14A048 Boo! by Jim Davies, 10/13/2014    

It must be quite discouraging to horror-fiction writers like Alex Knight and Stephen King, to see in the headlines every day what the FedGov is up to in real life. How can they and the makers of Halloween costumes and frighteners compete, with such existential terrors?

They may have changed - or been augmented - by next week, but the current horrors are the fiasco East of the Med, and the Ebola plague. Either is enough to scare most folk to the point of wanting a Great Protector, and that is precisely the object of the exercises.

What, is Ebola made in D.C.? - oddly enough it apparently was, though it doesn't matter a whole lot. What matters is that it's there, and poses a serious threat or crisis, and therefore we need a wise and powerful government to do something about it. What else are crises for?

Nonetheless, the fact is verifiable: the US Government holds a patent on the Ebola virus. It does so in the name of Jonathan S Towner (who may be fictional) and the patent number is US 20120251502 A1. Patents are granted in respect of inventions. So, the FedGov invented Ebola. Why?

Butler Schaffer lists six possible reasons. Pay your money, take your choice. Perhaps there is an innocent explanation for this, but prima facie it appears that the Feds created a plague that Nature would not have visited upon humanity. In either case, its heroic CDC is working day and night to prepare a vaccine to cure it, upon delivery of which it will be everywhere hailed as a savior. Well, not quite everywhere.

Meanwhile the plague has taken hold, in West Africa - though not, interestingly, in Nigeria. It will be fascinating, in due course, to learn why not. The FedGov's first reaction was to ship a supply of military personnel to the region. No, it surely cannot be that the "Defense" Department supposed that any enemy, even a viral one, can be defeated with guns? If not, though, one wonders why soldiers are needed for work that obviously requires nurses and physicians.

Its next move was to parade Thomas Frieden of the CDC on September 30th to assure us that “we will control this case of Ebola so that it does not spread widely in this country." His words were contradicted by reality within a week, when Thomas Duncan, who had brought it to Dallas from Liberia, died. The Liberian government showed its compassion prior to his death by promising to prosecute him. Just the thing, to encourage a desperately ill patient struggling to keep a hold on life; die, or recover and head for prison. Some choice. That prosecutor helped kill him.

Second in the current Government Horror Show is of course the bloodbath in Iraq and Syria. Mulsim fanatics are establishing a state (without UN permission!!) in land taken by force from those countries, and at this writing are trying to take some from Kurds, a relatively inoffensive group. The Iraqi government won't intervene because US occupation for 11 years drastically weakened its army, which must first protect Baghdad anyway. The Syrian one won't because it's out of US favor, and is busy with other rebels. The Turkish one won't because Kurds have been a nuisance on Turkish territory, and because any action against ISIS would help Syria, which it hates. Iran might help, but would have to go through Turkey or Iraq, and in any case is out of US favor. So it doesn't look good for Kurds.

The 2003 US intervention caused all this mess, and the blowback is that all over the region Muslim hatred of everything and everyone American is intensifying. Revenge may very well be taken, and it will likely be upon real people like you and me (the scary bit) - not on the villains who caused it all. Expect no improvement, while government survives.

US intervention also, apparently, furnished a more immediate cause: ISIS leaders were trained by the CIA, in Jordan, in 2012, for the purpose of waging a proxy war on Syria - which the US could not attack more directly after Putin had skilfully outmanoevred Kerry. Then, presumably, they turned on their trainers and pursued their own agenda. Oops!

Or, did they? Was the creation of the present chaos (or any like it) always the US intention? That too is credible, for what matters to the morons in D.C. is that mayhem and crises exist, so as to scare the US population and keep it dependent. So the FedGov is exploiting both these horrors the better to expand its power over us, and may even have manufactured the pair of them.

After the coming great implosion when a zero government society has gotten into gear, the annual celebration of a harmless Halloween may resume. I don't promise that, and in fact I rather hope it doesn't; it seems to me a macabre celebration. All Saints Day (the one after) is much healthier, when heroes are remembered. I think there will be many new names to add to the usual religious ones; those who had the vision to see that government should be eliminated, that it could be eliminated, and who actually helped cause it to be eliminated.

In the meantime, ain't we got fun - while we each find one friend a year to join TOLFA, there's a bumpersticker worth sporting. It goes something like: