Huge Scandal Erupts Inside NATO: Alliance Member Germany Slams NATO "Warmongering" Against Russia

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As we reported in just the past week, not only has NATO accelerated its encirclement of Russia, with British soldiers deployed in Estonia, US soldiers operating in Latvia and Canadians in Poland, while combat units are being increased in the Mediterranean... 

 

... but even more troubling, was NATO's assessment that it may now have grounds to attack Russia when it announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s Article V “collective defense” provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country.

Specifically, NATO is alleging that because Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton’s home computer, this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her U.S. State Department communications to her unsecured home computer and of such a Russian’s then snooping into the U.S. State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if the U.S. President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the U.S., trigger NATO’s mutual-defense clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the U.S. government in going to war against Russia, if the U.S. government so decides.

Also recall that the attack on the DNC servers which leaked the Democrats confidential files on Trump and Hillary donors lists were also blamed on "Russian government hackers", before it emerged that the act was the result of one solitary non-Russian hacker, but not before the US once again tried to escalate a development which may have culminated with war with Russia! 

Throughout all of these escalations, the popular narrative spun by the "democratic" media was a simple one: it was Russia that was provoking NATO, not NATO's aggressive military actions on the border with Russia that were the cause of soaring geopolitical tension. Ignored in the fictional plot line was also Russia's clear reaction to NATO provocations that it would "respond totally asymmetrically" an outcome that could in its worst oucome lead to millions of European deaths. Still, no matter the risk of escalation, one which just two weeks ago led to assessment that the  "Risk Of Nuclear Dirty Bomb Surges On Poor US-Russia Relations", NATO had to maintain its provocative attitude .

All NATO had to do was assure that all alliance members would follow the lead, and nobody would stray from the party line.

And then everything imploded when none other than the Foreign Minister of NATO member Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, criticized NATO for having a bellicose policy towards Russia, describing it as "warmongering", the German daily Bild reported. And just like that, the entire ficitional narrative of "innocent" NATO merely reacting to evil Russian provcations has gone up in flames.

As AFP adds, Steinmeier merely highlighted all those things which rational persons have known about for a long time, namely the deployment of NATO troops near borders with Russia in the military alliance's Baltic and east European member states. However, since it comes from a NATO member, suddenly one can't accuse Russian propaganda. In fact, NATO has absolutely no planned response to just this contingency.

"What we should avoid today is inflaming the situation by warmongering and stomping boots," Steinmeier told Bild in an interview to be published Sunday.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier

"Anyone who thinks you can increase security in the alliance with symbolic parades of tanks near the eastern borders, is mistaken," Germany's top diplomat added.

Needless to say, Russia bitterly opposes NATO's expansion into its Soviet-era satellites and last month said it would create three new divisions in its southwest region to meet what it described as a dangerous military build-up along its borders. This is precisely what NATO wants as it would be able to then blame Russian effect to NATO cause as an irrational move by the Kremlin, one to which the kind folks at NATO HQ would have no choice but to respond in their caring defense of all those innocent people, when in reality it is NATO that is desperate to provoke and launch the conflict with Russia.

And now even its own members admit it!

In its latest ridiculous escalation, blamed on Russia no less, NATO announced on Monday that it would deploy four battalions to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to counter a more assertive Russia, ahead of a landmark summit in Warsaw next month. Well, as Steinmeier made it very clear, NATO's deployment to provoke Russia was precisely that. As a result a Russian "assymmetric" response is assured, and this time it may even spill over into the combat arena, something which would bring infinite delight to Washington's military-industrial complex neocon puppets.

In an interview with Bild on Thursday, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Russia is seeking to create "a zone of influence through military means". "We are observing massive militarisation at NATO borders -- in the Arctic, in the Baltic, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea," he told the newspaper.

How do we know Steinmeier hit it nail on the head? The neocon Council of Foreign Relations trotted out its "fellow" who promptly took to character assassinations and demanding Steinmeier's resignation, instead of asking if perhaps a NATO-member country accusing NATO of being a warmongering provocateur, is not the real reason why Europe is back deep in the cold war, with an escalating nuclear arms race to go alongside it, courtesy of the US military industrial complex whose profits are entirely dependent on war, conflict and the death of civilians around the globe.

If Steinmeier calls it "warmongering" to push back agst Putin, he should step down -- that's not German policy. https://t.co/4V2iLCYvtx

— Stephen Sestanovich (@SSestanovich) June 18, 2016

As for the unprecedented reality in which NATO's biggest and most important European member is suddenly and quite vocally against NATO and as a result may be pivoting toward Russian, we for one can't wait to see just how this shocking geopolitical debacle for western neocons and war hawks concludes.

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"You Are Living Through The Dumbest Monetary Experimental Endgame In History..."

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Submitted by Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk via Bawerk.net,

We have seen several explanations for the financial crisis and its lingering effects depressing our global economy in its aftermath. Some are plain stupid, such as greed for some reason suddenly overwhelmed people working within finance, as if people in finance were not greedy before 2007. Others try to explain it through “liberalisation” which is almost just as nonsensical as government regulators never liberalised anything, but rather allowed fraud, in polite company called fractional reserve banking, to grow unrestrained. Some point to excess savings in exporting countries as the culprit behind our misery. Excess saving forces less frugal countries reluctantly to run deficits, or so the argument goes.

While some theories are pure folly, others are partial right, but none seem to grasp the fundamental factor that pulled and keep pulling the world into such unsustainable constellations witnessed in global finance, trade and capital allocation.

Whenever we try to explain the reasons behind the crisis, such as the build-up in non-productive and counterproductive debt (see here, here and here for more details) people ask us why did this happened now, and not earlier? It is a fair question that we have thought about and believe have one simple answer. Bottom line, the world economy is running on a system with no natural correcting mechanisms.

As we are never tired of pointing out, the Soviet Union only had one recession, the one in 1989. The system was stable, until it was not. A system that does not correct internal imbalances grows just like a parasitic cancer, eventually killing its host. If unsustainable capital allocations are allowed to continue unchecked, the pool of real savings will at some point be depleted. At that point recession hits because the structure of production is too capital intensive relative to the level of real saving available. A quick look at US saving and investment rates since the 1950s confirms what we all know to be true; saving and investments are not keeping up with GDP growth. That the trend broke after Nixon took the dollar of gold in 1971 is not a coincidence. Real funding for economic activity were slowly substituted from proper saving towards “forced” saving through fiat money expansion.

The inevitable result from such a policy has been the massive increase in debt and drop in the US balance versus the rest of the world. No matter what political leaning the country had, debt kept on rising and its mirror image, the current account balance, kept on falling. The US mortgaged their future to foreigners willing to fund this consumption spree. No one seemed to care that the US did not build up a productive capital base that could service all this debt in the future. The US, issuer of the world reserve currency, was good as gold. At least that was what the world assumed, and surprisingly enough still do.

So what does this have to do with a world in economic crisis? A dollar standard, with 100 per cent flexibility, led the US to emit dollar into the global economy at an increasing pace. Past follies occasionally caught up with the monetary masters in the Eccles building, which had the power to literally paper over them with bouts of new dollar emissions. The global economy was, and is, essentially running on a dollar standard and the Federal Reserve of the United States increasingly became the central bank of the world. A setback in global trade would affect all parties involved, and the transmitter were the US dollar. A contraction in dollar claims as created by the world’s banking system had the ability to derail the whole global system. The ebb and flow of US dollar denominated credit gradually morphed into the global economy. The Federal Reserve had to secure dollar liquidity to the global banking system, no matter where the bank were domiciled.

But therein lies the rub; by constantly bailing out unproductive business ventures the global system kept on toward the economic cliff. Financial imbalances, as shown clearly in the chart below, never corrected itself. Surplus countries kept on with surpluses while deficit countries maintained their deficits. Year after year.

A free market system would correct these imbalances long before they became a danger to the system. A fully flexible dollar standard, concocted on Keynesian principles, whereby demand does actually create its own supply (dollar reserve demand will always be met with additional supply, worldwide, as anything else leads to crisis) on the other hand will not perform this most fundamental task.

With the Federal Reserve suppressing any natural correction mechanism, the global economic system has been moulded into a perversion. A perversion that simply cannot be allowed its natural course because its legacy of capital misallocation would be too much to bear.

Of course, if it is not sustainable it will not continue ad infinitum. Our money masters are just postponing the inevitable bust that will eventually correct these imbalances through worldwide capital re-allocation. This earthquake of an economic downturn has been building tensions for so long that the consequences will be mass unemployment and financial losses like never seen before. Political upheaval and social unrest undoubtedly follows.

Federal Reserve parlour tricks that used to work when saving rates where high(er) and financial wealth more uniformly distributed will, to the amazement of today’s pundits, stop working. Moving capital and wealth from the poor to the rich, through inflationary depressing wages and boosting asset values, is a tax policy with rapid diminishing marginal returns, as witnessed by ever-larger amount of debt it takes to create GDP growth.

We are actually living through the end-game of the greatest Keynesian monetary experiment as we type. It was one hell of a party while it lasted, but the hangover is now over us.

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Mortgage Companies Seek Time Travelers to Find Missing Documents

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Recruiters are hiring for a job that shouldn’t exist: finding “missing” documents required to “complete” broken chains of title on mortgages entering foreclosure.

Since all assignments of mortgage should have been prepared and recorded within days of the transfer or sale — and the failure to do so irreparably ruptures chain of title — the companies would seem to be looking for time travelers or magicians.

Or maybe they want to manufacture false evidence to introduce into courts as a means to take away people’s homes.

Without a chain of title documenting the sequence of historical transfers of title to a property, foreclosure proceedings cannot continue in a legal fashion. 

Alluvion Staffing, a recruiting firm from Jacksonville, Florida, posted a listing on Career Builder for a “Default Breach Specialist” for an unnamed mortgage company, who would be tasked with locating “missing assignments needed to complete the chain of title prior to foreclosure referral.” The ad follows a separate search from Select Portfolio Servicing, a Utah-based mortgage servicer, for someone to “provide assistance in demonstrating the Investor has the appropriate legal authority to initiate actions through a complete Chain of Title.”

As I detailed in my book Chain of Title, the various companies packaging loans during the housing bubble routinely failed to follow the precise steps to transfer mortgages into the tax-preferred trusts used to create mortgage-backed securities.

For the most part, these breaches cannot be reversed, because the governing securitization documents, known as pooling and servicing agreements, specified a time limit for conveying mortgages into trusts.

Regardless of this rigid deadline, mortgage companies hired third parties to mock up after-the-fact documents, making it look like they held an unbroken chain of title and had the ability to foreclose. The obvious fabrications have been challenged in court numerous times, and were the focus of a national settlement with leading mortgage servicing companies in 2012.

However, the focus of the settlement — false documents submitted to courts in foreclosure cases — continues to this day.

The multiple job listings for specialists to fix broken chains of title only confirms that nothing has changed in the industry. No mortgage company would require a chain of title specialist if the documents needed to foreclose existed.

It’s possible the missing documents merely need to be located. But the presence of an entire industry of third-party “default services” companies that recreate mortgage assignments suggests that this isn’t a case of lost-and-found. Last September, one such third party, Security Connections of Idaho Falls, Idaho, was caught soliciting individuals to forge mortgage documents.

The Alluvion Staffing advertisement says the Default Breach Specialist must maintain a caseload of delinquent loans “to ensure timely preparation, execution and/or recordation of all needed assignments prior to foreclosure referral.” Alluvion adds that two years of mortgage default servicing and a high school diploma are required for the job, with “college education a plus.”

Select Portfolio Servicing’s job listing seeks individuals who can “facilitate document requests in a timely manner,” while exhibiting a “comprehensive understanding of proving up all Chain of Title requirements.”

The qualified applicant would have document-processing experience, proficiency in Microsoft Word and Excel, and mysteriously, the “ability to lift boxes weighing 25 lbs.” The company does not specify a pay range. Company officials could not be reached for comment.

Over 6.2 million families have lost their homes to foreclosure since the financial crisis began in September 2008, according to a report Monday from CoreLogic. It is not known how many of those foreclosures were executed with false documents. But we do know that the failure to follow longstanding property records laws in securitization contracts was so systemic that eight years later, special teams of chain of title specialists must be hired to make the problem vanish.

Michael Redman of the recently restarted 4closurefraud.org blog found the initial listing from Select Portfolio Servicing. Foreclosure defense attorney April Charney sent the Alluvion Staffing listing.

Sign up for The Intercept Newsletter here.

The post Mortgage Companies Seek Time Travelers to Find Missing Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

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Rio Declares State Of "Public Calamity", Warns Of Total Collapse In Security, Health And Transport

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Earlier today, the IAAF announced that Russian track and field athletes would be banned from the Rio Oympics due to allegations of systematic doping. Rune Andersen, who heads the IAAF task force overseeing Russia's attempts to reform, said that a "deep-seated culture of tolerance, or worse, appears not to be materially changed". "No athlete will compete in Rio under a Russian flag," he said.

Perhaps instead of fighting this decision, Putin's response should be a simple "thanks" because just hours later, and just 49 days before the start of the Olympics, the Rio state government declared a state of "public calamity" (yes, that's the technical term) warning of a risk of total collapse in public security, health, transport and virtually everything else, because as the local government explained, the financial crisis is preventing it from fulfilling its requirements for the Games.

'State of calamity' decreed in Rio; the state is broke. #Rio2016 #Brazil pic.twitter.com/nJen4WTiQd

— juliana barbassa (@jbarbassa) June 17, 2016

In other words, the money is gone... all gone, and as we jokingly predicted some time ago, as a result of the ongoing economic and now political catastrophe in the country, the 2016 Oympics may never even happen in the country gripped by what may be the worst depression in its history. Oh, and then the whole Zika thing.

As Bruce Douglas adds, the Rio state government fears "total collapse in public security, health, education, mobility, education, environment" due to financial crisis, and that Rio de Janeiro "will adopt exceptional necessary measures to rationalize all public services, with the aim of realizing the [Olympic] Games."

It was not clear what would happen if the rationalization fails. Finally, by declaring a state of public calamity, the state government of Rio de Janeiro aims to get access to federal cash.

The question is whether there is any left.

And then, on the background of this dire assessment, some humor:

I would like to ask the Rio de Janeiro state government what exactly declaring a state of public calamity means, but website's down #Rio2016

— Bruce Douglas (@bruceecurb) June 17, 2016

 

The silver lining: no matter how bad Brazil's economy gets, it will always remain rich in natural resources

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Read This Before The Government Uses the Orlando Shooting to Start Another War

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(ANTIMEDIA) Late Thursday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported, 51 State Department officials signed a statement condemning U.S. policy in Syria in which they repeatedly call for “targeted military strikes against the Damascus government and urging regime change as the only way to defeat Islamic State.”

“In other words,” as Zero Hedge summarized, “over 50 top ‘diplomats’ are urging to eliminate [Syrian Pres. Bashar al] Assad in order to ‘defeat ISIS’, the same ISIS which top US ‘diplomats’ had unleashed previously in order to … eliminate Assad.”

This gordian knot created by United States foreign policy — and intensified by that same policy — means not only could war with Syria be on the horizon, but if that happens, the U.S. could be facing a far more serious threat.

While discontented officials used what’s known as the “Dissent Channel” — “an official forum that allows employees to express opposing views,” State Department spokesman John Kirby explained in the WSJ — Saudi government officials employed more direct means to press their interests with the U.S. in Syria.

In a meeting with President Obama on Friday, Saudi foreign minister Adel al Jubair asserted, “Saudi Arabia supports a more aggressive military approach in Syria to get Assad to agree to a political solution,” as CBS’ Mark Knoller tweeted.

al Jubeir says Saudi Arabia advocates release of 28 classified pages on 9/11 attacks so his country can respond to “any allegations.”

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) June 17, 2016

Of course, this meeting and the push for increased military force couldn’t be more timely to drum up public support, as a heated national debate has ensued following the deadly attack on an Orlando nightclub purportedly carried out by Omar Mateen — who pledged loyalty to ISIS as he killed 49 people and wounded over 50 others.

Despite the CIA’s report acknowledging it found no tangible connections between Mateen and the so-called Islamic state — also released on Friday — the narrative concerning his ISIS ties saturated mainstream headlines for days, almost certainly cementing the link in the public’s mind.

Disgruntled politicians eager to overthrow Assad — thus also carrying out Saudi goals — can now facilely flip the script to assert deposing the Syrian government is necessary in the fight against everyone’s enemy, the Islamic State.

“Failure to stem Assad’s flagrant abuses will only bolster the ideological appeal of groups such as Daesh [ISIS, etc.], even as they endure tactical setbacks on the battlefield,” the WSJ reported the dissenting cable stated.

But concerns about bloating ISIS’ following borders on comical, except for the potential waterfall of repercussions from carrying out targeted strikes on the Syrian government, considering the U.S. government, itself, once expressed the desire for the rise of an Islamic State to aid in the overthrow of — you guessed it — Assad.

According to declassified documents obtained by Judicial Watch last year:

“If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

Former Director of National Intelligence and retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, however, spoke to Al Jazeera about this ill-fated, notorious strategical blunder.

“You’re on record as saying that the handling of Syria by this administration has been a mistake. Many people would argue that the U.S. actually saw the rise of ISIL coming and turned a blind eye, or even encouraged as a counterpoint to Assad,” journalist Mehdi Hasan prefaced his query, adding, “The U.S. saw the ISIL caliphate coming and did nothing.”

Flynn responded, “Yeah, I think that we — where we missed the point. I mean, where we totally blew it, I think, was in the very beginning.”

Besides backing and blessings from the Saudi government for aggression on the Syrian front, dissent among U.S. officials couldn’t be more imperative in their eyes, because, as the WSJ reported:

“The internal cable may be an attempt to shape the foreign policy outlook for the next administration, the official familiar with the document said. President Barack Obama has balked at taking military action against Mr. Assad, while the Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton has promised a more hawkish stance against the Syrian leader. Republican candidate Donald Trump has said he would hit Islamic State hard but has also said he would be prepared to work with Russia and Syria.”

In fact, as Zero Hedge also noted, an albeit contested report from earlier this week claimed Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made comments including “a claim that Riyadh has provided 20 percent of the total funding to” Clinton’s campaign.

Politicians and officials, in other words, are fast aligning a narrative touting the need to wage war with Syria in order to have it carried out by the candidate they assume will next take the White House.

And despite being a risky move in its own right — not to mention a potentially superficial, if not muddying, solution to an almost solely U.S.-created problem — ramping up military airstrikes in Syria could quite literally spark war with Russia.

“The Russian Air Force bombed U.S.-trained rebels in southern Syria not once, but twice Thursday, and the second wave of attacks came after the U.S. military called Russia on an emergency hotline to demand that it stop,” an unnamed defense official with knowledge of the situation told Fox News.

Russia has repeatedly warned against U.S. moves to oust Assad, which President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, reiterated following the tense situation Thursday and the report calling for increased military targeting of the Syrian government saying, it “wouldn’t help a successful fight against terrorism and could plunge the region into total chaos.”

As recently as February, Saudi Arabia proposed sending its own troops to join the fight against ISIS — which Russia wholly condemned. As head of the State Duma committee, Pavel Krasheninnikov, warned, “Syria has to give official consent, to invite, otherwise it will be a war.”

Now, it appears, that war might be closer than ever.

Syria doesn’t constitute the only arena of contention between the U.S. and Russia. As Anti-Media reported this week, continued buildup of NATO forces along the old Cold War foe’s borders in the Balkans and Poland — and particularly also in the Black Sea — has provoked Russia sufficiently enough for officials to caution the move might amount to aggression.

“This is not NATO’s maritime space and it has no relation to the alliance,” Russia’s director of European affairs told Interfax.

Nonetheless, the U.S. and E.U. have proffered a policy whereby defense of its installations on foreign soil is being carried out under the cloak of the NATO alliance — possibly with the intent of posturing dominance in the region to create a buffer zone for operations in Syria.

Pipelines through Syria would specifically allow oil and natural gas to flow to the European Union, which currently sources that fuel primarily from Russia. In other words, if Russia wants to defend its profitable relationship with the E.U., it must defend against the U.S.-led, Saudi-supported overthrow of its Syrian ally, Assad.

Meanwhile, civilians in Syria have been treated like cannon fodder and are fleeing for their lives — but the intensifying geopolitical maneuvers appear more likely than ever to have brought us all to the brink of a third world war.

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This article (Read This Before The Government Uses the Orlando Shooting to Start Another War) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

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EXPOSED: Leaked Emails Show DNC Colluded with Media to Push Clinton Nomination

TWA 800: Breaking -- Air Traffic Controller Tells All

“TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy guided missile ship which was in area W-105. It has been a cover-up from the word go.”

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/twa_800_breaking__air_traffic_controller_tells_all.html#ixzz4BjrR3TIC 
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Senator: Red Cross Misled Congress, Refused To ‘Level With the People’ on Haiti Money

ORIGINAL LINK

by Justin Elliott, ProPublica, and Laura Sullivan, NPR,

This story was co-published with NPR.

A blistering Senate report on the American Red Cross raises fundamental questions about the integrity of the country’s most storied charity and its stewardship of donors’ dollars.

The report, which was released today by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and contains nearly 300 pages of supporting documents, found:

• After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross spent tens of millions of dollars more than it has previously acknowledged on internal expenses. The Red Cross told Grassley that the money was largely spent on oversight to make sure the Haiti aid was used properly. But Grassley’s office found that the charity “is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred."
• Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern made false statements to Grassley’s office about whether the charity cooperated with congressional investigators.
• McGovern and her subordinates have kept the charity’s own internal investigations and ethics unit “severely undermanned and underfunded.” The charity is “reluctant to support the very unit that is designed to police wrongdoing within the organization.”

There are “substantial and fundamental concerns about (the Red Cross) as an organization,” the report concludes.

In an interview about the report, Grassley said that even after a year of back-and-forth with the Red Cross, “we did not get satisfactory answers. It was like pulling teeth.”

Grassley launched his investigation following stories by ProPublica and NPR on Red Cross failures in providing disaster relief, including after the Haiti earthquake. The group raised nearly half a billion dollars after the disaster, more than any other nonprofit. But our reporting found that, for example, an ambitious plan to build housing resulted in just six permanent homes.

Red Cross officials, including McGovern, have repeatedly told the public that the charity retains 9 percent of donations to cover management and administrative costs. But Grassley found that a full 25 percent of donations — or around $125 million — were spent on fundraising and management, a contingency fund, and a vague, catchall category the Red Cross calls “program costs.”

On top of that 25 percent, the Red Cross sent the bulk of the donated money to other nonprofits to do the work on the ground. Those other nonprofits then took their own cuts for overhead costs — as much as 11 percent.

Over a year of written exchanges with Grassley’s staff, the Red Cross repeatedly revised its figures for the same projects.

“The most important thing (from the report) is an unwillingness to level with the people about exactly where the money went,” Grassley said in the interview. ”There’s too many questions in regard to how the money was spent in Haiti that it gives me cause to wonder about money being donated for other national disasters.”

“One of the reasons they don’t want to answer the questions is it’s very embarrassing,” Grassley added.

In a statement, the Red Cross said that while it has not yet seen the senator’s report, the charity and McGovern have been transparent, and donors’ money was properly spent. The statement says the costs of the projects are “entirely justifiable given the size and complexity of the Haiti program, the scale of the destruction and the challenging and sometimes dangerous conditions of working in Haiti.”

The Red Cross was created by congressional charter more than a century ago, and receives a range of special benefits from the government.

Here are more details from the report:

The Red Cross wasn’t able to detail how tens of millions of dollars were spent

On a page recently added to its website, the Red Cross says the so-called program costs for Haiti — roughly $70 million — went to “monitoring the use of donations, informing donors about how their money has been spent, paying skilled staff members to carry out the work, renting secure office space, and ensuring that dollars are leveraged as far as possible.”

But pressed by Grassley’s investigators, the Red Cross could not give an accounting of the oversight it says it did with the money. After repeated requests by Grassley’s investigators over the course of months, the Red Cross finally last month produced a document with a narrative description of oversight but no financial details.

In general, the Red Cross itself doesn’t know how much money it spent on each project in Haiti because of a “complex, yet inaccurate” accounting system, the report found.

More of Our Red Cross Reporting

ProPublica is covering how one of the country’s most venerated charities has failed disaster victims, broken promises and made dubious claims of success.

The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster

After Superstorm Sandy, Americans opened their wallets to the Red Cross. They trusted the charity and believed it was up to the job. They were wrong. Read the story.

How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Built Six Homes

Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures. Read the story.

The Corporate Takeover of the Red Cross

Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern, who was hired to revitalize the charity, has cut hundreds of chapters and thousands of employees. Read the story.

See the full series.

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The report echoes confidential findings made by consultants hired by the Red Cross, which were previously reported by ProPublica and NPR. An internal evaluation of one of the group’s water and sanitation projects found there was “no correct process for monitoring project spending.” Another assessment found that the group’s figures on how many people helped in a hygiene project were “fairly meaningless.”

In response to Grassley’s investigation, the Red Cross for the first time posted online a list of specific projects in Haiti. But the accounting on the list, along with other materials provided to Grassley, raises more questions than it answers.

Documents provided by the Red Cross to Grassley show that the charity at times spent large sums of money on management even when it appeared to be simply writing a check to other organizations that were doing actual projects.

In 2010, the Red Cross gave $4.3 million to its sister organization, the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) for disaster preparedness work. On top of the $4.3 million, according to budget figures the charity provided Grassley, the American Red Cross spent another $2 million on its own — to “manage” granting money to another organization.

The IFRC then took out its own overhead and administrative costs before using the money to help Haitians.

When asked why the Red Cross needed $2 million dollars to give money to its sister organization, the group said in its statement the costs were “incurred to ensure accountability, monitoring and evaluation of work performed and ensure our partners meet their contractual requirements.”

The Red Cross added that “Implementing a tracking system by project would take a lot of time and would be a waste of donor dollars that could be better spent on delivering services.”

CEO Gail McGovern and her aides tried to stymie congressional oversight — and then made false statements about it

In 2014, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., of the House Homeland Security Committee asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the Red Cross’ disaster services, in part because of problems in its response to Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

McGovern recently told Grassley’s investigators that the Red Cross “gave [the GAO] everything that they asked for.”

That statement was untrue, according to the report: “This is contrary to the documentary evidence of communications between GAO and [the Red Cross].”

The Red Cross, the committee found, “failed to provide to GAO a substantial volume of requested material.”

The report lists eight examples of things the Red Cross declined to provide to government investigators. They range from descriptions of the charity’s internal oversight processes to interviews with chapter officials involved in the response to Superstorm Sandy.

In its statement to ProPublica and NPR, the group doubled-down on McGovern’s earlier assertion: “At no point did the Red Cross refuse to provide requested information.”

Sen. Charles Grassley. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

McGovern has publicly portrayed the Red Cross as a beacon of openness. “We made a commitment that we want to lead the effort in transparency," she said at the National Press Club in 2011. But Grassley’s report notes that, as ProPublica revealed last year, McGovern had tried outright to kill the GAO investigation.

Grassley’s report found that while the Red Cross couldn’t kill the investigation, it “was able to limit the scope of the GAO’s inquiry."

In meetings and email correspondence over the course of several months, Red Cross General Counsel David Meltzer questioned GAO’s legal authority to look at the Red Cross.

The Red Cross argued that investigators’ “requests for internal decision-making, internal oversight, and internal funding allocation are outside of GAO’s authority,” according to a GAO’s account included in Grassley’s report.

The negotiations reached an almost absurd denouement when the American Red Cross — or ARC — presented a hypothetical about why handing out blankets would not be subject to federal oversight.

As Grassley’s report puts it:

In a September 26, 2014 follow up phone call with GAO, ARC elaborated on its position and provided an example to provide additional clarity: if ARC is in the coordination tent with FEMA and a need for blankets is identified, and ARC has blankets to dispense, the implementation of the delivery of the blankets is outside the scope of federal involvement, but the conversation in the tent is within the scope of federal involvement. At the end of the September 26, 2014, conversation, GAO notes of that conversation state that ARC did not want “to open the door to a long, endless GAO review,” particularly on internal oversight.

As Grassley’s report notes, the Red Cross’ congressional charter explicitly gives the GAO the authority to scrutinize the group.

The Red Cross undercut its own ethics unit

The Red Cross has about 20,000 employees. But its ethics office, which investigates waste, fraud, and abuse, is composed of just three people, according to the Grassley report. That’s down from roughly 65 staffers a decade ago.

One of the three remaining employees, the “compliance coordinator,” does intake of phone calls and does not do investigations. Another, the chief investigator, is based in New York, away from Red Cross headquarters in Washington.

Requests by the head of the unit, Teala Brewer, for more staff have gone unfulfilled by the general counsel, Meltzer, according to the report.

The report concludes that the Office of Investigations, Compliance, and Ethics was left so under-resourced that it is “unable to perform its primary function; namely, to perform investigations, ensure compliance, and maintain ethical standards.”

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EXPLAIN THIS: Google Search Engine Picked-Up ORLANDO ATTACK News Story 6 HOURS BEFORE attack took place!

ORIGINAL LINK

Why would someone murder 49 people in a false flag attack to blame someone else?  Politics. Mass-Murders make a good excuse for gun control.  The Obama Administration is obsessed with gun control.  Would they actually concoct a mass murder to achieve their goals?

from Super Station 95:

The Google news search engine picked-up a Chicago Sun-Times Network article about the attack at an Orlando nightclub 6 hours BEFORE the attack took place!  The attack occurred around 2:00 AM eastern US time on Sunday, June 12.

But the Chicago Sun-Times Network has the following story about the attack, dated 06/11/2016, 08:00PM (Double Click Image to enlarge):

How could the Sun-Times Network write a story about an attack which had not taken place yet? The simplest answer is that someone at the Sun-Times Network knew about the attack in advance.

How did someone at the Sun-Times Network know there was going to be an attack at the Pulse nightclub?  The simplest answer: The attack was planned by someone other than the guy being blamed.  Unless, of course, there is some type of mistake in the time-stamp on the Sun-Times Network article.  So, we checked that possibility.

Not Just the Sun-Times, Google Too!

Google’s news system is totally automated.  It checks thousands of news sites dozens of times a day automatically, and creates a link within Google to news articles, then applies a Google time stamp when the story is acquired by Google (not when the story shows it was published).  Google’s news system shows that Google picked-up that story BEFORE the attack took place!

The attack took place starting around 2:00 AM eastern US time on Sunday,June 12 and this article (that you’re reading right this second) was written around Midnight on June 14 into 15.  From June 15, going back four days, is June 11 . . . . BEFORE the attack took place.  Below is the screenshot of the Google search engine results obtained by SuperStation95 around Midnight on June 14 into 15 showing that Google got the article “4 Days Ago” which would be June 11 . . . . BEFORE the attack took place (Double click the image to enlarge):

Read More @ SuperStation95.com

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Is Science Bullsh*t? John Oliver Explains The Corruption Behind Scientific Studies

ORIGINAL LINK

Everyday we are flooded with tons of scientific studies. On morning talk shows, social media sites and late night news. If it ever seemed to you that there is a scientific study for absolutely anything, well it’s because there pretty much is.

I don’t know how many times I’ve come across a study that proves one thing and then another that is able to prove the exact opposite. How are we ever expected to find out the truth and differentiate the facts from the bullshit?

In this case, we are not saying science as in the method is necessarily BS, but more so the way the community operates.

Reasons For Misleading Studies

On factor at play here, is the fact that often scientists, straight up. are paid to publish specific studies with specific outcomes based on the vested interests that are funding the studies. Basically, if a company wants a certain result, a scientist will be paid to find that specific outcome by any means necessary -even if the legitimacy and integrity of the study is essentially thrown out the window.

As Brian Nosek, a doctor working for the Center for Open Science, explained the motivations which lead scientists to forward misleading claims:

“My success as a scientist depends on me publishing my findings. And I need to publish as frequently as possible in the most prestigious outlets that I can.”

Scientists also want to be able to publish their research in order to gain success and respect. Unfortunately, this comes at any means possible. When you think about it, people generally don’t care or bother to read studies that weren’t successful, so that does little to help a scientist gain any sort of recognition.

This sort of pre-determined based outcome is often proved by a method known as P-Hacking. This process involves collecting a large amount of variables and then tinkering with the data until you are able to find something that counts as statistically significant, but could essentially be completely meaningless.

So finding a way to make the pre-determined outcome of the study look as if that conclusion came about from a real scientific method of evaluation. This can be achieved by using only a very small sample size of subjects, relying on studies only performed on mice or rats to conclude ‘proof’ of something in relation to humans, and the manipulation of data altogether, whether it’s included, excluded or re-arranged oto support the presupposition of any scientist.

One of the biggest reasons that scientists get away with this fraudulent method so often, is because so many regular people who hear about a study, by reading a headline or watching the news, don’t bother to look into the details of the it to find out for themselves whether a legitimate method was used or not, and these studies are almost never replicated.

Scientists do not get paid to replicate studies so unfortunately, many claims are made and taken at face-value, but in reality if many of these studies were re-done in the exact same manner, a different outcome altogether might emerge. Are you more likely to believe a study that was conducted once, or a study that was conducted multiple times with different variables and a wider range?

Also, if a study tells you that drinking champagne or eating junk food is good for you, are you more likely to do it in the future because science told you its okay?

The problem is, generally we just accept what is handed to us. It is because of this that scientists can just continue performing these studies in this way without any criticism or backlash from the public. Surely if science says blank, it must be true? So the scientists who are publishing these often fraudulent studies are receiving praise instead of backlash.

John Oliver goes into this whole charade in great detail in the video below.

Video: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver

As John Oliver points out, this whole process can actually be dangerous because it means that we are being duped into believing that certain things are healthy for us when they actually aren’t and while other things could be good for us, like exercise, we may opt for drinking a glass of red wine instead -this is pure madness when you think about it and it’s entirely unfair. It means that corporations who have the most money will always be able to get the results they want, no matter what the truth in the matter is. This is entirely unfair even for people who actually bother to do the research. This just means there is little funding for scientists to perform and publish studies without compromising integrity as they are being overshadowed by big, bold, misleading headlines.

How To Navigate Through The Bullshit

Luckily, although it can be difficult there are a few things you can do to help separate fact from fraudulent, so you can more easily be able to find out the truth about important issues, especially when it comes to your health.

As a writer for Collective Evolution it can be quite challenging at times, there are many people who won’t even consider a study, albeit scientific that is made because the study at hand is not peer-reviewed. It seems as though many colleges and universities are teaching that if something is not peer-reviewed then it is not scientifically sound and should not be trusted as a credible source. This is simply not true, there are many independent studies that are conducted that do not have the funding to be properly peer-reviewed mainly because they don’t have the support of the big corporations behind them with the vested interests of the outcome of the study. What does peer-reviewed mean anyways, well quite frankly, literally that peer-reviewed or reviewed by peers.

• First things first, find out if possible, who is funding the study.
• Look at their method of testing
• Look at the amount of subjects tested
• Were the subjects humans
• What was the duration of the study
• Does the study even match up with the headline or title?
• Was the study a double-blind study?
• Has the study been replicated with the same results?
• Use critical thinking

That last point is very important, if something sounds completely too good to be true, then it probably is. use your head, don;t just believe hat is more appealing to you, be smart about what you read, don;t take anything at face-value, and most importantly, question everything.

Much Love

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Sugar Identified As Top Cause For Obesity & Cancer Surge

ORIGINAL LINK

It seems incredibly hard to avoid sugar these days, with so many processed foods containing some form of it. But as research continues to unravel how our modern world’s food supply harms our well-being, there seems to be a dire emphasis on sugar as one of the main culprits for diseases.

The Credit Suisse Research Institute’s 2013 study concluded that as much as 40 percent of US healthcare expenditures are for diseases directly connected to the overconsumption of sugar. And more than $1 trillion is spent each year to fight the harmful health effects of sugar. Sugar and obesity are also linked to an increased risk of cancer, with obesity estimated to be responsible for 500,000 cancer cases worldwide each year.

How Sugar And Obesity Cause Cancer

Because sugar is not our body’s ideal fuel, it promotes more reactive oxygen species than fat, causing more free radicals, which then causes mitochondrial and nuclear DNA damage along with cell membrane and protein impairment.

Chronic overeating has also been found to generate a similar effect, as it places stress on endoplasmic reticulum, which is the membranous network located inside the mitochondria of the body’s cells. Because the ER can only handle a certain amount of nutrients at a time, an excess amount causes it to signal the cell to dampen the sensitivity of the insulin receptors on the surface of the cell. This causes insulin resistance, which is at the core of many chronic diseases, including cancer.

High-Fructose Corn Syrup Primary And Cancer

Obesity often results from over-consumption of refined fructose/sugar and not enough intermittent fasting. It can lead to chronic inflammation and an elevated production of certain hormones like estrogen, which can cause breast cancer.

Research from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has shown that refined sugar can not only increase your chances of breast cancer, but also raise your risk of tumors spreading to other organs. It also found that refined fructose in high-fructose corn syrup was the primary culprit for the breast tumors and metastasis. 

High-fructose corn syrup is found in most processed foods and beverages.

Give Up Sugar To Avoid Cancer

The worldwide cancer epidemic is alarming, but one of the most powerful ways we can avoid and/or treat cancer is to stay away from sugar, as without it, cancer cannot thrive. This is because cancer’s food source is primarily sugar and excessive protein.

Cancer cells do not have the metabolic flexibility to burn carbs or fat for fuel, and can only survive with enough sugar. While German cancer researcher Dr. Otto Warburg discovered this in 1931, for which he was given a Nobel Prize, few experts have embraced this theory.

The best way to cut back on sugar and fructose consumption is pretty straightforward: switch to REAL foods. Not only will you get more nutritional value out of them, but you’ll cut your chances of sugar overload, obesity, and cancer as well.

It’s also best to cut back on the amount of sugar you add to your food and drink. You can opt for alternatives like stevia or luo han instead of sugar and/or artificial sweeteners. Also try adding fresh fruit to recipes and meals, as well as spices like cinnamon to your food and drink, instead of adding sugar.

The U.S. Government’s Role In Sugar Consumption

Despite the fact that sugar alone causes so many health problems and contributes so much national expense, U.S. regulators don’t encourage lower sugar consumption.

Both the sugar and corn industry are heavily subsidized by taxpayers. In fact, The Washington Post noted:

The [sugar] industry used to boast that its government protection does not cost taxpayers anything directly, but that claim has been exploded due to recent market developments that forced the federal government to, in effect, buy up tons and tons of sugar and sell it to ethanol refiners at a loss — so as to prop up prices. Taxpayers took a hit of some $258 million in fiscal 2014.

Cancer Screenings May Not Be The Best Prevention

While cancer screening is conventionally touted as being a necessary part of cancer prevention, researchers are now questioning the validity of this, saying the public service announcements that claim “cancer screening saves lives” are more misleading than truthful.

As Newsweek reported:

The problem, they say, is that the ubiquitous adage is based on the fact that deaths from the target disease may decline but fails to take into account deaths linked to factors related to the screening itself. Sure, screening for prostate cancer might reduce the incidence of death from that specific disease, but does it reduce overall mortality for the person who got the screening? Maybe not.

For example, prostate cancer screening is known to return ‘numerous’ false positives . . . and contributes to over 1 million prostate biopsies a year. The procedure is ‘associated with serious harms, including admission to hospital and death.’ What’s more, men diagnosed with prostate cancer are ‘more likely to have a heart attack or commit suicide in the year after diagnosis’ . . . In both cases, the deaths aren’t due to the cancer itself but rather are linked to the screening.

Additional Lifestyle Tips

Make sure you’re always eating real food and avoiding processed foods and sugars, especially fructose. You should reduce non-fiber carbs and instead have large volumes of fresh, organic vegetables and fats from high-quality sources like avocados, seeds, nuts, and raw cacao nibs. Also make sure to get enough exercise, as it increases mitochondrial biogenesis, which is essential to fight cancer. Other things to consider are fasting three hours before bed, optimizing your Vitamin D intake, steering clear of BPA, phthalates, and other xenoestrogens, maintaining a healthy weight, limiting your protein intake, and avoiding drinking too much alcohol.

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My Lunch With Hillary

ORIGINAL LINK

I had lunch with Hillary Clinton.

Really.

I was on vacation on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, at a hotel that's a mixture of villas-for-rent that stand right next to big houses owned by rich Americans.

One day, several black SUVs arrived—men in suits wearing earpieces got out. I asked another tourist, "What's that about?"

"Bill and Hillary Clinton may stay here," he said.

Another tourist said, "That's just a rumor." But a few days later, Secret Service men surrounded a big house owned by Black Entertainment Television billionaire Bob Johnson. He's a big Clinton supporter. It was clear that the former president had arrived.

We then wondered, "Are both Bill and Hillary here?"

This was 2006, five years after Bill left office, 10 years after his affairs with Monica Lewinsky and others had been revealed. Pundits said the Clintons had a "political marriage"—that they didn't actually live together.

So we tourists asked, "Is it Bill with someone else?"

We got our answer quickly. There were the former president and first lady, strolling down our beach. "Holding hands!" gasped a tourist. "Is it just for show?" Who knows? But they certainly acted as if they liked each other.

So my brother-in-law invited them to lunch.

Why did he think they might accept? Because he's a successful investor who, years before, squandered money on a group called the Democratic Leadership Council. Its goal was to bring Democrats back to centrist economics.

The Clintons had convinced him that they were "responsible" Democrats (sometimes Bill was). So, by donating money, my brother-in-law helped Bill Clinton become president.

Donating money: That gets the Clintons' attention. Our lunch invitation was quickly accepted. Of course, they didn't know that I would be there.

I sat next to Hillary Clinton. She was very friendly—for a while.

Being a provocateur, I brought up a local controversy: Some Chinese workers were sleeping in old shipping containers, four to a container. They had moved to Anguilla to help build hotels.

"This is why we need regulation!" she told me.

I pointed out that the workers weren't slaves. They'd come to Anguilla only because their alternatives in China must have been significantly worse.

Of course, the housing the Chinese workers inhabited wasn't up to American standards, but the standards Clinton wants would raise costs. That would eliminate opportunities. Some of those workers might never have gotten the chance to leave China and better their lives. Our well-intended rules often create nasty, unintended consequences.

For example, after Western media complained that Bangladeshi workers were abused in "sweatshops," many of those businesses closed. "Good!" said the media. "We stopped the abuse!" But then Oxfam researchers discovered that many of those now unemployed workers were begging for food on the streets. Some became prostitutes.

Clinton replied, "I heard about that study, but most regulation improves living conditions: zoning rules, affirmative action, licensing, minimum wage..."

I responded, "Well, I'm a libertarian and ..."

"I know who you are!" she interrupted. We were off. I give her credit: She argued with me for half an hour. Finally, she'd had enough. She just ignored me for the rest of the meal.

Clinton's wish to regulate workers' sleeping arrangements is a symptom of "lawyers' disease." Like most politicians, she assumes problems are best solved with new rules. She doesn't notice that most new rules create new problems. Worse problems. Problems that often take away opportunity altogether.

I don't want to live in a shipping container. But when politicians say "no one" may, they prevent desperate people from improving their lives.

America's settlers lived in one-room homes made of sticks and mud. Should that have been banned?

In China, millions try to live on a buck or two a day. Because Anguilla did not have Clinton-level housing regulation, some moved to Anguilla, where they can live cheaply and start businesses. Many now run grocery stores. Their lives are immeasurably better.

This is how life progresses, if politicians don't constantly interfere.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton is eager to interfere.

COPYRIGHT 2016 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

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Fascism: A Bipartisan Affliction

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

If neoconservatives and progressives truly understood fascism, they would stop using the word as a smear term. That is because both groups, along with most political figures and commentators, embrace fascist ideas and policies.

Fascism’s distinguishing characteristic is a “mixed economy.” Unlike socialists and communists who seek to abolish private business, fascists are content to let business remain in private hands. Instead, fascists use regulations, mandates, and taxes to control business and run (and ruin) the economy. A fascist system, then, is one where private businesses serve politicians and bureaucrats instead of consumers. Does the modern American economy not fit the definition of fascism?

Fascism benefits big businesses that can afford the cost of complying with government regulations, unlike their smaller competitors. Big businesses, which have more political influence then entrepreneurs or small businesses, also significantly benefit from government subsidies. In order to maintain their power, big businesses finance the “deep state” — the network of lobbyists, journalists, think tanks, bureaucrats, and congressional staffers who work behind the scenes to shape government policy.

Obamacare is an example of fascism that is often mislabeled as socialism. Obamacare did not create a government-run “single payer" system as would exist under socialism. Instead, Obamacare extended government control over health care via mandates, regulations, and subsidies. The most infamous part of Obamacare — the individual mandate — forces individuals to purchase a product from a private industry.

Modern America’s militaristic foreign policy aimed at policing and perfecting the world is another example of fascism that enjoys strong bipartisan support. Both right-wing neocons and left-wing humanitarian interventionists claim our supposedly noble goals justify any and all actions taken by the US government. Thus, these supposed human rights champions defend preemptive war, torture, and presidential kill lists.

Many politicians supporting a militaristic foreign policy are more concerned with spreading largesse to the military-industrial complex than with spreading democracy. This is why some supposed free-market conservatives sound like Paul Krugman on steroids when discussing the economic benefits of military spending. Similarly, some anti-war progressives will support large military budgets if some of the money is spent in their states or congressional districts.

Mass surveillance and limits on personal freedom are additional hallmarks of fascist regimes. While there is a movement to “reform” the police state, few want to abolish mass surveillance, civil asset forfeiture, police militarization, and other police-state policies adopted in the name of the wars on terror and drugs. The federal government has even used force to stop people from selling raw milk! Attempts by progressives to silence political opponents are more examples of how many supposedly anti-fascist Americans are embracing fascist policies.

The growth of the welfare-warfare state has been accompanied by an increase in presidential power. This centralization of power, and the support it receives from the political class, is one more indication of the fascistic nature of our current regime. Of course, many in Congress will fight to rein in the executive branch, as long as the occupant of the White House is of the opposing party. Even the fiercest opponents of excessive presidential power instantaneously become lap dogs when their party wins the White House.

For all their alleged anti-fascism, today’s neoconned conservatives and progressives both support the use of force to reshape society and the world. This is the defining characteristic not just of fascists, but also of authoritarians. The true anti-fascists are those who reject the initiation of force. The true path to real free markets, peace, and individual liberty starts with rejecting the bipartisan authoritarianism in favor of the non-aggression principle.

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Is America Waking Up? New Gallup Poll Reveals Americans Less Confident In Core Institutions - Especially Banks

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Gauging Americans sentiment is always to be taken with a grain of salt, but an interesting new Gallup poll finds that Americans' confidence in many of the institutions that affect their daily lives has eroded, and in one case quite significantly.

Of all major institutions that Americans come into contact with throughout their daily lives, the percent of people who say they had a "great deal" of confidence in banks has plunged more than any other institution on the list since June 2006.

Banks, organized religion, television, newspapers, and congress all saw double digit declines since June 2006. What this tells us is that confidence is eroding in those who are entrusted to safeguard our assets, manage the country, communicate news and the truth, and provide support spiritually - said otherwise, it looks like America is calling bullshit on all of the very institutions that it once relied upon for all of the aforementioned reasons.

Also of note from the poll, is that 43% of those asked said that right now is a "good time to find a job":

Which is interesting considering the jobs that have been created are part time and service sector related (ie: less pay).

* * *

Perhaps all of the blatant lies and double speak is finally starting to take a toll on everyday Americans - if in fact Americans are beginning to wake up at all, that would be a welcome sign. Until then, we'll just keep peddling our fiction.

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Orlando Shooting: Still No Evidence

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Orlando Shooting: Still No Evidence

Paul Craig Roberts

In response to my challenge ( http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/06/13/orlando-shooting-paul-craig-roberts/ ) readers report that they have found no evidence of bodies or blood. One person reports that a TV station posted names of some victims, which is the way the absence of Sandy Hook bodies was handled.

One person who said he is a veteran said the AR-15 can have a 30-round clip. That would mean four reloadings in order to shoot 103 people. The veteran said that the rifle can be reloaded in 5 seconds: one clip is dropped out, another put in, and the bolt released. But 5 seconds is not fast enough to prevent being rushed. Remember, sprinters can cover 100 yards—300 feet—in less than 10 seconds. Ordinary people who are not couch potatoes can cover 300 feet in 20 seconds. That means they can cover 150 feet in 10 seconds or 75 feet in 5 seconds or 15 feet in 1 second.. In the crowded club, people were likely no more than 10 feet from the shooter, 20 feet at the most. Moreover, if there is only one shooter, he can be rushed in an arc that he cannot possibly cover. It is difficult to imagine that there were no veterans in the club, no people aware that guns run out of bullets and have to be reloaded and that so many people would miss four opportunities to disarm the shooter. It is hard to imagine that none of the hundreds of people present were capable of presence of mind. Bottles could be thrown at him, glasses, chairs. And no one did anything?

Mainly what readers have reported is evidence that the Orlando shooting is a hoax. One reader sent me a video in which a skeptic uses a RT video to show that the same three allegedly injured people, who so far are the only victims we have been shown, are being carried toward the night club, not away from it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiLk-V9DFpc

Another person sent a video that shows the man with the red shoes who is being carried is put down after the camera walk-by. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaNewsknuBw

Here are readers reporting their inability to find any real evidence. Somehow 103 people were shot and there is no visible evidence.

Dear Mr. Roberts, in response to your request for evidence regarding the Orlando shooting, I held my nose and forced myself to watch about an hour and a half of fox and cnn. No blood whatsoever. Nothing real about any of the videos or stupid interviews with alleged victims. I knew we were being lied to the first night when Fox News trotted out Bernard Kerik. We know that traitor lied to us about 911. Why would we believe anything that evil bastard said about this event. Thanks for such a great article. You really nailed it. Dutch

I was watching one of the networks at a local eatery. My working assumption on these mass shootings is that they are fake, either entirely so, as you mildly suggest in your latest article, or perpetrated by government informants. The cameo profiles of victims began appearing on TV last night, as my wife and I sat at a bar-restaurant eating chicken wings. Who believes this stuff? Pepe Escobar and others are also articulating skepticism on their Facebook pages. Is this a distraction from some important stuff going down at Bilderberg?

Thank you for your great work. I agree with your take on Orlando,San Bernardino,etc. Do you think there is a legal way to expose the people that perform these fictitious acts (I.e perhaps class action lawsuits against the crisis actors, etc).? Thanks again for all your efforts. Husni

A fat, crying woman under shock yells out a detailed story to the cameras, without stopping. It seems she practiced the script for a week or so. Such poor acting just causes pity. Someone should have said : \” Madame, please slow down. Fetch your script and come back for a second take, OK ?\”

It took 3 hours for the police to proceed with an assault. 53 wounded
people lay officially inside the establishment, crying for help. Are there recordings of these desperate yells ? Fifty three folks !

I searched Orlando on You Tube (easy, fast, no sound, and no blood). Thank God, actually.

Was wondering what your take is on this. Veterans Today has it as most likely another false flag. Like you pointed out, many groups to benefit from this. The DEMS are pushing hard for gun control, Israel is ecstatic of more hatred towards Muslims, the DOD loves more war money, and the beat goes on. I was looking for ambulances and paramedics, but saw none. Then the BOZO, known as the President here, gets on TV asap and pushes gun control, never mentions anything else. He was cold and remorseless, and walked away fast. Meanwhile, the Congress and President and Homeland Insecurity are bringing in crateloads of questionable immigrants, some handled by religious groups no less (raking in the dough).

I have not seen any evidence, but I am a bit \’over-the-hill\'(62 yrs old) when it comes to comprehensive internet searches. However, I asked my computer savvy 24 yr-old son, and he has not found any videos of the carnage inside nor out. He did suggest to me that if anyone did capture anything on their cell phone, etc., that the police/authorities would immediately confiscate it. I don\’t know though… Please let us peons know if you find anything remotely credible. thank you PCR

I appreciate readers bringing to my attention more evidence that suggests we are witnessing another drill, like the announced drill at the Boston Marathon, turned into a fake terrorist attack. That indeed might be what the Orlando shooting was. However, remember, our purpose is not to disprove the official story, but to find evidence in its behalf.

So far all we have are official statements and testimony by what seem to be crisis actors. 103 people cannot be shot without there being real evidence.
It has to be somewhere.

My cautionary statement was that we should not believe massive terrorist attacks without evidence, especially when we know for an absolute fact that the government lied to us about Saddam Hussein, Assad, and Libya. These lies have kept us at work destroying Muslim countries for 15 years, with a consequence that Europe is being overrun with refugees from our wars based on nothing but the government’s lies.

It is not an unreasonable conclusion that a government that will lie to us about Iraq, Libya, Syria, the economic condition of the country and that will lie to the 9/11 Commission might also lie to us about Boston, Sandy Hook, San Bernandino, and Orlando.

My point is simply that we are given stories based not on visible evidence but on claims. These kind of events have to leave massive evidence, but somehow it is not visible.

To recap, we are trying to see if we can find real evidence that supports the official story. We are not trying to disprove the official story but to prove it.

If we cannot prove the story, we are entitled to disbelieve it.

The post Orlando Shooting: Still No Evidence appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.

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Junk Food and Junk Science

ORIGINAL LINK

By Dr. Mercola

The junk food industry has a number of tricks up its sleeve to paint their disease-causing products in a better light. When your profits depend on people buying soda, candy, potato chips and other unhealthy snacks, good taste only goes so far.

Eventually, people begin to wonder just how bad these foods are for their bodies, especially in light of general trends toward healthier eating.

Such foods are carefully laboratory created to get you hooked, and once your cravings kick in for these extraordinarily addictive foods, the industry gives you reason to justify the indulgence via scientific research — research that the industry itself, of course, funded.

Funding scientific research gives the industry a certain level of control over the results. Although most researchers and sponsoring companies will insist the research is sound and unbiased, it’s well-known that industry-funded research almost always favors industry.

So when a study came out touting the surprising claim that children who eat candy tend to weigh less than those who don’t, it was not a surprise that the study was funded by a candy trade association representing some of the top U.S. candy makers.

Candy Industry Manipulates Science to Sell More Junk Food

“The only thing that moves sales," Marion Nestle, Ph.D., a professor of nutrition at New York University (NYU), told the Associated Press, "is health claims."¹ And if you can’t make health claims based on a product’s own merits, why not fund a study to drum some up?

The study in question was published in 2011 in Food & Nutrition Research. It followed 11,000 children and found those who ate candy were 22 percent less likely to be overweight or obese than children who did not.²

Further, the candy eaters even had lower levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation and a risk factor for heart disease. The findings were heavily publicized even though the paper’s authors even questioned its validity.

As reported by the Associated Press, which conducted an investigation into how food companies influence people’s thoughts about healthy eating, Carol O'Neil, Ph.D., a professor of nutrition at Louisiana State University (LSU), wrote to her co-author about the study, "We're hoping they can do something with it — it's thin and clearly padded.”³ The Associated Press continued:⁴

“Since 2009, the authors of the candy paper have written more than two dozen papers funded by parties including Kellogg and industry groups for beef, milk and fruit juice.

Two are professors: O'Neil of LSU and Theresa Nicklas, Ph.D., at the Baylor College of Medicine. The third is Victor Fulgoni III, Ph.D., a former Kellogg executive and consultant whose website says he helps companies develop ‘aggressive, science-based claims about their products.’

Their studies regularly delivered favorable conclusions for funders — or as they call them, ‘clients.’”

Industry Uses Science to Publicize the Results They Want

Sound scientific research should publish all the results from any given study, not only those that paint industry in a favorable light. But it’s common practice for negative or neutral study results to be left unpublished while favorable results get published.

The Associated Press used the example of a study funded by PepsiCo, which owns Quaker oatmeal. The study looked into whether consuming Quaker oatmeal or a Quaker Oats cereal (Quaker Oatmeal Squares) would be more filling than rival General Mills Honey Nut Cheerios.

While the oatmeal proved to be more filling, the oats cereal did not, so PepsiCo only published the favorable oatmeal results.⁵ Publication bias — the practice of selectively publishing trial results that serve an agenda — is common practice not only in the food industry but also in pharmaceutical research.

Meanwhile, it’s common practice for researchers to run their manuscripts by their industry funders prior to publication, and even carefully time the release of results to their advantage. In regard to the study that found candy-eating kids weigh less, the Associated Press noted:⁶

“The trumpeting of their research was also carefully timed. In June 2011, a candy association representative emailed O'Neil a critical article about a professor with industry ties.

'I'd like to monitor the fallout from this story, and give a little bit of distance to our research piece. I do not want to put you in the crossfire of a media on a rampage,' wrote Laura Muma of FoodMinds, an agency that represented the candy association."

Even Seemingly Reputable Nutrition Journals May Have Cozy Ties With Junk Food Makers

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In 2013, I interviewed Michele Simon, who has practiced public health law for nearly 20 years, fighting corporate tactics that deceive and manipulate you about health.

Last year, she released a report that revealed the disturbing ties between the American Society for Nutrition (ASN) — considered a premier source of nutritional science — and the primary purveyors of obesity and chronic ill health.

ASN is sponsored by 30 different companies, including Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Monsanto, and the Sugar Association, just to mention a few, each of which pays $10,000 a year in return for “print and online exposure, annual meeting benefits, and first choice to sponsor educational sessions, grants, awards, and other opportunities as they arise.” As noted by Simon:

“In other words, food, beverage, supplement, biotech, and pharmaceutical industry leaders are able to purchase cozy relationships with the nation’s top nutrition researchers.”

Junk food purveyors gain even more influence by sponsoring educational sessions at various conferences and annual meetings, and featuring speakers that represent the industry.

ASN’s ties are particularly problematic since they also publish three academic journals, including the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN).

These ties can “taint scientific objectivity, negatively impact the organization’s policy recommendations, and result in industry-friendly research and messaging that is shared with nutrition professionals and the general public alike,” according to Simon. She added:

“Obesity researcher David Allison, Ph.D. wins the prize for the most conflicts: PepsiCo, the Sugar Association, World Sugar Research Organization (WSRO), Red Bull, Kellogg, Mars, Campbell Soup, and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group (DPS).

Perhaps most troubling, Allison serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, ASN’s flagship publication. While his conflicts are disclosed, having Allison in such a critical gatekeeper role demonstrates how industry can potentially influence even the science that gets published.”

Even Nutrition Professionals Are ‘Counseled’ by Industry

In the realm of commercial profits, nothing is sacred, not even the reputation of the U.S. trade organization for food and nutrition professionals, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly known as the American Dietetic Association).

Food companies like Coca-Cola, General Mills, Nestlé, Kraft, and all of the major junk food purveyors buy sponsorships to be at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ annual trade organization meetings. They typically end up having the largest booths on the expo floor.

Besides showcasing their food products, they’re also allowed to sponsor or hold educational sessions at the meeting, including sessions for registered dietitians (RDs) to receive continuing education credits. Even fast food companies like McDonald’s are represented at the annual meetings. According to Simon:

“They want to make sure that they’re being viewed as a good-for-you fast food company. So, at their booth, they would be sampling salads, smoothies, and oatmeal … [Food companies] are basically trying to use these [nutrition] professionals to carry their message to their clients.

That’s the name of the game here: to make sure the next time an RD talks to a client, they’ll say, 'Gee, you should really try this better-for-you, Baked Lays potato chips, because it has a few less grams of salt or fat.' It’s to make sure that RDs are recommending these still highly processed, nutrient-deficient junk foods to their clients … There are many RDs, in fact, that have rejected membership in the academy, mostly because of these relationships …

The problem really lies with the leadership of this organization and the fact that they’re putting their stamp of approval on these types of webinars and companies that obviously are contributing to the very problem that the profession is trying to address.”

Coca-Cola Front Group Shut Down After Bad Press

Coca-Cola Company funded the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), a front group aimed at confusing you about soda science and diverting attention away from evidence showing soda is a major contributor to obesity and diabetes. One of the group’s primary messages was to tout exercise as the science-backed solution to obesity — while downplaying the importance of dietary issues, like soda consumption.

Coca-Cola did not come right out and disclose that they were behind the supposedly scientific front group — they were outed by The New York Times, which reported in August 2015:⁷

“The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media ...

'Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, 'Oh they're eating too much, eating too much, eating too much' — blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks, and so on,' the group's vice president, Steven N. Blair, an exercise scientist, says in a recent video announcing the new organization.’ And there's really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.'"

After The New York Times report, the front group received so much bad press and criticism that the University of Colorado School of Medicine said it would return the $1 million grant Coca-Cola had given them to help start the group. Public health authorities accused the group of using tobacco industry tactics to raise doubts about the health hazards of soda, and a letter signed by more than three dozen scientists said the group was spreading “scientific nonsense.”⁸

By December 2015, the GEBN announced it would be shutting down, with Coca-Cola claiming it was working on increased transparency.⁹

No Matter What the Spin, Junk Food Is Bad for Your Health

The food industry can use all the manipulative tactics in the world to create misleading data and other propaganda, but none of it will change the fact that junk food is bad for you. People who ate a diet focused on macaroni and cheese, processed lunchmeat, sausage biscuits, mayonnaise and microwavable meals with unhealthy fats, for example, showed serious negative changes to their metabolism after just five days.

After eating the junk food diet, the study participants' (12 healthy college-aged men) muscles lost the ability to oxidize glucose after a meal, which could lead to insulin resistance, which is the primary underlying factor of nearly every chronic disease and condition known to man, including weight gain.¹⁰ Stunted academic performance and depression have also been linked to junk food diets. Further, it only takes one junk food binge to influence your health for worse.¹¹

When you eat junk food high in unhealthy fats and sugar, the sugar causes a large spike in your blood-sugar levels called “postprandial hyperglycemia.” In the long term, this can lead to an increased risk of heart attack, but there are short-term effects as well, such as:

• Your tissue becomes inflamed (as occurs when it is infected)
• Your blood vessels constrict
• Damaging free radicals are generated
• Your blood pressure may rise higher than normal
• A surge and drop in insulin may leave you feeling hungry

Show the Junk Food Makers Who’s Boss: You!

It’s easy to fall victim to the junk food industry’s marketing webs and even easier to become biologically hooked on their high-sugar foods. However, breaking free from the trap and focusing your diet on real food instead is one of the best health moves you can make. How can you do it?

Ditching processed foods requires that you plan your meals in advance, and if you take it step-by-step as described in my nutrition plan, it's quite possible, and manageable, to painlessly remove processed foods from your diet. You can try scouting out your local farmer's markets for in-season produce that is priced to sell, and planning your meals accordingly, but you can also use this same premise with supermarket sales.

You can generally plan a week of meals at a time, making sure you have all ingredients necessary on hand, and then do any prep work you can ahead of time so that dinner is easy to prepare if you're short on time (and you can use leftovers for lunches the next day). Simply don’t bring junk foods into your home. That way there’s no temptation to eat them. And the more you nourish your body with real food, the less you’ll feel tempted by these fake foods anyway.

Finally, if food cravings sideline you, I highly recommend using the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). EFT is simple and effective, and can rapidly help you eliminate your food cravings naturally. Ultimately, your taste buds will come to realize that many “health” foods taste better than their science-lab counterparts any day.

Sources:

• STAT News June 2, 2016

• The Associated Press June 2, 2016

Related Articles:

  Junk Food: Just as Bad as Cigarettes, and Marketing Tactics Also Rival Those of Big Tobacco

  What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Junk Food?

  The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

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