Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements
The Pentagon is funding social science research to model risks of “social contagions” that could damage US strategic interests. Photograph: Jason Reed/REUTERS
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model “of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions.” The project will determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagians by studying their “digital traces” in the cases of “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey.”
Twitter posts and conversations will be examined “to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised.”
Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington “seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate,” along with their “characteristics and consequences.” The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on “large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity,” and will cover 58 countries in total.
Last year, the DoD’s Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine ‘Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?’ which, however, conflates peaceful activists with “supporters of political violence” who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on “armed militancy” themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:
“In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence.”
The project’s 14 case studies each “involve extensive interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence.”
I contacted the project’s principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and which “parties and NGOs” were being investigated – but received no response.
Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to answer a series of similar questions I put to them, including asking how “radical causes” promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential national security threat of interest to the DoD.
Among my questions, I asked:
“Does the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism in different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why? Activism, protest, ‘political movements’ and of course NGOs are a vital element of a healthy civil society and democracy – why is it that the DoD is funding research to investigate such issues?”
Minerva’s programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said “I appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the opportunity to clarify” before promising a more detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD’s press office:
“The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of Defense’s understanding of what causes instability and insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment.”
In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.
From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.
The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD’s Human Social Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon officials said their priority was “to develop capabilities that are deliverable quickly” in the form of “models and tools that can be integrated with operations.”
Although Office of Naval Research supervisor Dr Harold Hawkins had assured the university researchers at the outset that the project was merely “a basic research effort, so we shouldn’t be concerned about doing applied stuff”, the meeting in fact showed that DoD is looking to “feed results” into “applications,” Corman said in the email. He advised his researchers to “think about shaping results, reports, etc., so they [DoD] can clearly see their application for tools that can be taken to the field.”
Many independent scholars are critical of what they see as the US government’s efforts to militarise social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US government noting that the Pentagon lacks “the kind of infrastructure for evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research” in a way that involves “rigorous, balanced and objective peer review”, calling for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The following month, the DoD signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the NSF to cooperate on the management of Minerva. In response, the AAA cautioned that although research proposals would now be evaluated by NSF’s merit-review panels. “Pentagon officials will have decision-making power in deciding who sits on the panels”:
“… there remain concerns within the discipline that research will only be funded when it supports the Pentagon’s agenda. Other critics of the programme, including the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, have raised concerns that the programme would discourage research in other important areas and undermine the role of the university as a place for independent discussion and critique of the military.”
According to Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin’s University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State, “when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project.”
Prof Price has previously exposed how the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme – designed to embed social scientists in military field operations – routinely conducted training scenarios set in regions “within the United States.”
Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios “adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq” to domestic situations “in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order.”
One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.”
James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in New York, concurs with Price’s concerns. Minerva-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the “study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements,” he said, including how “to counteract grassroots movements.”
Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.
I phoned to voice support directly to the Indigenous Climate Action group.
What a difficult decision they had! Turning down $150,000 isn’t something an organization can do every day.
These are great young people, smart, well-organized, fun, relentless, hard-working, and effective. Well-networked. They’ve been activists for years, are already seasoned through experience.
I am definitely making a donation. I hope their reward for taking the high ground will be a rash of support and donations that will be more than $150,000!
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Thanks to Elaine:
Why our developing organization decided to turn down a $150,000 cash prize – Dec. 6, 2017
Indigenous Climate Action rejects $150,000 award from Aviva Canada due to moral conflict with Aviva investments
Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), Treaty No. 6 – Early last week Indigenous Climate Action (ICA), an Indigenous-led climate justice project, received news they had won the Aviva Canada Community Legacy Award – a $150,000 award through the Aviva Community Fund competition. However, in a major turn of events, ICA made an unconventional decision to reject the award and cash prize because of a ‘direct contradiction’ between Aviva’s financial relationship with oil and gas projects and ICA’s vision, mission, and values.
Shortly after receiving news they were winners in the competition, ICA received information that Aviva plc, Aviva Canada’s parent company, held major passive investments (over half a billion USD) in corporations operating in Alberta’s tar sands, including: Teck Resource Ltd (Frontier Open pit mine), Encana, Exxon, Imperial, Suncor, Chevron, Cenovus, Kinder Morgan (TransMountain pipeline), TransCanada (Keystone XL pipeline); and Enbridge (Line 3 pipeline). These investments, according to ICA, are in direct contradiction with their organizational mandate.
“We cannot in good conscience accept an award from a corporation that is financially associated with fossil fuel energy projects that violate the rights of Indigenous peoples and contribute to global climate change. Our organization is working to support Indigenous rights and address the climate crisis while Aviva is investing in corporations proposing or operating tar sands projects that threaten water, land, the climate and Indigenous rights,” stated Eriel Deranger, Executive Director of Indigenous Climate Action.
Aviva Canada and Aviva plc responded to ICA’s rejection of the award with openness and a willingness to begin discussion on divestment and how to move away from corporate investments in the tar sands. Aviva has already created the AVIVA: An Insurance Company’s Response To Climate Change (2016) and is a part of a move by the global insurance sector toward divesting from fossil fuels.
“There are other insurance companies who are taking the climate risk seriously, such as Swiss Re who recently have limited their underwriting of shale gas, tar sands and Arctic drilling projects. We want to see a major commitment from Aviva to climate action alongside their community fund and scientific research and a broader commitment to finding the mechanisms to divest from tar sands pipelines and projects. We need Aviva to look seriously into their investment in projects that are violating the rights of Indigenous Peoples, furthering the expansion of the Alberta tar sands infrastructure and pipelines which pose a major threat to the stability of the global climate,” stated Suzanne Dhaliwal, Director of the UK Tar Sands Network.
ICA and many Indigenous communities do not feel there has been true progress to ensure the inclusion and protection of the rights of Indigenous peoples in the climate and divestment discourse, resulting in continued violations of Indigenous rights.
“Aviva invests in projects that are in violation of international human rights and Indigenous rights standards. Right now my people’s traditional food source, the wild sockeye salmon and our very survival is being threatened by the Trans Mountain project, while communities at the source have already faced decades of contamination and devastation. Aviva needs to ensure they are on the right side of history and to do that, they must divest from projects that violate our rights and threaten our survival,” states Kanahus Manuel, a Secwepemc and Ktunaxa women at the helm of the Tiny House Warrior project – building tiny homes in the path of the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline.
“As a member of a community actively challenging tar sands expansion, I was shocked to learn Aviva invests in Teck Resources. Teck owns Frontier Mine — one of the largest proposed open pit tar sands mine just 16km from the boundary of a settlement near my community. I hope Aviva will take this opportunity to understand why these corporations should not be included in their investment portfolio,” added Deranger.
ICA hopes their rejection of the prize will move Aviva to step up and show real leadership to adopt policies that result in substantive change. This moment could move Aviva, and the divestment conversation, forward to recognize Indigenous rights and cease all underwriting of tar sands corporations and full divestment from fossil fuels.
“Kinder Morgan’s projects pose unacceptable risks to Tselil-Waututh’s culture, spirituality, economy and identity and denied us of our Free Prior and Informed Consent. We are working hard to restore Burrard Inlet and tar sands threatens this important work. We applaud and support ICA’s principled decision to reject this award. No amount of money can buy our consent or is worth damaging our waters, lands and people, because our spiritual reciprocal relationship with our lands and waters is unbreakable. We call on Aviva and any other investor of Kinder Morgan to divest from these projects and invest in our future.” — Rueben George, of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation Sacred Trust Initiative.
“Our organization is actively fighting TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline from crossing indigenous territories. We do this not only to protect the lands along the route but in solidarity with those struggling to protect their lands in the Tar Sands region. This fight includes divesting from TransCanada and all other fossil fuel development. We must continue to hold the line, physically and economically, against these corporations who wish to assault our Mother Earth for the benefit of the extreme energy regime. Divestment is key. Divestment is needed. We must hold the line.” — Dallas Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network
“My community has been challenging the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, working to protect our water and rights while corporations like Aviva continue to profit off projects that wreak havoc on Indigenous peoples. Corporate greenwashing in an era of extreme destruction and greed is shameful. Canada’s petro dollar plan is a shaky one, in the least, and it is time to move on. The Indigenous leaders of our time call for a higher standard. If Aviva wants to support ways to combat climate change and support Indigenous communities, they need to divest from all dirty fossil fuels now.” — Winona LaDuke, Honour the Earth
“Aviva PLC should not be invested in profiting off the climate crisis nor off of indigenous rights violations, many insurance companies are institutional shareholders of many of the world’s oil majors. Whats disturbing about Aviva and the circumstances with Indigenous Climate Action being selected for their award, is that their parent company Aviva PLC is invested in most of the major oil extraction and energy transport companies involved in Canada’s controversial tar sands development. This questionable list include Houston based pipeline company, Kinder Morgan and Canadian based mining company, Teck Frontier. Both of these companies and their proposed projects are strongly opposed by Canadian based First Nations in the courts, on the streets and out on the land.” — Clayton Thomas-Muller, 350.org
“Aviva is guilty of fueling the climate crisis and Indigenous rights abuses by investing in some of the most climate-deadly corporations of our time. To profit from investment in tar sands extraction and pipelines, then turn around and donate funds to Indigenous Climate Action is a gross example of greenwashing, and it won’t be tolerated. We applaud Indigenous Climate Action for taking this bold step to challenge Aviva’s integrity, and challenge Aviva and other insurance companies and investors to divest the tar sands sector.” — Ruth Breech, Climate and Energy Senior Campaigner, Rainforest Action Network
You will handle the following in your own good way!
In “The Golden Notebook“, author Doris Lessing writes:
“The other thing taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgement. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply.
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts, sciences and trades, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.
… . these are people whose whole education has been just that – to look outside themselves for their opinions, to adapt themselves to authority figures, to ‘received opinion’ – a marvelously revealing phrase.
It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don’t believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:
‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’
… picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down – even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written work, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written – and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this – are missing what is before their eyes. For storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught – you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people.’
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I thought the above might be helpful in understanding yourself. From my observations of the world, people are born a certain way – you don’t get to choose which way. Understand and accept and be grateful for who you are. As you probably know by now, you were not made to fit nicely into “the system”. You could say, “Why me?! Why couldn’t I have been one of those who is content with sitting in their place, doing what they are told, doing what they are expected to do?” The answer is that you are strong – physically, mentally and psychologically – for a reason. You HAVE to be those things in order to stick-handle your way through the game, one foot in the system, the other outside.
Mysticism, and reactions of readers, to the mysticism
QUOTE: P. 63 – 65 “I had experiences therethat changed my life. In time these strange things that began to happen to me when I was out on the prairie, not only in that particular field, but in others as well, began to come together for me to gradually form a shadowy but increasingly powerful whole. I was discovering something about living in Nature that I had never heard anyone speak of, or read in any books, though it might have been in some of them if I’d had the eyes to read it there.
Many of my writer friends who love to spend time in Nature have their own numinous experiences . . . (of or characteristic of a numen; supernatural; divine. having a deeply spiritual or mystical effect.) .. . . communicating with wild animals, seeing things which aren’t there in the everyday sense, learning things from people who are not present, being flooded with new understanding. I begin, despite official silence on the subject by much of religion and most scientists, to think that experiences are so widespread and frequent as to be the norm rather than the unusual. It seems inarguable to me that, as Erich Neumann wrote in “Mystical Man”, “Man is by nature a homo mysticus”.
I have said,”This is the place where words stop,” referring to that moment when, out in Nature, not shooting, collecting, studying, naming or farming, we realize that an entity is present, or that Nature is alive, even that Nature has a memory. I meant by this that suddenly there seem to be no words to describe, adequately our experiences, no familiar phrases or colloquialisms to fall back on, no single nouns or verbs which have been given over to the sole purpose of describing such awareness.
I think we have so allowed the scientific approach to the world to take over our perceptions that we are afraid to mention such experiences for fear of being laughed at or vilified. When we do, we find ourselves stammering, struggling for words, never being able to convey in language to our own satisfaction exactly what it felt like or looked like or what sensations it evoked in us. We struggle against skepticism, our own as much as anyone else’s, and in time we lapse into silence about them and a whole, valuable dimension of human experience remains unsung and unvalidated.
(RE Butala’s point: we have so allowed the scientific approach to the world to take over our perceptions – – John Ralston Saul’s tome, Voltaire’s Bastards, the Dictatorship of Reason in the West, 1992, addresses the issue. Or, his much shorter and more easily digested, “On Equlibrium“, 2001. Excerpts from it are in Understanding why we flounder, help from John Ralston Saul “On Equilibrium”.
It is hard not to be very angry with scientists for this loss. Their unshakable belief in a materialistic, purely objective world has so permeated our culture that only in religious life are we allowed the slightest latitude in the dimensions of what we might call the “real”. Scientists have specialized in narrowing experience, told us that the only truths possible are the ones they know; they have developed specialized language the rest of us don’t understand and have elevated themselves and been elevated by us, to the status of those who know, while poets visionaries and mystics have been relegated to the realm of the crazy.
We use words like “awareness”, “perception”, “sense”, or “intuition” or a “sixth sense”. They are as close as our language, as far as I know, allows us to come to describe the way in which we apprehend experience that is out of the realm of the ordinary. None of these words seem quite sufficient. And as for describing the quality of the experience, its texture, color and the accompanying emotion, the way it permeates our being and floods us with new knowledge/awareness/perception, it seems to be impossible to find the right words and a way to structure them that will make our listeners believe us.
Until one has had an experience of this sort, one cannot hear what one who has these experiences is saying. Those of us who allow these experiences room in our psyches, who do not refuse or deny them, know we are walking a narrow ledge with psychosis on one side and scientism on the other. It is a dangerous journey we gladly make, putting one foot carefully before the other, our arms out to maintain our balance, our concentration on the path absolute. The world is more wonderful than any of us have dared to guess, as all great poets have been telling us since the invention of poetry. To discover these truths we don’t need to scale Mount Everest or white-water raft the Colorado or take up skydiving. We need only go for walks.
QUOTE: Page 79 (contains references to some of the books that informed Butala’s quest to understand.
QUOTE: “I began to see, in the place of emptiness, presence. I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one, a landscape in which history, unrecorded and unremembered as it is, had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension.”
QUOTE: “If wilderness has anything to teach us, it is about our own weakness, our failure to control much less understand this earth onto which we are all born. And with this growing humility in the face of the unknown, slowly a sense of being in the presence of some great consciousness, other than one’s own, begins to grow too“
QUOTE: (I may add some more)
COMMENTS ON THE BOOK, with thanks to goodreads.com:
Amna: I appreciate her years’-dawning realization that we are completely different when shaped by urban environments than we are when we’re surrounded by nature. And I loved that she started having mystical dreams and experiences when she moved to the prairie. It was a reminder that this connection is always there, and just covered up by the busyness and noise of daily life.
Nelda: I do like some of the telling of the spiritual experiences and in no way question their validity. The attempt to, analyze, and place these experiences makes them “less than” to me.
Valerie: The cover says, “An appreticeship in Nature.” It truly was. She studied nature and awakened so much of her soul in her search. There were a number of things that were “flaky” to me, but I appreciated her thoughtful, deep study and presentation.”
Lee: Her dreams annoyed me intensely, and her constant assumption of their profound meaning left me nauseated. I cannot understand why any publisher would accept such a piece of writing and foist it on the reading public as worthy of its cost. Truly, one of the worst books I have read a part of.
Kristine: Butala had courage to write her story especially as she says we don’t really have the words to articulate this “otherness”. Especially because she went through this metamorphosis in the 1980’s and wrote the book in 1994 – was anyone else admiting to such thoughts and questions?
Stacey: I don’t typically write a book off and not finish it, but I couldn’t even get past the first chapter of this one. I just wasn’t interested in it at all.
Irene: Give yourself a gift of the amazing openness of the prairie.
Mercury detoxification should be seriously considered by anyone who has amalgam (silver) dental fillings. Amalgams fillings which have been used for about 150 years in North America are composed of an alloy of approximately 50% mercury, 35% silver, then tin, zinc, and copper. Mercury is more poisonous than lead, cadmium or arsenic. It is the most toxic non-radioactive metal known to man. Although amalgam use has declined in recent years, for many people it is the single largest source of mercury exposure.
Since 1988, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has required dentists to treat amalgam fillings that are removed as hazardous waste material. However, the various regulatory agencies as well as American Dental Association insist that putting “hazardous waste” in the mouth is safe. There is a great controversy over the dangers of mercury in your mouth. This page will give you some information about it and some ideas of what you can do for mercury detoxification and to reduce the effects of your exposure.
Quotes about Mercury and its Effects
Germany, Sweden, Austria and Denmark are moving to ban or phase out the use of amalgam. The Vancouver Sun, August 22, 1996
No government or professional agency has ever shown that mercury in dental amalgam is safe. Conversely, over 100 published scientific papers point to mercury released from amalgam fillings as a factor in chronic illnesses. Dr Zoltan Rona, MD, Health Naturally, Oct./Nov., 1995.
Mercury can damage DNA; the electricity produced from alloys can disrupt communication between cells. Mercury can induce free radical tissue damage, inhibit the activity of white blood cells, impair kidney function, and induce autoimmune diseases (MS, lupus, chronic fatigue) Dr. Zoltan Rona, MD, Health Naturally, Oct./Nov., 1995.
Symptoms of mercury vapour exposure can include: abdominal cramps, chronic constipation or diarrhea, gastrointestinal problems, irregular heart beat, pain or pressure in chest, chronic headaches, dizziness, tremors in hands, feet, lips, eyelids or tongue, ringing in ears, persistent cough, allergies, asthma, sinusitis, subnormal body temperature, anemia, joint pain and muscle weakness. Toxic Teeth, A Guide to Mercury Exposure From “Silver” Fillings by Dr Murray J. Vimy
Dentists are the third largest users of mercury on the planet and have three times the suicide rate of all professional groups. Twenty percent of dentists are on long-term disability due to mental or nervous reasons. Dental assistants and wives of dentists have offspring with higher birth defects and higher spontaneous abortion rates than any other group in the population. Murray Vimy, DMD, from a speech at the Nutritional Medicine Today Conference, May 6th, Vancouver, BC.
The World Health Organization says that from air, water and food, the average person will absorb about 2.6 micrograms of mercury a day. The average person with amalgams absorbs 3 to 17 micrograms. Murray Vimy, DMD, from a speech at the Nutritional Medicine Today Conference, May 6th, Vancouver, BC.
Dr. Murray Vimy’s and Dr Fritz Lorscheider’s three landmark studies in Calgary showed that after amalgam fillings were placed into the teeth of sheep and monkeys, mercury was absorbed into the tissue of the mouth, the jaw bone, the lung and the intestine. The main sites of accumulation of this heavy metal were the kidney and the liver. Dental Silver Amalgam Research and its Medical Implications, University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine, Dec. 1990
See a video of the emission of mercury vapor from amalgam-filled teeth:
Yikes! What Can I Do?
If you have amalgam fillings and are at all concerned about your health you should consider having them removed. Find a dentist that knows the proper protocol or you will be exposed to high levels of mercury vapor during the removal procedure. Dental work, of course, can be very expensive so if you can’t get it done or can’t in a reasonable time or even if you can there are things you can do for mercury detoxification.
Natural Agents to Remove Mercury and Counter its Effects
Cilantro, also known as Chinese parsley is a herb that can help to remove mercury, cadmium, lead and aluminum from body cells and the central nervous system. It is effective for mercury detoxification from within the cells of the body. The seed is well-known as the spice coriander but it is the leaves you want to use.
“Remarkably, without the help of any chelation agents, cilantro was able to remove the mercury in two to three weeks.” (Acupunct Electrother Res 96;21 (2): 133-60.)
I have put together a page of info on how to use cilantro including some recipes
Charcoal is a wonderful natural substance that can remove many toxins from the body.
“Charcoal is the most valuable single agent currently available for treating poisonings.” (Clinical Toxicology 3(1):1-4 March 1970)
Here is more information on charcoal. Charcoal would be an effective and inexpensive agent to use for mercury detoxification.
Clay has toxin-absorbing qualities somewhat like charcoal with the benefit that it can also supply the body with necessary minerals.
Liquid zeolite is a very effective detoxifying agent including for the detoxification of mercury and other heavy metals.
N-Acetyl-Cysteine (NAC) is a strong chelator of mercury. It is an antioxidant often found in good antioxidant formulas.
So there is some info about amalgam fillings and the dangers of mercury. Personally, I am concerned about the problem, have some fillings left to deal with myself and more mercury detoxification to do. I have even learned to like the flavor of cilantro and grow it myself.
so, I and my tax-paying buddies will pay, in all ways, for the liability of the accumulated radioactive waste AND any contamination that may result from it. There are many more than 20,000 truckloads of radioactive waste sitting in central and eastern Canada waiting to be trucked somewhere for disposal. With no place to go. A HUGE financial liability, more than thirty billions of dollars’ worth.
my financial responsibility cannot be lessened: insurance companies will not sell insurance for nuclear reactors, whether they are “Big”, or “Small”, or whether they have nice acronyms like “SMRs”.
The industry has some money set aside (because of citizen pressure) to start doing something about the accumulated waste, but not nearly enough. It’s still “tax-payers to the rescue”.
AND NOW,
CNL has sent out invitations worldwide, to the manufacturers of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) to use Chalk River, Ontario as the hub for the development and international marketing of SMR’s.
“Small” nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste.
MANY “small” reactors produce MANY “small” mounds of radioactive waste – – widely dispersed around the world.
“Small” is mere propaganda; many smalls make “BIG”.
And widely dispersed is worse than centralized. Especially in a country the size of Canada, and beyond that, internationally-marketed.
Worse: in a situation where the corporate interest is married to the Government, meaning that we’ve lost our regulatory capacity. (Not many, if any, lovers are effective at policing their bed-mates. Officialsare not supposed to sleep with people who may compromise them.)
Who are the brains behind this scheme? It is in someone’s interest; it is not in the interests of citizens. I revolt. I am tired of being fleeced.
The nuclear industry must STOP producing radioactive waste – – the Liability that it will not own.
“SMR’s” are irrational. The promoters would be highly subsidized by tax-payers. If it wasn’t so, they would not be hiding behind the skirts of a crown corporation. They would be out there, able to survive in the economy on their own, able to cover the cost of the waste they generate, sustainable. As a self-respecting commercial enterprise should be.
/Sandra Finley
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APPENDED: INFORMATION AND ACTION REQUEST
URGENT ACTION REQUEST –
BY MIDNIGHT DECEMBER 11 (MONDAY)
Please send a letter or written submission to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) at cnsc.interventions.ccsn@canada.ca, commenting on the 2018 relicensing of Chalk River Laboratories (CRL) for 10 years (until 2028). It is important to have many citizens’ voices on the record. Please send a blind copy of your letter or submission to ccnr@web.ca .
The deadline for written submissions is very soon – Monday, December 11, at midnight.
Please indicate your desire to make an oral presentation during the public hearings, to be held in Pembroke Ontario on January 24 and 25. A week or two before the hearings you can decide to come to Pembroke and make an oral intervention in person, or you can ask to make a telephone intervention, or you can withdraw your request to make an oral intervention altogether. But by indicating NOW your desire to intervene orally, you will keep all options open. We can probably arrange billeting if you decide to come to Pembroke.
Gordon Edwards
=========
IMPORTANT BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The proposed Chalk River licence does not go to Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL, the crown corporation that was in charge of Chalk River from 1952 until 2014), but to a private consortium of profit-making multinational corporations — two US companies, two UK companies, and the scandal-ridden SNC-Lavalin. [SNC-Lavalin faces fraud and corruption charges that will be heard in 2018.] This consortium operates the Chalk River labs (that still belong to AECL), and manages the radioactive and other toxic wastes (that still belong to AECL also).
In recent years AECL itself has had its staff slashed from 3400 to 40 (!!) employees. AECL had been unable to recruit a permanent president & CEO, despite years of effort, and they have not had a full roster of seven on their Board of Directors until very recently (measured in weeks). AECL is a hollowed-out shell of the corporation it used to be.
The main value of AECL is to funnel taxpayer’s money to the consortium, just under a billion dollars in EACH of the last two fiscal years.
The consortium is not only motivated, but instructed by the time-constrained contract under which it operates, to do things quickly and at minimum cost. Legally, AECL is in charge and CNL (owned by the consortium) works for them, but in reality it seems like a very slender tail trying to wag a very hefty dog. CNL = Canadian Nuclear Laboratories started out as a wholly-owned subsidiary of AECL but ownership was transferred to the consortium on November 3, 2014.
The current Chalk River licence was issued to AECL for a five year period in 2011. That licence was extended in 2016 for another two years. Next licence, to CNL, will be in 2018. Chalk River has never been issued a 10-year licence before.
Ole Hendrickson has done a careful comparison between the existing licence and the proposed licence, and he feels that there are many alarming changes that indicate less regulatory oversight, fewer requirements for reporting or for asking permission to do specified things, language that omits many of the words that imply enforcement — in short, Ole feels that the new proposed licence indicates a major step towards deregulation of the Chalk River labs, leaving the consortium free to do many of the things it wants to do without undue regulatory interference. (Ask me for a copy of his analysis and I will provide it to you.)
What the consortium wants to do is quite alarming — but their detailed plans do not enter into the licence itself. CNSC will no doubt rule that any DIRECT discussion of these plans is “out of order” in considering the Chalk River licence. However, if the terms of the licence are quite permissive and non-intrusive from a regulatory perspective, then the protection of the public and the environment may be seriously compromised as these future plans are carried out. So, indirectly, some discussion of those plans can be “inserted” into your intervention.
(1) CNL wants to build a huge 5 to 7 story mound of radioactive and other toxic wastes (including things like asbestos, heavy metals, DDT and many toxic chemicals associated with reprocessing and isotope production) less than a kilometre from the Ottawa River. Originally it was going to include everything except irradiated nuclear fuel (the high-level radioactive waste). CNL planned to include all low-level and intermediate-level waste in the mound, including materials that would require shielding to protect the workers and including very long-lived materials that would remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. Because of the outcry from the public — mostly from the Quebec side of the border — including a number of town council resolutions against the project and a good critique from the Government of Quebec — CNL has said that it will NOT put intermediate level waste in the mound, but will leave it where it is on site. However the site is still unacceptable as a permanent facility, ultimately to be abandoned.
(2) CNL also plans to demolish about a hundred buildings at Chalk River, many of them contaminated. It also plans to bring radioactive and toxic waste to Chalk River from the Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment in Pinawa, Manitoba, and from four federally-owned nuclear reactors: the NPD (Nuclear Power Demonstration plant) on the Ottawa River, the WR-1 reactor at Whiteshell on the Winnipeg River, the Douglas Point reactor at Kincardine on Lake Huron, and the Gentilly-1 reactor on the St-Lawrence River. High level waste and intermediate level waste will also be brought to Chalk River from these locations, but will not be put in the mound. Meanwhile, however, the NPD reactor and the WR-1 reactor will be decommissioned by simply being “entombed” on-site, right beside their respective rivers, by dumping all the intensely radioactive debris into the sub-basement of the reactor building and filling the entire below-surface radioactive structure with special (as yet to be developed) grout.
(3) CNL plans to revitalize the Chalk River site, as instructed in the contract, by building new state-of-the-art nuclear facilities. In particular, CNL is inviting designers and manufacturers of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) to consider building their prototypes at Chalk River so that they can subsequently market them worldwide. CNL reports it has already received expressions of interest from many of the 90 or so potential vendors of SMRs, who see themselves as the vanguard of a “nuclear renaissance” that was never able to materialize with the bulkier reactors of today. In fact the original talk of a massive nuclear renaissance has fizzled badly in North America and Western Europe.
“Canadian Nuclear Laboratories stands ready to assist vendors every step of the way; from supporting research and development activities to prototype deployment at one of our sites. A prototype SMR at CNL would be co-located with the world-class research facilities and scientists needed to solve key technology challenges with capabilities for fuel manufacturing, and examination, and novel waste solutions to efficiently move a project to deployment. CNL has an existing and broad site licence; we have operated several nuclear reactors on our sites safely over the last 60 years, with key supporting infrastructure and services – security, radiation protection, environmental protection, and many others – already in place.”
THINGS WORTH SAYING IN YOUR INTERVENTION?? (Just some off-the-cuff ideas — feel free to improvise.)
1) A 10-year licence is unwise as there are very big changes being planned at the Chalk River site. The consortium has been operating at Chalk River for only three years and should be kept on a short lease to ensure that the public and the regulator have ample opportunity to nip problems in the bud as CNL embarks on an entirely novel set of activities. A 2 or 3 year licence at most should be granted.
2) CNSC is the sole agency charged with protecting the health and safety of Canadians and the environment; as such it should not be relaxing licensing requirements but making them more stringent. All existing reporting requirements should be maintained and strictly enforced, and explicit permission should be required for each and every new facility on site, with regulatory approval and public notification required at every stage of development.
3) To enable future generations to deal with radioactive and toxic materials at the Chalk River site, as well as those being brought it from elsewhere, new licence requirements should be added to require that all waste materials be properly segregated, labelled, and packaged with a complete inventory of the contents of each package. Mixing diverse toxic materials together will make it extremely difficult for future generations to properly characterize the waste; and, in the case of failure of containment, to take appropriate corrective action.
4) The crown corporation AECL, as the owner of the site and the waste, and as the agency that has contracted CNL to operate the site and manage the waste, has had some serious ongoing problems with its management structure; the regulator and the public need to be able to monitor AECL’s ability to maintain control over the consortium. A shorter licence period is in order to allow for timely review of such.
5) The licence should reflect growing public concern over the long-term management of radioactive and other toxic waste products, including a set of requirements designed to keep dangerous waste materials as far away as possible from the Ottawa River, and to ensure that such wastes are packaged and routinely monitored so that leaks are readily detected and repairs can be expeditiously made for centuries to come.
Harry Leslie Smith says he’s seen humanity at its best — and worst. The 94-year-old has lived through poverty, war and the Great Depression and warns a younger generation to heed his message: Don’t let my past be your future.
TRANSCRIPTAs Harry Leslie Smith sees it, his life “is at eventide.”
But the 94-year-old author and activist isn’t letting that stop him from speaking out and trying to make a difference.
‘Life is not good anymore for ordinary people.’ – Harry Leslie Smith
The British-born Smith, who now makes his home in Canada, is spending his old age writing books, speaking at political gatherings, and podcasting to tens of thousands of listeners about the lessons he’s learned through his life story — and what a story it is.
Harry Leslie Smith in Hamburg, Germany, May 1945. Smith has survived extreme poverty in his childhood; the Great Depression; the Second World War; and later in life, the loss of his wife and one of his three sons. (Harry Leslie Smith)
Smith survived a childhood of extreme poverty in Yorkshire, England, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and later, while living in Canada, the loss of his wife and one of his three sons. As he puts it, he has seen humanity at its best — and worst.
‘I’m worried because I like people, I love people, and I know what it’s like when people suffer.’ – Harry Leslie Smith
But now he fears the world risks repeating past mistakes, and he’s warning a younger generation to protect the values and gains he helped fight for — especially the welfare state.
Harry Leslie Smith, 1941. This photo was taken at age 18 after basic training in the Royal Air Force. (Harry Leslie Smith)
“I can see already that we are retreating back to my past,” he tells The Current’s host Anna Maria Tremonti.
“Life is not good anymore for ordinary people.”
Smith blames government cuts to social programs, made in the name of austerity, and income inequality for turning back the clock on the progress made during his lifetime. It’s a lifetime in which he went from living in hunger, with no access to health care, to witnessing the creation of Britain’s National Health Service.
“I’m worried because I like people, I love people, and I know what it’s like when people suffer … when you go to bed at night with an empty stomach and you wake up in the morning with an empty stomach. And all you can feel as a kid is that rumble in the centre of your stomach when you’re trudging to school, and you don’t know what to do to fill that void.”
Smith explains he was spurred to action after the 2007-08 financial crisis.
In his podcast series Harry’s Last Stand, and his latest book Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future, Smith urges young people to protect the values of equality and inclusion.
‘Hopefully I can change the world’s thinking about refugees … We are all human beings.’ – Harry Leslie Smith
He also takes to social media to get his message out.
Smith has 135,000 followers on Twitter, and he recently started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for his next project — a book about the global refugee crisis. Smith wants to tour refugee hot spots to learn about their plight.
“I want to see how they are reacting to what is happening to their world,” he tells Tremonti.
“Hopefully I can change the world’s thinking about refugees … We are all human beings.”
Harry Leslie Smith in the Calais Jungle, a refugee and migrant encampment in use from January 2015 to October 2016 in Calais, France. (Harry Leslie Smith )
Smith says he won’t stop working to advance the causes he believes in until his last breath.
“I’ll be doing this ’til I drop dead,” he says.
“I don’t think there’s any greater challenge than to get people to wake up to a society that is taking advantage of their good nature,” Smith says.
“It’s time … that there will be a mini-revolution or something.”
Listen to the full conversation above.
This segment was produced by The Current’s Idella Sturino.
The Government of Canada is undertaking a broad review of Canada’s Criminal Justice System to ensure that it is just, compassionate and fair, and promotes a safe, peaceful and prosperous Canadian society. Find out more about why we are doing this.
Your input in this consultation will help the department understand what Canadians expect from the Criminal Justice System. The consultation is taking place until January 15, 2018. You can participate in the following ways:
How to Participate
Complete the Online Choicebook
Learn more about the issues facing Canada’s Criminal Justice System by reading the Choicebook, an interactive educational tool, and providing your feedback on how the Criminal Justice System can be improved. In thinking through these issues, imagine what an effective Criminal Justice System would look like to you in the future. The Choicebook will be open until January 15, 2018.
Join the Online Discussions
Hear stories first hand from people in the Criminal Justice System, and join other Canadians in a dialogue on five key issues. The online discussions will be open until January 15, 2018.
Twitter Townhalls
Join online conversations on the Criminal Justice System. Details on dates and times will be available shortly.
Email submissions
If you have views on the approach and actions that Canada needs to take to transform the Criminal Justice System, we welcome your input by email: CJSR_RSJP@justice.gc.ca
Why are we doing this?
Canada’s Criminal Justice System has a strong foundation, yet it is facing many challenges.
Whether it’s supporting victims of crime more effectively, reducing the number of vulnerable and marginalized people in the system, or completing cases faster, it’s clear that change is needed. It’s important for Canadians to think about these issues and what can be done to improve the system.
As part of this process, we are providing Canadians with an opportunity to have their say through an online discussion on a range of topics and issues related to the Criminal Justice System. For more information on these subjects, read the Criminal Justice System Primer.
These consultations are part of the Criminal Justice System review, which has involved working with stakeholders and provincial and territorial counterparts on determining what works well and where there is room for improvement in the current system. Criminal Justice System reform will take time and will continue on well into future years. The government’s vision of this broad reform is to ensure long-term safety and justice for all Canadians. A report on what we heard during this consultation will be published in winter 2018.
The following is a back-up copy of the article. Recommend, go to the above URL for active footnotes and video support.
Story at-a-glance
Medical vaccine exemptions in California have tripled since 2015 when the state’s personal belief exemption was removed from mandatory vaccination laws for children to attend school
The parents of more than 10 percent of children enrolled at 58 California schools in the fall of 2016 obtained a medical exemption for their children to attend school without having received every federally recommended dose of every state-mandated vaccine
A recent Los Angeles Times article accused some California doctors of helping parents avoid giving their children vaccinations by writing medical exemptions for children who do not need them — a practice that the newspaper alleged “could endanger their communities”
The editorial, written by the LA Times editorial board, called for punitive measures to flush out and sanction doctors who write medical vaccine exemptions, for which the editors said only 3 percent of children “should reasonably qualify”
Evidence strongly suggests the resurgence of whooping cough is due to vaccinated people becoming asymptomatic carriers spreading the disease. The pertussis bacteria have also mutated and no longer match strains included in the vaccine
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By Dr. Mercola
“Anti-Vaxxers Have Found a Way Around California’s Strict New Immunization Law. They Need to Be Stopped.” This hostile and derogatory headline was published in the Los Angeles Times November 8. The “loophole” they’re referring to is the use of medical vaccine exemptions written by physicians.
According to this editorial, no more than 3 percent of children “should reasonably” qualify for a medical exemption to avoid vaccination, yet parents of more than 10 percent of school-aged children enrolled at 58 California schools in the fall of 2016 had obtained a medical exemption written by a physician, allowing their children to attend school without every dose of every state-mandated vaccine.
“The new law — SB 2772 — pushed up the statewide immunization numbers to a safe level overall. But dozens of schools have reported suspiciously high numbers of medical exemptions that, if left unchecked, could endanger their communities,” the LA Times editorial board writes.
Medical Exemptions in California Have Tripled Since the Personal Belief Exemption Was Eliminated in 2015
On June 29, 2015, California enacted SB 277, which eliminated the legal right for parents to file a personal belief exemption to vaccination for religious and conscientious beliefs so their unvaccinated or partially vaccinated children can attend school. Now, school-aged children in California must get nearly three dozen doses of 10 federally recommended and state-mandated vaccines or forgo their right to be educated in a public or private school.
The alternative is for parents to homeschool their children — an option that is simply impossible for many single parents or families in which both parents work. The article goes on to state:
“[T]he numbers of medical exemptions statewide didn’t just rise after SB 277 took effect, they tripled, with a few schools reporting exemptions from as many as a quarter of their students. Given what health experts say about the expected rate of medical exemptions, that’s just not credible. Are there some physicians who are, for either ideological or financial reasons, helping parents avoid vaccinating their healthy kids?”
California Doctors in the Crosshairs
The authors note there have been “examples of a few doctors’ offices that advertise medical exemption evaluations for a fee,” and that these doctors are providing medical exemptions for health conditions that are not included in the narrow list of contraindications to vaccination defined by federal health officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).3
By and large, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which develops CDC vaccine policy guidelines, limits medical exemptions to severe allergic reactions to previous vaccinations and rare severe immunodeficiencies.
According to the LA Times, some children have received medical exemptions for autoimmune disorders, such as eczema, asthma and diabetes, which federal health officials do not consider a vaccine contraindication. Under current law school officials must accept a medical vaccine exemption form signed by a licensed physician.
“The only real enforcement mechanism against doctors circumventing the vaccination requirement is through the Medical Board of California,” the LA Times noted, meaning the only way under current law that the state can limit medical exemptions is for the state medical board to hunt down and punish doctors who think for themselves and stray beyond the CDC’s narrow contraindication guidelines if they believe a child’s health will be endangered by vaccination.
“It would be better to discourage doctors from helping parents to game the system in the first place. That could be accomplished by some level of secondary review and approval …
At the very least, county health departments could ask to review anonymized medical exemption forms to look for suspicious patterns in the cited medical conditions or in the doctors signing the forms. Failing a better response from the Medical Board, public exposure may serve as an effective antidote to abuse of the medical exemption rule,” the LA Times writes.
The Case of Dr. Sears
Pediatrician Dr. Robert Sears has been in the state medical board’s crosshairs since 2016, when the executive director of the California medical board accused him of “gross negligence” in the care and treatment of a pediatric patient who received a medical exemption for two “unusual and severe vaccine reactions,” which Sears determined would place the child “at risk of further harm,” were the child to receive further vaccinations.4
Sears has also been a vocal opponent of the current federally recommended childhood vaccination schedule, which advises doctors to give 69 doses of 16 vaccines, which is three times as many vaccinations as children received three decades ago.
His 2007 book, “The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child,” included an alternate schedule that gave fewer vaccines on one day and spread the vaccination process out over a longer period of time, which many proponents of mandatory vaccination laws blame as being a major cause of parent’s doubts about vaccine safety and a rise in the numbers of vaccine exemptions for school children.
The California medical board will review Dr. Sears’ case sometime next May and make a decision about whether or not he will be sanctioned. What the editorial board of the LA Times is suggesting is for the California medical board to go after more doctors who, like Sears, are giving medical exemptions that do not strictly conform to narrow CDC contraindication guidelines.
This approach completely fails to respect a doctor’s professional expertise (and conscience) when making a judgment about whether or not vaccination will harm a child’s health. It’s worth noting that ACIPs vaccine contraindication guidelines for medical exemptions excludes 99.9 percent of children, and leaves virtually no room for individualized considerations.
As noted by Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), in the video above, an unprecedented number of children are born healthy, get vaccinated and are never healthy again. Yet the LA Times is pushing for a group think, mob mentality aimed at health professionals and parents who are trying to protect children from vaccine injury and death by putting safety before unnecessary risk.
There’s No Way to Predict Who Will Be the Proverbial ‘Sacrificial Lamb’
The one-size-fits-all approach to vaccinations is dangerous in the extreme. Scientists have clearly demonstrated that some people are more susceptible to vaccine damage than others but, because the individual circumstances that raise vaccine risks are so multivaried, there’s no way to accurately predict who will be harmed and who will not. Reports published by physician committees at the Institute of Medicine confirm that vaccines can injure and kill people, and that:
Very little is known about how vaccines or microbes act at the cellular and molecular level in the human body 5,6,7
The Institute of Medicine confirms that an unknown number of us have certain genetic, biological and environmental susceptibilities that make us more vulnerable to being harmed by vaccines, but doctors cannot accurately predict who we are8,9
Clinical trials of experimental vaccines are too small to detect serious reactions before they are licensed10,11
The U.S. recommended child vaccine schedule through age 6 has not been adequately studied to rule out an association with allergies, autoimmunity, learning and behavior disorders, seizures, autism and other brain and immune dysfunction12
As noted by Fisher in a previous article:
“Vaccination must remain a choice because it is a medical intervention performed on the body of a healthy person that carries a risk of injury or death13,14 … We do not all respond the same way to pharmaceutical products like vaccines, so vaccine risks are not being borne equally by everyone in society.
Why should the lives of those vulnerable to vaccine complications be valued any less than those vulnerable to complications of infections? And why should people not be free to choose to stay healthy in ways that pose far fewer risks?”
The Immoral and Unethical Foundation of Americas Public Health Law
You’ve probably heard that mandatory vaccinations are “for the greater good” of society. That’s exactly what the LA Times editorial board is saying as well. What many do not realize is that this “greater good” argument is based in utilitarianism — a philosophy created by Jeremy Bentham, a 19th century British attorney and social reformer15,16 who mocked the U.S. Constitution for affirming the natural rights protected in the First Amendment.
Utilitarianism judges the rightness or wrongness of an action by how it affects the majority. According to Bentham, an action is only moral or ethical if it results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. During the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg after World War II, doctors who performed horrific scientific experiments on prisoners invoked the utilitarian defense, claiming it was moral to sacrifice the health and lives of some individuals to advance scientific knowledge that could save the lives of many others.17,18
In other words, this philosophy proclaims that it’s alright to kill your child if it saves two or three others. This philosophy might be useful on the battle field or in crisis situations where you absolutely cannot save everyone, but should not be the basis of public health law.
The utilitarian defense was rejected as immoral and unethical in Nuremberg, and the first principle of the Nuremberg Code that grew out of those legal proceedings is that “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”19 Alas, the U.S. never addressed its philosophy to medical risk-taking and never strayed from its utilitarian roots.
This is why we now have states where healthy, bright children are refused an education unless their parents are willing to play a dangerous game of Russian Roulette with their child’s life “for the greater good.”
Whooping Cough Resurgence Blamed on Vaccinated Infection Carriers
The case for mandatory vaccinations without exception also fall flat when you consider the scientific evidence showing that the re-emergence of many infectious diseases is in fact rooted in the vaccination program itself, and has nothing to do with people’s decision to not vaccinate.
This certainly appears to be the case with whooping cough. As noted by Science Daily in 2015,20 “The dramatic resurgence of whooping cough is due, in large part, to vaccinated people who are infectious but who do not display the symptoms.” That was the conclusion of a study published in BMC Medicine,21 which concluded that:
“[A]symptomatic transmission is the most parsimonious explanation for many of the observations surrounding the resurgence of B. pertussis in the U.S. and U.K. These results have important implications for B. pertussis vaccination policy and present a complicated scenario for achieving herd immunity and B. pertussis eradication.”
This study also concluded that the practice of cocooning — where family members are vaccinated to protect newborns — does not work, “because even if you get the acellular vaccine you can still become infected and can still transmit.”22 Despite such findings — and this is not the only study showing vaccinated individuals can transmit disease — the unvaccinated are routinely singled out as scapegoats when outbreaks occur.
Pertussis Has Out-Evolved the Vaccine
Last year, Tod Merkel, principal investigator at the Laboratory of Respiratory and Special Pathogens, Office of Vaccines Research and Review at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), also confirmed that “it’s not unvaccinated individuals that are driving the [pertussis] infection,”23 which in 2012 had ballooned to 50,000 reported cases24 from 1,000 cases in 1976.25
Yet, 2014 and 2015 saw a significant decline in reported cases, dropping to 32,971 and 20,762 respectively. These dramatic up-and-down swings are independent of vaccination rates, which have remained relatively stable at 95 percent for school-aged children, and 80 percent for booster shots.26,27
Merkel’s research also suggests asymptomatic carriage in the vaccinated population “explains the increased disease incidence in the U.S.” Commenting on his findings, he notes, “We think the vaccine, although it’s preventing disease in the individuals who are vaccinated, is not preventing them from becoming infected, carrying and transmitting the bacteria.”
Fisher’s fully referenced article, “Pertussis Microbe Outsmarts the Vaccines as Experts Argue About Why,”28 published last year, reveals that researchers have in fact known for decades that both whole cell pertussis vaccine and acellular pertussis vaccines fail to prevent infection and transmission of infection that can then be spread by vaccinated asymptomatic carriers.29
The B. pertussis organism actually began evolving to evade whole cell pertussis vaccine soon after the combination DPT vaccine was introduced in 1949, developing new strains that produce more pertussis toxin to suppress the human immune system and cause more serious disease. Today, the pertussis strains included in the vaccine no longer match the pertussis strains causing the disease. This is yet another reason why whooping cough infection has risen.
All of this has been scientifically verified, yet pertussis outbreaks are still met with disbelief. In January 2016, whooping cough broke out in a Florida preschool, where it continued to spread among students, staff and family members for five months. The high vaccination rate at the school did not prevent that sustained outbreak, which makes sense once you accept the fact that the vaccine no longer works as advertised.
According to Medscape, only five out of the 117 pupils had not received the complete series of three doses of DTP vaccine.30 In this case, the children’s recent vaccination histories worsened the situation because doctors were reluctant to test for and diagnose pertussis when the child was fully vaccinated.
This hesitation and assumption that the vaccine would offer protection against infection and transmission — which, again, has been disproven for decades — allowed the spread of the infection by asymptomatic carriers to continue.
Mumps Outbreak Caused by Faulty Vaccine
In related news, it looks like the mumps outbreak that began in August at Syracuse University is also the result of a flawed vaccine.31 As of November 13, there were 41 confirmed cases of mumps among students. All had received the recommended two doses of the mumps, measles, rubella (MMR) vaccine.
In 2010, whistleblowers sued Merck, the maker of the only mumps vaccine licensed for use in the U.S., accusing the company of falsifying data to inflate the perceived effectiveness of the vaccine. According to the legal complaint, the two whistleblowers, who worked for Merck, were pressured by management to participate in the fraud, and were threatened with arrest if they filed a complaint with the FDA.
That lawsuit is still pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The court is scheduled to decide whether the case will go to trial sometime next year. The whistleblowers blame the re-emergence of mumps on declining vaccine efficacy. Yet, despite that very real possibility, mandatory vaccination proponents such as Dr. Paul Offit suggest the best way to address the mumps vaccine failure problem is simply to require a third dose of MMR vaccine before students enter college.32
The ‘Public Health Risk’ Fallacy
In this lecture, immunologist Tetyana Obukhanych, Ph.D., author of “Vaccine Illusion: How Vaccination Compromises Our Natural Immunity and What We Can Do to Regain Our Health,” explains how vaccines damage your immune function, which can result in any number of adverse health effects.
In May 2015, just before California law SB 277 was enacted, she published an open letter to legislators,33 specifying a number of reasons why discrimination against unvaccinated children is unwarranted, as they pose no public health risk. She wrote, in part:
“It is often stated that those who choose not to vaccinate their children for reasons of conscience endanger the rest of the public, and this is the rationale behind most of the legislation to end vaccine exemptions currently being considered by federal and state legislators country-wide.
You should be aware that the nature of protection afforded by many modern vaccines — and that includes most of the vaccines recommended by the CDC for children — is not consistent with such a statement.
I have outlined below the recommended vaccines that cannot prevent transmission of disease either because they are not designed to prevent the transmission of infection (rather, they are intended to prevent disease symptoms), or because they are for non-communicable diseases.”
Obukhanych’s list includes inactivated poliovirus vaccine, tetanus, diphtheria toxoid vaccine (contained in the DTaP vaccine), acellular pertussis, H. influenza and hepatitis B vaccine. She also points out the “measles paradox,” which is that “as measles immunization rates rise to high levels in a population, measles becomes a disease of immunized persons.”34
“In summary, a person who is not vaccinated with IPV, DTaP, HepB and Hib vaccines due to reasons of conscience poses no extra danger to the public than a person who is. No discrimination is warranted,” she notes. She also points out that serious adverse events are in fact far more common than publicly admitted, with 1 in 168 children requiring emergency room admittance following their 1-year wellness check when vaccines are given, according to Canadian research.
One in 730 children ends up in the emergency room after their 18-month vaccination appointment. Some conscientious doctors are aware of these kinds of risks, and are willing to work with parents who have concerns about their child’s well-being by writing medical exemptions. Is this really a crime that should be punished by the removal of their license to practice medicine?
Mandatory vaccinations place many children at unnecessary risk, oftentimes for very little if any benefit. To remove informed consent protections from vaccine laws by eliminating all personal belief vaccine exemptions and severely restricting medical exemptions by thwarting doctors from doing what they believe is in the best interest of their patients, is an inhumane, draconian measure based on utilitarianism — an unethical philosophy upon which public health law should not be based.
Protect Your Right to Informed Consent and Defend Vaccine Exemptions
With all the uncertainty surrounding the safety and efficacy of vaccines, it’s critical to protect your right to make independent health choices and exercise voluntary informed consent to vaccination. It is urgent that everyone in America stand up and fight to protect and expand vaccine informed consent protections in state public health and employment laws. The best way to do this is to get personally involved with your state legislators and educating the leaders in your community.
THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY.
National vaccine policy recommendations are made at the federal level but vaccine laws are made at the state level. It is at the state level where your action to protect your vaccine choice rights can have the greatest impact.
It is critical for EVERYONE to get involved now in standing up for the legal right to make voluntary vaccine choices in America because those choices are being threatened by lobbyists representing drug companies, medical trade associations, and public health officials, who are trying to persuade legislators to strip all vaccine exemptions from public health laws.
Signing up for NVIC’s free Advocacy Portal at www.NVICAdvocacy.org gives you immediate, easy access to your own state legislators on your smart phone or computer so you can make your voice heard. You will be kept up-to-date on the latest state bills threatening your vaccine choice rights and get practical, useful information to help you become an effective vaccine choice advocate in your own community.
Also, when national vaccine issues come up, you will have the up-to-date information and call to action items you need at your fingertips. So please, as your first step, sign up for the NVIC Advocacy Portal.
Share Your Story With the Media and People You Know
If you or a family member has suffered a serious vaccine reaction, injury, or death, please talk about it. If we don’t share information and experiences with one another, everybody feels alone and afraid to speak up. Write a letter to the editor if you have a different perspective on a vaccine story that appears in your local newspaper. Make a call in to a radio talk show that is only presenting one side of the vaccine story.
I must be frank with you; you have to be brave because you might be strongly criticized for daring to talk about the “other side” of the vaccine story. Be prepared for it and have the courage to not back down. Only by sharing our perspective and what we know to be true about vaccination, will the public conversation about vaccination open up so people are not afraid to talk about it.
We cannot allow the drug companies and medical trade associations funded by drug companies or public health officials promoting forced use of a growing list of vaccines to dominate the conversation about vaccination.
The vaccine injured cannot be swept under the carpet and treated like nothing more than “statistically acceptable collateral damage” of national one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination policies that put way too many people at risk for injury and death. We shouldn’t be treating people like guinea pigs instead of human beings.
Internet Resources Where You Can Learn More
I encourage you to visit the website of the non-profit charity, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), at www.NVIC.org:
NVIC Memorial for Vaccine Victims: View descriptions and photos of children and adults, who have suffered vaccine reactions, injuries, and deaths. If you or your child experiences an adverse vaccine event, please consider posting and sharing your story here.
Vaccine Freedom Wall: View or post descriptions of harassment and sanctions by doctors, employers, and school and health officials for making independent vaccine choices.
Vaccine Failure Wall: View or post descriptions about vaccines that have failed to work and protect the vaccinated from disease.
Connect With Your Doctor or Find a New One That Will Listen and Care
If your pediatrician or doctor refuses to provide medical care to you or your child unless you agree to get vaccines you don’t want, I strongly encourage you to have the courage to find another doctor. Harassment, intimidation, and refusal of medical care is becoming the modus operandi of the medical establishment in an effort to stop the change in attitude of many parents about vaccinations after they become truly educated about health and vaccination. However, there is hope.
At least 15 percent of young doctors recently polled admit that they’re starting to adopt a more individualized approach to vaccinations in direct response to the vaccine safety concerns of parents.
It is good news that there is a growing number of smart young doctors, who prefer to work as partners with parents in making personalized vaccine decisions for children, including delaying vaccinations or giving children fewer vaccines on the same day or continuing to provide medical care for those families, who decline use of one or more vaccines.
So take the time to locate a doctor, who treats you with compassion and respect, and is willing to work with you to do what is right for your child.
Yes, we are right (even SMART!) to do something about the kind and amount of personal information being assembled by corporations (Google and Facebook, for example).
And oh God! it is good to be aware of the massive files and surveillance done by the Communist Government in East Germany. The Stasi is said to have built one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies the world has known.
The Stasi – that’s recent history – – the Berlin Wall only came down in November 1989, 28 years ago. Not long enough to forget.
All good – – but we Canadians are in that picture you painted of Google, and of the Stasi . . . or forgot; maybe we are invisible.
Consider: The Stasi was formed within 4 years of the end of WW2. And the Nazis had used the same tool as the Stasi: detailed files on citizens. The Nazis, and carefully disguised subsidiaries of IBM, had developed mechanized census data bases well before the war started in 1939. They operated in a number of European countries besides Germany.
(The story of the Nazi-IBM collaboration is meticulously documented in “IBM and the Holocaust”, by Edwin Black.)
Anyhow, the Stasi did not build their surveillance machinery from scratch. The practices were a continuation. In 1953 the East Germans made a mighty attempt to overthrow the regime, but Soviet troops entered the fray to maintain the Communist government. The police state was the norm in the east of Germany from the 1930’s (Nazi) until January 1990 when the Stasi was dismantled – – that’s for well over 60 years. Repeat: that is recent history, too recent to be forgotten.
Where are Canadians in this picture of the privacy rights of the individual citizen, rights that are missing in a police state?
Canadians learned all the good history. We were gifted with a Charter of Rights and Freedom, with a Charter Right to Privacy of Personal Information. In the picture I think we defecate upon it.
Not only do we acquiesce while our own Government builds, and keeps building, the files of data on us individual citizens (through censuses, and through on-going Government surveys). We are aware of, and participate in, the information-gathering by Google and Facebook.
Further, we know that the U.S. has constructed multi-billion dollar surveillance capability in Nevada. Seldom discussed is the number one surveillance specialist in the world, Lockheed Martin Corporation, that does contract work for the NSA, and did contract work for StatsCan. We know of the American’s international surveillance through the leaks by people like Edward Snowden. We know the Five Eye collaboration on census data bases, which includes Canada, under the project management of Lockheed Martin.
Drive me bananas – – talk about the surveillance state of the Stasi, of Google’s capture of private information, and say not a word about what OUR OWN GOVERNMENT is doing. Our Governments have the ability to bring charges against us. Corporations do not have the same authority over us.
In summary, Canadians have a Charter Right to Privacy of Personal Information because detailed information on individual citizens is a tool of a police state. People in the eastern part of Germany were terrorized under the Nazis. It did not change under the Communists.
Canadians received wisdom, a Charter Right, from the more than 60-year experience of people in East Germany. It seems we cannot learn from that history. There should be no cooperation with Government programmes that build detailed information files on citizens. We lose the Charter Right if we do not exercise it.
“No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”
