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About stuartbramhall

Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.

Ancient History of India: Origins and Rise of Buddhism

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Episode 10 Origins and Rise of Buddhism

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Film Review

According to Fisher, initial support for Buddhism arose from an increasingly powerful merchant class who were excluded from political power by the Kshatrya varna.*

Born the heir to a small Kshatryan kingdom, Siddharta Gautama (who became known as the Buddha) was stil a teenager when he left his wife and son to join a band of ascetics. After six years he renounced asceticism, gaining enlightenment through meditating under a famous fig tree in the city of Gaya (in modern Bahar).

As he and his disciples began preaching they taught four noble truths:

  1. Suffering is inevitable
  2. Suffering stems from sensual desire and attachment to this world
  3. Suffering stops when desire stops.
  4. The Middle Way (ie rejecting extremes of asceticism and pleasure) is the path to enlightenment.

He taught 7 steps towards achieving the Middle Way:

  1. Right intention
  2. Right speech
  3. Right action
  4. Right livelihood
  5. Right effort
  6. Right mindfulness
  7. Right concentration

Buddha and his disciples also referred to the Middle Way as Damma, the equivalent of the Sanskrit Dharma.**

Buddha and his disciples established sanga (monasteries), where monks lived four months of the year during monsoon season. They spent the other eight months as wandering teachers. Buddha initial banned women from monastic life but relented following intervention by his foster mother and aunt. Buddhist numbers produced the first record writings by women.

After 537 rebirths, Buddha finally achieved Nirvana when he died at age 80 in 480 BC.

As with Jainism, a religion where a person’s worth was independent of their birth was extremely attractive to increasingly wealthy Vaishya merchants. Thanks to their generous donations, many Buddhist monasteries became important centers of learning.

in the 3rd century BC, Buddhist missionaries went to Sri Lanka, where the vast majority of the population remains Buddhist. From Sri Lanka the religion spread to Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia), where it remains the predominant religion. Hindusim spread along the same route.

In the first century AD, Mahayan Buddhism emerged and spread to Afghanistan, China, Vietnam and Japan.

In the 7th century AD, Vajrayan (thunderbolt or sudden enlightenment) Buddhism emerged and spread to Nepal and Tibet.

Ironically by the 7th century AD, the religion had died out in India. Fisher blamed this partly on fabulously wealthy Buddhist monasteries that lost touch with the common people and partly on the adoption of Buddhist principles by Hinduism and Jainism.

In the mid-20th century Dalit (Untouchable) activist B R Ambedkar coverted to Buddhism shortly before his death in 1956 and persuaded many of his Dalit followers to convert. At present, there 8 million Buddhists (mainly Dalits) in India. Although they have used the courts to reclaim sacred Buddhist sites (from the Hindu religion), they account for less than 1% of the population.

*See The Vedic Origin of India’s Castes

**Buddha’s followers wrote in the Pali language spoken by north Indian people (not Sanskrit).

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/366254/366191

Spies Buying Americans’ Private Data. Congress Has New Chance to Stop It

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Aerial view of a city with an overlay of a target
Photograph: John Lund/Getty Images
An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would forbid government entities from buying Americans’ search histories, location data, and more.

A “must-pass” defense bill wending its way through the United States House of Representatives may be amended to abolish the government practice of buying information on Americans that the country’s highest court has said police need a warrant to seize. Though it’s far too early to assess the odds of the legislation surviving the coming months of debate, it’s currently one of the relatively few amendments to garner support from both Republican and Democratic members.

Introduction of the amendment follows a report declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—the nation’s top spy—which last month revealed that intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been buying up data on Americans that the government’s own experts described as “the same type” of information the US Supreme Court in 2018 sought to shield against warrantless searches and seizures.

A handful of House lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, have declared support for the amendment submitted late last week by representatives Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, and Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat. The bipartisan duo is seeking stronger warrant requirements for the surveillant data constantly accumulated by people’s cellphones. They argue that it shouldn’t matter whether a company is willing to accept payment from the government in lieu of a judge’s permission.

“Warrantless mass surveillance infringes the Constitutionally protected right to privacy,” says Davidson. The amendment, he says, is aimed chiefly at preventing the government from “circumventing the Fourth Amendment” by purchasing “your location data, browsing history, or what you look at online.”

A copy of the Davidson-Jacobs amendment reviewed by WIRED shows that the warrant requirements it aims to bolster focus specifically on people’s web browsing and internet search history, along with GPS coordinates and other location information derived primarily from cellphones. It further encapsulates “Fourth Amendment protected information” and would bar law enforcement agencies of all levels of jurisdiction from exchanging “anything of value” for information about people that would typically require a “warrant, court order, or subpoena under law.”

The amendment contains an exception for anonymous information that it describes as “reasonably” immune to being de-anonymized; a legal term of art that would defer to a court’s analysis of a case’s more fluid technicalities. A judge might, for instance, find it unreasonable to assume a data set is well obscured based simply on the word of a data broker. The Federal Trade Commission’s Privacy and Identity Protection Division noted last year that claims that data is anonymized “are often deceptive,” adding that “significant research” reflects how trivial it often is to reidentify “anonymized data.”

The amendment was introduced Friday to defense legislation that will ultimately authorize a range of policies and programs consuming much of the Pentagon’s nearly $890 billion budget next year. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Congress is required to pass annually, is typically pieced together from hundreds, if not thousands, of amendments.

This year negotiations are particularly contentious, given the split chamber and a mess of interparty strife, and only one in six NDAA amendments introduced so far have apparent bipartisan support.

Republican members Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, and Ben Cline of Virginia have backed the Davidson-Jacobs amendment, according to the House Rules Committee website. They’re joined by Democrats Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Zoe Lofgren of California, and Veronica Escobar of Texas.

Jacobs previously coauthored a related amendment with Davidson that attempted to compel the US military to disclose annually how often its various spy agencies purchase Americans’ smartphone and web-browsing data. The amendment was stripped from the final version of last year’s NDAA.

The data broker report declassified last month by the US director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, stressed that neither presently, nor at any point in the past, would the government be permitted to force “billions of people to carry location-tracking devices on their persons at all times.” That is, nevertheless, what is happening today, independent of the government’s actions. The unceasing explosions of new technologies are clashing more and more frequently with the nation’s antiquated privacy laws, giving the Department of Homeland Security, Defense Intelligence Agency, and others like them an unmistakable loophole through which virtually anyone can be surveilled without a reason.

Demand Progress senior policy counsel Sean Vitka, whose group has spent years lobbying for privacy reform in the face of the government’s growing and often secret reliance on data brokers, says the relatively untracked purchases—up to and including “turnkey lists of everyone who has gone to an abortion clinic, a place of worship, a rehab facility, or a protest”—represent an “existential threat” to the right to privacy. The Davidson-Jacobs amendment marks a “critical opportunity to get [federal lawmakers] on the record,” adds Vitka.

The American Civil Liberties Union intends to score how lawmakers vote on the amendment, WIRED has learned. The lawmakers’ effort is also being supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, FreedomWorks, and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, among dozens of similar civil society organizations.

Congressional staffers and others privy to ongoing conferencing over privacy matters on Capitol Hill say that regardless of whether the amendment succeeds, the focus on data brokers is just a prelude to a bigger fight coming this fall over the potential sunsetting of one of the spy community’s powerful tools, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the survivability of which is anything but assured.

[…]

Via https://www.wired.com/story/ndaa-2023-davidson-jacobs-fourth-amendment/

‘Uncontrolled Experiment’: How Smart Devices Are Damaging Kids’ Brains

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smart devices damage kids brains feature

By  Dr. Joseph Mercola

As little as two hours of screen time per day can impair a child’s thinking and language skills, interfere with sleep, and increase anxiety and depression.

Story at a glance:

  • Children ages 9 to 10 who use electronic devices for seven hours or more per day exhibit premature thinning of the brain cortex, the outer brain layer that processes information from the five physical senses.
  • As little as two hours of screen time per day may impact cognition, resulting in lower scores on thinking and language tests.
  • Infants under the age of 2 do not effectively learn language from videos; they need live interaction.
  • Babies do not transfer what they learn from the iPad to the real world. For example, the ability to play with virtual Legos does not transfer over to the skill of manipulating real Lego blocks.
  • Apps and social media are designed to be addictive, and young children are far more susceptible to addiction than adults.

Most people today live in a sea of radio frequencies emitted from wireless technologies of all kinds, from routers to smartphones, tablets, baby monitors, TVs, appliances, smart meters and many more.

According to many experts, chronic, heavy exposure could have severe repercussions for our health, especially that of children, who are now exposed even before birth.

Research also suggests interaction with social media, games and apps online produces a number of effects, both physical and psychological.

Heavy use of wireless devices changes kids’ brain structure

In the largest long-term study of brain development and youth health in the U.S., the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, reveals the brains of the most prolific users of electronic devices look different compared to those who use smartphones, tablets and video games less frequently.

[…]

These preliminary findings, based on the brain scans of 4,500 9- to 10-year-olds, reveal children who use electronic devices for seven hours or more each day have premature thinning of the brain cortex, the outer brain layer that processes information from the five physical senses (taste, touch, sight, smell and sound).

The exact ramifications of this anomaly are still unknown.

According to Dr. Gaya Dowling, a researcher with the National Institutes of Health, which is sponsoring the $300 million study, thinning of the cortex is thought to be part of the brain maturation process, so what these scans are showing is that this process is being sped up in children who get a lot of screen time (7-plus hours a day).

They cannot prove that the changes are definitively caused by screen time, and the full effects won’t be known until years from now, as the emotional and mental health outcomes of these children are evaluated.

Still, preliminary results suggest as little as two hours of screen time per day may impact cognition, resulting in lower scores on thinking and language tests.

American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for screen time

The “Growing Up Digital” report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), published in October 2015 . . .  cites data from research showing infants under the age of 1 do not effectively learn language from videos, whereas they do learn language from live interactions. Up to age 2, live presentations are far superior for language processing and learning compared to video presentations.

[…]

This is also noted in the “60 Minutes” report (see video below).

Research shows that babies do not transfer what they learn from the iPad to the real world, or from two-dimensional interaction to three-dimensional reality. For example, the ability to play with virtual Legos does not transfer over to the skill of manipulating real Lego blocks.

[…]

Digital media are designed to be addictive

While the AAP’s guidelines may be based on what seems to be a common sense of good parenting, the reality is that many parents have just as much trouble moderating their usage as their children.

What’s worse, young children, especially those under the age of 2, are far more susceptible to addictive behavior than older children and adults.

The fact that apps and social media are designed to be addictive adds to the challenge.

[…]

In the video below, Harris describes the process, known in programming circles as “brain hacking,” as they incorporate knowledge of neuropsychology into the development of digital interfaces that boost interaction.

[…]

The research discussed in the featured 60 Minute segment reveals that addiction to smartphones and social media is indeed a reality, triggering the release of dopamine — a neurochemical involved in cravings and desire that promotes impulsive and compulsive behavior.

[…]

Screen time linked to sleep deprivation

The radiation alone is a significant hazard and is known to disrupt sleep, but the blue light from the screen, plus the beeping and pinging when messages and other notifications come in are bound to interrupt sleep as well.

This does not even factor in the influence of microwave radiation from cellphones influencing melatonin, which regulates your sleep-wake cycle.

When your melatonin production is disrupted, it can have long-term health effects, as shown in a 2013 animal study, which assessed the effects of cellphone radiation on the central nervous system.

Exposure to cellphone radiation for just one hour a day for one month caused rats to experience a period of delay before entering rapid eye movement deep sleep — a phase necessary for restorative sleep.

Another study published in 2015 found that 1.8 GHz frequencies affected rats’ circadian rhythm and decreased their daily production of melatonin. Superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase (which help prevent cellular damage) were also decreased.

Low melatonin is used as a marker for disturbed sleep. It comes as no great surprise then that sleep deprivation among teenagers rose by 57% between 1991 and 2015.

Many do not even get seven hours of sleep on a regular basis, while science reveals they need a minimum of eight and as many as 10 hours to maintain their health.

The research clearly shows that heavy computer and cellphone users are more prone to insomnia. For example, one 2008 study revealed that people exposed to radiation from their mobile phones for three hours before bedtime had more trouble falling asleep and staying in a deep sleep.

[…

Data from the annual Monitoring the Future survey reveals the more time teens spend online, the unhappier they are, and those who spend more time than average on in-person relations and activities that do not involve their smartphone are far more likely to report being “happy.”

Results such as these really should come as no surprise. Spending time outdoors has been scientifically shown to dramatically improve people’s moods and significantly reduce symptoms of depression.

Interestingly, it doesn’t matter what type of screen activity is involved. They’re all equally likely to cause psychological distress.

Between 2012 and 2015, depressive symptoms among boys rose by 21%. Among girls, the rise during that same time was a whopping 50% — a truly remarkable increase in just three years’ time.

Rates of teen depression, self-harm and suicide have also dramatically risen.

Emergency room visits for self-harming behavior such as cutting have tripled among girls ages 10 to 14, and data suggest spending three hours or more each day on electronic devices raises a teen’s suicide risk by 35%.

Between 2007 and 2015, the suicide rate for 12- to 14-year-old girls rose threefold — a gender trend that can in part be blamed on a rise in cyberbullying, which is more common among girls. The suicide rate among boys doubled in that same time frame.

[…]

How electronics trigger anxiety, depression, memory problems

Aside from purely psychological factors, one of the reasons why social media use tends to raise a child’s risk for anxiety and depression has to do with the fact that smartphones emit electromagnetic fields (EMFs).

Research by professor Martin Pall, Ph.D., reveals EMFs activate voltage-gated calcium channels embedded in your cell membranes. This releases a flood of calcium ions which, through a cascade of effects, result in the creation of hydroxyl free radicals — some of the most destructive free radicals known to man.

In turn, this decimates mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, their membranes and proteins, ultimately resulting in mitochondrial dysfunction.

Your brain has the highest density of voltage-gated calcium channels in your body, which is why excessive EMF exposure is associated with depression and neurological dysfunction, including dementia.

According to Nicholas Carr, author of the book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” millennials are experiencing greater problems with forgetfulness than seniors.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/smart-devices-kids-brains-cola/

After Long Silence on ‘Long Vax,’ Science Magazine Links Autoimmune Disorders to COVID Shots

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science long vax covid feature

By  Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

After years of organizing and advocacy by people suffering autoimmune injuries from the COVID-19 vaccine, one of the world’s top scientific journals reports on the existence of “Long Vax.”

Mainstream publications and regulatory agencies have buckled to public pressure to admit the COVID-19 vaccine can cause injuries such as myocarditis and pericarditis — but until recently, they’ve published little or nothing about the substantial number of people suffering from autoimmune disease after vaccination.

However, on Tuesday, the journal Science published an article confirming that COVID-19 vaccines are linked to autoimmune disorders, such as small fiber neuropathy and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS).

“We’ve been screaming from the top of our lungs about these things happening,” Agnieszka Wilson, founder of #CanWeTalkAboutIt told The Defender. “And finally, slowly, it’s being acknowledged.”

The #CanWeTalkAboutIt campaign is a global effort to break the silence around injuries from the COVID-19 vaccine.

Suzanna Newell, board member of the vaccine-injured patient advocacy group React19, told The Defender:

“I am extremely grateful that doctors and medical institutions are now willing to talk about adverse reactions. [They] should have been listening to the injured. We even have many injured medical professionals among the injured who have had trouble being heard.”

Science reported that in addition to abnormal blood clotting and heart inflammation, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines give rise to “another apparent complication”:

“[This] debilitating suite of symptoms that resembles Long Covid, has been more elusive, its link to vaccination unclear and its diagnostic features ill-defined.

“But in recent months, what some call Long Vax has gained wider acceptance among doctors and scientists, and some are now working to better understand and treat its symptoms.”

According to Science, Long Vax cases “seem very rare.” They include a wide range of symptoms such as persistent headaches, severe fatigue and abnormal heart rate and blood pressure.

The symptoms can begin to appear within hours or weeks after vaccination and are difficult to study, the authors of the article said.

Science reported that increasing numbers of researchers are making diagnoses that include small fiber sensory neuropathy, which causes tingling or electric shock-like sensations, burning pain and blood circulation problems, and POTS — a condition that affects blood flow and can result in symptoms such as lightheadedness, fainting and increased heartbeat — that appear when standing up from a reclined position.

Post-vaccination symptoms could have features of one or both conditions. People with long COVID can suffer similar symptoms, according to the article.

Small sensory fiber neuropathy and POTS also are associated with other vaccines such as Gardasil, Merck’s human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.

Commenting on the article, Substacker Igor Chudov wrote that the authors acknowledge the suffering, but also minimize it, falsely asserting that it is rare. “It goes on and on about how ‘rare’ vaccine injuries are.”

Brianne Dressen, founder of React19, said that despite the fact the article qualifies some of its key claims, she sees it as an important step toward getting these conditions more widely recognized.

Dressen told The Defender:

“Science Magazine is speaking to an audience that the rest of us who have been pigeonholed into this corner can’t speak to because they don’t even know we exist. We’ve all been censored to no end. So how are we going to reach those people?

“They’ve been hammered over and over again in outlets like Science Magazine — which is kind of ironic — with the idea that the vaccines are wonderful and there’s no possible way that anything bad can happen …

“So if we ever get an opportunity to put a little bit of content out there in their lane for them to question even just a little bit what’s going on around them, then we’ll be able to pull them back over to, you know, to the truth.”

Vaccine-related autoimmune disorders are underreported 

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were attempting to study and treat patients with Long Vax symptoms in 2021. They published a preprint report on their work, but the study was abruptly halted without explanation and the NIH has stonewalled attempts to discover details about what the agency knew early on.

Science also cited previous and forthcoming research by Sujana Reddy identifying post-vaccine POTS, and a study published in Nature Cardiovascular Research by researchers from Cedars Sinai Medical Center last year that linked COVID-19 and the vaccine to POTS.

Other peer-reviewed research reported similar links and has revealed a wide range of immune system and neurological effects from the COVID-19 vaccine.

Numerous people with autoimmune disorders from the COVID-19 vaccine have also shared their stories with The Defender. Some reported difficulties in submitting their health information to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

A total of 1,569,668 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and June 23, 2023, to VAERS.

The latest available data from VAERS show 770 reports of POTS with 578 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 160 reports attributed to Moderna’s and 31 reports to Johnson & Johnson’s.

“Under-reporting is a known and serious disadvantage of the VAERS system,” according to VAERs expert Jessica Rose, Ph.D.

Rose wrote, “Unfortunately, we can never really know how many people are suffering from adverse events. Reports can go missing, reports can remain in temporary VAERS ID limbo or never get filed in the first place.”

Scientists hesitantly speak out

“You see one or two patients and you wonder if it’s a coincidence,” Anne Louise Oaklander, M.D. Ph.D., a neurologist and researcher at Harvard Medical School, told Science. “But by the time you’ve seen 10, 20,” she continued, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

In addition to Oaklander, a top researcher on small fiber neuropathy, Harlan Krumholz, M.D., a Yale cardiologist, Sujana Reddy, D.O., an internal medicine resident physician at East Alabama Health, Tae Chung, M.D., a neuromuscular physiatrist who runs a POTS clinic at Johns Hopkins, Matthew Schelke, M.D., a neurologist at Columbia University and Lawrence Purpura, M.D., MPH, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University, and William Murphy, Ph.D., an immunologist at the University of California, Davis all commented on their ongoing research on autoimmune illness associated with COVID-19 vaccination.

The article also reports that “regulators in the US and Europe say they have not found a connection between COVID-19 vaccines and small fiber neuropathy or POTS.”

But even Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which has denied and downplayed the existence of vaccine autoimmune side effects, conceded to Science, “If a provider has somebody in front of them, they may want to take seriously the concept [of] a vaccine side effect.”

German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach has “acknowledged that Long Covid-like symptoms after vaccination are a real phenomenon,” Science also reported.

Marks told Science he worried “the sensational headline” about vaccine side effects could “mislead” the public. And several other researchers quoted in the article also expressed concern that their research could “undermine trust in COVID-19 vaccines.”

Dressen said researchers are hesitant to speak out because it carries great risk.

“There is not a single person, whether they are new to the game or whether they’ve been in this for decades, there’s not a single person that when they do step across that line and they do speak out, that they don’t get punished,” Dressen said.

She added, “There’s not a single person that gets hailed a hero and money flows and their research happens. There’s always repercussions. And these researchers knew that, right? Which is why they came out together and they came out in force.”

[…]

Immune overreaction to spike protein

The article hypothesizes that the Long Vax symptoms might be caused by an immune overreaction to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

[…]

Rose told The Defender that “molecular mimicry” is a possible action for spike-induced autoimmunity. Molecular mimicry refers to a significant similarity between pathogenic elements contained in a vaccine and some human proteins.

According to Nature, this similarity may lead to immune cross reactivity, where the reaction of the immune system toward the pathogenic antigens may harm the similar human proteins, essentially causing autoimmune disease.

[…]

Science reported that a few university-sponsored research projects are moving forward. Yale’s LISTEN study will examine both long COVID and Long Vax cases.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/long-vax-science-magazine-autoimmune-disorders-covid-shots/

Damaged electric cars ‘quarantined’ over fears they will explode

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By Paul Homewood

Not a Lot of People Know That

Electric cars that sustain minor bumps are being kept 15 meters apart in repair yards over fears they might explode, adding to insurance bills.

Government guidelines recommend electric vehicles with damaged batteries should be “quarantined” from other vehicles due to the risk of battery fires. Damaged batteries pose a risk of “thermal runaway” where the energy stored in the battery releases rapidly, creating temperatures of up to 400C.

But the practice threatens to increase costs for the insurance industry by more than £600m, costs which ultimately could be passed onto drivers in increased premiums, according to a report by automotive risk firm Thatcham Research.

It said insurers would need to spend an additional £900m a year on quarantine facilities for damaged cars as a result of the safety measures by 2035, as more battery-powered vehicles take to the roads. The extra costs risk adding £20 a year onto all car insurance premiums, rising to £28 by 2050 when there are expected to be some 360,000 electric cars on the road network.

Just two damaged electric cars can fit into the same space that would otherwise fit 100 petrol or diesel cars, under current the DVLA and Transport Department guidelines.

Last year 9,400 vehicles were potentially involved in collisions resulting in batteries needing repair – a figure that could reach as high as 260,000 by 2035, the report said.

Claims for damaged electric cars cost insurers 25pc more than their petrol counterparts, the report found. Electric vehicles also take 14pc longer to repair.

Rapidly depreciating values mean the cost of replacing a battery outweighs the cost of the car after just one year, leaving insurers no choice but to scrap the car, it said.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/insurance/car/damaged-electric-cars-quarantined-fears-explode/

Don’t worry though, because Sir Humphrey has got it all in hand:

A spokesman for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “We are investing in innovation and research, as well as working with insurers and manufacturers to further improve the ways electric vehicle batteries can be repaired, refurbished and recycled.”

[…]

Via https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/07/06/damaged-electric-cars-quarantined-over-fears-they-will-explode/

Government Study: Half of US Households have Toxic PFAS Coming Out of Faucets

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Chemical Free Life

There is disturbing news coming from a U.S. government office about the safety–or lack thereof–of drinking water in the U.S.  According to a government study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), drinking water from nearly half of U.S. faucets likely contains toxic PFAS “forever chemicals”* that may cause cancer and other health problems.

Why this study is important

The study is the first nationwide effort to test for PFAS in tap water from private sources, in addition to regulated ones.** It builds on previous scientific findings that the chemicals are widespread, showing up in consumer products, food and drinking water across the U.S.

Study overview

Federal and state programs typically measure exposure to pollutants such as PFAS* at water treatment plants or groundwater wells that supply them. The USGS report, on the other hand, was based on samples from taps in 716 locations, including 447 that rely on public supplies and 269 using private wells.

The water samples were taken between 2016 and 2021 at a range of locations, mostly from private residences, but also a few schools and offices. The sample testing also included protected lands such as national parks, residential and rural areas with no identified PFAS sources, and urban centers with industry or waste sites known to generate PFAS.

Most taps were sampled just once. Three were sampled multiple times over a three-month period, with little change to final results.  Scientists tested for 32 PFAS compounds. Thousands of other toxic PFAS chemicals are believed to exist in water systems and other public use sources, but cannot yet be identified with current technology.

Results overview

The types found most often were PFBS, PFHxS and PFOA. Also making frequent appearances was PFOS, one of the most common nationwide.

Positive samples contained as many as nine varieties, although most were closer to two. The median concentration was around seven parts per trillion for all 32 PFAS types, although for PFOA and PFOS it was about four parts per trillion — the limit EPA has proposed for those two compounds.

The heaviest exposures were in cities and near potential sources of the compounds, particularly in the Eastern Seaboard; Great Lakes and Great Plains urban centers; and Central and Southern California. Many of the tests, mostly in rural areas, found no PFAS.

Based on the data, researchers estimated that at least one form of PFAS could be found in approximately half (~45%) of U.S. tap water samples nationwide.

What should consumers do?

According to experts, the information from the study “can be used to evaluate risk of exposure and inform decisions about whether or not you want to treat your drinking water, get it tested, or get more information from your state” about the situation locally.  Further, the study underscores that private well users should have their water tested for PFAS and consider installing filters.

Filters containing activated carbon or reverse osmosis membranes can remove the compounds.

The real problem

The U.S. government has still not prohibited companies from using the toxic chemicals nor from dumping them into public wastewater systems.**

*PFAS chemicals (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are toxic to humans, animals and the environment. They are comprised of approximately 14,000 human-made chemical compounds. The chemicals are ubiquitous in the U.S., appearing in thousands of consumer and industrial products and are typically used to make products resist water, stains and heat, including household products (like carpeting, curtains, furniture upholstery, waterproof and stain-resistant flooring, etc.), cooking supplies (including cooking utensils and bake ware), clothing, personal care products (like cosmetics, including waterproof mascara, dental floss, contact lenses and feminine hygiene products) and even food (PFAS appears in processed food packaging for humans and pets), pharmaceuticals like Prozac, and public drinking water (tap water) that affects an estimated 2 million Americans. PFAS chemicals are usually found in products labeled “stain-proof” and “waterproof”.  PFAS chemicals also appear in fire-fighting foam and other industrial products used at airports and military bases across the country, where the chemicals have leached into the groundwater. PFAS chemicals are known as “forever chemicals” because they do not readily break down in the environment or human body.  PFAS chemicals have been linked in scientific and medical studies to a variety of serious health conditions including cancer (which includes testicular and kidney cancers), kidney disease, heart disease, thyroid problems, reproductive problems, endocrine problems (PFAS has been found to disrupt hormonal functions with some research suggesting that the PFAS chemicals are linked to accelerated ovarian aging, period irregularities and ovarian disorders like polycystic ovarian syndrome) and liver problems. Some newer PFAS have been found to accumulate in organs, so in some cases, science simply cannot detect the toxic chemicals when testing for it in blood.

**Early in 2023 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the first federal drinking water limits on six forms of PFAS which do not degrade and remain in the human body and environment for years.

[…]

Via https://chemical-free-life.org/2023/07/06/half-of-us-households-have-toxic-pfas-coming-out-of-faucets-says-government/

Globalist Elites Fear You

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Globalist Elites Fear You

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Daily Reckoning

Globalist elites like to talk about democracy. But in reality, they don’t believe in democracy.

When the U.K. voted for Brexit in June 2016, the globalists were stunned. They couldn’t believe it. They then did everything they could to delay and fight Brexit.

Then when Donald Trump won the election as president in November 2016, the globalists were even more stunned. They went into complete denial and put their heads in the sand.

They comforted themselves with the convenient myth that Russian interference lost them the election, not a popular rejection of their ideology.

Yet it kept getting worse for globalists. Both China and Russia have become more nationalistic and completely turned their backs on globalism. The war in Ukraine has only intensified that trend.

The pandemic only strengthened the trend away from globalism, and the ongoing supply chain issues we’ve been seeing expose globalism’s fragile underbelly.

These chains may be efficient and economical, but when they break down, it has a rippling effect on the global economy. It’s like pulling on one strand on a carpet. The entire thing is affected.

“Tariffs Are as American as Apple Pie”

Globalists worship at the altar of free trade. But free trade is a myth. It doesn’t exist outside classrooms. France subsidizes agriculture. The U.S. subsidizes electric vehicles. China subsidizes a long list of national champions with government contracts, cheap loans and currency manipulation.

Every major economy subsidizes one or more sectors using fiscal and monetary tools and tariffs and nontariff barriers to trade.

America grew rich and powerful from 1787–1962, a period of 175 years, using tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to trade to nurture domestic industry and protect high-paying manufacturing jobs.

In fact, tariffs are as American as apple pie.

Beginning in 1962, the U.S. turned its back on a successful legacy of protecting its jobs and industry and embraced the free trade theory. This was done first through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, one of the original Bretton Woods institutions in addition to the World Bank and IMF.

Against the mercantilist system was a theory of free trade based on comparative advantage as advocated by British economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century. Ricardo’s theory said that trading nations are endowed with attributes that gave them a relative advantage in producing certain goods versus others.

These attributes could consist of natural resources, climate, population, river systems, education, ports, financial capacity or any other factor of production. Nations should produce those goods as to which they have a natural advantage and trade with other nations for goods where the advantage was not so great.

Countries should specialize in what they do best, and let others also specialize in what they do best. Then countries could simply trade the goods they make for the goods made by others. All sides would be better off because prices would be lower as a result of specialization in those goods where you have a natural advantage.

Works in Theory, Not in Fact

It’s a nice theory often summed up in the idea that Tom Brady should not mow his own lawn because it makes more sense to pay a landscaper while he practices football.

For example, if the U.K. had an advantage in textile production and Portugal had an advantage in wine production, then the U.K. and Portugal should trade wool for wine. But if the theory of comparative advantage were true, Japan would still be exporting tuna fish instead of cars, computers, TVs, steel and much more.

The problem with the theory of comparative advantage is that the factors of production are not permanent and they are not immobile.

If labor moves from the countryside to the city in China, then suddenly China has a comparative advantage in cheap labor. If finance capital moves from New York banks to direct foreign investment in Chinese factories, then China has the comparative advantage in capital also.

Before long, China has the advantage in labor and capital and is running huge trade surpluses with the U.S., putting Americans out of work and shutting down U.S. factories in the process.

Worse yet, countries such as China can pull comparative advantage out of thin air with government subsidies.

We’ve been living in a world where the U.S. has been a free trade sucker and everyone else breaks the rules. In a world where a few parties are free traders but most are mercantilists, the mercantilists win every time. They are like parasites sucking the free traders dry.

Globalization at All Costs

But to globalists, the moral arc of the universe bends in one direction, and that’s toward increasing globalization. Populism and protectionism are therefore moral evils that must be condemned.

But globalists have slowly realized that the nationalist trend is not an anomaly but a powerful force that is reversing globalist policies that have been ascendant since 1989, or even since the end of World War II, when institutions like the IMF and World Bank were established to promote globalist goals.

But right now, free trade is on the ropes, currency wars are rampant, there’s an actual war in Eastern Europe and geopolitical hotspots like Taiwan are becoming more dangerous.

What happened to globalism?

The globalist-in-chief is Columbia University academic Jeffrey D. Sachs. He led the charge for “market” solutions in Russia in the 1990s, which backfired into a takeover by oligarchs and the rise of Putin.

He also led the charge for “opening” China in the early 2000s, which led to the rise of Xi Jinping and the strongest form of Communism since the death of Mao Zedong.

Is Sachs willing to admit any mistakes? No. Like most globalists who are too arrogant to question their own worldviews and assumptions, Sachs instead says the problem is democracy itself.

Essentially, Sachs wants to abandon traditional voting in the U.S. and U.K. to create a system more favorable to globalists. Sure, you can let voters choose center-right candidate x or center-left candidate y, who might be 10% apart on many issues. Neither of them will really rock the boat and have no fundamental disagreement with globalism in general.

Globalists Don’t Trust You

As far as globalists are concerned, voters cannot be trusted to vote on fundamental issues like Brexit. They also can’t be trusted to vote against presidential candidates like Trump. Such decisions should be beyond democratic control, globalists believe.

In fact, Time magazine ran an article gloating about how corporate and media elites essentially conspired to prevent Trump from winning the 2020 election.

Media refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was just one example. Former intelligence officials joined in by claiming it bore all the trademarks of “Russian disinformation.” Of course, we all know the laptop was real. But they wouldn’t allow it to influence the election.

Meanwhile, recent disclosures by Twitter revealed the extent to which the company worked with the federal government to censor viewpoints they didn’t like.

The bottom line is, when elites don’t like the potential outcome, just change the rules.

The Climate Change Trojan Horse

Another issue that unites globalists is climate change. Globalists argue that climate change is too important to trust to voters in individual countries. Climate change is the perfect cover for globalism because combating it requires an internationally coordinated policy run by elites.

Their real agenda is to define a “global problem” so they can advance “global solutions” such as world governance, world taxation and world rule by elites. It doesn’t matter that the actual science behind hysterical climate alarmism is extremely weak.

[…]

Via https://dailyreckoning.com/globalist-elites-fear-you/

 

Social media can be as harmful to children as smoking or gambling – why is this allowed?

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The study showed that 35% Gen Z respondents spend over two hours on social media daily.

Debbie Shridhar

The Guardian

A consensus is growing among experts that apps such as Snapchat are bad for children’s health – there is a clear case for regulatio

WhatsApp is for old people. That is, people over 30. At least that’s what my first-year medical students tell me. WhatsApp has become the realm of government backchats about Covid-19 policy, or family groups sharing graduation photos and past-their-prime memes. Young people, especially teenagers, communicate through Snapchat, an app that reaches 90% of 13- to 24-year-olds and 75% of 13- to 34-year-olds across the UK. It has more than 21 million active users in Britain per month, which is almost one-third of the population, and each accesses the app on average more than 50 times a day.

If we go back to the 1980s and 1990s, parenting was often about keeping children physically safe. A moody 14-year-old wanting to be alone in their room was a normal thing– in fact this was sufficient to protect them. Parents had clear oversight over who their kids were around at home, and the physical materials they were consuming.

Fast-forward to 2023 and children are in their rooms at home, but while physically safe, they’re exposed to an entire virtual world with almost no regulation over the content they see, how much time they’re spending on devices or the boundary between necessary social communication with friends and a much darker world of harmful or pornographic material, and predatory influencers.

Compounding the problems facing teenagers and parents is the fact that apps are often designed deliberately to be addictive, or used compulsively. They regularly turn social interactions into games – like Snapchat’s “Snapstreak” feature that scores a user for the number of consecutive days they share a picture with each contact, encouraging them to be available on the app constantly. Apps also come with many safety and oversight concerns. Snapchat popularised disappearing messages, meaning parents can’t check what their child has been viewing or posting, and many apps share the user’s location with others by default. Teenagers and children may not even know that they’re sharing live data on their location throughout the day.

The potential harms of these apps are increasingly being called out. The US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an “advisory” last month on the effects social media use has on young people’s mental health. He said: “The most common question parents ask me is, ‘is social media safe for my kids?’ The answer is that we don’t have enough evidence to say it’s safe, and in fact, there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health. We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis.”

The president of the American Medical Association, Jack Resneck Jr, used even stronger words: “With near-universal social media use by America’s young people, these apps and sites introduce profound risk and mental health harms in ways we are only now beginning to fully understand.” The evidence of its mental health impact is concerning.

The latest Centers for Disease Control Youth Risk Behaviour survey in 2021 illustrates the scale of the problem: 42% of high school students surveyed had experienced persistent feelings of sadness over the last year, while 22% had seriously contemplated suicide. Research cited by Murthy shows that adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media have double the risk of depression and anxiety. Furthermore, 46% of adolescents aged between 13 and 17 say social media makes them feel worse about their body image, and 64% of that age group are “often” or “sometimes” exposed to hate-based content. Yet children themselves feel unsure of how to cope: one-third or more of girls aged 11 to 15 say they feel “addicted” to certain apps, and more than half of teenagers say they would find it hard to give up social media.

A study by researchers at the University of Bath looked at the mental health effects of a week-long social media break, which on average freed up about nine hours of their week. Even after only seven days, participants had significant improvements in wellbeing, depression and anxiety compared to a control group.

There is growing consensus among health experts about the negative chronic health effects of social media use. And yet we are largely leaving it up to parents, and other concerned adults, to find solutions to a side-effect of universal smartphones. The burden is on the government to recognise the negative health impact that certain social media apps have, create policies to regulate companies to ensure they’re not selling a dangerous product to children, and work towards collective solutions. This could include working with these companies to make design and development decisions in their product that prioritise safety and health.

Companies may resist this because it’s in their financial interest to keep users on their platforms for as long as possible. Screen time is their revenue stream: 99% of Snapchat revenue is from displaying advertising to its users; the figure for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is about 98%. The longer that kids spend on their platform, the more money they make. And the cost, maybe, is paid in the mental health of the next generation of society.

[…]

Via https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/04/smoking-gambling-children-social-media-apps-snapchat-health-regulation

Exposing the Covid Hospital Protocol

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Covid-19: The race to build coronavirus ventilators - BBC Future

By Stella Paul
American Thinker

If you’re driving in Ridgefield, N.J., you may notice history being made.  The first billboard of a statewide campaign is now up on Route 1, highlighting the deadly hospital protocol during COVID that took thousands of innocent lives.  More billboards should be coming soon.

I’ve been writing about the Hospital Death Protocol for some time, explaining how the federal government paid big bonuses to hospitals if they treated patients with the lethal drug Remdesivir, then ventilated and killed them.  Many people now know about the damage from the vaccines, mandates, and lockdowns, but news of the medical carnage in the hospitals has been sparse.

Fortunately, a group of volunteers is determined to get the word out.  I think of them as the Bereaved Army.  They lost a parent or spouse or sibling or child to what one eyewitness doctor called “organized homicide,” and they won’t stop fighting ’til they get justice.

I spoke with Charlene Delfico, the state chair of the New Jersey chapter of FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, which organized the billboard campaign.  “I lost my stepdad to the death protocol in Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey.  My mother was admitted at the same time.  She survived thirty days of brutal torture and came home unable to move or talk.  She’s slowly recovering.  But they put my stepdad on a ventilator and ran roughshod over him until he died.”

In her grief, Charlene found her way to FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, a nationwide group of people who lost a loved one to the hospital protocol.  A few survivors of the protocol participate, too — but not many, because most people forced into the federally subsidized “treatment” for COVID didn’t make it.

“We’re all connected because of this tragedy throughout the country,” Charlene said.  “It’s an amazing group of people, and we’re all working together.  We’re creating the COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project (CHBMP.org), a living record of what happened.  We gather videos and written testimonies and documentation for history.  And we’re working to get justice for our murdered loved ones and to make sure that other people never have to go through what they did.

“As a group, we’ve had discussions about putting up billboards, but they’re expensive to take on.  The brother of one of the hospital victims in New Jersey has been active, handing out flyers and trying to get attention.  One day, he walked into the billboard company and said he wanted to do this.

“We made a logo that shows the Hippocratic Oath being torn in half, surrounded by the phrase ‘Crimes Against Humanity,’ because that’s what the hospital protocol was.  And we posed the question ‘Covid Death…Are You Sure?’ to get people thinking and questioning about what happened.

“We already have other state chapters of FormerFeds interested in putting up billboards and we’re planning on having planes with our slogan fly across the Jersey shore beaches this summer.  We’ve got car magnets and bumper stickers and things are really starting to move.

[…]

Via https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/exposing_the_covid_hospital_protocol.html

 

Vitamin D Deficiency Linked to Heart Attacks

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Make sure your vitamin D levels are optimized, otherwise you could suffer a heart attack

By Dr Eddy Betterman

Research out of Australia has confirmed that vitamin D deficiency is directly linked to an increased risk of heart attack or some other cardiovascular event.

Supplementing with vitamin D – or better yet, exposing your skin to more natural sunlight – can go a really long way towards promoting a strong and healthy heart, which is absolutely critical in the age of Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccines.”

Since the jabs are known to clog people’s blood vessels, vitamin D optimization is of utmost importance. And the study confirmed that especially among older people, topping up one’s vitamin D stores can help to reduce the risk of major cardiovascular events.

While the absolute risk difference between the two groups evaluated in the study was relatively small, the researchers emphasized that the benefits of getting more vitamin D are not insignificant.

It is also important to note that the study is the largest ever to date to look at vitamin D and its impact on cardiovascular health.

“Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a general term encompassing all conditions affecting the heart or blood vessels and is one of the main causes of death globally,” a Study Finds report on the study explains.

“CVD events like heart attacks and strokes are projected to increase as populations continue to live longer and chronic diseases become more and more common.”

(Related: Keeping your vitamin D levels optimized can also help to protect your body against cancer.)

It’s never a bad idea to optimize your vitamin D levels

Previous studies have identified a definitive connection between vitamin D levels and CVD risk, but none up until now have yielded evidence to show that vitamin D supplements can help to prevent cardiovascular events.

For this study, the Aussie team assessed whether or not supplementing older adults with vitamin D could help to reduce the number of major cardiovascular events that occur, on average, among older adults.

Known as the “D-Health Trial,” the study was carried out between 2014 and 2020 and included 21,315 Aussies between the ages of 60 and 84. All participants received one capsule of either 60,000 international units (IU) of vitamin D (10,662 people) or a placebo (10,653 people).

All participants took either the 60,000 IU dose or a placebo – neither group knew which one they were taking – orally at the beginning of each month over the course of five months.

“Those with a history of high calcium levels (hypercalcemia), overactive thyroid (hyperparathyroidism), kidney stones, soft bones (osteomalacia), sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease, or anyone already taking more than 500 IU/day vitamin D were excluded from the experiment,” reports indicate about the study’s design.

Following the initial five-month period, researchers looked at data covering hospital admissions and deaths to look for major cardiovascular events such as heart attacks, strokes, and coronary revascularization (a treatment that restores normal blood flow to the heart).

At the end of the full five years of taking either the vitamin D supplement or a placebo, more than 80 percent of trial participants were still on track with participation. From this, the researchers determined that 1,336 participants had suffered at least one major cardiovascular event between 2014 and 2020 – 6.6 percent in the placebo group and 6 percent in the vitamin D group.

“Meanwhile, rate of major cardiovascular events was nine percent lower in the vitamin D cohort compared to the placebo group (equivalent to 5.8 fewer events per 1,000 people),” Study Finds further explains.

“Heart attack (-19%) and coronary revascularization (-11%) rates were lower in the vitamin D group, but the team did not note any differences in the rate of stroke between the two cohorts.”

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2023/07/05/vitamin-d-levels-optimized-prevent-heart-attack/