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.

Blaming Men For Women’s Groupthink

Gender, Government, libertarianism, Sex, Welfare

You heard it from the mouth of the Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift herself, on the McLaughlin Group. Women are less likely than men to identify as independent or libertarian and more inclined than men to stick with the “major brands,” the Demopublicans (the Democrat and Republican colluding quislings). Awful Eleanor, naturally, blames men for the female conformity and affinity for big government: Women know they can’t trust men, so they look to Sugar Daddy Sam to take care of them (by taking from some to give to others).

Via LRC.com

Via the Pew Research Center come some more well-known yet interesting demographic and socioeconomic correlations with libertarianism.

UPDATED: Lite Libertarians & Fracking: ‘Progress’ Over Private Property (The Cornerstone Of Civilization)

Economy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, libertarianism, Private Property, Technology

Lite libertarians—who always put “progress” above private property—just love fracking, the colloquial for “hydraulic fracturing” for natural gas. The great John Stossel has extolled the merits of fracking in his columns and broadcasts. Myself, I don’t know enough about “the drilling method that uses water, sand and other additives to expand fissures in underground rocks to free oil or natural gas trapped within them.” But I do know about the natural right to private property.

A legalistic ploy like the “split estate,” whereby “the right to develop oil or gas deposits is severed from the surface”—in other words, you own only the land surface, not the minerals below the surface—amounts to a lien on private property. Unless, of course, the “split estate” arrangement is clearly specified in the property deed of sale. Namely, “A” sells the land to “B,” under the condition, specified in a contract, that “A” retains rights to what’s underground.

Currently, some fracking operations are set up on the private land of hapless owners, who either did not know that “mineral rights had been sold off long before” their acquisition of said land. Or, could “still be forced to allow gas mining [on their land], if a majority of [their] neighbors sign leases with drillers.”

“Thin libertarians” think that generally approving of all technology makes them forward-thinking and ever-so hip. However, contra the angle mined by Mr. Stossel and his philosophical kin, the central problem with fracking is that it is done, for the most, in violation of homesteader, private-property rights.

By granting permits to allow vertical penetration of someone’s land with heavy equipment, state lawmakers are screwing the landowner out of his rightfully owned land and the privacy, peace and tranquility he is entitled to on that parcel of land.

Clearly the problem with grants of mineral rights by state or federal lawmakers is that these grants of privilege by government, local or federal, violate the landowner’s natural rights of private property.

UPDATE: In answer to the Facebook thread:

* Neighborhoods could also form a neighborhood association whereby buying into the community came with either a fracking permit or a ban on the practice.

* Reminder: The post is not about “fracking,” but about property rights, the cornerstone of libertarianism—and civilization itself.

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?