The Anti-Vax Bandwagon is STILL Going!?

 "Harvard Immunologist to Legislators: Unvaccinated Children Pose ZERO Risk to Anyone"

Errm, no. Yiiiikes.

That article is swimming in fallacies of rhetoric and context. There's a huge difference between longstanding herd-safety vaccinations and those specific edge-case vaccines which are (or were) on the forefront of vaccine research (i.e. very much works in progress) - yet this article only discusses the latter despite making sweeping assertions about the former.

I've read a lot of Obukhanych's research, and—her more infamous public appearances notwithstanding—the actual science underlying most of her "outreach" amounts to a couple of distinct points which are almost universally, if not always deliberately, misinterpreted and/or misrepresented. Most notably, none of them actually support or otherwise provide evidence for the anti-vax rhetoric stirred up by/in the (often for-profit) media in which she is often cited. Those points being:

— First, synthetic vaccination, in general, is an imperfect substitute for naturally-acquired immunity. This is factual common knowledge and generally uncontested in medical science.

— Second, because any given infectious disease evolves parallel to its hosts' immunity over time (but almost always evolves more efficiently than its hosts'), iterative, short-term vaccination is likely to lead to more severe long-term problems as disease evolution steadily outpaces the cutting edge of human disease science. This is also factual common knowledge.

Note, too, that with the exception of the now well-known flaws in the aP vaccine (which, despite that, is still better than nothing), the vaccines cited in this article are conspicuously absent their corresponding real-world data and context, such as: why a vaccine for a disease exists in the first place (referring to once-fatal and relatively commonplace diseases which, thanks to vaccines for them, now are not); why non-mandatory vaccines (particularly for cancer-comorbid viruses) might still be wise in populations demonstrating an above 50% rate of early-life infection; etc. There's a reason that those largely edge-case vaccines in particular are cited here, while the rest are not:

If one takes the aforementioned points completely out of context, it's easy to distort them into alleged or perceived "evidence" against vaccination - but that critical qualification obfuscates the real meat and potatoes of the issue (as is generally the intention). Here's the bulk of the important context, then, that's again-conspicuously absent from media employing that strategy to prop up that sort of rhetoric: when vaccinated individuals are exposed to a dangerous disease, they are demonstrably much, much, MUCH more likely to survive it, much more likely to avoid ever contracting it in the first place, and, if they do, their symptoms are almost always much less compromising to their short- and long-term health. Additionally, if infected, the body is able to fight off the disease much more quickly - which means everyone else in proximity is also much safer as a function of reduced exposure. Of course no solution is 100% consistent - but when the median rate of desirable outcomes within the expected range of possible outcomes is in the very high 90th percentile, that's clearly a success in big-picture terms.

Furthermore, when the alternative to even the most imperfect and inelegant solution is... a very high (or even simply non-negligible) risk of death... one can argue that there's not really much of a choice. Sure, human immunity as a whole might be better served in the long run if we were to simply allow ourselves to become infected with as many full-blown deadly diseases as possible - but in that case, "humanity as a whole" will only include the survivors, and the difference between that result and what we have now is far from negligible. Understandably and, in my opinion, justifiably, giving that up is not a price that most are willing to pay - and that pragmatism is the compromise that is vaccines.

Oh, just shoot me

VIDEO: Bulletproof / Stormproof safe rooms for schools  

The unfortunate reality is that security gimmicks won't keep children safe at school. It would simply accelerate the evolution of this society's school-massacre paradigm. Realistically, the net result would be to make more children less-safe, faster. Anyone can break through bulletproofing (especially, but not just glass) with $30 and a visit to a hardware store - or, with the same budget, cook up a nice IED, or enough poison gas to fill a school, etc etc.

A fundamental truth of security is that preparation supersedes the incidental. Anyone who resolves to kill a ton of people can find a way around incidental obstacles just by knowing they exist ahead of time. The bottom line is that there's no way to keep anyone safe as long as there are people willing to do whatever it takes to kill them, and that's regardless of how many easy options are or aren't available to do so. Guns, for instance, aren't even close to the most efficient way of killing a lot of people right now - they're just one of the most visible thanks to popular media, and thus the most immediate option given the general population's non-existent attention span. We are lucky that murderers are still using guns, frankly. When that changes—and it will, if social trends continue—so will the methodology, along with the scale of the body count.

No matter how much or how comprehensive physical and technological security is or becomes, the only way to truly prevent crime is to balance the social expression whose inevitable remainder is always crime. Crime is just a social waste product that a majority of people are either too dumb or too greedy to recycle properly before it gets out of hand.

... But that process is neither simple, nor profitable. So. *shrug*

Cynics laugh most, and hardest

"Wit" is laughing as everyone around you desperately scrambles to learn what you already know—after their circumstances finally make ignorance too inconvenient to maintain—because you also knew, long ago, that this moment would arrive far too late to make a difference. Wit may sometimes appear callous and insensitive to those without the facility to command it, but it is a necessary stress-pressure regulator for the burden of intellect. If you are intelligent, wit will likely save your life someday; if you are a fool, you will grow to resent the sting of wit's refusal to suffer you.

At what value of delusion does 0=1? Show your work.

Ya know how sometimes you have to wait for people to completely finish whatever bizarre nonsense they're doing/saying so you can find out if there's supposed to be a deliberate punchline or if it's just their god-awful personality showing?
 
— yeahhh, nah, me neither. Those 90s were good times, though.

There exists a point on the spectrum of human behavior beyond which lack of substance is so overwhelmingly characteristic that it inherits all of the inferred attributes of first order substance. Fuck murder; irony of that caliber should be the capital crime. No wonder our dictionary is becoming more unintelligible and backwards every day.

It's all downright pathological -_- 

(But, hey, on the bright side, if there are cultural anthropologists in our theoretical future, their work involving our time period will be really easy!)

On a completely unrelated note:

What manner of nincomfuckery is THIS!?

We live in a society that tolerates an economy in which an isolated minority profits from net waste despite and to spite the poor majority. 

Much about our lives is like a shitty Tom Clancy novel... but with no hero.
 Haaahaha!

I hope we're just being idiots - 
because, if not, we are insane.

Self-awareness is key -

- and lock, and door, and wall,

and notion or absence of them all.

Deluded desire to belong to something 

bigger than oneself is the biggest thing of all:

One palimpsest, once first before the rest,

now merely another before the next;

one errant truth to guide them all -

but to a lie, a cliff, awakening?

That's a better, smaller self's call.

'Mericuhhhh, FUCK YA!**

"The United States military today obliterated the small Oregon city of (city name) with a surgical nuclear strike, liberating the surrounding stateside from an outbreak of chicken pox in which at least seven children were confirmed to have demonstrated ongoing visible symptoms of viral extremism, the fear of which had held at least three of the city's twenty-four districts hostage for nearly as many days. Notable among those targets destroyed were at least eighteen primary schools that were flagged as key viro-terrorism training camps by the National Strategic Defense Algorithm, along with two public pools and the entire local franchise of fast-food restaurateur/viro-terrorism mastermind Colonel Sanders. Our White House correspondent reports that government officials have declined to issue a formal press release on these events due to the, quote, "Negligible scope of environmental fallout and minimal civilian casualties of what was an absolutely necessary and ultimately very minor military action that claimed barely four million human lives in total," but one Oval Office staff source—unauthorized to officially comment—has assured us that the President is very thankful for the continued sacrifice and commitment of the American people to a virus-free global society. We'll have more on this for you later, and while we're at it - have YOU vacuumed lately? A quirky new product from everybody's favorite national defense contractor, Roomba, has been sweeping the market this week, and by golly, we are just absolutely blown away - isn't that right, Steve? Tune in to Steve and myself again at 7 for more exclusives, only here on CNFNOXANBCOMGWTF911BBQ."

It's only a matter of time before the "terrorists" of the future are going to include viruses. You got a cold? Uh uh, not in my democracy, motherfucker - get dead, terrorist!

 'MERICUH! Mindless victory AT ANY COST!!!



**Not to be mistaken for "YEAH!"

Random Silver Linings

All is Not Lost, but Discipline

Language is a jug of comprehension teetering upon the edge of a mortal precipice of perspective beneath the endlessly-battering rains of subjective experience - and any waterfall of words can only possess its true meaning when it exactly fills the idea that spilled it. Its kung fu is foreign and rare, and it thrives in the invisible light of seclusion.

We certainly grow heartily—as stubborn weeds—in the depthless chasms between reality and awareness, but we can never grow strong within them. Left to the darkness of ignorance, the already-dim grow only ever more lost.... and content. I often wonder if it is not worse for humanity to collectively make only a little sense from time to time than to never make any sense at all.

Oops, I Did It Again

I accidentally made eye contact and smiled at a stranger walking by me today. FUCK ME AND MY STUPID ASS! I forgot that only women or brainless ultra-vain gym rats have that right. 

Pardon me, miss - for reals. I forgot not to be human for a sec. It was a fucking accident, okay? 

Fucking feminism...

More Thoughts From the Void

What exactly is the problem with our nation when the lowest-common-denominators among us are our majority denomination?

I'd love a hell-reciproc-yeah-al, but I'll settle for no equivocation.

Ladder Day

Today is International Ladder Day!

It's sort of an invisible holiday, so I'm spreading the word. If you happen to be that person in your community who is always going out of your way to help your friends & family—or even coworkers, neighbors, or strangers—grow, thrive and find happiness that would otherwise only ever taunt them as they failed over and over and over, then this day is for you! It's called "Ladder Day" because that's what we are: we see a need, we lean ourselves against it, and then we turn our time and energy into rungs for our loved ones to climb to better places in life that they otherwise wouldn't even know about, probably don't deserve, and usually can't handle.

Unfortunately, very few people celebrate or even know about Ladder Day - usually because they're too busy wasting their happiness, potential and good fortune on stupid shit. Few people remember how they got so fortunate in the first place. Maybe it was an accident? Maybe they always had it in them all along, and they just woke up one day and realized it, and then everything became awesome. Maybe it was the communion wafers; nobody really knows where they come from. It's easy to become confused and forgetful in a deluge of newfound positivity!

Anyway, happy Ladder Day - because no selfless love goes unignored!

And, tomorrow... Latter Ladder Day!

Excuse Me, But I Believe...

Excerpts of Future Histories

"You can't blame every American for the wrongs that its government and leaders have committed," said many Americans.

No one outside their country echoed this ridiculous notion, however.

It is a terrible tragedy that American citizens did not manage to act harmoniously and with conviction to right—or at least to end—the wrongs across the rest of the world that were both perpetrated in their names and made possible only by their knowing acquiescence. If only they had not turned away from higher instinct and rational foresight alike, perhaps the downfall of their society would not have come about in such a fiery and bloody manner. Some historians believe that an American civilization might even have persisted to this day had its people collectively elected to pursue one of the many possible constructive paths to which they had unobstructed access. Instead of taking purposeful advantage of their unprecedented opportunities in that time, Americans made the conscious choice to allow apathy and denial not only to control their own lives but to eventually corrupt all influence they exerted upon the world in turn.

With the ever-billowing smoke of their growing failures suffocating the world around them, they nevertheless danced gaily across a fiery landfill of self-righteous apathy as its unquenchable embers steadily burned away the last vestiges of their humanity - and by the time they realized that they were going to die, they were already dead. If any at all, very few among them likely realized that their demise was the sole fruit of their own laborious self-deceptions. For many decades they had been happy slaves, masters of the art of forging their own weightless and increasingly-invisible collars, but they were also self-indentured to the slow but steady construction of their own great coffin - and, eventually, their neighbors put them to rest in it. The citizens of the rest of the world collectively refused to allow global genocide to continue to follow in the footsteps of American ignorance and selfishness; at a certain point, after all attempts at peaceful resolution, negotiation, and reason had failed, the only possible solution was to stop its march once and for all.

All that remains today of Americans are their tragic celebrations of themselves in the social media records from that time: the trivial details of their wasted time on Earth - trophies to nothing more than the cursory self-acknowledgments of their egos that such activities represented. Like many ancient societies that rose and fell before and after them, the "USA" failed to even consider the possibility of its own inevitable downfall, much less plan for it. Its citizens' knowing-delusions of fundamental immortality was ultimately their fatal flaw.

The petrified nuclear forest that was once middle North America must be taught to current and future generations as exactly what it is: a stark reminder that a broader perspective MUST be cultivated—and, most importantly, must be *observed and acted upon*—by any human civilization that would endeavor to survive itself. The violent, catastrophic loss of what might someday have been a great society is a humbling lesson that can only be heeded or else suffered in future kind: that passivity is a delusion, that inaction is a potential force equivalent to that of any action, and that to abide willful ignorance is to invite inevitable extinction.

- "Histories of the Ancient World," (Holotext, Simms & Mandel, #37 Edition, 2683).

Frank's Observations

An intelligent person makes all measurements with immediacy, accuracy, and thoroughness. Any person inclined toward such observational acuity will quickly learn that the average human soul's contents are rather unremarkable - disappointing, even.

Happiness is a tenuous, many-layered delusion, and each of its layers relies upon a foundation more unstable than that of the layer beneath it. To maintain a modicum of contentment consistent with this delusion, intelligent people must avoid being too knowledgeable—too intelligent—about other people.

As for those poor souls whose happiness is contingent upon stabler and more fundamental notions of meaningful living, the notion of such contentment is merely a cruel abstraction.

Intelligent people must either take care not to evolve too far beyond the herd or else learn to sufficiently tend the substantial wounds received in leaving it.

Always,

Frank

Thankstaking Paingiving

11/29/2015

Today, the reality most believe in is still far less real than the fiction everyone knows about. We're still rolling backwards down Mt. Progress at full speed, and fewer care to remember which way is up or forward than did yesterday. Hope is a dark and heavy joke among the learned, employed in earnest only by necessity - as a litmus test of astuteness and intellectual discipline in strangers, and to inevitably discouraging effect. Most of us mistake truth for momentary smatterings of coherent confirmation bias in the otherwise din of attention deficits, and we couldn't learn the difference if our lives depended on it; we know this because our lives *have* depended on it for a long, long time - yet we're learning even less with every passing moment, each generation more content to die more ignorant and wasteful—more wasted—than the last. Typical conversation and interaction is so obscenely vain that it amounts to little more than oblivious pedantry.

— Diamonds are made of the densest bullshit ever, everyone wants the most carats, and nothing else matters. Life.

Our most acclaimed modern tradition is that of "investing" our best years in life into the best schools we can afford to teach us the best brand of consumer programming our withering faculties can accommodate, after which we peddle such pathetic trade for little more than the meaningless right to the laughable claim that we've earned it - and that "it" isn't the vacuum we know it to be. Nearly no one recognizes the con before becoming a part of it - but rather than choose to grow the backbone necessary to overcome the psychological inertia born of such shameful participation—rather than teach the lessons of our tremendous mistakes to those who will inherit the consequences—we lie to the next generation; we tell them it was worth it, that it was an achievement, that it was useful - that it contributed to our lives in some tangible way instead of pigeonholing our potential and dulling the point of our once-honesty about it to the point of our becoming completely useless human beings. Worse than merely allowing it to continue, we go so far as to build our identities upon our false endorsement of this lie as "education" - and so we limit what REAL education might become, dragging it even further away from what it should be with each celebrated diploma.

We are all cowards.

We're all so committed to resolving the cognitive dissonance of our long- and hard-fought self-loathing that we just can't help but preach it and ourselves as the best god-damned things since sliced bread - singing our praises all the louder as we bury ourselves deeper and deeper in our own proud bullshit. Black is white, truth is fiction, down is up... and thank god for that, too - because how on Earth else could we justify digging ourselves into the deepest and darkest hole possible while still calling it climbing a ladder?

THIS, here, today, is actual HELL; a grinning emoji; eventually, we'll even forget the denial behind it - and then it really will be all we are.

Happy fucking Thanksgiving.

Teething on the brimming teat of tit faux-freedom.

A "free the nipples" movement is presently sweeping through the enslaved minds of the self-labeled free peoples of our species. I'm actually not at all surprised, but—being the insatiably rational altruist that I am—I cannot help but do my due diligence - and eloquently poop intellect all over them.

To begin with, "freedom" is an actual delusion.

"Freedom" and "nipples" in the same general ideological circle is definitive insanity.
 

Consider the United States, for instance. The citizens of the USA call it the land of the free for the same reason people anywhere choose to think of anything as something it isn't: they're idiots, they don't care that they're idiots, and they don't care if anyone else is affected by their being idiots. Neither boobs, gender, politics or even the typical go-to (society) are to blame for this one. People are just predictably moronic at every opportunity.

But here's the catch: any proposal to take away anyone's rights to be exactly the idiots they want to be is EXACTLY the same as the perceived social pseudo-injustice it purports to fight. The best case scenario is that everyone ends up equally hypocritical - though whichever party ends up the least conscious of that fact is clearly the worst among the losers.

Men, women, mutants, whatever - go shirtless if you want to, but for god's sake, don't whine about it when people who genuinely don't want to see it—for any reason anywhere within the spectrum of bad reasons from which nearly everyone, including you, draws their monkey-do cards—exercise their equivalent right to complain about it, and definitely don't deceive yourself by rationalizing this nincompoopery as anything other than the latest transient bandwagon from which the masses are hanging their IV idiocy drips.

Everyone who has a half-decent reason to care one way or another is either shirtless right now, or wearing a shirt right now - and everyone else falls into the category of "those pretending to care about trivial bullshit that's only pretending to matter in the first place" - and, well, they matter even less.

How about you all pursue a better, more productive goal for the good of society?
— like KILL YOURSELVES. :)

Visions of sugar plums... burning alive.

The happiest moment of my life would be the day after the day humans collectively acknowledged that the actual cost of living in "societies" had long since far outweighed even the maximum theoretical potential for its benefit to us - when we finally collect our closest friends and our families, say good-bye to everyone else, and wander back to our better, older selves again.

Sadly, such a day will never come =p

— But! There is still a slight chance (within our lifetimes) that the Earth will put us very close to that ultimate goal on its own - regardless of the present state of humanity at the time. I'm excited for the likely apocalypse of the not-nearly-near-enough future! 

Imagine the beautiful chaos working to re-simplify the arbitrary organization of all of humanity's energy...

Thousand-foot tidal waves. 

Continent-wide lightning storms. 

Hurricanes the size of Texas. 

Volcanoes, and pyroclastic surges... 

New Grand Canyons, miles deep, that will explode outward from the nearest major fault line, hopefully swallowing at least a few major cities... ahhhh! 

I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE BEGINNING OF THE END. Let's make this happen, people! This is a goal worth achieving. The public consciousness is oblivious to its existence, but we do have the technology!

On your cognitive dissonance regarding your genitalia

"Don't objectify me!"

- Women like this one

When they say, "It's not you... it's me" - they're actually right, even when they think they're lying.

— An unsurprising sentiment from what is by far the most idiotic, self-important and self-ignorant generation in human history: "There's no room in my self-righteous selfishness for your selfishness." Hilarious!

Anyone who thinks this is clever should be added to a PSA list of humans with whom everyone else should avoid accidental breeding at all costs...