how strange it is to be anything at all

The bird:

✦ THE HELMET STAYS ON! (during teatime parties because he's a gentleman)

The Animals - House of the Rising Sun (1964)

Silver Jews - New Orleans (1994)

Infants are given a vitamin k shot at birth because they cannot synthesize vitamin k or get it from their diets, it is vital in preventing vitamin deficient bleeding which can cause death or permanent brain damage. Administering the injection is a bog standard preventative measure done on newborns immediately after birth, usually automatically. More and more parents are denying it and more and more babies are having totally preventable complications in their first 6 months of life just because the vitamin k shot has a black box warning. Doctors are repeatedly trying to explain to parents that babies need vitamin k and parents just keep asking “Why? Why are babies born needing vitamin k? Humans survived for thousands of years before it was invented. This must be a conspiracy.”

Infants, the human life stage notorious for randomly dying with no easily discernible cause. I don’t say that to be flippant, human babies are so incredibly fragile that before the modern era, about half of them died before adulthood. That is a natural 50/50 of making it. Humans did not evolve to be perfectly designed and efficient, we are just functional enough for some of us to survive to adulthood and reproduce. We don’t have to live like that! Looking at the human body through the lens of infallible intelligent design and allowing that to inform your medical decisions is so fucking dangerous.

The "problem" is that in the last hundred years or so our medical advancement has been meteoric. So people (in rich countries) forget, how easy it is for a child to die. We have built incredible scientific infrastructure to make sure that kids don't die of diseases like polio. But over time those advancements fade into the background. They become routine.

We are just far enough removed from diseases like polio, that people don't remember how devastating they were. You're not afraid of your kid dying of polio because you don't know any kids who have died of polio.