Health/Environment

Flu vaccine provides “little or no protection”

Flu vaccine only 23% effective in U.S., even less effective in Canada

CBC News: January 15, 2015

The flu vaccine seems effective in reducing the risk of flu by 23 per cent, based on an early estimate from the U.S. among people going to the doctor for respiratory illness.

Canadian and U.S. health officials have said the most common type of flu circulating this season is H3N2, which is not well-matched with the seasonal flu vaccine.

On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an estimate based on 2,321 American children and adults who got the flu vaccine between November and January. The CDC said vaccinated people had a 23 per cent lower chance of winding up at the doctor with the flu.

The poor effectiveness likely reflects the fact that more than two-thirds of circulating flu viruses are genetically different or “drifted” from seasonal flu vaccines, the CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The effectiveness was highest among children aged six months to 17 at 26 per cent. Effectiveness fell to about 12 per cent among people aged 18 to 49 and 14 per cent for those aged 50 and older.

In Canada, the flu vaccine could be working even more poorly, with “little or no protection.”

“About 98 per cent of the viruses are mismatched that have been characterized in Canada, whereas in the U.S. its closer to about 68 per cent, or about two-thirds are mismatched. So it’s not a good omen,” said Dr. Danuta Skowronski of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.

(read the full article at CBC)

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Health/Environment

Flu vaccine paradox adds to public health debate

CBC News : January 16, 2015

People who receive flu vaccines year after year can sometimes show reduced protection, an effect that Canadian infectious disease specialists say muddies public health messages for annual flu vaccine campaigns.

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, researchers at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control originally thought seasonal flu shots from 2008 might offer extra protection against the new pandemic strain. They were puzzled to find instead, seasonal flu vaccination almost doubled the risk of infection with pandemic flu.

Dr. Danuta Skowronski and her colleagues went on to do five more studies during the summer that showed the same effect in people and in ferrets, which are considered the best animal model of flu.

“This was a unique finding in a unique context of dramatically mismatched vaccine to novel pandemic influenza virus,” she said.

She recalled the intense time, struggling to find answers about whether to offer the seasonal as well as pandemic vaccine in the fall. “That was the worst summer I think of my life, work wise.”

What was originally called “the Canadian problem” has since been found in a randomized control trial by researchers in Hong Kong, with more supporting evidence from Japan and the U.S.

The paradoxical finding of increased risk of H1N1 infection only occurred during the pandemic.

Blunted protection to seasonal flu

In the 10 years since the B.C. lab invented more sensitive ways to conduct this type of sophisticated immune research, there’s never been an increase in flu illness among those vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated.

But researchers in several countries have found a blunting or “interference” effect between previous seasonal vaccines and reduced levels of vaccine protection in later years for some strains.

Regardless of previous vaccination history, flu shots did protect against flu infections requiring medical care, Huong McLean of the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation and her colleagues concluded in a September online issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Protection was greatest among those who weren’t vaccinated previously.

“People do not have a good explanation for why,” said Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infection prevention and control at Toronto’s University Health Network.

“The idea basically is that your immune system is occupied elsewhere. It would be like getting the swirling ball of death on your Mac where your operating system is doing something else rather than opening the file.”

The end result of both puzzles is the same: more sickness.

Huong said it all points to the need to think about prior vaccination history when estimating vaccine effectiveness.

“These findings are so new, so emerging that policy-makers have not yet had a chance to fully digest them or understand the implications,” Skowronski said.

Both Gardam and Skowronski believe the emerging findings should spur the search for a better solution.

“We have kind of hyped this vaccine so much for so long we are starting to believe our own hype. Really, what we should be doing is looking for better vaccines,” Gardam said.

(read the full article at CBC)

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Health/Environment

Massive die-off of birds as Fukushima fallout confirmed on West Coast

Unprecedented: ‘Cataclysmic’ die-off of birds on entire West Coast

Statesman Journal, Jan 2, 2015 (emphasis added): Why is the beach covered in dead birds?…  “I’ve never seen that many before”… a mass die-off [is] going on along the entire West Coast… “To be this lengthy and geographically widespread, I think is kind of unprecedented,” [said Phillip Johnson of the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition].

Oregonian, Jan 6, 2015: Dave Nuzum, a wildlife biologist… said his office continues to field calls from concerned beach-goers who come across a grisly scene: Common murres and Cassin’s auklets dead on the beach in great numbers… Oregon is the cataclysm’s epicenter… He doesn’t expect the crush of deaths to let up any time soon… [It’s] up to 100 times greater than normal annual death rates.

Prof. Julia Parrish, Univ. of Washington School of Aquatic & Fishery Science, Jan 6, 2015: This is the worst wreck of cassins auklets that we’ve ever seen on the West Coast… Certainly we are concerned… Is it that there’s less of their food, or perhaps that food has changed its distribution?… How many cassins may actually be suffering in this particular mortality event? We’re working with oceanographers and atmospheric scientists to try and discover whether there’s something in the environment which is signaling a difference, signaling a change. >> Full broadcast

Prof. Parrish #2, Jan 6, 2015: We’re seeing some adults wash up… The bumper crop [born this year] can’t quite explain [this]… We’re easily seeing tens of thousands, if not actually more… Normally [they] can exist out in the N. Pacific [far] from the coastline over the winter. We think that the population for some reason has snugged up to the coast… Unfortunately the cassins are the canary in the coalmine for us, so they’re telling us something is going on. To put it mildly, we’re still scrambling to figure out what’s going on with the ecosystem… Of course, everybody always wants to point the finger at climate change. The thing about climate change is it’s a very slow, steady change. >> Full broadcast

CBC, Jan 7, 2014: More than 100,000 carcasses… have been found… up to 100 times the normal number are washing ashore… “It’s a tragic event… We have never seen a die-off of Cassin’s like this, so that in and of itself says something” [said Parrish].

CBC News excerpts, Jan. 6, 2015:

  • CBC: It is a West Coast mystery — a mass die-off.
  • Prof. Parrish: [It’s] certainly indicating to us that there is something wrong.
  • CBC: Necropsies show no disease, no viruses, no bacteria.
  • Parrish: Tens of thousands of birds dead on the beach is something that we just can’t ignore — we ignore that at our peril.
  • Full broadcast here

    (originally compiled at : ENENEWS)

    The real fallout from Fukushima

    Colby Cosh
    Macleans: January 8, 2015

    On the verge of the new year, scientists from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans issued the first systematic report of measurements on the spread of radioactive seawater from Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor to the coast of British Columbia. The bad news, if you want to call it that, is that Japanese-originated radioactivity has in fact reached detectable levels on Canada’s continental shelf. The menace from the Land of the Rising Sun is officially here—and is, for now, growing.

    The good news is that, as responsible scientists almost universally predicted, the amount of radioactivity involved is infinitesimal and completely harmless. You can go ahead and eat the fish.

    (read the full article here Macleans)

    Unexplained bird die-off almost 4 years into an unprecedented nuclear disaster, but we are expected to believe the radiation is “completely harmless”. A big problem with this suggestion that radiation is harmless, is the fact that the dose will continue to increase significantly because the Fukushima disaster is still ongoing.

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Tyranny

Canada Allowed ESP Experiments To Be Conducted On Residential School Children

Brandon experiments exposed

Alexandra Paul
Winnipeg Free Press : January 12, 2015

Children at the Brandon Indian Residential School were test subjects of extra-sensory-perception experiments during the Second World War, states a science journal recovered from a university archive.

The article, ESP Tests with American Indian Children published in the Journal of Parapsychology, is believed to be the first hard evidence science experiments were conducted on residential school children in Manitoba.

It was published in 1943 by a scientist named A.A. Foster, and its existence adds to a growing body of knowledge to show science experiments were regularly conducted in the 1940s and 1950s on children at residential schools, with the permission of federal officials.

Canada’s expert on such studies, McMaster University post-doctoral research fellow Ian Mosby, said by phone from Hamilton he’s reviewed the article. Maeengan Linklater, the Winnipegger who stumbled across a reference to the study in a footnote and got a copy, forwarded it to him, Mosby said Sunday.

It’s significant because it shows how vulnerable Indian residential school children were to administrators, teachers and scientists, Mosby said.

“When it came to science experiments, these students had no choice whether it involved experiments on ESP or nutrition,” he said. “It makes you ask the question what experiments were done in these schools? What were the conditions that made it possible for scientists to walk in and do these experiments? The children were wards of the state,” Mosby said.

Mosby exposed alarming evidence of experiments in his 2013 research findings. News reports described them as noting children at Indian residential schools were deliberately starved in the 1940s and 1950s in the name of science.

(read the full article at Winnipeg Free Press)

Banksters, Corporate Welfare

Ten Reasons Why There Will Be Another Systemic Financial Crisis

Robert Lenzner
Forbes: December 8, 2014

1. The financial system is a fragile and complex network of financial relationships that has built into it a tendency for periodic disturbances that can produce “huge, unanticipated changes,” which at times spin out of control into a catastrophe as took place in 2008. This is the thesis Harvard professor Niall Ferguson put forth in his 2012 book The Great Degeneration, How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, a must-read for all economists, stock pickers and investment bankers. Fragile, as in “a system prone to crash,” says Andrew Haldane, today the chief economist of the Bank of England. “Lending within the financial system… raises inter-connectivity in the system, thereby amplifying systemic risk.” Ben Bernanke, former Fed chairman, puts the quandry in a pithy manner: “Assets are observable,” he says,” but the whole story is not observable.”

2. Wall Street is a highly concentrated politically powerful industry while the regulators of Wall Street are a highly fragmented group of institutions like the Fed, the SEC, the Treasury and the FDIC unused to working in tandem with each other. The financial system’s complexity of operations and nontransparent web of interconnections means that the worrisome problems of the financial institutions always slip below the regulatory radar.

3. The next crisis is bound to involve the Too Big To Fail Banks that have highly leveraged their hold on 68% of the banking industry’s deposits. As Federal Reserve Board Vice-Chairman Stanley Fischer has put it, “We should never allow ourselves the complacency to believe we have put an end to TBTF.” In short, real lasting financial stability requires reducing the system’s degree of concentrated risk in a mere handful of giant institutions that may be Too Big To Manage and Too Big To Regulate as well as Too Big To Fail. The dangerous bottom line: there is no pragmatic method that readily comes to mind that involves breaking up the TBTF banking system while maintaining a market-based financial system, according to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

4. No one understands the derivative risk positions of the Too Big To Fail Banks, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. There is presently no way to measure the risks involved in the leverage, quantity of collateral, or stability of counter-parties for these major institutions. To me personally they are big black holes capable of potential wrack and ruin. Without access to confidential internal data about these risky derivative positions the regulators cannot react in a timely and measured fashion to block the threat to financial stability, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.

5. The Dodd-Frank legislation does not reform Wall Street. Rather it preserves the system that existed prior to the 2008 crisis, according to Martin Wolf of the Financial Times of London. According to former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, “The goal of financial reform was to make the system safe for failure. It wasn’t to prevent the failure of individual firms that take on too much risk, but to make the aftershocks of failure less threatening to the system as a whole.” Most importantly, Dodd-Frank amended the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to prohibit the central bank from bailing out an insolvent financial institution on the verge of bankruptcy. It can only lend or inject capital if the bank is solvent. According to Harvard economist Larry Summers the Fed is simply not capable of understanding even when a member bank becomes insolvent.

6. The Fed’s monetary policy model at present does not take into consideration any factual or numerical input from events either in domestic financial markets or global markets. This lack of input means the Fed will always have trouble spotting a bubble that is developing out of speculation in the financial or commodity markets.

7. Nor does the Fed have any oversight powers over the Shadow Banking System, which amounts to $75 trillion worldwide of financial activities by non-banks that in 2008 triggered runs on the system that threatened its stability. Shadow banking, which runs the gamut from money market mutual funds to short term repurchase financing agreements, commercial paper and other aspects of investment banking, are activities that can trigger panicky runs on the financial system. Shadow banking is also inherently fragile due to the lack of a central bank safety net or the deposit insurance that supports bank deposits. The whole inter-relationship between shadow banking and traditional banking is not very well understood. In short, shadow banking increases the likelihood that systemic risk will be triggered from the breakdown and gaps that exist between it and traditional banking.

8. Wall Street pressure has awed its government overseers into a deadly form of “regulatory capture” especially as regulators lack the resources, the motivation, and in the last resort, the knowledge, to keep up with the main players in the financial hierarchy, according to Martin Wolf, author of The Shifts and the Shocks, a recent book on the 2008 financial crisis.

9. There has been very little progress on building an international framework to resolve failed financial firms, according to a House of Representatives report prepared by the Republican staff of the Financial Services Committee published in July 2014. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, described this absence of a cross-border regime for resolving large banks as “a gaping hole in the financial architecture” in a May 27, 2014 speech. Or as Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew put it in December 2013, “the failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that the absence of cooperation between domestic and foreign authorities to resolve a financial company can endanger the global financial system.”

10. The United States has experienced periodic financial panics or crises since its founding. From 1792, 1837, 1873, 1893, 1907 to 1929 and more recently 2000-2002 and 2008-2009 there have been bank closings, bankruptcies, massive stock market sell-offs and painful recessions. Many financial problems are hidden in the plumbing of the financial markets, which are not transparent and make the financial system exceptionally vulnerable. To some extent we are always flying blind. That is why we should have a serious fear of the unknown. As former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner puts it, “financial crises cannot reliably be prevented.” Its impossible to predict how and when the next financial crisis will occur. We can’t count on fallible central bankers to stop financial booms before they become dangerous, because by the time the danger is clear, it’s often too late to defuse the problem. There is a Black Swan tail risk in our future some day. We just don’t know when and how it will happen. ” There is no mechanism for determining when there actually is a crisis” says Yale economist Gary Gorton in his 2012 book “ Misunderstanding Financial Crisis Why We Don’t See Them Coming.”

(read the full article at : Forbes

Geopolitics/War

Terrorists Don’t Hate Our Freedom; Attacks Are Response To Western Intervention

‘Leave Muslims alone’: Paris hostage taker’s attempt to justify attacks ‘taped’ by media

RT: January 11, 2015

An argument between the slain gunman Amedy Coulibaly and hostages at the Paris kosher store was unwittingly recorded by French radio station RTL. The media released what it says was Coulibaly speaking on the West’s “attack on Muslims.”

“Leave the Muslims alone, we will leave you alone,” the man believed to be the 32-year-old gunman can be heard as saying in fluent French on an audio clip released by RTL.

The media says it was able to record the conversation after Coulibaly failed to hang up the phone following a brief interview.

Coulibaly called his actions a revenge for the French military presence in Mali, Western intervention in Syria, airstrikes against the Islamic State, and the French law banning women from wearing the hijab in public.

“Each time, they try to make you believe that the Muslims are terrorists. But I was born in France. If they hadn’t attacked elsewhere, I would not be here,” Coulibaly allegedly told the hostages at the kosher market on Friday.

The gunman argued with the hostages and blamed them for implicitly supporting the French government by “paying taxes” and not standing up to French politicians demanding they “leave the Muslims alone.”

One of the hostages replied: “But we have to pay.” That was followed by a surprised response: “What? We don’t have to. I don’t pay my taxes!”

“When I pay my taxes, it’s for the highways, schools,” another voice could be heard saying.

Coulibaly replied: “Everyone could get together. If they could get together for Charlie Hebdo … they could do the same thing for us and get together for us.”

(read the full article at RT)

Drugs

The Superman pill deaths are the result of our illogical drugs policy

David Nutt
The Guardian : January 5, 2015

The past week has seen a number of drug disasters in the UK, one of which is the unexpected deaths of three men, two from Ipswich and one from Telford. They all appear to have taken a drug called PMA (phenoxymethylamphetamine). We presume that they did not know this was what was in the pills bearing the Superman logo that they bought – it seems likely they thought it was ecstasy (MDMA). PMA and its close relative PMMA are not new drugs; they were made in the 1950s and tested for beneficial mood effects then. However, they didn’t provide a clear positive effect so were discarded, though were made illegal under the UN conventions.

They have in the past few years re-emerged as a toxic surrogate for ecstasy. In this period they have been responsible for more than 100 deaths in the UK, and now the majority of deaths that the media report as being due to “ecstasy” are, in fact, caused by PMA and PMMA.

Their re-emergence is directly due to the international community’s attempts, via UN conventions, to stop the use of MDMA by prohibiting its production and sale. As the earlier UN drug control conventions were clearly not working, in 1988 a further attempt to limit drug use by impairing production was made by banning a number of precursor chemicals. One of these is safrole, the precursor of MDMA. In 2010 there was a massive seizure of 50 tonnes of safrole in Thailand. This did significantly dent availability for MDMA production, so chemists looked for an alternative source of a suitable precursor. Aniseed oil seemed the ideal alternative, as it is chemically very similar to safrole, so this was used. Unfortunately the product that results from using the MDMA production process with aniseed oil is PMA or PMMA. Hence these substances only exist because of the blockade of MDMA production. That in itself wouldn’t particularly matter if they were not more toxic than MDMA.

PMA/PMMA are significantly more toxic than MDMA for three reasons. First they are more potent, up to 10 times so. This means that a user who is typically safely using MDMA at a dose of 80mg per session will be taking the equivalent of 800mg of MDMA if they take 80mg of PMA. Secondly, PMA works more slowly than MDMA so when users don’t get the expected effects of MDMA about 30 minutes after taking the drug they think they have been sold a weak lot and may take another dose to make up for this. Then, when the effects of PMA kick in at around two hours, they have taken far too much. Thirdly PMA and PMMA are not pharmacological equivalents of MDMA. They have very different actions, which is why they were discarded after first testing. Their major problem is that they block the actions of the brain enzymes that offset the desired effects of serotonin and dopamine release that PMA/PMMA produce. This then massively accentuates their toxicity as the brain can’t compensate for the increase in serotonin so users can develop serotonin syndrome. This is a toxic reaction that elevates body temperature to a dangerous, and in some cases lethal, level.

The emergence of the more toxic PMA following the so-called “success” in reducing MDMA production is just one of many examples of how prohibition of one drug leads to greater harm from an alternative that is developed to overcome the block. This first became obvious when the US pursued alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and many switched to hootch, which was illicitly distilled ethanol, and some even to methanol, both of which are more poisonous than regulated alcohol. The banning of smoking opium led to the increased production and injecting of a more potent and dangerous opiate, heroin.

There are several proven ways we can we stop this rising tide of PMA/PMMA deaths.

(read the full article at The Guardian)

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Banksters, WTF

Prince Andrew is named in underage sex lawsuit

Abby Ohlheiser
Washington Post: January 2, 2015

Prince Andrew was named this week in an ongoing lawsuit brought by a group of women who claim they were trafficked to the world’s rich and powerful as part of an alleged underage “sex slave” ring run by American investment banker Jeffrey Epstein.

The allegation, found in a court filing this week, prompted Buckingham Palace to issue an unusual statement to the Guardian, noting that the allegation surfaced in “long-running and ongoing civil proceedings in the United States to which the Duke of York is not a party.” The statement continues: “As such we would not comment in detail. However, for the avoidance of doubt, any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”

As part of a 2008 plea deal with prosecutors, Epstein spent 13 months in prison on a state charge of soliciting prostitutes. According to unsealed documents pertaining to that deal, Epstein was the subject of a federal investigation probing allegations that the powerful figure abused dozens of underage girls at his Palm Beach mansion. The deal effectively allowed him to avoid potential federal charges stemming from the investigation.

The lawsuit, filed in 2008 by two anonymous alleged victims, charges federal prosecutors with violating a statute by not consulting with them before finalizing the plea deal. The latest filing is a motion to expand that existing case to include the allegations of two more women.

Those women named Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz and other powerful associates of Epstein as participants in the alleged sexual abuse ring. It’s the first time the Duke of York’s name has appeared in a court document alleging that he sexually abused Epstein’s alleged victims.

But as the Guardian’s reporting makes clear, this isn’t the first time the Duke of York’s name has been linked publicly to the allegations against Epstein: Prince Andrew was friends with Epstein for years — before, during and after the banker served time in prison. In 2011, responding to a statement from one of Epstein’s former employees, Prince Andrew told Vanity Fair that he never attended any of the notorious pool parties at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and denied having contact with the alleged victims. He allegedly ended his friendship with Epstein at some point that year.

In the new motion, “Jane Doe #3″ says she was “forced to have sexual relations with this Prince when she was a minor in three separate geographical locations,” including in British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment in London; during an “orgy” on Epstein’s island in the U.S. Virgin Islands; and in New York.

“Epstein instructed Jane Doe #3 that she was to give the Prince whatever he demanded and required Jane Doe #3 to report back to him on the details of the sexual abuse,” the document says. Maxwell is a friend of Epstein’s who is named as a co-conspirator in the suit.

(read the full article at Washington Post)

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Drugs

What’s In My Baggie? [FULL DOCUMENTARY]

Common drugs from previous generations like LSD, mushrooms, cocaine and opiates are still popular, but they’ve been joined by the likes of MDMA and ecstasy, amphetamines, ketamine, and a massive array of others.

In fact, there are so many different psychoactive substances floating through our country that people don’t even realize how complicated things have gotten.

We quickly discovered that the majority of the time, people were surprised to find that their bag of drugs was not what they paid for.

According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 243 new drugs have been reported since 2009.

For whatever reason, many festival-goers and other young people alike seem to be thoroughly oblivious to the invasion of dangerous new drugs.

Unfortunately, most substance users are unaware of the availability of substance test kits.

source: whatsinmybaggie.com

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