Or how about a fucking scientist?

Robert F Kennedy, Jr. was recently tapped to lead a commission on vaccine safety.

Good news, everybody: President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly asked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr to chair a federal commission on “vaccine safety and scientific integrity.” In addition to being one of the original Robert F. Kennedy’s 11 children, RFK Jr. is an activist who believes vaccines cause autism—an idea that has been roundly rejected by scientists and doctors, found to have no merit in dozens of experimental trials, and traced to one article published in Lancet 20 years ago and subsequently retracted. But what do scientists know? How many of them are Kennedys? Fucking none, that’s how many—not one Kennedy has become a scientist, because science sucks. It’s not because they couldn’t do it. Why, RFK Jr. himself went to Harvard, even after he flunked out of Milbrook. He’s just naturally right about things, the same way he is naturally rich: by being a Kennedy. I quote the Washington Post:

“President-elect Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies, and he has questions about it,” Kennedy said. “His opinion doesn’t matter, but the science does matter, and we ought to be reading the science, and we ought to be debating the science.”

Yeah, when are people going to start reading and debating science? We’ve left the science behind vaccines to doctors and scientists for too long. It’s time to get some famous rich people in there to straighten this out and decide whether polio should come back.

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Friday links! Comeuppance edition

White supremacist Craig Cobb, who recently learned he is 14% black

White supremacist Craig Cobb, who recently learned he is 14% black

“Virtue is its own reward,” says the man who does not want to reward you for anything. It’s the consolation prize of aphorisms, implying not even that things will get better later, but that you should be more grateful for the injustice underway now. No wonder virtue is unpopular. Stupidity, on the other hand—along with arrogance, bigotry and old-fashioned bossiness—is going like hotcakes. Fortunately, the converse of our old saw is true: stupidity is its own punishment. Today is Friday, and those who deny the facts on the ground inevitably will be corrected. It happens to all of us. Won’t you enjoy your comeuppance with me?

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Bible mom maybe lies about vaccinations, maybe just loves Bible

If you Google "bible vaccinations," this is what you get.

If you Google “bible vaccinations,” this is the second most popular result.

A. Ron Galbraith has alerted me to the news that Bible mom doesn’t want to vaccinate her child, because Bible, but a federal judge in Brooklyn has denied her request for an injunction. For the purposes of this discussion, we will pretend that the New York Post is a reputable source of news and that Staten Island is part of the city. In February, Dina Check sued the NYC Department of Education on the grounds that she had unfairly been denied a religious exemption to let her daughter, A’ishah Mary, attend PS 35 without her shots. Her reason, which is maybe two reasons, reveals a fundamental problem with religious objections to law.

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Anderson Cooper is sick of this Bachmann lady

My new favorite micro-generic hallmark of the Michele Bachmman news story is the phrase “and then she did this.” It crops up again and again in baffled coverage from veteran reporters, and I think it captures something particular about her. What Michele Bachmann says so consistently contradicts what Michele Bachmann just said that her weirdness seems inevitable, and yet it keeps managing to surprise. After a while, her political communication takes on the sort of art-for-art’s-sake quality one sees in, say, Dadaism. It makes so little sense that you must accept it only for what it is—and then she did this. What Bachmann did this time was tell The Today Show that an anonymous woman approached her after Monday’s debate to say that her daughter got inoculated for HPV, and then she “developed mental retardation.” Is Bachmann saying that you shouldn’t vaccinate your child against preventable disease? Is she saying the HPV vaccine retards you? No—that would be irresponsible. But she is saying that “this is the very real concern, and people have to draw their own conclusions.”

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The other fun thing that happened at the debate

Google search results for "rick santorum"—note that the top result is a paid advertisement, and that the neologism is beating the original.

In all the chanting for death and keeping promises to seniors, we lost track of the other exciting development from the CNN Tea Party Republican Debate. Wolf Blitzer fielded questions from Twitter, one of which asked the candidates what they were doing to attract the Latino vote. Before Herman Cain could angrily shout whom?, Rick Santorum jumped on it:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8TJeP3MI

Santorum is doing the same thing to attract Latino voters that he’s doing to get votes from outside his personal church: nothing. When I first read this quote in print media, I assumed his “illegal—I mean Latino—voters” was a snide jab. Now I’m not so sure. We are talking about the man who, at the first Republican debate, said that if—when!—Rick Santorum becomes President, “the world as we know it will be no more.” Whether he just said illegal already and had it in his cache memory or was deliberately conflating ethnic identity with false citizenship, Santorum can be forgiven, because he was pursuing the objective of the debate: messing with Rick Perry.

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