Climate Sunday: Donald Trump Edition

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Keeping with the traditions I make up here on the fly, I have named this week's climate change and environment round-up after Donald Trump, who alleged, as the Tweet above shows, that climate change is a hoax started by the Chinese. (There is so much more raving silliness where that came from it's almost not funny. Almost. But mockingly plow on, I must.) But really--he doesn't know the Swedes started it? I'll give a buffalo nickel to anyone with the stones to ask him for the name of one Chinese climatologist.

Trump is still nattering on about climate change with apparently no more sense than he has about things appearing in the Bible, foreign policy, and how not to look racist in public. As a benchmark, I'd have to say my favorite "kooky uncle-you-ignore-on-Facebook" moment is when he quixotically actually made a crusade of tilting at windmills. When Carly Fiorina drops nonsense about stuff like windmills killing birds, you kind of just want to laugh it off and wonder what she's fixing to do about the damn cats. When The Donald calls windmills an eyesore and claims they don't look classy, you're in meta-territory. They don't look right. Shoot. The Dutch were cool with windmills, back in the day. Maybe Trump just has a problem with strong winds in general.

Anyway, he's not much worse than the rest of the "not-a-scientist" pack at the recent primary debate. Most either ignore climate change entirely or consider it a hoax, and where they don't, they use vague economic excuses about why they don't think anything should be done about it. Sen. Marco Rubio's "America is not a planet" line sticks out for it's half-rightness. Of course, The US is just one country that happens to exist on this particular globe--but exist on it we do. So climate change actually affects us and our responsibility doesn't change because of "Well, what are the other countries doing?" And for that matter, China is often used as the scapegoat--what are they doing anyway? Well, turns out they are doing a thing or two or a bunch. They are losing many citizens to environmentally-related diseases. They can't not realize that not addressing climate change is just as much a losing proposition for them in the long run. And keep in mind that globally, it's always the poor who are most screwed over by the results of climate change. Pretending we'll do nothing because it benefits them is a disgraceful lie.

Failing to understand how climate change affects populations in vulnerable areas as a national security and foreign policy issue is part of what's driving things like the Syrian refugee crisis. People willfully closing their eyes to the reality of climate change because they think it's about dollars and cents, are completely unprepared to recognize that this is not just a humanitarian issue abroad, but at home, when you consider that the western wildfire season has become nearly year-round and is costing our economy astronomical sums. Our coastal regions (where many countries have put their big cities because of the convenience for shipping trade) will also suffer from sea level rise--which is measurably occurring.  We experience significant short-term evidence of a warming planet, but also, some of the oases of supposedly contradictory evidence, like the polar ice caps, are melting away. The so-called hiatus when things weren't heating up--doesn't seem to have actually happened.

Donald Trump is way wrong on environmental issues and basically a conspiracy theorist, just like he is regarding Ebola, vaccines, or whether President Obama was born in America. The idea that this kind of gob-stopping ignorance is thisclose to the Presidency is really scary.

Not On My Worst Enemy--Literally

I hate to still be blogging like it's 2014, but I am fascinated by a rumor going around that there actually may be cases of ebola diagnosed in ISIL-held territory. This is pretty early and kind of unsubstantiated--a misdiagnosis is entirely possible and Mosul doesn't have the facilities to properly test that it really is ebola. (Hell, I'm not even particularly sure where the go-to place to look for an ELISA test from there is.) But it sort of looks like one part of the rampantly weird "worst-case scenario" fantasy of ISIL getting hold of ebola is a little more plausible, considering that there is not reason not to think recruits to ISIL could have traveled from an area where exposure to ebola was acutely possible.

While still filing this under the label of "unfounded and probably unlikely", I do find myself milling over the many ways in which such a thing as ebola spread among ISIL fighters could be a deadly bad thing. Sure--I would entirely "get" people who have a frisson of schadenfreude over the idea of these murderous asshats confronting their mortality in this particularly awful way. At the same time, given that that certain fighters of ISIL have intimate contact with innocent people in the areas they control, there is a pretty horrible likelihood that ebola spreads among any number of people, ISIL-affiliated or not.

Among the horrors that would attend--civil breakdown. There have been stories coming from ISIL held areas that indicate that ISIL sucks at infrastructure. They are "kingdom not of this world" types, and the day-to-day business of roads and schools and hospitals and shit like that are afterthoughts if not targets. They kill doctors and aid workers. Despite the sheer misery that would be visited on innocent people, organizations with the most experience in helping out with such epidemics, like Samaritan's Purse, being avowedly Christian and (vide the ever-giving spirits like ebola survivor Dr. Brantly) of no small personal courage--might still refrain in just this instance because facing ebola is one thing. Facing towering ignorance, belligerence, and beheading for not being of the Islamic faith, is quite another. ISIL have not exactly earned our deepest sympathies. And they have made regions they held toxic to people who would otherwise administer to any other soul. Also, being as ISIL seems to be a batshit insane organization to begin with, I can only wonder at what form of behavior they might lash out with in a crisis situation.

Now, I see no likelihood that ebola in their midst would enable them to weaponize the virus, since I've pretty much levied my estimation of their general incompetence and the actual crappiness of ebola as a bioweapon in the first place. But that doesn't mean that an active ebola epidemic in Northern Iraq towns or spreading through Syria, where refugee populations try to verge elsewhere, couldn't mean astonishingly bad things. All unintentional--and no less devastating for it.

Which is why I really do want to discount this rumor. I can only imagine the very worst.

Ebolacare, Or: What's Killing Republican Comedy

In my post below, I mentioned that Nick Muzin's joke didn't really work as a joke because, as I keep saying, ebola is serious business. But on a certain level, it should work. After all, who could take a contention that Obamacare and ebola are somehow connected seriously?  That's just absurd...right?

And then along comes Alan Keyes:

The Obama faction’s plan to import Ebola-infected persons into the United States maintains the outward appearance of and unarmed invasion while in fact introducing into the country what amounts to specialized “armies of one,” each of them carrying a biological weapon of mass destruction. If and when the resulting infections get out of hand (which seems to be happening despite repeated, apparently erroneous, possibly deceitful, assurances of effective containment) what will be made of the resulting health crisis? When, by way of this sly biological warfare, “Obamacare” morphs into “Ebolacare” what will become of the (always suspect) commitment of Obama’s ostensible opponents in the GOP’s elitist faction leadership to roll back the government takeover of the health sector?  

You know, bringing people infected with ebola into isolation rooms to be treated so they get better is probably one of the least-effective means of using what is already a piss-poor bioweapon (sorry/not sorry, Mark Thiessen) I can think of.  Spreading ebola to make Obamacare look good is...special? Does Keyes actually believe something this dopey? That is below the credibility threshold for a comic-book villain.

Oh, and people buy private health care plans on the exchanges. It's really not a takeover of healthcare. That's like saying "Stop" signs  and the DMV are a takeover of traffic.

It might work as satire, in a Daily Currant kind of way--but this is a real person really saying this thing! How do you parody that?

Sometimes it's Just Too Soon, Dr. Muzin

You know, sometimes a limit of 140 characters is about 140 characters too many. It's too easy to Tweet something stupid. Now, Senator Ted Cruz' s Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor is a seriously smart man--I mean, a doctor, a lawyer and a political advisor--what a trifecta! But you know what they say. Medicine, law, and politics are easy; comedy is hard. He did the right thing and deleted it and apologized, but I have to admit, the partisan side of me felt all nasty and like, "Yeah, and there was no AIDS epidemic before Reagan." And that one isn't meant to be funny--it's just really true.

But there's this other thing--I really don't see any connection between Obamacare and ebola. I mean, it's like a "Thanks Obama" meme gone all wrong, isn't it? And actually, in the case of the one person who had ebola who died here in the States, I still kind of think he didn't get diagnosed properly because he was uninsured. People being uninsured, ebola or not, is responsible for a lot of mortality, and I would be amazed if a smart guy like Dr. Muzin was unaware of that. Why, it's even projected to be true in Senator Cruz's own state of Texas.

Thousands of people have died of this virus an ocean away from our shore, and Dr. Craig Spencer, the patient who was diagnosed today in New York, went to the hot zone and risked himself to fight this deadly disease. I wish him a lot of luck and am confident he's in good hands. But when people politicize life-or-death issues so glibly, I wonder what kind of hands our political lives are in.

Could Ebola Teach US Americans Geography?

The late journalist Ambrose Bierce commented that "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Yeah. As if Americans ever learn geography. Truth of the matter is, that picture to the left probably is where a disturbing number of Americans (well, nortemericanos, anyway) stand with respects to understanding our planet and how she is laid out. (More knucklehead geography is on view at Buzzfeed. [No, but I love Buzzfeed, news and nostalgia and cat videos forevah. It is my #1 time-sink site and I can not lie.])

Basically, even our most elite Americans are totally having Caitlin Upton moments--but particularly about the whole Africa and ebola thing.

No, really:

For instance, at a school in New Burlington, New Jersey, two Rwandan students are staying at home due to other parents’ fear that they will infect other children with Ebola. Rwanda is as close to the Ebola outbreak as New York City is to Seattle.

In Hazlehurst, Mississippi, a school principal’s recent visit to Zambia has led to a lot of parents choosing to keep their kids at home. But Zambia is in Southern Africa, over 3,000 miles away from the Ebola outbreak — the same distance between New Hampshire and Los Angeles.  

A school bus driver in Poplarville, Mississippi who recently visited Ghana is being prevented from returning to work. Meanwhile, in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, some parents kept their kids home when their school hosted two visitors from Uganda.

Seriously? People aren't even Google-mapping where people are from? Can't even do the most basic Wiki research into where folks are and how ebola works and then front that they are concerned? They have the maps--because they have the cell phones. Maps are even on cell phones, now. They have the gateway to non-stupid in their pockets.

So I am thinking the answer is "Nope." Americans will learn geography when the stupid is pried from their cold, dead hands. Or possibly in the case of zombie apocalypse.

George F. Will is Not an Expert on Things.

One of the amusing things about punditry is it convinces the accepted class of mainstream commenters that their opinions on any and all things are valid and probably pretty damn smart.

George Will is an ancient and accepted pundit--and he is so wrong about stuff that Chris Wallace has to drag his ass up.  He unbelievably tries to say ebola is quasi-airborne because...nothing, on the FOX News Sunday show, and literally cannot be told he is wrong. Even the doctors he thinks he is quoting will go on to say he is wrong.

This is of a piece with his shtick though. Like, regarding climate change, where I have raked him over, he trots out the same things even though better brains than mine have said "Stahp".

He's made a spectacle of himself over rape culture to his detriment, and now, he wants to make a brand new spectacle of himself about ebola?

He is an expert about being a pundit who was mildly relevant in the 1980's. Please, Old Media, stop pretending he's relevant about anything else. He's very uninformed. He's like some 1950's sex manual recommending a cola douche for birth control. It's like, that level of embarrassing.

Climate Sunday: Diseases Like Ebola are an Environmental Issue

One of the things I sort of hate about writing about climate change and the environment (don't get me wrong--it's still my jawn) is that it pretty much seems like all the things I ever write about can be looped back to climate change, as if I were some kind of One-Note Nancy or something. But really, there's very good reason to give mankind's weird earth-domination habit the eye for probably unleashing ebola on all of us. And this isn't even the half of it.

West Nile used to be some kind of thing we never thought about in the contiguous 48--but then came climate change.  Malaria, Dengue, Lyme--all things that go better with climate change. Basically, if you are a virus or bacillus that can totes pwn pretty well when things go pear-shaped (which is the thing that makes infectious diseases what they are--they are opportunistic) you will love some climate change. Diseases are migrating because conditions are becoming more favorable for them.  This isn't a problem of border-control--this is a problem of environment-control.

Now, this isn't to say that the spread of odd, dangerous, deadly diseases is the worst thing about climate change (although it's pretty bad). It's to point out that we are all pretty much at the whim of forces that are based in science and that we have some, but not great, control over. The science folks are calling our era right now the Anthropocene, because we have great ability to screw with our natural environment, rendering it--something else.

We also have a great ability to massively autodarwinate, as we should have understood since our mastery of the atom.

But even if we have great ability to disturb the planet we live on--we also are still prey to the littlest predators. And we should take that very seriously.  And we currently don't take it half seriously enough.

Ebola is Serious Business 3: But it Would Make a Crappy Bioweapon

A long time ago, in a reality far, far away from my current internet persona, I spent a lot of time looking into the feasibility of bioweapons for, of all things, a fanfic I was working on. It involved a doomsday virus being used as a bioweapon, and I wanted to sound like I sort of knew what I was talking about. I decided viruses weren't even necessarily your best bet. Fuck it. I'd engineer a bioweapon that was bacterial--you just have more control with spirochetes or spores than getting all random with viruses. Ebola is pretty awful, but it's a piss-poor bioweapon.

See, a bacterium is generally anaerobic and you can keep it on hand, maybe distribute it in a targeted way. But let's say a terrorist had got hold of ebola the old-fashioned way--he caught it from someone. Since the incubation period is up to 21 days, he doesn't even know he's infectious until he has a fever and puts 2 and 2 together. Then he tries to travel. Let's say he's in a country known to have an ebola outbreak, and they are monitoring people for fevers--no trouble there: aspirin reduces fevers. So he takes a bunch of aspirin and an anti-emetic, and boards a flight to Europe.

Welp--No good Obviously Comes From This.

I will be on Fox & Friends tomorrow morning at 7.00. Ebola and ISIS will be topics.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2014

I'm not really sure what The Donald's level of expertise is on the topic of Ebola or ISIS, but he reeeeeaaaallly likes criticizing the president, so, I dunno. I guess he will be doing that thing. Since he was the guy who suggested just letting ebola-stricken Americans die, I'm sure whatever he's planning on saying will be most illuminating.

But now that there has been a second person in Dallas diagnosed with this disease, it might not be a bad idea to look rationally at what has happened. For one thing, as I've mentioned before in the comments, the decision by ER staff at Texas Health Presbyterian to let Duncan go with just a prescription for antibiotics when his fever had spiked to 103 F strikes me as shocking. That's a dangerous fever--a person's kidneys could shut down! A person could experience seizures! I'm not sure why they turned him out for sure--but I suspect to some degree they weren't trained to look twice at what should have been a major warning sign that this guy needed immediate isolation and observation. The infection of the health care worker who tended to him appears to be due to a breach of protocol, and it seems like there is some question about whether this particular facility was equipped to handle this kind of case. (I think it bears thinking about that a health care worker became infected--but as yet, not a single one of his family in isolation show signs of the disease.)

Thomas Eric Duncan, RIP

I am saddened by the death of Thomas  Duncan, who bears the unfortunate distinction of being the first person to die in the US of ebola. I genuinely hoped that our health care system could have done something for him, as it had for Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, but I think that medical intervention did not happen soon enough to benefit him.

I think I want it to be said he is not to be blamed for getting infected and bringing the virus here. I am certain he could not have wanted this. Who would? This was a man who boarded a plane a healthy man and eager to reunite with his partner and son. The fault that gave him contact with this disease was of kindness. He had helped a pregnant neighbor to the hospital when she was convulsing of fever, thought to be a complication of her pregnancy. He might genuinely have not known for sure what she had, and even so, what he had done was very human and humane. There is no malice in getting infected, or being human, and having the disease with one. There is no malice in seeking treatment, and wanting to believe that one isn't gravely ill. This strain seems slow to incubate and comes on like a touch of the flu.

He wanted to be reunited with his family here, maybe to start a better relationship with them, a new life. No one in this world can want to die half ashamed of spreading a contagion, so virulent one must be kept alone, so wretched one's family can't bear seeing you even via camera.

Seriously, Naomi Wolf?

I've visited the odd infatuation Wolf has for abandoning good sense when she has a point to make. (This got me mentioned in the same breath as Melissa MacEwan and Jaclyn Friedman at American Power blog, which tickled me to no end. Higher praise I could not buy.) For a public intellectual who made her bones as a good social critic, she seems to have an issue with applying critical thinking to some of her pet subjects.

So I don't actually wonder how it happens that she is heavily implying some weird conspiracy theory nonsense as being a form of "just asking critical questions". It's one thing to speculate that some of the ISIS news is hype or propaganda. It's quite another to assert that it can all be actually invalidated. She's basically standing on the same kind of shaky ground as, say, a Sandy Hook truther. Throwing Ebola into the "hating American militarism" mix is actually just sad.

I really don't get where she's coming from.

Who Represents the GOP?

We should put Wendy Davis' vagina in charge of the Ebola outbreak. It will kill all of them without mercy and go to Nordstrom's afterwards.
— Todd Kincannon (@Todd__Kincannon) October 4, 2014

I know this one! Todd Kincannon represents the GOP. He is it. He is the guy I think of when I think of how I want to relate to this party. Seriously! Whether it's how he wants to kill patients with ebola,  or it's just being a disgusting pig about a mass murder, so long as this vicious internet troll dressed up in a human-suit enjoys a relationship with conservatism where he isn't actually shunned and turned out, I am going to assume he is a perfectly adequate face of modern conservatism.

Well, not exactly. But seriously conservatives, is there anything you can do about collecting your boy? He's vandalizing everyone's goodwill and being a sick fool in your name.

Ebola is Serious Business 2

Now that there is a patient who came from Liberia to the United States on his own, it is necessary I think, to reprise my original statement: Ebola is serious business. But for the love of all that's good--let's be reasonable, hm? For one thing, I want to boost what Charles Pierce said about how this country can not go on like this. I get that people might feel like giving no fucks about Africa the entire continent thereof and not even a fuck and a half about Africans coming here--but politicizing ebola as if it were possible to indefinitely quarantine our healthy selves against patients in need, even our fellow citizens, let alone a Liberian like Mr. Duncan, is foolhardy. Our healthcare system may be expensive as all hell and have peaks and valleys of care depending upon one's ability to afford care, but when it counts, I think we have some kind of expertise. We have the know-how to contain and even see patients through this dread disease. We need not expect a Sierra Leone/Liberia-like outbreak. But we need to be sensible.

For one thing, the communication breakdown that did not result in Mr. Duncan explaining to a doctor that he may have come into contact with an ebola-infected person even though the CDC put out an alert is an issue. That nurses in the US don't feel properly educated is an issue. And that wankers in the US might try trolling on this issue, fearmongering and politically posturing over various draconian possibilities, is, I'm afraid to say--an issue. We don't need the kind of undue fear that leads to riots or stupidity. We need our media to convey factual POV like never before.

If Americans need a pep-talk on this: We built the bomb and put a man on the moon, for heaven's sake. We fuxxored Hitler and created more than 200 years of something very like a functioning democracy. Seriously, is containing a virus supposed to be beyond us? I say--let our smartest people do their best things. If we can beat the snot out of polio and smallpox, let's aim for Ebola. I feel like rooting for science.

But really, can someone muzzle FOX News? Because...if you want to talk "virulent"...

Ebola is Serious Business

I've been warily watching the ebola situation in Western Africa without saying a whole lot because I kind of took for granted that people would either take it very seriously or panic, which strikes me as just about the right level of interest.

Now, you know me, I am not about to holler "Oh my god! ISIS militants are schlepping ebola across the Mexican border to infect our precious bodily fluids!"

On the other hand, what a bad, uncontrolled outbreak of ebola in urban centers where it has more opportunity to spread can do as far as social breakdown goes, and the potential for the virus to mutate to a more communicable stage, are reasonable concerns. This is a disease with a high fatality likelihood and even more so when victims of it have no access to reliable care--there isn't a cure, but if it is beatable, nutrition, hydration, cleanliness and caring all help. If cases overwhelm the health system where an outbreak is occurring, then, survival rates would be far less.

Donald Trump Would Leave Americans Behind.

For those who can't see the graphic, Donald Trump (The Donald) tweeted: "The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!"

What a bloody noble bastard he is, right? No good deed goes unpunished!

He's speaking, of course, about the decision to have Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol (Americans who heroically risked their lives to assist with the Ebola crisis in West Africa) come back to be treated here in the good old U.S. of A. You know, where we have a funny old ethos about valuing human life and not leaving heroes behind if we can help it. Usually. Unless icky germs and human suffering might be occurring--if you're a privileged ignoramus like Trump, who has been bloviating about the risks in a nice public snit about how "leaders" are crazy to want to treat sick people.