born live love die

Robin Cook may be trying to drum up business for a book he wrote in 1995, but he can sure scare the hell out of me this year.

But that is not the case with another flu subspecies that originally appeared in 2006 and which is now slowly spreading from Southeast Asia, particularly in its normal reservoir of aquatic birds. This is the subspecies designated HPAI A(H5N1), standing for “highly pathogenic avian influenza A of subtype H5N1,” or avian flu for short. Luckily it has very low transmissibility — which it makes up for with knock-your-socks-off lethality. A truly scary percentage, about 60 percent, of those humans unlucky enough to have contracted the illness over the last three years have quickly died.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem. Is there a chance these two subspecies could hook up and help each other? The answer is definitely yes, and that is the worry because one of influenza A’s most disturbing characteristics is its ability to indulge in recombination of its 11 genes, which are arranged on its eight pieces of RNA. This produces what is called genetic shift — in other words, transfer of entire genes or gene combinations, and hence traits. It will become key to our plot.

Robin is writing about pandemics and risk.  Read the whole thing.

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama was met with scorn by many conservative pundits.  I noted at the time that many Americans do not understand how the rest of the world sees America.  Bono, he of shallow lyrics and cheery swagger, had an interesting op-ed in the New York Times:

And it is. The world wants to believe in America again because the world needs to believe in America again. We need your ideas — your idea — at a time when the rest of the world is running out of them.

I think that many Americans think that the piece of the fractious American political puzzle that they hold closest represents the whole or the majority of the American idea.  The American idea is bigger than that.  The rest of the world wants something, something that they perceive that we have.  It isn’t clear that perceptions are reality.

During the Chinese revolt of 1989, many of the Chinese protesters said that they wanted ‘democracy’, but if you listened in greater depth, what they wanted was an end to endemic corruption and they saw democracy as a way to achieve that.  I don’t think they really perceived the hazards and responsibilities of a full Jeffersonian styled democracy, but they wanted to end corruption.

Ending corruption and establishing justice are two of the stated goals of just about any political system.  Justice is flexible concept.  Hitler’s justice made it fair to de-state Jewish families who had lived in Germany for generations.  Justice was central to the appeal of Marx.  But justice is easily promised and poorly given.

Bono doesn’t address the desire for justice, but rather describes it in terms of poverty and hunger.  He is right in that America does represent a dream for most of the world.  Cynics may say that the rest of the world wants to live as we do, with enough fat off the land to wallow in, but I think not.  America represents an attempt to establish justice without needing a strong man to do it.

The progression of government is from strong men, e.g., clan champion, to council of elders, to clientelism to democracy.  It was distressing to hear people talk about President Bush as “he’s the commander in chief” as we we had reverted to a society ruled by a strong man.  This expression was most often used by conservatives and Republicans to question the allegiance and fidelity of anyone who questioned the policies of the Bush cohort.

No, we are a representative democracy, with all of its failings, and our goal and our responsibility is to establish justice.

When I was doing operations research around the Pershing missile system in Germany, about 30 years ago, I became familiar with the term ‘quick fix’.  For every failure on the launch pad, there was a ‘quick fix’, the first thing thing in the diagnostic chain that was to be checked or replaced.  There were gnarly problems for which there was no quick fix and there were people who were not very good missile diagnosticians.  I remember one crew with a warrant officer who couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a warrant officer named Ken who lived up to his name: he knew everything.  My co-worker used to say that the first guy’s quick fix was Ken’s phone number.

I was thinking about Ken when I read Frank Rich this morning.  Frank Rich is my ‘quick fix’ for having the goods on a lying Republican.  Frank Rich’s columns are all hypertext linked so when he makes a claim, he has the goods to back it up.  For example:

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

Check out the whole piece.

President Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize?  Two thoughts.  One, this seems premature.  Two, I don’t think Americans understand how President Obama is seen by the rest of the world.  Three, this seems premature.

I had been meaning to write a wrap up about spending two weeks in Milan, but I wasn’t really inspired to do it.  I was somewhat disappointed with the time I spent there.  I think my disappointment was more about unmet expectations than anything else.

I lived in Germany for 6 1/2 years about 30 years ago, and I accepted the way that people lived there then as standard for European life.  Each village had bakeries, butcher shops, inns offering rooms and food.  I spent time in villages, towns and cities, and with the exception of the core of Koln, that is the way it was.  These places were provided the civic space for meeting.  This is what I found while traveling in France and Italy in 1986.  I expected the same.

It wasn’t that way.  The villages, some of which were as much as 40 miles from downtown Milano, had no such places.  It seems that they have been squeezed out by merchants who offer the same goods at lower prices.  Restaurants, with plastic coated menus, just like Applebee’s, have taken over.  When I lived in Heilbronn in the late 1970’s, a restaurant chain called Wienerwald was one place open late.  I didn’t like the place because it was a processed food store.  I guess that is now the norm in Europe.  France has the highest density of McDonalds food stores outside of the United States.

McDs could be found in the Milan area.  But along with McDs, it seems that Europe has adopted a lot of American culture, and not the most attractive parts.  Tattooing has begun to sweep the youth there.  MTV has a lot of impact on young people.  In some ways, it is the like a new religion.  Is it a search for identity for a young population that isn’t well connected to history?  I don’t know.

The Italians I met were nice people and, with the exception of the car I kicked in Rome, well met.  My issues are about my expectations, not Italy as I found it.