And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
Negligent noocide.
Ending the violence would be justice enough.
The Russians probably consider that a bonus.
I just decided what the “death by…” punishment should be for the bastards that took down this particular civilian aircraft (and whichever govt. officials made it possible by approving the transfer of military tech.).
This week I had the opportunity to watch the British TV show Utopia, including the first couple episodes of the new season, and the way they wove real events from the 70s into the show’s Big Disease Conspiracy was kind of amusing and very stylish… until yesterday, when I still had the soundtrack rattling around loudly in my head. At some point there isn’t much to say about these kinds of historical inflection points that hasn’t already been prepared in some writer’s mind. Before 9-11 I’d read the Tom Clancy novel where a 747 is used to decapitate the U.S. government. An endless stream of stories have been crafted around plagues and sinkings and terrorist nuclear bombings.
Science-fiction has a wide open market space for predictions that don’t involve these stupid inflections, because they aren’t really jaw-dropping any more. When they actually happen they’re just disgusting and real.
This feels like a hate crime. This does not feel accidental at all. It seems that everyone isn’t happy with evolution and survival, and may not see how abating disease for everyone is connected. This feels like it’s been written to happen this way, like this is the terribly bad, and predictable third sequel to a previously beloved movie franchise you’ve seen a hundred times. I hope we all remember that we don’t have to let this play out this way. I hope that we can find a way to change the script , because the current script is absolute crap.
This level of loss is somewhat avoidable by splitting a group onto separate flights. This has become standard for many corporations when a group of important staff are traveling to the same destination.
Of course any loss of life like this is tragic but I’d hope that conference organizers or research groups would adopt this risk management basic tactic in the future.
Perhaps the group had been been split up, but not finely enough-- AIDS 2012 had 23,000 attendees.
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