Cliff Towle

 

Guest Post by Steve Kirsch

Here’s a quick summary of my survey of the parents of 10,000 kids. The results agree with other studies that have been done. The medical community refuses to do these studies. Why not prove us wrong?

Executive summary

I surveyed the parents of 10,000 kids on a variety of common chronic health conditions.

For every single condition in my survey, vaccination raised the odds that the child would develop the condition; the more vaccines, the higher the risk.

My survey confirms the results of other research that has been done showing similar risk elevations for chronic neurological diseases (ND).

This is devastating for our kids. Vaccines are literally poisoning them. This is why the health authorities will never conduct such a study such as the ones I point out below.

In fact, in 2009, 10 members of Congress including Rand Paul, tried to pass a bill forcing NIH to do a study, but the bill never made it out of the first committee because they don’t want you to ever find out that they’ve been poisoning our kids for decades.

Anyone can replicate the study I did. It took me just 24 hours to run. I invite any mainstream “fact checker” in the world to validate the results; I have the contact info for all the parents.

If the CDC wants to resolve the question quickly, all they have to do is give Professor Brian Hooker access to the VSD and Medicaid databases. Why not do that? Don’t they want people to know the truth?

Finally, the most important thing is that none of the vaccines have been needed in America for the last 25 years. Pediatric clinics which eschew vaccines have uniformly better clinical outcomes than their peers who vaccinate in the same population of kids.

This is a long but very important article.

The results graphically

This graph was done by Matt Briggs, an independent statistician. It’s crystal clear: kids with more vaccines are more likely to suffer from chronic conditions.

Odds ratio for each condition

Here is the summary of the survey. The right column is the odd-ratio for kids getting the condition with 10-15 vaccines compared with kids with no vaccines or Vitamin K shots. So if you got 10-15 vaccines, you are 4.5X more likely to develop autism than an unvaccinated child.

And we know from other studies (pediatric clinics with thousands of unvaccinated kids), that when you eliminate vaccination and the use of Tylenol, the autism rates drop to near zero. So this result isn’t a surprise.

Here’s the table:

You can download the survey, the record-level data and the analysis.

These results shouldn’t be a surprise at all. They are similar to other studies comparing vaccinated with FULLY unvaccinated kids (see the next section).

The bottom line: Kids with more vaccines are much more likely, not less likely, to have a large number of chronic neurological conditions.

For example, from the table above:

• ADHD: 7x
• Autoimmune disorders: 21x
• Autism: 5x
• Asthma: 9.3x
• Epilepsy: 4x
• Sinusitis: 33x

The largest signal was for sinusitis (33X more likely than fully unvaccinated); this basically is so rare in the fully unvaccinated that it causes the number to be high.

The vitamin K shot should always be refused

It is as devastating as giving your child a vaccine at birth as has been clearly pointed out in the Control Group study

In short, listening to your doctor was a huge mistake that your child will likely never recover from.

Check this out:

You shouldn’t be surprised by this; other studies found similar numbers

Here are other studies you should look at, all showing that the vaccines are significantly elevating the chance your child will get a chronic disease.

These are all published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. None of these studies have been retracted (even though Gorski would lie and claim they are retracted). I show the odds ratio for autism for comparison with my survey.

1. Hooker: 5.03
2. Mawson: 4.2
3. Control group: Infinite. “For those with zero exposures to post-birth vaccines, pre-birth vaccines, or the K shot, the total rate of autism in the entire CGS is 0% (0 of 1,024)”
4. Lyons-Weiler: The study was too small to assess autism risk, but showed better health outcomes among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated in other conditions. See this article which notes that the unvaccinated had better compliance to their wellness checks than the vaccinated which eliminates a common argument that anti-anti-vaxxers use. It says, “the unvaccinated families made their well-child visits with greater frequency than the vaccinated families.”

The Thomas study shows similar results. The study was unethically retracted by the journal over the objection of the authors, i.e., the journal didn’t follow the COPE guidelines. They said that “the conclusions were not supported by strong scientific data” which is NOT a valid reason to retract a study once it is published. The journal retracted the paper after an anonymous person claimed (without any evidence) that the results could be due to fewer office visits by the unvaxxed. The author provided evidence that this was not the case, but the journal ignored the evidence. Why? Because the paper got 250,000 views, it had to be retracted because it was counter-narrative and too popular. Later, a new paper showed proof that the reason the journal gave for retracting the paper was clearly false. The journal decided not to admit they were wrong and did not reverse the retraction of the Thomas paper. This is corruption of the highest magnitude. Please complain here using DOI:10.3390/ijerph17228674. The authors of that study would love to debate anyone on the ethics of this retraction. Any takers?

1. Paul Thomas: Showed generally consistent results overall. The study showed a RIOV of “developing autism” of 4.0 which dropped lower for more vaccines because kids are more likely to develop autism when they are younger and have had fewer vaccines.

Note: it’s possible that vaccines may be causing transgenderism, homosexuality, and many other conditions. I didn’t even think of that when I drafted the survey

Another Internet survey of 13,000 people showed a similar result, the unvaccinated were much better off in all areas measured in the survey (red bars always dramatically smaller):

We’ve even known about the link for nearly 100 years!!

The controls on my survey

There were controls to detect bias (birth defects, genetic disorders) which were not elevated proving that the survey was not biased. The OR for these conditions were both close to 1 exactly as we predicted.

The survey is analyzed using odds-ratios so the mix of vaxxed vs. unvaxxed is completely irrelevant.

So it doesn’t matter that 12% of the kids in my survey were unvaccinated. It simply means that I only had to survey 10,000 kids to get a decent comparison group; if others did their survey, they’d have to survey nearly 1M kids to find the same number of unvaccinated kids as I did. So I am able to do studies that are impractical for most other people to do.

The only way to attack my survey is to show that the parents all colluded and lied about their kids.

To defend against this attack, I have the contact info for each respondent and invite any fact checker to verify all the entries are accurate provided if you check, you have to publish the results.

The survey took 2 hours to write and was fully executed in 24 hours. The results were not shown to the public until after the survey was completed, making it impossible to game the results. All the data was collected on Airtable so that there would be a record of any data manipulation.

It is astonishing to me that none of the people who argue that vaccines don’t cause neurological diseases (ND) will do such a survey and show that the data I collected is inaccurate. Why won’t they do that?

Stopping the misinformation spreaders is easy! The CDC could have done this anytime in the last 25 years if they wanted to show people the truth.

Why won’t the CDC simply open up access to the VSD and CMS databases so we validate the results ourselves? Why hasn’t the CDC ever used VSD to do the same study? They’ve had 25 years to do that and never did. Why?

Are there any other studies?

We aren’t aware of any study, comparing the fully unvaccinated vs. partially or fully vaccinated kids that doesn’t have similar numbers.

When you read the peer-review literature carefully, you’ll find that they always consider the “unvaccinated” group to have kids without the particular vaccine under study.

So when they compare the MMR vaccine, they compare it to the kids who didn’t get the MMR vaccine. So it’s like comparing the autism rates of kids who got 28 vaccines with the rates of kids who got 27 vaccines. This is how they hide the signal. They design studies which are designed to fail.

Just because they don’t find a signal, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. It just means their study design didn’t find the signal.

They will NEVER compare the chronic disease rates in kids who got all recommended vaccines (well over 50 shots, many with multiple vaccines) vs. completely unvaccinated kids. It simply has never happened.

The excuse that unvaccinated kids are too hard to find is ridiculous. The Amish have thousands of such kids and there are hundreds of such kids that can be located in a heartbeat. All they have to do is call me and I’ll be happy to help.

A new study will be coming out soon

There is another study with around 50,000 kids that was done. It’s not published yet, but the results confirm the studies that were done above: the more you vaccinate kids the greater the difference in chronic diseases vs. the unvaccinated.

The medical journals will likely reject the study because it goes against the narrative. The study was done by a well known researcher.

Do vaccines cause autism?

Yes. More on that in an upcoming article. If you remove the vaccines and Tylenol, the rates of autism drop to near zero.

The 2007 Generation Rescue survey

In 2007, Generation Rescue (GR), an organization that is trying to alert Americans that vaccines cause autism, hired a third party polling firm (SurveyUSA) and paid them $200,000 to do a survey. The advantage to using a third party to do the survey is that GR cannot manipulate the results.

Like my survey, the GR survey found significant elevations for all diseases and conditions.

In the summary report, GR noted the following lack of interest by the CDC in doing any studies comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated kids:

No studies have ever been done to compare ND rates of children who received vaccines with those who received no vaccines, which is what our survey accomplished. Moreover, no studies have ever explored a link between vaccines and ADHD, despite the fact that 1 in 13 U.S. children have this diagnosis (versus 1 in 150 for autism).

…

The glaring absence of a study to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children for ND rates caused Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) to introduce this bill to compel the National Institutes of Health to do such a study.

Those statements are as true today as they were 16 years ago.

No public health authority has ever done such a survey. Ever.

I predict that such a survey will never be done because they don’t want the truth to be known.

Members of Congress tried to get a bill to force the NIH to do just **ONE** study. The bill was immediately killed in committee.

The bill, H.R.3069 — 111th Congress (2009-2010), was introduced on June 26, 2009 with 9 co-sponsors including Ron Paul. It never made it out of committee.

Here’s the summary:

Requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), acting through the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to conduct a comprehensive study to: (1) compare total health outcomes, including the risk of autism, between vaccinated and unvaccinated U.S. populations; and (2) determine whether vaccines or vaccine components play a role in the development of autism spectrum or other neurological conditions.

The bill would have forced the NIH to do just ONE study.

Why would anyone be opposed to finding the truth?

The answer is simple: because our government simply does not want anyone to know the truth.

People would go nuts if they found out that the CDC has been harming our kids for decades with these vaccines and not telling anyone. It would destroy all faith in the mainstream press, the medical community, Congress, and US government agencies. So they killed the bill and there is no press about it. All silenced by the mainstream media.

Some people will gaslight you into believing that surveys are not “science.” That is false.

In fact, Professor Anders Hviid, an author of the highly cited Denmark study which claims that vaccines don’t cause autism, was so proud of his nationwide questionnaire study on COVID that was published in Nature that he pinned it to his Twitter profile; he’s the senior author on that study!

Professor Hviid then blocked everyone from viewing his tweets within 24 hours after I emailed him to ask him for his data.

If these surveys are all wrong, where are their surveys done by a reputable independent polling firm with no conflicts of interest showing the “correct” numbers?

The silence and lack of interest tells you everything.

In 2005, here’s what the CDC Director Judy Gerberding said about doing surveys comparing vaccinated vs. fully unvaccinated

Here’s what Judy Gerberding, the CDC Director said in 2005:

I think those kinds of studies could be done and should be done.

Let’s speed this up. Let’s look for the early studies that could give us at least some hypotheses to test and evaluate and get information flowing through the research pipeline as quickly as we can. So we are committed to doing that/

We think we will be able to provide more accurate information in the next year or so than we’ve been able to do up to this point. And I know that is our responsibility.

Guess what happened? They did nothing.

Why didn’t they just run exactly the same poll that Generation Rescue did in 2007? Just employ a different third party respected research firm to replicate their study and see if they get similar results. That would have been easy and a great start. Total cost: $200,000.

Instead they did nothing…. nothing!

It reminds me of Sgt Schultz:

Is the CDC hiding the data? Absolutely! Here’s proof.

If the CDC was honest and had nothing to hide, they would give researchers such as Professor Brian Hooker, James Lyons-Weiler, and other scientists who have published papers on autism in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, free, full, unfettered access to the VSD and Medicaid databases to do research.

But they won’t.

They never will.

Because hiding the data is critical.

And that tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it?

A few other things you should know

Here’s my handy list of other things you should know:

1. Here is a complete list of necessary vaccines: <this space intentionally left blank>
2. Have you ever wondered why vaccines work so well? Check out the graphs here. You’ll find this most interesting.
3. None of the vaccines used in America today were ever tested against a true placebo (saline shot). This was noted in Turtles all the way down and has never been disproven.
4. There are no post-marketing studies of vaccine safety for any vaccine in America that prove the vaccines are safe. Only the states have the data and they aren’t sharing the data or doing the studies. See my article on data transparency for details and also my article “Is it safe?” for details on why that is.
5. Did you know CDC doesn’t have the vaccination record-level data for any vaccine from any state? So the CDC can’t know if the vaccines are safe. They could ask the states to provide these records, but they are too shy to ask the states for the data. I got this directly from the head of Media Relations at the CDC. I was floored.
6. The states aren’t doing the safety analysis either. When I contacted California State Epidemiologist Erica Pan, she ghosted me immediately after I asked her, “Do you believe in data transparency?”
7. None of the states make record-level public health data public. If they do that, we’d improve clinical outcomes. There’s no study showing keeping this data secret improves clinical outcomes. I believe that they keep this data hidden to cover the harms caused by vaccines. I’d love to be proven wrong. Simply open up the records.
8. A lot of people believe that vaccines have eliminated many diseases and are a net benefit to society. I’ve yet to see the proof of any of that today. While it “sounds” plausible, the risk benefits of each vaccine are dynamic and depend on the current morbidity and mortality of the disease relative to that of the vaccine. Where is the data on that? I haven’t seen it. Have you? There should be an on-going annual evaluation of risk vs. benefit for each vaccine. This has never been done. Why not let us into the VSD to make these assessments instead of blindly assuming vaccines have no risks?
9. If your child has autism, you can reverse it in some cases. Here’s what Scott Shoemaker did to cure his son. Unfortunately, doctors who know how to treat your child have to keep a low profile or they will have their license revoked. The medical community doesn’t want it known that autism can be reversed at all.

Reader comments

Colleen Gaffney wrote:

One other thing that I found alarming, my daughter came home from school last year and said that in health class they were all talking about things that they were allergic to. Out of 24 students, my unvaccinated daughter was the only one that wasn’t allergic to anything. So ironic.

Guest Post by Steve Kirsch

Nearly all the world’s autism experts know it. They just can’t talk about it.

Executive summary

According to one of the world’s most respected authorities on autism, all, or nearly all, of the world’s top 100 scientists in the autism field know that vaccines are the primary driver behind the autism crisis in America. They just aren’t allowed to talk about it in public. If they did that, they would lose their funding, their job, and be the subject of intimidation techniques from their peers. So they keep quiet and nobody knows what they really think.

Did you know that there are large pediatric practices in America located in high autism areas that have ZERO kids with autism? Normally, we’d simply study what these practices have in common that are different from their peers. It’s called “copying what works.” Showcasing these best practices would dramatically improve the health of kids in the US and reverse the staggering rise in autism rates which are now nearly 5% of people under 40 (per my survey of 10,000 kids).

Note: I make my 10,000 children survey record-level data public for everyone to see. The CDC doesn’t.

If these “best practices” were adopted and encouraged by the CDC, FDA, and NIH, we’d be the healthiest nation on earth and autism rates would drop to insignificant levels.

The reasons there are no studies examining these best practices include:

1. Almost nobody knows these practices exist and who they are. They keep a low profile. Otherwise, the health authorities would shut them down.
2. A common key strategy used in these practices is to avoid vaccination entirely and avoid the use of acetaminophen entirely. The drug companies would not allow a study like this to be published. The journal wouldn’t believe it either; it’s so counter narrative.
3. Another key strategy is if giving a vaccine, give them one at a time rather than multiple vaccines at once. If they admitted this, the CDC credibility would go way down.
4. Clinical outcomes simply don’t matter if you don’t follow the narrative.
5. If it became known that the CDC, FDA, and NIH have been giving advice that made Americans chronically ill, it would tarnish their reputation and nobody would trust them in the future.

The bottom line is that the experts know how to solve the chronic disease crisis in America, but they are not allowed to talk about it. And even if they did, no one would listen or believe them. They would be labeled as liars and misinformation spreaders. Trust me, I know something about that.

In my case, I’m not afraid of having my medical license revoked because I don’t have a medical license. And I’m not afraid of any reputational damage because I’m already disrespected by the mainstream community and banned for life on Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Medium, and so on. Google rates me as the world’s #1 misinformation superspreader. Most of my former friends won’t talk to me. So I have nothing to lose!

I will fund a study to identify the common unique practices of clinics with superior health outcomes (including zero autism). And I’m also going to fund a robust statistical analysis on my survey data to prove that it shows a causal link between vaccines and a variety of chronic diseases in a way that is impervious to attack.

The bottom line is that the mainstream medical community and CDC will never do these studies. And if they did, they’d never publicly release the underlying data.

But I will do these studies and release the data. And America will finally learn the truth about the incalculable damage that the CDC, FDA, and NIH have done.

Introduction

On May 19, 2023, I did a survey of parents who described the health challenges of their kids. The data showed a huge signal that vaccines in general increase your likelihood of various chronic diseases including autism. For autism, ADHD, food allergies, etc. it was a 5X signal; for autoimmune diseases, the risk was elevated by around 25X. More on the results in a subsequent article.

I called up my friend Dr. James Lyons-Weiler. James is an expert on autism; he read over 2,000 autism papers and wrote a highly-rated book about it: The Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism. He told me that he believed at the time he wrote the book that if you could eliminate vaccines from the US, the rate of autism would drop by around 4X. In other words, vaccines are the single largest factor causing autism. Knowing what he knows now, he’d have declined all vaccines and would never have vaccinated his kids.

James also noted that using Tylenol (aka Acetaminophen or Paracetamol) around vaccination time will significantly increase the likelihood that a child will develop autism from a vaccine shot.

This explains why medical practices that avoid vaccination (combined with other healthy practices) have near zero rates of autism (0 in 500 kids vs. around 25 in 500 in the surrounding community). So that’s a 5-sigma event which means either the practice is super lucky (way less than 1 in 1 million), or they are doing something right.

The staggering growth of autism

Do you see a problem? The Vaccine Injury Act was passed in 1986 that protected the drug companies from liability. Check out the graph. And it isn’t genetics because genes don’t change that fast. It wasn’t a change in the definition of autism either (DSM-III-R): that would show as a step function, and level off asymptotically.

This is just in California:

As you can see, when acetaminophen use tapers off, the autism rates decrease:

The pediatric practice with “off the charts” health outcomes eschews the use of all vaccines, vitamin-K shots, and acetaminophen. No acetaminophen period. Ever.

Why didn’t my doctor tell me about this?

You never hear about these practices because the doctors know that if they talk about it publicly, they will have their license to practice medicine revoked for life.

The most stunning thing James told me in our call today is that after he wrote the book, he was contacted by one of the most senior scientists in the autism field who told him straight up:

James told me if you got the top 100 autism scientists in a room and they took a poll that could not be traced back to them as to whether vaccines were the major driver of autism, the vote would either be 100% YES, or very close to that.

Bottom line: Neither the doctors nor the scientists are allowed to question the narrative. This is why healthcare is so messed up today.

Did you know that Congress knows vaccines cause autism?

Check out this comment from Kenneth Stoller, MD:

In 2004, I testified at a Congressional reform and oversight committee meeting about new developments in treating autism. Everyone was excited about what would happen next because we were hoping for legislation that would give autistic children access to off label treatments. There are no off-label treatments, but 3rd party payers don’t cover off label as a rule.

A sober congressional aide pulled me aside and told me the inconvenient truth. Every person in the upper tier in government already knew vaccines cause autism and were never going to do anything about it. There would be no legislation with the words autism and treatment found together.

Or this comment from Maui Freedom Fighter:

Because I am a recently retired teacher. These parents have technology, and they have “ receipts” !!! One parent showed me VIDEO of her son at a young age, speaking, clearly intelligibly and way beyond his years (mom was an eye surgeon, dad, multiple doctorates in IT)! … The next day after vaccines he lost ALL speech, gross motor and fine motor we’re extremely diminished = SEVERE Autism!!! They were devastated!! I heard similar stories from all my parents!!! Autism is 100% EPIDEMIC!!! Well the car I am currently consulting Catholic schools in Vietnam. What is the rate of autism they are saying currently??? ONE in 10

Did you know that SIDS is caused by vaccination? They are not allowed to talk about that either!

They gaslight parents into believing SIDS is caused by a baby sleeping on their stomach.

Are you kidding me?!?!?!

Let’s examine how silly that is. Babies have been around for …. How many years now?? It’s around 192,000 years.

It wasn’t until 1969 that SIDS was significant enough to merit a name.

It wasn’t until 25 years later that in1994, NICHD launched the “Back to Sleep” campaign.

In my survey there were 7 cases of SIDS. In two cases, the reporter didn’t remember the timing. Leaving 5 cases. 3 of the 5 were within 1 week of a shot. 1 of those 3 cases of SIDS was immediately after the shot. So data is consistent with the bulk happening right after the shot. If someone else has access to a larger dataset, I’d love to see it! This is just a quick sanity check with small numbers. It doesn’t “prove” anything but it is consistent with the hypothesis of harm.

I’m drafting a separate article about SIDS. There is no question it is caused by vaccines. I verified the data directly myself and found the same association that the papers wrote about.

SIDS is also vaccine dependent. Some vaccines have a higher rate than others. This is crystal clear from the VAERS data.

Check this out. This is direct observation:

In other words, virtually all the SIDS deaths happened shortly after vaccination and some vaccines have higher SIDS death rates than others.

You’d have to be very blind not to see causality here. If you don’t see the causality, you should probably not be in medicine.

I’ll be expanding on this in my next post dedicated to SIDS.

How can hundreds of papers in the medical journals that claim vaccines don’t cause autism or SIDS be wrong? Is science that corrupt?!?!

In a word, yes. I never would have believed this myself two years ago.

But look at COVID. All those safe and effective studies? They were all wrong! All the papers showing it reduced the rate of infection: wrong. These vaccines have nearly no adverse events and no deaths if you read the papers. If you read the post-marketing VSD study on the COVID vaccines, you’ll see your all-cause mortality is cut in half after the shot. In short, nearly all the papers showing harm seem to either never get accepted or are retracted for reasons that don’t satisfy the COPE guidelines.

And these people still have never acknowledged a death from the mRNA vaccine yet in the US.

What makes me different

What makes me different is that I’m not afraid to speak out and tell people the truth.

I’m also not afraid to ask for data transparency when no one else will.

Next steps

The survey I did shows very clearly what is really going on.

But in order to be able to publish this in a medical journal in a way that will survive calls for retraction, we have to do about 3 months worth of analysis on the data. James Lyons-Weiler will be doing this. This is his forte. He knows all the ways to block the data to make the analysis bulletproof. I agreed to fund James for the next three months to do that.

If you’d like to play a role in supporting this research, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack if you are not already a paying subscriber.

The autism rate among those under 40 years old is close to 5%. This is a train wreck. There are only a small handful of researchers who were brave enough to write papers and fortunate enough to get them published. The more we can add confirmatory studies like this that are relatively “bulletproof,” the harder it will be for doctors to cling to their belief systems.

Summary

It’s not like we don’t know what the major drivers of a large number of chronic diseases are in America today. Some doctors do know. They are just not allowed to talk about it.

Making it safe for doctors and scientists to be able to speak the truth without intimidation is a much harder problem and that may take decades to solve.

So our best move is simply to educate the public directly. The more evidence we can get published in medical journals, the easier it will be to educate the public ASAP on the truth about the harms of vaccines and other drugs.

Via History.com

On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred.

The Chernobyl station was situated at the settlement of Pripyat, about 65 miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine. Built in the late 1970s on the banks of the Pripyat River, Chernobyl had four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power. On the evening of April 25, 1986, a group of engineers began an electrical-engineering experiment on the Number 4 reactor. The engineers, who had little knowledge of reactor physics, wanted to see if the reactor’s turbine could run emergency water pumps on inertial power.

As part of their poorly designed experiment, the engineers disconnected the reactor’s emergency safety systems and its power-regulating system. Next, they compounded this recklessness with a series of mistakes: They ran the reactor at a power level so low that the reaction became unstable, and then removed too many of the reactor’s control rods in an attempt to power it up again. The reactor’s output rose to more than 200 megawatts but was proving increasingly difficult to control. Nevertheless, at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, the engineers continued with their experiment and shut down the turbine generator to see if its inertial spinning would power the reactor’s water pumps. In fact, it did not adequately power the water pumps, and without cooling water the power level in the reactor surged.

To prevent meltdown, the operators reinserted all the 200-some control rods into the reactor at once. The control rods were meant to reduce the reaction but had a design flaw: graphite tips. So, before the control rod’s five meters of absorbent material could penetrate the core, 200 graphite tips simultaneously entered, thus facilitating the reaction and causing an explosion that blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. It was not a nuclear explosion, as nuclear power plants are incapable of producing such a reaction, but was chemical, driven by the ignition of gases and steam that were generated by the runaway reaction. In the explosion and ensuing fire, more than 50 tons of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere, where it was carried by air currents.

On April 27, Soviet authorities began an evacuation of the 30,000 inhabitants of Pripyat. A cover-up was attempted, but on April 28 Swedish radiation monitoring stations, more than 800 miles to the northwest of Chernobyl, reported radiation levels 40 percent higher than normal. Later that day, the Soviet news agency acknowledged that a major nuclear accident had occurred at Chernobyl.

In the opening days of the crisis, 32 people died at Chernobyl and dozens more suffered radiation burns. The radiation that escaped into the atmosphere, which was several times that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was spread by the wind over Northern and Eastern Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest and farmland. An estimated 5,000 Soviet citizens eventually died from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses caused by their exposure to the Chernobyl radiation, and millions more had their health adversely affected. In 2000, the last working reactors at Chernobyl were shut down and the plant was officially closed.

 The good news about 2020 is that at least are out in the open now. They've all outed themselves. The masks are off.

 

By Katrina Fernandez | “Now will you finally leave the Catholic Church?” What do you do when there’s an intruder in your home? You defend yourself, your family, and your property. You call the police. Someone is in your home when they ought not...

... Trump's approach to regulatory reform is really quite reasonable and good, according to Cass Sunstein.

Well, it's not the first time a women's protest has been about sex. In 411 BC, Aristophanes's play Lysistrata involved the women of Athens and surrounding city-states going on sex strike until their long-suffering husbands signed a peace treaty and ended war. And certainly throughout history women have been demanding their sexual rights. Lysistrata complains that while the men are off waging war, young women are languishing at home, only getting older. It's not fair, because while old men can still marry and have children, women have a definite window of opportunity. The men at war are depriving the women of their right to marriage and children.

There's a rich Biblical tradition of sexual protest as well: Genesis 19 recounts how Lot's daughters, cut off from civilization, get their father drunk and have sex with him so that they may bear children by hook or by crook. Genesis 38 tells the story of Tamar, whose first two husbands refuse to give her children through primitive forms of birth control. And since her father-in-law Judah (the ancestor of Jesus) won't marry her to his third son and give her the right of having children, she disguises herself as a prostitute, has sex with Judah himself, and conceives that way. Ruth demands her right of marriage (and children) from Boaz by making herself attractive and laying down near him as he sleeps, and then making her request when he startles awake. (Ruth is praised for her initiative by the elders of the city, who compare her to Tamar in her audacity.)

So, two thousand years later, women are still protesting and demanding their sexual rights, wearing pink pussy hats in lieu of rich robes and perfumes of Araby, and those rights are still centered around children. In this particular culture, however, women aren't demanding that men stop withholding children from them. The explicit demand, the entire official purpose of this modern protest is the right to kill the child. Sex is not connected with the stability and the relative immortality of bearing children to perpetuate a name and a family, but with immediate gratification, with expressing oneself, with reducing the richness of womanhood to nothing more than a vagina.

Two thousand years from now, who will be making history? What will sexual protest be about in 4017? Probably something as inconceivable to modern women as abortion on demand would have been to the ancients. We're constantly lectured by bumper stickers that "Well Behaved Women Don't Make History" -- because only women who make noise, who make love, who dare to wear pussy hats have any chance of carpe diem-ing, while the meek inherit the housework. And yet, what woman has had a more outsized impact on history than the Blessed Virgin Mary? Her sexual protest involved questioning even an angel itself: "How can this be, since I do not know man?" She stands -- alone, not amidst a supportive mob of you-go girls -- and asserts her virginity against God Himself offering her the gift of being the mother of the Messiah. And God honors her courage, granting her both the child and the virginity.

Throughout her life, Mary stands not amidst, but against the crowd. She stands at the foot of Jesus's cross, quiet against the howling of the mob. (Every mob demanding its own will ends, in effect, by shouting, "Crucify him!" -- a good reason why the assembly at Mass faces the image of the crucified Christ, to remind them that they come to serve his will, not their own.) Her protest is silent and internal, unless she is addressing God Himself. There she is not shy about making demands: "Son, why have you done this to us? Don't you know your father and I have been looking for you?" "They have no wine." She makes no waves. She makes no splashy headlines. She makes no strategic alliances with evil. And yet she has changed the lot of more women for the better, has garnered more sexual respect and rights for women, than any other woman in history. Perhaps the key is in the only recorded bit of advice she utters: "Do whatever he tells you." In that is contained the key to sexual freedom, and every freedom.

Here is a little something sent to me by Baby Sis, who just had a birthday, BTW.

THERE IS NO SENIOR DISCOUNT FOR READING THIS!!!
Now this may not apply to some of you, but I can relate to nearly everything here, know what I mean ?

Coffee in the cozy kitchen this morning!

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

Between 600,000 dead children in Africa each year and the new Zika virus, it is time to declare war on mosquitoes. Now. Today. Before another state follows Hawaii's lead and has to declare a state of emergency.

For those too young, DDT was an incredibly effective tool against mosquitoes that was thought to harm birds. We now know it does not.

Environmentalists hate to admit they are wrong to the extent that children are expendable. While some contend, perhaps correctly, the mass fumigation was a problem, the judicious use of DDT under the present circumstances should be immediately considered.

…is that even our statues worship statues:

"Doctor, I'm in a dysfunctional relationship."

"Tell me about it."

"She's abusive to me and I can't trust her."

"What's the woman's name?"

"Facebook."


"Facebook?  Facebook is the woman's name?"

"Facebook.  She's a hussy.  I've written about her before, Facebook the Hussy."

"So what is the nature of the relationship?"

"She lies, she cheats on me, she hits me, I blow up at her.  And then I leave her and she woos me back again and tells me she's sorry and she'll never do it again.  And for a month or so everything's perfect.  And the sex is great.  And then I notice she's been lying, she's been cheating on me.  I confront her, she hits me, I blow up at her.  And we start the cycle all over again."

"But ... Facebook is not a woman.  Facebook is a thing."

"Look, Doc.  She's a woman, and a shallow and bitter one at that."

"Perhaps I should prescribe some ... medication?"

"No, listen!  When I first joined Facebook, I had a few friends, actors who worked for me.  Facebook looked at her algorithm and decided that I ought be be friends with my friends' friends.  But my friends' friends were all losers and drug addicts.  She kept throwing pictures up at me of losers and drug addicts.  She wanted me to "friend" these people, to have relationships with them.  I should have known then that she didn't care for me.  She did not have my best interests at heart."

"You actually had actors as friends?"

"It was foolish, I know.  And then one of them publicly complained about me (by posting on Facebook) and all of our mutual actor friends left comments consoling her and agreeing with her, so I unfriended the whole damn lot of them then and there."

"I see.  So this rage of yours ... "

"I'm not finished.  I swore off the Hussy at that point.  But we worked out our differences and got back together - or so I thought.  We had a deal.  No more actor friends.  Only Super-Catholic friends."

"Oh, my."

"I know!  I know!  That also had disaster written all over it!  Posts on novenas and devotions and all that Catholic stuff - I had hundreds of friends, and they were all Super-Catholics, fans of my EWTN work, fans of theology and saints.  Then one day I put up a post quoting from the Catechism and I got over 140 comments - all disagreeing with the Catechism.  With the freaking Catechism of the Catholic Church!  A ton of Super-Catholic friends were furious that I had quoted from it because they disagreed with it."

"So ... "

"So I broke up with Facebook again.  But I began to miss her - the smile, the laugh, the great sex."

"Continue."

"Then I compromised.  We'd get back together, but I would 'unfollow' all but about a dozen of my friends.  I simply would not see the posts of all of these whackos who were bringing me down.  And I'd do my best to ignore their comments on my posts."

"How did that go?"

"Fine for a month or two.  It was our second honeymoon.  But then I noticed something."

"What?"

"I couldn't keep my promise to stay out of the fray.  I started getting sucked in to pointless arguments in the comments to posts that I was putting up, posts that linked to my blog.  People wouldn't comment on my blog posts at my blog site, they'd comment on Facebook.  I'd respond to their comments, and then they'd rip into me and lecture me about how judgmental I am or how naive I am or how arrogant I am."

"But you really are all those things."

"I know, but that was beside the point!  I was trying to discuss issues or insights I'd had about spiritual matters or stuff like that.  I'd be attacked personally as a way to discredit the argument I'd be making, as a way of short circuiting any genuine intellectual engagement."

"Did you say, 'genuine intellectual engagement'?  This is the internet, you fool!  You really are nuts!"

"So finally, after about a dozen times back and forth, I've had it.  I'm giving her up for Advent - and for good."

"That's a bit extreme, wouldn't you say?"

"No, Facebook the Hussy is extreme.  Maybe not for everyone - though I've seen her hurt many of my friends, who not only become addicted to her, but who form intensely intimate so-called relationships with members of the opposite sex who are not their husbands or wives.  That sort of thing has happened to me as well, and it's devastating in every conceivable way.  It's a trap, you know."

"It's not a trap.  It's technology.  Technology is neutral."

"Technology is far from neutral, doctor.  Take the microphone, for example.  The microphone changed singing from stage-singing to crooner-singing, bringing in a whole different kind of music, revolutionizing the culture, for better or worse.  The automobile brings the benefits of quick transportation along with the burden of suburban sprawl and a kind of isolationism.  No technology is neutral."

"But it's not the technology's fault.  It's our fault."

"I agree.  But certain kinds of technology facilitate certain kinds of reactions.  The internet allows us to connect instantaneously with far away friends, but it also allows us to access unlimited pornography in the privacy of our bedrooms, the kind of pornography that only the most degraded of perverts were aware of fifty years ago.  Humans have always had the potential to find soul mates in far flung places, and humans have always had the potential to give themselves over to hard core porn.  The internet has facilitated both by the very nature of what the internet is.  Certain kinds of technology facilitate certain kinds of responses in us.  So perhaps you could say technology is neutral, but our use of technology never is.  Technology provides grooves that are more conducive to certain kinds of behavior and not conducive to others."

"But getting back to Facebook ... "

"The Hussy provides a false sense of intimacy.  Facebook friends are not real friends, as a rule.  Oh, maybe if you stick with sharing photos and videos of kittens, you're OK.  But beyond that, you'll find that Facebook friends will drive you crazy."

"Real friends can drive you crazy, too.  In the real world."

"Yes, but there's a humanity there that's lacking in Facebook.  For one thing, no real friend in real life would say the kinds of things many Facebook false friends are emboldened to say with their keyboards.  And for another, things like smiles, laughter (not LOL cyber laughter, but real laughter), tone of voice - all of the give and take you get when you're with a real friend in real life - these things bring warmth and context, these things convey humanity and real affection, or sometimes real frustration.  That's because real friendships exist in a real web - not a "world wide web", but the kind of web that's like a fine silk or a gauze, connecting people in a frail and fine and delicate way, just like a spider's web.  There's a finesse to real life relationships, a give and take, a kind of gauze that cushions much of what we do with one another and that operates on many levels in many subtle ways at once."

"So, to use an analogy ... "

"To use an analogy, Facebook is like a garish daytime talk show with celebrity hosts and insipid guests - too loud, too stupid, too contrived, too self-absorbed.  Real life is like the novels of Henry James."

"Well, maybe you've made the right decision - at least for you, at least for now."

"It's not a decision, doctor.  It's a deliverance."

These were so fun to think up. If you wanna share any of your own, you can do so here!