In December, the rightwing Breitbart tabloid published an article titled “EXCLUSIVE: Syrian Refugees Bringing Flesh-Eating Disease into US?” The question mark doesn’t make the xenophobic fear-mongering one bit more respectable.

The Breitbart article (with subheadings like “Volcano-like ulcers”) is about an infectious disease called Leishmaniasis caused by parasites & spread by sandflies. For over a year, health agencies, epidemiologists, & infectious disease specialists have been reporting an outbreak of Leishmaniasis starting in 2012 in Lebanon among Syrian refugees in the border region. The reports of medical personnel said the outbreak was treated with medications & contained.

The rightwing twitter world became abuzz with reports that ISIS was causing the “flesh-eating disease” to spread in Syria hoping it would wend its way with refugees to Europe & take out the population like the Black Plague. This likely came from the head of the Kurdish Red Crescent who in February 2015 claimed the leading factor behind the spread of the disease was ISIS dumping the corpses of their victims in the streets. But the sandflies which spread the disease don’t eat rotting bodies; they suck blood from living people.

Far more likely than ISIS intentionally spreading the disease–which would take out their own forces–is the complete destruction of the Syrian healthcare system as a result of Assad’s bombing. Recently, there are also reports of Russian bombers directly targeting hospitals & ambulances.

Health agencies (including the UN, World Health Organization, & the US Center for Disease Control) & epidemiologists report that Leishmaniasis is endemic to 16 of the 23 countries in the eastern Mediterranean region, including Afghanistan, Iraq, & Syria & is always a major health concern. They also pointed out that over four million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries are living in overcrowded makeshift settlements without sanitation, access to clean water, & thus increased exposure & vulnerability to disease.

The pathology of the disease, which varies by climate from Syria to India to Brazil to West Africa, is scary as hell. There are 20 different species of it. Some cause skin ulcers, some fatally attack visceral organs like liver & spleen, & children are the most frequent victims.

According to a WHO factsheet, the primary risk factors for Leishmaniasis are poverty, malnutrition, lack of health care, deforestation, urbanization. About 12 million people in 98 countries are currently infected with about 2 million new cases & up to 50,000 deaths every year. Because epidemics are among the world’s poorest people, pharmaceutical companies are not motivated to develop new drugs or vaccines & it is considered a neglected tropical disease. In other words, it’s a neoliberal pathology–caused by barbaric economic policies that destroy people’s livelihoods along with their healthcare systems.

Any reputable news service would do a little homework on Leishmaniasis before they started sending out red alerts. Breitbart isn’t that. But we will take advantage of their irresponsible, racist scare-mongering–what has been called “epidemiological xenophobia”–to learn about this disease & the pathology of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism.

Photo is a refugee in the Calais camp where thousands unable to move forward to the UK live in squalor without sanitation, access to clean water, or healthcare. Conditions are the same in Jordan, Lebanon, Greece, & elsewhere. To prevent the spread of infectious disease, the answer is simply open the damn borders & provide refugees healthcare & shelter.

(Photo by Philippe Huguen/Getty Images)

Yesterday marked the 207th birth anniversary of Louis Braille, the French inventor of the system now used by the blind in almost every language. Braille was blinded in both eyes at the age of three by playing with a tool in his father’s workshop. His parents went on to raise him without patronizing his disability or treating him as insufficient.

He attended one of the first schools for the blind & found the reading system then taught to be cumbersome. He was a creative, inventive person & at the age of 15 adapted a military code system into the braille reading system using an awl to create a raised dot pattern. An awl is the very tool which blinded him. Braille went on to teach history, geography, & algebra at the school but his reading system was not accepted in his lifetime. His lifetime however was brief & he died from respiratory illness at the age of 43.

Posting this photo of a little Palestinian boy in a refugee camp for no other reason than I just love it. I don’t love poverty & squalor or dispossession but that children often seem to rise above them–at least in some ways. And of course, that is exactly what Intifada will ask of this little guy.

Human beings are vulnerable; we’re also tough. Those distinctions shouldn’t be imposed on a child.

Honor & build BDS (refuse to buy anything with barcode beginning 729).

Under neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, slums are growing by an estimated 6 million people a year due to the expropriation of farmers & rural workers by multinational mining & agribusiness enterprises & by the lack of affordable housing. An estimated one billion people live in them now but that’s probably more a wild guess based on rural migration to cities, only includes illegal shantytowns & excludes the substandard tenements the urban poor have always lived in.

Neoliberal policies incorporate rural areas with huge agribusiness plantations & mining enterprises that lay waste entire ecosystems but also include urban gentrification & development schemes like resorts, swanky shopping malls, golf courses, casinos, IT centers, condominiums, convention halls catering to a well-heeled clientele. The policies dictate that there’s no place for people to live anymore unless they have big bucks.

This process is going on in every city around the world but it’s operating at Mach speed in Manila, Philippines after the supreme court (in obeisance to the IMF) usurped laws governing public property (where most of the slums are built) & declared they wanted the slums cleared by December 2015. That would affect an estimated 23 million slum residents in metropolitan Manila. Resistance to that by slum residents has been so forceful in Manila, that the city finds itself behind schedule–but not for lack of trying.

Every year there have been several slum fires which fire officials–who often show up hours late to the scene–attribute to pirated power, flammable building materials, use of propane for cooking. Fire forensics are seldom reported–actually never reported. Residents most often claim the cause was arson–& with damn good cause. This is all true in slums around the world.

With no provision for affordable alternative housing, residents simply return to their burned out shanties & rebuild–or they go homeless. That’s what’s going on in this photo. On New Year’s Day, there was a fire in the Tondo slum district of Manila & these kids are camping out in their gutted house. Manila has the highest rate of homelessness in the world with an estimated 70,000 children living on the streets & 1.2 million throughout the Philippines.

The reports on the New Year’s Day fire in Tondo–an area with squalid slums targeted for gentrification–are par for the course. What caused it depends entirely on which report you read–three of which cite three different fire marshals at the scene. At least 1,000 shanties burned down. Some reports said cause unknown. Others said it was from a wayward firecracker or a “rocket lit by revelers” which hit an abandoned hut. Some say the cause of the fire is still under investigation–which is where it will remain until hell freezes over.

It makes a good story for fire officials to claim the cause is the fault of residents. It actually sounds quite credible that flammable building materials & propane stoves would cause repeated conflagrations. But it stinks to high hell when they repeatedly occur in areas targeted for expeditious gentrification & development. Residents themselves accuse authorities of arson. If that’s the case, some intrepid reporter or detective should investigate & bring charges for property destruction but most importantly for jeopardizing the lives of thousands of people, including children, elderly, disabled, infirm, & making them homeless.

Housing is a human right.

(Photo by Mark Cristino/EPA)

In her annual Christmas address broadcast from Buckingham Palace, Betty Windsor covered a wide range of subjects in just 5 minutes. She discussed Christmas tree decorations, her honeymoon in Malta, her upcoming 90th birthday, World War II, death & grief, her new grandchild, new Commonwealth leaders, the story of Mary & Joseph’s flight from persecution & the birth of Jesus in a stable.

It’s unusual to see an older woman held in such esteem but without that tiara Betty’s oratorical talents would take quite a drubbing from critics. With that inimitable animation of hers where only her lips move, it isn’t always certain that she isn’t a ventriloquist dummy though we put incredulity aside in the interest of holiday cheer. Her speech was a string of non sequiturs, platitudes, & white lies. Let’s face it: what does WWII have to do with Jesus’ birth? And does she really expect us to believe her kids decorated the Christmas tree behind her when they need valets to wipe their own butts & brush their teeth?

This is reposted from November 2014–just cause I get a kick out of it:

Facebook prompted me to like the Facebook wall “Happify” which would teach me the science-based way to stop negative thoughts & feel happier every day. Apparently the system comes recommended by the NY Times & Katie Couric. Well there is just nothing worse than a negative thought so I rushed to the page to get happified hoping that a stupor or induced coma weren’t required.

Today we start listing all out goals for 2016, most of which those with good sense will abandon by February 1st. Those ‘of a certain age’ don’t bother with that ritual anymore. It only creates guilt which is a counterproductive emotion. Save guilt for a real transgression–like getting into a wrangle on FB. Who cares if we don’t lose weight or get rid of flab? Who wants to look like Twiggy anyway?

There is one resolution we should be steadfast with however because it draws on the highest aspirations of human beings: rebuild the international antiwar movement in solidarity with the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria & build the solidarity movements against occupation & ethnic cleansing in Palestine, Kashmir, Myanmar, & against indigenous peoples on every continent being dispossessed by multinational mining & agribusiness operations. The future they are forging is ours. What’s a little extra flesh compared to that?