Ebola Case Has Been Confirmed in Dallas, Texas

A patient who has recently traveled to West Africa at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas has a confirmed case of Ebola. There will be a CDC conference this evening with local Dallas officials.

See:

KERA News @keranews 57m 57 minutes ago Dallas patient tested for possible #Ebola.
“We want to caution Dallas County residents not to overreact.”
http://bit.ly/1rDjBEM @keranews

As my children go to a pediatric clinic across the street from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, this hits close to home.

The CDC’s “Risk communications” have gone to DefCon-1. The Dallas County Health and Human Services director Zachary Thompson has been on local media this morning with the following message:

“This is not Africa,” DCHHS Director Zach Thompson said. “We have a great public health infrastructure to deal with this type of disease.”

Notably missing was any mention of the Ebola fomite threat (AKA human body fluids with Ebola in them) in an urban environment.

I will try and keep you up to date on the latest local Dallas CDC “Ebola Risk Messaging.” Don’t expect the MSM to be of any use during this outbreak. You need to start reading the PANDEMIC FLU INFORMATION FORUM and the Free Republic EBOLA SURVEILLANCE THREAD for the latest real Ebola news updates, as opposed to MSM delivered “Risk Messaging.”

See:

http://www.singtomeohmuse.com/viewtopic.php?t=5725&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=2655

and see

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3191066/posts?q=1&;page=1#1

Wish all the folks in Dallas good luck. We are going to need it in the days ahead.

Home Grown Jihad

I think that I shall never hear a phrase more heavily loaded with skeptical sarcasm than the bromide of “Islam is a religion of peace.” It’s even more heavily loaded than the Soviet-era convention of client states calling themselves the “People’s Democratic Republic of Whatever.” I also will never see anything rhetorically speedier than those self-elected community Islamic community leaders who briefly note some horrific and murderous act committed by a member alleged to be in good standing in their community and then commence to whine about how they will be hurt (Hurt, I say, deeply hurt!) by the resulting (nearly always non-existent) anti-Islamic backlash on the part of the general public. Strong word – whining, but no other expression quite hits the spot when it comes to self-centered self-involvement. The implication which comes across is that blowing off the legs of runners at the Boston Marathon, knocking down the Twin Towers, opening fire on a bunch of Army troops at a post processing center, or beheading a middle-aged female office worker while screaming Allah Akbar is more wrong because it makes Muslims look bad, not because it is mutilation and murder, mass or otherwise.

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Stalling Progress in Aviation — It’s Time for a Breakthrough

Six Hour Radius for Commercial Airliners, 1940-1990

This diagram shows the stalling progress in the speed of air travel.

The inner ring, the range of a DC-3 in 1940, was substantially improved upon by the Lockheed Constellation in 1950, and much more so with the Boeing 707 in 1960. That was twenty years. But from 1960 to 1990, only the small outer circle was gained. And in the quarter century since, it has not expanded at all.

Technology has advanced in small things — small in size, not in importance — like electronics. But in big, macroscopic things, the world of “stuff”, it seems that there has been stasis for two generations. In a recent post, I linked to a video where Peter Thiel made this point. Theil may have overstated his case, but in the case of aviation he certainly appears to be correct. (Incidentally, my copy of Theil’s new book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future arrived yesterday.)

One theory is that only defense-related spending is sufficiently large and removed from market considerations to lead to truly massive breakthroughs in technology. This view is espoused by Peter J. Hugill, in his book World Trade Since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capitalism Paperback, a brilliant book which I heartily commend to you. However, I am not convinced that this is true in every case. In the case of aviation, the basic scientific insights exist, so government-financed development may not be necessary to reach the next breakthrough in aircraft performance.

My coauthor Jim Bennett notes:

We may soon see transsonic aircraft operating commercially. These will fly just above the speed of sound, where the sonic boom can be minimized by a number of design tricks. These could operate at airspeeds of around 700 knots, compared to the 500-550 at which most airliners are operated today. They could go faster but they are deliberately slowed down to reduce fuel consumption.

According to Jim, true supersonic or hypersonic aircraft “will be limited to transoceanic routes by sonic boom restrictions, or depend on new approaches which have yet to be fully tested.”

While a 20% increase in speed will be nice to have, I am eager to see these massive, disruptive changes in aviation speed — multiples of the present speed, not just incremental increases.

In America 3.0 we predict a breakdown of the regulatory machinery that is stalling technological progress in many areas, including improved aircraft performance. We speculate about what much faster commercial air travel will allow in terms of, for example, locating retirement housing in Cuba and Mexico, with rapid access by air.

Seniors are able to stay at home, both with mechanical assistance and with many people specializing in providing elder care, or move into modularized units easily attached to the their adult childrens’ homes. Retirement communities in Cuba, the Central Highlands of Mexico and the Mexican border zoner are becoming popular. Hypersonic air travel, until recently only used by the very wealthy or government officials, is slowly coming down in price, as aerospacelines compete for business, thus making visits back and forth to visit Grandma far easier.

Just as driverless cars will make exurban development feasible, as we describe in America 3.0, routine, affordable supersonic air travel will make remote locations useable for business and housing that are not feasible now.

A world that it is half or a third the size it is now, in terms of travel time, opens up opportunities that we cannot even conceive of now.

(The map above is from Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines by Vaclav Smil.)

Seriously Pathetic

Here’s one view of life and of leadership, from the French writer and pilot Antoine de St-Exupery:

”A chief is a man who takes responsibility.  He does not say, ‘my men were defeated,’ he says, ‘I was defeated.’”

And here’s a different view  from Barack Obama:

Well, I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.

What a pathetic excuse for a leader.

Nor should anyone kid themselves to the effect that Hillary Clinton would take a significantly more responsible approach to the job of President, or that that she took a serious and responsible approach to her job as Secretary of State—see my post excusing failure by pleading incompetence.  Neither Ms Clinton nor Mr Obama appears to have much understanding of what it actually means to be responsible for running an organization.

See also my post thoughts on leadership and command, from two writers and a general.  Can anyone imagine Obama or Clinton working to develop the kind of “feel” for an organization describes as being achieved by the fictional Willie Keith, or engaging in the sort of agonizing soul-searching described by the real William Slim?