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Posts posted by Steven Gaal
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Homelessness rises 55% under ‘disgraceful’ Tory govt (LINK)
Devastating figures released by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) reveal a significant 55 percent rise in homelessness since David Cameron became prime minister in 2010.
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TURKEY PULSE
TÜRKİYE'NİN NABZI
Syrian ethnic Kurds demonstrate after Friday prayers in the Syrian town of Qamishli, May 6, 2011. (photo by REUTERS)
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Will 'Kurdish Spring' redraw Middle East map?
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Author: Cengiz ÇandarPosted February 5, 2015
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It was almost three years ago that Barham Salih, then prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), on seeing me for the first time after an unusually long interval, shouted from the distance, even before we greeted each other: “The Kurdish moment has arrived!”
SummaryHis jubilant mood reflected the sentiments shared by most of the Kurds around the region. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring upheavals that started in North Africa, rapidly moved to the Levant and took a violent turn in Syria, the insurgent organization of the Kurds of Turkey had begun to issue calls to begin a “Kurdish Spring” by the year 2011. The KRG’s self-confidence was boosted by international oil magnates rushing in to explore and produce Kurdistani hydrocarbons, bringing with them not only the technological inputs but also the much-needed legitimacy for the quasi-independent Kurdish entity.
The Syrian Kurds had started to exercise self-rule in the three cantons, though lacking territorial continuity along the long Turkish-Syrian frontier. The one around the largest Syrian Kurdish town, Qamishli, was also at the proximity of the KRG, the other around Kobani at the midpoint of the 911-kilometer (566-mile) Turkish-Syrian border and the third around Afrin, which was also right across the Turkish border, a half-hour drive from the largest city of Syria, Aleppo, where nearly a half-million Kurds lived.
Since then, a new phenomenon was added to the map of the Middle East in the name of the Islamic State (IS), which declared itself a caliphate under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on June 29. Controlling large tracts of land in eastern Syria and the western and northwestern parts of Iraq, IS has become the neighbor of the KRG, having the longest frontier, nearly 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), which is judged as the line of confrontation. IS emerged as the main threat to Kurdish self-rule in Syria. The siege of Kobani compelled US President Barack Obama's administration to respond, forming an anti-IS coalition and pounding IS positions with US-led coalition aircraft. Kobani was hailed as the “Stalingrad of the Kurds,” adding an epic dimension to Kurdish nation-building that was accelerated on the ashes of the Arab Spring, which is no longer blossoming.
The resistance of Kobani that ended with the withdrawal of IS has become the pride of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the leading Kurdish party of the resistance. It was considered the Syrian affiliate of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which was banned and listed as a terrorist organization by the US State Department and the European Union since the latter half of the 1990s to appease Turkey, a NATO ally that has become a disappointment for not joining the West’s policies against IS.
The Kurds, ranging from Barzani’s KRG to its main competitor, Turkey’s villain, Abdullah Ocalan’s PKK and its Syrian affiliate, PYD, presented themselves as the most valiant and reliable resistance forces for the Western world’s anti-IS drive
The paradox is that Turkey is engaging the PKK by talking directly with its leader, Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence on Turkey’s prison island, Imrali. Turkey’s strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has seemingly lost any residue of sympathy in Washington and in most of the EU capitals, has his closest ally in the Middle East as Massoud Barzani, the president of the KRG.
Since the inauguration of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and with the removal of President Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt in February 2011, the talk that dominated was whether we would be witnessing the end of the Sykes-Picot order in the region with a new map.
The Arab Spring ultimately produced the human tragedy and carnage in Syria and began to be called “Arab Winter” by some Western pundits. If there is any reference to a new map for the Middle East, it is drawn by IS with unrecognized and illegitimate boundaries.
However, it is still far from certain what history is shaping for the Kurds’ destiny and how a new map might be drawn in the Middle East.
There could be no better timing for a book with the title “Kurdish Spring: A New Map for the Middle East.” A 264-page, very reader-friendly book from Transaction Publishers, it was published on Dec. 22, 2014. It has a foreword by Bernard Kouchner, the former French minister of foreign affairs who has a very good reputation in the region, greater than his ministerial title, as the co-founder of Médécins Sans Frontiéres (Doctors Without Borders),
Not surprisingly, the author is David Phillips, a Columbia University professor, a former State Department official known for his close relationship with the late US envoy Richard Holbrooke. Kouchner describes him as “The Activist Professor” and defines him in the following lines:
“Political science keeps events at bay and touches upon them with caution. David L. Phillips loves to embrace them. If you get lost in the day-to-day confusion of events, read his book and you will be able to distinguish what is important from the mundane. … Phillips knows how to project the real world into stale lecture rooms. To commentators and diplomats alike, he is a reality detector, and for us all, a lightning rod in times of confusion.”
In Phillips’ own words: “‘The Kurdish Spring’ draws on my experience as a practitioner and scholar of Kurdish issues for over twenty-five years. I have been engaged in various capacities, working with the US Congress, as a US official, at think tanks, institutes, and universities. Based on my experience, Kurds are one of America’s best and most reliable friends in the Middle East. …
“The Kurds are at a historic crossroads. This book tells their story. There are many scholars knowledgeable about Kurdish issues and the Middle East. However, few have been involved in Kurdish issues for as long as I have. Few have my experience working with Kurds across party lines and in different countries. Few have been engaged as both a scholar, activist and as an official. These pages describe the tragic history of betrayal and abuse experienced by the Kurds. They also tell a hopeful story of progress, with Kurds poised to realize their rights and national aspirations.”
While reading, I came across some minor errors — such as the exact date of the PKK’s declaration of its first cease-fire. There could be some people who might disagree with the analysis of the author on certain issues pertinent to the history of the Kurds and the Kurdish struggle. Nonetheless, nothing prevents the book from being the most concise account on the history of the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran since David McDowall’s seminal book “A Modern History of the Kurds” (I.B. Tauris, 1996).
It is an updated, a very fresh information arsenal on the Kurdish issue and Kurdish history. There is no doubt that it will take its rightful place on the bookshelves of everyone around the world concerned with the issues of the Middle East, despite that its content is less scholarly but more of a “Kurdish issue for Beginners” or “Overall Kurdish History 101” for the English-reading public.
It can be seen as a wake-up call for the US administration from a pro-Kurdish independence pundit implying that it is high time for the United States to assist Kurdish efforts for the eventual independent state of the Kurds in the region, so that the map of the Middle East could change.
It is good for Phillips’ book that he did not elaborate further. The future of the Middle East is so uncertain that even many Kurds would love to consider what is happening or what still may occur as the “Kurdish Spring,” but it is still far from certain what is in store for them.
We should consider “The Kurdish Spring: A New Map for the Middle East” to be one of the main reference sources that will ably serve all those concerned with the Middle East and the Kurdish issues.
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IN TWO PARTS ++
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))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Obamacare Is Not Some Left-Wing, Socialist Plot; It Is a Republican Plot
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Thursday, 26 February 2015 15:14
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed
Email
Most of the tenets of Obamacare were introduced way back in 1971 by Richard Nixon, a Republican president. (Photo: Tim Pierce)Obamacare is not some communist, left-wing, socialist plot.
It's a Republican plot.
Back in 1971, then President Richard Nixon was extremely concerned that he would have to face then Sen. Ted Kennedy in the 1972 presidential election.
At that time, Senator Kennedy was pushing a proposal for a national single-payer health care plan that would extend coverage to all Americans.
Nixon knew that Kennedy's proposal would be popular with the American people, and could threaten his re-election chances, so he came up with a health care proposal of his own.
Nixon's proposal for health care in the US included different plans for four categories of Americans.
See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.
Under Nixon's plan, employers would have been required to buy health insurance providing a basic package of benefits for 150 million working US residents and their families.
For 20 million people who were considered the working poor at the time and their families, Nixon's plan would have replaced Medicaid services with private health insurance plans fully paid for by the government for the poorest, with a sliding scale of contributions for families earning over $3,000 (roughly $17,300 in today's dollars).
Nixon's plan also dropped Medicare premiums for 21 million "aging" Americans, and instead adjusted Social Security taxes to make up for the costs.
Finally, Nixon's plan lowered health care costs for 30 million self-employed Americans by allowing them to buy health care policies at lower group rates through insurance pools.
Now, what does all of that sound like to you? It sounds an awful lot like Obamacare, right?
That's because most of the tenets of Obamacare were introduced way back in 1971 by Richard Nixon, a Republican president.
But Nixon wasn't the only Republican to get behind a health care plan that sounds a lot like Obamacare.
Back in 1993, then-President Bill Clinton tried desperately to reform healthcare in the US. He created a special health care task force that was charged with finding solutions to rising healthcare costs and an increasing number of uninsured Americans.
While that task force was trying to find solutions, Republicans in Congress were trying to create a health care reform alternative of their own.
They came up with the Health Equity and Access Reform Today bill, or HEART.
That bill was spearheaded by then Republican Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island, and co-sponsored by 18 other Republican senators, including current Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley, both of whom are now opposed to Obamacare.
It was also supported by the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, which at the time was pushing particularly heavily for an individual mandate.
Among other things, the HEART bill proposed by Republican senators included an individual mandate (to appease the folks over at the Heritage Foundation), the creation of insurance purchasing pools, standardized benefits, vouchers for poor Americans to buy insurance and a ban on insurance companies denying coverage based on preexisting conditions.
Again, what does that sound like?
Speaking about the HEART bill, Sheila Burke, former chief of staff for former Sen. Bob Dole told PolitiFact's PunditFact that,
"You would find a great deal of similarity to provisions in the Affordable Care Act. The guys were way ahead of the times! Different crowd, different time, suffice it to say."So, yet again, you have Republicans introducing a national health care reform plan that contained a lot of the key tenets of today's Obamacare.
The facts speak for themselves. Republicans have been pushing Obamacare-like health-care principles for more than 40 years!
So, why in 2015, are Republicans suddenly so opposed to policies they have crafted and supported in years past?
Because today, Republicans aren't operating on principle, they're operating on politics.
They're doing everything in their power to sabotage President Obama's presidency and tarnish his legacy.
They're fulfilling the plans of a group of powerful Republican lawmakers and strategists who sat down to a private dinner at the Caucus Room restaurant here in Washington on the night of January 20, 2009, and vowed to filibuster and obstruct any and all legislation supported by President Obama.
Republicans aren't morally opposed to Obamacare; after all, it's helped millions of people, and it's making the insurance industry even richer.
Republican opposition to Obamacare is entirely about politics, and that's no way to run a country.
If you're going to run a country, which Republicans basically are by being in control of Congress, you should be operating on principle and on legitimate policy disagreements.
It's time for Republicans to stop playing politics, and start doing what's right for the people of the United States.
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))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))PART 2=======Rothman: Yet Another Crazy Conservative Conspiracy Theory Proven Correct by Noah Rothman | 12:29 pm, April 15th, 2014 977In 2009, in the earliest weeks of President Barack Obama‘s administration, the White House made the controversial decision to take the unprecedented step of moving the Census Bureau from control of the commerce secretary over to the White House ahead of the decennial 2010 census.
Conservatives sounded alarm bells. “It takes something that is supposedly apolitical like the census, and gives it to a guy who is infamously political,” said Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) of then White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
“Requiring the Census director to report directly to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a shamefully transparent attempt by your administration to politicize the Census Bureau and manipulate the 2010 Census,” read a letter addressed to Obama authored by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC).
While Republican officeholders were the primary sources of statements expressing concern over the move, some non-partisan analysts were also unnerved by the move. “The last thing the census needs is for any hard-bitten partisan (either a Karl Rove or a Rahm Emanuel) to manipulate these critical numbers,” wrote University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato in an email to Fox News at the time. “Partisans have a natural impulse to tilt the playing field in their favor, and this has to be resisted.”
The White House dismissed the concerns of conservatives which were, indeed, unfounded insofar as they related to the 2010 census. But the fears of some that the Census Bureau could be corrupted by the imperatives of the political operatives in the White House was today proven accurate.
RELATED: Census Bureau Changes Health Care Survey Questions Hiding Effects of Obamacare
According to a report in The New York Times, the Census Bureau has been directed to change the wording of its questions relating to health care coverage so that they can no longer be checked against the past three decades of data. According to the nonpartisan analysts and census officials The Times spoke with, this change will make it nearly impossible to accurately assess the effects of the Affordable Care Act has had on the number of Americans who have health insurance.
The changes will, however, likely have the effect of showing a reduction in the number of uninsured. This will not be the result of the effects of the law. Rather, according to the Census Bureau’s chief of the health statistics branch, the drop in uninsured is only going to be due to “the questions and how they are asked.”
Policy analysts and columnists, who are not reflexively friendly to conservative causes, called the debasement of a formerly neutral agency to achieve a political end “insane” and “inexcusable.”
And, thus, another crazy conservative conspiracy theory is proven to not be so crazy after all.
[photo via Pete Souza/White House]
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))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))CONCLUSION ############ >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Obama a fake LEFTY that will use conspiratorial tactics to achieve his ends.
Are Conspiracy Theorists Nuts?
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Scots nationalists say want end to austerity as price for UK power support Reuters.co.uk 01:20 Wed, 11 Feb 2015
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Venezuelan Gov. Releases Audio of Coup Plotters (LINK)
On Thursday, two senior officials of the Venezuelan government released what they say is evidence of the coup that the government announced about a week ago. These are audio intercepts of what they say are coup plotters, as well as a recording of an imprisoned military officer confessing to various details of the coup.
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(WOULD STALIN LOVE THIS OR WHAT ??? GAAL)
Chicago Police Secretly Detain, Abuse Americans at Domestic ‘Black Site’ (LINK)
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If you have not ...please read post # 1 this thread ,thank you Steven Gaal
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UN Reveals 'Credible and Reliable' Evidence of US Military Torture in Afghanistan (link)
According to the report, prevalent torture methods used by Afghan forces include, "prolonged and severe beating with cables, pipes, hoses or wooden sticks (including on the soles of the feet), punching, hitting and kicking all over the body including jumping on the detainee’s body, twisting of genitals including with a wrench-like device, and threats of execution and/or sexual assault."
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David Gorski is a closed minded atheist that many call rude. Now Japan's medical acumen and expertise probably surpasses Australia.
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We give lots of vaccines below 2 yrs of age kids.
Japan almost ZERO under age two.....Evan is Japan stupid ??...or BIG PHARMA can trick a lot of people...
STEVE GAAL SAID
It is true that measles deaths had been dropping since the turn of the century.
The measles death rate (deaths per 100,000 people) in the United States was:
- 1900 - 13.3 (about 7000 deaths)
- 1910 - 12.4
- 1920 - 8.8
- 1930 - 3.2
- 1935 - 3.1
- 1940 - 0.5
- 1945 - 0.2
- 1950 - 0.3 (468 deaths)
- 1955 - 0.2 (345 deaths)
- 1960 - 0.2 (380 deaths)
- 1963 - first measles vaccine licensed
- 1965 - 0.1 (276 deaths)
- 1970 - 0.0 (89 deaths)
- 1975 - 0.0 (20 deaths)
- 1980 - 0.0 (11 deaths)
- 1985 - 0.0 (4 deaths)
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- KEY HERE TO NOTE THAT THE in 1963 - first measles vaccine was licensed but the first wide spread use of the vaccine was in 1971. So the argument that the measles vaccine help bring down the disease is ultra weak via data above.
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We give lots of vaccines below 2 yrs of age kids.
Japan almost ZERO under age two.....Evan is Japan stupid ??...or BIG PHARMA can trick a lot of people...
STEVE GAAL
NaturalNews) If flu shots are really as effective as the U.S. government claims they are, then why did nearly a quarter of the Navy crewmen aboard the U.S.S. Ardent earlier this year contract the flu, even though 99 percent of them had been previously vaccinated with flu shots?
- www.vaclib.org/basic/japanusa.htmJun 21, 2000 ... The 2002 vaccination scehdule is below. Two 'immunization schedules' follow,
the 1st is from Japan and the second is ... You will note that Japan recommends,
in the first year of life: ... [Japan and Britian both proved that less vaccination of
infants results in lower overall mortality figures in that age group.]. - phys.org/news/2011-03-japan-baby-vaccines-deaths.htmlMar 7, 2011 ... The infants, aged from around six months to under two years old, died over a
three-day period this month after receiving the vaccinations or in ... - www.lifehealthchoices.com/the-center/.../vaccines/what-others-doIn Japan, after two babies died of the vaccine in 1975, the Japanese ... Japanese
babies only receive 14 vaccines by two years of age compared with ... They
dramatically outperform us in infant mortality, under five mortality and longevity. -
[PDF]
- articles.mercola.com/sites/.../right-vaccine-dosage-for-babies.aspx
Nov 3, 2011 ... However, also be aware that vaccine exemptions are under attack in every ..... In
1991, my beautiful, healthy 3 1/2 year old son began having ...
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)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Delayed Vaccination Schedule Fact SheetGiven that:
- By the time our children are one year old, the CDC recommends 26 vaccine doses be administered to them,
- The United States vaccination schedule means that babies in the United States get more vaccine doses than any other babies in the entire world,[1]
- Babies in the United States also have an infant mortality rate that ranks 34th in the world,
- Despite the United States spending more per capita on health care than any other country on the planet, [2] 33 nations have better infant mortality rates than we do,
I am choosing delayed vaccinations for my child.
I am aware that there are many contributing factor that go into Infant Mortality Rates such as:
- Economic Factors
- Environmental Factors
- Diet
- Nutrition
I understand that the Givens in this proof indicate no directly proportional evidence that vaccinating infants under two years of age is unsafe.
However, when those same countries lessened their infant vaccination schedules and requirements, they saw their infant mortality rates change rapidly and directly. For example:
- In 1975, Japan eliminated all vaccines for children under two and that when that happened; their infant mortality rate plummeted so that it was the lowest in the world.
- In 1995, Japan started allowing infant vaccines, though on a very limited scale. Japan, with their very non-aggressive early vaccination schedule fell behind from the lowest mortality rate in the world to a still impressive 3rd place for awesomeness in the babies-living department.
I find the following chart difficult to allow me any other choice but to delay vaccinations for my child:
Furthermore…
RE: SIDS and the Introduction of Recommended Infant Vaccines
In the United States in the 1960s, campaigns urging national vaccination programs to be implemented for our infants were initiated. For the first time in history, most US infants were required to receive several doses of the vaccinations DPT, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella. While “crib death” has always existed, it was always so infrequent; it wasn’t even listed on infant mortality rates because it was that rare. In 1969, however, just a few years after the implementation of wide spread vaccinations of our nation’s newborns, medical certifiers presented a new medical term—sudden infant death syndrome. [3]
I understand that:
- The CDC states that vaccines are not attributed to cases of SIDS. Their evidence offered is that the back to sleep campaign has significantly reduced the numbers of SIDS cases.
- From 1992 to 2001, the SIDS rate did drop by an average annual rate of 8.6% during the implementation of the “Back to Sleep” campaign.
However, during that same time period, other causes of sudden unexpected infant death (SUID) increased. And so, I believe that the re-categorizing of infant causes of deaths has different results. For example:
- During this same period, the postneonatal mortality rate from suffocation in bed from 1992 to 2001 actually increased at an average annual rate of 11.2%.
- The postneonatal mortality rate in the categories of suffocation other, unknown and unspecified causes and due to intent unknown all increased during this period.
- Even with the “Back to Sleep” campaign, our babies’ rates of dying from inconclusive causes did not lessen as the CDC portrays.[4]
I would like to reopen the vaccination discussion when my child has reached the age of two because while I know the CDC says that we have to vaccinate as infants because infants are more susceptible to these horrible diseases, when taking into account the Infant Mortality Rates among different countries, deaths due to all of these diseases still counted as an infant mortality. It is my understanding that the Infant Mortality Rates are just what they are, the rates of death, not the causes of death. And the very simple fact is that we have alarmingly unacceptable Infant Mortality Rates compared to other industrialized, modern nations.
I have prepared a vaccination exemption form to be included in my child’s medical file. I would like a copy of this document entered into my child’s medical file as well.
[1] CIA. Country comparison: infant mortality rate (2009). The World Factbook. www.cia.gov (accessed 13 April 2010)
[2] Anderson GF, Hussay PS, Frogner BK, and Waters HR. Health spending in the United States and the rest of the industrialized world. Health Affairs 2005; 24: 903–91
[3] MacDorman MF and Rosenberg HM. Trends in infant mortality by cause of death and other characteristics, 1960-88 (vital and health statistics), Volume 20. Hyattsville, MD, USA: National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Government Printing, 1993
[4] Malloy MH and MacDorman M. Changes in the classification of sudden unexpected infant deaths: United States, 1992-2001. Pediatrics 2005; 115: 1247–1253
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Measles vaccines kill more than measles CDC data shows no deaths from infection for 12 years
Published: 02/07/2015 at 8:24 PM
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/02/measles.jpg
WASHINGTON – While those opposing mandatory vaccination for measles are widely portrayed as ignorant and even dangerous by some officials, pundits and even news media accounts, Centers for Disease Control records reveal a startling truth – while no one has died of measles in the U.S. in the last 12 years, 108 have died as a result of the adverse effects of the vaccine in that same time period.
The death statistics are recorded by Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which captures only a small percentage of the actual number of deaths and other adverse reactions to the vaccine. In addition, 96 of the 108 deaths in that 12-year time period were a result of the MMR vaccine, now the preferred shot for measles immunization.
In addition, CDC statistic show measles deaths were rare in the U.S. before the vaccine became widely used.
The adverse reactions to the measles vaccines are much more widespread than death, points out Dr. Lee Hieb, an orthopaedic surgeon and past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons who has studied vaccines and written about them in medical journals.
In a recent commentary in WND, the author “Surviving the Medical Meltdown: Your Guide to Living Through the Disaster of Obamacare,” revealed that since 2005 there have been 86 deaths from the MMR vaccine – 68 of them children under the age of 3 years old. In addition, there have been nearly 2,000 disabled, according to the VAERS data.
As a result of her study, Hieb questions the zealous push for mandatory measles vaccination.
“If you believe absolutely in the benefit and protective value of vaccination, why does it matter what others do?” she asks rhetorically. “Or don’t do? If you believe you need vaccination to be healthy and protected, then by all means vaccinate your child and yourself. Why should you even be concerned what your neighbor chooses to do for his child – if vaccination works? The idea of herd immunity is still based on the idea that in individual cases vaccines actually are protective
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/measles-vaccines-kill-more-than-measles/#0QxC2FgtGJ9LbOfw.99
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http://www.borgenmagazine.com/measles-outbreaks-signal-a-need-for-vaccines/
According to the National Institute of Infectious Disease in Japan, the country’s outbreak is the result of weak vaccination programs in need of restructuring. Japan was late to implement a program that required two vaccinations per person when it made this change in 2006, but this outbreak proves that there are still problems in the system. Japan saw 46 measles cases before January 26 of this year, compared to 18 in the same period in 2013. This grew to 171 cases by mid-March, though so far, there have been no deaths in the country.
- , there have been no deaths in the country.
, there have been no deaths in the country.
, there have been no deaths in the country - , there have been no deaths in the country
- , there have been no deaths in the country
- , there have been no deaths in the country.
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The number of ‘zero hour contract’ jobs has soared by 400,000 in just six months – with many people having to take on more than one to make ends meet, new figures have revealed.
There were 1.8million jobs without any guarantee of work in August last year – up from 1.4million in January.
The number of people whose main job was a zero-hours contract has also soared to 697,000 in the quarter to December, up from 586,000 in the same period in 2013, according to the Office for National Statistics.
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post # 1 unrefuted
Homeopathy bogus (BURTON)Homeopathy bogus so ?? (GAAL)----------------------------------------------------------
iStockphoto
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ORGANIZED CRIME ////////////=>>>>>>> BIG PHARMA AMERICA NEW MAFIA
Pharmaceutical companies have more power than ever, and the American people are paying the price—too often with our lives.=By now you have probably seen John Oliver’s comic take on the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on doctors’ prescribing habits. Media outlets from Mother Jones to the Wall Street Journal commented admiringly, and even the American Medical Association felt compelled to declare they were “committed to transparency” around drug company payments to doctors.
But satire will do very little to focus on the real problem if we’re distracted by the humor inherent in self-important doctors being bought off by a steak. What’s not funny is that America is the most medicated nation on earth, with some 70 percent of Americans taking prescription drugs—yet we have worse health outcomes than other industrialized countries. Part of the problem may be the drugs themselves. As Slate’s devastating expose on the fraud in clinical drug trials shows us: We don’t know much about the drugs we prescribe.
But as physicians, we have very little good information to go on. Even our most prestigious journals publish research based on falsified studies, according to Charles Seife, a journalism professor whose class spent a semester trying to figure out why the data don’t get corrected once research fraud comes to light. “As a result,” Seife writes, “nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses.”
If no one knows which data is bogus, we obviously have a big problem in conventional medicine. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so focused on marketing shenanigans, and more concerned about the original study data before something becomes standard of care. Standard of care, of course, is driven by “research” that is incorporated into academic guidelines and is the basis of customer demand.
Understanding consumer demand takes very little study—just turn on the TV. Every year pharmaceutical companies spend over $3 billion on direct-to-consumer ads. These ads work: a patient who requests a specific drug will get it most of the time. (We are, by the way, the only country besides New Zealand that allows this.) But the question of how something becomes part of a recommended guideline is less obvious—and has a lot to do with pharmaceutical money paid to academic physicians in research and consulting fees.
Many of these physicians “leaders” then get to influence prescribing practices—since researchers and consultants are, well, experts. Consider the 2004 Cholesterol guidelines that resulted in an explosion in the use of statin drugs—eight out of nine of the doctors who wrote those guidelines were in receipt of money from statin manufacturers. The Harvard psychiatrist credited with hyping the use of stimulant drugs for ADHD—that has resulted in nearly 15 percent of our youth being medicated—received $1.6 million from producers of stimulant drugs. Prestigious medical journals—the ones that often define medical guidelines—allow physicians consulting for pharmaceutical companies or paid medical writers to extol the virtues of the drugs they are selling.
“They behave in many ways like the mafia does, they corrupt everyone they can corrupt, they have bought every type of person, even including ministers of health in some countries.”I hate to ruin the fun, but practicing physicians are influenced far more by guidelines, esteemed academic physicians, and opinion pieces in prestigious journals than we are by a deli platter and a smiling drug rep. We look to the world of academic medicine because, well, where else can we turn? Pharmaceutical companies know this and have worked hard to sway the leadership. Now the question comes up if we can trust the data that the leadership relies on. One wonders how deep the deception goes. In fact, the heavy influence of pharmaceutical dollars inspired the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell, to conclude, “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.”
That’s why so many practicing physicians and patients alike were relieved that Obamacare would force pharmaceutical companies to come clean about how much money they’re throwing at some doctors. Sure, it’s fun to ridicule a middle-aged doctor ogling the drug rep’s cleavage while stuffing pens in his pocket or wolfing down a falafel sandwich—but this guy isn’t really the problem and everybody knows it. While $90 million went to drug-company sponsored meals in 2013, according to the Open Payments database, at least $1.4 Billion went to research. If we can believe that doctors can be bought with a slice of pizza pie, then we cannot underrate the influence of research monies.
And by the way, that $1.4 billion is probably a fraction of what is spent on researchers. Obamacare allows a four-year delay in the reporting of research grants for reasons that really don’t make any sense. An explanation from Medscape does little to satisfy: “The thinking is that if there were public transparency, it might stifle companies from getting involved in very early research…. And that’s again to specifically protect that research space.”
Whether or not the research space needs protecting is a matter of debate. Certainly we have so much research that it’s impossible for a working physician to get through it—some 800,000 articles are published annually. In response, the Cochrane Collaboration was formed in the 1990s to perform systematic reviews of the literature. Dr. Peter Gotzsche, the Director of the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen, has seen enough over the last two decades to sum up his findings in a book whose title says it all: Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare.
Company emails were released revealing that Merck employees planned to “neutralize” and “discredit” doctors who criticized the drug.“Much of what the drug industry does fulfills the criteria for organized crime in US law,” Dr. Gotzsche said in a recent interview. “And they behave in many ways like the mafia does, they corrupt everyone they can corrupt, they have bought every type of person, even including ministers of health in some countries…The drug industry buys the professors first, then chiefs of departments, then other chief physicians and so on, they don’t buy junior doctors.”
Gotzsche isn’t the only one accusing pharmaceutical companies of wrongdoing beyond the marketing malfeasance they’re famous for. In Australia, during the Vioxx class action suit brought against Merck, company emails were released revealing that Merck employees planned to “neutralize” and “discredit” doctors who criticized the drug. “We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live,” a Merck employee wrote, according to The Australian. Apparently, uncooperative physicians were targeted to lose academic appointments and research funding for telling the truth about the negative side effects they observed.
This is troubling—but even more so in light of the fact that it’s now widely accepted that prescription drugs can be dangerous and over the years dozens have been recalled. “Our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Our drugs kill around 200,000 people in America every year, and half of these people die while they do what their doctors told them—so they die because of the side-effects,” said Dr. Gotzsche in his recent interview. “The other half die because of errors—and it’s often the doctors that make the errors because any drug may come with 20, 30 or 40 warnings, contraindications, precautions…and then the patients die.”
This is a hard pill for any of us to swallow. We should be able to trust our doctors, who should in turn be able to trust “the science.” As amusing as Oliver’s “epic takedown” of doctors was, the trouble isn’t physicians prescribing a new drug because a drug rep brings us a platter of tacos, the problem is whether the drugs we have to choose from are truly safe and effective in the first place.
Of course pharmaceutical companies are here to stay—and on the whole that’s a good thing. But to prevent a power dynamic that may deny us fully accurate drug data, physicians, and patients need more transparency—not just about the money, but about the drugs we are putting in our bodies.
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Revolt In Athens: Syriza Central Committee Member Says "Leadership Strategy Has Failed Miserably" (link)
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....."Let us begin with what should be indisputable: the Eurogroup agreement that the Greek government was dragged into on Friday amounts to a headlong retreat. The memorandum regime is to be extended, the loan agreement and the totality of debt recognized, “supervision,” another word for troika rule, is to be continued under another name, and there is now little chance Syriza’s program can be implemented.... Greece will be receiving the tranche it had initially refused, but on the condition of sticking to the commitments of its predecessors.... How is it possible that, only a few weeks after the historic result of January 25, we have this countermanding of the popular mandate for the overthrow of the memorandum?"
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that's right. Gotta throw Hitler and the Rothchilds in there, too. I almost forgot.
--Tommy
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PS
COLBYGRAVES SEEMS NOT TO BELIEVE THAT THE ROTHSCHILDS CONTROLLED THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF HOUSTONA May, 1976 report of the House Banking and Currency Committee indicated: "The Rothschild banks are affiliated with Manufacturers Hanover of London in which they hold 20 percent ... and Manufacturers Hanover Trust of New York". The Report also revealed that Rothschild Intercontinental Bank, Ltd., which consisted of Rothschild banks in London, France, Belgium, New York, and Amsterdam, had three American subsidiaries: National City Bank of Cleveland, First City National Bank of Houston, and Seattle First National Bank.
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Its thus Congress vs
ColbyGraves ...Here I go with Congress......FYI =in 1971 GHWB became a director of said bank..just saying......=====================
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I think it's fascinating.
Going from memory here, but I think I've read that he and / or Revill and / or Stringfellow might have been instrumental in making sure that the right kind of information was given to Dallas Police Inspector Herbert Sawyer fifteen minutes after the assassination, i.e. that the "suspect" was (a Robert Webster-like) 5' 10", 160 lbs., the same "bios" that were originally fabricated in a report on Oswald by Dallas FBI agent John Fain in 1960, and soon thereafter incorporated into the CIA's computerized Registry by SR/6 officer and future Mexico City CIA operative, Bill Bright.
I realize that I've probably got this all screwed up, but I'm just too darn lazy right now to do any serious "act-checking" on it. Knowing that an expert on the subject will jump in and "set me straight" if I'm wrong, I have great satisfaction in advance that I've succeeded in keeping the topic alive! (Or at least derailing it!)
https://books.google... oswald&f=false
LOL GRAVES //
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Golly the link was information to your question ....guess your real agenda is to throw "Hitler" name around ...see maybe THRUSDAY I will post more on the topic ...oh yes JUST SAYING..
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FROM LINK I PROVIDED IN POST # 14 in honest response to your post
http://whowhatwhy.or...contra-and-911/
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In the case of the JFK assassination, I wish to focus on two men who functioned as part of the communications network of the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP), the agency renamed in 1968 as the Office of Emergency Preparedness (to which McCord was attached), and renamed again in 1982 as the National Program Office (for which Oliver North was the action officer).(11)
These two men (there are others) are Winston Lawson, the Secret Service advance man who from the lead car of the motorcade was in charge of the Secret Service radio channels operating in the motorcade; and Jack Crichton, the army intelligence reserve officer who with Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin selected the Russian interpreter for Marina Oswald’s first (and falsified) FBI interview.(12)
Lawson has drawn the critical attention of JFK researchers, both for dubious actions he took before and during the assassination, and also for false statements he made after it (some of them under oath). For example, Lawson reported after the assassination that motorcycles were deployed on “the right and left flanks of the President’s car” (17 WH 605). On the morning of November 22, however, the orders had been changed (3 WH 244), so that the motorcycles rode instead, as Lawson himself testified to the Warren Commission, “just back of the President’s car” (4 WH 338; cf. 21 WH 768-70). Captain Lawrence of the Dallas Police testified that that the proposed side escorts were redeployed to the rear on Lawson’s own instructions (7 WH 580-81; cf. 18 WH 809, 21 WH 571). This would appear to have left the President more vulnerable to a possible crossfire.
Early on November 22, at Love Field, Lawson installed, in what would become the lead car, the base radio whose frequencies were used by all Secret Service agents on the motorcade. This radio channel, operated by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), was used for some key decisions before and after the assassination, yet its records, unlike those of the Dallas Police Department (DPD) Channels One and Two, were never made available to the Warren Commission, or any subsequent investigation. The tape was not withheld because it was irrelevant; on the contrary, it contained very significant information.
06The WHCA actually reports to this day on its website that the agency was “a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.”(13) However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, or why it was not made available to the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).(14) It should have been.
For one thing, the WHCA tape, as Vincent Palamara has written, contains the “key” to the unresolved mystery of who, after the shooting, redirected the motorcade to Parkland hospital. The significance of this apparently straightforward command, about which there was much conflicting testimony, is heightened when we read repeated orders on the Dallas Police radio transcript to “cut all traffic for the ambulance going to Parkland code 3” (17 WH 395) – the ambulance in question having nothing to do with the president (whose shooting had not yet been announced on the DPD radio). In fact the ambulance had been dispatched about ten minutes before the assassination to pick someone from in front of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), who was wrongly suspected of having suffered an epileptic seizure.(15)
Lawson later reported to the Secret Service that he heard on his radio “that we should proceed to the nearest hospital.” He wrote also that he “requested Chief Curry to have the hospital contacted,” and then that “Our Lead Car assisted the motorcycles in escorting the President’s vehicle to Parkland Hospital” (17 WH 632), cf. 21 WH 580).(16) In other words, after hearing something on the WHCA radio, Lawson helped ensure that the President’s limousine would follow the route already set up by the motorcycles for the epileptic. (In his very detailed Warren Commission testimony, Lawson said nothing about the route having already been cleared. On the contrary he testified that “we had to do some stopping of cars and holding our hands out the windows and blowing the sirens and horns to get through” (4 WH 354).
The WHCA radio channel used by Lawson and others communicated almost directly to the WHCA base at Mount Weather in Virginia, the base facility of the COG network. From there, Secret Service communications were relayed to the White House, via the
batteries of communications equipment connecting Mount Weather with the White House and “Raven Rock” — the underground Pentagon sixty miles north of Washington — as well as with almost every US military unit stationed around the globe.(17)
Jack Crichton, head of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was also part of this Mount Weather COG network. This was in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, “Because it was intended for ‘continuity of government’ operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with communications equipment.”(18) In retrospect the Civil Defense Program is remembered derisively, for having advised schoolchildren, in the event of an atomic attack, to hide their heads under their desks.(19)But in 1963 civil defense was one of the urgent responsibilities assigned to the Office of Emergency Planning, which is why Crichton, as much as Secret Service agent Lawson, could be in direct touch with the OEP’s emergency communications network at Mount Weather.
07Jack Crichton is of interest because he, along with DPD Deputy Chief George Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit, was responsible for choosing a Russian interpreter for Marina Oswald from the right-wing Russian community. This man was Ilya Mamantov, who translated for Marina Oswald at her first DPD interview on November 22. What she allegedly said in Russian at this interview was later used to bolster what I have called the “phase one” story, still promoted from some CIA sources, that Russia and/or Cuba were behind the assassination.
As summarized by the FBI, Mamantov’s account of Marina’s Russian testimony was as follows:
MARINA OSWALD advised that LEE HARVEY OSWALD owned a rifle which he used in Russia about two years ago. She observed what she presumed to be the same rifle in a blanket in the garage at [Ruth Paine’s residence]…. MARINA OSWALD stated that on November 22, she had been shown a rifle in the Dallas Police Department…. She stated that it was a dark color like the one that she had seen, but she did not recall the sight.(20)
These specific details – that Marina said she had seen a rifle that was dark and scopeless – were confirmed in an affidavit (signed by Marina and Mamantov, 24 WH 219) that was taken by DPD officer B.L. Senkel (24 WH 249). They were confirmed again by Ruth Paine, who witnessed the Mamantov interview, (3 WH 82). They were confirmed again the next night in an interview of Marina by the Secret Service, translated by Mamantov’s close friend Peter Gregory. But a Secret Service transcript of the interview reveals that the source of these details was Gregory, not Marina:
(Q) This gun, was it a rifle or a pistol or just what kind of a gun? Can she answer that?
(A) It was a gun
Mr. Gregory asked: Can you describe it?
NOTE: Subject said: I cannot describe it because a rifle to me like all rifles.
Gregory translation: She said she cannot describe it. It was sort of a dark rifle just like any other common rifle…
Subject in Russian: It was a hump (or elevation) but I never saw through the scope….
Gregory translation: She says there was an elevation on the rifle but there was no scope – no telescope.(21)
We have to conclude not just that Gregory had falsified Marina’s testimony (“a rifle to me like all rifles”); but so probably had his friend Mamantov, who later testified no less than seven times to the Warren Commission that Marina had used the word “dark” to describe the gun. There were others in Dallas who claimed that Oswald’s gun indeed had been scopeless, until Oswald had a scope installed on it by Dallas gunsmith Dial Ryder. The Warren Report elaborately refuted this corroborated claim, and concluded that “the authenticity of the repair tag” used to support it was “subject to grave doubts.” (WR 317).
We can see here, what the Warren Commission did not wish to see, signs of a conspiracy to misrepresent Marina’s testimony, and possibly to link Oswald’s gun to a dark and scopeless rifle he had in the Soviet Union. Our concerns that Mamantov misrepresented her lead us to concerns about why two Army Intelligence Reserve officers from the 488th unit (Jack Crichton and Deputy DPD Chief George Lumpkin) selected Mamantov as her interpreter. Our concerns are increased when we see that B.L. Senkel, the DPD officer who took Marina’s suspect affidavit, was the partner of F.P. Turner, who collected the dubious rifle repair tag (24 WH 328), and that both men spent most of November 22 with DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin. For example, they were with Lumpkin in the pilot car of the motorcade when Lumpkin was communicating with Winston Lawson in the lead car behind them.
I conclude that when we look at the conduct of the two men we know to have been parts of the COG emergency communications network in Dallas, we see patterns of sinister behavior that also involved others, or what we may call conspiratorial behavior. These concatenated efforts to implicate Oswald in a phase-one conspiracy narrative lead me to propose a hypothesis for which I have neither evidence nor an alternative explanation: namely, that someone on the WHCA network may have been the source for the important unexplained description on the Dallas Police tapes of a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight (5 feet 10 inches, 165 pounds) recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.
08Note that there are no other known sources ascribing this specific height and weight to Oswald. For example, when he was arrested and charged in Dallas that same day, Oswald was recorded as having a height of 5’9 ½ inches, and a weight of 131 pounds. (22)The first reference to Oswald as 5’10”, 165 pounds, was that offered by Oswald’s mother Marguerite to FBI Agent Fain in May 1960, when Oswald himself was absent in Russia.(23)
The DPD officer contributing the description on the Police Channel was Inspector Herbert Sawyer, who allegedly had heard it from someone outside the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) whom he could not identify or describe. (24)The Warren Report said categorically that his source was Howard Brennan (WR 5), and that on the evening of November 22, Brennan “identified Oswald as the person in the lineup who bore the closest resemblance to the man in the window but he said that he was unable to make a positive identification” (WR 145). But there are many reasons to doubt this, starting with conflicts in Brennan’s own testimony (as Anthony Summers reported in Conspiracy, pp. 109-10) . And Ian Griggs has made a strong case that Brennan never saw Oswald in a line-up that evening. (There are police records placing Oswald in three line-ups that day, and corroborating witness reports of them; but there is no evidence whatever that Brennan attended any of the three.)(25)
There is another strong reason to doubt that the source was Brennan. Brennan testified later to the Warren Commission that he saw his suspect in a window of the Texas School Book Depository, “standing up and leaning against the left window sill.” Pressed to describe how much of the suspect he saw, Brennan answered, “I could see probably his whole body, from his hips up. But at the time that he was firing the gun, a possibility from his belt up” (3 WH 144).
The awkwardness of Brennan’s language draws attention to the fundamental problem about the description. It is hard to imagine anyone giving a full height and weight estimate from seeing someone who was only partially visible in a window. So there are intrinsic grounds for believing the description must have come from another source. And when we see that the same description is found in Oswald’s FBI and CIA files — and nowhere else – there are reasons to suspect the source was from government secret files.
We have seen that there was interaction in Dallas between the WHCA and DPD radio channels, thanks to the WHCA portable radio that Lawson had installed in the lead car of the presidential motorcade.(26) This radio in turn was in contact by police radio with the pilot car ahead of it, carrying Dallas Police Department (DPD) Deputy Chief Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit. (27)At the same time, as noted above, it was in contact with the COG nerve center at Mount Weather, Virginia. And Mount Weather had the requisite secret communications to receive information from classified intelligence files, without other parts of the government being alerted.
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Posted Today, 02:50 AM
Paul Brancato, on 23 Feb 2015 - 2:59 PM, said:
I guess no one is interested in the Crichton connection?
Paul,
I think it's fascinating.
Going from memory here, but I think I've read that he and / or Revill and / or Stringfellow might have been instrumental in making sure that the right kind of information was given to Dallas Police Inspector Herbert Sawyer fifteen minutes after the assassination, i.e. that the "suspect" was (a Robert Webster-like) 5' 10", 160 lbs., the same "bios" that were originally fabricated in a report on Oswald by Dallas FBI agent John Fain in 1960, and soon thereafter incorporated into the CIA's computerized Registry by SR/6 officer and future Mexico City CIA operative, Bill Bright.
I realize that I've probably got this all screwed up, but I'm just too darn lazy right now to do any serious "act-checking" on it. Knowing that an expert on the subject will jump in and "set me straight" if I'm wrong, I have great satisfaction in advance that I've succeeded in keeping the topic alive! (Or at least derailing it!)
https://books.google... oswald&f=false
LOL
--Tommy
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the speech that isn't free ,but you are lied to and said its free .....call it
paid for speech .....
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OLIGARCHY: Top British Politicians Offer Influence For Cash (LINK)
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The very fabric of British political society is being torn into pieces with an apparently never-ending stream of scandals.
Top British Labour Party figure Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, overseer of British intelligence agencies, have been caught on camera offering political influence for cash.
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1. post # 1 unrefuted
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BTW >LEN COLBY NOT PRO FLOURIDE
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THIS POST UNREFUTED
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=21448&p=291560
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2. Freaking Flouride
UGH. These people and their fluoride. They love to make up crap about how the government puts fluoride in the water to keep us dumb and rebellion-resistant, like no one has ever seen “Dr. Strangelove” before or something. This is usually what they start with, probably because it sounds slightly more realistic than like, Lizard People.
It is not, however, true. At all. And yes, I’ve “done my research.” But don’t tell that to these people, especially if they are drunk at a bar, because they will, in fact, start screaming at you about it. Fluoride and the “vaccinations cause autism” thing are like the gateway drugs into tin-foil hat land. // Burton
3. post of Monday, February 16, 2015 unrefuted
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5. They use the term term Big Pharma (or Big Anything) in all seriousness
There are about a 1000 problems with the pharmaceutical industry, for sure. However, when your friend is talking about “Big Pharma” they are not usually talking so much about overpriced cancer medication as they are like, vaccines causing autism and things like that. Also, sane people, when discussing the problems with the pharmaceutical industry just do not say things like “Big Pharma” because they like being taken seriously. // BURTON
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Golly
FROM ANTI-CONSPIRATORIAL SLATE
Monday, February 16, 2015
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Are Your Medications Safe? -- The FDA buries evidence of fraud in medical trials.\Agents of the Food and Drug Administration know better than anyone else just how bad scientific misbehavior can get. Reading the FDA’s inspection files feels almost like watching a highlights reel from a Scientists Gone Wildvideo. It’s a seemingly endless stream of lurid vignettes—each of which catches a medical researcher in an unguarded moment, succumbing to the temptation to do things he knows he really shouldn’t be doing. Faked X-ray reports. Forged retinal scans. Phony lab tests. Secretly amputated limbs. All done in the name of science when researchers thought that nobody was watching.That misconduct happens isn’t shocking. What is: When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn’t notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted. On the contrary. For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details of misconduct. As a result, nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses. The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn't get forthright answers. For an agency devoted to protecting the public from bogus medical science, the FDA seems to be spending an awful lot of effort protecting the perpetrators of bogus science from the public.Much of my research has to do with follies, foibles, and fraud in science, and I knew that the FDA wasn’t exactly bending over backward to correct the scientific record when its inspectors found problems during clinical trials. So as part of my investigative reporting class at New York University, my students and I set out to find out just how bad the problem was—and how much important information the FDA was keeping under wraps.We didn’t have to search very hard to find FDA burying evidence of research misconduct. Just look at any documentrelated to an FDA inspection. As part of the new drug application process, or, more rarely, when the agency gets a tipoff of wrongdoing, the FDA sends a bunch of inspectors out to clinical sites to make sure that everything is done by the book. When there are problems, the FDA generates a lot of paperwork—what are called form 483s, Establishment Inspection Reports, and in the worst cases, what are known as Warning Letters. If you manage to get your hands on these documents, you’ll see that, most of the time, key portions are redacted: information that describes what drug the researcher was studying, the name of the study, and precisely how the misconduct affected the quality of the data are all blacked out. These redactions make it all but impossible to figure out which study is tainted. My students and I looked at FDA documents relating to roughly 600 clinical trials in which one of the researchers running the trial failed an FDA inspection. In only roughly 100 cases were we able to figure out which study, which drug, and which pharmaceutical company were involved. (We cracked a bunch of the redactions by cross-referencing the documents with clinical trials data, checking various other databases, and using carefully crafted Google searches.) For the other 500, the FDA was successfully able to shield the drugmaker (and the study sponsor) from public exposure.It’s not just the public that’s in the dark. It’s researchers, too. And your doctor. As I describe in the current issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, my students and I were able to track down some 78 scientific publications resulting from a tainted study—a clinical trial in which FDA inspectors found significant problems with the conduct of the trial, up to and including fraud. In only three cases did we find any hint in the peer-reviewed literature of problems found by the FDA inspection. The other publications were not retracted, corrected, or highlighted in any way. In other words, the FDA knows about dozens of scientific papers floating about whose data are questionable—and has said nothing, leaving physicians and medical researchers completely unaware. The silence is unbroken even when the FDA itself seems shocked at the degree of fraud and misconduct in a clinical trial. -
Jack Allston Crichton - Steven - please repost just the link to the Spartacus page on Crichton. This guy has flown under the radar for so long. His name pops up once in a while of course, but Simkin puts it all in one place, and I think it is must reading, since he ties in so many things in Dallas. // Paul Brancato
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FTR #779 OUN/B Redux: The Underground Reich and the Ukrainian Crisis
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Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ March 9, 2014
AUDIO (section 10 USAID)
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Pierre Omidyar Co-funded Ukraine Revolution Groups with US government, Documents Show" by Mark Ames; Pando Daily; 2/28/2014.
On February 28, 2014 Just hours after last weekend’s ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, one of Pierre Omidyar’s newest hires at national security blog "The Intercept," was already digging for the truth. Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s "senior policy analyst," speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a "coup" engineered by "deep forces" on behalf of "Pax Americana":
"There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is."
These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking. Wheeler is partly correct. Pando has confirmed that the American government – in the form of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – played a major role in funding opposition groups prior to the revolution. Moreover, a large percentage of the rest of the funding to those same groups came from a US billionaire who has previously worked closely with US government agencies to further his own business interests. This was by no means a US-backed "coup," but clear evidence shows that US investment was a force multiplier for many of the groups involved in overthrowing Yanukovych. But that’s not the shocking part. What’s shocking is the name of the billionaire who co-invested with the US government (or as Wheeler put it: the "dark force" acting on behalf of "Pax Americana"). Step out of the shadows…. Wheeler’s boss, Pierre Omidyar. Yes, in the annals of independent media, this might be the strangest twist ever: According to financial disclosures and reports seen by Pando, the founder and publisher of Glenn Greenwald’s government-bashing blog,"The Intercept," co-invested with the US government to help fund regime change in Ukraine. * * * * When the revolution came to Ukraine, neo-fascists played a front-center role in overthrowing the country’s president. But the real political power rests with Ukraine’s pro-western neoliberals. Political figures like Oleh Rybachuk, long a favorite of the State Department, DC neocons, EU, and NATO—and the right-hand man to Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko. Last December, the Financial Times wrote that Rybachuk’s "New Citizen" NGO campaign "played a big role in getting the protest up and running." New Citizen, along with the rest of Rybachuk’s interlocking network of western-backed NGOs and campaigns— "Center UA" (also spelled "Centre UA"), "Chesno," and "Stop Censorship" to name a few — grew their power by targeting pro-Yanukovych politicians with a well-coordinated anti-corruption campaign that built its strength in Ukraine’s regions, before massing in Kiev last autumn. The efforts of the NGOs were so successful that the Ukraine government was accused of employing dirty tricks to shut them down. In early February, the groups were the subject of a massive money laundering investigation by the economics division of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry in what many denounced as a politically motivated move. Fortunately the groups had the strength – which is to say, money – to survive those attacks and continue pushing for regime change in Ukraine. The source of that money? According to the Kyiv Post, Pierrie Omidyar’s Omidyar Network (part of the Omidyar Group which owns First Look Media and the Intercept) provided 36% of "Center UA"’s $500,000 budget in 2012— nearly $200,000. USAID provided 54% of "Center UA"’s budget for 2012. Other funders included the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy. In 2011, Omidyar Network gave $335,000 to "New Citizen," one of the anti-Yanukovych "projects" managed through the Rybachuk-chaired NGO "Center UA." At the time, Omidyar Network boasted that its investment in "New Citizen" would help "shape public policy" in Ukraine:
"Using technology and media, New Citizen coordinates the efforts of concerned members of society, reinforcing their ability to shape public policy. "… With support from Omidyar Network, New Citizen will strengthen its advocacy efforts in order to drive greater transparency and engage citizens on issues of importance to them."
In March 2012, Rybachuk — the operator behind the 2004 Orange Revolution scenes, the Anatoly Chubais of Ukraine — boasted that he was preparing a new Orange Revolution:
"People are not afraid. We now have 150 NGOs in all the major cities in our ‘clean up Parliament campaign’ to elect and find better parliamentarians….The Orange Revolution was a miracle, a massive peaceful protest that worked. We want to do that again and we think we will."
Detailed financial records reviewed by Pando (and embedded below) also show Omidyar Network covered costs for the expansion of Rybachuk’s anti-Yanukovych campaign, "Chesno" ("Honestly"), into regional cities including Poltava, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Ternopil, Sumy, and elsewhere, mostly in the Ukrainian-speaking west and center. * * * * To understand what it means for Omidyar to fund Oleh Rybachuk, some brief history is necessary. Rybachuk’s background follows a familiar pattern in post-Soviet opportunism: From well-connected KGB intelligence ties, to post-Soviet neoliberal networker. In the Soviet era, Rybachuk studied in a military languages program half of whose graduates went on to work for the KGB. Rybachuk’s murky overseas posting in India in the late Soviet era further strengthens many suspicions about his Soviet intelligence ties; whatever the case, by Rybachuk’s own account, his close ties to top intelligence figures in the Ukrainian SBU served him well during the Orange Revolution of 2004, when the SBU passed along secret information about vote fraud and assassination plots.
In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rybachuk moved to the newly-formed Ukraine Central Bank, heading the foreign relations department under Central Bank chief and future Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko. In his central bank post, Rybachuk established close friendly ties with western government and financial aid institutions, as well as proto-Omidyar figures like George Soros, who funded many of the NGOs involved in "color revolutions" including small donations to the same Ukraine NGOs that Omidyar backed. (Like Omidyar Network does today, Soros’ charity arms—Open Society and Renaissance Foundation—publicly preached transparency and good government in places like Russia during the Yeltsin years, while Soros’ financial arm speculated on Russian debt and participated in scandal-plagued auctions of state assets.) In early 2005, Orange Revolution leader Yushchenko became Ukraine’s president, and he appointed Rybachuk deputy prime minister in charge of integrating Ukraine into the EU, NATO, and other western institutions. Rybachuk also pushed for the mass-privatization of Ukraine’s remaining state holdings. Over the next several years, Rybachuk was shifted around President Yushchenko’s embattled administration, torn by internal divisions. In 2010, Yushchenko lost the presidency to recently-overthrown Viktor Yanukovych, and a year later, Rybachuk was on Omidyar’s and USAID’s payroll, preparing for the next Orange Revolution. As Rybachuk told the Financial Times two years ago:
"We want to do [the Orange Revolution] again and we think we will."
Some of Omidyar’s funds were specifically earmarked for covering the costs of setting up Rybachuk’s "clean up parliament" NGOs in Ukraine’s regional centers. Shortly after the Euromaidan demonstrations erupted last November, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry opened up a money laundering investigation into Rybachuk’s NGOs, dragging Omidyar’s name into the high-stakes political struggle. According to a Kyiv Post article on February 10 titled, "Rybachuk: Democracy-promoting nongovernmental organization faces ‘ridiculous’ investigation":
"Police are investigating Center UA, a public-sector watchdog funded by Western donors, on suspicion of money laundering, the group said. The group’s leader, Oleh Rybachuk, said it appears that authorities, with the probe, are trying to warn other nongovernmental organizations that seek to promote democracy, transparency, free speech and human rights in Ukraine. "According to Center UA, the Kyiv economic crimes unit of the Interior Ministry started the investigation on Dec. 11. Recently, however, investigators stepped up their efforts, questioning some 200 witnesses. "… Center UA received more than $500,000 in 2012, according to its annual report for that year, 54 percent of which came from Pact Inc., a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Nearly 36 percent came from Omidyar Network, a foundation established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife. Other donors include the International Renaissance Foundation, whose key funder is billionaire George Soros, and National Endowment for Democracy, funded largely by the U.S. Congress."
* * * * What all this adds up to is a journalistic conflict-of-interest of the worst kind: Omidyar working hand-in-glove with US foreign policy agencies to interfere in foreign governments, co-financing regime change with well-known arms of the American empire — while at the same time hiring a growing team of soi-disant "independent journalists" which vows to investigate the behavior of the US government at home and overseas, and boasts of its uniquely "adversarial" relationship towards these government institutions. As First Look staffer Jeremy Scahill told the Daily Beast…
We had a long discussion about this internally; about what our position would be if the White House asked us to not publish something…. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won’t know what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? Glenn?
Of the many problems that poses, none is more serious than the fact that Omidyar now has the only two people with exclusive access to the complete Snowden NSA cache, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Somehow, the same billionaire who co-financed the "coup" in Ukraine with USAID, also has exclusive access to the NSA secrets—and very few in the independent media dare voice a skeptical word about it. In the larger sense, this is a problem of 21st century American inequality, of life in a billionaire-dominated era. It is a problem we all have to contend with—PandoDaily’s 18-plus investors include a gaggle of Silicon Valley billionaires like Marc Andreessen (who serves on the board of eBay, chaired by Pierre Omidyar) and Peter Thiel (whose politics I’ve investigated, and described as repugnant.) But what is more immediately alarming is what makes Omidyar different. Unlike other billionaires, Omidyar has garnered nothing but uncritical, fawning press coverage, particularly from those he has hired. By acquiring a "dream team" of what remains of independent media — Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Wheeler, my former partner Matt Taibbi — not to mention press "critics" like Jay Rosen — he buys both silence and fawning press. Both are incredibly useful: Silence, an absence of journalistic curiosity about Omidyar’s activities overseas and at home, has been purchased for the price of whatever his current all-star indie cast currently costs him. As an added bonus, that same investment buys silence from exponentially larger numbers of desperately underpaid independent journalists hoping to someday be on his payroll, and the underfunded media watchdogs that survive on Omidyar Network grants. And it also buys laughable fluff from the likes of Scahill who also boasted to the Daily Beast of his boss’ close involvement in the day to day running of First Look.
"[Omidyar] strikes me as always sort of political, but I think that the NSA story and the expanding wars put politics for him into a much more prominent place in his existence. This is not a side project that he is doing. Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else. And he is not micromanaging. This guy has a vision. And his vision is to confront what he sees as an assault on the privacy of Americans."
Now Wheeler has her answer — that, yes, the revolutionary groups were part-funded by Uncle Sam, but also by her boss — one assumes awkward follow up questions will be asked on that First Look internal messaging system. Whether Wheeler, Scahill and their colleagues go on to share their concerns publicly will speak volumes about First Look’s much-trumpeted independence, both from Omidyar’s other business interests and from Omidyar’s co-investors in Ukraine: the US government.
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Colby vs Minor,Simkin and Gaal
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Posted 04 May 2013 - 01:41 PM
Len Colby, on 21 Apr 2013 - 06:04 AM, said:
Gall: [...]
2. Did you actually read Our Crowd or at least the appropriate passage or did you get your info from Scott?
I asked because Scott misquoted and distorted Birmingham. Here is the relevant passage [1, 2]:
John Loeb's new firm opened its doors in January, 1931. Six years later, through a merger with Rhoades & Company, an old gentile firm that needed money, the Loebs' firm, which needed a prestige name, became Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Company. Like his banking predecessors, John Loeb has kept his house tightly "in the family," employing among others, his son, John Loeb, Jr., a nephew, Thomas Kempner, and until his recent death, a son-in-law, Richard Beaty, as Loeb, Rhoades partners. . . .
Thanks to antennae around the world that amount to something very like a private CIA, he completed the sale of the firm's major Cuban sugar holdings the day before Fidel Castro took over...
So the author of Our Crowd was referring to Loeb, Rhoades & Co not Empire Trust Co. a totally separate company the only connection again citing Our Crowd [1,2] was that “the Bronfman millions, however, have joined Loeb-Lehman and Bache holdings to make up the largest single holding of stock in New York's Empire Trust Company” [one Loeb had married Bache another a Bronfman]. But worse is that Birmingham meant intelligence gathering not covert ops, Scott however omitted reference to the former to imply the latter.
As for Carrere he served in Naval Intelligence during WWII [3], Julia Child served in the OSS during the same period so by your “logic” one might suspect that any organization she worked for had "something like a private CIA around the world.”
As for Crichton get back to us with evidence he was intel and worked for Empire Trust.
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http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=13934
LINDA MINOR
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Years ago I wrote about the Empire Trust, as follows:
Quote
My familiarity with the Empire Trust first arose while studying the JFK assassination. In Dick Russell's book, The Man Who Knew Too Much , at pp. 614-615, under a section called "Origins of the Cover-up" there is a description of a group of Dallas men who surrounded Marina Oswald as soon as her husband had been arrested, but before he was killed by Jack Ruby. These were intelligence operatives seeking out Russian speakers. Ilya Mamantov spoke Russian. A geologist with Sun Oil, he received a call five hours after the assassination from Jack Crichton, who was at that time the president of Nafco Oil and Gas, Inc. and a former Military Intelligence officer then attached to Army Reserve Intelligence. In the footnote following this information (found at pp. 792-93 fn. 14), Russell states:
Crichton background: The 1963 Dallas City telephone directory lists Crichton as president of Nafco Oil and Gas, Inc. A short article on Page 26A of the Dallas Morning News (February 16, 1975) identified him as a "millionaire oilman." Researcher Peter Dale Scott's unpublished 1971 "The Dallas Conspiracy," pp. III-16-17 notes that Crichton until 1962 "was also a Vice-President of the Empire Trust Company, a firm whose leading shareholders, the inter-related families of Loeb, Lehman and Bronfman are said by Stephen Birmingham to have maintained 'something very like a private CIA ... around the world' to protect other investments such as in Cuba, in Guatemala, and in General Dynamics." One of Empire Trust's directors was, Scott notes, Lewis W. MacNaughton--the employer of George Bouhe, one of the first members of Dallas's Russian community to meet Oswald.
I had followed Russell's lead and learned more about Lewis MacNaughton, whose partner in Dallas had been Everette DeGolyer, a director of Dresser Industries in Dallas from 1954 until his death in 1956, when he was replaced on the Dresser board by MacNaughton until 1969. Prior to moving to Dallas, DeGolyer, an Oklahoma native, had worked for Amerada Petroleum in New York (where the Empire Trust was located), leaving there to start a geological consulting firm called DeGolyer and MacNaughton. [source: Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc. 1880-1978 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 232 and 388.] DeGolyer’s death was reported in a December 15, 1956 Houston Post article, which stated that he "shot himself to death Friday in his Dallas office.... His death was ruled a suicide…."
I then underwent a long chain of research into the background of Everette DeGolyer and his career. DeGolyer founded Amerada in 1919 for Lord Cowdray, real name Sir Weetman Pearson, who had extensive oil interests in Mexico. In 1969 Amerada (1) would merge with the Hess Oil Co. (founded in 1925 by Leon Hess in New Jersey). Hess' wife, Leota, was the daughter of a long-time Houston banker named Joseph F. Meyer and is mentioned in Pete Brewton's book, The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush in connection to the Meyerland Plaza development which Brewton connected to massive financial fraud of the 1980s--much of which he connected to George Bush's friend in Houston, Walter Mischer. In following those clues, I learned that Mischer had acquired his group of banks in Houston from a supposed "wildcatter" oilman named Michel Halbouty. This led me to another new wheel of intrigue, which I hope will serve to enlighten rather than to add more confusion.
The most illuminating book about Halbouty is by Jack Donahue called Wildcatter: The Story of Michel T. Halbouty and the Search for Oil (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1979). At p. 135 thereof he indicates that Halbouty's funding for his wildcatting exploration came from the Empire Trust in New York. Empire paid 100 percent of the cost of the first well in a new area where Halbouty had explored and acquired leases at his own expense. After discovery, costs of other wells were split evenly; profits were divided fifty-fifty after payout. Both parties, for example, put up about three million dollars for the 1956 exploration program. Empire Trust had the option of non-participation in the drilling of any new area. In another separate venture, Halbouty went to New York to discuss with Empire Trust whether they wanted to participate in that deal on the same terms. They agreed and made a lot of money as a result.
Michel Halbouty was one of the initial investors of Continental Bank, later sold to Mischer. Biographer Donahue at p. 171 described the founding of the bank as follows:Halbouty . . . was walking down Main Street when he bumped into W.P. (Willie) Wells. Wells was a pretty fair country-boy promoter with heavy banking experience. He was trying to put together the Continental Bank. There on the sidewalk he sold Halbouty a sizable interest. Hardin and Noel also got a piece. Halbouty added to his interest as time passed and owned 30 percent, which turned out to be the largest single chunk, and he became chairman of the board.
Halbouty didn’t enjoy his role at Continental Bank. He was in constant disagreement with the other board members who could, by voting together, win all arguments. Halbouty sold his stock to Walter Mischer and Howard Terry, a couple of Houston’s entrepreneurs who would place their marks on a dozen profitable enterprises.Finding this out, I was confused about who controlled the Empire Trust, since the footnote in Russell's book tied control to the Loeb, Lehman and Bronfman family in New York. So I went back to Stephen Birmingham's "Our Crowd": The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Dell 1967), pp. 444-45, and found the following:
Thanks to antennae around the world that amount to something very like a private CIA, he [John L. Loeb--the son of Carl M. Loeb, Jr.] completed the sale of the firm’s major Cuban sugar holdings the day before Fidel Castro took over. In 1945 the Loeb and Lehman millions received a new infusion of wealth when Clifford W. Michel joined Loeb, Rhodes. Michel was married to the former Barbara Richards, one of the granddaughters of Jules Bache, and therefore related to the Cahns and the Sheftels and, by marriage at least, to the Lewisohns (to whom the Lehmans, of course, were already related). Another Bache granddaughter was Mrs. F. Warren Pershing, wife of the son of the World War I general, and head of J. Pershing & Company, a rich brokerage house. Then in 1953 John Loeb’s daughter, Ann, married Edgar Bronfman, elder son of Samuel Bronfman, the founder and chief executive of Distillers Corporation—Seagrams, Ltd., undoubtedly the richest man in Canada and among the wealthiest in the world. Bronfman money is not formally a part of Loeb, Rhoades capital, but one of the firm’s partners has said, "He’s a kind of partner who is awfully important." . . . The Bronfman millions, however, have joined Loeb-Lehman and Bache holdings to make up the largest single holding of stock in New York’s Empire Trust Company, **** which has assets of some $300 million. Edgar Bronfman, now [1967] in his middle thirties, and head of his father’s American subsidiary, Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, joined the board of directors of the Empire Trust Company in 1963. . . .(3)
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Tom Scully, on Jan 13 2009, 10:29 PM, said:http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?app=forums&module=forums§ion=findpost&pid=161327
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?app=forums&module=forums§ion=findpost&pid=161327
Linda, I don't know how you do it....amazing, and before Google book search was available !
Why do you think, it was not necessary for Empire Trust to submit corporate paperwork in Texas,
until 1966? Jack Crichton had been doing business out of Dallas, as an Empire VP, for more than
a dozen years, by then....LINDA MINOR
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My guess is that when the trust company was sold to the Bank of New York, one of the attorneys looking over the paperwork realized that the documents needed to be filed. Previously, such requirements were treated more loosely than they are now.
Thanks for your comments about my research. I can't take full credit for this, however. A friend has kept the research I did back in 2000 on her website for almost nine years now, and Russ Baker happened to see it. Since I'm probably the only person who has ever been literally obsessed with understanding the Empire Trust, Russ emailed me about it for further information. He actually obtained all the documents from the Texas secretary of state's office and forwarded them to me to analyze, since I spent many years as an attorney writing title opinions about real estate matters. Much research went into his book that had to be boiled down and condensed in order to get it out to a wider readership than just researchers; most people's eyes glaze over when they see all these names which mean nothing to them.
In answer to John's question about DeGolyer, I suspect it was through this family, social, and business relationship that existed between Brunie and McCloy and Lewis Douglas that caused them to seek out DeGolyer, who was THE authority on petroleum geology from way back, particularly as a result of his work for Viscount Cowdray, who sold out to Shell in the days when the British Government was heavily invested in private industry. Cowdray aka Sir Weetman Pearson also had bought control of Lazard Freres' English operations and invested heavily in British newspapers. By the time DeGolyer left Pearson's Mexican oil company to start his own consulting firm with Lewis MacNaughton, he was also called in by FDR's administration to help set up the oil consortium in Saudia Arabia.
Involved in the Saudi consortium was a man named Ralph K. Davies, who had been deputy petroleum coordinator and a member of the Mission to London to negotiate the Anglo American oil treaty and a special consultant to Secretary Harold Ickes. As president and director of American Independent Oil Co. (Aminoil) beginning in 1947 (under Truman), and of its Mexican subsidiary in 1949, he joined with Signal Oil and Edwin Pauley in signing the first "service contract" with Pemex, an oil company owned by the government of Mexico on March 5, 1949.
Everette DeGolyer disclosed the terms of the contract with Pemex in a letter he wrote to Ambassador Lewis Douglas (quoted in Lon Tinkle, Mr. De: A Biography of Everette Lee DeGolyer at pages 325-26). During that same time a syndicate called Aminoil--a consortium composed of two individuals, Ralph K. Davies, a California lawyer and former Standard Oil of California (Socal) vice president, and James S. Abercrombie, a Houston oilman, and eight oil corporations was also heavily involved in explorations in the Middle East (according to Leonard Mosley in his book Power Play: Oil in the Middle East) .
Possibly because of the closeness between DeGolyer and Ambassador Douglas, whose wife was the sister of John McCloy's wife, as well as McCloy's close friendship with Brunie, the Empire Trust decided to invest in Texas oil, as evidenced by Michel Halbouty's being financed by Empire Trust.
The question in my mind is how Stephen Birmingham tied all that into the Bronfmans and Seagrams and called it a private CIA.###############################################
John Simkin work shows Jack Crichton is intell officer and part of Empire Trust.
see
http://spartacus-educational.com/MDcrichton.htm
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GAAL
Lewis MacNaughton (head of DeGloyer and MacNaughton largest private oil industry analysts in the World who wanted to recruit my CIA connected Uncle) and Jack Crichton are part of Empire Trust. Ernest Carrere was a director of a Empire Trust owned company. MacNaughton and Crichton were directors of the Dallas conspiratorial GREAT SOUTHWEST CORPORATION. Carrere set up a retired naval officers organization ,similar to the "Retired Intelligence Officers of the CIA" of David Atlee Phillips lore.
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I go with Minor,Simkin and Gaal over Colby.
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PS COLBY SEEMS NOT TO BELIEVE THAT THE ROTHSCHILDS CONTROLLED THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF HOUSTON
A May, 1976 report of the House Banking and Currency Committee indicated: "The Rothschild banks are affiliated with Manufacturers Hanover of London in which they hold 20 percent ... and Manufacturers Hanover Trust of New York". The Report also revealed that Rothschild Intercontinental Bank, Ltd., which consisted of Rothschild banks in London, France, Belgium, New York, and Amsterdam, had three American subsidiaries: National City Bank of Cleveland, First City National Bank of Houston, and Seattle First National Bank.
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Its thus Congress vs Colby ...Here I go with Congress......FYI =in 1971 GHWB became a director of said bank..just saying......
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I am accused of being a tin foil hat person in this section of the ED Forum by a moderator (BURTON) ...my response this post below to show how I think.(GAAL)==============================================
In Search of The Origin – Beyond The Big Bang
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by Moderator · August 22, 2014
The Intelligence – The SourceBelieve nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true. [unknown]
There is little debate left that the Universe erupted out into existence with a Big Bang. Since we have come to terms with the Big Bang, we can say that the Big Bang ‘happened’ at some ‘time-point‘ – skipping the argument about the time-space dimensions coming into existence as a result of the Big Bang itself, we have to further agree that the Universe had a beginning. Then, the obvious question one may ask; what happened before the beginning – what was ‘there‘ (where?)?
One way to answer this question, is to view the situation in terms of the ‘General Relativity Theory‘ – which, incidentally, was proposed a few centuries before the incarnation of Einstein, that speculates that the space and time are not ‘absolute‘, they are not a fixed background to events. In other words, space and tine both are dynamic dimensions that are shaped by Energy Fields in the universe.
Still, whether we take the theory of ‘time-space dimensions wrapping around itself‘ or the ‘space-time continuum‘ theory, we still have to deal with the matter of the existence of the initial energy, that we may call the ‘Virgin Mother Energy‘.
The Issue with The Laws of the Universe: Further, we recognize that the ‘Laws of Universe’ (Laws of Science) came into existence ‘right after‘ the Big Bang. But, then the question one will have to ask is; if it was the emerging Universe that formulated those Laws, or if it were those Laws that regulated the formation of the Universe?
If it were the universe that formulated and gave us the Laws of Science/Universe/Physics, then how the Universe was propagating and structuring itself in the absence of any regulating laws – it must have been a chaotic state in such a case, at least at the very early stage of the formation of the universe? But, we don’t observe any indication of a chaotic state during the period that the ‘time-space’ dimensions and the basic sub-atomic particles were being created. Instead, we observe a very strict ‘order’ – from the energy-field distribution to the orbital and spin of the sub-atomic particles and the galactic bodies. There is absolutely no margin of error any where – Even a slight irregularity; and we would not have been here to recount the state of the utter chaos that would have been all around.
And, if we accept that it were the precise ‘Laws of Science’ that governed the formation of the Universe from the ‘Moment Zero‘, then how those Law came into existence? Who created those laws, and what ‘Authority’ imposed them upon the entire Universe?
Despite many theories that, in essence, dance around the subject, we don’t have a satisfactory answer.
The Time – A Product of Motion: We recognize, purely scientifically speaking, that the entity, ‘time‘, is a product of ‘change‘ – change that we can define as ‘motion‘. Consider the scenario presented below:You are at some place. It is mid-day. Sun is shining right above you. There is absolutely no movement – Sun remains where it is – Earth is not moving – there is absolutely no breeze – no air movement – No flutter of birds or insects – No sounds (air is not moving!) – Your watch/clock, electronics, gadgets, and all the electrical and radio signals are all dead – No change in light either – Every thing is in a state of absolute freeze. Will you notice any change in time . No, you won’t.It will be even a tougher call to visualize a state where even ‘you’ were in a state of ‘absolute freeze’ – No heart-beats – No blood flow – No Brain activities – No cellular or neural activity either – Even the body’s sub-atomic particles were at full-stop. It would certainly be a state of ‘absolute freeze’. As you can see, in such a state, time will be absolutely ‘still’ – Nothing ‘ticks’. It will be a state of ‘No Time’.We can, by thus visualizing, relate the time with the movement. We can relate to the strong theory that the Time came into play with the emergence of the Universe – The unleashing of the Energy that brought every thing into ‘motion’. Through deductive reasoning, we can also accept that the ‘time’, therefore, is not a fixed entity or dimension – since it is a product of ‘movement’, or, rather, speed, time will be expected to fluctuate along with the change in speed – It means that the scale, or the magnitude, of time will not be the same in all reference frames that operate at different relative speeds. The time is, therefore, a dimension whose unit is in reference (relative) to a specific frame.
State of Continuum or Abrupt Emergence: Physicists have many theories, some of them completely contradicting the others, that run form the Universe being in a state of ‘Continuum‘ – without a beginning, and without an end, to the abrupt Emergence of ‘The Energy‘, from a state of ‘Absolute Void‘, with a Big Bang, that brought the Universe into existence.
The ‘Continuum‘ or the ‘Loop‘ theory’s big flaw is that it simply doesn’t fit in a moving, rotating, and dynamic – almost a ‘living’- universe that we are living in – we are in a state of constant ‘change’. It is not a ‘Time-Loop‘, neither it is a state of ‘Continuum‘.
With the ‘Abrupt Emergence‘ theory, we have even bigger problems. Accepting the existence of an immense amount of Energy – far beyond our comprehension, from a state of complete ‘void‘, and, in its act of ‘abruptly leashing‘ out with a Big Bang, is in itself full of more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.
Further, to sell this theory, we will have to concoct more theories to justify the ‘Energy’ being there in a state of ‘nowhere’.
Defining and Understanding The Energy: When it comes to dealing with the energy, the problem is that we cannot even have a grip on this ‘Energy’ thing. What really is the ‘energy’ ?
Even though we freely use the word energy in our every day life, the fact is that we simply cannot describe or define it. We know that from the simplest movement of the tiniest of the particles to the heat exchange, and from decay to transformation of matter – it is all about the energy. Energy is all around us. We – our bodies, are made of energy. In fact, we are, in essence, energy? But, what that really means?
We understand that all matter, including our body, is made of atoms. Atoms themselves are formed by the assembly of the basic sub-atomic particles – which are kept confined and hold together in orbit by force-fields within the atomic structure. These basic particles are formed by the distinct alignments of the unit (quantum) energy packets. In turn, these unit energy packets themselves are composed of the ‘Energy Strings‘ that were propagated by the Supper Strings of The Virgin Mother Energy that were erupted out at the Big Bang – as for as we are able to describe, these strings are the ultimate ‘energy’,
These ‘tiniest‘ of the strings of the energy are the ultimate building blocks of every particle (think of light, heat, and electricity), and of every thing that exists in this Universe. And, these strings of energy are in a state of constant motion and ‘Spin‘.
A point to note is that; it is that ‘spin of the strings of energy‘ that bestows upon matter its ‘structural integrity‘ – Any disruption or irregularity in their spin order, and the things, including the living things, will be in a state of continuous deformation and transformation – No life form can exist in such a state.
But, returning back to the ‘basic quantum particle‘ and ‘energy strings‘, it seems that what we have been describing is either some ‘particles or some ‘strings’, and their respective interactions and motions – The point to focus is; what is causing these particles and strings to move, and what caused them to be formed in the first place?
In essence, what we are observing and describing is the ‘effect’ of the Energy, not the ‘energy’ itself!
A Universe of Order and Precision: We observe a very high degree of precision and order in the ‘movement’ and formation of these strings of ‘energy’ – No perpetual ‘deformities’ are observed. The same precision and orders is also reflected in the entire Universe.
With the observation of such an order and precision in this Universe of unfathomable vastness, along with those very fundamental unanswered questions about the Emergence /Existence of the Universe, we find ourselves stuck with some very pointed questions:
How any thing can exist in, or emerge from an Absolute Void – a state of absolute ‘nothingness‘? How is it possible for an enormous Energy (the Virgin Mother Energy) to exist, in a state of ‘absolute void, and to emerge to provide the ‘energy’ for the Big Bang – and exist where (nowhere?)?
And, to be a bit blunt, how can we define a state of ‘absolute singularity’? Is not it another of our theories of ‘convenience’ – to make believe the unbelievable?
What is the probability of The Energy to self-propagate, and transform itself into this observable Universe, and, also, manage to maintain a strict order?
Further, is it feasible for an uncontrolled energy to erupt out in an uncontrolled (absence of any laws) manner, and be ‘able‘ to produce the ‘Super Strings of Energy‘ that propagated the highly defined time-space-dimensions, and to form the basic energy packets to align and couple with each other with absolute precision to bring into existence this vast Galactic Universe, which has been able to hold its order for billions of years?
And, A Matter of Probability: In our sophisticated design works, form chip design to network processing, and from Nuclear Power Plants to Spaceship design, we rely upon the ‘statistical probability’ – This powerful mathematical tool provides us with the desired margin of reliability that helps us to design and produce sufficiently reliable products.
To ensure the margin of accuracy and reliability, we will further investigate our ‘universal’ affairs with the probabilistic point of view. We have to evaluate if a given theory has an acceptable probability of ‘success’. To proceed with:
What is the probability of the orderly formation of the atomic structure of the matter to appear from an uncontrolled, undefined and unplanned eruption? What is the probability of such an amazingly orderly evolution of life, that we observe on this earth, emerging from a state of chaotic eruption?
What is the probability of discovering a perfect and sequential order in the DNA structure of all the biological and botanical life forms that evolved out of an abrupt explosion of energy?
When we combine together the probabilities of events of various classes and the subclasses, whose lists just keep on going on and on, we recognize that the probability of these events occurring together reaches close to zero pretty fast. Purely mathematically speaking, there is, in practical terms, ‘zero probability‘ of this Universe coming into existence and maintaining its relative integrity from an unplanned, uncontrolled, and unregulated eruption.
Even if we could, somehow, provide for the existence of the Virgin Mother Energy of the Big Bang in a void, the Emerging ‘universe’ from such a chaotic event would be a chaotic “something” that would be in a state of perpetual ‘reformation and deformation’.
The Need for Precision and Accuracy in Systems of Very Large Scale: We know it intuitively that maintaining order at very small scale system is a simple matter. The process of managing the order becomes more complex as the system does scale up – With a very large system, we are looking at a very complex and elaborate operation to maintain the order – the tolerance for errors declines steeply.
When we consider the universe as whole, we are looking at an enormously Large System – A system too large and too complex for our mental comfort. In order to visualize and comprehend the enormity of this universe, we will take an informative tour of our Galactic Universe.
We will use the speed of light as the unit of measurement to simplify the presentation of the distances and the sizes. Light travels 186,000 miles or 300,000 km per second – The median distance from Earth to Sun is 150,000,000 km (93 million miles) – light travels from Sun to Earth in just 8 minutes and 19 seconds.
Our Earth is one of the ten planets of the star Sun. Star Sun is one of approximately 200-billion stars of The Milky Way Galaxy. The average distance between these stars is 31 Trillion kilometer. Which is 206,264 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. All the stars that we see in the sky are in the part of the Milky Way Galactic disk that is close to our star, The Sun.
The nearest known star to the Sun is 4.23 light-years (41 trillion km, or 25.3 trillion mi) away. In terms of interstellar travel, a spacecraft, moving at 171,000,000 kilometer per hour, would achieve the travel in several tens of thousands of years. A journey to the nearest star would take 80,000 years – Provided, of course, we could solves the problem of energy/fuel for the propulsion of the spaceship in the first place.
‘Our‘ Milky Way is just one of the 100-200 billion of Galaxies in the Universe. The nearest spiral galaxy to our Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. It is roughly 2.54 million light-years away from our Milky Way. As of the present date, the most distant observed galaxy is some 13.2 billion light-years away, which is 5000 times more distance than the distance to Andromeda Galaxy.
The vastness, the complexity, and the order of this universe is simply mind-numbing. The Universe is certainly a system of enormously large proportions – It is a system far above and beyond our mental capabilities for visualization.
Further to add to the complexity of the matter, this very vast universe is made of the tiniest of the ‘particles’.
Very strict precision and the abidance to unbreakable and strict rules have to be the absolute prerequisites for the orderly formation and continuation of this very vast Universe.
Deductive Reasoning and Logic: As we reviewed, there are quite a few theories speculating on the subject of the emergence of the Universe; some points to its emergence from a state of Absolute Singularity, while others suggest a state of ‘Continuum’ or ‘Tile-Loop’. On the subject of the Laws of Universe/Science, the two possibilities are considered; 1). the Laws of Science formulated the Universe, or 2). the Laws of Science emerged from the propagation of Universe itself.
Both of these theories have their respective week points. It is difficult to swallow the idea of the emergence of an Energy of enormous magnitude from a state of ‘Absolute Singularity’. And, the state of ‘Continuum’ or Time-Loop’ – No way; nothing is observed to be is such a state in the universe – it is a universe of continuous Change, not continuum.
As for the argument; ‘The Laws forming the Universe’ vs. ‘The universe forming The Laws’ – it is more like the proverbial ‘chicken-and-egg’ debate.
In the absence of any factual evidence or Laws to guide us, a more logical approach may be to apply the tools of ‘logical and deductive reasoning’ to evaluate and analyses the matter.
We can begin with the facts that are scientifically plausible and a common domain to all the prevalent theories:
1- The Big Bang was the ‘beginning point’.
2- The Big Bang was the eruption of The Mother Energy.
3- The Mother Energy provided for the formation of all that exist in the universe, and
4- The Time Dimension itself is a creation of the Energy.
We can further incorporate three more postulates by extrapolation, giving us:
1. The Existence of The Virgin Mother Energy ‘prior’ to the Big Bang event.
2. The Time, as we perceive, coming into play due to the Emergence of the Universe, and
3. The presence of the Laws of Universe – to ensure the precision and order in the Universe.
We can now analyze the various aspect and components of the issue at hand from a logical perspective:
Dealing with the Energy – A Logical Propagation: As we have been deliberating, the energy is something more and beyond what we describe as the quantum strings/packets. It is, rather than a quantitative entity, more like a qualitative ‘ thing’. It is ‘something’ that brings those ‘quantum stings’ into existence and make them ‘move’ and ‘interact’ in a certain way.
It is, therefore, quite probable, and within the realm of reason, that the Energy is a qualitative entity that created the quantum particles of the matter, and propagated the universe. In such a scenario, the Energy must be occupying the entire ‘container’ shell of the Universe, and keeping in motion the entire system – from the tiniest sub-atomic particles to the Galactic clusters of the universe.
Here, we are slightly modifying the ‘matter and energy’ theory, and stating that the matter is surely formed by the energy, but, in itself, it is not the energy. With the perspective of our universe, the Energy of this universe has a ‘qualitative magnitude’ that is in proportion and in tune with the dimensions of the Universe that it created.
In other dimensions – different than those of our own universe, we may be dealing with The Energy that is of a different ‘magnitude’, and has the ‘qualities’ and ‘properties’ that differ from those that are pertinent to the energy of our universe.
By the extrapolation of the logical reasoning process further, it can be deduced that there may exist an Energy of a different ‘qualitative nature’ and of a much higher order of magnitude. The Energy of the higher order may create its own ‘Universe’, and its own ‘container shell’ for that ‘Universe’ – For the convenience sake, we can dub that higher order energy the ‘Superior Energy’. By virtue of its higher order, the Superior Energy will have access and dominance over the domain of the inferior energy – While, The inferior energy cannot have access into the domain of the Superior Energy.
Working with The Time: As for as ‘our’ universe is concerned, the physicists are (almost) in agreement that the Time started with the emergence of the universe – in other words, the Time-dimension, along with the Space-dimension, was the creation of the Energy-Field of the Super Strings of the Mother Energy. Time can also be considered a product of motion or ‘Change’.
In a state of no motion/speed, and no change, there will be NO time dimension – it will be a state of ‘is’. A constant and continuous state – whatever is, ‘is’.
The Laws of the Universe, And The Enforcement: The notion of the universe creating the Laws of the Universe (Laws of Science) as it was self propagating, doesn’t fit with the logic of deductive reasoning – it is simply counter-intuitive. We can accept the logical conclusion that ‘Those Laws‘ didn’t exist in the absence of the universe, as the Laws were associated with the universe itself that was not there before its own ‘emergence’.
But, the logical reasoning process demands that the Laws of the Universe must have to come either prior to the emergence of the universe, or come along with it. It is simply a logical assumption. The precision and the order of the ‘Universal Affairs’ points to the presence of Laws, and a strict code of abidance in place from the moment of the birth of the universe.
Then, with this logical assumption, we will have to face the questions; What or Who devised and formulated those Laws, and how the mechanism of ‘law-abidance’ was imposed upon the entire universe?
Putting Together all the Logical Aspects: The presumption of the Laws of the Universe, either concurrent or prior to The Beginning, leads only to one logical conclusion; The presence of an Authority and Intelligence that must have to be there to establish those Laws of the Universe.
The Emergence of the Mother Energy, the Energy of the Big Bang, has only one logical explanation; The Energy either existed ‘somewhere’, or it was brought into existence for the purpose of bringing in motion the process of propagation of the Universe.
The logical assumption that there may exist a ‘timeless‘ dimension where there is NO Change – a state of being in a state of ‘is‘, along with the presumption that in such a dimension, there must exist a Superior Energy of higher order, points to two more logical deductions;
One, there must exist a ‘Universe’ or ‘World’ in a different dimension of ‘higher order’ in a state of ‘timelessness’ – No Change.
Two, there must exist in that ‘world’ a Superior Energy of a higher ‘magnitude’, and it was that Superior Energy that provided the Mother Energy for the propagation of our Universe.
And, by virtue of association, we can further deduce that ‘The Authority and Intelligence‘ must, as the giver and enforcer of ‘The Laws’, also be the ‘Source‘ and ‘Originator‘ of The Energy at all the levels and dimensions.
We can further deduce that the Laws of the Universe/Science must always be ‘true’ – these are the laws that we work hard to figure out and understand in our pursuit of knowledge. Our advancement in the field of science and technology depends upon our ability to decode and understand these ‘Laws of Universe’.
As for the naming convention, whether we chose to give a name to that ‘Intelligence and Authority’, makes little difference – the fact is that the same Intelligence and Authority also happened to be our ‘Creator’, too.To get a better handle on the subject, it will be a good idea to also review the following articles in this series:
In Search of The Origin – I
In Search of The Origin – II
In Search of The Origin – III
In Search of The Origin – IV -
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America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776 (LINK)
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))If you have not ...please read post # 1 this thread ,thank you Steven Gaal
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the freedom to lie is part of free speech (GAAL, of course all abuse of the truth has consequences)
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There Goes the Guardian, Lying About Ukraine…Again! (LINK)
The western media is busily trying to prop up their failed narrative of “Russian aggression” in Ukraine in a desperate attempt to legitimize their consciously deceitful reporting. To do so, they are now relying not on experts or western intelligence reports, but a discredited blogger and his corporate media chums.
US/NATO/EU and the desperate subversion of Ukraine
in Political Conspiracies
Posted · Edited by Steven Gaal
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> TWO DAYS AGO POLL <<<<<<<<
Vladimir Putin's approval rating Now at a whopping 86 ...))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Nemtsov murder: Putin warned about exactly this type of "false flag" three years ago
Thesaker.is
Sat, 28 Feb 2015 09:13 CET
Nemtsov with Yushchenko
Note: the Russian word "provocatsiia" is often translated as "provocation" which is not incorrect as long as you are aware that in Russian "provocation" can mean "false flag", as it does in this context. Putin is clearly warning about a false flag "sacrifice".
This video was emergency-translated by one of our "brother in arms", Tatzhit, to whom I am most grateful for this ultra-rapid translation.
As for the "liberal" or "democratic" "non-system" opposition it has already announced that it will convert the planned protest into a memorial rally.
Below is the previous post by the Saker on the event in Moscow
Breaking news: FALSE FLAG IN MOSCOW!
Boris Nemtsov has been shot dead in Moscow. He was one of the most charismatic leaders of the "liberal" or "democratic" "non-system" opposition in Russia (please understand that in the Russian context "liberal" and "democratic" means pro-US or even CIA-run, while "non-system" means too small to even get a single deputy in the Duma). He was shot just a few days before the announced demonstration of the very same "liberal" or "democratic" "non-system" opposition scheduled for March 1st.
As I have already explained many times on this blog, the "liberal" or "democratic" "non-system" opposition in Russia has a popular support somewhere in the range of 5% (max). In other words, it is politically *dead* (for a detailed explanation, please read "From Napoleon to Adolf Hitler to Conchita Wurst"). In the hopes of getting a higher number of people to the streets the "liberal" or "democratic" "non-system" opposition allied itself with the ultra-nationalists (usually useful idiots for the CIA) and the homosexual activists (also useful idiots for the CIA). Apparently, this was not enough.
And now, in *perfect* timing, Nemtsov is murdered.
We all know the reaction of the AngloZionists and their propaganda machine. It will be exactly the same as for MH-17: Putin the Murderer!!! Democracy Shot!! Freedom Killed!! etc. etc. etc. etc.
There is no doubt in my mind at all that either this is a fantastically unlikely but always possible case of really bad luck for Putin and Nemtsov was shot by some nutcase or mugged, or this was a absolutely prototypical western false flag: you take a spent politician who has no credibility left with anyone with an IQ over 70, and you turn him into an instant "martyr for freedom, democracy, human right and civilization".
By the way if, as I believe, this is a false flag, I expect it to be a stunning success in the West and a total flop in Russia: by now, Russians already can smell that kind of setup a mile away and after MH-17 everybody was expecting a false flag. So, if anything, it will only increase the hostility of Russians towards the West and rally them around Putin. In the Empire, however, this will be huge, better than Politkovskaya or Litvinenko combined. A "Nemtsov" prize will be created, a Nemtov statue will be place somewhere (in Warsaw?), the US Congress will pass a "Nemtsov law" and the usual combo package of "democratic hagiography" will be whipped-up.
What worries me most is that the Russian security services did not see this one coming and let it happen. This is a major failure for the FSB which will now have a lot at stake to find out who did it. I expect them to find a fall-guy, a patsy, who will have no provable contacts with any western services and who, ideally, might even have some contacts with the Russian services (like Andrei Lugovoi).
As for the "liberal" or "democratic" "non-system" - it will probably re-brand the upcoming protests as a "tribute to Nemtsov" thereby getting more people into the streets.
There are folks in Langley tonight who got a promotion.
The Saker