The Scare Talk Appears To Be Working!

I heard on the news today that health workers around the world are afraid to go help out with the Ebola epidemic because they think they might be in danger from the disease themselves if they got too close.  I think the news photo above -- showing a boneyard filled with health workers, each grave marked with a germproof glove or boot that utterly FAILED to protect one of the occupants  -- tends to underscore the reality of the danger. 

There was an interview with a WHO doctor who said that was piffle, because normal biohazard procedures are perfectly adequate with a disease like Ebola, but he then went on to say how exhausting and disorienting it is to wear a biohazard suit in temperatures as high as you get in Liberia in August -- probably that's hot enough to fry on egg on your forehead, am I right? -- and that's why mistakes happen.

At last count, 1427 people had already died of it, in 4 countries.

But wait!  There's more!  A report also just came out saying that the incidence of Ebola is seriously under-reported, because they don't have the personnel to count every single sick person.  They also feel some of the sick are being hidden by their families so they can't be carted away to isolation units, the families feeling they are better off at home no matter what's wrong with them.

So is the fear helping spread the disease or keeping it contained? 
 
Maybe both?

Katy Perry...of the Illuminati?

Says here in Rolling Stone  that Katy Perry is suspected of being a member of the Bavarian Illuminati, which in turn is described in the latest edition of The Week as "a mythical secret society that controls the world."  Let's leave aside that wonderful description of the Illuminati for the nonce...

...and turn to the question of HOW Katy Perry fell under suspicion in the first place.  The suggestion here is that she made herself look like a member of the world's most successful conspiracy by refreshing herself between shows with practices including cranio-sacral therapy, Transcendental Meditation and cupping, for pete's sake.   Cupping!  That one, at least, probably dates back even farther than the Illuminati, who got started in 1776.  As far as I know, though, the alternative health practices of the Illuminati were restricted to using strictly grade-A pink leeches instead of the slightly-used greenly ones -- oh, and ear candles.

...And how does Perry herself explain her reasons for using these questionable practices? 

 

"When I do it, I feel like I'm opening up holes in my brain, like -- what do they call it -- neural pathways." 

Spoken like a true nonexistent world leader!

Time To Take Out The Trash -- And One Country Is Making All The Rest Of Us Look Pathetic!

 

If you pay any attention to the news at all, you know that countries around the world are CLEANING UP AND CLEANING OUT.  There are a lot of public figures being pilloried, jailed and fired for all kinds of malfeasance.  One maniacal dictator after another has been toppled, and new governments formed, in the course of the Arab Spring. The previous French president and the second-to-last Italian prime minister are both in hot water right now for criminal activity, screwing around with public funds, you name it. Even South Africa, staggering under the loss of Nelson Mandela, is prosecuting a sports hero, "Blade Runner" Oscar Pistorius, for murdering his girlfriend.  

Here in the USA, we never seem to ruin out of fundamentalist Christian, Republican elected officials who are willing to proposition undercover police officers at highway rest stops.  As I type this, the Pentagon is investigating Montana Senator John Walsh for plagiarism on his War College master's thesis -- yeah, Senator, it must have been PTSD that made you steal someone else's work, just stick with that defense, why dontcha?   And let's not forget the abrupt downfall of Veteran's Administration Secretary Eric Shinseki for fiddling while Rome burned, by which I mean tolerating falsified paperwork intended to hide the fact that veterans were suffering and dying without medical treatment on his watch.  Even Lance Armstrong finally admitted to doping, and lost I know not how many endorsements.   It's like a race to see who can pile the most, and the worst-smelling, garbage in the public dump.

So, who's winning this race?  These guys:

 

 

They don't look that much like Batman and Robin, do they?  But in a cleanup operation that probably required several bulldozers and a fleet of garbage trucks, these ordinary-looking guys have removed or otherwise punished -- count 'em -- 200,000 corrupt Chinese government officials.

I doff my chapeau to Xi Jinping and his sidekick, Wang Qishan.  It will be quite interesting to see which direction China is going to go from this point.  If they play their cards right they may yet avoid a "Chinese Spring."

And the whole process is a lovely meditation on Chaos and Order, seriously.  The lives of public leaders and kids' heroes worldwide, from the "Cannibal Cop" Gilberto Valle to former Chinese security chief Zhou Yongkang, have been -- from their point of view -- thrown into Chaos.  But it only happened because someone, like the guy who chased Colonel Khaddafy into a sewer pipe and shot him, was trying to impose Order on a chaotic situation.  It makes me go all googly-eyed just thinking about it.

Never Mind The Ebola Scare...

...Looks like FLESH-EATING BACTERIA have gotten loose in the warm waters of Alabama and Florida!  So far there are eleven dead with more than 30 others in the hospital.  This is one of those diseases that makes you wonder what's worse -- death, or successful medical treatment. 

 

The fun never ends around here.