Fluoride: Poison on Tap

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By Dr. Mercola

Today, 74 percent of Americans on community water systems receive fluoridated water.¹ Since 1945, it has been widely accepted in the U.S. that fluoride is "safe and effective" to prevent tooth decay. But is it really?

The 2015 documentary, "Fluoride: Poison on Tap," seeks to expose what may be one of the longest-running and most successful deceptions known to mankind — adding industrial waste, in the form of fluoride, to public drinking water. You may be shocked at the lengths to which corporations, industry and government have gone to make this industrial waste product appear beneficial to your health.

Fluoride = Health: How Did We Get Here?

You may be surprised to know the first American commercial use of fluoride, in the form of sodium fluoride, was to kill insects, lice, mice and other vermin. It was quite effective. In the 1930s, aluminum-industry giant Alcoa was the largest producer of fluoride, releasing vapors into the atmosphere that crippled or killed farm animals and scorched crops and other vegetation. In those early years, many lawsuits were brought against Alcoa to recover damages from lost animals and crops.

Growing concerns about the seemingly negative effects of fluoride gas on human beings motivated the company to devise a means of recycling this potent industrial byproduct. The brainchild of water fluoridation was Gerald Cox, a researcher with the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh. He received a request to look at fluoride's effects on teeth from Alcoa lab director Francis Frary, who was concerned about mounting lawsuits related to the fluoride pollution his plant produced.

Another motivation was the reality that disposing of fluoride waste from its aluminum plants was becoming increasingly costly for Alcoa. Previously, the Mellon Institute had been the leading defender of the asbestos industry, producing research showing asbestos was harmless and worker health problems were purportedly due to other causes. Using "science" as a smokescreen, the Mellon Institute was able to save the asbestos industry from financial catastrophe.

As a result of their success in using science to prop up the asbestos industry at that time, it makes sense Alcoa chose Cox and the Mellon Institute to craft a story around the perceived health benefits of fluoride. To ensure their success, Alcoa executives realized public opinion about fluoride had to be carefully and continuously manipulated.

In a bold move, they hired public-relations pioneer Edward Bernays, who later became known as the "father of spin," to head the U.S. water fluoridation campaign. Using psychological principles targeted at what he called, the "mass mind," Bernays was quite successful in attracting public support for the widespread consumer use of fluoride.²

The Beginning of Water Fluoridation

By the 1950s and '60s, when the practice of releasing fluoride vapors into the air was reined in due to the introduction of air pollution technology, fluoride had already been added to U.S. drinking water. In January 1945, the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first of thousands of U.S. municipalities to proudly add fluoride to its community water source, under the guise of preventing tooth decay.

As technology has advanced, fluoride acid, also known as hydrofluorosilicic acid, is now caught in wet scrubbers, which curtails air emissions. As such, companies like Cargill, Mosaic and Pencco are able to barrel up and sell fluoride to cities across the U.S. which, in turn, add this unrefined hazardous material to their community water supplies.³ You may be shocked to learn that the fluoride added to your water is not pharmaceutical grade.

Indeed, most of the fluoride added to municipal drinking water is simply an unrefined, highly toxic, industrial waste product. Some of the contaminants that accompany the fluoride added to your drinking water likely include aluminum, arsenic, lead and radionucleotide, among others. As noted in the film, water fluoridation was invented as a profitable recycling venue for toxic waste. Instead of having to pay for proper disposal, this industrial waste is sold for profit, and "disposed of" by being dispersed into drinking water.

Fluoride May Be in More Than Just Your Drinking Water

Should you be fortunate to live far from industrial plants where fluoride is handled and lucky enough to reside in a community where fluoride has not been added to your water, you may still get dosed with fluoride. How? Because it's in beverages and processed foods such as cereal, beer, juice and soda. In fact, anything manufactured with fluoridated water will add to your body's fluoride toxicity burden.

According to the late Jeff Green, former national director of Citizens for Safe Drinking Water, fluoride can also be found in selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medications, such as the antidepressant Prozac. Additionally, it appeared in the banned diet drug Fen-Phen. Rohypnol, the so-called date-rape drug, also contains fluoride.

Green noted the teenagers responsible for the shootings at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 were using SSRI drugs at the time, which he suspects may have impacted their mood and behavior. If you live in the U.S., nearly 95 percent of all toothpaste sold in this country also contains fluoride. Increasingly, dentists are adding fluoride to their cement and filling materials, and fluoride-containing varnishes are often added to children's teeth.

Common Misconceptions About Water Fluoridation

It's a common misconception that fluoride is added to drinking water worldwide. Nothing could be further from the truth. Says Paul Connett, Ph.D., retired chemistry professor and executive director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN):⁴

"Water fluoridation is a peculiarly American phenomenon. It started at a time when asbestos lined our pipes, lead was added to gasoline, PCBs filled our transformers, and DDT was deemed so 'safe and effective' that officials felt no qualms spraying kids in school classrooms and seated at picnic tables. One by one all of those chemicals have been banned, but fluoridation remains untouched."

As stated by Connett, the U.S. is one of just eight countries worldwide in which more than half of its population is exposed to fluoride through their drinking water. The other seven countries that fluoridate drinking water are Australia, Colombia, Ireland, Israel, Malaysia, Singapore and New Zealand.

Water fluoridation has actually been banned in most European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, just to name a few. According to biological dentist Dr. James Rota, these countries, as well as China and Japan, have concluded the practice of adding fluoride to drinking water is "ineffective, toxic and should not be used." FAN underscores the limited scope and value of adding fluoride to drinking water, noting:⁵

• Nearly 378 million people, representing just 5 percent of the world's population, drink artificially fluoridated water
• More people drink fluoridated water in the U.S. than in the rest of the world combined
• Western nations that fluoridate their water have rates of tooth decay similar to those that do not add fluoride to their water⁶

The Effects of Fluoride on Your Body

Given that fluoride is handled as a hazardous material and labeled accordingly, the lack of transparency about its health effects is a true public health travesty.   According to Rota, several of the scientifically-proven health effects of fluoride are already known. He asserts fluoride has been shown to:

• Accelerate the aging process
• Cause genetic damage
• Contribute to arthritis and joint pain
• Increase the incidence of cancer and tumor growth
• Interrupt DNA repair

With respect to fluoride's presumed link to arthritis and joint pain, Connett stated: 

"The first sign fluoride has poisoned your bones is that you have pain in your joints, stiffness in your joints and pain in your bones … And the doctor will simply tell you that you have joint pain … We have millions of people in the U.S. and in other fluoridated countries who have joint pain —1 in 3 adults on average. But nobody's ever conclusively looked to see if these arthritis cases have particularly been caused by or exacerbated by fluoride. They just don't want to look."

The spike in the number of cases of hypothyroidism in the U.S. has also been loosely linked to fluoride. FAN noted that studies investigating fluoride's impact on thyroid hormone levels support the belief that fluoride has an "antithyroid" effect under certain circumstances.⁷

Particularly in instances where your iodine levels are low, fluoride will likely have a greater negative impact on your thyroid. About the probable link between fluoride and hypothyroidism, Dr. Spyros Mezitis, endocrinologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said:

"Clinicians … should emphasize to patients this association and should test patients for underactive thyroid. Patients should probably be advised to drink less fluoridated water and consume less fluoridated products, including toothpaste. … [S]tudies have also shown that iodine deficiency, that may be caused by extra ingestion of fluoride, is related to hypothyroidism." 

Fluorosis: Are Your Children Affected?

Research⁸ presented at the 2017 National Oral Health Conference highlighted the reality that increasingly more young people between the ages of 6 and 19 suffer from dental fluorosis. Data from 2011 to 2012 indicate that 57 percent of youth are affected by fluorosis, while according to recorded data, just 37 percent were impacted from 1999 to 2004.

Fluorosis results when tooth enamel becomes progressively weakened and discolored. It is often characterized by white spots and yellow or brown discoloration. About fluorosis, FAN states:⁹

"Fluorosis is a defect of tooth enamel caused by too much fluoride intake during the first eight years of life. Although fluorosis can be cosmetically treated, the damage to the enamel is permanent. Common causes of fluorosis include: fluoridated drinking water (particularly during infancy), ingestion of fluoride toothpaste, use of fluoride tablets and consumption of processed foods made with fluoridated water."

Often, dentists and public health officials brush off fluorosis as a purely aesthetic issue, one they believe is a worthy trade-off for the supposed benefits of fluoride. In reality, fluorosis is an outward sign that fluoride is damaging not only your teeth, but also most certainly, to some degree, the rest of your body.

Caution: Fluoride Is Extremely Harmful for Infants

Fluorosis is also a huge concern for infants because it is a condition that can progress well before your baby's teeth are visible. Instances of children developing fluorosis due to the consumption of fluoridated "nursery water" are well documented. Breast-feeding is the ideal choice for your baby for many reasons, one of which is that it contains very little, if any, fluoride.

This is by design because infants are extremely vulnerable to neurotoxins. If, however, breast-feeding is not an option for you, and you must use formula, be sure to prepare it using non-fluoridated water. In the book, "The Case Against Fluoride," Connett explains:

"In the view of many critics of fluoridation … it is reckless to expose infants to levels of fluoride in orders of magnitude higher than that found in breast milk. In the U.S., infants who are fed formula reconstituted with fluoridated tap water receive the highest levels of fluoride (per kilogram bodyweight) in the human population.

Specifically, infants who are fed formula made with fluoridated water at the current level of 1 part-per-million fluoride will receive a dose up to 250 times more than the breastfed infant."

The Bottom Line About Fluoride in Your Drinking Water

In their closing remarks, some of the experts featured in the documentary did not mince words about their dislike and distrust of fluoridated water. As noted by Connett:

"Once you put a medicine in the drinking water, you can't control the dose because you can't control how much water people drink. You can't control who gets it because it goes to everybody. If you ask your pharmacist if there's any drug in his store that is safe enough to give to everyone — young people, old people, sick people, well people — at any dose, he'd laugh at you."

Said Phyllis Mullenix, Ph.D., a pharmacologist and toxicologist: "There is absolutely no drug on the market that is given as 'one dose fits all.'" In his earlier writings, Connett shared five reasons he believes fluoridation of community water systems is unethical:¹⁰

1. It violates your right to informed consent to medication
2. The municipality cannot control the dose of fluoride you personally receive
3. The municipality cannot track the effects of fluoride on you individually
4. It ignores the fact that some people are more vulnerable to fluoride's toxic effects than others; you may suffer while others may benefit from its addition to the water supply
5. It violates the Nuremberg code for human experimentation

It's Easy to Safeguard Your Oral Health Without Fluoride

When it comes to good oral hygiene and preventing cavities, drinking fluoridated water and brushing your teeth with toxic toothpaste, which contains fluoride, is definitely not the answer. Your toothbrush and natural fluoride-free toothpaste are important, but don't be misled by thinking they're the only options for dental health.

Many natural substances, such as the foods you eat, also have the power to drastically improve not only the health of your teeth and gums, but the rest of your body too. The key to maintaining or improving your oral health hinges on the attention you give to your diet and proper dental care. Areas you may want to consider include:

Eating raw, organic foods

Avoiding sugary foods and processed foods, many of which contain fluoride

Brushing and flossing your teeth daily, ideally twice a day

Rinsing your mouth after meals and, at night, with a solution of baking soda and water to alkalize the pH in your mouth

Oil pulling with coconut oil, which reduces bacterial growth in your mouth, strengthens your teeth, reduces inflammation in your gums and naturally whitens your teeth

Receiving regular dental checkups, ideally from a mercury-free, biological dentist

Landmark Lawsuit Against EPA Seeks to End Fluoridation in US

FAN, along with a coalition of environmental and public health groups, has filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This landmark lawsuit is something many of us have anticipated for decades! It comes in response to the EPA's denial of a petition under Section 21 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) that seeks a ban on water fluoridation.

In November 2016, a coalition including FAN, American Academy of Environmental Medicine, Food & Water Watch, International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, Moms Against Fluoridation and the Organic Consumers Association, among others, petitioned the EPA to ban the deliberate addition of fluoridating chemicals to American drinking water under the provisions of TCSA.

The petition, which included more than 2,500 pages of scientific documentation detailing the risks of water fluoridation to human and animal health, was denied in February 2017. At that time, Michael Connett, an attorney with FAN and author of the petition, issued the following statement:

"Unfortunately, the EPA's decision to deny our petition demonstrates that the Agency is not yet prepared to let go of the outdated assumptions it has long held about fluoride … We believe that an impartial judge reviewing this evidence will agree that fluoridation poses an unreasonable risk."

Because the TSCA statute provides an opportunity for citizens to challenge an EPA denial in federal court, FAN is now suing the agency as a means of obtaining an independent legal review of the evidence. Stay tuned for further developments!  For now, you can help the coalition continue its momentum by supporting the efforts of FAN, and by joining or initiating a local campaign to end water fluoridation.

>>>>> Click Here <<<<<

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Flashback: Barbara Walters Shames Pedo Victim Corey Feldman On National TV For ‘Damaging An Entire Industry’

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Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

Six years ago, former child star Corey Feldman admitted that he and fellow child actor Corey Haim, who died from a 2010 overdose, were sexually molested by adult males throughout Hollywood during their time in the limelight. Haim is said to have received far more brutal abuse – having been raped at age 11 by a producer, while Feldman was groomed and abused by a man employed by his father at the age of 15.

In a 2011 interview with ABC, Feldman said Pedophilia was the Number 1 problem for child stars, saying “I was surrounded by [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. … Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realize what they were and what they wanted … till I went, Oh, my God. They were everywhere.”

And in a 2016 interview – days after actor Elijah Wood gave an interview in which he said “Hollywood has a Pedophilia Problem,” Feldman revealed that he was ‘molested and passed around‘ by men in the industry. The former child actor has refused to name his abusers, citing legal reasons.

Feldman has also written about Corey Haim’s time with Hollywood child-actor manager Martin Weiss, an agent primarily for children who appeared on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel – who enjoyed sleepovers and road trips with his clients. Weiss was arrested in 2011 and plead no contest to eight felony counts of molesting young actors – sentenced to a year in jail but released for time served.

Weiss raped a child actor 30 to 40 times until the age of 15, according to the police report. In an affidavit obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the victim told police that Weiss said what they were doing was ‘common practice in the entertainment industry.’

Weiss was caught when the 15 year old victim went to his apartment in November of 2011 and recorded a conversation in which Weiss admitted to the abuse.

Barbara’s Genuine Outrage – at Feldman…

In a 2013 interview on The View, Feldman told hosts Barbara Walters, Sherri Shepherd, Jenny McCarthy and Nick Offerman that “some of the richest, most powerful people” in Hollywood were pedophiles still operating in the industry:

Corey Feldman: There are people that were the people that did this to both me and Corey that are still working, they’re still out there, and they’re some of the richest, most powerful people in this business – and they do not want me saying what I’m saying right now.

Barbara Walters: Are you saying that they’re pedophiles?

Corey Feldman: Yes

Barbara Walters: And that they’re still in this business?

Corey Feldman: Yes

After telling host Sherri Shepherd that child acting is a “many feathered bird – be careful what you wish for. Don’t go into it with naievity,” Barbara Walters exclaimed “You’re damaging an entire industry!”

Walters’ comment echoed her defense of Woody Allen days after his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter to the New York Times, accusing Allen of sexually abusing her as a 7 year old child. Walters suggested Farrow had waited to come public to hurt Allen’s chances of winning an Oscar that year, adding "the fact that he likes younger women (in reference to Allen's marriage to the adopted daughter of ex-wife Mia Farrow), that has nothing to do with."

And when it came to Corey Feldman, Barbara Walters shamed a man on national TV who had the courage to stand up and tell the world about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Hollywood pedophiles – seemingly more concerned about her industry than a victim of its most vile and degenerate predators; the “richest, most powerful people” in the business.

Watch below:

Flashback: Barbara Walters shames pedo victim Corey Feldman on national TV for "damaging an entire industry" #HollywoodSwamp pic.twitter.com/cdBf3XdQ95

— ZeroPointNow (@ZeroPointNow) October 14, 2017

Follow on Twitter @ZeroPointNow § Subscribe to our YouTube channel

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Is Homeland Security 'Colluding' With Putin?

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Authored by James Durso via RealClearDefense.com,

Two weeks ago, we were treated to the alarming news that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified 21 states their election systems were hacked by the Russians.

This was a twofer for the media as it confirmed the “Russia did it” narrative behind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election loss, and it gave the weekend talking heads something to chatter about other than the NFL.

The alarm lasted four days, to the following Tuesday, when DHS reversed itself and admitted the Russians did not hack Wisconsin's election system.

Shoe #2 dropped on Thursday when the California Secretary of State rebutted the DHS claim and pointed out the DHS information was not just wrong but also a year late. On Friday, Texas declared it “determined conclusively” it was not targeted by hackers and asked DHS to correct its claims to the contrary.

Next time, DHS should hire the Geek Squad.

If Vladimir Putin is a religious man, he is praying that DHS keeps it up. DHS served up “fake news” so weak it was dead in one week. By comparison, the Czarist-era Protocols of the Elders of Zion is still going strong after a century.

This case will be unfurled in the future when DHS gets it right (I can dream, can’t I?) and catches Kremlin agent Boris Badenov Red-handed.

It's fun to have a laugh at a hapless bureaucrat’s expense, but these public misfires affect our foreign policy.

In today’s networked world, no news is “for local consumption only.”

DHS’s sloppy work allows the Russian government to highlight another example of the ongoing project by the secular, relativistic West to weaken Orthodox Christianity and Russian’s unique culture.

This is not overly-dramatic. In the U.S. “fascist” has latterly (since 8 November 2016) meant “Republican”; in Russia, it connotes a serious menace they have not forgotten. Russia lost about 14% of its population in World War II and felt its sacrifice in the defeat of (real) Fascism saved Europe from a negotiated peace with Hitler.

Russia has traditionally been invaded overland, to wit, the Mongols, the Swedish Empire, the Teutonic Knights, Napoleon, the Nazis. More recently it was menaced by Cold War NATO and the color revolutions. Its national security leadership now says war will be fought in the information space in addition to sea, sky, and land. The Kremlin assumes we are doing it the way they do it, only not as well.

It’s irrelevant if Putin believes everything he says; he probably believes much of it (and has a “public position” and a “private position”), and the Russian voters believe it, too. They might all be wrong, but this is politics, not a physics problem.

The Russians surely snooped on the candidates in 2016 because that’s what governments do. Putin may interpret our intramural fight over alleged Russian election hacking as the “provocation” to prepare the American people for sanctions and military action against Russia because that’s what he would do.

We cannot expect every bureaucrat to think of the foreign policy implications of his work, but slip-ups may make an adversary over-confident or, conversely, force his hand in response to a popular outcry. If the government gets it right, the U.S. will not be gifting Mr. Putin a bushel of whataboutism.

If Homeland Security had a year to get the word out, it had a year to get it right.

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A Provocation to Investigate the Las Vegas Massacre

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Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information.  Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1951

It is not only information that they need – in the age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it…What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.

— C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

The main stream media’s (MSM) ongoing narrative of the massacre in Las Vegas is clearly deceptive.  This is nothing new.  That is their modus operandi.  Overwhelm people with a glut of information about a terrible tragedy and all becomes clear to people sick-at-heart over the deaths and injuries to innocent people. But it’s a false clarity engendered to confuse. Tell the story big and loud, and tell it repetitively from different angles, and It becomes hard to think straight, especially with the addition of all the sad stories of the innocent victims’ deaths and injuries.  Who can forget the false official narrative that was spun amid the grief for all the innocent victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Few could think straight at the time.

The MSM tells us in detail about Stephen Paddock’s gambling life, his houses and real estate dealings, how much he paid for them, his gun collection numbering 47, including all those in his hotel room (23), the alleged exact number of rounds he had in his car (1,600), how he shot from his hotel room windows, etc.  We are told what his brother and girlfriend say about him: they are shocked; he was just a regular guy; they can’t explain it.  We are told how he got the room gratis, how long he stayed there, and that he was planning to escape (they say this with a straight face). Told how many people died (59) and how many were injured (527), we remember these numbers vaguely, especially the latter.  A regular person just feels overwhelmed by all the information, the numbers; saddened and depressed for all the victims, and more afraid.

A mystery is created, an endless mystery that can be pondered and pseudo-debated ad infinitum: why would a seemingly normal, if slightly eccentric, man do such an horrendous thing? Why did he “snap”?  Was there something wrong with his brain?  But if he “snapped,” why did he buy so many guns over a long period of time?   Is snapping consistent with long-term planning?  Was he mentally ill?  The national “conversation,” as they like to call it, will revolve around guns and mental health, and the MSM will keep the story going with endless experts offering their opinions.  And that endless conversation will divert the public’s attention from the essence of this case and other matters we are not supposed to be focused on at the moment.

What the media do not say is that there is video and witness evidence that there were at least two more shooters, maybe more, one from a lower floor and another at the Bellagio Hotel that was locked down. This means that there was a conspiracy involved.  They don’t mention this so that someone like me can do so and be branded a “conspiracy theorist,” the term created by the CIA to besmirch anyone questioning the official narrative of the JFK assassination.  You will notice that I am not – purposefully – linking to this evidence that I assert exists, nor am I raising more of the many questions surrounding this case. I am hoping that readers will research these matters themselves, and if they discover that there is evidence proving there was more than one shooter, then, just as with the magic bullet absurdity in the JFK case, they will conclude, ipso facto, that the MSM are involved in a cover-up of a conspiracy, which is itself a conspiracy – a factual conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory.  And if that is so, they will ask why, and who is being protected.  Cui bono?  Why would the MSM push this narrative of the lonely crazed gunman?

People need to realize that they must be immediately skeptical of such official narratives and do their own research, and they will learn that there are excellent alternative websites that are doing real journalism and are seeking truth for truth’s sake.

While this brief article is not a “lucid summation,” as Mills suggested we need, I offer it as a concise provocation to anyone reading this to develop their own sociological imaginations to achieve such lucidity at a time when propaganda is king and the pawns are being swept off the devil’s chessboard.

One might end up asking: Who’s the devil?  And answering their own question.

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Watching 'far-right propaganda' or accessing jihadi websites could result in 15-year jail term - Tory Home Secretary

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Watching streamed extremist material online will be a criminal offence under plans to crackdown on terrorist propaganda. Home Secretary Amber Rudd will say those found guilty of repeatedly viewing terrorist material could face up to 15 years in jail. The new law will extend an existing ban on downloading and possessing the content on a PC to repeatedly watching it through sites like YouTube.

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Facebook Turns Over 3,000 Ads To Congress; Adam Schiff Vows To Release "Representative Sampling"

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As Democrats in Congress continue in their endless crusade to prove to you that Russia swayed the entire U.S. Presidential election with a measly $100,000 worth of Facebook ads, Adam Schiff (D-CA) has come forward this afternoon to let you know that he now has his hands on the 3,000 ads in question and plans to release a "representative sampling" of them in an effort to "inoculate the public against future Russian interference in our elections."

Once you've recovered from the laughing fit, here is his full statement:

"As part of their continuing cooperation with our Committee's investigation, Facebook has now turned over more than 3,000 ads it uncovered that were purchased by an organization connected to Russian intelligence services. These ads are significant to our investigation as they help demonstrate how Russia employed sophisticated measures to push disinformation and propaganda to millions of Americans online during the election, in order to sow discord and chaos, and divide us from one another."

 

"As we fully examine these ads in the coming days, we will be particularly interested in understanding their full reach, in particular to determine what groups and individuals were most heavily targeted and why. We will continue to work with Facebook and other tech companies to determine the full extent of Russia's use of online platforms, including paid advertising, since what we now know may only scratch the surface."

 

"The American people deserve to see the ways that the Russian intelligence services manipulated and took advantage of online platforms to stoke and amplify social and political tensions, which remains a tactic we see the Russian government rely on today."

 

"Later this month, when our committee hears directly from tech firms in an open hearing, it's my hope to make a representative sampling of these ads public at that time so we can inoculate the public against future Russian interference in our elections. But I am also committed to making all of these ads public as soon as possible, working closely with Facebook to address any privacy considerations."

NEW: Facebook turns over 3,000 Russia-linked ads to congressional investigators; Rep. Schiff hopes to make "representative sampling" public pic.twitter.com/Ug457w6fwN

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) October 2, 2017

Of course, as Schiff continues to ignore reality and advance his "Russian collusion" narrative at all costs, even the Washington Post, who got their hands on some leaked copies of the now infamous 3,000 Facebook ads last week, admitted that the ads they saw hardly fit the narrative that Democratic lawmakers have spun in recent weeks, claiming the ads didn’t advocate on behalf of a specific candidate, but rather hewed to political issues like abortion rights (see: Leaked Descriptions Of Infamous "Russia Ads" Derail Collusion Narrative "They Showed Support For Clinton"). 

Moreoever, WaPo reported that the ads represented issues on both sides of the ideological spectrum, which would suggest that the buyers didn’t intend to support a specific candidate, but rather their own unique agenda.

The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.

 

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics - also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

In conclusion, while we could go through the effort of "fact-checking" each of the inconsistencies in Schiff's statement above, we'll just leave you with this more high-level, graphical analysis of why his continued focus on this specific issue is so criminally stupid (please note, this is not a mistake...the $50k worth of "potentially political" ads purchased by "Russian-linked" accounts literally isn't even big enough to show up on the chart compared to how much Hillary spent on her campaign).

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$21 Trillion Missing – U.S. Government a Criminal Enterprise – Catherine Austin Fitts

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com (Early Sunday Release) Investment advisor and former Assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts says you can add $21 trillion of missing federal money on top of the $20 trillion U.S. deficit. It’s all in a new explosive report on Solari.com.  Fitts explains, “This is $65,000 for every man, woman and […]

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Silicon Valley’s $300M donation to STEM education is not what it seems

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Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: AP/Manu Fernadez)

Many educators cheered the news, announced earlier this week, that a consortium of tech firms had pledged a collective $300 million towards bettering STEM education in the United States. A New York Times article on their donation spoke of it in glowing terms — a trade group executive described its potential to advance “opportunity,” while Ivanka Trump called STEM skills “foundational.” The positive press about a charitable gift is probably not too surprising. Most of us have a gut reaction to the word “charity.” It implies goodwill, and a philanthropic spirit. Because of this cultural understanding of charitable giving as “pure,” giving is generally tax-deductible.

Yet, as with any monetary relationship, charity is a form of control. It also teaches an idea about the way the world works — about what kinds of things are important to fund and what aren’t, about how social change happens, and about who is responsible for “fixing” the world’s problems. Charity’s answer to that last question, usually, is “the rich.”

While philanthropy is near-universally thought of as a “good” thing, a society that ran its social welfare state solely through charity would be a nightmare. The problem is that because the rich are interested in advancing their agendas, they generally only donate to prospects that fund those agendas. Learning the arts or the humanities, or learning to be a critical thinker, are useless — perhaps even harmful — skills to creating supple, pliant, obedient employees for the world’s corporations. (That is a big reason why you rarely hear of any corporations donating vast sums to education in those money-poor disciplines.)

When we let donors dictate which educational programs are well-funded and which aren’t, we cede control of our values and our minds to the whims of the wealthy. We, in effect, become their subordinates. We lose the collective value of democratic control, of living in a world in which all of us— not merely corporate donors and the foundations they fund — have a say as to how education function and how society operates.

But perhaps you are a centrist or a conservative who does not take issue with the anti-democratic maxim that we must leave rich technocrats to oil the gears of progress. Even if you think that the rich deserve the power that comes with their wealth — and that the rest of us poors should have no say in how our lives go — this STEM education gift should still alarm you. That’s because these tech companies don’t really care about your children, or their education. They just want to pay lower wages to future engineers.

Because there is an ongoing shortage of STEM skills, those professions’ wages are comparably quite high. Glassdoor, a job and recruiting site that tracks wages for different professions, pegs the average salary for a Bay Area software engineer to be over $124,000.  The comparatively high salaries of middle-management tech workers has fueled the income inequality of the Bay Area and driven gentrification, both here and in other cities with big tech sectors like New York. And while the tech companies often seem proud of their hand in fueling an unequally distributed economic boom in the Bay Area, they are also desperate to end that, by paying their workers less if possible — ideally, much, much less.

This is a general maxim for any capitalist enterprise: in order to maximize profits, one wants to pay one’s employees as little as possible, and get the most labor out of them. The latter half of that equation the tech sector has down pat: by making their workplaces “fun,” full of amenities like ping-pong, snacks, gourmet meals, showers, massage rooms and commuter shuttles, employees are encouraged to spend as much time as possible at work. The tech companies know that their investment in these oft-parodied amenities pays off in terms of increased productivity. It also inspires a certain reverence for one’s employer, which articulates itself in the social sphere, as many techies literally see themselves as forming a distinct culture and interest group (and sometimes, ironically, believe they are oppressed).

But the first part of that corporate maxim — to pay one’s employees less — ay, there’s the rub. For as long as programming and engineering skills are in high demand, wages will be high for those professions. What is to be done to drive them down?

Over the past decade, Silicon Valley companies did find one creative solution to this problem, albeit a blatantly illegal one: colluding to drive down wages, and not poach each other’s employees. In case you forgot about this quickly-buried scandal, here’s a primer: an antitrust investigation in 2010 revealed that Apple, Google, Intel, Pixar and other large tech firms colluded to pay 100,000 of their employees far less than they were worth. These companies stole a collective $9 billion in wages from programmers. Interestingly, the much-lauded $300 million gift for STEM education represents a sum of one-thirtieth the amount of money stolen from employees through this collusion.

Even though the gig is up, tech companies are certainly still interested in paying their employees less — but through legal means. One potential solution to this is to make STEM skills as commonplace as possible, as normal as learning addition and subtraction, so that software engineering is not a difficult skill to find — and hence, not as valuable.

Just as the corporate investment in employee amenities pays off in terms of productivity and loyalty, this $300 million donation to STEM education will eventually pay off in the form of lower wages for programmers and engineers. It’s a very long game, true. But to think of this $300 million charitable donation as somehow pure of heart, or a “gift” of some sort, is mistaken. Eventually, the tech industry will reap the rewards, and the profits.

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American Rape of Vietnamese Women was “Considered Standard Operating Procedure”

ORIGINAL LINK

Comparing testimony from Vietnamese women and American soldiers, Gina Marie Weaver, in her book Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in The Vietnam War, finds that rape of Vietnamese women by American troops during the US invasion of Vietnam was a “widespread”, “everyday occurrence” that was essentially “condoned”, even encouraged, by the military, and had its foundation in military training and US culture.  She explores why US rape in Vietnam was so common, and why this aspect of US behavior has been virtually “erased” from “narratives of the war”.  She stresses the issue is also important as rape in the US military continues at a high level today, having been mostly transferred away from foreign populations and onto female American soldiers.

Rape of Vietnamese women by US troops “took place on such a large scale that many veterans considered it standard operating procedure.”  It was “systematic and collective”; an “unofficial military policy”.  One soldier termed it a “mass military policy.”  Indeed, rape followed by murder of Vietnamese women was “so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran”.  Examples of soldier testimony regarding rape include: “…they raped the girl, and then, the last man to make love to her, shot her in the head” (Weaver notes the phrase “make love” here speaks in part to the military and general culture’s conflation of love, sex, and violence); two US soldiers dragged a young, naked woman out of a “hootch”.  The reporting soldier said rape was “pretty SOP [Standard Operating Procedure]”.  The woman woman was then tossed onto a “pile” of “19 women and children”, and soldiers around the pile “opened up on full automatic on their M-16s, and that was the end of that”; soldiers pulled a girl out of a bomb shelter and raped her in front of her family.  The reporting soldier said he knew of “10 or 15 of such incidents at least.”  The platoon leader “condone[d] rape”; female prisoners were “raped, tortured, and then were completely destroyed – their bodies were destroyed”; one sergeant reportedly told his platoon, “if there’s a woman in a hootch … rape her.”

Weaver explores the military and civilian culture of the period that produced these behaviors.  Soldiers generally cited racism and sexism, noting these were “pre-existent” and then “heightened” in military training.  One soldier said “the military was just an exaggeration, a caricature, of all that had gone before”.  Weaver notes there was a conflation of “enemy” and “race”; the “enemy” – i.e. the population being invaded by foreigners and slaughtered – does not have uniforms, but is an entire race of “gooks”, or evil, sub-human “objects”.  US culture and military training also encouraged the idea that women were inferior and the feminine was something to be hated and violently rejected.  Masculinity was defined through violent hostility to femininity.  Women, like the Vietnamese people, were objects – in the case of women, detestable objects that existed to serve men sexually.  Thus, Vietnamese women, Weaver notes, were doubly inferior, doubly hated.  Training essentially demanded men become misogynist predators.  Further hostility towards the feminine arose due to the prominence of women in the Vietnamese forces; the idea of being killed by a woman made the threat of the feminine that much more potent, and aggression against the feminine that much more common and extreme.  There was also an idea in the culture that men simply “had” to have sex; that they could not abstain during their tours of duty.  Weaver further notes some of the aggression acted out in Vietnam arose from the “powerlessness” of the working class American family, a “powerless kin unit” that could not “really determine [its] own future”, causing “powerless” father figures often to lash out violently through “intense male chauvinism”.  US women’s movements of the sixties were “catalyzed by these very attitudes”.  A further “sense of sexual entitlement” was “linked to soldiers’ belief in American exceptionalism” – the belief that the US was doing Vietnam a favor by destroying the country and killing millions of people, so Vietnamese women thus owed something to American men.  Many soldiers also pointed to movies with violent caricatures of masculinity, particularly “cowboys and Indians” films, especially ones starring John Wayne, as inspiration for joining the military.  When film crews came to Vietnam, soldiers would often strike poses as if they were soldiers in a Hollywood movie, thus “pretending to be” what they were.  In 1968, to help propagandize Americans in favor of the war, John Wayne actually made a Western style film, The Green Berets, pitting US soldiers as “cowboys” against Vietnamese “Indians”.  The film was a box office success but panned critically.  Military recruiters claimed recruitment climbed whenever John Wayne films were shown on TV.

Weaver, also a scholar of nationalism, then delves into how and why the history of rape has been “forgotten”, repressed, or erased.  She discusses the ways in which rape is generally used to “reinforce nationalism”: 1) men claim to defend the nation against enemies who would rape “their” women, and 2) rapes committed by one’s own nation are whitewashed, etc.  Thus, to bolster or “restore comfortable myths of American exceptionalism”, “producers of cultural narrative … forget” these and other aspects of US behavior that cause shame; owning up to them would debunk “the militarized … exceptionalism from which such behavior sprang”.  Even academics, “whose special job it is to remember such events”, “participate in this erasure.”  One reason it has occurred, says Weaver, is the nation’s re-positioning and re-imagining of the Vietnam veteran as pure victim.  This erases Vietnamese victims and allows the US nation, by extension, to become the war’s true victim.  This is in part a failure of trauma theory to provide a nuanced analysis wherein a veteran can be both victim and victimizer/war criminal (though it seems this “failure” may be a function of the ingrained nationalism, including in academia, that Weaver describes).  Weaver points out that many veterans are “victimized” by the memory of atrocities they have committed, but by committing them they are also victimizers.  Allowing them to admit what they have done (as many have tried to do) and accepting what they have to say, rather than whitewashing it, is thus, Weaver says, an important part of the healing process.

The “primary vehicle of forgetting violence against women in Vietnam” is “[v]isual media – specifically Hollywood films.”  Weaver looks in particular at some nominally “anti-war” films.  Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, based on Vietnam veteran Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers, erases Hasford’s depictions of rapes by US soldiers, as well as his illustration of the military conflation of rape and murder.  Hasford’s novel contains no Vietnamese prostitutes, but Kubrick’s film creates two.  Kubrick thus replaces women victimized by Americans with women who corrupt Americans (even though, Weaver notes, the US military was “almost solely responsible” for the proliferation of prostitution in Vietnam through the intentional destruction of the economy and agriculture, which forced people to turn to any means necessary to survive).

Oliver Stone’s Platoon depicts a rape about to take place but keeps it out of frame and has the “normative”, everyman American soldier intervene against the “bad seed” outcasts to stop it.  De Palma’s Casualties of War does largely the same thing, first bordering on justifying a rape by establishing that the soldiers expected to find prostitutes in the area but did not, then (contrary to its source material), while depicting the rape in frame (though without nudity), having the “normative”, middle-class everyman American (in reality all of the soldiers involved in this were “family men” of the same social class), played by Michael J. Fox, intervene against the lower class “bad seed” soldiers (an intervention that in reality did not occur), thus encouraging the interpretation that this was an atypical, essentially non-American occurrence.  The rapist/murderers were then, in reality, reported and tried.  De Palma includes their trial and sentencing, thus suggesting the problem was both limited and dealt with by the justice system, encouraging feelings of pride and closure.  However, Weaver notes, he erases that the already very short sentences were commuted to virtually nothing.

Weaver mentions that a later Stone film, Heaven and Earth, depicts the rape of a Vietnamese woman, Hayslip, by a North Vietnamese soldier (another rape that actually occurred in real life).  She does not delve into this scene at all, but I hypothesized that it would depict the rape more graphically and directly than any of the other films, would include no intervention to stop the rape, no justification, and no suggestion that the offender was either non-normative or was brought to justice.  I watched the scene, and my hypothesis was correct.  It is the most graphic of any of the rape scenes from the above films.  Stone shows the North Vietnamese soldier pushing Hayslip to the muddy ground in the rain, ripping her top open, starkly revealing her breasts, and then opening his pants and raping her, with medium shots showing the act, including multiple thrusts, and close up shots of both faces during the act: her tortured expression and his evil grimace.  There is no “normative”, everyman North Vietnamese savior to stop the act; the crime is not justified in any way; the rapist is depicted as a normative soldier, while another, similar soldier stands guard.  A close comparison of Stone’s two rape scenes would have contributed to Weaver’s demonstration of how nationalism influences depiction of rape: as Weaver illustrates, rapes committed by members of one’s “own” country tend to be erased, hidden, disavowed, justified, or a “normative”, national everyman savior intervenes to stop the rapes, which are being committed by “non-normative” nationals.  Rape committed by a member of an outside, or especially a targeted nation, on the other hand, can be depicted in graphic and gruesome detail with no redeeming elements whatsoever.

Robert J. Barsocchini is a graduate student in American Studies and a journalist. Years working as a cross-cultural intermediary for corporations in the film and Television industry sparked his interest in the often astounding discrepancy between Western self-image and reality. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists.

American Rape of Vietnamese Women was “Considered Standard Operating Procedure” was originally published on Washington's Blog

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"They Won't Know What Hit Them" Shocking Undercover Footage Exposes Antifa's "Premeditated" Violence

ORIGINAL LINK

As if the public needed any more evidence that violence is a central part of Antifa’s mission, conservative comedian Steve Crowder has published footage that he and his producer surreptitiously recorded after infiltrating a local Antifa cell and accompanying it to a protest at the University of Utah.

The shockingly candid footage offers a disturbing glimpse into the innerworkings of Antifa - a loosely organized band of far-left agitators - and the central tenant of violent resistance that encapsulates the group's philosophy. The footage primarily focuses on a transgender woman, the purported leader of a small cell of Antifa protesters, who can be heard telling Crowder's producer that she’s armed with a handgun, and that she expects reinforcements to arrive later with “two AKs”. The organizer can also be heard recommending that Crowder’s producer buy a small blade at a military surplus store and strap it to his ankle “just in case.”

What they show appears to confirm that the group protesters were planning to disrupt a speaking event hosted by conservative commentator and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, whom Antifa has accused of being a nazi despite the fact that he is Jewish. Shapiro's recent appearances at UC Berkeley and other university campuses drew protests, with demonstrators labeling him a “fascist.”

But perhaps the most surprising thing about the footage was the fact that mainstream media reporters AND police essentially told Crowder & Co. to get lost when they shared it with them.

In another shocking excerpt, the Antifa leader – whom Crowder didn’t name because he said he didn’t want to “dox” anybody, though he added that police have confirmed that they have been monitoring her – described a plan to lure right-wing demonstrators to a secluded area where, presumably, they would be attacked by Antifa.

“Plain clothes, hard tactics, I don’t think they’ll know what hit them. Because they’re not prepared for what we’re planning,” the organizer says at one point.

In the video, another unnamed Antifa member who goes by the pseudonym Clark can be heard explaining that the difference between Antifa and other activist groups is a “willingness to respond with violence.”

As we’ve reported time and time again, Antifa protesters have been inciting violence across the country since Trump’s upset victory in November, beginning with protests during Trump’s inauguration that quickly turned violent in destructive.

According to Fox 13 News in Salt Lake City, Crowder published the undercover video Thursday that purports to show far left-wing protesters distributing weapons ahead of the speech. Crowder’s production team presented the video to police moments after it was recorded.

Yet after evaluating the video, the police determined that there was no credible threat.

“Police looked at the video, evaluated other information available to them, and determined the individuals did not pose a credible threat that warranted action,” Nelson told Fox 13 News.

Similarly violent clashes instigated by members of the far-left group erupted on the campus of UC Berkeley in early February, where members of the group hurled Molotov cocktails and attacked “facists” and “nazis” who were attending a speaking event by Milo Yiannopoulos, causing extensive property damage on campus.

While both the mainstream media and more mainstream leftists initially defended the group, public sentiment has soured on the group.

Several media organizations – including the LA Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal – have criticized the group’s violent tactics. A month ago, it was reported that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security classified Antifa as a "domestic terrorist" group in internal communications that described them as "primary instigators of violence at public rallies" going back to at least April 2016 when the reports were first published."

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