Brain-Eating B.S.

They're coming to get you, Barbara...

By Infowars standards, vaccines that will "lobotomize" the population are old news; Jones & Co. have already returned to calling Obama "Barry Soetoro" and freaking about the tapwater. But we'll go over the issue, anyway, because I'm sure Jones will return to it at some point, throwing references to "lobotomy vaccines" and "lithium in the water" into his broadcasts as though they're well-established facts of life.

The "lobotomy vaccines", as you've probably guessed, don't actually exist. Jones is referring to the research of Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford professor who has been studying the effects of chronic stress on animals and humans for the past three decades. In 2003, he announced that he is conducting research to develop a "vaccine-like" form of genetic therapy that will, if effective, buffer people from the adverse health effects of stress. The idea is to deliver to the cortex genes that produce neuroprotective proteins, counteracting the stress response.

Sapolsky says he's doing this research because relaxation techniques, talk therapy, and drugs (which only mask the effects of stress, rather than relieving them) are not solving the problem. He admits that his treatment is still years away from the clinical-trial phase, but feels it's crucial for science to tackle stress head-on. After observing the behavior of wild baboons in Kenya, Sapolsky came to suspect that tolerating a rigid social hierarchy can greatly increase stress and its assorted ills, particularly if submission is drummed into us from a young age. (I'm sure Alex Jones would agree with that.)

Sapolsky's work was recently profiled in a Wired magazine online article by Jonah Leher. It was this article (or a recap in London's Daily Mail) that spurred Jones to raise the alarm about "brain-eating vaccines". Jones ignored the bulk of the Wired article, which dealt with the well-documented effects of chronic stress and the possible evils of subordination, and went straight for the "vaccinelike treatment". And rather than weighing the pros and cons of such a hypothetical treatment, he summarily decided it was just another New World Order attempt to make us stupid, submissive, and apathetic. He automatically assigned the worst possible motives to Sapolsky and his assistants: Scientific tyranny. Never mind that Sapolsky's dream of a stress treatment may never materialize. Never mind that it will not, in all likelihood, ever become mandatory even if it does reach the market someday.
I encourage you to look into Sapolsky's work for yourself before deciding it's part of some NWO zombification plan. I don't fully understand all the science behind it, but I do realize that stress treatment is not intended to render people passive, stupid, or emotionless. Nor will it nullify the fight-or-flight response. It will not disable or destroy any part of the brain, as lobotomies did.

Jonah Leher responded to the panic with an editorial, pointing out that the Daily Mail condensed, paraphrased, and sexed-up the details of the Wired article. This triggered "right-wing paranoia", and soon other media outlets were portraying Sapolsky as a mad scientist attempting to create a zombie army. Leher concludes his commentary in a nasty way, declaring, "Alex Jones is a liar".

Jones isn't lying. He's just not fully informed about the research, he's jumping to the worst conclusions without talking to any of the principal players like Sapolsky, and he's villifying a potentionally beneficial treatment that hasn't even been tested on humans yet (and won't be for years, according to Sapolsky himself).
Jones has challenged Leher to be interviewed on his show, to prove that Jones' "documented" assertions about Sapolsky's research and other NWO mind-control plots are wrong. If Leher accepts this challenge and is allowed to speak freely on the program, I think Jones' wildly hyperbolic statements about "brain-eating vaccines" will be shown to be the alarmist factoids that they are.

Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)

In an August 4th Infowars article, Paul Joseph Watson states that "major mental health professionals are already pushing for lithium to be introduced into water supplies as a means of mass medicating against 'mood disorders'". Scary sh**, right? Yes, it is - until you realize that the only "major mental health professionals" even suggesting lithium in the water amount to exactly four Japanese researchers and one flake in Vancouver. And the Japanese guys made their suggestion in the pages of a periodical that isn't even remotely peer-reviewed, Medical Hypotheses. As one blogger put it, this is where scientists go when they are drunk or bored. It is not a medical journal by any stretch of the imagination.
In their Medical Hypotheses article, the Japanese researchers cited their own study, supposedly showing minor correlations between natural lithium levels in water supplies and suicide rates, which could be interpreted to indicate that more lithium equals fewer suicides. These results were published in The British Journal of Psychiatry last year, but the authors didn't suggest adding lithium to drinking water at that time. For that, they had to turn to a non-scientific journal. The only other similar study was conducted in Texas in the early '70s.
The Japanese study was also cited by the Vancouver professor who believes it merits further research, and that this "further research" (which no one seems to be conducting) could merit experimental dosing of water supplies.
Aside from these five dudes (who are insane, IMO), no one else in the scientific community is seriously advocating the use of lithium in the water. No one. In fact, pretty much everyone except these five guys is in perfect agreement that adding potent psychoactive substances to drinking water is a very bad idea. For Watson and Jones to suggest otherwise is irresponsibly alarmist. This is just one more example of the media taking the results of a single study and running wild with them, hyping the news until it's so out of proportion it's barely recognizable as science anymore. Jones should be media-savvy enough to realize this.

Watson's article is absolutely bursting with misinformation like "lithium in the water". Examples:

- "The U.S. government has been forced to admit that childhood vaccines preserved with thimerosol have contributed to the explosion in autism cases in the United States." This is in reference to the 2008 Poling decision, handed down by the federal "vaccine court". The government paid damages to the parents of 9-year-old Hannah Poling, who claimed their daughter suffered neurological damage from a series of routine childhood inoculations. People who still believe - despite a complete absence of evidence - that mercury in the vaccine preservative thimerosol causes autism in children celebrated the Poling decision, and frequently point to it as definitive proof that autism is linked to vaccines. The problem with this conclusion is that Hannah Poling isn't autistic. She suffered neurological damage due to a brain disease (encephalopathy) brought about by a mitochondrial disorder. To date, there has been no research into a possible link between mitochondrial disorders and vaccines. This is why the vaccine court conceded the case without an evidentiary hearing. The Polings couldn't provide any evidence that vaccination caused their daughter's impairment, and the court couldn't provide any evidence that it didn't. In short, the government couldn't "admit" anything.
Furthermore, Watson's mention of thimerosol is completely out of line, because the Polings believed their daughter was injured not by the preservative in the vaccines, but by immunological overload from having too many vaccinations at once. (Never mind that the viral load in the smallpox vaccine alone was greater than all the current childhood vaccines put together, and that this didn't result in an autism explosion in the 1950s!)

- John Holdren (Obama's science czar) is still promoting the use of sterilants in drinking water to curb the population. Watson points to a 2006 article written by Holdren as evidence of this, but all the article shows us is that Holdren is still concerned (as are many people) about runaway population growth. Nowhere in the article does he advocate involuntary sterilization. Being concerned about overpopulation does not mean you are into eugenics, mass murder, or any of the other things Jones warns us the "elites" are into, even if you did express a few absurd ideas in the '70s. My own mother advocates zero population growth, but is not a eugenicist by any means. She and Holdren are from a generation that is highly concerned about the world's future.

Watson then quotes some of the comments that Infowars readers have made on the article itself, including a registered nurse who claims he/she is abandoning his/her profession because he/she disapproves of vaccination and water fluoridation. This person repeats the often-cited but never-verified assertion that the Nazis used fluoridated water to "make the Jews more docile". Watson also brought this up in his first Infowars article on "brain-eating vaccines".
I have been trying to trace this factoid to its source for over a year, and it leads only to dead ends. The most authorative source of the Nazi fluoride story was an anti-fluoridation crusader of the 1950s named Charles Perkins, who also declared (without providing any evidence at all) that water fluoridation was a Communist plot brought to the U.S. by Soviet brainwashers. Perkins did not give any source for his statement that the Nazis used water fluoridation in the concentration camps, and at any rate fluoride does not render people docile. (If it did, wouldn't crime rates have dramatically decreased since the introduction of fluoride to municipal water supplies?)

As error-riddled and alarmist as Watson's articles on the issue are, Jones' video on the "brain-eating vaccines" and "lithium in the water" is even less factual and even more fear-based. Jones states that articles in Time magazine, the New York Times, and "all the major medical journals" are promoting the idea of putting lithium in our water. This is not the case. Those periodicals were reporting the results of the Japanese study, not promoting adding drugs to the water. In fact, The New York Times and BBC articles both quoted Sophie Corlett, director of the British mental-health charity Mind, who warns against adding drugs to the water.