Family secrets can make you sick: The link between childhood abuse and health

© Maria Fabrizio / NPR

In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a very different health problem: helping severely obese people lose weight.

Felitti, a specialist in preventive medicine, was trying out a new liquid diet treatment among patients at a Kaiser Permanente clinic. And it worked really well. The severely obese patients who stuck to it lost as much as 300 pounds in a year.

"Oh yeah, this was really quite extraordinary," recalls Felitti.

But then, some of the patients who'd lost the most weight quit the treatment and gained back all the weight — faster than they'd lost it. Felitti couldn't figure out why. So he started asking questions.

First, one person told him she'd been sexually abused as a kid. Then another.

"You know, I remember thinking, 'Well, my God, this is the second incest case I've seen in [then] 23 years of practice,' " Felitti says. "And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored."

More than half of the 300 or so patients said yes, they too had been abused.

Felitti wondered if he'd discovered one of the keys to some cases of obesity and all the health problems that go along with it.

That possibility made him very curious: What if having a bad childhood could affect health in other ways?

The idea that childhood abuse and neglect could affect adult health was a revelation to Felitti. But a poll released Monday (from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) finds that the public widely believes this to be the case today.

How To Measure The Troubles Of Childhood

As he continued to explore the idea in the 1990s, Felitti got together with an epidemiologist named Dr. Rob Anda, who at the time was on staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They came up with a set of questions to trace, in a larger group, how tough childhood experiences might affect adult health.

They called their work the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE.

You can take the ACE quiz here.

First developed in the 1990s, the 10 questions of the Adverse Childhood Experiences test are designed to take a rough measure of a difficult childhood.

The 17,000 or so patients in this study were mostly middle-aged white people, upper- and middle-class, from San Diego. Felitti and Anda asked them to think back to their childhoods and list how many of 10 different types of adverse childhood experiences they'd had, including sexual, physical or emotional abuse; neglect; loss of a parent due to death, divorce or incarceration; mental illness in a parent; and drug or alcohol abuse by a parent.

The researchers wanted to get a sense of how being exposed to these different categories of adverse experience early in life might affect long-term health. So, on Felitti and Anda's score sheet, having undergone any one of those different categories of trauma or neglect before age 18 would add one point to a person's ACE score. Whether someone had been sexually abused one time, or dozens of times, the experience would count as one point in their study. Being habitually abused, and losing a parent to death, would add up to an ACE score of 2.

Even though Felitti and Anda were just getting a rough measure of the severity of the patients' experiences, when Anda's team at the CDC crunched the numbers, he was shocked.

One in 10 of the patients surveyed had grown up with domestic violence. Two in 10 had been sexually abused. Three in 10 had been physically abused.

"Just the sheer scale of the suffering — it was really disturbing to me," Anda remembers. "I actually ... I remember being in my study and I wept."

And then came the part where he found out what happened to all those people when they grew up: "very dramatic increases in pretty much every one of the major public health problems that we'd included in the study," he says.

Cancer, addiction, diabetes and stroke (just to name a few) occurred more often among people with high ACE scores.

Now, not everyone who'd had a rough childhood developed a serious illness, of course.

But, according to the findings, adults who had four or more "yeses" to the ACE questions were, in general, twice as likely to have heart disease, compared to people whose ACE score was zero. Women with five or more "yeses" were at least four times as likely to have depression as those with no ACE points.

When ACEs Are Very High

Carol Redding, one of Felitti's patients, answered yes to every single ACE question, and she ended up with an ACE score of 10. Ten out of 10.

Today Redding lives in a tidy, peaceful house outside San Diego. The walls of her home office are lined with degrees and certificates — at age 58, she's working on a Ph.D. From the outside, she's a success.

But inside — in her body as well as her mind, Redding says — she has been battling all her life.

She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of those childhood experiences. "I had the flashbacks," she says, "the depression, the anxiety — Oh, my lord! Anxiety, like ... if it were a tangible thing living in the house with me, I'd need another room just to house that."

In childhood, she was diagnosed with high blood pressure. In adulthood, she had a thyroid condition and has survived three different types of cancer: leukemia, breast cancer and lymphoma.

Learning about the ACE study and her own results made Redding wonder if all of that — maybe even the cancer — might be partly connected to her troubled childhood. After so many years, all of a sudden, "all those very confused, very scattered puzzle pieces of my life just locked together in one big, amazingly clear picture," she says.

This revelation meant so much to Redding that she started a newsletter about the ACE study and later worked for the CDC, publicizing the study's results.

And she did all that because one big question kept nagging at her: Why didn't more people know about this research?

Medical Community Initially Skeptical

Anda says that when he and Felitti first published their results in the late 1990s, the response from the medical community was frustrating.

"I thought that people would flock to this information," Anda says, "and be knocking on our doors, saying, 'Tell us more. We want to use it.' And the initial reaction was really — silence."

In fact, it took a long time to even get the study published. A number of top medical journals rejected the article, Anda says, "because there was intense skepticism."

Sarah Floud, an epidemiologist at Oxford University in England, says she understands that skepticism and thinks it may still be warranted.

"An association doesn't necessarily mean that one thing causes the other thing," says Floud. She thinks doctors and patients should take care not to overinterpret an ACE score — it's not a crystal ball that predicts health or illness.

Rather, Floud says, this rough indicator of a difficult childhood is just one risk factor in the mix with lots of others, such as your genes, your diet, whether you drink heavily or smoke, for example — factors known to be strongly related to some illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

So if you're otherwise healthy, not a smoker or a drinker, and not obese, can childhood trauma alone increase the likelihood of diseases like cancer and heart disease?

"I don't think there's quite so much evidence for that," Floud says. "But that's not to say that it might not be true. It's just that ... that seems to be harder to prove."

Now, 15 years after the ACE study came out, some scientists are trying to connect the dots — to get a clearer picture of what exactly adverse childhood experiences do to the body and why the study results came out the way they did.

"Well, you've reshaped the biology of the child," says Megan Gunnar, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota who, for more than 30 years, has been studying the ways children respond to stressful experiences. "This is how nature protects us," Gunnar adds. We all become adapted to living in "the kinds of environments we're born into."

And if you have scary, traumatic experiences when you're small, Gunnar says, your stress response system may, in some cases, be programmed to overreact, influencing the way your mind and body work together. Research in animals and people suggests that the part of the mind that scientists call "executive function" — thought, judgment, self-control — seems to be most affected, she says.

"Over time, especially when you're young, experiences of neglect and abuse and stress impair those circuits," Gunnar says. "You're less able to tell yourself not to eat the ice cream, or smoke the cigarette, or have that additional drink. You're less capable of regulating your own behavior. And that seems to be terribly important for linking early experiences with later health outcomes."

This growing body of research indicates that, right now, the health of millions of children is being shaped by abuse and neglect. As they grow up, these children will be more likely than other children to use behaviors like smoking, drinking and overeating to cope with stress.

Preventing childhood trauma in the first place, Felitti, Anda and their proponents now believe, is one of the biggest opportunities to prevent disease — and save billions in health care costs. It's an opportunity, they say, that American medicine and the health care industry still seem to be missing.

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The brain treats real and imaginary objects in the same way

© Flickr/Raphael Labbe

Does your brain know the difference between your real friends and your imaginary ones?

The human brain can select relevant objects from a flood of information and edit out what is irrelevant. It also knows which parts belong to a whole. If, for example, we direct our attention to the doors of a house, the brain will preferentially process its windows, but not the neighboring houses. Psychologists from Goethe University Frankfurt have now discovered that this also happens when parts of the objects are merely maintained in our memory.

"Perception and memory have mainly been investigated separately until now", explains Benjamin Peters, doctoral researcher at the Institute for Medical Psychology in the working group of Prof. Jochen Kaiser. There are close parallels, for in the same way as we can preferentially process external stimuli, we are also able to concentrate on the memory content that is currently the most important. These are essential skills of our brain, which are closely connected to intelligence and which are impaired in various psychiatric illnesses.

In their study, Peters and colleagues examined "object-based attention", a well-known phenomenon in perception research. This refers to the fact that we automatically extend our attention to the whole object when we attend only part of an object - like the front door and the windows. In the experiment the subjects were asked to direct their attention alternately to one of four screen positions, which formed the ends of each of two artificial objects. In accordance with the principle of object-based attention the subjects were able to shift their attention more quickly between two positions that belonged to the same object than between those that were part of different objects. It was discovered that this effect also occurred when the subjects envisaged these positions only in short-term memory.

The researchers were able to describe the effect physiologically by examining the neuronal activity using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). As expected, they initially found increased activity at those positions in the cerebral cortex where the currently focused position was represented (visual and parietal cortex). However, this increased activity also extended to the areas in the brain that represent the relevant associated position of the same object, despite the fact that the subject was not concentrating on it.

Peters explains the results of the experiment by saying: "It is remarkable that this effect was observed in regions of the brain that are normally involved in perception, despite the fact that here, objects and positions were only maintained in memory". On the other hand, the regions in which the equidistant positions of the other object are represented remained unchanged.

This concordance of an underlying principle of attention in perception and in memory suggests that it may be possible to attribute many functions of human cognition to a few basic mechanisms.

Goethe University Frankfurt

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Star explodes 4 times in this rare phenomenon

© NASA/ESA/STScI/UCLA

Thanks to a rare cosmic phenomenon, astronomers were able to witness an ancient, distant star explode as a supernova not once or twice, but on four separate occasions, according to a research published online Friday in the journal .

According to Space Daily, the supernova occurred directly behind a cluster of large galaxies that had enough combined mass to warp space-time. This forms a cosmic magnifying glass similar to the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, but which creates multiple images of the star.

This effect is known as an Einstein Cross, and the explained that it was first predicted by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity roughly a century ago. Because the cluster was located between the supernova (which was nine billion light years away) and the instrument imaging it, the same explosion showed up around the galaxy four times.

A Michael Bay star

Astronomers have seen Einstein Crosses made by galaxies and black holes before, but marks the first time that they've witnessed the phenomenon with an exploding star, the newspaper noted. In this case, since the supernova occurred so far away, it would have been too faint to be seen from Earth unless it was being magnified by multiple galaxies.

As it turns out, the explosions were actually subjected to gravitational lensing twice. The massive cluster of galaxies originally bent the light of the supernova, likely producing three images, and one of those was bent a second time to produce the fourth one. In all, the light from the explosion was magnified 20 times, and astronomers are calling it a dream discovery.

Dream discovery

"It's perfectly set up, you couldn't have designed a better experiment," Dr. Brad Tucker of The Australian National University's (ANU) Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and one of the study's authors, told Space Daily. "You can test some of the biggest questions about Einstein's theory of relativity all at once - it kills three birds with one stone."

While astronomers have conducted searches for this type of phenomenon many times over the last two decades, this Einstein Cross was actually discovered during a search for distant galaxies by Dr. Patrick Kelly of the University of California, Berkeley. Not only did the find allow Kelly and his colleagues to test the Theory of Relativity, it also provided new insight into the amount of dark matter and dark energy in the universe, as well as the strength of gravity.

"It really threw me for a loop when I spotted the four images surrounding the galaxy," Kelly said in a statement. "Basically, we get to see the supernova four times and measure the time delays between its arrival in the different images, hopefully learning something about the supernova and the kind of star it exploded from, as well as about the gravitational lenses.

"It's a wonderful discovery," added Alex Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and a member of the research team. "We've been searching for a strongly lensed supernova for 50 years, and now we've found one. Besides being really cool, it should provide a lot of astrophysically important information."

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The sinister treatment of dissent at the BBC

© Jonathan Brady/PA

The treatment of BBC staff involved in the breaking of the Jimmy Savile story is a scandal that has gone largely unnoticed.

Nobody from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night dares mention a scandal at the BBC. It undermines their reporting of every abuse whistleblowers reveal. It reinforces the dirty common sense of British life that you must keep your head down if you want to keep your job.

The scandal is simply this: the BBC is forcing out or demoting the journalists who exposed Jimmy Savile as a voracious abuser of girls. As Meirion Jones put it to me: "There is a small group of powerful people at the BBC who think it would have been better if the truth about Savile had never come out. And they aim to punish the reporters who revealed it."

Jones was one of the BBC's best investigative producers. He had suspected that Savile was not the "national treasure" the BBC, NHS, monarchy and public adored, ever since he had seen Savile take girls away in his car from an approved school his aunt ran in the 1970s.

He broke the story which showed that Savile was one of the most prolific sex abusers in British history, and handed the BBC what would have been one of its biggest scoops. If it had run it. Which, of course, it did not. The editor of banned the report. Thus began a cover-up which tore the BBC apart.

A week ago, Jones's managers told him that a temporary assignment on was over. He should have been able to go back to his old job. But there was no old job to go back to. He had been fired.

Jones's reporter on the Savile film was Liz MacKean, who documents the sufferings of the powerless - whether it be raped children in Britain or persecuted gay men in Putin's Russia.

But she spoke out, so the BBC forced her out too. "When the Savile scandal broke," she told me, "the BBC tried to smear my reputation. They said they had banned the film because Meirion and I had produced shoddy journalism. I stayed to fight them, but I knew they would make me leave in the end. Managers would look through me as if I wasn't there. I went because I knew I was never going to appear on screen again."

The BBC press office bridled when I described Jones and MacKean as "whistleblowers". As the Pollard review of the Savile scandal had concluded that BBC management had acted in "good faith", I must not call them that.

If you are tempted to agree, consider the sequel. responded magnificently to the news that the BBC had killed the Savile scoop. It broadcast a special documentary, which earned the highest audience in the programme's history. Jones and MacKean described how their journalism had been suppressed, and went on to document Savile's crimes. How open the BBC is, I thought. What other institution would subject itself to the same level of self-criticism?

What a fool I was. Since then, BBC managers have shifted Tom Giles, the editor of out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, announced last September that he was resigning to "find new challenges". Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the documentary, was demoted. The television trade press reported recently that his future is "not yet clear" (which doesn't sound as if he has much of a future at all).

Compare their treatment with those who did nothing to advance the public interest. As the Savile crisis deepened in the autumn of 2012, the BBC brought in Adrian Van Klaveren, the then head of Radio 5, to supervise news. He allowed to falsely imply that Lord McAlpine was a child abuser - an allegation that every journalist who had investigated the child abuse allegations in North Wales could have told him was ridiculous. The disaster of covering up the abuse by the BBC's own celebrity rapist and then falsely accusing an innocent man led to the resignation of the director-general George Entwistle.

But Van Klaveren has been promoted, not squeezed out. He is head of something called "strategic change". Helen Boaden, the BBC head of news at the time of the censorship, is now on the BBC's executive board. Peter Rippon, the editor who blocked Jones and MacKean, now has a comfortable job managing the BBC's archive.

I could go on, but I am sure you are weary of bog-standard jobsworths. The wider point is that the interests of those at the top of an organisation and the interests of the organisation can be miles apart.

If the BBC had exposed Savile, viewers would have admired its honesty. If it had bent over backwards to ensure that Jones and MacKean did not suffer for speaking out, everyone would say that it was behaving as a free institution should, rather than looking like the official broadcaster of a paranoid dictatorship or the board of directors of HSBC.

In the banks, the NHS, the police or the BBC, the greatest threats to those in charge, however, are not threats to the institution but threats to their status. If subordinates can contradict them, how can they justify their salaries and the prestige that goes with them? The Pollard review into Savile showed that status anxiety was generating real hatred at the top of the BBC.

A senior BBC press officer vowed to "drip poison about Meirion's suspected role". He was later promoted. Peter Rippon said that if Jones spoke freely: "I will throw shit at him".

The best aspect of modern culture is that it revolts against such hierarchical control. The computer revolution makes information sharing and cooperative ways of working easy to achieve. But hierarchies have men and women at their summits who will fight as ferociously as BBC executives to protect their position, and prevent democratic change.

The case of Jones and MacKean makes my point. I have reported on it in the and has covered it too. But the Tory press, which daily bashes the BBC, has avoided the story. You only have to look at the to understand why it does not want to encourage insubordination. Its journalists must resign before they can protest against HSBC's control of its news pages.

The power of hierarchies is hard to break. But if you want to fight fraud in the City or the rape of children, it has to be broken. A start can be made by insisting that everyone from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night tells the truth about the purge of the BBC's truth tellers.

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2014 saw sharp increase in torture of Palestinians detainees by Israel

© Reuters / Suhaib Salem

The instances of torture of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli services soared sharply in the second half of 2014, after the killings of three Jewish teenagers in June, says data from military courts and anti-torture bodies, collected by Haaretz.

All in all, 51 cases of torture were reported in the second half of last year, according to an attorney representing those accused of security offences. The data was obtained by from military courts, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.

"In years past there were a few rare cases. But something has changed," the attorney said.

Twenty-three Palestinians sent a number of complaints of torture they had suffered in 2014 by Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service. Each of the plaintiffs said they experienced several methods of torture.

In the first part of 2014, eight instances of torture were reported. They included beatings and sleep deprivations. However, the second half of the year saw 'darker' methods of interrogation, which included tying up suspects in what is called "banana" and the "frog" positions.

Of fifty-one instances of torture, there were 19 complaints of sleep deprivation, 18 of tying, 12 of beatings and 2 of shaking.

2014 saw 59 torture complaints, which is a rise, compared to 2013 (16 instances of violent means), 2012 (30), and 2011 (27).

Thousands of Palestinian detainees were tortured by Israelis up to 1999, a year when the High Court of Justice prohibited the systematic use of torture. However, it left a small 'window' for Israeli services: an interrogator could claim that there was an urgent need to flout the law. The rules when this "need" can be implemented are not open to the public.

Different types of torture are mentioned in the Shin Bet documents, officials in the military court who saw them told . They include blindfolding, beating, slapping, forcing a suspect to stand for hours with hands at his sides and tying people up in the "banana" position. All these methods are less brutal than covering the head with a sack, tying in the "frog" position and sleep deprivation, say the documents.

draws an example of Mohammed Hatib, a childhood friend of Marwan Kawasme, one the two main suspects in the killings of three Jewish teens in June 2014. Hatib, a Hamas activist, was interrogated by Shin Bet.

At first, he denied any involvement in the murders, but then as his questioning quickly turned into torture, he confessed being a lookout for Kawasme and his accomplice Abu-Aisha on the night of the kidnapping.

However, his 'confession' turned out to untrue, the investigation found. Shin Bet believed that Kawasme and Abu-Aisha might commit another assault and so considered them a "ticking bomb."

"The High Court recognized the need in cases of a 'ticking bomb.'" But no one knows what level of suspicion must be present to use "urgent need" as a justification," Mohammad Hatib's attorney, Fadi Kawasme said.

"After the abduction, Shin Bet used the necessity [clause] in order to investigate people just because they were friends of the attackers," he added.

Shin Bet said it operates "only within the framework of the law and is under internal and external supervision."

All the detainees interrogated by the service "receive all humanitarian rights according to international conventions to which Israel is a signatory and according to Israeli law," the agency added.

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Russian police arrest 5 suspects in Nemtsov murder - 1 has confessed

© RIA Novosti / Maksim Blinov

Moscow's Basmanny district court has arrested five people in connection with the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a prominent opposition figure, who was gunned down last week. Two judges are reviewing the charges against the five people brought before the court by the prosecutors on Sunday.

Two of them are Zaur Dadaev and Anzor Gubashev, who were identified as key suspects in the killing of Nemtsov after their detention on Saturday. The prosecutors asked the court to arrest the duo by April 28, the current deadline for the investigation, saying that otherwise they may flee or interfere with the investigation.

According to the judge, who ordered Dadaev's arrest as requested by the prosecution, he confessed his involvement to the police. The accused didn't comment on this during the court session. Gubashev pleaded not guilty to the crimes he is charged with.

The other individuals, who may have had a hand in the crime, are Gubashev's brother Shagit and two identified as Ramzat Bakhaev and Tamerlan Eskerkhanov. The request for their arrest has been reviewed separately by another judge.

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"The suspects denied their ties to the crime, but we have evidence of their guilt. It includes forensic evidence and eyewitness accounts," an investigator told the court.

The trio denied their involvement, with Eskerkhanov claiming to have an alibi. But the judge ordered their arrests as well.

Eskerkhanov and Bakhaev have been remanded until May 8 and Shagit Gubashev - until May 7.

Nemtsov was killed by a gunman a few meters from the Moscow Kremlin, triggering a flurry of condemnations and calls for a swift investigation. The assassination happened two days ahead of an opposition rally, which Nemtsov helped to organize.

While political motive is considered the most likely in the killing, the investigators said they were considering other scenarios, including a business or personal conflict. Likely political motives behind the killing according to the investigators include a provocation aimed at destabilizing the situation in Russia, possibly by Ukrainian radicals, and revenge by Islamists for Nemtsov's support of the French magazine following an extremist attack.

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The US and NATO are off the hook: Mainstream media says global warming sparked the creation of ISIS

© unknown

Jihadi penquin.

After five years of intense fighting and destabilization raging across Syria, Western mainstream press has finally discovered the true cause of the so-called "civil war." It turns out that all of the analysts in the alternative media suggesting that the situation in Syria was the result of a NATO destabilization campaign and foreign-backed invasion of terrorists in the form of al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and ISIS were wrong. In fact, even those mainstream analysts who have suggested that the foreign invasion was actually a legitimate rebellion were apparently mistaken.

Thankfully, the mainstream press has discovered the true cause of the Syrian crisis - global warming.

No, this is not a joke. Mainstream outlets are actually suggesting that climate change is responsible, albeit indirectly, for the creation of ISIS and the scores of Western-backed terrorists flooding Syria as well as the now international military involvement in the war.

This is merely the latest silly narrative being promoted by the likes of Slate, Wired, The Telegraph, NBC, and The Guardian among many others.

Slate, by no means, is the sole purveyor of such abjectly stupid claims nor are the other media outlets listed above. Still, one need only read the Slate article to see how the "climate change is the real reason for the Syrian war" claim is being presented. Slate writes,

By now, it's pretty clear that we're starting to see visible manifestations of climate change beyond far-off melting ice sheets. One of the most terrifying implications is the increasingly real threat of wars sparked in part by global warming. New evidence says that Syria may be one of the first such conflicts.

We know the basic story in Syria by now: From 2006-2010, an unprecedented drought forced the country from a groundwater-intensive breadbasket of the region to a net food importer. Farmers abandoned their homes—school enrollment in some areas plummeted 80 percent—and flooded Syria's cities, which were already struggling to sustain an influx of more than 1 million refugees from the conflict in neighboring Iraq. The Syrian government largely ignored these warning signs, helping sow discontent that ultimately spawned violent protests. The link from drought to war was prominently featured in a Showtime documentary last year. A preventable drought-triggered humanitarian crisis sparked the 2011 civil war, and eventually, ISIS.

A new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science provides the clearest evidence yet that human-induced global warming made that drought more likely. The study is the first to examine the drought-to-war narrative in quantitative detail in any country, ultimately linking it to climate change.

At this point, given the detailed nature of "climate science," I will spare the reader a summation of the thoroughly debunked theory of Anthropogenic Man-Made Global Warming, at least as it relates to the non-existent and entirely invented theory of CO2 as a poisonous and planet killing gas. I will spare the reader historical data that proves the earth was much hotter in the past, thus indicating that we are well within the norm of climate ups and downs. I will also spare the reader the details regarding the fact that global warming has not taken place in the last eighteen years despite the rigging of science equipment and faulty computer models to prove the opposite, thus calling into question whether the planet is actually still warming at all.

Unfortunately, Slate and its peers spared the readers the same information, leading hordes of hapless trendies to believe that CO2-Global Warming is actually a real issue and that it somehow is the guiding force behind terrorist cells, beheadings, and jihad. Leaving behind any and all knowledge of history of any form is generally important in order to be able to follow the logic provided by the recent mainstream press narrative about the Syrian war.

For instance, while US and UK media outlets attempt to suggest that global warming is responsible for the lagging Syrian agricultural sector and the fate of Syrian farmers, it conveniently fails to mention the US sanctions on Syria that helped plunge its economy into despair. While environmental factors undoubtedly play a role it is true that environmental factors always play a role in farming and agriculture in any country of the world at any time period. The false threat of CO2 does not change this fact.

Compounding the normal concerns and economic hardships of farmers with international sanctions, however, is not the result of too much CO2, it is the result of a concerted effort to destroy a sovereign and secular government for the purposes world hegemony.

Of course, these media outlets make no mention of the sanctions or the worldwide economic depression and place the blame firmly on the shoulders of Assad who allegedly "largely ignored these warning signs."

Thus, Slate writes that "A preventable drought-triggered humanitarian crisis sparked the 2011 civil war, and eventually, ISIS."

FALSE.

Global warming did not create ISIS. A drought did not create ISIS. The United States and NATO created ISIS.

As I have documented in my article, "The Roots of ISIS," ISIS is nothing more than a name change in a long line of many name changes for the same terrorist organization (al Nusra, al-Qaeda, IEIL, FSA, etc.) that the US openly funded since as far back as the late 1970s and has continued to fund, direct, control, and use across the world ever since.

The suggestion that a drought, global warming, or any other weather event created ISIS and its cannibal army is atrociously stupid and an unfortunate example of the intellectual depths to which we have sunk as a nation. The fact that such a claim can be written with a straight face by numerous major media publications is more of a sad comment on the state of the American public than it is on the state of the corporate media. After all, corporate media has always been garbage but, in the past, it was somewhat necessary to maintain a professional and respectable air so as to maintain some level of credibility.

Unfortunately, the reality is that the result of these articles and the frivolous study it cites will be that, in discussion of the Syrian crisis with trendies, hipsters, and academics, one will now undoubtedly be forced to endure having to debunk global warming along with the assertion that global warming created ISIS. Well done mainstream media. Well done.

Of course, if the study cited by Slate and other mainstream media outlets are correct in their claim that global warming produces terrorist outfits like ISIS and al-Nusra, then we have much more to worry about than the Syrian crisis. Surely we will soon be overcome by polar bear suicide bombings and penguins shouting "Allahu Akbar!!"

Still, Slate continues,

The study's authors are clear that global warming did not directly cause Syria's civil war—it took a mix of underlying social vulnerability and an antagonistic government to do that. But it does provide compelling evidence that, when combined with the effects of increased population pressure and the poor policies of the Assad regime, the drought made a bad situation worse.

To be fair, it is clear that the lack of availability of food, poor economic conditions and societal tensions can contribute and even cause mass social upheaval. This much is a fact.

However, to go to the lengths to which the mainstream press has gone, i.e. suggesting that global warming was the root cause of the Syrian crisis is absurd.

Its attempts to blame Syria and Syrians in general in regards to "the effects of increased population pressure" are nevertheless typical of Anglo-American population control and reduction initiatives as well as propaganda pieces that have been flooding Western culture in earnest since the early 1970s. Slate and its compatriots are therefore good Malthusians as much as they are good eugenicists because, apparently, the food issue never would have gotten out of hand if there been less Syrians to begin with. Fortunately for the mainstream press, its CIA advisers, and corporate owners, the problem of "too many Syrians" has been thoroughly dealt with.

But the question of the responsibility for the crisis lying with "an antagonistic government" is a bit more difficult to decipher. Antagonistic government? What does Slate mean? Is it referring to the Syrian government who has done nothing but protect minorities and its citizens from the likes of ISIS and the FSA and who was criticized by the majority of the Syrian people early on for not doing enough to destroy the so-called rebels?

Or is it referring to the United States who organized, directed, funded, trained, and facilitated the death squads for the last 5 years and even long before that?

Perhaps it is referring to Turkey, who has also funded, armed, and facilitated terrorists across its borders so that they can unleash hell on earth upon Syria?

Is Saudi Arabia a candidate for the title of "antagonistic government?" After all, the Saudis have been at the forefront of arming the jihadist fanatics dragging their knuckles across Syria today.

Or perhaps Slate meant Israel - the country that has bombed Syria numerous times in support of ISIS and has acted as a veritable Red Cross for injured jihadists?

No, clearly, Slate reserves its understanding of "antagonism" for the targets of NATO and US imperialism. In the eyes of the Western Press, Syria is antagonistic simply for having the audacity to exist outside the dictates of the Anglo-American purview.

While it is true that the world is facing an alarming environmental catastrophe, it is also true that the world faces an equally alarming economic crisis. Likewise, it is facing the possibility of total world war fought between nuclear powers.

But these impending catastrophes are not the result of CO2. They are the result of an insane world oligarchy.

Articles like those suggesting that Global Warming was the genesis of ISIS are nothing but propaganda pieces designed to draw the reader and the American public so far off track they begin to regurgitate utter nonsense where critical thinking once reigned supreme.

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