Swine-Flu is a Man-Made Panic..

Posted on by

My new piece on swine-flu is up at Lew Rockwell.

Please note, I have it as Harold Varnus in the piece. It should be Varmus, as in my previous blog post on the subject. In my defense, I wrote it mostly in very dim light…

“The latest in the barrage of media reports on swine flu is a Bloomberg news report (August 25, 2009) that it might hospitalize 1.8 million patients in the US and over-burden hospital intensive care units.

This comes from a planning scenario released by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology

The Bloomberg story cites some theatrical numbers:

  • Half of the US population infected (that is, over 150 million people)
  • 300,000 people in hospital intensive care units
  • 30–90,000 people dead
  • By-pass surgery emergency operations disrupted

But hidden in paragraph 5 of the Bloomberg piece is the most pertinent part:

These numbers are only “scenario projections” that were “developed from models put together for planning purposes only,” says a Centers for Disease Control spokesman.

So.

  • Statistical projections.
  • Projections from models of past pandemics. (And not the past, as in 1968 or 1957, but way back, as in 1918.)
  • Projections developed for planning purposes only.

That’s three stages removed from anything you could call reality.

But perish this tenuous link with facts, PCAST wants Obama to rush through vaccine production so that 40 million people can be infect – er – injected by mid-September.

And who should make that decision?

A doctor? The surgeon-general? A medical team?

Why, the homeland security adviser!

That’s John Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, deputy executive director of the CIA under George Tenet, and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2005 during the exact period when the CIA became most heavily involved in torture practices in Iraq and elsewhere.”

Note:

I wanted to state here that my social views are quite liberal, and I do not have any objection to voluntary family planning and contraception. I’m also firmly pro-choice. And in terms of the environment, I support far greater consideration by each of us, as individuals and as communities, for animal life, nature, and conservation.

But those are my personal views. Putting the legal and physical force of the corporate- state behind those preferences, in the form that Holdren apparently thinks will work, is, in my view, completely misguided.

Call for Indian Co-conspirators, Activists…

Posted on by

If you are an Indian doctor, nurse, farmer, agronomist, or engineer, and are interested in sustainable development, self-sufficiency, alternative fuels, alternative health, organic herbs and healing, yoga or astrology…

AND

And are concerned about food and water in India in the future, I would be interested in hearing from you.

Scientists Who Developed Vaccine Won’t Take It Themselves? (Correction added)

Posted on by

— Wayne Madsen on Guillain-Barre syndrome and the swine flu vaccine

My Comment:
I’m hearing that I misunderstood this and it’s the makers of the small-pox vaccine who are baulking.
I’ll try to track that down.

Meanwhile, why would you trust a government that sends secretive letters to neurologists admitting fears it won’t admit to the public that’s getting the vaccinations?

Bill Lets President Seize Emergency Control of Private Cyber Networks

Posted on by

In the news:

“Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.”

Read more here.

My Comment

Please note “behind closed doors.” This was supposed to be an ultra-transparent administration, right? To make up for the secrecy and tyranny of George Bush…..
Remember?

The Political Ideology Behind Swine-Flu Hysteria

Posted on by

A new piece about swine-flu that I’m still working on:

The President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, the creators of the swine-flu scenario, has three co-chairs:

1. John Holdren (Director, White House Office of Science & Technology, Obama’s “science czar”)

2. Eric Lander, (head of the Broad Institute, MIT)

3. Harold Varmus (CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center, NY)

A little digging fills in the details.

1. Holdren:

Holdren isn’t just any old bureaucrat. He’s a climate change expert who holds the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

(The ‘Teresa’ is, of course, John Kerry’s wife when she was spouse of Ketchup king, John Heinz)

The support for climate change policies goes hand in hand with support for nuclear technology that Holdren believes is needed for those policies. He also believes all nuclear energy should be under the monitoring of the International Atomic Energy.

Climate change and “peaceful nukes” have been the beneficiaries of a huge PR effort over the last 15-20 years, largely stemming from the Pentagon, specifically, from Andrew Marshall, a charismatic theorist of American dominance whose Office of Net Assessments is the most influential outfit you never heard of. This PR typically derides any dissent from climate orthodoxy and downplays the enormous costs and risks involved in the global move to nuclear energy.

There’s more. As early as 1969 Holdren teamed up with neo-Malthusian doomsdayer Paul Ehrlich to advocate population control to “fend off the misery to come.” In 1977, he and Ehrlich, as well as Anne H. Ehrlich, co-authored a textbook (“Ecoscience”) in which they discussed “a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls…..”

Check out this site for some truly mind-boggling quotes:

Toward a Planetary Regime
…
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

Independence Day: Alfredo Zitarossa Sings Adagio en Mi Pais

Posted on by

Adagio en Mi Pais (Adagio in My Country), written and sung by Alfredo Zitarossa.

Zitarossa was a beloved and important Uruguayan composer, poet, singer, and journalist, who was ostracized for his involvement with the Frente Amplio of the left, during the 1970s, at the time when the military junta (with its torturous secret police) came to power in Uruguay. Zitarossa’s songs were banned in the Southern Cone countries and he himself was forced to live in exile in Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. He died young in 1989 at the age of 52. The most characteristic voice of resistance in Uruguay’s second “independence,” he makes a good subject for a post on Independence Day (Dia de la Independencia) , which happens to be today.

Behind every door
my people are alert,
and no one can silence their song,
and tomorrow they will sing again.
In my country we are tough,
the future will show that.

[Here is a complete translation by Yoshi Furuhashi, Monthly Review Press]

A bit of history: Uruguay won its independence from a triangular war between Spain, Argentina, and Brazil between 1825 and 1828. As the second smallest country in South America (after Surinam) it’s still somewhat overshadowed by its giant neighbors, Argentina and Brazil, with whom it shares it western and northern borders respectively.

Uruguay has many things to recommend it to a libertarian temperament. It’s a small country. The culture is unpretentious and laid back. It’s the home of the gaucho, the ferociously independent vagabond cowboy of South America. And the national motto, Libertad o Muerte (Liberty or Death) echoes Patrick Henry’s famous words (“Give me liberty or give me death”) before the Virginia Convention in 1775.

It’s traditional to go out on the night before Dia de la Independencia and I made it to a neighbor’s asado (barbecue). According to the Uruguayans, the asado, mate (the ubiquitous herbal tea that is sipped through a straw), and tango all come from Uruguay, not Argentina. Of course, in Argentina, you hear another story.

The asador did a fine job with the wood fire that cooks the meat. I took a shot at it too. The idea is to spread out the embers as they fall through the grate of the parrilla (grill)* from the log fire. Too many in one place and the meat gets burned. Too few and it doesn’t cook. Most of our guests wanted their meat – the world-famous Uruguayan organic beef – well done, so the asador and I were quite busy. The beef cut is called tira de asado (a cut from the ribs) and is mixed with other kinds of meat, like chorizo (sausage). We served the asado with chimichurri – a relish from oil, oregano, garlic, and chopped belly peppers – and with baguettes and clerico (made by mixing fruit drinks and wine).

*The term parrilla is also used, by analogy, to refer to torture and to the torture-rack, which were wide-spread in the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil…..

For the role of the US in fostering the routine use of torture in Uruguay, read this piece by Bill Blum.