Category: Rants

A Pet Peeve

Something that gets me steaming is the current fashion opposing the vaccination of children. Some perspective:

Even if the myth [that vaccines cause autism] were true, not vaccinating your children would be a poor solution.

It has been such a long time since we’ve had to deal with polio and smallpox, that people have forgotten just how scary they were. In 1952, at the height of the polio epidemics, around 14 out of 100,000 of every Americans had paralytic polio. 300-500 million people died of smallpox in the 20th century. Add in hepatitis A, hepatitis B, mumps, measles, rubella, diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, HiB, chicken pox, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, pneumonia and the flu, and no wonder experts estimate that “fully vaccinating all U. S. children born in a given year from birth to adolescence saves an estimated 33,000 lives and prevents an estimated 14 million infections.”

There may indeed be dangers with vaccinations. But the dangers of not vaccinating far, far outweigh them.

The Rule of Law

If someone told you that you live in a country where anyone can denounce you for something you say (calling someone a “loser”, for example) to a government tribunal, where your accuser’s fees are paid by the taxpayer, and you are responsible for yours, where an unelected bureaucrat will sit in judgement on the case without reference to any law whatsoever, and that these government tribunals have a 100% record of conviction, would you believe it? Or would you think they’re talking about some third-world dictatorship?

If you live in Canada, you’re living in it.

Censorship

Mark Steyn skewers the artistes who’ve been crying “censorship!” over a bill to deny government funding to blatantly offensive movie productions:

But free money is not the same as free speech. Nobody is stopping any of these filmmakers from making their films; they’re simply stopping the cheque. It would not seem unreasonable that any truly “bold” “courageous” “radical” “transgressive” content should have to work a little to find a publisher, producer or distributor.

Putting you in jail for your movie is censorship. Refusing to hand out taxpayers’ money for your masturbatory fantasies is nowhere close.

If your art is so good, then you should be able to find backers.

Every Once In a While

It is useful to remember that what we see on the “news” is in fact NOT typical of life in general, but usually an exceptionally rare and unusual occurrence:

The current employment rate is 95.3 percent.
Out of 300 million Americans, roughly 299.999954 million were not murdered today.
Day after day, some 35,000 commercial flights traverse our skies without incident.
The vast majority of college students who got drunk last weekend did not rape anyone, or kill themselves or anyone else in a DUI or hazing incident. On Monday, they got up and went to class, bleary-eyed but otherwise okay.