This is the news that no one wants to hear, but the tale must be told. With all the holiday ho-hah and mindless consumption, no one is paying too much attention. This time of year, the mindless consumption index in the U.S. takes on even more horrible proportions, with waste and energy use way up.Caught up in a frenzy of materialism, an orgy of spending, wallowing in hubris, people in the U.S. pretty much switch off their superficial awareness of the world around the Holidays, replacing it with a treacly myth world of Santa and his elves, carolers, and all the Peace on Earth hypocrisy.

Nauseating, really, as the butchery in Iraq continues and the world hurtles toward an uncertain future.

Richard Matheson's novel, now put up on the silver screen for the third time with the Will Smith film release, imagines the world WITHOUT US, with a sole surviving protagonist, chronicling a Daniel Dafoe- type life of isolation, trying to maintain a castaway's sanity and meaning in a Manhattan necropolis.

A real life analogue of Matheson's viral plaque can be found in the H5N1 Bird Flu virus. No, it won't make you a slavering night-crawling zombie, but it will kill you quickly, as you go all blue and cyanotic,  drowning in your own fluids filling your lungs. The only thing that separates humanity from a full-blown pandemic are a couple of mutations. That, so far, knock on wood, has been the state of things. Lots of dead birds, culling, and dead bird farmers, sick from contact with infected birds in far away ( to Americans ) places.

End of story ? Unfortunately, no. A story out of Australian ABC news site, Dec.6, 2007, found at the bird flu blogspot.com site, provides a chilling warning of HUMAN TO HUMAN TRANSMISSION.

" A total of 1,600 scientists from 42 countries have attended a lung disease conference on Queensland Gold Coast. The conference convenor, Professor Paul Reynolds, says human victims of avian flu in the past have contracted the disease from sick birds, but that is changing.
 
' It is usually very close household contacts at this stage', he said.' Sometimes it is a bit difficult to tease out if people living together in a village whether the people involved have happened to come into contact with the same infected birds, but there are certainly some case reports emerging that are highly suggestive that direct person-to-person transfer if occurring'".



If Professor Reynold's observations are true, we all need to get mentally prepared for some troubles, serious troubles, societal breakdown type troubles. Handjob, bat-shit crazy Mike Huckabee, who just might be our next president, is already suggesting quarantining AIDS patients. Would he and the Homeland Gestapo create quarantined charnel houses for H5N1 victims as well , men in moon suits stacking corpses like cordwood in Halliburton run facilities, with heavily armed Blackwater mercernaries providing brutal muscle to manage a public health meltdown ?

A vision like that rivals Matheson's nightmare: viral outbreak combined with Orwellian police state stylings, right here in the good 'ol U.S.A.


Will ignorance and fear trump science and rationality  if human transmitted bird flu gains a foothold here ? Considering how dumbed down and sheep like citizens have become under the Bush Imperium, the outcome is less than comforting.



Ho, Ho, Ho...