Sack Up: A Screed and Guide for Soft-Ass Pseudo Men Everywhere

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This version of the problem, without that, and with uniform randomness, seems nice.

Will have to think about this. Maybe there is a unique answer after all! The process you already had, where people take turns striking stages and reach a median, was already super super fair — arguably it sacrificed a lot of fun for fairness, in that it decreased the variety of the game. Normal people who are playing a normal game will not care about fairness to this degree. Very competitive people might care about fairness to a very very high degree, but this solution will not satisfy them: If you encounter someone who is not satisfied with the fairness of taking turns striking stages, your next attempt at fairness should be something that uses simultaneous play to be provably fair.

Have each player prepare a list of all the stages in order of their preference. Find the N such that letting each player drop their least-favorite N stages leads to one stage remaining. If there is no such N, find the N such that letting each player drop their least-favorite N stages leads to two stages remaining, and flip a coin among those two. Alternatively, set up a UI such that each player chooses a stage to strike simultaneously and in secret. Something important to note is that in terms of winning competitive game tournaments — selecting the stage your opponent likes the least is more optimal than selecting the stage you like the most.

This seems like it could actually be a really general problem. It looks like a social choice problem where voters eliminate candidates instead of voting for their favorites. If each person has a VNM utility function over the possible stages given their chosen character and opponents character they would each want to maximize the difference in utilities, but ideally the striking order would minimize the utility difference median. Put this way, it would seem like alternating striking … with a coin flip to determine who goes first is randomization allowed?

For an odd total number of stages this would always choose the median, for an even number the first striker has an advantage. This immediately looked like a ranked voting problem to me too. That is a good point. So the starting assumption is that this is strictly a zero-sum game, where each player is trying to maximize the chance of winning? No situations like player A leaving player B with a choice between a stage where A has the advantage and a stupid stage that everyone hates to play.

This would give you the following problem:. Players A and B both have a random ordering of the stages. Each time they get a turn, they eliminate the remaining stage that is lowest in their personal ordering. How should you distribute turns between them for both to have a similar distribution for the index of the last remaining stage in their orderings?

Possibly you could ignore the exact distribution and only look at a single real-valued metric like expected index value. Approaching every situation as if everyone involved except him was straining at the leash to start a nuclear war. Allowing the Army to steer us into an intervention in Vietnam. Combining 1 and 2 to fight a war without any intention of actually winning.

Application of numerical analysis to military decisionmaking in the most boneheaded way possible. Shutting down missile defense work. Destroying an entire generation of procurement programs to try and keep the national fisc from feeling the effects of Vietnam. For instance, there was apparently a serious proposal to stop CSAR work because it was cheaper to just train new pilots. My impression is that both the B and the 60s-era missile defenses would provide, at most, short-term strategic advantage and will be mostly pointless by the late 60s and early 70s.

They were really pushing the technology of the time, but Sprint was promising, and another twenty years of continuous ABM development would probably have gone a long way towards easing the current boondoggle. I get the sense they were canceled more for political than technical reasons, although the political reasons are somewhat compelling — ABM development still makes the Russians really nervous, for example, and it would only have been worse in the Cold War. If the United States had continuously maintained a missile defense capability from the s to the present, it would have been mostly useless for most of that time, but we would have forty years of experience in how to do something resembling useful missile defense and we would probably have an operational system that had gone through a couple of upgrade cycles based on lessons learned.

Instead, we have a system that was rushed into service as an experimental prototype a little over a decade ago and only patched since. The precise details of our present situation would obviously not have been predictable to McNamara, but the general principle that if there is a major threat to the United States we should probably not completely zero out our defenses against it seems sound.

The reasoning behind canceling it might have been wrong, but approving it would have diverted the Air Force away from the B-1, which was better at low-level penetration and preferring this seems sound. In terms of performance, the B was about the same as the SR, and none of those were ever shot down, or even seriously threatened. These days, people in the defense world often claim that speed is the new stealth.

The level of missile defense that protects us from North Korea and gives the President more time to think in cases of a few missiles getting fired is very far from the level that makes it thinkable for the US to start an all-out nuclear war with Russia. Please note that in , the city with the heaviest air defenses on the planet was not Moscow but Hanoi. Now, imagine the plane is three times faster and flying higher, making it much harder to shoot down.

One of these seems strictly better than the other to me. Note that every time we go to war, extreme low-level penetration, which works OK in exercises, is soon discarded in favor of fighting at higher altitude where the threat environment is better. It happened in Vietnam, it happened in Desert Storm to both the vaunted A and the Tornado, and it happened over the Balkans. It might have been untouchable in and a sitting duck by As far as threats to the SR, if it had been capable of dropping bombs instead of just taking pictures, the Soviets might have tried harder to develop the capability to shoot them down.

The threat to stealth aircraft, as I understand it, involves a difference in kind and not merely degree of detection measures. In fact, that might be a good counter to the SR example: I remain somewhat suspicious of the ability of something flying higher and three times as fast as a BUFF to actually anything with 70s era technology. Tohit anything, it would have to slow down and drop lower, and that would have severely limited the advantages it provided. And those are better than ever. As a whole the Soviet IADS had much more depth, and in particular the North Vietnamese had fewer and far less effective interceptors than the Soviets did.

That being said, I still think canceling the B was the right call. As far as low-altitude defenses being a nasty surprise, obviously the solution is better exercises. I think the easiest solution is to run exercises against the Navy. I was thinking more about the conventional strikes the B proved so good at. The B would have been a plausible launch platform for air-launched ballistic missiles, but then so was the B And then the B-1 came along and blundered its way into being an extraordinarily useful aircraft in ways entirely different from the original plan.

The B was a nuclear bomber first and foremost. Obviously if a target was undefended it could just fly lower and slow down to achieve better accuracy, but those bombs dropped from 70, feet at Mach X were always going to be nukes. If Bs can be intercepted by Ss, I learned something new from this thread.

I think this is a bad comparison, though. Improved sensors, different wavelengths, and better signal processing can defeat stealth. Again, speed and altitude. The MiG was the only Soviet fighter that could hope to touch a B in , and it had only been in service 3 years, with all the attendant teething troubles that causes. And even it is only very marginal. Everything else is just useless. We are finally getting around to building those ALBMs. Soviet SAMs were not easy to use, and the crew training was suspect, too.

And remember, the Russians lie about their equipment. This is less true than most people think. Seriously, it looks like the S has never had a single combat kill against a hostile target. A question worth considering is what options McNamara really had. If he really needed more manpower for the war effort, he could have. If he had to bring on these low-ability men, he should not have drafted them as solders.

Heck, many of them had trouble getting through basic training. The basic problem is that they were still staring down the Soviets in Europe, and it was important to be able to keep those men in case the Soviets came west. Linebacker II proved that we could bring them to their knees with air power when we really tried. Everything before that was stupid posturing games. I dunno, if I were a s official, I might have done some of the same things.

The West has done a relatively good job containing communism so it looks like we can have a relatively easy victory doing normal counter-insurgency. Some of the stupid analytics definitely seem like something I would have believed if I were a s man. I most likely would have escalated more quickly, more rapidly. I assume if was a loss which wasted time, money, and lives. Or were all of those already drafted? The book does point out that a fair number of Project , men were either slightly underqualified or tested poorly for reasons not linked directly to intelligence illiteracy being the most common.

And that even a fair number of the truly sub-par did OK if they ended up in the right job. Supposing you wanted to prevent people at the top from engaging in obviously stupid projects, what organizational structures would be needed? In the middle layers, you can avoid stupid projects by being very deliberate and allowing no exceptions.

Except these days founders often have super-voting shares, so they both run the company and control the board, which is worrisome. People with a stronger business background than me should feel free to correct me here, but the way I understand it privately held companies do substantially better than publicly traded companies of similar size both in terms of their rate of growth and profit margins. This seems like the same principle that comes up a lot in discussing public choice theory.

The incentive for a given shareholder in a firm or a voter in a polity to cast their votes wisely, or at all, diminishes rapidly the more distributed the benefits and costs are and the lower of a vote share they have. Two major confounders on your thought about publicly traded verses private companies, in regards to growth and profitability. One, companies built privately that become public Facebook! We probably care a lot about failed companies as well as active, so pulling in that information would be important.

Centrally controlled companies owner-operator especially do have benefits if the small number of controllers make wise decisions, but they are also worse if they make poor decisions. This is similar, to me, to the idea of a Philosopher-King verses a Democracy. PKs can make great decisions for a group, if the right person is the PK. Finding the right person, getting them in control, and especially how to transition to the next PK are hard questions with that approach.

Democratic institutions often fail to be more than mediocre, but they can more consistently approach a problem without doing something that completely breaks the arrangement. Corporate boards and significant shareholders can act as a mitigating factor on bad decisions, as can creditors, CFOs, COOs, etc. Could you give an example? I find obviously stupid projects are much rarer than people think. So, Project , was not an obviously stupid decision in the context of its decision makers. It was an anti-poverty measure, meant to bring in people who could not otherwise find employment easily.

It was portrayed in these terms by the President, the Army, McNamara, and internal documents. To this end, he started the War on Poverty. If that had negative externalities, these diffuse negative effects are less than the concentrated benefit of winning elections for him personally. This incentive got stronger as the war went worse and it became more advantageous for Johnson to do so.

Again, most negative effects were diffused through the army while McNamara got the concentrated benefit of keeping his job. After all, why not see if it works. Though with the conscripts, it was believed, at the time, that giving them opportunities in the military would help them advance out of poverty. This turned out not to be the case. But this is Moloch. Am I using that term correctly? The system is not an agent. It was stupid for the army.

Now, the need to align incentives properly is very important for organizational health. Because most of the time, personal interests will win out. It was actually between , and ,, though a percentage of those were regular soldiers included as a control group. And why does having more make it more stupid? The more people in the program, the more otherwise unemployable people with jobs, the more poverty alleviated, no? And again, this was at most a few percentage points of total manpower.

Also, note that by the end of the war many of them were working as janitors and other jobs that were deemed possible. It was realized they were terrible infantrymen and the system adjusted. My point is that it was not stupid in the sense of being irrational or ill-motivated. It was people following incentives to a bad end. Not even something new, something that, until the day before, was considered positively unsafe.

The program was also implemented poorly, whether the end goal was to help the war effort or improve the station of the men in question. Trying to turn them into regular soldiers by sending them to basic training was typically a waste of time. These men needed a slower ramp-up to build up physical fitness and a more instructional approach to firm up long-neglected mental skills, starting with basic literacy. This might have turned some of the men into competent soldiers, though at a hefty cost.

Others could probably have done some good in low-expectations jobs; heck, some actually did. But there seemed to be a third group who were just too broken to be of use to anybody, whether by inherent inadequacies, or due to a couple decades of gross mistreatment. If the video was correct, there was a belief that these men could be made adequately capable during basic training. To me, existence means you experience something.

You can feel without being conscious. For instance, you can be asleep but feel the horror of a bad dream or the pain in your right foot. To experience these things, you must exist. For instance, a high-fidelity emulation of a human, instantiated in some AI, would when given a simulated impact to their simulated toe give out a simulated cry of pain exactly as real as the cries of pain that you presumably use to infer that other biological humans stub their toes. Maybe matter itself experiences being. Perhaps different elements experience being at different degrees of sensation, meaning perhaps carbon experiences a higher level of being than hydrogen.

It waits not till created eyes have seen it or hands handled it, to be in itself a strength and splendour of Maleldil. Only the least part has served, or ever shall, a beast, a man, or a god. But always, and beyond all distances, before they came and after they are gone and where they never come, it is what it is and utters the heart of the Holy One with its own voice. It is farthest from Him of all things, for it has no life, nor sense, nor reason; it is nearest to Him of all things for without intervening soul, as sparks fly out of fire, He utters in each grain of it the unmixed image of His energy.

Each grain, if it spoke, would say, I am at the centre; for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. Deiseach — I was just thinking yesterday about maybe rereading Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra! I reredd That Hideous Strength a few years ago. If Lewis had really wanted to make his case he should have figured out how to make us hate the idea of pharmaceutically mind-improving a serial killer or mass murderer.

Personally, I think both responses are terrible, though I have a little more sympathy for the Searle one than the Penrose one. To experience requires to process data. Where does the atom store the data? How does it move them around? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your case, must you again divide the indivisible? This is one of the weirdest, most confusing things I have ever read on SSC. In my brief experience working with children in primary education, many of them have the opposite default assumption: And I redd that when a certain European poet Stefan Zweig?

None of the existing answers have been very well-received, and your commentary would be interesting. That was basically how I took it. Asking this in the CW-free thread explicitly to decouple this conversation from the things which, as-enacted, are the subject of this question. Also worth noting that I am not a parent.

Giving them concrete knowledge and skills would be important to me mainly to the extent that it serves their own interest. I think the best way to get my kids to take care of me in my old age is to raise them as generally good people, which I should be doing anyway. Kids are people, not clay to be molded into people. For example, my sister hated whole-wheat bread as a kid. So, our parents got her white bread. I think I understand this sort of thing to fall under 3 , insofar as preference-fulfilment is a good outcome commensurable with the benefits of not eating white bread.

I think I agree with Hoopyfreud about this. I think of it as something you might get if you fulfill other goals. But you might not too. I agree with Ozy here. What you can do for their character or long term success you probably should likewise yourself, for that matter , but in the meantime try to not frustrate or humiliate them; ask their opinion, explain rules, offer comfort, give them agency in as much as is reasonable for the development, consider their preferences, etc. Studying a foreign language is a requirement, but I guarantee that no one on the UC admissions board is going to try talking to your kid in Spanish.

Which is a good thing considering how much our schools suck at teaching it. Rather the opposite — your kid is very unlikely, assuming some degree of conscientiousness and drive, to be starving or unemployed. As a father of a 13 year old myself, I encourage you not to let him think that making himself miserable now is necessary for the future. I hardly studied programming before my junior year of high school, was a complete failure in foreign languages till then, and still got into a good college and graduated with a computer engineering degree. If he is excited, what really helped me was good old-fashioned flashcards and repeated writing of vocab words.

There should be some things that both contribute to his getting into U. There was one school where our home unschooled daughter was accepted and offered money where we had no legacy connection. Their admissions person told us that what blew them away was her list of books she had read. All or almost all were read for fun. Computer programming is fun and should be well within the ability of a thirteen year old with access to a computer. Including with his application a couple of ingenious and entertaining programs he had written would be a sizable plus. The World of Mathematics is a several volume book of essays on various bits of mathematics and math history.

Find something you want to do in your target language. Here is where English learners have an advantage over learners of other languages, because a lot of very obscure hobbies only have enough following in English. I know a lot of people who fell in love during the Erasmus exchange program and ended up learning some obscure European language.

Of course, number 3 is probably not a good idea for such a young boy, but the first two options are still there. In my childhood and young adulthood, the door was wide open in general, and if you had computer talent and interest, people would reach out and drag you through it. I graduated from college with negligible debt, and went straight to a job that paid pretty close to what my factory worker father had been being paid only 4 years earlier. And then raises and promotions arrived pretty much annually for at least the next five years. Farther progress took work.

Good luck to him, anyway. If you can program, you can write your own ticket. Is your son interested in learning to program? That is, not in the career path programming brings, but the pure joy of filling a document with strange symbols and having a computer program come out? If so, I highly recommend he pursue that as his fancy drives him. A degree in computer science from even a decent university — much less UC Berkley — will get his foot in the door in industry. Also take as much high-level math as possible — trig, algebra, and calculus.

Tons of work for someone that knows Spanish in the US too, and plenty of opportunity to speak it in CA. Being a programmer is a pretty good lifestyle. Programming is also fun! If he just wants to get paid, Python as an introduction and then college will teach him whatever the industry standard is in 5 years. Learning more languages is better, but keep in mind his entire career will be learning a new language every years. Learning a new programming language is actually pretty easy — a good programming can get up to speed in a language in two weeks and be useful in months.

Specific languages go in and out of style as we develop better programming languages, so the important thing is the understand the principle of programming, how to think logically, and the basic structure of a programming language. Stack Exchange is a good place to search for help — https: Kahn Academy or EDx likely have some free courses as well. Having a good relationship with them throughout the rest of my life.

Get them to a point of self sufficiency where they see that as a responsibility of their own. Everyone wants to indoctrinate their kids with their values to some extent. Otherwise we would be just as happy with a kid that wanted to genocide Jewish people compared to a normal kid. Keeping kid on track to develop the endowments, upon adulthood, to choose his own path effectively.

Maximizing probability that kid will leave the world better than he found it. This is where instilling values come in, and in my case there is more than a dash of noblesse oblige: And it easily expands to avoiding major potential effects on their adult lifespan, health, etc. I agree with Plumber, above, that each day your main goal with a small child is simply to keep it alive until the end of the day, and your secondary goal is to keep it cheerful. In fact, a twelve year old can do it, and in many places for example, Boro Park, Brooklyn barely adolescent or pre-adolescent kids seem to care of their toddler-siblings for most of the day.

I am comfortable with 4, and explicitly reference it to them trying to produce good outcomes for other people, because I am a utopian socialist kind of guy. This reminds me of a discussion I started here a year ago. Personally from my own point of view, my priorities as a parent are: They marry wisely and their marriages endure.

Exact rankings may shift a bit with more consideration. And then, regardless of how important a goal is, my ability to effect it varies a lot too. And they are interdependent; happiness probably requires some level of financial success, for example. It seems as though you have to use websites to date anyone and get jobs and probably those are never the same websites from year to year and the things that you have to type on the various lines of the various forms in order to level up probably also change from year to year.

There are probably higher-level websites telling you how to find the appropriate lower-level websites and deal with them correctly, but those higher-level websites are probably very quickly obsolete as well. Regarding financial success, that involves educational achievement, setting goals, choosing careers wisely, making a good impression, being reliable, etc. I have kids 18,15 and 12 week. You can want things for and model things for your children but they have their own ideas of what is important. Some kids will take it to heart, some will be indifferent and some will oppose everything you hold dear and that is out of your control.

Model the behavior your want, show them what needs to be done and how it is done, punish aberrant behavior in appropriate ways and hope that your child wants to emulate you. We have two kids, one just out of undergrad, applying to grad school, and another half way through undergrad.

We also have another young adult living with us as he tries to get on his feet, and a fourth who was living with us and moved out once they became reliably employed, and we have had numerous others in the circle actively seeking us out for parental type advice. Here is the one simple rule that I used to guide me. I agree with most of that, but I think your job also includes helping them live a happy life during the time they are with you.

That is, after all, about a quarter of their lifetime. Part of my preference for unschooling is based on the idea that it works better, produces happier, better educated and more productive people than the alternative. But part is on my memory of spending a sizable part of my childhood sitting in classes being bored—and I had it relatively easy compared to modern children who also have to spend a lot of time sitting at home being bored doing homework that is of no interest to them and dubious use.

Hopefully they will meet some rationalists or EAs that can help them find meaning. What would it take for you to trust a robot nanny with your child? This includes feeding, burping, changing, washing, supervising, etc. Not that I have an answer, but interesting related question — would you trust machine learning here? Or would you prefer to stick to proofed-out code?

The machine learning would have to be a LOT more advanced than anything we have now for the child not to game the system and train the robot to do counter-intuitive things. Of course, with set rules, the rules would have to be unbelievably thought out and inclusive or the child would game those as well. I am quite confident in asserting that such a program would essentially mean that the child is raising themselves with a fancy smartphone available. Maybe not all kids, but certainly quite a few. I would think a learning system would be a necessity.

Kids adapt too quickly to involve a system that can't also adapt at all. If I didn't have much faith in the programming? Then a mediocre rules-based system would be preferable to a mediocre learning system. At least you can have a better sense of the limitations of the rules-based system, rather than finding out that your child essentially re-programmed your fancy robot to be their slave.

Well sure, but that was just a handy example that we happen to see biological parents doing, so hopefully the reader intuitively understands my underlying point. Presumably a real robot AI would be coded very strongly to regulate a diet such that each child falls within a certain healthy range of foods. Maybe this really is nutritionally acceptable, but a human parent may very quickly recognize a problem — the child is unwilling to try any variation. As an adult, this child may have significant problems finding appropriate food, especially if visiting others or going out to eat, and therefore struggle with socialization.

Humans also seem to have a lot more skepticism about repeated bland diets. Sometimes eating the same thing over and over again has unintended consequences. I read a story about a woman who got cancer from eating some incredibly high amount of microwave popcorn every day. Even hooked up to Google, the AI would not have recognized such a thing, because no one had ever noticed it before because nobody ate 20 bags of microwave popcorn every day for years before.

I feel like a simpler set of strictly-adhered to limitations might work better. Kids can get upset about a lot of things and be fine without ever been soothed by the robot. If you want the robot to do better than a lot of parents, then the robot should be able to tell if the generally healthy food is actually bad for a particular child. Ah, I misread the OP. Elderly Chinese ladies roam the streets of Brooklyn after dark or before dawn, picking up bottles for the 5 cents they get for them by sticking the bottles into machines outside of supermarkets; they push mobile towers of bottle-filled mega-sized garbage-bags.

It would be far easier and safer to make mech-suits for elderly Chinese-lady-nannies than to make robotic nannies. They are forced to deliberately weaken both the Second and First Laws significantly in their nanny bots. Human parents sometimes have he same problem, so who can blame them? A service record of several years during which robot nannies have been operated by a large costumer base without a higher rate of death or injury than human nannies. Same thing that would make me trust a driverless car with my life, in other words. Let technophiles and early adopters be guinea pigs if they want.

I agree with this criteria. I appreciate the rough spots and risks early adopters are willing to deal with! Will my kid turn out weird as a result? That said, a robot that can change a diaper might be handy with a lower bar for acceptance. It would have to be as good at at child-care than my father and in-laws, if not better. Even then it would need to be at least as strongly motivated as a blood relative. Robot nannies seem very dystopian. A race to the bottom in which only the rich will be able to afford to take time off work to raise their own kids.

Mostly commonly in that you spend a pleasant afternoon and learn that everyone you ever knew died of old age. Oberon is the King of Amber , scion of the unicorn and the father of a quarlesome lot of immortal Princes and Princesses. Oberon is referred to in Jonathan Strange and Mr. The gentleman with the thistledown hair is never named, but it is widely speculated by fans that he is Oberon. A Space Odyssey , Stanley Kubrick: Some of the tracks on the Sex, Lies, and Videotape are really very good. Not quite to the original question, but you could be turned on to classical music in general by vintage movie composers such as Korngold, Rozsa and Herrmann.

I got a snootful of that stuff as a movie-crazy teen, so maybe it planted the seed for becoming a classical music fan. One more note re movies about music: Not to be missed is the hilariously melodramatic Deception , with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid as orchestra musicians and Claude Rains as their imperious conductor, all locked in a stormy triangle. Ironically, I recently had a discovery opposite of the direction OP asked for, where I picked up a CD of movie music, and it included a great video game Star Wars track by by Joel McNeely, which led to me finding that entire soundtrack for Shadows of the Empire game is really good stuff.

Film version is by Vocal Ensemble Gordela and is beautiful, even more gorgeous version by famous Georgian singer Hamlet Gonashvili and ensemble Rustavi. There was an ad for the horror flick Asylum that evocatively used a scary little passage from Pictures at an Exhibition. And the self-explanatory Mephisto Waltz I had pretty much never listened to any pres music for pleasure, but I really loved Clair de Lune.

But for Amadeus, the big impact was Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments, the piece that bowls Salieri over after being gobsmacked by his buffoonery. The older Salieri describing the piece in the asylum illuminated it so much for me.

I have a great love for the anime soundtrack composers. They do the best classical music work in the world right now, imho, but there are plenty that put out great non-classical stuff, too. Yoko Kanno needs no introduction, of course. Sound of the Sky introduced me to Kubota Mina. Sound Euphonium alerted me to the piece Takarajima, and how ridiculously popular it is in the Japan wind ensemble scene. Mongolian Chop Squad was pretty instrumental in shaping my opinions on rock music, largely in making me always pay attention to the bass part.

Kind of cheating, but the musical film Bandwagon introduced me to some great names. But that lyric fits an awful lot of places. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the city it fits best. Ireland is certainly known for green grass and pretty girls or is it bonnie lasses? Maachu Picchu fits mountain and has grass, but no girls. Katmandu has that paradise vibe and is inhabited, but not so much on the grass. At least with substantial cities. San Diego was one of my ideas, but rejected as it appears to be severely lacking in the grass department.

The problem lies in coordinating the prettiest girls — toyear-old Puerto Ricans, in my opinion — with the grass. I think New York is out of the running. To qualify, the city has to get lots of rain, and also be warm and preferably with a beach so as to encourage skimpy clothing, and fairly rich, and have lots of open space. My second thought was Rio but it is also drier than I expected. South Beach is definitely awesome, but it definitely has little grass.

There are a couple of teeny tiny parks and some golf courses. So your set of cities will be Stockholm, Milan, LA and a few others Then you evaluate the greenness of the grass and how important that is to you and choose accordingly. Enough rain to be green, nice enough weather to see the pretty girls, and a disproportionate number of pretty girls because of the music industry.

Perhaps we could start with a list of which cities have the least onerous water restrictions? Vacationed there this summer and we were wearing jackets and long pants. Apparently the depth of the bay keeps the weather temperate. So bottom line, anywhere with nice lawns in the U. I lean more toward Florida here, or somewhere else warm on the south east coast. Most of CA is too dry. True, but the desirability of pretty girls is timeless; the location of the cutest girls is subject to change. Are you saying America does NOT have the cutest girls?

Comment reported for obvious Russian troll. If we are being picky, we could narrow our search to northern California where the girls are warm. That said, this is all starting to sound like one of those terrible triangles: Perhaps we add one more requirement to help narrow things down? Apparently I misunderstood this song all this time. I thought the point was that all these different types of girls are great, but California girls are the best so he wishes they were all more like California girls.

Not that he wishes all these types of girls resided in California. Nope, he says some good quality about girls from every region of the US except the Southwest, for some reason , then favorably contrasts girls from the States not state with all kinds of girls from all around this great big world. At no point does he compliment California girls specifically nor state that any type of US girls are superior to others. The Southwestern girls may have been lumped in with the ones in California, since the Southwest also has the sunshine and the girls all get so tanned.

Though I doubt the paradise summers are so miserable. Man, this past summer in NYC was truly miserable — made me feel as though the world hates humanity. Given the weather and the vulcanism, I think Reykjavik is more in the running for the Other Place. Axl Rose claims the chorus refers to the midwest. Since he is from Indiana, I would guess one of the college towns near where he was raised: Also, the city is a paradise because the grass is green and the girls are pretty.

Paradise is a conclusion about the place, not a descriptor. So the range of candidates is fairly large. It may or may not be out of date right now, but that does not affect what city the singer was singing about when the song was recorded. What are some underappreciated mechanisms for separating coaching and evaluation responsibilities? What are some cases in which there is a good prospect for achieving a much greater such separation in the future than we now have?

What success cases of separation are most worth learning from and generalizing? There are several common professions in which these are typically combined, schoolteacher and corporate manager being probably the most obvious. Arnold Kling has pointed out in the past that separating the two in education could improve outcomes through division of labor and specialization. I also suspect it would be effective at reducing abuses of power: So where should we look for frontiers of improvement here?

Flight training comes to mind. In New Zealand the training is done by one entity, exams are created and given by another, and oral exams and flight tests done by a third entity. All three entities are monitored by the regulator. If evaluation and training were done by the same organization you would end up with a lot more fake pilot licenses in third world countries.

So, I am nearing the end of my undergraduate studies, and thus having to think more seriously about finding a career. One possibility is law. However, in addition to the many other reasons why one might not want to pursue such a career, I have a personal bias or set of biases that might be unfounded. I would thus like to see if people think my impression is accurate or not. Namely, the study of law qua law seems to me to be the study of relatively uninteresting and unimportant questions.

Is the theory of evolution through natural selection more or less valid than the theory of creationism? What is the proper boundary, if any, between the religion of the majority and the state? How does one most effectively convince believers in creationism to instead believe in evolution through natural selection? So, if I really cared about the question of teaching evolution vs. In other words, it seems more interesting and important to me to debate what the law should say than what the law does say, and it seems to me that the former debate can only be moved forward and resolved by people who are not at least solely lawyers.

Of course, that makes me, maybe unwarrantedly, more optimistic about the possibility of succeeding in the profession. A counterexample to this general trend would be Glenn Greenwald: Some other examples of people I find similarly impressive would be linguist Noam Chomsky and the late economist Milton Friedman—as well as valued SSC commenter David Friedman, who, though a law professor, was not, as he proudly proclaims, formally educated as such. If this seemed to me to be representative of the typical intellectual and personal quality of people with a JD, I would be intimidated by but more interested in the prospect of becoming a lawyer.

However, I must say that this is sadly the exception, at least among lawyers who speak and commentate publicly. I agreed with some of his contentions, disagreed with others, but I was just surprised, as an outsider to the field, that this guy is considered to be one of the most brilliant legal scholars working today. Furthermore, some of his ideas have been dismissed by commentators I greatly respect. In either case, I am not impressed. Furthermore, you can see on YouTube Noam Chomsky own him pretty hard when Frum attempts to ask him a critical question, and in a Bloggingheads debate Glenn Greenwald conclusively defeats him.

Granted, she made the comment before she was a Justice, but it seems like an obviously empirically questionable and self-serving remark. Her later attempts to explain the comment lead me to suspect that she regrets stating her genuine views so baldly and quotably, but does in fact still believe the substance of the comment. This has gone on a lot longer than I intended it to, and there are actually quite a few other points I wanted to raise. Well, first of all, just from a pure employment side of things its not a great time to get into law.

None of those is going to change much for you if you get a JD. That strikes me as very true. Generally, as Scott mentioned in a post a while ago, law seems like a winner take all kind of market. Regarding the first point, I praised people Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman with widely divergent viewpoints, and criticized people e. Michael Avenatti and David Frum on very different places in the political spectrum.

Certainly, people who I think tend to have convincing arguments I tend to agree with to some degree. But I hope these examples suggest that this is postjudice rather than prejudice towards any particular view. Much the same holds for the second point, as well.

Regarding the third point, I would disagree. I would not say that e. Glenn Greenwald is an elegant rhetorician in the sense that I would say that e. Vladimir Nabokov is an elegant writer. I am also critical of commentators like the late Stephen Jay Gould who are gifted writers but disregard important evidence. I would say that the ability to make cogent and persuasive arguments—even in an informal or challenging setting—is hyped as one of the major benefits of a JD.

I got a JD. It teaches you a very particular set of skills. Vocal persuasion is the skill of a litigator, and litigation skills are barely taught or even practiced in law school. Evolution is extremely conservative in a way which is inconvenient for researchers who would prefer to only investigate one pathway at a time. Look at an unedited western blot sometime: Also, sadly, these days the electrodes are almost exlcusively going in rodent brains. Primate research is extremely expensive due to regulation and the need for security.

Even at large, well funded institutions almost all of the neuroscience research is done on rodents or in vitro. As late as the my Junior year of undergraduate studies, I was also planning on studying law, and ended up changing plans due to some similar concerns. This probably results in more rigorous thinking by some and more sloppy thinking by others, but in the end I think it is a practically minded profession, requiring high verbal skills and memory but not otherwise better prepared for abstract questions than any other.

I got a JD in , but due to a confluence of my own ineptitude at navigating law school exams and the job market, the Great Recession, and being fortunate enough to secure a high-paying non-legal job through nepotism, I have never practiced law. I am currently going through my biennial ritual of sitting through hours of continuing legal education lectures and wondering why I bother with all this hassle to renew a license I never use. Depression, substance abuse, and suicide are all too common among attorneys in America today.

Not that other sectors of the profession besides Biglaw are any better. I had to unfollow a classmate who works as a public defender, because the daily horror stories were just too much. The interesting questions bit matters if and only if you are weighing a career in legal academia vs some other kind of academia. Legal academics, and a tiny handful of high level judges, aside everyone else is a hired gun that are all trying to persuade rather than answer questions in the first place.

As being a journalist I think you are confusing correlation with causation. Some top end journalists have JDs for similar reasons to why some top bankers and lawyers for that matter have physics degrees. Well, applications to law school are way down and lots of schools have been lowering their admissions standards or downsizing. A few have closed entirely, some for economic reasons, some because the ABA has finally started enforcing its accreditation standards after years of permissiveness. I say good riddance to Infilaw, but there really needs to be more widespread reform that neither the ABA nor the state regulators have any interest in enacting.

Now this will necessarily reduce the prestige of law as a profession and of law school faculties, so it has no chance of happening, but it should. Two years of required courses, plus an optional third year for those intending to end up as legal academics or specialists in some field requiring substantial additional legal expertise. Someone, possibly the ABA, AALS, or USNews and World Report, ranks law school on value added —not the average quality of their graduates bar passage and the like but the quality of graduates as a function of quality of entering students.

Note that the decline in applications not only makes it easier to get into law school, it makes it easier to get financial aid—especially for students with good entering credentials. I find legal questions fascinating theoretically, but if your goal is to improve the world, the practicing law is among least efficient ways to do it. Only 9 justices have any true power, and they are preselected to just do whatever President and Congress want.

There are better, cheaper degree options. If you want to answer positive questions of socual and natural science, my advice is to become a subject matter expert in some narrow field. Public Health would be my personal choice, so I will use that as an example. You can apply for the PMF program to work as a GS-9 with fast promotion potential to implement what public health programs you believe are effective.

Word pairs that mean the same thing but where one is coded positive and the other is coded negative. A woman who is very thin is unlikely to be described as curvy, but neither is a woman who is very fat. I am firm; you are obstinate; he is dogmatic. I am detail-oriented; you are finicky; he is pedantic.

I am a patriot; you are jingoistic; he is a xenophobe. I am a wordsmith; you are a writer; he is a hack. Or, as per Yes Minister: Yes, I should have been clearer about the context. Childish and childlike do have that disparate connotation, but they are also used in different contexts because if it. Connotations exist for a reason. Suppose that at some point in the future we have artificial wombs and the ability to remove a fetus of any age from a pregnant woman and complete gestation in an artificial womb. If the technology were developed in the near future, there would still be a right to end the life of the foetus.

Different sorts of arguments would be made in favour of abortion, and the bodily integrity argument would be redeployed — for instance, arguing that it is a violation of bodily integrity to compel a woman to have an operation to remove the foetus and transfer it to an artificial womb, rather than kill it. However, on the margin, a few people would be swayed, and so there would be a few additional restrictions on abortion.

For example, abortion in the UK would probably only be legal up to 20 or 22 weeks, rather than I am less certain as to what would happen in the US, as there the situation is more in the hands of the courts, and so is unpredictable. If the technology were developed in the far future, it is very hard to say, as underlying attitudes on abortion might have changed so much as to make this technology irrelevant.

So, say there is a fetus in an artificial womb because of the some condition the mother had. I wonder how the right to terminate it would shake out? Requiring both parties consent? Or unilateral ability to give up parental rights and responsibilities, with the child automatically given up for adoption at that point? Probably a CW topic to go any further, though. One question is who is responsible for the resulting baby.

Current norms permit abortion but do not permit infanticide. But if she refuses any responsibility for taking care of it, that means she is willing to abandon the child whether or not there is someone willing to take over the responsibility. At least at the moment, there is no shortage of people ready to adopt healthy infants. Presumably the state would be on the hook for the unhealthy ones.

So a policy of letting women transfer fetuses they do not wish to carry to term into artificial wombs with the state taking responsibility for the fetuses thereafter seems workable. You leave the child at a hospital, police station, or fire station. My hope is that if artificial wombs become a thing, then they will be used when the mother wants to abort but the father still wants the child.

If the mother says no and the father says yes, then artificial womb. If both the mother and the father say no, then abortion. The Washington Post columnist came down pretty heavily against the pro-life side on this but it is probably more acceptable to quote here as unbiased or at least not biased in the same way pro-life sites would be biased:. The and measures included a controversial line that proved to be a sticking point. Wade Supreme Court decision. Here is an excerpt of his remarks from the floor debate:. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place.

OT Oberon Thread | Slate Star Codex

I mean, it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute. Critics contend that this interpretation is not necessarily true because some previable fetuses survive after delivery from an unsuccessful abortion. They argue that Obama essentially opposed protecting the survivors. This new legislation removed the controversial line about recognizing live-born children as humans and giving them immediate protection under the law.

Nonetheless, Obama voted against the new bill, which happened to be an almost exact replica — almost to the word — of a federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act that passed in without opposition in either politial party. The vote in the House was by voice vote and the vote in the Senate was by unanimous consent. Are you forcing a woman to become a parent against her will after all, this still results in a live, born baby even if the pregnancy of the woman has been interrupted?

Who is the legal parent of the baby born from the artificial womb? There have been women writing articles about how they want abortion rather than carrying a child to term then giving it up for adoption, because mothers-to-be are afraid they would bond with the child after birth and suffer emotional pain from giving it up and thinking about it being raised separate from them.

The picture you are sketching, where killing kids is a terminal value that they would defend even if a simple alternative exist, remind me of the caricature that pro lifers are actually all about oppressing women. There might be a tiny part of each movement which resembles these monsters, but they are only influential because of reasonable people around them. That is a nasty disease. Some calls we get are not very sick kids but pertussis in my experience has always been nasty. Like infants and toddlers taking bipap with 0 resistance because they are just so tired.

It's definitely not harmless like antivaxxers would have you believe. Granted I probably only see the worst cases but still isn't one preventable hospitalization I've had one 6 m. I wonder if a good case of pertussis in one unvaccinated kid would be enough to get the parents to vaccinate the others. On a similar note, I wonder what antivaxxers would say if there were an RSV vaccine. It's the perennial bogeyman for parents. When I was explaining to my mom why we are so busy fall and winter I said "there's this thing called RSV" and she's like "I know that.

You guy [my siblings and I] never got it but it was the kind of thing that kept me up at night. Unrelated It would be awesome if you maybe in collaboration with your NSSOB could put together talking points for healthcare providers dealing with antivax parents the on the fence kind. Paramedics and firefighters one in the same around here generally both have a lot of trust from the public but I've watched guys talk to parents of unvaccinated parents and just drive them further away from SBM.

It would be nice to have some good talking points and prepared answers to common arguments for those teaching moments. My state unfortunately won't let us vaccinate although I've heard rumors of some marvericks down south doing vaccinations at the fire houses but I think it would be cool to see a study of how allowing paramedics to adminster vaccines affects rates especially in communities where it's falling. We're EMS kind of the lowest rung right now as the newbies are wont to be and a little slow on the uptake of evidence based medicine especially in the sovereign state of Chicago.

Still, our position not so much mine doing only hospital-hospital but you get the point in the community is pretty unique among healthcare providers. Well, since no one becomes autistic from vaccines, yes getting vaccinated is much better than dying ;.

However, the autistics who are profoundly mentally retarded and can't abide any kind of stimulation, well we really don't know how happy they actually are or if they even understand what happy means. Their parents know that caring for these children is very difficult and getting resources is equally difficult. Having said that, though, I don't excuse spreading misinformation, as if it were some sort of way of taking revenge on the world for their suffering. One last thing you'll develop on your journey to become an Anti-Vaxxer is an endless desire to share information with others.

Once you're a veteran of the vaccine trenches, it grows old to continue providing sources to hundreds of interested people who want to learn. It's not that we aren't encouraged by your endeavors, it's just that we've told this story a thousand times before. That's why I don't give many references or links in my blogs. I encourage readers to take matters into their own hands and put in the elbow grease themselves. So, you can't tell if Matty is lying or misrepresenting stuff Liz Ditz quoting Matt: Funny, I don't remember when an anitivaxer gave out any useful verifiable sources.

Usually they just spout the same old websites and discredited papers by Wakefield, Shaw, Singh, Geier, etc. Or they just say, like he is in that sentence: I'm a "veteran of the vaccine trenches," having been at it far longer than Matt, and I never tire of providing links to my sources on this blog. I do it frequently and copiously. I will admit that I didn't throw in as many links to my sources as I usually do in my rebuttal to Matt, but that's just because there were so many antivaccine tropes in his post that I've deconstructed so many times before that I didn't have time to look up all my old posts and primary sources for all of them.

Be that as it may, it's come to my attention that Matt has been reading the comments here. Clearly he has a problem with little things called links, because many of my assertions had links to back them up, mostly to posts I've written in the past in which I refute various bits of antivaccine misinformation, almost always with links leading to the sources. Obviously, Matt hasn't clicked on any of them. Of course, maybe he doesn't understand the concept, given that he has yet to provide links to his sources. But, hey, maybe Matt'll keep reading as my minions continue to deconstruct the copious quantities of nonsense in his two posts that I linked to.

Maybe he'll learn something, although, sadly, I doubt it. I'm pretty sure that's true, because I had a terrible case of Chicken Pox when I was Um, looking at his profile pic, he looks to be about my age which means he probably got chicken pox BEFORE the vaccine came out. And just because he didn't get that vaccine, doesn't necessarily mean he didn't get the others. Aaaaaaaaaaand I can't read any more. It's just making me angry.

It's all the usual anti-vax propaganda, this time with no references to the biased sources he's getting it from, and a holier than thou attitude, not to mention the fact that he specifically says he's got a degree from Google U and is proud of it. Worse but, to an extent, amusing to me , there's not the least hint of self-awareness in Matt. He's a University of Google student and proud of it, to the point that he thinks he can take on someone like Paul Offit who's Arrogance of ignorance, indeed. He has obviously read this page and that comment. I saw the picture of rocks on the "about" page earlier, but now it is gone.

So Matt when you say: Though do be careful to not confuse "morbidity" aka incidence rate with "mortality" death , and to not mention any other decade nor any other country. Rate per of measles And then Matt continues with: Then why are the index cases most often those who had not been give the MMR vaccine? It seems that un-vaxed go overseas to where there are outbreaks and then spread measles at home: Of course you'll just chalk it up to Conspiracy!

Because obviously asking you to provide a PubMed indexed study by reputable qualified researchers to back up your Google U. Though I did love it when Miller's counterpart Stone kept insisting on using data from England and Wales. I asked him why as a UK citizen he thought they were American states. It's always this with these people, isn't it?

Don't you dare lump autistic children in with mentally ill people. The brain is part of the body, after all. Never mind that most "mental" diseases probably have a little something to do with the brain as well. I mean, I kind of get it. I think it was Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, probably in the part where she was on the psych ward, that she'd rather have almost anything wrong with her body that something wrong with her mind. I don't think I know somebody who's had to deal with mentall illness, and everything that comes with it, who hasn't thought the same thing.

Wishing, though, doesn't make it so. That's a train, son. I think you were going for some variation on "healthy as a horse" here. I just went back to read the comments in Matt's two posts. His response to questions about why he didn't link to his primary sources are truly full of lulz.

For instance spaces added to make it more legible, as Matt seems to have a problem with formatting things to make them tolerable to read, as well:. They claim they've studied vaccines to the point that they can say with certainty they are safe for all. However, when repeatedly asked, they fail to provide the studies we ask for. Until they can show us the studies, the burden of proof lies with them. As for peer reviewed literature, there is plenty of it to support vaccines. However, I don't always trust it.

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As I stated before, it's up to you to do your own research on the topic. I will make no claim to offer medical advice, so I will not share the research I've done over the past few years, because it would take months for you to pour over. I did however give you a good place to start if you're really serious about learning the risks of vaccines. Except for one link to a hilariously bad article an article so bad that it might be Orac-bait for a future post in an antivaccine source, Matt's response is basically a long-winded equivalent of "Google it yourself.

His intellectual laziness and arrogance of ignorance are so epic that even some antivaxers seem to have a problem with his failure to provide sources to back up his claims. A very powerful entity? What is this entity? Voices for Vaccines has a suite of tools for parents who are advocates for immunization. You could start by watching this slideshow presentation on Vaccines are Safe and Effective. Actually, this is an open forum, so I have all comments set to be approved, although if they get out of hand I will delete. However, I've chosen to leave yours up, to demonstrate my point of how many pro-vaxxers attack with no proof or evidence of their argument.

Yeah, okay, I guess it does. We all know about the Geiers. But their licenses don't get revoked willy-nilly. Is the rotator-cuff gag an 'old' doctor's joke, or did you just make it up? Brilliant either way as it's a perfect diagnosis of the "conservative millennial" mind.

The self-important arrogance and let's not forget the 'I'M the victim! As a conservative, Matt should have no problems smacking Big Guvment. The self-regulating invisible hand! Matt tries to spin it back to Rand-land: But then he has to concede the Feds are just stooges for the pharmas. So, um, Matt, how do you smack down the power of Big Pharma without regulating it? Writing blogs, I guess. Big Pharma IS a conspiracy. It just isn't the conspiracy the loons think it is.

I'm imagining Matt getting to sit-in on executive meetings at Pfizer or Lily, and being totally hear-no-evil, see-no-evil through the whole proceedings. That has to make some kind of Hall of Fame. Your typical CAMer will drop 'sbm doesn't cure' without elaboration, and let implication do the work. The most effective propaganda always contains a core of truth — cherry-picked, framed, with whipped BS and an artificial cherry on top — and it's the true part that makes it fly with the audience. Of course, it's hardly "only", and altie 'modalities' are as much or more directed at symptoms in practice.

If we actually looked at alt-'healers' we'd see the political economy claimed for sbm is even more central: Don't Look At That! Just look at the sbm! Look harder and deeper, and you get to the question, 'What has anyone ever fixed? Which is why the alties have to be very careful about the 'millennia of success' stuff in presenting this take. It goes to the background, and has to be framed as not-science, but rather the kind of intuitive experiential practice, like plant medicines in the pre-contact jungles of the Amazon, that could indeed be proved effective, if only those stubborn sbm-ers would open their minds and think outside the Big Pharma pill box.

Now that's a bold statement! Too bold for CAM's own good. What could possibly lead Matt to such face-palming hubris? The answer, of course, is right wing ideology. The biggest face-palm of 12 is yet to come. Over 4, words into a post claiming to present the forbidden knowledge revealed and verified by rigorous research, Matt's argument that 'holistic med works' comes down to this:.

YOU are not a special snowflake. YOU do not have Initiative like Matt. YOU are in the dark because you have not sought the light of Truth. Matt does not identify the rubric of his holistic diagnostician the prescription seems to be homeopathy, cleansing, and natural-diet-prevents-disease so I'd guess we're talking Naturopath , but then that would distract from the point: I'll say this about Matt. He's quite the contortionist. He can not only twist both shoulders to give himself constant double pats on the back, but kick you in the ass at the same time if you're not patting his back along with him.

Matt signs his post "A Father", has a photo of his infant child next to his as his "Author" pic. What ended his "normal" life and propelled him to existence as a reviled social-outcast anti-vaxer? Few and far between, it seems, are the anti-vaxers who can resist the opportunity to hammer the reader with 'I am special and important because I have a child! He has taken The Hard Road. Because he is better than you are. And, oh, how he suffers for his Excellence!

Pride in arrogant ignorance: Did you notice that under the imperative for everyone to "just stop and think" like him , Matt also urges us to "connect the dots? Is it Glenn Beck? It's a cartoon of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul! By my arrival, the cartoon had replaced the injection photo at the top of the OP, so when I got to the first comment I was confused about the reference to Mark Crislip and acupuncture.

So I started thinking: If acupuncture followed the cartoon, facts wouldn't need to be injected, just the needle would do, and unlike the sbm doc, TCM would know where to stick the needle. What if acupuncture could stop anti-vaxism? I think the prospects for that treatment are actually quite promising! You just need to find the right spot, and push the needle a lot farther in.

Thanks, Orac, I appreciate this post. After a discussion about vaccines over the holidays pro-vax, but with some dubious assertions , I decided to catch up on the vaccination scene. It is sad, though, to see that so little has changed since I drifted off to other skeptical topics. Thanks for including the links! Not the vaccine, if you study the dates. Sanitation, cleaner water, and better food are great for preventing the spread of airborne diseases. I am in awe of his research skills. Our good host mentioned Matt's point 6 You're not really "Anti-Science" in passing.

That passage contained the following passage:. He's on the run for stealing money from the testing grants for his own personal use. Similar to what Dr. Wakefield was condemned for; yet the CDC continues to use the study results as biblical truth. That whole thing is almost a word salad, but let's break it down Part I -- the FBI futitive single-handedly has performed all vaccine safety research to date.

It does appear that, between and , he did commit embezzlement, and yes, he is still on the Office of the Inspector General's most wanted list ; he is in Denmark, awaiting extradition. Has the CDC admitted that Thorsen performed most of the vaccine safety studies? That is apparently a figment of Matt's imagination. Did Thorsen work on vaccine safety studies? He is listed as an author on the following vaccine-safety studies. Thorsen P is listed as a co-author on studies, few having to do with vaccination. I am not sure how common a surname "Thorsen" is in Denmark, or how common "Thorsen P" is.

For those not familiar with what the order of authors' names signify in scientific studies: A population-based study of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and autism. Thimerosal and the occurrence of autism: MMR vaccination and febrile seizures: Time trends in reported diagnoses of childhood neuropsychiatric disorders: Autism prevalence trends over time in Denmark: The most charitable interpretation is that Matt does not understand how scientific research works, does not understand the vaccine safety literature, and has been mislead by only reading anti-vaccine sites, which are similarly, well, ignorant.

I got msg'd today by an aquaintence who is very anti-vax among a lot of conspiratorial positions he takes I said that this woman has no credentials to be fear mongering like this. What great friends I have, no really The term of years of Satan's power has been fulfilled, but other terrible things draw near. Thanks for the links LIz. Only scanned them but looks like a solid starting point.

I have big dreams but lack the authority and experience to put them into action.

I've heard of CE for car seat education I've been led to believe that education from paramedics and firefighters on proper car seat use has been very effective; never seen actually data though. Once the idea solidifies a little more I think I'll bring it up to my supervisor probably not exactly who I need but she certainly knows more than I do and go from there.

Systems states even that implement some kind of CE could add a couple custom NEMSIS elements I think this would need to wait for NEMSIS 3 to be rolled out relating to talking to parents of pediatric patients about vaccines and coordinate with pediatricians to track vaccine uptake of those kids. This could be a HUGE source of data for evaluating the efficacy of various educational strategies.

This stuff is way over my head though. Anyways, thanks again for the information LIz. It would be great if anything came of my ideas; I'll keep you posted expect updates to be slow and infrequent though. If anyone with more pull than I have i. No need to credit me as the source or anything "Inspired by brofessor" doesn't exactly inspire confidence , if it helps prevent some childhood diseases that's good enough for me I would appreciate a heads up though; would be cool to follow. Would love to see the idea picked up by someone higher on the food chain.

I'll have to ask him if he reads orac. He can be pretty insolent at times in private that is; not to parents, I'm told. Since the s, the need for EMS information systems and databases has been well established, and many statewide data systems have been created. However, these EMS systems vary in their ability to collect patient and systems data and allow analysis at a local, state, and national level.

Chicago changes glacially but the region I went to school in does great work using the data for CQI for specific agencies and providers and updating SOPs based on patient outcomes some of their systems have been doing spinal clearance since ; that's pretty cutting edge, esp. Regarding some earlier posts, when I have a spike in a graph, and I want to find the maximum value, I do so in a fit of pique.

I was starting to recognize some of the emergency response teams. At least more than one comforted me when we got to the hospital. This is why folks like Matt make me angry. I have one child who has been saddled with a bad roll of the genetic dice. Usually the calls were for his heart he decided to not take his meds , but the last more memorable was when he had a complex migraine that mimicked a stroke. This was major due to the known heart condition. It also paved the way for his surgery at the Mayo Clinic. Because of this one child I have been on several ambulance rides, have become familiar with several hospitals and know lots about health insurance.

People like Matt who have typical kids and pontificate about the medical system that they never get to know make me very very angry. And unfortunately their idiotic Google U. So thanks for all you do.

At least after his surgery we no longer need to dial , plus he much better about taking his heart meds. I was looking forward to an afternoon and evening of fun out with some people, but as it turns out, some people, are ill. Did some people get their flu shots? No, some people thought they were immune to flu, and so now they are bedridden and wishing they had made better choices.

Some people may or may not be my children. In my previous comment , I addressed the "FBI fugitive" part, having to do with the claim that Poul Thorsen was responsible for "most of the studies that "proved" safety. Thorsen submitted fraudulent invoices on CDC letterhead to medical facilities assisting in the research for reimbursement of work allegedly covered by the grants. The fact that the invoices were on CDC letterhead made it appear that CDC was requesting the money from Aarhaus University and Sahlgrenska University Hospital although the bank account listed on the invoices belonged to Thorsen.

Has Thorsen stood trial for these alleged crimes and misdemeanors? Has Thorsen, although he is a medical doctor, ever been accused of medical misconduct? To the best of my knowledge, no. I do not read Danish; it is possible he has been accused of such. However, I would be surprised if such accusations were not available in English. Some of the charges found proven by the British General Medical Council thanks to law professor Dorit Reiss for the summary.

Financial malfeasance Requesting funding from the Legal Aid Board for things that were already covered by NHS and therefore no funding was needed , used part of that money for other than the purpose it was granted. Other ethical lapses Not disclosing to the ethics committee participation in litigation, which was, in fact, a conflict of interest. Conducting clinical investigations for research purposes rather than for clinical purposes with no ethics committee approval. Involvement in filing a patent related to a measles vaccine and treatment of inflammatory bowel disease.

Matt seems to think that Thorsen's wrongdoing is exactly parallel to Wakefield's. Matt seems to think that the few studies in which Thorsen was a junior author should be discounted just as the retracted Wakefield paper is not to mention Wakefield's other autism papers. If you are reading these comments, Matt, I would like to know your reasoning in equating Thorsen to Wakefield.

Talking points for dealing with fence-sitters: Asking here's a good foot forward, IMHO, but you're sticking the trailing foot in a bear trap with "antivax parents the on the fence kind. Talking to real anti-vaxers is a waste of time. Talking to fence-sitters may be as important as a defibrillator or the Jaws of Life. To get fence-sitters down, you need to understand the fence, from the perspective of butt on the rail. I recently posted some of my own thoughts on fence-sitter persuasion here. I don't do brevity either, and YMMV.

What did your guys say, or how did they say it, and why do you think it was counter-productive? Science can't investigate that, so your personal experience is immensely valuable evidence. Granted, this is actually a little song for the echo chamber he inhabits. In a way, I have to wonder if it is almost a short hand of sorts - they "know" the answers, so just in hinting at them, others in the tribe automatically nod heads kind of like when end of days preachers say "Babylon".

If you aren't a regular inhabitant of the echo chamber, you are left to either ask for more of their special secret knowledge or traverse the far expanses of Google to locate it yourself. Both of his posts are more for him to get applause and encouragement from others in the echo chamber for his brave pokes at the dragon, not really written with the outer world in mind. I think he is too cowardly to engage this crowd and have his closely held beliefs challenged. And yes, they are "beliefs", because they are neither fact nor science.

I'm not seeing any change in the otherwise empty "about" and "contact" pages from when this post went up, BTW. But the IT monkeys have helpfully removed the standard CSS line advising which tags work, so sometimes you have to poke it with a stick. I definitely did not this time, so here goes nothing. Matt, you've probably already noticed this, but it looks like you're being targeted by Orac aka David Gorski and his team of sycophantic thugs and bullies.

They really have nothing relevant to add to the conversation.

OT115: Oberon Thread

The only thing they will do is say, "If you don't follow my dogma, then you're a heretic and should be excommunicated. Before, I mentioned some of my buddies work in communities with low vaccination rates; one in particular has very, very strong feelings about anti-vax parents. Those of us who looked earlier for me it was during some bout of insomnia , the "about" page was a picture of rocks on a seashore, then later a blank page. The timing of removal may have been due to browser choice. Mine just happens to be Firefox. It is obvious that Brave Sir Matt is reading this page but will not comment here for obvious fear related issues.

Re Matt's about page: Currently, they are visible to me. But it is late I do not expect Matt to reply any time soon. I am about to shamble off to the snore basket in the words of my dear late father. Stand by for further developments. Having made such errors myself, my no-screen-shots phenomenological "trust" something-something meter is not particularly forgiving. You know, given how much I hate spelling pedants who post comments here that are nothing more than spelling, typo, or grammar flames, it took every ounce of my self-control not to go all Orac on Matt's use of "peaked" instead of "piqued.

If nothing else, can you do anything with this abomination: Unless some good thinking people get on it, the lie will blossom unchecked. Season's Greetings to All! Ah, the old "your science is a religion" trope. When I see that I know Matt really does have nothing intelligent to say. Poul Thorsen has not been accused of medical misconduct. He is, in fact, still practicing medicine in Denmark. The charges against him for tax evasion were also dropped by the Danish Police.

So, unlike Wakefield, Thorsen has retained his license, has not been found guilty by a court of law and is continuing to practice medicine in his homeland, rather than fleeing to another country and setting up shop there to bilk families for a shoddy defense fund. Matt, This is just in case you are still reading this and few people could resist, give the circumstances. I did that, and found that the antivaccine movement distorts the facts, grossly misunderstands science, cherry-picks evidence that suits them, ignores evidence that does not and often flatly lies.

For example, I think what you wrote about formaldehyde in vaccines, one of my pet peeves, is misleading:. There is evidence that commonly links excessive formaldehyde exposure to cancer. It is a known carcinogen. Again, not something you want being pumped into your young children. Formaldehyde is only a carcinogen when inhaled, as far as I know. Vaccines, obviously, are not inhaled.

It is only toxic when exposure exceed the capacity of the body to metabolize it to formate, CO2, and water. You clearly know, since you mentioned it, that the human body generates and safely deals with far more formaldehyde than there is in any vaccine. That means our bodies happily deal with over 31, milligrams of formaldehyde each and every day; that's at least , times more formaldehyde than is present in any vaccine.

That very clearly is not the "excessive formaldehyde exposure" that is linked to cancer, is it? In any case, how can 0. Isn't it deliberately misleading to claim that formaldehyde in vaccines can possibly do any harm? Is what I wrote in any way bullying or an accusation of heresy? Apparently this one is even worse than her previous magnum crappus; she actually cites Wakefield's retracted papers, according to this account: What they fail to acknowledge and typically ignore if asked is that a vaccine containing up to mcg of aluminum administered via intramuscular injection is not the same as ingesting small amounts of aluminum via the digestive track.

I won't ignore it - in terms of aluminum ending up in the bloodstream, which is what is important, IM injection and ingestion are very similar. As has been discussed here many times before, the insoluble aluminum salts suspended in some vaccines slowly dissolve in the interstitial fluid in the muscle and are released into the blood at about the same rate as aluminum is absorbed into the blood from food, and are quickly excreted.

A child's kidneys can excrete very much larger amounts of aluminum without any problems, and blood aluminum levels after vaccination barely increase, never remotely approaching a toxic level, which is typically times that seen post vaccination. I can't find an EPA daily consumption limit for aluminum, just a limit for cosmetic effects i.

This limit is to prevent accumulation of aluminum, particularly in those with impaired renal function, who are given these IV fluids continually for days or even months. Contamination of IV fluids with aluminum leads to greatly elevated blood levels after they have been administered for long periods, hence the regulations. Comparing this with one-off intramuscular shots is clearly misleading. That works out to 22 micrograms per day, slowly leaching into the bloodstream, below the FDA safety limits for IV fluids which includes a large safety margin.

That's to micrograms of pure poison just to treat a sour stomach!!! Add that to all the Al raining down on us from Kemtrailz and now you'll understand just how eevyil these people are More than once, when somebody refused to give any sources, I responded by asking why they were deliberately withholding information that they believed could save human lives. Phrasing things in ethical and moral terms seems to have some effect, at least.

All of the coverage seems to stem from a talk Seneff Gave October 23, , at the "holistic-focused Groton Wellness organization.

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We are professionals in preventative and functional medicine, dental care, psychology, nutrition, and a host of complementary and alternative therapies. We work with you to develop a personal, comprehensive plan that achieves wellness and balance from head to toe. This is our mission. In that bit about Thorsen, Matt reveals that he has not actually done his own research, but rather simply read and regurgitated what other anti-vaccine folks have written about Thorsen.

Poul Thorsen is not wanted by the FBI. Matt would have discovered this if he'd bothered going to the FBI's web site and used the handy little search option over on the lower right. Matt, if you are reading, since you so strongly stress the TruthTM, I expect that you will promptly amend your post to correct your error, stating clearly that Thorsen is not, in fact, wanted by the FBI.

He likely would want to dissuade any of his readers from actually delving deep into VAERS data because they would see the lack of objectivity, and in many cases, total inanity of many of the submissions! From time to time she nodded to herself. Plenty of capital letters. Devotion to upper case, she had noticed, was one of the more consistent characteristics of Life Force enthusiasts. We can't tell, Tim, for all you have linked to is a press release promising that a study "is expected to be published in three months July ".

Her Autism One performance was in May. Hooboy, that Responsible Technology site is a piece of work. The testimonials at the bottom of the page are a Who's Who of crankery with one advertising exec thrown in for good measure. WTF does the "rusky hairy rat" study have to do with anything, Tim? Are you claiming that you don't understand why citing ANY retracted papers torpedoes Seneff's credibility? I only got a little way through the Al-adjuvant paper from during my public-transit "happening" this afternoon, but I'm reminded that I'm unclear about whether there is a balance between 1 phagocytic uptake of still-adsorbed antigen and 2 immune noticing of dissociated antigen — with subseqent IM Al loneliness — or whether the former has gone overboard in the decade since Lindblad Image four 15 year old children, Ursula, Ulf, Violet, and Victor.

Ursula and Ulf were unvaccinated and had measles at age 5. Violet and Victor had the two-dose MMR series, with the second dose given at age 5.

A safe bet is "never"; it's not built into WP, and SB Labs has a long track record of not being able to competently deploy even the stuff that is. Liz Not as far as I am aware. The antibody measured is IgG, and the assay is unable to distinguish between vaccine and naturally produced antibody. Oh well,I suppose that this is as as good a place as any. Just what you've always wanted to know,. Notice how she calls a reporter 'a cupcake' whilst she isn't exactly Simone de Beauvoir herself. And I'm not 'sqeamish' at all I'm vasovegal with increasing frequency of lack of arterial pulse.

They're playing Grand Canyon Adventure. I'm doing a backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon in a few weeks. He possesses one of the most unpleasant speaking voices I've ever heard, at once whiney and screechy, like the ghost of his grandmother lives down his windpipe. While I find his devotion to the environment as long as it doesn't incovenience him laudable, his grasp of science, well, I think we all know how flimsy that is.

Denice - interested in your "thrice weekly hair ritual" - my hair is hip length and I am always looking for ways to tweak my own care. Mostly I focus on gentle shampoo and plenty of conditioner. Not as far as I am aware. If you want to get fancier, though, you could try subtyping. First of all, to answer your question, there is a lot of woo about hair- avoid toxin chemicals, use all natural products and herbs, reverse hair loss and greying, restore its natural beauty etc.

Mikey sells his own products that remove cleaning agents that most general companies utilise see his website's store.

Null claims he can reverse hair loss and greying through diet- and he has a study to prove it an article is available. Both he and Mercola sell over-priced hair products see websites' stores There is a wealth of crap around the net.. For my own reality-based regime, I buy olive oil in the food store and spray-on argan oil from a general hair product line which I leave on for variable amounts of time - based on my schedule keeping the oil away from the roots and then, wash it out with shampoo I like based largely on fragrance. I don't keep it extremely long, but oil is the secret the longer it is.

Denice - thank you. Lately I have been really bad about getting it cut can't remember last time I sat in a salon chair , and have decided I am more likely to find a good set of hair shears online, have them delivered and trim off my own damage than manage to be bothered making regular appointments good thing my most regular companions are horses, chickens and other livestock? Still looking for the right formulation I guess. On hair woo - the most ironic is that they go on about chemicals, then recommend lye soap or baking soda paste. What exactly do they think "chemicals" are? I shall forever be grateful to a young gay man- hair cutter- who taught me how to CUT MY OWN by pulling it up over the top of my head- carefully- and cutting across, creating an infinity of layers - and then trimming the bottom separately.

People think I pay someone real money for it. Hard to believe but true. It's easy to really long hair it's- all geometry. It was cute that Conrick stepped in to bolster Stagliano's shreiking about bra shopping with Denice - a friend probably showed me the same thing probably 25 years ago, or at least something similar. As long as my hair is, I am slightly afraid of ruining it. The reason as to why vaccination does not provoke a higher response in these is thought by the authors to relate to the age at which kids are likely to get vaccine vs the age they usually get natural infection. But this paper looks at responses back in the day when only one shot was given at around 1yr, and no booster later on.

That being the case, I wonder what the IgG4 subclasses would be if this experimant were repeated. Perhaps the IgG4 levels would be much higher, and comparable to those from natural infection, and therefore not useful as a way to distinguish vaxed from natural immunity? Learning point for antivaxers: The primary protection against measles is from IgG1, levels of which are very good and durable both post vaccine and post natural measles, so please don't quote this article as "proof" that vaccine immunity is useless.

From a pro-vaxer to all you anti's - why do you assume that we haven't done the research? You say you've done the research and have made the decision that not vaccinating is best for your family. Great - I don't have a problem with that. But that doesn't make the rest of us uneducated nuts that just need to see the light.

Would you be okay with us doing the research and making the decision to vaccinate because that's what we think is right for our family? Because believe it or not that's actually the case for most of us; again this might shock you but we love out children too!

I had a similar conversation with a very close friend of mine recently. I'll tell you the same thing I told him:. I'm not pushing anyone to be anti-vax. That's your choice, just like it should be my choice to not vaccinate. Unfortunately my beliefs are in the minority, and some people - wealthy, influential people - have expressed a very public desire to have my kids vaccinated against my will, for reasons I strongly believe are unethical.

If these people have their way - and they are slowly forcing their way into our every lives - my children could be taken from me for something as trivial as not vaccinating my children. Put yourself in my shoes: In order to avoid this this, I need to do everything I can to be proactive. This includes writing a summary of my beliefs to base my stance. It just so happens that millions of people feel the same way I do, and we're starting to come out of the shadows and multiply in voice.

Our goal is awareness. My goal is not to push my beliefs on others, it is to raise awareness in those that perhaps haven't studied at all and haven't heard my side. My goal is to encourage others on my side to speak up. Not to be afraid of scrutiny, but to be courageous for their kids and our future generations. Surely if you've done your research you realize that there are indeed risks. My family has decided not to take those risks. We've chosen to boost our immune systems naturally instead of artificially. We don't expect you to do the same, but we expect that you respect our decision.

We have raised valid questions regarding popular vaccine points that have not been answered. We have asked for proofs that haven't yet been proved. We feel strongly vindicated in our decision. We respect your decision, even though we might not agree with it. We are tolerant even though we receive much intolerance in return.

It is at this point quite an unfair fight that we never even asked for. Please respect our position, and we can respect yours. Is this a veiled reference to Gates? Most of the attacks on Matt are coming from the same origin as stated. The Orac trolls from a couple 'skeptics' websites not deserving a name mention. They are probably paid, but if they're not then they've got serious cognitive dissonance issues. Vaccines have been fully exposed as a fraudulent and ineffective by now, yet the skeptics society is darn hell bent at protecting their fairy tale position on herd immunity.

Pharma is probably financing these attacks. I'll never get used to the jaw-droppingly ignorant statements that emanate from the anti-vaccine brigade. What kind of person writes something like this? Are they unaware of all the safety and efficacy studies? Where did measles and smallpox go? Why has chicken pox all but vanished in the US, but remains endemic in the UK? Even more mind-boggling, how can anyone deny herd immunity exists?

Not only is it supported by mountains of evidence, but it's simple common sense. If one person in a community of gets measles, if the other 99 are immune, through either vaccination or natural immunity, the disease cannot spread; if none of them are immune, almost all of them will get measles. That's herd immunity in a nutshell. How can anyone deny this? Reading Matt's blog would probably be helpful to anyone seeking to lose weight this year because his writing will induce vomiting.

It should be MY choice to not vaccinate. You have to hand it to Matt. It takes a certain talent to move bargain-basement Randian exceptional-individualism-persecuted-by-the-gray-masses to argumentum ad populum in the next paragraph. Kind melts the special snowflake. I don't suppose Matt has citations for anyone making such proposals. See,you don't own you kids, and the decisions you get to make about their health issues as domestic patriarch do not include any damn thing you please, including relating to life-and-death issues of their health. Read you Rand dude, and consider that your kids have individual rights, too!

But then, it's not just your kids. It's all the other kids, and grown-ups too who are VPD vulnerable you're putting at risk with your selfish actions threatening public health. For that, you should be in jail. I'd prefer restorative to retributive justice, so we'll just sentence you to community service setting up immunization clinics in poor neighborhoods with at-risk kids.

I suspect part of it comes from people misunderstanding the term, either out of perversity or ignorance. In the example of one person who catches measles in a population of , the fact that the rest of the population was immune conferred no benefit on the one who actually caught the measles. Their immunity was not conferred upon the non-immunized individual, thus the herd was not immune. Perusing the net, there appears to be an argument that vaccines don't provide as good a "permanent" immunity as catching the actual disease does, and if you're not re-exposed periodically say, by frequent epidemics then the actual level of immunization within the population will be lower than it appears base on immunization records.

Not being an expert, it is unclear to me if this argument has any merit - however, it would certainly seem to indicate that we should have more, not less, vaccination. After all, the goal it would seem to me would be to have less disease, not stronger immunization in disease survivors.

Likewise, it should be my choice pf whether or not to stop at red lights. They must be shills! It makes me see red whenever I think of those big traffic-light shills raking in the green, and about the yellow journalists who cover up for them. In related news, Kent Heckenlively — who apparently can't think of anything else to do — continues to pimp his Mikovits joint, this time with an utterly incoherent chapter summary that includes a time-traveling convalescent serum and airborne XMRV. It has to be seen to be believed. I wonder what Matt's driving record is like. Why do you think they're Red!

Connect the dots people! Big guvment Commie tyranny is right under your nose! Don't tread on Matt! I get how much this guy makes all of our collective blood boil with his errant stupidity, but it is almost a waste of our time to make fun of his misguided beliefs. It's tough to argue with anti-vaxxers because no matter what we say or what we do or what evidence we show them, there is always some rebuttal or fallback position that validates their position and nullifies ours. Scientists could conduct the highly unethical study they request and a child could die as a result of a disease contracted and they still would not accept the results.

They would still find fault with it. I am thoroughly convinced that it is a huge waste of time to even argue with anti-vaxxers as much as I want to try to do the right thing. They will never ever ever believe the converse opinion to their own unless their unvaccinated gets seriously ill or dies. Even then, it would be the fault of big pharma or some other boogey man.

As sad as it makes me to know there really are people out there who are completely insane and blissfully unaware of how ignorant they are or in some cases rejoice in their ignorance , I just do not have the time or energy to argue with them anymore. Jemima, do tell us how much money the USA would save if vaccines were no longer given to children. Provide us the economic analysis that it would be cheaper to treat diseases instead of preventing them. Some things to keep in mind: Also, your article was only about influenza by the way there are no adjuvants in American influenza vaccine , a disease that as so far this year killed at least fifteen children.

Now we are expecting a link to real and verified economic analysis showing that allowing diphtheria, measles, chicken pox, polio, etc. As part of your economic analysis I should tell you that I got a flu vaccine at my local pharmacy. I will now use our household income because the company provides sick leave, but the amount of money earned by college age child as a part time retail store employee: On the off chance that you actually read your source, I can only conclude that you are expressing some sort of petulant objection to pandemic preparedness.

Well, if it hadn't been for people like you, the NHL wouldn't be sidelined right now. That's a lot of money being lost, both by the players, the advertisers and the stadiums.

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We need vaccines for what reason? There's an outbreak of mumps among the NHL players this year. All of whom were apparently affected by the Wakefield panic, or whose parents 'forgot' to get the boosters for them. This piece reeks so much of arrogance and sarcasm that I can't even take you seriously. A smart, informative, and less snarky retort would have held more weight with me. I'm sick of the back-and-forth hatred spewing crap coming from both sides of this argument. Some people thinks that it's lunacy to vaccinate knowing so little.

Others thinks it's worth the risk to keep themselves and their kids safe from disease. There is just too much data being tracked or not by too many or too few people to really get a good grasp on what vaccines do or don't do. It's like education standards testing. Good grief, the statistics are staggering for both. And for both, there are people firmly camped on either side with some "on the fence. I think it's time for a little civility in the vaccine debate.

I encourage you to be the bigger person and go first. Then at least you can say that you didn't dive into the pile of muck with those you disagree with. And before you write me off, my friend is a director with the CDC. I'm neither pro- nor anti-vaccine. I'm just pro civil discourse. I would not chalk up the NHL mumps outbreak to Wakefieldian anti-vaccinationism.

Many of the NHL players are of an age where the second MMR had not yet been added to the vaccination schedule, so some may have had a sub-par response to the vaccine. Add to that atrocious personal hygiene among NHL players e. There are other factors at play, but at the very least, this is one instance where we can't really blame Wakefield et al.

I can't decide whether the notion that NHL players are paid per game or the failure to notice that not a single game has been canceled struck me as more amazing. I haven't seen any direct evidence of antivax beliefs being expressed, but there are certainly indications of stupidity on the subject of immunization and infectious disease. For instance, my local NHL team has been decimated by injuries this season, yet most players apparently are avoiding mumps boosters, for reasons including the fact that they just don't take the disease seriously despite the fact that a number of their colleagues have missed games and that mumps in older males can have serious implications.

It would be truly bizarre if athletes who aren't bothered by losing multiple teeth to high-velocity pucks and elbows, are simultaneously scared of a non-slap shot. This is the most ridiculous thing I've heard i a long time. We know a lot about vaccine safety. Even if your friend is in the CDC, so what? It's a non sequitur. It proves nothing about your claimed objectivity. In fact, I'll go one step further. I don't believe you when you say you aren't anti-vaccine, because I've never seen anyone but an antivaxer claim that we don't know anything for sure about vaccine safety, a claim that is just plain wrong on so many levels.

You might think you're not antivaccine, but you talk the talk and walk the walk. Your concern trolling is duly noted, however. One wonders if you've commented on Matt's blog and taken him and his commenters to task for their lack of civility as well. The concern-trolling is missing the part about being driven by the incivility to embrace the opposite camp.

I have to deduct points for that. As I pointed out in another thread, your side doesn't take science seriously at all, and is rich enough to escape the economic consequences of caring for a sick youngster. In addition, some of the most prominent anti-vaxxers are chronic liars and straight up bullies. There might be a nice anti-vaxxer somewhere, but I doubt it.

Being civil is a fool's errand. I had wondered if Wakefield had found a toe hold in Finland ever since the story broke, but I guess he didn't. Uh, most of my teams out, and I don't pay all that much attention to sports. Secondly, I meant that the players would lose endorsements and the stadiums would lose money for every game not played.

The lamely named Wild? Suter missed two games. I have to post this.

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