Even for me I was on a tear.

http://newfluwiki2.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2356#92400

The SPRS paper is definitely designed to stake out an unusual position – fundamental optimism about dealing with a high CFR flu outbreak.

As such it runs directly contrary to a lot of established wisdom. To really get into the details of why I think it would pan out in a particular way, we’re going to have to get into the dynamics of how a disaster reveals the existing flaws in society.

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Let me point you at the definitive work on how disasters and existing social problems like fragmentation or wealth inequality play out:

http://vx.netlux.org/lib/mjb01.html

(yes, it’s science fiction. it’s also the book that outlined how computer viruses would certainly work in the future – in 1975. it goes so deep into the fundamental human condition of “civilized” man that it is literally timeless.)

So, that done, let’s pick through these points.

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1> Starvation. The vast majority of the near-starvation population live in countries where their governments are The Problem. Terrible land management policies, failed attempts at agrarian socialism and land reform, or herding the poor on to crap land while the rich farm beef for export…

In nations where hunger is caused by politics, there will be bloody revolutions as the poor become hungry enough to simply march on to the land of the rich, and either start farming, or simply live off the available food reserves, as it is their fundamental human right to do. I hope they take full advantage of any chaos which dose arise.

So I basically don’t believe, for a minute, that 2.8 billion people will die of starvation. Some number, sure, maybe a couple of hundred million, but global food production is enough to feed the whole world many times over if it was done without farm subsidies, and with a smaller percentage of meat in diets. The problem is not producing food, it is the unequal distribution of food between poor and rich, and a sudden spike is the kind of catalyst required to effect real change.

What will happen is that poor people will take food and agricultural resources from rich people. How many will die in the process is uncertain, but as with the Black Death, which greatly contributed to the rights of the medieval peasant, I think that after a 50/50 flu outbreak, many fundamental inequalities in the developing world might well be righted simply by the things that people did to survive in the transitional period: slow, constant starvation enforced by land laws and police people (for whatever reason) live with. A sudden global famine might be met by a very different response.

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In terms of food yields, I suggest looking here this:

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5936

Nutshell summary: organic farming in the developing world can match and even out-produce fertilizer-and-pesticide farming. Note that it’s a real study by academics, not a story from organic food apologists.

“”Corporate interest in agriculture and the way agriculture research has been conducted in land grant institutions, with a lot of influence by the chemical companies and pesticide companies as well as fertilizer companies—all have been playing an important role in convincing the public that you need to have these inputs to produce food.” – Ivette Perfecto

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In terms of TEOWAWKI – sorry, I just don’t buy it. It wasn’t the TEOWAWKI of Iceland when they lost 1/3 of their population to Smallpox. It wasn’t the TEOWAWKI of Europe when they lost 1/3 of their population to the black death… that’s really the core point of the paper. Losing 1/3 of your population to disease is a **ROUTINE OCCURANCE** over the past few thousand years, it happens every so often, usually not globally but one continent or another. The human race basically rolls right through it.

Are there problems like nuke plants? Sure. But you know what? Chernobyl just didn’t kill that many people. According to this report, for example, the total death toll from Chernobyl was *** 4000 *** people. Four thousand.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4216102.stm

It’s like a month’s worth of traffic accidents.

So even if we have a couple of hundred nuke plants go chernobyl, the global effect will be approximately not worth worrying about globally. Yes, it would be bad to be close to those plants, and there would be a lot of problems for future generations… but, really? Threat overblown. Is it horrible and difficult to deal with? Will people die? Yes. But even a full-scale meltdown, even a lot of them, would be something people will cope with.

Let me put this simply: Westerners expect to live out their full span, with luxurious access to medical care, constant food supply, and many other insulations and buffers. Most of those insulations and buffers are brought about through a system of trade and military force which pumps 25% of the world’s natural resources into a country with 5% of the world’s population – America – and the numbers are pretty similar for Europe.

That world is certainly not going to survive without changes in a high CFR flu.

But in the developing world, life is cheap. Few people make it to their full lifespan, and those that do occasionally wish they hadn’t. The HIV rate in parts of africa is 40% among adults (Botswana, maybe) and they still have polio some places. Never mind malaria – don’t get me started.

For people who already live in these kinds of conditions, the idea that life is going to simply stop because the nuke plant down the road blows up is just not true. What will happen is that a few more will die of cancer, a few more will be born with birth defects, and everybody else will say “wow, since the power plant exploded, the fruit and vegetables are much bigger.”

Yes, there is a distinct risk of America and Europe losing a lot of the features which give them a vastly higher standard of living than the rest of the world. There is a risk of a general degradation in quality of life. Without swift government action, the people in the cities could indeed find themselves without access to food to import from the countryside to feed them, and have to fan out back to the farms.

But – and this is critical – things like this have happened again and again in the past 1000 years. And, for the most part, life goes on. It’s bad for a generation, then people adapt and continue.

You need a long view to think about things like this. I’m an Indian. My family has been teaching in universities generation after generation for maybe six or seven hundred years, and that’s not at all unusual. My religious sect goes back a thousand years in written history, and probably six or eight thousand years judging by the internal records. Over those kinds of timescales it’s easier to see that, yes, a pandemic could be very bad, but we used to live with smallpox, and it is a hell of a lot worse than most panflu would be.

Basically what I hear people saying is “in a severe pandemic scenario, I would lose most of the privileges which go with being a member of the richest societies on earth, and have to go back to living like the other 5 billion people on the planet, and that is THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.

It’s a problem of perspective. The global poor live in TEOWAWKI already, and a lot of it is maintained by the Western Powers through institutions like the world bank, the WTO, farm subsidies and other impediments to free trade and fair competition. Look what happened to the (misguided, yes, but popular) socialist leaders in South America, like Allende, who was overthrown by the CIA.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/americas/09/19/us.cia.chile.ap/

Or look at the crackdowns on the social justice oriented form of Catholicism called Liberation Theology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology

Yes, pandemic flu is a harsh blow that could *easily* upset the existing global apple cart. But you think that a lot of people who would probably be winners would be losers.

The existing system that would likely collapse in a panflu produces riches and wealth for a few, and starvation and poverty for the rest. It’s demise might be looked back on as the best thing that ever happened.

The West has the most to lose here: aside from the politics, western society functions as well as it does because of massive specialization, and an incredibly complex and efficient financial system. Yes, in a 50/50 flu, things like options trading are gone, and probably not coming back for a while.

But this is what I mean about relative perspective: the West isn’t on top simply because of options trading, it’s on top because of colonialism, militarization of trade agreements, and all kinds of bad practices like overthrowing generations of socialist leaders in South America and other places. These gains are often ill-gotten and, very likely, would be lost in any severe structural chaos during or following a pandemic flu.

But your assumption that life would automatically get so much worse for the poor – that 2.8 billion of them would die – is entirely unwarranted. A pandemic that left the western powers crippled might actually be what it takes to let them get back on their feet.

I understand that this is an *extremely* harsh post. But every day of my working life I deal with the fact that 20 million people a year die of poverty – bad water claims 5 million, indoor air pollution from cooking fires, 5 million, simple starvation at least 10, and that’s before we get into the lack of proper medical care and so on. And the role that the governments of western powers play in maintaining these problems is not small.

Trust me. The poor might be a lot better off after a pandemic flu, even if a billion of them die in the interim. They already know how to farm, they would likely take back a lot of the land that was taken from them during colonialism and turned into large plantations and farmed owned by their ruling classes, and the west’s attention would likely turn inwards to its own affairs, rather than being turned outwards, wondering what is available to be taken.

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Now, this is certainly an extreme counterpoint to your post, but I really want you to understand that I take issue with the idea than in a severe pandemic flu scenario, the poor are basically all going to die, leaving the rich behind. No, the poor are poor, by and large, because of political conditions which the rich have a very strong vested interest in maintaining, and do. When the poor organize to do something about their poverty, for example, electing Allende who attempted to build a computer network to help run Chile’s economy in partnership with British cyberneticist Stafford Beer – a system that might have yielded profound transformation of how economies are run and helped billions – the rich stomp them.

Pandemic flu is a crisis of exactly the kind that is discussed in Shockwave Rider – a crisis which is dangerous not necessarily simply because of the simple fact of the crisis, but because it reveals the deep structural flaws in the entire society which the crisis happens to.

You see the poor simply drying up and blowing away. I see them marching to where the food is and taking it, both on the hoof, and in the grain silos, and on the land which is currently cattle range but used to be their farms.

I don’t deny that pandemic flu on the 50/50 scale would be a global catastrophe, but I think that what would happen is much more complex – and much more **GOVERNABLE** than “everybody will die, there’s no point planning.”

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THERE IS EVERY POINT PLANNING FOR A CFR50 FLU.

There is **plenty** that can be done, that will **radically** cut the eventual death toll, and keep the CAR down. The list is literally endless. I can sit here right now and list off forty or fifty things that could get done that would massively increase social resilience in the face of a CFR50 flu, including things like locating critical facilities close to nuke plants, and moving troops close to those nuke plants. Prepositioning spares, setting up satellite communications nodes at hospitals…

Believe me, there’s a lot that can be done.

http://guptaoption.com/6.SPRS.php is *not about* saying “there is no point planning” but about saying PLANNING CAN HELP EVEN HERE.

Take the humidity intervention alone – done right, that could isolate and stop the spread of the first nodes of a pandemic strain, allowing them to be isolated and a vaccine prepared – while the grid is still up and conditions are good. Done right, it could head the entire mess off at the pass.

So, yeah, I reject “there’s no point planning for high CFR flu” utterly.

The idea that there is no point planning comes from social conditioning that the only way of life worth having is a Western lifestyle of massive consumption, never seeing the food you eat being grown, and living to the maximum age a human body can reach.

Most people never had those luxuries, and would not miss them if they were gone from the globe.

Harsh, but that’s how the world is outside of the west. Post-pandemic, the whole world might be more like the developing world – small farms, small towns, not so much travel, not so many MRI machines.

But that is not the end of the world. It’s just a leveling out of the current economic and political and especially military inequalities.

//RANT OVER!!!