Thursday, July 3, 2014

SAR #14183



Religious fundamentalists insist that we are meant to copulate only a few times during our lives, each time producing a new Christian. Anything else is immoral and ungodly and not protected by the First Amendment. 
 
Creepy Mission: Those US soldiers who were sent to Iraq to provide non-combat advice and support to the Iraqis are doing so from the pilot's seat of Apache attack helicopters. Alongside the Russian and Iranian jet fighters. 
 
Fear & Loathing: The gullible are winning. People who have fallen for the long since disproven myth that vaccinations are the Devil's work have, in the last decade, lifted measles from the 'nearly eradicated' category to a new 20-year high as their right to be idiots continues to trump the right of the community to be healthy. An unvaccinated child should be prima facie evidence of child abuse.

The Sins of the Father... The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that it is perfectly reasonable for the IDF to destroy the home a Palestinian who kills an Israeli. Preferably when no one is home, but stuff happens.

Freedom From Information: The Republican-led House Ethics Committee (sic) , already well-known for shielding everyone who knows the secret handshake from any ethics violations, has ruled that congresscritters no longer have to let their constituents (I use the term loosely, meaning those who live in the districts they pretend to represent) about the free airplane trips they get from their real constituents.

Consider: A 'Google Glass' is, among other things, a camera. It can take pictures. It can take pictures of you. It can take pictures of you at the ATM machine....

The Little Things: Since 2000, over 60,000 US factories have closed. Today over 50 million Americans are unemployed or under-employed. 55% of used cars (and 30% of new cars) are bought with subprime loans. And factory orders ex-defense spending fell 30% in June. Real rents have risen 15% in the last 25 years, while real incomes have not gone up a penny.

The Wrong Arm Of The Law: Cops in Michigan have gained live, real-time access to private security cameras in downtown areas, the better to watch you in the elevator. Or dressing room. Whatever.


16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fear & Loathing:

People should not blindly accept vaccinations from companies like convicted Racketeer PFIZER. Don't blame people who do due diligence. Blame BIG PHARMA for corrupting science and medical research just like the Banksters corrupted Finance.

No needles for me unless sound Science and reliable, uncorrupted manufacturing lie behind the product. Until then.......

GS said...

@Anonymous
There's not a single study that would indicate any long-term problem with vaccines. To the contrary, all meta-analyses, cohort studies and whatnot say one thing: long-term gains very much outweigh risk, and bring no significant adverse results. Sorry, but this Big Pharma scare is baseless. The science is sound.

Anonymous said...

So, as far as vaccines, we should throw Due Diligence out the window? Great advice in this day of rampant Fraud and a Metastasizing Crime Wave.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

In my defense, I'll amend the 'child abuse' to vaccinations which prevent communicable diseases. And I'd limit the imposition of evidence based treatments to communicable diseases. If yoou, for yourself and only for yourself, chose to get sick and possibly die from a preventable disease, that's your right. You do not get to make that choice for anyone else.

You have no right to chose to make me ill, if such prevention is proven and available. You - parent or not - do not have the right to leave your kid in a locked car in August, nor to otherwise by act or intentional neglect to harm that child - or mine.

McMike said...

You act as if vaccines have no side effects. They do have side effects. Children die occasionally or become permanently disabled after receiving vaccines - this is a fact and there is in fact a preemptive blanket liability waiver fund in place for compensation that has paid out billions. Many more children are harmed in ways that are harder to prove direct causality (i.e. the effects occur not within the short window for direct causality), but certainly have clear correlation. Others suffer more mild effects like severe fevers, headaches, nausea (this is in fact common). These numbers are statistically small perhaps, but for the kids who died or disappeared into catatonic neurological dysfunction after a vaccine, all too real. In some cases, the number of adverse reactions outnumber the former mortality rates of the disease itself.

So, it is not a risk-free choice as you imply, but in fact it is a choice between two risks. When you are vaccinating, you are in fact choosing between two lotteries: the getting-a-bad-case-of-flu/measles/chickenpox lottery versus the having-an-adverse-reaction lottery. Different people choose differently.

In this age of captive, hamstrung, corrupt, feckless regulators (FDA) and serial pathological companies (pharma) and rampant corporate criminality (everywhere) the parental negligence is in taking these craven sociopaths word for anything. Putting your children's health in the hands of this criminal/fascist cabal is what's crazy. I'll take my chances with the seasonal flu, thank you very much.

There are in fact no studies of long term effects because it is unknowable - there are too many variables from diet to environmental toxins to vaccines to single out what is going on inside our bodies. What is known is that as vaccines have increased, our general health-fullness has decreased. Measles cases have gone down indeed, coinciding alarmingly with immune and neurological degenerative conditions that have blown off the charts. Unheard of rates of autism and asthma and cancers and God-only knows what other tragic and heartbreaking degenerative childhood diseases are ravaging our children.

Some people choose to opt out of the for-profit war on our children's bodies using the exact same logic as they do to eat organic foods, protest fracking, avoid GMO foods, get off the technology utopian fantasy train, boycott Wall Street banks, and forgo preemptive antibiotic regimens after receiving minor wounds or surgeries.

There are a variety of other factors here that you might learn if you bothered to educate yourself. Concerns about corruption and conflicts of interest in the science and at the FDA; evidence of overzealous public health officials covering up a variety of concerns; clear evidence of chronic criminality on the part of drug companies; concerns about the adjuncts, preservatives, genetic modification, and nanotech in vaccines; concerns that vaccines may be leading to resistance problems in a way similar to antibiotic overuse; evidence that vaccines are not as effective as advertised; that recently-vaccinated people may in fact be vectors for spread; that scientists don’t actually know what vaccines do in any detailed sense, only that the "seem" to work, and on and on.

It was not that long ago that tobacco executive stood before Congress and insisted with a straight face that the sky was not blue. Same too for DDT before it, and fracking since. Some of us believe that the vaccine industry is following the same path.

GS said...

@McMike
I don't know where exactly you read that vaccines are 'risk-free': there are well-known (usually insignificant) side-effects, and there's always risk -- any medical intervention brings risks, the syringe needle use alone can cause complications and result in injury or death, even without any actual injection. However, research shows clearly that gains very much outweigh the risk. Because the alternative -- refraining from vaccinating -- is much more risky and deadly. The logic of avoiding risk in this case is flawed. Parents could equally well, say, prefer to drive their children to the summer camp in their SUV instead of sending them by train, because trains sometimes crash. Except that trains are orders of magnitude safer as means of transportation, so this would actually endanger the children -- the opposite of eliminating risk.

And in this case you endanger not just yourself and your children -- that's why you have no moral advantage here. Your freedom ends where other people's safety begins, exactly as in the case of driving regulations and car safety regulations. You may downplay the risk by lightly mentioning this "seasonal flu", but that's very telling actually. In reality, you're hand-waving away polio, measles, whooping cough and other diseases with a very well quantified mortality and long-term injury rate -- way over vaccination risk.

The Big Pharma scare is just that -- a scare. And please, just drop that nonsense about autism, asthma etc. There is NO research giving credible evidence of ANY long-term risk of adverse effects of vaccination. NONE. This is a very well researched area of medicine, don't make me quote all the meta-analyses and cohort studies here. The scientific controversy exists exclusively in the minds of the anti-vaccine movement. Vaccines save lives, and the anti-vaccine crowd endanger not only their own children, but have just caused the return of long defeated diseases -- without making a tiny dent on the autism and asthma statistics, by the way.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

GS - Thank you so much for presenting the adult view on this topic. " Vaccines save lives, and the anti-vaccine crowd endanger not only their own children, but have just caused the return of long defeated diseases" should be the last word.

ckm

McMike said...

Sorry, but the notion that i have an obligation to medicate my children preemptively in order to reduce another person's likelihood of getting the flu or chicken pox is dubious - or HPV for God's sake - and starts to smell a lot like arguments for eugenics.

Your fear of your own body and loathing of disease - and undo blind faith in infallible medicine - is your problem.


Further, your entire ethical premise is twisted and false. The idea that unvaccinated people cause threats to those who are vaccinated has been repeatedly proven false, aside wooly and tortured notions of "herd immunity". And even the CDC has come out and admitted that the whooping cough cases of late are not due to unvaccinated people, and may in fact be do to the recently vaccinated.

Please direct me to the studies that absolve vaccines from long term implications in degenerative health conditions.

Anonymous said...

Big Pharma is a "scare".

PFIZER is not a convicted Racketeer? You want your vaccine from a Racketeer?

Stop avoiding this issue and fully explain why you want your medicine from a Racketeer.

Please also address why Fraud and Crime in Medicine should be treated differently than Fraud and Crime on Wall Street. Is there some sort of Magic Firewall here?

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Note to Self & Staff: Please, Oh Please, stop me from bringing up vaccination again ...

ckm

McMike said...

... or at least refrain from labeling thoughtful dedicated loving parents who don't share your blanket fear of disease or unquestioning trust in the vaccine industry "child abusers."

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Nope. Spade's a spade. - ckm

GS said...

@CKM
Well, let me stretch your patience this last time, because I'm going to answer again. After that, it's over and out for me on this subject.

@McMike
To put it bluntly: your child is not your property. And failing to secure their -- and other people's children's -- safety from contagious diseases amounts to parental and civil irresponsibility. I'm not in the least surprised that some governments choose to regulate the issue.

The "vaccine industry", "Big Pharma" etc. etc. are just scares and smokescreens. It's not "Big Pharma" that's been coming up time after time, year after year, with research that flatly contradicts the 'autism' or 'asthma' nonsense. Finding a company guilty of racketeering doesn't change anything in the findings produced over the years by the medical scientific community.

And speaking of Magic Firewalls and corruption: the whole new wave of the anti-vaccination movement is built on the original fraud by Andrew Wakefield, who pocketed £400 000 from class action lawyers for "research" that would allow them to reap money using suits exploiting the original MMR-autism scare. Well, guess what -- there proved to be no connection between vaccines and autism:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X14006367%20%C2%A0

This is just one of a long series of studies, cohort studies and meta-analyses that confirm that the fraud was a fraud.

Asthma, "degenerative diseases", and the poring over every individual component of the vaccines have been invented to cover the baselessness of the original scare. Well, guess what -- vaccines do not induce asthma:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12182372
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14971117

In fact, vaccination may reduce the risk of asthma:

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/168/11/1277.short

The anti-vaccination movement keeps inventing new ploys (mercury, thimerosal, borax etc) whose ominous effects keep being disproven by new research. Now they're retreating into the "degenerative diseases" area, in search of rare diseases of complicated etiology that would allow them to keep blowing smoke in the eyes of the general public. Well, guess what: for many of the diseases, that "seasonal flu" that you so happily accept is a much greater risk factor than the anti-influenza shot itself. Illnesses often cause complications, you know. Including neurological ones. Ask your child's pediatrician one day.

You're of course free to profess any anti-scientific prejudice you choose. But just as religious principles don't immunize you from breaking car safety regulations, prejudice doesn't grant you the right to play with your children's -- and other people's children's -- health and safety. If you're not competent enough to judge the risk of such behaviour yourself, don't be surprised when you're looked at as an incompetent parent, and forced to comply with public policies in this respect.

Over and out.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

No, no, McMike - I did not intend to cut anyone off from this or any other discussion (well, aside from some few off-topi and off-their-meds folks). Carry on - especially if you are supporting my point of view!

I just need to remember that there are a few seriously misinformed folks on a few subjects, and it is best not to rattle their cages. Just because I'm going to refrain or restrain does not mean you should.

Have at it.

ckm

Anonymous said...

McMike-
Seek help dude. see if there is a cure for dumbasses...

Unknown said...

I know what I'm gonna do... buy stock in companies that make tiny baby coffins....