First off, SB277, the law in question, affects private schools too. Only home schooling would allow one to not vaccinate their child.

Second, this specific law has many non-contagious diseases on it. Tetanus is one, diphtheria is another. To me, the most egregious over-reach is Hep B. Why on earth should someone need a vaccination against that for kindergarten? The complete irony is that California has a separate law that protects the rights of kids who actually have Hep B to be publicly schooled. So, an actual carrier is allowed in, but a non-carrier who isn't vaccinated isn't.

This is not the law that OP is talking about. SB277 affects private schools too.

Have you looked at the conditional enrollment data for California schools? Infectious disease also doesn't pay attention to whether you signed a "Personal Belief Exemption" form, so why is there so much obsession over it? Twice as many kids are conditionally enrolled as are attending with a signed PBE form.

Or throw their kids out of school. Whichever.

however, the broader point is most instances of a vaccine-preventable disease in the u.s. is due to international travel (sorry, don't have time to look up the links right now, but they're out there; over 80% for measles iirc). so maybe it's not south and central america. who cares? shouldn't we be more focused on citizens who travel abroad and incoming visitors?

I realize I'm going to be attacked for this (maybe not, it's already 5 days old). Add that anyone searching for my name will see I'm vegan too and think I'm double-crazy and I should just not make this comment, but here it goes anyway.

Vaccines are good. Yes. They have prevented a lot of disease and saved lots of lives. Yes. Yet no one can explain to me why we need this bill.

1) Most cases of diseases on the vaccination schedule appearing in the U.S. come from travel to foreign lands (there are sources, I'm too lazy, use Google), 80% or so for measles, if I'm not mistaken. Why is this law so important while foreign travel is completely ignored? Okay, fine, do both, whatever, but the actual impact of this bill is going to be pretty small (point 2 below feeds this as well).

2) What of our current vaccine practices is failing so badly that requires this law? Vaccine rates are currently pretty darn high in California. Should we really sacrifice an education for underprivileged children for this relatively minor threat? Deaths from measles is at exactly 0 for the last 10 years. I think the status quo is okay, at least as far as school-aged children are concerned.

3) Yes, underprivileged children are the ones who will suffer. Everyone bandies about the personal belief exemption and Jenny McCarthy (McCarthyism irony?), but if you look at the California state data, conditional enrollees are the biggest unvaccinated population, twice that of personal belief. Conditional enrollees are ones who haven't provided records, but swear they will (but usually don't). Where are these conditional enrollees concentrated? In underprivileged areas (see http://www.cdph.ca.gov/program... for data, though you'll need to know your california neighborhoods to make sense of the info), at least that's the case in Los Angeles County. Malibu isn't the problem; south, central and east L.A. are. And if you think this law will actually make those conditional enrollees get vaccinated to go to school, you don't know Angelenos, at least not the ones I know who are underprivileged.

Also, I'm surprised that such an open-source happy community isn't requesting that government-required vaccines be open-sourced. If the government is going to force something upon me, I'd at least like to know the profit motive is removed. Senator Pan's most relied-upon person during all the hearings has been a paid Merck lobbyist after all. If this is really about public health, make Mr. Rotavirus-vaccine charge less than $500 a pop or at least discover there's a good reason it's so expensive.

so, i don't mean to weigh in on the value of doing this. okay, i will, but i agree that it's a bad idea. however, to really get this right, isn't there a temperature component? i know it works in the space-based system's favor, though i've not run the calculation to see how much.

also, on your blog post, if you take away the tracker on the ground-based system, does it just scale down by 1/sqrt(2)?

i don't think this is true at all. scanning radio waves seems just as viable a means as any other to me. my point is that we need to wait for far more than a few decades of silence before the statement "seti is a failure" should even enter our thinking. there may be a civilization making identical radios to our's right now and maybe they have been for as long as we have. but if they're 1,000 light years away (not very far in interstellar terms), decades of silence is the expected result.

well, the seti@home project may be in disarray, but it's a bit early to say that seti (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) in general has failed, isn't it? a few decades of silence from potential civilizations that may potentially be thousands, millions or even billions of light years away can hardly be construed as strong evidence.

i'm not sure why "philosophy of the vegan community" is in quotes. i never put those words next to each other in that order.

i agree with you. there are lots of ideas. any that removes carrots from consumption on philosophical grounds is not representative of even a small portion of vegans.

my answer to all of the "in the wild" comments is that cows are imported. left to their own devices, they would never have migrated here and would never have been bred into the weight-gaining machines they have been turned into by "modern" agriculture. so, by "left to their own devices," i don't simply mean opening the stalls of farms and leaving them alone. i mean what would have happened without any human interference. as for pigs, they seem to be be thriving in the wild, much to the chagrin of people who have to deal with them (see, for instance, "hogs gone wild" on discovery).

i do appreciate the fact that you took such good care of the animals. from everything i've seen and read about how most of the animals being fed to the public today are treated, what you did is no longer typical and hasn't been for quite some time. all of the new ag-gag bills being proposed are just further evidence (albeit circumstantial) that the agriculture industry has much to hide.

yes, we do live in an interconnected world, but by the logic of your last paragraph, we're all war profiteers too since the resources secured by such wars (mainly oil) are essential to pretty much everything. i do take issue with the idea that all the people who provided all those essential functions you list would not have been able to do it without eating meat. there are lots of vegetarians and vegans performing each of those functions just as well as their meat-eating counterparts.

allow me to reply without name-calling. that is, quite simply, a very low standard for consent. again, we're comparing milking cows to breast-feeding, at least that's where this started. there is no comparison between the levels of consent given. there is no definition of "consent" i know of that would exclude a mother breast-feeding her own child. there are many definitions of "consent" that would exclude cows being milked. even with your logic, i would argue that "this situation" is one where their objections do not affect whether they get milked or not. when one's only choice has no effect, the lack of objection becomes a very, very low bar for consent. if you're comfortable with it, that's fine. i'm not.

this is a very nice post. i enjoyed reading it and thank you for sharing because i think many vegans don't see this side of things and get unnecessarily righteous because of it.

nonetheless, i hope you're not offended that i will continue to not patronize your livelihood (or at least the one you grew up in) because i don't equate lack of objection with consent. and certainly the lack of an objection does not mean that the animals would do what you're trying to get them to do if left on their own.

i have indeed been to a dairy farm. everything you describe is exactly why i don't consume dairy anymore. it's as artificial than a chip manufacturing plant.