RFK Jr. Takes His Grandkids For A Mother’s Day Swim In A River Of Human Shit
from the health-nut dept
Look, folks, I have to admit that I’m running out of ways to open these posts about RFK Jr., so let’s just do this quickly. He’s a vaccine skeptic with a ton of bad ideas on public health policy, is letting the current measles outbreak expand for no good reason, has promised to have the cause of autism uncovered by the tail end of summer, will get the government to stop poisoning all of America with chemtrails, and might kinda be into a light version of eugenics. I’ll remind you again, should you have forgotten, that this is the man in charge of American healthcare.
Perhaps as alarming is some news that slipped by me a couple of weeks back: RFK Jr. has written in a book that he doesn’t believe in the germ theory of disease, opting instead for the miasma theory. What’s that you say? You haven’t heard of the miasma theory? Well, that’s probably because it was abandoned around the time his Nazi-appeasing grandfather was born.
The miasma theory was advanced by Hippocrates in the fourth century BC[3] and accepted from ancient times in Europe and China. The theory was eventually abandoned by scientists and physicians after 1880, replaced by the germ theory of disease: specific germs, not miasma, caused specific diseases.
Just impeach this guy already, damn it.
But my main point in bringing up yet another of Kennedy’s absurd healthcare beliefs isn’t merely to add a 59th reason he shouldn’t be the Secretary of HHS. It’s also because it makes what he posted to ExTwitter over Mother’s Day all the more strange.
Yes, Kennedy took his grandkids on a hike! And a swim! In a creek in which you are prohibited from swimming due to dangerous bacteria in the water? Why? Well, because it suffers from known sewage runoff, dear friends. Kennedy took his grandkids swimming in literal shitwater.
The creek is known for having a sewage overflow problem and posing a health hazard to any who enter it. The National Park Service, which manages the Rock Creek Park, strictly bars all swimming and wading in Rock Creek and the park’s other waterways due to the contamination, specifically “high levels of bacteria.”
A notice on the NPS website advises “Stay Dry, Stay Safe,” warning, “Rock Creek has high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health. Please protect yourself and your pooches by staying on trails and out of the creek. All District waterways are subject to a swim ban—this means wading, too!”
If I wanted to be kind to Kennedy, I could refer to this as the George Carlin method of healthcare. One in which you intentionally expose yourself to as many health dangers as possible in the misguided attempt to build up your immunity.
Now, if you watch that entire Carlin special, as I have, you know just how much tongue and cheek stuff is in there. But even if you wanted to take Carlin’s words at face value, he was a fucking comedian. He was the functional equivalent of a professional clown, whereas Kennedy’s clownery is as unprofessional as it gets. And, also like Kennedy, he too has zero medical training or background.
It would be easy enough to think that Kennedy will lie in whatever bed he’s made by swimming in unclean water, of course. But there are children to consider here. I, for one, wouldn’t want Kick or — checks notes — Bobcat, to get some flesh-eating bacteria inside their tiny bodies and have something horrible happen. Were Child Protective Services to witness a parent bathing their children in their home in a solution concocted of water, feces, and urine, those children would be whisked away and put in the charge of actual thinking adults. But here Kennedy is doing essentially the same thing, but out in a stream.
And the larger point is, again, that this man is in charge of American healthcare at the moment. He believes in disease theories from the 1800s, doesn’t like vaccines, thinks everyone should get measles and the weaklings will die, and is now a documented shit-diver.
Really, honestly, truly… how much more does anyone need to boot him from his post?
Filed Under: bacteria, germ theory, health and human services, healthcare, rfk jr.
Comments on “RFK Jr. Takes His Grandkids For A Mother’s Day Swim In A River Of Human Shit”
“Kennedy took his grandkids swimming in literal shitwater.”
I heard it’s a cure for Covid!
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Trump goes swimming in Rock Creek Park every week to help him look so young and fresh, it also make hair regrowing. (Source: who cares?)
The idiom is "tongue in cheek"
“Tongue in cheek” is the phrase you’re looking for there.
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Yes, because tongue in creek would be rather gross.
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Better than tongue in cheeks. Which earned him his position.
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In this case it’s actually “tongue in creek.”
Not the kids, of course, but I fully encourage Junior to show us how perfectly harmless the creek is to swim in, frequently.
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Yeah, I sincerely hope the halfwit is absolutely fucking peachy, this time, and keeps doing it.
Bathing in wastewater, the parasite’s luck will run out. Once it does, we’re good(er). Since it doesn’t “believe” in germ theory, there will consequently be no effective treatments available to help it overcome any of the myriad possible afflictions it may well be dealing with by then. Depending on severity, its choices may then come down to A) modern medicines, and survival, or; B) death. Should make for some entertaining reading, regardless.
Don't blame miasma theory
I am pretty sure a feces-plagued river counts as bad miasma, or as bad news under any empiric theory based on observing what makes people get sick.
Hygiene is not a modern invention; it is just better targeted and understood.
Or expressed differently: it would already have been obvious 200 years ago already that RFKJ is unfit to serve in a position responsible for promoting public health.
Is it too much to hope for that RFK becomes incredibly ill from his swim, and learns a lesson about germs?
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No need to learn about germs. Being up shit creek most certainly is really bad miasma.
His “belief” in miasma does not serve to pattern his behavior according to best hygienic practices two centuries ago. It serves to get hand-wavy about hygience because he really doesn’t want to think seriously about either germs or miasma.
Reminds me of some religious then-couple I knew who were opposed to unnatural ways of contraception and instead relied on the calendar. Except for that one time where they really wanted to, and then they did it because the calendar is not a fool-proof way of contraception anyway.
Well yes, but contravening it most certainly is worse.
Incidentally, the outcome of that event has these days cut ties with either of its parents for mental hygiene reasons.
I digress. The point was that there was no time in the history of the United States where picking RFKJ as somebody responsible for the nation’s health would have been an acceptable choice.
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The latter probably is, yeah.
Re: Unlikely
He’ll blame it on the creek miasma being unexpectedly unfriendly. Or phlogiston
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No, you blame wildfires on phlogiston.
“Raging forest fires left hundreds homeless after eco-terrorists secretly stockpile millions of dollars worth of phlogiston in our nation’s forests.”
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Actually, the fire service used a combination of phlogiston and dephlogisticated air in an effort to extinguish the fires. Just thought you should know.
Supposedly in the book he doesn’t even get Miasma theory correct. What he describes as miasma theory is actually another theory where your diet/exercise affects if you get sick… I forget what this theory was called.
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Terrain Theory – the go to model for germ denialists.
It claims germs don’t cause disease, it claims “toxins” cause disease, and that the symptoms from illness are the side effects of our bodies trying to “detox”. In their model, disease is not transmissible, if there’s an outbreak it’s not people passing germs from one to another, it’s people detoxing together after common exposures .And that all we need to do to prevent disease is to elimate toxic exposures..
As far as germs go they claim bacteria are benign or helpful scavengers, assisting in the detox, and they pretty much deny viruses exist, claiming that the viruses we’ve systematically observed, catalogued, and sequenced down to the genetic level are mere cellular debris, ejected by detoxing cells.
The given reasons for their denial that germs cause disease is the claim it hasn’t been “proven” that germs cause disease though a pedantically rigorous experimental demonstration of Koch’s postulates (which even Koch himself admitted were flawed).
Of course they never really go into how that lack of absolute proof invalidates germ theory, nor do they they every hold Terrain theory to the same standards, by showing experimetal proof that toxins are causing diseases like rabies, cholera, or measles,
Re: Re: Things that make you go "AAARGH!"
i had a physio at the hospital wed. say to me that kambucha would help you detoxify your body. I gently tried to disabuse him of this nonsense,with some success, but i really wanted to slap the shit out of him.
I consoled myself that he was but young, 22 or so, and we’re all stupid then.
When I said that RFK Jr. wanted people to die, I didn’t think he included himself in that group.
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Besides a death wish, this seems like a case of child abuse.
I’ve been reading a lot of posts on social media wishing he gets some deadly brain eating amoeba/bacteria. One can hope.
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I’m not sure he has much of a brain left to eat, given how much damage the worm seems to have already done.
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He starved the poor worm.
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Worm already ate that…
Shit Creek? I bet he didn’t have a paddle either…
I just can’t with this shit
Not a "skeptic"
You lose credibility when you call RFK, Jr. a “vaccine skeptic.” That term suggests that he could become a vaccine supporter given the proper set of data. This is obviously false.
He’s an anti-vax fruitcake, complicit in the murders of children.
If I want to see these anti-intellectual nutcases handled with kid gloves, I’ll stick to the NYTimes. Techdirt has the ability and brainpower to be more factual. Please use it.
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Not skeptic, just septic.
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Yeah, it would be great if words still had meaning, but “we” have “agreed” that skeptic can be used that way. It is not even remotely new, but so overused that the implied pile of derision and sarcasm is no longer apparent.
There's only so much evidence you can ignore and still claim to be a 'skeptic'
Look, folks, I have to admit that I’m running out of ways to open these posts about RFK Jr., so let’s just do this quickly. He’s a vaccine skeptic with a ton of bad ideas on public health policy,
If you want a suggestion on how to open articles about RFK Jr. might I suggest you and everyone else stop calling him a vaccine skeptic and start calling him what he actually is, a vaccine denier?
Being 'that guy'
Just to be “that guy”, after the Carlin clip?,you wrote “tongue and cheek”.
Its ‘tongue IN cheek’.
I HAVEN’T read ANY of the comments before blathering, but I’ll bet I’m not the only one that caught the, shall we say different, version you used.
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Personally, I could care less. For all intensive purposes, it doesn’t seem to matter irregardless of intent. Seems like a mute point to me.
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You need to tow the on granma if you want to be taken siriusly
RFK swims in sewage water
Hopefully this will help evolution erase on of its mistakes
I also have zero medical training or background, but like Carlin, I know it’s a seriously bad idea to swim in any river full of effluent from sewage overflow, especially for kids.