One of the Biggest Health Frauds EVER Perpetrated on the American People...
Animals in southern Iceland are at risk of fluoride poisoning if they inhale or ingest the ash from the recent volcanic eruption. Fluoride poisoning can lead to internal bleeding, long-term bone damage and tooth loss.
According to BBC News:
“The fluoride in the ash creates acid in the animals' stomachs, corroding the intestines and causing hemorrhages. It also binds with calcium in the bloodstream and after heavy exposure over a period of days makes bones frail, even causing teeth to crumble.”
Many may see this story and never connect the dots between the tragic poisoning of these animals due to a natural event, and the intentional poisoning of human beings through excessive fluoride exposure each and every day.
This story is another clue that just because something exists in nature doesn't necessarily mean it is good for you. And this is certainly true for the seriously misguided use of fluoride to prevent dental cavities.
The practice of adding fluoride to your tap water began in 1945. With more than 60 percent of U.S. water supplies currently fluoridated, chances are you’re one of the 170 million Americans who drink fluoride on a daily basis.
Most likely, your dentist – along with countless government and public health officials -- has praised and promoted the use of fluoride, both in toothpaste and drinking water, as one of your must-do regimens to promote strong and healthy teeth.
Unfortunately, they’ve all bought the public deception, and have unwittingly participated in and perpetuated perhaps one of the grandest public health frauds and toxic cover-ups in U.S. history.
Fluoride – A Historically Known Toxin
Prior to 1945 when communal water fluoridation took effect, fluoride was a known toxin.
For example, a 1936 issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association stated that fluoride at the 1 ppm (part per million) concentration is as toxic as arsenic and lead.
The Journal of the American Medical Association stated in their September 18, 1943 issue, that “fluorides are general protoplasmic poisons that change the permeability of the cell membrane by certain enzymes.” And, an editorial published in the Journal of the American Dental Association, October 1, 1944, stated,
"Drinking water containing as little as 1.2 ppm fluoride will cause developmental disturbances. We cannot run the risk of producing such serious systemic disturbances. The potentialities for harm outweigh those for good."
More recently, Christopher Bryson, award winning journalist and former producer at the BBC revealed the multi-tiered abuse of power by military and industry scientists and public health officials in his book The Fluoride Deception. In it, he describes the intertwined interests that existed in the 1940’s and 50’s between the aluminum industry, the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and the dental industry, which resulted in fluoride being declared not only safe, but “beneficial to human health.”
The political back story of how fluoride was introduced into your drinking water reads like a cross between a psychological thriller and mind-boggling science fiction.
Read Bryson’s book, and you’ll never think of fluoride the same again… Because the bottom line is that when you swallow fluoride, it does nothing to decrease disease, it merely accelerates it.
Do You Know What’s REALLY in Your Water?
What would you do if you suddenly found out that “fluoride,” which advocates claim is an all-natural element that you ingest anyway and is good for your teeth and bones, was not safe at all, but was actually a carcinogenic industrial waste?
That’s right! The fluoride in your water supply is not what you think it is.
The natural form of mineral fluoride found both in nature and in your teeth and bones, is called Apatite (calcium fluoro-chloro-hydroxyl phosphate).
Inside your mouth, there is a natural equilibrium between hydroxyl-apatite (calcium phosphate) dissolving and forming in your tooth enamel from substances occurring naturally in your saliva. Like everything else, your diet and various physical conditions shift this equilibrium back and forth constantly.
When you have more calcium phosphate dissolving than being adhered, you end up with a demineralization condition called caries. This is when cavities form in your teeth.
However, this has nothing to do with fluoride or fluoridation, but a good fib must always start with a kernel of truth, or else no one will listen to you.
So when it comes to the so-called “health benefits” of fluoride, it’s essential to understand what’s really being added to your water and other products you use on a regular basis, such as toothpaste.
When “fluoride” is added to your drinking water, it’s NOT the natural mineral. Instead, the fluoride in question is another chemical fluoride compound – the toxic waste product from phosphate fertilizer plants.
There are three basic compounds commonly used for fluoridating water supplies:
These are chemical byproducts of aluminum, steel, cement, phosphate, and nuclear weapons manufacturing. Such fluoride is manmade, and in this form, fluoride has no nutrient value and no health benefits whatsoever.
But there’s yet another tidbit that is not talked about openly, and that is the fact that these hazardous industrial wastes – the fluoride compounds actually added to your water -- have NEVER been fully tested to ascertain their full potential health hazard.
Instead, the pharmaceutical grade “sodium fluoride” (the first one on the list) is used in the majority of studies evaluating the risk to human health.
Therefore, the real danger to your health may be far greater than any of the studies done so far have shown, and numerous studies have already identified the pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride as a toxic agent, capable of doing irreparable harm to your body.
Fluoride May Actually CAUSE More Cavities Than it Prevents!
Studies have also shown that fluoride does not even help prevent cavities, which is the number one reason for water fluoridation in the first place.
Instead, studies have shown that consuming too much fluoride might actually cause tooth decay.
And fluoride-saturated American teenagers had twice the rate of cavities as the South African children drinking low levels of natural fluoride!
The Many Health Dangers of Fluoride
According to information from its Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS), and from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride is a dangerous toxin that can cause serious physical harm.
The chemical targets your:
Kidneys
Heart
Gastrointestinal system
Bone and skeletal structures
Teeth
Nerves
The MSDS for sodium fluoride also states that fluoride compounds can induce:
Systemic toxic effects on your heart, liver, and kidney
Depleted calcium levels in your body leading to hypocalcaemia and death
It points out that the toxic effect of fluoride might be delayed, and that laboratory experiments have resulted in the development of tumors.
In order to understand the long-term dangers of fluoride, it’s important to realize that fluoride is a cumulative poison.
Ninety-eight percent of the fluoride you ingest in water is absorbed into your blood through your gastrointestinal tract. From there, it enters your body’s cellular tissues. On average, about 50 percent of the fluoride you ingest each day gets excreted through your kidneys. The remainder accumulates in your teeth and bones, pineal gland, and other tissues, such as the aorta.
The amount deposited into your bones and teeth varies depending on your age. In children, more than 50 percent of an ingested dose of fluoride is deposited in bone, but in adults only about 10 percent is stored there.
As with teeth, fluoride is deposited in bone by the ionic exchange with hydroxyl-apatite as mentioned earlier. It does dissolve from bone as well, but at a slower rate than it is deposited, so if your intake remains constant, the level of fluoride in your bones increases linearly with age.
Therefore, if your kidneys are damaged, fluoride accumulation will increase, and with it, the likelihood of harm.
There are numerous health problems associated with the accumulation of fluoride in your body, such as:
When water fluoridation first began, the “optimal” level of fluoride for dental benefit was said to be 1 mg/day for an adult male, based on the estimate that the average adult male drank one liter of water per day. However, even at that level, 10 percent of the population (those in the high-risk group) was expected to get fluorosis.
But water is not the only source of added fluoride.
Although you may not know it, you are exposed to fluoride from many sources other than the obvious lineup of toothpastes and mouth rinses.
Far less obvious sources of fluoride include:
Food and beverages processed with fluoridated water
Mechanically de-boned meat
Pesticide residue on food
Pharmaceutical drugs, especially SSRI antidepressants and fluoroquinolone antibiotics like Cipro
A 1991 review by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows just how drastic your overexposure might be when taking multiple sources into account.
Fluoride exposure levels for a 110-pound adult from food, beverages, toothpaste, and mouthwash
Fluoride Concentration
in Drinking Water
Total Fluoride Intake
Percentage Over 1 mg
"Optimal" Dosage
Unfluoridated Communities
< 0.3 mg/L
0.88 - 2.20 mg/day
as much as 120 %
"Optimally" Fluoridated
0.7-1.2 mg/L
1.58 - 6.60 mg/day
as much as 560 %
Fluoridated communities
> 2.0 mg/L
2.10 - 7.05 mg/day
possible > 605 %
If you were to evaluate all the sources of fluoride you’re exposed to on a regular basis, you may be shocked by how much fluoride you and your children are actually ingesting.
Diet, Not Fluoride Builds Healthy Teeth
If you’re wondering how to keep your teeth healthy, remember that fluoride was never the answer in the first place.
Instead, you need to look to your diet if you want healthy teeth. In fact, most people whose diet includes very little sugar and few processed foods have very low rates of tooth decay.
Limiting or eliminating sugar, and avoiding processed foods and eating plenty of green vegetables and vitamin K2 -- along with regular cleanings with your natural dentist – is the best way to ensure your teeth stay healthy naturally.
Further Education
I strongly advise you to continue educating yourself about fluoride and to avoid it as much as you can.
Depression is a very pervasive health issue today, and it can be a terminal illness. People commit suicide, caused by depression, each and every day.
The traditional approaches have sought to use drugs to address this problem, but I believe there are far better alternatives. But before I get into that, what does the scientific literature show, in terms of short- and long-term effectiveness of the conventional drug approach?
In this interview, Robert Whitaker, who is a medical journalist and author of two books on this important topic, shares what he’s found after tremendous amounts of research.
How Effective are Antidepressants in the Short- and Long-Term?
When looking at the research literature, short-term trials show that antidepressants do NOT provide any clinically significant benefits for mild to moderate depression, compared to a placebo.
And as you know, all drugs have benefit-to-risk ratios, so if a drug is as effective as a placebo in relieving symptoms, it really doesn’t make sense to use them as a first line of defense. And yet doctors all over America prescribe them as if they were indeed sugar pills!
But what about their long-term effectiveness?
According to Whitaker:
“… that’s one of the things I looked at in this book and there are really two things that you find.
You find that even with major depression, in the pre-antidepressant era – and this is depression so severe people were hospitalized – they could expect to get better. The episode would eventually pass.
… So when antidepressants were introduced, the thought was okay, we really can hope to improve on this sort of natural recovery, but maybe we can help people recover quicker? So that really was the rationale for the use of antidepressants.
But it’s really interesting if you follow this course through, forward in history. The minute they start using antidepressants in any sort of large numbers, doctors start saying, “Well, you know, my patients may be getting better, the depression maybe lifting faster, but then we’re noticing that they’re also relapsing more frequently than before, back into depression.”
So right away you get this question: Does the drug treatment actually put people on a more chronic course than before?”
Long-term studies now indicate that of people with major depression, only about 15 percent that are treated with an antidepressant go into remission and stay well for a long period of time.
The remaining 85 percent start having continuing relapses and become chronically depressed.
“By the 1990s, this change in the long term course of depression was so pronounced that finally it was addressed by researchers,” says Whitaker.
“Giovanni Fava from Italy said, “Hey, listen, the course is changing with antidepressants. We’re changing it from an episodic illness to a chronic illness, and we really need to address this.”
Not only that, but the depression is sinking into people [on antidepressants] in a deeper way than before.”
According to Whitaker’s research, this tendency to sensitize the brain to long-term depression appears to be the same both for the earlier tricyclic antidepressants and the newer SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors).
Another famous psycho pharmacologist named Ross Baldessarini at the Harvard Medical School also began asking whether or not these drugs may in fact be depressogenic (causing depression).
Unfortunately, the evidence points that way, and the long-term prognosis when taking antidepressants is quite bleak, as this type of drug treatment has a whopping 85 percent chronic relapse rate.
It’s time for this trend to be broken.
Every year, 230 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled, making them one of the most-prescribed drugs in the United States. Despite all of these prescription drugs being taken, more than one in 20 Americans are depressed, according to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The statistics alone should be a strong indication that what we’re doing is simply not working, and that instead, these drugs are contributing to other serious health problems.
Fortunately, there are other, safer, more effective ways, and some countries are starting to pay heed to the fact that research is actually showing it to be beneficial, rather than bowing to the will of pharmaceutical companies.
What the Research Says about Alternative Treatments for Depression
One study conducted by Duke University in the late 1990’s divided depressed patients into three treatment groups:
Exercise only
Exercise plus antidepressant
Antidepressant drug only
After six weeks, the drug-only group was doing slightly better than the other two groups. However, after 10 months of follow-up, it was the exercise-only group that had the highest remission and stay-well rate.
Some countries are taking these types of research findings seriously, and are starting to base their treatments on the evidence at hand.
The UK, for example, does not routinely recommend antidepressants as the first line of therapy for mild to moderate depression anymore, and doctors there can write out a prescription to see an exercise counselor instead.
“With that prescription… you now get either a reduced rate or a free rate at a gym for six months,” Whitaker explains. “Part of the exercise might be “green gyms”… gardening outside, nature walks, repairing trails, hiking trails. And they are finding that people really like this. People comply with it…
People who have gone through this course and have been prescribed exercise, they say that rather than seeing themselves as a victim of depression, and helpless before it -- that they have this sort of biological problem they can’t do anything about -- they say, “Aha, I can make a change, I can do something. It’s in my willpower to do something that will help this problem lift.”
So it empowers the patient in a different way that drugs do not.”
Since 2007, when this new program was first introduced, the rate of British doctors prescribing exercise for depression has increased from about 4 percent to about 25 percent.
Studies on exercise as a treatment for depression are also showing that there is a strong correlation between improved mood and aerobic capacity. So there’s a growing acceptance that the mind-body connection is very real, and that maintaining good physical health can significantly lower your risk of developing depression in the first place.
Two Side Effects of Antidepressants You Need to Be Aware of
“There are two side effects or risks that really need to be addressed, and that everybody should be thinking about, that show up in the scientific literature,” Whitaker says.
“The first risk is that you’ll convert from unipolar depression to bipolar depression.
… One of the things we’ve seen with the use of the SSRIs is this incredible, extraordinary boom in bipolar diagnoses, and that is definitely tied to the widespread use of antidepressants.
Now, in kids, something like 25 to 50 percent of all kids placed on an antidepressant, who stay on that antidepressant for five years, will convert to bipolar illness. With adults, it seems like about 25 percent of long term of users that begin with a diagnosis of unipolar depression will convert to bipolar.
Bipolar used to be a fairly rare disorder but now it’s becoming much more common. Why is this so bad?
Well, when you convert from depression to bipolar, now you’re in a category where you’re often treated with a cocktail of medications including an antipsychotic medication, and long-term bipolar outcomes are really problematic in this country.
Only about 35 percent of bipolar patients are employed. So you see this risk of disability.
So my point is this, when you go on an antidepressant, you do have a risk of having a manic episode and that is a risk of becoming “a bipolar patient,” and at that moment you’re into a much more long-term problematic disorder that does not have a good outcome today.
The second real risk is that there is a lot of evidence compiling [showing] that if you stay on antidepressants for five, ten, fifteen years, there is some real worry with cognitive decline associated with that long term use.”
Most of you have probably heard that depression is due to a “chemical imbalance in your brain,” which these drugs are designed to correct.
Unfortunately for anyone who has ever swallowed this marketing ploy, this is NOT a scientific statement.
“The low serotonin theory arose because they understood how the drugs acted on the brain,” Whitaker explains.
“But it was just a hypothesis borne to try to explain why the drug might be fixing something. They investigated whether people had low serotonin…[But] in 1983, NIMH concluded that there is no evidence that there is anything wrong in the serotonergic system of depressed patients. And this was in 1983 before Prozac was released.
So there was never evidence that people with depression characteristically had low levels of serotonin.
As one doctor I interviewed about this who did some of this research said, “The serotonin theory of depression is comparable to the masturbatory theory of insanity.” It’s just not a scientific statement.”
Making matters worse, if you do not have low serotonin levels when you’re depressed, but you start taking an SSRI drug that blocks the normal reuptake of serotonin, you end up with the very physiological problem the drug is designed to treat –low serotonin levels. Which, ironically, is the state hypothesized to bring on depression in the first place.
According to Dr. Hyman, once your brain has undergone these compensatory adaptations to the drug, your brain operates in a manner that is “both qualitatively and quantitatively different than normal.”
“So these are not normalizing agents, from a scientific point of view,” Whitaker says.
Really they are abnormalizing agents, and once you understand that, you can understand why maybe they might provoke a manic episode; why they might be associated with sexual dysfunction or violence, acathisia, etcetera.
It’s because they in fact are abnormalizing agents.”
Whitaker discusses numerous other areas of confusion and shares many additional facts about the treatments for depression in this interview, so please, if you or anyone you know suffers from depression, do listen to the entire interview, or read through the transcript.
This is vital information that could very well save your life, or the life of someone close to your heart.
Finding an effective treatment for depression is not something to approach lightly, and having the facts about what actually works, and what doesn’t, is imperative.
In addition, below you will find the four cornerstones of healthy living that would be part of any successful treatment plan.
Other Key Factors to Overcoming Depression
Address your stress -- Depression is a very serious condition, however it is not a “disease.” Rather, it’s a sign that your body and your life are out of balance.
This is so important to remember, because as soon as you start to view depression as an “illness,” you think you need to take a drug to fix it. In reality, all you need to do is return balance to your life, and one of the key ways to doing this is addressing stress.
Meditation or yoga can help. Sometimes all you need to do is get outside for a walk. But in addition to that, I also recommend using a system that can help you address emotional issues that you may not even be consciously aware of. For this, my favorite is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). However, if you have depression or serious stress, I believe it would be best to consult with a mental health professional who is also an EFT practitioner to guide you.
Eat a healthy diet -- Another factor that cannot be overlooked is your diet. Foods have an immense impact on your mood and ability to cope and be happy, and eating whole foods as described in my nutrition plan will best support your mental health. Avoiding sugar and grains will help normalize your insulin and leptin levels, which is another powerful tool in addressing depression.
Get plenty of sunshine – Making sure you’re getting enough sunlight exposure to have healthy vitamin D levels is also a crucial factor in treating depression or keeping it at bay. One previous study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were 11 times more prone to be depressed than those who had normal levels. Vitamin D deficiency is actually more the norm than the exception, and has previously been implicated in both psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Mark McAfee is the founder of Organic Pastures, one of the largest producers of raw milk in the United States and clearly, one of the leaders in this industry.
In this interview, McAfee details the many health benefits of raw milk, and explains the process of raw milk production.
As Mark McAfee explains, there’s the raw milk intendedto be consumed raw, and then there’s the raw milk intended to be used for pasteurization, and contrary to popular belief, they are NOT the same.
When buying raw milk, it’s very important to make sure you’re buying milk that has been produced with the intention of being consumed raw, and not just raw milk from conventionally-raised cows that hasn’t gone through the pasteurization process yet.
There’s a vast difference between the quality and safety of milk from organically-raised, grass-fed cows, and conventionally-raised, grain-fed livestock.
How Can You Identify High-Quality Sources of Raw Milk?
Right now, only six states permit the retail sale of raw milk:
California
Connecticut
Maine
Pennsylvania
Washington
Arizona
However, it’s important to realize that each state sets their own standards. California, specifically, has its own special set of standards for raw milk for human consumption, in which farmers must meet or exceed pasteurized milk standards, without pasteurizing.
However, since many raw milk producers are very small farms, and the standards that do exist vary from state to state, how do you go about identifying solid, high-quality producers of raw milk if you can’t just buy it in a store nearby?
This is a complex question since the environmental conditions will vary from location to location, and from season to season. However, there are a few general conditions you should look for, including:
Low pathogenic bacteria count (ie does the farmer test his milk regularly for pathogens?)
The milk is quickly chilled after milking
The milk comes from cows raised naturally, in accordance with the seasons
The cows are mainly grass-fed
The cows are not given antibiotics and growth hormones to increase milk production
Cows are well cared for
If you’re thinking about purchasing milk from a small farmer, it would be very wise to visit the farm in person. Look around and ask questions, such as:
Does the farmer and his family drink the milk themselves?
How long has he been producing raw milk?
Are the cows clean?
What conditions are the cows raised in?
Are there any obvious sanitation questions?
If a cow is covered in filth and manure, stinks, is wet and cold and doesn’t look particularly comfortable, that could be a warning sign that her milk is less than ideal for raw consumption.
Only Healthy Grass-Fed Cows Produce Healthy Raw Milk
Naturally, fresh grasses for foraging are not available year round in many areas of the US, so it’s also important to take a look at what the cows are being fed during winter months. According to McAfee, acceptable winter feed includes dried alfalfa, timothy grass, and other cut pasture or forage that has been dried.
A key point to remember is that cows that are fed a lot of grain and raised under substandard conditions will likely produce milk that is unhealthy to drink raw because grains, antibiotics, growth hormones, and filthy living conditions change the pH balance and the natural bacteria present in her gut, which in turn affects the natural bacteria and pathogens present in her milk.
This is particularly problematic because so many Americans have depressed immune function, leaving any pathogen introduced into your gut free to wreak havoc.
Says McAfee:
“So, as an American citizen going out and finding raw milk, if you have a depressed immune system there is an exceptional challenge there, whereas somebody who is searching out raw milk in California, who has been on raw milk before and their immune system is in pretty good shape, it’s less of a problem.
But if you got a really depressed immune system and… find some bad milk from somebody who is intending their milk to be pasteurized… that’s kind of a marriage made in hell. That’s not a good thing at all.
And that’s where I think a lot of the outbreaks happen.
You see people doing research on the internet saying, “Oh, I have a really depressed immune system. I have common cold. I get irritable bowel syndrome. I got asthma. I got allergies. I need to fix that and they say raw milk will fix it.”
But they don’t have raw milk in their area that’s safe. [Milk] that is intended for people, so they go out and find a local dairy that takes pity on them, and they buy raw milk that is intended for pasteurization, and that’s where you start seeing real problems.”
Like McAfee says, “when you work with cows to produce raw milk, you can’t cheat!”
Why the FDA Doesn't Want You to Have Raw Milk
For a fascinating review of what the current position of the FDA is regarding raw milk I would strongly encourage you to read this recent enlightening article that will reveal some of their hidden agendas
The Many Health Benefits of Raw Milk
Organically-raised, grass-fed milk naturally contains hundreds of healthy, “good” bacteria, including lactobacillus and acidophilus. There are also several coliform families of bacteria. It’s important to realize that there are over 230 different kinds of E. coli., and only two or three of them are actually pathogenic and will cause you to get sick. The rest are actually beneficial for your gut.
Raw milk also contains vitamins, which are virtually eliminated by the pasteurization process of commercial milk. But it’s the presence of beneficial bacteria are what make raw milk such an outstanding food source to promote the growth of healthy bacteria in your intestine, which in turn has a significant, beneficial impact on your overall immune function.
Other health promoting ingredients in raw milk include:
Valuable enzymes that are destroyed during pasteurization. Without them, milk is very difficult to digest. So if you have lactose intolerance, it may very well disappear once you start consuming raw dairy products.
It also contains phosphatase, an enzyme that aids and assists in the absorption of calcium in your bones, and lipase enzyme, which helps to hydrolyze and absorb fats.
Enzymes are deactivated when you get above 120 degrees. By the time you get to 150, 160 degrees, almost all of them are completely inactivated, which is why you will not get ANY of these benefits from pasteurized milk.
Natural butterfat, which is homogenized or removed in pasteurized milk. Without butterfat, it becomes very difficult for your body to absorb and utilize the vitamins and minerals in the water fraction of the milk. Butterfat is also your best source of preformed vitamin A, and contains re-arranged acids with strong anti-carcinogenic properties.
Unfortunately, the FDA and other health agencies do not acknowledge the inherent differences between pasteurized milk and raw milk.
They claim raw milk and pasteurized milk have precisely the same kind of nutritional values, completely disregarding the value of enzymes, the probiotic value of beneficial bacteria, and the importance of healthy fats.
It truly is imperative to recognize that nutrition is a holistic thing.
You cannot take bits and pieces of nutrients and think you’re going to end up with good health. It is in fact the food as a whole that makes it good for you in terms of nutrition.
Says McAfee:
“When you look at the complete assessment of food, raw milk is a rock star when it comes to dietary meaningfulness.”
I agree with McAfee when he says that hopefully, someday, the FDA will come around and acknowledge the fact that we should look at the whole of the food instead of just pieces of the food. Right now, their assessments on most foods are partial and woefully incomplete, and unfortunately, this is having a major, detrimental impact on your health.
Should Humans Drink Cow’s Milk?
Some people believe that cow’s milk is food for calves only, and should not be consumed by humans to begin with.
However, this may be too simplified a view. As McAfee explains:
“Cows have four stomachs, so they can eat grass… They are literally that animal between us and the sun. They are solar sun convertors. They take sunshine expressed as grass on the ground (because the grass obviously grows when the sun hits the ground and [with] water the grass grows).
We can’t eat the grass but the cow can eat the grass, and then we can eat what the cow provides… [which] is very, very nutrient dense and very digestible by humans.”
I believe that’s an important point, and it’s an area of nutrition that few pay any attention to -- the area of biophotons.
But biophoton research explains the underlying principles of why it’s so vital to eat a diet of mostly RAW food, including raw milk.
As you know, without the sun it is virtually impossible for most life forms to exist. For example, we now know that without appropriate sun exposure, you will become deficient in vitamin D, which will have very far ranging consequences for your health.
Vitamin D influences at least 2,000-3,000 genes (that we know of), and without sufficient amounts of vitamin D, your body becomes susceptible to a staggering amount of diseases. But you can absorb sun energy via your food as well as through your skin (although this should not be confused with being able to alter your vitamin D status).
Every living organism emits biophotons or low-level luminescence, and the higher the level of light a cell emits, the greater its vitality and the potential for the transfer of that energy to the individual who eats it.
Hence, the more light a food is able to store, the more nutritious it is.Naturally grown fresh vegetables, for example, and sun-ripened fruits, are rich in light energy.
The capacity to store biophotons is therefore a measure of the quality of your food, and a very strong reason for making sure milk producing cows are allowed to forage for the healthiest, freshest grasses.
What about Raw Milk for Vegans?
As for vegans and strict vegetarians, unfortunately many of them end up not getting sufficient amounts of healthy fats in their diet, which can have a very detrimental effect on their nervous system.
Yes, the plant kingdom does offer some very important fats, but other fats are entirely animal-based, and they complement each other on a functional level. When all animal-based foods are excluded from your diet, you run the risk of developing a deficiency, which can have both physiological and psychological consequences.
In terms of consuming an animal-based food that is humane, drinking grass-fed milk from an organic dairy farm is perhaps one of your healthiest alternatives for the best of both worlds.
Pasteurized milk, on the other hand, does not offer any of the benefits available from raw milk, such as healthy fats, and a good case can be made that it does not fit the nutritional needs of humans.
I strongly recommend you avoid pasteurized milk entirely.
Explanation and Position of Organic Pastures on A-2 Milk and A-2 Testing
About five years ago, OPDC attempted to have the A-2 Corporation test all of our cows for A-2 genetic traits. At that time the “A-2 Corporation” was doing business in the Upper Midwest in the USA. The A-2 Corporation refused to test any cows unless all the milk was branded under the A-2 Corporation brand. They also required that all A-2 Corporation milk be pasteurized.
Because OPDC is 100% organic and never pasteurize our raw milk….that was the end of any A-2 testing idea for OPDC. The A-2 testing mandates andideas broke all of our rules.
About a year ago, OPDC again attempted to contact the A-2 Corporation in an attempt to have its cows tested for A-2 Genetic traits. It was discovered that the A-2 Corporation had gone bankrupt in North America and had just skeletal operations in New Zealand. It took months to get an email through or contact via phone.The answer from A-2 was that they were not providing the patented test to anyone at that time and that perhaps in the future that the test may become available.
As of March 2010, the A-2 Corporation is not providing tests to American Dairymen.
There are some people in the raw milk movement that say that they have a way to get cows tested for A-2 traits, but it is questionable whether these tests are actually the original A-2 test and these people want lots of money to do the test.
It is also still very questionable whether the claims made by A-2 are accurate.The authors of “The Devil in the Milk” book claim that cows made a genetic split about 5,000 years ago and that Holsteins and some other breeds were more domesticated because of calmness and other traits ( they were to become more A-1 dominant ). We have no way of knowing that this is true or not. No other research confirms these historical concepts. Also…it is claimed that A-2 cows ( Jerseys )produce milk which is far better than cows that are tested and found to be A-1 genetics.
We disagree with this analysis and remain unconvinced of its value. If the split occurred 5000 years ago and A-1 is the source of modern heart disease and makes autism worse….then this does not match up with other researchers at all. Modern diseases began with grain feeding and confinement just 75 to 100 years ago. Modern diseases are much more likely to be associated with modern processing of milk and lack of grass feeding etc.
When evaluating the “67th amino acid” differences in A-2 milk, we ask a much bigger question, whenpasteurized milk is observed microscopically it is a massive destruction zone. It looks as if it has been hit with a bomb and everything is dead, broken and twisted. Everything is in little pieces and nothing is alive.
How can a slight 67th position nuance of a single amino acid matter at all in the bigger scheme of massive amino acid changes during pasteurized milk destruction. This makes zero sense.
At OPDC about 50% of our cows are Jersey and 30% are Jersey-Holstein crosses. The rest are Holstein.
At OPDC we believe that the cow is a part of the environment and her milk reflects her conditions and her feed. We feed 100% pastures all of the time. These conditions will reflect in the raw milk that she produces.
Presently, we are being approached to test our cows for A-2 traits by people that do not work for A-2 Corporation. These tests are very expensive and we have no idea what the results would mean or what value they would bring or if they are actually A-2 tests at all? Who knows what they are.
For now, at OPDC, the jury is out on A-2 v. A-1 cows. We are approached every week by people that try to sell us something new to make our products better. We are always open to new ideas….but most of the time we stick with the very oldest of ideas. We stick with mother nature and grass and sunshine. We are not going to slaughter or sell off our perfectly good cows based on one book and a concept which has not been verified by anyone except for the authors.
Both of the founders of A-2 are now dead and no one is verifying their work.
In our calculation the very best milk is raw milk from cows grazed on green pastures and tested to assure that no bad bugs are present. This is the raw milk that makes people healthy, rebuilds human immune systems regardless of animal genetics.
The FDA will not allow OPDC to explain what things raw milk improves medically.
Trust us….Grass fed, tested, Raw Milk is a highly effective medical food.
For more information, I urge you to listen to the interview in its entirety above. The full transcript is also available.
Mark McAfee’s experience and knowledge base on this topic is phenomenal, and the interview covers many of the facets involved in raising healthy cows and producing healthy raw milk, as well as the numerous health benefits, and potential pitfalls, of raw milk.
This is no exaggeration. See the truth about why high fructose corn syrup and gluten create health havoc wherever they’re found...
HEALTH BOMB #1: High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has become a modern-day plague. Not only does it contribute to our obesity epidemic, but it has also been linked to diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
Sadly, the average consumption of fructose has doubled between 1980 and 1994. Soft drinks and some fruit drinks are a major source of HFCS, but it is also found in many other products, from crackers to salad dressing.
Fructose contains zero enzymes, vitamins or minerals — and it leeches micronutrients from your body. It doesn’t metabolize the same as sugar and because it’s often consumed as a liquid, it’s negative effects are multiplied.
Why is it found in so many products? Because, after air, water, and salt, it’s the cheapest ingredient in the American food chain (and we know how the food industry likes to save money…)
I’d also urge you to be on the lookout for HFCS in its many “disguises” — conveniently (for the food industry) labeled as chicory, inulin, iso glucose, glucose-fructose syrup, fruit fructose, and others.
Another major “health torpedo” you want to watch out for is…
HEALTH BOMB #2: Gluten — Wheat (and other grains containing gluten) is NOT your friend. My experience has shown that you could well be one of the estimated 1 in 10 people who have at least a subclinical intolerance to gluten protein. This is actually a food allergy.
I recommend avoiding gluten, even the organic whole-grain types.
Gluten intolerance has been linked to miscarriage, intestinal disease (including irritable bowel syndrome), malnutrition, rheumatoid arthritis, and developmental delay in children, just to name a few. Oftentimes, your gluten sensitivity may present with various unexplained symptoms.
Getting rid of these two health bombs will go a long way toward improving your health.
The sweetest scandal in the history of American health
Ever wonder what our former Secretary of Defense did before he got into politics?
Well years ago, he was the fearless leader of a company called GD Searle Corp. that developed a "miracle sweetener" called aspartame. (Yes, the same stuff in those little blue packets.)
For years, this company tried in vain to get aspartame approved. But no one wanted to go near the stuff! The FDA refused to approve it for 16 years.
Then, in the early '80s, "Rummy the Magnificent"..[Donald Rumsfelt] moved into the political arena. And one of the first moves he made was to appoint a new FDA commissioner. In 1981, the new appointee approved aspartame for the good old boys back at GD Searle... despite the clinically proven dangers.
Before long, aspartame was everywhere, from soda to salad dressing! Now let's look at what it's "contributed" to America's health...
After receiving some 10,000 consumer complaints, the FDA compiled a list of 92 symptoms linked to aspartame -- including death.
Other symptoms include headaches, memory loss, seizures, vision loss, coma, and cancer. It also appears to worsen or mimic the symptoms of such conditions as fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, ADD, diabetes, Alzheimer's, chronic fatigue, and depression...
Why so many? It could be because aspartame attacks your body at the cellular level so it can negate all kinds of medications Americans take, including antidepressants, Coumadin, cardiac drugs, hormones, insulin, vaccines, and many others.
It is a deadly neurotoxic drug masquerading as a harmless additive.
I can hear you asking: "Ok Dr. Douglass, so what can I sprinkle into my coffee?"
Let's run through the usual suspects then I'll tell you what I've been using...
SUGAR: A spoonful once in a while is fine, but in time, too much sugar can lead to diabetes, which will lead to heart disease, renal disease, peripheral vascular disease, diabetic retinitis (blindness), diabetic peripheral neuropathy and the list goes on and on. (Even so, next to aspartame, sugar looks almost attractive!)
SUCRALOSE: A very dangerous new chemical -- because in order to make sucralose, chlorine is added to sugar! Ever spilled chlorine bleach on your skin? No wonder that research by the Sucralose Toxicity Information Center showed that years of sucralose use can lead to serious compromise of the immune system and neurological disorders.
SACCHARINE: Yuck. Despite those famous animal studies, I actually don't count saccharine as much of a cancer threat to humans. But face it, saccharine tastes like the chemical experiment it is. Enough said.
STEVIA: Yes, it's natural. Yes, it's safe. But no, it tastes nothing like sugar. Okay for some, but not in my coffee!
AND THE WINNER IS:
You've probably never heard of it. It's called erythritol. And here's the best news: erythritol is natural, virtually calorie-free, tastes like sugar, doesn't affect blood sugar or insulin levels, reduces dental plaque -- and unlike xylitol, has no laxative side-effects. Available as Smart Sweet, it gets the Dr. Douglass nod!
The food giants would certainly like to keep these discoveries hush-hush. But now that you know the facts, you can kiss those killer blue packets good-bye forever -- and satisfy that sweet tooth with a delicious, natural, safe alternative.
ANNOTATION:
Does anyone see the 'links' all these corporate Monsters have? They are all inter-connected to one another. Rumsfelt, Cheney, Bush...etc. etc. It goes on for miles!
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Death by sugar may not be an overstatement—evidence is mounting that sugar is THE MAJOR FACTOR causing obesity and chronic disease.
Is sugar a sweet old friend that is secretly plotting your demise?
There is a vast sea of research suggesting that it is. Science has now shown us, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that sugar in your food, in all its myriad of forms, is taking a devastating toll on your health.
The single largest source of calories for Americans comes from sugar—specifically high fructose corn syrup. Just take a look at the sugar consumption trends of the past 300 years:[1]
In 1700, the average person consumed about 4 pounds of sugar per year.
In 1800, the average person consumed about 18 pounds of sugar per year.
In 1900, individual consumption had risen to 90 pounds of sugar per year.
In 2009, more than 50 percent of all Americans consume one-half pound of sugar PER DAY—translating to a whopping 180 pounds of sugar per year!
Sugar is loaded into your soft drinks, fruit juices, sports drinks, and hidden in almost all processed foods—from bologna to pretzels to Worcestershire sauce to cheese spread. And now most infant formula has the sugar equivalent of one can of Coca-Cola, so babies are being metabolically poisoned from day one if taking formula.
Today, 32 percent of Americans are obese and an additional one-third are overweight. Compare that to 1890, when a survey of white males in their fifties revealed an obesity rate of just 3.4 percent. In 1975, the obesity rate in America had reached 15 percent, and since then it has doubled.
Carrying excess weight increases your risk for deadly conditions such as heart disease, kidney disease and diabetes.
In 1893, there were fewer than three cases of diabetes per 100,000 people in the United States. Today, diabetes strikes almost 8,000 out of every 100,000 people.[1]
You don’t have to be a physician or a scientist to notice America’s expanding waistline. All you have to do is stroll through a shopping mall or a schoolyard, or perhaps glance in the mirror.
Sugars 101 -- Basics of How to Avoid Confusion on this Important Topic
It is easy to become confused by the various sugars and sweeteners. So here is a basic overview:
Dextrose, fructose and glucose are all monosaccharides, known as simple sugars. The primary difference between them is how your body metabolizes them. Glucose and dextrose are essentially the same sugar. However, food manufacturers usually use the term “dextrose” in their ingredient list.
The simple sugars can combine to form more complex sugars, like the disaccharide sucrose (table sugar), which is half glucose and half fructose.
High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.
Ethanol (drinking alcohol) is not a sugar, although beer and wine contain residual sugars and starches, in addition to alcohol.
Sugar alcohols like xylitol, glycerol, sorbitol, maltitol, mannitol, and erythritol are neither sugars nor alcohols but are becoming increasingly popular as sweeteners. They are incompletely absorbed from your small intestine, for the most part, so they provide fewer calories than sugar but often cause problems with bloating, diarrhea and flatulence.
Sucralose (Splenda) is NOT a sugar, despite its sugar-like name and deceptive marketing slogan, “made from sugar.” It’s a chlorinated artificial sweetener in line with aspartame and saccharin, with detrimental health effects to match.
Agave syrup, falsely advertised as “natural,” is typically HIGHLY processed and is usually 80 percent fructose. The end product does not even remotely resemble the original agave plant.
Honey is about 53 percent fructose[2], but is completely natural in its raw form and has many health benefits when used in moderation, including as many antioxidants as spinach.
Stevia is a highly sweet herb derived from the leaf of the South American stevia plant, which is completely safe (in its natural form). Lo han (or luohanguo) is another natural sweetener, but derived from a fruit.
All Sugars are Not Equal
Glucose is the form of energy you were designed to run on. Every cell in your body, every bacterium—and in fact, every living thing on the Earth—uses glucose for energy.
But as a country, sucrose is no longer the sugar of choice. It’s now fructose.
If your diet was like that of people a century ago, you’d consume about 15 grams per day—a far cry from the 73 grams per day the typical person gets from sweetened drinks. In vegetables and fruits, it’s mixed in with vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and beneficial phytonutrients, all which moderate the negative metabolic effects. Amazingly, 25 percent of people actually consume more than 130 grams of fructose per day.
Making matters worse, all of the fiber has been removed from processed foods, so there is essentially no nutritive value at all. And the very products most people rely on to lose weight—the low-fat diet foods—are often the ones highest in fructose.
It isn’t that fructose itself is bad—it is the MASSIVE DOSES you’re exposed to that make it dangerous.
There are two overall reasons fructose is so damaging:
Food and beverage manufacturers began switching their sweeteners from sucrose to corn syrup in the 1970s when they discovered that HFCS was not only far cheaper to make, it’s about 20 percent sweeter than conventional table sugar that has sucrose.
HFCS contains the same two sugars as sucrose but is more metabolically risky to you, due to its chemical form.
The fructose and the glucose are not bound together in HFCS, as they are in table sugar, so your body doesn’t have to break it down. Therefore, the fructose is absorbed immediately, going straight to your liver.
Too Much Fructose Creates a Metabolic Disaster in Your Body
Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, has been a pioneer in decoding sugar metabolism. His work has highlighted some major differences in how different sugars are broken down and used by the human body.
I highly recommend watching Lustig’s lecture in its entirety if you want to learn how fructose is ruining your health biochemically.
As I mentioned earlier, after eating fructose, most of the metabolic burden rests on your liver. This is NOT the case with glucose, of which your liver breaks down only 20 percent. Nearly every cell in your body utilizes glucose, so it’s normally “burned up” immediately after consumption.
So where does all of this fructose go, once you consume it?
Onto your thighs. It is turned into FAT (VLDL and triglycerides), which means more fat deposits throughout your body.
Eating Fructose is Far Worse than Eating Fat
However, the physiological problems of fructose metabolism extend well beyond a couple of pant sizes:
Fructose elevates uric acid, which decreases nitric oxide, raises angiotensin, and causes your smooth muscle cells to contract, thereby raising your blood pressure and potentially damaging your kidneys.[1]
Increased uric acid also leads to chronic, low-level inflammation, which has far-reaching consequences for your health. For example, chronically inflamed blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes; also, a good deal of evidence exists that some cancers are caused by chronic inflammation. (See the next section for more about uric acid.)
Fructose tricks your body into gaining weight by fooling your metabolism—it turns off your body’s appetite-control system. Fructose does not appropriately stimulate insulin, which in turn does not suppress ghrelin (the “hunger hormone”) and doesn’t stimulate leptin (the “satiety hormone”), which together result in your eating more and developing insulin resistance.[3][4]
Fructose rapidly leads to weight gain and abdominal obesity (“beer belly”), decreased HDL, increased LDL, elevated triglycerides, elevated blood sugar, and high blood pressure—i.e., classic metabolic syndrome.
Fructose metabolism is very similar to ethanol metabolism, which has a multitude of toxic effects, including NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). It’s alcohol without the buzz.
These changes are not seen when humans or animals eat starch (or glucose), suggesting that fructose is a “bad carbohydrate” when consumed in excess of 25 grams per day. It is probably the one factor responsible for the partial success of many “low-carb” diets.
One of the more recent findings that surprised researchers is that glucose actuallyacceleratesfructose absorption, making the potential health risks from HFCS even more profound.[1]
You can now see why fructose is the number one contributing factor to the current obesity epidemic.
NaturalNews) Mainstream health care isn't based on "health" or "caring." It's actually based on an ingrained system of medical mythology that's practiced -- and defended -- by those who profit from the continuation of sickness and disease. This system of medical mythology might also simply be called "lies", and today I'm sharing with NaturalNews readers the top ten lies that are still followed and promoted under mainstream health care in America today.
DID YOU KNOW: True fact: It is illegal in every U.S. state for a doctor to recommend any vitamin, nutrient or food for the prevention or treatment of any disease. Doing so can cause a doctor to have his medical license permanently revoked. How crazy and outdated is that?
Lie #1) Vaccines make you healthy
Vaccines have emerged as the greatest and most insidious mythology yet fabricated by western medicine. The idea that vaccines protect you from infectious disease is blatantly false in the long term because this year's flu shot actually makes you more susceptible to next year's influenza (http://www.naturalnews.com/028538_s...).
On top of that, even the theoretical short-term effectiveness of vaccines is dwarfed by the far more effective protection offered by vitamin D and other immune-modulating nutrients. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027385_V...)
Lie #2) Pharmaceuticals prevent disease
The big push by Big Pharma is now focused on treating healthy people with drugs as if pharmaceuticals were nutrients that could somehow prevent disease. This is the new push with cholesterol drugs: Give 'em to everyone, whether they have high cholesterol or not!
But pharmaceuticals don't prevent disease, and medications are not vitamins. Your body has no biological need for any pharmaceuticals at all. People who believe they need pharmaceuticals have simply been the victims of "fabricated consent" engineered by Big Pharma's clever advertising and P.R. spin.
Lie #3) Doctors are experts in health
Doctors don't even study health; they study disease. Modern doctors are taught virtually nothing about nutrition, wellness or disease prevention. Expecting a doctor to guide you on health issues is sort of like expecting your accountant to pilot a jet airliner -- it's simply not something he or she has ever been trained in.
That's not to say doctors aren't intelligent people. Most of them have high Iqs. But even a genius can't teach you something they know nothing about.
Lie #4) You have no role in your own healing
Doctors, drug companies and health authorities all want you to believe that your health is determined by their interventions. If you believe them, you have virtually no role in your own health or healing -- it's all managed by their drugs, their screening, their surgeries and their interventions.
Lie #5) Disease is a matter of bad luck or bad genes
Western medicine wants you to believe in the mythology of spontaneous disease -- disease that strikes without cause. This is equivalent to saying that disease is some sort of voodoo black magic and that patients have no way to prevent disease through their own diets or lifestyle choices.
It's funny, actually: Western medicine claims to be driven by scientific, rational thinking, and yet the entire industry still fails to acknowledge that chronic disease always has a cause and that most of the time, that cause has everything to do with nutritional deficiencies, exposure to toxic chemicals and a lack of exercise.
Disease is almost never a matter of bad luck or bad genes.
Lie #6) Screening equals prevention
Western medicine doesn't believe in disease prevention. Rather, the industry believes in screening while calling it prevention. But screening isn't prevention by even the wildest stretch of the imagination. In fact, virtually all the popular screening methodologies actually promote diseases.
Mammography, for example, emits so much radiation that it causes breast cancer in tens of thousands of women each year (http://www.naturalnews.com/027558_m...). Imaging dyes used in radiological scans can cause horrific side effects, and psychiatric "disorder" screening is little more than a thinly-disguised patient recruitment scheme disguised as medicine.
Real prevention of disease must involve disease prevention through nutrition, patient education about the causes of disease and lifelong changes in eating habits. Yet western medicine teaches absolutely none of these things. Heck, it doesn't even believe in such ideas.
Lie #7) Health insurance will keep you healthy
This is a favorite lie of those who recently pushed for the Big Pharma-sponsored health care reform that has swept across America. The lie supposes that merely having health insurance will provide some sort of magical protection against disease. But in reality, health insurance doesn't make you healthy! It is only YOU and your choices about foods, exposures to toxic chemicals, pursuit of exercise and time in nature that can make you healthy.
Health insurance is, in effect, a wager that you will get sick. How does gambling on your sickness provide any protection whatsoever for your health? It doesn't. Personally, I'd rather bet on health than sickness, and the way to do that is to invest in nutritional supplements, organic produce, superfoods, physical fitness and non-toxic personal care products.
Lie #8) Hospitals are places of health and healing
If you want to stay healthy or get healthy, a hospital is the very last place you want to find yourself: They are unhappy, unhealthy places that are infested with antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Hospitals usually serve disease-promoting foods and lack health-enhancing sunlight, and potentially deadly mistakes with pharmaceuticals or surgical procedures now appear to be frighteningly common in U.S. hospitals.
Certainly, emergency rooms in hospitals play an important role in urgent care for injuries and accidents -- and emergency room physicians do an amazing job saving lives -- but for people with chronic, degenerative disease, a hospital is a very dangerous place to be. Unless you really need immediate critical care, try to avoid hospitals.
Lie #9) Conventional medicine is "advanced" state-of-the-art medicine
Even though doctors and health authorities try to pass off western medicine as being "advanced" or "modern," the whole system is actually pathetically outdated and stuck in the germ theory of disease. Western medicine has yet to even acknowledge the role of nutrition in preventing disease -- something that has been scientifically documented for at least the last several decades. Western medicine fails to acknowledge mind-body medicine and hilariously believes the mind plays virtually no role in healing.
Neither does western medicine acknowledge the bio energy field of living systems, nor that organ transplants carry memories, nor that living food is qualitatively different from dead food. Seriously: Conventional doctors still believe that dead food is exactly the same as living food! (And the USDA food pyramid still makes no distinction between the two...)
"Modern" medicine isn't so modern, it turns out. It is, in fact, hopelessly outdated and desperately needs to upgrade its approach to health and wellness if it hopes to survive the next hundred years.
Lie #10) More research is needed to find "cures"
This lie is especially hilarious because western medicine does not believe in any "cure" for any disease. They aren't even looking for cures! This lie has been repeated since the 1960's, when cancer scientists claimed they were only a few years away from curing cancer. Today, four decades later, can you think of a single major disease that western medicine has cured? There aren't any.
That's because drug companies make money from sick people, not cured people. A patient cured is a patient lost. It is far more profitable to keep patients sick and pretend to "manage" their disease through a lifetime of pharmaceuticals. So when drug companies and disease non-profits claim to be searching for a "cure," what they're really doing is taking your money to fund more drug research to patent more medications that don't actually cure anything.
Remember this the next time you're asked to donate to some search for "the cure." The cures already exist in nutrition, herbal remedies and naturopathic medicine, but Big Pharma and the conventional medicine cartel isn't interested in real cures -- they only want to promote the idea of a cure while pumping patients full of drugs that don't cure anything.
Beyond the ten lies
When it comes to western health care, there are more than 10 lies, of course, but these big 10 lies are perhaps the most relevant to your own health decisions. By avoiding being suckered in by these lies, you can take charge of your own health and avoid the health care scam by staying healthy!
Staying healthy isn't as difficult as you think, and it doesn't require health insurance or disease screening. It only requires making informed, intelligent decisions about what to eat, what to put on your skin and how to get more sunshine and physical exercise. Once you do these basic things, you'll find that you are no longer held victim by a western medicine health care system based on lies and outdated medical mythology.
It's time for a revolution in medicine... A revolution that finally advances past the mental roadblock of a system of medical mythology stuck in the 1940's. Don't get me wrong, 1940's medicine was great in the 1940's. But this is no longer the 1940's, and the germ theory of disease is hopelessly outdated when it comes to the primary diseases that are striking the population today. Yet the profiteers of our dishonest, outmoded health care system are doing everything in their power to keep us all stranded in the past, a past based on treating the body like a chemical battleground and attacking every disease with a patented pharmaceutical.
That whole approach to health care is so far outdated that it's hilarious it can still be pushed with a straight face. No wonder doctors only spend an average of two minutes with patients these days. That's the limit of how long they can hold their faces without breaking out in laughter at how stupid this whole "treat the symptoms and forget the causes" approach to health care really is. Even they know it! That's why most doctors actually eat superfoods and take vitamins themselves, even if they never dare suggest it to patients.
True fact: It is illegal in every U.S. state for a doctor to recommend any vitamin, nutrient or food for the prevention or treatment of any disease. Doing so can cause a doctor to have his medical license permanently revoked. How crazy and outdated is that?
In the latest volley of the US Food and Drug Administration’s bizarre war on scientific freedom of speech, the FDA has sent a Warning Letter to the president and CEO of Diamond Foods stating that the firm’s packages of shelled walnuts are “in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.”
Why? As Bill Faloon, co-founder of the Life Extension Foundation, explains in a powerful new investigative article, Diamond Foods, a processor and distributor of nuts, dared to list some of the health benefits of walnuts on its website. The FDA says that the walnuts are being “promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs because these products are intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.”
In other words, if you say that a food is healthy and may help protect against heart disease, or ease arthritis or inflammation, your words have magically changed that food into a drug, and that’s illegal.
Life Extension magazine has published no fewer than fifty-seven articles that describe the health benefits of walnuts, each article supported with copious scientific references. Yet the FDA says the walnuts “are not generally recognized as safe and effective,” that the manufacturer’s “unauthorized health claims” have caused the walnuts to become “misbranded,” which makes them subject to government “seizure or injunction”!
As Bill Faloon notes (with every statement carefully supported by scientific journals and publications):
There is a sharply reduced incidence of heart disease in those who consume walnuts.
Walnuts provide a unique blend of polyunsaturated fatty acids (including omega-3s), along with nutrients like gamma tocopherol that have demonstrated heart health benefits.
Even moderate consumption of walnuts offers significant reductions in dangerous LDL cholesterol and improvement in the lipoprotein profile.
Walnuts protect against coronary artery disease and atherosclerosis because they contain key nutrients like arginine, polyphenols, and omega-3 fatty acids.
The National Library of Medicine database contains no fewer than thirty-five peer-reviewed published papers supporting a claim that ingesting walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce heart attack risk—yet the FDA, the federal agency responsible for protecting the health of the American public, would apparently rather support pharmaceutical manufacturers’ rights. Imagine what would happen to drug profits if everyone ate walnuts for heart health instead of taking expensive medications!
As Bill Faloon says, the verbiage in the FDA’s Warning Letter to the walnut manufacturer “makes it clear that the FDA does not even consider the underlying science when censoring truthful non-misleading health claims.”
Moreover, Faloon continues, “FDA has issued waves of warning letters to companies making foods (pomegranate juice, green tea, and walnuts) that protect against atherosclerosis. The FDA is blatantly demanding that these companies stop informing the public about the scientifically validated health benefits these foods provide.”
These latest FDA outrages are on top of an earlier attack on cherry growers. In that case, the cherry growers cited excellent scientific research from places like Harvard indicating that cherries reduce inflammation and pain. The FDA sent an injunction letter threatening the usual legal penalties—including jail—if this truthful dissemination of scientific research did not stop immediately.
What is the FDA thinking? Why is it blatantly disregarding its own mission of educating the public and promoting health? Why is it acting like an ignorant bully?
Potato Chips . . . as Health Food?
Faloon points to Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of the food and softdrink giant PepsiCo, makers of Pepsi-Cola®, as an example of the strange double standard the FDA seems to be applying. Frito-Lay sells $12 billion a year of products that include Lays® Potato Chips, Doritos®, Tostitos®, Cheetos®, and Fritos®.
You might not associate these mostly deep fried snack foods as being good for you, but as Faloon mentions, the FDA has no problem allowing the Frito-Lay website to state the following:
Frito-Lay snacks start with real farm-grown ingredients. You might be surprised at how much good stuff goes into your favorite snack. Good stuff like potatoes, which naturally contain vitamin C and essential minerals. Or corn, one of the world’s most popular grains, packed with Thiamin, vitamin B6, and Phosphorous—all necessary for healthy bones, teeth, nerves and muscles.
And it’s not just the obvious ingredients. Our all-natural sunflower, corn and soybean oils contain good polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, which help lower total and LDL “bad” cholesterol and maintain HDL “good” cholesterol levels, which can support a healthy heart. Even salt, when eaten in moderation as part of a balanced diet, is essential for the body.
In other words, Frito-Lay can make health claims about its processed fried foods, in opposition to real scientific research, with no repercussions whatsoever, but Diamond can’t make scientifically substantiated claims about shelled walnuts, a health superfood. As Faloon notes:
“For the FDA to allow Frito-Lay to pretend there are heart benefits to ingesting their high-calorie snack products, while censoring the ability of walnut companies to make scientifically substantiated claims, is tantamount to treason against the health of the American public. The simple fact is that walnuts are healthy to eat, while carbohydrates fried in fat are not. FDA permits companies selling disease-promoting foods to deceive the public, while it suppresses the dissemination of peer-reviewed published scientific information.”
Two Things You Can Do
As our regular newsletter readers are aware, on March 23 a bipartisan bill was introduced into the House of Representatives called the Free Speech about Science Act (HR 4913). This landmark legislation, promoted by ANH-USA, protects basic free speech rights, ends censorship of science, and enables the natural health products community to share peer-reviewed scientific findings with the public.
The Free Speech about Science bill has the potential to transform medical practice by educating the public about the real science behind natural health.
For this very reason, the bill will have opposition. It will be opposed by the FDA since it restricts their ability to censor the dissemination of published scientific data. It will be opposed by drug companies fearing competition from natural health approaches based on diet, dietary supplements, and lifestyle.
We also have a new Action Alert for you. This one will let you contact Congress to express your outrage about the FDA’s censorship of the scientific evidence supporting the health claims surrounding walnuts (and green tea, and pomegranates, and cherries!). It will also let you tell the FDA what you think about their hypocritical support of deep fried potatoes and corn chips as being “heart-healthy,” while denouncing the scientific evidence of walnuts’ health benefits.
If possible please send in both letters, one supporting the Free Speech About Science Act and the other expressing your opposition to the FDA’s outrageous attack on walnuts (not to mention cherries, green tea, and other natural products). We need to hammer home our message in defense of free speech, common sense, health freedom, and natural health.
“U.S. federal health authorities recommended … that doctors suspend using Rotarix, one of two vaccines licensed in the U.S. against rotavirus, saying the vaccine is contaminated with material from a pig virus,” CNN reports.
The Rotarix vaccine, which is made by GlaxoSmithKline and was approved by the FDA in 2008, has already been given to about 1 million U.S. children along with 30 million worldwide. The vaccine was found to contain DNA from porcine circovirus 1.
“The FDA learned about the contamination after an academic research team using a novel technique to look for viruses in a range of vaccines found the material in GlaxoSmithKline's product and told the company,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg told CNN.
One million U.S. children, and about 30 million worldwide, have already received GlaxoSmithKline’s Rotarix vaccine. Now a research team has discovered it is contaminated with “a substantial amount” of DNA from a pig virus.
What is pig virus DNA doing in a vaccine intended to prevent rotavirus disease, which causes severe diarrhea and dehydration?
It’s anybody’s guess, although CNN reported that GlaxoSmitthKline detected the substance in the cell bank and the seed used to make the vaccine, “suggesting its presence from the early stages of vaccine development.”
It is actually common for vaccines to contain various animal matter, including foreign animal tissues containing genetic material (DNA/RNA), but even FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg told CNN:
"It [Pig virus DNA] should not be in this vaccine product and we want to understand how it got there.
It's not an easy call and we spent many long hours debating the pros and cons but, because we have an alternative product and because the background rates of this disease are not so severe in this country, we felt that the judicious thing to do was to take a pause, to really ask the critical questions about what this material was doing in the vaccine, how it got there."
Disturbing Findings in Rotarix and Two Other Common Childhood Vaccines
Dr. Eric Delwart is the researcher who, along with colleagues, made the discovery of contamination in Rotarix. Their intent was reportedly to “show that live attenuated vaccine only contained the expected viral genomes and no other,” but what they found told a different story.
Using new technology to test eight infectious attenuated viral vaccines, the results showed three of the vaccines contained “unexpected viral sequences”:
A measles vaccine was found to contain low levels of the retrovirus avian leukosis virus
Rotateq, Merck’s rotavirus vaccine, was found to contain a virus similar to simian (monkey) retrovirus
Rotarix (GlaxoSmithKine’s rotavirus vaccine) was found to contain “significant levels” of porcine cirovirus 1
So in their tests, nearly 40 percent of the vaccines they tested contained viral contaminants. The implications of these findings on the alleged safety of the vaccine supply remains to be seen, but clearly there is contamination occurring that was a complete surprise to researchers, health officials and vaccine manufacturers alike.
“There are lots of questions about how the manufacturer of Rotarix vaccine and the FDA both missed the pig virus DNA contaminating the original seed stock and all doses of Rotarix vaccine given to more than one million American children in the past few years.
Is there state-of-the-art technology that is being used by private laboratories but not by drug companies and the FDA?
Why did the independent team of scientists, who found the contamination, notify the vaccine manufacturer first rather than also immediately reporting their finding directly to the FDA?
What about the significance of finding bird viral DNA in measles vaccine and the monkey viral DNA in RotaTeq vaccine?”
There are clearly a lot of unanswered questions right now. At the very least, it certainly makes you wonder what other “unknown” contaminants are lurking in vaccines. At worst, we could be injecting children with substances that could potentially cause serious health problems down the road.
Animal Ingredients Common in Vaccines
You should know that it is very common for vaccine manufacturers to use cells from animals and birds in their manufacturing process.
To put this in perspective, Barbara Loe Fisher has explained what animal material is par for the course in manufacturing the Rotarix vaccine for your children:
“Rotarix is a genetically engineered vaccine that GSK created by isolating human rotavirus strain infecting a child in Cincinnati and using African Green monkey kidney cells to produce the original viral seed stock from which all Rotarix vaccine has been made.
In the FDA licensing process, Rotarix had to meet certain FDA standards, that included demonstrating the vaccine was not contaminated with, for example TSE (Transmissable Spongiform Encephalopathy or “mad cow” disease, a brain wasting disease) or with cow viruses because bovine (cow) serum was used to prepare the original viral seed stock.
Porcine trypsin, an enzyme in the pancreatic juice of a pig, was also used to make the viral seed stock.”
So the fact that Rotarix contains animal material is not a surprise … it’s the type of animal material, an unexpected variety, that has even the FDA raising their eyebrows.
Why it’s Dangerous to Have Various Animal DNA in Vaccines …
Both the FDA and GlaxoSmithKline spokespeople continue to state that no safety risk has been uncovered from the contamination, at least not yet.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, said “a substantial amount” of the DNA was found in the vaccine. But, he stressed, “there is no evidence that it causes any disease. … There is no evidence that it ever does anything.”
Dr. Paul Offit added, “The PCV1 virus they found is an orphan virus, i.e., it is not associated with disease”.
History has shown that it can indeed be very dangerous when an animal virus unintentionally enters the vaccine supply.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the polio vaccine, which is still given in the United States, typically four times during a child's first 16 months of life, was widely contaminated with the monkey virus, SV40, which had gotten into the vaccine during the manufacturing process (monkey kidney cells, where SV40 thrived, were used to develop polio vaccines).
In lab tests, the virus was found to cause several different types of cancer, including brain cancer, and now SV40 is showing up in a variety of human cancers such as lung, brain, bone and lymphatic.
The virus is even showing up in children too young to have received the contaminated vaccine, and some experts are now suggesting the contaminated virus may have been in the polio vaccine up until as late as 1999.
It is because of risks like this that Barbara Loe Fisher said:
“With mounting evidence that cross-species transfer of viruses can occur, the United States should no longer be using animal tissues to produce vaccines.”
This is also the same reason why Donald Miller, a cardiac surgeon and professor of surgery at the University of Washington, suggests in his more User-Friendly Vaccination Schedule that if you choose to get your child vaccinated against polio, you request only an inactivated (dead) virus vaccine that is cultured in human cells, not monkey kidney cells.
The United States no longer uses the live oral polio vaccine, so parents don't really have to ask for the injected version. However, if you live internationally, this is still an issue.
Are the Benefits of Rotarix Worth the Risks?
Even without a potential contamination scare, there are serious risks to every vaccine. So before vaccinating you really need to be certain that the benefits will outweigh those risks.
In the case of Rotarix, along with RotaTeq (a similar vaccine made by Merck), the benefits are very questionable, especially if you live in the United States or another developed country.
Rotavirus is very contagious and does cause more than 500,000 deaths in young children each year, but this is mostly in developing countries. In the United States, rotavirus is responsible for only “several dozen” deaths a year, according to Hamburg.
Typically, when a child in the United States contracts rotavirus, and most do, only rest and fluids are required to recover. This infection also provides natural immunity that will protect your child for life.
“The CDC estimates that, by age 3, almost every US child has had a case of rotavirus. Once a child has been infected with a strain of rotavirus, he or she develops antibodies and is either immune for life or has a milder case if infected with that same strain in the future.
Most healthy children, who are infected with several strains of rotavirus in the first few years of life, develop lifelong natural immunity to rotavirus infection.”
The rotavirus vaccine, meanwhile, has shown little benefit for rotavirus rates in the United States. According to NVIC:
“Today, even though almost all US infants receive vaccines for rotavirus, and despite efforts to improve the management of childhood rotavirus-associated diarrhea, hospitalizations of children in the U.S. with the disease have not significantly declined in the past two decades.”
Along with showing little benefit for a disease that is typically entirely treatable with fluids and rest, a recent drug review by the FDA found that Rotarix is associated with a significant increase in pneumonia-related deaths in children, compared to a placebo.
So with this particular vaccine, children are taking on serious risks with what appears to be very little benefit -- and that was before the contamination was uncovered.
The moral of the story?
Whatever you do, please do your homework before subjecting your children to any vaccine. A great way to get started is to simply use the Search Feature at the top of each of my Web pages and search my site as it contains a litany of research on vaccine safety, and the lack thereof.
As a matter of fact, on any virtual meeting point (usenet newsgroups, http:// messageboards, maillists) you may register "attacks" by individuals interested in disrupting the flow of messages.
There are MANY kinds of such individuals, see for instance the wondrous descriptions of usenet people at [Flame Warriors]
A troll is basically one who posts messages intended to insult and provoke per fas et nefas (see [Trolls and Schopenhauer] below).
For each person who responds, the poster (the troll as a person) will consider that person "caught". The troll (the troll as an action) is considered to have been a complete success if it disrupts beyond repair the normal traffic on a newsgroup or on a messageboard. In extreme cases, trolls are posted by groups of trollers and crossposted to unrelated newsgroups in an attempt to destroy those groups by flooding them with flames and off-topic ranting.
Variants: 1.spamming troll, one who posts -or crossposts on many newsgroups- the same, exact post, multiple times (mostly one liners: "cascade"). Some of these 'listings' with all answers and counter-answers, can grow into huge files.
2. kook: a regular poster who continually posts messages with no apparent grounding in reality. The kook trademark is paranoia and grandiosity. Kooks will often build up elaborate imaginary support structures, fake corporations and the like, and continue to act as if those things are real even after their falsity has been documented in public. While they may appear harmless, and are usually filtered out by the other regular participants in a newsgroup or mailing list, they can still cause problems because the necessity for these measures is not immediately apparent to newcomers; there are several instances, for example, of journalists writing stories with quotes from kooks who caught them unaware. See http://www.crank.net/usenet.html for more info.
Some people have dedicated their lifes to expose kooks, and they will warn you that 'It is important to note the subtle distinction between a net.kook, a net.cretin, a clueless newbie, troll, or garden-variety @$$hole. The newbie, one hopes, can acquire a clue on the installment plan even if he can't afford to buy one for cash; the cretin is merely stupid and/or irritating; the troll is purposely pulling your leg like it got caught in some heavy machinery, the @$$hole is, well, simply that. But a TRUE net.kook has a special fascination derived from his/her/its utter ineffability. Their behavior is irrational, if not downright weird, but they are seldom merely boring'
A very interesting Kookologists' Manifesto is "The way of the Kook", this makes very good reading and it is much more informative as it may seem at first. 3. A flamer is one who contributes nothing but uninformative "ad hominem" bickering. His inventivity in names-calling and "hurting tooth poking" fears no matches. Even a good troll will never win against a good flamer. Yet flaming is an art that many, many, try, few master, and nearly all think -wrongly- they are good at. So since you (reader) are most probably not a good flamer, heed the (sound) advice: never answer to a troll (not even in order to flame him, see below).
4. A shill is one who posts messages as a spokesperson or "front" for an unseen group or organization, usually at odds to the topics being discussed.
The shills have joined trolls as parasitical newsgroup fauna, destroying the balance of free discussion, degrading the level of information, feeding like preditors on newsgroup populations that contain the resource that they seek to convert to money.
Remember, shills are creatures of darkness, and their enemy is the light. Shills can only succeed as far as they fool people, a shill is by definition an agent of deception, similar to a con artist, but acting on a target market instead of individuals. Shills always act on profit, and the motive, opportunity, and promise of profit, which in direct proportion to the degree of such, will spawn shills as surely as rotten meat spawns magots.
Awareness of shills is a first defense against shills. Shills unmasked are no longer shills, no longer effective.
As you'll see in the following, searchers can use trolls in order to gather information, trolls attacks are often organized (in "waves"), trolls coordinate on usenet groups, trolls can teach us powerful rhetorical tricks and there are some weapons that you can use to nuke them (apart from killfiles plonking on usenet). Moreover stalking and luring techniques can and will be very useful when seekers have to deal with trolls (or punish them).
But, first, learn that you can troll yourself, in order to gather specific knowledge or information...
Trolling for information
System administrators answering a troll
Well... soon or later I would have had to teach you how to fish info through clever placed trolls anyway, so learn it right now... (I'm just speaking for those among you that did not know this trick already, of course :-) ...Unix-related trolls (or Linux ones) on usenet can fetch a huge amount of interesting info, if cleverly placed.
Identity plays a key role on the web. The Internet offers instant communication with people all over the world through a plethora of channels: messageboards, email, chat rooms. In communication, which is the primary scope of any web-related activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. Yet in the disembodied world of the virtual community, identity is extremely ambiguous. The recipients are provided only with the information the sender wants them to see. Many of the basic visual and aural cues about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical world are absent. And we regularly use exactly such cues -though often not consciounsly aware of it- to make attributions. Other cues are present on the web, yet difficult to interpret.
If you receive an email from a guy whose address is Bill.Olderson@yahoo.com with an attached image of a middle aged man sitting comfortably on the patio of his house, you may be fooled into thinking that you have to do with a guy named Bill Olderson. It could be, yet you'll never have any real proof of it. One can have, on the web, as many electronic personas as one has time and energy to create (and memory to recall :-)
Even more complicated pranks are possible on the web. You could create a complete faked university with little work. The web is full of NON EXISTING universities, insitutions, groups and associations. You may easily create ex novo a totally bogus university, with nice name, good looking seals, imaginary list of professors.
Each one of them would of course be you, and yet answer to any inquiry with ad hoc pre-prepared emails: John W. Krasnjewsky, University of Salsaparilla, Department of Advanced Internet Studies, Dean.
Just build a "professional website", foresee adequate fees for entrance, courses and examinations, and offer "accredited" MBAs and diploms for money (create an "accrediting entity" ad hoc if needs be).
You think I am kidding? Think again: many people do just that already.
The web is full of gullible morons, and -what's even worse- the real world is full of administrative idiots that would trust such MBAs: ("Distance Online MBA Certification for who (sic) are studing a MBA or for who already did (sic) a MBA") in your curriculum vitae. You want a MBA for 150 euro?
Hence the importance of stalking, also in order to bust pranks and prankers.
Yet, while it is true that a single person can create multiple electronic identities that are linked only by their common progenitor, that link, almost invisible in the virtual world, is of great significance, and can often be quickly individuated.
That is the weak point of any virtual created identity. It's easy to say that your avatars should have 'coherent' personalities , i.e. if you create a 'lorry driver' personality and a 'university professor' personality, the two should have COMPLETELY different speech patterns, yet this is very difficult to implement.
Stalkers should be very versatile experts, ready to read and recognize voluntarily altered write patterns.
Usenet, for obvious reason is the field you should peruse to learn the first elements of the stalking art. These you'll be able to apply, later, to any messageboard or email exchange. See, once again: the basic premise is that the users are who they claim to be. There are, however variances between the different newsgroups as to what constitutes a real or "legitimate" identity. And there are numerous cases of identity deception, from the pseudo-naive trolls to the shills and kooks and board spammers.
See for a more detailed explanation the ad hoc related sections of searchlores: Usenet Lore and Trolling Lore
Boring as most of these little silly wars are, there are GREAT lessons in stalking hidden in there. That's why you too will have to deal with this. Actually, as usual in the Web, many of our techniques cross and merge reciprocally: Anonymity techniques, how to search general knowledge, reality cracking tricks, usenet techniques, anti-spamming and anti-advertisement knowledge are ALL required to tackle some of the tasks that you'll have to perform if you really intend to master what you are trying to learn now. Let's, moreover not forget how useful will be our holy software reversing skills each time we'll decide to use some of the many tools that the Web offers to track down our targets (tools that are unfortunately at times crippled or simply too short-lived :-)
If you are an experienced 'global' reverser you'll have more survival chances that many others, but only your own complementary work, and your own experience, will keep you acting as a hunter while keeping at the same time your target acting as a game and not the other way round.
Some professional spammers may turn quite nasty AGAINST you, when you'r chasing them, if you're not careful -and powerful- enough.
In order to gather more material, just search for 'avoiding flaming' and 'trolls flames' on any good search engine or follow some of the links provided here. As you'll see there are plenty of documents and faqs on these subjects all over the web.
Trolling, in the stalking context, deserves a special mention: the verb denotes, originally, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot, hoping for a byte. Real, able and powerful, Master trolls have a double audience: the idiots (newbies and flamers) that bait the bait and the 'trolls-savy' (often silent) that enjoy the troll. It is indeed possible, albeit difficult, to identify and track down experienced trollers. They are in fact among the most interesting game out there (together with professional spammers on rogue ISP) for any 'professional' stalker.
So, as said, the basic premise is actually, often enough, that the counterpart, on the web, is NOT who he/she claims to be... the danger is that the limited identity cues of the netherworld may make people accept at face value a writer's claims of credibility: it may take a long time - and a history of dubious postings - until people start to wonder about the actual knowledge of a self-proclaimed expert.
This said it is also true that - for web related matters - 'official' experts are often FAR inferior to clever autodidacts, so you never know :-)
When examining communications, it is important to try to distinguish between the 'expressions given' and the 'expressions given off'. The former are the deliberately stated messages indicating how one wishes to be perceived; the latter are the much more subtle - and sometimes unintentional - messages communicated via action and nuance in the real world. Both forms of expression are subject to deliberate manipulation, but the "expression given off" is much harder to control. This is true for the cyber world as well, even if we lack, here, the many clues offered by "real world" body language. One can write "I am female", but sustaining a mind set and reactions that are convincingly a woman's may prove to be quite difficult for a man.
Writing style can identify the author of an posting. A known and notorious net personality hoping to appear online under a fresh name may have an easier time disguising his or her header ID than the identity revealed in the text. The introduction to the cypherpunks newsgroup includes this warning:
The cypherpunks list has its very own net.loon, a fellow named L. Detweiler.
The history is too long for here, but he thinks that cypherpunks are evil
incarnate. If you see a densely worded rant featuring characteristic words
such as ``medusa'', ``pseudospoofing'', ``treachery'', ``poison'', or ``black lies'',
it's probably him, no matter what the From: line says.
- Cypherpunks mailing list
In this case, where the usual assessment signal - the name in the header - is believed to be false, language is used as a more reliable signal of individual identity. See also how spammers use multiple identities on the very nice "Kook of the Month" site.
One newsgroup that contains many business-card signatures is comp.security.unix. The discussion here is about how to make unix systems secure - and about known system flaws. Many of the participants are system administrators of major institutions, others are just learning how to set up a system in a fledgling company and some other, of course, are just hoping to learn how to break into systems :-)
A posting suggesting that administrators improve their sites by changing this or that line of code in the system software could be a furtive attempt get novice administrators to introduce security holes. Identity deception is a big concern of the participants in this group, and this makes it VERY interesting for any advanced studiosus of these matters, to try soon or later his luring abilities in this group. (When you'll do it, if you want to be taken seriously (and you'll probably don't go very far even so :-) first create 'really' your own company, say 'Software Alternative Limited', then name yourself 'Director of Software Development', create your domain and sign with something like "Director@SALSoft.com".
Many varieties of identity deception can be found within the Usenet newsgroup. Some are quite harmful to individuals or to the community; others are innocuous, benefitting the performer without injuring the group. Some are clearly deceptions, meant to provide a false impression; others are more subtle identity manipulations, similar to the adjustments in self-presentation we make in many real world situations.
Until recently, header information was quite reliable. Most people accessed Usenet with software that inserted the account name automatically - one had to be quite knowledgeable to change the default data. Today, many programs simply let the writer fill in the name and address to be used, making posting with a false name and site is much easier. The astute observer may detect suspicious anomalies in the routing data (the record of how the letter passed through the net) that can expose a posting from a falsified location. Yet few people are likely to look that closely at a posting unless they have reason to be suspicious about its provenance.
It is useful to distinguish between pseudonymity and pure anonymity. In the virtual world, many degrees of identification are possible. Full anonymity is one extreme of a continuum that runs from the totally anonymous to the thoroughly named. A pseudonym, though it may be untraceable to a real-world person, may have a well-established reputation in the virtual domain; a pseudonymous message may thus come with a wealth of contextual information about the sender. A purely anonymous message, on the other hand, stands alone.
There are some useful tricks to narrow down the number of suspected targets in order to stalk a pseudonym user. One of the best ones I know of is the time trick, but in order to understand it you mist first know the elementary elements of an email header. MUCH MORE HERE > http://www.searchlores.org/stalking.htmrers
GMO Scandal: The Long Term Effects of Genetically Modified Food in Humans
by F. William Engdahl*
LINK: http://www.voltairenet.org/article162087.html
One of the great mysteries surrounding the spread of GMO plants around the world since the first commercial crops were released in the early 1990's in the USA and Argentina has been the absence of independent scientific studies of possible long-term effects of a diet of GMO plants on humans or even rats. Now the real reason has come to light: the GMO agribusiness companies like Monsanto, BASF, Pioneer, Syngenta and others prohibit independent research.
Germany will ban cultivation and sale of genetically modified (GMO) corn despite European Union rulings that the biotech grain is safe, its government said on Tuesday. The ban affects U.S. biotech company Monsanto's MON 810 maize which may no longer be sown for this summer's harvest, German Agriculture and Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner told a news conference. An editorial in the respected American scientific monthly magazine, Scientific American, August 2009 reveals the shocking and alarming reality behind the proliferation of GMO products throughout the food chain of the planet since 1994. There are no independent scientific studies published in any reputed scientific journal in the world for one simple reason. It is impossible to independently verify that GMO crops such as Monsanto Roundup Ready Soybeans or MON8110 GMO maize perform as the company claims, or that, as the company also claims, that they have no harmful side effects because the GMO companies forbid such tests!
That's right. As a precondition to buy seeds, either to plant for crops or to use in research study, Monsanto and the gene giant companies must first sign an End User Agreement with the company. For the past decade, the period when the greatest proliferation of GMO seeds in agriculture has taken place, Monsanto, Pioneer (DuPont) and Syngenta require anyone buying their GMO seeds to sign an agreement that explicitly forbids that the seeds be used for any independent research. Scientists are prohibited from testing a seed to explore under what conditions it flourishes or even fails. They cannot compare any characteristics of the GMO seed with any other GMO or non-GMO seeds from another company. Most alarming, they are prohibited from examining whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended side-effects either in the environment or in animals or humans.
The only research which is permitted to be published in reputable scientific peer-reviewed journals are studies which have been pre-approved by Monsanto and the other industry GMO firms.
The entire process by which GMO seeds have been approved in the United States, beginning with the proclamation by then President George H.W. Bush in 1992, on request of Monsanto, that no special Government tests of safety for GMO seeds would be conducted because they were deemed by the President to be "substantially equivalent" to non-GMO seeds, has been riddled with special interest corruption. Former attorneys for Monsanto were appointed responsible in EPA and FDA for rules governing GMO seeds as but one example and no Government tests of GMO seed safety to date have been carried out. All tests are provided to the US Government on GMO safety or performance by the companies themselves such as Monsanto. Little wonder that GMO sounds to positive and that Monsanto and others can falsely claim GMO is the "solution to world hunger."
In the United States a group of twenty four leading university corn insect scientists have written to the US Government Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) demanding the EPA force a change to the company censorship practice. It is as if Chevrolet or Tata Motors or Fiat tried to censor comparative crash tests of their cars in Consumer Reports or a comparable consumer publication because they did not like the test results. Only this deals with the human and animal food chain. The scientists rightly argue to EPA that food safety and environment protection "depend on making plant products available to regular scientific scrutiny." We should think twice before we eat that next box of American breakfast cereal if the corn used is GMO.
Video on GMO Food Dangers [86 min]
http://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/gmo_food_genetically_modified
Facts About Genetically Engineered Food (Seeds of Deseption)
http://www.wanttoknow.info/deception10pg
Monsanto Watch
http://www.monsantowatch.org/
Millions Against Monsanto Campaign
http://www.organicconsumers.org/monlink.cfm
In this interview, Jeffrey Smith, author of the bestseller Seeds of Deception, explains how genetically modified foods cause health problems, and their potential for creating a vast array of unforeseen and surprising illnesses.
He also sheds light on how the corruption within the U.S. government, the FDA and the GMO industry has allowed, and perpetuated, the cover-up.
Jeffrey Smith has written two books about the significant danger genetically modified (GM) foods pose to your health, and the health of the entire planet.
He’s also the executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, whoseCampaign for Healthier Eating in America is designed to create the tipping point of consumer rejection of GMOs, forcing them out of our food supply. As a major force riling against GM foods, Smith is responsible for limiting the spread of GM crops in the US, just like others have successfully done in Europe.
Genetically Modified Foods = Toxins in Every Bite?
Corn chips, or tortilla chips, are quite pervasive. Perhaps you’ve had some yourself this week? Well, let’s see how you feel about buying them again once you realize what you’re risking by eating them.
In the only human feeding study ever published on genetically modified foods, seven volunteers ate so-called Roundup-ready soybeans. These are soybeans that have herbicide-resistant genes inserted into them in order to survive being sprayed with otherwise deadly doses of Roundup herbicide.
In three of the seven volunteers, the gene inserted into the soy transferred into the DNA of their intestinal bacteria, and continued to function long after they stopped eating the GM soy!
There are serious medical implications to this finding. However, the GM-friendly UK government, who funded the study, chose not to fund any follow up research to see if GM corn -- which are engineered to produce an insecticide called BT toxin -- might also transfer and continue to create insecticide inside your intestines.
These kinds of studies are sorely needed, and fast, because as of right now, about 85 percent of the corngrown in the US is genetically engineered to either produce an insecticide, or to survive the application of herbicide. And about 91-93 percent of all soybeans are genetically engineered to survive massive doses of Roundup herbicide.
What this means is that nearly ALL foods you buy that contain either corn or soy, in any form, will contain GMO unless it’s certified organic by the USDA. Other major GM crops include cottonseed and canola.
When trying to avoid these GM crops, you’d also have to avoid all the derivatives of them, which would include items such as maltodextrin, soy lecitin, and high fructose corn syrup.
Other common GM products include:
• Some varieties of zucchini, crookneck squash, and papayas from Hawaii
• Milk containing rbGH
• Rennet (containing genetically modified enzymes) used to make hard cheeses
• Aspartame (NutraSweet)
How Genetic Engineering Works
Many are under the flawed assumption that genetic engineering is a very precise, refined science.
Not so, explains Smith.
“… in order to understand the risks associated with GMOs, I’m going to back up and talk about the process of creating a genetically modified organism because if we understand that, then a whole host of things that can go wrong all of a sudden become clear.
… The biotech industry gives you this impression that it’s a very clean process. We just take a gene from a species and carefully splice it into another, and the only thing that’s different is it’s producing some new beneficial protein to produces some trait.
This is far from the truth.
What they do is – let’s say you want to create a corn plant that produces a pesticide. So you go to the soil bacterium called BT for “Bacillus thuringiensis” and you change it so it’s more toxic, and you make millions of copies of the gene.
You actually put a piece of a virus there which turns it on, it’s called the promoter. It’s the “on” switch that turns this gene on, 24/7, around the clock.
You make millions of copies and you put it in a gun and you shoot that gun into a plate of millions of cells, hoping that some of the genes make it into the DNA of some of those cells. Then you clone those cells into plants.
Now the process of insertion and cloning causes massive collateral damage in the DNA that could have higher levels, and do have higher levels, of allergens and toxins.
… Anti-nutrients of soybeans that are genetically engineered have as much as seven times higher the amount of a known allergen cold trypsin inhibitor when compared to non-GM soy, in their cooked state.
There is a new allergen in genetically modified corn. There is a new anti-nutrient in the [GM] soy which blocks the absorption of nutrients.
They don’t look for these things. These are found after they’re on the market by some few of the independent researchers that are doing their work.”
Farmers have long used BT spray on crops, and because it’s a natural bacterium, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the biotech companies claim it is safe for human consumption.
However, this too is clearly misguided optimism.
Smith states:
“Based on peer reviewed published studies, animals like mice that were fed BT had damaged tissues and immune responses as powerful as if they’ve been fed cholera toxin, and then they became multiple-chemically sensitive to where they started to react to formally harmless compounds.”
Genetically Engineered Health Problems
It’s important to realize that when the BT is spliced into the corn, it’s thousands of times more concentrated than the spray version.
According to Smith, thousands of farm workers who harvest BT-cotton in India are complaining of rashes all over their bodies. And animals grazing on BT cotton plants after harvest have died, sometimes within a day or so.
This should tell you something.
Now, some will point out the fact that humans are not dying like flies from eating GM foods. But the death of grazing cattle is likely the result of an acute reaction to large exposure. So, as Smith states, it’s still an indicator for what might be happening in the human system, albeit at a much slower rate.
For example, Smith mentions an Italian study where they fed BT corn to mice. As a result, the mice expressed a wide variety of immune responses commonly associated with diseases such as:
Rheumatoid arthritis
Inflammatory bowel disease
Osteoporosis
Atherosclerosis
Various types of cancer
Allergies
Lou Gehrig’s disease
In addition, Smith has documented at least 65 serious health risks from GM products of all kinds.
Among them:
Offspring of rats fed GM soy showed a five-fold increase in mortality, lower birth weights, and the inability to reproduce
Male mice fed GM soy had damaged young sperm cells
The embryo offspring of GM soy-fed mice had altered DNA functioning
Several US farmers reported sterility or fertility problems among pigs and cows fed on GM corn varieties
Investigators in India have documented fertility problems, abortions, premature births, and other serious health issues, including deaths, among buffaloes fed GM cottonseed products
Although Monsanto doesn’t believe (or admit) this is a possibility, their shortsighted focus on profits is blinding them to the very real threats that this technology is posing to the viability of the human race.
How Conflicts of Interest May Be Destroying Health of Millions
In this interview, Smith discusses some of the political intricacies involved with GM food labeling, and some of the more shocking conflicts of interest that may be harming literally millions of people.
Back in 1992, the FDA authority responsible for the decision of whether or not to label GM foods turned out to be a former attorney for none other than Monsanto. His name is Michael Taylor.
He went from being Monsanto’s attorney to serving as their vice president, and after that he became a policy maker at the FDA.
At this point in time, Taylor serves as the US food safety czar!
Taylor claimed that the agency was not aware of any information showing that GM foods were significantly different than conventional foods, and therefore no testing and no labeling were required.
Since then, documents made public from a lawsuit showed that it was a lie that the policy was clearly fictitious.
In fact, the overwhelming consensus among the FDA’s own scientists were that genetically modified foods were inherently dangerous and could create allergies, toxins, new diseases and nutritional problems, and of course they should be labeled because they are a food additive and new food additives must be labeled.
However, Smith explains, the FDA was directed by the White House to promote the biotechnology industry, and they knew that if they labeled GM foods, most Americans would avoid it like the plague. So, true to form, they supported the economic interests of the biotech companies at the cost of long-term human and environmental health.
It remains to be seen whether or not this type of blatant conflict of interest will be perpetrated again, allowing genetically modified alfalfa to be brought to market.
There’s currently a grassroots movement underway demanding that the Chief Justice force Clarence Thomas to recuse himself in the April Supreme Court consideration of GM alfalfa.
As it turns out, Thomas is also a former Monsanto attorney, who served the biotech giant from 1976 to 1979.
What You Can Do NOW!
The silver lining in all of this, however, is that we actually don’t NEED policy changes to kick GMO’s out of the market!
The only requirement is getting enough people to consistently avoid buying anything that contain GM-derived ingredients, and the food manufacturers will do the rest.
They WILL respond to market demands, because if they don’t they go out of business.
In addition, the natural food industry has decided to turn October of this year into “Non-GMO Month,” and October 10th (10/10/10) will be “Non-GMO Day.”
I encourage you all to prepare for October by spreading the information about GM foods. Together we CAN make a major difference!
You can also help by donating money to ResponsibleTechnology.org. Your donation will help preserve access to healthy, whole foods for you and for future generations. Let's stop this disaster from happening, and stop this insanity from being coerced upon us.
Dr. David Ayoub is a radiologist and a physician, and has become a specialist on the additives and preservatives used in vaccines. He was a presenter at the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) Conference in Washington D.C. last year.
Here he discusses the practice of using aluminum as an adjuvant, and why he believes aluminum may be far more toxic than thimerosal in vaccines.
Dr. Ayoub was, as many of you are, very concerned about mercury (thimerosal) in vaccines for a number of years, and attended a number of autism conferences that featured physicians who were highlighting the dangers of mercury.
However, a few personal encounters heightened his interest in another toxic metal frequently used in vaccines, namely aluminum.
Parents of autistic children kept pointing out the fact that their children’s heavy metal toxicity profiles showed high amounts of aluminum, and they wanted to know what that meant.
Secondly, a well respected nutritionist who deals with industrial aluminum toxicity showed him toxicity profiles of middle school children who had ADHD. In his estimate, 90 percent of the children in one particular school had developed ADHD during the course of a single year, and their toxicity profiles showed massive amounts of aluminum.
In addition, he did a pilot study with Dr. Usman, who treats autism with biomedicine, and when he evaluated the aluminum burden of these autistic children, he found that high percentage of them also had very high aluminum burdens.
All of these events led him to look deeper into the aluminum issue, which we discuss at length in this interview.
Why is Aluminum Used in Vaccines?
Mercury (thimerosal) exposure has declined significantly since it was eliminated from the single-dose vials of most childhood vaccines, yet autism rates have continued to skyrocket. This has led many to assume that mercury isn’t a problem, and anyone questioning the safety of vaccines is considered to be a hysterical wingnut.
However, while mercury use has decreased, the use of aluminum additives has increased!
Aluminum, like any other adjuvant, is added to the vaccine in order to boost the host’s immune response to the antigen. The antigen is what your body responds to and makes antibodies against (the virus being injected). By boosting your body’s immune response, the vaccine manufacturer can use a smaller amount of antigen, which makes production less expensive.
Interestingly enough, according to Dr. Ayoub, even our modern medical literature admits that how this happens exactly is still a mystery. And it’s not a consistent finding. He mentions a couple of studies on the more recent HPV vaccine, which found that the aluminum adjuvant had no effect at all on the immune response…
So, although aluminum is frequently added to vaccines for this particular purpose, no one knows with any degree of confidence that it actually makes a more effective vaccine.
Is Aluminum a Heavy Metal?
Aluminum is by many considered to be a heavy metal. However, based on the Periodic Table, it’s just shy of a heavy metal. So it’s called a “light metal.”
But regardless of its precise classification, aluminum is in the metal grouping, and it’s a common compound.
You will find aluminum in the earth’s crust, and in air, soil and water. However, although aluminum is a common, “natural” substance, it’s important to realize that it has absolutely no biological role inside your body.
The amount of aluminum in each vaccine will vary. However, according to Dr. Ayoub, it’s important to realize that the toxicity is not entirely dependent on dose, but also on how it’s distributed in your body.
For example, a small dose released rapidly from the injection site into your body can cause a rapid rise in blood aluminum levels. So a small dose released quickly may be much more toxic than a large dose that ends up staying longer in the tissue at the injection site.
The variables of personal differences and differences in how the injection is given are too numerous to count, and they may play a role in how toxic a shot ends up being once injected into your body.
How Much Aluminum is Your Child Getting Through Vaccines?
Dr. Ayoub has identified one vaccine in particular as being one of the absolute worst in terms of aluminum content – Pediatrix. It’s a combination vaccine, which contains 850 mcg of elemental aluminum.
The average aluminum content per vaccine ranges between 200 to 400 mcg. Others contain less, such as Prevnar, which has 125 mcg of aluminum.
Adding to the problem, however, is the fact that many children end up receiving multiple vaccines at a time. In effect, children are getting concentrations of aluminum that are 10 to 20 times higher than mercury.
Based on the number of vaccines given, children today are receiving 17 shots that contain aluminum, compared to four vaccines in the 1970s into the mid-80s. According to Dr. Ayoub’s calculations, the milligram dose of aluminum received has more than doubled in that time.
This can have significant implications, as aluminum is not only toxic in and of itself, but it also impairs your body’s ability to excrete mercury, and it impairs glutathione synthesis. As a consequence, aluminum will make whatever amount of mercury you have in your system even more toxic.
In the U.S., the FDA sets the guidelines for what and how much aluminum is allowed in vaccines. According to the FDA, the maximum amount of allowable elemental aluminum is 850 mcg per vaccine.
Clearly, it makes a major difference if this amount is injected into a small infant or an adult, but the FDA makes no distinction to that effect.
In fact, when Dr. Ayoub dug deeper into the FDA regulations on aluminum, he discovered that the limitation of 850 mcg per vaccine is based on the effectiveness of the adjuvant role of aluminum and has nothing to do with limitations based on safety whatsoever!
Shocking?
Yes! But not surprising, at this point.
However, it may be wise to keep this fact in mind, as those who argue that the amounts of aluminum in vaccines is a “legally safe dose” are really just citing a regulatory guideline that is based solely on the efficacy of the vaccine, and NOT based on any safety data whatsoever.
Approach to Treatment and Prevention of Aluminum Ttoxicity
1) Avoid/minimize exposures
Test drinking water with and without filter
Avoid cooking with aluminum utensils/pans
Never store food in contact with aluminum
Use non aluminum baking soda, deodorant, toothpaste
Avoid aluminum-containing vaccines, or separate multiple aluminum- containing vaccines by 2-4 weeks, only take single formulas/shots
Avoid drinks in aluminum pouches/cans, especially if they contain citrates/ascorbates which enhance aluminum absorption
Take vitamin C and fruit juices on an empty stomach
Minimize exposure to calcium carbonate-containing medicines
2) Testing for body levels
Blood aluminum only useful in cases of large, acute exposures (i.e., acute vaccine reaction) for chronic exposures: hair analysis, post-provocative (EDTA or DFO) urine metals, urinary porphyrin testing
3) Treatment of deleterious actions of chronic aluminum exposure maintain normal serum vitamin D levels
Melatonin has powerful antioxidant properties and is particularly depleted from aluminum exposure
Curcumin
Supplements or foods that dirve the methylation process (methionine cycle), i.e., B6, B12, folic acid, folinic acid, etc
Natural chelation like cilantro
Medial Chelation:
Calcium disodium EDTA pulls lead and aluminum. It is also contaminated with aluminum, as many calcium-containing products are. Oral dose is easiest but rectal suppository is available.
(Detoxamin) and may have the added benefit of low absorption of the aluminum contaminant that requires iron-transport system found mostly in small bowel as opposed to the rectum. Intravenous EDTA can be used by healthcare professional.
Medical chelation has been performed for many years using deferoxamine (DFO). This is a potent chelator for iron and aluminum and has been used mostly by nephrologists in treating aluminum toxicity from oral phosphate binders once used in patients with chronic renal failure. This is potent enough to reverse severe acute neurotoxicity from aluminum poisoning but has potential serious side effects and can only be used by a physician..
Learn More About the Health Implications of Aluminum!
I strongly urge you to listen to the interview with Dr. Ayoub in its entirely to learn more about the dangers of this common vaccine adjuvant. Clearly, aluminum stands poised to take over mercury as one of the worst offenders against health.
Also, the articles listed below will give you more information about the potentially devastating health effects of this dangerous toxin.
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Splitting the Sky, indigenous activist, seized by security forces in Canada last year when he attempted to make a citizen's arrest of George W. Bush will have his day in court on Monday, March 8th. According to Professor Anthony J. Hall, this case will demonstrate whether Canada is ruled by law or fear and highlight the need for new principles, the Calgary Principles to amend the victor's justice of the Nuremberg Principles, in light of the new impunities for high level crimes against humanity and the Earth in this era, and the need to protect and honor civil resistance to those high crimes.
Dacajaweiah, John Boncore, or Splitting the Sky, is not a man of few words. If you read his hefty 653-page autobiography, it is very clear that he has lived an extraordinary life and has survived more than his share of violence, to find deep within himself a well of energy and spirit enabling him to not only endure hardships, but to serve his people and the land in the timeless struggle against oppression and tyranny. From the Attica Rebellion to Gustafen Lake to Calgary in 2009, when he attempted a citizens arrest of George W. Bush, Dac has consciously taken a leadership role to politically challenge the powerful forces that dominate the North American continent. Brutally arrested for his action, he earned his day in court to voice not only his defense, but to highlight the hypocrisy and criminality of the Canadian government for allowing Bush into Canada, and to firmly establish the legal defense of civil resistance, the duty of citizens to act when our governments and their agents are derelict in their duty. This will be very useful in the future to rein these criminals in.
Prior to Bushs visit, the Canadian group Lawyers Against the War asked Canadian officials to bar entry or try Bush for his suspected crimes since Canadian Law prohibits people suspected of any involvement in torture or other war crimes and crimes against humanity from entering Canada for any period and for any purpose. The most recent report of the War Crimes Program affirms the necessity of barring war crimes suspects from Canada: The most effective way to deny safe haven to people involved or complicit in war crimes or crimes against humanity is to prevent them from coming to Canada.
Lawyers Against the War and protestors implored the government to do their duty and arrest Bush. Dac was carrying papers detailing the evidence against George W. Bush, which he had planned to serve him with on behalf of the victims and the people of the world, and he raised his hands to show that he was non-violent. Dac was then thrown down, stomped on, kicked, handcuffed and led off to be brutalized in a Calgary jail.
Monday, March 8, 2010, he will have his opportunity to put forward his case and present evidence, with support, testimony and affidavits on his behalf from respected scholars, including David Ray Griffin, Peter Dale Scott, and Michel Chossudovsky, as well as from former US Congresswoman, outspoken human rights advocate, and former Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney. Professor Anthony J. Hall, author of The American Empire and the Fourth World and founding coordinator of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge, stated last December:
Splitting the Skys action in Calgary highlights the abject failure of law enforcement agencies to do their job. It highlights the unwillingness of police and those who direct them to apply the law equitably and independently
As the Nuremberg principles make clear, the implicated law enforcement officers cannot claim in their defense that they were merely following orders in deciding to arrest Splitting the Sky rather than George W. Bush.
I propose that the trial of Splitting the Sky presents a platform for the elaboration of a new set of juridical rules and protocols to be known as The Calgary Principles.
It has been six decades since the UN general assembly agreed to a succinct refinement of the principles that emerged from the trial of some of the top Nazis, as well as their juridical, medical, and industrialist accomplices. During those decades, there has been an intensification of the culture of impunity that immunizes those at the top of the hierarchy of wealth and power from any legal accountability for their crimes.
Like the Tokyo trials of the defeated leadership of imperial Japan, the Nuremberg Trials were a classic example of victors justice.
As long as the power politics of victors justice continues to protect the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the rule of law remains a fraud. Under present conditions, the rule of law is a sad hoax designed to disguise the role of law enforcement agencies as protectors of the ill-gotten wealth often stripped from the branches of humanity that Frantz Fanon once labeled the wretched of the earth.
The elaboration of the Calgary Principles will have to entail the quest for new language and juridical concepts to capture the full extent and complexity of international crime in the twenty-first century...
Consider, for instance, the nature of the crime that takes place when whole populations are sentenced to endless futures of disproportionately high rates of genetic deformity through the saturation of their mother lands with depleted uranium. Consider the nature of a crime that would see a drug company covertly introduce a new disease strain in order to market a prepared antidote of vaccine to cure the disease it had disseminated.
What names, what prohibitions, and what punishments do we need to respond to and discourage crimes that infect populations, deform populations, and even destroy whole ecosystems, making the renewal of all kinds of life, including human life, impossible to sustain?
Hence it can be said that these days the most important agencies of the military-industrial complex and the national security state are the media conglomerates. These agencies of propaganda for an aggressive war bombard us on a daily basis with mental missiles of psychological warfare.
The constant barrage of messages we receive that peace is to be found in war, that freedom is to be found in slavery, that wealth is to be found in indebtedness, and that truth is to be found in lies, is pulling humanity away from our fragile inheritance of reason, rationality, and enlightened discourse on the real menaces we face
Splitting the Skys action mirrors the actions of countless people in countless demonstrations that are taking place across the world where lives, land, forests, lakes, jobs, homes, species, and communities are threatened by powerful forces, making decisions in luxury and comfort, protected by men with guns from citizens trying to make their voices heard to protect that which they love and care deeply about. The trial will illustrate whether or not Canada is ruled by laws or by fear. Whatever happens, the struggle for truth, justice, and peace will continue.
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded "anti-American," "anti-semite" or "conspiracy theorist."
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.
Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. "Free market economists" are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by "the New Economy," a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this "new economy" are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.
Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of "the New Economy."
And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted "studies" that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the "studies."
The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies' role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.
The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.
And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.
Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.
Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.
I remember when, following CIA director William Colby's testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.
When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a "threat," he wasn't impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don't carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.
As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO "performance bonuses," have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.
Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these "performance awards" by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about "the Muslim threat," Wall Street, U.S. corporations and "free market" shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.
Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.
Americans have bought into the government's claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect "terrorists," and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.
Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.
I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week's first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American "mainstream media."
For the last six years I have been banned from the "mainstream media." My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.
For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush's wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.
The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.
America's fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government's 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government's account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.
These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington's deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar's role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar's value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called "entitlements" as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.
With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington's greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the "war on terror," the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.
The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.
A W5 investigation: A patient's struggle to obtain the 60-year-old drug Thalidomide
Date: Sat. Mar. 27 2010 6:55 PM ET
Many Canadians believe that when they become sick the universal health care system will be there to protect them, but, when it comes to getting prescription drugs that might prolong their lives, that might not be the case.
Just over a year ago, Dan Childerhose, of Dorchester, Ont., was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer. Childerhose successfully underwent radiation, chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant treatment. The cancer went into remission but concerned about the possibility of a relapse his doctor prescribed a course of Thalidomide, as a good maintenance drug for those suffering from the life-threatening blood disorder.
Thalidomide is best known as a drug with a notorious past. In the 1950s and 1960s it was given to pregnant women to treat nausea but tragically caused birth defects. Thalidomide was responsible for thousands of children being born without arms or legs. The drug was ultimately banned around the world, but in recent years scientists discovered that it could be used for the treatment of leprosy, childhood leukemia and multiple myeloma.
Only available in Canada through a special access permit, Childerhose met the criteria to obtain the drug, but was told he would have to pay for it himself, as no provincial government was covering the drug's cost. Childerhose soon discovered that paying out of pocket would cost him a fortune, up to $4,000 per month.
"I wouldn't be able to afford that," said Childerhose. "I have some pension money and I would have to cash in my pension."
He applied to Celgene, the drug manufacturer, to obtain Thalidomide on compassionate grounds. Although Celgene told W5 that at least 60 per cent of Canadians who take the drug are given it free of charge, Childerhose didn't meet their criteria of financial need and his application was refused.
Rehabilitating Thalidomide
Dr. Bart Barlogie runs the Institute for Myeloma Research and Therapy in Little Rock, Arkansas. He discovered Thalidomide's benefits in treating multiple myeloma back in the 1990s, after consulting with a scientist who had been using the drug to treat childhood leukemia. Barlogie's own research showed some patients given Thalidomide had a dramatic reversal in their disease.
"When that happened I knew this was truly miraculous," said Barlogie. His findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999.
According to Barlogie, that groundbreaking research, which led to the expanded uses for Thalidomide, was primarily funded through the National Cancer Institute and American government grants.
According to a 2001study by Donald Light, a professor at the New Jersey School of Medicine, whose specialty is the economics of drugs, that public funding model is very common when new drugs are developed – or in the case of Thalidomide new uses are discovered. Light determined that 84.2 per cent of drug research money around the world comes from public and charitable sources.
While the research that led to Thalidomide being used to treat multiple myeloma was primarily paid for with public funds, the benefits and profits from that discovery were quickly seized by Celgene, the company which has the rights to sell Thalidomide in Canada and the United States. Celgene's reaction to Barlogie's miraculous discovery was to dramatically raise the price of Thalidomide.
When Barlogie's study was published in 1999, the B.C. Cancer Agency was paying about $400 for a month's supply of Thalidomide. Within six years the price had soared to $3,600 per month – a 900 per cent increase.
In an e-mail to W5, Celgene refused to discuss pricing issues: "It is not our policy to participate in interviews around ongoing regulatory and reimbursement reviews."
However during a brief interview with W5's Victor Malarek, Celgene Canada's general manager, Kevin Leshuk, said: "On a compassionate basis 60 per cent of Canadians have been getting it free on a compassionate basis. The value is there within the product. I think that's well established." He also indicated that pricing is set in the United States.
In a second, later e-mail, Leshuk wrote: "Companies such as Celgene assume extraordinary risks and costs to develop promising compounds and future disease-altering therapies for patients with rare diseases, such as multiple myeloma."
Prescription for profit
From the pharmaceutical industry's perspective, high costs are an unavoidable part of doing business. According to Russell Williams, president of Rx&D, the association that represents pharmaceutical companies in Canada, developing new drugs is very expensive.
"It costs our industry to develop one of our products approximately, and these are rounded figures, slightly over a billion dollars to discover that product and make it available," said Williams.
That billion-dollar figure is regularly quoted by the drug industry to support high drug costs and is based on a 2002 study conducted by researchers at Tufts University in Boston. Using data provided by the drug companies, the Tufts study concluded that "total R&D cost per new drug is $802-million (U.S. dollars)." In the intervening eight years that figure has been rounded up to a billion dollars.
"If we want to continue to bring new medicines that will save lives and improve the quality of life, we're going to need an environment in which we can create the revenues to keep reinvesting in research," said Williams.
But critics believe the billion-dollar price tag is fictitious.
"Those figures come from industry supported economists using confidential data submitted in secret by companies to their leading policy research centre at Tufts University that no one else can see except those economists," explained Light. "They essentially take what they claim to be $71 million of direct costs and inflate them up to $1.3 billion."
"They're trying to convince people that they have to pay high prices for prescription drugs to cover the R and D costs. That simply isn't true," said Dr. Marcia Angell. She is the former Editor in Chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine and the author of "The Truth about Drug Companies." "The best charitable guess would be about $100-million per new pill," she said.
Angell believes the reason for high drug costs can be found in the bottom line for all drug companies. "Every year they are in the top couple of companies in terms of most profitable industries in the United States," she said.
According to Forbes magazine's list of 2,000 multinational companies, the average annual profit margin is about eight percent, but for the top pharmaceutical countries the average profit margin is about 20 per cent. Celgene's profit margin rose from 16 per cent in 2007 to 29 per cent in 2009.
Critics of the profit margins believe that patients are being forced to pay the high prices for drugs because they are a captive market. Donald Light recounted an interview with the retired head of a pharmaceutical marketing department who called that "the exploitative marketing model."
"Exploit very sick people with very high prices because they're desperate and don't have a choice," said Light.
Russell Williams, the president of Rx&D, insists the manner that pharmaceutical drugs are priced is entirely reasonable. "We set prices in a way that is considered very fair on international norms," he said. Dan Childerhose disagrees. While he would like to take Thalidomide to ensure his cancer remains in remission, he can't afford the $3,600 a month price tag for what is a repurposed 60-year-old drug. Which leaves him considering an uncertain future.
"It's like Russian roulette," said Childerhose. And, the one holding the gun? "The pharmaceutical company," he said.
Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month.
Confidential government reports say that about 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure would be averted every month if patients switched away from Avandia.
One report, by Dr. David Graham and Dr. Kate Gelperin of the FDA, argued that Avandia should be withdrawn from the market.
Five Ways to Help Beat Depression Without Antidepressants Research has shown antidepressants don't work any better than a placebo. But here are 5 proven, safe & inexpensive strategies so powerful they could end your depression for good...
Recently, I received an intriguing email claiming that the rapidly increasing worldwide epidemic of diabetes was caused by depleted uranium (DU). As a medical doctor I never heard of such an idea. Every physician knows that radiation can lead to cancer, but the DU and diabetes connection seemed ludicrous. Nevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to check it out on the Internet.
The best tool for medical research on the Net is the PubMed website sponsored by the US National Library of Medicine. I typed in the keywords: depleted uranium and diabetes. No citations to scientific papers in the medical journals appeared on my computer screen, which further assured me there was no scientific connection. Even when I used key words - depleted uranium and human disease - only a mere 16 papers were cited on the subject from 1994 to 2005; and only half these papers addressed the medical problems of soldiers exposed to DU in the Gulf War.
What was revealed is that DU accumulates in lymph nodes, brain, testicles, and other organs, and the short term and long term effects of DU were not known. There was a definite increase of birth defects in the offspring of persons exposed to DU; and Gulf War vets who inhaled DU were still excreting abnormal amounts of uranium in the urine 10 years later.
Why was there so little written about DU and its effects on the human body? Having written extensively on the man-made epidemic of AIDS and its cover-up for two decades, I was not surprised. I strongly suspected research into the health effects of DU on Gulf War veterans was "politically incorrect." On the other hand, a quick Google Internet search of - "side effects" + "depleted uranium" - referred me to 71,000 English pages on the web. When I added the key word "diabetes" there were 22,000 pages.
I also discovered that articles about the health dangers of DU rarely, if ever, appear in the major media. In a January 2001 press release FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) accused the media of "depleted coverage of depleted uranium weapons." Nevertheless, a great deal of information on DU can be found on the Internet.
DU was first used by the US in the 1991 Gulf War, then in the Balkans in the late 1990s, in Kosovo in 2000, in the war against Afghanistan, in Iraq in 2003, and also by the Israelis in the 2006 war with Lebanon. Needless to say, US military and government officials totally deny any health danger from DU. A reassuring New York Times article of 9 January 2001 entitled "1999 U.S. document warned of depleted uranium in Kosovo" by Marlise Simons, noted "while acknowledging the hazards, both the Pentagon and NATO, pointing to medical experts, have denied any links could exist between exposure to depleted uranium and the illness and deaths of veterans."
DU weapons were developed by the US Navy in 1968, and were first given to Israel by the US in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Since then, the US has tested, manufactured and sold DU weapons systems to 29 countries. Vieques Island, a testing site in Puerto Rico, was repeatedly bombarded with DU in 1999 prior to its use in Kosovo.
DU is a byproduct of the enriching of natural uranium for use in nuclear reactors. As nuclear waste, DU is costly to keep but relatively inexpensive to obtain. Due to their tank armour-piercing capabilities, DU weapons are extremely effective and the reason why the military is so enthralled with them.
Depleted Uranium Whistleblowers
Major Doug Rokke is a leading DU expert who has become a whistleblower against its use. He claims each tank round is composed of 10 pounds of solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, and americium. The round is pyrophoric, meaning it generates intense heat on impact, easily penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of the metal. When DU munitions hit, they produce a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure, resulting in devastating burns and injuries to those who escape immediate death and incineration.
On impact, DU produces uranium oxide dust and pieces of uranium explode all over the place. Once inside the body the tiny nanoparticles enter the lungs and blood stream and are carried throughout the body. When Rokke and his team were assigned to "clean up" the DU after the first Gulf War, all his men got ill within 72 hours with respiratory problems, rashes, bleeding, and open sores. In an Australian interview with Gay Alcorn in 2003, Rokke admitted: "After everything I've seen, everything I've done, it became very clear to me that you can't take radioactive wastes from one nation and just throw it into another nation. It's wrong. It's simply wrong."
According to Asaf Durakovic MD of the Uranium Medical Research Centre in Washington DC, the term "depleted uranium" is a misnomer. Both "depleted" and "natural" uranium are over 99% composed of uranium 238. DU is almost as highly concentrated as pure uranium and may contain plutonium (a deadly element) in trace amounts.
Leuren Moret is an independent American scientist who works on radiation and health issues with communities around the world. At age 61, she is the leading activist against the use of DU, having worked in two nuclear weapons labs, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, run by the US Department of Energy. She is the ultimate antigovernment whistleblower on DU, along with Rokke and Durakovic, and all three have personally suffered (including death threats) for their anti-DU views.
In her article "Depleted uranium: The Trojan Horse of nuclear war," which appeared in the June 2004 World Affairs Journal, Moret claims: "The use of DU weaponry by the US, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on Earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential."
DU travels. DU radioactive particles are picked up by the atmosphere and are transferred by wind storms and air currents. They permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those areas. As the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, Moret calls DU "the weapon that keeps on killing." There is no way to turn it off - and no way to clean it up. It meets the US government's own definition of "weapons of mass destruction."
Depleted Uranium over the United Kingdom
DU has a very high affinity for cellular DNA and permanently damages it. DU is the "fourth generation" of nuclear weapons. First came the atomic bomb, then the hydrogen bomb, then neutron bombs, and now DU. Moret claims the contaminated DU-dust from the Middle East gets absorbed into the atmosphere. Via dust storms and air currents it ends up in Europe and Britain. Eventually it spreads and get absorbed into the atmosphere globally. There is no safe place; no possible way to escape it.
Moret's concerns are confirmed by a 2006 report from England by Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan, appearing in European Biology and Bioelectromagnetics and titled "Did the use of Uranium weapons in Gulf War 2 result in contamination of Europe?" Data (obtained with the help of the Freedom of Information Act) from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, UK, revealed that after nine days of the "shock and awe" start of the Iraq war on 19 March 2003, much higher levels of uranium were picked up on five sites in Berkshire. On two occasions, levels exceeded the threshold at which the Environment Agency must be informed, though still within safety limits. These levels were the highest levels of depleted uranium ever measured in the atmosphere in Britain. The report also confirmed weather conditions over this war period, which showed a consistent flow of air from Iraq northwards.
Not surprisingly this research was vigorously denied as "uranium of natural origin" by various government officials. However, Busby and Morgan insist the findings are the first evidence that DU particles were able to travel thousands of miles from Baghdad to England. Their report can be found on the Internet.
Gulf War Syndrome
About 300 tons of DU were dispersed over Iraq in 1991. Yet the US Department of Defense (DoD) has found little health risk to soldiers who inhaled DU and continues to claim exposure to DU is safe. Nearly 580,000 soldiers were deployed in the war. 294 soldiers died and 400 were wounded or became ill. As of year 2000, there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability, and over 11,000 have died. Obviously something serious happened to the health of these men and women who served in the Gulf.
DU is known to be neurotoxic. Gulf War vets are twice as likely to come down with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) than vets who did not serve in Iraq. ALS, a fatal neuromuscular disease, is now considered a "service-connected" disease and vets can get disability. Gulf War vets have nearly twice the prevalence of "chronic multi-system disease" than soldiers who served elsewhere at the same time. But so called "Gulf War Syndrome" continues to be denied as a specific illness. The Department of Defense's evaluation does not consider GWS as a unique syndrome, unique illness, or unique symptom complex in deployed Gulf War vets. The Worldwide Diabetes Epidemic
A half century ago, during the early years of the Cold War when I went to medical school, diabetes was not a common disease. Now in the 21st century it is common to hear of diabetes as an impending epidemic. Certainly the statistics bear this out.
Currently, 7% of Americans have diabetes (17 million). In addition, a Los Angeles Times front-page report on 16 September 2006, claims that there are more than 41 million Americans with abnormal blood glucose abnormalities, "that indicate they may soon develop diabetes." In Puerto Rico (where DU was tested) 10% of the population has diabetes.
The Centres of Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta declares that "unless Americans change their ways," 33% of the babies born this year will be diabetic by the year 2050. Also by 2050 there are expected to be 45 million diabetics in the US. A vet support group, Veterans with Diabetes International, says there are 143 million people worldwide with the disease, and 300 million people are expected to have diabetes in 2025.
Type 1 diabetes, most often seen in children and young adults, comprises 5-10% of the cases. Type 2, a metabolic disorder resulting from the body's inability to make enough or properly use insulin, frequently strikes adults, especially obese adults. This group comprises 90% or more of diabetics. The CDC predicts that Type 2 diabetes will increase 165% by 2050. People with Type 2 diabetes are also twice as likely to get pancreatic cancer.
Thirty-four years after the Vietnam war ended, the DoD finally presented the "strongest evidence" that Type 2 diabetes can be connected to Agent Orange. Eighteen million gallons of this plant defoliant and poison was sprayed over Vietnam by the US military. It is now known to cause cancer and birth defects. Starting in the year 2002 diabetes is now recognised as a "service-connected" disease for all Vietnam vets. At present, diabetes is not service-connected for Gulf War vets.
Nine percent of Vietnam vets have Type 2 diabetes. There is no current evidence that Gulf War vets have a heightened incidence of diabetes, but I could find no solid research to confirm or deny this. Perhaps in one or two more decades government scientists will discover a connection to DU.
The common causes of diabetes are thought to be obesity, poor diet and lack of exercise. Leuren Moret believes the cause of the new epidemic is more sinister: namely the increasing levels worldwide of depleted uranium in the atmosphere, combined with emissions from the proliferation of nuclear power plants.
Unlike government scientists, Moret says DU is very, very, very nasty stuff; and that diabetes is an immediate response to DU, in contrast to the decades it can take for uranium to produce radiation-induced cancer. Although she cannot prove it, she is the first scientist to strongly suggest a connection between the new worldwide diabetes epidemic and DU.
Moret insists the medical profession has been active in the cover-up of low level radiation from atmospheric testing and nuclear power plants. I have been unable to verify this, but it is consistent with the passive role the health profession took during the Cold War nuclear testing in the US (more later). She has also spoken about medical professionals in hospitals who were threatened by government officials with $10,000 fines and jail time if they talked openly about the returning Iraq war soldiers and their medical problems. This could explain the paucity of reports in the scientific literature regarding vets exposed to DU and their war-associated illnesses.
Moret also says reporters have been prevented access to more than 14,000 medically evacuated soldiers from the current Iraq War, brought back to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, DC. To learn more about Leuren Moret and her research, Google: Leuren Moret + videos. In addition, she appears in the recent documentary film Beyond Treason, detailing the horrific effects of depleted uranium exposure on American troops and Iraqi civilians in the Gulf region in 1991. Is Depleted Uranium Safe?
Ronald L. Kathren is Professor Emeritus at Washington State University and a leading authority vouching for the safety of DU. Unlike Major Rokke, he does not appear to have ever served in the military or to have come in contact with DU on a battlefield. Nevertheless, his opinions carry a lot of weight in the scientific world.
Kathren does not dispute the fact that military personnel who may have had contact with DU are suffering from various illnesses, but he believes that exposure to uranium is very unlikely to be the cause.
Writing for the Portland Independent Media Centre on 3 July 2005, he declares: "Health physicists are deeply concerned with the public health and welfare, and as experts in radiation and its effects on people and the environment, are quite aware that something other than exposure to uranium is the cause of the illnesses suffered by those who have had contact with depleted uranium from munitions. A truly enormous body of scientific data shows that it is virtually impossible for uranium to be the cause of their illnesses. Despite this body of scientific data to the contrary, misguided or unknowing people continue to allege that the depleted uranium, and specifically the radioactivity associated with the depleted uranium is the cause of these illness. This is indeed unfortunate, for health physicists and other scientists and physicians already know that depleted uranium is not the cause of these illnesses and thus any investigations into the cause of these illnesses should focus on other possible causes. If we are to offer any measure of relief or solace to these suffering people, and to gain some important additional knowledge of the cause of their illness, we should not waste our valuable and limited energies, resources and time attempting to point the finger at depleted uranium as the culprit, when it is already known that uranium is almost certainly not the cause of the problem." (http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/07/320739.shtml) "No Level of Radiation is Safe for Humans"
As a physician it is inconceivable to me that government-approved experts like Kathren can so quickly dismiss DU as safe and harmless, particularly when on 29 June 2005, a National Academy of Sciences panel in Washington DC has found that no level of radiation is safe for humans.
The panel concluded that "any dose of radiation, no matter how small, can induce cancer. Exposure to radiation is becoming more and more likely for most people because of the growing use of radiation in medicine. The new findings could lead to changes in medical practices and the levels of radiation allowed at former nuclear sites." The panel also contradicted the often heard dictum of some government pro-nuclear scientists that "a little radiation is good for you."
The idea that low doses of radiation are safe is the myth that allowed extensive nuclear testing during the Cold War without a huge protest from every member of the human race. It is this myth that still allows DU weapons to be used on battlefields against "terrorists."
Historically, the proof of the danger of nuclear warfare was provided a decade ago by the publication of a US Congressional committee report authorised by President Bill Clinton and entitled, The Human Radiation Experiments. The report showed clearly that government scientists and physicians could not be trusted in their pronouncements regarding the safety of nuclear weapons. Even worse was the documentation of countless covert and secret radiation experiments conducted on unsuspecting citizens during the Cold War "in the name of science." Unfortunately, this horrific 1996 report did not deter Clinton from allowing DU weapons in Kosovo in 1999, nor did it deter President George W. Bush, who authorised their use again in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Anyone with Internet access can simply Google "the human radiation experiments" for details of the shameful science surrounding nuclear testing and the disastrous health effects on unsuspecting American citizens.
In 2001, a half century after extensive nuclear weapons testing in the American West, the US National Cancer Institute was finally forced to reveal its finding that bomb testing in Nevada, which spread radioactive fallout across every state of the Union, has caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths and up to 212,000 non-fatal thyroid cancers. John LaForge of Nukewatch.com reminds us that "the 67 bomb tests blown off between 1946 and 1958 were said at the time to be safe." Money, Power and Depleted Uranium
Who is profiting from this global uranium nightmare? In The Enemy Within (1996) Jay Gould reveals that the British Royal family privately owns investments in uranium holdings worth over $6 billion through Rio Tinto Mines, an Anglo-Australian company, which is the world's largest mining company with more than 60 operations in 40 countries. Africa and Australia are two of the main sources of uranium in the world; and the Rothschilds control uranium supplies and prices globally.
Gould notes that nuclear radiation has brought dramatic increases in breast cancer mortality, especially in communities 50 to 100 miles downwind from nuclear reactors. Book reviewer Donna Lee writes: "The Enemy Within has enough scientific data to address those bureaucrats who deny that living near a nuclear reactor is a hazard to one's health. It also includes enough direct, clear prose to convince me, a breast cancer survivor, that I grew up during the Cold War as an unknowing guinea pig, further victimised by the politics of suppression and denial."
Lee continues: "After reading the book, however, I am bothered by one persistent question. I was born and raised and continue to live in San Francisco, California, which has the highest incidence of breast cancer in the world. The Enemy Within concerns itself with breast cancer mortality rates, which are highest in the communities around New York City. San Francisco isn't within 100 miles of a nuclear reactor and it isn't even mentioned in the book. If low level radiation explains clusters of breast cancer throughout the US, what explains us?"
Actually there was a nuclear power plant located in Sacramento, less than 100 miles from San Francisco, which became active in 1975. Gould probably did not include this in his 1996 book because the Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant was forced to shut down its operations in 1989, due to a public outcry and a referendum.
David Bradbury says child cancer rates on Vieques Island have soared 250% above the Puerto Rican national average in the last thirty years. In his 2005 documentary film, Blowin' in the Wind, the provocative Australian filmmaker and two-time Academy Award nominee also provides some answers regarding the huge financial interests involved in uranium production and DU weapons. Australia provides one-third of the world's uranium supply, and Bradbury reveals a secret treaty that allows the US military to train and test its DU weaponry on Australian soil. He exposes plans to extract over $36 billion from uranium mines over the next six years, and shows the finished construction of a 1,000 mile railway from the mining area to a port on the north coast of Australia to transport the ore.
The railway project was built by Texas-based Halliburton Company. In 1995 US Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of that company. The film maker says, "The Queen's favourite American buccaneers, Cheney, Halliburton, and the Bush family, are tied to her through uranium mining and the shared use of illegal depleted uranium munitions in the Middle East, Central Asia and Kosovo/Bosnia. The major roles that such diverse individuals and groups as the Carlyle Group, George Herbert Walker Bush, former Carlyle CEO Frank Calucci, the University of California managed nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos and Livermore, and US and international pension fund investments have played in proliferating depleted uranium weapons is not well known or in most instances even recognised, inside or outside Australia. God Save The Queen from the guilt of her complicity in turning Planet Earth into a 'Death Star'."
Depleted Uranium and the War on Terror
There is nothing more terrifying than the thought of exposing all life forms on the planet to DNA-altering radiation in order to provide us with "safety" and "democracy." It is truly diabolic to think that the destruction of the planet is now occurring with so few people comprehending what is going on - and still fewer people taking an active stand against this tragedy. It is apparent that most of the world's political and spiritual leaders, as well as scientists, physicians, lawyers, and health professionals do not care about the dangers of DU weapons and other forms of nuclear energy. If they cared we would certainly be hearing and reading about it on television and in the major media.
As a researcher and writer over the part few decades, I have focused on the man-made origin of AIDS and the little-known bacterial cause of cancer, paying little attention to nuclear radiation. However, in 2001 I wrote an article entitled "The Human Radiation Experiments: How Scientists Secretly Used US Citizens as Guinea Pigs During the Cold War", which was published in the September-October 2001 issue of New Dawn, and is posted on several websites. But I must admit I was unaware of the serious planetary problems posed by DU. I simply assumed that no civilised and peace-loving country would ever be reckless and heartless enough to use these radioactive weapons. How wrong I was!
What I find most pathetic and inconceivable is that we have learned nothing from the detrimental health effects unleashed by the atomic bombing of Japan - and nothing from the nuclear testing horrors of the last half of the 20th century. Instead we continue to contaminate vast areas of the world with radiation we don't know how to get rid of.
I remember as an eleven year-old boy how jubilant everyone was by the atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which brought the war to a rapid end. A half century later my Caucasian niece married a Japanese-American man. Shortly after the wedding she noticed a lump in his neck, which proved to be thyroid cancer. His mother was a child when she lived 50 miles outside of Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. Decades later, in her forties, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, undoubtedly due to the radiation fallout. The doctors considered the possibility that my niece's husband might have developed thyroid cancer because of radiation-altered and thyroid cancer-causing genes passed on to him by his mother. Of course the family wonders if their two young children will eventually also get thyroid cancer. Who would have thought that the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 would have a cancerous effect five decades later on my family living in California?
A few years ago I developed a thyroid nodule, which was biopsied and proved non-cancerous. As a teenager in the 1950s I received "superficial" radiation treatments for acne at the recommendation of a well-known New York dermatologist, a treatment that was later banned because of its potential to cause thyroid cancer.
It is almost a cliché to remind people that "all of us are connected." The fallout from DU and nuclear energy now binds us all together in an increasingly radioactive planet. No one is immune from the deleterious effects of radiation, and no one knows how to clean it up.
What can we do about it? The only thing we can do is to stop the madness immediately. However, power and greed and politics and religion make that highly unlikely.
We have met the perpetrators of the new radiation-induced "war on terror." And, sadly, it is us.
Dr. Alan Cantwell is a retired dermatologist and author of five books on the man-made origin of AIDS and the infectious origin of cancer, published by Aries Rising Press, PO Box 29532, Los Angeles, CA 90029, USA ( ). His book, Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot, is available in Australia through New Dawn Book Service. His latest book is Four Women Against Cancer: Bacteria, Cancer and the Origin of Life. His books are also available on www.amazon.com and in the US through Book Clearing House @ 1-800-431-1579. Email: alancantwell@sbcglobal.net.
It's being called the largest research fraud in medical history. Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer's speakers' bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals.
Now being reported across the mainstream media is the fact that Dr. Reuben accepted a $75,000 grant from Pfizer to study Celebrex in 2005. His research, which was published in a medical journal, has since been quoted by hundreds of other doctors and researchers as "proof" that Celebrex helped reduce pain during post-surgical recovery. There's only one problem with all this: No patients were ever enrolled in the study!
Dr. Scott Reuben, it turns out, faked the entire study and got it published anyway.
It wasn't the first study faked by Dr. Reuben: He also faked study data on Bextra and Vioxx drugs, reports the Wall Street Journal.
As a result of Dr. Reuben's faked studies, the peer-reviewed medical journal Anesthesia & Analgesia was forced to retract 10 "scientific" papers authored by Reuben. The Day of London reports that 21 articles written by Dr. Reuben that appear in medical journals have apparently been fabricated, too, and must be retracted.
After being caught fabricating research for Big Pharma, Dr. Reuben has reportedly signed a plea agreement that will require him to return $420,000 that he received from drug companies. He also faces up to a 10-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.
He was also fired from his job at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass. after an internal audit there found that Dr. Reuben had been faking research data for 13 years. (http://www.theday.com/article/20100...)
Business as usual in Big Pharma
What's notable about this story is not the fact that a medical researcher faked clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry. It's not the fact that so-called "scientific" medical journals published his fabricated studies. It's not even the fact that the drug companies paid this quack close to half a million dollars while he kept on pumping out fabricated research.
The real story here is that this is business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Reuben's actions really aren't that extraordinary. Drug companies bribe researchers and doctors as a routine matter. Medical journals routinely publish false, fraudulent studies. FDA panel members regularly rely on falsified research in making their drug approval decisions, and the mainstream media regularly quotes falsified research in reporting the news.
Fraudulent research, in other words, is widespread in modern medicine. The pharmaceutical industry couldn't operate without it, actually. It is falsified research that gives the industry its best marketing claims and strongest FDA approvals. Quacks like Dr Scott Reuben are an important part of the pharmaceutical profit machine because without falsified research, bribery and corruption, the industry would have very little research at all.
Pay special attention to the fact that the Anesthesia & Analgesia medical journal gladly published Dr. Reuben's faked studies even though this journal claims to be a "scientific" medical journal based on peer review. Funny, isn't it, how such a scientific medical journal gladly publishes fraudulent research with data that was simply invented by the study author. Perhaps these medical journals should be moved out of the non-fiction section of university libraries and placed under science fiction.
Remember, too, that all the proponents of pharmaceuticals, vaccines and mammograms ignorantly claim that their conventional medicine is all based on "good science." It's all scientific and trustworthy, they claim, while accusing alternative medicine of being "woo woo" wishful thinking and non-scientific hype. Perhaps they should have a quick look in the mirror and realize it is their own system of quack medicine that's based largely on fraudulent research, bribery and corruption.
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BBC News April 19, 2010
One of the Biggest Health Frauds EVER Perpetrated on the American People..., posted May 13th, 2010, 1 comment
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Animals in southern Iceland are at risk of fluoride poisoning if they inhale or ingest the ash from the recent volcanic eruption. Fluoride poisoning can lead to internal bleeding, long-term bone damage and tooth loss.
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