“Video presentation below by former EU Climate Change proponent Christopher Le Breton. This was presented in Dunedin several weeks ago.
A fresh look at Climate Change and it’s hidden agenda. Christopher Le Breton, a professional environmentalist who has lived, worked and traveled in 107 countries, shares his insights acquired after three decades of working with Government (EU) and not for profit organisations worldwide.
Christopher was previously working at high level in Brussels with the EU in helping to cement the global climate change narrative until he realized the truth and the true agenda. He has now given away that career, based himself in Dunedin, and is dedicating himself to raising awareness of the truth about the real climate change agenda, geoengineering, HAARP, and eco-terrorism.
Great to see someone like Christopher, with his background, now stepping away and taking on a mission like…
NOTE: Due to censorship Dr Mercola’s articles are archived to paid sub soon after publication, in which case the source link may no longer work. The article however is republished here in its entirety.
Story at-a-glance
Arthritis is a general term that refers to more than 100 different types of arthritis and related conditions; the four most common categories are osteoarthritis, autoimmune inflammatory arthritis, infectious arthritis and gout
Small food choices can significantly impact pain from arthritis. For example, choosing cruciferous vegetables that are high in sulforaphane, an organic sulfur that supports cell function, helps block the enzymes linked to joint destruction and lowers inflammation that drives pain
Anthocyanins found in purple and red-colored berries lower oxidative stress and inflammation and support gastrointestinal health, which is crucial to lowering inflammation and improving pain control
Marine-based fatty fish are rich in long-chained omega-3 fats that are highly bioavailable and essential to lower the inflammatory response driven by an imbalance between omega-3 and omega-6 fats
When used correctly, food is medicine. Put another way, you are what you eat. You can’t get away from the fact that your body requires nutrients to function optimally, and those nutrients come from the food you consume.
The small choices you make each day, such as a donut as a midday snack or a bowl of ice cream each night after dinner, have a way of catching up with you. One of the ways where food packs a powerful punch is in arthritis pain control.
Food impacts several pathways that make a difference in your pain level and even in the progression of the disease. Food manufacturers want you to believe that a calorie is a calorie — and that calories are all your body needs to survive. But if there is one thing the past years have taught us, it’s that food makes a significant difference to your health.
Before discovering some of the foods that can lower pain, let’s take a minute to explore the term “arthritis.”
Arthritis Is Not a Single Painful Disease
It is crucial to understand several facts about arthritis. For example, the word arthritis is a general term that refers to more than 100 different types of arthritis and related conditions. Arthritis can permanently damage your joints and the symptoms of common arthritis include pain, stiffness and swelling.
People may experience mild to severe forms of the disease and the symptoms can come and go. For some, the symptoms remain the same for years, but for others, the disease progresses and gets worse over time. There are four major categories of common types of arthritis.1
1. Osteoarthritis — This is the most common type and can be found in nearly any joint of the body. More frequently, it appears in the knees, hips, spine and hands. It used to be known as a wear-and-tear disease, but current evidence shows that it affects the whole joint and not just the cartilage, including making the bone weaker and deteriorating the connective tissue.
2. Autoimmune inflammatory arthritis — This is a global term that includes rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, juvenile arthritis and axial spondyloarthritis. Although an exact cause has not been identified, your gut microbiome plays a critical role.
3. Infectious arthritis — This painful condition is triggered by an infection that usually begins in another part of the body and travels to a joint. The symptoms can appear suddenly and cause intense swelling, pain and fever. Treatment usually resolves the condition.
4. Gout (metabolic arthritis) — This is the result of a buildup of uric acid crystals in the joints, more commonly the big toe. Uric acid crystals are a byproduct of the breakdown of purines, which are substances found in organ meat, red meat, some seafood and alcohol. There is some evidence to suggest that osteoarthritis or gut dysbiosis can also contribute to gout.
Sulforaphane Has Healing Properties
Cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and cabbage contain a compound called sulforaphane. This is an organic sulfur that has been shown to support cell function and division while at the same time causing apoptosis programmed cell death in certain cancers.2,3,4
When sulforaphane was tested in mice and human cell cultures,5 it was shown to target and kill breast cancer stem cells, which prevents the formation and spread of tumors. But the benefits of sulforaphane don’t stop there. It has been shown to reduce inflammation by reducing reactive oxygen species by as much as 73%,6 which in turn reduces cell damage.
Sulforaphane can also help reduce the risk of osteoarthritis,7 in part by blocking enzymes that are linked to joint destruction.8 A team of researchers from the University of East Anglia published a study9 in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism that showed substances in cruciferous vegetables could slow the progression of osteoarthritis, or possibly prevent it.
Sulforaphane did this by inhibiting metalloproteinases that have been implicated in the development and progression of osteoarthritis. The researchers found it also blocked inflammation to protect against cartilage destruction both in the lab and animal models.
Anthocyanins Play an Anti-Inflammatory Role
Research has demonstrated that there is power in the color purple.10 Purple and red-colored berries are high in anthocyanins, which are secondary metabolites plants produce to defend against predators. Anthocyanins work through a variety of pathways to exert beneficial effects on human health.
They’re primarily known to address oxidative stress and reduce inflammation, which in turn helps pain control in patients with an inflammatory-driven condition, such as arthritis. The science also demonstrates the power of anthocyanins in lowering the progression of cognitive decline and protecting the heart, kidneys, and gastrointestinal tract.
Researchers have demonstrated that anthocyanins, found in cherries and other berries, help regulate lipid and glucose metabolism. Elderberries are high in anthocyanin, vitamin C and zinc. These berries have anti-inflammatory modulating activity11 that may support pain control in patients with arthritis. They also became known for their ability to boost immune function and inhibit colds and flu long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
One 2004 study12 found 15 milliliters (just under 1 tablespoon) of Elderberry syrup, four times a day for five days, eased the symptoms of influenza four days faster than a placebo. In 2019, research13 detailed the mechanism through which Elderberry protects against viral attacks. As reported by Science Daily:14
“… the study showed that compounds from elderberries can directly inhibit the virus’s entry and replication in human cells and can help strengthen a person’s immune response to the virus.”
Let’s Spice Up Your Food
Bland food is never fun to eat. But did you know that by adding a few spices you may reduce your pain level? Researchers have discovered that garlic, ginger, cinnamon and turmeric are compounds that may improve pain control in people with arthritis.
One 2018 study15 found that cinnamon supplementation was a safe adjunctive treatment in women who had rheumatoid arthritis. The randomized double-blind clinical trial included a small group of 36 women who were divided into two groups: those receiving cinnamon and those receiving a placebo for eight weeks.
While the study was small and only included women, the results showed that it had a significant impact on tender and swollen joints with no changes in liver enzymes, lipid profile, fasting blood sugar or erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR).
Ginger is another spice that has been under investigation for the effect it has on reducing the symptoms of osteoarthritis. A 2001 study16 found using a highly purified and standardized extract could significantly reduce those symptoms and had a good safety profile.
More recently, a 2020 paper17 confirmed the use of ginger as a safe and promising strategy to lower pain. The researchers reviewed eligible random control trials where ginger was used to relieve pain, including from osteoarthritis. They concluded that ginger was safe and promising, but more studies were needed to analyze the amount required for useful long-term therapy.
Garlic is a staple ingredient in cuisines found in many countries, including Italy, China and Mexico. But it’s much more than a common spice. Data from a 2020 study18 of 62 women with rheumatoid arthritis suggested that garlic supplementation over eight weeks improved oxidative stress and health assessment questionnaires.
Turmeric is well known for its anti-inflammatory properties. A 2016 analysis of randomized clinical trials19 evaluated the use of turmeric extract and curcumin in the treatment of arthritis symptoms. While the results were positive, the researchers found the total number of trials and the total sample size were not sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion.
Another review of the literature published in 202120 compared turmeric against placebos and found a benefit on osteoarthritis pain and function in the knee. Based on the small number of studies, they believed the effects were similar to those that analyzed nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).
A 2021 randomized trial21 compared turmeric against paracetamol, a painkiller also known as acetaminophen. The results from this study demonstrated that bioavailable turmeric extract was as effective as paracetamol against osteoarthritis pain and symptoms in the knee and was safe and more effective in reducing tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF alpha) and C-reactive protein (CRP).
Balance Your Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fat
Historically, the human diet had an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of close to 1-to-1. Yet, the current Western diet is closer to a ratio of 20-to-1,22 which increases the inflammatory response and therefore has an impact on pain.
Most processed foods and seed oils are high in omega-6 fatty acid. While there are omega-3 fats found in some plants, only marine-based fatty fish have long-chained omega-3 fats eicosatetraenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) that are highly bioavailable and essential to good health.
When your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is out of balance, it increases your risk of obesity23 and the inflammatory response, both of which affect pain control in arthritis. The only way to know if you have enough omega-3 is to take a simple blood test — an omega-3 index.24 This measures EPA and DHA on red blood cell membranes and provides feedback about your dietary choices.
Food Addresses Gut Health and Lowers Arthritis Pain
Finally, while no single food completely addresses gut health, most of your food choices will either support good gut health or harm it. For example, a diet high in ultraprocessed foods is known to change your gut microbiome, which promotes the development of inflammatory diseases.25
The Arthritis Foundation recognizes that your gastrointestinal tract plays a crucial role in some of the most common types of inflammatory arthritis.26 Researchers have discovered that people with rheumatoid arthritis have different levels of bacteria in their gut and babies who are breastfed have a lower likelihood of developing ankylosing spondylitis as breastfeeding is known to positively affect the gut microbiome.27
A 2021 paper28 analyzed the association between the gut microbiome and symptoms of osteoarthritis. They summarized the evidence that supports a gut-joint axis and the interactions between the gut microbiome and factors that affect osteoarthritis, including gender, age, metabolism and joint injury.
Interestingly, data showed that an individual’s gut microbiota can potentially predict the progression of osteoarthritis, indicating that monitoring the gut microbiome may also help monitor the efficiency of therapeutic intervention. Broccoli is one food that helps support good gut health and may impact the pain of arthritis as it is also a source of glucosinolate, a precursor to indole-3 carbinol (I3C).29
In the stomach, I3C generates 3,3′-diindolylmethane (DIM). I3C is a powerful antioxidant and in an animal model, those fed cruciferous vegetables with I3C had healthier guts and were less likely to have inflammation.30 I3C also works by activating a protein called aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR), which communicates with immune and epithelial cells in your gut lining, thereby helping to reduce inflammation caused by pathogenic bacteria.
AhR also helps stem cells convert into mucus-producing cells in your gut lining. These cells also help extract nutrients from the foods you eat, all of which translate into improved gut function and health.
As you’ll note, there are several groups of foods that support pain control by lowering the inflammatory response and improving your gut health. Arthritis can be a difficult and life-changing condition that affects your daily activities. Consider taking these small steps to help improve your pain control without medication and take greater control of your life.
Let’s tell Chris Hipkins that we are not standing for the Therapeutic Products Bill. It is easier than you may think to make a submission and very easy to sign a petition. What would happen if we could get a million people to say:
No, we don’t want Natural Health Products regulated.
We urge Kiwis to join together, putting aside our differences, which in the whole scheme of things is tiny. We all want health and happiness for ourselves and future generations.
For more information on how the government wants to restrict your access to common foods, plants and supplements see:
There are two easy ways you can add your name to the increasing number of people who are saying no without leaving the couch!
1. Make a submission
This might sound scary, but we can tell you it is not. We’ll talk you through it.
Go to this webpage and start filling out your details. For those fired up you can request to make a submission in person but this is not compulsory.
Add your submission. This can be uploaded as a document or typed directly on the webpage.
Then simply click/press done!
Here are some hints about making a submission.
MPs are people too and they don’t like to read through screeds of evidence or hear your life story. They also won’t react well to you denigrating them either.
Keep it short Make it personal but not long-winded
State what you want. You do not need to justify yourself. MPs work for us.
Useful comments you can add.
We don’t want natural health products regulated Natural health products are much safer than many over-the-counter medications We trust our own bodies and know what they need Access to natural health supplements takes the pressure off the New Zealand health system by helping people to stay well At least 50% of New Zealanders use supplements As Maori, we have a right to easily access Rongoa, our traditional medicine
New Zealand boasts many people from diverse backgrounds. We all demand access to traditional medicine that has been used for centuries, whether it be Traditional Chinese Medicine or Traditional Western Herbal Medicine and everything in between.
Here is an example letter which you can use to help structure your opposition to the Therapeutics Bill. This example is long but gives you an idea of how to begin your objection.
2. Sign The Petition
When you sign this petition by lawyer and freedom fighter, Sue Grey, the government gets a message. Let’s get this to 1 million messages!
Lawyer Sue Grey’s message on the petitionThe proposal to regulate foods and herbs and traditional medicines is unlawful, irrational, unreasonable and unnecessary and is contrary to the interests of New Zealanders.
I am opposed to this bill because:
Foods, herbs and traditional medicines belong to the people, not the government.
It is contrary to the interests of New Zealanders to restrict affordable access to our foods, herbs and traditional medicines.
The Bill is too complex and impossible to understand.
The Bill is a poorly disguised attempt to privatise and block access to natural remedies with layers of costly red tape.
The Bill fails to recognise the considerable difference in risk between artificial and novel pharmaceutical drugs and natural products and that Pharmaceutical drugs are a significant cause of harm and death, whereas food and herbs are not.
New Zealanders need access to natural health practitioners. It is wrong to threaten them with civil and criminal penalties.
The NZ Government has NO mandate to reduce or remove our access to cheap, effective herbs, spices and nutritional supplements. This bill stinks of excessive influence of foreign corporations, and weak government that puts their profit ahead of our health.
Please take our foods, herbs and other safe, effective, traditional natural health products out of the Therapeutic Products Bill!
NOTE: Due to censorship Dr Mercola’s articles are archived to paid sub soon after publication, in which case the source link may no longer work. The article however is republished here in its entirety..EWR
Most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by three global news agencies — The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Until or unless at least one of these news agencies sends out a notice, national and local media are unlikely to report on an event. Even photos and videos are typically sourced directly from these global news agencies. This way, people hear, see and read the exact same message everywhere
Intelligence agencies and defense ministries are well aware of the power of these news agencies and use them with regularity. In 2009, then-president of the AP, Tom Curley, let it slip that the U.S. Pentagon has more than 27,000 PR specialists that spin up stories, and an annual propaganda budget of nearly $5 billion
The rest of the technocratic apparatus uses these news agencies in the same way and for the same reasons — to proliferate certain narratives while burying or “debunking” others
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). Through this consortium, the DHS is illegally censoring Americans
Google promised to bring us the world, and for decades dished up tens of thousands of results to any given search. It was a clever trap. Get the world’s population hooked on an information monopoly, and then, when the time was ripe, funnel everyone toward specific narratives and hide everything else.
Google can do it because the primary way anyone “researches” a topic online is by using the Google search engine; Google controls well over 95% of the searches done on the internet across the entire planet. A similar trap was laid within the media landscape. As reported by Swiss Policy Research:1
“… most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris. The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording.
In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world. A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research.
Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.”
Propaganda on the one hand, and censorship on the other, are the primary battle strategies of the information war we now find ourselves steeped in. It’s imperative, then, to understand how these “weapons of war” against the public are being used, and by whom.
News Agencies Are the Invisible Propaganda Nerve Center
When it comes to the actual dissemination of fake news and propaganda, international news agencies play a central role and, as mentioned, there’s only three of them:
The Associated Press (AP) — Headquartered in the U.S., with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, AP is relied upon by approximately 12,000 international media outlets and reaches more than half of the world’s population each day.
Thomson Reuters — Reuters was originally headquartered in London, U.K., but was acquired by the Thomson Corporation in 2008. The two media companies merged and become the Thomson Reuters Corp., which employs more than 25,000 people in hundreds of locations worldwide.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) — A quasi-governmental organization based in Paris, France, with about 4,000 employees, according to Swiss Policy Research,2 the AFP sends out more than 3,000 stories and photos each day to media companies around the world.
As once noted by Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of Austria Presse Agentur (APA, Austria’s national press agency):3
“News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts of this system.”
Indeed, until or unless at least one of these news agencies sends out a notice, national and local media are unlikely to report on an event. Even photos and videos are typically sourced directly from these global news agencies. This way, people hear, see and read the exact same message everywhere.
Even media outlets that have foreign correspondents on their payroll do not expect those correspondents to conduct independent investigations. They too simply report whatever the Big Three news agencies want covered, and from the angle they want it covered.
What you end up with is a sort of echo chamber where only one view is presented. As one might expect, this setup makes for a perfect propaganda machine. As noted by Swiss Policy Research:4
“Due to the rather low journalistic performance of the mainstream media and their high dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience.”
The Propaganda Multiplier
Intelligence agencies and defense ministries are well aware of the power of these news agencies and use them with regularity. In 2009, then-president of the AP, Tom Curley, let it slip that the U.S. Pentagon has more than 27,000 PR specialists that spin up stories, and an annual propaganda budget of nearly $5 billion.
The technocratic apparatus uses these news agencies to proliferate certain narratives while burying or ‘debunking’ others.
Curley also stated that high-ranking U.S. generals had threatened to “ruin” him and the agency should AP journalists decide to take a critical stance against the U.S. military.5
The rest of the technocratic apparatus also uses these news agencies in the same way and for the same reasons — to proliferate certain narratives while burying or “debunking” others. Of course, we now also know that at least some of the world’s defense ministries are working on the Deep State’s behalf, so there’s not much separating them. Their narratives fit together like puzzle pieces.
In short, the current censoring and labeling of anything that threatens the globalist agenda as “misinformation” and “disinformation” is a top-down scheme, as illustrated6 above. It’s not random, by any means, and it’s not driven by the opinions of private companies themselves. Social media companies, for example, are mere tools for the technocratic deep state, which operates worldwide.
That said, many of the key media personalities are also part of the globalist network.7 Just look at the membership rosters of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, just to name a few.
You’ll find many prominent journalists, editors and publishers. As insiders, they don’t have to be told what to report. They already know what the agenda is, and the narrative that will further that agenda.
Why News Outlets Don’t Let You in on Their Sources
The reason most people have no idea that their local or favored news media are simply regurgitating the same story as everyone else is because, except for print newspapers, where you’ll notice a tiny acronym in parentheses in the dateline, media rarely name their sources. If they did, you’d quickly notice the pattern.
At that point, you’d realize that few if any news reports have actually been independently researched, and this, of course, is a perception they don’t want you to have.
You can find these sources if you know where to look, but they’re still too cryptic to interpret for most. As mentioned, the news agency that circulated the story and occasionally the agency editor that edited the report are typically listed at the top or bottom of the article in abbreviated form, within parentheses.
Media specialists are usually the only ones who know how to decipher these references, but if you know the abbreviation of three international agencies — AP, Reuters and AFP — you will at least know that a news agency created the story.
Fabricated Media Narratives Shape Public Opinion
Sometimes media companies will use an agency’s story without attribution, however, and/or they may simply rewrite it slightly to make it appear like an independent contribution. Still, the vast majority of news stories — including accompanying photos and videos — are sourced from the Big Three.
“In the end, this dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics, using many of the same phrases — a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated with ‘controlled media’ in authoritarian states,” Swiss Policy Research writes, adding:8
“Dependence on global agencies is also a major reason why media coverage of geopolitical conflicts is often superficial and erratic, while historic relationships and background are fragmented or altogether absent …
Finally, the dominance of global agencies explains why certain geopolitical issues and events … are not mentioned in our media at all: if the agencies do not report on something, then most Western media will not be aware of it.
As pointed out on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the German DPA [the German national press agency]: ‘What the agency does not report, does not take place …
While some topics do not appear at all in our media, other topics are very prominent — even though they shouldn’t actually be: ‘Often the mass media do not report on reality, but on a constructed or staged reality. Several studies have shown that the mass media are predominantly determined by PR activities …'”
‘Homeland Security’ Is Now All About Propaganda
In mid-November 2020, then-President Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), after Krebs declared the 2020 election “the most secure election in U.S. history.”9
Incidentally, Krebs is a former Microsoft executive, which puts him inside the sphere of the globalist cabal. Krebs also oversaw CISA’s change of focus, from one focused on countering foreign disinformation campaigns to domestic censorship. This clearly demonstrates which team he’s on, and it’s not Team Humanity.
In 2020, Krebs even launched a “rumor control” website10 to debunk claims of voter fraud — including claims by the sitting president himself. CISA still maintains that site, ostensibly to counter any false claims of voter fraud that might arise in future elections.11
There are clear problems with this. If there are claims of fraud, both sides need to be allowed to be heard and present their evidence. You can’t just have one side saying “there’s nothing to see here, move along.” Yet CISA is acting as a de facto censorship bureau, using 120 analysts to censor millions of social media posts — not only on elections but also on COVID-19.12
CISA — A Propaganda and Censorship Platform
Elon Musk recently called CISA out as a “propaganda platform,”13 and he’s correct. We now know that CISA is partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). The EIP, in turn, is made up of four organizations:
The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO)
The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab
Graphika (a social media analytics company)
During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police wrongthink on social media. As reported by Kanekoa News on Substack:14
“The EIP built communication portals with Big Tech platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Reddit, and Discord; and liberal groups NAACP, Common Cause, the Democratic National Committee, and Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project, cofounded by former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, throughout the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, to censor domestic ‘mis- and disinformation.’
They had about 120 analysts monitoring social media for 20 hours a day, forwarding tickets of misinformation to be censored, and this censorship pivoted to COVID vaccines when they started the Virality Project in Feb. 2021.
A report15 from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), a non-profit founded by Mike Benz, entitled ‘DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events’ details this government speech control machine and its ability to control the narrative during the 2020 election …”
DHS Partners Pressured Private Companies to Comply
Based on the Foundation of Freedom Online’s investigation, the DHS and its partners targeted dozens of “misinformation narratives,” all of which were suppressed. They labeled 22 million tweets as “misinformation,” along with hundreds of millions of Facebook posts, YouTube videos and TikToks.
DHS partners also bragged about their ability to get tech companies to change their terms of service to facilitate or allow for this otherwise illegal censoring. As noted by Kanekoa News:16
“In short, CISA outsourced censorship to a web of like-minded private sector and civil society partners to circumvent unclear legal authorities and violations of the First Amendment.”
Not surprisingly, “Every single ‘repeat spreader of election misinformation’ … was aligned with the political right,” Kanekoa News writes, adding:
“Krebs and the EIP’s decision to completely censor the narrative around voting machine vulnerabilities fails to acknowledge that congressional members aligned with the left, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Ron Wyden, and Sen. Kamala Harris, among numerous computer science professors and election security experts, spent the last four years warning the American people that computerized voting systems are often connected to the internet, compromised, and vulnerable to hackers.
In effect, the left was allowed to discuss the vulnerabilities of voting machines after the 2016 election and the right was censored for discussing those very same vulnerabilities after the 2020 election.”
Equally hypocritical, many of the individuals in the EIP had promoted the idea that Donald Trump was an illegitimate president because of the accusations raised in the Russiagate “scandal” — all of which later turned out to be intentionally fabricated lies, approved and paid for by Hillary Clinton.17
Yet, despite delegitimizing the 2016 election and having been proven wrong, those same people then went on to censor anyone who dared “delegitimize” the 2020 election by asking questions and pointing to evidence of foul play.
Dangerous Hypocrisy
One player in particular, Renée DiResta, a technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, epitomizes the EIP’s hypocrisy. As explained by the Foundation for Freedom Online:18
“The prominent role Renée DiResta plays in EIP … is particularly worrisome and disturbing. Before DiResta became research manager at the Stanford disinfo lab, she was research director for a now-notorious, scandal-laden and disgraced political hatchet firm known as New Knowledge LLC.
In December 2018, the New York Times exposed that DiResta’s Democrat donor-funded small cybersecurity firm, New Knowledge, had clandestinely created thousands of fake ‘Russian bots’ (user accounts generated with a virtual private network (VPN) to simulate a Russian IP address) on Twitter and Facebook then mass subscribed those fake ‘Russian bots’ to opposition Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s campaign.
DiResta did this — or at least the small firm where she was a director did this — in the heat of the Nov. 2017 Alabama special election, which substantially decided the party control of the US Senate. It was a race in which Moore narrowly lost, and for whose loss New Knowledge – in its own report — took credit.
At the time, mainstream news genuinely thought Roy Moore was being backed by Russians. But it was just DiResta’s professional disinformation firm interfering in the election.”
Deep State Actors Say One Thing and Do the Opposite
A key take-home here is that a great deal of the propaganda war involves people and organizations that say they’re one thing but do the complete opposite. For example, DiResta is the head of policy for Data for Democracy,19 while at the same time taking part in a plot to directly circumvent the democratic election process.
This shockingly deceitful behavior becomes easier to understand once you know she’s also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the mission of which is to bring about a totalitarian one world government, a New World Order with global top-down rule. How do we know this? Simple, they’ve admitted it.
In 1950, the son of one of the CFR’s founders, James Warburg, said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We shall have world government whether or not you like it — by conquest or consent.”20 Similarly, in 1975 CFR insider Admiral Chester Ward wrote that the goal of the CFR was “submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.”21
According to Ward, the desire to “surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of its membership,” and “In the entire CFR lexicon, there is no term of revulsion carrying a meaning so deep as ‘America First.'” So, DiResta is working on behalf of those who seek to establish a one-world government, and they’re not known for their scruples, or for following democratic processes.
CISA Turned Law Abiding Americans Into Cybercriminals
As explained by Foundation for Freedom Online founder Mike Benz:22,23
“DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that ‘domestic disinformation’ was now a greater ‘cyber threat to elections’ than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.
So CISA’s self-invented censorship powers against ‘foreign disinformation’ went from being pointed outward against supposed Russian bot accounts to being pointed inwards at tens of millions of US citizens simply talking lawfully about their elections.”
Being Able to Identify Propaganda Is Part of the Solution
If propaganda is already deeply entrenched in our media structure, and government agencies are engaged in censoring, how do we know what is true and what is not?
There’s no easy answer to this question, but the solution involves first becoming aware of the fact that mainstream media consistently lie to support the cabal’s agenda. There is a reason for why the media narrative is what it is. One way to evaluate the news is to ask yourself, “Why might they want me to think of this in this particular way?” Eventually, patterns begin to form.
Ultimately, to find the truth, you must be willing to look hard for it, and to look in places outside the mainstream media consortium. You will rarely ever find the answer on Google, or even the new Open AI Chatbot. You have to ask questions and reason your way through the information you find. If something doesn’t make sense yet you’re told to accept it without question, it’s probably propaganda.
Any number of COVID-19 restrictions, for example, have been illogical in the extreme, which tells us they’re not about protecting people from infection. It’s about something else, and that something else has often been the purposeful destruction of small businesses to facilitate wealth transfer from the middle and lower class to the top echelon. Ultimately, that is the plan, and to stop it, we have to stop believing the propaganda. It’s just that simple. And that challenging.
Remember to make a submission … sure they don’t listen anyway, however, why roll over & give them free reign? Big Pharma is coming for all that is useful, healthful and free in your life. EWR
The sweet and spicy aroma of cinnamon makes it one of the world’s top spices. It’s been valued for its flavor and powerful health properties since at least 2800 BC.
Modern research has confirmed many important health benefits of cinnamon. Studies show that it contains powerful plant compounds that have an anti-inflammatory and antidiabetic effect. Consuming cinnamon regularly can also help your heart and brain health.
Here’s more about what makes this everyday spice so powerful and the proven benefits for your health.
The Fascinating History of Cinnamon
Cinnamon comes from the bark of Cinnamomum trees. These trees are native to regions of Southeast Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. China, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Vietnam are the four top exporters of cinnamon today.
To make the rolled up cinnamon quills you buy in the store, the outer bark of the trees has to be stripped to reveal the inner bark. The inner bark is then shaved and allowed to dry. As it dries, it rolls up into the familiar shape of cinnamon sticks.
To say that cinnamon has been valued since ancient times would be an understatement. It’s mentioned several times in the Bible as part of a sacred anointing oil and was used in ancient Egypt for embalming.
Cinnamon also used to be extremely expensive, even to the point of being an acceptable gift to give royalty. Celyon, the island “homeland” of the most valuable type of cinnamon, passed through many different hands as several countries fought to control the trade for this in-demand spice.
Isn’t it wonderful that all that nasty carbon will be sorted simply by preventing us from traveling too far? It’ll feel a bit like the CV lockdowns I expect but remember, it’s for the planet. At least now we’re a bit used to restrictions.
I wonder if Klaus and friends will live in these cities? And how might they get around those trips to Switzerland every year? I expect they will have that sorted by maybe saving up their travel permits? Or get exemptions perhaps?
It is really good to see they are now encouraging healthy eating and exercise too (see the image above). I feel this has been seriously lacking of late.
Anyway, here is an excellent little video commentary below at the link, detailing just what it will mean for Joe or Jill citizen. Be sure to check out the extra links below the video in the notes. Also the related video.
The New Zealand government is introducing the Therapeutic Products Bill, which is an omnibus piece of legislation controlling, among many other things, the availability of Natural Health Products and the introduction of biotech medical interventions. Given our experience of the last three pandemic years, we should be doubting the capacity of governments to protect our interests. Let’s look at what is already happening:
Do we really need legislation facilitating the further implementation of biotechnology in medicine, or do we rather need legislation outlawing its use?
An article in Mother Jones is raising the alarm. Mother Jones is actually a very pro-vaccine publication, so why is it alarmed? A clue is in the title “The DNA of Deadly Pathogens Is Easy to Obtain”. A virologist David Evans has created a close relative of smallpox, a devastating disease that was thankfully eradicated 36 years ago. He was able to do so because he was simply able to order long stretches of the virus’s DNA in the mail from GeneArt, a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific. Mother Jones summarises:
“Today there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies selling genes, offering DNA at increasingly low prices. (If DNA resembles a long piece of text, rates today are often lower than 10 cents per letter; at this rate, the genetic material necessary to begin constructing an influenza virus would cost less than $1,500.) And new benchtop technologies—essentially, portable gene printers—promise to make synthetic DNA even more widely available.”
An Unregulated Multinational Biotech Industry
The dangers of the wide availability of deadly pathogens is not too hard to figure out for the average citizen, but it is apparently very hard for governments. The United States imposes few security regulations on synthetic DNA providers. In the USA it is perfectly legal to make a batch of genes from Ebola or smallpox and ship it to a US address, no questions asked. A number of nonprofits pushing for regulation are finding it hard to gain traction in the spiralling multinational biotech industry.
The most prominent scientist sounding warnings about the danger of unchecked DNA synthesis is Kevin Esvelt, a biotechnologist at MIT. He explains the problem is that even a recent graduate level biotechnologist would have no problem assembling a bioweapon from readily available synthetic gene sequences. A bioterror attack is only a short time away, according to Esvelt.
Others disagree. Milton Leitenberg, a biosecurity expert at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, concedes that making a virus might be easy, but carrying out a bioattack would be difficult(???). Now correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t we in the middle of a global pandemic which was likely started very simply by a lab in China which says it wasn’t even trying to start a bioattack? It seemed to manage it quite simply by accident (???).
Governments Are Covering Up or Ignoring Safety Signals
The main problem is that nobody appears concerned about biosecurity. Most governments, including ours, have been ignoring pandemic safety signals and even covering them up. This article points out that the regulation of gain of function research is vague, secretive, opaque, lacks accountability, and captures very little that’s risky in the life sciences. You could be forgiven for thinking the US government wants to encourage it.
Surely not? In any case, it wouldn’t happen here. We have an honest government, right? It seems not. Dr. Vinay Prasad is an American hematologist-oncologist and health researcher. He is a professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is the author of the books Ending Medical Reversal (2015) and Malignant (2020).
He is a highly published author known for examining drug trial reliability. Vinay rates a preprint paper authored by our Ministry of Health (MoH) claiming satisfactory Covid mRNA vaccine health outcomes as “really bad” followed by a LOL emoji (that is about as low as you can go), because it uses misleading statistical methods in order to downgrade the safety signal for myocarditis.
Prominent Drug Safety Expert Criticises the Ministry of Health Methodology – Not!
I can see the headline in our papers “Prominent drug safety expert criticises the Ministry of Health methodology”, no wait a minute I can’t see that headline anywhere in New Zealand. I wonder why not?
It is papers like these put out by our Ministry of Health that are enabling Albert Boula, CEO of Pfizer, to falsely claim he hasn’t seen a single safety signal. He might try a new eyeglass prescription and look at this recent paper analysing the results of 29 studies of post-vaccine myocarditis indicating a significant safety signal.
Moderna has a similar disregard for safety issues, see here, and a close relationship with US government regulators. Unbelievably Moderna was busy developing a Covid vaccine even before the pandemic (!!!) based on information it received from the government (yes, they knew what was coming, but no one told us). You can’t read about this in MSM either.
Was this an isolated connection between biotech vaccine researchers and the US government? Apparently not. There is a history of US involvement with Ebola that is very worrying indeed.
Natural is Undoubtedly a Misused Term
So OK, it seems that governments can’t be trusted to regulate biotechnology, but will they be able to regulate Natural Health Products as they intend to do post pandemic here in New Zealand and elsewhere? ‘Natural’ is undoubtedly a misused term around the world. The EU has agreed to allow ‘acheta domesticus’ aka natural common house crickets to be added to:
“multigrain bread and rolls, crackers and breadsticks, cereal bars, dry pre-mixes for baked products, biscuits, dry stuffed and non-stuffed pasta-based products, sauces, processed potato products, legume- and vegetable- based dishes, pizza, pasta-based products, whey powder, meat analogues, soups and soup concentrates or powders, maize flour-based snacks, beer-like beverages, chocolate confectionary, nuts and oilseeds, snacks other than chips, and meat preparations, intended for the general population.”
Only the “defatted powder of house crickets” will be used. Whew!
Just in case you are worried that an ugly inch long bug will crawl out of your loaf or be found floating in your beer, be assured that only “defatted powder of house cricket” will be used. If you want to know how to turn house crickets into defatted powder, forget it. This is protected proprietary information, nor are details of its digestibility to be released. You may have to find out for yourself by eating it.
It is not all bad news though. Insect protein from house crickets is, in fact, already known to be allergenic, so you won’t be in for too much of a shock when you turn purple and swell up unexpectedly. The EU is a bit worried about that, but never mind; the regulator is planning to design some allergenic tests for some unspecified time in the future.
Insect Powder is the Way Ahead to Combat Climate Change
In the meantime, the EU has ruled that no advice on the label will have to warn unsuspecting recipients of defatted house cricket powder. In other words, the EU has looked into their crystal balls, realised that insect powder is the way ahead to combat climate change, and passed the paste. Regulators are wonderful, aren’t they, and they even get paid.
It makes you wonder what the independent (???) New Zealand regulator will do when they are appointed as the high wizard of New Zealand breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the ability to do whatever they like as long as they check with, yes you guessed it, our dear Ministry of Health.
Here’s a clue from the UK Express. Apparently, people in the UK have inexplicably been suffering from blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, and circulatory problems. No one can figure out why (???) The Express has figured it out with the help of the Cleveland Clinic and reports, “Blood clots: Compound found in eggs linked to an enhanced risk of blood clotting…which can lead to death. No worries for us then. There aren’t any eggs on our supermarket shelves. Let’s hope the regulator keeps it that way, and it is a big break for chickens. Funny though, we have been eating eggs for millennia and suddenly they are a big problem in 2023. Must be climate change again, something to do with gestation egg temperatures no doubt.
The Therapeutic Products Bill: Version 3
Joking apart, the New Zealand government has drafted an omnibus Therapeutic Products Bill, and it has passed its first reading in Parliament with the support of all parties (except the Maori Party, which might just be concerned about its effect on their traditional medicine). This Bill enables the government to facilitate biotechnology and gives a blank cheque to a regulator to tell us what herbs and supplements we can use and in what quantity. They are also allowed to tell us what herbs we can’t use.
This is the third attempt over recent years to pass a Bill like this. The last two failed because of public opposition. No one is being harmed by Natural Products, so why is our government doing this? You tell me because I can’t see any reason for this at all. It is good news for wannabe well paid government employees and multinational pharma-owned supplement suppliers. It is bad news for kiwi businesses.
Be Silent No More!
Ask your MP to reject the regulation of Natural Products and the facilitation of biotech medicine proposed by this Bill.
Write to Chris Hipkins (contact details) and let him know what you think.
Go to this link to make a submission before February 15th.
At first glance, it may not seem to affect you personally, because not much is actually specified in the Bill, just a little clause allowing one government employee to decide what we can consume.
If you want more details, this short video on YouTube explains what is likely to happen to the availability of our favourite Natural Health Products. It’s not pretty. If you want more information on the risks of biotechnology visit GLOBE.GLOBAL.
The biotech company Future Fields has notified the Canadian authorities of its intention to commercialize EntoEngine, a genetically modified fly. The flies are engineered to produce foreign proteins – in this case, growth factors, which are cell signaling molecules that play important roles in cell proliferation and development, for use in what Future Fields calls “cellular agriculture” – what we call lab-grown or fake meat, GMWatch reported.
Source:GMWatch Report by Claire Robinson; technical advice by Dr Michael Antoniou
The public can comment on the application until 28 January 2023 and we encourage them to do so. In GMWatch’s view, EntoEngine flies poses serious environmental risks in the likely event that they will escape contained conditions.
The details
The company says, “The EntoEngine fly line has been genetically engineered to express a growth factor isolated from cows…. The gene sequence poses no known risks to either humans or animals. Expression of the gene encoding the growth factor is under the control of a gene expression regulator isolated from yeast.”
Future Fields argues that the GM fly is needed to replace the usual way of producing growth factors – in bioreactors. The company confirms what GMWatch has long said – that bioreactor technology is expensive, resource and energy hungry and produces vast quantities of problematic waste. The company concludes, reasonably, that growth factors cannot be produced cost-effectively using bioreactor technology – so they aim to produce them in GM drosophila, or fruit flies.
The company makes grand claims for the fly’s sustainability and environmental friendliness, compared with bioreactor protein production, based on lower input use and less greenhouse emissions. Drosophila, Future Fields says, “do not have these large operation costs and require only modest environmental controls to ensure optimal rearing… Drosophila can feed on organic side streams and byproducts from other processes (i.e. organic waste). In fact, insects are some of the most efficient organisms at converting nutrients into biomass.”
However, the problem with this “solution” is that even with a cheaper source of cell growth factors in the shape of the flies, lab grown meat will still need to be produced in huge bioreactors, with the consequent vast running costs and environmental impacts.
Patent
Future Fields describes the status of the patent on EntoEngine as “pending”. Our patent search on the Espacenet and USPTO databases only found one patent on a GM insect with Future Fields as an applicant. The patent, titled “Method for producing recombinant proteins in insects”, describes the general concept patent but lacks the experimental data to prove that the system actually works. It’s unclear whether other patents exist, but the details of this patent illustrate the types of process that would be used for EntoEngine protein production.
The patent focuses on heat stress (taking the temperature up to 35-40 degrees C) as the trigger that will activate expression of the transgenes in the flies to produce the desired growth factors.
The expression of the transgenes encoding for the desired protein (in this case, mammalian cell growth factors) is under the control of a “gene expression regulator” derived from yeast. So these flies would appear to contain two foreign transgenes: One encoding the desired protein to be expressed and isolated from the flies; and the other encoding the yeast gene expression regulator.
In all likelihood, the yeast-derived gene expression regulator is a member of the heat shock factor family of proteins. The function of these proteins is elevated upon heat stress and their role is to increase expression of genes that will help the organism protect itself from external stresses (e.g. heat, cold, UV light).
Torturing fruit flies
Regarding the heat stress trigger, the patent describes a gruesome and torturous process of gradually getting the flies used to the higher temperature of the heat stressor so that they don’t die from the shock of a sudden rise, by applying the stressor interspersed with “rest” periods.
When the insects have exhausted their ability to produce growth factor, they are killed and “harvested”, in the words of the Future Fields patent, then ground up into a mass, and the desired protein is extracted and purified out. It is unclear how well the purification process will work and GMWatch warns that native fly proteins could end up contaminating the final product.
Doubtful ethics
The company’s patent and publicity make a big deal out of the supposedly superior ethics of using fruit flies to manufacture growth factors for “cellular agriculture”, as opposed to extracting them from fetal bovine serum (FBS) taken “from fetuses of pregnant cows prior to slaughter”. The patent says that cattle-derived FBS gives rise to “ethical concerns regarding the production of cultured meat products”.
But the point on ethics is disingenuous and contradictory, as Future Fields itself justifies its GM flies approach as replacing growth factors produced in bioreactors and not as replacing FBS, because FBS is not used by the lab grown meat industry.
Along the same lines, Future Fields’ use of language in its patent seems manipulative. While the cattle from which FBS is derived are subject to “slaughter”, the GM fruit flies are merely “harvested”, just like the crop plants that even vegans would be happy to eat.
But anyone concerned with the ethics around animal use in agriculture is unlikely to be impressed by Future Fields’ description of its GM fly as “a standalone biofactory” – the ultimate reduction of a living creature to a machine.
At a time when prominent environmentalists, from Sussex University’s Prof Dave Goulson to TV’s David Attenborough, are trying to persuade the public to give insects the respect they deserve as key regulators of ecosystems, genetically engineering fruit flies and then characterising them as “biofactories” or as non-sentient beings on a par with a wheat or maize crop seems distasteful in the extreme.
By timely coincidence, recently published EU-funded research shows that fruit flies, though “tiny”, are ” amazingly smart”. They are capable of attention, working memory and conscious awareness – abilities we usually only associate with mammals.
Environmental risks
The main risk posed by the GM flies is environmental. Containment facilities for GM animals are notoriously insecure – GM glofish have escaped from tanks and are breeding in the wild in Brazil and a whistleblower report paints a damning picture of lax attitudes and neglect of protocols at AquaBounty’s GM salmon-producing facilities. The risk with GM flies is that they could escape and breed in the environment or cross-breed with natural flies, leading to the escape of growth factor-producing genes into wild populations.
This wouldn’t pose a human health risk, as most of us don’t eat living fruit flies and the proteins in dead flies would quickly degrade. But plenty of animals, including mammals, fish, amphibians, and birds, do eat living flies. Because the growth factors in the GM flies are mammalian, they will to some degree be active in any animal that ingests them. This could cause uncontrolled cell division in the animal consumer – potentially leading to cancer.
In evaluating environmental risk in the case of an escape, much depends on what triggers are used to make the growth factor-producing genes express. The heat stress triggers discussed in the patent are worrying because they are designed to spring into action at 35-40 degrees C – temperatures regularly reached in the climate conditions of many parts of the world. And this raises the question: What happens at 31 or 32 degrees? Nothing, or something? And if something, then what?
Conclusion
Future Fields’ GM fly appears to be an invention of dubious utility that will do little to improve the sustainability of the environmental catastrophe-in-the-making that is lab grown meat. It poses unacceptable environmental risks in the event of an escape and the ethics around the GM fly’s grim life and grimmer death are dubious, to say the least.
Sujon blackcurrant, or any NZ blackcurrant, has been shown in several studies to improve performance and recovery. I have even met Professor Mark Willems from the UK, who did the original research. It may have something to do with how the berry adapts to the berry to high UV in NZ. Here’s a quick summary: https://www.sujon.co.nz/post/which-fruits-are-higher-in-antioxidants
So, I use it daily in my sports drinks when training and in recovery. Everyone will benefit but best when combined as follows:
The Therapeutics Product bill will limit access to supplements, herbs, spices & everyday foods.
What will you do to save your health & that of your children?
What will you do for happiness, wealth & a life well lived?
Without our health, these precious aspects of our lives are either not obtainable or meaningless.
Ardern may be gone, but the Therapeutics Product bill is not. There is a long way to go to reunite New Zealanders but a good place to start is in everyone’s interest – our health.
Vitamin C, aloe vera (even in your garden), cinnamon, fish oil, n-acetyl cysteine, Vitamin B12, magnesium, kawa-kawa, zinc, selenium, astragalus, niacin, calcium, bilberry, Vitamin A, iodine, crampbark, thiamine, iron, lavender, riboflavin, thyme, oats, valerian, chromium, ginger, coenzyme Q10, glutamine, chaste tree, echinacea, pantothenic acid, St John’s wort, slippery elm, tumeric, soy, probioitics, folate, licorice, garlic, flaxeed oil, cocoa, cranberry, pyridoxine, cloves, celery, carnitine, evening primrose oil, Vitamin D, New Zealand green lip mussel, psyllium, Vitamin E, tea, quercetin, rosemary……..
These compounds and many more are now under threat of being restricted to big companies and only available on a doctor’s prescription. The doctor in turn will likely not know anything about the health benefits of quercetin.
Think about how the “no” vote affected access to medicinal CBD. It is now on prescription only and costs around ten times the amount it did before. Do you want to pay ten times the price for Vitamin C or valerian?
And this for supplements that are estimated to be 45 000 times safer than pharmaceuticals and for food that we eat or drink daily.
Dr Guy Hatchard explains in more detail in this post.
What You Can Do
Stand up and speak out!
We did it before and it worked
Talk to everyone and anyone you can
Form a group
Hold a placard
Make a submission – Submissions close on 15th February
Start a petition
Visit your local MP – frequently.
The government needs to know how many people oppose this bill.
Let’s Speak Out Together for Our Health – and Our Lives
NZDSOS is preparing a submission, but it is going to take all of us to let the government and whoever the prime minister is, know that the people of New Zealand oppose this bill and if it is passed it will hurt them in this election year.
While you’re with your MP, why not mention the WHO’s plan to impose health controls on us via the IHR, and that many of us are dying and injured from the jabs, especially the young. They need to know that we know.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has resigned after months of rumours. Ardern, whose popularity has plummeted during the last six months, told us “she had nothing left in the tank”.
The backstory to this resignation is a tale of woe. Ardern said she wants to be remembered as someone who tried to be kind. The subtext is: the country is in an unprecedented mess but don’t blame me.
Last year school attendance was reported as running at just 67% on any given day. Machete wielding teenagers are ram raiding liquor outlets, vape shops, dairies, and jewelry stores daily in a frenzied crime wave. The health system is overwhelmed. Ardern’s government promised to build 100,000 new homes over three years. It has delivered just 1500 to date.
Our tourist, farming, and hospitality industries have not recovered from lockdowns and border closures. It now takes weeks to get a visa to visit New Zealand (it used to take two days) and the government says it only wants rich people to come. No wonder, we are all poor now.
Ardern famously insisted on universal Covid vaccination mandates. There is a suspicion that our 90% vaccination rate has left everyone in a lethargic fog. Excess all cause deaths are still running 15% above the long term trends, and it is not Covid.
History will judge Ardern harshly, but don’t blame her alone. This was a Parliament who woke up on all sides of the house to the weakness of our constitutional arrangements (there are none worth the name). The Bill of Rights was tossed aside, and no one in Parliament cared.
The leader of the National opposition Chris Luxon famously said pre-pandemic if he was in power, he would withdraw benefits from unvaccinated single mothers. David Seymour, leader of the ACT party wrote on his FB those losing their jobs through vaccine mandates only had themselves to blame. Labour’s coalition partners, the Greens, led by example, encouraging mothers in labour to ride to hospital on a bicycle (yes they did).
Politicians of all parties were afraid to meet protestors and turned the hoses on them rather than listen to their concerns.
Revelations this week (here and here) that Ardern personally overruled her scientific advisors who were expressing doubts about the safety of Covid vaccines for young people and the wisdom of mandates, have circulated very widely and no doubt this has further undermined confidence in the government.
Ardern introduced ‘rule by regulation’. Adopting the enabling model favoured by fascists in the 1930s, her government has empowered authorities to tell us all what to do, when to stay at home, and where not to go. The courts, the Human Rights Commission, and the broadcast regulators have all followed the government line meticulously which has had a devastating effect on business, families, communities, and professions. To cement her policies, Ardern introduced massive government funding of our media and broadcasters—a hallmark of repressive regimes.
Ardern was a protege of Tony Blair and a graduate of the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum young leaders program. Both must shoulder some blame too. What fantasies of global power did they offer to a young person who was given to idealistic dreaming that segued into fanaticism?
Ardern’s government, in an absurd overreach, has also funded a nationwide effort to discredit critics of policy, labelling them terrorists. This has divided a formerly egalitarian society, instituting a snitch culture that encourages us to dob in a neighbour. Government Disinformation Project employees appeared on funded films aired on television to a backdrop of atomic bombs exploding and Nazi stormtroopers marching. Absurdly they labelled knitting, blond hair, braids, vaccine hesitancy, love of natural foods, Yoga, and yes motherhood as signs of terrorism that should be reported to the intelligence services (yes they did, view it here on TVNZ if you can stand watching this nasty piece of propaganda and hate).
Why did Ardern suddenly change overnight in August 2021 from being a kindly figure saying she would never mandate vaccines, to being one of the world’s most draconian proponents? We can only speculate. New Zealand is a member of the five eyes intelligence network. Given the Pentagon’s recently revealed massive involvement in US Covid policy and gain of function research funding, was she fed information that a bioweapon was in play? We will likely never know.
The cynical will say that Ardern left early like Key to avoid the ignominy of U-turns and election defeat. Leaving open the possibility of political rebirth. The New York Times wrote this morning that Ardern, like Helen Clark, is in line for a global role and a bigger platform. We live in dread.
For a couple of weeks now government announcements and advertisements encouraging vaccination and boosters have been conspicuously absent. Has the penny finally dropped? We doubt it. It will take an honest, intelligent politician (are there any left?) to roll back Ardern’s dictatorial powers and kickstart New Zealand. Why would any aspiring newby give up that much power? The prospect will be too intoxicating, but that is what it will take. Someone has to rise above the mire of our current politics and realise that governments should represent the interests of people. Leadership is about fulfilling the aspirations of your followers, not just telling them what to do.
Our final verdict: It is not Ardern, but the whole New Zealand Parliament elected in 2020 that will be judged as the worst in our short history as an independent island nation, formerly famous for championing the underdog and offering opportunity to all. Ardern’s resignation lights a bonfire of the excesses of modern democracy. To find a way ahead, at the very least, the New Zealand Bill of Rights needs to be entrenched beyond the reach of power hungry politicians and compliant courts.
Great excitement for many in NZ, others not so much. For the former group, don’t get too excited. Remember Smiling Assassin Key resigning? He’s now a ‘Sir’. And just this week, in similar vein to that predecessor, there have been disturbing revelations of alleged lies (a serious must read) from our single source of truth.
Could these have hastened her departure? We’ll likely never know for sure.
Those who are aware of the globalists’ strategies will know that timing is everything. Their global leaders are greatly rewarded for the paths of destruction they create whilst in office. Remember Sir Roger Douglas? Wrecked NZ on claims of improving the economy, now nicely and comfortably retired in the sunny north. (Meanwhile the rich got richer and the poor are even poorer). Ms Clarke, who let the GE corn crops into ‘clean green’ EnZed, beavering away on global governance at the UN. These young global leaders, servants of Klaus & Co, are suitably stepped aside at the right time (that being when too many of the public are waking up and/or they are widely hated), and either way, they know they will be well looked after.
It’s fairly likely Jacinda will in due course become a Dame and like others before her, will be well rewarded for her more recent years of discomfort at the hands of an awakening public. A nice well paid job in realms offshore until the public’s pain has worn off and the wounds are less raw. By then the newly installed leader (be it a Nat or a Labourite, same bird, different wings) will be well along the way in the next phase of installing the (not) great reset.
It’s a globalist script people, we have the mere illusion of democracy.
Readers that have followed my weekly columns and books will be well aware of how I have combined gardening with health.
I know that naturally grown vegetables and fruit will be very beneficial to your health and well being and when you add all the 114 known minerals to the growing media then the same food plants will be super healthy and taste so good.
The minerals can be obtained from using Wallys Unlocking your soil (minerals from rocks) Wallys Ocean Solids (Minerals from the blue waters of the ocean) and Magic Botanic Liquid (MBL which is minerals from prehistoric times).
The most benefit from your produce is obtained by eating raw or only lightly cooked.
The fast way to obtain maximum goodness is by converting healthy foliage into a drink we call ‘smoothies’
This is achieved with a very high speed blender which smashes the molecules of the plant material used allowing for easy assimilation into your body when you drink the green liquid.
Take the leaves of edible plants such as lettuce, carrot tops, celery, wheat or barley grass, silverbeet etc.
There are also a number of weeds that are edible such as Puha or Rauriki, dandelion and Stinging nettles.
Every plant has some beneficial properties even ones that are not normally eaten.
For instance there are about 3 or 4 different coloured carrots you can grow and each one has their own health benefits.
I always add a banana to my smoothies as it gives a nice palatable flavour.
We know that for thousands of years people in different areas of the planet learnt about plants growing in their area which they could use for their health and medical purposes.
I read one time that there is a plant or plants some where on the planet that will cure any ills of humans; in some cases we just have not found that plant yet or have the knowledge of how to use it.
Much of the pharmaceutical medicines was originally found through the old remedies of various plants people had used for generations.
The original chemists had jars of all sorts of dried plants and minerals which they would use to make up the concoctions that added recovery from sickness.
We hear about Chinese medicines, Indian medicines and even Maori medicines most of which were derived from locally grown plants and herbs.
A problem arises as Big Pharma cannot make money out of natural remedies as they cannot be patient. So if you know your herbs and herbal lore the poor pharmaceutical companies are not able to take your money with their concoctions.
Recently we saw during the holiday break our beloved Govt once again trying to implement a bill to ban the traditional use of herbs and plants for your well being. This is their third attempt at doing so and again removing another of your rights to be able to treat yourself and look after your own heath.
The Therapeutic Products Bill replaces the Medicines Act 1981 and Dietary Supplements Regulations 1985 with a comprehensive regulatory regime that is (said to be) fit for the future.
Labour having failed twice in the past to pass legislation because of public outcry are using a different tact to make it happen..’The Bill establishes a new regulator within Manat Hauora – Ministry of Health, headed by an independent statutory officer,
with a wider remit than the medicines regulator Medsafe.’
This person can deem any plant, herb, fruit and vegetable as beneficial to your health and thus ban the use of it, the growing of it and the import of it.
The only benefit of this has to be for the pharmaceutical companies and removes our freedom of choice to take what is traditionally safe natural remedies to what are often not safe pharmaceutical medicines.
In 2017 Labour opted for a prohibited list of 300 common herbal ingredients.
More well know on these included Aloe Vera, Comfrey, Belladonna, Hibiscus, Jasmine, Snowdrop, Juniper, Mustard, Worm wood, Cinnamon, Almond, Grapeseed, Ipomoea, Neem, Eggplant, senna and Valerian.
Many of these plants, herbs and spices like Cinnamon, Mustard are currently sold in shops. So how on earth did they get onto a prohibited list?
The answer lies in attempts to gain control of our food supply.
Natural products that are beneficial to health cannot be patented, but synthetic copies can be.
To make this work, the products that grow in gardens need to be banned.
Already I see Senna which is a natural aid for constipation is not easily obtainable in NZ.
Labour and the Ministry of Health did not make this list up, the list was supplied by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) of which Medsafe is a member.
ICMRA is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry whose interests they serve.
If we wish to be able to continue to freely chose herbal medicines and supplements without government interference, we will need to speak up.
Write to your MP and complain that the appointment of a regulator amounts to an open ended blank cheque to control the use of products used by more than 50% of our population without fully specifying the principles he should use.
Many of us do not realise what uses there are for many plants we grow in our gardens and while researching for this article I discovered https://medicinalseedkit.com/kit/
Have a look, I was amazed the wealth of information that is there.
For instance Chicory : This is the wild plant that Native Americans used to look for more than any other.
They’d harvest and use chicory to make a natural painkilling extract for a wide range of physical discomforts, especially stiff and achy joints. And so can you!
The root is rich in chicoric acid (CA), a plant compound with potent anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties but no risk of addiction.
If our pharmacies ever run dry, having even a small patch of chicory growing in your own backyard will provide relief. There are many more such as:
Chamomile – The Natural Antibiotic
Evening Primrose – A Natural Remedy for Skin and Nerves
California Poppy – Better Than Sleeping Pills
Feverfew– Nature’s Aspirin for Fevers and Migraines
Knowledge is power over your destiny and well being and it should never be taken away from you by Government regulations not in our interest.
I have on both counts and if you would like a copy of the email I sent to most of the Labour MP’s just ask and I will send you the copy.
You can alter it to suit and use it in your words to the MP’s.
If enough people complain then you maybe we will be still able to still grow your lemon tree (good for colds).
No more broccoli (Some kids will be happy) as it is a great source of antioxidants and may enhance your health by reducing inflammation, improving blood sugar control, boosting immunity, and promoting heart health.
Why Is Broccoli a Superfood? fiber, vitamin C, vitamin K, iron, and potassium.
The list goes on.
Phone 0800 466464 Garden Pages and News at www.gardenews.co.nz Shar Pei pages at www.sharpei.co.nz Mail Order products at www.0800466464.co.nz New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Part II of the Act covers a broad range of Civil and Political Rights. As part of the right to life and the security of the person, the Act guarantees everyone:
1The right not to be deprived of life except in accordance with fundamental justice (Section 8)
2The right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel, degrading, or disproportionately severe treatment or punishment (Section 9)
3The right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without consent (Section 10)
4The right to refuse to undergo any medical treatment (Section 11)
Furthermore, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 guarantees everyone: Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion. This includes the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO ADOPT AND HOLD OPINIONS WITHOUT INTERFERENCE (Section 1)
Note: Grow your own! ‘They’ won’t be eating GM food, bugs and so on. The fake food is just for you. Note also, Bill is planning on other additions to your food supply. EWR
If “you are what you eat,” as the old adage has it, then what does that make us?
As consumers of heavily processed, chemically treated, GMO-infested gunk, we in the modern, developed world have “solved” the problem of hunger that plagued our forebears since time immemorial by handing our food sovereignty over to a handful of corporate conglomerates. The result of this handover has been the creation of a factory farming system in which genetically engineered crops are doused in glyphosate and livestock are herded into tiny pens where they live their entire lives in fetid squalor, pumped up with antibiotics and growth hormones until they are slaughtered and shipped off to the supermarkets and fast food chains.
There have been any number of documentaries and exposés produced in recent decades detailing the dangers of this industrial farming system that we find ourselves beholden to, any number of activists ringing the alarm about these problems, any number of campaigns and marches organized to raise awareness about these issues. Yet still, nation after nation gets fatter and sicker as traditional diets based on fresh produce sourced from local farmers are displaced by the fast food pink slime sourced from the industrial farms of the Big Food oligopoly.
But as bad as things may be, they’re about to get even worse. As crisis after crisis disrupts the food supply, the “solution” to these problems has already been prepared. New technologies are coming online that threaten to upend our understanding of food altogether. Technologies that could, ultimately, begin altering the human species itself.
Re-posting this from 2019 … shared a good six months before that planned event. Dean’s website is no longer up. I believe it got taken down. Note he has written several excellent books, worth acquiring…finally an excerpt from the article that’s very relevant at the moment… NZ is part of Five Eyes:
“SERCO’s specialty is in handling sensitive cyber-data, including criminal records, driver’s license records, vaccination records, DNA databases, and military records and communications. This puts them in a position to completely control the Five Eyes governments and their citizens”...EWR
Thanks to Dean Henderson at hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com for this brilliant article. Important information & truly intriguing but maybe not surprising knowing the grip all of these giant corporations now have on the planet. Pertinent right now as world events unfold & escalate, with the suppression of information & censorship of the net ramping up. The modern day replication of what was formerly book burning.
Two snippets from the article:
“SERCO, a powerful British company close to Lockheed Martin, GE and BAE. The first and last are the two biggest defense contractors in the world. All four are part of Crown Agents USA Inc. The golden share in SERCO is controlled through British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) by Queen Elizabeth II.
During the 1990’s SERCO took its “services” international, focusing on the Five Eyes Alliance countries of the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US. The middle three countries are part of…
December, January, February are the best months for planting vegetables and flowers for winter food and colour.
The reason is you need to catch the longer day light hours to obtain reasonable growth.
The day light hours are progressively diminishing but during these months there is ample time to get plants to a mature state before winter sets in.
Once it chills down vegetables which are mature or near mature, will hold nicely in the garden for you to harvest as you require.
There is a problem from my experience is that seedling nurseries don’t produce winter type vegetable plants and flowers until we are just about into winter. By then by then you have lost the growth of the longer day light hours.
Chances are that they will sit and sulk during winter then bolt in the spring to flower.
Many gardeners prefer to buy seedling in punnets or cell packs to plant which is very expensive even if you are getting a head start in comparison to growing from seed.
That is only an advantage at the start as seed sown vegetables, sown at the same time as transplanted seedlings from seedling packs, will out grow the transplants and give you a superior plant.
The key is not to sow seeds in containers to transplant but to direct sow where they are going to grow and mature.
Nature is by far the best plant grower from seed that I know of; just look at the crops of weeds that Nature has germinated in your gardens.
I am going to show you now the very best way to direct sow and grow seed in open ground or in raised gardens.
Select a sunny area of either of the above and remove all weeds that are currently growing there.
Rake the soil over to obtain a nice level area of friable soil.
Over this you sprinkle blood & bone, sheep manure pellets and Ocean Solids.
Alternative or as well as you can use any animal manures you have available.
Lightly rake the above to mix with soil or growing medium.
Then place about 4 layers of newspaper or one layer of thin cardboard to suppress any weed seeds that are likely to germinate. Wet down the paper or cardboard.
Next spread a layer of good purchased compost and I recommend Daltons Compost as its not just a bag of rubbishy bark with some lime and fertiliser thrown in.
(Some contains green waste that has herbicides in it as well which is no great help in establishing your plants.)
You are now ready to sow seeds of crops suitable for this time of year sowing
You need to do a bit of research on the Internet for mail order seeds from Egmont Seeds or Kings Seeds
Look at all the types available in say cabbages to see which ones are for winter growing/harvesting.
Buy the ones that suit you and the season best.
Open pollinate seeds are preferred ones to buy and g row as they will mature at different times rather than all at once. You can also note the recommended plant spacing distances on the ones you are buying.
Normally there are a lot of seeds in the packet and you are only going to sow a few of them at one time.
The packets with spare seed in them can be placed in a glass jar with a lid and placed in your fridge to keep well for future plantings.
Say the spacing is 30cm apart then you are going to put 2 seeds 15cm apart on top of your purchased compost and then spray them with Magic Botanic Liquid (MBL) before lightly covering them with the compost.
Leave for a day and then lightly water the area. Repeat lightly watering each day or if drying out quickly twice a day.
After a few days or a week or more you should have a strike with lots of the sown seeds sprouting.
Allow them to grow about 5 cm tall and spray them weekly with MBL.
Once they are at about 5 to 8cm tall you are going to cull out the crop.
Where two seeds have both germinated together select the stronger looking one and with a pair of scissors cut the weaker one off at ground level.
Allow all the other seedlings to grow and water to keep soil moist. As we are at say 15cm apart and not the preferred 30 cm we wait till the foliage of all are starting to touch each other
then we harvest the young plants to leave growing plants 30 cm apart (or what ever is the ideal spacing according to the seed packet info.)
The harvested young plants can be eaten/cooked in any suitable way.
If you have ample room and you want to plant for succession then repeat sowing as above in a months time and even a late sowing a month later in March.
That is it till the spring.
I can foresee that purchased vegetables are going to become very expensive over the next year or more for several reasons.
Imported chemical fertilisers that the commercial growers use are in short supply and much dearer than they used to be.
There are already and will be more crop failures from flooding or droughts and growth is slower because of the lack of direct sunlight from overcast and cloudy days.
If you have heard about the proposed ‘Dimming of the Planet’ to offset global warming by creating hazy skies and then if you are aware it; this has nothing to do with global warming but everything to do with slowing food crops growth so you have to eat Bill Gates Lab grown food or starve.
There is a lot of truth in the saying ‘Control the food and money and you control the people’.
I learnt of a recent problem in the Philippines were a kilo of onions is now the equivalent price of $20 NZD. Reason I believe is the flooding in northern parts of Philippines where the weather is a bit more like ours and a lot of food crops are grown there.
One Filipino friend going back for a holiday said she is not taking chocolates as normal but a suitcase of onions.
Taking about Philippines and their food stuffs we have a Philippine/Asian food distribution centre here in Marton which you can order non frozen food stuffs on line and have them sent to your home with your gardening requirements.
You are likely to be surprised at how better value many items are compared to Supermarket brands of similar products. Spaghetti sauces for instance are very popular with Europeans and about half the price of NZ brands.
Also save money in your gardens by seed sowing vegetables as I have described above.
Those people that took my advice in earlier articles about having a few chickens on their property will now be enjoying the fresh eggs daily and not paying about $10.00 a dozen at the supermarket.
Its just a sign of things to come I think.
ALSO DONT FORGET OUR CURRENT PROMOTION TILL END OF MONTH..
All Neem Products (Neem Oil, Neem Granules and Powder all sizes) 20% off
Wallys Super Pyrethrum 20% off
Wallys White Fly sticky Traps 20% off
Wallys Super Compost Accelerator 600 grams 20% off
Wallys Ammonium Sulphamate 2kilos 20% off
Wallys Cat Repellent 200 grams 20% off
All the rest of our products (except bulk ones and Asian food stuff ) 10% off.
Place orders on our mail order web site at www.0800466464.co.nz and place in comments ‘PEST SALE’ so I know to do the discounts when I will phone you.
I will apply discounts and Shipping (if any) before I phone you with the total.
Then we either do Credit/Debit card over phone or I will email you bank transfer details.
If in North Island and order comes to $100 after discounts then free shipping.
In South Island $150.00 after discounts for free shipping.
The total does not include bulk items such as 12kilo BioPhos, 13kg Ocean solids and 10 kg Unlocking soil (Freight is always charged on bulk products)
New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Part II of the Act covers a broad range of Civil and Political Rights. As part of the right to life and the security of the person, the Act guarantees everyone:
1The right not to be deprived of life except in accordance with fundamental justice (Section 8)
2The right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel, degrading, or disproportionately severe treatment or punishment (Section 9)
3The right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without consent (Section 10)
4The right to refuse to undergo any medical treatment (Section 11)
Furthermore, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 guarantees everyone: Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion. This includes the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO ADOPT AND HOLD OPINIONS WITHOUT INTERFERENCE (Section 1)
For millions of years, humans and animals have maintained their health by eating the fruits of the earth.
The necessity and benefits of a broad natural diet are evident from Egyptian skeletal remains from 6000 years ago, which suggest scurvy—a disease resulting from a lack of vitamin C. In 1753 a Scottish surgeon, James Lind demonstrated that scurvy could be treated with citrus fruit. The New Zealand government seems intent on changing history.
Just before Christmas, our Government introduced the Therapeutic Products Bill for its first reading. Public consultation is being rushed through the summer holidays here in the southern hemisphere and closes on February 15th. The Bill contains 423 pages of dense provisions with countless cross references. I am not sure whether any MPs actually read it before voting for its acceptance or whether the public could stand to do so. You can view my video summary of its draconian provisions here.
You might be interested in the kind of nation we will end up inhabiting:
Reverse Patenting
If a Natural Health Product is found to benefit a serious illness (such as lemons which benefit scurvy), according to the Bill it should be classed as a medicine. Consequently, according to the letter of the new law, only doctors will be allowed to prescribe lemons. Joking apart, most foods benefit serious illness. You might think there is no need to pass a law classifying them as medicines, but according to the government you would be wrong.
80% of drugs are in fact derived from the properties of plants. For years pharmaceutical companies have been trying to patent medicinal plants and secure a monopoly of their supply and use. But this effort largely failed in the patent courts. The remedy for pharmaceutical companies is contained in the Bill being introduced by our Labour government. If a plant is used to make a medicine or the molecular structure of any of its compounds is mimicked by a medicine, then the use of the actual plant should be restricted.
For this reason, in 2016, a bevy of well-paid Ministry of Health experts (???) produced an idiotic list of common plants that they envisioned should be restricted. Natural products in this list included cinnamon, eggplant, almond, mustard, tea (yes you did read that correctly), coconut, and many many others. The present Bill (the third attempt over the years to get this past Parliament) sets up the same conditions that prompted the 2016 list of restricted plants. A sort of frenzied desire to control the minutia of individual life driven by a mad instinct that the government always knows best.
More than 50% of NZ citizens use natural products, so you might think their availability should not be controlled by the government. Wrong again. The Bill requires the appointment of a regulator who will decide for us what among what we have eaten for millennia can be sold openly and what should be restricted. The idea that one person can decide for all of us what plants that grow in the earth, can be sold, eaten, or used puts New Zealand in a unique class among tin pot kingdoms. We can imagine as we gather around the family breakfast table a swarm of well-paid government experts with pens and questionnaires hovering close by for a final check.
The situation at the border is very similar. If a herb benefits health, it will be a medicine and therefore cannot be imported except with a permit. Border officials will be very busy examining packages and if they find anything healthy, tossing it in the bin. Am I exaggerating? No. Rauwolfia Serpentina is an Indian herb that reduces blood pressure. Studies such this one published in 2015 show it is a safe and effective treatment for high blood pressure, but it is banned here in New Zealand because some hypertension drugs contain synthetic copies of one of the many alkaloids found in the whole plant—reverse patenting at its best.
Why is the Government Intending to Regulate Natural Health Products?
A rational answer to this question is hard to find. A recent EU study found that natural health products are 45,000 times safer than pharmaceutical drugs. The government, however, apparently believes they are unsafe, but where is the evidence? It doesn’t exist. An imaginary NZ doctor explains to their teenage patient:
“Years ago, before you were born, dearly beloved, a person whose name is lost in the mists of time might have felt a little off colour after taking a vitamin tablet and then recovered quickly. Ever since then, the New Zealand government has quite rightly been very suspicious of vitamins and plants grown in soil. So they are introducing a new and very honest law for us all.” or words to that effect.
There are many continuous traditions of natural approaches to health that have been followed by cultures on every continent for thousands of years and still are. There are more modern ones too that have attracted followers guided by trained practitioners. These include Indian Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Chiropractic, Homeopathy, etc. The idea that a regulator who is unfamiliar with these traditions should control their practice and availability is inherently flawed.
This Bill represents an attempt to impose a modern medical/pharmaceutical straight jacket on the process of medical choice. A straight jacket that will no doubt be administered by people who are unfamiliar with and even opposed to natural medicine. The apparent intention is to drive people towards pharmaceutical-based medicine. It is worth noting that modern medical misadventure and misprescription is the third leading cause of death—hardly a direction that deserves a monopoly.
The logic of insisting on total government control of medical choice escapes me. It fits with a perspective that has been steadily growing throughout the pandemic: the government is seeking to control every aspect of life and impose a kind of uniformity on the nation. This originates from a distorted one size fits all view of reality. Diversity is actually a great source of progress and happiness, not something to be stamped out—a discredited communistic perspective.
It is rather curious that for two years the government has been denying there is any connection between serious illness and mRNA vaccination despite tens of thousands of instances of illness proximate to inoculation and studies showing a statistical connection, as well as plausible biomolecular mechanisms. In contrast, on account of a very, very small handful of unproven historical complaints about natural health products, despite widespread safe use, they wish to control what we eat and what health choices we can make.
Whichever side of the vaccine debate you are on, it should be clear that the government cannot have it both ways. They can’t apply different and incompatible logic as it suits their agenda. All the more curious when many vaccine injured and long Covid sufferers are relying on natural health products to help get them through conditions which many of our medical professionals deny exist.
Last night I spoke to a medical doctor who described how his comments on the benefits of Vitamin C and D have been censored by his colleagues and officials. No surprise really, doctors only spend an hour or two learning about the principles of nutrition during the entire course of their long training. One of his colleagues told him the only benefit of vitamins is to change the colour of urine. That just about says it all. James Lind, who found that lemons cure scurvy, must be turning in his grave.
There is in fact no reasonable rationale for introducing restrictions on Natural Health Products, they are not harming anyone and studies show that many of them have significant benefits for health. The introduction of the new law will cost a lot and it will be paid for by financial levies on manufacturers, importers, suppliers, practitioners, and retailers. A single company selling 300 products, each making two health claims, will be liable for as much as $3 million in government charges. Ultimately these costs will be passed onto the public making natural health products unaffordable.
What the Bill Doesn’t Do
Gradually over the last few years, synthetic flavours and additives have been turning up in processed supermarket items. If you are buying vanilla ice cream, it is now usually labelled as containing natural vanilla flavour. This is not in fact made from natural vanilla beans, it is a synthetic flavour. The use of the term “natural” is intended to disguise this fact. In 2016 our Ministry of Health approved over 3,000 synthetic ingredients, many of them without safety testing. The Therapeutic Products Bill will do nothing to correct the sleight of hand that is describing synthetic additives with an unknown safety profile as ‘natural’. I discuss many of the ways synthetic additives are affecting health in my book Your DNA Diet.
Nor will the Bill encourage the distribution of information about natural approaches to health that studies show are very beneficial in controlling common serious health conditions. Advice for example about diet, exercise, and the curbing of unhealthy habits such as smoking, excessive drinking, or ultra processed foods. Changes in lifestyle can be very influential in reducing cardiac problems as this BBC interview reports. Many other serious health condition outcomes could be improved in this way including cancer, obesity, diabetes, blood pressure, etc.
If the government wishes to encourage improvements in health and longevity, it would do well to launch a public education programme about natural health products and approaches rather than seek to limit their use.
What You Can Do
If we wish to be able to continue to freely choose natural health options, herbal medicines and supplements without government interference, we will need to speak up. Go to this link to make a submission before February 15th. Write to your MP and complain that the appointment of a regulator amounts to an open ended blank cheque to control the sale and use of products used by more than 50% of our population without fully specifying the principles he should use. Moreover, it will put many NZ businesses out of action. I could say a lot more but now is the time for all of us to have a go and hold up our hands. If we don’t, we will only have ourselves to blame. Given the short submission time available, we have to take a scattershot approach, contact as many people as you can and explain how this is going to seriously affect their health options now and down the line.
TN has examined this topic in detail several times. Ultimately, the only people who will be able to hop on the Internet, regardless of the entry point (5G, 6G, fiber optic, private of public WiFi) will first have to be definitively identified. This will require a personal, registered ID comparable to an electronic passport. No digital ID? You don’t use the Internet. Got ID? Every activity is tracked, catalogued and saved. The military is paving the way for this. ⁃ TN Editor
The Defense Department has finally laid out its plan for protecting its cyber networks after years of pledging to make it a commitment.
The Office of the Chief Information Officer released “The DoD Zero Trust Strategy” in November — which laid out metrics and deadlines for the department to achieve full zero trust adoption by 2027. Cybersecurity experts said the government and private sector should work together to leverage resources to successfully enter the new regime.
“Cyber physical threats to critical infrastructure really are one of our biggest national security challenges that we’re facing today, and that the landscape that we’re dealing with has gotten more complex,” Nitin Natarajan, deputy director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during a MeriTalk event in October.
Cyber attackers have more resources than they have in the past, and it’s less expensive to do a lot of damage to an unsecure system, he said. It’s not just lone wolf hackers, but nation states and cyber terrorists who can pose a threat.
For example, the 2019 SolarWinds cyber attack, which swept past the defenses of thousands of organizations, including the federal government, has been linked to Russia-backed operatives.
The new strategy’s basic tenet is that treating organizations’ security like a moat around a castle doesn’t keep out bad actors.
“Mission and system owners, as well as operators, increasingly embrace this view as fact. They also see the journey to [zero trust] as an opportunity to affect positively the mission by addressing technology modernizations, refining security processes and improving operational performance,” the document said.
Zero trust culture requires every person within a network to assume that it is already compromised and requires all users to prove their identities at all times.
The strategy lists technologies that can help cultivate a zero trust environment such as continuous multi-factor authentication, micro-segmentation, advanced encryption, endpoint security, analytics and robust auditing.
While these various technologies can be used to implement this basic premise, it essentially means that “users are granted access to only the data they need and when needed.”
The strategy revolves around four pillars: accepting the culture of zero trust, operationalizing zero trust practices, accelerating zero trust technology and department-wide integration. The strategy notes that while IT departments across the Pentagon may need to purchase products, there is no one capability that can solve all their problems.
“While the objectives prescribe ‘what’ shall be done in furtherance of the goal, they do not prescribe ‘how,’ as DoD Components may need to undertake objectives in differing ways,” the strategy read.
For the technology pillar, the Pentagon’s zero trust strategy calls for capabilities to be pushed out faster while reducing silos. Capabilities that promote simpler architecture and efficient data management are also important, according to the document.
While many methods can be used to authenticate users, the integration pillar calls for creating an acquisition plan for technologies that can be scaled department-wide by early fiscal year 2023.
One technology development already underway is the Thunderdome, a $6.8 million contract awarded to Booz Allen Hamilton earlier this year. The technology would protect access to the Secure Internet Protocol Router Network, the Pentagon’s classified information transmitter, according to a Defense Information Systems Agency press release.
It won’t be possible to completely retrofit every legacy platform with technology such as multi-factor authentication, the strategy points out. However, the services can implement safeguards for these less modern systems in the interim.
The securing information systems pillar will also require automating artificial intelligence operations and securing communications at all levels.
Automating systems is an important part of zero trust, said Andy Stewart, senior federal strategist at digital communications company Cisco Systems and a former director at Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. Tenth Fleet. If the processes behind zero trust don’t work well, people can struggle to use the technology and adopt the zero trust mindset.
“Zero trust is about raising the security, but it also means, ‘How do I operate more efficiently?’” he said. “The user experience should get a vote.”
While the strategy marks a turning point for the effort, the Pentagon started down the road of zero trust years ago. Its 2019 Digital Modernization Strategy mentioned that zero trust was an emerging initiative concept it was “exploring.”
Accepting more rigorous cybersecurity measures through the zero trust mindset is something the Marine Corps has been working on through education and raising awareness, said Renata Spinks, assistant director and deputy chief information officer of information, command, control, communications and computers and acting senior information security officer.
“We spend a lot of time educating, because if people know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it … it has been my experience that they will get on board a whole lot sooner than resisting,” she said
The 2021 zero trust mandate from President Joe Biden’s administration was “a godsend” because it gave justification for personnel inside the Marine Corps who may not have understood the necessity of some of the IT initiatives, she said.
A successful zero trust implementation will reduce threats to some of the most critical types of capabilities that warfighters will be relying on in the future: cloud, artificial intelligence and command, control, communications, computer and intelligence.
The military needs the help of defense contractors to protect sensitive data, Spinks noted. Industry can help the military’s IT personnel understand how to work with the type of data that they will be providing and to how much the military will need access.
“Zero trust will not be zero trust successfully if we don’t get help in managing identities,” she said.
The Marine Corps recently hired a service data officer who could use input from contractors about how much access the military will need to figure out the best ways to classify and manage the service’s data, she noted.
Having access to secure data anywhere will help military members and personnel in the defense industrial base who are working outside of business hours and in remote locations, according to the Pentagon’s strategy.
The push for zero trust is different from some cybersecurity initiatives because it has muscle behind it, Spinks added. Leadership has provided policies and procedures and are willing to be held accountable, she said.
“Cybersecurity is not an inexpensive venture. But I think what truly drives it is the vicious adversary and all of the activity across not just the federal government, but even at the state and local levels,” she said.
Better cybersecurity practices will also be needed to secure supply chains, Natarajan noted. Making them more resilient, especially in critical technologies such as semiconductors, has been a focus at the Pentagon in recent years.
“We know that this is being used by malicious cyber actors really to exploit a lot of third party risk after going after an organization’s supply chain,” he said.
That’s another reason why the government can’t work alone, he added.
“As we look at this, we’re looking at this not just from a sector perspective but also looking at this from national critical functions,” he said.
CISA released cybersecurity performance goals for companies to measure themselves in October. Though the performance goals don’t cite zero trust specifically, the goals are intended for companies to use regardless of their size.
“We’re really looking at these to be that minimum baseline of cyber protections that will reduce the rest of critical infrastructure operators,” he said. “But at the end of the day, by doing that we’re also impacting national security and the health and safety of Americans throughout the nation.”
The private sector in turn needs the government’s investment in education and resources to build up its cyber workforce.
“Cyberspace involves not just the hardware and software, the technology, your tablets, your iPhones, your technology, but it involves people. People developed cyberspace. People use cyberspace. We are in cyberspace,” Kemba Walden, principal deputy director of the National Cyber Director’s Office, said during the MeriTalk event.
Not yet at full operating capacity, the National Cyber Director’s Office was established in 2021 to take the lead on cyber issues at the federal level, including the first national cybersecurity strategy.
Just as important as the broad strategy will be the national workforce and education document that will be released after the cybersecurity strategy, Walden said.
“We took a look and recognized that 700,000 or so U.S. jobs with the word cyber in it are left unfilled,” she said. That number comes from market research firm Lightcast’s 2022 report based on 2021 data.
“As a national cyber and national security lawyer, that frightens me,” she said. “That is a national security risk from my perspective.”
In recent years, organizations such as Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative and the National Security Association’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center have sprung up to gauge the needs and collect feedback from large enterprises, she said.
“Those are the types of collaborative efforts that I think are necessary in order to evolve public-private collaboration and information sharing overall,” she said.
Ultimately, the benefits of zero trust trickle down to the warfighter, according to the document.
For example, the Pentagon’s joint all-domain command and control effort — which aims to link sensors and shooters while using artificial intelligence to make decisions — relies on that data being secure. If it falls into the wrong hands, military leaders can’t achieve information dominance, the strategy notes.
“We need to make certain that when malicious actors attempt to breach our zero trust defenses; they can no longer roam freely through our networks and threaten our ability to deliver maximum support to the warfighter,” Chief Information Officer John Sherman said in the strategy.
NOTE: The interview with Mark Steele begins at 5:30 minutes.
An interesting interview, in which researcher and activist, Mark Steele joined the SGT Report to talk about some of the weapons’ systems being used to undermine civilian populations currently. Mark’s website: https://www.saveusnow.org.uk/
VIDEO AT THE LINK (Transcript below, note the transcript refers to some products that are not named but are pictured in the video)
What does the public want?
The public are aware that research findings on diet, nutrition, and lifestyle indicate that there are proven health benefits.
Over 50% of the public use natural health products and alternative approaches to health care.
The public realise there are many traditional sources of information about what products can be used safely.
If an individual suffers from a chronic or serious illness, or simply wants to maintain health, they need to retain their options to research and choose the most effective treatment for them.
The new bill will regulate all natural health products that claim to benefit health.
This is an enabling bill. As a result, the government will appoint a regulator who will then decide for you what products can be sold and what health claims can be made.
Well, what will the regulator decide?
In 2016, the Ministry of Health published a draft list of 5500 approved and all restricted ingredients. Most likely, the decisions of the new regulator, when appointed, will be based on this list.
Let’s answer the public’s first question.
Are all these ingredients safe?
The 2016 Ministry of Health permitted list included 3000 synthetic and chemical additives.
A closer look shows that the permitted list includes many additives which are suspected of causing illness and cancer. Including:
FD&C red No. 2
Amaranth, No. 3
Erythrosine No. 4
Ponceau
All are banned in the USA by the FDA.
A 2007 study in the UK found a possible link between six food dyes, a preservative and hyperactivity in children. All these compounds are likely to be permitted by the bill.
Thousands of artificial fragrances and flavours have been approved, even though they have not been tested properly.
Here’s an example of a pre-approved synthetic product. This cheap popular drink is available in New Zealand supermarkets. All of its ingredients have already been approved by the Ministry of Health.
These include:
Sugar: which predisposes to obesity and aggravates diabetes
E330 Synthetic citric acid
Synthetic raspberry flavour, effects unknown.
E211 sodium benzoate: implicated as a possible cause of hyperactivity when used with E122
Colour E122 Carmoisine: banned in the United States, Sweden, Norway and Austria
Artificial sweetener E961 Neotame: similar to aspartame and banned in organic products. US FDA application noted adverse reactions. Dr. Mercola recommends this be avoided at all costs.
This bill will allow this synthetic product to be marketed as a natural health product.
We’re talking about serious health issues here. During the last 20 to 30 years, there’s been a huge expansion in chronic diseases, including cancers, diabetes, heart disease, anxiety, depression, and other mental and physical illnesses.
No one knows the exact causes but poor nutrition food, food additives and environmental pollution are all suspected.
Over 2000 new chemicals are registered each year. There’s been a rapid expansion in the use of chemicals in food and synthetic chemicals. Many of these have been approved without sufficient scrutiny.
Using discredited principles such as substantial equivalence additives that are similar to but slightly different from natural compounds have been approved in though is well known that very small differences in chemical structure can cause serious side effects.
The bill requires the regulation of entirely natural ingredients already known to be safe, in other words, foods.
Under the bill, all ingredients have to be pre-approved. We estimate a supplier will pay $200 annually for each ingredient.
The probable minimal cost of making a health claim on the label will be $5,000 to the regulator for each application. And for each mild condition, your product claims to benefit.
But you will not be allowed to claim that a natural health product can benefit a serious health condition.
If it is considered that your product has therapeutic value, you will pay around $100,000 to register it as a medicine. And only a medical doctor will be allowed to prescribe it.
An EU report found that natural health products are 45,000 times safer than pharmaceutical drugs; Despite this, suppliers will have to comply with pharmaceutical style regulations and undertake frequent costly testing of ingredients and products.
Say you’re selling 300 product products to the public, and each one benefits two mild conditions; the application fees alone will be $3 million before you’ve even begun to prepare your evidence.
The experience in Australia has been that the preparation of a single application can cost in excess of $100,000.
These restrictions are so costly that most suppliers will simply refrain from making health claims, so you’ll have less information. Many will go out of business.
The net effect of these regulations will be that consumers will have less information than they did before.
Restrictions on scientific information regarding serious illness
Did you know that the simple kitchen spice turmeric is effective in preventing bowel cancer?
There are a lot of studies.
New Zealand has one of the highest death rates from bowel cancer in the developed world.
Studies show that garlic, ginger, turmeric, thyme, rosemary, sage, spearmint, and peppermint all inhibit the growth of colon cancer cells.
A study found that 1/3 of patients with end stage bowel cancer for whom no other treatment options existed, improved after treatment with turmeric extract.
If the bill is passed, I would not be allowed to tell you this and could be liable for a substantial fine.
So there are restrictions on free speech
It has been proven for years that garlic benefits healthy heart conditions. No one selling garlic will be allowed to communicate this factual scientific information. Thereby the bill will restrict free speech and suppress matters of fact.
There’ll be restrictions on health claims
A consignment of this product, Vicks vapour rub, was seized by Medsafe. Officials in May 2016 and destroyed because the Label made this unapproved health claim:
Apply to the chest, throat, and back for 3-way relief from blocked nose, cough, and body ache.
Thousands of products could be snagged by this rule.
Restrictions on dose
In 2016 the Ministry of Health believed that the maximum daily dose of vitamin B 12 should be 50 micrograms. This product, vitamin B 12, is commonly used by people who are deficient. It has hit each dose 20 times the maximum daily dose specified by the Ministry of Health. So it could be banned.
A typical Indian or Thai meal may contain 50 grams of tamarind. The maximum daily dose of tamarind that has been permitted by the bill is 500 milligrams, that is 100 times smaller than the amount you might consume in a meal.
Civil servants have been employed to make up this ridiculous rule and hundreds more like it.
Banned ingredients
Even though this traditional coffee substitute contains only natural plants, it will be banned by the bill because it contains an ingredient that is listed under the medicines act.
A sort of reverse patenting that bans herbs if they are used to make medicines.
Hundreds of traditional remedies will disappear.
Neem is one of the world’s most revered traditional healing plants with many medical uses. Among its many uses, it reduces inflammation associated with internal ulcers. It’s so effective that pharmaceutical companies have tried to patent this plant.
The regulator is likely to classify this herb as suitable for external use only. Effectively banning its traditional use for no reason.
This popular form of vitamin C could be banned because it contains a derivative of lecithin (commonly used in chocolate and other supermarket products), which in 2016, was classified by the Ministry of Health as for “external use only“.
Restrictions on traditional Indian and Chinese medicine
The bill will empower the regulator to restrict the traditional practices of ethnic communities, and it will violate the Bill of Rights.
More than 150 commonly used Indian herbs and a similar number of Chinese herbs were wrongly placed on a not permitted list by the Ministry of Health in 2016.
To a large extent, this is because many traditional herbs have been found to be so healthy, that they have been used to develop medicines and therefore these ingredients will be restricted in natural health products.
There are more than 10,000 traditional healing herbs. It will cost more than $100 million to register their healing properties, so in effect, their use will likely cease in New Zealand.
Just look at this list. This is just a short extract from 300 herbs that the Ministry of Health sought to restrict in 2016. The last time they tried to introduce a bill of this type.
These are foods that we consume many of us regularly, why should they be restricted it doesn’t make any sense.
What will it cost you
And these restrictions are going to cost a lot. Last week a 50 gram packet of Rubia Cordifolia, a herb used to make healthy tea cost $12.
After the bill is passed, the same packet may cost 60 to $80, just due to the compliance clock costs.
There are over 100,000 eligible plants. It will take an army of civil servants years to classify even a small proportion of them.
Assessment costs will be paid by the manufacturing industry so the cost of natural health products will obviously rise dramatically.
What will escape regulation
Well, many unhealthy products will be allowed to be sold without regulation.
Sugary Drinks, hard fat, synthetic flavours, and alcohol will continue to be sold unimpeded….
while the government pours millions of dollars and years of fruitless effort into controlling products that are already known to be safe and healthy foods.
This would be ridiculous if it wasn’t immoral and criminal.
There is absolutely no need for the government to regulate natural foods that are based on DNA that are used in natural health products.
Natural foods and herbs should be automatically excluded from regulation. There is no need to do this.
Meanwhile, there is a crisis in healthcare
Medical misadventure, experimentation and interventions have just become the number one cause of death in the world.
Healthcare costs are spiralling out of control.
Mental illness has quadrupled.
Cancers, chronic diseases, heart disease, and many other conditions are increasing to epidemic proportions, all cause mortality is rising.
Clearly something has gone horribly wrong. But no one knows quite why.
There is no doubt that food additives and the drugs we take play a pivotal role in the development of disease.
There have been multiple failures in the regulatory processes which approve agricultural practices food and medicine.
How has this happened?
The process of regulation has moved away from science and becomes a cosy relationship between industry and regulators permitting unsafe and inappropriate products onto the market.
The bill, the proposed, bill represents a new phase of this cosy relationship. Regulators worldwide are cooperating to place restrictions on natural health products. And this will only benefit multinational companies.
What can we do to reverse this trend?
There is a scientific standard scientific approach to identify cause
Eliminate suspected causal factors and reintroduce them one by one.
Dr. Dee Mangin at Otago Medical School, has found that if you stop all non-essential medication for the elderly, their health improves.
Dr. Julia Rutledge at Canterbury University has found that greatly improved nutrition benefits children with ADHD.
Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary, a renowned San Diego neurologist, has found that her patients, including MS sufferers, improved dramatically when placed on a traditional herbal diet.
These are just pointers to the many scientific preventive approaches to health care, which are springing up everywhere based on natural foods.
So why is our parliament planning to restrict natural health products?
We need to remind ourselves there is no evidence that natural health products are unsafe.
In fact, there’s a great deal of evidence that they benefit health and prevent illness.
Natural health products are traditionally made from plants and animal products which are based on DNA and natural minerals.
Our digestive system has developed to easily metabolise food based on DNA without side effects.
Many people rely on natural health products to maintain their health. It will be criminally negligent to restrict their options.
True natural health products are in fact foods.
There is nothing risky about their use.
Taking natural health products is no different from the need to have a balanced meal.
Food is life. It is our first medicine.
The healing properties of plants are proven to benefit public health. Our right to use them should not be taken away by law and transferred to pharmaceutical interests.
We are a people here who believe in fairness.
This is not the time for New Zealand to become involved in an international effort to subvert regulatory safeguards.
This is not the time to restrict access to preventive health care.
This is not the time to allow suspected unhealthy synthetic ingredients to be included in natural health products.
This is not the time to restrict access to herbs and impose huge unjustified costs on traditional medicine.
This is a time for New Zealand to lead the world in the development of application of preventive approaches to health care.
The therapeutic products bill is currently up for public submissions up until February 15, 2023. Make a submission here.
Ask your MP to review this presentation, which shows that the bill relies upon outdated and discredited ideas.
Or you can contact me directly at my email ghatchard@gmail.com or go to my website for more information. Thank you
Guy Hatchard, Ph.D., was formerly a senior manager at Genetic ID, a food testing and certification company (now known as FoodChain ID).
From James Roguski @ substack via Dr Ana Maria Mihalcea
They are meeting again shortly in secret to discuss a further thinning down of your basic human rights …this is very important info to share as widely as possible … as indicated below with this short opening excerpt… EWR
A must watch video from an indigenous perspective. It questions the entire so called ‘science’ of GE. In it, from NZ the late Moana Jackson cites US activist the late John Trudell as saying ‘the New World Order is the Old World lie’. Couldn’t agree more. EWR
Funded by The Ford Foundation and screened on Maori TV, the film takes its title from a prescient folk tale of natural misinformation and explores the murky world of genetic sampling, engineering and ownership and its explicit links to a far from dormant colonialism.
Focusing on the economic, ethical and legal issues around exploitation of blood samples from first-nation islanders in Oceania, the film uses impressionistic image collages, effective scoring, archive footage and creative graphics to trace a centuries-old lineage of abuse and to argue for an alternative, interdependent worldview based on collaboration and ancient wisdom. Ambitious and provocative, the film is a welcome and timely search for values and worth in a desert of corporate sprawl.
It inspires audiences to ask serious questions of the collective illusion we call ‘progress’ sending a powerful message about the need for indigenous peoples to shift the focus of resistance away from reacting to the arguments of the biotech promoters. Instead, they should be reclaiming their own arguments and finding their own ways to restore the health of their communities.
A former lobbyist at Coca-Cola has come forward with bombshell information about the junk food corporation’s deceptive, racist, and potentially criminal behavior.
Calley Means, who worked on behalf of The Coca-Cola Company in years past, says the multinational purveyor of poison “food” paid the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to slander as “racist” any and all scientists, researchers, or other “opponents” whose work exposed Coke products as toxic.
Coke also paid off willing parties to produce pseudoscience “debunking” the link between soft drink consumption and diseases like obesity and diabetes. (Related: Ten years ago, Coca-Cola tried to boost sales by marketing its high-fructose corn syrup [HFCS]-laden junk food soft drinks as healthy for breakfast.)
“Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding,” Means recently revealed. “I say Coke’s policies are evil because I saw inside the room.”
“The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP and other civil rights groups to call opponents racist. Coke gave millions to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation – both directly and through front groups like the American Beverage Association (ABA).”
In 2011 when the idea of soda taxes really started to gain legislative traction, Coke amped up the slander and bribery agenda. Means says the conversations he heard within the walls of Coca-Cola corporate were “depressingly transactional.”
“We (Coke) will give you money,” Means recalls about the typical conversations that would take place internally between Coke and its target allies. “You need to paint opponents of us as racist.”
As silly as it all sounds, these tactics worked. As the Farm Bill for 2011-2013 was being negotiated and finalized, thousands of articles flooded the news cycle that helped Coke avert soda taxes and possible removal from the food stamp program.
Aggressive lobbying and slander allowed Coke to lie to the public that soda pop is “one of the cheapest ways to get calories”
Means says Coca-Cola also partnered with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to funnel money into “academia,” which used it to produce “research” claiming that soda taxes would harm low-income populations.
“I watched as the FDA funneled money to professors at leading universities – as well as think tanks on the left and right – to create studies showing soda taxes hurt the poor,” Means says.
“They also paid for studies that say drinking soda didn’t cause obesity.”
Coke was also able to get away with making the false and ludicrous claim that its soft drink products are “one of the cheapest ways to get calories,” which Means describes as “a flagrantly inaccurate statement when factoring in the health consequences.”
It was none other than the ABA that aided Coke in purveying the lie that taxing soda pop would hurt not just poor people but also “local businesses” while “unfairly targeting one product.”
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is also complicit in this racket, having put forth more lies claiming that “there are no bad foods, only bad diets.”
The entire regulatory structure of the United States has clearly been co-opted by Big Industry, which is steering all the “science” in its own favor. Coca-Cola is just one example among many of what an absolute joke this entire system has become – and that some would argue always was.
“The word ‘racist’ has lost all its meaning,” wrote a commenter about Coke’s flagrant abuse of the English language. “The word has been so overused that it lost its meaning.”
More news stories like this one can be found at RaceWar.news.
You have just over a month to make a submission folks. This is a time worn tactic… timing is everything. The ridiculous thing too is, some of these items are common cooking ingredients! And comfrey, well I’ve just recently been wondering why am I not seeing that useful plant as much as I used to. Do you really still trust your leaders? How does this move promote the health & well being of NZ citizens? It doesn’t. It promotes the interests of those folk who meet at Davos, currently seeking to force more of their ‘safe and effectives’ upon you. EWR
From hatchardreport.com
Natural Products Regulation—An Overreach of Government Control
Civilisations come and go through the ages. When governments empower people, they harness the intelligence and creativity of their citizens for the good of all; when they seek to control their populations, they fall into decline.
Following three years of pandemic control, governments are not stopping there. Here in New Zealand, the government has introduced the “Therapeutic Products Bill,” which will control how products which appear to benefit health are manufactured, prescribed, imported, advertised, supplied and exported. According to Health Minister Andrew Little:
“It will enable New Zealand to take advantage of advances in medicine, such as cell and tissue therapies, emerging gene therapies, and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning software. Having risk-proportionate approval systems will improve access to necessary and life-saving medicines, such as vaccines in a pandemic.”
An important part of the bill aims to regulate the natural health products used by more than 50% of our population. This is the third attempt of the Labour Party to introduce extreme regulation of the public’s options to choose their medical care, supplements and diet. Their earlier two attempts failed because of vocal public opposition. In 2017 Labour opted for a prohibited list of 300 common herbal ingredients ( for some of these see photo):
Control of Our Food Supply
It won’t have escaped your notice that many of these like Cinnamon and Mustard are currently sold in shops. So how on earth did they get onto a prohibited list? The answer lies in attempts to gain control of our food supply.
Natural products that are beneficial to health cannot be patented, but synthetic copies can be. To make this work, the products that grow in gardens need to be banned.
Labour and the Ministry of Health did not make this list up, the list was supplied by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) of which Medsafe is a member. ICMRA is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry whose interests they serve. You can read all about it in my book Your DNA Diet, available as a Kindle from Amazon or a hard copy from the Hatchard Report.
Labour says it has learned from prior public opposition. This time the Bill will not name any prohibited ingredients. Instead is an enabling bill, the type of legislation made famous by Adolf Hitler. The Bill establishes a new regulator headed by an independent statutory officer with a wide remit:
The new regulator will be responsible for ensuring the safety, quality, and efficacy of natural products. It will design and implement proportionate, risk-based market authorisation pathways. Its functions will include, in addition to market authorisation, licensing controlled activities, post-market surveillance, and compliance.
These services will be funded through levies on the industry which are liable to be costly. Government regulatory schemes mooted in the last two attempts were likely to push small players out of the market due to the cost of compliance, as happened as a result of the Food Bill.
Crucially the Bill also includes a range of modern enforcement tools allowing for a graduated and proportionate response to breaches, including tiered criminal offences, strict liability offences, improved infringement notices and a civil pecuniary penalty regime.
In other words, the Bill appoints a new, as yet, unnamed regulator who is being empowered to do whatever he thinks fit to control the manufacture and availability of supplements. He could and is, in fact, very likely to publish a list of banned herbal ingredients soon after his appointment. The list is ready to go from the ICMRA database connected to Medsafe, courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry.
If we wish to be able to continue to freely chose herbal medicines and supplements without government interference, we will need to speak up. Go to this link to make a submission before February 15th. Write to your MP and complain that the appointment of a regulator amounts to an open ended blank cheque to control the use of products used by more than 50% of our population without fully specifying the principles he should use.
In a fair world, Aruna Rodrigues would be heralded as an incredible individual for her ongoing struggle to protect the socio-economic and environmental integrity of India. So says respected environmentalist, author and campaigner Leo Saldanha, GMWatch reported.
He adds: “Since 2005, she has tirelessly pursued a public interest litigation before the Supreme Court of India, in which she has made a case why India should not yield to pressures from mega agri-transnational corporations and certain sections of the Indian agricultural sector who are keen on promoting genetically modified organisms in farming.”
India’s apex regulatory body, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee, recently sanctioned genetically modified (GM) mustard for cultivation. This would be India’s first GM food crop, despite a public interest litigation (PIL) before the Supreme Court to prevent cultivation as well as the widespread rejection of GM mustard by farmers’ organisations.
Aruna Rodrigues, the lead petitioner of the PIL, has exposed in her various submissions to court that claims about yield increases through GM mustard to be completely baseless. She indicates how data has been rigged and manipulated and protocols have been severely compromised, and that the government and its regulators are parroting the false claims of the crop developers.
Thanks to the PIL, the Supreme Court put a stay on the commercial release of GM Mustard on 3 November 2022.
Independent experts who have looked at the biosafety data submitted by the crop developer at Delhi University have clearly pointed out that GM mustard has not been tested rigorously and adequately.
India is a centre for diversity for mustard and several high-level official committees have recommended against transgenic technologies in crops for which the country is the centre of origin or centre of diversity.
Various high-level reports have also advised against introducing GM food crops to India per se. These reports conclude that GM crops are unsuitable for India and that biosafety and regulatory procedures are wholly inadequate.
Rodrigues also played a leading role in preventing commercial cultivation of GM brinjal more than a decade ago. Her tireless efforts have been a thorn in the side of global agritech corporations and seriously compromised regulatory officials who have for the best part of two decades been trying to get GM food crops cultivated in India.
There is much at stake.
India has a lot to lose, not least its food and seed sovereignty and contamination of its crops as well as the risks genetically modified organisms (GMOs) pose to human health.
The industry has much to gain.
Global biotech corporations like Bayer and Corteva are seeking to increase their control over the future of food and farming by extensively patenting plants and developing a new generation of GMOs.
They seek to claim all plants with those genetic traits as their ‘invention’. Such patents on plants would restrict farmers’ access to seeds and impede breeders from developing new plants as both would have to ask for consent and pay fees to the biotech companies.
According to an October 2022 report, the global GM crop and seed market is projected to reach $46 billion by 2027. That is up from an estimated US$30.6 billion in 2020. The US market is estimated at $8.4 billion, while China is forecast to reach a projected market size of US$10 billion by the year 2027.
Key global players include AgReliant Genetics LLC, BASF SE, Bayer Crop Science, Canterra Seeds Holdings, DLF Seeds & Science and Corteva (Dow/DuPont).
If India succumbs to pressure, that figure of $46 billion by 2027 could be much larger. With 1.4 billion people, India represents a massive financially lucrative cash cow.
For instance, Goldstein Research pushes pro-GM industry talking points and laments about resistance to GM food seeds as it is hindering the growth of India’s GM seed market. Even so, it forecasts that the Indian GM seed market is set to reach US$13.1 billion by 2025 (cotton is the only legally sanctioned GM crop in India at this time).
GM mustard is regarded as a pioneering food crop in India – it would open the floodgates for many other GM food crops that are in the pipeline under a veil of secrecy, including wheat, rice, brinjal and chickpea.
But – it seems – genuine science stands in the way. GM mustard is unwanted, unneeded and fails to stand up to scientific rigour.
Maybe that is why, in December 2022, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) prevented serving and former public officials from expressing any opinion or writing any article on the approval to release GM mustard. This is a ‘gag order’ and an attempt to close down debate on the matter and to keep the public in the dark on the issue.
Trade and agriculture policy specialist Devinder Sharma says that silencing scientific voices indicates there is more to hide than reveal. He says that every claim that the ICAR makes about GM mustard can be challenged. And it has been – in court. Sharma adds that the US is placing tremendous pressure on India to embrace GM crops.
In finishing, let us turn to where this article began – with Aruna Rodrigues.
Leo Saldanha, who is mentioned at the start of this article, is forthright on the Change.org website in condemning a recent attack on Rodrigues.
Due to Rodrigues, Saldanha says, the Supreme Court has time and again questioned the enthusiasm with which the Indian government and several public institutions have collaborated, questionably and controversially, in promoting GM foods and crops.
Just before Christmas, however, Aruna Rodrigues was unexpectedly forcibly evicted from her ancestral home by the Indian army. The Defence Estate Office is the custodian of all military properties of India and is required to secure such properties by following the due process of law.
Saldanha notes that Rodrigues’ home has been with her family from 1892 – legally secured via proper sale deeds. But about 27 years ago, the Defence Estate Office made a claim on the house. This claim was challenged, and the matter has been in court since then. Consequently, any action against the occupant should be only through due process of law.
On 20 December 2022, a court ruled that Aruna Rodrigues has occupation rights to the house. Yet the Defence Estate Officer moved into the house with army personnel – without any court directive – and physically removed her and threw the contents of the house onto the street. Within hours, a court ruled in Rodrigues favour. By then, however, the damage had been done.
As Saldanha says, we can only wonder whether any of this is connected to Rodrigues’ case before the Supreme Court. Given the billions of dollars at stake for the global agritech companies, it would indeed be wise to wonder.
Colin Todhunter is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization with an interest in food, agriculture and development issues.
Note: due to greater censorship now, I am finding that many links disappear or lead to error pages. I am therefore reproducing articles in their entirety rather than one or two paragraphs with a link to the source. Please contact me if I’ve reproduced your article in this way and you are not ok with it. EWR
New research published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology reveals that in 2020 alone, some 74 metric tons of microplastics – that is, the plastic particulates released from waste into the environment – fell on the city of Auckland in New Zealand via rainfall.
The first peer-reviewed study of its kind to calculate the total mass of microplastics in a city’s air, the paper found that the pollution equivalent of three million plastic bottles falls on Auckland in an average year – a truly astounding level that is much higher than generally accepted estimates.
Researchers say the global prevalence of airborne microplastics appears to be much higher than previously believed. Most of these particulates are too small to be seen with the naked eye, though scientists were able to identify them using a colored, light-emitting dye.
For analysis, researchers also applied heat treatment, which allowed them to calculate an aggregate mass of the particulates in terms of volume and tonnage. (Related: The average person consumes a credit card’s worth of microplastics every week in tainted food.)
“The smaller the size ranges we looked at, the more microplastics we saw,” said Joel Rindelaub, the study’s lead author and a chemical scientist at The University of Auckland. “This is notable because the smallest sizes are the most toxicologically relevant.”
Chances are you’re inhaling microplastics right now and don’t even know it
The smaller the size of a microplastic particulate, the easier time it has being inhaled and entering cells. If small enough, microplastics can even build up in vital organs such as the liver and cross the blood-brain barrier, accumulating in the brain.
In one square meter in one day in 2020, the average number of airborne plastics floating around Auckland was found to be 4,885. Comparatively for that same year in the same amount of space, London’s count was just 771.
A 2019 study that looked at the cities of Hamburg and Paris found that airborne plastics in that same one-square-meter space were 275 and 110, respectively.
“The discrepancy is largely because of the Auckland study’s inclusion of smaller size ranges, which were not part of previous research,” noted Bloomberg.
Rindelaub says that while more work needs to be done to quantify precisely how much plastic the average person is breathing in, it is clear from what we already know that inhalation of microplastics “is an important route of exposure” that cannot be ignored.
Since the 1950s when plastics first started being mass produced, some 8.3 billion metric tons of it have been generated. Of that, 79 percent has ended up in landfills or been dumped in the wild where it gradually breaks down and turns into microplastics.
“Once they enter the natural environment, they can pollute soil, kill wildlife and find their way into the food chain,” reports indicate.
In Auckland, the most-detected form of plastic was polyethylene, followed by polycarbonate. The former is a common packaging material while the latter is used in electrical and electronic appliances.
Since Auckland is located near the ocean and gets heavy winds from the Hauraki Gulf of New Zealand’s North Island, it is speculated that this could be a reason why more microplastics are being detected there compared to other more inland cities in other parts of the world.
“The production of airborne microplastics from breaking waves could be a key part of the global transport of microplastics,” Rindelaub explained. “And it could help explain how some microplastics get into the atmosphere and are carried to remote places, like here in New Zealand.”
The world’s growing microplastics problem is much more serious than many people realize. To learn more about the dangers and toxicity of exposure, be sure to check out Microplastics.news.
Science and opinion have become increasingly conflated, in large part because of corporate influence. As we explain in “Science for Sale,” an investigative series by the Center for Public Integrity and co-published with Vice.com, industry-backed research has exploded — often with the aim of obscuring the truth — as government-funded science dwindles. Read more.
The lawyer, Darrell Grams, explained that Ford had been losing lawsuits filed by former auto mechanics alleging asbestos in brakes had given them mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer virtually always tied to asbestos exposure. Grams asked Paustenbach, then a vice president with the consulting firm Exponent, if he had any interest in studying the disease’s possible association with brake work. A meeting cemented the deal.
Paustenbach, a prolific author of scientific papers who’d worked with Grams on Dow Corning’s defense against silicone breast-implant illness claims, had barely looked at asbestos to that point. “I really started to get serious about studying asbestos after I met Mr. Grams, that’s for sure,” Paustenbach testified in a sworn deposition in June 2015. Before that, he said, the topic “wasn’t that interesting to me.”
Thus began a relationship that, according to recent depositions, has enriched Exponent by $18.2 million and brought another $21 million to Cardno ChemRisk, a similar firm Paustenbach founded in 1985, left and restarted in 2003. All told, testimony shows, Ford has spent nearly $40 million funding journal articles and expert testimony concluding there is no evidence brake mechanics are at increased risk of developing mesothelioma. This finding, repeated countless times in courtrooms and law offices over the past 15 years, is an attempt at scientific misdirection aimed at extricating Ford from lawsuits, critics say.
“They’ve published a lot, but they’ve really produced no new science,” said John Dement, a professor in Duke University’s Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and an asbestos researcher for more than four decades. “Fifteen years ago, I thought the issue of asbestos risk assessment was pretty much defined. All they’ve accomplished is to try to generate doubt where, really, little doubt existed.”
The glut of corporate-financed science has yielded mixed results. Exponent had a role in jury trials won by Ford in St. Louis and Pittsburgh last year, for example, and in a trial Ford lost in Tennessee. Judges have noted the infusion of controversy into a subject that for many years was not controversial in the least. A veteran asbestos judge in Wayne County, Michigan, wrote in an opinion that he’d never encountered the argument that “the science was not there” on mesothelioma and brakes until he heard a case involving an Exponent witness.
The discord over brakes bankrolled by Ford “has, in certain cases, tipped the scales for the defendants with juries,” said plaintiffs’ lawyer Jon Ruckdeschel. “More frequently, it has been used by industry lawyers to increase the costs and burdens on the courts and sick mechanics by creating a tidal wave of pre-trial litigation regarding the ‘science.’ ”
A troubling history
Over the past decade 109 physicians, scientists and academics from 17 countries have signed legal briefs affirming that asbestos in brakes can cause mesothelioma. The World Health Organization and other research and regulatory bodies maintain that there is no safe exposure level for asbestos and that all forms of the mineral — including the most common one, chrysotile, found in brakes — can produce mesothelioma.
Worries about brakes as a source of disease go back decades. A 1971 Ford memo shows that while the company didn’t believe brake dust unleashed by mechanics contained significant amounts of asbestos, it already was exploring alternatives to asbestos brake linings. One of them, made of metal and carbon, performed well, the memo says, “but the cost penalty is severe ($1.25/car just for front-end brakes).”
A Ford spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. In its 2014 annual report, the company said, “Most of the asbestos litigation we face involves individuals who claim to have worked on the brakes of our vehicles over the years. We are prepared to defend these cases, and believe that the scientific evidence confirms our long-standing position that there is no increased risk of asbestos-related disease as a result of exposure to the type of asbestos formerly used in the brakes on our vehicles.” Ford announced recently that it earned a record pretax profit of $10.5 billion in 2015.
Dennis Paustenbach (ICIJ.org)
A written statement to the Center for Public Integrity delivered on behalf of Paustenbach by a public-relations firm says, “Dennis was viewed as one of the leading risk assessment experts in the country, and was contacted by Ford because of his experience and expertise in this field. … As Dennis and others learned more about brake dust, it was clear that while there was considerable data on the subject, the scientific information had never been synthesized and analyzed.”
His conclusion after reviewing the scientific literature, according to the statement: “There is no credible study that has shown an increased risk of disease in auto mechanics.”
An Exponent vice president declined to comment. On its website, the 49-year-old firm, originally known as Failure Analysis Associates, says, “We evaluate complex human health and environmental issues to find cost-effective solutions. … By introducing a new way of thinking about an existing situation, we assist clients to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.”
A Center review of abstracts on the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed website turned up 10 articles on asbestos brakes co-authored by scientists affiliated with Exponent or Cardno ChemRisk since 2003. (The latter was known simply as ChemRisk until it was acquired by Brisbane, Australia-based Cardno in 2012). None of the articles reported an elevated risk of mesothelioma among vehicle mechanics.
Many physicians and scientists say, however, that these papers muddy the waters by drawing overly broad conclusions from earlier studies of workers who might have had no contact with asbestos brakes. “In the asbestos area the whole literature has been so warped by publications just supporting litigation,” said Dement, of Duke. “It has a real negative impact on pushing the science forward.” Dement said he has, on rare occasions, consulted for plaintiffs in the past 10 or 15 years, earmarking nearly all fees for the university.
In a 2007 article, two researchers at George Washington University — one of whom, David Michaels, now heads the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration — reported finding six “litigation-generated” papers on asbestos and auto mechanics published from 1997 through 2001. In the ensuing five years, 20 such papers were published. All told, 18 of the 26 papers published from 1997 through 2006 were “written by experts primarily associated with defendants, while eight were written by experts who work primarily for plaintiffs … Sponsorship by parties involved in litigation leads to an imbalance in the literature … whoever is willing to fund more studies will have more studies published.”
Craig Biegel, a retired corporate defense lawyer in Oregon who represented plaintiffs later in his career, did an update of the Michaels paper as part of his doctoral dissertation. Biegel searched the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed website using the words “asbestos” and “brake.” He found 27 articles written from 1998 to 2015 by experts known to work for industry; all, he said, showed either no elevated risk of mesothelioma among mechanics or minimal asbestos exposures.
He found 10 articles written by plaintiffs’ experts; all showed an association between the disease and brake work. And he found 11 articles written by foreign scientists, who, as far as he knew, were not involved in litigation. All but one showed an association or documented high asbestos exposures.
“As far as I’m concerned, both sides in a lawsuit do the same thing: They both fund research to obtain evidence for trial, not to advance science,” said Biegel, who once defended asbestos property-damage claims for a Fortune 500 company he declined to identify. “The only difference is that defense counsel have almost unlimited industry money and plaintiffs’ counsel do not want to spend their own money.”
Ford’s knowledge of asbestos
There are several ways microscopic asbestos fibers can be sent airborne and enter the human body during brake work. Over time, friction wears down brake linings and pads — many of which contained asbestos prior to the mid-1990s and some of which still do — and they need to be replaced. A mechanic who opened a brake drum would find it filled with fine dust from the decayed lining. The easiest and most common way to clean it out was to use compressed air, a technique that generates grayish, fiber-bearing clouds that can trigger disease years later if the worker is not properly protected. Many weren’t.
Other opportunities for exposure: filing, grinding or sanding brakes, or cleaning up work areas.
Ford wasn’t the only U.S. automaker to use asbestos brakes. General Motors and Chrysler did as well and found themselves in court as a result. Of the so-called Big Three, however, only Ford continues to get hit with mesothelioma lawsuits; GM and Chrysler are immune by virtue of their 2009 bankruptcies. “The extent of our financial exposure to asbestos litigation remains very difficult to estimate,” Ford said in its 2014 annual report. “Annual payout and defense costs may become significant in the future.”
Documents show Ford was mindful of concerns about asbestos brakes by the late 1960s. An unpublished report by an industrial hygienist with Ford of Britain in 1968 said that while brake linings at the time contained between 40 and 60 percent asbestos, field tests indicated dust that collected in brake drums had a low asbestos content because much of the material decomposed after repeated braking. Consequently, he wrote, there was no evidence that blowing out the drums presented a “significant hazard to health.”
The hygienist added, “It would be helpful, however, for clinical examinations to be made of some repair mechanics with long experience of brake cleaning to confirm this view. It would also be desirable to include in Service manuals a general instruction that inhalation of dust during brake cleaning should be minimised.”
A 1970 Ford memo titled “Asbestos Emissions from Brake Lining Wear” included a bibliography of 40 articles on the cancer-causing effects of asbestos, dating to 1954. And the same 1971 memo bemoaning the $1.25 cost of asbestos-free brakes noted that the state of Illinois was considering banning the use of asbestos in brake linings, beginning with the 1975 model year.
Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole holds up a photo during a news conference in Washington, Thursday, July 27, 1989, showing alleged asbestos violations at the Friction Division Products Inc. plant in Trenton, New Jersey. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had proposed fining the brake-shoe manufacturing company $2.7 million for exposing workers to potentially deadly levels of asbestos. Bob Daugherty/AP
In 1973, Ford began telling its own employees to use “an industrial type vacuum cleaner” to remove dust from brake drums. “Under no circumstances shall compressed air blowoff be used to clean brakes and brake drums,” the company said. It first told its dealers about what it called “a potential health hazard” in 1975.
In a court filing, Ford said it began putting “caution” labels on packages of asbestos-containing brakes and clutches in 1980; many mesothelioma victims who have sued the company say they never saw such labels. In the same document Ford said it began a “complete phase-out of asbestos-containing brake products” in the 1983 model year, starting with its Ranger pickup truck. A decade later, only Ford Mustangs and certain limousines were equipped with asbestos brakes; some asbestos-containing parts for older model-year vehicles were available until 2001through dealerships and authorized distributors.
That was the year lawyer Grams reached out to toxicologist Paustenbach to gauge his interest in studying mesothelioma in ex-mechanics. “I contacted Dr. Paustenbach because he is one of the leading professional experts in the world,” Grams, who no longer represents Ford, said in a brief phone interview. Grams said he had read none of the recent deposition testimony about the relationship between Ford and its two brake consultants, Cardno ChemRisk and Exponent.
In his curriculum vitae, Paustenbach, president of Cardno ChemRisk, says he is “a board-certified toxicologist and industrial hygienist with nearly 30 years of experience in risk assessment, environmental engineering, ecotoxicology and occupational health.” The 181-page CV shows he has worked on topics ranging from arsenic in wine to heavy metals in hip implants; authored or co-authored 271 peer-reviewed articles; and given 440 presentations at conferences. He is regularly retained as a defense expert in asbestos litigation and other toxic-tort cases.
Paustenbach offered a window into his thinking in a 2009 article written by a University of Virginia business professor.
“Without a doubt, a large percentage of environmental and occupational claims are simply bogus, intended only to extract money from those who society believes can afford to ‘share the wealth,’” Paustenbach told his interviewer. He said, “The vast majority of cases that I’ve seen were fraudulent with respect to the scientific merit and billions upon billions of dollars are redistributed annually inappropriately — at least from a scientific standpoint.
“… Nonetheless,” Paustenbach said, “I am a firm believer in the wisdom of juries and support giving generous awards to those that have been truly harmed by bad corporate behavior.”
In a 2010 letter to Dolores Nuñez Studier, a lawyer in the Ford general counsel’s office, Paustenbach claimed his firm’s papers had “changed the scientific playing field in the courtroom. You know this better than anyone as you have seen the number of plaintiff verdicts [in asbestos cases] decrease and the cost of settlement go down over time.”
In the letter, which surfaced in the discovery phase of a lawsuit, Paustenbach complained that the fee structure in place between Ford and Chemrisk was “out of date” and too low.
“Dolores, currently, you are among our largest clients,” he wrote. “And, Ford has certainly been a loyal supporter. The Big 3 [automakers] were the foundation of the firm during our formative years, and for this reason, I have tried to go the extra mile to satisfy your needs.”
Asked to explain the letter during a 2014 deposition, Paustenbach said he was merely emphasizing to Studier that “we invested in scientific research to answer questions that remained unanswered in the courtroom for many, many years …. And I was pretty proud of that.” He said he didn’t feel it was fair for his firm to lose money “when, in fact, I was so committed to getting the science straight.”
Creating doubt
The World Health Organization estimates that 107,000 people die each year from asbestos-related diseases. “Exposure to asbestos, including chrysotile, causes cancer of the lung, larynx and ovaries, and also mesothelioma (a cancer of the pleural and peritoneal linings) [and] asbestosis (fibrosis of the lungs),” the WHO says. “No threshold has been identified for the carcinogenic risk of asbestos, including chrysotile.”
OSHA says, “There is no ‘safe’ level of asbestos exposure for any type of asbestos fiber. Asbestos exposures as short in duration as a few days have caused mesothelioma in humans.”
Taking the WHO and OSHA statements at face value, the case against asbestos would seem to be closed: Even someone with very low exposure to the mineral should worry.
In papers published over the past 15 years, however, scientists with Exponent, Cardno ChemRisk and other consulting firms have questioned whether brake mechanics truly are at heightened risk of developing mesothelioma, the disease that has fueled litigation against Ford and others.
A 2004 Exponent paper funded by Ford, GM and Chrysler, for example, concluded that “employment as a motor vehicle mechanic does not increase the risk of developing mesothelioma.” An update of that paper in 2015 found the same result. Each paper was a meta-analysis — an agglomeration of the results of multiple studies that, taken individually, may be too weak to indicate an effect.
In a deposition last October, Exponent’s Mary Jane Teta, a co-author of both meta-analyses, defended her firm’s findings. “I disagree when they say there is no safe level [of asbestos],” she testified. “I know the level of chrysotile … experienced by vehicle mechanics is safe.”
In his statement to the Center, Paustenbach wrote, “It is implausible that nearly 20 epidemiology studies” – on which he bases his legal opinions – “would conclude that there is no increased risk of mesothelioma for the time period during which brakes contained chrysotile asbestos if that were not the appropriate conclusion.”
The studies Paustenbach cites, however, are fraught with limitations, such as small sample sizes, vague job classifications and lack of exposure data. And not all of them found, as he put it, “no increased risk of mesothelioma” among mechanics. In a 1989 paper, for example, a Danish researcher who studied causes of death among auto mechanics reported finding a single case of mesothelioma among her subjects, where none would have been expected in the general population. As with other cancers, she wrote, this number was “too small to state or rule out a potentially increased risk.”
A co-author of another paper, Kay Teschke of the University of British Columbia, testified in a 2012 deposition that her research was being mischaracterized.
“Vehicle mechanics do many different things in their day; some might work on engines, some might only work on wheel alignment,” Teschke testified. “And when you dilute the [asbestos] exposure in that way, you can’t find the relationship with the job … It doesn’t mean that people in that job are somehow immune to the effects of the exposure … “
Christian Hartley, a lawyer in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, who has represented about 100 mesothelioma victims in brake cases, said the papers used in the defense of such lawsuits “push all this data together that’s totally incomparable. That’s what gets reported in the literature and is used to persuade judges and some experts. It’s very misleading to think we have any kind of real handle on what a typical mechanic has for exposure.”
Dr. David Egilman, a clinical professor of family medicine at Brown University and editor of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, argues that the papers are deceptive by design. Many reanalyze previously published studies of workers described as mechanics who may have had no contact with asbestos brakes, he said. The effect, Egilman said, is to dilute the cancer data so the overall risk appears low.
Egilman, who consults for asbestos plaintiffs, spends much of his time rebutting Paustenbach and other industry-funded researchers. “They can throw a lot of things at the wall and hope something sticks with the jury,” he said. “It forces people like me or other scientists to try to clean up each thing that was thrown at the wall, one at a time. And by the end of the day, that could be confusing to a jury or judge.”
Egilman said the body of work underwritten by Ford and other asbestos defendants is being used to try to deprive sick workers, or their families, of compensation. “Some courts have adopted it as a standard,” he said.
More broadly, the industry-funded papers can confuse the public – and even government experts.
In 2009, the National Cancer Institute published a fact sheet on its website stating there was no evidence brake work was associated with an increased risk of mesothelioma or lung cancer. The 2004 meta-analysis funded by the automakers was cited as a reference.
Dr. Arthur Frank, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Drexel University, was incredulous.
“What is truly ironic about such a statement is that it is incontrovertible that asbestos, including chrysotile, the type of asbestos found in brakes, does, in fact, cause lung cancer and mesothelioma,” Frank wrote in a letter to the institute’s director obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request. “Since we have not banned asbestos in this country, those who might read this statement could well think asbestos brakes are safe, putting at risk both professional and ‘shade tree’ mechanics, and their family members.”
Frank said the meta-analysis cited by the institute was “unreliable and should not serve as the basis for any statement by the NCI.”
Then-NCI Director Dr. John Neiderhuber replied that he had discussed Frank’s critique with an in-house expert who agreed that the language on the website should be amended. The new statement, posted less than two weeks after Frank sent his letter, read that while studies of cancer risks among auto mechanics were limited, “the overall evidence suggests that there is no safe level for asbestos exposure.” The citation of the 2004 paper was deleted.
The brake studies have had global reach. The “chrysotile-is-safe” argument has been used to stave off asbestos bans and preserve markets in developing nations such as India and China, where building materials and other products containing asbestos are widely used.
“The real nefarious part of this research … is that a lot of people who live in those countries are continuing to be exposed under uncontrolled conditions to asbestos,” Egilman said. “That’s the real horror story here.”
Ronnie Stockton’s auto repair shop in Jackson, Tenn. (Courtesy of the Stockton family)
Ronnie and Joyce Stockton. Courtesy of the Stockton family
A Ford loss in Tennessee
While the brake papers and the experts who write them have contributed to defense verdicts in mesothelioma cases, things occasionally go the other way.
Ronnie Stockton operated an auto repair shop 100 feet from his home in Jackson, Tennessee, for 30 years and specialized in brake jobs, often on Ford vehicles. He’d attended training classes in which instructors recommended that paper masks be worn around brake dust but never heard a “full description of what asbestos did,” he said in a recent interview. “We wasn’t warned it could kill you when you swept it up and didn’t wear the mask.”
As it turned out, Stockton’s wife, Joyce, was the one who got sick. She used to help her husband sweep out the shop. She kept the books and washed Ronnie’s dusty clothes. One night in December 2010 she lay down in bed and felt her chest tighten. “I thought I was having a heart attack,” she said. A biopsy confirmed that she had mesothelioma, to that point merely a strange word she’d heard in lawyers’ TV commercials. “I would sit in front of the television trying to learn how to pronounce it, not ever knowing I had the disease,” she said.
The Stocktons sued Ford and went to trial in August. Two Exponent scientists were among the defense experts.
In his closing argument after nearly two weeks of testimony, Ruckdeschel, the Stocktons’ lawyer, said Ford’s experts had “spun the literature” on asbestos. “They’re not taking what the studies say; they’re putting a spin on it.”
If independent research had shown no connection between brake work and mesothelioma, Ruckdeschel said, “they wouldn’t have had to go and pay Exponent to write all the papers to say, ‘Well, we’ve reanalyzed the data, and there really isn’t any evidence.’ ”
Defense lawyer Samuel Tarry urged jurors not to be swayed by the millions of dollars Ford had invested in the papers. It “shouldn’t come as any surprise that over time it costs a lot of money to defend these cases and to publish research where it can be critiqued and criticized and start discussions,” he said. Tarry recounted the testimony of Exponent’s Mark Roberts, who “told you that the majority of mesotheliomas in women are unrelated to asbestos. … He explained that all of us have a background risk, not just for mesothelioma but for any type of cancer …. They can happen naturally. They can happen with an environmental insult.”
After deliberating about two days, the jury returned a $4.65 million verdict in the Stocktons’ favor. It assigned 71 percent of the liability to Ford and 29 percent to brake manufacturer Honeywell, which had been brought into the case on Ford’s motion. Ford has asked for a new trial.
Latisha Strickland was the jury foreman. She’d wanted to assign 100 percent of the blame to Ford but agreed to the 71-29 split to avoid a hung jury.
“I felt ashamed — I had compromised what I thought it should be,” Strickland, a home-school teacher, said in a telephone interview. “You couldn’t give me the Powerball lottery to go through the amount of surgeries this woman [Joyce Stockton] has gone through.”
Strickland said she was especially put off by the 1971 memo showing Ford decided not to spend $1.25 per vehicle to replace front-end asbestos brakes.
Environmental Health Watch NZ 
You must be logged in to post a comment.