Category Archives: vaccines

All things ALEC

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Center for Media and Democracy has several links up on ALEC:

(most of these are from the week prior to the 40th birthday bash in Chicago)

They long for the bygone era.

ALEC agenda.

More *cough* scholarship funds for those poor, poor legislators…

I, for one, would like to know the reasons that Larry Summers, a hedge fund manager, would be the optimal choice for Federal Reserve.  WTH?

Pissed off at how much you’re taxed….well, how does this grab ya?  You at least expect your taxes to go towards useful things like roads, police, fire, schools….but, no, it is going to subsidize these folks.

This is the latest–the treatment of the protestors by Chicago P.D.  A note in the comments section said that over 900 people were arrested.

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On to other things–

Pandora’s lunchbox. Basically, like Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride tells GAPS patients….nothing processed is good for you–avoid it like the plague.  Try to eat more raw than cooked food.  Cooking destroys the enzymes in food–enzymes are used in all processes in your body.  This includes digestion of proteins and other nutrients so that your body can utilize them.  It won’t do your body any good if it lacks the enzymes to digest the nutrients.

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Lastly, there’s nanotechnology everywhere.  Is anybody regulating it? Well, yes and no.  The FDA is regulating silver nanoparticals, but you know the FDA on the nanotechnology as a whole….throw it out there and hope nobody notices.  Be sure to click on the links for Grist’s take (I knew there was a reason that I felt like I had sludge in my gut after eating M&M’s); also the link for Purdue’s report on the fish; and  the effect on DNA.  Yep.

 

Poverty and Education; Gates and Broad

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The thing that gets pushed aside with “school reformers” is the link between poverty and lower grades.  I never fully understood this country’s contempt for the poor until now.   You truly have to experience it as a poor person to understand.  You’re worse than criminals because at least criminals get three hots and a cot.  What does Congress do?  Cut funding to the Housing and Urban Development and cut food stamps.

And I found this excellent post by Joanne Barkan  on the fallacy of “school reform” by Gates, Broad, et al.  It is sickening how Gates has manipulated data, ignored poverty, and is stealthily racist when you view the public schools that closed being heavily minority.  Gates shoveled millions upon millions towards this boondoggle when instead he could have paid taxes so that those schools would be well-funded and able to have smaller class size so that teachers could help those that had more difficulty learning, or it could have helped the poor kids get nutritious meals cooked from scratch….the simple solutions that would have the greatest impact.

From the website:

In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan: performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school “turnaround” (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).

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Sickening, isn’t it??

 

More:

States were desperate for funds (in the end, thirty-four applied in the two rounds of the contest).

[…]

Enter the Gates Foundation. It reviewed the prospects for reform in every state, picked fifteen favorites, and, in July 2009, offered each up to $250,000 to hire consultants to write the application. Gates even prepared a list of recommended consulting firms.

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That pretty much says it right there.  States were desperate for funds –they had little choice.

In the same article, the Post broke the news that Bill Gates had “secretly bankrolled” Learn-NY, a group campaigning to overturn a term-limit law so that Michael Bloomberg could run for a third term as New York City mayor. Bloomberg’s main argument for deserving another term was that his education reform agenda (identical to the Gates-Broad agenda) was transforming city schools for the better. Gates put $4 million of his personal money into Learn-NY.

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And this should be great cause of concern:

On October 7 and 8, 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a two-part investigation by Robert Fortner into “the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships.” The report focused on the foundation’s grants to the PBS Newshour, ABC News, and the British newspaper the Guardian for reporting on global health.

[…]

Both Gates and Broad funded “NBC News Education Nation,” a week of public events and programming on education reform that began on September 27, 2010. The programs aired on NBC News shows such as “Nightly News” and “Today” and on the MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo TV networks.

[…]

Gates and Broad also sponsored the documentary film Waiting for Superman

[…]

As a vehicle for their partnership, the foundation and Viacom (with some additional funds from the AT&T Foundation) set up a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization called the Get Schooled Foundation.

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There is a reason that Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s FCC* allowed more consolidation of the media–the press has always been part of the Fourth Estate that kept Congress and the President in check.  If the media was weakened with consolidation, it concentrated ownership which in turn shut off different opinions, viewpoints, and independent voices.  It also stifled competition between media….ironic coming from people who often bring up “encouraging competition”  as a reason for allowing bank deregulation, relaxing EPA rules, and repealing or relaxing antitrust regulation.

The corporate takeover of public schools got a foothold because the media was not doing its job of investigating what was going on and who was behind it….because they were being bankrolled by those very people they should have been investigating.

*The Federal Communications Commission is staffed by presidential appointees.  The American public owns the airwaves, but those rights are being taken away from them by media consolidation.

The link between poverty and how well a child does in school broaches the subject of healthcare.   Children who live in poor areas are more likely to be exposed to toxic environments.  Heavy metals seriously impact one’s ability to learn, one’s ability to remember, and one’s ability towards impulse control–all of these impact a child’s education.  In addition, as anyone who has read this blog knows, ADD is a problem when heavy metals are involved–totally frustrating a child who may get distracted and lose focus during the teacher’s instruction, missing important information.

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of Badasses

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Diane Ravitch has a blog on the Badass Teachers Association:

 

 

 

 

I didn’t know what they meant when I searched for G4s –it came up a security agency and had many links including Israel.  However, when I searched for Gates and prisons, voila.

So I’m trying to wrap my brain around this, because Gates had invested in Monsanto, which purchased Blackwater/Xe…

…..so I’ve read several different sites that claim Monsanto did NOT buy Blackwater.  Stay tuned…jury is still out.

Whether Monsanto owns Blackwater or not, it is still a reprehensible corporation, and owning prisons?

Yeah…this would not have been possible if we didn’t have state governments privatizing state services like prisons…

Do you get the theme here?  Privatizing schools, privatizing prisons, cornering the biotech market and bullying farmers….

I found this on Cascade Investment, which is owned by Gates and family. More stuff here

Don’t like the NSA? How About Gates snooping into children’s school records?

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Diane Ravitch has this and this up on the continued invasion of privacy…only this time, it’s your kid they are gathering information on.  This critical information gathered by a Foundation that now owns 500,000 shares of Monsanto, .

…and what about Rupert Murdoch getting hold of your family’s records? Especially since the newspaper he owned invaded people’s privacy already…even after a warning about his dealings went unheeded.  

From the first Guardian article:

When the high court last summer ordered the News of the World to pay damages to Max Mosley for secretly filming him with prostitutes, the paper was furious. In an angry leader column, it insisted that public figures must maintain standards. “It is not for the powerful and the influential to run to the courts to gag newspapers from publishing stories that are TRUE,” it said. “This is all about the public’s right to know.”

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Does anyone else see the irony of a paper that is invading innocent people’s privacy complaining about maintaining standards….apparently lying and invasion of privacy are not standards someone should uphold…?

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The Uniparty

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One of the commenters here called the absence of real oppositional parties the “Uniparty”. …yep.

See…the Dems really believe in the Fourth Amendment and the rights of the American public to be let alone…

bwhahahahaha *snort*  bwahahahaha…

Don’t blame me.  I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.  The first time in all the years that I had been voting that I wrote a candidate’s name on the ballet.  Of course, now Indiana has changed to the computerized system so a voter wouldn’t be able to just write in a candidate.   Supposedly, they have paper ballots at each voting station, but this voter was not told there were paper ballots available, not even when I voted early, nor were there any paper ballots visible so that one could ask for it.

They changed the law so that one had to have 2% of the general votes cast for the Secretary of State in the previous election.  Note the deadlines were repeatedly pushed back in order to diminish the ability to gather signatures during summer events where crowds gather…

I found this page absolutely fascinating.  I had no idea that we had other candidates to choose from, as the write in candidates were not on the electronic ballot.  And being without access to media (no TV antenna in the community room at the time), nor did I have more than an hour per time from the library’s internet computers…so information was limited, as are most poor.  And I would venture a guess that even with cable TV, many middle class were also ignorant of this–funny how the nooz just doesn’t seem to get around to covering important issues like this….they’d rather scare you into getting a vaccine that will likely cause as much harm to your body as any good or tell you not to take Vitamin E because some bogus *study* says it’s bad for you…pfft.

Scientists against GMOs

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Wake-Up Call has a blog up on a new paper by scientists against genetically modified organisms (GMO’s).

From the paper:

For example, the claim that conventional plant breeders have been “genetically modifying” crops
for centuries by selective breeding and that GM crops are no different is incorrect (see 1.1). The term
“genetic modification” is recognised in common usage and in national and international laws to refer
to the use of recombinant DNA techniques to transfer genetic material between organisms in a way
that would not take place naturally, bringing about alterations in genetic makeup and properties.
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In my view, this “muddying of the waters” as they say, is a way to placate the growing public alarm about what they are
putting in our food supply.  See, if you can claim that GMO’s were there all along, the public is pacified and the current
push of asking for GMO labeling will die a slow death…
….meanwhile, the public continues to suffer from GMO induced leaky gut causing susceptibility to heavy metal poisoning,
allergies, chronic fatigue, etc., and their doctors will be clueless.
Important points of the paper:
1.  They assert that it’s a mistake saying changing one gene is only changing one gene….the scientists assert that changing one
gene has something of a ripple effect. It makes total sense that the genes aren’t isolated and they work in concert with other
genes, thus when you change it, it has unintended consequences:  crop nutritional value, allergens, toxins, environmental harm.
The most striking point of this section:
These unexpected changes are especially dangerous because they are irreversible.
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They go on to say that unlike pollutants that degrade over time, GMO’s do not.  Pandora’s Box, baby.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at the “atomic gardens” mentioned on page 12, but still shocking now, looking back,
at how they were using “peaceful radiation” to change plants beneficially.  Wow.  How naive we were.  I wonder at
the health of the people who ate those plants?  What about the people and wildlife surrounding these “atomic gardens”?
Since we know that people living within 20 miles of nuclear power plants are more likely to have thyroid issues….I
wonder about the effects of this type of radiation…
Well, I’m off to read more–it’s got 123 pages, so it’s gonna be awhile. 🙂

A post script

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A post script to this blog…what I meant when I referred to Katrina is that I told them I thought the George W. Bush administrations’ slow response to the emergency was racist.  It was September, 2005, so it was only a month after the storm hit, but it was apparent to me.  What really shocked me was how only the one black woman agreed with me, again, subtly, but she saw it, too.    This why I probably began to think that Daniels was dismantling or weakening the Civil Rights Commission and blurted that out.

When I think about that interview and how I missed such a fabulous opportunity–a  life changer- because it would have been a career I would have enjoyed with its daily change, using the creative along with the analytical, and fighting for the underdog—and all the misery that mercury has caused me, I want to cry in despair.   This poison has taken so much more than can be neasured…

I give myself 24 hours to feel sorry for myself, and then move on…

Bill Gates hasn’t destroyed public education yet….

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…but damn,he sure is trying with everything he’s got.

<sigh>  I was all ready to rip into Gates once again… but I’m halfway through the article of Chronicles of Higher Education….and this one sentence that Gates “just wants to get more people through the system with college degrees so that it will lift them out of poverty…”

bwahahahaha.  That’s rich.

Then, further down, they disclose that Gates Foundation is supporting the Chronicles of Higher Education financially.  I think I’ve already read that somewhere, but alas, the brain didn’t bring it up…the article is clearly a promo by Gates…so yeah….

So…I’ll have to refer to previous blogs on Gates…

Here.

Here. Silencing teachers.

Here. Supporting Brookings Institute that dismissed Diane Ravitch

Here. Not content with just controlling education, but the food supply, as well.

Here.

Napolitano leaving

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Janet Napolitano is leaving the Dept. of Hysterical Security to head up….wait for it…the University of California, including Berkeley.…

While reading the article, I again ask myself, “why is one person head over natural disasters, the CDC,  as well as security?”

The nurse did it….

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…in the break room….(sorry…this reads too much like an Agatha Christie mystery)

One has to wonder at the nurse being poisoned, too, for her behavior.  She was already being written up for her behavior, and over time she and the rest in the practice would be affected.  Have I  mentioned before that dentists have the highest suicide rate among the professions?