Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of polio vaccine, exposed as criminal-minded scientist who conducted illicit medical experiments on mental patients

From naturalnews.

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) Dr. Jonas Salk, one of the "gods" in the cult of pharmacology -- a man who is credited with inventing the polio vaccine -- has now been exposed as a medical criminal who conducted illegal medical experiments on mental patients. This fact has come to light courtesy of the Associated Press, believe it or not, which has been investigating the history of medical experiments as part of a press effort leading up to scheduled bioethics meetings in Washington.

According to the Associated Press, Dr. Jonas Salk co-authored a clinical trial that "injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later." The victims of this medical experiment were described as "senile and debilitated," meaning that obtaining their rational consent to participate in such experiments would have been impossible. And that means Dr. Jonas Salk -- one of the most highly-worshipped figures throughout modern medicine -- was conducting this trial in violation of medical ethics and in violation of the law.

Isn't it interesting how the vaccine industry and its medical journal propaganda mouthpieces always hurl accusations at people like Dr. Andrew Wakefield, claiming he violated medical ethics for taking blood samples with consent, but when one of their own heroes gets caught engaging in criminal medical experiments involving the injection of insane mental patients without consent, they have nothing to say about it?

In the pro-vaccine cult of pharmacology, any researcher who concludes that vaccines are good for you is considered "right" no matter what laws they violate, what victims they kill or what kind of evils they have to commit in order to achieve their fabricated results. The vaccine industry, as we see throughout history, has openly allowed criminal scientists to operate its clinical trials -- even when human victims were maimed or killed in the process. (And not much has changed since, it seems...)

The Big Lie about the polio vaccine

This trial involving Dr. Jonas Salk was, not surprisingly, federally funded. And it's just the beginning of the lies and deceptions about Dr Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. For starters, the polio vaccine was a failure and didn't eradicate polio at all, but we'll save that discussion for another story. Today's topic is illegal medical experiments conducted by mad scientists working for the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries.

And on that topic, the true history of the criminal medical experiments that have been done in order to boost the profits of Big Pharma will absolutely shock you. As the AP reports:

"The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs."

This is the result of Big Pharma leaning on state authorities, of course. Where profits are to be made, human rights have never gotten in the way. In fact, as the historical record clearly shows, the U.S. government has repeatedly conspired with the drug industry to use innocent human beings as unwitting guinea pigs in dangerous, deadly medical experiments.

The history of vaccines, you see, is a history filled with criminal misconduct on the part of medical researchers such as Dr. Jonas Salk (and many others). These were not heroes of science; they were pharma-funded criminal minds who routinely violated the foundations of medical ethics in order to trick prisoners, mental patients and the elderly into serving as their medical guinea pigs.

The criminal history of vaccines

Vaccines are founded on a history of deception and criminality, and now even the Associated Press has realized it, too.

AP reports that in 1963, for example, "Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them." This was a pharma-funded experiment, of course, conducted by yet another criminal-minded researcher claiming to be carrying out "science."

That's the other angle in all this, of course: All these criminal, inhumane medical experiments were carried out in the name of "science." Whether they were infecting blacks, injecting prisoners, or hiring prostitutes to spread sexually-transmitted disease (another true experiment funded in part by the NIH), all these criminal activities were carried out under the label of "science."

The AP goes on to report:

"In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees."

Yes! Cheaper than chimpanzees! Gotta love Big Pharma for their cost-saving efforts, eh? This is yet another example of the mindset of Big Pharma and "scientific" researchers who put humans lower than animals on the value scale.

Now Big Pharma is conducting medical experiments on victims in developing nations

Several of the worst medical experiments yet known are described in great detail by the AP report, including this one:

"Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward 'Yusef' Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison."

"I said 'Oh my God, my back is on fire! Take this ... off me!'" Anthony said in an interview with The Associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain. (http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/27/h...)

Of course, as many of these gross criminal activities came to light, the U.S. government was finally forced to put a stop to it due to public outcry. So the drug companies simply moved their criminal operations offshore where they now engage in routine medical experimentation on children in developing nations, usually by paying off top government officials in those countries to look the other way while their scientists and researchers unleash "pharma crimes" upon the people there.

This is how the experiments in Guatemala came about (http://www.naturalnews.com/029924_m...).

The long but true history of Big Pharma's medical experiments in the name of "science"

NaturalNews, of course, began reporting on these medical experiments in 2006 when we featured a timeline of human medical experimentation in the United States (http://www.naturalnews.com/019189.html).

Here's part two of that timeline: http://www.naturalnews.com/019187.html

In the last five years, the mainstream media was all but silent on this issue, failing to report much of anything on the pharma / government medical experimentation conspiracy until the Guatemala experiments were thrust onto the national spotlight in 2010. At that time, most people who learned about the criminal medical experiments carried out by the NIH and funded by the U.S. government were absolutely shocked... even stunned by the idea that this could have been done by the pharmaceutical industry or their own government.

And yet the Guatemala incident barely scratches the surface of what has really gone on behind the scenes, under the name of "science" and through the "conspiracy of profit" that has been operated by Big Pharma and the U.S. government for generations.

Dr. Jonas Salk was part of that criminal conspiracy, of course. Not only is he now implicated in these criminal medical experiments, but as you will see here on NaturalNews in upcoming articles, the credit given to Dr. Salk for ending polio is based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of the historical data -- something that was intentionally done by the vaccine industry in order to convince people that vaccines ended polio!

The truth is far different. The "success" of the polio vaccine has been a 60-year lie. A the "heroic" stature of Dr. Jonas Salk has been a 70-year lie. This man was a Big Pharma criminal. And the truth about him -- and his deadly vaccines -- is finally coming out.

Watch for more reporting here on NaturalNews that exposes the 60-year lie about the polio vaccine and the supposed "heroes of medicine" who were actually criminal-minded scientists working for the drug companies and exploiting human lives to test their deadly chemicals and vaccines.

The truth about the history of Big Pharma and vaccines is finally coming out, folks. And they can't claim it's just a bunch of "conspiracy theories" anymore: This information is now being published in the mainstream media. And there's a lot more to come.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/27/h...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20110302...

Related articles

• Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of polio vaccine, exposed as criminal-minded scientist who conducted illicit medical experiments on mental patients (inmatezero.wordpress.com)
• POLIO VACCINE - A tale of ruthless abuse (biosil.wordpress.com)
• Feb 23, 1954: Children Receive First Polio Vaccine (censorshipinamerica.com)

Ott releases free track from Mir!

You can get it here.

Thanks Ott, you're the best.

Bertrand Russell on Conformity

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Alex Jones on The View?

I never thought I would see the day that Alex Jones would be interviewed on The View. This is either very good news or very suspicious, depending on how much you trust Jones.

Who Does Hillary Think Is Losing the Information Wars? by Luis P. Almeida

Image via WikipediaWho Does Hillary Think Is Losing the Information Wars? by Luis P. Almeida

Great stuff here from Lew Rockwell. Talking about the CFR used to be laughed off as conspiracy loony talk. Now it's moving mainstream. Alex Jones is making guest appearances on The View and Russia today. Just what is going on here? I suppose information can't be suppressed forever.

Hillary recently testified to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that "we are in an information war" and that "we are losing that war." The Daily Bell’s Anthony Wile today questions who the "we" is behind Hillary’s statement and concludes that she is referring to the Anglo-American financial and political elite.

In order to determine whether we agree with Wile’s assessment, we must first define the political elite. Murray Rothbard’s mind-blowing article, "Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy," calls out and identifies the political elite by name. Murray’s article provides a detailed description of the 19th and 20th century battle between JP Morgan and Rockefeller interests. He also describes how early in the 20th century Rockefeller and Morgan interests melded and became one, forming the "eastern establishment." He explains that it was the need to open up new markets that drove JP Morgan and Rockefeller to unite and promote a militaristic and aggressive foreign policy. A path we’ve been on since the Spanish American war.

The article is long and detailed, and very much worth the read from beginning to end. The portion most pertinent to determining who Hillary meant when she said "we" is Murray’s description of the period immediately following WWI. Murray says that at that time "influential Britons and Americans," what I call the political elite, "decided that intimate post-war collaboration between the two countries required more than just close cooperation between the central banks." "Also needed were permanent organizations to promote joint Anglo-American policies to dominate the post-war world."

Murray then goes on to describe how a secret society established by the magnate Cecil Rhodes created the more open Round Table Movement. Both the secret society, called out in Rhodes’ will, and the Round table had, per Murray, the "aim of maintaining and expanding the British Empire to re-incorporate the United States." Yes, this is the same Cecil Rhodes and the same Round Table that is behind the Rhodes Scholarship, awarded to Hillary’s husband Bill in 1968. Amazingly this obscure figure from Arkansas had a meteoric rise to power after completion of his Rhodes-funded studies.

According to Murray’s article, members of Rhodes’ round table established in the US a group with the same intention of supporting the British Empire. It was called the "Institute of International Affairs." This group was funded by members of the JP Morgan circle and eventually merged with another Morgan-controlled group called the Council on Foreign Relations. Murray names the members of the CFR and their relation to JP Morgan interests. Murray’s article goes on to describe how and why the CFR and the Round Table pushed for a second world war.

Murray’s article shows the influence of the political elite and the mechanisms, such as the CFR, that they use to influence foreign policy. Information and the information wars per Hillary are critical in our foreign policy endeavors. But what, besides her husband's scholarship, does this have to do with Hillary?

Hillary openly admitted during an address delivered to the CFR on July 15, 2009 that she and thus the United States of America gets its marching orders from the CFR. As per the State Department’s own website she said:

"I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future."

There is not a hint of sarcasm or jest in any of her statements that day. The tone is one of reverence and gratitude for the position she finds herself in. It is because of her own words that I am convinced that Mr. Wile is correct and that Hillary was in fact thinking of her sponsors, the global financial and political elite, when she testified that "we" are losing the information war.

Wind Power Scam

Image via WikipediaFrom the Mail.


Scarcely a day goes by without more evidence to show why the Government's obsession with wind turbines, now at the centre of our national energy policy, is one of the greatest political blunders of our time.

Under a target agreed with the EU, Britain is committed within ten years — at astronomic expense — to generating nearly a third of its electricity from renewable sources, mainly through building thousands more wind turbines.

But the penny is finally dropping for almost everyone — except our politicians — that to rely on windmills to keep our lights on is a colossal and very dangerous act of self-deception.
Green and unpleasant land: The wind farm at Ingbirchworth, West Yorkshire, one of the landscapes blighted by turbines

Green and unpleasant land: The wind farm at Ingbirchworth, West Yorkshire, one of the landscapes blighted by turbines

Take, for example, the 350ft monstrosity familiar to millions of motorists who drive past as it sluggishly revolves above the M4 outside Reading.

This wind turbine performed so poorly (working at only 15 per cent of its capacity) that the £130,000 government subsidy given to its owners was more than the £100,000 worth of electricity it produced last year.

Meanwhile, official figures have confirmed that during those freezing, windless weeks around Christmas, when electricity demand was at record levels, the contribution made by Britain’s 3,500 turbines was minuscule.

More...

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To keep our homes warm we were having to import vast amounts of power from nuclear reactors in France.

Wind turbines are so expensive that Holland recently became the first country in Europe to abandon its EU renewable energy target, announcing that it is to slash its annual subsidy by billions of euros.

So unpopular are wind turbines that our own Government has just offered 'bribes' to local communities, in the form of lower council tax and electricity bills.
Taking over: Europe's biggest onshore wind farm is Whitelee, on the outskirts of Glasgow

Taking over: Europe's biggest onshore wind farm is Whitelee, on the outskirts of Glasgow

In Scotland, the 800 residents of the beautiful island of Tiree are desperately trying to resist Alex Salmond's plans to railroad through what will be the largest offshore windfarm in the world, covering 139 square miles off their coast, which they say will destroy their community by driving away the tourists who provide much of their living.

So riddled with environmental hypocrisy is the lobbying for wind energy that a recent newspaper report exposed the immense human and ecological catastrophe being inflicted on northern China by the extraction of the rare earth minerals needed to make the giant magnets that every turbine in the West uses to generate its power.

Here in a nutshell are some of the reasons why people are beginning to wake up to the horrific downside of the wind business. And since I began writing about wind turbines nine years ago, I have come to see how the case for them rests on three great lies.

The megawatts supplied by our 3,500 turbines is derisory: no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station

The first is the pretence that turbines are anything other than ludicrously inefficient.

The most glaring dishonesty peddled by the wind industry — and echoed by gullible politicians — is vastly to exaggerate the output of turbines by deliberately talking about them only in terms of their 'capacity', as if this was what they actually produce. Rather, it is the total amount of power they have the capability of producing.

The point about wind, of course, is that it is constantly varying in speed, so that the output of turbines averages out at barely a quarter of their capacity.

This means that the 1,000 megawatts all those 3,500 turbines sited around the country feed on average into the grid is derisory: no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

Furthermore, as they increase in number (the Government wants to see 10,000 more in the next few years) it will, quite farcically, become necessary to build a dozen or more gas-fired power stations, running all the time and emitting CO2, simply to provide instant back-up for when the wind drops.
This means that the 1,000 megawatts all those 3,500 turbines sited around the country feed on average into the grid is derisory: no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

Not green: Greenpeace activists raise an inflatable model of a wind turbine, but they do not save a lot of CO2

The second great lie about wind power is the pretence that it is not a preposterously expensive way to produce electricity. No one would dream of building wind turbines unless they were guaranteed a huge government subsidy.

This comes in the form of the Renewables Obligation Certificate subsidy scheme, paid for through household bills, whereby owners of wind turbines earn an additional £49 for every 'megawatt hour' they produce, and twice that sum for offshore turbines.

This is why so many people are now realising that the wind bonanza — almost entirely dominated in Britain by French, German, Spanish and other foreign-owned firms — is one of the greatest scams of our age.
The third great lie is that this industry is somehow making a vital contribution to 'saving the planet' by cutting our emissions of CO2 - it is not

What other industry gets a public subsidy equivalent to 100 or even 200 per cent of the value of what it produces?

We may not be aware of just how much we are pouring into the pockets of the wind developers, because our bills hide this from us — but as ever more turbines are built, this could soon be adding hundreds of pounds a year to our bills.

When a Swedish firm recently opened what is now the world's largest offshore windfarm off the coast of Kent, at a cost of £800million, we were told that its 'capacity' was 300 megawatts, enough to provide 'green' power for tens of thousands of homes.

What we were not told was that its actual output will average only a mere 80 megawatts, a tenth of that supplied by a gas-fired power station — for which we will all be paying a subsidy of £60million a year, or £1.5billion over the 25-year lifespan of the turbines.

The third great lie of the wind propagandists is that this industry is somehow making a vital contribution to 'saving the planet' by cutting our emissions of CO2.
Too many windmills: Holland is slashing its renewables subsidies

Too many windmills: Holland is slashing its renewables subsidies

Even if you believe that curbing our use of fossil fuels could change the Earth's climate, the CO2 reduction achieved by wind turbines is so insignificant that one large windfarm saves considerably less in a year than is given off over the same period by a single jumbo jet flying daily between Britain and America.

Then, of course, the construction of the turbines generates enormous CO2 emissions as a result of the mining and smelting of the metals used, the carbon-intensive cement needed for their huge concrete foundations, the building of miles of road often needed to move them to the site, and the releasing of immense quantities of CO2 locked up in the peat bogs where many turbines are built.

When you consider, too, those gas-fired power stations wastefully running 24 hours a day just to provide back-up for the intermittency of the wind, any savings will vanish altogether.

Yet it is on the strength of these three massive self-deceptions that our Government has embarked on one of the most reckless gambles in our political history: the idea that we can look to the vagaries of the wind to provide nearly a third of the electricity we need to keep our economy running, well over 90 per cent of which is still currently supplied by coal, gas and nuclear power.

It is true that this target of raising the contribution made by wind by more than ten times in the next nine years was set by the EU.

But it is no good blaming Brussels for such an absurdly ambitious target, because no one was keener to adopt it than our own politicians, led first by Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband and now by David Cameron and the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne.

To meet this target, our Government wants to see us spend £100billion on building 10,000 more turbines, plus another £40billion on connecting them all up to the grid.

This country will soon be facing a colossal energy gap, and dependent on politically unreliable countries such as Russia and Algeria for gas supplies

According to the electricity industry, we will then need to spend another £100billion on those conventional power stations to provide back-up — all of which adds up to £240billion by 2020, or just over £1,000 a year for every household in the land.

And for this our politicians are quite happy to see our countryside and the seas around our coasts smothered in vast arrays of giant industrial machines, all to produce an amount of electricity that could be provided by conventional power stations at a tenth of the cost.

This flight from reality is truly one of the greatest follies.

But what turns it from a crazed fantasy to a potential catastrophe is that Britain will soon face a huge shortfall in its electricity supplies, when we see the shutdown of conventional power stations, which currently meet nearly 40 per cent of our electricity needs.

All but two of our ageing nuclear power stations are nearing the end of their useful life, with little chance of them being replaced for many years.

Six of our large coal-fired stations will be forced to close under an EU anti-pollution directive, and our Government is doing its best to ensure that we build no more.

There is no way we can hope to make up more than a fraction of the resulting energy gap solely with wind turbines, for the simple and obvious reason that wind is such an intermittent and unreliable energy source.

Meanwhile, this country will soon be facing a colossal energy gap, while relying on politically unreliable countries such as Russia and Algeria for gas supplies.

What we are seeing, in short, is the price we are beginning to pay for the past two decades, during which our energy policy has become hopelessly skewed by the siren calls of the environmentalists, first in persuading our politicians to switch from coal and not to build any more nuclear power stations, and then to fall for the quixotic dream that we could gamble our country’s future on the 'free' and 'clean' power of wind and sun.

All over the EU, other politicians are waking up to the dead-end to which this madness has been leading us.

The Danes, who have built more wind turbines per head than anyone, have realised the idiocy of a policy that has given them the highest electricity prices in Europe, while they have to import much of their power from abroad.

In Spain, their rush for wind and solar power has proved a national disaster. In Germany, having built more turbines than any other country in the world, they are now building new coal-fired stations like crazy.

In Holland, meanwhile, they have now given two fingers to the EU by slashing all their renewables subsidies.

Only in Britain is our political class still so imprisoned in its infatuation with wind that it is prepared to court this dangerously misguided pipedream.

Related articles

• Why the £250bn wind power industry could be the greatest scam of our age - and here are the three 'lies' that prove it (windconcernsontario.wordpress.com)
• Transport Secretary Philip Hammond reveals his ignorance of wind power (telegraph.co.uk)
• What is a wind turbine? (greenanswers.com)

The Cannibalization of Charlie Sheen

Image via Wikipedia

Conventional wisdom tells us that the rich and famous have it easy, that they get away with murder, that they can buy and charm their way out of all the social traps the rest of us face. But in fact, people love to see a fall from grace, and they love to kick the fallen when they’re down. When the mass media target a celebrity for character destruction, the ostracism and witch-hunts are typically more relentless than when a commoner is in the crosshairs. There is no privacy. There is no escape. The entire media class, from Hollywood to Manhattan, lines up to cannibalize one of their own with gratuitous relish.

That Charlie Sheen has been the biggest national story, while the Arab world is aflame with revolution and the U.S. marches toward ever more war and economic disaster, is not the most remarkable thing. What is most striking is how easily so many line up behind a consensus that someone ought to be the butt of all jokes and the focus of everyone’s mockery and outrage. Why is the public so obsessed? Does the public’s obsession fuel the media’s, or is it the other way around?

Indeed, the main mystery is why so many entertainers have jumped on the bandwagon to belittle the actor. Why are so many glitterati pointing their fingers and laughing, judging, and psychoanalyzing Sheen from afar? And even if it was kind of funny the first time to compare his eccentric quips to the ranting of the dictator Qadafi, isn’t it a bit unseemly for so many to be piling on with such insults?

A look at the supposed reasons why Sheen has deserved such ridicule and voyeuristic attention can help dispel a number of myths about the media, the press and the dominant national culture. Specifically, we now see the "socially liberal" media is not quite how it’s normally understood.

If we lived in a reasonable society, the most serious accusation would be that Sheen has assaulted women, which he denies. But this has not been the focus of the attacks on Sheen. It should probably be the only charge that comes close to rising to the level of news. But according to today’s zeitgeist, his other alleged sins are far more severe.

Consider the endless fascination with Sheen’s drug use. The media are in many ways pro-drug. Rock music and most popular music, going back to jazz, has been shameless in the glorification of narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens. Comedies on networks and cable give a wink to casual drug use, or even outright encourage it. We’ve had three presidents in a row who admitted to having used marijuana, and almost no one in even the "serious" press condemns this outright.

Yet Sheen’s alleged abuse of drugs is now everybody’s business. Not only do the new-born Puritans in his profession point to these supposedly unique personal failings; TV quacks diagnose his "addiction" from a distance, just so the whole nation can prove their allegiance to the therapeutic state by shaking their heads at the shame of it all.

In his interview with Piers Morgan, Sheen addresses the drug use. He questions the very concept, as commonly understood, of "addiction." His response is almost Szaszian:

As long as I subscribe to the beliefs of others that build these models that don't really leave any room for individuality or creativity or anything that like, you know, they say you've got to surrender and you've got to get rid of your resentments, sit in a room and like be all lame, you know.

He says he never missed "a money day" of work – meaning, he never was a drain on his show’s production budget. He claims he always kept that part of his life away from his kids. He points out that cigarettes were perhaps his most regrettable habit. And in what might be one of his greatest offenses, he expresses relief not to be "held hostage by AA anymore." His dissent from the Alcoholics Anonymous model of addiction is a verboten blow against the psychiatric establishment for which there is no excuse.

Whether or not his defense is sound, he has given one, and yet most everyone has rushed to judgment on this matter as though they know a true addict when they see one – on television. The drinkers in our community, the pill-poppers in our neighborhoods, the druggies throughout the rest of the liberal media – we are all to believe that these people’s problems pale in comparison to poor Charlie’s.

The hypocrisy is even more shameless on the question of Sheen’s sex life. Everyone in the media believes in sexual tolerance, surely. Marriage need not be between a man and a woman. It can be between two men, or two women. Yet the fact that Sheen wants to "marry" two consenting women – a practice common in many societies for millennia – means there must be something wrong with him, something that makes him especially freakish. People should be allowed to do what they want in their own homes – that is unless we are talking about a weirdo, a megalomaniac, a man who has fallen out of favor with the mainstream.

Sheen notes that he was hired for an off-color role in large part because of his off-color lifestyle, and he has suffered a bait and switch. Indeed, the whole profession is off-color, and everyone knows it. Whether Charlie’s personal life should be hailed or condemned, there is something awfully peculiar in seeing him attacked for his deviancy by the same liberal establishment that has for decades essentially argued that deviancy doesn’t exist.

Of course, Sheen’s superlative success as an entertainer has something to do with the smears and ridicule. The rich and famous always love to cannibalize those even richer and more famous. Sheen was the most financially successful of TV actors, so the envy we usually see dripping off the silver screen – from the Oscars to the press corps – most likely played a role here. On the other hand, some have attacked him over his personal finances and contractual issues, yet it is hard to imagine that within his industry he is very unusual in any of this.

To add to the perfect storm, the TV star has violated one of the greatest doctrines of political incorrectness. Although Sheen himself is Jewish, he has committed the grave sin of involuntary anti-Semitism. This piece in the Telegraph, drawing a bizarre link between Sheen, the Pope and Julian Assange, describes the key allegation as "Charlie Sheen’s renaming of the producer of his former sitcom Chuck Lorre as ‘Chaim Levine’, carrying with it as it does two suggestions: one, that Jews are the controlling forces behind the US media, and two, that they have disguised this fact about themselves and need to be outed."

Lorre himself has referred to his own Hebrew name in a "vanity card," aired in front of millions at the end of one of his television shows:

How did Chaim become Chuck? How did Levine become Lorre? The only answer I come up with is this: When I was a little boy in Hebrew school the rabbis regularly told us that we were the chosen people. That we were God's favorites. Which is all well and good except that I went home, observed my family and, despite my tender age, thought to myself, "bull$#*!."

Sheen elaborates that Lorre used to call him Carlos Estevez. If true, both men called each other the names they were born with. Without knowing whether Sheen is telling the truth about this, we can still get some perspective here. Would it be scandalously wrong to call Sheen "Carlos Estevez"? Does it carry with it suggestions about Spaniards being embarrassed of their origins? Even if so, would we expect this kind of mild anti-Spanish slur to rise to the level of a small international controversy? Would people presume not only to pass judgment on a man’s state of mind, but to identify a general societal trend toward bigotry, all because someone called someone else by his given name? That is what has happened here.

Political correctness is probably the mass media’s most tangled web of double standards. Making fun of some groups is always more OK than other groups. Hollywood has always jumped on board with ugly nationalist racism when directed against an enemy of war; it has always been willing to make fun of helpless and harmless religious minorities, unprotected ethnic and immigrant groups and people with some disabilities and diseases (but not others); and the old, the ugly and the fat are generally fair game. Hollywood will even make fun of blacks, Jews, gays and other official victim groups, but only in certain contexts, and the rules always shift and are somewhat unpredictable. And if the wrong entertainer slips up in an interview or even off camera, there will be hell to pay, even if what was said was objectively no more demonstrably hateful or mean-spirited than prime time TV during sweeps week.

Moreover, as much as the liberal media love to claim openness toward questioning authority, some political positions are just considered too beyond the pale to tolerate. Sheen has wandered too far into embracing "conspiracy theories" and so the guy is not defensible. His views are not within the respectable range of opinion, like the belief that it’s fine for the U.S. government to invade and occupy foreign countries, detain suspects without trial, and run up trillions of dollars of debt like it was nothing.

Some will protest that Sheen does not deserve a rigorous defense. He faces no real persecution – except, arguably, the civil affair concerning child custody. And, perhaps, he has acted immorally. And, anyway, he has his millions and his women and claims to be happy.

But the confluence of factors in the media’s sacrifice of Charlie Sheen tells us more about the media than about the man. There is something rotten in our mass culture. It is the stench of an establishment that pushes a flavor of social progressivism upon the country while reserving the right to burn social heretics at the stake on even the most hypocritical of pretenses.

And it is against this establishment’s witchhunt and all its nefarious social consequences that a defense must be waged. Most certainly, it can be argued that Sheen has not acted virtuously. But the attacks on him have clearly been more distasteful, more pathetic, more indicative of a society in decline, than his own behavior. For the crimes of drug use, sexual deviance, and political incorrectness, a great talent has been thrown under the bus by a drug addled, sexually deviant, socially insensitive, politically clueless mass media and liberal culture. They have eaten one of their own. It has happened many times before, to Robert Downey, Jr., Britney Spears, Tiger Woods, and now Christina Aguilera. And it will happen again. And if even the most handsomely paid actor on TV is helpless against the official pop culture’s hypocritical lynch mob, what hope do any of us little people have should the mob decide we too deserve to be lynched?

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• The Lynching of Charlie Sheen (lewrockwell.com)
• The Cannibalization of Charlie Sheen by Anthony Gregory (gunnyg.wordpress.com)