It’s about time. The news belong to everybody and we don’t need corporate-filtered fake news to tell us how to think. You don’t like Alex Jones? Tough, we don’t like yer corporate fake news garbage mind control neither.
The alt-media underdogs will now sit beside corporate mainstream media and state-run broadcasters like the BBC.
Mainstream media has been sent into a frenzy as Donald Trump’s White House grants White House press credentials to InfoWars, the media outlet owned and operated by Alex Jones.
This means that an InfoWars reporter now has the option to be present at all White House press conferences and briefings just as those from CNN, the New York Times and state-owned British Broadcaster BBC currently are and have been for decades.
Whilst InfoWars does not have a fraction of the budget available to corporate media outlets like CNN and MSNBC or state-run broadcasters like the BBC or Canada’s CBC, InfoWars will now sit beside their reporters with equal access to White House events.
This is objectively a victory for alternative-media and for the ‘little guy’. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the editorial line of InfoWars, it is high time for White House press credentials to reflect the popularity and influence of one’s outlet rather than the wealth of those who fund the outlet.
Donald Trump’s White House would be well advised to continue along this line and grant further press credentials to media outlets that represent the future rather than the past.
Now watch Alex Jones describe the occasion as only he can.
Generally speaking, conspiracy theories form where there is a vacuum of verifiable facts associated with a controversial, usually tragic event. The concept has evolved over the years and is a part of our popular culture. There are legions of conspiracy theorists and “truthers” who have devoted their lives to certain theories, and there are legions of skeptics who have devoted their lives to debunking those theories. All the while, conspiracy theories of every stripe and variety festoon the footnotes of history. Even the origin of the phrase itself is subject to conspiracy theory, as some researchers have argued that the CIA invented and promulgated the term in order to marginalize fringe thinkers and neutralize investigations. The internet has obviously had a profound effect on conspiracy theories, simultaneously helping and hurting the cause. While a world of information is at people’s fingertips, so too are alternate worlds of manufactured propaganda. While the Internet may appear to be a democratized, unfiltered path toward facts and truth, it is easily manipulated. Powerful corporations pay a lot of money to have their dirty laundry buried in the search results underneath contrived puff pieces.With nearly the entire mainstream media apparatus at their disposal, the government is a maestro at this practice. As we learned from so-called Operation Mockingbird — a conspiracy theory fact discussed in my first post on the subject, “Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to Be True,” — hundreds, if not thousands of news organizations have been conscripted into working with the CIA to support pro-government narratives. That was in the 1960s. One can only imagine how vast the network is now. Not to mention the fact that a single proprietary algorithm owned by Google dictates the vast majority of the population’s exposure to a subject. In Part 1, I noted that the list had been meticulously whittled down to focus only on conspiracies that have been irrefutably proven to be fact. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories I think are likely to be true that are not on this list because there simply isn’t enough hard evidence yet to confirm it 100%. I also aimed for a good mixture of old conspiracies and new conspiracies. With groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous out there, the last decade has witnessed a dam burst of new data and documents. Thanks to intrepid journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists, and leakers, the human race continues to tear down the wall of lies erected by the corporatocracy.
Without further ado, let’s get to it….ten more conspiracy theories we can start calling conspiracy facts.
1. Operation Ajax, the CIA’s Iranian Coup
In Iran it was called 28 Mordad coup; the United Kingdom contributed under the name Operation Boot. However you refer to it, Operation Ajax was an Iranian coup that in 1953 deposed the democratically elected Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the monarchical power of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The primary cause of the coup was Mossadeq’s attempt to nationalize the Iran’s oil fields, which threatened the oil profits of Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company (AIOC). The U.S. — in addition to protecting its ally’s petroleum monopoly — viewed Mossadeq’s move as communist aggression and therefore helped plan the return to power of one the world’s more insidious dictators, the shah. Operation Ajax resulted almost directly in 1979 Iranian revolution that created an anti-West Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Though it was long considered an open secret, the U.S. government kept the truth behind Operation Ajax concealed from the American people until very recently. The CIA declassified various documents on the 60th anniversary of the coup.
Because of the recent declassification, much information relevant to this CIA-sponsored coup is now available in the CIA’s archives.
In describing Operation Ajax, the CIA itself has become rather oddly self-reflective:
“The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.”
In a recent interview on Democracy Now, Bernie Sanders remarked to Amy Goodman that this seminal chapter in the history of U.S./Middle East relations is almost entirely ignored by mainstream media. “Have you seen many shows about that on NBC?” he asked the crowd.
2. “Nayirah,” the False Pretext for the first Gulf War
It’s now commonly believed that the second Iraq War was sold to the American people — and their congressional representatives — based on an elaborate web of lies and manipulated intelligence. What is less commonly known is that the first Iraq War came about in a very similar fashion. While, surprisingly, there is broad agreement that “Operation Desert Storm” was a worthwhile war, many people overlook the role of a fifteen-year-old girl named “Nayirah,” whose 1990 testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus is credited with cementing the idea of Iraqi war crimes in the American popular consciousness. Nayirah testified to having witnessed Iraqi troops tearing babies from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them to die on the floor. It’s a profoundly disturbing image….and one that was entirely fictitious.
After a lengthy investigation, Amnesty International and other independent watchdog groups discovered that the situation described by Nayirah was fabricated by a PR firm named Hill & Knowlton (the largest in the world at this time), which was hired by the group Citizens for a Free Kuwait in order to create propaganda that would galvanize pro-war sentiment. The man overseeing the campaign was Bush political confidante Craig Fuller. This was a massive project utilizing 119 H&K executives in 12 offices across the United States and even involved casting Nayirah, who turned out to be Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The Justice Department, which could have investigated the entire effort under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, turned a blind eye, allowing the Bush administration to pull off a massive “Wag the Dog”-style ideological false flag. Others call it “atrocity propaganda,” a form of psyop (psychological operation).
The “Nayirah” story is just another example of the government falsifying a narrative in order to manipulate the public into supporting war. This kind of psychological propaganda continued all through the second Iraq War and the War on Terror. Just recently, it was revealed that the Pentagon paid PR firm Bell Pottinger $540 million to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq.
3. Operation Paperclip
Originally called Operation Overcast, Operation Paperclip was the codename of the secret American plan to conscript Nazi scientists into U.S. intelligence services at the end of World War II. This ushered in and shielded about 1,500 Germans, including some engineers and technicians. Ostensibly, the purpose of this redeployment by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was to prevent Nazi scientific intelligence from helping reconstitute a new German government; it was also a tactic meant to ensure the Soviet Union didn’t acquire any new technology.
Whatever strategic mindset might have lived inside Operation Paperclip, at its core, the project gave American identities to some of the most ruthless war criminals the world has ever seen.
According to Ynet, the new Nazi CIA scientists helped develop chemical weapons for the U.S. and worked alongside American scientists to develop LSD, which the CIA viewed as a ‘truth serum.’
4. Operation Gladio: Anti-Communist False Flags in Italy
Operation Gladio was the post-World War II love-child of a CIA/NATO/M16 plot to battle communism in Italy. The operation lasted two decades and used CIA-created “stay behind” networks as part of a “Strategy of Tension” that coordinated multiple terrorist attacks from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Authorities blamed these attacks on Marxists and other left-wing political opponents in order to stigmatize and condemn communism. The operation involved multiple bombings that killed hundreds of innocent people, including children. The most notable attack was the August 2, 1980, bombing of the Bologna train station, which killed 85 people.
In an Anti-Media piece written about five confirmed false flag operations (which includes Operation Gladio, I wrote:
“How do we know about Operation Gladio in spite of its incredibly clandestine nature? There are two principle sources. One, the investigations of Italian judge Felice Casson, whose presentation was so compelling it forced Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm Gladio’s existence. The second source is testimony from an actual Gladio operative, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving a life sentence for murder. In a 1990 interview with the Guardian, Vincenzo stated that Gladio was designed to psychologically coerce the Italian public to rely on the state for security.”
Operation Gladio is a textbook modern “false flag.” It used terror and violence to discredit an ideology (communism). And to think, this came at a time before the internet when the CIA didn’t have a fully entrenched mainstream media to trumpet, echo, and build consensus around every little nuance (though they were working on it with COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird). Nowadays, the CIA has multinational propaganda machines — the news networks — to make sure all terrorist attacks fit into the carefully scripted narrative that manufactures consent around our wars for oil, natural gas, and other resources.
5. Government uses insect and rodent drones to spy
It’s somewhat of a cliche to jokingly refer to a surrounding insect or bird as a clandestine spy deployed by the government to watch you. While we lack certain specifics on the ubiquity of the technology, we know definitively that the government has the technology to surveil citizens using insects and other small animals, and they use this technology in military applications.
There is some evidence to suggest that insect drones are used domestically to spy on citizens. In 2007, this theory conspiracy theory took shape when anti-war protesters reported strange buzzing insects. Written off as tin foil material, officials dismissed the suggestion that the government used insect drones to spy. Multiple witnesses reported erratic dragonfly-type objects hovering in the sky. The very next year, the U.S. Air Force announced their intended use of insect-sized spies ‘as tiny as bumblebees’ to infiltrate buildings in order to ‘photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.‘ The government has come clean about its use of drones to spy on American citizens, so it’s difficult to believe they wouldn’t have at least tried insect drones.
While we can’t say with 100% certainty that there are insect drones spying on American citizens, though it’s exceedingly likely, what is irrefutable is the use of micro air vehicles (MAVs) and “spy animals” as war-time tools. DARPA launched its Stealthy Insect Sensor Project in 1999 as an effort to deputize bees as bomb locators in war zones. This was just the first phase in an ongoing project. In her book The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency, journalist Annie Jacobsen revealed that the agency’s near-future trajectory is to introduce “biohybrids” — part animal, part machine cyborgs — into the United States’ military arsenal.
“DARPA has already succeeded in creating a rat that will be steered by remote control by implanting an electrode in its brain.
“And it’s done the same thing with a moth which is really remarkable because the scientists implanted the electrodes in the pupa stage of the moth when it was still a worm! And then it transformed into having wings, and those tiny little micro-sensors transformed with the moth and the DARPA scientists were able to steer that moth.”
6. CIA assassinations and coups in foreign countries
When operatives for the Democratic Party claim the 2016 United States presidential election was tampered with by a foreign entity, it’s hard not to cringe at the irony. Firstly, they’ve presented no evidence, except to claim that government intelligence agencies believe it to be true. Sorry, that’s not actually evidence. That’s like the police saying they have DNA evidence but never actually scientifically presenting it in court. It’s kind of unnerving that we even have to point that out. Secondly, our own government and intelligence agencies, namely the CIA, have actively and aggressively subverted countless foreign elections over the last century and, in some cases, have outright funded the assassinations of candidates.
This subject could easily fill a multi-volume book, and countless authors have worked over the years to uncover the role of the CIA in foreign coups. Using every tool in their arsenal — including white, grey, and black psychological operations, counterinsurgencies, and brutal coups aimed at repressing and destroying radically democratic candidates — the CIA has subverted the “will of the people” across the world.
The most commonly noted instances of the CIA meddling in foreign elections and governments include the following: South Korea (late-1940s); Italy (1948-mid-1970s); Guatemala (1954); Congo (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964); Uruguay (1969); Bolivia (1971); Chile (1970-1973); Argentina (1976); Australia (1975); El Salvador (1980); Iran (late-1970s); Grenada (1983) Haiti (1986); Panama (1990) Nicaragua (1990); Czechoslovakia (1990); Peru (1990-2000) Yugoslavia (2000). This is but a small sampling of countries where even mainstream news outlets and, in many cases, the CIA itself, admits calamitous U.S. involvement. There are literally dozens more and, of course, this is restricting the conversation to soft coups — otherwise, we could certainly include the complete military decimation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries during the War on Terror, as well as the myriad imperial wars against perceived communist threats.
‘A foreign government hacked and subverted our election!’
The irony is thick with this one. Payback’s a bitch…..which, of course, isn’t giving our intelligence agencies, who have proven themselves to be pathological liars, the benefit of the doubt regarding their claims of Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. It’s just to kind of say…..you reap the harvest you have sown. When you look at the track record of the United States government, it’s a wonder the average citizen is safe traveling abroad.
7. Mainstream media is the propaganda branch of the State Department
People have long accused the media of being a proxy branch of the State Department, a highly sophisticated and well-produced form of manufactured consensus and controlled opposition all rolled into one. In ostensibly democratic nations, a free and independent press is of paramount importance. But in the U.S., we find a cohesion of the state and corporate news networks that do not constitute ‘state-run media’ in the traditional sense — but it’s close.
Our first solid documentation that the media is an echo chamber for the government came with the disclosure of what has come to be called Operation Mockingbird. This nefarious and far-reaching conspiracy was documented in Part 1 and involved the CIA essentially conscripting journalists, American news agencies, and major broadcasters to become domestic propagandists and spies. Eventually, this CIA/media symbiosis included journalists from all the top news organizations. Literally, thousands of people were involved.
This infiltration of the American media and press took place during the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, and was carried out under the auspices of fighting communism. The CIA began to restrict its use of journalists in the Operation Mockingbird program in 1976, but many people believe it has since transmogrified into something far more powerful, nefarious, and ubiquitous today. We’re still in the early stages of proving to the masses that mainstream media is little more than a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the government and its various agencies, but the evidence is accumulating.
During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks exposed a number of disturbing revelations showing collusion between the media and political operatives. This included collusion between the media, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it wasn’t just about swaying the election. New revelations showed that the government actively infiltrates powerful media corporations in order to shape their content and narratives. One of the best examples of this was the State Department’s role in affecting a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Julian Assange.
A more comprehensive list of examples of the Orwellian symbiotic relationship between the press and the government can be found here.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent addition to this chapter was the “Countering Disinformation Act” that President Obama slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Christmas Eve of last year. In the context of the still-festering narrative of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, the act’s putative goal was to fight “fake news,” which many believe is actually a campaign to silence and dismantle alternative media on the Internet.
In order to accomplish this, the government is establishing a Global Engagement Center for managing disinformation and propaganda. Since we already know our government routinely performs psychological operations (psyops, or as they’ve been recently rebranded, Military Information Support Operations [MISO]), it should come as no surprise that manipulating the civilian population is a permanent goal. In fact, in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, the government formally legalized the use of psyops on U.S. citizens. So how does this Global Engagement Center factor in?
The new law states:
“The Center is authorized to provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions for the following purposes:
To support local independent media who are best placed to refute foreign disinformation and manipulation in their own communities.
To collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies and partners.
To analyze and report on tactics, techniques, and procedures of foreign information warfare with respect to disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda.
To support efforts by the Center to counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.”
While it may not immediately strike one as sinister, this codification of repressing journalists and voices the government deems to be disinformation while creating an even more centralized infrastructure to control “fact-based narratives” in the media should be highly alarming to anyone who cares about a free press. It would seem that while the State already has a steel grip on corporate news networks, they are struggling to control the influence of online independent media. This new law may be the start of this century’s Operation Mockingbird — a new full-scale infiltration of the local news and a war against anti-establishment narratives on the Internet. This is already taking the form of algorithmic censorship through Facebook and Google, as well as a weaponization of the “fake news” narrative.
8. The Deep State (or the conspiracy theory formerly known as The New World Order)
“For decades, extreme ideologies on both the left and the right have clashed over the conspiratorial concept of a shadowy secret government often called the New World Order pulling the strings on the world’s heads of state and captains of industry.
“The phrase New World Order is largely derided as a sophomoric conspiracy theory entertained by minds that lack the sophistication necessary to understand the nuances of geopolitics. But it turns out the core idea — one of deep and overarching collusion between Wall Street and government with a globalist agenda — is operational in what a number of insiders call the “Deep State.”
In the wake of the 2016 election, the concept of the Deep State has grown into somewhat of a common phrase in the lexicon of alternative media theorists, crossing political boundaries and resonating across the ideological spectrum. Everyone from alt-left socialists to alt-righters now agrees there is an unelected cabal of elite neo-conservative corporatists and crony lawmakers running the geopolitical show.
Because it’s such a complex subject and permeates so many different academic, economic, and state apparatuses, it’s virtually impossible to issue a single, simple definition of the Deep State. If I were to hazard one, I would call it “the nexus of Wall Street and the national security state — a relationship where elected and unelected figures join forces to consolidate power and serve vested interests.” But even that is vague. We could also call it “the failure of our visible constitutional government and the cross-fertilization of corporatism with the globalist war on terror.”
Former Republican congressional aide Mike Lofgren gets more specific with who is involved:
“It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.”
In his writing, Lofgren emphasized the role of FISA international surveillance courts. This was confirmed in a very interesting way when President Donald Trump accused former President Obama of tapping his phones, a charge Obama aides deflected by saying that if such a warrant had been issued, it would have been done through a FISA court. This shows how presidents are able to skirt the constitution by outsourcing surveillance requests. It also shows the interconnectedness of these agencies.
However you want to describe it, it’s the natural conclusion of Operation Mockingbird and most certainly a reality that the elites would have rather kept under the radar. Fortunately for the people of the Earth, revelations from Wikileaks and other whistleblowers have, over the last couple decades, made it abundantly clear that the Deep State (the New World Order) not only exists, but also that it’s far more sinister and powerful than early conspiracy theorists could have ever imagined.
9. CIA used psychics to infiltrate the Soviet Union during Cold War
It’s a plot in a science fiction movie or TV show we’ve all seen: a psychic being leveraged by a law enforcement agency to track down a criminal. The concept of a government psychic program was popularized by the film The Men Who Stare at Goats, which lampooned the mythical STARGATE program supposedly run by the CIA. Most people scoffed at the reality of this and considered it a wacky conspiracy theory, but a recently declassified trove of hundreds of thousands of CIA files finally confirmed not only that psychics are regularly used by police and other law enforcement agencies, but also that the government actually weaponized psychics during the Cold War to try to infiltrate the Soviet Union and gain information.
The documents, made publicly available thanks to the activist group Muckrock, confirm there were top-secret CIA and Defense Department programs to use remote viewing to infiltrate Soviet military installments. There were also programs developing ways to engage in “psychic warfare,” including the development of a “psychic shield” to block Soviet psychics.
10. CIA monitors U.S. citizens via their smart devices
Early in 2017, the organization Wikileaks began releasing their first post-2016 election cables with a series of explosive data dumps regarding the CIA’s cyber hacking abilities and exploits. It is called Vault 7. Updated serially in “Year Zero,” “Dark Matter,” “Marble,” “Grasshopper,” “HIVE,” “Weeping Angel,” and “Scribbles,” the documents show the unprecedented collection of cyber vulnerabilities, exploits, and hacking abilities consolidated within the agency that many believe constitute wide-ranging breaches of civil liberties.
Chief among these breaches is domestic surveillance and extrajudicial cyberhacking, which the Wikileaks documents confirm are taking place in an abundance of forms. The Vault 7 documents confirm that: The CIA can break into Android and iPhone handsets and all kinds of computers; the agency has the ability to hack into Apple iPhones and Android smartphones and actually assume full remote control of the device; the CIA can access consumer smart TVs to listen in on surrounding conversations; the agency looked into ways to hack into cars and crash them, allowing ‘nearly undetectable assassinations’ (an assertion that may be relevant to the Michael Hastings case); the CIA concealed vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers from other countries or governments.
This is just the beginning. Early in the release, Julian Assange said the documents released represented only a tiny fraction of the total data that was forthcoming. Wikileaks’ episodic data dumps on the CIA’s cyber hacking programs are nothing less than stunning. The establishment’s reaction to the ongoing releases verifies how big of a deal they are. One congressman went so far as to refer to Julian Assange and his whistleblowing outfit as a “foreign terrorist organization.” This isn’t new or unexpected, as the group’s slow but inexorable drips of revelations about government malfeasance continue to confound and disturb private citizens, consumer rights activists, tech companies, and international leaders alike.
Conclusion
Of course, not all conspiracy theories are true. In fact, there are hundreds, even thousands, that have been roundly debunked. Unfortunately, there are those who seek to lie and invent fictions for monetary gain and fame. Disinformation, propaganda, and dishonesty exist at all levels of society.
However, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Therefore, it’s worth assessing them, even if their claims appear wholly outlandish. Especially if their claims appear wholly outlandish.
The conspiracy theory is a tool in a larger tool kit used by those who wish to decode the grossly imperfect and fluid narrative describing our world. When investigated responsibly, conspiracy theories function as part of a conceptual spectrum of analysis with which we can investigate government and corporate abuses of power and the manufacturing of ‘consensus reality.’ In the 21st century, when the very transmission of information can be considered criminal, being a responsible conspiracy theorist just means you practice due diligence and hunger for the truth.
“The second NIDA-funded study, a more detailed analysis by the RAND Corporation, showed that legally protected access to medical marijuana dispensaries is associated with lower levels of opioid prescribing, lower self-report of nonmedical prescription opioid use, lower treatment admissions for prescription opioid use disorders, and reduction in prescription opioid overdose deaths.”
An update on the government website on drug abuse indicates a massive change to cannabis prohibition — in order to combat the opioid epidemic — may be on the horizon.
Study after scientific study expounding on the benefits of cannabis as a veritable panacea has garnered baseline skepticism, if not contempt, from the somnambulant corporate press keener to spew the State’s anti-marijuana nonsense than aligning with science proving government irresponsibly wrong on weed.
Scheduled for decades as akin to heroin — one of the myriad opiates of which the U.S. is currently experiencing an outright crisis — cannabis has remained the star target of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s contentious war on drugs.
But that may be about to change — and soon.
A dramatic shift in language on the government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse’s website bears every indication federal prohibition on cannabis’ days are numbered — specifically, as a means to break the chokehold with which opioid medications have stymied the fight against addiction.
“Medical marijuana products may have a role in reducing the use of opioids needed to control pain,” the NIDA website now states — startlingly in alignment with voluminous government-funded and independent research.
In particular, NIDA heralded the results of two studies it funded, one of which “found an association between medical marijuana legalization and a reduction in overdose deaths from opioid pain relievers.”
Further, the website adds, that apparent correlation “strengthened in each year following the implementation of legislation.”
In a highlighted box, the National Institute on Drug Abuse — still somewhat reserved, though fundamentally transformed, in praise of the miracle plant — states,
“NIDA funded two recent studies that explored the relationship between marijuana legalization and adverse outcomes associated with prescription opioids. The first found an association between medical marijuana legalization and a reduction in overdose deaths from opioid pain relievers, an effect that strengthened in each year following the implementation of legislation. The population-based nature of this study does not establish a causal relationship or give evidence for changes in pain patient behavior.
“The second NIDA-funded study, a more detailed analysis by the RAND Corporation, showed that legally protected access to medical marijuana dispensaries is associated with lower levels of opioid prescribing, lower self-report of nonmedical prescription opioid use, lower treatment admissions for prescription opioid use disorders, and reduction in prescription opioid overdose deaths. Notably, the reduction in deaths was present only in states with dispensaries (not just medical marijuana laws) and was greater in states with active dispensaries.”
Hospitals in states where cannabis has been made legal not only failed to see a veritable weed apocalypse in health problems — a notable non-repercussion, demolishing anti-marijuana propagandists’ favored, but completely baseless, tripe — but they also experienced plummeting numbers of patients needing treatment for opioid abuse.
Simply put, legal availability of weed does not create a health crisis — and it could be inadvertently solving America’s horrendous opioid epidemic.
In states allowing the medical use of cannabis, NBC Newsreported, the rate of opioid abuse and dependence noted by another recent study plunged 23 percent, while overdoses from opioids slid an average of 13 percent.
That study, published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, found no significant correlation in increased hospitalizations for cannabis-related illnesses in states where the plant has been legalized for medical use — effectively putting to bed that particular demonization of weed by sanctimonious politicians harboring pro-drug war agendas.
Rather than proving paranoid warnings legal pot would create a new health crisis, the aforementioned study’s author and public health professor at the University of California, San Diego, Yuyan Shi, told NBC News by email,
“Instead, medical marijuana laws may have reduced hospitalizations related to opioid pain relievers.
“This study and a few others provided some evidence regarding the potential positive benefits of legalizing marijuana to reduce opioid use and abuse, but they are still preliminary.”
An approximate 60 percent of Americans now reside in the 28 states and District of Columbia where cannabis has been legalized for medical use — more, still, in round out the number of people with legal, recreational access — and, in all of those locations, the little plant that can has been destroying decades of politicized anti-pot propaganda.
Better still — and as multitudinous government and independently-funded scientific studies show — legal cannabis helps alleviate the opioid epidemic currently choking the United States.
Emergency medicine professor Dr. Esther Choo, of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland asserted the previous point could hold merit as a possible solution to opioid addiction — something NIDA and the U.S. government may also be poised to admit. Via email, Choo told NBC,
“It is becoming increasingly clear that battling the opioid epidemic will require a multi-pronged approach and a good deal of creativity. Could increased liberalization of marijuana be part of the solution? It seems plausible.”
While heroin, morphine, and other illicit opiates contribute handily to the epidemic, legally prescribed opioid painkillers — such as name brands Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet, and many others — have been central to the ever-growing crisis, with doctors frequently turning to the societally-acceptable, highly-addictive substances to offer patients relief.
This flippant penchant for prescribing opioids damns patients in two ways.
First, under-prescribing often leaves those experiencing legitimate, stultifying pain with a set number of pills for relief. Second, terminal prescriptions — where relief has yet to be achieved for an acute ailment by the time medicine runs out — leave thousands bereft of pain relief, and thus, tempted to turn to illegal avenues to do so.
Of course, the pharmaceutical industry has been profiting handily from the uptick in legal opioids — that uptick incidentally coincided with an astronomical surge in opium production in Afghanistan, where the supply had been all-but eradicated prior to the U.S. military invasion in 2003.
But, whatever complex web of societal and world issues created the current opioid crisis, these studies — and a potential looming capitulation from the federal government — prove cannabis holds promise in reducing dependence, if not stamping out the epidemic, altogether.
Although the authors of this and other studies have yet to state as much, the irony of cannabis — a plant — occupying the same rung on the Drug Enforcement Agency’s blacklist of substances not meriting any medical value cannot be emphasized sufficiently.
However, if the definitive switch in stance from the National Institute on Drug Abuse can be a positive portent for the near future, it’s entirely possible politicians and policymakers have finally — at long last — come to their senses on the seeming innumerable benefits of cannabis.
Ending cannabis prohibition — and the entire drug war — would do more to help those addicted to Big Pharma’s opioids than any disingenuous moralizing about ‘drugs’ ever could.
“Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!”
Homo Sapiens live in an epoch unlike anything throughout history, figuratively speaking, as far back as Adam and Eve, especially since 1950 “the times they are a changin’” with headlong speed. In fact, ever since 1950, The Great Acceleration has taken off like a spaceship destined to hit warp speed, accelerating faster and faster. As this evolves, humanity risks becoming “a bug looking for a windshield.”
Here’s the issue with The Great Acceleration: “Only after 1945 did human actions become genuine driving forces behind crucial Earth systems” (J.R.McNeill/Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2014, pg. 208).
Still, Earth spins within the solar system at the same rate as it has for eons, whereas in stark contrast to that steady timeless global spin, humanity’s anthropogenic spin turbocharges the entire planetary ecosystem. This has never happened before, and thus, people need to brace themselves for a major jarring to the ecosystem. In fact, it’s already started!
Silently unreported by mass media, The Great Acceleration inadvertently destroys life systems. It happens right before our eyes. Not only that but regrettably, Trumpeters will assuredly accelerate that destructive capacity. That’s guaranteed, a “done deal” for sure. The “bug looking for a windshield” has never looked more certain than when world leaders (ahem), like Trump, look away from and ignore and downplay and denigrate everything about the ecosystem, which is referred to as “home” by pretty much everybody.
Curiously, overcrowding the planet has turned the planet small, as electronics and air travel shrink the world: “In the span of one human lifetime, 1945 to 2015, global population tripled from about 2.3 billion to 7.2 billion. This bizarre interlude, with sustained population growth of more than 1 percent per annum, is of course what almost everyone on Earth now regards as normal. It is anything but normal,” Ibid, pg. 41.
The tripling of population “within only one lifetime” is remarkable, sobering, breathtaking. Woefully, that is only the beginning of a process that may run out of control because unpredictably the repercussions of The Great Acceleration are like a drunken driver on the Italian Amalfi Coastline dangerously close to going over cliff’s edge at each and every turn.
In fact, death traps already exist, as for example, from 1950 to 2015 one of the principal byproducts of The Great Acceleration, air pollution, killed 30-to-40 million people, mostly Chinese as of late, which is roughly equal to the death toll from all wars throughout the world since 1950 (source: Ibid, pg. 24).
Furthermore, industrialization is on a tear, goosing up The Great Acceleration. Since WWII, motor vehicles increased from 40 million to 850 million and plastics production increased from one million tons to 300 million tons. Those numbers are not only signals of acceleration but off the charts! Still, everybody assumes it’s normal, except for climate scientists.
Normality is belied by the conditions of the biosphere itself as human activity shifts carbon stored over millennia from the lithosphere (Earth’s upper mantle and crust) into the upper atmosphere at unsustainable rates running from 1,200 million tons per annum in 1945 to 9,500 million tons in 2015, 8xs faster within only 70 years. Eight times anything is a big number, e.g., if everyone’s wages multiplied 8xs, everyone would be rich.
Even at the unsustainable rate of 8xs, carbon emissions continue accelerating, pre-Trump, post-Trump, forever-Trump, getting a huge boost ever faster during Trump days. For example, CO2 emissions during the 2000s have been running at a 3.3% annual rate of increase versus a rate of 1.3% during the 1990s. That’s a 150% increase within only one decade. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is already filling up with CO2, the primary cause of global warming. It can only take so much before the thermostat gets stuck wide-open… relentless heat scorching agriculture.
As such, humanity has become a vast experiment; nobody’s been here before, nobody. Meanwhile, the United States, under the direction of Trumpeters, cut public links to information about the crucial carbon cycle by cutting NOAA’s budget “to the bone.” Either that’s an honest mistake or it’s a mean-spirited mistake; chose your poison. Regardless, scientists are out of favor: According to a USA Today headline: “Trump’s Proposed NOAA Budget Cuts Rattle Scientists” d/d March 6, 2017.
Meanwhile, at the core of The Great Acceleration, capitalism works… at the top! Proof: Everything is accelerating as if there are no limits to growth and more growth. That’s capitalism par excellence. But cautionary flags are ubiquitous, e.g., according to certain academic circles, there is another side to the story: “The Great Acceleration in its present form cannot last for long,” Ibid, pg. 5. Expanding balloons eventually pop.
One major risk within the context of The Great Acceleration is human behavior itself because people have a tendency to dither away precious time when it comes to life-threatening issues that appear too big to tackle and too difficult to wrap arms around, like the planet: “Whilst the US and China fiddled for 20 years from 1995-2015, arguing about terms and conditions of the Kyoto agreement, the total tonnage of global carbon emissions from the energy sector nearly equaled that of all human history prior to 1995,” Ibid, pg. 78. That’s big league acceleration!
How does it end? Regrettably, not very well with Trumpeters at the helm. They’ve publicly denounced any and all concerns about the health of the planet and/or its inhabitants, as for example, the American Health Care Act, an oxymoronic title after reading its contents, makes deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, by $800 billion. “Donald Trump is attacking low- and middle-income families, children, seniors and people with disabilities in order to hand a $6 trillion tax break to his wealthy friends―the largest tax break in U.S. history” (Source: socialsecurityworks.org).
Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!
Still, as it happens, within the context of The Great Acceleration, Trump’s 1% have opted to go out in flaming glory, as they are the primary beneficiaries of all that floats to the top, but then again, some of the 1% are attempting to “get out of Dodge” by escaping to planets far, far away, leaving the hordes behind to fight over tillable land.
Evidence of The Great Acceleration is far and wide. After all, it was only one generation ago in 1986 when the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson (Harvard) presciently sounded the alarm in a book titled Biodiversity (The National Academies Press): “It carries the urgent warning that we are rapidly altering and destroying the environments that have fostered the diversity of life forms for more than a billion years,” Ibid, pg. 84.
Alas, there’s no way E. O. Wilson could have foreseen Trump would come along to “seal the deal” for his prognostications and in the process actually speed up the negative aspects of The Great Acceleration, as America becomes great again, maybe/probably not, but if so, for very, very short duration.
Withal, don’t stand underneath national monuments. Those are subject to severe budget cuts, poor maintenance, and unexpectedly crashing down forevermore as the nation loses its soul.
Postscript: Disastrous breaking news out of Alaska: The following is a synopsis (quotation) of a horrifying scientific release d/d May 11, 2017 that is extraordinarily relevant to The Great Acceleration:
“The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires). That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the US commercial sector in a single year.”
“The chief reason for the greater CO2 release was that as Alaska has warmed up, emissions from once frozen tundra in winter are increasing – presumably because the ground is not refreezing as quickly. Now what? Sit in a circle and hold hands, or get to work to find what (if any) options we’ve got?”
That is horrific news, almost as bad as it gets especially this early in the repercussions cycle of The Great Acceleration. It now appears that nature is competing head-to-head with humans, overflowing the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. That’s a perfect script for an apocalypse film project.
Looking ahead, one option scientists cannot rely upon is help from the anti-science Trump administration. Ipso facto, The Great Acceleration fallout is about to leap forward like never before. Batten down the hatches! And, Trump thinks health care is tough…
US politicians and media have evidently become so unhinged from Russian conspiracy theory, they are perhaps best treated with the mockery they deserve.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was in Washington this week to discuss serious global issues with his American counterpart Rex Tillerson. Instead of asking the pair about the Syrian conflict or the danger of nuclear war breaking out on the Korean Peninsula, all the assembled US media was clamoring to know about were the diplomats’ views on James Comey, the sacked FBI chief.
Lavrov couldn’t contain his contempt for such boorish behavior. He shrugged his shoulders and feigned surprise by saying: “You’re kidding me. You’re kidding me.”
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin was interrupted from partaking in an ice hockey game in Sochi by an American reporter who also pressed him for his view on Comey’s firing. Putin replied: “Your question is funny to me.” And he went on to say that the matter has nothing to do with Russia, being internal political business for President Trump and his law enforcement agency.
If the Russian leaders can be accused of anything is that they are being too polite in the face of such nonsense.If someone insists on asking you a stupid question, loaded with prejudice and paranoia, then it is best to simply ignore rather than dignify the nonsense with a considered answer.
For over six months now, since Donald Trump was elected US president on November 8, the US media and much of the other Western media too, have been dominated by claims that Russia “hacked American democracy” to get Trump into the White House.
Not one shred of evidence has been presented to support these lurid claims, which have mutated to also include allegations of Russia hacking into the French and other European elections. It’s all based on speculation, usually by politicians, think-tanks and unscrupulous journalists linked to unelected state intelligence agencies.
This is a relapse of Cold War-style Russophobia, but one which has become totally divorced from any reality. At least in the old Cold War days, Western states could create a semblance of there being a Soviet enemy. It was still overblown propaganda back then, but there was the appearance of ideological enmity between West and East.Today, it is objectively hard to plausibly portray Russia as an enemy state with malicious designs of conquest over the West. That disconnect, however, has not stopped the Western mainstream media churning out propaganda articles warning of the imminent Russian invasion of Europe or subversion of Western democracy.
The trouble is that there is such a credibility deficit to such claims; because they are based on nothing, except Russophobia and a desire by powerful Western state factions to fuel global conflict and massive military expenditure. In short, deep state militarism, propping up bankrupt Western capitalism.There is also a deep inherent problem in Western societies of traditional politics having completely lost legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary citizens. Decades of failed capitalist economics and burgeoning social inequality have fomented widespread disillusionment and contempt for the political establishments. The latter has run out of any solutions to address today’s urgent social needs of decent work, public services and welfare.
So much so that when elections don’t go the way that the powers-that-be want, then there is a tendency to find a scapegoat to explain the breakdown in political order. Russia and its alleged hacking into electoral process is the handy scapegoat for the US and its European allies to blame for what is inherent decay in their own systems.The election of business tycoon Donald Trump defied the political-media establishment in the US. And so his surprise victory has to be “explained” by a nefarious foreign plot allegedly carried out by the Kremlin. A more realistic, accurate assessment is that Trump won simply because millions of ordinary Americans have come to despise the fat-cat politicians who sit on Capitol Hill doing the bidding for corporate lobby groups. But that explanation cannot be admitted by the decadent establishment.
The self-serving paranoia of Russophobia put out by the Washington establishment just keeps digging a deeper hole for itself.
Trump fired FBI chief James Comey this week because the top law enforcement officer was riding a gravy train that is supposedly investigating alleged collusion between Trump’s election team and Russia. There is no evidence for these claims, therefore the probe should be shut down as an obscene waste of taxpayer money. Yet, Comey’s gravy train was set to keep on rolling, on and on.Comey wouldn’t look into investigating Trump’s presidential rival Hillary Clinton for provable violations of government secrecy rules when she was formerly the Secretary of State. But the FBI man wanted to keep stoking the smoke over outlandish claims that Trump is a “Russian agent.”
The whole charade is a ridiculous waste of time and taxpayer money, and Trump is right to call a halt to it by sacking Comey.
Rather than coming to their senses, however, the US media and large sections of the political establishment are doubling down on their paranoia.
Trump is accused of closing down Comey in a cover-up of the “truth” about his alleged Russia links. Comparisons are being made to the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in 1974. Top US media outlets like the New York Times are openly calling Trump a “liar.”
But what “truth” are they talking about? The allegations of collusion with Russia and the latter hacking US democracy are all based on hearsay, conjecture and prejudice. The only reason why this absurd story has kept on running is because of deep-seated Cold War-style paranoia and Russophobia among the American political elite.Trump’s reception of Russia’s top diplomat Sergey Lavrov at the White House the day after he terminated Comey was more fodder for the unhinged American media and political class.
Lavrov was right to treat the stupid US media questions about his view on Comey with the contempt that they deserve. Trump was right, too, to exclude the same media posse from the Oval Office where he greeted Lavrov and Russia’s ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
If US media are not capable of holding intelligent questions about real-world pressing matters then they should be shown the door. And if they persist in indulging in paranoid fantasies, then the only suitable reality-check is to hit them with a dose of mockery.
Genuine questions deserve a genuine response. Ridiculous questions that are persistently asked to further a spurious political agenda should be spurned.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
Freedom of speech, just like the freedom of the media are among the fundamental values that are to be promoted and defended by any state that deems itself democratic. Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
However, in spite of this declaration and a set of common believes about the way journalists are to be treated, they are still being prosecuted in a great many of countries which prevents them from performing their professional duties to the best of their capabilities. What is curious is that the freedom of speech has come under assault in the United States today. However, any reports about such instances are being suppressed, while Washington keeps actively promoting the so-called “America-style freedom of speech.”
In a bid to advertise the alleged respect that the White House towards journalists and their freedoms, on the eve of the National Day of Prayer, Donal Trump with a group of Catholic cardinals in order to publicly sign an executive order that would allegedly strengthen the protection of freedom of speech and religious freedom in the United Stats. Upon signing this decree, Trump announced that his administration has just made a historical steps in a bid to defend religious freedom in the United States. The US President would boldly announce that:
We will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied, or silenced anymore, and we will never, ever stand for religious discrimination
Trump had previously promised to ‘totally destroy’ the Johnson’s amendment prohibiting members of religious groups from campaigning for election candidates, although he has no authority to bring down the amendment altogether. Its curious that the amendment was introduced in 1954 by Lindon Johnson, who a senator at the time who would later become the president of the country. In particular, this amendment puts a limit to the freedom of speech of pastors, in fact, threatening churches and non-profit organizations with a loss of tax-free status in the event of their rooting for a political candidate.
It is very symbolic that Trump signed the above decree on the day when the whole world celebrated World Press Freedom Day, which aims to raise awareness of the importance of press freedom and remind governments around the world of their obligation to respect and uphold the rights that journalists must universally enjoy.
However, numerous facts show violations of the most basic principles of the freedom of speech in the United States. In spite of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, that guarantees protection of the freedom of speech in the United States, Donald Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway has recently penned a new term in the dictionary used by the Tramp administration – “alternative facts”. This happened after the 45th US president came into a confrontation with a number of American media people, in particular those who represent The New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, The Washington Post, Politico, by accusing them of publishing “fake news”. Trump would go as far as to describe them as the enemies of the American people. In his public appearances, Trump has repeatedly tried to prevent some reporters from attending press briefings in the White House.
Foreign media sources, those that are linked with Russia, have fallen victims of the recent Russophobic campaign launched by the White House, with certain political figures accusing RT and Sputnik of pretty much anything and demanding the US Senate for revoking their licenses.
In order to strengthen control over the way that facts are being presented to the general public, President Trump is planning to expand the stuff that is managing his own accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as it been reported last February by the CNN. And the new US National Security Minister, John Kelly, in February suggested introducing additional measures to determine the reliability of travelers entering the US, requesting visa applicants to hand over the passwords to their social network accounts.
As it’s been noted by Julian Assange, the creator and editor-in-chief of the notorious WikiLeaks portal, Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech rather than on the United States’ actual adversaries. Assange would note that Pompeo liked WikiLeaks when he perceived it was publishing material revealing the shortcomings of his political rivals. The “Pompeo doctrine” articulated in his speech ensnares all serious news and investigative human rights organizations, from ProPublica to Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch.
The “accountability of the media” in the United States has also been evidenced by the fact that the US State Department has a special program that is designed to train Middle Eastern journalists and establishing control over all sorts of media sources across the world. In order to affect public opinion through various publication the US government has even allocated 1.5 million dollars in the year 2017 alone. In the list of the countries that are to be targeted one can find Ukraine, China and Syria.
So is there any freedom of speech left in the US for journalists to enjoy does anybody really wants the American-style Freedom of Speech?
Grete Mautner is an indepenent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
