Jeez, Jay...so much for the beef industry. The US says it has plans and precautions in place to deal with
it but I for one, seeing one case of Jacob-Creutzfeldt disease in my career as a neurologist have had quite enough.
I will only eat beef now grown by local farmers who do ranching on side, feeding their cattle only what grows
on their lands, ie, no beef products. Saw a scary scene on CNN a few nights back, a scathing excoriation of
the airline industry. The spin was against the airlines but the unspoken threat was a view, unintended as part of the
story line, of all the aircraft in the air at any one time...like bees, underscoring from a different perspective
how connected the world is now. I predict mad cow disease will hit the US and despite my carnivorous
cravings will drive me and everyone else away from eating beef. Blue's optimism notwithstanding I am
forced to admit that mad cow disease is model reminder of unpredictability, of markets, of world dangers,
of unsuspected events that shift civilizations, reminding me once again how fundamentally dangerous it is
to pretend to predict...anything...in the longterm it is true we are all dead...but that said, I insist for myself and mine
that we marshall our resources and our fortunes with an eye to the possibility we may, yes, even we here
in the US, end up facing something not unlike what Jay Chen's father did. I wonder who thought in 1918
just as WWI came to an end that the world would face millions of deaths from the FLU!! pandemic. There is
a trend to "genetic drift"in that virus...vaccines are unpredictable and not always safe. Worldwide epidemics are as much a potential threat to economies, even civilizations,...and all those planes just keep buzzing around in the air,
connecting us all like the Gordian Knot. Musings of a Sunday morning, imagine a minor mutation of the HIV vurus
that made it stable and transmissable in aerosol...oops...now that would make a desert island appealing but
but not necessarily safe. Air will be air, you know. And that supposes no terrorists funded by bin Laden, and no Richter 8.5 in downtown Tokyo. No. I did not hoard food or silver coins for Y2K. Just a paranoid old fart
with enough experience to know unpredictability first hand but fortunate enough not to have been in Jay's
father's shoes. Happy Sunday everybody.
jim black |
