Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Lying by commission, lying by omission, censorship and self-censorship by Mainstream journalist, editor, politician and academic presstitutes has enabled the continuing, Zionist-promoted, US War on Muslims that has so far since 1990 been associated with 12 million Muslim deaths from violence or from war-imposed deprivation (Google “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”).
America’s antipathy to the Iranian Atom is especially remarkable given the fact that it was Washington that exported nuclear technology to Teheran in the first place.
Russia may have become Iran’s best nuclear supplier since the 1979 Revolution, but, in the earliest days of Tehran’s flirtation with the atom, it was the Eisenhower Administration that provided encouragement, equipment, funds and uranium to kick-start an Iranian nuclear program. An instructive timeline of America’s shifting views towards the Iranian Atom (compiled by the Iranian Website Alakhbar) details this curious history.
Beginning as far back as the 1950s, the US was busy promoting nuclear power around the world and one of the nuclear industry’s first clients was Iran – then under the control of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a pro-Western despot who maintained his hold on power through the brutal excesses of his secret police, the Savak.
In 1957, under the “Atoms for Peace” program, the US inked a civilian nuclear development deal with Iran. Three years later, the US sold a small research reactor to Iran. After the reactor went online in 1967, Iran signed and ratified the NNPT.
In 1970, the US (joined by France and Germany) began negotiations for the construction of as many as 20 nuclear reactors inside Iran. The “nuclear superpowers” also reportedly discussed establishing an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
The American public was not apprised of Washington’s plan for an Iranian bomb program but it certainly heard a lot about Iran’s civilian nuclear power program.
The US nuclear industry was in an expansionist mode and would-be reactor builders needed to assure a wary public that atomic reactors would be safe and trustworthy neighbors.
And that’s how Iran’s despotic and tyrannical Shah came to star in a string of eye-grabbing nuclear power ads in the USA.
The Shah Loves Nukes So Why Don’t You?
The advertising campaign was backed by large energy companies like Westinghouse and General Electric and the ads carried the names of burgeoning nuclear operators from across several East Coast states.
The ads, which began to appear in the early 1970s, bore the slogan “Nuclear Energy. Today’s Answer.” Small print at the bottom identified the sponsors: Boston Edison, Eastern Utilities Association, New England Power Co., Public Service Co. of New Hampshire, New England Gas and Electric Companies.
The ads featured a striking photo of the Shah, in all his embroidered, beribboned, imperial splendor, epaulets ablaze and medallions aglow. Hovering over his photo was the phrase: “Guess Who’s Building Nuclear Power Plants.” There was no question mark at the end of the sentence because there was no question about the message.
“The Shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world,” the ad copy began. “Yet he’s building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country. He knows the oil is running out – and time with it.”
It read like an Earth Day message delivered by a well-meaning nuclear industry that wanted nothing more than to save the world from a plague of oil spills, pollution and global warming.
But the real message wasn’t about the shortcomings of fossil fuels, it was about the abiding fear of atoms.
The Shah “wouldn’t build the plants now if he doubted their safety,” the ad copy read. “He’d wait. As many Americans want to do.” But the Shah was clearly wiser than the average American. “The Shah knows that nuclear energy is not only economical, it has enjoyed a remarkable 30-year safety record.”
That 30-year span would include the first atomic tests at Alamogordo, the two bombs that destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, and years of above-ground nuclear bomb tests that spread fallout around the world. Leaving aside those minor historic footnotes, the advertising copy pressed on to argue that atomic power’s safety record was “good enough for the citizens of Plymouth, Massachusetts, too. They’ve approved their second nuclear plant by a vote of almost 4 to 1. Which shows you don’t have to go as far as Iran for an endorsement of nuclear power.”
Shah-Bomb, Shah-Bomb
But the Shah wasn’t in the nuclear game just as a hedge against Peak Oil. There was more to it.
The Shah tipped his hand in 1974 when he boasted to a French reporter that he expected to be “in possession of a nuclear bomb” much “sooner than is believe” (sic).
President Gerald Ford publicly supported the Shah’s nuclear ambitions, as did his White House henchmen Dick Cheney, Ronald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger who served as the Shah’s nuclear lobby in Washington.
By 1978, relations between Washington and Tehran were so cozy that the US bestowed its “most favored nation” status on the country, which allowed Iran to undertake the reprocessing of nuclear fuel (a sure pathway to acquiring “weapons-grade” uranium).
The Shah’s nuclear ambitions were never realized, however. In 1979, a popular revolution toppled the Shah and the hated Savak. The country’s new leaders terminated the nuclear pacts with the West and ordered the nuclear program shut down for religious reasons.
Nuclear Iran, After the Revolution
For the next two years, Iran remained a staunchly anti-nuclear nation. In 1982, however, the ayatollahs were forced to rethink Iran’s nuclear-free status.
What happened? Iran had come under attack by its neighbor to the west. In 1980, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, sparking what would turn out to be a bloody eight-year war.
Did the US condemn Iraq’s aggression? Far from it, the US actively partnered with Saddam in his military campaign against the anti-US leaders of post-Shah Iran.
The nuclear weapons program that had been warmly supported under the Shah’s rule suddenly became hot-button issue among Iran’s critics in Washington, triggering a frenzy of anti-Iranian “nuclear-fear-mongering” that has raged unabated for the last 30 years. (The term “Islamic bomb” has recently begun to proliferate in the Western media. At the same time, US news agencies have never felt the need to refer to the Pentagon’s atomic weapons as “Christian bombs.”)
In 1984, Jane’s Defense Weekly primed the pump with an alarmist article warning Tehran was likely to have a nuclear bomb by 1986. When that threat failed to materialize, Senator Alan Cranston, a California Democrat, warned Iran would certainly be brandishing nuclear bombs by 1991.
Undeterred by these Western allegations, Iran stubbornly maintained its anti-nuclear stance — until 1988. That was the year Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sketched out an initial proposal to militarize the country’s civilian power program. Khomeini wasn’t acting in a vacuum. His proposal was prompted by the alarm that followed Saddam Hussein’s shocking use of chemical weapons against villagers during the Iraq-Iran War.
A Bomb Is Coming, We Know It Is
With the dawn of the 1990s, it was Israel’s turn to start beating the drums about a potential Iranian A-bomb. In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu (then a member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament) warned that Iran would be able to develop a nuclear bomb in “three to five years.” Netanyahu had a ready answer for how to confront this theoretical dilemma: “An international front headed by the US.”
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres followed up with a warning, as well. “Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East,” he proclaimed. Why? “Because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militantism.”
The criticism was blindingly ironic given the fact that Israel already possessed the Middle East’s only (and growing) arsenal of atomic weapons. Also, by this time, the State of Israel had accumulated an impressive record of pugnacious foreign policy adventures that could easily meet the defining test of “extreme religious militantism.”
Meanwhile, in the US, a team of House Republicans formed a research committee that claimed a “98 percent certainty” that Iran had amassed enough material for “two or three operational nuclear weapons.”
The fact that Iran never managed to meet any of these dire predictions did not deter the fear-mongers. In his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu warned Iran was “between three and five years away” from becoming a nuclear threat. A year later, Israel’s Foreign Minister Ehud Barak dialed back the hysteria a notch by warning the UN Security Council that Iran was expected to be able to produce a nuclear bomb “within eight years.”
In 1998, Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added another log to the fire with the claim that, in as little as five years, Iran could build an intercontinental missile capable of hitting the US with nuclear or biological bombs.
By the dawn of the 21st century, the Iranian Revolution had gone nearly two decades without announcing or producing any nuclear weapons. Instead, Iran’s leaders continued to formally condemn the use or possession of nuclear weapons as incompatible with the Islamic faith. Iran’s record failed to impress George W. Bush. Upon his arrival in the Oval Office, Bush declared Iran part of the “Axis of Evil.”
In 2003, as if to prove Mr. Bush wrong, Tehran invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect its nuclear facilities. While noting a past “pattern of concealment,” the IAEA concluded there was “no evidence” Iran was attempting to manufacture nuclear weapons. (In 2007, the NIE concluded with “high confidence” that Iran had completely abandoned its nuclear weapons ambitions but US and Israeli politicians continued to predict Iran would produce a bomb — perhaps sometime between 2012 and 2014.)
If Iran Poses No Threat, Why Does the US Impose Sanctions?
Despite the universal agreement within the US intelligence community that Iran’s nuclear power program poses no imminent military threat, the US successfully petitioned the United Nations to apply a series of punishing economic sanctions on Teheran.
Washington’s persistent badgering of Iran — for presenting a hypothetical but unrealized “threat” — is at odds with a stunning (but rarely mentioned) parallel reality: the specter of nuclear war already haunts the Middle East.
The one country in the region that has an atomic arsenal also has a posture of belligerence that includes both threats of military action and a history of cross-border attacks targeting its neighbors. That nation is Israel. Unlike Iran, Israel is a nuclear “rogue nation” that has refused to sign the NNPT. Unlike Iran, Israel has never permitted international inspections of its secret nuclear energy and nuclear weapons facilities.
We are left with a puzzle. Given the strategic consensus that Tehran poses no immediate military threat to the region or to the US, why does Washington persist in applying potentially destabilizing economic sanctions on the people of Iran?
A possible answer was provided by General Wesley Clark, in his book, Winning Modern Wars. In 2001, Clark wrote, he had a conversation with a “senior military staff officer.” The Pentagon planner described a plan to attack Lebanon. “But there was more,” Clark was informed. Targeting Lebanon was part of “a five-year campaign plan” to topple a succession of governments. “There were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.”
In retrospect, it appears that this Pentagon game plan has played out in real-world events. General Clark’s stunning disclosure has never become part of the national foreign policy debate and you won’t find it in mentioned in newspapers or in college textbooks. But you can find it on Democracy Now! and YouTube.
A Fatwa against Fission
In 2005, US Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested to Congress that Iran was harboring a secret plan to build nuclear weapons. The argument was weakened, however, by the fact that it was Powell who earlier made the notoriously bogus claim that Iraq harbored “weapons of mass destruction.”
During a meeting with IAEA officials in Geneva, Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei offered a dramatic response to Powell’s allegations: He formally announced a binding fatwa banning the production, stockpiling, or deployment of nuclear weapons.
“We don’t need atomic bombs and, based on our religious teaching, we will not pursue them,” Iranian President Mohammad Khatami proclaimed. It was a sentiment that should have given comfort to a wary world that has yet to hear any similar statements from the leaders of nuclear-armed Superpowers.
The Greater Threat Is Closer to Home
True, President Barack Obama has called for the abolition of America’s nuclear arsenal (but so did Ronald Reagan). However, while paying lip-service to abolition, Obama approved spending $214 billion over the next ten years on new nuclear weapons and the “modernizing” of our existing bombs.
It is not Iran that poses an immediate, palpable nuclear threat. The greatest imminent danger resides is the powerful coterie of five nuclear-armed superpowers — China, France, Russia, the UK and the US — and four nuclear-rogue states operating outside the bounds of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Three of these nations happen to be US allies — India, Israel and Pakistan.
It is the fourth rogue state, North Korea, that has upped the Apocalyptic ante with recent threats to level US targets from Guam to Chicago. Faced with nuclear saber rattling from North Korea’s Kim Jung-un, President Obama seems to have rediscovered his inner nuclear abolitionist. Obama has grandly called for the North to surrender its atomic arsenal as the first step toward creating a “nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”
But, as the head of the superpower with the world’s largest inventory of nuclear weapons (and the missiles, submarines and bombers needed to deliver then), the president should lead by example. As a first step, he should also insist on a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East (Iran has already proposed this), a nuclear-weapons-free Europe and, ultimately, a nuclear-weapons-free planet.
Mujahadeen meet president Ronald Reagan by White House, US Goverment
By Joe Giambrone
The Boston Marathon bombings are going to be covered up and obfuscated such that we may never know the truth. That’s a hell of lot like the 9/11 attacks, come to think of it, and similarities are real. It should be glaringly obvious by now to anyone who’s looked at theanomalies that there is something rotten in Boston, and that the FBI’s incompetence defense –after being directly warned about Tamerlan Tsarnaev by the Russian government – doesn’t pass the laugh test.
By Ed Hightower
On Tuesday, the Constitution Project, a Washington, DC think tank, released a 600-page report by its “Task Force on Detainee Treatment” documenting decades of war crimes committed by US imperialism and its military and intelligence agencies.
By Sebastian Anthony
What does it mean to be human? Biology has a simple answer: If your DNA is consistent with Homo sapiens, you are human — but we all know that humanity is a lot more complex and nuanced than that. Other schools of science might classify humans by their sociological or psychological behavior, but again we know that actually being human is more than just the sum of our thoughts and actions.
By: Michael Snyder
Have you ever wondered how the big banks make such enormous mountains of money? Well, the truth is that much of it is made by gambling recklessly. If they win on their bets, they become fabulously wealthy. If they lose on their bets, they know that the government will come in and arrange for the banks to be bailed out because they are “too big to fail”.
Either they will be bailed out by the government using our tax dollars; or, as we just witnessed in Cyprus, they will be allowed to “recapitalize” themselves by stealing money directly from our bank accounts.
So if they win, they win big. If they lose, someone else will come in and clean up the mess. This creates a tremendous incentive for the bankers to “go for it”, because there is simply not enough pain in this equation for those that are taking the risks.
If the big Wall Street banks had been allowed to collapse back in 2008, that would have caused a massive change of behavior on Wall Street. But instead, the big banks are still recklessly gambling with our money as if the last financial crisis never even happened. In the end, the reckless behavior of these big banks is going to cause the entire global financial system to collapse
Have you noticed how most news reports about Cyprus don’t even get into the reasons why the big banks in Cyprus collapsed?
Well, the truth is that they collapsed because they were making incredibly reckless bets with the money that had been entrusted to them. In a recent article, Ron Paul explained how the situation played out once the bets started to go bad…
The dramatic recent events in Cyprus have highlighted the fundamental weakness in the European banking system and the extreme fragility of fractional reserve banking. Cypriot banks invested heavily in Greek sovereign debt, and last summer’s Greek debt restructuring resulted in losses equivalent to more than 25 percent of Cyprus’ GDP. These banks then took their bad investments to the government, demanding a bailout from an already beleaguered Cypriot treasury. The government of Cyprus then turned to the European Union (EU) for a bailout.
If those bets had turned out to be profitable, the bankers would have kept all of the profits. But those bets turned out to be big losers, and private bank accounts in Cyprus are now being raided to pay the bill. Unfortunately, as Ron Paul noted, what just happened in Cyprus is already being touted as a “template” for future bank bailouts all over the globe…
The elites in the EU and IMF failed to learn their lesson from the popular backlash to these tax proposals, and have openly talked about using Cyprus as a template for future bank bailouts. This raises the prospect of raids on bank accounts, pension funds, and any investments the government can get its hands on. In other words, no one’s money is safe in any financial institution in Europe. Bank runs are now a certainty in future crises, as the people realize that they do not really own the money in their accounts. How long before bureaucrat and banker try that here?
Unfortunately, all of this is the predictable result of a fiat paper money system combined with fractional reserve banking. When governments and banks collude to monopolize the monetary system so that they can create money out of thin air, the result is a business cycle that wreaks havoc on the economy. Pyramiding more and more loans on top of a tiny base of money will create an economic house of cards just waiting to collapse. The situation in Cyprus should be both a lesson and a warning to the United States.
This is an example of what can happen when the dominoes start to fall. The banks of Cyprus failed because Greek debt went bad. And the Greeks were using derivatives to try to hide the true scope of their debt problems. The following is what Jim Sinclair recently told King World News…
When people say that the Cypriot banks lost because of being in Greek debt, what was one of the Greeks’ greatest sins? They used over-the-counter derivatives in order to hide the real condition of their balance sheet.
Depositor money, brokerage money, and clearing house money have been tangled up in the mountain of derivatives as the banks have used this cash to speculate in an attempt to make huge bonuses for bank executives.
As I have written about so many times, the global quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble is one of the greatest threats that the global financial system is facing. As Sinclair explained to King World News, when this derivatives bubble bursts and the losses start soaring, the big banks are going to want to raid private bank accounts just like the banks in Cyprus were able to…
What do you think happens when Buffett reports that he made $10 billion in derivatives? Somebody else lost $10 billion and it was most likely one financial institution. There is no question that what we are seeing right now is not isolated to Cyprus. It has happened everywhere, but is has been camouflaged by making the depositors and the banks whole. What Cyprus will reveal is that losses do not stop with the bank’s capital. Losses roar right through bank capital and take depositors’ money.
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This could have all been avoided if we had allowed the big Wall Street banks to collapse back in 2008. Reckless behavior would have been greatly punished and banks would have chosen to do business differently in the future.
David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, says that because we bailed out the big banks it was a signal to them that they could go back and freely engage in the same kind of reckless behavior that they were involved in previously…
Essentially there was a cleansing run on the wholesale funding market in the canyons of Wall Street going on. It would have worked its will, just like JP Morgan allowed it to happen in 1907 when we did not have the Fed getting in the way. Because they stopped it in its tracks after the AIG bailout and then all the alphabet soup of different lines that the Fed threw out, and then the enactment of TARP, the last two investment banks standing were rescued, Goldman and Morgan [Stanley], and they should not have been. As a result of being rescued and having the cleansing liquidation of rotten balance sheets stopped, within a few weeks and certainly months they were back to the same old games, such that Goldman Sachs got $10 billion dollars for the fiscal year that started three months later after that check went out, which was October 2008. For the fiscal 2009 year, Goldman Sachs generated what I call a $29 billion surplus – $13 billion of net income after tax, and on top of that $16 billion of salaries and bonuses, 95% of it which was bonuses.
Therefore, the idea that they were on death’s door does not stack up. Even if they had been, it would not make any difference to the health of the financial system. These firms are supposed to come and go, and if people make really bad bets, if they have a trillion dollar balance sheet with six, seven, eight hundred billion dollars worth of hot-money short-term funding, then they ought to take their just reward, because it would create lessons, it would create discipline. So all the new firms that would have been formed out of the remnants of Goldman Sachs where everybody lost their stock values – which for most of these partners is tens of millions, hundreds of millions – when they formed a new firm, I doubt whether they would have gone back to the old game. What happened was the Fed stopped everything in its tracks, kept Goldman Sachs intact, the reckless Goldman Sachs and the reckless Morgan Stanley, everyone quickly recovered their stock value and the game continues. This is one of the evils that comes from this kind of deep intervention in the capital and money markets.
The lessons that we were supposed to learn from the crisis of 2008 have not been learned.
Instead, the lure of huge returns and big bonuses has caused a return to the exact same behavior that caused the crisis of 2008 in the first place. The following is one example of this phenomenon from a recent article by Wolf Richter…
The craziness on Wall Street, the reckless for-the-moment-only behavior that led to the Financial Crisis, is back.
This time it’s Citigroup that is once again concocting “synthetic” securities, like those that had wreaked havoc five years ago. And once again, it’s using them to shuffle off risks through the filters of Wall Street to people who might never know.
What bubbled to the surface is that Citigroup is selling synthetic securities that yield 13% to 15% annually—synthetic because they’re based on credit derivatives.
Apparently, Citi has a bunch of shipping loans on its books, and it’s trying to protect itself against default. In return for succulent interest payments, investors will take on some of the risks of these loans.
Yes, the Dow hit another new all-time high today. But the derivatives bubble that hangs over the global economy like a sword of Damocles could burst at literally any moment. When it does, the damage is going to be incalculable.
In a previous article entitled “Why Is The World Economy Doomed? The Global Financial Pyramid Scheme By The Numbers“, I noted a couple of statistics that show why derivatives are such an enormous problem…
-$212,525,587,000,000 - According to the U.S. government, this is the notional value of the derivatives that are being held by the top 25 banks in the United States. But those banks only have total assets of about 8.9 trillion dollars combined. In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs total assets by a ratio of about 24 to 1.
-$600,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 - The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives generally fall within this range. At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives to global GDP is more than 21 to 1.
When the derivatives bubble finally bursts, where are we going to get the trillions upon trillions of dollars that will be needed to “fix” things this time?
And sadly, the reality is that we are quickly running out of time.
It is important to keep watching Europe. As I noted the other day, the European banking system as a whole is leveraged about 26 to 1 at this point. When Lehman Brothers finally collapsed, it was leveraged about 30 to 1.
And the economic crisis over in Europe just continues to get worse. It was announced on Tuesday that the unemployment rate in the eurozone is at an all-time record high of 12 percent, and thelatest manufacturing numbers show that manufacturing activity over in Europe is in the process of collapsing.
So don’t be fooled by the fact that the Dow keeps setting new all-time record highs. This bubble of false hope will be very short-lived.
The unfortunate truth is that the global financial system is a complete and total mess, and at this point a collapse appears to be inevitable
By: Nicholas Blincoe
Is modern life making us ill? Yes, say those who suffer from electrosensitivity. Are they cranks, or should we all be throwing away our mobile phones?
Tim Hallam is just tall enough to seem gangly. His height makes the bedroom feel even smaller than it is. Muddy sunlight filters through the grey gauze hung over his window. His narrow bed appears to be covered with a glistening silver mosquito net. The door and the ceiling are lined with tinfoil. Tim tells me there is also a layer of foil beneath the wallpaper and under the wood-effect flooring.
He says, “The room is completely insulated; the edges are sealed with aluminium tape and connected with conducting tape so I could ground the whole room. It’s a Faraday cage, effectively. Grounding helps with the low frequencies radiation, apparently. The high frequencies just bounce off the outside.”
Tim is trying to escape atmospheric manmade radiation caused by Wi-Fi, phone signals, radio, even TV screens and fluorescent bulbs. It’s a hopeless task, he admits: “It’s so hard to get away from, and it’s taken a toll on my life.” I offer to put my phone outside the room and he happily accepts, firmly closing the door. He explains the phone would have kept searching for a signal. “And because it wouldn’t find one, it would keep ramping up.” With the tinfoil inside his cage, the signal would hurtle around the room like a panicked bird.
Tim estimates he spent £1,000 on the insulation, taking photographs at every stage to share with others via ElectroSensitivity UK, the society for sufferers. He found the whole process stressful, especially after a summer sleeping in the garden of his shared house in Leamington Spa to escape a new flatmate’s powerful Wi-Fi router. How did he feel about the flatmate at the time? “Oh, I hated him. It wasn’t really him, of course. But I was so angry.” Among the symptoms Tim experiences – headaches, muscular pain, dry eyes – there are memory lapses and irritability. He now says his bed is the single most important thing he owns. “I climb in and zip it up so I’m completely sealed. Inside, I sleep extremely well. Without it, my sleep is fragmented, and without sleep, then lots of other things go wrong.”
Tim demonstrates the effectiveness of the tinfoil using a radiation detector called Elektrosmog, manufactured in Germany. It is blocky and white, which makes it look both retro and futuristic. On the front of the box, a picture of an electricity pylon is surrounded by jagged black lightning flashes. The machine gives a reading close to zero: Tim’s room is radiation-free.
As a child in the 70s, I watched a BBC science-fiction serial called The Changes, which imagined a future after humans became allergic to electricity. Pylons were the greatest danger, making people violently sick. On cross-country runs, I would speed up when I had to pass beneath a power cable, feeling the weight of the buzzing electricity above me. The idea that electromagnetic fields affect our health took root in the 1960s. A US doctor named Robert O Becker became the face of the campaign against pylons after appearing on the US TV show 60 Minutes. Professor Andrew Marino, now of Louisiana State University, was Becker’s lab partner. Marino says, “He’s the reason nobody wants to live near power lines.”
If electromagnetic radiation is dangerous to humans, there are far more risks now than 40 years ago, thanks to the telecommunications industry. More than a billion people worldwide own mobile phones. In the UK, there are more mobile contracts than people. The new 4G spectrum will cover 98% of the country, erasing all but the most remote “not spots”.
Dr Mireille Toledano runs Cosmos, a 30-year, five-nation study into the effects of telecoms radiation on humans. She knows how rapidly things are changing. In 2000, a 10-year study into mobile phones and brain tumours pegged heavy use at 30 minutes a day. The study found the 90th percentile had spent 1,640 hours of their lives on their phones. In the UK, Toledano says, “heavy use is now defined at 86 minutes a day; 30 minutes is in the median range. Across the whole [international Cosmos study], the top 10% of users have now clocked up 4,160 or more hours.”
The earlier study found no evidence linking phone use and cancer in the short term, yet as our love affair with technology keeps deepening, anxieties grow. Two years ago, the European Assembly passedResolution 1815, which, among other things, calls for restrictions on Wi-Fi in schools and the use of mobile phones by children. The World Health Organisation has classified electromagnetic fields of the kind used in mobile telephony as Group 2b carcinogens – that is, as possibly cancerous.
The issue of electromagnetic sensitivity is immediately political. It places sufferers on the other side from both industry and the governments that profit from leasing wavelengths. Over and over, I hear the phrase, “We are the canaries in the coal mine”: sufferers believe we are approaching a tipping point. Tim Hallam worries about the effects of electromagnetic fields on the most vulnerable: on his sister’s young family; on children in schools bathed in Wi-Fi rays; or old people in sheltered accommodation, each with their own internet router. “I think it’s affecting everyone’s cells. There are test-tube experiments which show it damages DNA and affects the blood-brain barrier. I do think there’s going to be a surge in the people who are sensitive in years to come. But my sister’s not fully taken that on board.”
Yet electro hypersensitivity syndrome is controversial. Sweden recognises EHS as a ”functional impairment”, or disability, but it is the patients, not doctors, who make the diagnosis. The fact is, everyone who suffers from EHS is self-diagnosed – and each has their own story to explain the cause of their problems.
Tim was 15 years old, at a gig by the industrial band Sheep on Drugs, when the singer produced a pistol and fired blanks into the ceiling. Tim, who is now 36, says, “It was the loudest thing I had ever heard.” His ears began ringing but he continued going to gigs without using ear plugs and the problem grew worse. He played clarinet in two orchestras but had to stop: “Immediately, my musical life and my social life ended.” Today, his sister is a professional classical musician. Tim, a Cambridge graduate, is a van driver for Asda. He works shifts that allow him time alone when his flatmates are out and the house is free of Wi-Fi and phones. It was the arrival of Wi-Fi in his house, just 10 months ago, that led Tim to identify the cause of his problems, but it was the tinnitus that started it all.
Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, 65, is wearing a jacket made from a silver-coated material that reduces the strength of electromagnetic fields. Photograph: Thomas Ball
Michelle Berriedale-Johnson has worked in the field of food intolerances and allergies for more than 20 years. She runs the industry awards for “Free From” foods from her home in north-west London, as well asfoodsmatter.com, a website that raises awareness around food intolerances. Five years ago, at the age of 60, she began to feel unwell. She was sitting at her desk when she identified the cause. “I looked up and there was the Royal Free Hospital with the phone masts on the top, beaming straight through my window, and it just clicked.” Michelle is bright and lively, happy to dive beneath her desk to show the precautions she has taken to shield herself from the spaghetti of wires. Her walls are painted with carbon paint, lined with foil and papered over. The windows have the same netting as Tim’s, though when she uses her Elektrosmog meter she discovers to her consternation that the netting is old and no longer works. Her front rooms buzz with electromagnetic radiation, though her office – now at the back of the house – shows far better readings. She says, “I’m lucky to work from home, but I often feel like a prisoner.” When she leaves the house, she wears hats lined with material similar to Tim’s mosquito netting and even has blouses made of the same material. “The important thing is to protect your head and upper torso,” she says.
Michelle precisely identifies the moment she became sensitised to radiation. She was an early user of mobile phones. “Do you remember the type with the little aerial? I had one where the antenna had broken off, but I continued to use it pressed to my ear, which people who know tell me meant that I was using my entire head as an aerial.” In her view, we are all sensitive to electromagnetic fields, but events can tip us over into hypersensitivity, like a kitchen sink filling so fast that the overflow becomes overwhelmed and water cascades to the floor.
The problem, in clinical terms, is that “hypersensitivity” refers either to allergies or to auto-immune conditions. EHS may be like hay fever or, in extreme cases, like rheumatoid arthritis but only via analogy. If we speak of “hypersensitivity” we are using a metaphor – or we are talking about something entirely new. Does this “new” condition exist?
Long-time researcher Dr Olle Johansson, from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, coined the term “screen dermatitis” to explain why computer users in the depths of the Stockholm winter could complain of sunburn-like symptoms. Johansson has a theory that could explain how extremely high levels of radiation could affect histamine levels in cells. Yet telecoms radiation is low and becoming lower as gadgets become more efficient. Johansson acknowledges that if anyone is found to be truly allergic to their phone it would be an entirely new kind of allergy, but he hopes that an awareness of EHS will lead to revolutionary changes. “In Sweden, we take accessibility measures seriously for disabilities. You think of changes to sidewalks, or wheelchair access, or ramps on buses. These are also helpful to mothers with prams, people with shopping or to rollerskaters. The big winner is everyone.” Similarly, he believes that cutting off the telecoms signals would not only help EHS sufferers, it would benefit all of us, returning us to a society based on face-to-face human interaction.
Dr James Rubin of King’s College Institute of Psychiatry is adamant EHS is not a genuine syndrome. “With most conditions, patients don’t necessarily know what’s going on. But with electrosensitivity there’s an absolute certainty about the cause. Self-diagnosis is at the core of it.” He prefers the term “idiopathic environmental intolerances”, or IEI, which covers conditions with no obvious cause, like multiple chemical sensitivity, sick building syndrome, food intolerances – even a physical reaction to wind turbines. “The problem is, if you look for a coherent set of symptoms, you are not going to find it. You even find that people’s symptoms change over time. Many have other intolerances in addition to the electrical sensitivity.”
Tim is intolerant to milk and gluten. He is also allergic to wool, and cannot sleep in a room with a carpet. Michelle has no intolerances but admits she is unusual in the community: “Most people do.” She made her diagnosis because she was familiar with EHS through her work. She is familiar with Rubin’s research and has written blogs condemning his methods: “These stupid so-called provocation studies where they place a mobile in your hand and ask if you feel unwell. And if you say yes, they go, ho-ho, the phone wasn’t switched on.” These tests pay no attention to the way that people are sensitised, or react to their sensitivity in different ways, she believes.
Rubin is a bogeyman in the electrosensitive community thanks to a 2008 paper that suggested the condition was psychosomatic. Yet he has also undertaken a review of all the research – more than 50 provocation studies – and found no evidence of sensitivity to telecoms radiation. He says, “The suffering is very real – I don’t doubt that – and I take it very seriously. But we’ve spent millions on the research and the time comes when you have to say, in the future the money would be better spent on looking for effective treatments, rather than chasing a cause.”
Professor Andrew Marino is less sceptical. “When people say they feel unwell and trace that to a Wi-Fi signal or a phone, that is a kind of experiment. It may not be well designed, they may not understand blinds and double blinds, but if they are reasonable people, carefully noting what they are suffering, we should take a look at that.”
Marino was a first-year postgraduate in 1964 when he began working with Dr Robert Becker. Once he and Becker began campaigning against electricity pylons, their funding disappeared. Becker retired at the relatively young age of 56. Today, Andrew Marino will not look to industry for research funds. He has reviewed many of the same 50 papers on EHS as Rubin, concluding, “It’s easy to find nothing.” The common denominator he identified in the papers casting doubt on EHS is that they were funded by the telecommunications industry.
EHS sufferers have criticised Rubin’s research because it is funded jointly by mobile phone companies and government. They believe this shows direct bias. Marino’s criticism is different. He recognises Rubin’s money was placed in a fund and administered by scientists separate from the industry. Yet, he argues, the industry approves funding because statistical modelling of large-scale studies averages out experiences and produces no clear-cut results. Big business is happy to back risk studies, but they favour projects that minimise risk: “You look at the statistics and see the way they design the experiments and they have no ability to find anything.”
Rubin’s research is statistic-driven. If Rubin is a pollster, then Marino is a canvasser. He believes vast overviews hide the way people really feel. Marino chose to focus on a single sufferer, a female doctor. His two-week study began by first discovering which wavelengths affected her. Once her symptoms had subsided, Marino and his team began again, using provocation studies of real and fake signals. Their results were published as Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity: Evidence For A Novel Neurological Syndrome.
Marino and Rubin have exchanged a series of letters about the study in the Journal Of Neuroscience. If the research stands up, Marino’s syndrome is novel because it is unlike other kinds of hypersensitivity. In truth, it depends upon singularity. Marino speaks urgently: “I’m not interested in measuring the prevalence of the syndrome. I want to establish its existence.” In his view, humans – complex living organisms – are all different. In the economy of our bodies, Marino says, “causes becomes effects and effects becomes causes which become effects, and so on”. It is an endless and unpredictable cycle.
So should we all make radical lifestyle changes, like cutting down our mobile phone use or getting rid of our Wi-Fi?
“Why?” Marino sounds perplexed.
“Because we might get sick.”
Marino dismisses the idea. He may disagree vehemently with Rubin, but he views EHS sufferers as outliers, far removed from the average human experience and with few lessons for the rest of us. “Listen, I use an ear bud with my phone, and I minimise use. I don’t know if you’d call it radical but I don’t have acute reactions to anything. So there’s nothing for me to worry about.”
Mia: Don’t you hate that?
Vincent: What?
Mia: Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it’s necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
Vincent: I don’t know. That’s a good question.
Mia: That’s when you know you’ve found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.
In the 1950s and 60s inventor Dennis Gabor discovered that when you photograph objects with a split light beam and store the information as wave interference patterns, you get a better image than with ordinary point-to-point intensity photographs. Not only is the captured image clearer, but it is completely three dimensional.
An Examination of Obama’s Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches
THE EVIDENCE IS HERE: This document contains over 60 pages of evidenc and analysis proving Barack Obama’s use of a little-known and highly deceptive and manipulative form of “hack” hypnosis on millions of unaware Americans, and reveals what only a few psychologists and hypnosis/NLP experts know.
By Nicolas Bonnal
Think of the great eye of Sauron, the all-seeing eye which symbolizes NWO and echelon surveillance. Think of Mellon, the password to get in the Moria, the name of an Illuminati and bankers’ dynasty.
By: LAWRENCE KELEMEN
I. When was Jesus born?
A. Popular myth puts his birth on December 25th in the year 1 C.E.
B. The New Testament gives no date or year for Jesus’ birth. The earliest gospel – St. Mark’s, written about 65 CE – begins with the baptism of an adult Jesus. This suggests that the earliest Christians lacked interest in or knowledge of Jesus’ birthdate.
By Jack Mullen
Were people consciously aware something was about to change in a very bad way just before Lenin and Trotsky appeared on the scene in Petrograd in the Spring of 1917 ? Did the German people realize accepting the ‘hope’ of Hitler would result in something so hideous and evil that tens of millions of people would die and a permanent blood stain would appear on the history of Germany? What was life like months or years before the Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the Turks, did they know that government imposed gun control was really disarmament before extermination? How about the Chinese before the tyrant Mao,or the North Koreans before the Kim Jung Il family infestation, did these people know what was coming, but didn’t know what they could do?
By: WofC
For the past 56 years the Church of Scientology has blazed a path of headlines and mystery across the globe. Once existing only as the idea held by a single man, the Church has grown into a multinational, highly organized institution in record time. There is little doubt that trends in the 60′s and 70′s of both counter-culture and new-age thought contributed to the break-neck speed of the Church’s growth, allowing its numbers to swell worldwide to figures that cannot be accurately counted, but are said to number in the millions.
By: Belen Fernandez
Many argue that Monsanto’s contributions in India have led to a “suicide economy” [EPA]
The website of US-based biotech giant Monsanto boasts that the corporation qualifies as “a sustainable agriculture company”.
By: Megan Gannon
Researchers examined blood samples, hair samples and measurements collected from mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys that were live-captured and released in Mexico and Guatemala between 1998 and 2008.
By: Tim Kelly
Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, rumors began to circulate challenging the official narrative that it was an unprovoked surprise attack.
Are Israel’s Jews – some of them (Zionists) – on their way to becoming Nazis?
By Alan Hart
Some and perhaps many will regard my headline question as offensive but I make no apology for asking it; and I take comfort from the fact that my decision to pose it is fully supported by one of my very dear Jewish friends, Nazi holocaust survivor Dr Hajo Meyer.
By: Patrick_Henningsen
Patrick Lynch writes: For almost two decades now the planet has been in the grip of a chemical and biological attack from the air. These weapons of mass destruction can actually be seen and there is a mountain of evidence that these methods of weaponry actually exist.
BY: JEFFREY PHELPS
Americans were stunned last week, coming to the startling reality that citizens from all 50 states, over 1 million signatories, thus far, have petitioned their state to secede from the union, with at least seven states, as of Sunday, having the 25,000 signatures necessary to officially force a White House response.
By Jeff Fitchett
When he was elected president in 2008, Barack Obama was untried and untested. Just four years out of the Illinois state Senate, he had not yet proved himself as either a manager or a leader. He had emerged from relative obscurity as the result of a single convention speech and was voted into office only a few years later on a tidal wave of hope, breezing past several opponents with far more experience and far clearer claims on the job.
Obama List Of Lies
Today, Obama is a very different candidate. He has confronted two inherited wars and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. He brought America’s misguided adventure in Iraq to an end and arrested the economic downturn (though he did not fully reverse it) with the 2009 fiscal stimulus and a high-risk strategy to save the U.S. automobile industry. He secured passage of a historic health care reform law – the most important social legislation since Medicare.
Just as important, Obama brought a certain levelheadedness to the White House that had been in short supply during the previous eight years. While his opponents assailed him as a socialist and a Muslim and repeatedly challenged the location of his birthplace in an effort to call into question his legitimacy as president, he showed himself to be an adult, less an ideologue than a pragmatist, more cautious than cocky. Despite Republicans’ persistent obstructionism, he pushed for – and enacted – stronger safeguards against another Wall Street meltdown and abusive financial industry practices. He cut the cost of student loans, persuaded auto manufacturers to take an almost unimaginable leap in fuel efficiency by 2025 and offered a temporary reprieve from deportation to young immigrants brought into the country illegally by their parents. He ended the morally bankrupt “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that had institutionalized discrimination against gays in the military.
The nation has been well served by President Barack Obama’s steady leadership. He deserves a second term.
His record is by no means perfect. His expansive use of executive power is troubling, as is his continuation of some of the indefensible national security policies of the George W. Bush administration. This page has faulted him for not pushing harder for a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws. Obama swept into office as a transformative figure, but the expectations built up by the long campaign thudded back to earth amid an unexpectedly steep recession and hyperbolic opposition from the right. That the GOP has sought to block his agenda wherever possible is undeniable, but truly great leaders find ways to bring opposing factions together when the times demand it; Obama has not yet been able to do so.
Republicans have sought to make the presidential election an up-or-down vote on Obama, hoping that voters will hold him accountable for the country’s stubbornly high unemployment and sluggish economy. But this election isn’t a referendum on one candidate, it’s a choice between two. And unfortunately for the GOP, its candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, has demonstrated clearly that he’s the wrong choice. He’s wrong on the issues, from immigration to tax policy to the use of American power to gay rights and beyond. And his shifting positions and willingness to pander have raised questions about who he is and what he stands for.
On economic issues, the race between Obama and Romney presents a stark choice. Romney wants to cut taxes, spending and regulations in the hope that the mix of stimulus and austerity will spark growth and reduce the federal deficit. Obama wants to trim spending but raise taxes on high-income Americans, shrinking the deficit without sacrificing investments in the country’s productive capacity or curtailing Washington’s role in protecting the vulnerable.
Obama’s choice of former New York Fed Chairman Geithner to head Treasury signalled fairly clearly that this President was going to go with Wall Street all the way. While not a banker per se, Geithner’s career was almost entirely within the international banking community, including the Treasury Department and the IMF. At the Fed in New York, he hobnobbed with Hank Greenberg of AIG and John Whitehead of Goldman Sachs, both of whom got bailed out generously in the midst of the 2007-08 crash.
While other nominees to Federal office might have been disqualified by the matter of failing to pay self-employment tax for several years, not so Wall Street club member Geithner. He was confirmed and jumped right in to support Obama’s policy of using Hitler-like health-care “reform” to cut costs, and ongoing bailouts of the desperately bankrupt international banks. He has continued that policy to this day, using his office to pressure Europe to adopt a suicidal policy of hyperinflation and austerity, and implementing the same policy here at home.
According to EIR sources on Capitol Hill, Geithner has also found time to visit Congressmen and Senators to pressure them against going for a Glass-Steagall banking separation. Nor was he above consorting with the rating agencies during the budget crisis of 2011, working with them to push a program of draconian budget cuts for the period ahead.
Now, with the recent exposé of the Libor interest-rate-fixing, it is clear that Geithner also played a hands-on role in that operation, although it’s not known how extensive it was. Minimally, he covered up a crime which devastated hundreds, if not thousands, of cities and states worldwide, by the scam known as interest-rate swaps, which were immensely profitable to his real “constituency,” the money-center banks.
By E. Thomas McClanahan
Soon after the Supreme Court upheld the bulk of Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office came out with a new estimate for its cost. No surprise: As before, CBO said it would reduce, not raise, the federal deficit. This put a warm glow in the heart of every Democrat and Obamacare supporter.
Too bad it’s a fairy tale. With the election only weeks away, the point must be emphasized: This law is a fiscal calamity.
CBO said the court ruling reduces the 10-year cost of Obamacare by $84 billion because states won’t be required to expand coverage under Medicaid. But that doesn’t come close to solving the budget problem.
CBO is obligated to follow “scoring conventions” that, among other things, assume spending cuts in current law won’t be overridden by Congress when the time comes for some favored constituency to feel the pain. Example: the “doc fix,” in which Congress regularly keeps physicians and other providers from being whacked by scheduled cuts in Medicare fees.
In April, Charles Blahous, one of two public trustees for Medicare and Social Security, published a study offering a more-realistic estimate of the law’s cost. Blahous found that over the next 10 years, Obamacare would balloon federal deficits by between $340 billion and $530 billion.
A big item is the double-counting of reductions in Medicare spending. This is several hundred billion dollars yanked out of Medicare and shifted to Obamacare.
CBO saw that move as a fiscal gain. If not for that, Blahous wrote, Obamacare “would have been scored as worsening the federal fiscal outlook.”
Here’s the problem: The Medicare spending reductions extended the life of Medicare’s hospital trust fund. As Blahous explained, when you take a dollar from Medicare and use it to pay for something else, the trust fund’s financial position improves.
Medicare can’t spend a dime unless the trust fund has a positive balance. Lower Medicare spending today leaves more in the trust fund to be spent later.
But that money will also be spent on Obamacare. Each $1 in Medicare sent to Obamacare sets up $2 in overall federal spending. Obamacare “expands the spending authority of Medicare in ways not accounted for under the scoring conventions that show positive budgetary effects of the legislation,” Blahous wrote.
The biggest single expense will be the health-care exchanges, estimated to cost nearly $780 billion over 10 years. Recipients will get both tax credits for premium costs and cost-sharing subsidies for out-of-pocket expenses.
This will create an incentive for companies to drop coverage and pay the required tax. CBO foresaw only a relatively minor shift from employer-sponsored policies to the subsidized exchanges, but it admits it has no clear idea how many people would be affected. Estimates by private consultants are much higher. If they’re right, costs would explode as more people migrate to the exchanges.
Obamacare supporters say new controls like the Independent Payment Advisory Board will help keep Medicare costs under control, but the problem here is similar to the doc fix. Congress will be pressured to override the panel’s recommendations.
Ditto for the tax on “Cadillac” health plans. Lawmakers will be lobbied to water down or wipe out the tax before it goes into effect in 2018.
More: Some supporters put great stock in “delivery-system reforms,” which include incentives for hospitals to boost quality and innovations such as “accountable-care organizations.”
But the savings are close to trivial. Medicare’s chief actuary put them at about $2 billion, all derived from comparative-effectiveness research. The other delivery-system reforms would have a “ negligible financial impact,” according to the actuary.
The coming Obamacare spending explosion is ironic because one of the main justifications for health-care reform was fiscal discipline. The route to that goal, said then-Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag, runs “directly through health care.”
Too bad the people who wrote this law lost their way.
and this is the “other choice”…
