Saturday, January 28, 2017

Seymour Hersh Blasts Media for Uncritically Promoting Russian Hacking Story

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Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news…

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Trump Warns Against Flu Shot & For Good Reason: “I Don’t Like Injecting Bad Stuff Into Your Body”

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The flu shot has often be said to be one of the greatest scams in medical history. While this can be up for debate, let’s shed some light on why people feel that way based on the research available – there’s no shortage of it.

Before we get to that, in an interview with Opie and Anthony on Sirius XM, Trump shared his opinion about flu shots and stated he feels they are “totally ineffective.”

“I’ve never had one. And thus far I’ve never had the flu. I don’t like the idea of injecting bad stuff into your body. And that’s basically what they do. And this one (latest flu vaccine) has not been very effective to start off with…. I have friends that religiously get the flu shot and then they get the flu. You know, that helps my thinking. I’ve seen a lot of reports that the last flu shot is virtually totally ineffective.“

Trump is right in this case – flu shots are the greatest medical fraud in history. They are full of “bad stuff” including formaldehyde and mercury – two powerful neurotoxins – and the vaccine industry even admits that laboratory tests prove the popular jab does not work.

Related: This One Thing Is Crucial To Preventing The Flu

Multiple studies found that flu vaccinations can cause harm to your heart, infant and fetus. The CDC recommends that all infants six months or older should receive flu vaccinations on top of a highly questionable vaccination schedule. You can check out the entire vaccination schedule here.

A study published in the journal Vaccine found that flu vaccines can cause a measurable increase in inflammation in pregnant women. This can increase the risk of preeclampsia which can result in high blood pressure and an increased amount of protein in the urine. Preeclampsia can lead to eclampsia, which are life threatening seizers pregnant women can have during birth.

Another study published in the Journal of Paediatrics, found that 85 percent of newborn infants experienced abnormal elevations of CRP when given multiple vaccines and up to 70 percent in those given a single vaccine. CRP is a protein found in the blood, a rise in this protein is a response to inflammation. Overall, 16 percent of infants were reported to experience vaccine-associated cardiorespiratory events within 48 hours of immunization.

Last but not least, a study published in the International Journal of Medicine revealed something that you don’t hear to often. That flu vaccines results in inflammatory cardiovascular changes indicative of increased risk for serious heart-related events, like a heart attack.

Together with an inflammatory reaction, influenza A vaccine induced platelet activation and sympathovagal imbalance towards adrenergic predominance. Significant correlations were found between CRP levels and HRV (heart rate variability) parameters, suggesting a pathophysiological link between inflammation and cardiac autonomic regulation. The vaccine-related platelet activation and cardiac autonomic dysfunction may transiently increase the risk of cardiovascular events.

More people are choosing to opt our of their yearly flu vaccination due to new information surfacing that shows they can be harmful to your health. Instances like children in Europe developing Narcolepsy after the H1N1 pandemrix vaccine adds to the new decisions as well.doesn’t help either. Periodic infectious challenges are natures way of strengthening the immune system, but with such a rigid vaccine schedule from the onset of birth, our immune system becomes reliant and weak instead of strong and more developed. In fact, during the global pandemic that was declared by the World Health Organization in 2009, Canadians actually increased the rate of medically attended pandemic H1N1 infection. Vaccines, therefore, may actually decrease the resistance to viral infection via their immunosuppressive actions. The study was published in the US National Library of Medicine.

Over 200 viruses cause influenza and influenza-like illness which produce the same symptoms (fever, headache, aches and pains, cough and runny noses). Without laboratory tests, doctors cannot tell the two illnesses apart. Both last for days and rarely lead to death or serious illness. At best, vaccines might be effective against only influenza A and B, which represent about 10% of all circulating viruses (source)

Hopefully this information inspires you to further investigate before receiving your flu shots. We are often pushed and encouraged by health organizations and mass media to take the flu shot without taking a look at the evidence that supports it, and the evidence that works against it. Having a broad range of information is always better than having no information at all. I personally choose not to be vaccinated, I am a strong believer that our immune systems are capable of overcoming any type of illness especially when we take care of our health and have the right mentally in place. I also recommend taking a look at the ingredients within the vaccine you are considering, and researching the potential effects those can have on your body.

It is said that the seasonal flu kills between 250,000 to 500,000 people worldwide, a number that to some reading might sound incredibly high.[1] Perhaps this is why the flu vaccine is so heavily offered? The key question that is creating a great amount of controversy is whether or not the numbers we read about the amount of flu deaths are actually accurate?

When winter time rolls around we start hearing the term “flu season.” As a result, we are offered the flu vaccine as a means to protect ourselves from the flu. I was just reading a public health flyer the other day that stated the best way to protect yourself from the flu is to take the vaccine. It seemed odd that the whole public health flyer seemed focused on making sure people knew the flu vaccine was a must have. I could understand that, if the death stats were actually accurate.

What Are The Stats Based On?

The World Health Organization is the source of the death count annually that is seen above. The CDC states that about 36,000 people in the US die each year from the flu. Although to some these sources seem credible, where they are getting their information from could be much more of a PR move than a legitimate stat.[2]

According to the National Vital Statistics System in the U.S., annual flu deaths in 2010 were only 500 for the year. Ulcers, pregnancy, childbirth and hernias were all around double or more compared to the flu. This of course didn’t even compare to things like heart disease or cancer which ranged somewhere in the 500,000 range. The story is the same in Canada.

Interestingly, the CDC released a data paper in 2010 that shows how they categorize flu deaths. The stat is grouped with Pneumonia deaths. If one were to look, it states that 50,097 deaths were attributed to flu and pneumonia, but when that number is broken down, pneumonia is responsible for 49,597 and the flu only 500. [3] The CDC itself acknowledges and admits that there is only a slim relationship, stating “only a small proportion of deaths… only 8.5 per cent of all pneumonia and influenza deaths [are] influenza-related.”

In Canada the numbers are approximately the same, reported deaths of the flu have never surpassed 350 during a flu season. Some years were as little as 150 or so. Furthermore, hospitalizations from the flu never surpassed  7000 for the entire country in some of the worst recorded years. [4]

The interesting thing about the WHO is that in their estimations they show no measure of how they arrived at their numbers. This is why controversy is so heavy when it comes to actual flu numbers. This is perhaps also why many point to the numbers as a PR stunt to sell more vaccinations.

Multiple Sources Agree

To take it even further, the American Journal of Public Health and the British Medical Journal feel the number of 500 deaths in the US could even be too high. They state that only about 15-20 per cent of people who come down with flu-like symptoms actually have the influenza virus. It is believed that the other 80-85 per cent actually caught rhinovirus or other germs that are indistinguishable from the true flu without laboratory tests, which are rarely done.

“U.S. data on influenza deaths are a mess,” states a 2005 article in the British Medical Journal entitled “Are U.S. flu death figures more PR than science?” The article points to the fact that the claimed 36,000 yearly flu-death figure commonly claimed is overstated and incorrect. This makes calling pneumonia/influenza as the 7th leading cause of death incorrect as well.

 Is The Vaccine Even Effective?

The former Chief Vaccine Office at the FDA, Dr. Anthony Morris states: “there is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza.”

Of course this statement has been attacked by many “science” blogs stating he isn’t an expert on the flu and that his opinion shouldn’t be trusted. A classic move by opposers where an attack is set out on statements made using emotional arguments attempting to make others feel unintelligent for questioning something.  Yet the opposers often provide no evidence to state the research or opinion is incorrect. This is perhaps one of the most dangerous aspects of parts of the scientific community. To think of how many things are ignored or shot down out of arrogance and fear of overturning old ideas is astonishing.

The prestigious Cochrane Library released a review in 2009 stating “There is not enough evidence to decide whether routine vaccination to prevent influenza in healthy adults effective.” [5]

Given the ineffectiveness of the vaccine and the potential side effects that go along with the vaccine, why put yourself at risk? The influenza does not appear to show any moderate risk of hospitalization or death and avoiding the flu can be done very easily with natural means.

Perhaps it’s finally time to end the hype and stop supporting the vaccine all together?

Sadly the CDC has created a mass market for the flu vaccine and enlisted doctors and the media to fear many into taking it. Since very few have questioned the efficacy of such a vaccine, the hysteria continues blindly.

Here’s an interesting look at the financial side of the flu vaccination.

Sources:

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/studies-find-flu-shots-can-harm-your-heart-infant-and-fetus

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20964738

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21945263

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17643770

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20386731

http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults

1. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs211/en/

2. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=195750

3. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf

4. http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/influenza/flu-stat-eng.php

5. http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/userfiles/ccoch/file/CD001269.pdf



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Robert F Kennedy’s Devastating Quotes on Vaccines and the CDC

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by Jon Rappoport, No MoreF Fake News:

From Kennedy’s video presentation, “7 Minutes on the CDC,” Anne Dachel (Age of Autism) has transcribed excerpts. This is explosive material, particularly because there is a chance Kennedy will head up an investigation of vaccine safety under Trump.

Kennedy understands the inherent conflict of interest at the CDC, which operates as a vaccine sales and marketing company, while at the same time posing as a neutral scientific body that assesses vaccine safety—AND OF COURSE, THE CDC PRESENTS AN EVER-EXPANDING SCHEDULE OF “NECESSARY” VACCINES TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Think of it: the CDC has the power—backed by federal and state governments, and supported by the fake-news media—to buy and sell vaccines, while deciding how many vaccines the population should submit to. What salesman wouldn’t want to work for an outfit like that?

Here are Kennedy’s remarks. Read them, study them, and learn the truth:

“The CDC is a very troubled agency, and it’s not just me saying that. There have been four separate, intensive federal investigations by the United States Congress—a three year investigation, 2001, 2002, 2003, by the United States Senate, Tom Coburn’s committee, by the Inspector General of HHS in 2008, by the Office Integrity in 2014. All of them have painted the CDC as a cesspool of corruption, of an agency that has become an absolute subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry, and that has become a sock puppet, a spokesperson, a shill for the industry.”

“CDC is not an independent agency. It is a vaccine company. CDC owns over twenty vaccine patents. It sells about $4.6 billion of vaccines every year. And its primary metric for success in all the departments in the agency are vaccine sales. The groups, for example the Immunization Safety Office, where the scientists who are supposed to be looking at efficacy and safety in vaccines, they are no longer a public service…agency. They are subsumed in that metric: We have to sell as many of these things as possible. And so they do things to their science to make sure that nothing interferes—no information—interferes with sales.

“Now there are two divisions of the vaccine branch where we worry about the corruption. The first one is called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. That is the committee that makes the decision about what new vaccines to add to the schedule.”

“When I was a boy, I got three vaccines. My children got sixty-nine vaccines. It changed in 1989.”

“Why did it change in 1989?”

“Because in 1986, Congress, [was] drowning in pharmaceutical industry money—pharma puts more money into lobbying than any other industry—Pharmaceutical companies have more lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are Congress people.”

“Do you think oil and gas has big influence in the Capitol? Well, that’s the next biggest. The pharmaceutical industry puts twice into lobbying, double the amount that the oil and gas, and four times what defense and aero space put in. So they control Congress.”

“In 1986, Congress passed the Vaccine Act, and there were good reasons for them to pass it. …At that time vaccine companies were being sued and were threatening to stop making vaccines. [Congress] said, okay, we’re going to insulate them from lawsuits. They made it illegal to sue a vaccine company in this country, no matter how reckless the behavior, no matter how negligent, no matter how toxic the product, no matter how grievous the injury to the child, you cannot sue.”

“You know how badly the pharmaceutical industry behaves when they are being sued, when there’s a whole bar of lawyers who spend their whole life looking for ways to sue the pharmaceutical industry and tell these stories to juries, and how many billions every year are won from that industry.”

“What do you think would happen if all of a sudden, all the lawyers disappeared, all the class action suits, all the multi district litigation, all the depositions, all the document searches, the discovery? Just gone. Nobody can sue. You can make anything you want.”

“And then they made it so that it was much easier to get a vaccine on the schedule than it was to get a pharmaceutical into the market. There’s no double blind placebo studies. They’re all fast tracked into the market place.”

“The decision is made by this group, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. And you’d hope that the people who would serve on that committee would be kind of nerdy scientists who are narrowly focused on public health outcomes, but that’s not who they are. The people who serve on that committee, almost all of them, have strong financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.”

“I’ll give you an example of how this committee works. In 1999, Paul Offit sat on that committee. And when you go to this committee, when you go to their meetings, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is in one room, and then there’s a press deck in the next room. You have a whole bunch of seats there with guys who look like me, in suits. They’re Wall Street analysts, pharmaceutical analysts. They’re waiting to hear the decision. And as soon as they come out and announce which new vaccines they put on the schedule, those guys run out in the hallway and get on their cell phones, and you can watch the stocks spike. So it’s become an economic enterprise.”

“Paul Offit sat on the committee in 1999 that added the rota virus vaccine to the schedule. He owned a patent to a rota virus vaccine. He was then able to sell his vaccine to Merck for $186 million. He pocketed something around $29 million. He’s never allowed anybody to ask him exactly how much, but according to the formula that they use, he would have gotten at least $29 million.”

“That caused a little bit of a scandal in Washington, and the Inspector General of HHS was sent to investigate it. They did a complete investigation of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and what they found, what they concluded was what he did was not illegal under CDC rules. Sixty-four percent of the people who sat on that committee had conflicts that were similar to Paul Offit, and ninety-seven percent might have conflicts because the rest of them never made out their conflict of interest forms. And nobody ever made them do it.”

“It’s very difficult when those kinds of shenanigans are going on. The American people have faith that all of these new vaccines that were added, beginning in 1989, are put there solely because this committee is concerned with public health.”

Got it? This is four years’ worth of university political-science curriculum in seven minutes. Well, the actual title is politicized science.

Every American who can read should read it.

This is what is really going on at America’s number-one public health agency—the agency that is also a corporation.

This is war against the American people from within.

Read More @ NoMoreFakeNews.com



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The Photographer Behind This Photo is Being Taken to Court by Child Services

The Photographer Behind This Photo is Being Taken to Court by Child Services: "An intimate photograph of a father cradling his sick child in the shower has become the subject of a legal battle with the Arizona Department of Child Safety. If the DCS succeeds, photographer Heather Whitten, the child’s mother, will be convicted of “neglect” for posting the photo."



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10 Sinister State Moves, Including Killing Protesters, Prove 1st Amendment Is Dying

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by Claire Bernish, Activist Post:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

President Donald Trump’s first week in office has seen a tumultuous mix of sweeping executive actions peppered with a few pleasant surprises; but if one thing proves true — as with the first term of any new president — there will be cause for someone to protest something.

Indeed, before Trump even took the oath of office, protesters descended on Washington, D.C. — marching en masse down the middle of typically congested roadways, chanting, screaming, and generally causing the sort of disruptions demonstrators seek in order to draw attention to a cause.

But that most basic right — to air one’s grievances to elected leaders in a public forum, often through disruption — might soon be a risky endeavor in at least ten states, as protest is gradually being criminalized in rather astonishing ways.


Lawmakers from North Dakota and Minnesota, to Virginia and the state of Washington, have proposed or passed legislation levying hefty penalties against anyone who dares to exercise the basic right to protest against — ironically enough — legislation and policy found to be untenable.

At the rate such laws have rapidly come to fruition, even if legislators in your state have yet to propose obstacles to protesting, the following list should serve as a guide for potential future strictures regarding your right to speak out.

1. NORTH DAKOTA

North Dakota lawmakers have proposed arguably the most crushing measures against protesters — seemingly specifically targeting water protectors opposing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Read More @ ActivistPost.com



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Another nurse whistleblower confirms: routine NICU vaccine injury happening

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There is a quickening happening within the establishment medical community. An awakening that is challenging an unthinking, business as usual atmosphere.Many within mainstream US medicine are arriving at the painful realization that their job is often to follow unethical orders and push the products of a monopolistic pharmaceutical industry.The Military Tribunal judges hearing the Doctors Trial in Nuremberg Germany after WWII. From left to right are Harold L. Sebring, Walter B. Beals, Johnson T. ...

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Friday, January 27, 2017

Europe Proposes "Restrictions On Payments In Cash"

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Having discontinued its production of EUR500 banknotes, it appears Europe is charging towards the utopian dream of a cashless society. Just days after Davos' elites discussed why the world needs to "get rid of currency," the European Commission has introduced a proposal enforcing "restrictions on payments in cash."



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Homeschooling Then and Now

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When the modern homeschooling movement started to emerge in the 1970s, many jurisdictions considered it a crime to teach your children at home. Today homeschooling is lawful in every state, albeit with different degrees of restrictions. It's one of the great victories for educational choice, and its impact is only increasing. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of homeschooled children has grown from 850,000 in 1999, when the center started to count them, to 1,770,000 in 2011, the last year for which it has done a tally.

In other words, we're long past the days when the stereotypical homeschooler was a hippie or a fundamentalist. They're still there, but they've been joined by many members of the American mainstream.

Here's an artifact from the days when homeschooling still seemed novel and strange. It's a 1981 episode of Donahue, and the guests include two homeschooling families and John Holt, a fervent critic of institutional education. Back then, if Holt's estimate on the show is accurate, there were only about 10,000 homeschooling families in the U.S. (That's families, not students. But even if each of those families had a dozen kids, it would still be a big jump from there to 1999's numbers.)

The audience greets the guests with a mixture of interest, skepticism, and sheer fascination. (One woman accuses one of the families of operating a commune.) Phil Donahue, as always, has a ball hopping around and playing devil's advocate. And the video includes the ads from when the program first aired, so you'll also get to see spots for everything from The Muppet Show to the Barnum & Bailey circus (RIP):

Bonus links: John Holt's one article for Reason, way back in 1971, is here. The left/right alliance that legalized homeschooling is described here. And past editions of the Friday A/V Club are here.

National School Choice Week runs from through January 28 and features over 21,000 events involving almost 17,000 schools from all 50 states. Go here for more information about events and for data about how increasing school choice—charters, vouchers, educational savings accounts, and more—is one of the best ways to improve education for all Americans.

As a proud media sponsor of National School Choice Week, Reason is publishing daily articles, podcasts, videos, interviews, and other coverage exploring the ways education is being radically altered and made better by letting more people have more choices about learning. For a constantly updated list of stories, go to Reason's archive page on "school choice."



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Isolated Incident? Half of ENTIRE Police Dept Fired, Quit Amid Corruption Probe

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departmentAn investigation into an Illinois police department has revealed a massive amount of corruption costing the jobs of half of the entire force.

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"What Happens When Doctors Only Take Cash"? Everybody, Especially Patients, Wins

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Anyone who has ever tried to shop around for prices on medical care knows how dysfunctional the market is. It's not because huge amounts of money isn't changing hands; it's that nobody really knows what anything costs at any given moment in time.

When I first moved to Los Angeles from Buffalo, my then-wife was pregnant with our first child and we were on a grad-student plan that didn't travel far beyond Western New York. Reason's benefits might not kick in until after our son was born, so I called around to area hospitals to try and find out what things cost. Four hospitals refused to give me any information, saying that they could not (and would not) price out anything. Part of that's understandable—what if something went seriously wrong?—but the people I spoke to refused to even say what basic charges were for things like delivery room time, anesthetics, and the like. Of course they have rate sheets for all that but share them with potential customers? Go fuck yourself, buddy.

For good reason: These costs are completely contingent on a wide variety of factors, especially what insurance plan you have or whether you have insurance at all. More recently, I've had the same problem trying to price out basic blood tests (a lipid panel) in southwestern Ohio, as simple and mechanical a procedure as exists. Without clear pricing, we'll never get far in radically improving the cost and quality of care for non-emergency services. In areas that are not traditionally covered by insurance—think Lasik surgery, cosmetic dentistry, and plastic surgery—a very different model obtains and you see exactly the sort of market-driven efficiencies that we see in virtually every other part of our commercial lives. The surgeon Jeffrey Singer has written about how various insurance contracts bar him from even discussing discounted cash payments with patients who announce they have insurance.

Time has a great story about bringing basic market forces to medicine. Titled "What Happens When Doctors Only Take Cash," the article uses the Oklahoma City Surgery Center as a model for a different way of doing business. Co-founded by the outspoken libertarian Keith Smith and Steven Lantier, two anesthesiologists, the center takes no insurance whatsoever. Instead, they take cash only and advertise and guarantee their prices and services. The result is pretty goddamned amazing:

The all-inclusive price for every operation is listed on the website. A rotator-cuff repair for the shoulder costs $8,260. A surgical procedure for carpal tunnel syndrome is $2,750. Setting and casting a basic broken leg: $1,925....

The Surgery Center would charge $19,000 for [patient Art Villa's] whole-knee replacement, a discount of nearly 50% on what Villa expected to be charged at his local hospital. And that price would include everything from airfare to the organization's only facility, in Oklahoma City, to medications and physical therapy. If unforeseen complications arose during or after the procedure, the Surgery Center would cover those costs. Villa wouldn't see another bill.

The savings for Villa's surgery were so awesome that his company footed the bill. Others are following suit:

Villa, for example, says his decision to go to the Surgery Center saved his company money, since his $19,000 bill is less than it would have been charged, even with a negotiated discount, by a traditional hospital. The Oklahoma state public employees' insurance fund, which covers 183,000 people, recently did similar math. In 2015 it announced a new rule: If patients go to a traditional hospital, they pay their deductible and co-payment. If they go to a cash-based provider that meets the fund's criteria, including the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, they pay nothing at all.

At the heart of this are the price signals that help us guide decisions in all parts of our lives. If you don't know what things cost at a given point in time, there's really no way to make an informed decision. Smith laid out for Time how he and Lantier came up with what to charge:

They asked their fellow doctors how much compensation was expected per procedure, factored in necessary expenses like surgical equipment and medical implants, then tacked on a 10% to 15% profit margin. Since their surgery center does not employ the army of administrators that is often required to haggle with insurers and follow up on Medicare reimbursements, their overhead is smaller. The whole operation is 41 people. "Finding an average price doesn't require complicated math," Smith says. "It's arithmetic." Since posting the price list eight years ago, they've adjusted it twice, both times to lower rates.

Read the whole thing here.

With about half of all medical dollars being spent by the government and much of the rest covered by completely inscrutable insurance-company payment systems, good luck figuring out what anything costs at any given point in time. Ironically, Smith notes that Obamacare's forced march toward high-deductible plans (still a rarity among insured people) is actually fueling more cost-consciousness among patients (who should be called customers! enough with the mystifying of medical care as something more than other types of services!). After all, if your deductible is $6,000 or $15,000 or something you're unlikely to reach in a given year, you have more incentive to track your costs.

Indeed. I started this post with anecdotes about the difficulty of finding medical prices and I'll end with another. A few years back I had switched to a high-deductible plan and was prescribed something—a statin or antidepressant, I can't remember which, but it was a drug for which many brand names and many generics exist. My doctor prescribed a name brand and I asked him how much it would cost per month. He replied, I have no idea. I pressed him a bit and he had his staff call my insurer and find out. It turned out it would be something on the order of $80 a month while a generic drug would do basically the same thing for about $8.00 a month. He prescribed the latter and said we could always switch if it wasn't getting the job done.

Start multiplying those sorts of interactions throughout the medical-care system and big things start to happen. You supercharge it with outfits like the Oklahoma City Surgery Center. What happens when doctors only take cash? The lucrative field of medicine gets demystified, prices go down, services go up, and everybody except insurance companies come out ahead. Paying cash on the barrel head isn't the full limit of how to increase the quality of medical care while driving prices down, but it's an essential part of any serious reform that doesn't simply involve rationing the quantity of care. Different conditions apply (obviously) for emergency situations, but those sorts of costs are exactly what real insurance—as opposed to the pre-payment plans we effectively call "insurance"—are designed to cover.

Back in 2012, Reason TV's Jim Epstein visited the Oklahoma City Surgery Center and talked with Keith Smith and patients. Watch this video to see the future of medicine—if we're lucky, that is.



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Congresswoman Returns From Syria With ‘Proof’ Obama Funded ISIS

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by Baxter Dmitry, Your News Wire:

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard told CNN that she has proof the Obama administration was funding ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard went to Syria on a secret fact-finding mission to wade through the lies and propaganda and find out what is really happening on the ground.

Immediately on her return CNN booked her for an “exclusive” interview – and Gabbard told them exactly what they didn’t want to hear: she has proof the Obama administration was funding ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

Explaining to Jake Tapper that she met people from all walks of life in Aleppo and Damascus, Gabbard said that Syrians “expressed happiness and joy at seeing an American walking their streets.” But they also wanted to know “why is it that the United States, its allies and other countries, are providing support, are providing arms, to terrorist groups like Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, who are on the ground there, raping, kidnapping, torturing, and killing the Syrian people?

“They asked me why is the United States supporting these terrorist groups who are destroying Syria – when it was Al-Qaeda who attacked the United States on 9/11, not Syria. I didn’t have an answer for that.“

That was more than Jake Tapper, who was hostile from the beginning of the interview, could handle.

His face screwed up and he lashed out, saying, “Obviously the United States government denies providing any sort of help to the terrorist groups you are talking about, they say they provide help for the rebel groups.“

If that was supposed to Tapper’s knockout blow, Gabbard saw it coming a mile away.

Without missing a beat, she calmly deconstructed his ideological, and savagely wrong, talking points.

“The reality is, Jake, and I’m glad you bought up that point. Every place that I went, every person I spoke to, I asked this question to them. And without hesitation, they said ‘there are no moderate rebels, who are these moderate rebels that people keep speaking of?’

“Regardless of the name of these groups, the strongest fighting force on the ground in Syria is Al-Nusra or Al-Qaeda and ISIS. That is a fact. There are a number of different other groups, all of them are fighting alongside, with or under the command of the strongest group on the ground that is trying to overthrow Assa

Read More @ YourNewsWire.com



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Thursday, January 26, 2017

Double Standards: Where Were the Liberal Protesters During Obama’s Wars?

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By Mike Whitney. Originally published at Smirking Chimp (republished with permission of the author).

The election of Donald Trump has sent millions of people pouring out onto the streets to protest a man they think is a racist, misogynist, xenophobic bully who will destroy US democracy in his quest to establish himself as supreme fascist ruler of the country.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe Trump is a fascist who will destroy America. But where were these people when Obama was bombing wedding parties in Kandahar, or training jihadist militants to fight in Syria, or abetting NATO’s destructive onslaught on Libya, or plunging Ukraine into fratricidal warfare, or collecting the phone records of innocent Americans, or deporting hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers, or force-feeding prisoners at Gitmo, or providing bombs and aircraft to the Saudis to continue their genocidal war against Yemen?

Where were they?

They were asleep, weren’t they? Because liberals always sleep when their man is in office, particularly if their man is a smooth-talking cosmopolitan snake-charmer like Obama who croons about personal freedom and democracy while unleashing the most unspeakable violence on civilians across the Middle East and Central Asia.

The United States has been at war for eight straight years under Obama, and during that time, there hasn’t been one sizable antiwar march, demonstration or protest. Nothing. No one seems to care when an articulate bi-racial mandarin kills mostly people of color, but when a brash and outspoken real estate magnate takes over the reigns of power, then ‘watch out’ because here come the protestors, all three million of them!

Can we agree that there is at least the appearance of hypocrisy here?

Indeed. Analyst Jon Reynolds summed it up perfectly over at the Black Agenda Report. He said:

“If Hillary had won, the drone strikes would have continued. The wars would have continued. The spying would continue. Whistleblowers would continue being prosecuted and hunted down. And minorities would continue bearing the brunt of these policies, both in the US and across the world. The difference is that in such a scenario, Democrats, if the last eight years are any indication, would remain silent — as they did under Obama — offering bare minimum concern and vilifying anyone attacking their beloved president as some sort of hater. Cities across the US would remain free of protests, and for another 4-8 years, Democrats would continue doing absolutely nothing to end the same horrifying policies now promoted by a Republican.” (“Delusions Shattered“, Jon Reynolds, The Black Agenda Report)

He’s right, isn’t he? How many of the 800,000 protesters who marched on Sunday would have flown to Washington to express their contempt for would-be President Hillary Clinton?

Zero, I’d wager, and yet it’s Hillary who wanted to implement the no-fly zones in Syria that would have put Washington in direct confrontation with Moscow, just like it was Hillary who wanted to teach Putin a-thing-or-two in Ukraine. But is that what the people want? Would people prefer to be led into World War 3 by a bonefide champion of liberal values than concede the post to a brassy billionaire who wants to find common ground on fighting ISIS with his Russian counterpart?

It seems like a no-brainer to me. And it’s not like we don’t know who is responsible for the killing in Syria either. We do.

Barack Obama and his coterie of bloodthirsty friends in the political establishment are entirely responsible. These are the people who funded, armed and trained the Salafist maniacs that have decimated the country and created millions of refugees that are now tearing apart the EU. That’s right, the spillover from America’s not-so-covert operation is ripping the EU to shreds. It’s just another unfortunate side-effect of Obama’s bloody Syrian debacle. As journalist Margaret Kimberly says in a recent post at The Black Agenda Report: “All of the casualties, the sieges, the hunger and the frantic search for refuge can be placed at America’s feet.”

Amen, to that. All the violence can be traced back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, home of Barack Hussein Obama, Nobel peace prize winner. What a joke. Here’s how analyst Solomon Comissiong sums it up in another article at the BAR:

“Supporters of Barack Obama, and liberals in general, are disingenuous frauds. They had no issues protesting the likes of the amoral warmongering George W. Bush or the racist xenophobe, Donald J. Trump, however when it comes to Barack Obama they can find no reason to protest his mass murdering escapades. Obama supporters were recently nostalgic and teary eyed after he gave his last major speech as president of the United States, yet can find little reason to shed tears over the masses of civilians who were destroyed directly as a result of Obama’s policies. Where were the emotions and tears when men, women and children were getting blown to bits by USA drone attacks, indiscriminate air strikes and bombs?…Those who protested the racist and xenophobic Trump, but not Obama or Clinton, are nothing more that disingenuous frauds and amoral cowards.” (“As Obama Exits the White House, Never Forget His Destructive Imperialist Legacy“, Solomon Comissiong, Black Agenda Report)

Let’s be honest, Obama got a pass from his supporters strictly because of appearances; because he looked and sounded like a thoroughly reasonable bloke who only acted on the loftiest of principles. Obama was hailed as a moral giant, a political rock star, a leader among leaders. But it was all fake, all make-up and glitz behind which operated the vicious national security state extending its tentacles around the world, toppling regimes wherever it went, and leaving anarchy and destruction in its wake. Isn’t this Obama’s real legacy when you strip away the sweeping hand gestures and pompous rhetoric?

Of course it is. But Trump won’t have that advantage, will he? Trump is not a public relations invention upon which heartsick liberals pin their highest hopes. Trump is Trump warts and all, the proverbial bull in the china shop. That’s not to say Trump won’t be a lousy president. Judging by the Wall Street cutthroats and hard-edged military men he’s surrounded himself with, he probably will be. But the American people are no longer asleep, so there’s going to be limits to what he can hope to achieve.

So the question is: How should one approach the Trump presidency? Should we denounce him as a fascist before he ever sets foot in the Oval Office? Should we deny his “legitimacy” even though he was elected via a process we have honored for over 200 years? Should we launch impeachment proceedings before he’s done anything that would warrant his removal from office?

Veteran journalist Robert Parry answers this question in a recent piece at Consortium News. Here’s what he said:

“The current danger for Democrats and progressives is that – by bashing everything that Trump says and does – they will further alienate the white working-class voters who became his base and will push away anti-war activists.

There is a risk that the Left will trade places with the Right on the question of war and peace, with Democrats and progressives associating themselves with Hillary Clinton’s support for “endless war” in the Middle East, the political machinations of the CIA, and a New Cold War with Russia, essentially moving into an alliance with the Military (and Intelligence) Industrial Complex.

Many populists already view the national Democrats as elitists disdainful of the working class, promoters of harmful “free trade” deals, and internationalists represented by the billionaires at the glitzy annual confab in Davos, Switzerland.

If — in a rush to demonize and impeach President Trump — Democrats and progressives solidify support for wars of choice in the Middle East, a New Cold War with Russia and a Davos-style elitism, they could further alienate many people who might otherwise be their allies.

In other words, selectivity in opposing and criticizing Trump – where he rightly deserves it – rather than opportunism in rejecting everything that Trump says might make more sense. A movement built entirely on destroying Trump could drop Democrats and progressives into some politically destructive traps.” (“Selectivity in Trashing Trump“, Robert Parry, Consortium News)

Right on, Bob. A very reasonable approach to a very thorny situation.

Bravo!

Double Standards: Where Were the Liberal Protesters During Obama’s Wars? was originally published on Washington's Blog



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Media already has verdict: There's no voter fraud

ORIGINAL LINK
Former President Barack Obama casts his ballot during early voting at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Chicago, Illinois, Oct. 25, 2012 (White House photo)

Former President Barack Obama casts his ballot during early voting at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Chicago, Illinois, Oct. 25, 2012 (White House photo)

“[President] Trump has continued to claim – without any evidence – that there was massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election,” said the left-leaning folks at the Annenberg Public Policy Center on Thursday.

Politico said, “The president can investigate imaginary votes all he wants. His numbers don’t add up.”

At Slate was the headline, “Trump is planning a federal investigation into mass voter fraud, which does not exist.”

In the old legacy media, the verdict already is in: “There’s no evidence that widespread voter fraud happened, there never has been,” flatly stated Fox News’ Shepard Smith.

Without, of course, any evidence for his statement.

He cited no studies, investigations, audits.

Didn’t mention the oddities from previous presidential elections where there were more votes that than were people in some jurisdictions. Or the charges for vote fraud. Or the convictions.

But Smith’s recent comment typified what the old networks, newspapers and such are saying, in light of President’s Trump’s comments about widespread fraud that may have happened over the course of the 2016 election.

For example, ABC stated, “President Donald Trump and the White House are reiterating the unsubstantiated assertion that millions of people illegally cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election – a claim Trump first made after the election without presenting evidence.”

The New York Times joined in: “During a private meeting with congressional leaders on Monday, President Trump asserted that between three million and five million unauthorized immigrants had voted for his Democratic opponent and robbed him of a victory in the national popular vote. There is no evidence to support the claim. …”

And USA Today chorused, “President Trump continues to claim – without any evidence – there was massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.”

Here are Smith’s comments:

But those comments may shortly have to change, as, even while there’s word that President Trump may order an investigation into vote fraud, a separate organization has confirmed plans for a forensic audit.

An examination.

A review.

Of actual, verifiable vote fraud in the United States.

True the Vote, the organization that infamously was targeted by the Obama Internal Revenue Service because of its conservation foundations, and fought the agency in court, has confirmed a study of the vote fraud problem already is beginning.

Citing its “comprehensive forensic audit” of the election results, officials with the organization said, “Our focus will include, but not be limited to, non-citizen voting, falsification of identity, double voting, mail-in ballot fraud, votes cast in the name of dead voters, and federal registration flaws.”

Millions of files

In the statement from True the Vote chief Catherine Engelbrecht, she said her group already has developed methodologies and supports needed to do such a complicated analysis.

“We are not only comfortable with, we’re confident in, our ability to manage a usable platform of hundreds of millions of files,” she said. “There is no doubt this will be our biggest project to date, but we aren’t going it alone. Our audit team will include world-class technologists, researchers, data miners, statisticians, scholars, analysts, and subject matter experts. This isn’t B team stuff. The integrity of our elections is too important.”

Those results then will be released, showing voter fraud does exist.

Officials with the group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC have explained they have the world’s largest archive of details about illegal immigration and associated issues such as illegal alien crimes and voter fraud activity.

“It is amazing to see all of these major news sources put out ‘fake news’ claims that Trump has zero evidence for his justified voter fraud concerns,” said ALIPAC chief William Gheen. “We have been sounding the alarm that the Democratic Party has facilitated and utilized illegal alien voters in western states like Nevada, California, Oregon and Washington state since at least 2010! Our archives are filled with substantial evidence of non-citizens voting in U.S. elections, and we applaud Donald Trump answering our call to launch an official federal investigation into these matters!”

He said his organization is compiling a special online report that provides evidence. ALIPAC is creating a special page to provide details, such as the study from 2008 that claimed 2.8 million non-citizens voted.

Or the thousands of names removed from voting rolls as ineligible after various investigations.

Only three years ago, John Fund wrote at National Review, “Voter Fraud: We’ve got proof it’s easy.”

“Undercover agents were able to vote as dead people, but election officials are attacking the agents. Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud – or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls. But New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a ‘John Test’ so as to not affect the outcome of any contest,” he reported.

Hotlines

The American Center for Law and Justice has provided a list of hotlines state-by-state for reporting voter fraud, and Infowars has reported the VoteFraud.org group cited three million votes in the election were cast by illegal aliens.

At about the same time, at Accuracy in Media, James Simpson reported on a specific, and different, vote fraud:

It is difficult to describe the enormity of the crime being committed by the Obama administration and their Democratic allies. They flagrantly flout the law, while simultaneously turning it into a weapon against political opponents, use government agencies to target innocent Americans, attempt to create legal voters through amnesty, and undermine voter integrity measures to facilitate vote fraud, while denying it even exists. In short, they are corrupting the entire process.

Thus, it is fitting to begin this report by recounting a story of deliberate, blatant official voter fraud. This April 17, the Illinois House Executive Committee voted to authorize $100 million to construct President Obama’s future presidential library and museum in Chicago. AP reported that the Committee voted “unanimously,” 9-0 to support the plan. The report was false. Only four of the 11 Committee members were in attendance – all Democrats. They did not even have a quorum. Furthermore, this was supposed to be a “subject matter only” hearing, i.e., entailing no votes. No matter; the legislators simply made up the results – even counting absent Republicans as “yes” votes. Republican State Representative Ed Sullivan observed, “In this case they didn’t even care to change the rules; they just flat out broke them.”

At Townhall in 2014 was a report on the results of work at Old Dominion University, which revealed in an article in Electoral Studies: “Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.”

The data came from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

“More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote.”

WND reported just this week that in 2016, Hillary Clinton garnered 2.9 million more votes nationwide than Trump, while the Republican won the Electoral College vote, 304-227.

Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and joined Fund in authoring “Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.”

They allowed WND to use quotes from the draft of an op-ed they submitted for publication, titled, “Trump’s probe of voter fraud long overdue. No one should oppose collecting the data Obama’s administration has been hiding.”

Perhaps their most consequential insight is that if all the past indicators are true and there likely has been rampant voter fraud, it may not be all that difficult to prove, particularly now that there is a will to look for it.

“Conducting an investigation that will help resolve the size of the voter fraud problem is straightforward,” asserted Fund and von Spakovsky.

“The Department of Homeland Security should cooperate with states wanting to check the citizenship status of voters on their rolls. The Justice Department should put pressure on or sue counties and states that refuse to clean up their rolls.”

Fund and von Spakovsky cited “a 2012 study from the Pew Center on the States estimating that one out of every eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date or a duplicate.”

“About 2.8 million people are registered in more than one state, according to the study, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. In most places it’s easy to vote under the names of such people with little risk of detection.”

No I.D.

WND reported previously on an explosive undercover video showing just how startlingly simple it is for anyone to commit voter fraud in Michigan – even when the voter provides no I.D. and falsely assumes the identity of a well-known columnist.

The undercover footage was released by Project Veritas founder and pioneering investigative reporter James O’Keefe.

In the video, O’Keefe visits a polling location in Michigan and requests a ballot for Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson.

At the location, workers request O’Keefe’s name, address and driver’s license.

“Oh, you do need a license?” O’Keefe asks. “I don’t actually have my wallet with me. I lost it over the weekend hunting. My license fell out of my pocket.”

He adds, “I didn’t know I needed an I.D.”

“You do,” says the poll worker, who asks, “What’s your address?”

O’Keefe obviously provides an incorrect address, and the poll worker is puzzled because O’Keefe says he lives on “Marietta” rather than “Henrietta.”

The female poll worker calls Birmingham, Michigan, city clerk Laura Pierce for instructions on what to do about a voter with no I.D.

The worker tells O’Keefe: “So you have to fill out the front, and do the back. And then you can vote.”

“Do I need to get an I.D.?” he asks.

“No, vote,” she says, instructing him to simply sign an affidavit on the back “saying you are who you say you are.”

O’Keefe asks her: “If I don’t have a license, how do you guys know I am who I say I am?”

Watch the undercover video:

A video sting by O’Keefe, first reported by WND, also prompted the resignation of Democrat campaign staffer Patrick Moran, the son of Rep. Jim Moran son, and a criminal investigation by the Arlington County Police Department in Northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Prosecutors decided not to press charges.

The Moran video:

Patrick Moran, who is also the nephew of Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Brian Moran, Jim Moran’s brother, is seen on video suggesting that the undercover Project Veritas reporter create fake utility bills to serve as voter ID so he can cast ballots in the names of registered voters. Moran warns there will be “a lot of voter protection” at the polling places to enforce the state’s identification laws.

WND also reported when O’Keefe’s team captured on video a regional director of the voter mobilization group launched by Barack Obama, Organizing for America, helping an undercover reporter vote for the president in two states. The director was fired after the video was reported.

There also was the report on major voter fraud going on in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation claimed in lawsuits claiming voter fraud is taking place in Broward County, Florida, and in Wake County, North Carolina.

1,000 instances

The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s report found more than 1,000 instances of illegal immigrants or non-citizens being registered to vote in just eight Virginia counties. They cast nearly 200 ballots in elections before being purged from voter rolls.

The other 125 counties in Virginia did not provide data, so the problem is much more widespread than the small sample would indicate, said attorney J. Christian Adams, who represents the foundation.

In 2014, Indiana launched a program to verify voter addresses, to crack down on voter fraud

Indiana officials admitted at least one in eight voter registrations contains inaccurate information.

In 2014, Fox News reported officials in North Carolina were investigating hundreds of cases of potential voter fraud after identifying thousands of registered voters with personal information matching those of voters who voted in other states in 2012.

And there were charges against a handful of people in Colorado for voter fraud.

Other contemporaneous headlines included “Nun charged with vote fraud” and “Woman, 86, charged with felony vote fraud.”

After the 2012 election, WND compiled the the Big List of vote fraud reports, accessible at this link.

It documented how 59 different Philadelphia voting divisions in which Mitt Romney received zero votes compared to Obama’s 19,605. And the Cleveland precinct in which Obama beat Romney 542 to 0. (In fact, Romney received zero votes in nine Cleveland precincts.)

The listing that follows is just a sampling of the results:

The Market Daily News reported on those 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, that on election day gave Romney zero votes, and Obama got 99 percent. “In more than 50 different precincts, Romney received two votes or less,” the report said. “One would think that such improbable results would get the attention of somebody out there.”

According to Philly.com, 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia produced a “head-spinning figure,” not one vote for Romney. “The unanimous support for Obama in these Philadelphia neighborhoods – clustered in almost exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia – fertilizes fears of fraud, despite little hard evidence,” the newspaper said.

A poll watcher told WND up to 10 percent of the ballots cast at a polling station in Pennsylvania reverted to a default, which gave Barack Obama a vote no matter who the voter had selected. The incident took place in the state where officials claimed Obama got a total of 19,605 votes in 59 voting divisions to zero for Mitt Romney and not far from the 100 precincts in Ohio where Obama got 99 percent of the vote, a feat not even achieved by third-world dictators. It was in Upper Macungie Township, near Allentown, Pa., where an auditor, Robert Ashcroft, was dispatched by Republicans to monitor the vote on Election Day. He said the software he observed would “change the selection back to default – to Obama.”

Chicago elections worker Steve Pickrum told WND as an equipment manager for the elections system, he was called when a voting machine malfunctioned. “On early voting when I did work on the floor when voters needed help using the equipment, I was able to see the preference of the voter, and every time that I saw [a] voter voted for Romney a ‘voter save failure’ message came up on the screen,'” he reported. Then when he went on election day to vote himself, he picked Romney and experienced the same error message. He reported he never experienced the error message when the voter was choosing Barack Obama.

Another poll worker, this one assigned at the University of Michigan, reported to WND a list of irregularities, including that the precinct captain told her at one point, “You go sit down, you are bothering me,” when she was trying to observe the proceedings. “I was only standing there and looking at voter documents,” she told WND. “It was clear that what bothered him was my very presence.” She said a short time later a young man arrived and identified himself as a Democrat poll challenger. “The first time he said anything was to object to my challenge of a voter. He tried to anger the voter by telling her ‘She does not believe you are who you say you are.’ He was trying to create a scene. It then happened again and I told him ‘You are not here to challenge me!’ His reply was a very loud ‘Yes I am! You are a Republican and you are here to prevent people from voting. You are holding up the line and creating obstructions,'” she reported. She told WND in fact no one waited more than about 15 minutes to vote the entire day, and there were no obstructions.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner reports that some 200,000 fewer white voters were recorded in Ohio’s election than in 2008. “There are several theories about those missing white voters, but the most plausible is that the ones who were undecideds or weak Republicans were deeply influenced by Obama’s relentless attacks on Romney …”

And in Florida, the Sun Sentinel reported that election workers a week after the election said they found 963 unaccounted-for ballots – in a warehouse. “How can you lose them? This is terrible,” candidate Chickie Brandimarte told officials. Election supervisor Brenda Snipes, however, said it’s routine for various vote totals to be adjusted up until the Nov. 18 final certification.

 



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Democrats Going Bonkers Over Betsy DeVos: New at Reason

ORIGINAL LINK

During her confirmation hearings for secretary of education, Democratic senators used Betsy DeVos as a prop to grandstand about every ideological hobbyhorse ofBetsy DeVos theirs – some such as gun control that didn't even have anything to do with education. And then they turned around and accused her of being an ideologue who was unwilling to see the evidence against her beloved charter schools. But by foregoing an opportunity to engage her views, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia, it seems they themselves don't want to see the evidence of failure against their teachers' union-conrolled beloved public schools.

Maybe once she's confirmed, which she will on Jan. 31, they will get off their highhorse and actually start listening. But don't hold your breath.



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Why Is The Deadstream Media Ignoring These GMO Studies?

ORIGINAL LINK

by Derrick Broze, Activist Post:

pro_gmo_propaganda.pngDespite new research indicating health concerns and conflicts of interest related to Genetically Modified foods, the corporate media has, once again, remained silent. 

In late December, a series of studies and news stories went largely unreported and ignored by the corporate, deadstream media. These reports covered blatant conflicts of interest between the biotechnology corporations promoting genetically modified or engineered products and the researchers and politicians guiding legal policy. There was also the issue of a new study that shows negative health affects with rats who ingest genetically engineered food.

This study, Effect of genetically modified corn on the jejunal mucosa of adult male albino rat, which was published in the journal Experimental and Toxicologic Pathology, showed that rats fed GM Bt corn MON810 suffered serious damage to the surface mucous membranes of the jejunum, an important part of the small intestine. The signs of damage were apparent after only 90 days, according to the researchers.

The study used Monsanto’s MON810: Ajeeb YG, a genetically modified version of Ajeeb, a local species of corn grown in Egypt. The GM version was created by Monsanto for the Egyptian market. The rats who were on the GM corn consumed MON810 corn as 30% of their diet. The control group had the same amount of non-GMO corn. The GM group experienced damage on the finger-like structures within the intestine known as villi. These villi are responsible for absorbing nutrients from food. The researchers found them to be distorted and flattened. They also found signs of inflammation, disturbed mucosal glands, and congested blood vessels.

“Consumption of GM-corn profoundly alters the jejunal histological [microscopic] structure,” the researchers concluded.

Despite this astounding study, there has been little to no mention of its conclusions in the independent or corporate media. The study alone is not hard evidence that the same results will be found in humans, or even necessarily that the genetically modified corn is the sole reason for the damage, but it does absolutely warrant further investigation. Especially in light of growing concern around conflicts of interest.

Read More @ Activist Post



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Tulsi Gabbard calls on US govt to stop ‘supporting terrorists’ after meeting Syria civilians & Assad

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587e558fc36188736e8b4590.jpg

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has called on the US to put an end to the “illegal war” she believes it wages in Syria after visiting Damascus and Aleppo. During her trip, she spoke with civilians, religious leaders, opposition leaders, and President Assad. Gabbard described her privately-funded seven-day trip to Lebanon and Syria as a “fact-finding […]

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Tuesday, January 24, 2017

"The Greater Depression" - Comparing The 1930s And Today

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

You've heard the axiom "History repeats itself." It does, but never in exactly the same way. To apply the lessons of the past, we must understand the differences of the present.

During the American Revolution, the British came prepared to fight a successful war—but against a European army. Their formations, which gave them devastating firepower, and their red coats, which emphasized their numbers, proved the exact opposite of the tactics needed to fight a guerrilla war.

Before World War I, generals still saw the cavalry as the flower of their armies. Of course, the horse soldiers proved worse than useless in the trenches.

Before World War II, in anticipation of a German attack, the French built the "impenetrable" Maginot Line. History repeated itself and the attack came, but not in the way they expected. Their preparations were useless because the Germans didn't attempt to penetrate it; they simply went around it, and France was defeated.

The generals don't prepare for the last war out of perversity or stupidity, but rather because past experience is all they have to go by. Most of them simply don't know how to interpret that experience. They are correct in preparing for another war but wrong in relying upon what worked in the last one.

Investors, unfortunately, seem to make the same mistakes in marshaling their resources as do the generals. If the last 30 years have been prosperous, they base their actions on more prosperity. Talk of a depression isn't real to them because things are, in fact, so different from the 1930s. To most people, a depression means '30s-style conditions, and since they don't see that, they can't imagine a depression. That's because they know what the last depression was like, but they don't know what one is. It's hard to visualize something you don't understand.

Some of them who are a bit more clever might see an end to prosperity and the start of a depression but—al­though they're going to be a lot better off than most—they're probably looking for this depression to be like the last one.

Although nobody can predict with absolute certainty what this depression will be like, you can be fairly well-assured it won't be an instant replay of the last one. But just because things will be different doesn't mean you have to be taken by surprise.

To define the likely differences between this depres­sion and the last one, it's helpful to compare the situa­tion today to that in the early 1930s. The results aren't very reassuring.

CORPORATE BANKRUPTCY

1930s

Banks, insurance companies, and big corporations went under on a major scale. Institutions suffered the consequences of past mistakes, and there was no financial safety net to catch them as they fell. Mistakes were liquidated and only the prepared and efficient survived.

Today

The world’s financial institutions are in even worse shape than the last time, but now business ethics have changed and everyone expects the government to "step in." Laws are already in place that not only allow but require government inter­vention in many instances. This time, mistakes will be compounded, and the strong, productive, and ef­ficient will be forced to subsidize the weak, unproductive, and inefficient. It's ironic that businesses were bankrupted in the last depression because the prices of their products fell too low; this time, it'll be because they went too high.

UNEMPLOYMENT

1930s

If a man lost his job, he had to find another one as quickly as possible simply to keep from going hungry. A lot of other men in the same position competed desperately for what work was available, and an employer could hire those same men for much lower wages and expect them to work harder than what was the case before the depression. As a result, the men could get jobs and the employer could stay in business.

Today

The average man first has months of unemployment insurance; after that, he can go on welfare if he can't find "suitable work." Instead of taking whatever work is available, especially if it means that a white collar worker has to get his hands dirty, many will go on welfare. This will decrease the production of new wealth and delay the recovery. The worker no longer has to worry about some entrepreneur exploiting (i.e., employing) him at what he considers an unfair wage because the minimum wage laws, among others, precludes that possibility today. As a result, men stay unemployed and employers will go out of business.

WELFARE

1930s

If hard times really put a man down and out, he had little recourse but to rely on his family, friends, or local social and church group. There was quite a bit of opprobrium attached to that, and it was only a last resort. The breadlines set up by various government bodies were largely cosmetic measures to soothe the more terror-prone among the voting populace. People made do because they had to, and that meant radically reducing their standards of living and taking any job available at any wage. There were very, very few people on welfare during the last depression.

Today

It's hard to say how those who are still working are going to support those who aren't in this depression. Even in the U.S., 50% of the country is already on some form of welfare. But food stamps, aid to fami­lies with dependent children, Social Security, and local programs are already collapsing in prosperous times. And when the tidal wave hits, they'll be totally overwhelmed. There aren't going to be any breadlines because people who would be standing in them are going to be shopping in local supermarkets just like people who earned their money. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of it is that people in general have come to think that these programs can just magically make wealth appear, and they expect them to be there, while a whole class of people have grown up never learning to survive without them. It's ironic, yet predictable, that the programs that were supposed to help those who "need" them will serve to devastate those very people.

REGULATIONS

1930s

Most economies have been fairly heavily regulated since the early 1900s, and those regulations caused distortions that added to the severity of the last depression. Rather than allow the economy to liquidate, in the case of the U.S., the Roosevelt regime added many, many more regulations—fixing prices, wages, and the manner of doing business in a static form. It was largely because of these regulations that the depression lingered on until the end of World War II, which "saved" the economy only through its massive reinflation of the currency. Had the government abolished most controls then in existence, instead of creating new ones, the depression would have been less severe and much shorter.

Today

The scores of new agencies set up since the last depression have created far more severe distortions in the ways people relate than those of 80 years ago; the potential adjustment needed is proportionately greater. Unless government restrictions and controls on wages, working conditions, energy consumption, safety, and such are removed, a dramatic economic turnaround during the Greater Depression will be impossible.

TAXES

1930s

The income tax was new to the U.S. in 1913, and by 1929, although it took a maximum 23.1% bite, that was only at the $1 million level. The average family’s income then was $2,335, and that put average families in the 1/10th of 1 percent bracket. And there was still no Social Security tax, no state income tax, no sales tax, and no estate tax. Furthermore, most people in the country didn't even pay the income tax because they earned less than the legal minimum or they didn't bother filing. The government, therefore, had immense untapped sources of revenue to draw upon to fund its schemes to "cure" the depression. Roosevelt was able to raise the average income tax from 1.35% to 16.56% during his tenure—an increase of 1,100%.

Today

Everyone now pays an income tax in addition to all the other taxes. In most Western countries, the total of direct and indirect taxes is over 50%. For that reason, it seems unlikely that direct taxes will go much higher. But inflation is constantly driving everyone into higher brackets and will have the same effect. A person has had to increase his or her income faster than inflation to compensate for taxes. Whatever taxes a man does pay will reduce his standard of living by just that much, and it's reasonable to expect tax evasion and the underground economy to boom in response. That will cushion the severity of the depression somewhat while it serves to help change the philosophical orientation of society.

PRICES

1930s

Prices dropped radically because billions of dollars of inflationary currency were wiped out through the stock market crash, bond defaults, and bank failures. The government, however, somehow equated the high prices of the inflationary '20s with prosperity and attempted to prevent a fall in prices by such things as slaughtering livestock, dumping milk in the gutter, and enacting price supports. Since the collapse wiped out money faster than it could be created, the government felt the destruction of real wealth was a more effective way to raise prices. In other words, if you can't increase the supply of money, decrease the supply of goods.

Nonetheless, the 1930s depression was a deflationary collapse, a time when currency became worth more and prices dropped. This is probably the most confusing thing to most Americans since they assume—as a result of that experience—that "depression" means "de?ation." It's also perhaps the biggest single difference between this depression and the last one.

Today

Prices could drop, as they did the last time, but the amount of power the government now has over the economy is far greater than what was the case 80 years ago. Instead of letting the economy cleanse itself by allowing the ?nancial markets to collapse, governments will probably bail out insolvent banks, create mortgages wholesale to prop up real estate, and central banks will buy bonds to keep their prices from plummeting. All of these actions mean that the total money supply will grow enormously. Trillions will be created to avoid de?ation. If you ?nd men selling apples on street corners, it won't be for 5 cents apiece, but $5 apiece. But there won't be a lot of apple sellers because of welfare, nor will there be a lot of apples because of price controls.

Consumer prices will probably skyrocket as a result, and the country will have an in?ationary depression. Unlike the 1930s, when people who held dollars were king, by the end of the Greater Depression, people with dollars will be wiped out.

THE SOCIETY

1930s

The world was largely rural or small-town. Communications were slow, but people tended to trust the media. The government exercised considerable moral suasion, and people tended to support it. The business of the country was business, as Calvin Coolidge said, and men who created wealth were esteemed. All told, if you were going to have a depression, it was a rather stable environment for it; despite that, however, there were still plenty of riots, marches, and general disorder.

Today

The country is now urban and suburban, and although communications are rapid, there's little interpersonal contact. The media are suspect. The government is seen more as an adversary or an imperial ruler than an arbitrator accepted by a consensus of concerned citizens. Businessmen are viewed as unscrupulous predators who take advantage of anyone weak enough to be exploited.

A major financial smashup in today's atmosphere could do a lot more than wipe out a few naives in the stock market and unemploy some workers, as occurred in the '30s; some sectors of society are now time bombs. It's hard to say, for instance, what third- and fourth-generation welfare recipients are going to do when the going gets really tough.

THE WAY PEOPLE WORK

1930s

Relatively slow transportation and communication localized economic conditions. The U.S. itself was somewhat insulated from the rest of the world, and parts of the U.S. were fairly self-contained. Workers were mostly involved in basic agriculture and industry, creating widgets and other tangible items. There wasn't a great deal of specialization, and that made it easier for someone to move laterally from one occupation into the next, without extensive retraining, since people were more able to produce the basics of life on their own. Most women never joined the workforce, and the wife in a marriage acted as a "backup" system should the husband lose his job.

Today

The whole world is interdependent, and a war in the Middle East or a revolution in Africa can have a direct and immediate effect on a barber in Chicago or Krakow. Since the whole economy is centrally controlled from Washington, a mistake there can be a national disaster. People generally aren’t in a position to roll with the punches as more than half the people in the country belong to what is known as the "service economy." That means, in most cases, they're better equipped to shuffle papers than make widgets. Even "necessary" services are often terminated when times get hard. Specialization is part of what an advanced industrial economy is all about, but if the economic order changes radically, it can prove a liability.

THE FINANCIAL MARKETS

1930s

The last depression is identified with the collapse of the stock market, which lost over 90% of its value from 1929 to 1933. A secure bond was the best possible investment as interest rates dropped radically. Commodities plummeted, reducing millions of farmers to near subsistence levels. Since most real estate was owned outright and taxes were low, a drop in price didn't make a lot of difference unless you had to sell. Land prices plummeted, but since people bought it to use, not unload to a greater fool, they didn't usually have to sell.

Today

This time, stocks—and especially commodities—are likely to explode on the upside as people panic into them to get out of depreciating dollars in general and bonds in particular. Real estate will be—next to bonds—the most devastated single area of the economy because no one will lend money long term. And real estate is built on the mortgage market, which will vanish.

Everybody who invests in this depression thinking that it will turn out like the last one will be very unhappy with the results. Being aware of the differences between the last depression and this one makes it a lot easier to position yourself to minimize losses and maximize profits.

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So much for the differences. The crucial, obvious, and most important similarity, however, is that most people's standard of living will fall dramatically.

The Greater Depression has started. Most people don't know it because they can neither confront the thought nor understand the differences between this one and the last.

As a climax approaches, many of the things that you've built your life around in the past are going to change and change radically. The ability to adjust to new conditions is the sign of a psychologically healthy person.

Look for the opportunity side of the crisis. The Chinese symbol for "crisis" is a combination of two other symbols—one for danger and one for opportunity.

The dangers that society will face in the years ahead are regrettable, but there's no point in allowing anxiety, frustration, or apathy to overcome you. Face the future with courage, curiosity, and optimism rather than fear. You can be a winner, and if you plan carefully, you will be. The great period of change will give you a chance to regain control of your destiny. And that in itself is the single most important thing in life. This depression can give you that opportunity; it's one of the many ways the Greater Depression can be a very good thing for both you as an individual and society as a whole.

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