Have I gone nuts or something?

Two topics today:
First, how the hell can I like both Johnson and Obama?

This is a question that I've been asked by a number of people, I suspect in attempts to discredit my knowledge of politics. Of course, we all want to believe that those who disagree with us are idiots, or at the very least, ignorant on whatever given subject... and we generally measure the knowledge of others by how much they agree with us. Arrogant, to say the least - to act in such a way assumes that we are the ultimate authority on a subject.

On the surface, perhaps, it would seem that the two are complete opposites - more so than Obama and Romney, even. But, that's only true if your attention is only focused on the current hot-button issues. Government spending, certainly... Obamacare... stuff like that. What about liberties and equal rights? Johnson supports equal rights for same sex couples, and so does Obama. On women's issues, hard to compare... they are pretty close. I guess it would depend on perspective. Obama said he would get rid of the Patriot Act, but sadly renewed it. I figure Johnson would be the one to actually end it. They both advocate internet freedom, although it's easier to trust Johnson's hands-off approach on this. Johnson wants to legalize marijuana, Obama has kept quiet on the subject... but has admitted to smoking the stuff in the past. Gun rights... well, I was nervous about Obama at first, but he has so far stood up for them pretty well even in the face of foreign leaders practically demanding that he tighten gun laws or ban them altogether.

The thing is that both candidates really want about the same thing, though Obama's more a politician (if you've been keeping up with my blog, you know that that's not exactly a compliment). They both want to improve the economy, but they have different plans. They both want America and its people as a whole to be better off, but go about it different ways. Different paths to (hopefully) the same goal. Obama's idea is to give more government aid, while Johnson's is to have the government back off. Both ideas can work, and both ideas can seriously fuck things up, all according to how it's done.

The Republicans, for example, claim to want government to back off. However, their idea of backing off is to deregulate for corporations and to give more and more tax breaks to the wealthiest, and will do any favors they can for the wealthiest while screwing over the rest and and accusing any who object of "class warfare." They are, after all, helping themselves out in doing so. Kind of like voting themselves an off-the-record pay raise. But, that's the extent of their "small government" - they still want to legislate your morals.

The Democrats on the other hand... the nannies. Their legislation tends to intrude on personal decision making, such as Bloomberg's ban on big soft drinks. And while well intentioned, raising the minimum wage in itself isn't going to work - it'll cause lay-off's and price increases, thus increasing the overall cost of living. Let's remember, business owners and execs (even the ones that really are rolling in the money) don't want to take a pay cut just to give their workers pay that they can actually live on. Also, while I don't support relaxing current environmental regulations, tightening them unnecessarily in the US really won't do much until other nations catch up. Comparatively speaking, we're not doing too terrible hear. However, look at China. Look at Mexico. Fiscally speaking, it would take much less for them to catch up to us. We should still always look for improvements, but let's also let our own businesses catch up on their profits a bit and encourage other nations to catch up on their pollution controls.

Anyway, between Obama and Johnson, I think it would be a win if either one of these candidates won. Romney, not so much. For me, the tie-breaker may be Obamacare, which brings me to my second topic:

How the hell can I support Obamacare?

Won't it completely bankrupt the healthcare industry? Think of it this way - you're driving your brand new black 2012 Dodge Challenger (WANT!), then someone runs a red light and smashes into your new beauty of a car. No problem, insurance will take care of that... oh? What's that? The other driver doesn't have insurance? Damn... well, guess it's a good thing you had to pay extra for that uninsured driver coverage, huh? Except while the hell should you have to?

Consider this: a lot of Americans don't have health insurance. It's not because they're irresponsible; it's because they can't afford it. Or they get denied because of pre-existing conditions. Not all employers provide health insurance, after all... my last two jobs didn't. Nonetheless, if someone walks into a doctor's office in extreme pain or in need of emergency help, legally, they have to help at least to stabilizing the patient... thankfully. The value of someone's life shouldn't depend on how rich they are. This leaves the patient with a debt to the doctor's office/clinic/hospital... and in many cases, the patient will not be able to pay off said debt, leaving the doctor's office/clinic/hospital with a bad debt and not much they can do to collect it.

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) addresses these issues. First, insurance companies won't be able to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions... and make no mistake, they will find any asinine reason they can to do so. Childhood asthma, depression, PCOS (Poly-Cystic Ovary Syndrome... fairly common, many cases go undiagnosed and untreated)... the list goes on. Insurance companies are a business after all, and they want their profits.

Next, the question of insurance companies being hurt, or them jacking up their rates. Obama essentially called bullshit on the insurers on this one in the form of the 85-15 rule. That is, 85% of their funds go to patient care with the remaining 15% used for whatever they feel like - administration, whatever. 

As for the question of the metaphorical uninsured driver... that's where the especially controversial individual mandate comes in. Basically, everyone is going to pay into healthcare somehow, if not through insurance, then through a fine or whatever you want to call it, that is withheld from tax refunds. I suppose you could call said fine your annual insurance dues.

I think that Obamacare does deserve a chance. It likely will reduce overall costs associated with healthcare on the private level as well as the government level as well as giving everyone at least minimal health insurance of some kind.

Awww...

Such a pity... Rush Limbaugh chose not to heed my advice:

Rush Limbaugh, afraid of losing too much money (and thus losing his spot on the radio waves), apologizes to Sandra Fluke.

Ah well... This is Rush Limbaugh we're talking about. It's not a matter of "if," but "when" he puts his foot in his mouth yet again. And the thing is that only a fool would believe his apology to her is sincere. His apology in truth is not to her, but to his advertisers that effectively sign his paycheck. For those of you boycotting his advertisers, I'd really recommend you continue this boycott.

He said it was an attempt at humor. This might be believable if he'd only insulted her on one occasion. He didn't. He had previous opportunities to apologize, and he responded by insulting her again, along with laughing at those who took offense. Yeah, he saw humor in it, no doubt. But not the type of humor you get from say, watching American Pie or going to a comedy club or something like that. It's the type of humor a bully finds in shoving a seemingly weaker kid's face into a toilet. And his apology is the same as when that bully is faced with going to a boot camp for juvenile delinquents.

You see, Limbaugh is afraid of real work... for all his hawking in talking about people mooching off the system and not wanting to find real work, radio is all he has. He doesn't have any college degree. In his mother's words, "he flunked out of everything," and "didn't seem interested in anything except radio." Not only that, but he managed to skip out on the Vietnam draft, on account of an ingrown ass hair.

He will bluster and bloviate, but when confronted with losing his advertisers, and thus losing his job... well, he makes lame excuses. But not before digging himself in much deeper, of course.

Like I said, I don't buy his apology even for a second. Regardless of who he overtly addressed in the apology, it was in reality made only to and because of his advertisers. So, for now at least, we're stuck with the oxycodone-addicted hypocritical blowhard misogynist chicken hawk.

The Wit and Wisdom of Rush Limbaugh

With a title like this, I'm tempted to leave this post blank to make my point. But... oh, what the hell! I just can't resist!

Oh Rushy, Rushy, Rushy... what are you getting yourself into? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, him having coined the term "feminazi." Now, I won't say this term is all bad... but horribly over used. I've known some "feminists" who believe that all men are evil and should die in a fire... or worse, if they can think of it. I wouldn't argue about the term "feminazi" being applied to them. To me, real feminism is about equality, not superiority. Let's see... if hating women is called misogyny, what would hating men be called? Misandry? Looked it up, and that apparently is the proper term, but not one I've ever actually heard being used. My spell-checker didn't recognize it, but it did recognize "misogyny." Reflective of society's double standards toward the issue too, I suppose. Society is rather accepting of bashing men and taking it in stride... but if the same things were said about women that are said about men... forget about it.

For those who haven't seen the news, I give you:

-Limbaugh calls Sandra Fluke, birth control advocate, a slut.

-Limbaugh dismisses Danica Patrick, race car driver, as a woman driver over her support of birth control measure.

-Limbaugh, unrepentant of calling her a slut, suggests Fluke make online sex videos.

At this point, advertisers are distancing themselves from him.You'd think that he'd be scrambling to save face at this point. That after making not one, not two, but at least three misogynist comments in regards to the same issue, he'd be meekly making some kind of apology.

Nope, not this conservative megalomaniac:

Limbaugh thinks it's "hilarious."

Many are calling on him to stop and to apologize. Me, I encourage him to keep on going. Why? Because I don't like the guy. He's a figurehead for what I don't like about the side I disagree with. He's one I'm glad I don't have on my side. So by all means - Rush, if you're reading this, keep with those misogynist comments! You'll show 'em!

Vaccines and Autism

There is at present, as many know, a growing movement opposing vaccination, saying that it causes autism. The suspicions may seem well-founded, as many parents with autistic children first noticed symptoms after a round of vaccinations. Dig a little deeper, and you find that in most vaccines, a mercury derivative called thimerosal is used as a preservative. Thimerosal does have some well-established antibacterial and antifungal properties, but the mercury it's derived from also has its own very well-known neurotoxicity. Logic does suggest that autism could easily be linked to a neurotoxin such as mercury, especially in the more sensitive bodies of infants.

Sharing a bit of medical knowledge here, it is crucial that such preservatives be added to multi-dose vials of parenteral (injectable) medications. Such things must be kept sterile, as the body simply does not have built-in defenses against things being injected directly into the blood or muscle. From a financial standpoint, the multi-dose vials are preferred because as anyone who goes to Costco or Sam's Club knows, you save when you buy in bulk. In this case, the savings is most obvious on the packaging. This of course makes it the preference of the insurance companies who pay the healthcare fees, the healthcare providers who order them, and the patients who receive them and pay the co-pays or the entire cost.

And so, considering that it's been used since the 1930's with minimal if any problems, it just seemed to make sense to keep using thimerosal. Yet we have a seemingly growing number of kids with autism.

Autism itself is a poorly understood disease. For my own part, I suspect there might be a few different diseases under the blanket term of autism. No one seems to know what causes it, and it hits some harder than others. It's upsetting to parents, as their child may never be able to live independently and achieve all those dreams they have for them, and for the children who have it and have some function, it's also upsetting. They have a harder time fitting in, and tend to have sensory issues which may prevent them from enjoying many of the same things their peers enjoy.

The thing is though that the link between vaccines and autism has never been established, and is close to being debunked, thanks in large part to a Danish Study. There are many groups who spend their time and efforts looking for flaws in the study, but it looks fairly straightforward to me. I actually rather wish that autism could be attributed to thimerosal, as then we would know and could solve the problem in short order. But so far, the evidence is stacking up against this mercury derivative in childhood vaccinations being the culprit. That being the case, one could easily make the argument that efforts and funding could be better put to use in finding the real culprit than in beating this dead horse.

It is easy to understand however the concern about any form of mercury in any amount being injected into your infant. And you are not alone in this concern. As it turns out, thimerosal is being phased out of childhood vaccines and is now absent from most, if not all, childhood vaccines. I consider this to be good news. While there is no scientific evidence thus far of the chemical causing problems in the small amounts that it's used, that doesn't mean we won't find the evidence later. If you question this however, by all means talk to your healthcare provider to verify that the vaccine your child is being given doesn't contain thimerosal.

In either case, I would say that getting the vaccinations outweighs the possible risks, unless the possible risks are a known allergy or such like. Thimerosal aside, the way a vaccine works is fairly natural. You've heard the phrase that you can't catch the same cold twice? Well, that's essentially what a vaccine does... except that you can skip that rather inconvenient "getting sick" part.

The first vaccine was created by an English physician by the name of Edward Jenner. The vaccine was against smallpox. He had noticed that milkmaids seemed somehow immune to the smallpox epidemics, and this got him thinking. If you remember your nursery rhymes and the like, I'm sure you remember some that talk glowingly of the beautiful complexions of milkmaids. Consider that this was in contrast to the faces of those who had suffered smallpox, which did leave some ugly scars on the faces of its survivors. Further, it was theorized that the protection of smallpox came from the milkmaids' having to suffer cowpox, a relatively mild disease whose victims typically fully recover. It wasn't hard for Jenner to put two and two together.

In an experiment that would have had him arrested in modern society, and perhaps justifiably so, he infected an eight year old boy with cowpox from a milkmaid's fresh, juicy lesions. The boy predictably came down with cowpox, then recovered. A couple months later, he then inoculated the boy with smallpox from a fresh and juicy smallpox lesion. The boy didn't get sick. Turned out the two were similar enough that the body's safeguards against a re-infection of cowpox also protected against smallpox.

And that's more or less the way vaccine works, the very name "vaccine" being a tribute to Jenner's work (vac- referring to a cow in Latin). Smallpox is something that's wiped out entire civilizations, and had an overall fatality rate of 30%. Notice I use the past tense. This is because, thanks to vaccinations, it has been eradicated from the world's population. It still exists, I'm certain, in various freezers around the world "just in case," and with this, there is the potential for it to be used in bioterrorism (think nuclear is scary?). But the point is that you didn't have it, and chances are, no one you know has had it. It's not killing people now. The last case in the US was in 1949, the last in the world having been in the late 1970's.

You can also thank vaccination programs for the fact that Polio (link goes to informative photo gallery) is now more often referred to in the past tense. While not eradicated, it hasn't been seen in the US for decades, and is well on its way to being eradicated.

While it is easy to forget these plagues in today's world, there was a time not that long ago where they were common. Kids with withered limbs from Polio (remember Franklin Roosevelt?), mass graves from the 1918 influenza pandemic... the list goes on. It is good to have legitimate concerns for your children, but it's also important to protect them and remember that ultimately, scientists are on our side.

Sorry about the quality of the video, it's the only one I could find of this clip on YouTube. Before the start of the video, the mother explained to House that she refused on principle to vaccinate her child, also talking about how she only gives the kid her all-natural breast milk as opposed to formula.

Same-Sex Marriage

First of all, I'd like to say that I'm very happy that Prop 8 was overturned as unconstitutional. Perhaps it's obvious by now that I agree with that assertion. Of course though, not everyone's happy about it, else I wouldn't figure it's worth blogging about.

The opponents of same-sex marriage honestly only have religion as their argument. However, a pesky little thing called the First Amendment makes purely religious arguments invalid. So, opponents have been forced to come up with other arguments:

"It's not natural!"

Only a very small step away from being a religious argument, this seems to be an attempt to merge religious with scientific. Unsuccessfully, though. For one thing, we as humans do a lot of things that aren't natural. Why should we stop at something that causes no harm? Another argument they make though is that humans are the only ones "perverse" enough to practice homosexuality. Guess again, suckers. So... I guess it is natural, then?

"Homosexuals spread AIDS!"

Well, so do straights. Straights also spread any number of other STD's and other diseases. A lot of society's more hateful members like to think of AIDS as god's punishment for gays. What about all the other diseases and disorders, though? If Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church) were to come down with, say... syphilis, who would he blame it on? Or what about just having a monster heart attack during one of their protests? Would it be god's punishment then? Diseases being called a punishment from god is nothing new. In the old days, the smallpox vaccine was considered by many to be a terrible sin, as it interfered with what they perceived as god's plan/retribution. There's some compassion for you, huh? Anyway, there are several different disease-spreading behaviors. Shall we ban them all, or just keep using it as an excuse to discriminate against some? Let's not forget about certain races being more prone to some diseases - Native and African Americans seem more vulnerable to diabetes. Native Americans and southern Europeans seem more vulnerable to milk allergies. African Americans seem vulnerable to heart problems. Asians seem disproportionately vulnerable to certain kinds of cancer, TB, and Hepatitis B. The list goes on. Shall we ban all those and just move on to Hitler's "super race" ideals?

I've seen many opponents of same-sex marriage become very angry when the issue is compared to the older civil rights movements involving racial equality and the like, but can anyone tell me what the differences really are? That is, without bringing up religion?

Religion and Medicine

Catholic church is furious about being required to provide birth control through church-linked hospitals and healthcare.

Admittedly, this did require some thought on my part. My initial reaction is, "so the Catholic church hates birth control. What else is new?" My feelings about how much involvement the church has taken in politics and in holding back science as a whole are no secret. This did require a little more thought, however. The reason? Quite simply because I do respect the First Amendment.

The First Amendment does protect religious freedom... it does say that government and churches should not tread on each other's turf, despite how often the churches in particular try to do so. I do however believe in leading by example, as "...but they started it!" comes off as a rather childish argument. So initially, it does seem that there is some merit to the church's argument that the government just treaded on church turf.

Let's take a closer look, though. When you start looking at the various hospitals, it seems that a lot of them have some sort of religious affiliation at least by name. Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Catholic (or mention of saints), etc. For one reason or another, healthcare seems dominated by religious organizations. I suppose it makes sense to expand spiritual healing to physical healing, and the churches actually do have some history of this, at least as far back as medieval nuns and monks in Christianity, and druids with the pre-Christian Celts, and the list goes on, I'm sure.

The question however is whether we should be able to deny treatment based on religious beliefs. Should atheists or other non-believers be turned away from such church-connected hospitals? Birth control in itself may seem a small issue. But for the woman who just got raped and needs a Plan B pill, it's something of a bigger deal. It's also a predecessor to a bigger issue. What about those churches who feel that HIV/AIDS is a punishment from their god, and therefore should receive no treatment? It wouldn't be anything new - the same has happened throughout history, whether it be disease such as smallpox, or a tragedy such as an earthquake or hurricane. Should any organization that can call itself a hospital be allowed to deny treatment over religious beliefs on these? I don't think so.

While it is kind of churches to build these hospitals, if they are going to treat them as public hospitals (not to mention accepting government aid and funding as such), then they must accept, at least in their hospitals, the same treatments accepted by other healthcare organizations. No one is dictating that churches change their doctrines, just that their hospitals catch up.