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England's National Health Service is urging parents to get their children vaccinated for the flu ahead of the holiday season to protect grandparents and other vulnerable relatives:
Flu vaccines administered through a nasal spray rather than an injection have been rolled out this autumn for two and three-year-olds, and children in reception class and years one to four in primary school. Children are super-spreaders because of the greater likelihood of them contracting flu at nursery or school, where germs are passed on at a rapid rate. But only 18% of school-age children have had the nasal spray immunisation, according to the latest figures.
Prof Keith Willett, NHS England's medical director for acute care, said: "Flu can be spread more easily by children, especially to vulnerable relatives such as older grandparents, those with heart or lung conditions and pregnant family members. Last year, millions of people missed out on their free vaccination and yet it's one simple, common sense step to help us all stay healthy this winter."
With less than a month until Christmas, the NHS is urging parents to book their children in for the free vaccination to help curb infection over the festive season, when family get-togethers can spread the infection.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mirror (a tabloid) claims that Russian agents are spreading anti-vaccination propaganda in the UK in an effort to destabilize the country:
Russian cyber units are spreading false information about flu and measles jabs in the UK, experts warn. [Ed's Note: The current flu immunisation is applied via a nasal spray - there are no 'jabs' involved.] Vladimir Putin is believed to want to erode trust in US and European governments. The state-sponsored units are spreading the lies on social media to destabilise Britain, it is claimed. The Kremlin has previously been accused of attempting to influence Brexit and Scottish independence. Now, it is feared it is trying to create distrust over flu jabs and the MMR measles vaccine.
[...] Security services are so concerned over the threat to public health and security that Government departments have been ordered to monitor social media and flag up risky articles. Health chiefs have had emergency meetings over the spread "fake news" over vaccination campaigns. [...] We can reveal public health officials are investigating whether an outbreak of measles last week in Liverpool and Leeds was fuelled by parents not vaccinating children due to "false information read on the internet".
Also at BBC. BBC's collection of newspaper covers.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 28 2017, @03:05AM (21 children)
Child care was a big problem even before double incomes became normal in western societies. Lots of kids grew up in abusive or neglectful households; it wasn't unusual at all. Parents beat them, parents were drunks, parents had too many kids and ignored them, etc. The idea that somehow there was some wonderful era where kids all were raised in healthy, non-dysfunctional families is nothing more than a myth. Childhood has been a terrible experience for countless children (especially poor ones) ever since civilization was invented.
As for double incomes, that *should* be the norm, otherwise one person (usually the female) is taking a *huge* risk that the relationship will work out and not result in divorce. Looking at today's stats, that's a foolish risk to take since roughly half of marriages fail. And the high divorce rate isn't even a bad thing: in older times, couples stayed together and hated each other because divorce wasn't socially acceptable, and countless women suffered in abusive relationships (and many men did too, though those usually weren't physically dangerous the way it was for women with abusive husbands).
Considering all this, and today's plummeting birthrate among non-poor people, it should be obvious that the current situation is simply unsustainable. As soon as humans have 1) gender equality, 2) easy access to reliable contraception, 3) wealth (middle-class or better), they don't want to have many kids, not enough to sustain the population. And it should be obvious that one solution to this is to delegate reproduction and child-rearing to the state. The other option I could see is normalizing polyamorous relationships (so that groups of parents lived together and raised kids as a sort of village), but that's fraught with legal problems, plus a lot of stigma, the way our societies are currently structured, so I think Brave New World-style institutional reproduction and child-raising is much more likely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @04:06AM (18 children)
As for double incomes, that should *not* be the norm, because without women taking a risk in the event of divorce there is little incentive to resolve relationship problems. We also don't get many children.
We'll fix this. If not via the law, we'll fix it with evolution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @06:59AM (10 children)
We have 7,000,000,000 people on planet. Soon 10,000,000,000. So WTF are you talking about?? There are more than enough people on this planet already. Human race is not enough to die off because we don't breed. On contrary, we may die because we over-breed.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @10:54AM (1 child)
> We have 7,000,000,000 people on planet. Soon 10,000,000,000. So WTF are you talking about??
Ah, but you see, most of those are browns and yellows, not good, honest, God-fearing Murricans and other superiors!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @07:29PM
Why is black pride supposedly OK, but white pride is not? Why do you hate me and my kind? In the world, I'm a minority. There are relatively few white people.
Without my kind being preserved, you lose diversity. It's like having mountain gorillas go extinct.
I happen to like the preservation of my sub-species.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 29 2017, @03:56PM (7 children)
We have 7,000,000,000 people on planet. Soon 10,000,000,000.
No, current projections show (IIRC) the global population leveling off around 8-9 billion, and probably falling after that.
There's a couple of problems here:
1) it's easy for the population to fall drastically, if everyone turns middle-class and starts having only 1.2 kids. Within a couple of generations, your population is cut in half or worse.
2) our economic systems and social services are not set up to handle population reduction *at all*. You need more productive younger people to support the not-as-productive older people. (And killing off the older people to remove them as a burden won't work, because then the younger people won't bother being productive any more since they can't even look forward to retiring.)
3) a bigger population results in more innovation; we've only enjoyed the technological pace we have because of a very large population.
4) the planet can handle a LOT more humans than it has now, the problem is that it can't handle billions more living a middle-class American lifestyle with a McMansion in the exurbs and 3 gasoline-powered cars. Build more cities like Manhattan or Tokyo with everyone taking public transit and living in small condos, and figure out how to grow meat artificially, and grow food in vertical buildings with robots, and the planet can comfortably support 3-4x the current population, probably more. Build giant rotating artificial habitats in space and we can support many billions more.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:00PM (6 children)
Cut back on the services, and you've fixed that problem.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:36PM (5 children)
Then you either have what I already mentioned in the parentheses, or you have a shitty dog-eat-dog society that only sociopathic libertarians (like about half of all tech workers) really want to live in.
One thing that'd help is eliminating aging medically, so that there's no more retirement and no more ageism.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 30 2017, @03:27AM (4 children)
Well, do you want to solve the problem or do you just want to whine impotently about it? Reminds me of the patient complaining to their doctor "It hurts when I do this." The doctor's reply? "Then don't do that."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 30 2017, @04:02PM (3 children)
Other, less-dysfunctional societies seem to get by just fine with plenty of services, and enjoy a higher quality of life than Americans do as a result.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:32PM (2 children)
You get what you pay for. Americans are paying to increase the price of various services (particularly education and health care) not paying for higher quality services. While I applaud your interest in higher quality services, that's not the point of US government services for the most part and hence, becomes yet another reason to cut back on those services.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:37PM (1 child)
Americans pay more per-capita for education and healthcare than other industrialized nations, and get much poorer-quality services for their money. (Their healthcare money isn't coming so much from tax dollars though, it's coming directly out of their bank accounts or paychecks.) Having higher-quality services for the same tax money we pay is certainly possible, though perhaps not in America just because we're too dysfunctional as a society.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 30 2017, @06:17PM
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 28 2017, @02:39PM (6 children)
As for double incomes, that should *not* be the norm, because without women taking a risk in the event of divorce there is little incentive to resolve relationship problems.
All that does is lead to virtual slavery for women and pushing people to stay in monogamous relationships leads to abuse and unhappiness. Abusive relationships were the norm before double incomes, because women had nowhere to go if they were unhappy.
We'll fix this. If not via the law, we'll fix it with evolution.
We'll fix it by having the state assume responsibility for child-raising, which is basically how it was before we stupidly invented monogamy. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, there was no marriage, and children were raised collectively by the village. We just need to go back to that, except with the modern version which involves governments.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 28 2017, @03:21PM (5 children)
Village != government. It's not even wrong.
And while we weren't data collecting back in the prehistoric era (by definition), marriage is ancient, wide-spread, and thus, probably predates agriculture. Tribes are well-known for have a huge variety of social systems and values. So it is likely that we had tribes back to the beginning of humanity who had monogamy relations (as well as other sorts of relationships) just like we do now.
And emotions aren't a recent invention of modern man. Things like jealousy and cuckoldry would have been a problem from ancient times. Monogamy is one way to manage that.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 28 2017, @04:44PM (4 children)
And while we weren't data collecting back in the prehistoric era (by definition), marriage is ancient, wide-spread, and thus, probably predates agriculture.
There's no evidence to support this.
So it is likely that we had tribes back to the beginning of humanity who had monogamy relations (as well as other sorts of relationships) just like we do now.
It's possible, but again there's no evidence to support it.
Pre-contact Hawai'ian culture had no monogamy among non-royals, and that was until relatively recent times.
Things like jealousy and cuckoldry would have been a problem from ancient times. Monogamy is one way to manage that.
Monogamy arose along with agriculture and the concept of land ownership. Jealousy and cuckoldry are only an issue in a culture where men care about their "legacy" or who's going to inherit "their" land. (Notice that, in traditional cultures including American culture until recently, it was only sons who were valued, and daughters were not.) In a communal village, such concepts simply don't exist. People have relations with whomever they please, whenever they want, and any children that result are raised by the community at-large.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @08:13PM
The fact that marriage is wide-spread in unrelated cultures is the evidence. Tribes in the remote Amazon rainforest have it; unmarried women get gang raped.
Jealousy and cuckoldry are issues wherever women historically needed male support for survival. It's strongly in the DNA of people from cold climates. Modern life may be different, but the imprint of the ancient environment has yet to be purged from our DNA.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 30 2017, @03:59AM (2 children)
Well, obviously no one wrote such things down in prehistory. But we have oral tales. For example, I can think of a number of ancient deities who had a single spouse such as the Greek or Norse pantheons. And many origin tales of humanity start with a man and a woman.
And once again, there is huge variety in hunter-gathering cultures today, including monogamy.
I disagree. Jealously and cuckoldry are clearly ancient emotions which are exhibited in similar fashion among other mammals and aren't particular to monogamous situations. I'm sure there were plenty of cultures that did as you indicate above, but I also am sure there were cultures which did not.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 30 2017, @03:58PM (1 child)
Well, obviously no one wrote such things down in prehistory. But we have oral tales. For example, I can think of a number of ancient deities who had a single spouse such as the Greek or Norse
No, we don't. Those mythologies you cite come long after the invention of agriculture, and sure as hell don't extend back to hunter-gatherer times.
And once again, there is huge variety in hunter-gathering cultures today
I'm sure there were plenty of cultures that did as you indicate above, but I also am sure there were cultures which did not.
Which proves that monogamy isn't a necessary part of human culture. If it were, they'd all be monogamous, but as you admit, they aren't by a long shot. As I've said before, monogamy only became really universal among human cultures with the invention of the notion of land ownership and agriculture.
Jealously and cuckoldry are clearly ancient emotions which are exhibited in similar fashion among other mammals and aren't particular to monogamous situations.
They're particular to situations where there's a shortage of one of the sexes (usually females). Eliminate that problem (and the sexual frustration that comes with it), along with the notion of parents being completely responsible for raising their offspring, and these emotions (which are simply a by-product of fear) go away. The whole idea of "cuckoldry" after all comes from the notion that a man "owns" a woman, and also from the modern idea that a man is responsible for providing for all the children of "his" women. Eliminate marriage and this idea of owning another person and then "cuckoldry" disappears as an idea, and jealousy has little place: if a guy gets mad that some woman is sleeping with another man, he can just go find another willing partner. It's only in monogamous marriage-oriented societies where this is somehow a problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 30 2017, @06:15PM
OTOH, if marriage was present in some form from at least the human population bottleneck of 75k years ago (Toba eruption), that would easily explain its prevalence now.
Moving on, even when pure monogamous marriage is not the only form of marriage, it often remains the most common sort, perhaps due to economics, lack of availability of mates, or desires of the couple. For example, almost 40% of listed cultures [uci.edu] (data comes from the Ethnographic Atlas [wikipedia.org]) are "occasionally polygamous", that is, have the potential to marry multiple times, but don't on average.
Emotions don't work that way. They're biological and hence, inherited from a time when they were preferentially propagated, perhaps because they were an evolutionary advantage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday November 28 2017, @06:53AM (1 child)
Equality is a good thing, there's no reason a man and a woman shouldn't divide work and child care equally. What we don't need is the necessity of 2 parents both having full time jobs. It's time to reduce the work week to balance out both parents working. We might eventually need to address the birth rate, but given the current world population, we have a few centuries where we could stand a slowly declining population.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 28 2017, @03:24PM
That's a solved problem. Parents can already choose to work less. Of course, it means less pay as well, but that's their choice.