Scotland’s ambitious government scheme to appoint for every child a “Named Person” who has the authority to overrule parents in child-raising matters apparently is near its end.
The U.K.’s Christian Institute, which won a court ruling that found the original plan violated the rights of Scotland’s citizens, says the latest, water-down version may not succeed.
The organization said Deputy First Minister John Swinney, long an advocate for the government plan to monitor children and their parents, including in matters of health and religious belief, previously claimed he had the authority to approve it.
Now, in the face of continuing opposition, he’s agreed that lawmakers will be allowed to vote on it.
Swinney recently told a Scottish government committee that parliament will have the final say.
He also admitted, during an appearance before lawmakers to defend the plan, that if the current legislation fails, “the concept of the Named Person goes into a hiatus.”
“The procedure outlined in the bill affords parliament a high level of scrutiny on the draft code of practice, and my intention has always been to ensure meaningful dialogue with both practitioners and parliament in relation to its contents,” he said.
Swinney said officials are preparing an amendment to give parliament “final approval of the code of practice.”
Polls showed two-thirds of the Scottish people believed it was an “unacceptable intrusion” into family matters.
And WND reported when the Scottish government was putting cab drivers through a new training course in which they were told they must spy on children they drive to schools. The drivers even were instructed to inform teachers in the schools if they hear something that is concerning.
The nation’s high court, however, rejected the proposal in 2016 as in violation of human rights.
When the plan was rejected, the court noted: “The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world. Within limits, families must be left to bring up their children in their own way.”
WND has reported the concept of a government watchdog for each child comes from the philosophy of the United Nations.
“This law shows the natural progression for a country that has ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and attempts to live up to its treaty provisions,” said Michael Donnelly, director of international relations for Home School Legal Defense Association.
When the court ruling was issued, the government was ordered to cover the estimated $623,000 in legal fees incurred by those who challenged the plan.
The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom struck down the plan sought by social workers to make sure every child meets government standards for being “safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible and included” because the laws don’t allow massive amounts of private information to be distributed randomly.
For the past two decades, Robert Spencer has been explaining through bestselling books, articles and speeches that jihadist groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS cite the texts of the Quran and the Hadiths as their authority for carrying out acts of violence and the objective of establishing Islamic supremacy worldwide.
It’s an assertion supported by overwhelming evidence, yet Spencer has always been willing to engage with any challengers.
Robert Spencer
Apparently, however, that’s too much for officials and students at one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions, Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
An invitation to speak on campus next Tuesday by the local chapter of the College Republicans is causing an uproar, with official condemnation from the student body association and the graduate council, a petition to rescind funding for the visit, and numerous condemning opinion pieces by officials and students.
The Associated Students of Stanford University took up the issue when students complained they don’t want any of the funds they pay to support campus student groups to go to Spencer, whom they accuse of “hate speech.”
“By inviting someone like Spencer and calling it free speech, they’re basically saying that hate speech is OK, and it doesn’t really matter how the marginalized students feel,” student Fatima Ledha told the local NBC affiliate, KNTV.
“Universities all over the country are no longer institutions of higher learning, but just indoctrination centers for the hard-left and ferociously intolerant of dissenting views,” he said.
Across San Francisco Bay at the University of California at Berkeley, violent demonstrations erupted in February after College Republicans invited libertarian activist Milo Yiannopoulos to speak. The university, the Los Angeles Times reported in September, said it had incurred at least $1.4 million in security costs since February, with $200,000 spent on the Yiannopoulos event, $600,000 for an appearance by Ann Coulter that ultimately was canceled, and an estimated $600,000 for a talk in September by Ben Shapiro.
Explaining in a piece for the independent campus publication Stanford Review why they invited Spencer, the College Republicans noted that in addition to authoring 16 books, including two New York Times bestsellers, he has led training seminars for the FBI, the U.S. Army and the Justice Department’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council.
“Time and time again, Mr. Spencer has made his theological arguments thoughtfully, backing them up with plenty of evidence from Islamic texts, history, and the actions of modern-day radical Islamic terrorists,” they wrote.
The College Republicans said Stanford students have “never been made to consider the role that certain passages in Islamic texts play in providing the ideological underpinning and inspiration for radical Islamic terrorism.”
“This perspective is routinely dismissed as Islamophobic and thus deemed illegitimate,” they write.
“How can a perspective be unworthy of at least due consideration, if it is a sentiment held by a majority of the American public? Moreover, why should we dismiss an opinion outright, if that opinion is held by many of the highest government officials making national security decisions on behalf of our country?”
“We acknowledge the emotional impact of Mr. Spencer’s visit on university community members, and we are actively developing supports for the Muslim community before and after his visit,” they wrote.
Spencer, on his Jihad Watch blog, commented that the “entire premise of this article, that Muslims are ‘disparaged’ and become the targets of hatred because of examination of the motivating ideology of jihad terrorism, is more genuinely and deeply insulting to Muslims than anything I have ever said or written.”
Noting that in his work he examines “how jihad terrorists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims,” Spencer said Brubaker-Cole and Shaw are “assuming that all Muslims, and particular Muslims in the Stanford community, are in favor of jihad terrorism — for otherwise there is no way they would feel hated or disparaged because of my work.”
Spencer asked further if the university officials could give even one example to support their claim he has “a track record of actions and speech that motivate hatred towards Muslims.”
‘I was afraid’
A Stanford student from Pakistan, Minha Khan, wrote in the Stanford Review that when she left her home country, her grandparents warned her to “be careful at Stanford.”
“I laughed it off and told them that things had changed — being Muslim on campus was not such a big deal anymore. I told them there was no need to be afraid. I wasn’t going to live in fear,” Khan wrote.
“But when the first thing I saw while walking downstairs to get breakfast was the flyer for Robert Spencer’s talk ‘Jihad and Radical Islam,’ I was afraid. I didn’t know what this meant for me, a Pakistani Muslim girl who covers her head.”
He believes Islam is “the only religion in the world that has a developed doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates violence against unbelievers and mandates that Muslims must wage war in order to establish the hegemony of the Islamic social order all over the world,” as he stated in an interview on C-SPAN in 2006.
Funny, I don’t recall Malala Yousafzai [a schoolgirl from Pakistan who has become a champion for girls’ education] advocating for violence and world domination. Must have missed that headline.
Spencer commented: “In reality, Malala may or may not be following all the doctrines of Islam, but the question of whether Islam has a doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates violence against unbelievers can only be answered by looking at Islamic doctrine, theology, and law, not at Malala.”
It's that time again. Flu season. And with it, a constant barrage of reminders to get your annual flu shot. Interestingly enough, what you're being told about the influenza vaccine's effectiveness and the reality are two very different stories. In January 2015, U.S. government officials admitted that, in most years, flu shots are — at best — 50 to 60 percent effective at preventing lab confirmed type A or B influenza requiring medical care.1
At the end of that same year, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analysis2 of flu vaccine effectiveness revealed that, between 2005 and 2015, the influenza vaccine was actually less than 50 percent effective more than half of the time. I wonder if the reality might be even worse than that.
Research from 2011 shows just how easy it is to inflate efficacy rates simply by using different end points.3 At that time, they found that by using serologic measures, i.e., the increase in influenza antibodies identified in the blood, results in an overestimation of vaccine efficacy.
During the 2015/2016 flu season, FluMist, the live virus nasal spray that typically has been recommended for children in recent years, had a failure rate of 97 percent.4 Its failure was so epic, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended FluMist be taken off the list of recommended flu vaccines for the 2016-2017 season, a recommendation CDC officials ended up heeding. There are many other examples of the influenza vaccine not protecting people as promised. So, what might we expect from the vaccine this year?
2017 Flu Vaccine Lineup
Flu vaccines are by their nature a tricky business because influenza viruses are constantly evolving and public health officials have to guess at least six months before the flu season starts which type A and B influenza virus strains will be predominantly in circulation so drug companies can manufacture the vaccines. When the strains chosen do not match the strains actually causing most of the disease in any given flu season, the vaccine's failure rate significantly increases.
Even when there's a good match, the flu vaccine's effectiveness is estimated to be between 40 and 60 percent,5 meaning that, at best, public health officials believe you have a 60 percent lower chance of not getting sick with influenza if you get a flu shot. But it could be as low as 40 percent. Put another way, it is still a coin toss no matter which way you look at it.
Before reviewing influenza vaccines, It is important to remember that the majority of respiratory influenza-like illness that people experience during any given flu season is NOT type A or B influenza.6 When you get a sore throat, runny nose, headache, fatigue, low grade fever, body aches and cough, most of the time it is another type of viral or bacterial respiratory infection unrelated to influenza viruses.7 There are several different types of influenza vaccines. This year, the available vaccine lineup includes:8,9
• Trivalent flu vaccines, which target two influenza A strains and one influenza B strain:
• Quadrivalent flu vaccines, which contain the same three strains as the trivalent, plus a second influenza B strain: B/Phuket/3073/2013-like (B/Yamagata lineage) virus. Two different types of quadrivalent vaccines are licensed:
◦ An inactivated version (Afluria quadrivalent)
◦ A recombinant version (Flublok quadrivalent)
There are also a range of delivery methods and formulations:
A high-dose version for seniors over the age of 65, containing four times the amount of antigen as the regular dose of the standard vaccine
An adjuvanted vaccine (Fluad) for seniors over 65, first available during the 2016-2017 season. It contains an adjuvant called MF59, described as an oil-in-water emulsion of squalene oil, added to hyper-stimulate a strong inflammatory response to try to strengthen artificial vaccine acquired immunity
An intradermal flu vaccine for adults between 18 and 64
An egg-free recombinant version approved for people over the age of 4 with an egg allergy
A jet injector (needle-free) vaccine approved for adults between 18 and 64
Since it was licensed in 2003, a live attenuated flu vaccine in the form of a nasal spray has been available but, for the second year in a row, the CDC is recommending the nasal spray version not be used by anyone because of its history of ineffectiveness.
New for the 2017-2018 season is a quadrivalent influenza vaccine (Flucelvax) for individuals over 4 years old that uses dog kidney cells (MDCK) for production.10 Traditionally, candidate vaccine strain influenza viruses, i.e., the viruses selected for inclusion in the vaccine, have been produced using fertilized chicken eggs.
The cell-based influenza vaccine viruses are grown in cultured animal cells instead of chicken eggs.11 Another relatively new technology uses insect cells to produce a recombinant quadrivalent influenza vaccine, Flublok, for individuals over 18 years old.12,13
Shoulder Damage Following Flu Vaccination
In October 2015, journalist Marlene Cimons wrote about her experience following a routine pneumonia vaccination.14 While she said the injection itself hurt more than most other vaccinations, that was nothing compared to the pain she developed in the days and months following. "Initially, I dismissed it as typical post-shot soreness," she writes. "But it didn't go away." Months later, her left shoulder was still in pain. Her orthopedist diagnosed her with subacromial bursitis — chronic inflammation and fluid buildup in the bursa sac.
"I'm convinced this occurred because the nurse injected the vaccine too high on my arm. I had no symptoms before the shot, and pain has persisted since. The needle probably entered the top third of the deltoid muscle — which forms the rounded contours of the shoulder — and probably went into the bursa or the rotator cuff, instead of lower down, into the middle part of the muscle, missing the bursa and rotator cuff entirely," Cimons writes.
In a recent Facebook post, ABC Action News journalist Ashley Glass also complained of shoulder pain, saying she could "barely move my arm now," following her flu shot.15 As it turns out, shoulder damage following vaccination16 is a known side effect of improper injection.
In a 2011 report, "Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality,"17 the Institute of Medicine acknowledged that shoulder injuries are one of the possible adverse effects of vaccine injections, stating it found "convincing evidence of a causal relationship between injection of vaccine … and deltoid bursitis, or frozen shoulder, characterized by shoulder pain and loss of motion."
Injection Site Injuries Becoming More Common
According to Dr. G. Russell Huffman, associate professor of orthopedic surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (cited by Cimons), shoulder injury related to vaccine administration, also known as SIRVA, includes chronic pain, limited range of motion, nerve damage, frozen shoulder and rotator cuff tears, and are typically the result of the injection being administered too high on the arm.
Rather than being injected into the muscle, the vaccine is injected into the bursa or joint space and, since vaccines are designed to provoke an immune response, the immune system ends up attacking the bursa sac, leading to the effects just mentioned.
Part of the problem appears to be related to more people receiving their vaccinations outside of a clinical setting, such as in pharmacies and grocery stores. Many will simply pull down the top of their shirt, exposing only the upper part of their deltoid, thereby increasing their risk of getting the injection in the wrong area.
Whatever the cause, reports of SIRVA have definitely increased in recent years,18 as has SIRVA cases settled in the federal vaccine injury court. Between 2011 and 2015, 112 patients were compensated for SIRVA and over 50 percent of those cases were brought in 2015.19,20 In 2016, 202 SIRVA cases were awarded damages by the national Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) created by Congress under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.21
In July 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed adding SIRVA to the NVICP Vaccine Injury Table (VIT), noting that, "The scientific evidence convincingly supports a causal relationship between an injection-related event and deltoid bursitis." By adding it to the table, SIRVA cases brought before the government's vaccine court will be easier and faster, allowing injured patients to receive compensation quicker.
SIRVA, as well as Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), were two vaccine reactions officially added to the VIT earlier this year, and applies to petitions for compensation filed under NVICP on or after March 21, 2017.22,23 One of the first case studies24 to recognize SIRVA was published in 2006. Clusters of GBS cases were noted among U.S. military personnel receiving the H1N1 influenza vaccine as early as 1976.25
It took a decade to get SIRVA added to the NVICP's injury table. If it takes that long for the government to acknowledge that vaccine injection site injuries are real, imagine what it takes to prove other vaccine injuries.
For GBS, it took more than four decades. Is it any wonder then that many very serious vaccine-related neurological problems still have not made it onto that list — and some have even been taken OFF the list by government officials reluctant to award compensation — considering the far-ranging ramifications it might have for the childhood vaccination program? 26
The More Flu Vaccines You Get, the More Likely You'll Get Sick
It seems no matter how poor influenza vaccine effectiveness is, the national call for everyone to get a flu shot every single year remains. But is getting an annual flu shot really "the best way" to protect yourself against influenza? Research frequently suggests otherwise. A recent article in Science Magazine27 delves into some of the finer points about individuality and how people's immune responses vary depending on a number of different factors, including the age at which you're exposed to the flu for the very first time.
That exposure will actually influence how your immune system responds for the rest of your life. Knowing this, what kind of effects might one expect when the first exposure to influenza viruses are vaccine viruses? It's a gamble that no one has the answer to as of yet. Other studies have shown that:
With each successive annual flu vaccination, the theoretical protection from the vaccine appears to diminish.28,29 Research published in 2014 concluded that resistance to influenza-related illness in persons over age 9 years in the U.S. was greatest among those who had NOT received a flu shot in the previous five years.30
The flu vaccine may also increase your risk of contracting other, more serious influenza infections.
A 2009 U.S. study compared health outcomes for children between 6 months and age 18 who do and do not get annual flu shots and found that children who receive influenza vaccinations have a three times higher risk of influenza-related hospitalization, with asthmatic children at greatest risk.32
Statin drugs — taken by 1 in 4 Americans over the age of 45 — may undermine your immune system's ability to respond to the influenza vaccine.33,34 After vaccination, antibody concentrations were 38 percent to 67 percent lower in statin users over the age of 65, compared to non-statin users of the same age.35 Antibody concentrations were also reduced in younger people who took statins.
Independent science reviews have also concluded that flu shots do not appear to prevent influenza or complications of influenza.36,37 Influenza vaccine does not appear to prevent influenza-like illness associated with other types of viruses responsible for about 80 percent of all respiratory or gastrointestinal infections during any given flu season.38,39,40,41
Research42 published in 2006, which analyzed influenza-related mortality among the elderly population in Italy associated with increased vaccination coverage between 1970 and 2001, found that after the 1980s, there was no corresponding decline in excess deaths, despite rising vaccine uptake.
According to the authors, "These findings suggest that either the vaccine failed to protect the elderly against mortality (possibly due to immune senescence), and/or the vaccination efforts did not adequately target the frailest elderly. As in the U.S., our study challenges current strategies to best protect the elderly against mortality, warranting the need for better controlled trials with alternative vaccination strategies."
Another 2006 study43 showed that, even though seniors vaccinated against influenza had a 44 percent reduced risk of dying during flu season than unvaccinated seniors, those who were vaccinated were also 61 percent less like to die BEFORE the flu season ever started.
This finding has since been attributed to a "healthy user effect," the idea of which is that older people who get vaccinated against influenza are already healthier and therefore less likely to die anyway, whereas those who do not get the shot have suffered a decline in health in recent months.
Study Suggests Flu Vaccination During Pregnancy Can Cause Miscarriage
In 2009, reports of miscarriage following administration of the pandemic H1N1 (pH1N1) swine flu vaccine started emerging.44 Dozens of women claimed they lost their babies hours or days after getting the pH1N1 vaccine, which had not been tested on pregnant women (if it was, the evidence was never published). Not surprisingly, these instances were passed off by health officials as coincidental. After all, miscarriages do happen, and for any number of different reasons.
Alas, scientific findings published September 25, 2017, in the medical journal Vaccine45,46,47 suggest this spike in miscarriage reports may not have been a fluke after all. Researchers found that women who had received a pH1N1-containing flu shot two years in a row were, in fact, more likely to suffer miscarriage within the following 28 days. While most of the miscarriages occurred during the first trimester, several also took place in the second trimester.
The median fetal term at the time of miscarriage was seven weeks. In all, 485 pregnant women aged 18 to 44 who had a miscarriage during the flu seasons of 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 were compared to 485 pregnant women who carried their babies to term. Of the 485 women who miscarried, 17 had been vaccinated twice in a row — once in the 28 days prior to vaccination and once in the previous year. For comparison, of the 485 women who had normal pregnancies, only four had been vaccinated two years in a row.
While study authors stated that direct causation could not be established, they called for more research to assess the link. Commenting on the study, which was funded by the CDC, Amanda Cohn, CDC adviser for vaccines stated:
"I think it's really important for women to understand that this is a possible link, and it is a possible link that needs to be studied and needs to be looked at over more [flu] seasons. We need to understand if it's the flu vaccine, or is this a group of women [who received flu vaccines] who were also more likely to have miscarriages."
At present, the CDC is not making any changes to its recommendation for pregnant women, which states they can and should get a flu shot at any point during their pregnancy, no matter which trimester they're in.48 This is irresponsible public health policy at its worst, placing the health of women and their unborn children in danger so corporations can profit.
Remember, the former head of the CDC, Julie Gerberding, left the CDC in 2009 to later become president of Merck Vaccines, a position she held until December 2014, when she became Merck's executive vice president of strategic communications, global public policy and population health.49 She's a poster-child for the revolving door between government and industry, and a clear example of how that door is working against protecting the public health and safety.
Fraudulent Advertising Is the Norm for Flu Vaccines
Now we find out that the 2016-2017 influenza vaccine, which public health officials acknowledged was very well-matched to circulating viral strains and was hailed in February 2017 as "one of the most effective in years,"50 actually turned out to be another rather useless dud.
According to the CDC, 100 percent of circulating H1N1, 95 percent of the H3N2, 90.6 percent of the Victoria B lineage viruses and 100 percent of the Yamagata B lineage viruses were similar to the vaccine virus components for the 2016-2017 season.51
In other words, the match-up between the vaccine strains and the circulating strains causing type A or B influenza illness was about as good as you could ever hope for and, based on interim estimates in February, the CDC reported vaccinated individuals were 59 percent less likely to get sick than unvaccinated individuals.52
Dr. Joseph Bresee, CDC's influenza division's associate director of global health affairs, told NBC News this was "good news and underscores the importance and the benefit of both annual and ongoing vaccination efforts this season."53 Fast-forward four months, and the good news turned into a report of last year's seasonal flu shot being yet another dismal failure.
It turns out the 2016-2017 influenza vaccine had "no clear effect" in those between the ages of 18 and 49. Ditto for the elderly. In fact, influenza-related hospitalizations among seniors were the highest they've been since the 2014-2015 season, which was rated as "severe."
Among young children, the effectiveness was about 60 percent.54 In older children and adults between the ages of 50 and 64, the overall effectiveness topped out at about 42 percent, in terms of preventing illness severe enough to send you to the hospital or doctor's office.
As reported by U.S. News & World Report,55 "In four of the last seven flu seasons, influenza vaccine was essentially ineffective in seniors, past studies suggest. The worst performances tend to be in H3N2-dominant seasons."
Last year, H3N2 type A influenza, which is associated with more severe illness and increased mortality among seniors and very young children, was the most prevalent influenza strain circulating in the U.S.56 So far, CDC influenza surveillance data indicates that H3N2 is the most prevalent strain circulating in the U.S. this year, as well.57
You can find a listing of adjusted vaccine effectiveness estimates for each influenza season going back to 2005 until 2016 on the CDC's Seasonal Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness, 2005-2017 webpage.58 told U.S. News & World Report, "While it is clear we need better flu vaccines, it's important that we not lose sight of the important benefits of vaccination with currently available vaccines."
What exactly those "important benefits" are was left unsaid. Personally, I cannot think of a single one. I can, however, point to a number of well-documented risks of harm and failure associated with influenza vaccine, which people take year after year, while apparently getting virtually no benefit at all.
The Bowling Green, Ky. neighbor who allegedly sucker attack Sen. Rand Paul last weekend, causing six broken ribs, was aggressively anti-Trump and anti-GOP in his social media, calling for the impeachment of the president and urging Russia investigator Robert Mueller to “fry Trump’s gonads.”
Captured screen grabs of Rene Boucher’s Facebook page provided to Secrets and taken down since the event also show that the anesthesiologist was a fan of the #NeverTrump clan.
His lawyer said that politics played no part and it has been suggested that the two verbally tussled over lawn clippings, leaving the impression that the Republican Kentucky senator was a negligent landscaper.
But seven neighbors in the Rivergreen gated community told Secrets Wednesday that the Pauls are friendly homeowners who kept their property tidy.
“The Paul’s landscaping looks just like everyone’s place in Rivergreen. Wish I could get him to cut my lawn,” said neighbor Robert Warner. “As a friend, neighbor and senator, Rand has been first class in every way. What I find amazing is the fact that he cuts his own grass. Our neighborhood is fortunate that the Paul’s live here,” he added.
All seven neighbors expressed shock at the “scary” attack on Paul as he was doing yard work last Saturday and they dismissed reports that it was the result of poor landscaping. However, they are puzzled about why Boucher, 59, allegedly tackled Paul, 54, who was wearing ear plugs at the time. Boucher has been charged with assault.
“The stories of a ‘landscaping dispute’ or a dispute of any sort between Rand Paul and Rene Boucher are erroneous and unfounded. The reason for Mr. Boucher’s bizarre attack is known only to him. Statements to the contrary are irresponsible and unnecessary,” said neighbor Travis Creed.
He added, “Speculation regarding Boucher’s motive has led to an unfair characterization of the Pauls and their home. The Pauls are and always have been great neighbors and friends. They take pride in their property and maintain it accordingly. Rand has enjoyed working on and maintaining his lawn for as long as I have known him.”
The press seems strangely eager to legitimize and excuse violence against Republicans in general. This will not end well.
Related: WSJ: Waiting for an explanation of an attack on a U.S. senator. “This was more than an attack on a neighbor. Now that his injuries are forcing Mr. Paul to miss votes, the assailant has temporarily prevented the people of Kentucky from enjoying their full constitutional representation in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Skaggs and his new close friends in the media may think it’s important for Mr. Paul to change his leaf-raking habits. But all Americans should simply be wishing him a speedy recovery and justice in a court of law.”
Roughly 70% of America's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed high school seniors will go on to binge drink study at a 4-year college, but, to our complete shock, less than two-thirds of them will manage to graduate with a degree. Even worse, 30% of the students will drop-out after just one year on campus.
Not surprisingly, a survey conducted recently by LendEDU found that college dropouts still manage to rack up an average of nearly $14,000 worth of student debt during their brief college careers and a staggering number of them go on to default on that debt in very short order.
LendEDU polled 1,000 respondents that had dropped-out of a four-year higher education institution and also held some amount of student loan debt. We wanted to find out how much student loan debt they owed when the walked away from college.
Respondents were given the ability to enter in an exact dollar amount when asked how much student loan debt they held when they made the choice to drop-out of school. After averaging together all 1,000 responses, we found that when the average college dropout finally gave up on college, they owed $13,929.65 in student loan debt.
LendEDU pegs the average student loan debt per graduated borrower figure at $27,975, so the aforementioned debt per dropout amount makes good sense. Under the assumption that most dropouts leave campus by the end of their second year, the debt per dropout figure is nearly half of the four-year debt per borrower figure of $27,975. That figure cut in half would equal $13,987.50, a tick above our debt per dropout figure of $13,929.65.
Nearly half of college dropouts interviewed by LendEDU admitted they're not currently making payments.
Even worse, just over 35% of the students interviewed said they hadn't made a single payment toward their student loans since dropping out of college...
...all of which resulted in nearly 50% of respondents saying they're currently in default on their student loans.
Asked why they dropped out of college, roughly one-third of students cited "financial reasons"...financial reasons that presumably get much worse after they drop out of school and ruin their credit by defaulting on their student loans.
The plurality of college dropouts, 35.30 percent, cited "financial reasons" as the main reason for leaving their respective college campuses. Trailing closely behind was "social/family reasons," which brought in 34 percent of the vote.
After those two options, there was a significant drop-off. ?12.90 percent of poll participants selected "other," while 11 percent cited "health reasons," and 5.40 percent dropped-out because of "academic reasons." Finally, "legal reasons" was an answer option selected by only 1.40 percent of the respondents polled.
Digging further, we asked the 353 respondents that cited "financial reasons" as the main cause for dropping out this question: "More specifically, did you drop out of college because you didn't want to borrow more student loan debt?"
Around three-fourths (74.79 pecent) of this sub-section of college dropouts responded "yes" to the question found above. Meanwhile, 25.21 percent of those who dropped-out because of financial troubles maintained that student loan debt had nothing to do with their monetary woes.
Of course, despite their lack of success their first time around, nearly two-thirds of college dropouts say they're considering a second attempt at earning a college degree. Moreover, we're almost certain that their previous defaults will in no way hamper the appetite of banks that will be all too eager to throw even more taxpayer subsidized student loans at their "do-over" attempts...
About two-thirds, 64.30 percent, of the 1,000 college dropouts that participated in this poll intended on going back to college to finish up their degrees. Contrarily, 35.70 percent of the respondent poll stated they had no plans to enroll in classes again.
The fact that quite the clear majority of college dropouts with student debt are set on going back to colleges? speaks to both the regret in their original choices to drop-out and also the belief that a college degree will greatly aid in their ability to grow their future earning potentials.
...student loans that we're sure these dropouts will take despite reporting overwhelming "regret" for taking their initial round of loans.
Award winning journalist and UN correspondent of 25 years, Joe Lauria, penned an outstanding article on the origins of “Russiagate” which he published to the liberal Huffington Postthis week.
24 hours later, HuffPo yanked the article – leaving a dead link and a sad message in its place.
Perhaps the insights offered in the article didn’t quite conform to HuffPo’s approved narratives, or maybe it has something to do withLauria’s new book “How I Lost By Hillary Clinton,” with a forward written by Julian Assange.
Considering Joe Lauria’s tenure as the Wall St. Journal’s UN correspondent of nearly seven years, as well as the Boston Globe’s for six – covering just about every major world crisis over the past quarter century, his unique perspective on the matter merits a read.
Reproduced below for your edification:
The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate
As Russia-gate continues to buffet the Trump administration, we now know that the “scandal” started with Democrats funding the original dubious allegations of Russian interference, notes Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria
The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled in the 2016 election — without providing convincing evidence — were both paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the Clinton campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers. Think about that for a minute.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
We have long known that the DNC did not allow the FBI to examine its computer server for clues about who may have hacked it – or even if it was hacked – and instead turned to CrowdStrike, a private company co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian. Within a day, CrowdStrike blamed Russia on dubious evidence.
And, it has now been disclosed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for opposition research memos written by former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele using hearsay accusations from anonymous Russian sources to claim that the Russian government was blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump in a scheme that presupposed that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw Trump’s presidency years ago when no one else did.
Since then, the U.S. intelligence community has struggled to corroborate Steele’s allegations, but those suspicions still colored the thinking of President Obama’s intelligence chiefs who, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “hand-picked” the analysts who produced the Jan. 6 “assessment” claiming that Russia interfered in the U.S. election.
In other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have been taken on faith by Democratic partisans and members of the anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by Democrats.
If for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many people feel toward Trump, it would be impossible to avoid the impression that the scandal may have been cooked up by the DNC and the Clinton camp in league with Obama’s intelligence chiefs to serve political and geopolitical aims.
Absent new evidence based on forensic or documentary proof, we could be looking at a partisan concoction devised in the midst of a bitter general election campaign, a manufactured “scandal” that also has fueled a dangerous New Cold War against Russia; a case of a dirty political “oppo” serving American ruling interests in reestablishing the dominance over Russia that they enjoyed in the 1990s, as well as feeding the voracious budgetary appetite of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Based on what is now known, Wall Street buccaneer Paul Singer paid for GPS Fusion, a Washington-based research firm, to do opposition research on Trump during the Republican primaries, but dropped the effort in May 2016 when it became clear Trump would be the GOP nominee. GPS Fusion has strongly denied that it hired Steele for this work or that the research had anything to do with Russia.
Couple walking along the Kremlin, Dec. 7, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
Then, in April 2016 the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid its Washington lawyer Marc Elias to hire Fusion GPS to unearth dirt connecting Trump to Russia. This was three months before the DNC blamed Russia for hacking its computers and supposedly giving its stolen emails to WikiLeaks to help Trump win the election.
“The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained Fusion GPS to research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his campaign team and Russia, court filings revealed this week,” The New York Times reported on Friday night.
So, linking Trump to Moscow as a way to bring Russia into the election story was the Democrats’ aim from the start.
Fusion GPS then hired ex-MI6 intelligence agent Steele, it says for the first time, to dig up that dirt in Russia for the Democrats. Steele produced classic opposition research, not an intelligence assessment or conclusion, although it was written in a style and formatted to look like one.
It’s important to realize that Steele was no longer working for an official intelligence agency, which would have imposed strict standards on his work and possibly disciplined him for injecting false information into the government’s decision-making. Instead, he was working for a political party and a presidential candidate looking for dirt that would hurt their opponent, what the Clintons used to call “cash for trash” when they were the targets.
Had Steele been doing legitimate intelligence work for his government, he would have taken a far different approach. Intelligence professionals are not supposed to just give their bosses what their bosses want to hear. So, Steele would have verified his information. And it would have gone through a process of further verification by other intelligence analysts in his and perhaps other intelligence agencies. For instance, in the U.S., a National Intelligence Estimate requires vetting by all 17 intelligence agencies and incorporates dissenting opinions.
Instead Steele was producing a piece of purely political research and had different motivations. The first might well have been money, as he was being paid specifically for this project, not as part of his work on a government salary presumably serving all of society. Secondly, to continue being paid for each subsequent memo that he produced he would have been incentivized to please his clients or at least give them enough so they would come back for more.
Dubious Stuff
Opposition research is about getting dirt to be used in a mud-slinging political campaign, in which wild charges against candidates are the norm. This “oppo” is full of unvetted rumor and innuendo with enough facts mixed in to make it seem credible. There was so much dubious stuff in Steele’s memos that the FBI was unable to confirm its most salacious allegations and apparently refuted several key points.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)
Perhaps more significantly, the corporate news media, which was largely partial to Clinton, did not report the fantastic allegations after people close to the Clinton campaign began circulating the lurid stories before the election with the hope that the material would pop up in the news. To their credit, established media outlets recognized this as ammunition against a political opponent, not a serious document.
Despite this circumspection, the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently became the basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against members of Trump’s campaign. More alarmingly, it may have formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence “assessment” by those “hand-picked” analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies – the CIA, the FBI and the NSA – not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were involved. (Obama’s intelligence chiefs, DNI Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, publicly admitted that only three agencies took part and The New York Times printed a correction saying so.)
If in fact the Steele memos were a primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations against Trump, then there may be no credible evidence at all. It could be that because the three agencies knew the dossier was dodgy that there was no substantive proof in the Jan. 6 “assessment.” Even so, a summary of the Steele allegations were included in a secret appendix that then-FBI Director James Comey described to then-President-elect Trump just two weeks before his inauguration.
Five days later, after the fact of Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the Steele dossier was published in fullby the sensationalist website BuzzFeed behind the excuse that the allegations’ inclusion in the classified annex of a U.S. intelligence report justified the dossier’s publication regardless of doubts about its accuracy.
Russian Fingerprints
The other source of blame about Russian meddling came from the private company CrowdStrike because the DNC blocked the FBI from examining its server after a suspected hack. Within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find Russian “fingerprints” in the metadata of a DNC opposition research document, which had been revealed by an Internet site called DCLeaks, showing Cyrillic letters and the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief. That supposedly implicated Russia.
Dmitri Alperovitch, the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of CrowdStrike Inc., leading its Intelligence, Technology and CrowdStrike Labs teams.
CrowdStrike also claimed that the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike’s conclusion about Russian “fingerprints” resulted from clues that would have been left behind by extremely sloppy hackers or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians.
CrowdStrike’s credibility was further undermined when Voice of America reported on March 23, 2017, that the same software the company says it used to blame Russia for the hack wrongly concluded that Moscow also had hacked Ukrainian government howitzers on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
“An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cyber-security firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election,” VOA reported. Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is also a senior fellow at the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
More speculation about the alleged election hack was raised with WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release, which revealed that the CIA is not beyond covering up its own hacks by leaving clues implicating others. Plus, there’s the fact that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has declared again and again that WikiLeaks did not get the Democratic emails from the Russians. Buttressing Assange’s denials of a Russian role, WikiLeaks associate Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he met a person connected to the leak during a trip to Washington last year.
And, William Binney, maybe the best mathematician to ever work at the National Security Agency, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern have published a technical analysis of one set of Democratic email metadata showing that a transatlantic “hack” would have been impossible and that the evidence points to a likely leak by a disgruntled Democratic insider. Binney has further stated that if it were a “hack,” the NSA would have been able to detect it and make the evidence known.
Fueling Neo-McCarthyism
Despite these doubts, which the U.S. mainstream media has largely ignored, Russia-gate has grown into something much more than an election story. It has unleashed a neo-McCarthyite attack on Americans who are accused of being dupes of Russia if they dare question the evidence of the Kremlin’s guilt.
The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Washington Post)
Just weeks after last November’s election, The Washington Post published a front-page story touting a blacklist from an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, that alleged that 200 news sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other leading independent news sources, were either willful Russian propagandists or “useful idiots.”
Last week, a new list emerged with the names of over 2,000 people, mostly Westerners, who have appeared on RT, the Russian government-financed English-language news channel. The list was part of a report entitled, “The Kremlin’s Platform for ‘Useful Idiots’ in the West,” put out by an outfit called European Values, with a long list of European funders.
Included on the list of “useful idiots” absurdly are CIA-friendly Washington Post columnist David Ignatius; David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s opposition research chief; and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
The intent of these lists is clear: to shut down dissenting voices who question Western foreign policy and who are usually excluded from Western corporate media. RT is often willing to provide a platform for a wider range of viewpoints, both from the left and right. American ruling interests fend off critical viewpoints by first suppressing them in corporate media and now condemning them as propaganda when they emerge on RT.
Geopolitical Risks
More ominously, the anti-Russia mania has increased chances of direct conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. The Russia-bashing rhetoric not only served the Clinton campaign, though ultimately to ill effect, but it has pushed a longstanding U.S.-led geopolitical agenda to regain control over Russia, an advantage that the U.S. enjoyed during the Yeltsin years in the 1990s.
Time magazine cover recounting how the U.S. enabled Boris Yeltsin’s reelection as Russian president in 1996.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in behind Boris Yeltsin and Russian oligarchs to asset strip virtually the entire country, impoverishing the population. Amid widespread accounts of this grotesque corruption, Washington intervened in Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999 reversed this course, restoring Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.
That inflamed Hillary Clinton and other American hawks whose desire was to install another Yeltsin-like figure and resume U.S. exploitation of Russia’s vast natural and financial resources. To advance that cause, U.S. presidents have supported the eastward expansion of NATO and have deployed 30,000 troops on Russia’s border.
In 2014, the Obama administration helped orchestrate a coup that toppled the elected government of Ukraine and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. also undertook the risky policy of aiding jihadists to overthrow a secular Russian ally in Syria. The consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate offensive was intended not only to explain away Clinton’s defeat but to stop Trump — possibly via impeachment or by inflicting severe political damage — because he had talked, insincerely it is turning out, about detente with Russia. That did not fit in well with the plan at all.
Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist. He has written for the Boston Globe, the Sunday Times of London and the Wall Street Journal among other newspapers. He is the author of How I Lost By Hillary Clinton published by OR Books in June 2017. He can be reached at joelauria@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at @unjoe.
You prefer to remember the times he took you to the park, that amazing camping vacation a few summers back, the funny things he often says at the dinner table, that beautiful dog he gave you on your 12th birthday.
But you can’t deny it any longer. The truth is painful. But . . .
Dad is an alcoholic and he beats mom.
Do you hate him? Do you reject him as your father?
No, but things have to drastically change and very soon.
This is not actually the story I wish to tell. I’m merely drawing a parallel. I’m talking about dealing with denial, facing reality, accepting responsibility, taking action.
There are many situations in life for which the above scenario is a metaphor.
The parallel I’m making is the relationship between a citizen and a government gone mad.
We’ve avoided it for a long time. We prefer to think of America as a beacon of hope in the world, the fountainhead of truth and justice, a purveyor of democratic values and human rights.
But we can’t deny it any longer. The truth is painful. But . . .
I won’t talk about the millions of human carcasses piled on top of more carcasses, the result of countless war crimes and merciless military strategies which place no value on human life, whether the victims are in uniform or innocent civilians. I’ve realized that the scale of the horror is such that it’s incomprehensible to most good decent citizens. I myself when confronted by figures like 3 million Vietnamese killed, 1.5 Iraqis killed, on and on, find my eyes glazing over in the deluge of zeroes. I literally cannot grasp these numbers and apply them meaningfully to the grief and physical suffering which they are supposed to somehow encapsulate.
Let’s instead look at a few simple very recent facts and try to put them in perspective.
Fact 1: The U.S. is not officially at war with any other country at this time.
Fact 2: The U.S. has not been attacked in any sense of the word in the last 16 years.
Fact 3: Last year the U.S. military dropped 26,171 bombs on seven different countries.
Mind you, these are the official figures. Who knows what the real totals are?
These were not water-filled balloons or July 4th fireworks. At the end of every explosion, there were body parts strewn all over the surrounding area. Survivors were being crushed in collapsed buildings, or crawling along the ground with limbs torn off, leaving a trail of blood squirting out of severed arteries. Innocent people, men, women, and children just going about the everyday business of living, were mangled by a lethal mix of high-velocity shrapnel, and chunks of rubble created by ton after ton of high-yield explosives dropped anonymously from the sky.
Rigorous studies have made it very clear that well over half of the casualties of current warfare are civilians. In what are called ‘internal conflicts’ — like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia — which now are by far the most prevalent form of military conflict, the percentages can be as high as 90% civilians. These violent clashes are typically fought by proxies. In all of the countries just listed, the aggressors are mercenaries paid by the U.S. and its allies to enter and destroy a country in what is then deceptively characterized as a civil war or “people’s uprising”. There is very disturbing recent evidence, for example, that the U.S. through CIA back channels has been funding ISIS, Al Nusra, as well as other extremely barbarous terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria.
By the way, that money they withhold from your paycheck? Or that quarterly tax payment you regularly make? Think about it. This is where a big chunk of your tax dollars is going. You’re paying for this.
Does any of this make my point a little more comprehensible?
26,171 bombs . . . funding terrorism . . . innocent civilians murdered . . . all in a days work.
America can say with great pride that what it does, it usually does very well.
When we put our minds to something, we pull out all the stops.
Now we can put cold-blooded killing right up there in the Top 10.
We kill efficiently. We kill without remorse. We kill without hesitation.
NOTICE TO THE WORLD . . .
Beware! We are a nation of relentless savagery!
Then again, a lot of countries already know that.
I’ve said this many times before and I’ll keep saying it until people get it . . .
Peace will not come from the top. There are too many incentives and rewards in our corrupt corporate kleptocracy to keep the wars going and the wheels of the defense industry churning out more mechanisms of death and destruction.
It is only when we everyday citizens finally have had enough of the carnage, enough of the military waste, enough of the chest-beating imperialism which makes us less safe, enough of the empty rhetoric which claims to embrace the noble virtues but is just more deception in the name of war and imperial conquest, it is only then that America will turn around.
Maybe there are detailed plans out there somewhere to mobilize the good decent citizens of this country. I haven’t personally seen any. So here is mine. Yes, it is outside-the-box, some would say radical, extreme. But if we are the nation we claim to be in the world and in the eyes of God, isn’t cruelly and senselessly dropping 26,171 bombs on mostly innocent people extreme and radical?
My plan demands very little of us individually. We don’t have to march on the capital or mount a revolutionary insurrection. Despite that, it could make all the difference in the future we leave to our children and our children’s children. All that is really required is that we listen to the voice of reason and stand strong.
At least take a look. Open your mind up to the possibility of a future without the madness. Of a future without endless war. Of a future when our hard-earned tax dollars don’t go to fund the relentless savagery of a military gone mad.