Ladies and Gentlemen: The US is Insolvent

A blog post Jesse submitted to his site on the 23rd.

So it's been a while. And I'm just trying to catch up with the posts here as much as I can.

Just some of my thoughts first.

This was kind of a "duh" moment for us here at the blog when President Obama said we were out of money. But this kind of statement has that inherent influence that is always carried down to mainstreet in a huge way. The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee knew this back when Greenspan was Fed Chairman. Comptroller General David Walker of the Government Accountability Office has known about this as well. You have to wonder (at least I do) if this was politically timed for some reason yet unknown to the uninitiated. We can certainly see the fine hand of the conspirators in September of last year.

So here's the following piece from his blog: "We are out of money." Barack Obama May 23, 2009

Obama openly says what anyone with common sense has known for quite some time: the US is broke, and will not be able to honor its financial and fiduciary obligations.

The question remains how the US restructures that debt and how big a haircut the debt holders will take.

20%? 30%? More like upwards of 50% at least in real terms.

And who are these debt holders?

Anyone who hold Treasury debt obligations and financial assets, from the Long Bond to the US Dollar, and assets guaranteed by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.

Technically the debt will be serviced and the interest paid according to the terms of the agreements, with devalued US dollars.

The process will continue until the debt is restructured and the dollar is replaced with a new dollar. This may take some years.

Didn't you just know they would spill it over a long holiday weekend?

Don't be too concerned, there will be more spin and denials after this trial balloon has been floated, and life will go on.

"Oh, that's not what Obama meant. He means we have a problem but there are the means and the time to address and repair it before it becomes too great."

People have an enormous capacity for delusion bordering on selective amnesia. Go back and read the posts on this blog starting in September 2008. Then reflect on what has been said recently on Wall Street and you will see what we mean.

We are now in the endgame of an historic credit bubble that will result in a currency crisis of epic proportions.

Self-Criticisms and Requests

This month has been MercuryToona's worst. 15 posts? One post below February's count.

To the readership, I went on a vacation to see family and the post count fell behind. This can't happen. We have a blog. We have to maintain it as an information resource and as loyalty to our readership.

And for God sakes! I have to post information at least on time!

I'm setting a goal for myself and the other bloggers who are part of the team have the option to follow my lead. From here on out, a minimum of one post per day or one post per every other day. This week-long abstinance is inexcuseable.

Court Orders Parents to Poison Their 13-Year-Old Child with Chemotherapy

(NaturalNews) Against the wishes of both the parents and the 13-year-old patient in question, a Minnesota judge has ruled that Daniel Hauser must undergo conventional chemotherapy treatments, which are characterized by the mass-poisoning of the patient with toxic chemicals.

For opting to explore alternative and natural remedies rather than chemotherapy for their son, the parents were accused of medical neglect and now face having their son taken away from them by Child Protective Services (CPS). They may also face prison time if they refuse to follow the judge's orders.

Daniel was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a health condition that is widely known by alternative cancer practitioners to be reversible (curable), especially in younger patients. Conventional medical doctors have told the courts that unless Daniel is subjected to toxic chemotherapy treatments, he has a 95% chance of dying.

That statistics is an outright lie. It is one of the many deceptive statistics put forth by the cancer industry in order to scare patients into submitting to extremely toxic protocols that cause far more harm than good.

Cancer patients cured by chemotherapy? Zero

There is not a single cancer patient that has ever been cured by chemotherapy. Zero. They don't exist. Not a single documented case in the history of western medicine. (Mister Goldbug - This is a very bold statement. I don't know if I can agree with it entirely.)

And why is that? Because conventional medicine operates from the false belief that there is no cure for cancer! Thus, anyone offering a cure (or assisting in the body's own natural reversal of the disease) is immediately dismissed as a quack. Meanwhile, the real quackery is found in the pushing of toxic chemotherapy chemicals that are injected into the bodies of patients and called "treatment" when they should really be called "torture." (Nancy Pelosi, by the way, was never briefed on the fact that chemotherapy is torture...)

What's most disturbing in all of this, of course, is that the state is now forcing parents to poison their own children, requiring they hand over money to Big Pharma and conventional cancer treatment centers. The concept of freedom of choice has been stolen away from parents. The idea of protecting your children from toxic chemicals has been not just nullified, but made illegal!

Furthermore, the whole universe of natural cancer cures that really work has been sidelined by this Minnesota judge who is, no doubt, completely ignorant on cancer and human physiology. All these were utterly ignored: Vitamin D (http://www.naturalnews.com/008567.html), selenium, oxygen therapy, medicinal mushrooms, microalgae, Amazon rainforest herbs, Chinese Medicine herbs, high-dose vitamin C, raw foods juicing, wild foods extracts, superfood powders, raw cacao, broccoli sprouts and a thousand other things that we know help the body reverse various cancers.

All these things were apparently thrown out of the courtroom and almost certainly disparaged by drug-pushing doctors who claim that only their own chemicals can treat this disease.

Can you imagine the arrogance of that position? Of all the hundreds of different systems of medicine in our world, with tens of thousands of identified medicinal plant species growing on our planet, with the knowledge and wisdom of over 5,000 years of natural medicine being used across nearly every continent, modern doctors insist there is but one approach to cancer that has any value whatsoever: Chemotherapy. And they believe it so strongly, that they will argue for the arrest and imprisonment of parents who disagree with them.

This is the point at which medicine crosses over the line of anything scientific and becomes a dangerous form of dogma known as "scientism."

Modern medicine is not a scientific debate, folks. It's a system of control. Doctors, judges and courtrooms are simply tools of oppression to manipulate, poison and exploit a diseased population, all while isolating them from the natural cures that really work.

And the people causing this to happen are, in every conceivable way, guilty of mass murder. To deny the population access to accurate information about natural cancer remedies that really work -- and to threaten to imprison those who attempt to protect their children from the harm caused by poisonous chemicals -- is essentially an act of murder. It's not quite the same as putting a gun to someone's head and pulling the trigger, but it's close: Dead is dead, whether they were killed by a bullet or an injection.

It is especially educational to realize that most oncologists refuse to submit to chemotherapy themselves. When cancer doctors get cancer, they avoid chemotherapy as any sensible person would. But they have no hesitation about injecting the poisons into the bodies of other people, including innocent 13-year-old boys who will almost certainly be harmed or even killed by the treatment.

Chemotherapy causes permanent brain damage. It's an undisputed scientific fact. It's called "chemo-brain." (http://www.naturalnews.com/020665.html)

Chemotherapy also causes heart damage and kidney damage. If you want to kill someone, an easy way to accomplish that would be to inject them with chemotherapy chemicals. But if you want to protect someone from danger, it would be far smarter to avoid chemotherapy altogether, and seek natural remedies that really work.

What works? Lots of things. Medicinal mushrooms (www.MushroomScience.com) are extremely powerful anti-cancer medicines. So is spirulina (www.Nutrex-Hawaii.com) and chlorella. Trace minerals are anti-cancer, as is aloe vera (www.GoodCauseWellness.com).

Cancer can also be beat with the help of superfoods (www.IntegratedHealth.com), berries (www.FruitFast.com), cruciferous vegetables, sprouts (www.TheRawFoodWorld.com) and even resveratrol (www.Vitacost.com). Eating spinach from your own garden is anti-cancer. The Amazon Herb Company sells numerous Amazon rainforest herbs that are naturally anti-cancer, and vitamin D all by itself can prevent nearly 4 out of 5 cancers (http://www.naturalnews.com/021892.html).

There is no shortage of cancer cures in our world. There is only a shortage of intelligence among court judges, doctors and CPS personnel who have allowed themselves to remain dangerously ignorant of the cancer treatments offered by Mother Nature.

When will the world wake up and figure out the obvious here?

Cancer is not caused by a poison deficiency. And poisoning the body while calling it "treatment" is a prime example of extreme intellectual dishonesty on the part of oncologists and Big Pharma pill pushers who, at the very least, are responsible for the deaths of perhaps half a million people a year worldwide.

By any honest mathematical analysis, cancer doctors are orders of magnitude more dangerous to our world than all the terrorists, ocean pirates and serial killers combined. And now, with the help of ignorant court judges, they have outlawed NOT using their own brand of poison.

It's sick beyond imagination. It's a crime against humanity, and I can only pray that one day the people responsible for the deaths of all these children being poisoned by chemotherapy will face their own court trials for mass murder.

Ron Paul Discusses Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics on Morning Joe

Yesterday, 5/15/2009, Ron Paul appeared on Morning Joe and discussed the pros of Austrian economics vs. the cons of Keynesian economics.

Here's the video.



My only problem here is how Ron Paul doesn't give the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee a shout-out! Is he not aware of them? He was re-elected to Congress in 1997. Being a member of the Oversight Committees, he would've received a copy of their book, Gold Derivative Banking Crisis.

Come on, Ron. You're the man! Speak up!

5/13: Rob Kirby - Forensic Examination of the Gold Carry Trade

by Ron Kirby

Forensic Examination of the Gold Carry Trade

Is There A Supply Deficit?

If you ask the World Gold Council or their “official numbers keeper” - GFMS – they’ll say there is no persistent gold supply deficit. If you ask the folks at GATA – they’ll claim there is an annual 1,000 – 1,500 tonne gold supply deficit.

So who’s telling the truth?

What’s interesting to note in this regard – the World Gold Council and GFMS haven’t always shared the same view regarding gold supply / demand aggregates. Empirically their positions, at times, have been ambiguously at odds with each other and have lacked continuity. Here’s how GATA consultant Frank Veneroso explained the disparity back in 2005;

“As I explained in the Gold Book, gold demand had been understated for years by GFMS, the ‘official’ keeper of the global gold statistics, as has been the flow of official sector gold. Official stocks were falling faster than the GFMS data would suggest. I presented abundant statistical information to make that case. We believe that the trend in the official data since then simply flies in the face of obvious facts and this discredits it further.

People ask us where we think supply and demand are now. Our standard response is that we don’t know, because the data available to us has become ever less reliable. In the old days, the World Gold Council produced a data series on gold demand for most (but not all) of the world. It was based on extensive survey data and it had no reason to be biased. It clearly showed a stronger trend in the growth of gold demand (excluding Western investment) than did the GFMS supply/demand statistics. For us it was an anchor that allowed us to see a growing error in the GFMS data (see the Gold Book).

In the 1990s GFMS was faced with a problem. From the late-1980s to the late-1990s, there was a growing flow of borrowed gold associated with speculative short sales, the hedging of central bank options and commercial inventory hedging, in addition to the well recognized producer forward selling. There were also some official sector liquidations that were not reported. These totaled to extremely large official supplies. For some strange reason GFMS refused to acknowledge most of these official supplies, particularly those associated with speculator short sales. This resulted in a gross understatement of annual supplies.

Unlike the World Gold Council, which tried to only come up with an estimate of demand, GFMS estimated both supply and demand. In the end GMS had to make their estimates of demand and supply balance. Because they were underestimating supplies to an increasing degree, they had to underestimate demand to an increasing degree to make these accounts balance. That is why the World Gold Council survey showed a stronger gold demand trend in the 1990s than the GFMS statistics.

Several years ago the World Gold Council decided to merge its statistical efforts with GFMS leaving us, in effect, with only the GFMS supply/demand estimates. It has been my opinion that the GFMS balances became so flawed by the end of the 1990s that they had become virtually worthless. Therefore, I’ve regarded the new World Gold Council/GFMS statistics in recent years as basically useless. We no longer have any anchor for estimating gold demand and supply.”

That Central Banks “swap” and “lease” gold is an undeniable matter of public record. The extent of this activity is not acknowledged by GFMS or the World Gold Council. We do know that it necessarily has been responsible for filling any and all recurring gold bullion supply deficits.

The bottom line is that Central Banks claim to “officially” have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 metric tonnes of gold bullion in their vaults. However, the reality is that Central Banks possess LESS physical gold than they officially report – how much less is a matter of speculation and a closely guarded secret.

The following formula explains the mechanics of the Gold Carry [lease] Trade:



** Do not confuse the Gold Forward Rate [GOFO] with the Gold futures price – they are not related.

Now, we shall apply our lease rate formula to a “real world” case study where there is plenty of irrefutable evidence that gold leasing occurred; namely, in the aftermath of the Sept. 26, 1999 announcement of the first Washington Agreement on Gold – which was “sold” [as in a bill of goods, perhaps?] to the world as being ‘gold friendly’.

In the aftermath of the announcement of original Washington Agreement [WAG], announced Sept. 26, 1999, the World Gold Council reported:

“Lease rates jumped to 10% in the first few days after the agreement, and though they have fallen back, they remain at a still high level of 4-5%, more than two times the rate the 1-2% the market is historically used to. The market remains tight, with very little gold coming onto it.”

What Happens When Gold Is Leased?

When Central Banks lease gold, it PHYSICALLY leaves the vault and the recipient / borrower sells the physical metal into the marketplace to raise cash – to invest or to finance capital expenditures. In this regard, we can say that “GOLD LEASING” is a means by which physical bullion is made available in the market place – thereby lowering the gold price. After the gold physically leaves the vault of the Central Bank, it is replaced with an I. O. U. and the Central Bank, for accounting purposes, “double counts” by continuing to claim that they still possess the same amount of physical bullion in the vault. It is notable that fraudulent accounting practices relating to gold is promoted by lawmakers the world over. This is contrary to generally accepted accounting practices and promotes market opacity instead of the much talked about need for transparency. Explicitly, it serves to promote the supremacy of the fiat U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

I’ve circled the 10 % spike in lease rates on the chart below:

Ladies and gentlemen, what the spike in lease rates above depicts is the INDUCEMENT that was required to get BULLION BANKS to accept the “ELEVATED COUNTERPARTY RISK” inherent in arranging further bullion loans since, in the days following the Washington Agreement, the subsequent rise in the price of gold weakened existing bullion borrower’s financial position and made repayment of their physical bullion loans a trickier proposition:



(Mister Goldbug - There is a table in the article that I can't figure out how to reproduce here so I'm leaving it out and skipping to the next part. Its a minor part of the article and I'm sure the author of the piece, Ron Kirby, would think it is important since after all he wrote it. Its for this purpose I'm including his website in this article so that the reader can, if so desired, sign up to his website.)

Now, let’s stop and consider WHO did the lending of metal in Sept. 1999 – expelling physical precious metal, intentionally at a loss, in the face of a RISING PRICE of GOLD. Remember folks, 3 month GOFO [the gold forward rate] is the return “earned” by the lender of bullion:


So ask yourself WHO would lend physical gold bullion to ANYONE with a guarantee that you would get LESS bullion back in 3 months????????????

Sir Alan of “I-looted-the-free-world” Greenspan gave us a good hint as to who might do such a thing when he twice testified before Congress in 1998 that "central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities [read: lose money] should the price rise."

Coincidentally, it is the lack of transparency concerning Central Bank gold leasing and the existence of double counting of gold stocks that, in Dec. 2007, prompted GATA to launch a freedom of information request campaign to wrest all documents from the Fed and U.S. Treasury in their possession that have been generated since 1990 and mention swaps of gold involving the U.S. government. Heck, even the I.M.F. admits that Central Banks double count gold, excerpted from I.M.F. issues paper # 11, April, 2006;

7. The current statistical treatment of gold swaps should be consistent with that of repos. The guidance of paragraph 85 (iii) of the Guidelines, which is applied to gold swaps by paragraph 101, results in overstating
reserve assets because both the funds received from the gold swap and the gold are included in reserve assets. While the gold is swapped, it cannot be the case that both the claims and the gold are simultaneously liquid and readily available to the monetary authority.

The United States of America claims to possess a little more than 8,100 metric tonnes of sovereign gold stored principally at Fort Knox, Kentucky, West Point, N.Y. and The New York Fed. The sovereign U.S. gold reserve has not been independently audited since the 1950’s during the Eisenhower Administration. GATA’s freedom of information requests are all about ensuring that the 8,100 metric tonnes of U.S. sovereign gold is still owned the U.S. and is where it is purported to be.

In April, 2008 the Federal Reserve responded to GATA’s request, releasing part or all of hundreds of pages of worthless information, but also claiming that it was withholding all or part of the information of about 400 pages of documents. The status of the withheld documents is currently under appeal.

These stonewalling tactics – with holding details - are eerily similar to those employed by Messer’s Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner refusing to divulge frank details as to “who” the beneficial recipients were of TARP and TALF funds.

Adding Some Websites

Debunking 9/11 Debunkers: The BlogSpot
Screw Loose Change: The BlogSpot (I figured if I was going to post the link to the 9/11 Debunkers BlogSpot site, it would only be fair to post the Screw Loose Change BlogSpot. Besides, even though I may disagree with James B. and Pat, I still have to keep abreast of their issues.)

Daryl Bradford Smith's I Am The Witness Smith has an archive resource of interviews he conducted with Eustace Mullins so I'm going to add his website.
Eric Hufschmid

Be careful with Eric Hufschmid and Daryl Bradford Smith as sources to trust. They both allege that the other one is a disinformation agent protecting the Zionist Jews. Hufschmid does lurch into the Twilight Zone with his Apollo moonlanding theories. They both have some good information all around though. Still, remember what I said.

Last Night's Get Together

Last night, I attended a local meeting that had been organized by Mr. Larry A. Hunt of Catawba, VA. Clearly this was not the first meeting they had scheduled since I was considered a first-time attender, but while I was there I met many great contributors.

The location of these meetings may vary from time to time but the timing is every Second Tuesday of each month.

Tax-Related Websites

The following websites have been added to the Sites We Like sidebar of our BlogSpot.

The Internal Revenue Code
Original Intent
Code of Federal Regulations
Tommy Cryer's Website
David Myrland

"InfoWarrior" Jason Bermas: Jew Critics Are "Anti-Semites" Who Should Hang Or Electrocute Themselves

Before I begin, I'd like to get something out of the way.

Buzz words like "anti-semite", "anti-semitic", "Jew-hate", "Jew-hater" are terms designed for the political purpose of stifling debate. There has been designed into these terms by educational conditioning a certain negative connotated weight meant to infer or to imply certain associative thoughts that lead the student to politically-desirable conclusions. It serves the purpose well, for when someone starts looking into the Jewish/Zionist angle of the World Order conspiracy the prejudice says that they must be "Holocaust deniers". Of course "Holocaust denier" is also one of those buzz words used as a means to communicate to people that those who question the Holocaust are "anti-Semites" who "hate Jews". David Cole doesn't believe the Holocaust occurred and he's Jewish. Oh, right. Nevermind. He's a "self-hating Jew".

I consider the following minutes a gift to me, provided in the video I posted in this blog post below my commentary. The minutes could not have transpired more beautifully. Jason Bermas proves, without my help, his unreliability as a Truth Seeker. He proves that as a researcher he has a fixed agenda. I would say he's a disinformation agent. If by now no one knows who he is, he's part of the trio team that produced Loose Change.

There's a lot of credible evidence to build the argument that Jews have a significant role to play in determining the political message that is produced out of Hollywood and the contexts of the reports in the corporate news media.

Jason Bermas makes no attempt to prove that the caller who phoned into the show is wrong about these claims. He just says that it's "not a Jewish conspiracy" and that he should "get over it." "Hook-nosed people don't run the world in some kind of cave while they suck the blood out of babies in some weird ritual you believe in."

Jason Bermas throws out the unsubstantiated allegation that the caller or anyone else who happens to agree with the caller believes that all Jews are "hook-nosed people." The well-trained emotional knee-jerk reaction most, if not all, people have to this kind of taboo discussion is to assume that the speaker is of course talking about every single Jew that has lived, is alive, and will be born in the future when no previous quantification existed. The caller did not say "some Jewish people", "most Jewish people", or even "all Jewish people". The caller just happened to say "the Jewish people."

Sweeping generalizations are made benignly about all kinds of groups of people ranging from those people who listen to emo music to those who have sexually active lifestyles and everybody in between. But the tirades only launch when one makes a casual inference - a generalization - about a race, an ethnic group, women, et cetera. It is the imagination of the critics who should be credited with assuming a generalization is pigeon-holing "every single one." Making the statement "gays are into anal sex" does not mean that every gay man likes giving it and/or taking it. And when has there been any conspiracy researcher looking into the Jewish/Zionist angle that believed Jews run the world from a cave? Also, I certainly don't believe every Jew is "hook-nosed". Jason Bermas is certainly not hook-nosed and neither is Dylan Avery.

Next, Bermas goes on to mention that the World Order conspiracy is comprised of participants of all religious backgrounds, all races, and all creeds. But wait a minute. Alex Jones wants us to believe that the World Order is ran by elite white racists who belong to Germanic nazi death cults. Little understood to Alex Jones and his Crew of Jew is that the term Nazi is the compromised derivative of National Socialism and Zionism. The "Na" part of Nazi is National Socialism and the "zi" part of Nazi is "Zionism". This is because Nazism is the combination of two different political philosophies whose students figured out how to benefit greatly by combining their efforts. (ref. Eustace Mullins)

More bizarrely, Webster Tarpley in Jones' latest documentary, The Obama Deception, referred to the World Order conspiracy as primarily an "Anglo-American Empire" when most of the people at the top of the pyramid are Jewish bankers who own the stock of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve!

Jason's next move is to call for extermination through population control of those who believe that Jews run the world. He erroneously conflates hating Jews to hating all minorities. He then makes the claim that he's somehow not of any particular ethnicity, a biological impossibility if there ever was one!!! In fact, he claims that with a little bit of lighting technique he can be made to look like any ethnicity!!

Bermas's next charge is that the caller is discrediting the "movement" by arguing Jewish domination in the media. What movement? The movement of sheep being deceptively led to the slaughterhouse by Jewish Zionist sheepherders? There's a difference between an InfoWarrior and a Truth Seeker. An InfoWarrior is someone who follows and parrots everything Alex Jones says and a Truth Seeker realizes Alex Jones is a disinformation agent. After all, isn't it a bit strange how the American Broadcasting Company allows Alex Jones to borrow their satellites for his radio show? And besides I'm sure with Jews in such dominant positions at the Genesis Communications Network Alex Jones signed a contract stipulating that he couldn't talk about the Jews.

And I love how these media celebrity conspiracy researchers always act like they're the first ones to uncover it all. They make these cases to become self-appointed leaders in the "truth movement". Eustace Mullins was the first one to write the book exposing the Federal Reserve as a fraud, but Alex Jones and his Crew of Jew promote G. Edward Griffin instead. He tries to discredit this claim but his own credibility evaporates when he turns an about-face and says that he has Jewish friends. Yes, of course, he does. Dylan Avery is one of them. No wonder the Loose Change film never touches upon the Israeli foreknowledge and involvement. They're protecting them!!

By the way, isn't Alex Jones married to a Jew? Violet Jones is not her real name! Her real name is Kelly Rebecca Nichols. Her father is Edward Lowe Nichols and her mother is Sandra Kay Heiligman. But he continues to deny that his wife is Jewish.

In the following video around the 8 minutes mark Alex Jones makes two very conflicting statements.

Statement #1: "My wife's not Jewish."

Statement #2: "In my wife's...you know...zzhh...you know...off on one side of her family they did have some Jewish relatives from Poland..."

Well, which is it, Alex? Is your wife Jewish or not? He goes on to say that it doesn't really matter since he has had the ADL attack him in the past. This really isn't much of an argument since the concept of "controlled opposition" is built on leading the opposition. How many sponsors does Alex Jones have that are Jewish? I would think that would factor in to his reporting. He had Eustace Mullins on his radio program only once and I bet his sponsors threatened to pull their support if he had him on his show again. Alex Jones would've become another Morton Downey, Jr.

But back to the origianl topic at hand here. Bermas then makes the most shocking statement of all. He argues that if you happen to be asking the "Jewish question" you should take a toaster oven, plug it into your bathroom's electrical socket and take a bath with it. Its these oversensitive defense positions that make "antisemites" think that the Jews control the world's resources and want to maintain their control over others with total impunity.

Swine Flu Spreads to New York, Canada, Ohio as U.S. Travel Remains Unrestricted

It's been a few days since this story was posted at Natural News, so I don't know if anything's changed, but I figure they'd let us know.

Monday, April 27, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews)The swine flu / bird flu / human flu virus (H1N1) has now been confirmed as striking victims in New York City, Kansas, Ohio, Canada and is suspected in New Zealand, Spain and Israel. Over 100 people are now confirmed dead from the swine flu (mostly in Mexico City), and confirmed infectious have surpassed 1600. Just today, the U.S. declared a Public Health Emergency over swine flu.

There is considerable speculation that the infection numbers are vastly underreported, especially by authorities in Mexico who are attempting to reduce the economic loss associated with international trade and travel restrictions erected in the aftermath of an infectious disease outbreak. (See related story on NaturalNews: http://www.naturalnews.com/026141.html )

As world health authorities have openly admitted, swine flu is way beyond containment. This virus completely eluded global health authorities and established a firm presence in multiple countries before it was even identified. So much for the first line of defense against infectious disease, huh?

The second line of defense is the government's much-touted "anti-virals" like Tamiflu (oseltamivir) which are actually weak pharmaceuticals that offer no immunity and are available in such small quantities that far fewer than five percent of the people in most countries will even have access to such medicines. For the most part, such medicines are being made available solely to health care workers, not to the population at large.

Even then, reports are already emerging that health care workers in Mexico City who were vaccinated have died within days (http://www.naturalnews.com/026141.html). It is not known whether they also took anti-viral medications.

It seems quite clear that if this swine flu strain becomes widespread, the people of the world will mostly have to fend for themselves. Government availability of H1N1 vaccines is currently zero, and availability of anti-viral oral medications is strictly limited. People who wish to purchase or make their own natural anti-viral medicines can tune in to the Health Ranger's LIVE swine flu preparedness teleconference this Thursday evening. Details at: http://www.truthpublishing.com/Prod...

There is already speculation that this swine flu strain may have been engineered in a laboratory. While NaturalNews does not yet agree with this assessment, this is without question a possibility that needs to be considered. There is already some evidence that the H1N1 genetic code has somehow been assembled from three species (bids, pigs and humans) spanning three different continents. The "natural" occurrence of such a combination seems extremely remote, although not impossible.

There is already speculation that this swine flu strain may have been engineered in a laboratory. While NaturalNews does not yet agree with this assessment, this is without question a possibility that needs to be considered. There is already some evidence that the H1N1 genetic code has somehow been assembled from three species (bids, pigs and humans) spanning three different continents. The "natural" occurrence of such a combination seems extremely remote, although not impossible.

I've covered the conspiracy theory / bioweapon issue with H1N1 swine flu in a related article here on NaturalNews: http://www.naturalnews.com/026141.html

Public Health Emergency declared, but travel is still wide open

I just returned from Taiwan yesterday, and in passing through U.S. immigration and customs in L.A., I noticed no special efforts to screen travelers for fever or infectious disease. This stands in stark contrast to Taiwan, which is far more vigilant on the matter, hosting a "quarantine zone" with an infra-red camera through which all arriving international passengers must walk. The idea is to catch passengers with fevers using the infra-red camera, before they enter the country and infect more people. (It's sort of a smart idea...)

The U.S. has no such protections in place that I saw (I was looking for them), and it was more than a bit disturbing to take an eleven-hour flight across the Pacific Ocean with numerous passengers coughing and sneezing the whole way. For all I know, I may have already been infected with the swine flu, although I show no symptoms for any such infection.

The point in all this is that the U.S. seems remarkably unconcerned with halting the travel of infected viral carriers. Conspiracy theorists might even say the U.S. is encouraging the spread of the virus, although I think it's more likely just incompetence on the part of immigration officials who are slow to respond to this issue. Or maybe they've already realized it's too late to stop the spread via air travel, since infections have now been confirmed across multiple U.S. states.

I can't speak for the Dept. of Homeland Security (nor would I want to), but if I were really interested in security, I would at least erect infection screening facilities at entry points in major U.S. airports. At the very least, you could use an infra-red temperature "gun" to zap people's temperatures as they're walking in. Those with high temperatures could be asked to step aside to at least record their travel history and future travel plans in the U.S. -- information that would be invaluable to CDC officials trying to track the spread of infections.

Note, by the way, that if you get infected with H1N1, U.S. health care and law enforcement officials can quarantine you against your will thanks to new laws passed by the Bush Administration. This makes sense on one level, of course, as a way to protect the rest of the nation's citizens from carriers of deadly disease. But it also means that the minute you step into an airport, train station, bus station or other public place, you may be placing your freedom at risk by merely sneezing!

My advice to NaturalNews readers? If you're sick (from anything, the sniffles, coughing, sneezing, etc.), STAY HOME. Don't go to work. Don't go to school. And certainly don't travel. If you do, you may find yourself riding out your sniffles in a high-security quarantine zone, courtesy of the U.S. government. Have fun with that one! (Just try to get some anti-viral tinctures in there!)

This story continues with part two: Swine Flu Spreads; Conspiracy Theories of Laboratory Origins Abound (http://www.naturalnews.com/026141.html).It focuses on the conspiracy theories discussing the possible man-made origins of H1N1 swine flu.

As Swine Flu Spreads, Conspiracy Theories of Laboratory Origins Abound

Monday, April 27, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews)Perhaps due to the genetic makeup of the fast-spreading H1N1 strain of influenza -- which includes genetic elements from bird flu, swine flu and human flu spanning three continents -- there is considerable speculation that the origins of this virus are man-made.

It's not an unreasonable question to ask: Could world governments, spooked by the prospect of radical climate change caused by over-population of the planet, have assembled a super-secret task force to engineer and distribute a super virulent strain of influenza designed to "correct" the human population (and institute global Martial Law)? (Mister Goldbug - I have to disagree with the author of the article here. Government around the world through the U.N. have been performing population control -- like the AIDS virus which was made right here in America in Fort Dix, Maryland, as uncovered by Eustace Mullins)

Technically, it's possible. The U.S. military, all by itself, has the know-how to engineer and unleash such a virus. That doesn't mean they've done so, however. It would be an astonishing leap into crimes against humanity to intentionally unleash such a biological weapon into the wild.

Then again, governments of the world have routinely engaged in crimes against humanity, haven't they? The U.S., for example, dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations in Japan. Israel rained white phosphorous on Palestinians, Hitler exterminated countless Jews, and Americans fired millions of rounds of depleted uranium rounds into targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unleashing a viral biological weapon in Mexico City is no great leap beyond what governments have already done to achieve their goals.

Throughout human history, virtually all the great crimes against humanity have been carried out by governments -- mostly in the name of peace, prosperity and security, by the way. So let's be clear about one thing: Governments are certainly capable of doing this if properly motivated. Let there be no question about that.

Is there any hard evidence of laboratory origins?

As of this moment, I have not personally seen any conclusive evidence of laboratory origins for this H1N1 swine flu. I am open to the possibility that new evidence may emerge in this direction, however, and I am suspicious of the genetic makeup of the virus as one possible indicator of its origins.

I am not a medical specialist in the area of infectious disease, but I have studied microbiology, genetics and a considerable amount of material on pandemics. What seems suspicious to me is the hybrid origin of the viral fragments found in H1N1 influenza. According to reports in the mainstream media (which has no reason to lie about this particular detail), this strain of influenza contains viral code fragments from:

• Human influenza
• Bird Flu from North America
• Swine flu from Europe
• Swine flu from Asia

This is rather astonishing to realize, because for this to have been a natural combination of viral fragments, it means an infected bird from North America would have had to infect pigs in Europe, then be re-infected by those some pigs with an unlikely cross-species mutation that allowed the bird to carry it again, then that bird would have had to fly to Asia and infected pigs there, and those Asian pigs then mutated the virus once again (while preserving the European swine and bird flu elements) to become human transmittable, and then a human would have had to catch that virus from the Asian pigs -- in Mexico! -- and spread it to others. (This isn't the only explanation of how it could have happened, but it is one scenario that gives you an idea of the complexity of such a thing happening).

Now, on a common sense level, what is the likelihood of such a combination of seemingly unlikely, trans-continental events taking place? At first glance, without the benefit of additional laboratory analysis, it seems extremely unlikely that this could have happened "naturally," without human intervention. It's not outside the realm of possibility, of course, but it seems exceedingly remote that such events happened without some human encouragement.

This is perhaps why the internet is smoking hot with talk of swine flu conspiracy theories. Alex Jones is, of course, covering the issue in articles like this one: http://www.infowars.com/medical-dir...

If the release of the virus was intentional, there are essentially two explanations for who might be behind it: 1) Governments attempting to reduce the human population, 2) Bio-terrorists attempting to kill lots of people. Or perhaps 3) Those two groups are one and the same!

Why we shouldn't dismiss the conspiracy theories outright

Many of the points made in conspiracy articles are well made, in fact: There is both a motive and a means for governments of the world to have played a role in the creation and transmission of this virus. Still, it doesn't mean they did, and NaturalNews will be cautious in reporting such conclusions until more evidence emerges.

There's no question about one aspect of the circulating conspiracy theories, however: If governments wanted to infect people with this bio-engineered swine flu, vaccines would be the best way to do it. It seems interesting that Mexico City health officials, in particular, leaped to a mass vaccination campaign in the midst of the swine flu outbreak even though no vaccines are yet available for swine flu!

So what, exactly, were Mexico City's health officials injecting into health care workers and patients? There's absolutely nothing they could have been injected with that would make any medical sense other than Tamiflu. But Tamiflu is an oral medication, not an injection. So what, then, was being injected into Mexico City's hospital workers?

What's very clear here is that Mexico is engaged in a massive cover-up about the swine flu. The potential from economic damage caused by other nations banning travel and imports from Mexico is very real, and as a strategy to minimize that economic damage, Mexico seems to be purposely under-reporting swine flu infections and deaths while engaging in elaborate theater whose only purpose is to make its own medical authorities appear to be doing something useful. Hence the useless vaccines stunt.

This is further supported by medical personnel whose comments appeared on the Barbara Walter show, published with ABC News Australia (http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2553104.htm). Read carefully what these medical experts have to say about the real situation on the ground in Mexico City:

ANTONIO CHAVEZ'S BBC WEBSITE POSTING (voiceover): The truth is that mortality is even higher than what is being reported by the authorities, at least in the hospital where I work in. It is killing three to four patients daily, and it has been going on for more than three weeks. It's a shame that there is fear here. Increasingly younger patients aged 20 to 30 years are dying before our helpless eyes, and there is great sadness among health professionals here.

BARBARA MILLER: Another doctor who wrote into the BBC is Yeny Gregorio Dávila.

EXCERPT FROM YENY GREGORIO DÁVILA' BBC posing (voiceover): I work as a resident doctor in one of the biggest hospitals in Mexico City and sadly, the situation is far from "under control". As a doctor, I realize that the media does not report the truth. Authorities distributed vaccines among all the medical personnel with no results, because two of my partners who worked in this hospital were killed by this new virus in less than six days, even though they were vaccinated as all of us were. The official number of deaths is 20; nevertheless, the true number of victims are more than 200. I understand that we must avoid panic, but to tell the truth - it might be better now to prevent and avoid more deaths.

BARBARA MILLER: While Mexican officials say their primary concern right now is human life, the country's Finance Minister Augustin Carstens says it's clear that the outbreak will have a significant impact on the country's economy.

Vaccinated doctors dead in days

Did you catch what was said here? As Dr. Yeny Gregoria Davila posted on the BBC website, vaccines were given to the medical personnel and those very same medical personnel were dead within six days. Thus, the vaccine is certainly not protecting these people from infection.

According to the conspiracy theories, these vaccines may indeed be the carrier of the virus. Injecting front-line medical personnel with the virus is the fastest way to spread it even further because medical workers interact with large numbers of immune-compromised people on a daily basis, including many people who tend to travel from far away to visit the hospital and then return to their distant towns, burros or villages in Mexico.

Furthermore, the true number of people infected or killed by the virus is being vastly underreported, according to these doctors. It's just like China's handling of SARS: The country was hesitant to admit the disease existed at all in order to avoid international embarrassment over its lackluster health policies.

As the WHO knows quite well, nations are universally reluctant to tell the truth about infectious disease. There's even a good reason why: Big Pharma usually attempts to acquire the virus early on, patent its particular genetic code, then manufacture expensive vaccines that it sells back to the stricken nation at a ridiculously-high price. This is how Big Pharma profits from a pandemic, turning human suffering into corporate profits.

Thus, it is actually in a nation's economic interests to avoid sharing viral strains with world health authorities because WHO routinely shares viral specimens with pharmaceutical companies. This is just one factor in a long list of factors that compel nations to lie about infectious disease outbreaks.

Even when it comes to pandemic outbreaks, we are still dealing with layer upon layer of commercially-motivated deception on the part of nations. That's why it's so important to figure out how to "read between the lies" of the mainstream media. I teach some techniques for doing that in my upcoming Swine flu advanced preparedness LIVE teleconference which you can read about here: http://www.truthpublishing.com/Prod...

This teleconference also reveals secret Chinese Medicine formulas for expelling viruses, how to survive disruptions in basic infrastructure (which are likely to occur if this swine flu goes pandemic), why flu masks are utterly useless at protecting you from flu, and many other topics. Click the link above to read more about this teleconference.

Another reason to avoid vaccines

Let's suppose for a minute that the conspiracy theory angle on this swine flu infection is correct. If the spread of the virus starts to wane, the best way for health authorities to unleash a second wave of infections is to mandate the vaccination of the public with vaccines that are intentionally contaminated with live H1N1 viruses.

Does that sound far-fetched? Consider the news item published here on NaturalNews just one month ago, entitled Vaccines as Biological Weapons? Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries (http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html).

As that article explained, one pharmaceutical company was caught inserting LIVE bird flu viruses into vaccine materials sent to 18 countries. Was this a trial run for the H1N1 global infection effort? It certainly raises suspicions. When a new virus seemingly "engineered" from three different species suddenly appears in multiple nations -- just one month after a drug company was busted inserting live bird flu viral fragments into globally-distributed vaccine materials -- it should raise the eyebrows of even the most steadfast skeptics.

It doesn't prove anything, of course, but it does raise suspicions that this sort of thing could be happening beyond closed doors.The question to ask yourself on this is the usual one: Who benefits from a global pandemic?

Once you answer that question, you're well on the way to determining the truth or falsehood behind the H1N1 conspiracy theories.

I'm not even going to answer that question for you. I'll let you ponder the answer yourself.Once you answer the question of who benefits from a pandemic, ask yourself this second question: Are they capable of harming or killing humans to accomplish their goals?

Answer that question and you've figured out most of the true story behind these events.

NaturalNews will continue to cover this H1N1 swine flu outbreak in greatly detail. Watch the website for frequent updates.

Thirty-Six Thousand People Do Not Die Each Year from "Regular Flu"

Thursday, April 30, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor


(NaturalNews) Read just about any news report on swine flu deaths, and you'll come across a line that claims "36,000 people die each year from flu-related causes." It sounds authoritative. It's even a nice, round number. But where is this number coming from? And is it based on any actual science?

This statistic is being paraded around by almost everybody, as if to say that swine flu isn't so bad because regular flu kills so many people each year anyway. The truth is that the only standard by which the CDC and WHO are quoting deaths from swine flu is if they are confirmed deaths from a particular viral strain. To them, if a death has not been confirmed in their labs, it does not count as a death from that flu.

Got that? Only "confirmed" deaths count. And they must be confirmed in a laboratory using a rigorous method of comparing samples taken from the deceased with a known database of viral patterns.

As it turns out, virtually none of the 36,000 people said to die from regular flu each year have been confirmed in any lab whatsoever.

Thus, according to the guidelines of the CDC and WHO, they don't count. Based on their own rules, it is technically accurate to say that regular flu kills virtually no one. It's not true, of course, because people do die from the "regular flu" each year, but it is technically accurate according to the CDC and WHO rules for scientific evidence.

Again, that's because nearly all of these "regular flu" deaths aren't confirmed by a CDC or WHO-recognized lab. Thus, they have no scientific standing.

Infectious disease double standard

I find it interesting that when talking about swine flu, the criteria for inclusion in statistics is positive identification in a rigorous laboratory. But when talking about regular flu, the criteria for inclusion is -- technically speaking -- anybody's wild guess.

The 36,000 number, it turns out, was pulled out of thin air. It has no scientific validity whatsoever, even according to the CDC's own standards.

I tracked down the origins of this number on CDC.gov, by the way. Turns out it was an estimate derived by the CDC in 2003 (http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pres).

It's an estimate, mind you, not a "confirmed" number of deaths. And that estimate has stayed exactly the same through 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Not a budge. Before the number was 36,000, it was 20,000 for many years. That tells you right off the bat this isn't some confirmed laboratory number -- it's a guesstimate!

I'm not disagreeing with the number. It's probably a fairly accurate guess (the CDC folks are a smart bunch). But it doesn't meet the criteria by which these infectious disease organizations report influenza deaths. (Mister Goldbug -- I have trouble agreeing with this statement here. the CDC is smart at deceiving people.)

As the CDC even says on their own website, "This estimate came from a 2003 study published in the Journal of the American Medication Association (JAMA), which looked at the 1990-91 through the 1998-99 flu seasons [10]. 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 or circulatory disease. During these years, the number of estimated deaths ranged from 17,000 to 52,000."

In other words, they took a look at how many people died from respiratory or circulatory disease, and from that they extrapolated "flu-related deaths."

This is all accomplished through "statistical modeling," which is the equivalent of statisticians waving magic wands to create new numbers where none exist. Based on the sample size, it can be quite accurate (plus or minus a few percentage points), or it can be way off base depending on the accuracy of the statistical sample.

Notably, if the same methodology were used to calculate swine flu deaths, it might currently show 300 or more deaths (and such methodologies would be widely criticized, of course, for being "just wild guesses," which they are).

As the CDC admits itself, "CDC does not know exactly how many people die from flu each year."

And... "It has been recognized for many years that influenza is infrequently listed on death certificates [12] and testing for influenza infections usually not done, particularly among the elderly who are at greatest risk of influenza complications and death. Some deaths – particularly in the elderly – are associated with secondary complications of influenza (including bacterial pneumonias)." (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/diseas)

In other words: Influenza isn't listed on death certificates and influenza testing isn't even done on most patients! Thus, it is not possible for these 36,000 influenza deaths to be confirmed at all.

Swine flu may escape detection, too

What else is interesting in all this is when the CDC explains that viral strains aren't even detectable in patients after the first few days of infection:

"Influenza virus infection may not be identified in many instances because influenza virus is only detectable for a short period of time and many people don't seek medical care until after the first few days of acute illness." - The CDC

If this is true, then isn't it also true that most swine flu patients can NEVER be confirmed in a lab?

I find this quite curious, because according to what the CDC is saying here, it is impossible to ever get an accurate "confirmed" count of swine flu patients because the influenza virus isn't detectable after a "short period of time." Thus, by limiting swine flu death reports to only those patients who have been confirmed in a laboratory, the CDC is essentially eliminating the very possibility that many swine flu patients will ever be tested and identified as carrying the strain.

Put another way, the criteria for identifying and reporting swine flu deaths is, itself, limiting the number of swine flu deaths that will ever be counted. Essentially, the system is rigged to under-report swine flu deaths by eliminating anyone who wasn't tested in time to identify the strain. (Mister Goldbug -- I have to say that while the system might be rigged to under-report swine flu deaths, it could also be used to artificially inflate death reports to scare hell out of the country in order to encourage mandatory vaccination.)

This, I believe, is why the swine flu death count remains magically low even as doctors on the ground in Mexico City are reporting much larger numbers of real-world swine flu deaths.

Different strains

The other important thing to realize here is that the 36,000 figure is not talking about just one strain of influenza: It's a cumulative figure from ALL the other strains of influenza combined!

"Regular flu," you see, isn't just one flu. It's a collection of potentially hundreds of different flu strains. So assigning the 36,000 deaths a year figure to "regular flu" is misleading because it makes it sound like a single strain of influenza.

The truth is that nobody really knows how many deaths each year occur from the different strains of flu circulating in the wild. Some top-notch CDC officials can probably take a pretty good guess at it, but it's still just that: A guess. The real numbers are, frankly, unknown.

It's also unknown how many people die from the viral load vs. how many die from secondary infections (such as bacterial pneumonia) that often follow viral infections. Technically, a lot of those 36,000 people (or so) might have been killed by various strains of common bacteria, not by the viruses.

Yesterday morning, Mexico was reporting 159 deaths from swine flu. According to the WHO, that number is not only 7. How does 159 magically become 7? By including the word "confirmed" in front of it.

Fine. Let's all go with the "confirmed" modifier. All infectious disease deaths must now be confirmed in a CDC or WHO laboratory in order to count. So that means the 36,000 number needs to be revised down to however many have been "confirmed" in that group.

And how many is that? Only the CDC knows. I'm guessing it's a two-digit number.

So much for the myth of "36,000 flu-related deaths a year." If you believe that number, I'm sure there's a job waiting for you at the U.S. Treasury Dept., too, where numbers are materialized out of thin air on a daily basis in order to finance the national debt.

What's Missing From Every Media Story about H1N1 Influenza

Saturday, May 02, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) If you read the stories on H1N1 influenza written by the mainstream media, you might incorrectly think there's only one anti-viral drug in the world. It's name is Tamiflu and it's in short supply.

That's astonishing to hear because the world is full of anti-viral medicine found in tens of thousands of different plants. Culinary herbs like thyme, sage and rosemary are anti-viral. Berries and sprouts are anti-viral. Garlic, ginger and onions are anti-viral. You can't walk through a grocery store without walking past a hundred or more anti-viral medicines made by Mother Nature.

And yet how many does the mainstream media mention? Zero.

The totality of influenza preparedness is defined by the mainstream media as the number of doses of Tamiflu a nation has stockpiled. You see it in stories like this one at the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124...

Tamiflu comes from an herb

To live in a world that's saturated with natural anti-viral medicine and then not even acknowledge it in the media is beyond bizarre. It's Twilight Zone-like. It's like we've been teleported to an alternate universe where anti-viral plants have disappeared... or at least everyone is pretending they have.

Where do you think Tamiflu comes from, by the way?

It's extracted from the Traditional Chinese Medicine herb called Star Anise. It's one of hundreds of different anti-viral herbs found in Chinese Medicine, not to even mention anti-viral herbs from South America, North America, Australia, Africa and other regions.

I find it downright comedic that Big Pharma and the world's health authorities extract their "champion" anti-viral drug Tamiflu from a Chinese Medicine herb, and then they go out of their way to announce to people that herbs and natural remedies are useless against influenza. If that's the case then why are they using herbs to make their own medicine?

How many stories have you read that bother to tell you Tamiflu is made from the star anise herb that's been used for over 5,000 years in Traditional Chinese Medicine? Virtually none. The powers that be don't want anybody to know they could actually grow their own medicine in a garden or a windowsill. If you can grow cilantro, you can grow medicine. If everybody figured that out, Big Pharma wouldn't be reaping the enormous profits it's making right now from Tamiflu sales, and the governments of the world wouldn't be able to scare and control people by promising to distribute Tamiflu (but only if you behave).

The Tamiflu scam is global

H1N1 influenza is not a hoax. But the way it's being reported by health authorities and the mainstream media certainly is. The scam in all this is what they leave out of the stories -- the fact that human beings live among a huge natural medicine chest of anti-viral drugs found in every city park, every forest, every swamp and every open field.

You cannot walk across any patch of natural land in America and NOT find anti-viral medicine. It's everywhere! It's in the weeds growing in the cracks in the sidewalks; it's in weeds on the side of the stream; and it's growing in the small patch of dirt left remaining in the median between highway lanes.

In the deserts of the American Southwest, you can't even drive to work without passing mile after mile of abundant anti-viral medicine grown by Mother Nature and just waiting for humans to wake up and be smart enough to recognize it.

I have a sobering prediction about H1N1 influenza (formerly "swine flu"): If it does become a global pandemic, many of those people who refuse to recognize the anti-viral medicine provided by Mother Nature will die. Their misplaced faith in Big Pharma will literally cost them their lives. In contrast, those who have the wisdom to get their medicine from Mother Nature will not only survive the pandemic, they'll thrive even as others around them are dying. It is those who embrace Mother Nature's powerful, synergistic and living medicines who will weather any pandemic storm, and they will emerge as the DNA holders of the future of human civilization.

Swine Flu Smoking Gun? CDC was Combining Flu Viruses in 2004

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 by: Sherry Baker, Health Sciences Editor

(NaturalNews) Last week, when what is now called a "swine flu" was first reported to be infecting and killing some people in Mexico, health officials noted it was a strain of flu never before seen. In fact, it is technically incorrect to call this simply a "swine" flu. Analyses showed it's a mixture of swine, human and avian viruses, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Moreover, it is genetically different from the fully human H1N1 seasonal influenza virus that has been circulating globally for the past few years. Bottom line: the new flu virus contains DNA from avian, swine viruses (including elements from European and Asian viruses) and human viruses.

So did this curious mixture just develop naturally, out of the blue? Is it the result of inhumane farming practices, as the Humane Society of the United States (http://www.hsus.org/) has suggested, that exposes immune-compromised pigs to all sorts of animal and human feces?

Well, maybe. But let's go back and look at the facts to see if any other scenario could be possible.

First of all, there's the troublesome detail that the virus has elements that come from multiple continents. Then there's the fact that true swine flu is only rarely transmissible to humans -- this flu is spreading human-to-human, most likely because it contains DNA from human flu.

Could someone have deliberately mixed these viruses together? Is that possible? Absolutely.

Was this virus mixing being done artificially in the lab, or had it already been done? Yes.

Who was blending potentially viruses in labs? Were those horrible generic boogie men known to Americans far and wide as "terrorists" doing it? There's no proof of bioterrorism at work here yet. However, there is evidence the United States government has been working on concocting new flu virus blends.

So could the hysteria-provoking, new swine flu have escaped from a lab? Or was it deliberately released as some kind of test? When these kinds of questions are asked, the knee-jerk reaction of the mainstream media (MSM) is to giggle and talk about "conspiracy theories" and to joke about wearing tinfoil hats.

But here's the potential smoking gun, the facts that suggest a potential source of the pandemic could be CDC labs. And at the very least, this possibility deserves thoughtful examination and research.

The University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) is hardly a place most Americans have heard about and, apparently, the Center's web site has news the MSM isn't familiar with, either. But information they published years ago has now taken on an urgent importance. CIDRAP, along with the Canadian newspaper Canadian Press (CP), revealed back in 2004 that the CDC was launching experiments designed to mix the H5N1 (avian) virus and human flu viruses. The goal was to find out how likely it was such a "reassortant" virus would emerge and just how dangerous it might be. Of course, it's logical to wonder if they also worked with the addition of a swine flu virus, too.

Here's some background from the five-year-old report by the University of Minnesota research center: "One of the worst fears of infectious disease experts is that the H5N1 avian influenza virus now circulating in parts of Asia will combine with a human-adapted flu virus to create a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world. That could happen, scientists predict, if someone who is already infected with an ordinary flu virus contracts the avian virus at the same time. The avian virus has already caused at least 48 confirmed human illness cases in Asia, of which 35 have been fatal. The virus has shown little ability to spread from person to person, but the fear is that a hybrid could combine the killing power of the avian virus with the transmissibility of human flu viruses. Now, rather than waiting to see if nature spawns such a hybrid, US scientists are planning to try to breed one themselves -- in the name of preparedness."

And CDC officials actually confirmed the government had plans for the research. The CIDRAP News folks did a great job covering this important issue, which was apparently mostly ignored by the MSM back in 2004, and CIDRAP News wrote to the CDC for information. This e-mail produced an answer from CDC spokesman David Daigle who admitted the CDC was working on the project in two ways. "One is to infect cells in a laboratory tissue culture with H5N1 and human flu viruses at the same time and then watch to see if they mix. For the human virus, investigators will use A (H3N2), the strain that has caused most human flu cases in recent years," the CIDRAP story stated. This co-infection approach was described as slow and labor-intensive. However, it was a way to produce a new virus that appeared to be closer to what develops in nature.

There was another, faster way CDC scientists could create the mix, too. Called reverse genetics, it involves piecing together a new virus with genes from the H5N1 and H3N2 viruses. Reverse genetics had already been used successfully to create H5N1 candidate vaccines in several laboratories, the CDC's Daigle wrote. "Any viable viruses that emerge from these processes will be seeded into animals that are considered good models for testing how flu viruses behave in humans... The aim will be to observe whether the animals get sick and whether infected animals can infect others," he revealed in his e-mail.

What's more, the CP reported the CDC had already made hybrid viruses with H5N1 samples isolated from patients in Hong Kong in 1997, when there was the first outbreak of that virus, dubbed the "Hong Kong flu". It is not clear if the results of that research were ever published. Back in 2004, Dr. Nancy Cox, then head of the CDC's influenza branch, would tell the CP only: "Some gene combinations could be produced and others could not."

The CP's report noted that the World Health Organization (WHO) had been "pleading" for laboratories to do this blending-of-viruses research. The reason? If successful, these flu mixes would back up WHO's warnings about the possibility of a flu pandemic. In fact, Klaus Stohr, head of the WHO's global flu program at the time, told the CP that if the experiments were successful in producing highly transmissible and pathogenic viruses, the agency would be even more worried -- but if labs couldn't create these mixed flu viruses, then the agency might have to ratchet down its level of concern.

The 2004 CIDRAP News report addressed the obvious risks of manufacturing viruses in labs that, if released, could potentially spark a pandemic. However, the CDC's Daigle assured the Minnesota research group the virus melding would be done in a biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory. "We recognize that there is concern by some over this type of work. This concern may be heightened by reports of recent lab exposures in other lab facilities," he told CIDRAP. "But CDC has an incredible record in lab safety and is taking very strict precautions."

Five years later, we must ask more questions. Were those safety measures enough? Was the CDC creating or testing any of these virus mixes in or near Mexico? What other potentially deadly virus combinations has the US government created? Don't US citizens, as taxpayers who funded these experiments, have a right to know? And for all the residents of planet earth faced with a potentially deadly global epidemic, isn't it time for the truth?

Stop Using Hydroxycut! You Better Listen to CNN and the FDA!

CNN has the story! Hydroxycut is a fraud! But did we really need CNN and the "Food & Drug Administration" to tell us that? No, we do not. At least we shouldn't have to turn our attention to an agency like the Food & Drug Administration to tell us that Hydroxcut is a fraud; we should have the intelligence to figure it out ourselves.

I don't know how its sales were doing before the recall, but I do know this: any medicine promoted through commercials with its doctors appearing in the advertisement should immediately -- immediately -- be suspected of fraudulent criminality. Their sales pitch is built around making it sound successful so that you buy it or go to your doctor for a prescription so that the drug cartel in America keeps profitting from misery and sickness. The only other salesman more dishonest and more full of shit is the preacher on the pulpit and the used car salesmen. But doctors may actually be overtaking the other two mentioned for the number one spot. Yes, I'm sure there are scientists and doctors working for the advancement of the human condition, but the pharmaceutical industry is its own culture and after a while, just like working in Washington, D.C. on Capitol Hill, the temptations of the system corrupts those who are hooked into it.

Hydroxycut epitomizes what's wrong with the medical industry today in America.

John Williams: Hyperinflationary Depression Ahead

Howard Ruff
The Ruff Times
Posted Apr 27, 2009

John Williams publishes the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter (www.shadowstats.com). He is an amazing professional economist with a great grasp of the real economy. He and I have arrived at the same conclusions about almost everything in the economy, despite the fact that we approach it from totally different directions: me from the fundamentals, and he from a real technical and numbers point of view.

I am now in John’s home in Oakland, California, looking past the government numbers to get his views on the world as it really is. Shadow Government Statistics reconstructs published government statistics the accurate way we used to do it that reflects reality, rather than the way these numbers are now manipulated, and comes up with different conclusions about the economy, such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and other revealing areas published by government.

I trust John’s numbers because the government has been manipulating and restating these numbers for purely political purposes. (Goldbug - I can see the conspiracy debunkers yelling "conspiracy theory" at this comment.)

HJR: John is it necessary to recreate government statistics to show what you feel is reality, and how have you recreated them? I’d like some examples.

JW: Howard, I’ve been a consulting economist for about 27 years. I found early on that to make meaningful forecasts I had to have accurate information. It was evident early on that there were big inaccuracies in government reporting I surveyed at a convention of the National Association of Business Economists. Some economists have to make real-world forecasts, as opposed to economists who are employed by Wall Street to come to up with happy stories to encourage people to buy stocks and bonds.

I asked them what they considered the quality of government statistics to be. Most thought the numbers were very poor quality. Political manipulation tends to increase in election years.

I talked to the chief economist for a large retail chain, and he told me that the retail sales reports were absolutely no good, but he thought the money-supply numbers were pretty good.
Next was an economist for a major bank. He said the money-supply numbers were not very good, but he thought the retail-sales numbers are pretty good. The more someone knew about a given statistic, the greater the problems there were with the numbers.

Over time public perceptions increasingly varied from what the government was reporting because government kept changing methodologies, and usually tended to build an upside bias to the economic statistics of unemployment or the GDP – the broad measure of economies – and a downside bias in the Consumer Price Index, a popular measure of inflation.

When it became popularly used in auto-union contracts after WWII, the concept of the Consumer Price Index was fairly simple. But they wanted to measure changes in the cost of living, and they needed to maintain a constant standard of living. That was the traditional definition; the way the CPI had been designed.

That held pretty much in place until we got into the 1990s when Alan Greenspan and Michael Boskin, the head of The Council of Economic Advisors for the first Bush Administration, started talking about how the CPI really overstated inflation. The rationale was that when steak goes up in price, people buy more hamburger instead of steak; therefore you should reflect the substitution in the CPI.

That is not the concept of a constant standard of living; it is the concept of a declining standard of living that has no value to anyone other than politicians in Washington. They succeeded in reducing the reported level of inflation, which reduced cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security checks. Because of the changes in the 1990s, our Social Security checks are about half what they should be!

There have been different definitions over time. The government itself publishes six levels of unemployment from what they call “U-1” through “U-6.” The popularly followed measure is called “U-3.” Right now they say it is around 8.6 percent.

The broadest measure published by the government deletes “the discouraged workers” and people who are marginally attached to the economy. This is close to 16 percent. The key there is the “discouraged workers,” people who consider themselves to be unemployed. They know whether or not they have jobs. The Discouraged Worker hasn’t been out looking for work because there are no jobs to be had in his area.

Up until 1994, those discouraged workers wouldn’t have to specify how long they had been discouraged. After that, if they were discouraged, the government wouldn’t add them. I add them into my numbers, and it totals around 20 percent unemployment.

The popular number for the Great Depression is 25 percent unemployment rate and 34 percent among non-farm workers. We are mostly a non-farm economy.

HJR: During the Bush Administration, we heard all the happy talk about how well the economy was doing because of the cuts in tax rates. Is that really just happy talk or was the economy really doing well under Bush?

JW: We actually had a pretty bad recession in the early’90s, longer and deeper than popularly reported. Near the end of Bush’s first term at the time of the re-election race, a senior Commerce Department officer talked with a senior executive in the computer industry and asked him to boost the reporting of computer sales to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which prepares the GDP report. They did; it boosted the GDP, the broad measure of the economy, and George Bush touted the strong economy. But some felt he was out of touch with reality.

The average guy has a pretty good sense of reality and knows whether or not economic conditions are good, or if inflation is up or down, which is why people have a difficult time accepting the government’s numbers. They have gotten so far away from common experience that people just don’t find them credible.

In terms of the GDP, clearly retail sales and industrial production were showing us a deepening recession long before the government reported it with the GDP. In fact, you didn’t show a contraction in the GDP until the second quarter of 2008. Officially the recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, started back in December, 2007. If the GDP numbers accurately reflected what was happening, it would have at least shown the contraction two or three quarters before that. Other indications show that the recession really began in late 2006.

HJR: Let me get to a practical issue. What kind of economic activity should we support? For example, the conservatives will say we should cut tax rates to boost the economy. What does your research show?

JW: Cutting taxes is always a good idea. The private sector can do more with the money than the government can. Right now we are in a deep and deepening recession which will probably be called “a depression” before it ends. By depression, I mean a ten-percent contraction in overall economic activity.

When the government is reasonably solid, it can cut taxes. It can even increase spending without disrupting the system. ("It can even increase spending without disrupting the system." Goldbug - I don't know if I can agree entirely with this statement.)

Right now we have a system where with the money poured into the banking system, and the “stimulus” by way of spending and tax cuts, is on top of record deficits.

If you look at the real numbers on the deficits, based on numbers published by the federal government, we really should look at it how it used to be. In the late ‘70s, the ten biggest accounting firms and congress said they could design an accounting system where the government will report its books the same way a company does. They finally got that into effect in 2000. Since then, instead of running deficits in the range of a couple of billion dollars, on a Generally Accepted Accounting Principal (GAAP) basis, the deficit has averaged $4 trillion a year. It was over $5 trillion in 2008 and will top $8 trillion this year.

This is unsustainable! You could not raise taxes enough to bring that into balance. If you wanted to bring it into balance, you’d have to eliminate Social Security and Medicare payments. It can’t be done.

HJR: Right now, Obama is spending money – I won’t say like a drunken sailor, because a drunken sailor spends his own money – but he is throwing trillions of dollars at the economic downturn, assuming it will stimulate us out. My personal opinion is that they are only stimulating government growth, and some day the average person may get a job, but his employer will be Uncle Sam.

What is the end result of creating all this money and throwing it at the problem?

JW: It will not stimulate the economy. The cost of all this is inflation. We will see inflation levels not seen in our lifetime by as early as the end of this year. Eventually we will see liabilities of $65 trillion – more than four times U.S. GDP, more than global GDP. There will be a hyper inflation where the dollar becomes worthless, where the paper is worth more as wall paper than as currency.

HJR: They couldn’t even use the money as toilet paper because it is a bad absorber of water. So we will have hyper-inflation. How can we protect the value of our assets, assuming that people have some discretionary money? Should they buy growth stocks because they are cheap, assuming “buy low, sell high?” Or are there better alternatives?

JW: We are headed into a hyper-inflationary depression that will become a Great Depression. When hyper inflation hits, it will disrupt the normal flow of commerce and turn it into a Great Depression.

What about paper assets based on the dollar? You want to get into something like gold or silver –physical gold or silver, not paper. Perhaps get some assets outside the dollar. It’s a time to preserve your wealth and assets, not to start speculating on the stock market. There is a lot of volatility ahead. Over the long term, gold and silver are your best hedges.

HJR: That sounds like the familiar tune I’ve been singing for several years. I’ve been publishing for 33 years. About 11 of those years I have been bullish on gold and silver as investments. When I abandoned gold in the early ‘80s, I was excommunicated from the gold-bug church because I was supposed to stay faithful to gold, but then the metals weren’t the right place to put your money. As a financial adviser, if I don’t have subscribers in the right investments, they will lose money and not renew their subscription to The Ruff Times. So I have a financial interest in being right. Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” the same thing is happening that I saw in the ‘70s that drove the prices of gold and silver to unprecedented highs – only more so now. They are creating more money than they ever thought of creating back then. We are using words like “trillions,” which we never used before. I’m not just looking at it as an investment and a place to make money. I am looking at it as a possible way to preserve the real value of your assets so you are not left destitute with a pile of worthless paper. (Goldbug - London Gold Pool)

You showed me a display of Zimbabwe currency, where multi-billion dollar notes started out as $2-bill notes. We could face the same thing. The world is littered with worthless dead-paper currencies with an average life span of about 75 years. It’s always the same: we make too much of it ever since we created paper currency with the printing press, and creating too much of it to buy votes, diminishing its value.

A subscriber who wrote to me recently asking me that if the government and the bankers can manipulate the price of gold and silver, so couldn’t they do that for many years and gold and silver would go nowhere?

History doesn’t record a single example when a society inflated the dominant currency even near the quantities we are creating dollars now without destroying its value. Gold and silver, not being anyone’s debt or obligation, is where people ought to put their money.

I have been watching your work now for more than two years. I am amazed that you and I have arrived at the same conclusions from different sides of the street. I’ve learned a lot from your view of the numbers, and I’m a fundamentalist.

One reason I like you is because you agree with me. We like people who agree with us. Thanks so much for sharing your time and expertise with us.

JW: Thank you very much, Howard. I greatly appreciate the interview. I also appreciate your work. Indeed, we are in very broad and general agreement on where things are headed here. I have followed your work for many years; in fact, your writings back in the 1970s were part of my education as to the nature of the real world. Again, thank you, sir!

John Williams: Hyperinflationary Depression Ahead

An Update on H.R. 1207

Dear Friends,

As we reflect on President Obama's first 100 days in office, the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street and the just passed budget, a staggering $3.4 trillion boondoggle, I wanted to share some good news with you.

As I write, H.R. 1207, my bill to audit the Federal Reserve, currently has 110 cosponsors in the House of Representatives. This piece of legislation is perhaps the most important of my career, and I thank you for your continued support in sending me back to Congress to fight for it.

A broad coalition of Representatives has joined with me in supporting your right to transparency at the Fed. For example, Rep. Tom Price (GA), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (CA), former head of the liberal Progressive Caucus, have both cosponsored the bill. Americans from all over the political spectrum are demanding an audit of the Federal Reserve. And with good reason!

Since its inception, the Federal Reserve has operated without sufficient transparency or accountability to the American people. In fact, current law specifically excludes the Fed from audit or real congressional oversight. No government agency has such an utter lack of sunshine.

The Federal Reserve has created and dispersed trillions of dollars in response to our current financial crisis. Of course, I am among the most outspoken critics of the bailouts, but Americans across the nation, regardless of their opinion of the TARP program, want to know where that money has gone and exactly how much has been spent.

H.R. 1207 will open up the Fed's funding facilities, such as the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, Term Securities Lending Facility, and Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility to Congressional oversight.

Additionally, audits could include discount window operations, open market operations, and agreements with foreign central banks, such as the ongoing dollar swap operations with European central banks.

By opening all Fed operations to a GAO audit and calling for such an audit to be completed by the end of 2010, the H.R. 1207 would achieve much-needed transparency of the Federal Reserve.

Times are tough, and we continue to hear a stream of bad news. But I will continue to stand up for you in Congress and fight for our American traditions, to protect our Liberty and for an Audit of the Federal Reserve.

Thank you again for your support. I could not continue my fight without you.

In Liberty,

Ron Paul