Zombie Apocolypse...?

We do have zombies walking among us...they are Obungler supporters.

By VICKI SMITH

The Associated Press

TAMPA, Fla. — First came Miami: the case of a naked man eating most of another man's face. Then Texas: a mother accused of killing her newborn, eating part of his brain and biting off three of his toes. Then Maryland, a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain.

FILE - In this Monday, Oct. 10, 2011 file photo, a sign promoting zombie preparedness displays in a hardware store in Omaha, Neb. After several gory incidents that have been reported around the country recently, online zombie talk has grown. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)

It was different in New Jersey, where a man stabbed himself 50 times and threw bits of his own intestines at police. They pepper-sprayed him, but he was not easily subdued.

He was, people started saying, acting like a zombie. And the whole discussion just kept growing, becoming a topic that the Internet couldn't seem to stop talking about.

The actual incidents are horrifying — and, if how people are talking about them is any indication, fascinating. In an America where zombie imagery is used to peddle everything from tools and weapons to garden gnomes, they all but beg the comparison.

Violence, we're used to. Cannibalism and people who should fall down but don't? That feels like something else entirely.

So many strange things have made headlines in recent days that The Daily Beast assembled a Google Map tracking "instances that may be the precursor to a zombie apocalypse." And the federal agency that tracks diseases weighed in as well, insisting it had no evidence that any zombie-linked health crisis was unfolding.

The cases themselves are anything but funny. Each involved real people either suspected of committing unspeakable acts or having those acts visited upon them for reasons that have yet to be figured out. Maybe it's nothing new, either; people do horrible things to each other on a daily basis.

But what, then, made search terms like "zombie apocalypse" trend day after day last week in multiple corners of the Internet, fueled by discussions and postings that were often framed as humor?

"They've heard of these zombie movies, and they make a joke about it," says Lou Manza, a psychology professor at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, who learned about the whole thing at the breakfast table Friday morning when his 18-year-old son quipped that a "zombie apocalypse" was imminent.

Symbolic of both infection and evil, zombies are terrifying in a way that other horror-movie iconography isn't, says Elizabeth Bird, an anthropologist at the University of South Florida.

Zombies, after all, look like us. But they aren't. They are some baser form of us — slowly rotting and shambling along, intent on "surviving" and creating more of their kind, but with no emotional core, no conscience, no limits.

"Vampires have kind of a romantic appeal, but zombies are doomed," Bird says. "Zombies can never really become human again. There's no going back.

"That resonates in today's world, with people feeling like we're moving toward an ending," she says. "Ultimately they are much more of a depressing figure."

The "moving toward an ending" part is especially potent. For some, the news stories fuel a lurking fear that, ultimately, humanity is doomed.

Speculation varies. It could be a virus that escapes from some secret government lab, or one that mutates on its own. Or maybe it'll be the result of a deliberate combination and weaponization of pathogens, parasites and disease.

It will, many believe, be something we've created — and therefore brought upon ourselves.

Zombies represent America's fears of bioterrorism, a fear that strengthened after the 9/11 attacks, says Patrick Hamilton, an English professor at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pa., who studies how we process comic-book narratives.

Economic anxiety around the planet doesn't help matters, either, with Greece, Italy and Spain edging closer to crisis every day. Consider some of the terms that those fears produce: zombie banks, zombie economies, zombie governments.

When people are unsettled about things beyond their control — be it the loss of a job, the high cost of housing or the depletion of a retirement account — they look to metaphors like the zombie.

"They're mindless drones following basic needs to eat," Hamilton says. "Those economic issues speak to our own lack of control."

They're also effective messengers. The Centers for Disease Control got in on the zombie action last year, using the "apocalypse" as the teaser for its emergency preparedness blog. It worked, attracting younger people who might not otherwise have read the agency's guidance on planning evacuation routes and storing water and food.

On Friday, a different message emerged. Chatter had become so rampant that CDC spokesman David Daigle sent an email to the Huffington Post, answering questions about the possibility of the undead walking among us.

"CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead," he wrote, adding: "(or one that would present zombie-like symptoms.)"

Zombies have been around in our culture at least since Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" was published in 1818, though they really took off after George Romero's nightmarish, black-and-white classic "Night of the Living Dead" hit the screen in 1968.

In the past several years, they have become both wildly popular and big business. Last fall, the financial website 24/7 Wall Street estimated that zombies pumped $5 billion into the U.S. economy.

"And if you think the financial tab has been high so far, by the end of 2012 the tab is going to be far larger," the October report read.

It goes far beyond comic books, costumes and conventions.

—An Ace Hardware store in Nebraska features a "Zombie Preparedness Center" that includes bolts and fasteners for broken bones, glue and caulk for peeling skin, and deodorizers to freshen up decaying flesh. "Don't be scared," its website says. "Be prepared."

—On uncrate.com, you can find everything you need to survive the apocalypse — zombie-driven or otherwise — in a single "bug-out bag." The recommended components range from a Mossberg pump-action shotgun and a Cold Kukri machete to a titanium spork for spearing all the canned goods you'll end up eating once all the fresh produce has vanished.

—For $175 on Amazon, you can purchase a Gnombie, a gored-out zombie garden gnome.

Maybe it's that we joke about the things we fear. Laughter makes them manageable.

That's why a comedy like "Zombieland," with Woody Harrelson blasting away the undead on a roller coaster and Jesse Eisenberg stressing the importance of seatbelts is easier to watch than, say, the painful desperation and palpable apocalyptic fear of "28 Days Later" and "28 Weeks Later."

The most compelling zombie stories, after all, are not about the undead. They're about the living.

The popular AMC series "The Walking Dead" features zombies in all manner of settings. But the show is less about them and more about how far the small, battered band of humans will go to survive — whether they'll retain the better part of themselves or become hardened and heartless.

It's a familiar theme to George Romero, who told The Associated Press in 2008 that all of his zombie films have been about just that.

"The zombies, they could be anything," he said. "They could be an avalanche, they could be a hurricane. It's a disaster out there. The stories are about how people fail to respond in the proper way."

Is race war in America inevitable?

I saw this on JPFO


      Several friends and I have talked about this for the past 15 years or so..  My friend Shell had coined a phrase "Balkinization" back in the mid 90's
to describe the fracturing of America along racial lines.  When the common glue of our language and customs are cast aside in the name of cultural communism diversity, people no longer have that common bond.  Also until recently we as Americans believe that we exceptional, but now due to cultural marxism diversity and affirmative action, we are told that we are to blame for most of the worlds ills.  When a people believe that they can do anything, they can, when they are told that they cannot, they won't.  In the 1800 and most of the 1900,s we were told that we had a manifest destiny
     I do differ with the author of this book I believe that "new africa" if it happens will not be in the part of the south that is Louisiana and Mississippi, part of Tennessee and heading to Illinois.  But that is my opinion. due to population shifts.

"History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen."
Enoch Powell, ex-member of the British Parliament.

Thus opens Thomas Chittum's disturbing book Civil War II. With chilling precision, Chittum outlines the realization that America is headed the way of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia … Balkanization, or, as the subtitle to the book proclaims, The Coming Breakup of America. If our illustrious President wants us to "dialogue" about race, we'd better face the lessons of history that Chittum identifies in this book. You may not agree with Chittum's conclusions, but every American, of any race, should be familiar with the disturbing similarities between the bloody paths other nations have followed and the path America seems to be blundering along.
Chittum is a military analyst who has had hands-on experience with war, specifically civil wars. He fought for the U.S. Army in Vietnam in the '60s, the Rhodesian Territorials in the '70s, and with the Croatian Army in the '90s.
Apparently, multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic democracies don't last very long, if they even get started in the first place. The minute a single race, religion or ethnic group loses a large majority in a nation, that nation begins to undergo internal fracture. Chittum points out that the fall of the Soviet Union had as much to do with an incredible growth of Islamic forces in the various conglomerates of the Soviet Empire as did the arms race with the West. In the case of America, we shouldn't "celebrate diversity," we should fear it.
Civil War II will start in the American Southwest. Actually, it has already begun. It is called the "Reconquista," or in English, the Reconquest. An estimated two million illegal aliens, mostly Mexicans, have now infiltrated and occupied a huge swath of American soil that stretches from Los Angeles to New Orleans and up into New Mexico. Mexican and Latino radicals have already given this nation-to-be a name: "Aztlan." A beachhead has been established. Mexico will erupt into a revolution within the next 20 years. This revolution will either be brutally put down, as in the recent Chiapas uprising, or it will succeed and a new, likely Marxist, government will take over. In either case, further millions of Mexicans, attempting to escape the bloodshed and even more depressing poverty, will flee north across the American border and into the Southwest. The conflict between the whites and the Hispanics will be exacerbated by the fact that one group speaks English and the other Spanish. One group is brown and the other is white. The inevitable "them vs. us" division will occur because the opposing forces can be immediately identified by skin color and/or language.
So re-draw your map of 21st Century North America with "Aztlan" occupying the territory (plus a little extra) that was once Northern Mexico before the "Gringos" stole it. Toss in Southern Florida, because the Cubans are there to stay.
Malcom X, and now Louis Farrakan, have called for a "Black Homeland." Demographics are beginning to outline the shape of this second nation-to-be. Middle class and working class blacks are moving back to the Old South in increasing numbers. As the Reconquista progresses, blacks in Southern California will be stuck between a rock and a hard place; a growing resentment against the Hispanic tidal wave will be mixed with the age-old resentment against the white race. Patience and compassion go out the window when social misery meets ethnic and racial diversity. This is simply a pragmatic, coldly realistic lesson of history. All liberal, social engineering mumbo jumbo aside, when the fecal matter hits the fan, people prefer to be with their "own kind." So draw in "New Africa" on your map of 21st Century America. This will be most of the deep South.
North of New Africa and Aztlan will be an all-white nation stretching to the Canadian border or perhaps blended with several provinces of Canada. In 1992, the white race was 75% of the American population. If one were to travel through only the rural Northern U.S.A., one would likely assume that this is a nation of exclusively white people. Minorities have historically occupied enclaves in cities in the North. In 2050 the white race is expected to have been reduced to 52% of all Americans. Non-white immigration and the greater birth rate of blacks and Hispanics are fueling this trend.
There is a problem that prevents this demographic transition from remaining peaceful. The Mexicans want that land back. They will take it back, not simply ask. Black and white property owners in the fermenting nation of Aztlan will not likely relinquish their property without a fierce struggle. Likewise, southern whites, some of the most irascible critters on Earth, will not gently surrender their property to waves of black refugees. As the bloodshed against whites by blacks and against blacks by whites increases in the South, the black enclaves in Northern American cities (i.e., ghettos) will erupt into street warfare.
The armies are already in place. Our federal government estimates that 500,000 young men, predominantly black and Hispanic, are members of street gangs. These fellows have guns, money and a highly-organized hierarchy, because, as Chittum perceptively points out, the leadership of gangs is decided by cunning, street-smart business acumen (the drug trade), and a merciless willingness to eliminate rivals for power. The leadership of street gangs is Darwinian, while the leadership of our police and military agencies has to do more with whose ass you kiss than whose as you kick. Given equal armament, the street gangs are potentially better warriors.
Don't get mad at Thomas Chittum for his pragmatic insight. His book is controversial and opinionated, but it is not a racist screed. You just might as well get mad at the weatherman who tells you a hurricane is coming. Instead, read the book. Read it as soon as you can, and think long and hard about what is said. Civil War II is available from American Eagle Publications ($16.95, priority post and handling included), POB 1507, Show Low, Arizona 85901, 800-719-4957. Or order it from your local book store (ISBN#0-929408-17-9)