A huge fuss is currently being made over the Constitutional rights of the “whistleblower” who outed Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president. That this concern is being felt by the corporate news media for some presently unknown individual should raise eyebrows. If they truly cared about the rights of a whistleblower it would definitely be a first, and that fact alone should make us hesitate before placing this person in the same hallowed group occupied by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Joe Wilson, John Kiriakou, and other actual heroes. The aforementioned were not treated well at all by the same media goons currently howling about justice over the White House leaker who of course turned out to be a CIA agent, and who is now safely nestled back at that murderous agency.

The corporate media doesn’t care about whistleblowers. In fact, they actively seek to demonize, smear, and convict them at every possible turn. That they are now coming to the defense of some individual whom they’ve deemed a whistleblower suggests that this person isn’t one.

How many corporate outlets reported on the September 27th death of Joe Wilson, the person who blew the whistle on the yellowcake uranium fraud used to con the public into supporting a tragic war in Iraq?

How many of these propagandists are using airtime to talk about Chelsea Manning’s plight, or that of Julian Assange? We know the answer, and we know why. Because they don’t care about true whistleblowers. The corporate news outlets serve the permanent structure of power, and they will defend any attempt at dismantling or exposing it. In this sense, then, the White House leaker is an anti-whistleblower, because Trump, at least in this case, is seeking to expose just one instance of the unbelievable corruption that is typical among our Political Class.

To label this CIA spook a whistleblower is to steal the valor of all the courageous whistleblowers who have sacrificed their freedom so that the American people would know the truth about the crimes their government commits in their name.

…is from a 2001 article, “Personal Hygiene and Life Expectancy Improvements Since 1850: Historic and Epidemiologic Associations”, appearing in the American Journal of Infection Control:

“Between 1850 and 1900, the commonly recurring epidemics of cholera, smallpox, malaria, and typhoid were gradually brought under control. During the next 50 years, gratifying victories over such endemic diseases as tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, and scarlet fever were witnessed. These diseases were less dramatic than epidemics, but each was among the leading causes of death before 1900. By the middle of the 20th century, except for the 1918 influenza pandemic, death from infectious disease in Western industrialized countries was no longer a major component of mortality statistics.”

Vaccines have today been mythologized, and it is just assumed that they saved humanity from infectious disease. The historical record, never referred to by the acolytes and evangelists of the vaccine mythology, contradicts that assumption. Vaccines had nothing to do with the sudden, dramatic decline in infectious disease. The true cause of the decline was the enormous advances in hygiene and sanitation that occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The purification of public water supplies that was widely adopted after 1910 in the United States caused an immediate and dramatic decline in mortality rates of such waterborne diseases as diphtheria, typhoid fever, cholera, and others.

Yet the pushers of vaccine myths are not in pursuit of truth, but of power. The public mythologizing of vaccines serves an agenda, one that, in turn, serves industry, and the various agencies that protect it.

California doctor Charity Dean will now oversee vaccine medical exemptions in the state, as well as lead the witch hunt against the doctors who have issued them.

Apparently Alexa plays 20 questions with the children of these smart device owners, asking intrusive questions that might not appear so to a child. According to a mother who called in to NPR, her daughter was asked by Alexa, regarding her father: “Does this person inoculate all of the children in his house?”  The NPR episode here. The entire episode is worth listening to, but the mother calls at 10:54.

There is no point in bringing these small avatars of the surveillance state into your home. They are clearly surveillance devices, spying on you and your family, and nothing good will come of owning one. Amazon has already admitted that Alexa recordings are saved indefinitely, even in the Alexa owner “deletes” them. They data will be saved, and probably sold/given to various state and federal agencies to use. Every interaction in your house will be eavesdropped upon.

The supreme irony lies in the fact that no piece of legislation was even needed to mandate the installation of an in-home surveillance device, many people are doing it of their own free will.

H/t to the Facebook group, ‘Vaccine Damage, I Believe in Science’.

Oklahoma Republican state rep. Kevin West held an informal meeting on vaccine safety last month that quickly drew jeers from the pedigreed multitudes of the Medical Establishment, including this statement from one Larry Bookman, president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association:

“Before vaccinations were readily available, thousands of Oklahoma’s babies, children and adults suffered from dire complications from serious diseases such as measles, mumps, scarlet fever and polio. The reason this is no longer an issue is because America’s childhood immunization efforts are one of the most effective public health programs in history…

“Despite the effectiveness of these life-saving vaccines, there remains a vocal, misinformed minority who are working to chip away at this essential program. With this in mind, I’m calling on our state leaders to embrace the facts regarding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. And, on behalf of our nearly 4,000 physician members, I encourage parents who are nervous about vaccine safety to have an open, honest conversation with your family physician,”

I would say that if Bookman here wants to talk about honesty, he should practice what he preaches. There is no vaccine for scarlet fever, and he, as president of his venerated institution, should know.

It is significant for our understanding of the cause of the dramatic decline in infectious disease that there was never a vaccine for scarlet fever in wide circulation. The disease was a feared killer up until the early 20th century, racking up a body count far higher than even smallpox. Yet, by 1940, scarlet fever had virtually vanished in the United States and England. And now, in the present, when someone contracts scarlet fever, it manifests as nothing more than a benign sandpaper rash that lasts less than a week.

How? Why? Haven’t we been told that vaccines saved us from the ravages of infectious disease? That this this greatly-feared infection burned out in such dramatic fashion should be grounds for intense historical interest. But it isn’t.

If there was no vaccine in use, how did this killer disease, feared for centuries, suddenly vanish within the span of 60 or so years? The answer lies in the myriad sanitation movements that arose in England and the United States in the mid- to late-ninteenth century. Clean water, nutritious food, innovations in plumbing, an awakening to the benefits of handwashing and general hygiene. These were things hitherto never given the time of day. The power of hygiene is illustrated in the graph above. It dealt a mortal wound to a feared, invisible killer that had previously wiped out entire families, cutting through communities, and sending nations into panics. The most dramatic decline in mortality appeared in children under 1 year of age.

No one learns of the sanitation movement in school today, despite its enormous historical significance. It is lost history. In its stead, we have acolytes and propagators of actual misinformation like Larry Bookman, and the seemingly endless drones just like him who mindlessly parrot all the same phrases when defending the cult surrounding vaccines.

Fair question. And, of course, the answer is obvious. If the roles had been reversed, the murderer would’ve received, at the very least, a life sentence. He wouldn’t get a hug from members of the victim’s family, nor would he receive a bible from the judge.

Mary Knowlton was the 73-year old retired librarian who made the ill-fated decision to participate in a “shoot/don’t shoot” demonstration with a criminally incompetent member of the punitive class. Lee Coel was supposed to be shooting blanks, but instead fired two live rounds through Knowlton’s heart, killing her. This rooting, snorting, unionized piece of garbage has been charged with “manslaughter”, and will more than likely serve no time at all, thanks to the “thin blue line” institutional support, amplified by the unconditional love held by an idiotic and unthinking public. Knowlton is a victim of the culture of incompetence that is rampant among police departments today. The kid who killed her had probably never even held a gun 6 months ago, but he did have the quick temper and eagerness to escalate a situation so prized among departments. IQ hovering below that of my dog. (That is an insult to my pit bull, actually, who exhibits daily a capacity for reflection and judgment far above that of most people I encounter).

As every firearm owner knows, you never point your gun at anyone, whether you think you’re loaded or not. Every real gun owner feels the gravitational pull of their barrel down to the ground, and obeys that instinct. No real gun owner would ever dream of pointing their weapon at an elderly woman, much less fire blanks at her heart.

Here’s a good example of why it’s a bad idea to mingle education and medical procedures. Many have pointed out the fact that if any of those students had been diabetic, the school would’ve had a death on their hands. Now everyone involved is getting sued, and the families will probably get a sizable pay-out. Litigation is the answer here.

The most outrageous part of the story, though, is that, once the school realized its mistake, it told the students not to tell their parents about the mishap. The student that OD’d also was not administered medical aid at the school. The parents evidently arrived to find their child unconscious in a chair.

Public schools have no business administering medical procedures, including vaccines. The personnel, more often than not, isn’t competent. Shots, and everything else, must be done in a doctor’s office, with parents present.

The greatest revolution and most dramatic advance toward a freer and far better future has been the flowering of marijuana legalization throughout the nation. Congress is now poised to give the cannabis industry banking rights, hitherto denied to them. Legalization takes the honors not primarily due to the many health benefits from its use, but because its legalization took the beating heart out of the tragic, almost century-long War on Drugs. The drug war is now terminal, as can plainly be seen. The arguments developed to discredit marijuana prohibition apply to the entire bureaucratic superstructure, as the public can clearly see. A flood of editorials and jeremiads, of which I contributed a small amount, were too much for the policy to withstand. No one could deny the injustice of the drug war. This phenomenon is probably one of the primary benefits of such prolonged struggles for liberty: the best minds are forced to develop and unleash the most devastating and convincing of arguments to combat the tyranny. Books, columns, speeches, documentaries, all of this will exist long after the battle has been won, stockpiled like an armory in the event that they ever need to be made use of again.

The foundation of a free society is voluntarism. All mutually-consenting contracts and interactions are permitted. The instigation of violence is prohibited. This has always been the ultimate goal. But it seems clear that it won’t happen all at once. Small victories will build on one another, and liberty activists will gain ground. The logic of liberty applied to one issue will then be transferred to another. More people will wake up to this logic, and then one day we will have reached a point where the principle of voluntarism has been pushed further than ever before. But pushed in a self-conscious, philosophical manner. Nothing by accident, and therefore more permanent. That is the ultimate goal.