To Panic over Ebola, or Not to Panic over Ebola

The outbreak of the disease known as Ebola has claimed nearly 1,000 lives, and it is spreading. It’s far too early to start panicking in the United States, though. Remember, Outbreak was not a documentary.

If you are seriously frightened, here’s a helpful, albeit snarky, flowchart that has been making its way around social media the past few days regarding fears of contracting Ebola:

ebola-flowchart

Author unknown

This is not to say that we should take the outbreak lightly, but rather that we should not panic and should not rush to make it personal. If you want to learn more, Huffington Post offers a more medically-oriented guide to understanding the disease, how it spreads, and how it progresses: Continue reading

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A South Texas Rancher’s Perspective

Hugh Fitzsimmons is a rancher in Dimmit County, Texas, part of an area once known as the Wild Horse Desert. He offers his perspective on the current situation on the U.S.-Mexico border. Unlike most people, Mr. Fitzsimmons has seen what’s going on firsthand. He describes how fear and compassion can go hand-in-hand.

Map of Texas highlighting Dimmit County

Not pictured: Mexico, but it’s close by.

He starts with the frightening:

One incident sparked this fear, which has since wormed its way into my psyche. In the spring of 2005, three members of a gang accosted me while attempting to break into my home. I stopped them, but I feared for my life.

Then he moves on to the merely notable: Continue reading

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What I’m Reading, July 31, 2014

Conservatives Resort To Lying About Child Refugees’ Vaccination Rates To Justify Their Deportation, Omar Araiza, Burnt Orange Report, July 29, 2014

Conservatives are coming up with multiple kinds of excuses in order to deport the Central American child refugees, all while trying to hide their true prejudice against them. Case in point: “Our schools cannot handle this influx, we don’t even know what all diseases they have. Our health care systems can’t withstand this influx,” recently said U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, trying to make a healthy safety case for deportation and “war” against these children.

Sadly for conservatives, their excuses and lies simply don’t match up to the facts. In a horrible twist of irony, according to statistics by the United Nations, Central American children have a higher vaccination rate than U.S. children.

And whose fault is this? The very same conservative officials and voters in America raging war against vaccinations, and health insurance coverage. [Emphasis in original.]

Mississippi’s last abortion clinic to stay open —  for now, Irin Carmon, MSNBC, July 29, 2014 (h/t Scott Lemieux)

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What I’m Reading, July 30, 2014

Can We Just Be Honest, For Once? BooMan, Booman Tribune, July 28, 2014

I love how this country devises new ways to always avoid taking responsibility for its past mistakes. Did we torture people to death for no good reason? Oh well, we can’t admit it or our soldiers deployed overseas will be put at risk. This is why we never saw many of the more appalling photos from Abu Ghraib. It would have inflamed international opinion and made people want to kill our troops.

***

[L]et’s stop being idiots and admit that people already are killing our people because of what we did and that the best way to assure that our people don’t do it again is to just be fucking honest, for once, about what was done in our name.

How Did the GOP Turn Into Such a Bunch of Clowns? Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, July 24, 2014

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What I’m Reading, July 25, 2014

If old white men feel maligned, they should take their own advice to minorities, Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post, June 2, 2014

If older white men feel maligned, they might try taking some of the recommendations that they routinely offer to people of color and women who want to better their lot. These suggestions are often presented as radically simple solutions to centuries of structural inequality. In reality, they function mostly as an attempt to make people with legitimate grievances less irritating to the powerful figures who might be expected to respond to their demands.

Africa Is Not a Derailment Tactic: Why Belittling ‘First World Problems’ Is Oppressive, Sian Ferguson, Everyday Feminism, July 11, 2014

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What I’m Reading, July 23, 2014

The Barbarism of ISIL, the Taliban and Wahhabism and collapse of hegemonic ideology, Ian Welsh, ianwelsh.net, July 19, 2014

Don’t use barbarians as your proxies. Saudi Wahhabism and its offshoots is fundamentally in opposition to secular Western enlightenment society. Doing business with such people undermines the core ethics of our own system of ideology.

This does not mean neo-con style perma war. It means showing that our ideology produces better outcomes for them than their own ideology does. Through the fifties and even into the seventies, secularism rose in the world because it was seen as providing better outcomes. It was constantly undermined by the actions of the United States in overthrowing democratic governments they didn’t like. Noticing that the West didn’t believe in its own ideology (at least not for Muslims, and today not even for its own citizens), and that they could not share in the prosperity of secular democracy and socialistic capitalism, is it any wonder that many turned to another strong ideology?

Not every international crisis is about Obama, Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 21, 2014 Continue reading

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What I’m Reading, July 11, 2014

The American myth about entrepreneurs is dying, Eric Garland, Eric Garland Blog, May 20, 2014

America used to have a myth that it supported and honored entrepreneurs. I was certainly raised with it. My father owns a farm store, my mother ran a pie shop, my sister has a dance school, my Italian grandparents had their own bakeries, et cetera. I always thought that owning your own business was not only possible, it was preferable, somehow more noble than working in the boiler room of someone else’s company. I am an American, and it wasn’t until I arrived in Paris that I realized that this was a myth which had not been internalized by everybody, everywhere. In France, I was forced to confront the notion that some people saw small business as being a petty, money grubbing merchant who could not survive in the larger, more important world of state institutions and major businesses. Quite a shock, really.

Yet this is a myth I still cherish and here’s why: small businesses tend to produce the greatest job growth. Huge companies are more dominant in an industry, but small companies are the most likely to grow and create a new position with wealth, a tax base, a market for other businesses and all that good stuff. Yet our policies are making the world more friendly to the big and more hostile to the small. There was a guy who wrote about this a lot in the 18th century: Adam Smith. In his Wealth of Nations, he saw large businesses protected by the government as unjust and inferior to smaller businesses with accountability to their neighbors. His theory was called capitalism and we have gotten away from it in recent years.

Americans need to Answer: When Will Palestinians get their Fourth of July? Juan Cole, Informed Comment, July 4, 2014 Continue reading

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What I’m Reading, July 10, 2014

football v. fútbol — it ain’t just sports, Greg Fallis, gregfallis.com, June 27, 2014

[T]he U.S. is a football nation; the places where we’ve been engaged in combat are fútbol nations. We’re talking two different sports with radically different philosophies. Those philosophies can be seen as metaphors for the ways we wage war. American football is a great metaphor for waging large-scale land and sea wars. The U.S. totally kicked ass in World War II. But for your more modern asymmetrical conflicts, fútbol is the ticket.

***

Here’s why. Football is centralized and authoritarian. Command and authority is channeled through coaches and advisers who aren’t even on the field. The information is relayed to a single individual who reveals those orders to the players. In other words, you’ve got old guys who don’t have any skin in the game making most of the decisions. This is thought to be a good thing, because their decisions can be made in a cold, dispassionate, logical way. Most of the individual players on the field don’t need to know what’s going on overall; they just need to follow instructions and do their fucking job. On the other hand, it means if communications fail, or if the defense takes out the quarterback, the team on the field is thoroughly fucked.

We, the people are violent and filled with rage: A nation spinning apart on its Independence Day, Jim Sleeper, Salon, July 4, 2014 Continue reading

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Uncompassionate Conservatism

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has a solution to the humanitarian crisis brewing at the U.S.-Mexico border, as thousands of unaccompanied minor children flee horrific atrocities in Mexico and Central America. Send the little lawbreakers back.

Cruz asserted that “the most heartbreaking aspect of this is you look at some 90,000 little boys and little girls coming in illegally, the people bringing them in, they’re not well-meaning social workers.”

“These are hardened, transnational, global carters,” he insisted. “They are cruel, vicious men. These little boys and little girls are being subjected to physical violence, to sexual violence.”

According to Cruz, drug cartels “cut off and send back body parts” of children to try and force their families to pay a ransom.

“They will force one little boy or one little girl to cut off the fingers or ears of other little boys or little girls,” he pointed out, adding that officials told him that children immigrating to the U.S. had been “maimed.”

“This is heartbreaking, and it is the direct result of President Obama’s lawlessness,” Cruz said.

But the senator proposed a solution: Send the children back to the countries where they had been mutilated and raped.

“The children will not stop coming, and will not stop being subjected to this horrific physical violence and sexual violence unless and until this administration begins enforcing our laws,” he warned. “That is the opposite of a humane policy.”

I’m still unclear how President Obama is wholly to blame for everything going on in various parts of Latin America right now, but I suspect that clarity is not the point for the Senator that my state shamefully elected.

I just want to know—specifically—which laws Senator Cruz thinks President Obama could enforce that would somehow end all of this and, presumably, allow all of these children to return to their homes on a wave of flowers and puppies. (Of course there are no such laws, or at least none that could offer any sort of solution to the conditions as they currently are. The Senator is just using whatever scenario presents itself to bash the President. If a group of children from, say, El Salvador had marched up to a border crossing in California requesting asylum in exchange for a verified cure for cancer, Senator Cruz would want to know why Obama hadn’t come up with the cure himself, since he’s supposed to be smart and stuff. Then he’d suggest he bomb the capital of El Salvador for withholding vital medical knowledge from American pharmaceutical companies. Then he’d eat a live goat as a sacrifice to the bald eagle god he secretly worships……okay, I’ve said too much.)

Fir0002 at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons

“Wait, what was that last part?”


Photo credit: Fir0002 at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], from Wikimedia Commons.

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