species final exams: dmitri orlov offers a prudent and scalable ebola mitigation strategy

cluborlov |  I have already mentioned that it may be a good idea to make arrangements through which survivors would be able to feed themselves, and provide them with the few other necessities for survival.

Beyond that, there are the basic mechanics of handling the pandemic. The current strategy treats it as a medical problem, best handled by doctors and nurses working in hospitals and clinics. This strategy only works for as long as the epidemic can be said to be under control; once it can be said to be out of control, the surviving doctors and nurses (medics are usually the first to be exposed—and to die) would be well advised to specifically refuse to handle Ebola patients.

In absence of any curative or preventive therapies, Ebola patients need shelter, hydration, hygiene, palliative care and, if and when they die, sanitary disposal of the remains. The goal is to do what is possible to give patients a chance to recover more or less on their own. To this end, it is very important to do all the things necessary to make sure that people are dying just from Ebola, and not from exposure, dehydration, or from any of the opportunistic diseases that thrive in disrupted circumstances, such as cholera and typhus. Sanitation is the most important aspect of the entire operation.

These services need not be provided by trained medics. The main two requirements for such service are: 1. psychological immunity to scenes of horrific suffering and death; and 2. immunity to Ebola. The first of these requirements comes down to natural talent; some have it, some don't. The second requirement is being provided free of charge by the Ebola virus itself, in cooperation with the survivors' immune systems.

English lacks a good word to describe this type of specialist, but we don't have to reach far to find one: the Russian word for it is “sanitar.” A popular Russian saying goes “wolves are sanitars of the forest” because they take care of disposing of the sick, the weak and the lame, thus giving those that survive a better chance. A sanitar need not be medically trained, but some training is needed: in diagnosis, palliative care, sanitation procedures and corpse disposal.

A third requirement is one that applies to the sanitation service as a whole: the number of sanitars has to scale with the rate of infection. Since the number of those infected is increasing exponentially, the number of sanitars assigned to serve them has to be able to increase exponentially as well. It seems outlandish to think that sufficient numbers of people will spontaneously volunteer for the job, and this means that they have to be press-ganged into service. And a super-obvious way to do just that is to simply never discharge Ebola survivors: once you are in, you are in until the pandemic is over, or until you die, whichever comes first. If you recover, you are given a bit of training, and then you go to work.

If you don't like the mitigation strategy I am proposing, please feel free to propose your own. Keep in mind, however, that what you propose has to automatically scale with the increase in the rate of infection, which is exponential. Sure, you can propose setting a public health budget, but then it has to double every couple of weeks—and keep doubling until the number of patients is in the billions.

elforsk ain't hesitate to interrogate (it gets cold in sweden and putin ackin a fool)...,

elforsk | Yesterday, astounding results from month-long measurements on a so-called “energy catalyser” were reported. The report, written by researchers from Uppsala University, KTH and the University of Bologna, describes a release of heat that cannot be explained by chemical reactions alone. Isotope changes in the analysed fuel instead indicate that nuclear reactions might have occurred at low temperatures. It implies that we may be facing a new way to extract nuclear energy possibly without ionizing radiation and radioactive waste. The discovery could potentially become very important for the world's energy supply.

The central part of the reactor is a narrow cylinder that is two decimetre long. In the experiments, the reactor operated at temperatures up to about 1 400 degrees Celsius. A net energy release of 1 500 kWh was observed. The thermal energy output was three to four times the electrical energy input. The reactor was filled with 1 gram hydrogen-loaded nickel powder and some additives.

In recent years, Elforsk has followed the development of what has come to be called LENR – Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. Elforsk has published an overview summary of LENR. Elforsk has co-funded the work described in the report in addition to earlier measurements that showed an anomalous excess of energy.

If it is possible to safely operate and control these reactions that are now believed to be nuclear reactions, we may see a fundamental transformation of our energy system. Electricity and heat could then be produced with relatively simple components, facilitating a decentralization of energy supply that could be both inexpensive and part of a solution for global climate change.

More research is needed to understand and explain. Let us engage researchers in trying to validate and then explaining how it works.

Magnus Olofsson, CEO Elforsk – Swedish Electrical Utilities' R & D Company

h8ters cain't wait to h8te...,

stephenpomp |  The title of the report, though, heralds quite differently “Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel”. So what is going on? 

Yet another version of the E-Cat² has been tested. This time the tests have been performed in Lugano³.

As in previous reports, some measurements and technical details are reported in great detail. One may, however, wonder why so much information, irrelevant for the core question, is reported while the really interesting claim is dealt with on only about two pages.  

So if you do not manage to read through all the tables and numbers, just turn to page 27 ff, read section 8 “Fuel analysis”, and check out table 1 in Appendix 3. That should do. Why? Because none of the measurements presented on the previous 26 pages matter, if what is written in this section is true; i.e., that the reported dramatic changes in the isotopic composition of the “fuel” are really due to a nuclear reaction in the E-Cat.

Levi et al. write that the “fuel” initially consists of a mixture of nickel powder and lithium in natural isotopic compositions. However, after the run, the “ash” is radically different in the isotopic composition! Practically all Li-7 has turned into Li-6 and all the 4 other naturally occurring nickel isotopes have practically vanished and turned into Ni-62. The latter has a natural abundance of 3.6 % but in the “ash” the abundance is about 99 %! Yes, you have read correctly. This is what is claimed. Nobelprize? If true: definitely. Imagine: You run the E-Cat and all the Ni-58 (68 % natural abundance), Ni-60 (26 %), Ni-61 (1 %) and Ni-64 (1 %) nuclei have turned into Ni-62.

Yes, you may read this again and try to digest it. The authors really claim that some of the nickel isotopes get some neutrons added while others have some removed and everything just becomes one single isotope. 

And this miracle happens without any radiation being emitted when the E-Cat is run, without traces of copper or other elements, and without changes in the effectiveness of the E-Cat while it is run⁴.

nothing would please me more than for the boy to face the future close to home...,

mospace.umsystem  | The 18th meeting of the International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (ICCF) was held at the University of MIssouri--Columbia on July 21-27, 2013.

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• Piezonuclear Fission Reactions Simulated by the Lattice Model 

  Veneziano, Diego (University of Missouri, 2013-07)
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  18th International Conference on Condensed Matter; International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (18th : 2013 : Columbia, Mo.) (University of Missouri, 2013-07)
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  Pfeifer, Peter (University of Missouri, 2013-07)

last night my son shifted his focus from chemical and petroleum engineering to physical chemistry and nuclear engineering...,

centauri-dreams |  Whenever we’re audacious enough to categorize far future civilizations, we turn to the work of Nikolai Kardashev. Nick Nielsen today looks at the well known Kardashev scale in the light of a curious fact: While many use Kardashev’s rankings in their own speculations, few have gone back and dug into his original paper. In Kardashev’s terms, our planet is close to attaining Type I status, which would surprise many commentators. And doesn’t the ambiguity over what constitutes the energy of a star — red dwarf? red giant? — play havoc with cut and dried ‘type’ definitions? How subsequent writers have adapted and modified the Kardashev scale makes for a cautionary tale about mastering our sources before using them for further extrapolation. For that matter, are there better gauges of a civilization than its use of particular energy resources? Answering the question deepens the debate that Kardashev so fruitfully began.

low energy nuclear reactions coming into view?

sifferkoll |   This report shows an undeniable COP of 3,2-3.6 over a 32 day period and substantial isostope changes in nickel and lithium. Anyway here it is for those interested.

LuganoReportSubmit

So, what does this mean?

It means that everything will change. It may take some time, but it means that most things will get significantly cheaper, since energy is such an important part in how we keep warm (and cold), what we eat and how we cook it, how me move about (fuels), and all other things we consume, etc. etc.

I would go so far to say that energy is as close we get to a ”gold standard” for our storage of value (ie. the petrodollar). Everything depends on it.

So what will happen when we suddenly gets five times as much energy per petrodollar?

Of course we will consume more energy,but in everything we consume there will be a HR part, so we will also consume more human resources (ie. valuable knowledge), which of course will increase in value. The economic boom will be unparallelled. All food and water scarcities around the globe could be solved if only the local rulers allow it (unfortunately they will not) and the environmental challanges can be solved as well since so much of it comes from air pollution, etc.

The amount of petrodollars around will be the same, so in a classical sense there will be neither deflation or inflation. However the deflation of price in all commodities and products with a high energy content will be huge, but balanced by a equally huge inflation in the new scarcities with low energy content; like human resources, time in general, attractive real estate and other status symbols. Generated profits will be invested in new products like never before. And debts could be paid off.

What about the financial system then?

Since the investment climate will change due to possible high returns, the price of money will go up, which in turn will make it a better investment to pay off debts. There will be some kind of balance, but basically it means that the financial debt crises in EU, US and Japan can be solved due to lower costs, higher taxes and lower unemployment in general.

So are there any losers?

Of course, oil stocks will be valued at cash instead of possible future profits. So the owners of these assets will loose money. Mainly this means savings and pensions of taxpayers; fortunately the same ones that in general will see an even bigger upside. some people and organisations will loose power, like the ”green” politicians that make a living out of environmental doomesday scenarios, and maybe most troubling, some governments that are dependent on exporting oil and gas for spendings. I guess Russia beeing the most scary one.  Fist tap Dale.

straight loving the way this cat thinks yo!

sifferkoll |  While looking in the logs after publishing the E-Cat report I found out that within minutes it was downloaded by an IP number owned by Blackrock/Barcleys. Within minutes after that oil futures started to fall and have stayed volatile since…

topological quantum computing

technologyreview |  In 2012, physicists in the Netherlands announced a discovery in particle physics that started chatter about a Nobel Prize. Inside a tiny rod of semiconductor crystal chilled cooler than outer space, they had caught the first glimpse of a strange particle called the Majorana fermion, finally confirming a prediction made in 1937. It was an advance seemingly unrelated to the challenges of selling office productivity software or competing with Amazon in cloud computing, but Craig Mundie, then heading Microsoft’s technology and research strategy, was delighted. The abstruse discovery—partly underwritten by Microsoft—was crucial to a project at the company aimed at making it possible to build immensely powerful computers that crunch data using quantum physics. “It was a pivotal moment,” says Mundie. “This research was guiding us toward a way of realizing one of these systems.”

Microsoft is now almost a decade into that project and has just begun to talk publicly about it. If it succeeds, the world could change dramatically. Since the physicist Richard Feynman first suggested the idea of a quantum computer in 1982, theorists have proved that such a machine could solve problems that would take the fastest conventional computers hundreds of millions of years or longer. Quantum computers might, for example, give researchers better tools to design novel medicines or super-efficient solar cells. They could revolutionize artificial intelligence.

Progress toward that computational nirvana has been slow because no one has been able to make a reliable enough version of the basic building block of a quantum computer: a quantum bit, or qubit, which uses quantum effects to encode data. Academic and government researchers and corporate labs at IBM and Hewlett-Packard have all built them. Small numbers have been wired together, and the resulting devices are improving. But no one can control the physics well enough for these qubits to serve as the basis of a practical general-purpose computer.

Microsoft has yet to even build a qubit. But in the kind of paradox that can be expected in the realm of quantum physics, it may also be closer than anyone else to making quantum computers practical. The company is developing a new kind of qubit, known as a topological qubit, based largely on that 2012 discovery in the Netherlands. There’s good reason to believe this design will be immune from the flakiness plaguing existing qubits. It will be better suited to mass production, too. “What we’re doing is analogous to setting out to make the first transistor,” says Peter Lee, Microsoft’s head of research. His company is also working on how the circuits of a computer made with topological qubits might be designed and controlled. And Microsoft researchers working on algorithms for quantum computers have shown that a machine made up of only hundreds of qubits could run chemistry simulations beyond the capacity of any existing supercomputer.

In the next year or so, physics labs supported by Microsoft will begin testing crucial pieces of its qubit design, following a blueprint developed by an outdoorsy math genius. If those tests work out, a corporation widely thought to be stuck in computing’s past may unlock its future.

Stranger still: a physicist at the fabled but faded Bell Labs might get there first.

speaking of contact-tracing: how is it that the government can read your emails but not count overseer-inflicted casualties?

salon |  The shooting of teenager Michael Brown has focused the nation (again) on the dangers faced by young, unarmed black men walking the streets of America. The sight of paramilitary police with guns pointed at peaceful protesters in a suburban town in the Midwest also got our attention. And as we wait for the legal system to determine if officer Darren Wilson will be held liable for the shooting, new questions are rising to the surface about the issue of officer-involved shootings in general. How often does this happen? How are these issues normally handled by prosecutors and the courts? And surprisingly, there is almost no way of knowing how often American citizens are killed at the hands of the authorities.

Most reporting in the last couple of weeks has cited the figure of 400 people killed in incidents of “justifiable homicide” by police officers each year since 2008.  This number comes from estimates done by the Centers for Disease Control and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to this article by Reuben Fischer-Baum at Five Thirty Eight, that number is highly debatable for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that only “justifiable” homicides are counted, which obviously means any that are deemed unjustified are not. It’s clear that the current government methods for reporting these deaths are unreliable.

Others have tried to compile these statistics themselves through media reports. Kyle Wagner at Deadspin recently announced a crowdsourcing project to collect the information for a comprehensive database. D. Brian Burghart, editor of the Reno News & Review, has been trying to gather the data for years and wrote a very interesting, and disturbing, article for Gawker discussing the difficulties he’s had getting cooperation from the authorities:

The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this project is something I’ll never be able to prove, but I’m convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why.

It’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting to collect this information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public records requests. The government collects millions of bits of data annually about law enforcement in its Uniform Crime Report, but it doesn’t collect information about the most consequential act a law enforcer can do.

It does seem more than a bit odd that the government has the capacity to collect all emails and texts that pass through the United States but is unable to compile a list of citizens who died in interactions with police agencies, doesn’t it?

cdc recommends hermetically-sealed fema coffins for ebola victims - and has stockpiled them for this contingency...,

alt-market |  I have been warning for quite some time that the banking establishment in particular is well aware that an economic collapse of incredible proportions is coming. In fact, they have done everything in their power to make one possible. This collapse, according to my research, is designed to clear the way through monetary carpet bombing for a new international Bretton Woods-style agreement which will plant the foundation of a truly global economic system centralized and controlled by a highly select few elites. Needless to say, the internationalists would prefer not to take the blame for such a calamity.

Regional or widespread war, terrorism, cyber attacks, etc, are all useful vehicles to conjure mass confusion, and can also be used as scapegoats for the eventual downfall of our economy. That said, a viral pandemic truly surpasses them all in effectiveness. All other tragedies could easily be tied to the first “domino” or “linchpin” (as Rand Corporation calls it) of Ebola transmission, but the strategy goes deeper than this...

An Act Of Nature

Even though most people are well aware of the fact that governments have been engineering biological weapons for decades, few people think political leadership would ever use them at all, let alone use them on the people they are tasked to protect. Even with the complacency and inaction of our government in terms of the response to Ebola, the general assumption by most of the American population will be that any viral outbreak is a product of nature, not of men.

Acts of nature are not things that the common man can easily rebel against. People rebel against governments and corrupt despots all the time, but not the plague. If a viral pandemic strikes, nearly everything a government does after the fact, no matter how corrupt or destructive, can be rationalized as necessary for the greater good of the greater number. If anyone does rebel, they will be labeled as pure evil, for they are now disrupting the government's ability to stop the pandemic from spreading, and thus, are partly responsible for the mass deaths that follow.

During a viral outbreak, government becomes mother, father, nurse and protector. No matter how abusive they are, most people will still look to them for safety and guidance, primarily because they have no knowledge of disease. What they do not understand, they will fear, and fear always drives the ignorant into the arms of tyrants.  One should also take into consideration the fact that most globalists lean towards the ideology of eugenics and promote the concept of population reduction.  A pandemic would fulfill this desire nicely...

Rationalized Economic Collapse

Who would question the event of an economic collapse in the wake of an Ebola soaked nightmare? Who would want to buy or sell? Who would want to come in contact with strangers to generate a transaction? Who would even leave their house? Ebola treatment in first world nations has advantages of finance and a cleaner overall health environment, but what if economic downturn happens simultaneously? America could experience third world status very quickly, and with it, all the unsanitary conditions that result in an exponential Ebola death rate.

The treasury, labor department, and private Federal Reserve have gone to vast lengths to skew statistics and rig markets with trillions in fiat dollars. Despite historic numbers of Americans falling off unemployment rolls, imploding shipping and manufacturing statistics, and the U.S. teetering on the edge of global “de-dollarization”, a large portion of the citizenry has been led to believe that economic recovery is assured. What they do not understand is that fiscal implosion is unavoidable, and the whole bull market is a circus designed to distract.

Amidst even a moderate or controlled viral scenario, stocks and bonds will undoubtedly crash, a crash that was going to happen anyway. The international banks who created the mess get off blameless, while Ebola, an act of nature, becomes the ultimate scapegoat for every disaster that follows.

why ARE so many deadly viral diseases breaking out all over the world right now?

economiccollapseblog |  Ebola, Marburg, Enterovirus and Chikungunya - these diseases were not even on the radar of most people coming into 2014, but now each one of them is making headline news.  So why is this happening?  Why are so many deadly diseases breaking out all over the world right now?  Is there some kind of a connection, or is the fact that so many horrible diseases are arising all at once just a giant coincidence?  And this could be just the beginning.  For example, there are now more than a million cases of Chikungunya in Central and South America, and authorities are projecting that there will be millions more in 2015.  The number of Ebola cases continues to grow at an exponential rate, and now an even deadlier virus (Marburg) has broken out in Uganda.  We have gone decades without experiencing a major worldwide pandemic, and many people believed that it could never happen in our day and time.  But now we could potentially see several absolutely devastating diseases all racing across the planet at the same time.

On Monday, we got news that the first confirmed case of Ebola transmission in Europe has happened.  A nurse in Spain that had treated a couple of returning Ebola patients has contracted the disease herself...

A nurse's assistant in Spain is the first person known to have contracted Ebola outside of Africa in the current outbreak.

Spanish Health Minister Ana Mato announced Monday that a test confirmed the assistant has the virus.

The woman helped treat a Spanish missionary and a Spanish priest, both of whom had contracted Ebola in West Africa. Both died after returning to Spain.

Health officials said she developed symptoms on September 30. She was not hospitalized until this week. Her only symptom was a fever.

How many people did she spread the virus to before it was correctly diagnosed?

aaaawwwwwww snap! if this overseer's hot, shit's about to get unbelievably real....,

dailymail |  Texas sheriff's deputy rushed to hospital with Ebola symptoms after attending apartment of 'patient zero' who died today

• Dallas County Sheriff Deputy Michael Monnig went to an urgent care clinic in Frisco, Texas with his wife on Wednesday A witness at the clinic described him as 'hunched over and flushed' 
• The deputy was inside the apartment where Ebola patient Thomas Duncan fell ill - the officer wasn't wearing protective clothing 
•  The CDC said the person is not one of the 48 contacts being monitored 
• The CareNow clinic was placed in lock-down Liberian national Mr Duncan, 42, died from Ebola on Wednesday morning 
•  Sgt Monnig's family said today the CDC had told them that their loved one was not at risk and they were just taking precautions

A Dallas County sheriff's deputy has been hospitalized today with Ebola symptoms, a week after he went unprotected into the apartment of first patient Thomas Duncan. Sgt Michael Monnig went on Wednesday to an urgent-care facility in Frisco, Texas with his wife, after complaining of stomach problems. The deputy presented at the clinic a week after he visited the Dallas home where Duncan was staying when he developed Ebola symptoms. Sgt Monnig was at the home to deliver a quarantine order to family members. Neither Sgt Monnig, nor the other two health officials, Zachary Thompson and Christopher Perkins with him, were wearing protective clothing or masks despite being in the apartment as cleaning crews were going about their work in full protective gear.

spanish flu in 1918 brought back by returning WW-I troops killed 1 million americans...,

zerohedge |  With boots-on-the-ground heading to Liberia to help 'manage' the anarchic dystopia that a frightened nation has become, General David Rodriguez (Commander, US Africa Command) held a briefing today to explain US troops' role:

• QUESTION: Will they be in contact with individuals or just specimens?
•  RODRIGUEZ: They come in contact with the individuals.

Of course this was followed by a stream of qualifiers that all protection possible will be taken (just like the nurses in Madrid?)

Via Bloomberg Transcript,

KIRBY: Afternoon, everybody. I'm proud to welcome into the briefing room General David Rodriguez, commander of Africa Command. He's here to give you an update on U.S. contributions to the effort against Ebola -- U.S. military contributions to the effort against Ebola in West Africa. And with that, sir, I'll turn it over to you.

QUESTION: Just a clarification on that, please. Will they be in contact with individuals or just specimens?

GENERAL DAVID M. RODRIGUEZ (USA), COMMANDER, U.S. AFRICA COMMAND: They come in contact with the individuals and they do that. And they're -- like I said, it's a -- it's a very, very high standard that these people have operated in all their lives, and this is their primary skill. This is not a -- you know, just medical guys trained to do this. This is what they do for a living.

open mic fail after cdc ebola press conference...,

raconteurreport |  There are, in fact, a total of four medical isolation units in the entire United States, as we noted yesterday, that are capable of handling infected Ebola patients near endlessly.

Where are they, and what can they handle?

Emory University's Serious Communicable Disease Unit is in Atlanta, GA. That's where Brantly and Writebol were treated. It has three beds.

St. Patrick Hospital's ICU Isolation Unit is in Missoula MT. It has three beds.

The National Institute of Health's Special Clinical Studies Unit is in Bethesda MD. It has seven beds.

And the biggest, the Nebraska Medical Center's Biocontainment Unit is in Omaha NE. It has ten beds.
  3+3+7+10=23 beds, coast to coast.
So, for the entire country, all 316,100,000+ of us, we're fully prepared to treat 23 Ebola patients at the same time. (For reference, that's how many Ebola patients Liberia had last April. It hasn't gone well.)
But the 316M-person question is, what happens when we have 24?
More happygas, anyone?

"But any major medical center could really take care of an Ebola patient," said William Schaffner, an expert on infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University's School of Medicine. 

Most ICUs have isolation rooms that are used for patients suspected to have tuberculosis, SARS, Middle East respiratory syndrome or another infectious disease. Schaffner said that not much would be different for an Ebola patient, though more stringent precautions might be taken to ensure that health care workers are following all protocols.

Why yes, gosh darn it, of course they can!

Just look at how well that worked at Texas Health Presbyterian, a top-tier 968-bed acute primary hospital in Dallas, and a regional healthcare keystone in that city.

They misdiagnosed their first patient.

Their computerized EMR doesn't dump the nurse's triage notes onto the doctor's page, so critical screening information was missed.

They exposed their hospital lab to specimens that weren't safe to handle, because they didn't know Thomas Duncan needed a BL4 response and specimen handling.

They exposed doctors, nurses, staff members, patients, and visitors to Ebola unknowningly.

  They sent him back into the community to expose family, friends, EMS workers, and random strangers as well.

Which led to inappropriate hazmat cleaning at his home;

the potential exposure of four public schools to the disease, which has necessitated closing them for cleaning while parents keep their children home, some withdrawing them completely;

and on and on, with 18/100/50 (depending on which number is currently operant) people under self-imposed quarantine and monitoring.
And that was a good look at how it's going to go everywhere else, the first time "shit's getting real". It's called the Normalcy Bias. "We've never had an Ebola patient walk in the door, so we never will, and we won't assume otherwise." Because ABCNNBCBS haven't been hawking any news to the contrary for months, right?
There are other problems: as noted yesterday, once you start traipsing highly infectious patients, frequently vomiting and squirting Ebola-laced body fluids everywhere, the hospital is unavailable for any other use.

That's not even news, it's CDC standard policy!
But don't believe me, go to their Ebola Info Sheet:

rule of law: reexamining residency requirements for overseers

fivethirtyeight |  Pittsburgh’s police force is at loggerheads with the city it serves. Since 1902, the city has required police officers to live within the city limits, but an arbitration panel recently ruled in favor of allowing officers to live within 25 air miles of downtown. City officials want the requirement to remain in place, as do the people of Pittsburgh, who voted overwhelmingly in a referendum last year to keep it.

Residency requirements are hugely unpopular among police officers in Pittsburgh and in other cities with similar rules. Many cities and states have contested the constitutionality of these strictures on the grounds that they violate freedom of travel and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Even where they are in place, they are routinely flouted. Today, only 15 of America’s largest police departments have a strict residency requirement for police officers, and a majority of cops live outside the cities they serve.¹

Residency requirements for police officers have long been tied to better relations between cops and the communities they’re meant to protect. They continue to be seen by activists and politicians as a social good, part of the struggle to improve police force diversity. These concerns remain significant in Pittsburgh and in cities across the country, where demographic gaps plague police forces and are often linked to tensions with the public. The fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August threw into relief the lack of representation for minority groups on the police force there and in hundreds of other departments.

On that measure, Pittsburgh isn’t doing great: 25 percent of city residents are black, but only 12 percent of the police force is, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. The police force is 85 percent white, even though whites make up only 65 percent of the city’s population.

Pittsburgh is far from an outlier — a look at the demographic data of 75 cities and their police forces reveals it’s as average as it gets.² Although it’s impossible to establish causation between requiring cops to live in the city and the demographics of the police force in Pittsburgh or anywhere else, our analysis does show that departments with the rule tend to reflect their communities less than departments without it.

Residency requirements for city workers date to the turn of the 20th century, when aldermen would staff municipalities with a cadre of friends. Reformers in the 1920s argued that these requirements kept the best candidates from getting jobs and that they fostered a culture of corruption that pervaded cities and their governments. The laws were allowed to lapse until the 1970s, when the requirements had something of a renaissance. They were reintroduced and justified as a way of keeping tax revenue in a city and arresting the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. And according to Werner Z. Hirsch and Anthony M. Rufolo, two economists who wrote about residency requirements in 1983, the rules were also thought to increase a police officer’s “interest in the results of his work.” This interest was specified by Peter Eisinger, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in a 1980 paper, in which he described the requirement as satisfying “the desire to create greater social symmetry between public servants and their clientele.”

perverse u.s. drug policies promote the justus growth industry

HuffPo |  To get your mind around just how dumb and perverse are our drug policies, you first have to absorb these astounding facts:

1. The U.S. has more deaths from drug overdoses than from car accidents.
2. Most are due to prescription narcotics, not street drugs.
3. Heroin deaths have also doubled in the past two years because patients first hooked on prescription narcotics often have to switch to cheaper street drugs.
4. States that have legalized medical marijuana have many fewer prescription narcotic overdoses than those that haven't.
5. Prescription narcotics are gateway drugs creating a new demographic of drug addiction -- older, whiter, suburban, and more female.
6. The Sackler family is famous and widely admired for its museum philanthropy; but is also infamous and deserves to be widely despised for its irresponsible drug pushing. Their drug company has been fined more than600 million for its criminal marketing of narcotics. Its pills cause more overdoses than any drug cartel.
7. Careless, sometimes criminal, MDs serve the same role for drug companies as corner pushers serve for drug cartels. Just one doctor in California was responsible for 400 emergency room visits.

We are fighting the wrong war on drugs.

The last 40 years prove conclusively that interdiction can't possibly win the war against the cartels. Illegal drugs are more available, stronger, and cheaper than ever. We have encouraged lawlessness and civil strife in every drug-producing nation. And we have cruelly and uselessly filled our prisons with people who might otherwise have had productive lives. The key to containing the cartels is to reduce demand for their products by legalization and by providing easy access to treatment and rehabilitation. The big losers if pot is legalized will be the drug cartels and the drug companies.

We couldn't possibly lose a battle to control Big Pharma -- if only our politicians and bureaucrats had the political will to engage in the fight.

charles ellison again: why the military and not medicine to ebola stricken africa?

theroot |  The Take turned to UCLA African American studies and Black Diaspora experts Dr. Peter James Hudson and Dr. Jemima Pierre to offer some expert insight into how effective that strategy is, whether it’s too militarized and if pharmaceuticals are calling the shots.  Hudson’s dissertation Dark Finance: An Unofficial History of Wall Street, American Empire and the Caribbean, 1889-1925 is under review and Pierre is author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race.

Jemima Pierre (@BLK_DIASPORAS): No matter the scale or severity of the outbreak, the Cuban response should be contrasted with that of the US and Europe. The Cubans have announced that they are sending an additional 300 doctors and nurses to Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia to combat the spread of and to help those infected with Ebola. In total, the Cubans will have 461 healthcare professionals in West Africa combatting Ebola. This needs to be contrasted with, on one hand, the military response of the US government, and, on the other, the commercial response of American corporations like GlaxoSmithKline who are fast-tracking approval of what will become, undoubtedly, an extremely profitable vaccine.

Peter James Hudson (@darkfinance): For those who have been paying attention, the militarization of the Ebola response is not surprising. What’s not talked about much is the U.S. militarization of the African continent long before Ebola and the presumed threat of Boko Haram. The U.S. established AFRICOM (U.S.-Africa Command) under President George W. Bush back in 2008 for a number of reasons – not least of which to be prepared for the “threat” of China as it positions itself in the continuous scramble for African resources. But under Bush, few African countries wanted to host a U.S. military base, with the notable exception of Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Under Obama, AFRICOM’s presence on the African continent expanded exponentially, and the U.S. has a military presence (often under the cover of “humanitarianism”) in just about every African country.

Pierre: We honestly think the Western response is racist and that the U.S. is acting in bad faith. The consistent privileging of white U.S. and European health care workers and missionaries needs to be seen as part of a broader context of racist practices around Africa in general, and the Ebola epidemic in particular. In the first case, one could accept the excuse that ZMapp is experimental and manufacturers didn’t want to give it to Africans for a number of historical and ethical reasons, including the long history of medical experimentation on people of color.  But, then, we find out that Dr. Sheikh Umar Khan, ­a highly skilled and respected Sierra Leonean medical practitioner [who succumbed to Ebola], ­was not even told about the experimental vaccine or given the chance to make a decision on taking it. It must also be noted that the one U.S. citizen that was said to have died of the disease was a black man, Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian-American who had been working as a consultant to the Liberian government. 

Hudson: Even if we put aside the discussion of a lack of “infrastructure to facilitate vaccination,” when it comes to dealing with Africa, ­ especially around epidemics, the optics look bad because the operations, quite simply, are racist. Given the history of U.S. racist representations of Africa, their cover was egregious. But then you see highly skilled African professionals ­like Dr. Khan and Dr. Olivet Buck ­ allowed to die, and white missionaries are saved.

Pierre: We find it dishonest when those in the west withholding vaccinations for Africans are claiming that they do not want to “experiment” on black African populations. There’s documented proof of experiments on African populations by western pharmaceutical companies. Africans are well aware of this history. And that history, along with the white west’s actions around Ebola, may also explain why many are questioning why this disease just suddenly emerged, and why there was already a secret vaccine in the works.

charles ellison putting in yoeman's work..., ebola-race-class

theroot | It’s a question that’s left people scratching their heads: How does a fully equipped hospital send an Ebola-infected man home—right after he arrived from West Africa and complained about being sick?

Some observers and public health experts are beginning to wonder if there’s an elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about: race and the politics of health insurance. Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, the private medical campus where Thomas Eric Duncan is currently under care and isolation, still can’t explain exactly how medical staff let the 42-year-old Liberian national go home with useless antibiotics. Hospital officials have only said that Duncan’s travel history wasn’t “communicated,” and now mainstream media reports are stuck on everything from malfunctions in Presbyterian Hospital’s electronic record system to Duncan being dishonest about the level of his Ebola exposure when he left Liberia.

But few want to touch the pointy eggshells of race and class in the frantic discussion over Ebola as it enters the United States. Did Duncan get initially turned away because he is black and, possibly, uninsured?

Would it have been different if Duncan had been white and insured?

We may never know for sure, and it’s unclear if Duncan had insurance (it’s unlikely, considering that he’s a Liberian national on a U.S. visa).

What we do know is that Ebola response in the U.S. is under enormous scrutiny as experts wonder if an already challenged health system—currently undergoing an Affordable Care Act renovation—is really all that prepared for something that is scaring us like a Contagion script. And the specter of race is lurking not too far behind: When white American aid doctors in West Africa showed signs of the virus, they were rushed back to the U.S. ... stat. The same happened when a white freelance cameraman for NBC News in Liberia was immediately flagged for treatment.

But it’s been rough going for black Ebola sufferers—even when one manages to sneak into the U.S. and access one of the most advanced health care systems in the world.

Former District of Columbia Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ivan Walks, who led the response against Washington, D.C.’s first bioterrorism attack, believes it’s a question we need to start asking. “I was stunned,” Walks tells The Root. “You could put [Duncan’s] picture in the dictionary under what you look for when responding to Ebola. How do you miss that guy?”

That’s where factors such as Duncan’s race and level of insurance could have influenced the hospital’s first decision in either subtle or not-so-subtle ways. “There is a lot of research showing that different people get turned away in different places,” argues Walks. “So if they turned him away at first because he’s an African with no insurance, that would not be inconsistent with what we’ve seen over the years.”

Walks draws on lessons from a similar event in October 2001 when the D.C. area was struck by multiple anthrax attacks that hit postal facilities particularly hard. When two black Brentwood-facility postal workers—Thomas Morris Jr. and Joseph Curseen—dropped by Maryland hospitals complaining of anthrax-triggered symptoms, at the same time that news of the attack and Brentwood as a focus of investigation was plastered on every cable channel, they were sent home and died soon after.
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hello, we're from the west and we're here to help you....,

natgeo |  The severity of this outbreak in West Africa reflects not only the transmissibility of the disease, but also the sad circumstances of poverty and the chronic lack of medical care, infrastructure, and supplies. That's really what this is telling us: that we need to try harder to imagine just what it's like to be poor in Africa. One of the consequences of being poor in Africa, especially in a country like Liberia or Sierra Leone, which have gone through a lot of political turmoil and have weak governance and a shortage of medical resources, is that the current outbreak could turn into an epidemic.

It's being spread because people are taking care of their loved ones at home. They're touching them, they're feeding them, they're washing them, they're cleaning up the vomit and the diarrhea that Ebola generates. That's a classic circumstance in which even health care workers are getting infected.

In addition, there are burial practices that involve washing the bodies and in some cases cleaning out the body cavities. In some cases, the funeral practices also involve a final touch or even a final kiss of the deceased person. And one of the things that's particularly nefarious about Ebola is that it continues to live in a dead person for some period of time after death. A person who's been dead for a day or two may still be seething with Ebola virus. So funeral practices can be a big factor in allowing it to be transmitted.

It's a combination of horrible circumstances. But the primary factor is poverty.

There's a cultural dimension to the way that disease is interpreted in Africa, isn't there? A kind of standoff between sorcery and science.

That's absolutely true. I know a little bit more about that element among the ethnic peoples of central Africa than West Africa. But in both regions there's a belief that these mysterious, invisible plagues are caused by sorcery and evil spirits—what we might call putting hexes on people.

There's a belief in some cultures that if a person experiences good fortune in financial terms and does not share the good fortune, when that person becomes ill with a mysterious fever and dies, people tend to say: "Aha! It was because he didn't share. It was the spirits who brought him down." There's also a belief in some cultures that if someone doesn't share, another person will direct these evil spirits to take that person down. There are a lot of different beliefs from culture to culture that involve the idea of sorcery. And that just adds to the confusion and the capacity for transmission.

When and where did Ebola first appear? (Belgian nuns with dirty needles in Yambuku!!!)

The first known outbreaks were in central Africa, in 1976: one in Zaire, the country that's now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and one in Sudan. The Zaire outbreak is the more famous. It began in a place called Yambuku, a little mission town in north central Zaire. People were suddenly dying with these horrible symptoms, but nobody knew what it was. An international team led by Karl Johnson went in, and it was this team that first isolated and identified the virus. They named it after a nearby river, the Ebola River.

in 1976 I discovered Ebola - now I fear an unimaginable tragedy

guardian |  Yes, and our first thought was: "What the hell is that?" The virus that we had spent so much time searching for was very big, very long and worm-like. It had no similarities with yellow fever. Rather, it looked like the extremely dangerous Marburg virus which, like ebola, causes a haemorrhagic fever. In the 1960s the virus killed several laboratory workers in Marburg, Germany.

Were you afraid at that point?

I knew almost nothing about the Marburg virus at the time. When I tell my students about it today, they think I must come from the stone age. But I actually had to go the library and look it up in an atlas of virology. It was the American Centres for Disease Control which determined a short time later that it wasn't the Marburg virus, but a related, unknown virus. We had also learned in the meantime that hundreds of people had already succumbed to the virus in Yambuku and the area around it.

A few days later, you became one of the first scientists to fly to Zaire.

Yes. The nun who had died and her fellow sisters were all from Belgium. In Yambuku, which had been part of the Belgian Congo, they operated a small mission hospital. When the Belgian government decided to send someone, I volunteered immediately. I was 27 and felt a bit like my childhood hero, Tintin. And, I have to admit, I was intoxicated by the chance to track down something totally new.

In the end, you discovered that the Belgian nuns had unwittingly spread the virus. How did that happen?

In their hospital they regularly gave pregnant women vitamin injections using unsterilised needles. By doing so, they infected many young women in Yambuku with the virus. We told the nuns about the terrible mistake they had made, but looking back I would say that we were much too careful in our choice of words. Clinics that failed to observe this and other rules of hygiene functioned as catalysts in all additional Ebola outbreaks. They drastically sped up the spread of the virus or made the spread possible in the first place. Even in the current Ebola outbreak in west Africa, hospitals unfortunately played this ignominious role in the beginning.

After Yambuku, you spent the next 30 years of your professional life devoted to combating Aids. But now Ebola has caught up to you again. American scientists fear that hundreds of thousands of people could ultimately become infected. Was such an epidemic to be expected?