Today's LEAST surprising "news" story

i was digging through some of my more recent memorabilia this past week and came across a brochure that was being handed out by argentine immigration and customs officials last year during the height of the swine flu "pandemic"... i was flying to buenos aires from afghanistan via dubai and sao paulo... swine flu was little more than a side topic of discussion in kabul... i saw no more than 4 or 5 people in the very busy dubai international airport wearing face masks, quite a few more in sao paulo as i was changing planes, and, when i got to buenos aires, all the officials were wearing face masks along with a goodly number of the passengers... i was surprised and remember commenting to myself on what i believed, even at that time, to be an overblown fear tactic... well, guess what...?

Reports accuse WHO of exaggerating H1N1 threat, possible ties to drug makers

European criticism of the World Health Organization's handling of the H1N1 pandemic intensified Friday with the release of two reports that accused the agency of exaggerating the threat posed by the virus and failing to disclose possible influence by the pharmaceutical industry on its recommendations for how countries should respond.

The WHO's response caused widespread, unnecessary fear and prompted countries around the world to waste millions of dollars, according to one report. At the same time, the Geneva-based arm of the United Nations relied on advice from experts with ties to drug makers in developing the guidelines it used to encourage countries to stockpile millions of doses of antiviral medications, according to the second report.

along with the multiple things that annoy me about my fellow "liberals" and "progressives" is the way they pounced on anyone who dared to question the legitimacy of the flu "pandemic" in very much the same way they do with those who question any other item of the liberal/progressive orthodoxy...

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What about that swine flu...

no one would ever consider it was just a bogus scam to enrich big pharma... oh, no-o-o-o-ooo...!

Although it is too early to write the obituary for swine flu, medical experts, already assessing how the first pandemic in 40 years has been handled, have found that while luck played a part, a series of rapid but conservative decisions by federal officials worked out better than many had dared hope.

The outbreak highlighted many national weaknesses: old, slow vaccine technology; too much reliance on foreign vaccine factories; some major hospitals pushed to their limits by a relatively mild epidemic.

But even given those drawbacks, “we did a lot of things right,” concluded Dr. Andrew T. Pavia, chairman of the pandemic flu task force of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Federal officials deserve “at least a B-plus,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University’s medical school.

Even Dr. Peter Palese, a leading virologist at Mount Sinai Medical School, who can be a harsh critic of public policies he disagrees with, called the government’s overall response “excellent.”

i don't chase after conspiracy theories, believe me... i've got too much to do dealing with the real world...

nonetheless, it simply amazes me that we can just sit back and soak in our belief that all these super-greedy, power-hungry folks who call all the shots for us peasants always act in the interest of the common good and take the spin of an article like this without even a shrug of skepticism...

yeah, i know... SOME of our esteemed leaders really do try to work on behalf of the common good, but i think they're the rare exception and their efforts invariably get neutered by those who are all to willing to leave them by the side of the road as just so much discarded street pizza...

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You knew somebody would do it...!

as of mid-morning monday, argentina time, this was the google ad at the top of the blog...



sigh...

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Still terrified of the coming pandemic...? Get over it...

here's the pig but where's the lipstick...?



meanwhile, back in the reality-based community...

Flu death toll 'less than feared'

Mexico has revised down the suspected death toll from swine flu from 176 to 101, indicating that the outbreak may not be as bad as was initially feared.

Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told the BBC that, based on samples tested, the mortality rate was comparable with that of seasonal flu.

comparable with that of seasonsal flu...? wait...! wait just a minute...! i thought i was supposed to be sequestered in some safe spot, isolated from the rest of humanity, wearing a mask, and trembling for fear of catching some deadly virus... now that i've swallowed the hype, hook, line and sinker, you tell me it's 'less than feared'...? have i summoned up all this paranoia for NOTHING...? hmmmmph...

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Swine flu hysteria, up close and personal

it's one thing to be in kabul or dubai and read about the absolute paranoiac idiocy accompanying the latest distraction for the masses, but it's another thing to see the hysteria up close and personal...

i spent monday and tuesday nights in dubai prior to flying back here to argentina... in the dubai airport yesterday, i didn't see one person wearing a mask... when i got to the sao paulo airport last night to connect with the flight to buenos aires, i saw a few folks wearing them, notable because i hadn't seen any one wearing them up to that point... the woman sitting across the aisle from me on the flight was wearing one but, lord almighty, the entire airport staff at the buenos aires airport were wearing them... even the taxi driver who took me home was wearing one... when i asked him about it, he mumbled something about being advised to do it on the news, but then, after a few minutes, probably feeling self-conscious, he took it off...

honest to pete... our controllers won't be satisfied until everyone on the planet are turned into quivering rabbits...

p.s. there are a lot of folks who wear masks or scarves over their faces in kabul (not counting the women) but it ain't about the flu... it's protection against the health-destroying pollution...

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The fear-mongers are at it again

what a wonderful time to try to introduce global panic... the sheeple are getting restless and maybe even a tad bit upset over being lied to and ripped off for the umpteenth thousand time so it's time to trot out a flu pandemic... get the folks focused on something else, worried about a silent killer that could creep unseen into their homes without warning... time to give up yet a little more of our freedoms to our benmalevolent governments, oh, and, btw, pay no attention to those war criminals over there in the corner, the ones who have lied, butchered, tortured, and robbed their way across the planet in a decades-long bloody rampage...

atrios gets it right...

WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!

Whenever there's a potential emergency looming, I really get the feeling that many internet dwellers get a bit too excited to the point of cheering for it.

here's someone else's thoughts, thoughts which precisely parallel my own...

The newest strategy - the ordering of laboratory-designed, created and released swine flu virus - is, as before, abetted by the controlled media's part of the plan, to declare PANDEMIC! It is puzzling to us that these dark ones did not learn from their abject failures with SARS and then the avian flu, both of which were widely publicized with the same global pandemic prognosis; eventually the publicity was forced to cease because those diseases caused a few deaths, then totally fizzled out. This swine flu situation will have the same result.

[...]

Think about the timing of this latest disease publicity. In addition to authorizing the creation of a virus and its intended worldwide fear, the darkly-inclined individuals' aim is to distract the attention of the populace from their growing demands for peaceful negotiations; indicting responsible ones in the US government who authorized torture; the truth about the perpetrators of '9/11'; what caused the collapse of the global economy; ... and the 'black ops' behind terrorism ... .

accurate or not, i'm at the point in my own understanding of what's happening in this world to allow as to how it could well be 100% true... in any case, succumbing to fear is precisely what we SHOULDN'T do, any more than we should cower in the belief that there's a terrorist lurking behind every piece of shrubbery...

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