My Governor Is A Child-Abusing Anti-Vax Terrorist

Because refusing to vaccinate your children then sending them out into the community to infect defenseless infants, and cancer patients is terrorism.

From the Herald:

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said in a radio interview that he deliberately exposed his children to chickenpox so they would catch the highly contagious disease and become immune.

During a Tuesday interview on Bowling Green radio station WKCT, Bevin said his children were "miserable for a few days" after contracting chickenpox but said "they all turned out fine."

"Every single one of my kids had the chickenpox," Bevin said in the interview. "They got the chickenpox on purpose because we found a neighbor that had it and I went and made sure every one of my kids was exposed to it, and they got it. They had it as children."

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article228187849.html#storylink=cpy

Bevin and his wife, Glenna, have nine children, four adopted.

Public health authorities strongly discourage the practice of deliberately exposing children to chickenpox, a medical expert said Wednesday.

"It's unfortunate and not an example for any of us," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

"We should vaccinate all our children. It's a great triumph of public health in the United States. Let's not take a step backward," he added in a phone interview.

SNIP

Kentucky requires that children entering kindergarten be vaccinated for chickenpox, but parents may seek religious exemptions or provide proof that a child already had the disease.

Bevin's comments followed reports this week of a chickenpox outbreak at a Kentucky Catholic school.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends two doses of chickenpox vaccine for children, adolescents and adults who have never had chickenpox and were never vaccinated, according to its website. Children are routinely recommended to receive the first dose at 12 through 15 months old and a second dose at 4 to 6 years old, it said.

"What the governor and other like-minded folks are unaware of is that there are potentially serious complications of chickenpox," Schaffner said.

Complications from chickenpox can include bacterial infections, pneumonia and encephalitis — inflammation of the brain, according to the CDC. Complications aren't common in healthy people with the disease, it says, but high risk groups for complications due to a serious case of chickenpox can include infants, adolescents, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.

You read that right.  Governor "I fight for life (of tumors, not adult women)" is deliberately and with malice aforethought attempting to severely injure or kill pregnant women.

He's up for reelection THIS November. In 2019.  Donate to Democratic candidate Attorney General Andy Beshear here.

You Don't Get to Have Religious Freedom That Kills Children

Is it obvious yet that the original source of all the lethal stupidity in this county is religion?  Specifically white xian fundamentalist freakazoids. On everything from global warming to gay rights to public education to racial justice, they are quite simply a clear and present danger to the nation.

Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette:

Aside from abortion, the number one issue for people who don't know what the hell they are talking about is vaccines. People who don't know anything about vaccines feel very confident that they are the ones who should be going around enacting legislation based on shit they have made up themselves, which is rather inconvenient for the rest of us! Especially those who have immuno-compromised children who need to rely on herd immunity to stay alive. The entire gist of the anti-vaccine movement is "Other people need to die to protect my right to be stupid." 

SNIP

 You don't get to have a religious belief that kills people. Human sacrifices are against the law. I can't just go and start a religion that demands I rob banks. So either vaccinate your kids or keep them the hell away from other children. 

Frankly, not giving kids vaccines ought to be considered child abuse. It should not be allowed, period. If parents refuse to vaccinate their kid and that child or someone else's dies because they refused vaccinations, parents should be charged with manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide just as they would if their stupidity caused that child's death in some other way. I mean, if someone left the gas on their stove, lit a cigarette and blew up the house and killed their kids, "I thought scientists were lying to me about gas being flammable, so I made up my own science" would not be a valid excuse in a court of law. 

People can personally believe any stupid thing they want, up to and until it affects other people. That is where the line needs to be drawn. If Bill Zedler wants to believe that antibiotics cure measles, that's fine. If someone else wants to believe in werewolves? Go right ahead! But no one should be able to push or draft legislation, or put other children in danger, just because they believe their own pipe dreams over actual science.

People Like This Vote. Do You?

Yes, it's from Australia.  But you can easily find a majority of repug voters here who agree.

From Pharyngula:

E. KY Middle-Schoolers Point the Way to Their Future

Ashland is coal country, made filthy and unhealthy by the refineries and coal trucks and poverty.  But these kids - these students of a public school teacher in a public goddamn school - rose above all that to point the way.

From the Herald:

Students at Ashland Middle School won a $150,000 grand prize Wednesday in a national Samsung competition for inventing a device that helps people safely pick up dirty heroin needles.

 

The students hope their invention will help keep first responders and others safe in Boyd County, where staff at a local elementary school scan playgrounds every day for discarded needles.

Students who worked on the project said they are happy to be recognized for the invention and hope it is mass-produced and distributed across the country.

“We’re just super excited,” said Aubree Hay, an 8th grader at Ashland Middle School who worked on the project. “Getting our project out and more advertised especially, this is such a big deal for us. It’s a really good feeling.”

Not another dumb robot, this is something practical and necessary that solves an immediate public health and safety problem.

Too bad that Gov. "I Got Mine, Fuck You" and repug legislators are doing every thing they can to make sure those kids will flee Kentucky the second they graduate, and go to states that actually fund their public schools and turn out budgets that grow the economy instead of stripping it bare.

Our Own Efforts

Divine Irony:

Proof of god

PZ Myers:

I’m a hardcore atheist, but I’m not claiming to possess absolute truth, Catholics are. I’m saying that 1) believers have failed to provide an internally consistent definition of a god that does not contradict available evidence, and 2) have failed to provide specific evidence that their god is the best possible explanation. 

Saying that “things exist” is not evidence for “my specific model for why things exist”, especially when there are better alternative models that don’t have the shortcomings of the god hypothesis. There is a fundamental distinction there that they consistently fail to notice.

Force Them to Pay

Rude Pundit:

Conservative beliefs are utterly delusional and fly in the face of all facts and all aspects of human behavior. We know that gun control works because it works everywhere gun laws are strict. We know that limiting access to abortion and birth control ends up harming women. We know that use of a private email server isn't a major crime. We know that football players protesting by kneeling during the National Anthem is protected speech. But conservatives have to keep the rubes at bay. The only way to reconcile the abject, fucked-up hypocrisy that conservatives live with is that they know. They just don't fucking care because there has been no cost to not caring since 2008 (and much longer in some congressional districts).

And so nothing will be done when it comes to guns in the wake of Las Vegas (and Orlando and Newtown and...). Until they are forced to pay for their hypocrisy, for the complete and utter fraud they have perpetrated (including the support for Trump), nothing is going to ever happen.

Don't Pray; Vote

From Brad Blog:

Failing

Now in Kentucky, unfortunately, it's called failing if you don't believe in bibble.

Divine Irony:

God Logic

Divine Irony:

If leprechauns aren’t real

Then why is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

All Exist

Divine Irony:



 (Source: cure-your-delusions)

Respect for Religion

Divine Irony:

‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion’. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and yes, our fearless disrespect.

Salman Rushdie. (via veganoanarchosatano)

If It's Not Breathing Air, It's A Tumor

Kevin Drum makes a heroic effort to expose the mendacity of anti-woman freakazoids who talk about blastocysts as if cell clumps are kindergartners, but in trying to be "reasonable," he drops the ball.

 

Science Fact: Fetuses are not human beings.  This is not a question on which reasonable people can disagree.  It is a science fact.  Shame on supposed pro-choicers who claim otherwise.

Over at The Corner, Alexandra DeSanctis is unhappy that Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president, refuses to say whether she considers a fetus to be a human being:

She avoided the questions because the abortion industry is built on the lie that the unborn child isn’t a living human, and if they acknowledge that this claim is fiction, their entire system will collapse.

....People on either side of the abortion debate can disagree on what rights that human being has. We can argue over the relevance of fetal viability, and we can differ on whether a woman’s right to “bodily autonomy” is more important than her child’s right to life. But these two fundamentally contradictory positions about the child’s humanity cannot both be correct; either each unborn child is a living human being, or it isn’t.....Until pro-abortion leaders such as Laguens are willing to admit to this humanity, it will remain impossible to have an honest disagreement about the competing rights at stake in this debate.

Well, I'm not on TV and nobody cares what I think, so I can say what Laguens wouldn't: a fetus is not a living human in any sensible way. I can't prove this. It's like asking whether a beanbag is a chair. It's an opinion, not a fact. 

As for why Laguens wouldn't answer, it's not because she's dishonest. Certainly no more so than pro-lifers who refuse to say whether women who get abortions should be thrown in jail for murder. In both cases there are arguments to be made either way, but none of them really matter. The real reason for reticence is that neither side wants to make scary-sounding statements that might drive moderates away from their side. 

In any case, it's not as if this is a bewildering mystery. "Life," in anything other than a technical biological sense, is a matter of human judgment.¹ We decide when it starts and when it ends. Both of these are gray areas, but they're gray areas where we set up semi-arbitrary rules: 20 weeks or viability or third trimester or EEG flatline or lack of retinal response or something similar. What other choice do we have? If you're going to have the government involved, you have to create a reasonably bright-line rule for people to follow.

Speaking personally, I offer up this hypothetical. On your left you have a baby. On your right you have a vial with an embryo in it. At the end of 60 seconds, one of them will be randomly crushed unless you make a choice of which to save. So which is it?

I don't think anyone, pro-life or otherwise, would hesitate. You'd save the baby even if the vial had two embryos in it. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. There's simply no visceral sense in which we genuinely feel that a fertilized egg is a human being. You can make an intellectual argument for it, but not one that will survive contact with the real world.

¹Needless to say, none of this applies to religious arguments. Dogma is not open to debate with nonbelievers.

Also, there is no such thing as an anti-abortion argument that does not boil down to freakazoid stupidity.  It's religion all the way down.

Just a Theory

Divine Irony:

The Resistance: Don't Fuck With Park Rangers

From Political Animal:

The Religion of Fossil Fuels

It's no coincidence that freakazoids are also fossil fuel fanatics.  It's the same blind, mindless clinging to destructive myths.

Divine Irony:

Ya’ll gon use up all the wind!

↵ Reblogged from thedragoninmygarage

Science and Poets

A letter to Free Inquiry Magazine:

Edgar Allan Poe was wrong when he accused science of “tearing at the poet’s heart.” On 
the contrary: it gives the poet something to write about. One has only to marvel at the cosmic beauty and wonders as seen through the Hubble Space Telescope in order to understand what this means.

John L. Indo
Houston, Texas

Beware the Shallow State

 I am old enough to remember when people who were educated, knowledgeable and experienced were respected rather than denigrated.  When becoming educated and knowledgeable and experienced were common goals among children of all classes and races, strongly encouraged by their less-educated parents.

Yes, the Know-Nothings have always been with us, but they have never been championed by a major political party.  Until now.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

At Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf writes that it is not the "deep state" Americans need to worry about, but the emergent shallow one that "actively eschews experience, knowledge, relationships, insight, craft, special skills, tradition, and shared values." With Trump as its avatar, the shallow state believes:

... knowledge is not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman. The same is true for experience, skills, and know-how. These things require time and work and study and often challenge our systems of belief. Truth is hard; shallowness is easy.

If this is greatness, it is not the kind lovingly preserved in museums as a cultural legacy. If this is greatness, it will not produce classic works of art treasured for celebrating "What a piece of work is a man!"

Rothkopf writes:

Art is not an adornment to society. It is not a luxury. It is the purpose of society. It becomes our legacy. It is also, however, our teacher; it helps us consider that which is around us and what we want to be. It makes demands on us that in turn lead us to place demands on ourselves and those with whom we live and work. And that is precisely why these programs have been targeted by Trump. They are the enemies of the shallow state. So, too, of course, are the members of the press whom Trump has mislabeled as “enemies of the people.” The only people they are the enemy of are those who are at war with truth and thought: Trump and his supporters, the champions of the shallow state. That is why, while it is easy to simply be angry or to laugh at a president who doesn’t read or to be distracted by half-baked conspiracy theories like the deep state, we must recognize that the shallow state is much more pernicious. This administration has come to power because America has allowed public discourse, the quality of education we give our kids, and the standards we set for ourselves to decline. Trump seeks to institutionalize that decline. He is at war with that which has made our society great. He seeks to eviscerate the elements of our government and discredit those within our society who are champions of the depth on which any civilization depends.

Your Beliefs

Divine Irony:

• ↵ Reblogged from cure-your-delusions

god's plan

Divine Irony:

(Source: gdewaynedarden)