Six Minutes Of President Obama's Accomplishments (Video)

NB Commentary: Oh Lord, complaining about how short this video is???

Folks don't even watch videos that last longer than 6 minutes, and no way in hell did he help Muslims considering how many of them got killed by his drones. I do say he could have done more for the veterans, but we all can. Got a bunch of stuff you ain't using? Got an empty house that no one is in? Got some food to share? Go visit a vet in the hospital. Ban all fireworks displays!! Take a vet to Lunch on a monthly basis.

We can always find fault, but what are we doing about it?

So, now we have Trump and we shall see that we are talking about the same coin, just the flip side, it matters not what puppet is in the White House, it matters who his handlers/backers/bankers/corporations/shadowgovernment that are pulling his strings people. Let's get over ourselves, let's stop being divided down party lines, let's look at the BIG GIANT ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. We are being lead like sheep to the slaughter, and as we fight among ourselves and kill each other off in the process, there will be fewer sheep for them to slaughter.

Wake UP People, this Ain't Kansas! We Live On A Prison Planet!

https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/videos/1395919043834479/

Ebola, the African Union and Bioeconomic Warfare

Ebola, the African Union and Bioeconomic Warfare » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Health Questions and the Challenges for Africa  Weekend Edition October 10-12, 2014

Ebola, the African Union and Bioeconomic Warfare

by HORACE G. CAMPBELL

As the Ebola outbreak rages, and there are projections of more than 1.4 million persons infected in the next few months, the African Union and the regional bloc ECOWAS have taken a back seat as the international media uses this virus to stigmatize Africa and Africans. Pious statements have been made by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the World Bank warns that could Ebola could have “catastrophic” economic costs on the region of Western Africa. This same World Bank has not yet accepted any reasonability for its role in promoting neo-liberal politics that degraded the health care facilities of Africa. This degradation will be called in this article economic warfare. Bioeconomic warfare is the combination of economic warfare and biological warfare. In the midst of this tragedy, Britain, France and the United States use the deaths of thousands to remilitarize West Africa. Characteristically, this militaristic intervention with the division of the three societies between USA (Liberia) France (Guinea) and the United Kingdom (Sierra Leone) ensures that the media attention is placed on the military deployments of the western states and not on measures for public education. 

The kind of international response that will be needed for countering bioeconomic warfare requires a different kind of public education and mobilization than what the AUand ECOWAS have so far called for. Liberia, Sierra Leona and Guinea are the societies that are at the epicenter of the outbreak of the Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF) that some writers have said has spun out of control. [1] These three territories are members of the Economic Community for West Africa (ECOWAS). ECOWAS is one of the five regional organizations that make up the AU. Six months after it was clear that this epidemic was widespread, in August 2014, there was a meeting of ECOWAS held in Ghana to address the outbreak. At this meeting, it was stressed that the best approach to curbing the spread of Ebola and bringing the disease under control remained effective quarantine, isolation and public education. There is no indication that either the AU or ECOWAS is working at their maximum effort to bring this disease under control. In the same month of August, the Director General of the World Health Organization stated that, the outbreak is “the largest and most severe and most complex that we’ve ever seen in the nearly 40-year history of this disease.” 

One of the priorities of public education is for citizens to have a fuller understanding of the source or sources of Ebola and the kind of responses that can bring this pandemic under control. Citizens need to understand everywhere that Ebola is not particularly contagious. There should be the clarification that there is no cure for Ebola. All of the therapies and vaccines being used so far are experimental. The simple requirements of control are robust public health infrastructures, clean water facilities with sanitation and a clean environment. In short, Ebola can only be contained with robust health facilities. The very same institutions and organizations that have been at the forefront of bioeconomic warfare in Africa cannot lead the mobilization against Ebola. This mobilization requires nonmilitary, civilian medical leadership. Ebola presents one more challenge for a new kind of leadership in Africa that can value the lives of the producers. 

EBOLA: WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

From the varying press reports this current strain of Ebola broke out in Guinea at the end of 2013 and was brought to international attention by the time it had spread across West Africa by March 2013. The symptoms of Ebola haemorrhagic fever begin 4 to 16 days after infection. Persons develop fever, chills, headaches, muscle aches, and loss of appetite. As the disease progresses, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, sore throat and chest pain can occur. The blood clots and the patient may bleed from injection sites as well as into the gastrointestinal tract, skin and internal organs. The mortality rate is usually very high. This virus is not spread through the air via coughs or sneezes like the common cold. It is spread through frequent contact with bodily fluids and can be spread only by someone who is showing the symptoms. 

It should be stated from the outset that Ebola is not one of those illnesses known to the majority of healers and doctors in Africa. Scientific journals of all continents attest to the profound ignorance about this virus. Fifteen years ago the internationally respected International Journal of Infectious Diseases stated that “Filoviridae is the only known virus family about which we have such profound ignorance.” [2] What accounts for this profound ignorance on the part of the top researchers in the West?

Inside Africa, the most experienced, the traditional healers have no experience in dealing with this illness. The reports in the mainstream media place the first outbreak of Ebola in Africa in 1976. This virus was named for a river in then Zaire, where Ebola was allegedly first detected. Then, according to information released by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta,” Ebola is a member of a family of RNA viruses known as filoviruses. When magnified several thousand times by electron microscope, these viruses have the appearance of long filaments of threads. Although the CDC places the first outbreak of Ebola in Zaire in 1976, the leading scientific journals such the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine placed the first outbreak in Marburg, Germany.

One of the most profound requirements of public education is to diminish the racialization of Ebola to clarify that the first recognized outbreak took place not in Africa, but in Marburg Germany, hence the name given to Ebola as Marburg Virus. In 1967 an outbreak of haemorrhagic fever occurred simultaneously in laboratories in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany.

Thirty-one people became ill, initially laboratory workers followed by several medical personnel and family members who had cared for them. Seven deaths were reported.

THE EVOLUTION OF EBOLA

According to the CDC, the first Outbreak of Ebola was in 1976 in Zaire. In their website, the CDC stated the first Outbreak of Ebola“occurred in Yambuku and surrounding area. Disease was spread by close personal contact and by use of contaminated needles and syringes in hospitals/clinics. This outbreak was the first recognition of the disease”. [3] Why is it necessary for the CDC to place the evolution of disease in Africa? [4] The website of the CDC differs from the Journal of Infectious Diseases that stated, “Biomedical science first encountered the virus family Filoviridae when Marburg virus appeared in 1967.”

The reporting on the number of deaths in the Zaire outbreak differs according to differing sources. One fact is indisputable. This was the largest number of deaths at that time in 1976. There were 550 cases and 340 deaths. In the third outbreak in 1979, in Sudan, there were 34 cases and 22 fatalities.

RESTON-EBOLA

The fourth outbreak of Ebola was in the United States. The strain of Ebola Reston is so called because of an outbreak which occurred in Reston, Virginia, in late 1989. Very few following the present outbreak of Ebola know that there was an outbreak of Ebola in the Washington Suburb of Reston, less than 20 miles from the United States Capitol. There were two other small incidents of the Reston outbreak after 1989.

THE KITWIT OUTBREAK

Six years after the first Reston outbreak there was a major outbreak of Ebola at Kitwit, again in Zaire. There were over 200 fatalities. Up to then, the Kitwit Ebola outbreak had been the deadliest. The outbreaks were usually controlled when appropriate medical supplies and equipment were made available and quarantine procedures used.

Since those days there have been periodic outbreaks in Uganda, Angola, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and other parts of Africa, but nothing compared to the scale and depth of the present pandemic in West Africa.

In the most popular book on this virus published over 20 years ago by Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus [5] readers are exposed to the twenty years of  research by the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRID) on a family of viruses that are lethal. This book came out before the Kitwit outbreak but we know from press reports that the USAMRID, the CDC, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other international research organizations used the Kitwit outbreak to study this virus. The book concentrated on the three ways which the scientific community attempts to deal with a virus: vaccines, drugs and bio containment. This book by Preston came out in a moment when the tabloid press was making great claims about the airborne possibilities of Ebola and was whipping up anti-African hysteria.

It was in the same period when Robert Kaplan had written his celebrated article, “The Coming Anarchy. “ It was this sensationalism that set the tone about the so-called failed and fragile states in Africa. Robert Kaplan wrote extensively on how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease were rapidly destroying the social fabric of our African societies. [6] Kaplan’s work was part of the psychological warfare against Africa and Africans at the moment when the peoples of world were celebrating the victory over apartheid.

USAMRID -THE US MILITARY AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE RESEARCH- ONE ARM OF BIOECONOMIC WARFARE

The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, is supposed to be the frontline research institution for the USA in its bioshield preparations, which is the preparedness of the US government to fight against biological threats. President Richard Nixon had ended the offensive biological warfare program of the USA with his “Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs” on November 25, 1969 in a speech from Fort Detrick. The statement was supposed to put an end, unconditionally, to all U.S. offensive biological weapons programs. The United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of the Development,
Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction was signed in 1972. Even after the signing of this international convention a number of countries, including the USA, continued research on designer viruses.


Despite the UN convention, the explosion of scientific research on genetically modified organisms gave a boost to the research being carried out by both military and civilian agencies that were chasing profits from developing dual use pathogens. Biological agents that were being experimented with as bioweapons accelerated and the one bioweapon from this school of dual use pathogens that has come to light has been the experimentation on anthrax.

Characteristically, the use of anthrax on civilians by the military was in the case of the racist Rhodesian military who unleashed anthrax spores in feed cakes for animals killing over 80 Africans in what was then Rhodesia. Years later Timothy Stamps, the Minister of Health in Zimbabwe, drew a connection between the anthrax outbreak in Rhodesia, the Ebola outbreaks and the experimentation that had been carried out under South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) program.

This South African apartheid CBW program has now received international notoriety through Project Coast where the apartheid regime was experimenting with biological agents that could be specifically targeted at Africans. The government of the United States has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the experimentation of Project Coast even though at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC of South Africa), Dr. Wouter Basson testified how he was warmly embraced by US intelligence elements. The full implication of the work of Wouter Basson and Daan Goosen is still to come to light. [7]

The attractiveness of the weaponization of biological agents increased in the era of genetically modified organisms. Because Africa was the space of the most diverse genetic materials, scientists and bio anthropologists from the West traversed the rural countryside in Africa looking for plants with unique characteristics. In the era of massive research in the life sciences, many universities became involved in dual use research.

DUAL USE RESEARCH


Dual use research (DURC) is life sciences research that, based on current understanding, can be reasonably anticipated to provide knowledge, information, products, or technologies that could be directly misused to pose a significant threat with broad consequences to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, or national security. In short, dual use research was research that could be used to assist in advancing human health and security or at the same time be used for biological warfare.

We have learnt from research carried out by UNESCO that “military interest, in harnessing genetic engineering and DNA recombinant technology for updating and devising effective lethal bioweapons is spurred on by the easy availability of funding, even in times of economic regression, for contractual research leading to the development of bioweapons.” [8] This is the research environment within which to grasp the present outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.


On the day before President Barack Obama spoke to the world on the Ebola pandemic, the White House on Wednesday September 24, 2014 issued new guidelines intended to strengthen the oversight of federally funded biology research that could inadvertently produce bioweapons. According to the report in the New York Times carried on Thursday September 25, “The new policy shifts the burden of finding and disclosing the dangerous aspects of research from the funding agency — usually the National Institutes of Health — to the scientists who receive the grants and the universities or other institutions where they work.” On the same day, the National Public Radio (NPR) was more specific that the ruling related to dual use pathogens and research being carried in government funded laboratories. This report came three years after the controversies about bird flu research that was being carried out for bioterror purposes. 

In 2011, there had been a fierce debate in the media about the use of biological research for terror, in short bioterrorism. Then as NPR reported, “Scientists and security specialists are in the midst of a fierce debate over recent experiments on a strain of bird flu virus that made it more contagious weapons. In September of 2011 at a scientific conference in Malta, one scientist made a stunning announcement at a flu conference “he’d done a lab experiment that resulted in bird flu virus becoming highly contagious between ferrets — the animal model used to study human flu infection. It seemed that just five mutations did the trick.” This report on NPR in November 2011 did not reappear but in the same broadcast one noted bioterrorism expert and director of the Center for Biosecurity at a national university stated that,

“It’s just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus. And it’s a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it.”

So far no expert or whistle-blower has come forward to speak openly about experimentation with viral haemorrhagic fevers, which are now lumped under the name of Ebola. Today as a vital component of prevention and public education there is the need for scientists and researchers to speak out about the laboratories in the West or elsewhere that have been experimenting with dual use pathogens. It is also necessary for the international community to know whether any of these research teams or university personnel associated with dual use pathogens has been active in the countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea or Nigeria before the present outbreak of Ebola. At the minimum, ECOWAS and the AU should pressure the UN Ebola Fund to focus not only on fund raising but to also make Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to fully develop the measures to properly organize against outbreaks of the current type.

From the reports coming in on the numbers of people who have been left to die without attention or a decent burial, the figures on the number of deaths in West Africa from WHO have been a clear undercount to minimize the extent of the devastation by Ebola. In contrast to the numbers being broadcast by WHO, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reported on Tuesday September 23 that “Ebola cases could increase to between 550,000 and 1.4 million in four months, based on several factors including how many people are infected by Ebola carriers. 

The report questioned whether the official number of deaths recorded by WHO, 2,800 out of at least 5,800 Ebola cases, has been underreported. CDC has said it is likely that 2.5 times as many cases, or nearly 20,000, have occurred so far.” [9] On the same Tuesday that the CDC issued its dire warning of the prospect of 1.4 million persons dying, the New England Journal of Medicine also weighed in and stated that “if the disease isn’t adequately contained, it could become endemic among the populations in countries hardest hit by the outbreak — Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. …. “Without drastic improvements in control measures,” researchers say, “the numbers and cases and deaths from [Ebola] are expected to continue increasing from hundreds to thousands per week in coming months.”
According to the WHO, “Extensive, immediate actions – such as those already started – can bring the epidemic to… a rapid decline in cases.” 

BEYOND THE MILITARIZATION OF THE RESPONSE TO EBOLA

The extensive and immediate action referred to by WHO concerns the deployment of military forces by the United States, Britain and France to the countries most affected. The US has deployed over 4,000 military personnel to West Africa to assist in the fight against Ebola. The fight against Ebola cannot be a military effort. It must be an effort that is based on seeking to bring back the health and safety of the peoples whose communities have been destroyed with hundreds of families losing loved ones. The US plans to quickly increase its presence in Liberia, where military personnel are deploying to help the people halt the advance of the worst Ebola epidemic on record but we also need to know what the private security contractors have been doing in Liberia over the past ten years. President Obama has stated that the military is required to set up the medical and transportation infrastructure needed to deploy health workers. Why could this infrastructure work not be carried out by civilian agencies?

From India, Sreeram Chaulia noted correctly in an article entitled ‘Foreign Pulse: Viral Politics’, that “As the Ebola epidemic ravages West Africa, a familiar act with troublesome connotations is playing out. The international response to the conjoined public health crises in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea is following imperial patterns of tutelage and patronage, wherein each of these three countries has been exclusively taken over by its respective former master from America and Europe through targeted humanitarian aid…….An erstwhile colony established by American citizens freed from slavery, Liberia is back to being literally a ward of the US, which faces no competition from any other Western donor there. 

Washington is deploying up to 4,000 military personnel to set up hospitals, medical laboratories and treatment centres on a war footing. This mission, codenamed “Operation United Assistance”, is being overseen by the controversial US Africa Command (AFRICOM).”

In a context where the international news media is dominated by the western news agencies, ECOWAS has also called for military mobilization to respond to Ebola. In the opinion of this author, ECOWAS and the AU have dropped the ball because the militarization of the international response will make it difficult for countries such as China, Cuba, India, South Korea and other societies to properly harmonize the medical response to this Ebola outbreak. The AU and ECOWAS need a new kind of medical diplomacy which is rooted in the valuation of black bodies. Chaulia noted that “if the US, UK and France were driven by humanitarian motives, why did they not contribute to the multilateral UN Ebola response fund that would have distributed the funds more equitably among the three worst-hit West African countries? Thus far, only India and Australia have made sizeable donations of $10 million each to the UN Ebola fund that is woefully undersubscribed.”

PROJECT 112


In North America, the Fox news organization and its affiliates have been at the forefront of the racialization of the present outbreak of Ebola. When the Liberian national was hospitalized and later succumbed to Ebola, the conservative media whipped up an unprecedented hysteria about the possibilities of an Ebola outbreak in the United States. (This patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, has since passed away). Within this hysteria, there are questions in the media whether this virus could go airborne. Some readers will remember that the possibility of the airborne transmission of Ebola was the theme of the film Outbreak that was produced by Hollywood. What has not been in the public domain is the fact that it was the US government that from 1962 to 1973 carried out a biological and chemical weapon experimentation project called Project 112.


This was specifically conducted so that those who were being experimented with did not know that they were guinea pigs. In 2000 when US television network CBS made known the existence of this biological warfare program, it was also revealed that apart from testing on individuals in the USA there were tests carried out in countries where “The US Department of Defense (DoD) conducted testing of agents in other countries that were considered too unethical to perform within the continental United States.”

PROJECT BIOSHIELD


We are yet to know which African societies were considered ripe for the testing of toxins by the US Department of Defense. After the anthrax scare in the USA in 2001 and the war against the people of Iraq in 2003, the US Congress passed the Project Bioshield Act in 2004 calling for U.S. $5 billion for purchasing vaccines that would be used in the event of a bioterrorist attack. There has been a ten-year program to put money into the same forces that were experimenting with dual use pathogens. In the words of the Congress, Project Bioshield was a ten-year program to acquire medical countermeasures to biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear agents for civilian use. The US government has been working on countermeasures against biological warfare. Is it by accident that the top three threats that the Bioshield program is meant to defend the citizens of the US from are Anthrax, Ebola and Bird Flu?

AFRICA AND BIOTERRORISM

Africans have faced bioterrorism from the time of colonialism and apartheid and this is well documented in the book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Author Harriet Washington went into great details about the bioterrorism against black people. The Tuskegee experiment is now the most well-known case of using black bodies as guinea pigs for medical experimentation. The book on Hela Cells (Henrietta Lacks) is another devastating account of the use of black bodies. [11]

Harriet Washington placed chemical and biological warfare under the larger category of “bioterrorism,” which “employs chemical or biological agents such as microbes and poisons in the service of terrorism…weapons often consist of disease-causing organisms, usually microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, or derivatives from humans, animals or plants” [12] Another important aspect of biological warfare that Harriet Washington brings forth is the fact that it can be both direct and indirect when used against populations. In other words, chemical agents can be used to kill people directly by physically harming them with something such as nerve gas, or biological warfare can be used to pollute the environment in which someone lives in order to cut off their source of food (plants, livestock), water, or both.

Cuba is one society outside of Africa that has been forced to develop the medical and biosafety capabilities after the outbreak of Dengue fever in 1977. We now know from the new book, Back Channel to Cuba, that Henry Kissinger had organized a plan to ‘smash’ Cuba. [13] This was because Kissinger was angry about the Cuban intervention in Angola in 1975-1976 to beat back the racist South African incursion. Kissinger who had overseen the authorship of the National Security Memorandum 39 of 1969 which predicted that whites were destined to stay and rule in Southern Africa was upset that a small island committed to an alternative mode of economic organization could ruin his plans for Africa. It was reported in the recent New York Times article that in the discussions between Kissinger (then Secretary of State) and President Gerald Ford, Kissinger used “language about doing harm to Cuba that is pretty quintessentially aggressive.” [14]

The Cubans have exposed that the Dengue fever which broke out in Cuba in 1977 was linked to biological warfare by the US government. This has been corroborated by press reports from the United States. At that time the US government blocked efforts by the Cuban government to purchase fumigators and chemicals to control the Dengue spread. As a small island, Cuba has been able to develop quarantine measures but more importantly develop the scientific capacity to research the root of outbreaks such as Dengue.

AU AND ECOWAS MUST TAKE THE LEAD TO RESPOND TO THIS LETHAL VIRUS

In August the President of the US called the first US-Africa Summit in Washington. Although the Ebola pandemic was already killing more persons than the four episodes discussed in the website of the CDC, White House was not focused on the devastation that was being wrought on West Africa. In Africa, Ebola has exposed the porousness of the so-called borders. The AU has so far failed to take the lead in mobilizing to fight this pandemic. Does the African Union have in place any kind of bioshield preparation? At the time of the outbreak of the HIV AIDS pandemic it was significant that western pharmaceuticals placed their profits before human lives. It took the massive organizing of a grassroots movement such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) of South Africa to pressure the pharmaceuticals to allow for the production of generic drugs to treat AIDS patients in Africa. This TAC campaign influenced the cooperation between India, Brazil and South Africa which later merged into BRICS.

A similar grassroots mobilization is now needed in West Africa to break the slow and lackadaisical response of ECOWAS and the AU. ECOWAS has been able in the past to intervene in Liberia and Sierra Leone to bring peace. Collectively, ECOWAS and the AU possess the technical and medical capabilities to be more vigorous in response to Ebola. There is the mistaken perception abroad that Africa does not have the medical personnel to fight this epidemic. However, the ability to mobilize the resources in Africa for a more robust response depends on political will. Nigeria alone has over 40,000 doctors with thousands having experience in infectious diseases. 

In the economic warfare against Africa the medical profession of Africa was assaulted and there was a massive brain drain of African medical personnel to Europe and North America. African governments have been very clear about their objections to the wholesale migration of their physicians to rich countries. Despite these objections there are more than 10,000 international medical graduates from Africa in the USA and Western Europe. The US received more than 7,000 doctors from three countries: Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. Progressive Africans will have to mobilize for a change of course so that the AU and the United Nations can demilitarize the response to Ebola.

Already it has been demonstrated in Liberia that the pandemic can be contained. Nigeria and Senegal have been able to contain the virus. The western media has drawn attention the fact that Firestone Company in Liberia was able to contain and control the virus on its rubber plantation. [15] This author is no fan of Firestone. At the recent Empowered Africa Dialogue in Washington during August, workers at Firestone spoke of the low wage and exploitative working conditions on the rubber plantation. Thus this company cannot be held up as an example, but the important point is that Ebola can be controlled and there is no need for the pandemic to spin out of control. The Firestone story also demonstrates that the military is not needed to organize the medical and transport infrastructure to contain the escalation of the deaths.

This author has been critical of saviours from outside but this Ebola pandemic provides an opportunity for the true humanitarian doctors to separate themselves from the militarized response to the Ebola outbreak. The African Union must take the lead so that those medical responders can find a non-military infrastructure to work with. There is the need for full-scale mobilization in all of the countries where health workers, traditional doctors, scientists, civilian agencies and the military will be crucial in the fight against bio-economic warfare. Global health experts have declared the Ebola epidemic ravaging West Africa an international health emergency that requires a coordinated global approach.

Although the media has racialized the Ebola pandemic, there is an urgent need for the international community to come together for this coordinated global approach. The Ebola virus presented a real challenge to Africa and the deployment of scientists, community health workers, volunteers and health brigades to combat this virus is one of the most important tasks of reconstruction in Africa.


Horace G. Campbell, a veteran
Pan Africanist is a Professor of African American Studies and Political
Science at Syracuse University. He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013. 


Notes.


[1] Evan Horowitz, “How the Ebola Virus Spun Out of Control,” Boston Globe, October 8, 2014. http://tinyurl.com/n7azj76


[2] C. J. Peters, J. W. LeDuc, “An Introduction to Ebola: The Virus
and the Disease,” The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Vol. 179,
Supplement 1. Ebola: The Virus and the Disease (Feb., 1999), pp. ix-xvi


[3] Outbreaks Chronology: Ebola Virus Disease, CDC, Known Cases and Outbreaks of Ebola Virus Disease, in Chronological Order: http://tinyurl.com/nrzolre


[4] See Centers for Disease Control, “Known Cases and Outbreaks of Ebola Virus Disease, in Chronological Order:” http://tinyurl.com/nrzolre


[5] Richard Preston, The HotZone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus,” Anchor books, 1995.


[6] Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic, February, 1994 http://tinyurl.com/lyx89cd


[7] Helen E. Pruitt, Stephen F. Burgess: South Africa’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2005


[8] Edgar J. DaSilva,” Biological warfare, bioterrorism, biodefence
and the biological and toxin weapons convention,” Electronic Journal of
Biotechnology,Volume 2, No 3, December 1999. See also Wright, S. (1985).
“The military and the new biology. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
41:10-16.


[9] “Estimating the Future Number of Cases in the Ebola Epidemic—Liberia and Sierra Leone, 2014–2015,” http://tinyurl.com/puh8tev


[10] Sreeram Chaulia, “Viral Politics, Foreign Pulse, October 8, 2014.” http://tinyurl.com/nrarcl2


[11] Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Broadway Books, New York 2011


[12] Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of
Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the
Present, Anchor Books, New York 2008 page 365


[13] William M. Leo Grande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba,
University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2014.


[14] Frances Robles, “Kissinger Drew Up Plans to Attack Cuba, Records Show,” New York Times, September 30, 2014 http://tinyurl.com/pzurfx7


[15] National Public Radio, “Firestone Did What Governments Have Not: Stopped Ebola In Its Tracks.” http://tinyurl.com/m8vqcov

War-Ebola-Environment-Health

It makes you wonder what the real agenda is when something so simple as "refraining from war" can really help impact the environment thus keeping people healthier and stronger so that their immune systems can do what it's supposed to do.

If you look at the countries hit hardest by this disease, you can see they have had periods of war and devastation. Classically Liberia and the Congo both have been ravished. Imagine the psychological impact and then the health impact. The weakening of the immune system can be catalyzed by simple stressors, not to mention war, killings, rapes, bombing, destruction of infrastructure etc.

I would imagine that a comparable outcome is to be expected in the middle east.  In addition to the obvious results of war, the long term effects that manifest as extreme psychosis and paranoia, birth defects, destabilization of habitable areas, farms and livestock being destroyed, and the wounded in need of emergency hospital care. Not to mention the bodies (and body parts) that need to be discarded as they too can cause an outbreak of some virulent disease. Couple that with the amount of fossil fuels used to  deploy these munitions and the amount of toxic smoke emitted after these munitions have been deployed. Are we looking at other forms of respiratory diseases in folks on the ground, the ones who survive?

On and on we can state the many consequences of war and then we could equate the impact on the health of the world... and not even by being a scientist, or doctor, or nurse, just someone with a bit of common sense and introspection. Again, it really makes you wonder what the agenda is, for we are certain that our so-called leaders are not that ignorant. I am sure they have at some point in their lives experienced some type of illness and its impact on their health, if from nothing more than a simple allergy.

No, they are not ignorant, they are not stupid, and they are not unable to see. It is by choice that they turn their heads away from the fact that they have blood on their hands from the present catastrophic decisions they have made over the lives of others, thousands of miles away. Undoubtedly, they will play with their toys and weapons of mass destruction in the air, on the ground and through their military prowess, and refuse to connect the dots. The agenda is almost unspeakable. The outcome is quite certain. And they are doing the bidding of the Overlords who control them.

People will die in numbers and this will fulfill the contract that has been made.

We can speak on this for days and more days to come, but until an awakening happens in the hearts and minds of those who pass the legislation for endless war... we will remain in this cycle of destruction till all is lost. There will be no safe haven for anyone.... I believe that is one point that is sorely missed as the ink dries on another imposition of hegemony and imperial hubris.

What's Behind the Ebola Crises and are U.S. Americans at Risk? http://ow.ly/CfIOq

 What's Behind the Ebola Crises and are U.S. Americans at Risk?

In an interview with Telesur's The Global African, Johns Hopkins Infectious Disease Program co-director Taha E. Taha discusses the roots of the Ebola crisis and what can be done about it. Courtesy of Telesur -   2 hours ago

NB Commentary "Ebola outbreak: call to send in military to west Africa to help curb epidemic"

Medical workers of the John F Kennedy hospital of Monrovia
show the aprons they have been wearing during a strike.
Photograph: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images

It seems that the militarization and military dominance of the Western World Powers are in full swing. Of course they experiment first on the least able to resist their control and then move towards the higher stakes.

There are many fields of conquest taking place at this moment, a sign that the steady plan by plan operations do not work reminiscent of how at the end of the battle all the ammo that is left is hoisted upon  the enemy. Western powers are losing their dominion over the world, economically, politically and spiritually. There desire for a New World Order by culling the masses has become exposed for all to see. As a result, they have found the need to resort to even more treacherous strategies. Ebola is bio-chemical warfare, hence the need for boots on the ground. They care not who they endanger as those wearing the boots are just as expendable as those who are affected by this virus.

Read Full Guardian Article Here

Ebola outbreak: call to send in military to west Africa to help curb epidemic

The design of worldwide population reduction is in full swing and they are now testing one of the deadliest man-made virus in recent history. When the initial outbreak occurred the loss of life was not astronomical. Now they have gotten to a people on the African continent who were already broken and now even more so, hence their inability to fight the infection. The human's immune system can be render useless with varying conditions of stress, strife, struggle, heart break, wars and various other events that happen in the life of human beings on this planet.

From my point of view, it is quite clear that the propaganda campaign that has been launched against the virus and the African people is a clear indicator that this disease has been set loose on the African populations. We must also look at the natural resources in the areas hit hardest by the outbreak and connect the dots.

Western Powers are plummeting into the depths of despair. Economically, politically and spiritually they are losing control over the masses as seen by the many protests against their governments. Their economies are collapsing as we speak and once the great Euro-American Empires collapse all those entrenched in their way of life will collapse as well. It will go down in the annals of time as the True and Unequivocal fall of man. 

Africans who have lusted after the Western Way of Life, have forsaken their ancient values for Capitalism. Once a beacon in the world for Community and support for family and traditional institutions; Africa's Leaders have become Westernized in their climb to the so-called top of the ladder. They are finding out slowly but surely that the Euro-Americans and their schemes for advancement cannot be trusted. 

While the "Obama Trojan" horse was set loose on

unknowing masses of Blacks in Africa, the Black leaders are lining their pockets with promises of riches, Western riches.... Ignoring their own profitability in their home grown resources as well as ingenuity. Euro-American Powers want to trump the advancement of China into Africa. This is a war on many fronts and all not done with weapons of mass destruction as they have been deployed in the past.

It is an insidious, creeping into the very fiber of the African being, a scraping away of all ethical and community connections; a masking of a great cancer that has rendered Africans in their quest for acknowledgement and acceptance by the beast who colonized it in the first place.

We are definitely living in some seriously trying times as wars wage across the planet. Our host Mother Earth has seen nothing like this before in her history, as we are much more populated and given to warring with each other than ever before.

Is there any hope? I am not too sure of that. In my opinion, attempting to gather together a Union of African countries numbering 50+ (as some countries have seceded and formed additional countries on the continent) the division among African people as a whole is daunting. Where are the true African leaders who will  or can bridge the gap? Qaddafi is gone along with so many others. Where are the true leaders of the African people who have the vision to see that their dependence on Euro-American assistance is a death knell?

I believe that Africans swallowed the Euro-American belief systems, religious, economic and political. These systems are antithesis to what ancient traditional Africa stood for. It flies in the face of the Ancient Ancestral traditions. It is a divide and conquer mechanism that has destroyed the very "immune" system of the Continental African. Ebola is just a sign of a deeper and more shattering phenomenon. Africa is infected with Western ideology, and as a result, Africa will fall ill with its disease and suffer a great loss until the cure is discovered. What is the cure? 

Sankofa! 

Self Reliance! 

Deporting any and all Euro-American ideology in all its forms. Taking back its true nature from the vulture who consumed it. 

Until then, Africa will drown in the sinking ship of Western Imperialism.

Fear of The Unknown Is Creating Hysteria In Every Part of Our Lives

by Marco Torres
Prevent Disease

Fear of The Unknown Is Creating Hysteria In Every Part of Our Lives And It's Becoming Accepted As The Norm

Being afraid of the unknown is not a new concept. From birth to death we've been trained to fear everything for a very long time. The dangers of modern life have a stranglehold on people’s imaginations. Sociologists call the phenomenon a risk society, describing cultures increasingly preoccupied with threats to safety, both real and perceived, but most definitely imagined. Most institutions today, whether they be academic, medical, religious, government and all others, would not exist in the way, shape or form they do today if it were not for the element of fear. The Earth you see before you today and the Earth of the future will be at a distinct contrast when it comes to how afraid we are of the unknown. Many of you see it coming already.

It's why wars exist. It's why modern medicine exists. It's why politics exists. It's why laws exist. We fear everything, so we must naturally attempt to control or prevent what we fear most. A majority of people will agree that the world is more dangerous than ever before. Even in the face of evidence that negates this misperception, there is no relief. We lock our doors, say our prayers, marvel at our own pessimism and then wonder why we still can’t get to sleep. We are immersed in a culture of fear.

Neurolinguistic programming, emulating psychosis, television, advertising, the illusion of terrorism and several other remarkable concepts affect every facet of our lives and our world at the expense of our health, safety and security.

If there is a disease, we must develop a vaccine or drug. If there is a terrorist, we must develop anti-terrorist measures. If there are criminals, we must create laws. If there are bullies, we must create anti-bullying policies. It is our nature. It is human nature. Well at least when it comes to modern humans.

Try and access any social media platform on the internet without getting bombarded by a fearful audience. It's impossible. People are scared of everything. So they criticize, argue, belittle, antagonize and resort to ad hominem attacks that focus on the character of others because they cannot fathom a truth which is not their own. It's a protective measure to guard against the unknown.

What Does Fear Do To Us?
        

Fear keeps us focused on the past and constantly worried about the future. It creates desperation and indecision that paralyzes our logic, thinking and actions. We can't live freely because we can't stop living in fear.

People who are fearful are very hesitant to explore new concepts or embrace other possibilities. You can always estimate the level of a person's fear by how they explore new surroundings and inspect objects around them. This ultimately affects our personality and how other behavioral traits affect our physiology including what kind of impacts these traits have on our overall health and life span.

There is an international consortium of scientists who are working aggressively to find ways to control fear in both the public and military. Is this the answer to our fearful ways? Certainly not as the initiatives themselves stem from fear.

Fear is tearing our society apart. In the past, fear has engendered solidarity, but today it throws wedges between all of humanity. This isolation, in turn, renders the public ever more fearful. What’s more, media outlets, politicians, modern medicine and businesses all have learned to capitalize on this distinctly modern sense of dread, and thus profit from finding ways to cultivate it. Until we find a way to resist fear, we’ll live at the mercy of these emotional entrepreneurs--and in doing so, be party to the personal, cultural, and political consequences.

Much of our concept of ourselves and our attitudes as individuals in control of our destinies underpins much of our reality or what we think about our existence.

A Negative Attitude Is The Basis of Cyclical Fears   

When people retain negative attitudes about anything that disagrees with their own version of reality, they are more likely to experience a continued sense of fear than people whose attitudes are less negative. Physiological markers such as heart rate and anticipatory anxiety always increase when measurements are taken in people whose attitudes remain negative.

Some of these attitudes are often based on a powerful association between a fear and a negative feeling that is so strong, that many people can't see or even think about the fear without experiencing that automatic negative reaction. For example, many people around the world devoted to their religion absolutely fear atheists. They refuse to relate to their position. They will not even conceive the right of atheists to their own opinions and feel extremely threatened by any content promoting the principles of atheism. The same can be true if we reverse the two roles. Neither position will ever advance the other if each can only think negatively about the other. This creates self-righteousness, divisions of superiority and of course ignorance.

Negative reactions to the unknown instills a sense of weakness in our character, specifically a lack of strength in our own convictions. When people have the need to strongly chastise others for their opinions and information they present, it shows a genuine deficit of attributes related to confidence about our own belief systems, morals and values.

Those who have confidence in their doctrines do not have to identify all those things they dislike so much in others or attempt to magnify those flaws to please their own conscience. In essence, they feel they must right-fight to support their own belief system since in their minds, a competing system must be incorrect.

Modern Fear Is Viral
 

What’s unique about 21st-century fear is how people experience fear. Since the 1980s, society at large has bolted frantically from one panic to the next. Fear of crime reduced us to wrecks, but before long we were also howling about deadly diseases, drug abusers, online pedophiles, avian flu, ebola, teens gone wild, mad cows, anthrax, immigrants, environmental collapse, and--let us not forget--terrorists.

“There isn’t a single fear that defines our era,” says sociologist Frank Furedi, author of Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation and Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right. “What we have is a more promiscuous, pluralistic form of fearing. The very important implication to this is that while my parents feared together, you and I have a more isolated, private experience. We fear on our own.”

Our brains are poorly equipped to weigh risks that don’t result in immediate negative consequences. Marketers, politicians, and entertainers grasp with precision how brains misfire, and they apply this knowledge to great gain. Few can doubt how well fearmongering has worked for pharmaceutical companies who use the fear of disease to sell drugs and vaccines by the billions.

As networks battle for ratings and newspapers grasp at disappearing readers, the urge to lead with sensational stories grows. The gap between the reported and the commonplace skews our subconscious stockpile of reference points, while hunger for the next big story inevitably broadens our catalog of things that go bump in the night.

It's Time To Abandon Fear To Change This World

People need not abandon fear altogether. Our ability to judge risk is sophisticated, and instinctual decisions often serve us well. But when something doesn’t quite seem to sync up, gut to head, then it’s time to pause and at least question what’s causing the discrepancy.

The new Earth will see people working to reduce or eliminate fear like never before. If you have a fear, first understand the nature of the object that arouses it. Let us say you are afraid of your future. What you really fear is the uncertainty that surrounds events yet to happen. By living totally in the present and by planning ahead you can reduce the uncertainty and fear. You cannot plan for all uncertainties but being prepared to an extent reduces your fear of uncertainties. Learn the art of enjoying it, too.  


The psychological programming inside you, your subconscious mind, should change before any real change can happen. Your subconscious mind comprises engrams -- mental traces that have been created over life experiences. These consist of both positive and negative associations and act like computer programmes. So long as the programming remains the same, the computer will function only in the manner dictated by that programme.   

Similarly, we have to change the programming of our mind. Wise thinking leads to discrimination of the good and the bad. When you have changed your programming, you start perceiving and acting positively. So it is wise thinking that holds the key to a positive frame of mind.

Once people start thinking this way, it’s impossible to stop: Every television program, every advertisement, every stump speech that hangs its hat on scare tactics will be thrown into acute relief. That is where we are headed. We are all eventually going to give up allowing fears to define us, and focus instead on which ones are worth tackling together. When we do that, we won’t just free politicians from fear-inducing rhetoric or stymie fearmongering marketers; but we'll also give ourselves some much-needed relief.

Reprinted from article by Marco Torres
Prevent Disease