Gary Null, Jeremy Stillman and Nancy Ashley - Vaccine Conspiracy: The CDC Caught Lying Again
October 29, 2011 The documents, which were acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), reveal correspondences between individuals at the CDC and scientists working on the Danish article which examined rates of autism in the country after a nationwide phasing out of all Thimerosal-containing vaccines in 1992. The unearthed communications prove that the data collected during the study actually reflected an overall decrease in the incidence of autism since the phase-out was implemented. However, the article’s authors chose to use only select data which bolstered the conclusion that rates of autism in Denmark had risen since 1992. This decision was deemed entirely acceptable by officials at the CDC.
Print Article | Permalink | tagged Features | in Big Pharma, Consumer Interest, Featured, Health, Health Care, Medicine, Science, Vaccines Jerry Policoff - Obama Admin Seeks Permission To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests - Even To The Courts
October 28, 2011 http://www.opednews.com/articles/Transparency-In-Government-by-Jerry-Policoff-111025-906.html
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October 25, 2011 By Jerry Policoff One of the President Obama's first promises after becoming President of the United States was a commitment to usher in a new era of unprecedented government transparency . Instead the Obama administration has exhibited what may be an unprecedented obsession with government secrecy including blocking numerous law suits by invoking the doctrine of "State Secrets." The administration has even come up with an interpretation of the Patriot Act which many in Congress who have seen it claim is overly broad and bestows more power on the Executive Branch than was intended by Congress when they passed it. Unfortunately those in Congress who have seen this document are not permitted to divulge its content, and we, the public, cannot see it because the administration has chosen to classify it as a "State Secret." In other words, you might be doing something that the Obama Administration believes violates the Patriot Act, but you won't know it until they indict you for breaking a law you did not know existed (I might be breaking it just by penning and publishing this article). Now the Obama/Holder Justice Department is attempting to re-write the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), empowering or even compelling government agencies to deny the very existence of records they know to exist if they believe they are legitimately exempted from disclosure. Of course they are most likely the sole arbiter of whether they are indeed exempt from disclosure. In effect the Obama/Holder Justice Department wants to be free to legally lie about the existence of records in response to FOIA requests. Apparently they want to avoid the embarrassment and inconvenience of being officially rebuked by the courts for doing exactly that (lying to a Federal judge), as occurred earlier this year when, in a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the "Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court." The solution is simple: re-write the law so the government, in many circumstances, can affirmatively mislead the court. |
Dean Baker - The Military Spending Fairy
October 28, 2011 Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by CEPR Blog
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/cepr-blog/the-military-spending-fairy
by Dean Baker
Faced with the prospect of cuts to the Defense Department's budget, the defense industry is pushing the story of the military spending fairy on members of Congress. They are telling them that these cuts will lead to the loss of more than 1 million jobs over the next decade.
Believers in the military spending fairy say things like "the government can't create jobs," but also think that military spending creates jobs. Under the military spending fairy story, if the government spends $1 billion dollars paying people to do research or to build items related to the civilian economy it is just a drag on the private economy; however if the same spending goes to military related purposes, then it creates jobs.
It's not clear exactly how the military fairy blesses projects to make them helpful to the economy rather than harmful. For example, the highways were built in the 50s ostensibly in part for defense purposes. They made it easier to move troops and military equipment around the country in the event of an attack. Government subsidized student loans were also originally dubbed as defense loans since they were ostensibly intended in part to produce more graduates in science and engineering who could help us compete with the Soviet Union in defense related technologies.
Using this same logic, perhaps President Obama could get the military spending fairy to bless some of his stimulus spending so that it will be economically useful. He could again call student loans "defense loans." He could also have the research into clean energy technologies be viewed as providing alternative sources for energy for the military in the event we are cut off from oil imports in a war. (It makes as much sense as the highway story.) Then the military spending fairy can bless the stimulus as creating jobs.
For people who don't believe in the military spending fairy, the story is simple. During a downturn where there are lots of unemployed workers, any government spending will create jobs, regardless of whether or not it is on the military. In fact, military spending is likely to create fewer jobs than spending in most other areas (e.g. education, health care, conservation) because it is more capital intensive.
When the economy is near full employment, military spending is a drag on the economy. It pulls resources away from private sector uses, lowering investment and increasing the trade deficit. This leads to job losses, which are likely to be felt most severely in manufacturing and construction.
In short, for those who do not believe in the military spending fairy, military spending will cost jobs in either the short-term of long-term. If the spending doesn't make sense in terms of advancing national security, then it doesn't make sense period: end of story.
Terra Daily - World population to hit 10 bln, but 15 bln possible: UN
October 28, 2011 TERRA DAILY
London (AFP) Oct 26, 2011
The world's population of seven billion is set to rise to at least 10 billion by 2100, but could top 15 billion if birth rates are just slightly higher than expected, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
In a report ahead of ceremonies on October 31 to mark the seven billionth human alive today, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) warned demographic pressure posed mighty challenges for easing poverty and conserving the environment.
"This is a challenge and a call to action. The issue of population is a critical one for all humanity and for planetEarth," Babatunde Osotimehin, the UNFPA's executive director, said at the launch of the report in London.
But he said that the world should focus on how to make the world a better place to live instead of worrying only about numbers.
"This is not a matter of space, it's a matter of equity, opportunity and social justice," he told journalists.
Richard RJ Eskow - Wanna See A Real Ass Kicking (Itself)? Read The Dems' Disastrous "Super Committee" Proposal
October 28, 2011 By Richard (RJ) Eskow
October 27, 2011 - 9:38pm ET
If you've ever questioned whether the so-called "Super Committee" represents a breakdown in the democratic process, yesterday's proposal from the group's Democratic members should put your doubts to rest. The system's seriously broken when unelected super-legislators from both parties keep trying to top each other in proposing inhumane and unpopular programs.
The party of the donkey is about to give itself a real ass-kicking.
Representatives from the "party of the people" want to cut Medicare and Social Security, and they're looking for bragging rights on who'd cut government more in a time of need.
If the regular folks' party is trying to impose this much pain on the elderly, poor, and disabled, what's the rich people's party going to do: sacrifice babies in Times Square on live television?
Counterfire.org - Greece on the brink of social explosion
October 28, 2011 COUNTERFIRE.ORG WEDNESDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2011 10:03
As another 48 hour strike begins in Greece Matthaios Tsimitakis describes a situation where despair and hope coexist in weird combination and where something seems to be about to change in the country.
WRITTEN BY MATTHAIOS TSIMITAKI
While surfing online, last week, I stuumbled on a blog-post that describes the life of a 37-year-old woman in Athens in these days of crisis. Unfortunately it is indicative of the condition in which so many gradually have entered as time under Troika and IMF, “rescue policies” passes by. Translated here is an excerpt:
“I have worked since I was 16 and I have lived in Athens since I was 24. I remember that many times I had to struggle in order to survive with two jobs, but never have I stayed unemployed for too long. During the past eight years there were times when things were tight and difficult and other times when things were more or less OK.
But not even in the most difficult period of my life, as a University student, did I find myself in the position I am today. For thirteen years I struggled, I fought, I stood on my feet. But now I can’t take it anymore. I’m giving up.
I’ve been unemployed for ten months. Knowing that I was going to lose my job, I started searching for a new one from as early as the Easter of 2010. By now I’ve sent 155 CVs but I only got two replies back, both saying that they didn’t need employees. For the first time in my life I’m facing an eviction order by the end of this month. The landlord says that I have no dignity and that I live on her expense, forgetting the eight years that I have been meeting my obligations regularly or even the improvements I ‘ve made to her house on my own expenses. Still, she’s right. She’s no charity – she wants her money.
Jim Hightower - "We the People," Not "We the Corporations"
October 28, 2011 Wednesday 26 October 2011
by: Jim Hightower, Truthout | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/we-people-not-we-corporations/1319632343
A year from now, Americans will be caught in an unprecedented blizzard of presidential campaign ads. We'll be blinded by the whiteout and buried in the storm's negativity.
For the first time ever, most of this ad blizzard will not come from the candidates, but from ads secretly funded by huge corporations. This is because a five-man cabal on the Supreme Court issued an edict last year that perverts nature itself. In a case titled Citizens United, the five decreed that -- shazam! -- lifeless corporate entities are henceforth "persons" with more electioneering rights than ... well, us real-life persons.
In a black-robed coup against our democracy, the Supremes ruled that a corporation's money is "speech" and that CEOs may dump unlimited sums of it into their own ad campaigns to elect or defeat any candidates they choose.
Michael LeVesque - The Multivitamin Battle
October 28, 2011 http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Multivitamin-Battle-by-Michael-LeVesque-111025-402.html
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October 26, 2011 By Michael LeVesque Perception is everything. Medicine is based upon observation, as the French Philosopher Michel Foucault stated in The Birth of the Clinic, when describing the medical profession. Observation is Perception For years the wealthy in northern Europe ate off pewter plates, which have a very high lead content. Tomatoes are very acidic and when placed in contact with the pewter they leached out the lead. When eaten, the tomatoes then produced lead poisoning. Lead poisoning manifests itself in many ways from headaches to delirium to death. Based upon perception tomatoes were considered poisonous in those regions for several hundred years by society and the medical community until the 19th Century when a merchant publicly ate a bushel of tomatoes to prove they were harmless without ill effects. |
Terra Daily - No simultaneous warming of northern and southern hemispheres as a result of climate change for 20 000 years
October 28, 2011 TERRA DAILY
Lund, Sweden (SPX) Oct 27, 2011
A common argument againstglobal warming is that the climate has always varied. Temperatures rise sometimes and this is perfectly natural is the usual line.
However, Svante Bjorck, a climate researcher at Lund University in Sweden, has now shown that global warming, i.e. simultaneous warming events in the northern and southern hemispheres, have not occurred in the past 20 000 years, which is as far back as it is possible to analyse with sufficient precision to compare with modern developments. Svante Bjorck's study thus goes 14 000 years further back in time than previous studies have done. "What is happening today is unique from a historical geological perspective", he says.
Svante Bjorck has gone through the global climate archives, which are presented in a large number of research publications, and looked for evidence that any of the climate events that have occurred since the end of the last Ice Age 20 000 years ago could have generated similar effects on both the northern and southern hemispheres simultaneously.
It has not, however, been possible to verify this. Instead, he has found that when, for example, the temperature rises in one hemisphere, it falls or remains unchanged in the other.
Environmental News Network - Calcutta leads world city list most at risk from climate change
October 28, 2011 Environmental News Network, October 26, 2011 08:37 AM
http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/43464/top_stories/article/43464/print
A major new mapping study, analysing climate change vulnerability down to 25km² worldwide, has revealed some of the world's fastest growing populations are increasingly at risk from the impacts of climate related natural hazards and sea level rise
Many of the countries with the fastest population growth are rated as 'extreme risk' in the Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI) released by risk analysis and mapping firm Maplecroft. These include the strategically important emerging economies of Bangladesh (2nd), Philippines (10th), Viet Nam (23rd), Indonesia (27th) and India (28th).
The CCVI forms part of Maplecroft's fourth annual Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas. It features subnational maps and analysis of climate change vulnerability and the adaptive capacity to combat climate change in 193 countries.
It analyses the exposure of populations to climate related natural hazards and sensitivity of countries in terms of population concentration, development, natural resources, agricultural dependency and conflict.
At a national level, the CCVI rates 30 countries at 'extreme risk,' with the top 10 comprising of Haiti, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Cambodia, Mozambique, DR Congo, Malawi and the Philippines.
The value of Maplecroft's research is much better appreciated at a subnational level, where risks to towns, cities, economic zones and individual company assets can be identified through interactive maps, which chart vulnerability, exposure and sensitivity to climate change down to 25km² worldwide. For instance, extreme hotpots of vulnerability can be seen in the South West of Brazil and coastal regions of China, but both countries are rated 'medium risk' by the CCVI the national level.
Vulnerability on this scale is illustrated particularly well when looking at the effects of climate change on the megacities of Asia; some of which have the highest rates of population growth, along with extreme vulnerability to climate change.
