NB: One more piece crossposted at Inverse Square.
I will be bringing most of what I write there over here, but if you want to make sure you see what will most often be thoughts, stories, and howls of rage in the general vicinity of my upcoming book, consider subscribing. For the foreseeable future nothing will be behind a paywall so doing so just gets you emails whenever something new shows up there.
With that…here’s a little polemical history for your Saturday afternoon.
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As I’ve dived into the history of anti-vaccine ideas over the last year, a question I get asked over and over again (and have asked myself, for that matter) is “why?”
Why do people who should know better—who can know better—go all in on repeatedly-exposed-as-false claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of vaccines?
There’s one obvious possibility. Take Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (please!). He was not always an anti-vaxxer. His big turn in that direction came in 2015, following a decades-long career as an environmental lawyer, and by no later than 2021 he was raking in genuinely big bucks, as New York Times reporter Susanne Craig documented during RFK Jr.’s short lived presidential campaign. In that piece he admitted that one of the motivations for taking that stance was the money he could get from doing so: “I had these big bills that I just couldn’t pay” he told Craig, until he without supplementing his income by acting as an anti-vaccine hired gun.
Money does talk, and without saying for a moment that the possibility of getting rich off vaccine fear-mongering could possibly color the views of any of the top social media vaccination opponents, ever wilder claims of vaccine harms have proved effective in attracting views, followers, and all the monetization opportunities that attend such success.
But even were money not a primary motivator, the deep history of vaccine rejection suggests another way in which that stance can be used to achieve goals that have nothing to do with vaccination itself.
So let’s set the WABAC machine* to take us to Boston, Massachusetts in the summer of 1721. It’s not a great time in the nascent Hub of the Universe. A smallpox flare that began in April with just a handful of cases has leapt its initial foothold along the docks, until by June it grew into a full-blown epidemic, one that would by year’s-end infect more than half of the city’s population.
This outbreak is mostly remembered for how a most unlikely person tried to stop it in its tracks. Cotton Mather, most famously the God-drunk Puritan minister who helped sustain the Salem witch scare…
…was also, it turns out, a medical innovator. Years before the 1721 return of smallpox to Boston, he’d learned from his slave Onesimus, born in Africa, of a way to stop a smallpox infection in its tracks. Onesimus told Mather what had been done to him as a child: a practitioner had taken material from the sores of someone with an active case of smallpox; scratched some deep scrapes into his limbs; and mixed the smallpox guck into those cuts. Onesimus described coming down with mild smallpox symptoms and was, he told Mather, protected ever after from a repeat bout with the disease.**
When smallpox returned to Boston more than a decade later, Mather resolved to put what he’d learned from Onesimus into practice. He recruited a local surgeon to perform the operation, and by the epidemic’s end the two men managed to persuade almost 300 people to try out the procedure.
The technique worked, as a series of repeat experiments would demonstrate over the rest of the eighteenth century. But it didn’t save Boston, not then: almost 6,000 people came down with smallpox that year. One in seven of them died. Why do so many of them reject an intervention that could have saved their lives?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that Mather and his medical partner faced vehement, occasionally violent opposition from the local medical and civic leaders. Their objections were often couched in piety: Mather was interfering with God’s plan by deciding who should get sick (with the reaction to the vaccine) and at the same time by attempting to overrule God’s judgement over who should live and who should die.
But there was another agenda behind that indictment. The loudest clamor against Mather and those of his fellow ministers who supported this proto-vaccination came from the New England Courant, edited by James Franklin, aided by his apprentice and younger brother, Ben. James (most likely) denounced Mather in the Courant throughout the summer and autumn in a series of unsigned articles and he provided a venue for local doctors who dismissively rejected the idea of a mere minister trespassing on matters of medical science.
That rejection of the authority of a religious leader was the key. The subtext to the attacks on Mather was the question of who should govern Boston and Massachusetts: the Puritan clerical elite who had exerted authority throughout the colony since the early 17th century, or those of more worldly power and expertise—doctors and merchants and the like.
Both Franklins supported that secular challenge to the idea of a handful of men claiming divine sanction for their power. And though that battle continued for quite a while (some might say it isn’t over yet), Boston’s 1721 smallpox invasion proved to be a milestone in that struggle. Mather had been right about variolation, but it took acceptance in the coming years by the same doctors who had dismissed him then to turn inoculation into standard medical procedure. Authority, who got to say what was in and what was out, was changing hands.
Now to my point (I promise I do have one). What’s been happening with vaccines over the last decade or so? Looking just at RFK Jr.’s career and it becomes clear that the argument he’s made more than any other is that experts aren’t expert; they don’t know more than you or I, and everything they say has to be understood through a lens of self-interest, corruption, or, more charitably, as merely conventional and suspect “wisdom.”
Instead, as Kennedy and his allies have urged, anyone can do their own research, and when you do, they say, the true horrors of vaccination become clear.
That’s bullshit, of course, but to channel the wickedly funny Firesign Theatre, it’s really GREAT shit.*** Which is to say that it has been extraordinarily effective in changing the landscape of authority in the United States (and around the world).
In practice, each mote of trust that could be extracted from established authorities—like doctors or biomedical researchers who actually know stuff about infectious disease—becomes a particle of power available to those who claim they represent the democratic alternative to a closed elite serving its own interests.
So…to the question that got this post going, why does Kennedy say stuff he knows (or once knew; he may genuinely be high on his own supply by now) to be false?
Look where it’s got him: he’s the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. His equally knowing or should-be-knowledgeable co-conspirators run the CDC and the NIH and more.
All that sway has flowed to them directly because of how they were able to erode the legitimacy of traditional expertise.
All of which is to say (again!) that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it damn sure knows the chords. Mather’s opponents were wrong on the matter at hand: variolation could have saved hundreds of lives that did not need to be lost in Boston in 1721. But they won the longer campaign, eroding Puritan authority while advancing their own.
Kennedy et al. have achieved a version of the same victory. They are completely, dangerously, already fatally wrong about vaccines but for now they have pushed scientific expertise out of the federal medical policy making and have commandeered that decisive power for themselves.
TL:DR—Kennedy, his associates, and the Republican Party that has elevated them, have done so for entirely rational ends. They’ve got what they wanted—a substantially unchecked hold on the levers of government. Those who suffer and die as trust in vaccines evaporates are the collateral damage those who’ve won this round are willing to accept.
And those same victims are who we need to defend, every damn day.
Open thread.
*Yes, I am that old. Mr. Peabody is one of my heroes. ;-)
**For more on the Mather story, you can take a look at my recent book on the history of germ theory, So Very Small, or wait until this coming May for another take on it in A Pox on Fools.
***Originally said by Mrs. Presky (Phil Proctor) in response to her game show prize on the Firesign Theatre classic Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers.
Image, Frans Francken the Younger, Witches’ Sabbath, 1606
_-_Witches%27_Sabbath.jpg){kind=link}
ArchTeryx
Okay, I’ll post from the dead thread, because it’s one of my favorite subjects.
The best way to think about Moby Dick is really two books in one: A fictional story and a nonfiction documentary.
The fictional story everyone knows about the Pequod, based, of course, on the ship Essex (and the REAL story will raise the hairs on your neck. Pure horror).
A documentary detailing the New England whaling industry and how whaling ships operated. Done to the last detail.
People go into the book expecting only story #1, and get documentary #2 for free. Then go, “WTF am I reading?”
You want actual Sperm Whale accuracy, go look at Susan Bird’s or Ingrid Visser’s videos some time of Sperm Whale pods. The whalers (no surprise) had everything dead wrong about them. Nowadays, Sperm Whales think of us as friend-shaped, or at the least, objects of intense curiosity. They also take great pains not to hurt us with their 220 dB hunting clicks.
You want scary? Go look up Livyatan melvillei some time, named after Melville himself. A prehistoric Sperm-Whale-like creature that had the jaws and feeding habits of orcas. An orca the size of a large Sperm Whale. That, that is scary. These things took on megalodon and ate them.
Professor Bigfoot
I’m (audiobook) reading “Black AF History” and while I remembered Cotton Mather from “So Very Small” it was the first I’d heard of Onesimus… (and correct me if my memory is mistaken Tom— I was driving while listening to your book!)
trollhattan
Fun post as always, much appreciated.
Think it’s important to add WRT RFK the Lesser is he’s always been a predator and rich little shit protected by his family’s now-waning name. We experienced his antivax ghoulishness firsthand when he came to the metroplex to fight against mandatory vaccinations for schools. Punchline is contained in the last graf.
Dr Pan was my state senator, now termed out. A hero—full stop. And for more on Junior’s pampered and evil life, a delicious venom-filled forty minute listen.
youtu.be/o0iCMldBYgw?si=04R9xrfEzmnXQOno
brendancalling
Ben came to regret that stance deeply when his own kid died of smallpox, which he admits could have been prevented by inoculation: founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-02-02-0025
Professor Bigfoot
Thank you; looking at them now.
JoyceH
Sadly, Ben Franklin later became a proponent of the early smallpox vaccinations, but he and his wife delayed getting his small son Frankie vaccinated because the vaccine then could cause a mild illness and little Frankie was sickly. So they put it off and little Frankie died of smallpox at the age of four and Franklin felt guilty about that for the rest of his life.
Another Scott
Always follow the money – especially with these monsters.
It’s yet another indication that taxes are too low on these wannabe MotUs, and there are too many horrible consequences for the rest of us.
Thanks Tom, and everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
TPO
Cotton Mather makes an appearance in Elizabeth Cook’s song Half-Hanged Mary, based upon a Margaret Atwood poem about an episode in the Salem witch trials. I was in the audience for the show at the link, though the video is not mine.
If I had any musical talent, I’d write a song called Cotton the Variolator (who knew?).
gene108
I wonder how much the anti-vaccine movement glommed onto the unregulated nutritional supplements business?
It’s natural for people to look for ways to improve their health by eating certain foods and/or taking supplements that claim to improve health.
People, all people, want to feel they are in total control of their health, or whatever they are doing, if it’s clearly an unhealthy lifestyle, won’t hurt them badly. It’s very very hard to accept a degenerative condition, which means you are no longer able to fully control your health.
Seems like the anti-vaccine movement co-opted some of the underlying beliefs in the alternative medicine sphere, where the “crunchy granola” types looked for ways to get a one up on their health, but sort of in reverse. Instead of promoting taking something, they started with stop getting vaccinated. They’ve moved into promoting vaccine alternatives that do nothing like taking Vitamin A to fight measles.
What’s interesting is how the biggest anti-vaccine proponents went from the supposedly liberal “crunchy granola” types to the most rabid right-wingers in this country. I’m not sure how that phenomenon came about.
trollhattan
@gene108:
A Venn diagram would be One Big Beautiful Circle.
The conceit of “just eat right and you’ll never get sick” is a powerful one.
Hey, I know, why not eat well AND take advantage of two-hundred years of medical advances?
gene108
@TPO:
From what I have read, Puritans valued education in their ranks and for the broader white Massachusetts colony.
Harvard University is named after Puritan clergyman John Harvard who donated part of his estate and his library collection to found the college, which was started to train clergy and became more secular in the 18th century onwards.
gene108
@trollhattan:
I think this is an inherent natural belief in most people. It’s instinctive.
It can be exploited by unscrupulous people, and probably has been for thousands of years.
VFX Lurker
The NYT article is paywalled, so it’s not clear to me if RFK Jr profited from one anti-vax billionaire or a legion of anti-vax small donors.
I suspect the answer is small donations. Too many Americans oppose vaccines.
Omnes Omnibus
@gene108:
This is in part because they regarded salvation as individual and that the ability to read and understand scripture was a necessity to achieve that salvation.
ArchTeryx
@Professor Bigfoot: Susan Bird’s a bit more of a crunchy granola type but I cannot deny she’s got a very deep bond with these animals. They’ll tail-lob (slap the water with their tails) when they see her – that’s Happy Sperm Whale. Females will even show her their new calves and the calves themselves are hopelessly curious. They’ll even let her touch them, and for wild animals, that’s insanely trusting. She takes great pains to keep locations secret, so tourists don’t rush out and disturb the pods. Quite contrary to what whalers believed, catchalots are very shy and will mostly flee humans, and strangers showing up in their pod territory is very distressing to them.
Ingrid Visser is much more an orca researcher; that’s what she is famous for. She’s also the one that will bluntly say that orcas are the “assholes of the ocean,” for what they do to each other and to their prey. But she also has filmed Sperm Whale pods, and (IIRC) at least one clash between orcas and Sperm Whales. The whales have a defense mechanism that’s almost guaranteed to drive even determined orca pods away. Disgusting, but extremely effective.
Omnes Omnibus
Gargoyle mood board. I am an 8.
Harrison Wesley
@ArchTeryx: Ron Howard made a movie (In The Heart Of The Sea) about the Essex. I suspect I wouldn’t enjoy it.
billcoop4
Tease.
BC in the ‘dacks
ArchTeryx
@Harrison Wesley: There’s a YouTuber called Scary Interesting that did a short but extremely informative documentary about the Essex. All the horrors of 19th century shipping multiplied by about 10. The whale that supposedly sank the ship was just the beginning of the story and that part is still debated to this day, since now we know Sperm Whales would have more likely fled than attacked. It’s quite possible, though, if they went after a calf, the mother would have launched an attack on the boat.
What happens after would make even Stephen King blanch. While Scary Interesting takes pains to make descriptions generic and nondescript, he also is quick to tell people viewer discretion is strongly advised for these sorts of documentaries.
Shakti
snip:
snip:
Harrison Wesley
@ArchTeryx: Yeah, starving people deciding which of their group gets eaten isn’t something I’d plan to watch on date night.
sab
Gosh darn. Now I have to hate Ben Franklin?
trollhattan
@Harrison Wesley:
Date night movie mistakes would be a good Medium Cool topic.
Will volunteer an earned example: Looking for Mister Goodbar.
Professor Bigfoot
EXCELLENT.
Y’know, this is the 21st century; we got cameras and microphones and the whole internet, nobody else needs venture down there.
(well, except for Dr. Bird and Dr. Visser, their equipment people and technicians, their grad students, and of course the sailors who get them there— but I suspect this is information they will ALL take to their graves)
trollhattan
@sab:
He’s propped up by a significant Plusses column.
Castor Canadensis
@Another Scott: The meta-question is…
… what were the motives of the folks who spent significant money getting RFK Junior to perjure himself?
I have my opinions, but they’re not kind ones (:-))
ArchTeryx
@Professor Bigfoot: Well, also, Sperm Whale pods will wander around a lot. They aren’t like transient orca pods, though, which literally will swim one end of the Seven Seas to the other. They follow their food, which is mostly Giant, Humbolt and Colossal Squid. Hunted at depths so deep we need submersibles or deepwater camera probes to reach it. And sometimes new members will join the pod and others leave it. One of her best videos is a brand new pod member checking her out – a completely wild Sperm Whale, giving her the once-over from point blank range. When her curiosity was satisfied, she just… sank straight down into the depths. No fluke movement, because that might have hurt their guest. Sperm Whales are just amazing animals.
They may also be the only other animal on the planet with language
They are quite capable of defending themselves, though, though nonlethal means. One unfortunate snorkeler (not Susan) was taking video of a Sperm Whale and startled it by accident. Sperm Whales defend themselves by completely emptying their bowels and spinning hard. The technical term researchers use for this is a “poonami” and you really, really don’t want to be in the middle of one.
Aziz, light!
Recent news that Bobby Junior said the keto diet can cure both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Is this lunatic going to try to cut people off from their meds?
sab
@Aziz, light!: My relatives on meds are quite concerned about that.
ArchTeryx
@Professor Bigfoot: youtu.be/SkBpummjR5I?si=rexsb5I_2c9L1SRo for a bonus. Deepwater marine biology expedition suddenly out of nowhere encounters a Sperm Whale in deep waters. She actually broke off her hunt to check them out, and what happened then was pure magic. There is no better rebuttal to Melville’s arguments than videos like that.
Ealbert
@trollhattan:
My boyfriend took me to that because it starred Diane Keaton so he thought it would be funny like here recent Woody Allen movie (Annie Hall). It definitely wasn’t.
Professor Bigfoot
@ArchTeryx: Wow.
Just, wow.
The Homeworld never ceases to amaze.
🙏🏾
VFX Lurker
@sab:
Maybe more like “know the complete Ben Franklin as a person,” instead of the airbrushed portrait we got as kids.
America for Americans by Erika Lee examined Franklin’s anti-German-American screeds. These came back to bite him when he later ran for office and lost the German-American vote.
He still drafted the Declaration of Independence, pioneered the modern library and evolved from slaver to outspoken abolitionist. He had flowers, and he had thorns.
Gvg
I get the impression talking to people about vaccinations, that an unspoken factor is a lot of people are just plain afraid of needles and don’t want to get shots. Combine this with how long it’s been since we had prolonged inescapable diseases killing us, and I think people wold like an excuse to not do something painful to themselves or their children.
Ya’ll talk about your day of feeling bad from Covid or shingles vax….sometimes even flu shots. I have only once had a day that a vaccination caused me more than a sore arm, so it’s been eye opening to read these stories. The one day was sleeping a lot after it was over and that may have been because of the hour and a half drive to get the first Covid shot plus return which turned out to be longer because of road construction. It was a pay attention drive too.
There is another factor. People don’t accept when they are told there is no medical solution or certainty. When they get told that, they may make up an answer that they think puts them back in control. If not in control, they may want a scapegoat. Even God’s will is not acceptable. We are not natural fatalists mostly, we want action. If we channel that into research of trial and error until we find a solution it is useful, but some just use some kind of faith such as quack medicine.
Harrison Wesley
@Aziz, light!: I think he meant the ketamine diet.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: @brendancalling: The most familiar and heartbreaking detail about that letter is that Franklin wrote it because someone was spreading the false rumor that his son got smallpox from being inoculated.
ArchTeryx
@Professor Bigfoot: They were alien beings in the whale’s own territory and he (not she, that was my mistake) was curious in the manner of an extremely intelligent animal. “We come in peace,” indeed.
They even waved their camera backboard at the whale at one point and if you look close he waved his flipper back at them. I’ll take that over Moby Dick any day. If we could understand them, what would they have to say?
The Homeworld is indeed a place of miracles – if you know how to look. First time I saw that, I cried. From killing these animals en masse to… just offering our friendship. About damn time.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: Even in pre-COVID days, antivax sentiment was less ideologically “left” than most people realized. There was a lot of it already going on on the religious right, which was also already deeply into alt-med and supplements culture.
Matt McIrvin
@trollhattan: Often, what these people regard as “eating well” is not a diet a mainstream doctor would endorse. It’s this extreme keto or paleo stuff where you try to eat almost nothing but meat, etc.
lowtechcyclist
Danny Dollar: “You mean you’re going to trade that four-foot cube of 18-carat Swiss bullion – and the snake knives, Mrs. Presky – all for that little bag?”
Mrs. Caroline Presky: “Yes! I want the bag!”
Danny: “Well, all right then! Open it up!”
Mrs. Presky: “Why – why, this is a bag of shit!”
Danny: “But it’s really great shit, Mrs. Presky!”
Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers is one of the great moments of comedy of any kind.
gene108
@Aziz, light!:
I’ve seen one influencer on YouTube say she cured herself of schizophrenia via a keto diet or some other specific diet.
She has several years of videos about the struggles she has with schizophrenia, and at some point in the last year or two she says a change in diet either cured her or greatly reduced the effects.
RFK, Jr.’s ideas on keto and mental illness seems to be a recent trend.
Of course he is. He’s a eugenicist. He wants a society where the weak are culled by preventable illnesses, so only the strong can pass on their genes.
Sally
I can understand those 18C reactions against variolation. As a 20/21C scientist, I understand how and why it works, but I sure wouldn’t like to have to use it. Variolation carries a risk far greater than vaccination. Without understanding the importance of viral load and method of infection, it would seem to be the same as giving yourself the full blown disease. There is no attenuation, it’s the live virus going into one’s body. Scary! And there would not have been much evidence to indicate that it worked. Even a few examples of survival of variolation would not have convinced me, as people also survived the full infection. Unless you have studies of hundreds, showing that the mortality rate was 1% instead of 30%, I think I would have been sceptical. They had no theory of virology to think through the issue.
lowtechcyclist
@ArchTeryx:
Since it’s effective against orcas, I’m sure you’re right!
Ohio Mom
My introduction to the anti-vax movement was as a young autism mom. Full disclosure: Ohio Son got all his vaccines on schedule; I sometimes joke he’s been inoculated against diseases I’d never heard.
A seminal figure in modern autism was a navy pyschologist named Bernie Rimland. He and his wife had a typically developing daughter and a very autistic son.
His first accomplishment was a review of all the literature on autism, which he used to destroy the then current belief that “refrigerator moms” caused autism (Bruno Bettelheim made that up out of whole cloth, and people bought it for some reason).
His paper won a prestigious award and he became well known. He went on to help found the national Autism Society, which was a very big deal for families who were pretty much on their own and often very isolated.
Autism was considered rare and there weren’t any established approaches for helping their children, other than being advised to institutionalize them. Finally families had a source of information and support. The Society continues its work today, currently it’s fighting the good fight against Trump’s cuts to special education, Medicaid, and other essential supports for the autism community.
Rimland was an early proponent of behaviorism as a treatment approach, and behaviorism continues to be one of the most established approacheds for teaching autistics (I think it’s a little oversold myself. Though it can be a useful tool, it’s not the panacea its often billed as).
Rimland met Temple Grandin before she became famous; he was an advisor on the movie Rainman.
And somewhere along the line, he became convinced mercury in vaccines was behind the increase in autism diagnoses.
For a while, hungry to know more about autism, I subscribed to his newsletter (this was in the late 1990s, before the internet really existed, and way before I got on it).
There was some useful information there but mostly it was vaccines and vitamins. I didn’t renew the subscription.
I’ve always been struck by the combination of Rimland being a breakthrough leader that changed the face of how we think about autism and approach helping autistics and their families, and then becoming a complete crank about vaccines. How could someone be so smart, so visionary, and so stupid?
Sally
The idea that god gets to choose who lives and dies, suffers and thrives, and medicine should not intervene, reminds of that story of the guy stranded on the desert island. Eventually he cries – god why did you abandon me? God replies – I sent you a boat, a plane and helicopter, what more do you want me to do!!
This argument is used for a number of right wing policies, particularly terminations. Never that god gave you choice, doctors, and meds. Spare me …
I’m in a mood!
Castor Canadensis
@gene108: Or the privileged quietly get their shots.
Like his kids, for example. “Kennedy has denied being anti-vaccination and stated that he and his children are vaccinated”, bbc.com/news/articles/c0mzk2y41zvo
Ohio Mom
@Matt McIrvin: Yes. You meet a lot of them at LaLeche meetings, at least I did. I was expecting to meet hippies, I met anti-vaxxer fundamentalists and super-Catholics instead.
Back when Hillary was First Lady, her project was childhood vaccinations. She had a cute slogan, I don’t remember it and don’t feel like googling for it. The right-wing anti-vaxxers were obsessed with that effort, it was more proof of how awful the Clintons were/are.
Professor Bigfoot
@ArchTeryx: If you know how to see.
Castor Canadensis
@Ohio Mom: was it Every Child by Two?
Ohio Mom
@Castor Canadensis: That sounds like it!
Spellboda
@Shakti: The link to the Susan Craig article in the New York Times seems to go to the Wikipedia article on RFKJr instead. Here’s a gift link to the NYT article: nytimes.com/2023/11/16/us/rfk-jr-finances.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KVA.dewe.s2OGWnovTWXm&sm…
Tehanu
@lowtechcyclist:
And so is their later work Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death from 1998 — amazingly prescient about not just the Y2K scare but about where we are today.
CHRISTOPHER H GREEN
Interesting, I didn’t know about the Cotton Mather connection.
Ben Franklin himself ended up as a prominent proponent of “variolization” (innoculating with active smallpox) after losing a son to the disease.
Another Scott
@Sally:
+1
The story it reminded me of was this one:
Maybe doing active work to make people better, and not worrying so much about what you are trying to convince others that “God wants”, is a good thing??!
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kayla Rudbek
@Professor Bigfoot: and I would recommend this SF/F novel as well (although the science may be slightly out of date) dianeduane.com/portfolio/deep-wizardry/
sab
@Ohio Mom: My step-daughter barely got out of the hospital with the baby alive. Baby was majorly failing to thrive, so they kept mom and baby there hoping to bully her into nursing baby better. Turns out baby was lactose intolerant like her mom, but not just to cows milk. To all mammal milk. Once she got on almondmilk formula she was fine.
I think that should have clued us into the chance of autism. Aren’t there dietary issues?
sab
@Kayla Rudbek: Speaking of sci-fi or at least fantasy: Naomi Kritzer has been an importamt person in nationalizing the Minneapolis protests.
She also writes sci-fy. I just read and love a couple of her YA novels about CatNet.
Geminid
@sab: I don’t know if you were around the other day when I posted about Diane de Vignemont’s article for New Lines Magazine. It was published January 30, and the title is:
I cannot confidently link to this article, but it’s worth looking up under “Vignemont New Lines Magazine.”
It’s long though, like most New Lines articles. They’re generally efficiently written, but they also cover a lot of ground. This one is rated a “21-minute read.” It might help you get in shape for Moby Dick!
sab
@Geminid: Thank you. That is interesting
ETA I do like the idea that we are not a revolution. We are just the Resistance.
Barry
@Shakti: “you think of ambulance chasing lawyers filing law suits to win big paydays. …”
Remember those WSJ editorials, Rush Limbaugh rants, etc. about trial lawyers?
As for everything, it was always projection.
HopefullyNotCassandra
@gene108: actually too much Vitamin A is quite harmful and can be deadly.
RFK grifting son Jr. told folks in the South Texas measles outbreak to load up on vitamin A as an alternative to vaccination.
Some of the people who vigorously followed his advice ended up hospitalized with vitamin A toxicity, also known as hypervitaminosis A.
usatoday.com/story/news/health/2025/04/04/texas-vitamin-a-toxicity-measles-patients/
Miki
@sab: More than one reason to hate the guy. Look up his practice of purchasing enslaved people. Yes – there’s some evidence of him “coming around,” but there’s no excuse for his deliberate choice to purchase human beings.
sab
@HopefullyNotCassandra: I went on an extreme vegetable diet in college. I got too much Vitamin A and my skin turned yellow. My liver was not happy (see skin tone.) But for the first time in my life I was not afraid of the sun.
But then I came to my senses.
sab
@VFX Lurker: Didn’t he risk frying his own kid in the kite electricity experiment? I thought I had some illusions about Franklin but I was wrong.
But he still risked his life for this wonderful often misguided experiment we call home.
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: Onesimus was the name of the slave who was the subject of the apostle Paul’s brief personal letter to Philemon. Onesimus had served Paul, after he had escaped his enslavement to Philemon, and Paul asked Philemon, as one Christian to another, to make it official, freeing Onesimus so he could continue helping Paul. The fact this letter is included in the corpus indicates the answer was yes.
Later, there is a bishop of Ephesus named Onesimus… coincidence? Scholars speculate that this bishop was responsible for collecting Paul’s writings so that they would not be forgotten.
BTW, the name Onesimus means useful, and Paul engages in several word plays in the letter.
Cotton Mather would know this letter like the back of his hand, and since Paul describes his relationship with Onesimus as father and son, you have to wonder about Mather’s relationship to Onesimus. The fact he was willing to be schooled by this black man, while he was educated at Harvard, suggests an openness to truth.
RevRick
@Omnes Omnibus: I think it’s a misreading of Puritan theology to say that they believed salvation was individual, because they had a strong communitarian bent. There’s was a Federal theology which associated human history as being a series of covenants between God and humans, and we now live in the covenant of redemption, which means living a life of gratitude.
It’s worth noting that John Winthrop in the City of a Hill address emphasizes that the Puritan experiment hinges on a big if. It will succeed if they rid themselves of excesses to provide for other’s necessities, if they make other’s conditions their own, if they labor and suffer together, if they share a common vision of community.
RevRick
We children of Puritans may be down but not out.
Geminid
@RevRick: As Jonathan Edwards used to say: “Shake it off, and get back in game.”
Well, Edwards didn’t say it that way exactly. But that’s what he meant.
Ohio Mom
@sab: Like everything with autism, the answer is yes, sometimes. I’ve met a couple of families that said removing dairy products helped their kid a lot, and they remain strict about avoiding milk in any form.
Meanwhile, toddler Ohio Son discovered he loved cheese and had a developmental spurt simultaneously.
I am at peace with the idea that autism will never be completely defined or described. Just give each one what they need and chill out.
sab
@RevRick: That is so interesting. Thank you.
sab
@Ohio Mom: One of the miracles of grand-daughter’s life was her mother’s horrible childhood in bad fostercare. Mom didn’t trust anyone with her child and was determined to learn how to do it herself.
The Autism Speaks creeps had a paid for place for child at their Cleveland Clinic facility, and when mom investigated she said NO!!