Category Archives: Propaganda

Flash: Radiation really is bad for you

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No safe level. Photo: Jon Åslund/Flickr CC

Once again, it appears we need a “conspiracist” — in this case, the indefatigable Alan Watt — to remind us that the National Academy of Sciences long ago stated the obvious: That there is no safe level for radiation exposure.

Listen to the archive of Alan’s April 8 radio program (you’ll find it via the link, below), and re-remember your basic biophysics.

Alan always writes a wee poem to accompany his archive posts. Here’s a portion:

Power-Elite and Scientific Combination, Guaranteeing Life’s Ruination:

There’s Radiation Swirling Around Each Head

It Will Add Many to the Great Book of the Dead

Over Many Years Propagandists Will Shout, Blustering, Denying the Effects of Fallout

Whilst Elitists, Comfortable in City-Size Bunker

And the Common Fearful in Cellars Hunker…

via Cutting Through the Matrix with Alan Watt – Clearing the rubbish from the road to reality.

Men Who Stare at U.S. Senators

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CC: Senior Airman Brian Ybarbo/U.S. Air Force (Homepage image: AP)

Recent talk of the alleged use of psy-ops on many politically influential figures, such as John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin, comes at an already charged time for the military, specifically with it’s enormous budget.

We’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq for too long, everyone in the world wants us out, but for some reason we just don’t seem able to leave. Maybe we just like the view from the top of the Pamir Mountains, maybe we need to be patient with our government, or maybe the wigs in office have been brainwashed to stay there.

Rolling Stone magazine covered the meltdown between the opposing views of Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell on the application of psy-ops on the previously mentioned visiting guests in Afghanistan.  The dramatic battle between lieutenants concluded with Holmes having to resign.  Holmes defended his actions by saying:

“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave. I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.”

With the score 1-0 in favor of the psy-ops division of the U.S. military, one must acknowledge their ability to fight off these accusations. And not only to defend themselves but manage to get  $553 billion for the Defense Department’s baseline budget.

So who knows? Maybe the military has an EC-130J flying around the capital, “brain-washing” politicians to support spending millions on obsolete aircraft parts when the majority of the human race wishes the U.S. could leave the middle east peacefully.



Healthcare spin control plan vs. ProPublica

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Photo: shanelkalicharan/Flickr CC

Worried by a ProPublica investigation revealing disgusting and dangerous conditions at dialysis clinics nationwide, PR people for the billion-dollar industry braced itself with a spin control document, with talking points.

From an industry PR memo obtained by ProPublica:

Despite our collective efforts, we do not anticipate a balanced presentation (in the ProPublica report), and we therefore feel it’s essential to create the “machinery” necessary to orchestrate an aggressive and prompt community-wide response.

The authors of the spin control doc suggests that docs and administrators, if contacted by the media in the wake of the ProPublica report, emphasize technological advances in the industry — rather than taking criticisms head-on.

The doc also shows industry flacks fretted that the story will get “will get traction through other media outlets.”

Fed. science official wants to de-develop US

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White House Science and Technology Director John P. Holdren wants to do something about our consumption habits. Photo: Paulien Osse/Flickr CC

Conservative news outlet reminds us of Obama appointee’s quirky vision for moving backward:

“De-development means bringing our economic system especially patterns of consumption into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation,” Holdren and the Ehrlichs wrote.

via White House Science Czar Says He Would Use ‘Free Market’ to ‘De-Develop the United States’ | CNSnews.com.

How ghost writers pushed bad drugs from Wyeth

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Telling lies for Big Pharma pays nicely, according to a new report in a peer-reviewed open access journal.

Wyeth, which makes menopausal hormone therapies, “used ghostwriters to create more than 50 journal articles with a favorable spin on the drugs,” even after the risks of the drugs was mounting, according to the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute.
More, via the Hastings Center:

Wyeth paid DesignWrite $25,000 each for articles that reported on clinical trials and $20,000 each for 20 review articles on the unproven benefits of hormone therapy, such as that it may help protect against Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

via Bioethics Forum – Ghostwriters in the Hormone Therapy Machine.

More potential evidence of Tylenol's toxicity

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Photo: Eric Lewis/Flickr CC

It might be time to throw out your Tylenol. Consider: filthy manufacturing facilities, mounting evidence of disease and overdose risk from the drug, and viable alternatives for pain reduction… MB

Asthma and other diseases are far more likely to occur in kids who get even a single dose of acetaminophen per month, a study finds:

There was a significant association between acetaminophen use and risk of asthma and eczema. For medium users the risk of asthma 43 percent higher than non-users; high users had 2.51 times the risk of non-users. Similarly, the risk of rhinoconjunctivitis allergic nasal congestion was 38 percent higher for medium users and 2.39 times as great for high users compared to non-users. For eczema, the relative risks were 31 percent and 99 percent respectively.

It’s not a causal link, the authors note. But it is a strong association.

via Acetaminophen Use in Adolescents Linked to Doubled Risk of Asthma.

Verizon's "Rule the Air" message: "Be the surveillance you fear"

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Rules nothing. Photo: Ed Yourdon/Flickr CC

Given that Verizon allowed the NSA to secretly tap millions of calls in the past decade, it’s stunning to see the company selling surveillance as sexy and empowering.

I am referring, of course, to Verizon’s new “Rule the Air” campaign.

In what might pass for a scenes from a remake of John Carpenter’s “They Live,” Verizon’s ads have buildings, a parking meter and other objects flowering into antennae that stalk cell phone-wielding models.

One blogger (excerpt and link below), notes the disturbing surveillance theme in “Rule the Air.”

But it is not enough to say that “Rule the Air” is Orwellian, just because it evokes a surveillance state nightmare. (Invariably, when people say, “Orwellian,” they are referring to “1984.”)

Even more insidious, and Orwellian, is the ad campaign’s vague and contradictory slogan. (Orwell warns of the perils of using imprecise language in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.”)

The truth, dear Verizon customers, is that you rule nothing.

Rather, as you can read here, Verizon and the US Federal Communications Commission “rule you.”

If you ask me the whole thing seems a bit Orwellian and the Verizon red coupled with the vintage logo and the tag line, “Rule the air”, strangely evoked old-time war propaganda to me, but the effects are cool—and who doesn’t like the concept of reception everywhere.

via Verizon Sets Out to “Rule the Air”.

"Geek" plugs GMO foods in O'Reilly cookbook

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In “Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food’’ (O’Reilly, about $35), Jeff Potter blends boring recipes, such as those for garlic mashed potatoes and chocolate chip cookies, with punishingly detailed (even for many geeks, I imagine) discussions of the chemistry behind tastes and fragrances, and the importance of cooking things long and hot enough to prevent foodborne illnesses.

But at times the book reads like more than a cookbook whose author is benignly attempting to work-up a new angle.

In a weird tangent, Potter makes a backhanded pitch for foods made with genetically modified organisms.

“What if a strain of rice could be produced that was more resilient in the face of floods and droughts?’’ asks Potter, as if saying “no’’ to such a product would make you heartless to the needs of people in developing nations.

Potter calls the GMO issue “an intensely charged political and social minefield.’’

But as any geek will tell you, the GMO debate is also about science. And scientists have not yet even agreed on standards for assessing the safety of GMO foods.

A geek puts pots and pans next to his beakers – The Boston Globe.

North Korean healthcare "the envy" of developing nations, says UN boss

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Embarrassed by a damning Amnesty International report that surprised no one — detailing amputations without anesthesia and other horrors in the Hermit Kingdom — the UN World Health Organization is still going to bat for Pyongyang.

The rationale for lying about North Korea, according to a spokeswoman for WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan is that only by kissing ass, can the the UN and nongovernmental organizations gain access to the country:

Major global relief agencies have been quietly fighting for years to save the lives of impoverished and malnourished North Koreans, even as the country’s go-it-alone government joined the exclusive club of nuclear weapons powers and wasted millions on confrontational military programs.

via WHO criticizes Amnesty report into NKorea health – Yahoo! News.

Space junk? MSM provides "cloaking device" for military space mission

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The US military on July 8 will toss a $500 million satellite into orbit to observe space junk circling Earth.

At least, that’s what the AP is reporting about the July 8 launch of the US Air Force’s new “Space-Based Space Surveillance” (SBSS) satellite.

But the sat will be much more than a space junk surveyor: It will serve at the core of the Air Force’s ongoing space-based missile defense program. If you read the words of the military’s top brass on the subject of SBSS, you will find that the Air Force’s priorities for the program are to track (if not disable) Iran’s and North Korea’s sats.

A snip from the AP story:

Currently, the Air Force relies on a ground-based network of radar and optical telescopes around the globe to monitor about 1,000 active satellites and 20,000 pieces of debris. The telescopes can be used only on clear nights, and not all radar stations are powerful enough to detect satellites in deep space orbit, about 22,000 miles from Earth.

via New US satellite to monitor debris in Earth orbit – USATODAY.com.