We need a travel ban

This NR article states well why we need a travel ban to help prevent the spread of Ebola in the United States. Excerpt:

The ban should, of course, apply to a traveler’s country of origin, preventing persons from West Africa from entering the United States via other countries. Such a ban would, in theory, have prevented entry to Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, who arrived from Liberia via Belgium. Furthermore, it would have protected the two hospital workers who contracted the disease through their interactions with Duncan.

No, the ban would not work perfectly. But an inability to eliminate all risk whatsoever should not disqualify efforts that would reduce it, and restrictions would substantially curtail travel from high-risk nations and minimize the risk of Ebola-infected patients reaching American shores.

The situation in Dallas makes clear that it is easier to protect Americans from the disease by keeping it abroad than by addressing it when it arrives. Screening procedures failed, because prior to boarding in Liberia, Duncan lied about his contact with the disease. When Duncan told staff at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital that he had just returned from Liberia, they took no notice and sent him home with a fever of 103 degrees. The two hospital workers now suffering Ebola were the victims of minor missteps in following safety guidelines. Even with American health standards and procedures, treating and containing the virus affords ample opportunities for accidental transmission. The U.S. can reduce that risk by instituting travel restrictions that will minimize Americans’ contact with the virus and keep the treatment process, as much as possible, abroad.

No, the ban would not work perfectly. But an inability to eliminate all risk whatsoever should not disqualify efforts that would reduce it.... It's hard to imagine how our leaders can trade this common sense fact for the blather they have been feeding us. But I suspect political correctness and false accusations of racism.

Doc Strangelove after reading the Divine Comedy

Miraculous cure.

Stop Ebola Flights Petitions

Matt Lynch is advertising this petition on Twitter to stop flights to and from ebola countries. Let's all sign it. I can't think of a reason not to.

Sign my online petition #StopEbolaFlights at http://t.co/etPmSM0Qs0

— Matt Lynch (@MattLynch4Ohio) October 15, 2014

Text of the petition:

We, the undersigned concerned citizens of the United States, hereby demand that the U.S. government immediately suspend commercial flights from countries at high risk for Ebola infection, including Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea. We further demand that all non-emergency or non-medical travelers from these nations be denied entry into the United States until the Ebola crisis has ended.

Here's another one on the White House website. Over 38,000 signatures -- just signed both.

Hail, hail, the gang's all here!

Can you smell the desperation? "Jerry Springer hits the road for Democratic Ohio candidate" reads the title. Drag out Jerry Springer to whip the crowd up into a frenzy to vote for Ed FitzGerald and the Democrats!

Oh, wait—sorry... misleading headline. Springer isn't joining the FitzGerald campaign. He's joining the Nina Turner campaign. Springer knows a loser when he sees one, no doubt, and Turner does have a chance against Husted.

Springer has given at least $12,000 to gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald, $10,000 to attorney general candidate David Pepper, and $5,000 to treasurer candidate Connie Pillich, according to state campaign finance reports this year. He also gave the state Democratic party at least $28,000.

Most of the time Jerry Springer is making money from showcasing losers rather than losing money to a loser. But $12,000.00 is probably pocket change. Springer is reportedly worth $45 million.

Springer said he attracts potential voters who don't typically attend political events. "Certainly not the blue bloods," he said, but more of a "working-class kind of audience."

I guess working class kind of folks can relate to people who can pony up $45,000.00 in political donations. For some reason.

The host of "The Jerry Springer Show" now lives in Sarasota, Florida, though he spent half his life in Ohio. He travels to Connecticut where he tapes episodes that feature bleeped-out obscenities, guests in fisticuffs and a studio audience chanting his name. (Recent titles include "I Slept With Your Twin & Your Mom" and "Stay With Me Or Else.")

We should qualify terms. Most of the working class people I know are decent people who vote Republican—sometimes begrudgingly—because the alternative is to support the ideology and lifestyles of pimps like Jerry Springer and philandering liars like Ed FitzGerald.

A spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party said Springer's appearance illustrates the size of FitzGerald's problems and hurts the Democratic ticket.

"Now voters associate the Democratic Party with two people: Ed FitzGerald & Jerry Springer," said GOP spokesman Chris Schrimpf in an email. "Maybe Ed can go on Jerry's show after the election and explain how not to run a campaign."

The question is whether Jerry Springer would ever let anyone he had the least bit of respect for to be on his show. Yes; this includes himself.

Read my tarot cards, baby

"Please help!! Buy me a Benedict Option to write about!!"

Our Cub Reporter sees a Benedictine convent on the sales block, and it makes him sad.

Bravely, Dreher puts out the call for someone else to buy it, and for others to go live there under the Benedict Option that he himself has been calling for:

Is there anyone who would have the means to make this a Benedict Option community, in which Catholic (and perhaps other Christian) families live together in community, and work in the surrounding area? . . . . 

Somebody, please help. . . . 

. . . . Are there any faithful singles and families who would be willing to relocate for the prospect of living this way?  

Now, now.  Before y'all get catty and accuse Dreher of asking others to do what he himself is unwilling to do (i.e., part with some money toward the purchase, or (gasp) pack up and move his own family there), take note that he is indeed willing to pitch in and do his part:

Share this with the people you know.  Let's see if we can get something going.

That's right.  He'll offer the TAC server to handle the blog hits from getting the word out.

Furthering the Police Brutality Narrative

This is a pretty pointless article, and this was the most ridiculous part:

A grand jury, meanwhile, is examining evidence to determine whether Darren Wilson should stand trial for shooting Michael Brown. The grand jury, originally impaneled until this month, has had its term extended to January—a date that not only falls after upcoming elections, but well into the winter, when cold weather might diminish the likelihood of rioting if there is not an indictment. Last week, the Missouri secretary of state’s office announced that more than three thousand people in Ferguson had registered to vote in the aftermath of the shooting. The next day, officials reversed themselves and said that they’d made an error: the actual number was a hundred twenty eight. The revision, in an already tense environment, inspired suspicions that the keepers of the status quo were somehow manipulating the numbers.

Italics mine. A little poking around shows the reason for the initial mistake in the original reported number of 3,287: this number included all name and address changes, marriages plus voters tagged in some kind of recent recount.

The part that cracks me up is the part about the manipulations of the evil "keepers of the status quo". This characterization would make sense if the status quo had under-reported the number and had to correct itself upward. But if their are any suspicions to be taken from the downward correction they would properly be that the agitators are doing the manipulation. And, to my mind, it was probably just a mistake.

However to people determined to create conspiracies and the perception of victimization from an unfortunate event, everything which happens plays into the grand narrative of police brutality and the attempt to cover it up. If there was any violence on the part of Officer Wilson the public has yet to see evidence of it.

Available Happiness

Michael Medved was just speaking to a gay caller who recently got married to his partner. Medved ended the call by stating "Well, I wish you every happiness available to you." Wow, I thought, that is a great, well-qualified wish to extend to gay people. I'm going to keep that one in my back pocket. When you say this, just make sure you pronounce the word happiness distinctly.

More Animal Photobombs

In the spirit of Keith's last post, I give to you... ANIMAL PHOTOBOMBS!!



Warning: contains public animal intercourse. Or, as I like to refer to it, the "doings of beings".

One last selfie

What can I say? The lighting was just ethereal and really flattered me, making me look wise beyond my years, I think.

Cliff notes on the Synod on the Family so far

Here's the half-time report. Here is my "cliff-notes" excerpt:

In the report, the Synod Fathers also reaffirm that same-sex unions cannot be considered equal to matrimony. And it is unacceptable that pressure be brought to bear on pastors or that international bodies make financial aid dependent on the introduction of regulations inspired by gender ideology.

Finally, stating that openness to new life is essential part of married love, the Synod Fathers affirm the message of Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae regarding the need to respect dignity of person in moral evaluation of methods of birth control.

There you go.

What does Tom Waits mean by the Marley Bone Coach?

I was driving in to work today and this song popped into my head. Probably due to the drab fall weather.



What does he mean when he states "So I will take the Marley Bone Coach"? There is a bit of speculation from a major Waits fan here. But I think the best explanation comes from Michael Quinn on this page. Quinn's stuff is fascinating to me.

To go by Marylebone stage meant to go on foot. It appears in a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon called Charlotte’s Inheritance of 1868: “‘The cabmen are trying it on, anyhow, just now,’ thought Mr Sheldon; ‘but I don’t think they’ll try it on with me. And if they do, there’s the Marylebone stage. I’m not afraid of a five-mile walk.’” There was indeed a stagecoach which ran (staggered would be a better term — a contemporary writer said it “dragged tediously”) the four miles from Marylebone to the City of London, taking two and a half hours to get there and three hours to come back, this duration being partly accounted for by the extremely bad roads of the period but mainly by an unnecessarily long stop at an inn along the way. The earliest reference I can find to it is in a court case at the Old Bailey in 1822, in which a young man was found guilty of stealing two handkerchiefs from a passenger.

It was quicker to walk. This may have been part of the allusion, since Marylebone stage was either a joke based on, or perhaps a corruption of, marrowbone stage, known from the 1820s. John Black tells me that two centuries earlier Marylebone was often written as Marrowbone by Samuel Pepys among others; Pepys wrote in his Diary on 31 July 1667: “Then we abroad to Marrowbone, and there walked in the garden, the first time I ever was there, and a pretty place it is.” This makes the connection even easier to understand.

Marrowbone was a figurative term meaning the shinbones, hence the legs. So marrowbone stage has the same meaning as Shanks’s pony or Shanks’s mare. (There was also the obvious going by Walkers’ bus, which Dr Cobham Brewer mentions in early editions of his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.) The first two expressions are equated in a book by George Augustus Sala with the title Twice Around the Clock, dated 1859: “The humbler conveyances known as ‘Shanks’s mare’, and the ‘Marrowbone stage’ — in more refined language, walking.”

Seems like maybe he's talking about both walking and dying, like he's slowly walking off to his own grave all alone. The song is very sad and beautiful at once, and it always reminds me of my friends who have never gotten married.

On a less somber note, check out Quinn's write-up on the word banana. It always cheers me up.

Etymology of goozlepipe

Here the top hit for goozlepipe when performing a search with Googlepipe. Excerpt:

The first thing that Steve Flores said he wants people to know about Goozlepipe & Guttyworks, the extension of his Kickbacks Gastropub, is that it’s not all about the beer.

Instead, he talked about its steampunk look, full of art and bits of old machinery, the basement patterned after a Belgian dining room. He talked about the expanded menu with 100 new items. And he talked about the new bigger kitchen that it will share with Kickbacks.
.....
“We won’t really advertise the beer,” Flores said. “We won’t have any beer signs. If you come in, it will be like ‘By the way, we have the world’s largest selection of beer.’ ”

Yeah, there’s lots of beers. The main floor of G&G will have 72 taps coming out of a 500-pound coffee urn that dates back to the Civil War and another 24 coming out of specialty towers.

When the Belgian room is completed later this summer, it will have 24 taps pouring nothing but beer from Belgium.

And then there’s Kickbacks itself with 84 taps.

That’s a total 204 drafts along with about 1,000 beers in bottles.

It goes even further. The one actual beer display will feature 99 bottles of Sam Adams Utopias on the wall, available in small pours. That hard-to-get beer sells for about $140 a bottle and is often sold for several times that on eBay.

So it's a steampunk-themed bar that has lots of beer. See how much we learn here. Maybe C3P0 and R2 will finally get served there.

Paper Airplane Machine Gun / Papierflieger-Maschinenpistole

Keith thought I would like this. And he was right.



What can I say. I'm a tech-nerd. But this guy is a tech-wizard. He mostly designed this with printed parts which he then sent to a contract 3D printer.

A little tinkering from me that shows what you can do with 3D printers today. Most parts of this paper airplane machine gun had printed by fabberhouse.de (the rest of them are to buy via Internet or hardware store). By the way, I use a cordless screwdriver from China for driving.

boom

Can you believe it? Rod Dreher's Theology not only has its own church in his backyard. It has it's own internet meme.

The above was my favorite. The Benedict Option will serve Alsatian Riesling. Nice pairing. I think there should be a lot more of these. Now that we know about them I expect the shortage will be over soon.

The Human Toggle Switch

One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies. I've been planning on doing a post about a topic and using this as an illustration. But I haven't gotten around to the post, so I decided just to put this out there for now. It has a vast amount of applicability to people and situations.

Ed FitzGerald and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Amanda Bynes retweet

This latest episode finds Ohio Democrat Gubernatorial Ed FitzGerald descending further into punchline territory. Now Ed FitzGerald can belly up to the bar with Anthony Weiner and commiserate about how it was Twitter that wrecked their political career, not that thing swinging between their legs. Here's the really important paragraph:

One thing to keep in mind about Twitter and politics: The politicians themselves rarely control their Twitter accounts. Those accounts usually end up in the hands of aides, who often keep personal accounts, too.

Keep in mind also that everyone serious has left the FitzGerald campaign at this point and what is left is the B-team. So there was a B-team aide taking care of FitzGerald's twitter messaging and he/she decides to favorite a tweet by Amanda Bynes, but he/she accidentally faves it as Ed FitzGerald. What is the content of the tweet? Is it "Legalize pot NOW!"? Is it "My dad put a microchip in my brain"? No. Try "Help a n*gga out and hop off ma d*ck". So that fits in perfectly with the booty call theme of the Ed FitzGerald campaign. (Nota: Amanda Bynes is rich white woman, but I suppose because she's a rapper she gets to be an honorary n*gga as well as use the word with impunity. I suppose she gets a honorary d*ck, too, as part of the deal....)

I hereby offer $10 to anyone who can identify this B-team re-tweeter. I'd love to do an interview, or at least go to their house and peak in the windows.* Maybe I'll do some real journalism a la Jason Matera.

Tom Suddes wrote today that "This could be the year Ohio Democrats hit bottom". But this is the modern-day Democrat party, Tom. I don't think there is a bottom.

______
* - Not really.