Locks and guards

H. P. Lovecraft's novel The Lurker at the Threshold is, like much of his work, uneven.  At its best, it's atmospheric as hell, and has some scenes that will haunt your nightmares long after you turn the last page.  (I swear, I'll never look at a stained-glass window the same way after reading that book.)  It's the story of a man named Ambrose Dewart, who returns to rural Massachusetts after inheriting some property that had passed down in his family from a mysterious great-grandfather "whom no one in the family talked about."  Upon arrival, he reads a set of instructions that had come along with the deed, and finds a baffling warning that he should not damage a stone tower located nearby "lest he abandon his locks and guards."

It's a phrase that's peculiar and evocative, and it's stuck with me since I first read the tale when I was a teenager.  Especially since Ambrose proceeds to ignore the instructions entirely, knocks a hole in the tower so he can get inside, and unleashes chaos.

While overall it's a decent story, Dewart's actions always struck me as completely idiotic.  If you're in an unfamiliar situation, and you receive a set of ominous directives, why would you blunder in and do the exact opposite?  Especially when the implication is by doing so, you're getting rid of something that might be vital for protecting you?

I must say, though, that my sense that "no one would do something that stupid" may have to be revised, now that I've watched the last four weeks of actions by our so-called government here in the United States.

Just in the first month of Trump 2.0, he, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the various other lunatics in charge have:

• withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization
• stripped funding from the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, including ending research into cancer prevention and treatment
• proposed revoking the Affordable Care Act and making drastic cuts to Medicaid
• ended the CDC-led "Wild to Mild" flu vaccination campaign, just as flu-related hospitalizations reached a fifteen-year high of fifty thousand per week
• suggested that anyone on psychiatric medications, especially antidepressants and anxiolytics, should be taken off their medications and forced to go to mandatory "wellness camps"
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center
• withdrawn the United States from the Paris Accords
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Parks Service
• fired senior staff in the military, replacing them with Trump loyalists
• fired all the Department of Energy staff who oversee nuclear weapons safety

When this last one got out, there was so much public outcry that the administration reversed course and tried to rehire the fired staff, with only partial success.  It turned out that the person responsible for the cuts was Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old SpaceX intern -- one of the techbro hackers Musk now has infiltrating the Department of Justice, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS.

And not one Republican congressperson has stood up and said no to any of it.  Sure, there are some who are probably loving every minute of this, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the spectacularly stupid Nancy Mace.  The scuttlebutt is that a lot of them are horrified, but are "scared shitless" to say anything because they're afraid of reprisals by Trump and his goons. 

The media, too, has been largely complicit, for which you can thank people like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong.  It's being played as "eliminating governmental waste and fraud," but make no mistake about it.  These cuts are not because they're examples of fraudulent spending.  You bring in auditors to find fraud, not hackers.  These decisions are being made purely for ideological reasons (when they're not just idiotic mistakes, like the firing of the nuclear weapons staff).  Epidemics and pandemics sound bad, and things like mandatory vaccinations and mask mandates don't sell well with the MAGA "don't step on muh freedoms" crowd, so no more funding the NIH and CDC.  Can't admit that anthropogenic climate change is happening, because it'll piss off Trump's BFFs in the fossil fuel industry, so destroy NOAA, the NWS, and the NHC.  The National Parks Service stands in the way of opening up the parks to mining, logging, and drilling for oil and natural gas, so they've gotta go.

And we have to make sure the military is led by Trump's christofascist cronies.  The firings went all the way up to the Chiefs of Staff, where Hegseth axed two -- Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and Joint Chairman Air Force General C. Q. Brown, Jr.  Hmm... the only woman on the Chiefs of Staff, and the only Black guy.

Wonder what the motivation was there.

See why I thought about Lovecraft's book?  Trump has had over two centuries worth of precedent basically saying, "Here's how to keep our nation and its citizens as safe as possible," and his response was, "Okay, I'm going to do exactly the opposite of all that."

Not that this was probably his conscious thought.  There's a lot of speculation about his being a Russian agent, and working to destroy the United States deliberately, and I find that dubious.  Thing is, he isn't that smart.  His thinking never goes beyond (1) this will get people to praise me, (2) this make me richer, and (3) this will keep me out of jail.  It's more a case of running roughshod through the government to pad his own bank account and keep one step ahead of the people who might try to stop him.

Yeah, if it causes chaos in the United States, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will be thrilled, but that's not why it started.  Trump is more a sticky-handed toddler loose in a museum.  He's likely to damage priceless stuff, but it's because he has the attention span of a gnat and zero impulse control, and throws hellacious tantrums when he doesn't get his way immediately.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ritchie333, Trump Baby Balloon at protest in Parliament Square, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As far as the other people in charge -- well, Musk is in it for the money, although you have to wonder why four hundred billion dollars isn't enough for anyone.  Hegseth, Vance, and Noem are loony ideologues; of all of them, they're the ones most likely to be true believers.  As far as RFK, who the hell knows?  You look into that guy's dead eyes, and it's anyone's guess what's going on behind them.

Look, I understand that government isn't perfect.  Not ours, not any country's in the history of humanity.  There are porkbarrel projects and waste and cronyism, and probably at least some outright fraud.  But you don't fix it by running around with a chainsaw (which, I shit you not, Elon Musk literally did at CPAC last week).  What this represents is a coup by a coalition of fascists and burn-it-all-to-the-ground opportunists, who are using as their public face a man who has never had any thought beyond personal self-aggrandizement.

And in four weeks, we've abandoned -- no, destroyed -- our locks and guards.  Maybe it's not too late to put the pieces back together and keep the monsters from getting loose.  I don't know.  But the Republicans now in charge of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court had damn well better figure out where their spines are and stop this.

Or in another four weeks we may not have a nation left to defend.

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The forbidden words

George Orwell, in his classic book 1984, writes characters who speak a dialect of English called "Newspeak."

The "Minitrue" (Ministry of Truth) controls the public perception of what is true, perceptions that are enforced by the "Thinkpol" (Thought Police).  The Thinkpol are responsible for stopping "thoughtcrime," including "facecrime" -- forbidden thoughts as revealed in your facial expression.  Toward that end, they "rectify" historical accounts (to conform to the government's agenda regarding what happened), eliminating anything that is "malquoted" or "misprinted."  You're trained to the point of accepting the government's views based on "bellyfeel" -- how they affect you emotionally, not whether they're true.

Intercourse between a man and a woman -- preferably without any pleasure -- is "goodsex."  Anything else is a "sexcrime."  The preference of the government is that babies are conceived by "artsem" -- artificial insemination.

Someone who breaks any of these rules -- or worse, contradicts what Big Brother wants you to do or say -- is not only killed, every trace of them is erased.  They become an "Unperson."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Orwell was strikingly prescient.  If you doubt that we're heading down that road, consider the story that appeared in Gizmodo yesterday, that employees at the National Science Foundation and Center for Disease Control have been given a long list by the Trump administration of words they are not allowed to use in official correspondence or publications without review and authorization.

Here's a sampler -- for the complete list, check the link:

• advocacy
• bias
• climate
• cultural heritage
• disability
• discrimination
• diversity
• ethnicity
• evidence-based
• female (no, I'm not making this up)
• gender
• inequality
• LGBTQ
• political
• racial
• science-based
• socioeconomic
• transgender
• women (no, I'm still not making this up)

When I first read this, my initial reaction was, "This can't possibly be true."  The NSF being forbidden from using the words "evidence-based?"  But after some digging about, all I can say is that it appears at the time of this writing to be true.

I'm not sure what to be appalled at most about this.  That we don't want a study identified as "biased," because then we might have to address whose political interests are being served by the bias.  That because of the Trump administration's ongoing war on minorities, we mustn't speak of diversity.  That LGBTQ individuals, whose rights to fair treatment are being threatened with each new executive order, are guilty of "sexcrime;" and we have to pretend transgender people don't even exist.

And "science-based" and "evidence-based?" What the fuck is the NSF supposed to base its policy on, then?  Magic?  The Bible?  Prophecy?

Or just what its "bellyfeel" is?

I've tried not to engage in hyperbole about what this administration is doing, but every new thing I read drives me further toward the conclusion that they have only two motives: consolidating power and seeking revenge against anyone who has stood in their way.  Toward that end, shutting down resistance, eliminating free speech and the free press, rewriting the truth to conform to whatever Trump's cadre says it should be.  Everything contradictory is "oldspeak" that should be "rectified."

The result should be "doubleplusgood," don't you think?  Or maybe we should just stick with "Great Again."

My hope is the fact of this having been made public will give NSF and CDC employees the courage to defy this order.  People have to fight back, tell the 2025 version of the Thinkpol "No way in hell."  We have to spread this story far and wide, because you know the first thing the Trump administration is going to do is claim that this is all "fake news."

"Malquoted" and "misprinted."  Just like the erasure of any reference to the riots and insurrection on January 6.  Just like Trump's insistence that the recent series of horrible airplane crashes had to do with "DEI" and not with the fact that two weeks before the first one, he'd dismissed the head of the FAA and laid off hundreds of air traffic controllers.  Just like the tragic wildfires in California having nothing to do with climate change, but with "failed water policy" by the state's Democratic governor -- and that Trump came in and saved the day by releasing billions of gallons of water from reservoirs that didn't even flow toward Los Angeles, the loss of which will jeopardize agricultural irrigation for months.

Doesn't matter what's actually true.  If it strokes Trump's bloated ego, and allows him to post smug, self-congratulatory, usually misspelled messages on social media, then it's de facto the New Truth.

Of course, forbidden words are not the only hurdle academia is facing in the United States; coupled with all of the funding cuts the NSF, CDC, and NIH are undergoing, it's looking like a war that might not be winnable, at least not in the short term.  If what the administration really wants is to destroy the United States as a leader in scientific and medical research worldwide, they're going about it the right way.  What Trump and Musk and their cronies have done in the last three weeks isn't "rooting out corruption and waste;" it's placing free inquiry into an ideological straitjacket that will set American academia back decades, if it doesn't ruin it completely.

And as far as Orwell goes -- looks like got the details right.  All he missed was the year it happened.

****************************************

The seven deadly words

George Orwell, in his classic book 1984, writes characters who speak a dialect of English called "Newspeak."

The "Minitrue" (Ministry of Truth) controls the public perception of what is true, perceptions that are enforced by the "Thinkpol" (Thought Police).  The Thinkpol are responsible for stopping "thoughtcrime," including "facecrime" -- forbidden thoughts as revealed in your facial expression.  Toward that end, they "rectify" historical accounts (to conform to the government's agenda regarding what happened), eliminating anything that is "malquoted" or "misprinted."  You're trained to the point of accepting the government's views based on "bellyfeel" -- how they affect you emotionally, not whether they're true.

Intercourse between a man and a woman -- preferably without any pleasure -- is "goodsex."  Anything else is a "sexcrime."  The preference of the government is that babies are conceived by "artsem" -- artificial insemination.

Someone who breaks any of these rules -- or worse, contradicts what Big Brother wants you to do or say -- is not only killed, every trace of them is erased.  They become an "Unperson."

[image courtesy of photographer Todd Page and the Wikimedia Commons]

Orwell was strikingly prescient.  If you doubt that we're heading down that road, consider the story that was broken by the Washington Post yesterday, that employees at the Center for Disease Control have been given a list by the Trump administration of seven words they are not allowed to use in official correspondence or publications.

Those words are:

• vulnerable
• entitlement
• fetus
• diversity
• transgender
• science-based
• evidence-based

When I first read this, my initial reaction was, "This can't possibly be true."  The CDC being forbidden from using the word "fetus?"  But after some digging about, all I can say is that it appears at the time of this writing to be true.  The reports have not been corroborated by any official channels -- spokespeople for the CDC itself refused to comment -- but no one involved has stepped forward and said, "Bullshit."

I'm not sure what to be appalled most about this.  That we don't want any group of people identified as "vulnerable," because then we might have to do something about it.  That because of the Trump administration's ongoing war on minorities, we mustn't speak of diversity.  That LGBT individuals, whose rights to fair treatment are being threatened with every new judicial appointment, are guilty of "sexcrime;" and we have to pretend transgender people don't even exist.

And "science-based" and "evidence-based?"  What the fuck is the CDC supposed to base its policy on, then?  Magic?  The bible?  Prophecy?

Or just what its "bellyfeel" is?

I've tried not to engage in hyperbole about what this administration is doing, but every new thing I read drives me further toward the conclusion that they have really only one motive: consolidating power, and toward that end, shutting down resistance, eliminating free speech and the free press, rewriting the truth to conform to whatever Trump's cadre says it should be.  Everything contradictory is "oldspeak" that should be "rectified."

The result should be "doubleplusgood," don't you think?

My hope is the fact of this having been made public will give CDC employees the courage to defy this order.  People have to fight back, tell the 2017 version of the Thinkpol "No way in hell."  We have to spread this story far and wide, because you know the first thing the Trump administration is going to do is claim that this is all "fake news."

"Malquoted" and "misprinted."

I have some slim hope that this report will turn out to be an exaggeration, or perhaps simply untrue.  But given the Trump administration's record for supporting not only the right to dissent but science itself, I'm not holding my breath.  What it's looking more like is that Orwell got the details right -- all he missed was the year it happened.

Shut up, Jim.

It would be really nice if we could stop giving credence to celebrities just because they're celebrities.

Just like any other slice of humanity, there are going to be some famous actors and singers and so on who are intelligent and sensible (Matt Damon seems to me to be one of those) and others who are either dumb as a bag of hammers, or else batshit insane (hello, Tom Cruise?).  Being in the limelight -- even being a brilliant actor or singer -- does not necessarily correlate with having brains.  So let's stop acting as if everything that comes out of a celebrity's mouth has to be divinely-inspired wisdom, okay?

The last in a long line of A-list stars to demonstrate a significantly low IQ is Jim Carrey, who recently went on a tirade in response to the passage of California Senate Bill 277, which outlawed personal and religious exemptions for parents trying to avoid having their children vaccinated before attending public school.  Carrey has long been anti-vaxx, and in fact was once in a romantic relationship with noted anti-vaxx wingnut Jenny McCarthy.  And now Carrey has launched into a diatribe on Twitter against the new law, saying that it legalizes "poisoning children."  Here are a few of his salvos:

California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory [sic] vaccines.  This corporate fascist must be stopped. 

They say mercury in fish is dangerous but forcing all of our children to be injected with mercury in thimerosol [sic] is no risk.  Make sense? 

I am not anti-vaccine. I am anti-thimerosal, anti-mercury.  They have taken some of the mercury laden thimerosal out of vaccines.  NOT ALL! 

The CDC can't solve a problem they helped start.  It's too risky to admit they have been wrong about mercury/thimerasol [sic].  They are corrupt.

First of all, if he doesn't like the stuff, learning how to spell it might be a good place to start for improving his credibility.  (It's "thimerosal," for the record.)  Second, although he's right that not all vaccines are thimerosal-free, all of the ones given as routine childhood vaccinations are (or are available in a thimerosal-free version).  (It's significant that the one the anti-vaxxers rail about the most often -- the MMR vaccine -- has never contained thimerosal.)

Third, of course, is that in any discussion of vaccines, we have to take a look at relative risk.  Have there been children who have had adverse reactions to routine vaccinations?  Sure.  No medical procedure, however innocuous, is completely risk-free.  There have been extensive studies of the relative risks of side effects, from mild to severe, for every vaccine that's commonly administered, and the vast majority of side effects from routine vaccinations are mild and temporary.  (Here's a summary of those studies -- oh, but wait.  It comes from the "corrupt CDC."  Never mind.)

What about the risk of childhood disease?  Again, the risk is known, and it's high.  Diseases like measles, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis A and B, and polio -- for all of which there are now safe and effective vaccines -- are killers.  It's significant that the boy that I wrote about a few weeks ago, the first person to contract diphtheria in Spain in 29 years, died last week, and that the parents are now blaming the anti-vaccination movement for their decision not to have him immunized.  "The family is devastated and admit that they feel tricked, because they were not properly informed," said Catalan public health chief Antoni Mateu.  "They have a deep sense of guilt, which we are trying to rid them of."

Interesting way of putting it.  Maybe they should be experiencing a deep sense of guilt, given that it was their decision that led to his death.  And it's hard to see how in this day and age, being anti-vaxx qualifies as not being "properly informed."  Falling for scare talk and pseudoscience isn't "not being properly informed," it's being anti-scientific and gullible, which isn't the same thing.  And there's a fundamental principle operating here, which is that you can't save people from themselves.  Humans are going to make dumb decisions and then cast around for someone to blame them on -- this is hardly a new problem.

It's just tragic when those decisions result in the death of an innocent child.

Which, by the way, is exactly why we should have mandatory vaccination laws.  Adults are going to make their own decisions, and some of them will be based in ignorance and fear, and some of them will result in people being injured or killed.  But society has a responsibility to step in and protect children when their parents won't do so voluntarily.

That's what Senate Bill 277 is about.

And as far as Jim Carrey: dude, go back to making movies.  You made some pretty good ones -- The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are two of my favorite movies.  (You also made some pretty stupid ones, but let's be as charitable as we can, here.)  You are not only not a scientist, you have shown that you can't even make an intelligent assessment of scientific research.  Hell, you don't seem to be able to spell.

So maybe it's time to retreat to Hollywood in disarray.  Or failing that, simply shut up.  That would work, too.

The random comment department

Two news stories I came across this weekend are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, a paper in the Journal of Advertising, by Ioannis Kareklas, Darrel Muehling, and T. J. Weber of Washington State University, tells a frightening but unsurprising story.  Their study shows that people who are presented with data about vaccination safety are more likely to consider online comments from random individuals as credible than they are information from institutions like the Center for Disease Control.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's how the experiment was set up:

Participants were led to believe that the pro-vaccination PSA was sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while the anti-vaccination PSA was sponsored by the National Vaccine Information Council (NVIC). Both PSAs were designed to look like they appeared on each organization's respective website to enhance validity. 

The PSAs were followed by comments from fictitious online commenters who either expressed pro- or anti-vaccination viewpoints. Participants weren't told anything about who the commenters were, and unisex names were used to avoid potential gender biases.

The researchers then presented participants with a questionnaire to determine how (or if) their views on vaccination had changed.

"The results kind of blew us away," said Kareklas in a press release.  "People were trusting the random online commenters just as much as the PSA itself."

Which, as I said, is disheartening but unsurprising, given that people like Jenny McCarthy are the public version of a Random Online Commenter.

Kareklas et al. followed this up with a second study, to see if the commenters were believed even more strongly if they were identified as doctors (as opposed to one of two other professions).  The commenters who were self-identified doctors had an even stronger effect -- i.e., they outweighed the CDC information even more.

Which explains "Dr." Andrew Wakefield.

And this brings me to the second story, which comes out of Kansas -- where a bill has been introduced into the legislature that would prevent professionals from mentioning their titles or credentials in opinion articles and letters to the editor.

The story about how House Bill 2234 was introduced is interesting in and of itself.  The bill was offered into committee by Representative Virgil Peck (R-Tyro), but Peck initially denied having done so.

"I introduce bills in committee sometimes when I’m asked out of courtesy," Peck said.  "It’s not because I have any skin in the game or I care about it.  I’m not even sure I introduced it, but if he said I did, I did."

Our leaders, ladies and gentlemen.  "Not even sure" what bills they introduce regarding issues they don't care about.

While on the one hand, the Kareklas study does point out the danger -- if someone thinks you're a doctor (for example), they're more likely to be swayed by your comments even if you're wrong -- in what universe is the public better off not knowing the background of the person whose words they're reading?

Representative John Carmichael (D-Wichita) nailed it.  With regards to the bill, he said, "If you are in fact a professor at The University of Kansas, that is part of your identity and part of your resume.  To muzzle an academic in identifying him or herself, and their accomplishment, not only does it have the effect of denying them their right to free speech, it also denies the public the right to understand who is commenting and what their, perhaps, bias or interest might be."

And that last bit is the important part.  My views on education -- which I throw out frequently and often vehemently -- are clearly affected by the fact that I'm a public school teacher.  Whether that makes me more or less credible would, I suppose, depend on your viewpoint.  But how on earth would you be better informed by not knowing what my profession is, by having less information with which to evaluate what I've said?

The Kareklas study and the bill introduced by Virgil "What Bill Did I Just Introduce?" Peck highlight one tremendously important thing, however; the general public is incredibly bad at critical reading.  One of the most important things you can do, when you read (or listen to) media, is to weigh what's being said against the facts and evidence, and consider the possibility of bias and appeal to authority.  The Kareklas study shows that we're pretty terrible at the former, and the Kansas bill proposes to eliminate our ability even to attempt the latter.

All making it even more important that children be taught critical thinking skills.  Because if adults don't consider information from the Center for Disease Control to have more credibility than opinions coming from an online commenter, there's something seriously wrong.

Zombie awareness training

There's a saying that has been repeated often enough that it is nearly a cliché, and that is: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

The Center for Disease Control just found that out.

Last year, you may recall, the CDC posted a page on their website called "Zombie Preparedness."  The creators of this page said that the whole thing was a tongue-in-cheek way of calling attention to the wisdom of knowing what to do during an emergency, and recommended such measures as having an up-to-date first-aid kit, knowing escape routes from the house (and also which roads to take if you need to escape in a bigger way), and teaching younger members of the family what to do when bad things happen.  All of it, they said, could equally well apply to other, more mundane disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.

Well, I'm sure that all of you have heard about the recent bizarre spate of human mutilations.  First, there was the drugged-out guy in Florida who ate a homeless man's face, putting him in the hospital with life-threatening injuries; the face-eater himself was ordered to stop by the police, but just looked up at them... and growled.  The police shot and killed him.  Then, a guy in Hackensack, New Jersey was holed up in his apartment with a knife, threatening to kill himself, and police ordered him to surrender -- so the guy stabbed himself, and proceeded to hurl pieces of his own intestines at the stunned cops.  Then a Canadian nutjob killed a former lover, ate part of him, and mailed other assorted parts to the Canadian governmental headquarters.  And then, just two days ago, two guys got in a fight in a Staten Island diner, and bit off and swallowed part of the guy's ear.

Not to mention the recent outbreak of "flesh-eating bacteria" in the American Southeast.

All of this has resulted in a flood of emails and calls into the CDC, from people terrified about the ongoing "zombie outbreak."  Sites have popped up all over the internet that we are seeing the beginning of the "zombie apocalypse" -- and that the CDC knew about it ahead of time, and that's what gave rise to the link on the CDC site about "zombie preparedness."  More insidiously, some conspiracy-minded types are suggesting that the CDC engineered the whole thing, and what we're seeing is a zombie-virus outbreak, à la 28 Days Later.

Predictably, I'm not buying any of it.

The truth of the matter is that the whole thing boils down to a standard principle of media; once you've found a catchy idea that causes people to read what you write, continue to riff indefinitely on the same theme.  The Florida face-eater was certainly a wild story, and its release in national media was probably justified.  But once that happened, and people mentioned the z-word, the other stories were cast in the same light, to get the same kind of attention -- the suicidal self-stabber in Hackensack probably wouldn't have reached national media if it hadn't been for the first story, and neither would the ear-biter in Staten Island.  The Canadian killer was certainly big news... but the news agencies that released that story all mentioned the Florida case, cinching up the connection in people's minds between the two unrelated incidents.

And now, the CDC is catching major amounts of flak for their "Zombie Preparedness" site, from people who (1) believe that Shaun of the Dead was a scientific documentary, and (2) wouldn't recognize a joke if it walked up and, um, bit them.  The CDC Zombie Preparedness page itself has had so much traffic that several of the subsidiary links on the site have crashed or have been taken down.

So anyway, let's keep our eye on the ball, people.  There are no such things as zombies.  There have been a lot of movies about zombies, but they're fiction.  (If you're curious, here's the Wikipedia canonic list of zombie movies -- including such obvious winners as Zombie Attack from Outer Space and Violent Shit III: The Infantry of Doom.)  The CDC was just trying to be funny, but also call attention to emergency preparedness, with their site, and are neither covering up a zombie apocalypse, nor are they responsible for one.

Okay, have we got that straight, now?  Because I have to go make sure my shotgun is loaded.