I recommend antibiotics.

The transition was from a flawed, but still readily identifiable constitutional republic (not a democracy), to a corporate oligarchy.

This has never been a democracy, and furthermore, the constitution insists that the federal government guarantee each state a republican form of government, as in, a republic -- not a democracy. That's in article 4, section 4.

This is why representatives decide the actual matters, and voters don't, in the basic design.

Of course, now even the representatives don't decide -- nor judges -- if the legislation deals in any significant way with business interests. The only way the old system still operates even remotely the way it was designed to is when the issue(s) at hand a purely social ones. Even then, the bill of rights seems to be at the very bottom of any legislator's or judge's list of concerns.

Can't see any of this changing, though. The public is too uninformed, and short of completely revamping the school curriculums, they're going to remain that way.

Guess I should have been a little more explicit. I meant, as distinguished from one that required another object impact. Just an original ring system.

...a collapsed ring system?

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?

World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people's eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans' lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties." Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.

The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.

America's best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America's Progressive class, first articulated by such as Princeton's Woodrow Wilson and Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the rest of the world to follow peacefully, today's ruling class makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America.

Describing America's country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.
Angelo M. Codevilla

This is just the tip of the iceberg, the entire article is huge and tells us exactly what we knew already: our rulers have nothing in common with us and see us as dangerous idiots.

Poor white people are not nearly as violent as poor black people.

Tell that to the families of the dead in Overland, Kansas.

You racist shit, what are you too embarrassed to post under your "Third Way" moniker tonight?

There is no if. There is no 100%.
"If" is anti-vaxism.
"100%" is antivaxism.

Real world data from a multitude of studies by a multitude of independent professionals show that vaccines are something like a hundred or a thousand times safer than any random food item.
There is no "if" there. There is no "100%" there. Vaccines are safer than food.

Ad hominem means "against the person". More specifically, an ad hominem attack is an argument that someone's statement is false, or should be ignored, because the person is bad.

When the argument is "don't listen to her, she's a nasty ugly bitch", that's ad hominem.

When the argument is "she's repeating stuff that was shown to be fraudulent research, and her claims have been exhaustively proven false, therefore she is wrong" is not ad hominem.

Proving her wrong, and then concluding she's a bad person because she's wrong, is not ad hominem.

Getting angry at her after she is proven wrong is not ad hominem.

Throwing gratuitous insults at her, after she is proven wrong, calling her an ugly bitch or whatever, after she is proven wrong, is not ad hominem. Gratuitous insults certainly add nothing to a debate, BUT THERE'S NO DEBATE HERE. On one side you have data and science and evidence, and on the other side you have an irrational social movement - fear based on a fraud all flying around a rumor mill of conspiracy theories and ignorance. "Don't take your child for their routine medical checkup, I heard the doctor is a pedophile! Don't take your child to any doctor for a routine medical checkup, you don't want to risk that doctor is part of the vast secret pedophile-ring that I hear is running the American Medical Association".

Your description of events is rather inaccurate.

Wakefield was being directly paid to do his "research" by a lawyer looking to file a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers.
Wakefield drew up a business plan, with figures for how many tens of millions of dollars a year could be brought in by marketing a competing vaccine
Wakefield established a contract with the medical school where he was working, requiring them to conceal the source of his funding, prohibiting them from disclosing his involvement with a pharmaceutical company.
Walkfeild established a contract with that pharmaceutical company requiring his involvement to be kept secret - secret specifically until he would be able to cash out on stock options.
Wakefield preformed "research" which, on later investigation, was found to be entirely fraudulent.
In order to publish his research the Journal REQUIRED the disclosure of things like the source of his funding and relevant business plans or involvement with pharmaceutical companies. In order to get his fraudulent study published in the Journal he fraudulently denied the existence of any financial conflicts of interest.
Countless legitimate scientists, a ton of valuable medical research money and research resources, were all WASTED trying to replicate the fraudulent Wakefield paper. It resulted in massive confirmation that the original claims were fictional and that vaccines were extremely safe. And then the specific investigation revealing exactly how Wakefield's original work was fraudulent.

And if things had ended there, all of this would be a pretty insignificant non-story. But things didn't end there.

We got a melting-pot that took on a life of it's own. We got the news media hyping an insignificant "research study" based on an insignificant patient sample, a paper which had not yet been confirmed (and which would turn out to be fraudulent). And in the melting pot we got parents of autistic children DESPERATE for any explanation why their kids have autism. And in the melting pot we got the kooks whom no one usually listens to.... the ones who spin conspiracy theories about vaccinations being some evil government plot... kooks who latched on to vaccine news stories to sound credible while they spew random scary paranoia-generated vax-nonsense into the mix. And then some famous idiot like Jenny McCarthy picks up the banner and tells millions of uninformed parents how scary and dangerous vaccines are while saying how any good parent would eagerly choose measles over autism. Which is a load of crap. It is a completely fraudulent implication that choosing to vaccinate is a choice about autism. It is a fraudulent and DEADLY implication that a parent who vaccinates is a bad parent risking giving their child autism.

You kinda skipped a few steps in your story. In particular you skipped the step WHERE CHILDREN STARTED DYING.
And we're not even talking about anti-vaxxers killing their own children, which would be bad enough. We're talking about anti-vaxxers killing other people's children. We're talking about actual disease outbreaks among anti-vaxxers, who then infect someone else's 1 month old infant. You can't vaccinate a 1 month old baby, their immune system isn't developed enough yet and the vaccine isn't effective yet. We're talking actual infant corpse, dead of vaccine-preventable-disease. Not to mention any cases resulting in brain damage, deafness, blindness, infertility, or other sever complications.

But, I guess you're right..... it's not literally murder by the legal definition. Perhaps manslaughter would be a more appropriate term? Reckless endangerment and disregard for life resulting in someone's death. I'm only half joking there. There are severe problems with trying to make people criminally liable for something like that, but they sure as hell are morally responsible. People DIE from this antivax bullshit. Antivaxxers are morally culpable for causing deaths or catastrophic injury to innocent bystanders, including other people's vulnerable infants.

There's good reason that smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella were targeted for world vaccination. We've had a generation of people growing up in a world essentially free of these diseases, and people are blissfully unaware of just how painful, horrific, or fatal the outcome can be for a percentage of the people who contract them.

You mean 6 shots. The triple vaccine is 2 shots, giving them separately requires 6 shots.

First, lets just rationally examine the merits of that plan.
We have thirty years record of probably a billion+ people and a gargantuan body of research establishing the triple vaccine is extremely safe and and highly effective. We have only limited study and limited track record on the safety and efficacy of a 6 shot program, and essentially zero basis on the ordering or timing of such a program.

What we do have is an extensive record that vaccination programs suffer skyrocketing failure rates as the number of doctor visits and injections increases. Whether it is due to poverty, apathy, forgetfulness, children begging their parents to avoid the needle, or whatever, vaccinations programs fall into catastrophic collapse because too much of the population fail to reach each increasing doctor visit or injection.

Some children aren't bothered by needles while others escalate the fear and pain to almost traumatic levels, but in any case it's hardly in the child's best interest to subject them to it three times more than necessary.

It's certainly not in the child's best interest to subject them to three times as much pain, three times as much bleeding, three times as much risk of infection from the puncture. And while the risk of adverse reaction is negligible... vastly lower than the risk of adverse reaction of eating a banana or any other food... it's still contrary to the child's interest to multiply the risk of an adverse reaction.

Splitting vaccination into 6 shots leaves the children vulnerable to two-out-of-three diseases during the delay period. (What delay period anyway? A day? A week? A month? 6 months? A year? There's no answer on that because this is all a vacuous hear-say "fix" for an urban legend nonexistent problem.)

The only "other side of the argument" is parents who are going to harm their children out of fear of an urban legend. Given a choice between harming children by not vaccinating them at all, or harming children with an untested regimen involving three times the pain and three times the skin punctures and multiplied risk of adverse reaction, well...... an untested vaccination regimen with a multiplied suffering and multiplied negligible-risk is vastly better than the dangers of going unvaccinated.

As for single vaccines they are around, although it seems that for one of the three diseases the most effective version is only available from Merck and only in the triple vaccine. The others are known to be less effective and aren't approved in all countries. I guess it would be a good thing if Merck offered all three as single vaccines if it would reduce the harm being done by vax-paranoid parents. And if Merck doesn't want to do that, well every country has health-and-public-safety clauses to their intellectual property laws and they could take the extremely extraordinary step of issuing an exemption allowing other companies to manufacture single vaccines. Or counties could just plain invoke health and public safety and make the triple vaccine mandatory, and simply ignore the anti-vax nonsense the same way we ignore the fluoridation paranoid conspiracy theory nutters.

No, someone TOLD your wife that there was a woman's jacket.

And after that person was shown to be LYING about it, your wife just spiraled deeper into paranoid jealousy and started following an internet psychic who tells her details about the (fictional) woman you're sleeping with. And then your wife kidnaps the kids and takes them to hide out in cabin in the woods, refusing to take the kids for regular checkups at the doctor because she's afraid you and the (fictional) woman you're sleeping with are planning to sue for sole custody of the kids.

-

I predict a sucky game.

I agree about Left/Right. The real divide is Top/Bottom. Even the notion of "individual/collective" is kind of a dodge in this instance. The only "collective" that I see anywhere in the US is aggregate capital in the form of the corporation.

Thanks for the info. That's what I'd assumed, and hoped.

So I'm not sure where this idea that these audits are "American only" or that there is something preventing someone from pointing out a vulnerability comes from.

Generally, I trust stuff that has lots of eyes on it.

No, it's because in the process of revealing NSA crimes (i.e. spying on Americans) he also blew the lid on basically every NSA overseas operation. Even the ones that weren't illegal at all and that were doing a lot of good. Either you are being deliberately ignorant or...well I can't really see it any other way.

It is weird how so many anti-freedom people like yourself are so quick to claim majority support for what Eich did. Sure, a slim majority were anti-gay marriage back when he tried to enshrine his religious dogma into law. But the overwhelming majority did not support "the cause" enough to spend money on it. By his own actions he revealed himself to be an extremist.

Furthermore, the whole idea that being part of a majority somehow excuses a person from judgment and consequences of their actions is itself morally bankrupt. The civil rights movement was a struggle against majority opinion too.

BTW, the freedom to restrict another person's freedom is freedom in name alone.

Africa itself was a key player.

And the Left is the real Right. and, and, Frazier Glenn Cross is a demonrat because Robert Byrd!

It's all about projection. I take that as a positive, in that it shows you are capable of shame.