials cite that federal quarantine of Pennsylvania as a model for an outbreak today.

More recently, other strains of bird flu have been found in the United States. In 2002, an outbreak in Virginia of virus H7N2 cost the industry and federal government about $130 million. In 2004, a Maryland flock tested positive for the same strain, as well as a flock in Pennsylvania and poultry in Delaware and New Jersey. In these cases, the strains were quickly contained and eradicated thanks to close coordination and cooperation between the U.S. Department of Agriculture, state and local officials, and industry leaders.

The poultry industry in Pennsylvania accounts for almost $700 million in annual income at the farm level, making it the second-largest agricultural industry in the state (behind the dairy industry). According to the Department of Agriculture, the state has more than 23 million egg-laying chickens and 123 million chickens raised for meat in 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

So while consumers don't have much to worry about, poultry farmers do. Consumers may abstain from chicken and eggs until the "all clear" sign is given by health authorities - and maybe not even then. Turkey's poultry industry is trying to regain consumers' confidence. In an ad published in several newspapers, a cow tells a bird, "Be patient, my bird, they called me 'mad' too."

Read Source Article: Philadelphia Enquirer

Bird Flu Survival: MMMKay, I'm Going To Need You To Go Home

2006-03-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Businesses need to plan on having 40 percent of their workforces out if a flu pandemic strikes and need to start rewarding employees for staying home when they are sick, U.S. government advisers told a conference on Tuesday.

The H5N1 avian influenza virus will almost certainly spread to birds in the United States eventually, and if it mutates into a form that easily infects people it will spread globally within weeks, they noted.

If that happens, up to a third of people will be sickened by the virus in the space of a few weeks, another third will have to stay home to care for ill relatives or children kept out of school, and others will be afraid to come to work or may have trouble getting in if mass transit systems break down.

"We have seen, in the past several weeks, a remarkable acceleration of the pandemic in birds," Dr. Rajiv Venkayya, special assistant for biodefense to President George W. Bush, told the conference.

"It's something short of inevitable that we will see a case of H5N1 here in the U.S."

Sweden on Tuesday became the latest in a series of new countries to report an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu among wild birds. It has also spread to domestic poultry in several western European countries and in the African countries of Niger and Nigeria, as well as Egypt.

"Every day there's another country," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "It's going to go all the way across, there's no doubt about it."

The epidemic affects birds in many Asian countries, and has infected 173 people, killing 93 of them, according to the World Health Organization.

No one can say if the virus will evolve into a form that passes easily among humans, but WHO and other experts say a pandemic of some disease is inevitable and that planning now will not be wasted.

PREPARING FOR EMPTY OFFICES

"At the peak of the pandemic each company must be prepared to sustain absenteeism of up to 40 percent," Venkayya told the conference, sponsored by the Trust for Americas Health and Fleishman-Hillard public relations.

Some businesses will be able to get by with letting employees work from home. "We need to understand the role of telework," he said. But others will have to be encouraged to stay home.

"We need to change our approach to absenteeism," Venkayya said.

This may be tough, others told the conference. "Half of America's workers have no sick leave," said Jeffrey Levi of the Trust for America's Health.

"We are going to ask people to stay home." But if workers face losing pay if they do not show up, they will come out while sick and will spread influenza, Levi said.

"The approach of most organizations is you go to work whether you have a cold, whether you are half dead," said Dr. Myles Druckman of International SOS, an international medical assistance firm.

"They are going to have to change their whole corporate culture."

Companies should make permanent infection-control measures that can reduce absences from illness in any year, not just a pandemic, Venkayya said.

But holes remain in the plan, published on the Internet at http://www.pandemicflu.gov.

For instance, Lisa Summers of the American College of Nurse-Midwives asked Venkayya if there was a provision in the plan for the 4 million children who are born in the United States each year. "What happens to a healthy woman who chooses not to birth in a hospital in a flu epidemic?" Summers asked.

"If that guidance exists, I haven't seen it," Venkayya admitted.

Read Source Article: Reuters

Bird Flu Survival: Oh Canada! A Proactive, Sensibile And Open Approach

2006-03-01T07:41:00.000-08:00

Mar. 1, 2006. 05:12 AM
RITA DALY

Canadian customs officials have beefed up inspections at entry points for travellers arriving from Europe, especially France, to keep the highly lethal H5N1 bird flu strain from entering the country.

And the Quebec government recently passed legislation prohibiting poultry producers from keeping their stocks outside to avoid contact with wild birds.

With the virus continuing its spread across Europe — most recently infecting a commercial turkey farm in France, and killing a cat in northern Germany and wild ducks in Sweden — Canadian officials are working with border security services to make sure passengers don't illegally or inadvertently import the disease. "We've asked the customs agency to have a higher awareness of anyone coming from any countries in Europe, not just the ones with isolations that have been identified," Dr. Jim Clark of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said yesterday.

Animal health experts say the greatest potential for spreading the disease to Canada now comes from international travel, not the flyways of migratory birds.

Travellers from France are the latest to join a long list from countries exposed to the H5N1 virus who are being closely questioned by Canadian authorities about visits to European farms; they are also being questioned about hunting, birding and whether they are importing feathers or other bird products.

The virus, which has spread in recent months from Asia to Europe and Africa, was found Saturday at a farm of more than 11,000 turkeys in southeastern France. It has spread to 20 new countries in the past month.

Health experts in the Bahamas are also investigating the possibility the virus may be responsible for a spate of flamingo deaths on the southern island of Inagua in the last couple of days. Yesterday, Niger ordered a cull of all poultry in areas hit by bird flu and said it was stepping up checks across the rest of the semi-desert country to try to stop the disease from spreading.

Veterinary chiefs meeting in Paris yesterday said it is "highly likely" the disease will continue to spread to poultry stocks in Europe and beyond.

Clark, national manager of the food inspection agency's avian influenza working group, said dogs will be used at Canadian airport luggage carousels to sniff out any feathers or bird products stored in bags or to detect bird droppings that may have attached to the bottoms of people's shoes or clothing.

"We're relying on a bit of an honour system but the dogs are keeping people honest too," he said.

Read Source Article: Toronto Star

Bush And Nixon Have A Lot In Common

2006-03-01T07:25:00.000-08:00

The release of a new CBS News poll showing Bush's approval rating dropping to 34 percent, a low for him in that survey, sent tremors through Republican circles in Washington. Scott Reed, who managed Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign in 1996, called the results "pretty shattering." Most distressing to GOP strategists was that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent.

"The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women and it's spreading.

It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

Bush shrugged off the poll numbers in an interview with ABC News yesterday. "If I worried about polls, I would be -- I wouldn't be doing my job," he said before leaving Washington for a trip to India and Pakistan. "And, look, I fully understand that when you do hard things, it creates consternation at times. And, you know, I've been up in the polls and I've been down in the polls. You know, it's just part of life in the modern era."

Yet at the White House, aides were decidedly downbeat, making dark jokes about the latest political trajectory and the Murphy's Law quality of life in the West Wing these days -- what can go wrong will go wrong. At least, some consoled themselves, Bush beat out Vice President Cheney, who was viewed favorably by just 18 percent in the CBS survey.

Others held on to the hope that this, too, shall pass.

Read Source Article:Washington Post

Bush And Nixon Have A Lot In Common (Other Than Poll Numbers)

2006-03-01T07:15:00.000-08:00

1972

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Bird Flu Survival: H5N1 Found In German Cat.

2006-02-28T22:33:00.000-08:00

By REUTERS
Published: February 28, 2006

PARIS (Reuters) - Bird flu is likely to hit poultry flocks in a number of European states, experts said on Tuesday, while alarm over the spread of the H5N1 virus was fueled by a report that it had been found in a dead German cat.

Scientists said they did not believe the case of the German cat increased the risks to human health from a virus which is known to have killed at least 93 people since late 2003. However, one expert advised cat owners to keep their pets indoors in affected regions.

Sweden became the latest in a series of new countries to report an outbreak of bird flu. Two wild ducks found dead on the Baltic coast had an aggressive form of bird flu and officials said it was likely to be confirmed as the feared H5N1 strain.

Iraq, which has reported two deaths from bird flu, said it was making checks for three suspected human cases in Baghdad and one in the northeastern province of Dayala.

The poultry industry is being hard hit as consumers shun meat such as chicken despite reassurances it is safe to eat. France last week became the first European Union country to confirm an outbreak on a poultry farm.

"The spread of the infection to domestic poultry in other European and neighboring countries is highly likely and may even be made worse by the arrival in Europe of possibly infected birds from Africa and the Middle East next spring,'' the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) said.

France, Europe's biggest poultry producer, has confirmed the first outbreak of H5N1 at a farm in the European Union. The news has prompted 20 countries to ban French poultry and France said it was in talks to reverse the bans.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned the crisis would depress demand for poultry and hit prices.

"The U.N. agency expects poultry consumption shocks in many countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa that have been hit by the avian influenza,'' it said in a statement.

"Poultry prices are expected to continue declining, threatening industry profitability around the world,'' it added.

GERMAN CAT

German officials said the cat was found at the weekend on the island of Ruegen off Germany's northern coast, the same location where the virus was first identified in birds earlier this month.

The finding may increase concern that the virus could spread to other species in Europe as it has in a number of cases in other parts of the world.

Germany's Federal Research Institute for Animal Health said it was still conducting tests to see whether the virus was the deadly strain of H5N1.

"It has been known for some time that cats can become infected by eating infected birds,'' Thomas Mettenleiter, the institute's president said in a statement.

Albert Osterhaus, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands who has conducted research into the virus in cats, said he was not surprised by the case.

"Cat to human transmission is theoretically possible and not to be excluded. We have seen cat-to-cat transmission in laboratory experiments.

"People should keep their cats inside in regions where the disease was found,'' Osterhaus told Reuters.

The H5N1 virus has been detected in around 20 new countries over the past month alone, crossing into Europe and Africa. The virus is endemic in birds across parts of Asia.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said H5N1 was spreading relentlessly.

Every day there's another country ... and it's going to go all the way across (the globe) -- there's no doubt about it,'' he told a conference on bird flu in Washington.

It has led to the culling or deaths of some 200 million birds since late 2003. In poultry flocks it can cause sudden severe disease, rapid contagion and a mortality rate that can approach 100 percent within 48 hours.

Although essentially an animal disease, humans can contract the virus through direct contact with sick poultry.

The real fear for humans is that the virus will mutate into a form which passes easily from person to person, sparking a pandemic in which millions could die.

KENYAN TESTS

Tests on dead chickens found dumped on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital Nairobi came back negative for H5N1. However, East African neighbor Ethiopia had sent samples from dead poultry to Italy for laboratory checks.

Experts fear the virus could spread rapidly in Africa where chickens live in millions of homes and health, veterinary and laboratory services are often poor.

The virus had been found in birds in the West African states of Nigeria and Niger and also in Egypt.

(Additional reporting by Niklas Pollard and Simon Johnson in Stockholm, Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa, Silvia Aloisi in Rome and Paul Majendie in London))

Source Article: New York Times

Bird Flu Survival: Old Friend, New Enemy

2006-02-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

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German officials say a dead cat has tested positive for the H5N1, the first case found outside of birds in Europe.

Authorities say the cat was found on the island of Ruegen, where dozens of birds died from the virus earlier this month.

Experts note that cats in Asia have been infected by eating contaminated birds. But there have been no cases of humans acquiring the illness from cats.

Meanwhile, Russian officials quarantined a poultry farm, where more than 100,000 birds died from the H5N1 strain.

In Paris, the World Organization for Animal Health warned that the H5N1 virus will likely spread across Europe, after the deadly strain was found on a French poultry farm.

Several nations, including the United States, have banned poultry imports from the affected Ain region of France.

And Pakistani authorities slaughtered at least 15,000 chickens infected with the H5 strain in North West Frontier province.

Read Source Article: VOA
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Bird Flu Survival: Chaos And Theory

2006-02-28T07:47:00.000-08:00

As new outbreaks of bird flu have peppered Europe and Africa in the last weeks, experts are realizing that they do not fully understand how migrating birds disseminate the H5N1 virus, leaving the continents vulnerable to unexpected outbreaks.

Just after new scientific research clarified the role of wild birds in spreading H5N1 out of its original territory in southern China, the virus promptly moved into dozens of locations in Europe and Africa, following no apparent pattern and underlining how little scientists know.

In fact, current knowledge of how H5N1 is spreading in Europe and Africa is so rudimentary that experts said there is absolutely no way of predicting where it will strike next - although they are now certain that it will, again and again.

"We know next to nothing about this virus; we have only anecdotal information about where it exists and what birds it infects," said Vittorio Guberti, head veterinarian at the Italian National Institute for Wildlife, who has devoted his career to studying influenza in wild birds. "We don't even know where to focus. We have to sit and wait for the big epidemic to occur, and in the meantime there will probably be small outbreaks all the time."

Scientists do not know, for example, which species are the major carriers of H5N1. While they suspect that there may be a few areas at the fringes of Europe that are perpetually infected with H5N1, they are not sure exactly where. And while they are convinced that the virus can be carried on trucks, shoes and in fertilizer, they are not sure how important that route is.

Until this year, Europe's small fraternity of wild bird researchers - like Guberti - was severely underfunded, its warnings about bird flu unheeded. Now they are racing to fill in gaps in knowledge and answer crucial questions.

"Think about this," Guberti said in his cluttered laboratory here. In March, "two million ducks from Nigeria, where there is a big problem, will arrive in Italy. And we don't know a thing about them."

Outbreaks in Nigeria have occurred in commercial poultry, but there is no information about whether the disease is in wild birds. Samples from African birds have been shipped to the official UN lab in Padua, Italy, for analysis, but they are "waiting on a shelf" because the lab is overwhelmed by samples from Europe now, a United Nations official confirmed.

"There is a lot of money coming in from the World Bank, but most of it's going to
pharmaceutical companies, although that is starting to change," said Alex Kaat, spokesperson for Wetlands International, a Dutch nonprofit organization that has sent teams to several African nations to sample wild birds. "Everyone ignored wild birds for a long time - too long. And now we have a lot to learn."

Since three weeks ago, when mute swans in Sicily became the first birds in the European Union to die from bird flu, Guberti's life has been "a nightmare," he said. He spent last weekend trying to trap swans in Sicily to see if the 200 or so remaining were infected.

On a bleak, rainy afternoon last Friday, his colleague Mara Scremine was taking blood samples from mallards on Italy's Adriatic coast, dressed in full bio-safety gear because of the discovery of bird flu in an Italian duck last week.

In neighboring Slovenia, scientists have been trying to make sense of the 11 dead mute swans that have been found near lakes and rivers outside the eastern city of Maribor, said Tomi Trilar, a senior biologist at the Slovenian Museum of Natural History. Like many countries, Slovenia has a native year- round population of about 100 swans, as well as visiting birds.

"They are really more vagrants than migratory birds, who fly short distances in search of food if there is a shortage in their normal wintering place," said Trilar, noting that Slovenian lakes are good resting places for hungry swans, since residents tend to feed them. "This year was very cold in southern Russia and the lakes were iced over, so we think the sick birds came from there."

But he said "it is very hard to check" if there is also bird flu in the native population. "They are huge birds and shy, and they struggle. You can go to a site and sample one bird a day."

In February, new research provided crucial clues about how the H5N1 virus broke out of its original stalking grounds in Southeast Asia, moving to western China and on to the edges of Europe late last year. Bird flu was first discovered in Hong Kong in 1997. The critical viral transfer took place in China's southern Guangdong Province, new genetic analysis suggests, when wild ducks or geese acquired the virus from domestic poultry in rice paddies where they coexisted.

Scientists at the University of Hong Kong have been studying subtypes of H5N1 virus in the birds of Guangdong for a number of years. Last month they reported that the genetic types found in both wild and domestic birds in the province matched exactly the types found last summer in migrating bids in western China, proving a positive link.

Dr. Guan Yi and his colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month that some birds infected with H5N1 could survive for a week, and so were capable of spreading it over vast areas - to China's remote west and Mongolia, for example. Previously, scientists were convinced that infected birds would be too sick to cover such distances.

From there, H5N1 predictably moved on to Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Romania and the Balkans. But the recent pattern of spread, into European and African nations, has been far more confusing.

"For a couple of weeks, it was raining dead swans all over Europe, which left everyone scratching their heads," said Jan Slingenberg, a senior veterinary official at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "Are the swans just the tip of the iceberg? Where should we worry? But given the rapid geographic spread in so many different places, it is a good idea for everyone to be stepping up security."

Wetlands International has made a list of 17 species it believes are particularly likely to spread H5N1 in Europe. There is no list for Africa or Asia. Some species, such as pigeons, which have provoked intense angst in European cities, are not susceptible, so there is little point in directing vigilance there.

Guberti and others suspect that there are now permanent reservoirs of the disease on Europe's doorstep, so that birds like the mute swan may pick up the disease as they enter the Continent. Suspects include the Black Sea and the lower Volga River, areas that have known outbreaks of H5N1 and where mute swans often winter.

Nations must identify such reservoirs, Guberti said, so that scientists can see which birds live there and where they migrate, creating a kind of early warning system.

The dead ducks that have been found in various corners of Europe, from Geneva to central Italy and the suburbs of Lyon, have proved even more disquieting to scientists.

"It's hard to explain," Kaat said, noting that scientists have no idea whether the ducks got the virus from infected poultry nearby, from mute swans, from another species that is spreading the disease undetected in Europe - or if they are birds making an early migration from infected parts of Africa.

While ornithologists are convinced that most of Europe's cases are tied to migration, they are also quick to note that wild birds are sometimes unfairly blamed. Officials in Turkey and Nigeria said that migrating birds were responsible for H5N1 outbreaks, though scientists said the distribution made that unlikely.

"It's easy to blame migrating birds, because then no one is responsible," said Juan Lubroth, a senior veterinary health officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

In Croatia, for example, Kaat said, fertilizer made of manure from infected poultry probably spread H5N1. Manure from farms is commonly used to fertilize fish ponds, which are frequent stopover points for migrating birds that probably contracted the virus there, he said. The virus persists in water for weeks.

In Nigeria, the first huge outbreak occurred in January in hens in the north, a dry area far from the wetlands that are home to the country's migratory birds.

"The outbreaks were in the wrong place and at the wrong time of year," Kaat said.

Instead, he and others believe, Nigeria's problem was probably caused by the transport of sick birds or bird products infected with H5N1 from another country in Africa or even Asia.

Most experts doubt that wild migrating birds themselves will precipitate huge outbreaks, since they are less susceptible than poultry to the virus, though they believe that Europeans must get used to a steady stream of wild bird deaths here and there.

Read Source Article: Herald Tribune

Bird Flu Survival: Meanwhile In Russia

2006-02-28T06:30:00.000-08:00

ROSTOV-ON-DON, February 28 (RIA Novosti, Anatoly Novichkov) - About 180,000 hens infected with bird flu have been culled at a poultry farm in Daghestan, a republic in southern Russia, a local spokesman said.

"Overall, there were 280,000 hens at the poultry farm, including 104,000 chicks," the spokesman for the republic's Emergency Situations Ministry said. "The chicks were kept separately from the hens; no cases of avian flu have been registered among them and they will not be destroyed," the spokesman said

On February 5-10, a mass death of hens was registered at a poultry farm near the capital of Daghestan, Makhachkala. Pathogenic samples were sent for tests, which revealed the bird flu virus. The authorities decided to cull all the infected poultry at the farm and impose quarantine regulations.

No cases of human infection have been registered, the spokesman said.

From January 15 to February 1, 350,000 birds died at the Eldama poultry farm in the Karabudakhkent district, south of the republic's capital near the Caspian Sea coast.

In the last few weeks, the bird flu virus has been detected in wild fowl, including migratory birds, in six Russian southern regions: the republics of Kabardino-Balkaria, Daghestan, Chechnya and Kalmykia, and the Krasnodar and Stavropol territories.

Read Source Artical: Russian News And Information Agency

Bird Flu Survival: Ineffective Response

2006-02-28T06:11:00.000-08:00

A day after the deadly strain of bird flu was confirmed in Niger, there are hardly any chickens on sale in the capital's markets. A BBC correspondent says consumers have been wary of buying poultry since the H5N1 strain was confirmed in neighbouring Nigeria.

Despite public concern, the government is making no official comment until after Tuesday's cabinet meeting.

There has been no culling of poultry in the areas where bird flu was confirmed.

The BBC's Souleymane Issa Maiga in Niamey says the bodies of some 1,100 dead chickens and ducks have been incinerated in Magaria and Ban Barde, the two areas where the H5N1 strain was found.

These are both near the border with Nigeria.

In other developments:

+ Nigeria is due to start paying compensation to poultry farmers affected by bird flu;
The results of bird flu tests in Kenya are negative;

+ Ethiopia is carrying out tests after the suspicious deaths of some 6,000 birds.

+ Nigerian officials have also urged people to carry on eating chickens and eggs, as long as they are cooked properly, to reduce the economic impact, reports the AFP news agency;

+ A farm affected by bird flu in northern Nigeria has been raided by villagers, who stole thousands of birds;

No human cases of the H5N1 strain have yet been found in Africa but the UN has warned of a possible regional disaster if the disease continues to spread.

'No transparency'

Our correspondent says that with a 1,200km border between Niger and Nigeria and many families divided between the two countries, it comes as no surprise that bird flu has crossed over.

This was echoed by Bernard Vallat, director of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).
"The measures of confinement were not taken and transparency was not applied from the beginning [in Nigeria]," he said.

"Now we know that all of the neighbouring countries of Nigeria are under a very big threat."

Niger, like most West African countries, had banned poultry imports from Nigeria, where some 300,000 chickens have reportedly died.

Bird flu has also been found in Egypt.

But Nigerian officials stress that well cooked chicken and eggs are safe to eat.

"The panic is actually causing more problems and if we continue this way, in the next week, our economy would be badly affected," said the head of the state-run food and drug administration and control, Dora Akunyili.

Some hungry villagers in northern Bauchi state appear to be unconcerned and have stole thousands of birds suspected to have been infected with bird flu. Police have made several arrests.

The Nigerian government is to start paying affected poultry farmers in order to encourage them to report suspicious deaths and stop the spread of the disease.

But the farmers say the amount on offer - 250 naira ($2) per chicken - is less than half of the market value, leading to fears they might not tell the authorities if their birds fall ill.

Read Source Article: BBC

Bird Flu Survival: Protecting Profits

2006-02-27T17:05:00.000-08:00

Veterinarians held over Ibaraki bird flu coverup

MITO, Ibaraki Pref. (Kyodo) Police arrested four people Monday related to a poultry farm operator in Ibaraki Prefecture in connection with a suspected coverup of an avian flu outbreak last year.

Police suspect Ikuo Eguchi, 58, Yoshio Maeda, 53, Takanori Nakamura, 36, all veterinarians at IKN Egg Farms Co., and IKN employee Tomohiro Nakane, 32, violated the Domestic Animal Infectious Diseases Control Law, which requires reporting any suspected contagious diseases in poultry.

They also suspect an antibody test conducted at the National Institute of Animal Health in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, by a veterinarian at the request of the IKN vets showed positive, the sources said.

The Tsukuba veterinarian is an acquaintance of the IKN vets.

The four IKN employees allegedly failed to report a case of suspected avian flu infection to the Ibaraki government late last August.

Polices searched IKN Egg Farms and the Tsukuba research institute in December and questioned the vets.

The vets at IKN Egg Farm are also suspected of obstructing an avian flu test at three farms conducted by Ibaraki Prefecture last August by submitting samples taken from other poultry farms, the sources said.

The prefecture has alleged that IKN Egg Farms committed similar misdeeds at two other poultry farms it operates in Ibaraki, prefectural officials said.

Avian flu infections have been found at 40 farms in Ibaraki Prefecture since June, and about 5.8 million chickens have had to be killed.

Read Source Article:Japan Times

Bird Flu Survival: Worries Being Felt In US

2006-02-27T06:44:00.000-08:00

The deadly bird flu virus is on the move, showing up in the European Union for the first time amid rising concern about an outbreak in the US.

If it happens, folks like Tom Klopfenstein will be on the firing line.

The 69-year-old Illinois farmer expects to be donning gloves, masks and disposable clothing, administering vaccines and improvising shelter to keep infected wildfowl away from his flock of nearly 40,000 free-range turkeys.

"For a company like us that grows birds on the open range, it keeps me up at night," said Klopfenstein, general manager of Kauffman Ho-Ka Turkey Farms in Waterman, Ill., 65 miles west of Chicago. "It's scary.

"Avian influenza is putting a fright into consumers around the globe, with consequences now being felt in the vast U.S. poultry industry. Prices are under pressure, particularly for leg quarters and other dark-meat chicken cuts, as demand begins to flag overseas.

Much of the worry focuses on the virus spreading from human to human, touching off a dreaded pandemic. But, so far, the disease has spread solely from bird to bird and from bird to human, with the biggest impact on the world's producers of chickens and turkeys.

At least 92 people have died, and the marketplace is feeling the pain as shoppers from Austria to India begin steering clear of this cheap and abundant meat.

"The real concern is that it is spreading," said Don Roose, president of U.S. Commodities in West Des Moines, Iowa. "We have not been able to put the fire out yet, and to think we can sit here isolated, you would have to be naive.

"For export nations such as the United States, which typically ships about 14 percent of its poultry to overseas buyers, the latest scare comes at an inopportune time, coinciding with a period of increased production. While the white meat-dominated domestic market has held its own, dark cuts have started piling up.

"There's just a lot of poultry out there," explained Roose, who said the amount of chicken in cold storage has soared almost one-third from a year ago.

Last week's spread of the flu across Western Europe particularly caught the attention of commodity traders, whose interest in bird flu has ebbed and flowed with the course of the disease in recent months.

As of Friday, the virus had arrived in 10 European countries, with the latest cases showing up on a turkey farm in France, the European Union's largest poultry producer. EU health ministers met in Vienna last week to address worries that their governments have failed to adequately prepare for a large-scale outbreak of H5N1, as the deadly form of the virus is known.

Meanwhile, in Asia, where bird flu has devastated poultry stocks, Indonesia sent hundreds of veterinary workers door-to-door in the capital of Jakarta, testing for infected fowl among the many chickens and songbirds commonly kept in the back yards of city residents. In India, workers in goggles and protective suits cleaned out chicken coops in a town where the disease struck last week.

Traders were on alert as the news poured in, said analyst Greg Grow of Archer Financial Services.

"This bird flu thing has been a dark cloud hovering over the commodity markets for four months now," he said. "Certainly it's going to continue to be out there.

"Grocery shoppers, meanwhile, should be catching a break. According to a widely followed wholesale price gauge, leg quarters and thighs have plunged 53 percent between October and last week, and even the sought-after skinless, boneless breasts have fallen 25 percent.

With poultry prices sinking, beef and pork have started to come under pressure too. And grain markets have felt tremors, on the theory that depleted flocks abroad will be consuming less American corn and soybean meal for feed.

"The boat has tilted in favor of U.S. consumers. Costco should be having better sales," said Dan Basse, analyst at Chicago's AgResource Co. "Poultry farmers in the U.S. are becoming very unprofitable. These guys are starting to lose money.

"Indeed, publicly held chicken processors Tyson Foods, Pilgrim's Pride and Sanderson Farms have seen their stocks ground like hamburger in recent months, though bird flu is just one of the industry's troubles.

In the current reporting period, almost nothing is going right, prompting Tyson Chief Executive John Tyson to declare last week that this quarter in the meat industry is "the toughest one I've seen.

"Just last summer, the outlook appeared considerably brighter. Poultry production was surging, and broiler exports to Asia, in particular, appeared to be on the rise as mad cow concerns cut into shipments of beef.

These days, the same poultry producers that aggressively ramped up are now scaling back, reducing the number of egg sets that determine how many birds will be raised to maturity in coming months.

If avian flu strikes the United States, most likely transmitted by migratory birds winging their way northward, an immediate export ban would probably go into effect until the outbreak could be isolated to a region or area, said Jim Robb, director of the Livestock Marketing Information Center. "That takes time," said Robb. "There are economic consequences.

"But the U.S. might be better able to cope than nearly any other market, he added. "We're well aware of the situation, and it would be constrained.

"The U.S. poultry industry is primarily run by big commercial producers with the know-how and resources to take appropriate measures for containing an outbreak. That contrasts sharply with the small, homegrown flocks in Asia that have proven vulnerable to repeated infections.

"If we do our job, we can really minimize the risk," said Ed Garrett, chief executive of West Liberty Foods, an Iowa turkey processor. "There are ways to really slow it down or control it.

"In addition, U.S. consumers tend to take bad news affecting the food supply in stride, as shown in the willingness to keep eating beef despite the threat of mad cow disease, Robb noted. Unlike mad cow, thorough cooking can eliminate the risk of contracting the poultry disease. Robb expects that message to get out quickly, helping to moderate public reaction.

That's not to say coping with flu would be easy, particularly for Klopfenstein. His business is acutely seasonal, and it depends on allowing his turkeys room to roam.

The usual growing season runs from June to mid-December, with nearly all his gobblers earmarked for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. "We'll hope if something does crop up, it would be in a season when we have no birds," he said.

Klopfenstein just hopes he can stay ahead of it. The same goes for the rest of U.S. agriculture.

"The market is really focusing on it as it moves into Western Europe," said analyst Rich Nelson of the Allendale Inc. research firm. "This will be something we deal with throughout 2006."

Read Source Article: Chicago Tribune

Bird Flu Survival: H5N1 Comes To A Nation Already In Crisis

2006-02-27T05:53:00.000-08:00

Roasted birds are seen for sale in a local market. Top veterinary experts warned that panic selling was fuelling Africa's first bird flu epidemic
So it begins in Africa.

H5N1 has moved inland on Africa’s west coast from Nigeria to Niger, the worlds first or second poorest country depending on who you are reading.

Niger a 98 percent Muslim country bordering on Nigerian Islamic Sharia law districts on the south, can ill afford to lose any food production as it endures year after year of poor climate, droughts and locust invasions.

It is estimated that 6 million of Niger’s 11.5 million people face food shortages, while 2.5 million are on the brink of starvation. Some families are trying to survive by eating leaves and wild roots.

Some 82 percent of Niger’s population relies on subsistence farming and cattle rearing, while only 15 percent of the land is suitable for arable farming.

I can only imagine that the sporadic problems of people hiding infected flocks will only get much worse in a starving, poor country. (Submitted by Herky)
_____________________________________________________________
H5N1 confirmed in second African country

Niger has become the second African country with confirmed cases of the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain.

Ilaria Capua, chief of the laboratory in Padua, Italy, that identified the H5N1 strain in birds from the deeply impoverished West African country, said the test were confirmed today and the government of Niger had been informed.

H5N1 had earlier been confirmed in Nigeria, Niger’s southern neighbour, and officials had said in mid-February they were investigating whether it had surfaced in Niger.

Experts have been particularly concerned about the spread of H5N1 to Africa, unprepared for such a health crisis because of weak infrastructure.

The virus is believed to have spread unchecked in Nigeria before it was identified, and Nigeria’s efforts to contain it have been hampered by lack of resources and information.

Further tests were being carried out to determine how closely the strain found in Niger matched the H5N1 strain detected elsewhere in the world.

Lab chief Capua, speaking at a bird flu conference in France, said she feared the arrival of the virus in a second African country was “just the start” of the virus becoming endemic on the continent.

Read Source Artical: Ireland On-Line

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NIGER: Thousands protest caricature of Prophet Muhammad

Thousands of Muslims took to the streets of the capital of Niger this week as protests against the publication of controversial cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammad reached West Africa.

Organisers said 50,000 people had turned out Tuesday in the dusty streets of Niamey after a call from religious leaders to press the government to cut diplomatic relations with Denmark, where the caricatures were originally published. An IRIN correspondent estimated the turnout at 10,000.

Muslim rage has swept Europe and the Middle East after the publication of the caricatures, some showing the prophet wearing a turban resembling a bomb. And Niger's Muslim leaders dubbed Denmark "an enemy of Islam."

"The amalgam knowingly maintained between Islam and terrorism is simply coarse and unacceptable," said protester Elhaj Tahir Ousmane. "The provocation was too much, it is necessary to put an end to it by all means."

In northern Nigeria, where some states have adopted Islamic Sharia law, protestors took to the streets on Monday chanting "Allahu Akbar [God is great]" and burning the Danish flag.
The caricatures, first published in September, angered Muslims in part because Islam bars any depiction of the image of the Prophet Muhammad. And many Muslims have called for boycotts of Danish goods, or held protests outside Danish facilities.

In Niger, security forces looked on as Tuesday's demonstrations passed off without violence. Ranked by the UN as the world's poorest country, Niger is 98 percent Muslim and most Nigeriens practice a moderate form of Islam, often infusing local cultural practices into their worship.

But in recent years, Nigeriens have become increasingly aware of a rise in fundamentalism, particularly in the east of the country bordering northern Nigeria.

The United States military has chosen Niger as one of a handful of countries on the fringes of the Sahara desert for a half-billion-dollar programme for training security personnel in tackling terrorism.

EPA: 4 Million Gallons Of VX Nerve Gas Byproduct Into Delaware River

2006-02-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

February 25, 2006, 12:09 PM EASTDOVER, Del. -- Citing new safety assurances, the Environmental Protection Agency has dropped its objections to a plan to treat and dispose of chemical weapon wastewater at a DuPont Co. plant along the Delaware River.

The agency also cited changes to the treatment scheme as a reason not to oppose the plan.

"EPA believes that all of our previously identified ecological concerns have been resolved," said Walter Mugdan, director of the EPA's Environmental Planning and Protection division in New York, in a letter released Friday which was obtained by The (Wilmington) News Journal.

DuPont has been seeking a lucrative Army contract to treat 2 million to 4 million gallons of chemicals left over from an operating VX nerve agent disposal operation in Newport, Ind. VX is a deadly military nerve agent, capable of quickly killing an adult after exposure to a pinhead-size droplet.

Delaware and New Jersey opposed an earlier version of the plan. Officials expressed concerns that traces of VX, other toxic byproducts and basic pollutants would reach the river even after treatment in DuPont's commercial wastewater operation at its plant near the foot of the Delaware Memorial Bridge in New Jersey.

"I'm not stunned by the decision. I'm skeptical in the sense that I need to review the evidence, and I think my staff has the same attitude," John A. Hughes, secretary of Delaware's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, told The News Journal late Friday.

"We did say early on that it's going to take new technology to make the VX treatment acceptable. The treatment level of the original plan was much too low," Hughes said. DNREC's researchers raised questions about DuPont's original proposal, eventually prompting the company to develop a new treatment step that would prevent toxic leftovers in the wastewater from escaping into the river.

The EPA's latest findings were forwarded to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where analysts are considering human health risks posed by the Army's plan. A final report is expected to go to the region's congressional delegations in April.

Anthony Farina, a spokesman for DuPont, said the company was aware of the development and has yet to review details.

"Certainly we've been working very closely with the EPA in addressing their concerns," Farina said. "We look forward to seeing the final report when it's completed and released."

Comments from DuPont in mid-2004 indicated the company could make $13.5 million annually during the two- to three-year treatment process. Details of the contract or government payments to DuPont during preparations for the work were unavailable.

Army officials could not be reached Friday.

The Newport VX disposal depot reported earlier this week that it had destroyed about 11 percent of a 250,000 gallon VX stockpile, with wastewater from the process stored in mobile containers pending a decision on the DuPont project.

Brendan Gilfillan, a spokesman for New Jersey's governor, said Jon S. Corzine remains concerned about the proposal.

"We're still very interested in seeing the result of the CDC's study of the human impact," Gilfillan said.

Although the EPA found DuPont had proven its discharge would meet federal toxicity limits, the agency recommended additional work, including studies of fish and other aquatic life before treatment begins. The EPA, New Jersey, DuPont and the Delaware River Basin Commission would collaborate in those studies.

Read Source Artical: NewsDay

Bird Flu Survival: Eygpt, Run On Water

2006-02-26T07:19:00.000-08:00

PANICKED people worldwide have been trying to ensure protection from bird flu, no more so than in Egypt. The advice went out last week spread via emails and word of mouth: don't drink the water.

Farmers and rooftop poultry breeders, a Cairo fixture, were dumping sick or dead chickens into the River Nile, the source of drinking water for millions of Egyptians. Suddenly, taps were turned off and there was a rush to buy bottled water.

"I never saw anything like it," said Emad Abu Fouad, a grocer in the Bab Zuweila district. "People bought whole cases."

No matter that the Government assured everyone that purification chemicals in public water supplies would kill the H5N1 virus that infects birds and, scientists fear, could mutate into a form that is easily transmitted among humans.

Egypt is not the only country whose population has reacted with alarm to the spread of bird flu during the virus's recent spread from Asia and into Europe. In Western Europe, poultry sales plummeted as soon as the disease was found in migrating birds.

Infected migratory birds and chickens have been found in 14 of Egypt's 26 provinces. But there is an inbred mistrust of official information, which leads to an especially irrational response.
"There is little transparency in our society and whatever information is given is likely to be false. It will take a long time for people to believe the government," one journalist, Magdi Mehanna, wrote in the independent Al-Masry Al-Yom .

No humans have been infected with the flu, Egyptian officials say, but as in other countries where the virus arrived in migrating birds, the spread of H5N1 immediately depressed the chicken market.

About 750,000 people are employed in poultry breeding, and about 800 million chickens are eaten annually in Egypt. Lay-offs are already approaching 30 per cent as sales plummet, with the industry losing about $US1.7 million ($2.3 million) a day. Supermarkets have emptied their poultry departments and a portrait of Colonel Sanders looks down on an empty KFC store on busy Tahrir Square.

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

* China warned the public of a possible "massive" bird flu outbreak as two more people died from the H5N1 strain and a new poultry outbreak in the country's east was confirmed.

* The European Union urged its trading partners not to over-react after Japan banned all French poultry imports and threatened similar action against the Netherlands.

* Indonesia's human death toll rose to 20 with confirmation that a 27-year-old woman had died.

Read Source Here: Washington Post

Bird Flu Survival: Slow-Motion Tsunami

2006-02-26T07:06:00.000-08:00

2 MILLION Americans could die in a flu pandemic, which many scientists say is not just inevitable but long overdue.

In such an emergency, national leaders would need to be forthright and candid to gain our trust — or risk chaos.

But recent polls show that President Bush's approval ratings have sunk below 50% and that deception about the Iraq war, as well as federal mismanagement after Hurricane Katrina, have hurt his credibility. That loss of public faith is almost as scary as the virus itself. When citizens are skeptical or defiant in the face of severe disease, fear becomes epidemic, leading to confusion and often needless deaths.

"One of the hardest things — and one of the most crucial things — about preparing for a public health crisis is cooperation from the public and trust in government," said Judith Walzer Leavitt, professor of medical history at the University of Wisconsin. Leavitt's study of two smallpox outbreaks — Milwaukee's in 1894 and New York City's in 1947 — illustrates how important this trust may be if a deadly new strain of influenza sweeps the world.

When smallpox struck Milwaukee, health officials permitted middle- and upper-class residents to be quarantined at home but ordered residents in the city's crowded immigrant sections to an isolation hospital known as the "pesthouse." Angry at the injustice, immigrant groups hid smallpox victims from authorities. The health commissioner told a newspaper reporter: "I am here to enforce the laws, and I shall enforce them, if I have to break heads to do it." Riots broke out, and smallpox raced through the city. By the end of the outbreak, 1,079 Milwaukeeans were infected and 244 died.

Compare this with New York City's enlightened smallpox communication in 1947. After three cases had emerged, the health commissioner said that while the chances of a full-scale epidemic were slight, everyone who had not been vaccinated should "go at once to their doctors to receive this protection." Officials held daily news conferences, announcing all suspected and confirmed cases. People felt they were being informed as events unfolded. Within four weeks, an astounding 6,350,000 residents were vaccinated. The virus caused only 12 cases and two deaths.

Words count. "The core of crisis communication is demonstrating competence, transparency, passion and compassion," said Howard Koh, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at the Harvard School of Public Health and a former Massachusetts commissioner of public health. Against those standards, if a flu pandemic hit tomorrow, this White House's words would fall on deaf ears.

How can leaders launch a vital national conversation on pandemic influenza?

First, they must earn back Americans' trust. That has been squandered in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the daily horror in Iraq, the unsolved epidemic of mail-borne anthrax in 2001 and the color-coded terror alerts after 9/11. Even the president's flu plan, announced in early November, seemed tardy.

The president and other officials should concede these earlier failures, said Peter Sandman, a risk consultant based in Princeton, N.J. Here's the pitch that Sandman suggested health officials give: "Look, it's hard for us to be the ones to warn you. Some of you are thinking about Iraq, where we warned you and we were wrong. Some of you are thinking about Katrina, where we were warned and we didn't respond well. Lots of you are thinking about the fact that if we're going to take this issue seriously now, why weren't we taking it seriously two years ago and gearing up properly? We come to this with a very imperfect record — but we've got to tell you about it anyhow.

"Second, the Bush team must straightforwardly warn Americans about how bad a novel strain of flu could be. The president's statement at an October news conference — "rest assured that we're doing everything we can" — was patronizingly dishonest.

Skilled risk communication is frank, said Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and senior fellow at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "It's resetting a baseline expectation: that people get sick and can die from flu, and in extraordinary outbreaks that can happen at a large scale.

"In crises, great communicators help citizens steel themselves for suffering, while also protecting them. "But we first have to admit that something tragic will happen," Schoch-Spana said.

Most important, leaders must take real action to get the country ready. Until now, the Bush administration has largely ignored this long-feared catastrophe. It forced local public health departments to divert their scarce resources to bureaucracy-laden bioterrorism preparedness. It didn't offer ways for hospitals to handle a flood of patients should disaster strike. It dismissed the need for domestic vaccine production. It failed to order enough Tamiflu — and by the time it tried, many other governments were standing ahead of us in line.

The Pandemic Influenza Plan leaves cash-strapped and staff-starved state and local health departments to pay for drugs and other vital necessities and to logistically handle a crisis on their own. That approach makes sense in one respect, because all public health preparedness and response ultimately takes place locally.

But in a global economy, no locality could be wholly self-sufficient for the 12 to 18 months that a pandemic would play out. "There are a lot of things besides vaccines and antivirals that are going to be critical," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "At this point, we virtually have no plans for that: masks, syringes, needles, IV bags, ventilators, food supply.

"We don't know where we'll get the medicines we take daily, the fuel that keeps us warm and runs our transportation, the consumer products and services we rely on. "This will have all the makings of a slow-motion worldwide tsunami," Osterholm said. "You never can be fully prepared for this. But there are many things we can do.

"To truly earn the public's trust, national officials should issue regular progress reports on the nuts and bolts of protecting us (and the rest of the world) against a lethal flu virus. The issue should be kept front and center, just as our leaders manage to keep the terrorism threat front and center. As a bonus, officials might draw up national plans to revive the long-neglected public health system and guarantee healthcare for all Americans, even in non-pandemic times.

But until words are paired with such actions, the administration's spiffy new campaign to warn us about pandemic flu amounts to little more than spin.

Read Source Here: LA Times

Bird Flu Survival: McNuggets Off Menu

2006-02-26T06:02:00.000-08:00

People eat free chicken at a camp organized by New Market Poultry Traders Association in Calcutta, India,

McDonald's is drawing up contingency plans to remove chicken burgers and nuggets from its menu and a British restaurant has dropped wildfowl as concern about avian flu grows.

Confirmation that the H5N1 bird flu virus has struck a turkey farm in the south-east of France, bringing the spectre of an outbreak in Britain closer, has led to what is being criticised as a "knee-jerk" reaction by some food outlets.

The City Inn Hotel in Birmingham became the first to announce that wildfowl would be dropped from restaurant menus as a "precautionary measure" for the foreseeable future.

Carl Littlewood, the general manager, said: "All our poultry comes from the UK and is totally traceable. On the basis of current scientific evidence, avian flu does not pose a food safety risk for any consumer.

However, we have taken this stance purely as a precautionary measure."
Fast-food chain McDonald's also confirmed last night that it was investigating the supply of alternatives to its chicken dishes.

A spokeswoman told the Sunday Telegraph: "We have a European task force working on contingency plans for our supply chain and, although the details of that plan must remain confidential, it involves potentially introducing alternative items into our menus to replace the chicken.

Read Source Artical: Telegraph

Bird Flu Survival: Economics Of A Crisis

2006-02-25T15:45:00.000-08:00

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin holds fried chicken during a visit to a chicken farm in the village of Mionnay in the Ain region of France Wednesday Feb. 22, 2006.

PARIS, Feb. 25 — The announcement on Saturday that the deadly strain of bird flu was discovered in domesticated turkeys in France has disrupted the country's $7 billion poultry market and raised fears among the French that they could be vulnerable to the disease.

President Jacques Chirac, a former agriculture minister, met with farmers and veterinarians on Saturday morning at the opening of France's annual international agricultural fair and urged calm.

There is no "absolutely no danger in eating poultry and eggs," Mr. Chirac said, eating a chicken dish to press the point. He said that the industry had been "profoundly hurt and disrupted," and that "a completely unjustified sort of total panic" was developing.

For the first time in the fair's 42 years, no live birds are on display.

Detection of the A(H5N1) flu strain on a turkey farm in eastern France represented the first time the virus had been found in farm animals in the 25 countries of the European Union.

France had already been reeling from the news that a wild duck, found dead nearly two weeks ago in the department of Ain, the same area where the turkey farm is located, had been infected.
Those fears, followed by Saturday's confirmation that a farm with a flock of 11,000 turkeys had been struck by the disease, have sent poultry sales plummeting.

Although the official estimate of market loss is 30 percent, some officials at the Rungis wholesale market in Paris reported a drop of close to 50 percent in the last two days.

The detection of the avian flu virus threatens not only to transform the eating habits of the country, but also to damage the export market for the poultry products of France, the largest producer in Europe and the fourth largest market in the world.

Japan announced Friday that it had temporarily banned the import of all poultry products from France — even foie gras packaged before the virus struck. Japan is the fourth-largest importer of foie gras.
Japan's agriculture minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, met Mr. Chirac briefly at the fair on Saturday, and told reporters afterward, "I am sure that French producers are responding correctly to our wishes and that this incident will not affect the relationship between France and Japan."

The French government has taken aggressive preventive measures throughout the poultry industry, ordering birds confined to pens and quarantining the area where the original infected duck, and later a second duck, were found. But the turkey farm is within that protection zone, the French agriculture minister, Dominique Bussereau, said Friday.

There is a plan to vaccinate many of the country's birds. The vaccine can prevent the flu in most cases, but it can also mask the symptoms of the virus in some infected birds, turning them into silent carriers, leading some countries to ban the import of birds from nations that vaccinate.

Also on Friday, authorities in Lyon simulated the arrival of two potentially infected passengers on a plane from an unidentified Southeast Asian country. Daniel Clair, the owner of the turkey farm where the flu was confirmed, told the newspaper Le Parisien that he thought the virus was carried on bales of straw that he had put into his indoor pens after his turkeys had been treated for diarrhea.

A local veterinarian, Claude Lessus, who told Le Figaro that he had prescribed antibiotics for the turkeys, said Mr. Clair collected seven big bales of straw with his tractor, adding, "This could be the means by which the animals became infected."

On Wednesday night, his turkeys were fine, he said. But on Thursday morning, he found 400 dead birds in his flock, and others that were sick. It was, he said, "a thing so thunderous, I immediately understood."

Mr. Clair's remaining turkeys were slaughtered, even before the final determination was announced after 1 a.m. Saturday.

Mr. Clair, his wife and their 8-year-old son are being treated with Tamiflu, an antiviral drug, and have been quarantined in their home. He said he had been told to notify the authorities if they became ill. An 11-year-old daughter, who was not at home when authorities intervened, has not been allowed to return.

A security zone of two miles and a surveillance zone of five miles has been created around the farm, French officials said. The police are disinfecting the farm — where other animals are also raised — as well as the wheels of vehicles that had traveled near the area.

Mr. Clair said that he wanted all necessary precautions to be taken, but he confessed he felt a bit like a pariah. The policeman delivering the flu medicine refused to come up to his house, but left the drug on the road, he said; his mail is not being delivered.

"I have begun to worry," Mr. Clair said. "We have started to run out of food."
Bird flu has hit six other European Union countries: Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Slovenia. On Friday, European health ministers met in Vienna, where they ate poultry products and discussed strategies.

On Friday, Mr. Chirac served Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski, suprême de volaille, a creamed chicken dish, at Élysée Palace.

The disease is highly contagious among poultry and can spread quickly through an entire flock. It can be contracted by people who come into contact with infected birds during slaughtering, plucking feathers, butchering or preparation for cooking, but it is not transmitted through eating thoroughly cooked poultry.

The infection could devastate France's upscale free-range poultry industry.
The area of Bresse, for example, which is close to the area of the turkey farm, is the only region of France whose poultry receives the coveted designation "AOC" ("Appelation d'Origine Contrôlée").

New Human Cases in Asia

SHANGHAI, Feb. 25 (Reuters) — China reported two new human cases of bird flu on Saturday, the New China News Agency said. In Indonesia, tests confirmed that a 27-year-old woman who died Monday was the country's 20th bird-flu fatality.
The Chinese cases involve a 9-year-old girl in eastern Zhejiang Province who had visited relatives who kept poultry and a woman who farmed in neighboring Anhui Province. Both are in critical condition, the agency reported.
The victim in Indonesia was said to be a housewife who had direct contact with her neighbor's chickens.
Maia de la Baume contributed reporting for this article.

Read Source Artical: New York Times

Bird Flu Survival: Bird Flu Growing In Europe

2006-02-25T05:41:00.001-08:00

German Health Minister Ulla Schmidt, European Union Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou of Cyprus and Austrian Health Minister Maria Rauch-Kallat (L to R) eat fried chicken during a lunch break in Vienna February 24, 2006.

BBC, Saturday, 25 February 2006

France has confirmed the deadly bird flu virus H5N1 has been found on a turkey farm in the east of the country.

It is the first time a European Union farm has been infected. France has already had cases in two wild ducks.

About 80% of more than 11,000 birds at the farm have died in the past week, and the rest have been culled.

Despite assurances that cooked poultry is safe, sales in France have fallen by 30%, and Japan has announced an import ban with immediate effect.

France, Europe's largest poultry producer, is to start vaccinating millions of birds against bird flu to try to protect its 7bn euros ($8bn) a year poultry industry.

The farm in Versailleux, where so many turkeys fell ill on Thursday, lay just 200 metres from the lake where the first case of bird flu among wild ducks in France was confirmed last weekend.
The farmer then appeared on French television demonstrating the precautions he was taking to prevent his turkeys, who were kept indoors, from catching the virus.
The latest developments will lead to questions about just how efficient the protective measures are, our correspondent says.

Pandemic risk

The vaccination programme approved by the EU this week, initially opposed by several countries, will be limited to birds in specific high-risk regions. Ducks and geese will be inoculated in three areas in the west and south-west thought to be at high risk, among them the coastal Landes region.

Poultry sales have plunged in Italy, Greece and France since the confirmation of H5N1 outbreaks.

Eight EU countries - Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia and Slovenia - have so far confirmed cases of the lethal H5N1 strain.

H5N1 has killed more than 90 people, mostly in Asia, since late 2003.

t can be caught by humans who handle infected birds, but is not yet known to have passed from one person to another.

Scientists have warned that if the virus mutates, it could create a pandemic that could kill millions of people

Read Source Article: BBC NEWS

Bird Flu Survival: Bird Flu In Italy

2006-02-13T02:32:00.000-08:00

Special report: bird flu
Italy sounds alarm over avian flu

· Swans fleeing cold bring virus to western Europe
· Rome warns people not to handle dead or sick birds

John Hooper in Rome and Jeevan Vasagar in Nairobi
Monday February 13, 2006
The Guardian

The authorities in Rome last night appealed to Italians not to touch dead or sick birds, as alarm spread over the arrival in western Europe of a virulent form of the deadly strain of avian flu, H5N1.
On Saturday, the health minister, Francesco Storace, announced the disease had reached Italy - apparently borne by migrating swans driven out of the Balkans by the intense cold of recent weeks. Yesterday, another case of avian flu was confirmed in neighbouring Slovenia, leading authorities in Austria to impose strict controls along the Austro-Slovenian frontier.

The keenest concern over the infection of human beings was in Nigeria, however. An investigation team was sent to a farm in Kaduna state where the H5N1 strain has been reported, and where at least two children were said to be sick.
In Italy, health workers carried out checks on wetlands, from Sicily in the south to near Venice in the north. Mr Storace said that a total of 22 wild swans had been found dead in three southern regions; five had been killed by a highly pathogenic strain of H5N1, which can be lethal to humans, two being found on the mainland and three in Sicily.

Mr Storace revealed that a dead swan had also been found at Pescara on the Adriatic. The woman who discovered it put the bird into a sack and delivered it to the local authorities. It was this incident that led the government to issue its warning against handling birds which could be infected. Guidelines being sent to health centres throughout the country advised anyone who came into contact with a suspect bird to wash both themselves and their clothing afterwards.

With alarm spreading, a health official at Crotone in Calabria denied reports that a child had been admitted to hospital after touching a dead chicken. From Sicily, it was reported that a swan living on a pond in a town in the centre of the island had been attacked and injured. The government said it was setting up a phone line to answer queries. Sicilian officials said some local people had called to ask if they could keep their pet canaries.

The European Commission said that Slovenia had sent samples of avian flu virus found in a swan to Britain for tests. Officials in Austria said Slovenian veterinarians had told them they had found the lethal H5N1 strain, but Slovenian authorities said they could only be sure it was H5. The area where the swan was collected was less than six miles from the border with Austria, the commission said.

Austria's southernmost province, Carinthia, introduced border controls on livestock and food from Slovenia. Dead swans in Greece and Bulgaria tested positive for the highly pathogenic version of the H5N1 strain on Saturday.

In Nigeria, the government said bird flu has now been confirmed at five farms and is suspected at a further 22.

Lola Sadiq, a bird flu expert with the World Health Organisation in the capital, Abuja, told Associated Press that a team had been sent to the farm where the disease was first detected: "They are monitoring the people, farmers ... to see if they have the virus." Chickens started dying four weeks ago, raising fears the virus might spread before emergency measures could be enforced. Police and veterinary officials have culled poultry across northern Nigeria. At one farm, according to reports, police slaughtered a flock of ostriches using automatic weapons.

European countries with confirmed cases of avian influenza:

Azerbaijan Reported its first outbreak of H5N1 last Friday in wild birds in the Caspian Sea near the border with Iran.

Bulgaria The European Union confirmed on Saturday several cases of H5N1 in wild swans found close to the Romanian border.

Greece Confirmed cases on Saturday of H5N1 in three dead swans found near the northern city of Salonika.

Italy Said on Saturday that five wild swans found in Sicily and on the southern mainland had tested positive for H5N1.

Slovenia Sent samples from a dead swan found near the Austrian border for further testing yesterday to establish whether the confirmed H5 strain was H5N1.

Bird flu was previously confirmed in Russia, Ukraine and Romania, with Romania confirming on Saturday that it had found new cases of the disease in the Danube delta.

Dick Cheney Accidentally Shoots Lawyer.

2006-02-12T16:08:00.000-08:00

Now every goddamn NRA RURAL Self Proclaimed Redneck Hunter/Gun Nut Better take notice!!! The people you are supporting actually make poor hunting buddies!!! They obviously lack aim, control and exhibit poor fire discipline.

Cheney Accidentally Shoots a Fellow Hunter

By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
Published: February 12, 2006
WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 — Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a prominent Austin lawyer while the two men were on a quail hunting expedition in South Texas on Saturday, firing shotgun pellets at the man while trying to aim for a bird, his spokeswoman confirmed today.

Mr. Cheney, a practiced hunter, sprayed the lawyer, Harry Whittington, with shotgun pellets on an outing on the Armstrong ranch in South Texas. Mr. Whittington, 78, was flown by helicopter to Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition today, according to Michele Trevino, a hospital spokeswoman.

White House officials did not release details of the incident. But local news accounts in Texas suggested that Mr. Cheney fired his shotgun without realizing that Mr. Whittington had approached him from behind, spraying his fellow hunter on his right side, on his cheek, neck and chest.

"Nobody wants this to happen, but it does," Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the ranch, told The Corpus Christi Caller-Times according to an article on the newspaper's Web site. The Caller-Times, which first reported the shooting incident, said that Mr. Whittington was a friend of the Armstrong family and was a frequent visitor to their ranch, one of the largest private properties in Texas.

Mr. Whittington is a former member of the Texas Board of Corrections, which runs the state's prison and he was once chairman of the Texas Public Finance Authority Board. In 1999, Gov. George W. Bush appointed him to the Texas Funeral Service Commission. In August 2002, he was reappointed to the commission for a term set to expire in February 2007.

White House officials, who did not make public the shooting incident for 24 hours, did not say how Mr. Whittington and Mr. Cheney were acquainted, although both have longstanding ties to the Armstrongs, a prominent Texas family. The White House also declined to say who was on the hunting trip with the two men. Local news accounts said that Secret Service agents attended to Mr. Whittington until the medics arrived.

The Armstrong ranch is a familiar hunting venue for Republican politicians, including Mr. Cheney, who sometimes hunts there several times a year.

Mr. Cheney often goes on hunting outings with other political figures. Two years ago he went duck hunting with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in Louisiana, a trip that drew criticism because the Supreme Court had just agreed to hear a case involving Mr. Cheney's energy task force.

Anne Armstrong, the family matriarch, is a Republican Party stalwart who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and also as ambassador to Britain. When her husband, Tobin Armstrong, died last October, Mr. Cheney and James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, spoke at the funeral.

The 50,000-acre ranch, which features Spanish-style cottages on the property and usually has a full working staff, including a chef, was settled in 1882 by a Texas Ranger named John Armstrong III, who passed the land on to the family. It sits near the King Ranch, the legendary property settled by the Kleberg family, also in South Texas.

Katharine Armstrong was in the hunting party on Saturday.

The Associated Press reported that Mrs. Armstrong was watching from a car as the vice president, Mr. Whittington and another unidentified hunter got out of the vehicle to close in on a covey of quail. She said Mr. Whittington shot a bird and went to look for it in the tall grass, as his hunting companions walked to another spot where they found a second covey of quail.

Mr. Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," Mrs. Armstrong told the A.P. "The vice president didn't see him. The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and show. And by God, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."

Campaign finance records show that Mr. Whittington contributed $2,000 — the maximum personal amount allowed — to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

Mr. Whittington has been involved in a long-running dispute with the city of Austin, which is trying to condemn a block his family owns to build a parking garage. He has won several legal victories in the case, most recently last month in the Texas Supreme Court.

Mr. Cheney visited Mr. Whittington in the hospital on Sunday, said the vice president's spokeswoman, Lea Ann McBride. After spending the weekend in Texas, Mr. Cheney was scheduled to return to Washington this evening.

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Government Surveillance: Republican Who Oversees N.S.A. Calls for Wiretap Inquiry

2006-02-08T00:27:00.000-08:00

By ERIC LICHTBLAU, New York Times
Published: February 8, 2006

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 — A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency broke ranks with the White House on Tuesday and called for a full Congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.

Representative Heather A. Wilson, a House chairwoman, has broken ranks with the president.
Top Aide Defends Domestic Spying (February 7, 2006)

The lawmaker, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said in an interview that she had "serious concerns" about the surveillance program. By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why.

Ms. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of President Bush's father, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full Congressional investigation into the program, in which the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.

The congresswoman's discomfort with the operation appears to reflect deepening fissures among Republicans over the program's legal basis and political liabilities. Many Republicans have strongly backed President Bush's power to use every tool at his disposal to fight terrorism, but 4 of the 10 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voiced concerns about the program at a hearing where Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales testified on Monday.

A growing number of Republicans have called in recent days for Congress to consider amending federal wiretap law to address the constitutional issues raised by the N.S.A. operation.

Read the Rest At: Full Article

Government Surveillance: Drones, Sticky Bomb Trackers & Car Scramblers

2006-02-05T21:06:00.000-08:00

OWWWWWWKAY. Heres a couple of reports that came out on the same week, from Los Angeles. Leave it to LA to find new ways to spend money without actually hiring more cops. This is a chilling look into the future my fellow sheep. These are the new cattle prods. While I am all for being able to stop car chases, the idea that police will be able to surveil the nation with little tiny airplanes scares the shit out of me. You?

Sky's the limit for surveillance drone
From staff and wire reports

PASADENA - Sheriff's officials Friday tested the next generation in law enforcement surveillance technology.
The pilotless aircraft - dubbed SkySeer - has an onboard GPS and a magnetic compass, along with a pan-tilt camera that can give commanders a real-time view of crime scenes, said Los Angeles County sheriff's Cmdr. Charles "Sid" Heal.

Authorities gave the 3 1/2-pound drone a test flight Friday morning in the Rose Bowl parking lot.

"The primary purpose is to provide a bird's-eye tactical view of a situation, although many other applications are possible," Heal said.

"It is one of the first intended for law enforcement purposes, and is an extremely portable, hand-launched, battery-operated vehicle capable of sustained and autonomous flight."

The SkySeer, developed by Chang Industry of La Verne, flies at about 20 to 23 mph, though testing was conducted up to 30 mph.

Equipped with an infrared camera, it can fly in conditions, such as fog, that helicopters cannot, and monitor locations without endangering law enforcement personnel, Heal said.

The SkySeer's electric motor allows for nearly silent surveillance, and its slow-forward airspeed enables a skilled controller to almost stall the craft in mid-flight in certain wind conditions, said Randy Earp, director of business development for Chang Industry.

"During a burglary or manhunt, officers can simply pop it out of a tube, assemble it in minutes and launch it into the sky," Earp said.

And unlike military drones, the SkySeer was designed around the camera, Earp added.

"That was the issue with our UAV - we decided what camera we'd need and built the air frame around it," he said.

While the craft has been tested up to 7,000 feet, its optimal range is between 250 and 450 feet, Earp said, adding that curious birds investigated and even attempted to mate with the drone during one test-flight.

Flight time for the SkySeer is listed at 70 minutes before recharging is required, Earp said.

Sheriff's officials will be testing the craft over the next 30 to 60 days, said Deputy Rich Pena.

LAPD Pursues High-Tech End to High-Speed Chases

By Richard Winton
Times Staff Writer

February 3, 2006

Question: "Chief, you said Los Angeles is the car chase capital of the world. What makes it that way?"

Answer: "There are a lot of nuts here."

With that street-cop psychology, Chief William J. Bratton unveiled Thursday a new and decidedly strange weapon in the LAPD's effort to halt high-speed pursuits.

It is an air-propelled miniature dart equipped with a global positioning device. Once fired from a patrol car, it sticks to a fleeing motorist's vehicle and emits a radio signal to police.

Bratton hailed the dart as "the big new idea" and said that if the pilot program was successful, Los Angeles' seemingly daily TV fix of police chases could be a thing of the past.

"Instead of us pushing them doing 70 or 80 miles an hour … this device allows us not to have to pursue after the car," Bratton said. "It allows us to start vectoring where the car is. Even if they bail out of the car, we'll have pretty much instantaneously information where they are."

U.S. Department of Justice officials, Bratton said, suggested that the StarChase system, the brainchild of a Virginia company, be tested in Los Angeles. A small number of patrol cars will be equipped with the compressed air launchers, which fire the miniature GPS receiver in a sticky compound resembling a golf ball, for four to six months as a trial.

There were more than 600 pursuits in Los Angeles and more than 100,000 nationwide last year. Critics have long questioned the wisdom of police pursuits because they can endanger bystanders and officers.

Los Angeles' love-hate relationship with police chases goes back at least to O.J. Simpson's slow-speed pursuit across Southern California freeways in 1994.

LAPD chases — as well as pursuits by other agencies — often end violently. Last year, an LAPD officer fatally shot a 13-year-old boy, who was driving a stolen car, at the end of a pursuit. This week, a pursuit in Chino ended with a San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy firing at the passenger of the car in a controversial incident caught on videotape.

With such things as license-plate reading SMART police cars and facial-recognition cameras, the LAPD is trying to become a testing ground for innovative police technology, Bratton said.

The LAPD may even consider using technology that would disable a vehicle's electronics.

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Bird Flu Survival: Killing Falcons & Flamingos

2006-02-04T00:59:00.000-08:00

Saudi Arabia culls falcons over suspected bird flu

RIYADH - Authorities in Saudi Arabia have culled a group of 37 falcons after discovering five suspected cases of bird flu among them, the Agriculture Ministry said.

Samples from the five falcons have been sent for checks to determine if they were affected by the deadly H5N1 virus, the ministry said in a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency.

It said the virus matched the H5 type, but the N subtype was yet to be determined.

No bird flu cases have been reported in Saudi Arabia, where falconry is popular.

In November, neighbouring Kuwait reported the first known case of deadly bird flu in the Gulf Arab region, saying a culled flamingo was carrying the H5N1 virus that has killed more than 80 people, mostly in Asia.

- REUTERS

Bird Flu Survival: New Bird Flu Vaccine Is 100 Percent Effective in Animal Tests

2006-02-02T23:07:00.000-08:00

From the LA times, January 26

New Bird Flu Vaccine Is 100 Percent Effective in Animal Tests
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer

Pennsylvania researchers have produced a bird flu vaccine made from a genetically engineered human cold virus and shown that it protected 100 percent of vaccinated mice and chickens.

While production of a conventional flu vaccine requires months of work and large numbers of fertilized chicken eggs, the researchers reported Thursday that they prepared their vaccine in only 36 days, growing it in a laboratory dish.

The ability to produce a new vaccine so quickly could give public health officials a powerful new tool to combat the H5N1 bird flu virus if it should mutate and begin infecting humans widely.

The team is working with the Food and Drug Administration to begin human tests of the vaccine, said Dr. Andrea Gambotto of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who led the team. He said those trials could begin within weeks.

He said the vaccine should be equally effective in humans because it is based on a human virus.

Gambotto's research, conducted in conjunction with scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is scheduled to be published in the Feb. 15 issue of the Journal of Virology and was made available early online.

The Pittsburgh team worked with a human cold virus, called an adenovirus, that had been stripped of the genes required for it to cause a respiratory infection.

Using genetic data from the CDC, they constructed the gene for a bird flu protein called hemagglutinin in the laboratory and added it to the adenovirus. The hemagglutinin protein allows the bird flu virus to bind to and enter cells that it infects.

The whole process of producing the vaccine took 36 days from the time the researchers received the DNA sequence information, Gambotto said.

Mice injected with the vaccine were 100 percent protected against the bird flu virus, the team reported, while those injected only with an unaltered adenovirus all died within a few days of being exposed to the bird flu virus.

Studying the mice, the team found that the vaccine produced two types of immunity -- antibodies that block the hemagglutinin and prevent it from binding to cells, and T-cells that attack the invading virus.

"This means that this recombinant vaccine can stimulate several lines of defense against the H5N1 virus, giving it greater therapeutic value," said microbiologist Simon Barratt-Boyes of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and a member of the team.

"More importantly, it suggests that even if H5N1 mutates, the vaccine is still likely to be effective against it," he said.

When the vaccine was given to chickens as a mist administered through the nose, about half the birds were protected from the flu. But when they were injected with the vaccine, they were 100 percent protected.

"This is a very potent vaccine," Gambotto said. "The results of this animal trial are very promising."

The team is not sure why the intranasal administration was not as protective, he added.

So far, the bird flu virus has infected mostly birds, although 152 humans have contracted it and more than 80 have died, according to the World Health Organization. Experts fear, however, that the virus will mutate slightly, allowing it to infect humans more easily and leading to a pandemic.

The virus originated in southeast Asia but has now spread to other areas, including Turkey, Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/la-na-birdflu27jan27,0,415814.story?coll=la-home-headlines

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Government Surveillance Prompts a Suit: Police v. Police

2006-02-02T22:54:00.000-08:00

Reprinted from The New York Times...

By JIM DWYER
Published: February 3, 2006
The demonstrators arrived angry, departed furious. The police had herded them into pens. Stopped them from handing out fliers. Threatened them with arrest for standing on public sidewalks. Made notes on which politicians they cheered and which ones they razzed.

Meanwhile, officers from a special unit videotaped their faces, evoking for one demonstrator the unblinking eye of George Orwell's "1984."

"That's Big Brother watching you," the demonstrator, Walter Liddy, said in a deposition.

Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.

Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.

A lawyer for the city said the police union members were treated no differently than hundreds of thousands of people at other gatherings, with public safety and free speech both protected. The department observes all constitutional requirements, the city maintains.

The lawsuit by the police union brings a distinctive voice to the charged debate over how the city has monitored political protest since Sept. 11. The off-duty officers faced a "constant threat of arrest," Officer Liddy testified, all but echoing the complaint by activists for other causes that the city has effectively "criminalized dissent."

The lawsuit is one of three recent legal actions in which the city has been accused of abuses of power that the plaintiffs say crimped free expression, a charge that officials say is belied by the reality of noisy sidewalks and streets, crammed year-round with parades and rallies.

At the core of all three cases are questions about the expanded powers the police were granted after the 2001 attacks, and how much the department needs to know about the politics of people who are expressing their views.

In 2003, a federal judge eased longstanding and strict limits on surveillance of political activity at the request of lawyers from the city's corporation counsel office, who argued that the Police Department needed broader authority to use such tactics to fight terrorism.

Since then, police officers in disguise have taken part in demonstrations, an approach the Police Department says it used before receiving the expanded powers; other officers have made hundreds of hours of videotapes of people involved in protests and rallies, very few of whom were charged with breaking any law. Neither form of surveillance, the city argues, violates the Constitution.

The three pending cases — two of them brought by civil liberties lawyers and the third by the police union — are the first to demand judicial scrutiny of those tactics.

Continue reading the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/nyregion/03police.html?hp&ex=1139029200&en=b56d5cbcc407ed2c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Another Shipwrecked Sailor...

2006-01-21T02:34:00.000-08:00

Well, my beloved edge of the herd sheep. It seems my keys are rusted. Several of them refuse to even move, no matter how hard I hammer.

Rust encrusted by the brine of our times, no doubt. Whatever it is, I will be leaving you…just for awhile. I turned some kind of corner back there. Some kind of thing I still struggle to express. Some kind of future. Some kind of death.

Some kind of truth.

But for now...I am signing off. I leave you with a poem I wrote for this occasion, in the hope that help would arrive soon…for all of us.

SET ADRIFT

I knew the crossroads to be open to me.

Like this wide expanse of sea.

And now I am afloat in your storm.

In a craft not fit for it.

With no sail.

No compass.

But the loss of it.

But maybe that is the light…

To know the not of it.

The flotsam want of it.

The salty sting on my cracked lips.

Dung beetle parchments & other lores.

A tale well spun down whirlpools…

Simply to wash up on your shores.

Alive.

And tell of it.

And tell of it.

And tell of it.

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The One Issue That Can Unite Americans: Corporate Tyranny

2006-01-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

Painting: Rubens' David and Goliath.
So I was at a ranch a while back, speaking to a cowboy. We discussed guns, then got on the subject of the war, then on the subject of politics. We instantly fell into our trenches & started shooting at each other over no man's land. I, on my side with the right of gays to marry, pro abortion rights & anti war. He fell into his side, with the need to show strength overseas, being against gays marrying & needing to support the troops....

But then I said to him, "OK, but don't you agree this country's is completely going down the toilet to a level that scares the shit out of you?" To which he replied, "Yes I do believe so." I replied, "OK we can agree...and do you blame the liberals for destroying the country?" He replied, "Not so much, but I don't agree with em'." I said, "Well, would you say then that we have a common enemy-and there is something ELSE that is destroying this country and THAT THING IS...BIG CORPORATIONS RUNNING THE GOVERNMENT?"

AND NOW GET THIS FOLKS...HE'S A GOOD MAN.

HE REPLIED..."YEP, ON THAT MUCH WE CAN AGREE."

Now there, my fellow Americans is how to start a conversation and it's one I would like to see started across the land. I hate to say it but we are all going to put aside certain divisive issues and work together to save this Country.

If you want some advice for 2006, that's it.

We all need to get our shit together...and start focusing on THE BIG ISSUE. THE ONE ISSUE WE CAN ALL AGREE ON. POWER IS IN THE HANDS OF A FEW MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND THEY ARE HOLDING ALL THE CARDS. What you perceive to be a working democracy is a FRONT, a FACADE, for the day-to-day agendas of the Mega Corporate Elite, of which Bush is only a pawn.

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Urban Survival: The 2006 Pasadena Rose Parade Finally Takes a Shower after 55 years.

2006-01-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

Something To Warm Your Cockles.

Cockles have nothing to do with birds, as I had thought. A Cockle is a furnace. Also, a Bunghole is a hole in the side of a keg.

As it is so often my way to be enraptured, if not entirely smitten, with tales of smite and smote. I will be attempting, but I warn you only mildly, to turn maybe ten or fifteen degrees toward the light. Not a full conversion to “The Light” in a “I got Jesus” kinda way but maybe more of like adding 1/2 pint of white to a gallon of black. My Chi is out of balance.

So now I will twang out a little Yang for you.

Here is a story from the mean streets of Pasadena, HO-HO-HO. A gripping tale of sorta bravery, a lazy kind of tenacity and some collective stupidity-all the necessary ingredients for true heroism.

Yeah, I went to the Rose Bowl Parade in Los Angeles last Monday. To cut to the chase, it was the first time in 55 years that it rained. And it didn’t just rain…it poured in horizontal sheets for five hours. The wind whipped umbrellas out of hands and tore makeshift garbage bag ponchos to shreds.

It was evident to anyone sensitive to cosmic forces of fate that God is incredibly pissed at America right now…our Karma is catching up to us. I mean 55 years with not a drop of rain and then a goddamn STORM. It rained more in Pasadena, the location of the parade, than anywhere else in the city. The message was as clear as an eviction notice when one looked at the radar imagery of the storm. An angry red cloud blew into town and lingered over Pasadena for the length of the parade…then vanished. God was not just pissed, but also pissing on our parade…hard.

That’s not to say it didn’t come without warning. Last year it had also rained, but had stopped right before the parade, and started again after the parade ended. Some said it was divine providence because the Rose Parade has never been held on a Sunday due to a local law dating back to the turn of the century. The law mentions some devout ramblings about the parade scaring the tethered horses of churchgoers along Colorado Boulevard.

The national telecast did a good job of not showing how miserable it was. Nevertheless the parade was not cancelled. The day before the parade, thousands of people staked a claim and then slept on a five mile long stretch of sidewalk. It rained on them several times. But they endured. They covered themselves with makeshift tarp shelters and kept warm around propane heaters and portable fire pits. The sound of axes splitting firewood echoed down the streets. Just to see the neat wood piles and the families playing cards by lantern light warmed my heart.

On the day of the parade thousands of high school bands from all over the country marched five miles through blinding rain, past miserable but cheering crowds. I will never forget the baton-twirling girls in their skimpy outfits. They smiled through chattering teeth, as their makeup ran and their hair stuck their faces. There was still three miles to go when they passed me-but they went on. Though some of them could barely have been 15, they did not cry…they went on. And I will tell you that I was touched deeply by the event. The sight of Americans facing even these simple hardships with courage and style warmed my heart.

Much to my surprise, I realized that Americans are not pussies. I really had begun to think of Americans as a lazy lot, and in a sense they were lazily sitting on the side of the road-recreating their living rooms at home. But goddamn it, they were going after their laziness with the toughness of pioneers. They were just enjoying what our parents and grandparents fought for. YEAH, THAT OLD AMERICAN DREAM. TO SIT ON A COUCH IN A WARM HOME AND WATCH TV IN PEACE AND HAVE A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD AND RAISE A FAMILY AND WORK AND LIVE AND BE FREE. AND I SAW THAT IF WE NEED TO GET UP OFF THAT COUCH AND FIGHT FOR IT AGAIN…WELL GODDAMN IT WE WILL FIGHT FOR IT AGAIN. BUT DON’T MAKE US GET OFF OUR COUCHES…BECAUSE WHEN WE DO, IT WILL BE ASS KICKING TIME.

DON’T WAKE THIS POTATO CHIP GIANT FROM IT’S HIBERNATION UNLESS YOU WANT A PACK OF SURLY MOTHERFUCKERS IN YOUR FACE. MIGHT AS WELL GO FUCK WITH BIKERS OR FLIP OFF COPS.

I noticed that every race, religion, state and nationality was represented-all of them braving elements that would send most deer hunters back to camp. When Americans decide to do something…like drive across the country, camp overnight on the streets of LA and sit in the driving rain and 50 degree temps for a day…they fucking do it and they do it with style and fearlessness. Americans have been asleep for a long time…they have been absorbed in the daily struggle to achieve the dream that is the USA. But if stirred to action, it’s amazing what they are capable of.

If this parade had happened in NYC there would have been a cop every five steps and barricades and police lines everywhere. Open fire pits and wood splitting with axes? I think not. In LA I saw two squad cars in six blocks and not a single beat cop, I don’t know if they have them there. At the end of the parade, the people just walked into the streets and went home. There were no barricades, no crowd control. There was no “lockup” by the police…it was all just open. I have to say, it stirred me deeply. Americans can really be very cool when they get their shit together.

My wish for 2006 is that we get our shit together soon…there is A LOT OF SHIT NEEDS TO GET STRAIGHTENED OUT BEFORE WE CAN ALL GO BACK TO SLEEP AGAIN.

Happy New 2006.

.

How The Fear Machine Works: "Roadmap To A Post 9-11 Truth World"

2006-01-05T00:05:00.000-08:00

Remember that feeling on 9-11? It seemed like the world had cracked open and you really wanted a "Daddy" to tell you what to do? You really wanted a paternal hand to come down and pet you, comfort you in this nightmare. That's exactly how they wanted you to feel. But somehow George Bush really didn't do the trick did he? Here is How the Fear Machine Works...Read On.
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Apocalypse of Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say About 9/11

By Kevin Barrett, http://mujca.com

Summary

“Apocalypse of Coercion” uses Douglas Rushkoff’s landmark book Coercion as a touchstone for understanding 9/11 as a psychological warfare operation. Rushkoff’s well-researched insights into the mind-control techniques of car salesmen, spin doctors, cult leaders, and CIA psych-war specialists explain how 9/11 was designed as a war-triggering “New Pearl Harbor.” These insights also explain why so many people can continue to believe the official myth of 9/11 in the teeth of the overwhelming evidence against it. Perhaps most importantly, Rushkoff predicts that new communications technologies promise to put an explosive end to the era of pervasive coercion. His prophecy of the coming apocalyptic end of coercion explains why the coercers were desperate enough to try to re-infantalize the public through 9/11 in order to maintain the old coercive structures of social control. In predicting doom for the coercers, Rushkoff provides us with a roadmap to a post-9/11-truth world.

Apocalypse of Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say About 9/11

“That’s just like hypnotizing chickens.” --Iggy Pop, “Lust for Life”

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...uh...(long pause)...we won’t get fooled again.” George W. Bush

They say suicidal Muslim fanatics did it. They say those radical Muslims hate our freedoms. They say the country is full of sleeper agents who could wake up and kill us at any moment, as soon as their little red-white-and-blue “I hate the USA” wristwatch alarms go off.

They say that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it—he’s Muslim, isn’t he? They say invading Afghanistan and Iraq was the appropriate response; we had to do something, right? They say if you’re not with us, you’re against us—and if you’re against us, you’re on the side of the evildoers.

They say those cunning, devious suicide hijackers defeated America’s defenses using flying lessons and box cutters. They say it was ordered by a tall, dark, handsome, sinister, hooknosed kidney patient in a cave in Afghanistan—a ringer for the evil vizier Jaffar in the Disney film Aladdin, but with a thicker beard to signify “Islamist.” They say it was masterminded by a real bad dude named KSM. They say they finally caught KSM, and that the whole story, enshrined in the official 9/11 Commission Report, is based on what KSM said under interrogation—so it’s all right from the horse’s mouth.

They say it happened because our defense and intelligence systems didn’t see it coming, despite all those urgent warnings from dozens of countries as well as whistleblowers from our own agencies. They say that nobody was really to blame, so nobody had to be prosecuted or fired or even reprimanded. They say that by promoting the very people who made the most outrageously improbable blunders, and giving the screw-up agencies a whole lot more money, we’ve ensured that they’ll do better next time.
They say that anybody who questions what they say is a conspiracy theorist.

“Who, exactly, are ‘they,’ and why do they say so much? More amazing, why do we listen to them?”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say (NY: Penguin, 1999)

Rushkoff’s Coercion is a sizzling exposé of mind control, American style. Unlike Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, Rushkoff’s book provides a detailed guide to the nuts-and-bolts techniques employed against us every day by advertisers, marketers, public relations specialists, Hollywood filmmakers, salespeople, pyramid-scam artists, and cult leaders —the very same techniques applied for decades, and gradually perfected, by CIA interrogators and psychological warfare experts. These techniques are designed to disable rational thought and manipulate behavior at the unconscious and emotional levels. Anyone curious about why so many otherwise rational people have believed the official story of 9/11 for so long, in the teeth of the overwhelming evidence against it, should start by reading Coercion.

The secret of mind-control is simple—so simple that Rushkoff can sum it up in one sentence: “In whatever milieu coercion is practiced, the routine follows the same basic steps: Generate disorientation, induce regression, and then become the target’s transferred parent figure” (64). Hard-sell car salesmen, CIA interrogators and psychwar ops, and cult leaders have long used this technique. Under coercion, millions of otherwise rational people can be persuaded to act against their own interests—whether by shelling out big bucks for an overpriced lemon, betraying a comrade and a cause, or allowing a gang of criminals to destroy their nation’s Constitution and launch criminal wars of aggression.

How do they do it? Let’s start by zooming in on your local automobile dealership. The car salesman carefully leads the mark to be dissatisfied with his current car, and by extension his current life—and as the mark sees his current life through newly dissatisfied eyes, he begins to experience disorientation. The salesman then takes the mark on a test drive and, at the right moment, asks “Is this the type of vehicle you would like to own?” Rushoff quotes a car-salesman-turned-whistleblower:

And anyone will tell you this, the vacuum cleaner salesman, the car salesman—the customer has a split-second of insanity. The mind goes blank, the body paralyzes, the eyes get glassy, dilated. And you’d be surprised how many people have an accident at just that moment! Ask any car dealer. We always joke about it.

The car salesman’s question, like the well-timed words of a good hypnotist, triggers a sudden intensification of the customer’s dissociated, suggestible state. Rushkoff explains: “The customer is already in a vehicle, being asked to imagine himself owning the same type of vehicle. It’s the same as if I asked you if this is the kind of book you can imagine yourself reading. Your current situation is reframed in fantasy. It creates a momentary confusion, or dissociation, from the activity you’re involved in. That’s why so many drivers crash” (43).
If the customer answers no, he gets the same treatment in other cars until he answers yes. Then he is brought back to the dealership and infantilized, as the salesman becomes his transferred parent figure:

He is told where to go, how to walk, where to sit. One training manual instructs the salesman to give the customer coffee whether he wants it or not: “Don’t ask him if he wants a cup of coffee—just ask him how he takes it.” In this way, the customer is trained to obey, and given his fear and disorientation in the sales environment, he welcomes the commands and their implied invitation for him to regress into the safety of childhood. (43)

Once the customer has been infantilized, he is controlled by various tricks. One of the best-known is the “common enemy” technique. The salesman pretends to be conspiring with the customer against the nasty head of the dealership, or against another salesman who is greedy and dishonest. The “common enemy” technique is also used by the CIA—one interrogator, the “good cop,” teams up with the subject against the other interrogator, the “bad cop.” Governments, of course, use the same technique: The illegitimate son-of-a-Bush of August, 2001 doubled his approval ratings by infantilizing the American public on 9/11 and rallying them against the “common enemy” of evildoing Muslim extremists.

The CIA, like the automobile industry, has long been refining coercive techniques aimed at eliciting compliance. Whether the Company wants to coerce an interrogation subject into spilling the beans, or a whole nation into supporting a war, the techniques are basically the same as those used by hard-sell car salesmen: Generate dissociation through disorientation, induce regression, and become the target’s transferred parent figure.
In an interrogation, the CIA begins by disorienting the subject:

As the minutes, hours, or days go by, the “sights and sounds of an outside world fade away, [and] its significance is replaced by the interrogation room, its two occupants, and the dynamic relationship between them” (CIA Interrogation Manual) which is why interrogation rooms are generally devoid of windows and free of all references to the outside world, including time of day and day of the week. The subject becomes completely dependent on the interrogator for all external stimuli and, accordingly, his sense of self

After the subject’s sense of self has been broken down, the CIA interrogator chooses from a grab bag of techniques that accomplish the same thing as the car salesman’s line “Is this the type of vehicle you would like to own?” These techniques induce a sudden state of radical confusion by disrupting the target’s familiar emotional associations. The CIA manual explains: “When this aim is achieved, resistance is seriously impaired. There is an interval—which may be extremely brief—of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis...that explodes the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion” (qtd. In Rushkoff, 36). At this moment, the interrogator encourages the subject to regress to a childlike state of mind, and becomes the subject’s transferred parent figure.

This is a very good description of what was done to the American people on and after September 11th, 2001. The images of the planes crashing into landmark buildings, and those buildings exploding into powder and shards, created a state of extreme confusion, “a kind of psychological shock or paralysis.” The bombs that brought down the Twin Towers and WTC-7 literally exploded the world that was familiar to us, and our images of ourselves in that world. We experienced a moment of dissociation, which is why we can still recall where we were and what we were doing when we learned of the attack. As the psychological warfare experts who designed the operation knew very well, this left us radically open to suggestion—to mass hypnosis. Our old world had been annihilated, and we were ready to be hypnotized, and to have a new world created for us. We desperately needed a parent figure to tell us how to make sense of the madness.

The government, of course, became that transferred parent figure. The presidency, instituted by George “father of his country” Washington, is a paternal institution. Even an illegitimate son-of-a-Bush could briefly become our idealized national daddy. We believed what “they” told us about 9/11, with little or no effort to discern the actual facts, because we had been coerced and infantilized. When Susan Sontag spoke out against the absurd infantilization of the American people post-9/11, she was subjected to vicious attacks by intelligence-asset pseudo-journalists. Why? Not because what she said wasn’t true—it obviously was. The reason Sontag had to be ripped to shreds by the CIA rag National Review and its epigones was that she was getting too close to understanding that 9/11 was a psychological warfare operation by US and allied intelligence agencies, not a “terrorist attack” by anti-American foreigners. Sontag understood that the American public had been subjected to induced regression. By calling attention to this fact, she was indirectly calling attention to the psy-op man behind the curtain.

The choice of September 11th as the date of the attacks was obviously made by a psychological warfare expert who wanted to make the American people suffer induced regression and put childlike faith in their government. The number 911 has overwhelming emotional associations in the mind of every American. From early childhood, we are taught that this is the magic number we can call in the event of an emergency. If anything terrible or deeply threatening happens to us, all we have to do is push those three buttons on the nearest telephone, and a benevolent parent figure—the government—will come rushing to help us. With the ongoing breakdown of the family and its authority, and the widespread consciousness of abuse between family members, the number 911 represents the government that has become our real daddy. The planners of 9/11 took advantage of this fact, enshrining their false-flag attack with a number that evokes our desperate, childlike need for the government to be the daddy who comes racing to help us in an emergency. Every time we hear “9/11” we are enveloped in subconscious emotional associations of a benevolent, fatherly government that can be counted on to save us from catastrophe. Unless we have learned how to defend ourselves against coercion, it is these emotional associations, not facts, that condition how we think.

Once our old world had been exploded, our minds regressed to a childlike emotional level, and our faith placed in the transferred parent figure of our government and its paternal figurehead, we were ready to be bombarded by hypnotic words and images. The hypnotic inculcation of thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes is a simple matter. The key is repetition: Repetition, repetition, repetition. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the so-called war on terror, “what I tell you three times is true.” They tell us over and over that 9/11 was like Pearl Harbor; we accept the paradigm and prepare for a righteous world war. They tell us over and over that Bin Laden did it, and we internalize that belief, without reference to evidence. They tell us over and over that Bin Laden is America’s enemy, and we accept the story, even though many of the world’s most prestigious journalistic outlets have told us that Bin Laden spent the first two weeks of July, 2001 getting treated at the American Hospital in Dubai and meeting with CIA Station Chief Larry Mitchell. They tell us over and over that the guy in the grainy video confessing to 9/11 is Bin Laden, even though there is very little resemblance between this overweight impostor and the Osama Bin Laden of other photos and videos. They tell us over and over about the 19 suicide hijackers, and we believe them, even when we find out that many of these alleged hijackers are still alive, that these individuals were/are not Muslims at all but intelligence agents, and that the “flight schools” they trained at were actually CIA drug import airstrips. They tell us over and over that (whore-chasing, boozing cokehead) Mohammad Atta put a bizarre parody of an “Islamic terrorist’s last will and testament” into a suitcase and checked that suitcase on board his suicide flight—say what?!—and that the suitcase was mistakenly put onboard a different flight so it could be quickly discovered and offered as “evidence.” They tell us that other “suicide hijackers” conveniently left a car full of evidence at the airport. They tell us that a hijacker’s passport miraculously floated down from the inferno in the Towers to be discovered as more “evidence.” They tell us that the fact that the “hijackers” spent the night of 9/10/2001 in a motel right across the street from the gates of the National Security Agency headquarters is just a weird coincidence. They tell us that a good Samaritan burglar happened to “steal” the briefcase containing the “evidence” of the “hijackers” concocting their plot in Hamburg, Germany, and felt compelled to deliver the briefcase to the German police. (What they don’t tell us is that the German police are rolling on the ground laughing at the absurd pretext, and have publicly stated that the “burglar” was an intelligence agent.) They tell us over and over that the World Trade Center collapsed from diesel-fuel-induced fires, despite the fact that no high rise steel frame skyscraper has ever collapsed due to fire, including much worse ones than those on 9/11. They tell us over and over that Hani Hanjour, who could not fly a Cessna training aircraft, somehow executed an amazing stunt maneuver in a hijacked 757 in order to hit the empty, newly-reinforced wing of the Pentagon and cause minimal damage—instead of just diving into the roof and killing thousands.

Even more important than the repetition of such ludicrous propositions, has been the bombardment of the public with words and phrases designed to disable rational thought: terror, terrorism, the war on terror, hate our freedoms, hate our values, patriot, patriotic, Patriot Act, evildoers, extremists, security, anthrax, homeland, biological weapons, Islamo-fascist, dirty bombs, weapons of mass destruction. These emotionally-charged terms, drummed incessantly into our brains, reinforce the unconscious emotional predispositions that govern our thoughts. They literally force us to think certain thoughts, and render us literally incapable of even entertaining others. Just as the car salesman’s coercive question “How do you take your coffee” literally forces 90% of non-coffee-drinkers to obediently accept a cup of coffee, the psych-war experts’ attack of disorientation, regression, and parental transference literally forces 90% of the American public to think patently ludicrous thoughts, adopt those thoughts as a model of reality, and cling to those self-evidently absurd thoughts in the teeth of overwhelming factual evidence.

The question remains, who are “they” ? The answer is obvious—just read the Project for a New American Century’s manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses, published in September, 2000, which openly calls for a “New Pearl Harbor.” The 9/11 “New Pearl Harbor” was brought to us by the neoconservatives, who believe that all human beings except themselves are governed by irrational emotions and incapable of evidence-based reasoning. The neoconservatives are Zionist extremists and cult followers of the demented philosopher-guru Leo Strauss, whose worldview can be summed up in the adage “if you can’t beat Hitler, join him.” They apparently believed that a massive dose of coercion, in the form of 9/11, could motivate Americans to preserve and expand their imperial domination of the planet in general, and their commitment to a belligerent, expansionist Israel in particular.

Oddly enough, 9/11 was apparently designed with the help of focus groups:
...The trick only needs to work long enough to win (or avoid) a war. Even if “the truth” emerges sometime later, at least the primary objective has already been achieved...when American corporate and governmental interests adopted these techniques for use against the American people, they needed to cloak their assault in a seemingly benign manifestation: the focus group. About ten “average” members of a target population are brought into a room and asked to discuss an issue while a team of researchers, clients, and a camera record their responses from behind a one-way mirror. A researcher stays in the room with the subjects, asking them questions and pushing them in new directions...

Bob Deutsch, an anthropologist [and legendary psy-op focus group guru] who worked for the Department of Defense...led focus groups revealing Americans’ irrational beliefs about Japan. “You want to uncover in your audience what I call a “spasm of sentiment,” he explained. “It’s their illogic—their emotional logic.” He told us how in focus groups with average American citizens, he learned that most people still associate the Japanese with Pearl Harbor: “People say, for example, “Japan took our lives in 1941, and they took our livelihoods in 1991.” Because Japan disrupted America’s self-mythology of being invincible, the nation would never be forgiven in the irrational American sentiment. (140)

The authors of 9/11 needed a horrifyingly spectacular, murderous attack on the American “homeland”
in order to elicit this “Pearl Harbor effect.” They needed to “disrupt America’s self-mythology of being invincible” so that Arabs and Muslims “would never be forgiven in the irrational American sentiment.” They were not interested in triggering just one quick war in Afghanistan, or a second one in Iraq. They were after “the war that will not end in our lifetimes”—an ongoing war that would remove Americans’ Constitutional liberties, massively increase military expenditures, and legitimize attacks against Middle Eastern nations for decades into the future, on behalf of Israeli expansionism and the petrodollar hegemony on which it depends.
9/11, in short, was an apocalypse of coercion. It was a psy-op on a scale of murderousness and mendacity to make the Reichstag Fire look like a kid playing with matches.

Play with fire, however, and you just might get burned. This “apocalypse of coercion” could end up being an apocalypse for its authors, and for coercion itself. The neocons have been revealed and reviled as pathological liars, and only the flimsiest film of reticence is preventing the major media from exposing the 9/11 psy-op and triggering the greatest scandal in world history, and a Constitutional crisis light-years beyond anything in the American experience. As people awaken to 9/11 truth, they grow psychic armor that renders them invincible to coercion in any form. Recoiling from the sheer horror of such murderous coercion, their psychic immune system is strengthened. It is a safe bet that no 9/11 skeptic will ever buy a lemon from a car salesman—or even accept an unwanted cup of coffee. The 9/11 truth-awakened individual will not succumb to the blandishments of advertisers, political pundits, cult leaders, politicians, or Fox News commentators. He or she will smell coercion coming from a mile away, and tell the prospective coercer into which orifice their coercion may be inserted.
The simple truth is, coercion doesn’t work any more, and future historians will view 9/11 as its final implosion. In the mid-1990s PR guru Howard Rubenstein saw that the internet had made damage-control coercion obsolete, and began advising clients that they had no choice but to let the ugly truth hang out. Need a coverup? “The lesson is not to do it. Sure, people will come to you and say, ‘Let’s set up a committee and we’ll call it so-and-so, and we’ll hire someone to run it,’ and my attitude is: What’s known is known. Simple. What is known gets published. So it’s foolhardy to set up a fig-leaf committee and hope nobody will look under the fig leaf and see what’s there” (160). Unfortunately, the Bush Administration didn’t take Rubenstein’s advice when it set up the 9/11 Commission.

The word “apocalypse” denotes the cataclysmic end of the world, but its original Greek meaning is “unveiling.” By unveiling the truth of 9/11, and the mechanisms of coercion it employed, we can avoid the apocalyptic future of endless war that the New Pearl Harbor was designed to trigger. Less obviously, we can expose and discredit the mechanisms of coercion that governments and corporations use to dehumanize us. It is time for coercion-savvy media specialists like Rushkoff and Rubenstein to join the 9/11 truth movement and help us figure out how to communicate 9/11 truth, turn the 9/11 apocalypse of coercion against its perpetrators, and ensure that in our shared human future, communications technologies will be used to empower people, not enslave them.

Kevin Barrett
Coordinator, MUJCA-NET: http://mujca.com

Source:
Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth Website
http://mujca.com/

WIll For An American Future Is Half The Battle

2005-12-20T02:42:00.000-08:00

The question lies at your feet. What are you more afraid of today, the US government or the terrorists? I am much more afraid of my government at this point. They seem to be unraveling the Constitution and Democracy faster than any terrorist could. They seem to be grabbing power, killing innocents and ignoring the will of the people as assuredly as any rising dictatorship. They have a plan my fellow sheep and you better wake up and start taking a look at it.

A COLD HARD 2006 LOOK.

I’m just gonna try to do a little timeline off the top of my head. In this sort of day to day NEWS RACE we can often lose sight of the big picture. It may be out of order, but the experiment should still reveal the very consistent agenda. Should reveal the times we live in. Please write in to help me fill in the gaps.

1) Hanging chad Un-election of Bush, fraud in Florida.
2) 9-11
3) Patriot Act creates Homeland Security Agency
3.5) Bush fights to stop and investigation of the government’s knowledge of 9-11. 9-11 commission reveals huge intelligence failures.
4) Illegal phone taps on millions of cell phone calls. (discovered recently)
5) Intimidation and investigation of Americans leads to civil rights abuses.
6) Afghanistan War
7) Osama escapes?
8) Internment and torture of prisoners without rights at Guantanamo begins.
9) Iraq 2A: Shock and Awe (10’s of thousands of innocents die)
10) No WMD’s found, no cause for war revealed
11) Iraq 2B: The Insurgency (10’s of thousands of innocents die) 27,000 innocent Iraqis are dead and that’s the low estimate.
12) Torture at Abu Graibe Prison.
13) Re-election of Bush. War President spends his “credit”
14) More Americans and innocents die in Iraq.
14.5) Republicans try to get rid of the Filibuster.
15) Cindy Sheehan, mother of dead American soldier, protests in front of Bush’s Ranch. Huge media attention, but her march on Washington happens on the same weekend as Katrina.
16) Katrina: incredibly poor government reaction, total chaos reveals race relations in America & leads to further government controls rather than reform.
17) Bush suddenly mentions the Bird Flu, gives world THE FEAR. He sets about creating legislation that would give the Pentagon domestic military power in case of outbreak.
18)Bush nominates Miers to Supreme Court
19) Rove outs a CIA agent.
19.5) Rovegate burns then simmers out.
20) The Washington Post reported on Nov. 2 that the CIA has operated a clandestine prison system in Eastern Europe and other countries. Condoleezza Rice defends position.
20.5) Bush nominates some other fucker to the supreme court.
21) Rumsfeld & cronies defend the use of torture to extract information from terrorist suspects.
21) Senate panel backs secret vaccine agency that will operate without any governmental controls, with total immunity from law, without the controls of the freedom of information act.
22) Secret source reveals use of widespread wiretapping that was authorized by George Bush after 9-11.
23) War rages on. Bush says on TV Sunday we need to stay the course.

Now I want you to take a cold hard look at that list and think to yourself, "When have I ever seen anything like this before."

Hunter S. Thompson said before he died, "If Richard Nixon ran for president today he would be seen as a liberal."

You write the next three years in your head folks. It’ ain’t gonna get any better because no matter how much outrage. No matter how much outpouring of anger. No matter how much investigation. No matter how much protest. No matter how many dirty secrets are revealed in the press. It don’t matter. They will spin it. And they are way ahead of you. They have a plan and they are “working hard.” They are going ahead with their plans. And THEY DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOU AND ME!!!

Don't hide your head. I know it's a lot to take. But stay alert. Keep your wits about you. Keep THE FEAR at Bay. Keep your spirits up. This will all end...but in order for it to happen, you are going to have to be ready. When shit happens, it happens fast. There may be a time when your private life will be overtaken completely with public events and you will have to stand up and take action. You will have to move and move fast and not follow the herd.

You are going to have to be a professional at seeing through lies. A Professional ANTI-POLITICIAN. A PROFESSIONAL DREAMER. You are going to have to dream of a NEW COUNTRY and nurse the embers of that dream in your soul…until it is a FIRE. We must believe in something we would die for again and again. I believe in you and our nation’s dream, and I would easily die for it.

But that dream must be liberty. It must be liberty for all. That is what America should be…and is not.

Be vigilant. Be strong, sharp and alert. Be Americans…BE NEW AMERICANS.

.

Bird Flu: Secret Vaccine Agency Will Make Billions & God Know What Else From Your Fear

2005-12-05T21:01:00.000-08:00

This is the scariest thing I have read in awhile. Please read this excerpt from an AP story published December 2nd, 2005...

"Senate Panel Backs Special Vaccine Agency"

"WASHINGTON (AP) — By creating a federal agency shielded from public scrutiny, some lawmakers think they can speed the development and testing of new drugs and vaccines needed to respond to a bioterrorist attack or super-flu pandemic."

"The proposed Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency, or BARDA, would be exempt from long-standing open records and meetings laws that apply to most government departments, according to legislation approved Oct. 18 by the Senate health committee."

"We must ensure the federal government acts as a partner with the private sector, providing the incentives and protections necessary to bring more and better drugs and vaccines to market faster," Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said when the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions approved the bill."

"The agency would provide the funding for development of treatments and vaccines to protect the United States from natural pandemics as well as chemical, biological and radiological agents."

"But it is the secrecy and immunity provisions of the legislation that have alarmed patient rights and open government advocates. The agency would be exempt from the Freedom of Information and Federal Advisory Committee acts, both considered crucial for monitoring government accountability."

"There is no other agency that I am aware of where the agency is totally exempt either from FOIA or FACA," said Pete Weitzel, coordinator of the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government. The coalition is an alliance of journalism groups, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors and Associated Press Managing Editors, that wrote to lawmakers seeking amendments to the bill. "That is a cause for major concern and should raise major policy concerns," Weitzel said."

Read Full USA Today Article Here

Ask yourself. Why does the US government think they need a SECRET agency to produce vaccines? The US government created the bird flu scare-so THEY can’t really be afraid. There have only been a couple of hundred bird flu deaths in the entire world, to date. See…

World Wide Bird Flu DeathsTo Date

So why should they be in such a supposed rush to create vaccines? Well, other than a way to make the pharmaceutical companies Billions, what are some of the other reasons they could possibly have? Let’s explore…

Hmmm, let’s see, Rumsfeld has already profited from the bird flu scare, through his ownership of Tamiflu stock. This BARDA plan gets the pharmaceutical companies to work for the government cheap and is, "giving manufacturers immunity from liability in exchange for their participation in the public-private effort.” So the government gets new drugs (whatever they may be) and the drug companies get tons of R&D money and new patents. And it’s all secret.

Not only will the Pharmaceutical Companies make BILLIONS off of this, WE WILL NEVER KNOW WHAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY DOING.

Did you know that the same labs that are necessary to produce large amounts of vaccine can also produce large amounts of deadly agents? They could be experimenting on new military weaponry for all we know. And we will NEVER KNOW because they will be exempt from the Freedom Of Information Act.

They could be creating all kinds of monstrous things and we would have no idea until it was too late.

My fellow sheep, WE HAVE GOT TO STOP THIS!!!

This whole Bird Flu scare originated from Bush’s statement that he had “read a book” on the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak and was now very concerned about it. He made this announcement at a moment in time when the entire country was in FULL KATRINA FEAR MODE. Our faith in the US government was at an all time low, and suddenly Bush starts shearing the wool on us sheep with this Bird Flu scare. In the context of the times, president Bush’s Bird Flu statement felt more like a THREAT than genuine concern. Sort of like a hit man saying, “That’s a nice family you have, you ought to shut up about this Katrina thing, or you might suddenly find your turkey has more than stuffing in it.”

If I was a Hollywood screenwriter I would start cranking out a political thriller about how the US government plans to start a secret vaccination agency using the best minds of the pharmaceutical companies, in order to rule the world. They are able to get away with creating this agency because they have petrified the public for over four years with terrorism and bird flu. The Biological Weapons Convention or BWC of 1972 prohibits the US from developing or stockpiling biological weapons. But under the guise of this new secret agency they can produce mass amounts of virus without threat of detection. They then spread this virus throughout the world, give themselves the vaccine and wait for everyone who is not “in the club” to die. In the movie, the president is a Born Again Christian and believes he is doing “God’s Work.” The name of the secret program is called “Project Ark.”

HEE HEE hee, um…shit. It’s not funny. It all depends on what your comfort level is. To some I will sound like the worst crackpot, to others, I might not go far enough. Do you still believe you are living in a Democracy? Do you still believe that you will be able to work within the system & the voting process to elect a leader that cares? Or do you believe that these elite fuckers have finally uncorked the cap on the champagne bottle of totalitarianism?

Gulf of Tonkin, hmm now that wasn’t real...but it got us into Vietnam. There’s been lots of proof-due to the release of documents through the Freedom of Information Act-that the US has, in the past, been willing to kill civilians and soldiers in order to maintain power and further political agendas. And now that we have had two US elections that have been possibly thrown, what do you think they have planned for the next one?

The Republicans wanted to get rid of the Filibuster and they didn’t seem to care that they might need it themselves someday. It was as if Republicans KNEW or at least FELT that they would never need it again. That’s the kind of thing that bothers me. The other thing that bothers me is why the CIA didn’t plant WMD’s in Iraq…it would have made everything so easy for them. But as you well know, the best kind of lie incorporates as much truth as possible.

Drunken Monkey Style is, again, working well for Bush’s masters.

Keep your spirits up, THE FEAR at bay, and your wits about you.

.

A Certain Kind Of Angst...

2005-12-04T00:53:00.000-08:00

Fear CAN be mistaken for the subconscious knowledge of truth.

You may experience a kind of fear that comes from knowing your own fate-by simply having seen into your own future.

Your soul may have read the script before you entered this body, and as you experience your own life you may have some vague memory of knowing that you are about to get hit by a bus or step in shit, or something equally as devastating.

It’s that sort of vague feeling you get when you are trying to figure out if you have seen a movie before, ”this...seems...familiar.”

So, when you tell your wife that dishpan hands make you horny, you may experience some strange sense of familiarity as the object in her soapy paws begins to fly toward you. You may have experienced a dull headache all week before she bounced that #10 cast iron skillet off your chrome dome. Or you may have simply been experiencing an intense fear of anything sautéed or pan fried--haunting you & ruining what otherwise may have been a completely satisfying gastronomic experience.

Unfortunately these little inklings of fate are few and far between and almost never in synch with the causal events. You may have actually foreseen the skillet incident 20 years earlier in the middle of freshman year keggar-then promptly dismissed the sharp skull pain as the product of the seven, orange flavored Jello shots you had ingested.

Unfortunately, these things seem to be imperfect. But this type of Angst does exist and it might be worth taking note of...if you are feeling out of sorts in today’s modern world. That bad feeling you are having right now may just be because you are getting a tooth pulled in 2020. Who knows?

How does this all relate? Well, I've had this strange feeling ever since the day Bush first mentioned "Bird Flu."

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Waiting For You & The Bird Flu: "FEMA Concentration Camps" Ready For Another Katrina

2005-12-03T22:13:00.000-08:00

Please click on the "Link" button at the bottom of this post. There isn't much that I can say about this other than watch your back & keep your wits about you. If this is your first time here, please take a look at my other posts concerning Quarantine & FEMA Camps.

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Bird Flu Fears Cause Millions To Investigate Tofurky: With A Heaping Helping Of Sauerkraut!

2005-12-03T00:51:00.000-08:00

Wow. It is very obvious to me that the Bush Administration’s Bird Flu Fear Machine has worked. If you visit the Google Zeitgeist page, it shows you the new trends in web searches for the week. Number 3 on the list for last week was…
TOFURKY!!!!!!!!

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

Tofurky came in just behind Xbox 360.

HOT DAMN AND CRISS CROSS BUNS MY FELLOW AMERICANS!!! THE WORLD IS SCARED SHITLESS OF BIRDS!!!

Do you realize what this means? This means that millions of people decided to at least investigate the idea of having Tofu Turkey for Thanksgiving instead of that old frozen bird from the supermarket.

I told you there might be Turkey Riots!!! INVEST IN GODDAMN TOFU BIRD SUBSTITUTES IMMEDIATELY!!!! I mean between this and the whole Sauerkraut panic…things LOOK VERY DARK FOR US.

But what is even more terrifying is the rest of the list…

1.
debra lafave
2.
xbox 360
3.
tofurkey
4.
rent lyrics
5.
cell phone records
6.
nick and jessica
7.
christmas wallpaper
8.
american music awards
9.
battlefield 2
10.
pat morita
11.
war of the worlds
12.
george best
13.
diana ross
14.
biggest loser
15.
call of duty 2

Shit...this country is doomed.

But you knew that already.

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Bird Flu Preparedness: FEMA Camps, Trailer Parks, Sauerkraut & Shotguns-Yeee Haaw America!

2005-11-29T23:10:00.000-08:00

Ok, folks now we have taken a look at massive quarantines of the past, now let's take a look at the present. The following excerpts are from a Rolling Stone article that is a few weeks old. It's not terribly enlightening other than this-camps and shelters are bad places. STAY OUT OF THEM IF YOU CAN!!! What was FEMA was thinking when they took all these poor people and stuck them in a massive trailer park? I'm sure living in FEMAville is fine, compared to living in a shelter, but it is also a really strange choice of housing. It really makes sort of a class statement-the very statement that Bush has been trying to get away from. Trailer parks are what substitutes for the lie that is the American Dream. Trailer parks are THE MINIMUM level of HOME OWNERSHIP. The truth is that they are really efficiency apartments arranged in a way as if to simulate homes. You own the aluminum box (if you're lucky), but you still pay rent on the space. I'm not dissing them, I spent a few summers on one myself, but you gotta wonder why FEMA thought this was a good idea. I mean this is a trailer park turned into a prison camp-how in the hell are you going to provide security for these people? They would be better off in hotels. And isn't it strange to put people who have just experienced a massive hurricane into shelters that are tornado magnets? The whole thing just strikes me as odd, and incredibly ironic. You know why they call it the American Dream? Because you have to be ASLEEP to believe in it. (Thanks George Carlin) I doubt, however, that we will get such nice lodgings when the bird flu strikes. But you can look at Katrina as sort of a "dry run," however wet, of how the federal government will treat it's people when and if the bird hits the fan. Thanks to the FEMA Camp Entertainment Director, Carl for this.

"Welcome to FEMAville"

Katrina's victims may be headed for desolation rows like this makeshift Florida trailer park

By PETER WILKINSON

For the past thirteen months, this sprawling installation -- at full occupancy, 551 trailers housing more than 1,500 people -- has stood as the largest natural-disaster-relief park in American history. But in coming months it will likely be far surpassed, as those displaced by Hurricane Katrina -- more than 200,000 people -- begin to move into a series of FEMA trailer parks spread across Louisiana and Mississippi. More than 120,000 trailers are now being prepared for Katrina victims, ready to be occupied just as soon as FEMA cuts through its own red tape and extricates those who have been living since the storm in hotel rooms, some costing $100 per night. What's in store for the residents of these new FEMA villages? The worst-case scenarios might look an awful lot like those that have plagued the residents of Punta Gorda: a complete lack of essential services; high crime; isolation from even their closest neighbors; and, because permanent housing is so hard to find, a pervasive sense of hopelessness and despair.

Safety in FEMAville isn't a major concern for children and teenagers only. Many older residents live in fear, which thickens the sense of isolation. Rarely do Sonia Dominguez and her husband, Jose Concepcion, venture out of Unit No. 364 at night. Jose, who drove a truck until a back problem left him drawing $800 a month in workmen's compensation, grimaces as he settles into an overstuffed chair. Sonia, 52, lost her job as a nurse after Charley and now works two days a week, for ten dollars an hour, as a private nurse's assistant. "It's not much," she says, "but I'm trying to save."

A couple of nights earlier, somebody threw a rock through one of their windows, sending glass everywhere. "A lot of bad people live around here," says Jose, 42. "The music is too loud, every night until 11 or 11:30. Dogs run wild."

"I pray every day for one thing," Sonia says. "To move away from here."

Click Here to Read Full Rolling Stone Article
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Bird Flu Preparedness: Federal Quarantine Has Happened Before-A Roadmap To Today's FEMA Camps

2005-11-28T03:28:00.001-08:00

Ever wondered what would happen if there was a massive outbreak of the bird flu in the US and the Pentagon went forward with their plan for a massive quarantine? What would a massive quarantine look like? Over the next week I will be addressing this issue with tireless diligence in several new posts. Let’s start where you should always start…the past.

There HAS been a massive quarantine in the US before. You can read about it in Khaled J. Bloom’s book, “The Mississippi Valley’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.”

In 1878 there was a yellow fever outbreak in, of all places, New Orleans. The disease (which knew no cure at the time) is said to have come off of a ship that docked in the New Orleans harbor. The disease quickly spread North via the newly constructed rail lines that ran along the Mississippi River. The US government was not prepared for the outbreak to spread so quickly (this was the first instance of rail lines transmitting a disease) and they were slow to respond. Eventually the government was forced to quarantine the entire southern half of the Mississippi River Valley-a massive quarantine zone covering thousands of miles and several states. The Federal and State governments did not have enough manpower to contain the area and were forced to rely on volunteer organizations-one of which was a thinly veiled KKK group. All trains were stopped and riders offloaded into quarantine camps. Road travelers were either shot by terrified locals or forced into camps by authorities. Most of the people who were forced into camps quickly succumbed to the mosquito borne illness. The non-governmental volunteer groups turned into marauders-roving bands of “quarantine riders” killed anyone (especially if they were black) found outside of the quarantine zone.

A dark and little known chapter in American History, like so many others. I recommend Bloom’s excellently researched book, it is hard to find & expensive, but entirely worth it. Check your library.

So what would a massive quarantine look like today? It totally depends on where you are and how much you trust the government.

Bush might be hoping for an outbreak around the next election, because he could then declare martial law. Would he rescind his power after the epidemic? Once half of America was dead (most of them from urban areas) and the country was now controlled by a massive police state? Hmmm, well if you were George 2 what would you do? Jesus, it sounds sort of like the perfect deal for him.

No wonder I have been hearing rumors about the bird flu virus being injected into birds.

“It appears as if someone is attempting to heighten the panic surrounding the predicted influenza epidemic. Researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan began to wonder how birds in nearby farms acquired the bird flu. They checked on the genetic makeup of the virus and it is "strikingly similar to that of a bird flu virus found in South America, too far for migrating birds to carry into Japan." This led investigators to surmise somebody brought a vaccine into Japan and injected it into some birds, infecting the animals around them. [Japan Times Sept. 3, 2005] The mysterious appearance of avian flu in birds around the world could be explained by contaminated avian vaccines!”

SOURCE: http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi45.html

So what would it be like if the bird flu shit really went down?

Ever been in a prison when they lock it down?

Small Towns:
If you are in a small town, your community may decide to “self quarantine.” There have been stories coming out of New Orleans about suburban neighborhoods that blocked roads and bridges with cars and citizens refused to let anyone through-12 guages pointed over car hoods. They had “The Fear” bad.

Big Cities:
Soldiers, police and possibly deputized volunteers (anybody with a gun who is part of a community club, like the Shriners) would be issued gas masks and vaccinated. These quarantine police would then surround your city or neighborhood and lock it down, creating a sort of Warsaw ghetto. Or they would force you into busses & trains to take you to detention/quarantine/medical centers. In these camps you would probably NOT be given medical treatment and you would be forced into close contact with the infected. Any attempt to leave would get you a bullet in the head. The medical community would be completely overwhelmed.

Or it might not be so bad. I could just be paranoid. Those prisons they are building outside of major cities right now could just be for illegal immigrants. We might be able to just sit it out in our houses, drinking warm beer and eating top ramen, as we listen to re-broadcasts of last year's football games on the radio. It might just be me...OK.

And certainly, it might not happen at all, like those supposed NY subway bombings they were so DAMN CONCERNED ABOUT RIGHT AROUND ROVEGATE.

THE THING IS, MY FELLOW AMERICAN SHEEP, WE JUST DON’T KNOW. WE JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT THESE BABY RAPERS ARE UP TO IN WASHINGTON AND LIKE I SAID BEFORE, THEY ARE CERTAINLY WORKING HARD TO THINK FASTER THAN US.

A more in-depth look at Quarantine will follow.

Keep your spirits up, The Fear at bay & your wits about you.

,

Saving America: Succession in Vermont, In Fighting Tyranny Left & Right Agree

2005-11-23T04:39:00.000-08:00

Goddamn it, I love these Vermonters. We ALL need to SUCEDE from the UNION, immediately...READ THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1108/p01s04-uspo.html

So I was at a ranch this weekend, speaking to a cowboy. We discussed guns, then got on the subject of the war, then on the subject of politics. We instantly fell into our trenches & started shooting at each other over no man's land. I, on my side with marrying gays, pro abortion rights & anti war. He fell into his side, with the need to show strength overseas, being against gays marrying & needing to support the troops....

But then I said to him, "OK, but don't you agree this country's is completely going down the toilet to a level that scares the shit out of you?" To which he replied, "Yes I do believe so." I replied, "OK we can agree...and do you blame the liberals for destroying the country?" He replied, "Nope, not so much, but I don't agree with em'." I said, "Well, would you say then that we have a common enemy-and there is something ELSE that is destroying this country and THAT THING IS...BIG CORPORATIONS RUNNING THE GOVERNMENT?"

AND NOW GET THIS FOLKS...HE'S A GOOD MAN.

HE REPLIED..."YEP, ON THAT MUCH WE CAN AGREE."

Now there, my fellow Americans is how to start a conversation. I am no longer a member of Move On as of Today. There are bigger issues than the ones that polarize us. Fuck the Left and Fuck the Right. This Country & Therefore YOUR ASS is on the line here. We are going to have to work together to solve THE BIGGER PROBLEM.

And the BIGGER PROBLEM is...

CAN AMERICA RETURN TO BEING A TRUE DEMOCRACY WITH A GOVERNMENT THE PEOPLE CAN TRUST?????!!!!!!!

CAN AMERICA FIND A NEW FORM OF GOVERNMENT THAT PROTECTS ITSELF FROM THE SPECIAL INTERESTS!!!!!!???

CAN THERE BE A NEW FEDERALISM???

CAN THERE BE A DEMOCRATIC STATE UN-INFLUENCED BY HONEYPOT BURGLING BABY RAPERS LIKE ENRON.

THAT IS THE ISSUE.

And right now that should be the only issue on the forefront of you sheep minds if you wish this country to have future.

VOTE FOR SUCCESSION!!!

NOW!!!

Us sheep can do it!!!

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Bird Flu Preparedness: Men's Health "Bird Flu Survival Kit" Is Pure Bullshit

2005-11-23T03:12:00.000-08:00

Well good intentions and A LOT of bullshit is how I would describe this Men’s Health Bird Flu Survival Kit. Like a drunken frat boy trying to do the long jump-this “survival kit” falls short of the mark. It seems that Men’s Health is a magazine obviously run by dumb ass jocks who have dads and uncles who are doctors…so take your advice from them at your own risk.

It is worth mentioning that this particular Men's Health piece was (somewhat) the cause of the run on sauerkraut in America. The AP used this article as a source for how sauerkraut was like kimchi. Shoddy journalism abounds as we spin the spin out of control.

I will RE-STATE that THE BIRD FLU or AVIAN FLU (H5N1) is a special type of super virulent strain of flu that has “jumped” from animals to humans. We know very little about it, but we do know that it does not behave like a normal flu. It is NOT a normal flu that resists anti-biotics…it is something more.

Here is their survival kit…

From the Men’s Health Magazine Website

http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&channel=health&category=colds.flu&conitem
=21c155f2befd6010VgnVCM100000cfe793cd____&page=1

The Bird Flu Survival Kit
Essential supplies for a worst-case scenario. Stock up on sauerkraut for a speedy recovery

Grape juice

MH: Concord grapes are packed with the antioxidant resveratrol, which has been shown in lab tests to inhibit the reproduction of the flu virus by 90 percent.

TF: Yeah, and what does that have to do with the Bird Flu? There is NO PROOF or EVEN CONJECTURE that GRAPE JUICE will protect you from the bird flu. However, if we are talking normal health, yeah drink as much of it as you can.

Hot/cold pack

MH: Aspirin and acetaminophen will make you feel better but can prolong flu infection, say University of Maryland researchers. Fight fevers with cold packs instead.

TF: Gee, thousands of Vietnamese are hoarding cold packs…not. Again, jock stupidity.

Selenium

MH: Take your daily dose in Brazil nuts or in supplement form (400 micrograms or less). Selenium is believed to help combat oxidative stress during sickness.

TF: Selenium is a powerful antioxidant. Take it if you are feeling a flu or cold coming on as well as zinc. However, that it would protect you from the bird flu, is up to GOD.

Alcohol-based hand sanitizer

MH: Next to inhaling the flu, the easiest way to catch it is by bringing an infected hand to your mouth, eyes, or nose.

TF: Stupid Jock bullshit.

M N95 1860 mask

MH: Most masks only prevent the wearer from spreading germs. The 1860 (20 for $20) stops him or her from inhaling virus droplets. allheart.com

TF: Yes, get them, by all means. But don’t pay much, they can be gotten at the hardware store for 15 bucks a twenty pack. The “Blue Medical” ones are no better that the construction ones. However, allheart has small ones for kids and women. But know that they are by no means a sure protection, the virus can still get through.

Nonperishable foods

MH: Make a few of the cans sauerkraut; it's packed with lactic-acid bacteria, shown by Korean researchers to speed recovery of chickens infected with avian flu.

TF: Absolute Bullshit. See my kimchi post.

Bottled water

MH: There could be quarantines and sanitation issues. The Department of Homeland Security recommends 1 gallon per person per day. Stockpile a week's worth.

TF: Stockpile a months worth if you can, but a bird flu outbreak is unlikely to contaminate water supplies or cause the water to stop flowing from you faucet. Also, remember that tap water doesn’t taste as good, but it is treated with Chlorine and other bacteria killers.

Oscillococcinum

MH: Take this remedy, made from diluted flu virus, within 24 hours of symptoms, recommends Keith DeOrio, M.D., a Men's Health alternative-medicine advisor.

TF: “Kieth is my dad’s golfing buddy.” There is NO PROOF that Oscillococcinum would prevent you from getting the bird flu, as there is no proof that Tamiflu would prevent you from getting the bird flu. It has prevented ME from getting normal flu, so it is something worth having on hand for the flu season, as well as Zinc for colds. But again, THERE HAS NOT EVEN BEEN CONJECTURE that Oscillococcinum will protect you from the Bird Flu.

Bird Flu Preparedness: Caring For The Infected & Using N-95 Dust Masks

2005-11-23T01:21:00.000-08:00

The following is information from US agencies about caring for those that are infected with the Bird Flu. The real issue for me with the precautions listed here is that they really don't seem to reflect the virility of the Bird Flu. They really seem to be the precautions one might take for the normal flu. As I understand it, Bird flu is several times more virulent than the normal flu and more comparable to something like Ebola, which has a BSL (Biological Safety Level) of 4. SARS is BSL 3. Thumb your The Coming Plague and let me know if you find anything. I need to find out how dangerous the bird flu is to work on in labs, that will tell me how much of the following is bullshit. But as of now, until I do further research, it seems like the following information is the best currently out there. However, I feel my bullshit meter reading OFF THE CHARTS...

FOLLOWING IS QUOTED AND WEB SOURCES LISTED AT END OF EACH SECTION:

Rationale for Enhanced Precautions

Human influenza is thought to transmit primarily via large respiratory droplets. Standard Precautions plus Droplet Precautions are recommended for the care of patients infected with human influenza. However, given the uncertainty about the exact modes by which avian influenza may first transmit between humans additional precautions for health-care workers involved in the care of patients with documented or suspected avian influenza may be prudent. The rationale for the use of additional precautions for avian influenza as compared with human influenza include the following:

• The risk of serious disease and increased mortality from highly pathogenic avian influenza may be significantly higher than from infection by human influenza viruses.
• Each human infection represents an important opportunity for avian influenza to further adapt to humans and gain the ability to transmit more easily among people.
• Although rare, human-to-human transmission of avian influenza may be associated with the possible emergence of a pandemic strain.

Standard Precautions
• Pay careful attention to hand hygiene before and after all patient contact or contact with items potentially contaminated with respiratory secretions.

Contact Precautions
• Use gloves and gown for all patient contact.
• Use dedicated equipment such as stethoscopes, disposable blood pressure cuffs, disposable thermometers, etc.

Eye protection (i.e., goggles or face shields)
• Wear when within 3 feet of the patient.

Airborne Precautions
• Place the patient in an airborne isolation room (AIR). Such rooms should have monitored negative air pressure in relation to corridor, with 6 to 12 air changes per hour (ACH), and exhaust air directly outside or have recirculated air filtered by a high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter. If an AIR is unavailable, contact the health-care facility engineer to assist or use portable HEPA filters (see Environmental Infection Control Guidelines) to augment the number of ACH.
• Use a fit-tested respirator, at least as protective as a National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)-approved N-95 filtering facepiece (i.e., disposable) respirator, when entering the room.

SOURCE: http://www.osha.gov/dsg/guidance/avian-flu.html

FROM THE CDC...

1 Standard Precautions
_ Pay careful attention to hand hygiene before and after all patient contact.

2 Contact Precautions
_ Use gloves and gown for all patient contact.

3 Eye protection
_ Wear when within 3 feet of the patient.

4 Airborne Precautions
_ Place the patient in an airborne isolation room (i.e., monitored negative air pressure in relation to the surrounding areas with 6 to 12 air changes per hour).

_ The CDC has recommended that, the minimum requirement is a disposable particulate respirator (e.g. N95, N99 or N100) used in accordance with 29 CFR 1910.134 for respiratory protection programs. Workers must be fit tested for -the model and size respirator they wear and must be trained to fit-check for facepiece to face seal, when entering the room.

- If transport or movement is necessary, ensure that the patient wears a surgical mask. If a mask cannot be tolerated, apply the most practical measures to contain respiratory secretions.

GUIDANCE FOR AIRLINE FLIGHT CREWS
This guidance is intended to assist airline flight crews in establishing appropriate precautions in the event they must interact with a person suspected of having avian influenza. Personnel should be aware of the symptoms of avian influenza. Although experience with human infection is limited, persons infected with avian influenza would likely have fever and respiratory symptoms (cough, sore throat, shortness of breath).

1 Wash hands frequently with soap and water or use an alcohol-based hand rub if hands are not visibly soiled.

2 Personnel should wear disposable gloves for direct contact with blood or body fluids of any passenger. However, gloves are not intended to replace proper hand hygiene. Immediately after activities involving contact with body fluids, gloves should be carefully removed and discarded and hands should be cleaned. Gloves must never be washed or reused.

3 The CDC has developed specific guidance on the handling of sick passengers. (See http://www.cdc.gov/travel/other/avian_flu_ig_airlines_021804.htm)

4 The CDC has stated that, the captain of an airliner bound for the United States is required by law to report the illness to the nearest U. S. Quarantine Station prior to arrival or as soon as illness is noted. Quarantine officials will arrange for appropriate medical assistance to be available when the airplane lands and will notify state and local health departments and the appropriate CDC Headquarters' officials.

SOURCE: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/professional/infect-control.htm#note

THE N-95 DUST MASK DESCRIBED...

A particulate respirator and surgical mask that is NIOSH approved as a Type N 95 respirator and meets CDC guidelines for TB exposure control. It is designed specifically for use in health care settings, but can also be used for home health care and personal protection. This protective mask includes a soft inner shell for greater comfort against the face, and since it is fluid resistant, it helps reduce potential exposure of the wearer to the spray, spatter, and aerosol of blood and body fluids.

Other Benefits:
Can be used during laser surgery, electrocautery, and other procedures using powered medical instruments to help reduce wearer exposure to airborne particles generated during these procedures.
>99% Bacterial Filtration Efficiency ( BFE ) to help reduce patient contamination caused by exhaled microorganisms.
Does not contain either natural or rubber latex or dry natural rubber as components in the product or its packaging.
Hypoallergenic to reduce chance of allergic reaction.

SOURCE: http://www.allheart.com/3m1860x.html

Will try to update you with better info soon.

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Bird Flu Preparedness: Go On A News Fast & Watch "Cockfighter"

2005-11-19T01:14:00.000-08:00

For the last week I have been on a news fast. I have refused to watch, listen to or read the Fear Machine. It has not been easy. I am obviously an addict because there was a short withdrawal period (two days). I reached for the remote to watch CNN several times, then chose re-runs of Gunsmoke and Little House On The Prairie instead. It has been a week of research, work, recharging, discipline, relaxation and readiness. Don't hide your head, but make sure you save some for yourself. For guidance on this I give you a quote from the great master of protest and freedom, Edward Abbey…

“A patriot must always be ready to defend their country from its government."

"I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving."

"If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness."

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell."

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

Yes.

Since the Bird Flu was still vaguely on my mind, I decided to rent this movie again...

Cockfighter, with Warren Oates. It was so great. It's a MUST SEE. Motherfuckers don't make movies like this anymore! No one has any balls like this anymore...

"In COCKFIGHTER (1973), the late, great and sorely missed Warren Oates stars as a down on his luck greaseball who has lost everything while betting on the illegal title sport. He has sworn to not utter another word until he wins the next round of Cockfighting championships. He spends the remainder of the film silent, delivering any exposition needed through voice over.

Like director Monte Hellman’s other films (Including TWO LANE BLACKTOP and THE SHOOTING) this is a character piece exploring the depths of obsession. Warren Oates captures perfectly a man who is completely broken, betting his very pride and soul on the odds compiled from the viciousness of barnyard animals. The trick is that the character is so self absorbed that he consistently misses the big picture of his life, letting family, friends, and opportunities pass him up as he stands silent in the cockfighting ring." Source:http://www.coppfilms.com/Neon%20Madness%20Site/Video%20Picks%20real%20men.htm

If the bird flu kills me, I will watch this movie on my deathbed and laugh...LAUGH. And drink Budweiser, my dad's bird flu beer of choice (thicker cans).

WATCH YOUR ASS, KEEP YOUR SPIRITS UP, FUCK "THE FEAR" & LIVE YOUR LIFE TO THE GODDAMN FULLEST...NOW!!!

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Bird Flu Preparedness: FOOLS, Kimchi is NOT Sauerkraut!!!

2005-11-14T02:20:00.000-08:00

Please Click Here To View The Most Recent Roman Wilderness Posts

If anyone out there is rushing to the store to buy sauerkraut, thinking it will protect them from the bird flu, you are out of your minds. OK, HERE IS THE THING...KIMCHI, for anyone that has NEVER gone out to eat Korean food (you savages) is about the furthest thing from sauerkraut you could possibly experience. Read on...

By Lee Hyo-sik
Staff Reporter

A local animal feed manufacturer shipped a feed additive that may be effective in treating bird flu to Indonesia last week amid growing international concern over the spread of the virus.

``A veterinarian at an Indonesian zoo asked us to send our animal feed additive, which contains the bacteria leuconostoc citreum, a type of lactobacillus found in kimchi,’’ said Lee Jong-Dae, president of Celltech International.

``We shipped some 800 kilograms of the additive last week.’’

Lee added that if it is proven effective in treating chickens, ducks and other birds infected with bird flu virus there, the company will sign formal export contracts with Indonesia and expand its export market into other Asian countries grappling with bird flu outbreaks.

``We are sure that the additive will work in treating fowls with the avian influenza as our tests have shown that local chickens that were fed the additive had a much stronger immune system against a wide array of viruses compared to ones that it was not given to,’’ he said.

Seoul National University professor Kang Sa-ouk and his research team extracted leuconostoc citreum and eight other lactobacillus from kimchi.

Professor Kang and Celltech International launched a joint project to develop anti-virus and anti-bacteria animal feed additives by using kimchi lactobacillus.

END QUOTE

Kimchi, for you fools that are buying sauerkraut, is packed with MANY different ingredients which make it an excellent antioxidant...if you are a smoker, or suffer from a disease that effects your immune system, try eating kimchi on a regular basis. I would however recommend that you experience it first while of eating an entire Korean meal...one of the most KICK ASS cuisines in the world. But we are talking about health here, so just eat a little bit a day as well as green tea, red wine, red grape juice and green leaf vegetables will prevent many diseases. Don't get kimchi that comes from China, it is supposed to have high levels of lead in it. Most of the kimchi in the states comes from California or from Korea and those are the best and can be picked up at most Asian groceries or ordered off the web. Don't be put off by the smell, it will go away once you take it out of the jar and put it on a plate, it is just the air inside the jar that smells...it is fermented remember. Also it is spicy, my dad asked if it would burn your A-hole. My answer is NO. But, remember it's a side dish, don't go crazy. MMMM...so yummy in my tummy. I am going to eat some right now with my Korean Udon Ramen.

Here are a list of the ingredients in Kimchi and their health benefits...

Green vegetables including cabbage
Vitamin A, Calcium, Iron, Potassium, Vitamin.
The high quality of cabbage is characterized by the fresh leaves, a thin peel, and heavy weight.

Red chili peppers
vitamin A and C
Rich is vitamins A and C: 37 times the amount in apples and 7 times that of oranges. The quality of red chili peppers is determined by how well they were dried, a sleek outer skin, no wrinkles, and an even vivid color.

Cucumbers
Elaterin, Peptin, Proteins, Acids, Potassium, and Phosphate
Good digestion and urination

Korean lettuce
Stimulates appetite, keeps blood clean, and makes stomach strong.

Green onions
Alicerpide, Vitamin A & C
Keeps the body warm, helps the circulation, and strengthens the intestine. Superior ones have a long and straight body and tiny spring roots.

Oysters
Calcium, Iron, Glycogen,
Essential Amino Acids, Glutamic Acid, Glycine

Radishes
Fiber, Protein, Anti-carcinogenic Ingredients
Cures virulent tumors or cancer, inside and outside of body. High quality radishes taste less spicey.

Mustard leaf
Mineral, Vitamin A & C
High quality produce has tender and shiny leaves.

Dropwort
Effective for lowering fever, reducing blood pressure, and also for remedying sun stroke.

Leeks
Highly nutritious and has a good effect on digestion. It smells like garlic as a sulphuric compound.

Garlic
Alilcerpide, Alitin
Stimulates the immune system and has an antibacterial effect. It also promotes the absorption of vitamin B1 and the fast digestion of proteins.

Ginger
Minerals
Good for lowering the cholesterol level in body. Good ones have a strong chili fragrance and peel easily.

Pickled fish paste
Protein, Amino Acids, Fat, Calcium
Helps body to be alkalized, making up for nutrients which can be deficient in vegetables.

Lactic Acid Bacteria
The well fermented kimchi has more lactic acid bacteria than yogurt. This bacteria is known to be especially good for the intestines and has anti-germ functions.

Acetic Acid
Acetic acid is produced differently according to the materials used, fermentation temperature and period, and level of salt. The flavor depends on the level of acetic acid. Overall, kimchi that is fermented with less salt at a low temperature has a better taste.

Amino Acids
The special flavor of kimchi depends not only on acetic acid, but also carbon gas, condiments, and amino acids. Amino acids are produced by breaking down protein in pickled fish paste and oysters. Researchers have found that kimchi contains 17 different kinds of amino acid.s

Vitamins
Kimchi has high levels Vitamin B, C, and Beta Carotene. The levels of Vitamin B1 and B2, and B12 double after a 3 week-fermentation period.

Kimchi Info Source: http://www.lifeinkorea.com/culture/kimchi/kimchi.cfm?xURL=nutrition

OK NOW HERE ARE THE INGREDIENTS FOR CANNED SAUERKRAUT: Cabbage, cucumbers, salt.

In the test listed above you will note that scientists gave the chickens " extracted leuconostoc citreum and eight other lactobacillus from kimchi." However, those were a product of the fermentation of ALL of the above ingredients. Whoever said that Sauerkraut would deliver the same virus fighting, KUNG FU vitamins as Kimchi is obviously some Stalwart of Western Medicine. Some white jacketed nabob who knew that they could not recommend something as exotic as kimchi to Americans- Jesus we might end up giving money to KOREA. That and Rumsfeld owns stock in Sauerkraut firms, I am sure.

If anything this should just make you go out and experience Korean barbeque for the first time. It's AWESOME.

Please Click Here To View The Most Recent Roman Wilderness Posts

Later I will be discussing Men's Heath Magazine's BIRD FLU SURVIVAL KIT and blasting a few holes in this bullshit...

http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&channel=health&category=colds.flu&conitem=21c155f2befd6010VgnVCM100000cfe793cd____&page=1

KEEP YOUR SPIRITS UP, "THE FEAR" AT BAY & YOUR WITS ABOUT YOU!

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Bird Flu, Riots In France, Tyranny, Protest

2005-11-12T02:49:00.000-08:00

I am sure most of you know about Rumsfeld holding interest in Tamiflu-just like he held interest in Halliburton. But as I continue to discuss the many issues of present day America, it is just worth a refresher course...

"NEW YORK (Fortune) - The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world."

My only comment on this is...watch your backs folks, continue to read between the lines. Also, it's not a GODDAMN BAD IDEA TO BE PREPARED. And…it’s not a bad idea to be paranoid, because believe me those in power are thinking twice as fast as you these days. Read my “Drunken Monkey” post.

I have no idea WHAT my own government is capable of anymore and I apologize to the world for us losing the standing we once had as a shining example of freedom.

To live in America right now is to KNOW that somehow the democracy you grew up with, limping as it was, is now gone. THAT DOESN’T MEAN we can’t win it back, but it’s gonna be hard…and it’s going to take millions of people that are willing to stand up and put their asses on the line for it. It’s going to take weaning ourselves off of our programmed addiction to THE FEAR. Center Herd Sheep are going to do everything to stay out of it-they think they are safe in their suburbs, small towns and gated communities.

But it’s gonna take all of us turning ourselves from sheep to Women and Men again. It’s gonna be a battle. A hard battle…and it’s got to happen in Russia, in France and in the whole world.

We all have to stand up and choose freedom. Democracy is not dead, it’s just that the capitalism it was founded on has been allowed to run roughshod over the world. I’m sure even the elitist George Washington-if he was yanked from his mount Vernon home in a time machine-would recognize the tyranny of King George in George Bush.

While the rest of the world cannot vote in our country, unfortunately they find themselves impacted by our policies on a daily basis and OUTRAGE in the public and in the press is NOT HAVING AN EFFECT.

Riots are fine, we need them once and awhile, but what do you do after the riot? We can take this world back from the multinational corporations that rule us…but it’s going to take more than a riot. It’s going to take a level of protest that the world has never seen. It’s going to take wit, ferocity, study and sacrifice.

IT’S GOING TO TAKE YOU…AND IT’S GOING TO TAKE ME.

And we are going to need leaders.

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Unprepared For The Bird Flu Or Other Disaster?

2005-11-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

Missed That Glance describes an empty larder...which pretty much describes my situation until last week when I went to the maga discount store and spent a hundred bucks. Though I did let THE FEAR get to me last week, I am glad that I have a few supplies on hand. It's a small thing and I do feel a little better. Even though this bird flu thing is mostly a product of the FEAR MACHINE to distract & exploit us, it's nice to know if some kind of everyday disaster happened I would have some extra supplies.

"we had a great larder all nice and ready after 9/11--and to be fair, living in earthquake country and NOT having fresh water and canned food available is pretty fucking stupid--but it got very depleted.

we were always good on water because we used to get the big bottles of arrowhead delivered, that plus the toilet plus the hot water heater was a fair amount of water.

now all i have left is anchovies stuffed with capers, which tastes good but is not entirely practical. we had a boatload of spam. i love spam anyhow.

the only other thing that's left in there is prescription med backups and stff like playing cards and little board games."

Wow, you even had entertainment planned? Not a bad idea.

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Spinning Out Of Control

2005-11-09T04:30:00.000-08:00

OK, HERE IS THE THING…America is going insane. It is starting to remind me of the few days after 9-11. This shit is getting close to being a fucking full scale NATION WIDE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. And these morons that are “in control” continue to fucking CRANK UP THE FEAR further and further each day. It’s like our whole society is being interrogated in some CIA secret prison and they are bombarding us with Clockwork Orange montages of our own imminent deaths while they whisper, “buy more,” in our bleeding ears.

As my step mom said to me tonight, “I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. I thought I would be dead way before society fell apart this much. I would hate to be 20 right now.” Tell me that’s not why the great Hunter S. ended it all, God Rest.

I mean so much is happening each day on the few tiny topics I have chosen to discuss that I would need a fucking staff to even basically monitor all the bullshit that is going down. Six months ago I was sending out an e-mail like once a month. Now it’s true that I have my ear to the ground a bit more than I used to, however…I can see that the spin spins so fast now that it is simply SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL.

short list of fear:
Iraq War*
Terrorism
Katrina*
Bird Flu*
Global Warming (newly revisited post-Katrina)
Oil Shortages*
Torture in secret CIA prisons* (coming to a town near you?)
Class riots in France (coming to a town near you?)

Let me know if I am missing anything, but look at that fucking list. Those are all current news stories in the press on a daily basis…this week. Oh hey, I almost forgot…weren’t we investigating the president? That's the Real Story.

Why won't someone do a story on HOW THE FEAR MACHINE WORKS and play that on Wolf Blitzer's "THE SITUATION ROOM."

Ready, here we go...

Show Description off of the CNN website: “Each week in “The Situation Room,” a Security Council convenes to look at the issues that affect your safety. The CNN Security Council draws together a panel of regular and guest contributors who have all served in the highest levels of government and the military. Together they will give you the most informed and useful analysis of the security issues facing the country.”

Wolf begins: “So gentlemen isn’t it true that both government and the media use fear as a way to make shit loads of money and control the populous?”

William Cohen, former Defense Secretary begins: “Well no Wolf I don’t see it that way at all, we believe that the public should be as informed as possible on all the events that concern them…without of course jeopardizing national security.”

Wolf: "Since there is no other journalist present, I will answer with respect to the media. Listen folks, we are just servants of the public, providing useful information the public WANTS and NEEDS to know, like that nuclear bomb they have recently discovered inside my asshole."

Retired General James “Spider” Marks, US Army: “You have a nuclear bomb inside your asshole?”

Wolf: “Yes sir, right now as we speak the area is being evacuated and an Anti-Terrorist bomb squad is sending in a robot to probe my anus with tiny fiber-optic cameras. We have to take a break but when we return we’ll go live inside a my asshole to try to diffuse this impending threat to national security.”

Cut to Commercial.

LED tickers in time square read: TERRORIST CELL DISCOVERED OPERATING INSIDE WOLF BLITZER’S A-HOLE. RUMSFELD ADMITS TO HOLDING CONTROLLING INTEREST IN SEVERAL MAJOR SAUERKRAUT FIRMS.

OK a deep breath and now we will continue…

The news story about Kimchi curing birds with the bird flu virus broke THIS MORNING! BY THE END OF THE MOTHERFUCKING DAY sauerkraut was SELLING OUT with some Midwest stores experiencing an 850% increase in sales of MOTHERFUCKING SAUERKRAUT!!!

My dad broke this story to me and I laughed at him & told him to stop making shit up.

Imagine my surprise...

Americans are in full panic mode, my friends.

When people start stockpiling Sauerkraut…indications are that they have totally lost their minds.

They are making us fear our thanksgiving turkey and forcing us to eat sauerkraut!

That, my fellow sheep, is a sign that THIS country is about to explode.

People just can’t take this much fear for this long...they just can’t take it.

The media and goverement are creating unheard of levels of fear in the public and the public knows that much of it is just spin in order to take attention away from issues that threaten the government...but now the now spin is spinning out of control.

They need to legalize pot, like yesterday.

.

I will, your loyal late night watchman, be filing these reports later on:

Kimchi…NO YOU FOOLS IT’S NOT SAUERKRAUT!!!

Men’s Health issues a dubious Burd Flu Survival Kit that gets picked up on the wire and spit out on your breakfast table tomorrow.

What OSHA and the CDC say about the Bird Flu

Rioters in France are not terrorists fighting for Jihad?

(*) Can be directly or partially attributed to the Bush Administration.

Turkey Riots In France!!!

2005-11-08T13:11:00.000-08:00

I told you what would happen if you increase the fear on us poor sheep!!!

I wonder if the reason they are not showing much of this coverage on the American TV FEAR MACHINE is because Murdock and Turner are afraid of getting their sports cars torched by spreading riots here in the US. It could happen, especially if they keep threatening turkey day with this bird flu bullshit. I mean you would think that CNN or FOX would be LIVE 24-7 on the scene in France. I mean they are injecting us with LIVE FEAR COVERAGE of Jet Blue Planes with fairly routine landing gear problems for hours on end...But when it comes to massive class riots in another country they only show a few clips. I guess you can only oppress the people with fear so long, then they STAMPEDE and burn A FUCK LOAD OF CARS.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9938333/site/newsweek/?rf=technorati

NYT- "Even as Mr. Villepin spoke Monday, the turmoil continued, with youths setting fire to buses and cars. He struggled to balance his tough line by acknowledging the social maladies underlying the unrest. "There are bands of youths, some very young, who are in a state of social, family and educational breakdown," he said, choosing his words with characteristic care. "They are in a destructive mind-set."

You fucking insensitive asshole, no wonder the riots get worse every day. I hope they singe your Citroen!!!

"Europe, meanwhile, watched the unfolding crisis with alarm. Copycat attacks on a few cars were reported in Brussels and Berlin, and Muslim sites on the Internet began carrying inflammatory messages."

Oh shit, the internet is carrying inflamitory messages? Scary, really scary and new. Now the internet scares me.

"Everybody is concerned about what is happening," Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said at a news conference in London. "You should never be complacent about these things."

I'll bet. Hey, I know...let's legalize torture and secret prisons. Clap your hooves together and gasp, my fellow sheep cuz...THAT'S JUST WHAT THEY"RE THINKING!!!

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Priorities

2005-11-06T23:45:00.000-08:00

<
Preparations from Wisconsin...

Glad to see Skunkhouse North is ready...and that your windows will be clean. If you run out of Windex, you can always drink Vodka.

Open Call For Food Cache & Larder Photos

2005-11-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

Please send your food cache and larder photos to me at romanwilderness2005@hotmail.com and I will post.

As I have said, mine is rather lame right now, but I am working on it. I threw everything out after 9-11 and now I am starting again from scratch. I have decided that the food I store will include more food that can be eaten without water or heating. Spam is a MUST for all food caches. It's a good luck charm, like a plastic Madonna on your dashboard. My dad recommends Budweiser in cans as the beer storage choice. He says the cans are thicker and therefore will last longer. I once drank a can of bud that had been in a fridge for 15 years. It was insanely alcoholic, but it tasted fine so maybe my dad is right. He usually is when it comes to this kind of thing. Remember, have fun with it, you don't need to buy food that you will suffer eating. Survival is required, suffering is optional. I don't know about the bird flu, but in these post 9-11, post Katrina times, we are reminded that even us Americans can suffer terrible calamities. No matter where you live there is always a need for it. My grandparents on both sides of my family lived through the depression and if there is one thing they instilled in me and my parents, it was the need to realize that something could happen like that again. But have fun with it & don't forget the Spam. If worst comes to worst and you get bored with the whole idea you can drink the beer, eat the food and use the dust masks as coffee filters. Ahh, things you learn on a jobsite.

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The Turkey Riots!!!

2005-11-03T21:54:00.000-08:00

Should you be aftraid to eat Turkey this Season? Check out...

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9880600/site/newsweek?rf=technorati

I mean I am not gonna let KING GEORGE THE SECOND TELL ME I CAN'T EAT MY GODDAMN TURKEY ON TURKEY DAY. NOW THAT IS PROOF WE ARE DWELLING IN A NEW FASCIST STATE. I HOPE HE KNOWS WHAT HE IS DOING, BECAUSE I AM ABOUT READY TO TURKEY RIOT!!!

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