Saturday, November 5, 2016

How The Soda Industry Caused Addiction

ORIGINAL LINK

We are a world of comparisons. And when it comes to understanding the implications something has on our health, what better way to drill it through people’s heads than to compare it to something that has, for decades, been shown to significantly harm health and even cause death?

I am referring to sugar, which many are now referring to as ‘the new tobacco.’ Our overconsumption of this sweet substance has created a health crisis that only stands to worsen unless we change our ways. Sugar consumption has skyrocketed by 30% in the last 30 years, with the average American adult consuming 22 teaspoons of it daily. And children are faring even worse, consuming a whopping 32 teaspoons every day. To put that into perspective, the WHO recommends just six teaspoons daily.

The soda industry, much like the tobacco industry, profits by selling products that are known to be both unhealthy and directly correlated to many diseases. But, unlike tobacco, soda consumption is still considered to be acceptable in moderation. Yet plenty of research has shown that refined sugar is biologically additive, and many would argue that in the coming years, it will become clear that soda should be avoided altogether.

To think that the simple pleasure of picking up a can of soda and slurping it down on a regular basis is an addiction seems extreme, but that is the reality for many people. So how exactly did so many of us become dependent on getting our soda fix?

We know that soda isn’t water. But when we drink it, we often fail to realize just how much sugar, and calories, we’re ingesting. We’ve been well-informed in recent years just how bad sugar is, even warned to stay away from it at all costs, as it can lead to weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and teeth and bone damage.

“People who drink this ‘liquid candy’ do not feel as full as if they had eaten the same calories from solid food and do not compensate by eating less,” explains Harvard researchers.

And if you’re looking to lose weight, it seems a no brainer to take sugar out of your diet.

“I know of no other category of food whose elimination can produce weight loss in such a short period of time,” notes Dr. David Ludwig, the director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Yet, we drink, and we drink, and we drink. Is it because we like it, or because we just can’t stop? Sugar has been shown to have similar effects on the brain as drugs like cocaine have. And to think Coca-Cola used to be made with cocaine just puts the cherry right on top of the sugary mound of madness.

The soda industry has long been reeling us in, and keeping us from associating our love for soda with heavy words like addiction, obesity, and disease. For instance, when the concern of soda leading to obesity came out, the soda industry pointed the finger at lack of exercise, not poor diet, as the reason for our collective weight gain. On Coca-Cola’s website, they say:  “There is increasing concern about overweight and obesity worldwide, and while there are many factors involved, the fundamental cause in most cases is an imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended.”

The industry even went so far as to fund research studies that would put sugar on a pedestal, like the report published by the Mayo Clinic that claims “the American diet is no longer a significant risk factor for disease for most individuals.”

And it was recently revealed by the University of California San Francisco that the sugar industry distorted research on the causes of heart disease. Research had previously shown in the 1950s that sugar was connected to heart disease, but then the Sugar Research Foundation sponsored a 1965 Harvard University literature review that devalued the risks of sugar, even pointing the blame on fats.

Even more concerning is the fact that the federal government didn’t even publish recommendations regarding sugar consumption until this year.

The soda industry also pays health professionals to put out statements that support them. For instance, Kyle Pfister, a public health advocator, found that dietitians were actually tweeting against soda taxes, revealing the dirty truth of their connection to the soda industry in the process.

Furthermore, a study from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine revealed that Big Soda giants Coca-Cola and PepsiCo financially backed around 100 health organizations from 2011 to 2015, including the American Diabetes Association and the American Society for Nutrition.

Soda companies have, without us really knowing or acknowledging it, slipped into the health and wellness industry. So much so that, just last year in November 2015, Rhona Applebaum, Coca-Cola’s chief scientist and health officer, was forced to resign after leaked emails between Applebaum and University of Colorado professor James O. Hill revealed the incredible bias of the Global Energy Balance Network’s health recommendations.

Another way the soda industry has reeled us in is by overselling their environmental image, or “greenwashing.” They do this by outright boasting their support for the environment, safe water supply, exercise, and more. For instance, both Coke and Pepsi promote “plant bottles” that are made partially from plant materials. However, critics warn that the ads behind these plant bottles are entirely misleading, because, though the bottles may be made partially from renewable sources, once they are manufactured, they are still plastic, and therefore have the same harmful attributes as those made from petroleum.

There’s also the concern of soda companies promoting their plant-based technology, which may confuse people into thinking their products are biodegradable, and not recycling them.

And as for water concerns, Coca-Cola tricked people into believing their water replenishment campaigns are worthy of celebrating, even boasting that they replenished all of the water they used in 2015. However, the water they saved only accounts for what goes directly into the product, not the 150 billion gallons used for manufacturing plants, or even growing their sugar cane.

All of this information feels eerily similar to brainwashing. Are we being tricked into addiction? Into diseases? Into, ultimately, death? False claims, manipulative advertisements, and corruption within the government and food industry all reveal the very tangible reality that getting you hooked, and keeping you hooked, may very well be on someone’s agenda.

 

 



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Friday, November 4, 2016

Civil War II - Fourth Turning Is Intensifying (Part 1)

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured.”The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe -1997

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As we enter the final stretch of this vitriolic, deplorable, venomous, propaganda saturated, deceitful, rigged presidential election spectacle, it becomes painfully obvious this Fourth Turning is careening toward bloodshed, bedlam, confrontation, and civil war. The linear fixated establishment, who fancy themselves intellectually superior to the irredemables, are too blinded by their sociopathic, increasingly audacious subversion of the Constitution, to grasp the level of rage and disillusionment of a white working class that has been screwed over for decades.

As the Wall Street shysters frantically accelerate their embezzlement of what remains of middle class wealth, with the Fed and the corporate media propagandists as their wing-men, the country devolves into a corporate fascist state. The disposition of the nation grows dark like the sky before an approaching deadly blizzard. As passions boil over and violence portends, this Fourth Turning hastens towards a bloody decade ahead with an uncertain climax.

If you think this is just hyperbole, you either haven’t studied history or your cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias prevent you from seeing the unavoidable societal altering clashes, which occur like clockwork on an eighty year cycle, when the portents are right in front of your eyes. Historian Arnold Toynbee’s great war cycle that arise every 80 years or so, aligns perfectly with the Fourth Turning generational theory. Great wars occur when the generation that doesn’t remember the last catastrophic war ascends to leadership of the country.

We are eight years into a Crisis period which won’t end until the mid-2020s. As this bitterly vicious presidential campaign accelerates towards a finale which will leave the country divided and irate, the hostile opposing forces will be seeking revenge, retribution, and retaliation no matter the outcome. There is no doubt the regeneracy is well under way.

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning 

It was five years ago I spent a couple fascinating hours with Neil Howe, co-author of the Fourth Turning, during the Occupy Wall Street protests. He thought the protests were all passion and no depth, engineered by anarchist Boomers. He was right. I thought OWS might be the start of the regeneracy, but it flamed out quickly. It was only a foreshadowing of what was to come. Whatever event or movement created the regeneracy, it would be driven by the toxic combination of debt, civic decay, and global disorder.

Neil was particularly worried about the Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy and how it was ruining our economic system, creating disincentives to saving and encouraging warped, debt driven speculation. And that was in 2011. The Fed keeping interest rates near zero on behalf of a corrupt establishment for the last eight years has been the primary factor in creating the anger, disillusionment and revolutionary spirit driving the regeneracy.

No critical thinking human being can deny this tumultuous presidential election and its equally turbulent primaries have been fueled by the dreadful self-serving response of the establishment to the 2008 Wall Street created financial collapse; the geopolitical anarchy created by U.S. interventionism in the Middle East; the civic decay created by a failing government educational system; rampant debt financed materialism enabled and encouraged by the financial/media complex; and racial division facilitated by the president and his social justice warrior brethren.

The rescue of Wall Street and destruction of Main Street by the Fed, Wall Street and the captured politicians of both parties in Washington D.C. has created the angry, acrimonious, throw the bums out mood boiling over in flyover America. The widening Grand Canyon gap in wealth between the haves and the have nots, produced by solutions from sociopaths in suits has reached the pitchfork and torch level.

The linear thinking ruling class has been in denial since this Crisis catalyzed in September 2008. Their looting, pillaging and ransacking campaign, designed to enrich and empower a small cadre of shadowy, powerful, wealthy men, had been successful for decades. When you control the currency and interest rates; rig the financial markets; buy the politicians; write the laws and regulations; own the corporate propaganda machines known as the mainstream media; operate a high tech surveillance state; create a dumbed down populace through government school indoctrination; and distract the masses with iGadgets, reality TV, hero worship, professional sports, social media, irrelevant cultural issues, and literally thousands of other modern day bread and circuses; you become arrogant and careless.

These sociopaths are so consumed with their ravenous fleecing of the middle class, waging wars for profit, and shredding the Constitution, they failed to recognize 2008 for the seismic earth shattering event that will change everything. The mood of the country shifted like tectonic plates beneath the nation. The mood continues to grow dimmer, as the peasants grow poorer and the modern day aristocracy (Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, corrupt politicians, shadowy billionaires) accumulate obscene ill-gotten wealth through their complete capture of the system. This perverted, degenerative, criminal degradation of our society is powerfully summed up by Jesse from Jesse’s CafĂ© Americain:

“Not all sociopaths wield knives and knotted cords. Some wear suits, and are exceptionally intelligent and articulate, obsessively driven, and are able to use and undermine the law and the rules for their advantage, like weapons.  It is never about the win, never about the money.  It is about the kill, the expression of their hatred, about elevating themselves with the suffering of others. Bind, torture, kill.  Not only with ropes and knives, but also with power and money, and the subversion of law.  Lawlessness is their addiction, their will to power.

When societies become lax and complacent, these sociopaths can possess great political power through great amounts of unprincipled money.  And over time they become almost anti-human, destroyers of all that is good, all that is life, all that offends their insatiable sickness with its goodness.  They twist the public against itself, and turn a broad sweep of society into their killing grounds. This is the undeniable lesson of the last century.  There are monsters, and they walk among us.”

Neil Howe has noted in previous articles the catalyst, climax and resolution of Fourth Turnings can be specifically dated. But the regeneracy is more of an era than a date. With only three previous American Fourth Turnings, I imagined the regeneracy to be a specific event where the American people, faced with growing peril and danger, put aside their differences and rallied around a strong leader to build something new. Boy was I wrong.

In retrospect, the American people were numbed by the Great Depression and the bloody initial battles of the Civil War. They just let FDR and Lincoln do whatever they needed to do. The regeneracy marks a growth in centralized authority and resolute governance at a time of great risk and urgency. I believe this era of regeneracy began at the outset of the presidential primaries early in 2016.

Based upon the reaction of the citizens in the last ten months, the dire problem facing the nation, perceived as the largest threat to our future, happens to be the Deep State establishment currently ruling the country. The captured mainstream media and grey beards running both political parties were completely stunned, horrified, and irate at the unprecedented success achieved by the two anti-establishment candidates, Trump and Sanders.

This election was supposed to follow the script as planned and coordinated by the establishment, with Hillary Clinton defeating Jeb Bush and continuing the corrupt status quo policies agreed to by the bought off leaders of both parties. They badly miscalculated the mood of the country and the whirlwind of change seeking to sweep away the stubborn remnants of a crooked, decrepit, putrid, existing social order. This collective middle finger to the establishment could only happen during a Fourth Turning.

This regeneracy is well under way and is poised to transform and replace the very foundation of this crumbling empire of debt, delusions, and denial. The unanswered question is what happens next. I posed that question to Neil Howe five years ago and he said the specific events of a Fourth Turning are unknowable, but the reaction to those events by the generational cohorts is consistent over time.

We are seeing the reaction of critical thinking Americans as they come to the realization the system is rigged against them. A revolutionary spirit is once again rising among the deplorables. I also asked Neil about the theory Fourth Turnings alternate between external conflicts and internal conflicts. He found the subject fascinating, but didn’t think there were enough data points to make a determination.

Based on the current path of this Fourth Turning, I’m now convinced of this alternating sequence between advancement cycles and atonement cycles. The advancement cycles can be seen as establishing, whereas atonement cycles are disestablishing. It is apparent each Fourth Turning alternates between an external struggle and an internal struggle. The American Revolution was a struggle against an external oppressor – Great Britain.

The Civil War was an internal struggle between the industrial North and the agrarian South. The Depression/World War II struggle was mainly against an external threat – Germany, Japan, and Italy. The American Revolution established our country. There was optimism and elation as a new republic, forged under an enlightened Constitution and led by judicious intelligent men, was born. It was clearly an advancement cycle.

The Civil War disestablished states’ rights, slavery, agrarian society and Constitutional rights. It was an atonement cycle for our actual and implicit sins. There was no glorious high. The resolution felt more like defeat, with the country exhausted, bitter and angry. The country had exhausted itself, spilling the blood of over one million men. The new High after an atonement cycle is like a cold miserable rainy dark Spring.

The Great Depression/World War II Fourth Turning established a new world order led by the United States. As the only major country left unscathed by the ravages of global war, the U.S. became the producer for the world, whose dollar was unquestioned as the currency of global trade. The new High was unleashed with fanfare and adulation. It was like a delightfully warm Spring, with flowers blooming and children frolicking.

All signs point toward this Fourth Turning being a life or death struggle between the ruling class of sociopathic bankers, corporate elites, and sleazy politicians versus the oppressed and infuriated middle class. The lying, deceit, rigging, deception, theft and other crimes perpetrated by the ruling elites will be atoned for. The heroic patriotic revelations from Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Bradley (Chelsea) Manning proving the government and politicians to be lying, corrupt, immoral, sociopathic traitors to the Constitution have undermined the last vestiges of trust in the system and the establishment. The alignment of generational dynamics will provoke the responses to events moving forward. We have been badly led. A silent coup by Deep State perpetrators has led to the complete capture of our economic, financial, judicial and political systems.

A vast swath of the populace has been lured into living beyond their means. The existing system is unsustainable. The Boomer generation does not want to yield on their perceived entitlements. The Millennial generation is saddled with un-payable debts, living in their parents’ basements, working the night shift at Ruby Tuesday. Generation X is trapped in the middle of this generational struggle. The huge economic imbalances, created by politicians buying votes and engineering wealth inequality to benefit the few, have built up over decades like flood waters behind a weakening levee. When the levee breaks the morally bankrupt criminal social order will be swept away in the raging torrent to follow.

Winter will eventually turn into Spring, but it might be a bitter, gloomy, austere Spring. Every Fourth Turning brings on forecasts of imminent doom, but that is also a trait of Prophet (Trump, Clinton) Generations. It’s how they feel about the prospects of their imminent die off; they expect the entire world to go with them. The 2008 financial crisis was horrific, scary and an eye opener for those who blindly believed what they were told by their establishment zoo keepers. The regeneracy has begun; trust in the system has further disintegrated; this presidential election has further deepened this distrust of the entrenched establishment; and the coming bust for stocks, bonds, and real estate will knock out the supports for the dwindling remaining trust in this crooked system.

“This might result in a Great Devaluation, a severe drop in the market price of most financial and real assets. This devaluation could be a short but horrific panic, a free-falling price in a market with no buyers. Or it could be a series of downward ratchets linked to political events that sequentially knock the supports out from under the residual popular trust in the system. As assets devalue, trust will further disintegrate, which will cause assets to devalue further, and so on.”

Eventually, all of America’s lesser problems will combine into one giant problem. The very survival of the society will feel at stake, as leaders lead and people follow. The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains its Framers’ visions with a robust new pride. Or it may be something unspeakably worse. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.” Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning

The next ten or so years will be atonement for decades of bad choices, corrupt leadership, living beyond our means, waging wars of choice across the globe, believing blatant falsehoods, exhibiting willful ignorance, ignoring facts, and failing to uphold the Constitution. Don’t think you can escape the consequences of this Fourth Turning. It doesn’t matter whether you lived according to a moral code, avoided debt, worked hard, paid taxes, and generally lived an upstanding honorable life.

The death and destruction headed our way will engulf the innocent as well as the guilty. I’m reminded of the penultimate scene in Clint Eastwood’s dark, brooding, vengeful western Unforgiven when Little Bill Daggett laments to “killer of women and children” William Munny that he doesn’t deserve to die this way. Munny responds, “deserves got nothin’ to do with it.” Then he pulls the trigger. This is the kind of future we will be dealing with, whether we like it or not.

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In Part Two of this article I will use recent polling data to assess where the most likely sparks will arise to start the civil war conflagration which will accelerate the crumbling of the American Empire. To reinforce the obvious, Fourth Turnings NEVER de-intensify. They end after the spilling of much blood, incomprehensible destruction and the total defeat of the vanquished.



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Julian Assange Just Said Clinton and ISIS Are Funded by the Same People

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julian assangeThe same people who are funding ISIS have also funded Clinton, claims Assange.

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WATCH: “All Governments Lie” — Matt Taibbi and filmmaker Fred Peabody on media failures and dissident journalism

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“All governments lie,” dissident American journalist I.F. Stone famously wrote, “but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

I.F. Stone stands out as a legendary figure in the history of journalism in the United States. The muckraker tirelessly devoted himself to exposing government lies and social injustices, through the publication of his independent newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly.

Filmmaker Fred Peabody, director of the new movie “All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone,” has chronicled the life of Stone, and the enormous influence he still has on investigative journalists today, more than 80 years after he began his career in journalism.

Salon’s Ben Norton sat down with Peabody, along with a subject in his new film — Matt Taibbi, the award-winning Rolling Stone reporter, who has been described as a contemporary I.F. Stone.

The three discussed the failures of the U.S. media, which so often acts as a stenographer to power. Peabody described how the profit-driven corporate media invariably puts easy clicks above critical reporting. Taibbi detailed how news outlets reward those who kowtow to authority, and punish those who challenge it.

Americans’ faith in the media is at a record low. The press gave Donald Trump billions of dollars of free advertising to run a far-right, chauvinistic campaign, while corporate executives like CBS CEO Les Moonves rejoiced at the skyrocketing ratings — and thus profits. At the same time, Bernie Sanders got a tiny fraction of the media coverage, when his grassroots campaign was mobilizing millions of people.

Norton also asked Taibbi to reflect on independent journalism in the 21st century, with the rise of adversarial, internet-based media outlets like Democracy Now, The Intercept, AlterNet and more. Many of the figures behind these news sites, such as Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, are also featured in Peabody’s film, alongside prominent dissidents like Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges.

Today, the kinds of lies I.F. Stone warned about continue to be told, and media outlets continue to uncritically echo them — from the Gulk of Tonkin incident, which the U.S. used to declare war in Vietnam, and which Stone himself exposed; to lies about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, which were used to justify an illegal invasion of Iraq.

The full interview can be watched here:



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Three New Scandals Show How Pervasive and Dangerous Mass Surveillance is in the West, Vindicating Snowden

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While most eyes are focused on the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, three major events prove how widespread, and dangerous, mass surveillance has become in the west. Standing alone, each event highlights exactly the severe threats which motivated Edward Snowden to blow his whistle; taken together, they constitute full-scale vindication of everything he’s done.

Earlier this month, a special British court that rules on secret spying activities issued an emphatic denunciation of the nation’s domestic mass surveillance programs. The court found that “British security agencies have secretly and unlawfully collected massive volumes of confidential personal data, including financial information, on citizens for more than a decade.” Those agencies, the court found, “operated an illegal regime to collect vast amounts of communications data, tracking individual phone and web use and other confidential personal information, without adequate safeguards or supervision for 17 years.”

On Thursday, an even more scathing condemnation of mass surveillance was issued by the Federal Court of Canada. The ruling “faulted Canada’s domestic spy agency for unlawfully retaining data and for not being truthful with judges who authorize its intelligence programs.” Most remarkable was that these domestic, mass surveillance activities were not only illegal, but completely unknown to virtually the entire population in Canadian democracy, even though their scope has indescribable implications for core liberties: “the centre in question appears to be the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s equivalent of a crystal ball – a place where intelligence analysts attempt to deduce future threats by examining, and re-examining, volumes of data.”

The third scandal also comes from Canada – a critical partner in the Five Eyes spying alliance along with the U.S. and UK – where law enforcement officials in Montreal are now defending “a highly controversial decision to spy on a La Presse columnist [Patrick LagacĂ©] by tracking his cellphone calls and texts and monitoring his whereabouts as part of a necessary internal police investigation.” The targeted journalist, LagacĂ©, had enraged police officials by investigating their abusive conduct, and they then used surveillance technology to track his calls and movements to unearth the identity of his sources. Just as that scandal was exploding, it went, in the words of the Montreal Gazette, “from bad to worse” as the ensuing scrutiny revealed that police had actually “tracked the calls and movements of six journalists that year after news reports based on leaks revealed Michel Arsenault, then president of Quebec’s largest labour federation, had his phone tapped.”

Speaking this week at Montreal’s McGill University, Snowden called for the resignation of Montreal’s police chief and denounced the spying as a “radical attack on the operations of the free press.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said “obviously I think that the troubling stories – troubling for all Canadians – coming out of QuĂ©bec,” adding: “we must and can continue to ensure protection of the press and their rights.” The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression’s Tom Henheffer made the key point – about this specific abuse but also mass surveillance systems generally:

You can’t even make the argument that this is just a few bad apples because it was authorised by a justice of the peace. This is the system as it’s supposed to work. Which just goes to show that the whole system is broken.

So just this month alone, two key members of the Five Eyes alliance have been found by courts and formal investigations to be engaged in mass surveillance that was both illegal and pervasive, as well as, in the case of Canada, abusing surveillance powers to track journalists to uncover their sources. When Snowden first spoke publicly, these were exactly the abuses and crimes he insisted were being committed by the mass surveillance regime these nations had secretly erected and installed, claims which were vehemently denied by the officials in charge of those systems.

Yet with each new investigation and judicial inquiry, and as more evidence is unearthed, Snowden’s core claims are increasingly vindicated. Western officials are indeed addicted to unaccountable, secretive, abusive systems of mass surveillance used against their own citizens and foreigners alike, and the more those systems take root, the more core liberties are eroded.

The post Three New Scandals Show How Pervasive and Dangerous Mass Surveillance is in the West, Vindicating Snowden appeared first on The Intercept.



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Thursday, November 3, 2016

Julian Assange Ends The Suspense: "The Source Of Hacked Emails Is Not Russia"

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With countless hours of media, and Clinton campaign, speculation and accusations that the source of hacked Wikileaks Democratic emails including the Podesta files, is none other than Russian president Vladimir Putin, either directly or indirectly, Julian Assange has decided to close the book on that particular loose end, and as RT reports, in a John Pilger Special, to be broadcast by RT on Saturday courtesy of Dartmouth Films, Assange categorically denied that the troves of US Democratic Party and Clinton work and staff emails released this year have come from the Russian government.

“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange told the veteran Australian broadcaster as part of a 25-minute interview.

Assange spoke with Pilger at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been for four years, and accused the US presidential candidate of being a pawn of behind-the-scenes interests, and voiced doubts about her physical fitness to take charge of the White House.

“Hillary Clinton is just one person. I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person, because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick – for example faint – as a result of going on, and going with their ambitions. But she represents a whole network of people, and a whole network of relationships with particular states.”

Over the past nine months, WikiLeaks uploaded over 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State. This was followed by nearly 20,000 emails sent to and by members of the US Democratic National Committee, exposing the party leadership’s dismissive attitude to Bernie Sanders, and his outsider primaries campaign.

Finally, last month, WikiLeaks posted over 50,000 emails connected to John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and a close associate of the current presidential frontrunner.

A preview of the upcoming interview below. The Homeland Security Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted a joint statement in October, claiming they were “confident” that the Russian government “directed” this year’s leaks. Moscow has rejected the accusation, with presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov calling the claims “nonsense,” while Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the “public bickering with Russia” before the US election is probably a “smokescreen” to draw the voters’ attention away from serious domestic issues.



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Wednesday, November 2, 2016

WikiLeaks: Not Just Brazile – 4 Others Rigged Debates For Hillary

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Wikileaks announced it was not just Donna Brazile and names four other parties directly involved in rigging the debates for Hillary Clinton. DNC chair Donna Brazile was just forced out of CNN and ABC. CNN made the announcement after a second WikiLeaks revealed Brazile leaked debate questions to Hillary Clinton in a second debate, this time at a Town Hall event in Michigan against Bernie Sanders.



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Iraqis in Mosul Find US Missiles at Captured Islamic State Base

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The Iraqis found missiles at an Islamic State base in Mosul stamped with USA and DOD. The discovery did not warrant a headline on CNN or The New York Times. "Several US-made missiles were found in al-Shoura region to the South of Mosul," reports Iran’s al-Alam News Network, citing a local source. "The ISIL terrorists have sent US-made TOW anti-tank missiles to Tal Afar and it is quite evident that they are preparing for a long-term war," an Iraqi security official told an Arabic-language media outlet.



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Bozell & Graham Column: CNN Gets Caught in Cheating Scandal

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Rush Limbaugh found just the right analogy for the CNN cheating scandal where (now) former CNN analyst Donna Brazile fed “town hall” questions to Hillary Clinton. It’s the quiz-show scandal of the 1950s, where Charles Van Doren was given the questions on the NBC game show Twenty One  in advance and looked like a genius on national television. Van Doren later apologized to America: “I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them.” 

That’s not the way CNN and Brazile reacted when exposed by the Wikileaks e-mails. In the first incriminating email, Brazile had told the Clinton team “[f]rom time to time I get the questions in advance” and gave them a question on the death penalty that Hillary would be asked on CNN’s March 13 town hall meeting. 

When the cheating was uncovered, CNN claimed Brazile didn’t get the question from CNN sources, but nstead from TV One’s Roland Martin, who had been....a longtime paid CNN analyst. For his part Martin denied sending Brazile the question, but she had it word for word. Brazile denied the very email: “I never had access to questions and would never have shared them with the candidates if I did." Brazile even deepened the deception by protesting to Fox’s Megyn Kelly:  "As a Christian woman, I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted."

Then on October 31, the other shoe fell, deepening the lie. Wikileaks released another email where Brazile promised the Clintonites more town hall questions: "I'll send a few more." Brazile also tipped Clinton aide John Podesta before a March 6 CNN debate in Flint, Michigan, that a local woman “has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the [people] of Flint.”

Now what was CNN to do? The networks’ response was as bizarre as Brazile’s was dishonest. CNN claimed it had accepted her resignation on October 14 – 17 days prior. The “public’s right to know” stops at the water’s edge of journalism. 

But why accept the resignation? CNN had a responsibility to fire Brazile for cheating – and didn’t. CNN staged a phony event, and they got caught. So like good liberals, they’re playing the victim card and blaming Roland Martin. 

Online, CNN put out a story where a network spokeswoman claimed CNN was “completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor.” They insisted CNN “never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate.”

What about on CNN’s airwaves, where it happened? Media reporters Brian Stelter and Dylan Byers – hour-by-hour fixtures for a Trump scandal or a Fox News controversy – disappeared. Brazile’s name went unmentioned after the news broke around noon on Halloween. 

On the morning of November 1, it  came up again on New Day when Republican congressman Chris Collins raised it: “Your own network, CNN, had to fire Donna Brazile on October 14th, for getting the town hall questions ahead of time, leaking them to the Clinton campaign.” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota changed the subject: “But Congressman, how about the connections between Donald Trump and Russia?”

CNN’s fraudulent programming and its unwillingness to own up to it on television is another reason why trust in the media is at an all-time low (according to Gallup) and why by 10 to 1 in a new USA Today poll, the American people say the media want Hillary to win. CNN’s reputation has been sullied by this shameful episode. It really is the Clinton News Network. 



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Turkey continues its post-coup purge on media and civil servants

ORIGINAL LINK

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄźan is carrying out an unprecedented clamp-down on opposition voices in the country, arresting tens of thousands of people, firing even more, and shutting down the few media outlets that still dare to be critical of the Turkish leader.

But on Tuesday one of Turkey’s oldest newspapers vowed to continue to protest against ErdoÄźan’s rule, despite having at least 12 members of its staff arrested Monday, including its editor-in-chief. The left-leaning Cumhuriyet was accused of supporting a failed coup attempt in July.

After the editor, a cartoonist, and several columnists were arrested, Cumhuriyet’s Tuesday edition ran with the headline “We won’t give in” and left two columns blank, in solidarity with the detained staff.

The attack on the Cumhuriyet newspaper is just the latest move in an unprecedented attack on free speech by the Turkish government.

Here’s a by-the-numbers rundown of what has happened since July to those accused of having links with terrorist organizations and with U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom the government blames for inciting the coup attempt:

On Tuesday, according to a Reuters report, the government said it would appoint administrators to run the municipality in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish region of southeast Turkey where ErdoÄźan’s crackdown has been largely focused.

Last week a Turkish prosecutor arrested Diyarbakir’s joint mayors, accusing the pair of links with terrorism for public statements they made about greater autonomy for Kurds, who make up about 20 percent of Turkey’s population of 79 million.

The July attempt to overthrow the ErdoÄźan government was by a faction within the Turkish Armed Forces that organized themselves as the Peace at Home Council. ErdoÄźan used the coup to enact a state of emergency, and he has extended it until January, to harsh criticism from some political players.

“What the government and ErdoÄźan are doing right now is a direct coup against the rule of law and democracy,” Sezgin Tanrikulu, an MP from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, said in a Periscope broadcast posted on Twitter.



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Former British Ambassador Claims Source Of Podesta Leaks "Comes From Within Washington"

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With the media gripped by accusatory speculation regarding the identity of the source behind the Wikileaks leak of hacked Podesta and DNC emails, much of it focused on Russia, a new theory has emerged from Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who tells Sputnik (a Russian media outlet) that the source of the leaks are not Russian hackers but a Washington insider.

"The source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all. I discovered what the source was when I attended the Sam Adam's whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these emails comes from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington not to Moscow."

Asked about whether or not WikiLeaks have ever published information at the behest of Moscow, Murray said that "WikiLeaks has never published any material received from the Russian government or from any proxy of the Russian government. It's simply a completely untrue claim designed to divert attention from the content of the material."

While blasted by Washington, first by Republicans several years ago, and most recently by Democrats, the WikiLeaks revelations have often been hailed as a champion of accountability.

"I think whistleblowers have become extremely important in the West because the propaganda model — as Chomsky puts it — has been reinforced to the extent that people don't get any true information out of the media at all. It's worth saying that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are publishers; they publish what whistleblowers leak to them," Mr. Murrary told Sputnik.

Yet, whistleblowers in the US continue to be subject to lengthy prison sentences. A key example is Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced on August 21, 2013 to a thirty five year sentence for providing WikiLeaks with sensitive military and diplomatic documents highlighting, among other things, US military conduct in Iraq. Murray also mentions the case of John Kiriakou, a former investigator of international terrorism with the CIA who turned whistleblower.

"The people who did the torture have suffered no comeback at all," adds Mr. Murray.

Taking a step back and discussing the risk of geopolitical escalation between Russia and the US, Murray told Sputnik that "there is no chance whatsoever that Russia is going to ever attack the United States, that simply isn't going to happen."

"Just as Russia is not going to attack the United Kingdom. There never has been a chance that Russia would ever attack either of these two countries. But of course the narrative is all to do with power and funneling huge amounts of American taxpayer money into the defense industry and the security industry and these people are both from the class that benefits."

It's an extremely dangerous game, says Mr. Murray, and it feeds into a foreign policy that is completely mad.

"In Syria — and I should say I'm no fan of the Assad regime at all — but the idea that backing assorted groups of jihadists to tear the country apart is a better solution is crazy and it's especially crazy when we've already messed up Iraq, Afghanistan and now we're doing exactly the same thing again and you can see it doesn't work, it only works in terms of promoting continued instability and continued spending for the military and the security services."

Finally, Murray also believes that the public can't get clear analysis of these issues from mainstream media, because they are part of the same money/power nexus.



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Wikileaks Exposes Collusion Between Clinton Campaign And DOJ's Peter Kadzik

ORIGINAL LINK

Yesterday we noted that Podesta's friend Peter Kadzik was the DOJ representative chosen to head up the "thorough" review of the new Huma Abedin emails as revealed by a letter he wrote to Congress.  Given Kadzik's personal relationship with Podesta, it seemed like a "convenient" choice for the Clinton campaign. 

In the letter to Congress, the DOJ writes that it “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” assistant attorney General Peter J. Kadzik writes in letters to House and Senate lawmakers.

"Ironically", that is the same Peter Kadzik who has proven his "impartiality" in multiple WikiLeaks emails including this newly released bombshell in today's dump in which Kadzik provides a very helpful "heads up" about Hillary's email server investigation.

Kadzik

 

Sure, who needs an independent investigator...this guy will do just fine.



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Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Secrecy over the silliest things: our government today

ORIGINAL LINK
The following is a news commentary

For federal and local government, the reflexive position too often seems to be secrecy. Not only is it often unnecessary, but it could be argued it’s unethical and possibly unlawful, at times. It’s as if government entities don’t understand they derive their power from the people. They’re funded by the people. They work for the people. The information they have belongs to the people. Instead, bureaucrats often treat information as if they own it, like a corporation coveting highly-proprietary material. They lord over and withhold it in ways they perceive to be to their political advantage, regardless of the public nature of the information and of the bureaucrats’ mission.

A few weeks ago, I asked whether the news media was avoiding showing Donald Trump’s large crowds. I concluded, in part, that Hillary Clinton (for her own reasons) appears to be choosing to speak at relatively modest venues.

Read: Is Media Avoiding Showing Donald Trump’s Crowds?

Today, prior to a Clinton appearance at Florida’s Sanford Senior Center, I called the center to ask how many people it can hold. This is a routine call to help determine maximum capacity for an event. Instead of answering the question, the person who answered the phone sounded distressed and consulted somebody else in the room.

“It depends on how it’s configured, if there are tables or chairs…” she explains, in dodging my answer.

“Well just tell me the normal capacity for a standing event,” I say.

Silence. She consults the other person in the room again.

“We can’t tell you that, for security reasons,” she informs me. She argues that the Secret Service doesn’t want them to say how many people could be attending the speech.

“You don’t have to address this particular event,” I tell her. “Just how many can the facility hold, in general, for other events, standing only?”

More conversation with the other person in the room. She finally returns.

“I can’t tell you. Sorry,” she says, and hangs up on me before I can ask anything else.

I do a little hunting around online and find that the information I’ve asked for is published on the senior center’s website. It says the maximum capacity if the auditorium, lobby and annex, if filled, is about 850.

But the point here is how the reflexive position is too often to withhold the most basic information from the public, even when unnecessary or unwarranted. The public has started to become accustomed to being stonewalled, even over the simplest matters. It’s a slippery slope, if allowed, that leads to a society-wide clampdown on material that we own and have a right to.

 



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Real Rehabilitation

ORIGINAL LINK

By Dr. Mercola

In the U.S., there are more prisoners than farmers. In fact, according to Solutions journal the U.S. housed about one-fourth of the prison population worldwide, which amounts to nearly 2.3 million people.1

Most (80 percent) of the prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent crimes such as drug charges, and the U.S. spends more than $80 billion a year on the criminal justice system alone. The implications of spending so much on prisons, not only financially but socially, are concerning, to say the least.

And, perhaps not ironically, where small family farms once stood is now an influx of new prisons dotting the rural countryside. Prisons are often built in economically depressed areas and are touted as a tool for promoting economic growth.

But this growth hinges on the continuation of crime. Efforts to stop crime would, in effect, shut down the prisons that many rural areas depend on.2 Meanwhile, for all the billions being spent on incarceration and criminal justice, most inmates are not rehabilitated upon their release.

Many prisons still focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation, which means many prisoners may be angrier and harder upon their release, any may be unwilling or lack the skills necessary to function in society. According to Solutions:3

“In states such as New York, Florida, and California, more is spent on keeping people in prison than is spent on higher education.

In California, for example, it costs almost $45,000 to keep an inmate in prison for a year, while only $15,000 to send that same person to the state university system. For all the money allocated to locking people up, very little targets rehabilitation.”

Gardening is Powerful Rehabilitation

Adding gardens to prisons may seem trite; prior to the 1970s, many prisons, including Alcatraz, had them. Then came an era when, as The Washington Post put it, “lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key justice took hold.”4

Gardens in prisons disappeared, along with their many profound, yet little-recognized, benefits.

Today some prison officials are recognizing the importance of rehabilitation. Most prisoners are released, but as it stands more than 60 percent will be sent back to prison after committing new crimes or violating parole.5 Could the simplistic act of adding gardens to prisons really change that?

Preliminary research in California prisons suggests that among prisoners who participated in gardening programs, less than 10 percent returned to prison.6

Beth Waitkus, director of the Insight Garden Program, which helps U.S. prisons establish gardens, told the Post, “The demand is huge … Prisons see the value of this. When you have to tend to a living thing, there’s a shift that happens in a person.”7

And the prisoners aren’t the only ones who benefit. Some prison garden programs use their harvests to feed inmates, both saving money and adding to the quality and taste of the food.

Others donate food to low-income areas, allowing prisoners to give back to areas where many of them were raised. Still other prison gardens generate so much food that they’re even able to donate to churches, nursing homes and schools.

Gardening Lets Prisoners Experience Success

Part of what makes planting a garden so cathartic is that it represents a tangible measure of success. Growing food from seed, many prisoners finally experience success after a lifetime of failures, which helps to build self-esteem.

More than just work details in which prisoners work in the fields while being closely supervised, today’s gardening programs teach inmates gardening skills and allow them to take part in the garden’s plan and make other decisions. Solutions reported:8

“Through programs that teach the science of gardening, inmates learn that knowledge is empowerment. They shed their identity as inmates and become students. As a result, they take a greater interest in what they do, and become more skilled and passionate gardeners.

… The hopelessness of ever finding a skilled job after release, a job that provides enjoyment and dignity in a complex technological world, is replaced by a greater sense of purpose.”

Former inmates that took part in prison gardening programs may even be able to use those skills upon their release. For instance, the California-based group Planting Justice, which helps to build gardens in inner-city areas, has hired former inmates to work on their landscaping jobs.

Connecting Prisons With Nature

The Washington-state-based Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP) goes beyond gardening and is working toward comprehensive “greening” strategies at correctional facilities.

In addition to gardens, SPP helps such institutions to establish recycling programs, composting, and green job training for inmates. Their activities include:9

  • Educating and training inmates in science and conservation
  • Conservation projects involving inmates, including caring for western pond turtles and propagating native prairie plants
  • Helping inmates and staff develop sustainable operations such as recycling and composting
  • Contributing to the community; in 2015, SPP donated more than 400,000 pounds of fresh produce to food banks and prisons and 30,000 hand-crafted items to non-profit organizations

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Prison System (PSS) also operates a composting program that keeps 685 tons of food waste out of landfills every year, turning it into compost instead. The program also saves Philadelphia $40,000 a year in landfill costs.10

PSS built a composting facility via a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and now creates so much “black gold” that they give it away to the community for free.

There’s also the Philadelphia Prison Orchard Project, which got its start from a donation of 200 fruit trees. The prison-created compost is used to fertilize the orchard, and inmates are able to work in both areas.

PPS has partnered with Temple University and inmates can earn a vocational certificate in organic farming after completing the program.

Food Waste Is a Global Issue

Inmates in the Philadelphia prison system generate 1.4 pounds of food waste per person per day, which is part of what prompted the composting program that is cutting back on sending this food waste to landfills. Food waste is not unique to prisons, however, and composting programs shouldn’t be either.

California supermarkets are among those joining in the composting movement. In April 2016, a California law took effect that requires large grocery stores to compost or recycle their food waste. Companies like California Safe Soil, which created a process to turn food waste into farm-ready liquid fertilizer in just three hours, are helping to channel the waste into usable fertilizer, fast.11

The issue of food waste attracted national attention in the U.S. in September 2015 when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), together with the EPA, announced the first national food-waste reduction goal, which calls for a 50 percent reduction by 2030.

According to the USDA, the average U.S. family of four wastes more than 2 million calories, which equates to $1,500 worth of food, every year. The USDA continued:12

Food loss and waste in the United States accounts for approximately 31 percent — or 133 billion pounds — of the overall food supply available to retailers and consumers and has far-reaching impacts on food security, resource conservation and climate change.

Food loss and waste is single largest component of disposed U.S. municipal solid waste … Furthermore, experts have projected that reducing food losses by just 15 percent would provide enough food for more than 25 million Americans every year, helping to sharply reduce incidences of food insecurity for millions.”

As for howthey expect to achieve a 50 percent reduction in food waste, they plan to build on the ongoing U.S. Food Waste Challenge (launched in 2013), which creates a platform of leaders and food-chain members to share best practices to reduce, recover and recycle food loss and waste.

Tackling Food Waste and Food Loss

Other initiatives aim to tackle both food waste andfood loss. The celery that goes bad in your veggie crisper, the remainder of your sandwich at a restaurant, and the loaf of bread that goes moldy on your kitchen counter are all contributors to the massive epidemic of food waste.

Restaurants and supermarkets are also contributors. Food loss is another issue, which typically takes place at production, postharvest and processing stages in the food supply chain. Initiatives to tackle these issues include:

  • Apps to help consumers understand how to safely store food and understand food date labels
  • Consumer education campaigns with food-waste facts and reduction tips
  • Encouraging restaurants, grocery stores, food service companies and others to set aggressive goals for reducing food loss and waste

Gardening and Composting in Your Own Backyard

The benefits of gardening are universal, and you stand to reap the rewards of starting your own backyard garden and compost pile. Once you begin to grow your own foods, it naturally lends itself to composting the scraps from all of the produce you harvest. Composting can be done on virtually any scale. If you live in a city or suburb, there are many small systems available. The principles of composting — finding the balance between carbon, nitrogen, water and air — remain the same.

If you want to give it a try, check out my interview with New York City native Rebecca Louie, above. She’s the author of "Compost City: Practical Composting Know-How for Small-Space Living,” and in the video shereveals how to create compost in even the smallest of spaces.



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CDC Blocks Whistleblower From Vaccine Injury Testimony

ORIGINAL LINK

By Dr. Mercola

A 16-year-old boy with autism and his family are suing a medical clinic for administering vaccines they believe caused the boy's autism. The Tennessee-based case is unique for a number of reasons, the first being that it's the first time in 30 years that a vaccine case such as this has been heard in a U.S. court.

This is because in the U.S. there is a federally operated vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) that Congress created under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims in the District of Columbia (Washington D.C.) handles contested vaccine injury and death cases in what has become known as "vaccine court."

The VICP is a "no-fault" alternative to the traditional civil court lawsuit and was established in 1986 after a string of high-profile lawsuits slammed vaccine manufacturers.

The federal VICP compensates vaccine victims not from a fund paid into by vaccine manufacturers, but through a federal trust fund that collects a 75-cent surcharge on every vaccine given.

The 16-year-old Tennessee boy, Yates Hazlehurst, was denied compensation from the VICP, so the current lawsuit is giving him a second chance at justice.

CDC Blocks Key Whistleblower Testimony From Autism-Vaccine Case

A key part of the case hinges on testimony from Dr. William Thompson, a research scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases (NCIR).

He was a co-author of four key studies the CDC has used to refute a link between the MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) vaccine and autism, as well as thimerosal-containing vaccines (thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative) and autism.

Thompson claimed the CDC covered up a vaccine-autism connection in relation to the MMR vaccine. According to a news release provided by the World Mercury Project;1

"Dr. Thompson has publically stated to Congressman William Posey and others that he and his colleagues in the CDC Vaccine Safety Branch were ordered to commit scientific fraud, destroy evidence and manipulate data to conceal the link between autism and vaccines."

According to Thompson, one of the studies in question found that African-American boys who received the MMR vaccine before the age of 36 months had an increased risk for autism.2 He also maintains that CDC studies have found a relationship between thimerosal and tics, which are associated with autism.3

CDC: Thompson's Testimony Would Not Promote CDC Objectives

Thompson's testimony could be critical to the lawsuit in order to set the record straight about the flawed data used to deny other autism vaccine-injury claims.

According to Ecowatch, Morgan & Morgan law firm attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. argued to Tennessee Senior Circuit Court Judge William Acree that Thompson's testimony was necessary:4

"Yates, and almost 5,000 other vaccine injured autistic children, lost their cases in vaccine court because CDC and the Justice Department submitted fraudulent science wrongly denying the vaccine-autism link."

CDC director Thomas Frieden blocked the request to have Thompson testify, stating, "Dr. William Thompson's deposition testimony would not substantially promote the objectives of CDC or HHS [Health and Human Services]."5

Thompson received federal whistleblower protection in August 2014 and is still employed by the CDC. The attorneys for the case, Kennedy and Bryan Smith, also with Morgan & Morgan, plan to appeal the CDC's denial. According to Smith:6

"Frieden's denial was a disappointment but not a surprise, since the inescapable implication of Dr. Thompson's allegation is that the agency altered the science to undermine autism cases worth potentially $1 trillion in compensation ordered by Congress." 

CDC Called a 'Cesspool of Corruption'

If you want to know more about the underhanded dealings allegedly going on at the CDC, read the book "Vaccine Whistleblower." It contains the unedited transcripts of four legally recorded phone conversations between Thompson and Dr. Brian Hooker, a scientist investigating autism and vaccine research.

The transcripts reveal the confession of the alteration of data that showed a significant link between vaccines and autism. Thompson has previously stated that a meeting was scheduled "to destroy documents related to the study."

He said the remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room, "and reviewed and went through all the hardcopy documents that we had thought we should discard, and put them into a huge garbage can."7 Thompson has said he retained hard copies of all of the data, however.

The transcripts are also featured in the film Vaxxed, which was originally scheduled to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year but was allegedly pulled due to threats from other filmmakers to cancel their participation.

Unethical Practices Are the Norm at the CDC

A group of senior CDC scientists sent a letter to the CDC raising concerns about the conflicts of interest and industry ties that appear to be so common among CDC leaders.

The group goes by the name CDC Scientists Preserving Integrity, Diligence and Ethics in Research (CDC SPIDER), leaving their names out for fear of retaliation. The letter begins:8

"It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests. It seems that our mission and Congressional intent for our agency is being circumvented by some of our leaders.

What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors.

… Some staff are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right. We have representatives from across the agency that witness this unacceptable behavior. It occurs at all levels and in all of our respective units.

These questionable and unethical practices threaten to undermine our credibility and reputation as a trusted leader in public health."

Conflict of Interest, 'Climate of Disregard' at the CDC Highlighted

The letter specifically addresses several areas of "particular concern," including:

A cover-up of accurate screening data for the CDC's Wise Woman Program. Despite, a multi-million-dollar investment, the number of women screened during the program fell short of expectations.

Officials misrepresented actual screening numbers, "cooked" the data to make results "look better than they were," and manipulated data in "irregular ways."

Resources allocated to domestic programs for Americans being directed toward global health and research issues.

A questionable relationship between Barbara Bowman, Ph.D., former director of the CDC's Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention (DHDSP), and Coca-Cola; she left the agency unexpectedly, two days after her close ties with Coca-Cola were revealed.

Michael Pratt, senior adviser for Global Health in the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the CDC, has also allegedly promoted and led research for the soda giant.9

"Neither of these relationships were necessary (or appropriate) to uphold our mission … In fact, these ties have now called into question and undermined CDC's work," CDC Spider wrote of Bowman and Pratt.10

Their letter continued, " … this 'climate of disregard' puts many of us in difficult positions. We are often directed to do things we know are not right."

Can You Trust Health Information From a Corrupt Agency?

Knowing that the CDC has allegedly intentionally withheld data showing a link between vaccines and autism, it calls into question where their loyalties lie. Are their continued and urgent calls for vaccination truly in the name of public health, or are they the result of corporate influence?

The CDC, by the way, claims that it does not accept commercial support, but it receives millions of dollars in gifts and funding from industry.11 The CDC, a supposed independent public watchdog, is therefore neither independent nor a watchdog. Jeanne Lenzer, associate editor of the British Medical Journal, even stated, " … Several recent CDC actions and recommendations have raised questions about the science it cites, the clinical guidelines it promotes, and the money it is taking."12

When it comes to making health decisions for your family, it's crucial to do your research from legitimate independent sources to get the truth. Many are not aware, for instance, that in 2008 the U.S. government conceded that childhood vaccines contributed to symptoms of autism in 9-year-old Hannah Poling.

If you or your child is injured by a vaccine, meanwhile, and find yourself in vaccine court, the government will fight your claim — even if it's more than legitimate — or they may try to quietly settle it with a lowball offer (which preys on families in urgent need of money).

If the government settles outside of court, they don't have to admit that the vaccine caused harm, which keeps them in good light with the public.





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Monday, October 31, 2016

DOJ Tells Congress It Will Work "Expeditiously" To Review Huma's Emails... There Is Just One Problem

ORIGINAL LINK

Now that the FBI has obtained the needed warrant to start poring over the 650,000 or so emails uncovered in Anthony Weiner's notebook, among which thousands of emails sent from Huma Abedin using Hillary Clinton's personal server, moments ago the Us Justice Department decided to also finally join the probe, and as AP reported moments ago, it vowed to dedicate all needed resources to quickly review the over half a million emails in the Clinton case.

BREAKING: Justice Dept. says it'll dedicate all needed resources to quickly review emails in Clinton case.

— The Associated Press (@AP) October 31, 2016

In the letter to Congress, the DOJ writes that it “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” assistant attorney General Peter J. Kadzik writes in letters to House and Senate lawmakers.

#BREAKING Senior DOJ official sends letter to lawmakers responding to request for more information about email review.#8days pic.twitter.com/PCgT2ODkQd

— Just the Facts (@JTF_News) October 31, 2016

So far so good, even if one wonders just how active the DOJ will be in a case that has shown an unprecedented schism between the politically influenced Department of Justice and the FBI.

And yet, something felt odd about this.

Kadzik... Kadzik... where have we heard that name?

Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, "Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary's Benghazi Hearing" in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton's Benghazi testimony?

It was Peter Kadzik.

posto%20email_0.jpg

In other words, the best friend of John Podesta, Clinton's Campaign char, at the DOJ will be in charge of a probe that could potentially sink Hillary Clinton.

For those who missed it, this is what we reported:

The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chairman met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, who is currently a top official at the US Justice Department serving as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs.

 

The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures. The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the Wikileaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant.  The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just one day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.

 

Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows. Another email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.

As the Daily Caller noted, the dinner arrangement "is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices." As one former U.S. Attorney tells told the DC, the exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department.

The hacked emails confirm that Podesta and Kadzik were in frequent contact. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.

“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.

“It’s the kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,” he added, comparing the Podesta-Kadzik meetings to the revelation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met in private with Bill Clinton at the airport in Phoenix days before the FBI and DOJ investigating Hillary Clinton.

Kadzik's role at the DOJ, where he started in 2013, is particularly notable Kadzik, as helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.

It gets better because, as we further revealed, if there is one person in the DOJ who is John Podesta's, and thus the Clinton Foundation's inside man, it is Peter Kadjik.

Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office. That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account. In a Sept. 2008 email, which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign. Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”

screen-shot-2016-10-25-at-11-57-45-am

Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal. As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky. In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.

Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.

Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time. “He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe. Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.

Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.

Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon. To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001. A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”

The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon. On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.

Kadzik's current role

In his current role as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation. The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.

But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress. Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.

In a Feb. 1, 2016 letter in response to Kadzik, Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis noted that Kadzik had explained “that special counsel may be appointed at the discretion of the Attorney General when an investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice would create a potential conflict of interest.”

DeSantis, a Republican, suggested that Lynch’s appointment by Bill Clinton in 1999 as U.S. Attorney in New York may be considered a conflict of interest. He also asserted that Obama’s political appointees — a list which includes Kadzik — “are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.”

It is unknown if Kadzik responded to DeSantis’ questions.

Kadzik’s first involvement in the Clinton email brouhaha came in a Sept. 24, 2015 response letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley in which he declined to confirm or deny whether the DOJ was investigating Clinton. Last month, Politico reported that Kadzik angered Republican lawmakers when, in a classified briefing, he declined to say whether Clinton aides who received DOJ immunity were required to cooperate with congressional probes.

Kadzik also testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the issue of classifications and redactions in the FBI’s files of the Clinton email investigation.

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And now it seems that Kadjik will be in charge of the DOJ's "probe" into Huma Abedin's emails. Which is why we are a little skeptical the DOJ will find "anything" of note.

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Peter Kadzik, with lobbyist Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta.



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