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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.

The Celts Today

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Episode 24 The Celts Today

The Celtic World

Dr Jennifer Paxton (2018)

Film Review

The pan-Celtic movement dates from the late 19th century like the pan-Slavic movement. At present the Celtic League, a UN accredited non-governmental organization founded in 1961, seeks to re-unite all the Celtic realms under a single Celtic political entity.

In 1904 Cornwall was admitted to the Celtic Congress, which promotes Celtic languages internationally. Galicia was admitted and then ejected in 1936, as no Celtic language is spoken there. However both Galicia and Austaurius are lobbying for autonomy from Spain, owing to their Celtic identity.

Even some residents of Switzerland have sought membership in the Celtic Congress. The Swiss rock group Eluveitie performs songs in reconstructed Gallic.

Active Celtic Languages

  • Isle of Mann (endangered)  – 2% speak Manx, street signs are bilingual, one Manx immersion school and all children eligible to learn Manx in school.
  • Cornwall (endangered but reviving) – 3000 fluent speakers and main language for 557 residents, bilingual street signs since 1990s, bilingual daycare, some BBC Cornwall broadcasts in Cornish.
  • Brittany – 200,000 Breton speakers in 2007, a few immersion schools (though it’s technically illegal for schools to instruct in any language other than French), 200-300 Breton dance circles, a few bilingual signs, Asterix comics translated into Breton*
  • Wales (largest percentage of Celtic speakers) – in 2011 562,000 (19%) spoke Welsh. All students study Welsh until age 14 and 16% go on to medium schools where they receive instruction in Welsh.
  • Ireland – Irish compulsory in all schools and on school leaving certificates, many Irish TV and and radio broadcasts, public services must be equally accessible in English and Irish.
  • Northern Ireland – campaign to promote the Ulster Scots language
  • Scotland – in 2016 only 10,000 or 1.6% learned any Gallic in school, bilingual signs in highlands and islands.

Desire for Autonomy and Independence

Wales – own national assembly since 1990, but the Plaid Cymru part has never enjoyed majority support like the Scottish National Party.

Scotland – its own parliament since 1999.

Cornwall – has a very small autonomy movement which enjoys little support for a devolved parliament like Scotland and Wales.

Brittany – in part due to Charles DeGaulle’s (1958-69) brutal crackdown on Brittany’s separatist movement, fewer than 20% of Breton residents desire independence from France.

According to Paxton, modern DNA studies show that the modern Celts of Ireland, Scotland and Wales didn’t originate in Central Europe as is commonly believed. However a more recent study (2022) published in National Geographic suggests her statement is an oversimplification.

Most recent DNA studies suggest two significant waves of migration to Ireland. The first occurred between 10,000 and 5,200 BC from southern Europe (mainly Spain and Sardinia) and the Middle East. The second occurred around 4,000 BC (and not 500 BC as previously believed) by people people originating from the steppe region of Russia and Ukraine who gradually migrated across Europe to the British Isles. This possibly explains the strong linguistic links between Gaulish and the modern Celtic languages and the strong similarities between Gaulish and Celtic art. See https://owlcation.com/stem/Irish-Blood-Genetic-Identity

* Since 1949, Asterix the Gaul comics (about the last Gaulish village to hold out against the Romans have been extremely popular throughout France.

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

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/5701024/5701072

Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Media and Big People: How the Obesity Industrial Complex Works

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big food pharma obesity feature

Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

In an episode of “Breaking Points,” journalist James Li explained how Big Food profits by selling unhealthy, addictive food that causes obesity, Big Pharma makes money from treating it, they both work with the government to create an industry-friendly regulatory framework and Big Media gets paid to peddle their products.

“Is modern medicine helping us live longer and healthier?” Or is a “darker, more sinister agenda” creating “a longer but sicker life?”

Journalist James Li explored this question on a recent episode of “Breaking Points,” where he discussed how “Big Pharma, Big Food, mainstream media, medical professionals, [and] the government” collaborate to make us sick.

Li showed a “60 Minutes” clip about the obesity epidemic ravaging the U.S., in which Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, obesity medicine physician-scientist and associate professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, explained why common beliefs about obesity are wrong.

“The number one cause of obesity is genetics,” she said. “That means if you are born to parents that have obesity you have a 50 to 85% likelihood of having the disease yourself even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management and stress management.”

Li also discussed Ozempic and Wegovy, the weight-loss drugs at the center of the latest weight-loss craze.

“So the message from the mainstream media is pretty simple,” Li said. “Obesity is a disease, take a drug.” But that’s not the whole story, he said.

Obesity in the U.S. has gone from “almost nonexistent” in the 1950s to a projected 50% of the population by 2030. So, “unless the human race experienced some kind of quantum leap in genetics, there must be something else we’re doing that is destroying our metabolic health,” Li said.

Drawing on recent work by pharma consultant-turned-whistleblower Calley Means, Li pointed to two major issues in the U.S. food system — too much sugar and a lack of fiber.

The average child eats 100 times more sugar — which is more addictive than cocaine — per day today than 100 years ago — and the sugar hides in processed foods, Li said.

Knowing that sugar is addictive creates an incentive for processed food producers to keep adding more of it to our food.

Li told viewers:

“If you are a food industry executive — bonus is on the line, shareholders demanding astronomical growth quarter after quarter — what do you do to get a leg up on your competitor?

“Well, you add sugar to your products to make them more addictive so people buy yours and not your competitors’ and then they try to one-up you and all of a sudden sugar is everywhere.”

Fiber, which according to the Mayo Clinic helps “maintain a healthy weight and lowers your risk of diabetes, heart disease and some types of cancer” has almost completely disappeared in a lot of our most popular food products.

In fact, Li said, according to the National Institutes of Health, only 5% of people consume the recommended daily target of fiber.

Li quoted Nicole Avena, Ph.D., who told Newsweek that many ultra-processed foods are “almost pre-chewed” for us:

“They melt in your mouth immediately. There’s no protein. There’s no water. There’s no fiber slowing them down. It’s going to hit your taste buds and light up your reward and motivation centers of the brain immediately. Then there’s a secondary hit of dopamine when it gets absorbed into the body.”

Li said, “These food companies have morphed into narcotics laboratories. They’ve found a way to hack our brains and make a killing both figuratively and literally.”

The healthcare system, he said, then comes in as a hero to treat these illnesses and makes skyrocketing profits doing so. Li cited Means to say that the healthcare system doesn’t focus on health or prevention. It only makes money when people are sick.

“Every single institution is incentivized for more Americans to be sicker for longer periods of time,” Li said.

FAIR reported that every doctor interviewed by “60 Minutes” for its segment on obesity had received money from Novo Nordisk, maker of the drugs effectively being advertised on the show.

None of the doctors mentioned the serious side effects associated with the drugs, Novo Nordisk’s massive profits from the drugs or the lobbying the drugmaker is doing to get insurance to pay for weight-loss drugs.

This is how the “obesity industrial complex” works, Li said:

“The food industry makes billions of dollars selling food that’s known to be toxic and poisonous, making millions of Americans sick in the process. The healthcare industry in this case gets to play hero while also pocketing billions of dollars selling a supposed miracle drug to millions of adults and children.

“Both of these industries have worked out a little deal with the federal government, Congress with lobbying money with funding for the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] so that they can rewrite science and continue to sell food that is known to be toxic and poisonous.”

But, he said, despite the fact that the entire system is organized to profit from making people sick, there are some “no-brainer” solutions Means proposed that Li puts forward.

First, the FDA ought to revise the “recommended” added sugar in children’s diet per day from 50 grams, based on a 2,000-calorie diet, to zero.

Second, he said, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as “food stamps,” functions as a subsidy to the processed food industry because most SNAP benefits are expended on cheap, processed food. Reforming that program, he said, could end those subsidies.

Li concluded by asking the audience:

“All the technological advancements in public policy decisions of the last half century, have they contributed to promoting a longer and healthier life? Or a longer and sicker life?”

Watch here:

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/big-food-pharma-media-obesity-industrial-complex/

RFK Jr Slams ‘Political Weaponization’ of FBI to Destroy a Sitting President

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Shannon Finney/Getty Images

By Steve Watson

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has charged that a “matrix of lies” was used by a “weaponized” FBI in an attempt “to destroy a sitting president.”

RFK Jr. was responding to journalist Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Durham report, which effectively exonerated President Trump once and for all from bogus charges of Russian collusion, concluding that the FBI had no grounds at all to open an investigation.

“This is no partisan skirmish,” Kennedy tweeted, adding “It is about the political weaponization of the FBI to destroy a candidate and then a sitting President. It’s about a matrix of lies so elaborate as to make a mockery of the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry.”

Kennedy also got the knives out for the media for being complicit in perpetuating the Russian collusion nonsense for years.

“Maybe most alarming of all, the Durham investigation reveals the abject complicity of the mainstream press, which has yet to admit they were taken in by the big lie, propagated it, and now continues to permit those lies to stand as truth,” Kennedy stated.

[…]

Via https://summit.news/2023/05/23/rfk-jr-slams-political-weaponization-of-the-fbi-to-destroy-a-sitting-president/

 

Criminal Coverup? New Evidence FDA, CDC Hid Early Data on Myocarditis

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covid vaccine myocarditis safety signal feature
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

New evidence suggests the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Food and Drug Administration may have violated the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act when they withheld knowledge about myocarditis safety signals from the public and from COVID-19 vaccine fact sheets.

According to Dr. Meryl Nass, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) knew about the myocarditis safety signal in February 2021, but “hid it until they got the vaccine authorized for 12-15-year-olds in May 2021,” and then “kept pushing” the vaccine on the highest-risk groups.”

Nass said the new evidence suggests the CDC and FDA may have violated the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) when they withheld knowledge about myocarditis safety signals from the public and from fact sheets included with the COVID-19 vaccines.

The new evidence includes warnings the FDA received from multiple sources, including the Israeli Ministry of Health at least as early as February 2021.

Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory committee, this week discussed the new revelations in two Substack posts and on CHD.TV.

In an interview with The Defender, Nass said the newly discovered revelations “provide clear evidence that the agencies knew of the connection and kept it under wraps, and did not inform their advisory committees till after the vaccine was approved for the teens.”

[…]

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., chief scientific officer for CHD and co-author of the October 2022 study that first revealed the CDC’s and FDA’s knowledge of the myocarditis safety signal in February 2021, said the new revelations suggest the actions of the two agencies were “criminal.”

[…]

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, an outspoken critic of COVID-19 vaccines, characterized the delayed acknowledgment of myocarditis safety signals by the CDC and FDA as “astounding” and referenced the growing numbers of athletes affected by the condition after their vaccination.

McCullough told The Defender:

[…]

By April 23, 2021, VAERS data showed the discerned level of myocarditis in young men following COVID-19 vaccination had increased to an extreme statistical level, indicating a very low likelihood that the connection between the level of myocarditis cases in this population and COVID-19 vaccination was attributable to chance.

Despite this safety signal, the FDA on May 10, 2021, expanded the EUA of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use in people as young as 12 years old, and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to recommend that all persons 12 or older get the vaccine.

According to researchers at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections or may result directly from a toxic effect such as a toxin or a virus. “More commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage.”

Severe myocarditis can permanently damage the heart muscle, possibly causing heart failure.

Contractor alerted FDA, CDC to safety signal in February 2021

In the first of her two Substack posts, Nass wrote, “I was told that the VAERS contractor for CDC and FDA (Oracle had the contract) told the agencies there was a myocarditis adverse event signal in February 2021. This was 2 months after the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were authorized.”

Nass referenced previous revelations by Dr. Robert Malone. Speaking at the Global COVID Summit on May 11, 2022, Malone said he had been “very actively engaged” with senior FDA personnel and William DuMouchel, Ph.D., chief statistical scientist for Oracle Health Sciences, when the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out.

“We were talking by Zoom on a weekly or twice a week basis,” Malone said. “This is the group that first discovered the signal of the cardiotoxicity” and “absolutely did know” of such adverse events — “and did not acknowledge it.”

Nass also referred to a June 23, 2021, ACIP meeting, where during a presentation on myocarditis and pericarditis, the presenter acknowledged that in over 80% of instances, myocarditis appeared within four days of the second COVID-19 vaccine dose.

And she shared a letter that came into her possession, sent by the Israeli Ministry of Health to the European Medicines Agency on Feb. 28, 2021, “investigating a safety signal of myocarditis/peri-myocarditis in younger population (16-30 years old) following administration of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.”

Data provided by the CDC in February following a Freedom of Information Act request by CHD showed that on Feb. 28, 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health also contacted the CDC with a similar request.

[.]

According to the letter, Israeli health officials had received reports of approximately 40 such cases of myocarditis and/or pericarditis.

“Israeli media were all over the story” by April 2021, Nass said, with estimates reported at the time that “young men had a 25 times elevated risk of myocarditis after the shots.” But despite some coverage in international media, such as Reuters, “somehow the story never got legs” in the U.S.

But according to Nass, “The CDC and FDA … managed to keep the story under wraps, denying any vaccine problems at an advisory committee meeting.” This continued until the FDA’s May 10, 2021, granting of EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for adolescents.

It took an additional six weeks for public health agencies to acknowledge the myocarditis safety signal.

 

[…]CDC data full of discrepancies

In her analysis of the June 23, 2021 ACIP meeting, Nass referenced a presentation by the CDC’s Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, showing that as of June 11, 2021, over two million males between the ages of 12 and 17 had received two doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, with 128 “observed” cases of myocarditis identified in this population.

According to Nass, the reason such a relatively low number of myocarditis cases was observed at this time in this population was that COVID-19 vaccines had been authorized for 12-15-year-olds for only 32 days before the data cutoff — and in those 32 days, adolescents would have had to receive both doses, develop myocarditis symptoms and have filed, or had someone file on their behalf, a VAERS report.

[…]

She also referenced a separate June 10, 2021, talk by Shimabukuro to the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee (VRBPAC), where preliminary safety data — including myocarditis cases recorded through May 31, 2021 — from VAERS, V-Safe and VSD (Vaccine Safety Datalink) were discussed.

[…]

Nevertheless, “people under age 25 comprised only 8.8% of the second doses received, but were 52.5% of the myocarditis cases reported,” Nass said, adding that this age group was six times more likely to be diagnosed with myocarditis than the overall population.

[…]

Another potential discrepancy from the data presented at the June 10, 2021, meeting pertained to adverse events reported within 21 days of either dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

According to Nass, the data presented indicated that all of the “prespecified outcome events” — as the adverse events were referred to — were “unassociated statistically with COVID vaccines.”

[…]

Nass suggested that such an outcome was not possible. According to Nass, the data presented at the meeting indicated that “people given other vaccines were more likely to get myocarditis than those who got a COVID vaccine.”

However, Nass noted that “the only other vaccines that commonly cause myocarditis are smallpox and monkeypox, and neither was being given to civilians at the time.”

Another possible discrepancy from the June 10, 2021, meeting pertained to statistics presented that showed “only 22 cases of diagnosed myocarditis in 16-39 year old enrollees in the VSD. Eighteen occurred after the second dose. Fourteen were in those who received Moderna.”

According to Nass, this data was “strange,” because “Even though 11 episodes of myocarditis occurred after the second Moderna dose, there is a claim that the adjusted rate ratio (ARR) is ‘non-estimable.’ Yet Dr. Shimabukuro estimated the ARR for Pfizer’s first dose when there was only one myocarditis case.”

[…].”

Nass also noted that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the parent agency of both the CDC and the FDA, holds patents in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Even with such potential discrepancies in the data, Nass wrote that the information presented at the June 10, 2021, VRBPAC meeting made it “clear that even by May 29, the second dose caused over five times as many myocarditis cases as the first dose. For both brands,” adding that “This cannot be a random event.”

In Hooker and Jablonowski’s October 2022 study, VAERS data was referenced, which showed 24,371 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis between Dec. 14, 2020, and Oct. 14, 2022. Of these, 1,333 reports occurred among 12- to 17-year-olds.

This was despite the fact that the CDC uses a narrowed case definition of “myocarditis” that excludes cases of cardiac arrest, ischemic strokes and deaths due to heart problems that occur before one has the chance to go to the emergency department.

VAERS has historically been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

‘I would call it a criminal coverup’

According to Nass, “the CDC worked to cover its derriere regarding the myocarditis ‘signal’ — I would call it a criminal coverup — regarding the data it was sitting on, and other data it was misrepresenting.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/fda-cdc-covid-vaccine-myocarditis-safety-signal/

 

 

Ending the Guantanamo Nightmare

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By Cesar Chelala

Legend has it that on April 30, 1494, Christopher Columbus arrived to the Guantanamo Bay area and spent the night there. Columbus probably didn’t dream that that area was going to be a subject of acrimonious debate centuries later. And the debate has not ceased, prompting calls for closing the facility. More appropriately, it should now be returned to its original owners, the Cuban people.Guantanamo’s contentious history is what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis found, to his chagrin, when he was questioned by Mansoor Adayfi, a former detainee at the Guantanamo prison, at the Museum of Tolerance in West Jerusalem in late April. He angrily denied Adayfi’s accusation that he watched unperturbed as Adayfi was forced fed to break his hunger strike in 2006. Two other former detainees, as well as defense lawyers and officials at the base, confirmed Adayfi’s claim.

Although DeSantis initially said that he advised the base authorities in favor of the force-feeding program, he later retracted his statement. That three former detainees at the facility question DeSantis behavior, is a serious accusation that should be considered in discussions about his qualifications as presidential candidate.

The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, colloquially called GTMO by members of the U.S. military, has a complex history. It is located on 45 square miles of land and water on the shore of Guantanamo Bay, at the southeastern end of Cuba. It is the oldest U.S. naval base in the world, and has been leased since 1903 as a coaling station and naval base. Initially the lease was $2,000 in gold per year. This was amended in 1974 to $4,085.

After the Spanish-American war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Spain formally relinquished control of Cuba. American officials denied Cuba a seat at the Paris peace conference.

In 1901, the U.S. government passed the Platt Amendment, part of an Army Appropriations Bill. In its section VII it read, “That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.”

After the Platt Amendment was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution, Gen. Leonard Wood, named by President William McKinley to be Cuba’s military governor, told President Theodore Roosevelt, “There is, of course, little or no real independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment.” During the invasion of Cuba carried out by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961 with the support of the U.S., Washington concentrated troops and weapons in Guantanamo.

In the last two decades of the 20th century the base was also used to house Cuban and Haitian refugees fleeing their country who were intercepted on the high seas. Since Jan. 11, 2002, the base has housed the Guantanamo detention center, where some 780 Muslims, captured during the U.S. invasion to Afghanistan, have been detained and tortured. As of February 2023, 31 detainees remain imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. These are not the conditions under which the leased was signed.

Several human rights organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, as well as the United Nations have condemned the treatment of inmates at Guantanamo, several of whom have committed suicide rather than accept the conditions at the detention camp.

Since 1959, the Cuban Government has stated its desire to end the lease on Guantánamo, a request that the U.S. has systematically refused. The Cuban government insists that the lease conditions were imposed under duress, since the treaty was imposed on the Cuban National Assembly as a pre-condition for limited Cuban independence. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, an American lawyer and professor of international law, notes that article 52 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states, “A treaty is void if its conclusion has been procured by the threat or use of force in violation of principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.”

Legal and ethical arguments favor the return of Guantanamo to Cuba. The world is exhausted by infamous images of cruelty and violence. What are needed instead are examples of civility and intelligence that show the kindness of the human spirit. Returning Guantanamo to Cuba, a long-delayed measure that would bring a worldwide wave of goodwill, would be a step in the right direction.

Via https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57569.htm

Fluoride: The New Lead!

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Lead Industry’s Denial Tactics Now Used by Dental Interests

By: Chris Neurath, FAN Science Director

Highlights: • Similar loss of IQ from fluoride as from lead • IQ loss seen at doses from fluoridated water • Same industry denials, personal attacks on scientists • Industry tactic: blaming the victim • Fluoride is the new lead, but worse

The National Toxicology Program (NTP) report on the neurotoxicity of fluoride confirms what experts have long been suggesting: that fluoride is the new lead in its ability to lower IQ in children. Over the past five years, experts in toxicology and epidemiology have equated the harm to developing brains from fluoride to that from lead.

NTP Final Report Confirms Similar Loss Of IQ From Fluoride As From Lead

The NTP’s final report on fluoride neurotoxicity supports these experts’ conclusions. NTP found an average loss of 7 IQ points in 55 studies that compared child IQ of a higher fluoride group to that of a lower fluoride group. NTP also conducted a so-called dose-response meta-analysis to look at the relationship between fluoride dose and IQ loss by combining results from many studies at different exposure levels. They found that as water fluoride concentrations rose from 0.0 to 1.5 mg/L (milligrams per liter, equivalent to parts per million or ppm), the average IQ dropped about 6 IQ points. Artificial fluoridation is generally at a concentration of 0.7 mg/L water fluoride, squarely in this range. The loss of IQ at 0.7 mg/L is predicted to be about 3 IQ points.

NTP Finds Loss Of IQ At Doses From Fluoridated Water

The dose-response curve calculated by NTP, which shows how IQ drops as fluoride exposure increases, is shown in their eFigure 17, reproduced here:

Chart
The graph shows no safe threshold and the slope of the solid line representing the relationship between exposure and loss of IQ is actually steepest in the low exposure range directly applicable to artificially fluoridated water. In the NTP’s own words: “there was no obvious threshold as illustrated by [eFigure 17]”. The relationship between fluoride and IQ loss can be compared directly to that between lead and IQ as shown in the right-hand graph from a 2005 paper that pooled data from the 7 strongest studies [Lanphear 2005]:
Charts

The paper and this Lead-IQ graph were largely responsible for the CDC halving its level of concern for child blood lead from 10 to 5 ug/dL (micrograms per deciliter), and for the EPA to declare there was no safe level of lead exposure. But for the strikingly similar fluoride dose-response graph in the NTP report, the fluoridation defenders at CDC deny relevance to artificial fluoridation. The EPA is also beholden to the dental lobby and hired chemical industry consultants to fight against a lawsuit which would require EPA to protect children from loss of IQ from fluoridation.

Experts: Fluoride’s IQ Deficits “On Par With Lead”

Editors from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) described the IQ drop of -4.5 IQ points in one study [Christakis & Rivera 2019]: “An effect size which is sizable – on par with lead.” David Bellinger, author of over 400 epidemiology papers on neurotoxic chemicals including over 100 on lead, said [NPR 2019]: “It’s actually very similar to the effect size that’s seen with childhood exposure to lead.”

Christine Till, leader of a research team that has published rigorous studies of fluoride neurotoxicity funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) [Canada CTV 2019]: “4.5 points is a dramatic loss of IQ, comparable to what you’d see with lead exposure.”

And [Farmus 2021]: “A 2- to 4-point decrement in PIQ [Performance IQ] may seem like a small difference at the individual level. However, a small shift in the mean of IQ scores at the population level translates to millions of lost IQ points given the ubiquity of fluoride exposure.” (emphasis added)

Philippe Grandjean, editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Health, and author of over 500 peer-reviewed papers on toxicity of fluoride, lead, mercury, perfluorinated compounds (like PFAS), and other chemicals [Grandjean 2013 book & website]: “Fluoride seems to fit in with lead, mercury and other poisons that cause chemical brain drain.”

Dental Groups Use Same Tactics As Lead Industry Used To Defend Lead Fluoridation advocates, mostly dentists, have been falsely claiming the NTP review did not find evidence of neurotoxicity below 1.5 mg/L water fluoride, or that the evidence below 1.5 mg/L is unclear. Some have even claimed the NTP found a safe threshold at 1.5 mg/L water fluoride. Some fluoridation advocates go so far as to falsely assert there is no evidence fluoride is neurotoxic at any level, or that the only studies finding adverse effects are at levels “far higher” than pregnant mothers and children would get from fluoridated water. Similar dismissals were made by the lead industry about what was called “low-level” lead exposures more than 30 years ago. The amount and quality of evidence available today showing fluoride causes IQ loss can be compared with what was available for “low-level” lead in 1990.

At that time, a review and meta-analysis by Herbert Needleman, groundbreaking medical researcher in childhood lead poisoning, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) [Needleman 1990]. There were only 12 human studies considered high-quality. It is worth noting that none were of designs considered as high quality as are available now with longitudinal cohort studies of fluoride.

Furthermore, the lead studies were in populations with lead levels from 2x to 4x higher than the average childhood lead level at the time and up to 30x higher than average child blood lead levels today. The study children mostly had 30-60 ug/dL blood lead, whereas the average at the time was 15 ug/dL.

Today the average child blood lead is down to 1 ug/dL because of the banning of lead paint and gasoline. Those bans were largely a result of Needleman’s research and his meta-analysis. A typical loss of IQ in the higher-lead-exposure groups compared with the lower-exposure groups was about 4 IQ points [Needleman 1979a]. Compare that to the 7 IQ point loss from fluoride found in the NTP’s meta-analysis. The fluoride studies evaluated by NTP today show greater loss of IQ from a stronger body of evidence than was available for lead at the time of Needleman’s 1990 meta-analysis.

Shoot The Messenger

There was heated controversy at the time over Needleman’s findings on low-level lead and IQ, with the lead industry making many of the same arguments now being made by dental interests with fluoride [Needleman 1979b letters, Needleman 1982, Needleman 2004]. There were even scurrilous personal attacks against Needleman claiming scientific misconduct, but he was always vindicated [Bill Moyers 2002 video, Denworth 2008, Markowitz 2013].

That same lead industry tactic has now been used by dental interests against scientists who have conducted the most rigorous fluoride-IQ studies. But the personal attacks today are worse. With lead, the claims of scientific misconduct were against a single researcher, Needleman. With fluoride, the dental advocates lodged formal complaints of scientific misconduct against all nine members of a research team at five different universities.

All five universities completely exonerated the scientists, but their work was severely disrupted by the need to defend themselves against the false accusations, on top of the personal stress that accompanies charges that can wreck a scientific career. The fluoridation advocates that filed the complaints had been advised by their own legal counsel that the accusations were false, yet they filed them anyway.

 Via
https://www.garymoller.com/post/fluoride-the-new-lead/
 
 

5 States Move to Outlaw or Label Meat from mRNA-Injected Livestock

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Fact checkers admit pigs are already receiving vaccines using “RNA particle technology”

Arizona, Tennessee, Idaho, Missouri and North Dakota have all introduced legislation either banning or requiring labeling of meat from animals that have received mRNA vaccines or “gene therapy.”

You may have gone to great lengths to avoid being injected with Covid vaccines, in which the new mRNA technology made its debut, and now be consuming pork from pigs injected with the same gene-altering technology.

In a “fact-checking” article, the Associated Press inadvertently admits that you may already be eating pork from pigs injected with RNA vaccines. The article starts by discrediting the straw-man “claim” that “farmers and ranchers are REQUIRED to inject livestock with mRNA vaccines,” and then toward the bottom admits pigs have been receiving vaccines using “RNA particle technology” for “several years.”

And, according to this study, mRNA-lipid nanoparticle vaccines are in the works for chickens.

The strongest bills, in Idaho and North Dakota, would criminalize administering mRNA vaccines to livestock and humans!

The Arizona, Tennessee and Missouri bills would require “conspicuous” or “easy-to-read” labeling of all meat derived from livestock given mRNA vaccines. The Arizona bill also prohibits mRNA-treated meat from being labeled “organic.”

“We label everything around the world,” said Missouri state Rep. Holly Jones. “We label non-GMO. We label GMO. We label grass-fed. We label no antibiotics used. We label manufactured in a plant that has nuts.”

“We should label anything that has not been proven safe and effective. As we’ve seen with the COVID vaccines, they’re neither safe nor effective. Even the CDC has come out with that.”

The Missouri bill would require labeling of any product created to act as a potential gene therapy or that could “otherwise possibly impact, alter, or introduce genetic material or a genetic change into the user of the product.”

[…]

Via https://returntonow.net/2023/05/10/states-ban-mrna-meat/

Celtic Music and Dance

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Carynx

Episode 22 Celtic Music and Dance

The Celtic World

Dr Jennifer Paxton (2018)

Film Review

This is one of Paxton’s best lectures and includes numerous audio clips of Celtic music, as well as brief videos of Irish dancing. She asserts music and dance are the most important living Celtic influence today. Musicians had a very high honor price* in Celtic history. A harpist was worth slightly less than a poet, on a par with physicians, smiths and other skilled craftsmen.

English invaders feared Irish bards owing to their biting satire with the potential to charm English settlers into wicked Irish ways. Although it was against the law, English settlers  continued employing Irish minstrels throughout the Middle Ages.

The oldest Celtic instrument, the Carnyx, the horn Celtic warriors sounded in battle,  vanished during the late Roman period. Celtic lyres, which are found on old Gaulish coins, survived much longer.

Ireland

Medieval Irish instruments included the harp, the tiompan (a hand drum), the Irish fiddle, the uillean pipes (which were played in Eurasia in 1000 BC and were possibly brought to Ireland by the Romans.

During the 17th century, a Scottish drum, the bodran, replaced the tiopan in Ireland. In the 8th century, the Irish fiddle died out, to be replaced by the Europeans violin in the 18th century in both Irish and Scottish music.

The Irish added the tin/penny whistle (which was mass produced in Manchester) and the accordion/concertina in the 19th century. In the 20th century they added the banjo, bouzouki and guitar.

Is The Tin Whistle A Real Instrument? – Sound Adventurer – Exploring the World of Music and Sound

The Irish ballad (sung in English) developed in the 19th century, based on bardic tradition. Ireland also has a rich tradition of political songs, both nationalist and unionist. Ireland and Scotland also have a tradition of lilting, singing nonsense syllables to a melody, often to accompany dancers.

Irish immigrants who settled in Appalachia gave birth to the bluegrass and country music tradition, and Irish immigrants in Quebec gave birth to Quebecois, a fusion of French and Celtic music.

19th century folklorist Francis Child collected a number of Irish songs found on both sides of the Atlantic, with Barbara Allan and The Twa Sisters the most famous.

Scotland

Medieval Scottish instruments included the harp, the bodran (a primitive drum) and the Crwth, a lyre played with a bow.

Modern highland bagpipes replaced uilleann pipes in Scotland in the 16th century and took off in a big way as highlanders played them (in place of the carnyx) as they marched into battle. They eventually spread to Ireland and to America, where Irish immigrants introduced them to local police and fire departments.

Wales

Medieval Welsh instruments included the harp, the crwth and the culean pipes. The appearance of Wales’ choral music tradition coincides with the 18th century Methodist revival.

Brittany, Galacia and Cape Breton

As members of the modern pan-Celtic movement, Brittany (in France), Galicia and Astaurius (in Spain) and Cape Breton (in maritime Canada) also value traditional Celtic music.

Celtic Dancing

There’s no Gaelic word for dancing, but it begins to be mentioned in the 16th century as popular among poorer agricultural classes.

  • Irish jig – borrowed from England in the 19th century
  • Reel – originated in Scotland and quickly taken up in Ireland
  • Strathsprey – slow and stately Scottish folk dance
  • Step dancing (typical of Ireland not Scotland) – associated with rigid posture of upper body.

The theatrical shows River Dance and Lord of the Dance played a big role in popularizing step dancing. Prior to the 20th century, the Catholic church was heavily critical of Irish dance, but the Gaelic League (see last post) revived it.

25 Years And Still Going Strong- Riverdance Still Impresses With Ease - TwinCitiesMedia.net

*See Social Structure in Medieval Ireland

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

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5701024/5701070

Toxic Contagion – Funds, Food and Pharma

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Colin Todhunter

In 2014, the organisation GRAIN revealed that small farms produce most of the world’s food in its report Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland.

The report Small-scale Farmers and Peasants Still Feed the World (ETC Group, 2022) confirmed this.

Small farmers produce up to 80% of the food in the non-industrialised countries. However, they are currently squeezed onto less than a quarter of the world’s farmland. The period 1974-2014 saw 140 million hectares – more than all the farmland in China – being taken over for soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane plantations.

GRAIN noted that the concentration of fertile agricultural land in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry every day. While industrial farms have enormous power, influence and resources, GRAIN’s data showed that small farms almost everywhere outperform big farms in terms of productivity.

In the same year, policy think tank the Oakland Institute released a report stating that the first years of the 21 century will be remembered for a global land rush of nearly unprecedented scale. An estimated 500 million acres, an area eight times the size of Britain, were reported bought or leased across the developing world between 2000 and 2011, often at the expense of local food security and land rights.

Institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity, pension funds and university endowments, were eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.

This trend was not confined to buying up agricultural land in low-income countries. Oakland Institute’s Anuradha Mittal argued that there was a new rush for US farmland. One industry leader estimated that $10 billion in institutional capital was looking for access to this land in the US.

Although investors believed that there is roughly $1.8 trillion worth of farmland across the US, of this between $300 billion and $500 billion (2014 figures) is considered to be of “institutional quality” – a combination of factors relating to size, water access, soil quality and location that determine the investment appeal of a property.

In 2014, Mittal said that if action is not taken, then a perfect storm of global and national trends could converge to permanently shift farm ownership from family businesses to institutional investors and other consolidated corporate operations.

Why this matters

Peasant/smallholder agriculture prioritises food production for local and national markets as well as for farmers’ own families, whereas corporations take over fertile land and prioritise commodities or export crops for profit and markets far away that tend to cater for the needs of more affluent sections of the global population.

In 2013, a UN report stated that farming in rich and poor nations alike should shift from monocultures towards greater varieties of crops, reduced use of fertilisers and other inputs, increased support for small-scale farmers and more locally focused production and consumption of food. The report stated that monoculture and industrial farming methods were not providing sufficient affordable food where it is needed.

In September 2020, however, GRAIN showed an acceleration of the trend that it had warned of six years earlier: institutional investments via private equity funds being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into industrial-scale concerns. One of the firms spearheading this is the investment asset management firm BlackRock, which exists to put its funds to work to make money for its clients.

BlackRock holds shares in a number of the world’s largest food companies, including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Walmart, Danone and Kraft Heinz and also has significant shares in most of the top publicly traded food and agriculture firms: those which focus on providing inputs (seeds, chemicals, fertilisers) and farm equipment as well as agricultural trading companies, such as Deere, Bunge, ADM and Tyson (based on BlackRock’s own data from 2018).

Together, the world’s top five asset managers – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group – own around 10–30% of the shares of the top firms in the agrifood sector.

The article Who is Driving the Destructive Industrial Agriculture Model? (2022) by Frederic Mousseau of the Oakland Institute showed that BlackRock and Vanguard are by far the biggest shareholders in eight of the largest pesticides and fertiliser companies: Yara, CF Industries Holdings K+S Aktiengesellschaft, Nutrien, The Mosaic Company, Corteva and Bayer.

These companies’ profits were projected to double, from US$19 billion in 2021 to $38 billion in 2022, and will continue to grow as long as the industrial agriculture production model on which they rely keeps expanding. Other major shareholders include investment firms, banks and pension funds from Europe and North America.

Through their capital injections, BlackRock et al fuel and make huge profits from a globalised food system that has been responsible for eradicating indigenous systems of production, expropriating seeds, land and knowledge, impoverishing, displacing or proletarianizing farmers and destroying rural communities and cultures. This has resulted in poor-quality food and illness, human rights abuses and ecological destruction.

Systemic compulsion

Post-1945, the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan bank with the World Bank helped roll out what has become the prevailing modern-day agrifood system under the guise of a supposedly ‘miraculous’ corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive Green Revolution (its much-heralded but seldom challenged ‘miracles’ of increased food production are nothing of the sort; for instance, see the What the Green Revolution Did for India and New Histories of the Green Revolution).

Ever since, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO have helped consolidate an export-oriented industrial agriculture based on Green Revolution thinking and practices. A model that uses loan conditionalities to compel nations to ‘structurally adjust’ their economies and sacrifice food self-sufficiency.

Countries are placed on commodity crop production treadmills to earn foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food on the global market (benefitting global commodity traders like Cargill, which helped write the WTO trade regime – the Agreement on Agriculture), entrenching the need to increase cash crop cultivation for exports.

Today, investment financing is helping to drive and further embed this system of corporate dependency worldwide. BlackRock is ideally positioned to create the political and legislative framework to maintain this system and increase the returns from its investments in the agrifood sector.

[…]

Via https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/dollarbills-blackrock-vanguard.jpg?x39625

Bill Gates ‘Blackmailed’ By Jeffrey Epstein Over Affair With Russian Bridge Player

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Mila Antonova, screenshot (YouTube)

 

Zero Hedge

Remember when Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he ‘only had dinner’ with Jeffrey Epstein?

Turns out (ok, we’ve known for a while) that’s a total lie – as the two also had a Russian bridge player in common, Mila Antonova.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Gates met Antonova in 2010 at a bridge competition, leading to an affair. Three years later, after Gates associate Boris Nikolic referred her to Jeffrey Epstein to help raise $500K for an online bridge business which failed to pan out, Epstein paid for her to attend coding classes.

In 2014, Antonova “stayed briefly at an apartment in New York City provided by Epstein” but claims not to have met with the guy who paid for her education.

Then in 2017, the pedophile financier allegedly blackmailed Gates over the affair – demanding in an email that the Microsoft co-founder to reimburse him for Antonova’s education. Given the de minimis amount involved for both men, Gates interpreted this 2017 email as threat to expose his 2010 affair.

So, poor boner-killer Bill was actually an Epstein victim all along, you see, and everyone interviewed for the report says they knew nothing about Epstein’s pedophile sex-trafficking operation and was ‘disgusted with what he did,’ etc.

But in March of 2013, long before the two had thrown out their BFF bracelets, they were hanging out at the house of Thorbjørn Jagland, then chair of the Nobel Peace Prize committee where the pair allegedly discussed ” the security situation in Afghanistan as part of Mr. Gates’ work on polio eradication,” according to a spokeswoman for the billionaire. We’re sure.

While he was working on the charitable fund, Epstein met in 2013 with Gates and Norwegian officials who were visitors to Epstein’s townhouse. Epstein told one former Gates Foundation employee that he knew the Norwegians, and could help Gates win a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to eradicate polio.

Here’s what else is contained in the report (some known, some unknown).

  • “Starting in 2011, Gates had more than a half dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein, including dinners at Epstein’s New York townhouse, documents show. “
  • Gates flew on Epstein’s ‘lolita express’ plane from New Jersey to Florida in March, 2013. “That same month the two men met in France with an official on the Nobel Peace Prize committee.” (that official being its chair, Thorbjørn Jagland)

While he was working on the charitable fund, Epstein met in 2013 with Gates and Norwegian officials who were visitors to Epstein’s townhouse. Epstein told one former Gates Foundation employee that he knew the Norwegians, and could help Gates win a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to eradicate polio.

  • In 2012, Epstein pitched Gates on a failed investment in a multibillion-dollar, JPMorgan-run charitable fund with a minimum contribution of $100 million.

The deal went sideways. In messages to Jes Staley and Mary Erdoes, Epstein essentially coached the JPMorgan execs on how to pitch the fund to Gates’ team.

“In essence this [fund] will allow Bill to have access to higher quality people , investment , allocation , governance without upsetting either his marriage or the sensitvites of the current foundation employees,” Epstein wrote on Aug. 16, 2011.

The next day, Epstein wrote: “Bill is terribly frustrated. He woud! like to boost some of the things that are working without taking away from thoses that are not.”

Six weeks later on Oct. 2, Epstein sent another email to Staley and Erdoes criticizing a JPMorgan presentation. “the presentation , is not tailored to bill.. He is the only person , the only one, that counts.”

The charitable fund never got off the ground. “The firm didn’t need him as a client,” a JPMorgan spokesman said of Epstein. “The firm didn’t need him for introductions. Knowing what we know today, we wish we had never done business with him.” A spokesman for the bank said Erdoes declined to comment. A lawyer for Staley, who is no longer at JPMorgan, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Staley has previously said he regrets his friendship with Epstein. -WSJ

But – given that this deal fell through in 2012 or so, and the two were hobnobbing at the Nobel Peace Price Committee Chairman’s house in 2013, it’s obvious that the two mended fences and moved on.

[…]

Via https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bill-gates-blackmailed-jeffrey-epstein-over-affair-russian-bridge-player?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1504