Right here in California
"Ya got trouble" from "Music Man."
A skeptic who was in the audience for the David Kirby - Arthur Allen debate said that Kirby reminded her of Professor Harold Hill in the musical, "Music Man." You might have to watch the whole debate which is on the DAN!/ARI website to see if you agree with that assessment. Some might translate Kirby's presentation into something like this.
Kirby as Professor Harold Hill:
Well, either you're closing your eyes
To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge
Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated
By the presence of a plume right here in your community.
Ya got trouble, my friend, right here,
I say, trouble right here in California.
Why sure I'm a Investigator,
Certainly mighty proud I say
I'm always mighty proud to say it.
I consider that the hours I spend
With a pen in my hand are golden.
Help you cultivate horse sense
And a cool head and a keen eye.
Never take and try to keep
An iron-clad lead to yourself
‘bout a childhood vaccine shot?
But just as I say,
It takes judgement, brains, and maturity to score
In the headline game,
I say that any boob can take
And put some words on a website.
And I call that sloth.
The first big step on the road
To the depths of deg-ra-Day--
I say, first, readin’ a blog from a newsfeed,
And then you’re hooked.
An' the next thing ya know,
Your son’s blogging with adwords,
From a cheap laptop.
And readin’ from some big out-a-town blogger
Writin' down stuff about SKEPticism.
Not a wholesome travel piece, no!
But this kid’s backing up facts with a graph!
Like to see some stuck-up blogger boy
Writin’ bout our kids?
Make your blood boil?
Well, I should say.
Friends, lemme tell you what I mean.
Ya got one, two, three, four, five, six payments on the table.
Payments that mark the diff'rence
Between a gentlemen and a bum,
With a capital "B,"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for plume!
And all week long your California
Youth'll be frittern away,
I say your young men'll be frittern!
Frittern away their noontime, suppertime, choretime too!
Get the blog on the blogspot,
Never mind gittin' amalgams drilled
Or bakin' GFCF poundcake.
Never mind sittin’ in the sauna
'Til your dad finds out you got no glutathione,
On a Saturday night and that's trouble,
Oh, yes we got lots and lots a' trouble.
I'm thinkin' of the kids in the HBOT tanks,
Shirt-tail young ones, peekin' in the port
Hole window after school, look, folks!
Right here in California.
Trouble with a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for plume!
Now, I know all you folks are the right kinda parents.
I'm gonna be perfectly frank.
Would ya like to know what kinda conversation goes
On while they're chattin' behind those blogs?
They're tryin' out typepad, tryin' out YouTube,
Tryin' out Custom Mades like Internet Feinds!
And braggin' all about
How they're gonna cover up a tell-tale breath with mentos.
One fine night, they leave the fallout,
Headin' for a chat on second-life!
Geeky men and Nerdy women!
Out blogging dorky humor
That'll grab your son and your daughter
With the arms of a jungle animal instinct!
Mass-steria!
Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground!
Trouble, oh we got trouble,
Right here in California!
With a capital "T"
That rhymes with "P"
And that stands for Plume,
That stands for plume.
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in California,
Right here!
Gotta figger out a way
To keep the young ones inside after school!
Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble...
Mothers of California!
Heed the warning before it's too late!
Watch for the tell-tale sign of toxics!
The moment your son leaves the house,
Does he go right a huntin’ for a real cookie?
Is there a processed cheese stain on his index finger?
And soy nuts hidden in the corn crib?
Is he starting to memorize jokes from Cap’n
Crunch boxes?
Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like 'pizza?"
And how ‘bout “Got milk?"
Well, if so my friends,
Ya got trouble,
Right here in California!
With a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P"
And that stands for Plume.
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in California!
Remember that DAN!, Martha Herbert and Bradstreet rule!
Oh, we've got trouble.
We're in terrible, terrible trouble.
That toxic cloud of from China is the devil's tool!
Oh yes we got trouble, trouble, trouble!
With a capital "T"! Gotta rhyme it with "P"!
And that stands for Plume!!!
There were lots of strange moments on the recorded version of the debate, this was one of them. Kirby seems to be saying that thimerosal has not yet been proven to have caused an "autism epidemic," that it might not ever be the proven cause of the "epidemic," but it also sounds like he's saying that in the end it will be the proven cause. In other words, what ever answer you want, it's in his response. Apparently, he has no doubt at all that there has been an "autism epidemic."
Slick.
Here's what some other uppity bloggers are blogging 'bout Professor Kirby
Kev also here.
Mike Stanton
Joseph
BC
and
Dad of Cameron.
Autism Diva
right here
posted by Autism Diva at 1:38 AM
12 Comments:
I have been lurking here for a while and I always find your posts interesting, informative and clever. How I wish you were more visible than David Kirby!
The guerilla campaign of the mercury moms really makes me tired. A few moms in my neighborhood have tried to "educate" me about the dangers of vaccines. It's all I can do not to shake them.
I have even had people suggest to me that I cut wheat and dairy out of my children's diet when there is no evidence of allergy. In fact, there is no evidence of anything. Oh, that opioid effect--why won't it work on me when I am confronted with these people?
Generation Rescue and others have no other tactic but to instill panic in everyone. They will not keep getting the attention they want if everyone on the planet isn't living in fear that their child will be next. Sadly, this anti-medicine propaganda is even catching with parents of terminally ill kids.
I saw a post recently on a blog about an infant recently diagnosed with SMA Type 1. This is a bad, bad diagnosis. The post was soliciting funds from friends so they could take the baby to an alternative medicine practitioner. The father even said that this guy had "even cured some kids of autism!" I actually cried that some quack was going to fill these parents with false hope and take their money. And this is a disease with a well-understood inheritance pattern with a well-established diagnostic test. It's so, so sad.
I am ashamed that there are people in the US who could stoop so low as to claim that vaccines are a gov't plot to dominate third-world countries.
I'll get off my soapbox now.
All Kirby needs is a straw hat, lol
All Kirby needs is a straw hat
Or a monorail to sell.
Quimby: "Now wait just a minute! We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville! Just tell us your idea and we'll vote for it!"
Thank you, vandychick, for your comment.
You are very right about Generation Rescue instilling panic in people. It's really gross. But it makes people like JB Handley feel like he's big and important like Paul Revere riding through the streets alerting people to disaster. But he's much more like an enraged Chicken Little.
Autism Diva can imagine what some parents go through putting up with the pushing by some of the mercury or biomed parents. Surely they mean well, but that's not much of an excuse when they are encouraging parents to stress out their kids by forcing massive amounts of vitamin pills (some kids take dozens of pills and potions a day) or restricting their diet to certain foods without reason.
Which is not to say that some kids don't need a special diet. It's a craze though to put all autistic kids on the GFCF in the hopes of curing the child of autism.
That is a really sad story about the family with the ill baby being dragged into a psycho world of quackery. The really sad thing is, when the baby gets sicker or dies the quack will say something like, "well, if you had only come sooner," or "you didn't do every last difficult and complicated thing I told you to do, obviously." It's blame the victim.
Diva said, "well, if you had only come sooner," or "you didn't do every last difficult and complicated thing I told you to do, obviously." It's blame the victim.
It's the nightmare scenario being played out every day.
Since when did serious and complex science become the business of journalists and local news personalities?
UCSD and its Cognitive Science Dept. should be ashamed for hosting this travesty. This so-called debate was nothing more than a public relations ploy for two journalists to promote their books.
There are appropriate forums for scientific discussion and this was not one of them. Such forums involve experts in the relevant fields who present findings to their peers, who are also experts. Such forums hold participants to the highest scientific standards where data cannot be misrepresented or fabricated.
Put these two journalists in the scientific meetings like the ones conducted by the Institute of Medicine in preparation for their 2004 report on thimerosal and autism and they would have been laughed off the podium. (China is blowing mercury to California. This is comedy.)
Because Arthur Allen can’t possibly know the entire body of relevant citations, he lets too many fabrications, straw men, and distortions go unchallenged. Had the debaters, moderators and audience been composed of enough experts in toxicology, epidemiology, neurology and neuroimaging, genomics, environmental genomics, etc. the various inaccuracies, distortions and mercury clouds would have been dispelled.
Arthur Allen is no better than David Kirby because they are both profiteering blow-hards who lack the expertise and the credentials to speak accurately much less truthfully. This debate left the impression that the mercury autism link is still in play.
Sorry, my toes are still tapping over your "Music Man" remix. Hilarious! Speaking of making blood boil: This is a bit off-topic, but the following review of "Autism Every Day" at Sundance pushed my personal plasma WAY over 212 F:
By Nicole Sperling
PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - The horror films on display at the Sundance Film Festival are nothing compared to every parent's fear that their child could be diagnosed with the mysterious developmental disability called autism.
That's right: The prospect of having a child with autism is far more terrifying than, say, a zombie heading at you with a chainsaw.
Nice work, Autism Speaks!
Puddintain,
You are right of course, there's a reason science isn't conducted by debate. There's no real way to debate the facts of science the way one might debate the pros and cons of building an overpass. It's really unfortunate that the majority of American's seem to be so lacking in understanding of basic science and that some of them have convinced themselves that whatever knowledge they pick up here and there is the equivalent of the knowledge a PhD would have... then there are some PhD's who are either liars or fools and who feed really bad information to the public, usually for a patently obvious self-serving reason.
To conduct a thorough reasonable debate for that audience would take a year, to train them in the basics of biochemistry, toxicology, neurodevelopment, statistics, the psychology of emotional manipulation and trickery, prudent consumerism, law, history, ethics and public health. Without a good background in those issues, or in most of those issues people like Kirby can slide all kinds of plausible sounding lies past them without the audience so much as blinking.
The it would take hours to present the evidence, with everyone having a copy of the papers referred to so they could assess what the papers really said.
What the Kirby/Allen debate was doing was like the Mark Twain story, "A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court" where the time traveller knows how to fool the less scientifically savvy people of the past with tricks that look like magic powers. Not that Allen used tricks, but he had to rely on emotional statements and asking the audience to trust him that he was right when he said certain things.
The Hg parent orgs are promoting snake-oil salesmanship, with Kirby selling his story to support the vaccine litigation industry and it's quack allies, and possibly to carry out a vendetta he MAY have against the CDC, re: their handling of the AIDS epidemic.
Kirby appears to be profiting from all this, he has an expensive pad in Brooklyn to pay the rent on and he seems to be doing that on what he gets from his mercury parent funded gigs.
Allen doesn't seem to be profiting from his book in a big way. Writing books is not a big way to make money unless you are one of the BIG authors of BIG selling books. Allen says he did it because it was an interesting project. He is still regularly writing for newspapers and magazines, David Kirby isn't, as far as Autism Diva can tell.
qchan,
You may not have seen this where Autism Diva linked to a clip from
Tourette documentary that was filmed by Home Box Office (HBO). Autism Diva ordered the DVD and just finished watching the whole documentary. It's so fantastic. It's mostly about kids, some of whom have serious difficulties with their tics, being bullied by teachers and kids who don't understand or don't want to understand. In the end the viewer must be left with a feeling of great respect for these kids and their families, though the families are not shown.
There are other excellent videos like this from organizations for neurodevelopmental disorders, so far none of them that Autism Diva has seen demonizes and brutalizes the kids in their documentaries. They report various difficulties, but without the "pooooor meeee" whine pervading the story, either.
Autism Speaks should go down in history as one of the most unethical organizations that has ever existed, but it's in bad company with almost all the autism related organizations in the US and Canada.
There are plans for some autistic adults and friends/parents to be there in Utah for the film festival protesting the showing of this movie. Hopefully that effort will get more coverage than the pathetic "Every Day" film with it's horrific and misleading message.
Autism Diva would rather spend an afternoon with a headless zombie avec chainsaw than with Allison Tepper-Singer or Bob and Suzanne Wright and their mercury daughter.
I have to say that watching Autism Every Day was great for me, but definitely NOT in the way the filmmakers intended. I was so horrified by those mothers that I swore right then and there that I would NEVER behave that way.
Or like the mother who told me that her asd child (who goes to mainstream K and has never gotten an offical dx) "totally ruined" her life. Or like the woman in my neighborhood who starts every comment about her asd son with "I love him, but..."
I don't have an asd child, but I had been engaging in some "poor me" behavior and it snapped me right out of it. The only thing I can truly change is my attitude.
A few months ago I read an article about an autistic teenager who suddenly began speaking. He said that when he was non-verbal he knew exactly what was going on around him. He understood everything, just did not interact in the "correct" way.
My fondest hope is that Ms. Singer's daughter gains the verbal skills to give her mother directions to said bridge.
Vandychick,
Your comment about the boy who started talking at 15 reminded me of this quote:
"Jeffrey Lurie, the owner of the [Philadelphia] Eagles, had a brother who was autistic who didn't speak his first word until he was 35. He told Jeffrey, 'Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot.'
http://www.dougflutiejrfoundation.org/press_release_10.html
The Flutie's son Dougie has childhood disintegrative disorder, not autism, but that article shows how they had been pulled in to the antivax/thimerosal hysteria. Even so they seemed to be good parents and not into self-pity.
- "I have to say that watching Autism Every Day was great for me, but definitely NOT in the way the filmmakers intended. I was so horrified by those mothers that I swore right then and there that I would NEVER behave that way."
Bravo vandychick!
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
<< Home