The elites and the little people

The New Neo Posted on by

Peggy Noonan’s been on a roll lately, and this column of hers about quarantine is especially fine. I recall similar stories to the one she tells, from my in-laws.

My own parents had no immigration stories. My father virtually never talked about his parents, and they were the ones who’d come through Ellis Island, and my mother’s ancestors had come in the 1840’s and so the stories had faded (and would have been pre-Ellis Island anyway).

Here’s Noonan on what it all signifies at this point:

It must be noted that all this””the quarantine argument, the travel ban””is another expression of the deep, tearing distance between America’s professional and political elites, who operate as if they are estranged from common sense, and normal people, who are becoming more estranged from the elites, their oblivious and politicized masters.

That distance has been growing all my adult life, but the Ebola argument has brought it into sharper relief. The elites should start twigging onto it. They are no longer immediately respected, their guidance is not reflexively taken. They seem more immersed in political thinking””what is the ideologically enlightened position to take, where’s the boss on it?””than in protecting public health.

When Noonan describes the rift between the elites and the regular Americans, it really rings true (it also reminds me of what’s happened to Europeans via the EU). Among all the other dreadful attitudes that the Obama administration has conveyed, one of the most obnoxious and dangerous is this elitist “we are so smart we know it all” mindset, coupled with a deep contempt for Americans and their wishes, topped off by a startling incompetence that fails to justify their hubris at all. It’s quite a combination.

By the way, such an attitude is not limited to Democratic politicians. However, Democrats make more of a pretense of caring about us proles.

But back when she dissed Sarah Palin she aligned herself with the political elites and against the “normal people” estranged from the elites. Because the Palin ciriticism was classest, elitist, degree-ist (is there such a thing?) snobbery. But she’s right now.

Lena Dunham and intersibling abuse

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s start out this way: I cannot stand Lena Dunham. Can’t stand her show, her attitude, her politics, you name it. And I haven’t read her book, and don’t have any intention of doing so.

Also, it goes without saying that I’m against child abuse, sexual or otherwise. But I’ll say it anyway, just to make it crystal clear.

However, I think the allegations that Dunham sexually abused her little sister, based on the evidence in her memoir, are somewhat over-the-top or at least misdirected.

First, the evidence of the abuse, from Kevin Williamson writing in National Review, based on Dunham’s new memoir:

Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.” At one point, when her sister is a toddler, Lena Dunham pries open her vagina ”” “my curiosity got the best of me,” she offers, as though that were an explanation.

Here’s the definition of “child-on-child sexual abuse”:

The term has been defined as sexual activity between children that occurs “without consent, without equality, or as a result of coercion”. This includes when one of the children uses physical force, threats, trickery or emotional manipulation to elicit cooperation. Child-on-child sexual abuse is further differentiated from normative sexual play or anatomical curiosity and exploration (i.e. “playing doctor”) because child-on-child sexual abuse is an overt and deliberate action directed at sexual stimulation, including orgasm. In many instances, the initiator exploits the other child’s naé¯veté, and the victim is unaware of the nature of what is happening to them. When sexual abuse is perpetrated by one sibling upon another, it is known as “intersibling abuse”.

Using that definition, we can see that what Dunham did was borderline and could possibly be considered abuse but not necessarily. She did use trickery and/or coercion, for example, taking advantage of her sister’s naivete, but that seems to have been in order to kiss her on the lips. She did look at her vagina (or, as Althouse writes, probably more accurately her vulva), but the aim there seems to have been more curiosity than stimulation; that’s what puts it in the gray area. And it’s not at all clear that her sister was even aware of Dunham’s masturbation, although she was nearby (by the way, Dunham was seven and her sister was one at the time).

In contrast, let’s look at what’s considered normal childhood sexual play:

Preschool (0-5 Years)
Young children frequently use limited sexual language that centers around body parts and the differences children see in genders. They sometimes explore body parts of other children, usually in the form of play, such as playing doctor or house. Children may also touch their own body parts and may even rub up against something to get the same sensation. Children at this age usually can be redirected easily and do not show signs of distress when told to stop the behavior.

School Age (6-11 Years)
The use of sexual words and sexual conversation is more common and frequent during these years. Experimenting with other children is also common and may take the form of “games” with same-age peers. This may include kissing, fondling, and “you show me, I’ll show you” types of behavior. Self-stimulation is also common at home or in private places but rarely happens in public. There are usually a great number of questions from children at this age about menstruation, pregnancy, and sexual behavior.

So we have a lot of curiosity and play at these ages. But one of the important ways to distinguish between play and abuse is difference in ages or coercion (some states even have a rule that children must have 5 years difference in ages for there to be sexual abuse).

So let’s say that what Dunham is describing is sexual abuse, although it’s somewhat unclear. However, as even Williamson acknowledges, the most important actors here would have been Dunham’s parents, who were guilty of setting the tone with a profound—and I mean profound—flaunting [correction: flouting] of sexual boundaries. From Williamson:

If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries. And they were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behavior that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions ”” “This was within the spectrum of things I did.”

A seven-year-old child is very much under the influence of his/her parents. We don’t criminalize the behavior of a seven-year-old, nor punish them in the same way as an adult, because of this and because they simply don’t have the sort of maturity to make fully moral decisions and then to accept full responsibility for them. Think about the situation here: according to the passage above (which is based on Dunham’s book), there were photos all around the house of Dunham’s mother openly (and I mean that literally) displaying her genitalia. Why on earth would Dunham have thought it especially out of line to take a look at her own baby sister’s?

The child abusers here were the parents, although not in the technical, hard-core sense of rapists, but in the sense of a flagrant and deliberate flaunting [correction: flouting] of boundaries. In such an atmosphere, children often become both confused and hyper-sexualized. And I believe that’s what happened to Dunham.

RIP, Tom Magliozzi

The New Neo Posted on by

The name may not ring a bell for you, but how about Click? Or Clack?

Tom Magliozzi and his younger brother Ray entertained millions—including me—with their NPR show “Car Talk.” Cars bore me, and I really couldn’t care less about their innards as long as they work. But Tom and Ray were funny, in an effervescent, zany, irrepressible, completely unique way.

Strangely enough, they came from Cambridge, Mass—East Cambridge, that is, which is a whole ‘nother ball game from regular old Hahhhvahd-Cambridge. And they had the East Cambridge accents to prove it. Cambridge isn’t quite what people from away think it is; there’s a massive town vs. gown thing going on. But Tom and Ray were of both worlds; they were actually MIT graduates.

It was Tom’s laughter that got you:

If there was one thing that defined Tom Magliozzi, it was his laugh. It was loud, it was constant, it was infectious.

“His laugh is the working definition of infectious laughter,” says Doug Berman, the longtime producer of Car Talk. He remembers the first time he ever encountered Magliozzi.

“Before I ever met him, I heard him, and it wasn’t on the air,” he recalls.

Berman was the news director of WBUR at the time.

“I’d just hear this laughter,” he says. “And then there’d be more of it, and people would sort of gather around him. He was just kind of a magnet.”

Even if I didn’t know quite what he was laughing about, he could still make me laugh along with him.

I had stopped listening to Car Talk about ten years ago when I started blogging. So I had no idea the brothers Magliozzi were no longer doing live shows because Tom was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Incredibly sad.

Here’s that voice and that laugh. RIP.

The NY Democratic leadership: they see you when you’re sleeping, they know when you’re awake…

The New Neo Posted on by

…they know if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

And that means you better vote on Tuesday or they’ll find out. Got it?

Good:

The New York State Democratic Committee is bullying people into voting next week with intimidating letters warning that it can easily find out which slackers fail to cast a ballot next Tuesday.

“Who you vote for is your secret. But whether or not you vote is public record,” the letter says.

“We will be reviewing voting records .”‰.”‰. to determine whether you joined your neighbors who voted in 2014.”

It ends with a line better suited to a mob movie than a major political party: “If you do not vote this year, we will be interested to hear why not.”

“Interested.”

Republicans may win in the mid-terms? Solution: cancel them!

The New Neo Posted on by

(The mid-terms, that is, not the Republicans.)

Thus saith an op-ed by David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan appearing in today’s NY Times.

Of course, they don’t actually say to cancel them because Republicans stand to do well. Their argument is that they should be canceled because midterms negate the power of the president. However, to most people of a non-tyrannical nature, that would be a feature rather than a bug. The midterms are one of the only checks the people have on a president such as Obama—or any other president, for that matter—who throws them a curve by doing the opposite of what he/she promised or pledged, and a Congress that goes along with it.

But no:

The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation. Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has on average lost 25 seats in the House and about 4 in the Senate as a result of the midterms…

The realities of the modern election cycle are that we spend almost two years selecting a president with a well-developed agenda, but then, less than two years after the inauguration, the midterm election cripples that same president’s ability to advance that agenda.

Well, maybe the public has decided it doesn’t want that agenda, as events have played out. Or maybe, just maybe, the agenda that was promised is not the one that was delivered, and the people want the president stopped. Or maybe even impeached.

Another problem Schanzer and Sullivan see is that midterms tend to attract the whiter, older, wealthier, more educated voters:

Another quirk is that, during midterm elections, the electorate has been whiter, wealthier, older and more educated than during presidential elections. Biennial elections require our representatives to take this into account, appealing to one set of voters for two years, then a very different electorate two years later.

There’s an obvious, simple fix, though. The government should, through a constitutional amendment, extend the term of House members to four years and adjust the term of senators to either four or eight years, so that all elected federal officials would be chosen during presidential election years.

Hey, I’ve got an idea for an even better fix! Only allow voters to vote in strict proportion to their racial and socioeconomic category percentages in the population, so that no one group is over-represented because of its suspiciously greater voting zeal.

The sort of thinking Schanzer and Sullivan espouse is frightening but not surprising. And the Times has a tendency to publish these “enough with the Constitution, already” op-eds now and then, as experimental feelers for how far the public is willing to go to enable the leftist agenda, and to get the people used to the arguments therein. They like to use professors to accomplish this.

The curious thing in this case is that Schanzer, although a Democrat, does not seem (at least by my reading of his resume) to be an extreme leftist—for example, the Congressional Democrat he advised was a Blue Dog Democrat from Texas. Why, then, is Schanzer so hepped now on an imperial presidency, unaccountable to the people [hint: rhetorical question]? Did he advocate that same position back in 2006? I certainly doubt it.

The PC crowd and academic freedom

The New Neo Posted on by

One would think that Robert Oscar Lopez, “Latino child of lesbians” who is also bisexual himself, might be in with the PC crowd. But questioning some of the tenets of their narrative trumps even those identifying credentials. Mr. Lopez is that relative rarity, a man who thinks for himself, one who actually believes in academic freedom rather than just academic freedom for those who espouse goodthink.

Lopez is guilty of the thoughtcrime—actually, of thinking—and that meant he must be destroyed. He’s not a researcher himself (he’s an English and classics professor), but he supports airing research and thoughts that dare to question the LGBT party-line on gay parenting:

But it was really only at the October 3 event that my life as a scholar came full circle. Tenured, well-published, and connected to international allies who could give me a serious chance at disseminating my commitment to the rights of children, I felt I could address a serious gap in research””the question of whether gay parenting as it has evolved is ethical””through the mix of testimonial sincerity and scholarly rigor that I felt had been missing for over 20 years.

The conference was consciously not structured as a rebuttal of gay parenting, and that made me very happy. For too long, an overemphasis on statistics and excessive pressure from the gay lobby had skewed scholarship on children…

Oftentimes when I was interviewed or when I debated, people would tell me, “But, Mr. Lopez, all the social science indicates that children do just as well in same-sex households.” Citations of the American Pediatric Association or the American Medical Association typically ensued. As a humanities professor, I faced a conundrum: I was arguing not only against an individual who was telling me that I had no right to feel the way I actually did about being deprived of a father; I was also arguing against a technocratic, deeply anti-humanist philosophy that felt comfortable reducing the higher aims of life to statistics.

He found himself under attack by LGBT activists, his words misquoted and his work misrepresented, as they tried to whip up a Two Minutes Hate against him. Lopez observes:

Under these conditions, research will die soon. Maybe it is already dead. Scholars cannot forge new ideas if they are punished for writing too much, publishing too much, considering too many ideas. There is no way for one lone scholar to prevail against full-time investigators paid by a massive lobbying organization to comb over that scholar’s work in search of embarrassing quotes. If every sentence must be written with safeguards against misquoting and interpretive abuse, then every scholarly study will sound the same, argue the some points, and support the same conclusion. That is how the field of sociology arrived at its now famous “consensus” about same-sex parenting, which Loren Marks deconstructed in 2012.

If people cease to take thinking seriously, the LGBT lobby wins. The cost of their victory will be, tragically, far more than the many careers and personal lives they destroyed in the effort to, as Josh Barro put it, “stamp out” dissenters. The cost will be the great marketplace of ideas that nourished scholarship since the days of Socrates and long before.

Lopez writes “maybe it is already dead.” I agree, and I think it’s been dead for quite some time. I first noticed the PC-attitude beginning to dominate the field of social science research several decades ago. The phenomenon has only grown since. What else was the firestorm over Larry Summers’ remarks on women at the highest reaches of science about? All the man did was notice an actual, bona fide phenomenon (the scarcity of women at the very upper levels) and call for research in the area, and it got him booted from his post as Harvard president because the tender sensibilities of the PC crowd could not stomach shining the light of science into an arena where they had an agenda.

It is ironic that universities have become the champions of irrationality and prejudice. But irrationality and prejudice are doubleplusgood as long as they’re for the right causes.

[NOTE: Personally, I have nothing against adoption and childrearing by gay and lesbian couples. There’s a lot of variation there, just as there is with heterosexual couples, some of whom are good parents and some not. Social science research might actually be able to yield information on makes for more successful parenting, of course (for any parent, of any sexual orientation), if it could be entered into with a spirit of intellectual honesty—although social science research (even of the unbiased sort) is deeply flawed because of the problems inherent in studying human beings and in coming up with objective measures for concepts that are difficult to operationalize.

Lopez mentions father absence, for example, as a potential problem. Of course it can be, even for children of divorce in heterosexual couples. How much of a problem, and how often? And how could this inform policy decisions? What might some solutions be? If we can’t be allowed to discuss these things rationally—and apparently we can’t—we’re sunk.]

Bronx Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not easy learning how to talk like Obama, if you’re from the Bronx:

The Romney impersonator is nowhere near as handsome as the real deal. Wonder if he’s still employed (the Romney impersonator, that is; I know about the real Romney). The documentary was made during the 2012 campaign.

Vaughn Meader (you older folks might remember that name, but here’s a link if it doesn’t ring a bell) had a meteoric career that completely tanked after Kennedy was assassinated.

Here’s a refresher:

When the female voice first comes on, did you think it was meant to be Marilyn Monroe? Some people may have forgotten—or never known—that Jackie Kennedy sounded quite a bit like Marilyn, especially in her breathiness. I had noticed the resemblance when I first heard Jackie, during the televised White House tour. An excerpt:

[NOTE: More here on Bronx Obama.]

Brittany Maynard postpones assisted suicide

The New Neo Posted on by

Assisted suicide is a huge topic about which I have tremendously conflicted feelings, including compassion for those who are suffering so greatly that they feel the need to consider it.

But this isn’t going to be a long, complex article on the topic in general. I will note, however, that I don’t think doctors (or other health professionals, or any official of any sort) should be involved in assisting patients who want to kill themselves. It blurs the role of a doctor, which should not involve outright killing. I say that although I’m well aware that there already is a gray area in which doctors often give pain-relief medication (morphine, for example) in doses that could hasten death, although death is not the goal, pain relief is. That seems a very different thing to me.

It is also easy to see that in countries such as Belgium, where physician-assisted suicide is the law of the land, it has been abused. The slippery slope is very, very real. I’ve written before about Belgium’s law, where it isn’t even necessary that a patient be considered terminal.

Here at home, American Brittany Maynard has gotten a lot of attention recently, in part because she has gone public with her assisted-suicide plan, and in part because she’s a young, telegenic person whose case is especially heartbreaking. She has a brain tumor that will almost certainly kill her fairly soon, but not before it takes away a great many of her faculties and causes her a great deal of suffering.

Maynard and her family moved to Oregon after her diagnosis, because Oregon allows physician-assisted suicide. She had previously announced her plans to kill herself today, November 1, because she could feel herself becoming more and more symptomatic and wanted to go before things got too terrible. But she has postponed her suicide:

I still feel good enough and I still have enough joy and I still laugh and smile with my family and friends enough that it doesn’t seem like the right time right now…But it will come, because I feel myself getting sicker. It’s happening each week.

She indicates she will do it when the time is right. I have no idea whether she will or will not. But I have noticed that in many people (including some I know personally) who have resolved to kill themselves when the medical going gets rough, it’s not unusual for them to change their minds much as Britanny has for now. Life seems to continue to have attractions past the point where they had thought it was time to give up. This seems to me to be a good thing.

When I was younger I had a fascination with the people who were then called the Eskimos, but have since become known as the Inuit. You may recall that they were known for the prevalence of suicide among the old, when they could no longer contribute much to society and were considered a drag under the very harsh conditions that prevailed in that climate.

But I discovered, when I actually studied their mores, that it wasn’t quite like what I had thought. What usually happened was that the older person would state, in a code for suicidal intent, “I think I may just take a walk outside in the snow for a while”—uttered, for example, on a night when the wind was howling and the temperature was 50 below zero. In other words, to go out to freeze to death.

The usual response from the family, though, was something like this: “We still want to see your face among us.” In other words: please don’t go yet; we’re not ready to say goodbye.

Love is tenacious of life, and does not want to let go.

Ebola in the US: some trends

The New Neo Posted on by

Been wondering about the condition of Dr. Craig Spencer, being treated at Bellevue? There hasn’t been all that much in the news about him, but here’s a relatively laconic article saying he has been upgraded from serious but stable to stable condition.

It also says that he “is receiving therapies that have been effective in treating Ebola patients at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta and at the Nebraska Medical Center.” In other words, (my translation), he’s getting some antiviral drugs and/or transfusions from survivors of ebola.

Fortunately, we haven’t had very many ebola patients in the US so far. But I can’t help but notice a couple of things about the group of patients we have had.

The first is that all of them except Thomas Eric Duncan seem to have contracted ebola while caring for other ebola patients. And if “carrying to a cab to go to the hospital” is defined as “caring for” (although I don’t think it actually does), that would include Duncan as well.

Note that I wrote “seem to have contracted ebola while caring for other ebola patients.” That’s because Dr. Rick Sacra, who contracted ebola in Liberia, was not caring for known ebola patients at all: he was treating pregnant women. So we must conclude that both Dr. Sacra and the staff at the hospital where he worked in Liberia, although they are medical professionals in a country currently experiencing an epidemic of the disease, have encountered patients who are ill enough to transmit ebola to others and yet whose symptoms are either not serious enough, or are atypical enough, that their ebola status has gone unrecognized by the medical people treating them.

Dr. Sacra’s case is a sort of mirror image of Thomas Eric Duncan’s case, because Duncan also helped a pregnant woman who was not known or recognized to have ebola at the time (look to all my previous posts on the matter if you disagree with me about that), but who turned out to have been highly contagious. This fact sequence points out something that health professionals here have mostly been mum about: although ebola is an extremely serious and often-lethal disease, it is not always recognizable as such, even by highly-trained (including Western) doctors and nurses.

There are many reasons for this (one is that what we think of as “typical” symptoms are not present in a significant number of cases), but for our purposes right now it’s enough to state that it is a troubling fact.

Another pattern that leaps out is that so far the death rate in the US has been much lower than in other places. This also includes all the US citizens who got their initial treatment in Africa and were only flown here after they had become quite ill. The good results might just be a coincidence, because the number of patients treated here has been very, very small. But if we assume there’s something to it, it could be some combination of early treatment (for about half the patients here, anyway), the high quality of our medical care in general (effective rehydration, etc.), and the aforementioned “therapies” which seem to include antiviral and other special drugs and survivor transfusions.

The only ebola death in the US so far has been Thomas Eric Duncan. He missed having the advantage of an early diagnosis because his case went unrecognized by the Dallas hospital ER he first visited. He also had the misfortune of not matching the blood type of the available survivor donors, so he got no transfusion. It’s also possible there was something different about his physiology; perhaps other illnesses had weakened his immune system, or there could even have been genetic factors that made him more susceptible to the illness.

It may be that we risk becoming a little too cocky, though, about our ability to treat ebola. Our success so far appears to depend in part on the tiny number of cases. It wouldn’t take much to completely overwhelm our ability to give patients the sort of care these first victims have gotten, and then things could change dramatically. What’s more, the fact that almost all the cases here have been among health care professionals caring for already-diagnosed ebola patients is in a strange way a tremendous advantage, because it has enabled us to monitor them from the start and to treat them almost the moment they display symptoms—symptoms that in a person not known to have had prior contact with ebola would cause no alarm. That, in turn, has two advantages: early treatment almost certainly makes it more likely that they will survive, and early isolation makes it less likely that they will spread the virus into the general public (or to other health care professionals, who will be wearing protection almost from the start while treating them).

A nightmare scenario would be if ebola were to get out into a population that was unaware they had been exposed to it, and who therefore could easily interpret early symptoms as commonplace flu and therefore would be far more likely to infect others in the public before being diagnosed. That’s the way ebola could get out of control in this country. And that is why so many people (including me) are in favor of quarantining returning health care workers, and placing a moratorium on the issuing of visas to citizens of the ebola-affected countries of West Africa, except in compelling circumstances. This is not because we are unaware of the fact that ebola is alleged to be contagious only in symptomatic individuals. It is because we realize that symptoms are not always heeded right away, the contagion is a continuum rather than an “off/on” phenomenon, and that there is a small percentage of African ebola cases where there has been no previous known contact with a symptomatic ebola victim.

Being extra-careful makes sense, because the stakes—and the risks if things get out of control—are tremendously high.

Kaci Hickox wins in court

The New Neo Posted on by

The lower court had upheld state authorities wanting to restrict her movements, but a District Court judge in Maine has overturned that ruling and let her go about her business. The reason? The science is settled:

Judge Charles C. LaVerdiere ruled Hickox must continue daily monitoring and cooperate with health officials if she chooses to travel. The judge said there’s no need to restrict her movements because she’s not showing symptoms of Ebola.

In his ruling, the judge thanked Hickox for her service in Africa and wrote that “people are acting out of fear and that this fear is not entirely rational.”

Maine Gov. Paul LePage disagreed with the judge’s decision, but said the state will follow the law…

The judge…acknowledged the gravity of restricting someone’s constitutional rights without solid science to back it up.

“The court is fully aware of the misconceptions, misinformation, bad science and bad information being spread from shore to shore in our country with respect to Ebola,” he wrote. “The court is fully aware that people are acting out of fear and that this fear is not entirely rational.”

No doubt the judge is also “fully aware” of certain facts I wrote about in yesterday’s post, such as for example this from the irrational and unscientific Nobel-prize-winning immunologist Dr. Bruce Beutler:

It may not be absolutely true that those without symptoms can’t transmit the disease, because we don’t have the numbers to back that up,” said Beutler, “It could be people develop significant viremia [where viruses enter the bloodstream and gain access to the rest of the body], and become able to transmit the disease before they have a fever, even. People may have said that without symptoms you can’t transmit Ebola. I’m not sure about that being 100 percent true. There’s a lot of variation with viruses.”

This could go to a higher court, but I don’t think it will, for two reasons: the state of Maine (and its governor in particular) doesn’t appear eager to do so, and Ms. Hickox’s restrictions were due to expire on November 10th anyway.

So, this is the way the argument is going to go: for the Hickox defenders, it will be “you stupid anti-science morons, we are the scientists who know best.” And this despite the terrible track record scientists and public health authorities have so far in this epidemic, both in controlling it in Africa and in preventing the disease from reaching the US, and then in preventing it from being transmitted to health care workers in the US.

That said, I’ve stated from the start that I think the chances of this particular person, Kaci Hickox, having ebola are very very very slim. So I would bet a fairly large amount of money that she and her supporters will say, on November 10 or even before, “See, dummyheads, she’s fine! Therefore a quarantine would have been wrong.”

Which of course would be a stupid and unscientific argument, although I doubt that will stop them. A quarantine is a game of numbers. It restricts an individual, but it does not require that every restricted individual develop the disease in order to justify the imposition of the quarantine. It doesn’t even require that most of them develop the disease, or even that any of them do so. It merely requires that it is possible they might have developed it, because they have had some exposure to the disease and are in the incubation period, and that the risks of that disease to the public are great enough to justify a very time-limited restriction on their physical movement and freedom of association. Returning health practitioners from ebola-affected countries all have a small but nevertheless actual possibility of infection, and since we are not certain at exactly what point a person becomes contagious, and since people (even health professionals) are not necessarily reliable at reporting and restricting their own movements the minute they are demonstrating symptoms, and because the disease is so unusually dreadful in both its symptoms and high rate of mortality, it could certainly be argued (scientifically and rationally) that a 21-day quarantine (or, as in this case, restriction from being around the public, which is what authorities were asking) is justified.

[NOTE: As one might suspect, Judge LaVerdiere appears to have been appointed by a Democratic governor, John Baldacci.]

[ADDENDUM: On the subject of the possibility of further court action, I just read this:

The current ruling supersedes the earlier order and will be in effect until a full hearing on the issue. The court papers set no specific date for a full hearing, but they noted that such a proceeding must be held “no less than three days and not more than 10 days” from Thursday.

As I said, it’s not clear to me whether the state will try to go further with its legal action.]