Editor’s Note:  The post below comes direct from one of the best newsletters you will ever have the opportunity to receive for free:  Mercola.com.  This publication by Dr. Mercola covers health, politics, food safety and other topics that should be of interest to anyone concerned about living a long healthy life.

As someone that has worked in the pharmaceutical and dietary supplement industries and has a long history of getting published as well as consulting for many of the top companies I have some pretty firmly established opinions on this topic.  Dr. Mercola is the first MD I’ve come across with whom I actually agree.  Seriously, this guy gets it and he even brings stuff to the forefront that I hadn’t seen before. I am continully impressed with his newsletter.

Below is an article that should scare the crap out of all of us.  Since when is the W3C supposed to be the arbiter of truth or the “decision maker” about what is and what is not a “conspiracy theory”?  I can’t tell you how big brotheresque I find this thought to be.  If it comes to pass that we have the opportunity to voice an opinion we must make it clear in no uncertain terms that we view the W3C as a web standards body and not as an entity charged with determining the validity of content.

The public does a perfectly fine job of voting with their clicks and page views and Google’s PageRank (among other things) is a good indicator of what the public thinks. We doin’t need a couple of biased individuals cow towing to the highest commercial bidder to be telling us what is or isn’t valid online.  We are certainly capable of making these decisions for ourselves thank you very much.  WC3 keep your influence where it belongs if you over reach you’re going to get spanked.

Big Pharma Ties Want to Shut Down Vaccine ‘Conspiracy Theories’

A foundation populated by the giants of business, banking, government and military wants to “vet” websites and limit the spread of information that it says creates “conspiracy theories”.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) says it is worried about the way the web has been “used to spread disinformation”. They want to introduce a new system that would give websites a label for trustworthiness or unreliability.

One “damaging conspiracy theory” they want to shut down is the notion that MMR vaccines are harmful. Of course, this “conspiracy theory” stems not from paranoid forum postings and misquoted blog entries, but from scientific research into the mercury based preservative thimerosal.

Thimerosal was developed by Eli Lilly, and Merck is the world’s largest supplier of the MMR triple jab — and it is little wonder W3C considers such information to be “damaging” given that Eli Lilly and Merck are both paid up and approved members of the Consortium! If anyone should be labeled with an “unreliable” rating, it is the WC3.

The blanket of lies our government has used to cover up the truth about extraterrestrials is apparently starting to wear thin and even unravel entirely in some spots. The latest hole in the government’s story comes from Clark McClelland a retired space ship operator for NASA.

In a post that appeared on his website on the 29th of July of this year, McClelland stated:

“I, Clark C. McClelland, former ScO [Spacecraft Operator], Space Shuttle Fleet, personally observed an 8 to 9 foot tall ET on his 27 inch video monitors while on duty in the Kennedy Space Center, Launch Control Center (LCC). The ET was standing upright in the Space Shuttle Payload Bay having a discussion with TWO tethered US NASA Astronauts! I also observed on my monitors, the spacecraft of the ET as it was in a stabilized, safe orbit to the rear of the Space Shuttle main engine pods. I observed this incident for about one minute and seven seconds. Plenty of time to memorize all that I was observing. IT WAS AN ET and Alien Star Ship!”

When added to the statements made just the other day by Dr Edgar Mitchell, the prior remarks by Bob Lazar (which perhaps should be reevaluated given these recent revelations), and the mounting body of evidence that contradicts NASA and our government’s words on the topic it is starting to look more and more likely that what was once thought to be fertile ground for those with only a thin grasp on reality might be more or less the truth of the situation.

In my opinion one of two things is happening; either this is simply a continuation of our Government’s plan of action which requires that the public be gradually desensitized before a full disclose can take place or else these individuals have reached a point where they feel that they are no longer at risk of certain reprisals that the powers that be might inflict upon them for their breach of certain security oaths and their consciences – perhaps due to their advancing age – has compelled them to come clean before it is too late.

There are some things that I am certain about. One is that this trend is only going to continue at an ever increasing pace until all the facts are out on the table and/or two, that an irrefutable extraterrestrial visitation event takes place such that no further denial is possible.

In either case, those of us that have steadfastly believed that we were not alone and have been resolute in that belief in spite of scorn, ridicule and the derision of our peers will ultimately be vindicated by what I think are now becoming more and more obvious facts.

The truth has been a long time coming – one can only hope that when it finally does come all the way out that those that have lied, deceived and taken advantage of their privileged positions for their own personal material benefit will be forced to account for their transgressions and that they will in some way pay for their crimes against the people of this and other planets.
On another note, you might have missed it since they appeared to have tried to minimize what is perhaps the most significant news ever received from a Martian rover lander; Phoenix has confirmed the presence of water ice on the surface of mars. As the mission scientists put it: “We’ve touched and tasted water on Mars”.

It has long been held that were there is water there is usually (in fact so far as we know there is always) life. Don’t be too surprised if the next news coming from the red planet is that they have found living organisims (but not by Phoenix nor any of the current rovers that don’t have the equipment required to make a definitive detection of living material).

This is also part of the desensitization process. First microbes, then plants, then lower life forms and before you know it we’ll be meeting our new nine foot tall overlords in their anti-gravity super-luminal craft.

Actually I agree with Dr Mitchell on this one. If the extraterrestrials we’ve encountered so far were hostile we’d either be gone already or else we’d be in their form of the galley of some Ben Hur ship or chipping away for some sort of ore in huge underground caverns.

No. They are our friends. Or at least we are so insignificant to them that they can’t be bothered to destroy us. Either way is fine by me. Just so long as they’re not like the aliens in “Mars Attacks”. That would be a real disappointment.

Editor’s Note: Here’s the long-awaited third installment to my series on Floyd Landis and his epic Tour de France and subsequent doping controversy. While I don’t claim to have all the answers, I do have a unique perspective that is based in part upon my career as a professional cyclist and in part upon my education and work in biochemistry and exercise science. If you’re just finding this article for the first time, you might want to read Part I and Part II first. You might also find my views on pharmacological sport performance enhancement interesting or amusing. That post is here.

In part two we talked a bit about doping in cycling and how it is a systematic program and not a fly-by-the-seat of your pants (or fly with the help of a needle more accurately) athlete-as-physician circus act such as the press and the sports governing bodies would like to, and would also like the public to believe. We discussed the stage and how hard the GC contenders had to go on the final climb and finally we saw a quote from Floyd that I believe was an overlooked but enormously important indication of why what happened next well…happened next.

TDF Stage 17 a Miracle on Two Wheels or Something Else?

The 200 kilometer stage 17 from St. Jean de Maurienne to Morzine was the final day in the Alps and represented the last chance any serious TDF contender had of making a significant move in the overall general classification.

On paper this stage didn’t look like a monster.  Unless, of course your perspective was colored by the fact that you’d already raced sixteen previous stages including monster climbs in the Pyrenees and the Alpes, and particularly if you’re perspective was also determined by the fatigue you’d added to your already acumulated fatigue by virtue of a leg shattering, lung searing effort on the final climb to the finish at La Toussuire.

The Role of Cumulative Fatigue and Superlative Effort

On the other hand, if your perception was colored by the facts above the seventeenth stage looked like one to be survived – to be endured – it was a perfect stage to let a bunch of no-hopers role on up the road and gain fifteen minutes and suck up all the points for the KOM and the Green Jersey along the way.  It looked like the perfect stage to have your lieutenants ride “tempo” all day – just fast enough that no one got any ideas but not so fast that the leaders would have to call upon those weary legs to do anything more than the minimum required to just finish the day in the same GC position as from the day before.

If you’ll recall in Part II of this series I wrote about the effort that the leaders must have made up the final climb to La Toussuire.  As you might imagine you pay a price for an effort of this magnitude, a price that is made all that much steeper by the previously acumulated fatigue, by the fact that it was made at the end of a long, hot stage, by the fact that every rider was dehydrated before the effort began and of course by the fact that the following day they had to get back on the bikes and race once more.

You might also recall that I pointed to Floyd’s statement the he could “only go one speed that wasn’t very fast” on that final climb.  In other words his bad day – whether he was bonking, fighting a virus, or whatever – so limited his performance that even though he was trying as hard as he possibly could he simply didn’t have the strength or the energy to go any faster or – and this is important- to hurt himself very much.

This last may seem counterintuitive so let me try to help you understand it.  Lets say you lift weights.  Lets also say you have a coach that is a few points shy of having a genius IQ and he has you do biceps curls every day for a month.  Then, on the 31st day he has you try and do your 5 rep maximum.

Now you might try very hard, but if your arms are trashed from the 30 prior days of lifting your five-rep max isn’t going to be all that impressive.  What’s more, since you’re probably sore as hell already you’re not going to be able to push yourself so hard that you’d make yourself all that much sorer.  In fact, the impact of your five-rep-max effort would probably be so minimal that on the 32nd day you wouldn’t be any more sore than you were on the 31st day, follow?

Now on the other hand, lets say you have a coach that’s a bit more capable and he has you train biceps only once every five days – he knows that your maximum strength and recovery capabilities are going to be on the fifth or sixth day post your last effort. So he has you train biceps only five times during that same month and then on the 30th day (which will be five days after your most recent biceps workout) he has you do a five-rep-max.  I can guarantee that you will absolutely crush your five rep max from the prior coach.  Your arms will have been fresh, but well trained and totally recovered.

Fresh enough and well enough recovered in fact that they’ll be strong enough to allow you to do an awful lot of damage to yourself in those five reps. I can also promise that you’ll be sore beyond belief on the first and second days after your big effort.

This same principle is at work in the tour.  Floyd was too fatigued and flat on the stage to La Toussuire to do himself much physical damage, but the other riders, the ones that were taking it to Floyd on that final climb felt better and they had the adrenaline of a cracking tour leader coursing through their veins.  They buried themselves.  In fact they did themselves so much damage that I am surprised that more of them didn’t crack completely the following day.

To Drink or To Chase, That Was the Question

But that’s not all by a long shot.  If you look at the route on the seventeenth stage you’ll see that it was tailor made for a long break by a small group or an individual.  The course was serpentine and undulating with small, winding roads that make it especially hard for a team to get a big chase organized and rolling.  It’s also tough on a course like that to see what is happening up the road.

The old saying “out of sight, out of mind” is really true and on a course like the seventeenth stage it was possible to get out of site almost right away and from then on the peloton never saw the leaders again the whole day.

The other thing that the seventeenth stage made difficult was for the riders in the peloton to get enough to drink.  With the small narrow roads the cars couldn’t come up next to the peloton which meant that the domestiques had to keep dropping back and ferrying water to their respective team leaders.

This was also a difficult situation – if the same guys that you need to be up front chasing are constantly going back to fetch water they aren’t going to have enough left in their legs to mount an effective chase.

Plus, with that many riders packed together and people getting nervous about the rider up the road the pace was probably very uneven which meant that there were likely brief accelerations where everyone was going nearly flat out followed by extended lulls where the pace dropped to barely 22 miles per hour.

In contrast Floyd, alone in front, had a car right there feeding him water whenever he wanted it.  In fact you saw on the coverge that he was actually dowsing himself with water – you won’t see any footage of the guys in the peloton doing that.  They needed every ounce of water they had just to keep minimally hydrated.

The same thing goes for food.  When you’re alone or in a small break, it is a lot easier to get the food you want and to eat it without worrying about someone crashing next to you or someone attacking just as you grabbed a musette bag full of snacks.

Floyd was also able to ride at a steady tempo.  No huge accelerations, no big lulls, just a steady, AT effort for several hours.

These Guys Forgot Who They Where Dealing With

It’s important to mention something else here too.  Did all the guys in the peloton forget Floyd’s background?  A moutain bike world cup race is basically a two kilometer sprint flat out, followed by blowing up and then scraping yourself together and riding at your AT for the next three to four hours.  Funny, that sounds a lot like the way Floyd rode the seventeenth stage, doesn’t it?

When you take all these factors and add them up, it doesn’t take illegal drugs to balance the equation – it seems to me that it balances pretty nicely all by itself.

Let’s examine it in summary, shall we:

1. The riders that rode away from Floyd on stage 16 nuked themselves in the process
2. Floyd was so flat on the final climb of stage 16 that he couldn’t hurt himself nearly so much
3. The peloton rode a very uneven pace on stage 16 while Floyd was able to ride steadily
4. It was nearly impossible for riders in the peloton to stay hydrated during the 17th stage
5. Floyd was able to hydrate very effectively during the 17th stage
6. Floyd was able to get and stay out of sight easily on the 17th stage
7. The domestiques that had to fetch water were also the ones that were supposed to be mounting a chase on the 17th stage, a task that was all but impossible given their own fatigue, the small winding roads and their leader’s need for water that they had to fetch from the cars following the race
8. Floyd was a pro mountain biker, very familiar with and exceptionally well-suited for an effort just like the one he made on the 17th stage.

In summary it seems to me that when you take all these facts and lay them out before you on the table, any rational person is going to see that there are  plenty of reasons to explain the respective performances of Floyd and the other riders in the Tour.

Yes, it was an exceptional effort. But was also the culmination of a series of factors and events that created a “perfect storm” for a miraculous solo win.  Also, don’t underestimate the fact that this was an enormous tactical blunder on the part of all the teams that should never have let Floyd gain so much time.  By the time  these guys realized that they had an emergency on their hands it was already too late to do anything about it.

Honestly – and I hope by now you can see that I really do call it the way I see it – I don’t see how you need doping to explain Floyd’s results on this stage.  Far from it.  I think that the facts that are readily apparent to all concerned, facts that can be conclusively demonstrated to be true, definitively prove that Floyd’s performance can be completely explained without resorting to speculation about doping.

Needles?  We Don’t Need No Stinking Needles

I’ll save the lengthy explanation about why using testosterone would have been one of the most ludicrous decisions imagineable for another post as I’m sure I’ve given you plenty to think about already today.  Before we wrap this up though let me remind you of what I said before: that on a Tour team of the caliber of Floyd’s the doping is not left up to the riders.  The doctors know this stuff as well as anyone – certainly as well as I do so I am absolutely certain that no one on Floyd’s team stuck him with testosterone before the stage.  I think that Floyd would have had a pretty tough time finding testosterone to shoot up with too.  Remember that in previous tours teams and riders had been raided in the middle of the night – recall people even going through the garbage in Lance’s room after he departed from motels during his final tour.

I hardly think that Floyd (as the American leader who was clearly under the microscope) would have been wandering around with syringes and testosterone in his bag or some tube of transdermal testosterone gel in his personal effects. Puhlease.  Why didn’t the “investigation” into his alleged doping ask any of these sensible questions?

Anyway, I’ll delve into the myriad reasons why only a moron would have used testosterone in my final post on this topic.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this one.  Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Oh- and I promise I won’t take another four months to write the final installment.  Oliver

I’m writing a series of posts on using dietary supplements to improve your health. The first installment just went up over at the GTD Times. If you have an interesting in which dietary supplements actually work and want to learn a bit about why, you might want to head on over and check it out.

Why am I qualified to write about this? Prior to my life in technology I was actually a biochemist and spent more than a decade researching and developing pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements. There’s still a fair bit of flotsam and jetsam I’ve written on the topic floating around the net – if you’re curious Google it and you’ll see…

Okay, I have a bit of a mystery and it’s driving me nuts. I’m a bit of a laser nerd. I collect a fairly wide range of DPSS handheld and larger Argon bench lasers. Among the things I do with them (aside from wasting prodigious amounts of time) is a form of projection laser microscopy that I’ve sort of developed hacked into being.

Over the past year I’ve been observing some very curious creatures with this apparatus I’ve created. They’re tiny, they’re ugly, they’re mean to each other and if they were much bigger they’d scare the crap out of me. Really. They scare me enough as it is and they’re smaller than a single human red blood cell (I know, I checked…anything in the name of science).

From observing and filming them extensively, I have come to believe that these are very complex lifeforms, clearly multicellular, and they even exhibit some fairly advanced behavioral characteristics (I am totally serious).

The problem is that I cannot identify them. Not family, not genus, not species, not phylum, class, or even order…heck they could be aliens for all I know. What I do know is that I have been uable to find them in any microbiology text, any book on insects or arachnids, no crustacean book either, even the all knowing info-god Google has let me down so I am turning to you, my smart readers for help. Please help me find out what the hell these things are!!!!!

More video of these terrifying critters can be found here
Photos of them can be found here Thank You.

In part one of this post I talked about my prior relationship with Floyd and also named a few of the folks that might have had a vested interest in seeing Floyd come up positive for synthetic testosterone in the 2007 Tour de France.

In this installment I’ll take a closer look at this contention and talk about the 16th and 17th stages, including a discussion of Floyd’s “miraculous” ride and just how testosterone may have helped or hindered such a performance. I’ll examine also, other possible reasons for his epic effort that it appears to me have possibly been overlooked by Floyd’s friends and foes alike.

Much has been written about drugs and cycling – mostly that professional cycling is one of the most drug riddled sports on the planet and that by in large nearly all professional cyclists use performance enhancing substances at least part of the time. Unfortunately, these statements are both essentially true. Though drug use is nothing new in professional sports there are few examples where systematic use of banned ergogenic substances is so endemic.

This is not a new phenomenon as some would have liked us to believe. Cyclists have been using various compounds nearly as long as the sport has been recognizable in its modern form. From alcohol and strychnine (I kid you not) used by riders contesting six day track events in the 1920’s and before to the use of cortisone and other anti-inflammatory steroids, along with amphetamines in the 70’s and 80’s, to the modern era of steroids, rEPO, blood doping, blood packing, perfuchloro, and even retro-viruses that stimulate local production of nerve growth factor if there’s even the potential that something will aid in the cyclists quest to go faster, go fast longer, or recover more quickly it has been tested, tried, discovered by the governing bodies, made detectable via testing and abandoned for the next tricky thing.

In recent years the testing – and particularly the “in competition” testing – has become so good that it has forced athletes to dope in entirely new ways. Doping has become much more of a science in the past decade as well. Gone are the days of a soigneur with a little black bag fixing you up before a stage when you’re not feeling so hot – we’re now in the time of highly trained, highly paid physicians that are exceptionally knowledgeable about the compounds they are employing to improve the athlete’s performance, the methods of using these compounds for maximum benefit and of course the means of detecting these drugs and how to get around them. It has even been said that the highest paid guy on most teams isn’t the team captain, it’s the team doctor. “Nuf said”.

When I was racing there was certainly plenty of drug use to be seen, from the unsophisticated, lower level pros and teams to the highly professional medical programs employed by the best teams and the best riders. A level playing field? Hardly. But that is not what I’m writing about. I only make this point for one simple reason and it is this: a team like Phonak, that had at least one rider capable of vying for a Tour de France victory is not going to leave doping to chance.

This is not amateur hour – at this level the riders themselves are not self administering pharmaceuticals any more than they are giving themselves (or each other) massages after the stages end. Pulease. We’re talking about major advertising dollars being spent on these teams and the salaries of the top riders. These athletes would no more medicate themselves than a jockey would medicate a Kentucky Derby winning thoroughbred. What this means is that if Floyd doped – or more specifically, since for the purposes of this post we are only talking about the use of synthetic testosterone during the 17th stage of the Tour de France – it is highly (one might even say impossibly unlikely) that such a drug was self administered without the guidance or knowledge of the team physician.

We’ll get back to this in a minute because it is important but first lets talk about what happened on the 16th stage

As you know, Floyd was seemingly in command of the tour up until the 16th stage when he had what can only be described as a catastrophically bad day. Riders in big tours have bad days all the time. It is inevitable that over 23 days of basically non-stop racing on some days you’ll feel good and some days you’ll feel like it would be an upgrade to feel like death warmed over. The key for a GC rider (general classification) is to have bad days on stages where it is possible to fake it through the stage without letting your competitors know how vulnerable you are.

A nice long flat road stage is perfect for making a bad day look like a not so bad day. A stage with 2 “hors” category (above category) climbs plus one 1st and one 2nd category climb is perfectly horrible for that same bad day. When the going gets vertical there is no place to hide, no teammate that can provide meaningful help and no amount of determination that can save you from the inevitable.

Unfortunately for Floyd, his bad day came on stage 16 which was without a doubt one of the most difficult stages of the 2006 Tour. The Yellow jersey, it is said, is a magic fleece and many are the riders who graced with the golden tunic suddenly found themselves transformed from mere mortal work-a-day professional cyclists (if there is such a thing in the European professional peloton) to beings capable of other worldly performances. You only have to play reruns of any previous Tour to see what I mean. Unfortunately, this magic is whimsical at best (Lance it seemed was charmed for a full seven years) and it chose to take its leave of Floyd at the worst possible time.

Apparently Floyd knew almost instantly that his day was going to be long and painful. I can tell you from personal experience that it is one of the worst feelings a professional cyclist can have to wake up with legs that feel like lead, lungs that feel like they’ve been scorched and a heart the size of a hummingbird’s when you’re facing a race of any sort – let alone a 220 km beast like the one facing Floyd. The course he was facing is so difficult that it would pose a truly serious challenge to all but the most extraordinary recreational cyclists to simply ride the distance in a single day, never mind the fifteen prior days and more than 2000km of racing at an average speed of around 47 km per hour leading up to it.

As you know, Floyd hung tough – incredibly tough – up until the final climb to La Toussuire. On those vertiginous slopes he finally cracked and with each stroke of the pedals his competitors drove a stake through the heart of his Tour de France dream. There was nothing left in the tank -it was obvious for all to see.

When I was a pro – and particularly during long time trials which was not my favorite discipline – I used to ask myself this question: ” If someone put a gun to my head right this moment and told me that I must go faster or they would pull the trigger, would I take the bullet? In other words was there another ounce of power I could summon for the effort? If there was you weren’t going hard enough. The correct answer should be “yes I’ll be taking the shot to the head, there’s nothing more I can do.”

I mention this, not so much on account of Floyd but on account of his competitors that were giving him a beating. During races like the Tour the riders have radio communication with their team directors in the cars following the race. These cars in turn are all tuned in to the race radio which is a moment by moment report of what is happening on the road.

The moment that Floyd cracked every director knew it, this in turn meant every rider with a prayer of a decent overall finish also knew it.  In an instant all those headsets came alive with directors sportif screaming at the top of their lungs to their respective athletes: “ride, ride, ride – venga, venga, die, die, allez, allez, allez…this is it, this is the race you must go now with everything you’ve got and more!!!” And ride they did. In spite of the heat and the three massive climbs already under their wheels that day the men looking for a GC placing went flat out – most likely as hard or harder than they’d ever ridden in their lives for the remainder of the stage.

It was the kind of effort about which books are written – the kind of effort where you die a little you go so hard. Pain means nothing, fatigue means nothing, vision narrows until you are racing in a black tunnel with barely any sight except the yellow line rolling by beneath your tires. Efforts so extreme that some athletes void their bladders or even bowels without even realizing until later – unless you’ve been there and done this, you simply cannot conceive of an effort like the ones the men who had dropped Floyd made.

At the finish Floyd had ceded 10:04 to Dane Michael Rasmussen, effectively taking him out of realistic contention for an overall victory. Speaking about the disastrous stage, Floyd said something which I found to be very telling. In fact, I believe, and experience dictates that my belief is correct, that what Landis said actually explains everything about what happened the following day.

“I was struggling even on the climbs before that,” Landis said. “I tried to hide it, but I wasn’t good, and then on the last climb there was only a certain speed I could go, which wasn’t very fast.” Floyd Landis following his disastrous finish on the 16th stage of the 2006 Tour de France

As I said, this statement is very telling but what it tells us is not obvious and also probably not what you’d expect….

In the next installment we’ll take a look at what this statement really meant and why it is the real smoking gun of this whole saga…