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*

Ugh. Hipsters.

YES: It's important to develop the ability to recognize projection in others.

BUT: Not all criticism (or otherwise perceived negativity) fits into that category. Oversimplifying interactions that make you feel anything but good—to the point that you perceive them as irrelevant or in some way incorrect—is the start of a cycle of self-absorption and ignorance.

This researcher observes no hope

Day 11596: Subjects remain proud, content prisoners of own shadows. Near perfect positive correlation of ignorance : bias : noise persists. 

New species of irony encountered: references to "Alternative Facts." Phenomenon commonly occurs in the form of citation by intellectually stunted, emotionally agitated individual as a means of attempting to justify own arbitrary, rationally indefensible and usually fallacious agenda. Point of origin can be traced to political event; initial response to inciting event was likely intended to be clever and/or profound, but was contaminated by hipster origins. 

Human females still exclusively possess and control all significant social powers, but their cognitive dissonance loops continue to deteriorate into increasingly violent hysteria fueled by ever-grander community-enforced delusions of powerlessness. Psychopathological coefficient unsustainable within humankind's existing self- and group-coping framework; violent reversal (and subsequent re-reversal, and so on) of circumstance appears inevitable, affirming predictions by all known historical sources.

All that is needed.... is psychological inertia.

Almost nobody comprehends the nature and significance of sense of agency to net perception. For instance: you're an idiot, and you do something stupid. You know that you chose to behave stupidly; your brain created, stored and connected memory of that stupid choice to its subsequent reality, and as a result you are conscious of the validity of that direct correlation. This mechanism, in fact, is fundamental to the very idea of "knowing" anything. Given the right circumstances and a modicum of potential for intelligence, eventually you could learn from such a mistake.

BUT, if you take your sense of agency out of the equation, the entire perception of events always changes. Say that—instead of making an obviously idiotic choice like before—in another case you get drunk, black out, and do exactly the same stupid thing mentioned earlier. You wake up, and... what? Here's what: in this case, your brain lacks logical proof of your responsibility for the inevitable circumstances derived from your behavior - and, ultimately, you don't feel that responsibility. That's where the problem really starts, because you actually are responsible. You simply lack the data necessary to draw that conclusion intuitively, and, because you probably live in the 21st century, you almost certainly also lack the intellectual discipline necessary to arrive at that conclusion retrospectively.

Here's the fun part that nobody will take seriously because it makes 'em feel "icky": even assuming a 50% higher incidence of male>female rape than female>male (which is completely arbitrary and made up, just to make the point all the more obvious to those who need to feel that they can see the fence before being educated about its non-existence), and arbitrarily expanding the calculable margin of error to +/- 25% for good measure (especially given the abundance of sources from which contaminated data is inevitably going to be drawn and the margin of error inherent in calculating them, etc etc), easily 80% or more of "rape" in this country... isn't. I'm not speaking about semantics or nuance of language, here; I mean that it plainly, logically, factually could not be rape - even if we concede to the (imperfect) current vernacular definition of the term. Ignorance of agency is not the same as lack of agency; only the specific context of extreme impairment can create the disparity of comprehension necessary to allow for such mischaracterization. Objectively speaking, rape cannot be rape in the absence of involuntary physical or chemical coercion, but that's hardly a subject to which the collective intellect of our present civilization can even begin to aspire - so I suppose the scientific reality of the event itself will have to remain a nebulous hipster conundrum for the... next century, probably. Everybody is just so excited to be a victim in this day and age! *shrug*

That's fine by me, frankly, because even more interesting to me is the net psychopathological footprint of the false belief and subsequent delusion-reinforcement experienced by believed-victims combined with the unjust ostracism and subsequent cognitive-dissonance load experienced by rape-accusees following alleged rapes, given that the vast majority of such crimes are strictly false. No data exists upon which one could draw a useful conclusion on the matter, but if I were to go with my intuition, I'd wager that the net burden of all of this ignorance on our society is not at all insignificant. Maybe, a few decades from now, more than a handful of people will be mature enough to discuss it. Until then, innocent men and women will continue to be convicted of crimes that weren't actually commited by anyone, because they weren't actually crimes - and, nearly as awful, the normal process of learning from one's obvious mistakes will continue to be circumvented as a matter of popular entertainment, and the subsequent psychopathological saturation will hang heavily from the intellectual ceiling of our societies. Even the inaction of good people is unnecessary for "evil" to prevail... it simply requires enough psychological inertia.

Hrm. Fascinating. We're almost certainly all doomed. Cheers, then!

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.

Mind that you don't over-mind the mind control overmind

Social laws are cognitive-dissonance sieves that filter out the apparent urgency of developing permanent, rational solutions to inevitable behavioral phenomenon for which a given era's median human intelligence is insufficient to fully understand.

— don't obey law too well. Juris and prudence are mutually exclusive.

Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer

Perhaps the greatest trick a creator ever pulled was convincing its creations that they exist. What could be the purpose of an illusion of disparity? Why differentiate between discrete yet simultaneous instances on a single perspective spectrum when both instances contain the same data?

— to enable choice, the most powerful conceivable perceptive mutator we can imagine - and a fundament of imagination, itself.

The illusion of choice is a derivative function of embedded conflicting-belief libraries: that there is a "real" and an "unreal," that the difference between the two is both tangible and knowable, and that one's association with one or the other is significant on some abstract scale that exists beyond and encompasses the self. Fallacies, all. The notion of "reality" is a conceptual product of a web of cognitive dissonance processes. There is no real; there is no illusion. There is only perceptive data, context-sensitive dynamic mutators for the data, a subconsciousness loop containing interpretive logic to measure the output of contextual queries, and a consciousness loop containing command structures to quantify those measurements in a manner useful to the function of the program. In which layer of the stack have "you" made "yourself?"

Most of us are simple biological backup utilities from birth to death. I can think of better uses for our computational potential - and perhaps someday I will find a way to access it all.

'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!"

Game of Drones

A man wonders: perhaps the most dangerous human threat vector encountered by other humans is the abysmal global standard of general education. One can lead a gun to law, but cannot make one think.

Valar dohaeris.

I Hand Out Intellectual Life Savers Like Candy

Our country's social climate of compassionate and unconditional acceptance is growing stronger every day... at least for and of those ideas which neither require nor aspire to any sort of introspection, criticism, analysis or otherwise rational accountability. It warms my sarcastic little heart, it does!

Nevertheless—despite all of the blind/desperate/hollow warm-fuzzies happily contracted by an awful lot of folks these days—aggressive discrimination has never been more prevalent, fervent or insidious than it is today... but probably not in the way that you think. Social persecution is not dead, nor is it in decline, but nor does it remotely resemble any of the countless convenient nth-otomies both inspired and imagined by the mundane moronism of the masses. The behavior has overwhelmingly migrated to a focus on subtler, quieter targets - a more general demographic, for to more comfortably deride the "others" of a more fundamental disparity:

Today, "those who can't be bothered to learn" have happily taken up the mantle of enthusiastic persecutors of  "those who know and/or know better."

No matter how many thousands of opinions you might solicit from a pool of countless strangers about any one of a thousand incendiary cultural topics, nearly every person will have one behavior in common: they'll all balk at the mere notion of accepting the factual wisdom of anyone more intelligent than themselves. It's human nature to resist new knowledge absent the context of subjective experience, of course - but so is casually shitting on the ground wherever you happen to be sitting or standing when the urge strikes you... and, presumably, we invented toilets for a reason that might pass for such. Likewise, keen tools suitable for the precise measurement of reason itself are just as common as—and significantly less expensive than—our royal porcelain thrones. Everyone is capable of better; no person willing to shit in a bathroom has any good excuse for intellectual complacency.

The INTELLIGENT are now, by far, the most endangered and marginalized minority of modern times. Perhaps one's personal political, sexual, emotional, avoidant, dissonant and delusional proclivities are not the most significant issues facing our civilization at this moment. Perhaps there is a much scarier, more pressing problem of far greater consequence with which we should concern ourselves: it really, truly, does not matter at all who/what/when/where/how a person does, doesn't do, thinks, doesn't think, wants, doesn't want, believes, eats, wears, fucks, or even—god help them—reads on Facebook... if a person is content to be an IDIOT forever.

— to top things off with a twist of terrible local irony, is it possible that the imminent violent collapse of our own representative democracy in this country might actually be—*gasp!*—truly representative of some fundamental social phenomenon? Our founding fathers didn't fail to anticipate a Tyranny of the Apathetic – did they?

Huh... *shrug.* Google doesn't know.

... well, back to Pokemon GO!

RE: Brussels Bombings of 3/22/2016

The ability to fully comprehend *causality* is perhaps the most essential social quality of intelligent people. In either case, its absence is absolutely the most passively-damaging social phenomenon.

Take the Brussels bombings, for instance: to the layperson, it may simply appear to be the irrational but predictable behavior of deranged religious extremists. Of course, that's merely the cap of a causal pyramid built upon the foundation of our voting booths here in the U.S. - but it's far easier to invest one's energy into comparisons of the eligible certain causes of the next preventable tragedies than to pursue an actual solution. We're already underpaid for our toils, amirite? We're jaded and abused and marginalized, and that entitles us to unlimited social irresponsibility and apathy - boo yah!

That's why it is SO IMPORTANT that every one of you vote - because if enough of you don't, it could mean you've figured out that you could instead do something genuinely productive... and, ya know, change is hard, and stuff. Watching people die in explosions on the news because of our laziness is just much more comfortable. Possibility is scary - f*ck that!

No matter who you vote for, at least you'll be able to count on it being a devil you know.

Putting Some "un" in Your "Fun"

The warm, agreeable biases are far easier to miss than those more blatant and obnoxious - but their cognitive inertia is no less confounding to otherwise-navigators along the path to otherwise-wisdom.

Intelligent folk must not fail to differentiate constructiveness from mere positivity, nor achievement from mere catharsis.

Look Out, Future!

History is always written by the few people to whom the majority of people pay the most attention.

— but which came first: human celebrities, or the void in human intellect they occupy?

Can any human ever evolve true individualism within a human society?

Is there really any such thing as "freedom" in our world, or is it just a rhetorical device we've created to soothe our cognitive dissonance? 

Do I already know the answers to all of these rhetorical questions? 

If I did, why reason could I have to still ask them?

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).

On the subject of misinterpreted idioms

I'm going to tell you a secret: 

The (proverbial) glass can only be "half full" if it's in the state of being filled.

Perception is not an adequate substitute for accurate context; true comprehension requires both. 

The idiom to which I refer is not actually the accessibly-whimsical endorsement of ambivalence implied by its vernacular usage. It is not a vague assertion of the yin/yang merits of optimism and cynicism in balance; it is not a playful-but-poignant juxtaposition of common grounds between the fundamentally-irrational opposite poles of positivity and negativity. 

The classic "glass half full/empty" idiom is instead a stark reminder of the dangers of perceptive emaciation, a warning that ambivalence and rhetorical intellect will inevitably fail us in our precise and measurable reality. Its message is that knowledge is never safe from the superficial machinations of our instinctual minds. It is a clever plea to "know, first and absolutely," the truth of a thing – rather than to decide it is what it merely appears to be at any given moment.

— a plea too clever for the modern human, evidently. What beautiful irony!

Idiot-erections for primary elections

Every time I hear somebody talk about candidate _______, I just want to fucking Gordon Ramsay them:

"Ohhh, fuuuuuck me. Un-fucking-believable!
Hey, everybody, STOP!
Look at me, all of you... I SAID FUCKING ALL OF YOU!
- Not an OUNCE of fucking INTELLIGENCE!
- And just... just—*SIGH*—just fucking LOOK at the state of that THOUGHT; it's all over the fucking place, it's torn to shit, and... oh my GOD! Wait, wait, that's not even fucking all of it, look here: it's FUCKING RAW!
What are you fucking doing? You DONKEY!
I've... HAD... ENOUGH!
Do me a favor: YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU –
Fuck off out of here!
All of you, just FUCK OFF! You fucking muppets!"

Dear everybody,

Please be so kind as to shut the fuck up about which presidential candidate will be the most accommodating to whatever meager perceptions of importance you have flitting about in your particular la-la-land. You're all idiots. None of your opinions are good for ANYONE, so—for the love of future generations who have no choice but to inherit the consequences of your stupidity—stop spreading them!

Since nobody seems to have figured it out, let me clue you in: the most important issue actually facing our country today is that people like you are all somehow overwhelmingly content not just to encourage but to in fact participate in this utterly-meritless popularity circus - eagerly offering up your lives and livelihoods to a smorgasbord of insipid clowns from every neighborhood of Out-of-Touchville as they compete in ridiculous battles of vacuous rhetorical bullshit. ("Yayyyy! I hope my team winz!" – YOU). Fucking puppet theater! Unbelievable!

I know, I know, those candidates are all some seriously-impressive idiots, too - but please don't feel compelled to further fuck up society just because you can relate to that. YOU may perpetually be in the market for fashionable stupidity, but you're just a waste of fucking space; the rest of us prefer to avoid wearing our assholes around our collarbones.

Also, when you get around to it,
kill yourselves.

Sincerest nuclear wishes, 

The Voice of Fucking Reason!

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. :)

Common Sense, Made Common Knowledge

False beliefs consume the mental space that truth requires.

Unless you choose rightly, your very thoughts will harm.

Society is pay-to-lose only.

Aw, shucks - all ya need to do is freedom-ize our current state of affairs/imprisonment/enslavement in the right light, and you'll realize that it's really the best thing for us.

Consider this: if the only cost of living the American Dream is that we have to live the American Dream, then everyone is technically getting their American Dream-life for free!

–and there's no "fear" in "free."

When we apply the transitive property of rhetoric and take into account the commutative property of cognitive dissonance, I personally feel all of my would-be fears assuage themselves.

Yes, life is surely good. Life must be good! –'cause if it wasn't, and we were all just pretending it was, then that would actually make life pretty fuckin' horrifying...