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Category: Health/Medical

  • The Hypocritical Oath

    Residency training often claims to focus on training effective physicians. In reality, it’s an intricately designed conditioning process to train physicians to be tools for profit maximization. In order to be truly “effective” physicians, residents, in solidarity with other healthcare workers, must organize to challenge the systems that lead to suffering and illness both in health care and around the globe.

    Image of person in a white medical coat holding a stethoscope in their left hand and crossing their arms.

    The end of medical school is a moment that, for many medical school graduates, is several years — sometimes several generations — in the making. After four grueling years the graduate is ready to officially get that “MD” behind their name. But what else has the four years of medical school done for the soon-to-be physician? As previously discussed, medical school is not an apolitical environment in which “medical knowledge” is simply passed on to each student. Mechanisms are put in place to condition students to be less likely to question systems of power. Overall, the medical school structure serves as an indoctrination system. By the time they graduate, medical students are forced to take on massive amounts of student loans — the average medical school graduate has around $250,000 in student loan debt — which serves as a form of economic control and coercion. By conditioning thought and using economic coercion, the medical education system helps make the physician more likely to participate in and help maintain a capitalist healthcare system whose focus is extracting monetary value from people’s bodies damaged by capitalism and colonialism.

    This indoctrination starts even before medical school as the educational system filters for a medical school candidate from a particular class and racial background. Folks from working-class backgrounds are systematically excluded from medical school education — from premedical courses designed to “weed out” students, few opportunities for mentorship, and unsupportive career counselors to hard-to-meet shadowing or extracurricular requirements to the highly prohibitive costs of standardized testing, applications, and interviews. To be clear, these dynamics are nothing new. In his book Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, E. Richard Brown cites concerns raised by education leaders as far back as 1908, when the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) was criticized for changing attendance requirements for medical school. As Brown states, the proposed requirement for a college education before attending medical school would “exclude poorer classes from their [medical school] ranks.”

    This trend continues today. According to an analysis from the AAMC, the median family income of matriculating medical students has only increased over the years, and it will likely further systemically skew upward in the coming years. These filtering mechanisms also serve to limit the political perspectives of incoming medical students, making it even easier to structure the collective thought of students once they are in medical school.

    After all this, what comes next for the new doctor? Medical residency. Medical residency lasts anywhere from three to seven years depending on the medical specialty. It is considered the place where physicians learn to “practice” the “art of medicine.” But what actually happens in residency? Residents work long hours for large corporations while being told that their work conditions are beneficial to their “learning.” In reality, though, residents work as cheap labor for the medical industrial complex. During residency, trainees learn to respect the corporate hierarchy, keep their heads down, be subservient to authority, and, most importantly for the capitalist medical system, how to more efficiently funnel patients through medical factories for profit.

    A Brief History of Modern Medical Education

    To discuss medical residency, we must understand how residency serves as a training program to produce physicians who function within and perpetuate the capitalist medical system. The field of medicine supporting the foundational structures of capitalism in a settler-colonial society is nothing new. For example, as E. Richard Brown cites, in Walter Fisher’s study of medicine’s role in the antebellum South, Fisher concluded that enslaved people were given medical care mainly because of “the tremendous economic investment they represented to slave owners.” Additionally, medicine was weaponized to justify the racial hierarchy that serves capitalism. As medicine became more modernized and education more formalized, it was important to ensure physicians were trained to practice medicine in a particular way. A document crucial in setting this path for modern American medical education was the Flexner Report.

    As educators of the Health Justice Commons (HJC) discuss, the Flexner Report, a landmark document written by Abraham Flexner and commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation, helped set the standards for modern medical education. The report was critical in helping shift modern American medical education to a strictly biomedical focus. As the HJC discusses, the report alienated traditional healers, criminalized alternative forms of care, and deemed women and people of color unfit to participate in medical education. In Rockefeller Medicine Men, Brown cites Flexner’s views that the practice of Black doctors be “limited to his own race.” Flexner perpetuated racist views about disease transmission by advocating for “improved training for Black physicians” largely because whites lived near Black people. These prejudices translated to medical school reforms and closures. Post-report, Black medical schools were disproportionately affected by closure, with 71 percent of Black medical schools closing compared to 55 percent of white institutions. Of the seven Black medical schools in existence at the time, only Meharry and Howard survived.

    The report also helped solidify a medical education system that systematically excludes applicants of working-class backgrounds, arguably institutionalizing the elitism of the medical education system. Flexner believed the previous requirement of just four years of high school before medical school attracted “a mass of unprepared youth drawn out of industrial occupations into the study of medicine.” As Brown notes, “Neither the ‘crude boy’ nor ‘the jaded clerk’ were suitable material for a career in medicine.” Flexner’s prescription was to require college before medical school. Brown emphasizes that this occurred at a time when “only 15 percent of the high school age population was enrolled in high school and only 5 percent of the college age population was enrolled in a college or university.”

    In the early 20th century large monopoly families were constantly exploring how to increase their wealth and power by controlling societal institutions. The Rockefellers, for example — a family headed by J.D. Rockefeller, an American capitalist and oil baron who profited off the Holocaust — founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901 to privately fund medical research. Families such as the Morgans (of JP Morgan) were also active in the research-focused Carnegie Foundation, which they used to exert greater control over legislative and governmental bodies.

    The Rockefeller Foundation was headed by Dr. Simon Flexner and notably did not support research investigating the connection between social factors, health, and disease. The ruling elites had no interest in changing society for the general health and well-being of the populace as an end in itself. Instead, research was explored in order to make the public healthy enough to labor, to be further exploited by capitalists. These ruling-class families also hoped to integrate these changes in medical education with contemporary reforms in education more generally to further expand their influence.

    In 1907, in the context of these larger reforms, the head of the newly reformatted American Medical Association (AMA), surgeon and professor at Rush Medical College, Arthur Dean Bevan, invited the head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Henry Pritchett, to discuss the possibility of a Carnegie-sponsored study on medical education. Eventually Simon Flexner’s brother, Abraham Flexner, was appointed director of this study, even though he had no experience in medicine. And thus, Abraham Flexner’s “Flexner Report” was born.

    While there can be arguments made around potential benefits of “standardizing” quality in medical education, as HJC notes, medical education’s shift to pure biomedicine has created captive markets of communities seen as disease vectors to be controlled through “healthcare.” In doing so, these reforms helped create vertical, high-profit industries in which patients become dependent consumers. The focus on biomedicine also served the financial interest of the medical industrial complex by not treating the root causes of illness, for self-preservation of the medical industrial complex itself. Additionally, it absolves the other interconnected industrial complexes (military, pharmaceutical, fossil fuel, manufacturing, farming) and allows their catastrophic effects on the well-being of the environment and communities to continue. As Brown notes, “The Flexner report united the interests of the elite practitioners, scientific medical faculty, and the wealthy capitalist class.”

    Medical Residency as a Tool for Indoctrination and Labor Extraction

    In their book Social Medicine and the Coming Transformation, physicians and activists Howard Waitzkin, Alina Pérez, and Matthew Anderson discuss how the training and education of healthcare workers can serve the interests of the capitalist system. They cite the work of Vincent Navarro, Spanish physician, sociologist, and political scientist who maintained there is a minimum level of health for the working class if it is to work. As a result an alliance must arise between the capitalist class and medical profession, as healthcare workers are needed to perpetuate the belief that the main causes of ill health are personal and biogenetic rather than social and commonly caused by the very occupations in which people work. Changes made to medical education as a result of the Flexner report, which continue to this day, helped to bolster this alliance. It is the job of healthcare workers who want to destabilize these oppressive systems to grapple with and struggle against this system of education. Today an elaborate array of conditioning mechanisms and structures are now in place to uphold these dynamics. Let’s discuss how some of these mechanisms function.

    Throughout medical school and residency training, students and trainees are subject to a series of licensing and board certification examinations. Studies have demonstrated that there is little to no correlation between United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) scores and clinical performance in residency. Instead of ensuring the production of competent, compassionate physicians prepared to address the structural factors that cause illness and suffering, these examinations function to promote conformity and the status quo. Studying for these examinations can be all consuming, thereby diverting time from questioning and challenging harmful systems to test preparation.

    Additionally, these tests ensure a constant source of revenue for test preparation companies, testing companies, and organizations, such as the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), the licensing and testing bodies, respectively. In fiscal year 2019, the NBME reported a revenue of $180 million, with $177 million operating costs and a profit of $3 million. The FSMB reported a profit of $4.7 million in 2019, and in 2020, their CEO was compensated $726,518. This tax data, available on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, is an example of how nonprofit organizations function like corporations within the nonprofit industrial complex. Test preparation for USMLE licensing exams and specialty boards is also  highly profitable, forming part of the billion-dollar test prep industry. Preparation courses and practice-question banks all come at a cost, which can be prohibitive to first-generation or low-income students and trainees, which serves to further exclude people of color and working-class people from becoming physicians. In summary, standardized testing with an emphasis on physician competence disguises the real goal of producing physicians for the extraction of profit from bodies damaged by capitalism and is also profitable in and of itself.

    Medical residency is also profitable to hospital systems. Let’s look at the data on Medicare Graduate Medical Education (GME) payments, which has been compiled here. Payments consist of direct and indirect costs of resident education, that is, the salary and benefits of residents and their attending preceptors and program operating costs, respectively. The Per Resident Amount (PRA) paid for each resident significantly exceeds the resident salary. For example, in 2018, Howard University Hospital was paid a PRA of $169,206 for primary care specialties, while the salary for a first-year resident was $50,628.36. The 2017 paper “Eliminating Residents Increases the Cost of Care” calculated the cost of replacing residents. Residents are paid less and work more than their replacements (they are not to work more than 80 hours weekly averaged across four weeks, as established by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education or ACGME, a body further discussed below). By the author’s calculations, the cost of replacing 1.0 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) internal medicine resident with 1.8 FTE Nurse Practitioner would be $168,104. The cost of replacing 1.0 FTE anesthesiology resident with 1.5 FTE Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist would be $218,111. They conclude that “GME programs are a positive factor in hospital finances and should not be considered a financial risk.” Though hospital leadership pretends they are doing a service by “training the next generation of doctors,” the financial incentive is clear. Hospital CEOs do not care about training competent physicians; they care about improving their bottom line with cheap, overworked resident physicians.

    In addition to being inherently profitable, medical residency serves as an indoctrination process for the production of physicians who will be complicit with the medical industrial complex. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) is the accrediting body for residency and fellowship programs, whose stated purpose is “improving the patient care delivered by resident and fellow physicians today, and in their future independent practice.” How does the ACGME determine when a resident physician has become “competent”? For one, through dictating the number of patients that should be seen during residency, with an emphasis on clinical efficiency during a 15–20 minute “patient encounter.” This number is 1,650 for family medicine residents, with the implication being that volume equals learning.

    Does it? Do residents learn to be compassionate listeners? Do they understand their patient’s illness experience and the oppressive systems that cause suffering? Do they have time to fight these systems outside the hospital or examination room? Do they have time to adequately precept and learn from their attending physicians? Do they have the option to slow down to learn if they need more time or support without fear of being placed on academic observation or probation?

    No, they learn to see human beings as a “single problem for today’s visit,” interrupt them midsentence, and further traumatize, police, and perpetuate harms of medical racism and the like. This practice is particularly damaging and exploitative given that residency programs commonly provide medical care in oppressed communities. Education about the systems that produce illness would cause the resident to conclude that the healthcare system, which commodifies illness and maximizes financial extraction from bodies damaged by capitalism and colonialism, must be dismantled entirely. Additionally, the ACGME says they value resident “well-being” and “patient safety,” which is why the 80-hour workweek was standardized. Eighty hours a week, however, is the equivalent of two full-time jobs, which leads to exhausted residents attempting to care for patients and increased risk of medical errors. Yet this comical “work limit” is maintained to give the perception of caring about well-being (of both resident and patient) while solidifying the place of the resident as a cog in the wheel of the medical industrial complex.

    Residency programs themselves take a crucial role in conditioning physicians. One way programs do this is by co-opting “woke” terminology in discussing the training of physicians without implementing policies that would change the actions of physicians practicing. For example, take implicit bias training, lauded in “social justice”–oriented residencies around the country. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2019 titled “A Meta-analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures” brought together 492 studies on procedures used to change the implicit biases that influence behavior. The study “found little evidence that changes in implicit measures translated into changes in explicit measures and behavior.” Yet despite data showing these trainings are ineffective, they continue because they allow residency programs to appear as if they are teaching physicians to address systemic problems.

    This sets up a dynamic, which MD/PhD student Ariel Hart references in their piece on Medium titled “what i know to be true:” where “Talking about implicit bias, structural competency, health inequities and even anti-racism can take up a lot of time and energy and most of the times is a checkbox, to make people feel good about doing next to nothing to actually uproot structural violence in our society.” Programs use these checkboxes to pretend they are “doing the work,” but as Hart explains “we will not ‘implicit bias,’ ‘structural competence’ or ‘health inequity’ training ourselves out of this. We need to explicitly name and target colonialism, capitalism, racism, sexism, and other oppressions.”

    In residency programs around the country there also is a focus on “wellness” to address higher rates of “depressive disorders, depressed mood, burnout, and suicidal ideation” among medical residents when compared to their nonmedical peers. Studies demonstrate that “male doctors have suicide rates as much as 40 percent higher than the general population, and female doctors up to 130 percent higher.” While the causes of depression and suicide are multifactorial, the continual alienation of physicians inside the medical industrial complex and its factory-like commodification of patients takes its toll on physician well-being.

    Yet combating this exploitative system is rarely discussed as a solution to resident issues. Instead, individual solutions are proposed, such as “finding better balance” or “improved time management” or “meditation.” Ultimately, residency programs emphasize individual solutions because combating the factory processes of medicine would threaten their existence, and this process of individualizing systemic issues then extends to a physician’s practice after residency. Residency programs deflect responsibility for exhausting 80-hour resident workweeks, citing the ACGME, when programs could institute hour limit restrictions unilaterally, yet fail to do so. Programs rarely feel threatened to make tangible changes as time in residency is limited (typically three to five years); by the time residents start to organize, they will already be graduating. Therefore, less effort is put into changing exploitative dynamics. Residency programs help create and maintain exploitative conditions for residents.

    Prospects for a New Approach

    There is a commonly held assumption that it is possible to practice technically “good care” in the current medical setting despite its goal of maximizing profit at the expense of all else, with medical training systematically designed to depoliticize healthcare workers and uphold the current medical structure. It needs to be explicitly stated — it is not possible. The current medical system does not allow for adequate patient care and the medical education system conditions healthcare workers to either mentally suppress that known reality or perform mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they are providing “good care.” The first step in addressing this system is understanding that adequate healthcare under capitalism is not possible. A medical education that trains physicians to recognize, address, and destabilize destructive systems will be attainable only when healthcare workers, both in training and independent practice, politicize themselves to the degree they recognize the need to build new systems of medical education and healthcare.

    Current residents must mobilize to help create these new systems. One way residents can begin doing this is to participate in the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), a union. If the residency does not have a union, the residents should fight to win one. But in the process of fighting for a union or fighting with a union, residents cannot settle there. Once politicized, residents must demand militant, fighting unions that do not campaign for capitalist politicians and do not sign comfortable contracts for the boss that include “no-strike” clauses. Residents must demand that “their union,” CIR, stop trying to play nice with exploitative hospital systems, “asking” for moderately better working conditions, or “seats at” a table of executives who care about profit maximization above all else. Unions should not be fighting for seats at the table of the medical industrial complex — they should be fighting to cut the legs off the table and destroy it all together. Healthcare workers can collectively run these institutions themselves and do not need bosses who only make their jobs more difficult and obstruct patient care. As we have highlighted, residents keep hospital systems running, and they and their union must use all the tools possible, including work stoppages and strikes, to fight employers that ultimately do not care about workplace conditions or patient health. Healthcare workers must resist and reject the boss’s myth that organizing for better working conditions will harm patients.

    While residents fight for combative unions, there is a danger that the focus can become solely on obtaining a union, which misdirects energy from building militant organization between workers in a workplace. Residents can become siloed and lose the view of the exploitation of workers occurring all around them. This must be avoided. At the Institute for Family Health (IFH) in New York City, for example, residents worked to organize across staff lines, combining the struggles among residents, attending physicians, nurses, medical assistants, and all other staff, focusing on the exploitation all workers experienced because of the boss. This fight was ultimately betrayed by workers pursuing their own self-interest instead of maintaining a collective struggle — this serves as another example of the result of the lack of political education among healthcare workers — but fights like these can serve as schools of war for workers organizing together. Another example of the power of resident organizing is advocating for protest as didactics, as done by residents at the Swedish Cherry Hill Family Medicine Residency in Seattle, which now gives didactic credit for participation in political actions within the community.

    In this process, it is important to recognize and accept the interconnectedness of all systems of oppression that harm the working class, and ultimately harm all life systems on this earth. Medical students, residents, and physicians who truly care about health — whether that means the health of the patient, the health of the community, or the health of humans and living beings on the earth more generally — must participate in political organizing outside the hospital to challenge the medical industrial complex, capitalism, colonialism, and U.S. imperialism. You cannot #decolonize medicine at historically racist institutions on stolen land, and the changes needed will not come from within those institutions.

    Workers both within and outside medicine must participate in political organizations focused on not just challenging the medical industrial complex but the capitalist system as a whole. Ultimately, the fight against the system of medical education comes as part of a fight against the medical industrial complex, which cannot be adequately waged unless it also fights other systems of oppression.

    The post The Hypocritical Oath first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Politics: We need a Transformation

    As if we needed any more evidence of the sorry state of our political system, the long-running battle over the ‘Build Back Better’ bill has provided it. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, an early version of this bill included many proposals that would help Americans live with a sense of security. In addition, these proposals were strongly supported by the US population.

    Among these many items were negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the obscenely high drug prices, universal Preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds, support for paid family and medical leave, and the expansion of Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids and glasses. Particularly popular with the public, the funding for this bill would come from taxes and legislative changes affecting the super wealthy who have benefited enormously from previous legislation (including gigantic bailouts) from Congress and the White House.

    The corporate media reported this version of the bill had a price tag of $3.5 trillion, but failed to emphasize that this cost was spread over a 10-year period, or $350 billion per year. Many politicians opposed this bill, claiming that the cost was too high.

    However, these same politicians didn’t bat an eye at giving about $715 billion a year or, assuming the same funding level, over $7 trillion for 10 years to the US military. It didn’t matter that the military has not passed an annual independent audit since Congress first mandated the audit for federal agencies in 1990. In addition, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the US spending on its military is greater than the sum of the next 11 nations combined and most of these countries are our allies.

    In 1957, General Douglas MacArthur, a leading US military figure during the 20th century and hardly a peacenik, explained the support for increasing military budgets:

    Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear … with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

    The situation is worse today than the one President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address when he pointed out the dangers of the military-industrial complex. The media, universities and think tanks now are also part of this complex and provide even more lobbying clout.

    An investigation by Brown University researchers estimated that the cost of US global war on terror since 9/11 at $8 trillion with direct responsibility for about 900,000 deaths. Clearly this war has been counterproductive for the US image around the world. In addition, its illegal attacks have also caused enormous unnecessary devastation and loss of lives particularly in the Middle East. Making matters worse, these illegal interventions, particularly the war crimes committed against Iraq, had very little to do with direct US interests. What a waste of resources! The financial cost to the US would be even far higher if the US were required to pay reparations for the devastation its war crimes caused.

    Yet Congress continues to generously fund the Pentagon and to enrich the merchants of death while it is a miser to agencies that actually help the American public achieve the necessities of life. These necessities include housing, education, health care, food, etc. People living in much of Western Europe live much more secure lives having had these necessities for decades. Clearly our system of legalized bribery of politicians enriches the wealthy at the public’s expense.

    It is terrible that two recalcitrant Democratic senators have been able to eliminate many of the important items included in the previous version of the Act such that it now costs about $185 billion/year. It is possible that the bill’s costs will be further reduced as other provisions are stripped away. What is even worse is the role of partisan politics where not even one Republican senator will stand up for the security of their fellow Americans and support the Act. What happened to the idea of standing up for the public interest? Do they prefer to see the public continue to suffer rather than to allow the other party to claim success? This system of legalized bribery and intense partisanship is a system that dooms us to disaster.

    The post US Politics: We need a Transformation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Quitting is a Mental Health Decision

    Well well, some of us try-try. We end up having to take pittance jobs, with pitiful nonprofits, where the bottom line is, well, poverty pimping.

    So in a time of Covid Capitalism, in a time of quick silver circling the drain, quitting after 5 weeks on the job may appear rash, or self-defeating.

    But here is the rub — working in Oregon, on the coast, in areas that are tourist-centric, rural, redneck, we have to juggle our principles and our ethics with the prevailing job market. Social services in USA are feces factories, and in Oregon, we as a state hit rock bottom. Not to take anything away from the rock bottom that Georgia claims, as we see in the Intercept, an article, “Judge, Lawyer, Help, Case Dismissed — Atlanta’s Mental Health Problem — and Ours” by George Chidi:

    About 62 percent of Georgians believe they may be foreclosed on or evicted in the next two months for being behind on payments, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted last month. It is by far the highest percentage in the United States.

    There aren’t actually enough marshals to process all of the evictions that are coming. People will be forced from their homes in fits and spurts. Many residents will look for relief from Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs, which has a $1 billion allocation for emergency rental assistance from the federal government.

    Good luck.

    After eight months with cash in hand, the department had spent about 9 percent of its money. The federal government is probably going to claw some of the remaining cash back.

    Chidi’s piece follows one woman, who lives in her feces, half naked, in Atlanta. His perspective is on mental illness, generational trauma, inept systems of oppression, and the disgusting nature of Americans. One super user person — her name is Harmony — has been to court, has been busted, has been ambulanced to the ER multiple times, has been forcefully evaluated and drugged. Tens of thousands a year just for one person. Some super users, as they are called, are costing taxpayers a million bucks or more a year in the penury-ripoff medical-mental health-nonprofit-policing systems of oppression. The housing-first model can’t work in capitalism, and the attendant mental illnesses, outright and brewing, in the tens of millions of Americans will be dealt with (sic) through fines, tolls, penalties, surcharges, fees, taxes, imprisonment, probation, handcuffs, rough sleeping on America’s streets, slow death, traumatic death.

    Pretty hardboiled this country, these systems are! And, after five weeks, I had to quit a job where my requirement was supposedly to help people living in poverty, living with mental illnesses, with traumatic brain injuries, with developmental disabilities, get job ready, get their job profiles and interview skills up to speed, and to get them jobs that are in most cases, Customized. That term is a double-edged sword, really, since in Oregon, the job of employment specialists like myself is to to find competitive, integrated employment. That sounds grand, but the reality is most of the clients I have served here at this new ex-company and for years elsewhere need bridges: guys like me speaking with employers, the business’ other employees, with the client, and with an eye to part-time work with accommodations requested, i.e. some tasks removed from the job, some coaching and supervision by the social services’ agency, and a lot of check ins with the employer, as well as natural supports and the client and his or her team of service coordinators, housing support staff, parents, guardians, state brokerages, and state vocational rehabilitation, as well as mental health teams when applicable, supporting him or her.

    This shit-show company (the identify and identifying characteristics have been changed herein) has headquarters two hours south of my county, and they have money making services that employ people with DD and ID, and, well, they are run by broken people, the services and the company in general. I’ve written about this before — Social services is populated with people living with a boat-load of chronic illnesses, complex PTSD, even mental illness. There are many in this field with physical disabilities. Unfortunately, these people on the coast, where I live and work, are loud, obnoxious, jealous of people with graduate degrees. They are racist, ageist, plain crude, rude and ugly in the way they talk out of the sides of their mouths. They are American, as American as this new putrid governor of Virginia, Youngkin, another racist, backward, millionaire of the private equity kind (inequity for us, the 80 percent). As American as Hunter Biden. As American as David Duke. Just on a poor scale. Trump and Jerry Springer. So many examples of the sickness of Americans, from academics, to FDA props, to your local gas station attendant.

    In my case, the supervisor unloaded on me — on day one — her personal life, her own prejudices, demonstrating all sorts of sad non-supervisorial ticks and attitudes. Unprofessional seems to be her middle name. She had to unload on me about her own broken family background, her own personal struggles, and all of the bad stuff. She’d say, “Well, this is between you and me … and if you try to throw me under the bus, watch out.”

    Funny how this field attracts broken people, and when you put these people into a supervisorial role, they take it seriously — boss, man. Broken bosses!

    See the source image

    Seriously, a fifty-something single mother of four boys expected the “yes, boss” crap from me. She is seriously flawed, and on day one she trashed the state workers, the counselors I had to work with since they are the people who refer clients to this nonprofit, which profits off of the homelessness, the intellectual disabilities, the mental and psychiatric disabilities, the trauma, the life circumstances of their clients.

    Having a supervisor, or manager, telling me “I’m a beaner,” and then laughing that she has “Mexican roots,” and then thinking and saying, “Yes, it may be crude and racist, but I am okay with it.”

    A boss who is confused about LGBTQA+, about transgenderism and transitioning, and yet, she has a military-based (Navy) son who is marrying another man, and that is how this redneck, broken world is — still calling people faggot, as an enduring term. She laughed about it.

    Again, this messed up, crude, disgusting country (yes, you can call anyone anything you want to in the privacy of your home, in the open air of your backyard and amongst your sick family and friends) is broken from top to down. But this is day one, day two, and on and on, of a low paying job.

    I quit yesterday, and my tendered resignation was about all sorts of terrible things this supervisor was doing. You are left out there in the middle of the muck when the boss ma’am is racist, sexist, loud, cussing, and yakking about her dating life, yakking to me, a man disinterested in this crap, and, me, someone who just wanted to get down to brass tacks with clients and their support network.

    The company is run by a guy who is ex-military, Army, and the entire organization is full of broken, sick and troubled people. There you have it, no, troubled, sick, broken people working with adults with broken lives, troubled minds, sicknesses from developmental disabilities and beat down emotionally and physically by weathering and the trauma of foster care and group homes and bad-bad families and schools.

    At the heart of it all, read Patrick Lawrence, “The Manufacture of Decline — Americans suffer the same disabilities as the Europeans of 1919: They cannot think. They cannot speak plainly among themselves.”

    It is sobering, to put the point mildly, to sit in America in 2021 and read the reflections of a writer sitting in Paris 102 years ago. The world America made in the post–1945 years has ended just as the Great War ended the world Paul Valéry, born in 1871, knew as his own.

    And Americans suffer the same disabilities as the Europeans of 1919: They cannot think. They cannot speak plainly among themselves.

    They are, in a phrase, manufacturing their own decline as they flinch from the world as it is in this, our post–American century.

    It makes sense that I would unfold this catharsis from my life in this attempt at closure, at DV, a newsletter, “a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice.” It makes sense that I tell the world — a few readers — that is —  things stink in Denmark, or Detroit, or Oregon. This is called ground-truthing, and as I age out of this society (aging out means that this society gives shit about you, gives shit about your background, gives shit about your great licks and qualities, your travel and depth of life), the micro/macro aggressions heaped up on the feces pile that these people, low or high, rich or poor, broken or semi-fixed, closeted tyrants or semi-narcissists, just grows.

    Failure after failure, I have weathered, leaving these trauma-inducing places behind. I have a thousand stories, or more. Maybe the nonfiction book or anti-memoir memoir, about all the people I have worked with, taught, reported on, been with throughout my walkabout. Again, who buys, who reads, who cares?

    • How the Salvation Army Lives Off (and thrives with) a Special Brand of Poverty Pimping
      Part-One: The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Salvation Army’s Faith-based ‘One Treatment Fits All’
    • Brother/Sister Can You Spare a Warm Shelter? What we see behind the faces of a homeless family
    • Insanity of Social Work as Human Control — Contemporary penal institutions are not often the penitentiaries themselves, but, are immersed within communities, manifesting in social welfare programming
    • Death by a Thousand Cuts: When the Cures of Big Pharma are Worse than the Diseases; The more chemicals, drugs, vaccines, additives, toxins they make, the more difficult it is to escape from big business’ straight-jacket

    In this eco-porn world now, where all we hear is about COP26, again, again, and again, Deja vu, the same rotting messages. Climate capitalism has always been the agenda, and so in Glasgow, we expect something different?

    Jesus. This is fossil fuel financing, fossil fuel usury, the tipping point of their multiple disruptive economies, pitchman of all pitchmen: Bill Gates.

    Gates set off on his environmental crusade aboard a superyacht, which environmentalists say are among the world’s worst ecological offenders. According to Turkish news reports, he sailed the azure waters of the Aegean on LANA, a 354-foot yacht described as “one of the most luxurious superyachts in the world.” The boat includes eight staterooms, a golf range, a cinema room, a pool and massage rooms. It accommodates 12 guests and 31 crew members, and rents for more than $2 million a week, according to a Monaco-based yacht rental service.

    LANA was followed by the Wayfinder — a 223-foot luxury “supply boat” that is believed to be owned by the billionaire and was used to house his 30 bodyguards for the weeklong trip, according to Turkish news reports.

    [Superyachts like LANA (top) and the Wayfinder are some of the most exclusive in the world and dump 7,020 tons of CO2 a year, making them the worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images]

    The Lana and Wayfinder super yachts are some of the most exclusive yachts in the world and dump 7,020 tons of CO2 a year, making it by far the worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint.

    Really, that is the contrast today, folks — finishing up my time with this poverty pimping outfit at 5 PM PST, Nov. 3, and the kicker is that according to service coordinators in my county, the supervisor for whom I argued failed to do her due diligence around mandatory reporting. Clients who have paychecks shorted, and who have bosses abusing them verbally. Each person in the developmental disability world who claims this to be happening, well, it is called financial exploitation, and as mandatory reporters we have to report it to an investigatory agency. I pushed this anti-Mexican, anti-transgender boss to do something, but her words stuck: “It’s not your job to get into the middle of that.”

    Yet, it is our job to report it, alas, and not analyze or parse the words of a person living with developmental disabilities when she or he reports financial abuse/exploitation.

    That is a good evening, November 3, to quit this shit job, and leave these bullshit people.

    But the fight is on, not just in DD Services. Oregon, the masked-up, blue state, retrograde and defiantly backward place, has these health care outcomes:

    The white paper explores the impact consolidation has on patients and communities and highlights current trends in Oregon. Key findings from the report include:

    • The number of independent hospitals and physicians in Oregon is dwindling. The number of independent hospitals in Oregon has declined by 43 percent since 2000. The share of physicians affiliated with health systems in the Portland metro area grew from 39 percent in 2016 to 71 percent in 2018.
    • Oregon’s most competitive healthcare market is not only highly concentrated, but also one of the priciest in the nation. In 2017, Portland had the 14th highest healthcare prices out of 124 large metro areas across the nation. In addition, the amount Oregonians paid for their healthcare increased nearly 29 percent in four years, outpacing the rate of inflation.
    • Consolidation could exacerbate health disparities in Oregon. Experts argue that when hospitals raise prices, resources are redirected to facilities that cater to privately insured individuals (who are disproportionately white and high-income) as opposed to those that care for Medicaid patients (who are disproportionately Black, brown, and people of color).
    • Following affiliation, rural hospitals are more likely to lose access to services, such as onsite imaging, outpatient nonemergency care, and obstetric and primary care.
    • Reproductive, gender-affirming, and compassionate end-of-life care are at risk. Several large, religiously-affiliated healthcare entities are governed by ethical religious directives that prohibit or impose barriers that reduce access to these services. Past mergers have put reproductive, gender-affirming and compassionate end-of-life-care at risk, as could future ones.

    And, just in the Portland area, the mental health outcomes, coming to, or already in your neighborhood/city/state:

    • Typical caseload: 100+ clients
    • Care provider turnover rate: 40%
    • Wait time for appointments: 4-6 weeks

    It’s no wonder Oregon ranks 51st in the country for mental health outcomes—behind every other state and Washington DC. (source)

    Fitting, and so I quit, left, tendered my resignation: This is a crisis beyond crisis,

    Clients feel abandoned by staff who leave due to low pay and poor conditions.

    — Community Behavioral Health Survey, 2016

    Ending with the Intercept story, this is the emblematic one issue tied to a thousand issues of our time. I just do not know how any sane person can look at these judges, cops, DAs, governors, senators, representatives, White House officials, administration armies without the thought of taking an old trusted Louisville Slugger to their blanks _____(fill in the blank).

    Harmony lay in a 6-foot-wide stream of her own waste, swaddled in a blanket infused with feces. She propped up her matted head on her right arm, looking up at two downtown ambassadors from the community improvement district who had come out to ask her to move for the fourth time in a week. They needed to pressure wash the sidewalk.

    Harmony is not her real name. Atlanta’s powers that be know who she is.

    Phillip Spillane, a good friend of mine among the ambassadors, had called 911 to get paramedics to take her to Grady Hospital that Friday. He has made this call about once every two weeks, when the state of Harmony’s squalor becomes too much to bear for an observer with a soul.

    I came upon them as paramedics were piling back into a Grady ambulance. I watched them drive away, an impassive expression on the face of the paramedic in the passenger seat as she watched Harmony, who remained on the sidewalk.

    It was the same expression on the faces of most of the people walking by. I’ve seen it every time I’ve come downtown to Atlanta to talk with her. It’s not that passersby don’t notice her, but people make an immediate mental calculation about their ability to help someone in this kind of distress. The social reaction — the human reaction — left over is a carefully deliberate nonchalance meant to provide some dignity to a person in a state of public humiliation and to retain some dignity of their own on the scene of a moral catastrophe.

    Of course, some people realize that they’re about to step in her shit and can’t keep from scowling.

    This story starts with Harmony. It does not end with her. (George Chidi)

    Vintage 1948 Louisville Slugger Babe Ruth Poster Sign
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  • Vaxxed Just as Likely to Spread Covid as Unvaxxed — New Study

    The post Vaxxed Just as Likely to Spread Covid as Unvaxxed — New Study first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by The Jimmy Dore Show.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ten Things for US to Understand about Latin America

    The United States — the land and people — will be a lot better off when the idea of US supremacy is dropped. Toward that end, and toward the goal of a better world, here are ten things for US to understand about Latin America. This piece has a special focus on Nicaragua, a country whose sovereignty needs respect, especially during this election season, from US critics both Right and Left.

    1. Threat of a good example. That is the main reason countries get on the “bad lists” of the US, not oil since not all maligned countries even have oil. The reason is that the countries do not “have the interest of the United States at heart,” as CIA director George Tenet said during the US-backed 2002 coup against Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. The bad lists include Trump’s “Troika of Tyranny” — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — and the 30-plus countries around the globe suffering from the deadly effects of US sanctions. The US justifies sanctions by saying that they are based on matters people care about deeply, such as human rights abuses and trafficking, and that they are less damaging than war. Meanwhile, sanctions are lethal, and the United Nations charter clearly prohibits “unilateral coercive measures” taken by one country against another.

    2. Sovereignty YES, Sanctions NO. Latin American countries are sovereign nations. They are not a “backyard” requiring US protection or interference. They have many leaders, in government and not in government, who are very intelligent with in-depth knowledge of history. They are not, as the US government and media call them, dictators, regimes, strong-men, or tyrants. To repeat, they are sovereign nations capable of choosing their own leaders. Certainly anyone familiar with US elections can believe it is possible to find improved, more easily verified electoral systems outside the US, for example, Venezuela’s system, which is computerized and has paper ballots that allow for audits.

    3. Constitutions get updated. Most Latin American nations are among the more than 90 countries in the world with proportional representation. PR is the key to having multiple parties, which allow voters to actually affect their governments because they can vote for the candidates most aligned with their values, not just against the worst candidates. It is said that it’s virtually impossible to eliminate from the US constitution even the based-on-slavery Electoral College, which installed two recent presidents who lost the popular vote, both Bush and Trump.

    4. Term limits are not a solution. Term limits are not the great electoral reform many people believe them to be. Nicaragua and some other “bad list” Latin American governments have dispensed with them. When Venezuela held a vote to remove term limits, there were loud cries that “Hugo Chavez wants to be dictator for life!” but significantly, those accusers did not point out that Venezuela joined other nations without term limits, like the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, and most Scandinavian nations. When facing term limits, elected officials tend to be less focused on their current duties and more focused on positioning themselves and their campaign contributors for their next move. Terms limits came in after FDR and stopped voters from being able to re-elect presidents they still wanted. More effective electoral reforms are proportional representation, free and fair media coverage, and open debates.

    5. Nicaragua’s healthcare system is free. A major hospital has a huge sign telling people, “All services are free. If anyone tries to present you with a bill, report it.” That certainly constitutes a “threat of a good example.” When a poor country like Nicaragua can provide healthcare to its residents, then there is no excuse for the US, the wealthiest nation the planet has ever known, to have the worst healthcare system — in terms of cost, access, and results — of the 30 wealthy, industrialized (OECD) countries. People question statistics with good reason, but it is clear Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela have dealt with the COVID pandemic better than the US. The Nicaraguan government had plans in place as early as January 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID, but did not impose quarantines. Most Nicaraguans could not have worked from home on their computers. Quarantines would have been an economic death knell to the majority of the population that work in very small businesses including farms and the informal economy of open air stands selling everything from food to furniture.

    6. Food sovereignty is key to Nicaragua’s resilience. Nicaragua produces about 90% of its food, primarily on the small farms of the campesinos. This represents a beneficial change from the mono-cropping agribusiness model that took over so much land in Latin America, and from the abandonment of farming that happened in oil-rich Venezuela in the 1900s. The ability of Nicaraguans to feed themselves locally helps them survive despite the pressures of US sanctions, the COVID pandemic, and yet another 2020 disaster: two hurricanes, category 4 Eta and then category 5 Iota, two weeks apart in November 2020.

    7. Devastating hurricanes — climate crisis is real. Wawa Bar is a small community in Nicaragua that was hit by both hurricanes. It is in a semi-autonomous region on the Caribbean Coast that has afro-descendant and indigenous populations. The devastation was heart-breaking — huge trees that had survived decades of hurricanes were uprooted, 700 head of cattle were killed; crops were ruined, and the soil had become too salty from the flooding to replant — but not one person died, everyone was evacuated in time, and all community members are moving back. Food was provided and within weeks the Nicaraguan government restored electricity and sent roofing supplies so everyone again had a roof over their head. Among the first buildings the community restored was the school. The hurricanes had destroyed their textbooks, bilingual in both Spanish and the indigenous Miskito language, but education will continue for their children. How can the US continue illegal sanctions in the face of such devastation? Sanctions, in the process of trying to effect “regime change,” greatly hurt ordinary people. Sovereign nations have the right to choose their own presidents, governments and economic systems.

    8. Nicaragua has the fifth highest gender equality in the world. It is not surprising the first four countries are Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, but how many people would guess Nicaragua to be fifth? The reason is that they have a mandate to have 50/50 in their legislatures, and if, for example, a president or mayor is male, then the vice-president or vice-mayor will be female. Or vice versa.

    9. Daniel Ortega is in for the long haul. President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega is a controversial figure particularly outside of Nicaragua, where media and official stories are not countered by people’s direct experience. Ortega was president in the 1980s when the Sandinista revolution ended the 45-year dictatorship of the Somoza family. The Sandinistas lost the 1990 elections, as the opposition promised peace from contra violence if elected. However, support for the Sandinistas remained strong in the popular neighborhoods and much of the countryside, so in 2006, Daniel Ortega was elected president again with 38% of the popular vote, re-elected in 2011 with 62% of the vote, in 2016 with 72.5% of the vote, and has the same level of popular support leading up to the elections in November 2021. Nicaraguans approve of their healthcare system, literacy programs, free higher education, expanded and improved roads and electricity — and they remember how those gains were reversed during the 1990s when the Sandinistas were out of power, and services including water were privatized. The large rural population likes land reform, which enables them to work their own small farms. They have hope for a good life for their families. That is why Nicaraguans re-elect Daniel Ortega, and why Nicaraguans are not joining the caravans migrating to the US the way many other Central Americans are trying to do.

    10. Power of a good example. It’s an American tradition to end with hope and this piece follows that tradition. There is hope for improvement in the US and the world, although it’s unclear whether the US will change significantly through a people’s revolution or a capitalist collapse. Even though, unfortunately, US media from FOX to PBS line up with the military-industrial-complex, people can still learn how the US affects the world, through compelling writings by authors such as Smedley D. Butler, Noam and his daughter Aviva Chomsky, John Perkins, and Naomi Klein.

    Life can certainly be better for people in the US, with better healthcare, housing, jobs, justice, education and environment, and less student debt, incarcerations, and wasteful military spending. What is needed is to raise expectations, increase pressure on politicians — including Biden/Harris, who have not shown signs that they will reduce Trump’s ramped-up sanctions — and find ways to stop believing the lies.

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  • Unholy Trinity: Medicine, Science, and Corporate Power

    This one goes out to all of you who still “trust the science.” 

    Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was a public relations pioneer, one of America’s most innovative social engineers, and the author of a 1928 book brazenly entitled Propaganda. In 1929, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to persuade women to take up cigarette smoking. His slogan, “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” exploited women’s fear of gaining weight (a concern purposefully manufactured through previous advertising and/or public relations work by Bernays and others).

    While Lucky Strike sales increased by 300 percent in the first year of Bernays’ campaign, there was still one more barrier he needed to break down: smoking remained mostly taboo for “respectable” women. This is where some watered-down Freud came in handy. As Bernays biographer Larry Tye said, he basically wanted to take his uncle’s works and “popularize them into little ditties that housewives and others could relate to.” With input from psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, Bernays conjured up the now legendary scheme to re-frame cigarettes as a symbol of freedom.

    “During the 1929 Easter Parade,” explains New York Times reporter Ron Chernow, “he had a troupe of fashionable ladies flounce down Fifth Avenue, conspicuously puffing their ‘Torches of Freedom,’ as he had called cigarettes.” As Chernow reports, Bernays augmented this successful stunt by lining up “neutral experts” to “applaud the benefits of smoking, all the while concealing the tobacco company’s sponsorship of his activity.” (I strongly suggest you re-read that last sentence and comprehend its relevance within today’s Big Pharma context.)

    Bernays was also concealing his knowledge of tobacco’s deleterious effects. “As he hypocritically seduced American women into smoking, he was trying to wean his own wife from the nasty habit,” Chernow continues. “His daughter Anne Bernays, the novelist, recalls that whenever he discovered a pack of his wife’s Parliaments, ‘he’d pull them all out and just snap them like bones, just snap them in half and throw them in the toilet. He hated her smoking.’” (I strongly suggest you also re-read that last sentence and comprehend its relevance within today’s Big Pharma context.)

    It’s no wonder so many of today’s Americans — all across the ideological spectrum — are so easily and willingly duped by fake news, deep fakes, and clickbait. In the era of social media and a 24-hour news cycle, we are now exposed to more propaganda than ever before. Bernays’ PR progeny continues refining and honing their skills. They keep us passive, distracted, and divided — but still inherently trusting those in power. Most Americans are thusly trapped inside news feed algorithms that serve as echo chambers to create and reinforce flawed opinions.

    We are the intended result of a century-long social experiment — but now they have artificial intelligence to more efficiently program and condition us. We’ve willingly surrendered our ability to discern fact from fiction. Even worse, we’ve surrendered our desire to discern fact from fiction. Pro tip: Nothing will change until we truly open our minds and recognize that we are being lied to.

    •  (Thanks to Joe from Maine for many of the images that appear in this article)

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  • Captives of Coca-Cola

    Ad for Coca-Cola on wall

    In July 2018 the attention of The New York Times and then Esquire magazine was somehow drawn to a mountain town in southern Mexico and the truly remarkable amount of Coca-Cola drunk by its residents. The British Broadcasting Corporation has produced a documentary on the same topic.

    The town is San Cristobal, in the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state. A third of its quarter-million or so residents are of Mayan descent. Their average per capita daily consumption of ‘the friendliest drink on earth’ is a gallon – the whole of a two-liter bottle and most of a second, delivered to numerous local convenience stores from a bottling plant on the town’s outskirts.

    Health impacts

    Coca-Cola was first marketed in 1886. The name refers to two of the original ingredients – coca leaves, which are the source of cocaine, and kola nuts, which contain caffeine. Both are addictive. Since 1904 the coca leaves used have been not fresh but ‘spent’ – left over after the cocaine extraction process is complete. However, despite claims to the contrary, they still contain traces of cocaine.

    This daily dose of Coca-Cola taken by residents of San Cristobal contains a whole pound of sugar. So it should be no surprise that each year over 3,000 of them die of diabetes. It’s an unpleasant way to die. Typical symptoms are frequent urination, hunger and thirst (despite eating and drinking), fatigue, blurred vision, slow-healing sores, recurrent infections, tingling, pain, or numbness in the hands or feet, sunken eyes, rapid breathing, headache, muscle aches, dehydration, nausea, stomach pain and cramping, vomiting, cerebral edema, and coma.

    Besides diabetes, excessive sugar causes obesity, tooth decay, and fatty liver disease and increases the risk of strokes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Researchers who estimated the burden of disease associated with consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) in 2010 found such consumption responsible for 184,000 deaths a year — 133,000 from diabetes, 45,000 from heart disease, 6,500 from cancer.

    These deaths were concentrated in high-income (24%) and especially medium-income (71%) countries. SSBs accounted for the highest proportion of all deaths – 12% — in Mexico, rising to 30% in Mexicans under the age of 45. In 2014 Mexico overtook the United States in per capita SSB consumption. In that year Mexicans drank on average 106 liters of Coca-Cola, Americans 99.5.

    Sugar, moreover, is not the only harmful ingredient in Coca-Cola. There is also caffeine, which raises blood pressure and can cause dehydration as well as urinary and respiratory problems. There is phosphoric acid, which like sugar causes tooth decay, slows down digestion, may produce kidney failure or kidney stones, and impedes the absorption of calcium by the bones, leading to osteoporosis. Finally, the caramel used to color the drink is carcinogenic.

    Why do they drink so much Coca-Cola?

    Observers talk about ‘addiction’ to Coca-Cola, and it does contain three addictive substances – cocaine, caffeine, and sugar. It is also said that Coca-Cola has become an integral part of the local culture in Chiapas. Many indigenous people believe that Coca-Cola can heal the sick. The BBC documentary features a ‘healer’ sacrificing a chicken to ‘Goddess Maria’ together with an offering of Coca-Cola.

    However, framing the problem in terms of addiction or ‘culture’ gives the impression that it might be solved with the aid of therapy and health education. This is not the case. The residents of San Cristobal have no real choice. Even those fully aware of the ham done to their health by imbibing huge quantities of Coca-Cola have no better alternative. After all, they need to drink water and Coca-Cola does at least contain clean water, drawn from a deep unpolluted aquifer.

    Is clean water available from any other source? Consider possible alternatives.

    The town has no wastewater treatment facilities. Untreated sewage goes straight into the waterways. This is the water that comes, now and then, from the faucet, contaminated by E. Coli and other pathogens:

    Symptoms of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) infection vary for each person, but often include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea (often bloody), and vomiting. Some people may have a fever, which usually is not very high (less than 101˚F/38.5˚C). Most people get better within 5 to 7 days. Some infections are very mild, but others are severe or even life-threatening.

    What about the water trucks that occasionally pass through your neighborhood? I have information specifically about trucked water in San Cristobal, but here is an assessment of trucked water in Mexico City:

    Trucked water is often higher in quality than the city’s notorious tap water, but its quality does vary significantly. Many suppliers simply provide filtered tap water in steel trucks — and others may bring water of such poor quality that it is unsafe to drink.

    The situation in poverty-stricken San Cristobal is presumably worse than in the capital.

    If water from the faucet and trucked water are not safe options, then why not buy not Coca-Cola but bottled water drawn from the aquifer? And/or other drinks known to contain clean water — milk, fruit juice, beer?

    This would indeed be a sensible thing to do.

    But Esquire remarks, without further explanation, that bottled water is ‘hard to find.’ So, perhaps, are other clean-water drinks. Perhaps Coca-Cola is the only clean-water drink that is at all widely available in this town?

    In order to show why this may be so, I must go into the commercial aspect of the production and distribution of Coca-Cola in San Cristobal.

    The commercial aspect

    The Coca-Cola Company is a US-based multinational corporation. It produces not Coca-Cola but a syrup or paste concentrate that has to be diluted with water to make Coca-Cola. it sells the concentrate to bottling companies that make the Coca-Cola, bottle it, and sell it in various regions of the world to which they have bought exclusive rights.1 The bottling company that owns the rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola in Mexico as well as nine other Latin American countries is FEMSA (a Spanish acronym for Mexican Economic Promotions). FEMSA is a Mexico-based multinational beverage and retail company. It is FEMSA that owns and operates the bottling plant in San Cristobal. It also owns retail chains, including OXXO, Mexico’s largest chain of convenience stores.

    Here again I have no information specific to San Cristobal, but a plausible reason why bottled water is ‘hard to find’ would be FEMSA’s ownership of the town’s retail stores. If one and the same company were to own the retail stores and the Coca-Cola bottling plant, it would hardly allow its stores to display drinks that would compete with Coca-Cola.

    In accordance with an old agreement between FEMSA and the Mexican federal government, the company pays for the water it takes from the aquifer at a very low rate – about 10 cents for every 260 gallons, which comes to $120 per day or $44,000 per year. Even this very modest payment goes to the federal not the local government and cannot be used for local needs. FEMSA offered to build a sewage treatment plant to provide 500 families with clean drinking water, but this token measure was abandoned when the company realized that it would not stop local protests.

    Why would the Mexican government allow this situation to continue? It may be recalled that Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico in 2000—2006, was a former chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company in Mexico. This fact suggests the political clout of the Coca-Cola business in Mexico.

    A clean-water monopoly

    Propagandists for capitalism like to dwell on the wide choice that ‘the market economy’ gives consumers. They forget to mention that this is true only of a competitive market and that most markets are no longer competitive. They are either oligopolistic, with a few big companies that conspire to limit consumer choice, or monopolistic, with a single company in a position to dictate terms to its customers.

    In a place like San Cristobal, a vital human need – clean water – has been turned into a commodity monopolized by a single supplier. This supplier exploits its monopoly position to compel residents to buy clean water from itself and mixed with other substances that destroy their health and doom many of them to an early and miserable death.

    End of the story?

    Climate change has brought a sharp and persistent reduction in rainfall to the Central Highlands of Chiapas State. Both surface and deep water sources are undergoing rapid depletion. If this continues for very long, the region will no longer be able to support a large population and most of the people of San Cristobal will join the swelling stream of environmental refugees. At a certain point, whether due to exhaustion of the aquifer or to the falling number of consumers, the making, bottling, and selling of Coca-Cola will cease to be a commercially viable operation. The managers of the plant will depart, well satisfied with the splendid job they have done for the shareholders of FEMSA.

    And so the story will end. Unless?

    1. A comrade was shown round a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. When he entered the refrigerated room where the concentrate was stored, the stench was so overwhelming that he had to get out immediately. He felt that otherwise he would collapse.
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  • That time my pediatrician lied to “do no harm”

    Once upon a time, I had a pediatrician who made house calls — complete with a little black bag. Dr. Harris practically became part of the family after my older sister was born. This was an age when doctors really got to know their patients. They also weren’t in a hurry to prescribe meds or suggest surgeries. Sometimes, they’d even go out on a limb and make moves that would be unimaginable today. Here’s a story about one of those moments.

    *****

    After being told she’d never have a second child, my mother was bedridden for much of her pregnancy with me. But there I was, nine months later: a happy and healthy baby, already proving that the medical establishment was full of shit. However, what no one but Dr. Harris knew was that I was born with what they used to call a “heart murmur.” Today, it’s Mitral Valve Prolapse (MVP) — typically not a condition that warrants any attention.

    After being told she’d never have a second child, my mother was bedridden for much of her pregnancy with me. But there I was, nine months later: a happy and healthy baby, already proving that the medical establishment was full of shit. However, what no one but Dr. Harris knew was that I was born with what they used to call a “heart murmur.” Today, it’s Mitral Valve Prolapse (MVP) — typically not a condition that warrants any attention.

    Back in the day, however, a murmur could’ve caused my parents to baby me even more than they already did. Dr. Harris sagely recognized this likelihood and did something incredible. He didn’t tell anyone. He worried that if he reported the condition, my parents would be over-protective and prevent me from being an active boy. He simply monitored my heart during every visit to be on the safe side. Translation: If not for Dr. Harris, I never would’ve become an athlete which helped me become popular and confident (as described here). I also wouldn’t have gotten into martial arts and fitness and all the other activities that enriched my life and kept me youthful. Who knows what I’d look and feel like today if not for him? I owe that man, big time.

    To cover his tracks, Dr. Harris had a plan. When my parents eventually decided to stop bringing me to a pediatrician, he’d contact my new doctor to explain the situation. At that point, the new guy could just keep monitoring the MVP. However, my parents brought me to their doctor without telling Dr. Harris beforehand. During my first check-up, the new guy heard the tell-tale click. Confused, he explained what it meant to my parents — saying that most people are born with a heart murmur. He couldn’t understand how Dr. Harris could’ve possibly missed it. This caused my mother to panic. She called Dr. Harris and he promptly confessed. What happened next may also be impossible today.

    My parents were okay with it. My mother admitted that Dr. Harris saved me from being forbidden to play sports and hang out with my hooligan buddies. The new doctor ran me through a battery of tests to “play it safe.” I remember him having the gall to ask me if I could do a push-up. With my parents in the room, a very insulted 12-year-old me hopped off the doctor’s plinth and onto the floor. He stopped me at 20 but I did another 10 to make sure Mr. Expert got the message.

    As the years passed, I literally forgot I had MVP until a new primary care physician of mine heard the click and tried to lay down a restriction. When I went for dental work, he declared, I needed to be medicated before and after the procedure. It’s called antibiotic prophylaxis and here’s the “logic”: If my gums bleed and I swallow some of the blood, there’s a slight chance it could cause an infection in my heart (endocarditis) because of the MVP.

    By that point, my mother had also been diagnosed with MVP (I likely inherited it from her) and was doing antibiotic prophylaxis for her dental visits. She begged me to comply, too. Being a good Catholic son, I did… once. They had you take about eight antibiotic pills before treatment and then another four pills a few hours later. I don’t know if any of you has ever taken that many antibiotics in a 6-hour time period, but it makes you feel high, and then it makes you feel like shit. Not to mention, there’s all the damage the drugs can do to your intestinal flora. Still, the fear of endocarditis was being imposed upon me. Just look around right now if you wanna confirm what medical fear-programming looks and feels like.

    I asked my dentist why I needed to take these meds when I was fully healthy and never displayed any heart-related symptoms. He just chalked it up to “protocol.” Then I asked him why it was okay for my gums to bleed each night when I flossed. He did not have an answer. He just made a joke about me being the only patient to ever question this protocol. These being the pre-internet days, I found some books at the library. In no time, I learned it was just a legal thing. Dentists and doctors were covering their asses when, in reality, there was NO need for antibiotic prophylaxis. If anything, as I surmised, the potential negative impacts far outweighed any benefits.

    I photocopied some pages from a book and brought them to my dentist. He took one glance and sighed. “I know, but I have to follow the rules. It’s required that I prescribe you the pills and ask you if you took them.” We stared at each other for about 10 seconds and I think we both knew exactly what would happen next. From then on, every time I’d come in for a cleaning, he’d ask: “Did you medicate?” I would nod yes and everything moved forward. In addition, I told my Mom I was still taking the pills. I didn’t like lying to her but I did so for her own protection. It’s a little trick I learned from Dr. Harris.

    The post That time my pediatrician lied to “do no harm” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Back at Ground-Truthing Again and Again and Again

    Time and time again, the left sites just keep pushing all those international stories, all those stories tied to this or that political party head, and while China is important, and while we know the dirty deeds of Blinken to Pompeo, all the way back, we still miss out on the common people, us, the little ones.

    Sure, this is a trending story, in California, tied to the vaccine mandate, the hysteria, the fascism:

    The University of California, Irvine has placed their Director of Medical Ethics, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, on ‘investigatory leave’ after he challenged the constitutionality of the UC’s vaccine mandate in regards to individuals who have recovered from Covid and have naturally-acquired immunity.

    Last month Kheriaty, also a Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine, filed a suit in Federal court over the mandate.

    “Natural immunity following Covid infection is equal to (indeed, superior to) vaccine-mediated immunity. Thus, forcing those with natural immunity to be vaccinated introduces unnecessary risks without commensurate benefits—either to individuals or to the population as a whole—and violates their equal protection rights guaranteed under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment,” Kheriaty wrote in a Sep. 21 blog post.

    “Expert witness declarations in support of our case include, among others, a declaration from distinguished UC School of Medicine faculty members from infectious disease, microbiology/immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, pediatrics, OB/Gyn, and psychiatry,” the post continues (click here to read the rest).

    …there is now considerable evidence that Covid recovered individuals may be at higher risk of vaccine adverse effects compared to those not previously infected (as seen in studies here, here, and here, among others). -Dr. Aaron Kheriaty

    This issue, though, is more important on a local level for schmucks like me, who are overeducated, aging in a hateful society, left of left in a centrist and capitalism hard left/right contradictory world. I am back at a job, and the pay is embarrassing, and the fact that I am in a rural county with rural thinkers and with a service economy tied to beach combing, fishing, crabbing and vacation rentals also contributes to precarity.

    You think I am ready to leave to go somewhere else, to some big sophisticated city, some harbinger of high tech and military industrial complex to find more sustainable and lucrative work? Each day, my skill sets, my background, all the ground-truthing and other on the job training, all the travel, all those deep learning moments in my life in several fields, all of that is mush to the masters of academia, the masters of companies that are small and large, getting on the gravy train of city, county, state, national and international money. Tax cheats and welfare queens and kings are those in the complex, the big C for the CRC, Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment.

    Yep, bad that an environmental lawyer was under ankle bracelet house arrest for more than two years and faces six months in jail for contempt as a lawyer who sued the pants off of Chevron for killing and polluting communities south of this border. Sure, the hellfire and brimstone of this rotting empire is addictive, with all these blogs and newsfeeds and whatnot tapping into the lizard part of the collective American brain.

    Chevron Steven Donziger Feature photo

    Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

    Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!”

    full image
    Original illustration by Mr. Fish

    So, note the “proverbial two-by-four between the eyes” comment from this judicial devil . . . . From a multimillionaire “judge.” Imagine that! If I told a pig that exact same thing, after stopping me for a dangling mud flap on my minivan, just think what might happen to me. Or if I told that she needed a proverbial two by four between the eyes to a judge during my trial or someone else’s? Or, to the boss, uh? Or to the teacher if I was an 11th grader. Or, to the drill sergeant? Or the TSA guy smelling my feet at the airport.

    This judge is human scum, and while this is of national and international importance, I have been in courtrooms (local, small and midsized town) where women lost their children, where drug addicted got the book thrown at them, where homeless rough sleepers were fined and incarcerated, where people more sane than this judge were committed to mental ward. This is the truth about systems of oppression, about modern white civilization, a fucked up rule of law lawlessness. This is it in our world. But it happens every day a few ten thousand times. To we the small ass people.

    Now, multiple that by a factor a ten thousand — try suing Boeing, or Pfizer or FDA, or Ford, or General Mills, or Bayer, or Trump Towers or Bank of America, or Amazon, or Google, or the manufacturer of the air bag in the minivan or the pretzel maker  your kid is choking on.

    Now, bring it back to a real perspective. Local, where cities have no money for infrastructure, where medical systems are threadbare at least, or missing altogether. No country for old men, for young people, for the sick, disabled, poor, mentally challenged, psychiatrically impaired. This is a country for no regular people.

    Paperback No Country for Old Men Book

    Yet, we will hear the media mental midgets yammer on and on about us bumkins, us flyover fucks, deplorables, or deploying any other laundry list of pejoratives or socio-psych mumbo jumbo for their elite brains to find more ways to subjugate the many in the name of profits, and in the words of their deep alter egos — “The world of elites and beautiful and worthy and good members of society have to deal with these useless breeders, breathers and eaters. Really, all we want is what’s best for the masses, for these misbegotten, less than high IQ, and multiple-dysfunctional people who in some cases, well, don’t mean to be useless eaters, breeders, breathers, existers. But we can corral them into good deeds, and we can make so much money from their faults, chronic illnesses, their low IQ’s, their inbreeding, their constant bad bad bad decisions in life. Their mistakes and pain and dysfunction are our opportunity to make society the way we want it designed, with a few trillion of profits in greenbacks to boot. But we would never say this outright to Anderson Cooper or Oprah or NPR or what not.”

    But reality is always local, no matter how much bullshit college sports and pro football teams and idiotic Republican and Democrat lying and spewing interferes with their noggins. For example, the outfit I work with, as a social services guy, doesn’t ask our clients — developmental and intellectual disabled adults — if they have had “the jab,” but rather, they ask: “If an employer asks you to provide proof of vaccination, will that be a problem?”

    That is the reality now — adults barely surviving, after their whole lives have been spent in special ed programs and being evaluated, separated, roomed, housed and institutionalized, and many coming from proverbial messed up families, dysfunction being the functional word — I have to navigate more of the same systems of oppression-poverty inducing-safety net fraying eating at our communities’ very souls. The chances of getting part-time work in a field tied to the five F’s (food, fur, factory, filth, foliage — restaurants, dog cleaning, warehouses, janitorial, and landscaping) are already slim, as so much is stacked against these folk. Think about the propaganda around “those with developmental disabilities are more vulnerable to the covid so they need to be vaxxed first” ideology.

    Many clients were so scared that they were more or less forced into getting the Pfizer or J & J, both mRNA biomedical experimental treatments. Most live in supported housing, and most of these in group homes, sanctioned by the state, so the vaccine mandates are not just inferred, but demanded. Boosterism (booster x, y, z, omega) will continue to run rampant. More will be sick. Some will die, or course.

    The reality is I know people who are losing jobs, and they are not sitting on piles of cash like a lot of professionals you might read about that are opting out of the forced chemical jabs. These people do not have the luxury of taking a stand with unlimited credit card limits, or fully owned homes, or hobby gardens out back with the swimming pool. These are people who read up about this planned pandemic, who take precautions, who listen to experts. Their choice is to not get jabbed.

    Imagine, being a teacher, PhD in physics, after  20 years, and you have 130 accrued sick days (paid) and you refuse to do the jab but accept the draconian test and mask. You are still going to be fired, or put on unpaid leave, and those PTO days you have accrued, well, forget about them.

    “LEAKED GRANT PROPOSAL DETAILS HIGH-RISK CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH
    The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.” (source)

    This is reality for one of my friends. Forget about the death proclamations of the Death Cult of Fauci. This guy is criminal, and he has sold millions a bill of goods. This bill of goods is dangerous, deadly, injurious.

    A bill of goods, man, the lies, the continuing criminal enterprises, and then, remade, make overs, etc. Take these middle of the road news sites: Robert Scheer is not my favorite, but this takes the cake, no, as he appears as Mister New York Times and Most About USA is Good Scheer. So, no doubts about this fellow joining up with the CIA, and then now in Holly-Dirt?

    This is the very celebrity culture that Chris Hedges rails against. This is a sick little blurb here promoting Scheer’s podcast of this criminal — CIA is a criminal outfit of the highest order.

    A former CIA officer and Emmy award-winning creator of the hit FX series “The Americans” about two Soviet agents living secretly in Washington during the Cold War, Weisberg offers a refreshing perspective on the tense relationship between the two countries throughout his work. He joins Robert Scheer on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” to talk about his latest book, “Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War,” in which he examines how he, like so many Americans, got Russia wrong.

    The author tells Scheer about his childhood growing up in a liberal Jewish household in Chicago, Ill. before studying Soviet politics at Yale University and joining the CIA, eager to do his “duty as an American” and fight what he considered then to be the “evil” Soviet empire. Now, after years of writing fiction about the Soviet Union in novels and TV scripts, Weisberg has decided to reflect on the historical events that he briefly played an active role in during his brief time at the CIA as the Soviet Union was collapsing through a more critical, factual lens. Based on both his personal experience as well as detailed research, Weisberg dispels common misconceptions about Russia that he once held to be true in “Russia Upside Down.”

    Here we go: More meaningless Hollywood-CIA-millionaire stuff that the average Joe in Tucson or Portland, in Kansas or Utah has zero connection to. But we get he is Jewish (hmm, why this?) a Yale graduate (Yale being a CIA-Imperialist school), and lover of CIA and USA (when he was young — what puke). Fiction writer, and now a book writer and TV series producer, wow, what a radical.  This is the upper echelons of America Putridity, and you couple that with his millions thrown at him as a Holly-Dirt thing, and we have the mini-Celebrity fawning.

    Scheer Intelligence Is America’s View of ‘Evil’ Russia Merely Projection?

    The Americans: The Complete First Season (DVD)
    More TV junk!

    I was at a hospital two weeks ago, and the nurses must have thought I wasn’t awake (I never sleep in a hospital, in jail, or on a plane). They talked about the Samaritan Hospital system they work for introducing a “no vaccine, no medical service” protocol. They did not sound happy about it. And here we have it yesterday:

    The Associated Press

    Leilani Lutali, foreground, and Jaimee Fougner pose for a photo, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021 in Colorado Springs, Colo. Lutali recently found out her hospital wouldn’t approve her kidney transplant surgery until she got the COVID-19 vaccine. Even though she has stage 5 kidney disease that puts her at risk of dying without a new kidney. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) — source

    A hell of a country, and a hell of a “follow the science” kind of messed up system, no? Idiots of the Biden-Obama variety, like Thom Hartman, are yammering on and on about how these hospitals have a right to refuse un-jabbed folk. This is it for the liberals — you eat junk food, you drink booze, you suck on fags, you drive recklessly, you think this or that anti-Democratic Party thought, then we, the good beautiful, Hillary-Obama-Harris have a right to cut you off, cut you down, chop you off at the knees!

    Many people I speak with and communicate with are tired of the pro-pro-pro forced jab perspective we are getting from the leftist Counterpunch, and from St. Clair.

    I am referencing “Roaming Charges,” Counterpunch, 10/8/2921, from the anti-science pro-some-science get-out-of-that-science’s way thinking coming from some of the articles posted on the site. Very sad in many ways, so sad that there is not a robust discussion of the vaccination that we see on Dissident Voice, even Mint Press, and especially Off–Guardian and Left Skeptics. Here, bullet points, direct quoting from “Roaming Charges”:

    + I’m against any exemptions (our social contract should require either all of us to get it or that the jab be completely voluntary ), but if there’s a religious exemption there should be one for philosophy, too. “Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’s worried that people resisting COVID-19 vaccine shots based on religious grounds may be confusing that with a philosophical objection.”

    + Merck is selling its high-touted new Covid pill Molnupiravir, whose development was federally financed by NIH and the Department of Defense,  back to the U.S. government for 40 times what it costs to make.

    + These people, if you want to call them that, seem to have taken their “tactics” from the Westboro (“God Hates Fags”) Baptist Church which used to (and I suppose still does) scream their godly obscenities at mourners during the funerals of people who died of AIDS.

    + Anti-vaxism is itself a kind of brain-eating virus…A Cumberland, Maryland man murdered his brother and sister-in-law in their Ellicott City home last week because his brother, a local pharmacist, had administered COVID-19 vaccines.

    + Cuba began vaccinating its population 150 days ago. In that time, it has administered 192 doses per 100 people. In contrast, the US began its vaccination program 297 days ago and has managed to administer only 119 doses per 100 people. The Covid death rate in Cuba is: 684 per million. The death rate in the US is: 2190 per million. This seems to provide pretty clear evidence that the embargo has been placed on the wrong country for the last 60 years. (end quote)

    And therein lies the problem with fake leftists — attacking even doctors and virologists and journalists and educated/educators who have doubts about the entire pandemic and mRNA and coronavirus multiplicity of very pro-pro Capitalist and pro-pro Authoritarian and pro-pro Government Bureaucracy rhetoric. The reality is Cuba is not jabbing its people with mRNA: “All of Cuba’s vaccine candidates—Abdala, Soberana 1, Soberana 2, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa, are subunit protein vaccines, like the Novavax vaccine. Crucially, the vaccines do not require extreme refrigeration, are cheap to produce, and are easy for the country to manufacture at scale. They are made by fermentation in mammalian cells, a process Cuba already uses for monoclonal antibodies.”

    A nurse holds up a vial of vaccine

    Now, we are worried about more of the celebrities, this time, a professor who was sacked —

    Now, think about any criticism against any university, when you are employed by the institution. I was employed by the University of Texas at El Paso. I was an English Department faculty, part-time, a radical, and I fought like hell for adjuncts, for students, etc. I was part of a group of students as a faculty member who made a human chain to stop the group of overweight sheriff posse dudes dressed up as Conquistadors on horses strutting on campus. That was 1992, the 500th anniversary of that evil contact we call Columbus Day. The El Paso Times ran a front page photo of these undercover cops jumping out of the bushes, and wrangling students, clobbering male and female with forearms to the neck. I was right in the middle, and I had to answer for myself to the Provost and president.

    This is what a university, then, in 1992, was encapsulated inside, under a rich white president, a campus that was and still is 80-plus percent Mexican-American, Latinx, now. You can’t protest without our permission and our approval of signs!

    More cities are recognizing Native Americans on Columbus Day

    This was a campus that introduced a free speech zone out of the way of foot traffic. A state sponsored school, with a limited small postage stamp of land near dumpsters where people can gain the public square for protesting. And the campus Nazis demanded permission, permits, and full written details of the “protest” or “information gathering.” Now, sure, talk about Covid, about Nuremburg protocol, about mandates, about those who have the jab and those who do not. Talk about NIH and Fauci and the shadowy origins of the SARS-CoV2, or the doctors who have protocols to stop not only Covid patients getting on ventilators, but getting patients out of the hospital and back home in recovery zone. Not allowed.

    These articles are verboten on campuses:

    And, if I was still on that campus, how quickly would I be sacked for criticizing a campus– that pushes the Hispanic University of the World theme while colonizing Hispanics (mostly Mexican Americans) — for lock-step falling into the fold of the Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment? This campus is the whoring field of military, aerospace, drone and weapons makers, and even more nefarious. What ugly optics! Four Star Murder Bomber Air Force General all smiles and the PhD’s just lapping up the uniform!

    So, back into that ground-truthing — try being a radical, a revolutionary, a critic of bureaucracies and corporate mandates and this sort of bullshit on a local level. UTEP is a sell-out, an embarrassment, but so are most all the colleges and universities in this shit hole. (Source) I have gone up against every single college and university I have taught in. EVERY ONE.  Can you imagine bringing this into the classroom — anti-war, anti-military, anti-corporation discourse and readings and critical thinking debates? Shit! Then, this? Pfizer Exposed! 

    And while the big house is for us in the 80 percent, the ground-truthing in your neighborhood is littered with the poisons of that Complex, the Continuing Criminal Enterprise called capitalism.

    [The aim of the international bankers was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.

    — Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, p. 324 (source)

    Finally, another point from a friend: “Fishy Felonious Fraudulent Fauci: Read Whitney Webb’s latest.”

    During the panel, the moderator—Michael Specter of the New Yorker—asked the question: “Why don’t we blow the system up? Obviously, we just can’t turn off the spigot on the system we have and then say ‘Hey! everyone in the world should get this new vaccine we haven’t given to anyone yet,’ but there must be some way.” Specter then mentioned how vaccine production is antiquated and asked how sufficient “disruption” could occur to prompt the modernization of the existing vaccination development and approval process. Hamburg responded first, saying that as a society we are behind where we need to be when it comes to moving toward a new, more technological approach and that it is now “time to act” to make that a reality.

    Several minutes later, Anthony Fauci stated that the superior method of vaccine production involves “not growing the virus at all, but getting sequences, getting the appropriate protein and it sticking in on self-assembling nanoparticles,” essentially referring to mRNA vaccines. Fauci then stated: “The critical challenge . . . is that in order to make the transition from getting out of the tried and true egg-growing [method] . . . to something that has to be much better, you have to prove that this works and then you have got to go through all of the critical trials—phase 1, phase 2, phase 3—and show that this particular product is going to be good over a period of years. That alone, if it works perfectly, is going to take a decade.” Fauci later stated that there is a need to alter the public’s perception that the flu is not a serious disease in order to increase urgency and that it would be “difficult” to alter that perception along with the existing vaccine development and approval process unless the existing system takes the posture that “I don’t care what your perception is, we’re going to address the problem in a disruptive way and an iterative way.”

    During the panel, Bright stated that “we need to move as quickly as possible and urgently as possible to get these technologies that address speed and effectiveness of the vaccine” before discussing how the White House Council of Economic Advisers had just issued a report emphasizing that prioritizing “fast” vaccines was paramount. Bright then added that a “mediocre and fast” vaccine was better than a “mediocre and slow” vaccine. He then said that we can make “better vaccines and make them faster” and that urgency and disruption were necessary to produce the targeted and accelerated development of one such vaccine. Later in the panel, Bright said the best way to “disrupt” the vaccine field in favor of “faster” vaccines would be the emergence of “an entity of excitement out there that’s completely disruptive, that’s not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes.” He later very directly said that by “faster” vaccines he meant mRNA vaccines.

    The Bright-led BARDA and the Fauci-led NIAID in just a few months’ time became the biggest backers of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, investing billions and co-developing the vaccine with the company, respectively. As will be explained in Part II of this series, the partnership between Moderna and the NIH to co-develop what would soon become Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was being forged as early as January 7, 2020, long before the official declaration of the COVID-19 crisis as a pandemic and before a vaccine was proclaimed as necessary by officials and other individuals. Not only did the COVID-19 vaccine quickly become the answer to nearly all Moderna’s woes but it also provided the disruptive scenario necessary to alter the public’s perceptions of what a vaccine is and eliminate existing safeguards and bureaucracy in vaccine approval. (Watch the 2019 Universal Flu Vaccine event here.)

    As Part II of this series will show, it was an alleged mix of “serendipity and foresight” from Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel and the NIH’s Barney Graham that propelled Moderna to the front of the “Warp Speed” race for a COVID-19 vaccine. That partnership, along with the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 crisis, created the very “Hail Mary” for which Moderna had been desperately waiting since at least 2017 while also turning most of Moderna’s executive team into billionaires and multi-millionaires in a matter of months.

    However, Moderna’s “Hail Mary” won’t last – that is, unless the mass administration of its COVID-19 vaccine becomes an annual affair for millions of people worldwide. Even though real-world data since its administration began challenges the need for as well as the safety and efficacy of its vaccine, Moderna – and its stakeholders – cannot afford to let this opportunity slip through fingers. To do so would mean the end of Moderna’s carefully constructed house of cards.

    The post Back at Ground-Truthing Again and Again and Again first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What Does Health Care For All Look Like in Nicaragua?

    Since the Sandinistas returned to power in January 2007, child malnutrition has dropped by 45% for children under five and by 66% for children ages 6-12.

    I’d like you to imagine for a moment that you are the parent of a child with asthma, living in Ciudad Sandino, just outside the capital of Nicaragua, in a barrio called Nueva Vida, which was recently founded after your family – along with 1,200 other families – was flooded out of your home along the lakeshore in Managua during Hurricane Mitch. The year is 2001, and although your family now has a concrete house and the bus runs regularly down your street in the daytime, nights are filled with rival gangs throwing rocks and bottles, and regular work has been nearly impossible to find. These days, you travel into the market in Managua before dawn to wash potatoes for a vegetable seller; with what you earn, you can usually bring home a little food for your family’s lunch.

    Although you have five children, it’s your middle child, the seven year-old, who worries you the most. She suffers from asthma, and you haven’t been able to save up to buy the expensive inhalers she needs to stop her persistent wheezing. Tonight, while your family is trying to sleep, smoke from burning trash in the nearby dump is heavy in your home, and your daughter can’t breathe. In the half-light you can see her eyes wide, struggling with an asthma attack. All you can think is that you have to help her. You don’t have a motorcycle, let alone a car, and the buses don’t run at this hour. You load your daughter onto the crossbar of your bicycle and ride through darkened streets – going around the long way to avoid the gangs – until you arrive at the Hospitalito. Although it’s called the little hospital, it’s really just a clinic. The doctor on duty is distressed when you arrive, he listens to your daughter’s lungs and sadly tells you that he has no medicine, no inhaler, no nebulizer, no tools to help you. Your daughter must go to a larger hospital in Managua, but there is no ambulance to take her. So you set her, weak and wheezing, on the curb, and begin to beg passersby for bus fare as light dawns over the useless hospital.

    Life under the neoliberal governments in Nicaragua – 1990-2006 – was exceptionally hard. In those years, the poor got poorer and the rich got richer and Nicaragua became one of the most unequal countries in the world. Lack of access to basic health care was one of the ways in which everyday people suffered.

    Health Care 1999

    Under the Somoza dictatorship in 1978, there were a total of 209 health units in the country – that is hospitals, health centers and health posts combined. After the Triumph of the Revolution in 1979, the new Sandinista government made health care free, and even in the midst of an economic embargo and fighting the Contra War during the 1980s, they managed to increase health units five-fold; by 1990 there were 1,056 units. But during 16 years, the neoliberal governments only managed to build 35 more health units, the majority of which were in rural areas and sat empty due to lack of personnel and materials.

    One of these units was our “Hospitalito,” in Ciudad Sandino. At that time, the public budget for medicines and materials was minimal: when the doctors who were working at our clinic during the day took the night shift at the Hospitalito, they had to turn sick people away because they didn’t even have gloves to examine patients or basic medicines. Even when patients managed to be seen by a doctor, they were given prescriptions for medicines they couldn’t afford. Imports of drugs were in the hands of foreign companies and production of generic drugs was restricted. Patients unfortunate enough to need surgery had to bring their own alcohol, gauze, sutures and sheets – oh, and also family members who could donate the blood they would need. Laboratory tests, specialized treatments, and surgeries were so expensive that poor families effectively could not access the service. During these years, patients literally died on the street outside hospitals for lack of basic medical care.

    Since the return of the Sandinista government in 2007, the difference in medical care is stark. Today, the Hospitalito is a fully equipped hospital with emergency care and admitted patient beds. There is outpatient care – general medicine, pediatrics, gynecology, psychology, natural medicine, a rehabilitation center, and a maternal wait home.

    Maternity Care

    Ciudad Sandino is just one city – public health care has been revolutionized all over the country, the entire structure and indeed culture of the health system has changed. Today, it is a more holistic system focused on families becoming active participants in their own health, and relying heavily on a small army of community workers doing everything from mosquito elimination door-to-door vaccination to health promotion and education.

    Since 2007, the largest public health infrastructure in Central America has been built, now with a total of 1,565 health units. In 14 years, Nicaragua has built 21 new hospitals and remodeled 46 more. It has built or remodeled 1,259 medical posts, 192 health centers and 178 maternity homes. In an effort to see patients who don’t normally go to health centers, MINSA also has 66 fully-equipped mobile health clinics. These are made from semi trucks that have been confiscated in drug busts, and converted into clinics; in 2020 these mobile clinics provided nearly 1.9 million consults. In the midst of the pandemic, MINSA rolled out the My Hospital in My Community program which sees patients at neighborhood health fairs with orthopedists, cardiologists, gynecologists and urologists and includes screening for prostate, breast and cervical cancers. Patients are then referred to a specialist at a hospital for follow up.

    Healthy Baby

    Access to specialized care has drastically changed – services such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy that were once only offered in the capital are now offered at regional hospitals. Prior to 2007, many surgeries were only performed by international brigades; last year 120 child heart surgeries and 4 kidney transplants were performed, all by local doctors. This year, Nicaraguan doctors became the first team in Central America to perform in-utero surgery, on a fetus with spina bifida.

    The list of improved health services is comprehensive by any standards: 260,000 cataract surgeries, care of 358,000 older adults and people with disabilities, three prosthetics and orthotics workshops, 91 centers for people with special needs, 265 free daycare centers, and 188 natural medicine clinics, 72 pain clinics, 34 mental health clinics integrated into existing public health centers.

    Nicaragua has made a long term financial investment in public health: in 2020, 40 cents of every dollar the government spent was for health care and education. Nicaragua now spends 476% more on health than previous governments, investing 5.2% of its GDP in the sector annually.

    In 14 years, total number of health care workers employed in the public sector is up by 66%, doctors up by 123%, free medical consultations are up by 329%, All this, combined with the school lunch program which guarantees a hot meal of beans and rice to 1 ½ million primary school children daily, has resulted in a 46% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children under five and a 66% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children six to 12 years old.

    School Lunch

    Investment leads to results: a 385% increase in pap tests plus equipping clinics with colposcopy and cryotherapy machines has led to a 25% decrease in cervical cancer mortality, previously one of the biggest killers of Nicaraguan women of child-bearing age.

    Both infant and maternal mortality have markedly dropped in the 14 years since the Sandinistas returned to power.

    A 212% increase in maternal wait homes has led to an 87% decrease in home births, followed by a 70% decrease in maternal mortality over the more than 1.5 million births attended since 2007, and a 61% reduction in infant mortality.

    Moving forward, Nicaragua plans to continue expansion – finishing five more new hospitals before the end of the year, building 12 more new by 2026 and continuing hospital remodeling as well.

    It is in this context of more than a decade of these revolutionary changes to the health care system that Nicaragua faced the coronavirus. When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Nicaragua was already prepared by having a healthier population with access to the best public healthcare in the region.

    Kids with Masks

    To date, it has seen fewer cases and fewer deaths than any country in the region; in fact, it compares favorably to the most developed countries in the world. Nicaragua has achieved this by refusing to carbon copy the approach of the developed world like the rest of the region has done – with lockdowns, strictly enforced curfews, and school closures – but rather choosing to fight the pandemic on its own terms, with a strategy devised for Nicaraguan reality. The government recognized that in a country where most people depend on daily earnings to survive, lockdown would result in hunger; that with children depending on their free school lunch for vital nutrition, school closures would result in hunger; and that with the economy already suffering from the failed coup attempt in 2018 (damages are estimated to be equivalent to that of 52 hurricanes like Eta and Iota which hit Nicaragua in 2020), forced economic shut down would cripple the nation. Instead, the government strategy to fight the pandemic played to Nicaragua’s strengths: its well-organized community health system and resilient population.

    From late March 2020 when the first coronavirus case in the country was confirmed, through mid-May when the first wave began to peak, lay health promoters carried out 5 million home visits to the country’s 1.3 million homes to share information on the virus, go through symptom checklists and identify possible cases. The public was encouraged early on to learn to live with the virus by going about their business safely, something the international scientific community is now also promoting as the world begins to recognize it is moving from pandemic to endemic COVID-19.

    Nicaragua’s adaptation has been agile and widespread: schools, markets, shops, taxis and bus cooperatives came up with creative hand-washing ideas right away. [Author’s note: This was when doctors still thought the virus could be passed through touching surfaces.] The population adapted to wearing masks in crowded areas early on, and we did not see a politicized mask debate. Unlike in countries where the government has made decisions for people what is safe and what is not, Nicaraguans have learned to judge for themselves what is safe, and life has continued.

    Cataract Surgery

    Nicaragua’s softer approach has resulted in fewer COVID cases than any country in the region, and its economy is in better shape. Nicaragua was forecast to have a 14% loss of its GDP in 2020, but managed only a 2% loss and was the only country in Central America to increase its exports in 2020. Even when adjusting for “excess” deaths – those above the expected death rate – Nicaragua has not only fared better in the pandemic than any other country in the region, but also larger countries like the U.S. and U.K.

    Unlike the developing world, the Nicaraguan response has never relied on testing – due to cost and lack of reagents, testing has been necessarily limited; but we also know that testing is also slow and unreliable. Although COVID tests are available – mostly for those who require it for traveling outside the country, at a cost of $150 per test – the current public health protocol calls for only testing at-risk patients: pregnant women, the elderly and healthcare workers. Rather than waiting for a test-confirmed diagnosis, any patient presenting even one symptom is treated as a suspected case. Recently, a member of our community got COVID, so we saw up close what happens when a patient is sick. When she first got a fever and aches, she called the free hotline to ask what to do. The doctors told her to go to the Hospitalito. She was examined and, like all patients with suspected COVID, was given two specific medications, plus others as needed in accordance with her own medical history. She was told to isolate at home for 14 days and come back if she presented more symptoms. Patients are also asked who they have been in contact with, and those contacts are then visited by health care workers, given a round of prophylactic medicines and told to come to see a doctor if they present more symptoms.

    Community Health Promoter

    In the area of prevention, Nicaragua is vaccinating against COVID-19, but the rollout has been slower than hoped for due to a lack of vaccines. This is especially frustrating because Nicaragua knows how to vaccinate: this country created the internationally used model for how to vaccinate in war zones when it eradicated polio and other childhood diseases with its vaccination campaign during the Contra war in the 1980s. Since 2007, Nicaragua has maintained a nearly universal vaccination rate, and public health workers participate in annual vaccination campaigns door to door throughout the country. Even in the first months of the pandemic, 2 million people were vaccinated against influenza and pneumonia with vaccines made at a lab in Nicaragua.

    But, as we have seen around the world, the COVID vaccine rollout is not equal and has been politicized with what is being called “vaccine diplomacy.” The United States – where to date 15 million unused vaccines have been thrown out, enough to vaccinate every Nicaraguan twice – has donated vaccines to every other Central American county except Nicaragua.

    Since March, Nicaragua has been vaccinating for free, starting with oldest population – those over 30 are currently eligible. So far, more than half a million people have been vaccinated, with the goal of doubling that by October 9th. Although there was initially some vaccine hesitancy in the older population, as COVID cases have risen in recent weeks, demand for the vaccine has also risen. Fortunately, the health care system’s organization is up to the task of dealing with long lines: I recently went to one of the five hospitals in Managua offering the vaccine. Although I was daunted by the snaking line outside the hospital, once I joined, it moved quickly. Despite the wait, there was a jubilant mood among us all and within two hours we were jabbed and done. We estimated 10,000 people got their vaccine at that hospital that day.

    Laboratory

    In Nicaragua we are currently experiencing a second wave – which is remarkable since other countries are already on their fourth wave. With this second wave, we are also fighting what Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo calls “health terrorism,” meaning disinformation about the pandemic situation, which has been widespread during both waves. Around the world, the pandemic has been politicized, and that is especially true in Nicaragua. The USAID “regime change” plan for Nicaragua, Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua, or RAIN, which was leaked in July 2020, specifically mentions exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic into a “humanitarian emergency” through what it calls Nicaragua’s “weak healthcare system.” Even before there were reported cases in Nicaragua, we saw this playing out through manipulation of international media, scare tactics via WhatsApp messages and Facebook, and even the creation of a parallel “authority,” the Citizens Observatory for COVID-19 in Nicaragua, an organization of anonymous “interdisciplinary volunteers” with a slick website. Throughout the pandemic they have reported exaggerated “parallel” numbers; and despite the fact that they admit one of their sources is “rumors,” international media have quoted Observatory counts as if they were official numbers.

    I personally have been told that hospitals have “collapsed,” there are bodies stacked in corridors, and patients being turned away, only to speak with someone who had been in that hospital or go myself and find out that simply wasn’t true. Unfortunately, this health terrorism has deadly consequences. The constant disinformation scares people, and understandably so – especially older people who remember the neoliberal years when patients did die for lack of care outside of hospitals. So instead of seeking medical care, patients are self-medicating at home, and too often go to the hospital too late and wind up much sicker or even die. To combat it, this week health care workers have again been deployed to go door-to-door checking on people, giving information, and convincing those who are sick to seek medical care.

    Nueva Vida 2000

    What does the future hold? Nicaragua will keep caring for its people, plugging away to reduce inequities in health and to eradicate poverty. As President Ortega said recently:

    The most terrible virus that exists on the planet is the one that causes poverty, because it is in the genes of those who dominate the world economy under capitalism. It is based on the principle of survival of the fittest, no matter how many dead it leaves in its wake.… That is savage capitalism, the most terrible disease on the planet.

    Sources: 1

    1. Gobierno de Reconciliación y Unidad Nacional: Plan Nacional de la Lucha Contra La Pobreza Para el Desarrollo Humano 2022-2026 ; Interview with Ivan Acosta, Nicaraguan Minister for Housing and Public Credit; Ministry of Citizen Power for Health Nicaragua: Advances in Health From 2007 to 2020.
    The post What Does Health Care For All Look Like in Nicaragua? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Becca Mohally Renk.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Branch Covidians are Waging War on Humanity

    All embarked, the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes while the son of Atreus told his troops to wash, to purify themselves from the filth of the plague. They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.

    — Homer, The Iliad (1.365-370)

    The Biden administration’s announcement that Americans employed in companies with over 100 employees would be compelled to take an experimental gene therapy in explicit violation of the Nuremberg Code has opened a new front in the biofascist assault on democracy. Businesses and government agencies that fail to enforce this mandate will potentially face draconian fines. Should the oligarchy succeed in completely weaponizing health care, vaccine passports would undoubtedly become both pervasive and mandatory, but as Tucker Carlson pointed out during one of his recent monologues, it is also likely that dissidents would be handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry. This is not an uncommon practice in police states, and the pathologization of dissent has been ongoing in the West for quite some time now. Only through knowledge, compassion, and camaraderie can the forces of neo-Nazi medicine be outflanked. The days of medical Armageddon are upon us.

    As the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and its European counterpart unequivocally demonstrate, the Covid vaccine program is causing tremendous harm and should have been terminated many months ago. Even the efficacy of the vaccines is very much in doubt, as evidenced by soaring Covid case numbers in some of the most vaccinated places on earth, such as the Seychelles (see here and here), Israel (see here, here, here and here), Gibraltar and Iceland. As physician assistant Deborah Conrad pointed out in her interview with The HighWire, VAERS is so dysfunctional that many doctors and nurses are only vaguely aware of its existence.

    Addressing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Joseph Mercola, MD, writes on Mercola.com:

    In a June 29, 2021, interview, Fauci called the Delta variant ‘a game-changer’ for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the Covid jab.

    As Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and other experts without ties to industry have noted, coronavirus vaccines have long had a poor safety record. Indeed, when scientists attempted to create a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1 the laboratory animals all died due to pathogenic priming.

    The vaccine mandates are causing middle class professionals to quit their jobs in droves, from highly trained fighter pilots, to large numbers of nurses leading to maternity wards being shuttered. In what is reminiscent of the anthrax vaccine (administered to the military despite the lack of both informed consent and FDA approval), army doctors are now observing serious adverse events in formerly healthy soldiers. The Covid vaccine drive has surpassed even the psychopathy of the Nazi doctors, as it would have been inconceivable to senior physicians in the Third Reich to give all of German society an experimental vaccine.

    In an incident that underscores how delusional the mass media has become, WXYZ-TV in Detroit, an ABC affiliate, reached out to people on Facebook for stories of Americans who died of Covid because they delayed getting vaccinated, but were instead inundated with thousands of stories of people who were killed or seriously injured by the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) gene therapies.

    Not only has a two-tier society emerged where the unvaccinated are being denied the right to work, attend university, eat out, go to sporting events, and enjoy the performing and visual arts; but another two-tier society has also emerged, one which has been evolving for quite some time now: the mega rich – for whom none of these draconian rules will apply – and everyone else. Video from a Democratic Party fundraiser hosted by Nancy Pelosi in Napa Valley has emerged showing affluent liberals rubbing shoulders unmasked while their brown servants wear masks. Masks and social distancing were apparently not required at the recent Met Gala in New York, where celebrities get to hobnob, have shallow conversations, and show off their outlandish costumes while millions of their countrymen wallow in unemployment, hopelessness, and despair.

    And it would seem that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (whose real name incidentally is Warren Wilhelm Jr.) is not the only one who delights in imposing punitive measures on those who opt for the control group, with museums and concert halls enthusiastically embracing the heinous practice. The Guggenheim has even written on their website in conjunction with their vaccine requirement that “We focus on safety so you can immerse yourself in art.” (Thankfully, I have a lot of art books).

    What will transpire if the mandates remain in place? Will our leaders order their minions to shut off the water of the unvaccinated? Will workers and students be compelled to take an experimental AIDS vaccine or submit to weekly testing? These injunctions are unethical, discriminatory, and unconstitutional, as they transform inalienable rights into privileges which must be earned by participating in a dangerous medical experiment. Restaurants in Manhattan, which have some of the highest commercial rents in the world, are naturally reluctant to enforce these regulations, yet run the risk of being snitched on by Branch Covidian undercover operatives.

    Such an incestuous relationship has formed between the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry, that going to the websites for these agencies invariably yields information that mirrors what is posted on the drug company websites. There is robust science indicating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity. There is likewise compelling evidence that face masks do more harm than good, yet these facts continue to be ignored by the presstitutes – a gaggle of clowns also on industry payroll.

    When reporter Emerald Robinson asked White House principal deputy secretary Karine Jean-Pierre how doctors were testing for the Delta variant, Jean-Pierre became defensive, demanding that we stop asking questions and follow “the experts.” They know best after all, who when not registering vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated and artificially inflating the Covid death toll, are busy turning the country into a nation of opioid, heroin (the two are inextricably linked), fentanyl, barbiturate, benzodiazepine, and psychotropic drug addicts. (American doctors even once prescribed cocaine and heroin). Speaking at the Washington National Cathedral, our imaginary president, Dr. Fauci, said that he was sympathetic to Brits and Americans who are accustomed to certain post-Medieval rights and freedoms, “but now is the time to do what you’re told.”

    The FDA “approval” for the Pfizer Covid vaccine attempts to conflate EUA investigational agents with FDA-approved drugs, as FDA has not approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which is still in use, but the Pfizer Comirnaty Covid vaccine, which isn’t even available. The FDA has argued that the two vaccines are indistinguishable from one another and that they can be used interchangeably, which is absurd. Any drug under the auspices of an EUA is by law experimental and cannot be mandated. Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to FDA Acting Commissioner Woodcock requesting clarification on this preposterous state of affairs.

    It is curious that Hydroxychloroquine is somehow safe as a maintenance drug for lupus, yet suddenly becomes dangerous when used to treat SARS-CoV-2, even if only taken for a very short period of time. Here is the website lupus.org:

    Given the drug’s many and varied beneficial effects and its excellent long-standing safety profile, most rheumatologists believe that Hydroxychloroquine should be taken by people with lupus throughout their lifetime. [Italics added]

    The FDA temporarily authorized the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 in March of 2020, but only with hospitalized patients. The FDA notice read as follows:

    Hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more and are hospitalized with COVID-19, for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.

    As Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Peter McCullough, and others have noted, Covid protocols using Hydroxychloroquine and other zinc ionophores are most efficacious early in the disease process. In other words, the FDA denied permission for doctors to use a medication for outpatient care where it has been shown to significantly reduce hospitalization and death, but allowed the drug to be used for hospitalized patients where the disease has often spiraled out of control, thereby setting the drug up to fail. Dr. Simone Gold has argued that the prevalence of Hydroxychloroquine in Africa, where it is frequently obtainable as an over-the-counter drug for malaria treatment and prophylaxis, has played a significant role in protecting the continent from Covid.

    So eager were the Branch Covidians to torpedo Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2 that they conducted dangerous and unethical trials where patients were deliberately overdosed and given toxic quantities of the drug, likely causing some of the trial participants to die, and causing even far more deaths when public health agencies around the world advised (or in some instances, ordered) doctors to stop using a life-saving medication as a treatment for COVID-19.

    Writing for The Defender, the newsletter for Children’s Health Defense, Jeremy Loffredo points out that in addition to threatening the profits of the mRNA vaccines, Hydroxychloroquine posed a threat to the profits of Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir:

    Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, dozens of new studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and its first cousin, Chloroquine, against Covid. These studies occurred in China, France, Saudi Arabia, Italy, India, New York and Michigan. However, such proof of Hydroxychloroquine’s benefit to patients with Covid has posed an existential threat to Gilead sales throughout the Covid outbreak.

    Remdesivir costs over $3,000 per treatment and has been linked to serious and potentially life-threatening side effects. Nevertheless, if a drug is profitable safety, necessity, and efficacy are disregarded. It becomes “the standard of care.”

    Having had their fill of demonizing Hydroxychloroquine, the presstitutes and pharmaceutical sock puppets turned their vitriol on another unpatentable drug, Ivermectin. Described as “a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction” by the journal New Microbes and New Infections, Ivermectin has played a critical role in combating onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness. Writing for The Lancet, Michel Boussinesq, MD, PhD, points out that “Ivermectin has been widely used for 30 years to combat onchocerciasis and is rightly considered a wonder drug.” In African countries where Ivermectin is regularly taken as an anti-parasitic Covid deaths have been negligible. Elaborating on this point, Kenyan doctors Stephen Karanga and Wahome Ngare pointed out in a Klartext podcast that due to Ivermectin’s effectiveness in treating Covid they weren’t worried about SARS-CoV-2; their real concerns lay with car accidents, HIV, and malaria.

    Meanwhile, the FDA refuses to even acknowledge that Ivermectin can be used in humans, tweeting “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” (Yes, those are some of the smartest people in the world). This villainy is not without precedent, as millions of Americans were prescribed highly addictive opioids as opposed to safer and more inexpensive over-the-counter pain medications. The sacking of Canadian emergency physician Dr. Daniel Nagase, who was found guilty of saving the lives of his Covid patients with Ivermectin, underscores the fact that the elites will stop at nothing to prolong the pandemic.

    In addition to fomenting the cult-like notion that a vaccine is a magical elixir for which no risk-benefit analysis is needed, the media has played a critical role in deceiving hundreds of millions of people around the world into believing that Covid is equally dangerous to all patients irregardless of age and preexisting conditions. This, in turn, has led to Black Death levels of hysteria, as evidenced by unvaccinated locals in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh being forced to wear placards displaying the skull and crossbones.

    Physicians who attempt to treat Covid early using Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) protocols are being vilified as quacks and snake oil salesmen, while doctors who are killing staggering numbers of people through a combination of nontreatment and dangerous experimental drugs are hailed as heroes. In many ways, this is the essence of biofascism: care patients desperately need is denied them, while dangerous care is imposed through coercion – both monstrous violations of the oath to do no harm.

    It is not uncommon for physicians to prescribe FDA-approved drugs to treat conditions that are different from what the drug was initially intended for. This is referred to as “off-label use” or “off-label prescribing.” How will a high-risk patient who contracts Covid benefit from masks, social distancing, lockdowns and vaccines (even if they were safe and effective)? They need something that will ward off the inflammatory phase of the disease and keep the ventilator at bay. This suppression of early treatment options has failed to escape the attention of the Indian Bar Association, which has sought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for making fallacious claims about Ivermectin to protect the Church of Vaccinology.

    A passage from the Rome Declaration, established at the Rome Covid Summit, and signed by over 10,000 doctors and scientists, states the following:

    WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;

    WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.

    In the Age of Faucism, everyone who arrives at an American emergency room is being given a PCR test, and if it indicates that they have the virus (not unlikely considering the prevalence of false positives), their loved ones are summarily kicked out of the hospital, they are put into isolation, given drugs of dubious safety and efficacy, and even intubated. Dr. Jane Ruby has referred to these Covid obsessed hospitals as “the new ovens.” Furthermore, physicians are being threatened with revocation of their licenses should they be found guilty of “spreading misinformation” – a practice also commonly referred to as informed consent.

    Hitler’s physicians were fond of euthanizing the mentally ill, and it would appear that their heirs are equally enamored with the practice, as the mentally handicapped have been vaccinated by force and with armed police present in Los Angeles. Children in Toronto have been given the experimental jab, without parental permission, and in exchange for free ice cream, while irate parents were prevented from entering the grounds. Not to be outdone, whistleblowers from Aegis Living, an assisted living facility for the aged, have reported that residents have been “chemically restrained” and injected with the investigational mRNA biologicals without their knowledge. As Dr. Lee Merritt said in a talk with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, “We have a whole society doing what we tried the Nazi doctors for.”

    As evidenced by the CDC vaccine schedule (a growing list of mandates coupled with liability protection for the manufacturer), and the fact that parents can be charged with “medical neglect” should they object to their children being placed on psychotropic drugs, the American public school system has long been in the grip of late-stage biofascism. To add insult to injury, toddlers are now being forced to wear masks and the mRNA biologicals are being injected into minors. Children’s Health Defense has reported that “Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be rolled out to babies as young as 6 months in the U.S. this winter — under plans being drawn up by the pharmaceutical giant.”

    Australia offers another window into our future should we fail to save humanity from the hordes of Faucism. Indeed, this has become a country where farmers’ markets are shut down by riot police, senior health officials tell their countrymen not to talk to one another so as to prevent transmission of a virus, pregnant women are arrested in their pajamas for attempting to organize anti-lockdown rallies on the Internet, women are violently choked by sadistic goons for leaving their homes unmasked, young children are pepper sprayed and brutalized for committing the aforementioned sin, citizens are committed (or “sectioned” as they say in Britain) for questioning the official Covid narrative, rubber bullets are fired into crowds of informed consenters, and extreme forms of violence are unleashed against elderly protesters – acts of barbarity that have enraged the citizenry. Melbourne in particular has lost all semblance of checks and balances, with storm troopers being unleashed on the population, in harrowing scenes reminiscent of the Wehrmacht’s storming of Prague. (Granted, without the live rounds).

    Convinced that anyone who questions the veracity of the liberal media and the public health agencies is a “conspiracy theorist” (really a euphemism for “mentally ill”), neoliberals have already crossed the Rubicon and taken up the truncheon of authoritarianism. Undoubtedly, the official Covid narrative is deranged. Yet is it any more inane than “Trump’s white supremacist insurrection,” “Russia invaded Ukraine,” “the Russians hacked the election,” “Trump is Putin’s puppet,” and NATO was compelled to bomb Libya to smithereens “to save Benghazi?”

    Trapped in a vortex of amnesia and unreason, the neoliberal has been hoodwinked into believing that whatever the medical mullahs say is “the science;” and whatever the liberal media says is incontrovertible, irrefutable, and infallible; i.e., “reality.” Fauci’s contradictory statements, particularly with regard to the virulence of COVID-19 and his stance on masks, fail to diminish their fervor as they cannot even remember what they had for breakfast, let alone the tens of thousands of Americans killed by Vioxx or the over 400,000 Americans that lost their lives to the opioid epidemic.

    The liberals of the 1960s, who genuinely believed in the Nuremberg Code, would have regarded the Branch Covidians with contempt. What a pity that the ranks of these medical brownshirts are dominated largely by those who once idolized the likes of Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, yet now wallow in a pitiable state of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It is true that conservative publications, such as The Washington Post, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal are parroting similar propaganda with regard to Covid. However, as evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s show, the conservative media no longer speaks with one voice. Moreover, millions of conservatives no longer believe in the infallibility of the conservative media as liberals continue to believe in the infallibility of the liberal media.

    Ultimately, the Branch Covidians are the offspring of a union between a corporatized health care system that has grown increasingly hostile to informed consent, and a liberal class that stopped thinking when Bill Clinton was inaugurated and has come to regard senior officials in the liberal media and the public health agencies as gods. The mass psychosis of the Branch Covidians is inextricably linked with the mass psychosis of neoliberalism. Without the latter the former would have about as much societal impact as the Hare Krishnas.

    The Nazis divided humanity into the subhumans (Jews, Roma, political prisoners, and Slavs); the humans (allied European fascists and the Japanese); and the supermen (the Germans, or Aryans). For quite some time now, the American health care system has been mired in a multi-tier system which divides patients up into similar categories. In light of this boorishness, teaching hospitals have long been instructing trainees that care is to be doled out depending on what kind of insurance plan patients have. Privileged patients are granted the right to choose their own doctor while the less fortunate are confined to narrow networks. Humans are permitted to meet with an attending physician while the Untermenschen are sent to resident clinics. Unbeknownst to Nazi doctors, both past and present, there is no bioethics on-off switch. In what was foundational to the Blitzkrieg but could also explain their increasingly deranged decision making, much of the German military during World War II was regularly taking Pervitin, the predecessor to crystal meth, and doing so with the support of their own doctors.

    As the forces of darkness become increasingly desperate, liberals drown in an ocean of madness and sociopathy. Hypnotized by an oligarchy they have deified, while believing that they are still marching with Martin Luther King singing “Kumbaya My Lord” and “We Shall Overcome,” this faux-left movement bears a closer resemblance to the Democratic Party of the 1860s than the Democratic Party of the 1960s. Indeed, if the Branch Covidians succeed in destroying the citadel of informed consent, only one form of government will reign in the United States: slavery.

    The post The Branch Covidians are Waging War on Humanity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Military and Intelligence Origins of Public Health

    In November the latest book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will be available to readers: The Real Anthony Fauci. In an address to a conference on the Covid-19 crisis held in Budapest, Hungary this past August, Robert Kennedy gave a preview of his research results to the participants. His “Historical and Legal Perspectives of the Pandemic” takes an unusually wide view of the context in which the past 18 months unfolded. As a conservative campaigner for healthcare safety, especially for children, and an environmental activist, Kennedy has concentrated on corporate malfeasance and regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry. In this talk he explains the relationship of the health crisis to the State, itself.

    It ought to be asked, for instance, “How much grant or budgeted money from the military establishment is needed before scientific research is called military or weapons research?” or “How much objective science is produced by people entirely dependent or whose salaries are determined by the amount of money donors contribute to buy results?” or “How many deceptions and frauds must be perpetrated before those responsible are deemed liars and criminals?” These are, of course, rhetorical questions. Where a significant majority has learned to accept that pay warrants obedience and profit is the highest form of success and virtue, these questions can mean little and their answers mean even less.

    Karlheinz Deschner wrote more than 10 volumes of historical research documenting from the records of the Roman Catholic Church, itself, all of its criminal activity since the very fraudulent founding of the Holy See in Rome. Yet none of this will alter the conviction of a true Catholic that he or she is adherent to a criminal organisation more than a thousand years old. Deschner includes all of Christendom, not just the Catholics, since the Reformation did not end the crimes.

    Here it might be worth noting that some of the most vicious enforcers of the medical martial law regime, Emmanuel Macron, Justine Trudeau, Gavin Newsom, and, of course, Anthony Fauci were Jesuit educated. The collaborationist pontiff, himself, is a Jesuit. The founder of the Society of Jesus understood his work as a military organisation for the aggressive propagation and defence of the holy church. It is a common place that Cecil Rhodes was inspired by the Jesuits when he created his Round Table movement for British imperial unity. The Jesuits enjoy the reputation within the espionage profession as an elite element of the Church’s notoriously wide-spun and efficient intelligence operation.

    So when Robert Kennedy explains the sources of Anthony Fauci’s funding, the integration of the military and intelligence organisations in the ostensibly civilian NIAID  (and hence NIH as a whole), he is scraping some of the veneer from a carefully created body of mythology about institutional medical research and major medicine.

    17-01 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (USA) – Greetings to Conference Participants. Historic and legal perspectives of the pandemic

    The story and context Kennedy presents in this talk will presumably be more detailed in his forthcoming book. However, it is useful to go back in history even further than Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech to which Kennedy refers.

    *****

    The following section is adopted from my March 5, 2021 article:

    The regimental genealogy of the NIAID can be traced to the War Research Service, the US regime’s secret biological and chemical weapons research office, run by George W. Merck, president of one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world.

    In 1948, coincidental with the importation of Japanese and German war criminals with their cases of prison experimentation results, the War Research Service was transformed into the US Microbiological Institute. The War Research Service had been hidden in the Federal Security Agency, a Roosevelt organisation that included a variety of civilian programs deemed to have national security relevance. Federal security meant programs to protect against anything that could destabilise the US regime during the 1929 Great Reset.

    After 1945 and the adoption of the UN Charter, repeating the injunction of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and establishing the offense at Nuremberg of “crimes against the peace”, wars did not stop. Instead names were changed. Names make a difference. The Washington Naval Treaty (1922) restricted the tonnage and types of ships that could be built. Hence ship classes were also renamed. At the same time armament and displacement were reallocated among new ship classes so that construction could continue. The US sought not only to buttress its secret first strike strategy against the Soviet Union but also later to circumvent the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (starting 1972) by maintaining the same number of missiles and introducing the so-called MIRV, multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles. In other words, one missile was turned into a delivery system that could deliver the same number of warheads as additional missiles.

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s Gestapo, could not have been sold to the states had it been called a police force.

    In 1947, the National Security Act was also a response to the need for new language. If war was illegal, then one could not have a “war department”. So the national military establishment was renamed the Department of Defence. After the ceasefire in Korea, the US was also forced to rebrand the programs developing weapons it denied ever having or using—namely, the chemical weapons, already prohibited and the biological weapons it had inherited from the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army and the Japanese war criminals of Unit 731 Douglas MacArthur hid from exposure or trials. The principal war criminals from this secret Japanese military research facility no doubt joined their German colleagues recruited through the good offices of Allen Dulles.

    Although military research continued under the auspices of the US Army’s Chemical Corps and biological weapons research was still conducted, mainly at Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD—with other major facilities such as Dugway Proving Ground, Wendover, UT—World War II had also raised the petrochemical industry and its sister pharmaceuticals to a major role in the military – industrial – complex. Atomic weapons had enormously expanded the already firm hold of DuPont on the munitions side. The Army Air Corps and the vastly expanded aeronautical and aerospace industry joined behind the new Air Force. Thus it should be no surprise that petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals needed their State bureaucratic partner for the massive post-war armaments program. It is important to remember here that one of the benefits of US strategic success in the war was the plunder of some of the most lucrative basic research and capture of the most ruthless research personnel available in Germany and Japan. When the leaders of the US regime whine about alleged intellectual property theft by China, they are merely sobbing at the inevitable trickle down from their historical larceny and brain draining.

    It simply would have been impossible after the war in Korea to openly foster a biological warfare service in the US war machine. A solution was found. This was supported by trends already well established in the US. Since Frederick Taylor Gates assumed control over the General Education Board (GEB) within the Rockefeller tax dodge, the two largest tax dodges of the time, Carnegie and Rockefeller, had agreed to allocate the theatres of ideological warfare in defence of their fortunes, their class and the system that had come to be called capitalism. Rockefeller money would be devoted to manipulation of the domestic political environment and Carnegie money would be used to buy control of the international side.

    At the same time Gates advised Rockefeller to invest his loot in scientific medicine. Although Gates, like Rockefeller, came from a Baptist background, both had come to recognise that medicine is more powerful and intimate even than religion. Scientific medicine, based on the work of professionals operating with “security clearances”, could turn the laboratory into technology for social transformation. Just as John D. Rockefeller had legalised his criminal activities to establish the Standard Oil monopoly, Gates proposed a strategy for establishing an ideological monopoly on medicine and thus a practically invincible defence of the gangster class’ prerogatives to rule.

    Today’s complicity of the Johns Hopkins University (Bloomberg) School of Public Health should not be a surprise to anyone who recognises that history did not begin in 2019 or 2020. It was GEB money that founded the JHU School of Public Health (in 2001 named after the financial propaganda magnate, Michael Bloomberg, whose tax dodging has permitted him since 1995 to buy reputation at the nation’s premier population control academy).

    Corporate control over scientific medicine, especially through funding of medical schools and medical research laboratories, combined with the integration of the pharmaceutical industry into the military-industrial complex. This process reached its international apex when the Rockefeller tax dodge, which had already made substantial financial donations to the United Nations organisation (notoriously supplying part of its feudal estate in Manhattan to build a kind of international “Vatican City”), managed the foundation of the World Health Organisation (WHO). The chief US delegate to the 1946 International Health Conference was Thomas Parran, the US Surgeon General, who would also be credited with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on unwitting African-Americans (1932-1972).  Rockefeller sent five official observers to the conference. Without a doubt the most powerful delegation at the conference was on the side of corporate medicine and pharmaceutical weaponry.

    Recently those few critics of the WHO to be found complain about the amount of money it receives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. However, it is important to note that WHO was deliberately underfunded when it was started. A proposal that the organisation be funded by the United Nations was defeated in favour of separate contributions by members and a provision for financial gifts (bribes) from other sources.

    In 1955, the US Microbiological Institute was again renamed. It became the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In 1946, the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, a military operation was renamed the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) and later becomes part of the US Public Health Service—itself a derivative of military/naval hygiene operations. In 1951, the CDC established its cadre program keeping with the ultimately military tradition to which it belongs. The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) was intended to satisfy “the need for an adequate corps of trained epidemiologists who can be deployed immediately for any contingency, including chemical or biological warfare”. The Communicable Disease Center was later renamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    *****

    While these institutions have been labelled and marketed as if they were public services and benign operations for the protection and preservation of a social good, namely, human health, they were created, and as Kennedy also shows, have been maintained for the purpose of supporting what is essentially a major arm of the US war establishment, the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry and its soldiers, the lab-coated officers of the medical profession, fight to control the greatest threat to international capitalism of all—free human beings. Since the start of the 20th century what most people call “science” was harnessed to augment, and where necessary, replace religion—not to liberate humans from superstition but to anchor them more firmly in it. Social sciences were promoted because they turned social movements and struggle into managerial problems. Medical sciences replaced the healing arts, first to exclude women who previously would have been burned as witches, and then to exclude any attempts to organise healing within healthy communities—by turning health into disease and the patient into an enemy.

    This pandemic of scientism also infected the humanities but for the most part by causing their atrophy. The imposition of science in its present form was forced by the Progressive movement in North America and the Fabians and Positivists in “Old Europe”. Their descendants today have stolen the language of popular struggle in the 19th and 20th century and wear it as a “lab-coat of jargon” with which they sell their 4th Awakening fanaticism to complement the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution.

    The old national military establishment that invented the national security ideology in 1947 to subjugate the peoples of the expanding capitalist empire after World War II, realised quickly that they could not “kill ‘em all”. They began quickly to improve on the technology first applied industrially to wage the Great War. The target of that technology was and remains the human mind itself. The body housing it was and is of collateral interest. The mission of the war departments in the Pentagon and elsewhere around the world is to control territory and resources, including populations. The mission of the National Institutes of Health is to conquer the human mind and destroy the will of capitalism’s greatest enemy, humans striving toward liberty.

    The post The Military and Intelligence Origins of Public Health first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Patriarchy:  The Struggle Continues

    In a day when America is ruling over a global Empire maintained with violent enforcement to insure universal subordination to its will;  and in a day when a military-style domestic police state relentlessly makes sure anti-government protest and dissent is contained,  the patriarchal part of that America has been enhanced and strengthened.

    Feminist movements have launched long, fierce struggles to undermine patriarchal culture:  to ensure female power, to assert woman’s image as showing woman’s strength, to refute women’s inferiority to men, to establish female equality, politically, economically, and personally.  In my own work, I’ve analyzed those struggles:  first, the National Woman’s Party’s heroic campaign for woman’s suffrage, which included jail, beatings and forced feeding;  second, the uphill battle of women athletes, from the late 19th century on, striving to rid themselves of the necessity to have an image of “sex appeal” and just play ball.  And last, I’ve written of the amazing courage of American women political prisoners, women who challenged a government and society which refused to recognize their right to be  dissenters against imperialism—racism—capitalist inequality and ecocide—and sexism.

    The Patriarchy, in spite of all the movements, campaigns and struggles, is not dead yet. The problems come from many directions, but they circle back to age-old conditions.  We feminists of the 1960s-70s thought we might have won some of the battles.  I almost got out of my car to object when I drove through a town near where I live to challenge workers sporting “men working” signs.  My Saratoga NOW chapter succeeded in eliminating separate sections for male and female in the local paper’s help wanted section in the 70s.  What happened to that?!  We feminists must continue to stubbornly insist on our equality, on woman’s image not being sexualized, and on changing women’s lack of power.  We must keep on insisting that women are not inferior to men, should be believed, should be listened to.

    American sports, still a stubbornly male-dominated institution, has largely held the line against real female equality.  All this was very evident last March when NCAA women’s basketball was not accorded anywhere near balanced attention, or its needs met in a comparable way to the men’s.  More ominously, the NCAA has shown their (lack of) concern for women athletes, especially vis-à-vis some criminally violent male athletes, when it decided, as Jessica Luther wrote in the LA Times, that “rape is not an NCAA violation.”  Between 2011 and 2016, 17 women reported assaults by Baylor University football players, including four gang rapes.

    In the spring of 2012 a woman volleyball player reported being assaulted by “multiple football players” at a party.  After her mother spoke to the athletic director and football coach Art Briles, nothing was done.  A player was convicted of sexual assault in 2015, but in 2016 and 2017 lawsuits against Baylor accused the school of continuing to ignore its “culture of sexual violence.”  Coach Briles was finally fired in 2016, and college president Ken Starr, who had belatedly started an investigation, also resigned.  Recently, citing pandemic delays, the NCAA finally ruled on Baylor’s culture of violence by deciding it “did not break NCAA rules.”  Although the NCAA panel punished them for an academic infraction, they did not find Baylor guilty for not reporting or addressing “sexual and interpersonal violence.”  They declared it was a failure of the coaching and athletic staff, but not an NCAA problem.  They who supposedly wanted (women) athletes to be safe, offered no assistance in the case of “gendered violence.”  Numerous attempts to get the NCAA to change this policy have not succeeded.  Remember Michigan State was cleared of blame for allowing gymnastics’ doctor Larry Nasser’s unspeakable sexual crimes against young women!

    The NFL also does not do well dealing with sexual violence.  Player violence against women has been commonplace, with few repercussions.  The recent case of accused multiple sexual assaulter DeShaun Watson is illustrative of valuable player versus serious female complaints about him.  The Houston quarterback has had a number of licensed massage therapists accuse him of unwanted sexual acts and assault.  At this time, Watson is facing 22 civil law suits and 10 criminal complaints, and is thus on the NFL’s “inactive” list.  The victims were interviewed by NFL investigators who treated them—said the women—in a “patronizing” and “victim-blaming” manner.  The NFL placed no restrictions on Watson during the investigation, who, according to his accuser Ashley Solis, not only assaulted her but threatened her career when she got upset.  When the investigator questioned what she wore for their massage sessions, she asked:  “What did they think I should wear to suggest that I don’t want you to put your penis in my hand?”  She has said that “the NFL is taking a stand against women and survivors of sexual assault.”  The NFL is also not so great in other areas regarding women’s worth and dignity.

    Cheerleading is a (predominantly) female sport which has encountered all kinds of indignities.  The NFL teams Buffalo, Cincinnati, Jets, Tampa Bay and Oakland all faced lawsuits from cheerleaders in 2014.  Two Buffalo Jills told HBO’s Real Sports they receive $125 a game, and nothing for ads, photo shoots or practices.  Some of these lawsuits were successful, but today there are still NFL cheerleaders making less than $1,000 a year.  The interviewed Jills also said they were rejected as dancers if they didn’t pass “the jiggle test” while doing jumping jacks. First female Jet football coach Collette Smith said on “Real Sports” that it does not seem right for cheerleaders, “athletes,” to just have to “shake with no clothes on, like sex kittens!”  There’s a new documentary film called “A Woman’s Work:  The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem,” about which Director Yu Gu says, that in a culture with “toxic masculinity… men feel entitled to women’s bodies.”  An even darker situation took place with youth cheerleaders.  In an unregulated sport, except by its own million-dollar profit-making organizations, abuses have been many.  Male cheerleading “coaches” supposedly training cheerleaders, instead sexually assaulted them—and continued to participate in the sport.  Two were even featured on the Netflix “Cheer” show, before finally being arrested and scheduled for trial.  Not much protection there, when, as usual, it might interfere with image and therefore profit.

    Image is also an issue regarding this year’s Tokyo Olympics.  I watched with admiration as silver medalist shot putter Raven Saunders demonstrated for human rights and against racism on the Olympic podium by crossing her arms over her head to show their intersection.  The IOC’s (International Olympic Committee) restrictions on protests held quite well, although hammer thrower Gwen Berry and the US women’s soccer team took a knee before competing.  Women Olympic athletes have not been afraid to speak out.  Track and field athlete Sara Goucher, with several other women, accused former champion marathoner and prominent track coach Alberto Salazar of “doping violations” and of abuse.  He is banned, at least for now.

    A problem which has always resonated with me is the way female athletes dress to do their sport.  It’s not new:  female baseball players had to wear short skirts and female basketball players sported red wigs in the 40s, but now it is beyond absurd.  Women have to wear (it’s mandatory) very revealing outfits as skaters, runners, beach volleyball players and gymnasts.  But some women are protesting this.  Norway’s women’s beach handball team (not yet an Olympic sport) were fined after they wore shorts instead of bikinis at EURO2021.  And at the Olympics, the German women’s gymnastics team wore unitards covering their whole body from the neck down.  They said they wanted to “push back against the sexualization of women in gymnastics.”  Male gymnasts wear shorts and loose pants.  It’s the Olympic women who wear revealing outfits to run, and bikinis to play beach volleyball.  It’s an extreme demonstration of “sexualization,” of a patriarchal culture limiting woman’s image to a sexual one, rather than one of a competent, strong athlete.

    In a patriarchal culture, male power attempts to supersede women’s.  In such an environment, women have little value and receive little respect.  And when powerful male politicians do this (and there are so many of them), it becomes very public.  (Former) Governor Andrew Cuomo is the latest to fall from grace after many years of getting away with sexual misconduct toward his staff, campaign organizers, and even a female state trooper.  Some of his fellow Democratic politicians have called him “a lecherous tyrant” who empowered his staff “to threaten and intimidate.”  Cuomo collected young, good-looking women to work for him and they were expected to always dress well, including makeup and high heels.  If a woman decided she didn’t like his demands and cruel work environment, it was made clear she’d have a hard time getting another job.  Inappropriate comments and touching were his trademarks.  He was able to maintain this extremely harmful situation for women in his employ until on August 3rd, New York Attorney General Letitia James, after taking on the growing complaints (which had gotten nowhere with senior staff), issued her thorough and well-investigated report which accused the governor of “sexually harassing 11 women in violation of the law.”  The report detailed “unwanted groping, kissing, hugging and inappropriate comments.”  Some were worse, such as the Albany staffers who reported that he grabbed their breasts.  And so the media darling who supposedly handled the COVID crisis so well (except for that pesky problem with covering up nursing home deaths), had to resign.  Most Democratic politicians abandoned him in the end:  but two who held out a long time were President Biden and Vice President Harris.

    President Trump’s sexual misadventures were numerous, as such things are very much bipartisan.  Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct got him impeached.  He admitted to relations with Monica Lewinsky, but faced more serious allegations of rape from Juanita Broaddrick.  Last March Kamala Harris held a discussion about “empowering women and girls”—something the Clinton Foundation states that it does around the world—which included Mr. Clinton.  Broaddrick asked in a tweet if conference host Howard University might “like to include me in their empowering event with Bill Clinton?”  Harris had no comment on that, nor, at that point, on the accusations surrounding Governor Cuomo.  The President also did not feel Cuomo should resign, until after the Letitia James report was revealed.  Funnily enough, Joe Biden has been accused of the self-same thing as Cuomo, for years.  During Biden’s presidential campaign, these proclivities were brought up, especially by Tara Reade, his former staffer.  Reade accused Biden of serious sexual assault, including pressing her against a Capitol corridor wall and digitally penetrating her.  She reported this incident to friends and family, and senior staff (to no avail), at the time.  Other women have complained of similar incidents of inappropriate touching, up to and including on the 2020 campaign trail.  Reade’s May 2020 interview with Megyn Kelly tells of her experience, but she also talks about the overwhelming hate she has received from the media and the utter disbelief from Democratic women protecting their candidate.  As Reade said to Kelly:  “Do we want [as president] someone who thinks of women as objects, who thinks that they can just take what they want in that moment for their pleasure and that’s it?”   She was not believed, an experience common to so many women who have undergone abuse by powerful men, from Dylan Farrow (re Woody Allen), to Ambra Gutierrez (re Harvey Weinstein), to Andrea Costand (re Bill Cosby), and to women aides and staff of important and powerful men.  #Me Too has been a good thing, to a point.  Women still shy away from believing accusations against certain men.

    Not believing women is inherent to patriarchal culture.  I remember going to the hospital when I was teaching in Fargo, where I was eventually admitted for severe dehydration and a bad case of the flu.  The male doctor who first saw me talked of “the so-called pain in my chest.”  He apparently didn’t believe me.  The value of women’s bodies certainly seems to be in question when yet another struggle supposedly won in the 70s—a woman’s right to choose abortion—is, thanks to the rise in power of Christian right fascists who are (!) patriarchal, again in jeopardy.  Women’s lives are in jeopardy on many fronts.  Attorney and John Jay professor Marcie Smith Parenti wrote a piece for the Grayzone, entitled “Why Won’t the US Medical Establishment Believe Women?”  She outlines a serious situation where the CDC and FDA, in their rush to vaccinate everyone (only 23% of pregnant women have at least one dose), have seriously downplayed and dismissed evidence that thousands of women have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 vaccines (most related to the mRNA vaccines).  Large numbers of vaccinated women have had their menstrual cycle disrupted:  extreme cramping, passing golf-ball size blood clots, and having “hemorrhagic bleeding.”  Parenti has several friends with such symptoms.  But beyond possibly anecdotal experience, by July of this year, the UK had 13,000 reports of “menstruation disruption,” with similar reports in Canada and India.

    The US, with its “Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), had thousands of reports (they admit VAERS only catches a low percentage of adverse events) by July as well:  such reports included 88 “fetal deaths” and 25 “stillbirths” along with the hemorrhagic bleeding.   Although the FDA and CDC quickly warned of the myocarditis threat (a heart ailment) to young men posed by the vaccine, no warnings have been issued regarding menstrual disruption.  Parenti argues that menstruation is a central issue for women’s health and there are many incidents revealing that cycle’s disruption in myriad and very serious ways, including possible infertility.  She says that women deserve an investigation into these reports, with explanations and medical information, and “non-punitive accommodations if they decline a vaccine at this time.”  But no:  they can be barred from school and public places, and lose their jobs.  And if women are showing too much concern publicly, Parenti says they are “subjected to 1950s-style dismissal and demonization.”   After all, such concerns could “stoke unwarranted vaccine fears.”  And about such trivial health issues as menstruation, just “woman troubles.”

    Last June the National Institute of Health called for proposals to study a possible link between the vaccine and menstruation disruption.  And now, the NIH has at last ordered a study about that possible link, $1.67 million worth, with a half million (!) participants.  But Diana Bianchi, NIH head of child health and human development says the FDA should not be faulted for the investigation’s delay.  And the (of course, justifiable) reason for the delay has been echoed in every single item of media coverage I’ve read over the last few days.  The FDA was “worried this was contributing to vaccine hesitancy in reproductive-age women.”  Bianchi says the vaccine certainly does not cause infertility.  And (again echoing all the news reports on it), “really [menstruation} is not a life and death issue.”  Women should simply do what they’re told and ignore their “so-called bleeding.”

    Another area where there is a lack of confidence in what women say is when they warn of wider environmental dangers.  Traditionally women have tried to prevent harm and bring healing to the environment.  Women whistleblowers have suffered repercussions for warning against corporate entities’ disastrous policies; while indigenous women have sacrificed to try to protect Mother Earth from corporate disregard for the Earth’s destruction.  African-American women are all too familiar with environmental racism, from the drinking water of Flint, Michigan to the waters of Hurricane Katrina (and now Ida).  When Mississippi environmental analyst Tennie White, a Black woman, brought to light highly toxic wastes produced by Kerr-McGee endangering the people of Columbus, Mississippi, she was railroaded by the EPA’s “Green Enforcement” Unit and went to jail.  And recently, another woman whistleblower was ignored and punished.  Ruth Etzel was hired by the EPA as an expert in children’s health; a pediatrician and epidemiologist she has done stints at the WHO and CDC.  Etzel was to investigate lead poisoning in the chemical industry.  She found herself put on leave, demoted and then became a victim of an EPA smear campaign.  Etzel and other fellow scientists found that the EPA’s biggest concern is protecting chemical companies. Her suggested policy to help children avoid lead poisoning, formed after she found industries were doing “irreparable harm,” has yet to be put into effect.  Neither Obama, nor Trump, nor now Biden has changed the trend to protect corporations, and not the environment, humans, or even children.

    Native-American women fighting fiercely against the terrible poisons of oil pipelines are harassed and jailed.  Winona LaDuke, Green Party VP candidate and head of environmental advocacy group “Honor the Earth,” was arrested and jailed repeatedly last July for protesting against construction of a new Enbridge oil pipeline in northern Minnesota.  Minnesota recently granted Enbridge the right to displace five billion instead of the former half billion gallons of water.  Such a disastrous situation leads LaDuke to protest and thus be charged with trespassing, harassment, unlawful assembly and public nuisance charges.  She charges Minnesota governor Tim Walz with giving “the water, the land and our civil rights to a Canadian multinational.”

    The incomparable LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, died last April, fighting to the very end against the Dakota Access Pipeline.  As of a month ago, federal regulators had fined DAPL for safety violations like not doing necessary repairs and insufficient oil spill impact studies.  But Biden’s Army Corps of Engineers is still allowing the pipeline to operate.  The women of Standing Rock and Honor the Earth will never stop their campaigns against corporate poisoning of their lands.  As LaDonna Allard said, the movement is not just about a pipeline.  “To save the water, we must break the cycle of colonial trauma.”  And:  “We are fighting for our rights as the Indigenous peoples of this land; we are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Unci Mako, Mother Earth.”  Women fight to protect the Earth from the American corporate state and women fight to protect people from the violence of the American police state.

    The penalties can be dire for those who dare challenge police violence.  Lillian House and Eliza Lucero of the Denver area’s Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) helped lead a persistent protest against the police and paramedics’ killing of the unarmed and unresisting young man, Elijah McClain.  Lucero and House faced felony charges of incitement to riot and kidnapping (of police) which could have meant sentences of 48 years.  Thanks to public pressure and a new district attorney, all charges were dropped on September 13th.  Earlier in the month, three police officers and two paramedics were indicted for McClain’s murder.  PSL’s Lillian House stated that “the indictments are a major victory, but they’re not convictions yet.  This is just the beginning of the people here taking power.”  And this is what these women activists want:  a dismantling of the police state in favor of “the people” being in charge.

    This is the goal of the movement, bringing huge numbers of people into the streets after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s executions.  But these demonstrations, gradually called “riots” by the corporate media, have been hard-pressed to continue.  A report by the Movement for Black Lives found there has been a major crackdown on dissenters against police violence.  Charges against protesters were made into more serious federal crimes, with harsher penalties.  Surveillance, violence, and intimidation, in a coordinated vast federal enterprise, has been the usual response to potentially viable movements to change the corporate police state.  Because Rev. Joy Powell tried to curb police violence in Rochester, NY, she’s served 14 years inside, framed for crimes she didn’t commit.  But she is never cowed, despite solitary, COVID, and all the harassment they dish out.  She recently wrote me (and I get some of her letters, but she gets very few of mine) that she “made it to an interview” with Essence magazine, which did a great job of gaining her deserved attention.  The Police State is an entrenched corporate/capitalist/patriarchal institution, as is the American Empire.

    The Empire is not feminist.  It is dangerously extreme in its macho Patriarchy.  The military, particularly one which has for years fed on death and destruction against helpless civilians, many of them women and children, is not feminist in its aims.  Expecting an occupying army to initiate and protect women’s rights is insane.  The women of Afghanistan have been tortured and murdered by US forces for over 20 years.  Perhaps a few elite women were helped and protected under American occupation, but their numbers are few.

    Aafia Siddiqui, Muslim woman prisoner of the Empire is serving her 86 years in a Texas maximum security prison—or not, it’s not clear if she’s still alive.  Siddiqui was raped, mutilated and tortured in American black sites, including Bagram (US) Air Force Base, Afghanistan, and was grievously shot in Ghazni, Afghanistan by American soldiers who needed her to be seen as a “terrorist” and so staged what was supposed to be her attack on the soldiers.  This is women’s rights in Afghanistan.

    As the incredible Caitlin Johnstone has written:  “If the US empire hadn’t manufactured consent for the invasion by aggressive narrative management about Taliban oppression westerners would give 0 fucks about women in Afghanistan, just like they give 0 fucks about women in all the other oppressive patriarchal nations.”  Was it worse for women to have a Taliban government, or to endure a 20-year occupation which has brought untold death and destruction to Afghan women and their families?  Occupying and controlling Afghanistan is not a feminist undertaking.  And so-called American feminist leaders should know better than to support it.  But NOW leaders urge you to write your Congress people to protect Afghan women (from the Taliban).  The “advances in [Afghan] women’s rights of the last 20 years are in jeopardy.”  The Feminist Majority web page asks for money for the same purpose, telling us that in 2009 Obama showed concern for “Afghans’ security” and the Americans “have brought much progress for women there,” in the last 20 years.  With all Obama’s drone killings?  Are you people serious?  This is not feminism.

    “Feminists” are also proud to see female warmongers as part of President Joe Biden’s Team.  There is Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who helped engineer the Iran deal (not a great one for them) and spent her early days in office busily scolding China to ramp up our newest Cold War.  Or Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, who famously helped arrange the neo-Nazi takeover of Ukraine in a power play vs. Russia, with her also famous leaked diplomatic conversation where she said “fuck the EU” re involving American allies.  Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth has a strong police/Homeland Security background; and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks will oversee a “modernization of our nuclear triad.” Avril Haines, Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, from the CIA, directed the drones program for Obama, sometimes having to get up in the middle of the night to decide who should be killed by a drone next.  Of course, there was never “collateral damage,” as we’ve seen just recently in our Afghanistan drone hit which killed an entire family (they were not ISIS K).  Wonderful to have such feminist examples!  As commentator Richard Medhurst (half Syrian, half British) has said:  isn’t it great for Biden to have all these women involved?  Will they drop pink bombs—rainbow bombs?—on my country?

    The real feminists are the stalwart anti-war women who fight the very real threats of Empire.  The women to be truly admired are women like Elizabeth McAlister, Martha Hennesy (Dorothy Day’s granddaughter) and Clare Grady. In 2018 they entered Kings Bay, Georgia naval base to bear witness against the Empire’s potential for nuclear war.  They have all now served time, 10 to 12 months, for trying to, as McAlister said, “slow the mad rush to the devastation of our magnificent planet.”  They too would save Mother Earth.  They too, like the tortured and ruined Julian Assange, are truth-tellers against the Empire.  Dismissed, ignored, not believed, imprisoned.  These are what 1980s political prisoner Marilyn Buck called “noncompliant women”—women who the patriarchal authorities believe should be put back into subordinate, quiet and compliant status.  Such authorities believe women should wear bikinis and makeup as athletes, not question if a vaccine has deleterious side effects on them, and overlook a governor’s inappropriate behavior.  Let’s not be compliant.  Let the struggle continue.

    The post Patriarchy:  The Struggle Continues first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • COVID-19 Detention Camps: Are Government Round-Ups of Resistors in Our Future?

    No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.

    — Albert Speer, Nuremberg Trials

    It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

    This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

    It’s just a matter of time.

    It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

    The groundwork has already been laid.

    Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

    So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.

    After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

    For instance, the Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

    Military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan may also be characterized as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats by the government because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

    Indeed, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

    Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

    According to the FBI, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories or dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s.

    The government also has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

    This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

    It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

    It’s happened before.

    As history shows, the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes.

    One need only go back to the 1940s, when the federal government proclaimed that Japanese-Americans, labeled potential dissidents, could be put in concentration (a.k.a. internment) camps based only upon their ethnic origin, to see the lengths the federal government will go to in order to maintain “order” in the homeland.

    The U.S. Supreme Court validated the detention program in Korematsu v. US (1944), concluding that the government’s need to ensure the safety of the country trumped personal liberties.

    Although that Korematsu decision was never formally overturned, Chief Justice Roberts opined in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that “the forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.”

    Roberts’ statements provide little assurance of safety in light of the government’s tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. Pointing out that such blatantly illegal detentions could happen again—with the blessing of the courts—Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

    In fact, the creation of detention camps domestically has long been part of the government’s budget and operations, falling under the jurisdiction of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

    FEMA’s murky history dates back to the 1970s, when President Carter created it by way of an executive order merging many of the government’s disaster relief agencies into one large agency.

    During the 1980s, however, reports began to surface of secret military-type training exercises carried out by FEMA and the Department of Defense. Code named Rex-84, 34 federal agencies, including the CIA and the Secret Service, were trained on how to deal with domestic civil unrest.

    FEMA’s role in creating top-secret American internment camps is well-documented.

    But be careful who you share this information with: it turns out that voicing concerns about the existence of FEMA detention camps is among the growing list of opinions and activities which may make a federal agent or government official think you’re an extremist (a.k.a. terrorist), or sympathetic to terrorist activities, and thus qualify you for indefinite detention under the NDAA. Also included in that list of “dangerous” viewpoints are advocating states’ rights, believing the state to be unnecessary or undesirable, “conspiracy theorizing,” concern about alleged FEMA camps, opposition to war, organizing for “economic justice,” frustration with “mainstream ideologies,” opposition to abortion, opposition to globalization, and ammunition stockpiling.

    Now if you’re going to have internment camps on American soil, someone has to build them.

    Thus, in 2006, it was announced that Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, had been awarded a $385 million contract to build American detention facilities. Although the government and Halliburton were not forthcoming about where or when these domestic detention centers would be built, they rationalized the need for them in case of “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies such as “natural disasters.”

    Of course, these detention camps will have to be used for anyone viewed as a threat to the government, and that includes political dissidents.

    So it’s no coincidence that the U.S. government has, since the 1980s, acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation.

    As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. There are at least 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

    Fast forward to 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines right-wing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists.

    Incredibly, both reports use the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably.

    That same year, the DHS launched Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

    These reports indicate that for the government, so-called extremism is not a partisan matter. Anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is a target, which brings us back, full circle, to the question of whether the government will exercise the power it claims to possess to detain anyone perceived as a threat, i.e., anyone critical of the government.

    The short answer is: yes.

    The longer answer is more complicated.

    Despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it.

    However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, it provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like.

    Frankly, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism.

    Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.

    We seem to be coming full circle on many fronts.

    Consider that two decades ago we were debating whether non-citizens—for example, so-called enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay and Muslim-Americans rounded up in the wake of 9/11—were entitled to protections under the Constitution, specifically as they relate to indefinite detention. Americans weren’t overly concerned about the rights of non-citizens then, and now we’re the ones in the unenviable position of being targeted for indefinite detention by our own government.

    Similarly, most Americans weren’t unduly concerned when the U.S. Supreme Court gave Arizona police officers the green light to stop, search and question anyone—ostensibly those fitting a particular racial profile—they suspect might be an illegal immigrant. A decade later, the cops largely have carte blanche authority to stop any individual, citizen and non-citizen alike, they suspect might be doing something illegal (mind you, in this age of over-criminalization, that could be anything from feeding the birds to growing exotic orchids).

    Likewise, you still have a sizeable portion of the population today unconcerned about the government’s practice of spying on Americans, having been brainwashed into believing that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

    It will only be a matter of time before they learn the hard way that in a police state, it doesn’t matter who you are or how righteous you claim to be, because eventually, you will be lumped in with everyone else and everything you do will be “wrong” and suspect.

    Indeed, it’s happening already, with police relying on surveillance software such as ShadowDragon to watch people’s social media and other website activity, whether or not they suspected of a crime, and potentially use it against them when the need arises.

    It turns out that we are Soylent Green, being cannibalized by a government greedily looking to squeeze every last drop out of us.

    The 1973 film Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

    Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, Soylent Green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

    Oh, how right he was.

    Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us in prisons of our own making.

    Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, technology and militaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted, and go where we wanted without those thoughts, words and movements being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

    We’re not quite there yet, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that moment of reckoning is getting closer by the minute.

    The post COVID-19 Detention Camps: Are Government Round-Ups of Resistors in Our Future? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Alabama Coal Miners’ ongoing Six Month Strike against BlackRock’s Warrior Met

    Larry Spencer, UMWA District 20 Vice President, represents the 1,100 coal miners in three UMWA locals which are on strike against Warrior Met in Alabama since April 1, 2021. He will give an update on the strike in a September 28 webinar. The strikers are fighting to reverse concessions that were foisted on them in 2016 when BlackRock and other billionaire creditors set up Warrior Met Coal and took over mine operations with the aid of a bankruptcy court. To keep their jobs, Warrior Met made the miners work up to seven days a week and take a $6-an-hour pay cut, accept reduced health insurance, and give up most of their overtime pay and paid holidays.

    BlackRock is one of the three majority shareholders in the new company. Black Rock is the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels, and the world’s largest asset manager complicit in Amazon destruction.

    BlackRock’s net income was $1.55 billion in the second quarter of 2021, with a record $9.5 trillion in assets. Warrior Met makes up just a tiny fraction of its portfolio.

    ** Register for the September 28 webinar with UMWA strike leader Larry Spencer **

    UMWA President Cecil Roberts pointed out:

    The workers gave up more than $1.1 billion in wages, health care benefits, pensions, and more to allow Warrior Met to emerge from bankruptcy five years ago. The company has enjoyed revenue in excess of $3.4 billion in that time. But it does not want to recognize the sacrifices these workers made to allow it to exist in the first place. All those billions came up to New York to fatten the bank accounts of the already-rich.

    Invoking shared sacrifice, Warrior Met had promised lots of improvements once the company attained financial solvency. When contract negotiations began last spring, however, Warrior Met reneged on its promise, refusing to bargain in good faith.

    “They’re making us work seven days a week, up to 16 hours,” says Brian Kelly, president of United Mine Workers of America Local 2245, who’s worked in the mine for 25 years. “Now we’re forced to work every holiday except Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas.”

    Excessive overtime is a key issue in the strike. Miners have been forced into 12-hour shifts stretching into weekends—without the double pay on Saturday and triple pay on Sunday that they used to get.

    Health insurance went from $12 for seeing any doctor in the world to $1,500 family deductible and co-pays up to $250. Given work conditions in a coal mine, health care is vital. Miners face silicosis, black lung, diesel, smoke.” Black lung is caused by breathing in coal dust, which silts up the lungs, scarring and destroying them.

    Another main dispute is that management is demanding the power to fire strikers and to give strikebreakers and new hires seniority priority.

    Strikers blocked scabs from entering the mines—until the company obtained an injunction to stop them. Strikers have been arrested and run into by vehicles driven by company employees.

    On July 28, 1,000 miners and supporters rallied in New York City to protest outside the offices of BlackRock Fund Advisors. There, South Dakota Federation of Labor president Kooper Caraway told Wednesday’s demonstrators that “workers all over the world are going to stand with you and support you, and there’s nothing BlackRock or any other rich asshole can do about it.”

    Hamilton Nolan wrote an excellent report on one of their biggest rallies a week later, August 4:

    There were more than a dozen CWA members from Atlanta who worked for AT&T, decked out in red shirts. There was a gaggle of UAW members. There were Teamsters, and teachers, and government workers, all proudly in their union t‑shirts. There were union officials from Georgia and Kentucky and Tennessee and South Carolina. There were presidents of locals from other states, climbing the stage to present $500 checks to the strike fund. There was an entire tent full of longshoremen wearing custom-made white t‑shirts that said ​“Port workers in solidarity with mine workers.” They had come from Charleston, Jacksonville, and Mobile, Alabama, on a single bus that stopped in each city, collecting the comrades.

    I spoke to many of these attendees and, to a person, the question of why they had gone to all the trouble to show up was answered as if it didn’t require any explanation at all. ​“Solidarity,” they said. ​“They supported us, so we’re supporting them.” ​“This is what the union’s about.” To take a 30-hour round trip on a bus was, for them, a no-brainer. This is what the union’s about. For one day, this was just common sense. But in the context of the United States of America in 2021, this was a rare sight to behold.

    The crowd at the Brookwood rally was multiracial. Not multiracial like a fashion ad, or a painstakingly assembled corporate board, but a large group of Black and white people united for a common purpose. The UMWA miners who are on strike at Warrior Met now are an integrated group, and so their supporters in the community are integrated as well.

    It is possible, down South, to get a racially integrated crowd where everyone agrees politically, but to get thousands of Black and white people whose politics range from strongly pro-Trump to strongly pro-Black Lives Matter together in a single place, in total unity of purpose, with virtually no conflict, and without being the explicit result of trying to assemble such a crowd to satisfy some sort of demographic diversity goals — well, that just doesn’t happen that much, ever.

    This is the promise of unions. Not just better wages, or better working conditions, but a better society. Unions offer a frame for human interaction that does not otherwise exist. Our everyday experience in a society that is racially segregated, unequal, and politically polarized tells us that getting young and old and Black and white and left and right all together for something should be extraordinary or impossible; but at a union rally, where everyone’s common interest is plain to see, it becomes natural.

    Little mainstream news has covered the strike, although ABC News had favorable report.

    The UMWA declared:

    The people who manage the Wall Street hedge funds that own Warrior Met don’t know us, they don’t know our families, they don’t know our communities. And they don’t care. All they care about is sucking as much money as they can, every day that they can, from central Alabama.

    You may donate to support the strikers electronically or send a check to UMWA 2021 Strike Fund, P.O. Box 513, Dumfries, VA 22026. Messages of support can also be sent ten.htuosllebnull@02tcirtsidawmu.

    • Webinar co-sponsors: Alliance for Global Justice, Chicago ALBA Solidarity, Black Alliance for Peace, Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox, Black Workers for Justice.  Contact:  Stan Smith, moc.liamgnull@001htimsdleifsnats, 773-322-3168.

    The post Alabama Coal Miners’ ongoing Six Month Strike against BlackRock’s Warrior Met first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 6 Reasons to Feel Grateful During Covid

    A novel coronavirus, deadly and unnecessary lockdowns, civil unrest, political division, economic crises, a rise in mental health issues — the list goes on and on and on. Since March 2020, most of the world has suffered immensely in one way or another. But, amidst the madness, there is room for gratitude. More specifically, I’m suggesting we should be grateful for who and what has been exposed over the past 18 months or so.

    6 Reasons to Feel Grateful During Covid

    1. EXPOSED: Science and Medicine

    If you ever had a doubt that these two “institutions” were hotbeds of corruption and greed, the response to Covid-19 surely cleared things up for you. Everything — from social distancing to masks to vaccines to variants to other treatments being demonized and beyond — was a poorly constructed lie.

    2. EXPOSED: Corporations

    The biggest money grab in history, #woke opportunism, support for mandates, and so much more. All their rainbow flags and BLM banners can’t change who they are (and have always been).

    3. EXPOSED: Government

    It’s a well-worn script: A crisis unfolds and elected officials — across the ideological spectrum — exploit it to enhance their power. If you were unsure whether or not any politician could be trusted, you now have your answer.4. EXPOSED: The #woke Left

    The same clowns who once marched against Monsanto are now shilling for Moderna. Plus: Censorship, support for mandates, hypocrisy, thought control, groupthink… need I go on?

    5. EXPOSED: Media and Social Media

    All media outlets and social media platforms — regardless of their ostensible “narrative” — are nothing more than AI-assisted stenographers to power.

    6. EXPOSED: The General Population 

    Before Covid, did you ever wonder how your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, etc., would respond to a genuine (or manufactured) crisis? Well… take a good look around. Most of them, it seems, will follow orders and respect authority without question. They’ll willingly abdicate their autonomy, enthusiastically volunteer to be lab rats, and ruthlessly turn on anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep. They will embrace totalitarianism and surrender their freedoms in exchange for the illusion of safety. So, yeah… now you know.

    I’m thankful that so many people and institutions in my life have clarified who they are and how they behave under duress. To connect with like-minded and open-minded comrades, you are required to move on from those seeking to harm you or, at least, hold you back. You know exactly who they are because they’ve openly exposed that they do not have your best interests at heart.

    In order to move forward in a positive and powerful way, it’s essential to know where you stand in relation to others. If you wish to continue growing, learning, and evolving, you must be willing to see and accept what’s going on. Translation: You must reclaim the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself. #gratitude.

    The post 6 Reasons to Feel Grateful During Covid first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Beast of a Nation: Banality of Evil and Peppy Propagandists

    See the source image

     

    I like to get down to brass tacks, into the muck, since I have been in on all aspects of academia and journalism, environmental activism, literary arts, and social work. I’m not pulling some trump card here, but in my more than six decades of confronting these amazingly dead-from-the-head-up members of the 80 percent, and those of the 20 percent, I have seen the complete shut down of discourse, critical thinking and shame.

    They really do not care about their people. They really do not care about their patients. They really do not care about their troopers. They really do not care about their students. They really do not care about the homeless, the women in Afghanistan, the Blacks Lives, and all the other BIPOC folk. Crocodile tears and thespian performances do not equate to caring for people. This country, and the West in general, is one giant stage of actors and actresses.

    It doesn’t matter if it is Kamala Harris, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Macron-Johnson-Trudeau, no matter who is in the acting part, they do not care about the homeless, the disabused, the marginalized.

    It could be Howard Stern one moment giving nationwide bits of perverted advice, or it could be the head of the teachers’ union, Randi Weingarten, or it could be the head of the CDC, Microsoft, Apple, FDA, CIA, ICE, ATF, FBI, NAACP, ACLU, no matter, but they all have their limits toward basic freedoms and rights. One day a hero, but the next day scum.

    I am talking about the mandates, the hard rule of outcasting, caste creation, and new stitched-on scarlet letters (a la digital dashboards). What is going on while the divide and conquer chatter and discord unfolds on corporate media and in the boardrooms of major and minor companies, in schools, universities, state, county, city agencies, and with the feds, while we watch sports, await Broadway opening up, line up for cruise ships, and eat-drink-&-be-merry in La-La Land.

    The reality is clear — there are so many ways to disenfranchise the lot of us: Those who want to stop the mandated experimental jabs, the mandates for useless masks, the absurdity of social distancing and quarantines. Those of us who want robust discourse. Those of us who want to look at the evidence. Those of us who want to uncover the subterfuge. There are great pieces of journalism and deep and passionate opinion pieces on all of this — DARPA, WEF, Fauci, gain of function, Event 201, Dark Winter, and Fourth Industrial Revolution. More. However, when you get into the day to day weeds, with our jobs, our workplaces, with those administrators, things are not looking great.

    I had the sickly unhealthy luxury of getting in on a huge national web call/Zoom with a major Human Resources management service, talking about what the thousands of companies they represent can do to force employees to go under the knife, err, jab. These people — your bloody neighbors, the soccer moms, the camping dads, the aunts who take the kids to museums, the grandfathers who have backyard gardens — are none other than the complete embodiment of Eichmann. The Eichmann Syndrome.

    These are the $400,000 a year professional managerial class (sic) people running the HR departments, looking at the three major airlines (swooning over them) for the jab mandates — everything from weekly testing AND a $200 a month additional premium to health insurance, to allowing for a religious exemption for a vaccine (sic) but with unpaid forced leave. Whirlpool, man, bribing a $1000 for each employee now to go under the jab.

    These HR people are looking at distinguishing jabbed from unjabbed, and they are utilizing all those HR tools in their toolboxes, thankful of the monopolies and big corporations for blazing the trail to take away the right to a livelihood, to informed consent, to travel, to basic human interchanges. They are writing the rules now as I write this around those of us who “get Covid and have to leave work,” but they are sly Eichmanns, as they are nuancing of the new normal of FMLA (family and medical leave act) laws, paid time off for recovery or hospitalization around Covid. They want to make it impossible to live on planet earth without subjugating oneself to the jab . . . and I mean, JABS, since booster x has a human biophysical life of three months, so bring on the Covid 18-pack. The bottom line is, today, September 14 will be harkening in a very different world in a month.

    The lawyers are working long and hard to force the jab, to force employees to bend and falter, in order to kick out as many miscreants as possible. This is what your large HR groups are talking about as we debate Saudi Arabia, or 9/11, and as we look at the Continuous Wars, and as we look at cops down under pounding grannies’ heads for coming out to protest.

    Typical HR booklets: Case Study: Protecting & Defending Intellectual Property; 5 Measures to Battle Construction Site Theft; Cybertheft & Participant Accounts: A Fiduciary Responsibility?; 6 Best Practices for Fraud Prevention; From Seed to Sale On-Demand Webinar Series: COVID-19 and Cannabis Operations. You get the picture: all about protecting the company, the rich folk, the administrators, stockholders, et al.

    Yet the partisan pattern persists throughout, with Democratic majorities favoring vaccine passports in nearly every situation (from 53 percent for indoor drinking and dining to 77 percent for international travel) and at least a plurality of Republicans opposing them (from 48 percent for international travel to 65 percent for indoor drinking and dining). Stores are the only venue where more Democrats oppose vaccine passports (40 percent) than favor them (37 percent).

    Sensing a political minefield, the Biden administration has so far deflected the issue of vaccine passports, vowing only to provide guidance for nongovernment initiatives in the days ahead.

    “The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday. “There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.”

    Yet the Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests the White House could, in theory, play some role in the process. Asked whether “the U.S. government” — as opposed to U.S. businesses — should require “Americans to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination before participating in certain higher risk activities (travel, concerts, sports games, etc.),” more Americans say yes (46 percent) than no (37 percent).

    It’s as if people somehow thought the neoliberals, the democrats, the polite ones, the freaks of nanny statism, would somehow just stick to LGBTQA and transgender bathrooms issues (not). It is the tyranny of stupidity, and I have mentioned this in many pieces here and elsewhere, when you deny authority, when you question the paradigms, when you go up against administrators, college presidents, social services nonprofit CEO poverty pimps, well, the price is more than ostracizing and triangulating. It is the social isolation of the castes these people have set out, in their professional managerial class power.

    You don’t need to lecture someone like me on the dirty dirt of republicans, at the governor level, on down. They are despicable. Yes, I am with groups who are against mandates, forced medical experiments on people that contain right wing religious freaks, and cops and fire fighters. These — right wing religious zealots, cops/pigs and overpaid firefighters — they are contrary to almost everything I have fought for, and they have been the despicable ones, too.

    This is not a provocative image, pre-Covid:

    Vaccine Mandate

    But it is now. Imagine this image: But, of course, the dude on the right, well, he has zero concept of communism, but alas, these are strange times — leftists fighting the Draconian measures aligning with, well, cops and dudes like that — “the final variant is called communism.” Funny stuff, since the variants are all about capitalism, and the final conclusion to all this is about the point zero zero one percent riding roughshod over us, with the help of their elites and the Eichmanns. Those communist countries like Cuba and China have, well, non-mRNA true vaccines. But, little do they know, these AmeriKKKans.

    Vaccine Mandate Protestors

    This person below, well, both, are really part and parcel of the fascism that has been unleashed in USA in several iterations, and following US Patriot Act and the forced shoe donning at airports, we as a country are insipidly inane and accepting of all the wrong kinds of authority. Now, with the dementia democrats in office, the blue bloods, we are now forced to fall under their thumbs, and follow the science religion of a very suspect, dead-end route.

    Dr. Walensky addresses press conference

    HR So, this meeting I snuck into, with HR fantastics swooning over Walmart’s vaccine policies and the “joints for vaccination” schemes, they are the people I have been warning my students and homeless clients and veterans and others about in order to learn from and defeat. This Rochelle is a monster in so many ways, and Fauci is too. We can’t even get one day of a Lancet article by two former FDA heads without Saint Fauci chiming in —

    The current evidence on COVID-19 vaccines does not appear to support a need for booster shots in the general public right now, according to an international group of vaccine scientists, including some from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization.

    The current evidence on COVID-19 vaccines does not appear to support a need for booster shots in the general public right now, according to an international group of vaccine scientists, including some from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization.

    “Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high,” the scientists write in a new opinion piece, published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet.

    The authors of the paper include two senior FDA vaccine leaders, Dr. Philip Krause and Marion Gruber, who will be stepping down in October and November, the FDA announced late last month. No further details were released about their retirements, although they sparked questions about whether the departures would affect the agency’s work.

    United Airlines has mandated that all U.S. employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or face termination. Those granted exemptions will be put on unpaid leave.
    Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    Two senior leaders in the US Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine review office are stepping down, even as the agency works toward high-profile decisions around Covid-19 vaccine approvals, authorizations for younger children and booster shots.

    But Fauci is now attacking these two who wrote in the Lancet their concerns, and they are not anti-vaccination folk. Speaking of the Lancet:  —

    A shocking admission by the editor of the world’s most respected medical journal, The Lancet, is saying that medical research is UNRELIABLE AT BEST IF NOT COMPLETELY BOGUS! Lancet editor, Richard Horton “… states bluntly that major pharmaceutical companies falsify or manipulate tests on the health, safety and effectiveness of their various drugs by taking samples too small to be statistically meaningful or hiring test labs or scientists where the lab or scientist has blatant conflicts of interest such as pleasing the drug company to get further grants.”

     

    This statement ties in perfectly with the article we have had on our website and been recommending for almost five years now from the World’s Leading Expert on Medical Research, Dr. John Ioanidis from Greece. Dr. Ioannidis told the Atlantic Monthly in an article titled “Lies, Damn Lies, and Medical Science” that 90% of medical research is tainted if not outright bogus due to influence from the industry. (source)

    But the HR consultants who charge millions for their services (sic) to companies on what to do with employees, with all the vagaries of those darned dirty and messy real people, now under the Covid Stain of Fascism, they all got their jabs because they are compliant, and they make individually amazing amounts of money for their, well, services. These are the dream hoarders, the true believers in taking as many rights away from people vis-à-vis workplace rules, regulations, laws, steps, credos, trainings, and more, to the point of creating entire legions of, well, the untouchables, the unhireables, terminated for noncompliance. These are mean folk, Hillary and Obama and Biden loving folk:

    Obama, the dance man, 60th b-day party, during Covid Maskless Madness?

    Performers At Barak Obama's 60th Birthday Share Photos Before Being Told To Delete Them
    No mask for AOC, the capitalist entertainer, but all the servants? You betcha!
    Notice these freaks, while the press crew, well, has to mask up.

    This is it for the great masses, as the screws get screwed down tighter and harder each minute. The news is vapid, and the depth of coverage on almost anything is boiler plate or pre-ordained by the commercial media honchos. And this is the final nail in the coffin for teachers,

    To all of my American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union brothers and sisters across America I call upon you RIGHT NOW to immediately LEAVE THE AFT in protest as a moral obligation.

    Randi Weingarten HAS FIRED ALL UNVACCINATED STAFF IN ALL AFT FACILITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY.

    So that’s not teachers, that’s secretaries, accountants, lawyers, custodians, doormen, etc…

    I personally can and will NEVER return to the AFT as long as Randi is president and as long as this segregationist policy is in place.

    The issue of AFT membership is no longer about what AFT does and doesn’t do FOR US as educators, it is now much bigger than that. IF you continue to pay dues to the AFT you are financially supporting a blatantly discriminatory and corrupt multi-million dollar organization.

    Please stop supporting them right now. Vote with your money AND LEAVE THE AFT NOW! This is bigger than whether or not YOU still have a PCR testing option at your job or not. This is about choosing your side — do you stand with rank-&-file workers who choose to make their own medical decisions? OR do you stand with the biosecurity state?

    Giving even one DIME to the AFT is supporting the biosecurity state. End that support right now!

    Please spread this far and wide to all AFT members. We will post at our webaite very soon.

    All the best;

    www.TeachersForChoice.org

    Viewpoint: AFT's Refusal to Challenge Democratic Establishment Leaves Every Teacher Behind | Labor Notes
    Biden and Randi — Team USA.
    Now She Tells Us | Jay P. Greene's Blog

    I don’t know what else to say, since so much of what is behind the biosecurity state, the mandates, all of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is tied to high tech and surveillance capitalism, much of which comes from the bowels of military, Israel, the chosen few.

    In the final act of the 2011 film “Contagion,” people wore bar-coded wristbands to prove they had been inoculated against the deadly, pandemic virus. But in 2021, of course, the vaccinated will be able to use a blockchain-powered smartphone app, according to IBM and Salesforce.

    The two tech giants are partnering up to help businesses and public spaces smoothly reopen as newly authorized COVID-19 vaccines become more available by integrating IBM’s Digital Health Pass with Salesforce’s web-based employee management platform.

    “At the start of the pandemic, many organizations deployed simple COVID-19 screenings, such as self-reported health surveys, to support re-entry to workplaces and other institutions,” said Paul Roma, general manager of IBM Watson Health.

    And this is not about health safety, about a shot passport. This is about moving everything into those HR digital libraries, containing background checks, drug screenings, mortgage records, all addresses lived at, court records, education records, criminal records, defaults on loans, credit reports, and, no, not too far fetched, an entire digital library of things written-snapped-photographer-tweeted-downloaded on the World Wide Web. And yet, again, just one little hour listening to the HR wonks talk about all the great things companies can do to coerce, cajole, conspire, contain, and co-opt their employees into doing anything: first the jab, and next some cool nanoparticle atomized air product, to calm the masses, to get more productivity, to erase emotions, what have you.

    The post Beast of a Nation: Banality of Evil and Peppy Propagandists first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Welcome to the Covid Twilight Zone: Mickey Z. interviews Mickey Z.

    When sex offenders can move more freely around New York City than someone who has chosen natural immunity, it’s time to get some things off my chest. And who better to talk with than the person I trust the most? To follow… is a self-interview.

    *****

    Mickey Z.: How’s it going with the mandate?

    Mickey Z.: Coercion is not consent, my friend. And if my hometown is so concerned about our collective health, why don’t they mandate a safe, affordable home for everyone? How about meaningful jobs that pay a living wage? Mandate less crime and more libraries. 

    MZ: I get the idea.

    MZ: If they wanna control what goes into our bodies, why not insist that organic produce be made available at affordable prices and be consumed every single day?

    MZ: I see what you mean.

    MZ: Mandate that all lawns be turned into organic vegetable gardens. Did you know that lawn is the single most irrigated crop in God’s Country™? 

    MZ: You’ve made your point. 

    MZ: Mandate people not commenting on social media until they’ve done some fuckin’ research. The next person who repeats the “ivermectin is horse dewormer” nonsense trope is the one who needs to be isolated from society.

    MZ: Wait… you’re not gonna defend ivermectin, are you?

    MZ: I’m not defending anything except adding facts to the conversation. Equine ivermectin — as the name implies — is made for horses. The FDA approved another kind of ivermectin for humans. It’s meant to treat infections in the body that are caused by certain parasites and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. 

    MZ: What has that got to do with COVID-19?

    MZ: You might wanna pose that question to the National Institutes for Health (NIH). They endorsed several studies showing ivermectin can be effective for treating Covid. For example, the American Journal of Therapeutics published a study that found: “Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of #ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”

    If you’re interested in more reality, click here and here and here. Read those links closely and then congratulate yourself for knowing more about ivermectin than any corporate media outlet or reporter — from Fox to CNN.

    MZ: If ivermectin works, why is it being badmouthed by the mainstream?

    MZ: Possibly because, according to the FDA, the only way the Covid “vaccines” could qualify for emergency use authorization is if “certain statutory criteria have been met.” For example: “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.” If doctors prescribe ivermectin, the jabs aren’t needed and thus don’t rake in billions for Big Pharma (and set the stage for endless boosters). Follow the money.

    MZ: Is this why you’re calling this the“Covid Twilight Zone”?

    MZ: It’s one of many reasons. The biggest might be the charade of PCR tests.

    MZ: Please elaborate.

    MZ: The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test works by converting the virus’s RNA into DNA (coronaviruses don’t have DNA). The PCR process makes millions of copies of the manufactured DNA by running it through “cycles” in a process called amplification. The more cycles run, the more the DNA can be copied. If no copies can be made, theoretically, no virus is present. The test provides a yes-no answer rather than any indication of how much virus was found, how old the virus is, or whether or not the virus is even capable of infectivity. 

    The test is so flawed that in Tanzania, it returned positive results for a goat and a piece of fruit! 

    The post Welcome to the Covid Twilight Zone: Mickey Z. interviews Mickey Z. first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Boycott Vaccine Mandates and Covid Passports

    Just as many predicted over a year ago, the rollout of the vaccine for Covid-19 and its implementation has introduced intense polarization and social segregation through the implementation of mandatory vaccination for employees and vaccine passports. Medical authoritarianism and the burgeoning biosecurity state are here, expanding in real time. In New York City, San Francisco, France, and Italy, vaccine passports are mandatory for entrance to nearly any indoor public venue: restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, and more. Also, hundreds of corporations, colleges, federal and state agencies are mandating rushed emergency experimental injections with no long-term knowledge of side effects.

    Yes, we’re all well aware that the Pfizer vaccine just got full FDA approval. Did anyone think that it wouldn’t? Did anyone in the media bother to ask if the forces of power, money, and technocratic medical tyrants would back down and not give full approval, considering how these forces have managed to shape reality and scare to death half of the population over a disease with a very low mortality rate? Regardless of your opinion of how severe the disease is, mandates and passports are incontrovertibly coercive, tyrannical measures. If the vaccines do not stop transmission, which the medical authorities have already admitted to varying degrees, then what is the point of these mandates and passports?

    Furthermore, the vaccine passport will effectively be discriminatory since minorities are less likely to get the vaccines. African Americans especially have lower vaccination rates, for good reasons, the US medical establishment experimented on black populations throughout the Cold War and even beyond. It’s not difficult to see the ramifications of bio-digital segregations. One does not need a PhD or medical degree; in fact, these “credentials” seem to blinker one’s view in support of this new form of discrimination.

    In the view of what we might term the technocracy, or perhaps the emerging biosecurity establishment, it is virtuous to separate the “clean” vaxxed from the supposedly disease-carrying, uneducated, lower-classes who won’t take these experimental shots.

    All of the power and money, all the “Science ™” snowballed into an unstoppable corporate/government momentum which shows no signs of letting up. All that propaganda, the deliberate lies about mask efficiency (they don’t work) and vaccine holiness (they don’t prevent transmission) they’ve been shoving down the public’s throats for over a year and a half? Yeah, the nanny-state politico-medical tyrants are not going to give up this narrative without a fight. They are doubling down on the fear and quest for total obedience and control. It suits late-stage capitalism just fine if small and medium sized businesses go under and the excess labor supply of the unemployed are evicted and go hungry. They are extraneous to the monopoly cartels which run the “economy”, which is run by giant tech corporations, the stock market, the military-industrial complex, and the FIRE sector, multinational conglomerates who operate with almost no competition in nearly every industry.

    There is no way to fight back against these abuses of power through the court system. In my opinion, the most rational approach would be to boycott, in any way possible, the corporations and public institutions that are going along with vaccine mandates and passports. Part of this involves the vote with your dollars approach. Hurting the corporate lemmings and technocrat sociopaths in their wallets and lack of tax revenues are the only things they will understand.

    If you were thinking of traveling to Europe, skip France and Italy. Guess what?  If globally millions of tourists suddenly gave the middle finger to these two countries and vacationed elsewhere, the dent in lost revenue and GDP might actually have some effect on the political establishment. In France and Italy citizens are rightly fed up with protests every day against the passports, and many vaccinated people have burned their vaccine papers in solidarity.

    Similarly, if people in the US abstained from traveling to and spending money in NYC and SF, every restaurant owner, museum board, theater, and small business would then put immediate pressure on city, state, and federal politicians to ban vaccine passports, hopefully for good. If millions of people refuse to shop and do business with companies that have mandatory vaccination requirements for their employees, it would also put immense pressure to relent.

    Investors should also divest from corporations that insist on mandating vaccines for employees. It may, in fact, be legal for companies to do so, but it is frankly coercive and is a sort of crossing of the Rubicon, blurring one’s private life and medical choices with public duties, to create a new type of “good citizen”, a biopolitical subject serving capitalism with zero critical thinking skills.

    For those in the workforce facing mandates, such as federal/state public employees and health care workers, if possible it is definitely worth considering if another career/job can be found. If enough teachers, nurses, etc., quit or go on strike against their employee mandates, pressure can be applied and the mandates could potentially be lifted.

    It’s worth pointing out that the goalposts continue to be changed from slowing the pace of transmission to eradicating the virus- from two weeks to flatten the curve (tacitly acknowledging that coronaviruses cannot really be stopped) to mandates for wide swaths of public and private work, as well as military and police presence on the streets of Australia, to name one of the most obvious police state measures. The goalposts are changing to determine our “good citizen” status. Before, one simply had to go along to get along, obey the laws, pay taxes, and keep one’s head down; now, not only are we expected to do and say the right things, but to inject the right experimental drugs into our bodies.

    My humble prediction is the goalposts are going to continue to move. The game is akin to the frogs boiling slowly in the pot; by consenting to our own freedom being curtailed and our own imprisonment, the establishment gets what it wants without having to crack down using excessive force and coercion. The innate desire to have access to public spaces, to go on vacation, will lead many people ignorant of the wider implications to accept these new dystopian measures.  The horizon of getting “back to normal” will recede faster as new variants naturally emerge, as viruses tend to do, and this will continue to be used as a new scare tactic, even as death rates effectively returned to normal four months ago (May of 2021) in the US, and many other countries show no more excess deaths, or none outside normal yearly variations, as well in 2021.

    The virus is now endemic, but the powers that be are going to insist upon using it as a weapon for total control over the population. We’re through the looking-glass, we now have a form of “scientism” which is irrefutable no matter how unsettled the truth really is. Statistics such as death counts from Covid are unreliable, with doctors confessing to listing Covid-19 as the primary cause of death when it’s not- dying “from Covid” is conflated as dying “with Covid”. Deaths from the lockdowns are not seriously considered, even though many scientists are on record stating that the lockdowns led to a large chunk of the excess deaths.

    Frankly, the near future looks pretty bleak for the US and the chances to have an open, honest dialogue about the seriousness of the pandemic, the capitalist world-system which stands to gain by using a 21st century tech-driven shock doctrine, and the police-state that will be built on the back of the panic caused by incessant propaganda. The fault lines are deepening and Democrats yammer to “trust the science” without any understanding themselves, and are willing to demonize anyone who doesn’t get an experimental jab or wear two masks while alone in their car; while Republicans continue to frame the “reopen the economy” debate in terms of those supposedly wonderful job-creating corporations, all the while being willing to sell the average worker out for an extra buck or two. Both parties are more than willing to screw over the poor, minorities, and working classes; if either cared about their citizens’ lives they wouldn’t throw people out into the streets via the mass evictions that are already underway.

    As imperial decline and rot deepen, and the domestic surveillance apparatus pulls its noose tighter against our necks, our best bet to resist these freedom-crushing decrees is to deploy citizen power, mass protests, and coordinated direct action against inhumane vaccine mandates and police-state vaccine passports.

    The post Boycott Vaccine Mandates and Covid Passports first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • To Counter Terror, Abolish War

    On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.

    Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center,  U.S. Mission to the UN officials called us and asked that we visit with them.

    I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.

    The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the U.S. now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes, and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.

    I visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend whom I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account, shortly before I arrived, about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.

    My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.

    In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”

    For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.

    When the U.S. was winding down its troop surge in 2014, but not its occupation,  military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant, a step which could prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment, would be 5 cents per child per year.

    Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?

    One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.

    The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.

    In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.

    It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.

    Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.

    In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and  three million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?

    On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.

    We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the U.S. helped create.

    Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.

    My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.

    Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage which says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”

    Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need U.S. people to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today.

    Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree:  To counter terror, abolish war.

    • This article first appeared at Waging Nonviolence

    The post To Counter Terror, Abolish War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Are They Disguising mRNA-Experimental Gene-Altering Poison Jabs as Flu-Shots?

    The house of cards is crumbling. It’s a known fact that the so-called SARS-CoV-2 “virus” has never been isolated and identified which logically leads to the conclusion that the entre covid-story – what has been keeping the world in a trauma for the last 18 months – is a huge fraud of biblical proportion, not comparable to anything that has happened – or rather, was done – to humanity in recent history.

    Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York, Carla Stela, reports on 31 August 2021, that the latest official figures (August 30, 2021) point to 38,488 mRNA vaccine reported and registered deaths in the EU, UK and US (combined) and 6.3 million reported “adverse events”.

    Although these are the official figures, they are vastly under-reported. They only represent the figures reported by the official Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in the US, created in 1990, and to those officially reported by the European Medicine Agency (EMA).  According to CDC’s own account, these agencies report under normal circumstances only between 1% and 10% of all cases. And most likely in the covid cases, where reporting is made difficult, even less. In other words, less than 10% of deaths and injuries are reported. For vaccine adverse events approximately one percent of the injuries are registered and reported.

    That would bring the effective death rate, conservatively assessed, close to about 1 million, for a total population of some 830 million (US: 330 m; EU: 500 m), where only about half is fully “vaccinated”. And this, from what they call begin of “vaccination”, on 14 December 2020, during about 8 months only.

    This does not account for probably several million serious adverse effects, some of them serious and most of them incurable.

    The fact that the authorities continue to push for vaccination – instead of stopping all jabs immediately – is indicative that that there is another, an evil plan, in play. Carla Stela puts it straight as it is:

     Most unconscionable is the fact that the United Nations Secretary-General is mandating this untested and often lethal vaccination for United Nations staff, in violation of every human rights declaration produced by the United Nations in its entire history.

    The key to their plan is getting as much people as possible jabbed with this deadly mRNA- experimental gene-manipulation injection. But people are become increasingly hesitant. There is increasing push back. More and more people depart from the mainstream media accounts, from the commanded lie-narrative, and seek their information from alternative media. Which is why extensive, but I mean extensive – censuring goes on. They call it “fact-checking”.

    There is so much fact-checking – call it “fake-checking” – going on, looking at internet has become ridiculous, almost a joke. They – those dark cult elitists in command and those super-billionaires, who control the major social media which do the cult’s dirty job – must be getting to a very low level of credibility among the common people. When censoring is becoming a must tool for survival, the downfall is usually pretty close. Examples abound. The Nazi Third Reich is a case in point.

    But vaxxing – as fast as possible as many as possible – remains a key element of the agenda 2030.  Why? Because, those who are vaccinated can’t escape anymore. They are doomed in one way or another. Either they die immediately from the effects of the inoculations — just see the figures above — or many may die within 1 to 3 years after receiving the shot.

    See here,  here, and here.

    The survivors are loaded with electromagnetic particles – all part of the mRNA-shot – so they can be remote manipulated by robots or Artificial Intelligence (AI) via the 5G and soon 6G, to transit from humans to “transhumans” – Klaus Schwab interview (2-min) on Swiss-French TV in 2016 – see here. At the time of this writing the video was still available. No surprise, however, if it will be “fact-checked” out. See also Dr. Astrid Stueckelberger:  You are Being Chipped

    Also, remember the Bill Gates introduced Agenda ID2020.

    Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, renown German-Thai virologist, warns that COVID-19 vaccination is the  greatest threat humanity ever faced.

    Above figures represent more vaccine deaths than those occurred in the entire history of vaccination – in only just over six months, when covid “vaccination” began on 14 December 2020. And the heartbreaking and criminal truth is that none of these deaths were necessary – because nobody or only very few people died from covid, the same amount or less, than die every year from the common flu. See Dr. Fauci’s peer-reviewed article, “Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted”.

    The evil cult has set a target of about 70% to 80% of world population being vaccinated by 2023, in order to reach their key targets – which include:

    (i) Drastic reduction of the world population, either directly through “vaxx” caused deaths, or from the mRNA-inoculations occurring sterilizations and infertility;

    (ii) Massive Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robot-driven transformation from humans to “transhumans”, through electromagnetic brain manipulation (this is – no kidding – the plan of the “Great Reset” – plus fully digitized money transactions, making the surviving “transhumans” slaves of the global banking system, to the point where, at completion of the Great Reset, you will arrive at “Owning nothing and being happy” (Klaus Schwab, “The Great Reset”); and finally,

    (iii) a colossal shift of worldwide assets and capital from the bottom and the center to the top.

    This is already happening as the world’s ten richest billionaires increased their combined wealth during the plandemic by US$540 billion, while more than half a billion people were plunged into abject poverty – Oxfam report.  This is the result of huge numbers of bankruptcies throughout the world, but affecting more the Global South than the rich West (Global North), since the latter produced – at least for now – debt-financed subsidies to some of the enterprises and to a lesser extent to debt-strapped people.

    Back to the enormous publicity-lie-induced, coerced and outright blackmailed vaxx-drive, people interested in risking their lives by accepting a potentially deadly mRNA-shot are getting fewer and fewer. And this even with a system that pays people to get to jab. In Texas the current going rate is US$ 250; in other US states the rates may be different, but on average already above US$ 100 – and rising. In Europe the incentives, or bribes rather, vary also from a cheap €50 to up to €250 per shot. Yet, many realize that life is worth more than that, and they will not succumb to the money trap.

    Now it looks like the latest gimmick is offering free flu-shots – and that already in August, in the heat of summer, when the official flu season starts in October/November. This is the case in the US, as well as in Europe. It is probably not far-fetched to assume that the so-called “flu-shots” are in reality mRNA-type covid shots.

    This would be the ultimate lie – doesn’t even cost a premium. That shows the kind of respect the dark killer elite cult holds for the population – “reduce” them with one lie or another. Are people really as naïve and lie-indoctrinated that they do not see behind the treason?

    Meanwhile, CDC is sued for massive fraud. Seven US top universities, including Stanford, Cornell, and a couple of the labs at the University of California, tested 1500 samples of people, who had “positive” Covid-19 tests. In none of the university lab tests was a single SARS-CoV-2 virus discovered. ALL people were simply found to have Influenza A, and to a lesser extent Influenza B. This is consistent with previous findings of other scientists.

    Dr. Derek Knauss, one of the testing team, said:

    When my lab team and I subjected the 1500 supposedly positive Covid-19 samples to Koch’s postulates and put them under an SEM (electron microscope), we found NO Covid in all 1500 samples. We found that all 1500 samples were primarily Influenza A, and some Influenza B, but no cases of Covid. We did not use the bulls*** PCR test.

    This latest gimmick to get people conned into getting a flu-shot in the midst of summer, reeks like mRNA-covid poison jab in disguise of flu-shots. The 193 UN member governments – all enslaved to the evil spell of a deadly cult – need as many people jabbed as possible. Because once they are jabbed, they are doomed, – doomed to die within 2-3 years max, according to Dr. Mike Yeadon, former Pfizer VP – and many others.

    And what will happen to these governments, which willingly and knowingly are prepared to actively obliterate their countries’ constitutions, as well as killing their people?

    A Nuremberg 2.0 Trial is in order. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, German-American top-lawyer, with his Team for Covid Ethics (over a thousand scientists and medical doctors), are working on it, having already filed class lawsuits in Canada and the US and are suing health institutions and individuals in Europe.

    We shall overcome!

    Giving-in is not an option.

    The post Are They Disguising mRNA-Experimental Gene-Altering Poison Jabs as Flu-Shots? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Complacency Rules: Consumerism and the Environment

    The 16 Year Old, middle class, privileged, argues that meat and other animal produce are essential for his health, his ability to play sport, and the development of his adolescent brain; besides, one person becoming vegetarian/vegan, won’t make any difference to the environmental crisis.

    The total failure to respond in any meaningful way to the environmental emergency rests firmly within the boundaries of such complacency. It can be found in all areas, from politicians and corporate board rooms to small businesses, NGO’s and community groups, education institutions, homes, and, apparently, some teenagers.

    Complacency and the refusal to change individual behavior and collective ways of living are stoking the underlying cause of the crisis – Consumerism. Irresponsible Compulsive Consumption, as habitually practiced by populations in the rich nations, principally and excessively by the wealthy, but to a lesser degree throughout all sections of society.

    Consumerism is the bedrock of the prevailing socio-economic system and materialistic way of life. Sold duplicitously as the Path to Happiness and Contentment it has poisoned the planet and created unhealthy societies of divided, insecure individuals. Inherent within the Ideology of Division is a methodology and set of values that encourage selfishness, greed and complacency. Sufficiency, cooperation and social responsibility, all essential if the environmental crisis is to be met, whilst routinely spouted by politicians and the like are thin on the ground or, more often than not, totally absent.

    The environment cannot wait

    Governments and businesses are completely invested in maintaining high levels of consumption; their profitability and continued existence depend on it. Indeed, far from prioritizing the environment and working to change societal behavior and deter individuals from spending, huge resources are expended to persuade and encourage consumption; to expand market share, develop new products and increase profits for shareholders.

    It is this poisonous Ideology of Profit, which, in direct contrast to the needs of the environment for simplicity of living, collectivity and sharing, perpetuates, not just rampant consumerism, but widespread apathy and inaction. Governments talk a concerned environmental talk, but policies are determined by economic growth and voters’ concerns rather than CO2 emissions, pollution, or bio-diversity. And most companies, particularly big ones, routinely demonstrate that they don’t give a damn about the environment, unless by doing so sales increase and their annual dividends rise.

    The environment cannot wait until governments and business judge that going “green” is more profitable or popular than the destructive status quo, before they act in a responsible manner. It is their insatiable thirst for power and profit, and their deep attachment to the Ideology of Greed – because, while the majority suffer, it has served them very well, that allows collective complacency to persist, and complacency (not money) is the root of all evil.

    The final leg in the trinity of environmental neglect is formed by Ignorance or Misinformation. Ignorance of how individual choices impact on the natural environment; Ignorance of the depth and scale of the crisis and Ignorance of the impact of diet on the planet. Such ignorance and lack of awareness exist due to decades of government negligence in countries everywhere (some more, some less). This could be changed with a UN coordinated public awareness campaign; a global project designed to make plain the relationship between consumer-based lifestyles (including animal agriculture) and environmental destruction/climate change.

    Unmitigated mess

    While it is true that only governments and business can make the needed large scale changes (fossil fuels to renewables, electrification of transportation networks,  green production methods etc), individuals can make a valuable impact, and when individuals act collectively large-scale change can be accomplished.

    Ultimately ‘we’ are the problem. It is our obsessive ignorant behavior, our complacency, greed and selfishness that has poisoned the planet. And it is up to all of us to act in the most comprehensive way possible to begin to clean up the unmitigated mess we have caused. We are all only ‘one person’, but every day we have a choice, every time we eat, or shop, or travel: Are our actions, our choices and decisions responsible or harmful, is the way we individually live detrimental to the planet or not?

    Diet is one area everyone can look at; reducing the intake of animal produce or, better still, moving to a plant-based diet is the single most important step most individuals can take. In some countries there are encouraging signs that people are waking up to this fact, and the number of vegetarians/vegans, particularly among young people, is growing. And according to the Vegetarian Resource Group (US), providing a varied diet is followed, all their nutritional needs can be adequately met. In fact, various detailed studies show that, vegetarians are at lower risk of a variety of diseases and conditions, including: heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, some forms of cancer, (conversely, The World Health Organization has classified red and processed meats as cancer-causing), and obesity. And according to Walter Willett at Harvard School of Public Health, “There is strong evidence that a plant based diet [vegan] is the optimal diet for living a long and healthy life.”

    So, cutting out animal produce is not only good for the environment, it’s good for human health. Despite this, globally only some 8% of people identify as vegan, vegetarian, or something in between. Meaning 92% of the 7.8 billion world population consume meat, fish, poultry and all manner of dairy. The environmental result of this obsession is disastrous and multi-faceted.

    Animal agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), which are the poisons disrupting natural climate rhythms. The  United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s (UNFAO) put the figure at 14.5% of total emissions, but estimates vary, some studies suggesting it’s a good deal higher: Greenpeace e.g. say that, “Livestock and animal feed is responsible for approximately 60% of direct global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”

    Whatever the precise number, animal agriculture is clearly a major source, if not the greatest source of emissions (surpassing the transportation industry); it’s also the biggest cause (80%) of deforestation, habitat destruction and species extinction, contributing to soil erosion and water contamination. And it’s driven by the incessant demand for meat, dairy and fish.

    A revolution in behavior and values is needed, moving away from excess to sufficiency, from selfishness to group responsibility, from complacency to action. Education and awareness plus a sense of imperative are the keys to igniting such a shift and generating urgent action. Action by government and businesses and action by us, all of us, particularly those of us living in developed nations where the historic burden for the catastrophe rests; action rooted in love, demonstrated as social and environmental responsibility undertaken by each and every one of us.

    The post Complacency Rules: Consumerism and the Environment first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Graham Peebles.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Remember the HPV vaccine scandal of 2018? (Of course, you don’t)

    Let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario. What if there was a time when the general population was being relentlessly coerced into taking a particular drug? How would you know what to do? Where would you turn for the necessary context? Surely you wouldn’t just take the shot without doing your homework… right? That would be irrational. And you wouldn’t ostracize others for being hesitant… right? That would be even more irrational. Logically, you’d look up a relatively recent, similar scenario to see what you can learn from it… right? Well, in case you wind up in such an ugly situation, I’m happy to share such relevant context in advance:

    The human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection. There are over 200 types of HPV and virtually everyone who has had sex will get it. HPV has no cure but it self-clears at least 98 percent of the time. In rare instances, it can cause cancer — particularly cervical cancer. However, such an outcome can be prevented through regular pap smears. Even with this proven method of prevention, a vaccine was developed anyway. Since cancers usually take years to develop, the vaccine’s effectiveness is unclear at best. As for safety, take a look at the photo up top… and I think this would be a good time to introduce Josh Mazer of Maryland.

    Josh is not a radical and certainly not an “anti-vaxxer.” He wrote in a 2018 Capital Gazette article: “A properly administered, robust vaccine policy is instrumental in promoting the public welfare. I am concerned about the marketing strategies being used statewide to aggressively promote Merck’s HPV vaccine. In January, a career public school nurse approached me to discuss her role in promoting the vaccine. She said that was being ‘forced’ to market it to 11- and 12-year-old kids at her school. She produced a set of letters outlining the policy, one on Maryland Department of Health (DOH), the other on Montgomery County Schools, letterhead.”

    Slide from HPV Symposium Ten Oaks, Maryland: March 2018

    Mazer went to work and learned that every school superintendent in Maryland received the DOH letter. It included phrases like:

    • “There is a critical public health issue of under-vaccination Maryland’s adolescents against Human Papillomavirus (HPV)” 
    • “14 million people get infected each year posing a significant public health risk” 
    • “It is imperative for age-eligible children to complete the HPV vaccination series while obtaining school-entry required vaccinations”
    • “There are 13,248 females and 13,796 males in Montgomery County that are of eligible age, 11 to 12 years old”

    Mazer was told that “the letters are supported by data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)” but the CDC denied any knowledge of the letters. Mazer filed a Public Information Act request with the Prevention and Health Promotion Administration and here is some of what he learned:

    • Maryland’s rates of cervical cancer were in decline for years prior to the introduction of the vaccine
    • The vaccine itself has never been proven to prevent cancer
    • The vaccine — if it worked — would only protect against only 9 (out of 200+) strains of HPV
    • Cervical cancer incidence in Maryland is up 8 percent since the vaccine policy was enacted
    • 44 percent of girls who get the shot are more likely to develop cervical lesions than those who do not

    Finally, Mazer learned that the state health department received $91.6 million just since 2012 from pharmaceutical-funded non-profits to promote the HPV vaccine in Maryland. Take a second and go back to read that last sentence one more time: The state health department received $91.6 million just since 2012 from pharmaceutical-funded non-profits to promote the HPV vaccine in Maryland.

    Big Pharma bribed Maryland officials to use an “anti-cancer” vaccine that INCREASES the chances of young girls getting cancer. Using “non-profits” to do the funding allowed for tax breaks and a semblance of distance. Related: A couple of the images I placed in this article are slides from a 2018 Maryland HPV Symposium. They show how physicians are financially rewarded for pushing the HPV “vaccine” on children. 

    Slide from HPV Symposium Ten Oaks, Maryland: March 2018

    Here is Mazer speaking at a Maryland school board meeting in late 2019 (3 minutes):

    So, just a heads up: If you — by some unexpected fluke — find yourself being coerced into taking a vaccine, you might wanna ask a few questions before lining up for the jab. It seems major pharmaceutical corporations along with licensed physicians are capable of lying to you — even if it can damage your health. Who knew? Again, just keep it in mind. You’ll probably never have an injection imposed upon you in a Free Country™ you but hey, ya never know. 

    The post Remember the HPV vaccine scandal of 2018? (Of course, you don’t) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Message to the EU: Address the Real Public Health Crisis by Banning Glyphosate (Part One)

    The herbicide glyphosate – the most widely used herbicide on the planet – is authorised for use in the EU until December 2022. The EU is currently assessing whether its licence should be renewed.

    Environmentalist and campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter to the head of the Pesticides Unit at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), Jose Tarazona.

    Mason wrote to Tarazona  because the Rapporteur Member States (France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden) tasked with risk assessing glyphosate and appointed by the European Commission in 2019, said on 21 June 2021 that there was no problem with glyphosate-based herbicides.

    A tireless campaigner against glyphosate, Mason has produced dozens of lengthy reports over the last decade documenting how her former nature reserve in South Wales was destroyed by glyphosate used on adjoining areas and how that substance is a major contributory factor in spiralling rates of disease – a ‘silent’ public health crisis; silent only because the media and officials fail to acknowledge or report on it.

    Indeed, to explain away the huge increases in various cancers and neurological disorders, officials cite ‘lifestyle behaviour’, poor diets or lack of exercise to divert attention from the elephant in the room and government collusion with the agrochemical sector.

    Drawing on hundreds of peer reviewed papers and official reports over the years, Mason has described in detail the devastating health and environmental impacts of glyphosate as well as the malfeasance and corruption that has led to this state of affairs.

    Mason informs Tarazona that the European Commission has colluded with the US Environmental Protection Agency to allow Bayer to keep glyphosate on the market.

    To support her claims, she enclosed a 5,900-word report with her letter informing Tarazona of the environmental devastation and severe public health crisis. Her report brings together recent research and analyses into the toxicity of glyphosate and industry dominance over regulatory processes.

    What appears below is the first part of a two-part article based on Mason’s report. This first part briefly highlights aspects of the public health crisis resulting from the use of glyphosate-based herbicides. The second part will argue that glyphosate remains in use due to industry influence over regulatory processes.

    Toxic Legacy

    Dr Stephanie Seneff, a US scientist who works at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has just published the book Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate is Destroying Our Health and the Environment.  She has written an article on her family background and why she wrote the book.

    Seneff says:

    This organic chemical compound, C3H8NO5P, is much more toxic to life forms than we have been led to believe. Glyphosate’s mechanism of toxicity is unique and diabolical. It is a slow killer, slowly robbing you of your good health over time, until you finally succumb to incapacitating or life-threatening disease.

    Dr Don Huber, emeritus professor of plant pathophysiology at Purdue University, who has been studying glyphosate for 40 years and genetically modified (GM) Roundup-ready crops for 25 years, said some years ago:

    Future historians may well look back upon our time and write, not about how many pounds of pesticide we did or didn’t apply, but how willing we are to sacrifice our children and future generations for this massive genetic engineering experiment that is based on flawed science and failed promises just to benefit the bottom line of commercial enterprise.

    When UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was elected in 2019, he stood outside Downing Street and committed himself to:

    … liberate the UK’s extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules.

    Mason notes that the Department for Envionment & Rural Affairs authorises farmers to use all forms of Roundup (Monsanto’s – now Bayer – proprietary glyphosate-based herbicide) on crops in the UK. Many farmers in the UK claim they cannot do without it and are keen to start using GM Roundup-ready crops post-Brexit.

    There is strong pressure on the European Commission from the Glyphosate Renewal Group, a group of manufacturers of glyphosate, who have asked for the licence for glyphosate to be renewed for 15 years from December 2022.

    In June 2021, the Rapporteur Member States from France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden apparently gave the green light. They see no signs that glyphosate can cause cancer or any other issue. But evidence is emerging that they used flawed industry science (to be described in part two of this article).

    Devastating health impacts

    In August 2018, samples of four oat-based UK cereals were sent to the Health Research Institute Laboratories in the US following a newspaper report about US children eating weedkiller in their oat-based cereals.

    Dr John Fagan, the director of the lab, said:

    These results are consistently concerning. The levels consumed in a single daily helping of any one of these cereals, even the one with the lowest level of contamination, is sufficient to put the person’s glyphosate levels above the levels that cause fatty liver disease in rats (and likely in people).

    Washington State University (WSU) researchers have found a variety of diseases and other health problems in the second- and third-generation offspring of rats exposed to glyphosate. In the first study of its kind, the researchers saw descendants of exposed rats developing prostate, kidney and ovarian diseases, obesity and birth abnormalities.

    Michael Skinner, a WSU professor of biological sciences, and his colleagues exposed pregnant rats to the herbicide between their eighth and 14th days of gestation. The dose – half the amount expected to show no adverse effect – produced no apparent ill effects on either the parents or the first generation of offspring.

    But, writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers say they saw “dramatic increases” in several pathologies affecting the second and third generations. The second generation had ‘significant increases’ in testis, ovary and mammary gland diseases as well as obesity. In third-generation males, the researchers saw a 30% increase in prostate disease – three times that of a control population. The third generation of females had a 40% increase in kidney disease or four times that of the controls.

    More than one-third of the second-generation mothers had unsuccessful pregnancies, with most of those affected dying. Two out of five males and females in the third generation were obese.

    Skinner and his colleagues call this phenomenon generational toxicology and they have seen it over the years in fungicides, pesticides, jet fuel, the plastics compound bisphenol A, the insect repellent DEET and the herbicide atrazine. At work are epigenetic changes that turn genes on and off, often because of environmental influences.

    Roundup kills bumble bees

    Although Mason mainly discusses the health impacts of glyphosate in her report to Tarazona, she did mention at least one disturbing environmental impact. In April 2021, the Journal of Applied Ecology published an article ‘Roundup causes high levels of mortality following contact exposure in bumble bees.’

    The article’s abstract stated that pollinators underpin global food production but are suffering significant declines across the world.

    It went on to say:

    Pesticides are thought to be important drivers of these declines. Herbicides are the most widely applied type of pesticides and are broadly considered ‘bee safe’ by regulatory bodies who explicitly allow their application directly onto foraging bees. We aimed to test the mortality effects of spraying the world’s most popular herbicide brand (Roundup) directly onto bumble bees (Bombus terrestris audax).

    The authors argue that Roundup products pose a significant hazard to bees, in both agricultural and urban systems and exposure of bees to them should be limited. They added that surfactants, or other co‐formulants, in herbicides and other pesticides may contribute to global bee declines.

    They called for pesticide companies to release the full list of ingredients for each pesticide formulation, as lack of access to this information hampers research to determine safe exposure levels for beneficial insects in agro‐ecosystems.

    Bayer’s multi-million-dollar headache

    Mason asks Tarazona whether he has been following the trials against Monsanto in the US for concealing that its herbicide Roundup caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

    She explains to him that three cases have been won against Monsanto/Bayer (Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018) and in 2021 there are thousands more awaiting to have their cases heard in court.

    Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr said in 2018 that Bayer needs more than an aspirin to cure its Monsanto-sized headache.

    Kennedy has been involved with some of these cases and has read enough of the scientific literature on glyphosate to conclude that there is cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of other injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney and inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.

    He added that strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.

    As if that is not worrying enough, Kennedy noted that researchers peg glyphosate as a potent endocrine disruptor, which interferes with sexual development in children. It is also a chelator that removes important minerals from the body and disrupts the microbiome, destroying beneficial bacteria in the human gut and triggering brain inflammation and other ill effects.

    Although a Monsanto scientist claimed that glyphosate is excreted unchanged from the body, Mason cites a study by Ridley & Mirly (1988) which found bioaccumulation of glyphosate in bone, marrow, blood and glands (including thyroid, testes and ovaries) and major organs (heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, spleen and stomach). The paper was commissioned by Monsanto but was not published.

    In a 1990 study conducted by Monsanto between 1987 and 1989 (again unpublished), glyphosate was found to induce a statistically-significant cataractous formation in the eyes of rats. Over the course of the study, cataract lens changes were seen in the low-, mid- and high dose groups in both male and female rats. The pathologist concluded that there was a glyphosate-treated related response for lens changes to the eyes.

    Mason notes that the Assessment by the Rapporteur Member States tasked with risk assessing glyphosate have concluded that, based on the available ecotoxicological information glyphosate the current classification “Toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects” should be retained and the current classification as “causes serious eye damage” (H318) should be retained.”

    She therefore asks: how can a chemical like glyphosate still be on the market?

    Mason states that, according to the UN’s Global Chemicals Outlook II, glyphosate was at the top of the top ten products used on major crops in the United States, by volume, in 2016. Clothianidin (also manufactured by Bayer) is number ten.

    She says:

    No wonder Bayer doesn’t want to lose its licence for glyphosate or for clothianidin, a long-acting neonicotinoid insecticide that is very persistent in the soil. Both chemicals are on the market illegally thanks to the corrupt EU and US regulatory authorities.

    And that is an issue which Mason draws Tarazona’s attention to and will be touched on in the second part of this article.

    •  Readers can access Rosemary Mason’s new report, with all relevant references, here.

    •  Recommended reading for Jose Tarazona and readers who want to dig deeper into the issues: all of Rosemary Mason’s previous reports can be accessed here.

    The post A Message to the EU: Address the Real Public Health Crisis by Banning Glyphosate (Part One) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed

    Both chronic stress and manipulative abuse can lead to an impairment of cognitive functioning. Whenever humans experience ongoing anxiety, their prefrontal cortex will generate increasingly higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps us deal with threats and danger. If stress — real or perceived — becomes chronic, we can get stuck in this state of high alert. The brain cannot differentiate between real and fake news. It initiates and sustains the body’s stress response for as long as you feel anxious, tense, worried, or scared.

    • The projected overall 2021 poverty rate is 13.7 percent of Americans. 
    • 78 percent of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.
    • Roughly 30 million Americans are without health insurance. 
    • Americans collectively hold about $81 billion in medical debt.
    • Approximately 325,000 Americans (age 12 or older) are sexually assaulted each year — about 1 every 93 seconds. As for those under 12, 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of reported child sexual abuse. Keyword: reported.
    • The top three causes of death in the U.S. would be mostly preventable in a society that included economic stability, access to quality health care, protection of the environment, an emphasis on healthy eating habits, and even a modicum of humanity. Instead, each year, heart disease kills about 650,000, cancer kills 600,000, and the third leading cause of death is (wait for it) medical error — taking out at least 250,000 Americans per year. The powers-that-be test their corporate medicines and procedures on us while granting themselves immunity from liability.

    According to the American Psychological Association:

    • 63 percent of Americans reported that the future of the nation is a significant source of stress 
    • 62 percent were stressed about money
    • 61 percent were stressed about work
    • 51 percent were stressed about violence and crime
    • 43 percent were stressed about health care

    Fifty-six percent said that the mere act of staying informed by following the news causes them intense stress. Three out of four Americans reported experiencing at least one stress symptom in the last month — and this survey was taken BEFORE the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns.

    Prices go up. Rents go up. The number of billionaires goes up. Everything goes up… except wages and quality of life. I could go on but you get the idea. Everyday life in the Home of the Brave™ — by definition — keeps the vast majority of its residents in a state of deep distress and high anxiety.

    High anxiety = high cortisol. High cortisol negatively impacts our executive functioning, e.g.:

    • Inability to pay attention
    • Decrease in visual perception
    • Feeling agitated and unorganized
    • Memory loss
    • Loss of emotional regulation and rational thinking

    This explains why so many of us jammed into supermarkets to fight each other for the right to hoard inordinate amounts of toilet paper when the dangerous and unnecessary pandemic lockdowns were implemented.

    When stress is chronic and cortisol is raging, we make exponentially more mistakes. We struggle to complete tasks, we lose concentration, we forget basic information, and we repeat ourselves in conversation. Since life itself in this corrupt culture is a source of relentless anxiety, most of us live in an altered state of inefficiency and confusion. However, this reality is so normalized that it’s become invisible and we often think we’ve got it good. After all, look at all these neat gadgets we own and get to stare at all day, every day.

    Think about it: We’re alive because our ancestors were the ones who used anxiety and hyper-vigilance to survive. The more casual or reckless early humans weren’t around long enough to pass on their genes. So, here we are — hard-wired with a hair-trigger fight-or-flight response — and we’re stuck in a world in which simple acts like breathing air or visiting a doctor are unhealthy or possibly lethal. Translation: We are the ideal subjects for a grand social experiment.

    If you were a member of the elite class — or the proverbial 1% — wouldn’t you prefer that the masses were pliable, easily controlled, and happy to settle for crumbs? Why wouldn’t you rig circumstances in such a way as to keep billions of potential challengers off-balance, frightened, and divided? What better way to maintain power and control than to implement an insidious form of group manipulation? It’s what cult leaders do. It’s what domestic abusers do. It’s what dictators do. And what are those in power if not abusive and narcissistic sociopaths?

    I know, the easiest and most alluring path for you right now is to dismiss this as a “conspiracy.” I get it. Life seems far more palatable if you choose denial. It feels so much simpler if you choose to believe those on top are not abusing you. You may even tell yourself that people never do things like create an oppressive, unfair system just to keep their fellow humans subdued and passive. If that’s your premise, let’s explore it for a few minutes.

    Would the folks who run things in God’s Country™ ever coerce people through abusive behaviors? You might want to ask the detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. As reported by the New York Times, the U.S. hired “two C.I.A. contract psychologists” to create a program that used “violence, isolation and sleep deprivation on more than 100 men in secret sites, some described as dungeons.” Tactics included waterboarding and cramming men into small confinement boxes. The idea here was to induce so much chronic stress, it would break their resistance.

    Human Rights Watch has documented other devious and abusive red-white-and-blue techniques paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars; e.g., mock execution by asphyxiation, stress positions, hooding during questioning, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce debilitating stress.

    The Land of the Free™ incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. The Center for Constitutional Rights reports that such prisoners are “repeatedly abused by their guards, fellow prisoners, and an ineffective and apathetic system. They suffer beatings, rape, prolonged solitary confinement, meager food rations, and frequently-denied medical care.” All in the name of punishment and pacification.

    Perhaps the best comparison for America’s brutal molding of its citizens is domestic abuse. The United Nations defines domestic abuse as “a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner.” Read that again: a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control.

    Abusers, says the UN, use actions or threats of action to influence others. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone. Are you frightened by the lack of financial stability? Are you terrorized by the threat of sexual assault or injury by medical error? Does the possibility of eviction, homelessness, and poverty manipulate you into making choices you abhor, choices that violate your deepest values and individual freedoms?

    If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.

    Pro tip: All it takes to flip the script is for each of you to change your mind. Demand more pleasure instead of less pain. It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it can’t be like this if we take off the blinders and see the ugliness of reality.

    “To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant,” writes Noam Chomsky. “Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry a significant personal cost.”

    Truths like those discussed in this article are ugly and painful but that’s why the big lies are invented in the first place. On that note, I leave you with this from the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

    Rise like Lions after slumber
    In unvanquishable number –
    Shake your chains to earth like dew
    Which in sleep had fallen on you
    Ye are many – they are few.

    — The Mask of Anarchy, 1819

    The post The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Dangers of Going Back to School After a Year of COVID-19 Lockdowns

    Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.

    — investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

    Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way and out of trouble.

    Those were the good old days, before the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a whole new level of Nanny State authoritarianism to our daily lives, locking down communities, forcing kids out of the schoolroom and into virtual classrooms, leaving vast swaths of the work force dependent on government welfare, while pushing other segments into a work-from-home model, and generally subjecting us to an increasingly obnoxious level of intrusion by the government into our private lives.

    Now, after almost 18 months away from a physical classroom, students are heading back to school.

    Here’s what they can expect.

    From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:

    • draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,
    • overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,
    • school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,
    • standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,
    • politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,
    • and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

    Young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.

    Nowadays, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

    Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

    Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot water, in some cases getting them expelled from school or charged with a crime.

    Not even good deeds go unpunished.

    One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

    In South Carolina, where it’s against the law to “disturb” a school, more than a thousand students a year—some as young as 7 years old—“face criminal charges for not following directions, loitering, cursing, or the vague allegation of acting ‘obnoxiously.’ If charged as adults, they can be held in jail for up to 90 days.”

    These outrageous incidents are exactly what you’ll see more of now that in-person school is back in session, especially once you add COVID-19 mandates to the mix.

    Having police in the schools only adds to the danger.

    Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.

    Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”

    Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SRO) have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.

    In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

    The horror stories are legion.

    One SRO was accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line.

    That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury.

    In Pennsylvania, a student was tasered after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away.

    When 13-year-old Kevens Jean Baptiste failed to follow a school bus driver’s direction to keep the bus windows closed (Kevens, who suffers from asthma, opened the window after a fellow student sprayed perfume, causing him to cough and wheeze), he was handcuffed by police, removed from the bus, and while still handcuffed, had his legs swept out from under him by an officer, causing him to crash to the ground.

    Young Alex Stone didn’t even make it past the first week of school before he became a victim of the police state. Directed by his teacher to do a creative writing assignment involving a series of fictional Facebook statuses, Stone wrote, “I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business.” Despite the fact that dinosaurs are extinct, the status fabricated, and the South Carolina student was merely following orders, his teacher reported him to school administrators, who in turn called the police.

    What followed is par for the course in schools today: students were locked down in their classrooms while armed police searched the 16-year-old’s locker and bookbag, handcuffed him, charged him with disorderly conduct disturbing the school, arrested him, detained him, and then he was suspended from school.

    Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these “hardening” tactics.

    On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”

    In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids—some as young as 4 and 5 years old—for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.

    Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.

    Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public schools.

    This is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into the schools.

    Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.

    For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school (it turned out to be a parent).

    Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and placing the school into lockdown mode.

    These police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.

    The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the nation’s young people treated like hardened criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled and taught the painful lesson that the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment) doesn’t mean much in the American police state.

    Unfortunately, advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry like to trot out the line that school safety should be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another school shooting. What they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare.

    As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places for children.

    There can be no avoiding the hands-on lessons being taught in the schools about the role of police in our lives, ranging from active shooter drills and school-wide lockdowns to incidents in which children engaging in typically childlike behavior are suspended (for shooting an imaginary “arrow” at a fellow classmate), handcuffed (for being disruptive at school), arrested (for throwing water balloons as part of a school prank), and even tasered (for not obeying instructions).

    Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters—which one would hope would be the objective of the schools—government officials seem determined to churn out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

    So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now—the children growing up in these quasi-prisons—but for the future of this country?

    How do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?

    Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?

    As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally and trickle upwards.

    For starters, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and demand that school officials 1) adopt a policy of positive reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; 2) minimize the presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in student discipline; and 3) insist that all behavioral issues be addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other disciplinary tactics are attempted.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.

    If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.

    If, on the other hand, you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums.

    Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state penitentiary.

    The post The Dangers of Going Back to School After a Year of COVID-19 Lockdowns first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • America in an Age of Faucism

    Reason can wrestle and overthrow terror.

    — Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis

    Medical ethics in the West has long been predicated on informed consent, the oath to do no harm, the notion that good health care is a human right, and the search for scientific truth free from skullduggery and censorship. These tenets are not only integral to a sound health care system but are foundational to a civilized society. Lamentably, each of these sacrosanct principles is anathema to the medical industrial complex. For we have entered the Age of Faucism.

    In “Why do patients hate going to the doctor?” by Maheswari Raja, MD, the author reiterates the establishment medical narrative, that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our health care system, and that the problem is the American patient:

    And the truth is that the doctor’s office is an uncomfortable place. It is where one answers the most intimate questions and speaks their most intimate fears — where they have to face the reality of the consequences of their behaviors and misjudgments.

    Will physicians devoid of a moral compass, the private health insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry ever face the consequences of their “behaviors and misjudgments?” No less delusional and absurd, Dana Hassneiah, MD, writes in KevinMD:

    Most people in other jobs would probably not care to help a person who is indifferent and doesn’t want to help himself. But in medicine, your knowledge and morals make you the desperate person in the encounter.

    These superior morals were on display in the Covid vaccine propaganda video where doctors tell patients to “Just grow the f**k up and get the vaccine,” an obscenity emblematic of the growing push towards severing ties with the Hippocratic Oath.

    Embedded in Faucism are three cults: the Cult of Psychiatry, the Church of Vaccinology, and the Branch Covidians. These branches of American pseudo-medicine inhabit a world of authoritarianism, zealotry, and unreason, and are anchored in a deep-seated contempt for informed consent and the oath to do no harm. Just as Europeans who were suspected of deviating from a once supremely powerful church were labeled heretics, necromancers, and accused of witchcraft and sorcery, those that have the temerity to question the pharmaceutical priesthood are denounced as “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vax,” and “anti-science.” Whether it be Wahhabism, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Nazis, or the Christian fundamentalists of 16th and 17th century Europe, tyranny needs a dogma, and the rapacious corporatization of medicine coupled with the neoliberal belief in the infallibility of the liberal media have spawned Faucism.

    The Cult of Psychiatry is grounded in despotism and dogmatism, as virtually all of the diseases in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) can neither be scientifically tested nor proven. (Consider how depraved a physician would have to be to genuinely believe that “oppositional defiant disorder” is a real medical diagnosis). The more mental illnesses are invented, the more psychiatrists are able to create drug addicts for the pharmaceutical industry. Undoubtedly, there are sinister elements within the intelligence services that are delighted with this Huxleyan state of affairs. While there will always be some good people in psychiatry such as Peter Breggin, MD, the field is infested with sociopaths that regard every human emotion as a disease. Indeed, the Britney Spears tragedy offers a harrowing example of psychiatric sadism and cruelty.

    When a new vaccine is in production, one should always ask three questions: Is the vaccine necessary? Is it safe? And is it efficacious? The Church of Vaccinology is founded on the notion that every vaccine is necessary, safe, and effective, and history has repeatedly shown this to be a myth going back to the Cutter Incident. Since vaccination constitutes a significant medical intervention which poses an element of risk, why should a vaccine be produced for an illness which is treatable? And if vaccines are unfailingly innocuous, why is there a need for coercion? Alas, wherever there are insatiable pharmaceutical cabals one is sure to find marketing masquerading as science.

    The Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) granted for the mRNA vaccines is contingent on there being no treatments for Covid. Yet this claim is fallacious, as Ivermectin (see here, here, here and here) and Hydroxychloroquine (see here, here, here, here and here) have indeed shown efficacy in the treatment of COVID-19, particularly if these regimens are deployed early in the disease process. Moreover, unlike with the mRNA vaccines, Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin have a strong safety profile, the former being approved by the FDA in 1955, and the latter being on the World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines. (The CDC’s website states that “Hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed to adults and children of all ages. It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers”). Those who spurn the studies which demonstrate that Covid is treatable because this would contradict the pharmaceutical priesthood are no less indoctrinated than those who once insisted that the Earth couldn’t possibly go around the Sun because this contradicted the teachings of the church. Terrified of excommunication, the proselytized refuse to look through the telescope. They refuse to see.

    Unlike the mRNA hucksters, the physicians of the FLCCC Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) have treated thousands of Covid patients and have real-world experience in successfully treating COVID-19. Does this mean that they will be able to save every life? No, it does not. There are Americans that die every year from influenza and pneumonia. Has that led to calls to turn the country into an enormous prison?

    The “vaccines” have not been proven to prevent transmission and there have been thousands of so-called “breakthrough cases.” In “Are vaccines driving the surge in new Covid infections?” Marco Cáceres points out that “In the UK, Israel, Chile and other countries with high vaccination rates, Covid infections among the fully vaccinated are outpacing those in the unvaccinated….” Israel’s Channel 13 has reported that in the Herzog Medical Center in Jerusalem the overwhelming majority of hospitalized Covid patients are fully vaccinated. Perhaps we can take delight in knowing what the vaccines have been proven to do: inflict staggering amounts of pain and suffering.

    It is likely that FDA, CDC, and NIH have known for quite some time about the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine, as an article about SARS-CoV-1 appeared in Virology Journal titled “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread,” and was published in 2005. Of course, when science gets in the way of profit-making, one can always publish fraudulent papers which later have to be retracted. As Dr. Peter McCullough has repeatedly emphasized, the public health agencies instructed doctors to send patients home without treatment when they were sick with Covid, as opposed to establishing protocols for how to treat patients early and aggressively with drugs that were already FDA approved. How many thousands died as a result of this malfeasance?

    The 1976 swine flu vaccine program was terminated after it caused the death of dozens of Americans and gave hundreds of Americans Guillain-Barré syndrome. Data on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicate that there have been thousands of Covid vaccine deaths in the US, and yet the authorities continue with this unprecedented push to get the entire planet vaccinated. It is important to note that VAERS is notoriously dysfunctional and captures only 1% to 10% of the actual data. Interestingly, the CDC recently decided to slash the VAERS death toll for Covid vaccines from 13,068 to 6,018 citing “foreign reports.”

    Distinguished scientists and physicians such as Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Ryan Cole, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Dr. Harvey Risch, Dr. Mike Yeadon, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, Dr. Tess Lawrie, and doctors Stephanie Seneff and Greg Nigh have expressed concern over the growing number of mRNA vaccine adverse events and the lack of long-term safety data. The cultlike notion that one must submit to the collective through masking and vaccination is antithetical to the principle of bodily autonomy and mirrors the sophistry used to defend female genital mutilation. It is also scientific hogwash, for if the vaccine confers immunity what difference does it make if one’s friends, colleagues, and neighbors are vaccinated or unvaccinated?

    Branch Covidian dogma mirrors the Nazi medical ethos, which maintained that any medical atrocity can be justified if done for the “greater good.” For instance, if an SS doctor were to place a Russian prisoner of war in a tub of ice water, monitor his vital signs and note how long it took for him to die, and then autopsy the body, all in an attempt to glean information that could ostensibly be used to aid German pilots and sailors, this would be justified by the medical community of the Third Reich as acceptable and executed within their medical guidelines. In this same vein, Branch Covidians would argue that the catastrophic impact of the lockdowns, the growing numbers of Covid vaccine deaths and injuries, and the deleterious consequences of the mask mandates are justified, as these measures represent inevitable collateral damage integral to “flattening the curve” and “preventing emergency rooms from being overwhelmed.” (A remarkable case of sophistry, particularly when one considers the fact that Ivermectin can be used prophylactically). According to Children’s Health Defense, “Nearly 67 million [Americans] lost work between Mar. 21 and Oct. 7, 2020.” And this, for a virus which is treatable and has a 99.7% survival rate! As the public health agencies of FDA, CDC, NIH, and NIAID (which should really be called corporate health agencies) have long fallen victim to regulatory capture, they have no incentive to impose stringent safety guidelines.

    In England, more minors have been lost to suicide than to “the coronavirus,” while thousands of American children have suffered serious adverse events from the experimental inoculations (see here, here, here, here and here), even as their risk of dying from Covid is almost statistically zero. Clearly, the Nuremberg Code is being egregiously violated, as EUA biologicals are by definition experimental. Bemoaning this deterioration of bioethical norms, one of the inventors of mRNA technology, Robert Malone, MD, writes in TrialSite News that “The Geneva Convention, the Helsinki declaration, and the entire structure which supports ethical human subjects research requires that research subjects be fully informed of risks and must consent to participation without coercion.”

    When a powerful pharmaceutical company is impatient to unleash a blockbuster drug they are invariably indifferent to safety, necessity, and efficacy. This apathetic attitude towards basic principles of medical ethics has been glaringly on display with regard to the overprescribing of benzodiazepines, the Vioxx disaster, the opioid epidemic, the psychotropic drug epidemic, anthrax vaccine (also an EUA), Gardasil vaccine, the 2009 Pandemrix vaccine for H1N1, and fen-phen, drugs and vaccines which have destroyed countless lives and some of which are still on the market. Bear in mind that the medical institutions that are responsible for these drug regulatory catastrophes – some of the worst in human history – are “the experts.”

    College students are generally kept in the dark about the many illegal wars of aggression, both covert and overt, that have been perpetrated by the CIA and the Pentagon. This is even more common with the indoctrination of military academy cadets and political science majors. Likewise, most medical graduates know nothing about the history of the pharmaceutical industry, rendering them incapable of placing contemporary events in their appropriate historical context. This intellectual amnesia explains how we ended up with an army of doctors that will happily hand out opioids, psychotropic drugs, benzodiazepines, and Covid vaccines as if they were gummy bears. Those among us that can no longer distinguish between real medical care, rooted in informed consent, the oath to do no harm, and medical scientific integrity, and Nazi medical care, where the powers of modern medicine are weaponized and used to enslave, debase, and violate have lost their humanity.

    Parents are consistently told by pediatricians that every vaccine is “safe and effective” and that no risk-benefit analysis is needed. As the ghosts of history emerge from the shadows, these claims ring hollow. Granted, this may be true with regard to certain immunizations, but the dramatic surge in the number of mandatory vaccines on the CDC schedule, combined with the treasonous behavior of the public health agencies, and the broad immunity granted for the vaccine manufacturers, has brought us to a precipice from which we are staring at an abyss of tyranny. Indeed, the Church of Vaccinology isn’t interested in public health. They are interested in money and power.

    The notion of vaccine inviolability is laid to rest in Dr. Richard Moskowitz’s masterpiece Vaccines: A Reappraisal. Concluding chapter 9, he writes:

    Population-based surveys have shown a linear, directly proportional relationship between the number of vaccinations administered in the first year of life and the infant mortality rate, as well as the rate of hospitalizations and emergency room visits during the same period. Other surveys have shown that children vaccinated according to the CDC schedule exhibit higher rates of asthma and other childhood diseases and generally have poorer health than those who were ‘undervaccinated,’ while those children who were never vaccinated at all seemed by far the healthiest in a number of typical parameters.

    As discussed in The Virus and the Vaccine, by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher, millions of Americans were given polio vaccines tainted with the monkey virus SV40, a contaminant initially dismissed as incidental by our public health agencies, but which was later shown to be oncogenic. There is also the unresolved yet compelling hypothesis of Edward Hooper, laid out in his tome The River, where he argues that the HIV pandemic began when the CHAT oral polio vaccine was deployed in the Belgian Congo, an apartheid state, and that chimpanzee kidneys contaminated with SIV, the cousin to HIV, were used in this process, meaning that the origins of HIV would be iatrogenic. Nevertheless, we mustn’t listen to heathens like Hooper who “spread misinformation,” are likely working for the Russians, and are possibly even terrorists.

    The totalitarian mentality of the medical establishment is evidenced not only by their lack of humanism and compassion, but by their disdain for checks and balances. Consider the bizarre language on the CDC’s website, where they repeatedly speak of “orders” that they allegedly have the authority to hand down. And who, pray tell, do they take “orders” from? As Senator Ronald Johnson pointed out in his discussion with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in affiliation with Children’s Health Defense, the government’s response to SARS-CoV-2 has been marked by a dangerous censorship and a growing antipathy towards openness and debate.

    The term “anti-vaxxer” is designed to disparage and denigrate those who reject biofascism. In actuality, these people are “pro-informed-consenters.” (Were those who expressed outrage over thalidomide-induced teratogenesis “anti-drug?”) They also resent the fact that the drug companies cannot be sued should their vaccines inflict long-lasting harm, which has been the case in the US since the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, a dastardly piece of legislation which gave the drug companies permission to use children as laboratory ferrets. Furthermore, the drug companies have liability protection for any adverse event caused by a Covid vaccine under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP), providing the pharmaceutical industry with multiple layers of immunity. The drug companies were afforded no liability protection for opioids and Vioxx, yet when it comes to vaccines where they are indemnified “they suddenly find Jesus,” as Robert Kennedy Jr. is fond of saying.

    For decades, informed consent has been under a sustained and ruthless assault. From threatening to call Child Protective Services should parents not want their children on psychotropic drugs, to failing to communicate the dangers of opioids and benzodiazepines, to practice pelvic exams performed on anesthetized patients by trainees, to the imposition of unwanted observers during physician office visits, to the violation of do-not-resuscitate orders, to the nondisclosure of long-term chemotherapy side effects, to the growing list of mandatory vaccines of dubious safety and efficacy, informed consent is being systematically and methodically dismantled. The mask mandates, lockdowns, and the relentless pressure to participate in a dangerous medical experiment are merely a perpetuation of this barbarism. Moreover, masks and vaccines are inextricably linked, for if a restaurant, bar, library, museum, school, or workplace has the power to deny you entry due to being unmasked then they will have the power to deny you entry should you be unvaccinated (an unfolding reality in New York City), as a critical precedent for medical martial law has been established.

    As pediatrician and pulmonologist Sterling Simpson, MD, pointed out in his interview with The Last American Vagabond, the majority of masks people are using are not FDA approved, which underscores the fact that they do not constitute a real medical device. In other words, the risks, such as extreme isolation, sensory deprivation, mass hysteria, traumatized children (some of whom are showing signs of cognitive impairment), and people becoming acidotic, can easily outweigh the benefits. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test is likewise not FDA approved. McBride and Locricchio write for The Defender:

    All COVID vaccines, COVID PCR and antigen tests, and masks are merely EUA-authorized, not approved or licensed, by the federal government. Long-term safety and efficacy have not been proven.

    EUA products are by definition experimental, which requires people be given the right to refuse them. Under the Nuremberg Code, the foundation of ethical medicine, no one may be coerced to participate in a medical experiment. Consent of the individual is ‘absolutely essential.’

    To underscore the dangers of rushing a vaccine to market in under a year, it took Sanofi Pasteur twenty years to create the dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia, which ultimately led to antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a phenomenon whereby vaccination inadvertently facilitates viral replication. The formalin-inactivated (FI) Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccine used in the 1960s is another example of ADE. Dr. Malone and Doctors for COVID Ethics have warned that this very scenario could unfold with the mRNA vaccines. (A new vaccine for RSV is expected to be extremely profitable and pharmaceutical companies are presently jockeying for position). Perhaps it is those who are responsible for pushing inadequately tested vaccines that are responsible for “spreading misinformation” and “stoking vaccine hesitancy.”

    If a government can force you to take an experimental drug, what will prevent them from forcing you to have exploratory brain surgery, a tracheotomy, or gender reassignment surgery? The Nazification of American medicine is magnified tenfold in the public schools, where sorcery has usurped science and the three death cults are bludgeoning minds, bodies, and spirits, and doing so in an environment of brutality and unmitigated lawlessness.

    The interminable fearmongering about all the different variants is simply a more rabid and maniacal version of what precipitated the 1976 swine flu, 2003 smallpox, and 2009 H1N1 vaccination programs. Keep that in mind the next time you’re told to “follow the science.” Another preposterous canard being parroted by the media is that naturally acquired immunity is somehow inadequate and pales in comparison with vaccine-induced immunity. As Dr. Charles Hoffe has pointed out, patients that have immunity for SARS-CoV-1 have immunity for SARS-CoV-2, despite the fact that there is a 20% difference between these two viruses, while the different Covid variants have less than a 1% difference between them.

    Can any amount of money restore fulfillment and tranquility to a perfidious soul? Let us reflect on the words of Imogen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline:

    Thus may poor fools
    Believe false teachers: though those that are betray’d
    Do feel the treason sharply, yet the traitor
    Stands in worse case of woe. (III.iv.)

    A collection of clowns, witch hunters, Eichmanns, and snickering snake oil salesmen, the Branch Covidians, together with the Church of Vaccinology and the Cult of Psychiatry, are hammering away at two of the most vital, indispensable, and irreplaceable pillars of democracy: informed consent and the First Amendment.

    As relationships crumble and the pressure to succumb to the primordial darkness grows, the chasm inexorably widens between the moral and the amoral, the sentient and the nonsentient, the wise and the wicked. Should the citadel of liberty fall to the hordes of Faucism, we will descend into a long and terrible night before our descendants reclaim its resurrection.

    The post America in an Age of Faucism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Of Life and Death

    Religious cults have always seemed weird to me. Political cults, equally bizarre. But I’ve never encountered anything quite as dangerous or strange as the current medical cult of eugenicists running wild upon the earth. A nihilistic death machine masquerading behind a mask of health care. But peel back the thin veil and it’s all really just a sick joke. Get it?

    I always wondered how in the world people like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could have ever risen to power and been provided with the opportunity to unleash their systems of methodical human extermination. But the mainstream “pop” culture of the modern era has put all doubt aside in my mind regarding that question. Because I now realize perfectly well how it happens.

    The psychology of the general public allows it, even cheers it on, even joins in to parrot all the propaganda they’re fed from the approved authoritative sources, mouthpieces, and talking heads.

    Fascism and communism are no longer far-off ideologies being implemented by adversarial forces across the pond that we can point toward and warn about as being slowly approaching threats. They’re now staring us straight in the face on a regular basis in the newfangled form of technocracy, transhumanism, and globalism. It’s called the New World Order, darling, and its tentacles are sinking deeper by the day.

    The part about this whole ordeal that shocks me the most is just how well-coordinated and effective the suppression of free-flowing information has been in the public sphere, despite the fact that everyone connected to the internet has access to and the ability to find the truth if they only put in the effort of seeking it out.

    Partly, the problem arises from the fact that a certain percentage of people don’t actually want to hear the truth because once knowing it they are then presented with having a larger responsibility to actually do something about it in their lives. So it is much easier for them to just keep a low profile and flow with whatever the consensus bias happens to be at any given moment and simply go along to get along without causing any disturbance or drawing any unwanted attention to themselves.

    Of course, we’re all familiar with the quote from Thomas Gray, “Ignorance is bliss.”

    Well, there’s another quote from Thomas Jefferson that I find appropriate for those who want to keep their heads buried in the sand:

    The amount of tyranny you get, is the exact amount you put up with.

    In that vein, the more insidious, draconian aspect of this corrupt situation doesn’t involve people’s willingness to set aside their critical thinking, but rather is a direct product of the censorship being enforced by the corporate media, social media, and government institutions. Basically, anyone who tries to speak out and raise truth up to the surface level gets their voice silenced and online presence axed out of existence.

    We’ve watched it play out with the thousands of doctors and nurses who bravely touted the effective nature of hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin as treatments for the virus. They were swiftly demonized by the system and banished to realms not easily observed by the mainstream. Now we’re witnessing the same basic theme repeat with people like Dr. Robert Malone, Michael Yeadon, Dr. Peter McCullough, and so many others who are warning about antibody-dependent enhancement and the adverse effects of the mRNA spike protein.

    Regardless, the data is still readily available and provided directly from different governments’ own systems. It can be accessed by anyone. The most alarming statistics are found in the weekly reports released through VAERS in conjunction with the CDC here in the US which shows that from December of 2020 through July of 2021 there have now been over 12,000 reported deaths and 545,000 adverse reactions (of which over 70,000 are serious injuries).

    It boggles my mind that more people are not aware of this information, but it just goes to show the type of stranglehold the Beast System has over the public discourse and narrative. It’s unfathomable, really.

    One of the great ironies and tragedies of human psychology is the propensity of our minds to facilitate behavior that is self-destructive and irrational in its nature.

    And so, when a mistake is made, it is common that a person, instead of assuming responsibility and altering their course appropriately to avoid the same pattern from being repeated in the future, will, rather, shun such responsibility and project blame outwardly on others or on the world at large or on God or on nature or on any other force that can be raised up in their consciousness to point at and target as a scapegoat.

    And, instead of viewing the situation from a logical perspective, they will enter into a state of cognitive dissonance, denial, and learned helplessness that allows them to block out the problem and not have to deal with it. A sort of Stockholm Syndrome where they begin to subconsciously identify favorably with the very circumstances that have caused them harm to begin with, thus entering into a vicious loop where the oppressive energy remains in control.

    Basically, the concept is that upon realizing they are in a hole, instead of climbing out when it is still relatively shallow, they continue digging even deeper, hollowing out the space for their own potential grave.

    This is why it is not unusual that people are unable to alter their lifestyle until they have reached rock bottom. I happen to have learned this lesson repeatedly in my younger years so I speak from experience.

    The theory doesn’t only apply to individuals, though. It can be extrapolated out to better understand collective organizations as well. And we are, indeed, at that point as a society and a species.

    It is now a matter of life or death in the eugenics-based Beast System of the New World Order. Those who do not realize the implications of continuing along in obedience to its methods of persuasion and propaganda will wind up wandering straight off the edge of a cliff. Those who resist, assume responsibility for their own destiny, become fully informed, and make wise decisions will at least stand a chance of surviving and making it through to the other side.

    Not the cheeriest message I’ve ever delivered, but certainly the most somber and realistic.

    We are – to weave another metaphor into the thread – in the belly of the whale. So one can either curl up in a fetal position and wait to drown in the abyss or muster up a bit of courage and begin to claw their way out of the monster to then swim back up to safety on the surface.

    There will never be a more welcome and peaceful breath that purifies the lungs than that first inhalation after breaking loose from the shackles of tyranny and escaping the grasp of the technocratic transhumanist agenda to fully embrace the blessing of true sovereignty as renaissance reignites upon the earth.

    Humanity can only be submerged for so long before survival instincts kick in and start working on overdrive to make up for lost time. Such are the signs being seen recently as concerned citizens take to the streets to protest in France, Italy, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the UK. A beautiful sight to behold as massive waves of hundreds of thousands of people point the way toward a great awakening here in the age of Revelation.

    Well, I say the signs have been seen, but only by those who are actively seeking. Because footage certainly isn’t being served up on a silver platter by the corporate media or Big Tech oligarchs. The truth about reality on the ground is still kept hush-hush in those circles. But the control mechanisms of the corrupt Priest Class are breaking down at an increasingly accelerated pace and so they won’t be able to keep the lid on this boiling pot for much longer. The scenes are, however, being broadcast widely on platforms that remain free and open to transparent communication. I’ve been feasting on a steady diet of late, and my digestion has never been smoother.

    Despite all the lunacy underway in this world right now, honestly, I’ve been having the time of my life so far this year. When you were spit out of the womb with a rebellious streak slashing straight through your soul, existence tends to take on a heightened sense of meaning and more purposeful intensity once the chaos really starts ramping up. These trying times are just a test of character in the end. So, as I continue to say, walk steady with a sturdy spine in good spirits. Hallelujah.

    The post Of Life and Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Science, Salvation and Heretics: From Monsanto to Pfizer, Same Old Playbook

    Why are numerous ‘independent alternative’ media outlets and writers not questioning the COVID-19 vaccine rollout? If anything, they are promoting it without even considering the serious concerns being voiced by top scientists.

    When there are experts like cardiologist and epidemiologist Professor Peter McCullough, Dr Robert Malone (credited with inventing mRNA vaccine technology), former vice president of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Dr Michael Yeadon, vaccine researcher and immunologist Dr Byram Bridle, world-renowned microbiologist Dr Sucharit Bhakti and hundreds of other respected scientists, immunologists and virologists expressing serious concerns or even calling for a halt to the rollout, surely their views must be given space.

    However, from the outset, these self-proclaimed ‘anti-establishment’ platforms and journalists threw their hand in with the official COVID-19 narrative. They are now supporting the vaccine rollouts and by implication the entities pushing the vaccines – governments, mainstream media, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, Big Pharma and Silicon Valley and its bedfellow, the US military.

    In effect, the full weight of the establishment has been brought to bear on pushing the COVID narrative and the vaccines. The very establishment that these ‘independent’ media outlets have previously challenged over the devastating ‘humanitarian’ conflicts in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria.

    To show such contempt for human life (civilian ‘collateral damage’) via geopolitical and resource-grabbing wars sold under the thin veneer of ‘the war on terror’ or ‘humanitarian intervention’ but then feel a need to save humanity from the ‘deadly’ virus must make some of those supporters of the official line on COVID just a little suspicious of the motives.

    As critical care physician Dr Pascal Sacre recently wrote:

    If people want trustworthy rulers, honest politicians, they should always judge rulers, financial elites and politicians by their actions rather than by their words.

    By not giving space to top scientists in the field of vaccine technology, immunology or virology who express deep concerns, these outlets are, in fact, engaging in censorship as much as the mainstream media, Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube.

    Science involves open debate and transparency, not censorship.

    Same old playbook

    There are strong similarities between the issue of genetically modified organisms (GMO) in agriculture and the COVID ‘pandemic’ in terms of the framing of debates in both fields: a type of ‘the science is decided’ mentality and a smearing of critics in an attempt to demonise and close down debate.

    Some years ago, Robert T Fraley, Monsanto’s former vice president and chief technology officer, asked on Twitter: “Why do people doubt science?”

    Accompanying his question was a link to an article that implied people who are suspicious of vaccines, GMOs, climate change or fluoridated water are confused, adhere to conspiracy theories, are motivated by ideology or are simply misinformed.

    But science is not the giver of ‘absolute truth’. That, in itself, should allow us to develop a healthy scepticism towards it. Scientific knowledge is built on shaky stilts that rest on shifting foundations. Science historian Thomas Kuhn wrote about the revolutionary paradigm shifts in scientific thought, whereby established theoretical perspectives can reinforce prevailing paradigms and serve as a barrier to the advancement of knowledge, until the weight of evidence and pressure from proponents of a new theoretical outlook is overwhelming. The old faith then gives way and the new ‘truth’ changes.

    The manufacture of scientific knowledge involves a process driven by various sociological, methodological and epistemological conflicts and compromises, both inside the laboratory and beyond.

    Why do people doubt science? Not because they are ill-informed or have read Kuhn or some sociology journal, but because they can see how science is used, corrupted and manipulated by powerful corporations and governments to serve their own ends.

    Take US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, for instance. He once called for “sound science” to underpin food trade that involves GMOs. Despite what Vilsack would have us believe – that there are no concerns about GMOs – many studies show that they present risks to human health and are having serious environmental, social and economic consequences.

    Sound science and the GMO agritech sector are too often perfect strangers. The industry carries out inadequate, short-term studies and conceals the data produced by its research under the guise of ‘commercial confidentiality’, while independent research highlights the dangers of its products. It has in the past also engaged in fakery in India, bribery in Indonesia and smears and intimidation against those who challenge its interests as well as the distortion and the censorship of scientific findings that undermine its agenda.

    In the US, policy makers released GM food onto the commercial market without proper long-term tests, citing the belief that it is ‘substantially equivalent’ to ordinary food. But foreign genes are being inserted into organisms that studies show make them substantially non-equivalent. Substantial equivalence is a trade strategy on behalf of the GMO sector that neatly serves to bypass science by removing its GMOs from the type of scrutiny usually applied to potentially toxic or harmful substances.

    Ultimately, it is not science, itself, that people have doubts about but science that is pressed into the service of immensely powerful private corporations and regulatory bodies that are effectively co-opted and adopt a ‘don’t look, don’t find’ approach’ to studies and products.

    There is a tendency to label anyone who opposes GMO as anti-science, not least because they are arguing against a supposed ‘scientific consensus’ in favour of GMOs. But this ‘consensus’ is nothing but a fiction of the collective imagination of the pro-GMO lobby.

    The first rule of risk-taking is to not cross the street blindfolded, which is what the GMO and COVID-19 vaccine lobbies would like us all to do, even though there are serious risks associated with these technologies. Furthermore, based on the work of US lawyer Steven Druker, we can see that the processes involved in getting GMO crop technology onto the commercial market were fraudulent and there has not been a single independent long-term epidemiological study on GMOs. With clinical trials still ongoing, similar concerns dog the ‘emergency use authorisation’ experimental COVID-19 vaccines.

    The ‘technological salvation’ argument being put forward in favour of the vaccines is also present with GMOs: the technology is needed to ‘feed the hungry’ or ‘save dying children’. When an argument cannot be won using rational debate and science, we usually see the emotional blackmail fallback position and ad hominems against critics.

    Whether it is GMO crop technology or COVID vaccines, we are seeing a huge unscientific experiment using people as human guinea pigs to rake in massive profits. In the case of the vaccines, there is also a wider agenda involving a ‘great reset’ of the economy and labour’s relationship to an increasingly authoritarian state whose role is to produce the conditions that will subordinate ordinary people to the ‘new normal’ required by private capital: mass surveillance, worklessness and the eradication of civil and political rights in favour of technocratic rule. In fact, genetically engineered food and crops are an integral part of this reset.

    Part of the vaccine rollout involves accusing critics and the unvaccinated of being irresponsible and dangerous fearmongers. There is a huge government-media campaign to marginalise and demonise those who question the vaccines or refuse to take them due to valid concerns.

    Instead of indulging in smear campaigns and censorship, what society should be facilitating is open debate and taking very seriously what critics are saying. When people engage in the former and run from the latter, it indicates that their arguments will not and do not withstand scrutiny.

    Vaccine billionaires

    In finishing, let us return to the world of Robert T Fraley and Monsanto and the type of ‘science’ he pushes. Bayer, which took over Monsanto in 2018, has just lost another appeals court decision in the US regarding its glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup, often used with GMO ‘roundup ready’ seeds and thus a key component of the GMO agenda. It faces tens of thousands of claims alleging that this herbicide causes cancer.

    In a recent decision by a court of appeal in California, it was stated:

    Monsanto’s conduct evidenced reckless disregard of the health and safety of the multitude of unsuspecting consumers it kept in the dark. This was not an isolated incident; Monsanto’s conduct involved repeated actions over a period of many years motivated by the desire for sales and profit.

    There is a clear lesson here with regard to the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Unlike Monsanto, however, Pfizer and the other vaccine manufacturers have received indemnities against the costs of compensation for adverse effects that might come from their COVID vaccines.

    A shrewd business move considering Pfizer’s corporate rap sheet which does nothing to inspire trust in that company. Its track record includes product safety, pricing, advertising and marketing, environment, human rights, labour, worker safety and tax and subsidy crimes and scandals.

    It is also claimed by the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism that Pfizer bullied governments to put up federal bank reserves, embassy buildings or military bases as a guarantee against the cost of future legal cases stemming from the adverse effects of its COVID-19 vaccine. This would mean that governments rather than the company would shoulder any legal costs.

    Vaccine manufacturers might well face bankruptcy sooner rather than later given the rising numbers of deaths and serious adverse effects being reported. But shielded from liability, the new vaccine billionaires, among them Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech, which has produced a vaccine with Pfizer, will be able to hold onto their loot.

    Although nothing will bring back those who succumbed to the deadly effects of glyphosate, at least Monsanto (via Bayer) is now in the dock and has already been forced to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to its victims or their families.

    Through these legal cases involving glyphosate, it has been made clear just how powerful corporations can and do corrupt science for their own ends.

    Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of the attorney’s fighting Bayer-Monsanto in the US courts, has explained that for four decades Monsanto manoeuvred to conceal Roundup’s carcinogenicity.

    He also says that Monsanto faces cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of other injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.

    This is what smearing and ignoring critics, malfeasance in public office, the capturing of regulatory agencies and scientific fraud leads to.

    It is interesting that governments and public officials sat on their hands and facilitated the rollout of glyphosate and other toxic agrochemicals and watched what is now a major public health crisis spiral out of control. They prioritised the needs of the agrochemical sector ahead of public health and side-lined science that challenged the adverse effects of its products.

    But governments are now suddenly expressing great concern for everyone’s well-being by locking them down, waging a fear campaign and cajoling and bribing people to take risky vaccines with dubious efficacy and which are arguably not needed. So, whose needs are they prioritising this time around?

    Although we are still in the relative early days of the COVID-19 vaccine rollouts, disturbing evidence is mounting of the actual harm resulting from these poorly tested vaccines and the potential risks (infertility, cognitive, cancer, cardiovascular, etc) that lie in store. Dr J Patrick Whelan, a paediatric rheumatologist, warned the US Food and Drug Administration in late 2020 that mRNA vaccines could cause microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver and kidneys in ways not assessed in safety trials.

    This is deeply concerning.

    But not for some. Not least the nine new vaccine billionaires worth a combined $19.3 billion courtesy of COVID-19 vaccines that were largely funded with billions of dollars from the public purse.

    The post Science, Salvation and Heretics: From Monsanto to Pfizer, Same Old Playbook first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Children’s Teeth, Collected Decades Ago, Can Show the Damage of Nuclear Testing

    Nuclear Weapon Test, Bikini Atoll, 1954

    In 2020, Harvard University’s T. C. Chan School of Public Health began a five-year study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, that will examine the connection between early life exposure to toxic metals and later-life risk of neurological disease. A collaborator with Harvard, the Radiation and Public Health Project, will analyze the relationship of strontium-90 (a radioactive element in nuclear weapons explosions) and disease risk in later life.

    The centerpiece of the study is a collection of nearly 100,000 baby teeth, gathered in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information.

    The collection of these teeth occurred during a time of intense public agitation over the escalating nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Soviet governments that featured the new hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), a weapon more than a thousand times as powerful as the bomb that had annihilated Hiroshima.  To prepare themselves for nuclear war, the two Cold War rivals conducted well-publicized, sometimes televised nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere—434 of them between 1945 and 1963.  These tests sent vast clouds of radioactive debris aloft where, carried along by the winds, it often traveled substantial distances before it fell to earth and was absorbed by the soil, plants, animals, and human beings.

    The hazards of nuclear testing were underscored by the U.S. government’s March 1, 1954 explosion of an H-bomb on Bikini Atoll, located in the Marshall Islands.  Although an area the size of New England had been staked out as a danger zone around the test site, a heavy dose of nuclear fallout descended on four inhabited islands of the Marshall grouping and on a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon—all substantially outside the danger zone—with disastrous results.

    Criticism of the nuclear arms race, and especially nuclear testing, quickly escalated.  Prominent individuals, including Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, and Benjamin Spock, issued spirited warnings.  New mass membership organizations arose, among them the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in the United States, the National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests (which morphed into the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in Britain, and the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs.

    The public grew alarmed, particularly by the fact that strontium-90 from nuclear tests was transmitted from the grass, to cattle, to milk, and finally to human bodies—with special concern as it built up in children’s bones and teeth.  By the late 1950s, polls found that most Americans considered fallout a “real danger.”

    Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, emerged as one of the most trenchant and effective American critics, circulating anti-testing petitions signed by thousands of U.S. scientists and even larger numbers of scientists abroad.  Pauling charged that the nuclear bomb tests through 1958 would ultimately produce about 1 million seriously defective children and some 2 million embryonic and neonatal deaths.

    Determined to maintain its nuclear weapons program, the U.S. government was horrified by the popular uproar and anxious to suppress it.  U.S. intelligence agencies and congressional investigations were unleashed against groups like SANE and antinuclear leaders like Pauling, while U.S. information agencies and government officials publicly minimized the dangers of nuclear testing.  In a Life magazine article, Edward Teller, often called “the father of the H-bomb,” insisted that nuclear test radiation “need not necessarily be harmful,” but “may conceivably be helpful.”

    Even so, public concern grew.  In August 1958, Herman Kalckar, a biologist at the National Institutes of Health, published an article in the journal Nature, calling on public health agencies in multiple nations to engage in large-scale collection of baby teeth. Kalckar proposed testing teeth for strontium-90 from bomb fallout, as children are most vulnerable to the toxic effects of radioactivity.

    Washington University scientists recognized that a tooth study could change public policy. In December 1958, they joined with leaders of the Committee for Nuclear Information, a citizen group opposed to nuclear war and above-ground bomb tests, and adopted a proposal to collect and test teeth for strontium-90 concentrations.

    For the next 12 years, the Committee worked furiously, soliciting tooth donations through community-based institutions like schools, churches, scout groups, libraries, and dental offices. A total of 320,000 teeth were collected, and a Washington University lab measured strontium-90.

    Results clearly showed a massive increase in strontium-90 as testing continued. Children born in 1963 (the height of bomb tests) had an average of 50 times more than those born in 1951 (when large-scale tests began). Medical journal articles detailed results.  Information on the tooth study was sent to Jerome Wiesner, science advisor to President John F. Kennedy.

    Kennedy, already seeking a test ban treaty, was clearly influenced by the uproar over the fate of children.  In his July 1963 speech announcing the successful conclusion of test ban negotiations by the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, he argued that governments could not be indifferent to the catastrophe of nuclear war or to “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs.”  The outcome was the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water.

    According to the ongoing tooth study, the average strontium-90 in baby teeth dropped by half in just four years after the test ban. With their goal apparently accomplished, the Committee on Nuclear Information and the University halted tooth collection and testing.  Soon thereafter, the Committee dissolved.

    Three decades later, Washington University staff discovered thousands of abandoned baby teeth that had gone untested. The school donated the teeth to the Radiation and Public Health Project, which was conducting a study of strontium-90 in teeth of U.S. children near nuclear reactors.

    Now, using strontium-90 still present in teeth, the Radiation and Public Health Project will conduct an analysis of health risk, which was not addressed in the original tooth study, and minimally addressed by government agencies.  Based on actual radiation exposure in bodies, the issue of how many Americans suffered from cancer and other diseases from nuclear testing fallout will be clarified.

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Lawrence Wittner and Joseph Mangano.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.