A TrumpWorld Cabinet of Curiosities

 

Pictures often are worth a thousand words--take a look at the picture above of Elon Musk, standing, not seated at the table, while Donald Trump is not even at the head of the table, but slumped, unnoticed by anyone, apparently drifting off to sleep. Just a podgy senior citizen with his hands in his lap, while everyone is listening to the real boss, who has not even bothered to put on a suit for the occasion but is dressed, as he generally is, like some close approximation an adolescent might make at adult clothing. He threw on a big-boy jacket over his play-clothes. 

It's not exactly The Last Supper, but what if I told you one of these folks assembled would betray Trump and every last one of them had eaten of his body and blood? 

We are getting on to a political Carnival. Lent for you, and Fat Tuesday for rich motherfuckers forever, so I felt like sprinkling a little Catholic consciousness over the above tableau. Also, I am very, very mean. 

I thought to myself when I perused Twitter's commentariat regarding the first cabinet meeting that what we were looking at was a Dunning-Kruger Group Therapy session where no one realized what their problem was and no one was getting any better. 

Land of a Thousand Outbreaks

 

We've been looking at the avian flu situation for a few years, so I guess what I want people to know about what we are looking at with respects to future outbreaks or epidemic situations, what we have got is not a "plandemic" in the conspiracy-fueled mindset of people who feel like masks and vaccines and the like are social control mechanisms fueled by some Big Pharma control or whatever.  You know who has cared about avian flu? People who care about birds. We used to have a birdfeeder out back of Strangely Estates. Then, we realized it might not be a great idea to have random birds congregating together if we couldn't regularly ensure we were cleaning out old feed, rinsing off poo, etc. 

We still have the birdbath up. It's heated. We get starlings, cardinals, jays. I don't know if it's a good thing or not. I understand there's a lot of risk with avian flu re: waterfowl. I look forward to the seasonal influx of geese along the Delaware. I don't want to see what I think we will. There's a good chance H5N1 and H5N9 are everywhere. This is why there are higher egg prices and massive bird livestock culls--but we are also seeing H5N1 in dairy cattle herds. 

Dr. Carson Makes the Right Point

Just to stay with the topic of vaccination for a moment longer--today a handful of possible presidential hopefuls made comments about where they stand on vaccination. Now, I guess my last post tells you where I stand. NJ Gov. Chris Christie expressed a need for "balance" regarding vaccination--which was elaborated as follows:

Christie, however, said, “There has to be a balance and it depends on what the vaccine is, what the disease type is, and all the rest.” He added, “Not every vaccine is created equal and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others.”

Hm. I'll admit I don't get a flu shot, myself.  I have the social schedule of a shut-in and don't regularly deal face-to-face with the public. But even so, I'd definitely get one if I dealt with kids or the olds. Even if the flu shot isn't 100% effective--it would be worth it to reduce the likelihood that I'm going around infecting people who, unlike me, aren't strong as an ox and wouldn't shake the flu as easily. But I kind of think he isn't signifying about things like the yearly crapshoot that is the flu vaccine. I'm not sure what he's talking about. The MMR vaccine is the topic of the day, and it's very effective. But you know...the HPV vaccination was a little controversial, no?  (As in, yes, as in, why do people think they can be taken seriously if they just quote some anecdotal stuff from random acquaintances?)

KY Sen. Rand Paul also had some things to say about vaccinations, and the possible link to "profound mental disorders". That connection? Not at all proven. Correlation is not causation. Besides which, Rand Paul hangs with Alex Jones who thinks there is a weather machine. That's only a couple hops from worrying about the lizard-people who run the UN.

But Dr. Ben Carson, who, don't get me wrong, says a lot of things I don't agree with, makes the overall point of why vaccination is important:

“Although I strongly believe in individual rights and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit, I also recognize that public health and public safety are extremely important in our society,” Carson said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.

Carson said diseases of the past should not be allowed to return because of people avoiding vaccines on religious or philosophical grounds.

“Certain communicable diseases have been largely eradicated by immunization policies in this country and we should not allow those diseases to return by foregoing safe immunization programs, for philosophical, religious, or other reasons when we have the means to eradicate them,” Carson said in the statement.

Science is Awesome and Measles is Bad

It seems really disturbing to me that there are people in this day and age who have caught the terrifying bug that is liable to cause thousands of deaths--called anti-vaccination hysteria. It's appalling, and stupid, that enough people are so flagrantly scientifically illiterate that a disease that was declared virtually eliminated in the US as of 2000, has come roaring back due to people who have swallowed some kind of nonsense "purity of our precious bodily fluids" codswallop. 

For a little bit of a primer on what vaccinations are--your body has a splendid disease-fighting mechanism called "anti-bodies". You make them if you've been infected with a disease and survive it. A vaccine provokes your body to have the antibodies that fight certain diseases to keep you safe from that particular infection. People have known how this basic principle of immunization works for over two centuries. That's a really long time in medical science-terms. We're getting good at it by now, and the MMR vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella is incredibly effective. And is in no way proven to be associated with autism.

Measles, on the other hand, is a pretty awful disease, which is why science developed vaccination against it in the first place. Measles is associated with blindness, secondary pneumonia, encephalitis, and there have been cases of peripheral gangrene. Yes, that means really sick patients can lose limbs. Skin doesn't necessarily get just a nice, neat little rash and you pour on the calamine and so on, like with chickenpox, which everyone my age got. It's a dense rash and skin can split, like with the poor little guy in the picture above.