$ jlc (10,317)

6' x 6' x 10'. (Just came back inside to get phillips screwdriver and some cold tea.) It costs about $230 at Home Depot, but that was the 'best deal' I could find for that amount of space after some months of searching (inc. Craig's list).

I have a lot of problems with coyotes eating my chickens. I figure that a fence that is designed to keep Fido in will probably keep Coyote out.

It is warm outside today. The run looks quite sturdy, though, and I am pleased (thus far).

Jan

No, I will refrain from following up. Please excuse that I am not up to further research at the moment, but I have spent several hours of this morning doing interesting research on vaccines instead of assembling a dog run to use as a chicken coop.

Perhaps later, I can come back and chime in further.

Jan

I have recently finished a poem. It is not an 'easy read' because it is written in Late Middle English. (Yes, I glossed it.) It is about an English archer who is almost killed by a Swiss longswordsman at the Battle of Nancy in 1477. I will be glad to PM it to you if you would like to read it, but I don't think it would be of general interest.

Jan

Certainly, PeterAsher. I am glad to comment. Since it is a multi-paragraph letter, I will prefix my remarks with "Comment" below each paragraph.

“Governor Brown, I’m sure you recognize that children today are subject to no less than 3 times as many vaccines as the previous generation. Parents today are facing a much more significant question about vaccines than parents 30 years ago were facing."
Comment: We did not have these some of these vaccines a generation ago; the ones we did have, generally were required. Hep B vaccine was developed in the 1980's, but was used amongst risk populations (hospital workers; IV drug users) at first. This vaccine also protects against liver cancer, since 80% of the liver cancer is due to Hep B. Measles vaccine was put into general use in the 1970's; it resulted in a decrease from >700,000 cases per year to about 600 cases per year in the US. (Remember the death rate from measles is about 135/million.) Rotavirus vaccine is a recent addition - probably ~ 2010. It reduces by 50% the death rate for rotavirus diahorreal gastroenteritis.

"Something is broken, Governor Brown. Our children have never been sicker, and our requirement for vaccines has never been higher. I understand correlation doesn’t equal causation, but please point me to a study that shows the benefit of heavy metal exposure on the human body. Children in the U.S. are fraught with auto-immune diseases, deadly allergies, asthma, eczema, perpetual ear infections, and childhood cancers. Autism rates are staggeringly high (1 in 68)."
Comment: This paragraph conflates several different concepts into one emotional plea. The perceived ill health and allergies of our current generation of children is arguably more closely related to their hygienic upbringing (yes, that is what I meant to say) than to the presence of vaccines in their lives. It is also something of an illusion because 'routine death' of children has been replaced by 'allergies'. I know of no study that indicates that Thimerosal relates to autism. Asking for proof that heavy metals cause health is disingenuous at best, irrational at worst. She is probably right that 'something is broken' but the 'something' is probably not vaccines.

"According to the CDC, our infant mortality rate is higher than any of the other 27 first world countries! This wasn’t the case 30 years ago. Don’t you think we should figure out what is happening to our babies? I personally know four people that have lost their baby to SIDS. Is that normal?”
Comment: Again, an irrational and emotional plea. One of the benefits of capitalism is that it has genuinely and spontaneously raised the standard of living in poor countries at a faster rate than it has raised it in developed countries. This is not to say that our standard of living has not improved, but that the standards of living of poor people have improved dramatically - including their health care. The main factor in the poor rating of the US in terms of neonatal deaths is that the US experiences almost double the rates of pre-term delivery as the countries with the best statistics. If you correct for that factor, the the US doctors are just as good at taking care of a baby of a specific age of gestation and birth weight as anywhere else in the world. So the question becomes: why are women in the US so prone to pre-term deliveries? I do not know the answer, but I doubt that it is due to vaccines because many countries with low neonate death rates also require vaccinations: Singapore's vaccination list looks a lot like ours, and they have the lowest neonatal death rate in the world.

Jan

Calm down, man. This is not a PC feminist site, and we can actually talk here rather than just rant at each other.

I am quite in favor of men's lib, and am aware of the feminization of our culture. This is not a good thing. But it was not a good thing 50 years ago when women were fit into a tiny niche and expected to stay there, either.

We are going to have some pendulum swings before we settle into a balance of the sexes - and I think that is still a few generations in the future. It is difficult for women to get over being second class citizens - for millennia. We have, as a gender, gone waaay overboard and tried to make our society over in a feminine image. This is bad.

But if you think about it, there are worse things: Accompanying the feminization of society is the socialization of society. This is what this site is about: reversing socialism (in a particular manner). I do not think that it is just chance that feminization and socialism are going hand-in-hand: women have been 'taken care of' by benign sexual sugardaddies for generations, and their job has been to nurture their children in an environment that has nothing to do with economic worth. This is a deep emotional seedbed for the growth of a socialistic philosophy that spreads this 'nurture and be nurtured' attitude over the whole earth. I think that your concerns about feminism and socialism are two aspects of the same thing, Zenphamy - two weeds sprung from the same evil root.

I do not regard the scene in AS as a rape scene, but if it were I would ignore it and go on. Ayn Rand was a human woman, and hardly infallible. She had a brilliant clarity of vision with respect to many aspects of economics and the worth of the individual vs society and that is what I treasure. Her fantasies are her own (and if she makes them part of her books, oh well, that is her choice).

Jan
(If a man tried to 'male up' to me, I would put him through a wall. If he apologized and talked philosophy for a while afterwards...maybe I would consider him a candidate. Someone weak - go away; someone arrogant - tear his arms off; an equal seeking an equal - yay.)

Do not know what Muse inspired that...I might be afraid to meet her...

Jan, poet who sometimes woos the Muse

Wonderful response!

Jan

Morning, dino! You gave me a morning chuckle.

Jan

As you can see from my Very Long post above, I do not think the gov has a right to include private institutions in this decree. I think that pretty much everyone on this list agrees that CPS is among those public 'alphabet' institutions that should be abolished; some of the work they do is laudable, such as in cases of extreme abuse, but that those cases also represent 'breaking the law' and can be taken over by other LE agencies; the niche that CPS has to itself is taking children away from parents who are NOT breaking the law. As a result I expect that there will be few people who debate that CPS should be able to do this, or that private schools and home schools should be included in the requirement for vaccinations.

The concept that there will be a federal law that requires vaccinations for adults is interesting, but pretty speculative.

I think that the center point of the discussion is whether the State has the right to require vaccinations for public schools. I think they do, but only if this issue has been voted on and passed by the people.

I keep needing to remind myself to separate my emotional response to being forced to do something (even something I like, such as eat chocolate chip cookies) that I would do voluntarily vs the logic of whether the basic decision to get vaccinations is good. (I do tend to have a button push when someone makes me do something. Or tries to.)

Jan

We are in accord as to the right of private companies to require vaccinations and that the gov is not entitled to require this for private institutions at all. If the government wants to require vaccinations for public schools, then it should be voted on - and if passed, then implemented.

And you are correct, if someone who does not have a vaccination contracts a disease, the individual is responsible, not the venue.

I posted my TLDNR message because there seemed to be some misunderstanding as to how vaccines work, and I wanted to try to clarify that. (Thank you for reading it!)

Jan

I love aussies. My first very own dog was an aussie mix.

Jan

This seems an odd thread to read. Most of the time, folks in the Gulch are pro-science but I am seeing a lot of comments that seem to equate vaccines with poisons. This is sooo not so.

Let us take a look at that: When you catch a disease, your body has a shot at finding some prominent epitope on the surface of the organism and making antibodies specific to it. (Your body cannot always do this.) When that organism tries to infect you again, the Lymphocytes that are dedicated to that particular epitope go wild and have an orgy and reproduce all over the place. Their offspring then start to produce the antibodies that protect you from that disease.

Sometimes the epitope is unique to a single organism. Sometimes it crosses from one species, or even from one phylum to another. Examples: Getting cowpox protects you from subsequent infection from smallpox. Developing antibodies to Schistosomiasis (a parasitic worm) can protect you from malaria.

When a vaccine is made, it is done in one of three ways (that I know of; I have never been in this part of the medical industry): they can weaken the disease so that it does not cause devastation and death but is otherwise the same and make that into the vaccine, they can kill the organism and make that into the vaccine, or they can take certain epitopes from the organism and combine them with some other molecule (often albumin) and then make that the vaccine. (This last method sometimes lets your body make antibodies to organisms it could not respond to on its own - such as some cancers.) All of these methods are ways of 'delivering the epitope' into your system so that you immune response can develop antibodies to it. It is your own body that provides the immune response and hence the resistance to disease, just as if you caught the disease naturally, but with a lower death rate.

In addition to the epitope, a vaccine often contains artificial substances such as 'the stuff they grew the virus on/in' (eg egg or media), preservatives (Thimerosal is the one that most people are concerned about) and some saline. Some vaccines also have a small amount of antibiotics in them to prevent growth of bacteria. Many vaccines in the US are now available in single dose packages without Thimerosal and other preservatives.

There are undeniably idiosyncratic reactions to vaccines that cause serious problems or death. These were more common when egg was used as a growth medium and horse serum was used as a carrier. Serious reactions still occur, but they are rare. I have never seen a study that presented what I thought was well documented evidence that anything related to vaccination caused autism or a high rate of deaths. I have, however, seen a number of anti-vaccination sites that include pretty ridiculous deaths in their statistics: a girl died of unknown causes nearly 2 years after she had a vaccination; she had no symptoms that would seem to relate her death to the vaccination - but it was attributed thereto statistically.

So we have a numbers game. Let me take the measles vaccine as an example: The rate of fatal reaction to a measles vaccine is about one person per million; the rate of death for measles in an unvaccinated population is about 135 per million. So I really wonder at the resistance against getting vaccinated: it seems pretty logical to me to get vaccinations.

Now 'being forced' to do anything - eat chocolate chip cookies, even - raises my hackles. I would like to propose that most of the people on this list would consider that it is the prerogative of a private organization to require vaccinations to be valid in order to 'attend or participate in that private organization'. So one answer to the question of how to deal with vaccinations in schools and supermarkets and airplanes and Disneyland is to let the private organizations police their own territories. If you consider that the public schools are 'owned' by the populace, then they get to vote as to what to do about vaccinations...which I thought was what had occurred. (If I am wrong, please tell me.) This means that if you want to change the regulations for attendance to public schools we should discuss who 'owns' those schools and hence who has the right to make the rules pertaining to them. (Of course, that can also mean that we have to carry our proof of vaccination around with us from now on.)

Fortunately, we do not have to be perfect in our vaccination strategy. If we get 'good enough' then herd immunity will make it statistically unlikely for a disease to be transmitted through a population. If we get to that point, then the people who have immunodeficiency problems will not be at risk. And I will not be at risk of having no place for me in the hospital if I get in a car accident because all of the beds are filled with influenza victims.

Jan, wanted to be an immunologist at one time
(Ed. for punctuation & clarity)

Which is, indeed, worthy of trust. (But not particularly fuzzy or inclined to cuddle.)

Jan

I do not entirely agree with you on the topic of vaccines but I applaud your robust health and hope that I will be able to at least match your record when I am in my 80's!

Jan

I almost always camp alone and I love it. I go to a secluded spot next to a stream and pitch my tent (medieval pavilion, actually) and set up camp. It is a lovely camp, and I really enjoy the days when I see people at all. For Days and Days at a Time, no other human beings. This really gives me the opportunity to recharge.

I am not particularly concerned about intruders - human or otherwise - because I bring 300lbs of German Shepherds along with me. I have had 'some sort of large animal who did not bother to walk quietly' come through camp a few times...still did not know what it was.

For the first couple of days, however, I do have an exaggerated awareness of the rustling emptiness around me. Occasionally, ghosts visit the camp, but they are pleasant ghosts and like to dance...

Jan, the imaginative

I spent many happy childhood hours bounding around on Mars, swinging a sword. (While Burroughs was not at today's level of including women in active roles, his women were all capable people - and several of them did fight - which made it that much easier to imagine.)

Jan, rescued handsome princes on Mars
Edit to include where princes were

My research has indicated that this is the case. Even Off, you are trackable.

Jan

They are inexpensive: http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Tracking-Sign...

Salty Dog. I did not know that cell phone blockers were illegal anywhere. They can certainly be bought readily: http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Tracking-Sign...

Can you give me more info on the illegality of these shields?

Jan

Have you read SM Stirling's The High Courts of Mars and The Sky People? (Very good modern pastiches on the Burroughs books - but updating them to answer the question, "With what we currently know about these planets, what would it have taken to make Burroughs' vision REAL?")

Jan

It is a nice place to be, is it not?

Jan

The pity of it is that THIS is what we have spent many pixels discussing over the past few years: where to go Galt and create our own Gulch. A parallel Earth, peopled by a subset of genius level optimists? Wow!

The images of the city and 'what they could do' were wonderful. I wanna!

Jan

One of our trainers actually graduated from Cal Tech with a degree in Light Optics Physics. I posed him your questions, and he replied:

A "separated quantum particle" sounds like one of a pair of quantum-entangled particles -- you detect the phase, but you don't change it (at least not without also changing the phase of the other). And that's not a question of power, so much as precision. The phase of a single photon can be changed by a single photon -- if it's in the right place at the right time.

If you can provide more details, he is a bit intrigued and is willing to provide a more complete answer.

Jan

That is certainly a profession to which I had never aspired. If you let me just watch SF/Fantasy and not have to go to any movie that is socially significant (OK: Except Randist movies.), I can do the job!

WooHoo. Another hobby/profession/whatever.

Jan

Thanks for the correction on the quote - I was dredging up a 30 year old memory.

They have to get the idea eventually that Science MATTERS and a rational plot MATTERS and believable character interactions MATTER. They will get this idea, Hiraghm. Won't they? Tell me it is so, please.....?

Jan