The impeccable timing of the New York Times — take II

Reality keeps intruding. I’d much rather be posting about a marvelous paper (see the end), but the Sunday New York Times of 18 September 2016 had 3 articles telling us all how deplorable, irrational and islamaphobic we are, the day after 3 separate attacks on the citizenry (the Chelsea and Seaside Park bombs and the knife attack in Minnesota).

Two were on the opinion page — one comparing the Jews of the 30s trying to escape the Nazi’s with the mideast refugees, another concerned “England’s Forgotten Muslin History”. Well, we all know what a bunch of terrorists the Jews of the 30s were.

On p. 13 “Level of Hate Crimes Against U. S> Muslims Highest Since After 9/11” “Some Tie Attacks to Trump’s Statements” It couldn’t possibly be anything they’ve done.

For your enjoyment, here’s the post of just 3 months ago (13 June)

The impeccable timing of the New York Times

After putting ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers on page 1 saying he wished he’d ‘bombed more’ the day of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the New York Times kept its unenviable timing record intact by posting “Dreams of my Muslim Son” about Islamophobia on the editorial page the day of the Orlando massacre. Usually they run their invariable innocent Muslims fearing hate crimes by American rednecks story a day or so after the latest atrocity.

Unfortunately Orlando can’t be camouflaged as workplace violence or the response to some video or other a la Benghazi. The perp was far too explicit. Nor can it be blamed on the failure of ‘the MidEast Peace Process’ or Israel, although undoubtedly some will try.

If I were the Muslim leadership in this country, I’d try to put together a Million Muslim March on Washington to protest the Orlando, San Bernadino, Boston etc. etc. massacres, as blots on the name of Islam. ISIS would probably try to kill a few, but it’s time for them to stand up, assuming there are large numbers of US Muslims that actually think this way.

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You could not have a better example of how totally out of touch elite opinion is and the placement and timing of these articles is exactly an expression of elite opinion.

I had thought that the terrorists would be lying low until after the election, as terrorist acts work in Trump’s favor. But as a friend said about another Muslim group — they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The paper I’d planned to write about is Nature vol. 537 pp. 107 ’16 (1 September 2016 Issue).

Now on to Trump’s health information.

The impeccable timing of the New York Times

After putting ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers on page 1 saying he wished he’d ‘bombed more’ the day of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the New York Times kept its unenviable timing record intact by posting “Dreams of my Muslim Son” about Islamophobia on the editorial page the day of the Orlando massacre. Usually they run their invariable innocent Muslims fearing hate crimes by American rednecks story a day or so after the latest atrocity.

Unfortunately Orlando can’t be camouflaged as workplace violence or the response to some video or other a la Benghazi. The perp was far too explicit. Nor can it be blamed on the failure of ‘the MidEast Peace Process’ or Israel, although undoubtedly some will try.

If I were the Muslim leadership in this country, I’d try to put together a Million Muslim March on Washington to protest the Orlando, San Bernadino, Boston etc. etc. massacres, as blots on the name of Islam. ISIS would probably try to kill a few, but it’s time for them to stand up, assuming there are large numbers of US Muslims that actually think this way.

Ebola

This morning (15 October) it was announced that a second health care worker at the Texas hospital where an ebola patient died has ‘tested positive’ for it. If ebola can spread in a hospital environment where presumably precautions were taken, once it gets out into the populace at large it can spread much faster. This had to be human to human transmission — no other animal vector is involved (as it probably is in Africa).

How does it spread? We don’t know, but the two Texas cases probably imply that airborne spread is possible.

What to do?

In our case it means not getting into a confined space with over 100 people we don’t know from all over the world for an 8 – 16 hour period (e.g. an international flight). Have you ever been on a flight where no one had a cold?

For the USA, it should mean banning all flights from endemic countries. This has been the case in the past. My cousin’s wife has a lot of relatives in Brazil, because the people on the boat had lots of pink eye, and the boat was simply turned away over 100 years ago.

It should mean caring for Ebola patients in specialized facilities where only they are cared for –e.g. not in a general hospital since we don’t know how it spreads.

The greatest way to spread the disease (the Hajj — millions of people from all over the world crowded together for days followed by worldwide dispersal) has mercifully just ended before the disease escaped Africa to any extent.

Will ISIS or Al-Qaeda try to bring Ebola to the USA? Of course.

We live in a society where children have supervised play dates, and where walking unattended to school is almost considered child abuse. What will happen to such a risk-averse society when there is actual risk to going out to (the mall, the school, to work)?

Maryam Mirzakhani

“The universal scientific language is broken English.” So sayeth Don Voet 50+ years ago when we were graduate students. He should know, as his parents were smart enough to get the hell out of the Netherlands before WWII. I met them and they told me that there was some minor incident there involving Germans who promptly went bananas. They decided that this wasn’t the way a friendly country behaved and got out. Just about everyone two generations back in my family was an immigrant, so I heard a lot of heavily accented (if not broken) English growing up.

Which (at last) brings us to Maryam Mirzakhani, a person probably not familiar to chemists, but a brilliant mathematician who has just won the Fields Medal (the Nobel of mathematics). Born in Teheran and educated through college there, she came to Harvard for her PhD, and has remained here ever since and is presently a full prof. at Stanford.

Why she chose to stay here isn’t clear. The USA has picked up all sorts of brains from the various European upheavals and petty hatreds (see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/hitlers-gifts-and-russias-gift/). Given the present and past state of the middle East, I’ve always wondered if we’d scooped up any of the talent originating there. Of course, all chemists know of E. J. Corey, a Lebanese Christian, but he was born here 86 years ago. Elias Zerhouni former director of the NIH, was born in Algeria. That’s about all I know at this level of brilliance and achievement. I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed. Hopefully more such people are already here but haven’t established themselves as yet. This is possible, given that they come from a region without world class scientific institutions. Hitler singlehandedly destroyed the great German departments of Mathematics and Physics and the USA (and England) picked up the best of them.

Given the way things are going presently, the USA may shortly acquire a lot of Muslim brains from Europe. All it will take is a few random beheadings of Europeans in their home countries by the maniacs of ISIS and their ilk. Look what Europeans did to a people who did not physically threaten them during WWII. Lest you think this sort of behavior was a purely German aberration, try Googling Quisling and Marshal Petain. God knows what they’ll do when they are actually threatened. Remember, less than 20 years ago, the Europeans did nothing as Muslims were being slaughtered by Serbs in Kosovo.

Not to ignore the awful other side of the coin, the religious cleansing of the middle East of Christians by the larger Muslim community. The politically correct here have no love of Christianity. However, the continued passivity of American Christians is surprising. Whatever happened to “Onward Christian Soldiers” which seemed to be sung by all at least once a week in the grade school I attended 60+ years ago.

These are very scary times.