iftttwall

The Daily Mail‘s story about
Ebola conspiracy theories begins by describing a yarn in which the
epidemic’s victims are now literally rising from the dead. In the
Mail‘s usual write-first, ask-questions-later style, the
paper declares that this story “went viral” without bothering to
ask how many people who shared it knew damn well that it was a
joke. (The tale came from a
humor site, and while I’ve
learned the hard way that satire can zoom over people’s heads,
it’s not exactly unthinkable that people might forward a story
about zombies and even play at being frightened about it as a form
of fun.) The article then covers several other bits of online
hearsay, such as a YouTube video
that claims The Simpsons “predicted” the crisis with a
throwaway Ebola gag in 1997. (Put differently, the show made an
Ebola joke two years after the press heavily covered an Ebola
outbreak in Zaire.) This theory does not seem to be a
joke, though I suspect that somewhere between 90 and 99 percent of
the people sharing it just think it’s funny.

The other items in the Mail piece are more serious,
though one of them—a rumor that drinking salt water can prevent or
cure the disease—doesn’t really qualify as a conspiracy theory,
given that no one is conspiring in it.

But there’s one Ebola conspiracy theory that’s missing from the
report. It
goes like this:

Terrorist group Isis may be considering using Ebola as
a suicide bio-weapon against the West, according to a military
expert.

The virus is transmitted by direct contact with an infected person
who is showing the symptoms—and it wouldn’t be difficult for
fanatics to contract it then travel to countries they want to wreak
havoc in, according to a military expert.

Capt. Al Shimkus, Ret., a Professor of National Security Affairs at
the U.S. Naval War College, said that the strategy is entirely
plausible.

That’s The Daily Mail again. To the reporter’s credit,
he goes on to quote several people explaining why this would be a
rather stupid and difficult terror strategy that isn’t likely to
work, but of course the headline highlights the alleged threat, not
the debunkers.

The ISIS scenario is a conspiracy theory by any
reasonable standard—terror cells are conspiracies, right?—and it
isn’t a very plausible one. But it’s one that
the Mail takes seriously, so it doesn’t get listed
with the others. An old saying comes to mind, something about motes
and beams.

Bonus link: I wrote a book about conspiracy theories,
and it
just came out in paperback.

Michaela Snyder, a 15-year-old girl from
Woodbury, Minnesota, was in seventh grade when her boyfriend asked
her to sext with him. She complied—sending him semi-nude pictures
of herself—but eventually her mother found the photos on her
phone. 

Michaela then became the subject of intense bullying at school
because rumors spread that she had deliberately ratted out her
boyfriend. (While I don’t think every bad experience at school
counts as bullying, this sounds like the real deal: Kids tripping
her, boycotting her at lunch, and telling her she should
“die.”)

The whole ordeal sounds just horrible. So here’s the ironic
part, according to Ruben
Rosario in TwinCities.com:

If you think this could not happen to your child, consider that
Michaela is the daughter of Grant Snyder, a veteran Minneapolis
police sergeant in the crimes against children unit who has spent
most of his career busting pimps and trying to help sexually
exploited young girls and women.

“I talked openly with her about the cases I worked on, how
(pimps) manipulate girls into (doing drugs and performing sex for
money),” he said. “I believe if you gave information, that was
protection enough. It wasn’t.

It’s not just ironic that her dad deals with sex crimes. It’s
ironic that he could have arrested his daughter for creating and
disseminating child porn had he wanted to. Then she would have
ended up on the sex offender registry.  That’s how easy it is
to ruin a life.

Sext arrests among minors aren’t theoretical.
Remember this
story? A 17-year-old boy and his 15-year-old girlfriend were
exchanging sexts. The boy was arrested and photographed—sans
undies—to certify him as the miscreant. But that wasn’t enough. The
authorities actually wanted to take him to a hospital and give him
an erection drug (vodka?) to make absolutely sure he was
the—forgive me—hardened criminal in the original photo that they
were calling child porn.

Only universal
ridicule
stopped them.

The happy ending to Michaela’s trauma is that she did not end up
on the sex offender list. What’s more, she rose above the shame,
realized that other young people are probably in her same
situation, and has gone public with her story as a sort of
motivational cautionary tale. Right on!

I hope she takes her story to law enforcement agencies next, to
remind them that often teens make regrettable choices when it comes
to sex. That doesn’t make them sex offenders. It makes them young,
horny, dumb. In other words, human.

Craft brewing is one of the great entrepreneurial
success stories of the past few decades. For the longest time,
America’s beer industry was dominated by a few big corporate
brewers that produced little but watery swill. But a few small
entrepreneurs who loved good beer thought there might be a market
for it. Turns out they were right.

Yet as A. Barton Hinkle explains, crony capitalism now threatens
to strangle that entrepreneurial spirit. Last week, Virginia
officials decided to hand out more than $30 million in government
subsidies to Stone Brewing Co., which will soon open its first
brewery east of the Mississippi in Richmond. As Hinkle notes, the
special favors conferred upon Stone must make central Virginia’s
longtime craft brewers gag.

View this article.

When it comes to gifts that keep on
giving, we all probably could have done without yet another
extended war in the Middle East. But that’s what we seem to have as
President Obama emerged from a meeting with military officials from
countries that have joined the coalition aganst ISIS to
announce, “this is going to be a long-term campaign. There are
not quick fixes involved.  We’re still at the early
stages.  As with any military effort, there will be days of
progress and there are going to be periods of setback.”

Oh goody. I’d hate to think my son would reach enlistment age
too late to participate in the fun.

How committed that coalition is to an open ended effort to
battling ISIS and “communicating an alternative vision for those
who are currently attracted to the fighting inside Iraq and Syria”
is an open question. Turkey’s
rapid repudiation of White House insistence that the country
had agreed to coalition use of its military bases may be only the
tip of the iceberg. Foreign Policy‘s Gopal Ratnam and John
Hudson describe it as a “kiss
and tell problem.” Like a high school nerd desperate for a
girlfriend, the Obama administration is so eager to interpret the
slightest kindness as a total commitment that it immediately
trumpets its new relationship to the world—and scares its new
friend away. Write Ratnam and Hudson:

The conflicting versions of events from the two allies have one
of two causes. One is political: The White House is eager to show a
war-weary American public that the United States won’t be fighting
alone, but many Middle Eastern countries don’t want to rile up
their own populations by advertising their roles in the coalition.
The other is a more basic and troubling one: that Washington may be
consistently misreading its partners and overestimating just how
committed they are to the fight.

The governments of Georgia and Slovenia also backpedaled from
U.S. announcements of deeper relationships than either country was
willing to acknowledge in world-wide press releases.

Now that the Obama administration is insisting on a long-term
commitment instead of a military quicky, the problem can only get
worse.