A new type of atypical pneumonia dubbed Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome continues to spread globally, with 1,316 cases and 48 deaths reported so far, most of them in China and Hong Kong. Despite the fact that health care professionals are practicing rigorous isolation techniques when they treat known or suspected victims, the disease is causing tens of new victims to fall gravely ill every day. It’s now clear that early guesses about the pathogen’s infectiousness were too optimistic, and that means more stringent measures to contain the outbreak are now justified.

Yesterday, doctors in Hong Kong announced that 14 people in one apartment block appear to have contracted SARS from another resident, who in turn got the disease from visiting his brother in hospital. The new victims live on different floors, meaning that they probably got the disease by inhaling small amounts of virus in airborne water droplets, perhaps left in the air by the “index patient” when he coughed in the building’s elevators or lobby.

Are you terrified yet?

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200303/msg00414.html

This SARS disease is fucking scary. The latest scoop from USA Today. The one beef I have with this article is it claims “it is not contagious if protective measures are used.” Yeah, right. Most of its victims have been doctors and nurses. Not the kind of people to take chances with germs.

I read yesterday that seven people caught SARS simply by flying in the same airplane as one of its victims. That’s right – just by being in the same airplane.

Here are some more links about the disease: one from the Center for Disease Control, and more links from Google News.

If the Smirker’s War wasn’t chewing up headlines, this disease would have people heading for the hills. I think Kelly and I will put off visiting our friends the Hibbles in Australia this year. 🙁

It is almost too late to celebrate it, but it was twenty years ago this month that my family and I first arrived in North Carolina.

It was 1983 when we moved into a house in Charlotte so big that another kid on the school bus asked me how many families lived there with us. He was serious, though the house wasn’t as big as that.

Jim Valvano’s Cardiac Pack had just won the NCAA basketball championship and his goofy grin was all over the local television advertising.

Charlotte was also primed for major growth as Bank of America (nee Nationsbank) was still North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) and still strictly local. Jim Hunt was governor and was reeling in business for his home state.

IBM made printers and ATM machines in a nearby office park. The IBM PC was barely two years old, and ours was one year old. I called my first BBS (bulletin board system) that year, beginning a long career in computer communications. It was there I began to call myself “IBMark” in the online forums.

The move to North Carolina was very good for our family, and to me in particular. I’ll always remember how at home I felt when I got here. Twenty years later and I still don’t want to leave!

Donald Rumsfeld and his staff have serverely underestimated the resistance U.S. forces are facing.

Many top generals have privately criticized him for ignoring their advice and micromanging the war.

Now, I used to admire Rumsfeld. I even sent him a complimentary email soon after he became SECDEF. He seemed like a smart man to me. And maybe he is. But only an idiot would disregard the advice of the uniformed men and women who actually do the fighting.

It was clear to me early on that this would not be a walk in the park. There is a reason we didn’t oust Saddam during the ’91 war: urban warfare. America’s military strength is ill-equipped to fight this kind of war. Sure, we have giant aircraft carriers, planeloads full of bombs, and plenty of high-tech weaponry. But all of that gets negated the minute troops have to pick the bad guys out of a crowd of friendly civilians.

Mogadishu. Vietnam. We’ve seen this before. There will either be massive casualties on both sides or we’ll simply give up. Truman preferred obiliterating two entire Japanese cities rather than risk American necks by invading Japan.

That is a quiet but persistent thought in the back of the minds of this war’s planners. Taking Iraq and its oilfields may exact a price that America is unwilling to pay.

We have rallied Iraq around a dictator we hoped they would overthrow. We have managed to piss away decades of good will among our European allies and the rest of the world. Our invasion has spurred hundreds of new recruits to become terrorists. And to top it off, we’ve just proven the value of owning weapons of mass destruction by invading Iraq (no WMD) and ignoring North Korea (most assuredly posessing WMD).

This scheme was half-baked from the start by a bunch of clueless chickenhawks and now its beginning to show. I only hope and pray that someone with some sense will get us out of Iraq before things get any worse.

I was pretty sickened to read this from one of the few journalists in Baghdad actually doing his job.

Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be ‘liberated’ by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ‘collateral damage’?

This isn’t a game, dammit. There are real people getting killed. Innocent people like you and me whose only crime was being in the path of an errant missile.

There is no justification for this whatsoever. None. No one will ever adequately explain to me the need for this murder.

I have discovered that I am turning away from some of my dreams of the “good life.” My outlook has changed somehow, and the distance between me and my goals increased while I wasn’t looking.

It wasn’t that long ago when I could see my family and me enjoying a second home. I was close to taking flying lessons. We would have a nice sailboat with which to cruise around on the weekends. All of that seemed doable.

Here I am today, mostly the same person I was a few years ago but a part of me is entirely different. Its not that I don’t still want those things – they’ve just been moved lower down my list. I suppose becoming a parent does that to you, in a sneaky way. I couldn’t have predicted back in May of last year how my priorities would have changed. And yet they have.

One belief I take to heart is “you hit what you’re aiming for.” Perhaps my sights have slipped when Hallie came along. Perhaps they would’ve, anyway. I have decided to adjust my aim so that my target – the “good life” I’ve always seen myself living – is again there for the taking.

I’m currently in the middle of a lightweight read, but entertaining, nonetheless, called Is Our Children Learning?. It’s a blatently partisan but factual account of George W. Bush’s political life.

How on God’s green earth did this guy get this far? It’s the strongest argument I’ve heard yet against social promotion in the school system.

The funniest part of the book is the Bushisms, one of which became the book’s title.

A fresh one from Slate’s website that I couldn’t resist posting:

“The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself.” – Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29, 2003

It doesn’t get any better than that, folks.

Kelly and Hallie are up visiting Kelly’s parents. I’ve spent the evening getting sucked into weblogs again. Seems that every day I find another wonderful source of opinion.

The gem of the evening is Monkey Media, a site which I was going to create if it didn’t already exist. My time spent on various local mailing lists made me realize that the local techie illuminati could do nearly as good a job reporting news as our local news media. Monkey Media was also one of the few places that pointed out the media manipulation that occured during the coverage of the Feb. 15th Raleigh protests. Even without Photoshop, the camera lies, my friends.

More blogging (damn, I lost track of where I got what) brought me to a Slate article on watching Iraqi TV. I have always been an AV geek, and satellite is the mecca of AV geeks. I have also always been interested in hearing from all sides, so you can imagine my interest in this topic. The article lists some Internet-bound methods of viewing, which I personally would pass on in favor of tuning in myself.

Weblogs have not only filled my mind with more viewpoints than the Official One, they have spurred me to define and share my own viewpoints. Bloggers have discovered that communication truly is a two-way street.

Our wonderful administration is whining about Iraq being in violation of the Geneva Convention for parading American POWs in front of the cameras. While I trust our POWs are safe and Saddam won’t do anything stupid, this is exactly what I worried about when we began throwing people in cages in Cuba.

As a sailor, I heard a lot about the Geneva convention. My superiors always talked about it during our abandon-ship drills. I don’t think anyone actually believed the enemy would be so kind.

Nor did I actually expect our country to actually respect it. Bush and gang are punching miles-wide holes through it to justify the illegal detention at Guantanamo Bay.

If the U.S. can’t even give lip-service to this convention, how could I ever hope it would save my butt? If there’s one thing that would do America good (and that’s all I ever want for my country), it would be to stop being so damn hypocritcal about everything. There are not “American citizens” and “everybody else,” for instance. There are only human beings. Let’s play by the rules or not hide behind them.