Suspending Students Isn't Effective. Here's What Schools Should Do Instead

From:  Nation Swell

by Chris Peake

Audubon Middle School discovered that getting rid of the disciplinary action actually improves pupil behavior.

A decade ago, 60 percent of students at one South Los Angeles middle school were suspended at some point during the school year. Out of 1,958 sixth, seventh and eight graders, 1,189 were written up for drugs, violence or class disruptions. But this zero-tolerance discipline policy didn’t have the desired effects. Troubled kids isolated themselves, academics lagged and enrollment sharply declined.

Led by a new principal and funded by a federal grant, Audubon Middle School and Gifted Magnet Center, an inner-city junior high school with one of the largest proportions of African-American students in L.A., joined the growing movement of implementing restorative justice in schools: Instead of simply penalizing misbehavior, the strategy involves talking through the reasons why a child is acting out. Prioritizing resolution over retribution, it’s all about keeping kids in school while maintaining the best learning environment. Audubon has taken the idea to a whole new level. Last school year, out of 827 middle school students, only 13 were booted from class — an astonishing 98.9 percent drop from 10 years ago.

In this community, too many African American and Hispanic students fall victim to a life of crime and end up imprisoned, says Kevin Dailey, a behavior intervention specialist with 31 years of experience at Audubon. “People are behind the gray walls because they don’t know how to communicate or because they didn’t have those supportive relationships,” he explains. “We have to do whatever we can to keep them out of that. Knowing how to communicate, how to listen and how to speak from the heart are very important.” In his mind, communication is the difference between being facedown on the ground in handcuffs and enrolled in college.

Read more: http://nationswell.com/audubon-school-restorative-justice-reduces-suspensions/#ixzz3VuFlWUpi

Future Blast Zones? How Crude-By-Rail Puts U.S. Communities At Risk

From:  telesur

by Steve Early

By: Steve Early

The transport of petroleum via rail is now a well-known and unwelcome sight in many other U.S. communities. Its long distance rail transport has resulted in five major train fires and explosions in the last 16 months alone.

Richmond, California began life more than a century ago as a sleepy little railroad town. It was the second place on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay where a transcontinental rail line connected with ferries, to transport freight and passengers to San Francisco. Now a diverse industrial city of 100,000, Richmond is still crisscrossed with tracks, both main lines and shorter ones, serving its deep-water port, huge Chevron oil refinery, and other local businesses. 

Trains just arriving or being readied for their next trip, move in and out of a sprawling Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) rail yard located right next to the oldest part of town. Some train formations are more than 100 cars long. The traffic stalls they create on nearby streets and related use of loud horns, both day and night, have long been a source of neighborhood complaints. Persistent city hall pressure has succeeded in cutting horn blasts by about 1,000 a day, through the creation of several dozen much appreciated “quiet zones.” No other municipality in California has established so many, but only after many years of wrestling with the industry. 

Despite progress on the noise front, many trackside residents continue to experience “quality of life” problems related to the air they breath. Some of their complaints arise from Richmond’s role as a transfer point for coal and petroleum coke (aka “pet coke”) being exported to Asia. As one Richmond official explained at a community meeting in March, these “climate wrecking materials” wend their way through the city in open cars—leaving, in their wake, houses, backyards, and even parked cars covered with a thick film of grimy, coal dust. Coal train fall-out has become so noisome in Richmond that its seven-member city council—now dominated by environmental activists— wants the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) to mandate the use of enclosed cars.  MORE

How Do Young Men Become Better Fathers? They Attend This Boot Camp

From:  NationSwell

by Chris Peak on March 24, 2015

In New York City, 749,000 kids are raised by single parents. But now, a program is providing support to these broken families.

Students from the Fatherhood Academy's fourth cohort graduate on April 25, 2014.

At 17 years of age, Kaeran Reyes-Little became a father.

Growing up in Queens, N.Y. — dad gone, mom working long shifts at the hospital — Reyes-Little found himself hanging with an older crowd, getting in trouble with the law. “I think that was God’s way of saying slow down,” he says of the birth of his son, Darius.

Even though he had just crossed into adulthood, Reyes-Little refused to perpetuate his own dad’s mistakes, to repeat the cycle. He took full custody of his son and tattooed his name across his forearm. Most mornings, Reyes-Little woke up at 4 a.m., wrestling with anxiety. “Why did I have a kid so early?” he’d ask himself. “I didn’t get to build a foundation before having to lay my son’s. What am I going to do?”

Through his older brother, Reyes-Little heard about Fatherhood Academy, a City University of New York program aiming to stop the downward spiral in broken families. Despite being apprehensive at first, he signed up. What he found there was a revelation: “Life’s not over. You’re still somebody,” he recalls hearing. “When you’re a single parent, you’re in a bubble already. It takes another parent to understand what that feels like. And this is not just parents, but fathers.”

Read more: http://nationswell.com/fatherhood-academy-educates-single-parent-dads/#ixzz3VXq8wNrr

How a “Gangsta Gardner” Changed How Los Angeles Polices its Sidewalks

From:  Care 2

by Crystal Shepeard
March 18, 2015 4:00 pm

 

South Central Los Angeles is known for a lot of things, most of them not positive. It has been the subject of songs, movies and the location of the famous 1992 Rodney King riots. However, South Central Los Angeles’ rich history runs the gamut of a turn of the century multi-ethnic neighborhood to a victim of social policies of forced segregation and the war on drugs. It is also the birthplace of a new hero whose guerilla gardening has changed the way Los Angeles City now polices its sidewalks.

As Ron Finley tells it, he was just doing something good for his community when he planted his first garden in 2010. South Central is one of the thousands of neighborhoods in the United States that are known as a food deserts. It’s particularly galling considering that just a few miles away in several directions, more affluent neighborhoods are overrun by grocery stores filled with organic produce and farmers markets happening several days a week. Finley was tired of having to drive 45 minutes “just to get a tomato.” While growing up in the neighborhood he also raised his sons in, he saw his neighbors dying of curable diseases. “I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars,” Finley shared in his Ted Talk. “I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks.”

In South Central Los Angeles, “The drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”
With space at a premium, Finley decided to make use of the unused areas between the sidewalk and the curb called parkways. Maintenance of the city-owned patches of dry dirt were the responsibility of property owners, but remained uncultivated and ignored, just like his neighborhood. He decided to maintain it by planting a “food forest” on the 150 foot by 10 foot plot of land in front of his home. Soon the area was overrun with vegetables and fruit. He let his neighbors know they didn’t have to steal in the middle of the night, as he once caught a hungry mother and daughter doing. He grew it for them. 

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/how-a-gangsta-gardner-changed-how-los-angeles-polices-its-sidewalks.html#ixzz3UqDcwszm

Among the “Conspiracy Theory” Theorists

From:  Global Research 

by  Prof. James F. Tracy

The University of Miami’s College of Arts and Sciences and Political Science Department held what was likely the world’s first official academic Conference on Conspiracy Theories from March 12th to 14th. The event was attended by 45 social scientists, historians and philosophers, including this author, who was initially uncertain whether he had been invited as a colleague or specimen.

The estrangement and doubt toward the conspiratorial by many attendees was evident in some paper titles, such as, “Anti-Science Conspiracy Theories of the Right and Left,” “Telling the Truth About Believing the Lies,” and “Conspiracy Beliefs and Personal Beliefs: Exploring the Linkage between a Person’s Value System and his/her Conspiratorial Ideas.” One overarching assumption in the social scientific research was evident in three conspiracy bugaboos: “climate change denial,” “vaccination denial,” and questioning President Obama’s genealogy. Other sources of what certain academic vernaculars term “conspiracy ideation” or “conspiracy belief” included 9/11, the JFK assassination, and the crash of TWA 800.

What made the conference especially exciting, however, was how many of the social scientists—when they were not involving themselves in weighty and often abstruse discussions over their studies’ methodological nuances—were fending off challenges by the handful of cultural historians and philosophers in attendance for failing to more closely consider the often compelling substance of the many conspiracy theories the former summarily labeled and took for granted as irrational.

Yet the key note addresses of any conference are an acknowledgement of what is believed to be the cutting edge and future of the given field. Keeping in mind that the event was organized by political scientists who must dance between disciplinary and institutional raindrops of their field, the invitees were revealing, with two asking the proverbial “What should be done about the conspiracy theories?” question á la Cass Sunstein.  MORE

The uncounted: why the US can't keep track of people killed by police

From:  The Guardian 

by Tom McCarthy in New York 

After a year of high-profile police killings, calls for a national database have gained traction. But how would that work? Tom McCarthy investigates the challenges for law enforcement and government officials alike.

A protester holds an image of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Relatively little public discussion has centered on how a federal count would actually work. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters 

 

A year ago, in a bureaucratic shift that went unremarked in the somnolent days before Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, the US government admitted a disturbing failure. The top crime-data experts in Washington had determined that they could not properly count how many Americans die each year at the hands of police. So they stopped.

The move did not make headlines. Before Brown was killed, a major government effort to count people killed by police could be mothballed without anybody noticing. The program was never fully funded, and no one involved was accustomed to their technical daily work drawing a spotlight. 

But it had been a major effort. For the better part of a decade, a specialized team of statisticians within the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) – number-crunchers working several nesting dolls deep inside the Justice Department – had been collecting data on what they called arrest-related deaths. The ARD tally was more than a count of killings by police. It was meant to be the elusive key to a problem that seemed easy to understand but difficult to define. The program set out to track any death, of anyone, that happened in the presence of a local or state law enforcement officer.  MORE

Keystone and the tipping point away from fossil fuels

From:  Elizabeth May

by Elizabeth May 

Last spring when the U.S. State Department Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on Keystone XL was released, it was heralded by project boosters as the green light to approval. It was actually more of a flashing yellow.

The EIS was dense and lengthy. It was a policy wonkish document. When the NEB report on Enbridge came out I couldn’t help but to contrast the approach taken by two different nations and their regulators. The NEB produced a PR document — complete with pretty pictures, but with a dearth of evidence — to boost a foregone conclusion: the NEB would approve the Enbridge pipeline. As I plowed through the EPA advice to State Department on Keystone, it was equally clear that there was no foregone conclusion. Secretary of State John Kerry could go either way in his advice to the U.S. President.

Last year, Joe Oliver and Gary Doer should have read the EPA report before praising it. Had they done so, they might have noticed the finding that Keystone would not boost GHG only if the price of a barrel of oil remained above $100. If prices dropped to $80/barrel the report found that building Keystone would boost oil sands expansion and thus be a significant contributor to global warming. Gary Doer’s recent attack on the EPA was shockingly undiplomatic. Suddenly the same report he once praised, he attacked as dishonest. I wonder if being Canada’s Ambassador to the United States is really worth Gary Doer’s loss of personal integrity. It must be humiliating to berate the U.S. Secretary of State claiming the EPA “ignores a decade of Canadian achievement in cutting greenhouse gas emissions,” when the EPA report had not ignored the evidence. It cited Environment Canada statistics that confirmed Canada would entirely miss our Copenhagen target.  MORE

Tulane University Gets Grant To Help Coastal Communities Prepare For Future Oil Spills

From: 89.9 WWNO

By Laine Kaplan-Levenson

Tulane University Gets Grant To Help Coastal Communities Prepare For Future Oil Spills

The Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy at Tulane University received $1.4 million from the BP Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative to fund research about impacts of the 2010 oil spill in Louisiana and Alabama. 

This three year program will focus on three coastal communities. Two areas in Louisiana and one in Alabama will be selected to study the impact of the oil spill.

Ky Luu is the Executive director of the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. He says these findings won’t stay locked in an ivory tower. "We have to better understand what’s been happening in these communities. We have to develop the metrics, we have to be able to measure the impact in order to provide these recommendations. But it doesn’t stop at publications. We’re taking these to the communities themselves. "  MORE

From:  Bellona

 by Charles Digges

US EPA proposes amendments to oil dispersant use as health issues in Gulf worsen

NEW ORLEANS –Nearly five year after BP’s 4.9 million barrel oil spill the Gulf of Mexico, which it inundated with 2 million gallons of the cancer-causing chemical Corexit during clean up efforts, the US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed amendments to standards governing dispersant use in oil spills, the agency said earlier this week.

NEW ORLEANS –Nearly five year after BP’s 4.9 million barrel oil spill the Gulf of Mexico, which it inundated with 2 million gallons of the cancer-causing chemical Corexit during clean up efforts, the US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed amendments to standards governing dispersant use in oil spills, the agency said earlier this week.

Numerous studies since the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster have shown that the dispersants BP used on the spill — and especially the mix of oil and dispersants — was far more toxic to some organisms than anyone knew. Among them was a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution, which said the combination of Corexit and crude is 52 times more toxic than crude alone.

“During the Deepwater Horizon response, chemical dispersants were used without prior understanding of their impact on the health of the people and the animals that depend on the Gulf of Mexico,” said Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN). “Many of these impacts continue today.”  MORE

The Year of Living Dangerously

From:  Epoch Times

By Glenn Scherer

Workers clean up after an above ground oil pipeline ruptured causing some 10,000 gallons of crude oil to spill into the streets of Los Angeles on May 15, 2014. The oil was knee deep in some areas and spread over a half mile area in Atwater Village, northwest of Los Angeles. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

What if al-Qaeda or ISIL poisoned America’s drinking water, contaminated our rivers, and used the railroads to deliver bombs that randomly exploded with deadly force in towns across the nation?

The outcry would be immediate; the perpetrators, dead in drone attacks.

But when the perps are fossil fuel executives, the government response is to give a pass to law-breaking energy companies. Legislators even facilitate their rogue status through deregulation, corporate welfare, and huge tax breaks.

Clearly this industry has found it cheaper to buy political favor than pay for basic infrastructure to insure the safety and health of Americans. As clearly, the daily assaults on our communities by big oil, coal, and gas do far more economic and human harm than do random lunatic terrorist attacks, like the horror just committed in France.  MORE

RF Cancer Promotion: Animal Study Makes Waves

From:  MicroWave News 

Germany’s Alex Lerchl Does a U-Turn

The RF–cancer story took a remarkable turn a few days ago. A new animal study challenged many of the assumptions which lie at the heart of claims that RF radiation —whether from cell phones, cell towers or Wi-Fi— are safe.

The new study, from Germany, a replication of an earlier experiment, also from Germany, found that weak cell phone signals can promote the growth of tumors in mice. It used radiation levels that do not cause heating and are well below current safety standards. Complicating matters even further, lower doses were often found to be more effective tumor promoters than higher levels; in effect, turning the conventional concept of a linear dose-response on its head.

And for those with the stamina to have stayed tuned to the slow-moving RF–health soap opera, the new paper offers an unexpected surprise. The lead author of new animal study is Alex Lerchl, who for years has charged that the only science showing low-level RF effects is bad science. Now the one whom activists had accused of being an industry lackey is being hailed as a hero.
Read the full story at: http://www.microwavenews.com/news-center/rf-animal-cancer-promotion

Giving Homes to the Homeless is Cheaper Than Leaving them on the Street. Here’s Proof

From:  Nation of Change 

Published: March 13, 2015 | Authors: Carl Gibson | NationofChange | News Investigation 

 

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
-Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

For the perfect image summarizing how cities are failing to address chronic homelessness, here is a 2013 video of Hawaii state representative Tom Brower smashing homeless people’s possessions with a sledgehammer while wearing an Armani hat. If that made you angry, keep reading. There is hope.

There are between 580,000 and 800,000 people around the country who are considered homeless. Roughly 84,000 of those are considered “chronically homeless,” meaning that they’ve been homeless for more than a year, and are struggling with mental health conditions, disease, injury, and addiction. The repeated emergency room visits and nights in jail that the chronically homeless endure costs around $30,000 to $50,000 per person, per year – approximately $3 billion annually. At the same time, there are approximately 18 million vacant homes all over the U.S., many of which were made vacant after Wall Street built and burst the subprime mortgage bubble. After doing the math, there are between 20 and 24 vacant homes for every homeless person. What’s wrong with this picture?

187 cities across America have effectively made it a crime to be homeless. While some cities, like Palo Alto, California, have made it illegal to sleep in public, other cities, like Fort Lauderdale and 24 other cities, have made it illegal to even feed the homeless. And in Waikiki, Hawaii are even launching programs aimed at giving homeless people one-way tickets out of town. Waikiki’s initiative to fly just 120 homeless people back to the mainland cost carried a price tag of $1.3 million. San Diego’s initiative only targeted a few hundred, and required them to first carry out community service tasks before getting a bus ticket to a city where the homeless person had a relative– reinforcing the false narrative that the only thing homeless people need to fix their situation is a little hard work, by gosh.

These types of “solutions” have been proven to fail every time in permanently solving the problem of chronic homelessness. One study cited by Mother Jones tracked 4,679 chronically homeless people in New York City and found that their emergency room visits, jail costs, shelter stays, and other uses of public welfare programs cost, on average, $40,449 per person, per year. When they were put in supportive housing, the state saved $16,282 per person. Denver conducted a similar study and found that for each homeless person given supportive housing, taxpayers saved $17,858 per person each year over a two-year period. And according to a Mother Jones infographic, support housing for a homeless person in Los Angeles’ Skid Row cost taxpayers just $605 per person, per month, as opposed to $2,897 per person per month if they remained on the street.

Salt Lake City’s program to end chronic homelessness has had enormous success, housing almost 2,000 chronically homeless people in a new apartment complex. The city learned that while it cost $20,000 per person, per year to leave them on the streets, taxpayers saved $8,000 per person when they were moved into the new apartments. Added benefits of homeless people getting a home accumulating over the long term also mean that taxpayers save more money on fewer emergency room visits (as well as time saved while waiting for treatment at the ER), and that police are able to respond faster without having to enforce anti-homelessness laws. KUER’s Whittney Evans reported in January that several hundred more temporary housing units are to be built throughout Salt Lake City for the local homeless population.

So how did ultra-conservative Utah agree to pay for this? They didn’t – existing federal government programs fronted almost all of the cost.

For starters, the federal low-income housing tax credit paid for 90 percent of the construction – these tax credits are for banks and other financial firms that agree to front the capital to build the new apartments. Once people have been moved into their new apartments, the costs of rent and building maintenance are covered by Section 8 vouchers, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development already provides to low-income individuals and families unable to pay fair-market rent. The remaining costs are provided by charitable organizations, like Habitat for Humanity, along with local/state tax dollars.

Doing the math, it isn’t hard to see how much more cost-effective it is to build public, low-income housing for the homeless than it is to leave them on the street. Phoenix, Arizona became the first city to officially eradicate veteran homelessness. New Orleans did the same thing earlier this year. 300 mayors and six governors around the country have pledged to find homes for all homeless veterans by the end of 2015. The only thing we’re lacking is the political leadership willing to abolish homelessness for everyone, nationwide.

(This is part 2 of the 5-part “Austerity is Bunk” series on NationofChange, also hosted on commonomicsusa.org)

Vicious vaccine culture war now being waged against informed, intelligent Americans who seek to protect their children from deadly side effects

From:  Natural News 

by Mike Adams 

 (NaturalNews) A critically important, heavily-researched article by Barbara Loe Fisher of the NVIC has been published today. Click here for the original, which we are reprinting below.

As this article exhaustively documents and reveals, the vaccine war taking place in America today is actually a "culture war" pursued by the most irrational and intellectually dishonest Big Pharma operatives, bloggers and journalists ever witnessed in recent memory. These people -- the "vaccine pushers" -- ignore real science and use wildly dishonest tactics of fear mongering, social shaming and blatant lying about scientific facts to demonize informed parents and attempt to criminalize those who pose intelligent, scientific questions about vaccine safety.

In this way, U.S. doctors, vaccine patent holders (such as Paul Offit), legislators and health regulators are marching America right down the path of medical crimes against humanity -- the very same thing we once witnessed carried out by scientists operating under the Nazi regime in Germany.

I've just released a new video that explains these dark parallels between today's vaccine culture war and the Nazi-era medical crimes against humanity. Both are predicated on the totalitarian belief that the government owns your body and can therefore tell you what to do with it.

Watch that video here:

The Vaccine Culture War in America: Are You Ready?

by Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center.

More than 1.2 million people in the United States are infected with HIV (1) but government officials do not ban HIV infected children and adults from attending school, receiving medical care, being employed, or otherwise participating in society. In fact, there are anti-discrimination laws that guarantee civil rights protections for Americans infected with HIV or living with AIDS. (2)

No Discrimination or Societal Sanctions for Infected Citizens

In 2012, public health officials reported that about two million people in America are infected with chlamydia, tuberculosis, syphilis and gonorrhea, (3) and they estimate another three million people are infected with hepatitis C. (4) Like those with HIV or AIDS, these citizens are not targeted for discrimination and blocked from getting a public education, being employed or moving freely in society.

Live Polio Vaccinated Children Could Still Attend School

Between 1963 and 1999, doctors gave live oral polio vaccine to millions of healthy American children, who became infected with vaccine strain polioviruses they shed in their body fluids and transmitted, sometimes causing other children and adults to contract vaccine strain polio paralysis and die. (5) (6) Those with compromised immune systems were at special risk for getting vaccine strain polio and shedding vaccine strain poliovirus for longer periods of time than healthy persons. Yet, children recently given live oral polio vaccine were not excluded from attending school.

Calls for Societal Sanctions After Measles Diagnosed at Disneyland

But in 2015 after a handful of measles cases were identified at Disneyland, suddenly Americans are being asked to surrender civil liberties. We are being asked to discriminate against and condone extreme societal sanctions against fellow citizens, (7) including removing religious and conscientious belief vaccine exemptions from state laws (8) (9) so children cannot attend school without 49 doses of 14 federally recommended vaccines by age six and 20 more vaccinations by age 18. (10)

How did a handful of measles cases at Disneyland turn into a full-scale assault on civil and human rights in America?

12 States Introduce Bills to Eliminate Non-Medical Vaccine Exemptions

Why have politicians in 12 states already filed legislation to eliminate non-medical vaccine exemptions, leaving only a very narrow medical exemption that most people cannot get? (11) (12)

With 93 percent of pediatricians reporting that parents don't trust the safety of the government recommended child vaccine schedule, (13) why are many of them refusing to provide medical care to children if they have not gotten every dose of every federally recommended vaccine – no exceptions and no questions asked? (14) (15) (16)

Censorship of Speech, Shaming, Imprisonment, MD Licenses Revoked?

Why are editorials calling for censorship of speech (17) (18) and for parents with unvaccinated children to be hunted down and publicly identified, (19) sued, (20) (21) criminally prosecuted and imprisoned, (22) and for doctors who criticize vaccine safety to have their medical licenses revoked? (23)

What is happening right now in America is not about the measles or public health.

Disneyland "Patient Zero" Never Found -- Assumptions Made Anyway

It all started in January 2015 after 320 million Americans (24) had just finished ringing in the New Year and California health officials announced that nine visitors to Disneyland were infected with measles. (25) Two weeks later, the total number of measles cases was 51 but no public health doctor in the country could find "patient zero." (26) That didn't stop newspapers from proclaiming that a single "unvaccinated" person with measles spoiled the Magic Kingdom and that measles is invading America because of "a decline in parents having their kids vaccinated." (27) (28)

Measles Immunity Wanes, High MMR Vaccination Rate in U.S.

It did not matter that the science shows measles vaccine immunity is not lifelong and wanes, (29) (30) (31) (32) just like pertussis vaccine immunity is temporary and wanes, (33) (34) (35) or that it is illogical to put all the blame for measles at Disneyland on 1.8% of children attending school with vaccine exemptions (36) (37) when 95% of children entering kindergarten have gotten two MMR shots (38) (39) and only 1% of children under age three are unvaccinated. (40) With a grand total of 170 measles cases reported in 17 states by March 2015, compared to 644 cases reported in 27 states last year, (41) and with 42% of the California-related cases documented to be in unvaccinated persons, while 13% of cases were vaccinated, (42) there is no justification for gutting vaccine exemptions in state public health laws.

Witch Hunt Led By Doctors Against Families, Dissenting Doctors

Rational thinking has been the first casualty in this 21st century equivalent of a 17th century witch hunt (43) led by defensive doctors in government, industry, academia and media, who are fed up with parents asking them questions about vaccine risks and failures they can't answer. (44) (45) (46) (47) Assisted by communication conglomerates (48) and Astroturfers, (49) (50) (51) (52) (53) they piously wave the science flag and call parents "anti-social" if they don't vaccinate (54) but completely ignore parents with vaccine injured children talking about how their vaccinated children are never healthy anymore. (55) Some of the most vicious attacks have been on families consciously choosing to stay healthy a different way (56) (57) and on doctors caring for families whose children are unvaccinated or receive fewer vaccines on an altered vaccine schedule. (58) (59)

The Cultural War on Freedom, Values & Beliefs

After headlines like "What would Jesus do about measles?" (60) and "God wants you to vaccinate your children" (61) marked a new low in American journalism, it became clear that the so-called "vaccine war" (62) (63) is really a culture war (64) on freedoms, values and beliefs that have long defined who we are as a nation. (65) (66) (67) How it is fought and where it ends will determine the kind of nation America will become in the 21st century.

$100 Billion Vaccine Market in 2025 Featuring Many New Vaccines

The $30 billion global vaccine market today will be worth a projected $100 billion or more in ten years. (68) A lucrative public-private business partnership has been forged between government and the pharmaceutical industry (69) (70) (71) (72) (73) (74) with your tax dollars to develop hundreds of new vaccines. (75)

Drug companies completely shielded from product liability because Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have declared vaccines to be "unavoidably unsafe," (76) (77) are rushing to licensure genetically engineered vaccines for syphilis, (78) gonorrhea, (79) herpes, (80) HIV/AIDS, (81) tuberculosis, (82) chlamydia, (83) hepatitis C, (84) e-coli, (85) cytomegalovirus, (86) ebola, (87) (88) salmonella, (89) norovirus, (90) adenovirus, (91) enterovirus, (92) asthma, (93) diabetes, (94) obesity, (95) high blood pressure, (96) anti-smoking, (97) anti-cocaine (98) and anti-heroin (99) use, and many more that Pharma and government will want many adults, as well as children, to buy and use.

Adult Immunization Plan Targets Women, Employees, Faith Groups

The new National Adult Immunization Plan aggressively targets pregnant women, (100) employers and their employees, (101) faith based groups (102) and other adults for increased vaccine use. (103) (104) Health care workers are already being fired if they do not get an annual flu shot, (105) a vaccine that works less than half the time and was completely ineffective this year. (106) (107)

The next profession on the firing line is the teaching profession. (108) (109) A doctor turned politician in Vermont is pushing a bill to require teachers and everyone working in a school to prove they have gotten government recommended vaccines or be re-vaccinated. (110)

Will your profession be next on that list?

Will You Be Prevented From Moving Freely in Society & Punished?

Will laws be passed to not only deny you a public education but prevent you from obtaining health insurance; entering a doctor's office, hospital or retirement home; boarding a bus, plane or train; buying a ticket for a movie or football game; shopping in a store, getting a driver's license, filing your taxes or otherwise participating in and moving freely in society unless you show proof you have gotten every government recommended vaccine?

Will your healthy unvaccinated children be taken from you (111) and will you be fined and thrown in prison? (112) (113)

Will public health officials with police power knock on your door one day and take you to a quarantine camp or forcibly administer vaccines to you and your children without your voluntary informed consent?

If Non-Medical Vaccine Exemptions Removed, You Will Have No Choice

Even if you and your children have willingly received every government recommended vaccine today, if non-medical exemptions are removed from U.S. vaccine laws, you will have no choice if you decide you don't want to use every new liability-free vaccine that government recommends tomorrow.

This vaccine culture war is about a lot more than vaccination.

Because if the State can tag, track down and force you against your will to be injected with biologicals of known and unknown toxicity today, then there will be no limit on which other freedoms the State can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow.

What You Can Do If You Are Ready to Take Action

Are you ready to fight for your freedom? If you are, here is what you can do:

GET INVOLVED. Participate in our democracy. Become an active user of the free online vaccine choice advocacy network at NVICAdvocacy.org and work with other people in your state to take action. You will receive email Action Alerts and be put in direct electronic contact with your own legislators so you can call or email them and show up to testify at legislative hearings. Invite your friends and family to do the same.

WITNESS. If you experienced vaccine reactions and are now chronically ill or disabled, you can share your experience with others. You are not alone.

Vaccine reactions and injuries are not as rare as doctors want to admit to themselves or to patients and parents. (114) Today, everybody knows somebody who was healthy, got vaccinated and was never healthy again.

Talk About What Happened to Your Child After Vaccination

If you are a parent and watched your child scream for hours or collapse, twitch and jerk or regress physically, mentally and emotionally and become a totally different child in the days and weeks after vaccination, (115) (116) (117) (118) (119) (120) you have witnessed a serious event that you can talk about with other people, including legislators representing you in your state Capitol and in Congress.

If your child was revaccinated and you observed the same symptoms or your child's health got worse, it is compelling scientific evidence of a causal relationship between vaccination and what happened to your child. In scientific studies, this is called challenge/re-challenge (121) and what you saw is called clinical observation, (122) even though when parents do the observing most doctors dismiss what happened as "anecdotal" (123) evidence or a "coincidence" (124) (125) that has no value at all.

Your Child's Life Has Value, Don't Let Anyone Bully and Shame You

What you witnessed happen to your child after vaccination does have value because your child's life has value. Don't let a doctor or anyone else bully and shame you into being afraid to talk about what you saw happen after vaccination, especially if your child is now chronically ill or disabled and has been diagnosed with learning disabilities; ADHD; epilepsy; autoimmunity; autism or communication, developmental or disruptive behavior disorders; asthma, allergy or other brain and immune system dysfunction. (126)

Witnessing about what happened after vaccination is a way to help others understand that every life has value, and no person's life should be considered expendable, and that we must never forget that universal truth.

REPORT. It is estimated that only between 1 and 10 percent of serious vaccine-associated reactions, hospitalizations, injuries and deaths are ever reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), (127) (128) even though federal law requires all vaccine providers to make reports. If your doctor refuses to file a vaccine reaction report, you can do it yourself. Go to NVIC.org and learn how.

NVIC Vaccine Reaction Registry; Freedom Wall; Memorial; Failure Wall

If you or your child were bullied or threatened with loss of employment, medical care, health insurance, federal food or housing assistance, the right to attend school or anything else because of your vaccination status, you can make a report to your state and federal legislators. Register for the NVIC Advocacy Portal today to be put into direct electronic contact with them.

On NVIC.org, you can also report a vaccine reaction to NVIC's Vaccine Reaction Registry and share your experiences with others by posting a vaccine harassment report on the Cry for Vaccine Freedom Wall or creating a page on the Memorial for Vaccine Victims or reporting a vaccine failure on the Vaccine Failure Wall.

LEARN MORE. Become educated about infectious diseases and the science, policy, law and ethics of vaccination. Go to NVIC.org to find fully referenced, accurate information you can trust.

Now, I am going to review five myths and facts that will help you understand what the vaccine culture war is really about:

VACCINE CULTURE WAR MYTH NUMBER 1: Most medical doctors say that vaccines do not cause injury or death, so it must be true.

Doctors who say vaccines are safe for everyone and do not cause injury and death are either uninformed, in denial or lying. Since the first vaccine for smallpox, doctors have known and it has been well documented that brain inflammation, permanent brain damage and death have always been among most serious complications of vaccination. (129) (130)

Just like any other pharmaceutical product, vaccines carry a risk of injury or death. These risks can be greater for some people with genetic, biological and environmental risk factors that doctors do not understand or cannot predict. (131)

Congress, U.S. Supreme Court Say Vaccines Are "Unavoidably Unsafe"

Knowing this, Congress in 1986 (132) and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 (133) declared vaccines to be "unavoidably unsafe" and shielded drug companies from all product liability. (134) If you or your child are injured or die after vaccination, you cannot hold the drug company that makes and profits from the vaccine or anyone who regulates, promotes, administers or mandates the vaccine accountable in a civil court of law in front of a jury of your peers.

Liability for Seat Belt Manufacturers – NOT for Vaccine Manufacturers

Seat belt manufacturers have product liability (135) but vaccine manufacturers do not. Doctors can be sued for malpractice except when they administer vaccinations that injure or kill a person.

Vaccines are the only product government mandates and completely indemnifies.

The federal government has paid $3 billion dollars in compensation to victims of vaccine injury and death under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. (136)

VACCINE CULTURE WAR MYTH NUMBER 2: People who question vaccine safety are ignorant and do not understand the science.

Just the opposite is true. Most people who question vaccine safety are very intelligent and understand the difference between good science and bad science. (137) (138) (139)

Studies reveal that mothers and fathers with college or post-graduate degrees are the ones who most often question the safety of vaccines. (140) (141) (142) They are wondering whether government policy directing pediatricians to give children three times as many vaccinations as children got 30 years ago (143) is safe, effective and necessary.

Big Knowledge Gaps in Vaccine Safety Science

If growing concerns among parents about vaccination was simply due to ignorance, two decades of reports published by the Institute of Medicine would not have found large knowledge gaps in vaccine safety science. (144) For example, there are fewer than 40 published studies evaluating the safety of the federally recommended child vaccine schedule for infants and children under age six. (145)

VACCINE CULTURE WAR MYTH NUMBER 3: People who do not vaccinate are selfish and don't care about the public health.

While we are all born equal with equal rights under the law, we are not born all the same. Each one of us is born with different genes and a unique microbiome influenced by epigenetics (146) that affects how we respond to diseases (147) (148) and pharmaceutical products like vaccines. (149) (150)

Many Americans no longer vaccinate today because the risks of vaccination turned out to be 100 percent for them, their children or other family members. They have good reason to believe that the genes they were born with make them more susceptible to vaccine harm. (151) (152) (153) (154) (155)

Vaccine Vulnerable Families Can't Find Doctors to Write Medical Exemptions

But often these former vaccinators cannot find a doctor to write a medical exemption because almost no health condition qualifies for a medical exemption to vaccination anymore. (156) Unless you are dying of cancer and on chemotherapy, have had a recent organ transplant or have the most severe combined immune deficiency, most doctors will not grant you a medical vaccine exemption. (157)

Non-medical vaccine exemptions are the only way vaccine vulnerable families can protect their lives.

Some Healthy Americans Choosing Different Path to Health

Some Americans use fewer vaccines or remain unvaccinated because they have chosen a different path to health. They focus on boosting immune function with good nutrition, exercise, avoiding environmental toxins and using holistic health alternatives that do not rely on heavy use of pharmaceutical products. (158) (159) (160) (161) They are contributing significantly to the public health because they and their children are very healthy.

It is not selfish to want to make informed choices about how to stay healthy. It is not selfish to protect yourself and your children from harm, especially if you believe your family is more susceptible to vaccine injury. If everyone protects their own health and the health of their children, the public health will be protected.

VACCINE CULTURE WAR MYTH NUMBER 4: Science trumps religious beliefs so religious exemptions to vaccination should be eliminated.

The attack on Americans with religious or spiritual beliefs is central to the political agenda driving this cultural war. (162) (163) (164) Fellow citizens, who do not believe there is a God, (165) (166) (167) (168) are demanding that those who have faith in God be required to place the same faith in science and doctors.(169)

There is a big difference between fallible human beings and God, but some doctors do not understand this difference.

Vaccine Developer Ridicules Religious Belief, Quotes Scripture

One prominent pediatrician vaccine developer, (170) who insists that babies can safely be given 10,000 vaccines on the same day, (171) has publicly ridiculed religious beliefs (172) (173) (174) but now is hypocritically quoting holy scripture (175) and comparing Disneyland to the "Garden of Eden." (176) Invoking the name of Jesus, he is trying to shame Christian parents refusing to obey his orders to give their children every government recommended vaccine, including the one he created (177) that has made him a very rich man. (178) (179) (180)

Mothers Responsible for the Health of Their Children

I remember many years ago when a public health doctor promoting the "No Shots, No School" campaign in America suggested I was "selfish" for declining to give my two youngest children pertussis vaccine even though my oldest son was DPT vaccine injured. Implicit was the suggestion that I had no right to protect my own children's health if it conflicted with what doctors believe protects the public health.

I looked him straight in the eyes and said "Doctor, whether or not I put my child's life on the line for you and your vaccine is between me and my God and not between me and you."

As mothers, we carry our babies inside us for nine months, we give birth, we love them more than we thought we could ever love anyone and we nurture them throughout childhood so they can grow up to be productive adult members of society. We are responsible for their health and we are the ones who care for them when they become sick and unable to care for themselves for any reason, and we are the ones who weep at their graves if they die before we do.

Do Not Let Anyone Violate Your Religious, Conscientious Beliefs

You do not have to belong to an organized religion or state recognized church to hold sincere religious or spiritual beliefs about health and vaccination. (181) (182) (183) As a mother or father, you have the God given natural right to use the brain and gut instincts God gave you to consider the evidence, examine your conscience, pray for guidance and exercise the human right to informed consent to medical risk-taking on behalf of your minor child. Do not let a doctor, government employee or politician take that God given right away from you.

It is a violation of religious freedom to force vaccination when you hold religious or spiritual beliefs opposing use of one or more vaccines and it is a violation of the human spirit to force you to disobey the certain judgment of your conscience.

VACCINE CULTURE WAR MYTH NUMBER 5: It is ethical for government to sacrifice the few for the many.

Based on hedonism (184) and a mathematical equation, this philosophy is called utilitarianism (185) (186) and comes from the word "utility." (187) The utilitarian rationale was created as a guide for legislators making public policy by an 18th century British social reformer Jeremy Bentham, (188) (189) whose mummified head is being preserved by the University College London, where a wax version is on public display. (190) In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court used Bentham's utilitarian rationale to rule in Jacobsen v. Massachusetts that state legislatures had the power to enact mandatory smallpox vaccination laws. (191)

American Eugenicists, U.S. Supreme Court Embraces Utilitarianism

American eugenicists and social reformers embraced utilitarianism in the early 20th century. (192) (193) They argued that government has the legal right to discriminate against a minority of citizens judged to be genetically defective or a threat to the health and welfare of society. In 1923, U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendall Holmes (194) gave the green light to the state of Virginia to forcibly sterilize a young woman, Carrie Buck, because doctors judged her to be mentally retarded just like her daughter and mother.

Coldly, Holmes proclaimed: "three generations of imbeciles are enough" and said "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes." (195)

It turns out Carrie Buck was not mentally retarded and neither was her daughter or mother. (196)



Utilitarianism Pseudo-Ethic In Its Most Extreme Form

Doctors and public health officials in the Third Reich implemented utilitarianism in its most extreme form to justify conducting horrific scientific experiments on captive people. (197) (198) The Nuremberg Tribunal justices presiding over The Doctors Trial after World War II declared utilitarianism to be a pseudo ethic. They issued the Nuremberg Code outlining the informed consent principle, (199) (200) which has guided research on humans and the ethical practice of medicine ever since. (201) (202) (203)

Forced Vaccination Laws Sacrifice the Genetically Vulnerable

The Institute of Medicine has confirmed that some individuals have known and unknown genetic risk factors that make them more susceptible to vaccine injury and death. (204) This means forced vaccination laws that fail to include flexible medical and non-medical exemptions become a utilitarian, de facto selection of the genetically vulnerable for sacrifice. (205)

Is America really going to walk down that road? Are we going to punish citizens for the genes they were born with in the name of the public health?

Are we going to slide down the slippery slope of utilitarianism and ignore the profound ethical and legal questions that remain: Who gets to decide what protects the public health? Which individuals should be sacrificed? And how many is too many?

Industry & Government Fail to Fund Good Vaccine Safety Science

Industry (206) and government have refused to fund good science to better understand the biological mechanisms for vaccine injury and death, and whether there are important health differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, (207) and whether increased vaccine use during the past 30 years is a major co-factor in the unexplained chronic disease and disability epidemic plaguing America.

With 1 child in 6 diagnosed with learning disabilities, (208) 1 in 9 with asthma, (209) (210) 1 in 50 with autism (211) and 1 in 400 with diabetes (212) (213) and millions of Americans suffering with cancer and other immune and brain disorders that cost our nation $3 trillion dollars a year to treat,(214) (215) (216) (217) isn't it time for government to explain to taxpayers exactly why vaccine safety science should be left off our nation's scientific research agenda?

Perhaps they already know they don't have to do that because they are getting laws passed to hunt down and vaccinate every last child and adult in America. Eliminating non-medical vaccine exemptions will guarantee that scientific evaluation of health outcome differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated people in America will never be done.

The Future Is In Our Hands

The future of health and freedom in America is in our hands. It is in your hands.

It's your health. Your family. Your choice.

See all references at the original story link at NVIC.org.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/048974_vaccines_culture_war_medical_tyranny.html#ixzz3UGJkqQQ6