W.J. Astore
“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind,” Jim Morrison said, and this is certainly true in America. Consider the lead stories over the July 4th weekend. The first was the threat of terror attacks against America. We were told that law enforcement officials were “in no mood for a national party” — that the threat of an ISIS-inspired terror attack was real. That no attack occurred is of no consequence. Fear was stoked, and that’s what matters. Prepare for the next terror reminder on the anniversary of 9/11, if not sooner.
The second story was shark attacks off the Carolina coast. Unusual, yes, but hardly a threat to America or to the vast majority of its people, even those who chose to go swimming in the ocean. “Shark surge!” “Fear at the beach!” “High alert!” These were common expressions in the media.
Of course, Americans were much more likely to be hurt in fireworks accidents than by terrorists or sharks, but the sensational always takes precedence over the mundane in our media. Indeed, if the goal was to safeguard ordinary Americans, we should have been told to stay off the roads this past weekend, but of course that would hurt tourism and the economy, so you weren’t about to hear that advice coming from America’s talking heads.
It seems nearly impossible to remember that one of FDR’s Four Freedoms was the freedom from fear. FDR knew the paralyzing and stultifying effects of fear, the way it erodes individual autonomy, the way it can be made to serve the powerful. Frank Herbert in Dune captured a powerful truth when he wrote that “Fear is the mind-killer.” The movie Blade Runner echoes the sentiment, with the Replicant Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) explaining that to live in fear is to be a slave.
A media that spreads fear facilitates a government of wolves. Or, put slightly differently by the great Edward R. Murrow, “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
There’s a definite method to the media madness, America.
Bracing Views 
Totally agree with you here. The press was often called the fifth column and it is designed to serve the ruling elite as its propaganda organ. Americans think propaganda happens elsewhere but here we just have news and fight over which mass media station is more real. However, none of them are. They all lead to the same place—submission to a system that is designed for mass social manipulation and control on one hand, while OTOH, the real power elite are exercising their nefarious and inhumane projects for destroying any meaningful independence of thought or behavior.
A concern of mine is that people don’t address the local forms of manipulation seriously enough–at least I think so. We talk about the Ukraine and Sudan and Syria. We may peak at the Greek situation. But when it comes to the evidence of power control at home we avoid Racism, the core to the economic power that has evolved and the current forms of slavery that still exist. The power relationship has not changed one iota despite some laws that were passed and have been ignored and now trounced. Gerrymandering to win elections has become one of the biggest tactics of the GOP/neo-cons as they have no populace platform. Imprisoning and denying voting rights to millions of people of color even when out of prison is another means to deny a voice to the powerless and enslaved. No other country imprisons for such long and brutal sentences (40 yrs in total isolation!!!!) and no other country denies voting rights once a sentence is served.
The other major institution of destruction is the medical/drug; i.e., health. We have no health care in this country. WE only have a drug industry in partnership with the insurance industry. Drug corporations use the public as their economic frontier pushing dangerous drugs, including vaccines that have never been seriously tested for safety or efficacy. They promote fear mongering for diseases that don’t even exist or minor conditions that are given bogus names. But we are told we have the FDA to oversee these concerns. But the FDA is totality subordinated to the Drug and Ag industries. With people who come from industries like Monsanto sitting in the driver’s seats, whose interests are really being served. GMOs have never been tested: a hand shake and a few winks with Bush I made it all legal. Now 30 yrs later we are fighting like crazy for recognition of independent research, whistle blowing revelations, and clinical evidence of severe health and environmental consequences. The fighter is for labeling instead of banning as in other countries. We are being mandated to take drugs without any understanding of what they do to us. Chemo and Radiation are a rotten bill of goods that kill but fear of cancer is used to force people into submission. Data reveals that chemo is useful on only 5% of cancer cases, for example. Medical people refuse these treatments for themselves due to their dangers and lack of usefulness, but the public is put into a co-dependency mindset in order to manipulate people with fear mongering and condescension and humiliation. Parents are threatened when they refuse vaccines which have never been proven to work–yes never. Never a single double-blind study has been done on any of them. Cooking the books to create unreal data to market them to people. The polio vaccine is one such scientific false marketing program. Much documentation on this but try to get it into the press and you will be mocked, denied and publicly trashed if you get a loud enough voice.
But fear-mongering is just the beginning of social control. If that doesn’t work, much worse is in store for you. And this, too, is underreported. All the lives destroyed because of contradictory information that wants to be publicized. I think there is much more work to do
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Tamarque.. When I was a child in the 1930s polio was a big disease. Vaccines seem to have almost eliminated that. Same with smallpox and measles. Please explain your questioning the effectiveness of vaccines. Did these diseases just disappear on their own?
In California recently measles reappeared and spread rapidly from Disneyland because so many people had not had their children vaccinated. The legislature just passed a bill making it mandatory. Syphilis was a very common disease until state governments mandated pretesting and penicillin was used to treat the infection. It is now extremely rare if it exists here at all.
I support your main thesis that the government bureaucracies tasked with regulating many things have, in recent years, been corrupted by political appointees representing the industries they are supposed to regulate. This practice has been particularly used by Republican administrations to purposely undermine regulation of businesses.
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First, let me thank you for asking your question open-mindedly.
Now, let me try to answer you briefly as this is a big issue for me and I can get a bit long winded on it.
Despite the marketing mantra about vaccines curing diseases, the reality is no different here than in any other industry marketing a product for profit. However, being concerned with what affects our body, fear mongering and blatant lying has worked extremely well.
There are a few conditions that have affected so-called epidemics and some that may actually have occurred.
One of the biggest ones is Public Health. Clean water, better food for more people, safer living conditions have all impacted the prevalence and spread of disease in a community or society. If you study the CDC data itself, and look at their bell curves that plot out the incidence of a given disease you will see that its
presence in all cases virtually disappeared before vaccines were introduced. But the marketing mantra is that vaccines did this. Blatant lie.
Polio–this is the one everyone puts on the table when this issue comes up. Polio is a syndrome of symptoms, not a single disease. It comes into a society and disappears with some regularity throughout history. One factor involved with this syndrome is toxins. I used to have a chart that linked the increase in polio with the increased use of DDT. Remove DDT and polio rates disappear.
Now the nefarious story of polio is too complicated for me to report here but let me offer these:
1. All cases of polio after the vaccine were from the vaccine itself. That is why the vaccine stopped being mandated in this country. In India, for example, where the US pushed polio vaccination, the incidence of polio increased dramatically.
2. The stats on polio have been heavily cooked. One game played is changing the definition of this condition. Paralysis for 1 day or 2 weeks or 3 weeks needed to define the condition. No lab testing, no clinical diagnosis. Another way to cook the books is to give the syndrome another name. Today we have the push for meningitis vaccination of teenagers going to college, another captive audience. This is the new polio. Lots of info on this.
3. Most polio cases were never more than a benign cold like illness lasting a few days. In some there was minor and transient paralysis or a flaccid condition.
4. There has never been a double-blind study of any vaccine, much less vaccines given in batches; i.e., several different ones at a time. Nor has there been any concern about the large and increasing number of toxins pumped into infants and young children and the impact they have.
5. All vaccines contain many toxic ingredients. Formaldehyde is recognized by the FDA as a carcinogen but it is allowed in vaccines. Mercury and Aluminum are known neurotoxins. And yes, mercury is still in some vaccines, particularly the flu and I would venture a guess in others given to adults.
6. The infectious component of the vaccine is not particularly attended to. Human fetal cells are being used to culture some vaccines. Remember Mad Cow disease? Chicken egg cells, peanuts, etc are used and we are seeing increased allergies to these substances.
7. The minute outbreaks of measles or chickpox are blown up in the press as if they are epidemics. More fear mongering to sell more vaccines which did not work. The vast number of children getting these diseases are those fully vaccinated, but the unvaccinated are blamed. Huh? If anything it is the vaccinated children that are the culprit. If the vaccines conferred life time immunity as the real disease does, why are these vaccinated people getting the diseases. So we have fear mongering and lying.
Oh, dear, I can go on with this issue. Let me direct you to some resources:
Here is one article that came in recently that you may find interesting:
http://vactruth.com/2015/07/05/cdc-made-polio-disappear/
Neil Z Mller has been a very avid researcher on the effects of vaccines. He worked with Dr. Mayer Eisenstein who passed this year. One book in my library written for parents is Vaccines: are they really safe and effective. He wrote a book with Dr. Eisenstein on this subject. Eisenstein was proud to say he had over 30,000 children in his practice and no autism!!!!
This website is run by a woman who was a nurse who became a homeopath. Her experience and history is quite extensive. She teaches some online courses on vaccination that you might be interested in. They are simple reading courses filled with studies and articles. She is an ardent advocate for vaccine choice and promotes information on vaccine dangers.
She also lists many resources on various aspects of the vaccine issue that you can access thru her site–free.
http://www.wellwithin1.com/vaccine.htm
NVIC is an educational organization that promotes information for an informed choice. They sponsored an incredible convention about 2 yrs ago on vaccines which I think is still online for listening. Many people of various medical, health and community background to hear speak on the issue.
We have people like Sheri Tenpenny, DO who is a very outspoken opponent of vaccines due to they dangers and lack of effectiveness. Look up her name and you find much.
I know this post includes more than just a focus on whether vaccines actually eradicated diseases but it seems to ask one question, requires also hearing about the rest. It is an industry that is held harmless for dangers and disasters that it causes. It can now fast track their drugs which means the public becomes the guinea pigs without consent for testing while corporation reap billions in profits.
What is important to know is that drug corporations include massive fines in their budgets–just the price of doing sleazy business. Merck last year was fined about $3 billion??? for it lying about its mumps vaccine. It admitted that the vaccine did not confer life time immunity. In fact it didn’t work!!.
Another aspect of vaccines is that they can contain all kinds of impurities. The Salk vaccine that you are familiar with contained cancerous tissue–never tested. When this was discover the reaction was simply “oops!” How many cancer cases are the result of this vaccine alone.
Small pox is another one. It is the first vaccine and its history is just as bogus and nefarious as the polio vaccine or any of the others. In the UK where there promoted smallpox vaccine in various communities, the incidence of smallpox increased. After a few years, the govt withdrew support of the vaccine and the rate of disease dropped. The Flu vaccine is another one of current massive marking and fear mongering. It does not work and does cause damage. Stats have shown that the vaccine at best shortens illness by about 1 day only. But for many people the disease they contract after the vaccine is much worse than anything they ever had before. Mayer Eisensteing’s mantra was Vit D3, Vit C and probiotics to avoid flu and illness. I do concur and have recommended this simple formula as a beginning towards building health.
Btw, on a personal note–I was fully vaccinated as a child with a mother who thought the men in white were gods. In the 3rd grade I got all my childhood diseases in 1 year. One of them was the Whooping cough which I suffered all year in conjunction with bronchitis. No one apparently identified this and I went to school coughing my head off and drinking cherry flavored alcohol when I got home. That was a favorite cough medicine back then. So I was one of the 25% who had a vaccine that had no affect.
I am sure this is way more of an answer than you bargained for but hope you read some of it and some of the resources. Given your understanding of how corporations run this government and avoid responsibility, this information should inform you of how the medical industry works in this regard.
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I wouldn’t say all vaccines are safe. But in the history of medicine, vaccines have saved countless millions of lives. Smallpox and polio are only the most famous.
Just a note: polio came before DDT, not after, and polio rates dropped with the Salk vaccine, even as DDT use was soaring.
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Thank you Tamarque. You have raised some interesting questions for me to cogitate on. I have spent a lifetime getting shots (vaccines) for everything and have never suffered the appearance of the things I was vaccinated for. Thus it is heard for me to wrap my mind around all of your arguments. Nevertheless you have raised the issue of “chance” and that is worth thinking about. . .
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I have also spent my 60 years of life getting vaccines, and received so many of them in the army that I felt like an overused pin-cushion. Not even once did I have any adverse reaction to the shots.
Meanwhile…
BREAKING NEWS (CNN) – Due to the impacts of climate change, industrial pollution, and overfishing, which have dangerously reduced fish species worldwide, Sharks are adapting by evolving their fins into hybrid limbs which apparently allows them to hunt on land for short periods of time.
Police in North Carolina apprehended a 20 ft. long Great White on Sunday who allegedly ate a Wilmington family sleeping it off after an inebriated 4th of July celebration. The shark, identified by authorities only as “Bruce,” was found laying on the family sofa with an American flag and a can of Budweiser stuck in his teeth. When asked by reporters if Bruce had made any comments about the incident, a police spokeswoman said that the suspect mumbled that “it tasted like chicken.”
Public outrage was immediate, which prompted the NC governor to declare a state of emergency. Federal agency officials rushed to the scene in support, and President Obama vowed to deploy underwater drones to hunt down and kill all “terrorist sharks.” Both House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to say whether or not votes would be held to declare a state of war against these malevolent oceanic predators.
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Believe it or not, I thought of combining terrorists with sharks with tornadoes. We already had the “Sharknado” movies. So why not a “Sharkternado” movie? With “land sharks” (as in that old “Saturday Night Live” skit) complete with ISIS flags whirling about in a tornado, chomping in its path all that’s near and dear to America, but sparing Wall Street, K Street, and the Pentagon.
The “Sharkternado” is finally stopped by President Chris Christie, who stalls it on a bridge it’s crossing and who is simply too big and tough for the sharkters to stomach. Victory America.
Copyright 2015 W.J. Astore. All movie rights reserved. 🙂
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Bill, someone may have already “jumped the shark” [groan] on your movie idea! Let’s call upon our reader/occasional commenter in Hollywood for the inside scoop!
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Headline: NEW JERSEY BULLY SAVES AMERICA FROM KILLER SHARKTERNADO!
lol!
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Ha! And he vowed “with every fiber of his being.”
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It is true that every person who is vaccinated doesn’t get autism or die of SIDS within weeks. However, there is also the long term accumulation of toxins that often show up as disease conditions later in life. Our medical industry is not interested in pursuing such investigation. Further, the number of people who are affected is great. Auto immune deficiency diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis is on the rise. And the rate of autism is acknowledged to be at 1:65 now, particularly with boys. Recent research has noted that African American boys are especially susceptible. FYI, in 1990 the rate of autism was about 1:10,000. Given the dramatic range of symptoms the explanation of better diagnosis is not real.
I am not sure Astore is correct about the DDT and polio, but I am sure that the rate of polio was way down on the CDC bell curve when the Salk vaccine was released. And I am sure about the withdrawal of the vaccine when it was all too obvious that polio cases were all being attributed to the vaccine.
Smallpox vaccine was no better in efficiency and the history of it is a mirror of current corporate greed and marketing ploys. It was not accidental that after 911 when the Bush admin wanted to force smallpox vaccines on everyone, lots of profit to be made, it was the medical profession itself that refused to be vaccinated with it due to the high rate of dangerous reactions. It is neither safe, nor effective despite the mythology around it.
I do know that what I write flies in the face of everything people have been taught about the trustworthiness of the medical industry and the FDA and CDC. We have been conditioned to believe in the white coats. Ads on TV have people in white coats selling us drugs. Images of labs all shiny and metal are supposed to convey purity and honesty. My understanding of both these agencies are that they are independent corporations thus pretty free from government oversight and control. And they both get a good percentage of their funding from private corporations they are responsible for overseeing. Once again the fox guarding the hen house. To me this alone is a formula for deceit.
I will also note that I have spent many years reading and studying the politics of health and medicine which is why I write so strongly about it. The history of the AMA, for example, is pretty nefarious. Its statement of purpose has nothing in it regarding health. It was established as a trade organization with Rockefeller money behind it. Rockefeller was a drug corporation. What is interesting about this history is that Rockefeller supported Homeopathy which he used for himself, his family and provided it to his factory workers. He actually expected this fledgling AMA to support it as well. However, he was not actively involved and the people who assumed control were not healers, but entrepreneurs using the latest social science to create a mass marketing program to sell the trade organization to doctors and the public. They ran it with a steel hand going after anyone who used other than a drug regimen and banned any doctor that used other forms of treatment, especially homeopathy. When the board was questioned at a meeting why homeopathy was so hated, the answer was because it worked and was a viable competition to drugs. They created a study to investigate medical colleges but it was designed with a preordained conclusion. It was designed to only support drug based schooling and was very instrumental in destroying all the homeopathic colleges that were quite successful in training medical people in both mechanistic medicine as well as homeopathy. With such history, it is not surprising that we have a corporate structure that controls healing in this country. Drug corporations actually design so-called independent studies in order to insure the ‘proper’ resutls. They write course curriculum in medical schools. They have been exposed in ghost writing articles for medical journals many of which are based on false sets of data, biased interpretations, and sometimes no study being done at all. Given the fact that drug corporation ads are what keeps most medical journals alive, it is not surprising how much control they wield over what gets published. About 3 yrs ago there was a big scandal about this and one of the demands made was for authors of articles to reveal their funding sources. Needless to say many did not want this information made available to the general public.
All I can say is that if you understand how media can distort and even create reality via corporate money, why is is so hard to understand that they do the same with an industry that produces billions of profit annually.
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Bill Astore–Thanks for the Murrow quote. Don’t think I’d seen that before. And none other than Thomas Jefferson would certainly endorse the sentiment!! Of course, the ol’ boy was a tad naive in one area: he actually thought the Constitution would be revised to reflect the changing times, every generation or so!! Oh, to be sure, it does occasionally get revised, like under pressure from great social movements like Civil Rights. But then there are little matters like that damned 2nd Amendment that the reactionary dinosaurs fall back upon as denying the right to regulate firearms ownership in a sensible manner. “Strict constructionism,” indeed.
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It’s so obvious: the 2nd amendment was all about keeping a well-regulated militia ready to defend kith and kin in the days of the frontier. It was linked to a citizen-military, and authorized in part to obviate the need for a large standing army.
So let’s make a deal: keep the 2nd amendment but eliminate the Pentagon and 90% of the professional military. Keep the state militias (National Guard). And make it mandatory for all gun owners to participate in occasional drills that emphasize gun safety.
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That’s a brilliant idea, Bill. Quite worthy of more widespread discussion, that’s for sure.
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A ‘contrary opinion’ on the 2nd Amendment via Carl Bogus. Start reading @ http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/13890
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Its interesting that you use Science Fiction specifically the Classic Blade Runner to illustrate the sad state of fear mongering in U.S. Media nowadays, and also that its just about the only Mass Genre that seems to know the score, or is on the cutting edge of illuminating us masses to it..! Sad indeed!.
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Plus unlike other forms of Literature it presents viable solutions, or plans on how the wrongs of our society can be addressed like in Ender’s game, and other similar stories / Novels, etc.Well that’s my 2 cents worth…
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And recall how powerful The Tyrell Corporation was! It basically made its own rules.
One thing we’re missing: No “Off-World” colonies. Some when the meltdown comes (whether it’s nuclear, global warming, disease, or some combination of these and more), we’re going down with Spaceship Earth.
Maybe we’ll be able to launch an ark like in “Silent Running.” We need to cryogenically freeze Bruce Dern — just in case!
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I maintain that George Orwell’s “1984” is THE most chillingly prophetic novel of last century. But certainly Philip K. Dick has to be given props for his work. Many of the movies made from his ideas–some vastly superior to others, of course (the movies, that is)–were expanded from mere short stories! I think “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”–inspiration for “Blade Runner”–was a longish story or perhaps a novella (obviously I haven’t read it yet myself).
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Or Transparent Aluminum that “Scotty” created, or Invented in S.T. IV “The Voyage Home” that has been since replicated in Reality to save the Whales in the Film. Interesting– Theory do Engineers get their Inspiration from Sci. Fi.?, or is it the other way around?…Tricorders, the original Cell Phones in S.T. The Laser Cannons, Sound as a Weapon in the S.T. Gangster Episode “Piece of the Action” Etc. Also an Interesting Concept since Robotics seem to be the Wave of the Future. When do You become more Machine than Man with all the Implantable devices being designed!?
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Reblogged this on philastore.
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