Ebola Could Mutate into an Airborne Virus; "Bar Entry from Affected Countries" Says Liberty GB

Tuesday during a House of Lords debate Labour's Lord Robert Winston, a medical doctor who has presented scientific TV programs, said that Ebola could mutate into an airborne virus that is caught like a common cold.

He was reacting to Health Minister Earl Howe's remark at the House of Commons that the Ebola risk to British people "remains low".

At the moment the disease is passed through bodily contact or fluids such as blood and sweat, but the contagion risk would increase if the virus became airborne.

Lord Winston asserted: "I am slightly concerned about the possible risk of seeming a little complacent about saying that this is low-risk. We know that viruses mutate, for example, and we know that the Ebola virus can mutate."

He was echoing a similar concern expressed on US television by an expert on the Ebola virus, Purdue University virologist Dr. David Sanders, who has been studying this virus since 2003.

Sanders made his concern known after – in the first person-to-person transmission of Ebola on US soil - Texas Presbyterian Hospital nurse Nina Pham contracted the virus from Thomas Duncan, a Liberian patient who, if proper controls had been in place, should not even have been in America . The associate professor of biological sciences explained: “So we actually have the data that show that Ebola enters into lung tissue from the airway side. This was done with human lung tissue. And it enters by the exactly same side of the cell as influenza enters cells. So it clearly has that inherent capacity to get into the lungs from the airway”.

In another interview he had warned: “So this argues that Ebola is primed to be able to have respiratory transmission... We need to be taking this into consideration – what if. This is not a crazy what if. This is not a loud what if.”

The US Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), a global leader in addressing public health preparedness and emerging infectious disease response, about a month ago had already reported: ”We believe there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.”

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, harshly criticised in the States for their mishandling of the crisis, seem to start accepting this possibility.

The heightened risk of contracting Ebola due to respiratory transmission, if confirmed, will and should put more pressure on British authorities to stop potential carriers from entering the UK.

President Obama has been accused of putting American lives at risk for the sake of political correctness, by refusing to suspend travel visas from Ebola-affected countries.

Here in the UK, Public Health England and Border Force officials admitted that there is no fixed plan on how to deal with people who have visited affected countries but refuse to give details or to have their temperature taken.

Screening for Ebola has started at British airports but it emerged that the process is voluntary.

Keeping in mind that “After Ghana and Gambia, the UK has the third highest risk globally because of the large number of people and flights from the epidemic region to London”, the Liberty GB party believes that the first step to protect the British public is to bar from entry to the UK people from the Ebola-stricken countries.

NUS Rejects Anti-ISIS Motion as "Islamophobic"

You have to see it to believe it.

A student of Kurdish descent has submitted a resolution to the UK's National Union of Students (NUS) to condemn the Islamic State, but the motion has been rejected because it offended the sensibilities of the Union’s Black Students Officer (BSO) who led a voting bloc to defeat it.

The NUS considers the ongoing conflict with ISIS to be “Islamophobic”.

You couldn't make this up. At least they recognise that ISIS represents Islam, and is not some totally extraneous group that for some hard-to-fathom reason has decided to associate itself to the "religion of peace" while beheading people like there's no tomorrow.

From Breitbart London:

One member of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) group took to his blog to bemoan the fact the Union’s Black Student Officer could railroad the motion apparently by virtue of race alone. Complaining of the excessive power the Liberation campaigns enjoy he said: “the idea is widespread that if a Liberation Officer opposes something, it must be bad… people see or claim to see debate on the Middle East as something that the BSO should somehow have veto power over, regardless of the issues and the arguments made”.

Apart from the purported Islamophobia that supporting a minority group being raped and murdered by the Islamic State implies, the involvement of the United States in the conflict appears to have caused the greatest division among the various elements of the NUS, as the traditional bête noire of right-on student politics is flying air-missions in support of the Kurdish army.

The NCAFC blogger was realistic about the utility of American intervention, remarking: “the Kurds and Yazidis thus far would not have been able to survive if it had not been for aid from the Americans. Calling simply for an end to this intervention is the same as calling for the defeat of the Peshmerga forces by ISIS”.

As the motion was defeated by a combination of abstainees and the BSO power of opinion setting, in the words of the angered bloggers this time the NUS thought it preferable to “sit back and watch the slaughter” than to ally themselves with a “pro USA intervention” vote.

Biggest Scientific Study Suggests Life after Death

"First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study", headlines The Telegraph, going on to say: "Southampton University scientists have found evidence that awareness can continue for at least several minutes after clinical death which was previously thought impossible".

Does this prove that there is life after death and that God exists?

Of course not, but it shows without a shadow of a doubt that there are many phenomena and events that science doesn't explain about the nature of consciousness and of the mind in general.

Someone's answer to that migtht be that science will one day explain everything: but that belief requires a deep faith in itself. Even though the object of that faith is science and not God, faith it is.

What is paradoxical about the way in which atheists - "unbelievers" is a misnomer, as they do believe without empirical or rational foundation in many things -, since 19th-century positivism to today's Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, have associated decline of religion with progress of science is that the advances in the latter, if anything, have demonstrated to us how many things in the universe, life and mind science doesn't understand, most notably their origin. And there are very good reasons to predict that it never will, as they probably require other constructs, other ways of thinking and other kinds of explanantion.

The connection between the brain, a material object, and the mind, or rather how the physicality of the former can produce the non-physicality of the latter, has not become clearer the more it has been studied and researched by science, but in fact the opposite has occurred: the questions have multiplied, while the answers have diminished in proportion.

It's perfectly true that it's in the nature of scientific investigation that every new problem solved, every new question answered gives rise to new problems and questions, which inspired one of the greatest philosophers of science, Sir Karl Popper, to title his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest.

But there is a difference between the type of investigation in which science excels, where satisfactory theories that can survive rigorous tests are reached, and the type of investigation which displays an exponentially increasing discrepancy between problems and their solutions.

What the neo-positivists of the early 20th century, like the Vienna Circle - thinking that they were following Ludwig Wittgenstein but in fact misinterpreting him -, were saying was that questions which cannot be answered by mere logic and empiricism (hence one of their names, "logic empiricists") should not be asked and pursued. Metaphysics and theology were nonsense. This was a way of limiting all intellectual search of knowledge to science.

This position has serious limitations. First a logical one: it is a self-contradictory position. If anything beyond the realm of science is nonsensical, what these philosophers (and their heirs today) are saying is nonsensical too, as it does not limit itself to logic and empirical evidence: they are engaging in metaphysics as well, albeit to oppose another metaphysical view.

And this takes us to its second serious limitation: if even people who have postulated boundaries for intellectual investigation cannot confine themselves to them and remain within them, that by itself is an indication that those boundaries are too narrow and unsatisfactory. And that science cannot provide all the answers that are necessary for a curious mind to be satisfied.

Even more, what if science itself, as it seems to be the case the more it expands and deepens, points to something outside itself?

From The Telegraph article:

The largest ever medical study into near-death and out-of-body experiences has discovered that some awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down completely.

It is a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread scepticism.

But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria.

And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room.

Despite being unconscious and ‘dead’ for three minutes, the 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of the machines.

“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.

“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.

“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.

“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”

Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and of 140 surveyed, 39 per cent said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated.

Although many could not recall specific details, some themes emerged. One in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness while nearly one third said time had slowed down or speeded up.

Some recalled seeing a bright light; a golden flash or the Sun shining. Others recounted feelings of fear or drowning or being dragged through deep water. 13 per cent said they had felt separated from their bodies and the same number said their sensed had been heightened.

Dr Parnia believes many more people may have experiences when they are close to death but drugs or sedatives used in the process of rescuitation may stop them remembering.

“Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best.

“Many people have assumed that these were hallucinations or illusions but they do seem to corresponded to actual events.

“And a higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.

“These experiences warrant further investigation.“

Dr David Wilde, a research psychologist and Nottingham Trent University, is currently compiling data on out-of-body experiences in an attempt to discover a pattern which links each episode.

He hopes the latest research will encourage new studies into the controversial topic.

“Most studies look retrospectively, 10 or 20 years ago, but the researchers went out looking for examples and used a really large sample size, so this gives the work a lot of validity.

“There is some very good evidence here that these experiences are actually happening after people have medically died.

“We just don’t know what is going on. We are still very much in the dark about what happens when you die and hopefully this study will help shine a scientific lens onto that.” [All emphases added]

It's Not Bias that Makes US Whites Wary of Blacks

Whites walking down Main Street with an AK-47 are defenders of American values; a black man doing the same thing is Public Enemy No. 1.

These are the words of Charles Gallagher, professor at La Salle University in Pennsylvania and "a sociologist who studies race", according to a CNN article on guns-race relationship.

The assumption is that Americans are biased against black people.

The reality is very different. The picture above, taken in August of this year, shows some of the over 30 members of the all-black Huey P. Newton Gun Club "gathered to march through South Dallas with rifles, shotguns, and AR-15s. The group eventually entered a restaurant with their weapons while Dallas police officers were inside eating lunch."

But the police hardly looked at them.

Sociologist Gallagher doesn't accuse white Americans buying a gun of being racist en masse, only of "being human, of unconsciously absorbing stereotypical attitudes about black men and violence that are as old as America itself."

But here as well what he says is far from the truth. You don't find those stereotypical attitudes in US white culture, dominated by political correctness and guilt feelings about American past.

Quite the opposite. Hollywood portrays much more frequently whites than blacks as criminals. The mainstream media are so sensitive to this issue that The Associated Press Stylebook, containing the United States' (and internationally) most authoritative guidelines for reporting, prescribes:

Racial identification should not be included in any story unless such reference is clearly relevant to the story or when part of a detailed description of a fugitive.

Gun Watch comments:

The downplay of black predominance in crime is so great, that most people in urban areas now assume that if the race of the perpetrator is not mentioned, they are black. It is an open joke. The AP attempt to prevent a stereotype, has become emblematic of the social engineering by the old media. It has had some effect, but reality overrides it.

The reality is represented by the official statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice:

[For homicide] The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

American blacks perpetrate almost 8 times more murders per capita than whites.

And this is not the only relevant figure. You'll find more of them here: US Racist and Capital Crimes Have a Black Hue .

Clacton Question Time Possible Bias

If you've ever watched the political debate program Question Time on the BBC, you'll have noticed that the audience in the studio - that asks the panelists topical questions - is constantly predominantly belonging to the Left and extreme Left of the political spectrum, and doesn't seem to be in tune with - let alone representative of - the general public opinion.

To dispel doubts of bias, the BBC once explained that its criterion for choosing the audience is that the latter should represent the various proportions of political views of the local population. Each show has a different location in a British town or city and, according to this criterion, when the broadcast is in Bath, the studio audience should include roughly the same proportion of Conservatives, Labour etc found in Bath.

How can the BBC explain, then, the kind of treatment (not quite lynch mob but getting there) reserved by the members of the audience to the UKIP's Economic spokesman and MEP Patrick O'Flynn on the last Question Time, Thursday 9 October in Clacton on Sea, Essex?

That same day, the by-election held in the Clacton constituency had returned a massive majority for UKIP with nearly 60% of the votes, the highest ever percentage increase (from 0 to 60) in a by-election in British history.

And yet, anyone watching the program would have thought that the people of Clacton viscerally hate the UKIP and love Labour, which came a lame third in the electoral results with just over 11% of the votes.

The possible explanations are prima facie two: either the BBC takes a long time to catch up with public opinion, or the apparently impartial criterion it indicated as the basis for its choice of audiences is not the one actually used.

London Says "Ban Jihadis" as New Terror Plot Is Discovered

Last Tuesday 7 October counter-terrorism officers and armed police have arrested four jihadists plotting a "significant" terror attack in London, and are still interrogating them.

One line of enquiry is that the group was plotting a Mumbai-style gun attack in the capital.

Scotland Yard and the MI5 suspect that the plot was linked to the Islamic State, the first plot directly inspired by the IS. At least one of the four men in their early 20s arrested had recently returned to Britain from Syria.

The police are convinced we are in a more intense phase of Islamic terrorism, increased by the threat of Muslim fighters coming back from their involvement in the Syria and Iraq violence.

Referring to the latest foiled plot, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, speaking to BBC London Radio, gave a grave warning: "[I|t is a quite serious case.

"It is one of a series of arrests that we have had over the last few weeks which taken together for me confirm that the drumbeat around terrorism has changed.

"It's a more intense drumbeat - we are having to be more interventionist and a lot of it is linked back to Syria and Iraq."

It looks like public opinion is getting the message loud and clear, as a Wednesday's YouGov poll showed that three out of four Londoners (74%) think that Britons who have travelled to Syria or Iraq to fight with extremist groups should be banned from returning to the UK.

This is what my party Liberty GB says, and it's been part of our policies regarding Islam since the beginning of the present crisis.

If we break down the survey results, it's interesting to see that women (at 77%) more than men (70%) are in favour of banning jihadists from entering the country.

But only 49% of people aged 18-24 support it, which is the unmpteenth confirmation that lowering the voting age is a bad idea, and it should in fact be increased.

In the last few weeks extra armed patrols have been employed all over London due to fears of increasing Islamic terrorism.

This plot has been foiled, but how long before another one cannot be stopped and we have a new atrocity?

And how long before the public realises that Islam is the problem and the number of Muslims who are sworn enemies of Britain - tiny minorities or not - is very large and counting?

Politically Correct Language Thoughts

If a prostitute is a sex worker, is a thief an expropriation worker? And a hitman a dispatch worker?

If a homosexual is gay, is a necrophiliac happy?

If Before Christ is Before the Common Era and Anno Domini is Common Era, is Jesus Christ a common good?

If a person who criticises Islam is suffering from Islamophobia, is a person who criticises him suffering from Islamophobiaphobia?

If someone opposed to Third World immigration to the West is a racist, is someone in favour of it a Westist?

If believing that a woman should cook is misogynist, is believing that a man should do the dishes misandrist?

If someone who researches evidence on the subject of the Holocaust is a Holocaust denier, is someone who is engaged in research on any historical subject a history denier?

If a person who doubts anthropogenic global warming theory is a climate change denier, is a person who doubts flat earth theory a flat earth denier?