Over at Fox News, Dr. Manny Alvarez supports the decision by a hospital organization in Michigan to mandate vaccination against seasonal flu by its staff on pain of termination.  The argument for this is that people who work at hospitals are at a greater risk for contracting and spreading the flu.  The counter-argument is that an employer should respect the rights of employees as to what they inject into their bodies.

Dr. Alvarez makes a good point when he says that a hospital can mandate that a worker must have certain education and credentialing qualifications before being allowed to work, so why shouldn’t they mandate vaccination?

I agree with Dr. Alvarez on this.  The flu kills on average about 6000 people in the United States, with thousands more becoming sick.  These sick people are going to concentrate at doctor’s offices, emergency rooms, and hospital wards.  People who work at these facilities, regardless of their job, are going to be exposed either to the patients or to the things they touch or cough and sneeze on.  For their own health, and the health of the people they will come into contact with, they should be immunized against this highly infectious illness.

Yes, the flu shot is not always effective, and yes there will be people who get sick from the shot itself.  But the risk of spreading flu in an environment where people are seeking health care is too high.  People who have a moral or medical reason to not get the flu shot can get out of it with a note from their doctor or pastor.

The other side of the coin is the rights of the employees.  I don’t like it when my employer comes out with yet another mandatory briefing, background screening, training session, or whatever that I have to do in order to stay employed.  While my company encourages flu shots and immunization in general, they don’t mandate it.  But I’m not working with or around sick people either.

My take on this particular situation is that employees who don’t don’t want to get the flu vaccine and don’t have a religious or medical reason for doing so, can always quit.  When you accept employment, even if you have the strongest union contract in the world, you are agreeing to exchange your labor and adherence to policies set by your employer in exchange for money in one form or another.  If an aspect of the work or one of those policies offends you, leave.  Drop your two weeks notice, start calling business and family contacts looking for your next gig, and polish your resume a bit.  Cashing the paycheck means you agree to the employer’s terms and conditions.

JP over at Eyes Never Closed has proposed that as many people as possible spend time on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks shooting their guns and eating pork.  If he gets pictures of people doing these things, he’ll post them on a website that’s basically a middle finger to murdering cretins wherever they may be.

Since that’s the weekend I have Girlie Bear for September and it’s also Little Bear’s birthday, I think I may take my kids to the range and then have a cookout.  Smoked Boston butt sounds really good after a morning out at Knob Creek shooting firearms from Savage, Ruger, and Smith and Wesson, doesn’t it?

I just read one of the most disgusting and disturbing things I’ve seen in a while.  Big Peace has an article about the open and widespread practice in Afghanistan of men buying teenage boys for use as dancers and sexual partners.  From what I surmise, this practice has been part of the culture in parts of Afghanistan, but it has exploded both in flagrancy and sheer number of boys being sold into sexual slavery since the fall of the Taliban.

We have our own issues with widespread abuse of children in our own culture, but at least we’re trying to clean it up and we curb stomp those who we catch debasing the most innocent of our people.  

Before I go off on a rant here, this has nothing to do with Islam.  The local Islamic scholars and preachers uniformly condemn the practice. This is also not a slam of all Afghani people.  We wouldn’t know how bad this situation is without reporting by Afghani journalists and others.  But something is rotten in Kabul, Kandahar, and the rest of that country and its culture(s).

Since we brought a massive amount of firepower to the side of the Northern Alliance in late 2001 and helped to push the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, we have been regularly treated to stories of massive corruption in the Karzai government, funded of course by the American taxpayer, a huge upswing in the amount of opium grown in Afghanistan, Afghani police and army units that are more a mob of stoners than cohesive groups of armed men with a mission, and now this. 

What exactly are we getting for all of the blood and money we’ve poured into Afghanistan for almost 10 years?  From what I can see, not much.  If the Karzai government isn’t capable of bring the warlords to heel and keeping horrific crimes like this from happening, why are we diddling with him and his family run enterprise in Kabul?

Are American interests protected by empowering men who use young boys as sexual puppets and status symbols?  Are we giving the Taliban and other groups we oppose in the region an example to point at when asked why they fight us when we put and keep such men in power?

We need to send Kabul and the rest of the scum in Afghanistan a very clear message:  Clean up your act or we walk away.  No ‘slow drawdown’ to attenuate the pain, no ‘follow-on force’ to protect them from reality, no massive infusions of cash and guns to keep them parroting democratic platitudes while they overfill their retirement accounts.  Clean up the corruption, the ineptitude, and the outright pederasty at the point of a bayonet if you have to, or we leave you to the Taliban.  We will burn or blow up all of our bases, take home or destroy all of the equipment we brought with us, and crater the runways after the last C-5 goes wheels up.  Piss us off, and we’ll salt the fields of opium and cannabis with ground up nuclear fuel rods while we’re at it.  It would be better for us to sit on the sidelines for a couple of years while Karzai slides down into the cesspool of history than to continue to enable his corrupt, lazy, inept, disgusting regime.

We are making the same mistake we made in Vietnam and other 3rd world crapholes during the Cold War:  Back any tin pot dictator with the blood of children on his hands so long as he keeps saying the right things to the reporters from the United States.  We either need to back someone who won’t stand for the corruption of his country and the cultural and systemic sexual exploitation of its children, or we need to drop Afghanistan like a hot rock while promising to make a desert out of it and call it peace if we’re ever bothered again.