Monthly Archive: March 2015

There are a lot of completely unfounded essentially fantasy conspiracy theories. That said there are of course real conspiracies, especially in the dimensions of personal interest.

This article proposes 8 interesting conspiracy theories. Some may hold little kernels of truth, and others are simply interesting ideas. You, the reader, are responsible from telling fact from fiction, and there’s still more truth than fiction in this text. Links are embedded to help, in certain instances, because after all: I don’t want to spread misinformation.

1. Wild conspiracy theories are designed and distributed by companies and governments to distract from real issues

Deep within the walls of the FBI, NSA, CIA, and in the cubicles of many multinational companies like BP, Exxonmobil, Dow chemical, and Newscorp (and others) sit men and women who are responsible for generating misinformation. The fact that uninformed and sometimes dangerously wrong information is listed at the top of Google searches (who are currently considering a change to a fact-based ranking system) is because keywords have been bought by vested interests intent to shift the debate to nonsense issues.

One of the most debunked images on the internet, yet this theory distracts from real environmental and social problems

2. The pharmaceutical industry promotes anti-vaccine misinformation to increase infection rates so they can raise vaccine and treatment prices as demand increases

The fact that vaccines have been so effective at stopping many human diseases has decreased demand and led to price competition between competing pharmaceutical companies. To increase profits across the board, misinformation was propagated via mass media and internet to synthetically polarize people into not vaccinating, allowing otherwise extinguished pathogens to reemerge, leading to an increased demand and funds to create a new vaccine.

3. The fact a child with a weak immune system can potentially get the contagion from a vaccine is deliberate (when using weakened, but still living versions of the pathogen), and the newest technology being ignored

Vaccines which use weakened forms of the actual pathogen have been deliberately kept in use to make more unvaccinated people sick, to help increase demand (as in theory 2). The newest technology, used only by a few labs (like one who created a multi-strain (multivalent) Ebola vaccine) are using it.

The newest technology, which uses characteristic surface proteins from target pathogens and puts them onto the surface of a harmless but “awakening” vector, leads to acquired immunity against threats the body did not even have to directly counter. It may also be possible to simply use synthetic cells (without DNA) using the same idea. To protect adjuvant makers and current production, this is being ignored.

4. The debate about GMOs is deliberately kept in center stage to protect current seed producers, who produce mutagenic seeds for organic and conventional agriculture.

This one is actually pretty much true. Both convention and organics share the same type of seeds: species created through cross-breeding and chemical or radiological mutation. What differentiates organic from conventional is simply how you grow them, but not where the seeds come from. Keeping the debate about GMOs prevents people from focusing the real problems in agriculture, like land and chemical use (if you didn’t know: organics are also allowed to use certain pesticides).

The anti-GMO films you have probably watched on YouTube were largely financed by these guys. They have a financial interest in preventing the discussion from actually going into detail about where conventional and organic seeds come from.

5. Real environmental issues are being ignored deliberately, focus is being put on social topics to distract from real issues.

Is it that people simply like discussions about popular cultural topics and famous people, or is it that this is being deliberately pushed to take time away from legitimate topics? Is it that people at the top know about impending biosphere collapse, and have decided to save only themselves while milking everyone around for everything they’ve got? How can 67-85 people control more money than half of the world’s population, and there exist no real list?

Aral sea due to water diversion

6. God was overthrown by the devil thousands of years ago, and our current understanding of God and lucifer is actually God banished from his own kingdom.

Not a big believer in this kind of stuff myself, but check out the story.

Having created the universe and the forces of nature and physics spanning over distances greater than the human mind can perceive, God became involved in the more cognitive aspects of existence, birthing 7th dimension planes of ideas accessible to every conscious life under the right conditions.

The forces of evil noticed that certain rules about psychic creatures allowed them to be turned into a belief or direction at will, with especially great odds of success when the belief played into the being’s fantasy . This “first fantasy force” held more power than later attempts to inform on the subject. God, knowing the infinite nature of reality and perception, was keen to allow conscious life to inform itself, to build theories to test and explore their surroundings. But the forces of evil wanted to gain as much control as possible and exploited this weakness, gaining more philosophical ground than God among the higher echelons of life capable of abstract thinking.

God was banished from the light, following the overthrow of harmony by misinformed militant arrogance. Those believing themselves to be following God fled from the light, and lived into the night. To this day, God remains the patron of the scientist, the truth-seeker, and the light-bearer, holding itself the name Lucifer (bringer of light).

7. Lobbyists pretend to be experts, while simply parroting corporate positions for money. They, and their supporters, control the outcome of political decisions.

Giving reports, advice, and gifts to politicians, as well as influencing policy and the interpretation or representation of facts, allows lobbyists to have a significant effect of US political decisions. Using the same tricks mentions in the God was switched theory (6), lobbyists manipulate representatives, regulators, and the public to push their agenda. This primarily entails support related to industrial growth and opposition to laws increasing environmental protection and regulation.

From Wikipedia

8. The FDA and EPA regulators are paid off to ignore and remain silent about serious problems.

It’s recently come out that the FDA remains silent about methodological and data based problems they find during audits or test sites. Records are kept, but only heavily redacted versions are accessible to the public or even congressional committees supposed to regulate these drugs.

Final Words

So, are you a good enough researcher to differentiate potential, fantasy, and fact within this text? In real life, you should treat every text as if it may have disinfo in it, and look up/into any facts you plan on citing.  Definitely read and look into every article you share. After all, none of us want to help propagate false information (here’s an article about 52 common myths).

The post 8 Interesting Conspiracy Theories You’ve Never Thought Of appeared first on Exposing The Truth.

Anne Glover

Studies linking genetically modified crops with adverse effects on the environment or animal health are based on “contested science”, according to a report by the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), which was supported by Anne Glover, the EU’s chief scientific advisor.

The report from EASAC, published in June 2013, warned of the “grave scientific, economic and social consequences of current European Union policy towards GM crops”, saying European countries should “rethink” their rejection of the technology.

The study came as a blow to environmentalists opposing GMOs as it received backing from the national science academies of all EU member states, plus Norway and Switzerland. Ironically, these same nations are often cited as examples of the “dangers of GMOs” since GE crops are more highly regulated in the EU.

This report has now received support from the EU’s chief scientific advisor, Anne Glover, who described it as “an authoritative, joint statement of the national science academies in the EU member states.”

“The conclusions of the report are based on the best possible evidence and I endorse its conclusions whole-heartedly,” Glover told EurActiv in an interview.

In Europe, countries that do not embrace GMOs “will face particular problems with the use of fertilisers, the availability of water and the degradation of soils,” the report warns, noting that improvements in farm yields for major crops have remained “limited or non-existent” in the past decade.

“Producing more food sustainably requires crops that make better use of limited resources including land, water and fertiliser,” which can be achieved through the exploitation of plant genetic resources, the report notes.

“But so long as EU policies on farming and the environment are out of alignment with the need to innovate, ambitions to improve agriculture will be thwarted,” it warns.

Contested science

More worrying for green campaigners, the report provides a resounding endorsement of scientific studies which concluded that GMOs were safe for the environment and human consumption.

“The scientific literature shows no compelling evidence to associate such crops, now cultivated worldwide for more than 15 years, with risks to the environment or with safety hazards for food,” the EASAC report states.

“Claims of adverse impacts have often been based on contested science,” it adds, saying that “some critics have falsely attributed the effects of a specific trait to the means used to introduce it to the plant”.

For example, the EASAC report says cultivating a GM crop with increased herbicide resistance may prove detrimental to the environment if the farmer over-uses that herbicide. “But the same would be true of herbicide resistance introduced by conventional breeding,” the report says.

“Any new tool or technology can have unintended and unwanted effects if used unwisely.”

Glover said she fully endorsed the EASAC statement. “There is no evidence that GM technologies are any riskier than conventional breeding technologies and this has been confirmed by thousands of research projects,” she told EurActiv.

“In my view consumers can believe in the overwhelming amount of evidence demonstrating that GM technology is not any riskier than conventional plant breeding technology. The EASAC Report is a major contribution to this debate as it reflects the view of Europe’s most eminent scientists.”

Séralini study ‘hopelessly flawed’

Still, recent scientific research has drawn attention to the long-term effects that GMOs might have on animal or human health.

A study by researchers at the University of Caen found that rats fed on Monsanto’s NK603 GM maize or exposed to the company’s top-selling Roundup weed killer were at higher risk of suffering tumours, multiple organ damage and premature death.

The research, led by biologist Gilles-Éric Séralini, reignited controversy over GM food in France, where the biotechnology is unpopular and growing of GM crops is banned.

The Caen researchers argued that their lifetime testing of rats were more pertinent than the 90-day feeding trials that form the basis of GM crop approvals, since three months is only the equivalent of early adulthood in rats.

But Glover dismissed the Séralini study for being “hopelessly flawed”, saying that dozens of independent reviews had challenged its conclusions. The study was more recently republished, but without actually repeating the experiment or incorporating the criticisms leading to its initial retraction.

“It’s simply bad science and the reputation of the journal that published it has suffered as a result,” she said, calling on the group of researchers to disclose their sources of funding for the sake of transparency.

EASAC study ‘90% non-industry funded’

EASAC also sought to placate green critics who claim that the majority of scientific studies on GMO safety are biased because they are carried out by researchers who are paid for by industrial lobby groups.

“We estimate that around 90% of the literature on which the conclusions of the report are based is on non-industry funded, peer-reviewed research,” said Sofie Vanthournout, head of the Brussels office of EASAC.

“In this specific case, extra care was taken in order to ensure that none of the experts had strong ties with industry, although a certain level of industry connections cannot be completely excluded,” she told EurActiv, saying the report included several peer-review rounds by external experts and scientific academies.

Yet, even the most convincing science seems powerless when the GMO debate enters the political realm. Public opinion surveys conducted by Eurobarometer and PEW survey and other polling agencies show a high level of distrust in GM crops, with a majority of consumers rejecting the technology.

The EASAC report acknowledged this, saying that “politicians – mindful of their electorates – may chose to ignore” scientific advice and invoke safeguard clauses to prohibit GMO cultivation.

But it also says public attitudes “are not immutable”. For instance, part of the suspicion surrounding GMOs is linked to the issue of intellectual property rights, with many people and farmers firmly rejecting the notion that living organisms can ever be patented.

However, EASDAC believes this is “a diminishing issue” because more intellectual property is now shared or licenced free for public use. “Although the first generation of GM products were the intellectual property of multi-nationals, more recent GM crop developments in Africa and elsewhere have often been publicly funded with support from international foundations and agencies,” it notes.

New plant breeding technologies

The EASAC report also draws attention to emerging grey areas in regulation. It says some crops obtained by new plant breeding techniques may be considered GMOs – and therefore banned for cultivation – even though they contain no foreign species in their genes.

Meanwhile, conventional and even organic crops can be developed by both chemical or radioactive mutagenesis. This affects far more genes, and in more unexpected ways, than targeted genetic modification (insertion, improvement, or RNAi).

“So one immediate consideration for EU regulators is to confirm that when plants do not contain foreign DNA, they do not fall within the scope of GMO legislation,” EASAC said. In the future, a more radical reform of GMO regulation should focus on a risk-benefit analysis rather than risk alone, it says.

Glover agreed, saying Europe should not miss the opportunities offered by emerging plant breeding technologies.

“We shouldn’t forget that there are also other promising novel plant breeding technologies, post-GM, and we shouldn’t make the mistake of regulating them to death as we have done with GM.”

Based on this article on EurActiv

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