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Swine Flu Fantasies
A testing epidemic, spread by media ignorance

by Terry Michael | June 2, 2009

Two very unfortunate realities explain the recent frenzy of public mask wearing, cable TV fear marketing, and the waste of probably a billion tax dollars worldwide in flu virus surveillance. First, there are the tunnel-visioned infectious disease prevention bureaucracies, which tout their epidemiological monitoring as the frontline protecting human health. Then there are their half-witted media propagandists, who wouldn't know the inside of a biology lab from a Labrador Retriever, and who avoided Statistics 101 like the plague.

I write while traveling late May in the South Pacific, where tens of thousands of passengers like me are greeted daily by an army of health ministry workers in New Zealand and Australia, collecting special health report forms from generally healthy passengers, and even video-capturing each face that passes by their airport control points. Late May. That's over a month since it should have been obvious to anyone with elementary logic skills that the pig flu is no uglier than hundreds of its viral cousins.

What separates H1N1 or "swine flu" (pity the poor pork producers) from other genetic code written in nucleic acid and wrapped in a little protein—the definition of a virus—is not an epidemic of illness or death. It's an epidemic of testing.

If you do a Google search for news from the first week of the "epidemic," you will find that Mexican health authorities counted 159 deaths as of April 28, as reported in The New York Times. A month later, when you might expect that number to be appreciably higher, the Associated Press listed the death toll in Mexico at 89—with the AP conveniently forgetting to report the nearly 100% disparity from the earlier statistic. That same AP story noted that the "world's death toll" was 108.

By April 29, Mexican health authorities were triumphantly heralding the discovery of "patient zero," a little boy in the town of La Gloria, who had suffered some flu-like symptoms a few weeks earlier and had fully recovered—again, according to the Times. In the same story, however, the Times also reported that, "Before Édgar fell ill, another person in San Diego may have been affected, said Dr. Miguel Ángel Lezana, Mexico's chief government epidemiologist." So much for patient zero.

Within a couple of weeks of that triumph of Mexican epidemiology, we learned no virus had been detected by testing swine at the pig farm near little Édgar Hernández's home. (Pity the poor little boy and his tearful mother, who lamented the world's fingering her son as the source of the Great Swine Flu of 2009.)

A few more than 100 deaths in the past month would be no more than a fraction of those who die each day in the U.S., Mexico, and the rest of the world from the amorphous disease described by the medical term of art, "the flu."

Indeed, the New York school children who tested positive for it in late April yet suffered nothing more than sniffles and tummy aches, provided early confirming anecdotal evidence that H1N1 was no killer bug.

So why the pig flu panic? Thanks to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO)—and all the health ministries they influence, like those in New Zealand and Australia—the world was subjected to frenetic surveillance of a single "new" flu strain.

If similar resources were used to check for other strains of virus causing other cases of flu-like illness during the same time period, mothers around the globe would have been panicked by some other viral code, though perhaps one with a less scary and dirty-sounding name.

But the well-funded CDC and WHO, not to mention those health ministries in New Zealand and Australia, wouldn't have had the necessary threat to yield them even bigger budgets from politicians pandering to a panicked public. And that panic, of course, has been provoked by science-challenged "news" organizations that propagandize for the virus-obsessed health agencies.

Epidemiologists studying communicable diseases are not the first or even second line of defense for our health. Strong immune systems are. It was their immune systems—not the CDC and WHO, not doctors, not drug peddling pharmaceutical companies—that protected those school children in New York, a few of whom had been to Mexico, where, like much of the developing and third world, poor nutrition and exposure to drinking water polluted by old bacterial pathogens weakens natural immunities to disease.

But proper nourishment and clean water don't have public relations advisors like the CDC and the WHO. So what we might call "flu-ism" spreads, a psychological phenomenon that can make us stupid as pigs, but not actually very ill.
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The War on Drugs
is No Laughing Matter
It's time for Barack Obama to take legalization seriously

by Terry Michael | March 27, 2009

Alcohol did not create Al Capone's gang violence in the hometown of our current president. Prohibition did.

Marijuana does not create murderous drug cartels in Mexico. America's War on Drugs does.

Surely President Barack Obama, one of the smartest men to inhabit the White House, must understand that truth—even if he chooses to laugh-off those of us who want to get serious about the need to end the social insanity of neo-Prohibition by legalizing marijuana and other psychoactive chemicals.

French essayist Georges Bernanos wrote, "The worst, the most corrupting of lies, are problems poorly stated." It is an outrageous lie, one that corrupts intelligent public policy discourse, when we talk of "drug violence." The official corruption and murderous mayhem in both Mexico and on our side of the border are not a result of dried leafy vegetation and white powder. They are the consequence of a lucrative black market, spawning profits for which bad people are willing to kill and die, directly resulting from federal and state laws that prohibit the sale, use, and possession of drugs.

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged in Mexico City, this lucrative marketplace is fed by human demand for altered consciousness as insatiable as that which President Obama felt when he regularly sought a nicotine fix, or which George W. Bush experienced when he reached for another bottle of beer. But our leaders weren't thrown in jail for smoking and drinking, and neither were their dealers at the corner convenience store and neighborhood bar.

President Obama promised an end to politics as usual, but he now stands in the way of a long-neglected debate about ending the harm creation of draconian policies which: infringe on individual liberty; rip apart neighbor nations; create government violence against our own people by militarized police forces; cause health harm to the young by forcing psycho-active drugs underground, with no regulation of their content, purity, and strength, or education about how to use them intelligently; promote disrespect for the rule of law, with unequal penalties applied to the rich and to the poor—all factors which have disgracefully transformed the United States of America into the world's number one jailer.

Our government's own research (a 2006 survey by the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services) reveals that over half of the adult population of America has, at one time, used a controlled substance. Which means—if our drug laws were equally applied—that over 125 million of us would have spent time in jail, as Barack Obama and George W. Bush themselves would have done for what we euphemistically and absurdly call "youthful indiscretions." Obama has admitted using marijuana and cocaine. Bush, who was less candid, simply refused to deny it.

It is understandable why politicians have convinced themselves that drugs are a third rail of public policy and that they therefore don't have to seriously address legalization. The media—the very institution charged by the First Amendment with facilitating intelligent discourse—colludes with the government's drug war rather than challenging politicians to engage a real debate. The Washington Post and The New York Times both require drug-tests from college students seeking summer internships. And both have given the federal government free advertising space to promote First Amendment-infringing drug policy, when the president's Office of Drug Control Policy acquires space for drug war propaganda. Would the Times and the Post ever alcohol-test an aging copy editor, or offer the Department of Defense free space to promote an elective war in the Middle East in return for a full-page ad touting "Mission Accomplished?"

In this time of national economic crisis, we keep looking in our collective rear view mirror for lessons from the 1930s for what we should do, and what we should avoid, in order to restore confidence in ourselves and create hope for our future.

While fiscal and monetary actions taken in that era offer mixed and muddled messages for today's policymakers, another action by a transformational leader in that far-off decade sends a clarion call to us at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Franklin Roosevelt supported the 21st Amendment to end the madness of the 18th, and in so doing halted the devastating social, economic, and cultural costs of Prohibition. That's a lesson Barack Obama needs to heed.

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Illinois' Culture of Reform
Inspired by Paul Simon

By: Terry Michael
December 16 , 2008

If Illinois politics has been a hotbed for corruption, it has also benefited from a culture of reform, a meme stream that flows directly to President-elect Barack Obama from the late Sen. Paul Simon, through generations of journalists and politicians Simon has inspired.

Like most everything in life, politics is physics. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And the patronage, vote-buying and bribes that were hallmarks of the Cook County Democratic machine and the corruption in Springfield stimulated a Progressive Era-inspired reform movement led by a young weekly editor and future state legislator, lieutenant governor, U.S. representative and U.S. senator.

Among those whom Simon has mentored and influenced have been Obama himself, plus two of his inner circle: Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a Simon protégé, and Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune political writer who was press secretary for Simon’s first U.S. Senate campaign in 1984.

The bow-tied senator began battling corruption in 1948, at the age of 19, when he dropped out of Dana College in Blair, Neb., to buy a failing Southern Illinois weekly newspaper, the Troy Tribune, with a $3,000 loan from the local Lions Club. It was the same year Illinois elected the blue-ribbon reform ticket of Adlai Stevenson for governor and Paul H. Douglas for the U.S. Senate. Holding the Senate seat to which Simon was eventually elected in 1984 and to which Durbin ascended after Simon’s retirement in 1996, Douglas, known as the conscience of the Senate, became a close friend and mentor to Simon in the 1950s and 1960s.

Simon used his weekly to challenge organized crime and the local Democratic machine in Madison County, across the river from St. Louis. His crusade drew the attention of Stevenson and the Kefauver Committee on organized crime in the U.S. Senate, before which Simon testified in 1951. Simon’s profile as a crusading editor helped launch a 40-year political career when he was elected, at the age of 25, to the Illinois House of Representatives, defeating the Madison County Democratic machine candidate.

He aligned himself in the Legislature with anti-machine “lakeshore liberals,” (a reference to Lake Michigan), including then-State Rep. Abner Mikva, who, like Simon, mentored Obama and encouraged his run for the U.S. Senate. Simon was just about to endorse Obama for the 2004 nomination when he died on Dec. 9, 2003, of complications from heart surgery.

Obama acknowledged Simon’s role as a mentor in an interview with PBS’s Gwen Ifill after his keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: “Dick Durbin, I think, [in his introduction of Obama] appropriately mentioned Paul Simon as somebody who was a mentor to me, and one of the things that he always talked about is being able to disagree without being disagreeable. ...”

As a young state representative, Simon authored Illinois’ first open meeting law, guaranteeing press and public access to official proceedings. In 1963, he blew the whistle on corruption in the Legislature in a piece for Harper’s magazine, for which his colleagues “jokingly” gave him their Benedict Arnold Award.

In 1968, Simon was elected lieutenant governor. He selected as his legal counsel a recent graduate of Georgetown Law School, Durbin, who had been an intern in Paul Douglas’ Senate office when he was a law student.

I began my own association with Simon in 1968, when I chaired his student support group at the University of Illinois. After five years as a newspaper reporter and then press secretary to the Democrats in the Illinois House, I became Simon’s first U.S. House campaign press secretary in 1974 and then his press spokesman in Washington. One of my duties was to prepare and release his annual statement of personal income, assets and liabilities, which he voluntarily provided for every one of his 40 years in office. He required similar statements from his principal staff — including this 28-year-old in 1975, when I was earning a paltry $18,000 (Paul was a frugal employer) and my net worth was deep in the embarrassingly negative range.

After the recent disclosures about Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, I heard a TV talking head refer to Obama as a “product of the Cook County Democratic machine.” That cable-babbler got it exactly wrong. Political geography was definitely not destiny for the new president. His political lineage winds its way back through Axelrod, Durbin, Mikva and others to the man who inspired many of us to public service and progressive journalism.

A former press secretary for Paul Simon, Terry Michael is director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, a college political journalism internship program modeled after one Simon founded at the University of Illinois-Springfield in 1972.

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Legislating Freedom from the Bench
The case for legalizing gay marriage
by "judicial decree"

Terry Michael | October 28, 2008

As a 61-year-old, un-partnered, gay, atheist libertarian, I react with mixed emotion but some agreement to arguments against activist judges imposing same-sex marriage.

Such a case was published recently by one of the most persuasive libertarian-minded essayists in daily print journalism, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman. "Massachusetts, California and (just this month) Connecticut have all legalized gay marriage the wrong way—by impatient, unpersuasive judicial decrees," Chapman wrote. "Now California voters have the chance to do it the right way—by the free consent of the governed."

Part of that makes sense. With fewer divisions than the Pope, courts can ill-afford to jump too far ahead of the culture. To do so invites rebellion by activists, like those in California who initiated Proposition 8, which was placed on the ballot this November in an effort to nullify the state supreme court's May decision allowing same sex couples to wed.

I would remind Steve Chapman of something written about a hundred years ago by his fellow Chicago newspaperman, Finley Peter Dunne, as voiced by his famous fictional Irish pub character Mr. Dooley: "The Supreme Court follows the election returns." Certain they can read the minds of the Founders by perusing the Constitution's text with their conservative imaginations, even rabid originalists like Antonin Scalia might acknowledge that truth (though it might take a few drinks at Mr. Dooley's tavern for Scalia to come around).

Mr. Dooley made enduring good sense, because justices, one way or another, are products of elections. Many state justices have been directly elected. And those in Massachusetts and Connecticut, though theoretically shielded from the whims of the masses by appointment, are usually politicians named by other politicians, and confirmed by still other elected officials.

So it strikes me as curious that Chapman argues that appointed judges aren't following the "the free consent of the governed."

Pollsters have found significant percentages of voters in the left and right coast states backing gay marriage. A Survey USA poll released just two weeks before Proposition 8 will be decided showed support and opposition running within the margin of error (48 percent for, 45 percent against, and 7 percent undecided).

In fact, a third or more of adults nationwide now tell researchers they back same-sex marriage. But there is a real regional difference, with support at 51 percent in both the West and East, but only 35 percent in the Midwest and 30 percent in the South, according to a Gallup poll taken just a week after the California court ruled on May 5. Even more interesting, however, is how far the culture has moved just since the mid-1980's, when over 80 percent of Americans opposed gay unions. By the mid-1990's, that number had dropped to about 65 percent. And now, according to the Gallup poll from this year cited above, opposition has declined another 10 points.

Contrast where the culture has moved in just a few years on gay marriage with public attitudes towards school desegregation in 1954, when, with Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court completely reversed its Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896. Plessy sanctioned segregation by claiming separate facilities for blacks were not a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Shortly after the 1954 Court "decreed" an end to segregation, a May 1954 Gallop poll showed that only a bare majority—55%—of Americans nationwide approved of the decision, and 40% opposed it—very close to the current division on gay marriage. You don't need a pollster to calculate the tiny percentage of voters in Southern states who would have tolerated integration then.

Should the Court have waited for Southern voters to fall in line before overturning Plessy? And, 54 years later, should state courts wait for electoral majorities to extend gay men and women the fundamental contractual right of marriage enjoyed by heterosexuals? Opponents of gay marriage, like 19th century proponents of segregation, essentially are claiming the right to protect their cultural and religious beliefs by enshrining them in law. Both Republicans catering to a socially conservative base, and "liberal" Democrats appeasing a divided center, now argue that gays and lesbians can enjoy the same rights afforded to straight couples through contract law, while reserving the term "marriage" for heterosexuals. But they're being disingenuous. To be consistent, they'd support civil unions for straights, who could then take their state-issued licenses to priests, rabbis, and pastors and be blessed as "married."

Where you stand on gay marriage is surely influenced by where you sit in the gay-straight divide. Steve Chapman, who usually does a great job of upholding the most important original intent of our Founders—liberty—doesn't seem to get the urgency of those who are tired of sitting at the back of this particular bus. Even as he gives lip service to what he calls "a noble goal designed to serve both individual freedom and social health," he argues that "a wholesome end doesn't justify every possible means."

A few years ago, I would have been more sympathetic to the "wait-for-the-voters" approach. Never a fan of marital bliss, I find myself empathizing with Texas humorist and heterosexual Kinky Friedman's backhanded support for gay marriage: "Because (gays) have a right to be just as miserable as the rest of us."

But as a libertarian, I have no problem with any court actively "legislating" a fundamental extension of freedom of choice and equal protection of the law. The time to wait for voters has passed. The time to decree this liberty is now.
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