The Balkanization of America continues…
On his syndicated radio show, former drug czar Bill Bennett speculated on how roe v. wade could actually fight crime, “if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”
Bennett goes on to say “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”
Could be that The Republicans have realized – post New-Orleans – that it is hopeless to court the Black vote and instead they have taken the Lee Atwater route of alienating it in an active effort to court the white racist vote.
Man, when this gets around it is going to be ugly.
The more I think about it, it is their M.O. ( modus operandi ), crisis, calamity, grief, tension, fear these people are ‘professional crisis mongers’.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 29 2005 11:26 utc | 4

Link to a song I dedicate to the Bugman himself, Tom DeLay

Posted by: Diogenes | Sep 29 2005 12:45 utc | 6

btw, while I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing now, (and instead reading blogs…and listening to the weather reports over and over…)
I just heard on The Early Show that the woman whose “faith” and use of Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” as the news touted over and over, to help her overcome a murderer who had abducted her…I forget her name…anyway, this woman actually offered her abuductor methamphetamine.
They were both addicted, and she gave him her stash. No wonder he thought she was, uh, inspiring.
okay, here’s a link. Her name is Ashley Smith. I kept thinking Ashley Simpson, but that’s the little sister of the new no talent white trash pop star du jour, isn’t it?

Posted by: fauxreal | Sep 29 2005 13:19 utc | 8

@fauxreal
Yes.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 29 2005 13:33 utc | 10

Scam, I heard or read the line was “Your men are dead. You can come and get them.”
The more I think about it, it is their M.O. ( modus operandi ), crisis, calamity, grief, tension, fear these people are ‘professional crisis mongers’.
They want as much hate and chaos as possible. Any kind, any time. Deluded, befuddled, frightened, terrified and viciously angry citizens suits them just dandy – they become incapable of rational thought and are easy to manipulate.

Posted by: Noisette | Sep 29 2005 14:49 utc | 12

mistah charley:
thank you. I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me, succinctly, what to do. but what about my pet chickens? my local feed store tells me nothing.

Posted by: dk | Sep 29 2005 14:59 utc | 14

it’s happened – Senate Confirms Roberts As Chief Justice

Posted by: b real | Sep 29 2005 17:28 utc | 16

God help us all. The whole world sees what can happen when you allow a welfare state such as exists in Louisiana to languish as is has. I do blame the Feds for not going in there prior and cleaning up that sh*t that they call local government. This is what happens when you allow tokenism. The government of NO (particularly the mayor) is filled with token blacks- period! The mayor has shown his incompetence in the past, and once again, he rises to the occasion. The Dem governor, much the same. All in all, this is yet another left-wing social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong.
Everyone in the world knows that Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular has a culture of corruption and crime that emanates from the highest levels of government right down to the police force. They are the poorest state in the union because of that corruption. The poverty and corruption combine, which is then translated into anarchy on the streets, as was shown to the whole world during the disaster relief effort. It did resemble Sadr City, Iraq, didn’t it?
Hard to blame the legitimate business owners and residents; yes, most are white because they are the few with initiative enough to actually work for a living, but there are lots of legit black residents as well. They were appalled at the conduct of their government, just as we were. So why don’t they as a population, stand up and demand better government? They share some of the blame for being apathetic, but I believe that they fear for their lives if they speak out.
And, yes, the Federal Government should have done more…but not from a disaster relief effort; more from a disaster prevention effort. They should have gone in there long ago and taken back the city of New Orleans and made those people clean up the sh*t hole that they created.
Thanks for listening.

Posted by: White Dick | Sep 29 2005 19:27 utc | 18

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out
how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame them, because it
has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The
reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are
confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response! for public officials is
obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to
evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the
flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure. For journalists, natural
disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people
pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors,
nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do
is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are
suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists–myself included–did not
expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about
rape, murder, annd looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
federal relief a! gencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has
gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen
over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane
Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an
emergency–indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other
emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they hhave been saying
that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what
we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They
work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously ! organize to
keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an
enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than
waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a
hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had
gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as
impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large
ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a
description from a Washington Times story:
“Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives
and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and
rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
“The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guards! men poured in
to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire….
“Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas
National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
” ‘These troops are…under my orders to restore order in the streets,’ she
said. ‘They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know
how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary
and I expect they will.’ ”
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article
shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an
armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid,
listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly
like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an
orgy of looting, armed robbery, and ! rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm
the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to
drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the
doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News
Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied
architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the
South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of
the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. “The projects,” as
they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable
squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demol! ished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage was a whiff of
the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the “crawl”–the informational
phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels–gave some
vital statistics to connfirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans
had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who
remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects. Jack
Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN
and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the
prisoners in the city’s jails–so they just let many of them loose. There is
no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations–that is, a
large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects,
and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the
deluge hit–but they were tr! apped alongside large numbers of people from two
groups: criminals–and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over
decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessnesss. The
welfare wards were a mass of sheep–on whom the incompetent administration
of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the
city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city,
despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted
by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of
handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters–not to
ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some
are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for
failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of N! ew Orleans had drafted an
adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the
Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on
American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos
was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the
welfare state. What we consider “normal” behavior in an emergency is
behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a
disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the
difficulties they face. They don’t sit around and complain that the
government hasn’t taken care of them. They don’t use the chaos of a disaster
as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving
their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do
they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are
going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do
they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way
of life for them.
The welfare state–and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and
encourages–is the man-made disaster that explains the moral uglinness that
has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Posted by: Robert Tracinski | Sep 29 2005 19:30 utc | 20

John “Barleycorn” Birch -meets- Dred Scott.
How beautiful, on the anniversary date when
SCOTUS has gone retrograde back to Jim Crow.

Posted by: Lash Marks | Sep 29 2005 19:33 utc | 22

Good:
Judge Orders Release of Abu Ghraib Photos

A federal judge ruled today that graphic pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison must be released over government claims that they could damage America’s image. Last year a Republican senator conceded that they contained scenes of “rape and murder” and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said they included acts that were “blatantly sadistic.”

Posted by: b | Sep 29 2005 19:55 utc | 24

Top U.S. General Says Number of Capable Iraqi Battalions Drops to One

The number of Iraqi battalions capable of combat without U.S. support has dropped from three to one, the top American commander in Iraq told Congress Thursday, prompting Republicans to question whether U.S. troops will be able to withdraw next year.
Gen. George Casey, softening his previous comments that a “fairly substantial” pull out could begin next spring and summer, told lawmakers that troops could begin coming home from Iraq next year depending on conditions during and after the upcoming elections there.

Posted by: b | Sep 29 2005 20:19 utc | 26

@Diogenes
We’ve had trolls before, we’ll have trolls again. The point of the troll is not to illuminate but rather to outrage and derail (I’m not going to post the troll FAQ for a third time). Refuting a troll, or even responding to it at all, is counterproductive. Bernhard has asked us kindly not to feed them and I agree that this is the best course.

Posted by: Monolycus | Sep 29 2005 20:41 utc | 28

@Monolycus – those pictures
Are the folks who would see real war pictures as a satisfaction the majority in the US? I really hope they are not and I don´t think they are.
This war has been sanitized like none before and it is really really time for pictures to become public, to be on the front pages, to show the people what they did vote for.
Rove knows this and the order is out to prevent such pictures (“waste” a few photographers if needed – who cares). I want these pictures in prime time on every news channel that is out there.
I´ll post more on the why tomorrow.

Posted by: b | Sep 29 2005 21:23 utc | 30

@Bernhard
I’d like to believe that the kinds of folks I described weren’t a clear majority, but public executions have sporadically been fun viewing for the whole family during certain periods in history and you’ve already heard from Billmon about the popularity of such sites as NowThatsFuckedUp.com. I don’t want to get off on a tangent about how ubiquitous violence in our society is (movies, television, video games, et cetera), but the fact of the matter is that these people do really exist and their numbers are not negligible.
One of the most deeply ingrained problems that the Left faces, in my opinion, is that they frequently found their ideas on the axiom that people are basically good. I hate to be more and more jaded, but the evidence to me has been pointing to the contrary. We have more than our share of bloodthirsty sociopaths here who would positively revel in the suffering of others. In the times I have travelled abroad, I have not seen such a degree of callousness or Puritan ethics as I have at home; although I have read about these attitudes in earlier societies, so I don’t think it’s peculiar to having been born and raised on American soil.
I am not against the release of these pictures. And I am expecting a well-warranted reaction of disgust and outrage; I am just not expecting it to come from many of my fellow Americans. And, yes, the Iraqi War, the Afghanistan War, the War on Terra… these have all been artificially sanitised in that Potemkin fashion that has become the hallmark of CheneyCo. If nothing else, exposure to these images might lead to a more balanced version of what is transpiring in future history books.

Posted by: Monolycus | Sep 29 2005 22:01 utc | 32

@b,

I don´t want to pay transatlantic cost just to out a bigot.

Not saying you should bother with a troll, but if you do want to go audio I have really good results with Skype (on OSX). It costs me only .02 euro per minute to call virtually anywhere from anywhere. No affiliation etc.

Posted by: PeeDee | Sep 29 2005 22:24 utc | 34

bernard, i just called and spoke to loretta. i sent her the info . she thanked me and said she would deal w/it and thanked me.

Posted by: annie | Sep 30 2005 0:14 utc | 36

Busy & Tired, but just wanted to thank Bernhard for keeping things going. Still the most fun & interesting place on the web. And a special welcome to tante aime & jm for their contributions.
I particularly enjoyed the last few days were there were parallel discussions on separate threads – one on manufacturing/ec. decay on General Morons while Open thread featured discussion of political & social decay.
Thanks Everyone for making this place so enjoyable.

Posted by: jj | Sep 30 2005 2:14 utc | 38

Ex-Security Chief Blows Whistle on UN’s Kosovo Mission
Following five years of United Nations control and billions of dollars of international aid, Kosovo is a lawless region “owned” by the Albanian mafia, characterized by continuing ethnic cleansing and subject to increasing infiltration by al Qaeda-linked Muslim jihadists, according to a whistleblower interviewed by Cybercast News Service.
The U.N.’s repeated failure to act on received intelligence has allowed illegal paramilitary groups to flourish and engage in terrorist attacks aimed at destabilizing regional governments in the Balkans, said Thomas Gambill, a former security chief with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), self-described as the world’s largest regional security agency.
Gambill was responsible for overseeing the eastern region of Gjilane in Kosovo from 1999 until 2004 under the authority of the U.N. His criticism comes as the United Nations prepares to launch final status talks on the troubled province of Kosovo, which has been a U.N. protectorate since North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces bombed Yugoslavia between March and May of 1999 to compel the Serb-dominated government of Slobodan Milosovic to withdraw its forces from Kosovo.
…
Gambill shared hundreds of pages of U.N. and OSCE documents with Cybercast News Service, showing how the Serbs and other minorities were systematically and successfully targeted for removal from Kosovo.

Posted by: b real | Sep 30 2005 3:20 utc | 40

“Perhaps Fitzgerald, deadline looming, is settling for who or what he can get?”
For some reason I can’t tell whether it’s shit or roses I’m smelling here.

Posted by: pb | Sep 30 2005 6:00 utc | 42

b wrote: (“waste” a few photographers if needed – who cares).
Just as b wrote his post at Sep 29, 2005 5:23:06 PM, I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of the following:
US forces ‘out of control’, says Reuters chief .
Reuters has told the US government that American forces’ conduct towards journalists in Iraq is “spiralling out of control” and preventing full coverage of the war reaching the public.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 30 2005 8:04 utc | 44

Curious piece by Sydney Blumenthal on Karn Hughes’ whirlwind redemption in the Middle East tour. Seems her approach is working wonders for Osama;
With these well-meaning arguments, Hughes has provided the exact proof for what Osama bin Laden has claimed about American motives. “It is stunning … the extent [to which] Hughes is helping bin Laden,” Robert Pape told me. Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has conducted the most extensive research into the backgrounds and motives of suicide terrorists, is the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” and recently briefed the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center. “If you set out to help bin Laden,” he said, “you could not have done it better than Hughes.”
……………………………
Here we go again with the “is it incompetence or is it a plan” thing.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 30 2005 8:56 utc | 46

Merely working through my lunchhour posting you copies of what is going around the Net…
Posted by: DoFW | Sep 29, 2005 6:17:00 PM
DoFW – Lash Marks – Robert Tracinski – Peg Leg – White Dick – Terrence Michaels – Trini Lopez – Clint Calder – Alice Walters – Larry Ellison – Telly Longerford – Frangi Pan – tante aime – … – all posting from 1 IP-address
tante aime, that are some long lunchhours you have there sitting in front of your taxpayer sponsered PC.
If I want to read the bullshit that´s out there, I can always go the freepers sites. I really don´t need it here.

Posted by: b | Sep 30 2005 11:24 utc | 48

My apologies for the troll reaction earlier. I just hate to see our bar violated by this kind of trash. In fact, the piece, despite it homespun appearance is part of a highly organized spam operation, probably aimed at blogs that lean to the left. Note the Google search of one sentence and what it yields:

Link to Spam Google Search

Usually I ignore cut and paste propaganda. But I don’t often see this type of thing here. My apologies.

Posted by: Diogenes | Sep 30 2005 12:04 utc | 50

Thank you, too, jj. Pleasures are few sometimes and should be enjoyed thoroughly in my opinion.
The problem is, is that the pictures won’t do anything to solve the problem. So it becomes an empty ritual that probably only serves a perverse desire for gratification, especially since the people know what happened. These are just details that won’t motivate the public to an uprising. Only a tsk tsk.
I’m not against the release of the photos. I am just disgusted with the continuing charade that occurs around human low-down bullshit. How people say they are outraged and then wait in high expectation for the next even more disgusting round. It’s a continuing contract between the perpetrators and the witnesses that is a never-ending cycle. And the justification around it saying this is important, that it insures freedom of the press, and that the people need to see the realities…is even more bullshit to me.
Why isn’t some of this titillating energy going into stopping it? Or at least asking some questions in that direction. I sense denial about what is really happening with this torture palace. It seems that everybody looks in shocked, but feigned horror. Now that we are so jaded. In some infinitessimal way, every repeated witnessing contributes to its continuation when nothing is done.
It might even slow progress in that people can rest in the comfort that it is not happening to them or in their vicinity. It falsely reassures them of their safety at the moment.

Posted by: jm | Sep 30 2005 15:47 utc | 52

debs is dead –
there are quite a number of factual errors in your argument – i will only address one now – namely “at no time has anyone caught the disease from another person”
i append here –
1)an abstract from the New England Journal of Medicine about a case last year (2004)
2)a report from Recombinomics about family clusters in the current outbreak in indonesia

New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 352:333-340 January 27, 2005 Number 4
Probable Person-to-Person Transmission of Avian Influenza A (H5N1)
Kumnuan Ungchusak, M.D., M.P.H., Prasert Auewarakul, M.D., Scott F.
Dowell, M.D., M.P.H., Rungrueng Kitphati, M.D., Wattana Auwanit,
Ph.D., Pilaipan Puthavathana, Ph.D., Mongkol Uiprasertkul, M.D.,
Kobporn Boonnak, M.Sc., Chakrarat Pittayawonganon, M.D., Nancy J. Cox,
Ph.D., Sherif R. Zaki, M.D., Ph.D., Pranee Thawatsupha, M.S., Malinee
Chittaganpitch, B.Sc., Rotjana Khontong, M.D., James M. Simmerman,
R.N., M.S., and Supamit Chunsutthiwat, M.D., M.P.H.
ABSTRACT
Background
During 2004, a highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5N1) virus caused
poultry disease in eight Asian countries and infected at least 44
persons, killing 32; most of these persons had had close contact with
poultry. No evidence of efficient person-to-person transmission has
yet been reported. We investigated possible person-to-person
transmission in a family cluster of the disease in Thailand.
Methods
For each of the three involved patients, we reviewed the circumstances
and timing of exposures to poultry and to other ill persons. Field
teams isolated and treated the surviving patient, instituted active
surveillance for disease and prophylaxis among exposed contacts, and
culled the remaining poultry surrounding the affected village.
Specimens from family members were tested by viral culture,
microneutralization serologic analysis, immunohistochemical assay,
reverse-transcriptase–polymerase-chain-reaction (RT-PCR) analysis, and
genetic sequencing.
Results
The index patient became ill three to four days after her last
exposure to dying household chickens. Her mother came from a distant
city to care for her in the hospital, had no recognized exposure to
poultry, and died from pneumonia after providing 16 to 18 hours of
unprotected nursing care. The aunt also provided unprotected nursing
care; she had fever five days after the mother first had fever,
followed by pneumonia seven days later. Autopsy tissue from the mother
and nasopharyngeal and throat swabs from the aunt were positive for
influenza A (H5N1) by RT-PCR. No additional chains of transmission
were identified, and sequencing of the viral genes identified no
change in the receptor-binding site of hemagglutinin or other key
features of the virus. The sequences of all eight viral gene segments
clustered closely with other H5N1 sequences from recent avian isolates
in Thailand.
Conclusions
Disease in the mother and aunt probably resulted from person-to-person
transmission of this lethal avian influenzavirus during unprotected
exposure to the critically ill index patient.
======================================
H5N1 Cluster in South Sulawesi Increases Pandemic Concerns
Recombinomics Commentary
September 29, 2005

the two citizens of the Soreang District, Parepare, that was brought to the Public Hospital of Andi Makassau underwent the maintenance.
Both of them were put into isolation space.
Sania and Sanawira suffered the high fever and had difficulty breathing….
The citizen of the Soreang District, Parepare was it was suspected strong tertular his mother that died.
The mother had the sign similar to birds flu namely the high fever and had difficulty breathing.

The above machine translation describes a familial cluster in the Soreang District of South Sulawesi. The mother has already died with bird flu symptoms and now two of her children have symptoms. The map of H5N1 bird flu cases in Indonesia shows that the cases are spread throughout the country and are appearing as clusters. In Jakarta (see map) there are clusters of clusters.
These larger growing clusters define phase 5 of a pandemic and as the reports accumulate daily, it seems that Indonesia is very close to the final phase 6, which is defined by sustained transmission in humans.
Some of the members of the familial clusters may have become infected by a common source, but the vast majority have a 5-10 day gap between the onset of symptoms in the index case and family members. This time gap is characteristic of human-to-human transmission.
The first two confirmed cases in Indonesia were both members of familial clusters with such a gap, and the frequency of these reported clusters is increasing.
A baby of an admitted patient was admitted yesterday in Jakarta, a sibling of two fatal cases in Demak, near Samerang in Central Java was just admitted, and now there is the above cluster in South Sulawesi involving a new admission.
Although the WHO is discounting these new cases, in part because samples are collected after the H5N1 has moved out of the nose and throat, the positive antibody levels in some patients coupled with PCR data and symptoms in others, paints a clear picture that WHO refuses to acknowledge.
The program of interventions with Tamiflu was based on a single outbreak in a remote village in Thailand. The widespread clusters and clusters of clusters in Indonesia indicate that the pace of H5N1 spread in Indonesia far outdistances WHO’s ability to even write press releases that are current. Their count of just 4 confirmed H5N1 cases throughout all of Indonesia compliments their scandalous monitoring of H5N1 worldwide.
H5N1 has clearly evolved and has become markedly more efficient at transmitting among humans, and has done so via recombination. WHO continues to monitor reassortment with human genes, which has never been reported for H5N1 and is conceptually flawed, since the human receptor binding domain resides on the HA protein and swapping away the H gene would eliminate the H5 serotype.
H5 will clearly be resident in humans worldwide.
The resulting major pandemic appears to be accelerating in Indonesia at this time.
from http://www.recombinomics.com

Posted by: mistah charley | Sep 30 2005 18:25 utc | 54

meant to add a comment on that story. so why doesn’t the official story – that 19 hijackers in the service of AQ planned & executed the events of that day – qualify as a conspiracy? more than one person conspired to make it happen? as another thread here makes mention of, it might be a very good idea to abandon english u.s.-style.

Posted by: b real | Sep 30 2005 18:57 utc | 56

a thousand words

Posted by: DM | Oct 1 2005 0:54 utc | 58

WHO warns against bird flu ‘scaremongering’

…
The WHO is stockpiling supplies of Tamiflu to help cash-strapped developing countries deal with an outbreak and stop further spread, after a donation from its Swiss manufacturer, Roche.
More than 30 governments have also ordered millions of doses from the pharmaceutical giant.

How much is the donation/promo costing Roche? How much do Roche make out of this deal?

Posted by: DM | Oct 1 2005 1:41 utc | 60