By now you’ve probably heard about the hyperventilating from the Pentagon about the threat from Hotcoldwetdry, which is a waste of money, pushed by administration weenies, and, quite frankly, a way to move the military even further to the Left politically, all based on supposition and looking into crystal balls. What if we stopped wasting money and time?
(The Hill) With each new case of the Ebola virus reported by the media, there is also more speculation about a pandemic if Ebola gets out of West Africa, which unfortunately it has. A pandemic is an epidemic that spreads across continents. The world has experienced pandemics at least as far back as the Middle Ages, when the Black Death killed about one-third of the world’s population, to more recent pandemics like smallpox, tuberculosis and most recently HIV/AIDs. In the early 1900s, the U.S. experienced the deadly Spanish influenza. Since about the middle of the 20th century, we have experienced at least four major epidemics: polio, Asian flu, swine flu and HIV/AIDS.
While the risk of an Ebola epidemic in the United States is believed to be small, it is a significant threat that will become even more serious if cases outside of West Africa become more numerous. As governments and health professionals focus on improving detection and treatments, it is fair to ask: What could we have done to better contain the risk? There is no single or simple answer. But one controllable condition is obvious: global poverty.
For over a decade, environmental scientist Bjorn Lomborg and others have been making a convincing case that the preoccupation with global warming/climate change has been misguided and wasteful. In a Wall Street Journalarticle in December 2009, he wrote that “Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can’t use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/[AIDS] prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation.” He added that “our dogmatic pursuit of a (climate change) strategy … can only be described as breathtakingly expensive and woefully ineffective.”
We’ve wasted enormous amounts of time, resources, and money on this idiotic notion that Mankind is mostly/solely responsible for every little change in the weather, which could have gone into actually helping people.
