A Letter to Bill Maher

10/13/2010

Dear Bill Maher,

I’ll start by sucking up and saying what a big fan I am, blah, blah, blah.  Sometimes you screw up or are shockingly ignorant on a subject but you’re fighting the good fight and unlike your counterparts on basic cable channels, you admit to mistakes.  A tiny mistake from last Friday’s show was the pronunciation of the county with the asshole firemen.  It’s oh-buy-un (phonetically obaiyun).  I think you said ohbeeon or something.

Just so you know, I grew up in Western Kentucky just north of there and it is a bigger shithole than you can possibly imagine.  You’ve heard of the Bible Belt?  This is the puss leaking from the penis just behind the belt.  It is a horrible place full of mean, hateful people that are truly the worst on earth.  You haven’t seen hate until you’ve lived amongst the Church of Christ and Baptist motherfuckers that make up the population there.  Horrible, evil, haters to the core, most of them were delighted to hear about this man’s house burning to the ground and would’ve been delighted if his children had been killed as well.  They would have felt it was just.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.  I was really disappointed that you let P.J. O’Rourke and S.E. Cupp get away with one of the stupidest Republican tropes out there:  “The government can’t create jobs.”  This is utter and complete horseshit.  Here’s how you counter that statement: 

1.  During the New Deal the government put most of America to work.  Those weren’t jobs?

2.  The people that are re-building all our roads and bridges aren’t working at jobs?

3.  When the government gives people jobs they spend money because they have money.

4.  That money being spent means people sell things meaning they have to buy things to sell meaning they have to hire people to sell the things and make the things and that stimulates the economy and creates more jobs.

5.  The best way to make sure that government money moves straight into the economy is to give it to the poorest first because they’re going to spend it immediately.  I’m poor.  I assure you this is true.

Republicans’ problem with this is the money is going to the bottom instead of the top, and they prefer to be trickled on than raised up.  That’s why they vote against their best interests (mention What’s the Matter with Kansas next time they disagree with you on that one), it’s because they believe they are better than everyone else even though they are dirt poor and getting poorer.  We live in a country of idiots that function according to belief rather than reality. 

There’s also the simple fact that what pulled us out of the Great Depression more than any other thing is that our government took complete and absolute control of the entire economy for four years and put everybody to work with good paying jobs with great benefits while forcing conservation and economy.  When our boys came home from war they came home to fat bank accounts, free education, and health care for life and that combined with the New Deal is why we had the greatest economy, best educated citizenry, and best health in the world up until the Republicans managed to end it all. 

“You can’t raise taxes during a recession” is bullshit.  “Tax cuts create jobs” is bullshit.  “Democratic spending caused the recession” is bullshit.  “The government can’t do it better (or cheaper)” is bullshit.  We have proof in recent history against all these but the Republicans keep on stating them as if they were laws of nature and they need to be called on it every time.  Maybe next time you have two conservatives on, haul out that little list and point out to them how each and every one has no basis in fact.  The Republican economic world view is just as H.W. Bush called it:  Voodoo economics.  In other words it is a religion, a belief system, not a science.  It is pure fantasy and history proves it again and again and again.

I watched Overtime as well and here’s a thing that occurred to me years ago about President Carter’s time in office.  The GOP hated Carter with a loathing that may exceed that which they have for Obama and were almost as obstructionist as today’s Congress.  The oil supply was cut off right after he got elected (probably with strong encouragement from GOP leaders).  The real nail in his coffin was the failed rescue mission in Iran.  Who planned this operation?  The CIA.  Who gave the intel that it was safe to fly those helicopters?  The CIA.  Who was the head of the CIA?  George H.W. Bush.  What did Nixon say about Bush?  “He’ll do anything we tell him.”  Worth thinking about.

Thanks for your time.  Please quit fucking up.

Love,

Alan Miller

The Vaccination "Debate"

Let's ignore the hundreds of thousands of doctors and scientists who have analyzed millions of pieces of actual data and pay attention to the blathering of paranoid contrarians instead.

About the Flu Vaccine

or
Open Letter to Bill Maher

Dear Bill Maher,

Let me start with a little brown nosing: I almost always agree with you, politically and socially, and even when your teleprompter reading is at its most obvious and awkward you make me laugh, and I was one of those that was totally behind you after 9/11. Had to get that out of the way so you know I’m not just some random lunatic hater and thus will go on to read this lengthy diatribe.

You have been a very bad atheist of late. You are making decisions and statements based on your beliefs and not science. I am, of course, referring to your irrational opposition to the flu vaccines. You are listening to your gut, and not the facts. You are also completely misunderstanding the way the immune system works and you then use your beliefs to convince you you are right about it.

You are acting like a True Believer, Bill. Even the evangelical Bill Frist who has faith he can diagnose a woman’s mental condition by watching a video told you that it’s what you believe but it’s not true. Your conviction that eating a pure diet and exercise will keep you safer than getting a flu shot and that, in fact, the shot itself is dangerous is belief. It is not logical nor rational. I’ll come back to this repeatedly. You are a man that spits at the idea of the “True Believer” but here you are behaving like one.

Here’s how the immune system works. Something invades the body, the immune system wakes up and detects it, attacks it and attacks and attacks until it figures out the antibody it needs to make to get rid of the attacker, body wins, and we feel better. What makes a completely new type of virus dangerous to us is that our immune system has none of the building blocks it needs for creating antibodies because our immune system has never seen anything like it. I don’t care how pure your food and lifestyle, when your body is attacked by a virulent, completely new type of virus you are going to be sick as runny shit. And that’s what makes the swine flu so dangerous, the immune systems of the healthy and young launch such a vicious attack against this totally new invader that it backfires and kills them. So far it appears a healthy older person might have been exposed to something similar in the 70’s so we may be fine. But nothing you eat, no amount of exercise or pure spring water colonics you, uh, enjoy as it were will prevent you from getting the flu if you haven’t already been exposed to that virus. You’re fucking screwed, basically, if you’ve never had something close to this year’s flu. The danger is in believing that getting any kind of flu isn’t really fucking awful.

A vaccine gives your immune system the information it needs to fight these viruses. That’s a fact, not a belief. Scientists (hundreds of thousands of them) have been creating, administering, and testing vaccines for over a century. They’re really good at it and only getting better. What you believe is being told to you by a few dozen blowhards and True Believers who are convinced by coincidence that vaccines are bad. It’s insulting to scientists everywhere to believe like you do. If there were some huge cover-up and sinister aspect to the vaccination programs, do you really think all those scientists are so corrupt they’ll kill people to stick with the program? Do you believe all the scientists and doctors working with vaccines are just making up the published numbers? That’s just fucked up, man. Those are far better people than fucking performers and politicians, don’t you think? And they’re especially better people than those that come up with these conspiracy theories.

And you should know about conspiracy theorists, Bill, considering how they regularly heckle you during your show. You’re acting just like them. You are acting on your beliefs and not the facts. Just as Fox News believers are convinced that the “balanced” perspective they are fed has a bearing on reality, you are getting your information from a very small group of very loud people and not listening to an incredibly large group of scientists and doctors that work on these vaccines around the world. You are not using logic, you are using belief.

The risk of side effects from the flu vaccines is vanishingly small. So small, in fact, that on the scale these vaccines are delivered, the correlative, non-causative events far outweigh actual problems. For instance, some guy dies right after getting vaccinated, but he would have had a heart attack that day regardless. That kind of event happens far more often than someone getting sick from the vaccine itself, which almost never happens, and in many years it doesn’t. People that continue to believe these correlative but non-causative events were caused by the vaccine rather than occurred coincidentally with it (causation, not correlation, remember that from your first science class?) are ignoring the facts and following their feelings and beliefs.

There is a risk to the vaccine. By any rational, logical process of thought and learning you should only come to the conclusion that the risks to you from getting the flu is much higher than any risks from the vaccine. Why would you think otherwise? Because of belief. If you haven’t had the flu in the last few years you’re lucky. If you had the flu a lot when you were younger your body may not be seeing anything really new. You may very well have had the sniffles a few times and didn’t realize you had a very mild flu because you were sick as holy shit fifteen years ago and this flu was very similar. But the H1N1 virus is completely new to most people and if you didn’t have the swine flu during Carter’s days then your souped up immune system may not be able to see this invader until you’re a sick, sorry mother fucker. I really think you’re putting many people in jeopardy of missing ten days of work because they didn’t get the vaccine. Try to imagine the loss of ten days of work for someone who is barely able to make ends meet and has no cushion or savings. It’s hard when you’re making millions to remember that the one in one billion chance of getting hurt by a vaccine has no comparison to the damage of getting sick and missing a week of work.

So anyway, get with being logical. This batshit conspiracy crap is for the birds. And don’t forget, it is the conservative mind that can not change.

Sincerely,

Alan Miller

[full address and phone number removed]