My old gf’s voice is ringing in my ears……….
Look again………. what do you see?
A phoenix aflame

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 18 2004 18:34 utc | 3

@alabama
beq sent me the picture and its title.
I did the cropping and came up with the text and links. So in this case those are my associations. I added “picture by beq” now, as I did on other post, to so now it should be obvious.
Under your Moon, you are always invited to think about everything 🙂

Posted by: b | Nov 18 2004 18:39 utc | 5

I am not up in the latest Gene research / Race studies. In any case, the topic is completely marginal and discredited as ‘race’ is a social construction and not a scientific, physical one. If distinctions of ‘race’ are relevant, they are so only according a very complex set of criteria or *hypotheses* mostly dealing with habitat (geographical, etc.), *large* migratory movements, marriage customs, and all kinds of weird extra considerations. — You need a viable (or believed) theory of evolution before attacking this topic!
Weapons targetting a particular race (socially defined) is just the latest racist fad – amazing that a modern link to gene research would rehabilitate it.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose.
It is, as far as I can see, an illusion, just as the Aryan super race never emerged, despite the very direct concrete actions implemented.
A telling example: It has been shown that Israelis and Palestinians are genetically equivalent, and what an amazing fuss and upheaval that created!
In our library, we had long ago adopted the clever policy (care of yours truly) that box-cutters or scissors could simply never be used to damage a journal or excise a published article.
Box-cutters put the fear of God into everyone…Ha ha ha.
Very instructive on Science Today:
Link
Nothing is impossible… wait and see…
Beq, good…

Posted by: Blackie | Nov 18 2004 19:05 utc | 7

What is the “official” position of evangelicals on genetics? If you don´t believe in evolution how does that concept work?

Posted by: b | Nov 18 2004 19:58 utc | 9

I don’t think we have enough background to make sense of that. Hell, humans are ~98-99% genetically identical to gorillas or chimps as well, so to make that meaningful, one would need to have a standard for comparison. It’s likely that only a few sequences separate any humans, so the whole undertaking sounds more like ideology or poetry – as tho a scientist trying to make a politcal point – hey, we’re all one anyway, what’s the big deal about – if you will. Should have been rejected for being both trivial & irrelevant since no one is trying to say that human conflicts are genetically based anyway. I’ve never read that Israel claiming genetic superiority & doubt they would – for ummmm obvious reasons.

Posted by: jj | Nov 18 2004 20:28 utc | 11

the sunshine project has been leading the effort to uncover these bio programs
re the art – at first i thought i saw words in there, but then a robin took shape amidst a couple of A’s and that was all i needed to understand what we have done to deprive these fellow humans of the most elementary of dreams

Posted by: b real | Nov 18 2004 20:58 utc | 13

I can’t get much traction when I try to put my thoughts into words. I painted this picture a few years ago. I don’t tend to dark and watery; what you have seen before is how I prefer to express myself. I had, for some reason gotten onto a strange mailing list for paramilitaries, mercenaries, people who like to dress up as soldiers (and if you can make out a detail, their children too) – you know. I combined some clippings, i.e. “Everybody’s Knife Bible”, women brandishing automatic weapons, models in military clothing, and one particular item: small zippered bags with the copy line “Bring out your dead” (a cry heard during the black plague to let townspeople know that a cart was coming to collect the dead from their households)…continues…”properly bagged and zippered, please”. Also a list of doll parts, “all the pretty littles faces and bodies you need…” Added deconstructed Japanese kana, color of fire, and good old khaki. It doesn’t make me feel good but it gets the stuff out of my system. Please, see what you will. That is what art is for.

Posted by: beq | Nov 18 2004 23:36 utc | 15

@beq – first thought on the picture was black, red, gold – German flag, but then the title pointed me to black death.
Hope you don´t mind my “comment”. That PNAC paper concerns me.

Posted by: b | Nov 19 2004 0:51 utc | 17

My tax dollars at work.

Posted by: beq | Nov 19 2004 1:38 utc | 19

@DM we have to get our laughs while we can, glad I had one to offer. have a drink on me.
I’m now going to be much less funny:

The most lethal massacre in human history was the 1918-19 influenza pandemic that culled more than 2 percent of humanity (40-50 million people) in a single winter. Although never proven, many researchers believe that the pandemic was caused by a bird virus that exchanged genes with a human strain and thus acquired the ability to spread easily from person to person. Humans have little immune protection against such species’ jumps.
The biological reservoir of influenza is the mixed agriculture of southern China where wild and domestic fowl, pigs (another influenza vector) and humans are brought into intense ecological contact in farms and markets.
Breakneck urbanization, a soaring demand for poultry and pork, and what Science magazine recently characterized as “denser concentrations of larger poultry farms without appropriate biological safeguards” create optimum conditions for the rapid evolution of viruses and their promiscuous passage from one species to another.
Influenza, indeed, is like a viral fashion industry: every winter changing styles (glycoprotein coats) to create new strains, but then, perhaps every 30 years, undergoing a revolution (species jump) that unleashes a virulent pandemic.
The last pandemic killed half a million people in 1968, but scientists interviewed by Nature and Science expressed fears that H5N1 might be on the verge of evolving into something more like the 1918-19 monster. Although so far we have confirmation only that it has been transmitted by direct contact with birds and especially their droppings, the current strain is far more lethal than last year’s SARs epidemic that caused so much international havoc. As a result, a top researcher told Nature, “Everyone’s preparing for the worst-case scenario.” At this moment, WHO investigators are checking on the terrifying possibility that the first human-to-human transmission has already occurred in Vietnam.
…
Thanks to global neo-liberalism, then, disease surveillance and epidemic response are weakest precisely where they are most important: in the mega-slums of Asia and Africa. That’s where the brushfire of H5N1 could turn into a deadly biological firestorm.
In that event, it would consume more than just the poor. Once a new pandemic had acquired the momentum of mass mortality in Asia it would inexorably spread to North America and Europe. It would easily climb the walls of gated communities and other fortresses of privilege.
Here, of course, is the rub. In the past, the rich countries, with few exceptions, have shown callous indifference to the monstrous human toll of AIDs in Africa or of the two million poor children annually claimed by malaria. H5N1 may be our unexpected reward.

[excerpt]
Mike Davis is not an idiot, not a Rapturista, not a tin foil haberdasher. he’s a guy who studies the sociology of cities and has recently turned his attention to “future cities” and the future of slums.

Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 19 2004 4:16 utc | 21

@ anna missed: Thanks for your comments. Duchamp was a genius. So, another topic to file under unintended consequences. At some point I expect my subconscience to take over; I depend on it. I hope for it and have performed a meaningless exercise otherwise. I like your perception and thinking back (this piece by the way is B911) the trigger for me, no pun intended, was a catalog I received called, I kid you not, “SNIPER”. I had to respond in some way. I juxtaposed the obscene with the mundane (not terribly original) and applied my anger. I was thinking about the blue sky this morning after not looking at the painting for a long time and wonder if I intended it to be emerging or submerging. I still don’t know. Thanks, again.

Posted by: beq | Nov 19 2004 12:11 utc | 23

Beq… I adore mixed media and collage work. I do a bit of it myself with glass and other “found” objects on masonite box canvases. This one is very fine.

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 20 2004 3:57 utc | 25

@CluelessJoe: sorry, but that difference (no World War) would probably make things worse, not better, thanks to the way influenza epidemics make the immune system backfire.
By way of analogy, imagine a hypothetical country which responds to external threats by turning citizens into soldiers using a rigid mathematical rule, and that the change is permanent. (And that soldiers are not allowed to do agriculture or ordinary trade.) This would work against minor threats during times of peace, because a few extra soldiers now and again can be survived, and will eventually be lost by attrition, but if there some massive, unexpected attack — say a well-armed army using some new, faster-than-ever-heard-of-before transportation headed straight towards the capital — then all the citizens would become soldiers and even if the invading force were defeated, the country would collapse under the weight of the army.
That’s similar to what happens to the body in severe influenza of the 1918 type; the influenza virus spreads up and down the surface of your throat and you suffocate as your lungs fill up with the detritus caused by your own immune system. Your body can’t cart the dead stuff away fast enough, and you die. According to the terrifying but informative recent book The Great Influenza, this is probably the cause of most of the recorded cases of people who were just fine then suddenly passed out and died. People who died this way would not even be helped by modern medical equipment; that sort of failure is not really safe today, even if you are immediately hospitalized with the best equipment. (And in an epidemic, nobody is immediately given the best equipment.) A weakened immune system — through age, illness, or general poor health — can check that sort of problem. Few health issues actively cull the strong from the herd, but a “strong” flu is one of them.
The statistical data backs this up, too. The 1918 influenza, unlike most milder strains, killed more people in the prime of life (teens to 40s) by percentage than it did children or the elderly. (It hit the latter groups hard, too, of course.) The usual explanation is that these people were killed by their own immune systems… if the world now has a greater percentage of young, healthy people, that could quite easily equate to a greater percentage of sudden deaths.
Of course, I have to admit that (1) I am not a doctor myself and (2) much of the theory of the 1918 influenza was developed long after the fact. (At the time, they didn’t even know there was a virus, and even today nobody is 100% sure that we have isolated the actual thing because the tissue samples were long-dead by the time anyone who knew what they were really looking for got to them.) On the other hand, the mortality rate of the current Bird Flu is worse than the 1918 virus was by a long shot — currently around 75%; try to imagine 3 out of every 4 people you know dropping dead at random. (On the other other hand, though, the current Bird Flu is still officially only spread animal-to-human; if it makes the transition to human-to-human it could lose some of its deadliness in the transition, too. There are just too many possibilities to be sure.)
Now ask me what I think of the Bush administration’s request that doctors never contact the WHO directly, only through the administration itself. That’s precisely — precisely — the sort of stupidity that allowed the U.S. Army to spread the 1918 influenza so effectively. (See, once again, the book; there is reason to believe that the 1918 virus first became deadly in a U.S. farming town, and that the Army was warned early enough that they could have stopped it from spreading if they hadn’t been wrapped up in “Total War”. Chilling thought for those of us living under a president who also wants such a thing, yes?)
Perhaps we should just look on the bright side and note that a global plague that took out large chunks of humanity would probably dramatically and rapidly improve the world’s environmental situation. (Only kidding!) (Mostly.)

Posted by: Blind Misery | Nov 21 2004 8:52 utc | 27

Thanks for the pointer DeAnander:
“Birds are, you know, warm-blooded,” he confided to the agent who was handcuffing him to the stretcher. Then Ain smiled gently and lapsed into inertness. He stayed that way almost all the remaining ten days of his life. By then, of course, no one really cared. Both the government men had died quite early, after they finished analyzing the birdseed and throat-spray. The woman at Kennedy had just started feeling sick.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 21 2004 9:26 utc | 29