Cholera in Iraq -- more

As the disease spreads south into Baghdad, the poo-pooing* of tribal chiefs from last May ("Oh we have this every year -- never goes anywhere.") seems to have been rather Bushian (or Cheneyan or Rumsfeldian**) in its "I'm all right Jack, fuck you" blase posture.

One more thing about cholera -- perhaps 3 out of 4 infected people never show symptoms (i.e., they don't know they have it) but the bacterium remains active and infectious in the person's feces for around 2 weeks, making the congenial "Here, have a sip of my water" possibly worth your life -- and of course that old saw they tell you about not dating co-workers as "don't shit where you eat" take on life-and-death significance.

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*Not to make light of it, but "poo-pooing" about a fecally spread disease, is an unintended pun.
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** Just in passing -- if I were paying the immense tuition (either by parents or self or student loans) and working my ass off to maintain the academic standards demanded in a top level university like Stanford, I'd be pissed off too, if the Hoover Home for Over-the-Hill Right Wingers was bringing in a War Criminal like Donald Rumsfeld.

SF Chronicle

September 22, 2007

Stanford students, faculty protest Rumsfeld's Hoover appointment -- More than 2,600 faculty and students at Stanford University have signed an online petition to protest the appointment of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a distinguished fellow to the university's Hoover Institution, the latest in a string of campus controversies that involve high-profile names and questions about ethics, free speech and political partisanship...

The Rumsfeld appointment is being protested by Stanford faculty, staff, students and alumni who do not want the university's name associated with an architect of the Iraq war.

"We view the appointment as fundamentally incompatible with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested enquiry, respect for national and international laws and care for the opinions, property and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed," the petition reads.

"This is an appointment that trades on the prestige of the name of Stanford University," said Pamela Lee, an art history professor who created the petition two weeks ago. "The petition is meant as a signal to the rest of the world that Donald Rumsfeld and Hoover do not represent the overall Stanford community."

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----------As much as I have always found most student demonstrations silly, even ones I was in, in this case I think they're right.

If pedophilic sexual predators have to maintain a distance of 2000 feet from playgrounds and parks, then a vicious and apparently soulless architect and engineer of a gigantic mass of Crimes Against Humanity should be kept at least the same distance away from any humans.

Like on the Space Station.
Alone.
Or with Dick Cheney.
And George W Bush.
And Wolfie.
And Dick Perle, the Prince of Darkness.
And Colin Powell.
And Condi Rice.

And, oh yeah, the ghost of Jean Paul Sartre.