Saturday, October 6, 2018

"Fess Up To Reality" - Former Google Exec Exposes Silicon Valley Hypocrisy In Scathing Essay

ORIGINAL LINK

After overcoming the temptation to publish under a pseudonym, former Google PR executive Jessica Powell has finally dropped her long-awaited satirical novel/memoir "The Big Disruption" last week. In the highly anticipated book - and in an accompanying personal essay published on Medium - Powell offers what may be one of the most scathing critiques of Silicon Valley from a former executive at one of its biggest and most influential companies.

Powell

Some of her claims are nothing short of shocking - like when she admitted in her essay that she quit Google last August (she was the company's top PR executive, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai) not to go back to school to study creative writing, as was reported at the time, but because she "got tired" defending the company's unscupulous actions. In particular, she cited YouTube's argument to UK lawmakers that it couldn't censor all of the far-right and jihadist recruitment content posted on its platform because of the sheer volume of content - a claim that Powell said was an outright lie, per the Daily Mail.

Memorably, there were some instances where Google even paid some of the accounts that posted terrorist content.

Google has been widely criticised for allowing jihadists, far-Right extremists and other hate preachers to post content on its YouTube video platform. In some cases, it funnelled cash from advertisers to the extremists posting videos.

But the firm has repeatedly told MPs it cannot stop problem content because of the sheer volume of videos that are uploaded to YouTube.

Miss Powell was in charge of the company’s response to the criticism, reporting directly to Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai.

Her decision to quit the lucrative role in August last year surprised many in the industry. At the time, Miss Powell claimed she was leaving to go back to university to study creative writing.

However, in her essay, published for free on the Medium website, she admitted she needed to ‘take a break from the issues that I got tired of defending at parties’.

She said: ‘On the surface, things seemed really important and exciting. We were doing big things! Bringing the internet to the developing world! But also, on some level, it all felt a bit off, like when you go on vacation and find yourself wondering when it’s going to feel like the Instagram pics other people have posted.’

While Silicon Valley insiders probably think they're among the most noble people on the planet as they fight to expand Internet access in the developing world and support other similarly "noble" causes, Powell argues that there's a certain cognitive dissonance that arises from tech industry excuses about its failures to combat election hacking and its unwillingness to be transparent about how user data is monetized.

"This is an industry that takes itself far too seriously, and its own responsibility not seriously enough."

[...]

"You can’t tell your advertisers that you can target users down to the tiniest pixel but then throw your hands up before the politicians and say your machines can’t figure out if bad actors are using your platform."

"You can’t buy up a big bookstore and then a big diaper store and a big pet supply store and, finally, a big grocery store, national newspaper, and rocket ship and then act surprised when people start wondering if maybe you’re a bit too powerful."

Powell urged Silicon Valley to "end the self-delusion" and "fess up to reality" or work toward holding itself to a higher ethical standard.

"I want Silicon Valley to end the self-delusion and either fess up to the reality we are creating, or live up to the vision we market to the world each day. Because if you’re going to tell people you’re their saviour, you better be ready to be held to a higher standard."

Of course, no Silicon Valley tell-all would be complete without details of the sexual harassment that's reportedly rampant in the valley. And Powell's essay is no exception.

Should I start with the early stage companies? Like the time I was at a startup and the founder I was working for — a guy who owned a hundred shirts in the same color and quoted Steve Jobs on a daily basis — asked me whether we should hand out dildos as company swag or consider converting our social media platform into an anonymous sex club. (We even whiteboarded it.)

Or maybe I could start with the money — all the absurd valuations with seemingly little basis in reality. Or the time a partner at a VC “jokingly” offered up my female friend, his employee, as an enticement for a founder to work with his firm.

To be sure, Powell isn't saying anything new. All of these criticisms of Silicon Valley have been lodged in the past - but mostly by outsiders. The fact that she was a senior executive working her tech - and that she walked away from the money because she became disillusioned - is almost as relevant as the details of her story.



via IFTTT

Shocking New Studies Find Young Americans Are Overweight, Unhealthy, Suicidal, & Addicted To Alcohol And Drugs

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

After reading the information contained in this article, you will probably find yourself questioning if America is going to be able to survive for much longer, because our young people are a complete and total mess.  Yes, all generations of Americans have had their problems, but this generation appears to be particularly screwed up.  Obesity rates are at all-time highs, a third of all American teens have not read a single book within the past year, and the average high school senior spends six hours a day on the Internet.  On top of all that, we are seeing unprecedented levels of suicide, drug overdoses and liver disease (due to heavy drinking) among our young people. 

Like other empires throughout world history, will we be undone by our own excesses?

Let’s start by talking about obesity.  At this point, so many of our young people are overweight that military recruiters are having a very difficult time finding enough “suitable candidates for military service”

The study, featuring roughly 18,000 randomly selected participants across each of the service branches, showed that almost 66 percent of service members are considered to be either overweight or obese, based on the military’s use of body mass index as a measuring standard.

While the number of overweight service members is a cause for concern, it correlates with the obesity epidemic plaguing the United States, where, as of 2015, one in three young adults are considered too fat to enlist, creating a difficult environment for recruiters to find suitable candidates for military service.

Right now, obesity among U.S. adults is at an all-time high, and one of the big reasons for this is because about a third of us are stuffing our faces with fast food on a daily basis.

The following comes from ABC News

A government study has found that 1 in 3 U.S. adults eat fast food on any given day. That’s about 85 million people.

It’s the first federal study to look at how often adults eat fast food. An earlier study found a similar proportion of children and adolescents ate it on any given day.

I was absolutely stunned when I saw that.

85 million people a day are eating fast food?

No wonder we have such a problem.

Another brand new study found that one-third of all American teenagers haven’t read a single book in the past year

new study of American teenagers and their reading habits finds that a third haven’t read a book — in hardcopy or on a device like a Kindle — in the past year.

Researchers from San Diego State University took a look at data from four decades of a “nationally-based lifestyle survey studying teens,” StudyFinds.com reports. In total, more than a million teens provided information.

To me, this is a tremendous indictment of our system of education.

Even if these kids are not reading on their own, our schools should be forcing them to read books.

This really hits home for me, because I love to read.  In fact, I don’t know where I would be today if I had not spent enormous amounts of time reading books on my own while I was growing up.

Sadly, instead of reading books our high school seniors are spending an average of six hours a day on “social media, texting, gaming and surfing the web”

“The meteoric rise of internet-based activities cannot be understated: between social media, texting, gaming, and surfing the web, the average high school senior spent six hours a day online in 2016 — double the time from a decade earlier. Eighth graders (4 hours a day) and tenth graders (5 hours a day) didn’t lag far behind,” the report finds.

Six hours a day?

That is almost a full-time job.

This is one of the reasons why the Internet is the focus of my work.  Yes, I have written a few books, but if we are going to reach the next generation with the truth we have got to reach them where they are.

And where they are is on the Internet.

In addition to everything that you have read so far, let me also share with you some numbers from a recent CDC study.

According to the CDC, drug overdose rates among our young people have been absolutely soaring

Among men ages 24 to 35, overdose rates rose by more than 25% each year between 2014 and 2016; nearly 50 out of every 100,000 people in this population died of overdose-related causes by 2016. Women ages 45 to 54 had the most overdoses overall, but those ages 15 to 24 saw the highest rate of increase: about a 19% jump per year between 2014 and 2016.

And the CDC also found that liver disease (due to heavy drinking) is rapidly rising among young adults

Liver disease replaced HIV as the sixth-leading killer of adults ages 25 to 44 in 2016. Among men and women ages 25 to 34, deaths from liver disease and cirrhosis increased by about 11% and 8% per year, respectively, between 2006 and 2016. Older adults, however, still die of liver disease at much higher rates than young adults.

But the most tragic fact from that entire study is that suicide is now the second leading cause of death for Americans from age 15 to age 24…

Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among people ages 15 to 24, increasing by 7% in this group each year between 2014 and 2016. It’s also the third-leading cause of death among people ages 25 to 44, killing almost 17 of every 100,000 people in this population in 2016.

Whether you like it or not, young people are the future of our country.

Yes, our country is a huge mess today, but what is it going to look like when they become the “leaders of tomorrow”?

In order for a nation to be great, it needs to be made up of great people, and at this moment it is very difficult to be optimistic about the future of our nation...



via IFTTT

Friday, October 5, 2018

Is Saudi Arabia The Middle East's Next Failed State?

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Daniel Lazare via ConsortiumNews.com,

Reports are growing that Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s hyperactive crown prince, is losing his grip. His economic reform program has stalled since his father, King Salman, nixed plans to privatize 5 percent of Saudi Aramco. The Saudi war in Yemen, which the prince launched in March 2015, is more of a quagmire than ever while the kingdom’s sword rattling with Iran is making the region increasingly jumpy.

Heavy gunfire in Riyadh last April sparked rumors that MBS, as he’s known, had been killed in a palace coup. In May, an exiled Saudi prince urged top members of the royal family to oust him and put an end to his “irrational, erratic, and stupid” rule. Recently, Bruce Riedel, an ex-CIA analyst who heads up the Brookings Institution’s Intelligence Project, reported that the prince is so afraid for his life that he’s taken to spending nights on his yacht in the Red Sea port of Jeddah.  

A statue of Ibn Khaldun in Tunis, Tunisia. (Kassus / Wikimedia)

Channeling Ibn Khaldun

What does it all mean? The person to ask is Ibn Khaldun, the famous Tunisian historian, geographer, and social theorist. You might have trouble getting him on the phone, though, since he died in 1406. But he’s still the single best guide to the deepening Saudi crisis.  

If you do somehow channel him, the message might be grim. In a nutshell, it’s that if MBS goes, he’ll likely take the Al-Saud with him, and that the people waiting in the wings will not be the “moderates” beloved of Washington, but ISIS and al-Qaida. A modern state bristling with shopping malls, superhighways, and high-tech weaponry thus will succumb to a ragtag militia riding Toyota pickups and waving AK-47s.

Ibn Khaldun, a member of an upper-class Spanish-Muslim family that fled to North Africa after the fall of Seville in 1248, was one of the most remarkable personalities of the late Middle Ages on either side of the Christian-Muslim divide. He wrote The Muqaddimah, a book-length prologue to his six-volume world history, which British historian Arnold Toynbee praised “as undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.” The anthropologist Ernest Gellner described Khaldun as a forerunner of modern sociology. The Muqaddimah, a strange blend of faith, fatalism, and science, is best known for its musings on the subject of the urban-nomadic conflict and the process by which dynasties rise and decay.

As Ibn Khaldun put it:

[T]he life of a dynasty does not as a rule extend beyond three generations. The first generation retains the desert qualities, desert toughness, and desert strategy. … They are sharp and greatly feared.  People submit to them. … [T]he second generation changes from the desert attitude to sedentary culture, from privation to luxury and plenty, from a state in which everybody shared in the glory to one in which one man claims all the glory for himself while the others are too lazy to strive for glory. …  The third generation … has completely forgotten the period of desert life and toughness, as if it never existed…. Luxury reaches its peak among them, because they are so much given to a life of prosperity and ease.

Decadence leads to collapse as fierce nomadic fundamentalists gather in the desert and prepare to mete out punishment to the city dwellers for their religious laxity. “[A] new purge of the faith is required,” summed up Friedrich Engels, who evidently read Ibn Khaldun, “a new Mahdi [i.e., redeemer] arises, and the game starts again from the beginning.”

It’s a recurrent cycle that has held true for a remarkable number of Muslim dynasties from the seventh century on.

Evidence of Instability

The big question now is whether the pattern will hold true for the Saudis.  

The answer so far is that it will. Events are proceeding on course. Ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi state, by allying himself with Wahhabism, the local version of Islamic ultra-fundamentalism, embodied Ibn Khaldun’s concept of a ruthless desert warrior who uses religion to mobilize his fellow tribesman and battle his way to the throne in 1932. Once Saud took power, he proved to be a tough and cagey politician who put down rebellion and expertly played Britain and America off against one another to solidify his throne.

But the half-dozen sons who followed were different. The first, Saud, was a heavy spender who brought the kingdom to the brink of bankruptcy. The second, Faisal was an autocrat who was so out of his depth that he believed Zionism somehow begat communism. Khalid, who took power in 1975, was an absentee monarch who was gripped by paralysis when hundreds of rebels took over Mecca’s Grand Mosque in November 1979 and had to be rescued by French commandos flown in specially for the occasion. Fahd, who succeeded to the throne in 1982, was obese, diabetic, and a heavy smoker who ultimately fell victim to a massive stroke.  Abdullah, his successor, also was sickly and obese, while Salman, who assumed the throne in 2015 at age 79, has suffered at least one stroke and is said to exhibit “mild dementia.”

A video of the king landing in Moscow in 2017 shows a doddering old man who can barely descend a staircase.

Muhammad bin Salman and Ash Carter in 2016. (Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley / Department of Defense)

The upshot is a group study in decrepitude. MBS, who all but took over the throne in 2015, meanwhile personifies all the foolishness and decadence that Ibn Khaldun attributed to the third generation. He’s more energetic than his father. But as one would expect of someone who has spent his entire life cosseted amid fantastic wealth, he’s headstrong, impractical, and immature. Appointed minister of defense by his father at the ripe old age of 29, he declared war on Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s neighbor to the south, two months later and then disappeared on a luxury vacation in the Maldives where a frantic Ashton Carter, Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, was unable to reach him for days.

A year later, MBS unveiled Vision 2030 a grandiose development plan aimed at bringing Saudi Arabia into the 21st century by diversifying the economy, loosening the grip of the ultra-intolerant Wahhabiyya,and putting an end to the country’s dual addiction to oil revenue and cheap foreign labor. In a country in which young men routinely wait years for a comfortable government sinecure to open up, the goal was to rejigger the incentives to encourage them to take private-sector jobs instead.  

It hasn’t worked. In a rare moment of candor, a pro-government newspaper recently reported that thousands of employers are evading government hiring quotas by paying Saudi workers not to show up. “Employers say young Saudi men and women are lazy and are not interested in working,” it said, “and accuse Saudi youth of preferring to stay at home rather than to take a low-paying job that does not befit the social status of a Saudi job seeker.”

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (lawepw / Wikimedia)

Some 800,000 foreign workers have left the country while capital is fleeing in the wake of last November’s mass roundup in which hundreds of princes and businessmen were herded into the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton and forced to turn over billions in assets. Foreign direct investment has plummeted from $7.5 billion to $1.4 billion since 2016 while a series of super-splashy development projects are in jeopardy now that Saudi Aramco privatization, which MBS was counting on as a revenue source, is on hold.  

While granting women permission to drive, MBS has imprisoned women’s rights advocates, threatened a dissident cleric and five Shiite activists with the death penalty, and cracked down on satirical postings on social media.  He preaches austerity and hard work, yet plunked down $500 million for his yacht, $450 million for a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and $300 million for a French chateau. The hypocrisy is so thick that it’s almost as if he wants to be overthrown.  

Fundamental Enemies

As for the lean and hungry fundamentalists whom Ibn Khaldun said would administer the final blow, there’s no doubt who fits that bill: ISIS and al- Qaida. Both are fierce, warlike, and pious, both inveigh against a Saudi regime drowning in corruption, and both would like nothing more than to parade about with the crown prince’s head on a pike.  

In May, al-Qaida denounced Saudi religious reforms as “heretical” and urged clerics to rise up against a “moderate, open Islam, which all onlookers know is American Islam.”

In July, Islamic State took credit for an attack on a Saudi security checkpoint that claimed the life of a security officer and a foreign resident.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2004

In August, ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi accused Saudi Arabia of “trying to secularize its inhabitants and ultimately destroy Islam.”  

These are fighting words. Both groups meanwhile enjoy extensive support inside the kingdom. Prior to the attack on the World Trade Center, wealthy Saudis, including members of the royal family, helped fund al-Qaida to the tune of $30 million a year, according to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2011 best seller, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden.

In 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confided in a diplomatic memo that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” More than three thousand Saudis have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join up with al-Qaida, ISIS and other Islamist forces. Once they return home, such jihadis might constitute a fifth column threatening the royal family as well. A crumbling royal family could fall like a ripe date into their outstretched palm.

Could Saudi Arabia become the Middle East’s next failed state? 

Washington is filled with so-called Middle East experts contributing to one disaster after another. Could it be that the best Mideast hand worth listening to is a North African scholar who died more than six centuries ago?



via IFTTT

Here’s how much Americans trust 38 major news organizations (hint: not all that much!)

ORIGINAL LINK

Surveys about “media trust” suffer from a definitional problem. “Do you trust the media?” is a meaningful question only if we know what “the media” is. Is it The New York Times and CNN? Fox News and Breitbart? Occupy Democrats and your uncle’s memes on Facebook?

In Gallup’s data on that question — which asks about “the mass media, such as newspapers, TV, and radio” — 72 percent of Americans trusted the media in 1976, post-Watergate. By 2016, that was down to 32 percent. But the media in 1976 was your local daily, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Harry Reasoner. “The media” is something fundamentally different now, and a decline in trust is a rational reaction to that, even in an environment less polarized than our own.

All this is to say that I find trust questions about specific news organizations a bit more useful, since you know with much greater confidence what the person being queried has in mind. And we have a new data set looking at just that, from Simmons Research.

Simmons surveyed 2,009 Americans in August asking them whether or not they trusted 38 different news organizations. Here are the results:

A few things pop out here. The bottom six — Breitbart, DailyKos, Palmer Report, Occupy Democrats, InfoWars, and in last place, Daily Caller — are all explicitly partisan sites without a pre-Internet legacy brand to fall back on. (Three liberal, three conservative.) I’d argue there are important distinctions to be made between them — InfoWars’ status as our nation’s leading lizard-people conspiracy den makes it stand out — but the average American seems to lump them together as untrustworthy.

At the top sits The Wall Street Journal, whose combination of respected news pages and conservative editorial pages seem to be a magic formula for generating trust across the ideological spectrum. (When Pew Research did a similar exercise in 2014, the Journal was the only publisher to be more trusted than untrusted in all ideological subgroups.) Then come the major networks, then the national newspapers, then wire services. A few surprises, to me: Forbes and The Washington Times ranking as highly as they did, and Mother Jones and Slate ranking as poorly as they did.

Fox News finished roughly in the middle, behind all the other cable and network news operations, but still with 44.7 percent saying they trust it. (In completely unrelated news, Donald Trump got 46.1 percent of the vote in 2016.) Fox finished tied with The Economist.

“The Doubters”

Simmons highlights one depressing finding: 13 percent of Americans said they found none of these news outlets trustworthy. Simmons terms this group “the Doubters.” (Passing up the equally applicable “the LOL Nothing Matters.”)

This group of info-nihilists is less likely to vote than the median American, but Simmons nonetheless estimates they made up about 6 million of the 129 million who cast votes in 2016. And they were much more likely to support Trump (62.2 percent) than Hillary Clinton (27.8 percent).

(This is my math, not Simmons’, but if those percentages are right, the Doubters netted out to contribute a 1.464 million vote margin for Trump. That’s about 1.13 percent of all votes cast. Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by 0.22, 0.72, and 0.76 percent, respectively.)

Who are these Doubters? Simmons asked these questions in the context of a larger consumer survey, so they have some interesting detail. Doubters are:

Much less likely [than the average American] to be a Democrat, much more likely to not identify with any political party at all, but just as likely to be Republican as anyone else

More likely to have married at some point, but also more likely to be widowed/divorced

Much less likely to be well educated

Less affluent

Less likely to be politically knowledgeable

Less likely to spend their time on social media, and less likely to spend time online in general

Somewhat less likely to consume any media, including television, radio, newspapers, and magazines

What are the consumption behaviors that Doubters are particularly into? They’re significantly more likely to read Soap Opera Digest, FamilyFun, Seventeen, TV Guide, InStyle, and…Playboy. (The issue of trust in centerfolds goes unexplored in this study.) They watch We TV, TLC, and “Married at First Sight.” They drive Chevys, have cell service through MetroPCS, and eat at Bob Evans.

At the same time, though, “Doubters were very much like the rest of the country demographically, in terms of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.”

Debates about media trust often end up debating a list of things news organizations could do in order to regain it. (Greater transparency! Events in the community! Solutions journalism! Um, blockchain!) But this data suggests that, at least for a small but significant share of the American public, the mistrust goes far, far deeper than a better corrections policy or hiring an ombudsman. It’s a deep-seated, core belief.

Photo by thefriendlyuser used under a Creative Commons license.


via IFTTT

Is Criticizing Terrorism "Mental Illness"?

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Guy Milliere via The Gatestone Institute,

  • A 615-page report was recently released, written by an adviser to President Emmanuel Macron, Hakim El Karoui, who is in charge of designing the new institutions of an "Islam of France." The report defines Islamism as an "ideology totally distinct from Islam" and also never addresses the links between Islamism and terrorism. The report also insists on the urgent need to spread "true Islam" in France and adopt the teaching of Arabic in public high schools.

  • The court's request, for Marine Le Pen to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine if she is sane, indicates that French authorities might be reviving the old Soviet use of "psychiatry" to silence dissidents or political opponents.

  • The legal offensive against Marine Le Pen was actually added to the financial offensive. Even if Le Pen is not sent to prison, the law seems to have been used to open the possibility of declaring her ineligible for the European Parliament elections scheduled for May 2019.

Marine Le Pen (pictured at podium), the leader of France's right-wing National Front Party, posted tweets critical of the Islamic State terrorist group, including photos of their murdered victims. For this, she was charged with the crime of "disseminating violent images," and ordered by a court to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine if she is sane. (Photo by Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images)

On December 16, 2015, a French journalist on a mainstream radio station compared France's right-wing National Front Party to the Islamic State (ISIS) by saying that there is a "community of spirit" between them and that both push those who support them to "withdraw into their own identity". Marine Le Pen, the president of the National Front party, speaking of a "unacceptable verbal slippage," asked the radio station for the right to answer. She then published on Twitter images showing the bodies of victims of the Islamic State and adding: "ISIS is this!"

The French media immediately accused her of broadcasting "indecent" and "obscene" images, and shortly after that, the French government ordered the Department of Justice to indict her. On November 8, 2017 the French national assembly also lifted her parliamentary immunity.

A few months later, a judge mandated by the French government, charged Marine Le Pen with "disseminating violent images," citing article 227-24 of the French Penal Code, which defines the crime of:

"... disseminating... a message of a violent nature, inciting terrorism, pornographic or likely to seriously violate human dignity or to incite minors to engage in games that physically endanger them, or to commercialize such a message."

As part of the proceedings, Marine Le Pen received a letter from the court orderingher to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine if she is sane. She refused, saying that showing horrors committed by the Islamic State is not incitement to murder, and that pictures of victims of terrorism cannot be equated with pornography.

The court's request indicates that the French authorities might be reviving the old Soviet use of "psychiatry" to silence dissidents or political opponents.

At the moment, Le Pen can be arrested anywhere, at any time and could face up to five years in prison.

As a presidential candidate in May 2017, she received 34% of the vote in the second round of voting. Sending her to jail could provoke anger among her supporters, so her arrest is not expected.

What seems more probable is an effort to intimidate her, and if possible, to destroy her politically. A few weeks ago, the French government asked magistrates responsible for investigating "financial crimes" to seize two million euros ($2.3 million) of public funds granted to Marine Le Pen's party, which has since ceased almost all public activities. The legal offensive against Marine Le Pen was actually added to the financial offensive. Even if Le Pen is not sent to prison, the law seems to have been used to open the possibility of declaring her ineligible for the European Parliament elections scheduled for May 2019.

French President Emmanuel Macron knows that today, Le Pen's party is his main opposition in France and that Le Pen is his main political opponent. He describeshimself as the champion of the "progressive" vision of Europe and the main enemy of those who want to resist Islamization, uncontrolled immigration, and who wish to defend national sovereignty -- views he has described as "leprosy" and "evil winds". He has verbally blasted Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, as well as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who are creating a European alliance of nationalist movements that include Le Pen's party. On the contrary, Macron supports European sanctions against Hungary and Poland if they refuse to accept more migrants.

Macron sees that a victory of the Salvini-Orban alliance would not only be a humiliation for him, but that a victory of Le Pen's party in France could mean the final collapse of his crumbling presidency (his approval rating, which has fallen 6 points in the last month, now stands at 23%). He cannot crush the Salvini-Orban alliance, but he can affect the political process in France.

Macron's stance against Le Pen might also be an attempt by his government to ward off more Islamic violence in France. Presently, books and publications that reference the violent dimension inherent in Islam are boycotted and absent from bookstores (the Quran, however, is still widely available). Organizations that fight the Islamization of France and Europe are judicially harassed. Pierre Cassen and Christine Tasin, the leaders of the main French anti-Islamization website, Riposte Laïque ("Secular Response"), must spend a disproportionate amount of time in court and are heavily fined on a regular basis. To avoid having their website closed down, they have had to relocate their website outside both France and the European Union.

615-page report was recently released, written by an adviser to Macron, Hakim El Karoui, who is in charge of designing the new institutions of an "Islam of France." The report defines Islamism as an "ideology totally distinct from Islam" and also never addresses the links between Islamism and terrorism. The report also insists on the urgent need to spread "true Islam" in France and adopt the teaching of Arabic in public high schools.

In the French media, any mention of the links between Islam and violence has now been almost completely eliminated. When a Muslim commits a knife attack and shouts "Allahu Akbar" ("Allah is the greatest"), the official message published even before any investigation invariably declares that what happened had "nothing to do with Islam" and "no terrorist character". All the media then blindly quote the message. In the most recent attack of this kind, on September 9 in Paris, seven people were wounded, four seriously.

Recently, the author Éric Zemmour spoke on television of the high proportion of young Muslims among France's prison inmates, and of the rise of Muslim anti-Semitism in France's suburbs. The Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA), France's TV and radio regulator, told the station that Zemmour had uttered "stigmatizing remarks about Muslims" and that the station would suffer huge consequences if he ever repeated them. A French talk show host began circulating a petition demanding that Zemmour be totally excluded from the French media. The petition drew more than 300,000 signatures in one week.

Zemmour wondered if the Soviet gulag would have to be reopened especially for him or if he would have to choose self-exile. He received so many credible death threats that he is now under round-the-clock police protection.

The political scientist Jean-Yves Camus said that although he does not agree with Marine Le Pen's views, "Everywhere and always, saying of a political opponent that he is 'crazy' opens the doors of totalitarianism".

A lawyer, Regis de Castelnau, wrote in the monthly Causeur:

"There is a country in Europe where the main opposition party, after the seizure of its financial resources, sees its president asked to undergo a judicial psychiatric assessment. Is it Putin's Russia or Orban's Hungary? No. It is France".

Castelnau added that the law used to charge Marine Le Pen is usually used to indict "perverts" and "psychopaths," and that "psychiatric expertise" was only asked for because their criminal sentences were often accompanied by an obligation to receive psychiatric treatment.

"All those who laugh at the troubles of their political opponents," he said, "would be wise to remember that if they accept attacks on political liberties, it could soon be their turn."



via IFTTT

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Even Wall Street Cheerleader Confesses—-Epic Meltdown Ahead

ORIGINAL LINK

Wall Street veteran Sam Stovall is warning stock investors the longest bull market on record will end with an epic meltdown. According to the CFRA chief investment strategist, it’s a side effect of an unprecedented business cycle.

“Three conditions: Very long, very high, very expensive,” Stovall said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Futures Now.” “History would imply that be careful because now we’re likely to fall into a very deep bear market when it does finally hit with the average decline being close to 40 percent plus.”

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/these-3-conditions-imply-stocks-will-fall-40percent-plus-in-next-bear-market.html



via IFTTT

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Cochrane Implodes Amid Accusations of Bias

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/10/03/cochrane-implodes-amid-accusations-of-bias.aspx

The Worst Totalitarian Since Mao

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Nick Taber via The American Conservative,

Xi Jinping is ushering in an era of Chinese illiberalism, and with it a chilling clampdown on freedoms...

This summer, a UN panel received reports of a human rights crisis unfolding in China’s far western Xinjiang province. The information showed that as many as two million people had been subjected to an intense political indoctrination and reeducation program. The backlash has largely focused on the ethno-religious nature of this crisis. Pakistan, China’s closest and most economically dependent ally, has asked China to ease restrictions on Muslims, and Uighurs (the ethnic minority group targeted) living in America are beginning to condemn China’s human rights abuses.

But over-interpreting the religious aspect of the crackdown distracts from the true nature of repression in China. The crisis in Xinjiang should be interpreted more as an assault on basic freedoms and the expansion of a totalitarian tyranny than an expression of ethnic superiority. To be sure, this is nothing less than a cultural genocide. But as far as we know, the Chinese government is not Sinicizing this group simply because they are Muslim or ethnically Turkic. It is doing so because they are a perceived threat to the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Intense repression has been rapidly growing throughout the country, cementing the power of the CCP in all corners of society. Indeed, the human rights abuses in Xinjiang are strikingly similar to what’s been happening elsewhere in China since Xi assumed office. Human rights reports of Xinjiang describe mass political indoctrination, the creation of a digital police state, arbitrary detention, and pervasive controls over daily life. Let’s look at each of those components individually.

Indoctrination: Mass political indoctrination is the central purpose of the reeducation camps established in Xinjiang. Elsewhere in the country, however, the Chinese government has instituted a wide variety of indoctrination programs, with the explicit goal of expanding the CCP’s control over people’s minds. This includes overhauling all of China’s major educational institutions, increasing the ideological content of all media, and controlling the spread of foreign ideas and influences within the country.

During a speech given at a Beijing kindergarten in 2015, President Xi Jinping outlined his vision of party control over education, saying, “Children should memorize the core socialist values by heart, have them melt in their hearts, and carve them into their brains.” The CCP plans to overhaul the nation’s university system to turn it into an ideological education machine. Students will undergo a hefty political indoctrination program all the way through university. Chinese professors will be forced to teach CCP propaganda. According to recent government plans, university faculty will be judged foremost by their “ideological and political performance.”

And while indoctrination and reeducation programs outside of Xinjiang do not have the same force and severity as those within the province, they are nonetheless very invasive, and are a core component of the country’s move towards totalitarianism.

Digital police state: Human rights groups have reported that there’s a digital police state at work in Xinjiang. A hyper-intelligent digital surveillance system is used to control citizens, tracking what they say, read, and do. Such a system, however, is hardly unique to Xinjiang. The government’s digital surveillance network is being implemented throughout the country. It has leveraged the ubiquitous smartphone as an ultra-powerful surveillance device, developing programs to organize phone data and providing granular, real-time intelligence on every citizen, which can be used to guide the actions of the populace and enhance the power of the state. China has also debuted a vast network of video cameras that use artificial intelligence to gather information on everyone’s actions.

Under the Chinese government, there has been a crackdown even on thought crime. Before Xi came into office, citizens had a moderate degree of freedom to have discussions privately about a variety of social and political topics, so long as they did not organize any movements or events. Those days are long gone. There are increasingly frequent reports of Chinese citizens writing seemingly innocuous messages to friends and family only to be promptly arrested.

Arbitrary detention: Reports of the Xinjiang crisis show that nearly all of China’s Uighurs are at risk of being forcibly and arbitrarily detained. Yet while more than one fifth of all arrests in China in 2017 occurred in Xinjiang (a region accounting for only 2 percent of the population), arbitrary detention is a major problem throughout China and appears to be on the rise. One of the reasons for this is the vague drafting of Chinese laws, giving authorities leeway to arrest anyone suspected of subversive behavior. Though they previously occupied a gray area where they enjoyed relative freedom, hundreds of journalists and human rights lawyers have been arrested, too.

Over the last year, there have been many accounts of arbitrary arrests for seemingly harmless behavior, raising concerns that the authorities seek to intimidate the population and encourage self-restraint. In 2017, a man referred to Xi as a coward over Wechat and was jailed for 22 months. Earlier this year, a retired professor from Shandong province was arrested while giving an interview for Voice of America.

Pervasive controls over daily life: Foreign media and Human Rights Watch allege that the Chinese government is instituting a range of controls over daily lifefor Xinjiang residents, including restrictions on religious practices. Outside of Xinjiang, a similar trend is taking place. Religion throughout the country is under assault: recently there was a crackdown on Christian churches. Christians in Henan province were reportedly forced to take down posters of Christ and replace them with portraits of Xi.

As another example, the government has increased the list of banned topics and words that can’t appear on internet content. Recently, the viewing or sharing of foreign news media was almost entirely banned. Homosexuals were once given a fair amount of room to quietly enjoy their lifestyle; now the government is becoming less tolerant in a push to reinforce “family values.” At a Dua Lipa concertin Shanghai, police dragged away audience members who held gay pride flags or even stood up to cheer.

The Chinese government’s assault on basic freedom is not a regional issue but a nationwide phenomenon. Indeed, China has lately moved closer to totalitarianism than at any time since the Mao era.

The abuses in Xinjiang are a harrowing example of this pattern.

Repression in Xinjiang is more intense because the threat of regional instability is greatest there since its people have separatist sentiments, and have different ethnicities, religions, and identities. Eliminating these differences would, in their calculus, ensure greater stability. However, there is little reason to believe that if a province that was dominated by Han Chinese experienced a widespread separatist movement, it wouldn’t suffer a similar fate to Xinjiang. Sure, detainees wouldn’t be required to denounce a particular religion. But there would very likely be a system of reeducation camps set up just the same.

China, then, is not only eager to eclipse the U.S. in global influence; it is increasingly diverging from what Americans recognize as core values. America’s policymaking establishment has long assumed that, as China grows, it will become more like the West in the ways that matter most: respect for individual rights, rule of law, and, perhaps eventually, democracy. That fundamental assumption was wrong. Since 2012, China has in many ways become more like North Korea than America, creating a highly sophisticated system of neo-totalitarianism, with the crisis in Xinjiang a demonstration of that dystopia.

Congress is justified in seeking to impose sanctions on the officials responsible for the Xinjiang crisis, as it’s currently doing. However, over the long run, it needs more: it needs a strategy to counter the rapid development of Chinese illiberalism.



via IFTTT

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Uranium One: FBI Refuses To Release Three-Dozen Secret Memos Involving Clintons, Russia And Obama

ORIGINAL LINK

The FBI has refused to declassify 37 pages of materials related to the Uranium One deal, citing national security and the privacy issues, reports The Hill's John Solomon. The documents are thought to contain information regarding then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's involvement, as well as the Obama administration's knowledge of the controversial deal. 

The existence of the documents became known after a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release of related material contained an entry entitled "Uranium One Transaction." The publicly available portion includes benign material, such as public letters from members of Congress who demanded information on the Uranium One approval. 

Perhaps the FBI’s unexpected “release” — and I use that word loosely, since they gave up no public information of importance — in the FOIA vault was a warning flare designed to remind America there might be evidence worth looking at.

One former U.S. official, who had access to the evidence shared with CFIUS during the Uranium One deal, said this to me: “There is definitely material that would be illuminating to the issues that have been raised. Somebody should fight to make it public.”

That somebody could be President Trump, who could add these 37 pages of now-secret documents to his declassification order he is considering in the Russia case. -The Hill

William Campbell and the FBI 

In October of 2017, John Solomon and Alison Spann broke the story of former CIA and FBI undercover agent, William D Campbell - who remained unnamed until this year. Campbell was deeply embedded in the Russian nuclear industry while Robert Mueller was the Director of the FBI - which paid him a $51,000 "thank you" award for his service.

For several years my relationship with the CIA consisted of being debriefed after foreign travel,” Campbell noted in his testimony, which was obtained by this reporter. “Gradually, the relationship evolved into the CIA tasking me to travel to specific countries to obtain specific information. In the 1990’s I developed a working relationship with Kazakhstan and Russia in their nuclear energy industries. When I told the CIA of this development, I was turned over to FBI counterintelligence agents.” -saracarter.com 

While undercover, Campbell was forced by the Russians (with the FBI's blessing) to launder large sums of money - which allowed the FBI to uncover a massive Russian "nuclear money laundering apparatus." Campbell claims to have collected over 5,000 documents along with video evidence of money being stuffed into suitcases, Russians bragging about bribing the West, and millions of dollars routed to the Clinton foundation. 

The evidence was compiled as Secretary Clinton courted Russia for better relations, as her husband former President Clinton collected a $500,000 speech payday in Moscow, and as the Obama administration approved the sale of a U.S. mining company, Uranium One, to Rosatom. -The Hill

Campbell initially discovered that Moscow had compromised an Maryland-based uranium trucking firm, Transport Logistics International (TLI) in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – which bribed a Russian nuclear official in exchange for a contract transport Russian-mined U.S. uranium, including "yellowcake" uranium secured in the Uranium One deal.

Yellowcake uranium

He delivered bribes from TLI in $50,000 increments to Russian nuclear official Vadim Mikerin of Tenex. Under orders from the FBI in order to maintain his cover, Campbell fronted hundreds of thousands of dollars he says he was never reimbursed for. As a result of Campbell's work, TLI co-president Mark Lambert was charged in an 11-count indictment in connection with the scheme, while Vadim Mikerin, who resides in Maryland, was prosecuted in 2015 and handed a four-year sentence.

Second, Campbell says that Russian nuclear officials revealed a scheme to route millions of dollars to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) through lobbying firm ARPCO, which was expected to funnel a portion of its annual $3 million lobbying fee to the charity. 

“The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months. APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement.“ -William Campbell

Campbell told Congressional investigators that the Uranium One deal along with billions in other uranium contracts inside the United States during the Obama administration was part of a "Russian uranium dominance strategy" involving Tenex and its American arm Tenem - both subsidiaries of state-owned Russian energy company Rosatom. 

“The emails and documents I intercepted during 2010 made clear that Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One – for both its Kazakh and American assets – was part of Russia’s geopolitical strategy to gain leverage in global energy markets,” he testified.  “I obtained documentary proof that Tenex was helping Rosatom win CFIUS approval, including an October 6, 2010 email …  asking me specifically to help overcome opposition to the Uranium One deal.” 

“Rosatom/Tenex threw a party to celebrate, which was widely attended by American nuclear industry officials. At the request of the FBI, I attended and recorded video footage of Tenam’s new offices,” he added.

Officials with APCO - the lobbying firm accused of funneling the money to the Clinton Global Initiative, told The Hill that its support for CGI and its work for Russia were not connected in any way, and involved different divisions of the firm. 

What did Obama know?

As Solomon notes, a giant question remains that may be solved by the release of the 37-pages of classified information; what did the Obama administration know about this? 

Did the FBI notify then-President Obama, Hillary Clinton and other leaders on the CFIUS board about Rosatom’s dark deeds before the Uranium One sale was approved, or did the bureau drop the ball and fail to alert policymakers?

Neither outcome is particularly comforting. Either the United States, eyes wide open, approved giving uranium assets to a corrupt Russia, or the FBI failed to give the evidence of criminality to the policymakers before such a momentous decision. -The Hill

Campbell says that his FBI handlers assured him that Obama had been briefed by then-FBI Diretor Mueller on Rosatom's criminal activities as part of the president's daily briefing, however "politics" was the reason that the sale was approved anyway. 

Smearing Campbell

After Solomon broke the Campbell story, Democrats viciously attacked Campbell, a cancer-stricken man showered by praise by the Obama administration at a 2016 celebration dinner in Crystal City, VA. Since his undercover work in Russia, Campbell has undergone 35 intensive radiation treatments after being diagnosed with brain cancer and leukemia. 

Michael Isikoff

Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News wrote an article slamming Campbell - saying he would be a "disaster" as a witness because some of his claims could not be documented, an anonymous source told Isikoff (Isikoff's Yahoo News article was used by the FBI to support the FISA spy warrant on Trump aide Carter Page, after Isikoff was fed information by Christopher Steele).

Meanwhile, in a move which can only be interpreted as an effort to protect the FBI, the Obama administration and the Clintons, AG Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein even tried to suggest the nuclear bribery case uncovered by Campbell is not connected to the Uranium One deal

Via John Solomon last November

Attorney General Jeff Sessions in testimony last week and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in a letter to the Senate last month tried to suggest there was no connection between Uranium One and the nuclear bribery case. Their argument was that the criminal charges weren’t filed until 2014, while the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approval of the Uranium One sale occurred in October 2010.” -The Hill 

This rubbed several Congressional GOP the wrong way:

“Attorney General Sessions seemed to say that the bribery, racketeering and money laundering offenses involving Tenex’s Vadim Mikerin occurred after the approval of the Uranium One deal by the Obama administration. But we know that the FBI’s confidential informant was actively compiling incriminating evidence as far back as 2009,” Rep. Ron DeSantis, (R-Fla.) told The Hill, adding "It is hard to fathom how such a transaction could have been approved without the existence of the underlying corruption being disclosed"

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a similar rebuke to Rosenstein, saying the deputy attorney general’s first response to the committee “largely missed the point” of the congressional investigations. 

Between the DOJ stonewalling Campbell and the MSM smear job he was subjected to after he went public, perhaps it's more important than ever that those 37 pages see the light of day. 



via IFTTT

Monday, October 1, 2018

Ron Paul: Venezuela's Socialism... And Ours

ORIGINAL LINK

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

This week we witnessed the horrible spectacle of Nikki Haley, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, joining a protest outside the UN building and calling for the people of Venezuela to overthrow their government.

“We are going to fight for Venezuela,” she shouted through a megaphone, “we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone.”

This is the neocon mindset: that somehow the US has the authority to tell the rest of the world how to live and who may hold political power regardless of elections.

After more than a year of Washington being crippled by evidence-free claims that the Russians have influenced our elections, we have a senior US Administration official openly calling for the overturning of elections overseas.

Imagine if President Putin’s national security advisor had grabbed a megaphone in New York and called for the people of the United States to overthrow their government by force!

At the UN, Venezuela’s President Maduro accused the Western media of hyping up the crisis in his country to push the cause for another “humanitarian intervention.” Some may laugh at such a claim, but recent history shows that interventionists lie to push regime change, and the media goes right along with the lies.

Remember the lies about Gaddafi giving Viagra to his troops to help them rape their way through Libya? Remember the “babies thrown from incubators” and “mobile chemical labs” in Iraq? Judging from past practice, there is probably some truth in Maduro’s claims.

We know socialism does not work.

It is an economic system based on the use of force rather than economic freedom of choice. But while many Americans seem to be in a panic over the failures of socialism in Venezuela, they don’t seem all that concerned that right here at home President Trump just signed a massive $1.3 trillion dollar spending bill that delivers socialism on a scale that Venezuelans couldn’t even imagine. In fact this one spending bill is three times Venezuela’s entire gross domestic product!

Did I miss all the Americans protesting this warfare-welfare state socialism?

Why all the neocon and humanitarian-interventionist “concern” for the people of Venezuela? One clue might be the fact that Venezuela happens to be sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. More even than Saudi Arabia. There are plenty of countries pursuing dumb economic policies that result in plenty of suffering, but Nikki and the neocons are nowhere to be found when it comes to “concern” for these people. Might it be a bit about this oil?

Don’t believe this feigned interest in helping the Venezuelan people. If Washington really cared about Venezuelans they would not be plotting regime change for the country, considering that each such “liberation” elsewhere has ended with the people being worse off than before!

No, if Washington – and the rest of us - really cared about Venezuelans we would demand an end to the terrible US economic sanctions on the country - which only make a bad situation worse - and would push for far more engagement and trade.

And maybe we’d even lead by example, by opposing the real, existing socialism here at home before seeking socialist monsters to slay abroad.



via IFTTT

This Fascinating World Map Was Drawn Based On Country Populations

ORIGINAL LINK

It’s likely you’re very familiar with the standard world map.

It’s shown practically everywhere – you’ll see it online, on the news, in books, and even as a part of company logos. In fact, the world map is so ubiquitous that we don’t even really think about it much at all, really.

But, as Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, the economist Max Roser from Our World in Data argues that this familiarity with the world map may lead to complacency in understanding global matters. After all, the typical world map shows us the basic geography of countries and continents, but it doesn’t give any indication of where people actually live!

INTRODUCING: THE CARTOGRAM

To get around the challenges of relying on the standard world map, Roser instead has made a population cartogram based on 2018 population figures.

What’s a population cartogram?

A cartogram is a visualization in which statistical information is shown in diagrammatic form. In this case, it’s a population cartogram, where each square in the map represents 500,000 people in a country’s population.

In total there are 15,266 squares, representing all 7.633 billion people on the planet.

(View this giant map in full resolution to see details )

world-map.png

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Countries like Canada or Russia – which have giant land masses but small relative populations – appear much smaller on this kind of map. Meanwhile, a country like Bangladesh grows much bigger, because it has a large population living within a smaller area.

THE REGIONAL VIEW

Let’s zoom in on some continental regions to get a sense of what we can learn from a population cartogram done in this fashion.

Asia and Oceania
Where did Australia go? The continent is completely dwarfed by neighboring Indonesia and the Philippines.

Not surprisingly, India and China are the biggest countries on this cartogram, especially looking oversized in comparison to countries in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, or the United Arab Emirates.

Europe
Geographically, Russia is a pretty massive country – but when resized based on population, the nation looks closer in size to many other European nations.

The Netherlands and Belgium, two countries with higher population densities than most European nations, also appear more prominent on this style of map.

The Americas
On the map below, Mexico has exploded to almost 4X the size of Canada. That’s because although the Great White North is the world’s second largest country in size, it only has a fraction of the population of Mexico.

Meanwhile, it’s evident that Argentina’s population is lower than the country’s giant landmass leads on.

Africa
Finally, we’ll look at Africa, which is in the middle of a massive population boom.

Countries like Namibia, Botswana, and Chad almost disappear.

Nigeria, which is expected to have the world’s largest city by 2100 with over 88 million residents, is the largest country in Africa using this cartogram method.



via IFTTT

Sunday, September 30, 2018

270 Painkillers Per Person: DEA Investigates Pill Mills in Small Tennessee Town

ORIGINAL LINK

DEA agents discover another small town in America's Rust Belt with an overabundance of opioids

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) last week conducted inspections at several pharmacy locations in the Clay County, Tennessee town of Celina, following a massive spike of painkiller purchases from drug distribution companies.

According to the sales data, obtained by the DEA, several pharmacies purchased nearly 1.5 million pills in 2017, a number that is considered an anomaly of a rural area in America's Rust Belt region.

Home to just 7,800 people, the pharmacies last year purchased enough opioids to provide 270 pain pills for every man, woman, and child living in the small Tennessee town.

In response to the opioid crisis, the DEA is now aggressively monitoring supply chains of pill distributors that primarily feed into hard-hit states.

"DEA's action today is one of many proactive measures we are taking to help prevent drug diversion, abuse, and trafficking that end lives and destroy families and communities," said Louisville Division Special Agent in Charge Chris Evans, who runs DEA operations in Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

"When DEA sees abnormal patterns such as this one, we must act. Too many rural communities like Clay County are often targets for both addicts and drug traffickers who exploit the most vulnerable and who profit from addiction. We've lost too many Americans to opioid abuse," Evans said.

Notice of inspection was issued to Anderson Hometown Pharmacy, LLC at 151 MacArthur Avenue, and Walgreens at 1000 Gainesville Highway. The DEA said an administrative inspection warrant was also issued to another pharmacy, Clay County Express Pharmacy, LLC at 651 Brown Street. Some of these inspections included a complete review of receipts and distributions, employee interviews, and all other pharmacy activities.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control reported that drug overdose deaths in 2017 were up 7% from 2016 and that more than 72,000 American died the previous year -- that is more than American soldier deaths in the Vietnam War (58,220 US military fatal casualties). This is a more than 200% increase over a decade. Of those overdose deaths, just over 49,000 were from synthetic opioids, which include prescription painkillers, heroin, fentanyl, and fentanyl analogs. Pain management, then pill abuse, is often the starting point for heroin and fentanyl addicts.

Days ago, we reported a similar incident in Williamson, West Virginia, where two pharmacies just four blocks apart pumped 20.8 million prescription painkillers in a town of only 3,191 residents.

It was reported that in December 2002 to January 2010, more than 335,000 prescriptions for painkillers were issued by Dr. Katherine Hoover at a small clinic in the struggling West Virginia town, a rate of about 130 per day.

Williamson is a small blue-collar city of some 3,000 residents just across the Tug Fork River from Kentucky. When the coal industry collapsed, it left behind many miners - many of whom were already reliant on painkillers.

However, like Williamson, Clay County is similar, both areas are located in America's Rust Belt, where de-industrialization and high unemployment fuels the deadly cycle of addiction.

Now, these lost and forgotten towns in the Rust Belt are being pumped with record amounts of opioids by large pharmaceutical firms, who then in return, have local doctors and pharmacies dish out painkillers to residents.

Yet while the DEA is finally cracking down on opioid abuse, the one question left is: why did the government allow pharmaceutical companies and pill mills to pump millions of highly addictive opioids into the Rust Belt in the first place?



via IFTTT

Vaccinated Vs. Unvaccinated: Mawson Homeschooled Study Reveals Who Is Sicker

ORIGINAL LINK

Celeste McGovern — Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute Nov 20, 2017

Vaccinated vs unvaccinated

It’s never been done before.The first-of-its-kind study of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated American homeschooled children shows who is really ailing…and parents should be worried

Something is wrong with America’s children. They are sick – allergic, asthmatic, anxious, autoimmune, autistic, hyperactive, distracted and learning disabled. Thirty-two million American children – a full 43% of them – suffer from at least one of 20 chronic illnesses not including obesity. Across the board, once rare pediatric disorders from autism and ADD to Type 1 diabetes and Tourette’s syndrome are soaring, though few studies pool the data. Compared to their parents, children today are four times more likely to have a chronic illness. And while their grandparents might never have swallowed a pill as children, the current generation of kids is a pharmaceutical sales rep’s dream come true: More than one million American children under five years old takes a psychiatric drug. More than 8.3 million kids under 17 have consumed psychiatric drugs, and in any given month one in four is taking at least one prescription drug for something. 

Fast food, bad genes, too much TV, video games, pesticides, plastics – name the environmental factor and it has been implicated in the surge of sickness, although none adequately explains the scale or scope of the epidemic. There is one exposure, however, that has evaded the search, despite that children have received it by direct injection in steadily accumulating doses far beyond anything past generations ever saw: 50 doses of 14 vaccines by age six, 69 doses of 16 pharmaceutical vaccines containing powerfully immune-altering ingredients by age 18.

We’re assured vaccines are “safe and effective” even though public health officials acknowledge they sometimes have serious side-effects including death and despite the troubling fact that no long-term study of their effects on overall health has ever been conducted.  Remarkably, not a single published study has ever compared vaccinated kids to unvaccinated kids to see who is healthier years after the shots. Until now.

pilot study of 666 homeschooled six to 12-year-olds from four American states published on April 27th in the Journal of Translational Sciences, compared 261 unvaccinated children with 405 partially or fully vaccinated children, and assessed their overall health based on their mothers’ reports of vaccinations and physician-diagnosed illnesses. What it found about increases in immune-mediated diseases like allergies and neurodevelopmental diseases including autism, should make all parents think twice before they ever vaccinate again:

*Vaccinated children were over four-fold more likely to be diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum (OR 4.3)

*Vaccinated children were 30-fold more likely to be diagnosed with allergic rhinitis (hay fever) than non-vaccinated children

* Vaccinated children were 22-fold more likely to require an allergy medication than unvaccinated children

*Vaccinated children were over five-fold more likely to be diagnosed with a learning disability than unvaccinated children (OR 5.2)

*Vaccinated children were 340 percent more likely to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder than unvaccinated children (OR 4.3)

* Vaccinated children were 5.9-fold more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia than unvaccinated children

*Vaccinated children were 3.8-fold more likely to be diagnosed with middle ear infection (otitis media) than unvaccinated children (OR 3.8)

*Vaccinated children were 700 percent more likely to have had surgery to insert ear drainage tubes than unvaccinated children (OR 8.1)

* Vaccinated children were 2.4-fold more likely to have been diagnosed with any chronic illness than unvaccinated children

Homeschooler vs. Homeschooler

The trouble with doing a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study a century or so after it should have been done is that virtually all American children are vaccinated today. When 95 percent of children get injections, there are few ‘controls’ left for studying long-term outcomes. Comparing American children at large to small pockets of unvaccinated children like those in the Amish community is revealing, but critics say they are comparing apples to oranges. There are too many other variables — diet, fresh air, computer time, for example – that might explain differences in health besides vaccination status.

So, Anthony Mawson, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, Jackson State University, along with colleagues Azad Bhuiyan and Binu Jacob, collaborated with Brian D. Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, OR, to engage and enrol homeschooling families to participate in the study. In this way, homeschoolers were compared to homeschoolers (apples to apples), but with the added advantage that homeschoolers as a population match the profiles of American families at large. The families who responded to the anonymous online survey were recruited through homeschooling associations in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oregon.

The Disease Trade

Both vaccinated and unvaccinated children in the study got sick sometimes. As expected, vaccinated children were less likely to have some infections they were vaccinated against: they were significantly less likely to have had chickenpox (Odds Ratio 0.26) and whooping cough (pertussis) (OR 0.3) (see Table 2).

However, in spite of public health hysteria over outbreaks of measles at Disneyland and mumps resurgence, there was no evidence that vaccinated children were any more protected against these so-called “vaccine-preventable diseases”. Children in both groups had about the same rates of infection with measles, mumps, Hepatitis A and B, influenza, rotavirus and meningitis (both viral and bacterial).

Unvaccinated children in the study were actually better protected against some “vaccine-preventable diseases” than children who got the shots. Since 2000, the CDC has recommended four shots against seven different strains of pneumococcal infections before age 15 months (13 strains since 2010), but vaccinated children in the study were 490 percent more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia compared to unvaccinated children (OR 5.9).

Brain Drain

So, what is the cost for this weak vaccine protection against chickenpox and pertussis?

The link between autism and vaccination is the biggest tornado in the vaccine storm. Autism has soared from a rare disorder to something affecting a child in every other classroom: in the 80s, it struck one in 10,000 children, by the early 1990s, one in 2,500. Five years ago, one in 88 children was diagnosed as autistic and today it is one in 68.

In the homeschooler study, the risk of being diagnosed on the autism spectrum was over four-fold higher among vaccinated children than unvaccinated children (OR 4.2).

“We do not know all of the causes of ASD,” the Centers for Disease Control says– which avoids saying they haven’t identified any cause for it. Or any treatment.

They still quote a 2004 Pediatrics study claiming to refute a link between autism and vaccines even though one of its authors, their own top scientist William Thompson, has admitted that he and his colleagues colluded to obscure and then shred data (he kept copies) which showed a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. “Oh my God, I can’t believe we did what we did,” Thompson confessed in one taped telephone chat to Brian Hooker, a bioengineer professor at Simpson University and the father of an autistic child.

The Thompson whistleblower case is the basis of the 2016 documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe by Andrew Wakefield, the gastroenterologist who was among the first to suggest a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism in the late ‘90s, and who has become a symbol of how the system deals with dissenters. It’s the film the CDC does not want anyone to see.

The CDC also fails to mention that the federal government has been forced to acknowledge vaccination’s role in inducing autism and has awarded compensation to some parents of damaged children. Other courts have recognized the connection between autism and vaccination too. Besides that, there are the thousands of parents the courts and federal government pretend don’t exist who all tell the same story over and over again: that they watched their children regress into autism following vaccination.

Brain and nervous system damage from vaccines is nothing new. Crippling and potentially blinding Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis, for example, (which causes MRI-visible white spots on the brain and can progress to multiple sclerosis,) has been described in the medical literature for decades and is a documented side effect of virtually every vaccine. Narcolepsy and Guillain Barré Syndrome are other examples.

So, what role might vaccines have in subtler brain damage? Don’t ask the CDC because they’ve never looked. But the JSU study found the odds for vaccinated children having a learning disability were over five-fold that of unvaccinated children (OR 5.2), over four-fold for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (OR 4.3) and over three-fold for any neurodevelopmental disorder (i.e., impairment of growth and development of the brain or central nervous system associated with a diagnosis of Learning Disability, ADHD and/or ASD) (OR 3.67).

Mercury, Aluminum and What Else?

Vaccine ingredients are known to cause brain damage. Robert Kennedy Jr. has been highlighting the dangers of mercury as thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines and its relationship to autism.

Aluminium is another well-documented neurotoxin added to vaccines as an adjuvant to evoke an immune system response.  Recent research has thrown everything scientists used to say about it (and the CDC still does) in the bin: aluminum is not excreted from the body within hours or days, but it persists for years and can migrate to organs including lymph, spleen and brain. Aluminum in vaccines has been implicated in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Macrophagic Myofasciitis in numerous autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, in sudden deaths following vaccination and in autism.

The FDA does not deny its toxicity – just that there is enough aluminum toxin in vaccines to cause harm. But it calculates risk based on oral exposure. Even so, it describes memory impairment in lab mice and “very young animals [which] appeared weaker and less active [and] less coordinated when their mothers were exposed to large amounts of aluminum during pregnancy and while nursing.”

Injected exposure can hardly be safer.  “It should be obvious that the route of exposure which bypasses the protective barriers of the gastrointestinal tract and/or the skin will likely require a much lower dose to produce a toxic outcome,” says a 2014 review implicating aluminium in the autism epidemic.

Besides toxic metals like aluminum and mercury, vaccines may contain contaminants from DNA from human aborted fetus cells, animal DNA and retroviruses and a host of debris and metal contaminants that are not measured by oversight agencies and whose health effects have never been studied.

The Ear Infection Connection

Vaccinated children in the study were nearly four-fold more likely than unvaccinated children in the study to have had a doctor-diagnosed ear infection (OR 3.8), and they were 700% more likely to have had surgery to insert ear drainage tubes for repeat or persistent infections (OR 8.0).

Acute ear infections have increased worldwide in recent decades and are so common they are almost unremarkable now; they affect 80% of American children by age three and are the leading reason for child doctor visits, antibiotic use and the number one pediatric surgical procedure –insertion of plastic tubes in the ears. Childhood ear infections cost the healthcare system almost three billion dollars a year.

The study points to reports of middle ear infection filed with the government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). A VAERS database search for children younger than one year of age who developed otitis media within one week of vaccination revealed 438,573 cases reported between 1990 and 2011, “often with fever and other signs and symptoms of inflammation and central nervous system involvement.” If that was the reported number for children under a year old within one week, how many children of all ages get common ear infections following vaccination? No one knows.

Messed-Up Microbiomes

As a possible mechanism for vaccine-induced ear infection, study authors Mawson and colleagues cite a 2006 study that looked at the types of bacteria in the nasal passages of children immunized with pneumococcal vaccine vs. “historical controls”  – kids from the prePCV-7 era — and found an increased colonization of a bacteria called M. catarrhalis in the vaccinated group. M. catarrhalis, it turns out, is associated with an increased risk of ear infection.

No surprise then that vaccinated children in the study were over two-fold more likely to have taken antibiotics (OR 2.4). They were also hospitalized more often (OR 1.8).

Broad-spectrum antibiotics like those frequently used for ear infections are like napalm on the microbiome — they may wipe out bugs that cause ear infections but they affect many other microbes as well, shifting microbiome composition in ways that science is only beginning to understand how profoundly this impacts health. New research links microbiome shifts to a growing list of diseases from irritable bowel syndrome, obesity,  Crohn’s disease, diabetes and multiple sclerosis to mood disorders such as anxiety and depression, mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and autism.

In a 2011 Lancet study, Danish researchers concluded the pneumococcal vaccine had a “much broader effect…on the microbial community than currently assumed, and highlights the need for careful monitoring when implementing vaccines…”

Another recent study found it isn’t just pneumococcal bugs that are affected, but several unexpected types of infectious bugs rush in to colonize where vaccines have been. What is the net effect of 69 vaccines on a developing child’s microbiome? Public health officials haven’t even asked the question.

Wheezy and Itchy

The JSU study shows that vaccinated children were thirty-fold more likely to have been diagnosed with allergic rhinitis (hay fever)  than unvaccinated children (OR 30.1), which exceeds the strength of the association between smoking and lung cancer. They also had a higher odds of overall allergies (OR 3.9), and three-fold higher odds of being diagnosed with eczema. (OR 3.1).

All this allergic disease was leading to more medication. The vaccinated children in the study were 22-fold more likely to have taken allergy medicine than the unvaccinated.

Allergic rhinitis (hay fever) is another of those current inexplicably soaring pediatric plagues; in 2012, it affected 6.6 million children. It is strongly associated with another spiking childhood disorder, asthma. More than three million American kids have a food allergy and one in four children have eczema. Worldwide, allergies have been increasing and they now affect almost half of all American school kids.

As with autism, public health authorities have no answers to explain the explosion of immune-mediated allergic disease. But researchers routinely create animal models of allergic disease by exposing them to aluminum adjuvants – the sort used in vaccines – at the same time as allergens. Recent experiments (here, here and here, for example) describe how scientists use aluminum to stimulate allergic rhinitis (hay fever) in mice.

This 2014 study describes how researchers used aluminum hydroxide bound to a bordetella pertussis  (that’s whooping cough bacteria in every child’s two, four, six and 18-month DTaP which also contains aluminum) and exposed the animal to an oral antigen (ie., food, like peanuts or soya)  to produce rats with food allergies.

Studies like these (here and here) describe how aluminum hydroxide linked to egg white protein (another vaccine ingredient) is used to create animal models of asthma.

So how does the CDC fail to consider if the very thing scientists are using to create allergic disease in animals is also creating allergic disease in children?

No Explanation?

“There was no explanation for the differences in health outcomes observed between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups of children other than vaccination itself,” the study’s authors concluded.  Although the design of the study limits causal interpretation, they added, there is an apparent dose-response relationship between vaccination and chronic illness too, with the partially vaccinated showing intermediate odds of being diagnosed with chickenpox and whooping cough as well as ear infection, pneumonia, allergic rhinitis, ADHD, eczema, and learning disability (see Table 4).

“The extent to which these findings apply to the population of homeschooled children, as well as the general population, awaits further research on vaccinated and unvaccinated children,” Mawson and colleagues say. “Investigating and understanding the biological basis of these unexpected nonspecific outcomes of vaccination is essential for ensuring evidence-based vaccine policies and decisions.”

There is little evidence, however, that the mainstream medical establishment has any interest in understanding unexpected outcomes. Its message is clear: vaccines are modern medicine’s greatest miracle, an intervention that has saved millions of lives and improved quality of life for millions more. The fine print, acknowledged since vaccines began, is that a few children will suffer serious consequences from vaccines, including death, but their lives are a small sacrifice for the greater good of protecting of humanity from plagues of infectious disease.

For more than a century it has been accepted public health dogma that vaccine benefits outweigh risks. What’s more, with the introduction of five new vaccines since 1995, bringing the total inoculations to 35 by kindergarten age, studies of the combined effect of vaccines have never been done. The reality is: real vaccine benefits are theoretical and real vaccine risks are unknown.

The emerging “vaccine war” is really just growing numbers of “hesitant” parents (and health practitioners) questioning the CDC vaccine schedule for good reasons: Why are doctors who profit from vaccines the spokesmen for public health? Can government health agencies really be trusted to protect our children when they are so wedded to the pharmaceutical industry?  Why are toxins in vaccines? Does my kid really need this vaccine or is somebody selling it, like Coca-Cola and video games? Why is it acceptable to knowingly sacrifice some children for the greater good? Is that greater good real or is it a mirage?

That vaccines may sometimes curb natural infections like chickenpox sometimes appears to be the case. What’s not been answered is the cost? What else do vaccines do? And if they are such a miracle, then why are American kids so sick?

This pilot study shows us that if mainstream medicine and our public health agencies are really interested in children’s health, not just vaccine profits or defending vaccine religion against blasphemy, what is needed is not the will to make everyone believe, but the courage to find out.

The Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI) is a medical and scientific collaborative established to provide research funding for independent studies on causal factors underlying the chronic disease and disability epidemic.

Celeste McGovern is an independent journalist who writes at www.ghostshipmedia.com.  

Source



via IFTTT