Month: October 2014

QOTD: Dianne Feinstein

by digby

“My view of ISIS is, I think people do not see the evil and the vicious side of it“

That’s so true. We only see the good side of ISIS. Their fashion sense is impeccable, for instance. Seriously, what in the world is she talking about?

And then, to drive home the point she added this:

I don’t see — think they see the beheadings of children —

Candy Crowley pointed out that they do see beheadings of journalists. But no, the beheadings of children haven’t been shown on TV as yet. I honestly don’t think we would need to see them, however, to know that ISIS is very terrible indeed.

I wondered where the head of the Intelligence Committee might be getting information about child beheading. Interestingly, Snopes was on this and discussed a recent email chain letter to that effect:

Claims that ISIS beheaded children have circulated separately from the Sean Malone forward, but are often appended with a graphic and inaccurate image. That picture, depicting a young, decapitated female child, was taken in Syria in 2013. [It’s unknown how that happened…]

Several concerned users took to the Facebook page of Crisis Response International to ask about the Sean Malone forward, and the person or persons who manage the CRI page have been fielding queries about whether the original message was possibly misconstrued or sent in haste. On 17 September 2014, CRI said:

That email was an urgent prayer alert sent to close friends over a month ago that somehow got leaked out. The reports of beheadings were what we were hearing from local pastors and other sources. The information was never meant to be blasted out publicly but for prayer as ISIS closed in our teams.

… We know of 5 children that were beheaded and this is from a city official on the ground.

An update later the same evening read:

Again this text was sent to a handful of people and was leaked. These were the reports that we were getting at that time and are now being confirmed. It wasn’t intended for public information but perhaps it was by divine intervention. In our opinion one child beheaded is an all out outrage. We have other reports as well that we are in the process of confirming. We have done our best to post info on this page on our website and in emails about this issue.

The undated message about systemic beheadings of children in Queragosh lends itself to eternal forwarding, but as many have pointed out, much of the information is secondhand. There is little doubt Christians are being displaced and even persecuted in cities including Queragosh, but no reports of any incidents matching the claim of “systematic” beheadings have been confirmed.

They had an earlier piece in August about this and came away with an “undetermined”. And lord knows, as nice as Feinstein thinks we all assume ISIS is, I don’t think anyone would be surprised at any atrocities they might have committed. It’s just a little odd for a Senator to drop that into the conversation and then let it go. It’s not as if what we know about ISIS isn’t bad enough for us all to recognize how evil they are. Why do these politicians insist on making it even more lurid than it is?

Anyway, the conversation deteriorated from there. Get a load of this gobbledygook:

CROWLEY: They’re online beheading journalists and others, right?

FEINSTEIN: I saw this, but essentially, I mean, for anyone that has any kind of value of a just system, ISIS doesn’t make that case.

ISIS is essentially a fighting force of 30,000 to 50,000 people, sophisticated with commanders, with some heavy weapons, and they are on a march now, and they are going to slay everything in their way.

CROWLEY: In the propaganda wars it does seem that ISIS is quite sophisticated.

So let me – I do want to talk to you about that and how to fight that but I first want to ask you about these lone-wolves which basically show many of these attacks have been. And by definition, there’s no known tie to a terrorist — direct tie to a terrorist organization of any sort. They’re kind of one person cells at this point.

What is the defense against that, Senator?

FEINSTEIN: Well, the only defense is intelligence and that is that you have to ferret it out. You have to be able to watch it and you have to be able to disrupt them. Now, this is hard to do because it takes technical means and Americans don’t necessarily like technical means.

CROWLEY: Right or spying is the definition of technical means.

FEINSTEIN: Yes. Well, that’s right. And this in the United States, this falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI, not the CIA, and I’ve been briefed by Director Comey. And I believe the FBI is making every effort to stay on top of this lone-wolf phenomenon. I think the White House is cognizant of it and is working very hard to see that we have the ability to be able to find them and stop them.

CROWLEY: In the Muslim community, the peaceful Muslim community they would tell you in the U.S. that they feel some of the outreach that’s being done by the feds, by the homeland – by the Homeland Security Department and others feels like what the U.S. really wants is for the Muslim community to become their spies within their community in the U.S. and that is off-putting when they do feel targeted obviously because of their religion.

FEINSTEIN: Well, let me —

CROWLEY: How do you bridge that?

FEINSTEIN: Let me say this. The Muslim community is a part of America, and as such, it has all of the protections of any community in America.

And one of America’s goals has been to integrate an immigrant community into our society and see that they have opportunity, that they’re able to be productive, that they’re able to live without any kind of harassment. And there are very few countries in the world that actually do that, United States does it.

CROWLEY: Let me ask you, because I know that you lost two deputy sheriffs in Sacramento…

FEINSTEIN: Yes.

CROWLEY: …over the weekend.

But we’ve also seen, and that does not seem, that seems like to be street crime as opposed to anything that’s related to terrorism, but do you feel, looking at what we’ve seen on the internet, some of the appeals from ISIS, that folks in police uniforms, that folks in soldiers’ uniforms, whether they’re in Canada or the U.S. are now under an even bigger threat than their jobs would lead to you believe?

FEINSTEIN: I believe that to be true. I believe word has gone out into these communities that a strike target would be somebody in uniform, whether it is police or whether it’s military. And I think you’re correct in that assessment.

CROWLEY: And what’s to be done about that?

FEINSTEIN: Well, what’s to be done about it is, I think the police and military have to be on guard. I think this is very difficult. I think halls of government have to be on guard the way the parliament in Canada was penetrated.

In Canada, you had an armed sergeant-at-arms who took action and killed the perpetrator and I think we need to think in some new ways. I don’t particularly want to discuss it on television, but one thing’s for sure, we are going to protect our institutions of government.

Except, except … an armed man just penetrated the White House the other day and he wasn’t a jihadist. Is she saying we need to let the government spy on all of us to stop any kind of threat there might be?
She claims you have to “ferret out” all these lone wolves by letting loose all of our technological abilities (aka spying) because … why? If it isn’t part of a larger plan that threatens us existentially then why is it necessary to give up our constitutional rights for that any more than it’s necessary to give up our rights to stop “lone wolves” from shooting up schools? Or is she saying that we do have to accede to ever more government spying in general?

I suppose she does have a point although it’s clear she had no idea she was making it. Why should the shooting of a soldier in Canada by some mentally ill lone nut who glommed onto jihad as his delusion be considered an act of war requiring us to let the government do “whatever it takes” to stop it, while we insist on keeping the constitution intact when dealing with any other killing by a mentally ill lone nut whose delusions run to something else?  A lone nut with a gun is a lone nut with a gun no matter what his motives and just because he aims his weapon at a uniform doesn’t change that.

Are we prepared to let the government spy on all of us so that they can stop killing before it happens? Senator Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems to think we should be.

*And no, I don’t know why Crowley thought it made sense to talk about police shootings and the Canadian parliament shooting as the same thing because soldiers and cops both wear uniforms.  WTH???

.

Who says bipartisanship is dead? Why the White House may be hoping for a GOP victory.

by digby

This story by Dan Froomkin leads one to all kinds of ugly thoughts. It’s about the White House slow-walking the Torture Report until after a new congress in installed in January. It appears they are hoping the Republicans will be in charge:

Human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, who interviewed a wide range of intelligence and administration officials for his upcoming book, “Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy,” told The Intercept that the White House and the CIA are hoping a Republican Senate will, in their words, “put an end to this nonsense.”

Stalling for time until after the midterm elections and the start of a Republican-majority session is the “battle plan,” Horton said. “I can tell you that Brennan has told people in the CIA that that’s his prescription for doing it.”

Republicans are widely expected to win control of the Senate Nov. 4.

Victoria Bassetti, a former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, wrote this week that the administration is playing “stall ball” and that Senate staffers expect Republicans would “spike release of the report” should they take over the chamber.

Asked if the White House is slow-walking the negotiations on purpose, National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan replied:

The President has been clear that he wants this process completed as expeditiously as possible and he’s also been clear that it must be done consistent with our national security. The redactions to date were the result of an extensive and unprecedented interagency process, headed up by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to protect sensitive classified information. We are continuing a constructive dialogue with the Committee.

She notably did not rule out the possibility that negotiations will extend beyond the 113th Congress.

The report, which Senate Democratic staffers worked on for five years, is over 6,000 pages long and is said to disclose new details about both the CIA’s brutal and systemic abuse of detainees and the pattern of deceit CIA officials used to hide what they had done.

They will spike it. The Republicans on the committee have already refused to endorse it and want it suppressed. And apparently, so does the White House.

This is torture we’re talking about.

.

“They yearned to believe” 

by digby

Thomas Frank has written another in his series of controversial essays for Salon today in which he compares President Obama with President Carter. (Oh boy …) It did remind me of my only Republican vote for Jerry Ford in 1976. (I was very young and really didn’t like what I saw as a moralizing, conservative preacher type in Carter and settled for the boring functionary with the cool wife and kids.)

Anyway, Frank’s piece delves into Perlstein’s Invisible Bridge, James Fallows’ The Passionless Presidency and comes up with some very interesting parallels between the assumptions of then and now:

Idealists of all kinds saw what they wanted to see in Jimmy Carter in 1976. Just as Barack Obama is, famously, a “blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” so presidential candidate Jimmy Carter tried to be “all things to all people,” Perlstein writes. Carter denounced elites in a memorable way in his speech to the Democratic convention that year, but when asked where he stood on the political spectrum, according to an article Perlstein quotes from The New York Times, Carter would say things like, “I don’t like to categorize, I don’t see myself as liberal or conservative or the like”—then proceed to suggest that he was a little of both.

Nevertheless, liberals in 1976 steadfastly maintained that Carter was one of them—to the utter exasperation of the journalists who had studied Carter’s statements and positions over the years. The man from Plains, Georgia, was no progressive, the journalists argued. But in those days, nothing was capable of shaking the faith of his disciples.

That faith was something to behold. “They yearned to believe,” Perlstein writes of Carter’s fans. Among the smitten were hardened journalists like James Wolcott and Hunter S. Thompson (!) as well as the leaders of some of the big labor unions, in those days the bulwark of American liberalism.

Once the election was over, the pundits of the day amused themselves—just as they do today—by speculating that the GOP was permanently done for. Today, it’s demographic change that is supposed to be slowly crushing the right; back then there were similar theories. In 1977, a columnist for the Boston Globe added up all the constituencies that the GOP had alienated over the course of the decade and wrote that the “Grand Old Party has begun to face the unpleasant fact that it risks becoming a permanent opposition dwarfed by a much larger ruling party.” Another notion, which Perlstein describes, was the widespread belief that the rise of the Now Generation would drag the whole spectrum of opinion leftward—just like millennials are expected to do today.

As president, of course, Carter wasn’t much of a liberal at all. Although economic conditions were not good when he took over, the stimulus he proposed was far too small because, like another Democrat who comes to mind, Carter was always drawn to fiscal responsibility and “hard choices.” “He has emphasized balancing the budget as if it were more important than reducing unemployment,” wrote the columnist Joseph Kraft in 1977.

That technocratic ascetism is what bugged me about both presidential candidates and I suppose, if I’m honest, the way that people projected idealism I didn’t see onto them bugged me just as much. (Obama was a genuine historical breakthrough, however, which I always appreciated and which made me feel the emotion of the moment in ways that Carter never did.) And as a card carrying member of the Now Generation, I certainly recall the assumption that this huge demographic bulge was destined to make America more liberal for the next 50 years simply because of our very existence. (And then came the 80s …)

Frank’s point is that liberals are always fooling themselves into the belief that we need “intellectual idealism that (we are told) is unmoored from ideology. We persuade ourselves that the answer to the savagery of the right—the way to trump the naked class aggression of the One Percent—is to say farewell to our own tradition and get past politics and ideology altogether. And so we focus on the person of the well-meaning, hyper-intelligent leader.” And I get that. Who doesn’t want a well-meaning, hyper-intelligent leader?

But this is where that hostility to ideology leads:

The final ironic lesson of the Carter presidency should be a cautionary tale for any centrist Democrat who dreams of striking a “grand bargain” with the right: No matter what conservative deeds Democrats undertake, as Rick Perlstein told me in conversation a few days ago, they will never win respect for it. It was Jimmy Carter, not the Republicans, who enacted the sweeping deregulation of transportation. It was Carter, not Reagan, who recommitted America to the Cold War and who slapped a grain embargo on the Soviet Union after that country invaded Afghanistan. (Reagan is the guy who lifted it.) And yet, in the mind of the public, Carter will stand forever as a symbol of liberalism’s fecklessness.

Perhaps Obama will escape that fate. In the short run anyway, Bill Clinton seems to have done so, so perhaps it’s possible. And it’s also possible that some enterprising progressive will take the bull by the horns and institute an Obama Legacy Project much as Grover Norquist did with Reagan. It worked like a charm to erase the apostasy of Reagan’s second term and return him to his rightful status as the avatar of modern conservatism. Obama did win twice, after all, and is likely to have set the table for at least one more Democratic term. In that regard he’s more Reaganesque than Carteresque which, depending on how the myth is created, could end up being a lodestar for liberalism no matter how tangential it is to the historical reality.  The old saw is true: history is written by the winners.

.

Yes, we should panic. (But not in the way people want you to …)

by digby

I’m getting older so I guess I shouldn’t care so much about the future anymore. In the long run, yadda, yadda, yadda. But strangely, I do. I see little kids running around every day right here in my neighborhood and on TV halfway across the world and it breaks my heart to think that we are such a limited species that we will allow catastrophe despite the fact that we know very well how to stop it and could do it easily if we just cooperated with one another. The first half of the 20th Century was a terrible lesson in how irrational human beings are capable of being in the modern world. And sadly so much of what we’re seeing today shows we haven’t improved much in that area:

The conventional (smart) wisdom is that we should not panic about Ebola in the United States (or Europe). That is certainly true because, even with its huge warts, US and European health-care systems are well-equipped to handle the few cases of Ebola that might pop up.

However, we should panic. We should panic at the lack of care and concern we are showing about the epidemic where it is truly ravaging; we should panic at the lack of global foresight in not containing this epidemic, now, the only time it can be fully contained; and we should panic about what this reveals about how ineffective our global decision-making infrastructure has become. Containing Ebola is a no-brainer, and not that expensive. If we fail at this, when we know exactly what to do, how are we going to tackle the really complex problems we face?

Climate Change? Resource depletion? Other pandemics?

So, I have been panicking.

Pandemics have long been among my favorite topics to teach sociology with, not because the subject is cheery, but because they contain so many of the lessons about our modern world.

But this year, it feels like a lesson in despair, about everything that’s broken.

There are dozens of textbooks for introduction to sociology, but they all have a similar chapter order. Somehow, globalization always ends up around chapter seven, the middle of the semester, when the novelty of sociology as a topic has worn off, and the class starts to drag.

But chapter seven would always be a turning point in my class: that’s when many students would sit up and realize that this, more than anything, was their generation’s core problem.

Read the whole thing. It’s eye opening. And then ponder the fact that the government of the most powerful nation on earth is dysfunctional.

What I just summarized in fewer than 2,000 words or so isn’t even basic epidemiology. It is the basics of basics of basics of epidemiology, and this is something every policy maker on the planet should understand after talking for 10 minutes to an expert of their choice in their own country.

I just watched a couple of hours of Sabbath gasbags. Let’s just say there’s not a lot of hope on that count. Policy makers seem to be stupider than the average person on the street when it comes to this.

And media has totally missed the mark as well:

Mass media is too busy generating the wrong panic — the infinitesimal chances of Ebola in the US now, rather than how to roll it back it in West Africa.

The UN is reduced to begging and being ignored.

There is heroic NGO work. Partners in Health — which specializes in hiring and training locals — and Doctors Without Borders — experienced at moving resources quickly and operating at challenging environments — are both phenomenal organizations — and I’m donating to both what I can this year. I don’t really believe in framing “charity” as a solution at this scale, but I believe in solidarity. However, this should not come down to whether or not a few people donate — our collective institutions should collect and organize these resources, and direct this effort. While PIH and MSF can and will do a lot, this cannot be on their shoulders alone.

So I panic and despair, about what this lack of response says about us, our institutions, our humanity.

How can we make our institutions work, for us, at a global scale? That remains the core challenge of 21st century, without which we will fail at many more tests, at great suffering.

I don’t know.

.

h/t to Emptywheel

Our exceptional country ranks number 60 among nation for political empowerment for women

by digby

The US ranks as number 23 in the world for lowest gender gap. And what’s most depressing is that we rank high when it comes to education and economic opportunity. What knocks us out of the top level is our piss poor ranking for political empowerment of women: we rank at number 60 in that category.

I don’t know what it is about our culture and democracy that creates a situation where half the population is still mostly represented by the other half of the population in our political system but I have a pretty good idea. (See #gamergate if you wonder what I’m talking about.)

And no, it won’t be enough to have a woman president. Just as the election of the first African American didn’t solve the problem of racist attitudes in America in America, neither will the election of the first woman president solve the problem of sexist attitudes. And as with the election of President Obama I have a feeling it would lay bare some ugliness that a lot of people would like to think is no longer part of our society. But maybe that’s a necessary step. Regardless of a woman becoming the top leader, the real issues is female political leadership at all levels. The fact that we rank number 60 among nations in that regard is just … shameful.

.

.

A little Orwell in the morning

by digby

It’s now become a cliche to quote Orwell (a comment on our times in itself) but sometimes you just have to do it anyway. My brother and I were talking about newspapers the other day and he reminded me of this:

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly​ reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the r​​elationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues–namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain.

Watch the press this coming week about the Middle East, terrorism, government spying, Ukraine and Russia etc and see if that comment doesn’t come to mind.

ht RLP

So long, American Dream, it’s been good to know yuh
by Tom Sullivan

Hmmm, maybe killing off the American Dream will keep out them foreigners?

Nicholas Kristof recalls how in 1951 his French-speaking father from Eastern Europe felt France was too stratified for a penniless refugee to get ahead. So he bypassed France for a opportunity in the United States. Better to learn English. He did. And earned a Ph.D. and became a university professor.

Now the escalator to opportunity is broken, writes Kristof.

A new Pew survey finds that Americans consider the greatest threat to our country to be the growing gap between the rich and poor. Yet we have constructed an education system, dependent on local property taxes, that provides great schools for the rich kids in the suburbs who need the least help, and broken, dangerous schools for inner-city children who desperately need a helping hand. Too often, America’s education system amplifies not opportunity but inequality.

Once the United States led the world — even Great Britain — in educating its people:

Then the United States was the first major country, in the 1930s, in which a majority of children attended high school. By contrast, as late as 1957, only 9 percent of 17-year-olds in Britain were in school.

Until the 1970s, we were pre-eminent in mass education, and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz of Harvard University argue powerfully that this was the secret to America’s economic rise. Then we blew it, and the latest O.E.C.D. report underscores how the rest of the world is eclipsing us.

In effect, the United States has become 19th-century Britain: We provide superb education for elites, but we falter at mass education.

But it’s not just the educational system that’s broken. Or the financing. It’s the social contract that undergirds the whole culture. People wave around pocket copies of the U.S. Constitution as though it is holy writ, yet break faith with it after the first three words of the preamble. We the People? Sounds like socialism. In spite of the fact that support for public education predates ratification of the constitution, is written into statehood enabling acts including the 50th (Hawaii, 1959), and is reflected in state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Yet, conservatives such as Rick Santorum preach that “… the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic.”

Because it’s “Every man for himself and the Devil take the hindmost,” you takers. Conservatives for conservatives. Undermining the public schools by cutting budgets and diverting public funds to private-school vouchers and charters isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy. Eliminate the American Dream and maybe “they” won’t want to come here and ruin it for Real Americans™.

Jack Bruce

by tristero

Words cannot describe how great a musician Jack Bruce was, not only in Cream, but also before and long, long after. Subtle when others around him were grinding out stolen blues cliches. A perfectionist with a spectacular ear. A brilliant and utterly original songwriter. His death is a monumental loss for contemporary music.

Jack, I saw you twice, both times with Cream, once in New Jersey back in the day (’67 or ’68), then again at Madison Square Garden fairly recently. Both times, your performing, your singing was simply amazing. Take care.

Great. Let’s treat the doctors and nurses caring for Ebola patients like criminals.

by digby

This is just absurd:

(Editor’s note: Kaci Hickox, a nurse with degrees from the University of Texas at Arlington and the Johns Hopkins University, has been caring for Ebola patients while on assignment with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone. Upon her return to the U.S. on Friday, she was placed in quarantine at a New Jersey hospital. She has tested negative in a preliminary test for Ebola, but the hospital says she will remain under mandatory quarantine for 21 days and will be monitored by public health officials.)

I am a nurse who has just returned to the U.S. after working with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone – an Ebola-affected country. I have been quarantined in New Jersey. This is not a situation I would wish on anyone, and I am scared for those who will follow me.

I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine.
I arrived at the Newark Liberty International Airport around 1 p.m. on Friday, after a grueling two-day journey from Sierra Leone. I walked up to the immigration official at the airport and was greeted with a big smile and a “hello.”

I told him that I have traveled from Sierra Leone and he replied, a little less enthusiastically: “No problem. They are probably going to ask you a few questions.”

He put on gloves and a mask and called someone. Then he escorted me to the quarantine office a few yards away. I was told to sit down. Everyone that came out of the offices was hurrying from room to room in white protective coveralls, gloves, masks, and a disposable face shield.

One after another, people asked me questions. Some introduced themselves, some didn’t. One man who must have been an immigration officer because he was wearing a weapon belt that I could see protruding from his white coveralls barked questions at me as if I was a criminal. 

Two other officials asked about my work in Sierra Leone. One of them was from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They scribbled notes in the margins of their form, a form that appeared to be inadequate for the many details they are collecting. 

I was tired, hungry and confused, but I tried to remain calm. My temperature was taken using a forehead scanner and it read a temperature of 98. I was feeling physically healthy but emotionally exhausted.

Three hours passed. No one seemed to be in charge. No one would tell me what was going on or what would happen to me.
I called my family to let them know that I was OK. I was hungry and thirsty and asked for something to eat and drink. I was given a granola bar and some water. I wondered what I had done wrong.

Four hours after I landed at the airport, an official approached me with a forehead scanner. My cheeks were flushed, I was upset at being held with no explanation. The scanner recorded my temperature as 101.

The female officer looked smug. “You have a fever now,” she said.

I explained that an oral thermometer would be more accurate and that the forehead scanner was recording an elevated temperature because I was flushed and upset.

I was left alone in the room for another three hours. At around 7 p.m., I was told that I must go to a local hospital. I asked for the name and address of the facility. I realized that information was only shared with me if I asked.

Eight police cars escorted me to the University Hospital in Newark. Sirens blared, lights flashed. Again, I wondered what I had done wrong.

I had spent a month watching children die, alone. I had witnessed human tragedy unfold before my eyes. I had tried to help when much of the world has looked on and done nothing.

At the hospital, I was escorted to a tent that sat outside of the building. The infectious disease and emergency department doctors took my temperature and other vitals and looked puzzled. “Your temperature is 98.6,” they said. “You don’t have a fever but we were told you had a fever.”

After my temperature was recorded as 98.6 on the oral thermometer, the doctor decided to see what the forehead scanner records. It read 101. The doctor felts my neck and looked at the temperature again. “There’s no way you have a fever,” he said. “Your face is just flushed.”

My blood was taken and tested for Ebola. It came back negative.

I sat alone in the isolation tent and thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal. Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?

I recalled my last night at the Ebola management center in Sierra Leone. I was called in at midnight because a 10-year-old girl was having seizures. I coaxed crushed tablets of Tylenol and an anti-seizure medicine into her mouth as her body jolted in the bed.
It was the hardest night of my life. I watched a young girl die in a tent, away from her family.

With few resources and no treatment for Ebola, we tried to offer our patients dignity and humanity in the face of their immense suffering.

Yeah well, you should have stayed there lady because we don’t want you here, amirite? We don’t have time for dignity and humanity, we have an irrational panic to stoke.

What in the hell is wrong with us? They couldn’t have handled that situation with a little human decency? They had to treat her like a criminal and make her sit there as if she’d done something horrible by volunteering to go to Africa to help with an epidemic? An epidemic that really will go global in a big way if trained people don’t go there to try to stop it?

God we are a primitive country. We’ve got idiots on TV screaming about a religion of 1.6 billion people being the toxic cause of violence even as our All American, non-religious school-kids are taking the deadly weapons their parents give them as presents to shoot their schoolmates and themselves. And we have the most sophisticated city on earth acting like a bunch of authoritarian creeps toward people who are doing serious work to stop the spread of an outbreak of a deadly disease — for PR purposes.

This is just … depressing. Irrationality all around.

.