Loss of Privacy

While Christmas is going to remain in the schoolbooks of most Texas schools, Neil Armstrong is going to be taken out of their 5th grade science books.  Why would someone do this?  They claim it’s because he wasn’t a scientist.  Except that he was.

He received an aeronautical engineering from Purdue University, and a Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California. He later was a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

And he’s also the most identified person from NASA.  You know, the science people.  Texas has, apparently forgotten something Armstrong said as well.  “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”  And then he walked on the freaking moon!

More than 50 people mentioned in current textbooks are not included in the proposed standards, including Carl Sagan, Colin Powell, Nathan Hale, Neil Armstrong, Eugene Debs, John Steinbeck and Mother Teresa.

Some board members argued for more accomplishments of minorities to be included in the final version. An early recommendation to remove the late farm workers leader César Chávez and the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall provoked a strong reaction. Both are expected to remain in the textbooks.

“We can’t satisfy everyone,” said board member Barbara Cargill, of The Woodlands. “We don’t want to burden textbooks with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names … As we go through this process we will see a lot more minorities than we ever have been before, so that’s a positive.”

Oh golly gee willikers.  We can’t expect people to know who important people like Neil Armstrong and Carl Sagan.   Why, they haven’t really contributed anything to society have they?

What’s really going on here is they want more religion and minorities taught and a whole lot of other stuff sacrificed to accomplish this.  It’s pretty sad when the state says their kids are too dumb to grasp everything so major events need to be removed so we can be PC about it.

Texas Governor, Rick Perry, has ordered that all schoolgirls in Texas must be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, making Texas the first state to require the shots. The girls will have to get Merck‘s new vaccine against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, that are responsible for most cases of cervical cancer. Who in the hell gave Govenor Perry the power to order people to get shots for things they don’t need?

This is nothing short of taking medical decisions away from parents and placing it on the state. While some claim that we have allowed this decision to be made before with the many vaccinations that children must have, this is an entirely different matter. HPV, like most vaccines, have a small part of the virus in the vaccination. Forcing girls who have no family history of cancer to get a vaccination against cancer is asinine and ridiculous.

“Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass laws in state legislatures across the country mandating it Gardasil vaccine for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.”

So, Merck creates a vaccine, gives its money to the right people in the government and, bingo! girls across Texas are forced to pay for something that they don’t necessarily need. Who cares that there haven’t been sufficient studies into the long term effects of this vaccine? Obviously, not Merck. They’re used to being sued.

Since HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, practicing safe sex would prevent it. There is no necessity for requiring this vaccine to every 11 and 12 year old girl. What is going to happen instead, is that the state of Texas will be liable if someone gets HPV after they get the vaccine. Merck’s own testing is questionable. 17 People died during the trial phase and sixty percent suffered side effects.

Because we don’t know the long term effects of the vaccine, we don’t know how long it will last or how effective it really is. Will your daughter end up sterile or something worse by the time she is 20? We simply do not know. Now, not only will you be required to pay hundreds of dollars for the vaccine, you’ll also have the joy of paying, via your tax dollars, for all lawsuits that will occur once the vaccine’s real effect start to appear.

At a cost of $360, and a little more than 2 million girls in Texas, Merck stands to make at least $800 million. I’m not sure if there’s any kickbacks involved in this, but it’s clear that the only thing Governor Perry and Merck are looking at is the huge dollar signs hanging over the head of every girl in Texas.

Currently, the only way to avoid this is that Texas will allow a parent to refuse the vaccine on the grounds of personal objections, such as religion. One can only hope that the millions of parents in Texas will all suddenly get a case of religion and refuse to subject their daughters to an untested vaccine that could possibly cause damage later on in life.