Ebola Bans
The people who think banning entrance will stop Ebola have more support: North Korea.
Look, you had the lab supervisor who spent big bucks on a cruise to the Caribbean get confined to her cabin for the trip, and the ship refused landing permission by Belize and Mexico, despite the fact that she didn’t have any symptoms of anything, and was found to be Ebola-free once she got back to the US and could be tested.
Then there was the Air Canada pilot who refused to have blood samples on his airliner, because they were going to be tested for Ebola.
The disease that is spreading outside of West Africa is paranoia, not Ebola. Chill the hell out, people.
6 comments
Yeah, seriously! People really are ignorant and stupid. I blame all the fear mongering by Bush and his fellow cretins, and the global right-wing cabal which even the left is buying into now.
The Terrorist groups are all laughing. They only have to make a brief statement now, and the World shits it’s collective pants! It used to take serious resources to be an effective terrorist, now you just have to be a moron and become a politician spouting the latest stupid talking points, and people will throw millions at you. And I don’t just mean the USA, though that’s mainly where the disease started (and I don’t mean Ebola!)
Even Canada is going crazy! According to their internal stat’s, the crime rate in Canada has actually been dropping the past decade (despite recent hysteria over a few notable events), yet – like the USA – they are now building more prisons than ever!
I wish there was a reset button for Home Sapiens. I’d happy press it!
If they want terrorism, they should have lived in Europe in the 1970s and ’80s. Even the US had people blowing things up and robbing banks to ‘help the people’, who really weren’t interested in the foolishness.
It’s simple, the Baby Boomers turned 46 in the early 1990s, and crimes have been declining ever since. The vast majority of crimes are committed by males between 15 and 45 years of age. The size of that group in the population tracks directly with the crime statistics – the fewer you have, the fewer the crimes that were committed.
People ignore the overall statistics and the actual trends, but react to what the media chooses to cover. Generally they are unable or unwilling to find out what is actually going on around them.
There was suggestion (in Freakanomics?) that two things happened about the same time: the removal of lead and the activation of legal abortions, both which helped reduce the criminal population.
The removal of lead would certainly reduce violent crime over time but legal access to abortions would be harder to document as the percentage of young males is the single most significant factor in the crime rate. The losses in the Vietnam War would have had a major effect on that rate, as all wars do.
Actually the US losses in the Vietnam War were fairly trivial from a demographic point of view. There was around 37 million males of military age during that war, of which only 58,300 died — or roughly 0.16% of the male population. Contrast with, say, the American Civil War, where roughly 10% of the military age male population ended up dead. Or, for that matter, the Vietnamese casualties during the Vietnam War, which are probably on the same scale as for our own Civil War.
I had the privilege of studying under a fine sociologist who specialized in criminal behavior who predicted the current decline in crime twenty years before it happened. He made the same point about demographics. The class was disbelieving, but I checked out his sources and they were pretty convincing — crime rates followed the demographics quite closely.
Regarding Freakanomics and lead/abortion, correlation is not causation. Removing lead from our gasoline and the removal of abortion bans happened to coincide with the peak of the crime-committing demographic. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. We’ve had other demographic boom/bust cycles in the past and crime rates went boom/bust with them. We’ve only had one removal of lead from gasoline, and a sample size of one has a 100% confidence interval (that is, it is as likely 0% chance of being right as 100% chance). So color me unconvinced.
There are a number of studies that show an increase in violence related to levels of lead in the blood, and NASCAR tracks have been calmer since they finally stopped using leaded gasoline after being exempt for decades. But a decrease in violence doesn’t necessarily mean a decrease in crime, it may mean a lesser offense.
While more crime age men died in auto accidents than the war during that period, and the number wasn’t large, a lot of guys who were sent to Vietnam were ‘encouraged’ by the criminal justice system to join the military. Any change in the number in the cadre would have an effect which was easy to see when you looked at the numbers for local areas, especially cities.
I compiled the numbers for my department and read the research in the ‘trade’ journals. It is such a consistent predictor that you can tell ‘problem’ neighborhoods based solely on that number.