Risk to "The Children"

Since I'm ALREADY getting e-mails from certain people's wives about where certain kids sit in the car, I thought that I'd post something showing just how much safer kids are in general than in the past.

Notice that the only risk that increased was homicide, but the risk is still insignificant.

I've also got this on motor vehicle safety:



That rate is mortality per 100,000 people, same as the first table.

Interesting that the numbers are pretty flat from 1 thru 14 years old, regardless of if the kids are in a car seat, booster, or just belted in. Maybe some of those older kids are even in the front seat!

In any case, those are some miniscule numbers, until they hit the teenage driving years!

Also, keep in mind that many of the same mitigating factors that Federalist mentioned about vaccines apply to these mortality rates. How many of the dead kids were completely unbelted in the car? How many were in cars being driven by drunk mothers driving the wrong way down the highway? Well, we know the answer to that one: 6.

So... what's the worst thing that I'm doing by letting the kids sit in the front seat? Doubling their risk of death? A risk that is miniscule in the first place?

I feel so GUILTY.

Vaccine risk and the illusion of control

Commenter "Bubba" posted an interesting link on the risks of Guardasil relative to other rare occurances, like getting hit by lightning:

Regarding Garadsil:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-safe-is-the-hpv-vaccine/

So... yeah...

Commenter Federalist still argues that the risk of actually getting cancer from HPV is small, not making even that small risk that Guardasil causes worth it.

Part of what is going on here, I think, is what I call "The Illusion of Control". Educated parents feel that if they go out and research everything, they can control what risks their kids are exposed to.

Perhaps in the past, certain risks were just accepted as a normal part of life, sort of like how Muslims today accept death stoicly as "Allah's Will".

I'm more of the opinion that "shit happens". ;)

The problem with these educated parents is multifold:

1) the risks that they're trying to manage are miniscule. For example, my pet peeve, stranger danger. Children being abducted by strangers is a very, very rare occurance. Maybe Bubba can find a link that ranks that risk relative to others, but it's less likely than getting hit by lightning.

2) By trying to manage these miniscule risks, there are horrendous unintended consequences. For example, becuase of fear of stranger danger, kids are now not allowed to roam freely in their own neighborhoods. Could it be that part of the childhood obesity epidemic is a result of this?

3) What about the stress on parents and kids? Obsession with stranger danger is causing undue stress on parents, and makes those who AREN'T obsessed with it feel guilty. What is this stress and guilt doing to the health of these parents and kids?

We're in a strange place as a society. Public health has been so successful that the risks that we do face are largely of our own making. For example, instead of pathogens in the drinking water killing us, obesity is. Or not wearing your seat belt.

As a result, there is a lot of focus on getting people to manage their own risks. The problem is that people are not good at weighing risk, and can suffer from availability and other biases that make them focus on the wrong risks.

Or maybe we should all just RELAX and enjoy ourselves. Obesity is never going to kill as many people as Cholera did. Letting your kid sit in the front seat of the car (which I do) exposes him to more risk than sitting in the middle position of the back seat, but so what? The increase in risk is miniscule. And the pleasure of having your kid next to you, talking and enjoying the heated seats and controling the radio and having a better view of what's passing by as you drive, is worth a little extra risk.

Federalist will say that this contradicts my position on the H1N1 vaccine. It doesn't. In that case, the public health establishment has determined that, based on what happened in Mexico, H1N1 is a pandemic. As a result they fast tracked the vaccine and implemented a program to get it out to those most at risk: children and young people. I do think that, in this case, they're the experts, they have information and expertise that we don't. We should do what they say.

How Indiana tax policy creates jobs

I'm big on tax competitiveness. Indiana needs to have the lowest income, sales, property, gasoline, cigarette, liquor, and other taxes in the midwest, if not the country.

And this is why:

Defenders of Cook County's notoriously high sales tax often assert, indignantly, that consumers can't possibly be shopping in other counties just to save a little money. On Tuesday, though, that clueless claim imploded: Board member William Beavers, among the fiercest defenders of the tax, admitted to fellow board members and Board President Todd Stroger that he buys his gasoline in ... Indiana.

Why? Because it's cheaper there!

And why is gas cheaper there? Because taxes are lower in Indiana!

And that's why every gas station within a mile of the border is always packed with cars. That's money in the bank, people.

Democrats in General Assembly seek to make assessments less transparent, more complicated

The news today was that Democrats in the General Assembly want to cap property tax assessment growth at a certain percentage per year.

House Speaker B. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, said a bill that would cap the annual increase in a property's gross assessed value will receive a committee hearing by the end of this year. The proposal sets the caps at 1 percent for homesteads and 2 percent for agricultural land, taking effect in January 2011.

You'd think that with the problems with my assessment this year, I'd be for this bill. I'm not.

Look, one of the few good things about our property tax system is that they're market assessments. At least that portion of your property tax bill is clear. You have some idea as to what your house is worth.

This bill is making the assessment process more complicated. The way it works in other states, and the way I'm sure that this bill will work, if you exceed the caped increase, the difference is "banked" for the future, to be applied at some future time that your house doesn't appreciate faster than the cap allows.

This just makes things more complicated that it needs to be.

And it's really not necessary. Homes don't appreciate that quickly in Indiana, and when there are instances that a home has appreciated in its assessment, there is usually a mistake or an assessor not doing his or her job. The appeals process takes care of those instances.

So... what's this bill really about? Is it just Democrats getting in front of the property tax issue, which Republicans have been driving for the last half decade or so?

Mitch talking Buzzcut's language

Mitch is talking about cutting state income taxes.

My dream is no state income tax and bringing down the sales tax to 5%. Indiana would have Sun State economic growth rates if Mitch could pull that off. We'd leave the entire Midwest in the dust.

Is Buzzcut the stupid one when it comes to vaccines?

Commenter "Federalist" called me up and told me that I'm the stupid one when it comes to vaccines, that I'm the one acting out of fear and emotion, like a typical liberal.

He says that vaccines are not proven safe in clinical trials, that the HPV vaccine in particular is dangerous, that swine flu isn't that bad (his kids and wife likely had it as well), and that it has killed less people that regular flu.

First of all, when it comes to vaccines, my biggest beef is people saying that you, as a parent, need to "study the topic and weight the evidence". I think that's a bunch of BS.

There are very few people with the intelligence and qualifications to weigh the evidence as to the risk of getting a vaccine. In fact, we know from some of the drug recalls that THE EXPERTS AT THE FDA are often confounded by the evidence.

So if you are most people, you go online and "weigh the evidence" and find a whole bunch of assertions that you can't possibly put into the proper context.

So ultimately you've got to go with what the "experts" say. The "medical establishment", as an authority, is saying that swine flu is killing many more kids than a normal flu, and the only reason that there are less deaths overall is that the elderly, who normally are decimated by the flu, have a natural immunity from past exposure.

Federalist brought up other anti-vaccine talking points about how the effectiveness of vaccines isn't 100% (it's maybe 98% effective), and that this leaves people open to worse illnesses in the future, in the case of the chicken-pox vaccine, for example.

But that is really an argument for univeral vaccination. If the vaccine isn't 100% effective, the only way that you're really at risk is if there is a large body of unvaccinated people who could start an epidemic on their own, spreading to those for whom the vaccine didn't "take".

Anyway, we're looking at upwards of thousands of kids who have already died from swine flu. How many have died from the vaccine? The risk of the vaccine itself is miniscule compared to the risk of death from swine flu. I'll try and get some numbers and post them in a later post.

Update: I should have said "thousands of young people" killed by the swine flu, worldwide. As Federalist said, the CDC is showing the number of deaths of children in the US in the hundreds. But they were making their recomendations based on what happened in Mexico, where the flu was deadly.

How Republicans are rebuilding in Indiana...

...from of all places, the Washington Post.

I always say that we can't win if nobody runs. The first step is "getting 5 star candidates for all open races".

That is the Lake County GOP's first problem.

The next is providing resources, ANY RESOURCES, to help our guys win.

One reason I like Kim Drull is that she's utilizing the free social networking resources to communicate with motivated people. The combination of a strategy and a few highly motivated people can go a long way towards winning a local race.

Get enough motivated people, and I think that a council seat or two could very well be within our reach.

And if this article is correct, and 2010 is shaping up to be historic, with tons and tons of people motivated to work for our side, maybe even a county race or a few statehouse races are winnable. Maybe Visclosky could even be knocked out.

Smart people are f-ing stupid when it comes to the Swine Flu vaccine

5 of the 6 Buzzcuts have come down with swine flu. Somehow, Buzzcut himself escaped the mallady.

It's a nasty flu. It takes a week to get over it, and 2 of the 5 got ear infections as a result of a weakened immune system.

Baby Buzzcut had a seizure from the fever and actually stopped breathing. We had to call 911, Mrs. Buzzcut performed CPR, and we had a visit from Munster's finest and Prompt ambulence service. Luckily, this sort of thing happens in small children with fevers all the time, and there was no damage. But it was unnerving and upsetting, to say the least.

This all goes to show that YOU DON'T WANT TO F AROUND WITH SWINE FLU!!!

If a vaccine were available to your kids, for free no less, why wouldn't you get it?

The authorities have even gone out of their way to make it easier by bringing the vaccinations locally, to Wicker Park.

Well, just talking to people in my kids' school, it seems like most people aren't getting their kids vaccinated. The anti-vaccine folks and their bullshit about the safety of the vaccine has gotten into people's heads, especially smart people who should know better.

Just because you're smart doesn't mean that you're not a f-ing idiot.

On a positive note, I talked to someone who DID go to get the vaccination, and they said that they ran out of vaccine and had to come back a couple days later. So someone is getting vaccinated.

Mrs. Buzzcut had gotten the regular flu shot, which didn't protect her from the swine flu one bit.

Should vaccinations of adults ever start, I'll be getting a shot. And I'll be getting the regular flu shot as well, and maybe a bunch of other vaccinations if I can at my next checkup.

Berlin Wall Fell 20 years ago, no one cares

It's strange that the most momentous occasion of most of our lifetimes is being more or less ignored on its 20th anniversary.

I mean, if you're a baby boomer or younger, this is pretty much the biggest thing that's happened in your lifetime.

It's strange that nobody cares, although the disintegration of the "Evil Empire" was pretty slow motion and relatively bloodless. Maybe we need something more exciting to keep our attention.

Lake County government now 11% Geezer!

I got taken to task last time when I complained about geezers in government when a 72 year old Lake County public employee confused the gas for the brake and drove her gold Ford Crown Victoria into the cafeteria of the county building.

But I never learn, so here we go again...

11% of Lake County public employees are over 65.

That seems like a lot, especially in government, where "generous" pensions mean that public employees usually retire early, some as early as 50.

So why are there so many geezers in Crown Point?

Could be a couple of things.

Maybe, unlike public employees everywhere else in America, Lake County public employees have crappy pensions.

The problem with this explanation is that private sector employees have crappy pensions too, and very few people work past age 65.

The other explanation is that the pay must be pretty high for those with a lot of seniority. The work is probably pretty easy physically and mentally as well.

I'd really like to see the age breakdown of the county workforce. I'd be willing to bet that 50% or more of the workforce is over 50.

"Social Justice", "Reconciliation", and Regionalism

Doug Ross has a pretty interesting commentary about "reconciliation" and regionalism.

First of all, did you know that there is a "Center for Social Justice" at Calumet College? As we all know, "Social Justice" is a euphamism for Communism. It's Communism for non-atheists.

The difference between the left and the right is that the left has institutions to do its dirty work. It gets institutions like colleges to create these programs, and then these leftists have jobs devoted to nothing more than spreading their Communist beliefs far and wide.

By contrast, those of us on the right have day jobs and can't devote ourselves to our ideology 24/7.

But I digress.

So these Communists had a conference about regionalism, and the failure of the transportation referendum. OF course, the Communists blame it on racism, that white South County and Porter County don't want to pay for "vital services" in black and hispanic North County.

Ross has an interesting perspective, that reflexivly blaming racism is counterproductive, and that there needs to be a reconciliation between those (whites) who fled North County for other areas, and those "left behind".

While I think that that's an interesting perspective, and I welcome the Communists looking at their enemies motives without reflexively screaming "racism", I still think that Ross is a bit off base.

I don't deny that much of Lake County politics is driven by an "us vs. them" mentality (which is ironic because everybody is a Democrat). But it's not just a white/black divide. It is a working, productive people vs. non-working, non-productive, layabout people mentality. There are plenty of African-Americans in the former group, even in Gary, and whites in the later. That's why it's not a black/ white issue.

Look, Gary is a wasteland, but who's responsible for that? Who keeps voting the same incompetant people into office over and over again?

What we saw in the referendum was the same people looking for a handout, looking for someone else to pay for the services that they consume. It's time that Gary starts to take care of itself and clean up its own backyard.

Until that happens, there will be no regionalism, because we're all coming to the table with different wants and needs. We're not coming to the table as equals, and the nature of the system is that the weak mooch off the strong. Or the incompetant mooch off the competant.

There's another way to look at the "Balkanization" of the region (that's a great way to put it, with so many Serbs around here). There's competition between the towns to attract residents and businesses. If regionalism means just giving more power to the county, which results in a big, unresponsive bureacracy run by incompetant Gary interests... we don't need to go there.