Starkehaus: The next liberal frontier is America’s children - Illinois Review
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Starkehaus: The next liberal frontier is America’s children
Consumed by equivocation, I've tried to figure out how I can say what I want to say about our vaccination nation without coming off as a flat-earth lunatic. I've concluded that it's time to embrace the lunacy.
The term "settled science" may be a fair approximation in many scientific circumstances, but it particularly irritates me when it's used to condescend, trivialize concerns and perpetuate intellectual elitism. More importantly, the growing monotheism associated with scientific discovery signifies an academic hubris that points to a rejection of the scientific method and the end of human progress.
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance ~ Orville Wright
Simply put, the intellectual snobbery of "settled science" is an indolent weapon used to stop the everyman from daring to ask questions that interfere with the State's incontestable authority.
But as we well know, the science is pretty indisputable…to borrow a phrase from our great Pontificator in Chief…vaccines save lives. Mumps, measles and polio are preventable, and parents who love their sons and daughters should unflinchingly present their children's upper thighs to the nearest pediatrician as a symbol of their love of mankind and nation, or they are superstitious science haters.
If you do a search for side effects associated with the most commonly required immunizations, you will find that the so-called settled science is not exactly black and white. I'm not saying that you shouldn't get your children vaccinated. Look, I vaccinated my children. You should do what you think is best for your children. All I'm saying is that there are risks. There are. Every single time you put a controlled substance into your body, you are risking side effects. Every single time.
Our society has concluded that for the sake of the common good, there are certain benefits that outweigh the risks associated with mumps, measles, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis for most people excluding those with compromised immune systems. Mumps, for instance, is preventable. Immunizations almost eradicated the disease in the US.
Americans have not dealt with mumps in a couple of generations, so mumps has earned its mystical quality. Actually, mumps is not the end of the world.
According to Drugs.com, symptoms of the disease include: swelling in the parotid gland and in other salivary glands located under the tongue and jaw. In the testes, mumps infection can cause swelling, pain, tenderness and, sometimes, permanent shrinkage, although it rarely causes sterility. In women, mumps infection of the ovaries can cause pain in the lower abdomen but doesn't lead to infertility. The mumps virus may cause inflammation and infection of the pancreas and abdominal pain.
"In about 15% to 20% of patients, mumps does not cause any symptoms. When symptoms occur, they usually begin 14 to 18 days after exposure to someone with a mumps infection.
In about half of patients, symptoms of mumps infection may include fever, headache, sore throat, muscle aches, poor appetite and malaise (a general feeling of sickness). The mumps virus causes pain and swelling in front of the earlobe, called parotitis. Because of the pain of parotitis, chewing and swallowing may be very uncomfortable, and the patient may not feel like eating.
Once it enters the bloodstream, the mumps virus also can travel to the brain, where it may cause meningitis (inflammation and infection of membranes covering of the brain) and encephalitis (brain infection). This brain involvement (which is very rare) sometimes leads to long-term complications, such as deafness, paralysis (weakness, especially of facial muscles), hydrocephalus and seizures."
Per Drugs.com there are also side effects associated with the vaccine. Cardiovascular side effects have included vasculitis. Hypersensitivity reactions have included anaphylaxis, anaphylactoid reactions, facial swelling, and bronchial spasms. Endocrine side effects have included diabetes mellitus. Genitourinary side effects have included orchitis. Hematologic side effects have included thrombocytopenia, purpura, lymphadenopathy, and leukocytosis. Nervous system side effects have included encephalitis, Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), febrile seizures, ocular palsies, and aseptic meningitis. Ocular side effects have included optic neuritis, papillitis, retrobulbar neuritis, and conjunctivitis. Otic side effects have included nerve deafness and otitis media.
So you see, you have to make an informed decision. Now, if you decide to immunize your child with the mumps vaccine (MMR)…and you most likely will because you want her to attend school… and she becomes diabetic, will you necessarily correlate diabetes to the vaccine?
No. You won't. Happy Meals must be the culprit. We will accept this as settled science.
Look, I have no quarrel with preventing epidemics of dangerous illnesses through vaccinations. The only concern I have is how we are defining the term "dangerous illnesses" these days. As mumps, measles and rubella fade from our collective memories, our tolerance for routine illnesses decreases exponentially. The issue at hand is that we have an ever increasing list of vaccines that your children must receive in order to go to school.
As a popular for instance, most people over the age of 30 suffered through chickenpox at some point during their childhood. Very few people have had complications associated with that disease, but in order for your child to attend a public school, she must receive the chickenpox vaccine.
Side effects of the Varicella virus vaccine can include:
Fever higher than 102⁰, blue lips and fingernails, chest pain, chickenpox, bloody sputum, asthma-like symptoms, irregular heartbeat, weight gain, bloody stools, seizures, severe and continuing headaches and vomiting.
Remember. It's a relatively new vaccine and the wunderkinds of science (who have settled the vaccination debate on chickenpox so we can't ask questions without looking like Neanderthals) don't know yet how many more negative effects can be linked to it. The list of symptoms that may be associated with the chickenpox vaccine would stun you. Paralysis, blindness, seizures, slurred speech… but that's no problem. Shut up and roll up your sleeve. Troglodyte.
There was a story that I remember reading in seventh or eighth grade. It was a real life account of one woman's experiences during the Holocaust. I don't remember the woman's name. I don't remember the name of the story. I just remember this.
I bring this up because the woman of the story sensed danger without much to go on and was able to extract herself from a life threatening situation. If she had been wrong? If it had turned out that she was being paranoid and the shower was just a shower? Would that have made her a "flat-earth" lunatic?
Forget the misery of her state of filth. To be unclean is to invite disease. And to invite disease is to put the lives of everyone around her in peril. By today's standards, she should have just gone along with her group and died rather than question settled science.
Still, she was able to assert her right to life during this era of extreme tyranny. She chose to escape death in spite of every indication that she had no such choice. We do not condemn her for disobeying authority and in that act of celebrating her survival, we bear witness to our own natural rights. While the rights to life and liberty become hazier as our government asserts and grows its own authority, in situations like I just described, we can still recognize the inherent right to self-determination.
Barack Obama went on national television on the night of the Super Bowl and explained that vaccinations are settled science. He circumnavigated through the question about whether the State has the right to force vaccinations but asserted that parents should get their kids vaccinated because it's good for them. He went on to express his concern that when we as citizens fail to vaccinate ourselves or our children, we leave an unprotected population of newborns with compromised immune systems vulnerable to illness.
Barack Obama twice voted that newborn children who manage to survive an abortion should be left to die in linen closets rather than be cared for. His advocacy for children is entirely conditional. Based on that fact alone, you have the right to disregard his advice because dead babies don't seem to bother him if they are babies that he considers to be invalid.
Additionally, your personal right to life and liberty is not predicated on the strength of someone else's immune system. You have the right to own you. And a man and woman who share a biological drive to protect the best interests of their offspring are the best individuals to raise their child. The State is prone to dishonesty, has no biological interest in preserving the safety of any individual child and cannot, therefore, be held responsible for her overall safety and welfare.
The debate over who owns your children is right there on the horizon fomenting in the vaccination debate. Get your ducks in a row and think about why your children belong to you.
"We always have had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of 'these are our children' so part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to the whole communities. Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the household's then we start making better investments." ~Melissa Harris Perry of MSNBC
Friday, February 06, 2015 at 08:36 AM | Permalink
Tags: Barack Obama, Illinois Review, settled science, vaccines
Starkehaus: The next liberal frontier is America’s children - Illinois Review
« Rhoads: A new low for the president | Main | Stantis: State of the State »
Starkehaus: The next liberal frontier is America’s children
Consumed by equivocation, I've tried to figure out how I can say what I want to say about our vaccination nation without coming off as a flat-earth lunatic. I've concluded that it's time to embrace the lunacy.
The term "settled science" may be a fair approximation in many scientific circumstances, but it particularly irritates me when it's used to condescend, trivialize concerns and perpetuate intellectual elitism. More importantly, the growing monotheism associated with scientific discovery signifies an academic hubris that points to a rejection of the scientific method and the end of human progress.
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance ~ Orville Wright
Simply put, the intellectual snobbery of "settled science" is an indolent weapon used to stop the everyman from daring to ask questions that interfere with the State's incontestable authority.
But as we well know, the science is pretty indisputable…to borrow a phrase from our great Pontificator in Chief…vaccines save lives. Mumps, measles and polio are preventable, and parents who love their sons and daughters should unflinchingly present their children's upper thighs to the nearest pediatrician as a symbol of their love of mankind and nation, or they are superstitious science haters.
If you do a search for side effects associated with the most commonly required immunizations, you will find that the so-called settled science is not exactly black and white. I'm not saying that you shouldn't get your children vaccinated. Look, I vaccinated my children. You should do what you think is best for your children. All I'm saying is that there are risks. There are. Every single time you put a controlled substance into your body, you are risking side effects. Every single time.
Our society has concluded that for the sake of the common good, there are certain benefits that outweigh the risks associated with mumps, measles, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis for most people excluding those with compromised immune systems. Mumps, for instance, is preventable. Immunizations almost eradicated the disease in the US.
Americans have not dealt with mumps in a couple of generations, so mumps has earned its mystical quality. Actually, mumps is not the end of the world.
According to Drugs.com, symptoms of the disease include: swelling in the parotid gland and in other salivary glands located under the tongue and jaw. In the testes, mumps infection can cause swelling, pain, tenderness and, sometimes, permanent shrinkage, although it rarely causes sterility. In women, mumps infection of the ovaries can cause pain in the lower abdomen but doesn't lead to infertility. The mumps virus may cause inflammation and infection of the pancreas and abdominal pain.
"In about 15% to 20% of patients, mumps does not cause any symptoms. When symptoms occur, they usually begin 14 to 18 days after exposure to someone with a mumps infection.
In about half of patients, symptoms of mumps infection may include fever, headache, sore throat, muscle aches, poor appetite and malaise (a general feeling of sickness). The mumps virus causes pain and swelling in front of the earlobe, called parotitis. Because of the pain of parotitis, chewing and swallowing may be very uncomfortable, and the patient may not feel like eating.
Once it enters the bloodstream, the mumps virus also can travel to the brain, where it may cause meningitis (inflammation and infection of membranes covering of the brain) and encephalitis (brain infection). This brain involvement (which is very rare) sometimes leads to long-term complications, such as deafness, paralysis (weakness, especially of facial muscles), hydrocephalus and seizures."
Per Drugs.com there are also side effects associated with the vaccine. Cardiovascular side effects have included vasculitis. Hypersensitivity reactions have included anaphylaxis, anaphylactoid reactions, facial swelling, and bronchial spasms. Endocrine side effects have included diabetes mellitus. Genitourinary side effects have included orchitis. Hematologic side effects have included thrombocytopenia, purpura, lymphadenopathy, and leukocytosis. Nervous system side effects have included encephalitis, Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), febrile seizures, ocular palsies, and aseptic meningitis. Ocular side effects have included optic neuritis, papillitis, retrobulbar neuritis, and conjunctivitis. Otic side effects have included nerve deafness and otitis media.
So you see, you have to make an informed decision. Now, if you decide to immunize your child with the mumps vaccine (MMR)…and you most likely will because you want her to attend school… and she becomes diabetic, will you necessarily correlate diabetes to the vaccine?
No. You won't
. Happy Meals must be the culprit. We will accept this as settled science.
Look, I have no quarrel with preventing epidemics of dangerous illnesses through vaccinations. The only concern I have is how we are defining the term "dangerous illnesses" these days. As mumps, measles and rubella fade from our collective memories, our tolerance for routine illnesses decreases exponentially. The issue at hand is that we have an ever increasing list of vaccines that your children must receive in order to go to school.
As a popular for instance, most people over the age of 30 suffered through chickenpox at some point during their childhood. Very few people have had complications associated with that disease, but in order for your child to attend a public school, she must receive the chickenpox vaccine.
Side effects of the Varicella virus vaccine can include:
Fever higher than 102⁰, blue lips and fingernails, chest pain, chickenpox, bloody sputum, asthma-like symptoms, irregular heartbeat, weight gain, bloody stools, seizures, severe and continuing headaches and vomiting.
Remember. It's a relatively new vaccine and the wunderkinds of science (who have settled the vaccination debate on chickenpox so we can't ask questions without looking like Neanderthals) don't know yet how many more negative effects can be linked to it. The list of symptoms that may be associated with the chickenpox vaccine would stun you. Paralysis, blindness, seizures, slurred speech… but that's no problem. Shut up and roll up your sleeve. Troglodyte.
There was a story that I remember reading in seventh or eighth grade. It was a real life account of one woman's experiences during the Holocaust. I don't remember the woman's name. I don't remember the name of the story. I just remember this.
I bring this up because the woman of the story sensed danger without much to go on and was able to extract herself from a life threatening situation. If she had been wrong? If it had turned out that she was being paranoid and the shower was just a shower? Would that have made her a "flat-earth" lunatic?
Forget the misery of her state of filth. To be unclean is to invite disease. And to invite disease is to put the lives of everyone around her in peril. By today's standards, she should have just gone along with her group and died rather than question settled science.
Still, she was able to assert her right to life during this era of extreme tyranny. She chose to escape death in spite of every indication that she had no such choice. We do not condemn her for disobeying authority and in that act of celebrating her survival, we bear witness to our own natural rights. While the rights to life and liberty become hazier as our government asserts and grows its own authority, in situations like I just described, we can still recognize the inherent right to self-determination.
Barack Obama went on national television on the night of the Super Bowl and explained that vaccinations are settled science. He circumnavigated through the question about whether the State has the right to force vaccinations but asserted that parents should get their kids vaccinated because it's good for them. He went on to express his concern that when we as citizens fail to vaccinate ourselves or our children, we leave an unprotected population of newborns with compromised immune systems vulnerable to illness.
Barack Obama twice voted that newborn children who manage to survive an abortion should be left to die in linen closets rather than be cared for. His advocacy for children is entirely conditional. Based on that fact alone, you have the right to disregard his advice because dead babies don't seem to bother him if they are babies that he considers to be invalid.
Additionally, your personal right to life and liberty is not predicated on the strength of someone else's immune system. You have the right to own you. And a man and woman who share a biological drive to protect the best interests of their offspring are the best individuals to raise their child. The State is prone to dishonesty, has no biological interest in preserving the safety of any individual child and cannot, therefore, be held responsible for her overall safety and welfare.
The debate over who owns your children is right there on the horizon fomenting in the vaccination debate. Get your ducks in a row and think about why your children belong to you.
"We always have had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of 'these are our children' so part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to the whole communities. Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the household's then we start making better investments." ~Melissa Harris Perry of MSNBC
Friday, February 06, 2015 at 08:36 AM | Permalink
Tags: Barack Obama, Illinois Review, settled science, vaccines