Here is the trailer from the film Freeing Bernie Baran along with a short excerpt. I recommend seeing this film if you are able to do so.
Baran was just a teenager when he started working at a day care center in Massachusetts. When a set of very low-class parents, with dubious parental skills themselves, discovered Baran was gay they started making accusations against the boy. It was the era of the day care witchhunts where the media, government agencies, and feminist-oriented therapists, created a hysteria that swept the nation. People became convinced that organized rings of Satanic pedophiles had infilitrated hundreds of day care centers. Police and prosecuters had a field day.
Literally hundreds of innocent people were rounded up across America, thousands of children were psychologically tortured by the child abuse industry and taken from their parents. To this day many of the victims of the hysteria still sit in jail. It was 25 years before Baran finally had justice and was released.
For those with short memories, or who are too young to remember, it was this bogus hysteria that inspired short-sighted politicians—as if they are any other kind—to pass hundreds of new laws to "protect" young people from sex. The result of that hysteria is that today teens are routinely arrested and charged as child molesters for normal adolescent sexuality. A teen, exploring their sexuality, takes a photo of themself standing naked in front of a mirror, discovers they are a child pornographer. Two young people have sex when their parents aren't around only to find they are now guilty of mutual molestation. Personally I'm surprised that some moronic politician hasn't introduced legislation to define masturbation as self-molestation. Worse yet the politically-induce "sex offender" panic, the resulting legislation, means these kids will be legally tormented for the rest of their natural life.
Bernie Baran was the victim of the perfect hysteria. He was gay and accused of child molestation. Combine anti-gay bigotry with a sexual panic of this kind and you know something ugly will happen. It is the kind of campaign that only the most despicable amoral scum would knowingly initiate, but many of the instigators were just terrified parents believing the breathless stories fed them by the media.
When fear inspires "urgent" political action you can bet the farm that the action taken will almost always be the wrong action. Political campaigns that rely on fear, something that Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of, are attempts to stampede the public into supporting precisely the wrong sort of legislation. Be it child abuse, drugs, the war on terror, gay marriage, illegal immigration, global warming or whatever the panic d'jour may be, fear campaigns intentionally shut down the critical reasoning faculties of the human mind. The results are always wrong, always ugly and victims are created.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
A toy horse is left by a playground, near a school. It is just a stuffed toy horse. But typical of the police state in which we find ourselves there is total and complete over-reaction. The paranoid police show up and put the nearby school into lock down. Dozens of police officers descend on the scene. The bomb squad shows up and the boys in blue use explosives to dispose of the dangerous stuffed horse.
How many tens of thousands dollars did these morons just flush down the toilet because they want to play Homeland Security.
Bin Laden long ago said that all he needed to do was engage in one terrorist attack on the United States and the political classes would then impose billions and billions of additional damage because of their paranoid over-reaction. Bin Laden never felt he could do the damage to America that he wanted to do, but he knew the political classes would do it for him.
I was reading Wendy McElroy's website which mentioned the continuing controversy in Texas over textbooks. She linked to a history of the controversy and I went to take a look. The originators of this whole textbook movement were a couple of far Right fundamentalists by the name of Mel and Norma Gabler, both deceased now.
Now, if we go back further than I care to admit I went to observe a conference of extremely conservative folks—emphasis on the the extreme please. Among the participants were Mel and Norma. One of their allies was the Rev. Ezra Graley, a fundamentalist minister from West Virginia who led the protests about textbooks in Kanawha county. Graley I knew better than the Gablers. All three, I should say, were John Birch Society types, heavily into far Right politics and theories. Where the Gablers merely protested textbooks some of Graley's allies resorted to violence. My conversations with Graley left me with the impression that while he claimed to have no knowledge of who was behind the incidents that he approved of them.
One of Graley's ministerial allies, Rev. Charles Quigley led public prayers asked God to kill board members. Several schools were firebombed. Someone set 15 sticks of dynamite near a gas meter at the board of education offices, which exploded shortly after a board meeting adjourned. A friend of Graley's, another fundamentalist minister, Rev. Marvin Horan was sentenced to three years in prison on charges related to the bombings. All of this was kicked off by Alice Moore, the wife of yet another fundamentalist minister, who used the Gablers as her resource bank for the protests. As you can see it was incestuous and completely riddled with fundamentalists.
During that trip to Salt Lake City it was Graley who decided that a day trip through some of the canyons would be a good idea. There were four us in the car. Graley, myself and Mel and Norma Gabler. I wish I could remember more of the details of the conversations. It was time when they all let their hair down and weren't so guarded in their comments. And what I vaguely remember was discussion that was supportive of violence and tinged with racism. Yet, like so many fundamentalists I've known, they could be sweet a pie if they thought you could be won over. Like many very bitter individuals they had these saccharin voices that they could use to sooth you. But remember saccharin is fake and so was their pleasantness.
Among the material I was reading on the protest movement was an article from the New York Times about the Gablers. The article quotes a fund-raising letter from the Gablers which said: "Until textbooks are changed, there is no possibility that crime, violence, veneral disease and abortion rates will decrease." That was in 1981.
It is now almost 30 years later and the fundamentalists are no happier with the textbooks today than they were back then. All the same "errors" are being taught to the kids. Yet all the trends in these areas are down, something the Gablers said couldn't happen without getting rid of the sinful textbooks.
In 1981, the year this was said, there were 593.47 violent crimes for every 100,000 people. In 2008, the last year I was able to find stats for the number of violent crimes had dropped to 454.6 per 100,000 people. That is pretty significant. For murder the decline was even more dramatic; from 9.9 per 100,000 in 1981 to 5.3 per 100,000 in 2008. And the textbooks are still evil.
I looked at VD rates and found that they were already declining when the Gablers were claiming that couldn't happen. Here is a chart from the CDC showing gonorrhea rates from 1970 to 1993. The rate for that disease had peaked in 1974 and was in a slow decline which escalated not long after the Gablers were claiming that couldn't happen, unless the textbooks were changed. As for syphilis, the height of infections in the US were during the youth of the Gablers, in the 1940s, when rates had reached almost 600,000 cases. By 1981, with a much larger population, the rate was around 100,000 per year. Now if the textbooks in 1941 were acceptable to the Gablers this would indicates that syphilis rates dropped as the textbooks got more ungodly.
Now lets look at abortion rates in the United States. Obviously there was a sharp rise in the number abortions once women were allowed the choice and no longer regulated by the state to prevent it. Once again the Gablers, however, predicted that a decline in rates couldn't take place, even while the decline had already started. If you look at the following chart you will see abortion rates had already begun a slow deline when the Gablers made their statement.
What this reminds me of is the dire doomsday predictions of another hysterical extremists, Paul Ehrlich of "population bomb" fame. Erhlich has a history of making the same sort of dire predictions as the Gablers and being as spectacularly wrong as the Gablers as well. I remember reading a follow-up book he wrote where he damned Vietnam to famine just at the time that food production was rapidly expanding and Vietnam became a food exporter. Unlike the Gablers, who tended to make the same false claims over and over, Erhlich had a tendency to remove the statement from later books and simply make similarly wrong claims about new areas instead.
Here is the reality. There are scary things in the world and always have been. But, for the most part, things have gotten better not worse. Crime rates are down, not up. The amount of food per person in the world has expanded, not declined. Most trends are positive.
Political types, like the Gablers and Ehrlich, use fear to manipulate the public. Any campaign that relies on dire consequences is most likely exaggerated or entirely false.
The other day I was walking through the parking lot to a local store when I heard a hysterical mother screaming at a child who had gotten out of the car that was parked, before the mother had gotten out. She was shreiking that the child must never leave the car first and "wander" around as bad things could happen to the child. The entire tirade was clearly premised on the "stranger danger" scenario that has fueled parental hysteria for some time now.
At an airport, not that long ago, a mother was standing in the waiting area with a small girl. The girl walked a few feet to look out a window. The mother lost eye contact momentarily and then panicked screaming out the child's name. The girl was grabbed by the arm and yelled out loudly and hysterically that bad people could grab her and that she must never walk a few feet away from her mother.
But, once again, these numbers have been steadily improving—and they were NEVER that high to begin with. When I was a kid we wandered all around the neighborhood without any parental monitoring. We didn't have cell phones that parents could call to "check up" on us. Now parents panic if the kids play in the front yard. We hiked through the fields and woods surrounding the town, and this was a suburb of a major city. Kidnappings and abductions today are at the same levels they were when I was a kid, but the parental hysteria level is higher.
I don't want to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That is quite true. What we have to fear is the solutions politicians propose to solve our imaginary fears. Those really scare me because they almost always mean a loss of freedom, greater taxation, and unintended consequences that are more negative than the "problems" they are meant to solve.
As I write this blog there is a 13-year-old young man climbing to the top of Mt. Everest. Really!
Jordan Romero, his father, and a small team are climbing the mountain from the Tibet side, mainly due to bureaucracy. The permit to climb the mountain is $6000 cheaper there and unlike Nepal there are no age restrictions for climbing. From Nepal, Jordan would have been forbidden by the law to climb. I could try even though it would no doubt kill me doing so, but he couldn't.
Let's put that in context for a second. Jordan was ten-years-old when he climbed to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. Then in Australia he climbed to the summit of Mt. Kosciuszko, the highest mountain there, at 7,310 feet, small compared to his first climb which was 19,340 feet. When he was 11 years-old he scurried to the top of Europe's highest peak, Mt. Elbrus, a climb of 18,510. Then he went to South America, still 11, and climbed the highest summit there, Mt. Aconcagua, 22,841 feet high. And still before his twelfth birthday he climibed Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America at 20,320 feet. Apparently he rested during his twelfth year since he was 13 when the climbed Puncak Jaya in Indonesia, but it was only 16,924 feet high, so no doubt he did it during lunch.
At this point Jordan has reached Camp 2 on the climb. This location is already higher than any previous climb he has done, at 24,750 feet. He has to reach 29,035 feet to summit. And then he plans on climbing the highest peak in Antartica, a mere 16,067 feet.
Jordan says, "I really have dreamed about standing on top of the world since I was a little kid," and, "I just happen to be doing it at this age." He tells the critics, "I don't think age matters so much."
Apparently a reporter at the New York Times does, as I found her article on Jordan rather demeaning and condescending. She has to comment about "shaving feathery whiskers or discovering girls" and then finds a psychologist who refers to teens as being "like an unfinished Ferrari—raw power, without brakes, lights or the ability to maintain equal pressure on the gas pedal." Of course he makes money peddling a book telling parents how to deal with "When Things Get Crazy With Your Teen." Hmm, perhaps demeaning teens with these sorts of comments drives them crazy! I suggest that had she spoken with Dr. Richard Epstein, author of The Case Against Adolescence, she would have received a more respectful interpretation.
Epstein notes that our modern society doesn't give teens the same freedom that previous generations did. Teens went into the world and worked, raised families and did quite well for themselves. We invented "adolescence" where we continue to treat teens like children in many ways and teens become angry and act in ways that previous generations did not. Perhaps it is because we started treating them differently.
Only a short while ago, Jessica Watson, 16 finished a solo, non-stop sailing trip around the world. Jessica battled storms but persevered and finished her journey by sailing into Sydney Harbour. Her parents were soundly criticized for giving her permission to make the trip.
But, of course, Lenore Skenazy was viciously insulted for letting her 9-year-old son rid the subway in New York on his own. The boy told his mother that he wanted to see if he could find his own way home. He did, quite efficiently and his self-confidence grew because of it. He's a better kid due to what he did. Skenazy went on to write an important book about the paranoid, fear-mongering that goes on about kids, which I recommend, the book that is, not the fear mongering.
If you watched the piece from Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano that I posted, you will hear the pro-censorhip moron, Phillip Cosby, claiming that without censorship of erotic material children will be subjected to molestation, rape and kidnapping. His proof was referring to news stories where kids were snatched or molested. The facts are that crime has been steadily declining for decades now. Kids are no more at risk today than they were thirty years ago. What is different is that paranoid, deluded parents are now denying a childhood to their own children, locking them indoors out some a fear that is irrational.
We are stiffling the ability of children to learn and to mature by treating the way we do. When I was a kid there were no cellphones, no constant monitoring. We went out to play, yes, out in the real world. We crossed streets, played in woods unsupervised, went off to the mall on our own, and only returned when it got dark. Mom couldn't check up on us, technology didn't allow it.
Joe Romm is one of the leading climate alarmists around and operates the ClimateProgress blog, which is associated with the left-wing Center for American Progress. Romm is one of the people the warming groupies turn to in order to learn their "talking points" in dealing with those big, bad, nasty skeptics.
Romm has been particularly unpleasant to Roger Pielke, Jr., perhaps because Pielke is also on the left side of the political spectrum but is most decidedly not a warming alarmist. Like most skeptics he does not deny warming (the deniers label is just one of the many inaccuracies that the alarmists like to push). But he also thinks the problems are grossly overstated and questions some of the science used to justify various political agendas.
Romm has used the usual tactic of sneer and smear that the alarmists seem to love. As much as they talk about science they really won't debate the science, instead they question the morality of their opponents, or their intelligence. That is not debate, that is the argument from intimidation that Rand exposed long ago.
Pielke offered to debate Romm and people put up a lot of money, to go to the charity of the choice of the debate victor. Romm immediately came up with multiple excuses as to why such a debate will never happen—mainly more of the same sneer and smear tactics again.
The matter started when Andy Revkin, a faithful alarmist who writes for The New York Times, said that Pielke should be part of the IPCC review of documents. In his typical hyperbolic fashion Romm called that suggestion "the most illogical climate post on Earth." It's not a bad suggestion, or a wrong suggestion. Nor is it just illogical. It is the most illogical post on Earth, which I guess means the most illogical post ever posted to the best of our knowledge. Wow! No sir, Romm isn't prone to exaggeration.
Romm then went on to attack Pielke in the same hyperbolic fashion saying that Pielke "is the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change." Wow! Now you know what to expect when he talks about the single warmest winter if the history of the planet and other such rot. Sneer, smear and gross exaggeration—that is the arsenal of the the warming alarmist in a nutshell.
Pielke offered to debate Romm and gave Romm virtually total control of the debate. Romm could veto any moderator for the debate. He could veto any resolution to be debated. He can pick the time and place of the debate. Foreign Policy magazine agreed to host the debate. And a donor would put up $20,000 to the charity of Romm's choice. None of that was good enough. Romm says that you can't trust audience votes at a debate because "antiscience ideologues" (the term he uses for scientists who disagree with his hysterical exaggerations) go to debates intending to lie.
I was wondering how they would explain three major debates I knew about—one in New York, one in London and one in Montreal—where the shift in audience perception was decidedly in favor of the skeptics. Apparently the reason the sneer, smear and exaggerate alarmists believe the audience is lying, even though many of the audience members are regular attendees at the series of debates.
Pielke says he is "offering Joe a chance to come out from behind his blog, where he bullies and systematically misrepresents my views. He has a chance to air his arguments about me in public and where I can respond to them directly. He will have a chance to explain why my views are so very wrong. At the same time, regardless of the outcome of the debate itself, we can do some good for people who need help, thanks to a generous donor."
Romm, of course, says that he won't debate because he doesn't want to give Pielke any publicity. That claim is disproved by the 75 posts he has written on his own site going after Pielke, including a recent 4,000 word extended attack. Pielke says: "Should Joe Romm turn down this offer, he will reveal his true colors to all -- a bully who hides behind his blog and who would rather call people names than engage in a serious policy debate on a topic of critical importance to our generation. There is no reason for Joe to turn this offer down, other than knowing that his arguments cannot stand up to scrutiny were he to emerge from behind his blog."
Mr Pielke doesn't understand that the entire purpose of the argument from intimidation is precisely to bully people into adopting a viewpoint. It is meant to bully. I think Rand's formulation of the argument was one of her more insightful contributions. She defined it:
There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent’s agreement with one’s undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure . . . [It] consists of threatening to impeach an opponent’s character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: “Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X’s argument is false.” . . . The falsehood of his argument is asserted arbitrarily and offered as proof of his immorality.In today’s epistemological jungle, that second method is used more frequently than any other type of irrational argument. It should be classified as a logical fallacy and may be designated as “The Argument from Intimidation.”The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: “Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless, insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea.”
Personally, when I see this argument used I conclude the user has an an empty intellectual quiver. They resort to the sneer and smear tactic because ultimately it's all they have. One reason, but only a small one, that I have to wonder if the skeptics aren't right, is because their opponents, the alarmists, act precisely the way individuals without good evidence act when debating opponents. They don't face the arguments head on, they instead use tactics to try and silence their opposition.
We saw precisely that in the emails from Climategate. Of course the alarmists immediately started screaming: "There's nothing to see here folks, move along." But the more people actually looked at the emails the more they concluded that there was most definitely something there worth discussing. Of course, Romm's talking points on the matter was to dismiss them and resort to sneer and smear. Consider this memorandum submitted to the British Parliament by the Institute for Physics. These are not scientific lightweights, nor are they known to be skeptics. In their submission to Parliament they said:
1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.
2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internetprovide primafacie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change.
They also say that the emails "eveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements." They write that the emails show an intolerance that "impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process..." And they indicate the "possibility of networks of like-minded researchers excluding newcomers."
The Institute says that the entire climate change network needs investigation, not just the one center in England. They write "there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field."
What went out with the Climate Research Unit, and Romm's actions, both seem manifestations of the same sort of attitude. Even though they act like people who know they are wrong, I suspect they are true believers who think they are absolutely, 100% correct—they are the fundamentalists of science, with an infallible, inerrant scripture (the IPCC report)—at least they like to think way. And like fundamentalists, they get downright nasty when someone questions the infallibility of their beliefs. The intolerance of fundamentalists exists because of their own insecurity. Deep down they fear they might be wrong. The more they fear that their arguments are false the more intolerant they become.
Francisco Lotero and Miriam Coletti were true believers in the various doomsday scenarios that some attach to the "threat" of global warming. The couple wrote their fears out in a letter, actually in a suicide pact. The couple shot themselves to death. Unfortanately these two fear-driving individuals were also parents. Their two-year-old son, Francisco, died after being shot in the back. Their daughter was shot as well, but the bullet missed any vital organs. Neighbors investigated the situation three days after the shooting and discovered the girl, still alive. She is in hospital and expected to recover. Police say the couple left a note explain their fear of global warming.
" Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." Al Gore.
This is supposed to be the opening video used at the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. This is a political body controlled by politicians where the "scientific process" is overriding by the politicians and bureaucrats who actually write the final reports. Each step of the way is designed to remove debate. I know some people who served as expert reviewers for the IPCC and all of them said that the material is rewritten to reflect political agendas before being presented to the public. Numerous members of the IPCC have publicly said that they are portrayed as part of the "consensus" when they are not, the false claim that all the scientists who contribute in any way are members. And, of course, there were some notable resignations by scientists who said that their own conclusions were rewritten and distorted in order to satisfy the political agenda of the governments that run the IPCC.
This video, if it is what it purports to be, shows that the IPCC is purposely using the politics of panic in order to push their very political agenda. This is fear-mongering intended to try and stampede the public into accepting the massive state controls that the Left wants in the name of climate change. It is not reason, it is not debate, it is not science. It is unmitigated propaganda meant to terrorize people.
I have no doubt that some people are driven by a pure belief in the theory that they popularize. I also have no doubt that many of the major drivers in the climate debate are politicians with very open political agendas. And the political agenda means they will fudge the science, exaggerate the science, play down the doubts, etc. The number of top warming hysterics who have openly admitted that they do that has been documented on this blog before. The more I watch the debate the less respect I have for the alarmists who seem to be getting desperate as they lose the battle for public opinion—they get more rabid and fanatical the closer they are to failure.
If they are right, and I always accept that possibility although I don't think they are, then much of the reason for their losing this debate is because they have been so rabid in their exaggerated claims. They play the fear card so often that they come across as the boy who cried wolf too many times. If the warming wolf does show up, in the terms they claim in their hysterical moments, it will be in part because they have alienated the public with their intentional fear mongering and political manipulation.
While I've always been skeptical of their claims, and most claims made by political special interest groups, my skepticism has grown the more I watch the debate. Apparently I am not alone. Rasmussen recently polled on the question of global warming and its causes. They do this every so often. I point this out, not because I think polls establish truth, as some critics of mine have claimed, but because it shows how opinion in shifting and in what direction. It says something about how the public perceives the debate.
In April 2008 47% of the public said warming was man-made and 34% said it was primarily due to natural causes. While the numbers have been up and down the trend is fairly clear. The latest poll shows that belief in human-induced warming has dropped to the lowest level since the almost monthly surveys began. It is now at 34% while those who say it is a natural phenomenon have increased to 50%.
Rasmussen also divides people by ideological content those who favor governmental control in general are called the "Political Class." These are people who like big government and think politicians are peachy. Among them the numbers who blame humans for alleged climate change are 80%. Among the group that Rasmussen calls the "political mainstream" the percentage who say that warming has natural causes is 60%.
We all know about Swine flu but does anyone know about SARS? I mean, Sudden Acute Republican Syndrome. This disease infects the mind of alleged libertarians and suddenly turns them into Acute Republicans. Known carriers are Bob “Typhoid Mary” Barr and Wayne Allen Root.
Some time ago the headquarters of the (formerly) Libertarian Party suffered an epidemic of SARS. This is one reason that party officers used their positions to push the Barr campaign and shut out actual libertarians like Dr. Mary Ruwart. This infection of SARS is the prime reason that I have severed any and all connections with the Libertarian Party. More importantly I consider the LP to be engaged in a campaign of “brand contamination” which destroys the value of using the word “libertarian” to describe a pro-liberty position.
Like many SARS victims the LP is exhibiting signs of delusionary thinking, most particularly in the form that more government control is a libertarian position and can solve the woes of the world. In a recent press release the LP demanded that Obama “more closely monitor crossings at the United States’ border with Mexico, and keep out persons infected with “swine flu.”
Apparently this “swine flu” has the swine in the LP office very worried. One such swine, Donny Ferguson, who is a paid pimp for the Republican-lites who run the party, says, “Libertarians support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a threat to security, health or property.”
The LP demands that the government use its “authority over the border to control entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a threat to our health by spreading the virus into areas where it does not exist.
Why is it that health professionals have almost all opposed the quarantine solution that the LP wants? Mainly because it is will do virtually nothing to stop the spread of the flu.
Even the LP, with its bout of SARS pushing it to embrace more energetic government once again, only whines about “foreign nationals” infected with the flu. But the main conduit for the flu into the United States has not been foreign nationals but American tourists. The LP, engaging in unsubtle xenophobia wants to prevent foreign nationals, but not US citizens, from coming into the country.
Last I knew the flu could spread from a citizen as easily as from a foreign national. So why single out foreign nationals? It isn’t to stop the spread of the flu since the LP is happy to allow infected Americans to cough inside our borders as much as they want. Amazingly, just as the Republicans are suffering a collapse due to their far Right agenda, which targeted minorities, the LP seems to be embracing a similar strategy. This may be a good thing, the sooner the LP collapses the sooner it will be that libertarians can start using the label libertarian again without being confused with the Republicans who have taken over the LP.
Instead of being a voice for reason and sanity the LP is trying to cash-in on the fear mongering that the media loves. Scary stories about global disasters get air time. But nothing in this outbreak of flu is significantly different than previous outbreaks of flu. Every year about 36,000 Americans die from the flu. Already an estimated 13,000 Americans have died of flu this year, totally unrelated to the current situation. This strain of the flu is no more virulent or deadly than the regular outbreaks of flu that we regularly see, in fact it may well be more mild than many. Yet rarely have we seen calls for increased border security—especially from alleged libertarians—over these routine cases of flu
The only difference I can see is that this outbreak started in Mexico where some children were the first to become infected. But anti-Mexican sentiment among xenophobes and racists is rather high, so they welcome anything that can be used to smear Mexicans or immigrants with open arms. If the flu had originated in Canada would we hear as much about the ethnicity of the first cases? I have my doubts.
What is troubling about this LP press release is that it is really an attempt to pander to the bigots. They want increased border scrutiny at Mexico but only applied to “foreign nationals,” i.e. Mexicans. I assume that the flu virus in Mexicans is clearly more problematic than the same virus carried across the border by American tourists.
Consider the main outbreak of flu in the United States today: New York City. In just a few days over 660 kids at St. Francis Preparatory School were ill—as were two dozen staff members. It spread to family and friends and soon over 1,000 were ill. In a few days the case numbers dropped and the infections seemed to stop. This has health officials baffled. But news reports indicate that a group of high schools, who had gone to Cancun for a vacation, had brought the illness back with them and it spread from there. And while many students got sick, tests indicated that many were ill with a completely different strain of flu altogether. Some didn’t have flu at all.
In other words, the biggest breakout of the flu virus would not have been stopped by the LP’s measure, even if fully implemented. It wasn’t busboys or hotel maids from Mexico infecting school kids. It was American teens who had travelled to Cancun for a vacation. Under the LP recommendation, those kids would still be admitted back to their home country. Imagine the outcry if they weren't.
The Centers for Disease Control say that one-third of all US cases of the flu were in people who contracted the illness while in Mexico. American tourists, not foreign nationals seem to be the main means of transmission of this virus. The CDC says that almost all US cases have been mild and only 13 people have needed hospitalization.
What makes the flu outbreak in Mexico sound so horrifying was the death rate but that death rate simply doesn’t transfer to America. The main reason for this difference is wealth. Mexicans, living on lower incomes, are more reluctant to pay for medical care when they become ill. They may wait longer to seek treatment than they should. The first death in Mexico was a woman who was ill for some time but didn’t want to spend money on health care until she was extremely ill—by then it was too late. While there were some 1,000 suspected cases in New York City none died. In Mexico, it should be noted, only 19 people have died from the disease—this is hardly the Black Death.
The unfortunate, but simple truth, is that the death rate in Mexico is higher because of poverty. The same disease, among wealthier Americans, has only a negligible impact.
So why the fear mongering by the LP? Why are they sounding like paranoid Republicans about gays or the crazed Left screaming about global warming? Using the politics of fear is an old tactic but usually one shunned by sane libertarians. Fear is simply not conducive to liberty. And this call is proof of it. The LP, when it was actually libertarian, tended to avoid fear campaigns because fear is always the tool of tyranny. Now, with Republican-lite leadership the LP is simply a Right-wing party with statist tendencies. For the most part those tendencies are less than what is found in the GOP but this LP press release shows they are willing to go head-to-head with the worst fear-mongers in the Religious Right.
Ask yourself exactly how border agents, who are not qualified in the medical sciences, are going to enforce the LP’s call for stepped up scrutiny. Harry Browne used to warn people that just because they think a government program is good, it doesn’t mean the government will run the program the way they want. Look at the crude, rude and often violent methods of the Travel Nazis who now police our airports. Consider how the Homeland Security thugs beat up a Baptist minister for mentioning his Constitutional rights.
We have elements of the government inclined to use violence at a drop of a hat. I could just imagine someone getting beat up because they sneezed near a border thug—it was for the good of the country and the person appeared to have assaulted the officer with a deadly weapon—his sneeze. Fanciful, but the government has killed people for less and then exonerated the thugs who did it. Do we want the same violence-prone thugs to be empowered to make on-the-spot medical evaluations and then take the necessary action to prevent "infections?" Why trust these thugs to get that right when they routinely get other things so very wrong?
But the LP now wants these same thuggish elements to have the power to conduct medical evaluations. You better suppress that cough at the airport lest the newly empowered thugs pull you aside as a threat to American health. These people are already getting their jollies frisking people and poking around their bodies, under the pretext of stopping suicide terrorists. They are already empowered to do strip searches merely on the hunch that it may be necessary. So the LP wants them to be able to justify such measures simply because of a sneeze, a cough or a sniffle. You may be tired from an international flight but the instant doctor at the border thinks you look sick so you are whisked off for further evaluations and scrutiny. And the LP call itself the party of “smaller government!” Jesus, they sound more like George W. Bush every day. And that’s no compliment.
We shouldn’t forget what happened the last time we allowed “swine flu” to panic us into demanding that government take action. Dr. Kevin Cahill, a top specialist in infectious diseases, warned “that in the last swine flu outbreak in the U.S. in 1976, more people died from taking the vaccination for the flu than the flu itself.” Yes, government often is literally the “cure” that is worse than the “disease.”
Consider what Dr. Marc Siegel, at Fox News said, “When all is said and done, it is looking more and more like H1N1 (a designation which describes two proteins on the surface of the flu virus which help it spread) will end up being a mild, over-hyped virus despite the fact that it is new.” Has the LP sunk so low that it is even more hysterical than voices at Fox News?
Siegel is the author of False Alarm: the Truth About the Epidemic of Fear. He says:
In 1976, when a swine flu virus appeared to kill a military recruit and then be present in the blood of 500 others (who never got sick) this led to a massive hysteria and vaccination program for a pandemic that never occurred. Forty million Americas were vaccinated and ascending paralysis (also known as Guillain Barre Syndrome) was associated with recipients in close to 1,000 patients.
Back in 1976 the prevailing theory was that pigs had been the source of the 1918 Spanish Flu, which was later disproven but served as an impetus for the hysteria at the time. In 2005, the knowledge that the 1918 scary virus was “bird-like” led the fear mongers to point a finger at an equally scary H5N1 virus that was killing millions of birds. But lost in the panic was the knowledge that human pandemics had likely never been caused by an H5 virus before. In the current swine flu scare the virus is assumed to be a more powerful human killer than it actually is. In reality it appears to losing virulence as it spreads human to human and is not that transmissible, and is NOT becoming widespread.
Siegel sanely warns his readers that “H1N1 is another pandemic mostly of fear—something that is stronger and more infectious than any virus.” It is a crying shame that the (formerly) Libertarian Party has turned itself into an engine for deceptive fear mongering, demanding more vigorous government control. When the Libertarian Party, instead of debunking fear campaigns, begins to employ them for their own publicity it is time for the party to close up shop. They are spreading something infectious themselves, something which, long term, will do more damage than the flu. They are spreading the virus of big government while destroying the brand name of libertarianism.
More troubling for the LP's hysteria is the story that epidemiologists are investigating the earliest cases of this flu in the United States, cases that predate the outbreak in Mexico!
Michael Shaw, associate director for laboratory science for the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the flu theoretically could have appeared first in California, but he cautioned against drawing any conclusions since the strain also exhibited genetic characteristics traceable to Eurasia.
The first case discovered in California was a 10-year-old boy in San Diego County, who fell ill with a fever March 30.
So, there is some possibility that the disease was first manifested in the United States and spread to Mexico from here. If this were the case, what would the LP be suggesting then? Would they demand that US border agents use force to prevent Americans they suspect of being ill from leaving the country? If Californians first got sick would we have government agents preventing ill-looking residents from visiting any of the other 49 states? If not, then why not? Based on the premises the LP used in their press release the logical conclusion would be that we need government also preventing Americans from moving around the world, and their own country, merely on the suspicion that they might have the flu.
Somehow, though, I suspect that the LP wouldn't be calling for border agents to prevent Californians, who sneeze, from visiting Mexico. The reason for that is relatively simple: there is no organized anti-Californian movement to pander to.
Below is a film of some of the government propaganda from 1976 urging people to get inoculated from swine flu. Remember the inoculations were more deadly than the flu.
