Is that always the case, though? That presumes that the schools are competent enough to notice that kids are behind and try to catch them up.

That's a fairly faulty analogy from where I'm standing. Because to do so, you'd have to be able to attribute that single African American's behavior to ALL of them, across the board. And given the high variability of humans, that is impossible. Whereas vaccines of the same type ARE standardized across the board.

One of the links follows through to another article the points out that the lowest vaccination rates in the US are among those living below the federal poverty line - a demographic that does not square with the ideology of anti-vaccine beliefs. I misattributed the statement directly to Plait when it actually comes…

Short answer: none of the "mainstream" ones.

Uh, he directly links to Keith Floor's article about the unvaccinated in America, which quotes at length the reasons why: most unvaccinated kids in America are so not for reasons of ideology or beliefs, but for reasons of economics - largely because they are uninsured (and hey, newsflash: the overwhelming majority of…

It's times like this I start to think that Christopher Hedges is totally right about the nature of evil - basically, that no belief system, no society, no group, nowhere where humans exist will ever be free of evil actions because evil simply resides in our hearts.

Okay, honest question time - how can you encourage vaccination without minimizing the incredible toll that autism can take and how stressful the condition can be?

I love me some Phil Plait. He can usually be counted on to display some compassion and thoughtfulness where it is sorely needed.

Uh, way to miss the joke?

Well if you want to get technical, the real "first edition" would be in Homer's mind. So unless Noah was somehow communing with Homer from the other side, there is no way that is a "real" first edition.

Even if it was an English first edition, it would still have to be hundreds of years old. I'm not quite sure how they expected this to slip past the audiences. Unless they presumed the audiences were really stupid....

The Vitamin C story is totally fascinating precisely because a very well-known and well-respected scientist - Linus Pauling - came up with it. A guy with two Nobel Prizes to his name, no less. He became obsessed with Vitamin C and it's alleged abilities to do just about anything (including curing cancer). His…

The only challenge I see with lawsuits would be causality. It would be super hard, in most cases, to conclusively link any particular person back to the person who infected your child. Yeah, it was likely the unvaccinated kid in daycare, but it could also have been the man on the bus who let his whooping cough booster…

David Oyelowo is clearly self-aware in that picture. Look at him. He's thinking "Yeah, you're a token right now. Just wait...wait....wait. One day, David, one day."

Ah, I learned that from my mother. Peppers or - for stuffy noses and/or sinus issues - taking a mouthful of spicy brown mustard. Opens those sinus cavities right up. But she was a huge fan of the peppers. She swore she learned it on the reservation and that it worked every time. She never tried it with us, but she…

Partly because science isn't exactly fail-proof. While it usually works okay, it's not infallible. Mother Jones writes pretty often about scientists who get caught with conflicts of interest or manipulating data, and after reading stuff like that for a while, I can totally get how people can walk away with a suspicion…

Ah, I missed him, I think because I looked for Native American actors - Greene is First nations, which isn't the same thing. But yes, he is indigenous American. It's nice that the Academy found one to nominate 24 years ago.

I know. It's really the first time you see Daria in a genuinely vulnerable state and when she fundamentally questions herself. She spent 5 seasons incredibly proud of her cynicism and then it gets hit like that in the end. I also loved how in the end she says to her parents how she was not an easy child and thanks…

I am still pissed off something mighty about Adam Beach getting NO recognition for Flags of Our Fathers. How sad it took Clint Eastwood to actually care about casting a Native American soldier with an actual First Nations (Beach is Canadian) actor. And how horrible that he got no recognition for it.

I have much less of an issue with the off the grid people who just have decided they do not wish to interact with society and they go their own way - homeschooling, living off the land, back to nature, that sort of thing. But at least they live a life consistent with their ethics. I might not agree with them, but I…