Dear Brainwashed People, The Measles Outbreak is Because the Vaccine Doesn't Provide Herd Immunity, Not Because Of Not Vaccinating

Apparently there was a Disneyland outbreak, and silly Tumblr person thinks the terrible danger was some unvaccinated person lurking somewhere:

You don’t get vaccinated just to protect yourself. You do it to protect others.
Six of the cases were in infants too young to have been vaccinated.

Since posting Dr. Obukhanych's video on the subject, I have been asking around, and, indeed, there are everyday folks in real life who got the vaccine and then got measles anyway.

Herd immunity was a phenomenon discovered within populations that had suffered actual disease outbreaks.

The idea the vaccinations would provide herd immunity was merely an assumption, and the measles outbreaks, not to mention that disease that looks almost entirely like polio- but it can't be polio because our almighty government vaccinated polio out of existence- is proving this assumption is incorrect.

The flu shots are giving us similar information. Various strains of flu are put into these shots each year. Not only is the vaccination often the wrong one for the year, but we have also had situations where previous shots should have kept outbreaks from happening, yet outbreaks happened anyway- in populations most likely to get the vaccinations- like nurses, and government workers who are often required to take these things.

How bad does it have to get for people to start questioning whether or not the vaccine is effective? As simple review of the facts- i.e. measles outbreak in a country were almost every school aged child either has to get vaccinated or parents have to be rich enough to home school and/or otherwise pay more to avoid massive number of headaches- suggests that logically the vaccines are failing. Indeed, you can also just ask other human beings. It was rather trivial for me to find a real human being who remembers being vaccinated for measles and yet getting measles anyway- I bet this holier-than-thou crowd could find some folks like that too, if they stopped treating vaccines like some sort of sacrament and started thinking differently.

Oh, guess what? If these infants were too young to be vaccinated, were they young enough to be breastfed? If they were breastfed by mothers who actually had immunity, then these infants would not have gotten measles. They would have been protected.

Now, in this retarded day and age, the mothers may not even be breastfeeding them, and even if they are, the moms were likely vaccinated, and thus not able to provide immunity.


This the worst sort of blindness. We could see some seriously rampant outbreaks and possibly even some pretty fascist backlashes against people merely exercising their freedom to choose, while one of these diseases blows right through the vaccinated population, and how long will it take for someone with authority to realize the vaccinations are not working? If they can't follow the logic now, how will they arrive at the right conclusion when there is a crisis?

Central Bank Wars?

The U.S. is almost alone in its onerous laws, ostensibly about taxes and or money laundering, which are getting so bad various foreign banks have simply decided not to allow U.S. citizens to bank with them. I have often thought this was akin to shooting oneself in the the foot, since a healthy economy depends on trade, but recently I have begun to rethink a little.

Most central banks of the world engage in Keynesian economics, and are essentially doing the same stuff the Fed does, but the Fed can enjoy the global dependence on the dollar whereas foreign central banks cannot. In order for Keynesian machinations to appear to work, the central banks need accomplices, unwitting or otherwise, who borrow money. If people don't want to borrow money, deflation is likely to happen despite all the shenanigans.

So, I wonder if the reason intrusive American laws have led to Americans being largely stuck with their own banking institutions and unable to access foreign banks is that these sort of laws (inadvertently or not) keep most Americans from accessing foreign credit. One would assume the foreign central banks are just as desperate for willing accomplices, and one way to beat the Fed would be to steal its borrowers.

It is not that I think these laws are being made and implemented with an ulterior motive. Rather I think there is probably more people currently engaged in what is essentially a false central bank economy rather than an actual economy. Thus laws that are ludicrous and obviously dangerous to true economic growth proliferate because they help prop up the false economy.

Big Data: Another Big Lie Screwing Up Innovation

A lot of people are familiar with the current state of climatology, fettered as it is by this insistence that we apply an inordinate amount of concern to atmospheric carbon dioxide and simultaneously insisting it has something to do with global temperatures, despite the track record on these sorts of predictions being abysmal. This is a subset of a larger scam- big computing- in which it is pretended that large, multivariate models of various systems can be used to do research, predict, and contribute in some sort of global way to our understanding of things.

This is not to say computers are never helpful, mind you, just that they are being applied most disingenuously in a great many fields, and as such we have various hypotheses, many of which have been disproven, masquerading as theories. We also have the acolytes of the techno-theocracy hailing the arrival of Big Data with evangelical zeal.

The result of this zeal is that nearly everything designed to track anything is being designed with some sort of transmitter because it is assumed we shall want to track everything and have it put into a spreadsheet so that we, or perhaps some experts in the field, can tease some sort of pattern out of all the data, and then we can materially improve our lives.

Lets look at a particular case in point- smart watches. Most of what a watch is good for, like telling time, and various biometrics, like heart rate variability, require a certain amount of power, but not as much as the total Android operating system, transmitters, and screen.

Maybe you don't need such a smart and power hungry watch.

Maybe we could use a low powered screen, like an e-ink screen. Perhaps we could work toward an extremely slim, possibly even stylish, imitation of mechanical watches which would be capable of a few extra screens of feedback we could use in real time.

Yes, I know I didn't do a good job crushing your dreams of a wonderful new utopia coming from having everything uploaded and analyzed, but you already know the here-and-now truth if you've tried tracking anything- most of the gadgets to track stuff ends up being awkward and annoying. Until it gets easy, there won't be Big Data anyway. Few people are going to upload enough data, because the gadgets suck. The gadgets can also be changing the very things we are trying to track- if your sleep tracker is wireless, and having something wireless that close to your head turns out to mess with your sleep, for instance.

But if we focused first on immediate feedback- which has a pretty solid track record in terms of helping us improve ourselves- we could have reasonably passive, low powered systems, and small, local data.

Update: I forgot to mention one of the most obvious failures of Big Data that everyone online sees all the time- advertising. Despite desperately tracking your every move, most of these advertising algorithms end up showing you whatever you've already bought. Or perhaps you did some online searching of something and it clearly can't tell the difference between something you would be interested in and something you just looked up because you wanted to know what it was.

An Extended Definition of Churchian And Examples of the Damage It Has Done

It used to be Protestants who slung the word Churchian around, mainly at folks concerned with liturgical matters, most likely, but the definition of the word has morphed. Since we now have the internet, everybody can get together and compare notes, regardless of the denominations.

Churchians assume Christianity and morality are one and the same. Worse still, people tend to degenerate further into the idea that morality equals feel-goods for other people. The 'be nice' brigade, if you will, many of whom cannot appear to understand the limits of 'be nice,' like if you actually did want a healthy society, church, community, etc...- there's the inordinate desire to be nice, and then there's that one guy or two telling you your dreams are disappearing down a demographic black hole.

Churchians tend to live as if they could know the mind of God, as if God is actually very much like that guy painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel:


Churchians tend to believe the feminization of the Church is actually a good thing.

Okay, so what is the big bad problem? The problem is that most people in Church are Churchians and/or have such leanings. They become cheerleaders for their side, not capable of providing any guidance to the larger society. Intelligent people, in this society, flounder. Here is an example I found in Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces:

Jesus, for example, can be regarded as a man who by dint of austerities and meditation attained wisdom; or on the other hand, one may believe that a god descended and took upon himself the enactment of a human career. The first veiw would lead one to imitate the master literally, in order to break through, in the same way as he, to the transcendant, redemptive experience. But the second states that the hero is rather a symbol to be contemplated than an example to be literally followed. The divine being is a revelation of the omnipotent Self, which dwells within us all. The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one's own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to precise imitation, the lesson being, not "Do thus and be good," but "Know this and be God."

I had thought it was going to be an interesting book, but it turned sour quickly, for this guy was into Freud, but I thumb through and found this nonsense. The problem with this garbage is that I can just see a relatively intelligent man inherently knowing the struggle, but when looking at Christ, sees only Churchians, none of whom appear interested in the struggle.

The pearl in our undervalued land lies in the Trinity. It is yet the third story- the one the author ignored, God being perfection and seeking to perfect his Creation, and Jesus being both God and Man offering a solution to our dilemma. For any reasoning man knows that this omnipotent Self is foolishness, but the mystery of Christ gives us an icon of what is to be. We can be perfect for perfection itself would make it so, even becoming man so that it can be done. So, we can, as the author I quoted above seems want to do, attempt to 'break through' knowing that our endeavors are not in vain.

But this is missed, and what do we get instead? Here's a link to an interview I literally had to stop listening to:Super Human Radio 1557. They start out discussing religion as a story that we tell each other, and that we (and the universe) driven by evolution can wake up, realize these are stories and then start making up our own stories- the implication being that our new stories will serve us better, like a new map of my town would serve me better than one from fifty years ago.

But you know what they pick as an example? X-men. Yes, folks, a bunch of dysfunctional people, incapable of having children or normal relationships- absolute failures by any evolutionary metric. And not only that, there is no perfection in the comic book world. So their idea of new, better stories are stories in which the characters can't pass basic evolutionary tests and the parameters are finite and orders of magnitude less than perfection.

Well that sucks.

The modern fixation with the Superhero is actually a side effect of the dysgenic slide we've undergone since the 1800s. These are the stories of a broken people, not a people about to evolve to a next level. They can't see the desired end result. They don't understand the parameters

But reasonably smart people end up making these mistakes. Are they really rejecting Jesus? Or are they rejecting you? Rejecting this pathetic version. Remember, there used to be real, actual, serious pagans who listened to Christians and then chose to become Christian themselves. I believe it is because the pagans also desired perfection. The author I quoted and the guys who did that interview also sound like they want to improve themselves. I suspect the reason Christianity is so undervalued is that there are so many Churchians in it. Churchians do not like the struggle. They use religion as an uncertainty reduction device, and there is probably a high correlation between them and those who wave the flag around like it still has meaning. True pagans would hold them, as well as their secular counterparts in contempt.

Remembering More Churchian Shlock, Thanks To Blair Naso

Blair Naso put up a good summary of what you are likely to get from a church these days:

“Loving Yourself Means Thinking Highly Of Yourself”
I used to have a close Christian mentor. He often told me, “One sin I struggle a lot with is low self-esteem.” Today I put my hand on my forehead when I think about that. This push for self-esteem at any cost is what has made my generation all fat and worthless. We want to blame the public schools for it, but the churches are almost as bad.

For those of you who grew up in American Christianity, recall VeggieTales’s “God loves you because you are unique” ethic at the end of every episode.

I remember in my early days of People of Praise we all listened to a talk. It was recorded, and they don't like to put stuff on the internet, largely because it can be critiqued to death. I was supposed to be impressed by this guy- people said he was a physicist or something; can't remember for sure, but what I do remember for sure is that he sorely needed to be familiar with Alfred Korzybski.

He spent what seemed like hours- and I think it was actually hours- trying to talk about what God is, which he couldn't really do, so he spent a lot of time talking about what God is not. It was a giant freaking waste of time, but I generally gave him the benefit of the doubt. He's trapped in Aristotelian logic, just like most of America, and he's struggling to find the right way of saying it.

But not now. The extent of the man's faith is Veggie Tales. The veggie tales quote is what reminded me of this talk. Talking about the uniqueness of you is a lot like how doctors just make up labels for stuff. If you go to the hospital with severe pain in your abdomen, and they do all the tests they can think of and they can't find anything, they say you have irritable bowel syndrome. It is a bit of a scam, because neither the Christian nor the doctor wants to be honest and say, 'I don't know.' I've got news- when you are trying to convince people of an All-Knowing God, you should say you don't know often, because you can't know the mind of God. He is just way too far above your head.

It seems to me much simpler to point to what God does. Then there are inferences to what God does that can be made. He wants more life- and that inescapably means more people, and He wants to bring people into perfection. Sure, maybe that talk would take hours too, but it would make sense. And you would end up with God's love being a driving, creative force seeking to increase creation and bring it into perfection, rather than something dependent on your flimsy uniqueness.

This isn't mentioned much, because God wanting more life would interfere with some girl deciding she really needs to be doing something more important than having babies. Blair Naso has seen that too:

I was recently gaming a high school senior who was convinced that God wanted her to become a surgeon because “He has placed this desire in my heart.” She wouldn’t listen no matter how I tried to tell her that was a bad idea. So I had to dismiss her.

Now not only is she about to fail at a miserable career—likely before it even starts—but she also missed out on a potential soulmate. Which ties back into my point above about toxic love, since I’m sure her parents encouraged her to piss away her best years in grad school.

Go read his post. There's more there.

Which City Is Least Likely To Be Bombed?

On my more pessimistic days, I wonder what isn't on the the Russian and/or Chinese bombing list should hostilities break out. I figure various military/political targets on the East and West coasts go first. There's an airbase near here, so we are probably on the list; but I suspect it may be harder to hit, being more in the middle and all. Who knows? If the rumors are true, and our military research has stagnated, while Russia is enjoying more innovation, then maybe even this little town is in trouble too.

Then there's that other thing- the thing the U.S. makes happen to the Middle East- most places we meddle. Whatever existent state there was dissappears and it doesn't actually get replaced by a legitimate state, not one thought legitimate by their own people, anyway. Occasionally, the state department can keep a little puppet alive, but it rapidly turns into no state. We like to pretend Iraq, Syria, etc- are still there, but they aren't, and what is there, well it depends on the block.

By default we've developed a no state solution. I suppose you could call it a multiple weak states, but it doesn't sound as catchy. You just need some pretext for statehood, and the ability to hire some thugs. Come to think of it, easily defensible land is probably the most important part. This is why Iran is better off than Iraq & Syria.

It can happen here too. Who knows what our leaders wanted when they started this crap- what matters is that folks have adapted to it. The good, the bad, and the ugly have all figured out how to dance with it there, and people learn from each other. The bombs don't necessarily have to drop. Just crank up the ethnic tension.

Solidarity: A Narcissist's Way of Making Your Death About Them

You are not Charlie.

Of course, I've been seeing this stuff in Ferguson and New York too, but not really seeing it, just sort of looking at the edges- that attractive space where it looks like maybe some of these protesters can be rehabilitated to the point where we could collaborate and actually get stuff done.

But I am afraid it isn't true. The revolutionaries are all about the process, and never want to have a solution. They will continue to develop policies that involve not allowing individuals the power to defend themselves, and then have a march whenever someone that they perceive as their own goes down.

In a nutshell, they won't implement the correct policies because they want it to happen again. Rather, they shall implement policies that inevitably result in tragedy, and then have another protest. It's like they get high off of outrage. This is why they keep saying police act like they do in America because they are racist instead of noticing the police have been turned into part of a revenue generating system. This is also why reasonable policies in France are dismissed with similar reasoning. Ultimately, of course, whether or not your interlocutor is racist is pointless when one is actually engaged in determining the truth. What will solve the problem will solve the problem, whether it is uttered by a racist, or Mary freaking Poppins.

Who wants the truth, though? Not the revolutionaries. The truth stops their merry-go-round. The truth stops them getting their high. Doesn't it seem a massive incongruity that many of those responsible choose to march in Paris? Who are they marching against? The answer it seems to me, is that they are marching for their own ego.