In 1970, a US Army captain went rogue after he discovered that the military was conducting surveillance on dissidents across the country, thus sparking the first effort in modern times to tame US intelligence.
In 1968, almost half a century before the world heard the name of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on a US-run global surveillance system, Christopher Pyle, an Army captain who taught law at the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Holabird, Maryland, was about to do something no less memorable.
After Pyle had concluded one of his popular lectures on civil disorder, which focused on how the military could better quell riots in those highly volatile times, a military officer directly involved in such operations approached him with the request for a meeting. Several days later, Pyle was escorted into a large warehouse facility that once had been used to assemble railroad engines. In his 2006 book, No Place to Hide, Robert O’Harrow described what happened next.
“Pyle walked into the cage, where an officer showed him books containing mug shots. He looked in the first volume and saw a familiar face. It was Ralph David Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s assistant. Officers called the books the ‘black list.’”
“Outside the cage, Pyle saw more than a dozen teletype machines. The head of the CONUS [acronym for Continental United States] intelligence section told him they were spitting out reports from some fifteen hundred Army operatives about demonstrations with twenty people or more. Pyle was starting to understand how naive he’d been. He began formulating a plan. He would be getting out of the Army soon. He could tell the world about what was going on. When he joined the Army he took an oath to defend the country against all enemies, here and abroad. In his mind now, that included the Army’s intelligence operation. They turned in their security badges and left the building.”
And thus was born one of the most consequential whistleblowers of the post-World War II era.
In January 1970, Pyle, now a full-fledged private citizen, penned an article for the Washington Monthly entitled, ‘CONUS Intelligence: The Army Watches Civilian Politics.’ The explosive opening paragraph said it all: “[t]he U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States. Nearly 1,000 plainclothes investigators … keep track of political protests of all kinds – from Klan rallies in North Carolina to anti-war speeches at Harvard.”
Immediately, some US media swung into action as journalists began hounding the Department of Defense and the US Army to determine the veracity of the claims. Given Pyle’s extreme proximity to the subject matter at hand, however, it soon became clear that Uncle Sam got caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
Pyle’s revelations were enough to prompt Congress, as well as a slew of litigation lawyers, to sit up and take notice. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senator Samuel James Ervin, a self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina, worked together with Pyle to investigate and expose the clandestine domestic spying program.
Pyle and Ervin eventually spent countless hours delivering testimony before various congressional meetings over a span of several years. The first fruit of their labors came with passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford on December 31, 1974, the legislation states: “No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains…” In other words, although the law didn’t actually stop the US Army or intelligence agencies from infiltrating civil action groups and public demonstrations, it did hamper the feds from disclosing the identities of the activists without their foreknowledge.
To this end, Pyle served as a consultant for three Congressional committees: the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights on the Judiciary Committee (1971-1974), the Committee on Government Operations (1974), and the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975).
According to Pyle, as a result of those successful investigations, “the entire US Army Intelligence Command was abolished and all of its files were burned.” For his actions, Pyle ended up on then-President Richard Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List.”
Given the severity of their overall findings, however, the congressional investigations triggered by the US Army captain did not stop there.
1975, the ‘Year of Intelligence’
On January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4, the US Senate created the so-called Church Committee, chaired by Democrat Senator Frank Church, to further examine abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The House carried out its own set of investigations with the Pike Commission and the Rockefeller Commission, thereby prompting the media to label 1975 as the ‘Year of Intelligence,’ and not in a way that was flattering to the intelligence community.
Pyle lent his expertise to the ambitious Church Committee, headed by Iowa Senator Frank Church, which discovered a number of questionable, unethical and outright illegal activities by the CIA between 1959 and 1973. Detailed in a series of reports dubbed the ‘Family Jewels’, these activities included conducting physical surveillance on journalists, amassing files on nearly 10,000 Americans connected to the antiwar movement, funding behavior modification research on unwitting subjects, and plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban President Fidel Castro and DR Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
The most impactful discovery made by the Church Committee, however, was that of Project SHAMROCK. Started in 1940 during World War II and running into the 1970s, the NSA was given secret authority to access all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. At the peak of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages were captured and analyzed by NSA personnel in a month. The pertinent information contained in these messages was then forwarded to other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and the Department of Defense. This formed the basis of the so-called ‘Watch List’ of the 1970s that included thousands of American citizens, including high-ranking politicians, celebrities, academics and antiwar activists.
The findings led Senator Frank Church to conclude that Project SHAMROCK was “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”
Based on the recommendations of the Church Committee, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Under FISA, the government is required to obtain warrants to conduct electronic surveillance against individuals from a special court. Such a warrant requires “probable cause to believe” that the surveillance target is a foreign government or organization, or an agent thereof, “engaging in clandestine intelligence activities or international terrorism,” as per a Department of Justice (DOJ) clarification.
Yet, as we shall see, even this minor legislative hurdle would prove too cumbersome for the Bush administration in its war on terror.
Privacy in the age of terrorism
The tireless work of the Church Commission was put to a test in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as US lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle were prepared to sacrifice citizens’ privacy in the name of national security. Thus, less than one week after three hijacked aircraft toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people in the process, one of the most comprehensive plans for conducting surveillance on American civilians and individuals worldwide – the USA PATRIOT ACT (an acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’) – was already being disseminated to members of Congress.
Arguably the most controversial part of the Patriot Act is contained in Section 215 of the 342-page document, which calls for sweeping government powers against private and public enterprises, individuals, and personal privacy. Most crucially, Section 215 did away with the requirement that the target of the records search be a non-US citizen and “an agent of a foreign power.” American citizens were now legitimate targets as well.
In the Senate, the Patriot Act passed in a 99 – 1 vote. The only senator to vote against it was Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold. “There is no doubt,” he declared on the Senate floor before the historic vote, “that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists…But that would not be a country in which we would want to live.”
Even with this widening of surveillance powers, then-US President George W. Bush, as part of the global ‘War on Terror’ that he declared following the events of 9/11, ordered the NSA to tap the communications of an untold number of people in the US, including citizens, without the warrants demanded by the FISA court – despite the fact that between 1979 and 2005, only four out of over 15,000 warrant requests were rejected by the FISA court.
Christopher Pyle, who was still committed to his cause over 30 years after he chose to become a whistleblower, labeled Bush “a criminal” for violating the FISA law and suggested that he should be impeached.
“The Constitution says he must take care that all laws be faithfully executed, not just the ones he likes,” Pyle said during an interview with Democracy Now in 2005. “The statute says … that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive law governing these international intercepts, and he violated it anyway. And the law also says that any person who violates that law is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. By the plain meaning of the law, the President is a criminal.”
More recently, Christopher Pyle, 83, who now works as Professor Emeritus of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, spoke out on behalf of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower who revealed a massive global intelligence program run by the so-called Five Eyes, a once-secretive intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“He’s just an ordinary American,” Pyle explained in 2013. “He’s trying to start a debate in this nation over something that is critically important. He should be respected for that and taken at face value and we should move on to the big issues, including the corruption of our system that is done by massive secrecy and by massive amounts of money and politics.”
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
Israeli authorities prohibit food, fuel, electricity, and water into the Gaza Strip as Defense for Children International – Palestine has so far confirmed the killing of at least 105 Palestinian children since Saturday, with the total now surpassing 300.
DCIP has confirmed the killing of at least 105 Palestinian children in direct Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip between October 7 and 11, while the Ministry of Health in Gaza announced today that over 326 children have been killed. DCIP staff in Gaza and the West Bank continue to document and confirm Palestinian child fatalities as hostilities continue between Palestinian armed groups and Israeli forces. Intensive Israeli bombardment throughout the Gaza Strip, lack of electricity, Israeli airstrikes on telecommunications infrastructure, and the unprecedented rate of daily child fatalities has resulted in a lag between confirmed fatalities by DCIP and the overall total child fatalities published regularly by the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
“Israeli forces are destroying entire neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip as an apparent full-scale ground assault is imminent,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP. “Immediate humanitarian relief is necessary to protect civilians as Israeli forces prepare to intensify attacks and Israeli officials declare their intention to commit further war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Around 6 p.m. on October 9, Israeli warplanes targeted, without prior warning, a two-story building behind the Golden Hall in the Americana area west of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, killing at least 14 Palestinians, including at least six children: siblings Karam, three, Akram, 10, Watan, one, Mahmoud, nine, Amani, four, and Fatima Mohammad Abdulrahim Al-Madhoon, seven, according to documentation collected by DCIP. Rescue teams were able to recover seven bodies.
An Israeli airstrike targeted without prior warning a residential building in Jabalia refugee camp around 9 a.m. on October 10, killing four Palestinians, including three children: Mohammad, two, Karam, three, and Naheda Mousa Yousef Al-Hesi, 11, according to documentation collected by DCIP. Other children were also injured in the attack.
Israeli warplanes targeted a residential building without prior warning around 11 a.m. on October 10 in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, killing 14 Palestinians, including seven children, according to documentation collected by DCIP. The airstrike killed seven children from the Ahmad family: siblings Mustafa, nine, and Elayn Tamer Mohammad Ahmad, four, their cousins Sidra, five, Haidy, one, Linda, seven, and Qusai Mohammad Aladdin Ahmad, three, as well as another cousin, two-year-old Obaida Rafat Aladdin Ahmad.
Israeli warplanes completely destroyed a three-story residential building without warning in the Tal Al-Zaatar area of Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip around 9:25 p.m. on October 10, killing everyone inside, including at least one child, 10-year-old Mohammad Baraa Taysir Shahin, according to documentation collected by DCIP. Palestinian civil defense teams have recovered two bodies from the building, while an estimated 10 Palestinians were inside during the bombing.
In addition to these incidents, DCIP has verified the killing of an additional 11 Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip in other attacks, though DCIP field researchers are still gathering and verifying details of the incidents. Those killed include:
Ali Omar Mousa Al-Qatnani, four, from Jabalia
Siblings Layan, two and Majd Mohammad Ismail Salah, two, from Beit Lahia
Haitham Khaled Abdulazeem Asayleh, 17, from Jabalia
Hassan Mohammad Ismail Salah, nine, from Jabalia
Malak Mohammad Majed Al-Daqs, two, from Jabalia
Kenan Mohammad Mahmoud Farhat, two, from Jabalia
Cousins Nadeen Mohammad Abdulati Salah, 13, and Diaa’ Ahmad Abdulati Salah, six months, from Jabalia
Mohammad Hassan Ali Al-Zain, seven, from Khan Younis
Sham Mohammad Saleh Al-Sawalha, eight months, from Jabalia
Israeli forces unleashed a massive military offensive on the Gaza Strip on Saturday after Palestinian armed groups fired rockets toward Israel and breached the Israeli perimeter fence surrounding Gaza early on October 7, launching attacks inside Israel. Israeli forces initiated a large-scale military operation dubbed Operation Iron Swords.
At least 1,100 Palestinians, including at least 326 children, have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Saturday morning, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. DCIP is working to document additional attacks and killings. Israeli forces have shot and killed six Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank since October 7, including 12-year-old Ahmad Abdulnaser Adnan Rabi.
DCIP previously confirmed the killing of at least 74 Palestinian children in direct Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip between October 7 and 10, 2023, in a report issued yesterday.
Over 263,934 people in the Gaza strip have fled their homes as mass displacement escalates with intensifying Israeli attacks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA). More than 175,486 internally displaced Palestinians are sheltering in 88 United Nations schools throughout the Gaza Strip, while over 73,900 Palestinians, whose homes have been destroyed or damaged, are hosted by relatives and neighbors, according to UN OCHA.
Members of 13 private military companies (PMCs) from Europe and members of nine foreign paramilitary proxy formations are participating in military operations against Russia in Ukraine, Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Alexander Bortnikov said on Wednesday.
“We record the participation of employees of 13 European PMCs and members of nine foreign paramilitary proxy forces in hostilities,” Bortnikov said at a meeting of the CIS Council of the Heads of Security Agencies and Special Services.
Additionally, the identities of 794 mercenaries from 35 countries fighting against Russia in Ukraine have been established, the official said.
There are 17 training camps in EU countries under the auspices of NATO special services, where militants from members of international terrorist organizations and mercenaries are trained for Ukraine, Alexander Bortnikov said.
Ukraine, thanks to the efforts of Washington and its NATO allies, has become a source of military and terrorist threats on the border of Russia and Belarus, Bortnikov added.
The priority of the international terrorist organizations, actively directed by the American and British special services, is to seize power primarily in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and incorporate them into the so-called “world caliphate,” Alexander Bortnikov said.
The undermining of the power lines of the Smolensk and Kursk nuclear power plants by the Ukrainian saboteurs was aimed at disrupting the technological process of the nuclear power plants’ operation; as a result of their actions, the No. 2 unit of the Kursk nuclear power plant was stopped in an emergency, Bortnikov said.
In August this year, the FSB detained members of the Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group, which was trained by the British Army Special Forces and whose task included sabotage of the Smolensk and Kursk nuclear power plants, Bortnikov stressed.
Once labeled a dangerous ‘anti-vax’ technique, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Dr. Peter Marks is now stating he would space out vaccines to avoid mounting adverse reactions.
1. The reactions to the latest hostility between Palestinians and the Israelis actually underscores why the conflict, which has been more than seven decades, would not find a solution.
2. Firstly, the responses that came from powerful Western nations and their apparatus, including their media, are hypocritical, bigoted and pathological.
3. Instead of addressing the conflict for what it actually is, they chose to continue with their deceptive narrative that it is an attack on Israel by terrorists – their blame being obviously against Hamas, the Hezbollah and Iran.
4. With that narrative, they stoke fear in the Western community, claiming that it is an attack on democracy and peace loving people.
5. With that, the US in particular feel justified to extend military support to Israel to “retaliate” against Palestinians attacks.
6. All these are far from the truth. Instead they are outright lies which had been perpetuated unashamedly by Western leaders and their media.
7. The truth is actually very simple.
8. For decades, the Israelis had been committing war crimes, massacres, genocide and unthinkable atrocities against the Palestinians.
9. These are not one-off acts but rather systematically conducted without respite throughout the seven decades.
10. Apart from Palestinian land which the Israelis acquired illegally through unilateral agreements and treaties with former occupiers of Palestine, the Israeli settlers have been forcefully seizing lands and farms belonging to Palestinians.
11. The Palestinians are chased out of their land and any attempt to seek some form of restitution from the Israeli authorities are met with violence backed most times by the Israeli security forces namely the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
12. The Palestinians, pushed to the corner, while Gaza was turned into an open air prison, attempted sporadic retaliations, which in turn were met with the full force of the IDF with weapons supplied by superpowers in particular the US.
13. This episode is not any different from previous retaliations except that probably this time around they are more focussed with a bit more assistance externally.
14. But the Western powers and their apparatus continue with their lies, with their narratives that the hostility is an act of terror committed by terrorists, ignoring the fact that it is retaliation by a people whose freedom and rights to their land had been forcefully taken away from them.
15. They refuse to view the hostility is committed by freedom fighters who are up against an injustice committed by an apartheid regime which had been perpetrating genocide on the Palestinians.
16. The Western powers and the US are party to apartheid, genocide and crimes against humanity for as long as they support the heinous Israeli regime.
17. With that, any attempt towards finding a just and fair solution for the Palestinians becomes an exercise in futility.
18. In the meantime, the Israelis can be expected to carry out their genocide with impunity and with total disregard of international laws.
The Fluoride Lawsuit has produced video admissions that may have exposed the nearly 80 year practice of adding the toxin to our nation’s water supply as one of the biggest public health scandals in American history. Attorney Michael Connett, Esq., explains how adding fluoride to drinking water became standard practice in the US and shares the studies that link it with severe disease. Then, he shares exclusive video of court depositions of experts you have to see to believe.
FROM 2012: Grant F. Smith, Research Director for the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy at IRmep.org, joins us to discuss the secret Israeli espionage program that smuggled nuclear materials out of the United States to help start the Israeli nuclear program in the 1960s. We go over the declassified documents tying Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to the smuggling ring, and explore Smith’s book, Divert!: NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the diversion of US weapons grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
“We know next to nothing about the vast majority of compounds in our diet … ‘Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components,’ says Albert-László Barabási at Harvard Medical School, who coined the term nutritional dark matter.
“‘But these represent only a small fraction of the biochemicals present in our food’ … The idea that food is a rich and complex mix of biochemicals is hardly news.
“Even the well-known macronutrients — proteins, carbohydrates and fats — are hugely diverse. There’s also a vast supporting cast of micronutrients: minerals, vitamins and other biochemicals, many of which are only present in minuscule quantities, but which can still have profound health effects.”
As noted by New Scientist : “With the USDA as your guide, 99.5% of the components in food are a mystery,” and as noted by Barabási, “It would be foolish to dismiss 99.5% of the compounds we eat as unimportant … We will not really understand how we get sick if we don’t solve this puzzle.”
Searching for nutritional ‘dark matter’
Disturbed by the information gap, an international team of researchers started working on a more comprehensive database a decade ago called FooDB, which as of 2020 contained information on some 70,000 nutritional compounds.
Yet even this database still has a long way to go. An estimated 85% of the nutritional components listed remain unquantified, meaning they know a food contains a particular component, but they don’t know how much.
The health implications of most compounds also remain largely unknown.
New Scientist notes:
“This is also true of individual micronutrients. ‘Consider beta-carotene,’ says Barabási. ‘It tends to be positively associated with heart disease, according to epidemiological studies, but studies adding beta-carotene to the diet do not show health benefits. One potential reason is that beta-carotene never comes alone in plants; about 400 molecules are always present with it. So epidemiology may be detecting the health implications of some other molecule.’
“Another probable cause is the effect of the microbiome on dark nutrients, says [FooDB founder David] Wishart. ‘Most dark nutrients are chemically transformed by your gut bacteria.’
“That’s probably why studies on the benefits of different foods give relatively ambiguous results. We don’t properly control for the variation in gut microflora, or our innate metabolism, which means different people get different doses of metabolites from their food.”
Processed foods are an even greater mystery
The reason I started with that background is because we know even less about the constituents of processed foods and synthetic foods that ignorantly claim to be “equivalents” to whole foods, such as “animal-free meats” or “animal-free milk.”
Food processing alone will often alter the composition of bioactive molecules in a food and hence the food’s impact on health, but today, processed foods also contain a wide array of synthetic chemicals that, prior to the modern era, were never part of the human diet.
As such, they pose incredible risks to long-term health and well-being. Processed foods may also have intergenerational effects.
In recent years, the idea that we can simply replace whole foods with synthetic, genetically modified or lab-grown alternatives that are wholly equivalent to the original food has taken root. In reality, that’s simply impossible.
How can scientists create equivalence when they don’t even know what 85% or more of the whole food they’re trying to replicate consists of?
Common sense will tell you they can’t. It might look, smell and even taste similar, but the micronutrient composition will be entirely different, and as a result, the health effects will be incomparable as well.
Animal-free equivalence is a PR fraud
Take cultured meat, for example. It’s said to be equivalent to real animal meat because it’s grown from animal cells. The cells are then grown in a nutrient solution inside a bioreactor until they become a meat-like slab.
Similarly, Bored Cow animal-free milk is a dairy alternative made with whey protein obtained through a fermentation process, plant-based fats (in lieu of milk fats), citrus fiber (for creaminess) and added vitamins and minerals.
Defenders of cultured meat insist that this product is not “fake meat” but “actual meat,” the only difference is that no animal had to be slaughtered to create it.
Cultured meat and other synthetic foods are also said to be more environmentally friendly. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Their impact is far more akin to that of the pharmaceutical industry than the food industry.
Based on this assessment, each kilo of cultured meat produces anywhere from 542 pounds (246 kilos) to 3,325 pounds (1,508 kg) of carbon dioxide emissions, four to 25 times greater than that of conventional beef.
And this information is only provided to refute those who believe the global warming fallacy.
As noted by the authors, investors have poured billions of dollars into the animal cell-based meat sector based on the theory that cultured meat is more environmentally friendly than beef.
However, according to these researchers, that hype is based on flawed analyses of carbon emissions.
A paper published in the April issue of Animal Frontiers also warned that there are several implications of cell-based meat that need to be considered but aren’t, including the fact that cultured products are not nutritionally equivalent to the meats they’re intended to replace.
The claim that no animals are killed in the process is also false. At present, most cultured or cell-based meats are created by growing animal cells in a solution of fetal bovine serum, which is made from the blood of unborn calves.
In short, pregnant cows are slaughtered to drain the unborn fetus of its blood.
Is it safe to eat tumors?
There are also many unanswered questions surrounding safety. For example, to get the cell cultures to grow, some companies are using immortalized cells, which technically speaking are precancerous and/or fully cancerous.
The reason for using immortalized cells is that normally behaving cells cannot divide forever. Most cells will only multiply a few dozen times before they become senescent (old) and die.
This won’t work when your intention is to grow thousands of pounds of tissue from a small number of cells, hence they use immortalized cells that have no off switch for their replication and can divide indefinitely.
Meat substitutes cultured in this way could therefore be thought of as tumors, seeing how the flesh is entirely made up of precancerous or cancerous cells. Is it safe to eat tumors? We don’t know.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Robert Weinberg, Ph.D., has proposed that humans can’t get cancer from these cells because they’re not human cells and therefore cannot replicate inside your body.
However, there’s no long-term research to back this theory.
Dietary headaches to come
It’s also important to realize that the nutritional composition and safety of synthetic foods will vary depending on the brand.
When you’re dealing with beef, for example, the meat from one cow will be relatively identical to that of any other cow (one major exception being the way they’re raised and fed).
One wild-caught salmon is comparable to any other wild-caught salmon and each russet potato is more or less identical to every other russet potato.
However since each synthetic food brand uses proprietary ingredients and processes, no two will have identical composition or safety, so even if one is eventually proven safe and nutritious, those results cannot be applied to any other brand.
This variance has the potential to create major problems in the future when all sorts of foods have been replaced with synthetic non-equivalents.
How do you determine which cultured beef, chicken or salmon brand might be best for you? How will you devise a sensible diet plan when every food comes in myriad variations of varying composition and safety?
Synthetic foods pose unique food-safety hazards
Many synthetic food proponents claim lab-created food will bypass a host of food-safety problems, but the converse is far more likely to be true.
Sure, beef, for example, can be contaminated during processing, packaging, transport or storage, or during the cooking process.
But in cultured meat, every ingredient and processing step brings with it the potential of contamination and any of the hundreds of ingredients could have toxic effects, alone or in synergy.
Indeed, an in-depth analysis of the available evidence by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and a World Health Organization expert panel, published in May, concluded there are at least 53 potential health hazards associated with lab-grown meat.
Among them are the possibility of contamination with heavy metals, microplastics, nanoplastics and chemicals, allergenic additives, toxic components, antibiotics and prions.
What’s more, some of the ingredients that go into synthetic biology like cultured meat are regulated as “non-detectable manufacturing aids,” and you won’t even know what they are. Israeli startup Profuse Technology, for example, has developed a growth media supplement that massively encourages protein growth.
As reported by Food Navigator Europe in an article titled, “Cultivated Meat ‘Breakthrough’: Media Supplement Achieves Full Muscle Maturation on Scaffold Within 48 Hours,” the supplement reduces the time to grow filets and steaks by 80% and augments the protein in the final product by a factor of five.
An unsustainable model
The cultured meat process also produces toxic biowaste — a problem that doesn’t exist in conventional agriculture and food processing. In the video above, Alan Lewis, vice president of government affairs for Natural Grocers, reviews what goes into the making of synthetic biology.
The starting ingredients are typically cheap sugars and fats derived from genetically engineered corn and soy, grown in environmentally destructive monocultures with loads of herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.
As a result, they’re loaded with chemical residues. Hundreds of other ingredients may then be added to the ferment to produce the desired end product, such as a certain protein, color, flavor or scent.
The most often used microorganism in the fermentation process is E. coli which has been gene-edited to produce the desired compound through its digestive process.
The microorganism must also be antibiotic-resistant since it needs to survive the antibiotics used to kill off other undesirable organisms in the vat.
As a result, antibiotic-resistant organisms also become integrated into the final product, and the types of foodborne illness that might be caused by gene-edited antibiotic-resistant E. coli and its metabolites are anyone’s guess.
In addition to the desired target metabolite, these gene-edited organisms may also spit out non-target metabolites with unknown environmental consequences and health effects. But that’s not all. Once the target organisms are extracted, what’s left over is hazardous biowaste.
While traditional fermentation processes, such as the making of beer, produce waste products that are edible by animals, compostable and pose no biohazard, the biowaste from these synthetic biology ferments must first be deactivated and then must be securely disposed of. It cannot go into a landfill.
Protect your health by avoiding ‘frankenfoods’
Making food that requires genetically modified organisms inputs and produces more CO2 than conventional farming and hazardous biowaste to boot is hardly a sustainable model.
But then again, synthetic biology and processed foods are not being pushed out of true concern for sustainability.
If that was the goal, everyone would be looking at regenerative agriculture where every part of the system supports and sustains other parts, thereby eliminating the need for chemical inputs, radically reducing water needs while optimizing yields.
No, synthetic biology is pursued because it is a formidable control mechanism. Those who own all the synthetic food production will control the world in a very literal sense. To learn more about this plot for control, see “The Fake ‘Food as Medicine’ Agenda.”
In short, the globalists already own and control most of the carbohydrates grown in the world today. By replacing real animal foods with patented lab-made protein alternatives, they’ll have unprecedented power to control the world’s population.
It’ll also grant them greater control over people’s health. It’s already known that the consumption of ultra-processed food contributes to disease, and the benefactor of ill health is Big Pharma.
The processed food industry has spent many decades driving chronic illness that is then treated with drugs rather than a better diet. Synthetic foods will likely be an even bigger driver or chronic ill health and early death.
The fact is, fake meat and dairy cannot replace the complex mix of nutrients found in grass-fed beef and dairy, and it’s likely that consuming ultra-processed meat and milk alternatives may lead to many of the same health issues that are caused by a processed food diet.
So, if you want to really protect your health and the environment, skip pseudo foods that require patents and stick to those found in nature instead.
Open letter to Dr Nikita Kanani MBE, Deputy Lead, NHS Seasonal Vaccination Programmes
Dear Dr Kanani,
Thank you for your personalised circular urging me, as ‘a priority for seasonal flu and Covid-19 vaccinations’, to book my shots now.
I last had flu in the winter of 1999-2000. Since then I have investigated the efficacy of the annual flu shot, and lean towards the conclusions of Dr Tom Jefferson, of the Cochrane Institute, who has stated that ‘Influenza vaccines are about marketing and not science. We have few trials, and masses of very poor quality observational evidence. We [the Cochrane Institute] have presented evidence of considerable reporting bias, which governments continue to ignore. The science is missing and so making an informed decision is very difficult.’
Any benefits offered by vaccination against the flu appear to me to be negligible in comparison with a reliance on good nutrition, sensible exercise and exposure to sunlight. Since we have very little of that last here in the north-east of England, and Mr Gates and the Net Zero fanatics are keen for us to have even less, I may well be low in vitamin D, and would be interested in receiving regular supplies of a high-quality supplement from the NHS as an alternative to the inferior protection of an annual jab. Is this on offer?
Regarding the Covid-19 ‘vaccines’, I would query the use of that term in relation to the novel medications prescribed. The common expectation of a vaccine is that it will prevent infection and transmission. The mRNA injections do neither. To sell them to the public as ‘vaccines’, therefore, is misleading, though I note that you are at pains to avoid such a charge by claiming only that the shots will reduce the risk of serious illness and speed recovery (itself a questionable assertion).The word ‘vaccination’, however, is more potent than any more realistic description of what is actually being offered, and as long as it is repeatedly brandished in literature relating to the mRNA products, confusion will continue to reign. Please adjust your terminology accordingly.
You say that ‘Seasonal vaccinations have proven safety records.’ This does not apply to the mRNA medications, which, in addition to the fact that they are not bona fide vaccines, were authorised for emergency use only under the Black Triangle label, pending completion of clinical trials. Their short-term safety remains questionable, and their long-term safety cannot be known for many years to come. These medications have already caused unprecedented numbers of adverse events. The most egregious life-threatening and life-changing injuries have been inflicted on young people who were in virtually no danger from Covid, but people targeted by your campaign for priority jabbing on account of their advanced age are also at risk. Older members of my own family have suffered, and are still suffering, serious illness in the wake of the booster shot. No wonder Dr Angus Dalgleish, an expert in immunology and professor of oncology who has seen patient after patient relapse on receiving the third jab, is calling for the injections to be banned!
You claim that ‘seasonal vaccinations’ offer ‘better protection than any immunity gained from previous infections’. This I believe to be misinformation pure and simple. I myself had Covid with the original symptoms (dry cough, fever, extreme breathlessness, loss of taste and smell) in mid-December, 2019, before we were instructed to panic. At that time I was 76 years old. I took to my bed for a couple of days with throat pastilles and the occasional paracetamol, and recovered in time for Christmas. Presumably I now have natural immunity. Certainly I have suffered no recurrence of the illness to date, whereas almost everyone I know who has had the mRNA injections has subsequently been re-diagnosed with Covid at least once, often repeatedly. My own experience, then, suggests that you are wrong, and that the many reputable doctors who declare natural immunity to be superior to anything that the mRNA treatments, or even traditional vaccines, can achieve are correct. What is more, such immunity is guaranteed free from life-threatening or crippling side effects, both now and in the future.
Naturally I am aware that my age makes me vulnerable to seasonal respiratory illnesses. Should I succumb to flu or Covid, however, there are tried and trusted medications competent to see me through, barring other co-morbidities. Remembering those who died after being denied such safe treatments as ivermectin at the height of the recent avoidable emergency, I can only hope that my doctor will not be forbidden to prescribe them for me, should the need arise.
This brings me to the question of informed consent. In this respect I find your circular shocking. You urge us to book a jab online, to visit a walk-in ‘vaccination’ site or a handy pharmacy. There is no suggestion that a family doctor who knows our medical history should be consulted, or that we should be guided by our own situation, and the strengths and weaknesses of our own constitution, before subjecting ourselves to this one-size-fits-all treatment; no suggestion that ‘vaccination’ should be undertaken in full awareness not only of its risks and its benefits, but of alternative ways of strengthening our resistance to illness.
As the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow state, ‘Consent is more than obtaining a signature on a piece of paper. It is a process that is part of patient-centred care and begins with finding out what matters to the patient, identifying what options are reasonable – including the option of no treatment – and helping the patient decide which option suits them best.’
For the government to conduct publicly-funded campaigns to promote the indiscriminate medication of targeted groups of people, or of the population as a whole, flagrantly defies these principles.
Please adjust your circular to conform with the facts, and with the requirements of fully informed consent.
You may think you know what transhumanist propaganda WEF minion Yuval Noah Harari is spreading, but if you haven’t read his book you don’t know the half of it! And so, in the increasingly illustrious tradition of previous editions of the “I Read” series, today on The Corbett Report podcast I present to you a summary and synopsis of Yuval Noah Harari’s 2016 tome, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Strap in, folks. This one takes some weird twists and turns.
Most people are aware of Thalidomide, many are aware of Valproate, but there are several other drugs that have caused birth defects in children that are less well known including Debendox, Carbimazole and Primodos.
Primodos families achieved a main house parliamentary debate on 7th September led by Yasmin Qureshi. Whilst the House was not well attended, every single MP in the Chamber was on the side of the families and little effort was made to defend Government and regulator action.
Yasmin Quereshi explained:
“Children were born with serious deformities due to the hormone pregnancy test drug Primodos, which was taken by expectant mothers between 1953 and 1975”
“The UK regulator first received a warning about the drug in 1958. A definitive study was published in 1967, which linked birth defects to the synthetic hormones in Primodos. Baroness Cumberlege concluded that Primodos should have been removed from the market in 1967. The UK regulator failed in its duty of care to women: Primodos was eventually withdrawn in 1978, 20 years after the first warning.”
Finland, Sweden, Holland and Norway banned the use of hormone pregnancy tests at least 7 years earlier by 1971. MPs passionately recounted many stories of harm caused to their constituents, including Allan Dorans who explained the impact on Nan’s daughter Michelle in 1975, 4-5 years after it was withdrawn in other countries.
Why is the UK always so late to act on medicine harm?
You may say “that was 50 years ago”, things have changed, but MHRA’s lack of action on AstraZeneca covid vaccines resulted in patient deaths as recently as 2021. If anything, the MHRA’s recent transformation from “From watchdog to regulator” (as proclaimed by June Raine) is making things worse. As was pointed out several times during the debate, Primodos was 40 times the strength of the contraceptive pill, this is a risk a lay person can understand, why didn’t the regulator?
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg stated “The drug was used in South Korea and Germany as an abortifacient. It was used to procure abortions.” Why would MHRA allow a drug that is used overseas for abortions, as a pregnancy test? It would be reasonable to assume there could be a risk of miscarriage. Why did MHRA reject Professor Carl Heneghan’s (director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University) report showing “a clear association” between Primodos and several forms of malformation? Why hasn’t MHRA taken the actions recommended by the Cumberlege report? The yellowcard system is clearly not fit for purpose and is resulting in unnecessary harm to patients.
The Perseus Group believes that a large part of the problem is that medicine safety doesn’t follow the best practice safety management practices of other safety critical sectors like aviation or nuclear. For example, MHRA does not set safety thresholds for the number of deaths/injuries which is allowed before a medicine is suspended. Previous Inquiries, such as the Cumberlege Inquiry, do little or nothing to improve the fundamentals of MHRA’s safety management because there is no input from those involved in managing safety in other safety critical sectors.
The Government committed to take action on Primodos after the Cumberlege report (if fact Primodos was a key driver resulting in the commissioning of the report), but they have limited that action to pelvic mesh and Valproate. The Patient Safety Commissioner role was created to close the gap but again her scope has been limited to mesh and Valproate. Primodos families have been fighting for decades for redress but the system is against them, they have been failed by the Government, the legal system and the regulator.
There are dozens of medicine and medical device victim groups (antidepressants, morning sickness medicines, vaccines etc) fighting their own battles for justice, what is the underlying theme?
A regulator failing to do their duty to keep people safe, influenced by pharmaceutical companies and defended by the Government.
Esther McVey stated “Sadly, Primodos is not an isolated case, and we have seen many examples over the years of our regulatory bodies failing to keep patients safe from new medicines and medical devices. In 2013, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency listed 27 medicines that had been withdrawn on safety grounds. The average time they were on the market was 11 years. I wonder how many times we will allow history to repeat itself. There have been reports and reviews calling for reform, and back in 2004 the Health Committee undertook an inquiry into the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. It noted, of drug companies, the ‘closeness that has developed between regulators and companies’”
Of MRHA’s 16 board members, 6 have Declarations of Interest relating to healthcare companies including pharmaceutical giants such as Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Pfizer. Pharmaceutical companies have been given immunity for several medicines by the Government, incentivizing them to support the pharmaceutical companies position rather than the victims. Pharmaceutical companies already have deep pockets, why are the Government willing to support them rather than those harmed?
Sitting from the outside, I see many victim groups fighting their individual battles in silos. Imagine their power if they all came together as a single voice demanding reform of MHRA? 22 MPs spoke in the Primodos debate, every single one of them wanting justice for the victims. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Maria Caulfield has agreed to meet with families and review the findings of the Cumberlege report, so this looks like a small step forwards for this group or at least a little more hope.
Do we now have the critical mass to demand reform of MHRA? If everyone came together, could we get a regulator that prioritises patient safety over pharmaceutical company profits?
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full article
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