It's Just a Little Cough

Unless you've been living under a stone somewhere, you've likely heard that the Centers for Disease Control issued the first federal government-ordered quarantine in more than 40 years because of a man who took two international flights and travelled around Europe while infected with an "extensively drug-resistant" form of tuberculosis. Since I'm guessing that you're already familiar with the case, I'm not going to belabor the details here.

But there is a part of the story that speaks to the way many Americans go about things, and I think that it's the sort of thing that colors people's perception of the United States.

"I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," he told the [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]. "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing."

I don't think that it requires a degree in public policy studies to understand that the armed guard is there because this man has shown an unwillingness to comply with instructions that he considers unreasonable. And in this case, failure to comply could spread a really nasty strain of an already nasty disease. His inability or unwillingness to understand the simple cause-and-effect relationship between these things seems to be more and more common these days. The expectation that people should regard him as trustworthy, in the face of his previous actions, seems to be more than a little unrealistic.

On the other hand, the man had simply been "advised not to fly," rather than being told: "you'd bloody well better keep your ass away from other people until we get this sorted out." The CDC's unwillingness to be more forceful from the beginning allowed this guy to downplay the risks involved. While I can understand them not wanting to quarantine the guy right off the bat, they clearly left him enough wiggle room that he felt that he could travel.

Between indescisive instructions and an unwillingness to alter plans to make accomodations for risks posed to others, a number of people were needlessly put at risk. This is the sort of thing that makes people unwilling to work together to solve mutual problems.

A Thousand Words

In the Seattle Times today were a pair of photographs of an Israeli missile attack on Gaza. These are striking photographs, and I find myself wanting the entire story behind them. You can do a lot with photographs these days, especially digital, and I'm curious to see what the raw images look like. Not that I suspect that anything funny has taken place, but because once cropped and aligned, the photos are different than they were when they were first taken. Was the photographer snapping these in a hurry, wanting to capture what was happening while moving to cover? Or was he confident that the missile would land far enough away that he wouldn't be injured? Was he holding the camera in trembling hands, relying on shutter speed and film sensitivity to freeze the action and eliminate blur, or was he solidly set up on a tripod? Was he close to the action, as the photos suggest, or was he a distance away, using a massive telephoto lens to bring the events closer to a safe vantage point?

While a picture is worth a thousand words, it's sometimes the ones you can't hear that are the most compelling.

The captions given here are the ones from the paper's website.

Photo Credit: MAHMUD HAMS / AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Palestinians run as a rocket falls at them during an Israeli air strike on the Hamas Executive Force building in Nusseirat refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza strip, Friday. Warplanes pounded the Gaza Strip for a ninth day as Palestinians continued to fire rockets into Israel despite a call from Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas for a truce.

(Note: I'm inclined to say that the incoming ordinance is a missile, possibly a Hellfire, rather than a rocket.)

An Israeli misslie strikes amongst Palestinians during an attack on Hamas's Executive Force building in Nusseirat refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza strip, Friday.

Can't Help Myself

A former IBM employee is suing the company after having been let go for accessing sexually explicit websites from his office computer. His argument is that he uses such sites as a form of self-medication for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a condition derived from having witnessed the death of a friend during the Viet Nam War.

His lawyers are arguing that his addiction should have been handled by the company in the same way as they would deal with an alcoholic or a drug addict, and that he should have been offered treatment for his condition.

This is an interesting case, and I wish that I knew more about it. On the surface, given just what I've been able to read so far, it seems a pretty open and shut case. Okay, let's accept that there is such a thing as "Sex Addiction." (It's still under debate, and I don't think that it's made it into the DSM yet.) And let's accept that this guy has it. Does that justify breaking company rules? I don't know the law well enough to know if a legitimate diagnosis of alcoholism would grant some sort of immunity to a company rule stating that you aren't allowed to drink on the premises. But I don't think that the common interpretation works that way.

It's tempting to view this as a somewhat creative excuse for bad behavior. Or yet another level of the "everybody's addicted to something" craze that never seems to go away. But this is going to be a case with pretty serious legal implications, and it will be interesting to see how it comes out in the end.

They Called Him MISTER Pig...

An 11 year-old boy shot and killed a giant wild boar with a .50 caliber revolver. It looks like a REALLY large animal, more like a small woolly rhinoceros than a pig. For a hunter, it's quite an achievement.

For everyone else, however, it seems to be either a travesty of barbarism and violence, or an outright hoax. I was tracking down the story, which I found on USAToday, and also found some a message board on Snopes that talks about it. And I was convinced that I could be snarky and judgmental. I guess because I grew up around people who hunted, I don't have a revulsion reflex that makes me upset or angry about this episode, or unwilling to give the story any credibility. (Although I would concede that the photograph seems to take advantage of forced perspective. I would have posed the boy in front of the animal, so you could get a better sense of their relative sizes. But we'll see if it turns out to be faked.)

If it is a hoax, I'm betting that it's really a Volkswagen wrapped in fur...

But It's For The CHILDREN...

A number of Attorneys General from various states have filed subpoenas to force MySpace.com to turn over the names of those individuals who have had their profiles removed from the site through MySpace's "Sentinel Safe" software. MySpace, citing privacy laws, waited until the legal actions were taken to release the information.

Despite the breathless talk of "protecting children," this is really little more than a thinly veiled attempt for some politicians to score points at the expense of an unpopular group of people.

"I think once we find out the content of the messages — of course, it will depend on how long they retain that information — we may very well find that some of the messages included illegal enticement of a child," [Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood] said.

Then again, they very well may find - absolutely nothing. This is what the legal concept of "probable cause" is for. I mean, if law enforcement were allowed to search private homes whenever they wished - of course, depending on how long people keep things - they might very well find evidence of criminal activity. As useful as we might find the idea of allowing the police to randomly check people out on the off chance that a crime has been committed, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America is usually construed to say you can't. To wit:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

I know that this makes me sound like some heartless weirdo who advocates for expanded rights for sexual predators, even if that results in death or injury to innocent children. [Yay, spin!] But that's not really what I'm getting at. In all honesty, I suspect that some of the people whose information is turned over are going to be found to have been in contact with children, leading to high-profile arrests. (Keep in mind, that I'm playing the cynic, here.) But you could say the same with a home-by-home search of a large apartment complex or subdivision. We don't want our legal system to get to the point where what stands bewteen a person and law-enforcement scouring their lives for evidence of criminality is a popularity contest, or political volume. When we start allowing the law to fall by the wayside when we're dealing with unpopular people, implicit in that is the idea that these people are justifiably unpopular. So are Hispanics justifiably unpopular enough that we shouldn't need probable cause before rounding them up? You'll likely find some illegal immigrants that way. How about Moslems? We might very well find some evidence of Islamist sympathies.

I've never been one for "slippery slope" arguments, and I'm not really attempting to make one here. Rather that laws should be followed, and if we don't like them, changed, so that we all know where we stand. If conviction for certain crimes carries with it the suspension of Fourth Amendment rights, let's put that out there, where people can see it, and know the score. Using scare tactics to convince people that their children are at risk from cyber-stranger-dangers (especially when you consider that 95% of sex-abuse crimes against children involve family members - who are unlikely to have met their targets through MySpace) don't do anything to solve the problem. Because almost anyone can be scary, if you can find the right arguments.