Temperature is falling

It’s finally cold here in San Francisco, after a bizarre stretch of almost two solid weeks of “real” summer (the kind we usually get at the end of September, but missed this year). I have been quite distracted these past weeks (yes, good weather makes it harder to sit at the keyboard) and not terribly inspired to write here. So I took a break. But today I’m feeling the itch, and I’m freezing, and Juan Cole gave me the impetus with his thoughtful comments on the current Sy Hersh story about the U.S. replacing ground troops with air power and his uncharacteristically hilarious attack on Bush:

I guarantee you, George, that historians are going to be unkind to you. You went into a major war over a non-existent nuclear weapons program. Presidents’ reputations don’t survive things like that. Historians are creatures of documents and precision. A wild exaggeration with serious consequences is against everything they stand for as a profession. So forget about history and destiny and the divine will. You are at the helm of the Exxon Valdez and it is headed for the shoals. You can’t afford to daydream about future decades.

It’s a common enough madness these days, to get lost in endless perambulations of the internet, from blog to blog, hopping around hoping for insight, humor, breaking news, what?… Somehow we’re in one of those irritating gaps between major events, and we’re all waiting with bated breath, knowing that the shit IS hitting the fan, but what color is it? Who’s throwing it? Who is getting it full in the face? It’s a version of gossip and celebrity fascination, albeit couched in terms of worldly affairs and history, news and politics.

I was turned on to a couple of blogs that are really outstanding: Firedoglake is by far the best place (if you have the time!) to keep up with all the breaking legal scandals engulfing the Cheney regime and its congressional allies. It’s written by three different former prosecutors so they have a helpful background and insider’s knowledge of how this stuff works. Effect Measure is another blog being written by 3 or 4 people on the topic of public health, and proves to be one of the more sensible, challenging, and sober places to keep track of pandemic news, crumbling public health infrastructure, and all the thoughts that pro health care folks are having in the midst of that.

I don’t think either of these two blogs, nor the other regulars (billmon, Juan Cole, Global Guerrillas, all linked at right), are gossipy per se, but there is a way that the recycling of news reports and current events fills my hours and is precisely analogous to how other people read People magazine or watch daytime TV or… I also read a huge pile of magazines, not closely, but again it takes up some serious hours every week (The Economist, Harpers, New Yorker, NY Review of Books, Mother Jones, Earth Island Journal, Bay Nature, Orion, Left Business Observer, Nat’l Geographic, even had the Financial Times coming for a few weeks–yeesh!).

I’m also deep into writing the next book, a project that promises to stretch out well into next year just to finish a first draft. A lot of the delay in writing it comes from finding so many spots that I feel I need to read one or more books I have or have heard of, before I can finish my own thinking on the topic. That’s a lot of fun, intellectually, but it just takes time. And not all my reading is instrumentally focused on my writing needs, so taken as a whole, my 20-40 hours a week of reading are a luxury and a necessity and an indispensable foundation and a huge waste of time!

Public Infrastructure: Health and Beyond

I just found a very sensible post at H5N1 that in turn links to another website with good advice on what to do in case of bird flu. In general, it proposes a decentralized, robust system of public health to respond to all kinds of public health disasters, rather than overly focusing on stockpiling antivirals for this one flu… The more I’ve thought about this stuff, the more I realize how woefully unprepared “we” are, and how urgently we need to fight for a public health infrastructure that can actually provide real services in time of crisis. Which means a high level of redundancy in normal times… interesting that San Franciscans voted to keep open all the firehouses in last week’s local election… it’s the same logic. You don’t need all these firehouses in normal times, but when you need ’em you better have ’em. And this is, after all, a predominantly wooden city, built on a huge fault zone running pipes full of natural gas and other chemicals all over the place… As O’Reilly condemns the city for its common sense votes on war recruiting and handguns (if only banning hand guns would curb gun violence! sheesh!), the actual story of the local election is much more practical. If we do get attacked, whether by humans or by nature, maybe with a public health infrastructure to match our fire readiness, we’ll have a reasonable chance of taking care of ourselves… I guess I must be a commonist!

Monster at the Door, Gardens on the Roof

I finished reading Mike Davis’s “The Monster at the Door” this weekend. An impressive book, extremely informative, and one that definitely gets an immediate entry into the “Sky is Falling” Hall of Fame. Sheesh! The biggest question I came away with is not if or how there will be a global pandemic that will kill (maybe hundreds of) millions, but why hasn’t it already started? That’s a question plaguing a number of scientists and researchers Davis sources in his book, too.

Davis is at his best when he puts the obvious terror of a super lethal pandemic into the context of the banal trajectory of capitalist development: the ever increasing densities of humans and animals, overlapping in turn with what’s still left of the wild, often mixed in our urbanized concentrations. An interesting insight I didn’t already know: apparently HIV has been definitively traced to humans eating “bush meat” in Africa (i.e. chimpanzees in this case). The crashing fisheries along the coasts of Africa and Asia are leading to a huge increase in industrialized meat making (highly concentrated factories of chickens and pigs) AND rampant exploitation of remaining mammals in the wild, hence more “bush meat.” The radical expansion of hosts for influenza viruses goes hand in hand with this, not to mention other lesser known viral agents in the bush meat (like HIV); all of this new mixing of humans and animals and diseases, combined with the generally underemphasized abysmal state of mega-slums in most parts of the world, set the stage for an inevitable pandemic. Throw in the systematic destruction of existing public health infrastructure, and the abject failure to take seriously the need for a global approach to public health, and you can’t feel anything but a bit helpless in the face of what we can hardly avoid… pandemic lethality as a natural event.

I already knew that the avian flu was something to take seriously. I blogged about it in passing some months ago. There are a number of worthy sites to keep track of, where bloggers and news outlets are tracking the paths of various flu outbreaks. The H5N1 site seems to be a guy up in Vancouver who is doing a great job of sifting through enormous daily flows of information. Bird Flu Today is a more graphic heavy digest of news from near and far. And the Flu Wiki is an attempt to make full use of the new “power” of the wiki form to bring together hundreds of observers and analysts to share the latest on this worrisome topic.

In one of those whimsical and mordant displays of dark humor that daily life is so good at producing, I spent my afternoon yesterday at the 5th annual Green Fest here in San Francisco. It is unquestionably the most self-congratulatory event you can attend hereabouts. Everyone is just glowing with self-righteous moralism, perusing in the mall of correct shopping, getting endlessly patted on the back by other attendees, speakers, and vendors.

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