Land of the free home of the rich
What really scares me is that they all have significantly cheaper health care AND education, which means Americans not only make the least, they pay the most.
…wait, what?
Yup.
P.S. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, this is the fault of both parties and the stagnation of wages since the 70s. If you keep voting for the same two options, you’re going to get the same crap out either end.
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.
“I feel all sleepy, ” she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her.
That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.
On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.
It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness.
Believe me, it is. In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk.
In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out.
Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year.
Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another.
At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections.
About 20 will die.
LET THAT SINK IN.
Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles.
So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised?
They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation.
So what on earth are you worrying about?
It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised.
Roald Dahl, 1986
(via brain-confetti)
TEAM VACCINE
(via watchoutfordinosaurs)
NINETEEN EIGHTY SIX.
roald dahl was calling out the anti-vaccination movement as self indulgent bullshit //thirty god damn years ago//.
(via ultralaser)
Over 1,000 preventable deaths and 128,000 preventable illnesses since 2007 and counting
And this is only in recent history. I can’t imagine the numbers if we had data all the way back to 1986.
(via autistiel)
And thanks to anti-vaxxers, measles is back in the United States.
(via thebicker)
Hey so to protect one of my friends I’ve decided to help her out by posting this on my blog instead. Please share this!
“This is Ian Foote. My husband and I met this man at one of my shows at the Rickshaw Theatre in East Vancouver last week and I added him on Facebook that same night because he and his girlfriend seemed nice enough.
WARNING TO WOMEN IN EAST VAN.
This man is a potential rapist who openly admits to having to forcibly stop himself from raping on the daily. Please spread this around, I want everyone in Vancouver to know to stay far away from this man.”
(Vancouver BC)
Please please please signal boost the fuck out of this you never know where your followers are. Thank you ♥
What fucking piece of shit.
This is a nightmare. He thinks he’s being clever and cute about his disgusting tendencies. And I’m sure once all of this gets out and the world understands what a monster he is he’ll claim it was all one big joke or social experiment or some shit. Or that he was being sarcastic to prove a point.
Okay so the really stupid — no wait, let me start again. One of the MANY stupid things about this kind of argument: the line that borders how much is showing “too much”, the outfit that supposedly “forces men to think about fucking them”— is completely and utterly arbitrary.
There was a time when women showing their ANKLES was utterly scandalous in most of the western world, and would have caused men like this to say “well she was asking for it, look how she was dressed.”
And what about cultural variance? During a slightly later time when women in the west could “safely” expose their ankles (but not their knees!), there were countries in the “British Empire” (colonialism being a whole other post) whose cultures forbade their arms to be exposed.
And so on.
Would looking at my ankles make your “inner caveman” think about fucking me? How about looking at my elbows? No? Then how did your “inner caveman” get slightly more “civilized” than the inner cavemen of the 1910s, and how did their inner cavemen get more civilized than the Victorian ones?
The bullshit “oh but it’s just evolution/biology!” argument doesn’t hold up to even the tiniest examination. “Modesty” rules have never been about anything but controlling women, and “evolution” arguments about behavior have never been about anything but blaming women for whatever happens to them when they step out of male control.
Mutant 101 – Professor Xavier Should Put In A Call To Her Parents – 5 Year Old Mia Stares Down marvelentertainment‘s Cast Of Guardians Of The Galaxy As She Crushes Them In A Game Of GotG Trivia On jimmykimmellive [X]
Vin Diesel in the background looking at her like “SHE’S PERFECT. WANT ONE.”
I thought girls didn’t like Super Heroes.
You thought what?
Also, bless five-year-old girls who can confidently pronounce the words ‘cybernetic enhancements’ because they’re so interested in superhero adventures that they saw no obstacle to learning anything at all to understand them better.
And can do it wearing a pink flower headband, if they feel like it.
GIRLS LIKE SUPERHEROES. GIRLS LIKE COMICS. GIRLS HAVE LIKED THESE THINGS FOR AS LONG AS THEY HAVE BEEN AVAILABLE TO LIKE.
(behold, three girls and one boy avidly reading new comic books in New York City, 1947, photographed by Ruth Orkin)
What girls don’t like is when they’re patronised, and herded towards titles designed according to what grown men think girls are supposed to like, and ignored with regard to titles that those men assume are just for boys and men. What girls don’t like is not being allowed to choose for themselves what they like.
This is not a new concept. This is noted in Chaucer. What every woman most desires is to choose her own way.
Tell me again why a women’s liberation movement is no longer needed.
Dear “I don’t need feminism” crowd…
“The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday stood by its ruling that a dentist acted legally when he fired an assistant because he found her too attractive and worried he would try to start an affair. Coming to the same conclusion as it did in December, the all-male court found that bosses can fire employees they see as threats to their marriages, even if the subordinates have not engaged in flirtatious or other inappropriate behavior. The court said such firings do not count as illegal sex discrimination because they are motivated by feelings, not gender.” [x]
Further proof, were it needed, that men are the weaker gender and need to be secluded in purdah so they aren’t driven into evil by their inability to control themselves or their impulses.
It’s for their own good, really. We’ll make sure they have wide-screen televisions and hot baths, and they can play fantasy football and work out in the gym to while away the hours until they’re called for. It’s what their nature wants, after all. They’re clearly not suited to be out in the world, making difficult decisions that might distract them from their sole purpose of contributing seed…
printing this
And don’t let them do it to themselves because someone else told them you wanted it.
“Hey sexy lemme talk to you”
“No thanks”
“MAN FUCK YOU YOU UGLY ANYWAY HO I WAS JUST PRETENDING TO LIKE YOU 1 CAN GET 3 MORE BITCHES THAT LOOK BETTER THAN YOU”
Yes, you. The gun-waving, amendment-spouting people of the NRA. Did any of you show up in Ferguson, MO to protect anyone’s rights? Did you protect any of the peaceful demonstrators? Did you offer to provide any security against the looting? Any of you? No one?
Yeah, that’s what I thought. The only thing you want to protect is your toys, your individual, selfish rights. Your rights to weapons you don’t even have the courage to use for what you repeatedly claim is their intended purpose. Did any of you even show up to protest, openly, as members of the NRA?
Hell, you didn’t even SAY anything. Couldn’t even have been troubled to risk a bit of face and, as a united organization, denounce what was happening there. As defenders of ANYone’s rights, to do anything at all, you are worse than useless.
Go away. You have nothing to contribute to conversations about the safety and well-being of any country’s citizens. You are liars and cowards, and have no place in discussions about who should be allowed to “keep and bear arms” when other people are dying as a result.
So what you’re saying is that those folk of Ferguson who are members of the NRA should have made an issue of that fact while they were stopping looting, crafting makeshift gas masks, and protesting. That the fact that they’re members of the NRA is as important as any of the rest of what was and is going on there.
What you’re saying is that you /wanted/ a gun rights organization to take sides in a conversation that had little or nothing to do with their focus, and try to make it all about them, at a time when that would have been the rudest possible thing to do — and if they /had/, I assure you, you’d’ve been just as upset and found that to be just as good a reason to tear them down.
Are you trying to say that the reason Mike Brown was killed was because he had a gun, because the officer felt threatened by the possibility that Mike Brown had a gun? Because I haven’t seen a /thing/ about that in the last week. There’s a whole lot of bullshit about what happened that night, in that confrontation, but so far nobody’s said a word about the dead party being armed.
If you’d like to know what actual NRA members think about the circumstances, I can put you in touch with a large cluster of them — many of them have blogs that are well-known within the gun rights community, and if you’re willing to have a conversation with them, I’m sure you can get some actual answers to the rhetorical questions you’re asking.
If you don’t want to do that, kindly shut up.
Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.
Some ticks carries a disease, so we’re supposed to avoid them all.
Some sharks bite people, so we’re supposed to always be cautious in the ocean.
Some snakes are venomous, so if you can’t decide whether it’s deadly or not, assume deadly.
But no, not all men.
