Talk about psyops. If you can't get the people to eat your dangerous, unwanted frankenfoods, just lie and say the Pope approves it.
On November 30, the magazine, New Scientist, published "Vatican scientists urge support for engineered crops," which the Vatican immediately denied.
"The Vatican did not endorse an 11-page final statement in favor of easing restrictions on and allowing more widespread use of genetically modified crops, especially in poorer nations," a Vatican official said in a statement published by Catholic News Service.
In fact, "the Vatican has never taken a formal position supporting or opposing genetically modified foods," reported CNS.
The study group who issued the report mostly include people with financial ties to genetically modified foods. Four employees of Monsanto graced that panel.
There are an estimated 1.2 billion Catholics in the world who now have more reason to distrust biotech scientists.
Society's Child
© Reuters
People power!
People power!
With so much happening all at once, it is difficult to see which event or trend presents the most danger for humanity. Is it the descent into fascism that the United States is undergoing? Is it the obnoxious Big Brother harassment of full-body scanner machines and the humiliating "enhanced pat-downs"? The construction of terror scares by the FBI and assorted alphabet agencies, perhaps? What about Israel's oppression of Palestine, together with its manipulation of global perception and its unparalleled contribution to the distortion of geopolitics? The ongoing destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? The squeezing of Western economies to bring them into line with Third World countries and the rising food prices? Winter coming so soon to the northern hemisphere and the biblical floods caused by torrential rain?
Join us as we try to filter out the distractions and the background noise by Connecting the Dots between the trends.
© Susan Walsh / AP Photo
She won't be welcome around here any more
She won't be welcome around here any more
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State."Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?
-- Dr. Joseph Goebbels
For example, the US print and TV media and the US government have made it completely clear that they have no regard for the First Amendment. Consider CNN's Wolf Blitzer's reaction to the leaked diplomatic cables that reveal how the US government uses deceptions, bribes, and threats to control other governments and to deceive the American and other publics. Blitzer is outraged that information revealing the US government's improprieties reached the people, or some of them. As Alexander Cockburn wrote, Blitzer demanded that the US government take the necessary steps to make certain that journalists and the American people never again find out what their government is up to.
The disregard for the First Amendment is well established in the US media, which functions as a propaganda ministry for the government. Remember the NSA leak given to the New York Times that the George W. Bush regime was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court? The New York Times spiked the story for one year and did not release it until after Bush's reelection. By then, the Bush regime had fabricated a legal doctrine that "authorized" Bush to violate US law.
Glenn Greenwald writing in Salon has exposed the absence of moral standards among WikiLeaks' critics. A number of American politicians have called for the US government to murder Julian Assange, as have journalists such as neoconservative propagandist Jonah Goldberg, who wrote: "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"
In this two-part SOTT Report special, Paul Craig Roberts talks about why government officials can no longer tell the truth, U.S. financial hegemony, evidence that the terrorist threat doesn't exist, and more.
Part 1:
Part 1:
Our leaders are an inherently hypocritical bunch and over the past 10 years, even the most uninformed have come to understand that our leaders have a definite tendency to say one thing and do another. Who doubts that such hardened politicians fully understand that lying to each other is par for the course in the sordid game of modern global governance? As such, why should the public be overly surprised to see confirmation of this in the Wiki-leaks documents? Entertained and even intrigued, but surprised?
I am not saying that there is no value in certain aspects of the documents themselves to the extent that they provide a chance to disseminate government corruption and mendacity to a wide audience, but titillating details such as Gadaffi's buxom 'nurse' is nothing new and, much more importantly, such details are by no means the main focus of the documents themselves.
© Raw Story
According to newly released documents from GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company often paid ghostwriters to pen medical studies, editorials and even a textbook that listed physicians as the authors.
The documents - some of which date back to late 1990s - were recently unsealed in litigation over a GlaxoSmithKline product. We saw them after they were attached to a letter released this week by a nonprofit watchdog group urging the National Institutes of Health to crack down on ghostwriting in medical academia. The documents and the letter by Project on Government Oversight together outline several examples of how a major drug company contributed to the funding, writing and approval of material published in medical journals and elsewhere.
The textbook, published in 1999, listed two physician co-authors who at the time were chairs of the psychiatry departments at the medical schools of Stanford University and Emory University, the New York Times reported this week in a piece that focused only on the textbook. According to the Times, it's the first instance where a book has been criticized for the same issues with ghostwriting and drug industry influence that have plagued medical journals.
Concepcion Picciotto has maintained an anti-war camp outside the White House for 29 years
"A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise."The strong act. The weak react. Protest is a tool of the weak. The main aim of any protest is to draw attention to an injustice. It appeals, broadcasts and seeks to impress you with its number. So many of us are feeling this way. You are few, we are many, etc. After each mass protest, there is always a disagreement over the size of the crowd, with the estimate of the organizers usually doubling that of the authority, i.e., the target of the protest.- Frederick Douglass
Even without number, even when the protest is made up of a few quixotic weirdos, or just one, it can still have meaning. The sight of a lonely protester on a city street, ignored by the crowd, is basically pathetic, if not comic, but if he happens to make some sense, then his very isolation can become an indictment of this crowd. Concepcion Picciotto, born 1945, has been encamped across the White House for twenty-nine years, since 1981. She lives in a tent, surrounded by signs denouncing U.S. militarism and its support for Israel. When Picciotto began, Carter was the President who had gotten us involved in Afghanistan. In 2010, Obama is fighting the same mujahideen armed by Carter. As long as the guns sell, it's all good. A lonely protester is not unlike Jonah ranting away in Nineveh, except Jonah got results. Folks actually heard him and changed their ways.
© 1994-2010 Miguel Cruz
Checkpoint
Checkpoint
Someone had denied you your inalienable right of defending your home and self, and mendaciously accused you of being "terrorist", justifying crimes and oppression by "self-defense"?
Someone, by using humiliation and most degrading ways, had gotten in your way when you are dying and desperately in need of medical treatment?
Someone had taken away your most beloved ones and incarcerated them in a non-human environment?
New Mother Harassed and Threatened by TSA because she requests alternate screening for her breast milk. Video contains two errors: she was not pregnant at the time (became pregnant 6 weeks later) and her child at home was 7 months old (not 1 year).
Comment: Breast Milk. The latest "threat" the Public needs protecting from, your own regulations be damned!
© AP Photo/Peter Morrison
As European officials thrashed out the finer details of an €85bn rescue package, huge crowds braved freezing temperatures to demonstrate against the cuts, aimed at driving down Ireland's colossal national debt.
The main march to O'Connell Street passed off peacefully but there was an uneasy standoff outside the Irish parliament as two lines of Garda Siochána officers hemmed in around 100 leftwing demonstrators who had broken away from the union-organised protest. Fireworks were thrown at gardai outside the gates of the Dail as protesters shouted: "Burn it down, burn it down." Extra police were rushed to the scene to surround the ad hoc demonstration by leftwing and anarchist groups, who also set fire to a picture of the taoiseach, Brian Cowen.
Among those on the main march there was deep anger that most of the €80bn-plus from the EU and IMF will be used to shore up Ireland's ailing banks.
Comment: For further reading on the scam of modern medicine see:
How Scientific Is Modern Medicine Really?