This Whole Homeland Security Thing Now Makes Sense

Too subjective a term for traction.

Then the irony that the Republicans (my party) are breaking civil rights en masse is ironic, counter historical and "bad".

It would if it was true. It's not.

Then we seem to disagree on the consequences of the Partiot act, the war powers act and the homeland security department itself.

My question is very simple. When will our rights, taken away in "knee-jerk" response to OBL, going to be returned?

When will any arm of the government cede rights back to the citizens that ARE the alleged government.

Jerry

community. Maybe it was first brought here by a straight person, and jumped to the gay community.

Bob, A gay male swedish airline Steward(ess) brought it to most of the planet. Stright to the bath houses of San Fran in the case of the USA.

History, gets twisted it seems with time by the revisionists.

Oooookay.

I think I'd rather argue string theory's impact on general relativity with Chris.

Zooty

But that's not how the disease started, nor how it spread in the first place.

Mostly, it's a heterosexual disease for most of the planet.

Zooty

I'd say that the North American gay population may have played a "canary in the coal mine" role with respect to HIV... since it first appeared here in a limited subgroup, and was transmitted more within that population than to individuals outside it, there was time to recognize what was going on before it spread more widely. (Of course, some of this time was wasted by political reluctance to support research on "something that affected gay folks"...)

-dave w

Americans have always been used as gunea pigs for governmental experiments. Hey lets crash the market and watch what happens :-(

I thought it was a gay flight attendant from Quebec that brought it into North America by way of Africa? We know Ebola originated from Africa. Makes me wonder about herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, trichanoma(sic) etc.

Ted Novak TRA#5512

Different parts of the world have "gotten used to" different diseases.

Transportation is the cause of the problem.

Just ask the Indians about various "European" diseases. There's a lot of debate as to whether syphilis came from the "New World" with Columbus:

The construction of roads in Africa is blamed for the blossoming of HIV. There appear to be small populations in Africa where, after possibly thousands of years of dealing with the virus, the people are not as affected by the illness. There's one highway that's pretty much blamed for the spread of HIV worldwide, but darned if I can remember the name.

Diseases like HIV come along every once in a while. The Human Genome Project has turned up what appear to be inactivated viruses in our genome. Like HIV, they were incorporated, but our bodies learned how to deal with them.

Felines have an interesting history that stands as an example. The presence of pure black felines (especially in felines like leopards, where significant genetic effort is spent on coloring to improve hunting) is far above the statistical norm. It turns out that the allele that causes the all black cats also confers an advantage against a virus that strikes felines in much the way HIV attacks humans.

To make a long story short, if we did nothing, eventually humans would get used to HIV. Now, there'd be a lot of dead humans as a result. It's the same concept as putting a 1 ton pile of cocaine on every street corner with a sign saying "Take all you want." Anyone who can't control his or her cocaine addiction would die off and drug abuse would no longer be a problem. Such an effort would be devastating to the economy, but evolution never cared about short-term solutions.

Ebola, thankfully, is just too nasty. A disease that did not appear symptomatic so quickly and that had a longer infective period would be more effective at spreading.

There are lots of ways to improve the lethality of ebola, but long-term, it's still a dead end. The common cold and the flu are far better examples of effective viruses. They're not very lethal, so there are always plenty of hosts, and they've developed ways to keep the host from becoming immune.

Zooty

(In 1977, I started writing a program that you could call SimVirus. I thought it would be a great way to teach people about epidemiology. I had some beta testers on an early version, and found that everyone (myself included) kept modifying the virus to see if it was possible to wipe out everyone. No one ever found the "perfect" combination, but it was then that I realized the game was teaching people how to make a better virus.

I wish I could say that I gave up writing the game because I was concerned for humanity. Actually, I gave up because certain reasonable values for the variables induced chaotic behavior. While I figured out that it mirrored possible real-world behavior, I thought it made a lousy game. Unable to get rid of the chaotic pathology, I gave up on the game and went to writing an improved version of "Star Trek." Yeesh. I think chaos theory was developed a year or two before that, but had I realized what I had come up with, I might have become a mathematician. Talk about pathology....)