Yes, You Agreed To This

I waded into an argument last week after seeing what Ren wrote about fluoridation. A Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS), who shall go unnamed because he’s a bit of a douche about stuff, decided to go on and on about how fluoridation of drinking water is an experiment on unwilling participants. Those participants, he claims, are the public, and the public never agreed to this according to him.

Number one, fluoride in drinking water is nowhere near a toxic level. It’s not even close. And there is little evidence that fluoride bioaccumualtes in humans. The human body is set up to deal with these things quite well. Unless your kidneys are completely in shambles, you’re going to be okay.

Number two, the people/public did agree to fluoridation of the water supply, even if they didn’t have a vote on it. In the United States, we elect people to make these decisions for us. Frankly, we would get nothing done if we had to hold an election every time some public health intervention needed to be made.

Essentially, we assented to have our elected leaders use the best available evidence and intervene on our behalf when a public health problem is identified. If we don’t like it, or if they do the wrong thing, then we vote them out… Or have a revolution or something.

Sorry, George.

This batshit insane rambling that vaccines or fluoride or vitamin K for newborns are all experimental is, well, insane. We took a vote, people. You lost. Live with it and go vote at the next election. Until then, drink up!

Anti-vaccine activists are killing physicians left and right, maybe

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but mostly in the context of a good novel of movie. In real life, multi-national conspiracies that reach down all the way to the everyday person are pretty much non-existent. Sure, big companies can and do get together from time to time to map out their next moves, but such meetings are hardly private. One of the biggest and most powerful cartels in the world, OPEC, gets together and sets the price of oil. That right there is something that affects us all deeply. If they wanted to, they could jack up the price of a gallon of gasoline to a point so expensive that it would bring our economy to a screeching halt. It wouldn’t be in their best interest since the dollar is tied to their revenues, but they could do it if they lost the goddamned minds.

The same is true with “Big Pharma.” If Big Pharma wanted to kill all of us, fast or slow, their plans would become unraveled so fast that hardly anyone would get hurt. Now, I know that some of you reading this want to believe that pharmaceutical representatives get together and plot on how to hide evidence of drugs causing harm or drugs that cure cancer, but that’s just not the case. The biggest weakness in such plots would be the individuals involved in those plots.

Think about it. How much would you have to get paid to hide a complex plot to hurt people?

And the US Government? Come on! Have you seen the blunders by the over-blown bureaucracy we have going on? There are leaks about the government’s activities left and right. There are hardly any secrets any more because even the most powerful among us rely on less powerful people to get their evil deeds done, and those less powerful (in seeking more power) ask for fame and/or fortune to keep a plot going, making it all fall down. Seriously, for the US Government to have some big, convoluted project going on to deceive all of us is incredibly unlikely.

That’s were we are with vaccines. Even with the claims of a “whistleblower,” and “conflicts of interest” between pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory agencies that oversee them, the evidence of an autism-vaccine connection continues to be flimsy at best. With all of us walking around with smartphones, no one has video evidence of their child becoming autistic after being vaccinated? No one has before and after video of this, even with all the claims to the contrary?

Better yet, with all the money that hapless souls pour into sham treatments, none of that money has been used to coordinate the long-desired “vaccinated vs. unvaccinated” study that so many anti-vaccine advocates want? With the academic affiliations of all those anti-vaccine zealots with MD and PhD after their name, they can’t come up with a feasible study and conclusive results? If there’s a conspiracy somewhere, my money would be on the anti-vaccine machine trying to keep going their illusion of vaccines being bad. They’ve had all the chances to prove it, yet their papers keep being retracted for being so awfully incompetent.

The latest conspiracy is that “they” are killing anti-vaccine-friendly quacks. By “they” I mean “the government,” “Big Pharma,” or whatever conspiracy theory fits the order of the day. For example, Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreed died of a self-inflicted gunshot would to the chest days after his offices were raided by federal agents. The raid came as part of an investigation into the illegal and unethical use of a drug to “treat” autism. The drug was being manufactured in less-than-desirable conditions in Europe and shipped to Bradstreet. He would then use it on autistic children, with poor results and charging the parents a ton of cash. When the jig was up, he drove out into the boonies and offed himself.

Of course, it is not possible that Bradstreet would commit suicide. Other quacks, like Andrew Wakefield, say that Bradstreet had no reason to do this. Never mind the fact that his world was crumbling down, and that federal charges were sure to come along with civil suits for malpractice. Anti-vaccine activists are raising money to investigate the suicide further, because, true to form, they can’t live with the evidence that experts come up with. They have to stubbornly question everything that doesn’t fit into their narrative of the world.

Before and after Bradstreet, other “alt-med” practitioners have died under different circumstances. In the death of Dr. Amanda Crews, a man was arrested for her murder and those of others. Although her murder has been cleared, it doesn’t mean anything to the “true believers.” They’re eating up any mention of a death of someone associated with “holistic medicine” and chalk it up to a big conspiracy because, in a nation of over 320 million people, people dying from suicide after their world crumbles, or from frailty at old age, or from any number of other reasons means only one thing: The Government is killing them in collusion with other big groups.

Well, I’d like to start my own conspiracy for you, if I may. I’d like to start a conspiracy where anti-vaccine activists are killing physicians left and right by using their own language:

Isn’t it eerie that so many physicians are dying so close in time to each other? Doesn’t it strike you as odd? In the last month, this trauma physician, this emergency physician, this other emergency physician, this pulmonologist, and this pediatric cancer specialist have all died. Pay no attention to the official causes of death, ladies and gentlemen, because the truth is out there. These physicians all died in a matter of the last month alone. That’s too much of a coincidence. And the fact that they died in different parts of the country points to a very powerful force behind their deaths.

My money’s on death as being that powerful force that touches (or will touch) every one of us, but you’re free to think for yourself and not be a sheeple. Open your eyes!

Sharyl Attkisson and big, fat frauds

To say that Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS reporter, has been acting a little weird lately is an understatement. It seems that she believes that there is a vast government conspiracy to keep her quiet. If that’s the case, the government is doing an awful job at it. She’s been speaking everywhere, including a testimony before the US Congress.

Her persecution complex appears to be one where she sees things happening all around her. For example, she thinks her computers at work and at home where hacked, but she never had access to the computers at CBS:

“But a report from the inspector general’s office obtained Thursday by The Associated Press said investigators found no evidence of remote or unauthorized access on her personal Apple iMac. Attkisson has also alleged that her CBS laptops were compromised, though CBS declined to make the computers available for examination…

According to the report, Attkisson provided the inspector general’s office with recorded videos showing the screen of her CBS-issued laptop.

One video showed what was determined to be a standard error prompt, the report said. A second video that showed text from a document she was creating on a Macbook laptop being deleted without her apparent involvement actually “appeared to be caused by the backspace key being struck, rather than a remote intrusion,” according to the report.

The report also said Attkisson pointed out a “suspicious” cable attached to her internet service provider’s connection box that she said may have been used to “tap” her house. But the cable was determined to be a “common cable” that could not be used to monitor or affect her phone or Internet service.”

My cable box is full of, you know, cables. I bet I’m being monitored too.

To make the conspiracy come full circle, Sharyl Attkisson also claims that there are “astroturf campaigns” out there designed to do stuff. Let her explain:

“The many ways that corporations, special interests and political interests of all stripes exploit media and the Internet to perpetuate astroturf is ever-expanding. Surreptitious astroturf methods are now more important to these interests than traditional lobbying of Congress. There’s an entire PR industry built around it in Washington.”

It’s her variation on the “Pharma Shill” gambit that anti-vaccine zealots use to cast doubt on facts supported by science. If the science is that vaccines save lives, and I tell you so, I must be getting paid by Big Pharma to say so. If a mother and another caregiver brutally murder a child with autism for no reason (BECAUSE THERE NEVER IS A REASON TO MURDER A CHILD), and I tell you that they are murderers who were misguided and misinformed by pseudo-autism-support groups whose true nature is anti-vaccine, then I must be getting paid by Big Pharma to say so.

To come up with her list of “top 10 astroturfers”, Sharyl Attkisson relied on a poll on Twitter. I’m not surprised about this because anti-vaccine advocates like Sharyl Attkisson often rely on like-minded zealots to form their opinions. Had she really conducted a proper poll, the results would have been different. I mean, if we’re going to talk about frauds, chief among them is Andrew Wakefield.

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield conducted one of the most damaging scientific frauds in the history of mankind. I’m not overstating it. He was hired by lawyers to take down a vaccine, and Andrew Jeremy Wakefield was more than happy to comply. He had a handful of kids go through some invasive medical procedures and come up with nothing to link the MMR vaccine to autism, except for his own gut feeling.

Perhaps inspired by that fraud, another big-time fraud has come up within the anti-vaccine movement:

“[T]he 37-year-old Coloradoan behind [an anti-vaccine website, Vactruth.org], Jeffry John Aufderheide, isn’t what his glossy website would have you believe. Vaccines just one of the many conspiracies in his rolodex—he’s also a 9/11 truther, gun-rights fanatic, and Infowars darling. Oh, and he lies about his time in the Navy.

The Navy discredited Aufderheide’s claim that he served as a “rescue swimmer,” stating that he actually served four years as an Information Systems Technician, Third Class. “This is all the releasable information we have,” Sharon Anderson, the Chief of Naval Personnel Public Affairs, told The Daily Beast in an email. According to the job description on the organization’s website, Aufderheide’s role closely resembled that of an IT guy, one who acted as “admin on mainframe computers” and “management” on internal databases. A necessary position, it’s less the life-saving Navy SEAL that “rescue swimmer” with “top secret clearance” implies.”

I’m not surprised that an anti-vaccine zealot would resort to lying in order to get people to follow him. And his zealotry doesn’t stop there:

“In May 2013, during an interview on Alex Jones’ InfoWars—who calls Aufderheide a fantastic writer that he’s been following for years—about a new government-funded mobile app that he believes is designed to track anti-vaxxers. Later in the same interview, Aufderheide claimed the polio vaccine gives people cancer. When asked by a user whether the chemicals in vaccines could affect the outcome of a person’s sexuality, he called it a “legitimate question.””

That’s right folks. I must be in love with Pedro (not her real name) because of the vaccines that I got, not because, you know, I was born this way. (I’d even be willing to entertain the other nutty idea that sexuality is guided by our experiences with the opposite sex and not the other way around.)

Then again, to Aufdeheide’s followers, the Navy must be lying in order to paint him in a bad light. I’m sure he’ll come out and show us the pictures of his days as a Navy SEAL.

As for Sharyl Attkisson’s claims about text being deleted from her documents, it’s a known issue with Microsoft Word. People have been reporting problems similar to hers for a long time now. It could be something as simple as having hit the “insert” key while writing. I’ve even had it happen once in a while. But we all must be operating well within Crosby’s Labyrinth, where things are not explained by simple phenomena that can be wrapped up in a few minutes. In this reality, it’s all one big massive conspiracy aimed to do something nefarious. I mean, the government nailed the response to Katrina so goddamned well that it is not outside the government’s ability to coordinate all these astroturfers.

The Kid can’t take the heat

Score one for the good guys. After two (just two!) blog posts on “The Epoch Times”, The Kid has decided that he can’t take the heat in the comments section. People pointing out his logical fallacies are, in his words, “trolls.” He even says that “Ren” has threatened him online without offering any kind of evidence, natch. Even better, the kid tried to scrub his comments and ended up looking like an even bigger tool.

Since The Kid can’t edit or ban commenters using the Disqus commenting platform, he has announced that he is not allowing any comments on Epoch:

“All – comments under The Epoch Times version of this post have been closed due to ongoing abusive and harassing comments from certain trolls. Sorry to anyone who has been following the rules and lost comments in the process. From now on, please comment on articles here at AI and not through The Epoch Times website. Comments will be closed on all future Epoch Times posts. Thank you.”

That’s right. Several of us went over to tell him that his “honeymoon” with Brian S. “BS” Hooker was over, and he got all in a huff. We’re sorry if we ruined your holidays, if you do holidays, kid. (He seems too angry to believe in anything having to do with joy.) What were the “abusive” and “harassing” comments? Well, The Kid may think that the comments are gone, but that’s not how the internet works, is it?

The comments are all here! You can even comment if you want.

In a way, I understand The Kid’s anger. He has been used to echo chambers like Age of Autism. When that echo chamber wasn’t there in Epoch, he decided it was better to go back to his WordPress-hosted blog and enjoy the deafening silence of that echo chamber. (Silence? Yeah, 99% of the comments there say nothing.)

Pictured: Baby’s interpretation of Jake Crosby at this very moment. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Speaking of douchebags, keep up the voting. Bob and Andy are tied at this very moment, with BS Hooker coming up from behind. It’s going to be a close vote.

You read what you want to read

A few weeks ago, I told you about a secret group on Facebook that has been planning to have children infected with, among other things, chickenpox and measles. They’re actively looking for cases of these diseases in order to bring their un-vaccinated children to exchange air and body fluids with infected children in the hopes that their un-vaccinated children catch the disease and get immunity that way. Let me be clear that this is nothing short of child abuse. To knowingly infect a child with an infectious disease defies the laws of logic and moral decency.

In that post, I never once mentioned that these parents were going to be reported to “Protective Services” (CPS?). Instead, I wrote this in the first post:

“I am looking into each and every one of those names there, and I will not hesitate to contact the proper health protection authorities in the places where they live.”

And I wrote a follow-up post that also talked about their insane way of looking at diseases vs. vaccines. I did not mention Child Protective Services, nor reporting to anyone, in that post.

True to form, however, one of the members of that secret group has taken to an online forum to complain that I am trying to intimidate her:

“I’m popping over here because I belong to the N/s/d group on facebook and I also belonged to the Chicken pox immunity network. CPIN was a group where you could locate case of chicken pox to expose your kids for natural immunty. The group has strict vetting guidlines. The group was originally just a closed goup on facebok and later changed to a secret group. A provax blogger screen shot the members list when the group was closed and a few days ago posted on his blog that he would be contacting Protection services for every member listed in the group. THere have ben an onslaught of attacks of vaccine choice groups on facebook. Great mothers questioning vaccine 2 group was recently hacked and all admins were deleted and screen shots were takenin the group and posted to provax sites. The original admins eventually regained control of the group but safety was compromised. A couple MMR immunity groups were also compromised during all of this. I just wanted to inform everyone that it seems like a big war is on the horizon trying to bar us from sharing information. Please be careful ladies.”

Here’s the screenshot:

She follows up with another post mentioning this blog:

Here’s a tip, Coral: If you link to my blog, I will be able to track your link down and see what you write. If you mention my blog, Google picks up that mention and reports it to me. If you don’t want anyone to know your anti-vaccine activism, the solution is simple: Don’t do it.

For example, don’t tell us that you’re guilty of knowingly reporting a Facebook group for no real reason other than your feelings being hurt:

I know, I know, it’s hard for you to follow simple solutions to complex problems, judging by your unwillingness to vaccinate (a simple solution) against vaccine-preventable diseases (complex problems).

Never once did I threaten anyone to report them to CPS. I probably should because willingly wanting to infect your children is nothing short of child abuse. Instead, I compiled all the names and sent them to a colleague in California and other states. It’s up to the proper authorities to do their due diligence in trying to stop the spread of disease. So I don’t know what that means for you and your friends, Coral.

The rest of the comments are the usual anti-vaccine hodgepodge of conspiracy theories about secret groups being infiltrated and hacked by everyone from the government to Bill Gates on down. I guess everyone sees the monsters under the bed that they want to see, yet not the monsters in the mirror.

Maybe that “mental disorder” crack was a bit too much?

You have to be out of your mind to deal with the anti-vax crowd. So maybe that last post about an anti-vaxxer maybe having a mental disorder was a bit much? Maybe I’m the one with the disorder since I willingly go and read their rants. In fact, I read so many of their rants that it’s hard to choose which one to take on. Instead of “ugly” in the following clip, replace it with “nuttier”:

Seriously, it’s hard to decide.

If anti-vaccine activists are not telling us that autism is worse than death, then they’re telling us unsubstantiated bullshit like this:

See, because the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) within the US DOH runs both the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, then HRSA must be taking organs from “vaccine injured” children and selling those organs to the highest bidder. That’s why we must have such a small number of people needing organ transplants… Oh, wait.

That picture there must be from a child about to have their organs harvested, right? I mean, since this posting from “VacTruth.com” is chock-full of facts, then the picture must be factual, right? Not so. It’s not even close to being about organ transplants. I shouldn’t be too hard on VacTruth.com. They probably did a Google search (their version of “research”) and probably found this article about organ trafficking allegedly done by Mexican drug gangs. (It’s from the Daily Mail, so take that article with a grain of salt.)

I don’t know what’s better, the post itself, or the comments from the page’s followers who swear that this is the truth, and that the child in that picture, despite being shown that the picture is from elsewhere, is a vaccine-injured child who is having his organs harvested. Even the people sharing the post are something to look at:

 

To people that are seemingly divorced from reality, no conspiracy theory is too outlandish not to believe it. Between this and the reasoning of the Supreme Court, I think we’re in trouble.

Grasping at straws much?

If you really pay attention to what I’ve written in the past, you may have come across two papers in which I’ve been either an author or acknowledge. (Go ahead and kill yourself trying to figure out my real name, weirdo.) Each paper took more than a year to finalize. The one where I’m an author was a labour of love. There were drafts, re-drafts, edits, conference calls, and more drafts. CDC asked us to put together our findings for a poster presentation months before the paper was published. So we did. But our analyses changed a bit from the poster to the final paper. The principal investigator clarified what those changes were, and those changes were based on new data, on suggestions from the journal’s editors, and on edits from the group as we discussed it more.

What I’m getting at is that scientific papers change from conception to publishing. There are even times when the conclusions change completely as well. Anyone with a good scientific base knows this.

This was pretty much the case in a paper from back in the late 90’s looking at the association between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. Initial analyses of the data showed an association, an increased risk of autism in children who got some vaccines. But subsequent analysis — in which the data were clarified by actual scrutiny of medical records — showed that the association fizzled. In fact, the initial “increased” relative risk between those who were vaccinated and those who were not had huge confidence intervals, something you see in studies without much statistical power to them.

Anti-vaccine activists have been barking up this tree for a while. They keep saying that the early drafts of the paper prove that CDC knew that thimerosal caused autism. Who are they? Are they epidemiologists? No, they are not. They are “the kid” and his newest mentor, a PhD in chemistry or some such. The PhD has his panties in a bunch over the early drafts. Because the paper followed the normal process of things, there must be a conspiracy.

Except that there isn’t a conspiracy. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Read Dr. Emily Willingham’s epic deconstruction of this manufactroversy. It is such an epic takedown that the PhD and the people funding his grasping at straws issued a most libelous “press release“. So what did Dr. Willingham reply to all that libelous filth? The most epic reply ever, with the best bottom line:

“Bottom line from me, EJW: Pinning hopes to a 15-year-old preliminary abstract from a partially completed study and ignoring the ensuing 15 years of mounting evidence supporting and extending that study’s ultimate finding of no relationship between autism and thimerosal in vaccines is sufficiently revealing of just how little the mercury-in-vaccines-causes-autism folks have going for them, evidence-wise. Behaving as though an already known preliminary finding from the 1990s is some kind of smoking gun and buying news release dissemination to kick up a bunch of dust about it in the wake of all of the evidence to the contrary simply reeks of desperation. That’s my final comment on the issue.”

Yeah, keep pinning your hopes on that. I’m sure you’ll uncover “the troof” soon enough.

The Boston Bombings and Anti-Vaxxers

Soon after the Boston Bombings last year, nasty rumours began to surface about the true nature of the bombings and who perpetrated them. All you have to do is Google “Boston Bombing False Flag” and you’ll get a flavor of what I mean. In simple terms, conspiracy nuts claim that the bombings were done by the US Government in an attempt to justify tighter gun control and surveillance measures. If we are led to believe that we are in mortal danger, the theory goes, we’ll be happy to exchange our freedoms in order to be safer.

Some of the “evidence” put forth by conspiracy theorists the world over was that the victims of the bombing were actors. For example, look at this victim:

Don’t agree with me? You’re a bigot!

Ah, the kid. If you ever find yourself snowed in and not have much to do but maybe see what the latest round of “nutbaggery” the anti-vaccine activists are up to, I recommend either the kid’s blog or either one of his two Twitter accounts. Heck, I recommend his Facebook page, in which he has been lately going around in circles with his old friends, now enemies, about whether or not he is correct in his assertions and in releasing otherwise confidential emails. His latest round of nutbaggery, other than not understanding a goddamned epidemiological study though he has a degree in epidemiology, is from his Twitter account.

Let me set it up for you.

Conspiracy Theorists Unite!

Today’s post is a quick one. You know who “The Kid” is, but do you know who This Guy is? He’s a scary fellow who believes that The Illuminati controls autism. I wish I was joking and that people like him didn’t exist. But they do.

As it turns out, The Guy posted a long rant at The Kid’s blog, blaming autism on just about every conspiracy under the sun. The Kid must have accidentally published the comment since the comment read “do not publish this” at the top. Anyway, this is all that remains of that rant:

 

I linked to The Guy’s blog post above, but here are some excerpts:

“Did you vote for Obama? Did you vote for McCain? If you answered “Yes” to either one, you thereby acknowledge that you are part of the 99% of voters who were led to do so by the Illuminati. That’s how all presidents are appointed.”

“The Rothschild family owns most of the major media and they show you the candidates that they select for you.”

“Certainly, the people who damaged your childrens’ (sic) brains are not going to voluntarily announce on Rothschild’s TV networks that they made a mistake and apologize to you. If that was a possibility, it would have happened in 1999 when an honest CDC employee named Thomas Verstraeten told us the truth about how mercury was causing the brain damage known as autism.”

“Why didn’t these “parents” of autistic kids make Courtney Zietzke famous and arrange for him to be on TV to promote the truth about autism the same way they did for Kirby? Can you guess the answer?

It was all planned propaganda. That’s what the Illuminati does. They own TV and they plan far in advance what will be shown to us.”

“I urge anyone who trusts the Canary Party to beat my brains in with the toughest questions you can think of to make me prove my point here. That task is a piece of cake for me but an impossibility for those “leaders”. I’m trying to help every parent of an autistic child see how you’ve all been fooled by superior con artists. I do have all the answers and I’m here to help all of you. You all have to break away from these bastards who took over your leadership or babies are screwed all over the world. Please ask questions. Thank you.”

Oh, I think we don’t need to ask any questions. Do we?