Fuck These People!

Two Infants Too Young For Vaccinations Contract Measles From Unvaccinated People At Disneyland

How the fuck do we allow this to happen?

How have we not, in this day and age, made vaccinations mandatory?

I mean, I get why we would have thought that it would never be necessary , but now it clearly is, thanks to people who take medical advice from Playboy models.

  

Wait, this isn't the Lancet!

Fuck these idiots and their stupid paranoid conspiracy theories. Vaccinations scare them? Too fucking bad. You don't get to risk your child's life because you don't get how science works, and you don't get to risk the lives of everyone else's kids because you think that you're smarter than every doctor in the fucking world.

Yes, if we make vaccinations mandatory, some people will be unhappy. Boo fucking hoo. Welcome to society. Everyone is unhappy about some law or other. After seeing Wolf of Wall Street, I'm a little unhappy that I can't try quaaludes. But you know what, too bad for me, we live in a society, so I'll just have to try to get along without them.

These people are hurting babies. BABIES! They're hurting and possibly killing babies. Not these kind of "babies" 

 

But these kind:

  

Of course, if it were the first kind, Congress would have already passed the "Unborn Protection from Infectious Disease Act of 2015"

So fuck these people. Childhood vaccinations need to be made mandatory. Enough of this bullshit.

Is FOX Even Trying Anymore?

Because this is pathetic!





I don't know what is worse, that FOX thinks two little girls with a lemonade stand is somehow proving some sort of point, or that the little girls' parents are willing to trot them out on TV as right-wing stooges, repeating bs talking points that they don't really even  understand. Or maybe the fact that their parents apparently think that it's just adorable for their little daughters to refer to them as "investors" and claim that their lemonade recipe is "proprietary." Yeah, that's the worst part. Oh, look honey. Our little darlings are already talking like little business school douchebags. Isn't that sweet?

If by "sweet" you mean "sad and creepy," then yeah. Totally sweet!

And I swear to God, no one has ever been worse at any job than Brian Kilmeade is at his.

Kilmeade began his segment with the Sutton sisters by playing a clip of Obama saying that business owners "didn't build" their businesses. . .
"These two girls beg to differ," the Fox News host claimed. "They built their lemonade business, not only without government help, but without any help. . . Who helped you start this business?"

You can't say that they didn't have any help and then ask who helped? You just can't be that ridiculous. Except on FOX I guess.

"Clara, how do you feel about the president saying that you needed help to start this business?" Kilmeade asked. "And just speak from within." [Because, yeah, a 7-year-old totally understands what that means!]
"I would say that's rude because we worked very hard to build this business -- but we did have help," Clara insisted. 

So. . . . it's rude to say that you needed help, but you did have help? I know you're just repeating what your idiot parents are telling you to say, but even if a 7-year-old doesn't see the gap in logic, Kilmeade is a fucking grown man. How does he not say, "oh, now I see why we shouldn't have 7-year-olds making our political points for us" and just throw to commercial? 

Four-year-old Eliza added: "My brother does things he likes to do, and he says, 'Car, car' every time. Every time he sees a car!"

You mean a car driving on a government-built road, pulling up to the government-built curb to buy some of your lemonade from the stand that your "investors" helped you build? My God, what rugged individualists!

Fox reporter says dumbest thing ever about global warming

(via C&L)

Fox Business reporter Tracy Byrnes says that climate change is overblown because the temperature of the Earth "basically hasn't changed much since the Ice Age."



Seriously, the temperature hasn't changed much since the ice age. The freakin Ice Age! Which is why much of North America is still covered by glaciers. And why Wooly Mammoth burgers are one of our most popular foods.

 

A typical Spring day here in Atlanta

 Does this idiot really not understand what "Ice Age" means?

 

Try renting this. It should be about your speed.

 

Bachmann Slaps the Shit out of Perry

Not literally, unfortunately, but she kicked his ass on this exchange. (gets good around the 2-minute mark)
This was so good, it almost makes me want to like Michele Bachmann, if it weren't for everything else about Michele Bachmann.



Oh, snap! So you're offended that someone would think you could be bought for a mere $5,000? How much does it take?

Of course, Bachman is right for all the wrong reasons. Her main objection seems to be that this was a "government injection," which means, what exactly? I'm not sure. Either the immunization was a good idea or it wasn't (hint: it wasn't. You can tell because Rick Perry was involved) but the government's involvement doesn't make it bad. Nor does it make it good, but if you're going to just dismiss something out of hand because it comes from the government, well, I hope you like not driving on paved roads, or getting your mail, or having a police department, etc. etc. etc. . . .

Oh, but don't worry, parents, you can opt out! If you don't want some durn guv'mint giving your young'uns no government vaccine, you can choode to let them go unvaccinated the way God intended!

Of course, when parents start opting out of vaccination programs, this sort of thing starts happening:

Whooping cough cases on rise

12:00 AM, Sep. 11, 2011

Florida infant dies of whooping cough

Published: Sept. 8, 2011

Snohomish mom, infant contract whooping cough; baby dies 

 

SNOHOMISH, Wash. -- Snohomish County health officials confirm a newborn has died from pertussis, or more commonly known as "whooping cough."

That brings the total number of confirmed pertussis cases in the county to 52, double the number from last year.

 

There seems to be a trend in this country of parents distrusting vaccines. And both the right and the left seem to have an equal problem. On the right, anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes have been well documented. The idea seems to be that "if we admit that doctors are right about vaccines, then we might have to concede that the scientists have a point about the global warming thing. Then we might end up believing that we're related to monkeys, and we just can't have that! So it's whooping cough for you, Junior!"


On the left, I think that the thinking is that since vaccines are produced by big pharmaceutical compamies, and big pharmaceutical companies are evil, then by the transitive property of evil, vaccines must be bad.

 

Plus, they're not natural, man!

You want to know what it's like without vaccines? Find an old person. Ask him about polio. Ask him what it was like when whole neighborhoods went into panic mode because someone had polio and no one was safe. Ask anyone who lived through that what they think about opting out of immunizations for your child.

Or just ask the parents of this child if they're proud of their decision:
(Warning, hard to watch)

CBS Pushes Quack "Science"

from CBSNews.com:

Vaccines and autism: a new scientific review

Posted by Sharyl Attkisson

For all those who've declared the autism-vaccine debate over - a new scientific review begs to differ. It considers a host of peer-reviewed, published theories that show possible connections between vaccines and autism. 

How many times does this theory need to be debunked? (there's a good debunking here)

In Atkisson's defense, her article does include this paragraph:

University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Brian Strom, who has served on Institute of Medicine panels advising the government on vaccine safety says the prevailing medical opinion is that vaccines are scientifically linked to encephalopathy (brain damage), but not scientifically linked to autism. As for Ratajczak's review, he told us he doesn't find it remarkable. "This is a review of theories. Science is based on facts. To draw conclusions on effects of an exposure on people, you need data on people. The data on people do not support that there is a relationship. As such, any speculation about an explanation for a (non-existing) relationship is irrelevant."  

But why pretend that there is still a legitimate debate? There are actual people out there who maintain that the earth is flat* and /or the moon-landing was fake, but we don't pretend that they have some sort of valid argument that needs to be debated.  


This bullshit pseudo-science is not just stupid, it's doing real harm. There are parents who refuse to have their kids immunized for horrible diseases like whooping cough and German Measles because they believe the bullshit. Why? I can't imagine. Your doctor will tell you to immunize. Get a second opinion and that doctor will too. So will the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, the American Medical Association, and anyone with a lick of common sense. But some parents will look at the overwhelming scientific consensus and say, "yeah, but Jenny McCarthy says otherwise!"

Trust me, I'm a ekspert!

For some reason, there are a lot of people who just hate Western medicine. They like to say that all doctors do is drugs and surgery. And they have a point. But just because a lot of doctors unfairly pooh-pooh natural remedies doesn't diminish the fact that countless lives are saved every day by drugs and surgery. That doesn't mean that herbal remedies don't have their place, or that accupuncture isn't good for a lot of things, but if you're having a heart attack, you'd be a fool to head for the health food store instead of the emergency room. How many people do you know whose lives have been saved by, say, chemotherapy? Now how many do you know whose lives were saved by yoga? 

But for some reason, there is this nasty strain of anti-intellectualism in this society which insists that if the "eggheads" are recommending something it must be wrong. Somehow, a large chunk of our population has made the leap from "doctors don't know Everything" to "doctors don't know Anything." And apparently, CBS and Sharyl Attkisson are going to give them a platform. And if a bunch of kids die from easily preventable disease, then what?






*no, really. Check 'em out here:  
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm

The WSJ Editorial Page Continues to be a Joke.

• FEBRUARY 16, 2010

Consensus or Con?

The global warmists are the real deniers.

By JAMES TARANTO

This column was scoffing at global warming back when global warming was still cool.

Okay, that's the first sentence of paragraph One.

Here's the first sentence of paragraph Two:

As we've written on various occasions, we didn't know enough about the substance of the underlying science to make a judgment about it.

So, I don't know anything about the science, but that doesn't stop me from scoffing at it?

And this is a person we're supposed to take seriously? This is someone given a forum in one of the biggest newspapers in the world?

Of course, this is the same paper that gives us this:

• 

  Vindicating John Yoo

  Bush lawyers are found to have acted ethically, unlike their accusers.

The Wall Street Journal, what a freakin joke.

Now This Is a Depressing Headline

(from Yahoo News)

Momentum Shifts to Skeptics on Global Warming Debate

Eroding confidence in climate science punctuated by a pair of blizzards has global warming skeptics across the United States calling for a sharp rollback to years of political and industrial efforts to curb greenhouse emissions thought to contribute to global warming.

Why are we required to act as though there is some sort of legitimate debate about this?

If we're going to pretend like these anti-science troglo-tards have some sort of a point, why don't we open up a debate on whether the moon landing was fake? Some people really believe the moon landing was fake, so why not pretend that the jury's still out on that question? Honestly, their logic isn't any worse than the climate deniers'. Both groups think NASA is full of shit, and believe that their "common sense" holds as much weight as scientific data.

Hey, why not have a representative from the Flat Earth Society on TV debating a geologist?

How does anyone take people seriously who think that a couple of snowstorms disprove Climate Change? That's like saying, "Hey, Payton Manning threw a big interception and lost the Superbowl. So much for that 'Manning's a good quarterback' theory!" You'd be laughed out of any sports bar in America.

So this is the debate. On the one side, we have every living Nobel Prize-winning scientist, NASA, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and decades of research and data.

On the other side: Hey, it's snowing!

And honest to God, that's the argument they're making on FOX "News."




And somehow, people are buying this line of BS:

In a survey released last month, the percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening declined 14 percentage points vs. the year prior, to 57 percent.

So, if Climatology were something we got to vote on, then we'd be getting close to solving the problem.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of climate scientists still agree the data on global warming is solid

Oh, like that matters. Scientists! What the hell do they know? Can't they see it's snowing?

We have to grow up in this country and realize that people who have spent their adult lives studying the subject know a little more about it than some guy who looks out the window and sees snow. Otherwise, we're screwed.

Anti-intellectualism

I believe we've touched on this theme before (here) so bear with me if this feels repetitive.

I know by now, it shouldn't be shocking, or even surprising to read something like this column by some pea-brain named Micheal Barone:

On Guns and Climate, the Elites Are Out of Touch

by Michael Barone



but I'm still stunned by the level of willful ignorance and the lack of simple logic that goes into a statement like this:

Similarly, last month, pollster Scott Rasmussen found that only 34 percent believes that global warming is caused by human activity, while 48 percent said it is caused by long-term planetary trends. That's almost exactly the opposite of what he found 12 months before -- 47 to 34 percent the other way around. However, 48 percent of the group Rasmussen calls the "Political Class" -- in other words, the elite -- continues to believe global warming is man-made.

I'm seriously flabbergasted that someone would actually posit that public opinion polling is in some way relevant to science.

I imagine that if Mr. Barone's car breaks down, he stops 100 people at random and asks them what they think is wrong with it. Then if his mechanic's diagnosis is different, well, the mechanic must be wrong!


In Mr. Barone's world, this counts as scientific research!



















What else ya got, Barone?

As for global warming, many Americans may have noticed that temperatures actually haven't been rising over the past decade, as global warming alarmists predicted. The elites are able to hire armed security guards and jet off on private jets, so they are less likely to notice these things.

Seriously, I can't believe I actually have to tell you this, but casual observation is NOT on a par with scientific research.

Here's another point. Let's say global warming has topped off. Let's say that it's not going to get any warmer. Even if that were true, it's already too hot! The polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, if the temperature doesn't go any higher, that just means that these phenomena will not speed up. It doesn't mean that the will stop or reverse themselves.

If you place an ice cube out on the kitchen counter, it will start to melt. Assuming your kitchen is kept at a normal temperature, it will melt pretty slowly. If the temperature is raised, the melting will speed up, but even if the temperature never increases, the ice will continue to melt. No matter how many people you survey who might believe otherwise, the facts don't change.

There's something very wrong with our society if people believe that scientific facts are subject to opinion polling. Sure, everyone has an opinion, and on some subjects, like say, the best flavor of ice cream, or the best hitter in baseball, one opinion's as good as the next. No, scratch that! When it comes to the best hitter in baseball, yes, that's a matter of opinion, and there can never be any one definitively right answer, but the opinion of, say, Willie Mays, or Hank Aaron, or Joe Torre should carry a lot more weight than that of the average baseball fan, and a hell of a lot more than the opinion of someone who doesn't follow baseball. Would anyone disagree with that? Would anyone argue "I know as much about hitting as Willie Mays!" No! No one with any sense would make that claim.









So why should the average person's opinion carry that kind of weight when it comes to science? I'll bet the average Joe on the street knows a hell of a lot more about baseball than he does about climatology, but he would never claim to know as much as Mays, or Aaron, or Torre, etc. But on the much more arcane subject of global climate trends, oh sure! My high-school science class that I slept through and copied off of the smart girl to pass gives me the same level of expertise as a PhD who has spent his adult life studying the subject. Where does this level of bone-headed arrogance come from? It's stunning! But I guess by now I shouldn't be surprised.

Michael Steele

As if he hasn't embarrassed himself enough lately, Mr Steele had this to say on the subject of global climate change:

“We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.”

The warming is part of the cooling process? I'm sorry, did you bring enough stupid for the rest of the class?
Oh, and yes, there is a reason why Greenland is called Greenland.

Norse legends written in the 12th century and later, it is told that Eric the Red explored the southeast and southwest coasts of Greenland in A.D. 983-986 and gave the country its name because people would be more likely to go there if it had an attractive name.
(from Answers.com)

Might want to do a quick Googling before making public statements.

But really, it's not just Mr Steele that's the problem here. For one thing, there's a pretty slim chance that he's actually this big a dullard. The thing is, he's so emblematic of the pernicious strain of anti-intellectualism that has infected our political process. It's this anti- knowledge, anti-science, anti-reason attitude that allows people to consider their "gut feeling" to be superior to actual expertise, that allows people to dismiss educated people as "elitist" or "out of touch." This pro-ignorance stance makes it easy for people to say things like "the jury's still out on global warming," assuming that the considered opinion of every legitimate climatologist in the world is no more authoritative than one's own observation that the last few days have been pretty cold.

That's how we end up with a fiasco like this:


Everyone knew that Al Gore was vastly more intelligent than George W. Bush, so why did so many people vote for W? For precisely that reason. Too many voters disliked Gore because he was smart. They liked Bush because he seemed like an ordinary, regular guy. Problem is, Bush actually is a regular guy. And a regular guy is not qualified to be the leader of the free world. An electorate with any sense would want to vote for an extraordinary person to be president. The previous 8 disastrous years should have served as an object lesson in "why being an amiable, slow-witted dunce is not sufficient qualification to be president," but no. Way too many of the same people have steadfastly refused to learn any lesson from the recent past, which is why we may end up, (God Forbid) with this:



or this:
or this:

in 2012.