PZ retweeted
Every summer a patch of the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey goes dead, the fish and shrimp leave or suffocate, and the thing that killed it is the fertiliser running off the corn and soy fields of the Midwest that grow the protein on the plant-based label.
The Mississippi drains forty percent of the United States, and most of that is cropland: a hundred and eighty million acres of corn and soybeans, fed every spring with nitrogen and phosphorus from the bag because the soil under a monoculture has nothing of its own left to give. The rain takes it. It runs off the fields into the ditches, the ditches into the rivers, the rivers into the Gulf, and in the warm shallow water off Louisiana it does what fertiliser does: it grows a bloom of algae that dies, sinks and rots, and the rotting takes the oxygen out of the water from the bottom up. By July there is a layer along the seabed where nothing with gills can live. Six, seven, eight thousand square miles of it. The shrimp boats steam further out every year to find water that is breathing.
It has been measured every summer since 1985 and has never been fixed, because fixing it means putting less on the fields, and the fields are the economy. The plant-based industry's inputs are grown in exactly that basin: the soy for the burger, the pea for the milk, the corn for the syrup and the oil.
A cow on grass puts her fertiliser straight back on the field she took it from, in a form the soil holds, and the water off a pasture runs clear. The dead zone has never once been traced to a hill farm.
The shrimp that were there are the animal protein nobody put on the ledger. The soybeans are what replaced them.
PZ retweeted
In June 1965 a 27-year-old Scot weighing 456lb stopped eating, didn't start again for 382 days, and the fat he was carrying kept him alive for every one of them.
Angus Barbieri worked in his father's fish and chip shop in Tayport, across the Tay from Dundee. He had eaten his way past 32 stone. He checked himself into Maryfield Hospital for what his doctors intended as a short fast.
It went well. He felt fine. He asked to carry on.
The doctors agreed, warily, and let him go home, provided he came back in regularly for blood and urine tests. He lived on tea, coffee, sparkling water and vitamins. No food. A week became a month. A month became a season. The weight came off at about three-quarters of a pound a day. Day 100 came and went, then 200, then 300, with the hospital checking his blood every step and waiting for something to break.
Nothing did.
For long stretches his blood sugar sat at around 30mg per 100ml, about a third of normal, the kind of reading that has junior doctors reaching for a drip. He went about his days perfectly lucid.
On 11 July 1966 he sat down to his first meal in over a year: a boiled egg and a slice of bread with butter. He weighed 180lb, under 13 stone. He had lost 276lb, very nearly 20 stone, and it went into the Guinness Book of Records as the longest fast in history. Five years on he was still around 14 stone, and he lived until 1990. His doctors wrote him up in 1973 under the driest title in medicine: Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration.
His brain kept working the whole year, which is the part the textbooks of the day had no answer for.
In 1967, in Boston, George Cahill's team supplied one. They ran fine tubes into the blood vessels draining the brains of three obese patients five weeks into a fast and measured what the brain was burning. It had switched to ketones, made in the liver from body fat, as its main fuel. The organ every textbook said ran only on glucose was running on fat, and running happily.
So every thought Barbieri had that year was powered by the fat around his middle.
A human body carries months of fuel and a brain built to use it. It was shaped by two million years of hunts that came good one week and failed the next, and it treats an empty plate as an ordinary Tuesday.
Angus Barbieri had 382 of them.
PZ retweeted
No animal on this planet eats breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the only one told to is the one carrying 100,000 calories to the gym.
A male emperor penguin goes 115 days without food, standing on ice at minus 40, with an egg on his feet.
A grizzly bear goes six months without food, and gives birth halfway through.
A bull elephant seal goes three months without food, on a beach, fighting, and mating, and winning.
A sockeye salmon goes the whole river without food, from the day it tastes fresh water to a thousand miles upstream.
A Burmese python goes a year without food and comes out of it capable of eating a deer.
A wolf goes a fortnight without food, then eats twenty pounds in one sitting, then sleeps.
A humpback whale goes four months without food and crosses an ocean on the fat it banked in Alaska.
A camel goes a month without food and carries you across a desert while doing it.
Not one of them is light-headed. Not one of them has lost its muscle. Not one of them had a flapjack to keep the blood sugar up.
Every one of them runs on the same thing: fat, kept on the body, turned into fuel when the food stops, and a brain that switches to ketones the moment the stores run down.
You have the same machinery. You have more of it than the penguin.
You have been told it is dangerous to skip breakfast.
PZ retweeted
There is a mountain of unworn clothes in the driest desert on earth, large enough to be photographed from space. It grows by 39,000 tons a year and almost none of it will ever rot.
The Atacama, in northern Chile, is a place where it may not rain for a decade. On its edge is a duty-free port called Iquique. Every year about 59,000 tons of clothing arrives there from Europe, America and Asia. It is last season's stock that never sold, and the bags people leave at charity shops.
Dealers pick through it for anything they can resell across South America. Two thirds of it is worthless. Nobody will pay to ship it back out, so lorries drive it into the desert at night and tip it.
The local landfill refuses to take it. The reason given is that the clothing does not biodegrade and is full of chemicals. Most of it is polyester, which is plastic, and in a place with no rain and no soil life it will lie there for centuries. Some of it is set alight, and the smoke drifts over a town of 100,000 people.
In 2025 a Chilean court ruled that the dumps had done serious damage to the land.
For most of history this could not have happened. Clothes were wool, linen and leather. They were worn out, handed down and patched, and at the very end a rag merchant paid for the scraps. In Yorkshire, from 1813, old woollens were shredded and spun into new cloth. Anything left went on the fields, where wool breaks down in months and feeds the grass.
Nobody ever had to find a desert for worn-out wool. We invented a fabric that cannot die, and then we started making it to be thrown away.
PZ retweeted
Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,
My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov.
The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.
I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.
I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.
Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.
Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.
Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.
A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.
This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.
There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.
Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.
I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.
This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.
Three things would change the math overnight.
Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.
End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.
Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.
I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.
Respectfully,
Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit
PZ retweeted
Watch this and then understand:
The mere 5 day threshold for measuring side effects after the vaccine implies (based on what we know) that that was the longest period of time (5 days) they could stretch without having to report deaths or other serious side effects. Or else they would have included data through day 6 or beyond.
Also, if they have a bad reaction to a medicine, the study scientists frequently exclude that patient from the study rather than acknowledge the red flag.
This happened when young Maddy got severely injured right after a dose of Covid mRNA vaccine in the first study on kids.
PZ retweeted
Customer: Is the raw milk safe? The supermarket one's been pasteurised.
Farmer: Why do you think they pasteurise it?
Customer: To kill what's in it.
Farmer: So what's in it?
Customer: ...I'd assumed nothing.
Farmer: Their pint is a tanker's worth from dozens of farms, mixed. Nobody checks it for salmonella on the way in. They don't have to. The heat's the plan.
Customer: And yours?
Farmer: I've no heat. So mine's tested for salmonella, E. coli, listeria, the lot, and an inspector's in that parlour twice a year.
Customer: So yours has to be clean and theirs has to be cooked.
Farmer: Theirs gets a second chance. Mine isn't allowed to need one.
Customer: Which cow is it from?
Farmer: [looks across the yard] Third from the left. Mabel. She's seen you.
Customer: The carton at home just says "British".
Farmer: There are 7,000 dairy farms left in Britain. "British" narrows it down to all of them.
Customer: How long does it keep?
Farmer: A week, then it sours. You can make cheese with sour.
Customer: And the supermarket one?
Farmer: That doesn't sour. It was dead when it left. It just rots.
[He bought two litres. Mabel watched him to the car.]
PZ retweeted
What caused the repeal of the 1813 Act to Encourage Vaccination? Voluminous reports of iatrogenic injury and death.
What ended the efforts to vaccinate the Indian tribes in the 1830s? Voluminous reports of iatrogenic injury and death.
What brought about the dramatic decline in vaccine uptake following mandates on both sides of the Civil War? Voluminous reports of iatrogenic injury and death.
What prompted the passage of the Biologics Control Act of 1902? Voluminous reports of iatrogenic injury and death.
What prompted the pulling of the Swine Flu shot in 1976? Voluminous reports of iatrogenic injury and death.
PZ retweeted
Glyphosate is a pipe cleaner... It started as an industrial pipe cleaner, pulling rust and metal out of pipes. Someone spilled it on the ground and it killed everything it touched, and that's when it got rebranded as a weed killer.
Then came the real move. Modify the food plants so they wouldn't die when sprayed with it. That's how GMO seeds started, engineering crops to survive a chemical built to kill everything around it. Nobody stopped to ask whether we'd be eating that chemical ourselves. It's all over our food supply now.
This is a dark, demented company. My dad called them Monsatan back when I was in elementary school, and I've had a problem with them ever since.
PZ retweeted
🚨BREAKING: LARGEST EVER VAXXED VS. UNVAXXED STUDY DONE BY CHD FINDS VACCINATED CHILDREN HAD SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER ODDS OF MULTIPLE HEALTH CONDITIONS
CHD scientists analyzed medical records from 6,239 children — including 3,825 completely unvaccinated children.
Compared with unvaccinated children, vaccination before 13 months was associated with:
• 130% higher odds of recurrent strep throat
• 100% higher odds of recurrent ear infections
• 80% higher odds of rhinitis
• 60% higher odds of recurrent respiratory disease
And as the number of vaccine doses increased, the odds of several conditions increased.
“The largest such study was not conducted with millions of taxpayer dollars, HMO data and by decree from the NIH. It was done by a small, unyielding non-profit that had to stitch together medical databases,”
“Something is very wrong with our national priorities, and our children are suffering because of it.” —Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist and one of the study’s co-authors
PZ retweeted
When I was first assigned to cover some vaccine safety stories at CBS News around the 2002 time period, the crazy reality escaped me because it made so little sense.
But I eventually came to understand it to be true.
Vaccines not working?
Problem defined as: Blame people who aren't vaccinated.
Answer: Give everyone more vaccines.
Vaccines not preventing disease?
Problem defined as: Blame the people who aren't vaccinated.
Answer: Give everyone more vaccines and boosters, too.
Vaccines injure a vulnerable child?
Problem defined as: Crazy parents.
Answer: Controversialize and attack them; give everyone more vaccines.
No matter what happens, or what the question is, or what the danger is: the answer of the vaccine industry and their propagandists in the medical health establishment, media, and government is: More vaccines.
Is journalism making a comeback?
•4 vaccinated people in PA test positive for measles; health secretary pushes for vaccines
•4 fully vaccinated people in Pa. are sick with measles, including 1 in Lancaster County
•Pa. reports measles cases in 4 vaccinated residents. The rare breakthrough cases are less than 1% of the spreading outbreak
•676 measles cases reported in Pennsylvania, including 4 vaccinated people, health officials say
•Pennsylvania measles case: Four fully vaccinated people test positive, DOH says
•Measles outbreak has sickened 676 in Pa., including four fully vaccinated people
•52 new measles cases in Pennsylvania, 4 among vaccinated individuals
•4 vaccinated people contracted measles in Pennsylvania, health officials say
•FULL NEWS CONFERENCE: Four fully vaccinated Pennsylvanians test positive for measles, DOH says
•Pennsylvania reports measles cases in 4 vaccinated residents. These rare cases account for less than 1% of the spreading outbreak
PZ retweeted
On the topic of splitting up the MMR vaccine into 3 separate vaccines, everyone should know that in 2012, two Merck virologists came forward and explained that around 2005 when Merck sought to change the label on its MMR vaccine and approval for ProQuad (a combination MMR and varicella vaccine), it “falsely certified as having an efficacy rate that is significantly higher than it actually is.” (Complaint ¶ 1.)
As detailed in the whistleblower lawsuit, Merck obtained a license for its mumps vaccine in 1967. (Comp. ¶ 16.) In the late 1990s, to obtain approval for ProQuad and change the label on its MMR vaccine, Merck needed to reconfirm its claims of efficacy for its mumps vaccine made thirty years prior. (Comp.. ¶ 22.) Merck’s virologists working on testing the efficacy of the mumps vaccine revealed that after Merck could not demonstrate a 95% efficacy for its mumps vaccine, the results were simply fraudulently falsified to achieve this result. (Comp. ¶¶ 15-131.)
As explained by Merck’s virologists, Merck took blood samples pre-vaccinated with the mumps vaccine and then exposed them to the mumps virus. (Comp. ¶¶ 25-28.) When a test against a live strain of mumps would not yield a 95% efficacy, Merck tried to improperly obtain this rate using an attenuated strain of the mumps virus. (Comp. ¶¶ 29-30.) When this still would not achieve 95% efficacy, Merck tried different virus dilutions, different straining procedure, and even more liberal antibody counting techniques. (Comp. ¶¶ 31-32.) The Merck lab even improperly added animal antibodies to the blood samples and still could not achieve a 95% efficacy rate. (Comp. ¶¶ 33-39.)
When it was clear that even improper testing techniques could not produce the desired result, the test reports were simply falsified. (Comp. ¶¶ 40-51.) According to the Merck virologists, to document the desired efficacy rate, Merck destroyed result sheets and falsified various documents. (Id.) The Merck virologists claim this fraud was done with the direct authority and approval of Merck’s senior management. (Comp. ¶¶ 52-58.)
Now you know.
This may explain why outbreaks of mumps still regularly occur in highly vaccinated populations. See, e.g.:
cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/m…(317 cases; 89% had received at least 2 MMR doses); cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/m…(281 cases; high two-dose coverage among university-affiliated cases, with community spread); cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/m…(301 student cases; all patients with complications had received at least 2 doses); cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/m…(42 cases; all patients had ≥2 documented MMR doses; campus two-dose coverage exceeded 99%); cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtm…(29 cases; 76% had received the recommended 2 dose); cdc.gov/mumps/outbreaks/inde…(CDC: “experts aren’t sure why vaccinated people still get mumps…).
Complaint: icandecide.org/wp-content/up…
PZ retweeted
I want you all to read this post. The entire safety profile behind the hepatitis B vaccine given to newborns comes down to this. They did 3 clinical studies, 434 doses, 147 healthy infants and children up to age ten.
Whenever we show studies with 147 children, they are treated as far too small a sample to prove anything. There is no study this movement has ever shown you built on numbers that small, spanning infants to ten-year-olds. And yet that's the entire foundation for injecting a one day old baby.
Recombivax ran this study on its own product, not the FDA, not the CDC, and the group skewed toward children who look nothing like the newborn actually receiving the shot. Monitoring lasted five days after each dose. Five days. A death on day six, an allergy or autism a year later, none of it would ever show up in that window, which is exactly how the industry gets to say the studies found nothing.
There was no saline placebo, no control group to compare against. And even with all of that, a real injury rate of one in two hundred would have been completely invisible in a trial of only 147 children.
PZ retweeted
Before Big Pharma captured the press, vaccine injuries were openly covered on national TV.
I compiled 78 forgotten news segments that could never air today.
Watched together, they make it impossible to believe "safe and effective" ever meant what they said it did: midwesterndoctor.com/p/vacci…
PZ retweeted
In 1986, lawsuits were piling up against vaccine makers for the injuries they caused. Instead of forcing them to make safer products, Congress gave vaccine manufacturers PROTECTION from lawsuits!
That was a terrible mistake. Finally, after 40 years we have legislation to repeal that law.
SIGN THE PETITION to tell Congress to repeal the 1986 Act. Then share it.
vacsafety.org/petition-repea…
PZ retweeted
🔥WHOA: The truth about measles from @lawrie_dr
“When you talk about a measles outbreak, there are far more adverse reactions that are going to occur from vaccinating people with, we know now, dangerous vaccines like the MMR vaccine.”