AS the swine flu threatens to become the next pandemic, the biggest questions are whether its transmission from human to human will be sustained and, if so, how virulent it might become. But even if this virus were to peter out soon, there is a strong possibility it would only go underground, quietly continuing to infect some people while becoming better adapted to humans, and then explode around the world.
What happens next is chiefly up to the virus. But it is up to us to create a vaccine as quickly as possible.
Influenza viruses are unpredictable because they are able to mutate so rapidly. That capacity enables them to jump easily from species to species, infecting not only pigs and people but also horses, seals, cats, dogs, tigers and so on. An avian virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic jumped first from birds to humans, then from humans to swine (as well as other animals). Now, and not for the first time, pigs have given a virus back to humans.
Mutability makes even existing, well-known flu viruses unpredictable. A new virus, formed by a combination of several existing ones as this virus is, is even less predictable. After jumping to a new host, influenza can become more or less virulent — in fact, different offshoots could go in opposite directions — before a relatively stable new virus emerges.
Influenza pandemics have occurred as far back in history as we can look, but the four we know about in detail happened in 1889, 1918, 1957 and 1968. The mildest of these, the so-called Hong Kong flu in 1968, killed about 35,000 people in the United States and 700,000 worldwide. Ordinary seasonal influenza, in comparison, now kills 36,000 Americans a year, because the population has a higher proportion of elderly people and others with weak immune systems. (If a virus like the Hong Kong flu hit today, it would probably kill more people for the same reason.)
The worst influenza pandemic, in 1918, killed 675,000 in the United States. And although no one has a reliable worldwide death toll, the lowest reasonable number is about 35 million, and some scientists believe it killed as many as 100 million — at a time when the world’s population was only a quarter of what it is today. The dead included not only the elderly and infants but also robust young adults.
What’s important to keep in mind in assessing the threat of the current outbreak is that all four of the well-known pandemics seem to have come in waves. The 1918 virus surfaced by March and set in motion a spring and summer wave that hit some communities and skipped others. This first wave was extremely mild, more so even than ordinary influenza: of the 10,313 sailors in the British Grand Fleet who became ill, for example, only four died. But autumn brought a second, more lethal wave, which was followed by a less severe third wave in early 1919.
The first wave in 1918 was relatively mild, many experts speculate, because the virus had not fully adapted to humans. And as it did adapt, it also became more lethal. However, there is very good evidence that people who were exposed during the first wave developed immunity — much as people get protection from a modern vaccine.
A similar kind of immune-building process is the most likely explanation for why, in 1918, only 2 percent of those who contracted the flu died. Having been exposed to other influenza viruses, most people had built up some protection. People in isolated regions, including American Indian reservations and Alaskan Inuit villages, had much higher case mortality — presumably because they had less exposure to influenza viruses.
The 1889 pandemic also had a well-defined first wave that was milder than succeeding waves. The 1957 and 1968 pandemics had waves, too, though they were less well defined.
In all four instances, the gap between the time the virus was first recognized and a second, more dangerous wave swelled was about six months. It will take a minimum of four months to produce vaccine in any volume, possibly longer, and much longer than that to produce enough vaccine to protect most Americans. The race has begun.
John M. Barry, a visiting scholar at the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, is the author of “The Great Influenza.”
Interesting debut for Douthat in the Times (Kristol's conservative replacement): Cheney for President
Benen: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PARTY....Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.
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Imagine for a moment that he’d had that chance. Imagine that he’d damned the poll numbers, broken his oft-repeated pledge that he had no presidential ambitions of his own, and shouldered his way into the race. Imagine that Republican primary voters, more favorably disposed than most Americans to Cheney and the administration he served, had rewarded him with the nomination.
At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.
We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.
“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.
This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.
As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. In debates with Barack Obama, he would have been as cuttingly effective as he was in his encounters with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in 2000 and 2004 respectively. And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.
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Chris Cillizza argued yesterday that the most important number in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll wasn't 69% (the president's approval rating), 50% (the number of Americans who believe the country is going in the right direction), but rather, was 21%.That's the percent of people in the Post/ABC survey who identified themselves as Republicans, down from 25 percent in a late March poll and at the lowest ebb in this poll since the fall of 1983(!).
In that same poll, 35 percent self-identified as Democrats and 38 percent called them Independents.
These numbers come on the heels of Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager for Arizona Sen. John McCain's presidential bid, declaring the Republican party a "shrinking entity" last week -- citing the decline of GOP numbers in the west, northeast and mountain west as evidence.
It's not just this poll. The New York Times published a new poll today and found that only 20% of Americans identify themselves as Republicans, the lowest number in at least 17 years. (It may be longer, but the poll internals only go back to 1992.)
There was some talk in Republican circles recently that the GOP is finally "back in the saddle." If that's true, the horse is looking pretty small.
Cillizza added, "The number of people who see themselves as GOPers is on the decline even as those who remain within the party grow more and more conservative. That means that the loyal base of the party has an even larger voice in terms of the direction it heads even as more and more empirical evidence piles up that the elevation of voices like former vice president Dick Cheney does little to win over wavering Republicans or recruit Independents back to the GOP cause."
Which brings us back to yesterday's discussion about the party's base refusing to allow the party to progress or adapt. Indeed, while the GOP would presumably be looking for new ways to expand its numbers, Republicans are apparently intent on doing the opposite.
C&L: Countdown: Redefining Torture
Heather Tuesday Apr 28, 2009 5:30amFrom Countdown April 27, 2009. Keith talks to Jonathan Turley about lastest revelations that the torture that occurred may not have stayed within the legal guidelines as defined by Bush OLC and therefore be subject to prosecution. Jonathan Turley makes this observation on the Democrats being informed about the torture:
Turley: We now know that the Bush administration did what frankly a lot of criminal enterprises do. They bring in people to expose them to what they know to be an illegal program or illegal act. It's a lesson that frankly I know some of my past clients used in their organization and so they even brought in Democratic Senators to get them to buy into the program.
But there's this notion that if you had so many people that knew about it, it's less of a crime. Of course that's ridiculous. It's a worse crime. If you're a rogue operator and nobody knew that you tortured it would be treated as a simple crime. A war crime is, the concern there is that is was coordinated and premeditated and many people participated in it. And that's exactly what we have here.
Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray sees the torturing of Zubaydah to get a casus belli for invading Iraq as just part of an entire operation generating self-perpetuating falsehood:
In gathering evidence from victims of torture, we built a consistent picture of the narrative which the torturers were seeking to validate from confessions under torture. They sought confessions which linked domestic opposition to President Karimov with Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden; they sought to exaggerate the strength of the terrorist threat in Central Asia. People arrested on all sorts of pretexts – (I recall one involved in a dispute over ownership of a garage plot) suddenly found themselves tortured into confessing to membership of both the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and Al-Qaida.
They were also made to confess to attending Al-Qaida training camps in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In an echo of Stalin’s security services from which the Uzbek SNB had an unbroken institutional descent, they were given long lists of names of people they had to confess were also in IMU and Al-Qaida. It became obvious to me after just a few weeks that the CIA material from Uzbekistan was giving precisely the same narrative being extracted by the Uzbek torturers – and that the CIA “intelligence” was giving information far from the truth.
I was immediately concerned that British ministers and officials were being unknowingly exposed to material derived from torture, and therefore were acting illegally.
I asked my Deputy, Karen Moran, to call on a senior member of the US Embassy and tell him I was concerned that the CIA intelligence was probably derived from torture by the Uzbek security services. Karen Moran reported back to me that the US Embassy had replied that it probably did come from torture, but in the War on Terror they did not view that as a problem.
In which Maddow and guest connect the dots between federal disaster preparedness funding and being prepared for disasters.
Swine flu fears in Mexico April 27: Mexico City turns into a ghost town as a strain of swine flu continues to claim lives. Rachel Maddow is joined by NBC Chief Science Correspondent Robert Bazell.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Christy Hardin-Smith: Kmiec Calls Out “Rank Politics” Against Dawn Johnsen’s OLC Nod
During a PFAW-sponsored press call yesterday, Douglas Kmiec had the following to say:
Dawn and I are people who come from different points on the policy spectrum. But one of the things that I've long admired about her is her independence of mind.
...when she has been performing her job as an advocate, or a lawyer or a a counselor for the United States, in each case she has performed those functions with a level of, as Walter [Delinger] said, care and precision. But, most importantly for the Office of Legal Counsel: objectivity. This is what was missing in the torture memo context. And this is what Dawn Johnsen so eloquently and appropriately challenged.
But, I thought Sen. Cornyn said she wasn't "serious" enough to hold the job. Kmiec smacks that head on:
Dawn Johnsen, more than almost any other academic lawyer in the country, has long been a student of executive power and constitutional structure, and the role of the Office of Legal Counsel. And, by virtue of that, has given through the American Bar Association some very sound guidance for the operations of that office.
I think we would be hard pressed to identify any other comparable appointee for a Justice post who would be as well suited. So I find the objections to Professor Johnsen to be quite incredible.
And, frankly just simply aimed, as so many of these things are aimed, at producing a defeat on a partisan basis rather than an evaluation on a merit basis or consideration.
Kmiec isn't exactly Mr. Liberal guy. This is a man who served as OLC chief during both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies, and who teaches at Pepperdine University with a clearly conservative ideological bent in his legal writings.
But Kmiec also knows Dawn Johnsen and her work well, has taken the time to read through her prior OLC writings to get a feel for her "seriousness." Kmiec is standing up to clearly oppose what he calls the "rank politics" behind those objecting to Dawn Johnsen at OLC.
Please call your Senators and tell them to vote FOR cloture and FOR Dawn Johnsen for OLC.
Also, take a moment to call Harry Reid's office -- (202) 224-3542 -- and tell him to schedule a vote.
The entire call was an excellent back and forth -- not just on Dawn Johnsen, but on rule of law questions about which a lot of lawyers around the country are worried. PFAW, who helped set up the call, has made the entire call available as an mp3. It's well worth a listen.
More from WaPo, Washington Independent, and Blog of Legal Times.
Blue Texan (FDL): Way to Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!
Guess they're really big on torture-enablers in Nevada.Attaturk (FDL): Torture — Manufacturing Reality…Thanks Media
"Judge Bybee has a good professional reputation in Nevada," Reid spokesman Jon Summers said in an e-mail. "While the memos that have been released are disturbing to Sen. Reid, at this point in time, he doesn't think we should be making a rush to judgment."
And Nevada's other Senator is even worse.
"To call for him to be impeached when he was trying to give the proper legal advice is just ridiculous," [John] Ensign said. "You impeach people for ethical violations, for criminal violations. It would be like impeaching a member of Congress because they voted the wrong way."
Now, I'm pretty sure providing legal cover for criminal acts that violate the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions is unethical, but I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a guy.
The important thing for Republicans is that the BS gets out there first, LOUD AND PROUD, so that when the truth comes out months later the lie is hardwired into the
"common wisdom"David Broder.Meet example 10,476 - December 2007, waterboarding is awesome:
Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”
We know this is a lie, but from Limbaugh to Pantload they all spouted this nonsense. Mr. Kiriakou was soon everywhere proclaiming the ol' waterboard had prevented many attacks. So you know what's coming:
During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.
And, you know what happened next:
Mr. Kiriakou was later hired by ABC to provide commentary on terrorism cases
AWESOME!!!
Update:
More Awesome! March 2009:
According to knowledgeable sources, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has hired John Kiriakou
Greenwald: Jon Meacham's subservient defense of monarchical power
One of the few impressive abilities of establishment journalists is their aptitude at so rapidly embracing and so loyally reciting the standard Beltway script of conventional wisdom. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham today has a new column on torture and prosecutions that is an almost exact replica of David Broder's and virtually every other column written by his fellow media stars [on the "torture debate," the Left and Right are the extremes; I'm above all of that and reside in the Serious middle; those who advocate prosecutions are leftists motivated by ugly vengeance; any investigations (like all important government proceedings) should occur only in secret and be devoted only to asking if torture works, etc. etc.]. But Meacham did manage unintentionally to express a thought that so perfectly reflects how they think that it's worth noting (h/t Retired Military Patriot; emphasis added):
And to pursue criminal charges against officials at the highest levels—including the former president and the former vice president—would set a terrible precedent. . . . That is not to say presidents and vice presidents are always above the law; there could be instances in which such a prosecution is appropriate, but based on what we know, this is not such a case.
Presidents and Vice Presidents aren't "always above the law" -- just most of the time. It's possible to imagine some extreme hypothetical case where it might be reasonable to want to impose accountability when the President commits crimes, but such a case is so unthinkably rare -- so theoretical -- that it's not even worth describing what that situation might be. That's the only view that can be heard on Meet the Press -- the masses must understand that it's wrong to treat Presidents the same way that ordinary citizens are treated when they break the law -- and Meacham was on yesterday with David Gregory to deliver that very message without challenge, the second consecutive week that show presented a unanimous panel endorsing presidential immunity for lawbreaking.
Also from Meacham: prosecuting Presidents for committing crimes would "set a terrible precedent" -- but placing Presidents above the law and adopting a bar against holding them accountable for crimes doesn't set a bad precedent at all, nor does it create any sort of destructive incentive scheme. If you were the President and were tempted to break the law, what possible reason would you have to refrain from doing so, given your certain knowledge that (as long as the crime did not involve a titillating sex scandal) you'd have the Jon Meachams and David Broders and the other decadent, monarch-worshiping establishment spokespeople to insist that you had the right to do so and nothing must be done when you're caught? That's what passes for reasonable, measured thought among our media elites: "That is not to say presidents and vice presidents are always above the law."
It just cannot be said enough that our political elites truly do believe that "law" is only for the dirty, filthy masses -- but not for them. It really is that explicit. Joan Walsh was on Howie Kurtz's CNN show yesterday and the other guests -- The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza and former Bush speechwriter David Frum -- responded to her like she was from Neptune all because she repeatedly made one point -- torture is against the law and therefore those who ordered it, by definition, committed crimes. This is a point they literally could not comprehend. That's because they reject the necessary premise in which this simple proposition is grounded: that political leaders are bound by what we call "law." The reason we have become the country we've become is because we've fallen all the way down to Jon Meacham and David Broder from what, at least in principle, used to guide us -- the Hard Leftist, vengeful idea of Thomas Paine:
But where says some is the King of America? I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.
Or the Hard Leftist idea of John Adams: " the very definition of a republic is an empire of laws, and not of men. . . . that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of law, is the best of republics."
Or that of Hard Left partisan Teddy Roosevelt: "No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor."
If one surveys the wreckage that has become our political class, this explains much of it: we've gone from Paine ("so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is King") and Adams ("an empire of laws, and not of men") and Roosevelt ("No man is above the law") to Newsweek and Jon Meacham ("That is not to say presidents and vice presidents are always above the law") and David Broder (holding leaders accountable for lawbreaking is ugly, destructive, populist vengeance except when it involves a sex scandal).
It's difficult to imagine how nauseated (though perhaps not surprised) people like Paine and Adams would be if they would have known that, a mere 230 years later, we'd have as opinion-making elites people like David Broder and Jon Meacham declaring that "presidents and vice presidents are [not] always above the law" -- this is the American President we're talking about; criminal prosecutions are inappropriate for his crimes-- as though that theoretical concession represents the reasonable, centrist, responsible view rather than the authoritarian, lawless, establishment-revering, deeply un-American tripe that it is.
UPDATE: To illuminate what lies at the crux of all of this, one could no better than to re-review the explanation from Meacham's star reporter, Evan Thomas, about what he sees his role as being as a member of the establishment:
By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.
There have been very few, if there have been any, better explanations of the role our establishment media plays than that. That is the idea that most of our "journalists" serve and revere, and from that necessarily follows the belief that "law" is something that only restricts what the lowly masses do but not "the ruling class." Thomas did everyone a great service by so clearly describing their true role.
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