Category Archives: Pseudoscience

The Obama Ebola Doctrine: Worship The Saints In ‘Spacesuits’

Barack Obama, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Healthcare, Nationhood, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Terrorism, The State

“The Obama Ebola Doctrine: Worship The Saints In ‘Spacesuits'” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… The Obama Ebola Doctrine (OED) was dictated during the second of two presidential addresses, this week, on Ebola. The message, delivered against a backdrop of demigods in freshly unpacked, white laboratory coats, was hardly subliminal. So serious was Obama, he even threw in references to a God not himself, something he rarely does.

The president used the word “troops” to describe the individuals stationed behind him. These public health workers were “serving” America (much like soldiers would). Theirs was a “sacrificial service” (much like that of saints). They were “citizens of the world, global citizens,” who were “leading globally” (as all you locals should strive to do).

Volunteering in Africa Obama has equated with American “patriotism.” Well of course. If being “citizens of the world” is the in existential state-of-being—then patriotism must be redefined. No longer does it mean the love of one’s country and countrymen, but love of The World. Go to West Africa, and you are demonstrating “citizenship … and public service at its best.” In Africa, you will be serving America, “the country that we love.”

The medics who rush headlong into the Ebola maelstrom embody “American exceptionalism” (unlike all those Americans who run businesses they didn’t build).

To the extent that America’s Ebola workers are motivated by “faith,” it is their “sense of faith and grace” that Obama has commanded all Americans to emulate.

The president is now defining for his subjects the very meaning of worship.

Aversion to Ebola, Obama mocked as “hiding under the covers,” indirectly associating precautions with cowardice, even venality.

His Holiness “saluted” Dr. Craig Spencer for “his service”— Spencer is the saint in scrubs who lied to investigators about his whereabouts. He had been gallivanting around Manhattan when already symptomatic.

Is Nurse Kaci Hickox next to be canonized? …

… The Bush Terrorism Doctrine was as follows: We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here.

The Obama Bioterrorism Doctrine runs parallel. BHO’s express objective is to convince Americans that if we fight Ebola in West Africa, it won’t threaten America: “If we [don’t] deal with this problem there, it will come here” …

… The complete column is “The Obama Ebola Doctrine: Worship The Saints In ‘Spacesuits,'” now on WND.

Underpinnings of Murderous Rage In The Age of Entitlement

Ethics, Morality, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

It’s time for the pop-psychology explanations of how an essentially tender soul, Jaylen Fryberg, was pushed to murder classmates at Washington State’s Marysville-Pilchuck High School. First, the carnage, via CNN:

Two girls are in the intensive care unit at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, and two boys are in ICU at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Providence spokeswoman Erin Al-Wazan said.
Three are “very critically ill” with “very serious” injuries, she said. One is in serious condition. One of the boys, age 14, suffered a jaw injury. The other, age 15, was critically injured in the head.

“When the mental health mavens appear on the scene, the narrative expands some, but generally retains its idiotic thrust. Having been played for all it’s worth, the-culture-of-violence causal factor has given way to the more in-vogue bullying theory.

Skin-deep qualities have always determined the pecking order in schools. Still, Janis Ian’s haunting 1975 song, “Seventeen,” would not have been written today. Angry teenagers nowadays are simply less inclined to ruminate about their angst, and more likely to act on it. Social justice, they are taught, pivots on redistribution. And redistribution is achieved by making some pay for the lesser fortunes of others. When taught to reject the harsh reality of inequality, of not having everything one covets—the anger of entitlement easily bubbles to the fore. Be it popularity or pulchritude, there is a sense that someone ought to pay for the pain of being without.

Furthermore, where once kids might have seen dignity in a brave and stoic face, now, the cultural cognoscenti have declared these to be pathologies, symptoms of repression and denial. Is it any wonder that some kids—the bad ones, at least—feel that the culture of share-your-feelings-with-the-group gives them permission to take the rage of entitlement to its deadly conclusion?”

From “Three-Step Program To Moral Unaccountability” ©2000 By Ilana Mercer

Some of this creature’s tweets:

Ebola Is Nothing Like HIV/AIDS

Healthcare, Pseudoscience, Science

Jane M. Orient, M.D., is the freedom-loving doctor behind the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (here’s an op-ed I wrote for the AAPS in … 2000). In a column for WND, today, she seconds the gist of “Obama Obfuscates On Ebola,” yesterday’s post: Ebola is nothing like HIV/AIDS.

Dr. Orient lists the things that make the prevention and containment of AIDS/HIV a walk in the park compared to Ebola. She concludes:

… Reassurances from the CDC, and the public policy based on them, rely on assumptions that are probably not true. The CDC still insists that the virus is not “airborne” – at least not for more than three feet. Barack Obama has said that “you cannot get it through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus.” But the CDC has told travelers who exhibit Ebola-like symptoms to avoid public transportation.
Our robust and sophisticated medical and public health infrastructure is supposed to be able to handle the situation. Like it did in Dallas? Time will tell whether any of Mr. Duncan’s contacts become infected (in addition to the Texas nurse who has tested positive). The Dallas public health department is supposed to be carefully following only about 18. How many more does it have the resources to track?

More.

Related: “Obama Obfuscates On Ebola”

Obama Obfuscates On Ebola

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Science

As a former HIV/AIDS volunteer counselor in South Africa, it is my never-humble opinion that comparing Ebola to HIV/AIDS amounts to politically correct theatre. For one thing, it is not easy to contract the human immunodeficiency virus. For another, the virus is relatively fragile outside the host. Viral load or titer factors into the chances of transmission. And it is both easy and cheap to prevent transmission. AIDS infection rates in Africa have nothing to do with lack of resources but, rather, with unprotected sex irrespective of ample education.

Ebola is the exact opposite. It is not difficult to get. The virus doesn’t easily destruct outside the body. In West Africa, in particular, it is difficult to stop an Ebola epidemic because of magical thinking and a lack of infrastructure.

Front men for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have obfuscated plenty about Ebola. However, Dr. Barack Obola, who should get that growing proboscis checked out, takes the cake. The president has managed to dispense Ebola advice in direct contradiction to even the CDC’s breezy platitudes.

“You cannot get it through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus. … Ebola is not spread through the air like the flu. … You cannot get it from another person until they start showing symptoms of the disease, like fever. … cannot get it from someone who’s asymptomatic.” (CNSNews & Hot Air)

The CDC’s website, as opposed to its media representatives, provides the correct information, distilled by Hot Air:

Casual transmission in close quarters in public spaces is possible.
Spending “a long amount of time” within three feet of an infected person is risky, a scenario that logically includes a long bus ride.
A spokesman for the CDC told the LA Times recently that “I’m not going to sit here and say that if a person who is highly viremic … were to sneeze or cough right in the face of somebody who wasn’t protected, that we wouldn’t have a transmission.” Well, there you go. If there’s a risk of transmission on a plane, why wouldn’t there be a risk of transmission on a bus?