Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Read these Doctor's Comments about Drugs.



"The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine." William Osler, M.D.
"The cause of most disease is in the poisonous drugs physicians superstitiously give in order to effect a cure." Charles E. Page, M.D.
"If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity."  O.W. Holmes, (Prof. of Medicine Harvard University)
"Every drug increases and complicates the patients condition." Robert Henderson, M.D.
"In sickness the body is already loaded with impurities. By taking drug - medicines more impurities are added, thereby the case is further embarrassed and harder to cure." Elmer Lee, M.D.
"The necessity of teaching mankind not to take drugs and medicines, is a duty incumbent upon all who know their uncertainty and injurious effects; and the time is not far distant when the drug system will be abandoned." Charles Armbruster, M.D.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Aljazeera watched by open-minded people.

A study has found that if you are more open-minded or smarter, you are likely to watch Aljazeera English than CNN or BBC. I am inclined to add that fans of Fox News Channel would have turned out to be even more dumb.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Foods that are not good for your sex life.

Carbohydrate-rich processed foods.

Fried Foods With High Trans Fat Levels, like burgers.

Soy.

Foods with high levels of oxalic acid, such as green leafy vegetables.

Mint.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Its Ron Paul, stupid!

If Americans knew what was good for them they would get rid of fakes and frauds like Obama and Gingrich and vote for Ron Paul in the upcoming presidential elections. But of course they wouldn't  --  such is the level of education in their country.

A speech Obama should have given but didn't.

The following is taken from an article by Simon Tisdall which appeared in the 
guardian.co.uk, on tuesday 24 January 2012.




In his state of the union address, Barack Obama has the opportunity to promulgate a three-pronged 'axis of virtue'. 
The best-known, or most notorious, state of the union address of recent times was delivered 10 years ago by George Bush, in January 2002, when he (or rather his speechwriter, David Frum) coined a phrase that has resonated ever since: the "axis of evil". Bush was referring to three "rogue" states: Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which he had already privately earmarked for US-facilitated regime change, Iran and North Korea. "States like these, and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world," Bush declared.


Barack Obama's state of the union speech tonight is unlikely to throw up a catchy phrase or soundbite to compare with Bush's portentous effort, although White House aides doubtless toiled until the last minute to try to attract the headline writers. Nor is Obama's election-year address, with a strong emphasis on domestic woes, likely to set the international agenda the way Bush did. After all, much of the decade after 2002 was taken up with US efforts, overt and covert, successful and floundering, to eliminate perceived threats emanating from the terrible trio.


This is a missed opportunity. If Obama really wanted to set the nation and the world talking, and breathe vigorous life into his so far underwhelming bid for a second term, he might do well to try new approaches to old problems. Instead of attempting to manage issues such as Iran's suspect nuclear programme, or skip over difficult challenges such as repeat sub-Saharan food emergencies, he could take a chance and propose radical solutions. Instead of trying to make a media splash, he could try to make a difference. In short, he could promulgate a three-pronged "axis of virtue".


Here are key excerpts from the "axis of virtue" speech Obama probably won't deliver:


1. "My fellow Americans. War with Iran in 2012 is not inevitable. It is not desirable. It is not practicable. And it is not necessary. There is no evidence – not one shred – that Iran has built or acquired a usable nuclear weapon. Nor is there good reason to believe it would use such weapons, against Israel or anybody else, should it obtain them in the future. Iranians are no different from Americans and Europeans. They are not suicidal. They wish to defend themselves against attack. Our job is to assure them they are not under threat.


"So today I announce that my administration will prepare and ask Congress to sign into law a non-aggression pact with the Islamic Republic of Iran. This pact will form the springboard for immediate, unconditional, across-the-board bilateral negotiations on restoring diplomatic and political ties, trade, investment, and people and cultural exchanges between our two great countries. We want to welcome Iran back into the family of nations. It has been absent for too long. For good measure, we are also planning full diplomatic relations with the state of Palestine and with Cuba. The days of big countries bullying weaker ones are over."

Friday, January 20, 2012

A Brief History of America's Dumb Policies Towards Iran.

The following is by Tom Engelhardt

In more than 50 years, America’s leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn’t lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback.
   
These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered.  Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry.  In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police.  He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf -- until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs.  While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington’s men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring.  In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things.

1967: Under the U.S. “Atoms for Peace” program, started in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Shah is allowed to buy a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which -- call it irony -- is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program).  Defense Department officials did worry at the time that the Shah might use the “peaceful atom” as a basis for a future weapons program or that nuclear materials might fall into the wrong hands.  “An aggressive successor to the Shah,” went a 1974 Pentagon memo, “might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran’s complete military dominance of the region.”  But that didn’t stop them from aiding and abetting the creation of an Iranian nuclear program.

The Shah, like his Islamic successors, argued that such a program was Iran's national “right” and dreamed of a country that would get significant portions of its electricity from a string of nuclear plants.  As a 1970s adby a group of American power companies put the matter: “The Shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world.  Yet he’s building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country.  He knows the oil is running out -- and time with it.”  In other words, the U.S. nuclear program was the genesis for the Iranian one that Washington now so despises.

September 1980: Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein launches a war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran.  In the early 1980s, he becomes Washington’s man, our “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf, and we offer himour hand -- and also "detailed information" on Iranian deployments and tactical planning that help him use his chemical weapons more effectively against the Iranian military.  Oh, and just to make sure things turn out really, really well, the Reagan administration also decides to sell missiles and other arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran on the sly, part of what became known as the “Iran-Contra Affair” and which almost brings down the president and his men.  Success!

March 2003: Saddam Hussein is, by now, no longer our man in Baghdad but a new “Hitler” who, top Washington officials claim, undoubtedly has a nuclear weapons program that could someday leave mushroom clouds rising over U.S. cities.  So the Bush administration launches a war of aggression against Iraq, which like Iran just happens to -- in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- “float on a sea of oil.”  (Bush officials hope, in the wake of a “cakewalk” of a war to revive that country’s oil industry, to privatize it, and use it to destroy OPEC, driving down the price of oil on world markets.)  Nine years later, a Shiite government is in power in Baghdad closely allied with Tehran, which has gained regional strength and influence thanks to the disastrous U.S. occupation.

So call it an unblemished record of a kind not easy to find.  In more than 50 years, America’s leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn’t lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback.  Now, another administration in Washington, after years of what can only be called a covert war against Iran, is preparing yet another set of clever maneuvers -- this time sanctions against Iran’s central bank meant to cripple the country’s oil industry and crack open the economy followed by no one knows what.

And honestly, I mean, really, given past history, what could possibly go wrong?  Regime change in Iran?  It’s bound to be a slam dunk and if you don’t believe it, check out Pepe Escobar’s latest, “The Myth of ‘Isolated’ Iran.”

 (Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just been published in November.)

Thursday, January 12, 2012

American democracy is a sham.

These Republican primaries are a sideshow – and so is the presidential election.

By Tom Mendelsohn


While we’re all going doolally over which malignant Republican replicant is the least tragically flawed – a process which will be stretched over the course of six glorious months – the culture wars are still being fought just under the radar.

The fact is, this beauty pageant of machine politics is a total red herring, and a dangerous one at that. None of this historic field of jokers, morons and shills could ever get close to unseating Obama. They’re either too mad to win over the country, or they’re having to pretend to be so mad that they won’t be able to win over the country. See, to win the primaries, they’re having to appeal to the Republican base – a base that has veered painfully hard to the right in the last few decades – using a rightwing narrative of such repugnance that they’ve toxified themselves in the eyes of America’s sane majority.

It once suited the GOP to indulge the fears, prejudices and ignorances of its base. It made delightful political sense; they could chip away at the Democrats and Clinton and Obama with any kind of poison they picked when they were a minority in government. There was practically no lie or obfuscation that the base would not lap up, scoring cheap political point after cheap political point. But eventually the lies got so big and so persuasive that the narrative ran away from the establishment string-pullers, and the lunatics (in the shape of the Tea Party) took over the asylum. Now GOP bigwigs are in thrall to their own monster, forced to pay visible lip-service to the insanity they themselves fermented in the name of political expedience.

The upshot is that we’ll either get a mad’un like Santorum or a pretending-to-be-mad‘un like Romney. And when we do get Romney, he’ll be cut to little gristly shreds in the main election, as the Obama campaign quietly keeps playing clips of him saying all the crazy things he needed to say to win the nomination. Couple that with the huge lack of enthusiasm his own party has in him and all his insincerities, and he won’t come within a parsec of the popular vote.

But here’s the thing: that doesn’t matter. The presidential election is a sideshow. The office of the president is not this all-powerful bully pulpit it’s cracked up to be. The US government is designed to stymie itself, packed as it is with checks and balances. Obama can’t get much of substance done on his own; he has no control over the budget or passage of bills, and precious little over the states. He couldn’t reshape the US into a leftist paradise if he even wanted to.

Which, I hasten to add, he does not. He is not the agent of hope, change and social democracy we all thought. Politically, he’s a hipper David Cameron: he loves financial services and slight regulation, and doesn’t really care about the significant trappings of the welfare state that we decadent pinko Euros thought he did. In any case, he’s as good as powerless, unwilling to act where he could, and unable to act where he wanted. He’s a figurehead, and that’s it.

The real battlegrounds in US politics are lower than the presidency – in Congress and in the states. And while the country may not like the GOP narrative at the top level, in the state houses and in Washington, the rightist agenda still goes great guns.

The states turned alarmingly red during the 2010 elections, and they continue to throb an ominous shade of crimson. There are 29 Republican governors and 20 Democrats, and the former are all pursuing radical right-wing agendas, nigh-on unchecked. Even a governor as unpopular as Scott Walker, who is currently in the throes of a historically unprecedented recall election for his union busting attempts, still clings fairly handily to power.

The fact that these red governors, and their red state assemblies, are still in power shows that the right is not losing the argument on the ground, no matter how wacky their marquee guys may be. They still get voted in and they are still empowered to enact all manner of destructively ideological far-right policies.

The House of Representatives has a huge Republican majority, which they use to thwart all progressive policies. It would take a massive turnaround and significantly higher poll numbers for Obama to even dent this majority. Meanwhile they’ll vote in near lockstep on anything that will hurt their foes and keep the economy faltering on the president’s watch.

The Senate may enjoy a slim Democrat majority, but rightwing obstructionism has choked it into uselessness. Without a ‘supermajority’ of 60 senators, the minority party can and does filibuster with impunity, making it another major thorn in the side of the liberal cause. More blue seats are in play in 2012 than red ones, and many of them are potentially vulnerable – because the GOP still retains credibility in the states that it lacks on a federal level.

On top of all that, the third branch of government, the Judiciary, is also hamstrung by an obstreperous Senate. Obama is struggling to appoint judges at any level in the face of an activist conservative bloc willing to put a filibuster-shaped kibosh on any of his nominations.

He’s not helped by the 5:4 conservative-liberal split in the Supreme Court, which puts a cherry on the eye of this perfect storm. The majority of the court is now openly hostile to liberal democratic aims and lawmaking, making another huge obstacle in the left’s already treacherous path.

So, like I say, all this presidential sound and fury is a red herring. Obama will beat any of the malingerers thrown in front of him, the GOP will take a bit of a hit from being so silly, and America’s inexorable rightward march will continue.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Why is America jailing so many of its citizens?

This article is from the UK's Guardian, written by Sadhbh Walshe.


We like locking people up in America. If incarceration were an Olympic sport, the United States would come away with every gold medal available and break a few world records in the process. On average, Americans are locked up at a rate four times higher than any other nationality, and we have the world's largest female prison population by a considerable margin.

Before the "get tough" policies adopted in the 1970s, less than 200,000 on average were behind bars. Now that number is closer to 2 million. That may make you feel more safe, or less, if you consider that all of our chances of ending up in prison someday have increased exponentially. With that in mind, we kind of owe it to ourselves to at least know what goes on behind prison walls.

With this new series, we hope to shed some light on what life is like inside our prisons by hearing directly from inmates, their families, correction officers and anyone else whose life is impacted by the practice of incarceration.? So far, my correspondence with inmates has revealed a fascinating world of endurance, resourcefulness, terrible choices, terrible cruelty and a lot of pain and suffering.

The most disturbing aspect of the corrections model, as it currently stands, however, is how much it has failed to either rehabilitate offenders or deter them from re-offending. No matter how harsh the prison stay, at least four in ten inmates will end up back inside soon after their release, usually on a more serious charge and for a longer, and more expensive, stay.

One of my correspondents, who is 20 years into a life sentence he earned for a crime he committed while serving time for a lesser offense, gave me his take on why prisons are often better at turning small-time crooks into full-on felons rather than model citizens.

"We do not live in a civilised society here. It could be, but rather than separate repeat violent offenders and have programs/services designed to show young, confused, antisocial people how to become productive members of society once released, or just allow them to learn enough in a safe enough environment to be able to draw on later when they run out of piss and vinegar, they throw us all together with a pile of bones to fight over like hungry dogs."

It's no surprise that prison yards are brutal places or that overcrowding and deteriorating conditions would lead them to be even more so. What is surprising is that rather than trying to reduce prison populations or improve conditions, the response has been to build tougher, meaner prisons to contain the violence by isolating the so-called "worst of the worst" in Secure Housing Units (SHUs), otherwise known as the "box" or the "hole" ? or, in polite parlance, a solitary confinement cell. My correspondent described how he earned his place in one of these solitary units two years into his prison stay.

"I came to the SHU for being involved in a melee. That's how it was described in my write-up. Doesn't sound so bad right? A donnybrook, a knockabout, a melee, involving myself and five other prisoners. There were some escalating racial tensions on the yard at that time. Several white folks had been stabbed or beaten in previous months.

"I was actually only out there waiting on a transfer to another prison. Had a bus ticket already and I expect the course of my life would have been much different had I caught that bus. But somebody said something somebody else didn't like and the next thing flat, there were four guys on one side and two of us on the other, trying to make the others meet with Jesus. We fought with knives and chains and teeth and claws.

"I got an additional two years added to my sentence, a one-way ticket to the SHU, 40 stitches, a broken hand and a nice little scar as a reminder."

Eighteen years later, he's still in the SHU, and presumably, his chance of inflicting violence on other inmates or being subjected to violence has considerably diminished. Still, the SHU has its downside. Aside from driving many occupants to the insane asylum or to suicide, they come with the rather hefty price tag ? of approximately $75,000 per inmate per year, about three times the cost of a regular prison stay.  So far, this guy's prison term has cost the taxpayer around $1,350,000.

One can't help but wonder what a difference it might have made to his life, or to the lives of others like him, had even a fraction of that sum been invested in his well-being before the spectre of prison crossed his horizon.

Not every person who gets locked up has such an extreme experience, nor are they all choir boys who have been falsely accused. But when you consider the degenerative nature of incarceration and the fact that we generally accept that prisons are hellholes that drive both captor and captive to do terrible things, you'd think we'd be doing everything in our power to keep people out of them.

We're not, of course, and for the time being, nearly 2 million people are languishing behind bars, some deservedly so, others not so much. It's easier, I realise, to turn a blind eye, but we should know what goes on inside our prisons. After all, even if you never end up in one yourself, you will be paying dearly for the many others who will.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

What if Iran said it already had the bomb...

What if Iran were to say to the arrogant West and to their Zionist buddy that it has no need to make a nuclear bomb because it has already acquired a finished product (perhaps from Pakistan or North Korea) and is ready to use it if its security is threatened. Will its enemies be prepared to call its bluff? I don't think so. They are more likely to back off.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

A vegetarian diet against cancer.

The following is by

Kathy Freston

a health and wellness expert.  
 
"...the most compelling evidence against eating animal products comes from China, and shows that the carcinogenic nutrient in meat is protein, rather than fat. In one of my favorite books on the subject of health, The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health, author T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., a Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, explains that animal protein is the most carcinogenic substance we consume and presents powerful data showing that animal products both cause and fuel cancer and other deadly diseases.
 
Dr. Campbell's study is the most comprehensive survey of the connection between diet and disease in medical history, and he has looked at all of the clinical, epidemiological, and other evidence, and it all backs up what he documented in China.
 
His final statement on what we should all be eating?
 
Here's how he explains it in "Why China Holds the Key to Your Health": "The data from the China Project suggest that what we have come to consider as 'normal' illnesses of aging are really not normal. In fact, these findings indicate that the vast majority perhaps 80 to 90% of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented, at least until very old age, simply by adopting a plant-based diet."
 
These are strong words from a man who was raised on a dairy farm, got his Ph.D. in animal nutrition, and worked on a project to produce animal protein more efficiently.
 
The Deadly Connection Between Animal Protein, Blood Cholesterol, and Carcinogens:
Dr. Campbell now believes it best to avoid animal protein altogether. According to Campbell, blood cholesterol levels can be reduced by eating plant protein instead. "Some of the plant proteins, particularly soy," he says, "have an impressive ability to reduce blood cholesterol." This might explain a finding released a few months back that "eating tofu can slash ovarian cancer risk."
 
"At the outset of the China Study," writes Dr. Campbell in his book, "no one could or would have ever predicted the relationship between cholesterol and any of the disease rates. What a surprise we got." Dr. Campbell and his team found that as blood cholesterol levels decrease, a slew of cancers decreases as well, including "cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach and esophagus (throat)."
 
According to Campbell, in addition to animal protein causing cancer, it also fuels cancer that exists. So you can have a carcinogen in your body, but it doesn't get "turned on" until you ingest animal flesh. Animal protein causes the carcinogen to grow and spread. Even so-called lean cuts of meat, as well as fish and chicken, are high in fat and protein, and as Dr. Campbell says, animal protein only causes "mischief."
 
Choose Health: Choose Vegetarian
From animal products doubling your risk of endometrial, to soy foods lowering your risk of contracting ovarian cancer, to carcinogenic arsenic in your chicken (and other meat, though in lower levels), to the news that animal protein is the big cause of dietary cancer (and remember, the American Cancer Society says that about 30 percent of cancer comes from what you eat!), it sure is looking like the "vegan thing" is making a lot more sense in a lot of different ways.
 
I highly recommend checking out The China Study to get the full scoop, which is full of fascinating information and gripping statistics. I give it out so much that I think I should be getting a commission. The book also gives tips on making the transition to a vegetarian diet, as does my last column, "One Bite at a Time: A Beginner's Guide to Conscious Eating."
 
aziz anom