Ross Dothat on Ebola and incompetence.
I promised myself I wouldn’t do it, but I did: While flying from D.C. to Dallas last week, just after the news came out that an Ebola-infected nurse had been allowed to fly while running a fever, I went back and read the opening pages of Stephen King’s “The Stand.”
In King’s epic, perhaps his finest, a superflu with a 99.4 percent fatality rate accidentally escapes from a desert laboratory and lays waste to civilization. King being King, supernatural developments ensue for the survivors. But the book is at its most terrifying in the unraveling with which it opens, when the only bogeyman that matters is a hacking cough that spreads and spreads and spreads. ...
But conspiracy culture, while always resilient, has had a tough go of it of late. From the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina and various Obama-era debacles, the public has been steadily conditioned to fear government incompetence much more than it fears secret conspiracies against the public good. Instead of the Bilderbergers and the Trilateralists and the cigarette-smoking man, it’s Mike “heckuva job” Brown and George “slam dunk” Tenet and whoever was allegedly in charge of the V.A. hospital system who haunt our collective unconscious these days.
Hmm, a Republican telling us that what really concerns him is that government is incompetent. But then, competent government is the enemy. For forty years, Republicans have concentrated on destroying the government, and now they want to complain that they succeeded. It's like all those people who are suddenly surprised that countries we worked so hard to make weak and unstable are weak and unstable.
Alan Feuer is also in the grip of... ebola fever (sue me, I couldn't help myself).
The spread of Ebola from western Africa to suburban Texas has brought with it another strain of contagion: conspiracy theories.
The outbreak began in September, when The Daily Observer, a Liberian newspaper, published an article alleging that the virus was not what it seemed — a medical disaster — but rather a bioweapon designed by the United States military to depopulate the planet. Not long after, accusations appeared online contending that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had patented the virus and was poised to make a fortune from a new vaccine it had created with the pharmaceutical industry. There were even reports that the New World Order, that classic conspiracy bugbear involving global elites, had engineered Ebola in order to impose quarantines, travel bans and eventually martial law.
While most of these theories have so far lingered on the fringes of the Internet, a few stubborn cases have crept into the mainstream. In the last few weeks, conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham have floated the idea that President Obama had sent aid to Africa, risking American lives, because of his guilt over slavery and colonialism. And just days ago, the hip-hop artist Chris Brown took to Twitter, announcing to his 13 million followers: “I don’t know ... but I think this Ebola epidemic is a form of population control.”
Just waiting for the first mailer telling voters that the ballots for the midterm election are contaminated with ebola. Actually, I surprised Mitch McConnell isn't running that ad.
Steven Petrow is also in the hot gossip zone.
There have been only three confirmed cases of, and one death from, Ebola in the United States. But a related condition is spreading much faster: Americans nationwide are showing signs of an epidemic of fear, all too reminiscent of the stigmatization, dread of contagion and panic of the early years of HIV/AIDS. I would know: In the 1980s and 1990s, I was living in San Francisco — a gay man at risk of contracting the disease, an AIDS hotline volunteer and a journalist covering the emerging epidemic. ...
Early in the AIDS epidemic, this kind of anxiety quickly morphed into panic: HIV-infected kids such as Ryan White were banned from schools; employees were fired simply because they were suspected of having AIDS; police officers in Washington raided a gay bar wearing gloves, face masks and bulletproof vests to protect themselves from what was described then as a “lethal threat.”
Dana Milbank looks at... the politics of ebola.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, administered a dose of truth to political Washington this week.
For this honest service, Collins was pilloried.
In an interview published Sunday night, Collins shared with the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein his belief that, if not for recent federal spending cuts, “we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this” Ebola outbreak.
This should not be controversial. His conjecture was based on cold budgeting facts. NIH funding between fiscal year 2010 and fiscal 2014 had dropped 10 percent in real dollars — and vaccine research took a proportionate hit. Research on an Ebola vaccine, at $37 million in 2010, was halved to $18 million in 2014. ...
With Ebola vaccines now entering clinical trials, it’s not much of a stretch to conclude that, with those extra research dollars, vaccines would now be on the market — potentially saving thousands of lives in Africa and avoiding panic in the United States.
I think of it as the Bobby Jindal effect–Step 1: Republicans cut volcano monitors, Step 2: volcano blows up without warning, Step 3: Republicans blame government. Return to step 1. Read the rest of this one. You need to see just how ridiculous the Republican protests on this issue really are.
Then come on inside. It's germ free in there...
The New York Times highlights a message from a disillusioned friend.
Over three decades, the Carter Center in Atlanta, led by former President Jimmy Carter, has established itself as a respected advocate for human rights and democracy. It has sent observers to 97 elections in 38 countries, worked to persuade governments to respect freedoms and human rights, and supported citizens who defend those principles. But it has thrown in the towel on Egypt.
In a statement last week, the center announced that it would close its Cairo office after nearly three years and would not send experts to monitor parliamentary elections later this year. “The current environment in Egypt is not conducive to genuine democratic elections and civic participation,” Mr. Carter said as part of the statement, which warned that political campaigning in an already polarized situation “could be extremely difficult, and possibly dangerous, for critics of the regime.”
The center’s withering judgment is a damning critique of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former general who overthrew President Mohamed Morsi, an Islamist allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, in 2013.
Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, President Carter has worked consistently to address the issue of genuine democracy around the world–which has naturally led to Republicans regarding him as a traitor.
The Miami Herald endorses Charlie Crist.
Rick Scott and Charlie Crist have done such a good job of tearing each other down in the campaign for governor that voters may be tempted to conclude they’re equally flawed and undeserving of victory. That would be wrong. The candidates take a markedly different approach to open government, have contrasting records on the economy, and they’re polar opposites on defining issues for the future of Florida.
But then they go on to talk about Rick Scott's commitment to jobs and his contacts in high places, making this the most milquetoast endorsement imaginable.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Guardian US combine to collect stories of police abuse.
In Ferguson and too many places, police are more likely to pull over people of color for driving - indeed, often for simply being a person of color.
But there is lasting power in the stories people never forget. They are stories of “broken” taillights, of police brutality that doesn’t show up in an arrest report because there never was one, of no justice because nobody knew where to turn.
Some of those stories they found.
My brother, was shot by a St. Louis-area police department. Like Michael Brown, he was also shot multiple times, in the middle of the day, with many witnesses. This was in front of my house. They thought he was selling drugs. ... And the officer’s still serving.
I was pulled over in December 2012 by an officer from [a police department in St. Louis County], who said my license plate bulb wasn’t working. ... the officer stormed around the back side of my vehicle: Get the f-ck out of the car, he yelled. He attempted to snatch the door open by the handle, then stepped back to grab his baton: I will break the damn window, he said. As I opened the door to get out, the officer had his gun in hand and aimed at my chest, finger on the trigger. ... I could have been Mike Brown before Mike Brown — five miles from Ferguson, or anywhere.
I noticed a police car following me, so I pulled over to a meter and got out to put in change. Both officers aimed their weapons at me. My infraction? Tail lights that were not bright enough.
You want to be angry this morning? Read these stories. Read them even if you don't want to be angry. You need to know.
Matthew Hole warns us not to get excited about Mr. Fusion.
Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin's announcement this week that it could make small-scale nuclear fusion power a reality in the next decade has understandably generated excitement in the media. Physicists, however, aren't getting their hopes up just yet.
I recently returned from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Fusion Energy Conference in St Petersburg, Russia, the world's leading conference on the development of fusion power. There was no announcement of research by Lockheed Martin, and the company did not field any scientists to report on their claims.
Lockheed Martin claims that its technology development offshoot, Skunk Works, is working on a new compact fusion reactor that can be developed and deployed in as little as ten years. The only technical details it provided are that it is a "high beta" device (meaning that it produces a high plasma pressure for a relatively weak magnetic field pressure), and that it is sufficiently small to be able to power flight and vehicles.
This isn't enough information to substantiate a credible program of research into the development of fusion power, or a credible claim for the delivery of a revolutionary power source in the next decade.
No but... at least it gives us the chance to be excited about a
good rumor.