Over the past decade there have been written a number of sobering books, exposing the dangers of the food industry, whose alarming messages were recently and dramatically echoed by the equally sobering documentary film “Food, Inc”. Food Inc has since been screened fairly widely by environmental and health groups across the nation and is available on DVD.
One of the books was titled “Diet for a Dead Planet” a title that I would have preferred – “never-say-die” optimist that I am – to have been called “Diet for a Dying Planet.”
The diets that have been espoused by these books can only effectively be delivered by the time-honored method of past centuries of eating fresh, non-processed food that is grown locally, organically and sustainably, qualities that cannot be delivered by the current industries that have been trying to dominate the food industry and drive out of business local farmers: Big Food and Big AgriBusiness.
Huge corporations, especially the thousands of obscenely profitable, multinationals like British Petroleum, Exxon/Mobil, Shell, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Merck, Glaxo, etc, have most of the characteristics of the criminal personality disorder known as sociopathic personality disorder (synonymous with psychopathic personality disorder), a reality very nicely laid out in the powerful documentary “The Corporation.”
The economic system known as predatory capitalism has regularly brought America’s economy (and the world’s) to its knees. The most recent examples are the Cheney/Bush economic crash of 2008 and disaster that has poisoned, possibly mortally, the previously slowly dying but still relatively fertile Gulf of Mexico, an important planetary asset that affects the Gulf Coast, the Atlantic Gulf Stream, the weather patterns of Great Britain and Europe and who knows what else – probably the entire planet.
Is Greed Good?
Global capitalism’s most obscenely wealthy, billionaire-wannabe corporate executives and management teams are regularly celebrated on the front pages of Forbes, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal Barrons and every investment industry newsletter and every radio and TV financial program. While there is nothing inherently evil about making a profit while doing business, American-style capitalism has degenerated (staring soon after its inception) into the obscene “Greed is Good” and the “everybody can be a millionaire” lies that were so seductively articulated and popularized by every US President since Ronald Reagan’s puppet masters and handlers in his corporate shadow government during the 1980s Decade of Greed.
American capitalism has been variously (and accurately) characterized as Coyote Capitalism, Casino Capitalism or Corrupt Crony Capitalism, where Predatory Lenders and billion-dollar per year Ponzi Scheme financial managers, backed by the hundreds of right-wing think tanks – like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute – all admit that the prime reason for the existence of their business enterprises is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.
The unspoken reality is that most corporate criminals achieve their goals “by any means necessary” (interestingly, this was the phrase Malcolm X used once, a phrase that his detractors repeatedly pointed out as evidence of his being willing to use violence to overthrow the existing order – thus justifying, and perhaps provoking his assassination).
My point in bringing up the nature of dog-eat-dog capitalism is to point out that the Masters of Business Administration (MBAs) who manage the powerful multi-national food corporations use the same unethical business practices as their MBA colleagues who manage hedge funds and every other exploitive Wall Street corporations, including Big Pharma, the gambling, pesticide, asbestos, oil and coal industries, the chemical, biological warfare and nuclear weapons industries - all in the interest of profits ”by any means necessary.” And we consumers, way too many of us grossly deficient in critical thinking skills, sit back and wait for the next amusing or happy news programming or the entertaining commercial or sports spectacular on the TV, so we can guiltlessly forget about getting up and doing something about the impending economic or environmental crises.
The population’s physical, neurological and mental health is being adversely affected – probably permanently – by the profit-driven synthetic food and pharmaceutical industries at the same time that we humans are being “Madison Avenued-to-Death” by the commercials that try to get us to believe that every processed meal is a Happy Meal – never mind wondering what is in the allegedly edible fast-food thing we are about to ingest. Artificially processing food – or adding toxic chemicals - extends the shelf life of a food, but such processing is not good for the body or brain.
Hence, in order to decrease spoilage and increase profitability, synthetically-altered fat or oil-containing food products makes the food potentially toxic to fatty organs like the nerves and brain and definitely less -nourishing. The same goes for vegetables and fruits that are at risk of fungal or bacterial infestations during growing, storage or transportation stages. Synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fungicides will definitely extend the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables but at the same time there is the risk of poisonous and ultimately disease-producing substance being added to the food.
Synthetic flavor-enhancers or color enhancers are mostly non-nutritive chemical substances that have their poisonous qualities as well. These include NutraSweet, Splenda, MSG and all the synthetic dyes that are so widely added to food. Synthetic preservatives such as nitrites (which makes the dead, gray meat in sandwich meat or hotdogs look pink and fresh) are toxic substances, added in sub-lethal doses that won’t kill us quickly, but may contribute to cancers, immune deficiency disorders and a host of other maladies whose etiologies will almost invariably be labeled “of unknown origin” and thus mis-diagnosed by the vast majority of the medical profession charged with diagnosing root causes of illnesses prior to prescribing treatment.
This subject of malnutrition vs. healthy nutrition is a vast one. I usually advised my patients to “eat as organically as you can afford, as vegetarian as you can tolerate, but be sure to eat adequate amounts of healthy protein”; and then I advised them to supplement any potential deficiencies in their diet by adding good quality vitamins, minerals, Omega 3 fatty acids, antioxidants, amino acids and probiotics as needed. To help avoid potentially toxic foods, I also recommended considering these five quick points that help identify unhealthy foods while at the grocery store:
If you can’t pronounce the ingredients on the label, don’t eat it.
If it wasn’t here 10,000 years ago, don’t eat it.
If it has a shelf life of more than 5 days, don’t eat it.
If it’s heavily marketed, don’t eat it.
If it’s man-made, don’t eat it. And here are some other bits of advice from NewsTarget.com:
Top 10 Things the Giant Food Corporations Don’t Want You to Know
Originally published August 14, 2006 @ http://www.newstarget.com/019957.html
The giant food corporations have one mission: selling more food and beverage products to consumers. Succeeding with that mission depends on keeping consumers in the dark on certain issues such as the presence of cancer-causing chemicals found in popular food products. Here are ten things the food corporations, whose products dominate grocery store shelves across the United States and other countries, absolutely do not want you to know.
The ingredients listed on the label aren’t the only things in the food. Cancer-causing chemicals such as acrylamides may be formed in the food during high-heat processing, yet there’s no requirement to list them on the label. Residues of solvents, pesticides and other chemicals may also be present, but also do not have to be listed. The National Uniformity for Food Act, currently being debated in the U.S. Congress, would make it illegal (yes, illegal) for states to require cancer warnings on foods that contain cancer-causing chemicals (such as California’s Proposition 65.)
Monosodium glutamate (MSG), which is added to thousands of food and grocery products through a dozen different innocent-sounding ingredients, imbalances endocrine system function, disabling normal appetite regulation and causing consumers to keep eating more food. This chemical not only contributes to nationwide obesity, it also helps food companies boost repeat business.
MSG is routinely hidden in foods in these ingredients: yeast extract, torula yeast, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and autolyzed yeast. Thousands of common grocery products contain one or more of these chemical taste enhancers, including nearly all “vegetarian” foods such as veggie burgers (read labels to check).
ADHD in children is commonly caused by the consumption of processed food ingredients such as artificial colors and refined carbohydrates. Eighty percent of so-called ADHD children who are taken off processed foods are cured of ADHD symptoms in two weeks.
The chemical sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet), when exposed to warm temperatures for only a few hours, begins to break down into chemicals like formaldehyde and formic acid. Formaldehyde is a potent nerve toxin and causes damage to the eyes, brain and entire nervous system. Aspartame has been strongly linked to migraines, seizures, blurred vision and many other nervous system problems.
Most food dips (like guacamole dip) are made with hydrogenated oils, artificial colors and monosodium glutamate. Many guacamole dips don’t even contain avocados.
Plastic food packaging is a potent health hazard. Scientists now know that plastics routinely seep the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) into the food, where it is eaten by consumers. Cooking in plastic containers multiplies the level of exposure. Bisphenol is a hormone disruptor and can cause breast formation in men and severe hormonal imbalances in women. It may also encourage hormone-related cancers such as prostate cancer and breast cancer.
Milk produced in the United States comes from cows injected with synthetic hormones that have been banned in every other advanced nation in the world. These hormones help explain why unusually young teenage girls develop breasts at such a young age, or why hormone-related cancers like prostate cancer are being discovered in unprecedented numbers. In order to protect Monsanto, the manufacturer of hormones used in the industry, the USDA currently bans organic milk producers from claiming their milk comes from cows that were not treated with synthetic hormones. Even organic milk is now under fire as the Organic Consumers Association says Horizon milk products are falsely labeled as organic. (The solution to all this? Drink raw almond milk instead.)
Most grocery products that make loud health claims on their packaging are, in reality, nutritionally worthless (like meal replacement shakes, instant chocolate milk, etc.). The most nutritious foods are actually those the FDA does not allow to make any health claims whatsoever: fresh produce.
Food manufacturers actually “buy” shelf space and position at grocery stores. That’s why the most profitable foods (and hence, the ones with the lowest quality ingredients) are the most visible on aisle end caps, checkout lanes and eye-level shelves throughout the store. The effect of all this is to provide in-store marketing and visibility to the very foods and beverages that promote obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and other degenerative conditions now ravaging consumers around the world.
A Few Facts from the Book “Diet for a Dead Planet”
Some 325,000 Americans are hospitalized each year for food-related illnesses; more than 5000 die annually.
Two thirds of Americans are overweight, and 30% are medically obese. The rate of obesity among children and adolescents has risen from 4% in the 1970s to nearly 15% today.
Diet and physical inactivity are now the second leading cause of preventable deaths in America, after tobacco.
Medical costs to treat these diet-related ailments, such as diabetes and heart disease, run $78 billion a year — nearly 10% of all US medical expenditures.
Environment
Factory farms, packing thousands of animals into barns and feedlots, produce more than 1.3 billion tons of waste each year — enough to fill 52 million 18-wheelers.
US agriculture dumps nearly 500,000 tons of pesticides – many of them carcinogenic — on food crops each year.
Agricultural pesticides kill an estimated 67 million birds annually – and cause and unknown number of deadly illnesses in humans.
Over the past 30 years, nearly half of all pesticides studied have been found in stream sediment and in 64% of edible fish and other aquatic life.
In California’s Central Valley, 2.6 million cows have become the region’s top emitter of reactive organic gases, a major smog ingredient.
Workers
Roughly 20% of meatpacking workers are injured on the job each year, many crippled by carpal tunnel syndrome.
Sixty-one percent of farm workers earn incomes below the poverty level.
Nearly 500 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisonings every year — in California alone.
The federally approved line speed limit for chicken processing plants is 91 birds per minute.
Food And Farming, Inc.
More than 17,000 farmers go out of business each year – one farmer every half an hour.
Four corporations control 80% of the American beef business; four firms control 67% of the US seed market.
The top five food grocers in America, led by Wal-Mart, take in nearly half of all retail food sales.
Supermarket markups of farm produce run as high as 900%. For instance, farmers in February 2004 were getting $.19 for a pound of lettuce for which consumers paid up to $1.92.
There are now as many prisoners in American jails as there are farmers.
(Note: All source information is available in the book, “Diet for a Dead Planet”.)
Dr Gary G Kohls, MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
“…most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.” – From the British Medical Journal editor, Peter Doshi, MD
“71 people would need to be treated with the flu vaccine to prevent one case. In other words, the flu vaccine did nothing for 70 out of 71 who received it. That means this study found the flu vaccine failed 99% (70/71).” -- Dr David Brownstein
“Under ideal conditions (when the vaccine actually matches the main viruses circulating that season) you need to vaccinate 33 healthy adults to avoid one set of influenza symptoms. 33 is what is called the NNV (Number Needed to Vaccinate).” – Dr Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration (Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2018. Feb. 1,2:CD001269)
“…influenza virus often mutates to adapt to being grown in chicken eggs, which can influence antigenicity and hence vaccine effectiveness.” -- Ian A. Wilson, MD, et al from: “A Structural Explanation for the Low Effectiveness of the Seasonal Influenza H3N2 Vaccine. (http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006682)
“Between 33 and 100 people are needed to vaccinate to prevent one case of flu symptoms.” – Alan Cassals, author ofSelling Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease
“Normally, the flu vaccine is between 50 to 60 percent effective.” -- Dr. Tom Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Last year, the well-propagandized talking heads on TV and radio repeated over and over again how important it was to be fully vaccinated with the newest untried and unproven-for-effectiveness influenza vaccine, whose ingredients had been chosen 6 months earlier (in the spring of 2017) by industry “experts” who were forced to guess which 3 or 4 influenza viruses from the southern hemisphere (out of hundreds of potential viruses) that were most likely to be circulating in the northern hemisphere by the next “flu season”, ie, the fall of 2017.
Six months is the minimum amount of time that it takes multinational vaccine corporations to grow enough of the viruses in fertilized chicken eggs to fulfill the anticipated demand for flu vaccines six months later.
Such a guesswork process is actually a crapshoot and the choices made are highly unlikely to match the new viral culprits that may or may not be circulating up north next fall. I suppose the vaccine industries in the southern hemisphere look at America’s flu statistics when they choose their vaccine ingredients for their next flu season.
Wild Influenza Viruses can Mutate Into Ineffective Components Before they get into the Vaccines
Well, the flu season of 2017 was another bust, but you wouldn’t know it from the CDC’s Tom Frieden, the broadcast media and other industry promotions that tried to convince us it was a grand success and worth the risks and expense. The guesswork had failed again; and there were essentially no viral matches between the viral antigens chosen and the several flu viruses commonly circulating in the population. The H3N2 influenza virus component, for example, had apparently mutated into ineffectiveness by the time enough of them had been grown in the egg cultures. (See above Ian A. Wilson reference.)
Only about 1% of Americans that submitted to flu shots in 2017 received any benefit from the shots, but 100% of them risked suffering the many potential side effects of the vaccinations.
Most important among the adverse effects were those often unrecognized toxicity from the neurotoxic, immunotoxic and kidney toxic mercury preservative (thimerosal) that is still in the multidose vials. What happens to patients who simultaneously received their pneumovax shots (that contains aluminum, which is neurotoxic, blood-brain barrier toxic and immunotoxic) will never be investigated in the US because there is a 1986 Reagan-era federal law that forbids lawsuits to be filed against vaccine manufacturers. Hence there is no impetus to find out about such inconvenient facts.
So, since there was a vague suspicion on the part of the public about the failed flu shot campaign, the CDC and Big Pharma statisticians felt that they had to do something to convince the duped masses that they hadn’t wasted their time, mind, money and health by submitting to the vaccine. In a profit-minded nation such as the US, where the stock market is king and the public health is secondary, the highly profitable annual flu vaccination campaigns have to be perpetuated or else the share prices (and the honor) of the involved pharma and medical companies might suffer.
And so the entities that profit from America’s over-vaccination agendas tried to save face by retrospectively claiming that there was a “60% effectiveness rate” for flu shot recipients.
Claiming a 60% Effectiveness Rate for Last Year’s Flu Shot Qualifies as one of Mark Twain’s “Damn Lies”
The big problem is that “60% effectiveness” is a relative risk reduction (RRR) statistic, which is a “damn lie”. The actual “effectiveness rate” for flu shots in 2017 was closer to 1% when one calculates the absolute risk reduction (ARR)
Exposing again the truth of Twain’s “lies, damn lies and statistics”, last year’s flu shots actually failed to protect 99% of vaccine recipients. In other words, the ARR for those who took the flu shot last year was 1%, a pretty dismal figure.
Both the CDC and Big Pharma are notorious for using deceptive statistics which drastically over-emphasize meager benefits and simultaneously under-report (or even fail to report) serious adverse effects or serious lack of effectiveness. What they are doing is bamboozlement at its most sophisticated – and diabolical.
The differences between the deceptive “60% effectiveness” (RRR) figure and the more truthful ARR can be best exposed by the following example:
If 100 unvaccinated people are exposed to the influenza virus, and, for example, of them 5 get the flu, that is an incidence of 5% among the unvaccinated. (Of course, 95% did not get the flu despite not having been vaccinated, which is very realistic.)
If another group of 100 people get the flu shot and 3 of them still get the flu that is an incidence of 3%. Following the statistical rules for RRR, one divides the 3% incidence by 5% and gets a relative effective rate of 60%.
But of course to calculate the absolute risk reduction, one divides 95% by 97% and obtains an ARR of 1%, which means that the number to treat (NNT - or number to vaccinate, NNV, which is the inverse of AAR) is 100. An NNT of 100 means that 100 people will have to be treated for one to benefit from the treatment.
Consider a hypothetical drug (or screening program) which reduces the the relative risk of colon cancer by 50% (the RRR) over five years. Even without the drug, colon cancer is fairly rare, maybe 1 in 3,000 in every five-year period. The rate of colon cancer for a five-year treatment with the drug is therefore 1/6,000, (the ARR) as by treating 6,000 people with the drug (the NNT), one can expect to reduce the number of colon cancer cases from 2 to 1.
One can see how easy it is to deceive readers by inflating the “success” of a drug or vaccine treatment by only mentioning the RRR of 50% when in absolute terms the “success” is actually a useless 1%. Which is a damned lie.
As usual, no calculation is applied to the side effects or adverse reactions, which may be substantial. One of the world’s experts on the risks and follies of America’s over-vaccination agenda is board-certified nephrologist Dr Suzanne Humphries. Dr Humphries personally treated three previously healthy adult patients who nearly simultaneously developed kidney failure soon after receiving their mercury-containing flu shots. Two of the three patients needed dialysis, one of them had a kidney transplant and one died.
Dr Humphries was actually ostracized and censored by her hospital’s staff leadership when she pointed out the obvious connections and soon thereafter left her nephrology practice to thoroughly research the history and (pseudo)science of the world’s increasingly over-vaccination agendas. Dr Humphries’ first and most important book on the subject is titled “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History”. Her co-author was Roman Bystrianyk.
Dr Humphries lectures widely on the subject (check out her many informative YouTube lectures), and her testimony has been featured on many important videos, including“VAXXED From Cover-up to Catastrophe”; “Bought: The Hidden Story Behind Vaccines, Big Pharma and Your Food”; “Trace Amounts: Mercury and the Hidden Truth”; “The Greater Good”; and “The Truth About Vaccines”.
The following excerpts are from several other authors who have been studying the flaws in America’s over-vaccination programs for far longer than I. They likewise have been essentially ostracized and censored by authorities that tolerate no exposures of truths that might derail their Big Pharma and Big Business gravy trains.
The following excerpts come from Alan Cassals, aCanadian drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria, Canada and co-author (with Ray Moynihan) of the powerful Big Medicine/Big Pharma expose that was titled Selling Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease. Cassals confirms much of what I have written about above.
This Flu Season, Let’s Immunize Ourselves from the Annual Infection of Exaggerating Relative Risk Reductions
That’s an important question that generates many headlines across North America every fall as the public health community starts ramping up its fall flu campaigns. Problem is, the media tends to generate a lot of noise around that 60% number, but provide very little clarity.
Influenza stories this time of year swirl around similar themes, often with the CDC taking center stage (featuring the platitudinous photo-op of the CDC director rolling up his sleeve for the shot), including the importance of the flu shot, the need for general hand hygiene and the expected effectiveness of the vaccine this year.
The number that arrives as predictably as the fall flu campaign is “60” as in the story that repeats the mantra: “Flu shots normally prevent 60% to 65% of infections serious enough for people to see a doctor.” Across North America, public health officers will stress that the flu vaccine “reduces the risk by 60%!”
Sixty sounds good, but ultimately is as meaningless as a used car salesman with big bright signs of “60% off” plastered on every car on the lot, without ever telling you what the regular prices are. Despite the potential for a huge bargain on that purchase, the reality is that you’re in for a much smaller deal than you think you are. MUCH smaller.
And so it goes with the flu shot. When people hear “60% reduction,” I believe this is what happens inside their thought bubble: “If my risk of getting the flu this winter is 100%, the shot will reduce that to 40%. So instead of 100 people getting the flu, only 40 would get it. Hmmm. This 60% reduction sounds like great odds.”
Even when the flu vaccine seems less effective, like in the story that said that “last year the flu shot, by the CDC’s own numbers, was 23% effective,” people might think it’s a good deal. 23% off that Chevy Impala in the back lot might be a great bargain. But what does the 23% or 60% really mean?
Since they are relative numbers, they demand us to ask “23% of what?” or “60% of what?” As we’ve made abundantly clear at HealthNewsReview.org, using relative numbers on their own are a statistical no-no because, to quote ourselves, “we think the relative risk number tends to inflate the impression of how much impact the drug [or vaccine] has.” (For a quick refresher on relative numbers check out our review criteria at: https://www.healthnewsreview.org/about-us/review-criteria/criterion-2/.)
I find the 60 or the 23 percent numbers irritating, not to mention epically misleading, and I’m not alone. One commentator looking at a flu study reporting a “23% risk reduction” called it Cockamamie propaganda. Colorful but true.
To get some perspective I talked to Dr. Tom Jefferson in Rome who has reviewed hundreds of flu vaccine studies as part of the Cochrane Collaboration. Dr. Jefferson gives me a quick tutorial on the 60% which he calls “CDC/Big Pharma spin of the worst kind.”
He reminded me that every flu season there are over 200 viruses that can cause influenza and influenza-like illness, all perfectly capable of making you headachy and feverish. (3 or 4 of the 200 viruses must be prematurely chosen in the spring 6 months before the winter flu season comes around so that enough vaccine product can be manufactured in time to accommodate the demand.)
Most people get through the flu just fine and, thankfully, the risk of death or serious illness in otherwise healthy people is rare. In a good year the vaccine might (or might not) protect against influenza A and B, which might make up a small percentage of all circulating viruses.
The best way to assess flu trials is to look at those that compared vaccinated people with unvaccinated people.
The All-Important NNV (Number Needed to Vaccinate)
When Jefferson and his colleagues published their February 1, 2018 review at www.cochrane.org, they found that under ideal conditions (when the vaccine actually matches [which rarely happens] the main viruses circulating that season) you need to vaccinate 33 healthy adults to avoid one set of influenza symptoms. This is what we’d call the NNV (Number Needed to Vaccinate) of 33. When the vaccine match isn’t so good as it was last year, the NNV is about 100. Therefore, of 100 people vaccinated, 99 will have no benefit and one person will perhaps avoid one set of influenza symptoms. Vaccination did not seem to reduce the number of people hospitalised or who lost working days.
Almost half (15 of the 36 trials they examined) were funded by vaccine companies and four had no funding declaration. His team cautioned that even these numbers may represent an “optimistic estimate” because “company-sponsored influenza vaccine trials tend to produce results favorable to their products.”
The excerpts immediately below are from Dr David Brownstein, who publishes a newsletter that is titled Dr Brownstein’s Natural Way to Health. Check it out at: https://www.drbrownstein.com/flu-vaccine-fails-99-in-new-cochrane-review/
For over 20 years, I have been writing and lecturing about how the flu vaccine fails nearly all who get it. I have written about the failure of the flu vaccine in past blog posts
The Cochrane Collaboration is a global independent network of researchers in more than 130 countries who strive to produce credible, accessible health information that is free from commercial sponsorship and other conflicts of illness. They do not take Big Pharma money. Therefore, their studies deserve attention when they are released.
On February 1, 2018, the Cochrane group released its latest findings on the flu vaccine. (1) The scientists studied randomized, controlled trials comparing the flu vaccine with placebo or no intervention. They included 52 clinical trials of over 80,000 people assessing the safety and effectiveness of flu vaccines in healthy adults. The studies were conducted between 1969 and 2009.
The authors found that flu vaccines probably reduced influenzas in healthy adults from 2.3% without vaccination to 0.9% with.
That means that the difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated is 1.4% or 0.014. Therefore, 71 people would need to be treated with the flu vaccine to prevent one case (1/1.4%). In other words, the flu vaccine did nothing for 70 out of 71 who received it. That means this study found the flu vaccine failed 99% (70/71).
There was more bad news for the flu vaccine in this study. The flu vaccine is touted as decreasing the risk of hospitalizations from the flu. I’m not sure how that happens since the vaccine has never been shown to be very effective against preventing the flu. In this study they found the risk of hospitalization in those that received the flu vaccine declined from 14.7% to 14.1%. That is a 0.6% decline. That means the flu vaccine fails over 99% (165/166) in preventing hospitalizations. Furthermore, the independent researchers found the flu vaccine “…may lead to little or no reduction in days off work.” To make matter worse, the flu vaccine was shown to cause an increase in fever from 1.5% to 2.3%. Oy vey.
Why would anyone get a flu vaccine when it fails 99% who receive it?
Why would any physician prescribe a therapy, which is associated with serious adverse effects, that fails 99% who receive it?
Why are health care workers forced to receive a flu vaccine when it is consistently shown to fail nearly 99% who get them?And, there is not a single well-done study showing that vaccinating health care workers with the flu vaccine protects against the spread of flu.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
Duty to Warn A Cure For What We Have All Been Taught Was Incurable: Obesity-related Hyperglycemia Ain’t Necessarily “Type 2 Diabetes”
Dr Gary G. Kohls, MD
Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014)
Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine
"The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful."
John LeClarre
author of The Constant Gardener, that focused on the corrupt nature of the pharmaceutical industry.
“Big Pharma is engaged in the deliberate seduction of the medical profession, country by country, worldwide. It is spending a fortune on influencing, hiring and purchasing academic judgment to a point where, in a few years’ time, if Big Pharma continues unchecked on its present happy path, unbought medical opinion will be hard to find.”
Dr Peter Goetzsche
author of “Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare”
“The drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs…Our healthcare system seriously impedes the rational, economical and safe use of drugs. The industry prospers on this and exerts tight information control. The research literature on drugs is systematically distorted through trials with flawed designs and analyses, selective publication of trials and data, suppression of unwelcome results, and ghost-written papers…This scientific misconduct sells drugs.”
Dr. Matthias Rath
Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998
“Throughout the 20th century, the pharmaceutical industry has been constructed by investors, the goal being to replace (and outlaw) effective but non-patentable natural remedies with mostly ineffective but patentable and highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs. The very nature of the pharmaceutical industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. Like other industries, the pharmaceutical industry tries to expand their market to maintain ongoing diseases and to find new diseases for their drugs. Prevention and cure of diseases damages the pharmaceutical business and the eradication of common diseases threatens its very existence.”
Dr. Matthias Rath
“Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry fights the eradication of any disease at all costs. The pharmaceutical industry itself is the main obstacle, why today's most widespread diseases are further expanding including heart attacks, strokes, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoporosis, and many others. Pharmaceutical drugs are not intended to cure diseases. According to health insurers, over 24,000 pharmaceutical drugs (as of 1998) are currently marketed and prescribed without any proven therapeutic value. According to medical doctors’ associations (as of 1998) the known dangerous side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs have become the fourth leading cause of death after heart attacks, cancer, and strokes.”
In the December 5, 2017 issue of The Lancet (a widely respected British medical journal) a study was published that showed that, after 12 months of weight loss with a strict low carb diet, half of the patients in the treatment arm of the study were cured of their diabetes. Cures occurred in spite of the fact that every member of the treatment arm had their anti-diabetic and anti-hypertensive drugs abruptly discontinued on day one. The matched control group continued to follow the “community standard of care” which involved continuing to take their synthetic hypoglycemic and anti-hypertensive maintenance drugs – which offered no hope of cure.
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
While half of the previously diagnosed Type 2 diabetic patients in the treatment group achieved complete remission of their diabetes, the patients with the largest weight losses were the ones that did the best. Indeed, about 90% of the treatment group that lost at least 15 kilograms over the year-long trial period achieved complete remission. Interestingly,4% of the control group achieved “remission” over the 12 months.
In other words, significant numbers of the patients in the “Type 2 diabetes” treatment group had become non-diabetic, They had been cured of a disorder (actually “obesity-related hyperglycemia”) that I and my med school classmates had been taught was incurable.
The myth about the permanence and incurability of Type 2 diabetes has been repeatedly reinforced for me and most American physicians ever since our training. The myth has been reinforced by everything that we read in the medical journals and everything we heard at our continuing medical education (CME) conferences - where all the major presenters, incidentally, were Big Pharma-influenced academic researchers/professors and assorted other “experts” that had been under the economic influence of a variety of cunning medical-related industries.
Similarly, everything that our thoroughly propagandized and very compliant obese and hyperglycemic patients knew about Type 2 diabetes had been “taught” to them by Big Pharma’s TV commercials and also by health and science journalists who seemed to regurgitate what corporate-influenced professors and Big Pharma’s public relations teams had taught them.
Then, in 1997, thanks to Big Pharma’s lobbyists in DC, it got worse. In that year the US Congress granted drug companies the legal right to use direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising (DTCPA) in the media, which resulted in a multitude of lucrative (and therefore self-censoring, self-silencing) advertising contracts with television networks. The DTC deluge soon included commercials in newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, the internet, billboards, brochures, etc).
The DTC phenomenon was a huge financial boon for Big Pharma. It became easier to sell its expensive, toxic and often addictive products to medically-naïve customers. But it was a disaster for the health of those easily-bamboozled consumers who managed to get prescriptions written. To an informed and skeptical observer, however, these drug commercials are laughable. One only has to watch a few hours of primetime television to understand why.
In a 2011 Pharmacy and Therapeutics article entitled Direct to Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising: Therapeutic or Toxic, (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3278148/) health writer C. Lee Ventola, stated that:
“The average American TV viewer watches as many as nine drug ads a day, totaling 16 hours per year, which far exceeds the amount of time the average individual spends with a primary care physician.”
As ridiculous as the deceptive claims and small print warnings are in the average DTC television ad, they apparently do sell a lot of drugs, and we physicians are supposed to know about the brand new drugs whose safety profiles are still years away from being determined, which means that we physicians can’t possibly know very much about the new drugs and shouldn’t be asked by Big Pharma to bear the burden of informing our patients about them!
Nevertheless, we physicians all-to-often comply with patient’s requests by writing prescriptions for brand new drugs when asked. Many physician, when asked, admit that Big Pharma’s drug ads in the medical journals are as laughable and deceptive as the ones that are shown to our gullible patients on primetime television.
“The only time the “cure” word is used anymore is by corporate research organizations (and patient advocacy groups) when they solicit funds from the public during their annual charity drives or their “walks for the cure”. Clearly all of the financial incentives are to mount a never-ending, unsuccessful search for the cure without ever actually finding it.” – quote from www.healingmatters.com
The very compelling Type 2 diabetes study at the end of this column proves that – contrary to community standards of care - Type 2 diabetes can actually be cured! In reporting that fact, the study has to be regarded as a serious existential threat to any number of medical and pharmaceutical groups that benefit from never curing or never preventing disorders that are actually potentially curable or – and hear this well - potentially preventable disorders. In my practice I have found any number of over-diagnosed, heavily-medicated, fully vaccinated, and chronically ill patients whose illnesses were eminently curable without drugs at the beginning of their medical histories. Obesity-related hyperglycemia was just one example. But that is another story.
Active, endless drug treatment and active, endless medical “management”, rather than trying for “the cure” was the only approach to Type 2 diabetes that has become the “standard of care” in the last couple of generations. Such non-curative approaches have resulted in successfully transforming millions of potentially curable patients into chronic, permanent patients – which is a huge financial benefit for every for-profit “healthcare” system.
Every MBA (Masters of Business Administration) hospital or clinic CEO knows that curing patients and sending them on their way is not good for the bottom line. And that goes for the drug and vaccine industries as well. Besides, even trying to devise complex cures is too time-consuming for the individual caregiver to even undertake, given that he or she has to see 30 patients a day. In fact, working out cures for patients is virtually impossible in America’s modern medical system that has been built around the very efficient 10-15-minute office visit paradigm, where writing prescriptions is the quickest and easiest therapeutic option.
As I often told my patients: “it only takes 2 minutes to write a prescription; it takes 20 minutes to NOT write a prescription.” What usually happens? Just do the math.
I graduated from med school and started practicing medicine 50 years ago, when office calls cost $6 and complete obstetric care was $250. Over the decades I have witnessed any number of medical break-throughs that threatened the medical establishment’s dogmas and economics or exposed the uselessness or dangers of certain treatments, drugs or vaccines. Usually the establishment, bolstered by Big Pharma, went on the attack to try to discredit the new information while simultaneously trying to defend the status quo. Justice wasn’t always done and speaking the truth to power didn’t always work out. Big Bad Pharma, their lobbyists, lawyers and their massive public relations campaigns usually won the day.
I have seen important truths squashed by profit-driven organizations in both medicine and commerce, and I fear that the important break-through in the Type 2 diabetes study below will be sabotaged in the popular press as well as in the medical literature. This important study should change forever the standard of care of patients with hyperglycemia and obesity. But it will be attacked, to the detriment of millions of vulnerable and unaware patients.
To more efficiently understand why justice isn’t always done when it comes to the practice of medicine, I have assembled below a short list of some of the groups that will be threatened by this study:
1) Every Big Pharma-co-opted academic researcher and educator who teaches medical students that Type 2 diabetes is incurable and therefore must be “managed” for a lifetime with unaffordable and potentially toxic drugs or injections;
2) The multi-billion-dollar Big Pharma corporations that make and market all the often unnecessary, obsolete or dangerous so-called diabetes drugs that are designed to very profitably manage (but not cure) obesity-related hyperglycemia (which the study below has revealed to not actually be Type 2 diabetes);
3) The medical establishment-trained nutritionists who do not teach the common-sense realities that this study teaches;
4) Allopathic, non-holistic medical practitioners in all capitalist countries where Big Pharma has thoroughly co-opted and successfully taken over control of the following institutions:
a) America’s profit-driven healthcare system (AMA, AAFP, APA, AAP, ACOG, etc);
b) The US government’s public health agencies (CDC, FDA, NIH, NIMH, etc);
c) Medical schools and general health education systems (patients and health caregivers);
d) Most health and science journalists;
e) The profit-driven mainstream media that relies on Big Pharma’s advertising dollars;
f) Our politicians who are bribed by campaign “contributions” from Big Pharma’s lobby groups and industry-funded “political action committees”); and
g) The “Too Big to Fail” Big Medicine establishment whose financial well-being is actually reliant on the widespread ingestion of Big Food’s “illness-producing”, malnourishing and always toxic junk food; the standard over-diagnosis, over-treatment and “medicalization” of otherwise transient, resolvable, adverse life experiences; the disease-producing over-vaccination policies that - both acutely and chronically - sicken innumerable and very vulnerable infants and children with the CDC’s unproven-for-safety, simultaneously-injected cocktails of vaccines that contain a variety of neurotoxic vaccine ingredients such as mercury, aluminum, live viruses and a variety of contaminants; and the endless prescribing of unproven-for-safety cocktails of synthetic chemical medications that can easily terminally sicken the drug-taker.
Be aware that new scientific findings that contradict previously deeply held beliefs are often ignored, denied or attacked by indoctrinated “true believers” - even if the new truths are unassailable and reproducible. The psychological discomfort one feels when confronted with new information that contradicts one’s deeply held beliefs is called cognitive dissonance, and we physicians are as susceptible to it as anyone else, especially if our honor or financial security are put at risk. Cognitive dissonance often irrationally leads one to go into denial, refusal to even consider the new information or even the willingness to attack the unwelcome messenger.
Primary care-led weight management for remission of type 2 diabetes (DiRECT): an open-label, cluster-randomised trial
Professor Roy Taylor, et al -Published: 05 December 2017
Type 2 diabetes is a chronic disorder that requires lifelong treatment. We aimed to assess whether intensive weight management within routine primary care would achieve remission of type 2 diabetes.
Methods
We did this open-label, cluster-randomised trial (DiRECT) at 49 primary care practices in Scotland and the Tyneside region of England. Practices were randomly assigned (1:1), via a computer-generated list, to provide either a weight management programme (intervention) or best-practice care by guidelines (control), with stratification for study site (Tyneside or Scotland) and practice list size (>5700 or ≤5700). Participants, carers, and research assistants who collected outcome data were aware of group allocation; however, allocation was concealed from the study statistician. We recruited individuals aged 20–65 years who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes within the past 6 years, had a body-mass index of 27–45 kg/m2, and were not receiving insulin.
The intervention comprised withdrawal of antidiabetic and antihypertensive drugs, total diet replacement (825–853 kcal/day formula diet for 3–5 months), stepped food reintroduction (2–8 weeks), and structured support for long-term weight loss maintenance. Co-primary outcomes were weight loss of 15 kg or more, and remission of diabetes, defined as glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) of less than 6·5% (<48 mmol/mol) after at least 2 months off all antidiabetic medications, from baseline to 12 months. These outcomes were analysed hierarchically. This trial is registered with the ISRCTN registry, number 03267836.
Findings
Between July 25, 2014, and Aug 5, 2017, we recruited 306 individuals from 49 intervention (n=23) and control (n=26) general practices; 149 participants per group comprised the intention-to-treat population. At 12 months, we recorded weight loss of 15 kg or more in 36 (24%) participants in the intervention group and no participants in the control group (p<0·0001). Diabetes remission (cure) was achieved in 68 (46%) participants in the intervention group and six (4%) participants in the control group (odds ratio 19·7, 95% CI 7·8–49·8; p<0·0001).
Remission varied with weight loss in the whole study population, with achievement in none of 76 participants who gained weight, six (7%) of 89 participants who maintained 0–5 kg weight loss, 19 (34%) of 56 participants with 5–10 kg loss, 16 (57%) of 28 participants with 10–15 kg loss, and (remission occurred in)31 (86%) of 36 participants who lost 15 kg or more.
Mean bodyweight fell by 10·0 kg (SD 8·0) in the intervention group and 1·0 kg (3·7) in the control group (adjusted difference −8·8 kg, 95% CI −10·3 to −7·3; p<0·0001).
Quality of life, as measured by the EuroQol 5 Dimensions visual analogue scale, improved by 7·2 points (SD 21·3) in the intervention group, and decreased by 2·9 points (15·5) in the control group (adjusted difference 6·4 points, 95% CI 2·5–10·3; p=0·0012). Nine serious adverse events were reported by seven (4%) of 157 participants in the intervention group and two were reported by two (1%) participants in the control group. Two serious adverse events (biliary colic and abdominal pain), occurring in the same participant, were deemed potentially related to the intervention. No serious adverse events led to withdrawal from the study.
Interpretation
Our findings show that, at 12 months, almost half of participants achieved remission to a non-diabetic state (ie, cure) and off antidiabetic drugs. Remission of type 2 diabetes is a practical target for primary care.
Read the synopsis above, be encouraged, but don’t hold your breath, for profit-driven (as opposed to altruistic) corporations, including those associated with Big Medicine, Big Pharma and Big Media, will likely find a variety of ways to sabotage the study’s findings. The financial stakes are too high for the powers-that-be to do nothing.
Note to readers: As I have frequently warned in the past, you should consult your physician before making use of the information in my columns.
(The bolding and italicizations in the summary above are GGK’s.)
[thrive_text_block color=”light” headline=”(Including Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD, Learning Disorders, Epilepsy, Asthma, Diabetes, Autoimmune Disorders, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and many other chronic illnesses that affect fully-vaccinated American children)”] [/thrive_text_block]
The epidemic of chronic disorders among US children, now reported to represent well over 1/3 of fully-vaccinated children in America is likely iatrogenic (ie, physician-caused, prescription drug-induced, vaccine-induced, medical/surgical treatment-caused).
But the corporate medical and pharmaceutical industries both go through all sorts of contortions to deny responsibility for the epidemic, even to the point of lying, black-listing whistleblowers, publishing fraudulent journal articles, smearing the tellers of inconvenient truths, refusing to publish certain authors that have disproved certain doctrinal medical beliefs, etc. Corporate medicine and Big Pharma have even stooped so low as to regularly hire pestering trolls that try to create doubt (a la Big Tobacco) and falsely debunk unwelcome truths that threaten the profits or reputations of the various Big Businesses associated with Big Medicine.
The Duluth, Minnesota, USA area is somewhat unique among most communities in that it has a totally independent alternative weekly newspaper – the Duluth Reader – that has allowed a number of columnists to publish articles that would never have been published in any of the region’s corporate-controlled newspapers or corporate-controlled television/radio outlets (including PBS, NPR, MPR, WPR).
The following article was written by a physician acquaintance of mine, pediatrician Ken Stoller, whom I met years ago at one of the annual conferences of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. We were members of that watchdog group because we were both suspicious of the pro-psych drug agendas of Big Pharma and Big Psychiatry.
Ken was also once a board-certified member in good standing of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) until that lobbying and trade association group began denying the provably strong connections between the AAP’s and CDC’s over-vaccination agendas (that recommended the intramuscular injections of cocktails of vaccines containing dangerous amounts of the neurotoxic ingredients mercury, aluminum and/or live viruses, starting with a baby’s first aluminum-containing Hepatitis B shot in the newborn nursery at day one (a shot that contained mercury until 2001). Recall that even trace amounts of toxic metals can be very poisonous when injected into muscle tissue.
So I was happy to run across the following YouTube video that was produced by Ken in 2011, probably prior to the newest information about the serious autoimmunity-inducing properties that aluminum adjuvants have on lab animals and humans. (Please google articles by RK Gherardi (Macrophagic Myofasciitis), Yehuda Shoenfeld (Autoimmune Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants [ASIA]), Chris Shaw, Lucija Tomljenovic, Suzanne Humphries, Sherri Tenpenny, and many other world-class experts on immunology and the serious dangers of the AAP’s infant vaccination schedule.)
The transcript of the video is viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36_qz2beMaE is printed further below, but I preface the article with a number of pertinent quotes and recommendations for further research for inquisitive and open-minded readers.
“The collective evidence strongly suggests that Thimerosal exposure is associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes.”– Jose G Dorea – Jan 2017 (Thimerosal is the neurotoxic mercury preservative that was in many infant, childhood and adult vaccines during the era of the explosive growth in autism spectrum disorders prior to the year 2000, when the AAP pleaded with Big Pharma to stop using Thimerosal in their vaccines because their pediatricians knew it was causing autism.)
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”J.B. Handley”]“The majority of studies that authorities point to as proof that vaccines do not cause autism have been published in a journal called Pediatrics, the official journal of the AAP. As we know, the AAP is a trade union for pediatricians (which derives a majority of its outside contributions – estimated at more than $25 million per year – from the pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines). The pediatricians that the AAP represents derive the majority of their annual revenues from the administration of vaccines to their pediatric patients” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Vera Sharav, MD”]“The most lucrative areas of medicine are the most corrupted by financial (and academic) conflicts of interest. So-called ‘authoritative’ sources of medical information are thoroughly corrupted not only by pharmaceutical industry manipulation but also by government officials and financially conflicted academic gatekeepers of medical science, ’expert’ panels, medical journal editors and the largely corrupted vaccine information base.” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Vera Sharav, MD”]“Public trust in professed authoritative sources of information about vaccine safety has evaporated because the ‘authoritative’ government and many non-government organizations have consistently misrepresented the vaccine safety data.” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Dr. Peter Aaby”]”It should be of concern that the effect of routine vaccinations on all-cause mortality was not tested in randomized trials. All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children (from other causes) than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis.” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Del Bigtree, Producer of ‘Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe'”]”The really sad thing is the number of doctors I’ve spoken to who say to me, ‘Del, I know that vaccines are causing autism, but I won’t say it on camera because the pharmaceutical industry will destroy my career just like they did to Andy Wakefield.'” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Virginia Wong”]“Physician-editors of medical journals (who often receive money from Big Pharma corporations) make decisions about which research manuscripts to publish, and thus play a major role in shaping medical knowledge and practice…Beyond deciding what gets published in medical journals (thereby shaping published research and widespread clinical practice), journal editors also decide who the peer reviewers are, which ones to use for a particular article, which articles are prioritized within a journal issue, and also determine the need for additional editorials or commentary, which might be pro or con the article’s conclusions.” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Dr Tom Verstraeten, senior CDC scientist”]“Mercury at one month of age is not the same as mercury at three months, at 12 months, prenatal mercury, later mercury. There is a whole range of plausible outcomes from mercury.” When asked about the risk of aluminum, Verstraeten stated: “the results (of toxicity from aluminum adjuvants) were almost identical to ethylmercury because the amount of aluminum goes along almost exactly with the mercury.’” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Dr Bernard Dalbergue (former Merck employee)”]“The full extent of the Gardasil scandal needs to be assessed: everyone knew when this vaccine was released on the American market that it would prove to be worthless. Diane Harper, a major opinion leader in the United States, was one of the first to blow the whistle, pointing out the fraud and scam of it all. I predict that Gardasil will become the greatest medical scandal of all time because at some point in time, the evidence will add up to prove that this vaccine, technical and scientific feat that it may be, has absolutely no effect on cervical cancer and that all the very many adverse effects which destroy lives and even kill, serve no other purpose than to generate profit for the manufacturers. Gardasil is useless and costs a fortune! In addition, decision-makers at all levels are aware of it! Cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, paralysis of the lower limbs, vaccine-induced MS and vaccine-induced encephalitis can be found, whatever the vaccine.” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Dr Bernie Rimland”]“The autism epidemic is real, and excessive vaccinations are the cause.” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”J. B. Handley, Jr.”]“Completely unvaccinated children have less chronic disease and a lower risk of autism than vaccinated children.” [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”C A Shaw, PhD”]“…our current results are consistent with the existing evidence on the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of Aluminum adjuvants which altogether strongly implicate these compounds as contributors to the rising prevalence of neurobehavioral disorders in children. Given that autism has devastating consequences in a life of a child, and that currently in the developed world over 1% of children suffer from some form of ASD, it would seem wise to make efforts towards reducing infant exposure to aluminum from vaccines.“ [/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Chris Shaw, PhD”]“There is a serious problem with vaccine safety. Vaccine aluminum adjuvant has adverse neurological effects, at dosages that are recommended by the US CDC. Vaccine critics are supported by the science. Parents refusing to vaccinate according to the recommended CDC schedule are supported by the science. Use aluminum-containing vaccines with great caution, or not at all.”[/pullquote]
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”(From Tomljenovic and Shaw’s journal article “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are They Safe?”.)”]“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant…research clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.” [/pullquote]
To be enlightened about the dangers of America’s over-vaccination mandates, please click on the VAXXED YouTube channel, and watch the documentary as well as some of the dramatic testimonials of vaccine-injured children.
Also watch a few of the following well-researched documentaries:
The Silent Epidemic: The Untold Story of Vaccines
[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’0′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’0′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1m3TjokVU4[/responsive_video]
The Truth About Vaccines
[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’0′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’0′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHWeJ0f_o3A[/responsive_video]
Trace Amounts: Autism, Mercury, and the Hidden Truth
[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’0′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’0′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQKglol4OLE[/responsive_video]
The Greater Good
[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’0′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’0′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU32Ojf8-rA[/responsive_video]
Injecting Aluminum: How Toxic are Vaccines?
Shots in the Dark: Silence on Vaccines
[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’0′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’0′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnxAsrAK2hw[/responsive_video]
Bought: Your Health, Now Brought to you by Wall Street (the Hidden Story Behind Vaccines, Big Pharma and your Food): Trailer at:
[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’0′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’0′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmTLF5wOKZs[/responsive_video]
VAXXED: From Cover-up to Catastrophe (The film they don’t want you to see)
[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’0′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’0′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpQyYTs5LTg[/responsive_video]
Vaccines, Autism, Vaccines, Mercury and the Culpability of the American Academy of Pediatrics
Autism is a behavioral or psychiatric diagnosis with symptoms that include lack of eye contact, an inability to speak or poor social interactions. Unfortunately, the real problem with the vast majority of children diagnosed with Autism is that they were poisoned beyond what their bodies could process at a critical point in their development. For some, the poisoning came from pesticides or volatile organic compounds, but for most it was a soup of toxins and immune system disruptors found in vaccines, including the most deadly non-radioactive element on earth, mercury.
Instead of identifying the root cause of this growing epidemic of neurologically impaired children and then sounding a call to arms, the American Academy of Pediatrics has allowed the myth of better diagnosing as the reason that there is an explosion of Autism. During the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Simpsonwood meeting in the year 2000, it was revealed to the American Academy of Pediatrics and all of the pharmaceutical companies that the mercury in the preservative Thimerosal was causing speech delays and learning disabilities in children. Unfortunately, this information was not shared with the public.
The American Academy of Pediatrics knew the bad news about mercury in vaccines was going to become public, so in 1999 they pledged to have Thimerosal eliminated from vaccines. However, ten years after making the pledge to remove mercury from vaccines the only thing the AAP ever did was join in the protest against a fictitious TV show – Eli Stone – because it was critical of mercury being in vaccines.
Mercury, which is the second most toxic substance to man and 500 times more toxic than lead, is still present in most of the flu vaccine, in the preservative Thimerosal. This is a deadly form of organic mercury called ethyl mercury, which is rapidly absorbed into human cells and the brain.
Vaccines with “trace” amounts of Thimerosal are supposed to contain less than 1 microgram of mercury. Another way of saying 1 microgram is 2000 parts per billion. Now, 1 microgram, or 2000 parts per billion, may not sound like a lot, until you understand just how poisonous mercury really is:
2 ppb of mercury is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s limit for drinking water. 20 ppb of mercury will destroy membrane structure of nerves. If there is 200 ppb of mercury in a liquid, the EPA classifies that as hazardous waste. In the United States from 1991 to 2001, the multi-dose, Hepatitis B vaccines administered at birth contained 25,000 ppb of mercury. And there were 50,000 ppb of mercury in the multi-dose DTP and Haemophilus B vaccines, administered 8 times in the 1990’s.
These toxic multi-dose vials continue to be used with the approval and encouragement of the World Health Organization throughout the world.
For years the Infectious Disease division at the CDC said the reason for the dramatic increase in autism is due to “better diagnosing” and “greater awareness.” They have encouraged those like the AAP to create uncertainty by publishing articles that were less than truthful. Instead of being the advocates for children that they pretend to be, the AAP shamefully plays along, perhaps encouraged by vaccine manufacturers who significantly contribute to the AAP’s yearly budget.
I have discussed mercury as being the chief culprit in the poisoning of a generation of children, most of whom are still under the age of 18, but the contents of vaccines are a toxic soup of ingredients that have never been safety tested appropriately. Vaccines are designed to upset the immune system, and ingredients like polysorbate 80, which is known to cause anaphylactic reactions in some people, as well as aluminum, MSG, DNA of aborted human embryos, and viral contaminants we know to cause cancer in animals, are all part of what is injected into infants, babies and children. For example, the mandatory immunization schedule will cause a two month-old child to receive 49 times the FDA safety limit of aluminum.
Many children can handle this toxic soup of ingredients and get through it unscathed. Others may wind up with allergies, ear infections, weakened immune systems or autoimmune conditions. Yet others can’t handle the toxins at all, and instead develop neuro-immune problems that forever impair their nervous systems. These children develop a brain disease called encephalopathy.
If we now have better diagnosis of Autism, then we should see a higher incidence of Autism in older adults. However, there are no studies that have found these previously undiagnosed or misdiagnosed autistic individuals among older Americans. They simply don’t exist, except in very small numbers, and that is because older Americans were not given the great numbers of vaccines that the children of today are being given.
A genetic epidemic cannot exist and therefore the increase of autism has been linked to the increase in an environmental exposure. This is now accepted as the probable cause, so the next logical thing to do is to trace all toxic exposures to their source.
We live in a world ruled by corporate interests and agendas that are not in the best interests of the citizens on this planet.
The federal government has never tested the type of mercury used in vaccines for toxicity. This is an unconscionable oversight failure at best, and at worse it is an example that we have left consensus reality to be created by liars, thieves, cheats, killers, and the junk scientists they employ
How it came to pass that the AAP joined these rogues and became an active participant in this skullduggery is beyond reason, and even beyond greed. They have remained silent as mercury-laden vaccine continues to be exported and used in all third world and second world countries.
We have tolerated the junk science that has covered up the true cause of this epidemic at a considerable cost to the integrity of science, the public, and our very way of life in this country. It is time to bring our collective heads out of the sand about the autism epidemic or we will make it possible for the destruction of a great many.
A question to ask is this: why haven’t pediatricians come forward to demand the end of the use of Thimerosal once and for all, and to advocate for the treatment of these children before it is too late for them to regain functional lives. There is effective treatment for children with autism, and for many of them, if they are treated early enough there is great hope for partial or even full recovery.
Why aren’t pediatricians at the front of the line protesting the amounts of mercury allowed to come out of coal-fired power plants? Why aren’t they leading the charge to stop the use of mercury amalgam dental fillings that are placed in the mouths of young children and pregnant women?
The very federal agencies that should have been sounding the alarm about environmental pollution creating future generations of mentally disabled citizens did less than remain silent because they have become the arms of the very corporations that profit from selling and distributing poison. When you look at who sits on the FDA’s Scientific Advisory Boards, it becomes obvious that the FDA has become a trade arm of Big Pharma. The conflicts of interest are so glaring that every American should question why this has happened.
Nevertheless, the handwriting is on the wall because the US government has been quietly settling vaccine brain damage cases in the Court of Federal Claims. The recent PACE Environmental Law Review has determined that many of these brain-injured children have autism. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, the FDA, and plenty of other medical organizations have adopted the Lies of Big Pharma without caring about the damage that is being done to the world’s children. And that is why I resigned from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
I recently went to a theater production of George Orwell’s ”1984” and also recently viewed the Ken Burns 10 episode documentary “The Vietnam War” on PBS. Although the Burns documentary was flawed in many respects, it was still well worth watching. I highly recommend that everybody watch it. It happens to be still running on PBS (one episode each Tuesday night in my Duluth, MN area).
Given the fact that the storylines of both the documentary and the play have relevance in our increasingly proto-fascist, increasingly militarized nation, I have decided to re-publish a slightly revised version of my April 4, 2017 Duty to Warn column about Orwell’s work of art and King’s critique of the Vietnam War.
The famous date “April 4th, 1984” appeared in one of the early pages of George Orwell’s most important novel (although the antifascist novel “Animal Farm” was in the same league as the antifascist novel “1984”). “1984” was published in 1949, and was a warning to readers about the continued threats to the world of a future totalitarian, corporatized, militarized police state – despite the defeat of Nazism in 1945. The novel was set in the fictional Oceania, once a thriving democracy which had been economically, structurally and morally torn apart by an atomic war that had started a perpetual world war. The date “April 4, 1984” was the first entry in the diary of Orwell’s main character, Winston Smith.
The previously free nation that he wrote about represented Great Britain and its allies forty years after the war had devastated the world, leaving it in a state with perpetual mind control and police state repression and torture and whose cruel and tyrannical elite (representing less than 1% of the population) ruled with an iron fist. The political system of Orwell’s Oceania was abbreviated INGSOC (short for English Socialism, which was obviously patterned after Hitler’s Nazi Party (short for National Socialism). The regime’s famous “doublethink” slogan was “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.” (to which I admit I once added: “Bush is President”.
Orwell was an avowed anti-fascist, for he had experienced true peace and yet had witnessed a world war and the rise of militarism, corporatism and fascism in post-World War I Italy, Germany and Spain.
He was particularly aware of powerful fascist movements in his homeland that involved Oswald Mosley and his 1930s nationalist political party: the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. Orwell saw the efforts of Vidkun Quisling’s fascist political party in nearby Norway, the National Unity Party.
And Orwell may well have been aware of the foiled fascist coup d’etat attempt in 1933 that had been planned by America’s powerful, right-wing plutocrats that were afraid of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to correct America’s obscene wealth disparity following the stock market crash of 1929. These wealthy, greedy, anti-patriotic and anti-democratic (and therefore traitorous) elites had conspired to overthrow the liberal Roosevelt administration by military force shortly after Roosevelt’s inauguration (google“The Business Plot to Overthrow Roosevelt” to find out who the elite traitors were).
<<<Fascism is Alive and Well Despite Orwell’s and MLK’s Warnings>>>
So Orwell understood the symbiotic relationships between Big Business and the Military/Industrial/Police State Complex (ie, fascism, whose orchestrators may be either friendly or frowning), whether it was occurring in Germany, Japan, Israel, South Africa, South America, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or in the United States. These relationships are currently alive and well and are in play in many 21st century nations all around the world.
In 1936, knowing that he had to do something, Orwell joined the heroic anti-fascist Lincoln Brigade, along with many American idealists, and fought on the side of the pro-democracy forces in the civil war against the Spanish military dictator Francisco Franco. Interestingly, the Catholic Church supported the Catholic dictator and his brutal regime in the fight against the “godless” pro-democracy leftists (the same reason that the official Catholic Church in Germany supported the capitalist Hitler against the German Communist Party). In Spain’s killing fields, Orwell experienced the cruelty, carnage and futility of war up close and personal.
Witnessing the military devastation of future generations, the planet, the children and other living things during the war, he began writing 1984 right after Germany surrendered. The book was published in 1949. Tragically, Orwell died in 1950 before he could possibly appreciate how influential the book was.
<<<Big Brother in 1984 is the Same as the Deep State in 2017>>>
The protagonist of Orwell’s 1949 novel, Winston Smith, wrote the date “April 4, 1984” on the first page of his clandestine diary, fully realizing that the surveillance state he suffered under (called “Big Brother” in the novel) and in which he “lived” and worked would likely punish him, imprison him or even execute him if his act of defiance (writing a diary) was ever found out. To read some plot summaries of the novel, click on: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087803/plotsummary?ref_=tt_stry_pl.
<<<Some Pertinent Words of Wisdom from George Orwell>>>
[themify_quote]
“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
“All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.” — 1984
[/themify_quote]
<<<April 4, 1968>>>
April 4, 2017, was the 49th anniversary of the execution of Martin Luther King, Jr. The assassination was orchestrated by un-identified – and therefore un-prosecuted – American Deep State assassins within (or hired by) the US government. The details of the plot to kill King have been documented in a number of books which have been successfully censored out of America’s consciousness and omitted from every officially-sanctioned history textbook.
For the real story of MLK’s murder, I recommend reading the book about the trial that the New York Times, the Washington Post and every other major media outlet in the US (!) black-balled – to their eternal shame. That jury trial posthumously exonerated James Earl Ray and identified some of the plotters. The book I am referring to is titled An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr.
An Act of State was writtenby William Pepper, the attorney that prosecuted the case. During the trial, Pepper obtained a confession from one of the accomplices that was intimately involved in the murder. (An extended interview with the author is at https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf. And a video of one of Pepper’s many speeches on the topic is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24-ALnvr4kM.)
<<<April 4, 1967>>>
Exactly one year before his assassination on April 4, 1968, King delivered a powerful speech to members of Clergy and Laity Concerned (condemning the war in Vietnam) at the Riverside Church in New York City. In that speech, King outlined many of the reasons that people of conscience like him – especially people of the Christian faith – needed to speak out against the atrocity-producing war in Vietnam.
That 1967 speech, much like the jury trial that proved that the United States government had framed James Earl Ray for the murder (thus proving complicity in the crime), was black-balled by the mainstream press. The speech was titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence. It can be read in its entirety at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html.
MLK’s deservedly-famous anti-war speech was intolerable to the United States Deep State, which included the US military-industrial complex, the assorted corporate war profiteers, (especially the weapons industries), the CIA and even the FBI (J. Edgar Hoover hated King and everything he stood for). Most observers of the civil rights and anti-war movements realized in retrospect that the speech represented the signing of King’s own death warrant.
The assassination – as was also true of the executions of Robert Kennedy two months later and the execution of Jack Kennedy five years earlier was secretly planned behind the many closed doors of Deep State functionaries. (The patsies in those two assassinations were Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald, respectively.)
The patsy and perceived “white trash” James Earl Ray was falsely accused of the murder. Ray, under pressure and in solitary confinement was coerced to accept a plea bargain that was offered by a cunning Deep State-affiliated lawyer. It was a bargain that Ray eventually saw through and recanted of.
The documentation of this information is extensive, but in Deep State/Pentagon/NSA/CIA/FBI circles, and with corporate Big Media, Big Business, Big Banks and Big Weapons in control of almost everything, most of us are insufficiently aware of what they have been doing and are currently doing to those of us in the lower 99%. (Google “Mike Lofgren and the Deep State” or click on http://billmoyers.com/story/the-deep-state-2-0/ for more.)
Read the following words of wisdom from MLK and open your eyes to see what is happening to all those who are suffering and struggling to survive on our increasingly poisoned planet.
And then, in some way that matches with your abilities, please join the nonviolent anti-fascist resistance movement as aggressively as you are able – before we are faced with what George Orwell and Martin Luther King saw coming and what Winston Smith experienced.
Recall that Martin Luther King often said, “It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social change is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the silence of the so-called good people.” That truism should inspire every person of conscience to speak out.
Below are some extended excerpts from King’s April 4, 1967 Riverside Church speech. Whenever you read the word “Vietnam”, mentally insert Wounded Knee, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, East Timor, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Niger, or any of the other scores of “targets” where US military forces (including Air Force, Navy, Army, Marine or their special commando units) have cavalierly drone-bombed or otherwise annihilated innocent civilians – and then the guilty parties experienced no remorse, guilt or war crimes indictments for doing so. (Note: it is usually only much later, after the combat mission is over, that remorse and guilt of those in the killing fields will strike the individual soldier who may only have been obeying the orders to kill from his or her equally guilty superiors.)
<<<Some Pertinent Words of Wisdom from Martin Luther King>>>
[pullquote align=”normal”]“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.” “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.” “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls ‘enemy’, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” “As I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.” “They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945, after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony”. “Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.” “So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.” “What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. “Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call ‘fortified hamlets.'” [/pullquote]
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” – Voltaire
“If you offend the powers that be; if you offend the public health establishments; if you offend the pharmaceutical industry and threaten their bottom line (as we did by calling into question the safety of MMR [and later all the other vaccines that contain brain-toxic, mitochondrial-toxic and blood-brain barrier-toxic ingredients like aluminum and mercury – ed note]) there is no price that you will not pay. You will be destroyed in order to protect their bottom line.” – Dr Andrew Wakefield
“Anything that implies that immunizations are not the greatest medical advance in the history of public health is ignored or ridiculed. Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunizations are killing (or maiming)thousands of babies?” — Dr William C. Douglass, MD (Honored twice as America’s ‘Doctor of the Year’)
“I was told by a network executive that during non-election years up to 70% of his news division’s revenues are from pharmaceutical corporation’s advertising. That executive told me that if one of his talk show hosts allowed me on the air, he would fire that host. Losing an advertiser is a major catastrophe for a network.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (an outspoken critic of mercury-laced vaccines)
“It is difficult to get a man to understandsomething, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist American author
Definitions:
“The Semmelweis Reflex (aka, the ‘Semmelweis Effect’): the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms.” — Semmelweis Society International (http://semmelweis.org/)
Cognitive Dissonance:the psychological discomfort that happens when one’s deeply held beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information.
Clinical Iatrogenesis: The injury done to patients by an ineffective, toxic or unsafe drug or surgical treatment.
When I was in medical school, one of the memorable lessons that I learned from the few lectures that I received on the history of medicine was the sad story of what happened to Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 – 1865), a young physician who practiced obstetrics in Vienna, Austria. Semmelweis died before his time after he was hounded out of his medical career (and out of Vienna) by close-minded establishment physician “colleagues” who refused to believe what Semmelweis had repeatedly proven to them: that the enormously high mortality rate of Vienna’s obstetric patients (from “childbed fever”) was caused by the older physician’s failure to wash their hands prior to examining and/or delivering their pregnant patients. In effect, Semmelweis was accusing them of being guilty of fatal “doctor-caused” (ie: iatrogenic) diseases.
Up until Louis Pasteur formulated the germ theory of infectious disease it was not unusual for physicians to go directly to the delivery room from the autopsy room while in the middle of dissecting freshly dead, often infected bodies while trying to determine the cause of death. Many of the corpses were the doctor’s own septic OB patients who came into the hospital healthy, and ended up dead because of an iatrogenic infection in the immediate post-partum period. Often the babies died or were sickened as well.
Semmelweis had noted that in the obstetric service of the female midwives (at the same hospital) the mortality rate for childbed fever was far lower than the OB service that was under the control of the male physicians. Midwives were gentler practitioners, more aware of the importance of good hygiene and far less likely to do pelvic exams; and they also did not do autopsies. At the time, women in labor were admitted to the two services on an alternating basis, but the mortality rates were well known in the community, and patients in the know often refused to be admitted to the physician services, preferring to deliver in the street had a low mortality rate.
So after considering the range of possibilities that might explain the higher mortality rate in the physician-controlled OB service, it was obvious to Semmelweis that the probable cause was the lack of physician hand-washing. Semmelweis set out to prove his thesis.
<<<<Proving that Childbed Fever was an Iatrogenic Disease was Fatal for Semmelweis>>>
It didn’t take him long to prove the connection. He did the obvious simple experiment that proved to him (and many other unbiased observers) that his theory was correct. He simply had his group of forward-thinking obstetric physicians that were under his supervision wash their hands with a chlorinated antiseptic solution prior to examining or delivering their patients. The incidence of childbed fever dropped dramatically down to the same rate experienced by the patients of the midwives, thus proving that childbed fever was an iatrogenic disease.
But instead of being celebrated by his colleagues for his life-saving discovery (which he repeated enough times to convince anybody with an open mind about the truth of the matter), Semmelweis was ignored, denigrated and eventually driven out of town for being impertinent enough to have pointed out that the esteemed physicians of his otherwise honorable profession had been responsible for the deaths and sicknesses of the pregnant women in their care.
It took many years after Semmelweis’s death for medicine to recognize the importance of his discovery and to give him the posthumous honor he deserved. It was another century before the term “The Semmelweis Effect” came into existence.
<<<Aggressive Blood-letting and George Washington’s Death>>>
It hadn’t been very many decades prior to Semmelweis’s discovery that blood-letting (opening veins to bleed patients) was an approved treatment for any number of illnesses for which physicians had no cures. I recall learning that repeated blood-lettings were administered to George Washington by his trusted physician, Dr Benjamin Rush (who was later to be celebrated as the “Father of American Psychiatry” – and whose likeness is proudly used as the symbol of the American Psychiatric Association).
Dr Rush, a co-signer of the Declaration of Independence, believed fervently in blood-letting for many of his patients, and he had persisted in bleeding Washington until he died of blood loss and shock. In other words, an iatrogenic disorder killed the first president of the United States – and very likely many others in that era as well.
One can only imagine the wrath directed at any upstart physician (or an unlucky patient’s family) who had the temerity of questioning the effectiveness of the treatment. Dr Rush of course was never accused of medical malpractice since medical knowledge had not progressed sufficiently to reveal that such “treatments” were counterproductive. Also, there was probably no Semmelweis around to point out the folly of such barbaric approaches to sick patients.
<<<Galileo Galilei was Also a Victim of the “Semmelweis Effect”>>>
Two centuries before Semmelweis, and long after his death, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was honored with the titles of both the “Father of Observational Astronomy” and the “Father of Modern Physics”. (One wonders if he ever observed an eclipse of the sun or moon.) It could be said that he was a victim of the Semmelweis Effect. He surely caused a lot of cognitive dissonance among his close-minded, indoctrinated clerical critics.
This original thinker, philosopher, scientist and mathematician had proved beyond a doubt that the earth revolved around the sun – rather than the other way around, which was the archaic interpretation of some of the stories in the Old Testament. The impertinence of this scientist to dispute long-held religious beliefs incensed religious authoritarians who had been indoctrinated into believing the ancient teachings that the sun revolved around the earth. Anyone saying otherwise was a damnable heretic that deserved punishment – and so Galileo was condemned by the church to house arrest, a punishment that continued for the remainder of his life.
<<<Andrew Wakefield and the Semmelweis Effect>>>
Galileo and Semmelweis were treated the same way that Dr Andrew Wakefield was treated a generation ago when he proved that the same strain of live measles virus that was in GlaxoSmithKline’s MMR vaccine was found in the infected bowels of a series of severely regressed autism patients, all of whom had been suffering with severe abdominal pain and chronic diarrhea soon after they each one had been injected with GSK’s live virus MMR shot (findings which, by the way, have been replicated a number of times by other independent researchers).
Dr Wakefield and his 11 co-authors in the research group weren’t really trying to make the point that the new syndrome they were researching was an iatrogenic disorder, but that is how many of the perpetrators understood it. The series of victims of the MMR shot all had severe, chronic, measles virus enterocolitis and they were all also severely regressed autism patients that had been normal children prior to the MMR inoculations. And because Wakefield defended the study’s findings after it was peer-reviewed and then published in The Lancet (and was then celebrated by the thousands of British parents whose autistic spectrum-afflicted children had suffered similar vaccine-induced disorders), he was hounded mercilessly by the pharmaceutical giant GSK, Rupert Murdoch yellow journalism media empire (Murdoch’s son sat on the board of GSK) and ultimately the Big Pharma-complicit medical establishment that combined to hound him out of his home country of England.
Similarly, Semmelweis was driven out of Austria to his Hungarian homeland, where he was met with similar hostility when he continued to promulgate his findings. Some of his forward-thinking students published journal articles that supported his thesis. And open-minded physicians elsewhere on the European continent were convinced of the truth he had uncovered, so that they too began instituting good hygiene in the delivery rooms.
It was only a couple of decades after Semmelweis’s death (from a vicious beating by security guards after he was tricked into being admitted to an insane asylum) that Louis Pasteur came up with the germ theory of infectious diseases, thus making sense out of – and finally proving – Semmelweis’s theory, even to those who had destroyed his career.
Only posthumously was Semmelweis honored for his contribution to women’s health. All he got during his short life was undeserved condemnation, disgrace and ignominy and an early, painful death. Both Semmelweis and Wakefield were intentionally made “radioactive” (or “leprous”) by the medical establishment that was threatened by unwelcome new scientific truths that they irrationally refused to acknowledge. One difference between the two pioneer physicians is that the medical establishment was able to convince Semmelweis’s wife that he was insane and needed to be removed from polite society, while happily, Wakefield’s wife believes in her husband’s important work. She has remained supportive of his continued efforts to convince close-minded physicians of his truth.
<<<Science is NEVER “Settled”>>>
Authoritarians throughout history – not just fossilized physicians who desperately want to believe that “science is settled“ (or can ever be” settled”) – have behaved like they know everything that needs to be known about their chosen profession, while in reality they just haven’t wanted to go through the effort of having to learn something new, especially if the new information contradicts their previously deeply held beliefs.
<<<Lessons to be Learned from how the “Establishment” Treated Galileo, Semmelweis, Wakefield, et al>>>
Many of today’s medical establishment “authorities” have vested interests in the drugs and vaccines that cause some of them to become oblivious to the iatrogenic disorders caused by the drugs and vaccines that were integral to their profession. There are thousands of examples that present similar ethical dilemmas to my profession.
For instance, many of us physicians and physician’s assistants prescribed Merck’s popular arthritis drug Vioxx to some of the 60,000 patients that died of heart attacks directly because of Vioxx. (Many millions more were heart-sickened but survived – so far.) We were, by definition, complicit in causing some of those iatrogenic deaths or illnesses, although we weren’t medicolegally liable. In those cases, the real fault lay first of all with Merck – who did the deeply flawed studies – but also with the FDA – the agency that approved the long-term use of the drug but didn’t require long-term safety studies. Such short-sightedness, sadly, is normal for the FDA.
The same accusations of malfeasance could be leveled against every Big Pharma corporation that made every SSRI, every benzodiazepine tranquilizer, every anti-psychotic drug, every ADHD drug and every sleeping pill that we practitioners wrote prescriptions for and which ALL are fully capable of causing serious, permanent body and brain damage, although such manifestations may only become obvious years later.
And, of course, the same accusations of iatrogenesis could be leveled against every Big Pharma vaccine maker that has added to their factory vats proprietary ingredients that include neurotoxic metals and other toxins that likely have synergistic (multiplying, not just additive) adverse effects when they are injected into the tiny muscles of infants known to be immunologically and neurologically immature. What should alarm every physician and every parent (and every over-vaccinated soldier and pre-dementia adult) is that such vaccine combinations have never been evaluated for either short-term or long-term safety.
One of the earliest examples of drug- or vaccine-induced iatrogenic disorders involved Smith Kline & French (SKF), the predecessor corporation of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the maker of the infamous neurotoxic, so-called “anti-depressant” drug Paxil. GSK also manufactures the MMR vaccine, which contains three live viruses, including a strain of measles which was found in the infected intestines of the Wakefield autism research group discussed above. Both of those drugs are currently under fire by watchdog groups, but the major media does not report on such delicate (ie for media advertisers) issues.
SKF got FDA approval in 1955 for its dementia-inducing, memory-impairing and brain-damaging “major tranquilizer” Thorazine (which was the prototype for future so-called “anti-psychotic” drugs like Mellaril). Thorazine was the first of a flood of other dependency-inducing and brain-damaging “anti-psychotics” and then by a host of the so-called “minor tranquilizers” like Librium and Valium.
Such dependency-inducing drugs naturally made a lot of money for any number of multinational drug companies – as well as many psychiatrists. Ever since the break-out of psychiatric drugs on the market in the 1950s, we physicians have been bamboozled into trusting the fast-tracking of drugs and vaccines through their FDA approval process without long-term safety studies! And the epidemic of psych drug-induced dementia and the epidemic of vaccine-induced neurological and autoimmune disorders are evidence of the over-looked dangers.
The FDA is the federal regulatory agency that approves vaccines (except for the Anthrax vaccine that is being regularly injected into soldiers ever since Desert Storm and which has never been FDA approved), but the agency does not require vaccine makers to perform or present to the FDA either long-term or short-term safety or efficacy studies! Neither does the FDA require vaccine-makers to present double-blind studies to the FDA or comparative studies (against a competitor’s vaccine) or even safety or efficacy studies of the vaccines that contain more than one antigen (!).
Vaccine-makers are also in denial (as is the CDC and the FDA and the AAP and the AMA) concerning the known neurotoxicities of many of the vaccine ingredients, such as the aluminum adjuvant that is currently in many vaccines or the preservative mercury (which was in many of the vaccines prior to 2000 (when the autism epidemic was just starting to surge).
In 2011, in a decision that granted Big Vaccine further protections against legal liability for when their vaccines killed or maimed patients, vaccines were justifiably labeled as “unavoidably unsafe” by the US Supreme Court.
The same charge of “unavoidable unsafe” could have been made against the previously normal blood-letting in Dr Rush’s era and the lack of understanding by physicians about the importance of hand-washing for physicians in Semmelweis’s era..
Galileo’s critics refused to look through his telescope for the proof of his heliocentric theories. Semmelweis’s critics refused to look at the evidence he presented to them. Wakefield and many other anti-over-vaccination activists (many scholars and independent scientists among them) who have studied the complex science of Big Pharma’s pro-vaccination agendas – should be informing all concerned people to look at all sides of all issues before being tempted to make a firm decision.
The following list of useful quotations from anti-over-vaccination whistle-blowers is must reading for every human – open-minded or otherwise – that will soon be threatened by coercive vaccination legislation that is in the process of working through most state legislative bodies.
Useful Quotations from Whistle-Blowers that Dare to Expose the Over-Vaccination Agendas of Big Pharma, the CDC, the AAP and the AMA
Graph revealing that the US mortality rate for measles had already declined to near zero by the time a measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, due to improved nutrition, sanitation, safer drinking water and the availability of refrigeration – and NOT to the vaccine! Similar mortality and incidence charts explain the decreases in rates of diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever (there never was a commercially-available scarlet fever vaccine) – From Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines and the Forgotten History, by Suzanne Humphries, MD and Roman Bystrianyk
Safety Recommendation for Parents Who Choose or are Mandated to Vaccinate Their Children, Based on Guidelines of the Autism Research Institute
Never vaccinate a sick child, even if just a runny nose from a viral infection, as all viruses are immunosuppressive, rendering the child more vulnerable to adverse vaccine reactions.
Never allow more than two vaccines per visit; avoid all combination vaccines.
Administer vitamin C before and after each vaccination, ideally in doses of 500 mgs every four hours during waking hours. Also give vitamin A in standard doses.
All forms of sugar should be avoided for several days before and after vaccines, as sugar has been shown to diminish the protective activities of the immune system by depressing white blood cells’ ability to destroy bacteria.
“industry-controlled ‘science’ is not really science but a smokescreen to pave the way for products that may be harmful – but what do they care as long as they profit? There are many great scientists but there are also some who are willing to be hired to ‘prove’ that something doesn’t cause cancer, or that something is ‘safe’. You cannot trust the EPA, the FDA, or industry science.” – Blogger
“A most disturbing thing about this entire zika virus fraud is the role that the mainstream media has played in continually promoting the fear mongering campaign orchestrated by the CDC. This is another example of how the medical/pharmaceutical industry controls what our mainstream media reports. They have gained the power to control not only what health information is reported, they also have the power to censor or not report any information that would be damaging to their financial interests.
“Here is one obvious example of this censorship. On April 14, the Reuters News Agency reported that more than 11,000 pregnant women in Colombia had tested positive for zika. More than 2,700 of them had already given birth, yet there were only two confirmed cases of microcephaly (compatible with the normal background rate). With only two cases of microcephaly out of more than 2,700 births, their health minister all but stated that there was no zika epidemic in Colombia. This was just more proof that the zika virus is NOT the cause of microcephaly and there is no epidemic.
“But this was a total contradiction to all the fear mongering claims of the CDC, and as far as I know, this information was censored and never even reported by any of our mainstream news media. So, by keeping the public in the dark, the CDC has been able to continue with their fear mongering, and is still pressuring Congress to give them $1 billion more of our taxpayer dollars to fight this fake epidemic and develop a new vaccine.
“With the aid of the mainstream media, our government leaders and Congress also seem to blindly accept the word of the CDC as if it’s the omnipotent and irrefutable truth. In spite of all the contradictory evidence, it appears that all the CDC has to do is to just say “TRUST US, WE ARE THE EXPERTS. IF WE SAY THERE IS A ZIKA VIRUS EPIDEMIC, YOU CAN BELIEVE IT’.” – Blogger on Mercola.com 8/16/16
“During the last 10 years, there has been one death from measles, but that patient was an adult woman who was on immunosuppressive medications and had other serious health problems. (But between)2000 and 2017, there were 156 deaths related to the MMR vaccine.” — Dr. David Brownstein – Holistic Family Practitioner
“We are taught by the authorities that vaccines protect us against eventual aggressive viruses and microbes, and, therefore, prevent contagious illnesses and epidemics. This lie has been perpetuated for 150 years despite the ineffectiveness of vaccines in protecting against illnesses…the uselessness of certain vaccines, notably, TB & tetanus..diphtheria…influenza and hepatitis B.” — Guylaine Lanctot, MD
“The decline in infectious diseases in developed countries had nothing to do with vaccinations, but with the decline in poverty and hunger (Dr. Buchwald draws the Committee’s attention to a series of about 50 graphs in his book which show that vaccinations have no effect on the decline of infectious diseases).” — Gerhard Buchwald, MD
“Up to 90% of the total decline in the death rate of children between 1860-1965 because of whooping cough, scarlet fever, diptheria, and measles occured before the introduction of immunisations and antibiotics.” — Archie Kalokerinos, MD
“According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, from 1911 to 1935 the four leading causes of childhood deaths from infectious diseases in the U.S.A. were diphtheria, pertussis, scarlet fever, and measles. However, by 1945 the combined death rates from these causes had declined by 95% before the implementation of mass vaccine programs.” — Harold Buttram MD
“All infectious diseases decreased without vaccinations. Not only did vaccines have no influence over the decrease of the diseases, the contrary is true, they slowed down the downward trend of all diseases. The best example for this is polio. After the majority of people were vaccinated, severe epidemics occurred, such as in 1962 in the German speaking countries, after vaccination had been in full force for 3 years. Dr Buchwald carefully collected the facts in his book, which prove this fact beyond doubt for all infectious diseases.” — Anita Petek-Dimmer, German-born Swiss anti-vaccine activist.
“The really sad thing is the amount of doctors I’ve spoken to who say to me, ‘Del, I know that vaccines are causing autism, but I won’t say it on camera because the pharmaceutical industry will destroy my career just like they did to Andy Wakefield.'” — Del Bigtree, Producer of “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe”
“I tell practitioners that vaccines are drugs, albeit biological drugs. I remind them that they would not consider it good medicine to give an unnecessary pharmaceutical drug on a recurring basis. I think it is even worse to give a vaccine…that isn’t necessary. The possible adverse consequences of a vaccine generally far outweigh the adverse consequences of a pharmaceutical drug. A pharmaceutical drug is usually much more restricted in its action. However, each time we stimulate an immune response, we have to look at the effect on all body systems—not only on antibody responses or cell-mediated immunity, but also on interactions with the endocrine system and the nervous system.” – Dr Ronald Schultz, Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathobiological Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an expert in companion animal vaccines.
Onthe Arrogance of Preventive Medicine
“But surely the fundamental promise we make when we actively solicit individuals and exhort them to accept preventive interventions must be that, on average, they will be the better for it. Accordingly, the presumption that justifies the aggressive assertiveness with which we go after the unsuspecting healthy must be based on the highest level of randomized evidence that our preventive manoeuvre will, in fact, do more good than harm. Without evidence from positive randomized trials (and, better still, systematic reviews of randomized trials) we cannot justify soliciting the well to accept any personal health intervention. There are simply too many examples of the disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence as a basis for individual interventions among the well: supplemental oxygen for healthy preemies (causing retrolental fibroplasia and blindness), healthy babies sleeping face down (causing SIDS), thymic irradiation in healthy children, and the list goes on.” — Dr David Sackett, (a pioneer of evidence based medicine),
“The full extent of the Gardasil scandal needs to be assessed: everyone knew when this vaccine was released on the American market that it would prove to be worthless. Diane Harper, a major opinion leader in the United States, was one of the first to blow the whistle, pointing out the fraud and scam of it all. I predict that Gardasil will become the greatest medical scandal of all time because at some point in time, the evidence will add up to prove that this vaccine, technical and scientific feat that it may be, has absolutely no effect on cervical cancer and that all the very many adverse effects which destroy lives and even kill, serve no other purpose than to generate profit for the manufacturers. Gardasil is useless and costs a fortune! In addition, decision-makers at all levels are aware of it! Cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, paralysis of the lower limbs, vaccine-induced MS and vaccine-induced encephalitis can be found, whatever the vaccine.” — Dr Bernard Dalbergue (former Merck employee)
“The autism epidemic is real, and excessive vaccinations are the cause.” – Dr Bernie Rimland
“Completely unvaccinated children have less chronic disease and a lower risk of autism than vaccinated children.” — J. B. Handley, Jr. – Founder of Generation Rescue
“…our current results are consistent with the existing evidence on the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of Aluminum adjuvants which altogether strongly implicate these compounds as contributors to the rising prevalence of neurobehavioral disorders in children. Given that autism has devastating consequences in a life of a child, and that currently in the developed world over 1% of children suffer from some form of ASD, it would seem wise to make efforts towards reducing infant exposure to aluminum from vaccines.“— C A Shaw, PhD
“There is a serious problem with vaccine safety. Vaccine aluminum adjuvant has adverse neurological effects, at dosages that are recommended by the US CDC. Vaccine critics are supported by the science. Parents refusing to vaccinate according to the recommended CDC schedule are supported by the science. Use aluminum-containing vaccines with great caution, or not at all.” – Chris Shaw, PhD http://vaccinepapers.org/category/aluminum/
“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant…research clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation andassociated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.” — (From Tomljenovic and Shaw’s journal article “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are They Safe?”, published in Curr Med Chem, 2011;18(17):2630-7.)
“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant. Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s medical understanding of their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor. There is also a concerning scarcity of data on toxicology and pharmacokinetics of these compounds. In spite of this, the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted.” — Tomljenjovic and Shaw
“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.” – President Ronald Reagan, as he signed The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies from all medico-legal liability when children die or are disabled from vaccine injuries, thus reversing many of the intentions of the original legislation establishing the FDA
“The human immune system is divided into two major classes: 1) Cellular Immunity (for which injected vaccines do absolutely nothing, except to weaken it), located in the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts and their respective lymph nodes and 2) Humoral Immunity, with production of antigen-specific antibodies by plasma cells in the bone marrow. For eons of time the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts have been the primary sites of infectious microbe entry into the body so that, of necessity, mucosal/cellular immunity has evolved as the primary defense system, with humoral immunity serving a secondary or backup role…Vaccines are reversing these roles, attempting to substitute vaccine-induced humoral immunity for the far more efficient mucosal immunity, the latter in turn undergoing a process of “atrophy of disuse” as a result of this role-switching.” — Harold Buttram, MD
“The steadily increasing patterns of physical and/or mental illnesses among American children show no signs of abating. Unless this issue is definitively addressed, at some future time the process will pass a point of no return (socially and economically) from the sheer numbers of incapacitated children.” – Harold Buttram, MD
“The soaring incidence of physical and mental illnesses among today’s children (may be) causally related to current childhood vaccine programs. Primary among these is the large-scale contamination of the measles, mumps, and influenza vaccines with retroviruses capable of engrafting their genetics into the DNA of childhood recipients. This is rendered more likely because of the cavalier disregard with which combinations of viral vaccines are now being administered, primarily involving the MMR vaccines…in spite of the toxicology principle that combinations of toxins may bring exponential (10-fold or 100-fold) increases in toxicity.” – Harold Buttram, MD
“In the field of chemical toxicology it is universally recognized that combinations of toxins may bring exponential increases of toxicity; ie, a combination of two chemicals may bring a 10-fold increase in toxicity, three chemicals 100-fold increases. This same principle almost certainly applies to the immunosuppressive effects of viral vaccines when administered in combination, as with the MMR vaccine, among which the measles vaccine is (known to be) exceptionally immunosuppresive.” – Harold Buttram, MD
“…the NIH (National Institutes of Health) is incapable of conducting conflict-free research. …it is clear that the system managing our vaccine program is corrupt beyond repair and needs a complete overhaul.” – Lori Mellwain, National Autism Association board chair
“It is difficult to get a man to understandsomething, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist American author who wrote in the first half of the 20th century. Sinclair’s 1903 novel “Jungle” (about the repulsive slaughterhouse practices in the meat-packing industry in Chicago) led to President Theodore Roosevelt’s pushing through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
“A 2007 [Zika] outbreak on Yap Islands in Micronesia is estimated to have affected nearly 75% of the (island’s) population of some 12,000 people, and a 2013 outbreak in French Polynesia affected nearly 28,000 of 270,000 residents. Neither epidemic caused a spike in microcephaly.” — Quartz (qz.com)?
“The correlation between a) the presence of Zika and b) babies with the microcephaly birth defect is so weak and sparse, it constitutes counter-evidence for Zika as the cause…the overwhelming majority of birth-defect cases show no presence of Zika. Therefore, the Zika-carrying mosquitoes have no business being the target of toxic spraying. But they are. And the spraying increases the risk of neurological damage in babies.” – Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/category/zika/)
“Microcephaly may result from any insult that disturbs early brain growth…Annually, approximately 25,000 infants in the United States will be diagnosed with microcephaly…” – From the Report of the Quality Standards Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology and the Practice Committee of the Child Neurology Society. (Neurology 2009 Sep 15; 73(11) 887-897)
“…even the ideal influenza vaccine, matched perfectly to circulating strains of wild influenza and capable of stopping all influenza viruses, can only deal with a small part of the ‘flu’ problem because most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.” – Dr Peter Doshi (from a British Medical Journal review article, “Influenza: marketing vaccines by marketing disease” 2013 (BMJ 2013; 346:f3037)
“…It’s no wonder so many people feel that ‘flu shots’ don’t work: for most flus, they can’t work because most diagnosed cases of the flu aren’t the flu.” – Jon Rappoport
“[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001—61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.” – Dr Peter Doshi, from in his 2005 BMJ report, titled, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” (BMJ 2005; 331:1412)
“Between 1979 and 2001, [CDC] data showed an average of 1348 [flu] deaths per year (range 257 to 3006).” – Dr Peter Doshi de-bunking the CDC’s pro-vaccine disinformation campaign that says that 36,000 people die from influenza annually
“The CDC says that 36,000 people die from the flu every year in the US. But actually, it’s closer to 20. However, we can’t admit that, because if we did, we’d be exposing (the CDC’s) gigantic psyop. The whole campaign to scare people into getting a flu shot would have about the same effect as warning people to carry iron umbrellas, in case toasters fall out of upper-story windows.” – Jon Rappoport
“Alzheimer’s Disease is a human form of chronic aluminum neurotoxicity.” – JR Walton, PhD – Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, St George Hospital, Sydney, Australia
“The only safe vaccine is one that is never used.”— Dr James A. Shannon, National Institutes of Health
“No batch of vaccine can be proved safe before it is given to children.” – Dr Leonard Scheele, Surgeon General of the United States, addressing an AMA convention in 1955
“The evidence for indicting immunizations for SIDS is circumstantial, but compelling. However, the keepers of the keys to medical-research funds are not interested in searching this very important lead to the cause of an ongoing, and possibly preventable, tragedy. Anything that implies that immunizations are not the greatest medical advance in the history of public health is ignored or ridiculed. Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunzations are killing thousands of babies?” — Dr William C. Douglass, MD (Honored twice as America’s ‘Doctor of the Year’)
“Only after realising that routine immunisations were dangerous did I achieve a substantial drop in infant death rates. The worst vaccine of all is the whooping cough vaccine…it is responsible for a lot of deaths and for a lot of infants suffering irreversible brain damage. In susceptible infants, it knocks their immune systems about, leading to irreparable brain damage, or severe attacks or even deaths from diseases like pneumonia or gastro-enteritis and so on.” — Dr Kalokerinos
“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has been reported following the administration of DPT. The significance is unclear. 85% of SIDS cases occur in the period 1 through 6 months of age, with the peak incidence at age 2 to 4 months.” (From the accompanying insert to Connaught Labs DPT vaccine.) — Jane Orient, MD, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) and clinical lecturer in medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, and a professor of clinical medicine at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
“Official data shows that large scale vaccination has failed to obtain any significant improvement of the diseases against which they were supposed to provide protection” — Dr Sabin, developer of Polio vaccine
“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization…..There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.” — Dr Robert Mendelsohn, MD
“It is pathetic and ludicrous to say we ever vanquished smallpox with vaccines, when only 10% of the population was ever vaccinated.” — Dr Glen Dettman
“The decline in infectious diseases in developed countries had nothing to do with vaccinations, but with the decline in poverty and hunger.” — Gerhard Buchwald, MD
“There is a great deal of evidence to prove that immunization of children does more harm than good.” – Dr J. Anthony Morris (formerly Chief Vaccine Control Officer at the US Federal Drug Admin.)
“There is insufficient evidence to support routine vaccination of healthy persons of any age.”— Paul Frame, MD Journal of Family Practice
“I think that no person would permit anybody to get close to them with an inoculation if they would really know how they are made, what they carry, what has been lied to them about and what the real percent of danger is of contracting such a disease which is minimal.”— Dr Eva Snead
“I was working in one of the oldest lung illness treatment centres in Germany, and just by chance, I looked at the files of those people who had fallen ill during the first German epidemic of smallpox (in 1947)…We had always been told that the smallpox vaccinations would protect against smallpox. And now I could verify, thanks to the files and papers, that all of those who had fallen ill had been vaccinated. This was very upsetting for me.” — Gerhard Buchwald, MD
“There has been a frightening increase in cases of autism that has not been explained. There are a number of anecdotal reports from parents that symptoms of autism have appeared close to the time of the (MMR) vaccine.” — Jane Orient, MD
“I once believed in Jenner; I once believed in Pasteur. I once believed in vaccination. I once believed in vivisection. But I changed my views as the result of hard thinking.” — Dr Hadwen
“If you want the truth on vaccination you must go to those who are not making anything out of it. If doctors shot at the moon every time it was full as a preventive of measles and got a shilling for it, they would bring statistics to prove it was a most efficient practice, and that the population would be decimated if it were stopped.” — Dr Allinson
“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization…There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.” — Dr Robert Mendelsohn, MD
“You might as well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination.” – George Bernard Shaw
“The vaccinations are not working, and they are dangerous. We should be working with nature.” — Lendon H.Smith, MD
“Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present far behind all the other arts.” — Hippocrates (400 BC)
Merck’s 27 page Hit List of Physicians who are Targeted for “Neutralization” or “Discrediting”
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
Q: If Donald Trump, the Commander of Chief of the US Military, is Historically, Theologically and Morally Blind and Also Scientifically Illiterate, Should He be Making Life and Death Decisions for the Planet?
[themify_quote]
“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we do about peace – more about killing than we do about living.” — WWII General Omar Bradley
“If (Japan does) not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.” – US President Harry S. Truman (August 6, 1945)
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States…(If they do)they will be met with fire and fury…the likes of which this world has never seen before.” – US President Donald J. Trump (August 8, 2017)
[/themify_quote]
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray”]
On the eve of the anniversary of the United State’s nuclear annihilation of the Christian community of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Donald Trump threatened the nuclear destruction of North Korea (including the deaths of thousands or millions of innocents) in ways more devastating than even the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The multibillionaire Donald J. Trump, being an over-privileged “Golden Boy” son of a multimillionaire, a narcissist, a sexual predator, a serial liar and an exploitive casino mogul with mob connections, was probably destined to become historically, theologically, morally and scientifically illiterate. It would have been very unusual for someone growing up in that trajectory to turn out otherwise.
Donald Trump is widely acknowledged to have the temperament of an arrogant schoolyard bully with the attitude of a “know-it-all” teen-ager who has no self-awareness that he is factually ignorant of many of the things one would expect of a business or political leader. Wealthy megalomaniacs surround themselves with obedient sycophants who are afraid to tell them the truth about their ignorance, and Trump is no exception.
Trump’s upbringing and adult life experiences allowed him to suffer very few appropriate punishments for his unethical behaviors, sexual conquests and bankruptcy proceedings. His worshipful celebrity status and financial successes have left him with dangerous character traits that include megalomania, sociopathy, narcissism and paranoia, as he has proven over and over again during his campaign rallies and his desecration of the Oval Office.
<<<Trump’s Cozy Relationship with Racists, Militarists and Christian Dominionists>>>
But what is perhaps most dangerous for the planet and for America is his obvious tolerance of – and even advocacy for – white supremacism, American exceptionalism, militarism, sexism and fascism/racism, filling his White House and cabinet with a strange combination of white supremacists and ethically infantile multimillionaires, corporate elites, pro-war militarists, American imperialists and assorted other power-mongers like those of a Christian Dominionist persuasion that could meet the definition of “christofascist” (look it up).
Christian Dominionists have internalized into dogma the many writings of one of the so-called “Christian Reconstructionist” gurus, R. J. Rushdoony (and his Chalcedon Foundation) and they are working tirelessly (and secretly) to recruit and train future political leaders for the time when an American Christian Fundamentalist plurality will reject democracy and create a theocratic nation that will be ruled by a tribunal of punitive male Christian elders – who will institute “sharia-like” Old Testament Law that includes 18 new capital crimes (as prescribed in the “inerrant” Old Testament).
Many Dominionist “christians” joined white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and the KKK (a far right-wing “Christian-based” cult) in voting for Trump. Many of them have been indoctrinated since childhood into believing in the mythical and non-biblical “Rapture theory” that will occur at the end of time. They believe that the Rapture will save them from the “fire and fury” that is described in the “inerrant” book of Revelation – where non-believing heretics will be “left behind” to suffer horribly as the earth is destroyed by a wrathful god. (Rushdoony’sphilosophy was that their wrathful god has given white male Christians dominion over the earth [which includes the animals, the land, the water, women, and all the heathen nations] and that a theocratic government, operating according to Old Testament Law is God’s will. Hard-core dominionists believe that democracy is apostasy and that only Christians should be able to vote. (Read more at www.theocracywatch.org or read the comprehensive article at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2009/05/r-j-rushdoony-reconstructionist-and-racist-bigot/#z0luYlZdblfpUHKv.99)
Many of those who have been gradually and often secretly grabbing political power at national, state and local levels have supported policies that are proto-fascist. Some of them are in Trump’s circle (perhaps unbeknownst to him) and are also in favor of the first use of nuclear weapons. Some of them have access to the nuclear codes (including Christian Dominionist Mike Pence if and when Trump is physically or mentally incapacitated or permanently impeached).
<<<To Trump’s Christian Dominionist Supporters, Nuclear Holocaust and Armageddon Might be Equivalent>>>
What should really worry every thinking person is that none of the imposters in the White House seem to have any awareness of the concept of “nuclear winter”, although “nuclear holocaust” might just be close enough for Christian Dominionists to represent a substitution for their long-anticipated and sometimes desired Armageddon.
Looking beyond the implications of the significant portion of right-wing (both ‘christian” and non-christian) voters that constitute Trump’s voting base the NeoNazi and KKK Trump voters raised their ugly heads at Charlottesville, Virginia a few days ago. Three weeks earlier (on July 27, 2017) the commander of the US Pacific fleet, US Navy Admiral Scott H. Swift, stated that he would obediently order the launch of a nuclear strike against China if President Trump ordered it.
All this is happening partly because of the artificial, media-enhanced, fake “crisis” that has been orchestrated between two saber-rattling, third-rate megalomaniacal wannabe dictators that have the legal (but not the ethical) right and ability to order the use of nuclear weapons to target and kill innocent bystanders and their homes and places of employment and permanently poison the earth and the oceans.
<<<Blow-Back>>>
Neither megalomaniac has expressed any awareness of the concept of “blow-back” that the World War I poison gas artillerymen first experienced when they shot their chlorine gas and mustard gas shells at the enemy and saw the wind change direction 180 degrees.
Of course, what the major media that are fanning the so-called “North Korean” crisis (that has no realistic military solution, according to the Pentagon) is that North Korea may not have the guided missile technology that is precise enough to hit targets smaller than the Sea of Japan.(Note: Authorities say that North Korea’s most recent and most powerful ”intercontinental” ballistic missile only traveled 580 miles and was in the air for only 39 minutes, but in order to strike the US, an ICBM would need a range of at least 4,800 miles.)
<<<Wars and Rumors of War can be Good Investment Opportunities>>>
Of course profiteers that have special interests and investments in war industries would like to see a bump up of another highly profitable arms race. Think of the money to be made by investing in weapons industries just before a president declares war! Think of the job security and pension enhancement of the career officer classes when somebody in the White House is a Hawk! (Think corporate Wall Street/DOW-Jones Industrial entities like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, etc and governmental War Street entities like the DOD, STRATCOM, AFRICOM, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the DOE, Seal Team Six, Blackwater [and the many other privatized mercenary corporations that profit from war]).
There are thousands of for-profit corporations whose paymasters fund well-positioned lobbyists that know all the legal and illegal tricks of bribing US politicians, influencing various governmental bodies and paying off major media outlets with their lucrative, the current one in the form of warning everybody that US coastal cities are in danger of being hit by a North Korean missile. But, of course, the chance of a precise missile strike from the Korean peninsula to a US city none or zero for North Korea’s third-rate military machine, and such a possibility is far less likely to happen than would be an accidental firing of a US nuclear missile in a provocative war game scenario. Sadly, the news-consuming public can be easily manipulated into believing any and all of the propaganda that comes out of the mouths of alleged authority figures that have a podium, pulpit or microphone and have the capability of convening a press conference.
<<<False Flag Ops Can Bolster Failing Presidencies>>>
Manufactured crises can be expected to temporarily save failing presidencies, and so false flag operations are trusted components of any president’s political strategy, as is also true when a nation’s power elite sees its hidden agendas threatened. (Ex: the assassination of JFK averted the possibility of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam; the Kuwait “invasion” by Saddam Hussein that was allowed to happen by the US State Department and the US invasion of Iraq temporarily boosted George H. W. Bush’s popularity; the missile attacks in Sudan and Afghanistan boosted Bill Clinton’s popularity; the dramatic controlled demolitions of the three World Trade Center Towers on 9/11/01 and the subsequent illegal invasion and war in Afghanistan (that predictably spread to Iraq, to Syria, Libya and beyond, boosted George W. Bush’s popularity; the alleged killing of Osama bin Laden (who had been documented to have already died in 2002) temporarily boosted Barack Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) popularity; the Cruise missile barrage against Syria temporarily boosted Trump’s poll numbers; and an orchestrated war crisis against North Korea will surely obscure – and possibly save – Trump’s failing presidency).
<<<Harry Truman May Have Been Scientifically Illiterate, but he Wasn’t Historically Illiterate>>>
In 1945 US President Harry Truman was far from historically illiterate, but he was surely scientifically ignorant about anything related to nuclear power or what was the impact of radioactive nuclear weapons materials like uranium and plutonium, or the fall-out waste products like radioactive strontium, cesium, iodine, etc on the bodies of actual humans that are downwind from Ground Zero.
In the case of nuclear weapons, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his military planning commissions had kept Vice President Truman entirely in the dark about the Manhattan Project. Truman’s first information about nuclear weapons happened right after he took the oath of office after FDR’s death, April 12, 1945. At the time VE Day was still a month away
The original target for the military planners that funded the Manhattan Project was the fascist Third Reich and Adolf Hitler’s Deutschland Uber Alles imperialist agenda that coveted the resources outside its borders that, if stolen, could make Germany Great Again. The original intention to drop the bombs on Germany energized the many brilliant Jewish scientists that had signed up to develop them, although some of them had second thoughts when they were dropped on civilian targets in Japan,
But the war in the European theater ended before the bombs were ready to be deployed, and so, rather than abandoning the project (too much momentum and money spent to stop it) and to justify the tens of billions of dollars spent (in 2017 dollar equivalence) in developing and delivering the bombs, Japanese cities became the targets, even though both sides knew that Japan had already lost the war.
So in view of the above, it seems appropriate to point out some of the hidden history of Nagasaki and the war crimes that the US military planners committed against non-combatants in Japan on the 72nd anniversary of the day that will forever live in infamy. Please see my 2016 Duty to Warn column on the history of the Nagasaki bombing by googling “Christianity and the Nagasaki Bombing” or go directly to https://consortiumnews.com/2016/08/09/christianity-and-the-nagasaki-bomb/.
The following quotes are appropriate words of wisdom that speak to the following three Trump administration moral crises:
1) The NeoNazi, KKK and White Supremacist power and influence in Donald Trump’s White House;
2) The ill-conceived saber-rattling of the historically illiterate, ignorant, amoral and too-powerful Donald Trump; and
3) the threat of a gradual Christian Dominionist take-over of the US government by the likes of smiley-faced, christofascist wolves in sheep’s clothing like Mike Spence, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckaby (and presumably also Sarah Huckaby Sanders), Sarah Palin,Michelle Bachmann,Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, Michael Huckaby, Gary North, Francis Schaeffer, Paul Hill (the infamous Planned Parenthood murderer), etc, etc. (For more, google “Theocracy Watch”.)
The quotes below are from courageous thinkers that have seen through the propaganda that has spawned and then perpetuated the nefarious agendas of yesteryear’s corporate-controlled media, corporate-controlled politics, corporate-controlled advertising and our corporate-controlled government.
These quotes are intended as teaching tools for peace and justice and anti-fascist activists and as learning opportunities for citizens who may be in lukewarm support of the agendas of the war-mongers in the US Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and the Mainstream Corporate-controlled Media. Hopefully they will also be read by the various cheerleaders for war everywhere and by the multitude of war profiteers on Wall Street, War Street and in the Oval Office.
NOTE: the list of antifascist quotes below does not contain quotes from Christian Dominionists or White Supremacists. Those quotes can be obtained elsewhere. This list contains 4,400 words. For Duluth Reader readers, the entire list of quotes will be archived at: http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn.
Quotes by Courageous Anti-Fascists
[themify_quote]
“A country that has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality.” — John K. Stoner, co-founder of Every Church A Peace Church (2001)
“As a physician, I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends continue, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced.” — Dr. Helen Caldicott
“Aggressive militarization under the rubric of defense against terrorism threatens to provoke a chain reaction among nuclear nations, big and small, that, once set in motion, may prove impossible to control. No military confrontation anywhere in the world is free from this ominous and ever-present danger.” — Helen Caldicott, from “The New Nuclear Danger” (2002)
“Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander and more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.” — Emma Goldman
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” — Theodore Roosevelt (1906)
“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” — President Theodore Roosevelt (who sometimes talked like an anti-fascist, but who often acted otherwise) from an editorial for the Kansas City Star (May 7, 1918)
“We were constantly told by our friends, ‘Who were we to differ with able statesmen, with men of sensitive conscience who also absolutely abhorred war, but were convinced that this war for the preservation of democracy would make all future wars impossible, that the priceless values of civilization which were at stake could at this moment be saved only by war?’ But these very dogmatic statements spurred one to alarm. Was not war in the interest of democracy for the salvation of civilization a contradiction of terms, whoever said it or however often it was repeated?” — Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Founder of Hull House; from “Personal Reactions During War” (1922)
“A nation can survive its fools – even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor — he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation — he works secretly and unknown to undermine the pillars of a city — he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.” — Cicero (42 BC)
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” — H. L. Mencken – Baltimore Sun (1920)
“…the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” — H. L. Mencken (1922)
“No one ever became poor underestimating the intelligence of the American consumer.” — H. L. Mencken “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” — H. L. Mencken ”Certified lunatics are shut up because of their proneness to violence when their pretensions are questioned; the uncertified variety are given the control of powerful armies, and can inflict death and disaster upon all sane men within their reach.” — Bertrand Russell
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln
“Thank God forDemocracy Now! Journalism is almost dead as we move into this Neofascist age. And thank god you all are still willing to tell the truth. I think Trump is already betraying working people in terms of making sure that Wall Street is in the driver’s seat. And what I mean by that is that in an emerging Neofascist moment, you have the rule of big business, which is big banks and big corporations (who control what the mainstream media is allowed to report).” — Cornel West
“Neofascists scapegoat the most vulnerable. It could be Muslims, Mexicans, gay brothers, lesbian sisters, indigenous peoples, black peoples, Jews, and so on. And then they also have militaristic orientations around the world. …Under a Trump administration….it’s clear that the One Percent are still running things.” — Cornel West
“The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want.
“Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.
“They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork….
“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. …The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice…. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on…. It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.” — George Carlin
“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private (and corporate) power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private (or corporate) power…. Among us today a concentration of private (and corporate) power without equal in history is growing.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
“If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.” — Mark Twain
“It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.” — Noam Chomsky
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” — Sinclair Lewis
“The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.” – Chris Hedges, from “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”
“Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. “Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection. “They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. “They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.” – Henry A. Wallace (Vice Presidentunder FDR)
“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.” — Henry A. Wallace
“Individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws (and disobey orders in wartime) to prevent crimes against peace and humanity.” — The judges at the Nuremberg trials that condemned Nazi war criminals
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie— deliberate, contrived and dishonest -but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” — John F. Kennedy
“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” — John F. Kennedy
“The most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” — John F. Kennedy, American University commencement address, Washington, 10 June 1963. (Five months prior to his assassination)
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” — George Orwell
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished – unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” — Voltaire
”A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” — Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
“Those who take oaths to politically powerful secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.” — President John Quincy Adams
“The project of the conservative throughout the ages is the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness. This is still worth every word of political philosophy written since the war, as well as being a damn good explanation of why self-styled “Libertarians” and traditional conservatives stick together.” — John Kenneth Galbraith, economist and ambassador
“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. It is the ruling class that declares the wars, and it is the working class who fights all the battles and furnishes the corpses. The ruling class continually talks about “patriotic duty”, but it is not their duty but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.” — Eugene V. Debs
“We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” — President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a televised speech 1961
“I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” — William Tecumseh Sherman (Civil War General)
“The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans.” — Hermann Hesse
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” — Albert Einstein
“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice…Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of country stance – how violently I hate all this; how despicable and ignoble war is…I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.” — Albert Einstein
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” — Robert F. Kennedy (from a UN speech on June 6, 1966, exactly 2 years before his assassination)
“Our Gross National Product now is over 800 billion dollars a year; but that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage…special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them…the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl, napalm, nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities, the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children…Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learnings, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country…It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans.” — Robert F. Kennedy (March 18, 1968, 10 weeks before his assassination)
“Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Star Wars will take money away from education, programs for women and children, and health care. There is a direct link between promoting weapons for space and the destabilization of our communities. People must connect these struggles.” — Bruce Gagnon
“In this time of war against Osama bin Laden and the oppressive Taliban regime, we are thankful that OUR leader isn’t the spoiled son of a powerful politician from a wealthy oil family who is supported by religious fundamentalists, operates through clandestine organizations, has no respect for the democratic electoral process, bombs innocents, and uses war to deny people their civil liberties. Amen.” — The prayer of Huey Freedman, from “The Boondocks” cartoon (during George W Bush’s presidency)
“Security policy” has led us into the most dire insecurity the world has ever faced. The politics of nuclear confrontation imposes a brand of insanity upon us that says, ‘In order to defend freedom, we must be prepared to destroy life itself.’ The system is bankrupt when humanity shrinks from recognizing that it is in the process of destroying itself. The enormous expenditure of energy, scientific sophistication and wealth on the military is the main cause of poverty, inflation and despair in the world.” — Petra Kelly from “Fighting For Hope” (1984)
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” — Samuel Adams from a speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776
“All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.” — George Orwell from “1984”
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” — Aldous Huxley from “Brave New World” (1959)
“A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts and who refuse to believe that their government and their media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the Police State Dictatorship it’s going to get.” — Ian Williams Goddard
“With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority” — Stanley Milgram from “Obedience to Authority” 1965
“Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore (individual citizens) have the duty to (refuse to obey) domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”– Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, 1950
“You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.” — Gandhi
“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” — Howard Zinn from “Failure to Quit”
“It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social change is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the silence of the so-called good people.” — Martin Luther King. Jr.
“If you see injustice and say nothing, you have taken the side of the oppressor.” — Desmund Tutu South African Anglican Archbishop
“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” — Tacitus
“Oh Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown out the thunder of guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander un-befriended the wastes of their desolated land. We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love. Amen.” — Mark Twain (the unspoken satirical Christian Patriot’s pulpit prayer to “Support Our Troops”)
“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.” – Aristotle
“It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” — Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)
“Globalization is but another name for colonization — nothing has changed but the name. And, just as the East India Company was the instrument for colonization, today’s corporation is the instrument for globalization. And, corporatization is but another name for Fascism.” — Urban Kohler
“We must bear in mind that imperialism is a world system, the last stage of capitalism and it must be defeated in a world confrontation. The strategic end of this struggle should be the destruction of imperialism. Our share, the responsibility of the exploited and underdeveloped of the world, is to eliminate the foundations of imperialism: oppressed nations, from where they extract capital, raw materials, technicians, and cheap labor, and to which they export new capital-instruments of domination-arms and all kinds of articles, thus submerging us in an absolute dependence.” — Ernesto Che Guevara
“The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor’s heart – and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.” — Clarence Darrow from “Resist Not Evil”
“Whenever a people… entrusts the defense of their country to a regular, standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens.” — An anonymous ‘framer’ of the US Constitution – Independent Gazetteer (1791)
“We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth…Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.” — Patrick Henry – Virginia Convention (1775)
“A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonels, captains, corporals, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?” — Henry David Thoreau
“The unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary for the indifferent and ungrateful.” — Anonymous Grafitti describing the reality of the Vietnam War
[/themify_quote]
[themify_box]
Dr. Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
The title above is a verbatim quote taken from any number of seriously uninformed TV physicians, paid trolls and paid celebrities as they have gleefully joined the popular CDC, WHO, AAP, AAFP and AMA-sponsored campaigns that have denigrated (and therefore infuriated) the witnesses of the hundreds of thousands of over-vaccinated, vaccine-injured, vaccine-disabled or vaccine-killed infants, children, adults and soldiers.
Particularly angered are the parents, siblings, neighbors and other loved ones of the vaccine-traumatized victims, for they KNOW FOR CERTAIN THAT THE VACCINES POISONED THEIR LOVED ONES BECAUSE THEY SAW WHAT WAS HAPPENING BEFORE THEIR VERY EYES. These witnesses knew the truth, even though their physicians (especially, apparently, pediatricians) and their clinics refused to listen to them and often fired them and their families when they logically refused to accept “coincidence” as the reason for the catastrophic vaccine-induced illness that suddenly changed their normal baby into a chronically ill or dead one.
Well-informed parents are beginning to realize – despite the aggressive propaganda campaigns from Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Media – that vaccines are NOT necessarily safe. Indeed they are seeing that they can be lethal. Many parents are also beginning to see that vaccines are NOT necessarily effective long-term either. As opposed to natural childhood infections giving life-long immunity, vaccines for such mild infections as measles, mumps and chickenpox need frequent booster shots to theoretically provide partial immunity.
Parents who can’t expect to get thorough information about the CDC’s and AAP’s over-vaccination mandates from their clinics are having to do their own research on neurotoxicology , and they are beginning to realize (no thanks to their too-busy and relatively un-informed physicians) that the vaccines that are planned for their precious kids contain varieties of neurotoxic ingredients in the cocktails of baby shots. As many as 3 injections at one sitting are supposed to go into the tiny muscles of 6 or 8 or 10 pound babies at their 2, 4 and 6 month well baby check-ups. These injections may contain live viruses, aluminum, mercury or unintended contaminants all of which the vaccine manufacturers admit may cause brain inflammation or infection.
The most brain toxic vaccine ingredient in this era since the year 2000 is aluminum, which is increasingly in many infant vaccines. The most brain toxic metal that was in vaccines in the latter two generations of the 20th century was mercury (thimerosal) – a preservative that was removed from many vaccines around 2000 because pediatricians KNEW that it was the major cause of the pediatric autism spectrum disorder (ASD) epidemic that had no other plausible explanation. Because of that knowledge, the AAP (the American Academy of Pediatrics that now infamously denies the connection between vaccines and ASD), with no help from the CDC, eventually helped convince the vaccine manufacturers to remove mercury from most vaccines.
Babies, most notably the premature ones, always have immature, leaky blood-brain barriers (and leaky guts) that allow some of these toxic vaccine ingredients to enter the brain. Both aluminum and mercury – even in “trace” amounts – are known to adversely affect both the blood-brain barrier and the placental barrier, with serious implications for pregnant women who are increasingly prompted to submit to expensive and probably fetotoxic vaccinations.(!).
<<<Paid Trolls are Behind Much of the Smearing of the Vaccine-injured>>>
The ubiquitous smear campaigns against what paid trolls pejoratively call “anti-vaxxers” target any and all rational and scholarly skeptics of America’s blatantly over-vaccination agenda – a American national agenda that 1) over-vaccinates the most children in the entire developed world, 2) has the worst infant mortality rate in the entire developed world and 3) has the largest percentage of autistic kids in the entire developed world. But Big Pharma’s toxic over-vaccination agenda is highly profitable for 1) Big Pharma, 2) Big Medicine, 3) pediatricians, 4) medical clinics and 5) Big Media (which makes billions of dollars per year from Big Pharma advertisers).
The propagandistic smear has been orchestrated by organizations (and their paid trolls) representing the 5 corporate institutions named above, who are drafting laws to make more and more of these toxic vaccines compulsory, as has happened in California in 2016. Even Big Pharma-bribed politicians – all totally ignorant of the neurotoxicology of America’s over-vaccination agenda – are joining the irrational campaign.
What is saddest is how vicious have been the attacks against the independent, non-pharma scientist-scholars who have actually done well-designed toxicology research that PROVES (to any unbiased physician or otherwise smart person that isn’t conflicted and immobilized by financial or professional conflicts of interest) that what the CDC and AAP is saying about vaccine safety is untrue.
Sadly, every major media outlet seems to employ attractive, highly indoctrinated, financially- and professionally-conflicted full-time celebrity physicians to only report on medical issues that are favorable to the network’s Big Pharma advertisers. Therefore no news will be effectively reported that might expose any of Big Pharma’s many blatantly fraudulent practices.
<<<Jimmy Kimmel: Don’t Criticize What You Can’t Understand>>>
And then there are ignorant celebrities who have joined the well-financed and well-organized smear campaign (ex Jimmy Kimmel) who know nothing about the science of vaccine neurotoxicology, a science that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that intramuscularly-injected aluminum (which is in most infant vaccines as an “adjuvant” – look it up) and intramuscularly-injected mercury (thimerosal) are common causes of childhood brain damage that can be diagnosed as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Asperger’s Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autoimmune/inflammatory SyndromeInduced by Adjuvants (ASIA), Autoimmune Disorders, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Allergies (and that’s just the list of vaccine-induced disorders that start with the letter “A”), tic disorder, seizure disorder, dementia, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, etc, etc, depending on what age the brain was sufficiently poisoned and what location in the brain was most seriously affected.
The sad reality is that most physicians (including my own) had woefully inadequate medical school training about neurotoxicology, immunology, vaccinology and nutrition, at least partly because Big Pharma has devious influences on medical education – hoping to create endless supplies of prolific prescription-writers and vaccine supporters.
A couple of years ago, prior to his pregnant wife (highly likely) receiving her mercury-laden prenatal flu shot and her aluminum-laden prenatal DTaP shot, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel chimed in with the CDC/AMA/AAP’s “just get your damn shots” campaign that demonized 1) parents and loved ones of vaccine-injured babies and children, 2) unbiased research immunologists, 3) unbiased neurotoxicologists, 4) the 10 – 15% of pediatricians who actually listen sympathetically to their patients, and 5) other scholarly and critically-thinking science-minded folks who know that toxic vaccine ingredients commonly sicken many of America’s over-vaccinated children.
Knowing that the most common neurotoxic vaccine ingredients (aluminum and mercury) 1) are both mitochondrial toxins, 2) are both blood-brain barrier toxins, 3) are both capable of crossing the placental barrier and 4) are both exponentially more poisonous when given together, it shouldn’t surprise any logical thinker that bad outcomes should be expected when metal-containing vaccines are given in cocktails at the same time, whether they are given to a soldier, a baby, a child, a pre-pubertal girl or an adult heading towards dementia.
And knowing that Jimmy Kimmel’s baby was tragically born with Tetralogy of Fallot (a heart defect that is caused by some toxic exposure to the embryo or fetus at a certain critical time in the pregnancy), one must wonder if Kimmel’s pregnant wife might have taken seriously Jimmy’s order to “just get your damn shots”. Or perhaps she might have followed the suggestion of her obstetrician (whose lobbying organization, ACOG, is now aggressively pushing DTaP and influenza vaccinations [!] along with her immature developing fetus – each of which are suspected to be teratogenic (causing fetal anomalies).
I conclude with some appropriate quotes that should give some uncertain or blind pro-vaccinators pause and give them interest and the willingness to go to the massive volume of unbiased medical literature to learn the truth about the dangers of over-vaccinating children.
I don’t expect changing the minds of those who have been indoctrinated by Big Pharma and Big Medicine. I also don’t expect influencing paid or unpaid trolls to actually go to the many references and scholars that I have referred to in the past. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. And you can point out the conflicts of interest of the ignorant naysayers and trolls but that won’t stop them from continuing to criticize the science that they are either incapable of understanding or unwilling to listen to.
[themify_quote]
“You might as well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination.” – George Bernard Shaw
“It is difficult to get a man to understandsomething, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair, American anti-fascist, anti-imperialist author
“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.”– President Ronald Wilson Reagan, as he signed The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies, pediatricians and all vaccine providers from all medico-legal liability when children die, become chronically ill with vaccine-induced autoimmune disorders or are otherwise disabled from vaccine injuries. (That law has led directly to an expected reckless, liability-free development of scores of new, over-priced, potential block-buster vaccines, now numbering over 250. The question that must be asked of Big Medicine’s practitioners: How will the CDC, the AMA, the AAFP and the American Academy of Pediatrics fit any more potentially neurotoxic vaccines into the current well-baby over-vaccination schedule?)
“By Nov. 1, 2016, $3.5 billion had been awarded to more than 3,500 vaccine victims through the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) created under the 1986 NCVIA law.”
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses … the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.”— Dresden James
”In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act“. – George Orwell
[/themify_quote]
Is the Childhood Vaccine Schedule Safe?
1976: 1 child in 30 was learning disabled → 2013: 1 child in 6 is learning disabled.
1980: 1 child in 27 had asthma → 2013: 1 child in 9 has asthma.
1992: 1 child in 500 developed autism → 2013: 1 child in 50 develops autism.
2001: 1 child in 555 had diabetes → 2013: 1 child in 400 has diabetes.
THREE TIMES AS MANY VACCINATIONS FOR CHILDREN
1953: CDC recommended 16 doses of 4 vaccines (smallpox, DPT) between two months and age six.
1983: CDC recommended 23 doses of 7 vaccines (DPT, MMR, polio) between two months and age six.
2013: CDC recommended 50 doses of 14 vaccines between day of birth and age six and 69 doses of 16 vaccines between day of birth and age 18.
MULTIPLE VACCINATIONS GIVEN SIMULTANEOUSLY
In 1983, the CDC directed doctors to give a child no more than 4 vaccines (DPT, polio) simultaneously.
By 2013, the CDC directed that a child can receive 8 or more vaccines at once.
The Institute of Medicine published a report in 2013 stating that “key elements of the entire [CDC recommended childhood vaccine] schedule – the number, frequency, timing, order and age of administration of vaccines – have not been systematically examined in research studies.”
VACCINATIONS DURING PREGNANCY
A new CDC policy directs doctors to give pregnant women one dose of influenza vaccine in any trimester and one dose of the pertussis containing Tdap vaccine after 20 weeks during every pregnancy. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that large, well-controlled long term studies have not been conducted to confirm that influenza and Tdap vaccination during pregnancy is safe.
[themify_quote]
“The evidence strongly suggests that it is the vaccines and the vaccinated who are spreading the diseases for which vaccines are given.”
“The real issue is viral shedding. Viral vaccines are vaccines containing live viruses, even if they are weak or attenuated strains. These live viruses shed for varying amounts of time in the body fluids of a vaccinated individual – and can be transmitted to others. You can absolutely catch the virus (or bacterium) from someone who has just been vaccinated against that disease. Not only that, but viral shedding from vaccines is leading to viral and bacterial mutations, helping to create a phenomenon of new and dangerous strains of disease which can evade treatment by becoming accustomed to whatever drugs get thrown at them.”
“The U.S. has maintained one of the world’s highest child vaccination rates and lowest infectious disease rates, even as public health officials have been unable to explain why so many of today’s highly vaccinated children are so sick and disabled. Also unexplained, is why America has the worst infant mortality rate of all developed nations, with 6 out of 1,000 babies dying before their first birthday.
“Maternal mortality in the U.S. has also become one of the worst of all industrialized nations, with between 12 and 28 women in 100,000 dying within one year of giving birth, a maternal mortality rate that more than doubled between 1990 and 2013. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), annually an estimated 1,200 women in America suffer fatal complications during pregnancy and childbirth and another 60,000 suffer near-fatal complications.
“Women having babies in the U.S. today, who represent the most vaccinated generations in our nation’s history, are now also being given influenza, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus vaccines during pregnancy, a federal maternal vaccination policy that was launched in 1997 with administration of influenza vaccine during any trimester and was widened in 2011 with the addition of a pertussis containing TDaP shot after 20 weeks gestation.
“As of 2015, about half of the nation’s pregnant women or nearly 2 million women, were either vaccinated with TDaP vaccine during pregnancy (42 percent) or influenza vaccine before or during pregnancy (50 percent) or received both vaccines.” – Barbara Loe-Fischer, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC)
[/themify_quote]
What has happened to the health of children in America since the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was passed in 1986?
[themify_quote]
“After drug companies, pediatricians and all vaccine providers were shielded from accountability and liability for vaccine injuries and deaths, U.S. health officials tripled the numbers of vaccinations recommended for children – from 23 doses of seven vaccines in 1986 to 33 doses of nine vaccines by 1997, which has escalated to a current 69 doses of 16 vaccines. States also increased the numbers of vaccinations required for children to attend school and, by 1997, it was obvious that a growing number of highly vaccinated children in America were never well anymore.
“The new and unprecedented child chronic disease and disability epidemic that has perfectly coincided with the expansion of the child vaccine schedule over the past 30 years is having a devastating effect on children, their families and our nation. Today, 1 child in 6 in the U.S. is learning disabled; 1 in 9 has asthma; 1 in 10 has ADHD; 1 in 50 develops autism; and 1 in 400 has diabetes. Millions more are suffering with severe allergies epilepsy, anxiety and depression, and other kinds of brain and immune disorders marked by chronic inflammation in the body.” – Barbara Loe-Fischer
“If we listen to present-day wisdom, we are all at risk of resurgent massive epidemics should the vaccination rate fall below 95%. Yet, we have all lived for at least 30 to 40 years with 50% or less of the population having vaccine protection. That is, herd immunity has not existed in this country for many decades and no resurgent epidemics have occurred. Vaccine-induced herd immunity is a lie used to frighten doctors, public-health officials, other medical personnel, and the public into accepting vaccinations.” – Russell Blaylock, MD
“The live polio vaccine…contains live attenuated polioviruses. Those polioviruses, when you take that [live] vaccine, you shed them in your body fluids – your saliva, urine, and stool…Whether you have the a viral infection or you get the live attenuated vaccine, you shed live viruses in your body fluids and you are able to transmit the virus to other people who come in contact with your body fluids.” — Barbara Loe-Fisher
”Curbing civil liberties under the guise of protecting the public health and national security has become big business. In 1982, when the pharmaceutical industry threatened to stop producing government licensed and recommended vaccines for children unless vaccine manufacturers got a product liability shield, Congress gave Big Pharma most of what it wanted in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. It was tort reform legislation sold to parents and the American public on the backs of children legally required by states to get federally recommended vaccines to attend school.
“Even though by Nov. 1, 2016, $3.5 billion had been awarded to more than 3,500 vaccine victims through the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) created under the 1986 law, two out of three claims have been denied throughout the entire history of the law’s implementation. Most of the compensation awards today are for adults injured by flu vaccine – not for children required to get vaccines to go to school.
“While the government denies compensation to many children, whose lives have been destroyed by state mandated vaccines, in the past five years liability-free drug companies have joined forces with politically powerful medical trade groups to change state vaccine laws. They are lobbying state legislatures to severely restrict the medical exemption and eliminate the non-medical religious, philosophical and conscientious belief exemptions for children attending school.” — Barbara Loe-Fisher
“…our current results are consistent with the existing evidence on the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of aluminum adjuvants which altogether strongly implicate these compounds as contributors to the rising prevalence of neurobehavioral disorders in children. Given that autism has devastating consequences in a life of a child, and that currently in the developed world over 1% of children suffer from some form of ASD, it would seem wise to make efforts towards reducing infant exposure to aluminum from vaccines.“— C A Shaw, PhD
“There is a serious problem with vaccine safety. Vaccine aluminum adjuvant has adverse neurological effects, at dosages that are recommended by the US CDC. Vaccine critics are supported by the science. Parents refusing to vaccinate according to the recommended CDC schedule are supported by the science.Use aluminum-containing vaccines with great caution, or not at all.” – C. A. Shaw, PhD
“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant…research clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation andassociated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.” (From Tomljenovic and Shaw’s journal article “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are They Safe?”, published in Curr Med Chem 2011;18(17):2630-7.)
“The CDC says that 36,000 people die from the flu every year in the US. But actually, it’s closer to 20. However, we can’t admit that, because if we did, we’d be exposing our gigantic psyop. The whole campaign to scare people into getting a flu shot would have about the same effect as warning people to carry iron umbrellas, in case toasters fall out of upper-story windows…and, by the way, we’d all be put in prison for fraud.” – Jon Rappoport
[/themify_quote]
[themify_box]
[themify_quote]
“A 2007 [Zika] outbreak on Yap Islands in Micronesia is estimated to have affected nearly 75% of the (island’s) population of some 12,000 people, and a 2013 outbreak in French Polynesia affected nearly 28,000 of 270,000 residents. Neither epidemic caused a spike in microcephaly.” — qz.com
“The correlation between a) the presence of Zika and b) babies with the microcephaly birth defect is so weak and sparse, it constitutescounter-evidence for Zika as the cause…the overwhelming majority of birth-defect cases show no presence of Zika. Therefore, the Zika-carrying mosquitoes have no business being the target of toxic spraying. But they are. And the spraying increases the risk of neurological damage in babies.” – Jon Rappoport
“Microcephaly may result from any insult that disturbs early brain growth…Annually, approximately 25,000 infants in the United States will be diagnosed with microcephaly…” – From the Report of the Quality Standards Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology and the Practice Committee of the Child Neurology Society. (Neurology 2009 Sep 15; 73(11) 887-897)
“…even the ideal influenza vaccine, matched perfectly to circulating strains of wild influenza and capable of stopping all influenza viruses, can only deal with a small part of the ‘flu’ problem because most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.”– Dr Peter Doshi (from a British Medical Journal review article, “Influenza: marketing vaccines by marketing disease” 2013 (BMJ 2013; 346:f3037)
“…It’s no wonder so many people feel that ‘flu shots’ don’t work: for most flus, they can’t, work because most diagnosed cases of the flu aren’t the flu.” – Jon Rappoport
“[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001—61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.” – Dr Peter Doshi, from in his 2005 BMJ report, titled, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” (BMJ 2005; 331:1412
“Between 1979 and 2001, [CDC] data showed an average of 1348 [flu] deaths per year (range 257 to 3006).” – Dr Peter Doshi
[/themify_quote]
[/themify_box]
[themify_quote]
“Official data shows that large scale vaccination has failed to obtain any significant improvement of the diseases against which they were supposed to provide protection” — Dr Sabin, developer of Polio vaccine
“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation…..There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.” — Dr Robert Mendelsohn, MD
“The only safe vaccine is one that is never used.” — Dr. James A. Shannon, National Institutes of Health
“No batch of vaccine can be proved safe before it is given to children.” – Dr Leonard Scheele,Surgeon General of the United States, addressing an AMA convention in 1955
“It is pathetic and ludicrous to say we ever vanquished smallpox with vaccines, when only 10% of the population was ever vaccinated.” — Dr Glen Dettman
“The decline in infectious diseases in developed countries had nothing to do with vaccinations, but with the decline in poverty and hunger.” — Dr Buchwald, MD
“There is a great deal of evidence to prove that immunisation of children does more harm than good.” – Dr. J. Anthony Morris (formerly Chief Vaccine Control Officer at the US Federal Drug Admin.)
“There is insufficient evidence to support routine vaccination of healthy persons of any age.” — Paul Frame, MD, Journal of Family Practice
“I think that no person would permit anybody to get close to them with an inoculation if they would really know how they are made, what they carry, what has been lied to them about and what the real percent of danger is of contracting such a disease which is minimal.” — Dr Eva Snead
“The evidence for indicting immunisations for SIDS is circumstantial, but compelling. However, the keepers of the keys to medical-research funds are not interested in searching this very important lead to the cause of an ongoing, and possibly preventable, tragedy. Anything that implies that immunisations are not the greatest medical advance in the history of public health is ignored or ridiculed. Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunisations are killing thousands of babies?” — Dr William C. Douglass, MD (Honored twice as America’s ‘Doctor of the Year’)
“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has been reported following the administration of DPT. The significance is unclear. 85% of SIDS cases occur in the period 1 through 6 months of age, with the peak incidence at age 2 to 4 months.” (From the accompanying insert to Connaught Labs’ DPT vaccine) —Jane Orient, MD, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)
“If you want the truth on vaccination you must go to those who are not making anything out of it…My aim has been to show that you have a powerful body to fight in the medical profession. We cannot be stirred without great effort. We are a kind of Juggernaut; we have to be dragged; we will not go. Let each one take his doctor, or, if he be so fortunate as not to need one, the doctor who lives nearest to him, and try and instruct him (about the dangers of vaccination). Send him the literature of the subject; he may not read it, but he may. Every little helps. – Instruct the people by means of public lectures and meetings. Show them as plainly as you can the uselessness and dangers of vaccination. Teach them that they must not go to the medical profession for counsel on the matter. If cases of small-pox were isolated and the clothes of the sufferers disinfected, the disease would not spread. If you wish to avoid smallpox, you must live pure and simple lives. If we crowd together we must expect disease; if we keep our skins closed, the impurities of the body are retained, and these impurities are the food upon which small-pox thrives. If your constitution is in a bad, state and you come in contact ‘with small-pox, you will probably have it.” — Dr T. R. Allinson
“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation…There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.”— Dr Robert Mendelsohn, MD
“Vaccine-induced herd immunity is a lie used to frighten doctors, public-health officials, other medical personnel, and the public into accepting vaccinations.” – Russell Blaylock, MD
“the 271 vaccines in development span a wide array of diseases, and employ exciting new scientific strategies and technologies. These potential vaccines – all in human clinical trials or under review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – include 137 for infectious diseases, 99 for cancer, 15 for allergies and 10 for neurological disorders.” — PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), the pharmaceutical industry’s trade association and powerful lobbying group
[/themify_quote]
[themify_box]
Dr Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and healthcare professionals.
[themify_quote]Definitions below have been obtained from a variety of open-source online sites – and then edited to fit[/themify_quote]
Big Pharma is the pejorative term given to the vast number of multinational (global) pharmaceutical corporations. It takes no Hippocratic Oath, does not insist that its sycophants give fully informed consent when their products are prescribed and it ignores the Precautionary Principle, thus affirming the sense that it has no concern for the health of its users or the health of the planet.
Big Pharma’s corporations make up the most profitable industry on the planet. According to US surveys, its executives are also among the most despised multimillionaires in America – just behind Big Tobacco and Big Oil. It is the industry that has the largest number of salespersons (who try to induce/bribe physicians to prescribe their increasingly unaffordable products that usually have no long-term safety studies performed prior to launch, especially when taken in combination with other of its drugs).
Big Pharma spends the most money of any other industry advertising their products on TV and print media outlets (trying to make prospective patients demand getting the prescribed from their physicians). This industry hires the most highly paid lobbyists in Washington, DC (many of whom actually help write legislation that favors itself at the expense of patients – who are at the mercy of the medical establishment that prescribes its products).
Critics of Big Pharma often use the Big Pharma nickname when addressing this partial list of its well-documented abuses:
1) Trying to suck every penny out of the pockets of the sick, injured, dying, and hypochondriacal.
2) Inventing new diseases so that frightened people will buy more drugs.
3) Selling new and old drugs, many of which are often falsely and cunningly marketed to be life-long medications that often cause dependency (addiction) so that those now-permanent customers won’t be able to stop taking them without going through serious withdrawal (similar to what happens to those taking addictive, molecularly-similar street drugs like uppers, downers, tranquilizers, hallucinogens, alcohol, nicotine, etc.
4) Demonizing and trying to drive out of business alternative treatments that would be cheaper, safer and possibly even curative.
5) Cleverly “educating” the public about a new disease just before the FDA is about to announce the approval of a new drug for the disorder.
6) Managing to convince people that their curable, temporary malady is permanent or more serious than it is, making them more willing to see a doctor and pay for high priced drugs.
An organized religion is a belief system that has a large number of followers and a set of rules that must be followed.
A cult is a religious or semi-religious sect whose members are controlled almost entirely by a single individual or by an organization. This kind of cult is usually manipulative and demanding of total commitment, unconditional obedience and loyalty from its followers.
Organized crime is illegal behavior that is planned and carried out by groups of people (sociopaths) in a very systematic fashion.
Faith is the strong or unshakeable belief in something, especially without proof or evidence (or, in the case of sociopathic corporations; believing in provably false, fraudulent corporate pseudoscience).
Heresy is any belief or theory that is at variance with the established beliefs or customs of an organized group, especially a religious organization. A heretic is an ex-believer who has come to doubt or disobey the dogmas and beliefs of the group. The heretic is often punished for his or her disobedience (especially if the heretic refuses to be silent in the hope of reforming or exposing the criminality of the organization – sort of like being “dis-fellowshipped” by the congregation of a Christian church).
A sociopath is an entity (including many inanimate, conscienceless corporations [google “The Corporation – the movie”) whose behavior is antisocial, often criminally greedy, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility, empathy or social conscience. Sociopaths never sincerely apologize nor are they capable of exhibiting remorse for wrongs that they have committed.
Common sociopathic traits include:
No conscience; deceitful; aggressive; often guilty of repeatedly lying
Conning others for profit; aggressively avoiding punishment; lack of remorse for evils done to others; indifference to the suffering of its victims
Rationalizes (makes excuses for) having hurt, mistreated or stolen from others
Willingness to exploit, seduce or manipulate others
Cunning, clever, and always looking for ways to make money or achieve fame or notoriety
Willing to cause or contribute to the financial ruin of others
Untrustworthy; cannot be trusted to adhere to conventional standards of morality
Big Pharma and its assortment of pro-drug/pro-vaccine acolytes in Big Medicine has a view of the world that requires as much of the public as possible to bow down to its fundamentalist, authoritarian “scientific priesthood of believers” whose knowledge, opinions, mercenary scientists, manufactured sets of data and orders from on high are never to be questioned.
Many such corporate powers appear to generously spread some of their wealth around (until it longer makes financial sense to do so), but it only does that to the acolytes and true believers that are loyal to it, particularly to its advertising branch, Big Media, a connected-to-the-Big Pharma-hip set of corporations, which knows its place, particularly because its executives and editors understand where most of its advertising revenues come from.
The executives of Big Pharma’s corporations are in possession of immense wealth and power – mostly undeserved, because the wealth usually comes from cunning or lucky investments – and lots of stock options. And, just like most non-democratic, authoritarian systems, the executives of Big Business insist that those below them in the pecking order pledge unquestioned obedience to the organization’s dogmatic teachings.
The acolytes of Big Pharma’s priests, the sales reps, are very well-paid underlings. But they have been indoctrinated in the faith and know that they will lose their status and incomes if they ever waver from the dogmatic teachings. As Upton Sinclair so wisely proclaimed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Baram wrote: “To sell their drugs, pharmaceutical companies hire former cheerleaders and ex-models to wine and dine doctors, exaggerate the drug’s benefits and underplay their side-effects, a former sales rep told a Congressional committee this morning.
“According to Ahari (ex-drug rep Shahram Ahari, who spent two years selling Prozac and Zyprexa for Eli Lilly), the benefits could be lucrative for sales reps, who tended to earn more than (Lilly’s) researchers. On top of a base salary for starting reps of $50,000, ‘there were four quarterly bonuses, an annual bonus, stock options, a car, 401K, great health benefits, and a $60,000 expense account.’
“Included in his prepared remarks, Ahari cites a quote from a senior marketing executive at Parke-Davis: ‘I want you out there every day selling Neurontin. Neurontin is more profitable than Accupril, so we need to focus on Neurontin. Pain management, now that’s money…. I don’t want to see a single patient coming off Neurontin before they’ve been up to at least 4,800 milligrams a day. I don’t want to hear that safety crap, either.’
Ahari was quoted elsewhere as saying that “his job involved ‘rewarding physicians with gifts and attention for their allegiance to your product and company despite what may be ethically appropriate …and that drug companies like hiring former cheerleaders and ex-models, as well as former athletes and members of the military, many of whom have no background in science.
Ahari was also quoted as saying that ‘On my first day of sales class, among 21 trainees and two instructors, I was the only one with any level of college-level science education…and that instructors teach sales tactics, including how to exceed spending limits for important clients, being generous with free samples to leverage sales, using friendships and personal gifts to foster a ‘quid pro quo’ relationship, and how to exploit sexual tension…The nature of this business is gift-giving…You drink the Kool-Aid. We were taught to minimize the side effects and how to use conversational ploys to minimize it or to change the topic.’”
Ahari was a heretic from the religious cult of Big Pharma when he finally couldn’t endure his two years job as drug rep for Eli Lilly anymore. He should be congratulated for followed his conscience in exposing the dark side of what he saw of the drug industry. He deserves our thanks, although I suspect that he paid dearly for his act of whistle-blowing.
It could be said that the first (now known to be false) article of faith in the Big Vaccine sector of the pharmaceutical cult (contrary to all the documented, unbiased historical evidence) is this one: “Vaccinations are the reason for the decreased deaths and disabilities related to common childhood infectious diseases.” For the evidence establishing that as a falsehood, click on: (http://duluthreader.com/articles/2017/06/14/10297_an_honest_look_at_the_historical_evidence_that)
Another article of faith declares the documented falsehood that “all vaccines are safe and effective”. In order to believe that one, one must ignore the fact that every vaccine has warnings about the dangers and lack of efficacy in the product information handouts. Big Pharma itself acknowledges that their vaccines are neurotoxic and have not been subjected to the gold standard – double blind studies – prior to FDA approval.
Faith in Big Pharma’s high priests (usually not even scientists, but rather masters of business administration) is the key to the belief (preferably blind) in this system. Those high priests are housed in the sacred corporate board rooms at Merck, Glaxo, Pfizer, Sanofi Pasteur, etc, and they forbid any government regulatory inspections of their manufacturing plants (privileged proprietary secrets!) unless there is a court-ordered subpoena related to a vaccine–injury or vaccine-death lawsuit (which, since 1986, is no longer allowed in the US).
The problem is that rich corporations have manipulated the science and thus have been able to distort research. Their vast financial influence gives them political clout and control of many scientific institutions. The result is that these for-profit institutions, research programs and practitioners now willingly serve the interests of powerful corporations rather than their vulnerable patients. Rather than helping mankind corporate greed has usurped what was once an honorable profession.
The reason why so many rational people doubt science is because they can have seen how it has been corrupted and manipulated by the 1%. They have noticed that the 1% has become increasingly unaccountable and that their activities and products are not properly regulated by watchdog governmental agencies. In fact, the regulatory agencies are being shut down or underfunded – as we speak!
Many scientific studies show that prescription drugs (especially psychiatric drugs) are a serious safety issue for both individuals and the environment.
By not being willing to inform patients about what is actually in the cocktail of vaccines or drugs that infants, children, pregnant women and increasingly chronically ill children are being injected with, Big Medicine is failing its ethical responsibility.
Labelling vaccines (and also food!) and fully informing patients about any potentially toxic ingredients would convince some patients to reject the “unavoidably unsafe” vaccines that are being forced into their bodies – and perhaps convince a small number of physicians, physician assistants and nurses to wonder about the over-vaccination agendas that they have blindly supported and had developed so much faith in. By attempting to side-line open discussion about Big Pharma’s potentially toxic products in this way, healthy public debate was stymied.
The concept of “sound science” is being manipulated by for-profit corporations and it increasingly obvious that there is a lot of deception going on, and it has become far too easy for America’s vaccine industry to promote vaccines since it coerced the US Congress and Ronald Reagan to grant legal immunity from prosecution for the deaths and disabilities of vaccine victims.
Big Pharma carries out inadequate and only short-term safety and efficacy studies and then conceals the data produced by the research done by its mercenary scientists under the rubric of “commercial confidentiality”, and this cover-up if facilitated by its partners in Big Media. Malcolm X was right when he famously proclaimed: “The real power of the media is the power to ignore.” Big Media censors out or distorts scientific facts – especially the inconvenient kind – and then helps its partners in crime to smear and intimidate anybody who challenges its interests. Heretics are not welcome. Ask Andy Wakefield, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and the hundreds of other American whistle-blowers for justice that have been made radioactive.
The reason why informed consent is not practiced in the US and no vaccine labelling or testing has taken place is not due to “sound science” but rather due to the undeserved political power and influence of Big Pharma – and because sound scientific principles have not been applied.
The pharmaceutical sector knows that it cannot win a fair scientific debate on these issues, so it resorts to co-opting “key opinion leaders” that are willing to propagate various falsehoods and deceptions.
<<<Co-opting Scientific Research>>>
People’s faith in science (especially corporate science) is being destroyed at many levels. Big corporations have achieved intimate access to policy makers, legislators, bureaucrats and governments and are increasingly funding research and setting research agendas that only have profits as their motivation. Money talks.
It is not science itself that people have doubts about but the kind of science that is owned by powerful profit-making corporations who have infiltrated governmental regulatory bodies that have adopted a ‘don’t ask, don’t look, don’t find, don’t tell” approach – or are simply being pressured by Big Pharma to fast-track drugs and vaccines onto the market before proper research is done. Time is money, and there is so much more money to be made if short-cuts are taken doing the research.
Science is up for sale to the highest bidder, but one of the unwritten contract terms assumes the suppressing of adverse scientific findings and the intent to harm the careers of scientists who discover and then altruistically publish adverse findings about a drug or vaccine. The best recent example was the smearing of the reputation of Andrew Wakefield, MD and his team of researchers (who should have, by the way, gotten the Nobel Prize for making the connection between GlaxoSmithKline’s flawed live virus MMR vaccine and a cluster of severe infectious regional enteritis cases in severely regressed autistic children – and then publishing the study for in a 1998 Lancet article). Big Pharma has the financial clout to control the funding that shapes what research is conducted at Merck, Glaxo, Pfizer, Sanofi-Pasteur, AstraZeneca, the NIH, NIMH, CDC, and the many others who have massive financial and professional conflicts of interest.
<<<Are Synthetic Brain-altering Drugs and Vaccines Actually Good for You?>>>
Marcia Angell, author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. Wrote this after she was fired for complaining in an editorial about Big Pharma’s increasing control over medical research: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
And the retired editor-in-chief of the Lancet, Richard Horton, echoed what Dr Angell said:
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
Big Pharma funds many for-profit research programs and greatly influences the careers of normally altruistic scientists. Through their funding activities, Big Pharma shapes the research agenda. Those agendas decide which issues are to be examined and which are not, and they even determine how research is to be carried out. By diverting funds to more malleable scientists they can suppress certain findings and even decide what gets published. Corporations may also fund or hold sway over journals and peer reviewers who commonly have their own careers to consider.
<<<Big Pharma: Masquerading as Trustworthy Truth-tellers>>>
Big Pharma’s thought-leaders routinely attack basic unbiased research scientists and scholars who have witnessed the immense dangers of America’s current corporate-induced, over-diagnosis, over-treatment, over-vaccination agendas because it is so very good for business.
The rhetoric makes the actual unbiased truth about the dangers of America’s over-vaccination schedules into taboo subjects. It also shuts down useful discussions about the root causes of our increasingly sick, over-treated and over-vaccinated society which, despite the trillions of dollars that the American health system has wasted on costly and usually unproductive screening tests, costly drugs, costly vaccines, and costly surgeries. Despite the trillions spent nobody can claim that they have increased either the quality or the quantity of American life.
Perhaps the well-financed thought-leaders from Merck, Glaxo, Pfizer et al (and the highly-paid mercenary scientist acolytes that are diligently working deep in the bowels of every Big Pharma corporate plant that you can name) should try to convince us why we should not doubt the perverted science that bombards us consumers multiple time per day – perhaps most cunningly in the incessant prime-time drug commercials and in the ubiquitous canned medical infomercials that pass as news items on the nightly news.
And while they are at it, given the reality of Big Pharma’s generations-long history of deceptions, cover-ups and criminality, they might want to contemplate why we should believe anything they say.
It is well past time for the hidden heretics and whistle-blowers to courageously stand up and address the congregation.
[themify_box]
Dr. Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
Over the 40 plus years that I was a family practitioner and teacher (the English word “doctor” derives from the Latin verb docere [do-ke-re] which means “to teach”), I have tried to fulfill what I have regarded as my solemn professional duty to warn my patients (and anybody else who would listen) about the multitude of deceptions and myths that all-too-often come from for-profit sociopathic pharmaceutical corporations (and their hangers-on). Those pesky entities never seem to give up trying to get patients (and us doctors as well) to desperately want to have the next blockbuster drug or vaccine, no matter what the fine print warnings say. Sadly, those always toxic synthetic substances invariably enriches the corporation more than it helps the duped patient.
Most of the time I was able to take the time to resist the temptation to blindly prescribe whatever treatment my patient saw on TV the night before, but it did take time. As I have often proclaimed in this column, it only takes two minutes to write a prescription, whereas it takes 20 minutes to not write one (a bunch of teaching and some arguing is required). But when time is money and medicine is a for-profit venture, one can predict what the average clinic administrator (and too many physicians) will choose to do. And therein lies one of the biggest problems in the for-profit medical (non-)system in America.
Being a physician, I had a certain amount of power to influence my patients to view with suspicion the latest fad drug. But more often than I care to admit, I found that I had also been the victim of deceptions and myths that my friendly – and very cunning – pharmaceutical salesperson wanted me to believe.
One of the most serious myths that I had to unlearn over the decades was the one that my academic (as opposed to clinical) medical professors had taught me about the “fact” that vaccines were entirely safe and entirely effective and were the reasons that measles, mumps, chickenpox and polio had virtually disappeared.
It was only after I had personally heard the many stories from the parents of vaccine-damaged children that I found the time to search the literature and find out more about the dangers and relative ineffectiveness of the vaccines that I once had prescribed. I never was led to believe that there was any reason for skepticism. In retrospect, I regard myself as being fortunate that I had already stopped seeing pediatric patients prior to the era when the various Big Pharma and Big Vaccine corporations (and their lapdog lobbying and trade organizations like the AMA, the AAFP and the AAP) were pushing dozens of new vaccines onto an unsuspecting public.
I was no different than most other healthcare givers in America in being relatively unaware of the dangers behind the escalating numbers of untested-for-safety inoculations that most family docs and pediatricians routinely prescribed for healthy (and even unhealthy!) kids. It wasn’t until the autism epidemic graph was found to be rising in parallel with the vaccine epidemic graph that I understood the obvious correlation between the two phenomena. There was no better answer to the question that the medical profession and Big Pharma consistently glossed over, tried to ignore and then irrationally tried to obfuscate: “what could be causing the astonishing and very sudden rise in the appearance of autism spectrum disordered kids?”
Here is the obvious answer to that question: It was the rapidly increasing numbers and combinations of known-to-be neurotoxic vaccines (as many as 9 antigens at one sitting into 2, 4 and 6 month well-babies!) that were being aggressively formulated, manufactured, aggressively marketed and then cavalierly injected into innocent babies, starting with the Reagan administration ‘s passage of a law that made it illegal for parents to sue vaccine companies or doctors when their little children suffered vaccine-related deaths or injuries from the combinations of vaccines that had never been tested for safety or even long-term effectiveness.
What made the connections between the shots and the resultant brain damage and autoimmunity so obvious was the fact that those intramuscularly-injected vaccines contained either 1) live viruses, some of which were known by the manufacturers (but not by the pediatricians or parents) to be capable of causing encephalitis (and therefore permanent brain damage), 2) mercury (thimerosal) which is known to cause the death of any cell it comes in contact with, especially liver, brain and nerve cells, and/or 3) aluminum which is known to cause brain damage, hyper-immunity and thus autoimmune disorders (which is now causing the American epidemic of childhood autoimmune disorders, an entirely new phenomenon that has no other logical explanation. Hereditary or genetics has nothing to do with either phenomenon.
Neither my drug reps nor my professors ever bothered to tell me what ingredients were in the baby shots. They maybe didn’t know themselves. They certainly didn’t tell me that there were intentionally-added metallic neurotoxins in the shots. They never informed me that the carcinogen formaldehyde was in many of the shots. They never informed me that a cancer-causing monkey virus (SV 40 – simian virus 40) was in one of the early Salk polio vaccines – still causing malignancies decades later! They never told me that the mercury and aluminum in the shots were accumulative (and synergistic!) nor that both metals could easily get into the brain and damage our mitochondria and cause brain toxicity, epilepsy, learning disorders, inattention, early deaths – and autism.
At any rate, in my wide reading and extensive research into the basic neuroscience of vaccines, I have acquired the science that I needed in order to understand exactly what my vaccine-damaged patients, relatives and acquaintances have gone through. Although it may be too late for them to benefit from the truth about vaccines, I do wish that I had known about those realities when I was practicing medicine, and I hope that I can belatedly shine some light on this important subject for that similar fates will be avoided for others. It might atone for some of the damage that I might have done to patients because of the many medical myths taught to me by my professors.
So I yield the remainder of this article to an important summary of the history of vaccinations written by a highly esteemed physician colleague of mine – and a fellow whistle-blower, Dr Suzanne Humphries, one of the most knowledgeable physicians on the subject of vaccines that I have ever encountered.
Dr Humphries co-authored an important book on the history of vaccines with Roman Bystrianyk. It is titled Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History. Check our www.dissolvingillusions.com for much more, and spend an hour or two watching some of Dr Humphries powerful lectures about the science of vaccines, information that you wish your kid’s physicians would try to understand. Dr Humphries is one of the many featured scholars and experts on vaccine dangers on the powerful new 7-part documentary series that is entitled The Truth About Vaccines. The first episode of that series can be viewed for free at https://go2.thetruthaboutvaccines.com/docuseries/replay/.
Vaccines: A Peek Beneath the Hood By Roman Bystrianyk and Suzanne Humphries, MD Co-authors of Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History
Originally published on the website of the International Medical Council on Vaccination
[themify_quote]
“It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.”
– W. Somerset Maugham
[/themify_quote]
Medical history books, almost uniformly extol the virtues of vaccination. Upon reading these books, one is left with the impression that during the 1800s and into the 1900s, there were rampant plagues that killed countless scores of people and that, because of vaccines, this is no longer the case. This is certainly what we believed growing up, and most people we talk to have a similar impression. It generally permeates society as an established fact.
It is difficult to underestimate the contribution of immunization to our well-being. It has been estimated that, were it not for childhood vaccinations against diphtheria, pertussis, measles, mumps, smallpox, and rubella, as well as protection afforded by vaccines against tetanus, cholera, yellow fever, polio, influenza, hepatitis B, bacterial pneumonia, and rabies, childhood death rates would probably hover in the range of 20 to 50%. Indeed, in countries where vaccination is not practiced, the death rates among infants and young children remain at that level. [1]
Paul Offit talks in his recent book Deadly Choices—How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All about how the whooping cough vaccine has reduced deaths from that disease from 7,000 to only 30.
Whooping cough (pertussis) is a devastating infection. Before a vaccine was first used in the United States in the 1940s, about three hundred thousand cases of whooping cough caused seven thousand deaths every year, almost all in young children. Now, because of the pertussis vaccine, fewer than thirty children die every year from the disease. But times are changing. [2]
This type of information can even be found in medical journals. A lengthy study on whooping cough and the whooping cough vaccine was published in 1988 in the journal Pediatrics. The first paragraph of the paper states the following:
In the United States, pertussis has been successfully controlled by routine mass immunization of infants and children. In the pre-vaccine era, there were 115,000 to 270,000 cases of pertussis and 5,000 to 10,000 deaths due to the disease each year. During the last 10 years, there have been 1,200 to 4,000 cases and five to ten deaths per year. [3]
That paragraph set the tone for the rest of the article by indicating that thousands of people died each year from whooping cough, but after the DTP vaccine was introduced, very few died. Anyone who believed this statement would, of course, believe in the benefit of the vaccine.
The problem with these statements is that they are not supported by the evidence. When we look at the actual data, we see that although many people did die from whooping cough in the early part of the 1900s, by the time the vaccine had been introduced the death rate in the United States had declined by more than 90 percent. Using the source that was referenced to make the statement in the Pediatrics paper, we see that the decline in deaths from the peak was approximately 92 percent before the introduction of the DTP vaccine. [4]
The article in the journal Pediatrics is quite damaging because it would have been read primarily by doctors, leaving many with the impression that vaccines were completely responsible for the decline in deaths. The actual number of deaths by the time of the introduction of the DTP vaccine was approximately 1,200—not the 5,000 to 10,000 often cited. Again, this faulty thinking that vaccines were responsible for the lion’s share of mortality decline is pervasive in all corners of society.
An additional important point to notice is that when looking at the graph you can clearly see that each year the trend was that of a decrease in deaths from whooping cough. At the point the vaccine was introduced there was no apparent effect in the downward trend.
Another data set from England starting at the beginning of the 20th century shows the lack of impact of the vaccines even more dramatically. Here you can see that the death rate had fallen by over 98% before the national use of the DTP vaccine in the 1950s.
England began keeping statistics in 1838, which was 62 years before official U.S. statistics were gathered. Looking at this data, we can see that the death rate from infectious diseases was high during the 1800s and declined from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s to almost zero. Looking at the whooping coughs death from England, deaths had decreased by more than 99 percent before any vaccine.
In the case of measles, the death rate had declined by almost 100 percent.
Analysis of the data shows this often-repeated mantra that vaccines were key in the decline of infectious disease deaths is a fallacy. Deaths had decreased by massive amounts before vaccinations. In the case of scarlet fever and other infectious diseases, deaths declined to near zero without any widespread vaccination.
Unfortunately, this erroneous belief has led people to trust in vaccination as the sole way to handle infectious diseases when there were clearly other factors that caused mortality to decline. Those factors were improved hygiene, sanitation, nutrition, labor laws, electricity, chlorination, refrigeration, pasteurization, and many other facets that we now generally take for granted as part of modern life. Very little of the improvement in the death rate had anything to do with medicine. A 1977 report estimated that, at best, approximately 3 percent of the mortality decline from infectious disease could be attributed to modern medical care.
In general, medical measures (both chemotherapeutic and prophylactic) appear to have contributed little to the overall decline in mortality in the United States since about 1900—having in many instances been introduced several decades after a marked decline had already set in and having no detectable influence in most instances. More specifically, with reference to those five conditions (influenza, pneumonia, diphtheria, whooping cough, and poliomyelitis) for which the decline in mortality appears substantial after the point of intervention—and on the unlikely assumption that all of this decline is attributable to the intervention . . . it is estimated that at most 3.5 percent of the total decline in mortality since 1900 could be ascribed to medical measures introduced for the diseases considered here. [5]
The emphasis today on more and more vaccines, is in part built on this ingrained thinking. The fact that deaths from infectious diseases declined so greatly before vaccines and antibiotics, is ignored. This lapse in study has created a situation where we could have learned a better way to manage all infections in a more comprehensive way. Yet, to this day, despite such a phenomenal transformation, we have failed to learn the lessons of this history. The solutions that led to a 99 percent decline in death has been ignored, with the entire emphasis on the final 1 percent, which would have occurred anyway even without a vaccine.
However, in some corners, there is recognition that vaccines were not what caused the major decline in infectious disease mortality. They often erroneously point to antibiotics and improved medical care and grudgingly give some credit to sanitation and other factors. There is little curiosity as to how all these factors worked and how they still apply today. The shift on emphasis is now on the incidence of disease after vaccination with a decreased emphasis on mortality. The thinking goes that, by wiping out the disease with vaccines, there is no risk of death. This appears to be a reasonable approach. How well has it worked?
Let’s take whooping cough as an example. In 1979 Sweden withdrew use of the DTP vaccine on the basis that it was not effective and possibly unsafe. The fear, of course, would be that with lower vaccination rates, the death rate would increase. So what happened in this case?
A 1995 letter from Victoria Romanus at the Swedish Institute of Infectious Disease Control indicated that deaths from whooping cough remained near zero. Sweden’s population was 8,294,000 in 1979 and 8,831,000 by 1995. From 1981 to 1993, eight children were recorded as dying, with the cause of death listed as pertussis. This averaged to be about 0.6 children per year possibly dying from whooping cough. These numbers show that the odds of dying from pertussis in Sweden were about 1 in 13,000,000 even when there was no national vaccination program. [6]
In another case, DTP vaccination coverage in England dropped from about 78 percent to 30 or 40 percent because of concerns over safety. The assumption was that there would be an increase in deaths due to the decreased coverage. The years from 1976 to 1980 were the ones when vaccination rates were at their lowest. Using official statistics, the number of deaths in those years totaled 35. The deaths from the previous five years (1971 to 1975), while vaccination rates were higher, totaled 55, or about 1.5 times greater than when vaccination rates were lower. [7] This was directly opposite what is generally believed should have happened.
And have whooping cough rates really been controlled? The sad truth is that whooping cough never really went away and is endemic. Huge numbers of people still cough from Bordetella pertussis, the bacteria involved in whooping cough. Because of waning vaccine- immunity, up to one-third of persistent coughs are whooping cough.
Although pertussis traditionally has been considered a disease of childhood, it was well-documented in adults nearly a century ago and is currently recognized as an important cause of respiratory disease in adolescents and adults, including the elderly. Because of waning immunity, adult and adolescent pertussis can occur even when there is a history of full immunization or natural disease . . . Studies from Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, and the United States indicate that between 12 and 32% of adults and adolescents with a coughing illness for at least 1 week are infected with Bordetella pertussis. [8]
Let’s focus on another infectious disease—measles. Keep in mind that by 1963, almost no one died from measles. During this year, the whole of New England had only five deaths (Maine: 1, New Hampshire: 0, Vermont: 3, Massachusetts: 0, Rhode Island: 1, Connecticut: 0) that were attributed to measles. [9] Deaths from asthma were actually 56 times greater than from measles during that year.
But did incidence decline as vaccine proponents emphasize? There are some graphs you can find on the Internet that claim there was little decrease in incidence. The graph I have seen that shows this only has a few data points and a line between two distant points in time. This graph is of poor quality and draws an incorrect conclusion. Looking at more comprehensive incidence data, we can see a drop in incidence in 1963 at the introduction of the measles vaccine.
Measles incidence did apparently dramatically drop after 1963. But can this drop be completely attributed to the success of the measles vaccine? The early measles vaccine that contained “killed” virus was an aluminum-precipitated vaccine produced from formaldehyde-inactivated monkey kidney cell cultures. A study from 1967 revealed that the vaccine could cause pneumonia as well as encephalopathy (inflammation of the brain).
Pneumonia is a consistent and prominent finding. Fever is severe and persistent and the degree of headache, when present, suggests a central nervous system involvement. Indeed one patient in our series who was examined by EEG, evidence of disturbed electrical activity of the brain was found, suggestive of encephalopathy . . . These untoward results of inactivated measles virus immunization was unanticipated. The fact that they have occurred should impose a restriction on the use of inactivated measles virus vaccine. We now recommend that inactivated measles virus vaccine should no longer be administered. [10]
The killed vaccines were quickly abandoned. [11] But there were also significant issues with the live vaccines, which were not highly attenuated and produced a “modified measles” rash in about half of those injected—essentially equivalent to a case of measles. Forty-eight percent of people had rash, and 83 percent had fevers up to 106°F post-injection.
So how did measles incidence drop so dramatically after the 1963 vaccine? In part, it had to do with a definition. If you had a high fever and you had a vaccine, of course you didn’t have measles even if you were sicker than you would have been if you contracted measles naturally.
Back in the 1960s, it was expected that a single shot would protect you for life without serious effects, which would later turn out not to be true.
The United State Public Health Service licensed a new, refined, live-measles vaccine. Although several live vaccines have been licensed since 1963—all of them one-shot treatments that give life immunity without serious side-effects—the new one is considered by epidemiologists as “the best so far in minimizing the side-effects.” [12]
Claims were even made in the 1960s that only a certain number of children needed to be vaccinated in order to wipe out measles.
Measles, the “harmless” childhood disease that can kill, will be nearly eradicated from most areas of the country a year from now, officials of the United States Public Health Service predict . . . Although there are still more than 12 million susceptible children, vaccination of the “right” two million to four million youngsters could wipe out the disease, according to Dr. Robert J. Warren of the Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta. [13]
More than a decade later, the objective of measles elimination was still not achieved. There were repeat epidemics that happened throughout the United States.
By 1989 the new theory on failure to eradicate was that the earlier vaccines were not as effective as originally believed. Some of the first vaccines mass produced in 1963 contained a killed virus. In 1989 Dr. Feigin of Texas Children’s Hospital stated that he believed the 1963 vaccine was “not widely effective” and that the 1967 vaccine was unstable and lost its “effectiveness” if not properly refrigerated. It was not until 1980 that a stable live measles vaccine became available. [14]
In the same year, after three types of measles vaccines had failed to produce eradication or even predictable herd immunity, vaccine scientists changed course from one shot and stated that, in using the new live vaccine, two doses would be required for reliable protection. They also recommended that everyone under the age of 32 be revaccinated because the old vaccines they received were inadequate. The single shot once promised to provide lifelong immunity against measles in the 1960s was never produced.
And was the measles incidence declining before 1963 anyway? Looking at the measles incidence data, the trend line shows that incidence was on the decline.
In fact, if that trend line held, measles incidence would have hit zero by around the year 2000. This is actually the year when the CDC declared measles had been eliminated from the United States.
So were all these vaccines worth the cost, effort, and adverse reactions to tackle what was by 1963 considered a mild childhood illness?
When we hear about vaccines, we are often told a simple story of how they stimulate antibodies. The theory goes that the stimulation of antibodies creates a memory of a disease so the next time you encounter it, your body will quickly defeat the enemy. It’s a nice, simple, and easy-to-remember story.
Believing you understand the immune system because you hear the words “antibodies” and “protection” mentioned together is like thinking you know how a car really works because you see it has wheels. The immune system is a highly complex, still-poorly understood entity, composed of many different cell lines, each producing different chemicals that are released into the blood. These chemicals are used by the body and are affected by age, stress, nutritional status, environment, and a whole host of factors that are barely understood.
“. . . the immune system remains a black box,” says Garry Fathman, MD, a professor of immunology and rheumatology and associate director of the Institute for Immunology, Transplantation and Infection . . . “It’s staggeringly complex, comprising at least 15 different interacting cell types that spew dozens of different molecules into the blood to communicate with one another and to do battle. Within each of those cells sit tens of thousands of genes whose activity can be altered by age, exercise, infection, vaccination status, diet, stress, you name it. . . . That’s an awful lot of moving parts. And we don’t really know what the vast majority of them do, or should be doing . . . [15]
The immune system is traditionally divided into the humoral immune system that is involved with antibodies and the cellular immune system that does not involve antibodies but entails the activation of various cells such as natural killer cells. What we do know is that, contrary to popular belief, antibodies are not necessary when it comes to full measles recovery.
. . . children with antibody deficiency syndromes have quite unremarkable attacks of measles with the characteristic rash and normal recovery. Furthermore, they are not unduly prone to reinfection. It therefore seems that serum antibody, at any rate in any quantity, is not required for the production of the measles rash; nor for the normal recovery from the disease; nor to prevent reinfection. [16]
Children with a deficit in antibody production, called agammaglobulinemia, recover from measles just as well as normal antibody producers, and this has been known since the late 1960s when vaccines were being developed and advanced. But antibody response is really the only thing that is talked about and promoted when it comes to vaccines. Because this knowledge disturbed the simplistic antibody-protection paradigm, it was considered a “disconcerting” discovery in this 1968 medical paper.
One of the most disconcerting discoveries in clinical medicine was the finding that children with congenital agammaglobulinaemia, who could make no antibody and had only insignificant traces of immunoglobulin in circulation, contracted measles in normal fashion, showed the usual sequence of symptoms and signs, and were subsequently immune. [17]
How does nutrition play a role in disease? Discovered in the 1920s, vitamin A was dubbed the “anti-infective” vitamin. It alone has a tremendous impact on measles deaths. During the 1990s, mortality reductions of 60 to 90 percent were measured in poor countries using vitamin A in hospitalized measles cases.
Combined analyses showed that massive doses of vitamin A given to patients hospitalized with measles were associated with an approximately 60% reduction in the risk of death overall, and with an approximate 90% reduction among infants . . . Administration of vitamin A to children who developed pneumonia before or during hospital stay reduced mortality by about 70% compared with control children. [18]
Availability of vitamin C-rich fruits and vegetables was another factor in disease morbidity and mortality reduction. There were improving trends in overall nutrition, as seen by a parallel in the decline in deaths from measles and the vitamin C deficiency disease, scurvy. Experiments done in the 1940s showed that vitamin C was effective against measles, especially when used in higher doses.
During an epidemic [of measles] vitamin C was used prophylactically and all those who received as much as 1000 mg. every six hours, by vein or muscle, were protected from the virus. Given by mouth, 1000 mg. in fruit juice every two hours was not protective unless it was given around the clock. It was further found that 1000 mg. by mouth, four to six times each day, would modify the attack; with the appearance of Koplik’s spots and fever, if the administration was increased to 12 doses each 24 hours, all signs and symptoms would disappear in 48 hours. [19]
In the early 1900s, other treatments were being successfully used to treat measles. In 1919 Dr. Drummond commented that cinnamon oil was an effective prophylactic against measles or that it made measles milder.
It has been my practice, when I meet with a case of measles in a family, to prescribe a course of cinnamon for all unprotected members of the family. In the majority of cases the person so treated [with cinnamon] escaped the disease [measles] altogether, or else had it in very mild form. [20]
Nutrition and other factors have a big impact on measles, so why aren’t we talking about them at all? Because the emphasis is always on a single, highly lucrative medical procedure—vaccination. This sole paradigm has swept virtually all other strategies to the wayside.
Another key factor to consider is that measles vaccine does not create lifelong immunity,whereas natural infection with measles does. The only way to remain immune with artificial immunity via vaccines is to be vaccinated several times during a lifetime. We have not yet seen how the vaccine will play out over several generations of exclusively vaccinated people. Epidemics are likely to become more common in the future.
A 2009 study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society investigated what could happen with waning measles vaccine immunity even with high vaccine coverage among children. They predicted that, after a long disease-free period in the population, the introduction of infection will lead to far larger epidemics than predicted by standard models.
We can foresee that vaccination will have two conflicting effects . . . it will reduce the number of newborn susceptibles and hence should have some of the usual associated public-health benefits reducing the number of cases in young children. However, this reduction in cases will lead to a reduction in boosting and therefore a greater susceptibility to infection in older age classes . . . When immunity wanes, vaccination has a far more limited impact on the average number of cases. While this observation has clear public-health implications, the dynamic consequences of the interaction between vaccination, waning immunity and boosting are far more striking. For high levels of vaccination (greater than 80%) and moderate levels of waning immunity (greater than 30 years), large-scale epidemic cycles can be induced. [21]
A 1984 study [22] reported that by 2050, the proportion of measles susceptibles may be greater than in the pre-vaccine era. So have we created a ticking time bomb with waning immunity? Will there actually be bigger measles epidemics in the future? If there are, the response will probably be to blame the unvaccinated, which has in fact been done for over 100 years, and then to enforce more vaccinations upon different age groups.
Because of the zealous pro-vaccine bias that permeates society, the true forces that drove the major decline in deaths from infectious diseases are not acknowledged. At most, there is a slight admission that “sanitation” has some effect, but better medical care and antibiotics are still given the credit.
Groups of individuals who have anointed themselves as “skeptics” seek to derail anything that questions vaccination. The definition of skeptic used to be “one who instinctively or habitually doubts, questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions”, but this definition in its modern usage has been hijacked and transformed to someone that essentially blindly supports any orthodox position as gospel. These people will continue on their crusade of supporting vaccines at all costs and to assail anything that might question their myopic view. If those people had a desire to learn the truth, perhaps they would peek beneath the hood of infectious diseases and vaccines, and learn a little more. Imagine what could be in the trunk!
Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk are authors of Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines and the Forgotten History available on amazon.
Bibliography:
1. Irwin W. Sherman, Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World, 2007, p. 66.
2. Paul A. Offit, MD, Deadly Choices—How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All, 2011, p. xii.
3. James D. Cherry, MD MSc; Philip A. Brunell, MD; Gerald S. Golden, MD; and David T. Karzon, MD, “Report on the Task Force on Pertussis and Pertussis Immunization—1988,” Pediatrics, June 1988, vol. 81, no. 6, Part 2, p. 939.
4. Historical Statistics of the United States Colonial Times to 1970 Part 1, Bureau of the Census, 1975, pp. 77.
5. John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay, “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, Health and Society, vol. 55, no. 3, summer 1977, p. 425.
6. Letter from Victoria Romanus, MD, PhD, Department of Epidemiology Swedish Institute of Infectious Disease Control, Stockholm Sweden, August 25, 1995.
7. Record of Mortality in England and Wales for 95 Years as Provided by the Office of National Statistics, 1997; Health Protection Agency Table: Notification of Deaths, England and Wales, 1970–2008.
8. Edward Rothstein, MD, and Kathryn Edwards, MD, “Health Burden of Pertussis in Adolescents and Adults,” Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, vol. 24, no. 5, May 2005, p. S44.
9. Vital Statistics of the United States 1963, Vol. II—Mortality, Part A, pp. 1–18, 1–19, 1–21.
10. Vincent A. Fulginiti, MD; Jerry J. Eller, MD; Allan W. Downie, MD; and C. Henry Kempe, MD, “Altered Reactivity to Measles Virus: Atypical Measles in Children Previously Immunized with Inactivated Measles Virus Vaccines,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 202, no. 12, December 18, 1967, p. 1080.
11. “Measles Vaccine Effective in Test—Injections with Live Virus Protect 100 Per Cent of Children in Epidemics,” New York Times, September 14, 1961.
12. “Thaler to Hold State Senate Hearing to Find Fastest Way to Expedite Plan,” New York Times, February 24, 1965.
13. Jane E. Brody, “Measles Will Be Nearly Ended by ’67, U.S. Health Aides Say,” New York Times, May 24, 1966.
14. Lisa Belkin, “Measles, Not Yet a Thing of the Past, Reveals the Limits of an Old Vaccine,” New York Times, February 25, 1989.
15. B. Goldman, “The Bodyguard: Tapping the Immune System’s Secrets,” Stanford Medicine, summer 2011.
16. P. J. Lachmann, “Immunopathology of Measles,” Proceedings Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 67, November 1974, p. 1120.
17. “Measles as an Index of Immunological Function,” The Lancet, September 14, 1968, p. 611.
18. Wafaie W. Fawzi, MD; Thomas C. Chalmers, MD; M. Guillermo Herrera, MD; and Frederick Mosteller, PhD, “Vitamin A Supplementation and Child Mortality: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of the American Medical Association, February 17, 1993, p. 901.
19. Fred R. Klenner, MD, “The Treatment of Poliomyelitis and Other Virus Diseases with Vitamin C,” Southern Medicine & Surgery, July 1949.
20. “Cinnamon as a Preventive of Measles,” American Druggist Pharmaceutical Record, New York, November 1919, p. 47.
21.J. M. Heffernan and M. J. Keeling, “Implications of Vaccination and Waning Immunity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 276, 2009.
22. D. L. Levy, “The Future of Measles in Highly Immunized Populations: A Modeling Approach,” American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 120, no. 1, July 1984, pp. 39–48.
If any recipient of this message prefers to not receive future emailings from this address, please type “unsubscribe” and your name in the subject line and hit “reply”
[themify_box]
Dr. Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
Although I have just been doing my scholarly, unbiased, science-based duty to warn (that is in direct opposition to the highly biased, indeed perverted, corporate “science” of Big Pharma that we all know is really in the game just because of the money), I have just received my first “death threat”. It came in the form of a blog post at Transcend Media Services, a European peace and justice website that regularly publishes my Duty to Warn articles.
Knowing the truth of the old phrase “You Know You’re Over the Target, When You’re Catching Flak”, when I receive attacks about something I wrote that is firmly backed up by irrefutable science, I feel motivated to continue doing my part to bring some truth to the seriously compromised healthcare non-system of America, which has been usurped by corporate entities such as Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big Finance that meet the definition of sociopathic personalities.
But, knowing the history of how progressive movements are usually stifled before they acquired power, it bothers me when I recall that so many prophetic voices throughout history have been silenced by death threats, by ad hominem attacks, by character assassinations, by smear campaigns, by threats of being fired from their jobs and, if the hero persists, actual assassination attempts (include being “suicided”) that come from entities that have hidden, but very ruthless agendas.
There are many progressive whistle-blowers and groups that many of us admire for doing courageous duty in the face of organized police state violence. Think suffragettes, anti-slavery abolitionist activists, antiwar activists, civil rights activists, feminist movement activists, gay rights activists, environmentalists, native American water protectors, etc, etc. And think of the tens of thousands of parents of vaccine-injured or vaccine-killed babies and children (and now consider the thousands of Gardasil-injured or killed young women who received that $130 per shot vaccine because the Merck corporation (of Vioxx infamy) claimed – totally theoretically – that 20 or 30 years in the future their risk of getting cancer of the cervix would possibly be lessened.
When the future of the planet and the futures – or health – of their children are at stake, courageous parents whose innocent children were harmed, are very willing to stand up and speak out even if it attracts flak from inanimate, non-human realities like governmental, pharmaceutical and media corporations. They are even willing to be abused and harassed – even shot at, by those conscienceless corporation’s highly-paid, potentially vicious mercenary armies that hire ex-special ops military veterans – as was the case with the pipeline industry at Standing Rock recently. These corporate entities, probably starting with their ubiquitous right-wing think tanks, have ulterior motives, very deep pockets and the complete cooperation of the major media – who are dependent on their prestige, largesse and, of course, advertising revenue.
But I really care about the many progressive heroes who have actually been assassinated when their courageous messages got too close to the truth. Some examples of the assassinated progressive thinkers include Jesus of Nazareth, Mohandas Gandhi, Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Paul Wellstone. Those dastardly acts surely happened because they were starting to annoy their respective Deep State entities because of their unwelcome truth-telling. Many people think that if the peace-making, anti-war, social democrat Bernie Sanders had become president of our war-mongering, police state nation, he would surely have been marked for figurative or literal assassination.
Anyway, here is the quasi-“death threat” (if condemning me to hell qualifies as a death threat) that I recently received from a drastically uninformed reader who had obviously swallowed – hook, line and sinker – the wide-spread myth that vaccines were totally responsible for stopping previously lethal infectious diseases. (Anyone who knows thoroughly the real history of vaccines knows that the lethality of many infectious diseases had already disappeared by the time the vaccines were introduced to the public. Specifically, smallpox disappeared in spite of the fact that only 10% of the world’s population ever received a small pox vaccination.
The writer of the letter obviously had never really read what I and so many other unbiased experts and scholars had written, and she obviously had fallen for the propaganda from Big Pharma (or the co-opted regulatory agencies like the subsidiaries of the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, etc). She also did not reveal her connections to the vaccine industry nor to the medical clinics that, based on their silence on this serious topic and their willingness to demean and even fire patients who distrust Big Pharma’s over-vaccination agendas for their children, must be very interested in inoculating their infants, children and adult patients with the 270 new vaccines that are in Big Pharma’s pipeline – soon ready to propagandize their importance for the public health.
Here is the letter from a Jane Foster, responding to my last column (about ad hominem attacks, the power of ignorance and cognitive dissonance), immediately followed, helpfully, by someone praising the same article. The second writer had obviously read and absorbed what I have written in the quite wonderful, peace studies-oriented Transcend Media Services, which I would highly recommend people subscribing to. For the last year’s Duty to Warn articles and information on how to subscribe to the weekly journal, go to: https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles
On 5 June 2017 at 22:46, Jane Foster (from somewhere in the UK) says:
Excuse me Gary.
You have been posting a string of unscientific horsesXXX about vaccines, and THIS is all you can come up with?
Go to hell with the rest of the genocidal anti-vax psychpaths.
To the editors: Diseases such as smallpox, polio and so has killed more than half a billion humans in the last centuries. More than all wars combined. Diseases that are preventable with vaccines. You are lending a hand to a psychopathic movement that want us to go back to those times where (mostly poor) people died due to lack of vaccines.
Why are you supporting these genocidal nuts?
Reply
On 6 June 2017 at 06:02, Gary Corseri. says:
Dear Dr. Kohl,
Thank you for another informative and enlightening article.
You wisely disarmed potential nonsensical critics with your apt series of lead-in quotes–from some of the great thinkers. That is: you “disarmed” those wise enough to contemplate your message; to respect your research and your dedication to the Hippocratic Oath and the Precautionary Principle. That dedication is manifest in this article (and in others that I have read by you).
You are sensibly calling attention to the destructive Power of Ignorance, and, in particular, lamenting “ad hominem” attacks that merely highlight the assailant’s paucity of wit or knowledge. Such attacks have become quite the norm in the US political system during the past 2 years. Rather than look for some “common ground”– (Johann) Galtung often asks: “What is your vision? How can we share?–rather than look for space to share, for the common good, the US public is dividing along “totally correct” and “totally false” narratives; and identifying simplistically as “good guys” or “bad guys.” Miss the subtleties of thoughts and emotions and surely we miss the range of qualities that make us human! In short, we not only “miss the point,” we dehumanize “the other” and ourselves!
Keep on keeping on, Dr. Kohls! Whether you write cogently about our corrupt political system, our misconstrued history, muddled media, or an exploitative medical-pharmaceutical-dental system, you write clearly, incisively and honestly.
And below are assorted quotes from concerned, unbiased scientists (who have resisted becoming affiliated with the corrupted vaccine industry) regarding the unequivocal neurological damage from the various highly neurotoxic vaccine ingredients, such as mercury and aluminum.
But remember, it isn’t just kids being adversely affected by neurotoxins; it’s also the older generation who have their own CDC-recommended vaccine schedule. And the evidence is that Alzheimer’s Disease has important vaccine-induced neurotoxicity as a factor.
[themify_quote]“In the field of chemical toxicology it is universally recognized that combinations of toxins may bring exponential increases of toxicity; ie, a combination of two chemicals may bring a 10-fold increase in toxicity, three chemicals 100-fold increases. This same principle almost certainly applies to the immunosuppressive effects of viral vaccines when administered in combination, as with the MMR vaccine, among which the measles vaccine is (known to be) exceptionally immunosuppresive.” – Harold Buttram, MD[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“The human immune system is divided into two major classes: 1) Cellular Immunity (for which injected vaccines do absolutely nothing, except to weaken it), located in the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts and their respective lymph nodes and 2) Humoral Immunity, with production of antigen-specific antibodies by plasma cells in the bone marrow. For eons of time the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts have been the primary sites of infectious microbe entry into the body so that, of necessity, mucosal/cellular immunity has evolved as the primary defense system, with humoral immunity serving a secondary or backup role…Vaccines are reversing these roles, attempting to substitute vaccine-induced humoral immunity for the far more efficient mucosal immunity, the latter in turn undergoing a process of “atrophy of disuse” as a result of this role-switching.” — Harold Buttram, MD[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“The steadily increasing patterns of physical and/or mental illnesses among American children show no signs of abating. Unless this issue is definitively addressed, at some future time the process will pass a point of no return (socially and economically) from the sheer numbers of incapacitated children.” – Harold Buttram, MD[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“For a long time no one considered the effect of repeated vaccinations on the brain. This was based on a mistaken conclusion that the brain was protected from immune activation by its special protective gateway called the blood-brain barrier. More recent studies have shown that immune cells can enter the brain directly, and more importantly, the brain’s own special immune system can be activated by vaccination.” – Russell Blaylock, MD[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“A recent study by the world-renowned immunologist Dr. H. Hugh Fudenberg found that adults vaccinated yearly for five years in a row (in the 1980s and 1990s) with the (mercury-containing) flu vaccine had a 10-fold increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease. He attributes this to the mercury and aluminum in the vaccine. Interestingly, both of these metals have been shown to activate microglia and increase excitotoxicity in the brain.” — Russell Blaylock, MD[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“…our current results are consistent with the existing evidence on the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of Aluminum adjuvants which altogether strongly implicate these compounds as contributors to the rising prevalence of neurobehavioral disorders in children. Given that autism has devastating consequences in a life of a child, and that currently in the developed world over 1% of children suffer from some form of ASD, it would seem wise to make efforts towards reducing infant exposure to aluminum from vaccines.“ — C A Shaw, PhD[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“There is a serious problem with vaccine safety. Vaccine aluminum adjuvant has adverse neurological effects, at dosages that are recommended by the US CDC. Vaccine critics are supported by the science. Parents refusing to vaccinate according to the recommended CDC schedule are supported by the science. Use aluminum-containing vaccines with great caution, or not at all.” – Chris Shaw, PhD http://vaccinepapers.org/category/aluminum/[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant…research clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation andassociated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.” — (From Tomljenovic and Shaw’s journal article “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are They Safe?”, published in Curr Med Chem. 2011;18(17):2630-7.)[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant. Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s medical understanding of their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor. There is also a concerning scarcity of data on toxicology and pharmacokinetics of these compounds. In spite of this, the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted.” — Tomljenjovic and Shaw[/themify_quote]
Nephrol Dial Transplant. 2002;17 Suppl 2:17-20
The potential role of aluminium in Alzheimer’s disease
Campbell A
Abstract
…A review of the epidemiological and clinical evidence linking aluminium to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is presented. The article discusses the role of aluminium in two mechanisms that have been linked to neurodegenerative disorders, including AD…The results discussed here have broad implications for the role played by aluminium and other metals in neurodegenerative diseases, and suggest that long-term exposure to supra-physiological amounts of these metals should be avoided.
Industrialized societies produce many convenience foods with aluminum additives that enhance various food properties and use alum (aluminum sulfate or aluminum potassium sulfate) in water treatment to enable delivery of large volumes of drinking water to millions of urban consumers. The present causality analysis evaluates the extent to which the routine, life-long intake, and metabolism of aluminum compounds can account for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), using Austin Bradford Hill’s nine epidemiological and experimental causality criteria, includingstrength of the relationship, consistency, specificity, temporality, dose-dependent response, biological rationale, coherence with existing knowledge, experimental evidence, and analogy.
Mechanisms that underlie the risk of low concentrations of aluminum relate to (1) aluminum’s absorption rates, allowing the impression that aluminum is safe to ingest and as an additive in food and drinking water treatment, (2) aluminum’s slow progressive uptake into the brain over a long prodromal phase, and (3) aluminum’s similarity to iron, in terms of ionic size, allows aluminum to use iron-evolved mechanisms to enter the highly-active, iron-dependent cells responsible for memory processing. Aluminum particularly accumulates in these iron-dependent cells to toxic levels, dysregulating iron homeostasis and causing microtubule depletion, eventually producing changes that result in disconnection of neuronal afferents and efferents, loss of function and regional atrophy consistent with MRI findings in AD brains. Alzheimer’s Disease is a human form of chronic aluminum neurotoxicity.The causality analysis demonstrates that chronic aluminum intake causes Alzheimer’s Disease.
Aluminum Induced Immunoexcitotoxicity in Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Disorders
Russell L. Blaylock, MD
Abstract
A great deal has been learned about the neurotoxicity of aluminum over the past two decades in terms of its ability to disrupt cellular function. Newer evidence suggests that a more central pathophysiological mechanism may be responsible for much of the toxicity of aluminum and aluminofluoride compounds on the brain. This mechanism involves activation of the brain’s innate immune system, primarily the microglia, with a release of neurotoxic concentrations of excitotoxins and pro-inflammatory cytokines, chemokines and immune mediators.
A large number of studies suggest that excitotoxicity plays a significant role in the neurotoxic action of a number of metals, including aluminum. Recently, researchers have found that while most of the chronic neurodegenerative effects of these metals are secondary to prolonged inflammation, it is the enhancement of excitotoxicity by the immune mediators that is responsible for most of the metal’s toxicity…This paper reviews the evidence linking immunoexcitotoxicity to aluminum’s neurotoxic effects.
Evidence that Ingested Aluminum Additives Contained in Processed Foods and Alum-Treated Drinking Water are a Major Risk Factor for Alzheimer’s Disease
Judie R. Walton
Abstract
Aluminum (Al) is a recognized neurotoxin causally linked to several neurodegenerative diseases with a dementia component. Al has long had a GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) rating by the US FDA, that allows Al salts to be used in food manufacture and clarification of urban drinking water supplies. Routine ingestion of Al salts throughout life causes bioavailable Al to accumulate in the brain where it specifically deposits in regions most vulnerable in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD has an insidious onset, developing slowly and progressively, producing cognitive deterioration in old age…a study revealed that a significant proportion of rats, particularly those that consumed Al in an equivalent amount to the high end of the human total dietary Al range, progressively accumulated Al in their brain, accompanied by AD-related neuropathology and cognitive deterioration in old age. This article describes evidence for the close involvement of Al with the major AD hallmarks and provides suggestions that may help to remediate the current AD epidemic in westernized countries.
Histol Histopathol. 2008 Apr;23(4):433-9
Aluminium exposure induces Alzheimer’s disease-like histopathological alterations in mouse brain
Rodella LF, et al
Abstract
Aluminium (Al) is a neurotoxic metal and Al exposure may be a factor in the aetiology of various neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The major pathohistological findings in the AD brain are the presence of neuritic plaques containing beta-amyloid (Abeta) which may interfere with neuronal communication…Chronic exposure over 12 months to aluminium sulphate in drinking water resulted in deposition of Abeta similar to that seen in congophilic amyloid angiopathy (CAA) in humans and a reduction in neuronal expression of GRP78 similar to what has previously been observed in Alzheimer’s disease. So, we hypothesise that chronic Al administration is responsible for oxidative cell damage that interferes with functions inducing Abeta accumulation and neurodegenerative damage.
Neurotoxicology. 2009 Nov;30(6):1059-69
Brain lesions comprised of aluminum-rich cells that lack microtubules may be associated with the cognitive deficit of Alzheimer’s disease
Walton JR
Abstract
A recent longitudinal study described an inducible rodent model for age-related cognitive deterioration. This model was produced by chronically feeding rats aluminum, from age 12 months onwards, in measured amounts equivalent to total aluminum levels ingested by Americans from their food, beverages and aluminum additives. The rats performed a hippocampal-dependent spatial memory discrimination task weekly throughout middle age and old age. One-third of the rats attained significantly lower mean performance scores in old age than middle age, in an aluminum dose-dependent manner, and exhibited behavioral signs observed in dementia.
The present study used histological and immunohistochemical techniques to identify neuropathological difference between brains of rats that showed cognitive deterioration and the cognitively intact controls. Most aged rat brains had large numbers of aluminum-loaded pyramidal cells in their entorhinal cortex and temporal association cortex but the cognitively deteriorated rats had threefold more such cells than controls (p<0.01). A distinguishing feature was that all brains of the cognitively deteriorated rats, and none of controls, had at least one substantial hippocampal lesion that consisted of aluminum-rich microtubule-depleted pyramidal cells with shriveled processes, and loss of synapse density. Corticolimbic sections from brains of humans with Alzheimer’s disease also showed neuropathology consistent with this type of damage. The evidence suggests bioavailable aluminum gradually accumulates in cortical and limbic regions of susceptible subjects’ brains, eventually producing hippocampal lesions consisting of dysfunctional aluminum-rich microtubule-depleted pyramidal cells with damaged neurites and synapse loss. These lesions expand over time, disrupting afferent and efferent hippocampal circuitry with the development of clinically overt dementia.
Brain Res Bull. 2001 May 15;55(2):211-7
Effects of aluminum on the neurotoxicity of primary cultured neurons and on the aggregation of beta-amyloid protein
Kawahara M, et al
Abstract
Recent epidemiological, neuropathological, and biochemical studies have suggested a possible link between the neurotoxicity of aluminum and the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. However, this relationship remains controversial. To investigate detailed characteristics of neurotoxicity of aluminum, we used primary cultured neurons of rat cerebral cortex as an in vitro model system for the observation of morphological changes induced by chronic exposure to aluminum. Although the exposure to aluminum chloride (10-100 microM) for 1 week did not cause marked neuronal death, degeneration of neuritic processes and accumulation of tau protein and beta-amyloid protein appeared after chronic exposure to 50 microM aluminum chloride for more than 3 weeks. We also investigated the polymerization of beta-amyloid protein in vitro using the immunoblotting technique. We thus found that aluminum induced conformational changes in beta-amyloid protein and enhanced its aggregation in vitro. The aggregated beta-amyloid protein was dissolved by the addition of desferrioxamine, a chelator of aluminum. The aggregated beta-amyloid protein pre-incubated with aluminum formed fibrillar deposits on the surface of cultured neurons.
J Inorg Biochem. 2013 Sep;126:35-7
Selective accumulation of aluminum in cerebral arteries in Alzheimer’s disease (AD)
Bhattacharjee S, et al
Abstract
Once biologically available aluminum bypasses gastrointestinal and blood-brain barriers, this environmentally-abundant neurotoxin has an exceedingly high affinity for the large pyramidal neurons of the human brain hippocampus. This same anatomical region of the brain is also targeted by the earliest evidence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) neuropathology. The mechanism for the selective targeting and transport of aluminum into the hippocampus of the human brain is not well understood. In an effort to improve our understanding of a pathological aluminum entry system into the brain, this study examined the aluminum content of 8 arteries that supply blood to the hippocampus, including the aorta and several cerebral arteries. In contrast to age-matched controls, in AD patients we found a gradient of increasing aluminum concentration from the aorta to the posterior cerebral artery that supplies blood to the hippocampus. Primary cultures of human brain endothelial cells were found to have an extremely high affinity for aluminum when compared to other types of brain cells. Together, these results suggest for the first time that endothelial cells that line the cerebral vasculature may have biochemical attributes conducive to binding and targeting aluminum to selective anatomical regions of the brain, such as the hippocampus, with potential downstream pro-inflammatory and pathogenic consequences.
J Inorg Biochem. 2009 Nov;103(11):1548-54
APP expression, distribution and accumulation are altered by aluminum in a rodent model for Alzheimer’s disease
Walton, JR, Wang
Abstract
…We examined in vivo effects of aluminum on amyloid precursor protein (APP) in aged rats, obtained from previously-reported longitudinal studies, that chronically ingested aluminum in amounts equivalent to total dietary aluminum levels that Americans routinely ingest…This study shows aluminum routinely derived from chronic oral ingestion, that gradually accumulates in brain regions important for memory-processing, is sufficient to increase APP levels in neural cells of those regions. Aluminum may thus launch the cascade that results in the formation of amyloid plaques in human brain.
Brain Res. 2008 Sep 26;1232:94-103
Impairment of mitochondrial energy metabolism in different regions of rat brain following chronic exposure to aluminium
Kumar V, Bal A, Gill KD
Abstract
… Mitochondrial preparations from aluminium-treated rats revealed significant decrease in the activity of various electron transport complexes…in the hippocampus region…This decrease in the activities of electron transport complexes in turn affected the ATP synthesis and ATP levels adversely in the mitochondria isolated from aluminium treated rat brain regions…The present study thus highlights the significance of altered mitochondrial energy metabolism and increased ROS production as a result of chronic aluminium exposure in different regions of the rat brain.
Indian J Exp Biol. 2010 Jul;48(7):737-43
Microsomal Ca2+ flux modulation as an indicator of heavy metal toxicity
Pentyala S, et al
Abstract
…Aluminum (Al), lead (Pb) and mercury (Hg) were reported to alter Calcium (Ca)-regulated events thereby causing neurotoxicity. Hence, an attempt was made characterize IP3 mediated Ca2+ release from rat brain microsomes under the influence of Al, Pb and Hg…All the three metals inhibited inositol trisphosphate (IP3)-mediated Ca2+ release, Pb being more potent. The order of potency of these three metals was Pb>Hg>Al…These results suggest that neurotoxicity exerted by Al, Pb and Hg may be due to the interference of these metals with IP3 mediated calcium release and also interfering with the microsomal Ca2+ sequestration mechanism.
[themify_box]
Dr. Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
147 years ago, the disastrous human and economic consequences of the American Civil War were becoming increasingly apparent, especially to certain thoughtful wise women who had seen their testosterone-laden loved ones eagerly march off to that “inglorious” war 5 years earlier. Those men and women, as is still the case today, had no idea of the psychological and spiritual devastation that comes from killing fellow humans until it was too late. But the well-hidden truth hit them when they saw their loved ones come home, changed forever. Some came home dead, some were just physically wounded but all were spiritually deadened.
That “patriotic” war basically ended in mutual exhaustion in 1865. The Northern foot-soldiers (who were numerically stronger) did not feel gleeful over the hollow victory” – just relief. Many Civil War-era women, including Howe, had actually willingly participated in the flag-waving fervor that war–mongers and war-profiteers can easily manufacture. Pro-war propaganda has always been directed at poor and working class men who must be duped into doing the soul-damning dirty work of killing and being killed.
Julia Ward Howe, author of the Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870, was a life-long abolitionist and therefore, early on, she was a supporter of the Union Army’s anti-slavery rationale for going to war to prevent the pro-slavery politicians and industrialists in the Confederate South from seceding from the union over the slavery issue.
Howe was a compassionate and well-educated middle child of an upper class family. She was also a poet who, in the early days of the Civil War, had written “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” using many biblically-based lyrics. Howe had intended her song to be sung as an abolitionist song; however, because of some of the militant-sounding lyrics and the eminently marchable tune, it was rapidly adopted by Union Army propagandists as its most inspiring war song, a reality that Howe likely regretted when the mass slaughter of the world’s first “total war” became clear to her.
Howe wrote the “Battle Hymn” in one sitting (in the early hours of November 18, 1861), but she soon became a pacifist and an antiwar activist. At the time she wrote the song, the Civil War was just starting and had not yet degenerated into the wholesale slaughter that was made possible by the technological advances in weaponry (mainly artillery and rifled muskets that were more accurate) that would make cavalry charges, the bayonet and the sword obsolete.
<<<Back then the Press Didn’t Censor out ALL the Horrors of War>>>
Howe’s evolution from cheerleader for war to anti-war activism came about after she witnessed the mutual mass slaughter of the War Between the States (1861 – 1865). By the time she proposed a national day of mourning for the victims of all wars, she had also become aware of the carnage that was occurring overseas in the Franco-Prussian War, which had started in July of 1870.
That war, won by Germany, was brief, but close to 100,000 soldiers were killed in action and another 100,000 were severely wounded. As is tragically normal for warrior nations of all historical eras, nobody thought to count up the psychological and spiritual casualties or either soldiers or civilians. But Howe understood. Her awareness of the realities of war was possible because war correspondents were allowed to write about the barbaric nature of modern war, which horrified sensitive humans like Howe.
It hadn’t taken too long for peace-loving, justice-oriented and compassionate observers to recognize that war was indeed, the equivalent of hell on earth. Howe understood what Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman had meant when he uttered his famous statement about the satanic nature of war. Sherman’s statement indicted his era’s “Chicken Hawks*”:
“I confess without shame that I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have never heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell.”
* Chicken Hawks are flag-waving war-mongering political or economic leaders who have never experienced the gruesome realities of combat war and yet have no problems promoting militarism and sending somebody else’s sons and daughters off “into harm’s way”. Recent examples include Republicans like Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Condolezza Rice, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Rudy Guiliani, Rick Santorum, Phil Gramm, and many Democrats as well, including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The list of Chicken Hawk elites also includes many right-wing journalists and reporters who particularly love to beat the war drum, but who also avoided serving in the military themselves, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, etc, etc.
Women throughout history have witnessed their sons and husbands returning home broken in body, mind and spirit. Those psychologically traumatized veterans, no matter on what side of the battle line they fought, and whether they claimed some sort of hollow victory or not, were all equally defeated when the war ended. And most of them never regarded themselves as heroes until somebody else insisted on the designation. Their bodies and brains had been forever changed and they knew it. And in their hearts they knew that war was not glorious.
<<<Soldiers’ Heart: the Civil War-era’s PTSD>>>
The unexpected development for many of the mothers of the returning Civil War soldiers was the fact that, while many of the veterans came home showing no physical scars, most of them were still disabled mentally, and many of them actually got progressively worse after coming home. In cases of combat-induced trauma the healing effect of time doesn’t work like it can work in less serious types of trauma.
Military veterans with combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) all too commonly have trouble functioning in society after the war. Many become severely depressed and/or anxious and suffer disabling daytime flashbacks of the original trauma (called nightmares when they occur in their sleep, but which are commonly misdiagnosed by psychiatrists as hallucinations – thus accounting for the falsely high incidence of “schizophrenia” among Vietnam vets). May military vets have serious insomnia (and thus sleep deprivation), serious concentration problems and are frequently develop drug addictions (to both illicit drugs and prescription drugs). Many combat-induced PTSD victims become suicidal, homicidal and/or turn to a life of crime (all these behaviors are seriously potentiated by the use of brain-altering addictive drugs or during the process of withdrawing from them).
It is a fact that some of the most infamous post-Civil War outlaws, train robbers, bank robbers and serial killers of the late 1800s got their start as Civil War soldiers (the members of the James and Younger gangs are good examples).
America has never known what to do with the large numbers of traumatized veterans that come home after any of their wars, and in the Civil War, the first “veterans homes” were constructed specifically for the care of invalided ex-soldiers who were “made crazy” by the war. Without the nation’s help, these victims would have otherwise been homeless, despairing, jobless, helpless and likely to starve to death.
Many of these unfortunate veterans were diagnosed as having “Soldiers’ Heart”, also known in the Civil War era as “Nostalgia”, a commonly incurable malady, that, after World War I came to be known as “shell shock”. After World War II the disorder was known as “combat fatigue”, and after the Vietnam War it was known as “posttraumatic stress disorder”.
<<<Howe’s Call to Action for Mothers>>>
Julia Ward Howe was a humanist who cared about suffering people. She was also a feminist, a social justice activist and a suffragette, and it was because of her anti-war commitment that she wrote the famous “Mother’s Day Proclamation” five years after the end of the Civil War, which resulted in a total of 600,000 dead American soldiers, with no accurate count of the probably much larger number of those soldiers who were wounded, missing in action or committed suicide after the war was over.
The Mother’s Day Proclamation was partly a lament for the useless deaths and partly a call to stop future wars. The call to action was not directed at men, most of whom would have refused to admit, because of their masculine pride, that their dead buddies had died in vain. Rather, the call was directed at women, who were more thoughtful, humane and compassionate than the more violence-prone male members of the species.
<<<The Intent of Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation has Been Conveniently Forgotten>>>
Sadly, Howe’s original call for mothers to protest against war on a regular basis has been struck from the consciousness of our capitalist, corporate-controlled media, militarized and war-profiteering society. Howe’s call has been watered-down to a sentimental shadow of its original intent. And the war-weary world and its innocent children are increasingly suffering because of it.
Mother’s Day in America was officially established in 1914 (May 9) as an annual holiday, but no mention was made by President Wilson that Howe wanted the day dedicated as a day of peace. Wilson instead said it was to commemorate America’s mothers.
And so Mother’s Day eventually became commercialized into just another profit-making holiday for corporations, with no regard for its original intent (pro-peace/anti-war). So now, just like most American holidays (especially including the originally religious ones like Easter and Christmas), Mother’s Day has been commercially exploited. What was originally a call to mobilize outraged mothers to keep their duped sons and husbands from going off half-cocked to kill and die for some corporate war profiteer or other, has become just another opportunity for commercial enterprises to enhance their bottom lines. Mention of its original purpose is a rarity.
One wonders what “irrelevant agencies” Howe was talking about in line two of her Proclamation below. Surely she meant the predecessors of America’s modern-day militarists, politicians, bankers, media moguls, sociopathic corporatists and various bureaucratic agencies that have been royally messing things up all over the world.
Think of all the nations that America’s military has bombed, invaded, and occupied with many of them then being economically colonized by our predatory financial corporations. Think of all the countries around the world that our CIA has destabilized and helped to overthrow. Think of all the foreign national elections that our American Deep State has covertly influenced so that they will conform to our “national interests” (meaning, of course, mainly American “business interests”).
Here is a list of all the nations that America has bombed, just since World War II: China 1945-46, Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, Guatemala 1960, Belgian Congo 1964, Guatemala 1964, Dominican Republic 1965-66, Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Lebanon 1982-84, Grenada 1983-84, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1981-92, Nicaragua 1981-90, Iran 1987-88, Libya 1989, Panama 1989-90, Iraq 1991, Kuwait 1991, Somalia 1992-94, Bosnia 1995, Iran 1998, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, Yugoslavia – Serbia 1999, Afghanistan 2001 – ?, Iraq 2003 – ?, Somalia 2001, 2011, Pakistan 2009 – ?, Yemen 2009, 2011, 2016 – ?, Libya 2011, Syria 2015 – ?. The list of CIA covert operations is much longer.
<<<When Will We (Males) Ever Learn?>>>
Note in Howe’s manifesto below how strongly she felt about wives and mothers never again having to be put in the position of applauding their soldier-husbands or soldier-sons when they came home from war “reeking of carnage”. Howe clearly felt that mothers should never again let war-making, war-profiteering institutions make killers out of their sons who they had raised to be ethical, humane citizens with a love for humankind. The prevention of such “reeking of carnage” is so much simpler than the never-ending attempts to somehow reverse the often untreatable consequences of the horrors of combat war. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and all that.
Let the people of good will begin again to promote the peacemaking vision of Julia Ward Howe and her female cohorts a century and a half ago. Given America’s current chaotic time of perpetual war, there is no time to lose. A good place to begin would be this Mother’s Day, May 13, 2017, perhaps followed up by a boycott of the upcoming, highly militarized, war-promoting Duluth Air Show (featuring the US Navy Blue Angels, and various war planes including an F-35, an F-16 and Canadian Air Force fighter jet ) partially designed to interest impressionable young boys into someday joining the military but with no information about the above-mentioned consequences of participating in war.
Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation
“Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or tears!
“Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.
“Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience.
“We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
“From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, disarm’
“The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor does violence indicate possession.
“As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
“Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar but of God.
“In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions and the great and general interests of peace.”
[themify_box]
Dr. Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
[themify_quote]“The full extent of the Gardasil scandal needs to be assessed: everyone knew when this vaccine was released on the American market that it would prove to be worthless…I predict that Gardasil will become the greatest medical scandal of all time because at some point in time, the evidence will add up to prove that this vaccine, technical and scientific feat that it may be, has absolutely no effect on cervical cancer and that all the very many adverse effects which destroy lives and even kill, serve no other purpose than to generate profit for the manufacturers. Gardasil is useless and costs a fortune and decision-makers at all levels are aware of it! Cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, paralysis of the lower limbs, vaccine-induced MS and vaccine-induced encephalitis can be found, whatever the vaccine.” — Dr Bernard Dalbergue (former Merck employee)[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]Merck acknowledges that in their Gardasil clinical trials, subjects have been known to be afflicted with neurological disorders that include “Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), transverse myelitis, motor neuron disease… autoimmune disorders…and death.” – From Merck’s product information sheet[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]Unsolicited post-marketing reports from patients included these adverse neurological effects:acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, dizziness, Guillain-Barré syndrome, headache, syncope sometimes accompanied by tonic-clonic movements(ie seizures).” – from Merck’s product insert for the 9-valent Gardasil product marketed in New Zealand[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.” – President Ronald Reagan, as he signed The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies from all medico-legal liability when children die, are injured or are disabled from vaccine injuries, thus reversing many of the intentions of the original legislation establishing the FDA[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“The human immune system is divided into two major classes: 1) Cellular Immunity,(for which injected vaccines do absolutely nothing, except to weaken it) located in the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts and their respective lymph nodes and 2) Humoral Immunity, with production of antigen-specific antibodies by plasma cells in the bone marrow. For eons of time the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts have been the primary sites of infectious microbe entry into the body so that, of necessity, mucosal/cellular immunity has evolved as the primary defense system, with humoral immunity serving a secondary or backup role…Vaccines are reversing these roles, attempting to substitute vaccine-induced humoral immunity for the far more efficient mucosal immunity, the latter in turn undergoing a process of “atrophy of disuse” as a result of this role-switching.” – Harold Buttram, MD[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“In the field of chemical toxicology it is universally recognized that combinations of toxins may bring exponential increases of toxicity; ie, a combination of two chemicals may bring a 10-fold increase in toxicity, three chemicals 100-fold increases. This same principle almost certainly applies to the immunosuppressive effects of viral vaccines when administered in combination, as with the MMR vaccine, among which the measles vaccine is (known to be) exceptionally immunosuppresive.” – Harold Buttram, MD[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“…the NIH (National Institutes of Health) is incapable of conducting conflict-free research. …it is clear that the system managing our vaccine program is corrupt beyond repair and needs a complete overhaul.” – Lori Mellwain, National Autism Association board chair[/themify_quote]
[themify_quote]“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair, whose 1903 novel “Jungle” led to President Theodore Roosevelt’s pushing through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.[/themify_quote]
Last year there was an article published in my local newspaper describing an outbreak of a syndrome afflicting a group of young women. The syndrome was eventually labeled by the Mayo Clinic as Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). As with most of the many iatrogenic illnesses (whose known causes are drug-induced or are caused by physician-prescribed “treatments” such as vaccine administration), the medical establishment regards POTS as having “no known cause”.
The young women involved were students that had, according to the article, been ill for an unspecified number of months. The young women were underclasswomen in a local high school, where they had found each other and started a support group. At least two of them had had symptoms since age the early teens, the typical age at which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) mandate (for pre-sexually active girls) a series of three intramuscular, aluminum-containing inoculations using one of the two FDA-approved, so-called “anti-cervical cancer” vaccines (the Human Papilloma Virus [HPV] vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix).
The Big Pharma giant Merck (of Vioxx and MMR/mumps infamy) makes and markets Gardasil and the equally large Big Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (of Paxil and Wellbutrin infamy) makes and markets Cervarix. Gardasil contains 4 genetically-engineered human papilloma virus-like antigens in it and Cervarix contains 2. The two vaccines have been approved by the heavily conflicted FDA (corrupted by industry shills) for safety and efficacy and have been pushed by the equally heavily conflicted CDC and AAP. The vaccines are described in more detail in previous Duty to Warn columns (see the links below).
The young women had been sickened for months with symptoms that included (according to the newspaper article) dizziness, light-headedness, fainting, headaches, stomach pains, cramps, nausea, “brain fog”, flushing, purplish legs, reddened hands and numbing fatigue. The most frustrating symptom mentioned in the article was that of chronic fatigue.
Because I had been doing a lot of research on the American epidemic of vaccine-induced (and therefore iatrogenic) illnesses, I wondered if some of the women had received their series of aluminum-containing HPV shots – or perhaps may have received other vaccinations known to cause vaccine-injuries. Unfortunately I was unable to find out more specific clinical details, but the information given made me want to search the literature.
Eventually, I found out that some of the young women had eventually gone to the Mayo Clinic where they received a diagnosis of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (“of unknown etiology”) – and therefore the girls were offered no cure or suggestions about prevention. And one can assume that they weren’t given any advice about avoiding receiving any toxic substance that could have triggered the illness. Read on.
Even though the FDA approved the vaccine to (theoretically) prevent HPV-associated cancer of the uterine cervix, no one will ever be certain if any cancers will actually be prevented until 20 – 30 years from now, because that is how long cancer of the cervix takes to develop after exposure to the carcinogenic virus. And the clinical trial results presented to the FDA only lasted a few years! Nevertheless, the FDA approved the inoculants, and the CDC and AAP immediately started recommending the very expensive shots (up to $130 per shot, not including office visit charges!) for girls of middle school age before there is any sexual activity).
Merck’s safety review group acknowledged a number of adverse events observed in the clinical trials of Gardasil, which physicians are supposed to inform patients or parents about before obtaining permission to inject the hazardous substance into the bodies of children.
Gardasil’s product insert states:
“local injection site reactions, syncope (fainting), dizziness, nausea, headaches, hypersensitivity reactions (such as rashes, hives, itching and anaphylaxis), Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), transverse myelitis, motor neuron disease, venous thromboembolic events (blood clots), pancreatitis, autoimmune disorders, pregnancy, and death.”
Delayed reactions reported by Merck (for its 9-valent Gardasil product marketed in New Zealand) from spontaneous (unsolicited) post-marketing patient reports include the following:
Infections and infestations: cellulitis
Blood and lymphatic system disorders: idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, lymphadenopathy
Nervous system disorders: acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, dizziness, Guillain-Barré syndrome, headache, syncope sometimes accompanied by tonic-clonic movements. Gastrointestinal disorders: nausea, vomiting.
Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders: arthralgia, myalgia
General disorders and administration site conditions: asthenia, chills, fatigue, malaise. Immune system disorders: Hypersensitivity reactions including anaphylactic/anaphylactoid reactions, bronchospasm, and urticaria
The website of the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, just like the websites of most other major clinics that benefit financially from aggressive over-vaccination agendas, mentions the following list of innocuous-sounding adverse effects from HPV inoculations:
“may cause soreness at the injection site (the arm), headaches and low-grade fever. Sometimes dizziness or fainting occurs after the injection. Remaining seated for 15 minutes after the injection can reduce the risk of fainting. In addition, Cervarix might also cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or abdominal pain.”
Note that the Mayo Clinic cleverly fails to mention any of the serious life-threatening adverse effects that were listed by the manufacturers, specifically not mentioning death or autoimmune disorders. The principle of informed consent is obviously being side-stepped – even by the Mayo Clinic.
Soon after Gardasil was introduced into the CDC’s recommended pediatric vaccination schedule, the independent Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) started reporting numerous adverse events related to the HPV injections, including fainting, pain at the injection site, headaches, nausea, fever, tonic-clonic (jerking) muscular movements and seizure-like activity. Fainting was particularly common after injections. The fainting spells sometimes caused serious injuries, such as head injuries.
Just two years after Gardasil’s introduction into the US market, VAERS reported 32 deaths, more or less equally distributed after the first, second or third inoculation. The median interval from vaccination to death was 14.5 days.
Other less-frequent illnesses reported by VAERS included:
“autoimmune hemolytic anemia, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, lymphadenopathy, pulmonary embolus, nausea, pancreatitis, vomiting, asthenia (weakness), chills, death, fatigue, malaise, autoimmune diseases, hypersensitivity reactions (including anaphylactic/anaphylactoid reactions, bronchospasm, and urticaria), arthralgia, myalgia, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, dizziness, Guillain-Barré syndrome, headache, motor neuron disease, paralysis, seizures, syncope (sometimes resulting in falling with injury), transverse myelitis, and deep venous thrombosis.”
According to the VAERS website, as of January 2015 there have been 220 HPV vaccine-related deaths, 1,283 chronically disabled patients, 3,945 hospital admissions, 12,305 admissions to emergency rooms, 595 abnormal Pap smears (including 262 cases of cervical dysplasia and 100 cases of cervical cancer!). Note that the FDA has previously admitted that as few as 1% of adverse reactions to drugs or vaccines are ever reported by patients or physicians so these numbers are likely to be falsely low. The real number of adverse events related to HPV could be as high as 100 times more that the reported statistics above!
Vaccine-related illnesses or deaths, just like many chronic illnesses from toxic exposures, can be delayed by months. Therefore it is likely that adverse reactions to any vaccine (or prescription drug, for that matter) may not be recognized by the patient or her doctor as being caused by the toxic substance, particularly the occurrence of a vaccine-induced chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disorders or POTS.
It is also likely, since physicians are widely and thoroughly indoctrinated into the belief system that all vaccines are totally safe and totally effective, they would tend to be unwilling to admit to any vaccine-related adverse event.
I end this article with some more quotes from vaccinology and immunology experts about the serious problems of America’s vaccine industry (and the studied lack of media attention to the truth about vaccines and iatrogenic illnesses) and then end with a few excerpts from some of the multitude of medical journal articles that support the assertions and warnings above.
Knowledgeable and informed observers of Big Pharma’s tendency to habitually lie about the value of their newest blockbuster products are shocked at how the medical establishment has accepted these new and dangerous vaccines without much skepticism. Just claiming that Gardisil will prevent future cancers of the cervix is almost laughable – if it weren’t so serious.
Below are some useful quotes and also abstracts from peer-reviewed medical journal articles that pertain to and support this discussion.
“The autism epidemic is real, and excessive vaccinations are the cause.” – Dr Bernard Rimland
“Completely unvaccinated children have less chronic disease and a lower risk of autism than
vaccinated children.” — J. B. Handley, Jr – founder of Operation Rescue
“The soaring incidence of physical and mental illnesses among today’s children (may be) causally related to current childhood vaccine programs. Primary among these is the large-scale contamination of the measles, mumps, and influenza vaccines with retroviruses capable of engrafting their genetics into the DNA of childhood recipients. This is rendered more likely because of the cavalier disregard with which combinations of viral vaccines are now being administered, primarily involving the MMR vaccines…in spite of the toxicology principle that combinations of toxins may bring exponential (10-fold or 100-fold) increases in toxicity.” – Harold Buttram, MD
“The really sad thing is the amount of doctors I’ve spoken to who say to me, ‘Del, I know that vaccines are causing autism, but I won’t say it on camera because the pharmaceutical industry will destroy my career just like they did to Andy Wakefield.'” — Del Bigtree, Producer of “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe”
“…our current results are consistent with the existing evidence on the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of Aluminum adjuvants which altogether strongly implicate these compounds as contributors to the rising prevalence of neurobehavioral disorders in children. Given that autism has devastating consequences in a life of a child, and that currently in the developed world over 1% of children suffer from some form of Autism Spectrum Disorder, it would seem wise to make efforts towards reducing infant exposure to aluminum from vaccines.“ — C A Shaw, PhD
“There is a serious problem with vaccine safety. Vaccine aluminum adjuvant has adverse neurological effects, at dosages that are recommended by the US CDC. Vaccine critics are supported by the science. Parents refusing to vaccinate according to the recommended CDC schedule are supported by the science. Use aluminum-containing vaccines with great caution, or not at all.” – C. A. Shaw, PhD http://vaccinepapers.org/category/aluminum/
“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant…research clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.” — From Tomljenovic and Shaw’s journal article “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are They Safe?”
Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia (POTS) with Chronic Fatigue After HPV Vaccination as Part of the “ASIA Syndrome”
Tomljenovic L, Colafrancesco S, Perricone C, and Shoenfeld Y
Abstract
We report the case of a 14-year-old girl who developed postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) with chronic fatigue 2 months following Gardasil vaccination. The patient suffered from persistent headaches, dizziness, recurrent syncope, poor motor coordination, weakness, fatigue, myalgias, numbness, tachycardia, dyspnea, visual disturbances, phonophobia, cognitive impairment, insomnia, gastrointestinal disturbances, and a weight loss of 20 pounds.
The psychiatric evaluation ruled out the possibility that her symptoms were psychogenic or related to anxiety disorders. Furthermore, the patient tested positive for ANA (1:1280), lupus anticoagulant, and antiphospholipid.
On clinical examination she presented livedo reticularis and was diagnosed with Raynaud’s syndrome. This case fulfills the criteria for the autoimmune/auto-inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (ASIA).
Because human papillomavirus vaccination is universally recommended to teenagers and because POTS frequently results in long-term disabilities (as was the case in our patient), a thorough follow-up of patients who present with relevant complaints after vaccination is strongly recommended.
Autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (Shoenfeld’s syndrome): clinical and immunological spectrum
Shoenfeld, Y. et al
Abstract
An adjuvant is a substance that enhances the antigen-specific immune response, induces the release of inflammatory cytokines…The immunological consequence of these actions is to stimulate the innate and adaptive immune response. The activation of the immune system by adjuvants, a desirable effect, could trigger manifestations of autoimmunity or autoimmune disease. Recently, a new syndrome was introduced, autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (ASIA), that includes postvaccination phenomena, macrophagic myofasciitis, Gulf War syndrome and siliconosis. This syndrome is characterized by nonspecific and specific manifestations of autoimmune disease. The main substances associated with ASIA are squalene (Gulf War syndrome), aluminum hydroxide (postvaccination phenomena, macrophagic myofasciitis) and silicone with siliconosis.
Long-term persistence of vaccine-derived aluminum hydroxide is associated with chronic cognitive dysfunction,
Gherardi RK, et al
Abstract
Macrophagic myofasciitis (MMF) is an emerging condition, characterized by specific muscle lesions assessing long-term persistence of aluminum hydroxide within macrophages at the site of previous immunization. Affected patients mainly complain of arthromyalgias, chronic fatigue, and cognitive difficulties. We designed a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests to prospectively delineate MMF-associated cognitive dysfunction (MACD).
Compared to control patients with arthritis and chronic pain, MMF patients had pronounced and specific cognitive impairment. MACD mainly affected (i) both visual and verbal memory; (ii) executive functions, including attention, working memory, and planning; and (iii) left ear extinction at dichotic listening test. Cognitive deficits did not correlate with pain, fatigue, depression, or disease duration. Pathophysiological mechanisms underlying MACD remain to be determined.
In conclusion, long-term persistence of vaccine-derived aluminum hydroxide within the body assessed by MMF is associated with cognitive dysfunction, not solely due to chronic pain, fatigue and depression.
A role for the body burden of aluminium in vaccine-associated macrophagic myofasciitis (MMF) and chronic fatigue syndrome
Exley C, Gherardi RK, et al
Abstract
Macrophagic myofasciitis and chronic fatigue syndrome are severely disabling conditions which may be caused by adverse reactions to aluminium-containing adjuvants in vaccines. While a little is known of disease aetiology both conditions are characterised by an aberrant immune response, have a number of prominent symptoms in common and are coincident in many individuals. Herein, we have described a case of vaccine-associated chronic fatigue syndrome and macrophagic myofasciitis (MMF) in an individual demonstrating aluminium overload. This is the first report linking the latter with either of these two conditions and the possibility is considered that the coincident aluminium overload contributed significantly to the severity of these conditions in this individual. This case has highlighted potential dangers associated with aluminium-containing adjuvants and we have elucidated a possible mechanism whereby vaccination involving aluminium-containing adjuvants could trigger the cascade of immunological events which are associated with autoimmune conditions including chronic fatigue syndrome and macrophagic myofasciitis.
[themify_box]
Dr. Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
*“Perhaps there is no more fitting tribute…to all wars everywhere – than the closing chapters of Johnny Got His Gun. Published on September 3, 1939, two days after the start of WWII. Dalton Trumbo’s novel was about a World War I veteran whose four limbs, face and genitals had been blown away by a shell but had been kept alive in a secret military hospital as a curiosity. He is deaf, dumb, and blind, and must lift and drop his head against a hospital pillow to tap out – in Morse code – what he wants to tell mankind. He asks that the wretched trunk of his body be placed in a glass case and taken around the world on display. One of the last powerful paragraphs of the book ends this way: ‘I know the truth and you don’t you fools. You fools you fools you fools…”
[/themify_quote]
“Take me into your churches your great towering cathedrals that have to be rebuilt every fifty years because they are destroyed by war. Carry me in my glass box down the aisles where kings and priests and brides and children at their confirmation have gone so many times before to kiss a splinter of wood from a true cross on which was nailed the body of a man who was lucky enough to die. Set me high on your altars and call on god to look down upon his murderous little children his dearly beloved little children. Wave over me the incense I can’t smell. Swill down the sacramental wine I can’t taste. Drone out the prayers I can’t hear. Go through the old holy gestures for which I have no legs and no arms. Chorus out the hallelujahs I can’t sing. Bring them out loud and strong for me your hallelujahs all of them for me.”
“To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn’t fight. So they were masking the future they were keeping the future a soft quiet deadly secret. They knew that if all the little people all the little guys saw the future they would begin to ask questions and they would find answers that they would say to the guys who wanted them to fight they would say ‘you lying thieving sons-of-bitches we won’t fight we won’t be dead we will live we are the world we are the future and we will not let you butcher us no matter what you say no matter what speeches you make no matter what slogans you write’…
“Remember this. Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots you fierce ones you spawners of hate you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives.” – The above quotes are excerpted from Hell, Healing and Resistance: Veterans Speak, by Daniel Hallock
Last week Donald Trump happened to watch the admittedly disturbing TV images of dead and dying Syrian toddlers that had been filmed by unknown videographers from Al-Queda – supposedly America’s mortal and very untrustworthy enemy. Those individuals were anti-Assad activists who claimed – with no verifiable proof – that the chemical gas attack had come from Assad’s Syrian army. Assad said that the allegations were false and that the footage could have been staged by one of the many very savvy rebel groups who regularly make propaganda films to somehow influence viewers around the world.
But ever since the unleashing of the American “dogs of war” back in 2003 by the Cheney/Bush administration and its illegal, de-stabilizing invasion, the Mideast has been a living hell for its inhabitants, with starvation, civil wars, massive internal displacements and war refugees everywhere. And yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, the US military elites are blithely regarding themselves as blameless of being the major root cause of the perpetual civil wars, the failed states, the anarchy, the human suffering, and all the dead and dying children; and it continues – thanks to its lapdog mainstream media – to evade any question of guilt.
Of course, it must be mentioned, that the main provocative event that started the whole process of Mideast de-stabilization, which predictably led to the war crimes, the atrocities, and the refugee crises, just like a line of dominoes, was the controlled demolitions and explosive pulverizations into fine dust of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11/01 – which was falsely blamed on Muslims like Osama bin Laden. Whatever groups or organizations or governments were responsible for those pre-planting the demolition charges are the ones that should be in the dock in a war crimes tribunal – for it couldn’t have been Arab hi-jackers.
The film footage that Citizen Trump saw was obviously very effective Al Queda propaganda, for it fooled him into ordering a Shock and Awe-type missile attack against the preferred suspects. Al Queda has no air force or cruise missiles, so Trump was effectively duped into striking a devastating blow for them against Assad.
It is almost like Trump and his cabinet have never heard of the concept of a “false flag op” or a “hoax”. Trump’s amateurish Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, immediately fell for the false flag and within 24 hours (and before any formal independent investigation was done) gave a humiliating verbal spanking to the Russian ambassador in a Security Council meeting – without any confirmation of Assad’s guilt.
And, as usual, the compliant American press also took the bait and immediately jumped to the Trump White House’s approved conclusion – thus convincing its exquisitely brain-washable and very obedient American news consumers that simplistic politicized explanations of complex issues are preferred, right or wrong. Damn the torpedoes; full steam ahead!
So now everybody who trusts the mainstream American media believes that they know all they need to know about the issue, and that is this: Assad, rather than any of the many likely-to-be-guilty anti-government militias or rebel groups in the Syrian civil war, was the sole perpetrator of the dirty deed.
And so the blindered, flag-waving, anti-Muslim majorities here in America reflexively cheered the newest “strong man”, “tough on socialism and crime” in the Oval Office when Trump directed Secretary of War General James “Mad Dog” Mattis to order the over-the-top retaliatory air strike. There is a lot of finger-crossing by the Trump team and a lot of praying by the Pence team going on right now, hoping, if and when an unbiased investigative team examines all the evidence, that the Syrian army will be found guilty. But don’t count on it.
Our once honorable and respected nation had developed a habit of shooting first and asking questions later. This is stupid on so many different levels. Such childish behaviors are a sure way to make the millions of our abused, denigrated and humiliated enemies start looking at all the soft targets that exist all around the world, including our vulnerable consulates and military bases, and all the indefensible oil pipelines and electric grids. People who live in glass houses -and nations that have target-rich environments – shouldn’t throw stones.
Sociopaths and Narcissists Never Say They’re Sorry
Strongmen, especially the narcissistic and sociopathic ones, never admit that they are ever wrong, nor do they ever say “I’m sorry”. And don’t expect any Mea Culpas from the war-mongering, militaristic types that are infesting the Trump administration, especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff-types that are in the habit of giving us such criminal disasters as the Operation Northwoods false flag operation, the Gulf of Tonkin false flag op, the My Lai Massacre and cover-up, the Kuwaiti Baby hoax and the Massacre in Fallujah (compliments of “Mad Dog” Mattis and company – [google “James Mattis is a War Criminal”]).
Remorseless, shameless, militaristic, racist, xenophobic, neofascist, plutocratic megalomaniacs are over-represented in Washington, DC and New York right now – although they have always been there; and the Deep State/Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex has been orchestrating conspiracies on a daily basis. Planning conspiracies is Job # 1 of secret cult-like groups like the CIA, the Mossad, MI6, the FBI and all the other intelligence services that serve the Deep State. (Google “Mike Lofgren and the Deep State” and “Dark Money”.)
Short Memories for American Atrocities; Long Memories for Everybody Else’s Atrocities
Prejudiced American civilians have angrily perpetrated indignities and abuse against innocent non-white, non-Christian people forever, and therefore their similarly prejudiced soldier-sons feel free to inflict indignities, abuse plus rape, plunder, war crimes and wartime atrocities against whomever the moneyed elites have fingered as the latest likely prospects for enmity (including Native Americans, foreigners, blacks, gays, non-Christians, Mexicans, Muslims, etc).
Just in the past week, there have emerged two more blatantly obvious ways that the Trump amateurs in the White House might be blundering into World War III. To find out about some of the others, one would have to look into the many CIA, Mossad and Pentagon contingency plans that are already in place for America’s Deep State to bamboozle these rookies.
In 2007, Clark was shown a Pentagon memo that listed seven Mideast Muslim nations for which there were contingency plans to invade or otherwise de-stabilize. The only nation among the seven that has not yet been invaded is Iran.
As of this moment, besides the Syria cruise missile caper, the most obvious incident risking a war is already happening in the China Sea, with amateurs Trump and Tillerson making threats against North Korea and sending the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier battle group to head toward North Korea, risking some sort of military provocation.
Throughout its history, the evidence of American military atrocities and war crimes are routinely censored-out by the American mainstream media, with sugar-coated fake news being substituted instead. We simpletons and untermenschen are only allowed to see the nefarious deeds of the “bad guys” of enemy nations, but never our own. So it is easy to believe the propagandized version of the wars that are fought by the honorable warrior sons of our “shining city on a hill”.
As an example of how war propaganda works, it is next to impossible for anybody who gets their news from America’s mainstream media to recall any of the details of the Fallujah, Iraq massacre of 2004 – because we were never allowed to see the videos of the US Marine war crime nor did we hear any of the atrocity stories. Another example is the fact that virtually all of the thousands of photos and films of the aftermath of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings were immediately confiscated and/or destroyed by General McArthur. America’s tender sensibilities would have been assaulted, and its appetite for future atomic war preparations would have been blunted.
Most Americans never knew there was an atrocity-producing war going on in Korea in the early 1950s because it was censored by the military elites. It was not called the Hidden War for nothing. And we American never found out about the My Lai massacre (March 16, 1968) until years later because it was covered-up by military insiders – including Colin Powell; nor were we told anything about the hundreds of little My Lai massacres that happened routinely during the Vietnam War.
Publicizing such things would weaken the innate patriotism of the citizenry and perhaps inflame some otherwise complacent civilians to object, resist, revolt or even adversely affect the stock market. And American elites won’t allow anything to happen that might threaten America’s artificial, sometimes drug-induced “tranquility”. Keeping the population comfortably numb is preferable.
But honesty demands that Americans acknowledge that the Pentagon and the CIA have been torturing innocent “suspects” for a long time, and they have been regularly committing crimes and atrocities all over the Mideast ever since 2002 – most recently in Yemen and Iraq. But, true to form, most Americans have already erased the stories that we might have heard only once from their short memories. Guilt-inducing realities, if we hear about them at all, are rapidly flushed down the Big Media and Pentagon toilets – and our memories are ready for the next False Flag op or hoax – which will only excite us until the next news cycle begins.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague
At the turn of the last century, the peace-loving nations of the world voted to include themselves in the International Criminal Court (ICC), allowing their nation’s militaries to be subject to judgement and punishment for war crimes, crimes against humanity and wartime atrocities. Shamefully, the United States, Israel, China, Iraq, Qatar, Libya, and Yemen were the only seven nations that opposed the treaty that established the ICC. 120 nations became signatories to the treaty – but not America. Conservative political organizations, emboldened by the outspoken opposition to the treaty from right-wing think tanks and lobbying groups like the Heritage Foundation refused to allow America to join the family of nations, regarding the US as being above the law.
America’s infamous – and highly profitable – war machine has been universally-recognized as possessing the most lethal weapons in the history of the world (since we replaced Nazi Germany in that category after WWII). And America’s two political parties agree that they will have no hesitation to use those weapons (a reality regularly expressed whenever the Pentagon says that “all military options are on the table”).
What About the Poison Gas Attack and Trump’s Ill-Advised Retaliatory Gesture?
With the American war crimes against innocent civilians in Iraq and Yemen effectively erased from our memory, the American media has been happy to promote the conspiracy theory that Assad and his air force conspired to use poison gas against Syrian targets. Having accomplished that sleight of hand, the media has shamelessly judged Assad of being a unique war criminal, thus simultaneously obscuring our own guilt and permitting Trump to jump to conclusions and order the bombing of the Syrian military air base – before any documented evidence of who was actually responsible could be brought before an unbiased tribunal.
Of course, the Al Queda videos went viral, instantly becoming very popular with the Russophobic Western pro-militarist elites in both NeoLiberal (corporate economic interventionists) and NeoConservative (corporate military interventionist) circles. And of course the corporate-controlled mainstream media – including the once-honorable PBS and NPR – have predictably failed to apply honorable investigative journalistic principles to the events, thus endorsing the military response that predictably boosted Trump’s approval ratings.
The US military has lost every significant combat war it has engaged in since WWII (including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq) and their war-profiteering industrialists have been casting about for more blame-worthy enemies to justify the annual trillion dollar, bankrupting military spending and war materiel orders that keep the weapons industries, Wall Street and the Pentagon humming.
A Summary of What is Likely to Have Been a False Flag Operation in Syria
The narrative accompanying the video footage that swayed Trump showed the now discredited-as-propaganda “White Hat” brigade members trying to hose down the dying poison gas victims in a region where there is no American presence. The unknown makers of the video claimed that the chemical agent responsible was military-grade Sarin gas.
Within hours after the Al Queda video went viral, a pair of U.S. Navy destroyers – that had been pre-positioned in the eastern Mediterranean – launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of some $1.5 million each, which equals $85,000,000 of scarce taxpayer dollars in one pop, to the delight of some weapons manufacturer or other), targeting aircraft, hardened shelters, fuel storage, munitions supply, air defense and communications facilities at the Syrian air base. Only 20% of the air base was disabled and jets were flying out of the base within a few days.
The cooler heads of most of the members of the UN Security Council refused to blame Assad until further study of the facts were examined by an independent group.
This space is reserved for the true story, if we Americans are ever allowed to hear it.
Note: Parts of this article are based on information from Scott Ritter’s April 9, 2017 Huffington Post article entitled “Wag The Dog — How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media”. Ritter was one of the weapons inspectors that determined that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, prior to the 2003 invasion, much to the disapproval of the Project for the New American Century and the Cheney/Bush administration. Readers can access it by googling “Scott Ritter is Not Buying It”.
[themify_hr color=’red’ border_width=’2px’]
[themify_box]
Dr. Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
I recently had a dialogue with a person who had emailed me about a friend of hers who had been mis-treated for years by drug-prescribing psychiatrists. The psychiatrists – and their alarming and illogical drugging – had made him worse and worse and eventually totally disabled over the years. Because of the high probability that the drugs he had taken over the years – known to be both neurotoxic and addictive – were also brain-damaging and dementia-inducing, we discussed some things that perhaps could be helpful (see the information below). The obvious major problem, according to the person who contacted me, was the fact that the patient had been continuously over-dosed with irrational cocktails of a multitude of dangerous psychiatric drugs. Since there were a number of lessons that I thought my readers could benefit from learning, I decided to make the letter into a Duty to Warn column. Below is the essence of my last communication with the concerned friend of the over-drugged patient.
[themify_hr color=”light-gray”]
“What a mess your friend’s so-called healers have made of his brain!! They are guilty, guilty, guilty of “first doing harm” rather than first doing NO harm (per the Hippocratic Oath). You tell me that he has been on SSRI antidepressants, psychostimulants, anti-psychotics, tranquilizers and mood stabilizers, which are the five categories of psychotropic drugs. A psychiatrist who has been using such a variety of drugs doesn’t know what he is doing , but what is worse is that he trusts the totally untrustworthy, amoral psychiatric drug companies way too much!
“No human being on earth would have responded any other way than how your friend has responded, what with being prescribed unknown combinations of brain-altering, brain-damaging synthetic drugs. Note that Big Pharma never does research involving more than one drug at a time even in the rat labs! What must come out of such corporate pseudo-research is bad science and therefore bad medicine!
“Below is the partial list of medications that you mentioned in your letter that your friend had taken at one time or another, usually, of course, in a cocktail of other drugs, any combination of which – as I mentioned above – has never been tested in either pre-clinical (animal lab) or clinical (human) trials for either safety or efficacy, either short-term or long-term.
“Zoloft, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Xanax, Concerta (36mg), Lamictal (as high as 900 mg), Lithium (only about a week as his psoriasis acted up), Depakote, modafinil, Ambien, Abilify, Zyprexa, Valium.”
1) Pfizer’s Zoloft, GlaxoSmithKline’s Wellbutrin and Pfizer’s Effexor are powerful and addictive so-called “antidepressant” drugs (which should more accurately have been called “agitation-inducing” drugs (but that wouldn’t have been good for Big Pharma’s business model). Most of them have been classed by the pharmaceutical industry as “selective serotonin reuptake pump inhibitors (SSRIs) – a very deceptive term because they are NOT selective to serotonin and they mess around with more organelles in the synapses of the brain than the reuptake pumps).
(Other examples of such drugs include Forest Lab’s Celexa, Lilly’s Cymbalta, Forest’s Lexapro, GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, Pfizer’s Pristiq, Lilly’s Prozac, Jazz’s Luvox, Merck’s Remeron, Lilly’s Symbyax, Bayer’s Yaz, and Lilly’s Sarafem.)
2) McNeil’s Concerta is a psychostimulant drug identical to Novartis’s Ritalin. They are in the class of drugs (FDA-approved for so-called ADHD or somnolence, including – irrationally – sleepiness caused by sleep deprivation!).These drugs are powerful and highly addictive dopamine and/or nor-epinephrine reuptake pump inhibitors that temporarily boost the level of those two transmitters in the synapse but at the same time dysregulate dopamine receptors as well as dopamine reuptake pumps.
(Other examples of such drugs include Shire’s Adderall, Shire’s Daytrana, Novartis’s Focalin, Shire’s Intuniv, UCB’s Metadate, Mallinckrodt’s Methylin, Cephalon’s Nuvigil, Lilly’s Strattera, Shire’s Vyvanse, Cephalon’s Provigil (modafinil), caffeine, nicotine, dexedrine, “uppers”, etc, that commonly cause mania, psychosis and sleep deprivation in addition to many other dangerous symptoms that can make ignorant or too-busy physicians think that the patient is mentally ill; rather than psychiatric drug-intoxicated.)
3) EliLilly’s Zyprexa, Janssen’s Abilify and Glaxo’s Lamictal, all so-called “anti-psychotic” drugs (which should more accurately have been called heavily-sedating major tranquilizers, which are seriously brain-altering drugs). These drugs are dopamine, norepinephrine and often serotonin blocking drugs that make victims feel dead inside. These drugs are also brain-damaging and highly dependency-inducing drugs that are difficult to stop taking, partly because one of the serious withdrawal symptoms is psychosis. Patients who have been given such drugs for off-label reasons such as for sleeping (never having been psychotic before taking the drug) have been known to have hallucinations and acute psychotic attacks during the withdrawal period!
(Other examples of such drugs include the now-generic Haldol, Prolixin, Mellaril, fluphenazine, perphenazine, prochlorperazine, thioridazine, GlaxoSmithKline’s Thorazine, Lilly’s Zyprexa, Astra-Zeneca’s Seroquel, Janssen’s Risperdal, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Abilify, Pfizer’s Geodon, Novartis’s Clozaril, Novartis’s Fanapt, Janssen’s Invega and Merck’s Saphris).
4) Roche’s Valium, Pfizer’s Xanax and Sanofi Aventis’s Ambien are benzodiazepine-type drugs, which are powerful and highly addicting. They are the so-called “minor” tranquilizers and sleeping pills.
(Other examples include Valeant’s Librium, Valeant’s Dalmane, Biovail’s Ativan, Lundbeck’s Tranxene, Pfizer’s Halcion, Roche’s Klonopin, Sepacor’s Lunesta, Mallinckrodt’s Restoril, Takeda’s Rozerem and King’s Sonata, any of which can cause somnolence, depression, lowered IQ and long-term brain damage and, when the dose is cut down, can cause serious withdrawal symptoms, including serious insomnia, agitation, psychosis and mania.)
5) Abbott’s Depakote and the generic lithium are so-called “mood stabilizer” drugs. Depakote could have caused your friend’s liver failure. Most “mood stabilizers” (except for lithium) are drugs that were designed and marketed as anti-epilepsy drugs, for which they were approved by the FDA. However, they have been heavily marketed (often illegally) as “mood stabilizers” or drugs that might help pain perception or anxiety but they have also been found, upon withdrawal, to cause agitation, insomnia and even grand mal seizures, even if the patient had never had a seizure before. (Other examples include Pfizer’s Neurontin, Pfizer’s Dilantin, Ortho-McNeil’s Topamax, Pfizer’s Lyrica and UCB’s Keppra).
6) Of course your friend was probably also using the over-the-counter (OTC) psychoactive substances caffeine and nicotine. The heavy use of such addictive “food substances” such as coffee, caffeinated soda pop, NutraSweet-laden “diet” pop and tobacco by patients on “anti-psychotics” is legendary.
“Those unfortunates that have been labeled with a psychosis and then forced to take “anti-psychotics” are almost always addicted to these OTC psychostimulants as well. Drugs that block dopamine and nor-epinephrine will make patients feel so numb and dead inside that they will do anything to overcome the dopamine and nor-epinephrine under-stimulation. And so, not only will they be dependent on the toxic prescription drug, they will also be addicted to the toxic stimulant substance. De-ciphering what drug is doing what is very difficult and time-consuming to figure out, and so most ignorant and too-busy doctors never try. They just keep prescribing the drugs and keep their fingers crossed, hoping that they will never have to face the inevitable withdrawal syndromes.
“Of course when the inevitable happens and such unlucky patients can’t afford the prescriptions anymore, can’t afford health insurance premiums, can’t afford the deductible fees, can’t afford the co-pays, loses health care for any other reason or somehow just quits or cuts down on the drugs (because they know they are being sickened by them), the patient will probably wind up in a mental hospital where another new mental illness label will be falsely applied and a new cocktail of brain-damaging and addictive drugs will be forced upon the patient again.
“Most physicians (and all physician assistants) do not understand the exact mechanism of action of the above drugs nor do they know how to help get their patients off the drugs when they start to understand the adverse effects that occur with ALL of these medications.
“It is important to remind ourselves that none of these psychiatric drugs were ever tested in the animal labs in any combination of two or more drugs, which is also true for the human trials!
“And there are hardly any long-term trials done either (most animal lab experiments last fewer than a week in length and most human anti-depressant trials lasted – on average – 6 weeks in duration, even though most humans are told to take them the rest of their lives!)
“Also none of these drugs were ever tested in sequential trials (one drug following another) for safety or efficacy!
“So your friend has been experimented upon by a system that knows next to nothing about what happens at the synapse level of the human brain, especially long-term. His psychiatrists have been cavalierly drugging him – on a trial and error basis, no less – with a multitude of dangerous and addictive chemical substances and combinations of substances that never came anywhere close to curing him.
“Indeed, these neurotoxic substances have instead made him worse with every cumulative dose. As we discussed, I believe that there is a good chance that his initial diagnoses were likely to have been in error.
“In other words, he might have only been experiencing a temporary, albeit perhaps overwhelming, emotional issue that could have been cured with non-pharmaceutical means such as good psychotherapy. But instead, he was probably quickly mis-diagnosed (because, unfortunately, he saw psychiatrists who have immense power and authority over their patients) with a “permanent”, “life-long”, “incurable”, “probably inherited” “mental illness” that would make him a permanent patient of the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries, who would be the ones to profit by prescribing and supplying the “necessary” drugs (that would be endlessly dealt out to him on a trial and error basis).
“Of course, if that scenario of erroneous diagnosis is true, your friend has been also been mis-treated. To de-cipher the situation in retrospect would require a series of thorough history-taking clinic visits and a slow tapering off of the brain-damaging drugs (along with close attention to his mal-nourished and drug-sickened brain and body plus good psychotherapy for whatever was the original emotional issue – as well as for the current psychological trauma from the mis-treatment he has received).
“I’m sorry to be so pessimistic, but honesty is the best policy. Your friend’s brain may be so messed up that he will never totally recover. His brain has already suffered enough damage to make him totally brain-disabled. But the fact that he had a good career prior to swallowing all those drugs, perhaps his prognosis is better than I fear. If he and his loved ones can educate themselves adequately, that will improve his chances. Please be aware that he might only be able to lower his medications to a minimum level to avoid serious withdrawal symptoms, or at least be willing to take many months or years to do the tapering.
“Also, because he has been on such a large number of drugs, he is at high risk of developing a psychiatric drug-induced dementia (an iatrogenic disease [doctor-caused] that his “doctors” will surely try hard to dismiss and mis-diagnose as Alzheimer’s Disease [of unknown origin] rather than implicate themselves as responsible for the dementia).
“I have had extensive experience with hundreds of similarly mal-treated “psychiatric” patients during my career, and I have been repeatedly angered over the injustices that had been done to them by well-meaning but poorly-informed physicians or physician assistants. A really good, committed lawyer that has no ties to Big Pharma or Big Medicine could have sued any of those mal-practicing doctors and drug companies – if there was any justice in this world and if the Big Pharma defense lawyers weren’t so well-paid and so cunning at making sure that justice is never done applied to the drug company’s victims.
“First of all very few lawyers want to go up against the raft of Big Pharma lawyers that every corporation has on retainer, and very few independent lawyers are eager to go up against the doctors in their own communities because it would be bad for their lawyer business.
“So what to do? It is important, first of all, to find a sympathetic, understanding, knowledgeable physician who is able and willing to write prescriptions for smaller and smaller doses of the offending drugs and will help in the slow tapering process.
“One caveat: the mechanics and neuroscience of tapering off psych drugs is NOT taught in medical schools, because Big Pharma has acquired too much influence on the medical education of our med students and the post-graduation education of licensed physicians. Big Pharma has also been very successful in indoctrinating (and in many cases bribe) academic researchers, authors of medical textbooks, medical school professors, politicians (especially the liberal ones) and the thousands of health journalists into believing the totally false notion of psych drug efficacy and safety, so that now the public also believes the dangerous myth (with lots of help from TV commercials).
“Therefore it is the rare physician who has the knowledge that there is such a thing as psychiatric drug-induced brain damage or psychiatric drug-induced dementia. And it also the rare physician that will have the inclination or the time to do what needs to be done.
“I would suggest that your friend’s caretakers to go to www.cchrint.org and view some of the videos there. Also, I would suggest reading some of the many of columns on the topic of mental ill health that I have written over the years. Many of them are archived at: http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=1 and at https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles.
“Good luck. Don’t give up. There is much justice-seeking to do. What you can learn will help increase the awareness of your friend’s tragic story. Perhaps future victimization from the psychiatric and psychopharmaceutical industries can be halted, so that others won’t have to go through the same things your friend has had to go through.
“Try to find some other folks with similar concerns that might want to get together with you to share information and learn more about you can do together, but don’t trust the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI is a Big Pharma front group whose entire existence has been funded by the drug company’s hundreds of millions of dollars and never mentions the immense dangers of their drugs, nor the fact that those chemicals can cause dementia or addictions).
“Do trust, however, what you read on the website of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (http://www.cchrint.org).”
[themify_hr color=’red’ border_width=’2px’]
Dr. Gary G. Kohls, MD
Dr Gary G Kohls MD
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
[themify_hr color=’red’]
Treason could be logically defined as “the crime of betraying one’s country (or its values) and/or giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the state (or in the case of the United States, its democratic values), no matter if the enemies are foreign or domestic.”
“The plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.” — Dick Cheney (VP under GW Bush) – at a West Point lecture, June 2002
“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” — Henry Kissinger, as reported in the October 28, 1973 New York Times
“So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” – Gary North, Christian Reconstructionist author
“What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime, we will see a country once again governed by Christians…and Christian values.”…“I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” — Ralph Reed – Christian Coalition executive director 1987-1989
“The fascist state must not forget that all means must serve the ends; it must not let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called ‘freedom of the press’…it must make sure that (the media) is placed in the service of the state.” — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
“It is not necessary to bury the truth. It is sufficient merely to delay it until nobody cares.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
Q: Are you a communist? A: “No I am an anti-fascist.”
Q: For a long time? A: “Ever Since I have understood fascism.”
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor — he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation — he works secretly and unknown to undermine the pillars of a city — he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.” — Cicero, 42 B.C.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America are the founding documents of liberal democracy in America. Altruistic Americans over the past 240 years since they were written and instituted have proudly defended their lofty principles against an assortment of enemies of democracy, whether they were foreign armies or domestic usurpers that objected to their progressive democratic principles. Many revolutionaries, reformers and dissenters against autocratic governments in other countries have been inspired by them and struggled heroically for their principles, even in losing causes.
And, like the heroes that they were, many of those progressive patriots were silenced, imprisoned, assassinated or otherwise violently opposed by the members of some of the following categories that opposed democratic principles.
The categories of anti-democracy groups include imperialists, monarchists, slavers, militarists, colonialists, aristocrats, Big Business corporatists, white supremacists, many authoritarian religious groups, fascists, racists, sexists, anti-Semites, wealthy elites, plutocrats (plutocracy is an anti-democratic government in which the wealthy rule), and other right-wing reactionary conservatives that have wanted to prevent the full development of one person/one vote democracy. These groups have taken an anti-democracy stance largely because giving the subordinates or the underclass a chance to vote is time-consuming and messy. Authoritarians demand obedience and no democratic debate is allowed.
In the case of the United States of America in the era of Trump, there has been a huge number of unelected anti-democracy types that were not on any ballot or even mentioned by Trump. They have been suddenly elevated to positions of power and, as the rookies that they are, have been frequently found to be following an agenda that had not even been hinted at in the campaign. These new swamp-dwellers have frequently been found to be both inept and disdainful of liberal democratic principles.
Many of Trump’s appointees have been covertly or overtly working for causes or organizations whose missions have been to retard, reverse or overthrow democratic principles. An example for today is Trump’s appointee to the US Supreme Court, Judge Neal Gorsuch, a member of the Federalist Society, which ishostile to civil rights, environmental protections, worker safety laws, the separation between church and state and more – all valued and constitutional democratic principles ). (For much more on the Gorsuch controversy, google “Neil Gorsuch sides with big business, big donors and big bosses”.)
In addition to the obvious anti-democracy white supremacists that have suddenly infested the White House (epitomized by the 24/7 presence of the “evil grey eminence”, white supremacist, anti-Semitic and “shadow president” Steven Bannon), there are now on the tax rolls anti-democratic proto-fascists like Stephen Miller, anti-intellectuals like Kellyanne Conway, racists like Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, wealthy elites like the handful of billionaire Wall Street financiers from Goldman Sachs, a handful of pro-war militarists like Secretary of Defense “Mad Dog” Mattis and Big Business types like everybody else in Trump’s democracy-destroying cabinet.
It has been noted that, in addition to the anti-democracy tyrants noted above, some of Trump’s cabinet and advisors meet at least a partial definition of sociopathic, narcissistic or paranoid personality disorders. (I invite the reader to read the diagnostic labelling information below and then make a judgment.) Some critics regard Trump and some in his cabinet as being dangerously unstable and/or inept and thus likely to make stupid or devastating mistakes under pressure.
What is new is that there has also been placed in positions of power (thanks to the born-again evangelical and “in charge guy”, vice President Pence), any number of Christian supremacists, Christian theocrats and assorted “biblical inerrancy-believing”, “young earth-believing” and “climate change-denying” Christian fundamentalists. Fundamentalism in any religious persuasion, whether Islamic or Christian, is, by definition, anti-democratic.
The desired theocratic state in America, as envisioned by many authoritarian Christian triumphalists, will be ruled by an un-elected, anti-democratic tribunal of elders that will institute – and then enforce – a dozen or more capital crimes that are mentioned in the 2,500 year-old “inerrant” book of Leviticus which is in the Hebrew scriptures). In that book, the punishment was death, which will be carried out as well in an American theocratic state,
One hopes that none of the Trump White House’s true believers in the Rapture theory are allowed anywhere near the nuclear codes or the red button.
One deep-thinking blogger on a Washington Post website recently commented on Trump’s appointment of pro-corporate, pro-Citizens United, far-right-wing conservative Neal Gorsuch (who has the financial backing of the Colorado-based billionaire, ultra-right-wing Coors Beer conglomerate). He wrote:
“The core of the Republican Party – those that pull the strings – are the Plutocrats. They understand that in order to win elections they must fall in bed with a pathetic demagogue like Trump and, to win the rural vote, the evangelicals.
“They consider Trump and his ilk acceptable collateral damage and are willing to put up with the consequences as long as Trump agrees to put their people in key positions, which he has done.
“But the leaders of the GOP play a very tricky game, and very well might lose control of this cancer, and in the end, destroy our nation as well as their wealth.
“The Plutocrats, Wall Street, Corporate America, the Banksters, are a very conniving, evil group, diseased and blinded by greed. They are sowing our destruction and theirs to maintain the unprecedented wealth divide, crony capitalism.”
My study of militarism and European fascism leads me to agree with the blogger. Anybody else that agrees should be very concerned about the survival of the planet and its children when America is being led by those that believe in the Rapture Theory and white supremacy and a Christian theocratic state – like Mike Pence and the followers of Christian Dominionists like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-TX), Sam Brownback (R-KS), James Lankford (R-OK), Steve King (R-IA), and their ilk).
I am raising several questions in this column:
Are the members of political movements that are dedicated to the destruction of American democracy guilty of treason? (If so, the US Constitution allows the death penalty for traitors.)
If an anti-democracy political movement’s members are not only traitors to democracy but also afflicted with the dangerous sociopathic, narcissistic or paranoid personality disorders, shouldn’t they be locked up or at least kept away from civil society (since such disorders are considered incurable)?
If any anti-democracy movement leaders also match up with some of the characteristics of fascism, shouldn’t they be kept far away from the levers of power?
To allow readers to make their own judgments about Donald Trump’s new group of swamp-dwellers in Washington, DC, I submit the following documents which consist of “Useful Definitions of Fascism, Sociopathy, Narcissism, Paranoia, Liberal Democracy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”:
[themify_hr color=”light-gray”]
The 14 Characteristics of Fascism
By Lawrence Britt, PhD
Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
Disdain for the importance of human rights
Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
Rampant sexism
A controlled mass media
Obsession with national security
Religion and ruling elite tied together
Power of corporations protected
Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
Obsession with crime and punishment
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fraudulent elections
[themify_hr color=”light-gray”]
The 7 Characteristics of Sociopathic or Psychopathic Personality Disorder
(only 3 are needed to make a positive diagnosis)
1) Callous disregard for the feelings of other people
2) Incapacity to maintain human relationships
3) Reckless disregard for the safety of others
4) Aggressiveness
5) Deceitfulness (repeated lying and conning others for profit)
6) Incapacity to experience guilt, and
7) Failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law
Other common sociopathic traits include:
8) No conscience
9) Lack of remorse for evils done to others
10) Indifferent to the suffering of its victims
11) Rationalizes (makes excuses for) having hurt, mistreated or stolen from others
12) Willingness to exploit, seduce or manipulate others
13) No sign of delusional or irrational thinking
14) Cunning, clever
15) Commonly above average intelligence
16) Always looking for ways to make money or achieve fame or notoriety
17) Willing to cause or contribute to the financial ruin of others
18) Untrustworthy
19) Cannot be trusted to adhere to conventional standards of morality
[themify_hr color=”light-gray”]
The 9 Characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder
(Narcissism = “pathological self-love”)
(only 5 are needed to make the diagnosis)
A grandiose sense of self-importance, superiority and talent and expects to be recognized as superior
A preoccupation with unlimited success, beauty, brilliance, ideal love, power, or wealth
A belief in being special and unique and can only be understood or should only be associated with people of high status
An unreasonable sense of entitlement and an expectation of being treated with favor or expecting an automatic compliance to his or her wishes
Is interpersonally exploitive, taking advantage of others to achieve his or her goals
Lacks empathy
Believes that others are envious of him (or is envious of others)
Exhibits arrogant or haughty attitudes or behaviors
[themify_hr color=”light-gray”]
The 7 Characteristics of Paranoid Personality Disorder
Paranoia = “the pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of the motives of others”
(Only 4 of the following are necessary to make the diagnosis)
Suspects without reason that others are exploiting, harming, or trying to deceive him or her
Has unjustified doubts about the loyalty or trustworthiness of friends or associates
Believes without reason that if he or she confides in others, this information may be used against him or her
Finds hidden demeaning or threatening meanings in harmless remarks or events
Persistently bears grudges and is unforgiving of insults or slights
Is quick to react with anger or to counterattack when he or she perceives that people are out to attack his or her character or reputation
Is suspicious about the fidelity of his or her spouse or sexual partner
[themify_hr color=”light-gray”]
12 Key Features of a Liberal Democracy
citizen freedom, rights to privacy and an impartial judiciary
a competitive multi-party political system,
a representative political system,
a constitution,
checks and balances between the component parts of the system (Executive, Legislative, Judicial Branches)
freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unjust search and seizure by police or the military, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom from coercive religious influences,
majority rule (with free and fair elections to choose the persons and parties to represent the electorate), but the laws are to be applied fairly,
one person/one vote and the right to full and meaningful citizen participation in governance,
racial and religious minorities, and their human and civil rights, are respected and enforced,
wealthy elites, business elites, military elites and authoritarian elites have no more rights or privileges than non-elites,
Everyone is Born Free & Equal. We are all born free. We all have our own thoughts and ideas. We should all be treated in the same way.
No Discrimination. These rights belong to everybody, whatever our differences.
The Right to Life. We all have the right to life, and to live in freedom and safety.
No Slavery. Nobody has any right to make us a slave. We cannot make anyone our slave.
No Torture. Nobody has any right to hurt us or to torture us.
Everyone Has Rights No Matter Where They Go. I am a person just like you!
Everyone is Equal Before the Law. The law is the same for everyone. It must treat us all fairly.
Human Rights Are Protected by Law. We can all ask for the law to help us when we are not treated fairly.
Unfair Detention is Unlawful. Nobody has the right to put us in prison without good reason and keep us there, or to send us away from our country.
Everyone has a Right to a Trial. If we are put on trial this should be in public. The people who try us should not let anyone tell them what to do.
Everyone is Innocent Until Proven Guilty. Nobody should be blamed for doing something until it is proven. When people say we did a bad thing we have the right to show it is not true.
The Right to Privacy. Nobody should try to harm our good name. Nobody has the right to come into our home, open our letters, or bother us or our family without a good reason.
The Freedom to Move. We all have the right to go where we want in our own country and to travel as we wish.
The Right to Seek a Safe Place to Live. If we are frightened of being badly treated in our own country, we all have the right to run away to another country to be safe.
The Right to a Nationality. We all have the right to belong to a country.
Marriage and Family.Every grown-up has the right to marry and have a family if they want to. Men and women have the same rights when they are married, and when they are separated.
The Right to Your Own Things.Everyone has the right to own things or share them. Nobody should take our things from us without a good reason.
Freedom of Thought.We all have the right to believe in what we want to believe, to have a religion, or to change it if we want.
Freedom of Expression.We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share our ideas with other people.
The Right to Public Assembly.We all have the right to meet our friends and to work together in peace to defend our rights. Nobody can make us join a group if we don’t want to.
The Right to Democracy.We all have the right to take part in the government of our country. Every grown-up should be allowed to choose their own leaders.
Social Security.We all have the right to affordable housing, medicine, education, and childcare, enough money to live on and medical help if we are ill or old.
Workers’ Rights.Every grown-up has the right to do a job, to a fair wage for their work, and to join a trade union.
The Right to Play.We all have the right to rest from work and to relax.
Food and Shelter for All.We all have the right to a good life. Mothers and children, people who are old, unemployed or disabled, and all people have the right to be cared for.
The Right to Education.Education is a right. Primary school should be free. We should learn about the United Nations and how to get on with others. Our parents can choose what we learn.
Copyright.Copyright is a special law that protects one’s own artistic creations and writings; others cannot make copies without permission. We all have the right to our own way of life and to enjoy the good things that art, science and learning bring.
A Fair and Free World.There must be proper order so we can all enjoy rights and freedoms in our own country and all over the world.
Responsibility.We have a duty to other people, and we should protect their rights and freedoms.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
“I predict that Gardasil will become the greatest medical scandal of all times because at some point in time, the evidence will add up to prove that this vaccine…has absolutely no effect on cervical cancer and that all the very many adverse effects which destroy lives and even kill, serve no other purpose than to generate profit for the manufacturers.”
— Dr. Bernard Dalbergue a former pharmaceutical industry physician with Gardasil manufacturer Merck
“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.”
– President Ronald Reagan, as he signed The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies from all medico-legal liability when vaccines kill or disable children
“The 271 vaccines in development span a wide array of diseases, and employ exciting new scientific strategies and technologies. These potential vaccines – all in human clinical trials or under review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – include 137 for infectious diseases, 99 for cancer, 15 for allergies and 10 for neurological disorders.”
— “Statement from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) – the pharmaceutical industry’s trade association and lobbying group.
The #1 talking point of Big Pharma, Big Vaccine, the CDC, the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics when they try to justify the use of the neurotoxin aluminum (and mercury) in their vaccines is this one: “humans shouldn’t be afraid of the small amount of either aluminum or mercury that is or has been in many human and animal vaccines.”
They say, truthfully, that aluminum is the third most common element in the earth’s crust, behind oxygen and silicone. Oxygen makes up about 47% of the earth’s mass. Silicon is second at 28%, followed by aluminum at 8%. They also say that aluminum may be just as harmless as oxygen and silicone and that humans are also exposed to aluminum in oral antacids and underarm anti-perspirants and that those products haven’t yet been “conclusively” proven to have caused “statistically-significant” health problems. They fail, of course, to mention that the “studies” that prove aluminum’s safety (and efficacy) were designed, performed and paid-for by the very industries that benefit from the unregulated, unexamined and widespread use of injectable aluminum in America’s over-vaccination schedules.
It is important to note that the reason that aluminum has been used in vaccines for the last 80+ years is because it has been found to be an “adjuvant” (defined as “a substance that enhances the body’s immune response to an antigen.” An “antigen” is “a toxin or other foreign substance that induces an immune response in the body”. Interestingly, nobody really understands exactly how aluminum performs as an adjuvant, and there is a desperate search for other adjuvants because the vaccine industry understands just how toxic it is.
Adjuvants, when incubated with certain viral particles in the lab, somehow temporarily hyper-stimulates the production of antibodies and thus usually produces the desired temporary, artificial, serological immunity against the virus, viral particle, bacterial particle of toxoid.
This plausible vaccinology theory ignores the fact that intramuscularly-injected aluminum can easily cause an over-stimulation of antibodies to some of the normal body tissues of the vaccinee, which is known as a “vaccine-induced autoimmune disorder”. How that can happen is dealt with later in this article.
<<<The Differences Between Oral and Injectable Aluminum>>>
It is important to understand that there are important differences between orally-ingested aluminum (in some antacids) and intramuscularly-injected aluminum (which is commonly used in many vaccines).
Orally-ingested aluminum is poorly absorbed through the intestinal mucosa into the blood stream. Only a tiny fraction of the total dose (0.3%) is absorbed, meaning that 99.7% of the ingested aluminum is NOT absorbed and thus passes out of the body through the stool.
There are questions as to how toxic swallowed aluminum is to the bowel mucosa or intestinal bacteria or how damaging to the body’s cells is the 0.3% that gets into the bloodstream. It depends on the total body burden of poisonous metals like aluminum, lead, mercury, iron, cadmium and manganese and the presence of other toxins like psychiatric drugs, vaccines, food additives, etc.). Another important factor is how healthy and mature is the blood-brain barrier (or the placental barrier in the case of women who are unfortunate enough to have submitted to vaccinations during their pregnancies, thus exposing their fetuses to potentially brain-damaging substances). The blood-brain barrier is discussed a bit further on.
Most of the aluminum that gets into the blood stream is excreted through the kidneys. But exactly how damaging aluminum is to kidneys, the blood cells and vascular system hasn’t been thoroughly studied.
However, aluminum (as is true for mercury [thimerosal], another vaccine ingredient that was widely used in injectable infant vaccines early in the dramatic autism epidemic) is known to be highly toxic to every organ system and its mitochondria, especially the kidneys, thyroid, liver, bone and brain.
(Recall that any toxin that gets into the bloodstream can potentially adversely affect every other organ in the body.) The degree of damage inflicted depends partly on the nutritional health of the individual, the amount of anti-oxidants in the diet, the detoxifying systems in the liver – and the blood-brain barrier.
<<<The Blood-Brain Barrier>>>
The normal brain is fortunately relatively safe from many toxins animals are exposed to because of the blood-brain barrier (BBB). The BBB is a system of unique brain capillaries, whose endothelial cells and their unusually “tight junctions” between each cell. Those endothelial cells are supposed to keep large molecules and infectious agents out of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF, the fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord) and therefore away from the very vulnerable central nervous system (CNS).
The BBB is a very effective defender of the brain, unless it is immature (is as the case for all small infants) or unless it is aged or diseased (which is the norm for the elderly, the acute or chronically ill, the highly medicated, the highly vaccinated and for those who are exposed to toxic substances that are known to harm the BBB. Toxins known to harm the BBB include solvents, herbicides, pesticides, viruses, bacteria, street drugs, many pharmaceutical drugs, toxic foods, toxic water, toxic metals (including the aluminum and mercury in vaccines), electromagnetic radiation, etc.
As touched on above, the aluminum in vaccines is designed to hyper-stimulate antibody production. The vaccine antigens that will be marketed to the public are first manufactured or grown in chicken or duck eggs, chicken kidney cells, mouse brains, African green monkey kidney cells or human fetal cells) in the laboratories of Big Pharma’s vaccine manufacturers like Merck, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Sanofi-Pasteur and MedImmune. Then aluminum nanoparticles are adsorbed onto those antigens in large vats. Then a variety of other substances are added, including preservatives (such as mercury, antibiotics, formaldehyde, phenol, phenoxyethanol) for the multiple-dose vials.
When the aluminum-containing inoculum is eventually injected into the vaccinee’s muscle tissue, the body’s immune system is supposed to produce antibodies (immunoglobulins) against the antigen which the aluminum nanoparticles were adsorbed. The intensity of antibody production varies tremendously, from zero effect to hyperimmune responses.
Whether the injection accidentally went into the subcutaneous fat, directly into a blood vessel or into scar tissue would account for some of the variance. And the duration of the antibody response also varies tremendously, also depending on those factors.
What is for certain is that any delayed antibody response is likely to be only temporary. Some of the adverse effects, like the high incidence of fainting and the POTS syndrome after the Gardisil vaccinations, might be because the vaccine was injected into a small blood vessel and thus directly into the bloodstream instead of the muscle.
What is also a certainty is that vaccinations have zero (or even negative) effects on cellular immunity, which is the equally important second half of the immune system.
But serious unintended consequences from vaccines can occur, for the injected material is regarded as a foreign body by the vaccinee’s mononuclear cells (macrophages). The macrophage’s main purpose is to attack foreign bodies that penetrate the body’s protective skin or mucosal surfaces, thus ameliorating the toxic effects of germs, slivers, cat bite saliva, injected vaccine ingredients, etc. Properly functioning macrophages will neutralize some of the toxicity of foreign bodies.
<<<How Can Aluminum-Adjuvanted Vaccines Cause Neurotoxic Disorders Like Autism or Dementia?>>>
I describe below two of the serious un-anticipated and unwanted outcomes that can happen when aluminum-coated antigens are injected into an animal’s muscle tissue:
1) After the body’s macrophages ingested the aluminum-coated vaccine material, they will migrate into the lymphatic system (including regional lymph nodes), and then they will go into the bloodstream, which eventually goes to many other distant organs, including the liver, spleen, bone, brain and everywhere else that the blood goes.
Macrophages are capable of crossing into the brain through the unique “tight junctions” that are located between the BBB’s endothelial cells. When the BBB is healthy it will keep out most toxic substances such as most proteins, viruses, bacteria, large molecule drugs, toxic metals and other toxic substances such as dissolved aluminum ions.
If the BBB is immature or diseased, many of those toxic substances are more likely to cross into the cerebrospinal fluid. So, whereas dissolved aluminum in the blood usually can’t get into the brain by itself, when it is inside a macrophage it can enter into the protected space of the brain and thus potentially toxify brain cells (neurons, nutrient glial cells and synaptic cleft organelles where neurotransmitters do their magic. Macrophages appear to be identical to brain microglia in that they have similar nutrient and de-toxifying functions.
The above phenomena have been well studied and are the mechanisms that explain how injected aluminum-adjuvanted material can cross the diseased or aged BBB of so-called pre-dementia patients or cross the immature BBB into the brains of infants, that might condemn some of those victims to come down with a vaccine-induced dementia or a vaccine-induced autistic spectrum disorder, ADHD, or other behavioral or neuro-degenerative disorder.
<<<How Can Aluminum Adjuvants Cause Autoimmune Disorders?>>>
2) The second serious thing that can happen when aluminum is injected into animal tissue – particularly the small bodies of children or infants – is that the needle can be expected to traumatize whatever tissues it pierces.
That trauma, plus the inevitable inflammation that develops from the vaccine ingredients, will cause the break-down of other para-muscular tissues, such as, obviously, the now-damaged muscle tissue, area blood vessels, white blood cells, platelets, blood clotting factors, collagen tissue, nerve tissue, myelin, etc, likely coating some of these otherwise normal cells with the aluminum adjuvant and setting up the possibility for the body’s immune system to develop antibodies against the body’s own tissues, which is the definition of autoimmune disorders.
So patients with autoimmune disorders like Macrophagic Myofasciitis (MMF), Autoimmune/inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants (ASIA), lupus, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, dermatomyositis, scleroderma, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, Guillain-Barre syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Gulf War Syndrome, Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, etc may actually have vaccine-induced autoimmune disorders. (Google research scholars such as Romain Kroum Gherardi, Yehuda Shoenfeld, Chris Shaw, Lucija Tomljenovic, etc for more.)
There are a multitude of case reports and case series in the world’s medical literature of vaccine-induced autoimmunity. The only get published in the journals that aren’t subsidized and don’t accept advertising money from pharmaceutical companies (and don’t have editors who have been co-opted by Big Pharma, the CDC or the AA).
These vaccine-induced autoimmune disorders are iatrogenic disorders (doctor-caused, prescription drug-caused, vaccine-caused, surgery-caused) and thus their existence makes them taboo subjects – not to be discussed publically. But in the honorable “first do no harm” profession that I proudly joined after medical school 40+ years ago, drug-induced, iatrogenic disorders were always to be at the top of the differential diagnosis list. That teaching appears to have disappeared over the years.
But, for the sake of our vulnerable patients, especially or babies and the elderly, who are getting sicker and sicker as more and more drugs and vaccines are prescribed, honorable physicians and paraprofessionals should be actively considering the possibility of iatrogenesis whenever they are faced with an autoimmune disordered patient.
<<<Further Vaccinations to Patients who Have Vaccine-Induced Autoimmunity or Vaccine-Induced Neurodevelopmental Disorders Should be Contraindicated>>>
Vaccine-induced injuries, deaths and autoimmune disorders are increasingly common among fully vaccinated populations. The correlation between the huge increases in dementia among America’s fully-vaccinated older adults (who get yearly mercury injections in their flu shots and then get yearly aluminum-containing pneumovax shots) needs to be thoroughly noted.
The worsening of toxic disorders caused by heavy metal exposure is known to happen with every additional exposure to the toxin. Two toxins together can cause enormous synergistic (as opposed to additive) increases in toxicity. That phenomenon of synergy appears to apply when aluminum and mercury vaccines are co-administered. Thus, if vaccine-induced disorders are not recognized, the already toxified patients will have their autism, autoimmune disorders and dementia worsen, and larger long-term health care costs and more human suffering will occur – exactly the opposite of the physician pledge to “first do no harm”.
There are a number of whistle-blower experts (see below) who are trying to alert doctors, journalists and law-makers to the dangers of Big Pharma’s highly profitable over-vaccination business plan. These out-numbered and silenced whistle-blowers are stepping on some very big toes, namely huge multinational pharmaceutical corporations that have large numbers of clever lawyers, cunning front groups, well-paid lobbyists and control of what gets reported on the mainstream news. That combination can easily destroy the careers of honest altruistic researchers that threaten their financial bottom line – and they have – most dramatically and cruelly in the case of Dr Andrew Wakefield (watch one of his powerful talks on YouTube).
What makes the problem urgent is that the medical establishment is allowing itself to be repeatedly brain-washed by Big Pharma’s criminal smearing of honest whistle-blowing physician-scholars like Wakefield, Suzanne Humphries, Sherri Tenpenny, Russell Blaylock, Diane Harper, Toni Bark and Kelly Brogan – as well as non-physician experts like Stephanie Seneff, Brian Hooker, Barbara Loe-Fischer, Gary Goldman, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. (google each of them before dismissing this column and listen to their testimony which is all over YouTube. One can find everything at one website: http://www.vaccinesrevealed.com/.
If the medical establishment continues in denial or ignorance about the dangers of vaccines, the financial impact of just three vaccine-induced disorders will not only dramatically increase in incidence and intensity but the escalating multi-billion dollar cost to care for the permanently disabled autistics, the permanently disabled “Alzheimer’s Disease” patients and the “mysterious” autoimmune disorder epidemic will bankrupt the nation (if the Pentagon budgets doesn’t do it first).
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
[themify_hr color=’red’]
Definition of Anthropogenic: “an adjective used to describe the environmental pollution and pollutants that originate from human or corporate activity.”
Conscientious whistleblowers in the honor-the-earth, protect-the-water and assorted other environmental movements regularly point out the glaring reality that it is actually the amoral, conscienceless multinational corporations that are the main cause of local, regional and planetary environmental pollution.
But if an investigative journalist accidentally allows those assertions to be published or voiced, the media’s propaganda machine predictably goes into defensive mode or attack mode, first casting doubt on the whistle-blower’s assertions or else it issues an ad hominem attack upon the whistle-blower.
The corporation’s stable of lawyers and public relations department – with the assistance of assorted media mouthpieces – start mis-directing the public’s perceptions by repeatedly using the “time-honored” phrase of “human activity” or “man-made activity” for causing the problem (even though all the credible truly scientific evidence implicates “corporate activity” for the damage).
Thereafter, especially if the media outlet depends on advertising revenue from the corporate polluter, the whistle-blower will likely be black-balled from further interviews.
Every polluting, fossil fuel-burning multinational corporation could be indicted in any unbiased court of law for crimes against humanity and for crimes against the planet – if any courageous lawyer could be found to prosecute the case. Plenty of solid scientific data exists to convict polluting corporations for their crimes against the planet – if a fair-minded judge could be found that is not beholden to corporate interests.
And any legislative body containing a majority of honorable politicians (that have not taken corporate campaign bribes) would easily pass legislation protecting the planet rather than listening for even another minute to the corrupted “pseudoscience” that is spouted so regularly by the highly-paid mercenary lobbyists that do the bidding their industry paymasters.
It is the rare corporation that does not pollute the earth in the process of mining the earth’s natural resources and in the manufacturing of their products. And then the end-products invariably cause serious pollution in many ways, including the act of disposing of the often toxic used-up product.
<<<Pentagon SuperFund Sites, the Worst of the Worst>>>
The Pentagon and its military-industrial complex of weapons suppliers are acknowledged to be the worst and most plentiful polluters on the face of the earth, with hundreds of military bases and weapons production sites that qualify for the designation of SuperFund sites. Those sites contain the most toxic by-products of war-making and the environmental pollution is so bad that the government and the taxpayers are on the hook for doing the impossible clean-up!
The same can be said of the mining industry, so that when a mine shuts down, the metallic ore plays out or the mining company goes belly-up, the government and the taxpayers are on the hook to do the clean-up. (The so-called clean-up is particularly difficult in the deadly residue and toxic tailing ponds at the sites of sulfide (sulfuric acid-producing) mines where gold, silver, copper and zinc had been mined.
(For much more information about sulfide mining, see my column on the Butte, Montana SuperFund open pit copper mine that is located just outside of the dying community of Butte, Montana. The Butte mine clearly illustrates the long-term pollution that just one abandoned copper mine invariably causes as it gradually fills up with heavy metals that are dissolved in sulfuric acid that has a highly acidic pH of 2.5 [approximating stomach acid].) The Butte SuperFund site is just one of 16 Montana SuperFund sites that the has been assigned to remediate.
Here is the link: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/12/poisoned-snow-geese-in-butte-the-new-canaries-warning-us-humans-about-the-toxic-nature-of-copper-mining/
<<<Minnesota’s 25 EPA SuperFund Sites>>>
Incidentally, Minnesota at one time had over 40 SuperFund sites, with 25 remaining on the EPA’s list, including Duluth’s St. Louis River site at the old US Steel Plant, where there are carcinogenic PAHs(Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), carcinogenic VOCs [volatile organic chemicals) , cyanide, naphthalene, and heavy metals – including mercury – in the sludge at the bottom of the river, where US Steel dumped its chemical and metallic refuse. Most of the Minnesota sites are either corporate refuse site, municipal landfill sites or weapons manufacturing sites. All have serious heavy metal and/or carcinogenic contaminants that are poisoning the ground water, soil and even the air.
The recently discussed irremediable pollution in the slip near Duluth’s Canal Park, where thedecommissioned ore boat, the William A. Irvin, is moored, is not large enough to warrant SuperFund status, nor has the upstream St. Louis River Cloquet Paper Mill operation, which, for many decades, discharged toxic paper-processing by-products (especially carcinogenic chlorinated hydrocarbons from the bleaching process) directly into the St. Louis River before it was forced to change its manufacturing operations.
<<<Corporate Disinformation Tactics>>>
When confronted by damaging information about their corporate processes, one of the early disinformation tactics that CEOs order is to have their public relations propagandists play the “doubt card”, which tries to deflect blame for the malfeasance on some other entity, often by producing some pseudoscientific research that the industry concocted in secrecy.
Wealthy corporations have the monetary resources to use that tactic for decades if necessary, thus delaying real remedies while the profits keep rolling in. The “doubt card” tactic is currently being used by climate change deniers, especially the accused, amoral corporations in the Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Coal, gas, energy, pipeline, mining, pharmaceutical and weapons industries, despite the evidence for global warming that is everywhere that an unbiased, well-informed person might look.
Big Tobacco particularly has become infamous for casting doubt on whether or not cigarette smoking was a public health problem. Big Tobacco’s executives have even expressed pride in inventing that tactic, stating that doubt was their greatest weapon in delaying government interference in their obscenely profitable industry. Casting doubt delayed the public’s perception that cigarettes were carcinogenic or could cause respiratory illnesses, and thus they got away with murder for decades longer than they should have.
Science-minded physicians like US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who served under Ronald Reagan (who was Big Pharma’s, Big Food’s, Big Agribusiness’s and the nuclear weapons industry’s hero), knew the facts about tobacco’s lethality. But Koop and many other unbiased scientists were essentially accused of being conspiracy theorists when they tried to warn the public about the tobacco industry’s dangerous products. Selling highly addictive but highly lucrative products creates life-long customers and patients who will pay almost anything to get their next caffeine, nicotine, opioid or prescription drug fix in order to avoid the painful symptoms of withdrawal.
Is there a more devious way for an entity to make money than to sell customers a highly addictive product that also sickens and even kills its customers, while simultaneously lying about the addictive quality and lethality of its products?
<<<Illicit vs. Legal Addictive Drugs>>>
Welcome to the world of sociopathic Big Businesses that profit by pushing illicit – but highly addictive – street drugs like heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and speed, each of which are intended to get customers addicted, thus becoming regular customers.
And welcome to the world of sociopathic Big Pharma industries that maximize profits by marketing legal – and oftentimes highly addictive – psychopharmaceutical prescription drugs such as “anti-depressants”, tranquilizers, opioids, the so-called ADHD drugs, the various anorexic/weight loss drugs and psycho-stimulating drugs like Ritalin, Strattera, Wellbutrin, Effexor and Provigil. Any adverse effects from these prescription drugs are iatrogenic.
<<<Big Pharma and Iatrogenocide>>>
Big Pharma’s psychotropic drug marketing programs are virtually indistinguishable from Big Tobacco’s. Until they were caught in the lie, both industries (falsely) asserted that their products were safe, effective and not addictive, and to this day, they both continue to co-opt their partners in deception (the tobacco sellers and the prescribing physicians, allied health professionals, psych drug salespersons and pharmacists) by convincing those groups to continue prescribing or dispensing these dangerous synthetic chemicals long enough to make their clients physiologically dependent.
And then, when the patient who has been taking brain-altering substances long enough and then realizes that he might be addicted, or feels sick or out of control and then to get off the drug, he is at high risk of developing withdrawal symptoms (that are usually totally different from the symptoms that caused him to start the drug in the first place).
When withdrawal from addictive drugs occurs, the prescribing physician often erroneously makes a knee-jerk diagnosis that the patient’s initial “mental illness” is “relapsing”. And then, because of the unfounded assertion that the withdrawal syndrome is just the old disorder coming back, the patient is often told that he will have to take a cocktail of drugs for the rest of his life.
Of course the longer a potentially addictive brain-altering drug is taken, the more likely it will be that the patient will have difficulty overcoming the brain’s dependence on the substance, and it doesn’t matter whether the drug was legal or illicit. There is also a great likelihood of long-term brain damage as these drugs accumulate with each dose and therefore can continue their neurotoxic adverse effects.
Whether using Big Tobacco’s or Big Pharma’s addictive products, smokers and drugged-up patients are likely to become lifelong consumers of the products and will be helping both industries keep the drug prices high, the next quarter’s financial report positive and the corporation’s stock price up; all of which keeps the gravy train going strong for the CEOs who regularly take home tens of millions of dollars annually.
Immediately below is one formula for the successful marketing of prescription psychotropic drugs. These principles are just a variation of how people get hooked on nicotine, heroin and other assorted street drugs.
1) Brain-wash prospective targets so they will want to try the potentially addictive drug;
2) Convince the target to demand a prescription from their physician;
3) Cheer-lead the patient to tolerate the inevitable adverse effects so that the patient will continue taking the drug until they are hooked;
4) Get the patient to take the drug even though it can be obscenely expensive;
5) Be ready for the patient to fail at trying to stop taking the drug;
6) Recommend additional drugs to cover-up the drug’s adverse effects (rather than quitting the drug altogether);
7) Encourage the patient to increase the dose of the addictive drug when he gets drug-withdrawal symptoms or even encourage the patient to take additional drugs to cover-up the symptoms (rather than taking the time to help the patient get off the drug completely).
Industries that sell addictive entertainment (such as videogames, online gambling and pornography), alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, sports, etc) are examples of addictive products that are regarded as good investments for the investor class, no matter what are the consequences for the patient.
Those examples of corporate amorality, malfeasance and greed could be called crimes against humanity and crimes against the planet. And just below is another crime against Mother Earth that has been essentially ignored by the national media. Pretending that the disastrous algae blooms in the Great Lakes aren’t there is irresponsible behavior whether corporations or individual humans are to blame. And to acknowledge the disaster might lead to criminal prosecution. Of course, if the root causes of the algae blooms are identified, the next step is to identify the guilty entities (usually corporations) that should be legally responsible for the clean-up.
<<<Toxic Algae Blooms in Herbicide and Pesticide-poisoned Lake Erie>>>
The environmental catastrophe that has been well-documented in a multitude of satellite photographs (see one of them below) has been slowly killing off Lake Erie, the 11th largest “fresh” water lake in the world. The pro-corporate, anti-regulatory, neoliberal and neoconservative entities (from all political persuasions except for Greens and Social Democrats) from the rust-belt states of Michigan and Ohio have been negligent in their duty to ensure the sustainability of the environment. But all those politicians took large campaign contributions – and then acquiesced to pressure – from regional and multinational corporations to do what was best for the polluting industries and not for the environment. The corporations most responsible were the ALEC-associated Big Agribusiness, Big Chemistry, Big Mining, Big Energy, Big Food and Wall Street industries in whose interest it has always been to see abolished the common-sense efforts of the Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency for the regulation of toxic pollutants. Immediately below are named some of the corporate pollutants.
1) Pesticides and insecticides used in corporate agribusiness,
2) Phosphorus- and nitrogen-containing nutrients in corporate agribusiness-promoted fertilizer and phosphate detergents (PO4),
3) Corporate sewage treatment plants,
4) Corporate garbage-burning facilities,
5) Corporate mining waste runoffs,
6) Corporate pharmaceuticals that are excreted by humans and livestock animals,
7) Organochlorine toxins (often carcinogenic, from upstream corporate paper mills, chlorinated drinking water, etc),
8) Fluoridated drinking water,
9) Corporate farm animal manure (virtually always contaminated with antibiotics),
10) PCBs and mercury from coal-fired corporate electric power plants,
11) Other synthetic, non-organic, toxic food waste and water in aquifers, lakes, rivers and streams (even water that is intended for drinking!), and
12) Global climate change because of the fossil fuel industry’s refusal to change to sustainable energy sources.
The following satellite image is of a massive toxic algae bloom from the summer of 2015, which was the worst bloom in years. The summer of 2016 was expected to be worse than 2015. The photo shows Michigan’s Lake St. Clair and the western part of Lake Erie, Both fresh water lakes received enormous amounts of Agribusiness-facilitated, fertilizer-laden, herbicide-laden, pesticide-laden, highly polluted water from streams and rivers that drain the area’s chemically-treated, corporate-managed farm land. Normal lakes should be uniformly blue with zero green color! The green, of course, represents the algal bloom.
These algae are often toxic. They are able to thrive partly because of the warming water (more proof of global climate change), but the bloom is made much worse because of the combination of high nitrogen and phosphorus nutrient load from farm fertilizer and livestock manure and because algae are resistant to the above list of cellular toxins that kill off algae’s competitors, such as fish and other aquatic life.
Highly toxic herbicides and insecticides are commonly found in the watersheds leading into Lake St Clair and Lake Erie. The poisons that are secreted by the algae can be lethal to fish and animals, including humans, given a large enough exposure. Some of the toxic chemical herbicides and pesticides listed below are commonly sprayed on farm fields of large American corporate farming operations, thanks to Big Agribusinesses like Monsanto. They include:
1) Metolachlor, atrazine, deethylatrazine, cyanazine, simazine and Round-up are among the most frequently detected herbicides.
2) Diazinon, chlorpyrifos, and carbaryl were among the most frequently detected insecticides.
Algae are simple plant species that do not thrive in unpolluted cold water. Under certain conditions, the overgrowth of some algae species can produce deadly toxins that can kill or sicken fish, shellfish, mammals, birds and humans, and, of course, will make the water smelly and undrinkable.
When masses of algae die and decompose and de-oxygenate the water, massive fish die-offs – if there are any fish left – will occur.
Non-human corporations are the major culprits, not individual human persons. Corporations are not persons, no matter what the Supreme Court said in 2010, but they should be held responsible.
In a strict law and order society like Donald Trump claimed his presidency was all about, such crimes against humanity and the earth should be punished with the death penalty.
I say take the culprits to court and lock ‘em up before they kill again.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
[themify_hr color=’red’]
Definition of Anthropogenic: “an adjective used to describe the environmental pollution and pollutants that originate from human or corporate activity.”
Conscientious whistleblowers in the honor-the-earth, protect-the-water and assorted other environmental movements regularly point out the glaring reality that it is actually the amoral, conscienceless multinational corporations that are the main cause of local, regional and planetary environmental pollution.
But if an investigative journalist accidentally allows those assertions to be published or voiced, the media’s propaganda machine predictably goes into defensive mode or attack mode, first casting doubt on the whistle-blower’s assertions or else it issues an ad hominem attack upon the whistle-blower.
The corporation’s stable of lawyers and public relations department – with the assistance of assorted media mouthpieces – start mis-directing the public’s perceptions by repeatedly using the “time-honored” phrase of “human activity” or “man-made activity” for causing the problem (even though all the credible truly scientific evidence implicates “corporate activity” for the damage).
Thereafter, especially if the media outlet depends on advertising revenue from the corporate polluter, the whistle-blower will likely be black-balled from further interviews.
Every polluting, fossil fuel-burning multinational corporation could be indicted in any unbiased court of law for crimes against humanity and for crimes against the planet – if any courageous lawyer could be found to prosecute the case. Plenty of solid scientific data exists to convict polluting corporations for their crimes against the planet – if a fair-minded judge could be found that is not beholden to corporate interests.
And any legislative body containing a majority of honorable politicians (that have not taken corporate campaign bribes) would easily pass legislation protecting the planet rather than listening for even another minute to the corrupted “pseudoscience” that is spouted so regularly by the highly-paid mercenary lobbyists that do the bidding their industry paymasters.
It is the rare corporation that does not pollute the earth in the process of mining the earth’s natural resources and in the manufacturing of their products. And then the end-products invariably cause serious pollution in many ways, including the act of disposing of the often toxic used-up product.
<<<Pentagon SuperFund Sites, the Worst of the Worst>>>
The Pentagon and its military-industrial complex of weapons suppliers are acknowledged to be the worst and most plentiful polluters on the face of the earth, with hundreds of military bases and weapons production sites that qualify for the designation of SuperFund sites. Those sites contain the most toxic by-products of war-making and the environmental pollution is so bad that the government and the taxpayers are on the hook for doing the impossible clean-up!
The same can be said of the mining industry, so that when a mine shuts down, the metallic ore plays out or the mining company goes belly-up, the government and the taxpayers are on the hook to do the clean-up. (The so-called clean-up is particularly difficult in the deadly residue and toxic tailing ponds at the sites of sulfide (sulfuric acid-producing) mines where gold, silver, copper and zinc had been mined.
(For much more information about sulfide mining, see my column on the Butte, Montana SuperFund open pit copper mine that is located just outside of the dying community of Butte, Montana. The Butte mine clearly illustrates the long-term pollution that just one abandoned copper mine invariably causes as it gradually fills up with heavy metals that are dissolved in sulfuric acid that has a highly acidic pH of 2.5 [approximating stomach acid].) The Butte SuperFund site is just one of 16 Montana SuperFund sites that the has been assigned to remediate.
Here is the link: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/12/poisoned-snow-geese-in-butte-the-new-canaries-warning-us-humans-about-the-toxic-nature-of-copper-mining/
<<<Minnesota’s 25 EPA SuperFund Sites>>>
Incidentally, Minnesota at one time had over 40 SuperFund sites, with 25 remaining on the EPA’s list, including Duluth’s St. Louis River site at the old US Steel Plant, where there are carcinogenic PAHs(Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), carcinogenic VOCs [volatile organic chemicals) , cyanide, naphthalene, and heavy metals – including mercury – in the sludge at the bottom of the river, where US Steel dumped its chemical and metallic refuse. Most of the Minnesota sites are either corporate refuse site, municipal landfill sites or weapons manufacturing sites. All have serious heavy metal and/or carcinogenic contaminants that are poisoning the ground water, soil and even the air.
The recently discussed irremediable pollution in the slip near Duluth’s Canal Park, where thedecommissioned ore boat, the William A. Irvin, is moored, is not large enough to warrant SuperFund status, nor has the upstream St. Louis River Cloquet Paper Mill operation, which, for many decades, discharged toxic paper-processing by-products (especially carcinogenic chlorinated hydrocarbons from the bleaching process) directly into the St. Louis River before it was forced to change its manufacturing operations.
<<<Corporate Disinformation Tactics>>>
When confronted by damaging information about their corporate processes, one of the early disinformation tactics that CEOs order is to have their public relations propagandists play the “doubt card”, which tries to deflect blame for the malfeasance on some other entity, often by producing some pseudoscientific research that the industry concocted in secrecy.
Wealthy corporations have the monetary resources to use that tactic for decades if necessary, thus delaying real remedies while the profits keep rolling in. The “doubt card” tactic is currently being used by climate change deniers, especially the accused, amoral corporations in the Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Coal, gas, energy, pipeline, mining, pharmaceutical and weapons industries, despite the evidence for global warming that is everywhere that an unbiased, well-informed person might look.
Big Tobacco particularly has become infamous for casting doubt on whether or not cigarette smoking was a public health problem. Big Tobacco’s executives have even expressed pride in inventing that tactic, stating that doubt was their greatest weapon in delaying government interference in their obscenely profitable industry. Casting doubt delayed the public’s perception that cigarettes were carcinogenic or could cause respiratory illnesses, and thus they got away with murder for decades longer than they should have.
Science-minded physicians like US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who served under Ronald Reagan (who was Big Pharma’s, Big Food’s, Big Agribusiness’s and the nuclear weapons industry’s hero), knew the facts about tobacco’s lethality. But Koop and many other unbiased scientists were essentially accused of being conspiracy theorists when they tried to warn the public about the tobacco industry’s dangerous products. Selling highly addictive but highly lucrative products creates life-long customers and patients who will pay almost anything to get their next caffeine, nicotine, opioid or prescription drug fix in order to avoid the painful symptoms of withdrawal.
Is there a more devious way for an entity to make money than to sell customers a highly addictive product that also sickens and even kills its customers, while simultaneously lying about the addictive quality and lethality of its products?
<<<Illicit vs. Legal Addictive Drugs>>>
Welcome to the world of sociopathic Big Businesses that profit by pushing illicit – but highly addictive – street drugs like heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and speed, each of which are intended to get customers addicted, thus becoming regular customers.
And welcome to the world of sociopathic Big Pharma industries that maximize profits by marketing legal – and oftentimes highly addictive – psychopharmaceutical prescription drugs such as “anti-depressants”, tranquilizers, opioids, the so-called ADHD drugs, the various anorexic/weight loss drugs and psycho-stimulating drugs like Ritalin, Strattera, Wellbutrin, Effexor and Provigil. Any adverse effects from these prescription drugs are iatrogenic.
<<<Big Pharma and Iatrogenocide>>>
Big Pharma’s psychotropic drug marketing programs are virtually indistinguishable from Big Tobacco’s. Until they were caught in the lie, both industries (falsely) asserted that their products were safe, effective and not addictive, and to this day, they both continue to co-opt their partners in deception (the tobacco sellers and the prescribing physicians, allied health professionals, psych drug salespersons and pharmacists) by convincing those groups to continue prescribing or dispensing these dangerous synthetic chemicals long enough to make their clients physiologically dependent.
And then, when the patient who has been taking brain-altering substances long enough and then realizes that he might be addicted, or feels sick or out of control and then to get off the drug, he is at high risk of developing withdrawal symptoms (that are usually totally different from the symptoms that caused him to start the drug in the first place).
When withdrawal from addictive drugs occurs, the prescribing physician often erroneously makes a knee-jerk diagnosis that the patient’s initial “mental illness” is “relapsing”. And then, because of the unfounded assertion that the withdrawal syndrome is just the old disorder coming back, the patient is often told that he will have to take a cocktail of drugs for the rest of his life.
Of course the longer a potentially addictive brain-altering drug is taken, the more likely it will be that the patient will have difficulty overcoming the brain’s dependence on the substance, and it doesn’t matter whether the drug was legal or illicit. There is also a great likelihood of long-term brain damage as these drugs accumulate with each dose and therefore can continue their neurotoxic adverse effects.
Whether using Big Tobacco’s or Big Pharma’s addictive products, smokers and drugged-up patients are likely to become lifelong consumers of the products and will be helping both industries keep the drug prices high, the next quarter’s financial report positive and the corporation’s stock price up; all of which keeps the gravy train going strong for the CEOs who regularly take home tens of millions of dollars annually.
Immediately below is one formula for the successful marketing of prescription psychotropic drugs. These principles are just a variation of how people get hooked on nicotine, heroin and other assorted street drugs.
1) Brain-wash prospective targets so they will want to try the potentially addictive drug;
2) Convince the target to demand a prescription from their physician;
3) Cheer-lead the patient to tolerate the inevitable adverse effects so that the patient will continue taking the drug until they are hooked;
4) Get the patient to take the drug even though it can be obscenely expensive;
5) Be ready for the patient to fail at trying to stop taking the drug;
6) Recommend additional drugs to cover-up the drug’s adverse effects (rather than quitting the drug altogether);
7) Encourage the patient to increase the dose of the addictive drug when he gets drug-withdrawal symptoms or even encourage the patient to take additional drugs to cover-up the symptoms (rather than taking the time to help the patient get off the drug completely).
Industries that sell addictive entertainment (such as videogames, online gambling and pornography), alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, sports, etc) are examples of addictive products that are regarded as good investments for the investor class, no matter what are the consequences for the patient.
Those examples of corporate amorality, malfeasance and greed could be called crimes against humanity and crimes against the planet. And just below is another crime against Mother Earth that has been essentially ignored by the national media. Pretending that the disastrous algae blooms in the Great Lakes aren’t there is irresponsible behavior whether corporations or individual humans are to blame. And to acknowledge the disaster might lead to criminal prosecution. Of course, if the root causes of the algae blooms are identified, the next step is to identify the guilty entities (usually corporations) that should be legally responsible for the clean-up.
<<<Toxic Algae Blooms in Herbicide and Pesticide-poisoned Lake Erie>>>
The environmental catastrophe that has been well-documented in a multitude of satellite photographs (see one of them below) has been slowly killing off Lake Erie, the 11th largest “fresh” water lake in the world. The pro-corporate, anti-regulatory, neoliberal and neoconservative entities (from all political persuasions except for Greens and Social Democrats) from the rust-belt states of Michigan and Ohio have been negligent in their duty to ensure the sustainability of the environment. But all those politicians took large campaign contributions – and then acquiesced to pressure – from regional and multinational corporations to do what was best for the polluting industries and not for the environment. The corporations most responsible were the ALEC-associated Big Agribusiness, Big Chemistry, Big Mining, Big Energy, Big Food and Wall Street industries in whose interest it has always been to see abolished the common-sense efforts of the Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency for the regulation of toxic pollutants. Immediately below are named some of the corporate pollutants.
1) Pesticides and insecticides used in corporate agribusiness,
2) Phosphorus- and nitrogen-containing nutrients in corporate agribusiness-promoted fertilizer and phosphate detergents (PO4),
3) Corporate sewage treatment plants,
4) Corporate garbage-burning facilities,
5) Corporate mining waste runoffs,
6) Corporate pharmaceuticals that are excreted by humans and livestock animals,
7) Organochlorine toxins (often carcinogenic, from upstream corporate paper mills, chlorinated drinking water, etc),
8) Fluoridated drinking water,
9) Corporate farm animal manure (virtually always contaminated with antibiotics),
10) PCBs and mercury from coal-fired corporate electric power plants,
11) Other synthetic, non-organic, toxic food waste and water in aquifers, lakes, rivers and streams (even water that is intended for drinking!), and
12) Global climate change because of the fossil fuel industry’s refusal to change to sustainable energy sources.
The following satellite image is of a massive toxic algae bloom from the summer of 2015, which was the worst bloom in years. The summer of 2016 was expected to be worse than 2015. The photo shows Michigan’s Lake St. Clair and the western part of Lake Erie, Both fresh water lakes received enormous amounts of Agribusiness-facilitated, fertilizer-laden, herbicide-laden, pesticide-laden, highly polluted water from streams and rivers that drain the area’s chemically-treated, corporate-managed farm land. Normal lakes should be uniformly blue with zero green color! The green, of course, represents the algal bloom.
These algae are often toxic. They are able to thrive partly because of the warming water (more proof of global climate change), but the bloom is made much worse because of the combination of high nitrogen and phosphorus nutrient load from farm fertilizer and livestock manure and because algae are resistant to the above list of cellular toxins that kill off algae’s competitors, such as fish and other aquatic life.
Highly toxic herbicides and insecticides are commonly found in the watersheds leading into Lake St Clair and Lake Erie. The poisons that are secreted by the algae can be lethal to fish and animals, including humans, given a large enough exposure. Some of the toxic chemical herbicides and pesticides listed below are commonly sprayed on farm fields of large American corporate farming operations, thanks to Big Agribusinesses like Monsanto. They include:
1) Metolachlor, atrazine, deethylatrazine, cyanazine, simazine and Round-up are among the most frequently detected herbicides.
2) Diazinon, chlorpyrifos, and carbaryl were among the most frequently detected insecticides.
Algae are simple plant species that do not thrive in unpolluted cold water. Under certain conditions, the overgrowth of some algae species can produce deadly toxins that can kill or sicken fish, shellfish, mammals, birds and humans, and, of course, will make the water smelly and undrinkable.
When masses of algae die and decompose and de-oxygenate the water, massive fish die-offs – if there are any fish left – will occur.
Non-human corporations are the major culprits, not individual human persons. Corporations are not persons, no matter what the Supreme Court said in 2010, but they should be held responsible.
In a strict law and order society like Donald Trump claimed his presidency was all about, such crimes against humanity and the earth should be punished with the death penalty.
I say take the culprits to court and lock ‘em up before they kill again.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
[themify_hr color=’red’ border_width=’3px’]
The United States is only one of many nations around the world that is experiencing a dramatic rise in fascist political movements. NeoFascist political parties have been achieving sizable minorities in several European countries over the past generation, and now American is experiencing the same phenomenon. Hard right-wing political parties in American have been around forever, but they have always been numerically insignificant – until now. Citizens who meet the definition of fascist have come out of the shadows in the US since Donald Trump started campaigning for president of the United States.
Of course the current hysterical xenophobia (fear of foreigners – a cardinal sign of fascism) has developed strength ever since the United States military destabilized the entire MidEast with its stupid and illegal invasions that spawned the Syrian refugee crisis and caused millions of desperate war refugees to seek shelter in foreign countries that can’t be expected to easily harbor all of them humanely.
Consider the hatred that must have been generated by America’s state-sponsored terrorism in the MidEast, especially the daily acts of cruelty, inhumanity, bombings, massacres and assorted international war crimes that were committed by our soldiers (which have been covered up and gone unpunished). And then consider America’s obvious “we don’t give a damn” attitude about the massive human suffering, and one can’t claim to be surprised about the occasional acts of retaliatory violence that American officials and their media mouthpieces choose to call Islamic terrorism.
I have been observing the drift toward overt fascism in American for several decades now, but democracy in America has always been just strong enough to keep the movement from over-whelming our supposed democratic ideals.
I used to call what I saw happening to American politics and commerce “Friendly” American Fascism, because of the fake friendly smiles that I have seen on the faces of so many of our nation’s proto-fascist leaders that are gradually trying to destroy our democracy. The contrast from the perpetual frowns on the faces of the infamous Nazis that we loved to hate was striking.
It is pretty easy to be deceived by the smiles on the faces of hard-right wing politicians like Mike Pence, hard right-wing Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia, hard right-wing commentators on TV like Bill O’Reilly, hard right-wing Christian clergypersons like Pat Robertson and hard right-wing multibillionaires like the Koch Brothers, all of whom have been greedily gaining control over more and more of our political system, our courts, our cops, our churches, our media, our wealth, and our corporations. (At least the neo-fascist White Supremacists guiding things in Trump’s White House [Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller] have unsmiling faces that truly reveal their inner fascist selves.)
Under the illusion of niceness displayed by the most of the un-elected usurpers in the Oval Office, they have been gaining control over the executive branch of government. But the US Senate’s role in the friendly fascist rolling coup has been facilitated with the help of another unsmiling curmudgeon – Mitch McConnell. Another brick in the wall was placed when corporations were granted the privileges (but none of the responsibilities) of personhood in the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision. But when Christo-fascists in the Fundamentalist movement teamed with the neo-fascists in the Tea Party and took over the Republican Party, “Friendly American Fascism” wasn’t so friendly anymore.
The frightening rise in bigotry, white nationalism, white racism, white supremacism, Christian supremacism, the KKK, authoritarianism, the Gestapo tactics of our increasingly militarized police, voting rights pull-backs for non-white minorities, the vicious xenophobia, intolerance, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, and the obvious tendency for many voters to denigrate science and restrict the civil rights of others is, by definition, fascism.
Therefore it seems way past time for somebody to put down in writing some essential definitions to de-mystify fascism that we all should have learned in civics class (but didn’t). So below are a number of definitions of political, economic and social realities that I found online and abridged, mostly from Wikipedia. I hope readers study it, take it seriously and re-read it as needed and perhaps pass it around to others.
The future of our democracy – not to mention the success of any political discussions readers may have with illiberal friends – may depend on it.
[themify_hr color=”orange” width=”200px”]
Left-wing politics: supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy and social inequality. It typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished (by advocating for social justice).
The political terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution (1789–1799), referring to the seating arrangement in the Estates General: those who sat on the left generally opposed the monarchy and supported the revolution, the creation of a republic and secularization (against church involvement in government).
Those delegates who sat on the right were supportive of the traditional institutions of the Old Regime. The word “wing” was appended to Left and Right in the late 19th century, usually with disparaging intent, and “left-wing” was applied to those who were unorthodox or heretical in their religious or political views.
The term was later applied to a number of movements, especially republicanism during the French Revolution in the 18th century, followed by socialism, communism, anarchism and social democracyin the 19th and 20th centuries. Since then, the term left-wing has been applied to a broad range of movements including civil rights movements, feminist movements, anti-war movements and environmental movements, as well as a wide range of parties.
Right-wing politics: Although the right-wing originated with traditional conservatives, monarchists and reactionaries, the term extreme right-wing has also been applied to movements including fascists, Nazis, and racial supremacists.
In the United States, the right includes both economic and social conservatives. In Europe, and the Right includes nationalists, nativists (opposed to immigration) and religious conservatives.
Democracy (Literally “rule of the commoners”) is a system of government in which the citizens exercise power directly or elect representatives from among themselves to form a governing body, such as a parliament. Democracy is sometimes referred to as “rule of the majority”.
According to political scientist Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements: 1) a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; 2) the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; 3) protection of the human rights of all citizens, and 4) the rule of law , in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.
Democracy contrasts with forms of government where power is either held by an individual, as in an absolute monarchy, or where power is held by a small number of individuals, as in an oligarchy (rule by “the few”). Most governments have mixed democratic, oligarchic, and monarchic elements. Karl Popper defined democracy in contrast to dictatorship or rule by a tyrant (tyranny), thus focusing on opportunities for the people to control their leaders and to oust them without the need for a revolution.
Plutocracy (from Greek ploutos, meaning “wealth”, and kratos, meaning “power, dominion, rule”) is a form of oligarchy that defines a society ruled or controlled by a small minority of the wealthiest citizens. Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy. The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense.
Liberalism is a political philosophy founded on ideas of liberty and equality (egalitarianism). Whereas classical liberalism emphasizes the role of liberty, social liberalism stresses the importance of equality.
Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas and programs such as 1) freedom of speech, 2) freedom of the press, 3)freedom of religion, 4) free markets, 5) civil rights, 6) democratic societies, 7) secular governments, 8) gender equality, and 9) international cooperation.
Socialist political movementsincludes a diverse array of political philosophies that originated amid the revolutionary movements of the mid-to-late 1700s and of a general concern for the social problems that were associated with capitalism.
Socialist politics has been both centralist and decentralized; internationalist and nationalist in orientation; organized through political parties and opposed to party politics; at times overlapping with trade unions and at other times independent of unions.
The term “democratic socialism” is often used to highlight its advocates’ high value for democratic processes in the economy.The term is frequently used to draw contrast to the political system of the Soviet Union, which operated in an authoritarian fashion.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels critiqued the economic dynamics of capitalism. For them “socialism” had come to signify opposition to capitalism and advocacy for a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of production. By the 1920s, social democracy and communism became the two dominant political tendencies within the international socialist movement. Socialism proceeded to emerge as the most influential secular political-economic worldview of the twentieth century.
Socialist parties and ideas remain a political force with varying degrees of power and influence in all continents, heading national governments in many countries around the world. Today, some socialists have adopted the causes of other social movements, such as environmentalism, feminism, and liberalism.
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization. Conservatives seek to preserve institutions like the Church, monarchy and the social hierarchy as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while the more extreme elements called reactionaries seek a return to “the way things were”. Conservatism has been historically associated with right-wing politics.
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I before it spread to other European countries. Violently opposed to liberalism, Marxism and anarchism, fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left-right spectrum.
Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes to the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and the total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilians and combatants. All citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war. The war had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines and provide economic production and logistics to support them, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.
Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascist-leaning movements urge large budgetary outlays for war-making and “defense”.
Political conservatism, in most modern democracies, seeks to uphold traditional family structures and “values”.
Cultural conservatives support the preservation of the heritage of one nation, and they hold fast to traditional ways of thinking even in the face of monumental change. They believe strongly in traditional values and traditional politics, and often have an urgent sense of nationalism.
A social conservative wants to preserve traditional morality and social mores, often by opposing what they consider radical policies or social engineering. Social change is generally regarded as suspect.
Christian conservatives principally seek to apply the theological teachings to politics, sometimes by merely proclaiming the value of those teachings, at other times by having those teachings influence laws. Christian conservatives typically oppose abortion, homosexuality, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage. For the past generation, many American Christian conservatives have been very active in politics, even envisioning a Christian theocratic state.
Authoritarian conservatism refers to autocratic regimes that center their ideology around conservative nationalism and even anti-Semitism. Authoritarian conservative movements show strong devotion towards religion, tradition, and culture and were prominent in the same era as fascism, with which it sometimes clashed.
Neoliberalism (neo-liberalism) refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These included privatization, fiscal authority, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980. The implementation of neoliberal policies and the acceptance of neoliberal economic theories in the 1970s are seen by some academics as the root of the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
The term “neoliberal” was reintroduced in the 1980s in connection with Augusto Pinochet’s [fascist] economic reforms in Chile. Scholars now tended to associate it with the theories of economist Milton Friedman, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan. By 1994, with the passage of NAFTA and the Zapatistas reaction to this development in Chiapas, the term re-entered global circulation.
Neoconservatism (NeoCon) is a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s among conservative-leaning Democrats who became disenchanted with the party’s non-interventionist foreign policy. Many of its adherents became politically famous during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
Neoconservatives peaked in influence during the administration of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prominent neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer. Senior officials Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while not identifying as neoconservatives, listened closely to neoconservative advisers regarding their aggressive foreign policy plans, especially the defense of Israel and interventions in the Middle East.
Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of American national interest in international affairs, including by means of military force.
Libertarianism seeks to maximize political freedom and autonomy, emphasizing freedom of choice, voluntary association, self-ownership and the rule of law.
Libertarians share a skepticism of authority and state power. However, they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing political and economic systems, often calling to restrict or to dissolve coercive social institutions, such as health care, social security, human rights.
Libertarians usually advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights, such as in land, infrastructure, and natural resources.
Economic/social systems
1) Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investment are determined by the owners of the factors of production in financial and capital markets, and prices and the distribution of goods are mainly determined by competition in the market.
Economists, political economists, and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include free market capitalism, welfare capitalism and state capitalism. Different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition, and state-sanctioned social politics. The degree of competition in markets, the role of intervention and regulation, and the scope of state ownership vary across different models of capitalism; the extent to which different markets are free, as well as the rules defining private property, are matters of politics and policy.
Capitalism has existed under many forms of government, in many different times, places, and cultures. Following the decline of mercantilism, mixed capitalist systems became dominant in the Western world and continue to spread.
2) Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production; as well as the political ideologies, theories, and movements that aim to establish them. Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective, or cooperative ownership; to citizen ownership of equity; or to any combination of these. Although there are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them, social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.
Socialist economic systems can be divided into both non-market and market forms. Non-market socialism aims to circumvent the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with capital accumulation and the profit system.
Market socialism, by contrast, retains the use of monetary prices and, in some cases, the profit motive with respect to the operation of socially owned enterprises and the allocation of capital goods between them. Profits generated by these firms would be controlled directly by the workforce of each firm or accrue to society at large in the form of a social dividend. The feasibility and exact methods of resource allocation and calculation for a socialist system are the subjects of the socialist calculation debate.
3) Communism is the philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of the communist society, which is a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and the state. Communism includes a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, anarchism (anarchist communism), and the political ideologies grouped around both. All these share the analysis that the current order of society stems from its economic system, capitalism, that in this system, there are two major social classes: the working class (the proletariat) —who must work to survive, and who make up the majority within society—and the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie)—a minority who derives profit from employing the working class, through private ownership of the means of production, and that conflict between these two classes will trigger a revolution. The primary element which will enable this transformation, according to this analysis, is the social ownership of the means of production.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
[themify_hr color=’red’ border_width=’3px’]
The United States is only one of many nations around the world that is experiencing a dramatic rise in fascist political movements. NeoFascist political parties have been achieving sizable minorities in several European countries over the past generation, and now American is experiencing the same phenomenon. Hard right-wing political parties in American have been around forever, but they have always been numerically insignificant – until now. Citizens who meet the definition of fascist have come out of the shadows in the US since Donald Trump started campaigning for president of the United States.
Of course the current hysterical xenophobia (fear of foreigners – a cardinal sign of fascism) has developed strength ever since the United States military destabilized the entire MidEast with its stupid and illegal invasions that spawned the Syrian refugee crisis and caused millions of desperate war refugees to seek shelter in foreign countries that can’t be expected to easily harbor all of them humanely.
Consider the hatred that must have been generated by America’s state-sponsored terrorism in the MidEast, especially the daily acts of cruelty, inhumanity, bombings, massacres and assorted international war crimes that were committed by our soldiers (which have been covered up and gone unpunished). And then consider America’s obvious “we don’t give a damn” attitude about the massive human suffering, and one can’t claim to be surprised about the occasional acts of retaliatory violence that American officials and their media mouthpieces choose to call Islamic terrorism.
I have been observing the drift toward overt fascism in American for several decades now, but democracy in America has always been just strong enough to keep the movement from over-whelming our supposed democratic ideals.
I used to call what I saw happening to American politics and commerce “Friendly” American Fascism, because of the fake friendly smiles that I have seen on the faces of so many of our nation’s proto-fascist leaders that are gradually trying to destroy our democracy. The contrast from the perpetual frowns on the faces of the infamous Nazis that we loved to hate was striking.
It is pretty easy to be deceived by the smiles on the faces of hard-right wing politicians like Mike Pence, hard right-wing Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia, hard right-wing commentators on TV like Bill O’Reilly, hard right-wing Christian clergypersons like Pat Robertson and hard right-wing multibillionaires like the Koch Brothers, all of whom have been greedily gaining control over more and more of our political system, our courts, our cops, our churches, our media, our wealth, and our corporations. (At least the neo-fascist White Supremacists guiding things in Trump’s White House [Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller] have unsmiling faces that truly reveal their inner fascist selves.)
Under the illusion of niceness displayed by the most of the un-elected usurpers in the Oval Office, they have been gaining control over the executive branch of government. But the US Senate’s role in the friendly fascist rolling coup has been facilitated with the help of another unsmiling curmudgeon – Mitch McConnell. Another brick in the wall was placed when corporations were granted the privileges (but none of the responsibilities) of personhood in the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision. But when Christo-fascists in the Fundamentalist movement teamed with the neo-fascists in the Tea Party and took over the Republican Party, “Friendly American Fascism” wasn’t so friendly anymore.
The frightening rise in bigotry, white nationalism, white racism, white supremacism, Christian supremacism, the KKK, authoritarianism, the Gestapo tactics of our increasingly militarized police, voting rights pull-backs for non-white minorities, the vicious xenophobia, intolerance, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, and the obvious tendency for many voters to denigrate science and restrict the civil rights of others is, by definition, fascism.
Therefore it seems way past time for somebody to put down in writing some essential definitions to de-mystify fascism that we all should have learned in civics class (but didn’t). So below are a number of definitions of political, economic and social realities that I found online and abridged, mostly from Wikipedia. I hope readers study it, take it seriously and re-read it as needed and perhaps pass it around to others.
The future of our democracy – not to mention the success of any political discussions readers may have with illiberal friends – may depend on it.
[themify_hr color=”orange” width=”200px”]
Left-wing politics: supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy and social inequality. It typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished (by advocating for social justice).
The political terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution (1789–1799), referring to the seating arrangement in the Estates General: those who sat on the left generally opposed the monarchy and supported the revolution, the creation of a republic and secularization (against church involvement in government).
Those delegates who sat on the right were supportive of the traditional institutions of the Old Regime. The word “wing” was appended to Left and Right in the late 19th century, usually with disparaging intent, and “left-wing” was applied to those who were unorthodox or heretical in their religious or political views.
The term was later applied to a number of movements, especially republicanism during the French Revolution in the 18th century, followed by socialism, communism, anarchism and social democracyin the 19th and 20th centuries. Since then, the term left-wing has been applied to a broad range of movements including civil rights movements, feminist movements, anti-war movements and environmental movements, as well as a wide range of parties.
Right-wing politics: Although the right-wing originated with traditional conservatives, monarchists and reactionaries, the term extreme right-wing has also been applied to movements including fascists, Nazis, and racial supremacists.
In the United States, the right includes both economic and social conservatives. In Europe, and the Right includes nationalists, nativists (opposed to immigration) and religious conservatives.
Democracy (Literally “rule of the commoners”) is a system of government in which the citizens exercise power directly or elect representatives from among themselves to form a governing body, such as a parliament. Democracy is sometimes referred to as “rule of the majority”.
According to political scientist Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements: 1) a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; 2) the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; 3) protection of the human rights of all citizens, and 4) the rule of law , in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.
Democracy contrasts with forms of government where power is either held by an individual, as in an absolute monarchy, or where power is held by a small number of individuals, as in an oligarchy (rule by “the few”). Most governments have mixed democratic, oligarchic, and monarchic elements. Karl Popper defined democracy in contrast to dictatorship or rule by a tyrant (tyranny), thus focusing on opportunities for the people to control their leaders and to oust them without the need for a revolution.
Plutocracy (from Greek ploutos, meaning “wealth”, and kratos, meaning “power, dominion, rule”) is a form of oligarchy that defines a society ruled or controlled by a small minority of the wealthiest citizens. Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy. The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense.
Liberalism is a political philosophy founded on ideas of liberty and equality (egalitarianism). Whereas classical liberalism emphasizes the role of liberty, social liberalism stresses the importance of equality.
Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas and programs such as 1) freedom of speech, 2) freedom of the press, 3)freedom of religion, 4) free markets, 5) civil rights, 6) democratic societies, 7) secular governments, 8) gender equality, and 9) international cooperation.
Socialist political movementsincludes a diverse array of political philosophies that originated amid the revolutionary movements of the mid-to-late 1700s and of a general concern for the social problems that were associated with capitalism.
Socialist politics has been both centralist and decentralized; internationalist and nationalist in orientation; organized through political parties and opposed to party politics; at times overlapping with trade unions and at other times independent of unions.
The term “democratic socialism” is often used to highlight its advocates’ high value for democratic processes in the economy.The term is frequently used to draw contrast to the political system of the Soviet Union, which operated in an authoritarian fashion.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels critiqued the economic dynamics of capitalism. For them “socialism” had come to signify opposition to capitalism and advocacy for a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of production. By the 1920s, social democracy and communism became the two dominant political tendencies within the international socialist movement. Socialism proceeded to emerge as the most influential secular political-economic worldview of the twentieth century.
Socialist parties and ideas remain a political force with varying degrees of power and influence in all continents, heading national governments in many countries around the world. Today, some socialists have adopted the causes of other social movements, such as environmentalism, feminism, and liberalism.
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization. Conservatives seek to preserve institutions like the Church, monarchy and the social hierarchy as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while the more extreme elements called reactionaries seek a return to “the way things were”. Conservatism has been historically associated with right-wing politics.
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I before it spread to other European countries. Violently opposed to liberalism, Marxism and anarchism, fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left-right spectrum.
Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes to the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and the total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilians and combatants. All citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war. The war had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines and provide economic production and logistics to support them, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.
Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascist-leaning movements urge large budgetary outlays for war-making and “defense”.
Political conservatism, in most modern democracies, seeks to uphold traditional family structures and “values”.
Cultural conservatives support the preservation of the heritage of one nation, and they hold fast to traditional ways of thinking even in the face of monumental change. They believe strongly in traditional values and traditional politics, and often have an urgent sense of nationalism.
A social conservative wants to preserve traditional morality and social mores, often by opposing what they consider radical policies or social engineering. Social change is generally regarded as suspect.
Christian conservatives principally seek to apply the theological teachings to politics, sometimes by merely proclaiming the value of those teachings, at other times by having those teachings influence laws. Christian conservatives typically oppose abortion, homosexuality, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage. For the past generation, many American Christian conservatives have been very active in politics, even envisioning a Christian theocratic state.
Authoritarian conservatism refers to autocratic regimes that center their ideology around conservative nationalism and even anti-Semitism. Authoritarian conservative movements show strong devotion towards religion, tradition, and culture and were prominent in the same era as fascism, with which it sometimes clashed.
Neoliberalism (neo-liberalism) refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These included privatization, fiscal authority, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980. The implementation of neoliberal policies and the acceptance of neoliberal economic theories in the 1970s are seen by some academics as the root of the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
The term “neoliberal” was reintroduced in the 1980s in connection with Augusto Pinochet’s [fascist] economic reforms in Chile. Scholars now tended to associate it with the theories of economist Milton Friedman, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan. By 1994, with the passage of NAFTA and the Zapatistas reaction to this development in Chiapas, the term re-entered global circulation.
Neoconservatism (NeoCon) is a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s among conservative-leaning Democrats who became disenchanted with the party’s non-interventionist foreign policy. Many of its adherents became politically famous during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
Neoconservatives peaked in influence during the administration of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prominent neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer. Senior officials Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while not identifying as neoconservatives, listened closely to neoconservative advisers regarding their aggressive foreign policy plans, especially the defense of Israel and interventions in the Middle East.
Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of American national interest in international affairs, including by means of military force.
Libertarianism seeks to maximize political freedom and autonomy, emphasizing freedom of choice, voluntary association, self-ownership and the rule of law.
Libertarians share a skepticism of authority and state power. However, they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing political and economic systems, often calling to restrict or to dissolve coercive social institutions, such as health care, social security, human rights.
Libertarians usually advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights, such as in land, infrastructure, and natural resources.
Economic/social systems
1) Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investment are determined by the owners of the factors of production in financial and capital markets, and prices and the distribution of goods are mainly determined by competition in the market.
Economists, political economists, and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include free market capitalism, welfare capitalism and state capitalism. Different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition, and state-sanctioned social politics. The degree of competition in markets, the role of intervention and regulation, and the scope of state ownership vary across different models of capitalism; the extent to which different markets are free, as well as the rules defining private property, are matters of politics and policy.
Capitalism has existed under many forms of government, in many different times, places, and cultures. Following the decline of mercantilism, mixed capitalist systems became dominant in the Western world and continue to spread.
2) Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production; as well as the political ideologies, theories, and movements that aim to establish them. Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective, or cooperative ownership; to citizen ownership of equity; or to any combination of these. Although there are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them, social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.
Socialist economic systems can be divided into both non-market and market forms. Non-market socialism aims to circumvent the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with capital accumulation and the profit system.
Market socialism, by contrast, retains the use of monetary prices and, in some cases, the profit motive with respect to the operation of socially owned enterprises and the allocation of capital goods between them. Profits generated by these firms would be controlled directly by the workforce of each firm or accrue to society at large in the form of a social dividend. The feasibility and exact methods of resource allocation and calculation for a socialist system are the subjects of the socialist calculation debate.
3) Communism is the philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of the communist society, which is a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and the state. Communism includes a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, anarchism (anarchist communism), and the political ideologies grouped around both. All these share the analysis that the current order of society stems from its economic system, capitalism, that in this system, there are two major social classes: the working class (the proletariat) —who must work to survive, and who make up the majority within society—and the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie)—a minority who derives profit from employing the working class, through private ownership of the means of production, and that conflict between these two classes will trigger a revolution. The primary element which will enable this transformation, according to this analysis, is the social ownership of the means of production.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
The program “revealed” supposedly new information about the high incidence of so-called “clinical depression” among American girls. The two guests on the program were actually academic psychiatrists who had recently had their research published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
The high incidence of long-lasting sadness and behavioral dysfunction among girls is actually very old news and the fact that it is getting worse should come as no surprise. 99% of our celebrity-worshipping and excessively fashion-conscious American girls are trying to survive in a junk culture while simultaneously being mal-nourished, sleep-deprived, over-stressed, over-drugged, over-vaccinated, sexually-harassed, sexually-abused, and screen time- and pornography-toxified all the while trying to pretend to be happy and not emotional distressed! Impossible!
Here is the bulk of my letter that I emailed to host Tom Ashbrook:
Tom, at the end of the radio program this morning, many of you listeners will surely have come to the mistaken conclusion that the solution to the vast problem of pervasive adolescent female sadness isn’t to logically address the obvious potentially preventable causes of mental ill health. I got the impression that the solution was to get them seem by a prescribing psychiatrist and “get them treated with drugs!”
Nothing that was said from your guests put much emphasis on anything other than drug treatment. I noticed that there were no call-ins from the millions of folks who surely have experienced psychiatric drug-induced suicidality, homicidality, psychosis, worsening depression, etc, etc.
What wasn’t mentioned this morning was that a person who is sad or anxious because he or she is a victim of cyber-abuse should NOT be given dangerous psych drugs!! The guests did not mention that most psych drugs haven’t been FDA-approved for use in the under-18 age group!
Nor are potentially addictive, potentially brain-damaging drugs the cure when someone’s abnormal thinking and/or behaviors have been caused by being a victim of poverty, racism, sexism, xenophobia, psychological trauma, malnutrition, living in a war zone or just living in a junk culture that teaches junk values! The cure can only come when root causes are addressed.
The first step that all doctors are taught in med school when starting therapy with ANY patient is a PROLONGED, flexible intake history that will examine ALL aspects of the patient’s past, including details of pre-natal life, infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood, including psychological traumas, neglectful or abusive parenting, toxic environmental exposures, drug use, nutritional status through the life cycle, toxic interpersonal relationships, and even, in the face of the new evidence of cumulative vaccine toxicity and the fairly recently described ASIA syndrome – of which psychiatrists, pediatricians and most physicians are studiously ignorant.
Although the enormously over-looked vaccine injury issue is a huge topic that can’t be thoroughly discussed here, it is important to point out that repeated exposures to the intramuscularly injected and highly neurotoxic metals that are in most vaccines (especially mercury, aluminum and the many other metallic vaccine contaminants) are not appreciated for being the central nervous system and DNA toxins that they are, and therefore the neurological disorders that they can cause are usually mis-diagnosed and therefore mis-treated as mental illnesses.
If they have active clinical practices at all, academic psychiatrists such as your two guests usually only see tertiary patients who have already been mis-diagnosed with a mental illness of unknown etiology and therefore mis-treated with drugs and perhaps even electroshocked. Surely most of them will have been neurologically sickened by the over-drugging for years and they may even have suffered withdrawal syndromes over that time that also may have been mis-diagnosed as relapses.
By the time such potentially doomed patients come to see academic psychiatrists (or even non-academic psychiatrists) they will likely have developed psychiatric drug-induced brain disorders that can make them appear or act like they have a mental illness. But rather than being diagnosed with a mental illness “of unknown etiology”, these tertiary patients actually have an iatrogenic disorder (doctor-caused or prescription drug-caused), namely, a psychiatric drug-induced brain disorder. It is important at this point to understand that America’s large numbers of iatrogenic illnesses are not to be discussed in polite company and are therefore covered-up with another diagnosis that claims to be “of unknown etiology”.
The underlying motivation of your two guests seemed to me to be to get everybody alarmed that these girls are being inadequately diagnosed with mental illnesses and therefore are being insufficiently “treated” (read “drugged with psychiatric medications”).
Therefore, I implore you and your producers to arrange a series of interviews with a number of the authors listed in the bibliography at the end of the article below. They will convincingly refute much of the Big Pharma propaganda that your guests were able to spout without a dissenting voice.
Your guests were obviously firmly in the pro-Big Pharma camp. It is well-known that most psychiatrists reflexively prescribe cocktails of psych drugs to 99+% of their patients, and they usually do it in an alarmingly unscientific trial and error manner. And what should be truly alarming it that those cocktails have never been proven to be safe in either animal labs or in clinical trials.
It is also well known that most academic psychiatrists have heavy financial conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry, and, of course, most physicians have deep professional conflicts of interest (and thus they often blindly – and obediently – follow the community standards of care that have been set up by authorities that may also have been under the influence of corporate powers that may have undeclared conflicts of interest).
It seemed obvious to me that your guests were not-so-subtly promoting the specialty psychiatric industry (and thus indirectly promoting the increased use of Big Pharma’s lucrative brain-disabling drugs).
The publication of their research in the Journal of Pediatrics, probably means that the psychiatric industry must be trying to promote the diagnosing and drugging of more and more so-called mental illnesses by pediatricians (and therefore indirectly attracting more referrals to psychiatrists). One of the negative consequences for increased diagnosing and increased prescribing of potentially addictive psych drugs to more and more kids is that most of these kids may only have temporary symptoms that may spontaneously disappear or be cured by good psychotherapy. Starting kids on drugs almost always has seriously negative long-term consequences, including psych drug-induced dementia.
It needs to be pointed out that the first of your guests, Dr Mark Olfson, was a major player in the now-discredited TeenScreen program that, unbeknownst to most parents at the beginning of the program, was allowed into middle schools and high schools and then tried to convince very suggestible, otherwise normal kids, that they were mentally ill and should consult with a professional. TeenScreen was conceived, funded and promoted by BigPharma, and Dr Olfson was deeply involved. His bio at Columbia makes it sound like he is still proud of that effort!
Enough said. Tom, I want to say that I think that your show is one of the best on radio, but I hope, in the interest of balance, that you and your staff will study the following article about why Big Psychiatry’s pro-corporate agendas desperately need exposure. Otherwise your listeners will become accomplices to and promoters of the over-diagnosing and over-drugging of vulnerable American children. Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN (Many of my articles that enlarge upon and provide the documentation for the statements above are archived at: http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2,)
Duty to Warn
14 Lies That Our Psychiatry Professors in Medical School Taught Us Med Students
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
Note that the article below is abbreviated for space considerations. The full version has been posted at: https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/01/duty-to-warn-14-lies-that-our-psychiatry-professors-in-medical-school-taught-us/
Lie # 1:
“The FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) tests all new psychiatric drugs”
Lie # 2:
“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is effective long-term”
Lie # 3:
“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is safe long-term” .
Lie # 4:
“Mental ‘illnesses’ are caused by ‘brain chemistry imbalances’”
In actuality, brain chemical/neurotransmitter imbalances have never been proven to exist (except for cases of neurotransmitter depletions that can be caused by psych drugs) despite repeated examinations of lab animal or autopsied human brains and brain slices by neuroscientists. Knowing that there are over 100 known neurotransmitter systems in the human brain, proposing a theoretical chemical ”imbalance” is laughable and flies in the face of science. Not only that, but even if a theoretical imbalance between any two of the 100 potential systems did exist a drug could never be expected to re-balance it!
Such simplistic theories have been perpetrated by Big Pharma upon a gullible public and a gullible psychiatric industry….
Lie # 5:
“Antidepressant drugs work like insulin for diabetics”
Lie # 6:
“SSRI ‘discontinuation syndromes’ are different than ‘withdrawal syndromes’”
The so-called “antidepressant” drugs of the SSRI class are indeed dependency-inducing/addictive, and the neurological and psychological symptoms that occur when these drugs are stopped or tapered down are not “relapses” into a previous ”mental disorder” but are actually new drug withdrawal symptoms that are different from those that prompted the original diagnosis….
Lie # 7:
“Ritalin is safe for children (or adults)”
In actuality, methylphenidate (= Ritalin, Concerta, Daytrana, Metadate and Methylin; aka “kiddie cocaine”) is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor drug and, it works exactly like cocaine on dopamine synapses, except that orally-dosed methylphenidate reaches the brain more slowly than snortable or smoked cocaine does. Therefore the oral form has far less of an orgasmic “high” than cocaine. Cocaine addicts actually prefer Ritalin if they can get it in a relatively pure powder form. When snorted, both the synthetic Ritalin has the same onset of action as the natural cocaine, but it has a longer lasting “high” and is thus actually preferred among addicted individuals. The molecular structures of Ritalin and cocaine both have amphetamine base structures with ring-shaped side chains which, when examined side by side, are remarkably similar. The dopamine synaptic organelles in the brain (and heart, blood vessels, lungs and guts) are unlikely to sense any difference between the two drugs….
Lie # 8:
“Psychoactive drugs are totally safe for humans”
Actually all five classes of psychotropic drugs have been found to be neurotoxic (ie, known to destroy or otherwise alter the physiology, chemistry, anatomy and viability of the vital energy-producing mitochondria that is in every brain cell). They are therefore all capable of contributing to dementia when used long-term.
Any synthetic chemical that is capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier from the capillary circulation into the brain can alter the brain. Synthetic drugs are NOT capable of healing brain dysfunction or reversing brain damage. Rather than curing anything, psychiatric drugs are only capable of temporarily masking symptoms while the abnormal emotional, neurological or mal-nutritional processes that mimic “mental illnesses” continue unabated….
Lie # 9:
“Mental ‘illnesses’ have no known cause”
The root causes of my patient’s understandable emotional distress were typically multiple, but the vast majority of them had experienced acute and chronic sexual, physical, psychological, emotional and/or spiritual traumas as root causes – often accompanied by hopelessness, sleep deprivation, serious emotional/physical neglect and brain nutrient deficiencies as well….
Lie # 10:
“Psychotropic drugs have nothing to do with the huge increase in disabled and unemployable American psychiatric patients”
Many commonly-prescribed drugs are fully capable of causing brain-damage and dementia long-term, especially the anti-psychotics (aka, “major tranquilizers”) like Thorazine, Haldol, Prolixin, Clozapine, Abilify, Clozapine, Fanapt, Geodon, Invega, Risperdal, Saphris, Seroquel and Zyprexa, all of which can cause brain shrinkage….
Lie # 11:
“So-called bipolar disorder can mysteriously ‘emerge’ in patients who have been taking stimulating antidepressants like the SSRIs”
In actuality, crazy-making behaviors like mania, agitation and aggression are commonly caused by the SSRIs (Prozac [fluoxetine], Paxil [paroxetine], Zoloft [sertraline], Celexa [citalopram] and Lexapro [escitalopram).
An important point to make is that SSRI-induced mania, agitation, akathisia and aggression is NOT bipolar disorder, and SSRI-induced psychosis is NOT schizophrenia! (Google ssristories.net to read over 5000documented stories about SSRI drug-induced aberrant behaviors, including 48 school shootings/incidents, 52 road rage tragedies, 12 air rage incidents, 44 postpartum depression cases, over 600 murders (homicides), over 180 murder-suicides and other acts of violence including workplace violence. These cases only represent a tiny fraction of the possible cases, since medication use is rarely reported in the media.)….
Lie # 12:
“Antidepressant drugs can prevent suicides”
In actuality, there is no psychiatric drug that is FDA-approved for the prevention of suicidality because these drugs, especially the so-called antidepressants, actually INCREASE the incidence of suicidal thinking, suicide attempts and completed suicides….
Lie # 13:
“America’s school shooters and other mass shooters are ‘untreated’ schizophrenics who should have been taking psych drugs”
Lie # 14:
“If your patient hears voices it means he’s a schizophrenic”
The very sobering information revealed above should cause any thinking person, patient, thought-leader or politician to wonder: “how many otherwise normal or potentially curable people over the last half century of Big Pharma propaganda have actually been mis-labeled as mentally ill (and then mis-treated as mentally ill) and sent down the convoluted path of therapeutic misadventures – heading toward oblivion?”
In my mental health care practice, I personally treated hundreds of patients who had been given a series of confusing and contradictory mental illness labels, many of which had been one of the new “diseases of the month” for which there was a new psych “drug of the month” that was being heavily marketed on TV or by the drug company sales staffs.
Many of my patients had simply been victims of unpredictable and un-forseeable drug-drug interactions (far too often drug-drug-drug-drug interactions) or simply adverse reactions to psych drugs which had been erroneously diagnosed as a new mental illness. Extrapolating from my 1200 patient experience (in my little isolated section of the world) to what surely must be happening all over America boggles my mind. There has been a massive iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused) epidemic going on right under our noses that has affected tens of millions of suffering victims who could have been cured if not for the drugs.
The time to act on this knowledge is long overdue.
Bibliography
(Authors and books that were used as background for the assertions in the above article)
Toxic Psychiatry; Your Drug May Be Your Problem; Talking Back to Prozac; Medication Madness:by Peter Breggin;
Prozac Backlash; and The Antidepressant Solution: A Step-by-Step Guide to Safely Overcoming Antidepressant Withdrawal, Dependence, and “Addiction”: by Joseph Glenmullen;
Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill; andAnatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America: by Robert Whitaker;
Soteria: Through Madness To Deliverance: by Loren Mosher and Voyce Hendrix;Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare: by Peter Goetzsche;
Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent; and Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime: by Grace Jackson;
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It: by Marcia Angell;
Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression; and The Antidepressant Era: by David Healy;
Blaming the Brain: The TRUTH About Drugs and Mental Health; by Elliot Valenstein;
Selling Sickness; How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients: by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels;
Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs: by Melody Petersen;
Excitotoxins: by Russell Blaylock;
The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying our Brains and Harming our Children: Carol Simontacchi.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
The program “revealed” supposedly new information about the high incidence of so-called “clinical depression” among American girls. The two guests on the program were actually academic psychiatrists who had recently had their research published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
The high incidence of long-lasting sadness and behavioral dysfunction among girls is actually very old news and the fact that it is getting worse should come as no surprise. 99% of our celebrity-worshipping and excessively fashion-conscious American girls are trying to survive in a junk culture while simultaneously being mal-nourished, sleep-deprived, over-stressed, over-drugged, over-vaccinated, sexually-harassed, sexually-abused, and screen time- and pornography-toxified all the while trying to pretend to be happy and not emotional distressed! Impossible!
Here is the bulk of my letter that I emailed to host Tom Ashbrook:
Tom, at the end of the radio program this morning, many of you listeners will surely have come to the mistaken conclusion that the solution to the vast problem of pervasive adolescent female sadness isn’t to logically address the obvious potentially preventable causes of mental ill health. I got the impression that the solution was to get them seem by a prescribing psychiatrist and “get them treated with drugs!”
Nothing that was said from your guests put much emphasis on anything other than drug treatment. I noticed that there were no call-ins from the millions of folks who surely have experienced psychiatric drug-induced suicidality, homicidality, psychosis, worsening depression, etc, etc.
What wasn’t mentioned this morning was that a person who is sad or anxious because he or she is a victim of cyber-abuse should NOT be given dangerous psych drugs!! The guests did not mention that most psych drugs haven’t been FDA-approved for use in the under-18 age group!
Nor are potentially addictive, potentially brain-damaging drugs the cure when someone’s abnormal thinking and/or behaviors have been caused by being a victim of poverty, racism, sexism, xenophobia, psychological trauma, malnutrition, living in a war zone or just living in a junk culture that teaches junk values! The cure can only come when root causes are addressed.
The first step that all doctors are taught in med school when starting therapy with ANY patient is a PROLONGED, flexible intake history that will examine ALL aspects of the patient’s past, including details of pre-natal life, infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood, including psychological traumas, neglectful or abusive parenting, toxic environmental exposures, drug use, nutritional status through the life cycle, toxic interpersonal relationships, and even, in the face of the new evidence of cumulative vaccine toxicity and the fairly recently described ASIA syndrome – of which psychiatrists, pediatricians and most physicians are studiously ignorant.
Although the enormously over-looked vaccine injury issue is a huge topic that can’t be thoroughly discussed here, it is important to point out that repeated exposures to the intramuscularly injected and highly neurotoxic metals that are in most vaccines (especially mercury, aluminum and the many other metallic vaccine contaminants) are not appreciated for being the central nervous system and DNA toxins that they are, and therefore the neurological disorders that they can cause are usually mis-diagnosed and therefore mis-treated as mental illnesses.
If they have active clinical practices at all, academic psychiatrists such as your two guests usually only see tertiary patients who have already been mis-diagnosed with a mental illness of unknown etiology and therefore mis-treated with drugs and perhaps even electroshocked. Surely most of them will have been neurologically sickened by the over-drugging for years and they may even have suffered withdrawal syndromes over that time that also may have been mis-diagnosed as relapses.
By the time such potentially doomed patients come to see academic psychiatrists (or even non-academic psychiatrists) they will likely have developed psychiatric drug-induced brain disorders that can make them appear or act like they have a mental illness. But rather than being diagnosed with a mental illness “of unknown etiology”, these tertiary patients actually have an iatrogenic disorder (doctor-caused or prescription drug-caused), namely, a psychiatric drug-induced brain disorder. It is important at this point to understand that America’s large numbers of iatrogenic illnesses are not to be discussed in polite company and are therefore covered-up with another diagnosis that claims to be “of unknown etiology”.
The underlying motivation of your two guests seemed to me to be to get everybody alarmed that these girls are being inadequately diagnosed with mental illnesses and therefore are being insufficiently “treated” (read “drugged with psychiatric medications”).
Therefore, I implore you and your producers to arrange a series of interviews with a number of the authors listed in the bibliography at the end of the article below. They will convincingly refute much of the Big Pharma propaganda that your guests were able to spout without a dissenting voice.
Your guests were obviously firmly in the pro-Big Pharma camp. It is well-known that most psychiatrists reflexively prescribe cocktails of psych drugs to 99+% of their patients, and they usually do it in an alarmingly unscientific trial and error manner. And what should be truly alarming it that those cocktails have never been proven to be safe in either animal labs or in clinical trials.
It is also well known that most academic psychiatrists have heavy financial conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry, and, of course, most physicians have deep professional conflicts of interest (and thus they often blindly – and obediently – follow the community standards of care that have been set up by authorities that may also have been under the influence of corporate powers that may have undeclared conflicts of interest).
It seemed obvious to me that your guests were not-so-subtly promoting the specialty psychiatric industry (and thus indirectly promoting the increased use of Big Pharma’s lucrative brain-disabling drugs).
The publication of their research in the Journal of Pediatrics, probably means that the psychiatric industry must be trying to promote the diagnosing and drugging of more and more so-called mental illnesses by pediatricians (and therefore indirectly attracting more referrals to psychiatrists). One of the negative consequences for increased diagnosing and increased prescribing of potentially addictive psych drugs to more and more kids is that most of these kids may only have temporary symptoms that may spontaneously disappear or be cured by good psychotherapy. Starting kids on drugs almost always has seriously negative long-term consequences, including psych drug-induced dementia.
It needs to be pointed out that the first of your guests, Dr Mark Olfson, was a major player in the now-discredited TeenScreen program that, unbeknownst to most parents at the beginning of the program, was allowed into middle schools and high schools and then tried to convince very suggestible, otherwise normal kids, that they were mentally ill and should consult with a professional. TeenScreen was conceived, funded and promoted by BigPharma, and Dr Olfson was deeply involved. His bio at Columbia makes it sound like he is still proud of that effort!
Enough said. Tom, I want to say that I think that your show is one of the best on radio, but I hope, in the interest of balance, that you and your staff will study the following article about why Big Psychiatry’s pro-corporate agendas desperately need exposure. Otherwise your listeners will become accomplices to and promoters of the over-diagnosing and over-drugging of vulnerable American children. Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN (Many of my articles that enlarge upon and provide the documentation for the statements above are archived at: http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2,)
Duty to Warn
14 Lies That Our Psychiatry Professors in Medical School Taught Us Med Students
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
Note that the article below is abbreviated for space considerations. The full version has been posted at: https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/01/duty-to-warn-14-lies-that-our-psychiatry-professors-in-medical-school-taught-us/
Lie # 1:
“The FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) tests all new psychiatric drugs”
Lie # 2:
“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is effective long-term”
Lie # 3:
“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is safe long-term” .
Lie # 4:
“Mental ‘illnesses’ are caused by ‘brain chemistry imbalances’”
In actuality, brain chemical/neurotransmitter imbalances have never been proven to exist (except for cases of neurotransmitter depletions that can be caused by psych drugs) despite repeated examinations of lab animal or autopsied human brains and brain slices by neuroscientists. Knowing that there are over 100 known neurotransmitter systems in the human brain, proposing a theoretical chemical ”imbalance” is laughable and flies in the face of science. Not only that, but even if a theoretical imbalance between any two of the 100 potential systems did exist a drug could never be expected to re-balance it!
Such simplistic theories have been perpetrated by Big Pharma upon a gullible public and a gullible psychiatric industry….
Lie # 5:
“Antidepressant drugs work like insulin for diabetics”
Lie # 6:
“SSRI ‘discontinuation syndromes’ are different than ‘withdrawal syndromes’”
The so-called “antidepressant” drugs of the SSRI class are indeed dependency-inducing/addictive, and the neurological and psychological symptoms that occur when these drugs are stopped or tapered down are not “relapses” into a previous ”mental disorder” but are actually new drug withdrawal symptoms that are different from those that prompted the original diagnosis….
Lie # 7:
“Ritalin is safe for children (or adults)”
In actuality, methylphenidate (= Ritalin, Concerta, Daytrana, Metadate and Methylin; aka “kiddie cocaine”) is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor drug and, it works exactly like cocaine on dopamine synapses, except that orally-dosed methylphenidate reaches the brain more slowly than snortable or smoked cocaine does. Therefore the oral form has far less of an orgasmic “high” than cocaine. Cocaine addicts actually prefer Ritalin if they can get it in a relatively pure powder form. When snorted, both the synthetic Ritalin has the same onset of action as the natural cocaine, but it has a longer lasting “high” and is thus actually preferred among addicted individuals. The molecular structures of Ritalin and cocaine both have amphetamine base structures with ring-shaped side chains which, when examined side by side, are remarkably similar. The dopamine synaptic organelles in the brain (and heart, blood vessels, lungs and guts) are unlikely to sense any difference between the two drugs….
Lie # 8:
“Psychoactive drugs are totally safe for humans”
Actually all five classes of psychotropic drugs have been found to be neurotoxic (ie, known to destroy or otherwise alter the physiology, chemistry, anatomy and viability of the vital energy-producing mitochondria that is in every brain cell). They are therefore all capable of contributing to dementia when used long-term.
Any synthetic chemical that is capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier from the capillary circulation into the brain can alter the brain. Synthetic drugs are NOT capable of healing brain dysfunction or reversing brain damage. Rather than curing anything, psychiatric drugs are only capable of temporarily masking symptoms while the abnormal emotional, neurological or mal-nutritional processes that mimic “mental illnesses” continue unabated….
Lie # 9:
“Mental ‘illnesses’ have no known cause”
The root causes of my patient’s understandable emotional distress were typically multiple, but the vast majority of them had experienced acute and chronic sexual, physical, psychological, emotional and/or spiritual traumas as root causes – often accompanied by hopelessness, sleep deprivation, serious emotional/physical neglect and brain nutrient deficiencies as well….
Lie # 10:
“Psychotropic drugs have nothing to do with the huge increase in disabled and unemployable American psychiatric patients”
Many commonly-prescribed drugs are fully capable of causing brain-damage and dementia long-term, especially the anti-psychotics (aka, “major tranquilizers”) like Thorazine, Haldol, Prolixin, Clozapine, Abilify, Clozapine, Fanapt, Geodon, Invega, Risperdal, Saphris, Seroquel and Zyprexa, all of which can cause brain shrinkage….
Lie # 11:
“So-called bipolar disorder can mysteriously ‘emerge’ in patients who have been taking stimulating antidepressants like the SSRIs”
In actuality, crazy-making behaviors like mania, agitation and aggression are commonly caused by the SSRIs (Prozac [fluoxetine], Paxil [paroxetine], Zoloft [sertraline], Celexa [citalopram] and Lexapro [escitalopram).
An important point to make is that SSRI-induced mania, agitation, akathisia and aggression is NOT bipolar disorder, and SSRI-induced psychosis is NOT schizophrenia! (Google ssristories.net to read over 5000documented stories about SSRI drug-induced aberrant behaviors, including 48 school shootings/incidents, 52 road rage tragedies, 12 air rage incidents, 44 postpartum depression cases, over 600 murders (homicides), over 180 murder-suicides and other acts of violence including workplace violence. These cases only represent a tiny fraction of the possible cases, since medication use is rarely reported in the media.)….
Lie # 12:
“Antidepressant drugs can prevent suicides”
In actuality, there is no psychiatric drug that is FDA-approved for the prevention of suicidality because these drugs, especially the so-called antidepressants, actually INCREASE the incidence of suicidal thinking, suicide attempts and completed suicides….
Lie # 13:
“America’s school shooters and other mass shooters are ‘untreated’ schizophrenics who should have been taking psych drugs”
Lie # 14:
“If your patient hears voices it means he’s a schizophrenic”
The very sobering information revealed above should cause any thinking person, patient, thought-leader or politician to wonder: “how many otherwise normal or potentially curable people over the last half century of Big Pharma propaganda have actually been mis-labeled as mentally ill (and then mis-treated as mentally ill) and sent down the convoluted path of therapeutic misadventures – heading toward oblivion?”
In my mental health care practice, I personally treated hundreds of patients who had been given a series of confusing and contradictory mental illness labels, many of which had been one of the new “diseases of the month” for which there was a new psych “drug of the month” that was being heavily marketed on TV or by the drug company sales staffs.
Many of my patients had simply been victims of unpredictable and un-forseeable drug-drug interactions (far too often drug-drug-drug-drug interactions) or simply adverse reactions to psych drugs which had been erroneously diagnosed as a new mental illness. Extrapolating from my 1200 patient experience (in my little isolated section of the world) to what surely must be happening all over America boggles my mind. There has been a massive iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused) epidemic going on right under our noses that has affected tens of millions of suffering victims who could have been cured if not for the drugs.
The time to act on this knowledge is long overdue.
Bibliography
(Authors and books that were used as background for the assertions in the above article)
Toxic Psychiatry; Your Drug May Be Your Problem; Talking Back to Prozac; Medication Madness:by Peter Breggin;
Prozac Backlash; and The Antidepressant Solution: A Step-by-Step Guide to Safely Overcoming Antidepressant Withdrawal, Dependence, and “Addiction”: by Joseph Glenmullen;
Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill; andAnatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America: by Robert Whitaker;
Soteria: Through Madness To Deliverance: by Loren Mosher and Voyce Hendrix;Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare: by Peter Goetzsche;
Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent; and Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime: by Grace Jackson;
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It: by Marcia Angell;
Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression; and The Antidepressant Era: by David Healy;
Blaming the Brain: The TRUTH About Drugs and Mental Health; by Elliot Valenstein;
Selling Sickness; How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients: by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels;
Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs: by Melody Petersen;
Excitotoxins: by Russell Blaylock;
The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying our Brains and Harming our Children: Carol Simontacchi.
is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
[themify_hr color=’red’]
Glossary
Xenophobia = an intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries
Nativism =the policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants
Summaries of the First 4 Points of Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fascism That Apply to the Trump/Pence GOP
Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia. 2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation. 3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts (aka “false flag operations”) against the targeted scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.
The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.
The pre-Civil War 1850s was an era when there was serious political instability and economic uncertainty partly because of the fear of a rising immigrant population without a concomitant increase in job opportunities. There was, as yet, no stable two party political system in the US. Because of these realities, a relatively new, very inexperienced political party, popularly known as the Know-Nothing Party, came out of nowhere and won 43 seats in the US Congress in the national election of 1856.
Although the existence of the new party was no secret, the names of its members were a closely kept secret. “I don’t know” was the preferred answer when the press asked about the party’s behind-closed-doors meetings and conspiratorial agendas. And so the pejorative label “know-nothing” was quickly applied to the group. It was a well-deserved title.
The Know-Nothing Party had originally named itself the Native American Party, although the name obviously did not refer to the real, non-white “native” Americans who had occupied the land for the previous 10,000 years – and then had it stolen from them. What the party meant by the designation “native” was “native-born”, and membership was limited to white people who were born in the USA. Only white Protestants were allowed in the party, and it specifically excluded Roman Catholics, most of whom were recent immigrants from Europe. The party soon changed its name to the American Party.
The Know-Nothing Party enshrined nativism and virulent xenophobia in its founding document. By today’s standards, it was a white supremacist party and its members would have been good Ku Klux Klan members when that “Christian” organization came into existence after the racist South “lost” the Civil War – pledging on their honor to “rise again” (a pledge still taken quite seriously 150 years later by Confederate Flag-waving, gun-toting southerners in the Tea Party wing of the GOP).
The fact that they actually chose “Native American Party” as their official name at their birth was evidence for why they may actually deserve their “know-nothing” nickname, for they appeared not to know the history of the genocidal way that their American ancestors had dealt with the real native Americans just a generation earlier. What was particularly ironic is the fact that their ancestors had at one time been non-native-born immigrants themselves.
Because of the rash of European migrants in the mid-1850s (many of whom couldn’t speak English) there was naturally a lot of fear of job competition with desperate poor people who would work for subsistence (or lower) wages. So an often hysterical fear of those foreigners arose and politicians exploited those fears. This “xenophobia” and the resultant violence that that fear generated was largely directed at Roman Catholicism which was practiced by the immigrants that came from Ireland and southern Germany.
The young and inexperienced Know-Nothing Party reactionaries were unashamedly racist and also religiously pious, and it turned out to be a flash-in-the-pan reality as more and more moderate and open-minded Americans rejected the vile nature of the party’s goals.
<<<A Party of Religious Fanatics and Unprincipled Demagogues>>>
A Catholic Bishop, J. L. Spalding, said that the Know-Nothings were “the depraved portion of our native(-born) population….It was not the American people who were seeking to make war on the church, but merely a party of religious fanatics and unprincipled demagogues who as little represented the American people as did the mobs whom they incited to bloodshed and incendiarism. Their whole conduct was un-American and opposed to all the principles and traditions of our free institutions.”
The know-nothing movement reached its peak in the mid-1850s, and by 1859 it had essentially disappeared from national politics. But the ideology obviously did not disappear.
The irrational fear of foreigners and fear of foreign religions that characterized the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s has a lot of similarities to the “America First” party of Donald Trump’s xenophobic GOP and the white supremacist Tea Party that sprang up after Barack Obama became America’s first black president.
Just like today’s right-wing parties in America, the Know-Nothings were again energized by the perception that America’s immigration policies were too liberal. And a lot of narrow-minded voters throughout American and world history have easily become irrational haters of misunderstood or falsely demonized foreigners. And those fears are typically fanned by media outlets that thrive on controversy. Xenophobia became normal and will probably always be easily made to be considered normal. Racial conflict still sells newspapers and biased TV news shows.
<<<Xenophobia is Incompatible with Sermon on the Mount Christianity>>>
Of course, the Know-Nothing Puritanical/Calvinistic Protestants, never having been carefully taught the primacy of the ethics of the non-violent Jesus as summarized so well in the Sermon on the Mount, were not very likely to be truly merciful to the stranger or to lovingly feed the hungry immigrant or to offer shelter to the homeless ones, as Jesus instructed his followers to do.
The helpless refugees who came to America’s “welcoming” shores may have been trying to escape political persecution, pestilence, poverty, homelessness and starvation or they may have been innocent victims of war, simply trying to psychologically or spiritually heal from their traumatizing experiences at the hands of war’s killing soldiers, secret service torturers and ruling tyrannical elites who were trying to maintain their wealth and power by any means possible.
Emma Lazarus’ famous anti-tyranny poem (apparently now newly obsolete in the brave new world of America’s xenophobic Republican Party supporters) is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty that has inspired so many millions of refugees since it was gifted to America by France in the 1870s. The plaque says “Give me your tired, your poor,your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.” But the Statue of Liberty wasn’t there in the 1850s.
So rather than welcoming beaten-down refugees into the New World, the Know-Nothings had their armed thugs administer beatings, shootings, and torchings of Catholic homes and Catholic churches. They even tarred and feathered a Jesuit priest, sending a clear message to other tired, poor, abused refugees who happened to have been indoctrinated into an “alien” religion.
The clear message was that they should self-deport – or else.
<<<The Know-Nothing’s Xenophobic “America First” Political Party was not Actually America’s First>>>
The Federalist Party of the early 1800s (frequently boasted about by the likes of the NeoCon Newt Gingrich) was probably the first xenophobic political party in the history of America.
During the administration of the Federalist Party president, John Adams, (POTUS # 2 – 1798-1802), that party pushed for the passage of America’s first Alien Act, which allowed the president to deport any and all “aliens” that he regarded as potential threats to the republic.
Even more draconian laws, which are still on the books, were passed during World War I and in the Constitution-shredding Bush-era laws that were hastily passed immediately after 9/11/01. And, it must be mentioned, on New Year’s Eve, 2011, when nobody was looking, President Obama signed the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012“ (NDAA 2012).
Buried deep inside of what is supposed to be next year’s annual Defense appropriation bill (that decides how many more hundreds of billions of dollars of bankrupting national debt with which the Pentagon will be further strangling the US economy for the next year), suspected native-born citizens can now be legally arrested without charge, and they can be kept in hidden prisons without charge and with no explanation to concerned loved ones, for as long as the president desires – if he thinks the arrestee is a possible threat to national security!
And there were other such “America First” movements that were indirect heirs of the Know-Nothings. As one example, American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who had been wined and dined and duly bamboozled by Adolf Hitler when he and his wife toured Germany in the mid-1930s, led an American First movement that truly believed in the political agendas of Adolf Hitler.
Lindbergh and his followers trusted an infamous sociopathic dictator who was famous for his total lack of compassion and his serial lying, just like most corporate lobbyist-duped politicians tend to do in America. They believed that America should be isolationist-minded and refrain from interfering even with outrageous violent movements such as European fascism and its xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic, anti-minority agendas. To Lindbergh and his followers, America First meant that America should always do what is selfishly best for America and keep its hands off of the problems of foreign issues, no matter how evil.
<<<The History of Xenophobia in American Politics>>>
The recent resurgence of the Christian Militias, Christian Dominionists, Christian Theocrats, the Pseudo-Christian Tea Party populist movements and now Trump’s and Pence’s xenophobic movement should give pause to all true patriots who love American democracy. Trump’s campaign rhetoric has successfully recruited millions of short-sighted voters to his cause and, in the last couple of election cycles these groups have come out of nowhere to wield significant – albeit often dysfunctional – power in the US Congress. It should not be a surprise to discover that many of these xenophobic and racist-leaning legislators have come from formerly pro-slavery and segregationist states. The perceived rapidity of the movement should also remind us about what Christian supremacist and Islamophobe Ralph Reed (decidedly not a Sermon on the Mount-type Christian) once said:
“What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime, we will see (America) once again governed by Christians….and Christian values….I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” — Ralph Reed (Republican Christian Coalition executive director 1987-1989)
But the beneficiaries of all acts of genocide, just like the beneficiaries of inherited wealth, are typically unaware of the fact that they don’t deserve the land or the privileges that accrued to them from the criminal acts and cruelty of their forefathers (or the sociopath-creating indulgent parenting style of doting parents in the case of any number of punitive, conscienceless and independently wealthy conservatives like Donald Trump).
America’s true history is blood-drenched, putrid, genocidal, anti-democratic and un-Christ-like in the extreme, and it contradicts the wide-spread and deeply-indoctrinated (albeit false) “Christian” belief that America has always been “a shining city on a hill” that is blessed by God.
One has to be a historically-illiterate know-nothing to believe that.
The most gruesome parts of American history have been censored out of America’s school books ever since history books began being published. Lying about the past has been true of all pseudo-patriotic nations since the beginning of time. The textbooks from my history classes never mentioned the mass slaughter of America’s First Nation’s peoples, nor was there anything taught about the horrific history of slavery or about the lynchings of black African-Americans at the hand of white supremacists after they had been emancipated. It was the rare history teacher who ever taught about the war crimes committed by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Usually the class never got to that part of the book before the semester ended.
Indeed, the real history of our nation has been profusely sugar-coated. Most of us grew up believing the false history that now desperately needs to be re-learned in this era when America is so profoundly hated for the wartime atrocities and injustices that we naïve ones are being sheltered from understanding. Ever since the homicidal white supremacist Christopher Columbus (and his greedy, sex-starved crew) began raping and pillaging the aboriginal inhabitants and their resources in 1492, the patriotic story/lie has been told over and over again until we sheeple believed that it was true.
<<<The Political Platform of the Know Nothing Party>>>
Following is the platform of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s: It might sound familiar. Only the type of religion might be different now.
Severe limits on immigration, especially from predominantly Catholic countries.
Restricting political office to native-born Americans.
Extending the residency requirements for citizenship from five to twenty-one years.
Limiting public office to native-born individuals.
Restricting public school teachers to (white) Protestants.
Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools (to be read from the Protestant version of the Bible).
Restricting the sale of liquor.
Article III of the Know-Nothing Party’s founding document declared that “a member must be a native-born citizen, a Protestant either born of Protestant parents or reared under Protestant influence, and not united in marriage with a Roman Catholic….no member who has a Roman Catholic wife shall be eligible to office in this order”.
When a Know-Nothing Party member was admitted into the secret organization, he was required to take the following oath:
“In the presence of Almighty God and these witnesses, you do solemnly promise and swear that you will never betray any of the secrets of this society.…that you never will permit any of the secrets of this society to be written.…that you will not vote.… for any man for any office.… unless he be an American-born citizen, in favor of Americans ruling America.…that you will not, under any circumstances, expose the name of any member of this order nor reveal the existence of such an association; that you will….obey the command of the.…president or his deputy.”
The candidate that the Know-Nothings ran for president in 1856 was Whig Party POTUS Millard Fillmore (who served under President General Zachary Taylor as Vice President from 1849 – 1850). Fillmore served as POTUS from 1850 – 1853 when President Taylor died in office.
Fillmore had quit the disintegrating Whig Party after 1853 and accepted the nomination of the Know-Nothings in 1855, but, even though he wasn’t as xenophobic as the rest of the party, his “America First” campaign slogan was “I know nothing but my Country, my whole Country, and nothing but my Country.” He lost in a landslide because voters had finally seen the criminal excesses of the xenophobic party’s agenda and repudiated it at the polls.
Fillmore won only one state in the Electoral College balloting that year and the once national party soon slipped into obscurity.
The Know-Nothings had conveniently forgotten that their ancestors had been complicit with Democratic President Andrew Jackson and his “Trail of Tears” atrocities (which would have easily met the 20th century’s definition of crimes against humanity). And of course the POW death camps of both the Confederate and Union Armies in the soon-to-erupt War Between the States would have met the definition of international war crimes.
The sorry state of some voters’ intelligence, Christian ethics, their knowledge of basic science and the ease with which they have been led to believe obviously false campaign rhetoric has been breath-taking.
And their apparent studied ignorance on such issues as global climate change, the threat of rising sea levels, the obvious environmental degradation, the mass pollution of the planet’s air, water and soil (thanks to the many sociopathic multinational corporations who care not about anything but next quarter’s earnings), the stubborn racism, and the obvious lack of knowledge of history, science, foreign affairs, drug policy, privatized prisons, gun violence, income and wealth inequality, access to medical care, etc, etc has been appalling and lends further credence to making the comparisons with the Know-Nothings.
Every weekend I find myself having to choose a pertinent topic for my next Duty to Warn column. The political turmoil surrounding the last election cycle and the resultant backlashes make it a difficult choice.
There are so many things worthy of analysis, especially with Trump’s habit of poking hornet’s nests every day and insulting my friends and allies. The late night comedians are having a ball with all the absurdities, but even they can’t keep up with all the juicy targets. They, and I, are being overwhelmed – probably by design.
On Mondays (Tuesday is deadline day at the Duluth Reader) I try to finish my rough draft. But occasionally I read a powerful essay by some other commentator or turn on DemocracyNow! and realize that there is a more urgent topic that needs to be addressed; and I find sometimes find myself shelving the first column to be finished and perhaps published later.
This week, I decided to shelve my first column and use extended excerpts from a powerful piece that author Neal Gabler wrote a month ago. It is one of those pieces that I wish I could have written myself.
What has been happening ever since Citizen’s United in 2010 I am convinced has been a rolling corporate coup d’Etat that was fleshed out so well Monday morning (Jan 23, 2017) by Naomi Klein and Lee Fang (of the Intercept) on the interview with Amy Goodman. It should be listened to at (https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/20/naomi_klein_on_trump_election_this). The corporate coup seems to be rapidly reaching its culmination with the election of Donald Trump,and Gabler writes about very well.
One caveat; It should be understood that the Democratic Party under Clinton and then under Obama, have paved the way for the coup by being co-opted and duped by the same corporate usurpers that have so seamlessly taken over both parties. One only has to examine the results of the conspiracies to dominate both parties and the US government by cunning billionaires and Deep State operatives inside Big Finance, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Weapons, Big Agribusiness, Big Chemical, Big Mining, etc, etc. (Note: Images, underlining and phrases in italics and/or parentheses are mine.)
Gabler titled his piece:
It’s Ayn Rand’s America Now: Republicans Have Stripped the Country of Its Last Shred of Morality By Neal Gabler – 12-9-2016
“As far right conservatives took over the Republican Party — the very same conservatives who just a few years earlier were considered crazies — the media dared not question Republican opposition to anything that assisted the disempowered and dispossessed, which is how a value-neutral media wound up serving the cause of conservatism and Republicanism and how the moral consensus was allowed to be turned upside down.” – Neal Gabler
“The GOP has been the party of cruelty for decades. In Trump, it’s found its champion.” – Neal Gabler
If you have any doubts that the phenomenon of Donald Trump was a long time a’coming, you have only to read a piece that Gore Vidal wrote for Esquire magazine in July 1961, when the conservative movement was just beginning and even Barry Goldwater was hardly a glint in Republicans’ eyes.
Vidal’s target was Paul Ryan’s idol (Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan is a right-wing “christian” and second in line to the presidency – behind Christian dominionist Mike Pence – if or when Trump leaves office under extraordinary circumstances) and the idol of so many modern conservatives: the trash novelist and crackpot (Russian Jewish atheist) philosopher Ayn Rand, whom Vidal quotes thusly:
“It was the morality of altruism that undercut America and is now destroying her.”
“Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom… or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.”
“To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.”
“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral…”
In most quarters, in 1961, this stuff would have been regarded as nearly sociopathic nonsense, but, as Vidal noted, Rand was already gaining adherents: “She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who hate the ‘welfare state,’ who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts.”
Because he was writing at a time when there was still such a thing as right-wing guilt, Vidal couldn’t possibly have foreseen what would happen: Ayn Rand became the guiding spirit of the governing party of the United States. Her values are the values of that party. Vidal couldn’t have foreseen it because he still saw Christianity as a kind of ineluctable force in America, particularly among small-town conservatives, and because Rand’s “philosophy” couldn’t have been more anti-Christian. But, then, Vidal couldn’t have thought so many Christians would abandon Jesus’ teachings so quickly for Rand’s.
Hearts hardened.
The transformation and corruption of America’s moral values didn’t happen in the shadows. It happened in plain sight. The Republican Party has been the party of selfishness and the party of punishment for decades now, trashing the basic precepts not only of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also of humanity generally.
Vidal again: “That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea that has figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race.” It is, one could argue, what makes us human. The opposing idea, Rand’s idea, that the less fortunate should be left to suffer, is what endangers our humanity now. I have previously written in this space how conservatism dismantled the concept of truth so it could fill the void with untruth. I called it an epistemological revolution. But conservatism also has dismantled traditional morality so it could fill that void. I call that a moral revolution.
To identify what’s wrong with conservatism and Republicanism — and now with so much of America as we are about to enter the Trump era — you don’t need high-blown theories or deep sociological analysis or surveys. The answer is as simple as it is sad: There is no kindness in them.
Why Should we be Surprised that the Corporate-controlled Media Allowed the Corporate Coup to Develop?
That the draining of kindness from huge swaths of the country occurred with so little resistance is, in large measure, the fault of the media. The media have long prided themselves on being value neutral. It was Dragnet Dragnet journalism: “Just the facts, ma’am.” Or: “We report, you decide” — a slogan coopted by the right-wing (and rabidly pro-corporate) Fox News, ironically to underscore that they weren’t biased, at least not liberally biased.
Of course, not even the most scrupulous journalists were ever really value neutral. Underneath their ostensible objectivity there was a value default — an unstated moral consensus, which is the one Vidal cited and the one to which most Americans subscribed throughout most of our history. But it took a lot to activate those values in the press. The mainstream white media moved ever so slowly to report on the evils of segregation. Yet when they finally did, they didn’t behave as if African-Americans marching for their rights and Sheriff Bull Connor siccing dogs on them were moral equals. Value neutrality had its limits. The reporting of the movement was one of journalism’s proudest moments, and you can read about it in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Race Beat” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. It is a story worth telling and remembering in these frightening days — a story that shows how the press can serve us.
However long it took for them to grow a conscience, those journalists who covered the civil rights movement didn’t think they were violating their professional code of objectivity by exposing the heinous conduct of the Southern authorities, because they knew what they were upholding wasn’t subject to debate. The morality was stark. (I have a suspicion from the way the Black Lives Matter movement is covered that it wouldn’t be so stark today.)
Taking sides against the KKK and redneck sheriffs, however, was one thing, as was taking sides against lunatic fringe right-wingers like the John Birch Society who hated government. But what happens when those extremists who advocate a bizarre morality that elevates selfishness and deplores altruism commandeer one of our two major political parties? What do you do then?
We know the answer. You do nothing.
The media sat by idly while American values were transmogrified. Even the so-called “good” conservatives — David Brooks, David Frum, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, et al. — refused to speak the language of kindness, preferring the language of free markets. As far right conservatives took over the Republican Party — the very same conservatives who just a few years earlier were considered crazies — the media dared not question Republican opposition to anything that assisted the disempowered and dispossessed, which is how a value-neutral media wound up serving the cause of conservatism and Republicanism and how the moral consensus was allowed to be turned upside down.
Read those Ayn Rand quotes to your children as moral instruction, and you will see how far we have fallen. This is Republican morality. This is Trump morality. And the media, loath to defend traditional American values in an increasingly hostile conservative environment, let it happen. That is what value neutrality will get you…
It is true that we don’t all share the exact same values, though in the past I think our fundamental values were pretty close to one another’s. But even if values differ, all values are not created equal. Some are better than others. Most of us do know what is right. Most of us do know that we have moral obligations to others. Most of us understand kindness. It is just that we have been encouraged to forget it. That was Ayn Rand’s mission. Trump is proof of how well she and her acolytes, like Paul Ryan, succeeded.
This election turned on many things, but one that both the public and the press have been hesitant to acknowledge is the election as a moral referendum: the old morality against the new Randian one Republicans had advanced for years and Trump fully legitimized. There is no kindness in him…Trump made shamelessness acceptable. We are reaping that whirlwind every day.
I don’t know whether a great society can survive without kindness. Unfortunately, we shall have a chance to see. In the meantime, those of us who believe in traditional morality must mount what I would call a “kindness offensive.” We must redouble our kindness in our daily lives, fight for it, promote it and eventually build a political movement around it.
…Appealing to our worst selves is usually a winning strategy, as it was for Trump. The media must remind us of what it means to be our best selves. This should be their new mission: a media in opposition. It should be unrelenting, regardless of the right-wing blowback.
America is in moral crisis. Many Americans seem far more interested in making sure that those they consider undeserving — basically, the poor — get nothing than in making sure that they themselves get something. A friend recently told me a joke told him by a Hungarian acquaintance, who intended it as an example of Hungarian schadenfreude, but I have modified it because I think it is a harrowing parable for contemporary America and its strange moral turnabout. This is Trump’s America:
There were three farmers: a German, a Hungarian and an American. Each had a cow. One day, misfortune befell them, and their cows died. Each remonstrated against God, saying God had failed him, and each lost faith. God realized he had to do something to make amends. So he came to Earth and approached the German.
“What can I do to restore your faith?” He asked. And the German answered, “God, I lost my cow. Please give me another cow.” And God did so.
“What can I do to restore your faith?” He asked the Hungarian. And the Hungarian answered, “God, I lost my cow. Please give me that cow and another to compensate.” And God did so.
And finally God came to the American, and He asked, “What can I do to restore your faith?” And the American answered, “God, I lost my cow. Shoot my neighbor’s cow.”
Republicans brought us here with the assistance of a passive media. Whether we can bring ourselves back is the new existential question. Until then, we are shooting our neighbor’s cow.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine’s non-fiction book of the year, USA Today‘s biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
