Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Out of prison, Barrett Brown recommits himself to agitating against existing order
After four years behind bars on hacking-related charges, journalist and activist Barrett Brown, still plans a global platform by which to generate real, cogent, viable opposition to the state of things.
This article was originally published at Shadowproof.
After four years behind bars, journalist and activist Barrett Brown was released from federal prison on the morning of November 29, 2016, and ordered to report to a halfway house in Dallas, Texas.
“I was picked up by my parents and Alex Winter and his camera crew,” Brown told Shadowproof. “They filmed me on the six-hour drive over to Dallas. We had to get to the halfway house by 4:00 pm, or it would be an escape charge. So, we barely made it.”
Barrett Brown, now free and active once again. Photo: Karen Lancaster [Public domain].
“[The Bureau of Prisons] originally gave me less time than was necessary to get there, and I had to go in there and forcibly get them to give me an hour more,” he said. “They also told me falsely that I could go in any car, and it wouldn’t be any problem, when in fact I could actually go back to jail for not being in a registered car.”
Brown faced 100 years in prison in 2013 for charges stemming from the hacking of the private intelligence firm Stratfor the year before. The hack—of which the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec took credit—revealed Stratfor was hired to spy on activist groups for corporations, such as Dow Chemical.
He was pegged as a spokesperson and co-conspirator for Anonymous despite renouncing ties with the group in 2011, and the most controversial charge brought against him by the Department of Justice was for linking to hacked data. That charge was eventually dropped.
Brown accepted a plea deal, under which he pled guilty to lesser charges for threatening an FBI agent in a YouTube video after the FBI raids. He also pled guilty to being an accessory to a cyber-attack and to obstruction of justice for putting his laptops in a kitchen cabinet. After over two years of pretrial incarceration, he was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
While incarcerated, Brown wrote award-winning columns, where he documented prison life and administration. He wrote about an endless stream of abuses and misconduct by BOP officials seeking to silence him and violate his rights and the rights of other prisoners. This includes multiple stints in solitary confinement and restrictions on his access to the press and use of email.
The Halfway House
The halfway house Brown currently calls home is operated by the nonprofit Volunteers of America under BOP jurisdiction. While halfway houses are supposed to help people get jobs and reintegrate into society after prison, Brown said the BOP “has a number of regulations that kind of get in the way.”
“Until recently, [halfway house residents] weren’t allowed to have cell phones,” he said. “Now they can have cell phones, but they can’t have iPhones or any phones with cameras or web access, which rules out 99.9% of phones. So people have to sort of scramble around. People have to find these phones that are allowed.”
Such hurdles are “pretty typical,” he said. “There’s some bureaucracy and some requirements. There’s rules that make those requirements hard to deal with.”
Brown said the director of his halfway house is “actually a pretty good guy; very, very dedicated to what he does. The assistant director, a guy named Woody something-or-other, he’s a wacky little rat creature that sort of runs around, a hyperactive bureaucrat.”
He shared he was written up the day before for smoking outside the facility. “Everyone goes out and smokes in the front area, they really don’t screw with you. But, me being who I am, I’m always subject to scrutiny,” Brown said, adding, “It really didn’t mean anything but I did had to get a 5 minute lecture about propriety from this rat creature.”
“A lot of my bandwidth has gone toward nonsense here, but at the same time, I’ve been able to get a lot done. I’ve got some projects. I hit the ground running on getting things launched, and that’ll be made public fairly soon.”
After his stay at the halfway house, Brown will be confined to his home, which he said is “not very restrictive in terms of what I do.”
Computer Restrictions & Employment
“When I’m on probation six months from now, we have very clear restrictions where I can use a laptop,” he said. “I have to bring a new laptop to the DOJ’s office, and they’ll install monitoring software and that’s it. I can use the internet just like any other civilian.”
“Until then, I’m still under BOP jurisdiction, and that’s where things get interesting. I’ve yet to get a written, any kind of written declaration of what I can’t do as opposed to other ex-convicts.”
Brown explained he was planning to bring a Playstation 4 to the halfway house “so everyone could have video games,” but “the assistant director, this Woody something, said, oh, let me go check on that. And, of course, if you ask the BOP if I can have something, they‘re going to say no.”
“In this case, they said I could turn it into a microcomputer. I don’t know what a microcomputer is exactly. Even the DOJ doesn’t say I’m a hacker.”
Brown renounced his ties to Anonymous in 2011, and while he was previously labeled as a spokesperson for the group, it was established at his trial that he is not a hacker.
He did not participate in the Stratfor hacking for which he was incarcerated. Yet, even before the Playstation 4 incident and despite his trial, the BOP labeled him as someone who should not be allowed around computers.
For example, Brown said federal prisons typically circulate lists of around 15 inmates once a month, which include their pictures and information about them. Staffers are supposed to memorize the information. “I was informed by a couple of staff members that I had been sort of cultivating that I’m on that sheet at Three Rivers listed as a hacker,” he said. (Federal Correctional Institution Three Rivers is where Brown was imprisoned for part of his sentence.)
Brown feels the DOJ’s probation officers are on his side, agree he’s been wronged, and understand he shouldn’t be under constraints except as provided for by law. “They’re trying to accommodate me,” he said.
The DOJ’s probation officers sent emails to BOP requesting clarification on what kinds of jobs he is allowed to have, but Brown said the BOP has not been responsive or helpful.
“I’m trying to get a job, a physical, 9-5, 40 hour week job at D Magazine down in Dallas,” he said. However, it is unclear what he’s allowed to do under the conditions of his release. “Can I touch a computer? Can I look at a monitor?” Brown asked.
“I had Tim Rogers, the editor down there, call the BOP representative down here and she said, I can’t give information about that case. Keep in mind, this is my employer trying to find out what I can do.”
“It’s not her this is coming from,” Brown said, again noting the absurd bureaucracy that not only frustrates him but obscures who it is within the BOP that he can hold accountable for such a decision.
“She is just passing on something from someone. That’s why I went in there to the director first couple days I was here and said, look, I need something in writing. Tell me exactly who is saying I can’t have a Playstation because that has implications about whether or not I can have a computer or touch a computer or be in a room with a computer.”
The BOP has not answered Brown’s questions, and he vowed to more forcefully ask “for them to explain what their authority is for making these declarations” and show in writing “exactly what they think my stipulation should be under BOP jurisdiction.”
Brown questioned whether the BOP was setting a dangerous precedent with their treatment of him, noting his columns had “already exposed a lot of the BOP’s activities and have already sort of made formal complaints of retaliation against me.” His email access was previously revoked for a year by the BOP.
Restitution
Another obstacle Brown faces is the more than $890,000 in restitution he must now pay, the vast majority of which is owed to Stratfor.
“My restitution was $200 a month for a while, then $100, and it’s based on how much money I brought in previously. That was determined by the case manager at the prison. Now that I’m out under a halfway house for the next few months, I don’t have to pay anything and then it goes back up to be calculated based on my income.”
When he begins probation, he will have to pay Stratfor and his the other “victims” a percentage of his income in restitution, and if he is compensated through a bequest or an award, he has to pay half of it.
“The bottom line is I do owe over $800,000 to Stratfor, Combined Systems, and the nonexistent law firm of Puckett and Faraj, which was quite literally destroyed by [Jeremy] Hammond. That’s still the case, and we’re going to make as much of that as we can.”
“The way I see it is we’re paying a bit of a price each month in order to remind people of what these firms are doing,” Brown argued. “That’ll stay in the news as long as we can keep it, and it’ll be a monument to the age we live in and to the injustice of the system. I think eventually Stratfor may decide they want out of that. We’ll see what happens.”
A Real, Cogent, Viable Opposition To The State Of Things
Assessing his plans now that he’s out of prison, Brown said his main objective is the same as it was around the time he started Project PM in 2008-2009: “to launch a global platform, a method by which to generate a real, cogent, viable opposition to the state of things; opposition to the nation state, corporations, the existing order.”
“At this point, it’s more viable for me to get something like that launched and make it quickly viable than it would have been years ago. Because at this point, I’ve got a degree of respect from the activist community and even establishment figures, who I think years ago would not have been as interested in radical solutions as they are now.”
“Obviously, the election results sort of sealed the deal in terms of getting people to realize there’s a problem here,” he said. “The grown ups are not in charge.”
“The greatest, most important fact of the 21st Century will be that any individual can collaborate with any other individual,” he explained. “That’s vaguely obvious now, but […] you’re going to see, on a global scale, an unprecedented non-state opposition grow up as little entities develop and evolve and start connecting with each other. That’s the period we’re entering. We’re entering a period of conflict.”
He described the first phase of this as “the last six years of Wikileaks and Anonymous and these different groups challenging the system.” Brown pointed to Wikileaks’ role in the 2016 election, saying they scored “sort of an unfortunate success to the extent that the election was somewhat thrown by [Julian] Assange.”
“It’s not the way I would have wanted it to be, but it does go to show that this is the age of non-state actors,” he said.
Brown said he would soon make an announcement with more concrete details about his upcoming projects. But for now, what is important is to understand the most pressing issues facing society “have to be addressed by outside forces, well organized systems in which we channel dissent.” His goal is to “channel peoples’ capabilities and skills and resources in a way that they don’t have to work through the Democratic Party, for instance, which is an organization in which scum rises to the top.”
“You look at someone like Dick Morris and then you think about all the twenty-something kids out there, who are actually very, very talented, very knowledgeable, they’re honest. But they have no viable way, for the most part, to get involved and bring their talents to bear and bring their honesty to bear.”
“If we give them something where they can rise, where they can channel those talents, if we create something for them and say, there’s no more excuses, here it is, here is your ability to change the system, and we do it in the right way and we provide charismatic leadership and an ethos that works to burn off this morass—this ridiculous over-entertained culture, then we will finally see results.”
Brown asked people to “start thinking about what obligations they have to the civilization they’ve been born into. Think about the people who have come before us, who have made sacrifices, much more considerable sacrifices than we’re asking of anybody. We’ll be asking people for their time and for their efforts without any real risk.”
“Just think about if they are going to take and enjoy the fruits of our liberty and this civilization or if they feel that they have a moral obligation to put something back into it,” he said.
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Tuesday, December 20, 2016
5 Arrested After Egyptian Police Bust Staged Photo Shoot Of "Wounded Aleppo Children"
Readers who have been following the crisis in Aleppo have seen media reports of videos and photos allegedly originating from innocent children victims, pleading against the advance of the Assad forces. And while there have been various accusations that these clips, like the infamous "chemical attack" YouTube clip from 2013, were staged, such reports were promptly slammed by the mainstream media as "fake news" and roundly ignored. However, if one ever needed a reason to be skeptical of claims, photographs, and/or videos coming out of the region, and the MSM's appeals to readers emotions based on fabricated facts, Egyptian authorities have just provided it.
Egyptian police arrested five people in Port Said, Egypt for making staged "wounded children" photos, which they were planning to use to misrepresent on social media as photos of destruction and injured people in Syria's Aleppo, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said on Monday. The group also made fake videos that purport to show the wreckage of air strikes in Aleppo.
The shooting team, which included the photographer's assistants and parents of the children, was detained in the Egypt's province of Port Said," the Ministry said on Facebook.
According to the Ministry, the police witnessed the shooting process, which was taking place near the vestiges of a building destroyed as illegal under the decision of the local authorities. A girl standing in a white dress covered in "blood" that later proved to be paint, drew attention of a police officer driving by. The girl held a teddy bear covered in the same "blood" and had her arm "bandaged".
The Facebook statement said the videographer, his assistants, and the parents of two children who appear in the footage were detained after a trail led police to them at a building site awaiting demolition. The five have reportedly admitted they were planning to distribute their footage on social media, which was supposed to show an eight-year-old girl in a white dress and bandages, covered in red stains while holding a teddy bear.
“A 12-year-old boy is also interviewed about what life is like under intensive Russian-backed Syrian government air strikes,” reported
The Independent
The photographer also admitted that he was going to publish these photos on social media as pictures of Aleppo.
To be sure, this one instance does not mean all footage coming out of the region is fake. It also does not mean every claim made by Russian, Syrian, and Iranian officials about the conflict is true in comparison. Still, the fact remains that journalists aren’t going to rebel-held areas for fear of execution. Instead, they rely on the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is run by one anti-Assad dissident in Coventry, England. So-called Syrian activists and the shady group known as the White Helmets make up the rest of the reports in Syria, even though they both have also been largely criticized and discredited.
Also troubling is the willingness of the conventional media to accept most of these reports at face value without ever questioning their authenticity.
The fact the mass media disproportionately focuses on Aleppo while turning a blind eye to the horrendous crimes being committed in Yemen courtesy of the United States, the United Kingdom, and an inexperienced Saudi-led coalition indicates the media’s concerns for human rights in Syria are disingenuous, as the AntiMedia correctly notes.
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Sugar Wars: Junk Food, Junk Science or Both?
Is eating too much sugar bad for you? And what's too much? As it happens average American per capita consumption of caloric sweeteners like refined cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup is down 111 grams per day in 1999 to 94 grams per day today. However, 94 grams per day adds up to over 75 pounds of sugar per year per person. Nearly 80 percent of the sugar we consume is found in candy, snack foods, and sweetened beverages, and is not inherent in the fruits and vegetables we also eat. A year ago, the government recommended that Americans get no more than 10 percent of their daily calories from added sugars. In 2,000 calorie per day standard diet, that would mean eating fewer than 200 calories in the form of sugar. Current consumption of 94 grams of sugar translates to 358 calories per day. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a different calculation in which per person annual consumption of caloric sweeteners peaked at 153.1 pounds in 1999 and fell to only 131.1 pounds in 2014.)
In September my colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported on the recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that revealed that the drafter of the U.S. dietary goals was bribed by Big Sugar to demonize fat in the 1950s and 1960s. In this way, the sugar lobby managed to take the nutritional focus off of their own product as possibly delterious to good health. As Brown noted, "And this demonization of fat actually helped increase U.S. sugar consumption, as health conscious Americans replaced morning eggs and sausage with carbs like bagels, or turned to low-fat and fat-free offerings where added sugar helped fill the taste void."
Now Big Sugar strikes back? A new study (paywalled) just published in The Annals of Internal Medicine (AIM), purporting to review the dietary guidelines relating to the consumption of sugar issued since 1995 by various countries and international health agencies, finds that they do "not meet criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low-quality evidence." The authors consequently conclude that "at present, there seems to be no reliable evidence indicating that any of the recommended daily caloric thresholds for sugar intake are strongly associated with negative health effects."
The Annals of Internal Medicine also published a companion editorial strongly critiquing the main article. First, the authors of the critique point out that the funders of the study are associated with sweetened beverage and candy manufacturers. In addition, they assert that including standards in the study that were devised in 20 years ago is misleading since scientific understanding of the role of sugar in metabolism and diet has advanced. Finally they further argue that applying the AGREE II clinical practice evaluation instrument is inappropriate for gauging the risk of consumption of added sugars at a population level.
In fact, as Americans consumed more calories, including more calories from added sugars, per capita the rates of obesity and Type 2 Diabetes soared.
As my colleague Brown astutely observed:
A report published last fall found that government nutrition rules have been and are still based more on money and politics than sound science. The latest update to federal dietary guidelines still cautions against saturated fat and sodium. Members of the committee that developed these guidelines have accepted funding from industry groups, such as the Tree Nut Council, and food companies such as Unilever. ...
Funding good nutrition research is expensive, and we shouldn't automatically look at industry-funded studies or researchers who accept food-industry funding as suspect. But let's not pretend like this sugar scandal is simply a relic of the bad old days of non-disclosure and undue influence. There continues to be every bit as much reason to look skeptically at government dietary advice today as there was in the 20th Century.
In any case, it would be well to take findings of the new AIM study with considerably less than 10 grams of sugar.
Heads up I will be reviewing Gary Taubes' new book: The Case Against Sugar soon.
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Betsy DeVos Prefers Education Choice Over Crappy Government Schools? I’m In.
There's a lot to worry about in the coming presidency of Donald Trump, but a few bright spots appear for those of us who want to run our own lives with minimal government interference. In particular, the naming of Betsy DeVos as the president-elect's pick for Secretary of Education holds a lot of promise for parents who want to move past decades of crappy politician-directed schooling to gain more say in how their children learn.
To go by her enemies, DeVos offers promise, indeed.
DeVos is "best known for her anti-public education campaigns" the National Education Association fulminates in its official response to her nomination. The NEA goes on to take her to task for supporting "vouchers—which take away funding and local control from our public schools—to fund private schools at taxpayers' expense."
Oh, horrors.
"It is clear that DeVos, like the President-elect who has chosen her, is comfortable applying the logic of the marketplace to schoolyard precincts," complains Rebecca Mead at The New Yorker. Encapsulating the nominee's sinister vision for America, Mead draws a quote from an interview DeVos gave to Philanthropy in 2013 summing up her educational dream: "That all parents, regardless of their zip code, have had the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children. And that all students have had the opportunity to fulfill their God-given potential."
Can't you just taste the evil?
Well, if supporting vouchers and other means to choose the best educational settings for children constitutes the oncoming headlights of America's educational doom, I say we throw ourselves right into 'em.
Actually, when it comes to real doom, public schools are already doing a hell of a good job.
"The performance of 17-year-olds has been essentially stagnant across all subjects since the federal government began collecting trend data around 1970, despite a near tripling of the inflation-adjusted cost of putting a child through the K–12 system," a 2014 Cato Institute study found. Not only did spending triple in that time, but public school employment soared, so more money and personnel were available over those decades to achieve absolutely zip--no improvement in education outcomes.
Likewise, "U.S. students are stagnating in reading and science proficiency while their math performance declined slightly," The Atlantic's Emily Richmond noted just weeks ago of the results from the latest Program for International School Assessment (PISA), which compares students from around the world. The U.S. hovers near the middle of the pack in reading and science, and toward the bottom in math.
"Stagnant" is also a good term for Americans' take on this situation, with Gallup consistently reporting since 1999 that more than half of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of education their kids receive. The polling company notes that the lowest level of regard is reserved for public schools, with only 37 percent of Americans saying government institutions provide "good" or "excellent" education—lower scores than reported for private schools, religious schools, charter schools, or homeschooling.
Which is where Betsy DeVos comes in. She and her husband have personally funded scholarships allowing low-income children to attend private schools. She chairs the American Federation for Children, "promoting school choice, with a specific focus on advocating for school vouchers, scholarship tax credit programs and Education Savings Accounts." She was instrumental in enacting Michigan's and Detroit's charter school program.
That last achievement has proven a bit controversial, with Tulane University's Douglas N. Harris insisting in the pages of the New York Times (after DeVos's nomination) that Detroit represents "the biggest school reform disaster in the country." But "the 'well-regarded study' Harris cites actually finds that Detroit charter schools are producing significantly greater gains than traditional public school alternatives," the University of Arkansas's Jay P. Greene responded. Stopping just short of accusing Harris of making things up, Greene went on to suggest that criticism of Detroit's charter school efforts may be motivated more by ideological opposition to choice, and DeVos, than by evidence.
Arguing with people who manufacture their arguments out of whole cloth is an all-too-familiar experience for homeschooling parents like myself. So it was especially encouraging when Betsy DeVos told Philanthropy, "Homeschooling represents another perfectly valid educational option...To the extent that homeschooling puts parents back in charge of their kids' education, more power to them."
If DeVos sees those of us teaching our own kids not as enemies, but as parents doing our best for children, that puts her head and shoulders above most government bureaucrats who tinker with education policy.
And our choices are "valid," even by bureaucratic standards. Homeschooled students "score, on average, at the 84th to 89th percentile" on tests according to Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute.
Likewise, research finds that, while not a panacea, "the charter school sector is getting better on average and that charter schools are benefiting low-income, disadvantaged, and special education students," as Dr. Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford University's Center on Research on Education Outcomes, puts it.
School voucher programs in cities including Washington, D.C., and New York also seem, in many cases, to improve education outcomes, including graduation rates. "Our analyses revealed positive effects on math scores for children who applied to the program from certain types of schools—those with average test scores below the citywide median," researchers reported of New York City's efforts.
Just as important, families who choose the means by which their children are educated are generally more satisfied than those whose kids go to assigned schools—probably because their choices correspond with their values and preferences. No wonder, then, that the ranks of the homeschooled have grown from 1.1 million kids in 2003 to 1.8 million in 2012—and an estimated 2.3 million this year. And we've seen high-profile growth in the number of children attending privately-managed, publicly-funded charter schools, from 800,000 kids in 2003-2004 to 2.5 million in 2013-2014.
People want to be able to guide their children's education. They generally achieve better results than government schools when their right to do so is respected. And they're happier when allowed to make such choices.
So, is there a potential downside with Betsy DeVos? Sure enough. As Cato's Neal McCluskey writes, there's a risk "that President-elect Trump will see Ms. DeVos—or that she will see herself—not just as the education department head, but rather as the national education boss." That's the overall danger with the Trump administration. If it goes full authoritarian, that top-down approach will taint everything it touches.
But we've had a top-down approach in education for a very long time in this country. It's bossed families around and turned the process of teaching children into a one-size-fits-few boondoggle that leaves not too damned many people happy—or well-educated.
If Betsy DeVos can break with that lousy tradition by expanding options for parents and children, she'll be a bright spot not just in the Trump administration, but in the U.S. government's overall treatment of education.
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Russia Did Not Hack The DNC. The Leaks Came From The Inside
Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who is now working with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after being leaked by whistleblowers, and not actually hacked by Russia.
“Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,” Murray told Dailymail.com. “The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.”
Murray’s version contradicts in its entirety that of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election was developed by U.S. intelligence.
He explained that he was handed a package in a wooded area near American University by a “disgusted” Democratic whistleblower amidst the White House trying to put the blame on Russian hackers for tampering with the presidential election.
WikiLeaks published thousands of emails that were stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that caused a media frenzy of the Democractic presidential nominee leading up to the final weeks of the campaign. Murray, a controversial figure who was stripped of his British ambassador title due to allegations of misconduct, said the leakers were driven by “disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.”
U.S. intelligence officials have urged their confidence that Russians passed the documents to WikiLeaks in order to swing the election in Donald Trump’s favour, but Murray claims that the DNC and Podesta emails WikiLeaks published were given to them by Americans who had authorized access to the information, and that the person he met with was not the original person but was an intermediary as to keep the person who originally obtained the information safe.
“I don’t understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn’t true,” Murray said. “Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.”
It was Murray’s vocal criticism of human rights abuses occurring in Uzbekistan that outcasted him from the U.K. Foreign Office. He now calls himself a “close associate” of Julian Assange, having spoken out to support Assange, who faces rape allegations and is restricted to the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange has long been acknowledging that WikiLeaks did not receive the emails at hand from Russian sources. “The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,” Assange said. “Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”
The Obama administration has been working to reveal Russia’s potential role in influencing the presidential election. Yet amid a general consensus on Capitol Hill that Russia hacked U.S. political groups and officials, there are some holdouts from the Republican side who do not believe the motive is clear enough to claim it was an attempt to swing the election, or just to gather intelligence.
“Now whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that’s the subject of investigation,” said Senator John McCain. “But facts are stubborn things, they did hack into this campaign.”
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Study pulled from publication after proving truth of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children
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(NaturalNews) The censorship of science is nothing new. In Canada, for instance, there were serious concerns about the federal government’s increasingly strict regulations that prevented scientists from sharing their findings with the public. Censorship, on the whole, is a persistently under-acknowledged problem in our society. The election of Donald Trump certainly showcased the fact that... |
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Texas Plans to Remove Vaccine Exemptions
By Dr. Mercola
Your right to vaccine exemptions is under attack in many states, from Texas to California, with lawmakers increasingly pushing for mandatory vaccination in the name of public health.
The issue came to a head in 2015, when a measles outbreak that started at Disneyland ignited near hysteria about the number of unvaccinated children in the state of California.
The source of the initial Disney theme park exposure was never identified, yet it was assumed that the measles outbreak (which amounted to a total of only 125 cases, zero deaths and only 17 hospitalizations) was the fault of unvaccinated residents.
Yet, even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated, “Annual attendance at Disney theme parks in California is estimated at 24 million, including many international visitors from countries where measles is endemic.”1
All but One California Vaccine Exemptions Taken Away
Theoretically, if vaccines work as intended then people who are vaccinated should have little risk of contracting measles during an outbreak.
But rather than focus on why some vaccinated individuals still ended up with measles (the vaccines do not always work for a number of reasons), the media and regulators launched efforts to take away residents’ right to vaccine choice.
That year, California quickly went from a state that protected vaccine choice to one with one of the strictest vaccine policies in the U.S. California is now only 1 of 3 states in the U.S. that will only allow a medical vaccine exemption written by a doctor, for which the vast majority of children do not qualify under strict federal guidelines.
Unless you can find a medical doctor to write your child a medical exemption, your child cannot go to day care or attend public or private schools in California without getting multiple doses of nine or 10 state-mandated vaccines (polio, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, haemophilus influenza B [or day care], hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella and varicella zoster [chickenpox]).
If you refuse even one federally recommended dose of those vaccines, you are forced to homeschool your child. Further, not only Californians’ rights were affected by the measles outbreak. Barbara Loe Fisher, president and co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), said:
“One hundred vaccine-related bills were introduced in this country in January and February of 2015 as a result of this mass hysteria about measles' cases associated with Disneyland. In Texas, 20 bills were introduced. In 11 states, the personal belief exemption was attacked for removal.”
Vaccine Exemptions Threatened in Texas
Texas is one of 18 states that allow philosophical exemptions to vaccines, but that may soon change. The number of kindergarten through 12th grade students in Texas who reported filing philosophical exemptions for at least one vaccination during the last school year increased 19-fold since 2003.2
This still only amounts to less than 1 percent of enrolled students, but Texas lawmakers have filed bills aimed at lowering the number of children who are exempted from vaccinations for non-medical reasons. As reported by American-Statesman:3
“[State Rep. Donna] Howard has filed bills to be considered next year that would require students to opt-out of the state’s immunization registry called ImmTrac rather than opt-in and physicians to counsel parents on vaccinations before they obtain an exemption.”
A similar bill filed last year did not move forward, and some, including the Home School Legal Defense Association, expressed concerns that such bills could harm parental rights.
It remains to be seen whether the bills will move forward next year, but, one by one, more vaccine exemptions are being removed while society moves in favor of mandatory vaccinations using a flawed, and sometimes fatal, one-size-fits-all schedule.
Why Vaccine Exemptions Must Be Protected
It’s incredibly important that people retain the right to choose what is, or is not, injected into their bodies. The fact is, vaccines are tolerated by some people and devastating to others.
Most would agree that in the case of medical care, one size does not fit all. But in the case of vaccinations they’re prescribed exactly the same for every child. Today we know, however, that some children, like those with chronic diseases or mitochondrial disorders, are at increased risk from vaccinations.
Unfortunately, efforts aren’t being made to identify these children to prevent any unnecessary harm. An individual’s response to a vaccine is actually influenced by manyfactors. For instance, an individual’s gut microbes may help determine their immune response to vaccines.
Infants that responded to the rotavirus vaccine had a higher diversity of microbes in their gut, as well as more microbes from the Proteobacteria group, than infants who did not mount the expected immune response.4
Epigenetic science, which now tells us that our genes are NOT our destiny, is another variable in vaccine safety, because no one knows how vaccines affect your genes (and it’s likely different in every person).
Part of the problem is that once you start to epigenetically tinker with the infant immune system, you are basically depositing what Dr. Suzanne Humphries, author of “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History,” refers to as "little cluster bombs" that will eventually "explode into a big problem."
As an example, she cited a study by Nikolaj Orntoft, in which African girls were injected with a tetanus vaccine to see which genes might be upregulated or downregulated (basically “turned on” or “turned off”). What they found is that there's really no way to predict which genes will be affected.
So not only will each individual have a unique response to any given vaccine based on their age, current health status and microbial makeup, but we're also epigenetically predisposed to respond differently in terms of the side effects we might develop.
You can see, then, how vaccine mandates may turn out to be health disasters for some people.
What About Herd Immunity?
In the debate over vaccine exemptions, one of the arguments commonly used in favor of increased vaccination is that of herd immunity. It’s necessary for the vast majority of a population to become vaccinated, officials say, for the betterment of the group, but there are flaws with this assumption.
Many people believe that once you receive a vaccine, you’re protected from that disease for life. This is a misconception. Vaccines do not confer the same kind of long-lasting immunity that is obtained from experiencing and recovering from the natural disease.
This is why booster shots are necessary, as vaccine-induced immunity eventually wanes. The vaccine simply cannot provide life-long immunity the way getting a naturally acquired infection can.
So, what many people don't realize is that there is such a thing as natural herd immunity. However, vaccines cannot provide this.
As an example, most Americans born before 1957 experienced measles and have naturally acquired life-long immunity, which allowed women to pass antibodies on to their babies to protect them from measles during the first year of life.
Things have definitely changed in the past 60 years. Because vaccine antibodies are different from naturally acquired measles antibodies, young vaccinated moms today cannot give longer-lasting naturally acquired measles antibodies to their newborns.5
There Are More Questions Than Answers When It Comes to Vaccinations
From my point of view, there can be little doubt that we need to review the safety and effectiveness of the current vaccination program in the U.S. This review needs to include methodologically sound investigative studies that are not compromised by conflicts of interest within industry and government.
There are simply more questions than answers regarding vaccination, and scientists have only scratched the surface of the complex changes that occur when you artificially manipulate the human immune system. Consider, for instance, the fact that vaccines cannot provide 100 percent protection from any given disease. Vaccines are imperfect, and imperfect vaccines may actually trigger the evolution of more severe disease.6
“Vaccines rarely provide full protection from disease,” Andrew Read, Ph.D., evolutionary biologist at Penn State University, and colleagues wrote in one study, and those that are imperfect or “leaky” may protect the host from succumbing to the disease while still allowing them to shed the virus into the community.
Ordinarily, a particularly lethal or “hot” virus is self-limiting because it will kill those it infects relatively quickly, before they have a chance to spread the virus to those around them. With leaky vaccines, this is no longer the case, as infected hosts may spread the lethal virus for weeksor more.
In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) discovered that while the whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine may reduce symptoms in those who are vaccinated, the pertussis vaccine does not prevent infection and transmission of the disease. In fact, you can get a series of pertussis shots and still become an asymptomatic carrier who is contagious and can spread the disease to others without even knowing it. That study effectively shattered the long-held illusion of vaccine-induced herd immunity.
Is Eliminating Vaccine Exemptions Akin to Blackmail?
Fisher compared the removal of non-medical vaccine exemptions to blackmail. Even the medical vaccine exemption is useless for many because, as Fisher stated, “almost no medical condition qualifies.” She continued:7
“Now public health and medical trade groups are pressuring legislators to pass laws that would not only eliminate non-medical religious and conscientious belief vaccine exemptions for children to attend school, but also would require children to get every one of the 69 doses of 16 federally recommended vaccines — unless a parent can get a medical vaccine exemption from a doctor.
This vaccine dragnet, which is already being applied to health care workers, is also pulling in childcare workers and teachers as proposed new vaccine laws threaten them with loss of employment if they cannot find a doctor to write a medical vaccine exemption.
Zealously pursuing a 99.99 percent vaccination rate and using very small groups of immune compromised individuals as an excuse to eliminate all non-medical vaccine exemptions, liability-free doctors want permission from lawmakers to blackmail virtually every American into playing vaccine roulette. And they want to do this in the absence of sound vaccine safety science, even for those potentially at higher risk for suffering vaccine harm.”
The Difference Between Vaccine Requirements and Federal Vaccine Recommendations
In case you’re wondering why every state has its own vaccine requirements, it’s because the CDC makes vaccine policy recommendations on a national level, but state health departments are the ones that make and enforce vaccine mandates. It’s important to be aware of the vaccine requirements and exemptions in your particular state, as not all require every federally recommended vaccine as a condition for work and school. NVIC further explained:8
“By the early 1980s, the CDC recommended and most states mandated that children get 23 doses of seven vaccines (polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps [and] rubella) to attend kindergarten.
By 2014, the CDC recommended that children get 69 doses of 16 vaccines between day of birth and age 18. Most states mandate that children get 29 doses of nine vaccines to attend kindergarten and children enrolled in daycare in many states are required to get multiple doses of 13 vaccines.
While vaccine policymakers in the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) make vaccine recommendations for children and adults, the bottom line is that your state may not require all federally recommended vaccines as a condition of employment, and school or daycare attendance.”
As is currently ongoing in Texas, increased attacks on vaccine choice and vaccine exemptions are occurring, which is why taking action to protect your right to personal liberty and informed consent.
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CAFO Meat Is Even More Dangerous
By Dr. Mercola
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria infect at least 2 million Americans every year. At least 23,000 die as a result.1 The growing threat of antibiotic-resistant disease is one of the biggest health threats facing the globe, yet, unlike some other pressing health threats, it has a clear and well-known cause: overuse of antibiotics.
“The use of antibiotics is the single most important factor leading to antibiotic resistance around the world,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes, explaining “simply using antibiotics creates resistance.”2
The drugs are one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in human medicine, and up to 50 percent of the time they’re prescribed when not needed or using incorrect dosing or duration, according to the CDC.
This is problematic, but it pales in comparison to the use of antibiotics in food animals, which is driving rates of antibiotic resistance sky high.
Antibiotics Transform Farm Animals Into ‘Disease Factories’
Eighty percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are used by industrial agriculture for purposes of growth promotion and preventing diseases that would otherwise make their concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) unviable.
With animals packed into tight quarters, fed unnatural diets and living in filth, disease flourishes. Low doses of antibiotics are added to feed as a matter of course, not only to stave off inevitable infectious diseases but also because they cause the animals to grow faster on less food.
“But there is a terrifying downside to this practice,” Scientific American reported. “Antibiotics seem to be transforming innocent farm animals into disease factories.”3 The antibiotics may kill most of the bacteria in the animal, but remaining resistant bacteria are allowed to survive and multiply.
You can be exposed to the resistant bacteria by eating contaminated meat or consuming produce grown in contaminated soil or exposed to contaminated water.
It’s becoming clear, however, that the deadly resistant microbes may be spreading far easier and wider than has been previously realized. According to Scientific American:4
“Recent research shows that segments of DNA conferring drug resistance can jump between different species and strains of bacteria with disturbing ease, an alarming discovery. By simply driving behind chicken transport trucks, scientists collected drug-resistant microbes from the air within their cars.”
Industrial Agriculture Makes It Difficult to Prove They’re Endangering Public Health
The industrial agriculture industry has denied that antibiotics usage in animals poses a direct risk to public health, and it’s difficult for researchers to prove the point, in part, because the industry makes it harder.
Under the guise of protecting the animals’ health, some CAFO farmers are instructed by their meat producer bosses to not allow researchers on the farms. In reality, they’re tying the hands of scientists, lest they produce the proverbial smoking gun that forces the lucrative practice of administering low-dose antibiotics to stop.
Dr. James Johnson, an infectious disease physician at the University of Minnesota, told Scientific American, “Frankly, it reminds me of the tobacco industry, the asbestos industry and the oil industry … We have a long history of industries subverting public health.”5
There has been some revealing research, even still. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which can cause deadly infections of the skin, blood and lungs, was first discovered in pigs and pig farm workers in the Netherlands in 2004.
Since then, this livestock MRSA strain has spread across Europe, Canada and the United States, causing both mild and life-threatening infections.
Last year, research published in Clinical Infectious Diseases revealed that current workers at pig farms are six times more likely to carry multi-drug resistant MRSA than those without exposure to CAFO pigs.6
They also observed active infections caused by livestock-associated Staphylococcus aureus (LA-SA). Worse still, aerosolized MRSA has been detected in the air inside and downwind of a pig CAFO, as well as in animal feed.7
Also revealing, people who have close proximity to pig CAFOs and areas where CAFO pig manure is applied to crop fields are more likely to be infected with MRSA, adding to the “growing concern about the potential public health impacts of high-density livestock production.”8
Voluntary FDA Guidelines Allow CAFOs to Keep Feeding Animals Antibiotics
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidance on agricultural antibiotics on December 11, 2013, but it didn't go anywhere near far enough.
They asked drug companies to remove indications for “feed efficiency” and “weight gain” from the labels of their antibiotic products. They also require veterinarians to oversee any addition of these drugs to animal feed and water.
Most companies have agreed to comply with these voluntary guidelines and state they no longer use antibiotics for growth promotion purposes. Instead, they simply state they use the antibiotics for disease prevention and control, a use that is still allowed under the FDA’s guidance.
Farm Animals May Contain Bacteria Resistant to Antibiotic of Last Resort
Carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriacea (CRE), bacteria resistant to the class of antibiotics called carbapenems,9 have now been detected in a U.S. pig farm.10 The finding surprised even the researchers, since carbapenem drugs are illegal to use in food-producing animals because of their importance to human medicine.
CRE has been dubbed a “nightmare bacteria” by the CDC’s Director Dr. Tom Frieden because of their extreme resilience — it’s nearly impossible to kill them with conventional antibiotics:11
- CRE are resistant to virtually all antibiotics, including the ones doctors use as a last-ditch effort to treat an infection
- The organisms can transfer their virility to other bacteria, making containment much more of a challenge.
- CRE bacterial infections are quite deadly, with a fatality rate as high as 50 percent.
CRE was found after researchers swabbed the floors and walls of the pig farm over a period of five months. A gene called bla IMP-27, which gives bacteria the ability to resist carbapenem antibiotics, was also detected.
The researchers suggested the bacteria may have been introduced to the farm from the outside and that other antibiotics used on the farm could be potentially contributing to its maintenance and spread.12 The researchers wrote:13
“The implication of our finding is that there is a real risk that CRE may disseminate in food animal populations and eventually contaminate fresh retail meat products …
The emergence of [CRE] … has been described as heralding the end of the antibiotic era with their global expansion presenting an urgent threat to public health.
… These potential pathogens can harbor highly mobile genes that confer resistance to the most critically important, live-saving antimicrobial drugs.”
Mega Plate Petri Dish Shows Disturbing Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance
Roy Kishony, Ph.D., a biologist at the Technion in Israel and a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and colleagues have built a giant petri dish called a Microbial Evolution and Growth Arena (MEGA) plate that shows what happens as bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.
The bacteria, shown in white in the video above, first fill in the areas where there is no antibiotic present but quickly a “mutant” appears that’s resistant to the antibiotic. HMS noted, “The experiments are thought to provide the first large-scale glimpse of the maneuvers of bacteria as they encounter increasingly higher doses of antibiotics and adapt to survive — and thrive — in them.”
In 2015, the federal Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria was created. Part of its role is to evaluate the implementation of the National Strategy for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria. One of the latter’s goals is to slow the emergence of resistant bacteria, which will require “judicious use” of the drugs.
According to the National Strategy, “Judicious use of antibiotics in healthcare and agricultural settings is essential to slow the emergence of resistance and extend the useful lifetime of effective antibiotics.”14
By 2020, the plan calls for the elimination of the use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion in food-producing animals. It also calls for veterinary oversight for use of medically important antibiotics in the feed or water of food-producing animals. But is this going far — and fast — enough?
Sustainable Farming Methods Combat Antibiotic-Resistant Disease
While CAFOs promote antibiotic-resistant disease, traditional farming practices combat it. At small, regenerative and diversified farms, where pigs, hens and cattle are raised together in a sustainable way, there are many reasons why disease is kept to a minimum, even without the use of antibiotics in animal feed.
The animals have more space to move around, for starters, making them hardier than those raised in confinement. They are weaned at a later age, which builds their immune systems. Even exposure to the sun, a natural sanitizer, is helpful, while a pig allowed to roll in mud enjoys a natural anti-parasitic. Scientific American further reported:15
“In a 2007 study, Texas Tech University researchers reported that pigs that had been raised outside had enhanced activity of bacteria-fighting immune cells called neutrophils when compared with animals raised inside.”
As the importance of combatting antibiotic-resistance disease grows ever stronger, you can do your part and help protect your health not only by using antibiotics responsibly but also by rethinking where you buy your food. Choosing food that comes from farms that do not feed low-dose antibiotics in animal feed is crucial.
While avoiding CAFO meats, look for antibiotic-free alternatives raised by organic and regenerative farmers. If you live in the U.S., the following organizations can help you locate these types of healthy farm-fresh foods:
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EatWild.com provides lists of farmers known to produce wholesome raw dairy products as well as grass-fed beef and other farm-fresh produce (although not all are certified organic). Here you can also find information about local farmers markets, as well as local stores and restaurants that sell grass-fed products. |
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Weston A. Price has local chapters in most states, and many of them are connected with buying clubs in which you can easily purchase organic foods, including grass fed raw dairy products like milk and butter. |
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The Grassfed Exchange has a listing of producers selling organic and grass-fed meats across the U.S. |
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This website will help you find farmers markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats and many other goodies. |
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A national listing of farmers markets. |
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✓ Eat Well Guide: Wholesome Food from Healthy Animals The Eat Well Guide is a free online directory of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy and eggs from farms, stores, restaurants, inns, hotels and online outlets in the United States and Canada. |
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✓ Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) CISA is dedicated to sustaining agriculture and promoting the products of small farms. |
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The FoodRoutes "Find Good Food" map can help you connect with local farmers to find the freshest, tastiest food possible. On their interactive map, you can find a listing for local farmers, CSAs and markets near you. |
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The Cornucopia Institute maintains web-based tools rating all certified organic brands of eggs, dairy products and other commodities, based on their ethical sourcing and authentic farming practices separating CAFO "organic" production from authentic organic practices. |
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If you're still unsure of where to find raw milk, check out Raw-Milk-Facts.com and RealMilk.com. They can tell you what the status is for legality in your state, and provide a listing of raw dairy farms in your area. The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund also provides a state-by-state review of raw milk laws. California residents can also find raw milk retailers using the store locator available at www.OrganicPastures.com. |
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