Mystery Illness Thread (press Conference @ 1pm est.)

15 March 2003 | KickRightRudder

[KickRightRudder]

MSNBC reports mystery illness in Asia-kills every one infected so far. Hundreds more infected. Airlner to Toronto with infected man has been quarentined-- all passengers.

CDC is "EXTREMELY concerned". If these hundreds who are infected die in the next couple of days, we might have the beginnings of a panic. After sophisticated test doctors don't know what it is. Like flu or Pnemonia symptoms, except everybody dies. Press conference at 1pm.

[Catspaw]

We'll just say that I'm much closer to the Walkin' Dude than that.

Lloyd, is that you?

[Eala]

I missed one link, and there have been one or two since.

[Eala]

You know, I'd hate to be the first to say it (but I will, anyway): Saddam's revenge?

Don't worry. Somebody already beat you to it (one of the several threads on this.) Unlikely, though. This thing seems to have originated in SE China or Vietnam, best I make out from the reports posted here.

[Godebert]

"Puh-leaze. You must have me confused with one of the FR paleocons - only they would be so whacked out that they'd burn old lady Semple's check, besides, its not time yet."

Being a paleo-con in a conservative forum is a GOOD thing. Anything to the left of that term is just some shade of liberalism anyway.

[ExSES]

Life just isn't safe anymore.

Indeed! Living IS dangerous and, in the long run we are ALL dead! (Waiting for the Democrat Platform which promises otherwise..., maybe 2008?).

[Eala]

A terrorist's worst nightmare or a terrorist's wildest dream?

LOL. I was thinking the same thing...

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Lloyd, is that you?

The Walkin' Dude's PR flack. I've borrowed a concept from Kneel Before Zod suitable for the moment - "voting is irrelevant unless you like the thought of ravenous wolves under demonic command ripping out your throat at a voting booth - I am your leader".

I thought it sounded catchy, and would be integral in shoring up public support for the new administration.

;)

[Dog Gone]

Just don't get in my way, and keep that old woman away from me......

LOL. Viva Las Vegas.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Being a paleo-con in a conservative forum is a GOOD thing.

The terms "paleocon" and "conservative" are diametrically opposed, as is evidenced by the recent frenetic scribblings of Herr Buchanan and others of his ilk.

[Luis Gonzalez]

Laws yes!

[Chancellor Palpatine]

That's gonna be one long drive. Gotta get my Elvis tapes together.

[Domestic Church]

No, I've worked in medicine...surgeons don't consult on infectious disease cases usually.

[Godebert]

"The terms "paleocon" and "conservative" are diametrically opposed, as is evidenced by the recent frenetic scribblings of Herr Buchanan and others of his ilk."

Paleocon is a rather recently coined term invented by those in the "mushy middle" masquerading as conservatives.

[engrpat]

Thanks for the posting...I was going to add it sounds like Cpt Trips.

[Luis Gonzalez]

Chapter 1

Hapscomb's Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston. Tonight the regulars were there, sitting by the cash register drinking beer, talking idly, watching the bugs fly into the big lighted sign.

It was Bill Hapscomb's station, so the others deferred to him even though he was a pure fool. They would have expected the same deferral if they had been gathered together in one of their business establishments. Except they had none. In Arnette, it was hard times. In 1980 the town had had two industries, a factory that made paper products (for picnics and barbecues, mostly) and a plant that made electronic calculators. Now the paper factory was shut down and the calculator plant was ailing --- they could make them a lot cheaper in Taiwan, it turned out, just like those portable TVs and transistor radios.

Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week. Victor Palfrey was retired and smoked stinking home-rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford.

"Now what I say is this," Hap told them, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward. "They just gotta say screw this inflation shit. Screw this national debt shit. We got the presses and we got the paper. We're gonna run off fifty million thousand-dollar bills and hump them right the Christ into circulation."

Palfrey, who had been a machinist until 1984,was the only one present with sufficient self-respect to point out Hap's most obvious damfool statements. Now, rolling another of his shitty-smelling cigarettes, he said: "That wouldn't get us nowhere. If they do that, it'll be just like Richmond in the last two years of the States War. In those days, when you wanted a piece of gingerbread, you gave the baker a Confederate dollar, he'd put it on the gingerbread, and cut out a piece just that size. Money's just paper, you know."

"I know some people don't agree with you," Hap said sourly. He picked up a greasy red plastic paper-holder from his desk. "I owe these people. And they're starting to get pretty itchy about it."

Stuart Redman,, who was perhaps the quietest man in Arnette, was sitting in one of the cracked plastic Woolco chairs, a can of Pabst in his hand, looking out the big service station window at Number 93. Stu knew about poor. He had grown up that way right here in town, the son of a dentist who had died when Stu was seven, leaving his wife and two other children besides Stu.

His mother had gotten work at the Red Ball Truck Stop just outside of Arnette --- Stu could have seen it from where he sat right now if it hadn't burned down in 1979. It had been enough to keep the four of them eating, but that was all. At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, and then at the stockyards in the neighboring town of Braintree, Iying about his age to get twenty backbreaking hours of labor a week at the minimum wage.

Now, listening to Hap and Vic Palfrey argue on about money and the mysterious way it had of drying up, he thought about the way his hands had bled at first from pulling the endless handtrucks of hides and guts. He had tried to keep that from his mother, but she had seen, less than a week after he started. She wept over them a little, and she hadn't been a woman who wept easily. But she hadn't asked him to quit the job. She knew what the situation was. She was a realist.

Some of the silence in him came from the fact that he had never had friends, or the time for them. There was school, and there was work. His youngest brother, Dev, had died of pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never quite gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best . . . but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed.

In high school he had found football, and that was something his mother had encouraged even though it cut into his work hours. "You play," she said. "If you got a ticket out of here, it's football, Stuart. You play. Remember Eddie Warfield."

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Actually, paleocon is a recently coined self description invented by people who realize that publicly praising the virtue of the Nazi system in this day and age is bad PR, and who want to maintain the veneer of public respectability.

[per loin]

interesting to watch and judge the degree of panic over this.

So far, I've not seen anyone running barefoot down the street, but today is the first day it really hit the news.

[varina davis]

Anthrax strain?

[Chancellor Palpatine]

I've not seen anyone running barefoot down the street...

It warmed up today - I could volunteer, but I'd need money and a whole lot of beer.

[Dog Gone]

From the NY Times:

In another rare step, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention activated its emergency operations center in Atlanta, including sophisticated communications technology, to enhance its ability to coordinate information from other countries and to investigate any suspect cases in this country.

C.D.C. has used the operations center only twice before, for the mosquito-borne West Nile fever epidemic last year and the anthrax attacks in 2001. The last time it issued a global health alert was in 1993, to enhance measures to control tuberculosis. W.H.O. officials said they could not recall the last time an emergency global travel advisory was issued.