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Every two weeks Drs Sam & Mark Bailey provide an hour long Q&A to questions submitted by those subscribing to their Private Member Service.

Usually they cover about 10-12 topics each time.

This week they devoted a fascinating 8 minutes discussing Shingles, it’s Vaccine, Chickenpox, Shedding – Red Dye #3.

I asked Sam to create this segment so I could share it with you on LRC BLOG and she graciously agreed.

After viewing the segment, HERE, please also take the time to view their two related videos on Chickenpox Parties, HERE, and the Fallacy of Vaccine Shedding, HERE.

As a bonus I’m attaching below the latest Members Only Q&A Index pdf, where you can view the now more than 500 topics covered by them since 2022.

This is a tremendous resource and if you’re interested in joining, at $5/mo I find it an awesome value for you and your family.

Highly Recommended 

The post Drs Sam & Mark Bailey: Chickenpox, Shingles, Shedding – and Red Dye 3 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Excellent background overview of the last several months, the monumental 2024 presidential election of Donald J Trump, and his world-shaking consequential impact on redirecting the political impact of foreign and domestic policy, Robert Barnes does an excellent overview of the ramifications of the unitary branch theory of government and its dramatic impact on the deep state.

 

The post The Duran: Challenging the Deep State – Russia-US Rapprochement Begins in Saudi Arabia w/ Robert Barnes (Live) appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

TASS News

 

The post Russian, US teams meet in Riyadh, hold ‘serious conversation on all questions’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Vicki Marzullo:

It seems to me, if DOGE is using AI on these “untraceable” payments through the Treasury Department, they could pull up a list of all accounts missing a TAS, and go through them to see where the checks were mailed or which bank accounts they were deposited in to see if they’re legitimate payments.

See here.

 

The post DOGE Finds $4.7 Trillion In Virtually Untraceable Treasury Payments appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Successful US/Russia Talks Leave EU & Zelensky Pounding Sand! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

The post Steve Bannon, Jimmy Dore: Robert Kagan and assassination attempts against Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Al Jazeera

 

The post Which countries are the top military spenders and where does Europe rank? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lo stop all'USAID è stato possibile grazie alla fine della dottrina Chevron, la quale ha permesso alle varie agenzie governative statunitensi di interpretare arbitrariamente le leggi “ambigue”. Ma anche forzare linee di spesa che il presidente poteva non voler approvare. Lo sfoltimento delle incrostazioni burocratiche segnerà anche la fine di tutti quei soldi che finivano nelle ONG, usati per plasmare il mondo secondo la visione di chi le indirizzava... e gli inglesi hanno sempre usato proxy in tal senso. Ovviamente non se ne andranno senza combattere, perché suddette incrostazioni di potere sono impermeabili al cambio di casacca delle amministrazioni e servono sostanzialmente due padroni (l'amministrazione corrente e chi li ha messi lì, o il gruppo politico di riferimento che li ha messi lì). Di conseguenza quando c'è un Musk che tramite il DOGE vuole efficientare la spesa pubblica statunitense, lo Stato profondo si innervosisce e sguinzaglia i propri agenti affinché il suo controllo non venga messo in discussione. Non c'è da stupirsi, sapevamo che sarebbe successo ed era una strada obbligata per raggiungere il risultato finale. Ritengo, nonostante ciò, che il progetto di snellimento della spesa pubblica andrà avanti, con nuovi compartimenti burocratici che remeranno contro e cercheranno di fermare la scure; a vantaggio della nuova amministrazione Trump c'è da dire che i cosiddetti disfattisti della prima ora, ovvero della sua prima amministrazione, sono stati quasi tutti fatti fuori e c'è gente determinata a fare pulizia nel sistema amministrativo americano. Non sarà facile ma verrà fatto, almeno in una percentuale sufficiente a riportare equilibrio.

____________________________________________________________________________________

 

da Zerohedge

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lombra-di-obama-lo-stato-profondo)

Nel discorso politico contemporaneo il termine “Stato profondo” emerge spesso come termine generico per descrivere le incrostazioni burocratiche e le forze invisibili che plasmano la governance degli Stati Uniti. Washington DC è spesso raffigurata come l'epicentro di questo cosiddetto Stato profondo, dove le dinamiche di potere operano indipendentemente dai risultati elettorali.

Sebbene sia vero che la governance degli Stati Uniti è guidata da entità non elette e non responsabili, come i complessi militari e di intelligence, il concetto di “Stato profondo” può semplificare eccessivamente le complessità della governance a Washington DC. Può anche servire a deviare la responsabilità da coloro che sono maggiormente colpevoli dei danni inflitti al nostro Paese.

Lo Stato profondo può sembrare un'entità monolitica, tuttavia è, in realtà, una complessa rete di attori umani con ruoli attivi in una qualche agenzia governativa. Tra questi individui Barack Obama si distingue come una figura fondamentale, la cui influenza e la cui eredità hanno plasmato in modo significativo il panorama politico negli ultimi 17 anni.

In questo articolo esploreremo il suo ruolo determinante nel plasmare la politica degli Stati Uniti, non solo durante la sua presidenza, ma anche durante il primo mandato di Trump e la presidenza Biden (a volte indicati come il terzo e il quarto mandato di Obama), e come questa sfortunata era potrebbe ora avvicinarsi alla fine.

La rete nelle agenzie governative

Obama esemplifica il concetto di rete all'interno di ciò che di solito viene definito “Stato profondo”. La sua presidenza non solo ha portato a significative divisioni e cambiamenti politici, ma ha anche gettato le basi per una rete di fanatici lealisti e alleati ideologici, molti dei quali sono rimasti trincerati sia nelle istituzioni governative che in quelle non governative. Queste figure, molte delle quali sono ex-membri dell'amministrazione Obama, hanno minato la democrazia e la volontà del popolo in molteplici presidenze.

Gli sforzi post-presidenziali di Obama, come la sua difesa politica, il suo ruolo di mentore dei leader democratici emergenti e il fatto che sia stato il primo ex-presidente dopo il morente Woodrow Wilson a rimanere a Washington, evidenziano la sua influenza continua. A differenza della burocrazia senza volto tipicamente associata al termine “Stato profondo”, Obama incarna la realtà della sua vera natura: non un'entità monolitica, ma una rete di individui, come lui, che plasmano la politica e l'opinione pubblica, spesso da dietro le quinte.

Un esame più attento rivela che molti individui che hanno prestato servizio sotto Obama sono rimasti attivi in ​​ruoli governativi attraverso più amministrazioni. Le figure chiave dell'intelligence, della difesa e di altri settori critici spesso mantengono le loro posizioni o riemergono in ruoli diversi, rafforzando la percezione di una continuità non democratica nella governance americana.

Questo fenomeno non è esclusivo dell'amministrazione Obama. Washington ha assistito al riciclo di funzionari e consiglieri in diverse presidenze, dando origine a una classe di insider che opera con un alto grado di autonomia rispetto alla volontà del popolo. Ma Obama ha senza dubbio portato le cose a un nuovo livello. Ecco alcuni esempi.

I nomi permanenti a Washington

Antony Blinken è stato vice Segretario di Stato e vice Consigliere per la Sicurezza Nazionale sotto Obama prima di diventare Segretario di Stato sotto Biden. Ha continuato le disastrose linee di politica di Obama, che spaziavano dall'Iran all'Ucraina.

Jake Sullivan ha ricoperto vari ruoli di sicurezza nazionale sotto Obama prima di diventare National Security Advisor sotto Biden. Tra questi incarichi è stato fondamentale nel promuovere la bufala della collusione con la Russia. Sebbene non ricopra più una posizione governativa, sua moglie, Margaret Goodlander, ha prestato giuramento di recente come nuovo membro del Congresso.

Victoria Nuland ha alimentato la guerra in Ucraina nel 2014 quando era Assistente Segretario di Stato sotto Obama. In seguito è diventata Sottosegretario di Stato per gli Affari Politici sotto Biden. Anche lei ha avuto un ruolo chiave nel promuovere la narrazione fraudolenta della collusione con la Russia. Il marito della Nuland, Robert Kagan, è un commentatore presso la Brookings Institution ed è stato, fino a poco tempo fa, un fervente anti-Trump sul Washington Post.

Susan Rice è passata da Consigliere per la sicurezza nazionale e Ambasciatrice delle Nazioni Unite sotto Obama a Direttrice del Consiglio per la politica interna nell'amministrazione Biden. La Rice ha tentato di nascondere il coinvolgimento di Obama nell'armare il governo americano contro Trump attraverso la bufala della collusione con la Russia, in particolare il ruolo di Obama nel licenziamento del generale Michael Flynn.

Mary McCord è stata Procuratore generale aggiunto sotto Obama, una posizione che ha permesso anche a lei di avere un ruolo nel promuovere la narrazione della collusione con la Russia. In seguito è diventata consulente legale della Camera dei rappresentanti degli Stati Uniti durante la farsa dell'inchiesta sui datti del 6 gennaio. Più di recente ha cercato di ostacolare le nomine di Pam Bondi a Procuratore generale e di Kash Patel a Direttore dell'FBI. Suo marito, Sheldon Snook, ha lavorato per il giudice capo John Roberts dal 2014 al 2020. A dicembre 2020 ha scritto un articolo anti-Trump sul The Atlantic.

Lisa Monaco, un'altra mistificatrice della collusione con la Russia, è stata Consigliere per la sicurezza interna sotto Obama ed è diventata vice Procuratore generale sotto Biden. Ha guidato la campagna del Dipartimento di Giustizia contro Trump e i manifestanti del 6 gennaio.

John Carlin ha ricoperto un ruolo nella sicurezza nazionale sotto Obama ed è tornato nell'amministrazione Biden come Procuratore generale aggiunto per aiutare la Monaco a perseguire il programma di Obama in materia di diritto.

Janet Yellen è passata da Presidente della Federal Reserve sotto Obama a Segretaria del Tesoro durante l'amministrazione Biden.

Ron Klain è passato dall'essere capo dello staff del vicepresidente Biden a capo dello staff della Casa Bianca sotto Biden.

John Kerry è stato Segretario di Stato sotto Obama e inviato speciale del presidente per il clima sotto Biden.

Denis McDonough è passato dall'essere capo dello staff della Casa Bianca sotto Obama a segretario per gli Affari dei veterani sotto Biden.

Samantha Power, ambasciatrice delle Nazioni Unite sotto Obama, è diventata amministratrice dell'USAID sotto Biden.

Jen Psaki ha lavorato come vice addetta stampa e portavoce del Dipartimento di Stato sotto Obama, prima di diventare addetta stampa della Casa Bianca sotto Biden.

Amos Hochstein, che aiutò Hunter Biden a nascondere i legami corrotti della sua famiglia in Ucraina, era l'inviato speciale di Obama per gli affari energetici. È stato ricompensato con un ruolo simile sotto Biden.

Alejandro Mayorkas è stato direttore dei Servizi per la cittadinanza e l'immigrazione degli Stati Uniti e vicesegretario alla sicurezza interna sotto Obama, prima di diventare Segretario alla sicurezza interna sotto Biden.

David Shulkin è stato Sottosegretario agli Affari dei veterani sotto Obama prima di ricoprire l'incarico di Segretario agli Affari dei veterani sotto Trump, fino al suo licenziamento definitivo nel 2018.

Norm Eisen è passato senza soluzione di continuità dai suoi ruoli nell'amministrazione Obama, tra cui quello di ambasciatore in Repubblica Ceca, alla guida di operazioni contro Trump presso organizzazioni di facciata dell'establishment come la Brookings Institution.

Altri, come i due principali funzionari dell'intelligence di Obama, John Brennan e James Clapper, potrebbero non aver ricoperto ruoli ufficiali nelle amministrazioni successive, ma sono stati inseriti in importanti organi di stampa tradizionali (Brennan alla NBC e Clapper alla CNN) dove potevano dare forma al dibattito pubblico. Non sorprende che siano stati questi due uomini a guidare la famigerata  campagna dell'intelligence che affermava falsamente che il laptop di Hunter Biden era disinformazione russa. Le loro azioni hanno avuto un ruolo fondamentale nel minare le possibilità di Trump alle elezioni del 2020.

Ci sono molti altri nomi, tra cui personaggi come Anthony Fauci, che facevano parte del governo non eletto prima della presidenza di Obama e hanno mantenuto i loro incarichi anche dopo.

Potremmo continuare, ma il punto è chiaro: la Washington permanente non è una “macchia” senza volto, ma una rete di élite interconnesse.

Trump

La presidenza di Donald Trump, caratterizzata dal suo status di outsider, ha posto una sfida significativa a questo ordine costituito. La sua elezione nel 2016 è stata vista da molti come una rivolta populista contro le élite radicate di Washington. Tuttavia i meccanismi dello Stato profondo, o più precisamente, le incrostazioni burocratiche e le reti di lunga data, si sono dimostrati resilienti e pericolosamente efficaci. Non ha aiutato il fatto che molti degli individui sopra menzionati, insieme ad altri, siano rimasti a Washington in ruoli governativi o quasi governativi, lavorando attivamente per minare la prima presidenza Trump.

Il secondo mandato di Trump rappresenta un'opportunità unica per sfidare il sistema consolidato e potenzialmente apportare cambiamenti radicali nel panorama politico. Se sarà in grado di interrompere in modo permanente la continuità delle élite di Washington, o semplicemente causare un temporaneo cambiamento di potere, rimane incerto.

La sfida è certamente formidabile. L'inerzia istituzionale è profonda e le sofisticate reti di influenza, costruite nel corso di decenni con personaggi come Obama al timone, sono saldamente radicate, così come i complessi militari e di intelligence che operano dietro le quinte politiche. Il primo passo è assumere le persone giuste e su questo fronte sembra che le cose stiano andando nel verso giusto.

Non ci sarà un quinto mandato per Obama, almeno non per un po'. Il velo è stato sollevato e i repubblicani non cadono più negli stessi inganni. Anche la posizione politica di Obama ha subito un duro colpo dal suo sostegno alla candidatura disastrosa di Kamala Harris. Tuttavia ciò non significa che non tenterà di ritornare. La sua cordiale interazione con Trump al funerale del presidente Carter allude a un possibile complotto.

Anche se il nostro incubo nazionale potrebbe concludersi con l'uscita di scena di Biden e Obama, almeno per ora, dobbiamo restare vigili per garantire che la storia non si ripeta.

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

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una “mancia” in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

Thanks, Bruce McLane,

THOMAS JEFFERSON

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies . . . If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] . . . will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered . . . The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” — Thomas Jefferson — The Debate Over The Recharter Of The Bank Bill, (1809)

The post Not perfect but better than most appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

Abp. Vigano asks Trump’s CIA director to ‘investigate the Deep State plan to eliminate Benedict XVI’

It is shocking how Bergoglio’s appeals on the “infinite dignity of all” stubbornly exclude defenseless children massacred by abortion, victims of organ harvesting and mutilation for so-called gender transitioning, mothers used as merchandise for surrogate motherhood, young people corrupted by woke perversions, and the masses of minors who fuel the prostitution racket or end up in a Beverly Hills villa to satisfy the execrable depravities of the pedophile elite.

***

The newly appointed bishop of Detroit has proposed canonical sanctions – from a ban on receiving Communion to excommunication – for border guards who do not allow illegal immigrants to violate the borders. This woke delirium typical of the Bergoglian church is even more serious in the face of the silence of the bishops on the scandal of a corrupt self-styled “Catholic” president like Joe Biden, who promoted abortion up to the moment of birth and yet was consistently sacrilegiously admitted to Communion.

***

The very last thing that Bergoglio ever pursues is the defense of the integrity of the faith or the salvation of souls. Nor does he really care about the poor: just look at how many homeless people are camped around the Vatican and under Bernini’s colonnade; back in the era of COVID, in order to get a meal they had to show that they had received the vaccine.

***

What we are witnessing is in fact a forced migration, which impoverishes the nations of origin of so many men and young people who could be making their own governments strong and their own nations prosperous. Instead, they are transformed into criminals, slaves, and victims of the vile trafficking of perverts or of the organ harvesting market.

Hundreds of thousands of minors disappear into thin air every year, with the complicity of those who pervert Christian charity in the culpable counterfeiting of “welcoming” in order to make a profit.

***

What has been emerging in the United States since President Trump’s inauguration is only the tip of the iceberg of a vast subversive system that involves all Western states.

***

> The Trump administration is well aware of two things. First, there is a subversive supranational power that constitutes a concrete threat to the sovereignty of nations and to all humanity. Second, there is a group of people and agencies that support this power because they derive an advantage from it in terms of power and money.

***

The words of American cardinals and bishops speaking against the cut in donations to the so-called welfare agencies of the Catholic Church are steeped in hypocrisy and falsehood. They come from characters who have not wasted one word – nay, not even one syllable – against the policies promoting abortion, gender ideology, surrogate parenthood, euthanasia, and homosexuality of previous administrations in the hands of the Democrats, while they wake up from their vile torpor only when a brake is put on illegal immigration, for which the Deep Church receives billions from the treasury.

 

The post Archbishop Vigano asks Trump’s CIA director to ‘investigate the Deep State plan to eliminate Benedict XVI’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Reuters

 

The post Florida man shot Israeli visitors thinking they were Palestinians, police say appeared first on LewRockwell.

Growing up is the often painful process of coming to terms with the reality of one’s own limitations, and recognizing that it’s impossible to gain anything in life without hard work and sacrifice. Wisdom lies in recognizing that—as the economist Thomas Sowell would put it—getting what we want often requires a tradeoff. Children, particularly the children of indulgent parents, struggle to recognize this. They want everything NOW and they don’t want to give up anything to get it.

For some time now I have perceived that the European Union—both the supranational entity and the constituent nations—are governed by childish people with childish ideas about what is best for their countries. This has been very painful for me to watch, because I love Europe and spent the happiest years of my life living there.

Especially distressing has been the ruin of Germany with stupid “green energy” initiatives that have wrecked it’s brilliant manufacturing sector, and with its bizarre welcoming of young males from the Arabic-speaking world.

The objective of these policies is apparently to destroy the 1). Economic security of young German men who had long enjoyed great, skilled labor jobs, and 2). the physical security of young German women.

The entire “green energy” hoax completely ignores the laws of thermodynamics, while allowing millions of young Arabic men into Germany ignores the basic reality that most of them have nothing to do in Germany but hang out and chase cute German girls. Any grownup man with a shred of common sense instantly recognizes the folly of these polices.

Equally idiotic has been the willingness of Germany’s so-called leaders to wreck the the excellent relationship that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder forged with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This relationship—expressed by the construction of the NordStream Pipeline—was built on the essential facts that Germany needed Russia’s plentiful and cheap gas, while Russia (which has an economy smaller than that of Texas) needed a market in which to sell it.

Under the baleful influence of the equally moronic Neocons in Washington, German officials decided to wreck this relationship by playing along with the U.S. fantasy of dominating Ukraine, even if it meant destabilizing the balance of power in Europe and wrecking Germany’s fruitful relationship with Russia.

In the last few days, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance have been in Europe, with Hegseth giving talks to NATO officials in Brussels and Vance giving a talk at the Munich Security Conference.

In stark contrast with the creepy weirdos in the Biden administration, the youthful and handsome Hegseth and Vance cut fine figures at their respective talks, which were the most incisive I’ve heard in years. Compared to Kamala Harris’s mealy-mouthed and jarring ramble at the 2022 Munich Security Council—which was apparently designed to insult Russia and dismiss its legitimate security concerns—Vance’s talk was elegant and crystal clear.

The message of both Hegseth and Vance to Europe’s leaders was essentially the same—namely, it’s time for them to grow up and recognize the hard facts of life. Just as the U.S. can no longer afford to indulge its own “regime change” fantasies all over the world, Europe can no longer afford to wreck itself with inane, virtue-signaling fantasies about green energy, mass migration, and Ukraine.

Vance also pointed out the sheer nonsense of claiming to be dedicated to democracy while at the same time persecuting popular parties and even trying to nullify election results. The overheated rhetoric about the rise of conservative populist parties being “far right” and “Nazi” has gotten so tired that no one outside of privileged political and leftist circles believes it.

Hegseth made the following clear:

1. NATO membership for Ukraine is not a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement
2. As part of any [postwar] security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine
3. A return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders, an official Ukrainian war aim, is “an unrealistic objective.”
4. Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.
5. The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.

In other words, the U.S. will no longer pursue an antagonistic relationship with Russia in Europe, especially in Ukraine, but will seek a negotiated settlement. If the Europeans want to persist in having an antagonistic relationship with Russia, they are on their own and will have to pay for it.

Hegseth was criticized for what appeared to be making concessions to Russia before President Trump had even commenced negotiations with Russia. The (Neocon) National Review gave him a hard time for this, and an equally hard time for apparently walking back some of these remarks the following day, which made him seem amateurish.

And yet, let’s face it— a return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders is “an unrealistic objective” at this point.

Is a single American, English, German, or Austrian reader of this post willing to die fighting Russia in order to ensure that Ukraine’s 1991 borders are restored?

If you, dear reader, are too old to fight in Ukraine, would you be willing to sacrifice one of your children to restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders?

Samuel Johnson famously remarked:

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Likewise, when a man knows that either he or his young sons are going to be sent abroad to die to maintain Ukraine’s 1991 borders, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. In light of this, I believe it is high time for the Neocon armchair warriors in Washington to quit talking and start enlisting.

Join the army, get into shape, and get your asses over to Ukraine. On the flight over, you may take heart in reading Kipling’s poem to a “Young British Soldier,” which concludes with this heart-rousing stanza:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, So-oldier of the Queen!

Neocons, go to your Gawd like a soldier!

The post Pete Hegseth & J.D. Vance Tell Europe’s Leaders to Grow Up appeared first on LewRockwell.

While acknowledging his great evils, future strategists and historians will one day likely recognize Osama bin Laden’s strategic acumen. With minimal resources or technology, Osama bin Laden managed to create immense socioeconomic damage and nearly destroy both of his main enemies—the “godless” Communist Soviet Union and the Zionism-supporting United States. Bin Laden achieved this using only one simple weapon, a basic understanding of economics, and thus, the immense harm that military spending does.

A simple economic concept is all we need to understand why most military spending is so detrimental. Every living order—whether it’d be a single cell, or a collection of them like a human being, or a collection of humans like a community or a company—is in a constant cycle of the production and consumption of wealth. A surgeon produces wealth in terms of surgeries, which he exchanges for money, which he then exchanges for the wealth he consumes in terms of housing, energy, food, and so on.

Production increases the world’s economic pie of wealth and order, while consumption reduces it. If the government taxes people and uses the money to hire 100 laborers to work on digging holes, only to then refill them, the laborers have not produced or increased the economic pie in terms of useful wealth, yet they trade their wages for—and then consume—goods and services (civilian goods that lead to life, enjoyment, etc.). This leads to an overall net shrinking of the economic pie to the detriment of the taxpayers who were deprived of the wealth which they sacrificed a part of their lives to create. In order to realize overall economic growth, action and social cooperation must be coordinated to facilitate more production than consumption.

With the above in mind, let us now look at military spending. Every year, about $1.5 trillion—an amount similar to the entire yearly productive output of Spain, which has the world’s 15th-largest economy at $1.58 trillion GDP—is consumed by the millions of people employed by the national defense bureaucracy and its associated contractors as they produce push-ups, military drills, jets, nukes, and other weapons. There is a massive consumption of real wealth taxpayers were deprived of and production of goods which do not improve the lives of Americans. Should the US be invaded, the production of the aforementioned would have been well worth the $1.5 trillion dollars of wealth consumed. But, since there is no chance of anyone attempting this, and they themselves—not being completely bankrupted by the attempt—the materials created would all be virtually worthless.

Also consider the following: in the year 2022, the world’s top 2,500 R&D-spending companies, which make up about 90 percent of worldwide R&D spending—companies like Amazon, Toyota, Google, Microsoft, and Volkswagen—spent, and thus consumed, about $1.44 trillion dollars as they sustained their research, production, and innovations which are truly transforming the world right before our eyes. Thus, the US’s national defense-related yearly consumption of wealth is similar to that which is consumed in corporate R&D by the entire planet.

According to one estimate, by Grok (X-Twitter’s AI chatbot), creating all the buildings and infrastructure of a city in the US that could house 500,000 people like Miami, would cost about $250 billion dollars. From this, we can crudely estimate that about six Miami-sized cities could be built each year if—instead of consuming $1.5 trillion in wealth toward military spending—we produced the cities.

One can also imagine the private sector—not being taxed the $1.5 trillion and allowing it to consume the wealth to produce these 6 cities every year—and then nuking them out of existence. The outcomes are similar: consuming the wealth that could have produced the cities to make weapons is the same as consuming the wealth to produce the cities and then destroying them. This is one of the main reasons why China creates many Miami-sized cities full of skyscrapers every year, while the US goes deeper in debt and has us where we are today, where about 20 percent of our taxes go just to pay the interest on the massive $36+ trillion debt.

If military spending-consumption actually led to economic growth, the always backward and poor former Soviet Union and today’s North Korea—with their relatively large militaries—would be prosperous. However, simple economic logic easily helps explain why they were not so. If military spending-consumption is bad for the economy, then all-out war is even more so. How can having even more people stop producing free market goods, reducing the economic pie in order to increase the amount of weapons, which are then used to destroy wealth, lives, and infrastructure possibly be good? Yet this is precisely what many naïve mainstream economists like 2008 Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman believe. He once famously mentioned:

Think about WWII…it brought us out [of the great depression]. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat…this slump would be over in 18 months.

The very existence of such a large military is just a sign of the economic ignorance and tribalism of the American public and its democratically-elected politicians. It is a reflection of a flawed ideology which erroneously believes that the fellow humans in other parts of the world are somehow so different from us—so irrational, potentially malicious, and unwilling to use reason and logic to discuss potential intellectual differences—that it makes all the militarism necessary.

Imagine if we divided the 535 members of Congress into five groups of 107 people, and every three months each group alternates between spending a week visiting politicians and their families in other countries, and hosting foreign politicians in the US. In just one year, these five groups would get to significantly interact with fellow humans from 20 countries, doing infinitely more to overcome the mythical good versus evil ideology which kept Europeans slaughtering each other across the trenches from 1914 to 1918 in World War I for reasons not one out of a million today know or care about.

Obviously a basic understanding of economics is the key to realizing just how disastrous our military-related expenditures are, and this is precisely what Osama bin Laden had. As a young man, Osama bin Laden studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University and his understanding of economics became his main weapon. He tells us his strategy in a message to the American public on November 1, 2004:

…we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat….

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah….

All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies….

…every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan…

And it all shows that the real loser is…you.

It is the American people and their economy.

What an embarrassment to what remains of freedom and capitalism in our nation. Some guy in a cave thousands of miles away that has been dead for many years has managed to let American tribalism and economic ignorance destroy us from within. Not only is our economy being destroyed, but so are our freedoms as this kind of criticism becomes “unpatriotic” or “antisemitic,” and thus, potentially “hate speech” since most of America’s recent military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Syria have been done to destroy entities hostile to Zionist ideology.

Why does mankind keep making the same warmongering mistakes? Because the economic ignorance remains the same. In the words of the great historian John Toland: “It is human nature that repeats itself, not history.”

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post Osama bin Laden’s Secret Weapon: Economic Literacy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Many traditions throughout history have come to view the prenatal period and childbirth as one of the most important moments in a human’s life as it sets the stage for all that follows. Unfortunately, much in the same way we desecrate the death process by over-medicalizing it (to the point research has found doctors are less likely to seek end of life care at a medical facility), the same issue also exists with childbirth. Many physicians I know who are familiar with the hospital birthing process chose to skip it and give birth at home (along with many more doctors featured in a 2016 documentary).

Conversely, a minority of childbirths do need advanced medical care, and for those mothers, access to a hospital greatly benefits them, particularly if actions are taken to mitigate the most dangerous aspects of hospital birth. As such, childbirth occupies a similar place as many other medical controversies; neither side of the issue is entirely correct. However, the discussion remains perpetually polarized because advocates on either side will not acknowledge the valid points raised by the other side for fear of weakening their own position. Since I feel strongly about the dangers of hospital birth, it is my hope in this article that I will be able to portray both sides of the issue fairly.

Note: I feel one of the most destructive trends in our society has been the devaluation of motherhood (e.g., when I visited China, it was striking how much more respect and consideration they gave to pregnant women) and children. Beyond new life being necessary for the viability of our society, it often ends up being the most transformative and fulfilling experience in a parent’s life. Yet, so much of our societal messaging encourages us to shun that path and put our hearts into other things. In parallel, a general disconnect has been fostered upon this entire process where it is treated as a sterile, lifeless, and mechanistic event we need to be separated from and entrust to someone else—which I believe is the ultimate problem that underlies many of the issues that will be discussed in this article.

The History of Midwifery

A lot of the dysfunctional things that have come to characterize the birthing process (e.g., unnecessary hospital interventions that create complications begetting more hospital interventions) make much more sense once you understand the history behind them and how childbirth was transformed from a natural human life-event to a medical emergency requiring those interventions.

From the start of America, midwives were highly valued in colonial communities, receiving housing, food, land, and salary for their services (particularly since they also served as nurses, herbalists, and veterinarians). Then, during the 1800s, midwives played a key role in the westward expansion, particularly in the Mormon migration to Utah, but by the early 1900s, a variety of social factors (e.g., economic pressure and societal prejudices) caused midwifery’s reputation to decline.

Much of this was due to male doctors (who had initially been averse to delivering babies) displacing midwives. This began in the late 1700s when it became fashionable in Europe to have doctors attend deliveries, after which an influential Harvard professor (and its first profession of obstetrics) convinced his American colleagues to enter, for example in 1820 stating:

Women seldom forget a practitioner who has conducted them tenderly and safely through parturition they feel a familiarity with him, a confidence and reliance upon him which is of the most essential mutual advantage. . . . It is principally on this account that the practice of midwifery becomes desirable to physicians. It is this which ensures to them the permanency and security of all their other business.

Once doctors entered the field of midwifery, it quickly became necessary to justify their “expertise” and a gradual medicalization of childbirth began.

Dr. Joseph DeLee (who later became known as the father of obstetrics), in 1895, opened Chicago’s first obstetric clinic, and since it was successful, opened an obstetrics hospital which also trained doctors and nurses and developed lifesaving innovations (e.g., incubators for premature infants) which lowered the childbirth mortality rate.

Simultaneously however, because DeLee observed so many complications and deaths from childbirth, he was of the opinion that natural childbirth was extremely dangerous for both the mother and child, and hence needed to be medicalized. In turn, he spoke actively (e.g., at a 1915 professional meeting) against the use of midwives, arguing they lowered the standards of the profession, and were childbirth to be seen as a more dignified profession, higher fees could be charged, and more doctors would be willing to replace midwives.

Following this (like many zealots), in 1920, he argued that the approaches he had developed for challenging pregnancies (e.g., forceps, episiotomy, toxic anesthetics) should be used for most of them, while other doctors argued these approaches were too aggressive in many of the situations where DeLee advocated for them. However, due to his growing influence in the profession and success in making childbirth a part of the medical curriculum (in part due to how many doctors he trained) by the 1930s, his standardized invasive approaches became increasingly popular, particularly since society had become enamored with advanced technology improving things.

Finally, near the end of his career (in 1933), due to increasing maternal deaths and complications from hospital infections, he became an advocate for cleaner maternity wards, which met significant resistance from his colleagues (although not as severe as what Ignaz Semmelweis faced almost a century in Austria for pointing out that doctors not disinfection their hands was routinely killing mothers).

From one perspective, I can greatly sympathize with where DeLee came from, as significant issues needed to be addressed (e.g., in 1913, the infant mortality rate was 13.2%). However, he failed to recognize many of them were due to the abhorrent living conditions of the time (which as I show here were also the primary driver behind the incredibly high mortality from infectious diseases).

At the same time however, some of his approaches (e.g., making women partially unconscious during labor and then pulling the babies out with forceps) were abhorrent (and explicitly detailed within his classic 1920 paper), and set the stage for a variety of other harmful and unnecessary interventions to hijack the childbirth process.

Worse still, he seeded the idea within the medical profession that childbirth was inherently pathologic and required a doctor to save the mother and child—despite the fact for most of human history, we had not needed them. Likewise, the maternal death rate was actually the highest between 1900-1930 (when DeLee’s practices came into vogue), and it was only after years of deaths and mistakes that the standard of care began being improved and maternal deaths declined. Nonetheless, even now, over a century later, the United States still has a significant issue with these deaths (which is particularly noteworthy as during the period below, those deaths were declining in the other wealthy nations).

Note: another controversial doctor James Marion Sims, who in 1845 began experimental gynecological surgeries on African American slaves (without anesthesia—and operated some on individuals up to 30 times) and after roughly 4 years of work, perfected the surgeries enough to use them on white women (with anesthesia) after which, in the 1850s, he opened the first women’s hospital (which was mired in controversy due to how barbaric some of his procedures were, their high fatality rate, and some of the unnecessary brain surgeries he did on black children). Nonetheless, he became one of the most famous doctors in the country (e.g., he was the 1876 president of the AMA) and is considered to be the father of gynecology.

At the exact same time DeLee’s work occurred, a variety of federal and state initiatives recognized that the incredibly high infant and maternal mortality rates were connected, and that appropriate prenatal care could prevent them (e.g., Mother’s Day was created at this time to provide maternal support to prevent those deaths).

Simultaneously, a debate known as the “Midwife Problem” unfolded, with some (e.g., doctors) advocating for the abolition of midwifery (largely to shield themselves from competition) and others supporting it with proper training and licensing (as they felt midwives could play a critical role in preventing deaths if utilized correctly). Laws were passed in some states (e.g., those that simply did not have enough doctors to attend childbirths) to regulate midwifery, and schools were created to improve midwifery standards. However, by the 1930s, the increased use of hospitals for deliveries made it possible to close many of these schools.

Fortunately, a 1921 Federal law provided for training nurse midwives, and in 1931 (owing to the increasing recognition of the failures of American obstetric care), a successful nurse midwifery school emerged (which amongst other things, had a maternal mortality rate of one-tenth that of the country). Their graduates then created numerous schools and created the modern discipline of nurse midwifery.

Note: in parallel, the Frontier Nursing Service (founded in 1925 by a British trained midwife) trained nurses and provided extensive midwifery (and medical care) to the woefully underserved inhabitants of the Appalachians, which ultimately resulted in a far lower maternal death rate (roughly one third as much as the rest of the country). In turn, when many of its nurses returned to England at the start of World War 2, they also created a successful nurse midwifery program there as well.

Following this, in the 1940s and 1950s, due to limited existing opportunities to practice clinical midwifery, most of the graduates of these programs had to fill other obstetric related roles, and ultimately only a quarter served as midwives. In the 1960s, a variety of attempts were made to address this (e.g., having them work at hospitals where 70% of the births were taking place), and it was not until 1968 that more opportunities began to emerge (due to one school finding a way to integrate with New York’s medical system).

Shortly after, a variety of rapid shifts occurred (e.g., key professional organizations endorsed nurse-midwifery, feminism came into vogue, the media promoting midwifery, federal funding for it, an explosion of childbirths from the baby boomers coming of age that the existing system could not accommodate) which propelled midwifery into the mainstream. In turn, many doctors began partnering with midwives, programs became officially recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, and public demand for midwife supervised home births exploded.

This increased demand quickly exceeded the available supply, after which there was a rapid proliferation of non-nurse midwives (lay midwives) with highly variable degrees of training (who had their first national meeting in 1977). By the 1980s, nurse-midwives were present throughout the healthcare system, and a split developed in the medical community between obstetricians who recognized their value and worked with them versus those who viewed them as economic competition that needed to be eliminated (particularly because there was now an overabundance of obstetricians).

Since then, midwifery has faced additional obstacles from the medical system but has continued to develop. Mixed opinions exist within the obstetrics field towards midwifery, and its accessibility varies. Since the 1990s, approximately 1% of births have been at home (although recently it suddenly increased to 1.5%).

Note: this abridged history necessarily omits the immense struggles countless incredibly dedicated midwives went through to make midwifery available to the public or just how much that work approved the abysmal obstetric care that existed throughout the country and the human cost that came with it.

A Standard Hospital Birth

When women go into labor, it is frequently viewed as a medical emergency that necessitates getting to the hospital as quickly as possible (e.g., this idea has been reinforced in television and movies for decades) and then struggling and having the doctor miraculously deliver the baby.

During this whole process, the following will happen.

• The mother will be placed in an uncomfortable and stressful environment (where many unfamiliar people enter and exit the room), be subject to repeated vaginal examinations, and typically placed on her back with the legs spread out.

• The mother will be placed on fetal heart rate monitoring (typically via the abdomen, but sometimes also through an electrode applied intravaginally to the baby’s head).

• If the mother delivers too slowly, she will be given pitocin (oxytocin) to speed up the rate of contractions and may have her amniotic membrane prematurely ruptured.

• To mitigate her discomfort, she will often be given an epidural.

• Once the baby starts to come out, it may be pulled out with forceps or a vacuum extractor if the labor progresses “too slowly” or an issue arises.

• To prevent tearing and to make childbirth easier, mothers will often be given a prophylactic episiotomy, which preemptively cuts the vaginal opening to widen it.

• If any of the above goes awry, the mother will be converted to having a C-section.

• Once the baby is born, the cord will be immediately cut (and the placenta disposed of). The baby will typically be separated from the mother for a prolonged period (e.g., to go to a newborn nursery or the neonatal intensive care unit), and will receive a vitamin K shot and a hepatitis B vaccine and then have their blood drawn. Lastly, if the baby is a boy, circumcisions are often performed in the first days of life while they are still at the hospital.

• Finally, following this, if all goes well, the mother will go home with the baby in a few days, or a week if issues emerge.

However, while many of these steps can potentially save an infant’s life, many of them create significant long-term complications, and many increase the likelihood more hospital interventions will be needed.

This in turn, touches upon a criticism of the medical industry—medical interventions often thrust you onto an assembly line that requires more and more of them (e.g., many psychiatric drugs are prescribed to treat the side effects of other psychiatric drugs). Typically, it takes time to see this process play out, but in the case of labor and delivery, the changes requiring additional interventions occur quite rapidly—whereas in contrast, almost none of this is seen outside of the hospital.

Note: I believe this bias towards excessive intervention in part occurs from obstetric units being understaffed (e.g., if a doctor is attending 6-10 mothers, the deliveries need to be artificially sequenced so that they don’t occur simultaneously and accelerated so they aren’t held up in one place) and due to OBYGN’s having significant liability risk if anything goes awry with a pregnancy if the standard protocols had not been followed.

Any intervention that interferes with women’s ability to cope in labor has enormous implications: it can destroy feelings of achievement and self-esteem. Women who feel they have coped have more confidence in their mothering abilities than women who feel traumatized by the birth process. Specifically disturbing to this aspect of common labor ward practice is the data of Robson and Kumar reporting an association between procedures in labor, such as artificial rupture of the membranes, and the delayed onset of maternal affection.

We’ll now look at the issues with each of the previous approaches.

Note: as we go through these, consider that America currently spends at least 111 billion dollars on childbirth (which is twice that of most high income countries) yet ranks last amongst the high income nations in both infant and maternal mortality.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Hidden Dangers of Hospital Births and How to Protect You and Your Baby appeared first on LewRockwell.

Declan Hayes contends that the new rulers of Syria do not have a firm control over the country where resistance to the reign of terror is growing.

Atrocities are being committed every day in Syria by the new rulers, according to Irish writer and peace activist Declan Hayes.

However, the Western corporate-run media are ignoring or censoring the horrific reality because the Western governments backed the regime-change operation.

He says that Syria – a cradle of civilization – is now being ruled by barbarians with the tacit support of Western governments and media.

The population is living under a reign of terror because the new rulers are terrorists affiliated with Islamic State who espouse an extremist version of Islam that does not tolerate other religions or versions of Islam.

Declan Hayes visited Syria as a peace activist and humanitarian many times during the decade-long war in that country. He witnessed the aftermath of atrocities carried out by insurgent groups in Latakia, Kassab, and Maaloula, among other places.

These mercenary groups were proxy forces financed and armed by the United States and its Western allies in a covert war for regime change against the former Syrian government.

The reasons for the regime-change operation were geopolitical due to the West’s support for Israel and antagonism towards Russia and Iran, as well as control of oil and gas resources.

Hayes maintains close contact with religious leaders and other community figures in Syria, especially among the Alawite, Christian and Shia Muslim communities. He says that the appalling violence and killings that were carried out by the Western-backed terror proxies during the decade-long war are continuing to be inflicted today.

Homes and villages are raided daily by armed supporters of Syria’s new ruling regime led by the de facto president, Ahmed al Sharaa, also known as Mohammad al Jolani, who is the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia.

HTS was formerly an affiliate of Islamic State and other Al Qaeda-linked terror networks. HTS seized power two months ago in Damascus after former President Bashar al-Assad fled the country with his family. Assad is living in exile in Russia.

The collapse of his government surprised the world but in many ways, it shouldn’t have been a surprise because Syria was worn down and destroyed by a 10-year war sponsored by the U.S., European powers, Israel and the Gulf Arab kingdoms.

The country was also devastated by crippling Western economic sanctions. Assad’s allies, Russia and Iran, could not prevent the collapse and takeover by the Western terrorist proxies.

Syria is facing an extremely dangerous future where the new regime is exacting brutal retribution against minorities and communities perceived as being loyal to Assad.

What makes the situation all the more grim is that the United States and European Union governments and their media are propping up the new regime, whitewashing its violations and its terrorist links, or simply ignoring the daily atrocities being inflicted.

However, Declan Hayes contends that the new rulers of Syria do not have a firm control over the country where resistance to the reign of terror is growing.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post In Syria, the Barbarians Aren’t at the Gate, They’re in Power With Western Support appeared first on LewRockwell.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Silence of Barking Dogs

On Thursday the full Senate voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). This gave Kennedy full authority over one of America’s largest government bureaucracies, including its 90,000 employees and an annual budget of nearly $2 trillion, twice that of the Department of Defense.

Ironies abounded in that narrow 52-48 vote, which was almost exactly along party lines, with every Democrat in opposition and all but one Republican in support.

Not only had Kennedy spent almost his entire life as a liberal Democrat, but he was the scion of that party’s most famous political dynasty, nephew of the martyred President John F. Kennedy and son of his brother Robert, who would have also probably reached the White House in 1968 if he had not been cut down by an assassin’s bullet.

The younger Kennedy had followed in their illustrious footsteps, spending nearly his entire life as a high-profile environmental activist, so well regarded in Democratic Party circles that President Barack Obama had considered naming him to the Cabinet in 2008. But in recent years, Kennedy’s views on public health issues had caused him to fall from grace in his own ideological camp. His strident skepticism regarding the safety of vaccines in general and the Covid vaccine in particular outraged the mainstream liberal establishment, as did his loud denunciation of the lockdowns and other controversial public health measures undertaken to control the spread of that dangerous disease.

This sharp ideological rupture eventually propelled him to challenge the renomination of President Joseph Biden in the Democratic primaries, then to launch an independent run for the White House, and ultimately to drop out and endorse Donald Trump in that race. Following Trump’s victory, the president-elect named Kennedy as his choice to lead HHS, with the former Democrat proclaiming his intent to “Make America Healthy Again.” Last week’s Senate vote has now given Kennedy the authority to set our national public health policies.

Over the years, Kennedy had become a very sharp critic of both the pharmaceutical and the food industries, so having him in control of the NIH, the CDC, and the FDA represented the worst nightmare of those powerful corporations. Therefore, they naturally mobilized their army of lobbyists and opposition researchers to assist their media and political allies in derailing his nomination.

Along with Tulsi Gabbard, nominated as Director of National Intelligence, Kennedy had probably ranked as Trump’s most controversial and bitterly opposed nominee. Indeed, the volume and vehemence of the attacks I saw against him in our leading media organs such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal may have even been greater, with those influential publications doing everything they could to endorse and amplify any harsh accusations, hoping to sway enough senators to block his appointment. He was accused of every sort of iniquity and denounced as a deranged conspiracy theorist, whose bizarre, irrational beliefs would severely endanger our nation’s public health.

Few stones were left unturned in the attacks on Kennedy’s fitness for the job, and he experienced two days of grueling testimony before the relevant Senate Committees, with the Democratic staffers having obviously strategized on the best means of defeating him before feeding the most effective attacks to their senatorial principals who grilled the nominee before the television cameras.

But one oddity I noted was that almost none of the hostile news stories nor the probing senatorial questions ever mentioned the name of “Sirhan Sirhan.” That young Palestinian had been arrested and convicted of the 1968 assassination of Kennedy’s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and there had been a multitude of supposed eyewitnesses to that crime. But in recent years Kennedy publicly declared that Sirhan was an innocent patsy, framed by the true conspirators, and called for his release from prison.

For six decades, our media has invested enormous resources in ridiculing and demonizing anyone questioning the official verdict of the 1960s Kennedy assassinations as a “conspiracy theorist,” rendering that term of abuse almost as radioactive as slurs such as “racist” or “antisemite.” Yet although Kennedy had publicly placed himself in that poisonous category, virtually none of his fierce opponents were willing to take notice of that important fact.

I think there were obvious reasons that those barking dogs kept strangely silent. Not only had the victim been Kennedy’s own father, but he had very strong evidence on his side. As even the ultra-establishmentarian Wikipedia page admits, the fatal bullet had been fired into the back of the senator’s head at point-blank range while everyone agreed that Sirhan was standing five or six feet in front of him, and this led the LA Coroner to declare that a second gunman had apparently been responsible. Sirhan’s gun only held eight rounds yet acoustical records proved that more shots had been fired. In an early 2022 article, I discussed all this evidence at considerable length, and the journalists and Democratic staffers challenging Kennedy must have realized that his case was too strong and raising it would badly backfire against them.

In any event, the question of who had assassinated Kennedy’s father in 1968 might have seemed too far removed from how he would administer America’s system of public health nearly six decades later.

However, I also noticed a far more recent and more relevant matter that had equally escaped any public scrutiny.

On two consequence days, the New York Times ran a pair of major articles summarizing the intense questioning that Kennedy endured, with each of these carrying five or six bylines and containing a number of sections highlighting all the major points raised against the nominee:

Fact-Checking Kennedy’s Health Claims in His Confirmation Hearing, January 29, 2025

• Chronic Disease
• Who Covid-19 Affects
• Children’s Risk from Covid
• Ultraprocessed Foods and Obesity
• Medicare and Medicaid
• Fluoride in Water

Fact-Checking Health Claims in Kennedy’s 2nd Day of Confirmation Hearings, January 30, 2025

• Prioritizing chronic disease
• Covid-19 in Children
• Hepatitis B Vaccinations
• Use of Adderall
• Weight Loss Drugs
• Cost of Childhood Diabetes
• Harms of Electromagnetic Radiation

These items were apparently regarded as Kennedy’s greatest vulnerabilities. But I noticed that one entire topic was totally missing from the interrogation, so I dropped a note to a highly knowledgeable journalist calling attention to that remarkable absence:

I know that you’ve been very skeptical of my support for the Duesberg Hypothesis regarding HIV/AIDS, but here’s another interesting data-point you might want to consider.

As I’m sure you’re aware, the Democrats have been mounting a ferocious all-out attack in the Senate on RFK Jr., doing everything they can to discredit him and try to block his confirmation. They have focused on every possible means of portraying him as a deluded, conspiratorial individual who holds crackpot beliefs and who must therefore be kept away from our public health system…

Don’t you find it very odd that there has been absolutely no mention of HIV/AIDS during those hearings?

After all, Kennedy published a #1 Amazon bestseller that devoted 200 pages(!) to promoting the theory that HIV was harmless and AIDS was merely a hoax.

Obviously, I wouldn’t have expected any of the senators themselves to have read his book, but surely many of their staffers did, and held strategy sessions to decide which issues to raise against Kennedy. They must have consulted scientific and medical experts to help decide where Kennedy was most vulnerable.

Isn’t it absolutely extraordinary that apparently not a single senator has brought up the Kennedy’s utterly heretical views on HIV/AIDS?

Surely this must be one of the most extreme cases of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark” on record.

The only explanation I can see is that the staffers concluded that raising the HIV/AIDS issue would be disastrously counter-productive to their efforts. This doesn’t prove that Kennedy and Duesberg are correct, but I think it means many, many very knowledgeable people fear that they might be.

While still refusing to consider that the Duesberg Hypothesis might be right, he admitted that something very strange had taken place:

I agree – it’s most peculiar that Democratic Senators passed up the chance to assail RFK on his writings about HIV. I follow your logic that something must have warned the staffers off this issue.

HIV/AIDS and the Duesberg Hypothesis

Although there is naturally a great reluctance to consider the possibility that Duesberg was correct and our forty year battle against HIV/AIDS has been waged against a medical phantom, I think that anomalies such as the Kennedy confirmation hearings must force us to begin seriously considering that shocking notion.

Several months ago, I published a long article summarizing this case, and with Kennedy now in charge of American public health policy, I think it is now worth revisiting some of that important material.

As I have recounted on several occasions, despite being a very strong critic of the wildly popular Covid anti-vaxxing movement, in late 2021 I happened to read Kennedy’s new book The Real Anthony Fauci.

I was quite impressed with a great deal of the material provided, which sharply criticized our pharmaceutical industry and its close allies in the public health bureaucracy. But what completely shocked me was that nearly half the text—some 200 pages—was devoted to presenting and promoting the astonishing claim that everything we have been told about HIV/AIDS for more than forty years probably constituted a hoax, and this latter issue became a central focus of my own subsequent review.

As all of us know from the media, AIDS is a deadly auto-immune disease that was first diagnosed in the early 1980s, primarily afflicting gay men and intravenous drug users. Transmitted by bodily fluids, the disease usually spread through sexual activity, blood transfusions, or the sharing of needles, and HIV, the virus responsible, was finally discovered in 1984. Over the years, a variety of medical treatments were developed, mostly ineffective at first, but more recently so successful that although being HIV-positive was once considered a death-sentence, the infection has now become a chronic, controllable condition. The current Wikipedia page on HIV/AIDS runs more than 20,000 words, including over 300 references.

Yet according to the information provided in Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this well-known and solidly-established picture, which I had never seriously questioned, is almost entirely false and fraudulent, essentially amounting to a medical media hoax. Instead of being responsible for AIDS, the HIV virus is probably harmless and had nothing to do with the disease. But when individuals were found to be infected with HIV, they were subjected to the early, extremely lucrative AIDS drugs, which were actually lethal and often killed them. The earliest AIDS cases had mostly been caused by very heavy use of particular illegal drugs, and the HIV virus had been misdiagnosed as being responsible. But since Fauci and the profit-hungry drug companies soon built enormous empires upon that misdiagnosis, for more than 35 years they have fought very hard to maintain and protect it, exerting all their influence to suppress the truth in the media while destroying the careers of any honest researchers who challenged that fraud. Meanwhile, AIDS in Africa was something entirely different, probably caused mostly by malnutrition or other local conditions.

I found Kennedy’s account as shocking as anything I have ever encountered.

Under normal circumstances, I would have been extremely reluctant to embrace such seemingly outlandish claims, but the credibility of some of the adherents he mentioned was difficult to disregard.

However, the first endorsement on the back cover is from Prof. Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus in 1984, and he writes: “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Moreover, we are told that as far back as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference of June 1990, Montagnier had publicly declared “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.”

Perhaps this Nobel Laureate endorsed the book for other reasons and perhaps the meaning of his striking 1990 statement has been misconstrued. But surely the opinion of the researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus should not be totally ignored in assessing its possible role.

As Kennedy explained, three additional science Nobel Laureates have also expressed similar public skepticism toward the conventional HIV/AIDS narrative, one of them being Kary Mullis, the renowned creator of the revolutionary PCR test. Meanwhile, the reaction of the hostile media towards Kennedy’s book greatly raised my own suspicions.

Despite the book’s tremendous success, it was initially ignored by the mainstream media. That silence was finally broken a month after publication, when the Associated Press released a 4,000 word hit-piece harshly attacking the author and his controversial bestseller.

Yet as I noted in my own response, that lengthy denunciation had entirely avoided the subject of HIV/AIDS, which surely constituted the most outrageous and explosive portion of Kennedy’s material. Six AP journalists and researchers had spent at least ten days producing the article, so their total silence on that topic struck me as extremely suspicious. If almost half of Kennedy’s book argued that HIV/AIDS was a medical media hoax and his harshest critics refused to challenge him on that score, any fair-minded reader must surely begin to suspect that at least some of the author’s remarkable claims were probably correct.

Prior to the recent Covid outbreak, AIDS had spent nearly four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, and I began to wonder whether I might have been completely misled for all those years by my daily newspapers. Indeed, Kennedy himself had never previously been associated with the HIV/AIDS topic and he emphasized that his coverage was merely intended “to give air and daylight to dissenting voices” so I would need to consult other sources for additional information. The story he told was an extremely strange one but his book also clearly identified the most important figure in the debate.

In 1985 AZT, an existing drug, was found to kill the HIV virus in laboratory tests. Fauci then made tremendous efforts to speed it through clinical trials as an appropriate treatment for healthy, HIV-positive individuals, with FDA approval finally coming in 1987, producing Fauci’s first moment of triumph. Priced at $10,000/year per patient, AZT was one of the most expensive drugs in history, and with the cost covered by health insurance and government subsidies, it produced an unprecedented financial windfall for its manufacturer.

Kennedy devotes an entire chapter to the story of AZT, and the tale he tells is something out of Kafka or perhaps Monty Python. Apparently, Fauci had been under enormous pressure to produce medical breakthroughs justifying his large budget, so he manipulated the AZT trials to conceal the extremely toxic nature of the drug, which rapidly killed many of the patients who received it, with their symptoms being ascribed to AIDS. So following FDA approval in 1987, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy individuals found to be infected with HIV were placed on a regimen of AZT, and the large number of resulting deaths was misattributed to the virus rather than to the anti-viral drug. According to the scientific experts cited in the book, the vast majority of post-1987 “AIDS deaths” were actually due to AZT.

One of the major scientific heroes in Kennedy’s account is Prof. Peter H. Duesberg of Berkeley. During the 1970s and 1980s, Duesberg had been widely regarded as among the world’s foremost virologists, elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences at age 50, making him one of its youngest members in history. As early as 1987 he began raising serious doubts about the HIV/AIDS hypothesis and highlighting the dangers of AZT, eventually publishing a series of journal articles on the subject that gradually won over many others, including Montagnier. In 1996 he published Inventing the AIDS Virus, a massive 712 page volume setting forth his case, with the Foreword provided by Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the renowned inventor of PCR technology and himself another leading public critic of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Duesberg even underscored the confidence of his HIV skepticism by offering to be injected with HIV-tainted blood.

But rather than openly debate such a strong scientific opponent, Fauci and his allies blacklisted Duesberg from receiving any government funding, thereby wrecking his research career, while also vilifying him and pressuring others to do the same. According to fellow researchers quoted by Kennedy, Duesberg was destroyed as a warning and an example to others. Meanwhile, Fauci deployed his influence to have his critics banned from the major national media, ensuring that few outside a narrow segment of the scientific community ever even became aware of the continuing controversy.

One of Duesberg’s central claims was that the disease known as “AIDS” didn’t actually exist, but was merely the official label attached to a group of more than two dozen different illnesses, all of which had a variety of different causes, with only some of these being infectious agents. Indeed, most of these illnesses had been known and treated for many decades, but they were only designated “AIDS” if the victim was also found to test positive for the HIV virus, which probably had nothing to do with the condition.

In support of their contrary position, the authors noted that the various groups at high risk for “AIDS” only tended to get particular versions of the disease, with the “AIDS” suffered by hemophiliacs usually being very different from the “AIDS” of African villagers and only slightly overlapping with the diseases of gay men or intravenous drug addicts. Indeed, the pattern of “AIDS” in Africa seemed utterly divergent from that in the developed world. But if all these different illnesses were actually caused by a single HIV virus, such completely disparate syndromes would seem puzzling anomalies, difficult to explain from a scientific perspective.

The Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals and in 1996, the year after he become its chief editor, Richard Horton took to the pages of the intellectually-prestigious New York Review of Books to produce a 10,000 word discussion of Duesberg’s theories, as propounded in three of the researcher’s recent books and collections. Horton was obviously among the most respectable of establishmentarian figures, but although he mostly came down in support of the orthodox HIV/AIDS consensus, he presented Duesberg’s entirely contrary perspective in a fair-minded manner, respectfully though not uncritically.

However, what struck me most about Horton’s account was how appalled he seemed at Duesberg’s treatment by America’s ruling medical-industrial complex, as suggested by his title “Truth and Heresy about AIDS.”

The very first sentence of his long review article mentioned the “vast academic and commercial industry built around…HIV” along with the fundamental challenge Duesberg posed to its scientific basis. As a consequence, the “brilliant virologist” had become “the most vilified scientist alive” and the subject of “excoriating attacks.” The leading professional science journals had displayed an “alarmingly uneven attitude,” and partly as a consequence, other potential dissidents had been dissuaded from pursuing their alternative theories.

According to Horton, financial considerations had become a central element of the scientific process, and he noted with horror that a press conference on research questioning the effectiveness of a particular anti-AIDS drug was actually packed with financial journalists, focused on the efforts of the corporate executives to destroy the credibility of a study that they themselves had helped to design but which had now gone against their own product.

Most importantly, although Horton was generally skeptical of Duesberg’s conclusions, he was absolutely scathing towards the opponents of the dissident virologist.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the dispute between Duesberg and the AIDS establishment is the way in which Duesberg has been denied the opportunity to test his hypothesis. In a discipline governed by empirical claims to truth, experimental evidence would seem the obvious way to confirm or refute Duesberg’s claims. But Duesberg has found the doors of the scientific establishment closed to his frequent calls for tests…

Duesberg deserves to be heard, and the ideological assassination that he has undergone will remain an embarrassing testament to the reactionary tendencies of modern science…At a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation are so desperately being sought, how can the AIDS community afford not to fund Duesberg’s research?”

That ringing last sentence closed the entire review, which appeared in a prestigious and influential publication nearly thirty years ago. But as near as I can tell, Horton’s heartfelt criticism fell on deaf ears, and the AIDS establishment simply ignored the entire controversy while gradually pressuring the media to end any coverage. This seems to fully confirm the narrative history provided in Kennedy’s current bestseller, and I recently summarized this strikingly dissenting analysis of the supposed HIV/AIDS disease in a lengthy article.

• American Pravda: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the HIV/AIDS Hoax
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 25, 2024 • 7,800 Words

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The wailing sound you heard last Thursday was the chorus of the Beltway warmongers shrieking in despair at President Trump’s suggestion that there was no reason for the United States to be spending one trillion dollars on “defense.”

“…[O]ne of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China and President Putin of Russia, and I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that, and I think we’ll be able to do that,” the President told reporters.

With this statement, President Trump blew up one of the biggest myths of our time, particularly among Republicans, that spending more on the military is essential to keeping us safe. There is a vast and well-funded network of political and industrial interests that depend on maintaining that myth, from the weapons manufacturers to the mainstream media to the think tanks and beyond. Why? Because most of what is called “defense spending” has little to do with defending this country and a lot to do with enriching the politically well-connected.

Maintaining that global military empire has bankrupted the United States while making us less safe and less free. President Trump seems to understand this. But the military-industrial complex and its cheerleaders have for decades pushed the idea that we could not survive without continuously increasing their budgets.

Thanks to the work of the “Department of Government Efficiency” we are learning that much of what has been sold as “essential spending” is nothing of the sort. Take USAID, for example. We were led to believe that this agency was feeding the poor while promoting the best kind of American values overseas. Thanks to DOGE, we learned that the money was going to absurdities like funding transgender puppet shows in Peru.

We are also learning that a great deal of USAID money was going to actually overthrow democratic governments overseas – as well as manipulate foreign media and promote censorship of “dissident” voices at home and abroad. Not only was USAID not helping countries overseas – it was actually harming them!

Just as with USAID, when we are able to see just where that one trillion military budget is going Americans are going to fully realize that they have been lied to for decades. That is why we need a full audit of the Pentagon and full transparency of the results.

We also need a change in policy. Americans are beginning to understand the economic costs of maintaining a global military empire. US taxpayers are forced to cover more than half of the entire NATO budget while European countries rattle sabers at Russia and threaten war. If Europe feels so threatened by Russia, why don’t they cover the costs of their own defense? Why do poor Americans have to pay for the defense of rich Europeans? Haven’t we had enough of this?

I very much hope that President Trump follows through with his plan to drastically reduce our bloated military budget. We can start by closing the hundreds of military bases overseas, bringing back our troops from foreign countries, and eliminating our massive commitments to NATO and other international organizations.

We will be richer, safer, and happier.

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By seizing the initiative Trump and Musk stole a march on corrupt Democrats and their whore media. The whore media has been destroyed by the large amount of information that came out of the government’s own data clearly demonstrating immense theft from taxpayers by Democrats and misuse of approprIated funds by USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, Social Security and Medicare, US Treasury, Department of Health and Human Services, and the use of federal funds for advertising private abortion clinics and sex change operations–thus the use of our money to contribute to immoral profits, use of taxpayer funds to pay the whore media to lie and deceive the American public, and major blockbusters about to hit with the audits of the Defense Department and IRS, likely the two most corrupt agencies of all. 

The Democrats’ corruption of the US budget that Musk revealed before corrupt judges, themselves on the take, could illegally and unconstitutionally delay release of official government data to the cabinet secretaries and the President of the United States elevates the Biden Regime to the most corrupt government in human history.  The world has never seen anything like the corruption of the past four years.  A world record.

The shame of the Democrat Biden Regime is indelible.  America will never live it down.

The media concentration that comprises the whore media today is inconsistent with the Sherman Anti-trust Act.  In the last year of his corrupt regime, Bill Clinton, little doubt well paid, permitted the creation of a media monopoly, owned, it seems, by Jews.  A law contrary to the Sherman Anti-trust Act, most likely introduced by the Israel Lobby, permitted six mega-corporations controlled, apparently, by Jews, to concentrate 90% of the American media into six hands. By signing on to this, Clinton not only was in violation of the Sherman Anti-trust Act, he was also in violation of the established American tradition of an independent and dispersed media.The Congress, apparently fearful of being cut off from Israel Lobby financing, went along with the monopolization of the American media.

Now is the time to close down the whorehouse that is the legacy media. The media existed on USAID and National Endowment for Democracy illegal grants and on the profits from other enterprises in the conglomerates. If thesis mega-corporations are broken up, which they must be if Trump’s government is to be in compliance with US law, the legacy media will cease to exist. This will disempower the American Establishment which used the media to create the false reality in which they kept the American population while the establishment pursued its own agendas.

Since the rise of the American liberals’ campaign to de-Americanize us of our principles, beliefs, morality, history, and self-confidence, the Democrat left has been the principle agent of the American Establishment to turn the US into a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel.  

Under the anti-American Biden Regime, 3.6 million immigrant-invaders were allowed illegally to enter the United States each year, and the anti-American governor and attorney general of New York helped the immigrant-invaders hide their illegality by giving them NY driving licenses. This is illegal, a violation of federal law. 

Blue state regimes have declared their resistance to federal authority to close the border. This does not differ from the “rebellion” of Southern states that refused to pay the Morrill Tariff. When a government has anti-American governors of states, as America has, it is irrevocably divided. Either the anti-Americans prevail or the Americans prevail.  If Trump and MAGA Americans do not understand this, they will lose and be exterminated.  The future of America will be decided in the next four years.

If Trump can avoid being sent to war for Israel against Iran, in which case his agenda will be put on the back burner, Trump could possibly stop the de-Americanization and resurrect the America that once existed. But not if Americans prefer their amusements to a bitter fight. If Americans are not willing to fight their Democrat internal enemies, America will go down to defeat.

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U.S. Vice President JD Vance has held up a mirror to Europe’s ‘elite’ which did not like to acknowledge what could be seen in it: Minions, a lot of minions.

“But our common values?” cried Christoph Heusgen, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference.

What values Mr. Heusgen? Those displayed daily, with your applause, by the European colonists in Palestine?

“Like a headless chicken,” is what the German broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine called the reaction of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The descriptions fits to (nearly) all European leader.

Today U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia. They will talk like grownups, EU be damned, and find ways to achieve peace in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The Europeans are aghast that they are not invited to take part in the talks.

But why would one invite parties to peace talks when they want nothing more than to sabotage those? The EU’s foreign representative Kaja Kallas, a former mayor of Baltic villages, dreams of breaking up Russia into smaller states. How could Russia ever seriously negotiate with such people?

Today the Europeans will huddle in Paris to find some, any, way to get out of the mess. It won’t work unless they acknowledge that the war in Ukraine has been lost.

The U.S. has recognized that there aren’t enough troops, money or will to achieve a better negotiation position for what’s left of Ukraine. The European ‘elite’ still fails to get that.

Any prolongation of the war will lead to more losses of land to Russia. Will it take the fall of Odessa for the Europeans to be finally ready for talks?

There are still dreams of ‘security guarantees’ which would be given to Ukraine after it files for peace or surrenders.

No such guarantees would make any sense. When peace is achieved there will be only one manner that can prevent a new outbreak of war: good behavior towards Russians and Russia by what will be left of Ukraine.

Failing that no European battalions strewn over Ukraine could prevent or even hinder another special military operation.

The U.S. negotiation team handed the Europeans a list of questions that will hopefully help them to come to grips with that:

The United States has sent European governments a set of questions about what they would need from the U.S. in order to provide Ukraine with security guarantees.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said that Washington “has been clear that we expect European partners to take the lead in establishing a durable security framework and look forward to their proposals.”

Here are the questions with answers by me in Italic:

1) What do you view as a Europe-backed security guarantee or assurance that would serve as a sufficient deterrent to Russia while also ensuring this conflict ends with an enduring peace settlement?

There is no Europe-backed guarantee possible that would be a ‘sufficient deterrent’.

2) Which European and/or third countries do you believe could or would participate in such an arrangement?

Each could provide a few dozen soldiers (plus rotations). None has the size of forces and/or stamina to really commit to the mission.

Are there any countries you believe would be indispensable?

The U.S. – if it would give nuclear guarantees to prevent the eventual annihilation of any ‘security guarantee’ force.

Would your country be willing to deploy its troops to Ukraine as part of a peace settlement?

No!

3) If third country military forces were to be deployed to Ukraine as part of a peace arrangement, what would you consider to be the necessary size of such a European-led force?

500,000 men, i.e. about the same size as the Russian forces in that theater.

How and where would these forces be deployed and for how long?

No idea. Any stationary deployment would be open to a Russian surprise attack. A forever roving force is thinkable but not practicable.

4) What actions do U.S., allies and partners need to be prepared to take if Russia attacks these forces?

Nuke Russia and risk being nuked back.

5) What, if any, U.S. support requirements would your government consider necessary for its participation in these security arrangements?

Nukes and the will to use them. Plus satellite based intelligence to have at least some warning.

Specifically, which short-term and long-term resources do you think will be required from the U.S.?

See above.

6) What additional capabilities, equipment and maintenance sustainment options is your government prepared to provide to Ukraine to improve its negotiating hand and increase pressure on Russia?

Never ending bickering.

I am sure the questions above, as cited by Reuters, are not meant to really be answered.

They are supposed to induce some realist thinking.

Applying such one will come to the conclusion that nothing but a long term peace agreement, which does not necessitate ‘guarantees’, makes any sense.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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The “U.S. government” is comprised of a wide variety of different people, many of which are good and decent human beings. So this obviously does not represent everyone who works in the government. More importantly, this does not represent U.S. citizens either, so please do not fall into the trap of defending the crimes of your government, because you feel yourself personally under attack. Identify yourself with integrity, humanity and Truth, not a criminal government or group.

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated “war on terrorism.”

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable.

The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.

And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.

It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000.

Comments on Gathering These Numbers

Generally speaking, the much smaller number of Americans who have died is not included in this study, not because they are not important, but because this report focuses on the impact of U.S. actions on its adversaries.

An accurate count of the number of deaths is not easy to achieve, and this collection of data was undertaken with full realization of this fact. These estimates will probably be revised later either upward or downward by the reader and the author. But undoubtedly the total will remain in the millions.

The difficulty of gathering reliable information is shown by two estimates in this context. For several years I heard statements on radio that three million Cambodians had been killed under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. However, in recent years the figure I heard was one million. Another example is that the number of persons estimated to have died in Iraq due to sanctions after the first U.S. Iraq War was over 1 million, but in more recent years, based on a more recent study, a lower estimate of around a half a million has emerged.

Often information about wars is revealed only much later when someone decides to speak out, when more secret information is revealed due to persistent efforts of a few, or after special congressional committees make reports

Both victorious and defeated nations may have their own reasons for underreporting the number of deaths. Further, in recent wars involving the United States it was not uncommon to hear statements like “we do not do body counts” and references to “collateral damage” as a euphemism for dead and wounded. Life is cheap for some, especially those who manipulate people on the battlefield as if it were a chessboard.

To say that it is difficult to get exact figures is not to say that we should not try. Effort was needed to arrive at the figures of 6six million Jews killed during WWI, but knowledge of that number now is widespread and it has fueled the determination to prevent future holocausts. That struggle continues.

37 VICTIM NATIONS

Afghanistan

The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation.

The Soviet Union had friendly relations its neighbor, Afghanistan, which had a secular government. The Soviets feared that if that government became fundamentalist this change could spill over into the Soviet Union.

In 1998, in an interview with the Parisian publication Le Novel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to President Carter, admitted that he had been responsible for instigating aid to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan which caused the Soviets to invade. In his own words:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Brzezinski justified laying this trap, since he said it gave the Soviet Union its Vietnam and caused the breakup of the Soviet Union. “Regret what?” he said. “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?”

The CIA spent 5 to 6 billion dollars on its operation in Afghanistan in order to bleed the Soviet Union. When that 10-year war ended over a million people were dead and Afghan heroin had captured 60% of the U.S. market.

The U.S. has been responsible directly for about 12,000 deaths in Afghanistan many of which resulted from bombing in retaliation for the attacks on U.S. property on September 11, 2001. Subsequently U.S. troops invaded that country.

Angola

An indigenous armed struggle against Portuguese rule in Angola began in 1961. In 1977 an Angolan government was recognized by the U.N., although the U.S. was one of the few nations that opposed this action. In 1986 Uncle Sam approved material assistance to UNITA, a group that was trying to overthrow the government. Even today this struggle, which has involved many nations at times, continues.

U.S. intervention was justified to the U.S. public as a reaction to the intervention of 50,000 Cuban troops in Angola. However, according to Piero Gleijeses, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University the reverse was true. The Cuban intervention came as a result of a CIA – financed covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa1,2,3). (Three estimates of deaths range from 300,000 to 750,000

Argentina: See South America: Operation Condor

Bangladesh: See Pakistan

Bolivia

Hugo Banzer was the leader of a repressive regime in Bolivia in the 1970s. The U.S. had been disturbed when a previous leader nationalized the tin mines and distributed land to Indian peasants. Later that action to benefit the poor was reversed.

Banzer, who was trained at the U.S.-operated School of the Americas in Panama and later at Fort Hood, Texas, came back from exile frequently to confer with U.S. Air Force Major Robert Lundin. In 1971 he staged a successful coup with the help of the U.S. Air Force radio system. In the first years of his dictatorship he received twice as military assistance from the U.S. as in the previous dozen years together.

A few years later the Catholic Church denounced an army massacre of striking tin workers in 1975, Banzer, assisted by information provided by the CIA, was able to target and locate leftist priests and nuns. His anti-clergy strategy, known as the Banzer Plan, was adopted by nine other Latin American dictatorships in 1977. He has been accused of being responsible for 400 deaths during his tenure.

Also see: See South America: Operation Condor

Brazil: See South America: Operation Condor

Cambodia

U.S. bombing of Cambodia had already been underway for several years in secret under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but when President Nixon openly began bombing in preparation for a land assault on Cambodia it caused major protests in the U.S. against the Vietnam War.

There is little awareness today of the scope of these bombings and the human suffering involved.

Immense damage was done to the villages and cities of Cambodia, causing refugees and internal displacement of the population. This unstable situation enabled the Khmer Rouge, a small political party led by Pol Pot, to assume power. Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge’s role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people.

So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge – a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge.

Also see Vietnam

Chad

An estimated 40,000 people in Chad were killed and as many as 200,000 tortured by a government, headed by Hissen Habre who was brought to power in June, 1982 with the help of CIA money and arms. He remained in power for eight years.

Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre.

Chile

The CIA intervened in Chile’s 1958 and 1964 elections. In 1970 a socialist candidate, Salvador Allende, was elected president. The CIA wanted to incite a military coup to prevent his inauguration, but the Chilean army’s chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, opposed this action. The CIA then planned, along with some people in the Chilean military, to assassinate Schneider. This plot failed and Allende took office. President Nixon was not to be dissuaded and he ordered the CIA to create a coup climate: “Make the economy scream,” he said.

What followed were guerilla warfare, arson, bombing, sabotage and terror. ITT and other U.S. corporations with Chilean holdings sponsored demonstrations and strikes. Finally, on September 11, 1973 Allende died either by suicide or by assassination. At that time Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State, said the following regarding Chile: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”

During 17 years of terror under Allende’s successor, General Augusto Pinochet, an estimated 3,000 Chileans were killed and many others were tortured or “disappeared.”

Also see South America: Operation Condor

China An estimated 900,000 Chinese died during the Korean War.

For more information, See: Korea.

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