Rebuilding Humanity- Cedar Sanderson
I had to write a paper this week on the state of human trafficking in the Balkans. As I wrote for the paper, this requires a deeper understanding first, of the current and historical role of police in the region, the socio-economic status of the people in the region who participate in trafficking, and finally, the role of external monitors who ostensibly would be a deterrent to such trafficking. However, outside the confines of the classroom, I can add my own editorial comments about the state of affairs morally and politically that has led to this situation. Slavery, and in particular what is now euphemistically termed ‘human trafficking’ has been around since the dawn of time. This is evident in literature and archaeological evidence from the dawn of pre-civilization eras. How is it possible such an archaic tradition can linger on it our enlightened world?
The more modern woes came about with the fall of communism, and in the struggles that followed, as a generation of people brought up without the ‘burden’ of Western morality and religious teachings tried to make ends meet in any way they could. That they could sell their wares, as it were, to the ‘more civilized’ UN peacekeepers and various NGO personnel is indicative of other issues, more close to home for those of us who frequent this blog. I am going to allow you to draw your own conclusions, and suggest your own resolutions to these problems. I am merely going to say that when the philosophy that is taught either directly, or by omission, is morally bankrupt because morals are no longer a thing, and good is indefinable, then what is evil?
The shattering of the former communist state of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s led to the creation of several smaller states in the early 1990s, and a civil war that tore the new countries apart from their beginning. Previous to this, however, the police during the reign of the communist Tito were tasked with many other things than an American observer would anticipate, as the role of the police in the United States is quite different. Aleksa Djilas, in an article for Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/51216/aleksa-djilas/tito-s-last-secret-how-did-he-keep-the-yugoslavs-together) says, “The main guarantors of Yugoslavia’s unity were the communist police and army. No force in the country could challenge them, and Tito always had complete control of both.”
During the civil wars the police took on an even uglier role, as discussed by Dr. Robert Winslow,
“At the end of May, Federal and Serbian Government authorities began exhuming five mass grave sites discovered near the towns of Batajnica, a suburb of Belgrade, and Petrovo Selo, in eastern Serbia. More than 300 bodies were recovered during the year; an estimated 700 bodies are expected to be found. The victims were assumed to be ethnic Albanian men, women, and children, most likely victims of 1999 massacres by the Yugoslav police and army in and around Pec in Kosovo.”
(http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/rwinslow/europe/yugoslavia.html)
Is it any wonder, then, that the people in the Balkan states fear and despise their police forces? The European Union has made it a part of their criteria that the police must be separated from their former roles in the military, de-politicized, and reformed before the EU will accept the new states. To this end, the United Nations has been working with the new nations for the last decade and a half to restructure and reform the police from a terror group to trusted law enforcement agents.
Human trafficking in the Balkans exploded in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union (and that of Yugoslavia in the same time frame). “By the mid-1990s, the Global Survival Network estimated that upwards of 500,000 women were being trafficked from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union into Western Europe each year.” (Human Trafficking, Human Security and the Balkans.) We now know that the economy of the Soviet states was stretched beyond bankruptcy. The estimated national income of a Serbian, for example, was only $988 USD. The new reality was that in a warn-torn land, with unemployment keeping more than a quarter of the workers from earning a living, the temptation to make a living through crime was insurmountable. For the first time, a measure was pushed through the UN with the funding that made it seem possible to combat the wave of traffickers. Friman writes
“Unlike earlier steps against human trafficking, the United States also supported the Trafficking Protocol through funding for foreign anti-trafficking programs and personnel training, and, more importantly, threats of shame and sanction linked to assessments of the activities of foreign governments as published in the annual TIP Report” ((Human Trafficking, Human Security and the Balkans.)
Unfortunately a great deal of debate has slowed the fight against human trafficking, as there is no firm definition of what it is, and thus, what actions should be taken against it. Another paper from the same year (2007) points out that perhaps a ground-up approach would be more effective.
“Many of these actors respond to human trafficking as if it were a social and criminal phenomenon that can be isolated for moral condemnation and addressed separately from other problems. Such efforts, we argue, are destined to fail, because the connection between trafficking and poverty, unemployment, discrimination, violence in the family, and the demand in countries of destination is undeniable.” (Combating trafficking: international efforts and their ramifications)
With the United Nations, then, tasked with peacekeeping in the area, one might expect the incidence of trafficking to be reduced. Instead, we see between 1999 to 2004, the premises listed as being suspected of forced prostitution local to the peacekeeping forces rise from four, to well over two hundred. While the initial patrons inviting these establishments to believe they could make money and risk the penalties may have been the UN personnel, it is now believed that their patronage is also significantly local.
Sadly, the UN peacekeepers have been implicated worldwide and for many years in atrocities either implicitly, or complicitly. In Africa, in 2008, in the Congo
(http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2009-10-13/dr-congo-civilian-cost-military-operation-unacceptable), in 2011, in the Ivory Coast (AP, 2011), and again in Congo, in 2012 (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-20422340). The BBC, in investigating the Ivory Coast claims, found many who were willing to come forward about what they had endured at the hands of the purported ‘peacekeepers.’(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7420798.stm)
“A 13-year-old girl, “Elizabeth” described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home. “They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me… I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing,” she said. “I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.” No action has been taken against the soldiers.”
Reports of “Rampant corruption”( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/17/AR2007121701914.html) have been brought forth since the early 1990s against UN peacekeeping missions in Africa, the Balkans, and Cambodia. “In response, in 1994 the United Nations created the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), but it has a poor record of holding corrupt officials to account.” Stepping forward twenty years, we see again that little has changed. Mark Pyman of Transparency International:
“There is external corruption in the host nation which is “likely to be endemic” and where greater efforts are needed to keep it from becoming embedded, he said, and there is corruption within the peacekeeping force which needs stronger oversight than the U.N. has today.” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/09/united-nations-corruption-report/2956565/)
It seems clear that not only is the UN neutered when it comes to real power, it is a corrupting influence on countries where it is supposed to bring peace and stability. Or perhaps it is corrupted by those nations? Whatever else is or is not clear, it is certain that history weighs on this part of the world, and it cannot be ignored in looking at today’s reality. The states and their newly-minted police forces did not spring forth fully-formed, as Athena from the head of Zeus, and they are in need of guidance and support if they are to fully return humanity to countries ravaged by war and reduced to animalistic behavior under the veneer of civilization. What can accomplish this? No less, I would suggest, than solid educations and the freedom to make their own choice, to build their own markets and sell what they can, to bring their nations up out of the pits they have been cast into by the scourge of what came before. Who can give this? Ah, now there is the question. Not, I think, the USA, which is still a bastion but would do well to look within for the signs of that corruption of police and politics that led to the likes of Tito ruling over a nation that only endured until his iron fist was gone before shattering in a bloody mist of lost lives and innocence.
According To Hoyt 
One simple thing tells you we are past the tipping point to join that sort of horror here. The police hide their faces.
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+1
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Wasn’t it Col. Cooper that said only a bad man need wear a mask?
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A distinction needs to be made between those who wear masks and those who wear gas masks.
Since Vietnam assaults with biological agents– from spit to blood to possibly more dangerous things– have been relatively common among activists, and don’t get me started on throwing things that cause permanent blindness at folks.
Don’t conflate into the “pushes old ladies” category those who shove them in front of buses, and those who shove them away from buses.
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While our police are admittedly orders of magnitude better than theirs, the attitude that they can do what they want, because they are the ‘authority’ and we all must accept it is pervasive.
This is not helped when we have ‘conservatives’ like Mike Gallagher /spit/ who advocate always doing exactly what the police tell you to, and will take their word over anybody else’s, or any evidence to the contrary; because they are the ‘authority.’
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The big problem that I see, is the European model of policing seems to lean toward State police, which brings politics into play. America, on the other hand, has historically been a lot more interested in the Rule of Law, and not in doing things like, say, chasing down dissidents. This is what we need to watch for, and squelch on a local level, which we can do. There are some 18,000 individual police forces in the US. Let’s keep it that way.
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You mean be on the lookout for something like this:
http://thetruthwins.com/archives/72-types-of-americans-that-are-considered-potential-terrorists-in-official-government-documents
;)
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Or the ruling by a judge the other day that a Mayor is allowed to send in the SWAT team to shut down a parody website?
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Well, that was Illinois. One of the current slave states.
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I used to know a man from Palatine Illinois, retired to Mexico and said la mordida made him feel right at home. It allowed him to enjoy his new life same as the old.
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Given how much of a money machine “Civil Forfeiture” has become for some police/sheriff departments, I don’t see me just calmly doing whatever the police tell me to do. Well, once I have an attorney and am sure I won’t be shot while resisting or anything stupid like that.
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I’ve found that it’s useful to ask the Mike Gallagher types to imitate the founding fathers who didn’t trust any public power base. Cops need oversight that rests light on the honest cop and is efficient about retiring the bad actors, no matter where they are.
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The answer is simple, AND horrifying: It’s NOT all that enlightened out there, and in all too many places, the lights are going out.
Islam, obviously, but Political Correctness is just as bad. Doctrine overrides reality, no matter WHAT the cost.
I hate to rely on cliches, but more and more, I’m thinking the only way out is a global pandemic of something nasty. . . people just trying to survive don’t have the bandwidth for unproductive doctrine. . .
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You mean something like this? http://shepherdofthegurneys.blogspot.com/2014/09/ebola-update_8.html
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Scary stuff, Cedar so I went back and looked at some its earlier posts and found this one http://shepherdofthegurneys.blogspot.com/2014/09/things-that-make-you-go-hmmmmmmm.html
And that one makes the claim, basically, that Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantley did not have Ebola because, well, they survived.
I think we can ascribe Shepard of the Gurneys to the David Icke Space Lizard category i.e. “It’s On The Internet It So It Must Be True /s”
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I made no such claim Bill, not basically, not tangentally, nor even by spontaneous gesticulation while I was in REM sleep. In fact, what I actually did was point out that the facts we do know don’t line up neatly, while I studiously avoided any wild-ass black helicopter speculations.
Which you have evidently been only too happy to provide unbidden.
Contrary to your counterfactual assertion that their mere survival is fishy, I noted that 10% of people who get Ebola survive despite no worthwhile medical intervention. That two people did lines up as a 1% probability.
What I said was that what we’ve been told about Brantley and Writebol does not line up with their activities since their infection and cure, which means either we were lied to about their condition, or their altruism has been gobsmacked by a healthy dose of reality, after trusting in God and Magic Beans to protect them from well-known mechanisms of disease transmission. Either of those may be true, or their may be some other plausible reason for the way things are, but regardless, none of it ties up in a neat and simple bundle.
Because IMHO, if their altruism and their infection were both as advertised, either or both should be trying with all haste to go back to the one place where they’re now invincible. But they’re not, by any account.
If you think I said anything otherwise, you’ve done yourself a disservice, and ought to up your attention span and comprehension skills.
Especially if you’re using your misanalysis to discount the probable progress of Ebola (which I did without recourse to anything more advanced than a pencil, the back of an envelope, and daily open-source news resources) comes to the same conclusions as the CDC, except without any of the rosy “everything’s gonna be fine” happygas they keep spewing every which way, despite every single piece of evidence, all contrary.
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OK, so you are the Shepherd.
Do you believe that Brantly and Writebol had Ebola?
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Someone who just recovered from a deadly disease maybe is immune to that disease. (Although Mr. White Cells may not be equal to a second exposure to something else nasty.) But he will not be immune to every other nasty tropical disease, and even the common cold will be able to kick his immune system and his energy up and down the block.
Meanwhile, if you stay home and well, they can do blood tests on Mr. Immune System.
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Exactly. That they are not back in Liberia a month after a brush with death should not lead someone to thoughts of conspiracy.
Brantly, btw, is planning on going back as I understand it.
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I believe that I’ve been told that via the media.
Beyond that, it’s an open question to anyone intellectually honest.
If they were acting differently, for example actively attempting to re-enter W. Africa to continue where they were, the absolute probability would go up in my mind. But AFAIK they aren’t doing that, so it’s a open question.
But you asked the right question:
“Do you believe they had Ebola?
Because at the root, the issue is one of credibility, credulity, and probability, rather than debating with recourse to known facts.
It isn’t beyond the realm of reality to posit that either the government, or the media, let alone both, would or do lie to us regularly, unless someone is Pollyanna incarnate.
I brought it up at all simply because the facts don’t all line up neatly.
There’s at least one thing about their whole situation we don’t know.
Which item that is, I haven’t any idea.
That’s why I brought it up:
“I could spin any number of wild suppositions. I won’t because that’s what Daily Kos and Facebook is for.
But all I know at this point is that the undisputable facts don’t add up.
2 + 2 = 9 and 11/3rds.
And it’s nagging the hell out of me.
“
Which is 180 degrees opposite from what you suggested I had “basically” said, something which is only true in OppositeWorld.
The entire thought exercise in the post was one based on what we do know. Whether they actually had Ebola is not one of those things, unless you’re the guy who ran their blood tests.
Which information would actually reside at…the CDC.
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/interim-guidance-specimen-collection-submission-patients-suspected-infection-ebola.html
Whose website is CDC.gov.
A bonafide entity of the U.S. government, under the Dept. of H&HS.
So at root, you’re asking me if I trust the government, and the current administration.
My reply is that you’d have to be insane to implicitly trust the government to be totally transparent and forthcoming with regard to providing information to the public about a virus outbreak spiraling beyond any known territory of prior experience, with the ability to wipe out up to 90% of all infected persons on the planet, in the next 18 months or less.
If you can show a fault there, swing away.
Start any sentence with “Because we know the government always tells the truth….” and see if you can make it to the end of the sentence before mirth overcomes your typing abilities.
In the post you cited, I looked at things from both sides:
If they had Ebola, their failure to go back now is out of line with their previous sentiments and behavior. Therefore either their sentiments changed (possible) or they weren’t really infected.
OTOH, if they weren’t really infected, their current attitude is totally understandable.
So now I’m at deciding which is more likely:
A) That the sort of people who would (and did) pass up a lucrative healthcare career here, to travel to a primitive and culturally alien land and help the less fortunate amidst a deadly pestilence, on behalf of a religion with a notable history of selfless suffering and even martyrdom for the benefit of others, would become selfish?
Or, B) That perhaps the government isn’t being honest?
Shall we take an online poll on that dilemma?
The results may or may not be truth, but a least they’ll settle where the mainstream of opinion is on the range of possibilities.
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I believe that I’ve been told that via the media.
You have been told that by the media.
And by the CDC.
And by Samaritan’s Purse
And by Emory University Hospital.
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When playing “telephone”, a greater number of intermediaries doesn’t equal more truth nor greater accuracy.
Try to recall that the entire college of cardinals assured the Pope that the sun revolved around the earth, and Galileo was wrong.
Neither Samaritan’s Purse, the media, nor even Emory Hospital, test samples for Ebola.
The CDC does.
So the total number of informed reporting entities in that chain is still “one”.
If Dr. Brantly does, in fact, return to W. Africa, that will answer my questions somewhat.
But if he’s well enough to do press interviews, he isn’t debilitated and needing desperately to recuperate.
I’m not “led to thoughts of a conspiracy”.
I have questions for which, at present, there are no answers.
And let’s recall it was you who falsely ascribed some kneejerk default to conspiracy to what I wrote, after merely ignoring what I suggested was precisely the opposite.
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The CDC does.
Brantly and Writebol said they had Eboola. The diagnosis and testing was done in Liberia, and not by the CDC.
I’d drop this particular line of conspiracy theory but it’s a free internet.
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I advanced no such conspiracy theory.
I just reflexively doubt untrustworthy sources.
Comes from scientific rigor, not wingnuts and tinfoil.
But gotcha. You’ve now gone from relying on the honesty of the US government, to Third World testing labs amidst an epidemic as the acme of accuracy.
Talk about tinfoil!
I’d stop casting about for confirmation among countries for whom a flush toilet is the equivalent of a space shuttle program if I were you.
And hey, back on the original topic of Ebola projections (that you so cavalierly dismissed), it seems the NYTimes and the WHO have come to the same conclusions I did, just a day or two later:
Note their projection in Paragraph 4 at that link, then look at my table.
“If control does not improve now, there will be more than 20,000 cases by Nov. 2, and the numbers of cases and deaths will continue increasing from hundreds to thousands per week for months to come, according to the report.” -WHO, NYTimes
“date/cases
Now >5K
10/11 10K
11/1 20K
11/22 40K” – My blogspost (excerpted)
Would you like your crow baked, or broiled?
It’s easy to be smarter than the Fishwrap of Record or even WHO on the Ebola crisis when you actually know what you’re talking about, and pay attention to the facts, instead of trying to sell the “It’s not a problem. Remain Calm. All is well!” happygas they’ve been peddling.
You should definitely try it.
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I advanced no such conspiracy theory.
Okey dokey. Brantly and Writebol really didn’t have Ebola but powerful government forces want us to think they did. Got it.
And are you saying the New York Times and WHO are untrustworthy when reporting on Brantly and Writebol but trustworthy when increasing their infection projections, which, btw, still don’t claim 90-percent of us dead by the Christmas after next.
And who exactly is trying to pretend it’s not a crisis? Brantly isn’t considering what he told Congress. The New York Times isn’t. In fact they are doing an excellent job reporting on the disease and what’s going on. More often than not that’s what Drudge has been linking to.
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I know this is hard for you to grasp, but I’ve never said they didn’t have Ebola.
I said that I don’t know whether or not they did (and neither do you), and the only source has a credibility problem.
You either deny that, or cannot fathom it to be so.
Now you want to play Devil’s advocate, and pretend that you don’t trust the NYTimes, when their reporting of the WHO’s analysis comes to the same conclusions I did, just later.
So you’d like to have your cake and eat it too, instead of the lovely crowburger you served yourself. Fair enough.
Nor did I identify “powerful government forces” as the source of anything, So once again, this is you inserting your words into other people’s arguments to prove your own points. That may work with your sockpuppets, but on the Internet, not so much.
” which, btw, still don’t claim 90-percent of us dead by the Christmas after next.”
Yet, smart guy.
Just a few short weeks ago they were busy assuring one and all that this epidemic would top out at 20K total victims, based on unicorns farting happygas.
Doubtless you’re also aware that in claiming the 70% mortality number, with Ponzi-like precision, the WHO counts those infected now against that total, thinning the sample of dead people in a virus that currently doubles every 21 days (up from every 30 days a bare month ago), totally ignoring the fact that the number of those who had Ebola 21 days ago multiplied by 0.90 (that would be 90% for public school grads, the past Ebola mortality number) is almost precisely the number of people dead from Ebola now, going back as far as you care to look during this outbreak.
Wikipedia has a handy table at the bottom of their page – based on WHO’s (self-admittedly underreported) rough numbers – in case you’d like to take a crack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_epidemic_in_West_Africa
Math, Bill. Anyone can do it.
Sorry it isn’t as fun as snark and condescension about things beyond your ken, but you learn a lot more.
As far as your agnosticism about “who’s pretending this isn’t a crisis?”, perhaps if you’d been spending some quality time noting the near-weekly upward revisions and the cacophonous drumbeat of ever-more-dire prognostications, each one falling far short of the realities with the former predictability of Soviet Five Year Plan estimates, and sometimes obsolete before they were even typed and handed out, you’d know more, and be a smidge less smug.
And while it’s usually never too late to educate yourself, things are going to get a bit dicey in that respect if nothing improves in the next few months. This is news only to baby ducks, for whom the whole world is new every day.
Mother Nature is a pitiless bitch, and neither ignorance nor snark is going to save you if the Ebola monster comes to your town.
And the government is not here to help you.
My apologies if that’s news.
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“And the government is not here to help you.
My apologies if that’s news.”
Seriously, at least glance around this site.
That’s not news to anyone here.
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I know this is hard for you to grasp, but I’ve never said they didn’t have Ebola.
You asked loaded questions and made calculations (10% of 10% is 1%) based on unfounded assumptions (the 10 percent survival rate is set in stone and is not based on care; the experimental drugs provided did not work)
If Brantly and Writebol survived Ebola it kind of puts a dent in your claim that about 90 percent of us are going to be dead 14 months from now doesn’t it?
To point out that maybe you are being a bit, and counter-productively, hysterical is not discounting the threat.
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“Seriously, at least glance around this site.
That’s not news to anyone here. “
Sorry Sarah, I have no doubt it’s not news to the site at large, but it’s evidently news to Bill on this topic.
“If Brantly and Writebol survived Ebola it kind of puts a dent in your claim that about 90 percent of us are going to be dead 14 months from now doesn’t it?
To point out that maybe you are being a bit, and counter-productively, hysterical is not discounting the threat.”
No, it puts a dent in nothing. The ideal medical care given to an entire two patients under textbook standard-of-care best-case conditions isn’t going to be the care received by 100, let alone 1000 or 10,000 patients.
If you were up to speed on this, including noting any of the other updates on the subject I’d posted, there are, in all of the US, four small wards capable of handling Ebola patients to the degree Brantly and Writebol received. Other than the one in Emory, none of them is in a single major city, none of them is in any city with an international airport, and none of them have any sort of capacity for any large scale outbreak. (Emory’s is contiguous to the CDC, there’s one in MD not far from Wash.,D.C. and Ft. Detrick (USAMRIID), and there are two more, in Nebraska and MT, contiguous to both NORAD, and the Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds for Chem/Bio weapons in Utah. That’s it, in the entire U.S., for 300M people. Live in NYC/LA/Chicago/Philly/Boston/Phoenix/Houston/SF/Miami/anywhere else? Too bad for you.)
I don’t know much about this topic Bill, I’ve only pissed away twenty years in two of the busiest hospitals in the country, including the busiest ER on the planet, dealing with petty disasters like riots and earthquakes, and I know what we can’t handle there, to a mathematical certainty.
I work with nearly two hundred doctors, PAs, nurses, and supporting technicians, all calm, cool, and professional, and to the last one, they’re all calmly, coolly, professionally scared sh*tless about what happens if/when it hits here. (The CDC’s memo to all US hospitals last week pretty much said “Forget about if, plan for when”.)
I also know the amount of supplies we’d go through in the first week which we don’t have, and don’t even stock, and normally don’t use in a quarter-year.
So Ebola patients walking into US hospitals is going to do the same thing here it’s doing in Liberia, by about Day Two, maybe Day Three.
We have a few negative-airflow rooms in the entire hospital, maybe 20 or 30 in the entire county, and once someone with Ebola comes in, the rest of the ER and hospital, especially the ICU, will be unavailable to all other patients.
Each infected patient requires an average follow-up of 10 contacts. And the disease is dormant for up to 21 days, and fully contagious for several before you’re even likely to show up for eval or treatment, during which each Patient Zero is spreading it like the Ebola Fairy to everyone they come into close contact with. “Close contact” being defined by the CDC as shaking hands, or being within 3 feet of for short periods of time.
The first thing to disappear will be the supplies; the second will be the staff.
The only thing guaranteed to increase will be the patients.
So if you learning all that is news to you now, welcome to my world, a couple of months late.
I’d love love LOVE to be wrong about this.
But the news from Africa doesn’t seem to be cooperating with my fondest wishes, nor yours.
If you’ve got something to address any of that besides mere gainsaying and disdain, have at it.
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Nobody here is saying this is not a serious issue or that we are prepared for it or that it is being poorly reported by the media. Really. http://billlawrenceonline.com/ebola-coverage-stays-quiet/
Or that Obama is on top of things: http://billlawrenceonline.com/obama-parties-world-burns/
But if you want to sound a call to action you really and truly should think very hard before you put down your speculations because this is a very serious matter.
I mean that in the most sincere and constructive sense.
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Nobody here is saying this is not a serious issue or that we are prepared for it or that it is being poorly reported by the media. Really. http://billlawrenceonline.com/ebola-coverage-stays-quiet/
But if you want to sound a call to action you really and truly should think very hard before you put down your speculations because this is a very serious matter.
I mean that in the most sincere and constructive sense.
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Aesop,
cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/
“Close contact” being defined by the CDC as shaking hands, or being within 3 feet of for short periods of time.”
This is just to say you might have contracted it but the likely hood that you did is quit low.
20,000 even 40,000 projected deaths that’s all?
It get’s into the millions I might start worrying.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/
Aesop a better name for you might be Henny Penny. I’m not sure what you did working in a hospital but one more reason why I don’t go to them for any reason.
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Noted, Bill.
In what I wrote, I made no wild leaps of illogic nor assumed any black helicopter conspiracies. I made no unsubstantiated speculations. I merely noted that what we know to be true, and what we observe to be true, doesn’t line up congruently with everything we’d been told is true. I was specifically clear not to take it any farther than that.
That’s why I bristle at suggestions I said things, or drew conclusions, I specifically did not.
And Josh, thanks for that, but you’re behind the info curve, just a bit; the “20-40K projected deaths” happygas BS story is no longer operative.
Just to catch you up from Fox News earlier today:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/09/23/who-forecasts-more-than-20000-ebola-cases-by-november-2/?intcmp=latestnews
“The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report Tuesday predicting as many as 550,000 to 1.4 million cases of the Ebola virus in Liberia and Sierra Leone alone, by the end of January.
The report, published six months after the first cases were reported, is far more pessimistic than an earlier survey published last month, in which the WHO suggested that the number of cases could reach 20,000 by the middle of next year.”
Gosh, if only someone, somewhere had been saying the same things about how rosy and ridiculous the WHO estimates were weeks ago, and suggested that things were going to be a lot worse than that based simply on the well-documented logarithmic spread of this outbreak…
If you’re going to stay on top of how wrong they’ve been so far, you’ve got to be pretty nimble.
So perhaps you ought to consider worrying now, hmm?
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Aesop,
What about the first part of what I said.
We are not Liberia or Sierra Leone the worst slum in all of America probably has better sanitaton than both of those countries combined.
What you said here, “We have a few negative-airflow rooms in the entire hospital, maybe 20 or 30 in the entire county, and once someone with Ebola comes in, the rest of the ER and hospital, especially the ICU, will be unavailable to all other patients.” is patently missleading as you don’t need negative air flow isolation for Ebola.
Here are some inconvenent facts you are ignoring:
“The disease can be passed to humans from infected animals and animal materials. Ebola can also be spread between humans by close contact with infected body fluids or through infected needles in the hospital.” and…
“Avoid areas in which there are epidemics. Wear a gown, gloves, and mask around sick patients. These precautions will greatly decrease the risk of transmission.”
– from: nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001339.htm
Ebola is not airborne so the only reason you would promote negative airflow isolation is either paranoia and over kill.
You don’t have very good reading comprehension I said “might,” and that is only because it will then have started to put on it’s big boy pants of infectious diseases.
From the CDC website:
cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/guinea/
The WHO website Fact Sheet:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/
Aesop! Yes it’s it’s getting bad over there on the Ebola front but it’s by no means the worst thing going on over there on the infectious disease front.
And even if it makes it over here standard Hospital infection control is adequate to handle ebola.
The only reason they took extra special precautions for the two doctors they brought back is because of people like you. – “Oh! My G-D!!! How could they bring Some One the Ebola over here to the States!!!! They will infect us Allll!!!!!” Not that you have actually expressed that level of hysteria but you are close. Not everyone is that come into contact automatically contracts the disease. This is not a Zombie Apocalypse movie. And I don’t think you needed to worry about the government Fuel-Air Bomb bombing a small town to stop an Outbreak.
FYI: I wouldn’t quote media source like they know what the hell they are talking about. Primary sources work best.
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I merely noted that what we know to be true,
More constructive criticism:
Is it true that Ebola has a 90-percent mortality rate?
It’s often reported as such but WHO is now saying it’s 70 percent (and last week they were saying 50 percent). Granted that a 70 percent and 90 percent death rate is of the same magnitude with regard to a disaster, but it is still very important to recognize the difference — and the uncertainty.
And is the infection rate 100 percent? Of course not. I think the last I heard is that if you keep yourself three feet from an infected person (and don’t touch infected walls and door knobs) you are fairly safe albeit I wouldn’t necessarily count on that either.
One of the saddest things I heard from Liberia is that talk radio in that country was claiming Ebola didn’t exist when the infections started and was a conspiracy.
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One problem with survival rates is that the worst cases are going to be the ones they actually see– if medical is bad enough, people might be getting treatment in unofficial situations, especially if there’s not a big trust in authority.
Kind of trying to calculate the death rate of flu by counting up how many people check into the hospital with it and later die.
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Thanks guys, but sorry, you’re still behind the info curve on this.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1411100?query=featured_home&&&#t=articleTop
“This analysis shows that by September 14, a total of 70.8% of case patients with definitive outcomes have died, and this rate was consistent among Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Assessing the case fatality rate during this epidemic is complicated by incomplete information on the clinical outcomes of many cases, both detected and undetected. Estimates of the case fatality rate derived by calculating the ratio of all reported deaths to all reported cases to date are low in comparison with historical outbreaks.”
So NEJM has noted the WHO’s 56% rate is horseapples, and the actual rate is higher than 71%, they jus can’t properly estimate how much higher.
“The critical determinant of epidemic size appears to be the speed of implementation of rigorous control measures.”
In case that isn’t clear, by “rigorous”, they’re referring to quarantine at gunpoint.
“As of September 14, the doubling time of the epidemic was 15.7 days in Guinea, 23.6 days in Liberia, and 30.2 days in Sierra Leone. We estimate that, at the current rate of increase, assuming no changes in control efforts, the cumulative number of confirmed and probable cases by November 2 (the end of week 44 of the epidemic) will be 5740 in Guinea, 9890 in Liberia, and 5000 in Sierra Leone, exceeding 20,000 cases in total. The true case load, including suspected cases and undetected cases, will be higher still”
So infection rates of 21 days (the current overall age) aren’t anywhere near the worst it can get, and there is no end in sight for this outbreak.
“[T]he current epidemiologic outlook is bleak. Forward projections suggest that unless control measures — including improvements in contact tracing, adequate case isolation, increased capacity for clinical management, safe burials, greater community engagement, and support from international partners — improve quickly, these three countries will soon be reporting thousands of cases and deaths each week, projections that are similar to those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experimental therapeutics and vaccines offer promise for the future but are unlikely to be available in the quantities needed to make a substantial difference in control efforts for many months, even if they are proved to be safe and effective. Furthermore, careful assessment of the most effective means of utilizing such interventions (e.g., vaccination or treatment of contacts versus health care workers) will be required while stocks remain limited. For the medium term, at least, we must therefore face the possibility that EVD will become endemic among the human population of West Africa, a prospect that has never previously been contemplated. The risk of continued epidemic expansion and the prospect of endemic EVD in West Africa call for the most forceful implementation of present control measures and for the rapid development and deployment of new drugs and vaccines.”
And even that gloomy appraisal is based on the fervent hope that all government order (including quarantine enforcement) doesn’t go up in a total collapse of government there, at which point the entire continent goes up. NEJM doesn’t touch on that, because while it has obvious medical implications, it’s primarily a geopolitical problem.
And sorry to break it to you Josh, but I argued often and early for bringing Brantley and Writebol back, precisely because we clearly had the abaility to properly care for two such patients here with virtually zero risk, and because it was the right thing to do.
But that won’t be the case when it becomes god-alone-knows how many cases among the 3000 sacrificial military lambs Pres. HopeyDopey is dropping into the middle of this hellhole.
But the unintended consequences are starting to come home to roost, and the light is just barely beginning to dawn on some in the media:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/09/24/us-hospitals-unprepared-to-handle-ebola-waste/?intcmp=latestnews
Fox has apparently noted that hazmat waste is going to be a problem.
“U.S. hospitals may be unprepared to safely dispose of the infectious waste generated by any Ebola virus disease patient to arrive unannounced in the country, potentially putting the wider community at risk, biosafety experts said.
The issue created problems for Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first institution to care for Ebola patients here. As Emory was treating two U.S. missionaries who were evacuated from West Africa in August, their waste hauler, Stericycle, initially refused to handle it. Stericycle declined comment.
Ebola symptoms can include copious amounts of vomiting and diarrhoea, and nurses and doctors at Emory donned full hazmat suits to protect themselves. Bags of waste quickly began to pile up.
“At its peak, we were up to 40 bags a day of medical waste, which took a huge tax on our waste management system,” Emory’s Dr. Aneesh Mehta told colleagues at a medical meeting earlier this month.
Emory sent staff to Home Depot to buy as many 32-gallon rubber waste containers with lids that they could get their hands on. Emory kept the waste in a special containment area for six days until its Atlanta neighbor, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, helped broker an agreement with Stericycle.
”
And that was for one of the four designated Ebola wards, nationwide!
But the true money quote is buried in the tenth graf:
“NOT IF, BUT WHEN
Experts say it is only a matter of time before at least some infected patients are diagnosed in U.S. hospitals, most likely walking into the emergency department seeking treatment.”
The reason we use negative airflow, Josh, is because the droplets involved in droplet precautions, include vomited blood, coughed saliva droplets, and blood-laden diarrhea, all of which don’t helpfully stay within a couple of feet of a patient in an average 10×12 room, they splatter travel yards. That’s why staff wear respirators, full hoods, splash resistant goggles, and full head-to-toe hazmat barrier suits. The only sense in which Ebola is not “airborne” is that the virus doesn’t actually have wings.
And the particles are infectious for days on walls and surfaces (and dead bodies).
But thanks for playing, from your fund of “never been to a hospital, never going to one” misinformation.
For those of those of us who actually know what we’re talking about, things are a bit less rosy than you think.
Of course, the hazmat problem will solve itself: when we run out of all that personal protective equipment (in a day or two), and the smarter staff members decide not to be sacrificial guinea pigs because of unpreparedness, so they go home and stay there. The altruistic and unprotected will simply die.
Then US healthcare will be exactly what is it in the Ebola wards in Monrovia:
Unlicensed workers, minimally protected, doing effectively nothing that would pass for “medical” care.
So, how’s that working out in W. Africa?
Beuller? Beuller…?
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Aesop,
You really don’t have very good reading skills do you.
I said that I don’t go to hospitals because of people like you, that say you work at hospitals, not that I’ve never been.
The reason I avoid hospitals is 2 fold.
1) I avoid placed of concentrated sickness.
2) You really got to watch out for the over educated idiots if you do go.
They are both concentrated in hospitals. There are a lot of good strong solid professionals out there. I’m might be skeptical of medical professionals, but I’m not the one that thinks they will run if the going gets tough.
Because that is what Americans do… run from trouble… Yah… right!
A goodly portion of doctorswithoutborders.org/ is from which country?
Now let’s look at this:
cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/environmental-infection-control-in-hospitals.html
Lame Stream Media, this includes Fox, always over hype shit. You only look at the negative your going to get a lopsided view of what’s going on.
“I’m reminded of Swine Flu H1N1 a few years ago, wasn’t that supposed to be the one that killed us all?”
What you fail realize also is that DHS/FEMA & the National Guards all have Equipment and Training (as do the Any Troops that get sent over there) to deal with any Chemical, Biological & Radiological situations that come up.
Click to access OEPR_EPR-News-Special-Edition-Operation-Vigilant-Guard.pdf
americanoutrage.us/index.php/leads-front-page-hidden/588-ebola-detection-kits-deployed-to-50-states
We have infrastructure (though weekend) that African countries don’t have, so let not suggest that what is happing over there is what would even remotely happen here in the States.
cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/patient-management-us-hospitals.html
virology-online.com/general/InfectionControl5.htm
We are not a third world war torn African country with poor sanitation and no to little medical infrastructure.
The mortality rate is hovers around 70% if you only count test and confirmed cases. If you add all likely case of people showing sings but not confirmed the it drops to around 50%. That is crunching the numbers based off the latest CDC WHO case numbers that I provided.
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P.S.
http://www.elastec.com/portableincinerators/mediburn/
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Wait – have you been watching Torchwood, Miracle Day?
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Wayne,
No. No Cable or Netflix
:(
My point was if a shity company do their job then we do have the capacity and ways to dispose of Medical waste on site.
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Sorry, I just watched that on Amazon Prime. They used something similar in an… unpleasant fashion.
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Good grief, Josh, are you still trying to leverage your argument from ignorance into some sort of Internet logic-win??
Here’s a source from another perspective:
I’ll spare you all that tedious reading and sifting, and excerpt the following:
“ W.H.O. … is hoping to open two additional centers with a total of 400 beds here in the capital over the next month, but is unable to find international workers to operate them, Mr. Veyrenche said.
Last week in Bong County, in central Liberia, the International Medical Corps began operating a treatment center built by Save the Children. The Medical Corps and Doctors Without Borders are the only international organizations operating treatment centers in Liberia.
Sean Casey, the leader of the International Medical Corps in Liberia, said he hoped to increase the center’s current capacity of 10 beds to 70 beds over the next six weeks. But because of the fear of Ebola and the time commitment required of foreign volunteers, the organization has been unable to draw doctors and nurses from its usual pool, he said. The organization is recruiting health workers for the first time in the Philippines, Jordan and Ethiopia.
Like most experts here, Mr. Casey was skeptical of the American military’s plans to find and train 500 health workers a week.
“It took us a few weeks to just open 10 beds,” he said.”
Everybody runs when the option is death. Go look up the stats on health workers infected by this outbreak; IIRC, they were at one point 10% of the total, but that was before this thing climbed into the mid-thousands, and they largely ran out of health workers willing to risk dying by even showing up. And that’s with them taking precautions.
But hey, thanks for informing me of the expertise of the military. All that time I did annually in two hitches the Marines in full MOPP gear left me less informed on the topic than you are behind the keyboard.
The military’s gear is lowest-bidder crap, wholly unsuited for dealing with Ebola. Just for one example, the suits they issue aren’t impervious, they’re absorbent (which is just ducky for dealing with people and bodies bleeding from every orifice from the eyes to the anus). And the charcoal lining doesn’t neutralize viruses like it does chemical agents. In fact, it holds them next to the wearer until they get out of the suit.
They’re also hot, uncomfortable, and only extend your life expectancy in a hostile environment for a few hours, long enough hopefully to get the H— out and stay out, not to stay and play. They have little capability to medically manage anything like this, which is why of the four civilian wards, all of them are located contiguous to the military facilities that would need such support, but are unable to provide it for themselves. In a pandemic, the only thing the military to the party brings is guns to enforce a quarantine. Exactly as the local military is doing in W. Africa.
“The mortality rate is hovers around 70% if you only count test and confirmed cases. If you add all likely case of people showing sings but not confirmed the it drops to around 50%. That is crunching the numbers based off the latest CDC WHO case numbers that I provided.”
Josh, Josh, Josh.
This is what all that over-education that frightens you is for:
People who show signs but aren’t confirmed are called “people who don’t have Ebola” by medical professionals. They cover this in Microbiology 101, BTW.
Signs are headache, fever, muscle ache, even nausea/vomiting. It has perhaps escaped your notice that those symptoms describe 50% of every ER here any night in the last 50 years, and in West Africa, with endemic dengue, malaria, dysentery, typhoid, and AIDS for a time period best described as “nearly forever”.
So you do not get to statistically lump in all the people with everyday health problems other than Ebola into the mix with those with actualEbola, and then conclude that the death rate of Ebola is magically lower, unless you’re a total medical and statistical moron.
Crunching the numbers the way you do is like noting that there are 7 billion people on the planet, but only 6000 or so with Ebola, therefore your chances of dying from it are only 1 in 1.16M. As though the whole problem with that isn’t that in 18 months with no changes in spread, your chances will be 1 in 1. You’re like the guy falling off the Empire State Building, yet noting “So far, so good…” all the way to the ground.
And “sanitation” is a meaningless factor. This disease isn’t spreading because people there crap in holes in the ground and don’t wash their hands. It’s spreading because the virus is easily transmissible from person to person, before they know the person they got it from has it. And they continue doing that for days, until it’s been passed on to more and more people, before they get sick enough to seek care, or they just collapse.
So WHO and everyone else has always been 21 days behind this thing, which is the latent incubation period, since Day One.
No amount of first world sanitation fixes that, unless you spend every waking moment walking around dressed like the entire society has Ebola 24/7/365, in a full hazmat encapsulating suit w/accessories and respirator.
Why don’t you try that, and go to the mall or supermarket. YouTube it, and show us how it plays.
Then head over to the local hospital. That’ll be a hoot.
You clearly don’t understand any disease, nor this disease, the statistics or methodology for assessing it, the problems with treating it, or containing the outbreak, or the logistical nightmare for of any of that.
And the problem in this discussion isn’t what you don’t know, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know, and that what you think you know is almost entirely wrong.
Seriously, man, give your eyes and ears a chance, for a few consecutive days, and give your fingers a rest, if only for the sheer novelty.
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Tangential:
There is a number of cases that beyond which containment is no longer an option.
What is this number and what is it called? I ask the learned people of this forum because I can’t seem to formulate the question well enough for a meaningful Google search.
From a historical perspective, we are due for a major plague. The species will continue as it always has but it may bring great social change. Remember the first glimmerings of self ownership emerged among the peasant class in the wake of the Black Death.
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Aesop,
You can’t have it both ways.
If sanitation isn’t the main vector for transmission then why do we need to worry about waste?
Math –
The WHO numbers:
Total Deaths divided by Total Case Count times 100 gives you 47.9365621. Will round that up to 48%.
Total Deaths divided by Labitory Confirmed Cases times 100 gives you 84.1364861. Since we rounded up the othe number we’ll round this one up too, 85% though it’s closer to 84%.
Guinea 63% & 78%
Liberia 53% & 183%
Nigeria 40% & 43%
Senegal has a 100% survival rate.
Sierra Leone 33% & 37%
Math and Statistics are fun.
The NewYork Times is not a primary source.
I was a Damage Control-man & Hull Tech in the Navy.
emedicinehealth.com/script/main/mobileart-emh.asp?articlekey=59374
There are different levels of PPE protection given out for different threats level of Red, Yellow and Green Zones. Which you don’t mention.
I’ve all ready given you the known best practices for dealing with and treating those effected with Ebola.
But since you like news stories. Here’s new protocol: http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/25/health/ebola-fatu-family/index.html?hpt=hp_c4 …and you don’t need fance facilities or equipment to implement it.
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“People who show signs but aren’t confirmed are called “people who don’t have Ebola” by medical professionals. They cover this in Microbiology 101, BTW.
Signs are headache, fever, muscle ache, even nausea/vomiting. It has perhaps escaped your notice that those symptoms describe 50% of every ER here any night in the last 50 years, and in West Africa, with endemic dengue, malaria, dysentery, typhoid, and AIDS for a time period best described as “nearly forever”.
So you do not get to statistically lump in all the people with everyday health problems other than Ebola into the mix with those with actualEbola, and then conclude that the death rate of Ebola is magically lower, unless you’re a total medical and statistical moron.”
Aesop,
Josh is wrong for wanting to lump those people in, it does screw the statistics. But, you are claiming that nobody has Ebola EXCEPT those that are “confirmed”, which screws the statistics the other direction. Especially in a third world situation, people don’t GO to the doctor unless they are really sick, as in dying. So, practically nobody who isn’t dying is going to go to a doctor, and if they do it is likely to be some overworked local doctor who will give them some antibiotics and hope for the best (which is about all they can do in their situation for Ebola, but it is also about all they can do for a whole bunch of other diseases), so none of those people get confirmed. If you only count those cases that are confirmed (many, after death, because they don’t bother unless the patient dies) then fatality percentages skyrocket.
Basically both of your guys figures are worth almost as much as the rest of us paid you for them. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
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Bearcat,
Symptoms of Ebola virus disease
The incubation period, that is, the time interval from infection with the virus to onset of symptoms is 2 to 21 days. Humans are not infectious until they develop symptoms. First symptoms are the sudden onset of fever fatigue, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, symptoms of impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding (e.g. oozing from the gums, blood in the stools). Laboratory findings include low white blood cell and platelet counts and elevated liver enzymes.
Diagnosis
It can be difficult to distinguish EVD from other infectious diseases such as malaria, typhoid fever and meningitis. Confirmation that symptoms are caused by Ebola virus infection are made using the following investigations:
antibody-capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)
antigen-capture detection tests
serum neutralization test
reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay
electron microscopy
virus isolation by cell culture.
Samples from patients are an extreme biohazard risk; laboratory testing on non-inactivated samples should be conducted under maximum biological containment conditions.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/
And nothing I put out is my personal opinion but what is put out as best practices by the CDC, WHO and other medical professionals.
A medical Diagnosis is just a medical judgement made by a medical professional. You then take samples and test to confirm the Diagnosis. That is the way the medical profession works.
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Josh:
“Sanitation” as you were referring to it was things like running water and flush toilets, which has zero effect on the disease, or mitigating it.
Waste from direct Ebola patient care is a problem, because even with only two whole patients Emory University Hospital generated 20 garbage bags per patient, with no place to put it. You get that medical hazmat from Ebola is deadly-toxic biological waste, right? The exact medium the CDC notes that Ebola is transmitted by? Stop me when this rings a bell in your memory…
The federal government had to step in basically force the waste management company to take the waste.
Now imagine if you can how much waste there will be for 100 patients, or 1000, and when the hazmat companies say “Hell no, we’re not touching that!”, it just sits at the hospitals, just as lethal inside the bag, and you can’t send the National Guard to garbage companies and make people pick up toxic waste with a gun to their heads.
And you don’t get the fatality rate by dividing the total cases into the total deaths because the disease incubates for up to 21 days, and it takes another 12, on average, before somebody dies after symptoms appear. The disease is currently doubling every 21 days. So that means the people who are dying today got it 3 to almost 5 weeks ago.
So of course you come up with 48% already dead, because 50% of those infected right now didn’t have the goddam disease 21 days ago. This is 4th grade math, Josh. Get a grip on it.
What you’re trying is the same happy horsecrap the WHO has been pulling since this outbreak started, to minimize how bad it is. It’s junk science for morons.
And since you evidently missed the point the first time I posted it two days ago, let’s try one more time:
From the New England Journal of Medicine:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1411100?query=featured_home&&&#t=articleTop
“This analysis shows that by September 14, a total of 70.8% of case patients with definitive outcomes have died, and this rate was consistent among Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Assessing the case fatality rate during this epidemic is complicated by incomplete information on the clinical outcomes of many cases, both detected and undetected. Estimates of the case fatality rate derived by calculating the ratio of all reported deaths to all reported cases to date are low in comparison with historical outbreaks.”
In simple terms, they know the rate is higher than the almost 71% they can calculate, but because they know the actual numbers are different from the “official” numbers, they just can’t say how much higher the true rate is. Ebola zaire strain normally has a 90% fatality rate.
So I can believe the most prestigious medical journal on the planet, or I can believe Josh, Internet math whiz.
And how bad is the under-counting of cases?
According to separate estimates from the CDC and Medecins Sans Frontieres, the official numbers represent at best 20-25% of the actual tally, because people there don’t come forward, and deny that their relatives have Ebola, and because the craptastic folks running things in those countries suck at math, or basic competence at anything. This is why they’re still Third World crapholes, since forever.
For the mathematically challenged, that means we may already have 25,000 cases and 12,000 deaths, right now. And WHO just sits there with their fingers in their ears going “La la la, I can’t hear you!”, and repeating “This is what the government sources are telling us” even though they admit their own numbers are crap.
And no, Bearcat, I’m not saying the only people who have Ebola are the “confirmed cases”; I’m simply saying you can’t lump unconfirmed cases in with confirmed cases just because they show initial symtoms, and call them all Ebola to try and lower the mortality rate, unless you’re mathematically retarded.
Most of the cases of Ebola since months ago have not nor never will be confirmed, because they don’t even have more than 30% of the patients in actual hospitals. They just go home, die, get recovered by the burial teams, and get dumped in the truck to go to the mass incineration, without any lab tests to confirm anything.
The pitifully small number and capacity of labs they have there to confirm cases can’t even begin to keep up with the workload now, and we’ve gone from 3200 to 6400 reported case in the last 3 weeks alone. They were overwhelmed when it was just 3200 cases. In 3 more weeks, it’ll be 12000 cases. And they aren’t making any more labs.
If you look at how many people are dead of Ebola now, for any given value of now back to April or earlier, it’s almost exactly 90% of the number of those who were reported infected 21 days prior to whatever date you pick (given the utterly horrible job they’re doing tracking this in the field). So the reality is that it’s basically killing 90% of everyone infected, just like Ebola zaire always has, and now it’s in a target rich environment: slums full of people in total denial that there’s even a problem.
Those idiots literally think that the decontamination teams spraying dead people with bleach solution to limit disease spread are secretly spraying everyone with Ebola. They’ve attacked medical teams and burial teams. We’re dealing with retarded four year old magical thinking levels of reason and logic there.
And the quarantine just ensures that they take care of their relatives at home because there are no hospital beds and no health workers, so it infects the whole family, one after the other, and the numbers keep going up, up, up.
The next step is a toss-up: either the governments in the affected countries collapse, and it escapes quarantine, or it manages to escape quarantine all by itself when someone, or a number of someones, manage to evade the checkpoints.
Either way, it spreads to the next country, and potentially, someone manages to get on an airplane, and it doesn’t just go to Ivory Coast or Ghana, it goes to London, Mumbai, or New York. And when the cases start cropping up 1-3 weeks later, there will already be dozens of people infected and walking around with it before we know it’s here. And no hazmat gear you aren’t wearing will stop something you caught last week, including for hospital staff when the patients start arriving, and the docs and nurses are still working in scrubs instead of hazmat suits.
This is why pandemics happen.
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“I noted that 10% of people who get Ebola survive despite no worthwhile medical intervention. That two people did lines up as a 1% probability.”
Those two people DID get medical treatment, so the 10% figure doesn’t apply to them. Doctors Without Borders claims that with treatment, recovery rates are as high as 75%. Which gives a 50-60% chance of their combined survival.
(And the 75% figure is still in a third-world country without the resources that were applied to those two… so it’s likely their odds were higher.)
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I’ll make it easier for you, Rob. W. Africa is also populated by endmic AIDS and malaria patients, already debilitated.
So then, why not bring them all here?
We’re only talking about 6000 “official” patients right now.
We could set up a hospital on an empty military base and save 4500 of them right this minute, by the 1st of October in most cases.
So could Britain.
So could France.
So could 20 other nations, and for less money than any of them will spend on a couple of airplanes that they’ll crash this year in training accidents.
That and some bleach spraydown, and the virus outbreak would be O-V-E-R, by the weekend, if it was just that simple.
Bonus: Once they survived, they’d be immune to future outbreaks for years, if not for life!
Seriously, if all it took to solve that disease was a few cases of IV saline, some cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, and a crate full of barrier gowns and masks, we’d be treating Ebola like it was the flu, and it wouldn’t be a BL4 biohazard virus at USAMRIID and the CDC.
Medicins Sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders’ contention is interesting, but not quite the same thing as evidentiary science. It’s a pitch for more funding from a group that lives or dies based on donations, and people don’t donate to lost causes, do they?
And it isn’t that simple.
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I think you’ll find, and Ms. Sanderson will certainly correct me if I’m wrong, since she’s been into this more recently than I have, but quite often the UN “Peacekeepers” are drawn from nations where the lights never really were on.
As I keep repeating in various ways, humans are intensely tribal, and in some manifestations of this if they aren’t your tribe then nothing you do to them is wrong. NOTHING.
Progressives in Europe and the US don’t get that, and because they’ve run the education and news for so long that most of the rest of the folks don’t get it.
Other cultures aren’t just Judeo-Christian morals with a different meal plan and odd clothing. Some of them really do suck and need to be wiped off the face of the earth.
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Just take a gander at who they have sitting on the Human Rights Council.
“Cuba”
Enough said.
No one in their right mind wants the UN anywhere near their populace …. especially to “help”.
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http://www.dhs.gov/news/2011/09/15/united-nations-security-council-resolution-1540-committee-visits-dhs
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If this was already posted somewhere in the thread, my apologies.
http://news.yahoo.com/hamas-rockets-found-second-united-nations-school-224830922.html
U.N.R.W.A. came under fire last week not only after rockets were discovered in a vacant school, but also as its critics accused the agency of turning the rockets over to “local authorities,” which in Hamas-run Gaza, could mean the rockets went right back into circulation.
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My opinion of the UN is unprintable even here. Things like this are no surprise, and worse things are common place in the cesspool that is the UN.
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“The United Nations. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”
Daniel: The System Lords can’t be trusted, either as a group or individuals. They’re posturing egomaniacs driven by an insatiable lust for power, each one capable of unimaginable evil.
Weir: See, why should I be nervous? Sounds like an average day at the United Nations.
;-D
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too nice.
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Maybe. I’m sure quite a few of the delegates would have the death sentence in multiple systems, instead of member ship in the Human Rights Council.
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yeah, I just wish it was This system was one of them.
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Right now I’m entertaining myself watching Clamps advocate a woman allow herself to be raped so that a ‘condom like device’ in her will hurt her rapist. Oh and the use of acids and dangerous chemicals, in the most horrific ‘anti-rape’ thing ever. After saying Jews need to stop being so offensive in order to win his approval, and that because I ‘did nothing’ when they came for Muslims’ so that will somehow result in the death of my children. And for pro-self-defense me being a rape apologist.
It’s like someone stuffed into one person all the idiotic beliefs of the left and all the crap that the UN and feminism pushes and he believes that this is real as a result.
It’s kinda fascinating, like one observing a cancer’s progress.
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I hope he realizes that such a device will just cause a bad reaction in the men who are determined, such as using a broom handle first, to make sure there’s nothing like that in there to hurt them.
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Noooo, he clearly doesn’t. Also, acids that will melt a woman there. Seriously, go look. It is breathtaking in it’s stupidity.And this is the guy who says I’m a rape apologist because I got angry at that self-proclaimed rape victim who was advocating the smudging of rape definitions for feels, and yet also advocated that rape victims and potential victims not defend themselves somehow.
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WHO came for the Muslims? (Curiously.)
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I don’t know, honestly. He seems to think I’m affiliated with them in some way… which makes no sense because I’m a housewife.
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WHO should come for the Muslims.
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Hah! I’m watching the terrorist wannabes get their collective arses kicked over here in Australia, and cheering and laughing every single time it happens. For Crampsy, that’s unfair, unwarranted subjugation and oppression of the Muslims, which tells you who he supports.
Crazed, murderous psychopaths like this guy.
http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/from-french-fries-to-fatwa-the-deadly-path-to-jihad-of-numan-haider/story-fnii5s3x-1227069680027
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Oh and, they’re … kinda really starting to ask for it.
http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/uniformed-australian-defence-force-member-allegedly-attacked-by-men-of-middle-eastern-appearance-in-western-sydney/story-fnj3rq0y-1227070573383
Defence force families have already been put on high alert after an incident in Western Sydney in which two men of Middle Eastern appearance approached the house of a serving soldier and asked if defence force personnel lived there.
They left after the wife of the soldier told them “no”.
Probably why Cramps-in-brain sounds so sure that my kids and I ‘will be next.’
The question is, how is he aware of this beforehand?
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Sounds like one smart lady. That should also be the answer if asked if you have guns in the house.
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Y’know, the sad thing is, there ARE moderate Muslim groups cooperating with the government and there have been calls to NOT go vigilante. But these (insert expletive of choice)-for brain idiots are MAKING IT HARD for people to do that.
“I am begging you please don’t fucking force me to kill you,” pretty much describes Australia – and there’s only so much that people will tolerate. Enough atrocities from the ISIS wannabes and similar groups? Reach a threshold, and boom.
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It describes the sane part of America, too. They don’t want to get our attention.
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They’re going to keep pushing until a group gets tired of it, and starts a bloodbath.
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He’s one of them?
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Not sure if he is, but he sure parrots 99% of the crap that the Sharia law supporters and terrorists do. Especially the nonsense about ‘oppression of Muslims’ and that insane filip about ‘Muslims are the new Jews’ and has been consistently very pro-HAMAS in the past. And anti-Semitic.
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The word is that his real world self is a Muslim convert who thinks he’s fighting islamophobia on the nets. No, seriously.
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A few years ago, there was this female Muslim who haunted the S. M. Stirling list. Very dogmatic about Islam, very pro-Palestinians, etc. Oh, at one point she claimed to be lesbian. When the fighting first started in Syria, she claimed that she was a Syrian supporter of the “Freedom Fighters” and actually was in Syria. Even claimed that her life was in danger. Her story actually became News. She even provided a picture of herself.
That’s when the Truth came out. Apparently “she” didn’t exist. She was the creation of two Liberals, a married couple. IIRC neither were Muslim.
So “Champ” may not be Muslim but only a Lefty who knows the right buzz-words.
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Huh. That’s something that has been suspected of him, because of his support for largely Muslim causes. He tried denying it at one point, but we’re too aware of taqqiya and kitman to believe him.
Interesting to know though.
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I am sorry? (cough! cough.) Did I read you correctly?
Why do you think that being Muslim is an issue for the World Health Organization?
Or is this an opportunity to employ my pump action water gun loaded conveniently loaded with garum?
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Because they are sick. I know, really lame joke.
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Clamps is a waste of oxygen … but then we are comparing Chlamydia to the UN so that goes without saying, no?
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*wicked cackle* Yes, pretty much.
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Ya know, someday the karma bus is going to hit him/it so hard that the force of impact will trigger seismographs all over the globe.
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Truly, everybody needs to go read this, it is like watching a particularly hilarious train wreck… in slow motion.
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I mean, the parts where he is threatening my kids… I wonder where he gets that surety, but the rest of it is just hilariously trainwrecky indeed.
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The cholera epidemic in Haiti was caused by Peacekeepers who never grasped basic sanitation.
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This reminded me of something I was going to mention about the Tiananmen Square massacre. Back in the late 90’s I was working with a guy who was from the PRC and explained how the soldiers could basically just kill all those people. Basically “They weren’t from around here.” China is huge, it has varied ethnicities and languages and the communists haven’t exactly turned them into one big happy. It wasn’t like the Oregon national guard firing up protestors in Florida.
Not sure where I was going with this outside of “Yes. Tribalism and other makes it easy to think of people as things.”
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The info about Tien an Men is correct. The soldiers who were watching the protests at the start had to be pulled out because they were local troops, and too acquainted with the protestors to be used against them. The unit that eventually crushed the uprising was brought in specifically for that purpose.
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…and as I understand it. in the course of getting reliable troops moved to Beijing, there was at least one and possibly several Generals who delayed or declined to move their troops when ordered, citing various difficulties. They also declined to be removed from command initially as well. This basically panicked the Politburo and pretty much ensured that the hammer would fall hard on the kids in the streets.
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quite often the UN “Peacekeepers” are drawn from nations where the lights never really were on
Ding, ding, ding, and freaking a-men…..
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I am merely going to say that when the philosophy that is taught either directly, or by omission, is morally bankrupt because morals are no longer a thing, and good is indefinable, then what is evil?
Great point, Cedar.
I remember an article from several years ago (I think in American Spectator) about the mind-boggling corruption of NGOs and the UN, and how they were working hand-in-glove with the slavers.
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The majority of the entities represented at the UN are dictatorships or “socialist” nations. None of them have an issue with slavery.
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And I forget to hit the Notify me of comments box.
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“Bueller?”
…
“Bueller?”
…
“Bueller?”
…
…
“Kruschke?”
Present
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Human trafficking has been and is going on in all parts of the world. The United States is not free of the problem either. Anywhere people are willing to treat others as objects it is not a far step to buying and selling them for labor and prostitution.
Prostitution is not called the world’s oldest profession for nothing. Some have argued that it should be legalized, even suggesting that it would be a means of ’empowering’ women. The evidence indicates that even where prostitution has been legalized, such as Amsterdam, the workers (male and female, young and old) were initially trafficked into the profession.
On the Netherlands check:
http://www.gvnet.com/humantrafficking/Netherlands.htm
and from Wikki:
According to the US Department of State, the Netherlands is primarily a source and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced prostitution and forced labor, though, to a lesser extent, it is a transit country for such trafficking. According to the US Department of State, the top five countries of origin for victims are the Netherlands, China, Nigeria, Hungary and Sierra Leone.
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The problem with “Human Trafficking” as a cause is that so much unmitigated nonsense has been mixed in. There may be a real problem, but it’s awfully hard to find in the midst of all the “WHITE SLAVERY!” bullshit that has been resurrected from that panics of the Edwardian era.
Maggie McNeill addresses a lot of this on her blog;
http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com
which I follow off and on. It seems like every municipality in the US has claimed to be “one of the biggest Human Trafficking hub in the country”. The claims that the Superbowl is a big “Trafficking” event fall flat ever year. Most of the “Rescue” operations have to keep their “clients” imprisoned. Several of the big “Human Trafficking” activists have proven to be con artists (Somaly Mam being a nasty example).
I’m prepared to believe that Slaveholding of various kinds exists. I am prepared to believe that the “Human Trafficking” hysteria has its roots in a real problem. I don’t see that the proposed solutions are likely to actually solve anything. If Prostitution is illegal, then women forced into prostitution will reasonably fear the law instead of go to it for protection.
And a nasty corner of my mind keeps whispering that the whole thing has its roots in the simple fact that no male with a moiety of his marbles is going to bed a Western Liberal Intellectual Female, with the attendant neurosis, drama, and head games, if he can get sex somewhere else.
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The trouble is “human trafficking/ white slavery” sounds catchier and is easier to fund-raise for than, oh, debt peonage (a form of de facto if not precisely de jure slavery that is common in the third world) and does not require either pleader or donor to look at the problem of societies that cannot outlaw slavery without violating the tenants of their religion (Salafist Islam).
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Well, there’s that. But an awful lot of the hysteria I see seem to focus on Western societies, instead of cultures where slavery and debt peonage are acknowledged states. People are readier to believe that all the prostitutes in New Orleans are somehow coerced than they are to face what Islamic society os like for women. Maybe because actually facing what Islam is like would also face them with tough choices, like how much blood are we ready to spend and/or spill to put a stop to it?
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It would also deprive them of an Approved Victim Group.
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There is a coalition of churches in our area that work with people who have been brought into the state by traffickers. The usual promise is a job placement in the United States, with all the paper work arranged. The women are not American and fear deportation. They often come from countries where the citizens do not trust the police — as Cedar notes there are places where the police have functioned as killing squads.
Even if we were to legalize prostitution the issues would not be solved, as demonstrated in Amsterdam. If you go to the gov link I gave you will find some nightmarish stories of what happens when one does go to authorities.
But it isn’t just prostitution:
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/195321/
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“With the United Nations, then, tasked with peacekeeping in the area, one might expect the incidence of trafficking to be reduced.”
Hahahahaha! You’re a funny, funny lady, Cedar! :)
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From another site – “when the baby blue helmets move into your area, that’s a sign that it’s time to move out.”
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Glad someone caught that :D Keep in mind the core of this post was a paper for school, where I try to toe the company line.
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I noticed that while I was around “police” in Central Europe, I tended to shy away and make certain to act as harmless as possible, because their uniforms and bearing rang a “paramilitary, short-fuse, be wary” bell in my mind. Probably also in part because of hearing too many stories about encounters between (usually intoxicated) American servicemen and the German motorcycle police and the Italian carabiniari. I felt more comfortable around the soldiers guarding Parliament in Budapest than around the police.
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I feel much more comfortable around soldiers in the US than I do around police. The soldiers are there to protect you, the police SAY they are there to protect you.
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Bearcat,
Be careful, because any US troups used on American soil will betold that they are fighting Amarican Extremists and it will not be your adverage troups on the ground determining what is or is not extremist behavior. That will be left up to the policy wonks in Washington and careerists military officers at the Pentagon and War Colleges.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/full-spectrum-operations-in-the-homeland-a-“vision”-of-the-future
forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2012/11/15/how-the-u-s-military-would-crush-a-tea-party-rebellion/
washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/7/the-civil-war-of-2016/
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I think you totally missed the point Josh. The troops are not being used on US soil, if they were it would totally negate my point. The troops are not looking at US civilians as the enemy, while the police ARE looking at the civilians as either an enemy or a potential enemy.
If somebody views you as threat to be eliminated or nullified, then you are going to view them as a threat. On the other hand, if somebody views you as something to be protected, you are much more likely to have warm fuzzy feelings about them.
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And there would have to be a significant cultural shift inside the military to get the troops to start looking at their own countrymen as the enemy. As much as I think the current administration would love to use them as a means of solidifying their position, there’s no way it’s going to happen.
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So, is the solution, then, spreading Western Civilization and its traditional morals into areas where they have either never been before or have been forcefully quashed? That’s doable, but it’s harder when you have so much lack of confidence in Western Civilization and its traditional morals. (We need to spread it in our own countries first, and then we can spread it to others, perhaps.)
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Yes, by all means, let’s revive Colonialism. No, I’m not being sarcastic. It took only a few daces of post colonial kleptocracy, tribalism, genocide, and famine as a tool of statecraf to make Colonial Paternalism look awfully goddamned good.
The problem is, who is going to do it? America lacks the temperament, and Great Britain has lost it. The French were only ever so-so. The Dutch are still almost universally loathed by anyone who was colonized by them, and the Belgians gave rise to the Belgian Congo (which really was The Heart of Darkness).
Makes you wonder what people were thinking of when they made Brussels the headquarters of the EU, doesn’t it?
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No, no.
Not Colonialism. Charter Cities!
VERY VERY different :)
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If we are going to go for charter cities we will need a few good men to run them.
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Not if you’re talking about Sarah’s “Good Men”.
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I kind like Lucius. I suspect that he would, if given his druthers, be inclined once he had taken over the world to leave it ruthlessly alone. That is if any of it is left once Athena was finished with it.
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Maybe that’s why he wants Canada to take over Gitmo. They’re such nice, polite people up there. Of course getting a hockey rink that keeps decent ice in Cuba would be difficult…
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But if you could do it, think how much more effective waterboarding would be if done on ice.
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I was about to nominate the Portuguese, but then I thought, “hey! I’m nominally libertarian. Who says I need a government to do colonialism? Can’t I do that with some kind of private enterprise?”
There’s a plot bunny for you. (Shades of Deathworld 2…)
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Hmm, I think I’ll go colonize Brazil, good timber for a booming timber industry, significant oil reserves, some gold, and of course good Jaguar hunting.
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I don’t think they have enough pretentious rich jerks in Brazil for good Jaguar hunting, but if you’re willing to hunt Beamers and such as well I suppose you might have a good result in your hunt. :-)
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It’s been done. The results do not seem to be particularly attractive.
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It just hasn’t been done big enough and expensive enough!
Oh, wait, private organization…
We will need to assess progress and adjust our approach to accommodate facts on the ground!
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“It just hasn’t been done big enough and expensive enough!”
Who are you, Paul Krugman?
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He’s just jealous of Josh. wants to be called Statist Zach. (Seriously, he’s joking.)
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*smiles* I knew he was joking. Calling someone on this forum Paul Krugman in all seriousness would be kind of like calling their mother something unspeakable. Well, at least to me. :)
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Byron I don’t know about Zachary but if you had called me Krugman *spits* we would be facing off at 20 (if you didn’t pick the sword or other close in fighting implement.)
;)
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Carp.
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Carp
Hmmm?
Not my first choice of dueling weapons, but it is an option.
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Carp trebuchet. don’t knock it.
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Are different fish like different caliber bullets?
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Likewise. We’re both totally joking.
My response, if I could have found one, would have been a clip of Zoidberg saying “My mother was a saint!” CURSE YOU, DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICES!
As it is, I’ll have to make do with this…
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*snort* Every time I bring that up, I get yelled at. Of course, by horrified leftists who can’t believe that ANYONE would think it so bad.
I just look at the hellhole that Africa became and ask if that’s working out great over there.
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Take it as a compliment. These days, if you’re not getting yelled at, it’s proof positive you’re neither saying nor doing anything worthwhile. :)
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If Kim was around right now, he might say “Africa wins again.”
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And WHY isn’t he around? I might have to poke him and make sure he’s okay.
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If you do, let us know.
Thanks.
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He’s probably busy writing. last weekend was balloon festival.
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Heh. You just reminded me that I recently found out my company has a “Diversity Calendar”, where people can add their ethnic holidays.
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You can add one for Left-handed Lithuanians?
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The Starcraft II calendar my siblings sent the kids has a whole lot of holidays on it, including Yom Kippur. The calendar corresponds to the global clients they get, so…
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Younger son has a B’nai B’rith calendar. He was walking with his brother and this young lady darted out of the club booth at club fair to hand him a calendar. Not his brother though.
Curiously, his brother is the one who has considered/is considering becoming observant. (When he’s on his own.) But Marsh LOOKS it.
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Your parenthetical comment was my point, yes.
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Yes, exactly. As long as societies that have money and desirable goods are willing to treat people as a commodity there will be enterprising groups that will seek to provide (particularly if it will reduce the population of their enemies). We have to refuse to treat people as objects that can be bought and sold. If we cannot figure out a way to eliminate the problem within our own society how can we expect to find a way to stop it elsewhere?
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Aaaaand one more for the new comments button.
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Must be Monday. It’s definitely going around.
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I’ve been around the world a time or three, and I was in a job where a lot of information not available to the average person was available. I’ve read quite a bit about “human trafficking” and “white slavery”. Some of it was solid information, and a lot of it was hearsay. I’ll try to write here about what I KNOW, and now what I suspect or think.
Human trafficking and slavery (not necessarily white) is rampant anywhere there isn’t a strong, HONEST central government. Even where there are such governments, however, it still happens. One out of every 10,000 disappearances in the United States and Canada is believed to be an abduction of someone who will end up in a Middle- or Near-East country as either a sex slave or a labor slave. There’s just no way to prove it without regaining those abducted, and most of them end up dead and buried when their usefulness expires.
Saudi Arabia is the worst for buying and keeping slaves, for any reason. That’s politically unpopular to mention, but it’s true. The Philippines is a major source for labor slaves to Saudi Arabia, but Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam also supply bodies.
Sex slaves and “indentured servants” (see Philippines) are relatively newcomers as far as definitions go, although they’ve been around for several thousand years. We also need to recognize a third type of slavery — poverty slaves. Poverty slaves are those people who are unable to make a living for themselves or their family, but who are also not allowed to move from where they are. They primarily exist in Asia and Africa, but I would also include at one end of this spectrum the US urban welfare recipient.
Twenty to fifty years ago, prostitution was a way out of poverty for many, where they were free to enter and practice the trade, and free to leave when they wished. Today, most prostitutes are not free. Most are drug addicts, hooked on one of the more addictive drugs as a part of their “indoctrination”, and continued to be supplied as long as they produce. That prostitution is mainly operated by criminal gangs, even where prostitution is legal.
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restavecs just might be a class of poverty slaves? Is there an obligation, as under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (articles 13 et. seq.) say to allow poverty slaves more physical mobility?
John Rawls like some other utopians starts out sounding so good and ends up like so many good intentions.
A market solution after the manner of orphan trains? I’ve known well only one person who went west on an orphan train and in the single case it worked out well. What happens to The Logic of Empire when the nature of empire changes?
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There’s a market solution isn’t there?
Although I’m pretty sure the U.S. Department of State is ignoring the issues of scale. That is the Netherlands may be important on a per capita basis but AFAIK De Wallen (Dutch pronunciation: [də ˈʋɑlə(n)]) or De Walletjes (Dutch pronunciation: [də ˈʋɑləcəs]) just don’t have the scale of say NY, NY On One Brooklyn Block, Two Violent Crimes Bring Broader Scourge to Surface per the NYT for 9/22/2014.
I used to know a man in Idaho whose first sworn job of constable, as given to him in no uncertain terms by the town fathers, was looking for men who seemed confused or inebriated. When he found such he was to ask if they needed his help getting to one of the local brothels. He was pretty much impossible to corrupt by his own standards because he did have a plan to kill everybody in the room and justified faith that he could do it well. Happy to help any working girl who felt coerced but it was pretty much a matter of no better alternative in the time and place. I’m pretty sure there was more coercion other places on the circuit.
The U.S. Navy pretty much shut down Lewiston Idaho (not the site of the anecdote above) just it had Storyville when training at Lewis and Clark (mostly radio) was important for the Korean War. Prior to that Lewiston had run wide open enough that there were city tax stamps on the slot machines – and eventually a court decision that the machines were illegal as gambling just the same.
Part of the success in promptly crushing the Hungarians in 1956 was the ability of the Soviet Union to bring in troops for whom the Hungarians were other. For Hungarians today there seem to be a wide choice of other from their own perspective?
And if there be a time for everything …..a season for every activity under the heavens, I do wonder what happens when the time is allowed to pass without speaking.
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For Hungarians today there seem to be a wide choice of other from their own perspective?
——————–
Hungary’s also got some long-standing border disputes, particularly with Romania. Officially, of course, no one cares about such things anymore. Unofficially… well, I don’t live in either country, so I’m not the person you want to talk to about that sort of thing. With the recent open political shifts in that country… I’ll just note that Budapest wasn’t on the list of capitols that Putin recently suggested he might want to overrun.
And note that Hungary’s currently a member of NATO…
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Well, I got the sense that 1) at least some Hungarians would be pleased to have those areas with majority Hungarian minorities returned to the country (notably Transylvania), and that 2) they were hoping for a Scottish “yes” vote because the Hungarians-in-Transylvania planned to use that as leverage for local autonomy, perhaps, perhaps, maybe, as a first step toward reunification with current Hungary. But it was not a topic I wanted to pursue too heavily, and I did not have a random sample of Hungarians-on-the-street to ask. *shrug* I suspect if anyone develops a time machine, there will be a waiting list of Hungarians who want to go back and terminate (or heavily revise) the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.
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Ending a 1920 treaty wouldn’t do much good in the grand scheme of things. Hungary took it from Romania in 1940. And Romania took it back at the end of World War 2. The only thing that might avoid that last swap is to arrange things so that Hungary could successfully switch sides in World War 2 (as Romania did), which would probably lead to Romania not being rewarded with the return of Transylvania.
On a more realistic note, I don’t know how well racially-motivated autonomy in the region would work. It’s my understanding that both nationalities have communities all throughout the region. It’s not as if you can draw a line across the region and say, “Everyone living north of this line has Hungarian ancestry, and everyone living south of it has Romanian ancestry.”
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Minor correction, Josh. A large portion of Transylvania belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary prior to 1920, in fact going back to the 1200s and a touch earlier. It became the semi-independent Voyvod of Transylvania during the Turkish Wars (really after 1540s), then returned to the kingdom after 1689. Romania/ Rumania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire differed over what belonged to whom until the end of the empire and the 1920 treaty. The area currently is Romanian, and there have been attempts by the Romanian government to strongly encourage the Slav-ization of ethnic Hungarians, Saxons, and Székelys living in the area. It’s a touchy topic, which is why I listened a great deal when people talked but didn’t go turning rocks over. (Bryan Cartledge’s book “The Will to Survive” is probably the most thorough English-language history of Hungary that I’ve found.)
As you say, dividing the area up by culture/ethnicity likely wouldn’t end well, if it were possible at all.
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TXRed,
Josh?
Not sure if junior is going to be offended or not?
;)
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See, this is what happens when I’ve been reading too many earlier threads while also trying to look up data so I don’t make a bigger fool of myself than usual.
Sorry Josh. That was for Junior. *SIGH* At least I got it on the right thread.
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While you were gone — I THINK — we had a troll invasion, one of whom threw a fit at Josh and told him “What statists like you don’t understand.” So, for ease of reference, Josh K. is now Statist Josh. Because irony.
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Statist Josh? :D Oooohhh kay. *adds to list of Hun titles*
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Heh.
On a more serious note, if my previous post suggested otherwise, I’m aware of the various claims and counter-claims over the territory. I’m merely of the opinion that the only bit that matters from a “possession is 9/10ths of the law” standpoint is when the Soviets handed it over to Romania, most likely as a “reward” for switching sides in World War 2. Sending a time machine back to 1920 won’t change that. The Romanians would have wanted it even without the 1920 treaty (otherwise they wouldn’t have claimed it in 1920), and thus probably would have picked it up as after the war regardless of anything else.
Also –
“… there have been attempts by the Romanian government to strongly encourage the Slav-ization of ethnic Hungarians…”
I’m not sure I follow. The Romanians themselves aren’t Slavs.
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Sorry, I didn’t catch that in your post. Not an excuse, but I’m having trouble getting back into the internet-shorthands-and-protocols after three weeks away.
I should have written, “to convert the non-Romanian ethnic minorities to cultural Romanians.” Too much Czech history piled up on my desk at the moment.
[Hey, WP? Proofread and edit functions would be really nice in the next upgrade, hint, hint. Just don’t futz up anything while you’re at it.]
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“Hey, WP? Proofread and edit functions would be really nice in the next upgrade, hint, hint. Just don’t futz up anything while you’re at it.]”
You’re not asking for much, are you?
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No, meanwhile, they’ve given me an “upgrade” that takes forever to post.
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One caveat there, Cedar: there _are_ no “UN peacekeepers.” There are (usually third world) forces provided to the UN, over which the UN has no authority to speak of. If it had the authority, it wouldn’t likely use it, because then the nations that provide would stop providing. And I think I am not alone is stating, with regard to the prospect of actual UN forces, “Over my dead body.”
Also, even Human Trafficking is not without its humorous aspect. For many years, and perhaps still, the largest open air female sex slave auction site in the world was Arizona Market, which _we_ created.
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“And I think I am not alone is stating, with regard to the prospect of actual UN forces, “Over my dead body.”
Well, no, good Colonel. Over their dead bodies.
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Very possibly mine also, but I plan to have a cushion under me when I fall.
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Remember your status in the afterlife is determined by how many you take with you.
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aYup.
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And maybe
quoted in University of Pennsylvania Law Review [Vol. 158: 1784]
Speaking of SJW
University of Pennsylvania Law Review [Vol. 158: 1826]
If they’d just settled for trading in maybe pirated video games?
But see also a broadcast interview on CNN about the Rwandan Genocide (where is Mike Hoare when you need him?)
Michael New and a couple of other people have litigated the issue of U.S. service members asked to wear blue helmets and berets and made the precedents settled law – at least where the writ of U.S. courts runs.
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Again, I was working within the confines of a paper for school, presenting to a professor who works part-time in Kosovo retraining their police. I completely agree about the prospect of a “UN Force”
Regarding human trafficking, we really can’t do a whole lot about it until there is an actual definition, rather than loosey-goosey ‘feels’ about it. Most of the comments have been focused on the sex trade, but the forced labor camp falls into this as well.
For class I was made to watch the Whistleblower movie. I was.not.happy. with it. Far too dramatic, and at the end, we have the ‘noble’whistleblower on BBC, but you will note that NONE of the girls she was so worried about made it out of country away from the appalling conditions we all know from Ringo’s Choosers of the Slain among other stories. Reality is… sucky.
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The behavior on the part of “peace keepers” is part of why so many are… reluctant… to have US members serve “in blue hats.”
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I can relate. The guilt by association is strong.
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Smurf helmets, make sure and use the proper terminology.
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