Personal Musings category archive

James Randerson in the Guardian. Read the whole thing:

So anyone who clings to the notion that MMR causes autism is just plain wrong. Worse, if you opt not to have your child vaccinated, you are reducing the “herd immunity” and putting other children at serious risk.

(snip)

According to the Health Protection Agency there were 1,348 cases of measles last year, compared with 56 in 1998. In 2006 a 14-year-old boy died of measles – the first fatal case for 14 years. The reduction in herd immunity is causing unnecessary suffering.

The decision by many of my neighbours not to vaccinate their children is on a par with the drunk who decides to get into his car to drive home. It is a personally reckless action that also endangers the lives of everyone else on the road. Society should view the MMR refuseniks with the same degree of scorn.

I understand the psychology of the MMR refuseniks.

They want something or someone to blame and some way to act.

One of the harsh truths that separates grown-ups from children is this: Sometimes bad stuff happens and there is no one to blame and no way to prevent it. It just is.

As usual, I am late to the party, but I must comment on this story (emphasis added).

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

As someone who is a white, evangelical Protestant (contrary to how many behave, “evangelical” does not refer to a political philosophy), I must say, these folks haven’t read the same Bible I have.

They must have found some kind of anti-Gospels which counsel hate and cruelty in the name of the God of love.

Dan Froomkin explains.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

I don’t read Cal Thomas any more because Thomas is just a hate-full idiot.

The primary purpose of computers is to train persons to talk to themselves.

What kind of moral code has as its central tenet the right to torture?

You can’t control the deal.

You can only play the cards.

. . . between using hate and fear as political tactics and stuff like this?

Legitimizing hate legitimizes hate-fullness.

End the politics of hate.

A library book looted in the American Civil War is returned:

Nearly 145 years after it was stolen by a Union soldier during a Civil War raid, a missing library book has been returned to the Washington and Lee University library by an Illinois man who inherited it from the soldier’s descendants.

(snip)

The school was looted and the neighboring Virginia Military Institute was burned down by Gen. David Hunter and his troops on June 11, 1864. A note written in the book and signed by C.S. Gates reads: “This book was taken from the Military Institute at Lexington Virginia in June 1864 when General Hunter was on his Lynchburg raid. The Institution was burned by the order of Gen Hunter. The remains of Gen. Stonewall Jackson rest in the cemetery at this place.”

Aside: Persons sometimes wonder why Southerners still remember the Civil War so vividly.

Putting aside the moral issues, on the wrong side of which the South clearly was (diagram that, grammar nerds!), this illustrates it.

Where I grew up, persons still tell stories of Union soldiers stabling their horses in a local church. Whether or not the stories are true I do not know. The point is simply that they are.

Memories like that do not respect greater moral rights and wrongs, and they die hard.

Oh, yeah: Note to Texas. The South lost.

Why?

It really is easy to drill out a brass file cabinet lock.

Aside: Out of filial affection, I left out the “It’s about time.”

I was actually discussing the sociological constant, K_i, with a friend last night.

It refers to the Idiocy Constant in human nature. Baldly stated, if you drag enough persons randomly selected into a room, a certain percentage of them will be idiots.

It’s just a fact of human nature.

Oliver Willis.

Mr. Willis’s site has been having some database issues this morning. If it doesn’t load, be patient and try again later.

Baseball announcers who actually knew something about baseball.

Watching or listening to a Philies broadcast won’t be the same without Harry Kalas.

If I hear one more blowhard public figure use the phrase, “a conversation we have to have,” I think I shall scream.

There are few things more frustrating than losing your morning cup of coffee while you’re still too asleep to look for it.

The twosythias are in bloom. If I got two more, they would be forsythias.

The cat is coming between me and my blog.

Or maybe is was my low-key socially conservative Southern upbringing . . .

I do not understand the urge to have something new, not because I need it or not because I want what it can do or not because it looks like it might be fun or entertaining or useful, but, well, just because it’s new.

Yet, whole segments of our economy seem to be founded on new simply for the sake of new.

Gap Inc.’s upscale Banana Republic chain, struggling with declining sales, plans to open a test store selling limited-edition accessories mostly below $100 to lure ever-more discriminating shoppers seeking both style and value.

Edition by Banana Republic — featuring limited-edition handbags and jewelry, along with some shoes, sunglasses and personal-care products from Banana Republic — will open exclusively in Gap’s hometown Westfield San Francisco Centre in May. A Gap spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the company has plans to open more of the stores, but said that Gap plans to incorporate lessons from the test shop.

Limited edition over-priced unnecessary junk is still over-priced unnecessary junk.

I restrict my shopping to cheap, necessary junk, thank you very much.

It is really difficult to disagree with this.

Bad stuff doesn’t just happen. Well, some bad stuff just happens. If you’re standing under a tree when a branch breaks off and lands on your head, you could argue that that “just happened.”

My pastor recently said that, when persons ask him, “Why did God do [this or that bad thing]?” he responds with, “God did not [take your child from you/lead your husband to drive off the road/whatever}. Some things just happen because we live in a physical world. And some things happen because God gave humanity free will, and, with free will comes the the ability to make the wrong choices.”

Whether or not you or I agree with him theologically is no matter. Here’s the crux:

These folks made wrong choices. They made wrong choices to pay for their multiple McMansions, their Bentleys, their private clubs, their gold-encrusted Dixie cups. They sold financial good sense and personal integrity for pieces of silver.

And they do not realize it. They still think they are Masters of the Universe–victims, not victimizers.

Let their wrong choices confront them in every airline first class lounge, on every street corner, in every dream.

I have one, so the last show I would want to watch is The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

I hate the coinage, “Octo-Mom.” It is not cute, it is not clever, it is not funny.

Please make it go away.