The immense majority of the cows I’ve met were extremely agressive to people and would do their best to trample or skewer any humans in sight.
Man, you guys really know how to milk a joke.
At least until the cows come home.
Quit trying to steer the conversation!
You don’t still have a link to this, or have it archived somewhere. I would love to read this.
This is true, but most behavior experts I know, who have studied autism, and work with autistic people, suspect that what happens is you simply have a child who is lactose intolerant, gets a lot of stomachaches, and maybe generally doesn’t feel well if the lactose intolerance is enough to cause malabsorption. The autistic child can’t express his discomfort verbally, though, and it comes out in his behavior. Remove the irritant, the child feels better, and behavior improves. So does concentration and learning, eventually.
There’s another factor with the complicated casein-free/gluten-free diets some autistic children are on that parents swear help. First, these kids have virtually no junk food, and second, they have parents spending a lot of time on their diets, and as a result, paying extra attention to them. The extra attention helps, but there’s also some observer bias: parents don’t like to think all that work is for nothing.
I’m surprised that the number of measles cases was that high twenty years ago. Does anybody know the cause? Where antivaxers around even then?
I’ve seen a couple of posts mentioning Elizabeth Hasselbeck. Has she come out as an anti-vaccination nut?
One strange detail about this recent outbreak is that more than half the cases are in adults aged 20 years or older. So these would be the kids of pre-1994 anti-vaxxers.
Maybe they had other kids around the same time that caught the virus as infants 20 years ago, as is usually the case, but since most people were vaccinated, herd immunity allowed the current cases to make it a couple of decades without being exposed.
Before widespread vaccination the US had an average of 500,000 cases per year. This 20 year high of 288 cases is miniscule compared to the way things once were, but the numbers are definitely moving the wrong direction.
This chart is demonstrates the progress we’ve made since the introduction of the vaccine: File:Measles US 1944-2007 inset.png - Wikipedia
It’s rather awesome actually.
Thankfully, this wholly unnecessary 288 cases won’t even register as a blip.
Immunity can fade. When the virus was everywhere, people were repeatedly exposed-- it was like getting a booster a couple of times a year, so people who had had measles and recovered maintained immunity. It’s possible someone vaccinated as a child, but not since, could catch it if exposed at age 30 for the first time to the actual virus, especially if it was a slightly mutated version.
{Gives this about 5,000 thumbs up.}
I know I’ve posted THIS before, and it’s simplex, but it’s correct. Anti-vaxxers are batshit crazy and their goal is insane and deadly!!!
To be fair, the dumbshit media (or at least, large segments of it) has learned a lesson since the Wakefield debacle and has backed off the “tell both sides” nonsense. Nearly every mass media/major newspaper story I’ve seen about the 2014 measles outbreaks has been sane and factual, without demonstrating a compulsion to interview nitwits for “balance”.
CBS News has benefited from the resignation of antivax “investigative reporter” Sharyl Attkisson, who has been reduced to blogging her antivaccine idiocy (in addition to fulminating about Fast and Furious and Benghazi), while writing her soon-to-be-classic exposé about the pro-Obama media.
In the US, the “fairness doctrine” was in full force from 1969 to 1987, and it required the media to present both sides of a controversial issue. Gloria Steinem once said that when TV interviewers booked her for interviews, they would ask her if she knew of an “anti-” they could book as well, to fulfill the fairness doctrine. Phyllis Schlafly became famous by being the ready and willing “anti-ERA” for the fairness doctrine. Even after 1987, there was still language in FCC regulations that encouraged “both sides,” even when one side might contain dangerous misinformation. The last vestige of the doctrine was remove by the FCC in 2011. If it were still in effect, the anti-vaxxers would probably be getting even more press than they do.
While most journalists were happy to see it go, there are lots of older editors who can’t help but feel uncomfortable at the thought of being perceived as unfair if they come across as one-sided, even when the one side is sane and level-headed, while the other is wacko. Supposedly, the public can spot the wacko, but just giving them airspace lends them legitimacy.
RivkahChaya: Nice contribution, but the mainstream media is saturated with false equivalences. If the Democrats said the Earth was round and the Republicans said it was flat, the New York Times would report, “Opinions on the shape of the Earth differ”. The modern impulse towards balanced reporting runs a lot deeper than old Federal regulations which only covered television. One aspect is that main networks pursue broad audiences while cable stations can go for narrow audiences. My take is that distinguishing between science and crackpottery runs against reportorial instincts and requires greater care and effort. So there’s less of it in mediocre news outlets.
The Financial Times, New York Times and the Economist are better in this regard, relatively speaking. Though the best are probably policy blogs like Vox, the Upshot, Kevin Drum, Brad DeLong, James Fallows, etc.
My point was that this is still the legacy of the fairness doctrine. Back when Salk was developing the polio vaccine, and there were news reports, journalists didn’t feel the need to give space to crackpots, although they existed back then.
Managing editors and other higher-ups probably mostly went to journalism school (or, went to college and majored in either journalism, or “communications”-“TV/film/radio,” or whatever their school called it) back when the fairness doctrine was still in place. People who are 50 now went to college in the early 80s.
When we get a generation away from it, and people who grew up with The Daily Show, and either laughing at the wackos, or just not giving them a forum, other than the internet, maybe things will improve.
We need to work a little harder in teaching high schoolers that not every source is trustworthy, but we’ll probably get there.
And of course, you see exactly the same kind of ignorance in antivaxxers everywhere. "You have your facts and figures and peer-reviewed papers and statements from historically reliable government bureaus (which I think are universally corrupt an sold out to big pharma but am unwilling to even accept the fucking burden of proof for that statement), but I know people who got the flu from the flu shot! (Even though even a basic understanding of fundamental immunology would tell you that no, they didn’t, that’s completely fucking impossible). It’s a little frustrating when otherwise rational people are completely incapable of understanding just how fucking clueless they are.
Budget Player Cadet, I so agree with your post. You hit it on the head.
I think some people who believe in conspiracy theories feel powerless in their lives. It makes them feel good to “know” the “real” story about something, to be in an inner circle of illuminati, and superior to those who don’t believe.
Wow. And when you gaze long into a cow, the cow also gazes into you.
There’s actually a phenomenon that has been studied, by which the less a person knows about something, the less likely they are to realize they are ignorant, and to actually learn something. People who really know something also know what they don’t know.