I once read that Americans, for some reason, are especially prone to conspiracy theories. They have a love affair with them. What they failed to mention in the article though was that American history is rife with conspiracies, making it easy to believe in just another one in a long line of examples; those with money and power manipulating the world in their favor, lying and cheating and stealing to maintain their position of power and profit. I believe George Carlin said it best, "They try to make it seem like you are somehow out of the norm, that you are a kook, that you are a conspiracy buff. Do I believe in conspiracies, nah. Do I believe powerful people would get together and plan for certain outcomes, nah. Do I believe powerful interests would operate outside the law, maybe even kill people, nah. Do I believe secret government agencies might feel the need to assassinate a person and cover it up, nah. I think everything in America is open, clean, and above board and powerful people always play by the rules." Anyone familiar with Carlin knows he was using irony here and made it very clear that conspiracies are a part of everyday life in America. You would have to be a kook to not see it is really business as usual.

Thank you for another year helping us to keep up with and get better informed on autism, and vaccine/environmental injury.

I agree it's conspiracy in our government and other captured institutions, and it's corporate policy as Mr. Stone/Dr. Wakefield pointed out, and IMO it has become pervasive in all fundamentally important aspects of our lives. Here's a report on another aspect:

http://truthinmedia.com/judge-allows-usda-whistleblowers-claim-move-forward/

The only ideas I have for going forward are 1) perhaps looking for ways to stop supporting the multinational corporate conglomerates, i.e. be conscious of what we're voting for when we vote with our $$$, small as most day to day choices seem to be, 2) support consumer-funded watchdog groups that are trying to do what the government is supposed to do (provide government employees with some severely needed competition perhaps) and 3) perhaps support defunding and dismantling government bureaucracies, especially the ones outside of Constitutional purview (is that all of them?). Bureaucracies aren't accountable to voters who don't have much say in how they operate even though they are theoretically voter funded. In fact failure in government usually translates into more calls for more funding (and sometimes promises of lucrative work for some corporation when periods of public "service" end as we've seen)...so (even if there aren't national or possibly globally organized criminal groups willing to "suicide" healthcare providers, etc. who go against some policies...) there is much incentive to fail (not that there aren't many such as the above trying to do their jobs, but we see how they are treated for their efforts...).

My alternative to 3), so maybe this is idea 4) is to get angels into public office, starting at local levels perhaps, and then also provide an army of angels willing to take bullets for the elected angels with them...something like that. Most of us have gotten ourselves a life-long full-time obligation to care for some of society's most angelic angels...so that one is tough to propose (particularly without hypocrisy on my part ... I don't see myself as someone who could even consider giving public service, if the idea didn't make me sick to the stomach, but I do see value in the early American? Colonial? cultural view that civil service is a civic duty--not a career opportunity).

Dan,

The photo is great and so is all that you do for our kids. Never give up!

Hurray Dan,
Great job. I wonder if any of the politicians will be able to take this information and run with it.

Vaccinations are crimes against humanity, pure and simple. Crimes which exceed in scale the holocaust of WWII and are conducted with premeditation by medical-pharma mafia supported by the criminal regime's bureaucrats. For now the only way to avoid being killed or maimed by vaccinations is to stay away from all vaccines, as none is safe. Massive public resistance against forced vaccinations is necessary for survival of American nation. However, there is no hope anymore for normal development of US, as soon the majority of young generations will be autistic or maimed otherwise by vaccines.

Thank you Dan! It doesn't get much better than this. When I'm here on the planet "Age of Autism" I am with extraordinary people. Too many to list by name, but they are here today.

A quote from the eulogy for Bobby Kenendy--

"who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

I think this is who we are and will continue to be as long as it takes.

The Force is With Us

Once a newspaper editor that I had sent lots of information to wrote me like this:

"You have a lot of claims about vaccine safety and autism, but what you're talking about is a conspiracy involving the government regulators, the medical community, and the vaccine makers, and there's just too much oversight for that to ever happen."

I should have told him that the main reason all the lies and cover-up continues is because members of the press refuse to do their job. They take the industry's side every time. They are too scared, ignorant, lazy or corrupt to honestly and thoroughly coverage this issue. They report on vaccine safety like PR people for the vaccine makers. None of this could have happened is the media were honest. Someday soon they'll be sharing the blame with all those responsible for a generation of sick and disabled Americans.

Anne Dachel, Media

Well said. Thank you!

The passive conspiracy as described in the book "When Teams Work Best" (LaFasto/Larson):

The Passive Conspiracy
Often, teams engage in a passive conspiracy to avoid confronting the root cause of their dysfunction. By "conspiracy" we do not mean to imply that something overtly heinous is going on. Instead, an implicit and unspoken agreement emerges as a norm for the group. The implicit agreement may be to accept a condition as it is rather than to talk about it openly and address it directly. Even if the condition is one that affects the team's performance in a major way, ways are found around the problem.

There is some research that suggests that problems in organizations are seldom approached in a problem-solving or collaborative manner. Other ways of handling the problem predominate. People ignore the problem Or they create activities and structures that maintain the illusion the problem is being addressed. Or they accommodate by giving in to the conditions and avoiding them whenever possible they use the problem as a justification for adopting forcing strategies; attempting to impose some principle of power or position on each other.

We are amazed at the number of times we have encountered teams that operate under oppressive or stifling communication climates. Even disturbing is the fact that when we've asked team members how conditions have been present, the response often translates into "a very long time." The adjustments have been made, accommodations have been reached. The passive conspiracy is in place.

Linda1,

"No, the consumer/victim is not to blame because the (scientifically illiterate intellectually numb) consumer is the target of government approved, highly sophisticated billion dollar marketing campaigns developed by an army of social scientists, experts in psychological and social manipulation."

OK, let me give you another example, from a completely different application. I heard a C-SPAN panel recently on concussions in football. It consisted of two authors who described the seriousness of the problem in their book, a leading players' agent who has been concerned about the problem, and a retired pro football player.

There have been a number of pro football retirees who have suffered from various neurodegenerative diseases, including some notable suicides. According to the panel, the League has tried to downplay the link between the concussions and the diseases. No surprises there.

What about the players? They have been made aware of the data from myriad sources. Except for a few rare cases who quit at the peak of their career, with the remainder it's business as usual.

What about the parents of children in their teens? According to the panel, hard hits that don't result in concussions are still dangerous, and their effects are cumulative. These could start the process when children are in high school, and especially in college. According to the panel, a few percent of the parents advised their children against playing football.

Well, I could apply your paragraph quoted above, and say the consumer has no responsibility. That's just a variant of the Government-Industrial-Media complex I mentioned in the book. It certainly is true, but it is not the whole truth. The reason the cell phones and WiFi continue along with their adverse effects is partly because we want them and are addicted to them; the reason football continues along with its adverse effects is because the League, the colleges, the high schools, the parents, the kids, and especially the TV viewing audience, want it and are essentially addicted to it. Not everyone, but enough in each toxic stimuli to insure that their use continues. We will never solve these problems until we admit them fully, no matter how disquieting the results.

According to professor Lance deHaven, the word "conspiracy" theory" entered American political speech when the CIA in order to stop criticism of the Warren Commission encouraged media outlets to use the word to discredit doubters. Ever since that time it has been used about once a week, and is used routinely to tarnish dissident opinion. This propaganda strategy has worked incredibly well. If one goes down the rabbit hole into a "conspiracy theory" you can see how it works.

Take 9 11 conspiracy theory that revolves around two planes taking down three buildings. The third building, number 7, fell later than the first two and isn't as well known. Essentially 9 11 conspiracy theorist want to know why that building fell so fast (in a matter of seconds) when not hit by a plane. The government agency that investigated the collapse of building 7 (it took them several years to get around to it) concluded that it fell from office fires due to a new phenomena called "thermal expansion." The agency would not release their models on this phenomena because of national security. Still, an alarmed building industry needed to know how to avoid having their high rise steel framed buildings collapse from "thermal expansion" if a fire should break out. The agency countered that "thermal expansion" is just a hypothesis and unproved. Life returned to normal in the building industry and thermal expansion was ignored, that is with the exception of the "conspiracy theorists". I have a child that works as a commercial real estate manager and she was taken aside the first day of her job and told that "we do not believe that buildings fall down from office fires and we do not believe in talking about politics in the office." End of story.... except most building engineers are now dissidents, or hummm conspiracy theorists.

The conspiracy theory about the anti-vaxers really peaked with the incidence of 100 or so measles cases in Disneyland. The conspiracy (misinformation) that vaccines cause autism had really now caused a demise of general public health. These dissidents were a threat to everyone and must be stopped. There were cries to jail them. Then California passed this draconian SB277. It didn't seem to matter much that it turned out that probably the measles was not caused by an unvaccinated child but by a tourist from the Philippines where measles is still endemic. Life returned to normal...no wait...it hasn't returned to normal yet. California has maybe the highest taxes in the nation and tax paying parents can't send their kids to school if they don't have all of the required 36 doses of vaccines....(no need to explain here why a parent might not want to do this and in fact probably won't). Maybe it's harder to ignore autism then it was to ignore thermal expansion. We'll have to wait and see....

Ottoschnaut,

"Mainstream scientific consensus holds that there is little to no evidence that cellphone signals raise the risk of brain cancer or other health problems;"

One could replace "cellphone signals" by "vaccines" and "brain cancer" by "autism" in that NYT article, and it would be equally credible. Both published literatures are swamped with manufactured research showing no adverse effects from vaccines or (non-ionizing) EMF. There are more than a few EMF researchers who have risked their careers to disseminate the truth about adverse health effects. Most have been shut out by the mainstream media and the 'professional' journals, but there is more than enough evidence of harm. My published paper on EMF in concert with other toxic stimuli shows the synergistic effects of even simple combinations of toxic stimuli that include EMF, but does not begin to address the synergies of myriad toxic stimuli (including EMF) acting in concert.

Recently, I was involved in a project to block construction of a cell tower near the border of our community. I was not in the radiation danger zone (it was essentially outside our community), but, because of the studies I had done on EMF health effects, believed I could add some value to the effort. I bought an RF meter, and made radiation measurements from existing cell towers in the area with different topographies. I read the latest literature on health effects from cell towers. As bad as I had thought cell towers were, my readings and measurements convinced me they were even worse.

There were at least four good studies (none of which were performed in the USA) that measured increase in cancer incidence relative to cell tower proximity. Within about 500 meters from the antenna, there were substantial increases in cancer incidence, and they increased as one went closer to the antenna. While the exposures varied, my rule of thumb is that people exposed to ~a thousand or more microwatts/square meter (m^2) were at increased risk of developing cancer, with a latency period of about five years. During my own measurements, I found that one antenna, located in a park with minimal obstructions, was producing radiation fluxes of 2000+ microwatts/m^2 at distances of 700 meters!

Even more disconcerting, I came across articles on other sources of EMF, such as cell phones, cordless phones, WiFi, smart meters, etc. Depending on where one was located in proximity to these sources, the radiation fluxes could be as large as, or larger, than that from the cell towers. For example, the following article describes EMF radiation in schools with WiFi

(http://www.parentsforsafetechnology.org/wi-fi-radiation-levels-at-us-schools22222.html).

There are some classrooms where the radiation measured was on the order of hundreds of thousands of microwatts/m^2, or more!

So, if people are willing to be exposed (and allow their children to be exposed) to high levels of non-ionizing radiation from all these other sources, why would they be concerned about the radiation from cell towers? Especially if 'credible' organizations like the CDC and FCC tell them it's essentially safe, and 'credible' media dutifully report the government's conclusions.

We lost the cell tower battle.

Great article! I appreciate all you do and all the information I get from this site. I read your book "The Age of Autusm" back in 2010 and my eyes were opened. Thank you again!

Dr. Kostoff,
The normal order of business for the industries you have listed is to conspire against consumers by suppressing science and advancements that threaten their business.

"to what degree are we, the public, part of these 'conspiracies'? Is our overwhelming addiction to, and craving for, all the myriad wireless communication systems not supportive of that conspiracy/institutional modus operandi?"

To no degree and no. Because we are trained in government institutions (schools) to go along to get along, to be good consumers, to buy and consume the latest, to fit in or be lost, to do what others are doing, to internalize whatever the school wants us to "know" and to turn off undesired thoughts and ideas in order to get the grade and stay alive academically, and, schools turn out scientifically illiterate intellectually numb graduates by the millions, all the way up through the highest levels of "education".
Re your second question - No, the consumer/victim is not to blame because the (scientifically illiterate intellectually numb) consumer is the target of government approved, highly sophisticated billion dollar marketing campaigns developed by an army of social scientists, experts in psychological and social manipulation. Because in the workplace, for decades now, people have been required to use these technologies, many 24/7. In the workplace people have had to conform and keep up or end up living on the street. Beepers became blackberries which became smartphones, etc. I know I've missed some steps in there, but you get the point. Workers didn't have a choice. It was 'here is your new device. This is how we will be communicating and working from now on.' (until the next newest thing comes out.)

"After I published the EMF health effects paper, I conveyed the adverse effects to a number of highly educated colleagues. Do you think even one made any changes in their use of wireless devices? "

Because they are brainwashed and addicted. It will take a lot more than the voice and research of one person in their face to overcome the massive indoctrination. And because they have been intentionally deceived into believing that by virtue of their training and degrees that they possess superior almost infallible powers of discernment which ironically makes them easily led and intellectually locked into place.

If the NYT published one article on page 1, it would make a tiny dent in societal behavior. Those who are prone to keeping their head to the ground would notice and act, depending on the quality of the reporting. In others, seeds would be planted but you might not see behavioral change beyond that. If the NYT published a series of high quality articles (which they scarcely do these days - referring to quality), and if other media outlets did the same (instead of attacking the NYT), then you'd see a change in behavior all the way up to the telecommunications industry. They would have no choice but to address the media's reporting and accusations and the public's concern. Unfortunately, as you know, the telecommunications industry, along with Pharma and a few other industries, owns the media, among society's other institutions, like government, education and medicine.

For everyone in California worried about sb277

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p61nx_FOobg

Dr Rima thinks its very easy to circumvent these illegal "BrownShirt" laws.

Dan,

Good article. I think there's a fine line between 'conspiracy' and normal operation of institutions. For example, the Pharma companies exist to maximize returns for their shareholders. This means having as large a customer base as possible, charging as much for their drugs as possible, and limiting their liabilities as much as possible.

To achieve these ends, they use a combination of carrots and sticks. The carrots are 1) large donations to politicians to pass laws favorable to the companies; 2) large advertising and sponsorship donations to the media to disseminate information favorable to the companies; 3) large donations to academic and similar institutions to insure the 'proper' employees are hired and kept in line; 4) potential of cushy lucrative jobs to government officials who benefit the companies by how they enforce regulations and what research they sponsor that will enhance the companies' products; 5) potential of cushy lucrative jobs and large grants to researchers who produce results that support the companies' products.

The sticks are 1) the possible manufactured research they support to disallow any consensus for regulatory purposes; 2) the 'Wakefielding' of researchers and clinicians who disseminate information adverse to the companies' interests.

These are the carrots and sticks about which we know. There may be others of which I'm unaware or that have yet to be uncovered; it's difficult to address the unknown with any degree of credibility.

In addition to the above direct actions (one might also call these the 'active conspiracy'), there are the indirect actions of other players (the 'passive conspiracy'). There are a large number of organizations that benefit from the adverse effects of drugs and vaccines; e.g., assisted-care institutions, therapy organizations, the Pharma companies themselves who produce drugs to attenuate these side-effects, etc.

So, as we have seen in the case of the MMR vaccine, is there a 'conspiracy' to minimize/cover-up its adverse effects or is what happened just the consequence of the normal order of business of the institutions involved? For the telcoms and electric power utilities, is there a 'conspiracy' to minimize/cover-up the adverse effects of non-ionizing radiation (RF and ELF-EMF) or is the present state of affairs just the consequence of the normal order of business of the institutions involved? We can go down the list of pervasive causes of disease and ask the same questions: fluoridation, biosludge, glyphosate, etc.

And, most importantly, to what degree are we, the public, part of these 'conspiracies'? Is our overwhelming addiction to, and craving for, all the myriad wireless communication systems not supportive of that conspiracy/institutional modus operandi? Is our reluctance to admit the adverse effects of non-ionizing radiation, and thereby allow our elected politicians not to challenge and reverse the status quo, not part of the problem?

After I published the EMF health effects paper, I conveyed the adverse effects to a number of highly educated colleagues. Do you think even one made any changes in their use of wireless devices? I am almost convinced that if the NYT published the adverse effects of EMF on page 1, it would have minimal impact on the use of wireless systems.

In the AoA community, there is the belief that if only the true information about vaccines were relayed to the public, there would be a dramatic change. I remain to be convinced; information dissemination was not the key factor in the partial reduction of smoking among adults, and it is less than clear to me that it would impact vaccine use to the degree we believe. Obviously, I support maximum information dissemination, but its impact remains to be seen.