The Imaginary Crisis, Chapter MMIX

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. — H.L. Mencken

The solution these practical politicians always offer involves stripping another layer of your freedom and privacy away, once a sufficient number of the populace are alarmed.

Don't be alarmed. Refuse to be afraid. And especially refuse to acquiesce to whatever intrusion on your liberty they propose to impose.

UPDATE: Oh, and another thing, my Wisconsin connection reminds me The cure can be worse than the disease.

Maybe pigs have learned to fly

A fascinating discovery from John Newman, one of our regular visitors, who e-mails that he has discovered a 1997 interview with Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, who according to Red Nova "spent nearly a decade carefully extracting and piecing together the viral genes, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle" in an attempt to understand the avian flu menace looming just around the corner.

Problem is, according to Taubenberger in 1997, the big 1918 epidemic was caused by a strain of swine flu: "... what we find is that it's a virus that does not match any strain of influenza virus isolated since, but it is most related to the kind of influenzas that infect swine, suggesting that this influenza entered the human population after being passaged through pigs."

I'm willing to allow that maybe over eight years and more research, scientists have moved away from the swine flu theory and decided the 1918 virus was more likely related to avian flu. But I'm also willing to allow that the Powers That Be will use any means to keep us frightened and kowtowed, and if that involves changing a few facts to fit their scenario more conveniently, so be it.

Thanks, John, for the link (and the great subject line)!

Avian flu: Excuse for martial law?

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush said Tuesday that he was working to prepare the United States for a possible deadly outbreak of avian flu.

If an epidemic appears, he said, he has weighed whether to quarantine parts of the country and whether to employ the military to enforce such a quarantine. "I am concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world," he said.

Read the rest and weep here.

Our benevolent dictators are considering using the military against Americans for their own good, ostensibly out of fear of a disease the International Herald Tribune says has killed - horrors! - 65 people since 2003. It's not even a danger yet, but it might be, so we should have government troops standing by: "The virus has not thus far mutated into a strain capable of transmission from one human to another. If it did, scientists say, it could kill millions of people worldwide, like the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, which claimed more lives than World War I."

Oh, and in case you're counting on the loyal opposition to balk at this shocking pending abuse of presidential power - sorry, the loyal opposition thinks Bush hasn't gone far enough:


"Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, said the vote and Bush's comment reflected 'some agreement that the United States is behind in getting prepared for avian flu and that the time to try to make that gap up is now.' More than 30 Democratic senators, including Obama, sent Bush a letter Tuesday asking him to release the administration's final plan for dealing with a pandemic influenza. The group expressed its 'grave concern that the nation is dangerously unprepared.'"

Dangerously unprepared for what? The Centers for Disease Control says in its FAQ about avian flu: "The risk from bird flu is generally low to most people because the viruses occur mainly among birds and do not usually infect humans. However, during an outbreak of bird flu among poultry (domesticated chicken, ducks, turkeys), there is a possible risk to people who have contact with infected birds or surfaces that have been contaminated with excretions from infected birds."

So yep, you heard right: The president is weighing whether to use the military against Americans to enforce a quarantine over a disease that doesn't usually affect humans, but did kill a whole lot of people in 1918.

And folks who point out the horrifying danger to our basic liberties are called extremists. Well, as a great American once said, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.