“All we can do, Scully, is pull the thread. See what it unravels.” – The X-Files
Alexander the Great and Smokey the Bear had one thing in common: same middle name.
In 333 B.C., Alexander the Great entered the city of Gordium. In the city there was a really tangled piece of rope – so tangled that no one could see how the intricate knot was made. It was ancient. The legend was that whoever could solve the knot, would become ruler of all of Asia. We have a similar puzzle in our laundry room, and whoever can sort all of the socks can choose dinner next Wednesday.
Alexander the Great, it is said, fiddled with the knot for a few minutes. After deciding that was as useless as trying to push a piece of spaghetti, Alexander drew his sword and cut the knot in half. Problem solved. Was he worried that the locals would think he was cheating? Nope. He had an army. From this story we get the phrase “Gordian knot” for a problem that can’t be solved under the terms it was created.
I’m just hoping Pugsley doesn’t solve that sock problem by putting them down the garbage disposal. Again.
Okay, this isn’t my laundry room. But I once did own a hat just like that one.
We are in a strange place. In the nation, and in nations all over the world. We are all separating. The world is falling apart. But don’t consider world civilization a complete failure – remember, the swimming pool on the Titanic is still full after over 100 years so that counts for something.
The unravelling of society, however, can be seen in many ways:
- Vaccine Believers and Anti-Vaxxers
- No Brexit and Brexiteers
- Global Warmists and Climate Deniers
- Globalists and Nationalists
- Flat Earthers (they’re all around the globe!) and, um, I guess Sphere-ists.
- Left and Right
- Nuclear Power Advocates versus No Nuke Activists
This separation was pointed out to me in an email from my friend who I will call John, because he has an awesome first name, and I promise is totally not my alter ego. The questions he asks are deep, and the answers aren’t necessarily obvious. When I finally get to a post based on one of John’s ideas, it might have taken dozens of hours of study and research where I try to prove my ideas wrong with the data. Occasionally, I do prove myself wrong. As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
If you haven’t seen this, it’s Thanksfabulous.
I won’t go into detail on all of the symptoms of unravelling listed in the bullet points above, since if I did I think the post would be longer than Bill Clinton’s address book. And I could easily add additional topics, like the validity of the Moon landing, homeopathy, and court verdicts like the one showing RoundUp® causes cancer. But I’ll discuss just vaccines, for an example.
All vaccines are safe and a good idea. Well . . . maybe not. I looked first at chickenpox. Deaths from chickenpox have dropped since the chickenpox vaccine became mandatory from about 100 deaths per year in the United States to (as near as I can find) zero. But let’s face it – to die of chickenpox a kid has to have a pretty weak system already. If it wasn’t chickenpox, somebody would have probably popped the kid with a Nerf® gun or the kid would have faced a strong breeze and it would have finished him off.
But let’s assume that the 100 who died were perfectly healthy kids. The vaccine costs about $300. Multiply that by the 3.9 million kids born in the United States each year, and the cost of the vaccination alone is nearly $1.2 billion dollars. Divide by the one hundred substandard kids you would have saved, and that’s (drumroll) nearly $12 million dollars per kid “saved”. I assure you, you can make a new one for far less than that.
He also lifts dictionaries to work out. He says that’s how he gets definition.
The cost benefit ratio is silly. If anyone said we had to spend a billion dollars to save 100 random kids, we’d never do it – don’t believe me? Our school buses are made from thin sheet metal by the lowest bidder. If we spent that same billion dollars on safer school buses, we’d save far more than 100 lives. I don’t doubt that the vaccine works.
So what? It’s not worth it.
I moved to the next vaccine: Gardasil©. Gardasil™ protects against nine variations of HPV – HPV is the stuff that gives humans warts. In this case, Gardasil® protects against warts on your naughty bits. So, I started to research, but I assure you I avoided pictures. Ewwww.
I attempted to look into vaccine safety for Gardasil©, and found a most curious phenomenon. When I tried to find information that showed data that put Gardasil™ in a bad light, Google® was useless. Any query about deaths related to Gardasil® led only to how safe and wonderful it was and how we should probably rub it into the fur of our pets, bathe in it, drink it in shot glasses.
I swapped over to Bing© and got actual answers to the question about Gardasil© safety, learning that there were nearly 63,000 reported adverse reactions to Gardasil™, 317 reported deaths, and a study indicating that maybe Gardasil™ causes infertility in 1/3 of the women that take it.
In fairness, it is thought that the vaccinations of Gardasil© might save 2,900 lives a year from cervical cancer starting sometime in the year 2046. This sounds like me trying to make a joke, but most cases of cervical cancer won’t hit until a woman hits her fifties, and the vaccinations didn’t start in earnest until just over a decade ago on teenage girls.
So, what if Gardasil© is the vaccine that causes the zombie apocalypse? Hmmm? Didn’t think of that in your double-blind studies, did you?
And I used the word “might” for a reason. There’s no study that shows that Gardasil® will stop cervical cancer, although I’ll believe scientists are probably right. But that has to be viewed with a grain of salt, too: according to one source, the fatality rate of cervical cancer for women who get regular tests is nearly zero, with or without Gardasil©. I ran the numbers on this one, and on a cost basis it’s better than chickenpox, at only $700,000 per theoretical future life saved in 2046.
Me? If I ever get a uterus, I think I’d skip Gardasil™, though that won’t be the first thing that comes to mind if I wake up with a uterus.
I’m not an Anti-Vaxxer: my kids are vaccinated against things like diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, and rubella. Yes, I’d vaccinate them again. I think we did opt out of the chickenpox vaccine for The Boy and Pugsley, but I can’t recall. It seems like there’s a clear cut case for eliminating many diseases, like, oh, polio. I don’t think the world misses smallpox, either, which was eliminated thanks mainly to vaccines.
I have another vaccine joke, but it’s like smallpox: no one gets it anymore.
But anyone who questions a vaccine is branded an “anti-vaxxer” and ignored. In fairness, many people who question vaccines have valid questions, and want the real information so they can make a choice. Google®, however, seems to think that sort of question is not valid, and only pointed to pro-vaccine sources in page after page after page of results, no matter how I asked the question. As Mark Twain said, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.”
And that illuminates the real problem.
The legitimacy of Big Science is in doubt. The legitimacy of Government is in doubt. People are also doubting:
- The educational system.
- The United Nations.
- Mainstream news media.
- Mainstream entertainment media.
- The courts.
- Silicon Valley tech companies.
- Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.
And it’s not just in the United States – it’s spreading. Riots have broken out in Chile, which is the most prosperous nation in South America and has the least amount of income inequality on the continent. Europe is facing Brexit, the Yellow Vest movement, and the national rejections from countries like Denmark, Poland, and Hungary to unfettered migration.
I guess Hillary is still looking for Mr. Riot.
The world is unravelling. One possible reason is we’ve reached the end of the Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) where this sort of social chaos is to be expected. Another is that we are seeing increasing polarity in public life. While the Right has moved farther Right, the Left has gone very far Left. It’s not me imagining this, like it turned out I was imagining Tyler Durden after I started up all of those Fight Clubs®. No. This rift shows up in the graphs:
Politically we are flying apart. Is part of this demographics? Certainly. Immigrants (legal or illegal) to the United States vote overwhelmingly Left. Why? It doesn’t matter. They do. Immigrants and their children are perhaps the single largest driving force of this polarity shift, but there are other factors.
We’re also becoming more urban – this urbanization leads to a lower sense of belonging, and drives people to vote Left. Sure, you’re a fan of (INSERT FOOTBALL TEAM HERE), but how many people in faceless condos in Seattle or Salt Lake City or San Francisco know each other? When I moved to Modern Mayberry, neighbors up and down the street knew I worked at the PEZ® factory before the house deal closed. Do we know our neighbors like family? No. But we know who they are, and know a bit about them. Urbanized people are more disconnected from their neighbors than rural folks. That disconnection makes distrust in your neighbor that much easier.
Lastly, the Internet provides a source of information that wasn’t available in the past. What was only available in libraries and in mimeographed samizdat is now available to everyone. It’s now possible to research things like vaccines and global warming from your couch, and pull in better data than would have been available to almost any scientist in 1980. And news? The Internet has pulled it from the control of the gatekeepers. When John Podesta’s emails were leaked, I was combing through them, and found many things before the news media did, like the fact that a nice Nigerian Prince wanted to give him a lot of money.
These are the symptoms of a society where the fundamental premise of that society is no longer a given. The United States has been defined as meeting everything to everyone. We are finding that those are empty promises – it’s really about power and control. With the amount of information out there, however, power and control can’t be kept.
How do we solve this puzzle?
Our society, our culture, our trust won’t be regained through Congressional committees or an impeachment. It won’t be made whole by an election. And it won’t be healed through movies or television.
Someone, somewhere, is going to have to cut that knot.
Here’s the American Gordian Knots. Not even necessarily the best maps of them, either, just what came up with 3 minutes of Google. Cut these in just a few places, especially in the Northeast, and I guarantee that urban centralization of power will come to an end and the focus will become local in a hurry. Oh, and all hell will break loose.
https://www.infrastructureusa.org/interactive-map-visualizing-the-us-electric-grid/
https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php
https://pipeline101.org/Where-Are-Pipelines-Located
https://theodora.com/pipelines/north_america_oil_gas_and_products_pipelines.html
https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/maps/interactive-map-pipelines-united-states
And let’s not forget food.
https://www.vox.com/a/explain-food-america
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK305173/
https://www.clustermapping.us/cluster/food_processing_and_manufacturing
Stalin didn’t.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/
I’ve read the Atlantic – but blue state voters can’t read a map – they think that food is made when they click an app and have it delivered.
That’s a lot of scary data. We live in a society that exists because 99.9% of people want it to exist.
We don’t need to cut the modern Gordian knot. We need to burn it to ash.
Like a supernova, when the outward pressure cannot be sustained, the outer layers implode. Then?
Bad things.
Dude! How can you say that just as we are achieving Peak Kumbaya? The newly released Sprite commercial says so!
https://youtu.be/8l_8yeYVlBo
I think “Drinking the Sprite” just replaced “Drinking the Kool-Aid” for a generation that doesn’t remember a seminal event from almost exactly 40 years ago…
https://www.businessinsider.com/drinking-the-kool-aid-meaning-jonestown-massacre-2018-11
Strangely, no Sprite featured. What, exactly are they selling?
Point of order:
Look, I get humor and all, but unless you’re making fruit salad, the bit about chicken pox vaccine is the most fallacious attempt at an apples and oranges defense I’ve read outside the NYSlimes.
The point of the vaccine wasn’t to save lives, ever, nice while that extremely rare side effect may be.
Chicken pox as a child is a serious pain in…everything, for those of you too young to have ever been gifted with it, because you got the vaccine.
Some of us are old enough to have had old school doctors, who, when they found out your little brother had it, said to your mom “Throw him in with his brother, so they can both have it now and not have to deal with it as an adult.”
And your mom did just that, because
a) the vaccine was decades away, and
b) the doctor was an idiot, but high-functioning for his era.
The effing point of that treatment then, and the vaccine now, is that chicken pox as an adult is orders of magnitude worse for adults than children (who don’t have anywhere to be anyways, and benefit from the character-building of the pre-Snowflake era), and chicken pox is potentially life-threatening for pregnant women (pneumonia will do that), while putting your baby at yuuuuge risks for birth defects or death. Neither of which can happen if you had either the disease, or the vaccine, before your child-bearing years.
Secondly, chicken pox itself, once you’ve had it, doesn’t die. Kind of like Shrillary, or Jerry Brown, it just goes dormant until you’ve forgotten what a flaming pain it was the first time, then comes back again and again. And again. In chicken pox, we call these excrutiating bouts “shingles”, and in politics, we call them election years.
So, versus a dozen or two $2000@ hospital visits for pain control from shingles from age 50-80, what’s the cost-benefit of that $100 vaccination again, please? If you’ve had the vaccine, how about we kick you hard in the crotch for half an hour every hour, and then you tell us what avoiding that would be worth to you after three or four episodes. (Or subject you to Governor Moonbeam or President Shrillary for a term or two, which is a hate crime and a violation of the Geneva Convention in 157 other countries.) Deal or no deal?
Knowing that, would you like to amend and revise that original analysis in light of reality, or will you be proceeding with the impeachment despite it?
You’re thus rather guilty of exactly the problem you describe. J’accuse!.
Even if it was accidental. Vos sunt reus..
(FWIW, should the need arise, I’m available for research questions, and my rates are unbeatable: free.)
The observations for HPV vax are closer to the mark, because it’s still some decades from empirical proof, so I leave those without further comment.
And I’m neither pro- nor anti-vax.
I’m just vehemently anti-stupid.
Stupid, in job-lot quantities, is vastly over-subscribed, and over-subsidized, and the pain it should merit is doled out far too sparingly of late. We should be a nation of flame-scarred, toothless, one-eyed walking lessons of why not to be That Guy. As Stevie Wonder said, “I’m not seeing it.”
I don’t, for example, believe children should be subjected to 47 shots all at once, nor all before their fourth birthday, but I also know that parents who risk their child needlessly because they’re too stupid to make intelligent and informed decisions, and after trusting instead the medical eructations of a high-school dropout Playboy bunny, or God forbid, the Internet in general, should be beaten with a glowing hot fireplace poker, and then treated to the pincers and thumbscrews. Therapeutically.
—
On the greater question, the exact problem you inadvertently illustrated, the knot in question has been built up over decades, even centuries, with tender loving care, by people who have been counter-revolutionaries ever since 1776, and working, exactly like rust, to undermine, rot, and corrupt the whole experiment.
A sword isn’t going to cut that knot.
As McChuck noted, it’s going to go away in fire on a volcanic level, and bloodshed in oceanic quantities.
Not because anyone wants it (though some indeed do), but because there no other way through that’s left to us.
I defer to the timeless wisdom and philosophy of Inspector Calahan on that point:
“There’s nothing wrong with shooting, as long as the right people get shot.“
This comment leads into a very interesting related discussion if you switch from “vaxx cost benefit ratios / Dirty Harry would be a good Grim Reaper” to “Medicare cost benefit ratios / Let Grandma just die”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/how-we-spend-3400000000000/530355/
“Last year, (2017) America’s total medical costs hit a new record of $3.4 trillion…an estimated five percent of the population accounts for 50 percent of total medical costs…..hundreds of billions of dollars each year are spent treating Americans who are in the last weeks, or days, of life….”
Then there’s Neil Armstrong, the poster child for walking on the moon, er, medical malpractice payments….
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2019/07/23/neil-armstrong-family-got-six-million-settlement-hospital-after-death-mercy-health/1809928001/
More lies with statistics.
First, Medicare only pays 3¢ for every $1 of care delivered. IOW, it’s f**king the medical system, ripping them off for the other 97¢, and doing it on your nickel (assuming you’re under 65) and mine. Now ask me again why your Tylenol tablet got billed at $47, and see if you can figure out who’s paying the freight for you and grandpa, from your cradle to his grave.
Second, if we simply required all descendants to assume all financial responsibility for the grandparents and such they’ve neglected for 20 years, I wouldn’t see 87-year-old patients after two heart attacks and a stroke, with dementia so bad they scream at the walls non-stop, have CHF, CAD, COPD, DM, kidney failure, dialysis 3x @week, and Stage III cancer come into the ER as a “Full Code”. Again and again and again, every day for 25 years.
If every family member was going to be personally financially liable, out of their own pocket, for $30,000 worth or more of granny’s $300,000 bill for cardiac arrest, intubation, and dying a week later in the ICU anyways, all while being tortured because the family can’t let go, they’d have put her on a DNR the day they dumped her in Elder-Don’t-Care, and drove away. Then, when she coded, they could have held a nice wake, a decent funeral, and let the old girl die peacefully in her own bed without me breaking 17 of her ribs doing compressions or stabbing her nine times to get IV access on someone with no pulse and no blood pressure.
Please, stop me when the penny drops.
No relatives? No pre-planning? No problem: no care. Problem solved.
We get a few minutes to make decisions that patients and families have ignored for years to decades.
That’s why we try and have families present during codes; when they see how grim it is, they realize what fools they were, and usually want us to stop, at least on anyone over 70, or a total train wreck like I described, which is most of them.
When they’re even within 3 states.
Or would you rather just issue SS camp guard uniforms to medical staff, and let us decide who lives and who dies based on whimsy and caprice?
Because you’ve already delegated that decision to the government now, and billed it to strangers, so I was wondering where you draw the line.
Just wondering; nothing personal.
Telling me we spend the most money on people about to die is like telling me that 90% of life guard and Coast Guard rescues are for people about to drown.
Yeah…so?
Not particularly brilliant, and pretty worthless as a discussion point.
Either you try to rescue people, or you don’t.
True in the ocean, true at the hospital.
You don’t get any points by noticing that Coast Guard cutters burn a lot of fuel, and cost a lot of money to buy and maintain.
The question with Medicare is why you didn’t put grandpa and grandma on a DNR and hospice care months to years ago, and forbid anyone to call 9-1-1 to make futile efforts to resuscitate patients who are terminal, oblivious, and would, if they could, ask you to just let them die peacefully and naturally.
No one lives forever.
Medicare helps subsidize that last six months, mainly for guilty family members (and clueless patients) who can’t adjust to that inevitable truth.
Medicare started out as a way to keep the elderly who were penniless from dying because they couldn’t afford any care at all.
paid for by everyone else.
Something about the road to Hell and good intentions should come to mind.
Also a quote about socialism and running out of other people’s money.
It’s turned into a boondoggle to futilely try and tell people they can live forever.
Vote to abolish it entirely, and I’ll buy your newsletter and march in your parade.
It’s been a disaster for medical care for everyone, and subsidized people too stupid to plan ahead.
You had 65 years to plan for retirement; it didn’t suddenly sneak up on you one day and then pounce.
It’s like insurance for getting run over by a glacier.
Stupid ideas are always stupid.
And a Ponzi scheme in 1935, or 1965, is still a Ponzi scheme now.
Preface and background: After additional reflection, both The Boy and Pugsley were vaccinated against chickenpox. Obviously, not an event that was very memorable.
So, for starters, I selected two vaccines that were (in the scope of things) fairly new and ones where I wouldn’t have a decision, ever, on. Yay having older kids!
I recall going to the doctor when the chickenpox vaccine was fairly new. His attitude was, essentially, “meh.” Since The Boy and Pugsley came in after it became mandatory, they have it, and I didn’t fight as much.
You probably haven’t tried to find out information on the Internet on vaccines, since you’re immersed in that milieu every day. I’m not. So, when I went to research the benefits of chickenpox vaccines? The major feature that showed up is . . . preventing 100 already doomed kids a year from dying. The risk of shingles? Not apparent until you go looking for it like I did after your comment. And then? Looks like Shingrix® (seriously, who names these things, Pinhead™ from Hellraiser?) has a 90% effectiveness at a cost (per Google©) of $280.
Sounds like a good deal to me. I actually had chickenpox (almost typed smallpox, which would have been a really fun typo) when I was in my early thirties. It was (for me) a day off from work and a total of about three poxes. I guess the Wilder constitution is stronger than the federal one, but it probably makes sense for me to get some Shingrix© when the time comes.
So, Shingrix™ solves (mostly) the problems of vaccination of people like me who pre-date the chickenpox vaccine, but not as completely as the chickenpox vaccine. Pregnancy is left. Yup. 100% I’d suggest it for women (now that you’ve mentioned it) who can become pregnant, especially now that chickenpox has ceased to get to 99% of people by the time they’re 20 – this is a weird case where it looks like vaccination has made being unvaccinated much more serious.
And chickenpox is in no danger of being eradicated. The NHS in the UK has opted against the vaccine, noting: “if chickenpox in children disappears as a result of a vaccine programme, adults would no longer have their immunity boosted by exposure to their chickenpox-suffering children and grandchildren and would be more likely to get shingles. Put simply, the conclusion of the previous review was that it would not be cost-effective for the NHS to immunise children against chickenpox.”
Reference: The Conversation
If the NHS is for it, I guess I should probably be against it.
You’ve actually convinced me (as noted above), but my argument remains the same. We have created a situation of polarity where the information available to the average consumer isn’t well thought out, and discussions that should be fairly straightforward (to vaccinate or not) are now cloaked in an almost religious cloth. But why isn’t a clear and cogent explanation like yours readily available in the dozens (no exaggeration) of pages I opened up for researching this?
So, yes, you’re right, mea culpa. I’ll even throw in an Epstein non occidit se ipso.
There are two problems at work.
They combine synergistically against the shallow end of the gene pool.
Problem One is that, exactly like the CIA, we don’t suffer from a dearth of information, but from a glut of it.
People are inundated with information on the Internet, most of it pure codswallop and propaganda, and a large amount of it outright bullsh…er, rose fertilizer.
And the average person can’t tell the gold from the dross.
Problem Two is Dunning-Kruger: brighter people know how much they don’t know; middling to absolute dumb@$$#$ have no wild idea how much they don’t know. So the smart people tend to underestimate what they know, and the dumb@$$#$ overestimate what they think they know.
Which leads to people for whom the biggest problem isn’t that that they don’t know what they’re talking about with regard to vaccines; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know what they’re talking about with regard to vaccines.
For example, Dr. Jenny McCarthy, former Playmate of the Year, and now ersatz authority on cellular microbiology and communicable diseases, with her 38DD diploma. When the leading authority on something’s most famous paper on a topic was a centerfold, it’s probably best to cover your wallet with one hand, and run for your life.
Another classic pseudo-expert is “Bill Nye, the Science Guy”. As if.
Who, IIRC, actually has a simple degree in mechanical engineering.
Which is handy if were talking about designing a machine to deliver ice cold sodas, but Stephen freaking Hawking he ain’t.
He is to science what Gilderoy Lockhart is to wizarding.
But they both have a following, because human lemmings instinctively like to herd up, even if the destination is the nearest cliff.
https://imgur.com/EhcM4OD.jpg
Point one: Exactly! Too much information. And, we don’t trust the sources. Perfectly said.
Point two: The Internet is fantastic at Dunning-Krugerizing a population. And my mea culpa re: chickenpox is real. The idea that people could make a rational case for a vaccine like that is a simple one. But they don’t.
Yup, Dr. Jenny is suspect medically, but was pretty funny in Baseketball.
Bill Nye? I have no use for that tool. None. I rather take science advice from The Mrs.’ dog. At least he isn’t biased.
So… my dog?
Should she get a Rabies re-newal vaccine?
I question the effectiveness.
Rabies is a virus; other virus-caused disease are rarely helped by vaccination BECAUSE THE VIRUS MUTATES!
For example, this year’s vaccination against last year’s
* chinese pig and bird flu or
* chinese blind albino salamander flu or
* chinese buffet flu
is worthless BECAUSE THE VIRUS MUTATES!
Ha… ‘chinese buffet flu’.
I crack myself up.
I think your dog should get one. But for free-range vegan people who like communism? No. They must get written consent first.
Now you have me wondering if I should get a rabies booster shot!
Yes, it’s a fact, I “have”, had my shots.
It’s probably a good thing too.
I can still remember having the Chickenpox too, back in about ’64 .
I can remember it 56 years later because I got stuffed into a bathtub of ice for a prolonged period.
My teeth are chattering just remembering it.
I also had the Mumps as a child.
The reported relationship between autism and some vaccines would scare the bejesus out of me as a parent,
Full disclosure, my wife and I have a 35 year old autistic boy but he was born with it.
On the other hand, some of these diseases making a comeback due to the unwillingness of Democrats to see their voter base diminish would cause me to want my kid vaccinated until his tongue turned blue.
It’s a sticky wicket.
It really is a sticky wicket. I had the mumps – it was a week off from school watching daytime television.
Yeah – measles was eradicated. Why is it back now???
Yup.