Swine Flu Fear Mongering
Well, it seems that this whole swine flu thing completely overblown by the mass media and the government. With schools closing because of just one possible case of swing flu, you would think this was the Spanish Influenza that killed at least 20 million people worldwide in 1918. Well, it isn’t. It doesn’t have the killer genes of that flu. The Mexican government claims 200 people have died of the virus in Mexico, which the World Health Organization disputes. One person has died in the US. It doesn’t even seem to have the strength of “normal” flu which kills thousands each season.
This just seems to be more of the fear mongering that both major parties love, since fear mongering makes it easier to enact their agendas. They will use every crisis real and imagined to their personal political benefit. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” says Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. What a sick human being. Even the idiots over at the Libertarian Party are advocating that the US government stop people from coming into this country. I thought that they were the party of principle?
There is only one answer. Stop believing anything you hear on news (especially from TV and newspaper) by anybody that has a journalism degree. H.L. Menchen – the great skeptic most famous for his satirical reporting of the Scope Monkey trial – once said
“The more reflective reader reads next to nothing [in newspapers] and believes the same amount precisely. Why should he read or believe more? Every time he alights on anything that impinges upon his own field of knowledge he discovers at once that it is inaccurate and puerile. The essential difficulty here is that journalism, to be intellectually respectable, requires a kind of equipment in its practitioner that is necessarily rare in the world […]. He should have the widest conceivable range of knowledge, and he should be the sort of man who is not easily deluded by the specious and the fraudulent. Obviously, there are not enough such men to go round. The best newspaper, if it is lucky, may be able to muster half a dozen at a given moment, but the average newspaper seldom has even one. Thus American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.”
It is as true today as it was then.
