REPUBLIC REBORN

From The Guardian:”Monsanto operated a “fusion center” to monitor and discredit journalists and activists, and targeted a reporter who wrote a critical book on the company, documents reveal. The agrochemical corporation also investigated the singer Neil Young and wrote an internal memo on his social media activity and music.

The records reviewed by the Guardian show Monsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company’s weedkiller and its links to cancer. Monsanto, now owned by the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, also monitored a not-for-profit food research organization through its “intelligence fusion center”, a term that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies use for operations focused on surveillance and terrorism.”

To say that vaccine policy has been a hotly debated, emotional topic, particularly so over the past several months, is an assured understatement. The debate has raged online, in state legislatures, and on television. The consensus, aggressively defended and promoted among corporate news outlets, regulators, and government officials, has been that vaccines are “safe and effective”, that they have saved the human race from rampant disease and mass death, and that it is crucial that we obediently comply with the command to inject. We’ve heard it repeated constantly throughout our lives, but does it reflect the truth, or is “safe and effective” more marketing slogan than fact? If it were true, why the need for the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has paid out over $4 billion over the past 30 years to those who have suffered a vaccine injury? If vaccines are safe, why grant their manufacturers blanket legal immunity from lawsuits? If critics of vaccine safety are so obviously wrong, why the push to censor their voices? 

You’ll never receive answers to those questions from the mainstream media or their corporate and regulatory allies, because those questions will never be asked by them. To ask them would be to shine a light on uncomfortable facts that surround current vaccine policy, poking holes in a narrative that they are increasingly desperate to hold together. But the questions deserve to be asked, and answered, and the public deserves to know the full story behind the pharmaceutical products they’re told they must inject into their children. If a pharmaceutical product is causing rampant injury and even death, the public deserves to know, regardless as to whether said product is in a syringe or not.

One such product is the HPV vaccine, ubiquitously promoted as the miracle cervical cancer prevention that women have been waiting for. Except for one small fact that is rarely mentioned in the myriad puff pieces extolling the virtues of the vaccine: it has never been proven to actually prevent cervical cancer. For that, the manufacturers would have needed a clinical trial period of several decades, since cervical cancer develops slowly, over a period of many years, with the median age of death occurring at 58. Merck, the maker of Gardasil, couldn’t wait that long. Suffering under the criminal scandal of their heart attack-inducing drug Vioxx, the pharmaceutical giant needed an all-star product that could pull their financials back from the brink. Gardasil, their HPV vaccine, was seen as that product, and they wanted it on the market as soon as possible. So, of course, they cut corners during the clinical trials in an ethically negligent manner, as Slate’s thorough investigation documented in 2017. Instead of proving to cure cervical cancer, the manufacturers only had to prove a positive effect at preventing specific cervical lesions that are thought to eventually progress into cancer.

The Slate investigation found that the Gardasil clinical trials were flawed from the outset, seemingly designed to downplay injuries stemming from the vaccine: participants were told that safety trials had already been conducted and that the vaccine had been proven safe, which many of the participants later found to have been a lie. Participants were monitored for side effects for a meager 14 days, and investigators were given wide discretion to decide for themselves whether symptoms should be attributed to the vaccine. Any symptom not seen as related to the vaccine was classified as “new medical history”. Many of the trial participants developed severe neurological disorders soon after receiving the vaccine, but were finding that trial investigators did not appear willing to entertain the notion that the vaccine was responsible. 

Another fatal flaw in the Gardasil clinical trials was the lack of a true saline placebo in the control group. Half of the participants received the Gardasil vaccine, and the other half, save for a few hundred participants, received an injection containing Merck’s aluminum-containing adjuvant, AAHS. Participants that received the aluminum-laced placebo experienced adverse reactions at almost the same rate as those who received the vaccine, leading some to believe that Merck’s proprietary aluminum adjuvant to be a primary culprit in many of the neurological disorders that began to emerge. 

And many have blamed the use of aluminum in vaccines as a culprit in the host of neurological disorders emerging at an alarming rate among children. 

Why didn’t Merck use an unadulterated, saline placebo in the control group? Were they afraid the contrasting health outcomes between the two groups would derail another billion-dollar pharmaceutical product? Both the vaccine and the placebo also contained a host of other compounds, including polysorbate 80, sodium borate, and L-histidine.

Once the vaccine was approved, it was widely distributed, with Australia being the first country to launch a nation-wide HPV vaccination campaign, despite the fact that cervical cancer is vanishingly rare there, at 1.8 deaths per 100,000 women. Injuries began appearing almost immediately, with around 4,300 adverse events reported to Australia’s ‘DAEN’ adverse event reporting system between April 2007 and March 2018.

In Denmark, clinics opened that primarily treated victims of injuries related to the HPV vaccine. One such clinic, the Syncope Centre, saw over 400 injured girls by 2017. Since 2015, five new clinics have opened to treat injuries related to the HPV vaccine, which immediately saw 1,300 new cases of injuries flood in. Of the 2,300 HPV vaccine injuries officially reported in Denmark, over 1,000 were severe. 

You’ll never hear about the flawed safety trials or the numerous injuries from the corporate media, regulators, the manufacturers, or even your doctor, despite knowledge of it being crucial to adequately make an informed decision regarding the vaccine. Instead, you’ll get a chiding for questioning the “safe and effective” dogma and a good dose of cancer fearmongering, amounting to a minor form of emotional terrorism that shames parents into acquiescing to the jab.

There is also a fairly good chance you’ll never learn that the vaccine may increase the risk of cervical cancer if the recipient already has an HPV infection. In the Gardasil trials, Merck reported a 44.6 percent increased risk of developing CIN2 or CIN3, the precancerous lesions most likely to eventually develop into cervical cancer, if the participant had a current HPV infection along with a prior infection.  Trial participants were at a 33.7 percent increased risk if they had a current infection and/or a prior infection. GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix trials found similar results.

The HPV vaccine was also never tested for its effects on fertility, yet the Gardasil trial data showed a miscarriage rate of around 25 percent for the participants, much higher than the average of 10 percent among young women. Premature ovarian failure, a condition virtually unheard of among healthy young women, has been studied as one possible adverse reaction to the HPV vaccine. In a paper published in 2014, Dierdre Little looked at three cases of premature ovarian failure in teenage girls following vaccination.

The Pap smear, widely regarded as “the most successful screening technique in the history of medicine” for its role in the dramatic decline in cervical cancer deaths, remains the true miracle cancer prevention, reducing cervical cancer rates around 80 percent in the developed world. Despite this, research shows that the false confidence instilled by having received an HPV vaccine could lead to fewer Pap screenings, which would result in increased cervical cancer rates.

Like most miracles, the HPV vaccine has failed to live up to the hype. But that doesn’t stop the corporate media, regulators, and every other beneficiary from hyping. And they don’t plan on informing you of any of the serious questions raised concerning the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, questions that would compel many parents to refuse it. Instead, the media and regulators deceptively promote the vaccine as a risk-free cancer cure, recklessly so, thereby condemning the public to a hidden game of Russian Roulette with their children’s health. 

Anyone who questions the safety or efficacy gets slapped with the pejorative “anti-vaxxer” in an attempt to bully them into silence, but the name-calling appears to be losing its effectiveness. Facts are stubborn, and always seem to bubble up and break out of any imposed censorship campaign. And the fact-free defense of vaccines does nothing but raise more eyebrows. The public is smarter than the media, regulators, and government give them credit for, and they’re realizing that they need more than mere emotional manipulation and appeals to authority to assuage that skepticism. 

Nothing should be exempt from criticism, certainly not a pharmaceutical product manufactured by an industry widely known for its boundless corruption. Vaccines aren’t a pure gift from God, but they’re treated as such. For some strange reason, a product of Pharma becomes sacrosanct in the eyes of the public and Political Class once it’s stuffed into a syringe.

BONNIE KRISTIAN: The U.S. shouldn’t play endless whack-a-mole in Syria

DOUG BANDOW: Mandatory national service: a bad idea that won’t die

Daily Mail: U.S. government shuts down military lab studying Ebola and the plague over safety fears

Health Impact News: How Google threatens your children

Mondoweiss: State Dept. updates antisemitism definition to include comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany

Common Dreams: Privacy advocates celebrate court ruling on class-action suit targeting Facebook’s facial recognition tech

Gizmodo: This map shows if your town’s police are tapped into Ring’s surveillance network

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Amazon’s Ring is a perfect storm of privacy threats

USA Today: ‘Red flag’ laws violate rights to due process

JEFFREY TUCKER: “Do Something” is a dangerous demand to make of politicians

The measles crisis hasn’t made an appearance in the news in awhile, I wonder why that is? Rockland County, New York, ground zero for hyperbolic measles fear-mongering, recently called off its hysterical, months-long state of emergency with barely a mention, why could that be? Could it be because every single measles case there has resolved itself? Measles is a self-limiting infection, lasting less than a week. Surely the health officials there are kicking themselves for scaring everyone half to death over such a mild infection now that they see that it was all for naught. But I’m sure it boosted sales of the MMR vaccine at just the right moment, and gave irresponsible, corporate media outlets a chance to run irresponsible headlines.

So every other case of the measles in the country has either cleared up or is in the process. And all those that caught the infection are now immune from future measles infections for life. Yet this fact will not be reported by any of the outlets that fanned the flames of measles hysteria, outlets that recklessly reported measles as “deadly”. News outlets that were panting for a measles death, a death that they could then trumpet to the heavens as proof positive that the dreaded anti-vaxxers are a danger to society.

The cacophony of measles hysterics also appears to have reached its peak towards the tail end of state legislative sessions, suspiciously so. Just when state legislatures were considering vaccine mandates, a threat blamed on the lack of vaccine mandates conveniently made an appearance, and the myriad corporate outlets made sure to inflate the threat beyond all belief, thereby using a fear-induced momentum to force the mandates into law. As the legislative sessions ended, so did the measles coverage.

In the wake the fallout from the unearthed recording of a young Reagan calling Africans “monkeys”, here is a hilarious SNL skit from 1986:

I suspect that the simple-mindedness of many a politician is an elaborate ruse. Yet I doubt Reagan was anything like Hartmann’s portrayal. I imagine there were several people around him who could silver-tongue, or even blackmail, him into rubber-stamping just about anything. The odds of blackmail are greatly increased when it is revealed that a recording of Reagan making racist remarks. Was the recording ever brought up to coerce the cooperation or support of Reagan? It’s an open, but important, question. How much does the threat of blackmail factor in to the actions of our Political Class? I suspect quite a bit.  Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been a prime generator of blackmail material on powerful people. Eric Margolis, writing at Unz in his piece, The Honey Trap on E 71st, tells the story of receiving a lunch invitation from Epstein. He arrived at Epstein’s New York mansion only to be greeted by a butler who immediately asked, “would you like an intimate massage, sir, by a pretty young girl?” As an intelligence reporter, he smelled a rat and immediately declined. He probably imagined the room he was to receive the “massage”, with multiple hidden cameras and microphones.

The power behind the throne is the only power that matters. The power that stems from the ability to exercise complete control over those who hold power.

I can’t recall ever being so surprised by a film as I was upon viewing Tarantino’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As with most of his films, each is an experience more than a film. Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, et cetera, these works of art stick with you, but he appears to have outdone himself with Hollywood. I can’t speak as a pinky-out critic of any caliber, merely someone who enjoys fun movies. And I sure-as-heck found it in this movie. Where to begin? The movie saunters through a beautiful, 1969 Los Angeles. Too beautiful, in fact. Every ad, every face, every car, every conversation, has an angelic quality. The love of films themselves is apparent is almost every shot. Margot Robbie is blindingly beautiful as the doomed Sharon Tate, and she exudes a high voltage joy in each scene. Yet the obvious, dark undercurrent weaving its way throughout is the inevitable Manson massacre that begins to feel palpable the farther you go into the film. It gets worse the more attached we get to the characters that we know won’t survive. Robbie’s Tate in particular. Her unearthly beauty and charm casts such a spell that you, audience goer, feel increasingly helpless as the film builds to the bloody climax, that you badly want to defend her from the inevitable but know that you can’t. You can’t rewrite history.

And here is were Tarantino uses the ace up his sleeve.

Ever heard a crowd of people cheer in a theater? You will if you see this movie. Perfect strangers were veritably sky-hooting in unison during the last ten minutes of the film as their secret fear did not come to pass.

So, Spoilers.

Manson’s killers descend on Cielo Drive at around midnight on August 8th, 1969, yes, but something quite unexpected occurs. All you could really say is that the catharsis of half a century, from an entire generation, was suddenly loosed in cinemas around the nation. Brad Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, high as a kite from smoking an LSD-laced cigarette, is confronted by Rex, Susan, and Patricia. At this moment we, the audience, wholeheartedly believe that we will witness his death, along with DiCaprio’s character and that of his wife. And yet. Cliff’s lucidity returns in a flash while facing the hippie scum, and with the click of his tongue, he commands his beautiful beast of a pit bull to attack Rex. Suffice to say, Rex and one of the female killers is shredded by the dog. The third gets torched by an utterly sloshed Leonardo DiCaprio, wielding a flamethrower that had been used as a prop from a previous film. The audience laughing and cheering throughout.

It’s in this moment of revenge that the audience realizes how much they’ve despised Tate’s killers. We have always hated the pieces of human excrement that took the life of an 8-month pregnant Sharon Tate even if we didn’t realize it. And probably most of us have harbored the barbaric desire to see them get what’s coming to them. And, in this film at least, they do receive it.

There’s so much more to the film than just the build-up to the Manson murders. For instance, was Bruce Lee really as much of a jackass as he was portrayed to be in the film? Watching the film in the moment, you couldn’t care less, and the subsequent dressing-down he receives at the hands of Pitt’s character is fairly satisfying.

Was 1969 Hollywood, and its inhabits, really as beautiful as Tarantino’s portrayal?

The best parts, for me at least, are the various disembodied moments; a young Roman Polanski taking his french press coffee to a backyard table in the morning, An electric Tate taking in a matinee of one of her own films. Brad Pitt weaving in and out of traffic. The exquisite dialogue-heavy scenes that Tarantino is known for. It is the perfect summer movie.

Very informative article from The American Conservative: The doctor monopoly is killing American patients

In school we never learn about the American Medical Association’s efforts to shut down 80% of medical schools during the early twentieth century. Yet it happened, and that organization’s continued stranglehold on medical education is causing the needless deaths of thousands of American citizens.

Tulsi details Kamala’s hideous record as a California prosecutor in a matter of seconds during tonight’s Democratic debate, exposing Kamala’s corruption on a major network. Kamala had no response. She won’t recover from this, and neither will Biden once Tulsi similarly exposes his sordid past. Once Kamala and Biden are out of the way, what other candidate could stand in the way of Tulsi’s nomination? And once nominated, how could Trump hold a candle to her?

I’ve always wondered who writes the bills that are voted on. Lawyers, lobbyists? How about CIA analysts? It appears that SB 3153 is a direct product of the intelligence community, handed straight to Congress with the expectation that it’s signed into law as is.

Here’s the write-up at Zero Hedge

And here is Ron Paul on the bill:

The newly-approved Pentagon budget.

For perspective, the budget for rest of the government over the same time period is $1.3 trillion.