In the interview, and in the book, Michelle Alexander makes the argument, clearly, cogently, and with an abundance of supporting evidence, that the War on Drugs in the United States has been carried out as a de facto war against black people.

A war against freedom

I have argued before on this blog that the War on Drugs is economically unsustainable and Constitutionally illogical; but my focus on the pragmatic “big picture” largely omitted the personal specifics of the effects of these policies on the millions of individuals who get sent to jail every year for nonviolent drug offenses, often simple possession.  My coverage of the topic in my book, Principles for a Self-Directed Society,  was succinct and to the point:

The war on drugs is a war waged by the government against the freedom and privacy of its own people.

The government breaks up families to imprison nonviolent offenders, often for nothing more than simple possession.  Drug laws are often applied more harshly to persons of color.

And so on.

A war to enforce a racial caste system

But Michelle Alexander’s argument is far more specific and detailed than my own.  What Alexander makes clear is how the War on Drugs has become the mechanism to enforce a modern-day Jim Crow, with separate and unequal enforcement practices targeted overwhelmingly at the black community, even though the actual rates of drug use are nearly identical in the white community.

She describes systematic and unconstitutional police tactics such as warrantless searches based on no probable cause: just racial profiling, pure and simple.

She describes the effects on the community of millions and millions of these individuals, nonviolent offenders swept up in unconstitutional arrests, as they are incarcerated in for-profit prisons and then branded as felons upon their release.  With a criminal felony conviction on their record, they cannot vote, cannot find employment, cannot get credit, cannot even live in low-rent housing, and even if they can find work they often have their wages seized by the state and turned over to the for-profit prisons.  What would you do, if you were caught in a situation like that?  Well, Jean Valjean, I’ll tell you what you would do:  You’d start stealing things, if your only other option was to starve.  In this manner, past offenders are effectively forced into recidivism by a system that provides them with no other options.

All of these effects are an absolutely intentional consequence of a racist policy designed to guarantee the political and economic supremacy of the white population in parts of the country that have a sizable black population.  The system is designed to keep as many black people as possible locked up in prison for as long as possible, and to force the black community to enrich the coffers of for-profit prisons in the process.

Coded references in politics

It’s no longer permissible for white politicians to openly speak in racist terms when they campaign for public office; so they coach their meaning in coded phrases, and everyone within their target demographic understands precisely what is being said.

“Getting tough on drugs” is code for keeping black people in prison.

“Preventing voter fraud” is code for preventing black people from voting.

The war on Democracy

Of course, all the recent initiatives to require photo ID for voting will not only affect black people: they also affect lower-class whites and Hispanics.  Still, the true purpose of these initiatives could not be more clear: the people in power are trying to retain their power by preventing the poorest people from having access to the political system.  Who has a photo ID?  People who own cars.  Who does not own a car?  The very poor, the very young, and the very old: demographics that largely tend to support public education, public health care, and progressive tax policies.  Prevent these groups from voting, and you can effectively own the system, without the nuisance of having to persuade a majority of the actual population to agree with you.

What, you think I’m being cynical?  Well, then you clearly haven’t been following the Republican presidential campaign; which seems unlikely, as no media channel has talked about practically anything else for months.  If it could be possible for anyone to doubt that I am correct in my interpretation, then just let the candidates speak for themselves.

First, the racist Southern conservative, Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich made it abundantly clear that the purpose of requiring photo ID for voting, is to prevent liberals from voting.  He said so quite clearly in a campaign speech in South Carolina on Friday, January 13, 2012:

If the only people who vote in elections are law-abiding, hardworking citizens who are deeply committed to America, the left wing of the Democratic Party will cease to exist.

“Deeply committed to America” of course is once again code for “agree with everything I say.”  The purpose of Gingrich’s rhetoric is, obviously, to argue that people who disagree with him should be explicitly excluded from the system.  That’s democracy, Southern style!

Racist stereotypes and ultra-nationalists

The Republicans competing for the hardline conservative vote have been doing so by appealing to the anti-black-people sentiments of their base.  They are trying to build themselves up by demonizing a racial minority, a disgusting but often successful tactic employed by ultra-nationalists around the world throughout modern history.

Ron Paul, in literature from 1990 made available by The New Republic, argued that:

we are headed for a race war—public insurrections that will make the 1960s look mild, with many Americans injured or killed…  the problem is much deeper, and it was created by welfare programs, quota systems, and government interference in just about everything we do, plus the victimization mentality created by the civil rights movement, where every black failure is a white crime.

Confronted with this quote, Ron Paul’s reply was something along the lines of, “I don’t know how you could possibly think I would say something like that.”  Then he went and said something else just like that, in a South Carolina campaign speech on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, when he argued that states should have the right to ignore Federal laws that they don’t like: laws such as the Voting Rights Act,   for example; or perhaps the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

“Well, Ron Paul is a nutcase,” you say, and quite right you are: not even the extremists of the far right would ever support his bid for the presidency.

But a majority of the right wing did vote for Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses (yes, there was a recount, and Romney lost, for you non-political-junkies who fail to keep up with these things).   In a campaign appearance  in Sioux City, Iowa on Sunday, January 1, 2012, Santorum told the audience that, in his words,

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.

This type of racial demonizing encourages the listening audience to blame a minority for the entire country’s problems.  Yet rather than chastise Santorum for his racism, the other candidates rushed to take up the theme.

Newt Gingrich proudly announced that,

If the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.

Again, this is pure racial demonizing, and the stereotype perpetuated by Gingrich is not based on a shred of fact.  As many have pointed out in response to Gingrich’s offensive remarks, by far the majority of food stamp recipients are in fact white people.  The data is freely available from the United States Census Bureau, and you are welcome to look it up.

Unfortunately, the Census website is set up in such a way that I cannot provide a direct link to the search results for the term “food stamps”; and while the data available on the FactFinder website is exhaustive, the system is quite slow.  So, for your convenience, I have downloaded a set of data from the Census Bureau related to food stamp recipients by racial demographic, and posted them here.  Again, don’t take my word for it: please feel free to look up this data for yourself, and conduct your own custom search.

The Census Bureau data shows quite clearly that 61.0% of food stamp recipients are white, while just 26.4% of food stamp recipients are black.  The myth perpetuated by Santorum, Gingrich, and their ilk is pure racist hate-mongering, designed to win them the support of the lowest common denominator.

The racists will not win

America is better than this.

America, I believe in you.  I believe that the American people are deeply devoted to the ideals of freedom, justice, and political equality.  I believe that America will not tolerate this kind of racist demonizing from the people who wish to win the Presidency.  I believe that America will show them the door.  Come on, America!  You can do it.

Peace.

Their message is clear: “We are the 99% and we’re not going to take it anymore!”  People are protesting out of their deeply held belief that the governments and economies of the world must be run for the benefit of the people of the world.  People are protesting because the banks got bailed out, the hedge fund managers made off with the billions, and we the people have been told to accept poverty, endless unemployment, backbreaking debt, and austerity galore.

The corporate media intentionally misunderstands and obfuscates this message.  The corporate media systematically undercounts the number of protesters in attendance at the rallies.  The corporate media goes out of their way to associate the Occupy movement with a few violence-loving anarchists in Rome.  The corporate media uses terms such as “anti-capitalist” and even “pointless” to describe the Occupy movement.

The corporate media does not get it.

Calling for change is hardly pointless.  The corporate media had no trouble understanding the point of the Tea Party movement: and in the time that the Tea Party has controlled the House of Representatives, we have all had an opportunity to observe the devastating effect of Tea Party ideology on the living standards of the 99%.

Some in the Occupy movement are doubtless opposed to capitalism in its present form: and as long as the government continues to fail in its responsibility to represent the interests of the people, who can blame them?

I think most of the Occupy protesters probably hold more nuanced views: that regulation of the financial system is both necessary and lacking; that political power and high finance are too cozy and must be separated; that the tax system has dramatically increased the gap between the rich and the poor at the expense of the middle class, and therefore the inequalities inherent in the system must be corrected.

My personal hope for an outcome of the Occupy movement is that this popular uprising will result in a Constitutional amendment permanently prohibiting campaign finance of any kind.  Get the money out of politics: all the money.  And while we’re at it:  Fix the tax laws, regulate the banks, tax the sale of stocks, and use the revenues to put the people back to work.

Vive la Occupation!

What’s been omitted from our global strategy for reducing the impact of armed conflict is an international framework designed to respond to events in real time and impose cease-fires in conflict zones without taking sides with any particular belligerent.  This would not just apply to conflict zones where there is actually a war going on: this would also apply to situations like what’s going on in Bahrain right now, with unarmed protesters being shot by government forces, and medical staff being punished for treating the wounded, in contravention of the Geneva Conventions.  Why is the world set up to sit back and watch this happen on TV without doing anything about it?

The conflict in Libya would have been over by now if we had reacted immediately when Qadaffi began shooting unarmed protesters with missiles from airplanes; and even then, the last-minute intervention smelled a bit like an attempt to appease the world oil markets.  The winners in the ethnic civil war in Sri Lanka refuse to discuss the report that finds they intentionally and indiscriminately killed tens of thousands of Tamil civilians at the end of the war: a genocidal atrocity.  I remember at the time, in the sickening final days of the decades-long conflict with the Tamil Tiger rebels, hearing news reports of a high civilian death toll as the government forces crushed not just the rebels but the entire population of the Tamil homeland.  After the last of the rebel forces were defeated, entire villages were rounded up and trucked off to squalid camps.  All this happened, and the whole world knew about it, and nobody did a thing.  The attitude of the world government is essentially this:  “The local governments should be left to manage their own affairs, unless the local governments happen to be sitting on resources that are critical to the economic and national security interests of the world’s richest nations; and if somebody has a problem with something that happened, then the lawyers can argue about it in court.”  For each perpetrator who is brought to justice before the International Criminal Court, hundreds go free, and meanwhile nothing can undo the suffering of the people who have been subjected to crimes against humanity.  This attitude is unacceptable; this situation is wholly inadequate for a civilized society to allow such brutal unlawfulness to be perpetuated around the world on a daily basis.

I proposed in the book and I maintain now that we need a fast-response peacekeeping arm of the United Nations: a world police whose task is not to take sides in conflicts but specifically act in real time to prevent atrocities from happening.

Effective prevention happens in real time, not after the fact.

The US government would have avoided a lot of trouble if it had listened to me years ago.

Instead we get WikiLeaks, which has no principles whatsoever.  WikiLeaks would probably leak the blueprints to atomic weapons, if they could get their hands on that kind of information.  I would be so much happier if the government would just declassify all its communications and internal reports so I would never have to hear about that annoying twerp Julian Assange again.

The fact that a member of NPR’s senior political staff has been a regular guest on The O’Reilly Factor for the past eight years proves my point entirely.  NPR’s management hired the kind of guy who feels comfortable with the Fox News view of the world… and they put him in charge of political reporting.  What does that tell you about the worldview of NPR’s management?

It tells you that NPR’s coverage of the news is affected by conservative bias.

By being noisy and obnoxious, anarchists of all stripes tend to garner a lot of attention.  For example, I remember an anti-war protest I attended in Portland several years ago.  There were well over 20,000 people there, decrying the expensive and pointless war against the people of Iraq.  Within this huge crowd were five or six black-clad anarchists with their faces covered.  The anarchists were not a part of the protest.  The anarchists were counter-protesters, just like the fat guy with the megaphone who was shouting in very demeaning terms that by objecting to unilateral militarism I was somehow supporting Saddam Hussein.  Like that fat man, the anarchists were counter-protesters.  Their purpose, if they had a purpose, was to disgrace the legitimate protesters; and in that, they were successful.  The media coverage of the event focused almost entirely on this small handful of black-clad counter-protesters.  The media ignored more than 20,000 demonstrators and concentrated on five anarchists.  Ever since then, anarchists have been my enemies.  I have no sympathy for them.  I cheer when they are sent to jail for their shenanigans.

More recently, anarchists have made a mess of a number of demonstrations around the world.  In Chicago and Copenhagen and elsewhere, anarchists stole the headlines, detracting from legitimate and well-reasoned opposition with their violent antics, setting fire to dumpsters and smashing windows on police cars.

Anarchists, in short, are stupid kids who get their jollies from violence and destruction.  Their underlying philosophy of opposition to everything makes no sense if you bother to sit down and look at it.  And that is something they have in common with the Libertarians and the Tea Party.

Tea Party activists, Libertarians, and violent anarchists all have this in common: they object to regulations.  They all object to what has come to be known as “the rule of law.”

I will grant that their reasons differ.  The Tea Party and the Libertarians are more specifically focused on two things:

1. their objection to regulations governing businesses: they think corporations should be able to do whatever they want without fear of consequence or reprisal
2. their objection to taxes of any type.

Either they have not thought through the consequences of their lunatic policy agendas, or else they legitimately wish to turn the country into an aristocratic oligarchy run by unregulated mega-corporations.

For example, regarding regulations, conservatives consistently object to food labeling laws; and for decades the Republicans have been pushing legislation that reduces the right of an individual to redress grievances against a company.  The end result of such policies, taken to their logical conclusion, would be a grocery store full of food products contaminated by salmonella and melamine.  In the nightmare scenario that is the Republican paradise, if you happen to get sick and die from something you ate, that’s your problem, not the producer’s problem; and you’d better hope your heirs have the money to pay for your medical bills after you die, or they might end up in debtor’s prison.

Regarding taxes, come on, let’s be reasonable about this.  Nobody likes paying taxes; but they are necessary in order to live in a country that’s governed by the rule of law.  Without taxes to support it, the government would crumble.  Without government, by definition, the country would be in a state of anarchy.  The stupid punk kids would have a heyday smashing stuff; but that’s where the fun ends.  The rich would retreat to their gated communities, guarded by well-armed private security forces.  The poor (i.e. everyone else) would be left to fight over the scraps of poisonous food produced by companies that are subject to no oversight or regulation of any kind.

There are real-world examples of anarchist countries in the modern era.  One of them is named Somalia.  It is a haven for pirates and terrorists; it is a hell for everyone else who has to live there.  There is no infrastructure to speak of, no social services, no law and order of any kind.  Such rules as do exist are imposed by warlords, accountable to none.  It’s not much of a life, and certainly not a democracy, but on the bright side, nobody has to pay taxes!  I invite all anarchists, Libertarians, and Tea Party activists to live out their ideals.  Enjoy living in a country free from regulation or taxation.  Go to Somalia, and stay there.

Another region that existed in a state of anarchy was northern Afghanistan under the Taliban prior to the US invasion in late 2001.  The totalitarian religious zealots were unable to keep the area under their control.  There was no government of any kind, neither central nor regional; instead the area was parceled up between various warlords, who employed their own private militias and occasionally went to battle with each other over control of supply routes and resources.

That is what anarchy looks like.  Anarchy is not a quiet peaceful afternoon in the woods with the elves and the unicorns.  Anarchy is endless low-level war occasionally erupting into all-out war, with powerful feudal barons (call them warlords, call them whatever you like) maintaining control of the region closest to their strongholds.  The outcome of anarchy is not freedom.  The outcome of anarchy is feudalism of the basest kind, with local power concentrated in the hands of a few, and misery for the masses.

Do we really want to return to the Dark Ages?  Haven’t we had enough of feudalism yet?

For that matter, do we even want to do away with the Food and Drug Administration?  Do people truly imagine that life would be better if drug stores sold toxic snake oil and grocery stores sold rotten meat?

It turns out that some regulations are necessary.  If there were no regulations, then the next time you saw an anarchist, you could simply punch him in the face, and as long as he wasn’t backed up by several large buddies, all he could do is run home to cry to his mommy.  However, since anarchy is a stupid idea and we live in a society governed by the rule of law, if you were to punch an anarchist in the face, he could file a police report and have you arrested for assault, thus proving that anarchists have no ideals at all whatsoever.

The fact is, we need laws; and in order to enforce those laws, we need taxes.  Get over it.  Get over anarchy.  Get over Libertarianism.  Get over the ridiculous Tea Party.  They are all pages from the same book, and it’s a book that should go back on the shelf.  It turns out that we’ve read it already, and we don’t like the way it turns out in the end.

“A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome” by Richard E. Green et al. was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science this week reporting findings from gene sequencing work done on Neanderthal bones. The conclusion: “gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.”
That’s right folks, it’s official: Neanderthals mated with humans. The human-Neanderthal interbreeding probably occurred shortly after some humans migrated out of Africa.
The finding will doubtless require us to further question what it means to be human. I look forward to the debate!

In a long-overdue move, today a Congressional panel approved a measure which labels the massacre of Armenian civilians by the military forces of the Ottoman Empire as “genocide.” Proposals to apply this term to the atrocity committed nearly a century ago have been punted down the line from one Congress to the next for many years now. The wholesale massacre of civilians by a military force is inexcusable under any circumstances, and the fact that it has taken Congress this long to call the act by its true name is shameful and sad.

More shameful is the last-minute effort by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to convince the panel not to even vote on the measure for fear of offending Turkey. Would Clinton have urged the Nuremburg Commission not to accuse the Nazis of genocide for fear of offending Germany?
Another country’s touchy sensitivities must never be a consideration when one is making a statement of true facts. The people of Turkey need to finally accept that the military of their grandparents’ generation committed war crimes, atrocities, and crimes against humanity. In my view, until Turkey accepts this fact, they remain under suspicion of condoning the atrocity.
In Section 3.3.2 of the book, entitled “Apologize for Historical Crimes Against Humanity,” I argue:

When genocidal acts and war crimes have been committed historically, they must be acknowledged, as a warning to all the world of the paths which we must not tread. … Admitting our past mistakes will enable us to be a better world in the future.

The specific example I cite in this particular section of the book is closer to home: the genocide of Native Americans committed by white settlers over the course of hundreds of years, a long-term crime against humanity which included the military slaughter of civilians, forced relocation to concentration camps, and biological warfare. However there are unacknowledged historical atrocities which have occurred in many other areas of the world, including the Armenian genocide committed by Turkish troops during World War I, and the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers against Korean and Chinese civilians during World War II. In order for our global society to move forward, we must acknowledge the terrible actions of our ancestors, we must resolve that such acts will never be perpetrated again, and we must structure our global system of governance to protect civilians the world over.
Despite the shockingly slim margin by which today’s resolution passed, I applaud Congress for passing the measure labeling the massacre of Armenian civilians “genocide.” I applaud this Congressional panel for standing up to the irrelevant concerns of the State Department. I applaud Congress for growing a pair. I hope they will take this newfound courage and charge forward with it. Maybe Congress will even use its newfound balls to enact meaningful health care reform legislation.

The first time I became aware of this issue was when the Bush administration bundled a provision into the first edition of the USA PATRIOT ACT that prevented the parents of autistic children from suing vaccine manufacturer Eli Lilly over their children’s condition. That seemed odd, to say the least. I thought at the time that if the vaccines had nothing to do with autism, then the drug manufacturer should be able to recoup its defense expenses by countersuing the plaintiffs for filing frivolous lawsuits. Surely if Eli Lilly was able to legitimately win even one such case, then it should be able to prevent future cases from going to trial. And what did all this have to do with an anti-terrorism law? Clearly the administration wanted to bundle a questionable line-item into what was considered must-pass legislation.

But I was not a parent at the time, and I had other reasons for despising the Patriot Act (namely that its privacy-invading provisions were Unconstitutional) so I went on with my life and did not revisit the issue until I became a parent several years later.

Full disclosure: My wife is a medical doctor. She works at a hospital and prescribes medications on a daily basis. She delivers babies and intubates patients who require resuscitation. She also happens to have serious, legitimate doubts about the veracity of the major pharmaceutical companies regarding the safety of their products. Anyone who remembers Vioxx and Fen-Phen should understand why. The pharmaceutical industry has repeatedly demonstrated that it is more interested in profiting from selling its products than it is interested in the safety of those products for the people who use them.

The pro-vaccine crowd invariably points to studies that seem to indicate that vaccines are harmless. The problem with such studies is that they were funded by the manufacturers of the drugs in question. That is a problem because drug companies are not compelled to disclose the results of studies that don’t show their product in a positive light. In other words, to imagine a somewhat extreme example, a drug company could pay to have the same study done ten times, and in nine of those studies the drug being tested could be associated with horrifying side effects; the drug company would not be required to release those results, and could publish the one study in which no side effects were observed. That single study could well be peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal: however, being peer reviewed does not necessarily mean that the study’s conclusions are correct; it simply means the paper being published meets certain academic standards. Don’t get me wrong, the peer review process is an essential component of the advancement of science. However, just because a paper was peer reviewed does not mean that it is infallible.

The vaccine debate - and again I must insist that this is a legitimate debate and not just the hoarse shoutings of a few fringe whackos, as doubters are increasingly being portrayed in the media – the vaccine debate largely focuses on the safety of the adjutants and preservatives used in the vaccines.

Several years ago, vaccine manufacturers stopped using Thimerosal, an antiseptic preservative that contained mercury. Without admitting that injecting babies full of mercury could possibly have had an adverse effect on their health, the vaccine manufacturers phased out its use.

Modern-day vaccines use an adjutant containing a large dose of aluminum. A single dose intended for an eight pound infant contains several hundred times the amount of aluminum that the US FDA considers safe for a two hundred pound adult. Why is it irrational to question the safety of this practice? Are the FDA’s guidelines reasonable, or not?

In the same time period that common childhood vaccinations have increased from 2 or 3 shots to 20 or 30 shots, the instance of autism has dramatically increased. It is not unreasonable to ask the simple question, “Is there a correlation?” The pro-vaccine crowd explains this increase away, claiming that this is a statistical anomaly due to changes in diagnosis. If they are correct, then the incidence of autism is in fact the same as it has always been; but they have no proof for this claim.

On the other hand, I have been repeatedly presented with anecdotal evidence which seems to suggest that modern vaccines may cause severe neurological damage in some individuals or under certain circumstances. There are a number of very upset parents who assert that their children were completely normal until they received a vaccine; and that having received the vaccine the child began exhibiting symptoms of autism. What if those parents are correct in their assertion of a causal relation? The dismissive tone which pro-vaccine spokespeople take when writing off such concerns is not helpful or informative.

My first objection to the unquestioning acceptance of the pro-vaccine spokespeople is from a technical perspective. The published safety trials only test one vaccine at a time, yet in the real world the shots are almost always administered in combination. All health practitioners are aware of the potentially lethal effects of drug interactions: therefore, if vaccines are to be administered in combination, then they must be tested in combination to rule out the very real, very serious possibility of interaction effects. Such a study has yet to be conducted.

My second objection is one of quantity. How many vaccines does a newborn really need? When I was a child I got all the vaccines that were required in those days: Tetanus and MMR (measles mumps rubella). That was it. Polio inoculations had been phased out, and the twenty-some vaccine recommendation had not yet been phased in. (I did eventually get vaccinated against Hepatitis B, when I was living in Egypt and on my way to India; but I certainly did not suffer any ill consequences by not getting that shot when I was a newborn.) Many children now get more than 30 vaccinations by the time they are just six years old. Do we really think we can prevent them from ever getting sick?

My final objection is one of trust. It has become clear that drug companies routinely suppress clinical trial results that indicate that their products might not be safe. In just the last few years we have heard of antidepressants, weight loss drugs, and painkillers that were known to be unsafe by the companies that made them, but the companies suppressed the studies which showed that these drugs were unsafe and continued to market the unsafe products to an unsuspecting public and to doctors. If the drug companies engage in such practices with regards their regular pharmaceuticals, what is to inhibit them from engaging in these practices with regards to their vaccines?

The problem is that the clinical trials used to establish the safety of vaccines are all funded by the product manufacturers. The manufacturers stand to profit by proving that their product is safe. Given the industry’s known history of cherry-picking their data and only publishing favorable results, I personally view the results of such studies with a great deal of skepticism.

The question then becomes, “What would it take to convince me that vaccines are safe?”

I want to see a study funded by the government; not by the vaccine manufacturers. The study should have a very large random sample, a cohort of several thousand who are followed from birth through age ten. The study must track vaccines as they are administered in hospital situations.

In the real world, a newborn infant is immunized against Hepatitis-B within hours of birth, and by six weeks the infant receives a simultaneous vaccine cocktail of four or more shots targeting seven or more illnesses. Similar multi-vaccine cocktails are administered at close intervals until age 2 and at longer intervals throughout childhood. However, existing vaccine studies only examine the health consequences of the administration of a single vaccine.

The study I propose would have a randomly selected sample population that receives all the vaccines recommended by the CDC and the WHO, delivered in the multi-drug cocktails common in most hospitals. The study should have a control population of equal size who receive no vaccines, and a third group that receives only certain vaccinations against the two or three diseases that are statistically most likely to actually kill or cripple an individual in childhood. Children participating in the study would have their cognitive status closely examined immediately before vaccine administration, again immediately after vaccine administration, and a third time several weeks later. Children in the control groups would have their cognitive status examined at corresponding times.

If such a study were to be conducted, I would be a lot more inclined to believe its results. And if such a study showed conclusively that vaccinated children have exactly the same rate of autism and ADHD as unvaccinated children, then I would be willing to accept those results.

I am not categorically opposed to vaccines. My son has been selectively vaccinated and as he gets older we will continue to selectively vaccinate him against other risks. I am not calling vaccine proponents evil or any other name. I am simply saying that it is reasonable to raise the question; and that until the question has been answered PROPERLY, parents should continue to ask it, and to reserve the right to refuse treatment if the question has not been answered to their satisfaction.

What’s needed is to run a long-term double-blind study with a very large cohort sample population, funded by an unbiased entity. I cannot think of any truly unbiased entity, but in this country, a properly supervised agency of the Federal Government is about as close as we are going to get. That is the study that must be conducted and that is who must conduct it. Until such research is conducted and its results publicized for public scrutiny, I believe that it is only appropriate for concerned parents to continue to loudly ask the very reasonable question: How do I know that these shots are really safe for my child? Because the truth is, we don’t know, and the people who claim that we do know, are too often the very people who make their money by saying things like that.