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April 30, 2009
Links April 30 09
  • Billmon on Texas – Second Thoughts, or Rebellion Reconsidered – (Daily Kos)
  • How the NSC runs everything – Obama's Chess Masters – (Rolling Stone)
  • More on Obama's NSC and Foreign Policy – A Thousand Envoys Bloom – (National Interest)
  • Okay. Now prosecute the culprits – Obama: 'I believe waterboarding was torture – (Guardian)
  • Poodle does as master says – Gordon Brown: 700 more troops for Afghanistan – (Telegraph)
  • Another poodle – Australia boosts troop and financial assistance to Afghanistan – (Radio Australia)
  • Theory – Policy in Afghanistan – (Pat Lang)
  • Practice – Behind Closed Doors COIN Chatter on Afghanistan – (Ghost of Alexander)
  • Swine flu panic – WHO raises pandemic alert level – (BBC)
  • It's antisemitic! – Israeli official: Swine flu name offensive – (AP)
  • Chutzpah – Israel warns EU to stop criticizing Netanyahu government – (Haaretz)
  • Economists change course – The Last Temptation of Risk – (National Interest)
  • Game of chicken – Chrysler Bankruptcy Looms as Deal on Debt Falters – (NYT)
  • In bailing out banks – The Importance of Battlefield Nuclear Weapons – (Baseline Scenario)

Please share your links, news and views in the comments.

Posted by b on April 30, 2009 at 06:07 UTC | Permalink
Comments

The non-jew flu? One wonders whether these nudniks will start a movement to rename all the diseases named after all the Jewish researchers and doctors. These spinmeisters just can’t see the hole they are drilling themselves into.

Posted by: biklett | Apr 30 2009 6:45 utc | 1

Pretty amazing website: Life, death and carbon emissions on Planet Earth

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Apr 30 2009 8:11 utc | 2

A reporter from El Pais went to the mexican health secretary and found no one was using the mask there because they think that it’s quite useless. The mask is to comfort the people (actually spread fear and remark the excepcionality of the situation). The whole article is worth reading if you can read spanish are can cope with machine translations. The reporter talked with the top epidemiologic expert who basically destroyed the whole scare campaign promoved by his government. There were no deads registered in La Gloria and the scare started, discarding a few odd deads, after the April 17th discovery of the new strain in California.
Nadie lleva mascarillas en la secretaría mexicana de Salud
Translated tittle: No ones uses masks in the mexican health secretary.

Posted by: ThePaper | Apr 30 2009 8:29 utc | 3

Yeah. I always pointed that out during the SARS scare, too: the virus can get in through your eyes, through your ass, through your ears, grow on your skin until you take off the mask, etc.
But let’s not underestimate some people’s paranoia: i knew folks who carried their own disinfectant soap and started wearing protective glasses during SARS. So certainly, there are folks who are motivated to go that far.
Also, many folks said — with typical Asian social awareness — that the masks should be warn to protect others from your germs, and if everyone wore them then the measures would be both more effective and more humane (i.e. — protect those who were really sick from getting ostracized or beaten because they were unfortunate enough to contract a common cold).

Posted by: china_hand2 | Apr 30 2009 9:43 utc | 4

World Bank finds Israel’s water policy hard to swallow.
Guess what’s new? More sanctions against Iran.
Flying pigs, Tamiflu and factory farms.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 30 2009 10:09 utc | 5

Oh, the humanity: White House split on drone strikes against Balochistan.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 30 2009 10:18 utc | 6

(some truth, finally)
Scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild
Genetic data indicate this outbreak won’t be as deadly as that of 1918, or even the average winter.
By Karen Kaplan and Alan Zarembo
April 30, 2009
As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza — at least in its current form — isn’t shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.
In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.
“Let’s not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world,” said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison.
His remarks Wednesday came the same day Texas authorities announced that a nearly 2-year-old boy with the virus had died in a Houston hospital Monday.
“Any time someone dies, it’s heartbreaking for their families and friends,” Olsen said. “But we do need to keep this in perspective.”…
…
Ralph Tripp, an influenza expert at the University of Georgia, said that his early analysis of the virus’ protein-making instructions suggested that people exposed to the 1957 flu pandemic — which killed up to 2 million people worldwide — may have some immunity to the new strain.
That could explain why older people have been spared in Mexico, where the swine flu has been most deadly….
…
More at link:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-sci-swine-reality30-2009apr30,0,5923718.story

Posted by: Ensley | Apr 30 2009 13:59 utc | 7

Chrysler bankruptcy: hedge funds would not settle. b, it sounds like you called that one, though haven’t yet heard news mention CDS.
Has anyone heard if AIG is holding those CDS? Are those taxpayer dollars that the hedge funds will be collecting?

Posted by: small coke | Apr 30 2009 14:55 utc | 8

Torturers and rapists are like two peas in a pod in that people who get their jollies by torturing those who’ve been accused of terrorism are the same sort of people who get their jollies by raping those who’ve been accused of sexual misconduct. So it don’t make any sense to me why there’s hardly any public outrage over the fact that Bush-backed torturers are getting off scot-free for torturing prison detainees who’ve been accused of terrorism.
Many Americans can’t seem to get it in their heads that if Obama and his judicial team close the book on Bush-backed torture, this will give government officials the green light to use torture as a means of extracting confessions from other types of prison detainees, even though these confessions are bound to be false. And it goes without saying that if the White House continues to turn a blind eye to state-sponsored torture, this will put America well on the road to fascism!

Posted by: Cynthia | Apr 30 2009 15:30 utc | 9

Escobar, The myth of Talibanistan.
Barak says to Europe: we’re very keen to talk to people that do what we say (my paraphrasis).

Posted by: andrew | Apr 30 2009 15:52 utc | 10

The reaction to the Mexican flu has been really frightening. Mexican because that is the tradition in flu naming: Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, etc. and it is (so far?) a human flu, pigs don’t suffer from it, contrary to bird flu which affects avian creatures. Egypt killing pigs!
A sort of planetary scare, in the developed world. It reminds me of when Lady Di died, then we had hysterical communal grieving. Or Saddam’s WMD, and duct tape.
TV has killed reason in favor of emotion.
Now, rich people are dead scared of the flu, because everyone has had it, and anyone can catch it in the winter. We don’t worry about TB, malaria, trachoma, and children dying of diarrhea and hunger.
In 1918 there were no antibiotics. No Tamiflu, Relenza. Most who die of the flu die of other infections – pneumonia caused by various bacteria. Pfeiffer’s work and hypothesis wiki– he identified a small bacterium as the causative agent, was accepted. Reading a few articles from that time, public health and preventative measures have not changed an iota, except in their tone (practical and analytic rather than alarmist, put forth by experts and not TV personalities) and the fact that mass produced masks were not part of the picture.

Posted by: Tangerine | Apr 30 2009 16:04 utc | 11

Increasingly, it seems that our culture has become increasingly obsessed with life-threatening dangers. Lead, mercury, chainsaws, WMDs, Islam, flu…the list goes on and on. Media-induced hysteria, perhaps.
Yet, we seem to be immune to the terror of war. Go figure.
We could all learn that life is dangerous and no one survives it. Drop the useless hysteria and get on with it.

Posted by: Obelix | Apr 30 2009 18:22 utc | 12

Too many people, an instinct to fight off a predator that long ago disappeared, and sexual selection and social dominance behaviors rooted in how much moola-meat the female gets —
Those are the sources of all human problems, and it has always been that way.
The solution is an ugly, unpleasant one, but someday – whether we want it to or not – it will arrive and do Gaia’s bidding.
Doesn’t matter if it’s nuclear weapons, bio-warfare, or the recrudescence of some unknown, unrecorded million-year-old plague, but it’s going to happen. The planet earth has an equilibrium state, and humanity is throwing it out of whack.
Frankly, i think it’s a sucker’s game. In my more peaceful moments, i really enjoy imagining how happy everything else would be if people disappeared. Of course, it wouldn’t be any fun unless i was around to say “i told you so”, but it’s still quite reassuring to picture the lions and tigers and bears and gorillas and redwoods finally getting their own back.

Posted by: china_hand2 | Apr 30 2009 20:25 utc | 13

Right now the swine flu appears like its virulence is on par with the seasonal flu. We should all be breathing a sign of relief over this. So if the swine flu comes around each year like the seasonal flu does, the most we’ll have to do is cook up a new batch of flu vaccine every year and dispense it to at-risk populations, namely those with severe heart and lung conditions and those who are immunocompromised for various reasons.
But there’s still a lot of unknowns about this flu, especially since it’s not only derived from pigs and birds, but humans as well. Because of this, no one knows for sure if the swine flu will mutate into a more virulent strain as it continues to work its way through our species at large.

Posted by: Cynthia | Apr 30 2009 20:45 utc | 14

I would not sweat the swine flu in America unless it is transmitted by rotting corpses in mass graves. The natives are restless.

Posted by: …—… | Apr 30 2009 21:37 utc | 15

MI6 Agent loses memory stick with 5 years’ worth of intelligence.
I suppose it would be silly to ask if the data was strongly encrypted…

Posted by: Obelix | Apr 30 2009 22:46 utc | 16

Obama wants to rename the swine flu to H1N1 virus not because he cares deeply about the health and safety of pigs, but because he’s deep in the pockets of Big Pork. And I’d like to think that Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, had Miss Piggy dressed wearing a string of pearls as his way of slamming the Biblical phrase “don’t cast pearls before swine.”
Just a couple of thoughts…

Posted by: Cynthia | Apr 30 2009 22:49 utc | 17

Not surprising, although the sample is very low:
April 30th, 2009
Churchgoers more likely to back torture, survey finds
Posted: 01:55 PM ET
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than 6 in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only 4 in 10 of them did.
The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants, and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small.
http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/30/churchgoers-more-likely-to-back-torture-survey-finds/

Posted by: Ensley | Apr 30 2009 22:56 utc | 18

Cliff May not only thinks that torture is peachy keen, but he also comes across as a neonut Zionist who’d love to wipe Palestine off the map!
http://blog.indecisionforever.com/2009/04/29/jon-stewarts-extended-interview-with-cliff-may/

Posted by: Cynthia | May 1 2009 0:36 utc | 19

Gotta love that–research on religion funded by the Pew Research Center

Posted by: Browning | May 1 2009 2:21 utc | 20

Bush policies all over again, but this time from congress:
You’re either with us, or against us

Posted by: Anthony | May 1 2009 4:09 utc | 21

Obama wants to rename the swine flu to H1N1 virus.
This is the WHO recommendation. WHO needs advice! They took this choice as a default because any name that has any other meaning will now be objected to. The Mexicans also objected to Mexican flu. So expect that soon we will have official names, unreadable and incomprehensible, and people’s constructions, that will veer off in any direction. This is the fault of the scientific community, who should pay more attention to naming, communication, etc.

Posted by: Tangerine | May 1 2009 15:46 utc | 22

Enslet, the Pew study you referenced,
“Churchgoers more likely to back torture, survey finds (but among non-church-goers),
Only 4 in 10 of them did.”
It does surprise me to learn that (within whatever margin of error a 700+ sample study has) a very large number of people are in favor of causing pain. 40% of the most empathetic group want to cause pain and possible disfigurement or death to their fellows. 60% in the “least” empathetic group. No matter how you cut it that is a very large number of vicious fearful folks among us. Now I know why the lizards succeed so easily with the *fear&torture* program.
The study ought to have included a question like, “Would you change your answer if you yourself, having been bad, were detained for six years and tortured every day, with no access to law or family?”

Posted by: rapt | May 1 2009 17:51 utc | 23

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