I haven’t said much about the latest measles outbreak or about the many ignoramuses who refuse to vaccinate their children on dubious grounds, for I take for granted that most of the readers here are smart and acquainted with the evidence for the safety and efficacy of vaccination. I will, however, just mention two bits of vaccinaton-related lunacy and one of sanity.
First, the sanity. In an almost unheard-of move to reverse U.S. religious exemptions for medical care, the Los Angeles Times reports that both U.S. Senators from California—Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein (peace be upon these Democrats)—have urged their state to pass legislation eliminating all exemptions from inoculation save those based on medical grounds (i.e., weakened immune systems). Governor Jerry Brown has offered tentative support for this legislation. Now let’s have California also ditch its many other dangerous religious exemptions, like allowing teachers to avoid getting tested for tuberculosis if they have religious reasons. (Yes, that’s the rules.)
On to the lunacy: Queen’s University, a very good school in Ontario, Canada, has been found to harbor a course that warns against vaccination. Have a look at the professor’s slides attacking inoculations. The school and the Canadian government are investigating.
Also at PuffHo you can watch a short but cringe-inducing video of Kristin Cavallari (once star of the odious “reality” series “The Hills,” now a fashion designer) explaining to the public why she doesn’t get her kids vaccinated. She trots out all the usual tropes, including an increase in autism and the use of mercury compounds in vaccines (no longer true), and winds up asserting that it’s up to the parents to decide about vaccination—”to each their own.” (She also says she’s “read too many books” to not oppose vaccination. She’s clearly been reading some wonky books.)
*******
Well, when it comes to public health, it’s clearly not “to each their own”, because what each one does can affect the health of many others. And that’s today’s lesson, one that involves, sadly, a United States Senator. This particular Senator thinks that it should be optional whether restaurants require their employees to wash their hands after a bathroom break, for that’s an unwarranted government intrusion into the public sphere. It should be up to the restaurant.
Can you guess what party the senator belongs to?
Yes, you’re right—it’s Republican Thom Tillis, the junior U. S. Senator from North Carolina. And, according to The Raw Story, this is what he said on Monday in a speech at the Bipartisan Policy Center:
“I was having this discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,” Tillis recalled. “Let an industry or business opt out as long as they indicate through proper disclosure, through advertising, through employment, literature, whatever else. There’s this level of regulations that maybe they’re on the books, but maybe you can make a market-based decision as to whether or not they should apply to you.”
Tillis said that at about that time, a Starbucks employee came out of one of the restrooms.
“Don’t you believe that this regulation that requires this gentlemen to wash his hands before he serves your food is important?” Tillis was asked by the person at his table.
“I think it’s one I can illustrate the point,” Tillis told the women. “I said, I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as the post a sign that says ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restrooms.’ The market will take care of that.”
“That’s probably one where every business that did that would go out of business,” he added. “But I think it’s good to illustrate the point that that’s the sort of mentality that we need to have to reduce the regulatory burden on this country.”
Yes, by all means let the market decide!
Bad, bad idea. Those rules are in place to protect the public—a public that may not be curious enough to read all the signs on the walls. There is no good case to be made for allowing people the option of risking their health when others don’t do what they should. Remember Typhoid Mary?
I’d love to ask Tillis if he also favors getting rid of the laws mandating vaccinations for schoolchildren, as that’s also government intrusion (after all, the kids can just wear warning tags saying, “I didn’t get my shots”). Is he against quarantining patients with contagious diseases like Ebola, which is clearly an unwarranted restriction of their liberty?
h/t: Stephen Q. Muth, Tom H.
On the extremely unlikely chance that I ever meet Tillis, no way in hell will I shake his hand.
b&
I would, but only after I’d used the bathroom.
Or you could give him a taste of his own medicine, and go before you shake his hand… 🙂
Oops, I misread your comment and said exactly what you said. Shift brain into gear before posting, eric…
That was actually what I was implying.
Shake him warmly by the throat…
/@
That reminds me, I think, of something from Lewis Carroll…but I’m drawing a blank past that….
b&
>
That’s called a Shawinegan Handshake.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawinigan_Handshake
I’m sure the term was used much earlier than that, by Arthur C. Clarke of meeting Isaac Asimov, or vice versa. Something to to with HAL breaking the Three Laws of Robotics, iirc.
/@
LOL I thought the same. Sometimes I miss Chrétien; he didn’t need An RCMP detail!
PCC, people like Tillis confirm the suspicion most of us have that most Americans have very low IQs. Who in his right mind would make such a suggestion?
I don’t know about most, but if you changed Americans to humans I couldn’t argue.
Well yes, most humans really have low IQs
Except in Lake Wobegon.
I think it’s more the profound effect that an ideology can have on common sense. Libertarians tend to think that a person should be able to choose to consume a less safe product if the result is a lower price. Let the market decide if the company should change its policy.
At least your surviving relatives will know whom to boycott after you get poisoned from unsafe meat! The market works!
I haven’t checked carefully, but I’m under the impression that the same people who wanted to close all airports to travellers from African countries and quarantine anyone who might have been in contact with Ebola patients are the ones who are inveighing against government regulations requiring vaccination or hand-washing. Strange.
I’ve found that people who are “against government regulation” actually mean “they shouldn’t tell me what to do. They in no way mean that they shouldn’t tell *other* people what to do, especially if it’s something of which I, personally, disapprove.
The analogy with fundamentalist christians and their use of the bible is hopefully too obvious to require elaboration.
So you repeal a law which says employees must wash their hands and replace it with a law which says you have to put up a notice if employees aren’t required to wash their hands. And how exactly does this reduce the burden of bureaucracy?
Good point!
Logic is not required for membership in the GOP …
What’s GOP ? Gang Of Pinheads?
Like it!
We used to say it stood for Greedy Old Pigs. Which also fits.
In fact, it’s a disqualification.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. This guy is not a very good libertarian. His solution to government regulation is to change the regulation so that instead of making all food safer to eat, you can make it disgusting as long as you say so. Brilliant! That’s a totally worthwhile endeavor for our government. A real libertarian would get rid of the regulations all together – any restaurant can do anything it wants; as people get sick and die, the market will sort it out…it’ll be Utopia!
I know, the market as panaces is ludicrous. Ceiling Cat help us if there is ever a revolution around libertarianism.
Panacea. Stupid iPad.
+1
A killer point.
There really is too much regulation, and there really are nanny-state laws. But simple, effective, low-cost safety regulations are not amongst them.
John Stewart did a brilliant take down of Tillis last night, titled “Mr Unclean”
here’s the link
http://on.cc.com/1DhfsMu
No one does it better…especially now with Colbert gone.
Johnny Carson in a monologue: “May an unclean troll fandangle in your Fruit Loops.”
Well, another really in your face absurdity of the good senator’s argument is that he requires the restaurant to post a sign saying employees don’t have to wash their hands so that the market, people, can then determine if they want to buy there or not. In other words, government regulation. Or perhaps he wants the government to hire mercenaries to enforce his signage requirements?
The odious ideas are bad enough, but the level of reasoning on display from the people chosen to run the nation is enough make you cry.
Nah. He’d just let companies police themselves. Eventually a private entity, like Consumer Reports, would manage to out a few of the cheaters and *then* the market would punish them. I’d wager that is his fantasy, at least.
The key problem with guys like Tillis is that they don’t believe in externalities, valuable things not captured by markets. They believe in a mythical thing, The Perfect Market, that will solve all problems. Markets are good a processing information about people’s preferences and the costs of various ways of achieving those preferences. A perfect market, it is possible to imagine, might therefore solve all problems that can be solved. If everyone had all the information they needed at all times, and the cognitive capacity to remember and process all of it, and the ability to integrate their choices over time, and there were an infinite number of competing businesses to choose from, and that choosing were frictionless, then it might be the case that the only companies that would survive would be the ones that fully reflect our aggregate values and which preserve externalities (like clean air) simply by responding to subtle inputs of the market. None of the properties of a perfect market exist in reality. We know, for a fact, that companies will, for example, taint food and drugs and get away with it for ages unless there is more of a deterrent than the market can provide.
To anyone not blinded by this utopian vision this is an obviously childish fantasy. As childish as the other extreme, that if I give the government total control over all my choices, over all production and business, that that will lead to a world without problems.
People are easily seduced by totalizing ideas, the One Thing that, if obtained, will fix all other things. To me, all such utopian fetishes are a curse. For some the totalizing ideal is a religion, for some it’s The Perfect Government, for others it’s The Perfect Market.
Fiction is no way to run a country, but it is what motivates a great many people to want to.
” A perfect market, it is possible to imagine, might therefore solve all problems that can be solved.”
This is one of those things discussed in Econ 101 in college. There are very few products in which anything close to a perfect market exists. Maybe something like salt.
Its not just externalities, its that they somehow think deregulated markets won’t act like real deregulated markets act. Boom and busts are a good example: they think deregulation will somehow prevent them, when wild swing boom and bust cycles are exactly what you get in an unregulated market. I once had a conservative tell me that a deregulated market would be just as stable as the earth’s ecosystem, since that’s also unregulated (in an outside-rule sense). Well yeah, that’s true…and that’s a good reason to regulate it. Because we don’t want financial mass extinctions and ice ages. We don’t want people’s life savings going the way of the dodo.
It’s funny how they don’t want to believe that Darwinian evolution exists yet still want to try practicing it in their personal lives.
I’m surprised all y’all’re missing the “big picture.”
Tillis knows full well what the consequences would be of the types of deregulation he proposes. Of course he does!
And the only such consequence he gives a tinker’s damn about is that it would maximize quarterly shareholder earnings.
If a bunch of people have to get typhoid and he has to lie through his teeth for the rest of his life, that’s all fine and dandy so long as he gets that third yacht….
b&
Maybe he does, but there are real True Believers out there who think Ayn Rand was a great thinker and who really, truly believe that laissez-faire capitalism will build a wonderful, prosperous, Utopia. This guy is clearly an idiot, since he didn’t even realize he was just suggesting a new regulation to replace the old one, but the real deal does exist. It’s like they’ve never heard of the Robber Barons and never read Dickens. They know that John Galt will save the world if only given the chance.
Yeah, for supposed atheists they sure love their deus ex machina story endings.
If true — and it may well be — it just means that it’s his bosses who know the score and who find it useful to whore him out like that.
b&
>
Sounds like oligarch thinkin’
Extinction aside, natural ecosystems are rife with predation, parasitism, ruthless exploitation, and senseless suffering. So that’s exactly what we should expect from unregulated markets even in the best of times.
I used to work for a US Federal regulatory agency (as a regulator). One of the first things I was told by my new boss was, “Every one of these regulations has human blood on it. Remember that.”
And it’s true.
And one of the next things he told me was, direct quote, “we are here because people are basically fuck-ups.”
Even if they want to do it right, they are going to fuck up some of the time. We helped prevent that from getting to “the field.”
Having worked on all sides of the system, I can tell you that this is how the system works in reality.
People like Tillis are exactly the sort who will injure others to make a few extra bucks right now (and then expect to not be held responsible for it!) Count on it.
People like Tillis are also right-wing republicans. These two facts may not be entirely unrelated.
“Eventually a private entity, like Consumer Reports, would manage to out a few of the cheaters and *then* the market would punish them.”
Nah, the cheaters would sue Consumer Reports for a gazillion dollars for damages and loss of business. Isn’t that how the Free Market works? 🙁
Free markets are self-contradictory.
If you allow a market in advertising, people’s preferences are distorted by external factors.
If you don’t, then presumably that doesn’t count as allowing anything to be sold.
“I’ve read too many books.” Is a perfect example of something an intelligent person would never say.
“I choose to believe…” is another example.
It’s a weird that people can chose to endanger their children and other people’s children. If I want my child to have diseases from the 50s then that is my choice, it’s also my choice that I will let my child pass these diseases onto the elderly and smaller children. I also want to be able to drink and drive. Not vaccinating is fashionable now, so whooping cough and measles is going to be fashionable soon. If celebrities are not going to vaccinate and politicians are fighting for my right not to vaccinate then they must be onto something.
Well, that depends on what they follow it with. “I’ve read too many books to possibly believe your fairy tales about a man who was also a god who was sacrificed to that same god in order to absolve humans of the sin committed by a pair of people who never actually existed” is a perfectly intelligent thing to say.
Yeah, my retort to her would have been: Yes; but you read the wrong books.
The interviewer said something similar, she had a laptop out and was looking at the autism speaks website and reads that studies have not found any link between vaccines and autism. This was avoided, not vaccinating is a choice, not something she wanted to discuss. It would have been fun for the interviewer to ask what books on this topic she had read.
Exactly. It’s surprising how many people think that a lot of books and a lot of “studies” means that their science is now as legitimate as yours, regardless of where the vast majority of the scientific consensus lies. In fact, being on the side of Brave Maverick Scientists who are bucking the system is a sign that you’re right. That special combination of arrogance and ignorance fits well into the role of rebel warrior.
Apparently, the quality of the science is measured against the quality of the drama.
I think it has to do with our fiction. How many times have you hear of a movie about a heroic authority figure bravely standing up to a rule-breaking maverick?
Standing up to authority and the establishment is pretty much universally played as being heroic in American culture, regardless of what that authority of establishment actually is. And this seems to have resulted in it being seen as heroic if you boldly stand up to experts in the real world.
Experts, what do they know? (Aside from more about the subject than non-experts)
Or “I’ve read too many books with pop up pictures”.
Did anyone else also notice the striking similarity of “I’ve read too many books.” to Palin’s answer to the question about which newspapers she reads (“All of them”)? The willfully ignorant very carefully avoid reading the “wrong” things by reading (and understanding) very few things, which are most often, if not always, wrong.
Stupid example: we would end up exactly where we are now. Every business would opt-in, no business would enforce it unless there was some government penalty for not doing so, so the government would have to use health inspectors and a regulatory framework to find and punish corporate slackers. Exactly like they do now.
Hey, I’ve got an idea. We implement the opt-out scheme just as Tillis wants, but with this amendment: in any civil suit against the corporation for noncompliance or damaging someone’s health, the sponsoring legislator and individual corporate owners will be held personally liable. How does that sound, Thom?
Tillis’s resort to the Republican mantra “let the market decide” is just another demonstration that Republican politics are nothing more than the dogma of a religion.
This is only the pathetic bottom of the thinking that goes on in republican land. These people think back fondly on the days with no child labor laws, no unions and JP Morgan as president. Take your vaccines and stick it.
For a second or two I thought Tillis was joking. Nah.
Every time I read a weird article about a Republican, I always look to make sure that it doesn’t say “the onion” down in the corner.
They are that hard to distinguish from satire.
Tillis was a state senator, and defeated the democratic incumbent, Kay Hagen (who unfortunately accomplished little while she was senator, and that led to her defeat).
Tillis was known for his righwing views while in the state senate, and now we see him espousing nonsense at the Federal level.
I’ve never seen a party so good at “pandering” as the Republicans. If they think ISIS is a threat, they ought to consider that their policies constitute an even greate threat in the longterm to our survival as a democracy. Loony-toons is too kind a term to apply to people like Tillis. We got rid of Jesse Helms, but we haven’t move forward very much with Tillis, if at all.
Thom Tillis is a charlatan and a panderer. If he is stupid enough to think that people handling food that will be consumed by others should have the option of not cleaning their hands after urinating or defecating, he should be given a cup of the briny and a plate full of the steamy. Then, he should be wished bon appetit!
I’m too depressed to subscribe.
Ah, so you didn’t tick the box and you won’t see this comment then? 🙂
(Sorry ’bout that, I share your presumed views on the subject…)
As crazy as it sounds to statists, the government should have no say whatsoever with regard to whether or not any private individual or business washes their hands or the practice of personal hygiene. I’m sure North Korea has these types of laws nicely in place and they are probably rigorously enforced. I can’t imagine any business not requiring employees to wash their hands. If a business does not see the importance in this, I’m sure they won’t remain in business very long. I don’t buy the statist argument that capitalists are out to kill their customers because they are greedy. Human beings are not ‘bland slates’ who must be molded, shaped and prodded to do the ‘right thing.’ That’s not reality and things on the whole are getting better.
Wherever you got your basic education from, demand a refund. It’s clear that it’s woefully deficient.
Start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
if you’d like to try to get caught up to speed.
Cheers,
b&
Maybe senator “Shithands” should read “The Jungle”? Or would he be beyond redemption?
He likely considers it inspirational….
b&
>
But I really like “Senator Shithands”, maybe that would prevent -just tipping- him from re-election`?
Karl May (who never visited the US of A, btw) had “Old Shatterhand” and “Old Surehand”. Maybe “Old Shithand” would be better than “Senator Shithands”? It remains kind of murky anyways.
I really rue my lack of mass psychological knowledge here.
I mean Old Poophand” lacks lister…
Lustre, not lister
Food safety standards does not turn USA into North Korea.
So how many people have to get food poisoning before the ‘word spreads’ enough?
You realise that this policy would literally kill people and cost millions $$ in unnecessary medical expenses? Instead of answering that question, I’ll issue you with a challenge: please name a country that does not have food safety standards.
Ooh, ooh, I know the answer! It’s the libertarian paradise of Somalia!
It wasn’t fairies who dumped arsenic into the pond near where I lived in college. It was some businessman trying to save some money. And that’s with it being illegal!
And as for people not needing to be prodded to do the right thing, I have to give you that one. That’s why we read about the great Spontaneous Emancipation in our history books.
I’m still bent over from “demand a refund”
There really is no need to over think this dip stick. No matter, if it’s not washing hands or voting for pipelines or climate change. The standard garbage will be the same from anyone in the party. We don’t need no stinking regulations and the Koch brother’s check is in the mail.
” Human beings are not ‘bland slates’ who must be molded, shaped and prodded to do the ‘right thing.’ ”
Right. Except for the fact that you just described precisely how the majority of human behavior is motivated; i.e., through positive reinforcement.
RE Tillis — Wouldn’t a requirement to notify the public that their servers are filthy be the sort of “government intrusion” he’s decrying?
I know this isn’t the most absurd thing about what Tillis is saying, but…
Isn’t he proposing regulations that are more of a burden on businesses than the ones he’s proposing to eliminate?
At present, Starbucks merely has to insist on employees washing hands. In order for the market to even have a chance of of “taking care of” the not-washing-hands problem, Starbucks would be required to advertise the fact that they don’t require this. Presumably a five-point footnote at the bottom of a skirting board wouldn’t be enough; there’d have to be a raft of regulations about how they inform the public, how prominently they display signs, and so forth. If it’s red tape Tillis is worried about, it seems to me he’s proposing more rather than less.
Unless he really thinks that restaurants should be allowed to keep their poor health policies secret, which is more in keeping with the weirdo-ultra-libertarian viewpoint he seems to hold.
Yeah, but with the washing hands thing businesses also have the added expense of having plumbing, running water, and soap! Just think how our flagging restaurant business would soar if unfettered from soap costs!
I hope I never have to live in any area where this guy has a say. He doesn’t understand basic hygiene, yet is at the helm of government?
Unfortunately, I’ve often said of North Carolina’s Right Wing politics:
All the arrogance of Texas, and all the ignorance of Mississippi in 1 state.
It occurs to me that the position adopted by Ms. Cavallari re: vaccines is a lot like that adopted by creationists: there are a lot of books written by each side, people should be free to make up their own mind about it, etc. The only thing missing was “teach the controversy.”
I live in NC. My opinion: Tillis did not win the election so much as Hagan lost. I watched both of their debates: Hagan won on content, but Tillis won on style. He was slicker than she and her record in Congress was bland. All he did was regurgitate the vile and stale GOP bylines. He gave not one single independent thought. However, the vote was very close. Most likely NC will be a blue state for the 2016 election (with a nice chunk of electoral votes) unless the GOP actually nominates a viable general election candidate. I think we are one of the few purple states left…..
Independent thought seems to be something the GOP frowns on.
Way back in 1905, SCOTUS ruled, in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, that the government can, by force of law, mandate vaccination for the safety of people and the general welfare of the nation. The decision still stands, 110 years later.
Somehow, I don’t think that this putz really believes this crap. IMHO, he’s only pandering to the tea partiers in North Carolina. However, I don’t live in North Carolina and know nothing else about this clown except for this utterly idiotic statement.
Issues of medical safety always trumps free market principles. Human beings are not the guinea pigs of supply and demand. Period.
No, I can’t guess what party the senator belongs to.
Anti-vaccination people seem to belong to both left and right wing political extremes – liberals who are all-natural and conservatives not wanting to be told what to do.
And Gov Brown’s “tentative support” (excuse me, did the wind just change directions?) is interesting since he expanded exemption loopholes in a signing statement.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/11/07/california-children-betrayed-governor-jerry-brown-and-the-neutering-of-a-law-designed-to-make-vaccine-exemptions-harder-to-get/
Years ago a female coworker told me one of our female peers did not wash her hands after using the toilet. Until I was behind the non-washer in a potluck buffet line, I was not aware I had that particular hangup. She and I had very different lunches that day.
The idea these libertarian know-nothings are promoting, that food service workers being required to wash their hands could somehow be replaced with businesses posting a notice that they are opting out of mandatory hand washing, is absurd. One has little enough faith that the workers are compliant, I trust “small business owners” even less. The context they have to set – voluntary hand-washing, arguing that sex with an unconscious person is not rape, vaccination should be optional – just in the past week! – to establish their anti-gummint bona fixes is alarming. The holy “market” surely does reward and punish businesses, but it’s so much less efficient than government policy in these kinds of affairs: it should not take business failures and job losses to enforce basic civility and common sense. What a bunch of entitled, spoiled jerks. But boy oh boy, say a curse word or expose a breast on TV, and the nanny state is their best friend. And man do suddenly they love them some “trial lawyers” anytime they get caught with a hand in the cookie jar or a spoon up their nose! Because justice!
hhhmmm…
Not washing your hands after using the bathroom sounds like a new take on pubic (sic) health.
You would think that California could catch up with Mississippi and West Virginia, those being the only two states that allow no religious or philosophical exemptions, (only medically necessary ones), for childhood vaccinations. Mississippi exempts home-schoolers with 10 or less related kids, but I couldn’t even find that exemption in West Virginia. WV law also provides for free immunizations.
There are minds which will be boggled at the notion of having to pay for a vaccine….
b&
>
I remember my dad (MD) fuming about this sort of thing in the 1960s. “It’s 1968 and you can’t get the goddamned waiters and cooks to wash their hands after wiping their ass with ’em.” Back in those good ol’ days hospital admissions due to e. coli contamination and the transmission of Hepatitis A and B were pretty common. Infections by protozoans were less common but boy were they spectacular when they did come along. Yes, let’s kill the restaurant industry by killing off the clientele – we’ve already killed off most other industries in the USA.
I wonder what per cent of hospital visitors do not wash their hands. Among those are a subset who do not wash their hands after using the PATIENT’S restroom. And then they open patient room doors and push elevator buttons on their way to the hospital button- and lever-festooned vending machines and cafeteria. I’ve yet to read a media article about hospital-originated infections which mentions the visitor vector. (Ah, but the visitor fancies himself double first cousin to the customer, who “is always right,” eh?) Shall market forces determine the efficacy of hospital infection control?
For sure it is immoral for a restaurant worker to not wash his hands. I myself have worked as a restaurant private servant, and I washed my hands without exception.
Surely at least a few readers here, when a customer at a restaurant, have observed another customer not wash his hands. (Did you have to bite your tongue?) That customer then handles his plate and other table items, which wait staff must necessarily touch when clearing the table. Then when the server presents the bill in the leather folder (or whatever the heck it’s called), he handles that with his nasty hands (with at least a few other hand-washing customers having to handle it throughout the evening), handling his credit card or cash and touching doors and other surfaces while at and exiting the restaurant.
I seem to recall a surreptitious survey someone conducted of doctors’ hand-washing habits while at a medical convention. Results were surprising/disappointing.
Reblogged this on Fairy JerBear's Queer World News, Views & More From The City Different – Santa Fe, NM and commented:
When Public Health mixes with conservative politics the results aren’t pretty!
“… and the use of mercury compounds in vaccines (no longer true)”
I must have missed the memo. Several states like California, New York and Washington restrict mercury containing vaccines in kids or pregnant women, even though they are perfectly safe. Vaccines are now almost always available in a formulation that is mercury free. However, thimerosal (mercury)containing vaccines are still found in multi-dose vials.
P.S. really interesting interview by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now aired 2/5/15 where Dr Paul Offit takes anti-vaxxer nut jobs to task. Clip on their website.
Not very helpful perhaps but there is an alleged Churchill quote –
Young man [after seeing Churchill leave the bathroom without washing his hands]: At Eton, they taught us to wash our hands after using the toilet.
Churchill: At Harrow, they taught us not to piss on our hands.
Remind me not to shake hands with Thom Tillis!
In a rush. Haven’t read comments.
I’m in this noble senator’s state.
For starters, do microbes distinguish between private servants and their pure-as-the-driven-snow customers and masters, who would be righteously “offended” if the posted sign included the word “customers” or “everyone.”
Two comments:
1. Mississippi is one of two states that do not give religious exemptions for measles vaccinations (the other is West Virginia). Have a good Darwin Day in Mississippi.
2. Would senator Thom Tillis, who believes that it is enough for restaurants to inform that employees are not required to wash their hands, require that transgenic foods also be labeled so that persons who believe they are a danger can take their business elsewhere. I, for example, hold that it is very unhealthy to put profits in Monsanto’s pocket. Or, in treating the welfare of corporations, is it simply a case of “It’s none of your business where your business goes, so shut up and eat”? [NB: I have no complaint about nutritionally enhanced GM foods, but that is irrelevant for the comment.]