Frank Bruni on people risking the lives of their children, and the lives of other people's children, for a very good reason. That reason being: they are idiots.
It used to be that unvaccinated children in America were clustered in impoverished neighborhoods; now they’re often clustered among sophisticates in gilded ZIP codes where a certain strain of health faddishness reigns. According to a story in The Hollywood Reporter last year, the parents of 57 percent of the children at a Beverly Hills preschool and of 68 percent at one in Santa Monica had filed personal-belief exemptions from having their kids vaccinated.
Why? Many of them buy into a discredited theory that there’s a link between the MMR (mumps-measles-rubella) vaccine and autism. They’re encouraged by a cadre of brash alarmists who have gained attention by pushing that thinking. Anti-vaccine panic was the path that the actress Jenny McCarthy traveled to innumerable appearances on prominent news and talk shows; she later demonstrated her singular version of concern for good health by working as a pitchwoman for e-cigarettes.
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In 2004, there were just 37 reported cases of measles in the United States. In 2014, there were 644. And while none of those patients died, measles can kill. Before vaccines for it became widespread in 1963, millions of Americans were infected annually, and 400 to 500 died each year.
If Jenny McCarthy were running around telling people that they shouldn't put their infants in car seats, or that it's okay for children to play in traffic, would she still be given free air time to spread that idea? Wait... I probably don't want to know that answer.
Quick! Come inside!
Leonard Pitts revisits the ongoing tragedy that is the Florida system of "justice."
Marissa Alexander got out of jail last week, but she is not free. At best, she enjoys only a species of freedom, a defective freedom that imperfectly resembles the real thing.
After a cumulative total of three years behind bars, she will now spend two years on house arrest, monitored by a GPS ankle bracelet. The monitoring, for which she must pay $105 a week, was agreed to by a judge over the objection of prosecutors who wanted her to do two more years in jail.
All this, for firing a gun into the air.
Alexander, a 34-year-old Jacksonville woman, has endured a nightmarish odyssey through the Florida injustice system ever since the day in August of 2010 that she got into a fight with her husband, Rico Gray. She said Gray, whom she and other women describe as a serial woman beater, started strangling her when he found text messages from her first husband on her phone. Alexander managed to escape to her garage, intending to flee in her truck. Realizing she had left her keys in the house, she said, she armed herself with a gun and went back inside. When her husband came at her again, she fired a warning shot and he fled.
In his deposition, Gray largely corroborated her story. “I told her if she ever cheated on me, I would kill her,” he said. Had she not had the gun, he added, he would have “probably hit her. I got five baby mamas and I put my hands on every last one of them except for one.”
The stupidity of this, in a state that ardently defends the right of (white men) to shoot anyone who looks at them cross-eyed, is absolutely staggering.
Prosecutors offered Alexander a plea bargain — three years against a possible 20 for aggravated assault. Alexander declined, reasoning that surely no jury would convict her under these circumstances. They convicted her in 12 minutes.
But... I mean... I.... Damn.
Dana Milbank on Hurricane Bernie.
Bernie Sanders is in his natural state – of agitation.
It’s just 9 a.m., but the socialist senator, contemplating a presidential run as a Democrat or as a populist independent, is red in the face and his white hair askew. In a conference room at The Washington Post, he’s raising his voice, thumping his index finger on the table and gesturing so wildly that his hand comes within inches of political reporter Karen Tumulty’s face.
“We are living in the United States right now at a time when the top one-tenth of 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent,” the Vermont lawmaker says in his native Brooklyn accent.
“One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns by itself more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.”
If you're expected Milbank to make fun of Bernie's anger... think again.
The real outrage, though, is that so few people share his fury.
There’s widespread agreement about the problem – that inequality is as bad as it has been in America since the crash of ’29. Even Republican leaders are talking about it (their solution, alas, is a tax system with even more breaks for the wealthy.) But there’s no sign yet of the mass anger that could turn into a political movement.
Are the Sanders 2016 bumper stickers ready yet? The goal of turning this anger into a national movement should be the goal of everyone here.
Ross Douthat and that whacky left.
For the last week, liberal journalists have been furiously debating whether a new political correctness has swept over the American left. The instigator of this argument was New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, normally a scourge of Republicans, whose essay on what he dubbed “the new P.C.” critiqued left-wing activists for their zeal to play language cop, shout down arguments and shut down debate outright.
It will surprise absolutely nobody that I think the phenomenon that Chait describes is real. But I come not to judge but to explain — because whether you like or loathe the “P.C.” label, the rise of a more assertive cultural left is clearly one of the defining features of the later Obama years. This assertiveness is palpable among younger activists, on campus and online; it’s visible in controversy after controversy, from Ferguson to campus rape. And it’s interesting to think about exactly where it’s coming from.
There were a couple of weeks there where Douthat seemed almost reasonable, but this week with talks of "post-post-racialism" and the "welfare state," he has climbed comfortably back into his warm everything-bad-is-caused-by-liberal-culture sweater.
Colbert King reminds you that it's time to change the calendar page, and to pay attention.
If this year’s celebration of African American History Month focuses mainly on seminal events in the civil rights movement, such as the 1963 March on Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” oration, then the commemoration, which begins Sunday, will be in vain. Those crucial moments in civil rights history indeed represent decisive turns in the long and painful odyssey from the horrors of the slave deck to today.
But getting from there to here involved more than marches, sit-ins, demonstrations and legal victories — essential as they were.
Long before those events, institutions largely unrecognized today promoted cohesion and structure in black life. These were the forces that brought blacks together and propelled them forward. Chief among them, black churches and black schools — preachers and teachers. Together, they are two unsung heroes of African American history.
Go read the rest and get started on making this Black History Month the most widely celebrated, and the most deeply considered.
Adam Liptak on the rightward tilt of judges.
If judges reflected the pool from which they were selected based on politically neutral grounds like technical skill and temperament, the bench might be expected to tilt left.
But something else is going on.
“Politics plays a really significant role in shaping our judicial system,” said Maya Sen, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and one of the authors of the study. Since judges tend to be more conservative than lawyers, she said, it stands to reason that the officials who appoint judges and the voters who elect them are taking account of ideology. She said the phenomenon amounted to a politicization of the courts, driven largely by conservatives’ swimming against the political tide of the legal profession. ...
“You would think there would be a better match” in the United States, she said. “Why would the attorneys facing the bench be so different from the people looking back at them in robes?”
Since so many judges face some form of election, and every judicial election in the country seems to boil down to "I promise to fry more killers, cage more predators, and beat people silly over the smallest offense" it shouldn't be shocking that judges tend to be from the conservative camp. But it is disappointing.
Peter Brannen gives an update on one of those mysteries that too many assume has been solved.
By now the image of the demise of the dinosaurs has become iconic: a luckless tyrannosaur looking over its shoulder as a colossal fireball from heaven bears down on the horizon, the monster’s death by vaporization imminent.
Hanging above the desk of the Princeton geologist Gerta Keller, though, is a different artist’s depiction. This time it’s a pair of tyrannosaurs — still doomed — but not by an errant space rock. In this picture they’re writhing on the ground in a withered landscape as eruptions from volcanoes and fissures in the ground tear the earth apart.
These dinosaurs were killed not by the lava itself, but by the environmental catastrophe unleashed by the volcanic gases. It was an end time of global warming, acid rain and acidifying oceans that might sound familiar today as a vast body of scientific research warns us of our own developing ecological crisis.
The difference between these two pictures represents one of the most acrimonious battles in science.
This is a good article to read, even if you have no direct interest in dinosaurs. It's educational both from the standpoint of how environmental issues may have weighed on the end of the dinosaurs (except for the sub-set of dinosaurs we call "birds") and and on how science is far from the monolithic entity that is so often represented. Did an asteroid wipe out the dinosaurs? Well, consider this. 74 million years ago, an asteroid more than a mile across came screaming down from space and impacted on North America. It vaporized water, soil, layers of limestone and shale, and blasted a hole deep into the granite heart of the continent while flinging up waves of flaming debris. That may sound familiar, but the dinosaurs became extinct only about
65 million years ago. This asteroid hit more than 10 million years too early to cause T. rex to pack his bags. The extinction of the dinosaurs is often associated with an asteroid that impacted near the Yucatan at about the right time. The earlier collision impacted at a point now near the town of Manson, Iowa. How many extinctions are associated with the Manson impact? None. Granted, the asteroid that struck off Mexico was around three times as large, and it impacted in a shallow ocean (which many consider the worst possible site in terms of damage). Still, the relative shrug that Earth's biosphere gave to the Manson impact may indicate that other factors were involved in ending the dinos.
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