Happy As Kings

Confessions of a media dupe

My reply (the previous blog post here) to the posting on an email list of an Infowars site announcement that outed the government roundup of all children, and their subsequent forcible inoculation, drew fire.

A brave soul:

• Suggested I lacked a basic understanding of the United States Constitution
• Implied that I lack a sense of personal responsibility 
• Told me we do not live in Germany 
• Gave me the news that this is the land of the free 
• Said that if he does not have the right to make his own destiny, then all soldiers who fought for this country have fought in vain. 
• Referred to scores of world wide investigators documenting the tragedy of vaccination
• Counseled me to spend at least ten minutes on the internet 
• Questioned why the government bought flu vaccine that hadn't been tested 
• Refreshed my memory of the Thalidomide tragedy 
• Objected to me objecting about a simple warning from one homeschooling family to others
• Opined that I thoughtlessly accept government propaganda
• Has the opinion that my speaking up is scary and dangerous, and that I drink Kool-Aid 
• Shared that he was capable of thinking on his own
• Commanded that I educate myself so I could make informed decisions 
• Reiterated my need to take personal responsibility 
• Proclaimed his contribution to the military

It was a total takedown.  Two other list members thanked him.  Coffee and punch in the lobby.

_______________________________________________________________________________

The main points that I see in his reply are:

• A distrust of civilian government, offset by a respect for the military
• A greater dislike of modern medicine than of natural selection 
• A dislike of 'organized' news and a preference for individual voices (except those whose views are closer to those of 'organized' media)

The boil-down of all that seems to be a preference for the individual rather than the group, with the exception of the military.

This opinion on a homeschooling list -- a preference for the individual over the group -- is not surprising.  After all, each of us parents who homeschool have taken personal responsibility for the (usually delegated) education of our children.  With the continued growth of homeschooling and the resultant influx into homeschool support group of parents with more mainstream ideas, more 'group dynamics' people have shifted the homeschooling center from strongly individualistic to moderately individualistic, but a preference for the individual dynamic is still dominant.

The questioning that I did on the list, though, wasn't about how homeschooling parents, as a group, ought to capitulate to authority and that email lists should put the clamps on free and unfettered discussion among free-thinking, personally-responsible individuals.  Nor was it about the safety or effectiveness of vaccinations, or about how the swine flu vaccine is safe as mother's milk and not the horribly dangerous and utterly ineffective poison that the mainstream will not admit to.

My questioning was about a website sensationally objecting to the government doing any planning.

Infowars stated:

One of the most shocking modules of the conference deals with "School/University Pandemic Planning" and strongly implies that authorities will usurp parental rights over children in the event of a swine flu pandemic.

A YouTube … person … (I'm unfamiliar with this narrator) whose video is linked to from the Infowars site interprets the plan to instruct teachers in schools how to deal with sick students or colleagues as a plan to put flu-stricken children in internment/resettlement camps:

Plans to take children from schools for mass vaccinations and quarantines

I'm assuming the children will be flown there in black helicopters.

What the PDF says (about schools and children)  is:

School/University Pandemic Planning

Train teachers to screen for symptoms & know what to do when students/teachers fall ill
Transport ill students
Identify when to reduce or close down your school
Effectively transform school facilities into shelters
Continue learning through alternative routes like the web telephone, mail, radio and TV
Communicate effectively with staff, parents and students

The point of the training is how school and university officials should plan to deal responsibly with a large number of students or teachers who fall ill while at school. 

• Should classes continue? 
• Should an alternative schooling plan be in place ahead of time? 
• If a person becomes seriously ill at school, should that person be sent to the nurse's office, sent home/back to dorm, or sent to a hospital?

As for the morgue operations, if, heaven forfend, something like the flu pandemic of 1918 strikes, and if many people die, and if you do not, do you want someone, somewhere, to know how to deal with the aftermath, or would you rather have them just wing it, or maybe leave you to clean it up yourself?

1918 Flu Pandemic

1918 flu epidemic: the Oakland Municipal Auditorium in use as a temporary hospital.  The photograph depicts volunteer nurses from the American Red Cross tending influenza sufferers in the Oakland Auditorium, Oakland, California, during the influenza pandemic of 1918. Wikimedia Commons,  Photo by Edward A. "Doc" Rogers. From the Joseph R. Knowland collection at the Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1918_flu_in_Oakland.jpg

People concerned with public health are planning what to do if worse comes to worst regarding the H1N1 strain of influenza, and Infowars sensationalistically re-interpreted that as government plans to round people up and, what?, kill them, dispose of the bodies and steal the children?  In any case, the International Swine Flu conference, wasn't a government conference.  It was marketed by the New Fields Exhibitions company.

In the view of some, that kind of warning is sensible, and to point out the mistakes in interpretation is scary.  I could parrot Barney Frank.

Forced inoculations: Authorities Prepare To Seize Kids During Swine Flu Pandemic

From an email list:  Authorities Prepare To Seize Kids During Swine Flu Pandemic, at Infowars.com

Authorities are preparing to seize children from schools, set up quarantines and morgues, conduct mass vaccinations, and deal with riots and unrest, according to an international swine flu summit recently held in Washington DC which was attended by distinguished scientists, industry leaders and top health officials from all over the globe.

"Authorities" doing this sort of thing is pretty much standard operating procedure about a situation that could affect large numbers of people in a bad way.

When I lived in Europe (U.S. military) during the Cold War, the threat of an invasion was as real as anyone knew it could be without actually seeing tanks pushing down the East German fences (The Wall was in Berlin).

From 1971, when I first lived in Germany, until 1999, when we moved to the United States to care for my mom, while we lived in Europe we were required to have as much food, water and clothing/hygienic supplies as each one of us could carry, as well as our "NEO cards" to turn in along the way until we reached safety.  This was our NEO Kit.

Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (NEO)
(USAREUR is the Army in Europe, USAFE is the Air Force, and USNAVEUR is the Navy.  POV is a car -- "privately owned vehicle" as compared with GOV, a gov't owned vehicle)

Section IV NEO FORMS AND CHECKLISTS
15. NEO Kit
16. POV Registration Certificate
17. Individual Family Report
18. Noncombatant Evacuation Processing Record

At one point, my family lived 12 miles from the East German border in the 'traditional' invasion route through the Fulda Gap.  One morning 'we' had a scare of 'tank noises on the border' that turned out to be just the noise of tanks being moved.  Only watchers on the Border heard the noises, so it wasn't as if the tanks woke us up such as American tanks might do while rolling through our village during REFORGER.  Still, my husband's office was on alert until 'authorities' figured out who was making the noises.

If 'anything happened' other than noises, we family members were told we would be given strip maps to debarkation points/airports (although the reality in case of a full-bore invasion was 'about a 7-second life expectancy' for those of us on the Border)  Ca. 1957 when I was a child, we even had one practice "evacuation" at a SAC base, Ellsworth, in South Dakota where we lived (relatively) near Mt. Rushmore.  On evacuation day, the sirens went off and all the families got their picnic lunches in the car and drove off into the Black Hills.  According to my mom, it was a bit of a mess (I remember the traffic jam), and no commander at Ellsworth evacuated an entire housing area again, not even during the Cuban missile crisis a few years later.  How fast could you drive away from a direct nuclear attack?

It is the responsibility of our government to make plan for disasters -- that's one of the things we pay them for.  I'd rather have a plan in place (this is one area in which I'd want competent planners on the job -- the aftermath of Katrina was another 'bit of a mess'), rather than for the government to just leave everything up to anarchy with people shooting it out in neighborhoods.   Self-sufficiency is admirable, but our society is not now centered on the gentleman farmer in a landed aristocracy, and back yard tomatoes only get you so far.  (sites such as 72 Hours provide a plan)

Disaster planning is nothing to sneeze at, and if worse came to worst (god willing and the creek don't rise, this flu season will be just another 'scenario' such as Y2K), having someone who knows something about "quarantines and morgues" (in the Army, part of that is the job of the graves registration unit) would be something anyone with a 'need' would probably be grateful for.

As for the 'forced inoculations' I don't have a problem with vaccination, although as a small child in school I often objected loudly and with energy.  When I was in 3rd grade, ca. 1958, a teacher was diagnosed with active TB and the entire school, teachers and kids, were given the pre-TINE TB test in the school gym.

The only method of vaccination I was heartily in favor of (as a child) was the method for administering the (then) brand new Sabin polio vaccine.  After school one day, entire families trooped up to the school's new cafeteria to get their doses ... on a sugar cube.  What looked to me like cookie sheets of sugar cubes with a pink(?) drop on the top were laid out on the cafeteria tables.   It was probably that same year that my class visited a girl in an iron lung.  She'd been stricken with polio and could no longer breathe on her own.  The visit was probably a purposeful move to convince us of the need for vaccination, and also probably an effective one.  Who hears about wards full of polio victims in iron lung wards any more?

Otherwise, US Air Force kids at the school I went to got their shots at school -- the nurses trundled a cart through the hallway and those of us who needed shots, lined up in the hallway, shot records in hand.

Public inoculations are nothing new.

I understand that many people have heartfelt reasons for questioning the level of present inoculations, the manufacturing processes, or the trade-off of individual side effects against 'herd immunity,' and I'm not quibbling about discussions to answer those questions.  But what, I wonder, is the point of scaring readers because our various levels of government are planning ahead and actually doing a job that we pay them to do?  What's the point?

Nazis, health care and shouting 'fire!'

The Truth About Nazis, by AKMuckraker

I remember as a child I was not allowed to watch Hogan's Heroes. It wasn't a joke in my house. There was nothing funny about prisoner of war camps. There were no handsome well-fed prisoners with secret tunnels under their bunks, and pirate radio equipment who always managed to play their captors for the fool. There were frightened, emaciated young men whose minds and bodies were broken an ocean away from home, who were shot on fences , and who ate cats, and watched their friends die. There was nothing to laugh about. Those were Nazis.

My parents were in the Pacific theater of operations during WWII, Mom in China and Dad in the Philippines and New Guinea.  The 'war stories' I grew up with were about my luck for not having to live in a town where wagons loaded with 'honeypots' were trundled down the street, and admonitions to be happy I wasn't a starving orphan waiting with a pail by the garbage can to scrounge whatever was left from someone else's father's supper.  Like AKMuckraker, I never heard about the really bad stories such as evacuations as the communist troops overran China, or the crashes of air crews staffed by friends that my photographer-father had to document; I only found out about those later.  Still, I don't feel slighted that my childhood memories don't have those additions and I also don't feel slighted that neither of my parents was imprisoned and tortured by starvation.

The attempt to make health care more reasonably available to more citizens of the country than can presently afford it is not comparable to the aims and methods of the men who became monsters in Germany. 

I am tired of people comparing Obama to Hitler. I am tired of seeing signs with swastikas and Nazi symbols at health care rallies. I am tired of people saying that a health care plan intended to uplift millions of Americans to give them dignity, and choice and the ability to care for their families, is like Naziism. I am tired of Rush Limbaugh.

In the 1930s and 1940s, no one in my family was stolen from her ordinary life.  No was made to breathe gases produced by the combination of Zyklon B and air.  No one met Josef Mengele. Those are the evils the charge of being "Nazis" plays into, not our disagreement with the perceived national aspirations of a Bürohengst ("office stallion," aka "paper pusher").  "Nazis" brings up the picture of death camps, crematoria and mass graves, not office workers on phones and stacks of paper for payment claims.

At the Town Halls, Trivializing Evil by Michael Gerson

These lessons are relevant to politics. But they are trivialized when applied to Obama's health insurance reform plan or the conduct of disorderly town-hall protesters. The burning of the Reichstag and Kristallnacht are not arguments against a single-payer health plan or against the Patriot Act.

Saying that working to provide more health care is equivalent to death panels of moustachioed men separating the Jew workers from the useless Jews is like falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater:   Sound and fury endlessly linked to. 

"Results 1 - 10 of about 6,120,000 for obama nazi."   

That's not discussion.  That's hysterics.

Singer, Ashley Cooper

Today, Mom's retirement community enjoyed the talents of Mr. Ashley Cooper.  I very much enjoyed Mr. Cooper's narrative between songs, his interaction with the residents, and how he included a family of children visiting their grandmother (they were his 'backup dancers').

Thank you for the enjoyable afternoon, Mr. Cooper.

As Time Goes By

Kansas City area groups should find Mr. Cooper's show enjoyable.

Health care reform politics from HSLDA

I want to do things other than 'react' to HSLDA.  Reacting is not on my 'to do list' and reacting interferes with what I am already doing.  However, even a person who doesn't have an agenda other than 'leave us alone' (which I find difficult to be an activist about) must say something.  Because of the quickness of today's communication methods, my knee must jerk as quickly as the knees of the people who might not act if HSLDA had not issued another of its "urgent" calls.

Tying homeschooling (since HSLDA's 'big voice' is rooted in, and built on, homeschool activism) to an opposition to health care reform is ridiculous.  The cost of everyday care, and a way to pay for it using today's arrangements, are too difficult, and too restrictive.  Something has to change.

Little Blue School:  HSLDA Pits Homeschoolers Against HR 3200 and Health Care Reform

Well, now we're just fear-mongering, and over-generalizing. Bigger government bad, smaller government good! Really? No exceptions? No grey area? Welfare makes government bigger. Medicare and Medicaid make it bigger. Social Security makes it bigger. Are we ready to get rid of all of these things? A lot of people like to shake their fists and yell about smaller government, but I don't believe this is a rule we can apply universally. By using this bit of as a final bullet point, HSLDA is trying to join in the popular chorus sung by tea partiers, libertarians, and erstwhile Republicans who have only recently decided that big government is bad, after the guy they most recently elected swelled the government more than anyone since Roosevelt. Increasing the size and power of the federal government has only just become a bullet point for opposing a bill. When considering the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, or the Transportation Security Administration, or No Child Left Behind, this would have been a bullet point on the pro side of the argument.

I don't know about the people who are in sympathy with the political position of HSLDA, but these adrenalin-rush emergencies are tedious.  I feel as if we're all, supporters and pluralist freethinkers alike, just puppets jigging about on HSLDA's 'we're the voice of homeschooling' strings.

What will it be tomorrow?  Slamming Obama because Bill Clinton went to North Korea and North Korea doesn't allow homeschooling?  North Korea unfair to homeschoolers!! Boooooo!  Write now!  Write today!  Obama's against homeschooling because he let Clinton go to North Korea!  It's all about homeschooling!  It's all about us!  The sky is falling!! 

All this reminds me of the letters my elderly mother gets about the president of Mexico stealing all her social security money, and how Nancy Pelosi is waiting for her to die.

What is the priority for HSLDA? Homeschooling or politics?

I've already commented on the inappropriate connection the National Guard has with the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA):  National Guard and HSLDA.  The connection seems to go farther than just a military ignorance of 'how' homeschooling 'works' (thoroughly decentralized, with with HSLDA representing all homeschoolers as much as the editors of Parenting magazine represent all parents). 

HSLDA and the U.S. Military

Recent events and respected publications are bringing to light the unprecedented depth of change the theopolitical agenda has created in our government. Homeschooling is always included in assessments of these actions because it is an intrinsic part of the theopolical agenda. Therefore, as homeschooling families we need to recognize our involvement and the inevitable confusion it raises in the public's mind. We need to prepare ourselves to answer some very difficult questions.

I continue to hope that the HSLDA connection to official military websites is one of ignorance, and not a result of anti-pluralist servicemembers purposely skirting long-standing military policies of official neutrality concerning religious beliefs.  However, as information accumulates about overt anti-pluralist activities in the armed services and the government, my hope is fading.

• Mother Jones:  Gog, Magog and George Bush (2009)
• GQ:  Onward Christian Soldiers 
• GQ:  2003 SecDef Worldwide intel report cover sheets
• The Atlantic:  The Rumsfeld Briefings: Decoding The Classification Phrases  (2009) [my note:  "norforn" is nothing new, and is perfectly appropriate; "humint" is another longstanding term]
• The Star (Toronto):  Was Bush on a mission from God? (2009)
• Daily Kos:  MRFF Lawsuit Alleges Mandatory Christianity in US Military (2007)
• With God On Our Side:  One man's war against an evangelical coup in America's military by Michael Weinstein and Davin Seay  (2006)
• The Family by Jeff Sharlet (2008)