Month: October 2019
Alexa, other smart home systems, are apparently interrogating your children for personal information
Apparently Alexa plays 20 questions with the children of these smart device owners, asking intrusive questions that might not appear so to a child. According to a mother who called in to NPR, her daughter was asked by Alexa, regarding her father: “Does this person inoculate all of the children in his house?” The NPR episode here. The entire episode is worth listening to, but the mother calls at 10:54.
There is no point in bringing these small avatars of the surveillance state into your home. They are clearly surveillance devices, spying on you and your family, and nothing good will come of owning one. Amazon has already admitted that Alexa recordings are saved indefinitely, even in the Alexa owner “deletes” them. They data will be saved, and probably sold/given to various state and federal agencies to use. Every interaction in your house will be eavesdropped upon.
The supreme irony lies in the fact that no piece of legislation was even needed to mandate the installation of an in-home surveillance device, many people are doing it of their own free will.
H/t to the Facebook group, ‘Vaccine Damage, I Believe in Science’.
The myth that vaccines saved the human race
Oklahoma Republican state rep. Kevin West held an informal meeting on vaccine safety last month that quickly drew jeers from the pedigreed multitudes of the Medical Establishment, including this statement from one Larry Bookman, president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association:
“Before vaccinations were readily available, thousands of Oklahoma’s babies, children and adults suffered from dire complications from serious diseases such as measles, mumps, scarlet fever and polio. The reason this is no longer an issue is because America’s childhood immunization efforts are one of the most effective public health programs in history…
“Despite the effectiveness of these life-saving vaccines, there remains a vocal, misinformed minority who are working to chip away at this essential program. With this in mind, I’m calling on our state leaders to embrace the facts regarding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. And, on behalf of our nearly 4,000 physician members, I encourage parents who are nervous about vaccine safety to have an open, honest conversation with your family physician,”
I would say that if Bookman here wants to talk about honesty, he should practice what he preaches. There is no vaccine for scarlet fever, and he, as president of his venerated institution, should know.
It is significant for our understanding of the cause of the dramatic decline in infectious disease that there was never a vaccine for scarlet fever in wide circulation. The disease was a feared killer up until the early 20th century, racking up a body count far higher than even smallpox. Yet, by 1940, scarlet fever had virtually vanished in the United States and England. And now, in the present, when someone contracts scarlet fever, it manifests as nothing more than a benign sandpaper rash that lasts less than a week.
How? Why? Haven’t we been told that vaccines saved us from the ravages of infectious disease? That this this greatly-feared infection burned out in such dramatic fashion should be grounds for intense historical interest. But it isn’t.
If there was no vaccine in use, how did this killer disease, feared for centuries, suddenly vanish within the span of 60 or so years? The answer lies in the myriad sanitation movements that arose in England and the United States in the mid- to late-ninteenth century. Clean water, nutritious food, innovations in plumbing, an awakening to the benefits of handwashing and general hygiene. These were things hitherto never given the time of day. The power of hygiene is illustrated in the graph above. It dealt a mortal wound to a feared, invisible killer that had previously wiped out entire families, cutting through communities, and sending nations into panics. The most dramatic decline in mortality appeared in children under 1 year of age.
No one learns of the sanitation movement in school today, despite its enormous historical significance. It is lost history. In its stead, we have acolytes and propagators of actual misinformation like Larry Bookman, and the seemingly endless drones just like him who mindlessly parrot all the same phrases when defending the cult surrounding vaccines.
What would be the verdict for a black man who had murdered a white, female police officer in her own apartment?
Fair question. And, of course, the answer is obvious. If the roles had been reversed, the murderer would’ve received, at the very least, a life sentence. He wouldn’t get a hug from members of the victim’s family, nor would he receive a bible from the judge.
Never forget Mary Knowlton, the retired librarian shot to death by a cop during a “demonstration”
Mary Knowlton was the 73-year old retired librarian who made the ill-fated decision to participate in a “shoot/don’t shoot” demonstration with a criminally incompetent member of the punitive class. Lee Coel was supposed to be shooting blanks, but instead fired two live rounds through Knowlton’s heart, killing her. This rooting, snorting, unionized piece of garbage has been charged with “manslaughter”, and will more than likely serve no time at all, thanks to the “thin blue line” institutional support, amplified by the unconditional love held by an idiotic and unthinking public. Knowlton is a victim of the culture of incompetence that is rampant among police departments today. The kid who killed her had probably never even held a gun 6 months ago, but he did have the quick temper and eagerness to escalate a situation so prized among departments. IQ hovering below that of my dog. (That is an insult to my pit bull, actually, who exhibits daily a capacity for reflection and judgment far above that of most people I encounter).
As every firearm owner knows, you never point your gun at anyone, whether you think you’re loaded or not. Every real gun owner feels the gravitational pull of their barrel down to the ground, and obeys that instinct. No real gun owner would ever dream of pointing their weapon at an elderly woman, much less fire blanks at her heart.
School injects students with insulin by mistake, resulting in one overdose. Families are suing.
Here’s a good example of why it’s a bad idea to mingle education and medical procedures. Many have pointed out the fact that if any of those students had been diabetic, the school would’ve had a death on their hands. Now everyone involved is getting sued, and the families will probably get a sizable pay-out. Litigation is the answer here.
The most outrageous part of the story, though, is that, once the school realized its mistake, it told the students not to tell their parents about the mishap. The student that OD’d also was not administered medical aid at the school. The parents evidently arrived to find their child unconscious in a chair.
Public schools have no business administering medical procedures, including vaccines. The personnel, more often than not, isn’t competent. Shots, and everything else, must be done in a doctor’s office, with parents present.
Liberty as the ultimate goal
The greatest revolution and most dramatic advance toward a freer and far better future has been the flowering of marijuana legalization throughout the nation. Congress is now poised to give the cannabis industry banking rights, hitherto denied to them. Legalization takes the honors not primarily due to the many health benefits from its use, but because its legalization took the beating heart out of the tragic, almost century-long War on Drugs. The drug war is now terminal, as can plainly be seen. The arguments developed to discredit marijuana prohibition apply to the entire bureaucratic superstructure, as the public can clearly see. A flood of editorials and jeremiads, of which I contributed a small amount, were too much for the policy to withstand. No one could deny the injustice of the drug war. This phenomenon is probably one of the primary benefits of such prolonged struggles for liberty: the best minds are forced to develop and unleash the most devastating and convincing of arguments to combat the tyranny. Books, columns, speeches, documentaries, all of this will exist long after the battle has been won, stockpiled like an armory in the event that they ever need to be made use of again.
The foundation of a free society is voluntarism. All mutually-consenting contracts and interactions are permitted. The instigation of violence is prohibited. This has always been the ultimate goal. But it seems clear that it won’t happen all at once. Small victories will build on one another, and liberty activists will gain ground. The logic of liberty applied to one issue will then be transferred to another. More people will wake up to this logic, and then one day we will have reached a point where the principle of voluntarism has been pushed further than ever before. But pushed in a self-conscious, philosophical manner. Nothing by accident, and therefore more permanent. That is the ultimate goal.
Ukraine-gate is the new Russia-gate
Boy is politics entertaining, and provides much fodder for someone like the great Jimmy Dore:
Liberty is lovely
H/t Oklahomans for Cannabis:
$2.49 million awarded to woman devastatingly injured by flu shot
Vaccines are safe and effective? Not so for Cheron Golding, who received a flu shot in 2013 and developed transverse myelitis, a disease on par with the worst aspects of polio: paralysis, loss of vision, etc. She took her case to vaccine court and won.
It’s good that she received the payment, but the question needs to be answered: how can an allegedly innocuous medical procedure cause a complication as severe as transverse myelitis? There are around 1,400 new cases of this polio-like illness in the United States each year, with over 33,000 Americans affected permanently in some manner by the illness. With all the fear-mongering circulating about polio, why don’t we hear more about those numbers? How many cases are vaccines responsible for? This is important. Vaccine injuries need to be spoken about plainly, even if only to confront the fact that safer vaccines need to be developed. Hiding the problem, or denying that it exists, is harming thousands needlessly. The logic goes that if some vaccines were perceived by the public as unsafe, then vaccine uptake would plummet. It would take years, maybe decades to rebuild public confidence, so health authorities believe it to be better to deny vaccine injury rates at every instance. I believe this to be the cause of the phenomenon of giving multiple vaccines in a single visit. If a doctor were to admit that more than one vaccine at a time is dangerous, the first question would be, why? And so now we have doctors administering combinations of vaccines at once, despite their never having been tested for reactions.
Combining various medications and administering them to a child all at once would be insane if it were any other product. But for vaccines it is standard procedure, regardless of the outcome.