TiLTNews Network: Earth Watch -
Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference,
not by safety. It is easy to clamor for government security when terrible things happen; but liberty is given true meaning when we support it without exception, and we will be safer for it ~ Dr. Ron Paul
Merck MMR Vaccine Failed to Protect Thousands from Mumps
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier (photo: Wikipedia)
Pharmaceutical giant Merck is being accused falsifying data so it could sell a vaccine that wasn’t as effective as advertised and didn’t work for thousands of individuals.
Merck has a monopoly on vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR and MMR II vaccines. These vaccines have been given to millions of Americans. Thousands of those inoculated still contracted the mumps during outbreaks in 2006, 2010 and 2014.
“In 2006, there were over 6,500 cases of mumps, which spread rapidly throughout eight states in the Midwest. Of those whose vaccination status was known, approximately 90 percent had been MMR II vaccinated, with 63 percent of those having received two or more doses,” Alex James wrote at Truthout. Four years later, James added, another outbreak affected 1,500 people in the New York-New Jersey area, and 88% of them had received the MMR II vaccine.
When another outbreak hit Ohio State University in April 2014, 97 percent of the 225 students who were infected had been vaccinated.
Merck is now being sued by two virologists who say the company knowingly falsified data about the effectiveness of the vaccine and still put it on the market. Former Merck employees Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski said in 2010 that the company infused a blood sample with animal antibodies to make it look like the vaccine had elicited increased antibody production.
Merck needs to keep its efficacy at 95% so it will continue to be the exclusive supplier selected by the U.S. government to produce $1 billion worth of the vaccine annually, according to MedCity News.
The loss of our basic right to determine our own health care including Forced Vaccinations is coming and in many cases the precursors already exist. When We The People no longer have the right to decide what goes into our bodies and are forced to acquiesce to government mandates on such issues as Vaccinations then tyranny is no longer a possibility … it is a fact!
This article will discuss this point and the reasons so many of us choose not to vaccinate and will stand by that decision. Only the use of tyrannical force will overcome that objection.
Study after study is proving that vaccines are ineffective, may cause the very disease they are purported to prevent and in some cases may cause more harm to us than the actual disease. Peer Reviewed studies now link vaccines and psychotropic drugs to such physical and mental diseases as Cancer, SIDS, Dementia, Autism, ADHD, Behavioral Disorders and a host of other maladies we as a nation suffer on a massive scale, some of which we as a nation lead the world in.
Is it just coincidence that the rise in these diseases coincides almost perfectly with the massive drive to vaccinate the American public and put a huge portion of this population on psychotropic drugs? Is it just a coincidence that we are the most vaccinated and drugged nation on this planet? When does coincidence become fact?
Below you will find an abundance of information contained in excerpts from an article called “Boycott The American Academy Of Pediatrics” first published about two years ago. Some of the information and active links has been updated to function and to reflect current conditions. The knowledge and information contained is invaluable for those of us facing persecution and indeed legal ramifications for our steadfast and scientifically fact based beliefs! Additional information on the Nuremberg Code is also included below as well as a video on this subject …
Excerpts from: “Boycott The American Academy Of Pediatrics”
In 2000, “At an annual meeting at the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a resolution called for an end to all government mandated vaccinations. The resolution passed without a single dissenting vote.” The resolution read, “Mass vaccination is equivalent to human experimentation and subject to the Nuremberg Code.” (Francis).
In 2007, Gov. Perry of Texas, lied and told families that he had the power to force children to take vaccines.
In California, AB 499 has become law (Governor Brown Signed AB 499 into Law on August 27, 2013). This bill takes away parental informed consent for a dangerous & potentially deadly vaccine.
Judicial Watch investigated side effects of HPV Vaccine and discovered at least 3589 adverse reactions including 213 cases of permanent disability and 16 deaths. Is HPV Vaccine Safe? Please watch this clip that includes a report from Cheryl Atkinson of CBS.
If That is not enough to convince you, see the many articles appropriate to this subject here:
Please take a moment to reflect on this quote, “Education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . . Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” Bertrand Russell The Impact of Science on Society, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1953, p. 50.
If you are still reading this and care about the future and freedom of humanity please watch this.
Here is a Hollywood Propaganda piece,” Contagion,”
“No One is Immune to Fear” Please forward this to your friends and family, especially to those that have children and those that work in the medical field. I urge everyone to call their state and federal legislators and demand a stop to mandates & demand more freedom not less. “Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship.” Patrick Henry Baby DNA is being confiscated across the country without parents consent.
More & more children are being given stimulants, anti-depressants and ant-psychotics. In the last 20 or so years there has been an increase in mass murder and school shootings. The pharmaceutical industry has known about the connection to the 2D6 Gene.
For, “the treatment of a large number of metabolic and infectious diseases including but not limited to cancer, macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, Alzheimer’s and other neural disorders, autoimmune diseases, and all viral infections including AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), hepatitis and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).” Please help in the call protest the American Academy of Pediatrics and any and all physicians that attempt to promote the use of HPV Vaccine or any other dangerous vaccine, weather you are pro-education, pro vaccine choice or anti-vaccine, or wherever you stand. “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Ben Franklin. Stand Up For Liberty! Peace, Love & Liberty Will Prevail. (Tyranny)
Violation Of The Nuremberg Code
TLB: Parting Shot – Have we learned nothing from our experience with the eugenics programs of Nazi Germany … or has our government learned too much …
Jack Mullen Activist Post “Compulsory vaccination which once had the suffrage of the nation has now hardly a serious supporter. We are ashamed to jettison the idea completely and perhaps afraid that if we did the accident of some future epidemic might put us in the wrong. We prefer to let compulsory vaccination die a natural death and are relieved that the general public is not curious enough to demand an inquest. In the meantime our attention is diverted to other and new forms of immunisations" - [A] Charles Cyril Okell, "From a Bacteriological Back-Number,"The Lancet, January 1, 1938 pp 48-49 A Vaccine Apocalypse is in progress Now in America. This is a war, started centuries ago and continues today because Americans have no education in the history of vaccines or the nature of medical tyranny. There is a war raging against American Citizens, an attack, hidden and packaged in a religion of pretended Authority, presented and sold by an immoral and synthetic, media manufactured, culture of self-sacrifice, guilt, pacifism, denial and learned helplessness. The phony, plastic, unnatural culture is supported by pseudo-science, monopoly capitalism, false intellectualism and a growing expression of violence against those beginning to see behind the mask of this specious malevolent deception.
Vaccination hysteria and a crescendoing push to validate, normalize and implement vaccinations for growing numbers of disease is one expression of this multi-headed serpent gathering strength via usurpation of an individual's rights, responsibilities and sovereign authority over their property including their bodies.
A 2012 study led by Dr. David Witt, an infectious disease specialist at the San Rafael, California Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, concluded that whooping cough, pertussis, occurs more among vaccinated children than children not vaccinated for pertussis with the DtaP vaccine that replaced the DTP vaccine.[B]
The entire tainted history of vaccines has been riddled with fraud and deception. Without a working knowledge of the medical tyranny festering in America and the Western World, including the real history of vaccines, Americans cannot defend themselves in this war, which has been raging since the early 1800s.
As a matter of fact, pertussis has been on the rise since pertussis vaccinations have increased. In 2010, a mumps outbreak occurred among 1000 children in upper New Jersey and lower New York. Almost 80% of them had been vaccinated with MMR (measles, mumps & rubella) vaccine. [B]
People today, as they were in the 1800s, are fear peddled into opening their bodies to an invasion of foreign chemicals, micro-organisms and in this century even nano technology. Opening their bodies to complete unknowns, trusting corporations with histories fraught with lies while, at the same time, opening their wallets to these companies and their enforcement arms in government just to placate and immunize themselves against further intrusion into their lives. Doing the research and reading history it can be easily seen vaccines have never worked very well. They have always been associated with promoting and expressing the disease, called shedding, a process whereby the inoculated can and does manufacture the immunizing virus internally while the immune system is shocked and responding to the direct injection of attenuated virus (or in most cases, multiple viral strains, DNA and RNA).
Throughout the 1980s, official agencies reported several outbreaks of measles occurring among children who had been vaccinated in various locations including an Illinois junior high and high school, a Massachusetts high school, a region in France, and a rural area near Helisinki, Finland.
Both USA schools had well over 90% of children vaccinated against measles – that’s the herd immunity mark for a given population. The bogus herd immunity claim serves to create more revenue while blaming parents who refuse vaccinations for endangering humanity. [B] *
According to Barbara Loe-Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a non-profit charity dedicated to preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and defending the legal right for everyone to make vaccine choices.
Live attenuated viral vaccines (LAV) that use live viruses try to, in essence, fool your immune system into believing that you’ve come into contact with a real virus, thereby stimulating the antibody response that, theoretically, will protect you,” she says.
When you get these live viral vaccines, you shed live virus in your body fluids. Just like when you get a viral infection, you shed live virus. That’s how viral infections are transmitted.
Because viruses, unlike bacteria, need a living host... in order to multiply. What these viruses do is they try to disable the immune system and evade immune responses. [F]
The push to force these disease-causing, tainted with numerous co-toxins, vaccines on the American public is declaration of war by those seeking to downsize human populations, end the reign of sovereign states and to discredit and forever render powerless an individual's right to privacy and controlled access to his or her body.
The vaccine mafia, supported by the thugs of medical malpractice, the factitious authority of the State and soon the end of a gun, are replaying a war they already lost long ago: Forced and defined mandatory vaccinations has been tried and then refuted in the past.
Perhaps the best reason to know our history is so that the worst parts are never repeated. - Dr. Suzanne Humphries, M.D. [A]
Today just like yesterday, the modern, for big profit, pharmaceutical cartels, supported by their priests and acolytes, are pushing a self-contradictory idea that vaccinated people are getting diseases anyway because they are in the company of non-vaccinated people.
Sir Duminie Corigan, M.D. when acting as one of the the committee in 1871, on the Vaccination Act [In England ], said: "An unvaccinated child is like a bag of gunpowder which might blow up the whole school, and ought not, therefore, to be admitted to a school unless he is vaccinated" - [A]
However, it was during a major outbreak of smallpox in the 1880s and 1890s that some enlightened, and apparently not bought off, officials in the City of Leicester, England, a city and unitary authority area in the East Midlands of England, after reviewing the history and data concerning vaccinations and noting increases in the number of people infected with smallpox seemed correlated with vaccination, decided to go against the church of medicine and ban vaccinations for all those in the city. Then just as now:
Concerns over vaccine safety, effectiveness, and governmental infringement on personal liberty and freedom through compulsory vaccination stoked the fires of the anti-vaccination movement. People began to resist the government and chose to pay fines. Some even accepted imprisonment rather than allowing vaccinations for themselves of their children. The public backlash culminated in the Great Demonstration in Leicester, England in 1885.
That same year, Leicester’s government, which had pushed for vaccination through the use of fines and jail time, was replaced with a new government that was opposed to compulsory vaccination. By 1887 the vaccination coverage rates had dropped to 10 percent. [A]
The so-called Leicester method relied on quarantine of smallpox patients and disinfection of homes. The city believed this method was inexpensive and effective means to eliminate vaccinations. According to an article in the The Times, March 24, 1885:
The last decade has witnessed an extraordinary decrease in vaccinations, but, nevertheless, the town has enjoyed an almost entire immunity from the small-pox...
The result is that in every instance the disease has been promptly and completely stamped out at paltry expense. Under such a system the Corporation have expressed their opinion that vaccination is unnecessary, as they claim to deal with disease in a more direct and much more efficacious manner. This and a widespread belief that death and disease have resulted from the operation of vaccination.
Stunningly, the success of the Leicester method was not seen in towns and cities that forced citizens to vaccinate.
Not only may well-vaccinated towns be affected with small-pox, but the most thorough vaccination of a population that is possible to imagine may be followed by and extensive outbreak of the disease. This happened in the mining and agricultural district of Mold, in Flintshire... Leicester, with population under ten of age practically unvaccinated , had a small-pox death rate 144 per million; whereas Mold, with all of the births vaccinated for eighteen years previous to the epidemic, had one of 3614 per million [A]
That’s a 32 times increase because of vaccinations.
An ongoing study out of Germany comparing disease rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated children points to a pretty clear disparity between the two groups as far as illness rates are concerned.
As reported by the group Health Freedom Alliance, children who have been vaccinated according to official government schedules are up to five times more likely to contract a preventable disease than children who developed their own immune systems naturally without vaccines. [C]
Pharmaceutical cartels protected by regulatory bodies, captured and controlled by Big Pharma, are finding it more difficult and expensive to produce medicine to actually cure disease and have been moving to a cheaper and highly profitable model of vaccinating for disease. The upside also includes a not spoken about benefit - vaccinated people are likely to develop chronic life-long problems associated with immune disorders and disease caused by the compounds of vaccines. Damaged vaccine recipients become a continual source of patients supplied to the conventional medical system still treating people with disease-causing medicine, unnecessary surgery and long-term hospitalization and nursing home care for older people suffering from disease caused originally by vaccination years earlier.
As disclosed at VaccineInjury.info, vaccinated children are nearly twice as likely as unvaccinated children to develop neurodermatitis, for instance, a skin disorder marked by chronic itching and scratching. Similarly, vaccinated children are about two-and-a-half times as likely, based on current data, to develop a pattern of migraine headaches compared to unvaccinated children. [C]
Children are dying from the flu shot and suffering unknown maladies from mercury and other contaminants of the flu vaccine, while the MMR vaccine has been shown to cause Autism and Autism rates are fantastically high and rising, in fact according to MIT research:
At Today's rate, half of All U.S. Children Will Be Autistic (by 2025) [D]
Recently Dr. William Thompson Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control publicly admitted, in August 2014, the CDC covered up data linking the MMR vaccine to Autism in 1998 -- and yet nothing has been done about this ongoing tragedy that apparently will never end. In fact, the mainstream scripted news outlets, such as FOX, CNN, MSNBC and disinformation sites like snopes.com are claiming William Thompson's revelations are a hoax - yet Doctor Andrew Wakefield had already shown a correlation between vaccines in an article published in The Lancet Medical Journal in 1998, meanwhile children are still be forced to suffer the MMR vaccine and Autism rates are still climbing. (Source) Vaccines are a money making super-scam being foisted on humans in the name of doing good. Doing good in this case may even require the point of a gun or the threat of losing your children or long jail terms. Vaccines themselves are an open door to your body, a direct entrance past the firewall of your skin and immune system, capable of causing or creating any imaginable malady in your body, whether at the moment of injection or, via a timed mechanism, causing long-term health problems after any number of years. Vaccines are a pig-in-the-poke which neither you, nor your medicine man (Doctor), has any clue about contents of these liquid unknowns.
In this interview Dr. Maurice Hilleman reveals some astounding revelations. He admits that Merck drug company vaccines (Polio) had been deliberately contaminated with SV40, a cancer-causing monkey virus from 1953 - 63.
New evidence, shown in link just below, presents even more convincing and damning revelations the CDC, FDA, NIH, Planned Parenthood and likely other United Nations cover operations are purposefully maiming and killing our children. The article entitled "Finally the Truth: Study Links Autism to Vaccines of 'Aborted Babies' Cells", announces a study showing "increases in Autism rates directly linked to the introduction of vaccines manufactured using human fetal cells from aborted babies." The study, published in the September 2014 in the Journal of Public Health and Epidemiology, "was designed to analyze whether or not the environment factor of fetal cells could be connected with the rise in Autism." (Source)
The actual study is located here: http://www.academicjournals.org/journal/JPHE/article-abstract/C98151247042 According to the study "Researchers identified three specific change points in the U.S. between 1970 and 2002 following the approval in 1979 of the MMR II and Varivax Chickenpox vaccines, which used the fetal cell line WI-38, instead of animal-based cells. The Late 1980 study by the EPA confirmed one of the change points in which the incidence of Autism rose significantly in the U.S. as well as points in other countries. Each of these points corresponds to the times that a vaccine containing DNA from aborted babies was added to the recommended vaccine schedule." IBID Worse yet "Not only are the human fetal contaminated vaccines associated with autistic disorder throughout the World but also with epidemic childhood leukemia and lymphomas." IBID With more and more babies being aborted, the irony of rising Autism rates, rising in direct proportion to "the increasing numbers of human fetal manufactured vaccines which have been added to the US immunization guidelines", should be interpreted as a wake up call to those thinking nature will not push back against anti-life activities. A bigger and more primary issue in this discussion of forced, mandated, and “required to work” vaccinations is this: where comes the "Authority" to violate the body of an individual without permission, by force or threat of job loss or jail ? By what moral authority or life natural authority can costumed pretend authorities violate a person's most intimate and private possession, his/her body? Pretended Authority has not no authority, especially over your body and life, which must therefore include your property. It is only the people that give these authoritarians the right, via tacit consent and lack of education and concern. Vaccines are, at the best, a last resort method in the face of some out-of-control infectious contagion, but should never be considered for normal childhood disease such as the measles and mumps and rubella (measles). Typically measles results in the death of 1 or 2 children per 1000 cases and of those deaths, most result from pneumonia not the measles. The risk of vaccine related long term damage, or Autism, now 1 out 50 children, is just not worth the risk. Compare these death rates to the rate of Autism, now 1 in 50 or consider that hospitals kill over 700,000 per year by mistake. (Source) Or consider that Medical Doctor Mistakes are the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States. (Source) Is Autism a fair trade for pretended immunity against a disease that kills less 1 or 2 out of 1000?
The DTP (diptheria, tetanus, pertussis) vaccine has had a very high infant mortality rate, which is why it was replaced with the DtaP vaccine for pertussis. Though not as often, brain inflammation still occurs from the DtaP vaccine, which is not so effective for preventing pertussis after all. [B]
Is it worth damaging your child’s brain or risking infant mortality for a vaccine that has no evidence of even conveying immunity? Forced or "Required" MMR vaccines are just avarice and greed and psychopathic adherence to a global eugenics, and genocidal, plan to drastically reduce world population. By the time a child is 18 months old he or she will have received on average:
Edward Jenner (1796-1839) "discovered" that cowpox vaccine would supposedly innoculate persons against the eighteenth century scourge of smallpox. In fact, smallpox was already on the wane, and some authorities believe it would have vanished by the end of the century, due to a number of contributing factors. After the use of cowpox vaccine became widespread in England, a smallpox epidemic broke in which killed 22,081 people. The smallpox epidemic became worse each year that the vaccine was used. In 1872, 44,480 people were killed by it. England finally banned the vaccine in 1948, despite the fact that it was one of the most widely heralded "contribution" which that country had made to modern medicine. This action came after many years of compulsory vaccination, during which period those who refused to submit to its dangers were hurried off to jail.[E] page 136-137
In a stunning reversal, world renowned pediatric gastroenterologist Prof. John Walker-Smith won his appeal against the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council regulatory board that had ruled against both him and Andrew Wakefield for their roles in the 1998 Lancet MMR paper, which raised questions about a link to autism. The complete victory means that Walker-Smith has been returned to the status of a fully licensed physician in the UK, although he had already retired in 2001 — six years before the GMC trial even began.
Justice John Mitting ruled on the appeal by Walker-Smith, saying that the GMC “panel’s determination cannot stand. I therefore quash it.” He said that its conclusions were based on “inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion.” The verdict restores Walker-Smith’s name to the medical register and his reputation to the medical community. This conclusion is not surprising, as the GMC trial had no actual complainants, no harm came to the children who were studied, and parents supported Walker-Smith and Wakefield through the trial, reporting that their children had medically benefited from the treatment they received at the Royal Free Hospital.
While John Walker-Smith received funding to appeal the GMC decision from his insurance carrier, his co-author Andrew Wakefield did not — and was therefore unable to mount an appeal in the high court. This year, however, Dr. Wakefield, who now conducts his research in the US, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Brian Deer, Fiona Godlee and the British Medical Journal for falsely accusing him of “fraud.” The suit is currently underway in Texas, where Wakefield now lives. The ruling today bodes well for Dr. Wakefield’s suit against Deer, on whose reporting the entire GMC hearing was based.
In 1998 the Lancet published a case series on twelve children receiving treatment for bowel dysfunction at the Royal Free Hospital in London. The paper called for further study of a possible association between bowel disease and developmental delay, including cases of autism. It also noted that eight of the children’s gastrointestinal and autistic symptoms began shortly after they received the MMR vaccination. The verdict today raises questions about whether or not the Lancet should have retracted the paper after the GMC decision, as the reasons for its retraction have now been contradicted by the judge’s decision.
The thirteen original co-authors of the 1998 Lancet case series were members of the Royal Free’s Inflammatory Bowel Disease Study Group. In 2004, under pressure from the British medical establishment, ten of the co-authors signed a letter retracting an interpretation of the paper that it proved that vaccines caused autism, which the paper never actually claimed in the first place. John Walker-Smith, Andrew Wakefield and Dr. Simon Murch were subsequently brought up on misconduct charges before the GMC. The proceedings resulted in Walker-Smith and Wakefield being found guilty and being “struck off” the medical register, while Dr. Murch retained his status as a physician. Wakefield was then vilified by corporate media and by bloggers eager to repeat scandal and engage in industry protectionism, rather than investigate the complicated facts of the story.
Today, almost 14 years after the paper was published, the high court determined that John Walker-Smith was innocent of the wrongdoing alleged by the GMC. Judge Mitting reported that the GMC, “on the basis of sensible instructions, does not invite me to remit it to a fresh Fitness to Practice panel for redetermination. The end result is that the finding of serious professional misconduct and the sanction of erasure are both quashed.”
British parents from the group CryShame, which includes parents of the Lancet 12, issued a statement saying that they “welcome with immense relief the end of the eight year ordeal of Prof John Walker-Smith and the quashing of all substantive charges against him in the High Court, and wish him their heartfelt congratulations at finally clearing his name.”
“Though justice has finally prevailed for Prof. Walker-Smith, the damage done to him and his colleagues has been incalculable,” said Mark Blaxill, chairman of the Canary Party. “The UK government must investigate the corruption in the GMC, which has severely damaged the reputations of good, honest doctors. Most of all, it’s outrageous that Dr. Andrew Wakefield has been vilified by government officials, vaccine manufacturers and physician organizations, and that the media has accepted these unfounded accusations uncritically.”
“It’s time that we started treating responsible parents as reliable witnesses to serious adverse reactions to medical procedures such as vaccination,” said Jennifer Larson, president of the Canary Party. “The work that Walker-Smith and his colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital did with the Lancet 12 was medically necessary and above reproach. No patient complained, and the charges against the Royal Free team came only from a freelance journalist writing for a Rupert Murdoch newspaper. Meanwhile, the findings reported in the Lancet paper have been replicated in numerous scientific publications and reported by thousands of parents all over the world.”
“It is quite obvious to me that James Murdoch, Brian Deer and GlaxoSmithKline orchestrated the smear attack on Dr. Andrew Wakefield,” said Ginger Taylor, executive director of the Canary Party. “A judge has now ruled that the GMC hearings were a farce. Parents are waiting for journalists to find their spine and start some honest reporting on the character assassination of doctors that is blocking medical treatments for vaccine injured children, and the role that GSK and Merck may be playing to protect their profits on the MMR vaccine. The Canary Party honors and stands by doctors of integrity like Prof. Walker-Smith, who continue to fight and defend their hard-won reputations for going the extra mile to investigate and improve the chronic, difficult-to-treat cases that now permeate our society.”
Vaccine Epidemic How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children by Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland J.D.
FREE Shipping Available!
- See more at: http://healthimpactnews.com/2012/british-court-throws-out-conviction-of-autismvaccine-md-andrew-wakefields-co-author-completely-exonerated/#sthash.QdE2bn6E.dpuf
Segment features main character browsing 'Conspiracy Wars' site with crazy headline
by PAUL JOSEPH WATSON | FEBRUARY 13, 2015
An episode of the Comedy Central show Broad City depicted one of its main characters visiting a clone of the Infowars website entitled ‘Conspiracy Wars’ which featured the kooky headline, “Michael Jackson Lives in a Richard Branson Space Condo’.
The episode which featured the thinly veiled Infowars reference aired on Wednesday night. The design of the clone website seen in the clip is virtually an exact replica of Infowars.com.
The plot of the show revolves around two scatterbrained Jewish feminist women living in New York. The character seen viewing the Infowars clone website is Ilana Wexler, who is described as, “a twenty-two-year-old slacker and marijuana enthusiast who is often oblivious to (or apathetic to) how others react to her often wacky antics.”
According to the author of the video above, the use of the Infowars clone website in the show is part of the ongoing demonization campaign against Infowars and Alex Jones being deployed across both entertainment and news media.
“Apparently, the mainstream media believes it’s just not enough to demonize and lie about Infowars in the news alone, the attacks must also cross over into entertainment, where the audience lets their guard down and are more susceptible to the conditioning,” states Adam Green, adding that, “the producers of the show went out of their way to create a fake website to condition their audience.”
By associating the crazy headline with the Infowars replica, the producers of the show intended to brainwash their viewers into confusing the real Infowars with fake news websites and tabloid media, according to Green.
A more positive reading of the issue would be that Infowars has seeped so far into the cultural zeitgeist of America that directors and script writers are now throwing in Alex Jones and Infowars references as a recognition of how much impact we have had. Or maybe Broad City just wanted us to draw attention to their show, and if that’s case it’s mission accomplished.
Although in the case of Broad City the connotation is undoubtedly negative, both Alex Jones and Infowars have featured in a plethora of popular entertainment releases, including numerous video games.
It also emerged this week that left-wing activist Peter Young, an expert in media manipulation, crafted an entire campaign to target Infowars in order to draw attention to his troubles with the TSA.
“The specific end-goal was The Alex Jones Show,” Young told the New York Observer. “While culturally considered fringe, he has a larger platform than most websites and TV shows.”
Given that Infowars is now being chided by shows on Comedy Central, which is owned by media giant Viacom, maybe we’re not so fringe after all.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept theUnited States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains extremeDRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police their users, likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement. And in the most recent leak of the TPP’s Intellectual Property chapter, we found an even more alarming provision on trade secretsthat could be used to crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers who report on corporate wrongdoing.
Here, we’d like to explore yet another set of rules in TPP that will chill users’ rights. Those are the criminal enforcement provisions, which based upon the latest leak from May 2014 is still a contested and unresolved issue. It’s about whether users could be jailed or hit with debilitating fines over allegations of copyright infringement.
Dangerously Low Threshold of Criminality
The US is pushing for a dangerously broad definition of a criminal violation of copyright, where even noncommercial activities could get people convicted of a crime. The leak also shows that Canada has opposed this definition. Canada supports language in which criminal remedies would only apply to cases where someone infringed explicitly for commercial purposes.
This distinction is crucial. Commercial infringement, where an infringer sells unauthorized copies of content for financial gain, is and should be a crime. But that’s not what the US is pushing for—it’s trying to get language passed in TPP that would make a criminal out of anyone who simply shares or otherwise makes available copyrighted works on a “commercial scale.”
As anyone who has ever had a meme go viral knows, it is very easy to distribute content on a commercial scale online, even without it being a money-making operation. That means fans who distribute subtitles to foreign movies or anime, or archivists and librarians who preserve and upload old books, videos, games, or music, could go to jail or face huge fines for their work. Someone who makes a remix film and puts it online could be under threat. Such a broad definition is ripe for abuse, and we’ve seen such abuse happen many times before.
Fair use, and other copyright exceptions and limitations frameworks like fair dealing, have been under constant attack by rightsholder groups who try to undermine and chip away at our rights as users to do things with copyrighted content. Given this reality, these criminal enforcement rules could go further to intimidate and discourage users from exercising their rights to use and share content for purposes such as parody, education, and access for the disabled.
Penalties That Must be “Sufficiently High”
The penalties themselves could be enough to intimidate and punish users in a way that is grossly disproportionate to the crime. Based upon the leak, which showed no opposition in key sections, it seems TPP negotiators have already agreed to more vague provisions that would oblige countries to enact prison sentences and monetary fines that are “sufficiently high” to deter people from infringing again. Here is the text:
penalties that include sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement, consistently with the level of penalties applied for crimes of a corresponding gravity;
Already in manycountries, criminal punishments for copyright grossly outweigh penalties for acts that are comparatively more harmful to others. So the question as to what crimes copyright infringement corresponds to in “gravity” is obscure. What’s more alarming is that countries without existing criminal penalties or whose penalties are not “sufficiently high” to satisfy the US government, may be forced to enact harsher rules. The US Trade Representative (USTR) could use the certification process, at the behest of rightsholder groups, to arm-twist nations into passing more severe penalties, even after the TPP is signed and ratified. The USTR has had a long history of pressuring other nations into enacting extreme IP policies, so it would not be out of the realm of possibility.
Property Seizure and Asset Forfeiture
The TPP’s copyright provisions even require countries to enable judges to unilaterally order the seizure, destruction, or forfeiture of anything that can be “traceable to infringing activity”, has been used in the “creation of pirated copyright goods”, or is “documentary evidence relevant to the alleged offense”. Under such obligations, law enforcement could become ever more empowered to seize laptops, servers, or even domain names.
Domain name seizure in the name of copyright enforcement is not new to us in the US, nor to peoplerunning websites from abroad. But these provisions open the door to the passage of ever more oppressive measures to enable governments to get an order from a judge to seize websites and devices. The provision also says that the government can act even without a formal complaint from the copyright holder. So in places where the government chooses to use the force of copyright to censor its critics, this could be even more disastrous.
Criminalization of Getting Around DRM
We’ve continued to raise this issue, but it’s always worth mentioning—the TPP exports the United States’ criminal laws on digital rights management, or DRM. The TPP could lead to policies where users will be charged with crimes for circumventing, or sharing knowledge or tools on how to circumvent DRM for financial gain as long as they have “reasonable ground to know” that it’s illegal to do so. Chile, however, opposes this vague language because it could lead to criminal penalties for innocent users.
The most recent leak of the Intellectual Property chapter revealed new exceptions that would let public interest organizations—such as libraries and educational institutions—get around DRM to access copyrighted content for uses protected by fair use or fair dealing, or content that may simply be in the public domain. But even if it’s legal, it would be difficult for them to get around DRM since they may not be equipped with the knowledge to do it on their own. If someone else tries to do a public service for them by creating these tools for legally-protected purposes, they could still be put in jail or face huge fines.
Conclusion
Like the various other digital copyright enforcement provisions in TPP, the criminal enforcement language loosely reflects the United States’ DMCA but is abstracted enough that the US can pressure other nations to enact rules that are much worse for users. It’s therefore far from comforting when the White House claims that the TPP’s copyright rules would not “change US law”—we’re still exporting bad rules to other nations, while binding ourselves to obligations that may prevent US lawmakers from reforming it for the better. These rules were passed in the US through cycles of corrupt policy laundering. Now, the TPP is the latest step in this trend of increasingly draconian copyright rules passing through opaque, corporate-captured processes.
These excessive criminal copyright rules are what we get when Big Content has access to powerful, secretive rule-making institutions. We get rules that would send users to prison, force them to pay debilitating fines, or have their property seized or destroyed in the name of copyright enforcement. This is yet another reason why we need to stop the TPP—to put an end to this seemingly endless progression towards ever more chilling copyright restrictions and enforcement.
If you’re in the US, please call on your representatives to oppose Fast Track for TPP and other undemocratic trade deals with harmful digital policies.
One week ago, when previewing what may be the first lockout of the West Coast Ports since 2002, we cited the Retail Industry Leaders Association who, realizing that failure to reach an agreement between the dockworker union and their bosses, the Pacific Maritime Association representing port management would lead to devastating consequences for the US retail industry, had several very damning soundbites:
"a work slowdown during contract negotiations over the past seven months has already created logistic nightmares for American exporters, manufacturers and retailers dependent on an efficient supply chain. A complete shutdown would be catastrophic, with hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk if America’s supply chain grinds to a halt."
"A west coast port shutdown would be an economic disaster."
"A shutdown would not only impact the hundreds of thousands of jobs working directly in America’s transportation supply chain, but the reality is the entire economy would be impacted as exports sit on docks and imports sit in the harbor waiting for manufacturers to build products and retailers to stock shelves."
And the punchline: "The slowdown is already making life difficult, but a shutdown could derail the economy completely."
Just so readers have a sense of what is at stake, this is what the average dockworker makes: $147,000 a year in salary, plus $35,000 a year in employer-paid health care and an annual pension of $80,000 (according to an association press release). It is the overtime compensation to the total shown here, which grosses to over a quarter of a million dollars, that dockworkers are negotiating to raise or else the key US supply-chains gets it.
Incidentally, the demands of the dockworker union and their leverage is precisely the reason for the dramatic discrepancy we showed in the following chart:
In any case, as of last night, the choking of the US supply-chain has officially begin, when as the LA Times reported last night, "West Coast ports — including the nation's busiest in Los Angeles and Long Beach — will partially shut down for four days as shipping companies plan to dramatically slash dock work amid an increasingly contentious labor dispute."
More:
Terminal operators and shipping lines said that they would stop the unloading of ships Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, because they don't want to pay overtime to workers who, they allege, have deliberately slowed operations to the point of causing a massive bottleneck. Thursday is Lincoln's Birthday and Monday is Presidents Day, which are holidays for the workers.
Slowing down work "amounts to a strike with pay, and we will reduce the extent to which we pay premium rates for such a strike," said Wade Gates, spokesman for the Pacific Maritime Assn., the employer group representing the shipping companies. The local union in Los Angeles and Long Beach has denied using slowdown tactics.
Accoring to the LA Times, it is not clear if the partial shutdown foreshadows a total closure of the ports. Fears of a lockout of dockworkers, who have been without a contract since July, have risen in the last week and the two sides haven't held talks since Friday. SF Gate was far more clear on what the dockworker action means: "West Coast ports to shut down 4 days amid labor dispute."
Work delays and stoppages over the past three months have caused mounting problems for Bay Area importers and small-business owners, who say they are losing money as trucks line up daily outside the Port of Oakland waiting for container ships anchored in San Francisco Bay to unload.
The shutting down of port operations is ironic because it’ll make the situation worse, said union officials who claimed the association canceled a negotiating session Wednesday and has not been available since last Friday.
“This is an effort by the employers to put economic pressure on our members and to gain leverage in contract talks,” said Robert McEllrath, president of the longshore and warehouse union. “The union is standing by ready to negotiate, as we have been for the past several days.”
Regardless of who is at fault for the (partial) shut down, one can't blame dockworkers for doing what Greece is actively doing at the same time in its own negotiations with Europe: maximizing its leverage. Because as Bank of America showed yesterday, in a piece dedicated precisely to this topic, nothing short of 3.5% of marginal US GDP is at steak, which translated into CAGR terms, means that the fate of America's estimated 3% growth in 2015 is suddenly in the hands of a few thousand port workers, and with that, whether or not the US has a recession.
Some more thoughts from BofA:
Could port activity grind to a halt?
Due to continued unsuccessful contract negotiations between West Coast port employers (Pacific Maritime Association) and workers (International Longshore and Warehouse Union), there is a growing risk of a shutdown/lockout at West Coast docks, possibly within days. This past weekend, ports temporarily halted operations, adding to uncertainty. In our view, although a port strike/lockout could weigh on operations and profitability in some industries, the economic fallout of a one-week strike is likely to be limited to a loss of $0.8-1.8bn, representing a 0.1-0.2% hit to annualized GDP growth in 1Q15.
Size matters
Since the fall, a notable disruption in activity at the ports has materialized, and the risk is the current delays could spiral into full-blown gridlock, or that employers could lock out workers. West Coast ports are an important component of US trade. As cited by our Transportation Analyst Ken Hoexter, the value of total traffic at West Coast ports (waterborne, air and land) accounts for 12% of GDP. However, drilling down specifically to goods arriving/departing by water vessels (and hence, impacted by the labor dispute) reveals a much smaller share, only 3.5% of GDP or roughly $600bn, as of 2014.
Gauging the economy-wide risk during a shutdown
The economic fallout of a port shutdown is challenging to measure and depends heavily on the technique of analysis. Economic impact studies of West Coast port shutdowns have yielded loss estimates as high as $2bn per day. However, analysis by Peter Hall of the University of Waterloo and by the US Congressional Budget Office criticized such techniques as they fail to account for the ability for firms to substitute to alternative transportation routes, resulting in inflated loss estimates. Instead, according to research published by the CBO in 2006, the fallout is likely much lower, roughly $65mn to $150mn per day if Los Angeles and Long Beach ports were to shut down for a week in 2004. To get a sense of what the risks are in today, we gross that figure up to account for higher trade volumes, and include all West Coast ports. Our back of the envelope calculation suggests the daily loss to GDP would be $150-350mn per day, or $0.8-1.8bn per week. That would represent 0.1-0.2% hit to annualized 1Q15 GDP growth.
Learning from the past: short-term pain is likely
If history is any guide, a temporary port shutdown would acutely hurt the trade sector in the short term, but would not threaten to derail the recovery. In 2002, port workers at 29 West Coast ports were locked out for roughly 10 days in October, before President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to reopen the ports.
What could go wrong?
We highlight two key scenarios that may lead to greater downside risk relative to our base case:
A protracted disruption could trigger non-linear (accelerating) economic costs as temporary contingency measures run their course, resulting in worsening supply chain disruptions. President Obama could intervene by invoking the Taft-Hartley Act as was done in 2002, but it is not clear if or how quickly the White House would be willing to step into a labor dispute this time around.
There is uncertainty regarding the capacity of alternative transportation routes. Extensive use of air freight and Canadian/Eastern ports may lead to capacity constraints at those sites, limiting the ability of industry to successfully substitute to alternative supply chains for an extended period.
So the bottom line is that nobody really knows what will happen if the "partial" stoppage becomes a permanent one, as dockworkers try lever their influence on the US economy (which according to financial comedy TV is so strong, it should have no problem to meet their demands, right?), but it is safe to say that the final outcome will be somewhere between the "catastrophic" devastation for the economy which the retail industry predicts, and anywhere up to a 3.5% hit to the GDP, which in turn means an economic recession, if only temporary.
One thing, however, about which there is no doubt at all, is the unprecedented congestion that has slammed the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach harbor: that is very much real, as can be seen on the series of photos below courtesy of Mike Kelley. From his blog:
As anyone who follows my work knows, I'm fascinated by industry and infrastructure. For the past few weeks, a labor dispute has been unfolding at the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach. After flying over the area while coming in to land at LAX, I saw all of these giant container ships anchored offshore and instantly knew that I had to photograph it.
The next day I called my pilot and said 'when is the soonest we can go up?!' Less than 24 hours later we were in the air. It was one of the most exciting experiences I've had doing aerial photography - being that far out at sea, with the huge swells underneath you, and these massive, massive container ships everywhere was like living a scene out of Walter Mitty's life.
Cargo ships have been backed up for weeks on end at the ports of LA and Long Beach amid a labor dispute.
The size of these ships blows the mind; many of them are over a thousand feet long.
We photographed them from anywhere between 200 and 5,500 feet, and even at this height the enormous size was something else entirely.
The haze and setting sun created an ethereal mood to all of the pictures
Cargoes from around the world are backed up right now
I've never seen ANYTHING like this, even rush hour at the 405 doesn't look so bad.
Colorful and massive, this ship is over 1000 feet from end to end.
From this angle, the scale and size of the city and ships becomes quickly apparent
* * *
Finally keep in mind that to many economists, or at least those who realize that the US economy is in a far worse shape than what official government data represents, an "exogenous" event like a West Coast port strike, just like a "Polar Vortex" is precisely what the doctor ordered. After all, what better scapegoat for the lack of growth than a few thousand dockworkers who are merely leveraging capitalism as much as they can... even if it means shutting down key US economic supply-chains in the process.
![ninetymilesbjtcQw1rjmkoko1_500[1]](http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ninetymilesbjtcQw1rjmkoko1_5001.jpg)
![gardasil-cartoon[1]](http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/gardasil-cartoon1.jpg)
