There is no joy in Tucson. My friend Elisa has struck out

Today is Thanksgiving, and one of my very good friends died today.

As you may imagine, I don't have very much to be thankful for right now.

Elisa Corrales was a co-worker of mine, who would always have a smartass remark to make me laugh, exuberantly proclaiming how much she loved to see me in the morning while I was half-awake and grumpy, or sucker punching me in the shortribs on her way out the door. Our opinions about a lot of things were very similar, and she provided me with assistance when I finally applied for and got my promotion (since she had been a temp Team Manager before).

Despite her grumbling about the plethora of stupid people in this country and general dissatisfaction with the capitalist setup of our society... she was extremely optimistic and cheerful. She could always find some way to make me grin like an idiot when I was having a shitty sales day, and could give as good as she got when the team got to teasing each other. She was a good person, a moral person, an intellectual and reasonable person.

However, she was prone to having seizures from time to time, and it had gotten a bit more frequent after she began to do more of the Zumba and other workout routines in an effort to be healthier. I'm unsure if she was dialing the exercise back or not when all of this went down, but regardless, it only took one time.

She was found unconscious and not breathing, and rushed to the ICU. Unfortunately she had been found too late and was effectively brain dead due to oxygen deprivation. They're removing her from life support right now.

She's gone.

I type the words, and it doesn't feel real. I fully expect in some small portion of my consciousness to walk into work on Monday and see her at her desk, fiddling with her exercise ball and telling some moron customer that he didn't get his part shipped until now because of the holiday, stupid. I know that that's not going to be the case, but right now, I can't imagine that not happening.

Elisa is dead, and we are all poorer for it.

I can hardly even see what I'm typing. The tears just won't stop. I know that a lot of people that are praying and saying God will take care of them all have good intentions, but that and a nickel will get you a hot cup of jack squat. It makes me angry at first, but the grief overshadows that, because I know that being angry at these people is also not going to change anything.

Elisa is dead. I miss her already.

Something that Aaron Freeman wrote a while back gives me some comfort, by giving me a different viewpoint. As a rational, thinking individual, this makes me feel a little bit better. Elisa, like all of us, is functionally immortal, thanks to physics. Oh, not immortal in the religious sense, no wings and a halo in a poofy sky kingdom (that's just silly), but... becoming a part of the world, making up other things, other life, eventually being spewed back out into space as star stuff, to begin the whole cycle again... it helps to put things in perspective. Makes it less immediate, less raw.

"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly."

We are the Universe experiencing itself. For a short time, I got to experience it with Elisa. I regret that that time was short, but it was rich, and meaningful. Worthwhile.

And for that, I shall always be thankful.

Anti-vaccination is why we can't have nice things, like good health

Let me preface this by saying I despise anti-vaxxers almost as much as I despise the religious. This cause of theirs is almost like a religion to them, especially when you consider they have zero proof of their claims.

So as I'm sure most of you know, Jenny McCarthy is a dumb blonde. She is also the moron who decided that since she made a defective kid and didn't want to take the blame for it, she was going to go after vaccines instead. She had zero scientific evidence that this was the cause of her kid's autism, but since this all happened after he got his shots, it MUST have been the cause, right?

Wrong. That is what we call a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, aka questionable cause. Correlation does not imply causation. Just because something happened after something else, doesn't necessarily mean that the first thing was the cause of the second thing. This is something your average 'Murican just doesn't understand.

Here's a little gem I found on the intarwebs that accurately describes how every intellectual, thinking individual feels about anti-vaxxers. This verbal smackdown comes from an immunologist, so I'm more inclined to trust his claims over some stupid mom who knows absolutely fuckall about modern medicine:

You may have to click this to make it bigger

Also, to quote Paracelsus, the father of toxicology: "Everything is poison, there is poison in everything. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison." So if you don't want to poison yourself, I guess you'd better stop eating, breathing, drinking, and existing, because frankly, even the air is poison in this cigarette/pollution filled world we live in.

Doing research on this subject, I was amazed at the number of anti-vax posts and images that have popped up on the internet over the last 2 years or so that this has been a thing. The common thread between all of them is one of a few things, sometimes all of them at once:

1) Doctors are somehow unqualified to perform a simple medical procedure
2) The FDA/Gubmint is trying to kill all the Christians/Vegans/insert group here because NWO or something
3) Medicine is unnatural and we should only use crystals/roots/incense to heal ourselves

The amount of dumbfuckery is seriously amazing. I have a friend who is one of those paragons of "natural living", so much so that she makes a hippie look downright mainstream, who makes the claim that everyone can decide for themselves what they want to do and we shouldn't challenge them or make fun of them.

WRONG. Letting people do what they want as long as it impacts ONLY THEMSELVES is just fine, but when your bad decisions not only affect your kids, but everyone else around you, THEN we get to say "no, you're retarded, vaccinate your fucking children." These kids need their parents to stop playing games with their health, instead of being an idealistic fuckwit who gambles with their kid's lives just to prove a point that has no scientific or factual support.

Let me put it another way: There are a lot of people who CAN'T get vaccinated because they're allergic to certain things found in most vaccines, and that's fine. I can understand that. Those people RELY on the general 'herd immunity' of everyone else who ISN'T allergic and does get vaccinated, so they don't catch these deadly diseases. When you get a bunch of people claiming that vaccines are poison and they refuse to have them... these people's lives are put in jeopardy because of your idiocy.

Then you hear the cries of people who are afraid the government will force them to get vaccinated.

Honestly, we should do that. We should absolutely do that. The only reason we don't is because here in 'Murica we're still stuck with this private insurer bullshit where people have to pay out of pocket for medical procedures, so these greedy assholes can stick it to you while sticking you. If we had a true single-payer system like in EVERY other industrialized nation, we should definitely make vaccination mandatory (excepting those who are allergic, of course). When it is a matter of public health and safety, absolutely the government should step in and take care of business.

Here's a fun chart:

Before vaccinations were invented in 1798 with the first smallpox vaccine, by Edward Jenner, mortality rates caused by diseases such as smallpox, cholera, rabies, tetanus, typhoid fever, bubonic plague (yes, for real), were through the fucking ROOF. Basic quarantine procedures allowed for some way to contain the spread of an outbreak, but there were so many of these outbreaks that it was like stamping out a stray ember while your house burns down.

After the process was publicized and began to be used for other diseases other than smallpox, over the next 200 years mortality rates from these deadly diseases plummeted to near zero as more and more people were vaccinated against them. This is why we have such a huge, growing world population now, because we're not seeing people die off in droves due to diseases we can now prevent completely.

This is the world that anti-vaxxers want to return to, although they idealize it as a "better time" before modern technology and medicine and shit. They sound just like the idiotic vegans and hippies who scream about anything that's not "organic" or "natural". Let me let you in on a little secret: EVERYTHING IS NATURAL. If it exists, it is natural, as it is made from elements found in nature. Just because something is made in a lab rather than grown in the dirt doesn't mean it is automatically bad, and in most cases, it's BETTER. That's what we call fucking PROGRESS.

Finally, to put a ribbon on this tirade against stupidity, I was having a conversation with one of my highschool friends, who was taking his newborn to get immunized, and one of our "acquaintances" (I am not going to give her the status of friend, because I'm not friends with abject morons) decided to chime in with her two cents about how vaccines are poison yadda yadda yadda.

This girl is literally dumber than a box of rocks, and her husband isn't much better. Oh yeah, they're poor white trash living in backwoods Vermont, no surprise there. Sarah Parisi and Jeremy Infante are prime examples of how believing everything you hear without any credible scientific evidence makes you a fucking dipshit. Infante is an appropriate last name for them, since their thought processes are truly infantile.

She got upset when someone told her she was wrong with facts to show why, and basically dismissed the argument out of hand, claiming he was being "rude". I then told her that whether or not you think someone is rude, that doesn't invalidate their argument, and to stop getting so butthurt anytime someone disagrees with you. Her response was to block me. Typical conservative move (yes, she is a Republican fascist).

So in closing: get your fucking kids vaccinated. If you don't, you are guilty of endangering a child, and endangering the public health, and should be fined and have your kid taken away at the very LEAST.

That will be all.

And now for my next trick: Pseudoscience is bad, guys

So I was sent a link by someone I know to this blog post. I want you guys to read it, all the way through, all the while being skeptical of everything it says. Go on:

http://rhondagessner.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/a-killer-in-your-fridge-sweet-poison-a-must-read/

Ok, finished? No one's brain has exploded? Good.

This was sent to me after I had stated I was switching to diet soda in an effort to cut down my HFCS consumption (High Fructose Corn Syrup for the laymen, which IS bad for you, here's a source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup_and_health )

It would take more time than I would want to spend on my weekend off to count for you all the instances of fallacious logic, bad arguments, and outright lies in this article. Shit, the whole thing can be discounted completely due to the last statement at the very end: She just copy-pasted this from someone else's blog. Anecdotal evidence can never be used as a reliable source by virtue of it using such a small sample size or of personal account. This is why any good lawyer will tell you that eyewitness accounts of something are garbage as evidence in court (I have a good lawyer who will attest to this, as those are his words, Mr. Andrew B. Delaney, a lawyer for Charles S. Martin & Associates).

The entire first half of this blog article of hers is nothing but pure anecdotal evidence. There are zero cited sources for the article or lawyer her friend said she took to her "doctor", and there's no way to prove that this woman had Multiple Sclerosis-like symptoms, no way to prove they were caused by aspartame, and no way to prove that this magic "aspartame poisoning" cure pill stopped these so-called symptoms. (Note: There is no such pill. This is a complete fabrication. We also like to call that a bald-faced lie)

It's also an example of Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Latin for "after this, therefore because of this", which states "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." You may have seen this also quoted by people saying that correlation does not equal causation, which is another way of putting it. Just because your friend had MS-like symptoms, doesn't mean they were caused by the diet soda she was drinking. That's the fallacy.

She then goes on to use the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are stressed. She makes the claim about how when aspartame was first being used that it was challenged and brought to Congressional hearings, citing a random doctor who claims it causes birth defects and diabetes, and a whole slew of other bad things, and then just stops there, claiming "nothing has been done, because the "chemical lobby" (I wasn't aware there was one, awesome) has deep pockets. She COMPLETELY ignores all of the other data that came about because of these fears back in the early 80's, and how both the FDA and the CDC ran independent studies to test the validity of these claims. I'll give you one guess as to how those studies came back.

Oh, here's the evidence for that too. See, I back up my claims, unlike Ms. Gessner here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame#Safety_and_health_effects

So she basically just cherry-picks the bits that support her false claims, and ignores the rest, hoping 'Muricans will be gullible enough to not do their own research (and sadly, most are).

Lastly (for now), she goes on to claim that MONSANTO created Aspartame as part of some master plot to poison us all and take our money, because Monsanto is the devil, right?

While I won't argue that Monsanto is not an evil corporation, because let's face it, they fucking ARE, I will contest her assertion that Monsanto created aspartame. They didn't. At all. This is an outright lie, completely and unabashedly a lie. All of her "knowledge" as a nutritionist for 35 years is complete and utter bullshit, how diabetes is exacerbated by aspartame, and how ADHD kids miraculously get better after stopping aspartame consumption, and also how aspartame "gets in your brain" and turns you into a psycho rage-monster. Which, if that were real, would be awesome if you wanted to actually be the Incredible Hulk.

Yes, all of these claims are nothing but pure lies. Her claim that she is a "nutritionist", which, for those who are unaware, is a pseudo-science title that is not professionally regulated like doctors and dietitians are, and that basically anyone can call themselves a nutritionist and claim anything they want is true despite having zero credibility and no formal training, this claim of being a nutritionist invalidates everything she talks about in terms of treating diseases and causes of symptoms. It's like taking your car to a guy who calls himself a "car wizard" and claims that he can fix your car by drawing out the bad juju instead of, you know, turning a fucking wrench.

Again, too many 'Muricans believe this shit because no one does any fucking research for themselves anymore, they just lap it up like the gullible sheep they are. BE SKEPTICAL OF EVERYTHING. If anyone tells you that something is true without citing any sources, tell them they're full of shit until they can provide evidence. That's how this thing we call reality works. If you don't play by the rules, then you don't get to play, period.

Oh, and if all of this weren't enough for you to see this random blog post for the pure shite it really is, there's this from Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/aspartame.asp

In closing: Aspartame will not kill you, unless you drink 100 cans of diet soda a day, every day, for the next decade, and even then there is no evidence of THAT either. Anyone that claims it causes anything other than a somewhat sour experience when drinking diet soda and expecting it to taste like regular sugary soda, is full of shit and deserves to be mocked publicly.

Stay skeptical and intelligent, Citizens, it's the only way you can understand the Universe.

Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Greatest Fuckshow on Earth!

Welcome to this, the inaugural posting of Everything That Is Wrong With America, wherein I plan to showcase all the things that make this country shitty and stupid. There will be many posts that shame religious folks, pseudoscience believers, societal followers, and much more.

This is your only warning: If you have a thin skin, or feel like posting dickish/whiny things just because you got offended by something here, you can fuck right off. I have zero patience for dealing with baby tantrums. This page is for intelligent liberals who can see the shit being done to ruin this country, not for stupid sheep-like 'Muricans who have no concept of anything but what Fox "News" tells you.

I'll be moving some rants from my other blog, The Book of Heavy Metal, so stay tuned for some good content. I decided to consolidate my political stuff here, and keep that one for the epic Metal and random life rants. Atheism stuff will probably go on both, so if you're a Christian/Muslim/What have you, be prepared to deal with a person who has actually read your holy books and can shoot down any argument you make with cold logic and reason.

Other than that, I hope you enjoy :D