E. coli barackus.

The most onerous expression of idolatry in the modern era was the communist conceit that the scientific ordering of society can eliminate uncertainty. Scientific socialism was supposed to eliminate economic crises and war; instead, it brought about 100 million deaths and reduced once-prosperous countries to penury. Seventy years after its founding, the entire value of the industrial plant of the Soviet Union and its satellites was less than its scrap value . . . . Russia and its former satellites have such low fertility that their populations will fall by between one-third and one-half by mid-century. Europe's nanny-state version of social democracy is a low-grade version of the same infection.

On this side of the Atlantic, Democrats, long since hollowed out by progressives, socialists, and fellow-traveling lunatics (whatever distinction between these there may be) -- voted in by morons who think the hideous misery of the last century is distilled in the terms “Dick Cheney,” “Moral Majority” and “corporation” -- labor as you read this to inject that same bacillus here.

"A Commedia for our times." By Spengler (David P Goldman), Asia Times Online, 1/5/10.