ok here goes I mostly prefer to stay outta the vaccination argument because it is unwinnable, just like with fluoridation, both ‘sides’ quote statistics which appear to justify their stance without considering the effect on the total human population. In certain circumstances fluoride can be harmful, but fluoride in the water supply greatly reduces tooth decay which in turn can reduce a person’s susceptibility to heart disease and circulatory disorder.
I’m no epidemiologist but I can comprehend these issues are complex and dependant upon individual response to a plethora of diverse instigations. Satistics can only give a very generalised take on these situations where responses vary according to each individual’s physical make-up.
Even so, one thing sticks out. Communities which regularly vaccinate enjoy greater longevity than most of those which do not.
We can push & shove n argue till the cows come home but the fact remains that the MMR vaccine even in its dodgy early 90’s aluminium enriched version killed and damaged a lot less people than would have been the case if there was no vaccine.
I most definitely have a dog in this fight. My youngest boy born in 1992 has several permanent disabilities which are typical of those disabilities suffered by many early 90’s kids given a version of the MMR vaccine high in aluminum.
I haven’t done anything about ‘proving’ this because AFAIK no proof will obliterate the medical issues which this excellent human being has to endure.
All it could do would be to force him to spend years in another country (he was born and spent the first coupla years of life in a different nation than where we live now) arguing a case which he would almost certainly lose. Big Pharma have made sure of that.
The primary reason there has been so many kids killed by measles in the last 8 weeks is because last year (2018) some Samoan children were given a bad batch of vaccine two Samoan children died.
The problem was caused by shoddy pharma processes, but just as they did when the realisation high aluminum content in the MMR vaccine was damaging children, the drug companies persuaded health authorities that owning the problem would cause a big drop in vaccination rates, so better to stay quiet.
Now that may work in europe & north america, but a nation the size of Samoa (pop 200,000 approx) everyone hears about it and saying nothing breeds distrust.
Samoans stopped vaccinating their children, instead reverting to traditional medicine, the upshot? many less kids immunised to measles, consequently many more children dead.
The drug corporations didn’t give a toss about public health issues such as vaccination take up rates, they are fixed on bottom line issues like massive class action suits against them for negligence because of the lackadaisical manner in which they manufacture & distribute vaccines.
There will never be a one size fits all solution, but it seems to me to be total madness to allow some greedy corporation whose main concern is profit, to have the final say on an issue that is all about quality of service for public health.

Posted by: A User | Dec 23 2019 7:51 utc | 104

Karlof1 @ 65
Many thanks for that important link. Fascinating reading. I imagine that you know Maisky’s Diaries – Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, writes of this period and of how Britain, France and the US cold-shouldered all attempts by the USSR to unify against Hitler’s Germany, and only when the USSR found itself entirely isolated did it agree to a non-aggression pact with Hitler.
I doubt however that much indeed any of this will find its way into Western consciousness, which does not apply reason or logic when considering Russia.

Posted by: Montreal | Dec 23 2019 8:54 utc | 106

Posted by: Rancid | Dec 23 2019 9:06 utc | 106
“Big Finance is bad, Big Government is bad, Big Agriculture is bad, multinational corporations are bad, MIC is bad, however Big Pharma is different and can be trusted. Vaccines are not for massive profit, they are the saviors of humanity.”
True, it’s funny how so many erstwhile “anti-imperialists” become the most authoritarian, infantile pro-imperialists the moment some shiny techno-gewgaw with the brand name “Science™” plastered on it is dangled in front of them. Slavish faith in the corporate vaccine product and the constantly bloating vaccination schedules recommended or mandated by the corporate state is just one example; there’s lots of others.
The vaccine debate has three separate elements:
1. The actual science of vaccination as such.
2. The real-world character of vaccines produced by profit- and power-seeking corporations which have been absolved of all legal liability.
3. The authoritarian ideology of statism and scientism which decrees that the people should unquestioningly obey the government on something like vaccination schedules, no matter how extreme the bloating of this list becomes or how perfectly the recommended/mandated schedule tallies with the demands of corporate lobbyists.
It’s automatically suspicious that the pro-vaxxers refuse to acknowledge this tripartite division of the subject. The fact is that most if not all non-vaccinators are motivated first and foremost by (2) and (3), but the proxxers fraudulently try to boil everything down to (1).
I call them “proxxers” since their authoritarian rage against this group engaging in civil disobedience is clearly motivated by something other than the fake reasons (the proxy) they claim. They’re really motivated by the affront to their religion of statism and scientism.

Posted by: Russ | Dec 23 2019 10:12 utc | 108

I think what is more important than forcing vaccines is making sure that everyone in the world has access to good basic health care and nutrition and I do not think this would be very expensive, compared to other things, such as endless wars.

Posted by: paul | Dec 23 2019 11:39 utc | 110

The routine goes on in Syria, where Israel continues to mock both Russian aa and Russian claims that it stands for national sovereignty and self determination.

Posted by: paul | Dec 23 2019 11:56 utc | 112

psychohistorian @96: “One could say [violence-centered mass media] was done consciously as part of a ploy to alienate people from each other and community/family”
Bingo!
Never ever underestimate the power of mass media (private corporation controlled under capitalism, of course, with big finance conducting that economic orchestra) to define society’s norms, and the effort to define those norms is entirely deliberate. People have often maintained the mistaken belief that changes in society lead and then the mass media just follows, delivering content that its market wishes to consume. But media products since the 2016 elections have fallen out of sync with the market demands, laying bare the efforts by big business to atomize the population with “identity” issues. In 2016 the pawl of society’s cultural ratchet slipped and the ratchet spun backwards (from the neoliberal establishment’s perspective) with shocking ferocity. The establishment is desperately cranking that ratchet to get back to where they were, but the ratchet is now damaged and its pawl isn’t engaging securely anymore.
But this ratcheting process has been going on for generations and the damage to individuals in society has been done. Depending upon whose ranking you check, between half and all of the most popular video games in the US are centered on killing other people. Most western gamers would be hard pressed to imagine gaming without violence, in fact. “A game where you don’t kill anyone? How can that be any fun?”
Black men in the West, in particular, are programmed by mass media to equate their masculinity with acts of violence. The mass-produced “identity” that big business manufactures for them (the way a fast food restaurant cranks out lardburgers) features hyperaggression as a central characteristic that Black men have to try to adopt in order to be “real men who are faithful to their own culture.” This is being done deliberately by the capitalist cultural engineers to set America’s Black population up to be the lightning rods for any outbursts of rage that the neoliberals’ economic policies trigger in the working class.
Other demographics are being set up to be lightning rods as well, such as Jews and gays. Though the “identities” manufactured for them to fit themselves into are quite different from what is fed to Black Americans, the point of these other “identities” is to fulfill the same function as lightning rods to draw the strikes away from capitalism… except for women. The identity built for western women, particularly those who consider themselves contemporary “feminists”, is paradoxically intensely misogynist; far beyond the perceived misogyny of the most gropey deplorable white working class men.

Posted by: William Gruff | Dec 23 2019 12:25 utc | 114

Posted by: pretzelattack | Dec 23 2019 11:40 utc | 110
adopting russ’s framework to the climate science debate, the ones claiming it’s a plot by big science tend to claim to be operating in the spirit of science, while ignoring the actual science, ignore the vast profit made on fossil fuels, and ignore the fact that the climate regulations that exist lack teeth.
The fact that the climate regulations that exist lack teeth, that the climate-industrial movement is celebrating thirty years of failure while emissions continue to rise and to rise at an increasing rate while the economic civilization continues to destroy sinks (often in collaboration with Big Green corporate front groups), and that the only mainstream discussion allowed is how to manipulate these notions in order to perpetuate the cancer economy of productionist “growth”, is deliberate and is in line with my framework. Thus we would have:
1. The science of ecology and climate.
2. The many forms of political denial and exploitation of the ecological crisis this science describes, whether it be old-style de jure denial or the concern-trolling of the climate-industrial movement (the climate crocodiles, as I call them, crying tears for the Earth while they want to continue raping it). This latter openly says it wants, not to save the Earth but to save the economy.
A faction among the capitalists sees the writing on the wall for fossil fuels. Some might see all the way to the final collapse. But with a good propaganda campaign, assisted by a new wave of popular excitement drummed up by NGO astroturfs like XR and the Greta Show, they see how they might be able to grab one last bonanza of government subsidies for “green capitalism”, a Green New Deal, before the lights go out for good. The fact that this last green blitz will be horrifically ecocidal in itself while emissions continue to rise and to escalate their rate of rise means nothing to them.
It’s appropriate that they call their big-state big-corporate big-ecocide plan for monumental intervention a “Green New Deal”, since the purpose of the original New Deal was to save capitalism from itself. The corporate sectors, such as energy, agribusiness, automobiles etc. mostly straddle the fence, denying the crisis or offering fake techno-solutions to it, depending on the context. The corporations and mainstream Big Green agree that extreme-energy capitalism, “green” or otherwise, must continue.
They keep squawking about 1.5C or 2C while according to the paleoclimatic evidence at least 5-10C is already locked in. It’ll just take time for the temperature to rise to meet the carbon concentration which skyrocketed so fast. And as emissions continue to rise and sinks continue to be destroyed, which they will for as long as this civilization exists, the locked-in global heating will continue to rise. And their IPCC keeps rigging its models in order to assure civilization it still has a “carbon budget” (very telling term) to spend, when in fact civilization went deep into the red many years ago.
All this is politics misdirecting away from the ecological reality. The science is clear – there is no carbon budget for ANY more industrial emissions, nor can Earth spare even one more sink.
Getting back to reality-based science, there is one and only one set of three actions which can avert the worst of the climate crisis, if done in time. If not, and civilization certainly will not do them, then Earth will do its worst as it imposes all three by force. These three actions are:
End all industrial emissions; stop destroying carbon sinks; let all natural sinks resume their natural ranges.
Anything else is a lie in opposition to the science.
(I should add that whatever’s left of the de jure deniers are no better. They’re evidently incapable of the simple mental procedure of understanding that the fact of the climate crisis is one thing, and the political scams which take their cue from it are another. (Much like the pro-vax mob I analyzed in my first comment who also can’t separate science from socioeconomy and politics.) By the deniers’ logic, since the War on Terror is a scam there must be no such thing as terrorists at all. Or because the Drug War is a scam, therefore drugs must not cause any real problems at all.)

Posted by: Russ | Dec 23 2019 12:55 utc | 116

They keep squawking about 1.5C or 2C while according to the paleoclimatic evidence at least 5-10C is already locked in. It’ll just take time for the temperature to rise to meet the carbon concentration which skyrocketed so fast.

I am sorry but this is total fantasy, even by the corrupted IPCC ‘standards’. I don’t think you actually believe this. CO2 does nothing regarding climate, and if it did it would be beneficial. Periods of warmer climate are called climate optima for a reason. Claims of CO2 causes warming is fraudulent, as it has been shown over and over again that the miniscule increase of CO2 is caused by warming in the sea and not the other way around.
I could make this a long post.

Posted by: Norwegian | Dec 23 2019 13:46 utc | 118

Lurk, if you want a relevant text from Feynman about trust in science I would take ‘the 7 percent solution’ as a starting point. You can find it in the same book and it addresses the problem of how much weight to attach to scientific resources and the complex heuristics we use to balance them, to resolve conflicts between them, to decide where we invest our limited resources in. Take Telegdi’s case for instance. Feynman is not the best example because he can afford to be at the radical end of the spectrum . I prefer to look at what the average competent scientist would do with limited resources. It is a subject I like but I’m not going to continue the discussion.

Posted by: Tuyzentfloot | Dec 23 2019 14:18 utc | 120

Russ | Dec 23 2019 10:12 utc | 108
Thanks for that. Well said…
As for the likes of Duncan, and his ilk… condescension not only undermines your argument, it actually makes a case against it (see Russ’ post above)

Posted by: xLemming | Dec 23 2019 14:56 utc | 122

vk 117
even if you presuppose the State is an all-totalitarian institution that seeks to control every aspect of each individual’s life, you have to also presuppose vaccines do really work, because for the State, there are no drawbacks in having very low mortality rates from perfectly and cheaply preventable diseases. The more healthy adults the State has under its control, the more powerful it is.
I presuppose, based on the unbroken evidence record, that corporations care about literally nothing but power and revenue and will cut every corner they can think of. They don’t care about healthy adults, nor does the state that is their lackey. Otherwise why is the corporate state systematically wiping out antibiotics as a medically effective treatment? The answer is the corporate imperative. They want to waste the very existence of antibiotics on factory farming, and so they do it.
And does any large modern state really care about maximizing the number of healthy adults? Technocratic capitalism is liquidating all real jobs as fast as it can, rendering an ever greater percentage of people socioeconomically worthless from its point of view, effectively economically stateless. Capitalism no longer wants to exploit workers, it just wants people to GET OUT of the economy, polity, society one way or another. Capitalism’s greatest fear is what’s going to happen with this vast worthless surplus of people who have no place and no future within its framework.
Indeed, that offers a good explanation for why the system wants antibiotics to fail. (And getting back to the vaccination culture war, it explains why the corporate media has riled up this pro-vax lynch mob which is so full of hate. The system is setting up a scapegoat for when the factory farms, literal bioweapon incubators, become the vector of lethal pandemics.)
So, you don’t even need to posit the existence of a “scientism”: pure game theory already tells us vaccines must work.
Scientism is the religion/ideology which worships the ideas of high-technology and big-S “Science”. It doesn’t really understand how legitimate science works and doesn’t care, nor does it care whether the technologies really work. Much like e.g. the type of Christian who worships the Bible but never lives up to it in action (and may never even have read it), except for the authoritarian and violent parts.

Posted by: Russ | Dec 23 2019 15:40 utc | 124

@Khun Les #94
The measles vaccine was developed in 1963.
Mumps was developed in 1967, rubella in 1969 and MMR created (all 3 together) in 1971.
Prior to this, it was perfectly fine that thousands of people died from it in the US, because there was no alternative.
So it isn’t surprising that insurance policies in the 1960s embodied a different mind set than today.
And yes, while thousands died, tens to hundreds of thousands had “mild” illnesses. Is that acceptable?
As always, personal experience does not necessarily show the bigger picture.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 16:26 utc | 126

@Russ #116
Your commentary would be more credible if it were not for the fact that CO2 levels have been literally 10x higher in the past than today.
So the talk of “carbon budget” is nonsense. Plants have been and are responding – global CO2 respiration rates are measurably higher.
I actually agree that smarter usage of fossil fuels is important and necessary, but the idea that “all industrial emissions” must be ended now – good luck with that.
There is no will, there is no power, there is no incentive for that to happen.
Furthermore, people who say that “all industrial emissions must be ended now” but are typing this on the internet – hypocrisy to the highest degree. The internet and associated digital technologies are incredibly polluting. Being a hunter gatherer or a literal subsistence farmer would be putting actions behind talk – anything else is just nonsense and betrays a deep seated lack of understanding of how the modern economy works.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 16:50 utc | 128

Clue, if there is to be no double-blind placebo tests ever for these preexisting vaccines, then your dismissal of their claim of noticing onset symptoms shortly after vaccine was administered is just more unscientific shrugging of the shoulders. Meanwhile, the steamroller flattening the way for full governmental control over your body remains unhindered and unchallenged.
If there ever were to be a double blind placebo test for these vaccines, it would be no unqualified hunch that long term studies would show a marked increase in adverse immune responses in individuals as well as autoimmune disease upticks. How do I know this? Because as pft pointed out, the adjuvant in these concoctions are potent neurotoxins unsafe at any level.
Could you imagine the message this would send rippling through the sheep consumers? It would undermine the legitimacy of not only the cdc, but our government as well as pharma. That is just one good reason why no double blind placebo will never be utilized for vaccines.
You can argue that conducting double blind tests is medically imprudent and dangerous because some kids would not be getting the vaccine. Indeed, this is their main argument. But au contraire. There was a double blind for the hpv as it is a new vaccine for the market. The results should alarm but not surprise. Check the who report. 77,000 tested and several adverse events including death. Their conclusion was that tests concluding the vaccine’s safety should be considered dubious. I would agree.
So what is stopping Merck from creating a new measles a la cart which would satisfy many demands including the non use of aborted baby cell line. You know the answer! They will never conduct another double blind placebo for a common vaccine ever again. Even though they should and it is what the catholic church pushes for albeit feebly.
Why won’t they create a measles vaccine a la cart and subject it to a double blind? You can get enough volunteers to sign wavers as we know the danger of the measles has diminished greatly with modern life.
The answer is obvious. They are too deep and have come to far to take a hit like that which the truth would bring.

Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Dec 23 2019 17:49 utc | 130

And before you say it, C1ue – no I was not damaged by the MMR. My mom had a religious exemption. (She really is a Christian Scientist believe it or not). I sat in a small room for an hour and did my homework, on the day I would’ve gotten it.

Posted by: Sejomoje | Dec 23 2019 18:09 utc | 132

>His life will never be normal. And he is a mild case.
>”Autism” is a euphemism for brain damage.
>Posted by: Sejomoje | Dec 23 2019 3:41 utc | 89
You have my sympathies. I can barely imagine how devastating this is for your family.
Robert Naviaux is planning to start a new trial of Suramin for autism in about six months. Suramin was developed a hundred years ago to treat African Sleeping Sickness. Naviaux’s theory is that an event triggers the “cell danger response” which remains stuck in the “on position”.
As far as I can tell (not very far) he is a serious investigator whose work could become very important in a number of chronic diseases. Here is a link to his latest newsletter.
I am glad I don’t have to make difficult decisions regarding vaccines for children. My useless doctor only gives me the soft sell on influenza vaccine. It’s easy for me to say No Thanks because I am home bound and have few visitors (which is OK because even visiting and typing on the computer wears me out).
No one knows if vaccines might make my illness worse. There may be something wrong with my immune system already, so no, I’m not going to poke a sleeping bear.
I guess that means I have that new social disease called “Vaccine Hesitancy”. I suppose that will soon be added to my (social) credit score. When the establishment press says that I am diseased or morally defective because I dare question the edicts of Dear Leaders, that is a big clue there is something wrong with the program. Add that to the FDA being captured by the pharma industry, and that most published research is rubbish, and that Dear Leaders lie about almost everything almost all the time, and one is looking at a huge mess.
As with global warming promoters and so many other promoters, the vaccine promoters don’t bother with evidence, just personal attacks and appeal to authority. It’s always “Just Do What We Say”. I don’t find those sorts of arguments to be persuasive.
Personally I am more concerned about the adjuvants than the antigens. Studies that don’t look very hard won’t find anything, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to find. What is the impact of all those various adjuvants added together? As far as I can tell, no one knows, and certainly there are plenty of important people who don’t want to know.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss (and profitable).

Posted by: Trailer Trash | Dec 23 2019 18:22 utc | 134

@Nemesiscalling #130
Double blind testing is unnecessary because there are studies including 1 million children which clearly showed no difference in autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
You furthermore are still refusing to address the core of the problem: measles is a very contagious disease which is very dangerous – it kills people and babies can’t even be vaccinated by it until year 1.
You’ve tried to say measles vaccine is unnecessary – false.
You’ve tried to say it might be dangerous – also false.
You’ve tried to say vaccines should be a choice – I said pass a law and be prepared to suffer the consequences in the meantime, but you want what you want now and screw what anyone else thinks.
Sorry, but the parade of attempts has failed and isn’t showing any promise of even showing information of value.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 18:31 utc | 136

Clue, why do you keep alluding to autism?
Why do you want to keep the debate there and not expand it to all adverse reaction events?
…
You can not scientifically say that without the mmr, measles levels would not be at the near innocuous levels they are today.
Long before the vaccine uptake had registered to a level even barely near what theorists say is needed for herd immunity, incidences and mortality from measles had been eliminated to such an extent that vaccine uptake I would say could be merely seen as a supplement for diminishing cases.
If you think about it this way, modern sanitation, hygiene, and diet was not unlike the effect of Russia on jihadists in Syria, when it comes to thwarting their regime change attempts. When the vaccine was finally able to register high uptake in the mid 80s, measles was nothing to fear at night, yet here comes the vaccine a la the U.S. Saying that they were the ones who took on Isis! Lol.
Damn, that is a good analogy if I do say so myself.
Clue is misleading you.

Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Dec 23 2019 18:44 utc | 138

And on another note: yet more sign that cell phones are fundamentally privacy invasive.
Here’s an article where the NY Times looked at a database which contained 50 billion location pings from 12 million Americans.
From it, they

The journalists analyzing the data found one phone that appeared to belong to a Secret Service agent on President Trump’s team, and showed the course of the agent’s progress during a trip to the commander-in-chief’s Mar-a-Lago resort, then to a golf course where Trump was playing golf with the Japanese prime minister.
The NYT team were able to track other phones into Congress, the Pentagon, and many other sensitive areas. By following where the phones spent the night, they could also get a good idea of a target’s home address and when they were out.
The case highlights the egregious way in which telcos in the US are profiting from selling off location data to almost anyone with the money.

source

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 18:47 utc | 140

@Nemesiscalling #138
Sadly, you keep trying but only undercut your own credibility with each further attempt.
Every measles outbreak due to local populations of anti-vaxxers hitting a critical point – shows just how much the measles vaccine does and how vaccines work in real life.
You also seem to assume that no testing was done when these vaccines were first created and deployed, or that there is no data showing that the net benefits outweigh all known harms. This is patently false.
Now you want to expand to other vaccines, because you’ve lost the MMR one. I’ve no interest in whacking every vaccine mole you wish to bring up, but in any case the same dynamic exists there: if there is demonstrable harm, show it. And in showing it, then that’s the first step to changing the outcome.
It seems very clear to me. You disagree – and so the situation stands.
In the meantime, the law is what it is. Either follow it or be willing to suffer the consequences, personally, of your decision.
I can respect principled, real behavior opposition a lot more than solipsistic desire to have one’s own way.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 18:54 utc | 142

@xLemming #139
Thank you for proving my point for me.
I’ve never said that vaccines never cause harm – Hotez and others say there are absolutely cases where they can. But they are very rare.
100 vaccine deaths in 10 years is nothing compared to 3000-4000 measles deaths per year prior to MMR.
Case closed. Again.
Anti-vaxxers don’t seem to understand basic statistics. There is risk in anything you do – but the net risk from vaccinating is far, far lower than the net risk from not vaccinating.
100 vaccine deaths vs. 30000-40000 measles deaths alone – that’s a significant statistical difference.
Avoiding vaccines to prevent being 1 of those 100 is exactly like not wearing a seat belt because you might be trapped in a car accident and burned alive. It happens, but far more deaths and injuries occur due to not wearing a seat belt.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 19:00 utc | 144

And in other news: the anti-vax experiment has begun in Austin, Texas
First measles case in Austin since 1999 confirmed
The list of locations which the infected person went to is listed. Outbreak?

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 19:07 utc | 146

c1ue 128
Furthermore, people who say that “all industrial emissions must be ended now” but are typing this on the internet – hypocrisy to the highest degree. The internet and associated digital technologies are incredibly polluting. Being a hunter gatherer or a literal subsistence farmer would be putting actions behind talk – anything else is just nonsense and betrays a deep seated lack of understanding of how the modern economy works.
1. The few of us actually trying to propagate the necessary truths and ideas have no choice but to use the internet. If I could press a button and abolish it, along with everything else that industrially emits, and put everyone back on an equal non-fossil non-ecocidal playing field I would. Would you? I’d bet anything that’s a No. Rather than me being a hypocrite, on the contrary you’re one of the concern trolls I was talking about who clutches beads but would never want to change anything. You’re the epitome of hypocrisy.
2. I understand all too well how your death machine, your modern economy of parasites, squatters and vandals works: Lie, kill, destroy; lie, kill, destroy; lie, kill, destroy. All for nothing. All for worthless junk which murders the human soul as much as it murders the Earth. We need a civilization-sized bonfire of the vanities.
And if you think this extreme-energy economy is ecologically sustainable, your lack of the most elementary understanding of reality is seated so deep the Marianas Trench couldn’t accommodate you.
3. I’ve been a farmer and I adhered to strict agroecological practices. The only reason I’m not able to right now is because YOUR Mammon socioeconomy based on the totalitarian dominion of money and property won’t let me, while all around me I see land being wasted, land being destroyed, land being used to destroy others.
I understand your death economy far better than you do. I see to the core of how it’s killing us all.

Posted by: Russ | Dec 23 2019 19:20 utc | 148

Got this in my email—“Caitlin”
“A lot of you have probably noticed that my website has been having a lot of issues lately. The good news is that this has been because my old hosting plan has been struggling to keep up with the traffic that this site has been getting lately due to so many people visiting it now. The even better news is that I finally coughed up the money to upgrade my hosting service to one which can actually keep up with the new level of traffic.
Hopefully this new move will resolve all my site’s issues. If you still encounter problems going forward, please let me know about them and rest assured that I’ll work on finding a resolution as soon as I can.
If you haven’t already subscribed to my site’s mailing list I strongly encourage you to do so; the internet censorship on social media is only going to get worse so it will get increasingly unlikely for you to see my latest publications on Facebook or Twitter or wherever. If you subscribe you’ll get an email every time I publish. Tim and I have some big plans for 2020, with a lot of exciting announcements in the coming months.
I’ll probably be taking a break from publishing for a few days because hosting the family Christmas this year is taking up too much of my headspace, but I’ll probably still be active on Twitter. Thank you all so much for your incredible support, and for getting this site to the level it’s at now. I promise to keep sticking it to the bastards until they’re down for the count.
Gobs of love and merry Christmas, and may 2020 be the year we finally drive the stake into the heart of the beast once and for all.
Caitlin”

Posted by: arby | Dec 23 2019 19:39 utc | 150

This is very interesting:
Bust to boom: how UK central bank boosted births after 2008 crisis
The cause for this, according to the article:

A study by economists Fergus Cumming and Lisa Dettling showed that cutting interest rates from 5% in the summer of 2008 to 0.5% by March 2009 led to 14,500 additional babies being born in 2009 and increased birth rates by 7.5% over the next three years.

What the article doesn’t mention (probably because it would remember them of a very unpleasant event) is that, in the same year, the UK had a deflation (the fist in more than 60 years). Long story short: the BCE brutally slashed its interest rate from 5% to 0.5% and the prices still went down in the UK in 2009.
In the USA, the movement was the opposite, as the same article notices:

Britain’s rising birth rate contrasted with a “baby bust” in the US – a differing trend that the two economists suggest is the result of American homebuyers being more likely to be on fixed-rate mortgage contracts.
“In both countries, birth rates begin to fall almost as soon as the unemployment rate begins to rise, but in the UK that trend is reversed once the policy rate (bank rate) begins to drop. In the US, the downward trend continues through the recession.”

So, it was not the fall of the interest rates per se that generated a small baby boom in the UK in 2009, but the fact that it was sitting over a bigass bubble of its predominantly financial economy – a bubble so big that it didn’t entirely burst after the demolition of the interest rate.
The UK never recovered from 2009, and its depression directly resulted in Brexit, seven years later.

Posted by: vk | Dec 23 2019 22:49 utc | 152

@Russ #148
You said

1. The few of us actually trying to propagate the necessary truths and ideas have no choice but to use the internet. If I could press a button and abolish it, along with everything else that industrially emits, and put everyone back on an equal non-fossil non-ecocidal playing field I would. Would you? I’d bet anything that’s a No. Rather than me being a hypocrite, on the contrary you’re one of the concern trolls I was talking about who clutches beads but would never want to change anything. You’re the epitome of hypocrisy.

Nice try, putting words in my mouth. I have never said that humans are evil and should be exterminated/decimated. You, on the other hand, just admitted that you would be fine killing 90% of humanity by flipping a switch to go to zero emissions.
I also like how you are “forced” to use the internet to spread the message. How’s that working for you? Unsurprisingly, it turns out most of humanity isn’t the least bit interested in suiciding so you can achieve your goals.
You said

2. I understand all too well how your death machine, your modern economy of parasites, squatters and vandals works: Lie, kill, destroy; lie, kill, destroy; lie, kill, destroy. All for nothing. All for worthless junk which murders the human soul as much as it murders the Earth. We need a civilization-sized bonfire of the vanities.

Nice talk – it would be more credible if there weren’t more humans around today than ever before. The Death machine isn’t killing people. Yes, nature is suffering – but nature is also about survival. Species die all the time – humans have accelerated the death of the large ones, but we’ve propagated a handful of other species to unprecedented heights: wheat, corn, rice, dogs, cats, mice, rats, pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and so forth.
It is easy to see why you’re angry: you want to save the Earth but can’t convince all the other nasty humans to kill themselves off in the tradeoff.
You said

And if you think this extreme-energy economy is ecologically sustainable, your lack of the most elementary understanding of reality is seated so deep the Marianas Trench couldn’t accommodate you.

Sustainability has always been in the eye of the beholder. As an engineer, I understand extremely well just how complex modern existence is.
Unfortunately, you consider the progress made to be negative – that’s your right but I don’t have any obligation to share it.
You said

3. I’ve been a farmer and I adhered to strict agroecological practices. The only reason I’m not able to right now is because YOUR Mammon socioeconomy based on the totalitarian dominion of money and property won’t let me, while all around me I see land being wasted, land being destroyed, land being used to destroy others.

Yes, I am the seed, distribution and commodity trading monopolies/monoposonies that persecute you. Not.
Sadly, you don’t even understand how the farming class has been subjugated. It has nothing to do with ecology and everything to do with business practices. For that matter, why don’t you become a nice organic farmer selling overpriced produce to rich people? Then you could have the luxury of keeping your beliefs even as you pander to the 1%.
You said

I understand your death economy far better than you do. I see to the core of how it’s killing us all.

You seem to think so, but you have done a terrible job of communicating it. Particularly since you don’t seem to understand the details on how many things actually work, or care since you are clearly driven by ideology.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 23:09 utc | 154

@Trailer Trash #151
You said

This theory don’t mention vaccines or any other specific environmental danger. There may be many triggers that end up at the same place. Nobody knows. The medical industry likes to present itself as all-knowing and to be obeyed without question. But this is rubbish. The more medical research I look at, the more I understand a bit more just how little is actually known for sure.

I love how you contradict yourself in the same paragraph above where
researchers, doctors, etc all say that the exact cause of autism is not known.
The medical industry clearly doesn’t pretend to be all-knowing on autism even from your own statement.
The researcher you point to has a theory – and he’s going to test it. I hope he’s right and there is a way to reverse the negative effects of autism but it seems unlikely. There are actually ways by which neuronal connectivity can be stimulated – I’ve heard of drug treatments that actually enable cochleal (audio) nerve birth defect people to gain hearing, but stimulating connectivity in a specific target vs. rewiring an existing brain – the latter seems like an immensely more difficult and complex task.
You said

Imagine taking an early IBM PC back to 1930 in a time machine and give it to a radio technician. That person could’ve measured the power supply output, but as for the rest of the box, could they reverse engineer it? That is about where medical research is today.

Wow, you really know nothing about either computers or electricity.
You might remember this thing called the telegraph. It predated radio, and the typical telegraph used current in the order of milli-amperes – comparable to cell phone battery consumption. There were tens of thousands of telegraph stations, likely a lot more, and multiples of telegraph operators.
So there’s no problem for a competent electrical engineer or technician to measure what is going on at different points in the IBM PC – keyboard to motherboard, voltages to/from each chip, outputs etc. What they wouldn’t have is the fast ability to understand the whole thing because the IBM PC has 134,000 transistors in the central computer chip plus memory etc vs a telegraph being basically a single transistor.
The technicians or engineers would eventually figure it out though, especially if they could see outputs on a monitor and inputs from a keyboard – it would just take a really, really long time because Boolean theory long predates the telegraph. Babbage first created his difference engine 100 years before 1930: in 1823. That machine could calculate to 31 digits.
Babbage then tried to create an analytical engine – the direct precursor to the punch card IBM mainframes. IBM, incidentally, was created by a bankster to roll together all of the punch card based difference engines, including Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company (punch cards).
But let’s get back to your radio example. Radio generates radio waves. There are electrical components but you can create a radio signal with a spark-gap transmitter – which is basically an electromagnetic version of the telegraph.
The key point, however, is that radio waves have nothing to do with computing or electricity in a machine.
So nice try, but a terrible example.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 23:34 utc | 156

Below is a link from Wall Street on Parade continuing my financial crisis drum beating
Trump and the Stock Market Are the Winners in the Fed’s Repo Loan Binge; Here’s the Losers
The take away quotes
”
The S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average set new record highs every single day last week. This occurred despite the Federal Reserve justifying its unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars each week in cheap loans to Wall Street’s trading houses as necessary to stem a “liquidity” crisis.
You can’t have a liquidity crisis when the stock market is setting record highs for an entire week. Those two things just don’t correlate.
……………………
The Federal Reserve, as the central bank of the United States, is not supposed to meddle in elections or impeachment hearings. But by providing unprecedented cheap funding to Wall Street’s trading houses, it is artificially boosting the stock market and the 401(k)s of workers, which is artificially boosting the economic track record and re-election chances of President Donald Trump – who has repeatedly linked his reputation to a thriving stock market.
On June 15 President Trump Tweeted the following:
“The Trump Economy is setting records, and has a long way up to go….However, if anyone but me takes over in 2020 (I know the competition very well), there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before! KEEP AMERICA GREAT”
……………………
There are plenty of losers as a result of the Fed’s ongoing money spigot to Wall Street. Every presidential candidate challenging Trump has had his or her arguments against Trump’s record undermined by a stock market spiking to new highs.
U.S. taxpayers are also the big losers. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is ballooning again as a result of these repo loans and is now back over $4 trillion. If its balance sheet is this big now, what’s going to happen if Wall Street blows itself up again and the Fed has to intervene as a legitimate lender of last resort. Are we looking at an unthinkable $8 trillion balance sheet at the Fed? U.S. taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for any losses at their central bank.
U.S. investors and U.S. citizens are also the big losers. A euphoric stock market undermines the case in Congress for making the critically-needed reforms of Wall Street’s mega banks before they blow themselves up again with derivatives.
And, finally, the next generation and their children are the ultimate biggest losers of all. By funneling cheap loans to Wall Street’s trading houses instead of using its bully pulpit to demand reforms at the casino-like mega banks, the Federal Reserve is aiding and abetting and guaranteeing that the next market crash will be worse than it needs to be. That crash will result in more fiscal spending to shore up the economy, ballooning the national debt exponentially. This will mean that our children and their children will experience a blighted standard of living as more and more of Federal tax revenues are diverted to service the debt load instead of going to healthcare, education, and rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
”
From a ZH article
”
On December 23, 2018, Mnuchin (Secretary of US Treasury)—while vacationing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, decided to call the CEOs of the six-largest banks in the U.S. after the S&P 500 fell nearly 14% from its high on the first trading day high of the month through the Friday close. Stocks had sold off basically all month, with the S&P 500 closing lower 12 of the 14 days during the period following a lack of progress on a trade deal, a rate hike by the Federal Reserve and an imminent federal government shutdown.
……………..
The S&P 500 put in a bottom the day after the call and hasn’t looked back since. Since the Christmas Eve bottom, the S&P 500 has gained 37%, hitting countless fresh all-times on accommodative monetary policy, buybacks and hopes of a trade deal as economic conditions deteriorate. The timing of Mnuchin’s call and the reaction from markets ever since might be the most blatant example of how those who sit on the PPT (Plunge Protection Team) —Secretary of the Treasury, Chairperson of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, care about the performance of the stock market over everything else.
”
The US has the best government global private finance can buy. Isn’t is time to change the Western social contract to have public finance at the core?

Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 24 2019 4:32 utc | 158

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 23 2019 23:09 utc | 154
“As an engineer, I understand extremely well just how complex modern existence is.”
Taking that literally it’s a non sequitur. Except perhaps for economists, it’s hard to imagine a more myopically instrumental-minded (“Will it work?” is the only question, never Why do it, What harm will it cause, Is it worth the harm?) and otherwise ignorant and blind group than most engineers. And you have proven yourself to be a typical example.
“you don’t even understand how the farming class has been subjugated. It has nothing to do with ecology and everything to do with business practices. …..you don’t seem to understand the details on how many things actually work, or care since you are clearly driven by ideology.”
No one understands the history of agribusiness, for which I’ve often seen you shill, better than I. I’ve been writing against corporate industrial agriculture, all its evils from ecological to socioeconomic, for ten years.
Your ideology, or I should say religion of “progress”, technocracy, productionism and the fantasy of the infinite capacity of the Earth including humanity to absorb abuse and remain intact, is clearly in the driver’s seat in your case. One wonders why you’re not just a regular pro-business conservative. Well, I’ve noticed for a while now that there are more and more like you who are unable to convince yourselves of the truth of your position using just the regular mainstream propaganda.
BTW there’s abundant empirical and scientific evidence that agroecology could produce enough food, and much higher-quality food, for more than the world’s population right now, and do so with far less of an ecological impact. Of course that would require that all able-bodied people participate in food production, which is why almost no one among you fat parasite Westerners supports such a transformation, even though this work would be more like gardening than the horrors of being an agricultural worker under your system. Meanwhile your industrial agriculture inevitably soon will collapse, for any or all of many reasons (resource limitations, soil destruction, ecological collapse, global heating, genetic collapse of crops etc.). I’m afraid the Earth will insist.
I’m the one presenting the only ideas through which the maximum number of people could save themselves (of course I’m under no illusion that more than a handful in the West ever will make the attempt). It’s you and your religion of modernity which want to consign the great bulk, perhaps the entire species, to death through famine and disease, and probably nuclear war.

Posted by: Russ | Dec 24 2019 6:35 utc | 160

Below is a Xinhuanet article that MoA barflies might find interesting because it documents the banning of usury in China
China getting closer to long-expected civil code
The take away quote
”
In the contracts section, the draft makes a clearer stipulation to ban “usury,” stating that “the interest rates of loans shall not violate relevant national regulations.”
The stipulation is expected to provide more legal basis to address prominent problems in the area of private lending, said Meng Qiang, director of the research center on civil code at the Beijing Institute of Technology.
Banning usury will encourage people to invest more in the real economy, which will facilitate the high-quality development of China’s economy, said Wang.
”
Just in case you wondered about why I keep writing about how the world is in a civilization war over public versus private control of finance………Why isn’t this on the front pages of the Western press and discussions engaged in to understand the why?
Nice to see this in writing says me…….

Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 24 2019 10:36 utc | 162

@Bemildred #161
I don’t think you’ve looked at the actual income statements for the overall farming industry today – they aren’t making profits. Perhaps you mean the intake monopolies and the distribution monopsonies?
As for the notion that “sustainable” agriculture practices can compete with industrial methods: that’s something that should be easy to see if it were true, since the economic impact would spread very quickly. So far, I have yet to see evidence of this.
The sad reality is that organic farming today is primarily about creating high priced product to sell to rich people.
IF “sustainable” agriculture could truly produce at a cost and scale to compete with industrial methods – why hasn’t this been reflected by more farmers using these practices? Because they can get much higher prices for “organic” than not.
Of course, you hit the nail on the head when you talk about “sustainable” agriculture requiring more labor than industrial. Labor costs a lot – the organic farm examples I have looked at were reasonably productive, but the amount of labor expended was enormous. This is what underpins the higher prices.
Is production truly equivalent when multiples of labor are involved? I would remind you that American agriculture for export arose primarily because of industrial machinery plus railroads. The plowing of the Great Plains, plus the McCormick reaper and the railroads to transport to markets (domestic and abroad) allowed the economic export of wheat even though the yields weren’t impressive compared to “prime” farm land – but the yield per unit labor was very high.
Wikipedia notes

In 1830, it took four people and two oxen, working 10 hours a day, to produce 200 bushels. The geographic center of wheat-growing areas in the U.S. in 1839 was to the north and west of Washington, D.C., and spread further over time to the far west of the country. Production conditions also resulted in extending the wheat growing areas into harsher climatic regions. Data on wheat production is available for the period between 1885 and 1930.
…
By 1895, in Bonanza farms in the Dakotas, it took six different people and 36 horses pulling huge harvesters, working 10 hours a day, to produce 20,000 bushels.
…
The annual wheat production of the United States more than tripled in the fifty years between 1871 and 1921; it increased from about 250 million bushels during the period of 1869–1871 to over 750 million during the period of 1919–1921

source
4+2 = 200 in 1830 vs. 6+36=20000 in 1895 – that’s exactly what I refer to above. The yield per acre wasn’t great, particularly vs. modern yields, but “a farmer” could handle an enormous area vs. before.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 24 2019 11:54 utc | 164

And back to climate. The panic-mongers rely on the global climate models projecting huge temperature increases starting any day now.
The problem is that the actual temperatures aren’t conforming to the model predictions.
Since 1998 or so, the actual global temperature has always been under the average global model projected temperature. There have been 2 El Nino warming events since then – even with the El Nino 1-2 year spikes, the global model projected temperature average has never been reached. Even more problematic – the spread is increasing.
And note that the model performance prior to 1998 can’t be ascribed as accurate, either, since the models are hand tuned towards the temperature records for that period.
Here’s the inconvenient graph
In more technical terms, the issue is the ECS (Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity) to a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
From a pure CO2 doubling perspective, ECS should 1.5 degrees C or less. The historical warming to date is on this scale of ECS. Again, to put this in perspective – the actual global climate “anomaly” (i.e. warming) is 0.55 degrees C as of November 2019. I use 1-2 degrees because different people have different starting reference points, but it doesn’t really matter since behavior to date has been under ECS 1.5 type parameters. source
The models almost all assume an intensification – feedbacks which amplify the actual warming from CO2 increases – which is why the models accelerate temperature increases starting in 2000, and which is why the global climate model averages are becoming ever more distant from the actual temperatures recorded. The much higher ECS numbers under the feedback scenarios is how the 5-10 degree numbers come into play.
So while ECS value is an academic question, the divergence between models and actual temperatures is not. If the models are diverging from reality even at this early point in the acceleration, why should they be trusted for scenarios in year 2100?
The scientists like Judith Curry suspect that natural variability may be much higher than the “consensus” believes. This is one explanation for the divergence – for example, another inconvenient fact is that CO2 levels rose dramatically after World War 2, but the global average temperature was flat to down source picture.
Again, few scientists believe the enormous amounts of CO2 emissions have no impact. But the debate isn’t about whether CO2 has an impact on temperature – the real debate is about whether there will be amplifying feedbacks and whether natural variability is actually high. And if higher temperatures are coming, the next debate items are whether these higher temperatures will be a net negative (climate refugees, more climate related disasters etc outweighing fewer deaths from cold and more food production), and whether there is any way to actually moderate or stop further CO2 emissions.
Personally, I see zero chance of climate accords being able to even stop increases in CO2 emissions. The people in Africa, South America, SouthEast Asia and Central Asia want to go from 3rd world to 2nd world living. The East Asians (China) want to go from 2nd to 1st. This isn’t going to happen without at least enormous infrastructure building – which releases enormous CO2 emissions from steel and concrete production – even if emissions from actual per capita consumption doesn’t take off.
This is why more and more of the climate crusaders are trending towards tyranny or even terrorism – there’s no other way that their goals are going to get accomplished.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 24 2019 12:27 utc | 166

temperatures are rising all over the world, on average. heat records are constantly being broken, the projections were too conservative–and people still blather on about “computer models”.
judith curry used to be a legitimate scientist, then she stopped publishing and got on the fossil fuel gravy train.there are a few of them, at the university of alabama huntsville, university of alaska fairbanks. the creationists had a few pet scientists, too, though they were likely motivated more by ideology than cash–possibly lindzen is motivated more by ideology, to be fair.
1998 is a tell, that’s just one long refuted talking point beloved by the fossil fuel industry. the hottest years on record are post 2000, and the trend is up.

Posted by: pretzelattack | Dec 24 2019 13:42 utc | 168

@pretzelattack #168
As usual, repeating the same tired tropes which don’t address the actual issues.
Temperatures increasing do not automatically equate to disaster.
Solutions being pushed now do not show any capability of affecting actual reductions in overall emissions, worldwide.
And repeating “fossil fuel industry” is meaningless when the panicmongering industry spends far more advertising and PR money, gets more press and yet still can’t achieve its goals.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 24 2019 13:51 utc | 170

lol shifting ground to other talking points c1ue. the temps have been rising. the predictions and projections have been validated. now we’ve gone from “temperatures aren’t rising” and “the computer models aren’t working”, to “warming isn’t necessarily disastrous”. a proper gish gallop.
there isn’t a panic mongering industry, there is a vastly wealthy and vastly powerful fossil fuel industry that doesn’t want to write off its assets in the ground, and has financed a propaganda campaign for 3 decades to avoid that. complete with talking points about 1998! and east anglia emails! and the oregon petition! and computer models that don’t work! and there was a consensus that it was cooling in the 70’s! all horseshit, all in the service of creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about the science, per the tobacco industry campaign playbook.
the fossil fuel industry is well capable of protecting itself, by financing studies to refute the science. instead they buy politicians to torpedo attempts to address the problem, and propaganda shills to catapult the talking points developed by ad companies.

Posted by: pretzelattack | Dec 24 2019 14:18 utc | 172

”
Ben Norton
‏Verified account @BenjaminNorton
22h22 hours ago
Venezuelan soldiers who betrayed their country and joined Trump’s far-right coup attempt then fled to the US after the coup failed
Now they are being detained by ICE in hellish conditions”
huh huh

Posted by: arby | Dec 24 2019 14:54 utc | 174

The vaxx conundrum can be boiled down to one word IMO. Trust.
Russ I love your stuff, keep it up. I too have a lifetime experience w sustainable food production. There is a point where ‘labor’ ceases to be a roadblock. It is perfectly obtainable for 1 person to grow enough food for approximately 10 (just ask my neighbors) other people without continuous labor inputs in a manner that returns to the soil at minimum what is taken through harvest. I started w sandy clay and now have a nutrient dense loam which holds water and requires almost no additional water. While I don’t share your urgency I do agree w most of your writing, here an elsewhere.

Posted by: Tannenhouser | Dec 24 2019 15:28 utc | 176

There is an alternative to tyranny and terrorism: climate engineering. It would certainly be risky, but, if warming becomes bad enough, we may be forced to resort to it.

Posted by: lysias | Dec 24 2019 15:57 utc | 178

@Likklemore #175
Whooping cough used to be the leading cause of childhood death and trauma in the US.
You also clearly don’t understand that vaccines don’t mean immunity. Some diseases, a vaccine will but many don’t including flu, mumps, whooping cough and more.
As the article snippet you posted notes: having been vaccinated reduced severity. Whooping cough = pertussis.
From wiki

About 50% of infected children less than a year old require hospitalization and nearly 0.5% (1 in 200) die
…
In 2015, pertussis resulted in 58,700 deaths – down from 138,000 deaths in 1990

As for the tattoo ID – the very discussion going on in this thread is very possibly the basis: Anti-vaxxers faking vaccinations
Parents faking vaccination records to get their children into school

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 24 2019 16:06 utc | 180

@169 clue
Once again clue is using anything at their disposal to mislead and obfuscate, including jumping around the world to developing Somoa to tell us how dangerous measles is for us here in the West.
He will not acknowledge the more dangerous risks of measles had been mitigated here in the US as well as in the West, long before the vaccine had arrived, and so from that we can surmise that Sanitation, diet, and hygiene must be the first steps taken to combat infectious disease if doctors are to remain true to their Hippocratic oath and not utilize medical intervention until absolutely necessary. They swore an oath to tell the truth here in the west! But like clue, they resort to scare tactics of some third world problem with sanitation in order to make us bend the knee to medical interventionism.
Here is a shocking graph which tells everything you need to know about the deadly effects of measles and their precipitous decline long before the advent of any wide-reaching vaccine program Here in the U.S. Scroll down the page to see it.
Again, much like the War on Terror, so much information the public needs to make an informed decision is left out entirely and so policy is thus formed and exacted through fear and emotion, not looking at all the info and deciding,”Hmmmm…measles deaths were on an impossibly large downward turn during the first half of the 20th century, so why do we need the measles vaccine at all and what it be prudent so see just how far mortality rates would surely fall without the advent of a vaccine?”
We will never know now with the mass implementation of these potentially very unnecessary vaccines and we are further in danger now of never knowing the full picture on safety and efficacy.
Having sat in on my union’s bargaining for a new contract, one of the most important lessons to be gleaned when you are working with an agreement between labor and management that has stood for 75 years, is that once you lose something, it is gone for good. Bargaining is all about maintaining what has been fought for by the good will and effort of past generations to lay the groundwork for the future one.
I hope I am wrong and this misstep we are taking into mandatory medical intervention via vaccines can be rectified in the future through good sense and the further search for truth. But it is very hard to undue what had been bound in either contract or legislation.

Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Dec 24 2019 16:23 utc | 182

Link is broke in above post. My apologies.
Here it is.

Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Dec 24 2019 16:47 utc | 184

@ c1ue 126

The measles vaccine was developed in 1963.
Mumps was developed in 1967, rubella in 1969 and MMR created (all 3 together) in 1971.
Prior to this, it was perfectly fine that thousands of people died from it in the US, because there was no alternative.

You keep making these erronious statements that prior to the measles introduction thousands of children died, even tho it is easy to find statstics showing that the death rate was extremely low in USA before 1963 when the vaccine was introduced. You make it hard to take any of your arguments seriously when you so blatently misrepresent the facts!

In the U.S., the death rate dropped by about 98%, from about 10 per 100,000 population a century ago to one fifth of one person by 1963, the year measles vaccines made their American debut.

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-the-untold-story-of-measles

Posted by: Lorna MacKay | Dec 24 2019 17:53 utc | 186

Some interesting data on Tesla battery degradation:
story about a 450K mile Tesla
Key notes

The first battery pack the Tesla Model S had experienced 1.2 miles of range lost per 10,000 miles while being driven about 17,000 miles per month and was replaced due to a battery chemistry issue. The second pack was losing about 4.7 miles every 10,000 miles driven, and its replacement was due to a defect in the battery assembly. The current battery is a 90 kWh pack and showing a loss of about 2.4 miles of range per 10,000 miles driven; however, about midway through the mileage, the car was transitioned from a long distance shuttle to a daily rental car, so the averages may not be a great reflection on its efficiency. At about 126,000 miles into the new pack, eHawk’s battery degradation is around 9%.

So the Tesla in question had to have its battery pack replaced twice, and the present battery pack has lost 9% range capacity.
The cost to replace? Covered by warranty in the above case, but apparently is in the $25K range according to this (2014) link vs. a $45K list price.
Both links refer to Tesla Model S.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 24 2019 18:37 utc | 188

@Lorna MacKay #185, 186
So let’s look at the “1/5 of a person per 100,000 population” number in 1963.
The US population in 1963 was 188,434,000 people according to this link
188434000/100000/5 = 377 (I am rounding up). So are vaccines killing more than “1/5th of 1 person in 100,000” = 377 people a year?
A similar ratio today would be 652 people a year. Is that acceptable as well?
Furthermore, for every death – there are likely 1000 or more hospitalizations.
If not, then the math still makes sense to vaccinate.
Spin and spin – the result is still the same.
The simple way to resolve this is to show some type of theory, even, of how the measles vaccine can cause or trigger the brain disconnectivity associated with autism – first by crossing the blood brain barrier (and I really laugh at the attempt to justify water, oxygen and what not as examples. Small molecule vs. large – at least do some homework), then the mechanism by which connectivity is affected. The apparent genetic link also needs to be addressed.
Then the large study outcomes need to be explained. Why is it that there seems to be no difference in autism outcomes between vaccinated and not-vaccinated children in 1 million children studies?
Then there are the regional differences: Why are the US, Japan and Canada showing 50% or more autism rates than the rest of the world?
One possibility: as I noted – the US and Canada both use the DSM. Japan hasn’t officially standardized on DSM, but it is actively taught there.
Europe uses a different system entirely (ICM).

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 24 2019 18:56 utc | 190

@Nemesiscalling #189
As I note above – even assuming modern death rates are at the level stipulated – the actual public health cost would still be enormous.
The burden is still on the anti-vaxxer to show any type of evidence that the tradeoff is a net negative.
Furthermore, the data applies to a single disease. What would be the net public health damage from stopping the full vaccine regime?
This is: Hepatitis B, Rotavirus, Diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b, Pneumococcal conjugate, Inactivated poliovirus, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella.
Are the death rates for all of these diseases “1/5th of 1 person in 100,000”? Then we only have 7800 deaths a year and 7.8M hospitalizations.
Surely that’s worth the risk of any single child potentially developing autism even though the rates of autism don’t differ at all between vaccinated and invaccinated? /sarc

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 24 2019 19:08 utc | 192

Posted by: Tannenhouser | Dec 24 2019 15:28 utc | 176
“Russ I love your stuff, keep it up. I too have a lifetime experience w sustainable food production. There is a point where ‘labor’ ceases to be a roadblock. It is perfectly obtainable for 1 person to grow enough food for approximately 10 (just ask my neighbors) other people without continuous labor inputs in a manner that returns to the soil at minimum what is taken through harvest. I started w sandy clay and now have a nutrient dense loam which holds water and requires almost no additional water. While I don’t share your urgency I do agree w most of your writing, here an elsewhere.”
Thanks for the good words. Yup, low-external-input farming/horticulture to grow food for people (as opposed to commodities for corporations) can work wonders. Acre for acre it’s far more productive than industrial commodity monoculture in terms of both calories and nutrition. And like you and I can testify from personal experience, it does so while building the soil instead of denuding and eroding it the way all industrial practice does, and can be done in a way that enhances biodiversity instead of massacring it the way all monoculture does.
Is “Tannenhouser” a Wagner reference? My main e-mail handle is named after the Flying Dutchman.

Posted by: Russ | Dec 24 2019 19:33 utc | 194

@192 clue
You are being silly. It is not on the “anti-vaxxer” to produce a numerical value that proves its point.
Although it probably could if a double-blind would ever be performed demonstrating safety and efficacy in a long-term study.
At bottom, it is a philosophical and bio-medical ethical question that incorporates issues such as the Hippocratic Oath, liberty to abstain from forced immunization, the ability to access unbiased testing results which demonstrate complete and full informed consent to the recipient, the dollar question as pertaining to Big Pharma, and also the ability of the west to relegate once-deadly diseases into the realm of innocuous, childhood ones by natural means that no, do not incur a substantial dollar amount to mitigate in the field of public health, at least not when looking at healthcare in this country as a whole, or the MIC, or what have you.
But because your engineering brain wants to impose a +/- numerical value to a question that touches so many issues of public and individual concern, of course you would say and quote statistics you have chosen to present and then broadly dismiss all the ones that go against your thesis or merely shrug your shoulders at all the missing data which we will never be able to parse. In your mind, “We have the solution now! We must act.” Or: “Mr. President, we have to bomb Iran now! If we wait, their reactors will be built and Israel would be finished!”
…
Your question, “what if there were no vaccine use?” Is equally obfuscating and silly.
No one here is advocating a complete ban on vaccine use in the West.
As Lorna mentions above, there is a justified use in the developing world where modern safety living standards have not been raised enough to justify a diminished role for vaccines. However, I would argue that this route is too fraught with peril, as those above who have already mentioned, vaccine immunity is a far, far cry from natural immunity. For this reason, I would posit that lulls in a nation’s case numbers gives an incomplete picture as to if a country has effectively mitigated the causes of disease complication in their country, such as diet, nutrition, and sanitation. I said it before that it cooks a false value to a country’s health score and therefore incurs future need and dependence on vaccines, which can develop into a nefarious cycle. I find this point to be essential when speaking of developing world and vaccine use.
Which brings us back to my point that there is no proof that the measles vaccine was needed in the West if the vaccine had not already brought about the phenomenon of artificial immunity which is fraught with its own problems and questions, none of which scientists seem able to explain or doctors of the immune system are able to predict.
But Merck will keep those booster shots increasing on the CDC schedule, that is for sure, that and make sure to get the national news pumping scare stories into your home about those dirty unvaccinated children.

Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Dec 24 2019 19:53 utc | 196

In the human species the dominant gene for eye colour is brown; those having blue eye colour show the recessive gene’s effect. My mother had brown eyes; all four of her offspring had blue eyes – what gives? Easy, the mother had the dominant brown gene as well as a recessive blue gene which coupled with the father’s blue genetic contribution resulted in the offspring’s eye colour.
The problem with vaccination efficacy encounters the problem of being universal to all the combinations and permutations that genetic combination can produce throughout the genome through sexual reproduction. Currently there is no effective way to determine and know all the factors that can affect vaccination results (which are not absolute results themselves). The attempted goal with vaccination is to produce a population that does not support an active infection within that population and reducing the likelihood of uncontrolled spread. Not vaccinating allows just that segment to maintain sufficient victims to allow the disease survival and possible spread. The argument against using vaccines due to genetic propensities toward undesirable outcomes is a valid one that must be balanced against the safety of the whole population’s wellbeing against that disease, a decision to test the wisest Solomon. Therefore, until a greater genetic awareness is available, this question will not be solved and the greatest good for the greatest number should have the greater consideration whilst offering protection for those whose genetic relations have shown some propensity towards unfavourable results.

Posted by: Formerly T-Bear | Dec 24 2019 20:48 utc | 198

Quoting from my # 97 comment about gun deaths in the US this year
”
According to the GVA, 14,801 people were killed and 28,613 people injured by guns across the United States as of Dec. 22, excluding suicide.
”
In comment #192 c1ue wrote that
”
What would be the net public health damage from stopping the full vaccine regime?
This is: Hepatitis B, Rotavirus, Diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b, Pneumococcal conjugate, Inactivated poliovirus, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella.
Are the death rates for all of these diseases “1/5th of 1 person in 100,000″? Then we only have 7800 deaths a year and 7.8M hospitalizations.
”
So we are killing twice as many people with guns every year than vaccine but c1ue still does not want to give people the choice about it and this thread has absolutely no responses to my comment $ 97, like it is a non issue.
Hello?

Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 24 2019 21:01 utc | 200