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March 25, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:01
Edition 291 - Jon Rappoport

The views of US investigative journalist Jon Rappoport on news, the media, science andmedicine...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for returning to the show and for all of your nice emails and for keeping faith with me and this.
I'll be doing some shout-outs on this edition because we didn't do any on the last edition, so I shall be getting through as many emails as I can.
If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website theunexplained.tv and there you can either leave a donation for the show if you can, and if you have recently, you know who you are, and thank you very much indeed.
You can also follow another link on the website, theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, and that is how you can send me a message or a guest suggestion, anything you want.
Okay, guest on this edition, somebody very special who has made regular appearances on shows in America like Coast to Coast AM.
I first discovered him in the Art Bell days of that show.
A man called John Rappaport.
Described as an investigative journalist, but he's a man who is fascinating to listen to.
So we're just going to leap in with both feet and see how this one goes.
John Rappaport on this edition from the U.S. Okay, before we get to him, let's do some of your shout-outs here, some of the communications that you sent me.
Veronica says I'm a long-time listener right from the talk sport radio days.
Veronica, that's 12 years ago now, 13 this year.
I listen to your podcasts while I commute across London and also listen to your talk radio show.
Have you ever interviewed any representatives from the Flat Earth Society or anybody who subscribes to the theory?
I'm still trying to find somebody really good about this, Veronica, and work in progress.
I'll let you know.
John Chadwick, thank you for your guest suggestion, John.
Eric, wise words from Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music and the grand old Opry.
Keep up the excellent work and just know that no matter how far we've gone in our journey, there will always be new people to meet and new experiences to share.
Eric, very, very wise and thank you so much.
Martin Clark in Newark in the East Midlands, UK says, Martin, is this right?
You get motion sickness when you listen to the MP3s of this podcast.
If that is so, you've got to go to an audiologist and ask about that because that sounds like some kind of issue there, Martin.
And let me know what happens.
Favian from Toronto, Canada, listening at the moment on honeymoon in the Maldives.
Wow.
What a fabulous place that is.
And I'm very, very impressed that you've made time to listen to the podcast.
On your honeymoon, Favian.
I hope that's all going well.
John Harris in Birmingham, UK, wants a show about reverse speech.
The master of all of this, one of them anyway, is David Oates in Australia.
We had him on the radio show about two or three months ago, and we'll try and get him on the podcast.
Philip, from Liverpool, currently serving in the British Army.
Philip, thank you for your communication.
I'm sure I'm not going to pronounce this right, so forgive me, Gullin Senol Driesen.
I'm writing to you from Belgium.
I've recently started to listen to your podcast.
They are so intriguing.
Your voice is so calming.
Thank you, Gullin.
Is it Gullin or Gulin?
Let me know.
And, you know, we Brits, we always get these things wrong.
Jan Yakobovich suggesting Leslie Keene.
Thank you for that, Jan.
I'm already in touch with Leslie Keene and Leslie Keene's people.
So hopefully, Leslie Keen guest on this show soon.
Steve in Oregon, U.S. says, I've been listening to your shows for a while.
Recently, your show with Dark Waters fascinated me, especially since I had a frightening wager board experience when I was young.
Something very powerful took control of the board and didn't want to leave.
My God.
I fear that I exposed not only myself and friend, but also my mother who was in the house.
That's quite a story, Steve.
I hope you're okay now.
Andrew in Bristol, UK, great email and thank you.
Guradat in Mumbai, good to hear from you.
Charles Jacoby in Pennsylvania, USA says, want to thank you for the wonderful job you do with the unexplained.
I've only recently unearthed the wonderful world of the unexplained, and I truly appreciate you and what you do.
Charles, thank you.
I appreciate you for letting me know that.
And finally, Hubert, or maybe Hubert, in Zurich, depends on which part of Switzerland you're in, says I'm a new listener, and I enjoy listening to your interesting talks.
I discovered your podcast last year.
They helped me to cope with my situation.
Hubert in Zurich, Switzerland, or Hubert, thank you very much for being part of all of this.
And if you want to get in touch with me, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
You can go to the website theunexplained.tv and follow the message links from there.
Send me a guest suggestion.
Just tell me that you're there.
Shoot the breeze if you want to.
Let's get to the United States now, the East Coast thereof, and John Rapper Port.
John, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Good to be here.
John, I've been hearing you for years on various radio shows, mostly coast to coast AM in the States.
But the one thing I've never been able to do, even though I've always found you fascinating, is categorize you.
I cannot find, and that's good because the media likes to pigeonhole everybody.
I can't find a description for you, so you better give me one for yourself.
Well, I've been working since 1982 as a reporter, investigative reporter, freelance.
I started out by writing extensively for LA Weekly in Los Angeles, and then that spread out to other newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Europe, Spin Magazine, Stern, CBS Health Watch, in these times, other newspapers and magazines.
And then somewhere around 1986, 87, I decided that things that I wanted to cover were becoming more difficult to cover, even in the alternative press.
I wrote a book called AIDS Inc., Scandal of the Century in 1988.
It was published here in the U.S. and then eventually in the U.K. And from that point on, I was extensively involved in research on a number of subjects, deep politics,
health, medical fraud, the arts, culture, the importance of the individual in our world as opposed to the collective.
And then in 2001, I began my website, No More Fake News, and have been working on that site pretty much exclusively since then.
Now, that's going to be news to a lot of people, including me.
I didn't realize he'd been doing the No More Fake News site for this long, because as we both know, fake news is a phrase that has come into prominence since around about November last year when Mr. Trump got himself into the White House.
And now fake news is a phrase that we hear all the time.
Yeah.
Yes, I'm aware of that.
And you see, my experience up until the year 2001 when I started my website was that mainstream media were the purveyors of fake news.
I mean, it was obvious on many fronts, not only to me, but to many reporters.
Now, look, it's something that has dawned on many people, and I've worked in the mainstream all of my career, but I'm also doing this, which is outside the mainstream now.
And I'm an observer of this.
I've worked on news desks for 25 years, the better part of three decades, actually.
So I've seen it from all sides.
The idea of fake news and things being reflected in a way that is not exactly so, that is somewhat distorted, it seems to me that that only really got into our consciousness around the time of 9-11.
Am I right?
Well, I think that was a watershed moment, no question about it.
And also, of course, the internet did exist at that time in a less sophisticated state.
So you had many voices that were able to cover that event and many readers that were interested in hearing alternative explanations for what happened.
And so there was an explosion of consciousness that, well, wait a minute, this story isn't exactly the way it's being told.
And there are other factors that are being ignored by mainstream press or belittled as, quote, conspiracy theories.
Because, of course, before mainstream press decided to use this meme of fake news, it was all about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.
That was the former way that it was presented to the public.
And the problem is, isn't it, John, even now, if you come up with an alternative explanation for something that happens, the first phrase that people use to describe you is conspiracy theorists, because it's a nice, easy handle.
Yes.
Or they will call you a purveyor of fake news now.
So either one works for them because they believe that they own the territory.
It's very much a question of entitlement here at the ground level.
People have to understand.
Mainstream media news stakes out the territory and says, this is ours.
We own it.
And so anybody who says something outside of what we present is an intruder, is an invader.
And we don't like that.
We don't want that.
This is our turf.
And that's pretty much the attitude, to belittle anybody that tries to come in the door, whatever door it is, and present a different idea, a different point of view, and a different investigation.
One of the big things I would say that differentiates real investigative reporting on the Internet from investigative reporting in the mainstream press, which doesn't happen very often now at all, is that internet reporters or online reporters will actually try to solve an issue by researching it on their own.
They're not going to say, well, this kind of strange idea that I'm presenting here is backed up by the following authorities, A, B, C, D, E, F. Therefore, it has some kind of currency.
Instead, they're going to do the investigation themselves.
And that investigation can range over unlimited territory, doing interviews with dissident people, doing research in libraries online or physical libraries.
In my case, it would sometimes be a matter of searching out studies, medical studies that have been published that have been ignored by the mainstream.
In other words, the investigators are trying to solve a mystery or a problem or present their own findings.
That is not permitted in the mainstream.
I mean, I've had experience.
That is what we used to do, and I'm sorry to interrupt.
It is what we kind of used to do.
And it was what certainly the people who trained me, I was on one of the, they say, is the best journalism courses in this country in Cardiff in Wales, UK.
And the people who were part of that were people who were veterans.
And that is what we were trained to do.
We were trained to use what they used to call shoe leather and go and do the research.
Now, the problem is now, on the mainstream, it seems to me, and I'm very keen to get your thoughts about this, on the mainstream, there are no resources.
A, there are no resources to do stuff.
B, everything is owned by the same few organizations.
So you tend to get one view of everything, and that leads to uniformity.
It leads to consensus, even if the consensus is arguably wrong.
And the resourcing issue is very important, too.
But on the other side, all of these crusading people on the internet, laudable aims many of them have, but the problem is that some of them call themselves investigative journalists, but all they know is what they've read other people saying.
And sometimes they're plain wrong, sometimes they're ill-motivated.
So what is to separate people like you, John?
You've served your time, you've used the shoe leather, from those people?
Well, you have to have judgment.
you have to be able to reason and think through something.
So, for the reader of online news, it's a matter of bringing yourself up to speed on being able to differentiate between what appears to be investigative journalism and what actually is.
There's no simple formula for it, but there are certain clues.
For example, when there are no sources listed, when there is no basis.
I mean, you find this, sure, there's a lot of pretentious kind of journalism online because it's a fairly free territory.
You can start a blog and publish anything you want to.
So there's a downside and an upside to that.
One of the things is that somebody will base an entire article on somebody they claim is a source they spoke to, let's say in the FBI or a former FBI employee agent, who says that we've been spraying the sky with chemtrails for the last 40 years.
Now, the question is not, have the skies been sprayed?
The question is, that article, is that article reasonable and does it have any foundation?
And you pretty easily see, well, wait a minute, you know, I'm going to have to accept that this reporter talked to somebody in the FBI, I don't know who, knowledgeable person in the FBI, don't know why, and I'm just going to have to accept this, you know, without question.
Well, that doesn't fly.
It just doesn't.
You know, you have to be able to do that kind of thinking.
But in the mainstream now, most investigative reporting depends on getting somebody with some kind of a reputation to give you a dissenting point of view about an issue that the mainstream will not cover.
They will not cover that dissenting point of view.
Now, if as an investigative reporter in the mainstream, you can get some sort of recognized authority to say, no, this congressional committee or that parliamentary decision was based on a tissue of lies, and I'm going to show you exactly how that is so.
Well, now you've got a piece of so-called investigative reporting.
It isn't complete, but it depends upon your editor at whatever operation you're working for saying, okay, well, this is reasonable because you got somebody who is a member of parliament to say that this whole thing is based on a tissue of lies, so we're going to run with that story.
You know, there are many, many stories that I have covered and broken that had none of that.
What they had was information that had been researched or published.
Let's go back to medical, medical studies that were ignored by the mainstream, huge numbers of them in some cases.
And so I became the authority in writing the story.
That is verboten right now in the mainstream press.
I've had conversations with editors where they'll tell me off the record, hey, we can't allow you to become the authority of an investigative story.
We can't allow you to do, quote, original research.
All we're interested in is, can you give me a good quote from a recognized authority that dissents from what we would ordinarily publish?
Then maybe I would go with it.
Okay, so they're asking you to do their job for them.
In other words, you find somebody who will offer a dissenting view.
Your view is not what they want.
So you have to find the person to deliver to them?
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, because they are nervous, uncomfortable, whatever, with accepting that the reporter is the one who does the digging and finding.
They don't want that.
They want exactly what you just said.
They want a quick substitute.
Well, look, you come to your conclusion.
That's fine.
All right.
We're not going to publish any of that.
But you take that conclusion, and now you get me a quote from a, quote, recognized authority who says the same thing that you discovered.
And maybe then we've got a story.
But still, we're not going to publish what you found because you're not an authority.
Okay.
Well, over here, of course, you know, we have the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC.
And on those occasions when I have worked for the BBC, they are meticulous about a thing called balance.
If you have one view put across one side of a story, you have to find another side of the story, and then you have it balanced.
So goes the theory.
Surely, as long as you do that, you're doing the right thing, aren't you?
Well, you're doing the right thing as far as your editor is concerned, but it's a joke because what are you left with?
It's a model.
It's a pattern.
It's a machine.
Give me a quote from this side and get me a quote from the other side.
Okay, then what do we have?
We don't have a conclusion.
All we have is a kind of bland, neutral situation.
However, here's where the trick comes in.
Who do you quote first?
Depending on who that is, that's going to be the slant of the story.
And for example, I've had an editor tell me, we like the story, but we want you to rewrite it because that first guy that you quoted, that's not going to be the lead of the story.
We want you to take the second guy That you quoted and move him up in the story because that's the point of view that we want to feature in the article.
Well, you know, this is one of the reasons that I left mainstream reporting because it's a game.
It's just you're playing a game here.
And so, why is this being done?
Is it are these issues of ownership of the media?
Is it the individual journalists are afraid of saying anything out of line with what everybody else is saying just in case somebody goes to litigation against them?
What is the driver?
Well, both of those are drivers.
It's the people that own the media, and it's also the reporters.
See, what your listeners have to understand is in this day and age, we are far advanced down the line of knowledge about what the mainstream will permit to be published and what they won't permit to be published on a variety of subjects.
And reporters that have worked for a while in that atmosphere, they know what they can do and what they can't do.
They don't have to be told.
The editor doesn't have to chide them or say, no, you stepped over the line here.
The reporters all know.
And I can think of no better example than medical issues because I've done very deep research on that and have covered stories that are, you know, would fry your brain.
Well, nobody in the mainstream is going to publish that story.
And that is because, for one, medical advertising makes up a tremendous amount of revenue for newspapers and for broadcast journalism.
That's the ground-level reason.
On higher levels, it's because mainstream press in general is in partnership with mainstream medicine.
They are cooperators.
They move along the same lines.
They publish stories that are really very little more than public relations and propaganda.
And they are in that partnership, come hell or high water.
So if you violate that, you are not only not going to get published, but the editor from then on is going to look at you as a problem.
And maybe you're not going to have a job for very long.
Of course, one of the more innocuous aspects of this is that you are sometimes, as a journalist, a generalist in a specialist field.
So you are trying to make sense with medical stories, science stories, of things that you may not wholly understand.
But it's your job to understand them.
It's your job to make them palatable for other people.
Maybe some of this is just simply down to the fact that people will not use their own initiative anymore.
They will want to play it absolutely safe because, you know, number one, who wants to get sued and on the most basic level, who wants to be wrong?
Yes.
You know, there's a certain amount of truth to that, but it's a case-by-case issue.
Here's a story.
It's 2,000 words.
It explodes a holy concept in the church of modern medicine.
And I could give you many examples, but for example, I've written about a widespread diagnostic medical test called the antibody test, which many people are familiar with, and doctors use it these days to decide whether a patient is ill or is going to get ill.
Well, the truth of the matter is until 1985, a positive reading antibody test was generally an indicator that a person's immune system was in good shape.
Well, the antibodies swung into action.
They made a phone call to the rest of the immune system and said, hey, we've got an invader here.
Come on in and wipe them out.
And that was done.
1985, that was totally turned on its head without any reason or rationale.
Suddenly, and this promoted, of course, much more illness concepts, drugs to treat these so-called illnesses.
All of a sudden, the antibody test was used as an indicator that a person was either sick or he was going to get sick.
Well, this is fallacious science.
It's just baloney.
It's absolute scandal.
You try to sell that article to a mainstream news outlet.
It's impossible.
You can't.
You can't get in the door.
And many outlets will never let you in the door again once they look at that because you're now crumbling a whole pillar of the medical research establishment.
That'll never happen.
These editors and publishers, for the one reason, are worried about huge amounts of blowback.
They'll get a pharmaceutical company representative walking into their office the day after that story is published who will read them the Riot Act and say, look, we don't want those kinds of crazy stories that are fallacious in your outlet, or we're going to pull our advertising dollars.
And that's the end of that issue.
Well, isn't that just called defending your interests?
If the state of medical knowledge or the state of what we believe changes and you happen to be working in that sector, perhaps you're working with a pharma company, then you'll want to defend your interests just as a company that makes tractors or makes aeroplanes will want to defend their interest.
Of course.
Sure, you want to defend your interest, but suppose your interest is actually harmful to people.
Suppose your tractors explode.
You're still going to want to defend your interest.
You're still going to want to pretend that this is a rare occurrence, even though it's happening alarmingly in many places.
So defending your interest, while understandable, is a crime.
Let's just call it what it is.
If you're harming patients who are being told that they're ill and therefore they have to take a toxic medical drug when in fact they're not really ill, then yeah, you can defend that interest if you're a pharmaceutical company, but then you're a liar and a criminal and you ought to be in jail.
But isn't the problem with a lot of medical stuff?
And I've got a personal reason to say this.
I've had some medical issues recently and I've relied very much on the good guidance that I've had from my own doctor and from the hospital that I've been going backwards and forwards to.
But look, I'm a journalist.
I've been researching things and there are certain drugs that I've been given.
I've wanted to know what do these drugs mean?
What happens if they put you on them for a long period?
And to tell you the truth, I came out of it with a big headache.
I really didn't know what to believe because I'm reading all sorts of stuff from people who say I've had this experience, I've had that experience, researchers who say this, researchers who say that.
And you cease to believe what you read.
And at the end of the day, I threw my hands up and did the only thing that I think I can do.
And that is I'm trusting the professionals who are looking after me.
Well, that's your choice.
You know, I mean, good luck is all I can say.
Maybe it'll work out.
I hope it does.
Well, all right.
Where would I find, because I'm looking for, and we won't mention the specific drugs, we won't mention any of the specifics about this.
But if I'm looking for information and I'm trolling the internet and I want to see what researchers say and I want to see what users say, consumers say, what do I do?
Where do I go?
Well, I mean, there are obvious things you can do.
You use a search engine and you find published studies for one thing.
In some cases, you have to pay to read the whole study.
In other cases, you can read the abstract.
You can go to the physician's desk reference in the United States.
I don't know what the comparable text is in England.
And you can look at the adverse effects of the drug.
And you can read those and you can see what you think.
You know, you can find articles written about the drug.
And yes, you may find contrasting opinions and so forth.
But that in itself is rather instructive.
You're saying that I've been looking at the smoke and I should have been going down to the fire.
Maybe.
I don't know exactly what kind of research you did, but, you know, I take this as a clue.
If my doctor is saying to me, listen, I know what I'm talking about and you need this drug, and I have already researched that drug and I find that there is a tremendous amount of controversy about the drug in published studies, for example, but this doctor is acting like God.
A red flag goes up for me right away.
A red flag goes up immediately.
Why is he so absolutely sure on what basis?
I've had conversations with doctors, believe me, over the years because they've read my work and they're, how can you say?
And blah, blah, blah, blah.
I say, well, have you read this study?
Have you read that study?
Have you read this study?
Well, I've never heard of them.
Well, that's your problem.
I have.
I know what they say.
So what are you basing your authoritarian truth-telling on exactly?
Would you like to tell me?
And in most cases, they have nothing.
They really have nothing.
And what do you say to them when they say to you, where did you train in medicine, John?
I say, I didn't train anywhere, and yet I know more about this drug than you do.
What does that say about you?
I mean, I don't take a defensive stance.
I go on the attack.
That's my approach, and it always has been, because in the field that I operate in, where contrarian views are the views that I mostly come up with in my research, I'm going to get flack from people.
And the major impetus of that flack is, I'm the expert and I know everything and you're not and you know nothing.
So I don't sit still for that.
I never have and I never will.
And people after a while figure that out and they say, well, let's not talk to that guy.
Okay, we'll pick an easier target here because he's pretty thorny.
Yeah, I am because I don't like that approach.
I'll give you evidence.
You make up your mind.
That's fine.
But if you begin to pull rank on me, then you're going to get an earful.
Have any of the vested interests that you've talked about and hinted around tried to influence you, stop you?
No.
I've had a few emails over the years.
You know, let's say a major corporation, some PR flak will send me something saying, I read your article about so-and-so.
Are you aware that this and that and the other thing?
And I'll read what they wrote and look at it and see what I think.
But nobody has ever said, don't write this or you can't say that.
No, I've had no problems with that.
And I think part of the reason is that they see from what I'm saying that they're not going to deter me, or they see from the way that I'm saying it, that they're not going to deter me.
Now, you could find people who certainly would criticize things that I've written, but mostly they're just trying to attack me.
And I don't pay any attention to that, you know, because what is that worth?
We've got a saying over here.
I don't know if you have it there.
You know, they're trying to play the man, not the ball.
Exactly.
In logic, it's called the ad hominem argument.
You attack the man, not what he's saying.
Because, why?
Because what he's saying is too uncomfortable because it seems to be valid.
So we can't use that.
So we're just going to have to try to discredit the person himself.
So should we believe, let's look, and we'll move on to other matters in a moment.
But when we think about medical issues and we read, which I do avidly all the time, newspaper articles about new medical advances and guidance on various things, are you saying that we should not trust a lot of it?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
First of all, a lot of that is coming from pharmaceutical companies, medical research centers, university research centers, who all have a particular model of what modern medicine is all about, which they accept unquestioningly.
This information not only comes from those research centers, it comes from usually spokespeople.
And those spokespeople are told what to say by the researchers, and those spokespeople hand over information to reporters, and reporters print that information.
Sometimes the reporter will get back to the PR person and say, well, I'd like to get a quote or two from the researcher himself.
And the PR person will think, well, is this a trusted journalist?
Oh, yeah, we've read his stuff before.
Sure, I'll arrange that and I'll let you know.
Then the reporter talks to the researcher and he says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that's the quote in the article.
Most of this is completely untrustworthy, especially when they're talking about breakthroughs right around the corner, maybe possibly could be a new frontier and treatment, da-ba, ba-da-ba-ba-da-ba.
It's all public relations.
But isn't it part of the dialectic, if that's the word?
Isn't it part of the debate that, okay, they can put their latest breakthrough and the researchers behind it up for interview?
As journalists, we can report it as it is claimed that.
And you put it out there and you see it's like hoisting a flag.
You see who salutes it.
Maybe somebody's going to come back to you and say, those people are claiming this, but I can tell you, you've just said X. Here's Y. Well, I suppose, yeah, you could get some of that.
But if you look at the overwhelming majority of such hoistings of the flag, as you say, you will notice comparatively very, very rare occasions when a follow-up article is published saying, wait a minute, we have another point of view here.
That almost never happens.
The original hoisting of the flag is what flies, and that's it, until the next hoisting of the flag.
That's the practical fact of the matter.
That's the numbers.
I've followed this for years, and I've analyzed, you know, I don't know how many of these articles.
Scientists believe that they may have a new blah, blah, blah treatment for such and so and so and so okay all right let's see what they're talking about oh they're studying mice in the lab that's what they're talking about and admittedly mice are very far from humans so they haven't even done any human clinical trials yet and let's read a little further oh the mice in the lab they were specially genetically altered
to be vulnerable to some kind of a germ so that these genetically altered mice could be treated with the drug, which is the subject of the article, the breakthrough that's just right around the...
I mean, this is just baloney.
So you're saying that some of that research is faintly bogus because it is designed to get a particular result.
And when you design it to get a particular result, lo and behold, you get that result.
That's part of it, yes.
But the other part that I was talking about is just that it's grossly preliminary research when you drill down far enough.
Nothing has actually happened to provoke the comment, scientists believe a new breakthrough may be right around the corner.
Even by their own terms and their own research, they've just put their toe in the water.
They haven't even gotten to the point of actually giving this drug to a human to see what it does.
And yet, why are they touting this?
Well, they tout it because that's what they do, because it adds to their reputation and it gives credence to their...
if they're working for a pharmaceutical company, to the drug company, it might make their stock go up temporarily.
You know, there's all kinds of reasons they do that.
And the other thing that frustrates the public, if they have, which most of them don't, most members of the public, ordinary people don't have time to do this, unless they have a specific interest.
Now, a few years ago, my listeners know this, I acquired tinnitus ringing in the ears after an infection.
And it took me off the radio for a while and frightened me very, very much indeed, because I was staring down the barrel of, you know, a lot of bad news.
So I was looking for any information about breakthroughs in tinnitus.
And I keep reading about alleged breakthroughs that could actually deal with this issue once and for always.
And certainly over the last five, six years, there've been so many of these reports.
And I look for more information on those things, and you don't hear a damn thing.
You hear nothing.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It surfaces and it drops like a stone and you never hear about it again.
I've encountered this hundreds and hundreds of times.
It looks like we've got something here.
It's a phenomenal, it works in a different way, said Dr. So-and-so from the older treatments and blah, blah, blah.
And here's the giant blah.
And you go, wow, okay, so I want to really, you know, see what happens to this.
And then a year or two, three later, nothing.
Now it's something else that's brand new right around the corner and so on and so forth.
But I think you're hinting there's some kind of unhealthiness about all of this.
It's a little bit of, I hesitate to use the word conspiracy.
It's not the right one.
I wonder if it's just down to the fact that journalists have to fill column inches or airtime.
And so anything, anything that looks like a story, you're going to leap all over it.
Sure.
I mean, that's, part of the business of mainstream news no question about it you've got a certain amount of time to fill a certain amount of space to fill it's a pattern of how stories are done as a reporter with a modicum of intelligence after about a year in the business you can figure out that pattern and you can say oh look i've got one of these right here i just saw this little study over here.
Let me call that doctor, get a few quotes and this and that.
I got a story.
Great.
And that's the end of it.
The reporter doesn't even think about it again.
He just moves on to the next thing because he has to.
So on one level, yes, that's what's happening.
But from the point of view of, let's say, the pharmaceutical company who is doing the research, we're talking about quite something different because those people know that they've just stuck their toe in the water.
That's as far as it's gone.
And their PR people are the ones who are touting this potentially possible breakthrough in a press release.
And they are talking to reporters, and reporters are running with it.
So those people at the pharmaceutical company are completely aware that they are jumping the gun by a thousand miles.
They know that's what they do.
And is this, John, is this issue worse now?
You wouldn't be flagging it up if it wasn't, I suspect.
Is it worse now than it was when I first became a journalist?
Yeah, or when I became a journalist in 1982.
It's much worse.
It goes on all the time.
What is, you know, apart from journalists perhaps not being quite as prepared or not as willing to take risks or not being resourced properly, so they've got to leap all over press releases when they come in and not thoroughly investigate and interrogate those, you know, what more is happening, do you think?
Is there something more sinister than all of those things I've just said?
Oh, sure.
I mean, there's so many on so many different levels, but you have to take into account the question of harm.
If you start from there, you begin to understand a lot more about what is going on.
And what I mean, for example, is what is going to be the harm to people who believe false medical research that assigns a certain virus as the cause of a condition when there is no real evidence that the virus causes that condition.
But saying it often enough is going to result in the manufacture of a drug or several drugs, all of which are toxic, that are supposedly designed to treat the virus, and many people are going to be taking that drug.
Oh, now you're talking about harm.
Now you're talking about institutionalized harm, about a pattern that pervades the entire pharmaceutical industry and affects people.
And are you sure this isn't no more than, or isn't any more than just the process of learning?
We try something new, we discover it doesn't work, or it has the opposite effect to what we thought it.
I mean, that's the whole history of medical research, isn't it?
I mean, look, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, but it seems to me that that is the whole process of research.
It is thesis, antithesis, antithesis, and synthesis in the middle.
No, it's not.
Give you a couple of examples.
The Zika virus, when there was a purported outbreak of a condition of birth defect called microcephaly in Brazil a couple of years ago, suddenly there was a mass hysteria.
Babies are being born with smaller heads and brain damage.
More babies.
Okay, so I started to look into this and initially found that the numbers reported of these cases problematical.
There were different estimates and they weren't even close to each other.
But okay, let's start from there.
Almost immediately, the cause of this was said to be the Zika virus.
So I began to look into that.
What are the Brazilian researchers discovering?
Well, what they were discovering, without trying to talk for an hour about all the details, was in studying a certain number, several hundred cases confirmed of babies that had this birth defect, they said they were finding the presence of this Zika virus in about 10 to 20 percent of those cases.
The standard for proving that a virus causes a condition is that you find it in every case or at least an overwhelming percentage of cases, 80, 90 percent.
They're talking about 10 to 20 percent.
This is the reason to abandon that hypothesis completely at that point, unless you can come up with much greater percentages.
But that's not what they did.
They continued on, and they examined more cases, and once again, they found an incredibly weak correlation between the presence of the virus and the condition called microcephaly.
But that didn't stop them.
They just simply announced that they were finished with the research.
The issue was decided.
The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, climbed on board and began to promote the hysteria of becoming pregnant in certain countries, and women shouldn't travel to these countries because they had nailed down the virus as being present there, and the virus was the cause, and it was all fake science.
Totally fake science.
Not hypothesis thesis, let's see, progress is being made.
No.
On the basis of fake disease causation science, they pressed on and they are still pressing on.
Even with the worst studies being published, which I could describe to you, they are continuing to go.
And of course, they are going to have drugs.
They're developing a vaccine as we speak.
And they are going to foist this on people.
And let me just give You one more here.
On July 26, 2000, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the most prestigious journals in the world, Dr. Barbara Starfield, a revered public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, another revered institution, published a review called, Is U.S. Health Really the Best in the World?
And in that review, Dr. Starfield gave what she called a conservative estimate, and I've interviewed her, that in the United States, every year, the medical system kills 225,000 people.
If you extrapolate that out to 10 years, they kill 2.25 million people.
Now, I have found, since I became aware of that study or review, several other confirming studies published by different people, all mainstream researchers, not even fringe researchers.
And when I interviewed Dr. Starfield about a year or two before she died, I asked her, to your knowledge, has the federal government of the United States done anything to remedy this horrendous situation?
And she wrote me back, it was an email interview, capital N, capital O. Has the federal government ever approached you to act as a consultant to help them understand or remedy the situation?
Again, capital N, capital O. But there are many reasons why those things that you talked about with Dr. Starfield might have been happening, I would guess.
Just to put the alternative view here, the process of going to the doctor and getting treated, sometimes they'll think that you've got one thing and you might go months being investigated for one thing and being treated for that.
And then suddenly, because it is, a lot of it is in exact science and, you know, people present in different ways, they'll find later on that you've got another.
So we're trying to quantify something that in some ways is not quantifiable.
Incorrect.
What we're talking about here is an effect of a drug that kills you.
Now, let's say, let's take your scenario and let's say, okay, we diagnosed the patient with disease A and we gave him a drug for that.
Actually, we found out later he had disease B and we could have treated him with another drug.
But he died from the effects of the drug that was given for disease A. He didn't die because he had disease B and it was left untreated.
No, he died from the effects of a toxic drug given for disease A. If that drug hadn't been toxic, then he would have survived and perhaps we would have later diagnosed him with disease B. So that does not hold water.
I'm sorry.
We're talking about pharmaceutically correctly prescribed, correctly prescribed, FDA approved as safe and effective pharmaceuticals in the U.S. that kill people.
And I'm not even talking yet about the maiming figures, which are extraordinary and extensive, way beyond those numbers for deaths.
But what about the figures for how many people those drugs help?
Do you know those figures?
Yes, this has also been argued to me in the past.
Look, if you're going to try Let's say that I am a prince of medical bureaucrats, and somebody puts a report on my desk and says, we are saving the following number of people with medical drugs every year, isn't this wonderful?
And we are killing the following number of people every year with these medical drugs.
That's, oh, oh, oh, oh.
And I look at that.
So I can say several things.
I can say, well, that's really good because look how many more people we're saving than we're killing.
Or I can say, look, I don't care how many people we're saving.
If we're killing this many people, 2.25 million per decade, that's got to stop.
I don't care how many people we're saving.
It seems to me we ought to be able to stop that, or at least make an attempt to stop it at the federal level with a serious program, which is not happening.
To some extent, John, isn't what you're saying a bit dangerous?
Because an ordinary person hearing this might be tempted not to go and seek medical help when they really should.
And we must never advocate that people don't get the help that they need.
Otherwise, what do you do?
Listen, anything that anybody could say could be interpreted in some way that is non-optimal or even dangerous.
There's any number of things that you, Howard, could say or I could say that somebody would interpret as meaning that they should do something bad.
You know.
So if that is the standard, then I'm sorry.
I'm reporting what I have found and what other people have found.
Now, if you want a disclaimer, here's a disclaimer.
You, the listener, decide what you're going to do about your health.
Who you consult, who you allow to treat you, who you trust, who you don't trust.
It's your decision, not mine.
I am not telling you what to do.
I am presenting what I found, which I believe is catastrophic and tragic.
I mean, we can argue this one round in a circle, I guess, because I can always make it a circle at all.
Okay, well, I can always put back to you here.
I can always put back to you.
I can see that you have a different point of view than I do, but it's not a circle.
It's not a point of view.
I'm just trying to put the opposite side of this.
I mean, I am riveted by what you say, but I have to put the opposite view here, otherwise we're not balanced.
And in the UK, we have to do that.
So look, George.
Why?
Why do you have to mean you could have this show canceled if you didn't try to provide balance?
Is that what you're saying?
Not at all.
But somebody would come after you first.
No, not at all.
No one's going to come after me, but I've always kind of been schooled in this thing of one view equals another view.
Okay.
And so I hear what you say, and I find it very persuasive, I have to say.
But there is the other view of this that it's part of medical advance.
We can't know everything.
We will never get to the stage where we know everything.
All we know at the moment is the best that we can do.
Look, if you are, let's say that you, Howard, occupy a high position as a public health officer in America in a major agency like the Centers of Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health or the Food and Drug Administration.
I mean, you're a big shot, right?
And you are presented with the figures that I just gave you on medically caused death in America.
And you do your homework and you realize that this is true.
These figures are good.
Okay, now you have a couple of choices in front of you because you're a big shot.
You can try to do something about this because why wouldn't you?
Or you can ignore it and just move right along.
Now, knowing you from, I would say, the last 45 or so of talking to you, I know that you would try to do something.
You would.
But they don't.
They never have.
They don't even try to remedy the situation.
They know about it.
They understand it.
They're aware of it, as are the pharmaceutical executives and CEOs that keep turning out the drugs that kill these people.
But they don't do anything about it.
And what do you think should happen?
Well, what should happen is if I'm that person, I now call in a meeting of serious drug executives, other medical bureaucrats, doctors, and so on, armed with all my knowledge, and I say, okay, boys, here's a story.
You can prove to me that you're going to do something about this right away in terms of how you approve drugs as being safe when they're not safe, how you do studies on these drugs that claim that they're safe when they're not safe, because look how many people they're killing.
Or if you ignore this, I'm going to make it my life's work to give you a world of trouble like you've never seen before, like a prosecutor at the Department of Justice would give you if he was a holy crusader who had only one thing in mind, your destruction.
You have a choice.
I know you're aware of all these figures.
So if you think that killing 2.25 million people every decade is okay, that's fine.
You go right ahead.
We're going to bring you into court.
We're going to charge you with willful negligence at the least.
And we're going to expose all this information in court to the public, to the press.
But the lawyers are going to have a field day where something like that to happen.
The lawyers on both sides will make an awful lot of money and nobody be any of the wiser because all of the parameters on which those figures are based could be called into question.
Of course they could be.
Let that happen.
Let's bring it out there.
Let's let all the lawyers argue.
You're saying that that's going to obscure everything else.
I say it depends on who's doing the prosecution.
That's not a slam dunk, what you just said.
Yes, it's possible, and certainly mainstream press are going to do everything they can to obscure the truth of the situation.
Of course they will.
But that's the battle that we've joined.
That's what you do when you know something and it's killing lots of people.
You don't stand back and say, well, this whole thing is going to be obscured, so what's the difference?
Let's just forget about it and write it off to we're doing the best we can.
No.
The procedure of certifying drugs in the United States, which I'm sure is somewhat similar to that in England, is that the Food and Drug Administration looks at clinical trials of those drugs, and they decide on that basis whether the drug is safe and effective.
They are the only agency in America that can approve a drug for public use.
They are completely aware of these statistics because they had some of them up on their website until that page went away a year ago or so.
They're doing nothing.
So it needs more diligence and it needs somebody in government to say, okay, we're going to investigate these numbers because these numbers need investigating and we'll see where we go with that.
I mean, I understand what you're saying.
I think it's a very hard road that you're walking.
Well, sure.
I mean, you know, I've been aware of that since the beginning, but I like those roads.
I don't like those little highways where you go, well, I could do this, I could do that, so let me do this.
Let me write for this newspaper and this editor because it's all going to be comfortable.
I'll make good money and I'll have a nice little house and everything.
I've never wanted that.
It's not that I don't want a nice house.
It's just that I don't want to do it that way.
So I like those roads.
I've always liked those roads.
You were kind enough to give me an hour.
I don't think we have very much of that hour left.
One of the things you talk about, I mean, you talk about a lot of subjects and we've spent a lot of time on the medical issues.
I'm glad we did, is mind control.
Now, I'm fascinated by that because I have a feeling that we are moving into a world of consensus Where global media, all saying the same kind of stuff, pumping the same kind of music and advertising at you, seems to be doing that.
It seems to be subtly, on some level, manipulating people.
Is that what you're talking about when you talk about mind control?
Well, I'm talking about a number of different things, but that is certainly one of the major things that I'm talking about because I think that, by and large, information mind control, I would call it, is the biggest form, most extensive form of mind control on the planet.
And you have given the bare bones of that, which is the consensus that is produced by the mainstream press all over the planet.
It's quite extraordinary when you stop and think about it.
Here is an event, let's say event X, a catastrophic event.
Many strange facts begin to emerge, as well as public pronouncements by officials and so forth and so on.
And any reasonable person would say, well, you know, the conclusion that we should reach about who caused this event and why they caused it and how it actually happened, the details of how it happened, are really up for grabs here.
I mean, come on.
But yet, amazingly, as if in an echo chamber, a global echo chamber, the mainstream press outlets that dominate the news from one end of the planet to the other all agree on exactly what happened.
Unbelievable, but true.
And they do so time and time again to the point where that's what the public expects.
They don't even think about it for the most part.
Naturally, they're all going to agree.
What would we do if the, I don't know, the Times in London and the New York Times analyzed the same catastrophic event and came to radically different conclusions.
My God, my mind would explode.
Well, some of it's about resourcing, I think.
A lot of journalists now take the facts from the same wire copy.
And that's the problem, isn't it?
You know, it doesn't come from a primary source.
It's ripped off the wire.
So everybody kind of says the same thing.
If you're talking about news, and if you're talking about popular culture, then I worry very much for popular culture because there doesn't seem to me to be any great diversity in anything anymore.
I would agree.
I mean, you were asking me for my own views on things before.
There's one view for nothing.
Sure.
I would take the example of Hollywood, for instance.
The way that that industry has come to be run is mainly we have to produce several blockbusters within a certain amount of time, giant budget action movies with lots of explosions and tricks and special effects because we need that money to keep on going the way we want to go.
And everything else takes a back seat.
So that's what we're going to do.
And yeah, we'll make a few little movies and we'll hope that one of them maybe gets an Academy Award nomination and so forth, whatever.
But this is what we're really going to do.
And in the process, we're going to, you know, kind of present a point of view of some sort of a hero who against great odds triumphs and, you know, satisfy that impulse and desire on the part of the audience.
And maybe we've got to have a romantic component.
Okay, so let's throw together a script.
What do you got?
Let's see.
Let's see what we can do here.
And then you rewrite the script 57 times.
The original writer is no longer in the picture, or if he is, he can't even recognize the script.
You get a few A-list actors on board and your director, and you're off and running.
And that's popular culture.
It's empty, it's vapid, it has no content to speak of, and it generates giant business all over the world.
And who was it who decided that on television, most of the TV we now see is either about cooking or baking or talent shows?
Sure.
Or murder in America.
Crime shows, I mean, dominate the scene.
It's either crime or amateurs trying to sing their way to a million-dollar record contract, and that's about it.
That's about it.
That's about it.
It's deeply depressing, I find a great deal of it.
I have to tell you, John, I mean, we can agree on this.
I've got here, and I don't pay for television subscription apart from my very valuable license fee to the BBC, which is a fine broadcasting organisation.
But, you know, we all pay that in the UK.
I've got a choice of about 95 TV channels that are free to air here.
And many nights, unless there's a good drama on the BBC or I catch the BBC News, a lot of nights I watch no television.
And I watch no television because it's the same stuff everywhere.
It is.
Absolutely.
So on one level, it speaks to the decay of imagination of the people who put these things together.
You know, they're looking for lowest common denominators, basically.
And I've had some contact because I used to live in Los Angeles for 35 years and with people in the business and, you know, talk to them many, many times.
And that's kind of the attitude.
Okay, so what was successful?
Can we do something that looks like that?
Hopefully make a lot of money.
Here are the components of a screenplay.
This is what you have to do.
It's all pattern.
It's all kind of, you know, a machine.
And so it degrades the people who could be or maybe even are actual artists who would like to get into the business and soon discover that aside from very few people, it's not going to work for them because they're going to have to sacrifice everything that they're interested in and want to create in order to go for this lowest common denominator approach.
I mean, that's it.
What is going to sell?
What are the components?
And there used to be, when I was a kid, there was a certain amount of harmonization only in a very gentle way so if one network came out with bewitched the other network comes out with i dream of genie similar kinds of shows but these days it's all gone to the nth degree um and i know it's something that you talk about a lot and we don't have time to go into it um but i think it's it's something that is not getting the level of thought from ordinary people that it deserves and i guess they're all too you know everybody's too busy these days anyway and no one's got time to think about
this well the one thing that people can do is to just stop watching it i mean you know that may be a pie in the sky but if enough people stop watching this crap then uh something is going to happen because the advertisers are not going to be happy they're already not happy i can tell you that is that why we're seeing some media organizations in the u.s start to have financial problems we're starting to see the first uh signs of this aren't we i mean we don't have
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