Friday, June 27, 2014

Kansas pipeline eruption leaves worrisome oily residue across Olpe


By Associated Press / June 24, 2014 

Image
A damaged area of crop and range land, seen June 23, extends northward from the Panhandle Eastern pipeline that emitted a plume of dark, oily substance on Thursday at a Panhandle compressor station near Olpe, Kansas.

Dustin Michelson/Emporia Gazette/AP

Kansas health officials on Monday were at the site of natural gas pipeline eruption in eastern Kansas, where crops and trees have withered since a dark, oily plume burst from the line while crews were trying to perform maintenance.

Shrubs, crops, trees, and houses near Olpe were covered in an oily mist that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment told The Associated Press was natural gas condensate, a mix of natural gas and hydrocarbons. Since then, leaves on trees have begun to wither and soybeans have died. An unpleasant smell lingered Monday.

The accident happened Thursday along a Panhandle Eastern pipeline. Residents reported seeing the plume burst from the line and spread across nearby fields and yards, The Emporia Gazette reported. Olpe is a town of about 550 residents south of Emporia.

"I saw that smoke and thought, 'What the ---- is going on at the Panhandle?' It was all black coming out of there at 400-600 PSI," landowner Don Brown told the newspaper. "It was going everywhere."  MORE

A 1,000-foot high wall might be the key to saving the midwest from tornados

From:  Engaget


Tornado

A towering, 50-meter thick wall may sound like the fevered dream of isolationists bent on border control, but it just might be the solution to the midwest's tornado problems. University of Drextel physicist Rongjia Tao reckons that a trio of 1,000-foot high, 165-foot "great walls" could mitigate the worst natural weather of Tornado Alley -- a loosely defined area that spans several states with high tornado risk. Tao compared Tornado Alley to a geographically similar area in China and concluded that the midwest suffered from more tornados primarily because it doesn't have east-west mountain ranges to weaken or block the weather patterns that form them. Now he's proposing that we build some.

Tao envisions three enormous walls to protect the midwest: one in North Dakota, a second in a middle area like Oklahoma and a third near Texas or Louisiana. Smaller sections of these barriers could be built in high-risk areas to start, he says, and then gradually extended. As much as Tao believes in his proposed solution, he's at least being realistic about it: he doesn't expect the project to start anytime in the near future. Even so, it could be comparatively affordable -- one mile of the tornado wall is estimated to cost about $160 million, but it has the potential to stop tornados that cause damages that rack up into billions. Check out Tao's findings in the International Journal of Modern Physics at the source link below.
[Image credit: Gettystock]

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Vaccine researcher charged with felony crimes for research fraud; may spend 20 years in prison over faked AIDS vaccine


vaccine

(NaturalNews) Scientific fraud is so common in the vaccine industry, it's practically the default business model. The truth is that most vaccines don't work, so in order to make them appear to work, researchers routinely spike blood samples of vaccinated test subjects with antibodies, making it appear the vaccine caused the body to produce those antibodies.

This is exactly what Merck does with MMR vaccines, according to the company's own former virologists who filed a False Claims Act with the federal government. It's also why up to 97% of children who contract measles or mumps were already vaccinated against measles and mumps.

Now, a National Institutes of Health-funded vaccine scientist who was celebrated as achieving a breakthrough vaccine against HIV has confessed to spiking the test subject blood samples with antibodies. Dong-Pyou Han had taken $5 million in NIH grant money to further his "research" at Iowa State University. The mainstream media and vaccine advocates hailed his research as groundbreaking, "game-changing" advancements in the search for an AIDS vaccine.

But now, it turns out Han committed outrageous scientific fraud that wasted taxpayer money and diverted resources away from other important research projects. So federal prosecutors have taken the extraordinary step of charging Han with making false statements to the government. He now faces four felony counts, each of which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years. (Yes, lying to the government is a federal crime. But the government lying to us, well... that's another matter altogether.)

"It's an important case because it is extremely rare for scientists found to have committed fraud to be held accountable by the actual criminal justice system," said Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky in an ABC News article. (1)

The vaccine industry routinely gets away with fraud: Why aren't more criminal charges filed?

All this brings up the question of why more fraudulent vaccine researchers aren't charged with felony crimes. It also begs the question of why companies like GlaxoSmithKline, which openly admit to committing multiple felony crimes in the routine bribing of doctors, are still allowed to conduct business with the government at all.

The vaccine industry, you see, is run like a criminal mafia that has blanket legal immunity thanks to the U.S. Congress. Vaccines are the only product sold in the USA which can be defectively manufactured and kill people, yet still face zero legal liability in the courts.

This is true even when vaccines have been found to contain tiny shards of glass, high levels of toxic mercury, a brain-damaging heavy metal, or even live viruses that literally infect people with the very disease the vaccine claims to prevent.

In the United States, a vaccine manufacturer could spike their vaccines with motor oil, cancer viruses, live bacteria, hexavalent chromium, Agent Orange or any other chemical they wanted, and the manufacturer would still have total immunity from all lawsuits. Because of this immunity, vaccine manufacturing has zero quality control pressure in the real world, because vaccine manufacturers are not liable for defective products. So what's the difference if a few batches a year accidentally contain SV40 cancer viruses, or shards of glass, or too much mercury?

That's why Dr. Maurice Hilleman, former Merck vaccine developer, openly said, "I think that vaccines have to be considered the bargain basement technology for the 20th century." (SOURCE)

Vaccine and drug researchers who commit fraud are also routinely given a slap on the wrist rather than being charged with felony crimes. Remember the psychiatric doctor named Charles Nemeroff who held a chairman position at Emory University? Even after being caught secretly taking $800,000 from GlaxoSmithKline and stripped of his chairmanship, Emory University -- a dubious institution steeped in drug money influence -- failed to fire Nemeroff and kept him on staff. According to the WSJ, 14 other Emory University doctors also received money from the Depression and Anxiety journal to write articles about Effector. At Emory, it seems, selling out to the drug industry is just a routine way of participating in academia.

It's time to end legal immunity for research fraud

Vaccine researchers in particular have long enjoyed a presumed legal immunity, even when they commit outrageous scientific fraud. The public has been hoodwinked into thinking vaccines always work and drug companies are engaged in "evidence-based medicine" even when it's all being faked.

In truth, most vaccines don't work on most people. This is readily admitted on the vaccine inserts themselves, believe it or not. For example, I have in my possession a Flulaval Influenza Virus Vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline. This insert says, word for word, all the following astonishing things:

"There have been no controlled trials adequately demonstrating a decrease in influenza disease after vaccination with Flulaval." (The vaccine insert openly admits the vaccine is backed by zero evidence? So much for so-called "evidence-based medicine." Now you're taking a flu shot on pure faith. Perhaps they should be called Evangelical Vaccines...)

Because some readers were skeptical that a vaccine insert would openly admit the vaccine doesn't work, I have taken a photo of this insert as shown here. This is the photo the vaccine industry desperately hopes you never see:



Other astonishing statements made on the vaccine insert include:

"Safety and effectiveness of Flulaval have not been established in pregnant women, nursing mothers or children." (And yet this vaccine is routinely administered to pregnant women.)

"Safety and effectiveness of Flulaval in pediatric patients have not been established." (Yet the vaccine is also routinely given to children.)

"Flulaval has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential, or for impairment of fertility." (It might cause cancer and spontaneous abortions, in other words, but they don't really know.)

"Do not administer Flulaval to anyone... following previous administration of any influenza vaccine." (No one who has already had a flu shot in any previous year should take this flu shot. Yet flu shots are routinely given year after year to the very same people who often end up getting the flu anyway because their immune systems are so compromised.)

Total immunity from FTC over blatant marketing fraud

What's interesting to note about flu vaccines in particular is that they also enjoy complete immunity from the FTC even while making blatantly false claims in their marketing.

The FTC, you see, routinely goes after scammy weight loss supplement companies for making false claims. They even threw Kevin Trudeau in prison for making false statements in a weight loss book.

But when influenza vaccines are aggressively marketed with blatantly false claims -- both literal claims and implied claims -- the FTC utterly ignores them. Think about it: what other product can get away with being marketed to the public as working even though its own safety sheet openly admits there's no evidence the product works at all?

Can you imagine an oil company selling gasoline that didn't combust? Or a soap company selling a liquid that didn't contain any soap? How about a wine maker selling a beverage that turned out to be grape juice instead of wine? In all these cases, people would get angry and the FTC would investigate. But when flu shots are sold without any scientific evidence that they really work, the federal government looks the other way and pretends no marketing fraud is taking place.

Thank goodness at least one branch of the feds is charging Dong-Pyou Han with crimes related to the massive vaccine fraud he committed. This is at least a start. If all fraudulent vaccine researchers were similarly charged with felony crimes, we'd have a court system full of such cases and we'd probably have to build a whole new prison just for the vaccine criminals, where they could all practice exposing each other to Anthrax by using CDC-approved research protocols.

Sources for this article include:
(1) http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/r...

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Former state health employees say they were silenced on drilling

From:  State Impact npr 

By  
Two retirees from the Pennsylvania Department of Health say its employees were silenced on the issue of Marcellus Shale drilling.
Lindsay Lazarski/WHYY

Two retirees from the Pennsylvania Department of Health say its employees were silenced on the issue of Marcellus Shale drilling.

Two retirees from the Pennsylvania Department of Health say its employees were silenced on the issue of Marcellus Shale drilling.

One veteran employee says she was instructed not to return phone calls from residents who expressed health concerns about natural gas development.

“We were absolutely not allowed to talk to them,” said Tammi Stuck, who worked as a community health nurse in Fayette County for nearly 36 years.

Another retired employee, Marshall P. Deasy III, confirmed that.

Deasy, a former program specialist with the Bureau of Epidemiology, said the department also began requiring field staff to get permission to attend any meetings outside the department. This happened, he said, after an agency consultant made comments about drilling at a community meeting.

In the more than 20 years he worked for the department, Deasy said, “community health wasn’t told to be silent on any other topic that I can think of.”  MORE

Colorado Regulators Halt Fracking Wastewater Injection Operation After Earthquake Strikes Area For Second Time in One Month

From:  EcoWatch


Thankfully, two earthquakes proved to be too many.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COOGC) has directed High Sierra Water Services to stop disposing wastewater into a Weld County injection well as a result of a 2.6 magnitude earthquake striking the area Monday morning, about five miles away from Greeley, CO, the Colorado Independent reported. The earthquake marked the second one in just one month.
Colorado regulators halted the operation of a wasterwater injection well after an earthquake struck the area for the second time in less than a month. Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons
Colorado regulators halted the operation of a wasterwater injection well after an earthquake struck the area for the second time in less than a month. Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons
High Sierra agreed to a 20-day halt after University of Colorado seismologists found evidence of low-level seismic activity near the injection site, including a 2.6-magnitude quake.
“In light of the findings of CU’s team, we think it’s important we review additional data, bring in additional expertise and closely review the history of injection at this site in order to more fully understand any potential link to seismicity and use of this disposal well,” COGCC Director Matt Lepore said.
To environmentalists, the connection between injection and earthquakes is as indisputable now as it was following the event on May 31.  MORE

Buying Up the Planet: Out-of-Control Central Banks on a Corporate Buying Spree

From:  TruthOut 

by Ellen Brown 

"Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means?"
Dr. Michael Hudson, Counterpunch, October 2010
When the US Federal Reserve bought an 80% stake in American International Group (AIG) in September 2008, the unprecedented $85 billion outlay was justified as necessary to bail out the world’s largest insurance company. Today, however, central banks are on a global corporate buying spree not to bail out bankrupt corporations but simply as an investment, to compensate for the loss of bond income due to record-low interest rates. Indeed, central banks have become some of the world’s largest stock investors.

Central banks have the power to create national currencies with accounting entries, and they are traditionally very secretive. We are not allowed to peer into their books. It took a major lawsuit by Reuters and a congressional investigation to get the Fed to reveal the $16-plus trillion in loans it made to bail out giant banks and corporations after 2008. MORE

Behind the scenes of a Koch conclave




attribution: U.S. Presidential archives
 
 President Richard Nixon displays his trademark victory wave to a crowd during his 1970 campaign on behalf of Republican congressional candidates.

I hope he haunts them.
 
The news that the Kochs were creating a new Super PAC, and now intend to spend at least $290 million this cycle—likelier an even $300 million—came after a weekend gathering in southern California of the Koch brothers' billionaire friends and donors and certain Republican politicians. The Nation's Lauren Windsor got an insider's perspective on what went down at the highly secretive meeting.
The highly secretive mega-donor conference, called “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” featured a who’s who of Republican political elites. According to conference documents obtained through a source who was in attendance, Representatives Tom Cotton (AR), Cory Gardner (CO) and Jim Jordan (OH) were present, as were Senators Mitch McConnell (KY) and Marco Rubio (FL). Cotton, Gardner and McConnell are all running for the Senate this year; Jordan for re-election in the House. Rubio is widely considered a major contender for a 2016 presidential run. According to the documents, the conference attendees discussed strategy on campaign finance, climate change, healthcare, higher education and opportunities for taking control of the Senate. (The draft agenda is available for viewing here.)
Of particular note, there was a special dinner held at La Casa Pacifica, "the former home of President Richard Nixon that has come to be known as 'The Western White House.'" The ghost of Tricky Dick must be particularly inspiring. The house is currently owned by former Nixon buddy Gavin Herbert, who also happens to have founded a pharmaceutical company—Allergan—which spends a lot of money on the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC. He also apparently spends a lot of money on other Koch projects, and loans out Nixon's house for them.  MORE

Sunday, June 22, 2014

RADICALS FOR CORPORATE POLLUTION: The Koch Cartel & The Heartland Institute

From:  The Exiled 

 


Yesterday, our old friends the Koch brothers were back in the news. The DeSmog Blog exposed how some of the most rancid trolls in the world of climate change-denialism are on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, one of the Koch Cartel’s early propaganda mills set up during the Reagan Era. 

Among the Heartland Institute’s disinformation projects: paying schools to spread pro-pollution lies to K-12 students by “providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain.” Also memos exposed direct funding deals from the Heartland Institute to pseudo-contrarian “scientists” like S. Fred Singer, named one of America’s top climate change-denialists, who also serves in a variety of Koch propaganda mills like the Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies and George Mason University.

The main thing to remember in any story involving the Heartland Institute is that it is a direct project of the Koch Cartel (you gotta admire the Kochs’ ability to generate so many bland names for their propaganda outfits, that blandness acts like a wizard’s cloaking power).  MORE

The Billionaire's Party

                                                                        


The Koch Family  
(Photo: Clockwise from top left, Courtesy of Koch Industries (3); Newscom; Courtesy of Koch Industries; Alan Klein)


Fred Koch, a native of North Texas and son of a Dutch immigrant, liked to say that he didn’t want his sons “to turn into country-club bums.” Fred graduated from M.I.T. in 1922 with a degree in chemical engineering and, like David, excelled in sports, in Fred’s case as a boxer. Fred moved to Wichita, where he became a partner in an engineering company called Winkler-Koch, made a fortune building oil refineries around the world, and bought a 160-acre horse farm outside of town, across the street from the Wichita Country Club. 

Early on, Fred’s company was nearly destroyed by litigious competitors. He and his partners had developed a new method for thermal cracking, a process that helps convert oil into gasoline; major oil companies tried to block him in court for years. Koch developed a fierce independent streak, and advised his sons never to sue: “The lawyers get a third, the government gets a third, and you get your business destroyed,” he told them.

Between 1929 and 1931, Fred Koch built fifteen oil plants in the Soviet Union, where he bore witness to the lead-up to Stalin’s Great Purge. Thirty years later, Koch published a pamphlet called A Business Man Looks at Communism. His list of “potential methods of communist take-over in U.S.A. by internal subversion” begins: “Infiltration of high offices of government and political parties until the President of the U.S. is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us of course, when as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy he could control us. Even the Vice Presidency would do as it could be easily arranged for the President to commit suicide.” Koch became a founding member of the John Birch Society. “Father was paranoid about communism, let’s put it that way,” says David.  MORE
The Koch Family  
Fred Koch, a native of North Texas and son of a Dutch immigrant, liked to say that he didn’t want his sons “to turn into country-club bums.” Fred graduated from M.I.T. in 1922 with a degree in chemical engineering and, like David, excelled in sports, in Fred’s case as a boxer. Fred moved to Wichita, where he became a partner in an engineering company called Winkler-Koch, made a fortune building oil refineries around the world, and bought a 160-acre horse farm outside of town, across the street from the Wichita Country Club.
Early on, Fred’s company was nearly destroyed by litigious competitors. He and his partners had developed a new method for thermal cracking, a process that helps convert oil into gasoline; major oil companies tried to block him in court for years. Koch developed a fierce independent streak, and advised his sons never to sue: “The lawyers get a third, the government gets a third, and you get your business destroyed,” he told them.
Between 1929 and 1931, Fred Koch built fifteen oil plants in the Soviet Union, where he bore witness to the lead-up to Stalin’s Great Purge. Thirty years later, Koch published a pamphlet called A Business Man Looks at Communism. His list of “potential methods of communist take-over in U.S.A. by internal subversion” begins: “Infiltration of high offices of government and political parties until the President of the U.S. is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us of course, when as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy he could control us. Even the Vice Presidency would do as it could be easily arranged for the President to commit suicide.” Koch became a founding member of the John Birch Society. “Father was paranoid about communism, let’s put it that way,” says David.
- See more at: http://nymag.com/news/features/67285/index1.html#sthash.9wVBFEKd.dpuf

Thursday, June 19, 2014

John Devens, Valdez Mayor During Exxon Spill, Dies at 74



Senator who attacked Doctor Oz over dietary supplements received over $146,000 in campaign contributions from Big Pharma mega-retailer and Monsanto





campaign contributions


(NaturalNews) The pieces of the puzzle are finally coming together on U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill's bizarre attack aimed at Doctor Oz. In a scathing Senate hearing exchange, Sen. McCaskill all but accused Doctor Oz of peddling quack weight loss products -- even though Oz actually runs a very meticulous, science-based operation where dietary supplements are heavily researched before being recommended to the public.

Now Natural News has learned that Sen. McCaskill received over $146,000 in campaign contributions from one of the largest pharmaceutical retailers in North America. According to campaign contribution data published at OpenSecrets.org, prescription drug mega-retailer Express Scripts gave McCaskill over $109,000 in campaign contributions, most of which was routed through lobbyist groups or PACs. (1)

Sen. McCaskill also accepted over $37,000 from Monsanto, widely regarded to be the most evil corporation in the world and an enemy of sustainable food production, heirloom seeds and traditional American farming methods.

Strangely, McCaskill also received over $32,000 from Google, Inc., and another $29,000 from Comcast.

In contrast, Doctor Oz receives no money whatsoever from recommending natural dietary supplements on his show. In fact, he goes out of his way to halt dietary supplement companies from using his name to promote such products.

Oz is the one operating in integrity here, while McCaskill is hiding her financial conflicts of interest. (Is anyone surprised?)

Blatant conflicts of interest kept hidden by Sen. McCaskill

Although these campaign contributions from a major drug retailer clearly present serious conflicts of interest with her line of questioning Doctor Oz, she failed to disclose these conflicts of interest in her conversation. Instead, she intentionally tried to make Doctor Oz look like a "bad guy" for recommending natural weight loss supplements (which he doesn't even sell, by the way) while in truth, McCaskill was merely working to eliminate the competition of her largest campaign contributors.

Natural weight loss supplements directly compete with prescription weight loss drugs, of course. But there's a lot more money to be made in prescription drugs sold by retailers like Express Scripts. McCaskill's attack was designed to intimidate Doctor Oz into halting his recommendations of natural products, thereby strengthening the near-monopoly of drug manufacturers and their lucrative retailing partners.

Now we know the rest of the story the mainstream media isn't reporting. This was never about green coffee bean extracts. Like almost everything else in Washington, it was always about protecting corporate interests at all costs. Even if it means raking an innocent guy over the coals and trying to intimidate him into silence.

Sources for this article include:
(1) http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contr...

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Our Stolen Future: Recent Important Scientic Studies

From:  Our Stolen Future 

book by Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers 



 
Shortcuts to recent important studies
Header links go to introductory essays about related issues.
identifies studies newly added to www.OurStolenFuture.org

 
  Corruption of science by vested interests
Cancer
 
Behavior and intelligence


Endometriosis
  Sperm count and other testicular maladies
 
Reproduction and fertility
  Immune system
 
  Wildlife and ecosystem

 
  Low dose effects

 
Results important for regulatory science

Mixtures of chemicals

Ubiquity of exposure