I'm not saying.......

I'm not saying that all vaccinations are bad for you, I was just speculating on the reasons why some people think they are. Our daughter had all her shots before she started school. Indeed, my hypothetical wife and I both seem to remember that it was the law. The doctor gave us a shot record card with the dates all the shots were given, and we had to show it before they let her start school. I don't remember there being a controversy about it at the time. It was about a year later that the "swine flu fiasco" was in the news. I looked it up and Wiki has an article about it: "1976 Swine Flu Outbreak". It isn't exactly like I remember reading it before, but Wiki articles change all the time, and a certain amount of memory loss is normal at our age.

I don't think the 1976 controversy is related to the present day controversy about vaccinations. I have heard that some people believe that vaccinations cause autism in children, but I understand there is no reliable evidence that says it does. I am not really on one side or the other on this issue, it's not very high on my list of priorities of things to be concerned about. If this be "flip-flopping", so be it. There are only so many hours in a day, and I've got firewood to cut. We haven't gotten flu shots for a long time, and we haven't had the flu for a long time. This doesn't mean we're against flu shots, it just means that we don't get them for ourselves anymore. If you did everything that they say you're supposed to do, you wouldn't have any time for yourself.

Since you like stories so much, I just remembered another one: My shots were all up to date when I started school, I got them from our family doctor. Unbeknownst to me, my mother had signed me up to get my future shots at school because they were free. One day they unexpectedly herded us all into a vacant classroom and told us to line up for our shots. It was no big deal to me, but most of the other kids started screaming, crying, and throwing up. I thought, "What's the matter with these people, haven't they ever gotten shots before?" When it was my turn, I asked the nurse what shot we were getting today, and she said it was a tetanus booster. I told her not to bother because I had just gotten that particular shot from my doctor a few days ago, which was the truth. Apparently the nurse didn't believe me because she sent another lady to call my mother and ask her about it. The lady came back a few minutes later and said that my mother told her I never had that shot. I didn't argue because I figured that my mother knew more about it than I did and I must have been mistaken.

I came down sick a few days later, and I told my mother that I wondered how I could be sick with all the shots I had been getting lately. My mom said "What do you mean by 'all the shots'? You only had one shot last week. I said, "Yeah, and they gave me the same shot again at school the other day, so I should be doubly protected." Come to find out that the lady had lied, she had never even called my mother, who was not happy about that. I never got any more shots at school,  just from our family doctor.

The moral of the story is: Shots are not bad for you, school is bad for you.

is it better to flip flop or stay wrong?

First of all I am going to dismiss all anecdotal evidence out of hand as I always do. I did some brief internet research on that thing about more people dying of vaccinations than dying of the flu and couldn’t find anything on that, and just on the face of it it doesn’t pass commonsense logic, so that is also getting dismissed out of hand.

The rest is just a bunch of stuff about how the medical profession often fucks up, and I wholeheartedly agree, but it is right more than it is wrong (since penicillin anyway), and in conclusion I think we can all agree that anybody who doesn’t vaccinate their kids is a moron and a danger to the surrounding neighborhood. I’ll bet you vaccinated your daughter and that you would be alarmed if you learned that a lot of your neighbors, who were sending their kids to the same school as the future wiccan, weren’t vaccinating their kids.

One of the odd things about the anti vaccers is that they aren’t a bunch of backwoods snake-handling types, they are affluent Marin county types. They would probably be good democratic voters but they probably heard somewhere that you can get Ebola from stepping into a polling booth.

A couple repbublicans (Christie and Paul) got their teats in a wringer over this, though both have backtracked, though neither one all the way back. Politicians just hate to admit they were wrong over anything. Nobody wants to be accused of being a flip flopper, though I think it’s not such a terrible thing. It’s better to have been right all along, but if you were wrong it’s better to change your mind and become right than to stay wrong. Changing your mind every election is probably too much, but I don’t see what’s so bad about changing it from time to time.

I say that last because I saw an article where both Clinton and Obama were squishy at one time on vaccinations. I like to think that this was before that study that started the whole furor was roundly debunked.

I guess this last snowstorm was the fourth biggest we ever had, though it didn’t seem that bad to me. I was out walking around in it and I had no trouble. Of course it helps to not have a car and to be walking around downtown which is where the plows go first

Antivaccinationarianism

Like most stories, there is probably a certain amount of truth to this this one, but not as much as some people think. I've heard lots of people say that, when they got a flu shot, it gave them the flu. The thing about the flu virus is that it mutates readily, and we get a different strain every year. The drug companies try to anticipate what this year's virus will look like and formulate their vaccines accordingly. Sometimes they get it wrong, and sometimes there's more than one strain going around. Also, a lot of what people call "the flu" isn't really the flu, it's some other kind of virus that gives you some of the same symptoms.

Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of risk to any drug or medical procedure. Some people might be allergic to a drug and not even know it. They might have taken the drug before and nothing bad happened but, this time, they get an allergic reaction. That's also true of bee stings, by the way. You have to balance the potential risk against the potential benefits, and it might be different for different people or the same people under different circumstances.  That's why they stopped routinely vaccinating people for smallpox. Smallpox was generally believed to have been eradicated world wide, so getting vaccinated against it was thought to be not worth the risk anymore. I understand that they have some of the smallpox virus stashed away somewhere in case the disease ever rears its ugly head again and they have to make more vaccine.

I lost a dog to distemper once, and she had just gotten her distemper shot a week or so before she got sick. I asked the vet if the dose of vaccine he had given the dog might have been defective.  He said that anything is possible, but it was more likely that the dog had been exposed to the distemper virus before she got her shot. A vaccination will not cure a disease that is already in progress. Not long after that, I got a new puppy, had her vaccinated, and she was dead within 24 hours. I thought that she might have had an allergic reaction to the shot, but the vet said again that was highly unlikely. I had lots of dogs after that, I never had any of them vaccinated for distemper, and none of them ever caught the disease. How's that for anecdotal evidence?

Then there was the big swine flu scare. I don't remember when that was, but they were harping on everybody to get their swine flu shot. I seemed to remember that the swine flu vaccination killed more people than it saved, so I wondered why they were trying to foist it on us again. I looked it up and, and sure enough, there was one year back in the 70s that more people died from the swine flu shot than from the swine flu, but that was only one year. That year, the anticipated swine flu epidemic never materialized. Not that many people died from the shot, no more than could statistically be expected, but even less people died from the swine flu. Come to find out that most flu strains originate in swine, but they stopped calling it "swine flu" after that fiasco in the 70s. Apparently somebody forgot to not do that, probably some young whippersnapper who wasn't even alive in the 70s. Nevertheless, neither I nor my hypothetical wife got the swine flu shot, and neither of us got the swine flu either.

By the way, I understand that you guys got some snow the other day, and Detroit got even more. We didn't get hardly any, just enough to sweep the porch but not enough to plow the driveway. This seems to be one of those winters where we stay on the dry, cold side of the jet stream. I don't think we've got over eight inches on the ground. We've had more than that for a total, but it keeps settling and sublimating. It certainly hasn't been melting.

a musical interlude

I wanna go home

I wanna go home

Oh how I wanna go home

That’s the way Bobby Bare felt forty of fifty years ago, but then he was making the cars by day, and his main problem, as with so many of those geetar pickin’ types was the girl he left behind in the cotton fields. Well all those songs are like that ain’t they? The bars don’t fill up to hear about guys getting or losing a job, they mostly want to hear about looking for love. And more than that about lost love. There is something about the way beer goes with heartache that makes them an unbeatable combination.

Then there’s Iris Dement moaning about nothing but the dead and dying in her little town, and how nothing good ever lasts, and you know my eyes remain dry. So what if your little town fading, it happens to a lot of towns, people move around, if they don’t move here, they move there.

I don’t know where that came from. I guess Iris pisses me off. She has such a sweet voice, but then she sings such vapid songs I could just throttle her.

Oh Detroit. I’ve read of those plans to bring agriculture back to the abandoned zones. It would be nice to have a strawberry field inside an abandoned strip mall, cattle drives along abandoned express way. It would almost be fairy tale like, maybe it would encourage tourism, maybe Detroit could come back Baby.

So you know I had my rilly big shew this weekend. Debbie came to Chicago with a couple of her friends, and she was reading some email I had written to her where I said I thought those anti vaccine people sucked the big weenie, and it turned out that her friend was an anti vacinator, and you know I love a good argument, but I knew this wouldn’t be a good one because she is slow talking and meandering, and she would just quote some anecdotal evidence and then cite some study or expert of whom I hadn’t heard (but when I looked it or him up, it would be on some crackpot website), and we were stuck together for a couple days so I let it go.

Well it’s just shocking to me. I can see how some people get nutty about things like organic kale, it’s just their own bodies, but when they get nutty about something like this, one of mankind’s great achievements, and want to give the germs another chance and threaten the health of not only the neighbor’s kids but their own, it just drives me nuts, nuts I tell you.

Maybe I could get Iris Dement to write a song about it, maybe Bobby Bare.

More About Detroit

According to Wiki, the Detroit riot of 1967 was the most destructive riot in U. S. history until it was surpassed by the Los Angeles riot of 1992. Forty three people were killed, 1,189 reported injuries, 7200 people were arrested, and 2,000 buildings were destroyed. According to the quote from Mayor Coleman Young, the outward migration of Whites from Detroit was three times greater after the riot than before.

Granted, the city was in decline before the riot but, as you pointed out, other cities have had riots over the years and recovered. Detroit never did. It was only a few years ago that the city started demolishing some of the derelict buildings. Before that, they were being informally demolished by arsonists and salvagers. People would go in and strip the plumbing and wiring and anything else they could sell on the scrap market. According to newspaper accounts, the fire department decided to stop putting out fires in these buildings because they got tired of fighting fires in the same buildings over and over again. They would monitor the fire to make sure it didn't spread to other structures, and just let it burn itself out. There used to be a tradition of mass arson  on "Devil's Night", the night before Halloween. Fire and police resources would be overwhelmed and unable to do anything about it. I seem to remember they stopped that some years ago, but I don't remember why. Maybe there was nothing left to burn. According to Wiki, not all of the arson fires are random acts of vandalism. Many of the derelict buildings are being used as drug houses and, when the neighbors get tired or waiting for the police to do something about it, they just torch the building.

Every once in awhile, our local newspaper runs a story about somebody who has a plan to make use of some of the vacant property in Detroit. There was one guy who proposed planting thousands of fruit trees and going into the orchard business. Others are encouraging the locals to plant vegetable gardens and grow some of their own food. There have been a number of projects to spruce up the downtown, but they have had minimal effects on the distressed neighborhoods. The city will sell you a derelict building or a vacant lot for a dollar if you promise to make something useful out of it.

Detroit has recently gone through the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. There has been a lot of talk about it being a new beginning for the city. Maybe so, we'll just have to wait and see.

riots shmiots

The thing about riots, and here of course I mean the black riots of the 60s, is that they were just not a big deal, the property damage was all in the black area where the property is cheap, and it was a small percentage of the black people that were rioting, and looters, well there is always somebody who will take that opportunity when the law is otherwise distracted. Even the disturbances that take place after the world series or super bowl involve looting.

We had our little riots down in Champaign during the anti war period, piddly by comparison to the real riots, the most we did was block intersections. The photos of drunken college students, excuse me, valiant anti war demonstrators, following their consciences, screaming into the windows of terrified or annoyed local yokels inside the blocked cars was certainly dramatic, but all it meant was that you had to change your route to the grocery store away from campus town for a couple hours on Friday and Saturday nights.

Anyway a couple years after we ended the Vietnam war by blocking the intersection of Sixth and Green for a couple hours on a couple weekends, some kind of event on Halloween arose. Chiefly it involved college kids getting really drunk that weekend, so you can see that it was very appealing, and once the bars emptied the resultant behavior was not all that different then from what it had been back when we were ending the war.

And you know, back in those years every big city had riots. Chicago and LA had big riots, and LA is doing fine, and Chicago is doing a little better than holding its own. The cities that were in decline continued to decline, and the cities that were doing fine continued to do fine.

The riots didn’t mean shit.

Like I said before, some of the black people were proud, thinking that they had shown Whitey that they wouldn’t take his shit anymore, and maybe thinking terrified whites would pass laws to their benefit. That never happened, all they did was trash a commercial strip of their own neighborhood, and if the looters made of with some goods from the liquor store, everybody else now had to travel further to get to an undamaged one.

The white people were leaving the city before the riots and would continue to leave it after the riots. Maybe they packed up their suitcases a little faster afterwards, but not that much faster. Most all of them were leaving for economic reasons and to have a bigger back yard, but some were leaving for racial reasons, they just didn’t want to sit next to them on busses or whatever, you heard that kind of talk in Gage Park all the time. I’m certainly not saying you were among them, but you certainly heard it often.

But later on that attitude became not very fashionable, and so as not to admit it, they would say something like, oh I suppose black people are alright, and we got along with them well enough, but then they had those riots, and so you know we had to leave, for the children. It seems like sometimes it is just a way to avoid admitting to racism.

Or maybe there is a bill to raise food stamps, and we all know that food stamps go mostly to black people, which they actually don’t, but this is what people generally believe. And some white people don’t want to do it because they say we can’t afford it, and arguments can be made on either side of that, and that’s fine. But then there are always some of them who will add, and what about those riots, which what does that have to do about anything? But you know what they are saying, we don’t want to give any of our money to those black people, because remember they rioted that time, and so they are bad people and we never have to do anything to help them.

In conclusion, the riots were just a teeny pimple on the great backside of America, and I think it doesn’t have much to do with anything, and I am suspicious when it is brought up often.

Update on Detroit

While Uncle Ken  has been on hiatus, I have been doing a little research on Detroit. Much of this information came from the Wiki article "Decline of Detroit". Okay, I was mistaken about the riot of 1967 causing the decline of Detroit, but it certainly accelerated it.

Of the 1967 riots, politician Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, wrote in 1994:

The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit's losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.^[22]

Detroit's population peaked at over 1.8 million in 1950, and it was pretty much all downhill from there. The first emigrants went to the immediate suburbs, as part of the great urban sprawl movement of the 20th Century. Most of these people still commuted to their jobs in Detroit, until the jobs also started to leave the city in their perennial search for cheap labor.

By the 2010 census, Detroit had lost 60% of it's population. The good news is that we don't need to expel Detroit from the State of Michigan. At this rate, Detroit will be totally depopulated in another 40 years or so. The vacant land could be used to replace some of the agriculture and forestry property that has been lost to urban sprawl over the years. Indeed, much of the city has already been cleared of derelict buildings by city demolition crews, as well as amateur salvagers and arsonists. Some of it is being converted to farms and gardens, while the rest is spontaneously reverting to prairie and forest.

As may be seen in the above quote, the Detroit Riot of 1967 is often referred to in the plural. Detroit experienced two other riots in its history, one in 1867 and another in 1943, but that's not what people are talking about when they refer to "the riots". The late 1960s also saw riots in Pontiac, Flint, Saginaw, Grand Rapids, and Toledo. This whole region of Southern Michigan and Toledo, Ohio, which should also be in Michigan, is commonly referred to by Northerners as "Down Below". This area went to hell in the late 60s and hasn't recovered since. They even have a town named "Hell", which might be a good choice for their capital when they reorganize after we detach them from the real Michigan, which is also known as "God's Country".

Although there certainly is a racial component to the decline and fall of Detroit and other "Rust Belt" cities, it's not just about race anymore. In the last decade or so, Black people have also been leaving in droves, and you won't believe where they're going: The South! I have heard it described as the "New South" before, but I thought that was just Chamber of Commerce hype. Come to find out, the South has been undergoing a kind of renaissance while the North has been rusting away all these years. I hear they have jobs down there and everything. Of course they don't pay much, but nothing does anymore. I once met a guy who had just returned from working on an oil well in Oklahoma. When the well shut down and no other jobs were available, the guy came home. He said "I'd rather be poor in Cheboygan than poor in Oklahoma." I suppose the Southerners feel the same way about their homeland.