Category Archives: Science

Dying For Obama’s Deadly Dogma

Africa, Conspiracy, Constitution, Healthcare, Propaganda, Racism, Science, South-Africa, The West

“Dying For Obama’s Deadly Dogma” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Africa, Like Trayvon Martin, is extremely important to Barack Obama. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the president said famously about the slain teenager.

His fellow-feelings about the continent, the president expressed during the August 4-6 U.S.-Africa Summit, this year: “I do not see the countries and peoples of Africa as a world apart; I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world – partners with America,” he said.

With the wealth of the most industrious, generous and gullible taxpayer at his disposal, the president believes that it is his duty, first, to stop the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, when, in fact, the duty of the president of the United States is to those who pay the piper.

America’s governing elites habitually betray their constitutional and fiduciary obligations to their constituents. The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, claim that restricting entry into the U.S. from the Ebola ground zero is without merit “from a public health standpoint,” and will only worsen matters.

For whom, pray tell, Dr. Fauci? For American nurses? Cui bono Dr. Frieden?

Contrary to the Frieden-Fauci-Obama obfuscations, it is quite possible to both stop at-risk individuals from entering the U.S., as well as assist in curbing the contagion in the hot-spot countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The two are not mutually exclusive. While the U.S. welcomes, on average, 150 daily travelers from West Africa; dozens of infection-free African nations have done the sensible thing to contain the spread of the dread disease. The most advanced of them, South Africa, has “restricted entry for all non-citizens traveling from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.”

OBAMA’S OBFUSCATIONS ABOUT EBOLA
Back in South Africa of the mid 1990s, I trained and volunteered as an HIV/AIDS counselor. My last client, before I decamped to North America, was a lovely gay man who had just been diagnosed HIV positive and whose CD4-cell count was already low. He wept in my arms for hours.

My point: Comparing HIV/AIDS to Ebola, as the Frieden-Fauci duo has repeatedly done, amounts to politically correct theatre. …

… Read the rest. “Dying For Obama’s Deadly Dogma” is the current column, now on WND.

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.

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?

Parrot Smarts

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intelligence, Science

Those of us who’re owned by a parrot know of their great intelligence and wish the general public would come to sympathize with their plight in the wild and in captivity. Scientists are slowly becoming hip to this remarkable intelligence. Hat tip to Marc Harper for “Cockatoos teach tool-making tricks”: “Cockatoos learn to make and use tools when shown by another bird, research reveals.”

And Goffin cockatoos have now shown an impressive ability to learn from one another how to use and even how to make tools.
A team of researchers has discovered that the birds emulate tool-making tricks when they are demonstrated to them by another bird.
The results are published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.
The researchers are interested in what they call “technical intelligence”, which is essentially animals’ ability to use objects to solve problems.
It confirms how innovative and how adaptable this species is to novel problems”
“Cockatoos are very interesting for this, because they’re very playful with objects,” explained lead researcher Dr Alice Auersperg, from the University of Oxford and the University of Vienna.
She and her colleagues had already noticed that one of birds in their research aviary, named Figaro, spontaneously used sticks to drag nuts under the bars.
Figaro also worked out how to make his “fishing sticks” by stripping long, thin pieces off a wooden block in his enclosure.

For me the more remarkable aspect of a Cockatoo’s fashioning of a tool to retrieve a treat is the superior intelligence of the one bird and the flock’s ability to learn advantageous behavior from this leader.

The one researcher, however, seem a little dim in his disbelief, postulating that the observed learning is but “trial and error learning,” as if the two were mutually exclusive faculties. I wonder how this skeptic thinks kids learn? Modeling, schedules of reinforcement, trial and error: has this guy heard of B. F. Skinner?

Parrots are flock animals: They watch each other, need each other and learn from one another as a matter of survival. In the absence of a flock, humans become their family. Thus nothing is crueler than isolating a parrot.