By Nathan Barton

Good morning!

Crude oil prices are continuing to dive, nearing $80 a barrel on Wednesday, down from $95 in just a few hours, while some are predicting going as low as $60 a barrel within a few months.  Clearly, a combination of factors is driving it down, including most recently the Ebola scare.  Remember that lower crude oil prices DO mean (eventually) lower gasoline and diesel prices, but also negatives: I have several relatives whose retirement income could be greatly reduced by lower prices – and many communities (even the fabled North Dakota economy) can be harmed as well.

Mama’s Note: Yes, that’s too bad for some, but a welcome part of market fluctuations for most of us. The positive is the reduction in all farming, manufacturing and shipping costs, a big boon to everyone, whatever their income source.

Is requiring hospitals to provide emergency room care unconstitutional? So posits the Cato Institute.  Since 1986, American hospitals have been subject to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), requiring hospitals which contract with Medicare and which have emergency rooms (ERs) to treat and stabilize all patients who present themselves to the ER, regardless of that person’s ability to pay.  More than a few of us have pointed out that in reality, that is little more than a form of slavery: of forcing people and owners of the equipment and materials used to provide labor without hope of recompense, much less payment in a timely manner.  It is impairing contracts between people, which supposedly is against the principles of liberty.

Does the CDC need more funding? Politico thinks so: With the Ebola crisis growing, some pundits are blaming the United States for failing to fund the fight against Ebola at sufficient levels.  However, this political claim mostly by Democrats that the GOP is “to blame” for Ebola reaching the United States, because they refused to provide “adequate levels of funding” as requested by the Fuehrer.  The facts are now widely understood that Congress actually gave HIGHER funding to the CDC than the White House asked.  But BOTH these positions miss the point: the CDC is a big, scum-filled, incompetent bureaucratic agency whose reputation has been totally destroyed by the facts of lab scandals, contamination, and now the stupid response to Ebola.

The latest Ebola victim identified in Texas again proves that the CDC (and its putative master, the Fuehrer) has again failed both to tell the truth and to respond properly.  This woman flew from Cleveland to Dallas on the 13th, the DAY before she was diagnosed, potentially exposing another 132 people just on the Frontier airliner.  If she was asymptotic, according to CDC, she could not infect them with the virus, so WHY are they questioning the people on the aircraft?  And why NOT check on the people in Cleveland and Dallas airports?   Or the people she came in contact with in Dallas before going to the hospital?  And nurses in Dallas say that the hospital and CDC lied about what training they received and the protocols that they followed. Is Dallas now doomed? The CIDRAP (at the University of Minnesota) now claims that Ebola CAN be transmitted by air.  How will panic affect this?  Will the FedGov panic and implement the various executive orders and start rounding people up, or will they panic and shut down the CIDRAP for fearmongering?

Government officials panic so easily, that we can expect far worse results from their panic than from the “threat” we are actually faces.  Consider how a school treated a five-year-old girl who drew what “might have been” a gun, and pointed her crayon at others and went “pew, pew.” She is now, officially, a homicide and suicide risk, to the idiots in the school.  Mom, get your girl OUT of that idiotic place.  It is too late for a 17-year-old former honor student in her senior year in Michigan, punished for forgetting to have a 3-1/4-inch pocket knife forgotten in her purse after work, because the school district panicked and the “law” is only 3-inch blades are “legal.”

Apparently panic was the order of the day at Southern Oregon University, where administrators stated it was illegal for students to pass out copies of the US Constitution near dorms on PUBLIC property.  The students, of course, were evil: they were advocates of concealed carry on campus, so the campus dictators -excuse me, administrators- claimed that they were scaring other students.

Maybe it is possible that all things concerned, the FedGov is more concerned about things like this and so isn’t panicking.  Apparently the First Consort dances with turnips. Well, I guess that is better than having sex with a horse or declaring yourself a god or all the other things that their mentors in ancient Rome did. (I don’t know if sexual attraction to turnips is a treatable condition, and it is too bad that Joan Rivers is dead: she would have had such fun with this!)

As I have pointed out several times, Ebola is NOT the only medical danger threatening society and the economy.  New York City is the home of 8 million humans but 80 million rats, and a recent study found some really nasty stuff in just 138 of them: at least 18 pathogens that cause disease in humans, and dozens of ways to cause food poisoning.  It isn’t just the NYPD and NYC schools that are bad for you.

And we are still NOT properly dealing with Enterovirus D-68, according to stories that seem to be more and more divorced from reality: we are now told that only 700 cases have been identified (down from thousands) but there are at least six deaths and at least 30 people per day are getting the disease (mostly children) but that will increase to 90 per day, and there are now 46 states and DC that have cases.  The lies seem to be spreading as fast as the disease, which has the potential for being as bad or worse than Ebola or SARS or MERS or AIDS.