Ghost of a flea

Forensics

Age progression is a technique whereby a forensic artist uses childhood photos to extrapolate an image of the same subject with the passage of years. Take Michael Jackson, for example.

If Michael Jackson did not have all his surgery over the years, this is how he might look at the age of 45.

I do not have much to say about Jackson beyond pointing to this rather sad image of the human being that might have been. Lock him up. Don't lock him up. This is for the criminal justice system to deal with. I find it difficult to believe people can be so taken up in the minutiae of the man's life when our civilization is under attack. This applies equally with those obsessed with other burning issues of the day such as telling other grown-ups who they can and cannot marry. Christians are enslaved in the Sudan, girls are sexually mutilated and sold into "marriage" and men who prefer to have sex with men are thrown into cess-pits by the gangsters of the PLA. The right to self-defence is threatened in most democracies and is non-existent in most of the world.

Feminists, gun owners, gay activists and evangelical Christians as groups may often disagree on points of policy. They are certainly most often disagreeable with each other. I wish we would all stop sniping at each other when we have the prospect of losing a city or two to a North Korean built, al Qaeda deployed nuclear device or an engineered chimera virus that could kill millions more. Before 9/11 this was the stuff of fiction. After 9/11 there are too many people who want to hang out in Jackson's fictional Neverland. This includes the thinking people, the politically engaged people from the left and the right who should recognize the greater danger of losing the right to debate anything ever again.

Neverland is a world where we can keep arguing over who got the biggest piece of cake and nobody ever has to grow up. Well, the results of trying to live out that fantasy can be grotesque, so suggestive of an infantilizing pathology of the imagination that even to look at it is embarassing. Forensic art gives a picture of what Jackson might have looked like as a grown-up. Forensic anthropology often comes into play long after a crime has been committed. I hope some future archaeologist will not need its techniques to figure out why our culture was enthralled with trivia while the nightmare gathered strength.

And then... But Flea, some part of myself asks another, aren't you obsessed with trivia to the point of cranking out this blog every day? Fair point, but I am not producing the lead segment for every major broadcaster in North America.

And then... Thanks, John for your endorsement of my spittle-frothing madness. I did some googling around to add links connected to chimera virus bioterrorism. I hope there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than turns up on the internet. Otherwise, it looks like the novelists are the only people other than al Qaeda who are thinking this stuff through. That and a Flea article on the second page of hits for this subject.

This last observation horrifies me. I urge anyone reading this to look into the effects of smallpox on non-resistant populations. This has only happened once before on a large scale as the tens of millions (possibly more) of inhabitants of the Americas encountered their distant European cousins for the first time since a time before there were cities anywhere. Let us be clear about this. Vaccine or no vaccine every one of us is resistant to a broad spectrum of pathogens due to the simple fact we are the descendants of every cough, cold and plague in history. We all of us enjoy some immunity to naturally occurring strains of even the nastiest smallpox. Those of us old enough to have been vaccinated are even better off.

This is not the case for a bioengineered smallpox. We will have no immunity to that monster and the effects will be comparable to what hit the peoples of the Americas. I don't believe that could happen today, one of my Collapse of Civilizations students sighed in blank refusal of this simple chain of reasoning. All it takes is some clever, reasonably well-financed evil people with the urge to kill as many of the rest of us as possible and this is no more fictional than a handful of maniacs flying passenger airliners into office buildings. A weaponized smallpox renders all of us a non-resistant population with only pre-Columbian America to take as a guide. As much as ninety percent of the population of the Inca empire died thanks to the lethality of the disease and the efficiency of the Incan highway system. Our medical technology would provide no better comfort than theirs but our transportation system is much, much better.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at November 22, 2003 09:04 AM

Comments

Posted by: John of Argghhh! at November 22, 2003 09:44 PM

Posted by: Nicholas Packwood at November 23, 2003 07:07 PM