Friday 25 February 2011

The vaccine against clean.

My mother likes to tell the tale of the time my brother and I arrived home from a day's play and sent the dogs in first. We had been to the local pond, and the dogs were completely covered in stinking mud.

We sent them in first to get our mother's rage spent, before we went in. There was a sound and logical reason for this.

We were dirtier than the dogs. Oh, she laughs about it now, but she wasn't laughing at the time. It was worse than the time we came home with mice in a cereal box or with lizards in a jar. If she ever reads this - I know those lizards didn't escape on their own in the night. The jar was in the kitchen and if those lizards had really escaped on their own, she would not have been so calm the next morning. What do you mean, hold a grudge? It was only just over forty years ago. I don't forget so easily, you know.

Contuinued exposure to filthy things gave us pretty robust immune systems. At school, it was notable that those kids who lived in houses the likes of me weren't allowed inside, those pristine showhouses with not a speck of dust to be found, were always the first kids to catch whatever was going around.

We scruffy urchins could catch things too, but it took repeated exposure before we did. The super-clean kids fell as soon as the latest microscopic nasty appeared. Fortunately there weren't too many of those disease-spreading clean kids around.

It's different now. There are still scruffy urchins with well-exercised immune systems but the clean kids are on the rise. They have parents who have been terrified with tales of germs, with stories of Gary Glitter's gang lurking behind every bush, and now with the horror of the smoker who might approach their child and make them die. These children's white blood cells are playing cards and getting drunk every night while watching re-runs of 'I'm a cerebrum, get me out of here' and some are turning delinquent through boredom. That's when autoimmune diseases get under way.

It's not really the parents who are to blame. It's not their fault they are stupid and gullible enough to believe all the nonsense they hear. They've had it continuously beaten into their eyes and ears for nearly fifteen years. So they protect their offspring - as parents are biologically programmed to do - from the threats they perceive in their environment.

These parents have been indoctrinated to believe that every bit of soil is teeming with evil bacteria, that daylight will make their child's skin bubble and burst, that every male who even glances in their direction has designs on the child's unformed parts, that every drinker will beat the child to a bloody pulp, that every smoker has Devil Breath which can make their child's lungs instantly lumpy. Actually that last one is a good one, I'll have to remember that next time I'm smoking at a bus stop.

They believe that their child can catch obesity from fat people and they believe that if the child ever uses the word 'black' he is a future leader of the BNP and must be re-educated. They believe that their child can be defined as a potential criminal at age 3 and must be scourged of Satan's influence every day so they grow up to be pious members of the New Puritan World.

I'm not joking. There are parents out there who nodded their heads all through that list. They really believe it all.

It is not about real risks. It is all about perceived risks. Parents have been convinced of the reality of these dangers while other, possibly much greater, dangers have been ignored or glossed over.

So these same parents will see no harm in the chemical mix contained in air fresheners. They perceive no risk in medication, even where the companies producing that medication list the possible side-effects of the drug. They do not consider the very low humidity of their home heating systems a problem. They see no danger in driving the child through slow, heavy traffic unless there is a smoker with half a gram of burning leaf within five miles.

They believe that they must restrict the food intake of a fast-growing child so they don't become obese. They have lost all understanding of puppy-fat, which generally disappears after age 11 so they accept all those studies on childhood obesity that mysteriously never progress beyond age 11. They believe that they must buy vitamin D supplements to prevent their child developing rickets while ignoring the free vitamin D contained in a decent diet and sunshine.

Now they will pay for a vaccine that will deliberately expose their children to a small proportion of the range of bacteria we used to expose ourselves to for free. We enjoyed it, too. Playing in the dirt and the grime built up our immune systems, kept us busy and out of harm's way, gave us regular exercise and tired us out so we'd sleep when told to. It didn't cost a penny.

Paedos? They were around. We knew who the dodgy characters were and we weren't afraid of infringing their human rights by pointing them out to any new kids. Fat kids? There were a few, yes, but they were not objects of fear. They were just kids who were a bit larger than the rest of us. Sunlight? If it started to hurt, we put a shirt on or went inside. Smoke? Around half the adults we knew were smokers. We'd build bonfires that could out-smoke a whole platoon of them and not one of us keeled over from third hand anything.

Modern parenting is producing a generation of disease-prone weaklings. It's not the parents' fault entirely, although their rampant gullibility must be held up as a contributory factor. The fault lies in many years of indoctrination backed up by the threat that if they don't follow instructions, their child will be stolen from them and enfeebled elsewhere.

Why? It makes no sense to produce a weak population. Well, it does from a certain viewpoint. If you develop a cure for a disease, it's not profitable unless lots of people get the disease. You want to sell your rickets cure? Asthma? Flu? Any disease you like. First you need to generate a demand. If you think long-term profits, what you need now are loads of kids prone to all kinds of ailments. You need to have a population with immune systems so weak they cannot survive without your drugs. Better yet, make them so scared of any possible risk that they'll pay you for a prophylactic that could just as well be sugar water, because the risk isn't even real. Now we're talking serious profits.

I know, I know, tinfoil hattery. But tell me another logical reason to produce a generation scared of everything that made their grandparents strong and healthy. Then tell me the Pharmers give a pickled rat's pancreas about the health of anyone or anything other than their bank balances.

Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. Still, from where I'm standing, you people aren't bringing up children.

You're bringing up a whole dairy herd for the Pharmers to milk.

If you really pay to inoculate your kids with dirt, then you'll know for sure you've been had.

36 comments:

Anonymous said...

One problem - infant mortality then and now.
Life expectancy then and now

Leg-iron said...

There's no profit in selling drugs to the dead ;)

Anonymous said...

i thought it was the mmr jab that compromised childrens immune systems

JuliaM said...

"Now they will pay for a vaccine that will deliberately expose their children to a small proportion of the range of bacteria we used to expose ourselves to for free."

*speechless*

banned said...

"...if they don't follow instructions, their child will be stolen from them and enfeebled elsewhere." Which is the really clever bit.

Timdog said...

"You're bringing up a whole dairy herd for the Pharmers to milk."

Yes, exactly, the collusion between Government, Charidee (fake or otherwise) and Pharma is appalling, those UkUncutters should turn their gaze to this instead of bibbling about Vodafone and bankers.

Was going to draw your attention to an unusually lucid and perceptive comment on the DM article, then I realised.

Unbelievable. They've finally developed a vaccine against 'clean'. Now if they can just find a way to vaccinate against 'stupid'...
- Leg-iron, Aberdeen, Scotland, 24/2/2011 22:25

It's yours! Nice.

Oldrightie said...

Cracking post. If we take your logic further, the filth wallowed in by the hierarchy that run the world, explains why they never get ill!

Snakey said...

I know, I know, tinfoil hattery.

It's not tinfoil hattery when it's true. Just look at the billion dollar payouts the pharma companies are forced into due to their drugs killing people. Of course, such fines are chump change to them.

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/avandia-lawsuit-settlement-reached-in-cases-10153/

"Earlier this year, a Senate report was released that criticized GlaxoSmithKline for intimidating doctors who spoke out about Avandia side effects and for failing to adequately warn users about the risk of a heart attack from side effects of Avandia."

http://www.fiercepharma.com/special-reports/big-pharma-behaving-badly-timeline-settlements

"Eleven companies have paid a total of over $6 billion to the government in 22 months. The biggest offender? Eli Lilly, with three appearances and over $1.4 billion in fines, all for Zyprexa. But those three settlements pale in comparison to Pfizer's massive $2.3 billion charge for mis-marketing a host of drugs, including Bextra, Geodon, Lyrica and Zyvox."

Anonymous said...

Anon 4:20,

It’s the great dilemma, isn’t it? The fact that once a species becomes “civilised,” natural selection is stopped in its tracks.

Of course low infant mortality and high life expectancy are good things, but only when they are the result of better nutrition, better public sanitation systems and good, basic childhood and social care, as was the case when infant mortality first began to fall and life expectancy to rise during the late Victorian era. They are not quite so good when, as now, they are artificially induced by an industry whose primary motive is profit and who therefore, aided and abetted by carefully-cultivated friends in high places and powerful positions, will automatically be disinclined to acknowledge that they have now given people so much of a good thing that in the long-term that good thing isn’t going to turn out to be as good as we thought it was.

The increasing effectiveness of pharmaceutical products does not serve to change an individual’s genetic make-up or the predispositions toward health problems or innate weaknesses within that make-up – it serves merely to conceal them and to enable the individual to survive long enough to pass these predispositions on to the next generation. And as more and more of these individuals survive into adulthood, the chances of two “carriers” of weak genes getting together increases – hence the huge rise in the number of asthmatic, hyper-sensitive or hyper-allergic children that we see today.

Parents play their part in this whole scenario, of course, as Leg-Iron outlines here, through their innate gullibility and instinctive self-interest, which has been exploited to the full by the industry in their desire to sell ever more of their health-and-hygiene products. They are made to feel fearful and guilty because they are told relentlessly and at every turn that their child must be protected from anything which poses any risk, no matter how small or, indeed, how necessary that risk might actually be for their children’s future wellbeing. Ironically, the breeders of today may well be sowing the seeds of destruction for the generations of tomorrow through sheer lack of foresight, common sense or the ability to think outside of their own tight little family circle.

Bucko said...

It's not just pharma that benefit.
A weak and feeble population will be constantly crying to the government for help.

Mark Wadsworth said...

LI, don't worry, it's not tinfoil hattery, that is exactly how things work.

Particularly annoying are these cleaning products advertised on telly which say kill 99% of known germs. No doubt you can tell us that the 1% that survive are the nastiest 1%, and that in the right conditions of moisture/warmth, they cen duplicate themselves a hundred-fold within [an unknown number of] hours, and hence you end up with something even nastier.

Derek said...

Excellent post LI.

Before a baby gets out of hospital after birth in the US, it will have as many as thirty jabs. Choose homoeopathy and you break some laws. Judicial custody follows.

Our foods, our medicines, 'Health & Safety', Hi-Viz and helmets for all, ride on the pavement, not in the road, no adults allowed without a child in the play area, schools where the whole class migrates to another room for a different lesson, and Doctors pushing more drugs than recent school leavers. Social Service Gestapo ordering armed raids on a neighbours tip-off.

Dr. Wakefield it was who suggested that the MMR vaccines should be administered individually. Tucked up like a Kipper by the media and the judiciary.

My Mother-in-law at 84yrs on deaths door through Doctor prescribed drugs. Taken off them after hospital admission she is a new woman, and one found to have been defined 'withdrawn' as seriously harmful to health. That in France.

So much to avoid, and most of it sold as 'good for you'. It's all in the profit made. Next on the list will be water. Additives, scarcity, and therefore price and population control.

kitler said...

My mother smoked whilst pregnant and everyone smoked around me as a child and I have smoked cannabis and tobacco for nearly twenty years and I have never had any kind of chest infection, or indeed any illness really.

However I do know plenty of sterile middle class types who are permanently ill with colds and chest infections.

Interestingly, these people are the most persistent in their criticising of my smoking habits.

Go figure.

microdave said...

More tinfoil hattery -
"It makes no sense to produce a weak population. Well, it does from a certain viewpoint."

How about Agenda 21 - If the population is at risk from every disease going, eventually we'll all die out. No more nasty fuel guzzling humans causing Warble Gloaming, and the Penguins & Polar Bears can flourish....

I've just been cleaning out the chip pan with paint stripper (it's the only thing which removes baked on grease), so I probably won't be posting for much longer!

Dave H. said...

The ads for Dettol etc. always leave me slightly perplexed:

"This stuff's gruesomely shit-hot toxic to all forms of life. Heck, it's more poisonous to cells than a Polonium soup with cyanide bread.

Method of application: freely drench all the surfaces your baby's going to come into contact with. Then rest assured it can't touch anything that might be harmful to its health."

Anonymous said...

DaveH

That's what woke me up years ago , the white line representing purity went along the work surface and over a lettuce.
It suddenly occured to me that breast feeding women do NOT scour their bosoms with Dettol.
And the spell was broken from then on.

Anyway, mud is a child's natural element.

Rose

PT Barnum said...

Even our clothes need treating for bacteria now, it seems (a side-effect of carbon footprint anxiety and cold temperature washing, the ad suggests). While not suggesting that stinkiness is a virtue, I grew up when there was a thing called 'bath night', ie one bath a week, invariably on a Sunday. And now cleanliness is synonymous with sterility. Morlocks and Eloi may yet become a reality, merely through the Eloi's progenitors fear of every scrap of grime, while those of the Morlocks eat out of bins and tattoo themselves with rusty pins.

Chief_Sceptic said...

As ever, an extremely well-written and terminally depressing read ! ...

Time to find that commodious all-year-round cave in the Norwegian mountains, methinks ...

auntieban said...

It's guilt.

It's 'acceptable' now to dump your kid/s on a childminder 8 - 10 hrs a day while you chase up a career.

So then you compensate for what is, in truth, neglect by latching onto all this half-baked nonsense. It costs money (which you've got) and no time (which you haven't).

Okay, this only applies to a certain type of mother, but it's usually the same type that's constantly thrusting its sickly offspring under our noses and demanding that 'something' be done for it.

Meanwhile, the mums who would rather be home, playing in the mud with their kids, get dragged into the whole charade because they feel guilty about the neglect and they want to show that they care. How else will the State know that they are worthy of parenthood?

The Wimmins' movement has a lot to answer for.

sixtypoundsaweekcleaner said...

In my neck of the woods, we are being force-fed floride in our water. The public have had no vote on it, of course. Which company, I wonder is providing the floride and how much profit are they set to make from it?

We live in Nazi Germany.

Can we be vaccinated against politicians?

Anonymous said...

auntieban

It wasn't the women's movement, it was Blair and his crew.


"Persuading mothers to go back to work soon after their children are born has been a central plank of Mr Blair's 'project'.

Three years ago the Department of Trade and Industry - then headed by current Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt - published a paper describing those who do not return to jobs in the first two years after childbirth as a 'problem'.

It said mothers who stayed at home were not giving the taxpayer a return on the cost of their education."
http://tinyurl.com/6ykmkdz

Rose

Lysistrata said...

Leg Iron: a truly fantastic post as ever. I used to breastfeed(abit yuk) my children WHILE SMOKING. Now there's a conflict of what's proper for you. And, so did my husband's mother.
My kids were encouraged to play out. A lot. Many is the time they arrived back home so filthy that I had to instruct them and their friends to strip off by the back door, and then dunk the lot of them in the bath, and their clothes in t'washer and send the kids that weren't mine (not always easy to tell) home in borrowed clean clothes with a note. My neighbours did it for my kids as well.

Derek said...

"Can we be vaccinated against politicians?"

We should be vaccinating politicians!

Cameron's offspring have NOT been vaccinated. I wonder why?

http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/graphs/

Books: Get 'The Vaccination Bible".
Search Amazon, used copies very cheap.

Anonymous said...

My introduction to cleanliness was a wipe with a sponge on Sundays whilst 'Sing something simple' was on the radio. I still hate that song.

Anonymous said...

Yes, but straight after "Sing Something Simple",if I remember correctly, was a terrifying serial, so the end of SSS for me was like a chilling prelude.

I thought it was called "The Mud" but it appears that it may have been called "The Slide"

It was a very long time ago, so I may be completely wrong.


Rose

Anonymous said...

Oh Lysistrata, how the authorities would have had a field day with you had they been around then! They'd all have been in on it - anti-smoking health visitors, the National Childbirth Trust, the Child Protection Agency, Social Services .... the list would be endless!

I bet they've had an attack of the vapours just reading your post, and, worse still, knowing that your children didn't grow up with humps on their backs or sprouting extra heads. How dare you contradict their much-cherished scientific reality so brazenly, you bad girl!!!

sixtypoundsaweekcleaner said...

CallmeDave hasn't had his children vaccinated? I think Tone the Fone dobbed out of it too.

Do they something we don't?

Anonymous said...

Do excuse me, but I've just realised how angry I still am after all these years.


What do women want? To be left alone - 2003

"So what is the Government doing about it? What has the trio of women - Tessa Jowell, Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Hodge - who decide such matters for us, said?

Get back to work. Stop being so selfish.

A report from the Women and Equality Unit makes it clear: "Real problems persist.
The employment rates for women with dependent children have remained consistently below those without dependent children."

"Her department believes that the stay-at-homes are a drain on the economy, by failing to pay for the cost of their education through taxation."
http://tinyurl.com/6z3xof2

"She told The Telegraph that Labour ministers had created the perception since coming to power in 1997 that they believed that all women should get jobs.

This had been a mistake. Policies, such as tax credits for working mothers, and support for child care had left those who raise their own children feeling worthless."
http://tinyurl.com/6epac4t

Don't fool yourself woman, it wasn't the money, it was the constant bullying, defaming on news programmes, discussed as a "problem" and they didn't let up for years.

We had made the decision that I would stay home to look after the children and I didn't want a thing from them, just to leave me alone.

Now I remember, the social engineers have run a denormalisation campaign against me twice.


Rose

timbone said...

"Paedos? They were around." - were they? I had to buy my own sweets!!

Amusing Bunni said...

They really are evil. I never had a vaccine or stuff, and I never will. I don't trust any of them.

When we were little, we stayed out all day playing and fed stray dogs and stuff, and we survived very nicely.
Big pharma has taken over the world, and it's not good.

Those were funny stories LI, I can imagine you and your brother getting into all sorts of mischief.

Anonymous said...

Paedos? Of course. They've always been around and they probably always will be. But back when I was young enough to be interesting to them it was drummed at me constantly that I should never go off with strangers/get in their car/accept sweeties from them etc etc. Not by any stage-managed government ads or "life skills" teaching campaigns, but by my parents.

My and my friends response? Whenever there was a rumour about a paedo touting for business in the area, I and my friends would try and "set him up" by one of us walking home ahead of the others so that if anyone stopped to talk to us we could all pile in, pin him down, and one of us would rush to fetch the police. Yeah, right, like it would really have happend like that! But the point is that, far from being simpering little softies, scared of their own shadows, our attitude was "let's get him!"

But my mother would nevertheless have had kittens had she known ......

Anonymous said...

There is a dream world. In this dream world, animals like cats can stick their noses into any flesh and eat it if their sense of smell indicates that it is OK. But, in this dreamworld, human animals cannot do that. They must obey the dictats of 'health professionals'.

It seems to be a very sad truth that very few people can think for themselves. We have seen it many times. In the above example, people do not know that boiling and roasting kill germs.

Is this truth not precisely what Tobacco Control etc are playing on? Is it not true that the zealots use surveys of people who do not go to pubs at all to create some sort of antipathy to those who do go to pubs?

The serious point is that, if the zealots had their way, we would have no army at all. This translates, in a 'proactive sense', into the idea that we would not have any guns at all. In which case, we would have to 'take a chance' on an invader being beneficial.

In a philosophical sense, all bans are of this nature. "Thou shalt not have a gun to defend thyself since there is nothing to defend thyself against" Does this idea not, eventually, translate itself into the idea that: "Thou shalt not defend thyself AT ALL"? And are we not seeing this already? "Don't attack an intruder, call the police"; "don't attempt to put a small fire out - let it develop and call out the fire brigade".

Thus we see the ramifications of the weakness that you speak of. It isn't just, or even, about illnesses. It is also about weakness of the will and weakness of the mind, actively encouraged by various special interest groups.

smokervoter said...

On the advice of a friend with 60 years in the business, I jettisoned my central cooling system for an old fashioned evaporative cooler. My peak summertime cooling bill went from $250/month to just $35. Swamp coolers went out of fashion with perfect world, sheltered baby-boomers because they were allegedly too humid. It just so happens that the hottest time of day is also the least humid; as a given quantity of air is heated, the relative humidity of this air decreases.

As an added bonus, because it brings in outside air and pushes out interior air, my non-smoking ex-GF says she can't tell that I smoke in the house anymore, although I do so incessantly.

Leg-iron said...

Mark - 99% of all known germs are harmless. The most tenacious little buggers are among the non-harmless. Anthrax, botulism, tetanus, Cl. difficile, for example, are capable of producing a resting state (spore) which is seriously as tough as nails and in some cases can hang around for a very long time indeed. Long enough to skip a couple of human generations, in fact.

All disinfectants - all of them - are toxic. Antibiotics act specifically on bacteria but disinfectants attack protein or (sometimes) DNA and they are not complex chemicals. They don't need specific attachment sites like antibiotics, they just blast hell out of any living thing they touch.

Two things I used to drum into stuidents involved in food hygeine/management/waste disposal.

One. When you coat a surface with disinfectant (used correctly), you can say you have taken reasonable care to ensure your preparation surface is clear of infection sources. However, it's now coated in a hazardaous chemical so you must rinse it off!

Two. The sewage works relies on bacterial action to break the crap down until the remaining water is clean enough to dump into a river. Do not fill every damn sink and toilet with concentrated bacterial death chemicals because if everyone did that, the sewage works will cease to function.

If they can't clear it, it'll back up, and nobody wants that.

Killing bacteria in the toilet bowl is silly unless you drink from there. Clean, yes, blast with a bottle of Saddam's Finest, no. Those bog bacteria are vital.

Even more so if you have a septic tank. Killing the process in the tank can have utterly evil results...

Leg-iron said...

£60aweekckleaner - I have made several attemps to keep tropical fish here. Eventually gave up and sold all the gear. Including the dechlorinator that did its best but could never win.

The water here is treated with chloramine so heavily that I have to have a filter tap to make a cup of coffee that doesn't taste like Toilet Duck.

Since this water can't keep fish alive, I drink as little of it as possible.

Leg-iron said...

I think the funniest vaccine I ever had was rabies vaccine. It was two doses, before I went to China, and I was told 'It won't stop you getting rabies but it'll let you survive long enough to get treatment'.

When I went to China I saw no rabid dogs. No dogs at all. They'd been eaten.

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