That you are well informed by reading a newspaper other than the Coastal Post, plus a magazine or two and maybe listen to NPR. You have no idea who owns the media source you consume and what other companies they own or have investments in. You think that the bigger the headline the more important the story, and that the facts are usually correct in a story unless it's a subject you consider yourself an expert in. Then you consider writing in a huffy letter informing them how ignorant they are in that area.

That A Happy Meal Will Make You Happy...

Mickey D's is now featuring vegetarian, un-saturated grease to fry it's frozen potatoes in. You consider switching to a competitor, not because you're aware that heating unsaturated oils creates harmful free radicals, but because you believe that saturated arteries lead to a happy heart.

You are sure that fast food will provide all the pleasures of life portrayed in the commercials. For evidence you ignore the grumpy, obese customers waiting in line beside you and the surly, acned cashiers in front of you because you want it your way, now.

At least one customer is currently suing McDonald's because he blames their calorie laden food for causing his health problems due to obesity. The tobacco companies warded off lawsuits for decades by blaming the victims for making bad choices, even if they actively encouraged them to smoke their brand.

All it would take is some leaked documents that their "secret sauce" contains an addictive potion and "billions served" would have all the class action lawyers drooling. Until that happens unhealthy, unhappy people will only have themselves to blame for choosing convenience over caloric or nutritional content. However states which pick up many of the costs of health care for our national epidemic of obesity may start gunning for these purveyors to prop up their deficit laden budgets.

That The War On Drugs Is An Ally In the War On Terrorists...

Serial liar Drug czar John Walters is readying another billion dollar campaign aimed at teenagers to convince them that the pot they buy is funding narco killers. This will backfire. Even teenagers are logical enough to understand that it is the black market in illegal drugs that provides terrorist profits and guarantees violent turf wars just as alcohol prohibition did.

If these same drugs were legalized, regulated and reasonably taxed at sale to adults, drug dealers would be "law abiding" businessmen. Our government would save hundreds of billions in costs from this unwinnable war and generate billions in taxes, which they would probably spend on state approved terrorism.

The CIA has been spending its drug profits on terrorist activities for decades but you won't hear that in these taxpayer funded lies.

Most of these ads are aimed at marijuana smokers, which is absurd since most pot smoked in the US is grown here or in Canada. The true pot terrorists are DEA agents and local SWAT teams conducting heavily armed no knock raids on peaceful growers and medical marijuana farms.

That Fluoride In Your Water And Mercury In Your Fillings Don't Harm Your Health...

If you consider it at all, you think that the only problem with fluoridated water is unsightly splotching in otherwise improved tooth enamel. If you are even aware that "silver" fillings contain over 50% mercury you believe that this toxic metal is "stable" and doesn't leach out into your bloodstream.

You don't know that fluoride is a highly toxic poison even though there is a warning on your tooth paste label to contact a Poison Control Center immediately if swallowed. That your dentist should dispose of discarded mercury fillings as toxic waste products, because dental offices are the main source of mercury contamination in wastewater.

You've never heard that fluoride was an extremely toxic by-product of the nuclear industry and fraudulent "studies" were authorized by our government to justify getting rid of it by adding it to water supplies. You have never read of numerous scientific studies showing no reduction in dental cavities from fluoridated water, but significant increases in bone fractures because fluoride increases bone brittleness along with causing neurological problem.

You may know that mercury is also a neurological poison, associated with "mad hatters" but aren't aware that mercury poisoning causes suicidal depression at extremely low levels. Dentists have the highest suicide rate of all professionals.

You think the mercury contamination problem is from coal fired power plants, discarded thermometers, batteries and car switches or from eating swordfish. You have no clue that the main source of mercury poisoning in Americans with "amalgam" fillings is the release of volatile mercury vapors from the "thermometers" they have in their mouth. Hot liquids and foods release more vapors.

Like most people you think that the enormous reduction in deaths from infectious disease and increased lifespan in America is due to the wonders of modern medicine and vaccination programs. Few people know that public health measures like cleaning up water supplies and reducing malnutrition were responsible for 90% of the reduction in deaths from infectious disease. This happened well before the late 1950's when the first widespread vaccination programs began for polio.

Even that disease was already killing and maiming far fewer Americans before the vaccines were even introduced. One of the first Polio vaccines marketed was contaminated with a virus that has been linked to brain tumors and other cancers. Other vaccines which are state mandated can cause death and brain damage to the infants they are supposed to protect. Less than 1% of adverse reactions to vaccines are reported to the Center for Disease Control, according to that agency which does manage to publicize a more accurate number of infectious diseases each month.

It's a Russian Roulette parents are forced to play with their child. These vaccines are rushed to billion dollar markets with inadequate safety and efficacy tests. State boards of physicians who often have financial ties to the companies selling them have the legal right to force parents to have their children injected with experimental vaccines if they want to send them to public schools.

Vaccines are even mandated for childhood illnesses like measles that are rarely harmful and actually strengthen our immune systems. Even the more harmful diseases can usually be treated successfully with no long lasting health problems, while there are no cures for severe adverse effects, including brain damage, blindness, and death.

Vaccines are experimental because they can't be tested for safety on children and do not even provide complete protection from the illness. Half the children who contract whooping cough or pertussis have had the vaccine. Parents can not even sue the makers for damages but must apply to a special fund if there is an adverse reaction, which only pays for the child's care while still alive. These vaccine makers have no incentive to improve the safety of their vaccines since they are protected by law from being sued.

The mercury preservative thimerosal in some vaccines can cause autism, which has increased at a 300% rate in the US as the number of mandated vaccinations has increased. Mercury is being phased out of vaccines, (not fillings, though) yet there are even more contaminants in the vaccines which are allowed by regulators. And we wonder why the number of learning disabilities and attention deficit disorders are skyrocketing. No problem, it just means a bigger Ritalin market.

That Lone Nuts And Magic Bullets Explain Assassinations In America...

From Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley to Timothy McVeigh official "investigations" have ignored conflicting evidence, buried the facts and denied the laws of physics. Their explanation invariably ends up pointing the finger at the great American icon "the Lone Nut" who can make a bullet or a bomb perform impossible acts. The Lone Nut makes the perfect patsy to scapegoat for wider conspiracies and government involvement in assassinations and bombings.

These official explanations are accepted even if not truly believed by most Americans. By allowing the government to get away with covering up the truth about assassinations we encourage them to think they can get away with just about anything.

We are fed a daily dose of information about the "secret" lives of Hollywood movie stars. Except for the occasional sex scandal we rarely hear about the documented "secrets" of truly evil government officials and their henchmen, unless they have crossed the line and gone against the interests of the unofficial powers which own the media.

That Israel Is America's Best Friend And Is An Innocent Victim Of anti-Semitic Prejudice In The Middle East...

You believe that to even bring this up deserves an accusation of anti-Semitism. You don't know the actual Semites are Arabs, not the majority of Israeli and American Jews who are from Eastern Europe, descended from Turkic peoples. Technically Zionists are the real anti-Semites but that truth has been buried beneath tons of anti-semantic dogma.

You've never heard of the Lavon Affair in the late 1950's when Israeli secret agents began bombing American targets in Egypt to trigger an anti Egyptian response from America. They were arrested by Egyptian forces before they could complete their bombing targets, but the acts were virtually ignored by the American press.

You think the Israeli bombing and strafing of the USS Liberty in 1964 in international waters was an accident, if you've even heard of it. After all that's what several official "investigations" at the time said, even though the attack went on for hours in broad daylight, with our ship clearly marked and with no resemblance to the Egyptian ship Israelis claimed they mistook it for.

You've never heard that an Israeli Mossad agent, who fled to Canada, wrote a book claiming that they planted a radio in the Libyan Desert in the early 80's. It broadcast messages to implicate Khaddafi as ordering the German disco bombing that killed American soldiers. These false messages were allegedly the reason Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya, which killed Khaddafi's baby daughter.

You've barely heard of Jonathon Pollard, an Israeli double agent working in US intelligence in the 80's. He was the most damaging spy in America ever and is serving life in prison for stealing half a million pages of top secret information about our nuclear defenses and other national security issues. This mole sent them to his masters in the Mossad who promptly gave them to 'the evil Empire" in exchange for the Soviet Union allowing millions of their Jewish citizens to emigrate to Israel.

Israel put pressure on Clinton to pardon him but even cumstain Clinton wouldn't go that far although he did pardon Israeli benefactor and gunrunner Marc Rich who stole billions of dollars before fleeing the US. You heard not a peep in the US media about the latest Israeli spy scandal in the US, except maybe that it was an "urban myth", despite the fact that almost two hundred spies have been caught redhanded from 2000 through 2002.

You think that Arab countries attacked Israel in 1948 because they hated Jews, even though Jewish people had lived in Moslem countries for over a thousand years with far less prejudice than in Christian countries. You've never heard that the Arab nations invaded in a failed attempt to protect unarmed Palestinian men, women and children (including cutting out fetuses from pregnant women) who were being slaughtered by Israeli terrorists.

Hundreds of Palestinians in six villages had already been mercilessly killed starting in 1947. Almost a million were forced to flee their homes from the region because of these terrorists and their threats to continue their slaughter until all the Palestinians who lived on the land Israel coveted were dead.

You believe that the Palestinians were ordered to leave by radio to clear the way for Arab armies to sweep Israelis into the sea, even though the BBC and the NSA which monitored all radio broadcasts in the area report no such announcements were made. Even Israeli historians have documented the truth, but American "historians" are given Pulitzer prizes for denying the reality of the slaughter.

That A Pandemic Of Aids Is Destroying Africa...

You've read that enormous percentages of Africans are infected with HIV the retrovirus that is blamed for causing AIDS. You are a compassionate person and favor shipping billions in AIDS monies to Africa to alleviate their suffering and deal with the millions of AIDS orphans created by the pandemic.

The numbers said to be infected change almost every week because they are only estimates and not based on testing for HIV, except in certain small subgroups of pregnant African women. In fact since the mid 90's an international agreement was made to not test for HIV in Africa to determine if a person had AIDS. Instead, the diagnosis is based on the persistence of symptoms including fever, diarrhea and weight loss. This is because testing for HIV is both expensive and not very accurate, likely to produce false positives if a person has been exposed to malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases that actually are pandemic in Africa. Even more insidious, pregnancy itself can create false positives in the test for HIV.

South African President Thabo Mbeki was condemned worldwide, when he declared that he did not want to spend billions of health care dollars on treating pregnant women, who may or may not have HIV. He wanted to test these "medicines," actually cellular poisons to see whether they actually prevent AIDS in their children.

The drug companies that make the HIV retroviral drugs orchestrated this world outcry with their drug company funded AIDS town criers.

The whole HIV=AIDS theory is barely understood by anyone except microbiologists and they are deeply divided. The majority, who receive all the multi-billions in AIDS funding admit there are huge holes in their theory, but with more funding they will fill them. The minority who include Nobel Prize winners and renowned retrovirologists have never had their arguments refuted only ignored. They are cut out of funding entirely even though their theories that AIDS is caused by toxic drugs and chemicals, including prescribed "medicines", could be tested for a few million, and would save hundreds of billions of dollars if true.