h/t gates of Vienna
We're now witnessing the worst Ebola epidemic ever. It's spun "out of control," warns one of the world's most influential newspapers. What's not to be afraid of? Well, Ebola.
As always, count on the World Health Organization's (WHO) Director Margaret Cho to make the worst of any epidemic. "If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives but also severe socioeconomic disruption and a high risk of spread to other countries," she said. Assuming that WHO is more competent than other UN agencies makes an ass of you and me?
Here's a rule of thumb about diseases: The rarer and less likely they are to kill you; the more hype they get. The New York Times ran more than 2,000 articles on SARS, which ultimately killed zero Americans.
Previous epidemics were smaller, but that didn't stop them from becoming epidemic hysteria. I should know: My first article about Ebola hysteria appeared during the 1996 outbreak, with more articles during a subsequent outbreak 13 years ago!
This is only the deadliest outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease because past ones were so tiny. At this writing, there have been 1,711 reported cases in Africa and 932 deaths. That's too many. Still no suspected cases that didn't originate in those four countries and mortality rate remains 55 percent.
#4
Maybe epidemiologists, like generals, are too inclined to prepare to fight the last war. How would we be reacting to this if we had had no prior contact with Ebola?
Posted by: Matt ||
08/14/2014 19:59 Comments ||
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[DAWN] The issue of Kashmire is a perennial lightning rod in the subcontinent. Whenever leaders in both India and Pakistain wish to burnish their nationalist credentials, jingoistic references are made about the troubled territory.
In a similar vein, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi used a visit to Leh — his second to India-held Kashmire after securing the top slot — to slam Pakistain and revive memories of 1999's Kargil ... three months of unprovoked Pak aggression, over 4000 dead Paks, another victory for India ... imbroglio. Speaking to the Indian troops, Mr Modi castigated Pakistain for engaging "in a proxy war" while he recalled the infiltration of Kargil.
Considering his audience — Indian military personnel — it can safely be said that Mr Modi was playing to the gallery. While there has been some holy warrior activity in India-held Kashmire, the most recent incident being an ambush of troops near Srinagar, as well as cross-LoC trading of fire by both militaries, Mr Modi knows there is no comparison with the situation that existed two decades ago.
At the height of the Kashmire insurgency in the late '80s and throughout much of the '90s, hundreds of deaths were reported every year from the held territory, including a high civilian corpse count. Today there is no such parallel; instead, there is a feeling of isolation from India in Kashmire and periodic waves of unrest — much of this is due to the harsh laws in place in the region as well as the heavy Indian military presence.
Comments such as those made by Mr Modi will only raise the temperature in the region and fail to address the real problem. And we must accept that Kashmire remains an unresolved issue.
Pakistain's Foreign Office, while criticising the Indian prime minister, said Islamabad seeks "good, neighbourly relations" with India. Both countries must realise that good neighbours discuss their differences in a calm, logical manner and do not go about accusing each other in public.
If India has concerns about infiltration — which is indeed unacceptable — it needs to communicate these via diplomatic channels. Issuing combative statements only makes the resolution of outstanding issues all the more difficult.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/14/2014 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
Lets admit it: Israel can never win the media war against Hamas. No matter what it does, no matter how hard it tries.
Not because the Islamist terror group that is raining missiles on its cities and villages and using its own hapless subjects as human shields is the underdog in this conflict, but because the sight of Arabs killing Jews (or other Arabs for that matter) is hardly news; while the sight of Jews killing Arabs is a man-bitedog anomaly that cannot be tolerated.
h/t Instapundit
The hawks (including me) were wrong about a lot, but some got one thing right. It's going to be a long war.
...When new threats emerged, the White House dismissed them with the whitewash that "core al-Qaeda" was "on the run." All pretenders to al-Qaeda's mantle were little more than a "jayvee" squad, as Obama put it. It's okay to slumber again was the message.
One jayvee squad -- the self-styled Islamic State formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS -- now controls the territorial equivalent of Britain and is one of the best-equipped and ideologically committed military forces in the Middle East. Everyday jihadis -- many with Western passports -- enlist in the struggle to create a global caliphate while the "Muslim street" from Turkey to Saudi Arabia follows the Islamic State like a sports team.
...No one in the West wants a generational struggle with jihadism any more than Israel wants perpetual war with Hamas in Gaza. The problem is the enemy always gets a vote. It just may be that the Middle East will become the West's Gaza. And, so far, nobody has a good answer for what to do about it.
...Adherence to this nefarious notion of trading Jewish land for Arab peace can no longer be excused or condoned by the assumption of well-intentioned naiveté.
In the light of objective experience, continued adherence to it, despite its failures, both flagrant and frequent, can only be explained by assuming motives that are either moronic or malicious, either imbecilic or insidious.
If the land-for-peace two-staters had their way, we would now be in a perilous situation indeed.
If we had complied with their supplication to relinquish the heights of the Golan to Bashar Assad -- a man whom, we were assured, we could do business with because he studied medicine in the West and surfed the Internet -- we would be facing the specter of al-Qaida-affiliates deployed above Lake Kinneret and overlooking Tiberius. Had we relinquished the heights of Judea-Samaria, as the Left beseeched us to do, we could well have been confronted with forces of the Islamic State group perched on the hills overlooking Greater Tel Aviv, with Ben-Gurion Airport within mortar range of their forward positions and hundreds of tunnels being burrowed under the security barrier.
Unlike Gaza, where the border is around 60-km.-long, abutting the relatively sparsely populated South, the border of Judea-Samaria is some 400-500-km.-long and adjacent to the densely populated Coastal Plain with its congested traffic arteries and vital infrastructure installations.
But for the grace of God (or good fortune) this would be the dread situation facing Israel today -- courtesy of the "peace camp" and their perilous, puerile and petulant penchant for "peace in our time."
In which Ms Rosett, who broke the Oil for Food story among others, all tenaciously followed, goes beneath the surface of reports of the planned Hamas Rosh Hashanah tunnel massacre.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
