A Syrian Muslim pilgrim poses for a picture outside a hotel near Mecca’s Grand Mosque on October 1, 2014. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim worshipers started pouring into the holy city for the annual Hajj pilgrimage. The hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam and is mandatory once in a lifetime for all Muslims provided they are physically fit and financially capable. By Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images.
Neil Irwin flags a new survey showing that “where big business has the least power and capitalist economies are the least developed, optimism and support for the corporate sector is highest”:
When it comes to business exerting power over the economy, Americans have mixed views but are generally comfortable. But when it comes to business exerting power over government, they are much more exercised. Americans aren’t antibusiness, in other words. They’re just against business having what they see as too much power in Washington.
Compare that with China, where citizens seem to view businesses as less powerful in terms of lobbying (only 19 percent seeing a lot of influence by corporate lobbyists, a full 40 percentage points lower than in the United States) but are more likely to believe it is good for companies to be strong and influential. One might imagine that Chinese citizens see less a phenomenon in which business overly influences government and one more in which government overly influences businesses. … In Communist Party-led China, 74 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “it is a good thing when corporations are strong and influential, because they are engines of innovation and economic growth.” That is around three times the level of support found in capitalist paradises like Britain, the United States and Australia.
Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything, argues that capitalism is largely to blame for our climate crisis. How Klein describes her book in an interview:
What I’m arguing in this book is that we need to return to the progressive tradition of responding to deep crisis by trying to get at the root causes of the crisis. And the best example of that is the way in which the progressive movement responded to the Great Depression. It became an opportunity to change the way we organized our economies, to regulate banks, to launch social programs that got at the roots of inequality.
If we really believed that climate change is an existential crisis, if we believed climate change is a weapon of mass destruction, as John Kerry said, why on Earth would you leave it to the vagaries of the market?
In another interview, Klein clarifies her position:
I’m not saying that markets have no role in combatting climate change. I think the right market incentives can play a huge role—we can point to all kinds of companies doing great stuff. The issue is not to say the market has no role. It’s the idea of leaving this to the market. We can mint solar and wind millionaires and still not get there because we have these hard targets we have to meet. There will have to be a strong role for the public sector, a strong role for regulations and, yes, incentives. But the idea of just leaving our collective fate to the market is madness. You wouldn’t treat any other existential crisis in that way.
Zachary Karabell strongly disagrees with Klein’s thesis. He fears that “rhetoric risks obscuring just how much is being done by large companies around the world to reduce their carbon emissions and environmental footprint”:
None of us should lose sight of working toward a less resource-intensive future. Getting there requires massive investment of trillions of dollars and concerted effort at multiple levels of society. Dismissing a key element of that change—the multinationals and global NGOs that are trying to make these changes in spite of the sclerosis and opposition of so many governments and in the face of powerful lobbies—may galvanize some activists. But barring a synchronous overthrow of the entire global capitalist system, we need the assiduous efforts of multinationals that simultaneously strive to make heaps of money and to reduce their environmental impact. Without them, we would be many steps closer to the environmental Armageddon that Klein and so many of us fear is nigh.
Rebecca Henderson argues along the same lines:
We need to build a social movement that can insist that our leaders put in place the policies that will enable us to deal with the threat of climate change. And while we may struggle with longer-term priorities, we’re also a species that will do almost anything to ensure the welfare of our children. We need to rediscover the old idea that responsive, democratically controlled government has a central role to play in ensuring that the rules of the game are fair, and in dealing with problems like climate change: tough, long-term collective action problems that can only be addressed by the state.
But that doesn’t mean that we should abandon capitalism. With the right policies, capitalism properly understood is perfectly well equipped to prepare us to face the risk of large scale climate change. In fact, it’s the only thing that can.
And Will Boisvert calls the book “a garbled mess stumbling endlessly over its own contradictions”:
Her understanding of the technical aspects of energy policy — indispensable for any serious discussion of sustainability — is weak and biased, marked by a myopic boosterism of renewables and an unthinking rejection of nuclear power and other low-carbon energy sources. Having declared climate change an “existential crisis for the human species,” [15] she rules out some of the most effective means of dealing with it.
Her attack on globalization and trade sometimes clashes with rather than supports her goal of rapid decarbonization. Her abhorrence of industrial civilization misconstrues its complex, sometimes positive impact on the environment. Her politics veer between calls for massive government initiatives and celebrations of an extreme localism and populism that are likely to hobble state action. And her rhapsodic ideal of a society that stands in “humility before nature” [267] glosses over the inherent tension between natural limits and human aspiration — and what that implies for her goals of development and liberation.
John Gray is much more sympathetic. He calls Klein’s latest “a powerful and urgent book that anyone who cares about climate change will want to read.” But he finds it “hard to resist the conclusion that she shrinks from facing the true scale of the problem”
When I read The Shock Doctrine (Guardian review headline: “The end of the world as we know it”), I was unconvinced that corporate and political elites understood what they were doing in promoting the wildly leveraged capitalism of that time, which was already beginning to implode. The idea that corporate elites are in charge of the world is even less convincing today. …
Another problem with pinning all the blame for climate crisis on corporate elites is that humanly caused environmental destruction long predates the rise of capitalism. As Klein herself observes in an interesting chapter on what she calls “extractivism” – the economic model that treats the Earth as a bundle of resources waiting to be exploited – human activity was already changing the climate centuries ago. “We started treating the atmosphere as a waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that.” Moreover, though Klein doesn’t explore the fact, it’s worth bearing in mind that the extractive model was applied on a vast scale in the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and Mao’s China, where some of the largest and worst 20th-century environmental catastrophes occurred.
However, Chris Bentley is against dismissing Klein out of hand:
We haven’t made significant progress, Klein argues, because we’ve been expecting solutions from the very same institutions that created the problem in the first place.
As for who should be the agents of this change, Klein reports on the front lines of grassroots movements from Montana to Greece — an unofficial coalition of shared interests that she dubs “Blockadia.” Klein says the answer is to empower the communities that stand to lose the most: among them, indigenous peoples threatened by mining and drilling operations, the world’s developing nations, and activists resisting austerity amid widening socioeconomic inequality.
While “power to the people” may seem an uninspired way to change the world’s dominating socioeconomic systems, Klein’s sharp analysis makes a compelling case that a mass awakening is part of the answer.
https://twitter.com/Creative_Boom/status/516994707751047169
Tiffanie Wen discusses the reception of a black burger in Burger King restaurants in Japan:
Americans have been both intrigued and repulsed by the images. “Finally #BurgerKing makes a burger the way your body sees it … disgusting and cancer-causing,” one Twitter user wrote. Another tweeted: “It’s the black cheese that freaks me out the most. It looks like the kind of rubber they use to make gimp masks.”
But the burger is enjoying a “favorable reception” in Japan, according to the Guardian—so why do Americans have such a negative response to it?
She offers an answer:
McDonald’s and other international chains have long adjusted their recipes and menus to cater to local tastes. Last year Thrillist dedicated a post to the best foreign McDonald’s products from around the world. (I’d personally love to try the deep-fried Camembert “cheese melt dippers” from branches in Ireland.)
With regards to the KURO burgers, Garber says, “Black in the U.S. simply doesn’t convey a favorable food meaning. It means charred or burnt or moldy or spoiled or inedible.” But in Japan, black is positively associated with food. Eva Hyatt, a professor of marketing at Appalachian State University, told New York Magazine that people in Japan are exposed to more black foods, including seaweed, bean paste-based foods, black walnut powder, squid ink, and other grey foods.”
Clint Rainey notes that McDonalds has followed suit with a black burger of its own, “and the limited-edition burger is now available at three Tokyo branches”:
Happy Halloween from McDonald’s Japan! http://t.co/WTSal1bRdu pic.twitter.com/RBtAMyoyHK
— Brian Ashcraft (@Brian_Ashcraft) September 26, 2014
Tara Mohr flags startling new research on the criticism men and women receive in the workplace:
Across 248 reviews from 28 companies, managers, whether male or female, gave female employees more negative feedback than they gave male employees. Second, 76 percent of the negative feedback given to women included some kind of personality criticism, such as comments that the woman was “abrasive,” “judgmental” or “strident.” Only 2 percent of men’s critical reviews included negative personality comments.
She offers some practical advice:
In my coaching practice and training courses for women, I often encounter women who don’t voice their ideas or pursue their most important work because of dependence on praise or fears of criticism. …
I’ve found that the fundamental shift for women happens when we internalize the fact that all substantive work brings both praise and criticism. Many women carry the unconscious belief that good work will be met mostly — if not exclusively — with praise. Yet in our careers, the terrain is very different: Distinctive work, innovative thinking and controversial decisions garner supporters and critics, especially for women. We need to retrain our minds to expect and accept this.
There are a number of effective ways to do this. A woman can identify another woman whose response to criticism she admires. In challenging situations, she can imagine how the admired woman might respond, and thereby see some new possible responses for herself. It can be helpful to read the most negative and positive reviews of favorite female authors, to remind ourselves of the divergent reactions that powerful work inspires.
For more on Mohr’s work, check out her new book Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message.
Spot your favorite underwater scenes in cinema:
A reader shares a harrowing series of stories and insights on corporal punishment, which at times borders on torture:
This email is too long, Andrew. But I don’t know another way to do it. Those last sentences in your post on “The Racial Divide On Spanking Kids” are packed with the stuff I’ve been struggling with all week. I’m sending this because I took so much time to write it. I’ve been close to tears often this week, and I suppose it’s a way of defending that tenderness.
“Discipline”: It was a belt or a switch in my house, except for the handful of times I was slapped. I hail from a poor, white, fundamentalist family in Texas. Sometimes we managed to get a hold of the bottom rung instead – lower-middle class, or is it upper-lower class? – but it wasn’t ever a very firm grip. I think that matters, our economic and social status – how it operated on my parents, their sense of self, their sense of control and agency, their standing, that fuzzy line between “poor” and “trash,” the dependable hierarchy at home of respect and obedience. But I can’t unpack all of that, and I don’t know what it would mean for anyone else if I did.
Whenever I got caught swearing – or if someone told my mother I’d been swearing – I had my mouth washed out with soap. In practice, even this is a stupid and violent thing to do. Really, the logistics of the sink and the soap and the faucet, the mouth and the hands, the gagging and spitting and crying – it’s jammed with aggression. I was six the first time.
Mind you, I never once swore at my parents. Not once. I swore at other kids or my siblings, and as I was the youngest by a decade – this was all mimicry. In truth, I was a freakishly good kid, but only because I wanted, more than anything, to keep out of the way and get through the day unnoticed. As all the evidence shows, this stuff doesn’t work: I’m a committed swearer to this day – but, well, there’s a time and a place. You learn that sort of thing over time, not over a sink.
Before I was tall enough to choose my own switch, my mother would get it herself. And the period of time that marked her absence, waiting for her to return with one, was filled with terror. It is a kind of psychological suspense that no child is equipped to manage. I certainly wasn’t. I remember that waiting period much more vividly than I remember the pain of being struck, repeatedly. (Does anyone “spank” a kid once a session? Isn’t it always part of a series?) I can hear myself crying and screaming, I can see myself touching the welts later, the stippled blood, but it has none of the embodied force of that terrible, terrible waiting.
When I was finally made to get my own switch, it was a kind of relief. Maybe because I felt I had some control? Alone and outside, it was nice to get lost in the concentration required to choose the right switch, the one that might hurt the least. (I’m choking up now, typing this. All week it’s been like that, following the national reactions.)
Anybody who thinks that hitting a kid with a switch is remotely related to “spanking” or “swatting” or “discipline” is full of shit. It’s a violent, strange, lacerating affair. Where the length of the switch lands can’t be controlled; anyone who’s used one – or been hit with one – knows this. Adults don’t get to shrug and claim they didn’t mean to lash a child’s scrotum or face or breasts. A child will automatically jerk and twist and try to shield herself when someone is striking her with a switch. (Whipping posts were useful because they prevented this very dance. One could aim better, land the strike with precision. Become a marksman.)
A child is also typically being grabbed and yanked with the parent’s free hand. It’s chaotic. Shit is going to go wrong. You don’t know where the next blow is going to land. That’s what makes it so terrifying for a kid. And a switch is like a whip – it is a whip: each lash has stages; it curls and snakes and bites. The sound of it, both a rip and whistle – awful.
As a kid, I was not only hit with a switch; I was “paddled” with a board (in school), hit with the belt, and slapped. But nothing had the psychological impact of the switch. Every blow was new and surprising and fresh. A switch is unpredictable. That is its nature. That is its power. Any offending adult who claims not to know that is a liar.
My father never hit me. I don’t know why. He beat the shit out of my brother and sisters. My mother didn’t intervene. And then one day he stopped. Cold turkey. Later, perhaps motivated by guilt (her other children were his stepchildren), my mother would scream at him to punish me, but he wouldn’t. I can still see him shaking as she screamed, pushing the belt into his hands. I don’t know how I knew it – I was too young – but I did know: he was trying to control himself. He was shaking from the effort required to resist. And I remember perfectly those minutes of fear and confusion: Why does he look afraid? Why does she want him to hurt me? Is he going to? Why does she hate me?
Almost ritualistically, it ended with her grabbing the belt, crying and yelling both, and “spanking” me with all she had. My father always, always, left the room. I feel certain they would tell you, or anyone taking a survey, that they spanked us and disciplined us. Yes. That is was their responsibility, and their right.
I graduated high school in Texas in 1986. Students were still “paddled” in the principal’s office then. It was a long board with three holes drilled into it. It had a handle. We would bend over, knees straight, and put both hands on a chair. For the girls, a secretary was called in to observe. I worked half days my senior year and so was ineligible for detention. After three tardy slips and without the option of detention, I was paddled. I can faithfully report that it didn’t help me get to class on time. I was already a tired kid, overwhelmed and depressed, living in a chaotic house. I couldn’t always get it together or keep it together between work and school and home. Corporal punishment didn’t change that.
I will say that the boys in my high school got hit a lot harder. A lot. I remember leaving class with a bathroom pass once and seeing a boy I didn’t like – he frequently taunted me in front of other students about my small breasts – alone in the hallway, returning to class after a “paddling.” His walk was slow and stiff. He was in real and visible pain. He looked humiliated, and like he’d been crying. And I remember feeling confused because I had the urge to comfort him – him of all people.
Mostly I’ve been wrestling a lot with how all these terms have been conflated in the media and between people lately: “spanking” and “discipline” and “punishment” and, let’s be straight about it, flogging. The bravado and the gallows humor: classic (mal)adaptive coping strategies for all manner of survivors and people living or working in violent, fearful, unpredictable environments – soldiers, the hazed, the bullied, the ostracized or marginalized, ER nurses, cops. I sense it sometimes, how tough I can feel – or toughened. I took it. I made it through. Man, can I take things. There’s something haughty in the feeling. Triumphant. A badge-of-honor quality to it. But I know it’s an overcompensation. I know it’s a coded admission of my vulnerability and my anxiety about feeling helpless, of how my early dependence and vulnerability was exploited.
Maybe it’s transference, but I swear I could see the very same brew on Hannity’s face during this piece. He repeatedly invokes his father and the ways he was punished by his father. He sounds almost like a battered spouse (or, say, an abused child), claiming he deserved what he got, making excuses for his father. There’s even a pleading tone in his voice – do not take away this guy’s career, don’t put him in jail. But who is Hannity really talking about? Who should be spared and protected? Because for almost the entire clip he’s been talking about his father, and himself as his father’s child.
There’s something poignant and terrible about that merry reenactment with his belt. Slapping it against the desk. Even the certified guests seem to be dazed by the simultaneous demonstration and disavowal. But wait, now he’s snapping the belt. And snapping a belt like that at a child is nothing but a calculated form of emotional torture. I remember it well. I remember it physically, everything in my little body starting to rev and jack-knife. Snap. Snap. Snap. It’s nothing to do with discipline; it’s everything to do with domination, control, intimidation. (There’s this, too: Some people just like this shit. Same way some people like making and seeing their dog cower.) Either way, it’s pretty much condoned in our culture.
If you’re the sort of person who needs to idolize your parents your whole adult life; if you can’t navigate the necessary distance from which to admit their inevitable mistakes and weaknesses; if you can’t simultaneously love them and admit your own honest anger or pain, the dark ways you’ve been formed, too; if you need a rationalization for how you also “discipline” your children – well, then, I guess you talk a lot about how fine you are, or how you deserved it, or how harmless and necessary it is and the rights we have to it – all this “spanking” and “discipline” – maybe you brag about it a little, and you take off your belt on live TV and snap it for all the world to see, because, hey, everybody’s all right. The kids are all right. Right?
An expert from the in-tray weighs in:
I am a political scientist, and my research focuses on executive power and the American warfare state. I’m writing in response to the ongoing discussion about the Obama administration’s tenuous legal rationale to wage war against ISIL without requesting permission from Congress. Most legal scholars that you cite agree that a congressional authorization is constitutionally required in order to carry out extended air strikes. You pushed this normative case even further, balking that “Obama…has blown a hole so wide in any constitutional measures to restrain the war machine that he has now placed future presidential war-making far beyond any constraints.”
However, there are very logical (if troubling) reasons why presidents continually assume the prerogative to carry out their national security agendas unilaterally, and why Congress’ power to declare war has become nearly obsolete.
Although the US Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to declare war, this prerogative is only meaningful if Congress also exercises strict budgetary authority over the military. For most of the nation’s history, Congress’ tight control over the defense budget required that presidents not only obtain formal legislative authorization for military operations, but also that they secure funding, weapons and armies from Congress in order carry out large-scale military endeavors. However, the formal power to declare war is rendered almost entirely symbolic in era in which legislators overwhelmingly support large military budgets, procure sophisticated military technologies and refuse to limit funding for imprudent, reckless or unpopular wars.
Since President Truman referred to the Korean War as a “police action” (using a semantic sleight of hand to explain the absence of a congressional declaration of war), Congresses have furnished presidents with the armies, weapons systems and funding to wage war regardless of the legality of their actions. Presidents have assumed the prerogative to project American military power and exercise force abroad as they see fit, and they have received so little pushback from Congress, the courts or the American people that it often appears as though this outcome was the result of deliberate planning. Obama is no different in this regard than most of his predecessors who also found that inheriting an executive monopoly over vast arsenals of military equipment was too irresistible to bother with constitutional formalities. In fact, most Americans hardly notice that intensifying air strikes in Iraq and Syria even raise constitutional questions.
By maintaining large military budgets at all times and refusing to limit the war funding available to presidents, Congress has essentially relinquished any meaningful authority over the decision about how, when and whether to go to war. Congress’ blank check mentality with regard to war funding also promotes military solutions to complex foreign policy problems, and empowers presidents to carry out their national security agendas independently.
The cost of bombing ISIS is already closing in on $1 billion. And Eisenhower wept.
Readers may understandably be concerned by my continued dissent on the new war counter-terrorism operation in Iraq and Syria – which has no chance to roll back a Sunni insurgency that will endure as long as Iraq is still kept as a unitary “state”, huge chances that blowback will bring terror to the US again, and has only token Sunni support in a region where the Shi’a-Sunni war may well continue for years or decades. But I have long argued that we should look at Obama’s long game in assessing results. And with two years to go, the long game can begin to be assessed.
The results in foreign policy? A new open-ended years’ long war in Iraq and an indefinite continuation of thousands of troops in Afghanistan. These were not wars, it turns out. They were operations in which the United States became permanently responsible as a neo-imperial power for two more failed states. More to the point, as ISIS has managed to become the new al Qaeda, Americans have returned to their 2002 mindset, with a new Congress looking as if it will be dominated by Republicans, who are all-too-eager for ever more wars against ever more non-threats to the United States. The last two years of Bush were more hopeful for some kind of unwinding of this war machine. But now a liberal Democrat has given them bipartisan legitimacy – and fueled the fires for a Cheneyite comeback.
Gitmo, of course, remains open. More to the point, even as war criminals have been given total immunity, the Senate Intelligence Committee report remains bottled up, as the CIA is allowed to doctor, redact and openly challenge it, while the president sits back and lets Denis McDonough protect the war criminals we once had some aspiration to at least expose. James Clapper has been revealed as a liar to the Congress and suffers no consequences; he admits he failed to anticipate ISIS’s breakout, and the president retains full confidence in him. John Brennan runs an agency which actually spied on its Congressional over-seers, lies about it in public – and retains the president’s full confidence. And now we discover that a real current issue of mistreatment of detainees in Gitmo is being covered up:
The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to hold a highly anticipated court hearing on its painful force-feedings of Guantánamo Bay detainees almost entirely in secret, prompting suspicions of a cover-up.
Justice Department attorneys argued to district judge Gladys Kessler that allowing the hearings to be open to the public would jeopardize national security through the disclosure of classified information. Should Kessler agree, the first major legal battle over forced feeding in a federal court would be less transparent than the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay.
That’s precisely what we supported Obama for, isn’t it? That allegations of abuse of detainees in Guantanamo Bay be kept completely secret – and that no one will ever be held accountable for it. The actual videotapes of the force-feeding – critical evidence to allow anyone to judge whether these methods are indeed a form of torture – are barred from any public viewing.
The videos exist – just as they did of the brutal water-boarding of terror suspects conducted by a lawless CIA that then destroyed the tapes – again with total impunity. The lawyer for the detainee alleging inhuman treatment has the following to say:
“It’s obvious what is really going on here: the government wants to seal the force-feeding trial for the same reason it is desperate to suppress the tapes of my client being hauled from his cell by the riot squad and force-fed. The truth is just too embarrassing … The Defense Department says force-feeding isn’t torture? Bring it on, I say. Release my client’s force-feeding tapes, and let’s let the American people decide for themselves. DOD [the Defense Department] know full well that if Americans saw the real evidence they would side with the Navy nurse who refused to force-feed my client, and condemn this daily violation of medical ethics.”
But this president won’t allow it. The administration has even ordered a media ban on any reports of hunger-strikes – understandably conducted by prisoners with no recourse ever for a fair trial, release, or anything but a lifetime in legal and political limbo. If this were happening under Bush, it might be prompting an outcry:
The government’s desire for secrecy in the hearings is consistent with the military’s attempts to break the hunger strikes through a media blackout. Guantánamo officials no longer release formerly public information about how many of the 149 detainees are on hunger strike, going so far as to ban the term from its lexicon in favor of “long-term non-religious fasting.”
“Long-term non-religious fasting.” Orwell would be proud. Obama should be ashamed.
Sara Stern-Nezer and Aliza Monroe-Wise insist that “even if you were on that September 19th flight from Liberia to Dallas and shook the hand of America’s ‘patient zero,’ your risk of transmission remains relatively small.” Julia Belluz looks at how fast Ebola spreads:
A mathematical epidemiologist who studies Ebola wrote in the Washington Post, “The good news is that Ebola has a lower reproductive rate than measles in the pre-vaccination days or the Spanish flu.” He found that each Ebola case produces between 1.3 and 1.8 secondary cases. That means an Ebola victim usually only infects about one other person. Compare that with measles, which creates 17 secondary cases.
If you do the math, that means a single case in the US could lead to one or two others, but since we have robust public health measures here, it probably won’t go further than that.
Jonathan Cohn doesn’t see how we could have prevented the Dallas case:
According to the CDC, the infected traveler to the U.S. had no symptoms when he arrived in the U.S. on Saturday, September 20. A temperature test at a U.S. airport wouldn’t have picked up anything—and that would have been true for at least another four days, because it wasn’t until Wednesday the 24th that he started to feel sick and run a fever.
Public health experts I consulted quickly on Tuesday thought that was entirely predictable, given that Ebola has a long asymptomatic period of up to 21 days. Short of putting all travelers from affected areas into quarantine for three weeks, they said, airport screening isn’t likely to do much. “The idea is misguided,” said Howard Markel, a professor of medicine and communicable diseases at the University of Michigan and author of When Germs Travel. “It would not have worked in the case of an asymptomatic person. Airport screeners look for obvious signs, such as high fever and other visible or measurable signs of illness.”
Rebecca Leber analyzes the CDC’s “textbook response to public health news that has the potential to incite mass panic”:
“Great uncertainty without guidance and support increases unhelpful behavior in a crisis,” Dr. Barbara Reynolds, now director of public affairs at the CDC, wrote in a 2011 blog post. She notes that panic itself is a rare behavior. “From a psychological point of view, panic is best used to explain a behavior that is irrational or counter to a person’s survival.”
But Jesse Walker thinks it’s the press, rather than the public, that is most prone to panic:
Everyday citizens tend to keep their heads in situations like this. As I wrote half a decade ago, when the purported panic on the horizon involved swine flu, “It’s easy to find examples of public anxiety, with every hypochondriac in the country fretting that the cold his kid always catches this time of year was actually the killer flu. But panic? Where’s the evidence of that?” Going through a series of stories that were supposed to show flu hysteria, I was underwhelmed. … In Dallas right now, the chances that people will start stampeding in the streets is far, far smaller than the chances that scare-mongering coverage will make it harder to get good information.
Our complete Ebola coverage is here.
The Dish 