SOON ALL VITAMINS, HERBS, SUPPLEMENTS and DRUGS WILL BE AVAILABLE THROUGH DOCTOR'S ONLY!!! YOU BETTER STOCK UP NOW!!!

Our right to choose our vitamin, mineral and other supplements may end in June of this year (2005). 

After that, U.S. supplements will be defined and controlled by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). 

It is called the CODEX ALIMENTARIUS (food code) and it is setting the supplement standards for all countries in the WTO. CODEX met secretly in November, 2004 and finalized Step 8 (the final stage) to begin implementation in June, 2005, severely restricting the use and availability of numerous vitamins, minerals and other supplements. 

The U.S. president and congress agreed to the takeover when the WTO treaty was signed, therefore these supplement standards WILL BE ENFORCED BY THE WTO AND WILL OVERRIDE US LAWS. CODEX violations are/will be punished by WTO trade sanctions. 

CODEX Includes: 

No supplement can be sold for preventive or therapeutic use. Any potency higher than RDA (recommended daily allowance, aka minimal strength) is a drug requiring a prescription and must be produced by drug companies. Over 5000 safe items now in health stores will be banned, terminating health stores as we now know them. CODEX regulations become binding internationally. New supplements are banned unless given very expensive CODEX testing and approval. CODEX now applies to Norway and Germany, among others, where: Zinc tablets rose from $4 per bottle to $52. Echinacea (an ancient immune-enhancement herb) rose from $14 to $153. Both examples above are now allowed by prescription only. They are now drugs. Vitamin C above 200mg? Banned for over-the-counter. Sold as a prescription drug only. Niacin above 32 mg? Banned for over-the-counter. Sold as a prescription drug only. Bitamin B6 above 4 mg? Banned for over-the-counter. Sold as a prescription drug only. Same for Amino Acids like arginine, lysine, carnitine, etc. Same for the Omega Essential Fatty Acids and many more supplements including DMEA, DHEA, CoQ10, MSM, beta-carotene, etc. 

The CODEX rules are not based on real science. They were made by a few people meeting in secret (see web sites below); not necessarily scientists. In 1993 the FDA and drug companies tried to put all supplements under restriction and prescription, but over 4 million Americans told congress and the president to protect their freedom of choice on health supplements. The DSHEA law was passed in 1994 which does so, but this will be overruled by CODEX and the WTO. 

Virtually nothing about it has been in the media. What the drug corporations have failed to do through congress, they have gotten by sneak attack through CODEX with the help of a silent media. 

So, what can be done at this late hour? 

Spread the word as much as possible. 

Inform yourselves fully at www.ahha.org and www.iahf.com and www.illiance-natural-health.orgOppose bills S.722 and H.R.3377. These support the CODEX restrictions with US laws, changing the DSHEA law. 

Support H.R.1146 which would restore the sovereignty of the US Constitution over CODEX, etc.

- Larry Kramer -

Today in History

Twenty-five years ago today, HAARP caused its first earthquake.

Best Ad Campaign for Prosthetic Penis
Soon to be Offered on eBay

Tom Sizemore's failed drug test using an artificial dong. And allow me to point out that the most depressing thing about this incident is that it's Sizemore that's being held up to ridicule instead of judge Antonio Baretto. Why does anyone give a fuck whether some actor is doing speed?

Alternate headlines: Saving Ryan's Privates, Take the Schlong Way Home, Heidi's Salami, Cheater Banana, Too Bad He Didn't Fill it with Chicken Soup.

Film I Want to See

Alien vs. Creditor

Important Political Action of the Week

Use this card (downloadable PDF)

More PDFs

"The National Security Archive today posted the widely-debated, but previously unavailable, January 25, 2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice - the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration. The document was central to debates in the 9/11 hearings over the Bush administration's policies and actions on terrorism before September 11, 2001. Clarke's memo requests an immediate meeting of the National Security Council's Principals Committee to discuss broad strategies for combating al-Qaeda by giving counterterrorism aid to the Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, expanding the counterterrorism budget and responding to the U.S.S. Cole attack. Despite Clarke's request, there was no Principals Committee meeting on al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001."

Some wacko who actually thinks that eating good food and taking good medicine is good for you has posted Secret Sources for Healing Foods and Natural Medicines That Can Save Your Life.

Cruel Juxtaposition of the Week

What a decade has done to Tanya Harding.
(Nancy Kerrigan probably doesn't look so hot either)

Quiz of the Week

See if you can find something that you and everyone you know desperately need in this list of programs eliminated or cut in the 2006 Bush budget.

Gallery of the Week

Don't Take My Word For It

"Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat."
- Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes -

"My goal is to be the best damned Pope there ever was. I want to bring the 'fun,' 'mental,' and 'dog' back to fundamentalist dogma. I want everyone to see that there's more to Catholicism than firing a heretic out of a canonization. I want to make Vatican City the biggest non-stop 24/7 party scene on God's glorious and most excellent earth. I want to convert the heathens and pagans or at least dance naked with them. I want to spread God's word like I spread Hellmann's Mayonnaise on Wonder Bread. I want to wear the hat and funky robes. And much like the lyrics from that old Cheap Trick song, I want you to want me. Oh, and I'm also currently unemployed and could use the work."
- Avery For Pope - He's Pope-A-Licious -

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
- Albert Einstein -

"Last Wednesday was Groundhog Day and also the State of the Union Address. It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a hideous little creature of marginal intelligence for prognostication. The other involves a groundhog."
- dave m -

"As melon scratchers go, that's a honeydoodle."
- Ned Flanders -

"There's no doubt that the drug companies are after one thing only: profit. And they seem to be willing to trade anything for it: ethics, safety, honesty, humanity, compassion... you name it. As long as there's money to be made, they're the first in line, regardless of the tactics. This behavior even makes Enron look good. After all, Enron was a fiasco, but at least in the end it was only money, not lives at stake. But with Big Pharma, it's both."
- Drug companies allegedly defraud state Medicaid programs with 54,000% markups -

"Everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is."
- G. I. Gurdjieff -

    "When best-selling author Ann Coulter arrived at Charles Coughlin College in Lynchville, Illinois, Ceci Lawrence was shocked. 'She looked so different from her photos,' the 22-year old co-ed marveled. 'She had these long, bony fingers, and her skin was all stretched and thin like rice paper, and I remember thinking during her speech: she looks like a talking kite.' It was then that Ceci and several of her sorority sisters resolved to do something for their distinguished visitor.
    "'We decided to have a blood drive,' Ceci said, 'So that Ann could renew the unholy forces which animate her flesh by bathing in the blood of the innocent. Let’s face it — she travels all the time and that’s got to play havoc with any sort of rigorous beauty regimen. After all, the average human body only contains six quarts of blood, so you can imagine how many virgins it would take to fill up even one of those crappy little tubs at the Ramada Inn. I mean, come on — she can’t just keep dropping by Townhall.com and draining Ben Shapiro for a pint — he’s starting to look bleached.'"
- Scott C: Ann Coulter's Beauty Secret - CONSERVATIVE VIRGINS DONATE BLOOD FOR COULTER'S BATH -

"Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
- Dr. Martin Luther King -

"I have no other wish than a close fusion with nature and I desire no other fate than to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws." 
- Claude Monet -

"Things turn out the best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out."
- John Wooden -

    "In the prosperous decades after World War II, the nation found too many Americans still without access to decent housing, education and economic opportunity. Later, from President Johnson's declaration of a war on poverty in 1964 to the expansion of federal anti-poverty programs under presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, a national consensus emerged supporting the federal government's power and duty to alleviate disenfranchisement and powerlessness in our poorest urban and rural areas. Even President Reagan, a conservative hero, expanded block grants.
    "The programs Bush intends to cut enjoy bipartisan support in Congress: Conservatives often favor block grants, which allow local governments to set their own agenda to fight poverty. Federal officials have suggested that the cuts are intended to hold local governments 'more accountable.' The Department of Housing and Urban Development already conditions grants on oversight and meeting exacting standards.
    "Even more perverse, the president himself has called the country's attention to causes that his own budget abandons. His State of the Union address admirably underscored the fight against gang violence. But the organizations that struggle to do what Bush called 'giving young people, especially young men in our cities, better options than apathy, or gangs, or jail' rely on block grant funds."
- Eric Garcetti: Bush's Budget Transforms the War on Poverty Into a War on the Poor -

"The seeds of joy and freedom are buried deep in our consciousness. If we do not water these seeds, peace will never be obtained. We run away from ourselves because we do not want to touch our pain, suffering, anger, or despair. In today's society, everything encourages us to run away from ourselves and look outside for happiness. So it is important for us to learn to embrace our pain, anger, and fear in a very tender way, to accept them, and to make our peace with them. The energy of mindfulness will help us. When we do this, a transformation takes place and we touch the deep peace, joy, and stability that are within us."
- Thich Nhat Hanh  -

"My interest is in the future, because I'm going to spend the rest of my life there."
- Charles F. Kettering -

"By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd be grown up."
- Eve Babitz -

"A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time."
- Alfred E. Wiggam -

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
- Mohandas Gandhi -

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it."
- Chinese proverb -

"There are two ways of spreading light - to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
- Edith Wharton -

"Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they shall never cease to be amused."
- Jesus H. Christ -

"In 2018, Social Security will begin paying out more money than it takes in. This is what Dennis Hastert calls the 'crisis point.' But the entire federal government is paying out more money than it takes in right now. Indeed this has been the case for four years, thanks to GOP tax-and-spending policies, and it will continue. Why is it that a modest deficit in Social Security that won't begin for over a decade requires immediate radical action, while a vastly greater overall federal deficit occurring right now doesn't?"
- Paul Glastris: Political Animal -

"This is the most prestigious award Del Monte gives."
- Kent Brockman -

    "Do you want to base your security in old age on a program engineered at the same time as the Model A and the vacuum-tube radio? Has work changed much since the era when slopping pigs for Auntie Em was a typical job? Does the boundary between state and individual look different now that the USSR has gone from progressive polestar to oppressive flop? Has American finance advanced from the decades when the only choices for ordinary savers were the passbook, the mason jar, or the mattress? Are the retirement goals of Americans still the same as in the days when the Bambino retired? Or is it time for Social Security to enjoy a major-league update?
    "The answer, I think, is obvious. Nothing but a government welfare program could ever last this long in unimproved form. Our transportation networks, our medical services, our economy are all light-years better than they were in 1935. So why are we still stuck with a gramophone/Hupmobile/fountain pen system of public pensions?"
- Karl Zinsmeister: Bird's Eye (Depressingly enough, the most persuasive argument FOR Social Security reform you'll ever see, and, yeah, mandatory reading) -

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."
- Henri Cartier-Bresson -

    "An Antioch kindergarten teacher has earned $15.6 million for modeling work he did 19 years ago in a photo shoot he'd forgotten all about that created a world-famous label he never saw for a coffee he never drank.
    "The coffee was instant Taster's Choice, and for years Russell Christoff was the man on the label in a red sweater, smiling as he took a satisfying whiff from the cup of Joe in his hand. He posed for the photo in 1986, and he says that after getting paid $250 for two hours of work he never gave the shoot another thought, believing it was a bust."
- Kevin Fagan: Average Joe instant millionaire Teacher in Antioch wins $15.6 million for '86 photo shoot -

    "Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI's 'most wanted list' as the World's foremost terrorist.
   "While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America's war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI - operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has - since the Soviet-Afghan war - supported international terrorism through its covert operations.
   "In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad - featured by the Bush Administration as 'a threat to America' - is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organizations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
   "In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Administration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity."
- Michel Chossudovsky: Who Is Osama Bin Laden? -

"There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness."
- Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy -

"The characters in movies do not always do what we would do. Sometimes they make choices that offend us. That is their right. It is our right to disagree with them. It is not our right, however, to destroy for others the experience of being as surprised by those choices as we were."
- Roger Ebert: Critics have no right to play spoiler -

    "At issue is whether it is possible, and in what ways it could be possible, to reconcile two important social values one value being the importance of equal dignity and treatment for all citizens, and the other being the importance of marriage as a vital, pro-child social institution. From the perspective of marriage and the marriage movement, the current controversy over equal marriage rights for same-sex couples is the most important social policy debate of our generation. It is also an issue on which we in the marriage movement currently hold divergent views.
   "The issues in this marriage law crisis are not simple. They are also frequently emotional and divisive, in part because they touch upon core social, religious, and personal values, and in part because they concern the very existence of a fundamental social institution.
    "The challenge for us in the marriage movement is to model and help to lead a deeper national conversation on possible solutions a conversation that is civil and democratic, that emphasizes first the well-being of children, and that aims toward the renewal of marriage in the United States. We in the marriage movement do not shrink from this challenge. We embrace it."
- What Next for the Marriage Movement? (The most persuasive argument FOR marriage you'll ever read so, yeah, I guess it's mandatory too) -

"J.D. Guckert (aka Jeff Gannon) of Talon News service recently announced his retirement under a cloud of controversy regarding his ownership of a web site dedicated to the sexual exploitation of Iraq war amputees (www.militarystumplovers.com). Other sites registered to him include http://www.meninburkas.com/,
http://www.desertfux.com/, and
http://www.meetmeatabugraib.com/."
- Jeff Crook's Strangely Believable but Untrue Fact of the Day -

    "What does it take to bring a turnaround in social consciousness - from being a racist to being in favor of racial equality, from being in favor of Bush's tax program to being against it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it? We desperately want an answer, because we know that the future of the human race depends on a radical change in social consciousness.
   "It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy psychological experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at ourselves and to talk to our friends. We then see, though it is unsettling, that we were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness - embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.
   "This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas. It is so simple a thought that it is easily overlooked as we search, desperate in the face of war and apparently immovable power in ruthless hands, for some magical formula, some secret strategy to bring peace and justice to the land and to the world."
- Howard Zinn: Changing Minds, One at a Time -

"In California, Los Angeles moves inexorably toward San Francisco at 3.5 cm per year."
- Edna Devore: Teach Evolution: Leave No Child Behind -

    "Now that it's safe to bet that world military expenditures in 2005 will exceed one trillion dollars (that's one with 12 zeros or $1,000,000,000,000) and possibly even more with Black Budgets, the world is sure to grow increasingly more chaotic . Small poor countries feel more threatened than ever by neighboring countries with bigger weapons. Some of these smaller countries spend more on military and weapons than on health care, education, and other social services combined. The United States government's military spending accounts for almost 50% of the world's total military spending, more than all other countries combined. The United States' largest national export is weapons, and the weapons corporations sell to anyone anywhere that has cash. Weapons Corporations, like International Money Lenders, have no allegiance to their own countries. Eighty percent of their weapons are sold to non-democratic regimes around the world. In many cases these US-made weapons are used on American soldiers in subsequent conflicts. The United States is not the only one in the weapons game. Russia, China, Europe and other countries are also selling weapons to the highest bidder and in many cases sell to both sides of a conflict.
    "The U.S. government is exporting what the Pentagon calls 'security' around the World and is, at any given time, training soldiers in over 70 countries. One of the best known of these training programs is the Pentagon's International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). Soldiers in these US training programs come from warring countries and countries with the most horrific human rights abuses on record, including Indonesia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Congo, Columbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries inside what Thomas Barnett, author of 'The Pentagon's New Map' calls THE GAP. Thomas Barnett goes on to say that the US is selling security in the 'GAP' and the 'GAP' is measured in 'billable hours.' 'Security' is the new buzz word for the 'military industrial complex' and has increased 80% since the fall of the Soviet Union, making war a big money-maker for the multi-national corporations. This has been dubbed 'a permanent war economy.' Barnett says that if you give him any pissed-off 18-, or 19-year-old American kid who likes to play video games, he will show you the soldier of tomorrow.
    "In 2002 James Glaser stumbled across the VFW web page section for eligibility and, to his surprise, found 67 places on the globe where America has been at war in some way since after WW II. Antiwar.com and Lew Rockwell state that we have engaged the enemy 23 times since 1945, but the Congress of the United States put that number at 67."
- Randy Atkins: Arsenal of Hypocrisy -

"It's been revealed the soldier is not John Adam as Al Mujahadeen had claimed but an American-made action figure named Special Ops Copy... Despite the revelation, the insurgents are holding fast and have threatened to not only kill their hostage, but, 'Blow him up with firecrackers and put his face in Ken's butt.'"
- Jon Stewart: The Daily Show -

"It is especially important in this discussion to recognize the unity of the total process, from that first unimaginable moment of cosmic emergence through all its subsequent forms of expression until the present. This unbreakable bond of relatedness that makes of the whole, a universe, becomes increasingly apparent to scientific observation, although this bond ultimately escapes scientific formulation or understanding. In virtue of this relatedness, everything is intimately present to everything else in the universe. Nothing is completely itself without everything else. This relatedness is both spatial and temporal. However distant in space or time, the bond of unity is functionally there. The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself." 
- Thomas Berry -

    "The history is powerful: the story of the lies and massacres that accompanied our national expansion, first across the continent victimizing Native Americans, then overseas as we left death and destruction in our wake in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and especially the Philippines. The long occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the repeated dispatch of Marines into Central America, the deaths of millions of Koreans and Vietnamese, none of them resulting in democracy and liberty for those people.
   "Add to all that the toll of the American young, especially the poor, black and white, a toll measured not only by the corpses and the amputated limbs, but the damaged minds and corrupted sensibilities that result from war.
   "Those truths make their way, against all obstacles, and break down the credibility of the warmakers, juxtaposing what reality teaches against the rhetoric of inaugural addresses and White House briefings. The work of a movement is to enhance that learning, make clear the disconnect between the rhetoric of 'liberty' and the photo of a bloodied little girl, weeping."
- Howard Zinn: Changing Minds, One at a Time -

"We were right. I regret nothing."
- Timothy Leary -

Everything Else

Before you go to a sushi bar again, learn how to get the best possible experience by reading Advanced Sushi.

Two excellent articles about where I live, in between Joshua Tree and Desert Hot Springs.

This explanation of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, done in the style of the original film, is thought provoking and trippy.

Even trippier, view the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

Dean Friedman's song tells us what to expect from Four More Years.

You absolutely must read this before you ever take a Rorschach Test.

Cristo's website might make you want to wrap him.

Here's a very funny interview with Thomas Chong.

I can't believe you haven't already read A Valentine Carol.