Category Archives: Pestilence

Death Row for Corporations: Getting Crowded

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We used to do this to horse thieves. How about executing a few corporations? (Photo by Joe Hall/Flickr)

In June of 2011, in a post titled Capital Punishment for Corporations: Time to Start, I wrote the following:

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that corporations are citizens, their money is speech, and their right to buy politicians with their money is protected by the Constitution. If they are persons, in these respects, then why should their lives not be forfeit when they commit horrific crimes? We kill people who kill people, don’t we? And if we’re going to start meting out capital punishment to corporations, and I hope we are, I have some nominations for who goes first:

I am still very much of that opinion, and I have a new list of candidates for a corporate Death Row: Continue reading →

The Silence of the Leaves

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The view from my deck (in West Virginia) in mid-October, 2007.

The view from my deck in mid-October 2018. Notice anything?

If you Google “fall foliage 2018,” you will be deluged with Chamber-of-Commerce rantings and tour-operator ravings about the glories of fall and the many opportunities for the well-heeled tourist to revel in it all — for a suitable fee, of course. There’s big money in leaf-peeping, and no money to be made at all from observing that the leaf emperor does not have any clothes on. Well, he does, but they are looking very drab. Continue reading →

New Rule: If It’s Industrial Food, Don’t Eat It

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I knew I shouldn’t have eaten those honey-garlic-onion-cracked pepper-mustard-sea salt fizbos. But damn they were good.

Everything done to industrialize a product — to mass-produce it in large numbers, minimize the unit cost of production, maximize cash profits –at the same time concentrates risk of harm. The profit, however, is immediate, while the risks are almost always delayed, and this fact skews the judgment of the people involved. They come to believe that a healthy profit in hand today is worth any number of sick people down the road tomorrow or the day after. Industrial food is certainly no exception.

Scaling up food production requires the handling of plants and animals in enormous numbers, subjecting them to numerous chemical and mechanical processes performed by regiments of people using battalions of machines. Every chemical, process, person and machine presents multiple opportunities for contamination, a delayed risk for the eventual consumer of the product. Indications are that the risks are getting worse, fast. Continue reading →

Ebolas of Our Own

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Health care workers in Guinea suit up before approaching patients infected with Ebola in the early days of an outbreak that has become a world health emergency. But it’s not the only one. (Photo by the European Commission.)

Health care workers in Guinea suit up before approaching patients infected with Ebola in the early days of an outbreak that has become a world health emergency. But it’s not the only one. (Photo by the European Commission.)

The world is transfixed right now by the awful spectacle of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It’s like a horror movie — it has inspired several — this monster that lurks for years in some remote African cave, then lashes out to condemn with its touch hundreds of people to a quick and ghastly death. Like a horror movie, the revulsion it inspires in us Americans is short-lived, a quick thrill of faux fear (it is, after all, in West Africa) somewhat like a child’s anxiety about a monster under the bed. But in our real-life movie, the Americans who hyperventilate briefly about the Ebola under the bed are ignorant of the fact that there are chain-saw mass murderers at the door and window. Continue reading →