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To: EternalHope

Why don't you look up something useful, like the difference in density between natural and weaponized anthrax.


3,539 posted on 08/21/2004 10:55:23 PM PDT by HipShot (EOM couldn't cut the head off a beer with a chainsaw)
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To: All; HipShot
Severed heads and the Arab world's foul predicament
The Daily Star

..excerpt..

"My blood flowed on the pavement. The head had separated from the body as though it had been chopped off by a sharp sword. I was sorry to see my body lying on the macadam only to be run over by some truck or lorry. I tried to order my hands to lift the corpse but soon realized that they were no longer subject to my command. The veins and arteries were gushing a jet fountain, spurts of blood spreading out, perhaps aspiring toward the final form of (a) red pool."

So begins Mohammed Barrada's intentionally disturbing tale, "The Story of the Severed Head." Before its adventures are over, Barrada's severed head will take flight and deliver a politically subversive message to an astonished populace: You may take solace in fantasies, the head tells its listeners, but those fantasies are the source of your oppression. Eventually, the head will be captured and finally judged by a ghost. First published in 1979, this short, surrealistic work by the distinguished Moroccan author and teacher has lately taken on an unexpected and unhappy contemporary resonance.

Of course, the most obvious source of the story's renewed timeliness is the severed head itself. Originally a device intended by Barrada to evoke antique horrors for his modern Arab readers, it may now evoke instead the disgust of daily reality. Beheadings or threats of beheadings are in the news almost every day, thanks to murderers who are acting in the name of Islamist political fantasies. Headless bodies are found floating in the Tigris River, and bodiless heads are discovered in Saudi refrigerators. Videotaped beheadings may be watched at any time on the internet, their appalling images overwhelming Barrada's or anyone else's attempts to capture their savagery in words. Barrada's quarter-century-old political horror story is now our daily reality.

Yet Barrada's bizarre tale is not timely merely because of the rise of beheadings as a tactic of terror and revulsion. Rather, this literary severed head lies at an intersection of terrible cultural and political forces in the Arab world, forces that not only shape the story's message of personal and political fantasy, but that may also underlie the story's own origins.

Arab literary fantasy is a remarkable phenomenon. Despite the flights of grand imagination for which the Arab folktale and epic are justly famous, fantasy remained rare in modern Arabic prose literature until quite late. While such important authors as Yusuf Idris and Naguib Mahfouz did make use of fantastic elements in their writing, especially in their short works, the great majority of Arab novelists remained faithful to the established tradition of social realism.

In the late 1960s, however, this situation changed dramatically: An explosion of Arab prose tales employing the fantastic, the surreal and the marvelous became apparent.

3,540 posted on 08/21/2004 11:07:35 PM PDT by nwctwx
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To: HipShot
Why don't you look up something useful, like the difference in density between natural and weaponized anthrax.

Next time get your facts straight before picking a fight. Then go soak your head.

Try here:
Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak incubation data

6. INCUBATION PERIOD

From I to 7 days, although incubation periods up to 60 days are possible. (In the Sverdlovsk outbreak, incubation periods extended up to 43 days.)

ADDENDUM

Data from the Sverdlovsk outbreak indicate a modal incubation time of approximately 10 days for inhalational anthrax. However, the onset of symptoms occurred up to six weeks after the reported date of exposure. Such long incubation times presumably reflect the ability of viable anthrax spores to remain in the lungs for many days. Longer incubation periods may be associated with smaller inocula.

Source: Dixon TC, Meselson M, Guillemin J, and Hanna PC. Anthrax. New England J Medicine 341, 815-826, 1999.

3,543 posted on 08/21/2004 11:48:53 PM PDT by EternalHope (Boycott everything French forever. Including their vassal nations.)
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