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It might be all over except the shouting. We are talking about the last chance to meaningfully curtail the nation’s headlong plunge into fiscal disaster. Since the Dems are hideously obtuse and feckless on the fiscal front, the only remaining hope was that the GOP would finally screw-up the courage to take sweeping bites out of Federal spending and borrowing in the process of enacting the Donald’s “one big beautiful” reconciliation bill.

But it’s now clear that won’t happen, either. Not even remotely.

That’s because over the weekend the House GOP even threw in the towel on serious Medicaid cuts. Yet Medicaid was the site of the last entitlement stand, so to speak, given that Social Security, Veterans and Medicare had already been given a hall pass by the Donald and the GOP congressional leadership.

So now a real red line has been crossed. That is to say, if the GOP is unwilling to rollback Medicaid to even its 2008 pre-ObamaCare level, then the white flag of fiscal surrender might as well be hoisted.

Indeed, the fiscal math is definitive. When you add defense and net interest to the entitlements exempted from the budgetary knife by the Trumpified GOP the result is that nearly three-fourths of the Federal budget has been ring-fenced as “sacred cows”.

Moreover, in the case of the defense budget Trump is actually seeking a 13% increase to the already vastly bloated level of baseline spending in order to achieve the first ever $1.0 trillion annual DOD budget for FY 2026. That’s twice or $500 billion more than would be needed for a true America First national security policy—based on $75 billion per year for an invincible strategic nuclear deterrent and a couple hundred billion more for an impenetrable conventional defense of the America’s shorelines and airspace. All the rest of that great swamp of waste known as the Pentagon budget goes for standing up a Global

Empire and propping up dozens of so-called allies abroad, which we do not need in order to defend the homeland in this day and age of high tech weaponry.

In any event, if you examine baseline spending for the first five columns in the table below—defense, the big entitlements and net interest—-which we have summed as “Sacred Cows” in the sixth column, the total off-limits budget components amount to $65.4 trillion over the next decade. That’s fully 73% projected baseline spending of $89.3 trillion during the next 10 years.

Moreover, if you move over to the next two columns in the table for Medicaid and Food Stamps/Nutrition programs, respectively, they add another $10 trillion to baseline spending. At this point in the Congressional proceedings, however, we can see honest cuts of no more than $300 billion for Medicaid (see below) and $200 billion for Food Stamps/Nutrition.

Such stingy savings figures would amount to only a 5% cut in these two giant welfare programs. Yet, as a political matter, slashing these programs by five times more—say $2.5 trillion over the next decade—should be a piece of cake for the GOP. After all, precious few food stamp/Medicaid recipients even vote, to saying nothing of voting for Republicans.

So when we said it’s all over except the shouting, we were not indulging in hyperbole. It’s hard core fiscal math: When you get over to the “N’aid” (nutrition programs) column of the table (8th column) you have encompassed 84% of the entire Federal budget and $75 trillion of spending over the next decade. Yet if the GOP manages to come up with even the aforementioned $500 billion of Medicaid/Foods Stamps savings in their current Reconciliation bill mark-up process we’d be pleasantly surprised.

That is to say, the so-called conservative party—the only hope left—can apparently manage to come up with savings of just 0.6% of built-in spending for the big components of the Federal budget. Looking $75 trillion of spending square in the face as they craft the Trump economic plan, the GOP is whiffing entirely, and pathetically so.

Never mind, of course, that these cats never stop giving speeches about runaway Federal spending and decrying the the soaring public debt. These ills they are pleased to blame on the “Joe Biden” entity and the Big Spending Dems.

So what a joke. After all, the built-in baseline deficit for the next decade is nearly $22 trillion, given that baseline spending will total $89.3 trillion, whereas revenues are estimated by CBO at just $67.5 billion.

Accordingly, if the GOP majorities blow on defense, veterans and border control increases the pitiful $500 billion savings from entitlements for poor people now pending, the public debt will hit nearly $58 trillion by 2035 or 135% of GDP.

In turn, even at today’s blended average yield on the public debt of 4.3%, annual interest expense at the end of the 10-year window would be a staggering $2.5 trillion per year!

Baseline Federal Budget Outlays, FY 2026–2035 ($Billions)

And yet and yet. The CBO revenue baseline assumes all of the 2017 Trump tax cuts are allowed to expire, thereby adding upwards of $5 trillion relative to the tax code in effect during FY 2025. In fact, however, the Trumpified GOP is determined come hell or high war to extend the 2017 tax cuts for another decade. So here is the latest estimates of the revenue cost of the tax bill pending in the House Ways and Means Committee. It would actually reduce the CBO revenue baseline by in excess of $5 trillion over FY 2026-2035 or to barely $62 trillion—resulting in Uncle Sam borrowing 30 centson every dollar spent.

The crucial point to note based on the most recent estimates by the good folks the Committee for a Responsible Budget (sic) is that a pure mechanical extension of the 2017 tax act (TCJA) would cost a net of $3.45 trillion over the decade. So the GOP tax writers have already added more than $1.5 trillion to the revenue cost—and that’s before a single dime of revenue loss from cutting taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, as the Donald promised during the campaign.

Still, there is no mystery as to the difference between the first column and the second column of the table below. Aside from some slightly more generous rate cuts and other personal income tax items, the big change is on the so-called “payfor” line, which is dominated by the current SALT cap (deductibility of state and local taxes) of $10,000 for joint filers. Extending the current SALT caps would generate a revenue offset of $1.26 trillion over the 10-year period, thereby reducing the net cost of extending the tax rate cuts (37.0% top rate versus 39.6%), child credit increases from $1,000 to $2,000 and the 22% business income pass-thru deduction.

Again, the GOP delegations in the high tax states like New York and California have threatened to fall on the sword if the SALT cap is not raised dramatically. The current working target, therefore, is $62,000 for single filers and $124,000 for joint filers. Alas, that would make it easier for Blue State legislatures to keep income taxes sky high, but would also reduce the revenue offset by nearly $750 billion to just $500 billion over the decade. That retreat, in turn, accounts for the preponderant share of the shrinkage in the “line itemized and other deductions” line of the chart below.

So, there is no surprise that the Blue State Republicans are getting their way. An initial proposal to raise the cap on joint filers to $30,000 was shot down in no uncertain terms. And with a one-vote margin the House, every caucus of squeaky wheels is getting to name the price of their votes.

“It’s not just insulting—it risks derailing President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill,” Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) wrote in a statement.

Indeed, the squeaky wheel factions and caucuses are the reason there are no meaningful spending cut, either, and most especially with respect to the hideously bloated, out-of-control Medicaid program. Or as the GOP chairman of the House committee handling the bill admitted,

“I think that the people who will have the most difficult time with it would be that it doesn’t go far enough,” Guthrie said in an office boardroom lined with the committee’s policy staffers. “We’re going to go as far as we can go to get 218 votes.”

To be sure, House Republicans are largely on board with imposing work requirements on able-bodied Medicaid recipients, but that would only save $190 billion over 10-years because the GOP work requirements are loophole ridden. Likewise, there is broad support for barring those who entered the country without authorization, but it will be a stretch and then some to save another $100 billion from this restriction because Medicaid expenditures for illegal aliens are not nearly what the hype suggests.

By the same token, what would save material Medicaid dollars is going back to the lower Federal matching rates (see below) which prevailed before ObamaCare and the Trump-COVID bailouts of 2020. But as Speaker Johnson told reporters recently a proposal to directly reduce the enhanced federal match for states that expanded Medicaid, known as the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP), was off the table.

Likewise, a common sense proposal to include per capita caps on Medicaid expansion enrollees (i.e. ObamaCare) is another hard “no” among GOP RINOs. So the Speaker told reporters this week “I think we’re ruling that out.”

If this sound like the squeaky wheels are ruling the roost, that’s exactly the case. In fact, Congressman Mike Lawler is the very poster boy. When he is not carrying water for Netanyahu he is running for governor of New York State. And as it happens, New York state gets $45 billion per year of matching payments for Medicaid from Uncle Sam, but only $27 billion of this is from the traditional Federal matching rate. The balance is owing to the above mentioned FMAP expansions from ObamaCare and the pandemic add-ons.

“I’ve said very clearly, I do not support any change to FMAP, I don’t support per capita caps,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said this week, even as he was also insisting that any revenue offsets from a meaningful SALT cap be eliminated from the tax portion of the bill, as described above.

For want of doubt, however, here is what Lawler and the RINO faction of the House GOP are defending. That is to say, an explosive growth of Medicaid spending per poor person in the US that has doubled in constant dollars—from $11,329 per capita in 2000 to $24,837 per capita in 2024.

Medicaid Spending and Poverty Population (2000–2024)

As shown above, total medicaid spending has increased by 340% since the year 2ooo— from $207 billion per year to $914 billion in 2024. However, during the same 24-year interval the poverty population grew by only 16%, rising from 31.6 million at the turn of the century to 36.8 million in 2024.

Accordingly, Medicaid spending per poor person has soared. The $6,547 per capita figure in 2000 was actually $24,837 in 2024. And as indicated above, even when you adjust for inflation, constant dollar Medicaid spending per poor person (2024$) has risen by nearly 120% since 2000.

There is no mystery as to why we have 18% more poor people in the US over the last quarter century, even though real Medicaid spending per poor person has more than doubled. To wit, the UniParty spenders in Washington has simply opened the Medicaid flood-gates to a larger and larger share of the US population, reaching far beyond the poverty population.

Thus, in the year 2000 there were 39.6 million Medicaid recipients and constant dollar Medicaid spending (2024$) was $358 billion. Fast forward to FY 2024, however, after the huge ObamaCare expansion and then the Trump-expansion during the 2020 pandemic free-stuff blow-out, and constant dollar spending was 2.6X higher at $914 billion.

As is evident from the table, however, a good share of that enormous real dollar gain was owing to the soaring Medicaid enrollments, which reached 79 million in 2024. That is to say, whereas 14% of the US population was on Medicaid in the year 2000 that figure now stands at nearly 24%.

So the question recurs: Why is the Congressional GOP in the year 2025 hesitant to sharply rollback Medicaid eligibility and spending when as recently as the turn of the century Medicaid coverage level of about 40 million was barely half of today’s nearly 80 million. Yet the Bill Clinton Dems then in power were not screaming to high heaven that needy people were being left out in the cold.

In fact, when you combine the Medicaid population with Medicare and the ObamaCare insurance subsidy population and eliminate the dual and triple eligibles, the combined enrollment in government-funded medical insurance programs is 141 million. That’s 41% of the entire US population.

So the fact is, the House reconciliation bill cut of maybe $300 billion in Medicaid is occurring in a context in which nearly half of the US population is already in a socialist medical care pool. If the GOP can’t find its way clear to even a tiny $300 billion 10-year cut in that context, they should literally throw-in the towel on fiscal restraint. They would be tantamount to useless.

Total Federal/State Medicaid Spending and Recipients, 2000–2024

For want of doubt, here is a table showing the impact of merely capping Federal reimbursement at the 57% rate that prevailed under Bill Clinton’s auspices as recent as the year 2000. It shows that the Federal share of Medicaid spending could be cut by $900 billion over the period or three times more than is likely to happen—just by going back to the Clinton standard for Medicaid cost-sharing with the states.

Unfortunately, the RINO’s in the GOP House and Senate caucuses have already ixnayed any material roll-back in the above documented explosion of Medicaid enrollments and spending.

Table: Medicaid Spending Projections (FY2026–2035)

Needless to say, even as the GOP slouches toward adding $5 trillion to the $22 trillion of baseline deficits already built-in for the next decade, the Washington spending machine rolls on—the DOGE boys to the contrary not withstanding. In fact, spending during FY 2025 through the first six months of the fiscal year is already running 10% above last year’s Biden level.

As a result, the 12-month rolling deficit total is back above the $2 trillion level, and will be headed sharply higher if the GOP Congressional majorities can manage to confect a big beautiful reconciliation bill that buries the nation in upwards of $30 trillion of additional public debt over the decade ahead.

The Donald, of course, has promised a new Golden Age of Prosperity. But based on what the Trumpified GOP is now cooking up we are more likely to get a Fiscal Armageddon like never before.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

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From the Tom Woods Letter:

We actually had some very good news at the federal level the other day, but it’s been almost completely buried.

You may be familiar with a book called Three Felonies a Day, by Harvey Silverglate. The author’s point: federal criminal law, extending into the Code of Federal Regulations, has become so extensive, abstruse, and serpentine that we essentially violate some aspect of it on a regular basis without even knowing it.

This, in turn, affords the feds broad scope to harass ordinary people, since we’re all guilty of something.

It’s the classic case of anarcho-tyranny: actual criminals are treated with kid gloves, but normal people have the book thrown at them.

Well, an executive order was just issued called “Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations.”

(For anyone fearful of the very words “executive order,” I remind you that an order directing federal agencies to do certain things is within the president’s constitutional authority.)

Here’s how Alexandria Brown described it on X:

What does this do? The most important part is that every agency has 365 days to list out all the regulations that have a criminal penalty and then that report has to be made public. Right now, there is literally no one on this planet that knows this information. No one.

That report must be made public and must be updated annually.

All future regulations have to state criminal offenses clearly. Mens rea is back on the menu! The default will be to require mens rea. What that means in English is that you have to know you are committing a crime; strict liability is highly disfavored.

Each agency has 45 days to publish guidance on how criminally liable regulatory offenses will be handled. Then clarification that this doesn’t apply to immigration regulations and generic catch-all language.

This is everything I have ever wanted on this topic. Everything. I never ever ever, not in the history of ever, thought that there would be a requirement for a report from each agency mandating that the regulations with criminal liability be listed, let alone that it would be public.

The shift to pursue civil over criminal first is, obviously, significant. See re: the issue of people fighting over property lines with the US government who all of a sudden were being charged with major federal felonies.

And then there are the mens rea requirements. Mens rea means guilty mind. It is the doctrine that you have to have criminal intent to be charged with a crime. Let’s say you grab a coat off a rack. If you thought it was your coat, that’s not theft, that’s a mistake.

Strict liability means if you take the coat, you’re guilty no matter what. Substantial portions of regulations with criminal penalties attached are strict liability. Did you do the action? You are criminally liable, even if you did not know the regulation existed and you had no criminal intent.

This EO is tremendously important and will have direct, and hopefully immediate, effect on more or less everyone in America. And did you hear anything about it? Anything at all?

This is one of my areas of keen interest and I missed this. This should be being shouted from the mountaintops as to how it is restoring the rights of Americans to know when they will be criminally charged, for what, and that you can’t be held criminally liable for a mistake.

This is unambiguously good news, and to be welcomed.

Because, as I think you know, we are dealing with people who do not exactly have your welfare at heart.

So it makes sense to me why people might be very particular about protecting their privacy against such people, and against the corporate lackeys who do their bidding.

As I mentioned yesterday, it may sound crazy, but we’ve learned that it isn’t a “conspiracy theory” to say the NSA has a way it can spy on you in your own home.

Thankfully, good technology is getting ahead of the bad technology that makes all  the invasiveness possible, and my old friend Glenn Meder, who’s spoken at two of my conferences on this very topic, is going to walk you through how to use the good to shut out the bad.

He’s doing a live presentation today that people love, in which he shares five secrets to outsmart surveillance (including the solution to that creepy NSA thing) to shield your online life from prying eyes.

https://www.tomwoods.com/privacy

The post News Flash: Normal People Just Got Relief appeared first on LewRockwell.

. . . for interviewing on his podcast an Israeli historian who voiced disapproval of the genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli and U.S. governments in Gaza.

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Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.  

John Miltimore

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Tim McGraw wrote:

Pearly Gates

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Click Here:

Louis Conte

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Thanks, Patrick Foy 

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Click Here:

Republic Broadcasting Network » When you hear “Real ID,” think “Papers, please” 

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Writes Steven Wallace:

Hi Lew,

Thank you for the article titled, The War Against Religious Freedom. Very thought provoking!

All individuals, here in Idaho, are statutorily required to report child abuse to the prevailing authority or jurisdiction in which the abuse is taking place with a very narrow exception for certain clergy. Obviously, there is a moral imperative to do something positive to alleviate a bad situation of which we become aware, but the statutory requirement presents a moral dilemma for us all. Often is the case when an abused child is removed from parental control the child then becomes abused by the state agency charged with the child’s care and placement. Child Protective Service is notorious for losing track of these children and many of them wind up being trafficked or placed with people who’ve not been carefully vetted. What is a person to do in such a dilemma? Even with stupid laws there are practical considerations in weighing what course of action to take in the context of there being a higher law than man’s law in which we may be held to account for.

The state, as an institution, isn’t the only abuser of children. Religious institutions, protestant or catholic, all have a sordid history of abusing children under the veil of authority. I can’t help but think that an abuser of children going to confession knows the confidential and incriminating nature of the information he is giving a priest during confession could be used by that priest, if they are so inclined, to satisfy their own deviant inclinations and setting up a co-dependent relationship with the one doing the confessing. In my view the question is this, does absolution related to confession contribute positively or negatively to the child abuse dilemma? If the law requiring priests to report child abuse discourages confessions and the wannabe confessor can’t obtain absolution through the confessional process, might that inspire one, with a genuine conscience, to quit the behavior that was driving the need for confession in the first place?

I’m not Catholic so the sacrament issue associated with this law, from my perspective, is minuscule in comparison to the unchecked abuse of children by the church or the state. Priests and other individuals statutorily required to make this report have a moral dilemma as the cure could be as bad as the dis-ease. The upside, however, is those not trusting the priests or clergy because of this law may have to put on their big boy pants and become more personally responsible for their behavior to maintain a clear conscience. This would be a form of spiritual decentralization in the removal of earthbound intermediaries (men of the cloth, whether church or state) that have proved themselves to be less than trustworthy in many cases. Fewer children of parents, with a conscience, would be abused. I would submit that confessions by those seeking absolution, without a repentant heart, are null and void in the spiritual realm and represents an attitude and dogma not flattering to any religious institution. When dogma becomes superior to morality, it’s game over in the spiritual realm.

Thanks again,

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Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

The Washington Post

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Cpcondon wrote:

Stunning moment Pope Leo XIV caught on camera at 2005 World Series game in Chicago

The new pope was born in Chicago in 1955 and half a decade later he was among the crowd at the then-US Cellular Field for Game 1 of the World Series against the Houston Astros.

See here.

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Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Come and sing a simple song of freedom
Sing it like you’ve never sung before
Let it fill the air
Tell the people everywhere
We, the people here, don’t want a war

Bobby Darin is back in the news. The new Broadway musical “Just in Time” is based on his life and his son Dodd is promoting it. Darin wrote, recorded and performed an antiwar song in 1969 called “Simple Song of Freedom” that was a hit for Tim Hardin. Darin became very political, supporting RFK for president due to his stance against the Vietnam War. 

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Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato "fuori controllo" negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/limportanza-pluridecennale-della)

Durante tutta la mia vita la Groenlandia era fuori dai radar della maggior parte degli americani.

Se gli americani sapevano qualcosa della Groenlandia, era che si trattava della risposta alla domanda banale: “Qual è l'isola più grande del mondo?”

Negli ultimi decenni i fanatici del clima hanno ripetutamente lanciato allarmi su allarmi riguardo il fatto che i livelli globali del mare sarebbero aumentati pericolosamente a causa dello scioglimento dei ghiacciai della Groenlandia e della vasta copertura del ghiaccio artico.

Purtroppo per gli allarmisti, il famoso ghiacciaio Petermann della Groenlandia ha continuato ad accumulare ghiaccio negli ultimi dodici anni, crescendo di quasi 16 chilometri in lunghezza dal 2012 al 2024. Infatti, negli ultimi dodici anni, la perdita di ghiaccio in Groenlandia si è ridotta complessivamente di due terzi, pari allo 0,0005% della copertura glaciale totale, una quantità non sufficiente a modificare la tendenza a lungo termine dell'innalzamento del livello globale del mare a un tasso di 3 centimetri ogni decennio.

Nel 2025 la Groenlandia diventa improvvisamente una notizia di grande attualità. Il presidente Donald Trump, citando la posizione strategica dell'isola come vitale per la sicurezza statunitense e internazionale, insieme alle ricchezze minerarie in gran parte inutilizzate, ha parlato apertamente dell'annessione dell'isola agli Stati Uniti, suggerendo persino la possibilità di ricorrere alla forza.

Anche se potremmo rabbrividire di fronte all'indelicata proposta di Trump di un'occupazione forzata di un protettorato danese con una popolazione di soli 57.000 abitanti, ha perfettamente ragione nel dire che la Groenlandia è strategicamente importante, e lo è da molto tempo. Lo so sin dalla metà degli anni '50.

Qui devo addentrarmi in un capitolo ampiamente dimenticato della storia della Guerra Fredda. Negli anni '50, con lo sviluppo dei missili balistici intercontinentali (ICBM) dotati di testata nucleare, gli Stati Uniti cercarono di escogitare modi per difendersi dalla minaccia sovietica. Le tattiche difensive spaziavano dalle esercitazioni nelle scuole elementari, che ci costringevano a ripiegarci in patetiche palline di carne nascoste sotto i banchi, alla costruzione della Linea di Allarme Precoce a Distanza (DEW), una serie di decine di installazioni radar all'estremità settentrionale del continente nordamericano che si estendeva verso est fino alla Groenlandia.

Sebbene potesse sembrare controintuitivo per chi pensasse che i sovietici ci avrebbero lanciato i loro missili balistici intercontinentali attraverso l'Atlantico, la realtà geografica del nostro globo è che la distanza più breve tra le rampe di lancio nucleari russe e gli obiettivi negli Stati Uniti era ed è ancora sopra la regione polare e l'Oceano Artico. I radar DEW dovevano darci tempo sufficiente per lanciare un contrattacco e (si sperava) intercettare almeno alcuni dei missili in arrivo.

Ho avuto modo di dare un'occhiata dall'interno alla Linea DEW. “Pop”, lo zio che ha dato una casa a me e a mia madre vedova, aveva eccellenti capacità ingegneristiche e costruttive. Lavorava per la Michigan Bell, parte del Bell System, il principale appaltatore che collaborava con il Dipartimento della Difesa per la costruzione della Linea DEW.

Per farla breve su “Pop”: nonostante avesse servito il suo Paese per tre anni nella Marina degli Stati Uniti a metà degli anni '20, rimanendo nella riserva da allora fino alla Seconda guerra mondiale e prestando servizio attivo per cinque anni in essa (quattro dei quali sulla portaerei Essex nel Pacifico), all'età di cinquant'anni non aveva ancora finito di servire il suo Paese. Si offrì volontario (cosa che fece davvero infuriare mia zia!) per servire nell'Artico e fu nominato sovrintendente assistente responsabile della costruzione dei radar. Il suo superiore diretto si occupò della contabilità in patria, mentre “Pop” visse nell'Artico per due anni (1955-1957) e supervisionò personalmente la costruzione di ognuna di quelle installazioni radar.

Lavorare alla Linea DEW non era per i deboli di cuore. “Pop” copriva spesso due turni da 10 ore nello stesso giorno. C'erano bagni con secchi a temperature di -30 gradi sotto zero; c'erano le lunghe ore di buio in inverno. In più di un'occasione le squadre spalarono la neve per una settimana per preparare una pista di fortuna per gli aerei in arrivo che trasportavano attrezzature e rifornimenti necessari, solo per vedere poi scatenarsi una tempesta di vento il giorno della consegna prevista, vanificando l'intera settimana di lavoro e vanificando così la consegna sperata. Ho ancora una scatola piena di diapositive fotografiche che mostrano oltre una dozzina di aerei gravemente danneggiati durante l'atterraggio sul ghiaccio irregolare, alcuni dei quali erano aerei su cui “Pop” era stato passeggero. Ricordo di aver sentito parlare di una vittima: un uomo caduto in un crepaccio. Costruire la Linea DEW, quindi, era tutt'altro che un compito facile, con il solo vantaggio principale di vedersi raddoppiare lo stipendio.

Come accennato in precedenza, la Groenlandia, come l'Alaska e il Canada, era un sito di installazioni della Linea DEW. Infatti, uno dei regali che “Pop” portò dall'Artico fu un gagliardetto dalla “Base Aerea di Narsarsuak” in Groenlandia. Sono sicuro di essere stato l'unico bambino della mia scuola ad aver mai sentito parlare di Narsarsuak (oggi si scrive “Narsarsuaq”). Curiosità: la pista di Narsarsuaq è in salita verso est, quindi invece di decollare controvento, gli aerei decollano tutti in discesa verso ovest.

La Linea DEW è stata chiusa nel 1993. I satelliti possono rilevare i lanci di missili molto prima dei radar terrestri, con linee di vista limitate dalla curvatura terrestre. Ciononostante la Groenlandia rimane strategicamente importante. Rappresenta un terreno fertile per le malefatte russe e cinesi. E, dato il potenziale economico dei giacimenti minerari sull'isola, è comprensibile che Trump la voglia avvicinare all'orbita statunitense. Spero solo che le sue dichiarazioni schiette non facciano naufragare un buon accordo con i groenlandesi.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

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Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

For those of us who have opposed every war since Vietnam, or all wars, and whose hearts are broken and our sensibilities sickened by US foreign policy funding the bombs and weapons in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere, we need to be reminded sometimes that there will be peace in the valley when we are reunited with the Lord. Pat Boone was a guest on The Johnny Cash Show in 1969, and the two of them performed the beautiful gospel song, “Peace in the Valley.”

The post Peace in the Valley: Pat Boone and Johnny Cash appeared first on LewRockwell.

Polls prove just one thing; the effectiveness of propaganda.
Approve/disapprove “statistics” only determine how many dumbasses bought the story.
I just have to laugh!

As a recent example; Tariffs and stock market gyrations so-spun as earth shattering news for weeks are finally proven “unpopular” by the very networks that fear mongered and spun the idea in the first place!  Smug “news” anchors gloat over the fulfillment of their prophecy “proven by opinion polls”,…opinions they just implanted!  You can easily see those views regurgitated by network believers.  You can also see them reflected in public behaviors demonstrating the power of words and scurrilous lies.

How many young men sacrificed their lives “to do their patriotic duty” believing 9/11 was legit?

The power of media is not to be underestimated!

“In the beginning were WORDS!”  People will “jump off bridges” on account of a few discouraging words.

Doesn’t that disprove the old saying, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but WORDS will never hurt me?”

Words are seeds; watch them grow into beautiful flowers,…or deadly poisons.

Lies Live On;

The thing is; once these lies are disseminated, people cop a position and refuse to ever admit they were fooled.

Need I list “official” explanations for JFK/RFK/MLK murders, Vietnam, Waco, Kansas City, 9/11, Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya, Covid 19, Ukraine or 10/7 that will not die???  Highly paid network shills perpetuate these historical fictions as “givens.”

How ’bout the enemization of Russia, China, Iran?  Neocon “wet dreams?”

After Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, yellow and white flags showed massive support for a phony proxy war.

Israel was brutally “attacked” on 10/7 and proceeded to genocide Gaza.  Opposition to zionist Israel’s rampage morphed into “antisemitism” and we were shown the limits to “free speech.”

Or the phony food and drug ads, and bogus medical findings?  First you are made to wonder if you have a particular “disease” and are then handed a pill,…all presented by happy actors dancing through fields of glory.

Or CIA/Mossad/MI-6 ops nixxed as “conspiracy theories”, Epstein’s certain “suicide”, covid came from “China”, “tinfoil-hat” chemtrails and “weather balloon” UFOs?

People are still getting flu shots and Pfizer is still promoting covid boosters for kids?  WTF, don’t they know the jig is up?

And yet big-lies seem to have a half life. Soon after Bush neocons invaded Iraq (again), approval ratings for the war were at least 70%.  The country was still in the grips of a patriotic reaction to false-flag 9/11 after being stunned by “video evidence” of an Arab Terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.  A few years went by and approval fell below 50%.  Some began to realize that Israel was the sole beneficiary of a “Mideast Cleansing” by a “coalition of the willing.” The endless war went on for another 20 years, spreading through Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen flooding western Europe with millions of refugees.

The sick-ass networks even “proved” Ofc. Derek Chauvin guilty of murder by running a video of George Floyd’s fentanyl suicide in a loop!  That fueled the BLM race thumpers and gave a green light for looting and burning.

A divisive distraction that artificially created racism and white-cop hate where none existed could have only benefited the left over a supposedly white supremacist right and even brought a bogus court conviction against Chauvin.

Color TeeVee became black and white; mainly black!

Demographics were baked-into a chocolate upside-down cake.

Years later, those who saw the infamous video are still 100% convinced of black death by white cop.

Trump should pardon Chauvin who survived a brutal knife attack and remains in the can to this day!

Ditto Jan 6, the infamous “insurrection” that halted all question of election fraud.  It sure seemed FBI assets provoked the invasion of the capitol, everyone in the area was marched off to prison Gestapo style, and a phony “1/6 Committee” doubled-down on the setup.

THE Existential Enigma

Maybe the worst sin of the “system” is much celebrated university-designed agriculture.

Decades of “progress” have only yielded nutrient-deficient produce, a chronic disease epidemic and the unsustainable destruction of rivers/lakes/oceans?

Chemical farming, GMO crops and confined animal feedlots provided production shortcuts at great cost to human health and the environment.

They treated mother-soil like dirt and contaminated the planet with chemical fertilizers and our bodies with pesticides/herbicides and made genetically modified monocrops dominant in all opposition to diversified farming and the laws of ecology!

Soil is the living organism our food once depended on,… until chemical methods became little more than toxic dry-land hydroponics; seed/fertilize/irrigate.

The idiocy behind modern agronomics defies common sense, but unfortunately replaced natural diversified farming the way pharmaceutical medicine replaced simple therapies and natural immunity.

Why?

Whether from envy, lack of self esteem, IQ or originality, most folks succumb to peer pressure and follow the crowd…errr fake narratives imposed by media tricksters.  Weren’t they warned against other kids as bad influences by their parents?  TV news, entertainment programming, radio and Hollywood movies, and now social media is packed with queer peers and bad influencers.

Everybody needs a friend, but the media is really no friend of Jack’s.

Heroic gun violence is the meat and potatoes of prime-time programming, adding to the prevalence of mass shootings as much as chemically-whacked suicidal serotonin-overloaded kids under “mental healthcare.”

Network tradecraft relies on generating fear, shame, envy and a primal  sense of being left-out if one does not join an imaginary bandwagon.

At this point it is probably too late to awaken the masses to the sly perpetrators of endless wars, corporate scams and their abject serfdom.

They have been hoodwinked, hosed, boned and bullshitted, yet bristle at any reference of reality….a sad commentary on human gullibility.

The post Polls??? HaHa! appeared first on LewRockwell.

On April 30, 1975, the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese communists. A big military parade in front of hundreds of thousands of flag-waving Vietnamese was held last month in what is now called Ho Chi Minh City to mark the fall of Saigon 50 years ago. Many conservatives have been reflecting on this event. I don’t agree with what some of them are saying because they are apologists for the immoral, unnecessary, undeclared, senseless, criminal Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War officially ended in January of 1973 after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. The agreement resulted in the withdrawal of all remaining military forces from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The civil war between North and South Vietnam quickly resumed, the North conquered the South, and the two countries were reunited on July 2, 1976.

The United States spent about $140 billion (said to be $1 trillion today) and lost over 58,200 men. Like U.S. military personnel who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, they all died in vain and for a lie. They died to get their name on a wall, so Vietnam could join the World Trade Organization and become a U.S. trading partner, so Vietnam could receive millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid, so the United States could sell military supplies and weapons to Vietnam, and so hundreds of thousands of Americans could visit Vietnam every year as tourists.

The death toll of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians is in the millions, many of them civilians. This is something we never hear about from conservative apologists for the Vietnam War. Instead, it is all about the hundreds of American POWs and MIAs who are unaccounted for.

I have written three articles in which I have expressed my opinion of the Vietnam War. The first is a review of John Marciano, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (Monthly Review Press, 2016). The second is a review of Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books, 2013). The third is an article titled “Should We Honor Vietnam Veterans?”

Here are some things that I said:

The Vietnam War was not a mistake, a blunder, a noble cause, or a painful chapter in American history; it was a crime that will forever be a blight on the United States.

The “daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam” was     murder; beatings; torture, including waterboarding and electric shock; rape, including gang rape; sodomy; forced displacement; home burnings; specious arrests; planting of weapons on dead civilians; imprisonment without due process; corpse mutilation; killing and raping of children; point-blank executions; mass killings; dehumanization and humiliation of civilians; repeated aerial bombing and artillery fire on rural populations; aerial spraying of defoliants that wiped out crops; slaughter of animals; using people for target practice; running down civilians with jeeps and trucks, including deliberately crushing people with armored vehicles; destruction of food supplies; sexual exploitation, abuse, violence, and slavery; forced drownings; prisoner abuse and executions; defecating in houses; taking body parts as trophies and souvenirs; mounting Vietnamese heads on poles; lashing corpses to U.S. vehicles; dropping corpses from helicopters.

I for one will never forget what Vietnam Veterans did – they traveled half way around the world to fight an unjust, immoral, and unnecessary war against people they didn’t know who were no threat to them, their families, or the United States. The Vietnam War was a monstrous evil in every respect.

In reflecting on the Vietnam War, some conservatives are saying that the real problem with the war is that we lost, that we were not permitted to win, or that we could have won the war quickly and left.

So, even though the United States foolishly took sides in a civil war; unnecessarily sent its troops halfway around the world; wasted billions of dollars; senselessly sacrificed 58,000 of its young men; and killed millions of people, many of whom were civilians; the U.S. military should have dropped more bombs, shot more bullets, thrown more grenades, dropped more napalm, employed more attack helicopters, destroyed more buildings, and killed more people in a country that was no threat to us so that America could win a noble patriotic cause and have peace with honor.

Here is my reflection: Because the Vietnam War was from the very beginning immoral, unnecessary, undeclared, senseless, and criminal, every day that the United States was involved in the war was one day too many. The only honorable thing to do was to immediately stop fighting and get out—not after we “won” or developed some plan or met some objective.

Muhammad Ali may have been wrong about religion; he may have had several failed marriages, affairs, and illegitimate children; and he may have underestimated Joe Frazier; but he was certainly right when he said: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” And neither did the United States.

The post Reflections on the Vietnam War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Before he was confirmed as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was a well-respected professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University, from which he took an M.D. in medicine and a Ph.D. in economics, econometrics, and health economics.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and, unlike the majority of academics across the United States, Dr. Bhattacharya did not quickly fall in line with the normative narrative. Just days after the government ordered Americans to shelter-in-place, he co-authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that questioned the rationale for lockdowns. Later, he was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which codified resistance to government mandates.

The story of Dr. Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration exposes a systematic effort by the Biden administration to suppress scientific truths at the expense of life and liberty. With his confirmation, America and the world are witnessing a momentous victory for “real science” and free speech.

Named for its drafting and signing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, The Great Barrington Declaration was published on October 5, 2020, months before any Covid – 19 vaccines were widely available. Its premise: lockdowns and restrictive measures will inflict harm, and people at high risk of the disease should be protected while healthy people should live normally as herd immunity develops.

The story of the ‘declaration’ is a tale of sensible scientific minds sticking to their truths even as the government and government-supported scientists made every effort to ridicule and silence them.

The declaration’s three authors, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor of theoretical epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, were highly respected academic leaders. Their combined expertise did not focus on the sole metric of stopping disease spread, but on the ancillary consequences to society if lockdowns were implemented.

This contradicted the misinformation narrative of Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins. In an email to Fauci four days following the release of the Declaration, Collins wrote: “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. Is it underway?”

Collins and Fauci conspired to rally a government disinformation network to discredit Bhattacharya and the declaration, including via social media platforms later implicated in the “Twitter files” as co-opted by the Biden administration to do the government’s bidding. The World Health Organization decried the declaration a dangerous strategy lacking a sound scientific basis. Dozens of supposed health authorities, including the American Public Health Association, rallied to condemn the declaration in an open letter stating:

“If followed, the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration would haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives…. The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace. Instead of selling false hope that will predictably backfire, we must focus on how to manage this pandemic in a safe, responsible, and equitable way.’”

The exact opposite is now known to be the truth: these organizations participated in a coordinated smear campaign that itself cost innumerable lives. The political strategy of the NIH under Collins ignored the sound public health expertise of the declaration’s authors in favor of fearmongering, lockdowns, and government domination at the expense of free speech liberties and scientific inquiry.

As the National Review later explained in “Francis Collins & Anthony Fauci’s Great Barrington Declaration Attack Was Wrong”:

“Real scientists would investigate the premises first, then decide if the declaration should be subject to a “takedown,” but no such thing ever happened. The authors were disparaged, their motives impugned, their conclusions ridiculed, but one looks in vain for anything like a scientific counter-argument.

“It’s enough to make you suspect that the real objective of Fauci and friends was expansion of government authority rather than protection against disease.”

Jay Bhattachrya and crew stuck to their truth-telling guns, criticizing the efficacy of masks, social distancing, school closures, and even (gasp!) vaccine effectiveness. This determination has paid off in revelations of common sense and led to the eventual dethroning of the disgraced Collins. On his way out the NIH door, Dr. Collins leveled still more slanderous guff at the Great Barrington Declaration and its supporters. Collins labeled the (now widely accepted) lab-leak theory a “huge distraction,” and maligned as killers those telling Americans the truth:

“Outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins took aim at the makers of the “The Great Barrington Declaration,” refusing to step down from calling them ‘fringe epidemiologists’ while arguing ‘hundreds of thousands’ would have died of COVID-19 if the country followed their advice.

“Collins told Fox News host Bret Baier Sunday that he was ‘not going to apologize’ for comments Friday in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis in which he called advocates of herd immunity ‘fringe epidemiologists,’ arguing that ‘hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.’”

This shameless dishonesty has been thoroughly debunked. Defending themselves in a subsequent article published by The Brownstone Institute, Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff wrote:

“It is impossible to shut down society completely. Lockdowns protected young low-risk affluent work-from-home professionals, such as administrators, scientists, professors, journalists, and lawyers, while older high-risk members of the working class were exposed and died in necessarily high numbers. This failure to understand that lockdowns could not protect the vulnerable led to the tragically high death counts from COVID.

“Collins, Fauci, and [Dr. Jeremy] Farrar got the pandemic strategy they advocated for, and they own the results together with other lockdown proponents. The GBD was and is inconvenient for them because it stands as clear evidence that a better, less deadly alternative was available.”

Over time, truth conquers propaganda. In 2024, Collins admitted the utter folly of his disparagement of the Declaration:

“Collins, whose July 2023 comments recently attracted online attention, confessed that ‘public health people’ made a ‘really unfortunate’ mistake by ignoring the devastating side effects of the interventions they believed were necessary to curtail COVID-19 transmission.

“During the pandemic, the wisdom of weighing costs against benefits was not just forgotten but explicitly repudiated.

“Collins … regrets that he and his colleagues paid insufficient attention to the ‘collateral damage’ caused by restrictions on social, economic, and educational activity. ‘We probably needed to have that conversation more effectively,’ he said.”

In remarks to The Kennedy Beacon, Great Barrington signatory Dr. Meryl Nass responded to Francis Collins’ admission: “A day late and a dollar short,” she said. “Collins was central to the conspiracy that kept the [false] notion of ‘zoonotic spillover’ alive to protect himself and his agency–or worse, to prolong the pandemic and roll out a vaccine he must have known was deadly by mid 2021. Is this evil man now trying to polish his legacy?”

Dr. Bhattacharya’s most tremendous vindication: he is now America’s first Indian American to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bhattacharya and all those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration are true freedom fighters. It is a new day in America.

This article was originally published on The Kennedy Beacon.

The post The Vindication of Dr. Bhattacharya appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump’s return to the Middle East this week, the first since his first-term 2017 visit, will take place amidst great turmoil. It is a region that bears little resemblance to  the Middle East of 2017 and it appears, at least from media reporting this past week, that the Trump Administration has some understanding of this reality.

Syria has been over-run and is now controlled by the same al-Qaeda that the US government supposedly spent 20 years fighting in the “war on terror.” Violence against religious and ethnic minorities has, predictably, exploded under the “rule” of a self-proclaimed Syrian president who until very recently was on the US “most wanted” terrorist list.

After the October 7, 2023, Hamas raid, Gaza has been reduced to rubble and turned into a humanitarian catastrophe. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and perhaps another million face starvation. US bombs and financial aid have facilitated the utter destruction of Gaza.

Iran has made peace with Saudi Arabia thanks to Chinese mediation and is deepening its ties with the Kingdom. Thus, the US has little leverage in talks with the two former enemies.

Israel is conducting military operations against several countries in the region simultaneously as the world increasingly condemns its aggression against its neighbors.

After tearing up the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran in his first term, President Trump is pushing for a new deal with Iran while threatening to attack if negotiations do not produce the results he demands.

Massively increased US military action against the Houthis in Yemen starting in March did not result in their capitulation to US demands. Despite attempting to put the best spin on things, it is clear that the US retreated from the region in the face of a series of successful Yemeni actions in defense of their homeland.

Biden and then Trump launched attacks against Yemen on behalf of Israel, but in the end the US president wisely removed US military assets from the area and called off the bombing.

In short, President Trump will be wading into a minefield this week, but it is a peril that the US government has largely brought upon itself. Decades of US interventionism, from at least the 2003 Iraq war, have not produced the peaceful transformation of the region, as promised by the neocons and their mentor, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

From the unnecessary Iraq war – based on lies – to the destruction of Libya and Syria and countless other interventions, the Middle East is a basket case. And it turns out none of it actually helped Israel at all!

Having ignited the tinder box of the region with US backing, Israel has now found itself friendless in a region increasingly hostile to its policies and even its very existence. Now there are indications that the Trump Administration is tiring of this entangling alliance as the MAGA base looks more warily on foreign interventionism.

The lesson that President Trump should take with him is that to a large degree it has been US interventionism in the Middle East that has produced these poisoned fruits. His wise military disengagement from the Houthis in Yemen should serve as a US model for the region. Ties forged by trade and friendship produce peace and prosperity and are far preferable to endless neocon war cries.

The post What Will Trump Find in the Middle East This Week? appeared first on LewRockwell.

One baseline truth in current American life is that our bodily well-being gets worse as the so-called health care industry gets ever-larger — it is now 17.6-percent of the economy (GDP). This is clearly the basis of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign that attached itself to the Trump 2.0 program. You hear almost no arguments against MAHA itself, even from the Party of Hustles and Hoaxes, but plenty of calumny and objurgation against MAHA’s chief advocate, Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Mr. Trump’s initial nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat was pulled last week just before her scheduled Senate confirmation hearing. Her credentials looked a bit sketchy — med school on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Maarten (say, what. . . ?) and other irregularities — which she confabulated about anyway. Plus, she was a Covid vaccine cheerleader and an avid advocate of the censorship campaign to slam down debate over it.

Which leads directly to a glaring quandary in President Trump’s current order-of-business: he has avoided engagement with the whole Covid fiasco that unspooled in the last year of his first term. Now, it is the opinion of this blog that Mr. Trump was played on Covid by blob-marshaled “experts” Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, who led the White House Covid “team,” and then snookered the president into Operation Warp Speed, appealing to his vanity to play the superhero. You can also surmise that the Covid operation was hatched to run Mr. Trump out of office by enabling epic election fraud, making a chump of him.

Other aspects of the Covid hairball are now finally getting unraveled, such as the lab origin issue and Dr. Fauci’s nefarious and vast operations to fund bioweapons. But the awful subject of the Covid mRNA vaccines, and all the monkey business around their development and deployment, remains taboo, even as Trump 2.0 sets records in smashing bureaucratic idols and radically shifting all sorts of policy — for instance, today’s monumental move to lower drug costs by 30 to 80 percent, using the Most Favored Nation trade policy device, which ties U.S. drug prices to the lowest prices paid by other high-income countries (e.g., Canada, Japan, or European nations) for the same medications.

But the Covid vaccine shots loom over the land like an ominous miasma that no one wants to talk about. The evidence has mounted steadily that the shots were ineffective and deeply harmful to many of the people who took them, especially those who got multiple boosters. The result, apparently, is a shocking rise in rare and aggressive cancers, immune system dysfunction, damage to the heart and blood vessels, neurological disorders, and much more. The CDC under “Joe Biden” worked desperately to hide all that, but it came out, anyway, because it was too big to hide.

81-percent of the US population submitted to the Covid vaccine shots. So, you can suppose that all that would be an extremely touchy matter. To admit all that scary information to the public arena would likely set off a politically dangerous fury. You can see why Mr. Trump would avoid going near it in the early going of his second term. But eventually he must come to terms with it.

Likewise, sooner or later, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., will have to take some kind of stand on the Covid vaccines, namely stopping the shots altogether. Whatever you think of the childhood vaccine schedule — a red-hot issue these days — it seems quite insane that the Covid mRNA vaccine is still included on it. It is still officially recommended by the CDC. Among the “much more” effects of the shots is damage to human fertility. You must ask: by giving these shots to kids as young as six-months, are we setting up a nation that won’t be able to have children? Pretty spooky.

So, the new nominee for Surgeon General is one Casey Means of the brother / sister team, Calley and Casey Means, known primarily as food safety advocate sidekicks to Bobby Kennedy. The Meanses were already under some suspicion for rising too rapidly into prominence from out of nowhere since the summer of 2024 when Mr. Kennedy began to swing over to the Trump campaign. They were suspected and criticized as the shills for some sort of sinister alliance between Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, and the US intel blob. The Meanses have adroitly avoided taking a position on the Covid vaccines. Hmmmm. . . . That’s the chatter, anyway — whether there’s any truth to it, we will have to stand-by to discover.

You’d have to ask yourself whether Mr. Kennedy would ally himself with people of supposedly sketchy character. Is he being used or played? Or maybe, it’s just not so. The nomination of Casey Means sent out shock-waves through MAGA and MAHA. Her credentials seemed a little sketchy like Janette Nesheiwat’s before her. Ms. Means dropped out of her five-year medical residency in Oregon a few months before completing it, apparently due to disillusionment with conventional medicine. She does not have an active medical license, supposedly required to serve as Surgeon General.

Instead, she transitioned into what is loosely called functional medicine, which rejects the oppressive “standards of practice” dictated by insurance companies and reliance on pharma products to alleviate symptoms rather than treat the causes of disease. Ms. Means also became a medical entrepreneur, starting Levels, a glucose-monitoring tech company, and is an Instagram “wellness influencer” with 750,000 followers. Given the gross racketeering aspects of conventional medicine and its failure to deal with the shocking rise in chronic disease, you might argue that Ms. Means made the right career moves, weird as they might seem superficially.

It’s pretty much a miracle that RFK, Jr., managed to land safely as Secretary of HHS and that he was able to enlist “medical freedom” advocates Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes for Health and Marty Makary to run the Federal Drug Administration. This represents a stupendous turnaround in government policy. It’s also plausible that this new public health team has been preoccupied with personnel and administrative re-org in the first months of Trump 2.0. They’ve begun to nibble around the edges of the national health crisis, such as banning toxic food coloring.

They have yet to face the big, nasty legal questions such as revoking Pharma’s liability shield against lawsuits for its defective products, ending TV advertising of Pharma products — which is just an extortion racket for managing cable news content to protect Pharma — fully confronting the autism calamity and its connection to childhood vaccines, and, of course, pulling the Covid shots.

There is also chatter that RFK, Jr., is “managed” by hidden persons or forces. One not-so-hidden character in that psychodrama is Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA). Sen. Cassidy, a medical doctor, chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee that ran Mr. Kennedy over-the-coals in his confirmation hearing. Political pressure caused Sen. Cassidy to cave and vote “yes” for RFK,Jr., then. Louisiana has since changed its election rules so that Democrats can no longer vote in the GOP primary, and Cassidy is vulnerable. His base is restless. He voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January 2021 over the Capitol J-6 riot.

So, the chatter says that Mr. Kennedy made a deal with Sen. Cassidy to avoid taking certain actions — like, anything that might hurt Pharma and its profit-stream — or else Mr. Kennedy would be dragged back in front of the HELP Committee and raked over the coals again. If that were to happen, I suspect Mr. Kennedy would handle himself very capably in any public hearing. He has always been in command of the facts. As head of HHS, he has had access to a deep trove of information that he had no access to previously. He must know by now exactly what sort of mischief has been perpetrated in US public health over the decades and will not be shy about disclosing it publicly. You should also not be surprised if Mr. Kennedy begins issuing criminal referrals before much longer.

As for Casey Means. . . give her a chance to demonstrate that she is on the right side of MAHA and willing to fight in what has become a biomedical war on the American public.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post MAHA Hugger Mugger appeared first on LewRockwell.