How To Really Save Planet Earth: A Test About Al Gore

September 9th, 2007 Toasted

If you really want to bring the Earth back from the brink of disaster, who should you be listening to?A. Al Gore of “Live Earth” and “An Inconvenient Truth”
B. Diane Sawyer of ABC’s “Seven Ways to Help Save the World”
C. Michael Brune of “Rain Forest Action Network”
D. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck of “CNN Headline News”

“An Inconvenient Truth” left out the most inconvenient truth of all, and the Live Earth concerts were an environmental joke (and the music was really bad, too). Ms. Sawyer’s suggestion to cut back on toilet paper is a bit of poo itself. Then, with a golden opportunity to enlighten and empower Americans, Michael Brune of the Rain Forest Action Network only highlighted the problem with even our “environmental” groups. Therefore, and by way of deductive reasoning, the answer must be … and is … (drum roll, please) … Glenn Beck. Yep, that’s right. Glenn Beck, the ultra-conservative, speaks out on CNN Headline News while interviewing Michael Brune and tells people how to really save the environment.

In speaking about the Live Earth concerts, Glenn said, “There’s nowhere in here about vegetarianism or anything like that, that would make a real impact on the environment … It is animal gases that produce more CO2 than any of the cars we’re driving.”

To which Michael Brune disagreed. Michael? HUH? Earth to Michael … Come in, Michael.

The fact is, a HUGE portion of our environmental problems come from eating meat and dairy (and from producing meat and dairy), and Glenn Beck, of all people, hit the nail square on the head. Global warming, rain forest destruction, coral reefs dying off, topsoil erosion, poisoned water and polluted air are all a result of animal agriculture, and everybody – including our “environmental” groups – refuses to connect these dots. Thanks, Glenn, for doing what Al Gore, Diane Sawyer and even Michael Brune have refused to do.

“A report released by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization last November charged that raising livestock produced more “greenhouse gases” globally than the international transportation system.” http://www.crosswalk.com/news/11543779/

The U.N. report tells of a tragedy in the making on everyone’s dinner plates, and it doesn’t stop there; global warming concerns are now keeping kids up at night. http://www.gm.tv/index.cfm?articleid=24717

Kids, and all Americans, need to know that they are the empowered ones. This is not a political or governmental issue. WE, each of us, has a hand in global warming, and, therefore, its cure. If we stop eating animals and their secretions, we will stop killing the planet. It is as simple as that. Concerts galore, one million TV shows on the “Top Seven Ways …” and pseudo-environmentalists be damned. Without veganism for all people, nothing else can possibly save our doomed planet. The great news is, if we each switch to eating a vegan diet, we will no longer have to “save the planet.” Veganism allows the planet to save itself.

Major kudos to Glenn Beck

Al Gore is NOT telling people how to really save the planet, but you may be surprised who is. The solution to our planetary problems doesn’t need to be political, and you can’t even blame George Bush for this one. People created this problem and also have the power to solve it. This article can empower YOU.

Jeff Popick, known as “The Vegan Sage,” is a keen visionary & a leading expert on the diverse effects our diet has on our health & environment. Jeff is putting together a contest for students with a grand prize of one million dollars called “The Great Earth Contest,” aimed at enlightening kids on the cause of our planet’s problems - and the real solution. For more info, go to www.JeffPopick.com.

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Conflict of Interest between Drug Companies and Doctors

September 9th, 2007 Toasted

PILLS, PILLS and MORE PILLS

We are fortunate to live in a time having medications that alleviate uncomfortable, even life threatening symptoms of physical and mental disease. Yet, traditional medicine in the developed countries continue to use only two primary methods to treat patients complaints; medication, generally in the form of pills, and surgery.

When you visit your doctor and have a symptom, you get a pill, a second symptom, another pill, a third symptom still another pill with little regard for the drug interactions, neutralization of the efficacy or increased effects that one drug may have on another.

Take a woman in her sixties who has high blood pressure, headaches, and fatigue and is overweight. She will be given a pill to lower her blood pressure, another to regulate her cholesterol, another to increase her energy and yet another for her headaches, possibly another to regulate her weight. Five medications. She may get short-term relief but faces potential long-term ramifications, including possible life threatening side effects and complications.

Where and how do doctors decide what drugs to prescribe? From drug company representatives of course. They haunt offices of physicians offering bribes in the form of candy for the office staff for “just a minute to talk to the doctor,” to free samples, inscribed pens, to lavish gifts including cherished tickets to college and professional sports games, trips and dinners in fancy restaurants. In fact a whopping 30 % of the marketing budgets of pharmaceutical companies is used to “educate ” physicians and lure them into writing prescriptions for their latest banner drug. Other obvious methods of drug use seduction are television and print media ads to encourage people to request a specific medication from their doctors.

This is blatant conflict of interest.

I have personally been prescribed Vioxx, Permex, Advandia and female hormones when generic and /or cheaper alternatives were/are available. I am 74 years old and I have Type 11 diabetes with a family history of heart disease, yet the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) either warned or removed all of these drugs from the market due to the danger of causing heart attacks and strokes. What was my doctor thinking of when he put me on these drugs? Or was his decision motivated by propaganda by some drug salesman?

These designer, non-generic drugs are very expensive for both the Medicare Advantage program (ultimately the tax-payer), my insurance company, and for me with an expensive co-pay, when they paid at all. I live on a fixed income and paying of expensive drugs creates a financial hardship for me. Additionally they put me in life threatening danger of an early death.

The FDA as the alleged watchdog on drug safety is not doing its job. They are just another front for unscrupulous drug companies who value profit more than developing drugs that can save lives. They claim to be understaffed.

Take Advandia for example, it is prescribed to over 1 million Americans for treatment of Type 11 Diabetes. In an analysis by Steven Nisson, M.D. of the Cleveland Clinic and former president of the American College of Cardiology reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 21, 2007 that his analysis of 42 clinical trials suggest that the drug could cause a 43% increase in heart attack risk. Yet doctors continue to prescribe it for their patients.

Drugs are often tested by pharmaceutical companies on 25-year-old medical students who are paid to be guinea pigs, and then after approved by the FDA prescribed for 65-year-old woman or 75-year- old man who have different body weights, blood pressures, and other medical problems.

The drug testers have a lot to lose by reporting any side effects, namely that they may be excluded from the current test or future tests and thus lose the money they are paid. So even when they experience side effects they don’t report them. Even so–called double blind studies have problems in credibility for the reasons outlined above.

Congress must be more pro-active in: Overseeing the role of the FDA, regulating the conflict of interest between drug companies and physicians, price controls.

This is a serious issue for America and must be addressed immediately.

This article deals with the blatant conflict of interest between physicians and drug company’s who use guerrilla marketing techniques to influence a doctor to write prescriptions for their latest designer and very expensive drug, often without proper testing for side effects and dangerous interactions with other drugs.

Based on the book How To Talk To Your Doctor by Nancy O’Connor Ph.D. Dr. O’Connor is a retired Psychologist and former nurse. Available at http://www.lamariposapress.com , Amazon.com and Barnes and Nobel.com

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Biological and Chemical Weapons In An Age of Terror

September 8th, 2007 Toasted

A history of terrorism requires a very specific definition to avoid a never-ending summary of every violent act ever recorded. The brief, objective definition proposed by Dr. Boaz Ganor, an Israeli political scientist and deputy dean of the Lauder School of Government and Diplomacy at the Interdiciplinary Center Herzliya, works well for this purpose:terrorism is the intentional use of, or threat to use violence against civilians or against civilian targets, in order to attain politician aims.

This avoids subjective interpretation based on the perpetrator’s motivations, tactics, and civilian versus military status. When we discuss terrorism in the 21st century, however, we must include weapons of mass destruction, and broaden the defintion slightly to include indiscriminate targets, since many of the weapons and tactics of modern terrorism are capable of killing huge numbers of people at once.

Additionally, some forms of modern terror, such as cyberterrorism, do not fall neatly under the rubric of “violence”, at least in their initial employment, although in this increasingly computerized world, viruses and database intrusions could ultimately lead to deaths.

How real are the threats of WMD terrorism? What new or highly mutated forms of terrorist activities might lie ahead? And more to the point, how can countries hope to counter such violence, when one of the key components of “successful” terrorism is the element of suprise?

If you have ever seen photos of ordinary household germs and dust mites under an electron microscope, magnify your visceral and immediate recoil by ten-fold and you have a fair idea of how most people think about biological weapons.

Terrorism feeds on fear, and one thing people fear is fighting something likely invisible, insidious, and irreversible. Certain chemicals (and radioactive fallout) meet this description as well, but many do not. Biological pathogens, however, seem especially frightening to people perhaps because they seem, to the lay person, the easiest to disseminate and, unlike with other weapons, can be passed from one person to the next, expanding an attack well beyond the original point of deployment, using such contagious diseases as small pox, ebola, AIDS, or plauge.

Adding to this is the reality that the first responders are not members of law enforcement or the military, but members of the public health sytem: doctors, EMTS, firefighters, and other civilians.

Consider some staggering facts. According to a report issued by the World Health Organization in 1999, “Over the next hour alone, 1,500 people will die from an infectious disease- over half of them are children under five. Of the rest, most will be working-age adults-many of them breadwinners and parents.

Both are vital age groups that countries can ill afford to lose.” That adds up to 13.1 million people a year. Perhaps more frightening still, just six infections diseases account for more than 90 percent of those deaths: pneumonia, tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases, malaria, measles, and HIV/AIDS. (WHO,p.2,1999)

Improper use of antibiotics, as well as increased virulence and human tolerance due to the natural mutation process, have led to highly resilient strains of pneumonia, tuberculosis, cholera and malaria.

Considering that accidental and naturally occurring outbreaks can cost so many millions of lives, it’s not difficult to imagine the effect deliberately mutated and weaponized strains of biological pathogens would have around the world.

Armies and individuals have employed biological weapons throughout recorded history. Many of the earliest recorded instances involve poisoning food and water supplies. During the BC 6th century, Assyrians poisoned enemey wells with rye ergot, a fungal parasite that causes hallucinations and brain damage. Solon of Athens poisoned Krissa’s water supplied with hellebore, a narcotic that can also cause heart attacks. Ancient armies routinely infected tossed rotting animals into the enemies; water supply; in the 12th century Barborassa used the bodies of his own dead soldiers.

Contaminating food and water supplies is not the only-time honored form of bioterrorism. Spreading infection and disease using conventional weapons and everyday objects has a long history as well. As far back as BC 400, archers poisoned their arrows by dipping them into decomposing bodies or in blood mixed with feces. During the Second Macedonian War, in a crude but effective precursor to missiles with biological warheads, Hannibal won the naval battle of Eurymedon by launching pots of venomous snakes onto the decks of the Pregamon ships.

In 1346, when many of the Tatar soldiers attacking the Crimean port of Kaffa were dying of bubonic plauge, their leader, DeMussis, capulated the diseased corpses into the city. When the infected Geonese defenders fled, precipitating the Black Plauge epidemics that killed enemies with wine mixed with blood of lepers.

Two hundred years later another Spaniard, Franciso Pizarro, tried to speed along his invasion of South America by distributing clothing infected with smallpox. British forces tried the same tactic in the French and Indian War.

In the early part of the Civil War, a Confederate surgeon tried to infect the Union army with clothes carrying yellow fever, while his compatriots were tossing dead animals into wells as they retreated. At this time, the U.S. Government, concerned that its Union soldiers were far less experienced in military matters thatn were their Confederate counterparts, paid German lawyer Franz Lieber to prepare a code laying out the accepted principles of warfare.

The articles in the resulting document,”Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field,” became part of General Order No. 100, issued April 24, 1863. One key article read as follows: “The use of poison in any manner, be it to poison wells, or food, or arms, is wholly excluded from modern warfare. He that uses it puts himself out of the pale of law and usages of war.”

Other countries were at work drafting similar codes. The nations participating in a conference in Brussels in August 1874 issued a declaration banning specific weapons, including poison. A 1907 addition prohibited the “employment of projectiles containing asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” These same prohibitions were upheld by later declarations, including the “Protocol for the Prohibion of the Use in Ware of Asphyxating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods fo Warfare”- the Geneva Protocol, signed June 19, 1925-which stated that “the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world.”

Countries that ratified the protocol before WWII were Iran, Iraq, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The U.S. did not sign until 1975. The protocol was further strengthened in 1972 with the Biological Weapons Convention, but efforts to make it legally binding failed in 2001 when President George W. Bush refused to sign.

One business-oriented publication that often supported the president’s policies had this reaction: “Alongside Mr. Bush’s refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, and his moves to scrap the ABM(anti-ballistic missile) treaty, this was more than an undiplomatic blunder. It seems to represent a dangerously ideological aversion to any sort of binding arms control.”

These noble agreements, however, failed to prohibit governments from continuing to research, develop, store, transport, or produce biological weapons, and implied that all that was truly outlawed was being the first to use them in a particular conflict. The result is that countries around the globe still have active biological and chemical stockpiles or, as in the case of the United States, maintain active facilities engaged in defense research.

The real terror is the use of biological and chemical weapons in a city which is the ultimate fear. The article purpose is to make a contribution to the public understanding of the threat.

Dr.Leon Newton is the author of the book, Terrorism 101: A Library Reference and Selected Annotated Bibliography. He teach Terrorism and International Affairs. http://www.outskirtspress.com/terrorism101

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