Government List of Things that Could Kill You

By Alan Caruba

With the presidential announcement that H1N1, the “swine” flu, is now officially a national emergency, plus reports out of the CDC that not enough vaccine is available, I thought it might be helpful to provide a list of things that the government says could kill you.

Right up there at the top is, of course, (1) global warming. President Obama and Al Gore says the entire planet is going to resemble a toasted marshmallow at a Boy Scout jamboree if we all don’t stop driving cars, manufacturing things, generating and using electricity, et cetera. And that goes for you, too, China and India!

Next is (2) smoking. It is an incontrovertible fact that everyone in the graveyard nearest to you who ever smoked is dead. The government, which used to make a lot of money from tobacco taxes, is dead set—no pun intended—against anyone smoking. This used to be a matter of personal choice, but now it will get you thrown out of arenas, restaurants, offices of all descriptions, and just about every other public place. Those who insist on still smoking are going to die. At some point.

Another thing that will kill you is (3) guns. It is a matter of complete consternation that the 90 million or so gun-owners in America are not all dead! The government wants to take away their guns in order to protect them from shooting themselves, their family members, and possibly someone trying to break into their home or apartment. Apparently criminals have not paid sufficient attention to government warnings and insist on using guns, whenever possible, in robberies and drug deals gone bad.

May I digress briefly to note what almost any homicide detective in America will tell you; on entering the murder scene, the first question they ask is where’s the husband or wife of the victim? Then they go down a list of nearest relatives and friends; most of the time this produces the perpetrator. Here’s a tip. If you kill someone, your family and friends will be the first to turn you in because they don’t want you killing them, too. So, essentially, if someone does end up murdering you, it’s someone you know and, if you kill someone, your mom will send you up the river faster than drinking the water in Mexico will give you the runs.

Before I go further, I need to also list (4) eating to the list of lethal activities in which you may be engaging. Eating, as is statistically demonstrated, can lead to obesity, defined as the inability to see your shoes or put them on without help. Or you may just get “fat.” And we all know that fat people are (a) jolly and (b) doomed to any early death. The food groups you are not supposed to eat are cookies, candy, and ice cream. If you eat any of these, you’re doomed, but frankly life without cookies, candy, and ice cream life is probably not worth living anyway.

A little known fact that the government is trying to suppress is that being a Republican or a conservative will, in fact, add years to your life. That’s because most of these folks have guns. Also, they have a very low level of gullibility so they are less prone to things like panic-inducing Swine flu announcements. They just deal with stress better. A lot of them love to hunt and fish. You know, clinging to their guns, et cetera.

The government really doesn’t want you to know this because it will cut into General Motors and Chrysler sales, but (5) driving a car can kill you a lot faster than most other activities. On the average, it kills about 40,000 people every year. So buckle up. Obey the traffic signals. Drive at a safe speed, and hope that the other people on the highway or street aren’t pumped full of “meth” or “coke”, so spaced out of their minds they think they’re in a space ship on the way to Planet Zeno. And, of course, there are all those drunken drivers out there, too.

I should also point out that ordinary flu kills about 36,000 people a year no matter what name it has. They are frequently the very young who lack sufficient immunity or old people with other life-threatening ailments. The H1N1, in terms of fatalities, does not appear to be anything other than a variation of ordinary flu.

There are, in truth, so many things the government thinks can or will kill you, legislators and bureaucrats are exhausted from passing laws against them, regulating them, and generally getting between you and them.

For the record, I think global warming is pure crappola; I have smoked cigars since my late teens and am now in my seventh decade of life averaging two a day; I own several guns; I eat and drive a car every day. I have an occasional drink, mostly wine. I get a “regular” flu shot every year and I get most of my exercise as a pall-bearer for friends who watched their diet, didn’t smoke, or had much fun when they were alive.

The Swine Who Live to Scare You

By Alan Caruba

For a very long time I have made my living as a business and science writer. That profession tends to make one fond of facts. It’s the reason my blog’s URL is “facts not fantasy” and why I call it “Warning Signs.”

It is the reason I founded The National Anxiety Center in 1990 as a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns designed to influence public opinion and policy.”

We live in a world of competing lies, all swirling around us and generated by government and what are now called “non-governmental organizations.” These NGOs suck at the government’s teat or insert themselves into larger organizations such as the United Nations in order to steer them in directions that will fatten their purses and wallets.

These are the swine who live to scare you because they know this is the way to benefit from your ignorance, gullibility or because you will not take the time to check out the “facts” they are telling you, using them like cattle prods to make you and others move in the direction they want.

All of which brings me to the Swine flu or its more politically correct name, H1N1. It is another variant of the flu that goes around the world every year. Do you remember the Bird Flu that was supposed to kill millions, but didn’t? Or what about the regular seasonal, but unnamed flu that kills an average 36,000 Americans every year?

So one is compelled to ask why the United Nation’s World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, along with the idiot who is our current Secretary of Health, are all doing their best to convince everyone that a worldwide “pandemic” is occurring when it clearly is not?

My friend and colleague, Michael Fumento, arguably one of the best investigative writers in America, had a commentary about the Swine Flu in the October 8th edition of the New York Post. “The real threat is panic” neatly slices and dices the lies about the Swine Flu, citing data from around the world to demonstrate that “There is no flu epidemic.”

There is the seasonal flu and I take this to be a good reason to avoid the rather hastily created vaccine for the Swine Flu in preference for the regular one that’s widely available. And, yes, I did get my annual shot.

It strikes me that scaring enough people to take the Swine Flu vaccine is very much a part, if not the whole purpose, of the whole orchestrated effort to panic people. If this is not accomplished, those spreading the misinformation about the Swine Flu would be in for some severe condemnation. This way, they can clam they were just doing their job to protect the public.

The Swine Flu panic comes out of the same box of tricks that tells people that drinking anything from a plastic bottle will eventually kill them if old age doesn’t get them first. It’s the same foolishness that warns against taking vitamins and minerals to supplement the body’s need for them.

It’s the same lies that try to get people to stop eating meat, drinking soda, or that there’s an obesity “epidemic” in America where food is not only fast, but cheap and tasty. Meanwhile, you can pick up Le Big Mac in Paris’ famed museum, the Louvre, these days or in downtown Beijing.

With a lifestyle that has extended the average life expectancy in America from age 43 in 1900 to 78 today; the government seems desperate to get people to die off at an accelerated rate before Social Security and Medicare goes broke even sooner than expected.

Naturally, in the bizarro world in which the Democrats live, they are trying to enlarge the number of Medicare recipients so that life-saving procedures can be denied to even more of them.

Only children singing the Obama song believe anything the government tells them. The rest of us would do well to assume it is mostly lies.

Don't Just Stand There. Panic!

By Alan Caruba

I am rather tired of having to panic every other day courtesy of the U.S. government. It started with seeing the former Secretary of the Treasury sweating profusely while demanding the Congress give him a blank check for $700 billion to bail out some financial institutions that probably should have been allowed to fail.

Many were given gobs of taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy. Others were merged with those that hadn’t been as profligate.

In October 1929, Variety, the show business newspaper, had a headline that said “Wall Street Lays an Egg.” What followed was some ten years of a Depression that would not go away because the government did everything possible to prolong it in the name of ending it.

The so-called “brain trust” around Franklin D. Roosevelt made every wrong decision available. The Supreme Court had to step in to limit some of the damage at one point. Constitution? What Constitution?

About the only thing we are being told is not a cause for panic is the “war on terror”, a phrase that is no longer allowed to be used in official Washington where, apparently, if you don’t call a duck a duck it is no longer a duck. Nonetheless, we are also told that Afghanistan is the “front line” of the war on you-know-what even though there are no “front lines” in insurgencies or guerrilla wars.

Aside from the economy and the former war on you-know-what we are being assured that there are still sufficient causes for panic. We were told that unless the Cap-and-Trade act was passed, the planet would be destroyed by global warming. Apparently this will happen well before any member of Congress actually reads the bill.

Al Gore has been telling us this for quite some time and recently the Secretary General of the United Nations said we only had four months to act before we were doomed. Americans have, however, concluded, based on empirical observations of cold temperatures, expanding glaciers, and other indicators, that the Earth is cooling. No need for panic after all.

Having failed to panic about global warming, the very same Congress told us that we had to “reform” Medicare or terrible consequences would occur. Some sacrifices will have to be made to save Medicare. These include sacrificing crippled veterans and most of the old people in America because they require too much care. After that, Medicare will be okay, unless you get ill, are over age 65, and actually need medical care. The bill has been renamed KennedyCare to avoid any connection to Barack Obama.

Perhaps the most genuine cause for panic involves the economists on the President’s staff who managed to miss the amount of the federal deficit by two trillion dollars the first time they made their calculation. After that, feel free to panic about a deficit that your great grandchildren will be working to pay off.

Another likely cause for panic is the growing list of “czars” being gathered around the President. They are in charge of all the big things in the nation as well as things such as the Great Lakes and something called Green Jobs.

Following an attack on the homeland which could easily be perpetrated by hired thugs, the President is likely to get on television, peer deeply into his TelePrompter, and announce that his “czars” are now in charge and Congress has been dismissed along with the members of the Supreme Court. Remember, it only took 19 real terrorists to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Lastly, the CDC is presently spending $16 million dollars to ensure that Americans panic over the H1N1 flu which will be arriving the same time as all previous flu seasons. We call them seasons because some form of flu arrives in the autumn. This one, however, is raising questions, not about its lethality, but about the shots that will be involuntarily administered to school children to prevent its spread. Word is circulating that the new vaccine is more lethal than the flu. Were I a parent I would not permit my child to be innoculated with the swine flu vaccine, but if an alternative exists. it's probably a good idea.

Simply said, if you have ever had the flu, your immune system has already built up antibodies against a new strain and the vast number of people who get the flu feel lousy for a week and then recover. There is at this writing, no indication of a massive die-off occurring.

If you get the impression I no longer trust anything the President says or that our government is doing, you’re right. That is why I am refusing to panic.

Instead, I will be attending tea parties and will try to make it to Washington, D.C. on September 12 to join a protest that I hope will cause the White House and Congress to panic.

The Horrid Dr. Holdren

By Alan Caruba

England had “Mad King George” who was probably bipolar and eventually went completely insane around 1810. It would take another ten years before his suffering ended and he passed away, but his powers had passed to the Prince of Wales by then. In those days they knew when people were crazy and even provided an asylum from which we get the word “bedlam.”

As the days and week go by, they might as well post a sign outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where our President conducts the affairs of state. It should simply say, “Welcome to Bedlam.”

One example of the kind of dangerous insanity circulating like swamp gas around the White House is Dr. John P. Holdren, Obama’s science advisor. He is so nuts that even The New York Times reporter, John Tierney, asked “Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor?”

When Bjorn Lomborg published “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, Holdren joined in an attack published in Scientific American that The Economist called “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance.”

In a book that Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man who is now responsible for U.S. science policy advocated that women be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not, not unlike the Chinese one-child policy. Holdren also thought that single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies taken from them and given to other couples.

Holdren thought it would probably be a good idea that the population in general should be sterilized by intentionally putting infertility drugs into the nation’s drinking water or food.

Holdren believed that those who “contribute to social deterioration” should be required by law to “exercise reproductive responsibility” or to put it in its purest Nazi terms, they should be sterilized.

As history reveals, the Nazis began by gassing the mentally challenged and moved on to wholesale genocide for Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and everyone else deemed an enemy of the state.

Holdren, who served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006, holds views that are seriously out of touch with reality and totally out of synch with actual climate data.

Writing in Scientific American, he said, “the ongoing disruption of the earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.”

Virtually no climate scientist believes that “man-made greenhouse gases” have anything to do with “global warming” because (a) there is no global warming and (b) greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide play no role whatever in climate change.

On July 13, the Space and Science Research Center called for the firing of Dr. Holdren and of NOAA administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenko, while denouncing the Cap-and-Trade act, more formally and, in a spectacular act of mass deception, named the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

“These two individuals,” said the Center, “and other agency heads orchestrated and then signed off on the recently released government report, ‘Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.’ This report was a piece of blatant, politically motivated bad science and pure propaganda intended to reinforce the ‘big lie’ that global warming is still a threat to the planet.”

Meanwhile, over at the Environmental Protection Agency, a 37-year employee and analyst who offered a report seriously challenging the accuracy of global warming data found himself literally silenced and then alleged to be mentally unstable.

The Environmental advisor at the White House is Carol Browner, a former EPA Director during the Clinton years, close friend of Al Gore, and someone who shares his radical views on the environment and global warming. She answers to no one, not even the White House press corps who has not been able to get a word out of her. For all we know she is in her office assaying chicken entrails and shiny stones to come up with more environmental advice for the President.

Did I mention that the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, thinks we can save ourselves from global warming by painting the roofs of our buildings white?

There must surely be a few sane people among the mounting number of “czars”, advisors, and assistants, but so far the results of their accumulated advice have been frightening.

The economy is in free fall, the Cap-and-Trade bill in the Senate is based on climate fiction, billions are being given to the least practical form of energy generation, wind and solar, and the White House is talking about “reforming” the nation’s health system.

Every day the White House treats Americans to the Crisis-de-Jour; the latest nonsense being a Swine Flu “pandemic” and a questionable vaccine that will be forced on school children and others.

It’s bedlam!

To learn more about Dr. Holdren, click here

Rolling the (Swine Flu) Vaccine Dice

By Alan Caruba

As a layman with no special knowledge about communicable diseases, I have nonetheless been struck by the drumbeat of scare mongering coming out of the World Health Organization and our government regarding “Swine Flu.” My reasoning is simple. Ordinary flu kills some 36,000 Americans annually and its victims are frequently the elderly and those in poor health.

I am not against vaccination and routinely get a flu shot every year, but I worry about all those youngsters who are required to receive several vaccinations in order to attend school. This begins in kindergarten and it takes no genius to know that their immune systems are not fully mature at that point.

Barbara Loe Fisher, a co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center is a consumer advocate and author of several books including “The Consumer's Guide to Childhood Vaccines.” She has posted a videotape on the site that is well worth watching.

Regarding the Swine Flu vaccine, she asks “Will we have a choice?” regarding whether we or our children are required to be vaccinated with a hastily created vaccine specific to this form of the flu. Such a vaccine would not be subject to same standards of testing as others because it would be deemed a response to a serious, widespread pandemic. That raises the risk, particularly for children. And is there truly a widespread pandemic?

“What a lot of people don’t know is that true Type A or Type B influenza only causes about 20 percent of all flu-like symptoms that people experience during any flu season.” That means that “80 percent of all flu-like illness in a normal flu season is NOT caused by Type A and B strains of influenza contained in annual flu shots. And vaccine acquired immunity is temporary, while immunity gained after recovering from influenza is longer lasting.”

That’s good news for most people born before 1957. They may be naturally protected and have a lower risk of being infected because they have long lasting antibodies that help them resist infection.

I am increasingly skeptical of the claims being made by the World Health Organization and those in our government regarding Swine Flu. My suspicion is that it is just another type of flu, not unlike the 80 percent of influenza that is not Type A or B. Even if I am wrong, I worry more that the new swine flu vaccine that will be ready in October will not have been adequately tested. In 1976, when there was a similar flu outbreak, the vaccine ended up killing a lot of people.

Originating in Mexico in April of last year, one might reasonably expect to hear of a rising infection or death rate from Swine Flu there, but that is not the case. As of May 2009, Mexico’s health minister noted that there had been 908 tests on suspected cases and, of them, 397 turned out to be the Swine Flu virus. Deaths, however, numbered only 101. “Apparently the rate of infection is not as widespread as we might have thought,” said Jose Angel Cordova, the health minister.

For the past few years, some American doctors have been insisting that every child from six months old to age 18 must get an annual flu shot and some U.S. health officials want the first doses of the experimental swine flu vaccines to be administered in the schools.

In October, the National Vaccine Information Center will hold its Fourth International Public Conference on Vaccination in Washington, D.C. One of the issues will be that of “informed consent” and this is very important for any parent who does not want their child vaccinated against Swine Flu when those new vaccines may very well be unnecessary or represent a risk in themselves.

Out of a world population now exceeding six billion, as of June 2009 there were more than 35,000 cases of Swine Flu involving 163 deaths attributed to it, most of which occurred in Mexico, its point of origination. To this layman that hardly constitutes a global pandemic. It’s more like just another strain of flu virus.

I am beginning to tire of the monthly “crises” being declared by our government, particularly when it is clear that the solutions put forth at this point do not appear to be having any affect. Swine flu can be added to the list.