I disagree. Low quality processed foods, typically found in western diets, glysophates, high in industrial seed oils, processed sugars, and salts, are likely one of the biggest reasons for all the negative health effects we are seeing in the western diet, calorie numbers be damned.
Any quantity of this food, long term, is likely the reason for the explosive amount of health issues in the population, including many cancers we now commonly deal with.
One of the biggest changes to my health I ever noticed was a switch not in how I ate, but in WHAT I ate.
When I switched my diet over to high quality foods, organic and garden grown, meat I purchased from a local hunter, it made a substantial impact on my health, helped to fix a lot of my cholesterol and blood sugar numbers, and my overall health shot through the roof. No pills required, just decent ingredients, garden grown food, high quality meat.
That attitude has always existed in an economy to some degree, but you still retain the option to move to something else and get away from it.
A digital centrally controlled currency means you never get to escape it.
Even if you switch landlords for example, it would be inescapable, you have the masters of the universe doing it to you, not just one person you can move away from.
The Supreme Court also validated slavery and other actions that proved to be incredibly damaging to the society.
As for George Washington, if you are attempting to make the argument that the government has a right to inoculate it’s military soldiers during war time against a disease, so be it, there is your precedent to argue upon. Furthermore, Washington has a habit of requiring many things, including the Militia Acts which required every able bodied male to own a military firearm. I don’t currently see an argument to enforce that idea. Pick and choose.
But using his small pox inoculation program from the 1700’s and a tiny military of rag tag farmer soldiers as a basis to go after an entire free and educated society of hundreds of millions in the 2000’s for an experimental vaccine, you are stretching this further than it could go.
The information is out there for people to make decisions now. They’ve made it, make a better argument.
If you're referring Dred Scott, I agree the Supreme Court validated slavery (this is at least one of the causes of the Civil War). That is, the decision had such consequence that the nation was nearly split, and after the war, several amendments were added that overrode the Court.
I don't see anybody gearing up to have a civil war over vaccines, just a bunch of "make a better argument for why you have the right to tell me I have to do this, with economic or social consequences if I don't" responses. The military already exited folks who didn't comply with COVID vaccines, and the Biden administration has already requested that the SC officially rule on workplace mandates (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21A244/206997/2021...).
Children are already the group least likely to be harmed by covid. Couple this with the data showing vaccines don’t prevent spread, but rather reduce symptoms in groups most affected, what is the point of doing this to children? An 80 year old diabetic, sure, but a perfectly healthy 5 year old? Why?
Children _die_ of covid. Studies have shown that the complications due to the vaccine are basically nothing other than arm pain and do decrease that chance of death. Studies have shown it's worth it for children to take the vaccine regardless of questions of spread.
Beyond that I've never seen that vaccines don't prevent spread. Sure they are not "sterilizing" vaccines and they don't prevent 100% of spread, but nowhere have I seen anything saying they don't decrease the likelihood of spread.
> Studies have shown that the complications due to the vaccine are basically nothing other than arm pain and do decrease that chance of death. Studies have shown it's worth it for children to take the vaccine regardless of questions of spread.
Not sure if the risk/benefit ratio for vaccinating children is so clear-cut. A pre-print study from University of California, for example, "suggests that boys aged 12 to 15, with no underlying medical conditions, [might be] four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in hospital with Covid over a four-month period" [1].
The UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) "is of the opinion that the benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms [...] but acknowledges that there is considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the potential harms. The margin of benefit, based primarily on a health perspective, is considered too small to support advice on a universal programme of vaccination of otherwise healthy 12 to 15-year-old children at this time. As longer-term data on potential adverse reactions accrue, greater certainty may allow for a reconsideration of the benefits and harms." [2]
That's also why Pfizer announced that "long-term safety of COVID-19 vaccine in participants 5 to <12 years of age will be studied in 5 post-authorization safety studies, including a 5-year follow-up study to evaluate long term sequelae of post-vaccination myocarditis/pericarditis." [3]
> Not sure if the risk/benefit ratio for vaccinating children is so clear-cut.
That's a totally reasonable position. There is a line that needs be drawn somewhere. Some people will consider the benefits here outweighing the risks while others might conclude the opposite. That's fine. For example there isn't a current recommendation in the US for boosters for the majority of the healthy population for exactly those reasons.
But claims here like covid vaccines "certainly will not benefit" children are quite clearly untrue. Or taking statements like "children are already the group least likely to be harmed by covid" to mean that they shouldn't be vaccinated even if the likelihood of vaccine complications is even lower.
The fact is that children are harmed by covid and that vaccines will reduce the risk of that harm. Is it worth it overall? Maybe, maybe not. That's a risk analysis question worth having. But acting like we're in a hysteria because of recommendations to get vaccinated drawn from studies showing it makes sense is itself hysteria.
> Some people will consider the benefits here outweighing the risks while others might conclude the opposite. That's fine.
> But acting like we're in a hysteria because of recommendations to get vaccinated drawn from studies showing it makes sense is itself hysteria.
IMO, the emotional response (or hysteria) stems from the fact that debatable recommendations are currently being used to justify mandates ("SF will soon require everyone 5 and older to show vaccination proof for restaurants, theaters, Warriors games"), therefore prohibiting people from outweighing the risks on their own.
Reading the same studies, health officials could come to the creative conclusion that, due to the "considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the potential harms", all children should be banned from getting a vaccine or be forced to pay higher insurance rates.
Taking a medication as a condition of maintaining basic human rights, or merely existing is a long bridge to cross. This bears no equivalency to a seat belt.
We know the shots don’t prevent spread, nor prevent you from getting it, the only argument is it lessens severity of symptoms, yet many are dying after the shots anyways and being hospitalized.
So you are basically arguing they I need to take a medicine that supposedly reduces symptoms, although in practice it isn’t showing that effect, but carries other potential negative health effects unique to the shot itself.
A more analogous car argument is that I would be required by law to pick up random hitch hikers everyday and drive them to their destination as a condition of owning and driving a vehicle, especially if we are working off the public good argument. If I refuse, I lose the car. Most likely 98% of those hitch hikers won’t chop me up into little pieces in the middle of the desert, but there is always that one...
> We know the shots don’t prevent spread, nor prevent you from getting it, the only argument is it lessens severity of symptoms
That's just not true. The shots significantly decrease the chance that you'll get COVID. They also significantly decrease the chance that you'll spread COVID. This is most clear via the lower likelihood of infection. (You can't spread it if you don't have it.)
Sure, the shots are not 100% effective. They were never claimed to be. That doesn't mean they are not very effective. They are.
Pretty much all of public health is cost-benefit analysis.
Vaccines dramatically reduce the incidence and severity of disease, and therefore the spread. It would be nice if I could say ‘prevent’ instead of ‘reduce’ there, but this is the vaccine we have for the pandemic we’re facing. Vaccine complications are about 1e-5, COVID complications (conditional on infection) are like 1e-2. Excepting non-falsifiable mRNA concerns the balance seems firmly in favor of vaccines if we’re all going to be exposed eventually.
It’s fair to argue that individuals should be able to chose to forgo that benefit based on their own views; it’s not fair to argue that there’s no benefit.
They haven’t studied these genetic therapies long term to know if what you assert is the case. We already know there are health issues associated now with the mrna shots.
We could see a rash of issues show up in the next couple of years.
“We already know there are health issues associated now with the mrna shots.” What issues? This is the first I’m hearing of this. Details and sources please.
Of course not in all cases can we prove that the health issues are 100% the shot, but it looks extremely likely the shot causes health issues in rare cases [1]:
-Anaphalaxysis in 2-5 per million peoples
-Thrombosis (2 reported cases from J&J)
-Myocarditis / Pericarditis : 854 confirmed
The benefits appear to far exceed the risk at the population level. But that's not much consolation at the individual level if you are someone predisposed to anaphylaxis or thrombosis, which are potentially life threatening, in which case at the individual level the vaccine may look to not be worth the risks. Better screening tools could help identify individuals with these risks.
I'm also not sure there are any mRNA vaccines for which we have to compare in humans that have been out few years and FDA approved. It is my understanding the COVID vaccine was the first widely distributed mRNA vaccine in humans. I have no reason to believe they are dangerous, but they are lacking any long term studies in humans on any large scale.
We are also lacking evidence for what happens after booster shots are given repeatedly. (Or even in the cohort that has been infected and double vaccinated.) We are participating in an open trial to find out. It's only rational to consider that there may be yet-unobserved risks.
Disengaged voters will simply vote for the current leadership or loudest guy, typically the same thing, without a thought towards the issues.
Strongmen love compulsory voting, it creates a false perception of legitimacy, because corruption or no corruption, if only 30% of a population is engaged in the issues and the other 70% could give two shits, that is a slamdunk for incumbents.
There's some evidence for this. Chile adopted voluntary voting in 2012. According to this study[0] this decreased the incumbent's advantage in the elections that follower.
My favorite feature of NA beer is social. I found myself enjoying one too many beers sometimes with my group of friends I play hockey with, which made for terrible mornings after and the poor health effects overall.
What I do now is enjoy a real beer or two, and then finish the rest of the evening with NA. Athletic brewing is my favorite. I wish bars had it on draft. It fits both needs, I get to enjoy the taste and effect of the real at first, but continue socially with the NA after that won’t lead to drunkenness.
Alcoholism runs in my family, I could very easily go down that road if I’m not careful, but I found combining the two short circuits the desire to binge on the real thing. I can easily do most events with just NA beers and enjoy myself all the same.
This describes me as well. Sometimes I have a couple of beers, and want to have a couple more. But I don't really want anymore alcohol. I find N/A beers to have a nice harmony with regular beers.
Any quantity of this food, long term, is likely the reason for the explosive amount of health issues in the population, including many cancers we now commonly deal with.
One of the biggest changes to my health I ever noticed was a switch not in how I ate, but in WHAT I ate.
When I switched my diet over to high quality foods, organic and garden grown, meat I purchased from a local hunter, it made a substantial impact on my health, helped to fix a lot of my cholesterol and blood sugar numbers, and my overall health shot through the roof. No pills required, just decent ingredients, garden grown food, high quality meat.