Scientific American has an interesting editorial about Obama’s Cap and Trade plot to reduce the temperature of the planet by starving off those who are deemed overly warm. Shockingly, they realize that there is a problem with it. Unsurprisingly, the editors suggest a ridiculous solution which solves nothing but might just help hide the farce of the plan long enough to get it implemented.

They don’t see the central problem of it all being based on a pack of lies called global warming. And please note that, unlike skeptics of this bunk who are ridiculed for being out of touch when they use the term “global warming” instead of anthropogenic climate change, the SciAm editors state in their concluding paragraph:

“Global warming is a reality, not an opinion.”

I am glad that the not-out-of-touch editors cleared that up. Though a criteria of what makes something a reality as opposed to an opinion might have been helpful. Neither good evidence nor successful predictions seem to be involved. The problem they accurately see is that the plan will damage the economy at a time that it really does not need yet another kick in the teeth from the Democratic party’s boot.

So what is their solution? Same cap and trade limitation on fossil energy production but give the money from the auction of these energy production/import rights directly to the consumer/taxpayer/milk cow to offset the increase in energy costs created by having energy companies bid up the prices on energy. No damage to the economy right?

Ignoring the ludicrous idea that government could steal money from one source and give it to another without taking a massive cut or even just saying “the Hell with it” and deciding that the state can spend it much more wisely than Johny Lunchpail; you might have noticed something wrong with this cunning plan. The increase in energy costs will be more than the amount of money raised from auctioning off carbon rights. The limitation on energy will mean that there is less of the stuff than people and companies need. That creates a shortage so consumers who are able to pay more will and those who can’t are SOOL. You are covered by your government energy stamps for the added cost to the producer of buying the right to use carbon but you are not given any extra to make up for the fact that Government Motors can buy energy at a much better price than you can. But you are still being taxed to fund Government Motors as they buy your share of energy.

But don’t worry. The government will see what is happening and will hear your pain. They will step in to fix the price of energy so that everyone can afford it. As the price of everything rises because there is limited energy to produce anything, the value of that fixed rate will decline to the point that there is no point in companies buying the rights to produce energy and production will stop. But again the government will smell your suffering and come to the rescue. They will run the energy production companies – the oil refineries, the power plants and such. All of it will come under state control which will be a remarkable success. It might be worth noting that all of the nations that produce fossil fuels via state owned enterprises have been running their industries into a state of decay because when oil prices are high they have better things to spend the profits on than preventative maintenance and development and when the prices are low they can’t afford such luxuries as preventative maintenance and development.

So the editors of Scientific American just recommended that America turn itself into a failed petro state in order to prevent “global warming”. If the planet hadn’t been cooling for the last decade or so – or if someone’s climate model had actually predicted that that would happen – it might be an easier sell. But let’s not write off the idea too quickly. It seems to me that people have been proving for some time that prosperous and democratic societies with modern technologies and personal liberties are both unwanted and, in the long-term, unstable. Perhaps letting the world degenerate first into North Korea, then into a collection of neo-Assyrian empires, with the associated life of clay pots, wood smoke and the king’s spears through your heart if you blaspheme him is just what we all really want. Granted, it will take a lot of killings to get the population down to a level where that is sustainable but it shouldn’t take long.

A flu patient in Thailand developed meningitis. Just in case you didn’t read my earlier post, the theory I have been harping on lately is that the overreaction by the body to a new viral infection that takes it by surprise results is a large release of cytokines called interferons which have been shown to inhibit viruses but also instruct bacterial fighting cells to stay out of the way, leaving the lungs vulnerable to bacterial infections like pneumonia, meningitis and whooping cough. That is not to say the flu virus itself doesn’t kill anyone but it would explain why second waves of pandemics are more severe than first waves. The larger pool of compromised victims lets more bacterial epidemics sweep through the sick. If it really is the case that a lot of people who die from flu pandemics die because of secondary bacterial infections then I would suspect that larger concentrations of flu victims would provide more fertile ground for pathogenic and opportunistic bacteria to sweep through a population. While the bacteria that causes meningococcal meningitis is widespread as normal flora (even the vaccine only keeps you from getting the meningitis, not from harboring the organism in your nose and throat now and then) it does seem to spread in epidemics of pathogenic cases. Perhaps the bacteria needs to alter its metabolism to be pathogenic and once induced to do so will start causing illnesses whereas it would normally just hang out. So if there are lots of compromised flu patients around and a meningococcus gets angry it starts making trouble along  with other bacterial opportunists like Streptococcus pneumoniae.

New Zealand is experiencing its worst flu season in 12 years. Flu rates are double what they were this time last year and I would assume last year there were three or four strains doing it while H1N1 seems to have largely pushed competing flues to the margins as pandemic strains tend to do.

Australia is seeing record absenteeism. Oh, and they have a flu spike and a whooping cough epidemic going on right on top of one another in Queensland. Whooping cough is caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis in the lungs. It is highly contagious on it’s own but a little extra help from  numerous instances of “mild” swine flu in an area might just have given it a boost, I suspect.

Remember the whole controversy about the poor mutant frogs with extra or missing legs? The undeniable proof that humanity’s evil capitalist ways were causing the collapse of the biosphere?

False alarm. Environmental catastrophes are always much worse when the media’s enemy is in power.

The wife of a Kenyan government minister visiting Algeria felt she was such an important VIP (her husband is the Minister for Culture and Sport for God sakes – in a nation trying to lift itself out of poverty, they have a ministry for culture and sport and she thinks she is a VIP as opposed to, say… a mucous-covered parasitic flatworm), that she does not need to stay isolated even though she is displaying symptoms of H1N1 influenza. Let the entire hotel get sick – let all of Algeria get sick. It’s not like there are lots of people in Africa with preexisting conditions which might make this flu dangerous or anything. Pregnancy, HIV, TB, poverty, urban overcrowding… it’s all rather unheard of in Africa I understand.

Meanwhile, the battle by media and health officials against the mass global panic about the new flu – a panic which has yielded a worldwide death toll approaching 1 (with a margin of error of +/- 1) continues but even some of the devote are beginning to wonder if the “It’s almost always mild” message has been over done.

Researchers are discovering evidence suggesting that the virus can indeed get down into the lungs and even guts of ferrets which are a close animal model for humans (I would have thought rats but maybe I’m prejudice). The gut infections would explain the diarrhea and vomiting in some human cases. But the virus is a little weak in its ability to attach to the relevant human cell receptors. Given the speed that resistance to Tamiflu is popping up around the globe, I don’t think that would be too much of a challenge. The vaccine will be ready sooner or later and even if lots of anti-vaccinationists refuse it, the immunity on the population will help slow it’s progress in the industrialized nations. Since Russia is falling apart at the seems and has yet to even hit its debt crisis, I wouldn’t necessarily keep Russia in the league of “industrialized nations” and mass vaccination campaigns in Central Asia and Africa are hard to imagine being implemented in a timely fashion. Especially when there a so many VIPs and ministries of culture and sport to maintain.

Well it might be news to them.

CNN has no trouble with people claiming that Sarah Palin is a dirty, filthy whore because she is an attractive woman, not a Democrat and does not wear a burka. But it becomes news when she makes a small dig about mule-face Kerry having a long face. Especially when she was responding to a comment by Kerry wishing she had been the governor to “disappear”. Someday, some reporter or interviewer or Democratic politician or Che-worshiping celebrity is going to go after Palin with a kitchen knife. They will get a few days in jail as a first time offence. If I were advising her I would tell her to get her family out of the country with new identities. The hatred being focused on her kids is really disturbing and the sexual nature of the hostility towards her personally is not to be taken lightly.

There are some things I oppose about Palin’s views but a lot I support too. It would be a shame if her career and life were ended because some CNN anchor went off his anti-psychotic meds before having her in the studio. But then, you need to be on meds to go off them.

The supreme leader of Iran (I wonder if these Alpha Ayatollahs think that people want to blow them because of that title or if they just have the title to give themselves morning wood) has explained to the opposition that if they don’t sit down and shut up they will be responsible for the spilling of their own blood. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei first threw his support behind the presidential fire monkey Ahmadinejad but then effectively admitted the unbelievable nature of the vote in an attempt to defuse the emotion fueling the protest. He promised to look in to some of the more obscene instances of voting fraud and maybe pull down fire monkey’s victory to a more believable level. Then he admitted that this was a sham by saying that nothing much would change and so everyone should come together in national unity to shut the fuck up.

And now, having no electoral legitimacy for his pet president, and having lost the fear of the people, has no choice but to prepare for a bloody crackdown to try to regain that fear. While some of the army and police force have stated they will not turn their guns on the people and one highly placed cleric has issued a fatwah telling them that Allah will judge them harshly if they do, once the large-scale shooting starts there will be enough who want to be on the right side of the trigger and for good measure, the regime has been bringing in Hamas and Hezbollah agents to augment the domestic religious militias in some warm-up murders of protesters. Yes, that would be the same Hamas that Jimmy Carter wants to have de-listed as terrorists. Because you know… it’s kind of hurtful and counter productive to label someone as a terrorist just because they target random innocent people for death in an effort to use fear for political purposes.

Interestingly, the fire monkey in chief, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who for years has been putting revolutionary guard alumni like himself in important positions in what looks like preparation for a military coup, is not actually all together on the cleric’s side. Ahmadinejad, as someone wrote recently, currently has to answer to 12 men. These holy rollers are extreme, no doubt, they also like the power and money and prostitutes that come with the job. Ahmi’s plan to bring on the end of the world by squandering the last remaining oil wealth nuking everyone he dislikes, starting with Israel, is a bit of a harder sell compared to their plan of threatening to nuke everyone and then negotiating forever for more stuff while never giving an inch – the North Korean model. So Ahmi would really like to put his old uniform back on and become a full-on  dictator instead of a high ranking oligarch. If the clerics don’t order the crackdown, fire monkey and company could stage a coup, restore order until all the streets are red and give the ayatollahs the option of keeping some power, money and prostitutes (and their heads) if they become his kennel of mutts.

So there you have it, the reformers, the clerics and Ahmadi’s army. The first two to blink lose big time.

Some interesting reactions have taken place across the world. Obama went from praising the election to being troubled. Then he was very troubled. Then he was almost committed to a side. Now he feels support for the opposition as long as they are peaceful – while being bloodied by Hamas and Hezbollah and the Basij or when the real shooting starts? Even Egypt, that beacon of human rights which jails bloggers and has cops sodomize people who protest the open acts of sexual harassment of women in the street, has slammed Obama for not being able to grow a pair.

The leftist media went from ignoring the issue completely, as they have with other mass mass protests in Iran during previous years, to being embarrassed when they were outperformed by an electronic gossip application called Twitter. Now, the Daily Kos is whining that Americans are eating popcorn during these events (what does Obama have on his popcorn) and Andrew Sullivan feels that all the Jews and conservatives (who were covering the protests from the beginning) are in league with the Iranian regime against the protesters.

And even if the pro-democracy forces win, which would take more than just getting their leader in office, and a real secular democracy began to take root in Iran, they would face years of terror attacks by the theocrats; something more to blame on Bush no doubt.

UPDATE: I got some more info from a doctor I know well. He told me that there were reports of flu patients going from seemingly healthy one day to seemingly very much dead the next. DIC from infective agents doesn’t happen that fast. He informed me that there are three diseases generally known to cause such sudden death: cholera, plague and meningococcal meningitis. Meningococcal meningitis is caused by Neisseria meningitidis. It is normal flora in many people’s nose and throat region but can cause devastating infections if it gets in the wrong site under the wrong circumstances. Not only does it fit the bill, I suspect, for the sudden deaths but meningococcal septicemia can produce a purplish rash – explaining the heliotrope cyanosis (along with actual cyanosis from fluid in the lungs). So DIC might not be needed to explain some of these strange symptoms though it may occur in some patients who get a different opportunistic infection due to the effects of the flu virus. The rest of the post continues as first posted.

The more I learn about this swine flu and previous flu outbreaks the more interesting the subject becomes to me.

When I had previously heard about the concept of novel flu viruses causing what is referred to as a cytokine storms, I had the impression that they were causing a massive overreaction by the immune system to the unfamiliar viral infection which (after getting the jump on the body’s defenses) provoked fluid in the lungs which helped to nurture the bacterial pneumonia that these flu patients often die from – or with, depending on your point of view. But it seems to be more subtle than that. One of these groups of cytokines, called interferons, are used to inhibit viral reproduction inside cells and helps keep them from gaining access in the first place. These interferons also have other effects like telling bacteria-eating cells such as neutrophils that the infection is viral in nature and their services are not needed or wanted.

Hey, that’s fine when the flu is in the upper respiratory tract since there are normal flora living there – helpful bacteria which can out compete potential pathogenic species which might land in the area and keep each other in check. And the tissue of the upper respiratory tract is harder for bacteria to colonize than the tiny little air sacks of the lungs. But when the virus is in the lungs, for the immune system to tell all bacteria-fighting cells to clear out is asking for trouble. Now, even some of the beneficial normal flora in the upper respiratory tract can ride down on an aerosol, a globe of phlegm or some misdirected trickle of spit and start planting its flag. “I claim these aveoli in the name of Streptococcus pneumoniae!” All the neutrophil are out of the area and the virus is raising a ruckus that leaves the region filled with blood, cell proteins and mucous. Whatever bacteria land in the environment think they have died and gone to prokaryote heaven. The immune system is making a mistake that Stalin made at the onset of WWII. He was so obsessed with threats like Japan and his own paranoia that he couldn’t imagine that the Nazis would break the non-aggression pact; to the point that he didn’t believe it even while his own forces were frantically trying to tell him that the Nazis were on the move east.

Another interesting feature of the 1918 flu is the colour it left its corpses. The term, “heliotrope cyanosis” was often used to describe victims and some of the dead had been turned black, leading some of the survivors to term it the “black flu”. I have heard of claims of similar effects on bird flu victims but I have yet to see a reference to back this up. The cyanosis was, I suspect, due to the fluid in the lungs causing the body to shunt blood away from the skin to the vital organs to maintain their oxygen but this usually causes a blue tinge. This could be pushed into the purple and even black range if the damage in the lungs was causing D.I.C. – distributed inter-vascular coagulation. Many things can cause DIC but when it happens, tiny clots form through the blood and cause microscopic strokes in the capillaries of the tissue, usually leading to organ failure and death in about 90% of DIC sufferers. The tiny clots would probably cause the blue of the cyanotic skin to become purplish and DIC also uses up coagulation factors and platelets meaning that bruising and bleeding can occur which could cause a blackening of the skin. Wikipedia states that bleeding from the mucous membrane occured in some cases which would be consistent with DIC.

The fact that some called it the “black flu” is rather appropriate. I remember someone noting that, while everyone learns that the black plague killed about a third of Europe, it did so over the course of a few decades. The 1918 flu seems to have killed a similar number of people in one year but since there were so many people on earth its proportion of fatalities is less impressive unless one realizes how short a time it took to do it. This would not be the best time to be sitting back and gloating over how worked up everyone got over a simple flu. Now would be the time to be stocking up on antibiotics to fight the bacterial pneumonia and stocking the supplies needed to monitor for early signs of DIC while working diligently to get the vaccine ready.

This might not be a “herald wave”.

No! Herald wave.

But it is acting like one so it would be wise to plan for a deadly second wave so as to minimize the damage.

They are you know.

And one of the main causes of them becoming sightless are diseases affecting the cornea. Gizmag has an article describing a new procedure where adult stem cells (those would be the ones that religious people do not ascribe a soul to and thus can be used without hyperventilation) are cultivated from the patient and grown on a contact lens. A little eye surgery consisting of cornea cleaning and scraping and popping in the contact lens and in time the patient gains significant amounts of vision. It has only been done on three people but all three had improved vision. The results were not perfect but improvement in all three attempts is impressive for such preliminary work. One subject was able to pass a vision  test for a driver’s license. Two others went from legally blind to being able to read the big letters on an eye chart.

The Gizmag article includes more detail and a video with a couple of short clips of the eye surgery/scraping and cleaning and a lot of groovy lab footage. Even if you’re squeamish about eye surgery the video is well worth the view.

This procedure promises to be not all that expensive and I am pretty confident that results will improve as more knowledge and experience is gained. Whether you feel that my confidence is worth anything is your own business.

After I debunked my own bit of speculation about why pandemic flu viruses seem to have an earlier first wave, I have been worried that I have left the speculation community with less speculation to enjoy. So I have been hard at work drumming up some new speculation for the enjoyment of the various speculation mongers out their.

I have been told that (regardless of the mechanism of the cytokine storm) viruses which cause the more lethal infections are ones which are adapted to be able to enter the cells in the lower respiratory tract. the avian flu (H5N1) does this, which is why it has such a high death rate but it is not adapted to the upper respiratory tract where one victim can easily form aerosols which can be easily transmitted to the upper respiratory tract of a new host. The adaptation to the upper respiratory tract is the big event epidemiologists are dreading for bird flu but since it kills so many people it does not have a lot of time to make the get the on-the-job-training in the upper respiratory tract of humans. So in the short-term, probability is on our side.

The swine or H1N1, however, may be already adapted to the upper respiratory tract but not so much to the lower tract. That makes it a good traveler, especially since it is novel to humans but it is largely a mild killer.

Let’s assume for the moment that this is how most pandemic flu viruses start off. As it spreads around the world it gets to spend a lot of time in humans and some strains start to adapt to being able to enter the cells of both the upper and the lower respiratory tract – a much more likely event given the amount of time the virus is able to spend in humans since it does not kill them. Now you have a disease which causes the aerosols needed for easy transmission being created in the upper tract and more irritation which causes coughing contributing to transmission as well. So a more lethal and more transmissible virus is born and begins what we notice as the second wave.

I am really not rooting for a lethal pandemic. But I can’t help but feel that we have been on rather a lucky streak as far as air born pandemics are concerned. Even drug resistant TB doesn’t sweep through cities the way the pneumonic plague can and we really dodged a bullet with SARS. 1918 seems so long ago but my grandmother was a survivor of it. Our high populations and dense cities; our rapid international travel and many environments from slums to skyscrapers make me confident that their will come a day when a global pandemic begins disrupting our societies the way it did in 1918. And if you might be dreaming about how nice it would be to be the last human on earth wandering through the cities with zoo animals for company like in the movie Twelve Monkeys, forget it. A small fraction of people will die. Just enough to disrupt our health care and cause labour shortages and mass absenteeism to wreak havoc with our economies. And was it really necessary to show Bruce Willis’ butt in that Twelve Monkeys movie? I really could have done without that.

And who is this John Galt fellow anyway?

Submitted without comment – stolen from a comment at REDSTATE.