Distracted by beauty (products)...

Having a little looksie through the beauty products I've been sent this week to try out & review for Mylookbook... Tis quite the assortment, I'm looking forward to playing with them all this weekend!


Dermalogica Hydro-Active Mineral Salts http://www.dermalogica.com/au
The Body Shop Delipscious Sheer Lip Balms $19.95 www.thebodyshop.com.au (Available from the 5th August)
Napoleon Long Black Mascara & China Doll Foundation http://www.napoleonperdis.com
L'Occitane Immortelle Brightening Products http://www.loccitane.com.au/http://
Youngblood Mineral Lengthening Mascara www.youngbloodmineralcosmetics.com.au/
An assortment of NATIO lip glosses, eyeshadows and mascara http://www.natio.com.au/
The new DIOR Hypnotic Poison Eau Sensuelle EDP - Available August 30th

High waisted pants

Right now I'm loving high waisted pants. 

This outfit (found on streetpeeper.com today) is an example of perfect balance. Not only with each item of clothing, but the stunning combination of colour & tones...

LOVE
♥


Image: http://streetpeeper.com

Catching up with Karla

I've been so busy this past few weeks I haven't been checking a lot of my favourite blogs. Today I went back to Karla's Closet for a quick look at what she's been wearing and discovered some lovely surprises.

I'm so in love with all of these clever outfit combination's... Her latest post shows photos from a holiday to Maui... how nice would that be right now.. (especially as my fingers are completely freezing off while I type this)... Enjoy...

All images from http://karlascloset.blogspot.com/

Political Science! - The Politics of Medical Science and Research

The Politics of Science (Part 1)

The following last chapter in Robert O. Becker's book, The Body Electric" should give some insight into the politics of science. How and why some researchers and their research gets funded while others don't. Maybe, it will explain why many researchers in CFS continue to bark up the wrong tree and will not dare delve into truth of the matter - into the Big Lie - since this might very well cut their funding, ruin their reputations, and even end their careers. This has happened to many honorable and brilliant scientists such as Dr. Antione BeChamp, Dr. Livingston Wheller, Dr. Royal Rife, Dr. Gunther Enderlien, Dr. Duesburg, Dr. Robert Becker, Dr Nassens and finally Dr. Robert O. Young.

Postscript: Political Science

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.-Max PlanckDispassionate philosopher inquiring into nature from the sheer love of knowledge, single-minded alchemist puttering about a secluded basement in search of elixers to benefit all humanity - these ideals no longer fit for most scientists. Even the stereotype of Faust dreaming of demonic power is outdated, for most scientists today are overspecialized and anonymous - although science as a whole is somewhat Mephistophelian in its disregard or the effects of its knowledge. It's a ponderous beast, making enormous changes in the way we live but agonizingly slow to change its own habits and viewpoints when they become outmoded.

The public's conception of the scientist remains closest to its image of the philosopher - cold and logical, making decisions solely on the basis of facts, unswayed by emotion. The lay person's most common fear about scientists is that they lack human feelings. During my twenty-five years of research I've found this to be untrue yet no cause for confort. I've occasionally seen our species' nobler impulses among them, but I've also found that scientists as a group are at least as subject to human failings as people in other walks of life.It has been like this throughout the history of science. Many, perhaps even most, of its practitioners have been greedy, power-hungry, prestige-seeking, dogmatic, pompous asses, not above political chicanery and outright lying, cheating, and stealing. Examples abound right from the start. Sir Francis Bacon, who in 1620 formulated the experimental method on which all technical progress since then has been founded, not only forgot to mention his considerable debt to William Gilbert but apparently plagiarized some of his predecessor's work while publicly belittling it. In a similar way Emil Du Bois-Reymond based his own electrical theory of nerve impulse on Carlo Matteucci's work, then tried to ridicule his mentor and take full credit.


Many a genius has been destroyed by people of lesser talent defending the status quo. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who practiced in Vienna during the mid-nineteenth century, demanded that his hospital colleagues and subordinates wash their hands, especially when moving from autopsies and sick wards to the charity childbirth ward he directed. When the incidence of puerperal fever and resultant death declined dramatically to well below that of the rich women's childbirth ward, proving the importance of cleanliness even before Pasteur, Semmelweis was fired and vilified. His livelihood gone, he committed suicide soon afterward.


The principle figure who for decades upheld the creed that dedifferentiation was impossible was Paul Weiss, who dominated biology saying the things his peers wanted to hear. Weiss was wrong, but along the way he managed to cut short a number of careers.


For many years the American Medical Association scorned the idea of vitamin-deficiency diseases and called teh EEG electronic quackery. Even today that august body contends that nutrition is basically irrelevant to health. As the late-eighteenth-century Italian experimenter Abbe Alberto Fortis observed in a letter chiding Spallanzani for his closed-minded stance on dowsing, "... derision will never help in the development of true knowledge."In the past, these character flaws couldn't wholly prevent the recognition of scientific truths. Both sides of a controversy would fight with equal vehemence, and the one with better evidence would usually win sooner or later. In the last four decades, however, changes in the structure of scientific institutions have produced a situation so heavily weighted in favor of the establishment that it impedes progress in healthcare and prevents truly new ideas from getting a fair hearing in almost all circumstances. The present system is in effect a dogmatic religion with a self-perpetuating priesthood dedicated only to preserving the current orthodoxies. The system awards the sycophant and punishes the visionary to a degree unparalleled in the four-hundred-year history of modern science.


This situation has come about because research is now so expensive that only governments and multinational corporations can pay for it. The funds are dispensed by agencies staffed and run by bureaucrats who aren't scientists themselves. As the system developed after World War 2, the question naturally arose as to how these scientifically ignorant officials were to choose among competing grant applications. The logical solution was to set up panels of scientists to evaluate requests in their fields and then advise the bureaucrats.


This method is based on the naive assumption that scientists really are more impartial than other people, so the result could have been predicted decades ago. In general, projects that propose a search for evidence in support of new ideas aren't funded. Most review committees approve nothing that would challenge the findings their members made when they were struggling young researchers who created the current theories, whereas projects which ponder to these elder egos receive lavish support. Eventually, those who play the game beome the new members of the peer group, and thus the system perpetuates itself. As Erwin Chargaff has remarked, "This continual turning off and on of the financial faucets produces Pavlovian effects," and most research becomes mere water treading aimed at getting paid rather than finding anything new. The intuitive "lunatic twinge," the urge to test a hunch, which is the source of all scientific breakthroughs, is systematically excluded.


There has even been a scientific study documenting how choices made by the peer review system depend almost entirely on whether the experts are sympathetic or hostile to the hypothesis being suggested. True to form, the National Academy of Sciences, which sponsored the investigation, suppressed its results for two years.


Membership on even a few review boards soon establishes one's status in the "old boys' club" and leads to other benefits. Manuscripts submitted to scientific journals are reviewed for validity in the same way as grant requests. And who is better qualified to judge an article than those same eminant experts with their laurels to guard? Publication is accepted as evidence that an experiment has some basic value, and without it the work sinks without a ripple. The circle is thus closed, and the revolutionary, from whose ideas all new scientific concepts come, is on the outside. Donald Goodwin, chairman of psychiatry at the University of kansas and an innovative researcher on alcoholism, has even put it in the form of exasperation: "If it's trivial, you can probably study it. If it's important, you probably can't."Another unforeseen abuse has arisen, which has lowered the quality of training in medical schools. As the peer review system developed, academic institutions saw a golden opportunity. If the government wanted all this research done, why shouldn't it help the schools with their overhead, such as housing, utilities, bookeeping and ultimately the salaries of the researchers, who were part of the faculty? The influx of money corroded academic values. The idea arose that the best teacher was the best researcher, and the best researcher was the one who pulled down the biggest grants. A medical school became primarily a kennel of researchers and only secondary a place to teach future physicians. To survive in academia, you have to get funded and then get published. The epidemic of fraudalent reports - and I believe only a small percentage of the actual fakery has been discovered - is eloquent testimony of the pressure to make a name in the lab.There remain today few places for those whose talents lie in teaching and clinical work. Many people who don't care about research are forced to do it anyway. As a result, medical journals and teaching staffs are both drowning in mediocrity.


Finally, we must add to these factors the buying of science by the military. To call it a form of prostitution is an insult to the oldest profession. Nearly two-thirds fo the 47-billion 1984 research budget was for military work, and in the field of bioelectricity the proportion was even higher. While military sponsors often allow more technical innovation than others, their employees must keep their mouths shut about environmental hazards and other moral issues that link science to the broader concerns of civilization. In the long run, even the growth of pure knowledge (if there is such a thing) can't flourish behind this chain link fence.


If someone does start a heretical project, there are several ways to limit this threat. Grants are limited, usually for a period of one or two years. Then the experimenter must reapply. Every application is a volumous document filled with fine-print forms and meaningless bureaucratic jargon, requiring many days of data compilation and "creative wriiting." Some researchers may simply get tired of them and quit. In any case, they must run the same gauntlet of peers each time. The simplest way to nip a challenge in the bud is to turn off the money or keep the reports out of major journals by means of anonymous value judgements from review committees. You can always find something wrong with a proposal or manuscript, no matter how well written or scientifically impeccable it may be.


Determined rebels use guerrilla tactics. There are so many funding agencies that the left hand often knoweth not what the right hand doeth. A proposal may get by an obscure panel whose members aren't yet aware of the danger. The snowstorms of paper churned out by the research establishment have required the founding of many new journals in each subspecialty. Some of these will accept papers that would automatically be rejected by the big ones. In addition, there's an art to writing a grant proposal that falls within accepted guidelines without specifying exactly what the researchers intend to do.


If these methods succeed in prolonging the apostasy, the establishment generally exerts pressure through the schools. Successful academics are almost always true believers who are happy to curry favor by helping to deny tenure to "questionable" investigators or by harassing them in a number of ways. For example, in 1950 Gordon A. Atwater was fired as chairman of the American Museum of Natural History astronomy department and curator of the Hayden Planetarium for publicly suggesting that Immanuel Velikovsky's ideas should receive a fair hearing. That same year Velikovsky's first book, Worlds in Collision, was renounced by his publisher (MacMillan) even though it was a best seller, because a group of influential astronomers led by Harvard's Harlow Shapley threatened to boycott the textbook department that accounted for two thirds of the company's sales. No matter what one may think of Velikovsky's conclusions, that kind of backstairs persuasion is not science.As the conflict escalates, the muzzled freethinker often goes directly to the public to spread the pernicious doctrines. At this point, the gloves come off. Already a lightning rod for the wrath of the Olympian peers, the would-be Prometheus writhes under attacks on his or her honesty, scientific competence, and personal habits. The pigeons of Zeus cover the new ideas with their droppings and conduct rigged experiments to disprove them. In extreme cases, government agencies staffed and advised by the establishment begin legal harrassment, such as the trial and imprisonment that ended the career and life of Wilhelm Reich.


Sometime during or after the battle, it generally becomes obvious that the iconoclast was right. The counterattack then shifts toward historical revision. Establishment members publish papers claiming the new ideas for themselves and omitting all references to the true originator. The heretic's name is remembered only in connection with a condescending catchphrase, while his or her own research programs, if any remain, are defunded and the staff dispersed. The facts of the case eventually emerge, but only at an immense toll on the innovator's time and energy. To those who haven't tried to run a lab, these may seem like harsh words, unbelievable, even paranoid. Nevertheless, these tactics are commonplace, and I've had personal experience with each and every one of them.


I got a taste of the real world in my very first foray into research. After World War 2, I continued my education on the GI Bill, but those benefits expired in 1947. I'd just married a fellow student named Lilian, who had caught my eye during our first orientation lecture, and I needed a summer job to help pay expenses and set up housekeeping. I was lucky enough to get work as a lab assistant in the NYU School of Medicine's surgical research department.I worked with Co Tui, who was evaluating a recently published method for separating individual amino acids from proteins as a step toward concentrating foods for shipment to the starving. Dr. Cok, a tiny man whose black, spiky hair seemed to broadcast enthusiasm, inspired me enormously. He was a brilliant researcher and a good friend. With him I helped develop the assay technique and began to use it to study changes in body proteins after surgery.


I was writing my first scientific paper when I walked to work one morning and found our laboratory on the sidewalk - all our equipment, notes, and materials in a junk pile. I was told neither of us worked there anymore; we were welcome to salvage anything we wanted from the heap.


The head secretary told me what happened. This was during a big fund drive to build the present NYU Medical Center. One of the society surgeons had lined up a million-dollar donation from one of his patients and would see that it got into the fund, if he could choose a new professor of experimental surgery - now. As fast as that, Co Tui and his people were out. I vowed to Lilian: "Whatever i do in medicine, I'm going to stay out of research."I'm happy that I wasn't able to keep my promise. The research itself was worth it all. Moreover, I don't want to give the impression that I and my associates were alone against the world. Just when hope seemed lost, there was always a crucial person, like Carlyle Jacobson or the research director's secretary to help us out. However, right from my first proposal to measure the current of injury in salamanders, I found that research would mean a constant battle, and not only with administrators.Before I began, I had to solve a technical problems with the electrodes. Even two wires of the same metal had little chemical differences, which gave rise to small electrical currents that could be misinterpreted as coming from the animal.


Also, the slightest pressure on the animal's skin produced currents. No one understood why, but there they were. I found descriptions in the older literature of silver electrodes with a layer of silver chloride applied to them, which were reported to obviate the false interelectrode currents. I made some, tested them, and then fitted them with a short length of soft cotton wick, which got rid of the pressure artifact. When I wrote up my results, I briefly described the electrodes. Afterward I received a call from a prominent neurophysiologist who wanted to visit the lab. "Very nice," I thought. "Here's some recognition already." He was particularly interested in how the electrodes were made and used. Some months later, dammed if I didn't find a paper by my visitor in one of the high-class journals, describing this new and excellent electrode he'd devised for measuring direct-current potentials.


A couple of years later, while Charlie Bachman and I were looking for the PN junction diode in bone, I was asked to give a talk on bone electronics at a meeting in New York City. The audience included engineers, physicists, physicians, and biologists. It was hard to talk to such a diverse group. The engineers and physicists knew all about the electronics but nothing about bone, the biologists knew all about the bone but nothing about electronics, and the physicians were only interested in therapeutic applications. At any rate, I reviewed some bone structure for the physicists and some electronics for the biologists, and then went on to describe my experiments with Andy Bassett on bone piezoelectricity.


I probably should have sat down at that point, but I thought it would be nice to talk about our present work. The rectifier concept was tremendously exciting to me, and I thought wwe might get some useful suggestions from the audience, so I described the experiments showing that collagen and apatite were semiconductors, and discussed the implications. After each talk, a short time was set aside for questions and comments, generally polite and dignified. However, as soon as I finished, a well-known orthopedic researcher literally ran up to the audience microphone and blurted out, "I have never heard such a collection of inadequate data and misconceptions. It is an insult to this audience. Dr. Becker has not presented satisfactory evidence for any semiconducting property in bone. The best that can be said is that this material may be a semi-insulator."


Semiconductors are so named because their properties place them between conductors and insulators, so you could very well call them semi-insulators; the meaning would be the same. My opponent was playing a crude game. Where saying these derogatory things about me, he was actually agreeing with my conclusion, merely using a different term.This man's antagonism had begun a couple of years before. When Andy Bassett and I had finished our work on the piezoelectric effect in bone, we wrote it up, submitted it to a scientific journal, and got it accepted. Unbeknownst to us, this fellow had been working on the same thing, but hadn't gotten as far in his experiments as we. Somehow he learned of our work and its impending publication. He called Andy, asking us to delay our report until he was ready to publish his own data. Andy called me to talk it over. What counts in the scientific literature is priority; he was asking us to surrender it. There was no ethical basis for his request, and I would never have thought of asking him to delay had the situation been reversed. I said, "Not on your life." Our paper was published, and we'd acquired a "friend" for life.


Now there he was at the microphone trying to scuttle my presentation with a little ambiguous double-talk. I thought, "He must be doing the same work as we are again. If he wins this encounter, I'll have trouble getting my data published, and he'll have a clear field for his." Instead of defending the data, I explained that semi-insulator and semiconductor were one and the same. I said I was surprised he didn't know that, but appreciated his approval of my data! Someone else in the audience stood up in support of my position, and the crisis was past. The lab isn't the only place a scientist has to stay alert.In 1964, soon after the National Institutes of Health approved the grant for our continuing work on bone, I received the VA's William S. Middleton Award for outstanding research. That's a funny story in itself. The award is given by the VA's Central Office (VACO), whose members had already decided on me, but candidates must be nominated by regional officers, and the local powers were determined I shouldn't get it. Eventually, VACO had to order them to nominate me.


The award put me on a salary from Washington instead of Syracuse, and due to the pressure from VACO I was soon designated the local chief of research, replacing the man who signed all the papers at once. I was determined to put the reseach house in order, and I instituted a number of reforms, such as public disclosure of the funding allocations, and productivity requirements, no matter how prominent an investigator might be. Many of the reforms have been adopted throughout the VA system. They didn't make me popular, however. Over the next several years there was continuous pressure from the medical school to allocate VA research funds for people I felt were of little value to the VA program itself; thus the money would have constituted a grant to the school. I knew that if I didn't deliver I would eventually be removed from my position as chief of research. In that case, I would go back on a local clinical salary and my research program would again be in jeopardy. Therefore, at the beginning of 1972 I applied for the position of medical investigator in the VA research system, a post in which I would be able to devote up to three fourths of my time to research. I was accepted. The job was to begin a few months later; in the meantime I continued as chief of research.


Apparently, my new appointment escaped the notice of my local opponents. I'd accepted several invitations to speak at universities in the South and combined them all into a week's trip. I left the office a day early to prepare my materials and pack. While I was still home, my secretary called. She was crying, and said she'd just gotten a memo firing me as chief or research and putting me to work as a general-duty medical officer in the admitting office. This not only would have closed our lab, but also would have kept me from practicing orthopedic surgery.


It was a nice maneuver but, fortunately for me, it wasn't legal. As medical investigator, I could be fired only by Washington, and the local chief of staff soon got a letter from VACO ordering him to reinstate me. Soon I began to get on some "enemies lists" at the natinal level too. In December 1974 I got word that our basic NIH grant (the one on bone) hadn't been renewed. No reasons were given. This was highly irregular, since applicants normally got the "pink sheets" with at least the primary reviewer's comments, so they could find out what they'd done wrong. Instead I was told I could write to the executive secretary for a "summary" of the deliberations.


The summary was half a page of double-spaced typing. It said my proposal had been lacking in clarity and direction, and that the experimental procedures hadn't been spelled out in enough detail. The main problem seemed to be that I was planning to do more than the reviewer thought I could do with the money I was requesting. In addition, my report on the perineural cell research with Bruce Baker was criticized as "data poor." The statement concluded: "On the other hand, there are some areas which appear to be worthy of support and are reasonably well described, e.g., bone growth studies, regenerative growth, and electrical field effects."


I was, to say the least, puzzled. The subjects "worthy of support" were precisely the main ones we were working on. It didn't make any sense until I reflected that this was just after I'd helped write the first Sanguine report and had begun to testify about power line dangers before the New York Public Service Commission. Perhaps the Navy was pressuring the NIH to shut me up.If someone at the federal level was trying to lock me out as early as 1974, he forgot to watch all the entrances, for my proposal of that year on acupuncture was approved. I'd originally tacked this on to the main NIH application, where is was criticized as inappropriate. I merely sent it off to a different study section, which funded it. After a year we had the positive results described in Chapter 13, and I presented them at an NIH acupuncture conference in Bethesda, Maryland. Ours was the only study going at the problem from a strictly scientific point of view, that is, proceeding from a testible hypothesis, as opposed to the empirical approach of actually putting the needles in and trying to decide if they worked. To the NIH's basic question - is the system of points and lines real? - our program was the only one giving an unequivocal answer: yes.


Nevertheless, when the grant came up for approval in 1976, it, too, was cut off. The stated reasons were that we hadn't published enough and that the electrical system that we found didn't have any relation to acupuncture. The first was obviously untrue - we'd published three papers, had two more in press, and had submitted six others - and the second was obvious pettifogging. How could anyone know what was related to acupuncture before the research had been done? I happened to know the chairman of the NIH acupuncture study section, so I wrote him a letter. He said he was surprised, because the group itself had been pleased with our report. By then it was obvious that something was up.As of October 1976 we would have no more NIH support. As the money dwindled, we juggled budgets and shaved expensese to cover out costs, and with the help of Dave Murray, who was now chairman of the orthopedic surgery department at the medical school, we kept the laboratory intact and enormously productive. We actually published more research than when we hadn't been under fire.Early in that same year, however, my appointment as medical investigator had expired, and I had to reapply. Word came back that my application had been "deferred," that is, it had been rejected, but I had the option of reapplying immediately. In her accompanying letter, the director of the VA's Medical Research Service wrote, "While your past record and strong letters of support [the peer reveiws of my application] were considered favorable, the broad research proposal with sketchy detail of technique and methodology was not considered approvable." Now, the instructions for medical investigator applications clearly stated that I was to spell out past accomplishments and indicate future directions only in broad outline. Instead, the director was applying the criteria for first-time grant applications just entering research. She invited me to resubmit the proposal in the other format. But that would not have helped. Even if the second application was approved, the money would arrive six months after the lab had been closed and we had gone our separate ways.


There was another strange thing about the rejection. By that time all federal granting agencies had to provide the actual reports (with names deleted) of the peers who had done the reviewing. Three out of the four were long, detailed, well-thought-out documents in the standard critique format; they'd been neatly retyped, single spaced, on "reviewers's report" forms with an elite typewriter. One was absolutely lavish in its praise, saying that the VA was fortunate to have me and that the proposed work would undoubtedly make great contributions to medicine. Another was almost as laudatory.One name had inadvertently been left on one page of the third review. It was the name of a prominent orthopedic researcher with whom I had disagreed for years about commercialization of bone-healing devices. Since our mutual disregard was well known in the orthopedic service, I feel it was indefensible for the director to ask him to review my application in the first place. Perhaps she expected a more damaging critique from him. He did complain that the proposal was insufficiently detailed. However, his appraisal was quite fair and even said my proposed work was of "fundamental importance to the field of growth and healing." It obviously led up to a recommendation for approval, but the last sentence of that paragraph had been deleted.The last review was half a page of vague objections, typed double-spaced on a pica machine with no semblance of the standard format. There was a revealing mistake ("corrective" tissue instead of connective tissue) that showed the writer had glanced at my proposal for cues but really didn't know what it was about. Strangest of all was the phrasing of this pseudoreview: "[Becker's proposal] is broad and sweeping in scope and contains little documentation for technique and methodology. However, in view of his past record and strong letters of support, a decision should be deferred..." The director had used it almost word for word in her letter.


She certainly had no motive for such conduct herself. I'd met her briefly a few years before. In 1966 she'd been appointed chief of research at the Buffalo VA Medical Center and had visited Syracuse to see how I'd organized the program there. Our conversation was pleasant but quite innocuous....

Double Denim Trend

The double denim epidemic is spreading...

http://stockholmstreetstyle.feber.se/
http://carolinesmode.com/caroline/
http://www.hanneli.com

A lesson in lines…

At first I was simply going to show you a photo of my favourite Kookai cardigan, however I had wardrobe dilemmas on the weekend (possibly contributed to PMT as everything I put on felt hideous) however my Kookai cardigan always seems to save the day so I thought I’d delve a little deeper into why…

I got thinking about how the cut of this cardigan totally changes the silhouette of my appearance, so I did some more experimenting with how tiny little changes to small parts of your outfit can make such a big difference.

Experiment:

I really wanted to wear this cropped a-line singlet: I love the style however the loser fit doesn’t really do anything accentuate my waistline or lengthen the look of my body. At 5ft tall and 56 kg I have a slightly solid figure with bigger thighs. With the sides of this singlet reaching the widest part of my body, it creates a rounder overall shape. Ideally I should be wearing things that accentuate my waist however the sucker for fashion that I am, I love this top so wanted to wear it!

Solution: By adding the longer style cardigan with the nice vertical frill feature running down the front of my body, it’s lengthened and slimmed down the entire silhouette. I also love how this cardigan tapers down into points at the front and is cut shorter at the back. Sometimes a big long cardigan can overwhelm someone smaller however this style finds the perfect balance.

I also played around with different shoes. I LOVE my calf high flat boots however by changing into my healed ankle boots (which are also fitted around my ankle) it gave a slimmer appearance to lower part of my legs.

So there’s my little style lesson. At 35 years old I’m still just learning as I go however so many of you are always asking for style tips I'll just share them as I work them out for myself!


The Kookai Cinnamon Cardi is  made from 100% merino wool and available in Vanilla, Grey Marle, Peacock, Prusse and Amaranth Marle. They are $100 but in my opinion definitely worth the investment, I LIVE in mine. www.kookai.com.au

CDC Votes in Favor of Deadly Flu Vaccines For Americans

The following article is a good article for any that believes or doesn't believe in the germ theory. For those that understand that germs are a biological transformation of healthy matter caused by an acidic environment, then you will understand that vaccines are an acidic contributing factor in causing the very symptoms they are touted to prevent.

Vaccines are acids and acids cause dis-ease and so-called disease.

The Flu is nothing more or less then the body trying to re-establish the alkaline design of the body fluids. The Flu is the body increasing temperature to remove acids out of the orfaces or pores of the skin.

When you decide to have a Flu vaccine injected into your body all you prove is you can poison yourself and hopefully survive.

True immunity comes by maintaining the alkaline design of the body with an alkaline lifestyle and diet.

There are no deadly viruses just deadly theories, deadly lifestyles and deadly diets.

The following article may help you decide NOT to have this or any vaccine NOW or in the FUTURE.

CDC Votes in Favor of a Flu Vaccination Assault on Americans’ Health

by Richard Gale and Gary Null

We can choose our political party, our religion, and the food we eat, but this does not seem to be the case when it comes to our medical choices and our freedoms to make them.

The recent unanimous 11-0 vote by the members of the Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) favoring every American over the age of six months receive the flu influenza vaccine is one more attempt by our federal health officials to open up our bodies to the free market capitalism of pharmaceutical coffers. It is another step to mandate a vaccine across the nation, a policy that has many supporters in the pro-vaccine science community.

The vote raises an alarm about our federal government’s scientific integrity, and calls into question its true allegiance and purpose: to protect the health of American citizens or increase Big Pharma profits. If the recommendation were ever enforced, the US would be the only nation in the world with mandatory flu vaccination. However, what our investigations show and what differentiates the US health agencies from the health ministries in other nations, is that in the US federal health system Big Pharma money, lobbying and corporate favors are what shape drug and vaccine policies and this is rampant throughout the system.

Mandatory vaccines fail in Japan

Mandatory influenza vaccination has been tried before across a nation. During the 1980s, Japan had mandatory flu vaccination for school children. Two large scale studies that enrolled children from four cities with vaccination rates between 1 and 90 percent discovered no difference in the incidences of flu infection. As a result, in 1987, Japanese health authorities ruled that flu vaccination was ineffective and was no more than a serious financial and legal liability if it was to continue. The mandatory policy was quickly overturned. By 1989, the number of Japanese taking the flu vaccine dropped to 20 percent. A follow up study at that time found that there was statistically insignificant change in influenza infection rates compared to when the vaccine was mandatory.[1]

Now we are hearing that for the forthcoming 2010-2011 flu season, the H1N1 flu strain will be included in the seasonal flu vaccine. This will be a quadravalent vaccine comprised of four strains including the H1N1. As of this month, the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to evaluate the H1NI virus at a 5 level pandemic and issues warnings to deaf ears now that people realize the WHO’s word is disreputable. Nevertheless, we should still brace ourselves for another year of old yarn, fear-mongering, media spin and more voodoo science.A brief overview of the past H1N1 pandemic boondoggle will help us to understand the addiction of denial permeating the ranks of the CDC’s advisory committee. It presents a picture of a delusional bubble, unrelated to medical facts, that the CDC has found comfort to float within. The simple fact remains that the CDC is disconnected from anything resembling legitimate science thereby making their recent decision ludicrous and criminally irresponsible.The CDC’s predictions of particular strains during past flu seasons has never been especially accurate. In fact, often it has been extraordinarily dismal.

The previous swine flu prediction in 1976 resulted in only one swine flu death but hundreds of people suffering permanent disabilities, including death, from the vaccine. For the 1992-1993 flu season, the prediction made for the virus used in the vaccine was off by 84 percent. For the 1994-1995 season, it was off by 43 percent for the primary strain targeted and off 87 percent and 76 percent for the other two strains. The Laboratory Center for Disease Control’s study comparing vaccine strains with the strains appearing during the 1997-1998 season found the match off by 84 percent. One would achieve a greater accuracy rate by simply flipping a coin.

The CDC's scare tacticsAn article published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 2005, “Are US Flu Death Figures More PR Than Science” is apropos for addressing the wildly inflated figures by the WHO and CDC to present their case for mass vaccination measures. The article begins, “US data on influenza deaths are a mess.” The study reviews the CDC’s own statistical data and finds numerous inconsistencies and incompatibilities between “official estimates and national vital statistics data.” Although the government’s predictions never came close to the “dire outcomes” stated by our health officials, the CDC’s own communication strategy was marked by high levels of fear.[2]

The US government’s assessment of the past H1N1 scare is another example of flawed science and incompetence. In last August’s issue of USA Today, the White House’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which receives its recommendations from the CDC, warned us that the H1N1 would kill between 30-90,000 American citizens. At the same time, the CDC was predicting 2 million people would be infected and as high as 40 percent of the entire population. The WHO, which sleeps in the same bed with the CDC in their shared complexes in Atlanta, was screaming figures of 7.5 million deaths worldwide. Consequently, the FDA fast-tracked swine flu vaccines manufactured by 5 different drug makers, none which met reliable standards of viable clinical testing and data to determine their efficacy and safety.And pregnant women, young children and the elderly were primary targets -- those also most susceptible to serious vaccine adverse reactions. Over $1.6 billion tax dollars went to Big Pharma on orders of 229 million doses, of which only 90 million were actually administered and the remaining 71 million left to decompose on shelves or dump off on poorer nations out of the graciousness of the American philanthropic spirit.

However, as we witnessed in 2009 and the early months of 2010, people woke up to the false alarm of a swine flu pandemic. Often intuition is better suited to sniff out a hoax and scandal than the pseudo-science our federal health officials give obeisance to behind closed door conference rooms. And in the case of the so-called H1N1 pandemic, intuition proved correct. Our health agencies’ warnings and numbers propagandized over mainstream media simply did not add up and have been consistently found to be contrary to more medically reliable and unbiased facts generated by independent sources without ties to the private vaccine manufacturers.

Whenever the CDC, the FDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services post figures, it is a prudent rule of thumb to be suspicious and investigate their accuracy. The fact of the matter is that the CDC is completely clueless about this past season’s flu infection rate and the number of deaths due to the H1N1 strain. Let us explain why.

No proper testing was ever conductedImmediately following the WHO’s decision in May 2009 to cease laboratory testing of samples to determine the actual biological cause of infectious cases with influenza-like symptoms, the US followed suit. Therefore, no matter what they tell you, no matter what Dr. Gupta and other tools of the media and establishment have to say, no proper testing was performed. Only PCR technology can determine the actual subset of a Type

A flu strain, such as H1N1. But PCR diagnosis was not routinely performed in order to monitor and track rates and the spread of infection. By its own admission, a CDC report found that rapid influenza kits used in hospitals and clinics were wrong as much as nine out of ten times, and on average between 40-69 percent. The CDC determined that the instant tests are “not highly worthwhile for diagnosing H1N1 infections.”

So why would any organization responsible for the tracking of an infectious disease believed to be a global health threat, potentially threatening the lives of millions of people, make such a decision to not carefully monitor flu infections is beyond comprehension, unless it knowingly determined, with malice of forethought, that the H1N1 strain was mild and not a national danger. And many independent experts in infectious diseases had been stating this throughout the season but our health agencies preferred to ignore their warnings.

Yet it is the reported death rates due to H1N1 infection that seriously call the CDC’s integrity into question. According to the CDC reports, anywhere between 8,870 and 18,300 Americans died from swine flu. For the sake of simplicity, the health feds conveniently circulate the figure of 12,000 deaths.Projections in the UK were equally off the mark. The British Ministry of Health was expecting 65,000 deaths, but reported only 500 towards the season’s end. British citizens, however, were better informed of the scandalous hoax and of the 110 million vaccine doses purchased, under contracts amounting to over $864 million to the drug makers (not including national preparatory measures bringing the total to over $1 billion for a small population), only 6 million Brits, approximately 10 percent, were vaccinated.

What figures does the World Health Organization report for the number of worldwide swine flu deaths? 18,036. That is correct, not millions. That is only 5 percent of the global figure for deaths associated with the regular seasonal flu. I don’t need an advanced degree to notice a grave discrepancy here, unless we are to believe that the H1N1 virus was on autopilot to target victims with American birth certificates or citizenship. But the reasons for the CDC’s erroneous numbers are quite easy to understand.

The CDC's flawed statistics

First, as mentioned, the CDC did not monitor the swine flu with any precision and accuracy. Our officials don’t have, and never had, the data to make any accurate determination.Second, the CDC does not distinguish between deaths caused by an influenza virus and deaths due to pneumonia. The two are lumped together in their mortality statistics and pneumonia-related deaths are reported as having an initial influenza cause. For example, if we take the combined figure of flu and pneumonia deaths for the flu period of 2001, and spin the figures, we are left believing that 62,034 people died from influenza. The actual figures are 61,777 died from pneumonia and only 257 from flu.

Even more amazing, in those 257 cases, only 18 were scientifically identified as positive for the flu virus. These are the CDC’s own figures. But does the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and all the others report this? No. Do any of the puppets that mumble on television, with access to official sources and data, actually do their homework? No.

A separate study conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics for the flu periods between 1979 and 2002 reveals that the actual range of annual flu deaths were between 257 and 3006, for an average of 1,348 per year.[3] This is a far cry from the 36,000 annual flu deaths still found on the CDC’s website and vomited by the major media.

And here is the catch. If we apply the same criteria to determine the actual number of swine flu related deaths in 2009-2010, serious vaccine adverse effects, besides the hundreds of reported miscarriages, would far outweigh deaths and injury due to the virus.

Third, there are over 150 different viruses during any given flu season that can cause flu-like symptoms, such as adenovirus, parainfluenza, bocavirus, etc. Very few of these are ever tested. For example, in Canada where actual infection rates are more carefully monitored, during the 2004-2005 flu season, the Canada Communicable Disease Report showed that of the 68,849 laboratory tests performed for influenza, only 14.9% tested positive for a flu virus. The remaining 85.1% specimens were a result of other pathogens impervious to flu vaccines.[4]

For the following 2005-2006 season, Health Canada received 68,439 tests for influenza like infections. Of these, only 6,580, or 10.4% confirmed positive for influenza. The rest, 89.6%, were other pathogens.[5] So no vaccine would have benefitted or protected those almost 90 percent in Canadians.

In the US, however, the CDC relies upon an esoteric witch’s brew of figures based upon various mathematical algorithms and speculative projections with no sound basis in reality. On one CDC site we find evidence of their flawed methodology:

“Statistical modeling was used to estimate how many flu-related deaths occurred among people whose underlying cause of death on their death certificate was listed as a respiratory and circulatory disease.”[6] This is clearly an indication of policy turned dogmatic with utterly disregard for sound scientific evidence. It is all business as usual, negligent disregard for scientific reason, and full speed ahead.And while the brilliant minds in the CDC decide to expose all Americans to the adverse risks of influenza vaccination -- Guillain-Barre Syndrome, schizophrenia, neurological disorders, miscarriages, polyneuritis, encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, intense headaches suggestive or meningeal or brain irritation, aphasia (loss of speech), bronchopneumonia, sexual impotence, angor pectoris, anaphylactic reactions and death[7] -- we should not lose sight of what is unfolding across the great pond in the European Union’s investigations into the CDC’s favorite bed partner -- the WHO, an utterly corrupt organization at every level.

Corruption at the WHO

Two reports recently published have indicted the WHO for serious malfeasance and conflict in interests behind the fabrication and propagation of the 2009-2010 H1N1 swine flu pandemic and has been called a “momentous error” in global health oversight. The people at the WHO had as much accuracy in their predictions as the Bush administration did with WMDs in Iraq.

The British Medical Journal printed a research paper by its Features Editor, Deborah Cohen, and Philip Carter from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, charging the largest global health organization with exaggerating the H1N1 flu and being steered in their decisions and fraudulent fear campaign by the pharmaceutical industrial complex. According to the authors, “credibility of the WHO and the trust in the global public health system” has been damaged.

A second devastating preliminary report released by the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (CE) found gross negligence and lack of transparency in the WHO’s handling of the swine flu scare. Throughout the WHO’s key advisory committees, particularly a secretive group known as the “emergency committee”, which steered the WHO’s assessment and predictions of the spread of H1N1 flu virus and advised them to announce a level 6 pandemic, were scientists entrenched in the morass of private vaccine and drug interests, particularly GlaxoSmithKline (H1N1 vaccine and Relenza anti-viral drug maker) and Tamiflu maker Roche AG.

Even worse, the WHO never publicly disclosed widespread conflict of interests. Paul Flynn, the rapporteur for the CE’s report stated, “the tentacles of drug company influence are in all levels of the decision-making process,” and “they vastly over-rated the danger on bad science.”

Following a lengthy investigation, a preliminary report, which still awaits a final version next month, states the result of the WHO’s negligence in proper oversight resulted in the “waste of large sums of public money and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public”The WHO continues to withhold the names of the 16 members sitting on its secret “emergency committee.” However, this week, two of the members resigned, notably Dr. John MacKenzie from Curtin University in Australia, who was the WHO advisor who first urged the organization to call a pandemic and is well known to be entangled in financial interests and investments with the pharmaceutical cartel.

So far the CDC has weathered the WHO controversy in Europe unscathed. A fundamental oversight in the CE’s investigation and hearings has been solely targeting the WHO. It ignores the role of government health agencies’ complicity in promulgating the H1N1 hoax and the flushing away of billions of dollars into the drug industry, especially during an economic downturn and recession. As we witness the WHO’s indifference and denial of wrongdoing crumble, the question remains over whether or not the CDC was complicit in the propagandizing of the astronomically expensive H1N1 hoax.

Of course, the vaccine industry doesn’t give a damn about the investigations. Their vaccines, anti-viral drugs, and oligarchic rule over the medical caste system make them immune to independent international scrutiny. And we can be assured none of the lap dogs at the New York Times, MSNBC and other major media would expose their crimes. In the shadow of this medical charade, the drug makers are laughing their way to the banks. No Big Pharma executive is sitting before investigative committees to give an accounting of corporations’ role in the pandemic debacle. Instead, after scoring over $6 billion (Associated Press, May 19, 2010) it is again business as usual and another flu season ahead to further increase revenues.

Financial corruption at every level

Similar to the WHO, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Vaccination and Practice, which voted in favor of a flu vaccine-for-all policy, is equally stacked with individuals entrenched in financial ties with the vaccine and drug makers. The Committee’s Chair, Dr. Carol Baker from Baylor University, has consistently received research and educational grants and private donations from Big Pharma. She is also on the Board of Directors of the National Foundation of Infectious Diseases, a consulting body of scientists frequently wined and dined and provided perks by the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

Another Baylor University committee member, Dr. Wendy Keitel, received clinical trial support from Novartis, the maker of the H1N1 vaccine most widely distributed in the US.

Dr. Janet Englund at the Children’s University Medical Group in Seattle received financial support for clinical trials favoring vaccines made by Medimmune (the nasal flu vaccine), Novartis, and Sanofi Pasteur. Dr. Cody Meissner received Big Pharma support through Tufts University for his supporting clinical trials for Medimmune’s RSV vaccine and for participation in Wyeth’s streptococcus vaccine for children, Prevnar.

To put this into greater perspective, since the FDA relies on industry-funded clinical trials and subsequent data to approve vaccines and drugs, there also appeared in the news this month a critical finding from the German Institute for Quality and Efficacy in Health Care, published in the peer-reviewed journal Trials.

The study investigated 90 approved drugs in the US (and let us make no mistake, vaccines are drugs! In fact, the flu vaccine is listed as a Category C drug; which means there are no adequate safety studies to determine whether flu vaccination adversely affects pregnant mothers and their fetuses.) and discovered that 60 percent of the 900 papers were unpublished and some were concealed from the federal regulatory agencies. Forty to sixty percent omitted clinical details or changed their final analysis. Among the pharmaceutical industry studies alone, 94 percent were unpublished, and 86 percent of the university studies sponsored by drug makers remained unpublished.

What does this tell us? If they were positive results, the drug companies would without hesitation publish their findings; but if the clinical studies’ results contradict their expectations negatively, thereby delaying and preventing regulatory approval and licensure of a product, then there is no incentive for their release. And they are under no regulatory obligation to publish or produce them. Hence the American public is denied approximately 90 percent of the actual clinical data performed on any given drug or vaccine.

Quack science, useless vaccines and wasted money

The German study concludes that drug makers intentionally “conceal unfavorable results or results that do not fulfill one’s expectations.”

Therefore, the vaccine and drug makers are permitted to conduct their nefarious, quack science behind closed doors with full participation and cooperation from the WHO, CDC and FDA. Of course, the CDC and FDA condone this behavior because they are completely subservient to the power and wealth of the pharmaceutical industry.

The recent CDC vote continues a tradition of denial over independent studies and reports warning of the over-exaggerated alarm and the dangers of pushing forward with an H1N1 vaccine that was not given sufficient time to prove its safety and efficacy. They even deny their own voices.

Dr. Anthony Morris is a distinguished virologist and a former Chief Vaccine Office at the FDA. His view about influenza vaccines summarizes their efficacy well. In Morris’s opinion there is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza,’ Dr. Morris states, as a matter of record, “The producers of these vaccines know they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway.”

Canada’s Vaccination Risk Awareness Network (VRAN) website is a community of physicians, researchers and vaccine researchers and journalists reporting on vaccines’ flawed promises and pseudo-science. Among all vaccines, the flu vaccine is presented with “The Most Useless Vaccine Of-All-Time Award.”

Some of the most damning evidence about the efficacy of flu vaccines was reported in two studies performed by Dr. Tom Jefferson, head of the Vaccine Field Group at the prestigious independent Cochrane Database Group, published in The Lancet and the prestigious Cochrane Database Systems Review. The first study was a systematic review of the effects of influenza vaccines in healthy children.[8] The other was a review of all the available published and unpublished safety evidence available regarding flu vaccines.[9]

The authors of the study had also contacted the lead scientists or research groups for all the efficacy and safety trial studies under their review in order to gain access to additional unpublished trial studies the corporations may possess. The conclusions are shocking. The only safety study performed with an inactivated flu vaccine was conducted in 1976. Thirty-four years ago! And that single study enrolled only 35 children aged 12-28 months. Every other subsequent inactivated flu vaccine study enrolled children 3 years or older.Dr. Jefferson told Reuters, “Immunization of very young children is not lent support by our findings. We recorded no convincing evidence that vaccines can reduce mortality, [hospital] admissions, serious complications and community transmission of influenza. In young children below the age of 2, we could find no evidence that the vaccine was different from a placebo.”[10] With respect to adults, in 64 studies involving 66,000 adults, Jefferson noted, “Vaccination of healthy adults only reduced risk of influenza by 6 percent and reduced the number of missed work days by less than one day. There was no change in the number of hospitalizations compared to the non-vaccinated.”

And in another interview for the German magazine Der Spiegel on July 21, 2009, Jefferson seems to conclude his analysis of the H1N1 scare, “Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur. The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.”

Clearly there is no rationale for submitting the American population to a vaccine with higher risks of adverse effects than its record of efficacy in preventing flu infection. If the CDC’s vote withstands and were to ever become the law in the land, we will witness one of the largest crimes ever inflicted upon the American public, solely for corporate gain. Aside from rampant adverse effects in children, many that will not appear until their later years due to the number of toxins contained in flu vaccines, there will also be thousands of women having miscarriages.

We will have entered a new medical twilight zone, where true science, responsible medical practice, and reliable public health become virtually nonexistent.

Sources cited in this article:

[1] http://www.whale.to/vaccines/flu7.html

[2] Doshi, Peter. “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” BMJ 2005; 331:1412 (10 December).

[3] Doshi, Peter. “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” BMJ 2005; 331:1412 (10 December)

[4] Statement on Influenza Vaccination for the 2004-2005 Season” Canada Communicable Disease Report. Volume 31, ACS-6, 15 June 2005.

[5] Hall, Celia (Medical Editor). “Flu Vaccines ‘Not Worth the Bother’” The Telegraph, UK, October 27, 2006.

[6] Centers for Disease Control. “Influenza death statistics”. http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/diseases/us_flu-related_deaths.htm Accessed September 24, 2009.

[7] See the following sources: Ehrengut W, Allerdist H. Uber neurologische Komplikationen nach der Influenzaschutzimpfung. Munch. Med Wschr. 1977; 119/705-710. Miller H, Cendrowski W, Schapira K. Multiple sclerosis and vaccinations. BMJ. 1967. April 22: 210-3. Hennessen W, Jacob H, Quast U. Neurologische Affektionen nach Influenza Impfung. Der Nervenarzt. 1978. 49/90-96. Wells CEC. British Medical Journal. 1971. 2: 755.

[8] Jefferson T, Smith S, Demicheli V, Harnden A, Rivetti A. Assessment of the efficacy and effectiveness of influenza in healthy children: systemic review. The Lancet 2005; 365: 773-780.

[9] Smith S, Demicheli V, Jefferson T, Harnden T. Matheson N, Di Pietrontonj C. Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2004. 3:CD004879.

[10] Reaney, Patricia. “No Evidence Flu Shots Work for Under-2s: Study. Reuters, September 22, 2005; Jefferson, Tom. “Safety of influenza vaccines in children.” The Lancet, 2005. 366:803-804.