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'A few viral particles that are still infectious may be enough, in the presence of a vulnerable host, to revive potentially pathogenic viruses,' warned researcher Jean-Michel Claverie.
Exploitation of oil or other mineral resources in these regions could unleash ancient viruses long dormant in the frozen permafrost, now melting due to climate change.
Zombie Broadcast Notebook
By Garth Mullins Oct 29th
Today at 9pm our documentary “The Coming Zombie Apocalypse” goes to air on CBC Radio One. The final edits are just about done.
In the show, zombies are allegory for climate change, economic collapse and the dismembering of social fabric by austerity governments. But there’s also a little brain eating.
We made the documentary because many people we knew who dreamed of changing the world have started to focus on just surviving its end. Pop culture's obsession with the apocalypse eclipses revolutionary ideas that might help avoid one. And the proposed political and policy solutions are so wildly out of scale with the size of the problems. I needed to find some way to survive the nauseating oscillation between feeling politically defeated and cautiously optimistic. I wanted to know why it’s so much easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
Besides, I’m a legally blind sociologist. What am I supposed to do after the apocalypse? Wander the charred landscape, going from campfire to campfire, offering to do a little policy analysis?
There is something about ongoing impacts Thatcherism and the demise of social democracy that underlines this doomed feeling. She famously quipped that there is no such thing as society. And in the decades since, austerity governments have been doing their best to make her right. She haunts us still. The charred landscapes of our imagination are her legacy.
Major cutbacks at CBC meant that it took us over a year to get the project finished. There were three rounds of deep cuts during that time. Hundreds lost their jobs. In Montreal, David Gutnick showed us around: abandoned studios, empty newsrooms, shuttered workshops: zombie broadcaster.
This apocalyptic obsession grows as wages stagnate, pensions vanish, shelter becomes a luxury, nature becomes a commodity and work becomes a precarious privilege. Its every-man-for-himself capitalism, without promise of anything better. At “decade zero” of the climate crisis, the most optimistic vision of the future is holding global warming to an average two-degree temperature rise.
And our built world is hyper-gentrifying into shining, unaffordable shopping malls. The CBC buildings are on the auction block. They’ll probably be replaced by some kind of luxury housing towers, with faux antenna on the top to harken back to the site’s previous life, as so many developments now do.
People have always proclaimed the end-of-the world. Y2K was supposed to throw us back into the Stone Age with planes falling out of the sky. Cold war nukes and Mutually Assured Destruction brought us close several times. I went to the Diefenbunker to see how the state thought it would survive the bomb. There was a little musy PMO five stories underground. I sat behind my desk and chastised my imaginary cabinet. There was also little office for Fisheries and for Transport. Weirdly, there was even one for the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. I guess they wanted to look after property values during the long nuclear winter.
But for Native American studies scholar, Dr. Cutcha Risling the apocalypse is nothing new. She knows its happened before: “As a culture we become obsessed with this end of the world as if nobody has ever had that experience,” she said in an interview from California. “But there’s lots of Native people who can speak to an experience where they lose everything in these massive waves of destruction.” Dr. Risling Baldy watches The Walking Dead on TV, and writes about how the trauma of that imagined zombie apocalypse parallels the very real trauma echoing through Indigenous nations after generations of colonization.
I also spoke to Caribbean-Canadian sci-fi writer Nalo Hopkinson. She says that it already feels like the end of the world for people of colour living in of Baltimore, Ferguson or other hollowed out inner cities. Mass unemployment, crumbing infrastructure and deadly police violence are normal. “It’s not the apocalypse,” she told me, “its just Tuesday.”
kool maudit » Wed Oct 28, 2015 12:22 am wrote:I have this intuition that zombies are the horror of an overpopulated world, a world at seven billion.
Florida city sends out fake ‘zombie’ alert during power outage
By Morgan Gstalter - 05/22/18 07:17 AM EDT
The city of Lake Worth, Fla., sent out a false “zombie alert” to residents during a power outage.
The Palm Beach Post reports that the message was sent around 1:45 a.m. on Sunday and read “zombie alert for Lake Worth and Terminus.”
Terminus is a city in the popular zombie television show “The Walking Dead.”
“There are now far less than seven-thousand-three-hundred-eighty customers involved due to extreme zombie activity,” the alert read.
The city’s public information officer said in a statement that they’re looking into how zombies were mentioned in the report.
“I want to reiterate that Lake Worth does not have any zombie activity currently and apologize for the system message,” Ben Kerr said.
Power was out for 27 minutes for about 7,880 customers, Kerr said.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... wer-outage
elfismiles » 06 Jun 2012 13:54 wrote:Don't wanna keep the zombie avatar for very long so am switching.
[social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1
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