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elfsOmaha and I went to the Burien Drinking Liberally tonight. I don't have all that much in common with most of those people, and tonight, I had even less.
Omaha and I sat the girls down at a separate table so we could have a night together. The girls are behaved enough that they can be trusted to sit by themselves through a meal, and they did well enough tonight that one woman came up and complimented us on teaching children how to behave in a restaurant. Unfortunately for Omaha and I, the evening was not to be as quiet we had hoped.
The woman sitting next to us started out, with me at least, on the wrong foot. "I hope Barack Obama becomes president," she said. "He'll be ready to deal with the terrible things that mother nature is about to hit us with. That what it says in the Mayan Prophecies. Four years from now we're going to be in deep, deep trouble. And the prophecies were right, too, they predicted the economic crash we're having right now."
Oh, grief.
"But I have two causes now that I'm a grandmother and retired," she went on. "The first is world peace, and the second is clean water."
"Well," I said, making a mistake, "Clean water isn't really a problem in the US and Canada."
"Oh, that's where you're wrong," she insisted. "Too much water in our country has flouride in it."
It went downhill from there.
She and her male companion were anti-flouridation nuts. They were anti-vaccination nuts. He went on and on about thimerosol in vaccines, and when I told him there hadn't been any thimerosol in vaccines in ten years but that there'd be no noticeable affect on public health, he said, "Autism rates are up." No, autism diagnoses are up because the diagnostic criteria have been broadened, but there's no appreciable increase in rates of autism. (Or if there is, there's a commensurate drop in diagnoses of other forms of "mental retardation" which have been deprecated by the medical community.)
And then he dropped the final straw. He was a 9/11 truther. He did not believe, thankfully, that the entire thing was a conspiracy, "But," he intoned seriously, "Something happened to building 7 that they're not telling us about." Uh, it caught fire and collapsed after too much damage?
But she was certainly the leader of the two, going on and on about flouridation, and how it was a seventy-year-old conspiracy by the coal companies to give them a way to dispose of ash waste buildup in smokestacks, and how it was a carcinogen and a toxin and the AMA had said that pregnant women shouldn't drink flouridated water. Sigh.
I was very grateful that we had the kids. They gave us both an excuse to get out of there before too many more braincells were sacrificed under the stress of being "polite."
Omaha and I sat the girls down at a separate table so we could have a night together. The girls are behaved enough that they can be trusted to sit by themselves through a meal, and they did well enough tonight that one woman came up and complimented us on teaching children how to behave in a restaurant. Unfortunately for Omaha and I, the evening was not to be as quiet we had hoped.
The woman sitting next to us started out, with me at least, on the wrong foot. "I hope Barack Obama becomes president," she said. "He'll be ready to deal with the terrible things that mother nature is about to hit us with. That what it says in the Mayan Prophecies. Four years from now we're going to be in deep, deep trouble. And the prophecies were right, too, they predicted the economic crash we're having right now."
Oh, grief.
"But I have two causes now that I'm a grandmother and retired," she went on. "The first is world peace, and the second is clean water."
"Well," I said, making a mistake, "Clean water isn't really a problem in the US and Canada."
"Oh, that's where you're wrong," she insisted. "Too much water in our country has flouride in it."
It went downhill from there.
She and her male companion were anti-flouridation nuts. They were anti-vaccination nuts. He went on and on about thimerosol in vaccines, and when I told him there hadn't been any thimerosol in vaccines in ten years but that there'd be no noticeable affect on public health, he said, "Autism rates are up." No, autism diagnoses are up because the diagnostic criteria have been broadened, but there's no appreciable increase in rates of autism. (Or if there is, there's a commensurate drop in diagnoses of other forms of "mental retardation" which have been deprecated by the medical community.)
And then he dropped the final straw. He was a 9/11 truther. He did not believe, thankfully, that the entire thing was a conspiracy, "But," he intoned seriously, "Something happened to building 7 that they're not telling us about." Uh, it caught fire and collapsed after too much damage?
But she was certainly the leader of the two, going on and on about flouridation, and how it was a seventy-year-old conspiracy by the coal companies to give them a way to dispose of ash waste buildup in smokestacks, and how it was a carcinogen and a toxin and the AMA had said that pregnant women shouldn't drink flouridated water. Sigh.
I was very grateful that we had the kids. They gave us both an excuse to get out of there before too many more braincells were sacrificed under the stress of being "polite."
