Darwin marches on

Just one more generation and your grandchildren will be crippled, blind and dumb as posts, having ruined your universities. Your want to talk entitlement? Boy, do you deserve it!

Having been raised as children incapable of withstanding the reality of life, even when sheltered at Yale, the new crop of liberals are exposing their children to diseases of the past. Not out of nostalgia, one presumes, but because they can’t think. And, of course, out of a sense of entitlement.

Q: There’s a perception that vaccine refusal is especially common among affluent, well-educated, politically liberal parents—is there any truth to that? 

S.M.: It’s dangerous to make broad generalizations about a group, but anecdotally and from the overall data that’s been collected it seems to be people who are very actively involved in every possible decision regarding their children’s lives. I think it relates to a desire to take uncertainty out of the equation. And autism represents such an unknown. We still don’t know what causes it and we still don’t have good answers for how to treat it. So I think that fear really resonates.

Also I think there’s a fair amount of entitlement. Not vaccinating your child is basically saying I deserve to rely on the herd immunity that exists in a population. At the most basic level it’s saying I believe vaccines are potentially harmful, and I want other people to vaccinate so I don’t have to. And for people to hide under this and say, “Oh, it’s just a personal decision,” it’s being dishonest. It’s a personal decision in the way drunk driving is a personal decision. It has the potential to affect everyone around you.

Q: But why liberals?

S.M.: I think it taps into the organic natural movement in a lot of ways.

I talked to a public health official and asked him what’s the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there’s a Whole Foods. I sort of laughed, and he said, “No, really, I’m not joking.” It’s those communities with the Prius driving, composting, organic food-eating people.

Q: In society as a whole, why does there continue to be so much fear of vaccines?

S.M.: I think there are a bunch of different answers to that. A really big one is that the fears of the repercussions of not vaccinating have become notional. Most people in our generation don’t know people who had polio or don’t know families where a child was blinded by rubella. So when there’s any concern at all about vaccines, no matter how ungrounded in scientific evidence, it’s like you’re taking an infinitesimal risk against what almost seems like no risk.

Walt gets testy over this kind of stuff

He provides the following snapshot of the Methodist Church (across from the YMCA) nativity scene. Well yes, cardboard figures do seem a bit on the cheap side, but these are Methodists, not Episcopalians, for Christ’s sake, poor as church mice. You want a real creche scene? Look across the street from the other Y, the YWCA – I’m sure the rich catholics have put up something more in tune with the mores and values of Greenwich.

By the way, did you know that wherever there are four Episcopalians gathered, there’s always a fifth?

 

 

She was against gay marriage until she was for it, now she flip-flops on deporting illegal immigrant’s children

Off to algebra class

Uh oh: the base doesn’t like the idea of deporting children (anyone, actually), so now Hillary doesn’t like the idea either.

So who are these “children” Clinton and the mob want to keep around? Here’s a profile of four of them, all members of the El Salvador gang, M-13.

Gang murders on the rise in Washington suburbs. 

An 18-year-old was fatally stabbed in a gang-ordered slaying near the Montgomery-Prince George’s county border by assailants who threw heavy rocks down on him as he crawled away from the attack to a stream, according to court records filed in Montgomery District Court on Thursday.

The death of Denis Montufar-Bautista follows two other recent slayings in wooded areas of Montgomery that police have linked to a resurgence of the MS-13 gang. In one of those cases — the killing of a 34-year-old man found in a shallow grave — detectives filed charges this week against four people. The suspects range from 15 to 19 years old.

Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy raised the issue of gang violence last month. Since then, he said Thursday, he’s come to believe “the depth of the problem is even broader and wider than I ever imagined.”

He said five slayings in the county in 2015 are probably linked to MS-13.

“I don’t think we’ve ever reached this kind of gang violence in Montgomery County,” he said.

Julio­ Rivas-­Rosales, 15, made his first court appearance Thursday — charged as an adult with first-degree murder. Police say that he and others had been motivated by retaliation, because their target had reported being assaulted by four MS-13 gang members who attend High Point High School, in Beltsville, in Prince George’s County.

[Defense attorney] Lavigne spoke briefly about his client, saying he arrived in the United States about a year ago from his native El Salvador, lives with his mother and goes to school in Langley Park.

The earlier assault — allegedly at the hands of the High Point students — occurred on Oct. 28. It also was an act of retaliation, police said, because gang members said the victim, also an MS-13 member, had disrespected a higher-ranking member by having sex with that gang member’s girlfriend.

I’ll make what is surely an unfounded, prejudiced assumption here, and suggest that none of these students are on the Dean’s list. But, as the left says, they do enrich the educational community by bringing cultural diversity into the classroom.

Bonfires of the inanities

More air pollution coming to Brindisi

Effective January 1, Italians who drop their cigarette butts on the street instead of trash bins will be fined  €300 

Uh huh. Do they really expect them to also extinguish them before tossing? Fat chance.

You can’t always get what you want

Would you base your budget on this man?

A lesson for disappointed children on Christmas and for politicians all during the year. NY cigarette tax revenue plunges $400 million, additional $1.3 billion lost to “alternative sales” as smokers buy elsewhere.

“The Germans call it ‘schadenfreude’ when you take pleasure from another person’s misfortune,” noted Dan Mitchell, a tax expert at the Washington DC-based Cato Institute, commenting on the New York smoking tax fiasco.

“Normally, I would think people who feel this way have a character flaw.

“But not in this case,” he added. “I confess that I get a certain joy from this story because politicians are being punished for their greed. I like the fact that they have less money to waste.”

WWJD?

“And it’s got flat-screen TVs in every room” Brokers compete for business

Buy, rent, or pass? Riverdale mansion built for Jesus is on the market for $10 million.

Although never occupied by its intended tenant during its first incarnation, the 1920s mansion has been restored to something resembling its former glory (and beyond: the single bathroom has now been joined by 4 others) and can be had for just $10 million. No word whether the seller expects the bearded one himself to appear with a broker, or whether a mere mortal will buy it for his use, when he shows up, but she’s probably not too particular, so if you want a late Christmas present for the one who started all this, now’s your chance.