Swine Flu's Hidden Agenda (Four cartoons by Latuff)

...but where is the 4th cartoon?

Smithfield, Latuff, where is Smithfield? A killer disease deserves a killer cartoon. If their lawyers are too much for you then publish it under my name, I'd be honoured to take your flak.

My god - these don't even have your usual saving grace of being offensive. They're just gratuitously, boringly, self-mutilatingly unfunny, like something out of the 1950s or one of those Onion spoofs of unfunny newspaper cartoons.

But then what can I expect when your fans can't even count to four?

001
010
011
100

Yeah, well for some reason the fourth cartoon didn't appear when I posted that. Maybe a technical glitch on my own PC.

However, to claim a cartoon about the factory farmed flu isn't funny is to show complete incomprehension about what great cartoons are all about. They aren't intended to make you laugh. They are intended to make you angry enough to act.

They are too predictable to make you angry.

In fact understanding that some viruses have the ability to pick up genetic material from the cell in which they are reproducing, genetic material of either the cell or as in the case of the flu viruses, a different sort of flu present in the cell at the same time was a key part in humans learning how to do transgenics.

That, in fact is how they do it. They can't pick up and carry around a strand of DNA or RNA. They use a virus to do the picking up and then transfer that virus to where they are trying to transfer the genetic material. Of course they need a virus capable of infecting both organisms, the one from which they are taking genetic material and the one in which they are trying to insert it.

PLEASE -- don't take the explanation of "how they do it" as in any way, shape, or form endorsing doing genetic engineering of this sort. And mainly I was pointing out that in the case of the various flu viruses it's something that happens without human intervention (except that we are one of the animal species involved in the process whereby the various flu viruses create new flu strains).

Remember -- it wasn't scientists manipulating flu genes back in 1918-1919 (the last really big AND deadly flu pandemic -- flu pandemics can be big without being deadly strains and new strains can be deadly strains but hard to catch so no pandemic.

It's not natural, unless you consider factory farms natural. The flu wasn't deliberately developed in a lab, but all the conditions necessary for it to develop and spread were caused by man, in the form of the Smithfield corporation.