I'm for justice and equity for all peoples everywhere. I am also for exposing lies and corruption, particularly the lies of the corporations that have a tight grip on humanity, all for profit and control. A grip that has been instrumental in the rape and pillage of indigenous peoples planet wide, for centuries.
It had been an unusually busy day in the hospital last weekend— far busier than expected for Fall. The kind of day that makes you think ahead to winter and wonder how intense it’s going to get!
There was nothing particularly special about the day itself. Just another long hospital day filled with patients, decisions, and the usual challenges of hospital medicine. But as always, one thing stood out above everything else: the powerful difference made by loved ones who stay at the bedside.
And I will never stop imparting this crucial advice for anyone dealing with a loved one in the hospital.
Being the best advocate you can be for your loved one is LIFESAVING.
And having a great advocate at your bedside is a true BLESSING.
I see this over and over again.
In some rooms, you can feel that energy immediately— a spouse, a daughter, or son, or other family member— cheering their loved one on and watching every detail. Family members asking questions and making sure everything is on track. In others, there was silence. A patient alone for hours, monitors beeping, no familiar faces around.
That contrast hits me every single time.
And so here’s my golden tip— something I cannot emphasize enough after years on the frontlines:
If you ever have a loved one in the hospital, be the best advocate you possibly can. Be there. Watch over them like a hawk. Ask questions. Never assume everything is being handled.
This isn’t being overbearing or difficult (which you must NEVER think). It’s being life-saving.
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Why This Matters So Much
Hospitals may be full of some hard-working and dedicated professionals who work long hours. But they are also complex, high-stress, fast-moving environments. Even with the best systems in place, mistakes happen. It’s simply the nature of such a demanding environment.
Studies suggest that medical errors contribute to over 250,000 deaths every year in the United States, making them one of the leading causes of death. This may even be an underestimate! Countless more patients are harmed by preventable complications or breakdowns in communication.
Nobody sets out to make mistakes— but fatigue, time pressure, and human error are unavoidable realities. That’s why a vigilant, caring family member at the bedside can make all the difference in the world.
What Being an Advocate Really Means
Being an advocate doesn’t mean you need to know medicine or have a healthcare background. It means you are paying attention. Closely.
You’re the one who notices that a medication hasn’t arrived, a dose looks different, or a symptom is changing. You’re the one who asks when the next test is scheduled, whether results have come back, or what the plan is for the next step. The ill person lying in bed often cannot do these things.
You don’t need to worry about “bothering” anyone. This isn’t the time to be overly polite or worry about hurting feelings. If something doesn’t seem right, speak up— clearly and firmly.
This is not being pushy. It’s being responsible. It’s imperative. The reality is, when a patient has someone at the bedside keeping an eye on everything, they’re safer. Period.
I always make it a point (and it’s a delight to walk into a room and see loving family at the bedside)— to say thanks for coming in and how wonderful it is too see them! No doctor worth their salt should ever think differently.
The Emotional Impact
Aside from safety, there’s also the emotional side, and it’s enormous. The presence of loved ones can transform a hospital stay. Seeing a familiar face, hearing a reassuring voice, knowing someone truly cares— it changes everything. Patients feel calmer, more hopeful, and more determined to recover.
Of course not everyone is the same. Some people may not want relatives nearby or be happier alone. That’s fine, but most people realistically are not like that.
The human body responds to connection. Healing is faster when people feel supported. I see it every single week.
That’s why it’s heartbreaking when a patient lies alone for days on end. Sometimes it can’t be helped— families live far away, or life circumstances make it hard to visit. Not everyone is blessed to have loved ones nearby, especially at the extremes of age. But there’s no question: loneliness in hospital is one of the saddest things to witness.
If it were up to me, there would be no strict visiting hours at all— as long as sleep and privacy are respected. The benefits of human presence far outweigh any “inconvenience”.
How to Be the Best Advocate Possible
If someone you love is ever in hospital, here’s how to make a real difference:
Be there as much as you can. Your presence alone improves safety and morale.
Keep a written log. Jot down medications, test results, and what doctors say (as well as the names of doctors). You’ll be surprised how often it helps clarify things later.
Ask questions— lots of them! Understand the plan of care. Know what’s being done and why. Don’t let a doctor turn his or her back until you’ve got your answers.
Be firm if needed. Don’t shy away from speaking up. This is too important for hesitation.
Stay observant. Notice every change, every symptom, every delay.
One Day, It Could (And Probably Will) Be You
One day, any of us could find ourselves in that hospital bed— sick, anxious, vulnerable, or not in our full capacities. In that moment, having someone who loves you watching over things, asking questions, and refusing to let anything slip through the cracks could literally save your life.
Medicine has advanced in many ways over the last 100 years, but the most powerful force of all is still human presence. Machines can monitor your vitals, but they can’t care for your soul. Algorithms can alert staff, but they can’t notice the small things only someone who knows you can see (feel free to share your stories with us down below!)
So if a loved one ever ends up in the hospital— don’t just visit. Be there. Stay alert. Ask questions. Protect them.
Whether you are a spouse, child, parent, sibling— or even a trusted friend.
Because sometimes, that’s the difference between recovery and tragedy.
That’s one of the most lifesaving pieces of advice I could ever give you.
“As the world teeters on the verge of nuclear war and economic collapse, remember that in times of war and economic downturns, food is more valuable than gold.”
EWNZ Note: Remember Kissinger’s statement:
If you control the food, you control a nation. If you control the energy, you control a region. If you control the money, you control the world.
The following report was first published on October 10th, 2022, on winepressnews.com.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is encouraging people to legally register their community and backyard gardens into a national registry, where anyone can join.
The initiative is called the People’s Garden Initiative, which was created to build a “more diverse and resilient local food system to empower communities to address issues like nutrition access and climate change,” the USDA says.
“The simple act of planting a garden can have big impacts – from building a more diverse and resilient local food system to empowering communities to address issues like nutrition access and climate change.”
The USDA says there are 5 types of gardens that qualify for this project:
Food – indoor and outdoor gardens, “to increase access and consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables in urban and rural areas.”
Wildlife Habitat– Areas designed to increase the number of animals and insects, namely pollinators such as bees.
Conservation – preservation of natural resources like soil, water, air, and so on.
Beautification – an objectively pretty garden, by “rethink[ing] the planting of seasonal annuals and instead design a space with native species of flowering plants to enhance the biodiversity of your community and build a healthier ecosystem.”
Education and Training – gardens can fall under on the previously mentioned 4, but solely created for teaching and internship.
The USDA clarifies that these gardens can be any shape or size.
“You can plant a home garden in your yard or in a small space like a windowsill or balcony.”
Every garden registered can currently be publicly viewed online, per an interactive map that displays all gardens around the nation.
Each dot can be clicked on to learn more specifics about a registered garden, such as the type and pictures of the garden.
According to a press release from the USDA published on September 9th, those who register will also be featured in USDA communications, and sent a swanky sign showing their registration.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said:
“We welcome gardens nationwide to join us in the People’s Garden effort and all it represents.
“Local gardens across the country share USDA’s goals of building more diversified and resilient local food systems, empowering communities to come together around expanding access to healthy food, addressing climate change and advancing equity.
“We encourage existing gardens and new gardens to join the movement. Growing local food benefits local communities in so many ways, and we offer technical resources to help. Also, it’s a great way to connect with your local USDA team members.”
The press release notes that this project actually began in 2009. So, it would appear the USDA is attempting to make a renewed effort for this project. “It’s named for the “People’s Department,” former President Abraham Lincoln’s nickname for USDA, which was established during his presidency in 1862,” the USDA added.
But not everyone is on board with this idea.
Matt Agorist of The Free Thought Projectis pessimistic about this initiative, explaining that the USDA has never been in favor of people’s health. He cites an example of a group of physicians in 2020 who sent a whopping myriad of evidence to the USDA in a bid to reduce their recommended levels of sugar intake – levels these doctors thought was too high already, but settled on a reduced rate. In short, the USDA did not consider it and rejected the plea.
Agorist wrote,
“Now, this same organization is claiming that it wants you to register your vegetable garden so it can place you in a database and put your healthy food source on a map — for your health, of course. You also get a cool sign for your front yard too.
“While a handful of folks inside the USDA may have well-meaning intentions behind this program, the behemoth organization’s track record and history clearly indicate that the overwhelming majority of them do not care about your health. Not only do they not care about your health but most of their farm and food budget goes toward subsidizing products that directly harm your health.
“So, skepticism over a national garden database run by this organization is entirely warranted. As the world teeters on the verge of nuclear war and economic collapse, remember that in times of war and economic downturns, food is more valuable than gold.”
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AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Please don’t do this. I, like Agorist, am quite pessimistic about initiatives such as this.
WinePress readers already know that the government and tech giants love to database our info already, and now registering your garden – even down to your windowsill plants (!) – they want to have on record. Absolutely not. But this type of thing certainly fits right in line with the coming CBDCs, social credit scores, carbon calculators, food IDs, and so forth. Right now it’s optional. But how long before it becomes mandatory?
With the food shortage narrative in play, it certainly could present an opportunity for the government to try and craft a narrative as to why Americans need to register their gardens, as to know who is buying what, what food crops are which, whose hogging up too much water, who is impoverished in nearby towns, how much excess you have, and on and on.
In the early days of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, many nations were already racing to get these very same types of agendas in place for the time they wish to roll them out. I suspect that when the famine gets to be a legitimate and obvious problem to the broad masses, coupled with a grand economic collapse – something I have been warning about for some time – that is when they might roll this type of thing out. Admittedly, some of this is speculative on my end.
Do you realize that most states still to this day still ban the commercial sale of raw milk and dairy products? I cannot go to the store and eat and drink what I want: I need the government’s approval, as they are “all-knowing.” And those that do want to sell raw milk and dairy, for example, if they are allowed to do it, have to have their practices registered, inspected, and datalogged, but still cannot sell it on the grocery store shelves in most states, but through these convoluted backdoor channels and red tape, most consumers will never notice and realize. And the states that do allow the commercial sale of raw milk and dairy, had to lobby and plead with the government to be allowed to do it!
So, lest anyone think that I am not a “patriot” and whining about nothing, then I suggest you chew on that apple and think about what I just said… And that is just one example. If you cannot eat and drink what you want, and plant and pasture whatever you want, without the government’s permission, then you do not have freedom. PERIOD. No president, governor, politician, or media tell-a-vision prophet will admit this truth to you, on either side.
Ecclesiastes 5:18 Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it is his portion. [19] Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labour; this is the gift of God. [20] For he shall not much remember the days of his life; because God answereth him in the joy of his heart.
But you see, that is not part of the new paradigm. America has an odd fusion of communism and fascism for a puppet government. This will be the framework for this “Great Reset.” “You’ll own nothing, and be happy” – as the masses live in these smart cities, packed in like sardines, physically connected to the grid; where everything is serviced and run through by the major corporations working in tandem with the government.
The bottom line is this: do NOT EVER register your garden with the government. Simple as that.
Note: I’m taking the liberty of adding here the NZ info on population decline first, given this blog is a Kiwi one. Prof Crispin Miller has gathered together the global evidence on the population free fall happening in plain sight. He has done this with a global team of folk who daily document the instances of ‘sudden death’ and injury post covid jab … down to that taking place within various people groups and professions. What you are seeing individually (many of us now have several people we know who have suffered death or injury) is actually global. EWNZ
The authors of the ongoing democide believe that it will make the world a better place for THEM. We who really want the world to be a better place must stop them, break their power, and indict them.
“ABV” stands for “anything but the ‘vaccine.’” We use it to refer to articles whose authors strain to name some other “factors” causing this unprecedented cull..
What better way to preface this apocalyptic overview than to revisit Bill Gates’ (in)famous 2010 Ted Talk, in which he proposed “our” lowering the global population by “10 or 15%,” through “vaccines, health care [sic] and reproductive health services” (i.e., lots more abortions). He cast this project as an urgent one, because “CO2 is warming the planet.”
News from Underground by Mark Crispin Miller is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The segment with Gates making that “humanitarian” suggestion, as well as the whole talk, was on YouTube, which disappeared it early in the “COVID crisis.” So here’s Gates’ whole performance, still accessible on Rumble: (click on the vid image to watch at Rumble.com)
The video is also in this article, along with a full transcript:
First, we’ve got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent. But there, we see an increase of about 1.3.
Later, early in the COVID-19 panic, Gates, interviewed by Stephen Colbert, indiscreetly tipped his hand (and Colbert quickly urged him to use different wording, lest “the conspiracy theorists” seize on what Gates really said):
OOPS THE VIDEO HAS ALREADY BEEN ‘DISAPPEARED’
It now appears that Gates—and his towering cohorts in the eugenics movement (guided by the likes of David Rockefeller)—have got their wish; only Gates was shrewdly lying when he lowballed the number of those marked for non-existence. (The cantankerous Ted Turner, a eugenicist fanatic like Bill Gates, didn’t hesitate to come right out and say that 90% of the human race must go.) Thanks to them, and their multitudinous accessories, what we’re now living through (if we’re lucky) is a catastrophic global population crash—which will do, is now doing, vastly graver harm to all the rest of us than “overpopulation,” COVID and CO2 combined.
Brace yourself, and read the evidence; then do all you can to spread the word about this democide, and that it’s the responsibility of all who can still think to bring the authors of the most destructive crime in history, and all their accomplices, to justice.
World fertility rates in ‘unprecedented decline’, UN says
June 10, 2025
United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA] surveyed young adults and those past their reproductive years. “The world has begun an unprecedented decline in fertility rates,” says Dr Natalia Kanem, head of UNFPA. “Most people surveyed want two or more children. Fertility rates are falling in large part because many feel unable to create the families they want. And that is the real crisis,” she says. In all countries, 39% of people said financial limitations prevented them from having a child. The highest response was in Korea (58%), the lowest in Sweden (19%). In total, only 12% of people cited infertility – or difficulty conceiving – as a reason for not having the number of children they wanted to. But that figure was higher in countries including Thailand (19%), the US (16%), South Africa (15%), Nigeria (14%) and India (13%).
New Zealand’s fertility rate hits record low as births fall
February 19, 2025
New Zealand’s fertility rate slumped to a record low in 2023, official data shows, as the total number of births also dropped. The fertility rate tracks the average number of births women will have in their lifetime. New Zealand, along with many countries around the world, has seen this number drop as factors like education, participation in the workforce, and access to contraception contribute to women having fewer children. Statistics NZ data released on Monday found there were 1,932 fewer babies born in the year ending December 2023 than in the year before, the lowest number of registered births in 20 years. The drop was despite a 3% increase in the number of women between 15 and 49 years old, the ages at which most children are born. The combination of fewer births and more women in the population led to the fertility rate hitting a record low of 1.56 births per woman. In 2022, the rate was 1.66, and it remains far below the 2.1 needed to replace population numbers in the long term.
Japan Confirms Over 600,000 Citizens Killed by Covid ‘Vaccines’
September 21, 2025
Chilling news is emerging from Japan as the nation’s leading experts have uncovered explosive evidence linking skyrocketing excess deaths to Covid mRNA “vaccines.” A grassroots coalition, United Citizens for Stopping mRNA Vaccines, has forced the release of official vaccination records for 21 million Japanese citizens through a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The records include vaccination dates, batch numbers, and post-vaccine death reports. The results are devastating.
Professor Murakami of Tokyo Science University, a respected scientist, analyzed the data and uncovered a consistent, alarming pattern:
• A surge in deaths occurred 90–120 days after injection.
• Those who received multiple doses saw earlier and steeper death spikes, suggesting cumulative toxicity.
•Murakami estimates that 600,000–610,000 Japanese citizens have been killed by the “vaccines.”
This figure is eerily consistent with Japan’s excess death statistics. Because these deaths typically happen months after the jab, doctors rarely connect them to the shots, allowing health officials to hide the carnage in plain sight.
Covid ‘Vaccines’ Triggered Global Turbo Cancer Crisis
September 24, 2025
Devastating alarm bells are emerging from Russia as the nation’s leading experts warn that chilling new evidence proves that the global turbo cancer crisis was caused by Covid mRNA “vaccines.” An alarming new review has confirmed the link between mass mRNA “vaccination” and skyrocketing cancer cases and deaths recorded around the world. The study was led by renowned Russian researcher Angelina Alekseevna Seliverstova and Dr. Oleg Germanovich Makeev, Professor of Biology and Biotechnology at Ural State Medical University in Yekaterinburg. Their findings confirm that the worldwide rollout of Covid mRNA shots triggered unexpected long-term safety risks. Most damning of all, the study exposes how Western institutions have downplayed, censored, or outright concealed these risks. The authors accuse global health officials of keeping the public in the dark about what could be the most devastating medical cover-up in modern history.
Unlike many Western studies, this review declared no financial conflicts of interest, no outside funding, and no pharmaceutical ties, underscoring the independence of its conclusions. The warning from Russia is clear, as the world is now grappling with a medical ticking time bomb unleashed by the mRNA experiment. Meanwhile, the establishment is doing everything it can to silence the truth.
The evidence is mounting and shows that mass mRNA “vaccination” has not only failed to stop Covid but may be fueling an ongoing surge in cancer, chronic illness, and unexplained deaths. The warnings from Russian and Western scientists now converge on a single reality, revealing that humanity has been subjected to a reckless experiment with catastrophic consequences. Yet, the cover-up may be as dangerous as the injections themselves.
US population decline sooner than expected as deaths to outpace births in America by 2031
September 19, 2025
The US population is approaching a critical demographic milestone as deaths are now projected to exceed births as early as 2031, two years earlier than previously expected. This shift signals a trend toward near-zero population growth, raising concerns about the country’s economic future and social support systems. In conclusion, the convergence of lower birth rates and aggressive immigration enforcement signals a turning point in U.S. demographic dynamics. Policymakers face the urgent task of addressing this population slowdown’s economic repercussions while balancing immigration regulations and social welfare needs.
Puerto Rico ranks among world’s fastest-shrinking populations
April 21, 2025
Puerto Rico is the fourth jurisdiction with the highest population decline in the world, according to recent statistics showing the island’s population shrank by 1.2% in 2024 compared to the previous year. The Cook Islands in the South Pacific, American Samoa, and Saint Pierre and Miquelon experienced greater population declines — at 2.24%, 1.54% and 1.21% respectively — Statista reported. Of the 20 countries with the highest rate of population decline, the majority are island nations, where emigration rates are high, particularly to Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. mainland, or they are in Eastern Europe, which suffers from a combination of high emigration and low birth rates, according to Statista. Puerto Rico’s population is forecast to decline steadily between 2024 and 2029, dropping by 100,000 people, or 3.13%, to little more than 3.1 million in 2029 — reaching its lowest level since 1977. The island’s population peaked at 3,827,000 in 2004, according to World Bank and U.S. Census Bureau data.
Canada’s population growth slows to historic lows as temporary residents decline
September 25, 2025
Canada’s population stood at an estimated 41.65 million on July 1, 2025, rising by just 47,098 people, or 0.1%, over the previous quarter. According to Statistics Canada, this is the lowest second-quarter growth rate since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when border closures nearly halted migration. Excluding that year, it is the slowest pace for a second quarter since comparable records began in 1946. From July 2024 to July 2025, Canada’s population expanded by 389,324 people (+0.9%), sharply lower than the 1.21 million (+3.0%) added a year earlier. Much of the slowdown came after the federal government introduced policies in 2024 to reduce temporary migration.
MEXICO
ABV:
Birth rate in Mexico declines, mirroring a global phenomenon
October 2, 2024
Mexico’s birth rate fell to a three-year low in 2023, with 1.8 million births recorded, marking a significant decline in fertility, according to a report by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. This decline will have important implications for the country’s labor market, healthcare, and economic growth, signaling an urgent need for policy adjustment to address the evolving demographic landscape. Several interconnected factors have contributed to the decline in birth rates, including rising living costs and economic pressures, as reported by Al Jazeera.
CUBA
ABV:
Cuba gets older: The island reports its lowest birth rate since the Revolution
March 10, 2025
A group of Cuban officials has confirmed what has been obvious on the streets of Cuba for some time: that the country has much fewer people than it did three years ago. Fewer births are being registered and only older adults are increasing as a demographic group. The latest official figures from the National Statistics and Information Office (ONEI) show that the latest exodus of Cubanshas emptied the country out; that women are reluctantto have children in the midst of an endless economic crisis, and that young people are leaving while the elderly remain behind. Authorities have said that this population aging should not be “dramatized,” but researchers insist that it should not be underestimated either. In any case, they say that the problem is not aging per se, but the conditions in which Cubans are getting older.
Latin America’s Fertility Decline is Accelerating. No One’s Certain Why
January 5, 2024
Among demographers, 2023 will be remembered as the year Brazil “shrank” by almost 5 million people. A new census put the country’s population at 203 million people—well below the 208 million previously estimated by Brazil’s national statistics institute, and even further from the 216 million calculated by the United Nations. Those missing people didn’t vanish or emigrate—they were never born. The 2022 census, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, showed that Brazil’s population grew during the 2010s by just 0.52% per year—half the rate seen throughout the 2000s, and the lowest such percentage since 1872. Brazil is not alone. For half a century, fertility rates around the world have been drifting downwards thanks to a confluence of rising education levels, greater labor force participation by women, strengthened reproductive rights, and wider access to contraception. But in several Latin American and Caribbean countries, this decline has recently accelerated to an unexpected degree that even experts are struggling to explain.
UNITED KINGDOM
ABV:
Fertility rate hits record low in England, Scotland and Wales
August 27, 2025
The fertility rate for England and Wales has fallen for the third year in a row to reach a record low, figures show. The total fertility rate across both countries, meaning the average number of live children women can expect to have across their child-bearing life, stood at 1.41 in 2024, down from 1.42 in 2023, the lowest since comparable data was first collected in 1938, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is despite a 0.6% increase in live births last year, with a 14% increase in the number of babies born to fathers over 60, according to figures published last month. Bernice Kuang, a demography researcher at the University of Southampton, said the fall in fertility rates could be a temporary result of people postponing having children.
Birth rate in France: The decline under the microscope
July 10, 2025
The birth rate in France is declining, and the trend has been observed under the microscope by the Académie Nationale de Médecine and INED (French institute for demographic studies), which have each recently published a report on the subject. The decline recorded can be analysed through different factors. The total number of births has been steadily falling since 2010 in mainland France. At that date, the number of births was 832,000. In 2024, a historic low was recorded with 663,000 babies. To understand these figures, the post-war record was achieved in 1971 with 916,000 births. These raw figures should also be compared with the size of the population. Indeed, the size of the population bears an obvious link with the total number of births. The INSEE (National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies) defines the birth rate as the number of births during the year relative to the total mean population for the year. The rate has been falling almost constantly for several decades. from 14.8 in 1982, it has dropped to 9.9 in 2023. Many analyses have been put forward in order to understand the phenomenon. Among the explanatory factors, the social and professional status of women is important. Women are undertaking longer studies, and a much higher proportion of women have a salaried income.
After decades of growth, Brussels’ population is set to decline
June 20, 2025
The Brussels region is expected to see a slight population decline to just under 1.25 million by 2034 after two decades of steady growth, the Brussels Institute for Statistics and Analysis said in a new report. Between 2004 and 2024, the region’s population grew from 1 million to 1.25 million, with international migration being one of the main drivers. Non-Belgians accounted for 37.2% the population data from last year shows – the French are topping the list, followed by Romanians and Italians. But the next decade isn’t expected to see any further growth, as residents are leaving for other parts of the country and birth rates are declining. By 2034, the numbers are expected to drop to just under 1.25 million, the Brussels Institute for Statistics and Analysis (BISA) estimates in a new report. The municipalities of Brussels are projected to lose 2,400 inhabitants between 2024 and 2034.
In 2024 Germany‘s population rose by 0.1% which is a drop from the 0.4% growth witnessed the year before, according to preliminary figures released by the Federal Statistical Office on Friday. As a result, the population for the EU’s largest economy now stands at 83.6 million. The figures showed that, as in previous years, more people died than were born in Germany, but the population growth came about due to immigration. Population growth concentrated in Germany’s western states, which saw an increase of 0.2%, while the eastern states, excluding the city-state of Berlin, recorded a decline of 0.3%. The largest increase for a state came in Bavaria, with population numbers up by 73,000. The biggest population losses occurred in the eastern states of Thuringia (down 15,000 or 0.7%), Saxony (down 12,000 or 0.3%), and Saxony-Anhalt (down 9,000 or 0.4%).
A disappearing country. Moldova on the verge of a demographic catastrophe
August 1. 2025
Moldova is one of the fastest depopulating countries in the world. Since it gained independence in 1991, the population of its right-bank region (the territory controlled by Chișinău, excluding the separatist region of Transnistria) has shrunk by approximately 35%. This is primarily due to mass labour migration driven by economic conditions, involving over one million citizens of a country with a current population of 2.4 million. Other significant factors contributing to Moldova’s declining population include a dramatic drop in fertility rates and high mortality associated with low life expectancy, which is ten years below the EU average. Consequently, Moldovan society is ageing rapidly; in 1991, the average age of a resident was 29, compared to 38 at present.
Croatia is facing a serious depopulation crisis, with many young people leaving in search of better opportunities. In an effort to reverse this trend, the government has pledged €700 million in 2024 to support returning Croatians, tax relief, and affordable housing. But will these measures be enough to keep people in the country? Experts warn that financial incentives alone won’t solve the problem, HRT writes. The biggest challenge for young families remains securing a place to live. Croatia is implementing projects aimed at reducing the cost of housing construction, yet it still ranks among the most expensive EU countries in terms of property prices.
No one left to live, let alone work: Serbia faces a major demographic crisis
June 23, 2025
The saying “The further south you go, the sadder it gets” perfectly applies to the story of demographic changes in certain parts of Serbia, which are now heavily influencing the labour market. In essence, in some regions, depopulation has reached alarming levels, threatening not only to reshape the local economy but also to alter the structure and even the nationality of the workforce. While this may sound overly pessimistic, data from both national and international institutions indicate that the country and its leadership face serious demographic challenges. If left unchecked, these challenges could significantly reshape the economy – not only in southern and eastern Serbia, where the problem is most pronounced – but in the entire country. The bleak reality is underscored by World Bank data, which ranks Serbia 13th globally for the fastest population decline. Jakup Berisha, UNDP’s Resident Representative in Serbia, also reminds us of this status. “The census shows that Serbia has 6.65 million inhabitants, 496,000 fewer than in 2011. Due to a low birth rate, an ageing workforce, and emigration, the number of young people entering the labour market is decreasing, while the number of pensioners is rising faster than we can replace outgoing workers. At the same time, emigration disproportionately draws away highly educated professionals, further worsening labour shortages in key industries,” Berisha told NIN.
Bulgaria Among EU’s Most Declining Populations as Demographic Shifts Intensify
August 7, 2025
Over the past two decades, Bulgarians rank among the top three populations in the European Union that have experienced significant decline. Across the EU, the share of children in the population has fallen, marriages are increasingly rare, and one in four newborns last year had a mother from an immigrant background. The latest European statistics shed light on these demographic trends. Eurostat data shows the EU population grew by 4% over 20 years, concentrated mainly in five countries: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland, which together account for nearly 70% of the total. Smaller populations include Malta, with around half a million inhabitants. Bulgaria’s population stands at approximately 6.4 million, placing it 15th in size among EU member states. Within this timeframe, 19 countries saw population growth while 8 experienced decline. Luxembourg’s population doubled, followed by Malta and Ireland, which increased by about one-third. Bulgaria saw a notable 17% reduction, equivalent to a loss of roughly 1.3 million people, second only to Latvia’s 18% decrease. Immigration remains a significant factor shaping the EU’s demographic landscape.
Greece announces €1.6bn relief package to tackle population decline
September 7, 2025
Greece has announced drastic measures, including tax breaks and other financial incentives, to address a population decline that is on course to make it the oldest nation in Europe. The prime minister said the €1.6bn (£1.4bn) relief package had been dictated by one of the biggest challenges facing the Mediterranean nation: a demographic crisis of unprecedented scale. Greece’s near decade-long crisis has been widely blamed for the alarming drop. This is partly because younger people were among those hardest hit by austerity measures required in return for international rescue funds that kept bankruptcy at bay and debt-stricken Athens in the EU.
Low Birth Rates, Brain Drain, and Living Conditions Drive Greece’s Population Down by Half a Million
August 23. 2025
The latest report by the Laboratory of Demographic and Social Analyses of the University of Thessaly paints a grim picture of the current state and future demographic outlook of Greece, as the country’s population continues to age disproportionately and decline sharply. Data shows that the total population of Greece has declined by half a million over the last thirteen years, while the birth-death ratio is projected to remain negative until at least 2050, pointing towards a shift in the migratory flows balance as the most imminent solution to the problem. According to the report, the reasons for this significant decline in population are not only related to demography but more generally to the social challenges that Greece has faced in recent decades and the worsening living conditions for both native Greeks and migrants.
Poland records EU’s largest population decline for second year running
July 15, 2025
Poland’s population fell by over 123,000 in 2024, the largest overall decline among all European Union member states for the second year in a row. In relative terms – taking account of the size of countries’ population – Poland had the EU’s joint-third-largest drop of 0.34%. The data for 2024 mark the sixth consecutive year that Poland’s population declined amid a demographic crisis that the country’s statistical agency has forecast will continue in the coming decades. Last year saw the number of births in Poland fall to a new postwar low. It was the 12th year in a row in which deaths have outnumbered births. Poland’s fertility rate – the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime – also fell to a new record low of 1.099, which is among the lowest in the world.
Population Decline in the Czech Republic: 27,000 Fewer Residents in the First Half of 2025
September 11, 2025
The population of the Czech Republic decreased in the first half of 2025. By the end of June, 10.88 million people were living in the country, 27,200 fewer than at the start of the year. This is due to both the negative birth-to-death balance and emigration abroad. According to data from the Czech Statistical Office (ČSÚ), 57,700 people died in the first six months – almost 2,000 more than in the same period last year. In contrast, only 37,400 children were born, a decrease of around 12 per cent compared with the first half of 2024. Nearly half of all births occurred outside marriage, and most children were born to women aged 30 to 32.
Albania, with the strongest population decline in Europe in the last decade
July 14, 2025
Throughout Europe, especially in developing countries, people are moving in search of a better life. Globalization, the opening of markets, the easing of movement and work permit criteria by aging developed countries are opportunities that, naturally, many will try to take advantage of, especially young people who today have higher expectations from life. But no one is leaving at the rate that Albanians are leaving. The latest Eurostat data, processed by “Monitor”, show that Albania’s population has been reduced by 18.2% at the end of 2024, compared to 2011, a period that includes the development of two censuses. In Albania, the strong population contraction is related to two factors. First, the slowdown in natural increase, which turned negative during the pandemic and is now at minimal levels, with only 1.2 thousand people plus in 2024, from over 60 thousand people in the early 90s. The second and most important factor is emigration, which saw a new wave after 2016, mainly from the young population. In 2024, according to Eurostat, net emigration was 28.8 thousand people.
In six, months, 102 new cases of childhood cancer were reported in Ceara
September 23, 2025
The data are from the Albert Sabin Children’s Hosptial and refer to the number of visits performed in the state public health system in the first six months of 2025. [paywall]
Portugal grapples with accelerating demographic decline
August 28, 2025
Portugal is confronting a deepening demographic crisis, as recent data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) highlights a marked decline in its younger population and a significant increase in the elderly. The Portugal News reports that in 2023 only 12.8 percent of the Portuguese population was aged between 0 and 14, positioning the country as the third in the European Union with the lowest proportion of young people, surpassed only by Italy and Malta. This trend is attributed by the INE to decades of consistently low birth rates combined with a rise in life expectancy. Analysis reveals that between 1970 and 2024, the proportion of young people in Portugal decreased from 28.5 to 12.6 percent. The INE projects that if current demographic patterns persist, Portugal’s resident population will decline to approximately 8.2 million by 2080. This forecast further accentuates the urgencyfor policy interventions designed to stimulate birth rates and facilitate the integration of young people and migrants into the labour market.
Italy’s demographic crisis worsens as births hit record low
March 31, 2025
Italy’s demographic crisis deepened in 2024 as the number of births hit a new record low, emigration accelerated and the population continued to shrink, national statistics bureau ISTAT said on Monday. Italy’s ever-falling birth rate is considered a national emergency, but despite Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her predecessors pledging to make it a priority, none have so far been able to halt the drop. There were some 281,000 more deaths than births in 2024 and the population fell by 37,000 to 58.93 million, continuing a decade-long trend. Since 2014, Italy’s population has shrunk by almost 1.9 million, more than the inhabitants of Milan, its second-largest city, or of the region of Calabria in the country’s southern toe. The 370,000 babies born in 2024 marked the 16th consecutive annual decline and was the lowest figure since the country’s unification in 1861. It was down 2.6% from 2023, ISTAT said, and 35.8% lower than in 2008 – the last year Italy saw an increase in the number of babies born. The fertility rate, measuring the average number of children born to each woman of child-bearing age, also fell to a record low of 1.18, far below the 2.1 needed for a steady population.
Unprecedented Crisis in Italy, Population Decreasing to 54,8 Million by 2050
April 1, 2025
Italy is facing an unprecedented demographic crisis that will have profound economic and social repercussions in the coming decades. According to data presented by the president of Istat, Francesco Maria Chelli, during the hearing at the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on the effects of the demographic transition, the Italian population continues to decline, reaching 58,9 million inhabitants in 2025, with a decrease of 37 thousand people compared to the previous year. The forecasts for the future are even more worrying: by 2050 the population will drop to 54,8 million, with a loss of over 4 million inhabitants compared to current levels.
Turkey sounds alarm over declining birth rates amid economic concerns
May 27, 2025
Turkey’s birth rate has plunged to its lowest level in modern history, prompting warnings from officials and experts, who say the country is facing a demographic crossroads. Recent data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) show that the total fertility rate in 2024 fell to 1.48 children per woman, well below the population replacement level of 2.1 and a steep decline from 2.38 in 2001. The number of live births in 2024 stood at 937,559, with boys accounting for 51.4 percent and girls for 48.6 percent. This marks a continuation of a trend that demographers and economists say is increasingly linked to economic hardship in Turkey, particularly among young adults of childbearing age.
Despite exhortations from ruling clerisy to be fruitful, and pro-natal policies intended to prop up birth rates, fertility in Iran is slumping once again. Earlier this month, the Tehran Times reported that annual births in Iran fell below the million mark. According to the Civil Registration Organization in charge of Iran’s vital statistics, just under 980,000 births were recorded between the Iranian calendar year coinciding with 21 March 2024 through 20 March 2025. It has been a very long time since so few babies were born in Iran. By the reckoning of the United Nations Population Division, we have to go back seventy years—to 1955—to find a time when Iranian annual birth totals were lower than today. The current birth level, as we see in Figure 1, is less than half as high as it was forty years ago, in 1985.
Grim warning: Writer warns of declining population in Saudi Arabia
February 8, 2025
A Saudi writer has raised alarms about the country’s declining birth rates, warning that Saudis could face extinction. In an article published in the Saudi newspaper Al Watan, Mansour Al Daban referenced UN data that shows a worrying drop in Saudi birth rates. The figures indicate that births in Saudi Arabia fell by 67 per cent in 2023 compared to 1950, when the birth rate was 53.34 per 1,000 people. By 2023, the rate had plummeted to 15.7, marking a 2.88 per cent decline from the previous year. Al Daban also cited a study titled Epidemiological Decline in Human Fertility Rate in the Arab World, conducted by researchers from the University of Sharjah in the UAE. The study, which analysed fertility rates in the Arab world from 2011 to 2021, found a similar decline in most Arab countries.
Russia’s attempts to boost its flagging birth rate — through policies promoting “traditional values,” tighter abortion restrictions and officials’ encouragement of larger families — appear to be falling short, as the number of births has fallen to its lowest level in centuries. According to data released by the state statistics agency Rosstat, 195,400 children were born in Russia during January and February 2025 — a 3% drop compared to the same period in 2024. The decline was even steeper in February alone, with births falling 7.6% year-over-year to 90,500 — 7,400 fewer than in the same month last year. Some regions saw even sharper drops. Births fell by 18.7% in Arkhangelsk, 19.4% in the republic of Karelia, 18.6% in the Oryol region, 21.6% in Kostroma and 26.6% in Smolensk. According to demographer Alexei Raksha, the first quarter of 2025 likely saw the lowest number of births since the early 1800s, with February marking the lowest monthly figure in over 200 years. Based on preliminary registry office data, he estimated that 95,000 to 96,000 children were born in March, bringing the total for the first quarter to around 293,000-294,000.
Some parts of India have been forced to shut down schools amid the country’s declining birth rates. Economist Sanjeev Sanyal, who was previously the principal economic adviser in India’s finance ministry and a member of the Economic Advisory Council to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has spoken about this happening and called for it to occur “more routinely.” “Our population is only growing now because we are living longer, we are not having enough babies,” he told the Indian financial newspaper Mint on Monday. “So our problem is already the case that in parts of the country we have to shut down schools.” “We should be shutting them down,” he added. “We are doing them slowly. But we need to do them more routinely. Because whenever I mention that we need to shut down schools, people get very emotional about this issue.”
Rethinking Thailand’s Population Crisis through the Lens of a “Reluctant Economist”
September 23, 2025
Many of us are already aware of Thailand’s growing demographic crisis. The country is now experiencing “more deaths than births,” and the Thai population is steadily shrinking. Within approximately 50 years, the population is projected to drop by half—from over 60 million to just over 30 million. The country will be filled with elderly citizens. Working-age individuals will become rare, and the number of children and youth will decline dramatically. All of this stems from one key issue: Thai people are having fewer children. This is undeniably a major issue that many sectors are trying to address with the best possible solutions. In our article, “Integrated National Strategic Plan: Turning Thailand’s Population Crisis into Future Opportunities,” we presented macro-level strategies for dealing with this issue. However, in this article, we want to invite everyone to “rethink” the problem through the perspective of the “Reluctant Economist”—a concept developed by Professor Richard A. Easterlin. This lens, which is rarely seen (or perhaps never seen) in Thai discourse, may help us better understand the root cause of the population crisis—and possibly lead us to better solutions. Thailand’s declining birth rate poses the core of the population crisis. From the perspective of the Reluctant Economist, the central question is, why are people choosing to have fewer children? [Hint – It’s not lower fertility.]
Why Vietnam’s Demographic Decline Will Reinforce Its Non-Aligned Foreign Policy
August 26, 2025
Demographic decline is causing multiple headaches for Vietnamese policymakers. According to the latest statistics, Vietnam’s births per woman in 2024 declined to 1.91 from 1.96 in 2023, which is slightly below the replacement rate of 2.1. Vietnam’s population is aging rapidly. The number of people over the age of 60 increased from 11.4 million in 2019 to 14.2 million in 2024 out of a population of approximately 100 million. This cohort is projected to reach 18 million in 2030. An aging population and a declining workforce will put pressure on Vietnam’s nascent welfare system and its ambitious growth target of becoming a high-income country by the 2040s. The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) is encouraging births by handing out a one-time cash payment to women having two newborns before the age of 35 and not punishing party members who have a third child. This year, Vietnam also ended its two-child policy and allowed families to decide for themselves how many children they can have.
Chinese kindergartens in crisis as enrolments plunge 25% in 4 years
July 26, 2025
The number of Chinese kindergartens has fallen by a quarter in four years, prompting the closure of tens of thousands of schools in the country as a precipitous drop in births hits the education system. Enrolments in China’s kindergartens have declined by 12mn children between 2020 and 2024, from a peak of 48mn, according to data from the country’s ministry of education. The number of kindergartens, serving Chinese children aged 3-5, has also fallen by 41,500 from a high of nearly 295,000 in 2021. Falling enrolments are now “baked into the system and that’s not going to change”, said Stuart Gietel-Basten, director of the Center for Aging Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He added that compared with five or 10 years ago, the decline in births was “huge”. The contraction of China’s pre-school system is a foretaste of the challenges to come for business and policymakers from China’s demographic decline, which is expected to be one of the most rapid in the world. China has recorded three consecutive years of population decline to 2024 following the decades-long policy, ended in 2016, that limited many couples to one child. While the number of births rose by about 520,000 last year to 9.3mn, following a record low in 2023, they were still outpaced by deaths and have declined by nearly half since the peak of 17.9mn in 2017.
China to offer $500 per child in move to boost birth rate
July 28, 2025
The Chinese government will offer parents subsidies of 3,600 yuan ($500, €429) per child under the age of three per year, Beijing’s state media said Monday. China‘s population has declined for three consecutive years, the world’s second most populous nation — after India — is facing an emerging demographic crisis. The number of births in 2024 — 9.54 million — was half as many as in 2016, the year that ended its one-child policy that was in place for more than three decades. Marriage rates in China have also hit a record low. Young couples put off having babies due to the high cost of raising children and career concerns.
China’s population falls for a third consecutive year
January 17, 2025
China’s population fell for a third consecutive year in 2024, with the number of deaths outpacing a slight increase in births, and experts cautioning that the trend will accelerate in the coming years. The National Bureau of Statistics said the total number of people in China dropped by 1.39 million to 1.408 billion in 2024, compared to 1.409 billion in 2023. Friday’s data reinforces concerns that the world’s second largest economy will struggle as the number of workers and consumers declines. Rising costs from elderly care and retirement benefits are also likely to create additional strains for already indebted local governments. The high cost of childcare and education as well as job uncertainty and a slowing economy have also discouraged many young Chinese from getting married and starting a family. Gender discrimination and traditional expectations for women to take care of the home exacerbate the issue, demographers say.
Taiwan sees 18th consecutive month of population decline
July 10, 2025
Taiwan’s population declined for the 18th consecutive month as of the end of June, according to data released Thursday by the Ministry of the Interior (MOI). In total, 55,375 babies were born in the first half of 2025, down 8,499 from the same period last year, when 63,874 births were recorded. Meanwhile, 16,554 deaths were reported in June, equivalent to approximately one death every 2.6 minutes. That figure represents an increase of 1,172 from May and 1,632 more than in June 2024. The crude death rate for the month stood at 8.63 per 1,000 people. The natural population decrease – the difference between births and deaths – was 7,586 for June.
New South Korea Data Reveals Scale of Population Decline
September 5, 2025
Marriages in South Korea have dropped by nearly half over the past three decades, while annual births have fallen to just one-third of 1995 levels, according to newly released data. The numbers show what officials consider a looming population crisis. South Korea‘s fertility rate—the lowest in the world—stood at 0.75 births per woman in 2024, well below the 2.1 needed to sustain a population. The same year, the share of South Koreans aged 65 and older passed 20 percent. The demographic shift could drag on the country’s economic prospects and strain its pension and health care systems, with fewer young workers supporting a growing elderly population. Analysts have cited high housing costs, an unforgiving workplace culture and unequal burdens of child care as key reasons young South Koreans are deciding to delay or forgo children.
South Korea’s Military Personnel Plummet 31% as Male 20s Drop 16%
September 23, 2025
This year, the male population in their 20s stood at approximately 3,024,000, a 15.8% decrease compared to the male population in their 20s in 2010, 15 years ago. Meanwhile, South Korea’s military personnel, which numbered 650,000 (based on the Defense White Paper) in 2010, plummeted to 450,000 over 15 years, a 30.7% drop. The reduction in military personnel has outpaced the natural decline in the population eligible for service. Analysis suggests that populist policies aimed at shortening military service periods to appeal to younger voters have accelerated the military’s crisis more rapidly than the decline in conscription resources due to low birth rates.
The Philippines’ annual population growth rate (PGR) is declining, according to data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has officially declared the country’s latest population count at 112,729,484, based on recent data. This marks an increase of 3.69 million people since the last nationwide census in 2020, when the population stood at 109.03 million.
A table showing the increase in the Philippines’ population since 1960
The population and the population growth rate (PGR) are two different things. The population refers to the total number of people, while the PGR measures the rate at which that number increases over time. Despite an increase in the overall population size, the PGR has declined, from 1.63% between 2015 and 2020, to 0.80% between 2020 and 2024. The country’s PGR has been generally declining since 1960 to 1970, when it was recorded at 3.01%.
A table showing the decline in the Philippines’ population growth rate since 1960
“The slowdown in the growth rate may be driven by several interrelated factors such as but not limited to declining fertility and birth rate, elevated mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, and subdued migration activity,” the PSA said.
Australia’s birth rate hits rock bottom with severe consequences for economic future
October 16, 2024
There are warnings that Australia’s birth rate — having hit a record low — is now at a critical level. Bureau of Statistics figures show 286,998 births were registered in Australia in 2023, resulting in a total fertility rate of 1.50 babies per woman. Australian National University demographer Liz Allen said the nation’s birth rate is perilously low. “We’ve hit rock bottom,” she said. The Total Fertility Rate, or TFR, over the past 30 years has slowly dropped from 1.86 in 1993 to 1.5 in 2023. The birth rate for girls and women aged 15 to 19 has fallen by more than two thirds over that period. There’s also been a large decline for women aged 20 to 24 years. She described a “deep-seated attitudinal problem” facing millions of younger Australians. Many, the demographer said, lack enthusiasm about the future, and that relates to their views on climate change, housing affordability and gender equality.
“Nearly every physician took the experimental shots. Now, he says, many are paying the price in silence. “They’re coming to me quietly,” … “They don’t want anyone to know they’ve been vaccine-injured.”“
Note: We ought not to think that this will be confined to the US. The plan was and still is global. The writing is on the wall here in NZ. The state of our ‘health’ system reflects this. I know and you probably know of horror stories emerging from visits to the ED in the night. Of the horrific post safe & effective injuries treated with large helpings of pharma’s products. As Makis points out AI will take the Doctors’ places. Recent discussions with professionals in other arenas tell me that AI is replacing actors and musicians also. Makes sense now doesn’t it? How were we to do without them, given they are passing on in droves? If you doubt this sub to Prof Mark Crispin Miller’s substack. He has teams of folk world wide who are compiling lists of sudden deaths post-safe & effective roll out. Read the post below. EWNZ
Dr. William Makis just issued one of the most chilling warnings yet — a quiet crisis unfolding inside the medical profession itself.
According to Makis, thousands of doctors are now falling ill — heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, and a terrifying surge in what he calls “turbo cancers.”
Nearly every physician took the experimental shots. Now, he says, many are paying the price in silence. “They’re coming to me quietly,” Makis reveals. “They don’t want anyone to know they’ve been vaccine-injured.”
Behind closed doors, once-proud physicians are seeking help — desperate for treatments like ivermectin and fenbendazole, while their own profession refuses to acknowledge what’s happening. The result? Doctors are retiring in their 40s. Practices are closing. The healthcare system is hollowing out from within. And what comes next, Makis warns, is even darker: AI will fill the void. “The doctors will drop out… and AI will take their place.”
“It is common practice to dump excess 1080 pellets after 1080 drops have finished (Re Stewart Island dump, see article).When 1080 toxin was first discovered in ground water the source of the toxin was traced to a landfill site above. Un-spread 1080 baits had been buried in the landfill and the toxin had leached out of the baits and seeped down into the ground water where it remained as toxic as the day it was dumped. No breakdown of the poison had taken place over all that time” … these are only DoC’s figures … “OSPRI has traditionally dropped more 1080 poison than DoC. Regional Councils account for around 12% of 1080 use too.”
A post from 2021 revisited. See how lamestream controls the narrative and sways you from making informed choices? I say sway because you all can search out the info for yourselves. Sadly many did not. And are not. Difficult and all as it was and still is … who doesn’t now know somebody who has been terribly affected? Heart problems, clots, can’t breathe, can’t walk, blind, diagnosed with all manner of serious conditions, all waved away as being caused by stress or worse, the imagination … EWNZ
“Thousands of people across the globe started posting photos of themselves on social media receiving the shots. Brittany Hall Perez is one of said individuals. The 39-year-old posted a public Facebook photo on January 13 wearing a mask and holding a vaccination record card.
Her obituary says she died on January 13, meaning the mRNA shot killed her within hours.”
Pursuing Justice on Behalf of Our Clients for Nearly 40 Years
Founded in Los Angeles, California in 1985, the law firm of Wisner Baum has earned a reputation for breaking new legal ground, holding major corporations accountable, influencing public policy, and raising public awareness about important safety issues. Our trial experience across a broad range of practice areas includes over $4 billion in verdicts and settlements.
Paraquat dichloride is a non-selective, broad-spectrum herbicide used primarily to kill weeds and grass. Austrian chemist Hugo Weidel and his student, M. Russo, discovered paraquat in the 1880s. Roughly 50 years later, scientists Michaelis and Hill discovered the chemical’s redox properties and named the compound methyl viologen. Scientists discovered the chemical’s weed-killing properties in the late 1950s.
Commercially introduced in 1962 as Gramoxone, paraquat quickly became a top-selling herbicide despite numerous studies linking the herbicide to wide-ranging health issues. The rise in paraquat use coincided with the surge in no-till farming in the U.S. and worldwide.
Common Paraquat Products
Syngenta and Chevron are two of the largest paraquat producers. Some of the most common paraquat products include:
Blanco
Bonedry
Cyclone SL 2.0
Devour
Firestorm
Gramoxone
Helmquat 3SL
Para-Shot 3.0
Paraquate Concentrate
Common Paraquat Side Effects
Research shows that paraquat exposure is dangerous, even at low levels. Paraquat side effects depend on the amount, route, and duration of exposure to the herbicide and the person’s overall health. The herbicide enters the body via:
Skin: Contact or penetration of the skin, mucous membranes, and other epithelial tissues (including the mouth, nose, trachea, and conducting airways, particularly where cuts, abrasions, rashes, sores, or other tissue damage are present).
Inhalation: Spray droplets enter the nose or mouth.
Ingestion: The liquid chemical is swallowed.
Acute Exposure – Paraquat Poisoning
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “one small sip [of paraquat] can be fatal, and there is no antidote.” In general, people who accidentally or intentionally ingest paraquat may experience any of the following symptoms:
Acute kidney failure
Coma
Confusion
Heart issues
Liver failure
Lung scarring
Muscle weakness
Pulmonary edema
Respiratory failure possibly leads to death
Seizures
While these cases are rare, paraquat poisoning may also occur via skin contact or inhalation. This report out of China highlights the potential for paraquat poisoning via skin absorption, and this report highlights the potential for paraquat poisoning via inhalation.
Paraquat Parkinson’s Disease Link
The body of scientific research linking paraquat and Parkinson’s disease (often referred to simply as “PD”) has continued to grow in recent years. Several studies have concluded that exposure to paraquat increases the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease and that the effect is dose-dependent. The research suggests that farmworkers and pesticide applicators are more at risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. People who live near fields and other areas where paraquat is heavily used may also be more at risk for PD.
” … vaccinated children showed 4.29 times higher rates of asthma, nearly six times higher rates of autoimmune disease, and 5.5 times higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders. Most remarkably, among nearly 2,000 unvaccinated children, there were zero cases of ADHD compared to 262 cases in the vaccinated group. “
“An Inconvenient Study” delivers a gripping piece of investigative journalism that will leave viewers questioning everything they thought they knew about vaccine safety research. When medical journalist Del Bigtree challenged Dr. Marcus Zervos of the prestigious Henry Ford Health System to conduct the most comprehensive vaccinated versus unvaccinated study ever undertaken, neither anticipated the explosive journey that would follow. The documentary’s hidden camera revelation—capturing Dr. Zervos admitting that publishing his completed study would end his career—provides one of the most stunning moments in recent documentary filmmaking. With over 18,000 subjects studied and shocking disparities found between vaccinated and unvaccinated children’s health outcomes, this film exposes what appears to be a deliberate suppression of critical public health data that every parent deserves to see.
Del Bigtree brings unique credibility to this investigation, having evolved from CBS medical journalist to becoming one of the most persistent voices demanding transparency in vaccine safety science. Through his nonprofit ICAN (Informed Consent Action Network), he’s successfully sued government agencies and uncovered the startling absence of proper placebo-controlled trials for childhood vaccines—victories that provide crucial context for understanding why the Henry Ford study matters so profoundly. The documentary skillfully weaves Bigtree’s personal journey with the larger narrative, showing how his production of the original “Vaxxed” documentary opened his eyes to thousands of parents reporting similar patterns of vaccine injury. His encounter with Colton, a 13-year-old paralyzed by the HPV vaccine who tragically took his own life in 2018, provides emotional weight that grounds the statistical arguments in human reality.
The relationship between Bigtree and Dr. Zervos forms the documentary’s compelling core, with Zervos emerging as a complex figure caught between scientific integrity and institutional pressure. His credentials—having solved the Flint water crisis and conducted controversial hydroxychloroquine research—establish him as someone willing to challenge orthodoxy when lives are at stake. The film’s presentation of the study’s findings is staggering: vaccinated children showed 4.29 times higher rates of asthma, nearly six times higher rates of autoimmune disease, and 5.5 times higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders. Most remarkably, among nearly 2,000 unvaccinated children, there were zero cases of ADHD compared to 262 cases in the vaccinated group. When Zervos admits on hidden camera that he would publish the study “just how it is” if not for the current climate, calling the findings “important” while simultaneously refusing to publish out of career preservation fears, the documentary captures a scientist’s moral crisis in real-time.
The film’s methodological approach demonstrates sophisticated understanding of epidemiological research while remaining accessible to general audiences. Rather than simply dismissing potential criticisms, the documentary shows how the Henry Ford team conducted multiple sensitivity analyses, adjusting for follow-up time, healthcare-seeking behavior, and various confounders—yet the alarming disparities persisted. The visual presentation of data, particularly the graph showing that by age 10 only 43% of vaccinated children remained free from chronic health conditions compared to 83% of unvaccinated children, makes complex statistics immediately comprehensible. The film strengthens its case by contextualizing the Henry Ford study within other independent research, including Dr. Peter Aaby’s shocking findings from Guinea-Bissau where DTP-vaccinated children had five times higher mortality rates despite being protected from the target diseases.
The documentary’s investigative techniques create undeniable dramatic tension while raising important questions about scientific transparency. The decision to use hidden cameras, while controversial, proves justified when Zervos’s candid admissions reveal the gulf between private acknowledgment and public silence. The film effectively contrasts heart-wrenching parent testimonials—particularly the devastating account of triplets who simultaneously regressed after vaccination—with the cold institutional responses that dismiss their experiences. Attorney Aaron Siri’s deposition of vaccine luminary Dr. Stanley Plotkin provides another documentary highlight, with Plotkin admitting under oath that five-day safety trials cannot detect autoimmune or neurological conditions that develop after that window, essentially acknowledging that vaccine safety science rests on assumptions rather than data.
From a cinematographic perspective, “An Inconvenient Study” excels at building narrative tension through careful pacing and strategic reveals. The filmmakers wisely hold back the actual study results until after establishing the credibility of both Bigtree and Zervos, making the eventual revelations land with maximum impact. The hidden camera footage, while grainy, carries the authentic tension of genuine investigative journalism—this isn’t polished propaganda but raw documentation of a scientist’s confession. The film’s emotional range, from parents’ anguished testimonials to Bigtree’s visible frustration when Zervos refuses to publish, creates a human dimension that prevents the documentary from becoming merely a data presentation. The inclusion of the cease-and-desist letter from Henry Ford Health’s attorneys in the film’s conclusion adds a layer of institutional intimidation that reinforces the documentary’s central thesis about suppression.
“An Inconvenient Study” stands as essential viewing for anyone concerned about children’s health, scientific integrity, or institutional transparency. The documentary’s power lies not in telling viewers what to think but in exposing information that has been deliberately withheld, allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions. When Dr. Zervos states that “nothing is going to come out of it other than me losing my job,” he inadvertently explains why this study remained hidden and why Bigtree felt compelled to expose it through unconventional means. The film’s call for other institutions to replicate this research feels less like activism and more like basic scientific principle—if the Henry Ford study is flawed, prove it through replication, not suppression. For parents making health decisions for their children, medical professionals questioning orthodox positions, and citizens concerned about institutional capture of science, this documentary provides crucial information that has been systematically kept from public view. Its ultimate message—that parents deserve access to all safety data before making medical decisions for their children—should resonate regardless of one’s position on vaccines, making “An Inconvenient Study” one of the most important documentaries of our time.
Most people go through their entire lives never questioning where money comes from. They assume governments create it, that banks merely store and lend it, and that economic crises are natural phenomena like weather patterns. Stephen Mitford Goodson’s “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind” demolishes these assumptions with documented evidence spanning three millennia: for over three centuries, private banks have created 97% of the world’s money supply from nothing, as interest-bearing debt. Banks don’t lend existing money – they create new money by typing numbers into computers, then charge compound interest on this fiction while seizing real assets when the mathematically impossible debts can’t be repaid.
Goodson’s authority comes from his position as a former Director of the South African Reserve Bank who witnessed firsthand how central banks operate. Unlike academic economists who theorize from ivory towers or journalists who speculate from outside, Goodson sat in the boardroom where monetary policy gets made. He saw the mechanisms of control, understood the deliberate creation of booms and busts, and recognized the same patterns of manipulation he would later trace through Roman copper coins, medieval tally sticks, colonial scrip, and modern electronic transfers. His sudden death in 2018, like so many monetary reformers before him, fits a familiar pattern.
The historical evidence reveals consistent outcomes: whenever governments issue their own money debt-free, civilizations flourish with full employment, stable prices, and cultural achievement. Medieval England’s workers labored just fourteen weeks yearly when tally sticks served as money. Tsarist Russia grew 10% annually with the world’s lowest taxes under state banking. Hitler’s Germany eliminated unemployment while doubling GDP in six years using state-issued currency. Modern North Dakota maintains budget surpluses while every other American state drowns in debt. Every one of these successful systems was destroyed through war, revolution, or assassination. The French Revolution, the American Civil War, both World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the recent destruction of Libya – all were fundamentally about destroying state banking systems that threatened private usury.
The mechanism of enslavement works through mathematical impossibility. When banks create money as debt, every dollar in circulation requires more than a dollar to repay because of interest – but that extra money doesn’t exist unless more debt is created. Society must sink ever deeper into debt just to maintain the money supply, while compound interest transfers real wealth to parasites who produce nothing. When the Federal Reserve creates a trillion dollars with keystrokes, then collects interest on it forever, that’s counterfeiting with legal protection. Sir Josiah Stamp, former Bank of England director, stated it plainly: banks own the earth through their power to create deposits, and with a flick of the pen will create enough to buy it back again even if you took it away.
Today’s cascading crises are predictable outcomes of this system reaching its mathematical limits. The demographic collapse across developed nations – with fertility rates below replacement from Germany to Japan – stems directly from compound interest forcing both spouses to work ever-longer hours for diminishing purchasing power, making children unaffordable. The 2008 crisis that destroyed millions of lives while banks received trillion-dollar bailouts was the system working exactly as designed: create the bubble through easy credit, crash it through credit restriction, then seize real assets during the panic while taxpayers fund the rescue. Goodson documents how every leader who tried to reform this system – Lincoln, Garfield, Kennedy, Qathafi – was assassinated, while every nation that created sovereign money – Napoleonic France, Imperial Russia, National Socialist Germany, modern Libya – was destroyed through wars marketed to the public as ideological conflicts.
The implications of Goodson’s work challenge our entire understanding of modern history. Wars are fought to enforce banking monopolies, not ideologies. Democracy operates as theater while private banks hold true sovereignty through money creation. Our enslavement is mathematical rather than political. The current system’s end game is civilizational extinction, as usury makes human reproduction itself unaffordable. Yet the solution has been proven successful hundreds of times throughout history: governments must reclaim their sovereign right to create money debt-free for the public good, as the American colonies did with colonial scrip, as Lincoln did with greenbacks, as North Dakota does today. You’ve never heard these success stories. You don’t know banks create money from nothing. You believe wars are fought for freedom rather than to enforce debt slavery. This ignorance is carefully cultivated, because as Henry Ford warned, if people understood the banking system, there would be revolution before morning.
The toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS contaminated “almost all” of the popular baby formula brands tested recently by Consumer Reports, it says in a new report.
These results are troubling. The study analyzed 41 popular baby formula brands, including well-known names like Enfamil and Similac, startups like Bobbie, and a range of store and imported brands, for the presence of chemicals like arsenic, lead, BPA, acrylamide and PFAS.
Because the study tested just one sample per brand, more research is needed to be certain which ones contain forever chemicals.
Even more concerning is that many of the PFAS compounds detected have not been thoroughly studied, leaving uncertainty about their potential health risks, especially for infant safety.
PFAS are everywhere, from cookware and food packaging to waterproof clothing and cosmetics. They contaminate water, food such as baby formula, soil, air and household dust, contributing to widespread exposure.
Consumer Reports’ scientists detected PFAS in most of the formula samples, with one particularly concerning compound standing out: PFOS, detected in several samples. It is one of the most notorious PFAS, formerly an ingredient in 3M’s Scotchgard. It was phased out in the U.S. under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency after revelations of PFOS health hazards.
The EPA now regulates PFOS in drinking water with a maximum contaminant level of 4 parts per trillion, due to its classification as a carcinogen.
Because of its known toxicity and potential long-term health impacts, the presence of PFOS in any baby formula is especially alarming. PFAS don’t break down in the environment, and they build up in the human body over time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has detected PFAS in the blood of 99 percent of Americans, including newborn babies.
EWG’s PFAS map shows PFOS contamination in nearly half of the nation’s drinking water. Without any information to the contrary, it’s possible to surmise that some of the PFOS Consumer Reports detected comes from contaminated water used for the formula.
This possible source of PFOS in formula raises urgent questions about manufacturing processes and the need for stronger industry oversight and stricter safety standards to protect infants from exposure to hazardous chemicals.
PFAS exposure risks for babies and children
Babies and young children, whose bodies are still developing, are particularly vulnerable to PFAS exposure, which can have lifelong consequences. Their small size, growing organs and developing immune systems make them especially susceptible to the harmful effects of these bioaccumulative chemicals, which remain in the body for years.
Even small amounts of PFAS in formula can add to cumulative exposure, putting infants’ growth and health at risk.
Research has found PFAS in umbilical cord blood and breast milk, revealing direct prenatal and early-life exposure. Babies born with PFAS in their cord blood are more likely to have elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels – biomarkers linked to future heart disease. PFAS exposure also disrupts bile acids, which are essential for digestion and metabolism, so the risk of chronic health issues may go up as these children grow.
Even very low doses of PFAS can also weaken babies’ immune systems, making them more prone to infection and reducing vaccine effectiveness. PFAS exposure has also been linked to thyroid dysfunction, which can impair growth and brain development. In the gut, PFAS may alter the balance of microbial cells, disrupting digestion and weakening immune defenses.
PFAS pollution has caused a widespread public health crisis. Over 143 million Americans are exposed because of their drinking water. These forever chemicals have contaminated the water supply at 8,865 sites in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and two U.S. territories.
Yet despite mounting evidence of harm, our government mostly fails to regulate PFAS contamination of food, including baby formula.
Following Consumer Reports’ alarming findings, the Food and Drug Administration announced plans to strengthen oversight of the baby formula industry. The agency pledged to increase testing for heavy metals and other contaminants in formula, a welcome step.
But it remains unclear whether tests for PFAS will be included or whether the FDA will establish safe limits for these toxic chemicals in infant nutrition. Without stronger regulations, children will continue to be at risk of harm from this insidious threat.
We urgently need stricter regulations and greater accountability from industries that have allowed PFAS to infiltrate everyday life.
Consumer Reports’ findings are a wake-up call for regulators and manufacturers to prioritize infant safety by eliminating PFAS from formula and strengthening oversight.
What parents need to know
No parent should have to worry whether their baby’s formula contains toxic chemicals. Parents can take practical steps to help reduce their baby’s exposure, including
Using filtered water when preparing powdered formula. Since PFAS can contaminate tap water, a water filter can help reduce exposure. The most effective option is a reverse osmosis system installed under the sink or at the tap, but these systems can be costly. Fortunately, many countertop pitcher filters have also proven effective in lowering PFAS levels, according to EWG tests.
Pushing for stronger regulations. Parents can make their voices heard by supporting consumer safety initiatives that demand the FDA set stricter standards for PFAS and other contaminants in baby formula. Greater oversight and enforcement are essential to protecting infant health.
No family should face the burden of toxic exposure from essential nutrition. By taking steps to reduce risk and advocating for stricter safety measures, parents can help protect their children’s health and push for long-overdue industry accountability.
The film reveals how the government (along with police), from the very beginning tried to suppress the truth of what really went on.
There are persistent claims (by family supporters and some commentators) that:
A large tranche of evidence was effectively withheld or placed under very long restrictions (“embargoed for 100 years”).
One thing that does come out in the film is that a police whistleblower provided the family with footage, recorded in early 2011 by cameras lowered into the mine through bore-holes, showing a pair of glasses, rubber hosing and a wooden pallet and at least two intact bodies.
This is covered here.
On June 19, TV3’s Newshub aired more footage taken inside the Pike River Coal mine in New Zealand’s South Island, which exploded in November 2010, killing 29 men. The video, recorded in early 2011 by cameras lowered into the mine through bore-holes, shows a pair of glasses, rubber hosing and a wooden pallet.
It also clearly shows at least two intact bodies, and there are less clear images of what may be more bodies. These images have not been made public but have been viewed by the families and reporters.
The video is part of several hours of footage suppressed by police for more than six years. It was released to the victims’ families only after some excerpts were leaked and broadcast in April. That video showed members of Mines Rescue working inside the drift tunnel that leads into the main body of the mine. It discredits repeated National Party government claims that the mine is too dangerous to re-enter to investigate the precise cause of the explosion and to recover bodies.
The film, only just released, practically ended with an agreement between the Labour Party and NZ First with a “commitment to re-enter the Pike River mine”
After the agreement, on 20 November 2017 the Government announced the establishment of the Pike River Recovery Agency “to work in close partnership with the Pike 29 families … plan for decisions on the manned re-entry of the drift of the Pike River mine”.
The film shows a scene with a smiling, toothy, Jacinda Adern that mplies she is the hero.
There are two heroes amongst the families on the West Coast. One is trade unionist, Helen Kelly who appears briefly in the movie.
The other is Winston Peters who consistently supported the position of the families.
However, in the film Peters us conspicuous by his absence and Adern is portrayed as the hero.
Much was made in NZ media of bodies being found
This report says the families were “one step closer to discovering why CEO, Peter Whittle escaped prosectution.
However, it is clear that the cover-up continued.
From 2021
WINSTON PETERS ALLEGES THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT COVERING UP THE MINE DISASTER
Some of the best coverage came from WSWS, a British, Trotskyist publication that shows its true political colours when describing Winston Peters as a “right-wing nationalist”who is posing as a supporter of the families, presumably for cynical political reasons.
The Labour Party-led government is racing to shut down the underground investigation of Pike River coal mine. It aims to prevent the recovery of evidence that could lead to prosecutions of those responsible for the disaster which killed 29 workers in November 2010.
The article hones in on the disgusting Andrew Little, now mayor of Wellington – one of the most digusting figures amongst a very bad bunch.
The government is relying on the trade union bureaucracy, which has maintained a conspiracy of silence about the cover-up of one of the country’s worst industrial disasters. E tū, formerly known as the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), had 71 members at Pike River when it exploded; its current national secretary Bill Newson told the WSWS in May that the union “supports the government’s position regarding not re-entering the main mine.”
Minister for Pike River Recovery Andrew Little, who ordered the shutdown of the investigation, was the head of the EPMU when Pike River exploded. This is a clear conflict of interest, since the union was complicit in the disaster. It took no action to stop workers entering the mine, despite knowing about the unsafe conditions. In the days after the disaster, Little defended the company’s safety record.
The government’s move to seal and walk away from the mine as quickly as possible raises disturbing questions of vital importance to the working class in New Zealand and internationally: What is the government seeking to bury, and why?
On July 30, Winston Peters, leader of the right-wing nationalist New Zealand First Party, visited Greymouth, near Pike River, to pose as a supporter of the families. Peters served as deputy prime minister and foreign minister in Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led 2017-2020 government, which also included the Green Party. NZ First lost all its seats in parliament in the October 2020 election, getting only 2.6 percent of the votes.
And, yes, the mine HAS been sealed – something the mine owners and the authorities wanted from the start
The mine has been sealed after the re-entry of the access drift. It is no longer open for further human entry beyond the drift (and the drift itself is now closed). The focus now has shifted to borehole imaging and investigation rather than full human re-entry into the deeper workings (ChatGPT)
DOC has taken steps to develop the site as a memorial and legacy project: the Pike 29 Memorial Track was officially opened in February 2024, connecting the Paparoa Track to the mine‐valley.
The key oversight/government function has shifted: DOC now manages the site and holds the mine records; the PRRA’s core job is done
I’ll leave the final word to ChatGPT, which reflects my own thinking
Bodies still unrecovered – symbolic of a nation’s unhealed wound. The miners remain entombed, and so the event lives on in suspension.
Royal Commission embargo – even if for procedural reasons, it feels to many like truth deferred; the official narrative remains partially sealed.
Site handed to DoC – once seen as a desecration when raised by Key’s government, now presented as closure under Labour. It marks the bureaucratic transformation of tragedy into heritage — tidy for institutions, painful for families.
No criminal convictions – not for lack of evidence, but because the system itself balked. The unlawful deal that let Peter Whittall avoid prosecution was later condemned by the Supreme Court, yet still left no accountability.
Public fatigue – the story, so long and grim, has receded from the headlines. The movie revives empathy, but for a moment; institutions remain unmoved.
So what is one to say?
Perhaps only that Pike River has become a mirror — of how modern states manage moral disasters. The language of “closure” replaces justice; “risk management” replaces responsibility. A memorial track is built, and the living are invited to walk through a landscape the dead cannot leave.
It’s not cynicism to observe this — it’s simply to note that when a society can’t finish a story, it builds a monument instead.
An exposé of the Irish famine (book review) … further illustration of how genocide is not new, and how the victors write our histories … a must read. I encourage you to sub to Unbecoming’s excellent substack. EWNZ
By Chris Fogarty – 30 Q&As – Unbekoming Book Summary
For over 170 years, the world has been told that Ireland suffered a natural famine between 1845 and 1850 – a tragic tale of potato blight and a foolish population’s over-dependence on a single crop. This story, taught in universities, memorialized in museums, and repeated in countless history books, has one fundamental problem: it’s a deliberate lie. Christopher Fogarty’s “Ireland 1845-1850: The Perfect Holocaust and Who Kept it ‘Perfect’” demolishes this narrative with military deployment records, shipping manifests, and Ordnance Survey maps that reveal what actually happened. While only the potato crop failed, Ireland continued producing massive quantities of grain, cattle, dairy, and other foods – all of which were removed at gunpoint by 67 British Army regiments, approximately half of Britain’s entire military force, and shipped to England while the producers starved. The death toll wasn’t the officially claimed 21,770 but approximately five million people, half of Ireland’s population.
The evidence Fogarty presents reads like a prosecutor’s case file. He names every British regiment involved, tracking their movements through Ireland’s 32 counties via National Archives records. He identifies General Sir Edward Blakeney as the Commander-in-Chief who orchestrated this operation from before 1845 through after 1851 – a man Queen Victoria honored with the Order of the Bath in 1849 as he neared completion of his genocidal mission….
A recent study confirming the herbicide’s carcinogenic potential has been the subject of fierce criticism. However, this criticism is based on flawed scientific grounds, Le Monde has reported.
The recent publication of a study indicating an increased risk of various tumors in laboratory rats exposed to glyphosate has sparked numerous comments on social media and in the press, aimed at downplaying or denigrating this research.
These results, published on June 10 in the journal Environmental Health, only confirm the conclusions of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which estimated in 2015 that the studies available at the time provided “sufficient evidence” of glyphosate’s carcinogenicity in animals.
The attacks on this study, led by the Ramazzini Institute in Bologna, Italy, offer an exemplary array of the sleight of hand of “doubt manufacturing,” a rhetoric aimed at undermining confidence in scientific results, often used to delay or fight regulatory decisions.
“The journal is unknown, so the study is flawed.”
Eric Billy, an immuno-oncology researcher, was among the most vocal critics of the Ramazzini Institute study (which was actually an international study with authors from all over the world not just the Ramazzini Institute), which he deemed “flawed.” In a series of messages published on June 14 on his X and Bluesky accounts, which received numerous retweets, this employee of the pharmaceutical company Novartis first accused its authors of having “chosen a more lenient journal to avoid criticism,” explaining that he would have expected to read this article in the journals “Nature, Science, or Cell,” which he believes are of higher quality.
WHY IT IS IRRELEVANT
Environmental Health, published by the SpringerNature group, is actually one of the most influential journals in its field. Its citation rate places it 32nd out of 687 indexed journals covering the fields of public health, environmental health, or occupational health, according to the 2024 ranking by scientific publisher Elsevier. Prestigious journals like Nature or Science do not generally publish tests like the one conducted by the Ramazzini Institute.
“A number of reliable and high-quality toxicity studies, like the one you share with us, are published in specialized journals,” explains Meagan Phelan, spokesperson for publications published under the Science banner. “Although these are essential elements of substance assessment, these tests are not considered conceptual advances and, as such, Science does not generally publish them.”
“Exposed animals live as long as others”
The Ramazzini study did not reveal any significant difference in mortality between rats exposed to glyphosate and unexposed control rats. This point was highlighted by Mr. Billy to put the study’s conclusions into perspective. And it hit the mark: it was later reported in Le Figaro, which saw it as the “first lesson” of this work.
WHY IT’S MORE COMPLICATED
The fact that the study did not reveal any significant differences in survival rates between the two groups was not presented by the Ramazzini researchers as a result in itself. Their protocol was, in fact, designed to detect the carcinogenic potential of a product, not its effect on the animals’ survival: all of them were sacrificed two-thirds of the way through their lives, at the age of 104 weeks. Now, it’s easy to understand that if human smokers were compared to non-smokers, the mortality differences would be small if all individuals were euthanized at the age of 50.
In reality, the absence of a mortality difference between groups of animals over the duration of the test is mainly a guarantee of the quality of the study, for statistical reasons. An animal that dies prematurely will have been exposed for a shorter time to the substance tested, and the probability of tumors developing in its group will therefore be reduced. Its statistical weight in the analysis will therefore be different. A high survival rate in each group, both treated and control, guarantees the “maintenance of statistical power” of the experiment, according to the good practice guides in toxicology (maintained by the OECD).
“The chosen rodent strain is not appropriate.”
Several commentators have also criticized the Ramazzini Institute researchers’ choice of the so-called “Sprague-Dawley” rat strain. Eric Billy argues that the use of this type of rat “has already been strongly criticized by the scientific community due to an abnormally high frequency of spontaneous tumor lesions compared to other rodent strains,” recalling that this strain was used by Gilles-Eric Séralini in his famous and controversial study on GMOs.
WHY THIS IS INCORRECT
In reality, the high rates of spontaneous tumors observed in the “Sprague-Dawley” strain only concern certain sites (tumors of the mammary gland, pituitary gland, etc., found at comparable rates in the treated and control groups). Furthermore, the researchers have at their disposal an abundant literature to take into account the specific characteristics of this strain.
Not only is the “Sprague-Dawley” strain not problematic in itself, but it is the most widely used. In 2024, researchers showed that more than 55% of the 263 carcinogenicity studies of active ingredients conducted in recent years on rats used this strain. The carcinogenicity of Ruxolitinib, a drug substance marketed by Novartis, was, for example, tested on this strain. As for Dr. Séralini’s study (published in 2012, before being retracted and then republished), the choice of strain was not, in itself, among the criticisms made. As summarized by IARC experts in 2015, it was the entire protocol implemented that was criticized.
“The doses tested are unrealistic”
Like several other critical voices, Eric Billy is surprised by the high doses of glyphosate to which rats were exposed in the Ramazzini Institute study, stating that “even the lowest dose tested far exceeds actual human [dietary] exposure” and that “the other two doses are therefore a hundred and a thousand times higher than this human exposure.” The same argument and the same figure are used in Le Figaro.
WHY IT IS IRRELEVANT
This argument is frequently raised to challenge the relevance of the results of animal studies. However, millions of humans exposed for decades cannot be compared to a hundred rats exposed for 24 months. The purpose of these tests is to characterize the carcinogenic potential of substances, not to assess the risks faced by the population at actual exposure levels (sometimes much higher than dietary exposure, for people living near farms, farm workers, etc.).
In fact, the Glyphosate has already been associated with an increased risk of certain lymphomas in farmers in four meta-analyses and one pooled study—the highest levels of evidence in epidemiology. Animal studies allow us to interpret these results, suggesting that these associations are indicative of a causal link. And even if we give credence to the “too high dose” argument, the objection remains unfounded.
The Ramazzini study indeed examined the effects of glyphosate at considerably lower doses than all previous similar studies. In the seven studies selected by European authorities during their latest assessment of the herbicide molecule, the lowest doses tested were 12 to 420 times higher than in the Ramazzini study, and the highest exposures were 10 to 33 times higher.
“The route of exposure is not adequate.”
In the Ramazzini study, the animals were exposed to glyphosate through drinking water, not food. Mr. Billy maintains that this is inadequate, arguing that humans are more likely to be exposed through food.
WHY IT IS IRRELEVANT
Among the animal studies on glyphosate submitted to health authorities or evaluated by IARC, none has been deemed inadmissible because it opted for a similar exposure route. Drinking water is, moreover, considered acceptable for assessing “food or environmental chemicals, including pesticides,” just like diet, according to OECD Good Practice Guide No. 451.
This false controversy is a classic argument. In 1953, the Sloan Kettering Institute’s first work on the carcinogenic potential of tobacco involved observing the development of tumors on the shaved skin of rodents after smearing it with cigarette tar extracts. The American Tobacco Company criticized the scientists’ use of a “high concentration of smoke extracts—entirely different from the smoke a person might inhale from a cigarette,” while stating that “all scientists agree that there is no known relationship between skin cancers in mice and lung cancers in humans.”
Like the Ramazzini researchers, those at the Sloan Kettering Institute were not seeking to exactly mimic human exposure to the agent being tested (no one smears cigarette tar on themselves), but to test its carcinogenic potential.
“The number of animals is insufficient”
In his critical thread, Eric Billy makes a calculation estimating that, to achieve greater statistical robustness, the Ramazzini researchers should have used at least three times as many rats, or 160 to 220 individuals per group.
WHY THIS IS INCORRECT
Such requirements are fanciful. No chronic toxicity or carcinogenicity study of glyphosate conducted on rats has ever enrolled so many animals. All studies similar to those of Ramazzini one have included around 50 rats per group. And for good reason: this is the threshold recommended by the OECD guidance document.
“In this case, it is completely ridiculous to require more animals per group,” asserts American biostatistician Christopher Portier, former director of the US National Toxicology Program, whose work is an authority on the subject. According to this specialist, an expert witness for plaintiffs in several ongoing trials in the United States, the Ramazzini researchers “managed to demonstrate a statistically significant trend toward an increase in certain tumors in the treated animals, even though there were only 50 per group. Why would the experiment be repeated with more animals to gain more statistical power?”
In reality, it is when a statistically significant effect is not found that it is possible to argue that the number of animals is too small, and that it may be useful to increase statistical power. “The only disadvantage of having 50 rats per group, rather than 160 or 220, is ‘missing’ an effect, certainly not seeing an effect that doesn’t exist,” concludes Mr. Portier.
This article benefited from discussions with researchers at the Ramazzini Institute and critical review by three researchers (INRAE and INSERM) involved in toxicology work involving animal studies.
What is the “manufacturing of doubt”?
As science historians Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University) and Erik Conway (NASA) have shown in a landmark book (Merchants of Doubt, 2012), the “manufacturing of doubt” was developed in the 1950s by tobacco companies to deny or relativize the effects of cigarettes.
This rhetoric turns science against itself, by distorting the intellectual tools at the heart of scientists’ approaches (methodical doubt, demands for rigor, distrust of claims perceived as spectacular, etc.). It is thus very effective on members of the scientific and medical communities who do not work directly on the targeted subjects, as well as on audiences attached to rationality and the defense of scientific values, or even journalists who sometimes repeat such circulating arguments without thinking twice.
A highly effective propaganda technique, “manufacturing doubt” sometimes requires lengthy explanations to unmask, especially since it sometimes mixes legitimate criticisms with others based on untruths, misinterpretations, or simply erroneous considerations. It constitutes a toolbox constantly used for decades by a variety of industrial sectors wishing to protect their activities from any health or environmental regulation.
“Injuries are 10–15 times higher … 30–50-year-olds are dropping dead… The victims fear backlash or can’t accept they were misled …The media and tech giants actively suppress these stories … “
Note: Barry Young, NZ data analyst also revealed shocking details he discovered in our data and was promptly shut down, vilified and silenced… take note Kiwis … it appears that the safe & effective is not & it is still being promoted (more links here) EWNZ
Wall Street Whistleblower Reveals Grim Truth Behind Rising Deaths of the Young and Fit
Edward Dowd, a veteran data analyst and ex-BlackRock executive, has just blown the lid off a terrifying trend: 5,000 people are dying every week, and the insurance industry knows why.
Linked directly to Covid mRNA ‘vaccines’, the spike in excess deaths is especially devastating among young adults.
Dowd says the silence is deadly, and the numbers are undeniable.
One of the world’s leading data experts has revealed that the insurance industry is now seeing up to 5,000 deaths every single week that are linked to Covid mRNA “vaccines.”
The staggering death toll was disclosed by Edward Dowd, a renowned Wall Street data analyst.
Dowd dropped the bombshell during a recent interview on the Commodity Culture podcast.
While sounding the alarm about the discovery, Dowd revealed that the number of healthy young adults “dropping dead” has skyrocketed.
He also notes that “vaccine” injuries are now “10-15 times higher” than before the mass Covid “vaccination” campaign.
Worryingly, however, he says that “vaccine” injury victims and families of the dead are too afraid to speak out because they “fear backlash.”
Dowd argues that the reports on mRNA injection-related deaths and injuries are being shut down by Big Tech and the corporate media.
In the United States alone, Dowd revealed that insurance data shows “3,000–5,000 vaccine-linked deaths a week.”
“Injuries are 10–15 times higher,” he added.
“30–50-year-olds are dropping dead.
“The victims fear backlash or can’t accept they were misled.
“The media and tech giants actively suppress these stories,” he warns.
(click on the image belowto watch video at rumble.com)
Dowd, a former executive at the world’s largest investment firm, BlackRock, has been sounding the alarm about surging deaths among the Covid-vaxxed for some time.
He is considered one of America’s leading data experts.
Through his expert analysis of insurance industry data, Dowd has become a prominent figure in investigations into the impact of the global Covid “vaccination” campaign.
As Slay News previously reported, Dowd dropped a chilling warning in April after uncovering evidence showing that the number of excess deaths of working-age Americans is skyrocketing.
According to an alarming warning from Dowd, insurance industry data shows that excess deaths are soaring among people aged 18 to 64 years old.
These deaths started exploding after the Covid mRNA “vaccines” were rolled out for public use in early 2021.
However, the deaths appear to show no signs of slowing down, despite the pandemic being long over and “vaccination” rates dropping off.
In January 2022, Life Insurance CEO Scott Davidson reported that death rates among working-aged people aged 18 to 64 were “up 40 percent over what they were pre-pandemic.”
He explained that a 40 percent spike in deaths was completely unprecedented.
Davidson compared a 10 percent rise in deaths to a once-in-200-year flood.
According to Dowd, excess deaths are now “off the charts.”
Davidson also noted that excess deaths that started surging in 2021 were non-Covid deaths.
(click on the image below to watch video at rumble.com)
Meanwhile, other highly vaccinated nations around the world are continuing to sound the alarm about surging deaths.
An explosive new alert has emerged from Singapore regarding the nation’s skyrocketing excess death rate among those who received Covid mRNA “vaccines.”
The chilling data has raised serious questions about the true toll of the aggressive global Covid “vaccination” campaign.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that “excess deaths” are the number of deaths above what would be expected based on historical trends.
According to bombshell data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) and peer-reviewed studies, the country experienced a sharp and sustained rise in excess deaths immediately following the rollout of Covid “vaccines.”
The spike is an ominous signal that the vaccines may have played a significant role in the surge of mortality.
The data paints a disturbing picture of a country that, despite being one of the most vaccinated in the world, is facing unprecedented levels of death.
In March 2022, excess mortality in Singapore spiked to an astonishing 49.9% above expected deaths.
The broader period between February and April 2022 saw an average of 24.0% higher deaths than usual.
Alarmingly, however, this wasn’t a temporary uptick.
Excess deaths have continued surging long after the pandemic.
As of December 2024, the most recent data reveals that excess deaths in Singapore have stabilized at approximately 25-30% above the historical baseline.
The data suggests that this elevated mortality rate has become the new normal for the fully “vaccinated” nation.
The New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science (NZDSOS) have provided a fact sheet on their covid-19 ‘vaccine’ (experimental injection) concerns. EWNZ
PREPARED BY INDEPENDENT DOCTORS OF NEW ZEALAND
ABOUT THE ISSUE
Over 300 medical professionals and 55,000 New Zealanders have strong concerns about covid-19 vaccines. Since 2021, formal communications have been sent to government officials and regulators documenting serious safety issues with covid-19 mRNA vaccines
KEY SAFETY CONCERNS DNA CONTAMINATION CONFIRMED
Laboratory testing by virologist Dr David Speicher and nine independent labs worldwide has confirmed all tested vials are heavily contaminated with synthetic DNA
The FDA has received a landmark Citizen Petition (21 January 2025) demanding immediate revocation of approvals for Pfizer’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax
DNA levels exceed the 10 ng/dose limit by up to 145 times
Lipid nanoparticle encapsulation may allow synthetic DNA to integrate with our own DNA, with potential to cause permanent genetic changes and heighten cancer risk
Billions of cancer-causing SV40 (monkey virus) DNA insertions per dose have been found
At least one of the tested contaminated Australian batches was administered to New Zealand children
Read &/or download the pdf for more info at the link
This is all sounding not unlike the 1080 ruse in NZ… not forgetting the glyphosate one either. All those claims these products are harmless are blatant lies! EWNZ
“There is no upside to this poisoning of Australian farming land, but rather, a wide array of agonising downsides from the brutal programme of poisoning of insects, animals, earth, waterways, and humans. There is not even a clear body of evidence that this supposed “pest control” programme is actually working to reduce the fire ant population. However it is putting many farmers under such added stress that they are breaking down under the strain of the bullying by bureaucrats, and are starting to abandon the farming lifestyle altogether – which then in turn puts food production supply lines under great stress, causing a rise in food costs to Australians already struggling to feed their families.”
This is a video discussion with Liz Gunn, Ginger Bartlett, Tania Fouquet & Bronwyn Holm.
As part of the larger worldwide pushback against what is now seen by millions of aware people as ‘The Climate Change Rort’, we speak to Bronwyn Holm, Ginger, and Tanya about the blatant government overreach and bullying on display with the Fire Ant Eradication Programme in southeast Queensland., Australia.
Ginger and Tanya discuss the government’s forced and unnecessary application of toxic chemicals on farming properties, despite there being zero evidence of fire ant presence on these rural lands.
The toxins are poured on to the land by the overweening and cruelly indifferent bureaucratic enforcers, who have been given vast powers to behave in tyrannical ways by the WEF puppet politicians.
The poisons end up causing widespread environmental damage, the suffering deaths of family pets, as well as serious harm to the health of the farmers who find their lands invaded- and their rights as owners of private land completely over-ruled and ignored.
There is no upside to this poisoning of Australian farming land, but rather, a wide array of agonising downsides from the brutal programme of poisoning of insects, animals, earth, waterways, and humans. There is not even a clear body of evidence that this supposed “pest control” programme is actually working to reduce the fire ant population.
However it is putting many farmers under such added stress that they are breaking down under the strain of the bullying by bureaucrats, and are starting to abandon the farming lifestyle altogether – which then in turn puts food production supply lines under great stress, causing a rise in food costs to Australians already struggling to feed their families.
Included in this widespread discussion about the current intentional globalist cull of farmers, and the manufactured ‘food provision and cost crisis’, is a clarion call for Affidavits- sworn statements of truths of the suffering by Australian farmers – and other tangible evidence about the failures of this pest control scourge, from all farmers who are sick of being pushed around and who want to join up to offer a strong challenge to the Fire Ant Programme.
What is happening in Queensland is part of a much larger picture of unprecedented global government cruelty to our valuable farmers, especially in Western countries.
It’s also part of the Marxist Agenda 2030, from the UN, which has a plan to bring The People to our knees through famine and war and societal division, in order that they can usher in fully digital ID and control, as well as centralised financial control of the human race that they aim to treat like second class citizens of the world, in just the same way that has been done in China.
The People of Australia are called instead to stand together, and to stage collective action, now, against their globalist government, to protect Australia’s land and the food security – for which farmers are needed in vast numbers.
When Australians stand up and push back on this unacceptable bullying of farmers, using fabricated ‘excuses’ like the imagined ‘Fire Ant Problem’, then the world will follow suit.
Please Australia, stand with your farmers and join them, and farmers we ask you all to be united, fearless, and outspoken in your stance against the thoroughly discredited – but highly propagandised – Climate Change Con.
For over a century, vaccination has been repeatedly linked to severe neurological injuries including brain damage—with many modern studies showing a 3-10 fold increase in common chronic illnesses.
To dodge this massive liability, all research into vaccine injuries (and many other catastrophes like Agent Orange) was suppressed so that health authorities could claim there was “no evidence” of vaccine harm.
Another scheme was to redefine the brain injury as “autism” rather than encephalitis (which the US government was legally required to provide injury compensation for).
Previously, children with significant vaccine brain damage were referred to as “mentally retarded.” However, after a multi-decade campaign cancelled “retarded” they were instead diagnosed as autistic—a vague term which blurs severe and minor disability together, thereby effectively concealing the severe cases from the public’s awareness.
This article will reveal the manipulative techniques and wordplay that have been used to conceal vaccine injuries from the public’s awareness, as now is the time when we can at last end this atrocity.
I’ve long believed that public relations (propaganda) is one of the most powerful but invisible forces in our society. Again and again, I’ve watched professional PR firms create narratives that most of the country believes, regardless of how much it goes against their self-interests. What’s most remarkable is that despite the exact same tactics being used repeatedly on the public, most people simply can’t see it. When you try to point out exactly how they’re being bamboozled by yet another PR campaign, they often can’t recognize it—instead insisting you’re paranoid or delusional.
That’s why one of my major goals in this publication has been to expose this industry. Once you understand their playbook—having “independent” experts push sculpted language that media outlets then repeat—it becomes very easy to spot, and saves you from falling into the traps most people do. The COVID-19 vaccines, for instance, were facilitated by the largest PR campaign of our lifetime.
One of the least appreciated consequences of this industry is that many of our cultural beliefs ultimately originate from PR campaigns. This explains why so many widely believed things are “wrong”—if a belief were actually true, it wouldn’t require a massive PR investment to instill in society. Due to PR’s power, the viewpoints it instills tend to crowd out other cultural beliefs.
In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at what’s behind one of those implanted beliefs: “vaccines don’t cause autism.”
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The Frequency of Vaccine Injuries
When vaccinated and unvaccinated children are compared, chronic illnesses are 3-7X as common in the vaccinated individuals. Because of this, there is a longstanding embargo on ever conducting this type of research (allowing the status quo to remain that “no evidence exists” between the vaccine and the injury).
Recently, Senator Ron Johnson revealed that a robust study comparing vaccinated children to unvaccinated had been conducted at a premier medical institution in 2020, but due to the results it showed, despite previously committing to publishing the paper, its authors chose not to, due to how much it violated the medical orthodoxy.
It’s important to note that beyond these results being earth-shattering, they are also entirely in line with every other long-term comparative study that has ever been done on vaccines—all of which I synopsized here (along with the characteristic signs that allow one to identify the frightfully frequent vaccine-injured children).
Erasing Encephalitis
A key theme of George Orwell’s book 1984 is that language defines a culture. If ideas aren’t present in language, the populace can’t conceive of them (which is why 1984’s ruling party eliminated words like ‘freedom’, ‘rebellion’, and ‘justice’ from the new language).
Another way language controls the public consciousness is through the use of ambiguous term which are not clearly defined, so that depending on the needs of the situation, the audience can be steered towards the desired interpretation of it, even if those interpretations sometimes overtly contradict each other (effectively allowing the PR firm’s client to “have their cake and eat it).
For example, Fauci was a master of using slippery language to constantly get whatever he wanted with no accountability through implying but never explicitly stating his desired conclusion (which the media would then run with). A classic example is having everyone in lockstep assert vaccines are “safe and effective” without ever defining what that actually means, thereby allowing that meaningless statement to be treated as “vaccines are 100% safe and effective,” yet simultaneously, having no accountability for lying as those who repeat it never actually said that. This was best demonstrated when Fauci (who continually told us the vaccine would definitely prevent us from getting COVID) was grilled at a recent Congressional hearing, where in response to:
But we knew from the trials that people who got vaccinated still were subject to getting COVID, so was the COVID-19 vaccine 100% effective?
Fauci stated:
I don’t believe any vaccine is 100% effective.
Note: in a recent article I also highlighted how the ambiguous phrase “brain death” was created to make people believe unresponsive individuals were in fact dead, thereby both removing the societal cost of perpetually caring for them and securing a reliable supply of donor organs.
One of the most widely recognized side effects of vaccination is neurological damage (particularly to the cranial nerves and brain). Prior to the censorship which took over our medical journals, reports of vaccine brain and nerve injuries (e.g., encephalitis) were extensively reported throughout the medical literature—including many identical to what are seen in modern-day autism.
Furthermore, it used to be widely recognized that vaccines could make you “mentally retarded” or “severely retarded.” Consider for example, the language at this 1983 debate between doctors which took place on the Donahue Show (which at the time was the largest talk show in America)—that to my knowledge was the last time a publicized debate on vaccines was allowed to happen…
“There has been an explosion of suffering and death from diet-related disease in the UK so I don’t think it’s credible to claim that the committee has been very effective,” said a London professor.
The following report was first published on winepressnews.com on January 8th, 2025. The following report is by the BMJ Group, first published on September 12th, 2024:
More than half of the experts on the UK government’s nutrition advisory panel have links to the food industry, reveals an investigationby The BMJ today.
At least 11 of the 17 members of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) have conflicts of interest with the likes of Nestle, sugar manufacturer Tate and Lyle, and the world’s largest ice cream producer, Unilever, reports freelance journalist Sophie Borland.
And at least six out of the 11 members of SACN’s Subgroup on Maternal and Child Nutrition have ties to food firms, including baby food manufacturers and formula milk brands.
SACN is a powerful group of people appointed as independent experts to advise the government, which in turn influences policy, explains Borland. Since being set up in 2000 it has produced high profile guidelines on daily salt and sugar intake, vitamin D supplements, and feeding babies.
But there is concern that both SACN – and the previous governments reviewing its recommendations – have not done enough to curb rising obesity levels and food-related ill health.
The BMJ looked at the interests declared by SACN members – in publicly available documents published on the government website – within the past three years.
Among them is David Mela, a retired senior scientist from Unilever, who has done consultancy work for Unilever, Tate and Lyle, Coca Cola’s Israel franchise CBC Israel, and Cargill, which produces cocoa and chocolate products among other things.
Another member, Julie Lovegrove, is chair of an expert group at the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) Europe, whose member companies include Pepsico, Cadbury’s US owner Mondelez, and General Mills, the American firm behind Cheerios and Haagen Dazs.
Members of SACN’s Maternal and Child Nutrition subgroup include Ann Prentice, a council member of the Nestle Foundation, and Marion Hetherington who has undertaken work for Danone and baby food brand Ella’s Kitchen, the latter on an unpaid basis. The group’s chair, Ken Ong, has also received research funding from Mead Johnston Nutrition, which makes formula milk.
The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) responded on behalf of SACN and all members named in this article, saying SACN members are required to declare any potential conflicts of interest annually – and new ones at the first appropriate committee meeting, which are included in the minutes and published on the SACN website.
It added: “No members of the committee are directly employed by the food and drink industry, and all have a duty to act in the public interest and to be independent and impartial.”
But Chris van Tulleken, associate professor at University College London and author of a best-selling book on ultra-processed food, says: “Even small financial conflicts affect behaviour and beliefs in subtle or unconscious ways,” while Rob Percival, head of policy at the Soil Association, says: “We’re concerned that the committee and its integrity might be undermined by those ties to the food industry.”
Experts tell The BMJ the make-up of SACN needs to be reviewed in light of members’ ties to the food industry. However, Kat Jenner, director of the Obesity Health Alliance, says these ties are partly a result of the lack of money in relevant research.
Alison Tedstone, former chief nutritionist for Public Health England, also suggests that refusing to allow experts with industry ties on SACN would “diminish” its expertise and could delay future legislation.
Yet Van Tulleken insists: “Despite two decades of work from a conflicted SACN there has been an explosion of suffering and death from diet-related disease in the UK so I don’t think it’s credible to claim that the committee has been very effective.
“There are some excellent independent experts but they are a minority and in my view their work has been hampered by conflicts of interest with the industry that has created this health crisis. SACN must become independent of the food industry.”
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It isn’t just the ‘safe & effective’ itself that’s killing us, but its consequences all throughout society—including the airliners, many small planes and helicopters, and the military
This essay builds primarily on Eric Dubay’s “Schools = Forced Government Indoctrination Camps,” which synthesizes and presents the historical transformation of American education into a system of control. Dubay’s work itself draws heavily on the pioneering research of John Taylor Gatto and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, whose decades of investigation and documentation provide the foundational evidence for understanding how schools became indoctrination centers.
John Taylor Gatto, the award-winning New York teacher who quit because he was “no longer willing to hurt children,” offers an insider’s testimony that validates everything Dubay documents. His “Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher” strips away the veneer of education to reveal the actual curriculum: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and constant surveillance. These aren’t failures of the system—they are the system.
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt brings the receipts. As a senior policy advisor in the Reagan administration’s Department of Education, she had access to the documents that prove the deliberate nature of education’s destruction. Her book “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” provides the paper trail—the foundation reports, government memos, and policy documents that show this was never about education. It was always about control.
Together, these three sources paint a picture that many will find difficult to accept: that the schools we trust with our children were designed as factories to produce compliant workers and consumers, not educated citizens capable of self-governance. The evidence they present isn’t theoretical or conspiratorial—it comes from the architects of the system themselves, who wrote quite plainly about their intentions to use schooling to create a manageable society.
Understanding this history matters now more than ever. As we witness populations accepting unprecedented restrictions on their freedom, as we see adults unable to evaluate conflicting claims or think beyond expert pronouncements, as we observe the widespread inability to imagine alternatives to existing systems—we’re seeing the intended outcomes of a century-long project. The dumbing down wasn’t a mistake. The destruction of critical thinking wasn’t accidental. The production of dependent, anxious, controllable populations was the goal.
This essay synthesizes the work of Dubay, Gatto, and Iserbyt to tell the complete story: how American education was captured, transformed, and weaponized against the very people it claims to serve. The truth they reveal is uncomfortable, even painful. But until we understand how thoroughly we’ve been processed by this system, we cannot begin to reclaim our capacity for independent thought and autonomous action. And without that capacity, we remain what the system designed us to be: human resources awaiting instruction.
Introduction: The Uncomfortable Truth About Modern Schooling
Before 1852, American education consisted of one-room schoolhouses, independent teachers, and students of all ages attending of their own free will. A child in 1840s America might spend a few months learning to read from the Bible, master arithmetic through practical farm calculations, and study rhetoric from books that would challenge today’s college students. The literacy rate in Connecticut showed only one in every 579 people was illiterate. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” sold 600,000 copies to a population of just 3 million—of whom twenty percent were slaves and fifty percent indentured servants.
Today’s reality presents a stark contrast. After twelve years of mandatory schooling, one in five American adults is functionally illiterate. Students graduate unable to think critically, emotionally dependent on authority, and conditioned to accept their place in economic hierarchies they don’t understand. This transformation didn’t happen by accident or incompetence. As John Taylor Gatto discovered during his thirty years as a New York City teacher—including three awards as Teacher of the Year—the system works exactly as designed. The problem is that it was never designed to educate.
The architects of modern schooling stated their intentions plainly. In 1906, William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, declared that ninety-nine students out of one hundred are “automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom.” This wasn’t a lament but a goal. John D. Rockefeller, whose General Education Board would reshape American schools, was even more explicit in his mission statement: “We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets, or men of letters… The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
Charlotte Iserbyt, a former senior policy advisor in the Reagan administration’s Department of Education, spent decades documenting how this agenda unfolded through the 20th century. Her research reveals a paper trail of deliberate decisions to transform American education from a system developing individual potential into one producing manageable populations. The methods evolved—from Prussian discipline to Soviet psychology to Silicon Valley algorithms—but the objective remained constant: replacing critical thinking with conditioned responses.
This is not a story of good intentions gone wrong. It’s a documented history of powerful interests using schools to solve what they saw as the problem of too much democracy, too much individual liberty, and too many people capable of questioning authority. Understanding this history isn’t merely academic—it’s essential for recognizing why millions of adults today struggle to evaluate evidence, question experts, or imagine alternatives to the systems that confine them.
The Architecture of Control: From Local to Federal
The transformation of American education from local community schools to a federalized system of control happened through calculated steps spanning seventy years. Between 1852 and 1918, every state adopted compulsory schooling laws—not because communities demanded them, but despite fierce resistance at every turn. As Edward Ross wrote in 1901, plans were underway to “replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media.” The state would shake loose from church and reach out to school, making children belong “more to the state and less and less to the parent.”
The initial laws seemed modest. Ten to twelve weeks of attendance for children aged nine to twelve. But incrementally, like a ratchet that only turns one way, the requirements expanded. The school year lengthened from three months to nine. The age range stretched downward to kindergarten and upward through high school. By the 1970s, four-year-olds entered preschool, and by 2000, twenty-six-year-old doctors were still being institutionalized in formal education. Each extension came wrapped in the language of opportunity and progress, never acknowledging that longer schooling meant longer separation from family, community, and meaningful work.
The federalization began in earnest with the 1870 founding of the National Education Association, which immediately announced that science courses nationwide must restructure to teach evolution as fact, not theory. This wasn’t about science—it was about establishing that centralized authorities, not local communities, would determine what children learned. The pattern repeated with each federal intervention: create a crisis, propose a solution requiring centralized control, then never relinquish that control regardless of outcomes.
World War I provided the perfect crisis. The U.S. Army’s intelligence tests revealed that hundreds of thousands of recruits were illiterate—though literacy had been near-universal before compulsory schooling. Rather than question why forced education produced worse results than voluntary learning, reformers demanded more control, more standardization, more years of mandatory attendance. The military’s need for compliant soldiers who followed orders without question became the template for producing compliant workers who would accept industrial discipline without resistance.
The Reece Committee of 1953 and the earlier Walsh Commission both concluded that private foundations—particularly Rockefeller and Carnegie—had essentially purchased control of American education policy. Norman Dodd, the Reece Committee’s research director, reported a chilling conversation with Rowan Gaither, president of the Ford Foundation. Gaither told him bluntly that these foundations operated under White House directives to “use our grant-making power to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” When Dodd suggested this investigation might proceed, Gaither warned: “If you proceed with the investigation as you have outlined, you will be killed.”
The creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979 completed the architecture of control. What began as local parents teaching their children to read had become a vast bureaucracy employing millions, consuming hundreds of billions of dollars, and producing steadily declining results. Yet the worse the outcomes, the more power and funding the system demanded. Failure became its own justification for expansion.
Gatto observed this paradox firsthand: the system’s failures weren’t bugs but features. Every reform that promised to help struggling students actually extended institutional control over their lives. Every program to close achievement gaps widened them. Every initiative to promote critical thinking produced more passive conformity. The architecture wasn’t broken—it was performing exactly as its architects intended, creating what Iserbyt documented as “the deliberate dumbing down of America.”
The Hidden Curriculum: Seven Lessons of Compliance
John Taylor Gatto’s revelation came after winning his third Teacher of the Year award in 1991. In his acceptance speech—later published as “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher”—he exposed what he actually taught, regardless of the subject on his certificate. These seven lessons form the hidden curriculum of every American school, the real content beneath the surface of math, English, and history.
The first lesson is confusion. Nothing connects to anything else. Students jump from mathematics to literature to physical education at the ring of a bell, with no relationship between subjects, no unified understanding of the world. As Gatto explained, children learn “the un-relating of everything,” an infinite fragmentation that prevents them from ever constructing coherent meaning from their experience. A child studying the Revolutionary War at 10:15 must instantly forget it at 11:00 to memorize plant cells, then abandon those at 11:45 for Spanish conjugations. This deliberate incoherence isn’t poor planning—it’s the point. Confused people don’t ask dangerous questions.
The second lesson is class position. Students are numbered, sorted, tracked, and labeled from their first day. They learn to stay where they’re placed, to envy those above them and despise those below. The lesson penetrates so deeply that adults continue competing for position decades after graduation, never questioning why human worth should be ranked and sorted like industrial products. The gifted program teaches arrogance, the remedial class teaches shame, and everyone learns their place in hierarchies they didn’t create and can’t escape.
The third lesson is indifference. Nothing is worth finishing. No project, no thought, no conversation survives the bell. Students learn to invest themselves completely in the moment’s task, then abandon it without hesitation when authority demands. This produces adults who can’t sustain attention, can’t delay gratification, and can’t complete anything without external compulsion. They become perfect consumers, always seeking the next stimulation, never satisfied, never still.
The fourth lesson is emotional dependency. Stars, stickers, grades, and praise teach children that their worth depends on authority’s approval. The teacher’s mood becomes the classroom’s weather. A smile means you’re good; a frown means you’re bad. Decades later, these same students desperately seek validation from bosses, experts, and celebrities, unable to trust their own judgment about their own value. They’ve been taught that self-respect is arrogance and self-knowledge is delusion.
The fifth lesson is intellectual dependency. Good students wait for teachers to tell them what to think. Of the infinite things worth learning, only those assigned matter. Curiosity becomes cheating—looking ahead in the book, asking about topics not on the test, wondering about connections the curriculum doesn’t make. The successful student is one who can suppress their own interests and enthusiastically perform assigned thinking. This produces adults who wait for experts to explain reality, who cannot form opinions without official guidance, who panic when faced with questions that don’t have authorized answers.
The sixth lesson is provisional self-esteem. Report cards teach that worth is always conditional, always measured, always compared. A child who knows they’re loved regardless of performance is impossible to control. So schools ensure that no achievement is ever enough, no status ever secure. The honor student fears the first B, the athlete dreads the faster rival, everyone learns that identity itself is provisional, subject to constant evaluation and revision by authority.
The seventh lesson is that one can’t hide. Surveillance is constant and total. Hall passes, bathroom monitors, homework that invades home life, guidance counselors who demand emotional transparency, standardized tests that measure the psyche as much as knowledge. Students learn that privacy is suspicious, that secrets are dangerous, that authority has the right to know everything. They’re being prepared for a world of credit scores, social media surveillance, and employment monitoring that tracks every keystroke.
These seven lessons explain why school reform always fails. You can’t fix a system that’s working perfectly. The hidden curriculum produces exactly what it was designed to produce: emotionally needy, intellectually dependent, confused and compliant people who will fill the jobs they’re given, buy the products they’re told to want, and never question the structures that confine them.
The Rockefeller Design: Engineering Society Through Schools
The Rockefeller influence on American education represents one of history’s most successful social engineering projects. Through the General Education Board, founded in 1903 with an initial endowment rivaling the entire federal budget for education, John D. Rockefeller didn’t just reform schools—he rebuilt them from the foundation up to serve industrial capitalism’s need for manageable workers and predictable consumers.
The General Education Board’s mission statement deserves careful reading because it states explicitly what critics of education usually only suspect. “In our dreams,” it declared, “people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own goodwill upon a grateful and responsive folk.” This wasn’t educational philosophy—it was industrial production applied to human beings.
Rockefeller’s lieutenants understood that direct control would provoke resistance. Instead, they used grants and gifts to make schools dependent on foundation money, then attached conditions that seemed reasonable but fundamentally altered education’s purpose. Teacher training colleges received millions, but only if they adopted foundation-approved curricula that emphasized classroom management over subject knowledge. School districts got new buildings if they implemented “scientific” tracking systems that sorted students into future roles. Universities expanded with Rockefeller funds, then found their research agendas shaped by what the foundation would finance.
The strategy worked through three mechanisms that Charlotte Iserbyt documents extensively. First, they funded the experts who would define educational problems and solutions. When the National Education Association needed research, Rockefeller foundations provided it. When superintendents wanted training, Rockefeller programs delivered it. Soon, questioning foundation-backed reforms meant questioning science itself.
Second, they created interlocking networks of influence. Foundation trustees sat on education boards, education leaders joined foundation committees, and everyone attended the same conferences, read the same journals, and cited the same research—all funded by the same source. Dissent didn’t need to be suppressed because dissenters couldn’t get hired, published, or promoted within this self-reinforcing system.
Third, they played a long game measured in generations, not election cycles. While politicians came and went, the foundations persisted, accumulating influence like compound interest. A teacher trained in 1920 under Rockefeller-funded programs would still be teaching Rockefeller methods in 1960. A superintendent who implemented foundation reforms in one district would be promoted to spread them to another. Each generation of educators grew up assuming foundation priorities were simply how education worked.
The Rockefeller foundations didn’t work alone. The Carnegie Corporation, established by another industrial titan who understood that controlling education meant controlling society, pursued parallel strategies. Together, they funded the transformation of reading instruction from phonics to “look-say” methods that produced functional illiteracy. They promoted the replacement of classical education with vocational training. They supported the elimination of history in favor of “social studies” that disconnected students from their past.
The brilliance of the Rockefeller design was making teachers and administrators complicit without their knowledge. Well-meaning educators implemented reforms they believed would help children, never realizing these reforms were designed to limit children’s potential. A teacher using foundation-created curricula genuinely wanted students to succeed—success had simply been redefined as accepting your designated role in the economic order.
By the 1950s, the transformation was so complete that Congressional investigations could barely comprehend what had happened. The Reece Committee found evidence of a deliberate agenda to collectivize American society through education, but the findings were dismissed as conspiracy theory. How could philanthropy be subversive? How could gifts have strings attached? The investigators were right but too late. The Rockefeller design had become the only design anyone could imagine.
The foundations’ own archives, which Iserbyt studied extensively, reveal they knew exactly what they were doing. Internal memos discuss “the importance of social control,” the need to “direct human evolution,” and strategies for “managing the dangerous classes.” They weren’t hiding their agenda—they were counting on a populace too well-schooled to recognize it.
From Citizens to Human Resources: The Workforce Pipeline
The transformation of students into “human resources” marks the complete industrialization of education. This shift in language from “children” and “students” to “human capital” and “workforce development” isn’t merely semantic—it represents the fundamental reconception of human beings as economic inputs rather than sovereign individuals. The U.S. Department of Education’s embrace of “lifelong learning” and “21st-century skills” masks a darker reality: the conversion of schools into workforce training centers for a managed economy.
The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), established in 1990, crystallized this transformation. Its report, “What Work Requires of Schools,” didn’t ask what children need to become fulfilled human beings or engaged citizens. It asked only what employers wanted from their workers. The answer became the new curriculum: compliance, teamwork, acceptance of authority, and just enough literacy to follow instructions but not enough to question them.
School-to-work programs, promoted heavily in the 1990s under both Republican and Democratic administrations, eliminated the pretense that education was about anything other than economic production. Students as young as fourteen were tracked into career paths, their courses determined by workforce projections rather than individual interests or aptitudes. A child who showed mechanical aptitude would be steered toward technical training, regardless of whether they dreamed of writing poetry. One who tested well would be pushed toward college, even if they wanted to work with their hands.
Iserbyt, working inside the Department of Education, watched this transformation accelerate through the 1980s. She documented how Soviet education methods, explicitly designed for a planned economy, were imported wholesale into American schools under the guise of “effective teaching strategies.” The similarities weren’t coincidental—both systems needed to produce predictable outputs for centrally managed economies. The U.S.-Soviet education agreements of 1985, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev, formalized this exchange of “pedagogical techniques” that treated children as products to be molded rather than individuals to be educated.
The language of manufacturing pervaded education reform. Students became “products,” teachers became “delivery systems,” and schools became “production units.” Quality control meant standardized testing. Efficiency meant larger class sizes and scripted curricula. Innovation meant finding cheaper ways to produce the same outcomes. The factory model that reformers claimed to oppose had actually conquered education completely—it just dressed in the language of reform.
Outcome-based education (OBE), promoted by William Spady and implemented nationwide in the 1990s, epitomized this industrial approach. Rather than teaching subjects, schools would produce “outcomes”—predetermined behaviors and attitudes that students must demonstrate. The outcomes always emphasized workplace skills and social attitudes over academic knowledge. A typical OBE goal might require students to “work effectively in diverse teams” or “adapt to changing conditions,” but never to think critically about why they should accept constant workplace surveillance or question who benefits from their adaptation.
The tech industry’s entry into education accelerated this transformation. Companies like IBM and Apple didn’t just sell computers to schools—they shaped curricula to produce the workers they needed. Computer literacy replaced classical literacy. Coding bootcamps replaced shop class. Students learned to interact with machines more fluently than with humans, preparing them for futures in cubicles interfacing with screens rather than communities.
Goals 2000 and America 2000, federal education initiatives that promised to make American students “first in the world in mathematics and science achievement,” actually subordinated all learning to economic competitiveness. The goal wasn’t educated citizens but competitive workers. When students learned science, it wasn’t to understand nature but to staff STEM industries. When they studied mathematics, it wasn’t to develop logical thinking but to fill engineering positions.
This workforce pipeline explains why schools obsess over college attendance rates while ignoring whether students actually learn anything in college. The credential matters more than the education because employers use degrees as sorting mechanisms, not indicators of knowledge. A bachelor’s degree signals that someone can tolerate four more years of institutional processing, making them suitable for cubicle work. Graduate degrees indicate even greater compliance capacity, qualifying holders for management positions where they’ll impose the same system on others.
The conversion of citizens into human resources serves multiple functions for those Gatto calls “the guardians of the system.” It ensures a compliant workforce that won’t organize effectively for better conditions. It creates insecure workers who compete against each other rather than cooperating for mutual benefit. Most importantly, it prevents people from imagining themselves as anything other than economic units, foreclosing possibilities for different ways of living and organizing society.
The Deliberately Dumbed Down: Methods and Outcomes
Charlotte Iserbyt’s meticulous documentation reveals that the dumbing down of America wasn’t accidental decline but deliberate policy, implemented through specific techniques designed to prevent critical thinking while maintaining the appearance of education. Her archive of government documents, foundation reports, and insider communications provides the smoking gun: they knew exactly what they were doing.
The assault on literacy came first and most decisively. The replacement of phonics with “whole word” or “look-say” reading methods in the 1920s and 1930s, funded by Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, created an epidemic of functional illiteracy. Children who could have learned to read any word by sounding it out instead had to memorize thousands of word shapes like Chinese ideograms. Those who couldn’t—particularly boys and active learners—were labeled dyslexic or learning disabled, then shunted into special education where expectations dropped even lower.
Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld’s research, which Iserbyt cites extensively, showed that prior to these reforms, literacy was nearly universal among non-slave populations. After look-say methods took hold, reading problems exploded. By 1993, the National Adult Literacy Survey found 42 million Americans completely illiterate and another 50 million reading below fifth-grade level. This wasn’t failure—it was the intended outcome. As UNESCO’s “Toward World Understanding” stated explicitly, teaching children to read too well would make them resistant to social engineering.
Mathematics instruction followed a similar pattern. Traditional arithmetic—memorizing multiplication tables, learning algorithms, practicing computation—gave way to “new math” in the 1960s, then “whole math” in the 1990s. Students used calculators before understanding numbers, discussed mathematical concepts without mastering basic operations, and worked in groups where one student’s knowledge masked another’s ignorance. The result: cashiers who can’t make change, engineers who rely entirely on computers, and a population that accepts economic statistics without understanding their manipulation.
History disappeared entirely, replaced by “social studies” that severed children from their heritage. Instead of learning about the American Revolution, students did projects on “conflict resolution.” Rather than studying the Constitution, they participated in “consensus-building exercises.” The timeline of human achievement became a catalog of oppression, teaching children to despise their civilization rather than understand it. How can people defend freedoms they’ve never learned existed? How can they recognize tyranny they’ve been taught to call progress?
The methods for achieving this dumbing down came straight from behavioral psychology. B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, imported wholesale into classrooms as “mastery learning,” treated children like laboratory rats. Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy, which sounds educational but actually derives from psychotherapy, focused on changing attitudes and values rather than transmitting knowledge. Every child became a patient, every classroom a therapy session, every teacher an unwitting psychologist modifying behavior toward predetermined outcomes.
Iserbyt documented how these methods were tested first in inner-city schools on minority populations, refined through experimentation on the powerless, then rolled out nationwide once perfected. Programs with names like “Outcomes-Based Education,” “Mastery Learning,” and “Direct Instruction” all used the same behavioral conditioning techniques: break learning into tiny fragments, reward compliance, punish deviation, never allow students to see the whole picture.
The computer revolution didn’t democratize education—it completed the conditioning process. Educational software tracks every keystroke, records every wrong answer, builds psychological profiles more detailed than any teacher could compile. Algorithms determine what students learn next, how fast they progress, what remediation they receive. The machine becomes the teacher, infinitely patient with compliance, infinitely intolerant of creativity.
The results are visible everywhere. College students who can’t write coherent paragraphs. Employees who can’t solve problems without step-by-step instructions. Citizens who can’t evaluate competing claims without fact-checkers. Voters who respond to emotional manipulation rather than logical argument. A population perfectly prepared for management by experts, incapable of the independent thought required for self-governance.
The most insidious aspect is that the dumbed-down don’t know they’re dumbed-down. They’ve been taught that their limitations are natural, their ignorance inevitable, their dependence necessary. They believe themselves educated because they possess credentials. They think themselves informed because they consume media. They consider themselves free because they can choose between approved options. The deliberate dumbing down succeeded not just in limiting what people know, but in eliminating their awareness that there’s anything else to know.
Conclusion: The Cost of Institutionalized Childhood
After twelve years of compulsory schooling, American children emerge having learned primarily how to respond to bells, how to request permission for bodily functions, and how to accept arbitrary authority. They’ve spent 15,000 hours in preparation for lives of compliance, their natural curiosity systematically extinguished, their capacity for independent thought deliberately atrophied. The cost cannot be measured merely in dollars or test scores but in human potential destroyed, imaginations stunted, and spirits broken.
Gatto calculated that students spend less than 100 hours actually learning to read, write, and compute—skills that motivated children can master in months, not years. The remaining thousands of hours serve no educational purpose. They habituate children to institutionalization, teaching them to depend on experts, to wait for instructions, to seek external validation, to never trust their own judgment. School extends childhood artificially into the twenties and beyond, creating perpetual adolescents who never achieve genuine maturity or independence.
The damage ripples through generations. Parents who were themselves schooled into compliance cannot model independent thinking for their children. Communities stripped of their educational authority lose the capacity for self-governance. Families scheduling their lives around school calendars, homework demands, and extracurricular activities have no time for the conversations, projects, and relationships that once transmitted culture and values. The very idea that parents might be their children’s primary educators seems radical, even irresponsible, to people convinced that only certified experts can teach.
Yet cracks appear in the edifice. The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 forced millions of parents to see what their children were actually learning—or not learning. Homeschooling, once considered fringe, gained mainstream acceptance as families discovered that children learn better without schools. The internet, despite its dangers, allows motivated learners to access knowledge that schools would never provide. Some young people are rejecting the college-to-cubicle pipeline entirely, creating their own paths outside institutional frameworks.
The solution isn’t reform—it’s replacement. No amount of tinkering can fix a system functioning exactly as designed. Adding computers won’t democratize education when the software embeds the same behavioral conditioning. Smaller classes won’t help when teachers are trained in the same methods. Higher standards mean nothing when the standard itself is compliance rather than thinking. Every reform extends the system’s reach while claiming to improve it.
Real education looks nothing like school. It happens when a child’s interest meets appropriate resources—books, tools, mentors, experiences. It requires time to think, freedom to fail, and permission to pursue tangents. It involves making real things, solving actual problems, and contributing to communities. It cannot be standardized, measured, or certified because each human being’s potential is unique, irreducible to institutional categories.
The path forward requires courage to reject what we’ve been conditioned to accept. Parents must reclaim their children’s education, even at financial and social cost. Communities must create alternatives to school that nurture rather than process children. Most difficult, adults must unlearn their own schooling, recovering capacities for independent thought and autonomous action that twelve years of institutionalization suppressed.
The architects of compulsory schooling succeeded beyond their dreams, creating a population so thoroughly schooled that they cannot imagine education without school, cannot conceive of children learning without curricula, cannot trust themselves to think without expert guidance. But human nature persists despite institutional processing. Children still wonder, still question, still resist—until school teaches them not to. That resistance, that natural curiosity and independence, is the seed from which genuine education can grow, if we have the courage to nurture it outside the shadow of institutional control.
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Due to numerous requests to air The Dimming documentary on an independent platform from Youtube in the event that Youtube shuts us down, we are launching a slightly upgraded version of The Dimming on the Rumble platform. Please subscribe and follow this channel as a backup to GeoengineeringWatch.org videos. Our skies are not the same, our weather is not the same, our world is not the same, climate chaos and catastrophe are now the norm. Covert climate engineering operations are wreaking havoc on already badly damaged climate systems around the world. The ground breaking GeoengineeringWatch.org documentary “The Dimming” has reached a milestone of over 25 million views on YouTube as we enter 2025 in spite of ever more severe social media censorship. Hopefully with your help we can make many more aware of the threat posed by the ongoing climate engineering operations. All are needed in the critical battle to wake populations to what is coming, we must make every day count. Share credible data from a credible source, make your voice heard. Dane Wigington
In the attempt to answer as many questions as possible on the dire issue of climate engineering, Geoengineering Watch is producing a weekly “Climate Engineering News Q and A”: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwfFtDFZDpwsQyIUkWcYJzaarFt40K1KM By submitting a question to this email questions@geoengineeringwatch.org you are granting permission for your question and your first name to be read online. If you do not want your first name mentioned, please state that you wish to remain anonymous.
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This week I had an experience that really drove home how crazily impersonal our world is becoming. I was at the airport, ready for an international flight—excited, optimistic, the usual sense of anticipation that frequently comes with travel. But what should have been a smooth start quickly turned into a frustrating reminder of how much we’ve lost in the name of “progress.”
I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate not being able to deal with people anymore. Give me the good old days— when you’d arrive at the airport, greeted by a warm smile at check-in. A friendly agent would hand you your boarding pass, take your bag, maybe even wish you a good trip. That small but meaningful human interaction started your journey on the right note.
Not anymore.
These days, you’re greeted by machines. Cold, unfeeling screens that demand you scan, tap, and print your way to a boarding pass. I’d had some trouble checking in online, so I went up to what looked like a help area—only to be told there was no manual check-in counter anymore. “You can use the kiosk, sir,” the agent said, “but if you have trouble, there’s a staff member nearby who can assist.”
Fair enough, I thought. It’s annoying and the “staff member nearby” seemed busy and preoccupied.
After wrestling with the machine— which, for reasons known only to it, didn’t want to check me in initially— I finally got it to print my boarding pass and bag label. Then I had to drag my suitcase to another spot and personally scan and load it onto a conveyor belt. And mind you, I’m fairly tech-savvy! It wasn’t straightforward at all. Eventually, a staff member did appear to make sure the bag went through. That was the only moment of human contact in the entire process.
Barely an interaction.
It’s clear the philosophy is: check-in, print passes, load your own large bag— click button to send to airplane.
It would have been so much easier with a real person at a check-in desk. Someone who could have sorted it out in seconds, offered a smile, and sent me on my way feeling cared for—not just processed.
But this is the way everything is going.
You’ve seen it at grocery stores too—fewer cashiers, more self-checkout machines. Some people don’t mind, but there’s no denying we’re losing something deeper here: connection, empathy, the simple feeling that another human being is there to help you.
Let’s call it what it is: this is a total loss of human interaction.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Luddite! You’re reading this newsletter right now— and you watch my videos— because of modern technology. Tech can be amazing when used wisely. But we’ve crossed a line. Convenience has taken priority over humanity. Efficiency has replaced empathy.
And this is what really worries me: the same thing is creeping fast into healthcare.
Healthcare, by its nature, is one of the most personal fields there is. When you’re sick, anxious, or scared, you don’t want to be “processed.” You want to be seen, heard, and understood. But look at what’s happening:
Online portals are replacing conversations with your doctor.
Chatbots answer questions once handled by nurses.
AI algorithms are determining which patients get appointments or tests first.
And some clinics even encourage patients to do self-checks of vitals and symptoms before a doctor ever lays eyes on them.
This conveyor-belt mentality might make spreadsheets look efficient— but it’s destroying the essence of medicine. Healing doesn’t come from screens or software. It comes from human beings who care enough to listen, to look you in the eye, to truly understand your story.
Machines can process data, but they can’t offer reassurance. They can’t pick up subtle cues in your voice or expression. They can’t show compassion.
And if we lose that human touch, we lose the heart of healthcare itself.
The same goes for society at large. Every time we automate away an interaction, we erode something fundamental about being human. Progress isn’t just about speed—it’s about meaning.
So here’s my plea: let’s not sleepwalk into a world that’s frictionless but soulless. Let’s hold on to what makes life feel real— the eye contact, the shared laughter, the empathy. Technology should make our lives better, not emptier.
Because at the end of the day, no app, no kiosk, no chatbot will ever replace a warm smile that says: I’m here to help you.
“People section: One Drive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos to help you find photos of friends and family. You can only change this setting 3 times a year.”
Microsoft continues to force new features that cannot be easily bypassed or turned off. Following the company’s decision to close a loophole that no longer allows users to create local analog accounts, but now rather must create an online-active Microsoft account, Microsoft is now forcing facial recognition to use its popular OneDrive app – a cloud storage and synchronization app.
Strangely, the latest update says this function can only be turned off three times a year, so Microsoft says.
“People section: One Drive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos to help you find photos of friends and family. You can only change this setting 3 times a year.”
On the Microsoft Support website, the company describes the feature as “collecting, using, and storing facial scans and biometric information from your photos through the OneDrive app for facial grouping technologies … When you turn off this feature in your OneDrive settings, all facial grouping data will be permanently removed within 30 days.”
Microsoft is also quick to highlight that the feature is never used to train AI models, and the data collected is only ever used to help improve the feature for the individual user that has enabled it. Face data is never shared outside of your account. “Microsoft does not use any of your facial scans and biometric information to train or improve the AI model overall. Any data you provide is only used to help triage and improve the results of your account, no one else’s.”
AI face recognition in OneDrive is a feature that has been rolling out for quite some time, and it appears to be enabled by default when it does eventually reach you. It’s still in limited preview, so not all users will see it just yet, but it is concerning that the support webpage for the feature seems to imply that the feature can only be enabled or disabled three times a year, even if that’s not the case.
A world-renowned oncologist has issued a chilling warning after uncovering evidence that the Covid mRNA “booster” shots have caused huge waves of cancer deaths among those who received the injections.
The warning was issued by Dr. Angus Dalgleish, a professor of oncology at St George’s University of London and a leading vaccine researcher.
Dr. Dalgleish is sounding the alarm over the surging numbers of cancer deaths currently being recorded among those who received the so-called “boosters.”
In a new statement, Dalgleish warns that cancer cases and related deaths are now skyrocketing among those who received the injections.
The highly respected oncologist explains that the mRNA shots “suppress the immune system” and “drive” the surging cancer cases.
He asserts that the Covid mRNA “booster” program may have been one of the greatest medical missteps in modern history.
Dalgleish, who is celebrated globally for his contributions to HIV/AIDS research, has been one of the leading voices in raising concerns about the safety of the injections.
He is now warning the public directly about his alarming findings linking the mRNA shots to devastating cancer spikes.
His critique is based on a series of alarming observations regarding the impact of the boosters on the immune system.
Dalgleish is particularly concerned about how the shots were rolled out for public use and the horrific consequences they have had on the health of millions.
According to Dr. Dalgleish, the boosters were initially introduced based on the premise of falling antibody levels.
While it’s normal for antibody levels to decrease following vaccination or infection, this drop was misinterpreted as a sign that additional boosters were needed.
However, Dalgleish stresses that the real defense against infections lies not in antibodies, but in T cells.
T cells are a more long-lasting and critical component of the immune system.
The booster shots, he argues, not only failed to improve immunity but actually suppressed T-cell immunity.
This suppression left people more vulnerable to infections.
Furthermore, Dalgleish points out that the boosters targeted an extinct strain of the Covid virus that had “already left the planet.”
This rendered them essentially useless against newer, more contagious variants that emerged, Dalgleish explains.
This failure to adapt the boosters to evolving strains further undermined the effectiveness of the “vaccination” strategy.
With the “boosters” ineffective against the virus, the only thing left they could do was cause harm.
What Dr. Dalgleish found to be particularly troubling was the harmful shift in how the immune system responded to the “boosters.”
Instead of providing robust protection, the injections switched antibodies from a “protective” mode to a “tolerizing” state.
This effectively made the body more susceptible to infections.
This issue became even more pronounced in cancer patients, he noted.
Dalgleish observed a dramatic increase in cancer relapses post-booster.
His early observations were met with hostility and silencing, as he was dismissed by institutions that labeled his warnings as “anecdotal.”
Now, global data has confirmed Dalgleish’s findings.
Recent national data from Japan shows a significant rise in cancer cases that can be directly linked to the “vaccine” program.
“The cancer incidence has gone up in Japan, just due to the ‘vaccine’ program,” Dalgleish explains.
He notes that the official data from Japan is more “trusted” than other nations because the government doesn’t “fiddle” with the statistics.
Dalgleish added that the Japanese data appears to show that cancer deaths are emerging roughly two years after people received mRNA “booster” injections.
This confirmation from worldwide scientific communities has validated his claims, as he explained:
The cover-up surrounding these findings has been a source of immense frustration for Dr. Dalgleish.
He revealed that he was bullied, censored, and ignored by the very institutions that should have prioritized patient safety.
The guiding principle of “first, do no harm” was, in his view, abandoned as patients were pressured into receiving boosters.
However, these mRNA injections ultimately worsened their outcomes, Dalgleish notes.
Now that the truth is coming to light, Dalgleish is calling for accountability.
Meanwhile, a leading biochemist has issued a warning over surges in colon cancer cases among children who received Covid mRNA “vaccines.”
Dr. Jessica Rose, a respected researcher known for her in-depth analyses of vaccine safety data, says the evidence now shows a disturbing correlation between the mRNA rollout and skyrocketing colon cancer cases.
As Slay News reported, Rose analyzed data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
According to Rose, VAERS data reveals a staggering “8,300% increase in colon cancer” that is directly linked to the Covid mRNA “vaccine” rollout timeframes.
Scientists around the world are now confirming that the boosters did significant damage to immune responses and contributed to the acceleration of deadly cancers.
What was once dismissed as reckless or anecdotal is now undeniable.
The consequences are becoming impossible to ignore.
For several decades, saturated fat was wrongly blamed for heart disease, while vegetable oils quietly caused a surge in obesity, inflammation, and chronic metabolic disorders
Newly appointed FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary is now leading efforts to revise outdated dietary guidelines that were built on cherry-picked data from Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study
A 2016 BMJ-published reanalysis found replacing saturated fat with linoleic acid-rich vegetable oils increased cardiovascular deaths, despite lowering cholesterol
Investigative journalist Dr. Maryanne Demasi faced vicious backlash after exposing the flawed science behind saturated fat demonization in her documentary “Heart of the Matter”
Industrial seed oils like canola and soybean are now linked to mitochondrial damage, inflammation, and chronic illness — while saturated fat is finally being recognized as metabolically supportive
For decades, the dominant narrative insisted that saturated fat was deadly — even though the actual data never proved it. As a result, the health advice shifted toward seed oils and processed margarine, which quietly ushered in new health problems, from metabolic disease to obesity and inflammatory disorders — all while the original hypothesis remained unchallenged by mainstream medicine.
Now, for the first time, high-ranking officials are openly criticizing these outdated guidelines. So, if you still believe that butter, beef, and full-fat cheese clog your arteries and are damaging your health, it’s time to relearn everything you know about these fat sources.
New FDA Commissioner Aims to End the 70-Year War on Saturated Fat
On July 14, 2025, Dr. Marty Makary, the newly appointed U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, along with Sec. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of the Department of Health and Human Services and Sec. Brooke Rollins of the Department of Agriculture, held a press conference addressing their plans to significantly overhaul the U.S. dietary guidelines.1
•One of the primary areas that they will work on is revising the guidelines on saturated fat — During the press conference, Makary highlighted how the changes to the food guidelines will be made based on scientific findings. He mentions that the demonization of saturated fat began with a flawed study — the Seven Countries Study by Ancel Keys.
•Why the Seven Countries Study was significantly flawed — The study, which started in 1958 and continued until 1983, explored the heart health of different populations in several prominent Western countries. According to Keys’ hypothesis, there is a significant link between saturated fat and heart disease. When he published his data, it showed perfect correlations between cardiovascular disease and the dietary consumption of fat.2
However, there was just one problem with the research — Keys cherry-picked the data. He selectively chose the countries that fit his hypothesis while ignoring data from 16 other countries that went against his recommendations.3 Had he chosen a different set of countries, the data would have been the opposite — that increasing the percent of calories from fat actually reduces the number of deaths from coronary heart disease.
•Despite the methodological flaws in his data, the medical community accepted Keys’ study — This led to the promulgation of “low-fat, low-cholesterol” foods as healthy. Butter, coconut oil, red meat, dairy, and eggs were all shunned, while polyunsaturated fats (PUFs) like margarine, vegetable oils, and shortening were popularized.
•The medical establishment “locked arms and walked off a cliff together” — This was how Makary described the shift from saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat — basically, the health community back then took a look and decided that Keys’s study was gospel truth — despite many experts contesting his hypothesis and many studies4,5 showing the opposite.
“The medical establishment started with a robust debate in the New England Journal of Medicine among academics of the National Academy. But that debate ended in the 1970s because there was groupthink,” Makary said.
“Well, that dogma still lives large and you see remnants of it in the food guidelines that we are now revising. So, we’re going to ensure that the new guidelines are based on science and not medical dogma.”6
To see the tide finally turning and the government health agencies taking the lead on these monumental changes is something I applaud. Over the past couple of decades, I’ve published countless articles about the flaws in Keys’ study — and why saturated fats are not to be feared, as they are actually integral to your health.
Documentary Exposed the Flaws and Received Fierce Backlash
Just like me, Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., has been speaking out about the erroneous demonization of saturated fat for a long time. Several years ago, I wrote about a two-part documentary she produced called “Heart of the Matter,” which aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s show (ABC) Catalyst in 2014. I was extremely impressed by the film, as it did an excellent job of exposing the cholesterol/saturated fat myths and its financially links to cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins.
In her recent Substack post, Demasi detailed the severe backlash she received after she released the documentary, and her thoughts on these recent developments from the U.S. government agencies. “It was a stunning moment — not because the criticism was new, but because it was coming from someone in an official position to do something,” she said.7
•“Heart of the Matter” focused on two primary points — The first part examined the demonization of saturated fat, while the second part dwelled on the widespread use of statins.
“The medical dogma was firmly entrenched: saturated fat raised cholesterol, and cholesterol caused heart disease. But the science behind it was shaky — built on cherry-picked data and upheld more by consensus than by critical evaluation,” she said.
•The findings were supported by some of the top experts in the field of cardiovascular health — Among the interviewees featured were Dr. Michael Eades, an early advocate for low-carb, high-fat diets, cardiologists Dr. Stephen Sinatra and Dr. Ernest Curtis, nutritionist Dr. Jonny Bowden, and science journalist Gary Taubes. All of these experts voiced their concerns regarding the warnings against saturated fat. Demasi said:
“Eades, for instance, highlighted the absurdity of the prevailing narrative: ‘You very seldom see the words ‘saturated fat’ in the public press when they’re not associated with artery clogging. So it’s like it’s all one term — ‘artery clogging saturated fats.’’
And Taubes, author of Good Calories Bad Calories, known for his meticulous dismantling of diet dogma, cut to the core: ‘There’s no compelling evidence that saturated fat is involved in heart disease.’”
To present both sides equally, the documentary also featured experts who vigorously defended the warnings against saturated fat. Robert Grenfell, the director of the National Heart Foundation, and Professor David Sullivan, a cardiologist, shared their thoughts in the film.
•Still, the backlash was overwhelming — Demasi describes it as “immediate, vicious, and unrelenting.” The media not only turned against her, but they also went against the experts who challenged the saturated fat dogma. And even though no factual inaccuracies were found, ABC still pulled both episodes from its website.
Numerous Experts Have Sounded the Alarm on Keys’ Flawed Research
The fact that Ancel Keys’ hypothesis was purely observational and could not establish causation has long been raised by many health experts — even during the first years when the Seven Countries study came out. According to Demasi, John Yudkin, a British physiologist and nutritionist warned that sugar, not fat, was the real cause of heart disease. However, he was mocked and marginalized by Keys, who considered Yudkin his fiercest opponent.8
Yudkin was the first, but he wasn’t the only one — numerous researchers like Uffe Ravnskov and Malcolm Kendrick, also publicly challenged Keys’ hypothesis, co-authoring publications that exposed the flaws of this study. Many others soon followed, which Demasi outlined in her blog post.
•“Saturated fat is not the major issue” — In 2013, cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra published a commentary on the BMJ, saying that the flawed advice from Keys caused people to aggressively lower cholesterol — which may have led to higher rates of heart disease.
“The mantra that saturated fat must be removed to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease has dominated dietary advice and guidelines for almost four decades. Yet scientific evidence shows that this advice has, paradoxically, increased our cardiovascular risks,” Malhotra wrote.9
•”The Big Fat Surprise” — Nina Teicholz wrote her best-selling exposè in 2014,10 which helped bring the issue to public attention. Her deeply researched book challenged the conventional wisdom on dietary fats, especially saturated fat. “Teicholz documented how weak science, political pressure, and food industry lobbying created a false consensus that demonised fat and distorted public health policy,” Demasi remarked.11
•“Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis” — In 2016, a group of researchers published a landmark re-analysis of the Minnesota Coronary Experiment in the BMJ, to evaluate the accuracy of Keys hypothesis. They found that when saturated fat was replaced with linoleic acid (LA) from vegetable oils, cholesterol levels were lowered — but paradoxically led to an increase in deaths, particularly from cardiovascular disease.
“Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid,” the researchers concluded.12
The Cholesterol Hypothesis Is a ‘Professional Litmus Test’
The plans to overhaul the U.S. dietary guidelines give hope to many researchers like Demasi, who have long raised their concerns about this flawed science — but were ostracized as a result.
“For the first time, real change may be coming — not from the margins, but from the very top of the U.S. health establishment…
It’s taken decades. The cholesterol hypothesis wasn’t just a scientific claim — it became a professional litmus test. To challenge it was to risk your funding, your career, your credibility. Many of us paid that price. Even now, entrenched interests remain,” she wrote.
•But why was the myth allowed to persist in the first place? Apparently, it’s all because of the food and drug industry. In a video podcast, Dr. Paul Saladino and Teicholz discussed how the low-fat, low-cholesterol myth rapidly led to dramatic changes in the food and drug industries — changes that have proven to be highly lucrative, financially speaking.13
•Acknowledging that saturated fat is healthy means to relinquish big industry profits — The Big Food industry is raking in millions of dollars from the low-fat and low-cholesterol (yet highly processed) foods, including industrial vegetable oils. To admit that these “healthier options” are actually decimating public health would lead to great financial losses. The healthy alternative is real food — however, there’s no big industry profits to be made from that.
•Moreover, statin sales and other Big Pharma profit areas would suffer — The whole point of prescribing statins was to lower cholesterol, but if the notion that cholesterol is bad would be overturned, then what would be the point of taking these drugs?
Personally, I believe that statins are among the most overprescribed — and unnecessary — medications on the market today. Not only do the harms far outweigh the benefits, but they’re also ineffective. In fact, in “Heart of the Matter,” the experts repeatedly say that statins only lengthen a life by a few days and, despite their hype and popularity, are shockingly ineffective for all but a few people. Learn more about these drugs in my article, “Statins Do More Harm Than Good.”
Vegetable Oils Undermine Your Health
Perhaps the worst effect of the demonization of saturated fats — including butter, tallow, lard, and coconut oil — is that it paved the way for vegetable oils like soybean, canola, and corn oil, which are loaded with linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fat (PUF), to become a standard part of the modern diet.
Today, Americans consume LA at levels that would have been unimaginable a century ago. In the 1860s, we only consumed 2 grams of LA per day; that number has now increased to close to 30 grams per day for most people. It now makes up 15% to 25% of a typical American’s caloric intake. And the cost of this overload? Your cells become more vulnerable to oxidative stress.
•Excessive LA causes your mitochondria to break down — The mitochondria, which are the powerhouse of your cells, responsible for creating energy, are significantly damaged because of this fat. LA transforms into oxidized linoleic acid metabolites (OXLAMs), dangerous byproducts that damage DNA, disrupt energy production, and drive chronic inflammation throughout your body.
OXLAMs have been linked to not just heart disease, but nearly every chronic disease now plaguing the developed world, such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and even neurodegeneration.
•LA stays in your body for years — You don’t simply eliminate it; instead, it LA embeds in your body fat, where it continues to inflict damage even after you clean up your diet. I recommend reading my paper published in Nutrients to understand how this happens — and how you can reverse it. My paper also expounds on the long-term biological effects of this metabolic disruptor.
•Unfortunately, LA is rampant in the food supply — Even if you stop using seed oils, or don’t eat fried foods and fast food, you could still end up eating large amounts of LA mainly because it’s cleverly hidden in so many packaged products where you’d least expect it.
Lowering your intake of industrial seed oils starts with knowing where they hide. I recommend downloading my Health Coach app, which will be out soon. It has a unique feature called Seed Oil Sleuth™, which will help identify every hidden source of seed oils in your meals. It also calculates your daily LA intake to the nearest tenth of a gram.
Saturated Fat Is Not the Enemy — Misinformation Is
So how do you undo the damage of 70 years of misguided health policy? The good news is there are ways to help revert the damage, and it starts by focusing on the root cause — removing industrial seed oils loaded with linoleic acid (LA). Carefully read labels, even in so-called “healthy” snacks; remember, these harmful fats are lurking everywhere.
Once you’ve cleaned up all the unhealthy fats in your diet, start rebuilding your health with saturated fats from clean animal sources, which are stable and nourishing. Choose healthy options like grass fed butter, ghee, beef tallow, and coconut oil, which support your mitochondria, don’t oxidize easily, and provide steady energy. For more healthy lifestyle strategies to eliminate LA from your diet, I recommend reading “Linoleic Acid, Mitochondria, Gut Microbiome, and Metabolic Health — A Mechanistic Review.”
These new developments in the U.S. food supply are certainly a breath of fresh air, and if Makary and others who are part of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) campaign follow through, we may finally get dietary guidelines that reflect biological truth, not industry agendas. As Demasi concludes:
“[W]e may finally be seeing the collapse of one of the most destructive public health myths in modern history … For those of us who’ve waited decades, it’s not vindication we want (although that would be nice) — it’s change.”14
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About the War on Saturated Fat
Q: Why is the war on saturated fat finally ending?
A: For decades, saturated fat was wrongly blamed for heart disease due to flawed research like Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study. Now, top U.S. health officials, including FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, are acknowledging these mistakes and working to revise the dietary guidelines based on current science, not outdated dogma.
Q: What was wrong with the original research that demonized saturated fat?
A: Keys’ study selectively included countries that supported his hypothesis and ignored those that didn’t. This cherry-picking created a false link between fat and heart disease, leading to widespread promotion of low-fat, high-seed oil diets that have been harmful to public health.
Q: How have vegetable oils impacted health since replacing saturated fats?
A: Vegetable oils like soybean, corn, and canola are loaded with linoleic acid (LA), which damages mitochondria, promotes inflammation, and contributes to chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and neurodegeneration. These oils now make up 15% to 25% of caloric intake in the average American diet.
Q: What role did media and government play in spreading misinformation?
A: Mainstream media and government agencies endorsed and enforced the cholesterol hypothesis without fully examining the evidence. Whistleblowers like Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., were attacked for speaking out, and even accurate documentaries were censored to protect the status quo.
Q: What changes are being proposed for the U.S. dietary guidelines?
A: Upcoming revisions may eliminate the cap on saturated fat and elevate full-fat foods like butter and dairy. Officials aim to base the guidelines on actual science, not outdated industry-driven dogma.
A repost of this important info, introducing an article from Jenese James. It makes some sense of the massive killing sprees of wildlife with poisons, particularly down under in ‘guinea pig’ NZ. Sprees that are inconsistent with the ‘sustainable’ and ‘conservation’ mantras. Read on…
Just this week the UK Telegraph has been warning us of the next possible plandemic, with their eye this time on your pet cat that might be putting us all in danger:
Experts have long regarded pigs as one of the greatest zoonotic threats to public health because their cells allow viruses to mix and mutate, creating new strains capable of causing human pandemics. This is how the 2008/09 H1N1 swine flu pandemic started and it is suspected that pigs in Haskell country, Kansas may have triggered the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic which is estimated to have killed between 50 and 100 million people. Now a new study suggests that pet cats could be just as dangerous – and could provide the bridge that allows H5N1 bird flu to mutate and jump to humans.
We should be very afraid and be looking to getting rid of our pets, or so they’d have us believe. Meanwhile the Guardian is hyping it up by warning all pregnant women who contract bird flu will die!
They’ve actually been targeting cats in NZ and elsewhere for some time now.
Note: some years back (at least 6) I inquired of two NZ companies that produced chickens and pork, whether they fed their produce GM feed. Both replied they couldn’t rule that out as the feed was not labeled GM. EWNZ
A scientific review in World’s Poultry Science Journal highlights the adverse health effects on avian species from exposure to the widely used weedkiller glyphosate (Roundup) throughout the process of poultry production. The herbicide enters the poultry production system through residues in genetically engineered feed, Beyond Pesticides reported.
An earlier article in Scientific Reports concludes that glyphosate’s (GLP) “widespread application on feed crops leaves residues in the feed,” while residues are “found to be common in conventional eggs acquired from grocery stores.”
In analyzing the biochemical, toxicological and ecological impacts of glyphosate on poultry, particularly chickens, the authors find a wide body of evidence linking glyphosate and its metabolite (breakdown product) aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) to debilitating hazards that extend beyond mortality.
These sublethal effects include disruption of the gut microbiome and gastrointestinal disease; decreased productivity and diminished reproductive health; hepatic and kidney toxicity; growth and developmental impacts, including teratogenicity and embryotoxicity; endocrine disruption and oxidative stress; and impaired immune functions.
The effects of glyphosate, as have long been documented in the scientific literature, range from negative impacts on biodiversity and the environment to food safety risks and human health implications.
Glyphosate Box
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Residues of both glyphosate and AMPA “have been detected in soil, crops, animal feed, poultry, and water sources, prompting scrutiny of their long-term effects,” the authors state.
They continue:
“Studies indicate that glyphosate disrupts enzymatic pathways, particularly by inhibiting the cytochrome P450 system, leading to oxidative stress, endocrine disruption, and mitochondrial dysfunction.
“It has been linked to liver and kidney toxicity, gut microbiota alterations, reproductive harm, developmental defects, and possible carcinogenicity, though regulatory agencies remain divided on its classification as a carcinogen.”
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a part of the World Health Organization, has classified glyphosate as having cancer-causing properties, as have independent peer-reviewed scientific studies.
The ubiquitous nature of glyphosate residues throughout the environment and within organisms is a result of the widespread application of this toxic chemical in forestry, agriculture, landscaping and gardening.
Over 750 herbicides contain glyphosate as the active ingredient, and it also plays a large role in the production of genetically modified (GM) crops, “with approximately 80% of GM crops bred specifically for GLP tolerance.”
Glyphosate-based herbicide formulations contain not only glyphosate but also other inert (undisclosed) ingredients, such as adjuvants that increase toxicity.
A common adjuvant in glyphosate-based herbicide products is polyethoxylated tallow amine (POEA), which researchers have found can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.
Effects on poultry
Glyphosate residues in animal feed, as well as in water and through other exposure routes, pose risks to both animal and human health, as these residues can bioaccumulate and biomagnify throughout the food chain.
With a high reliance on corn and soybeans in the diets of poultry, GM crops are a significant source of exposure for these animals.
“The presence of GLP residues in poultry feed raises concerns about potential health effects on birds, including disruptions in gut microbiota, oxidative stress, and overall productivity,” the authors write.
They continue:
“Globally, approximately 57% of maize grain and 85% of soybean production are directed towards animal feed. Several studies have investigated the effects of feeding glyphosate-tolerant GM crops to various livestock species.
“Research has included dairy cows, cattle, and chickens, highlighting the potential impact of glyphosate residues on poultry growth performance, immune function, and reproductive health.”
Hepatic and kidney toxicity
Studies show that the kidney and liver are among the first organs to be affected by alimentary poisoning/foodborne illness. Additional research shows glyphosate residues in food can then impact various systems in animals, including the liver, intestine, kidney, and lung, as well as alter enzyme activity.
In a study of hatched chickens exposed to glyphosate alone and in Roundup shows “histopathological alterations in the kidneys and liver, along with imbalances in serum parameters and various biochemical changes in these organs, which could potentially impair their function.”
Oxidative stress
Exposure to glyphosate can induce oxidative stress and lipid, protein, and DNA damage. Previous research shows how glyphosate and AMPA are genotoxic and linked to oxidative damage.
One study shows that glyphosate increases the generation of reactive oxygen species in the liver and small intestine of chickens. Chronic exposure to products containing glyphosate in broiler breeders (stock chickens) weakens eggshells and delays embryo organ growth, with oxidative stress as the cause.
Gastrointestinal toxicity
Glyphosate diminishes the bioavailability of cytochrome (CYP) enzymes, which are crucial for metabolism, in the organs of chickens. One study shows that glyphosate specifically inhibits CYP P450 enzymes in chickens’ livers and small intestines.
Chicks exposed to glyphosate also have compromised liver function and altered lipid metabolism, further causing oxidative stress and deposits of fat in blood and liver tissues due to heightened expression of lipogenesis-related genes, as a result of its disruptive effect on cytochrome P450 enzymes.
Additional studies show disruption of the gut microbiome in livestock and poultry, where glyphosate reduces beneficial bacteria and enhances resistance in pathogenic strains.
These impacts can lead to the onset of chronic gastrointestinal diseases. In a study of the intestinal structure of chicks, glyphosate has been shown to impair the intestines, reduce antioxidant capacity, induce inflammation and cause the downregulation of genes in the small intestine.
Impact on reproduction
Previous research shows that chronic exposure to herbicides containing glyphosate can impact the survival, growth, activity and reproduction of organisms, including chickens.
A study of roosters with chronic, subtoxic exposure to glyphosate shows reduced plasma testosterone and a decline in their reproductive peak.
Another study finds “significant effect on the histopathological [diseased tissue] characteristics of the rooster testes as well as sperm motility, the key determinant of rooster sperm quality.”
Additional research shows altered sperm in roosters when fed a diet containing glyphosate that leads to “metabolic disorders in the offspring, most likely due to epigenetic effects.”
Glyphosate implications for productivity and performance
Several studies have classified glyphosate-based herbicide formulations as teratogenic, causing developmental abnormalities in a fetus or embryo, and embryotoxic, causing harm or death to embryos during development.
In a study of quails, glyphosate was found to accumulate inside the eggs, causing damage to lipids (fats) in the brains of the developing embryos. This study also reveals that residues of glyphosate in food also slow plumage development and linger in eggs, muscles and livers of the birds.
Another study of chickens shows “exposure to GLP led to a significant reduction in the expression of key productivity-related genes.”
Exposure directly in the eggs of chickens to glyphosate-based herbicides induces teratogenic effects with negative effects on embryonic growth and development, as well as embryo mortality.
Changes in blood parameters, adverse effects on digestive tract development and reduced body weight are noted in chickens exposed to glyphosate.
Reproductive and developmental impacts regarding eggshell quality and embryo development are also associated with levels of both glyphosate and AMPA within egg yolk.
Yet another study shows that a decline in hatchability is associated with higher levels of glyphosate residues in feed among broiler breeders.
Regulatory deficiencies and the organic solution
Despite mounting scientific evidence that continues to link glyphosate to adverse effects in a wide range of species, current regulations fail to protect health and the environment.
The regulatory processes, such as those utilized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), also ignore factors that enhance the toxicity of these already harmful chemicals, such as synergy, mixtures and inert ingredients.
“Current safety evaluations mostly concentrate on glyphosate in isolation, overlooking the synergistic toxic effects of commercial formulations and their capacity for bioaccumulation in adipose tissues,” the authors point out.
They continue:
“Furthermore, the heightened toxicity of commercial glyphosate formulations, influenced by co-formulants such as POEA, in conjunction with glyphosate’s interference with gut microbiota, cytochrome P450 enzymes, and endocrine functions, emphasises the necessity for cumulative risk assessments and long-term studies that account for species variability, bioaccumulation, and synergistic effects.”
These inadequacies in the regulation of petrochemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers support the urgent need for the widespread adoption of safer alternatives.
Here is a repost from 2016 … on the topic of poisons and the general ignorance of folk concerning their hidden effects … remember the ‘safe and effective’ mantra that wasn’t? EWNZ
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