Every time there's a story about Mad Cow in this country, the media always refer to it as a "rare brain disease," or a "mystery ailment," or as "Creutzfeldt-Jakob q-variant whatever." Today's NYTimes story is no exception (remember: BugMeNot.com for access).
The reason? Food disparagement laws. Oprah paid a heavy price (even tho she won her case) when she talked candidly about Mad Cow on her show. Four people in a single community in upstate NY dead from Creutfeldt-Jakob and the authorities say they have no reason to assume a public health threat? Hmmm. Japan found its 14th case today as well.
I saw somewhere recently an anti-Bush sticker that said "End Mad Cowboy Disease."
9 comments:
That article is bull-shit. "Health officials would not say whether further tests have shown what type of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease..." "Rare" my ass!!!!
"Rare" refers to their steak preference.
I love the Mad Cow Google Ads on this Comments page, by the way.
Puns intended!!!
Of course, why else would you have "quotes" around them? But Mad Cow prions aren't harmed by cooking--in fact they survive incineration, and infected cattle whose bones were incinerated at 3000 degrees and turned into rose fertilizer still were able to transmit the disease in England to poor saps who breathed in dust while working in their gardens.
In other words, we're all doomed.
I know!!! Why are prions so crazy? How were they formed--can you unmake them...fertilizer--organic produce in New Zealand uses blood and bone for fertilizer...
are we on the verge of another mass extinction? reading Gorgon by Ward about the Permian one.
I'm gradually coming to the belief that all of the natural world is conscious, and that our share as humans of this consciousness is unique but only in its degree, meaning in plain english that humans are not smarter than stones or birds or iron atoms, only differntly intelligent. The entire network functions together, and when something threatens the entire network, it gets axed. I think evolution works not by accidental fortuitous mutation, but by specific steps stemming from this nebulous consciousness. IE, giraffes didn't end up with longer necks because an accidental mutation happened, but because giraffes looked up and thought--"You know, I wish I had a longer neck" and somehow this self-conscious wish/hope/need was translated into the generations which followed. I think when fish first went to land it was the same process--"dude, I wish I could go up there and eat those bugs," and then the next generation had half-leg/half-fin appendages.
I think humans are the most dramatic example of this sort of evolution, but we've lost our way, and Mother Earth will fuck us if we don't wise up, and the fucking will be hard core fucking too--we're talking worse than the Wrath of Yahweh here, and worse than Tim LaHaye's sword-swingin' Jesus on Judgment Day. Prions are perhaps the proto-life forms that first sprung into existence (after minerals and gases contemplate their plight for millenia, they begin to transform and evolve, and prions/protein structures are the first steps)--and Mother Earth is unleashing them anew, and sending them into our brains for a reason.
Someday I'll write about the origins of my theory--but today I'm too fucking busy.
So you feel that there is an underlying conciousness--what about (instead of mutation), a slow physical change based on repeated trial and error to get those bugs, treetop greens, etc.
yeah, basically, but for that theory to work I need an impetus outside of just the physical exercising--I think DNA is maleable to the NEEDS of the species, and can detect necessity in the environment and better adapt the physical to the environment to match the two, but a giraffe stretching its neck all the time ain't enough. I think if it were tied wholly to physical moves we'd have many more failed species with really bizarre mutations (and all human penises would be monstrous), and there's no fossil record of that--there are maladapted species who died off, but typically because of some food source that vanished or a meteor impact or some climactic change. Something has to explain the changes but I don't believe in God.
This ties into the idea of genetic memory (Carl Jung's collective unconscious, or "past lives" memories) that are actually in the DNA encrypted and available if we had the tools to access them. I'm starting to believe that DNA itself can think and act and change. There's much more to bring in here: medieval alchemy, kabbalah, the Vedas, Egyptian temple architecture, Gothic Cathedral ornamentation, the pituitary gland, the face on Mars, Aleister Crowley, the WB cartoon with the singing frog, Cheddar Cheese Combos, gherkins, Dune, Freud and C.S. Lewis, Genesis (the book, not the band), St. Exupery, residual eyes in blind cave fish, man titties, etc.
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