Religious beliefs and vaccination exemptions

 Yes, I know that Anabaptist types like Mennonites aren't Calvinist per se, but many of them hold to the same rigid determinism, as do the parents of the child who was the first measles death in West Texas a few weeks ago.

The child's parents make that clear.

The Texas parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died from measles Feb. 26 told the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense in a video released Monday that the experience did not convince them that vaccination against measles was necessary.

“She says they would still say ‘Don’t do the shots,’” an unidentified translator for the parents said. “They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”

The West Texas measles outbreak, the biggest in the state in 30 years, has infected more than 270 people and hospitalizing dozens of them. Public health officials have repeatedly told Texans that studies have time and time again shown that the safest and most effective way to avoid contracting the very infectious, life-threatening disease is to vaccinate with the measles-mumps-rubella shot.

The couple, members of a Mennonite community in Gaines County with traditionally low vaccination rates, spoke on camera in both English and Low German to CHD Executive Director Polly Tommey and CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.

“It was her time on Earth,” the translator said the parents told her. “They believe she’s better off where she is now.”

What do you say in response to that?

It's hard, but not THAT hard theologically, as I will address on my other blog site.

For here?

For the parents not keeping children home when unvaccinated, this is an infliction of their religious belief on others. Parents who don't believe their children are predestined to get measles, and have their kids vaccinated, shouldn't have to deal with a "breakthrough" case. Nor should they have to deal with more generalized school disruptions.

Nor, to be blunt, should they have to deal with, for the public eye, pretending sympathy for another family they may not feel in reality.

And, they shouldn't have to.

Especially when, reading between the lines of Covenant Hospital's statement, these parents are willing to lie for their religion.

And, with that sort of lying, they surely don't care about endangering others.

Which they are.

Health experts say it could take a full year to fully contain the West Texas measles outbreak:

“This demonstrates that this (vaccine exemption) policy puts the community, the county, and surrounding states at risk because of how contagious this disease is,” said Glenn Fennelly, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases and assistant vice president of global health at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso. “We are running the risk of threatening global stability.”

There you go.

That said, per that same piece, is this all about religion or not? One person says no:

Katherine Wells, director of public health for the City of Lubbock, during a Tuesday meeting of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a national organization for large metropolitan health departments ... said efforts to increase the vaccination rates in Gaines County, which is about 70 miles from Lubbock, and the surrounding region have been slow as trust in the government has seemingly reached an all-time low.

“We are seeing, just like the rest of Americans, this community has seen a lot of stories about vaccines causing autism, and that is leading to a lot of this vaccine hesitancy, not religion,” she said.

But, putting the cloak of religion on non-religious beliefs is an all-American pastime. 

Beyond religious issues, here in Tex-ass, as the piece notes, is state Republicans continuing to gut local control of local issues. Seminole ISD doesn't have the power to close local schools, for example.

On this and related issues, Texas gets unfavorably compared with New Mexico.

Putin is no Churchill, and no Stalin, either

A few weeks ago, I wrote in depth about Der Spiegel's piece about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a new Churchill and how he had not only gotten hoist on this petard, but was keeping himself hanging.

So, what about his counterpart, Russian President Vladimir Putin?

I've semi-regularly called him Vlad the Impaler, after Vlad Tepes, aka Count Dracul. But, that's a figure from many centuries ago,  that works primarily as a pun of sorts.

What Putin is NOT is Uncle Joe Stalin. First, contra the tankies, he's not a Communist. Second, while Stalin, at least theoretically, opposed Russian nationalism continuing from Tsarist times — a stance that, as Lenin's Commissar of Nationalities, helped get us into the situation we're in — Putin is indeed a Russian nationalist.

So, if not Stalin, and not Vlad Tepes, as he predates post-Thirty Years War modern nationalism, who is he?

Could he be, per Montefiore's book on Stalin as the Red Tsar, some sort of Black Tsar? A quasi-fascist tsar? I mean, post-Yeltsin, he shook down the oligarchs just enough .... to line his pockets, keep them in line, yet keep them loyal by protecting them.

But, not a fully fascist one. Yes, Prigozhin owned a few things, but government ownership of the means of production without a dictatorship of the proletariat? Putin's not a fascist; of course, compared to Mussolini, Hitler wasn't totally a fascist,either.

As for trusting Putin? Or, per Norm Finkelstein, saying his invasion is "justified"? Uhh, no.

Let's start with John McCain vs. George W. Bush. Without supporting McCain's idea then, or others today, of expanding NATO to included Ukraine (or Georgia), he was right when he responded to Bush by saying that, contra Shrub, when he looked in Putin's eyes he saw three letters — "KGB."

In one of the KGB's more odious moments, in the early 1980s, it was the apparent originator of the claim that the US had engineered the AIDS virus for population control of African-Americans, Black Africans, or both. And, in South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki, this led to horrendous AIDS deaths. In the US, it built on Black mistrust of the medical world because of things like the Tuskegee experiments. You know, the KGB in which Putin served 1975-90.

Ken Paxton, Coppell ISD and falling for "sting" videos

Setting aside the asshattery of Kenny Boy Paxton suing Coppell ISD for being DEI or whatever? If you're a school superintendent in Texas, how do talk to some rando coming to your district without thoroughly vetting them, which Superintendent Evan Whitfield apparently failed to do with Accuracy in Media's non-ambush videographer?

I mean, to get into a building, AIM's dude had to present a driver's license. In these days, at a school district of any size, if I don't know who "Accuracy in Media" is (assuming the dude was truthful about who he was working for), I do teh google. I also google dude's name. And, since we have his DL, I use Google Images or similar to match his face with what's available online, and to see if that matches otherwise.

I mean, it's 2025. How do you fall for a sting video, especially on a subject like this?

The word is not "trans" — you're missing a modified noun at the end

The story of a formerly (sic) transgender (sic, we don't use just "trans" here) person stuck in legal ID document limbo — in fair part because of a ruling by Texas AG Ken Paxton that has since been extended has several caveats — and not just for the BlueAnon (and beyond among actual leftists) crowd on this issue.

First, of course, is that sex is not gender, something I've said a gazillion times.

Don't believe me? Philosopher friend Massimo Pigliucci, holder of dual PhDs, in philosophy and evolutionary biology, has taken on fellow philosophers on this issue.

Second, per, or rather, contra, Texas Monthly's first story on the plight of Razavi, this is why we don't use the bare prefix "trans" without either the "-sexual" or "-gender" at the end.

Third, the actual story of Razavi in the TM second link? Obviously, "detransitioning" is a lot more difficult, and tougher, biologically and even sociologically, on the matter of sex than gender. Related, if Razavi thinks that being transgendered would always leave him as a "second class citizen," and notes in both stories that he's 6-5 with a beard .... why did he want to and try to play a different gender role in the first place?

Shed not too many crocodile tears for the Dalai Lama

Actually, for many people, tears for his post-1959 plight would be real.

And, this is not an apologia post for defending Xi Jinping's minions hacking computers and devices of modern exiled Tibetans.

But, as Tenzin Gyatso officially has announced that his successor, the to-be 15th Dalai Lama will come from outside China, let us take note that, even if he's being truthful in denying original knowledge himself, his brothers were major assets in a CIA campaign of skullduggery against Beijing, a campaign that also involved Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang in Taiwan. Wikipedia has a page about it that, while it gets a flag for possible "original research," is still worth a read. Indeed, per the Wiki page, before the 1949 "fall" of China, the older brother of Tenzin Gyato (who was born Lhamo Thondup), Gyalo Thondup, lived in Nanking 1947-49 and boasts about eating dinner at Chiang's table.

The backstory is that, before Beijing invaded in 1950, Tibet was not part of China. And, we'll get to backstory to that in a minute. Essentially, the Dalai Lama and other lamas ruled it as a semi-feudal theocracy. Now, it was not religiously or otherwise coercive in the way the mullahs are in Iran, let alone the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the way some Christian Right folks would like to be in the USofA, but it wasn't exactly enlightened.

Before that, Lhamo Thondup was officially declared to be that 14th Dalai Lama in 1939. His birthplace was in a northeastern borderland which has both Tibetan and non-Tibetan people and was ruled at this time by a warlord whose nominal superior was Chiang.

Even today, per the map at the top of the Wiki page on Tibet, Tibetan exiles claim a vast amount of land beyond what is clearly Tibet. The orange and red areas on the map contain, by ethnicity and/or language, Han Chinese, Mongolic peoples, peoples of Southeast Asia that live in various parts of southern China, Turkic peoples in its northern areas, etc. And, vis-a-vis this piece, ethnic Han have lived in large numbers in much of that area since the Yuan Dynasty if not earlier. (In today's Tibetan Autonomous Area within China, Beijing trod more lightly in Western Tibet in the first decades, not just first years, post-1950.

Looking back in Tibet's history, the Qing Dynasty, at peak, had semi-full control over Tibet. The Ming, before that, claimed they did, but many scholars reject that. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty indeed controlled the area, but Chinese dynasties before that generally did not. At the tail end of the Qing, in response to "Great Game" meddling by both Britain and Russia, the Qing in the early 20th century for the first time staked a formal legal claim to the land, and began a process of "Sinifiction."

As for long ago history, before Genghis Khan and his descendants and the Yuan Dynasty, there was a "Tibetan Empire" about the same time as Tang Dynasty China, pictured above. As you can see, at its maximum, it controlled or had influence over all of today's Tibet, all of today's Xinjiang, and much if not all of today's Gansu, Yunnan and Sechuan areas of China. To the west, it went into Kashmir and Turkic Central Asia.

See Wiki's "History of Tibet" for more on Tibetan history in general.

The point of this part of this piece is that Tibet does not have something unique and special in its cultural DNA, no more than the Hopis of the US Southwest, or other modern Puebloans. With the Hopi, Awatovi should tell you that. (If that doesn't, Ekkehart Malotki has said that, contrary to legend — whether first propagated by Hopi or by Anglos — that the etymology of the word "Hopi" is NOT related to any Hopi word for "peace.")

Now, one could counterclaim that this was pre-Buddhist Tibet. And, I would counterclaim back to that? The murderous Islamophobia of the 969 Movement in today's Burma, as well as past history in Buddism; I've covered this in a bit of depth.

Back to closer to where we are now. Tibetans eventually resisted the 1950 invasion — with help from the US. The Dalai Lama himself first appeared to encourage some degree of passive resistance against China, including limiting how many troops they would send, while signing off on a 17-point agreement that he repudiated after escaping to India in 1959. What led to that was him becoming, by the middle 1950s, a symbol of resistance whether he was personally leading it or not. Per that link, he may well have lied about signing the agreement under duress.

After he fled into exile, China stopped trying to do its version of Sinification through Tibetans and rather through direct Chinese control and action. Meanwhile, Tibetan exiles continued to resist as they could.

The Dalai Lama himself, at best, made a devil's bargain with his brothers. Could he have done better? Maybe. What led to Beijing's invasion was a decision by parts of Tibet's complex leadership — but definitely not all — to boot all Chinese. It appears to be a bid for "neutrality" after Mao and the Communists had chased Chiang and the KMT off the mainland. But, it was too late for that, it would seem. Even if the Dalai Lama himself were not directly involved, as a teen, he might have been asked for thought. Today? Could he be forthcoming about what he knew and when about the CIA a few years later? I don't totally buy his claim that he was originally ignorant of his brothers' activities.

And what brings us to today is the Dalai Lama's announcement above, in a new book, which directly confronts Beijing's claim it will chose the 15th Dalai Lama.

Today, per Wiki's article on the Kashag, a Qing-era body of Chinese governance reconstituted by the Dalai Lama after his 1959 flight, Gyatso has himself repudiated the idea of full independence for Tibet or a political role for either himself or successor Dalai Lamas. On the former, what degree of autonomy does he want, and what degree of confessional vis-a-vis his ties to the CIA, and other things, will he do to get even a mildly lighter hand by Beijing? On the second? I think you are playing a political role as is. And, playing with a self-dealt bad hand by rejecting Tibetan independence.

That all said, since this is the site for non-twosiderism, isn't the regime of "godless Communists" in Beijing hypocritical for saying it will choose the next Dalai Lama rather than declaring the office abolished? (That said, Lenin and Uncle Joe Stalin didn't abolish Russian Orthodoxy, they just made it more servile inside the country.) That said, this secularist awaits the idea of dueling Dalai Lamas and anti-Dalai Lamas, like the papacy of the late 1300s and early 1400s at the end of the Avignon period. That then said, since Qing times, formalized in 1793, the Chinese government has claimed the right to select, or denote, or whatever term we should use, the next Dalai Lama. It may not always have exercised that right, but it has claimed it. And, we already have dueling Panchen Lamas. (Per the matter at hand, that link notes the Panchen Lama has traditionally been involved with selection of the Dalai Lama.)

And, otherwise? Most the Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ world inside the DC Beltway knows at least the basics of the story above. They're the ones being called out for decades of crocodile tears.

THAT then said, the likes of Max Blumenthal are wrong about Xinjiang. And, good leftists like Cory Doctorow have written much more on that, so it's not just Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ talking about the labor camps, etc., there.

Texas Progressives talks state water, more

Off the Kuff notes that the Trump "Justice" Department has dropped the redistricting lawsuit filed by the Biden Justice Department after the 2021 redistricting.

SocraticGadfly talked about the end of an era at Southwest Airlines, looking at the end of "your bags fly free" — and other items Southwest announced.

The Lege wants to ban uncertified teachers, at least from "core" subjects. It sounds good; how will they address shortages in those areas, though? (Will it crack down on charter schools, where it's more of a problem, too?)

Texas could indeed face a water problem. Do either the House or Senate bills that purport to address that target conservation? Probably not. We know that, on the Senate side, Perry pushes desalinization, which remains overhyped.

How much is Houston Mayor John Whitmire himself, a known ConservaDem, behind Helltown PD's degree of cooperation with ICE? That' missing from the Trib story.

Linda McMahon's Department of Ed is targeting Rice and UNT for their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Nationally, DOE is weaponizing anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

Greenhouse gases are drastically shrinking our upper atmosphere, causing more problems for the future for satellites. Grist reports, as republished by the Observer.

Ethics reform under the Pink Dome? Dead as a doorknob, despite the RINO hunters claims this was why McDade Phelan had to be shown the door.

Trump is bribing El Salvador (even if its president calls it "a very low fee") to accept deported Venezuelans, who might have been deported in the face of a court order. (We know the Trump Administration has violated at least one other such order, in a deportation to Lebanon.)

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project reports from a protest at a Houston Tesla dealership & says the next protest will take place when you organize it.  

Your Local Epidemiologist answers some questions about the MMR vaccine. 

The Austin Chronicle reported from a SxSW panel on modern cars and the amount of our personal data they hold.  

Law Dork worries about SCOTUS taking up a case involving state bans on conversion therapy.

The Houston Press looks at the ethos behind "pay what you can" theater tickets.