Frozen Badness

(Note: Before reading this post, please consult the very serious Deonandan.com disclaimer.)

First, the news:

• In Manhattan there’s now a law that allows cops to ticket a childless person who sits on a park bench near a playground. So retarded is this law that a 47 year old woman, waiting for a festival to start, was given a potential $1,000 fine. Jeebus, people. The overwhelming majority of childless people are not paedophiles. We have this ridiculous impression, created by the media, that every other strange man is waiting to steal our children. It is a curse upon civilization when basic liberties are curtailed to protect against extremely unlikely circumstances.
• Of course, another dog-fucking story. (For those of you new to this site, I do not include these bestial links because I advocate the behaviour; quite the opposite, really. Rather, they are exemplars of my thesis that such events are being increasingly reported in the mainstream media.)
• Want to see Jon Stewart versus drunken blow-hard Christopher Hitchens, he of the poor research? Click here.
• Want to read the transcript of Christopher Hitchens versus ron Reagan, he of the questionable sexuality? Click here.
• A new study suggests that societies are much worse off when citizens purport to believe in a god. Read it here.

Here’s an angle on both global warming and the increased tendency toward viral pandemics that I had not considered before: the fact that ancient diseases may be waiting for us beneath polar ice. As is well known, both bacteria and viruses, some thousands or hundreds of thousands or, I think in one case, millions of years old have been revived through the gentle thawing of antarctic ice under laboratory conditions. If successful revivification can be done in the wild with natural thawing, this is bad news indeed. Modern organisms have no natural immunity to diseases of yesteryear, so there’s a fair chance some of these pathogens will prove lethal to either humans or to our animal and plant slave species. Perhaps some of these bugs will go airborne. And given the propensity for modern viral diseases to reach pandemic status very quickly –due in large part to growing population densities and to the ease of air travel, both of which eliminate populations’ natural defence against epidemics, i.e. geographic isolation– there is a real chance that one or more of these frozen baddies will wreak untol havoc upon the Earth.

Stay tuned, kiddies. The world just got even more interesting.