You have no excuse not to vaccinate

…when even the Amish are doing it.

Amish communities in six counties are taking drastic actions to control a rapidly spreading outbreak of measles, including vaccinations, quarantines, cancelation of church services, and postponements of weddings and other events where people would gather in large numbers from multiple locations.

They aren’t religiously opposed to vaccines, contrary to popular belief, but just have a low rate of vaccination due in part to nobody requiring them to get shots.

Meanwhile, on that note, a Federal judge in New York — where the crunchy anti-science-left private school parents have made measles all the rage again — just expanded the power of schools to strongly encourage vaccination, by compelling kids who aren’t immunized (by parental choice) to effectively drop out of school for days or weeks at a time every time someone else at the school became sick. The various parents in the suit tried to claim a religious exemption — again, remember that even the Amish don’t mess around with such BS — to this school exclusion, but the judge said that public health concerns trumped that under the famous Supreme Court ruling from the first decade of the 20th century:

In turning down all three families, Judge Kuntz cited a 1905 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a $5 fine for a Massachusetts man who disobeyed an order to be vaccinated during a smallpox outbreak, a case that helped establish the government’s right to require immunizations as a matter of public health.

 
So, you don’t have to vaccinate your kid, but the public school doesn’t have to let your kid be there either. The lawyers for the families tried to claim the vaccines of are somehow differenter and dangerouser now than in 1905 because reasons.


Past Arsenal For Democracy Radio Segments on This Topic

Guest expert Dr. Sydnee McElroy of the “Sawbones” podcast explains the science of vaccines.

Part 1 – Sydnee McElroy – AFD 78

Nate and Greg join Bill to talk about rising vaccine hysteria, the importance of public vaccinations, and how the “debate” fits into the broader arc of American politics and ideology.

Part 1: Vaccines – AFD 76


More on the New York ruling this month:

Ms. Check said she rejected vaccination after her daughter was “intoxicated” by a few shots during infancy, which she said caused an onslaught of food and milk allergies, rashes and infections. Combined with a religious revelation she had during the difficult pregnancy, she said, the experience turned her away from medicine. Now she uses holistic treatments.

“Disease is pestilence,” Ms. Check said, “and pestilence is from the devil. The devil is germs and disease, which is cancer and any of those things that can take you down. But if you trust in the Lord, these things cannot come near you.”

Seems legit.

In defense of competitive presidential primaries

While I’m more or less resigned to accepting the 2016 Democratic coronation, I do think some kind of competitive primary for the nomination would be valuable, even if the outcome didn’t change. If for no other reason than that it preps the nominee much better and keeps them from getting rusty while waiting for the other party to get it together.

It seemed “bitter” at the time, but the 2008 primary on the Dem side was one of the best things that could have happened to the party as a whole or either candidate, regardless of who had ended up winning. We never could have won Indiana and North Carolina that year in the general election if the Dems hadn’t been registering people through May and June there during the primary battle.

And on the flip side, we can look at the 2000 Democratic presidential primary. Vice President Gore was guided strongly into the “inevitable” position by President Clinton (whom he then tried to run from, which was weird, given Clinton’s continuing popularity at the time). Gore’s only challenge was a very weak run by Sen. Bill Bradley (NJ), who is a good guy but had no real chance of prevailing.

This meant Gore — who hadn’t run for office in his own right (i.e. not in the running mate slot) since the 1988 presidential primary — essentially didn’t campaign seriously in 2000 until about October. Then he suddenly woke up to the fact he was about to lose and then he campaigned like crazy. He was actually pretty good at it, and appealing, in the final weeks, by most of the accounts and polling I’ve read (since I was a bit too young to notice most of it at the time). But it was too late in the Electoral College, popular vote victory and Florida shenanigans aside. That he even came close enough for it to be stolen from him (if indeed it was) is a miracle given his lack of campaigning until right near the end.

 
(Exception to the above: Incumbent presidents tend to be hurt by primary challenges, though it’s unclear if that’s because they’re only challenged when already very weak, but they are already in full-time campaign mode anyway and thus don’t need the practice a non-incumbent requires.)

11 interesting facts from the history of Mosul, Iraq

Mosul is back in the news after its capture by ISIS militias, which triggered the current crisis in Iraq. This isn’t the first time the northern city’s fall has been a tipping point for regional disruptions. Mosul and the area around it have very long and rich histories. Here are eleven facts about that:

1. Mosul is located on the west bank of the Tigris River across from the famous Biblical-era former city of Nineveh, the capital of the mighty Neo-Assyrian Empire until its collapse (7th century BCE). In the story from the Book of Jonah (and the Quran), the titular figure is swallowed by a great sea beast while trying to avoid going to Nineveh to preach to the people. The city is featured through much of the religious literature of the whole region, due to its early and ongoing political and economic importance in the Middle East. The area around Mosul is still called the Nineveh Province to this day.

2. Mosul is the center of Iraq’s Assyrian Christian community, a diverse set of old school (2nd century CE) Middle Eastern Christian sects in the Assyrian/Syriac/Chaldean ethnicity, who still speak and read Aramaic like back in the days of Jesus & Friends. Unfortunately, most of Iraq’s Assyrians have fled the city and country since 2003.

3. Mosul is the center and originator of the production of “Muslin” fabric, a thin type of cotton cloth used even to present day for theatrical productions but once the height of fashion in Europe (and later the United States) during parts of the 18th and 19th centuries.

4. Mosul was established to replace Nineveh as the major northern crossing point of the crucial Tigris River, when the older city fell to various forces. Mosul was captured from the First Persian Empire by Alexander the Great in the 4th Century BCE and then was transferred to the Greek-run “Seleucid Empire” (one of those empires that never gets much love in the textbooks) when the Alexandrian Empire was divided between Greek and Macedonian military officers. Later it fell to the Parthians (then the Sassanids) during the Roman-Persian wars over the Middle East and Asia Minor.

5. Mosul became the regional capital of what is now Iraq under the Umayyad Muslim dynasty even as it remained a major — even rising — Christian city. It also maintained a significant Jewish population well into and past the era of the Crusades.

6. Under the Abbasid Muslim dynasty, Mosul became a major economic hub on the Silk Road. From that point forward, Mosul continued to develop incredibly advanced techniques in the arts and fine goods production. Beyond the Muslin weaving, Mosul also became famous for its fine metalwork and painting styles.

7. After being the site of many power plays by competing Arab, Turkic, and Persian factions, the city was transferred without destruction to a grandson of Genghis Khan, under one of the Mongol sub-empires. Christians, including those in Mosul, came to play an important role in the Mongol courts in that part of the Mongol-ruled world. Mosul continued to be a highly contested junction point because of its strategic value and ultimately was sacked as a result, though it was rebuilt.

One of the Mongol sieges of Mosul in the 13th century CE.

One of the Mongol sieges of Mosul in the 13th century CE.

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ISIS or ISIL: Lost in chronological, cultural translation

Here on AFD’s blog and on our show, I’ve consistently used “ISIS” (not spelled out often at all) as the name of the group seizing control of parts of Syria and Iraq right now. Part of that is for convenience (or, as Nate said, to mockingly associate them with the spy organization on the FX animated series “Archer”) and part of that is not quite knowing how to culturally translate the meaning of the group’s name.

As a new article in the New York Times explains, that’s proven a problem for the whole English-speaking world, from governments to the media. The organization uses an old-school Arabic geographic phrase in their name which doesn’t precisely translate at a 1:1 word ratio into existing English terms for the region’s geography and history.

الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام, or al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wa al-Sham. The difficulty comes from the last word.

Al-Sham is the classical Arabic term for Damascus and its hinterlands, and over time, it came to denote the area between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, south of the Taurus Mountains and north of the Arabian desert. Similarly, in Egypt, “Masr” may refer either to Cairo or to the whole country. Used in that sense, al-Sham takes in not just Syria but also Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and even a part of southeastern Turkey.

That is fairly similar in extent to what Western geographers call the Levant, a once-common term that now has something of an antique whiff about it, like “the Orient.” Because of the term’s French colonial associations, many Arab nationalists and Islamist radicals disdain it, and it is unlikely that the militant group would choose “Levant” to render its name.

The fighters do not like “Syria” either, though. Syria is what the Greeks named the region in ancient times, possibly after the Assyrian people who once lived there, though that derivation is disputed. And at times in the past, the term “Syrian” was used to mean specifically a Christian Syrian, while Muslims or Jews living there would be called Shami. Today, when Arabs speak of Syria, they usually mean only the modern state, which the insurgent group is fighting to obliterate.

 
Compounding the problem is that the rebel faction appears to frequently use archaic Arabic phrases/words that are not common in modern Arabic, in place of their modern synonyms. This would perhaps be equivalent to insisting on using only Anglo-Saxon rooted words in place of every Franco-Norman rooted word in the English language.

Or I guess a bit like the pedants who insist on not using any of the newfangled American English words (and new usages) that have come into vogue since the rise of computers… But I digress. Or as George Orwell might edit me: I am getting off track.

If you disagree with our use of “ISIS,” contact us. It might impact our choice.
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Banging around in the dark in Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia: the land between two rivers, the buffer between eastern and western empires, the perennial peripheral battle zone between Persia and her Western challengers. Today: Iraq.

Parthian Empire at its greatest extent. Credit: Keeby101- Wikimedia

Parthian Empire at its greatest extent. Credit: Keeby101- Wikimedia

The Republican Iraq policy of the past 12 years has been to stumble through a pitch-black room of broken hazards with no awareness of what’s behind, what’s nearby, or what’s ahead. But they triumphantly declare that we’re almost there and everyone else is an unpatriotic traitor who wants us to fail.

On the other side of the room, Iran — supposedly the Republicans’ greatest boogeyman since the Soviet Union and at least the second greatest since 1979 — is standing silently with night vision goggles and thousands of years of knowledge of what’s behind. If we get too close, it steps out of the way, but remains inside the room. It used to wait outside the room, in the darkened hallway, but then the Republicans opened the door by trying to get into the room, as if they had no idea Iran was even next to the room and that that closed door had been the only thing keeping Iran out.

I don’t have an instinctive, overriding opposition to Iran the way some do. But if the goal was to keep Iran from gaining influence over more territory, there had to be a counterbalancing force left in Iraq which was in opposition to Shia Iran. And that would have meant a minority-led dictatorship, statistically speaking. Which is not a reason to support the existence of such a thing (though we had managed to mitigate it without dismantling it by 2002). But their bumbling haste meant they didn’t even attempt to reconcile that their regional policy goals — taking out the Iraq regime and containing Iran — were at complete odds. Today they find themselves rallying to the Shia-aligned government whose biggest friends are in Tehran, condemning the President for not unquestioningly dumping money, bombs, and troops into the cause, even as they condemn his efforts to negotiate a nuclear solution with Tehran.

Worst of all: Still today they refuse to entertain the idea that the 2003 invasion was a mistake of vast and sweeping proportions on all possible fronts. A crippling, even rippling, disaster at home in our politics, economy, and budget; the elephant in the room on U.S. foreign policy for years to come; and a massive disruption that upended the delicate Middle Eastern balance and tore a fragile country apart into a bloodbath. At least most Democrats who supported it, despite how obviously bad an idea that it was at the time, have the decency to admit they screwed up.

The continued denial of reality on Iraq, let alone repentance, from Republicans right now makes me politically angry in a way I haven’t felt since George W. Bush was in office. Their genuinely — not even strategically or cynically — held belief that President Obama is to blame for what’s happening now is merely the infuriating cherry on top of a rage sundae.

Oped | American Unexceptionalism & The Republic

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The real story of the origins of the U.S. political system. Composite oped from two new essays (here and here) in The Globalist.

You’ve read the story before. A number of loosely aligned, merchant-dominated offshore territories of a European empire begin chafing at their distant monarch and the high taxes he imposed without giving them a reasonable say in their own governance.

Predictably enough, their mounting dissatisfaction is met with an increasingly overbearing response — including military deployments. That strategy is pursued until the provinces reach a breaking point.

They declare themselves free of the faraway king and initiate a rebellion. Not all the territories are persuaded to join. Some prefer to remain loyal to the crown.

The rebellion binds together a small collection of sovereign entities into a union, equipped with a weak, loosely formalized provisional government. Its purpose is to direct the union’s foreign policy and manage the rebellion.

Government after monarchy

Having declared themselves without a king, the newly independent elite must devise a replacement system of government for the continued union.

For a time, they consider the possibility of bringing in another member of the European nobility to serve as king. Such an invitation or election of an outsider as king was common in Europe for centuries, from Poland to Sweden to the Holy Roman Empire. Even the papacy is an elective monarchy.

But eventually the merchant elites and past commanders of the rebellion decide they have been doing fine without a royal. They are now content to continue to strengthen the temporary system as it is.

The exceptional story takes shape

These elite gentlemen look around at other precedents for other self-governing states without kings. Smaller free states — such as Florence and Venice — had previously installed non-hereditary systems of rule by the commercial elites and major families. They had called them “republics,” after the elite-run classical “Roman Republic.”

Elections in such systems are highly indirect and susceptible to manipulation. They are also restricted to a very small number of participants. Essentially, the only voters are members of the propertied, male elite — usually white.

After all, they make no secret of the fact that this exclusionary voting franchise suits the new country’s leaders’ aims anyway. They are not interested in creating a democracy. Rather they are keen to establish a republic insulated from the passions of the mobs.

It is then agreed that under the new union of rebel provinces, each member republic would send delegations to the union’s government, but they will be answerable to their home governments. This further would keep the regular people away from any major levers of power.

Finally, they devise an elaborate system of checks and balances. The ostensible purpose is to preserve the sovereignty of the member republics within the union. The bigger purpose is to prevent the “tyranny” of a central government and an executive. The union will have weak powers of taxation — only enough to mount a common defense of the member republics.

This is, of course, the story of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces in Netherlands and their departure from Spain — about two centuries before the United States constitution was ratified by thirteen former British colonies.

So much for America’s origin story being exceptional, as claimed for so long.

The Dutch precedent was a model, both to be emulated and avoided, for the framers of the U.S. Constitution and those advocating for its adoption. Far from being an “exceptional” idea, the original version of the United States was just the latest iteration of an existing system. It is what came after that that made it exceptional.

Almost before the ink had dried on the U.S. Constitution, the United States and its citizenry — indeed, even its government officials — began adapting the document in other directions the framers had never intended or anticipated.

That is probably for the best, from the world’s perspective, and from the country’s, since rule by a narrow slave-owning elite is not exactly a paragon of excellent governance for the world to follow.
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