After recently learning that infectious disease expert Amesh Adalja has a podcast, I listened to a few episodes while out yesterday. They're all short, but very interesting. One of these episodes, about Measles and the Avian Flu, mentioned a web site I'd never heard of before, Back to the Vax, which is run by two former anti-vaccine activists.

The site is devoted to promoting good health by fighting back against the anti-vaccine movement:

Heather Simpson is a former anti-vaxxer who dug deep into the science, and finally put her fears to rest. She is passionate about science communication as a way to overcome the most common vaccine fears. She has an 8 year old that inspires to create needle-less vaccines for all children. She is enrolled in school as a Biology major with a focus on Communications.

Lydia Greene was an anti-vaxxer for 12 years and wrote a story on her journey to changing her mind, and bringing her 3 children up to date. She is now in nursing school to get into public health, to deal with vaccine hesitancy on the front lines.

Together we share our story with anyone that will hear us. To our surprise, we have been welcomed back with open arms. We now give other people like us support and a platform to share their experience if they choose to.

Their stories and those of others appear on the site's blog. If I recall correctly, one of the founders bought the lie about vaccines causing autism -- only to learn that her unvaccinated son was autistic.

The site also features a 70-page booklet titled Vaccine Fears Overturned by Facts, which is a collaboration with the Immunize Kansas Coalition. I have not read the whole thing, but I am impressed by a few things I read that I already understood well-enough to evaluate, one example being its discussion of thimerosal, which reads in part:

Remember, "mercury" was removed from most childhood vaccines over twenty years ago! So how many vaccines still contain mercury? While none actually contain "mercury," multi-dose flu vaccine vials do contain thimerosal, a preservative that contains an ethylmercury group.

...

Yes, thimerosal is used as a preservative in multi-dose influenza vaccines, however it is also used in cosmetics, tattoo inks, eye drops and contact lens solutions, disinfectants, as well as in products used to treat contact dermatitis.

Methylmercury is the type of mercury found in fish. It can be toxic to humans at high exposure levels. This is why the FDA recommends limiting your intake of some types of fish.

Compounds containing ethylmercury, on the other hand, are cleared from your body faster than methylmercury and don't appear to be toxic. For example, methylmercury takes around 20-80 days to be cleared by half from the body, whereas thimerosal takes around 7 days to be cleared by half from the body...

Each section is listed in an annotated Table of Contents and includes a QR code by which anyone can go to the list of references for that section, an innovation that shortens the booklet, so that it doesn't seem like an inaccessible tome that nobody ever is going to have the time to trudge through.

I recommend perusing the booklet, because, while it is aimed at the vaccine-hesitant, it is also a handy catalogue of the myths driving the anti-vaccination movement, as well as refutations of the same.

The site's inclusion of the stories of recovering anti-vaxxers is good for a couple of reasons I can think of: (1) it helps the questioning anti-vaxxer feel seen, rather than preached to, and (2) it helps humanize anti-vaxxers to those of us who have never been anti-vaxxers and might be puzzled or even smug about them.

The first will motivate anti-vaxxers to help themselves, and the second will help the rest of us understand where they came from, and reach out to them more sympathetically and effectively.

With our Federal Government platforming a very evil person in Bobby Kennedy, Jr., we need efforts like this to fight back, and it is encouraging to see that this is indeed being done, and being done well.

-- CAV

The Census Bureau is still moving full speed to promote racial profiling to support disparate impact and DEI objectives. Strong executive action is required to stop and reverse this refusal to change.

The post Bart Ehrman on the Christian Origins of Altruistic Morality appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.

 

Download video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/62w3EFQML58



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Commentators need to denounce support for violence against business leaders for what it really is: support for terrorism

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Angry articles about immigration have flared up again among Objectivists, but both sides seem to have no difficulty ignoring the points I’ve made. Or, more benevolently, which I have not done enough to publicize and explain.

But first, a new perspective.

Globalization is here and cannot be stopped. With cheap and easy transportation around the globe (unless a country walls itself off–like North Korea–with similar meaning and consequences), the differences in race and culture of 100 years ago are going to melt away.

Take the worldwide growth of English, and American English in particular. The French reportedly hate the growing use of English words. It cannot be stopped. Take the growth of interracial marriage, unheard of 60 years ago. It cannot be stopped. Neither can interfaith marriages and other “mixed marriages.”

80 years ago, “colored people,” as they were commonly called, could not play in the white baseball leagues. Now, you don’t even think about the race of sports stars–Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson, A-Rod. And is Aaron Judge 100% Caucasian? Who knows? Who cares? Race has (thankfully) become of no concern in professional sports.

The same is true (or is becoming true) in terms of country of national origin. I follow only baseball, and not much of that, but it seems that the rosters are entirely filled with South Americans and a sprinkling of Japanese. And baseball was/is “America’s pastime.”

The same is true in entertainment (and has been true there for longer). Even in the early 1950s, before rock ‘n’ roll, black singers were coming into prominence: Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Fats Domino, the Platters, Ella Fitzgerald.

Consider some other dimension of the homogenization: young Southerners have only a tenth of the southern accent of their grandparents. Every suburb has Mexican restaurants, Thai restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Lebanese restaurants, Japanese restaurants, Italian restaurants, and pseudo-Australian (Outback).

You may bemoan the loss of national or regional identity, but it cannot be stopped.

Generally, what goes into the mixing process are the best elements of each culture. Or so it seems to me, and it makes sense: why would people of culture B value the things about culture A that are objectively inferior?

(Here I’m taking “culture” in a perceptual-level sense: how people look, what foods they eat, their mode of dress — not in Ayn Rand’s deep sense: “the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted . . .”. I am talking about regional differences in optional lifeways.)

So, to the extent that people feel turned off or threatened by people coming into their country who look different and act differently, that concern is going to fade into the background over the next 20 years.

Differences over ideas, not foods or dress, are an entirely different matter. The difference between Islamic jihadists and Americans is a matter of literal life and death, not something optional. Even there, globalization will have a big impact. The ultimate defeat of Islamism will be accomplished by young people in the Islamic countries seeing the rational values of the West. That’s unless the West commits suicide—a distinct possibility.

The oft-noted “moral weakness of the West” has become “God damn America!” (Reverend Jeremiah Wright). The cause is not immigrants; the cause is the (Kantian) ideas taught in our schools and universities.

The danger to America comes not from a handful of terrorists crossing the border, but from the millions of university graduates crossing from academia into (actual) America.

Today, it is necessary to add that the government cannot combat ideas and must not try to. The law must be not only color-blind but ideology-blind.

Two red herrings dominate the arguments against open borders: crime and welfare. Neither is an important issue.

Immigrant crime. Yes, this is a problem. But how big a problem? The number of crimes committed by American citizens is, of course, many times greater than the MAGA-spotlighted crimes by immigrants. There are 14 times as many citizens as non-citizens.

We need a sense of proportion. All of us are victims of the massive, ceaseless violations of our rights by government: the seizing of a huge portion of our earnings in taxation, the retarded rate of innovation due to a mind-boggling web of regulations, the sword over businesses’ heads posed by the antitrust laws, a government-imposed fiat currency that inflates away our savings.

The number of homicides in the U.S. is about 22,000; the number of deaths from medical causes was about 2.8 million in the most recent reporting. We can’t know what that 2.8 million figure would have been if the FDA had never existed, but it is quite clear that the deadly effect of the FDA is orders of magnitude bigger than 22,000 cases of homicide.

Theft? AI tells me that last year there were about $15 billion in “property crimes.” $4.19 trillion were taken by the federal government. That’s 280 times more property seizure by the feds than by immigrants and non-immigrants combined.

And the problems facing us are not limited to rights violations. What about such evils as: “climate-change” hysteria? What about an educational system that is destroying the conceptual faculties of our youth?

Against that backdrop, how big a problem in your life is crime? Now make it: how big a problem is crime by an immigrant? Now make it crime by an immigrant who could have been kept out by a good vetting process at the border?

The questions answer themselves.

Crime by immigrants, as with crime by citizens, is for the police and courts to deal with. Both could be better funded. And repealing the drug laws would reduce crime a hundred times more than any border policy could.

Immigrants on welfare. Again, this is a tiny, tiny problem compared with the harm done to you by the climate hysterics or sales tax or the educational comprachicos. But by all means, let’s make every immigrant and immigrant child ineligible for any federal funds ever. Make a video record of each immigrant signing a document affirming that he or she will never take any government money (except as wages if hired for a government job). Make it include no free public schools for his children.

Do you think that the no-welfare policy would noticeably reduce the number of people wanting to come here? I don’t, but let’s test it out.

Now here are the two fundamental points: rights and limited government.

1. Foreigners are human beings. They have the same individual rights that every American has.

(I distinguish individual rights, founded in the right to life, from civil rights such as to vote, which come with citizenship; civil rights are narrow and conditional, individual rights are not.)

The initiation of physical force against a foreigner at the border is as evil as the initiation of physical force against an American citizen in his hometown.

2. Objective law: a proper legal system has standards governing when the police may use force and how much force they may use.

Some terms of art are: “reasonable suspicion,” “probable cause,” and (in a trial) “beyond a reasonable doubt.” These standards concern the degree of evidence that someone has committed or is about to commit a crime—i.e., violate rights by initiating physical force.

The amount of force a law enforcement officer may properly use varies with how much evidence he has of criminal activity. Reasonable suspicion warrants stopping to question; probable cause warrants detaining and maybe arresting; guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (as determined by a jury) warrants punishment.

These standards apply whether the person the officer is confronting is a citizen or a non-citizen, an immigrant or native-born. In the absence of “reasonable suspicion,” the police cannot stop an individual, interfere with him, or question him.

What power the police may exercise is to be decided on the basis of individual rights, and rights have nothing to do with anyone’s country of origin or citizenship status.

If it’s wrong for the police in the interior of the nation to stop everyone and make them prove they are “okay” in some way, it is wrong for the border police to do the equivalent to people trying to cross into the country.

Accordingly, there’s a desiderative test for any proposed border policy: would the same policy be right inside the nation?

Regarding the proper extent of police power, what’s wrong on a street corner in Poughkeepsie is wrong in El Paso at the border.