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Comment Re: Mom's of the world will prevent it. (Score 1) 8

Antibacterial soap doesn't use antibiotics, it uses chemicals known to destroy antibiotics directly and physically. It's usually done with compounds they can't reasonably develop resistance to. This is easier than in antibiotics because they don't have to be safe to put in your body.

Comment Re:Trump Mania (Score 1) 179

Is it more likely that the Mennonite population found some measles lying around, or that the immigrant/refugee population of Alberta might have brought it from somewhere else?

It does not matter even slightly where it comes from. It's coming in all the time. What matters is what percentage are vaccinated, which determines whether a population has effective herd immunity. The immigrants aren't moving the needle on that, but the religious are.

Comment Re:Applause please (Score 2) 179

It is not the same to say a brand-new vaccine for a never seen disease that affects the entire planet has the same safety.

So what? Is there a point here or are you just wildly offtopic? Because that brand-new vaccine DID go through some testing, albeit much abbreviated from the usual, and it was already clear that it was safer than the disease. There was also less need for testing because due to its nature it was LESS hazardous than traditional vaccines. We already knew this because we had been doing mRNA vaccine research for years.

Comment Re: Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1) 179

All these mayors and governors telling their local law enforcement (you know actual men with guns) to thwart the efforts of federal law enforcement

There are zero of those.

There are mayors and governors instructing local LE not to assist the crimes of federal human traffickers, but they're NOT instructing them to thwart anything, even though the things they're doing are illegal at all levels.

Comment Re:Applause please (Score 1) 179

Yeah, but with RFK and "Doctor" Oz running the nation's health care, how can we even actually trust vaccines in the US at all anymore? If I'm going to get stuck with the needle, I want it to have an actual medication or vaccine in there; NOT colloidal silver or green coffee bean extract or essential oils or lysol or whatever other quackery has their attention at that moment in time.

Fortunately, I'm traveling overseas next spring. One of the things I'm going to get from my doctor at my next physical is a list of any boosters that are coming due any time soon. So I *WILL* be fully vaccinated because I will be getting my shots in a country with real medical leadership who practice and promote real science and medicine.

Comment Re:Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1, Interesting) 179

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

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... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

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