FDA Shuts Down Entire Operations of Real Water...One Bottling Facility Here in Mesa

3 hours ago:

On June 1, the FDA announced that Real Water Inc., a Nevada-based bottled water manufacturer, would cease operations and shut down due to its violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act).

BLOG INSERT: HYPER-LOCAL CONSUMER ALERT > Complete Recall For “Re2al Water Drinking Water” From One of The Three Company Facilities Here in Mesa

Information for the public: Local news outlets revealed that Jones was merely repackaging Las Vegas tap water, which would be bad enough anywhere else, but in a water-starved desert? Incredible. . .

Documents say the commercial product is drawn from the Las Vegas-area municipal water supply, filtered and processed with potassium hydroxide, commonly called lye, the chemical potassium bicarbonate and a mineral salt, magnesium chloride.

 

 

 

The consent decree requires the company to recall and destroy all its product produced before Wednesday; to turn over to the FDA records about processing, bottling and distribution; and to submit to unannounced inspections of company facilities in Las Vegas; Henderson, Nevada; and Mesa, Arizona.

The Mesa facility is located at 6018 E Main St, Mesa, AZ 85268

Real Water, a premium bottled water, recalled amid death and liver illnesses

the Guardian |

Federal authorities have ordered a complete recall of the Las Vegas-based bottled water brand Real Water and ordered the company to surrender records in investigations of at least one death and multiple cases of liver illness among people who reported drinking it.

The product is sold as premium alkalized drinking water in distinctive boxy blue bottles touting “E2 Electron Energized Technology.” Labels say it is “infused with negative ions” and offers healthy detoxifying properties.

Brent Jones, the company’s president, and attorneys for the company and the bottler, AffinityLifestyles.com, did not immediately respond Friday to email messages about a US district court order issued Wednesday.                

The consent decree requires the company to recall and destroy all its product produced before Wednesday; to turn over to the FDA records about processing, bottling and distribution; and to submit to unannounced inspections of company facilities in Las Vegas; Henderson, Nevada; and Mesa, Arizona

According to a judge's ruling, the company cannot process, distribute, or promote its products until its manufacturing operations comply with federal regulations and a list of other specific requirements.

It must also destroy any remaining product it has in stock. . .

In addition, part of the court order stipulates that the company must hire an independent expert to ensure its manufacturing practices comply with federal standards if they plan to restart operations.

The FDA Just Shut Down This Entire Bottled Water Company

Zachary Mack

June 2, 2021, 6:47 AM·4 min read

Reaching for a bottle of water is usually not one of the moments when your brain might suspect you're in danger. But after one water brand's products were linked to serious illnesses, a major recall was issued to remove them from shelves. Now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ordered that the troubled bottled water company shut down for violating federal regulations.

The FDA ordered that bottled water company Real Water Inc. shut down immediately.

On June 1, the FDA announced that Real Water Inc., a Nevada-based bottled water manufacturer, would cease operations and shut down due to its violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act). According to a judge's ruling, the company cannot process, distribute, or promote its products until its manufacturing operations comply with federal regulations and a list of other specific requirements. It must also destroy any remaining product it has in stock. . .

 In addition, part of the court order stipulates that the company must hire an independent expert to ensure its manufacturing practices comply with federal standards if they plan to restart operations. . .

According to the FDA, anyone who still has Real Water alkaline water products "should not drink, cook with, sell, or serve it," including to pets. The products include 5-gallon containers that were delivered to homes in Hawaii, California, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, 3-gallon containers that were sold nationwide through home delivery and subscription service, other various sized bottles that were sold online and in stores nationwide, and "Real Water" concentrate that was sold online.

Real Water has been potentially linked to liver disease. Real Water products have potentially been linked to multiple cases of non-viral hepatitis, which is inflammation of the liver that can lead to cirrhosis on the liver, liver cancer, liver failure, and even death. . .                                                

Since the FDA's original warning in March, the number of reported illnesses has grown to 16 cases of acute non-viral hepatitis in adults, including one death of a woman with underlying medical conditions. In a recently posted notice, the agency says the common symptoms associated with hepatitis include "fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, dark urine, clay or gray-colored bowel movements, joint pain, yellow eyes, and jaundice."

The FDA urges anyone who begins experiencing these symptoms to "contact their doctor."

_____________________________________________________________________________________

RELATED CONTENT ON THIS BLOG Sunday, May 21

HYPER-LOCAL CONSUMER ALERT > Complete Recall For “Re2al Water Drinking Water” From One of The Three Company Facilities Here in Mesa

Information for the public: Local news outlets revealed that Jones was merely repackaging Las Vegas tap water, which would be bad enough anywhere else, but in a water-starved desert? Incredible. . .

Documents say the commercial product is drawn from the Las Vegas-area municipal water supply, filtered and processed with potassium hydroxide, commonly called lye, the chemical potassium bicarbonate and a mineral salt, magnesium chloride.

 

 

 

The consent decree requires the company to recall and destroy all its product produced before Wednesday; to turn over to the FDA records about processing, bottling and distribution; and to submit to unannounced inspections of company facilities in Las Vegas; Henderson, Nevada; and Mesa, Arizona.

The Mesa facility is located at 6018 E Main St, Mesa, AZ 85268

Real Water, a premium bottled water, recalled amid death and liver illnesses

the Guardian |

Federal authorities have ordered a complete recall of the Las Vegas-based bottled water brand Real Water and ordered the company to surrender records in investigations of at least one death and multiple cases of liver illness among people who reported drinking it.

The product is sold as premium alkalized drinking water in distinctive boxy blue bottles touting “E2 Electron Energized Technology.” Labels say it is “infused with negative ions” and offers healthy detoxifying properties.

Brent Jones, the company’s president, and attorneys for the company and the bottler, AffinityLifestyles.com, did not immediately respond Friday to email messages about a US district court order issued Wednesday.                

The consent decree requires the company to recall and destroy all its product produced before Wednesday; to turn over to the FDA records about processing, bottling and distribution; and to submit to unannounced inspections of company facilities in Las Vegas; Henderson, Nevada; and Mesa, Arizona

Vice News: The Zoom Dick Fiasco That Went More Than Viral

Whoops! By now, after that Jeffrey Weiner thing and that Jeff Bezos thing, what if anything could capture anyone's interest any farther? Try this

In Aftermath of Zoom Dick Fiasco, Believer Staffers Say, Bosses Used Public Records Law Against Them

Motherboard’s attempts to learn more about how a Zoom dick incident at The Believer led, staffers say, to a bizarre campaign.

by Anna Merlin and by Tim Marchman

 

 vice.com |

"Motherboard’s attempts to learn more about how a Zoom dick incident at The Believer led, staffers say, to a bizarre campaign.

Long before Joshua Wolf Shenk reportedly stepped out of his bathtub and into infamy as the latest media figure to expose his penis to colleagues via Zoom, there were already issues at The Believer, the prestigious literary magazine where he served as editor-in-chief. And months after his departure, the fallout is still affecting staffers there, one of whom has resigned in protest. Staffers at both The Believer and the Black Mountain Institute—an affiliated institution that is, like the magazine, part of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas—say that records requests from Motherboard seeking documents about how UNLV handled both the bathtub incident and previous complaints about Shenk were improperly used to intimidate staffers.

The situation is both highly unusual and deeply rancorous: Maxwell Neely-Cohen, the staffer who resigned in protest, for instance, was involved in fundraising, and told UNLV that its handling of the records requests cost the university “millions of dollars” in donations, in a resignation letter obtained by Motherboard. It’s just the latest dramatic turn in the strange saga of an uncomfortable relationship between a respected literary magazine and the academic institution that houses it.  

“As UNLV’s leadership goes, I never have any idea where incompetence ends and nefariousness begins,” Neely-Cohen, who was editor-at-large at The Believer for three years before his resigning in protest this week, told Motherboard. “I just don’t know.” 

. . .In late April, a Los Angeles Times story broke the news of the Zoom dick incident and of Shenk's resignation from his roles as EIC and as director of the Black Mountain Institute (BMI). The version of events presented to the paper by Ira Silverberg, a famed literary personality acting as an advisor for Shenk, was that Shenk had, while wearing a mesh shirt, taken a bath during a February staff meeting to ease pain from his fibromyalgia, and inadvertently displayed his penis to Believer staffers when he stepped out of the tub. The article, which touted Shenk's many achievements but didn't manage to quote any of his colleagues, portrayed the incident as a ludicrous and regrettable but isolated one-off. . .

The issue, they made clear, was not that the staff was too fragile or ungenerous to countenance having been inadvertently flashed, but what they said was a long, frustrating history of mismanagement. 

 

"Our experience of Shenk," staffers wrote in the open letter, "is that he was an inattentive and negligent boss who created a fractured workplace rife with pay and labor inequalities, and whose behavior on the Zoom call matched a pattern of callousness and abusive disregard for the staffers who worked under him."

. . .Two female Believer staffers—who, like other current staffers who spoke for this article, were granted anonymity because they fear for their jobs—independently told Motherboard that they had been warned about Shenk's conduct before or early on in their tenures. He made female staffers deeply uncomfortable, according to the accounts of four current staffers, though none said he had sexually harassed them. “He doesn’t seem to be aware of his body or of other people’s comfort or reality,” one staffer said, dryly. 

. . .

One puzzling thing—which speaks to the concerns of staffers that their voices haven't been heard—is that while the Los Angeles Times story, relying on Silverberg's account, presented Shenk as having been in the bathtub, exposing himself by mistake when he stood up, no one who was actually on the call and who spoke to Motherboard found that to be a credible version of events. One person said that Shenk had told different stories to multiple people: that he’d been on the toilet with a towel covering him, for instance, or that he’d sought to keep his relevant parts under wraps with a robe. 

“It never crossed my mind that he was in water,” one person said. Nor was he wearing a “mesh shirt.”

READ MORE?  

Driving The Q'Anon Gonzo GOP Herd To Dallas: "For God & Country Patriot Round-Up"

Not to be missed over the long Memorial Day Weekend was this extravaganza that was staged at The Omni Hotel

Yeehaw!

Here's just one review of that event + a few more to follow . . .Let's go there
1

QAnon's cowboy-themed "Patriot Roundup" sure sounds like it was full of horseshit

By Andrew Paul

(Andrew Paul is a contributing writer with work recently featured by NBC Think, GQ, Slate, Rolling Stone, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

He writes the newsletter, (((Echo Chamber))).

"Howdy again, pardners! Say, do y’all remember that “For God & Country Patriots Roundup” weekend? You know, the QAnon conference scheduled to saddle up at the (taxpayer-funded) Omni Hotel in Dallas, Texas, hence the hackneyed cowboy theme? Well, despite a petition garnering well over 20,000 signatures in protest, the death cult convention went off without a hitch over this past weekend, and by golly, was it just plumb full of all the prerequisite ultra-rightwing nihilists, MAGA Country A-Listers, insurrectionist pablum, and constitutional law analysis reflected through gold filagreed funhouse mirrors.

As VICE’s “Roundup” roundup described over the weekend, there was a veritable, steamin’ crock of shit pot full of choice moments, including disgraced Gen. Michael T. Flynn buttering up the crowd with his support of a Myanmar-like military coup, Roger Stone’s “social media advisor” pantomiming hanging from a noose after mentioning Hillary Clinton, and the QAnon-spewing lawyer, Sidney Powell, wearing a leather biker vest emblazoned with MAGA patches struggling to sing the national anthem.

People also paid thousands of dollars at a Q-themed auction for items like a quilt signed by Mike “MyPillowGuy” Lindell, which we feel is painful enough to envision, and doesn’t require any more elaboration.

But now the Chauvinist Stampede is receding into the distance, haloed within the setting sun by a cloud of F-250 diesel plumes, Camel Crush cigarette smoke, and Lone Star farts. Don’t retire your spurs just yet, though, cowpokes. This year’s Patriot Roundup may have ended, but rest assured there will undoubtedly be additional QAnon rodeos, MAGA hootenannies, and 8Chan corrals in the months ahead. Like a wild pony, the Q movement refuses to be broken—no matter how many attempts you might make at reining them in with logic and provable facts.

So saddle up, sycophants, the rodeo’s just starting. Yee-fuckin-haw."

____________________________________________________________________________________

2 From The Daily Beast

Louie Gohmert Says He Isn’t a QAnon Supporter, Just a Moron

VERY FINE PERSON

opinion

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

This is maybe not the compelling defense that the congressman seems to think that it is.

Molly Jong-Fast

Editor-At-Large

Updated Jun. 01, 2021 8:32PM ET / Published Jun. 01, 2021 8:30PM ET 

More > "Some people spent Memorial Day at parades or BBQing with friends, but not Loonie Louie Gomhert, who was in Dallas speaking at The For God & Country Patriot Roundup hosted by “Q power couple” Amy and John “QAnon John” Sabal.

It was like CPAC meets a flat earther convention, but with more talk of coups and overthrowing the government, including former Trump National Security Adviser Mike “Madman” Flynn calling for a Myanmar-style military coup in America (he later denied saying that, but he said it on camera) and Sidney “Kraken” Powell musing that former President Donald Trump should be “reinstated” and then installed as president with a “new inauguration date.”

Powell, of course, is defending herself from a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems, which she said rigged the 2020 election on behalf of Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, by arguing that “no reasonable person” would take seriously the things she says.

So Rep. Gohmert maybe wasn’t the craziest guest at this cavalcade of crazy, but he was the only elected member of Congress there, giving a speech under a banner with a QAnon slogan on it. Gohmert didn’t embrace Q on stage, which I guess is better than the alternative, but he did play down the Jan. 6 attacks and say, “I would submit that weaponizing the FBI and the Department of Justice against one administration was an attack on democracy.” After his speech, he hung out with such Q’minaries as Capitol rioter Zak Paine, better known online as redpill78.

You’d think that a sitting United States congressmen would stay away from a cult that FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress “can lead to violence.” But Louie is no fool or, rather, he’s a fool who can read the writing on the wall, which is that QAnon is very popular with the Republican base, which counts on roughly 100 percent of the votes from the “15 percent of Americans (who) say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.” Maybe he’s not crazy but is just trying to meet the base where they are, which is nowhere good.

When the local CBS affiliate asked Gohmert’s office what he was doing there, a member of his staff insisted that he wasn’t there even though he was on camera.

Later, the station’s David Lippman got a long email from Gohmert that said his staff got its days mixed up and wasn’t lying about him being at the event (which organizers had tried to distance from QAnon amid lots of coverage about how it was a QAnon event) and also claiming that he does not even “know who or what QAnon is.”

But I was too stupid to know what the event I spoke at was about isn’t the defense Louie seems to think it is.

It’s been quite the year of being on the wrong side of history for Rep. Gohmert. . .

But back to this weekend’s fuckery. Gohmert went on about how “it wasn’t just right-wing extremists” rioting in the Capitol (although it was). He’s talked previously about how, in the words of Trump, there were lots of “very fine people” there at the insurrection.

People may be right that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Rothschild space lasers lunatic, is the worst member of Congress, but she has at least been stripped of her committee assignments by Democrats and scolded, for what little that’s worth, by her own party’s leaders after comparing mask mandates to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. Louie Gohmert remains a party member in good standing in his R+25 district.

Texas can do better than this guy. It would be hard to do worse."

_________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

3

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer.

Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

the national interest June 1, 2021

 

Texas Republicans Want to Make Trump’s Coup Nice and Legal

Michael Flynn said a coup “should happen”; Republicans prefer to use the legislature.

ByJonathan Chait

Intelligencer |

This past weekend, former national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared at the “For God & and Country Patriot Roundup,” a right-wing conclave in Texas, where he endorsed a military coup. “I want to know why what happened in Minamar [sic]” — QAnon believers have fixated on Myanmar’s military junta as a precursor to a similar event here — “can’t happen here?” an audience member, who identified himself as a Marine, asked Flynn. “No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That’s right,” Flynn replied. (Flynn later denied saying this, but it was captured on video.)

At the same time Flynn casually endorsed the military overturning the election and reinstalling the defeated president, the state’s Republican legislature was rushing through a package of voting restrictions that would advance the same broad agenda as Flynn advocates, but within the color of law.

One of the easy and cheap tools of political rhetoric is to hold up one of the more extreme members of the opposing party and misleadingly depict them as representative. To be clear, Michael Flynn is not representative of the Republican Party. He is an outlier in the full extent of his paranoia and willingness to advance the party’s cause through mass-scale illegal domestic violence.

But Flynn’s beliefs are not isolated, and as the drama in Texas indicates, they relate closely to the agenda of the party’s mainstream. A clear majority of Republican voters believe the 2020 election was stolen, and nearly a quarter of them support QAnon’s deranged fantasies. (Specifically, they agree that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation,” that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders,” and “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)

The proportion of Republicans who believe Joe Biden legitimately won a majority of votes in a majority of the Electoral College is also about one-quarter. All of this is to say that people like Flynn are no more marginal within the GOP than people who believe Joe Biden won the election. If Flynn is an outlier, so are the Republicans who accept the election results. Within the Republican Party, Michael Flynn is no more of a kook than Mitt Romney. . .

But Republicans can’t afford to completely alienate their pro-coup wing. That is why the consensus party stance is to act on the majority Republican belief that Biden stole the election, by imposing a sweeping regimen of voting restrictions, along with legal provisions that will allow Republicans to more easily challenge and overturn the next Democratic presidential election victory.

In Arizona, Republicans stripped the secretary of State (who is currently a Democrat) from any role in election litigation, while vesting all authority in the state’s attorney general, who is currently a Republican. Tellingly, the provision sunsets in January 2023, when the term ends for both officials.. Why? Because the state’s Republican-controlled legislature wants to be sure that it can hand control over a contested election to a Republican, and don’t know yet which office will be controlled by which party. . .

The thing to grasp about the Republican state-level counteroffensive against voting is that, within the bounds of party opinion, it is a compromise. Stacking the legal deck against voting, and in favor of Trump-style postelection legal challenges, arouses barely any controversy on the right.

> The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has occasionally drawn publicity by criticizing Trump’s communication style and undisciplined personal conduct, gives the Texas bill a fulsome endorsement. (The Journal has been laying the groundwork to fend off another Georgia-style backlash by running column after column warning corporations to stay out of the democracy issue.) Even Liz Cheney refused to condemn voter suppression, or even concede any link between these measures and Trump’s lies about the election.

The Republican Party, like all parties, is trying to hold together a coalition. That coalition includes people like Flynn, who want to simply seize power at gunpoint. The accommodation they have reached between their violent and nonviolent wings is a legal regimen designed to ensure that the next time a Trump rejects the election result, he won’t need a mob to prevail.