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Here’s Why I Doubt That Hillary Clinton Used a Private Email Server to Evade FOIA Requests

by RobtKirkland Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Thanks to the endless release of her emails, we’ve learned something about Hillary Clinton that hasn’t gotten much attention: As near as I can tell, she’s sort of a technology idiot. She asked her aides for information that she could have Googled in less time than it took to ask. She needed help figuring out how to use an iPad. She didn’t know her own office phone number. She used a BlackBerry. She had trouble operating a fax machine. She was unclear about needing a WiFi connection to access the internet.

In other words, when Fox News reporter Ed Henry asked whether Clinton’s email server had been wiped, and she answered, “What, like with a cloth or something?”—well, that might not have been the sarcastic response we all thought it was. She might truly have had no idea what he meant.

As for setting up a private server with just a single account in order to evade FOIA requests, it looks as though she’s genuinely not tech savvy enough to have cooked up something like that. She probably really did just think it sounded convenient, and nobody stepped in to disabuse her of this notion.

So what was the deal with FOIA? I don’t know, and I suspect we’ll never know. But I’ll say this: there were obviously people at State who knew that Hillary used a private server for email. The folks who respond to FOIA requests are responsible for figuring out where documents might be, and in this case it was just a matter of asking. Apparently they didn’t, which is hardly Hillary’s fault. The alternative is that they did ask, and Hillary’s staff flat-out lied to them and said that she never used email. You can decide for yourself which sounds more plausible.

POSTSCRIPT: After writing this, I decided to do some Googling myself to check a few things. And it turns out that I’m not, in fact, the first to notice Hillary’s technology foibles. Just a few weeks ago, Seth Myer did a whole late-night bit about this.

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Here’s Why I Doubt That Hillary Clinton Used a Private Email Server to Evade FOIA Requests

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Let Us Now Praise Authentically Stiff Politicians

by YoungT08gxixm Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brendan Nyhan thinks we spend too much time yakking about which candidates are “authentic” and which ones aren’t. For example:

George W. Bush and Al Gore were both born into powerful political families, but were perceived very differently. Mr. Bush successfully reinvented himself as a down-home Texas ranch owner despite being the son of a president with elite New England roots, while Mr. Gore was widely mocked as a phony who grew up amid wealth and power in Washington, especially when he invoked his childhood work on his family’s Tennessee farm. Again, one simple explanation for the disparate treatment they received is that Mr. Bush was a better political performer.

I would remind everyone that Brad Pitt gets paid millions of dollars for doing a very good job of pretending to be authentically charming. The ability to feign authenticity is called “acting,” and it’s a lucrative profession if you’re good at it.

Was Al Gore authentic? Hillary Clinton? Mitt Romney? Sure. Gore is genuinely sort of wonkish and stiff. Hillary is earnest and cautious around people. Romney is careful and detail-oriented. That’s authentically who they are. If they studied up and adopted a hail-fellow-well-met persona, everyone would think they were authentic, but they’d just be pretending.

If you prefer politicians who are bluff and emotional in public, just say so. If you can’t stand being around people who natter on about policy and guard their private lives, say so. But cut out the “authentic” nonsense. That’s not what this is about.

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Let Us Now Praise Authentically Stiff Politicians

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It’s Been 50 Years Since the Biggest US-Backed Genocide You’ve Never Heard Of

by DemetriusBeike Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Fifty years ago today, one of the biggest mass murders of the 20th century began in Indonesia. On the heels of a Cold War-era military takeover, between 500,000 and 1 million people were slaughtered by the army and civilian death squads—with support from the US government. Starting in October 1965 and continuing through much of the next year, these Indonesian victims were accused of being communists, whether or not they supported the country’s communist party: Many were targeted simply because they were seen as opponents of the new US-supported, military-backed Indonesian regime.

In Germany, Rwanda, and Cambodia, mass killings have been followed by truth-and-reconciliation commissions or trials. In Indonesia, despite a transition from military rule toward democracy that began in 1998, there haven’t even been memorials for the victims. The killers were never brought to justice, and many of them remain in power today. Meanwhile, the US government’s own role in the bloodshed remains unclear, as key documents related to the atrocity are classified. Even so, researchers and journalists have dug up some damning evidence of American involvement. Here’s a rundown of what happened and what we do know.

President John Kennedy and Sukarno share a car at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington in 1961. The Associated Press

During the the Cold War, why was the United States concerned about Indonesia? After Indonesia won its war of independence against the Netherlands in 1949, a hero of the struggle named Sukarno became president. The United States was not a fan of his politics: Though he was not a communist himself, he was an anti-West populist-socialist who took steps after the war to nationalize plantations and other lucrative assets. He also protected the rapidly growing communist party, known as the PKI, which by 1965 was the biggest such organization outside of a communist country. The US conducted covert operations during the late 1950s intended to weaken Sukarno’s government and strengthen the staunchly anti-communist Indonesian military. “They considered the army to have the muscle to balance Sukarno,” says Indonesian journalist Andreas Harsono, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

What sparked the mass murders? In the early hours of October 1, 1965, a group of army conspirators killed six generals in Jakarta, the country’s capital. Maj. Gen. Suharto, who would soon become Indonesia’s dictator for more than three decades, took control of the armed forces, claiming that the killings were part of an attempted communist coup. Then he and the military launched a campaign to purge Indonesians believed to be connected with the communist party or left-leaning organizations. They also targeted hundreds of thousands of Indonesians unconnected to the party who they saw as a potential opponents of their new regime, including union members, small farmers, intellectuals, activists, and ethnic Chinese. The carnage was so intense that people stopped eating fish—fearing that the fish were consuming the human corpses flooding the rivers.

Members of the youth wing of Indonesia’s communist party are taken to a Jakarta prison on October 30, 1965. The Associated Press

So, how was the United States involved? Speculation abounds over the US role in the 1965 military takeover, though there’s no concrete proof in the public record that America had a direct hand in it. However, investigations by journalists, as well as government documents, have made it clear that the United States provided money, weapons, and equipment to the Indonesian military while it was undertaking the killings. What’s more, according to excerpts of contemporary cables released by the US State Department, officials at the US embassy created lists of thousands of names of communists and provided them to the military. It has been reported that the CIA worked on the lists, too, but the agency has denied involvement, Harsono says.

How was the genocide covered by the US press? “It was presented in the American media as good news,” says Joshua Oppenheimer, a filmmaker who has spent the past 12 years investigating the mass murders and producing two award-winning documentaries about them. He cites a 1966 story in Time magazine that said the killings were the “best news for years in Asia.” In a report at the time for NBC News, a correspondent spoke with an Indonesian man in Bali who claimed that the island, famous for its tourism, had “become more beautiful without communists,” and that “some of them wanted to be killed.” The correspondent noted that Indonesia boasted “fabulous potential wealth in natural resources” before showing footage of so-called communist prisoners at a labor camp on the island of Sumatra, some of whom, he said, would be starved to death or released from the camp to be killed by local citizens.

What’s the situation in Indonesia today? Military rule ended in 1998 when Suharto was forced out, but even today many of the perpetrators of the killings remain in power, immune from prosecution. (Under Indonesian law, soldiers cannot be taken to trial in civilian courts.) Schools continue to teach that it was necessary and good to wipe out “the communists,” and the government has yet to issue a national apology or establish a truth-and-reconciliation commission. “It was the darkness period,” says Harsono. “I have hope that sooner or later the Indonesian government will apologize and overcome the handicap to learn the truth of that darkness.” Over the last 50 years, the nation has remained a key US ally in the region. Home to some 250 million people, Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country and an important backer of the United States in the so-called war on terror. Oppenheimer believes a US acknowledgment of its role in the killings might embolden Indonesia’s current president, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, to address what happened.

Is anyone pushing for more accountability? Human Rights Watch and other activists have for years called on the US government to declassify all relevant documents, and last year Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) introduced a resolution in Congress calling for their release. Oppenheimer’s documentaries have brought new public attention in both countries to the period. In his first film, The Act of Killing (2012), which was nominated for an Academy Award, he identified several of the killers and convinced them to reenact the murders they committed. “They offered boastful accounts of the killings, often with smiles on their faces and in front of their grandchildren,” Oppenheimer explained in a recent New York Times op-ed. “I felt I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power.” In his second documentary, The Look of Silence (2014), a death squad leader looks straight into the camera and says, “We should be rewarded with a trip to America—if not by airplane, a cruise will do. We deserve it! We did this because America taught us to hate communists.”

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It’s Been 50 Years Since the Biggest US-Backed Genocide You’ve Never Heard Of

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The Human Cost of Saudi Arabia’s Air War in Yemen, in Photos

by FrancisHaber Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mohammed Al-Harazi was eating breakfast with his family one morning in late April when the first rocket struck across the street from his home in Sana’a, Yemen. The 49-year-old ushered his children and wife into the basement, went to fix a window in the children’s room, and then he heard the warplanes overhead. When he ran to close the door, the pressure from the next explosion, much larger than the first, sent him flying from the building.

Yahya Maasar and his family live in the ruins of a neighbor’s house after their own was destroyed by bombing in one of Sana’a’s most heavily bombed areas. Adam Bailes

He doesn’t recall the next moments clearly, only that there was continued bombing and a rain of shrapnel and football-sized rocks. After it was all over, he was elated to find his family alive—though his house had been reduced to rubble. His body riddled with shrapnel and his hand broken, Harazi took himself to the hospital on foot. On his way, he encountered 14 dead bodies. Inside the machine shop where his neighbors worked, he saw a man he knew shaking on the floor. Harazi recalled to photojournalist Adam Bailes, “I watched his last moment of breath before he died.”

Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and a coalition of Arab nations, has been bombing Yemen for several months in support of the Yemeni government. The Saudi-led coalition has been fighting since March, when Houthi rebels from northern Yemen ousted President Abd Rabu Mansour Hadi. While Saudi Arabia claims that it is targeting Houthi fighters and military installations, human rights groups and the United Nations have found the coalition’s air campaign has mostly affected civilians. Since March, more than 2,000 civilians have died and another 4,000 have been injured, most of them killed in the air campaign, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. A new UN report states that 86 percent of casualties in the ongoing violence have been civilians.

In the Al Sufra district, fresh graves lie alongside those of Yemenis who died in previous conflicts. Adam Bailes

The Saudi coalition has repeatedly targeted schools, hospitals, and religious buildings. Civilian infrastructure, including a camp for displaced people, water supplies, and power stations, have been destroyed. Civilian hospitals—overloaded with patients injured by airstrikes yet painfully under-supplied because of coalition blockades—are nearing collapse. In late June, the UN envoy to Yemen said the country was “one step away from famine.” And in August, the UN’s World Food Programme said the blockades were contributing to pushing 6 million of the country’s inhabitants to the brink of starvation. Peter Maurer, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross observed, “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years.”

A UN statement that described the conflict as “beyond tragic” recently noted that “indiscriminate attacks and attacks against civilians and civilian objects may constitute war crimes.” Meanwhile, 1.5 million Yemenis are internally displaced—five times what it was last December—and thousands are fleeing the country every week, leading some to wonder whether Yemen will be the next refugee crisis to hit Europe.

A bomb crater marks what used to be a three-story house inside the old city of Sa’dah, in northwest Yemen.. Adam Bailes

A young girl with third-degree burns is treated at Sana’a’s Al-Jumhori Hospital, which has the only burn ward in the country. Adam Bailes

Bailes, who had been documenting the war’s civilian toll since July, was recently forced to leave the country by Houthi officials.

Back in the Sana’a neighborhood where Harazi’s home was destroyed, 22-year-old Zakaria Abdullah, described the war in pointed terms: “The day of the explosion, the street was so full of blood that you could not walk on the main road that you see over there.” That airstrike left 85 dead and 300 injured, and forced some 2,000 people from their homes. Abdullah told Bailes, “We do not support either of the two sides fighting. We are not with the strikes or against the strikes. We are under the strikes.”

Children play in front of ruined buildings of Sa’dah’s old city, a historic site that’s been hit by multiple coalition airstrikes. Adam Bailes

Fifteen people were killed while waiting for fuel in April when an airstrike hit this gas station in Sa’dah. Adam Bailes

Dead livestock line the road after a coalition jet attacked a truck carrying animals to market. Almost all of the of vehicles destroyed on the road between Sanaa and Sa’dah have been civilian. Adam Bailes

Al Muhamasheen, a marginalized group at the bottom of Yemeni society, make up a large percentage of those living in camps for the displaced. Adam Bailes

At a hospital in Sa’dah, a young man is treated for injuries suffered in a coalition airstrike. Adam Bailes

In one two-hour period, the Saudi-led coalition hit Sana’a 30 times, killing 17 civilians and wounding another 77. Adam Bailes

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The Human Cost of Saudi Arabia’s Air War in Yemen, in Photos

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Eat Any Kind of Sugar You Want, Just Don’t Eat Too Much of It

by MichellDubay Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Susan Raatz, a research nutritionist at the USDA who recently conducted a test of cane sugar, honey, and high-fructose corn syrup:

The marketers “made a big mistake when they called it ‘high-fructose corn syrup,’” said Raatz.

Now, now. Let’s not blame the marketers. They had no hand in this debacle. And they did try to rename it “corn sugar” a few years ago, but the FDA turned them down.

Anyway, Raatz concluded that HFCS, honey, and cane sugar all had similar effects on the human body. This should not come as a big surprise, since all three are basically 50-50 mixes of fructose and glucose.

So why is HFCS high fructose? Because it has more fructose than ordinary corn syrup, not because it has more than most other sweeteners. But the damage has been done, and now concerned parents everywhere are making sure to feed their kids only cane sugar or honey, in the misguided belief that they’re somehow healthier and more natural.

Sorry. Sugar is sugar. Eat any kind you like. Just don’t eat too much of it.

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Eat Any Kind of Sugar You Want, Just Don’t Eat Too Much of It

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Health Insurance Companies Are Even More Horrible If You’re Trans

by LucilleMickle Posted on September 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed new rules to crack down on pervasive health care discrimination against transgender men and women. The draft rules address forms of discrimination that were banned years ago on paper but remain a constant feature in many transgender individuals’ dealings with doctors and insurance companies—from being refused basic services such as blood tests to not being reimbursed for health care screenings such as Pap smears or prostate exams.

If approved, the rules would force many health care providers and insurers across the country to provide transgender patients with the same medical treatments and level of care they provide to nontransgender people—parity that most insurers never even approach.

In a recent survey of transgender men and women by the National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 19 percent of people polled reported that someone refused them medical care because of their gender identity. Twenty-eight percent had postponed medical care because of discrimination, and half reported that they had to explain transgender health issues to their own doctors. These practices have contributed to disproportionately negative health outcomes for transgender people compared with the general population, such as staggering rates of depression, suicide, and HIV.

A series of actions at the federal level to end such discrimination did little to change the reality for most transgender patients. When it passed in 2010, the Affordable Care Act included a provision that explicitly barred many providers from sex discrimination. In 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services clarified that sex discrimination included discrimination against transgender patients on the basis of gender identity. A federal court in Minnesota backed up that interpretation in March this year, giving transgender people the ability to sue. But states still have broad authority to determine what actually constitutes discrimination—leaving a substantial loophole when it comes to enforcing protections.

The rules proposed last Thursday do not compel insurers to cover the medical components of the transition process, such as hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery. But Mara Keisling, the founder and director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, stresses that health care discrimination goes far beyond transition treatments. It can be as simple as “access to hospital rooms,” says Keisling. “Being placed with a roommate of the wrong sex.” Transgender patients have reported being forced to undergo a pelvic exam when going to the doctor for a sore throat or being grilled at length about their gender identity and sexual history when seeking treatment for a broken arm. Keisling adds that insurance companies routinely refuse transgender men and women sex-specific preventive care—such as mammograms or prostate exams. These rules would force insurers to cover whatever preventive services a doctor finds necessary, regardless of what gender is listed in the patient’s medical history.

Thirty-seven-year-old Seth Marlow’s medical history reads like a catalog of such abuses. Marlow works in health care IT and is well connected in transgender advocacy circles. But even he has struggled to get basic medical care. At one point, Marlow says, he was unable to have routine blood work done because a doctor he visited said his Christian faith prevented him from treating Marlow. His previous insurance company refused to pay for a fertility clinic to extract and freeze his eggs—which was one of the insurer’s covered benefits—seemingly because he identified as a man.

“As much as there’s this great transgender tipping point,” Marlow says. “I still can’t get health care.”

Part of his problems stem from the fact that until this year, the Obama administration did not define what discrimination specifically means. That definition was originally left up to the states, and only a handful have applied the protections in the Affordable Care Act to transgender people.

Marlow now lives in Virginia, a state that has not enacted any of these protections. The health care plan he purchased on the Obamacare exchanges routinely denies him coverage for hormone therapy, even though the insurer covers the same hormone treatments for other, nontransgender patients. More recently, Marlow’s insurer refused to cover his annual pelvic exam and pap smear. In a September letter that Marlow shared with Mother Jones, his insurer suggested he contact his state legislator if he was unhappy with Virginia law.

“I’ve spent probably 10 years of my life fighting these exclusions,” he says. “On paper, I’m protected. But in practice, I’m getting blown off and shut down at every turn.”

Most civil rights advocates point out that these actions by insurance companies are already illegal under the Affordable Care Act, and when such cases go to court, they are usually settled in favor of transgender litigants. But legal action is time-consuming, costly, and undertaken when there are no other options. “After they announced the rule, I went to our Facebook page,” Keisling says. “And person after person was saying, well that’s great, but I doubt it will help me.”

Marlow is also skeptical that the proposed rules will reduce health care discrimination, given that many rules were already in place and not enforced. “I’m so jaded and so tired that it’s hard to believe this is going to make any difference,” Marlow continues. “There’s a little progress. But it’s painfully, gruelingly slow.”

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Health Insurance Companies Are Even More Horrible If You’re Trans

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Can Poop Save Us From the Next Global Epidemic?

by ZWMKlarazzttn Posted on August 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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About a quarter of deaths around the world are caused by infectious diseases—a number that is expected to increase with rising rates of antibiotic resistance. In the race to catch these diseases before they spread, international disease surveillance systems typically rely on reporting from doctors after infections occur, which can lead to dangerous delays and even more transmissions.

But a group of scientists have suggested a new way to quickly detect diseases: poop. More specifically, poop collected from international flights.

Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark argued in a piece recently published in the journal Scientific Reports that airports could identify infectious diseases immediately by analyzing the bacterial DNA from the waste collected in the tanks beneath on-board lavatories.

“What we did was take a single sample from the entire mixed toilet waste from each plane, purified the DNA, and sequenced everything,” says Frank Møller Aarestrup, who heads the Research Group for Genomic Epidemiology. After sequencing poop samples from 18 international flights, the scientists were able to compile plane profiles that showed the prevalence of common pathogens and the how many antibiotic-resistant bacteria were also onboard.

Aarestrup says the process requires just one lab analysis, and he and his team are now recommending that airports have their own sequencers, which he estimates would cost around $150,000 in equipment and one full-time employee. “Not so much, the impact considered,” he adds.

It sounds like a great solution, but it may not be as easily implemented as Aarestrup and his team suggest.

Jonathan Eisen, a professor at the Genome Center at the University of California-Davis, says he doesn’t think the science is quite there yet. “Yes, people may shed various pathogens that go into the sewer system,” he says, “but we still don’t know what to look for and how to detect at these organisms at low levels.”

Though the data showed promise, Eisen says, there are still many unknowns and far too much complexity involved in trying to drill down into this kind of information to have a functioning surveillance system. And there are are a series of other obstacles that still have to be considered.

“There are issues of privacy that they didn’t address at all or issues of false-positive correlations that you might detect,” he explains. “It is really cool to get data from global populations, and I think it is going to be really useful for some purposes. But I don’t see screening sewage systems in airport facilities as a proven avenue for doing that.”

Unfortunately for now, Eisen says, successful poop surveillance is just an exciting hypothetical.

“It is interesting—really interesting actually,” he says. “But I think right now it is a research project. A cool, fun project on microbial diversity and the human environment that is unquestionably worth doing—but without any obvious use yet.”

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Can Poop Save Us From the Next Global Epidemic?

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The HPV Vaccine Prevents Cancer. So Why Aren’t Most Teens Getting It?

by ElviaChuter92 Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to latest National Immunization Survey, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thursday, around 60 percent of teenage girls and 78 percent of teenage boys haven’t received all three of the recommended doses of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which helps prevent reproductive cancers and genital warts caused by the virus.

Administered through three shots over a six month period, the vaccine protects against the most common types of the highly contagious virus, which is spread through sexual contact. Health officials recommend that adolescents receive the shots between the ages of 11 and 12 to boost the chances for immunity prior to any sexual activity, but the survey showed that 40 percent of girls and 60 percent of boys ages 13 to 17 hadn’t received even the first dose.

HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease—most people will contract one of the 40 strains at some point in their lives. Seventy-nine million people in the United States have HPV, and an additional 14 million people are infected annually. Many people don’t even know they have the virus, and it often goes away on its own.

But not everyone is so lucky: One in every 100 will develop genital warts and 23,000 are diagnosed with HPV-caused cancers each year. According to the CDC, the vaccine prevents almost all pre-cancers and warts caused by the virus in both males and females. Since the first HPV vaccine was developed in 2006, the vaccine has helped reduce HPV infections among teenage girls by 56 percent—even with vaccination rates as low as they are.

Still, many parents are deciding to pass. A study published in Pediatrics in 2013 showed that the reasons most cited included unwarranted fears about vaccine safety and disbelief that their kids would be sexually active. Despite it’s proven safety and effectiveness, the vaccine has become a politically divisive issue. In 2011, Texas Governor Rick Perry was the first in the country to order a mandate, sparking outrage from the religious right. During a 2011 debate, Michele Bachmann claimed that the vaccine was “very dangerous” and caused “mental retardation,” and Rick Santorum called vaccine mandates, “just wrong.”

HPV vaccine uptake has not kept pace with that of other adolescent vaccines and has stalled in the past few years. In 2012, only about one-third of 13- to 17-year-old girls received all three recommended doses. These levels fall considerably short of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Healthy People 2020 goal of having 80 percent of 13- to 15-year-old girls fully vaccinated against HPV. Immunization rates for U.S. boys are even lower than for girls. Less than 7 percent of boys ages 13 to 17 completed the series in 2012. This low rate is in large part because the ACIP recommendation for routine vaccination of boys was not made until 2011. However, it is even lower than what was observed for girls in 2007—the first year following the recommendation for females—suggesting that concerted efforts are needed to promote HPV vaccination of males. – See more at: http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/advisory/pcp/annualReports/HPV/ExecutiveSummary.htm#sthash.R6gsTr6L.dpuf

The National Cancer Institute has called for an “urgency of action” in closing vaccination gaps , citing that current vaccine rates are falling short of the US Department of Health and Human Services Goal for 80 percent coverage among 13 to 15 year old girls by 2020.

Though the focus is more often on girls, men are at also risk for HPV-caused cancers, including throat cancer, which may soon replace cervical cancer as the most common caused by the virus.

The survey did show there had been big gains in some parts of the country—Illinois, Montana, North Carolina and Utah all averaged increases of roughly 20 percent—which health officials say is an encouraging sign.

“The large increases in these diverse parts of the country show us it is possible to do much better at protecting our nation’s youth from cancers caused by HPV infections,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, assistant surgeon general and director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a statement released with the report. “We are missing crucial opportunities to protect the next generation from cancers caused by HPV.”

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The HPV Vaccine Prevents Cancer. So Why Aren’t Most Teens Getting It?

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Are We Still Yammering About Whether the Civil War Was About Slavery? Really?

by SondraYuill Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Are we still arguing about whether the Civil War was really fought over slavery? Seriously? What’s next? The Holocaust was really about Jews overstaying their tourist visas? The Inquisition was a scientific exploration of the limits of the human body? The Romans were genuinely curious about whether a man could kill a hungry lion? The Bataan death march was a controlled trial of different brands of army boots?

WTF?

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Are We Still Yammering About Whether the Civil War Was About Slavery? Really?

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Why are we building a research center full of deadly diseases in the tornado capital of the world?

by HiramWhittell Posted on June 18, 2015

The United States eradicated foot-and-mouth disease from its borders in 1929. The virus, deadly to livestock, persists in more than 100 countries, though, and travels with ease. It is able to hitchhike on shoes, clothes, and tires. Airborne, it can travel almost 40 miles overland and almost 190 over open ocean. …

If the foot-and-mouth virus—or any other airborne danger—escaped from the lab, the air currents would likely carry it beyond where it could cause harm. An out-of-the-way location makes sense because no lab is risk free. In 2007, for instance, the foot-and-mouth virus escaped from Great Britain’s Pirbright Institute, one of the world’s leading laboratories studying animal disease, and set off an outbreak at a nearby farm.

So it is absolutely mind-boggling that Homeland Security has decided to move the lab, to be known as the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, to the Kansas State University campus in Manhattan, Kansas, smack in the middle of cattle country and Tornado Alley. Builders recently broke ground on the brand-new $1.25 billion dollar facility, which is set to be fully operational in 2022. It will include a biosafety level 4 lab, meaning one designed to handle deadly and exotic pathogens for which no vaccines or treatments exist. …

In 2010, the National Academy of Sciences conducted a risk assessment of Homeland Security’s first proposal for the Kansas lab and found a 70 percent probability that a foot-and-mouth virus release resulting in an outbreak would occur over the facility’s 50-year life span. In 2012, the National Research Council evaluated Homeland Security’s revised proposal and found considerable improvements in lab construction design that lowered the 50-year risk to below 1 percent, but this extremely low probability of accidental viral release was based on Homeland Security’s unsupported, overly optimistic estimates of human error rates.

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Why are we building a research center full of deadly diseases in the tornado capital of the world?

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