Calculating the odds. My respect for Eddie's school. Language differences. Zoriana's bike.
20231003
On Saturday I gave about my fifth Toastmasters talk on the subject of lifelong exercise. New this time was the importance of exercise in strengthening your immune system. I haven't learned a whole lot about exercise itself in the past three years, but the lessons about the advantage of natural immunity over anything else, especially vaссines, are clear.
I was disappointed that I wasn't able to answer the audience’s questions as crisply as I wanted, so I reread Vernon Coleman's book and re-watched the movie. Humor me on my paranoia, and type in Coleman "Vaссіnes Are Dangerous and Don't Work" and "rumble Vaххed-the-movie." Copy and paste won't work – the spooks (I hope) won't read these references and decide I'm a danger to humanity.
As I have mentioned, my son Eddie got the MMR shot, discussed in both the book and the movie. How dangerous is mеаsles? Oddly, the latest reference providing mеаsles statistics for the United States is dated 2019. Here is what the CDC says:
From January 1 to December 31, 2019, 1,274* individual cases of mеаsles were confirmed in 31 states. This is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992. The majority of cases were among people who were not vaссinated against mеаsles.
Nobody died. There is no statistic offered on permanent injury from encephalitis and the like. In saying that the majority of cases were among unvaссinated people, they are tacitly conceding that vaссinated people do get sick. No indication how many. So, the vaссines are not 100% effective.
Who is not vaссinated? With Covid 19, it is a horseshoe-shaped graph. On the left are people who are so ignorant and out of touch they don't even know they're supposed to get vaссinated, and on the right are people who are smart enough to be skeptical. My guess is it is the same for mеаsles. The illnesses are probably more among the great unwashed on the left of the bell curve than us educated skeptics on the right. Eugyppius has a good blog on the theme that midwits are the most ovеrjabbеd element of society.
What happens if you do get vaссinated? Suppose they are right about autism, at least in some percent of the cases. Here is a CDC graph of the increase in the incidence of autism. There are 1.5 million children with autism in the United States, which I figure equates to about 100,000 new cases per year. The people who have resolutely insisted it cannot be attributed to the shots have, in the course of thirty years, not come up with any better explanation.
How bad is autism? It falls on the spectrum, but many cases can disrupt family life as much as Downs syndrome. Considering that a majority of women choose to get amniocentesis when they are pregnant and abort a fetus if Down syndrome is present, one can guess that they would do the same if there were a prenatal test for autism. I certainly would not want to be saddled with such a child.
So, looking at my odds when it comes to mеаsles, there is almost zero chance of my kid dying from getting mеаsles, not having been vaссinated. There remains a good chance of the kid getting mеаsles despite being vaссinated. And there is a fair chance – maybe one in 200 or so – of the kid being so severely affected by autism that we would have aborted him if we had known.
Of course, it has not been proven beyond a doubt that vaссination causes autism. The link between smoking and cancer was also long unproven. Long enough that my parents and one ex in-law managed to die of smoking related diseases.
Mеаsles is more prevalent than the other dangerous diseases against which children are vaссinated: diphtheria, tetanus, polio and the like. The vaссines against more prevalent but less dangerous diseases such as the flu and RSV are simply not that effective.
Even if autism were the only adverse reaction to childhood vaссines, it would be enough to tip the risk-reward against them. But many other things go wrong: sudden infant death syndrome, mercury poisoning, the disease itself, autoimmune diseases, weakened immune system and so on.
The argument that a parent should do it "for the good of society," promoting "herd immunity" simply does not hold up. None of the vaссines are even claimed to be 100% effective at preventing disease. Actual efficiency is of course less than what is claimed. Witness what happened with Covid 19. And, immunity fades over time. The result is that the diseases will always be present in the population. The only real defense is a good immune system, which correlates with overall good health. Coleman and RFK Jr. cite many studies showing that unvaссinated children are healthier.
Who owns our bodies? Us or the state? We do! We should enjoy bodily autonomy, the freedom to make our own health decisions. And parents should have the authority to make decisions for their children until they can do so for themselves.
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On the subject of mathematics, Eddie came home with an interesting geometry problem. I took geometry in the 10th grade rather than the 7th, and do not remember problems this challenging. The statement is simple: The length of a given line segment is equal to the diagonal of a square minus the length of one side. Using a compass and a straightedge, construct the square.
I leaned over Eddie's shoulder pondering the problem for about ten minutes, then grabbed my own pencil and paper to work it by myself. After five minutes Eddie said "Eureka" (in Ukrainian, of course) at the very moment I did myself. Comparing work, we found that we both had the same insight. Momma beamed, and a moment of father-son bonding ensued.
Eddie's school wants him to look serious. No torn jeans. It makes me glad – he should be properly dressed. No Hawaiian shirts! I bought him three nice long-sleeved shirts, the kind you iron. He looks like a proper young scholar. They see their role as forming a competent, presentable adult. I applaud.
Sister Steph sent me three links to videos explaining the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian languages. We who live here already know, but you may be interested. I'll add my own observation that the two languages split at about the same time as Spanish and Portuguese. There are about as many differences in pronunciation, and even more differences in vocabulary and orthography. Ukrainians are not Russian!
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where Zoriana today graduated to a derailleur bicycle. As could be expected, the chain came off straightaway as we rode to school. I'm glad it was me instead of the good-looking woman taking her there.
Graham
About vaccines, I was not convinced either way about vaccination before Covid, but since then, I have done a lot of research, not as much as some of the people that I read these days, but enough to convince myself that vaccination is unnecessary and is likely harmful. First off, I came to the conclusion on my own that the schedule and timing of vaccinations is partly the problem. It appears that boys more than girls are afflicted by autism. Boys in general mature later than girls, so if they are on the same schedule for shots, boys may be more vulnerable because they have not matured enough to have protection against the harmful elements of vaccines. Second, RFK, Jr. wrote in his book something that I had not considered. At this time, there are more than 47 childhood vaccines, not all of which are mandated, but this is far more than the three that I got when I was a child. We probably got tetanus, mumps, measles, smallpox, and diphtheria. I doubt that there were any others. I also got a round of shots when I entered the military since I had no choice. A lot of research has been done on the toxic ingredients in vaccines, but no thought has been given to the cumulative effects of 47 vaccines. There might be toxic elements in each vaccine serum that alone would not cause harm, but the cumulative effect of all the vaccines in a lifetime might be more than some human bodies can overcome.
In addition, the one thing that modern medicine fails to recognize is that each person is unique. During the Covid panic, they were going on and on about big data, but the fact is that we are all individuals, not cars, and each person reacts differently to circumstances and to disease. I have always had a robust immune system, so I have never been afraid of others with colds. Even in college, I would tell friends that I don't get sick, and that's pretty much still a fact. I must admit that during the Covid panic, I flew to California and I had a slight cough for a week after the flight. That's it. The thing is that we cannot treat all people the same. We give the same dosage of medicine to a person who weighs 100 pounds as we do to a person who weighs 250 pounds. That makes no sense. The immune system is part of our body and it needs exercise. The problem is that we cannot see it directly, but without exercise we know that our muscles atrophy. We have to move to live; otherwise we stagnate. It is the same with our immune system. It needs to work, and we stop it from working when we get vaccinated. The idea of vaccination is actually contrary to good health. We need to be exposed to illness in order to build well being. In order to be robust, we must be exposed to disease. It's the same with any activity in life. If we have never worked, we don't know how to work. That's why they have apprenticeship programs. If you fear the world, you stay indoors and never go outside, but at the same time you deny yourself the opportunity to fully live. I would say that a person is much more healthy when they are exposed to disease, get sick, and recover than someone who avoids exposure and withers inside.
The story of the Buddha is an explanation of this theory. When Shakyamuni was young, his parents tried to protect him from the evils of the world. They didn't want him to see old age, death, and suffering. But, he needed to go out into the world, and there he saw the suffering. But he realized that the only way to prevent suffering was to evolve and transform himself. The main tenant of Buddhism is that life is suffering. The corollary of that is that we cause our own suffering by our attachment to our illusions. We must exercise our mind and spirit to rid ourselves of those illusions and by doing so, there is no suffering, thus we must go out into the world and be exposed to disease so that we can build a robust immune system. This requires exercise, discipline, and determination. If we hide from life, we will never live.
During the black plague, approximately half the population of Europe died, but half the population lived. What can we learn from those of survived? This is the lesson that we must learn to be healthy. Why do some people get sick and die, while others thrive? Drug companies don't ask those questions and neither do politicians. Why? Because there is no profit in good health.
The laws of physics generally change from hypothesis to law with a correlation probability of 99.999999% or more. Engineering makes use of those laws. If you look at the medical papers here, you won't find a single correlation probability of 99.999999%. In other words, medical reasoning always has the possibility of being wrong. Since there is data showing that there is likely to be a correlation between Vaccine and Autism, in order to claim that it is not a side effect of Vaccine, doctors must prove a causal relationship, or at least a mechanism, to say that it is not a side effect. However, if you look at advertisements for pediatric clinics, there are many clinics that refer to autism as a genetic disease.
That's probably why they're trying to get infants vaccinated for money.
Behind the scenes, doctors are brainwashed by pharmaceutical companies.
Malicious!