According to the Brady Bunch:

The measles is not the second coming of the Plague, hyperventilating headlines notwithstanding.

In light of the recent hysteria over anyone who questions the safety and efficacy of present-day vaccine policy, the campaign to censor those people, and the push for mandatory vaccination, it is more important than ever for us to remember that vaccines are not dropped from heaven by angels, but are pharmaceutical products created by fallible, flawed humans, in an environment ideal for the unchecked growth of corruption and fraud. One tragic instant of fraud happened when Merck’s pain medication Vioxx was recalled in 2004 after being on the market for 5 years. Vioxx greatly increased the risk for fatal heart attacks and strokes, with some estimates that the drug killed over 55,000 U.S. citizens in the 5 years it was on the market. More damning was the revelation that Merck knew in 1999, before Vioxx was available to consumers, that the drug increased the risk for fatal heart attacks, but fudged the research in order to fast-track the drug.

Worldwide, over 80 million people used Vioxx during the five-year window that it was available, meaning that the deaths could exceed hundreds of thousands. This is the same corporation that manufacturers, with complete legal immunity, the MMR and Gardasil vaccines. How can we trust anything that Merck produces? And how can we trust a medical establishment that can’t even bring itself to send to prison the executives that knowingly killed as many Americans as died in Vietnam?

A Sprint cell tower was installed on an elementary school campus in Ripon, California, (why, exactly?) in 2015. Since then, four students developed aggressive cancer, along with three teachers. The parents blame the cell tower for obvious reasons, and Sprint sent in a spokesman armed with a stack of industry-funded studies. Thankfully, the parents didn’t buy the bullcrap that was being sold to them, and now Sprint and the school have been sufficiently pressured to remove the cell tower.

The question, now, is: what about 5G? Thousands of cell towers identical to the Ripon tower will be placed everywhere. The wireless radiation will be ubiquitous, there will be no place to escape from it. What will be the rate of cancer after a decade of blanketing entire populations in 5G radiation?

A crucial lesson from the Ripon debacle is to never trust industry-funded science. It’s the same “science” that the tobacco industry used to “prove” that smoking cigarettes won’t give you lung cancer. It’s the same “science” that Merck has used to grease the gears for wide acceptance and distribution of the murderous Gardasil vaccine. But people who have seen the effects up close on a family member, usually won’t buy the BS that corporate reps use to cover up these crimes. What are people going to believe, what a stooge from Sprint says about the safety of a cell tower, or their own eyes?

Much of this industry-funded science uses the easily manipulable “epidemiological study” to finesse the desired facts. The susceptibility to fraud inherent in the epidemiological study was encapsulated perfectly by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he said that you could easily manipulate an epidemiological study to prove that having sex didn’t cause pregnancy.

Industry scientists are basically the propaganda arm for their particular industry, and it’s nearly impossible to fight it. They buy the media and the politicians. Just look at how long it took to get a judgment on the non-Hodgkin Lymphoma-inducing glyphosate in Roundup. But the propaganda arms extend from the industry and into the regulatory agencies tasked with monitoring them. “Regulatory capture” takes place, which means that an industry begins staffing the agency with industry toadies, blessing the industry with a facade of objective science and accountability. Industry science infects the regulatory agencies, and these agencies begin to resist and suppress independent, actual science.

MATT TAIBBI: It’s official: RussiaGate is this generation’s WMD

Reason: February’s budget deficit was the largest in U.S. history

Also Reason: ICE tracking immigrants with huge license plate database

The Intercept: Pentagon says Google’s drone work is exempt from Freedom of Information Act

FEE: 8 cases that show the FBI and CIA were out of control long before ‘RussiaGate’ Ed: A must-read. And check out the ‘suicide letter’ that the FBI sent to MLK Jr. and his wife.

Health Impact: Disease outbreaks among fully vaccinated students show insanity behind mandatory vaccination laws

Calls to silence an intellectual opponent is clearly an implicit admission of defeat, an admission that you have no faith in your own ability to make your case. Calls for censorship have abounded in recent weeks, when legislators and various medical professionals have called for silencing those who do not completely accept that “all vaccines are safe”. Dr. Peter Hotez prominently called for censorship of vaccine skeptics on Joe Rogan’s podcast, refusing even to consider a forum to debunk the “anti-vaxxers”. This clearly baffled Rogan, who couldn’t believe that someone who considered those ideas so dangerous would refuse to debate them. Here is the relevant part of the interview:

The anti-vaccine lobby owns the internet? The pharmaceutical industry is by far the biggest lobbying group in D.C., they air the majority of advertisements on television, in effect owning the government and the media. Social media has been a place where vaccine skeptics and health choice advocates can meet and discuss their concerns. Hotez takes the cowards way out, refusing to debate, and instead advocating censorship of these people, taking away the one public forum where they can convene.

More recently, three Yale professors and one pediatrician pulled out of a debate with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine safety at the last minute. Kennedy took the 3,000 mile flight to Connecticut anyway, and gave a four-hour press conference instead. If the other side is so confident in their ideas, why are they afraid to debate? The answer is obvious: they aren’t confident in their position. Kennedy would’ve humiliated them in a high-profile public forum and the footage would’ve garnered wide attention. The ensuing fallout would very likely have triggered a national debate where vaccine-skeptical ideas were given serious attention. It would’ve triggered a revolution and restructuring in vaccine policy. It would’ve been a healthy change, and all due to open debate. But the corrupt and intellectually bankrupt do not want debate. They want to keep their highly-paid jobs and their faux influence. But to do so means defending the laws and regulations that artificially animate their employers.

From his book, Socialism: 

Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. No one can stand aside with unconcern: the interests of everyone hang on the result.”

I’ve always felt that the true test of character comes when one is made to choose between defending a position or belief all alone, going against what seems to be the majority of your fellow man, those who hold a belief or are bent on engaging in an act of which you know in your heart to be evil, or a path that leads to eventual ruin. It’s a rare sight, not dissimilar to walking outside at night, looking up, and seeing the sky filled with lighting sprites. Not impossible, but it catches you off guard. All you can do is marvel at it, thank the gods you were there to witness it, and pray you learned something from it. The quality I’m referring to is intransigence, that immovable bullheadedness that vanishingly few possess but can do enormous damage when awakened. And more than likely it is a quality that remains dormant for much of the unsuspecting individual’s life, placed there by whatever force breathed life into the cosmos, lying in wait in case it is ever needed. This individual could be moving along through life at a steady pace, meeting all the milestones that society demands of him or her. Yet one morning this person finds something wrong, he sees what he has always seen, yet this time he sees it as it truly is: crimes committed in broad daylight by a ruling class flanked by murderers and rapists of entire nations. He realizes with shame and outrage that he’s become a sharecropper of his own life, a vision of his children’s future becomes clear as a diamond sky, effectively delivering his children to a hereditary parasite that will never be satisfied until their futures and lives are consumed.

His sensibilities, his very nature is offended at the molecular level. All at once a sleeping star goes nova within him, something awakens, utterly possessing him, transforming him. The monkey brain chatter that his filled his mind for years is suddenly silenced. The mind clears, he sees the path before him. He picks up a large club, and he begins to walk. And as he walks, the history of entire countries change. His eyes are on the path, the goal, not the jeering horde of drones that mindlessly prop up the system that enslaves them. History itself is changed by this quality. It’s this quality that Matthew Arnold saw in Edmund Burke when he wrote:

“…when you hear all round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam-engine and can imagine no other–still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put in your mouth.”

These people have existed throughout history, and they have changed that history. Their refusal to yield, their indifference to the odds of success, indifference to whether they stand alone or with millions, their inability to “speak anything but what the Lord has put in (their) mouth”, this is intransigence. Not just a bullheaded refusal to back down, but a continued, unceasing, advance toward the enemy, is its hallmark. It is what every ruling class fears, because it is almost impossible to defeat, and it is the harbinger of their doom. When a ruling class has openly committed crimes against the public long enough, the intransigent will awaken and begin pursuing them.

An intransigent person is like the Terminator. They just keep coming, and they won’t shut up. They can’t be bargained with, bribed, or cajoled. And they won’t stop until either your establishment has been dismantled, or they has been killed by agents of the Political Class. Any ember left alight within will continue to pursue its prey with every fiber of its being. A ruling class is virtually helpless in the face of an articulate, intransigent person.

We are living in an age where corporations and governments speak with one voice. Where crimes are committed at home and abroad, to thunderous applause, by a rapacious Political Class who are also intent on grinding into dust all dissent. What better testing ground could there be for bringing the intransigent to the foreground? And it certainly has. Ron Paul was the first major public figure to exhibit an almost superhuman intransigence in the face of evil.  More recently, Tulsi Gabbard has exhibited Jimmy Dore, comedian and host of the Jimmy Dore Show, certainly has it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has an enormous amount of it.

With most of these people, you can point to some single moment or revelation that propelled them to action. Tulsi saw firsthand the evil of regime-change wars. Jimmy’s was the constant exposure to propaganda. RFK Jr. looked at the data behind the murderous Gardasil vaccine in disgust and horror. For Ron Paul it was the evils of the Welfare/Warfare State, and the rapid dismantling of liberty.

Intransigence is much more than an unwillingness to compromise. It calls out your crimes to your face. It will publish pamphlets of your crimes and distribute them. It will tell every person who will listen that you, the ruling class, are composed of human garbage and are fleecing them for every cent they have. They will be very persuasive, and will build a following. They will come for you.

Apparently the professors skipped out just as RFK Jr. was about to board his flight. He made the flight and showed up at Yale anyway and held a press conference:

Much has been said about “vaccine misinformation” in recent weeks. A Senate hearing was recently convened to address this crisis of “misinformation”, with a panel of doctors all speaking in unison regarding vaccine policy. At the request of California representative Adam Schiff, Facebook has pledged to combat the “misinformation”, Pinterest has removed anti-vaccine content, and Amazon has removed many documentaries containing this “misinformation”, with the hope that censoring the content will halt its spread. But what is strange about all this is that nowhere is this content ever addressed directly. What is this “misinformation” that scares them so much that they’re willing to censor it rather than address it directly? Rather than misinformation, could it be that parents find the widely-available facts surrounding current vaccine policy deeply disconcerting, and voice that concern? Those concerns warrant serious discussion, not censorship.

Just one of these concerns is the simple fact that vaccine manufacturers are exempt from liability in the event of an adverse reaction to a vaccine. This is due to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986, which also created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which funnels petitioners to the “vaccine court”, where the families of the vaccine-injured must make their case in order to receive compensation. Over $4 billion have been paid out as part of vaccine injury settlements by this program since its inception, according to NVIC.org. And in just the first quarter of this year, the Department of Justice has reported that $110 million in settlements has been paid out to victims. The program, ostensibly created to put an end to the wave of lawsuits that vaccine-injured individuals were bringing against vaccine manufacturers, has now clearly created a very dangerous, textbook example of moral hazard.

A possible result of this moral hazard is found in disturbing video footage of a 2018 meeting of the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices, which shows a vote being held on a vaccine containing an adjuvant with unknown side effects and safety, yet receives unanimous ‘yes’ votes. After the vote, the members appeared to discuss when the data on the new vaccine would be available, implying that the general population would, in effect, be the test subjects for the unproven vaccine for the next several years.

This is reckless in the extreme, and clear evidence that we have every reason to distrust regulatory bodies that operate in this manner, as well as distrust any policy or product emerging from their deliberations.

After the passage of the 1986 Act, Congress assigned responsibility for monitoring vaccine safety to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was required to submit a report to Congress every two years that details the state of vaccine safety. Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Informed Consent Action Network and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it has been revealed that HHS has not filed a single vaccine safety report since the creation of the program 30 years prior. This isn’t misinformation, it’s fact. Inconvenient, but fact nonetheless.

Vaccine safety isn’t some idle concern among parents. Autism, autoimmune disorders, and chronic illness are rising at alarming rates among children. This is a serious concern for children and their parents. A 2010 EPA study, “Timing of Increased Autistic Disorder Cumulative Evidence”,  traced the origin of the modern autism “epidemic” to 1988, when cases began spiking dramatically. As of 2018, according to the CDC’s own stats, approximately 1 in 37 boys is diagnosed with autism, whereas 1 in 151 girls receives the diagnosis.

And, more fundamentally, what number of vaccines would be too many? The standard schedule calls for around 28 doses of 13 separate vaccines by age 2, 35 by age 5. At what point would it be considered excessive by even the most pro-vaccine advocate? 50 before age 2? 100? The misgivings of parents are informed and entirely rational. Marginalizing these people, and attempting to silence them will not make them go away. A demand for censorship is an implicit admission that you have no faith in your ability to persuasively respond to your opponent’s argument. It is an admission of defeat.

Parents who have even the slightest misgivings over the number of doses, their contents, and their possible dangers find their concerns dismissed with an eye roll, and eventually, if they continue to voice their concerns or network with like-minded individuals, find themselves marginalized by the medical establishment at large.  They find themselves dismissed as the “useful idiots of the anti-vaccine lobby”, as Peter Hotez did when he smugly spat it at the mothers of vaccine-injured children after a Senate hearing on vaccines on March 5th. Later, they listen to an interview in which Hotez, rather than address any of the arguments of the “anti-vaccine lobby” or even affirm the value of some type of public debate, says that “some of this anti-vaccine media empire needs to be dismantled”, blatantly calling for censorship, regardless of any First Amendment violations. Does he really have such little faith in his arguments in favor of mandatory and expanded vaccine policy that the only option is to silence his critics?  A real debate must happen, it can’t be swept under the rug. Something is wrong with vaccine policy and our entire approach to health in general. It requires discussion, no matter how uncomfortable that discussion may be for either side. The future of health and the future of our children vitally depend on it.

And now for something lighter: a few notes on my experience, thus far, with that most infamous, blood-thirsty, maniacal breed of dog on the planet, the pit bull. 

Lucy is my pit bull, the first one I’ve ever owned. About 18 months ago I decided I needed some kind of energetic beast in my life, and only a dog would do. I’ve grown up around other types, just never a pit. But I’d heard the hysterical stories about this maligned breed. I’d also heard the good things that came from pit bull owners, along with their bewilderment that anyone would think this breed in any way vicious if they’d actually ever been around them. They’re reputed loyalty, intelligence, and athleticism pushed me over the top: I contacted a seller with a new litter the next day. First I confirmed that she was full-blood rather than a mix, and made a small road trip to Ardmore to pick her up. The rest are just a few observations that may either dispel or confirm the stereotypes, but they are observations based on my first-hand experience from a new owner. 

1. Lucy is intensely loyal to me, in a way that I’ve never encountered before in a dog. Her exuberance at just being around me is almost always at the max, but it’s very self-contained and controlled. She doesn’t jump all over me or my children, but just tap-dances in place until she feels she’s permitted to come over.
2. When you take a pit bull for a stroll around town, people do cross the street. Maybe it’s their preconceptions, maybe it’s the dead stare that she gives people from a distance. Whatever it is, people move. Comedian Bill Burr said that everyone owes it to themselves to walk a pit bull down the street at least once. It is a glorious experience.
3. Her athleticism is a sight to behold. Lucy’s only desired material possessions are her blanket (that she prefers to arrange herself) and tennis balls. In lieu of a live squirrel, Lucy is content to chase and fetch a tennis ball as long as you’re able to throw it. In fact she is faster than your ability to throw the ball. She’ll bring it back, but not before performing several victory laps around the yard. Pits are muscular in a compact, barrel-chested way, and you can see every muscle’s purpose when they’re running at top speed. 
4. Intelligence. Her ability to quickly learn commands is something I’ve never encountered before in another dog. I chalk it up to her eagerness to please. Almost all of my handful of commands to her aren’t even verbal, but merely hand gestures and finger snaps.
5. She is by far the most even-tempered animal I’ve ever encountered. That is not hyperbole, merely an observation. 
6. Pits do have boundaries and will enforce them in a casual way with people they’re unfamiliar with. It’s probably never a good idea to approach a stranger’s dog before being introduced, and I wouldn’t recommend it with a pit bull. They won’t rip your arm off, but they will make sure you keep your distance.
7. For home security, a pit bull is far better than an alarm system or even a gun. She hears every noise in the house, and can somehow parse the noises of my two cats with anything that seems to her to be suspicious. On the rare occasion she thinks something needs to be checked out, she lets out a single, full-throated bark, walks slowly around the entire house, then goes back to bed.
8. There isn’t a violent or impulsive bone in her body. On the contrary, Lucy is the least-impulsive of any dog I’ve ever been close to. Her extremely cool, even temper is one of her greatest features. On the single occasion that a neighbor’s dog entered my backyard, rather than tearing each other limb from limb, that dog and Lucy spent the next twenty minutes running in figure eights at full-speed.

So there it is, my un-embellished impression of the infamous breed of dog after one year. Was it helpful? Who knows. But what is astounding is that hundreds of high-quality specimens are practically given away every day on Craigslist. Few people want them due to the stigma. Guess what? The stigma is baloney. If you want a very good dog, consider a pit bull.