I was getting so disappointed with HBO I was actually thinking about cancelling. Boardwalk Empire started out okay, only I can’t imagine why they didn’t tell the real story of Nucky Johnson’s war with William Randolph Hearst. Now that show has jumped the shark so many times I’ve lost interest. But yesterday I was surfing the documentaries and came across the newly released Toxic Hot Seat.
This is truly an eye-opening revelation. Did you know most house fires are started by cigarettes? The cigarette companies actually had to put chemicals in their products to keep them burning constantly like that. I guess that was to make more money because cigarettes smoke themselves. Notice that spliffs go out right away and don’t burn down any houses, but if you fall asleep with a cigarette in your fingers, you might not wake up. The fire doesn’t kill you because toxic fumes usually get you first.
Back in the early 1970s, the cigarette companies knew they had a serious problem with house fires, so they went after the furniture makers. Instead of making cigarettes safer by eliminating some of the chemical additives, the cigarette companies decided furniture must be made safe from cigarettes. Pretty soon all the foam used in furniture was laced with tons of deadly chemicals, all to make us safer? This was certainly a win-win for the DuPont company. The entire concept was absurd, but we are still paying the price. And it’s a lot higher than you might think.
Yes, much of our furniture is toxic and emits clouds of fumes every time you sit down on your couch, although you can solve this problem by getting a couch made before around 1972. Hard to imagine today, but there was a time when foam had zero chemical additives. If you’re wondering why autism and other mental disorders are epidemic, consider the role of chemical pollution. Some of the worst pollution comes right into our homes disguised as furniture. What makes this situation even more ridiculous is that this toxic furniture turns incredibly more deadly once it catches fire. Yes, the retardant slows down the ability of the foam to flame up….for a few minutes….but once the foam does catch fire, and it will, then those chemicals vaporize and can enter your system easily. Talk to some firefighters about the epidemic of cancer in their profession and they’ll tell you it’s from the vapors created by toxic furniture.
Maybe this documentary can change the situation. There’s no justification for continuing to dump all these toxic chemicals into our homes. We really need a furniture company to come along and stand up against this nonsense. One of the primary chemicals we are talking about is BVO, brominated vegetable oil. And you know something really bizarre? The soft drink manufacturers put BVO into many of the citrus-flavored soft drinks. BVO use in food is banned in most civilized parts of the world, but here in the United States, we let our kiddies lap it up in sugar-laced drinks? And we wonder why some of our kids are having mental problems?
What this country needs is an all-out assault on the chemical industry that keeps making up new toxic molecules every year and dumping them into our homes. There’s been little effort so far to slow down this poisoning. I sure hope this eye-opening documentary starts a groundswell of protest against BVO. And stay away from Mountain Dew, Fanta Orange and Gatorade drinks with citrus. Always check the ingredients because soft drinks containing BVO will list it on all their bottles and cans.
An Apology to Elephants
Lily Tomlin has produced a most amazing documentary. Only 40 minutes in length, I guarantee anyone who watches this film will have a hard time ever attending a circus again. I don’t think I ever went to a circus that displayed elephants, but I’m sure never going to even think about paying to see such a spectacle as long as I live.
Elephants are some of the most sensitive creatures on earth: huge telepathic engines for emotion and love vibrations. Their deep attachment to each other is well-known and when a lover, child or friend of an elephant dies, it’s not unusual for that animal to go into mourning for six months. Looking at an elephant in mourning, you get a real sense of how that vibration shuts down all their chakra centers.
What they don’t tell you is that getting elephants to do stupid tricks is a complicated process. First the animal’s parents and adult tribe are usually all assassinated in front of the children in Africa. That’s done to harvest ivory and meat. Then the elephant kids are rounded up and shipped overseas to a circus or zoo. Once the toddlers arrive at a circus, they have to be “tamed,” which involves six men. First, they put ropes on every leg and pull the baby elephant off its feet while one man holds the trunk and another sticks a bullhook into the animal’s anus. The bullhook is a steel torture device designed to stab or hook the animal’s most sensitive parts, usually a tender spot right about the eye. Baby elephants are beaten and tortured until they lose their spirit. At that point, they’re ready to learn tricks, like standing on their hind legs, a completely unnatural position for an elephant.
Interestingly enough, elephants posses great powers that have never been put to use. Had an orphan elephant been showered with love and adapted willingly to living around people, keep in mind he or she is much more sensitive to smell compared with a bloodhound. And probably more intelligent too. Imagine if that elephant had been honored and treated with respect and dignity, instead of being beaten into submission? Almost all are suffering from PTSD, and you can see that in their unnatural head-rocking behaviors. Instead of being treated like a slave, what if that elephant had just been treated like another person, with feelings, emotions and some basic rights? Elephants may lead the way to ending the worldwide abuse of all animals who are denied all dignity in their existence, pumped up on pills and standing in their own feces for most of their short lives before being harvested for human consumption. You know, animals emit telepathic vibes just like we do, so imagine the signals emanating from those animal factories.
Thankfully, people are starting to wake up to this atrocity, and thank you Lily Tomlin for bringing this to our attention. A couple in California created an elephant sanctuary so old elephants no longer of use to the circuses can come and try to get some healing in their final years. One of the most moving parts of the documentary concerns two baby elephants who were separated after coming to the states, both tortured for years, and much later in life, they reunite at this sanctuary. The deep emotion these creatures feel for each other despite being separated for decades was obvious. In fact, elephants spend a lot of time touching each other, rubbing against each other. If they could hug they would since they are obviously sharing compassionate energies on a regular basis.
So check out this amazing documentary while it’s on HBO. It will make you sad, but it’s something that might actually help turn the tide and help stop the abuse. And never, ever, buy anything made of ivory again.
HBO’s Epic on Dick Cheney
Can anybody actually sit through that 2-hour epic HBO is running? I always start spacing out after 20 minutes as I find it impossible to focus on Dick Cheney for longer than that. What an over-inflated, pretentious bore of a documentary, eh? The show is a coverup and apology parading as history, a complete distortion of truth, although I’m sure it unintentionally sheds some light in some dark corners despite the carefully selected cast of characters and facts. It plays like Cheney had final cut.
Yeah, the whole “weapons of mass destruction” was a complete lie, they expose that, but the documentary never goes into the structure of the Neo-Con take-over of America and the complex agenda that came with that takeover. The plans for an Iraq invasion as well as the plans for Iraq oil were carefully worked out before Saddam became the unexpected scapegoat for 9/11. According to Greg Palast, the real reason for the invasion was Saddam was dumping oil on the market in a way the oil cartel didn’t like, which kept prices down. The Neo-Cons drew up a plan to sell off every asset Iraq owned, but the oil cartel wanted to make sure the spigots were turned down so as to weaken OPEC’s hand in negotiations? This is the news today at least. You’d be surprised how much the intelligence agencies hover around oil production and distribution as they are considered the keys to the kingdom so long as oil continues to run the world. Only thing more profitable is war and drugs, which usually go together like a horse and carriage.
Here is what I took away from the HBO show from what I’ve seen so far:
We know now that Watergate was really a CIA plot to remove Nixon from power. What happened when Nixon was gone? Rumsfeld took over. Ford was a figurehead president, who didn’t even have his own staff. Rumsfeld brought Cheney into the White House. Ford didn’t know him from Adam. A year later, Cheney becomes the youngest Presidential chief of staff in history. Then Rumsfeld and Cheney made a huge power play, taking out a host of Rockefeller allies. And even though Rockefeller was Vice President at the time, it seems Rumsfeld and Cheney were wielding more power. You have to wonder what power group engineered these two people into such lofty positions.
I guess the best thing about the documentary is watching how a dozen junior lawyers at the Justice Department were able to squash illegal searches that had grown out-of-control, but what they don’t tell you is that the CIA and other agencies like them routinely do illegal searches every day. When you work with the bad boys, bad things happen and nobody is ever the wiser. That sort of activity is part of the culture of winning the fake war on terror. And too bad those lawyers didn’t shut down Gitmo, that national embarrassment that will follow W’s legacy for the rest of his life, pulling his karma like an anchor. That would have been a real achievement.
First abuse case against Catholic Church inspired by cannabis
Mea Maxima Culpa is a devastating HBO documentary on sex abuse inside the Catholic Church and includes an amazing detail. Did you have any idea how this scandal involving the Church actually started?
It started with a group of deaf men (who’d been sexually abused by the same priest as kids), hanging out later in life, smoking pot, and while smoking, they decide to take on the mission of seeing that priest defrocked in order to protect any more children from what they’d suffered. But after the Church did nothing to respond to their allegations, and after the courts said the statute of limitations had expired on the crime, the men put “wanted” leaflets with the priest’s picture on cars in front of the Milwaukee Cathedral. This act is what eventually blows open the doors of silence on the rampant sex child abuse going on virtually untouched and unabated, probably for centuries, within the Catholic Church, even though the Church knew the extent of the problem to the point of estimating the financial cost of settling the global cases as over $1 billion. Those deaf guys from Milwaukee eventually won the first of those settlements and created a landslide that has already paid out more than double the original Vatican estimate.
Don’t you find it strange that the original reefer madness was actually launched by the Vatican in the Middle Ages, when they made possession of cannabis proof of witchcraft and punishable by burning at the stake? And now cannabis has struck a nearly mortal blow to the Vatican as these child abuse cases have devastated the credibility of an institution already struggling to hold onto its flocks in the industrialized world.
And now today we hear the first Pope in 600 years is going to resign immediately after surviving a huge scandal involving his butler leaking secret documents to the press, a disclosure supposedly intended to purge deep corruption inside the Vatican? Or did I miss something?
During my freelance career, I did one story for the New York Times, by the way. It was on the National Theater for the Deaf. I think even then they clued me in on the fact that pot was popular in the deaf community.
HBO and Showtime present opposing views on Obama
Did you notice that HBO and Showtime have dueling perspectives on President Barack Obama currently airing? On HBO, you can view By the People, a loving documentary of Obama’s rise to power; while on Showtime, Oliver Stone tears Obama apart in the closing segment of his series on the Untold History of America, a finale that seemed primarily focused on showing how Obama was really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and his velvet glove has disguised a fist of steel.
Obama is clearly one of the most intelligent and charismatic Presidents in history and his election was a tremendous watershed for the country, a wonderful thing for all, but especially for minorities. However, I couldn’t help but marvel at the complete lack of minority representation in his inner sanctums as shown in the HBO documentary. Clearly, Obama did not rise to power like a Martin Luther King, a grassroots activist with a team of peers. Obama’s career, it seems, has been much more carefully crafted, no doubt carefully guided by people inside the political power structure.
As Stone makes clear, Obama was secretly the candidate of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex, since they gave far more money to his campaign than they did to his opponent. Meanwhile, although Obama was swept into office on a promise and hope of change, a lot of the same faces paraded into positions of power in his administration, while the perpetual war plans continued unabated, even though the wars have clearly bankrupted the nation. Obama doesn’t have the courage to face down the Joint Chiefs the way JFK did after the Bay of Pigs. But then, Obama probably doesn’t want to end up like JFK either.
I believe Obama’s grandfather worked for the CIA and this played a role in his political development. I saw this claim initially made in a DVD circulated during the election that claimed Obama’s real father is Frank Marshall. That claim may also be true. However, the DVD then jumped the shark by asserting Frank Marshall took topless pictures of Obama’s mother while she was underage and sold them to men’s magazines. And that allegation is what took the whole story off the deep end and guaranteed it would never be addressed in the mainstream press. But this is they way a lot of disinfo ops work: conceal the truth by wrapping it in lies.
Watching the two shows back-to-back is a real eye-opener, sort of like dueling propaganda pieces that cancel each other out. We can always hope Obama slips off leash and tries to do something to end the madness of promoting a fake war on terrorism that destroyed our Constitutional rights. So far, however, we’ve seen no signs of that happening anytime soon.
Oliver Stone’s “Untold History” Leaves Stones Unturned
I have to admit I was expecting something a bit deeper from Oliver Stone’s new mini-series on HBO. So far Untold History of the United States is really the untold story of how Henry Wallace was derailed as President and war-hawk and big money tool Harry Truman was engineered into the Presidency. Truman immediately unleashed a war of terror on German and Japanese civilians, although he’s gone down in history as one of our greatest presidents, when, in fact, he was probably a war criminal with blood on his hands.
Stone does a great job of illustrating how the actions of the allies insured millions of Russian, German and Japanese people would be senselessly murdered. The biggest toll during WWII was paid by the Russians, who lost over 20 million. The six million Germans who died leave no monuments. I like Stone’s work, but I wish he’d hired me as a researcher for this series. First of all, I would not have started with WWII, I would have started at Plymouth Rock. To understand America, you must understand the founding families of the Eastern seaboard, who still hold immense power. Some of these families supported England during the Revolutionary War, but emerged unharmed. A similar situation existed in New York City. British influence is largely hidden through secret societies, of which Freemasonry remains their most important, although its influence has been in steep decline for years. To understand how a man like Harry Truman made it to the Presidency with a high school education, you have to understand Truman was a Freemason. He was also the 33rd President, and 33 is the most important number in Masonic numerology, so you know the Masons wanted that Presidency above all others, although all the early Presidents were Freemasons.
If I had been Stone, I would have paid great attention to the creation of the anti-Masonic party, the first third party in American history, and surely as important as Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, which never gained anything close to the traction of the anti-Masons. My initial hero would have been Smedley Butler, the most decorated war hero of WWI, and a man who tried unsuccessfully to blow the whistle on the elites who were orchestrating war for profit at the expense of American lives.
But the worst error of omission so far with this series is how it ignores all the gold and booty that was stolen by the Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Forces, most of which ended up in the Black Eagle Funds, which were used to foment Wall Street agendas around the world for the last 50 years. Until Stone looks into the secret societies and black gold his untold story can never be complete. Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, who engineered the Black Eagle Fund, was, after all, a member of Skull & Bones, which has always been dominated by the aristocratic families of Boston and New York.
Game Change & SSRI Psychosis
I’ve been on the road with Bob Stutman for over ten years now, and the most amazing thing about our Heads versus Feds debate (recently cited as “the hottest college act in America”) is the chemistry that has developed between us.
I’m hoping to grow our webcast into a cable TV show and would appreciate any feedback our fans (or critics) have to offer. The show just took a new direction today, as we moved from hard news concerning the drug war, to reviewing two shows recently produced by HBO.
They call us “The Ultimate Odd Couple” and the point of Heads versus Feds is to show that even people from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum can actually hold discourse in a respectful manner.
Last night we visited Virginia Tech, and had a rare tense moment when I talked about the relationship between SSRI’s and school shootings. Afterwards, Bob told me he thought it was callous to bring up that tragedy, especially since no SSRI’s were involved. As far as I know, the medical facts in the case were never released.
Only one in ten studies on SSRI’s was ever published and they show SSRI’s are no better than placebo pills. The other nine studies, however, were shredded. Shredded, no doubt, because they discovered a link between SSRI’s and psychotic behavior—like yesteday’s Jet-Blue-pilot-meltdown. We’ll likely never know the truth about a possible SSRI-Psychosis cover-up until some form of class-action law suit appears. For all our sakes, I hope it comes soon as the legal drug companies are currently pushing the concept SSRI’s “are for everyone.”