Americans increasingly see FBI as ‘Biden’s Gestapo’ – poll
Samizdat | August 20, 2022
A majority of respondents in a new survey have said they view the FBI as President Joe Biden‘s “personal Gestapo,” reflecting increasingly polarized views about the federal policing agency amid an investigation into the former commander in chief.
A Rasmussen poll published on Thursday showed major divisions in Americans’ attitudes toward the FBI, with 44% of respondents stating a recent raid on Trump’s Florida home made them lose some trust in the bureau. However, a significant 29% said the move only increased their confidence in the FBI, while 23% said it made no difference.
Asked about previous comments by former Trump adviser Roger Stone – who said “politicized thugs at the top of the FBI” are using the agency as “Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo” – a majority (53%) of those polled agreed, including 34% who concurred “strongly.” That figure is up from 46% last December, though the more recent survey still found 36% disagree with Stone’s characterization. The results were split along party lines, with 76% of Republican and 37% Democrat respondents agreeing with the “Gestapo” claim.
According to officials and an unsealed property receipt, the federal raid on Trump’s Florida home on August 8 was centered on a probe into classified documents allegedly taken from the White House – some of them said to be top-secret and even potentially related to nuclear weapons – with the bureau hoping to recover 11 different sets of material from the residence. It remains unclear what was found in the search, however, and unnamed sources cited by NBC recently said agents will need time to sift through the seized files.
Trump, for his part, has accused the FBI of a politicized raid, and claimed the agency “stole” his passports and privileged legal documents “which they knowingly should not have taken,” although the passports had since been returned. The former president’s lawyers were not permitted to observe the search of his property, and said FBI agents ordered them to shut off security cameras while it was conducted.
How We Have Been Misled About Antidepressants
By Joanna Moncrieff | Brownstone Institute | August 18, 2022
Our umbrella review that revealed no links between serotonin and depression has caused shock waves among the general public, but has been dismissed as old news by psychiatric opinion leaders. This disjunction begs the questions of why the public has been fed this narrative for so long, and what antidepressants are actually doing if they are not reversing a chemical imbalance.
Before I go on, I should stress that I am not against the use of drugs for mental health problems per se. I believe some psychiatric drugs can be useful in some situations, but the way these drugs are presented both to the public and among the psychiatric community is, in my view, fundamentally misleading. This means we have not been using them carefully enough, and crucially, that people have not been able to make properly informed decisions about them.
Much public information still claims that depression, or mental disorders in general, are caused by a chemical imbalance and that drugs work by putting this right. The American Psychiatric Association currently tells people that: “differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression.” The Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists tells people: “Medications work by rebalancing the chemicals in the brain. Different types of medication act on different chemical pathways.”
In response to our paper finding that such statements are not supported by evidence, psychiatric experts have desperately tried to put the genie back in the bottle. There are other possible biological mechanisms that could explain how antidepressants exert their effects, they say, but what really matters is that antidepressants ‘work.’
This claim is based on randomised trials that show that antidepressants are marginally better than a placebo at reducing depression scores over a few weeks. However, the difference is so small that it is not clear it is even noticeable, and there is evidence that it may be explained by artefacts of the design of the studies rather than the effects of the drugs.
The experts go on to suggest that it does not matter how antidepressants work. After all, we do not understand exactly how every medical drug works, so this should not worry us.
This position reveals a deep-seated assumption about the nature of depression and the action of antidepressants, which helps to explain why the myth of the chemical imbalance has been allowed to survive for so long. These psychiatrists assume that depression must be the result of some specific biological processes that we will eventually be able to identify, and that antidepressants must work by targeting these.
These assumptions are neither supported nor helpful. They are not supported because, although there are numerous hypotheses (or speculations) other than the low serotonin theory, no consistent body of research demonstrates any specific biological mechanism underpinning depression that might explain antidepressant action; they are unhelpful because they lead to overly optimistic views about the actions of antidepressants that cause their benefits to be overstated and their adverse effects to be dismissed.
Depression is not the same as pain or other bodily symptoms. While biology is involved in all human activity and experience, it is not self-evident that manipulating the brain with drugs is the most useful level at which to deal with emotions. This may be something akin to soldering the hard drive to fix a problem with the software.
We normally think of moods and emotions as being personal reactions to the things going on in our lives, which are shaped by our individual history and predispositions (including our genes), and are intimately related to our personal values and inclinations.
Therefore we explain emotions in terms of the circumstances that provoke them and the personality of the individual. To override this common-sense understanding and claim that diagnosed depression is something different requires an established body of evidence, not an assortment of possible theories.
Models of drug action
The idea that psychiatric drugs might work by reversing an underlying brain abnormality is what I have called the ‘disease-centred’ model of drug action. It was first proposed in the 1960s when the serotonin theory of depression and other similar theories were advanced. Before this, drugs were implicitly understood to work differently, in what I have called a ‘drug-centred’ model of drug action.
In the early 20th century, it was recognised that drugs prescribed to people with mental disorders produce alterations to normal mental processes and states of consciousness, which are superimposed onto the individual’s preexisting thoughts and feelings.
This is much the same as we understand the effects of alcohol and other recreational drugs. We recognise that these can temporarily override unpleasant feelings. Although many psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, are not enjoyable to take like alcohol, they do produce more or less subtle mental alterations that are relevant to their use.
This is different from how drugs work in the rest of medicine. Although only a minority of medical drugs target the ultimate underlying cause of a disease, they work by targeting the physiological processes that produce the symptoms of a condition in a disease-centred way.
Painkillers, for example, work by targeting the underlying biological mechanisms that produce pain. But opiate painkillers may work in a drug-centred way too, because, unlike other painkillers, they have mind-altering properties. One of their effects is to numb emotions, and people who have taken opiates for pain often say they still have some pain, but they do not care about it anymore.
In contrast, paracetamol (so often cited by those defending the idea that it does not matter how antidepressants work) does not have mind-altering properties, and therefore although we may not fully understand its mechanism of action, we can safely presume it works on pain mechanisms, because there is no other way for it to work.
Like alcohol and recreational drugs, psychiatric drugs produce general mental alterations that occur in everyone regardless of whether they have mental health problems or not. The alterations produced by antidepressants vary according to the nature of the drug (antidepressants come from many different chemical classes – another indication that they are unlikely to be acting on an underlying mechanism), but include lethargy, restlessness, mental clouding, sexual dysfunction, including loss of libido, and numbing of emotions.
This suggests they produce a generalised state of reduced sensitivity and feeling. These alterations will obviously influence how people feel and may explain the slight difference between antidepressants and placebo observed in randomised trials.
Influences
In my book, The Myth of the Chemical Cure, I show how this ‘drug-centred’ view of psychiatric drugs was gradually replaced by the disease-centred view during the 1960s and 70s. The older view was erased so completely that it seemed people simply forgot that psychiatric drugs have mind-changing properties.
This switch did not occur because of scientific evidence. It occurred because psychiatry wanted to present itself as a modern medical enterprise, whose treatments were the same as other medical treatments. From the 1990s, the pharmaceutical industry also started to promote this view, and the two forces combined to insert this idea into the minds of the general public in what has to go down as one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history.
As well as wanting to align with the rest of medicine, in the 1960s the psychiatric profession needed to distance its treatments from the recreational drug scene. Best-selling prescription drugs of the period, amphetamines and barbiturates, were being widely diverted onto the street (the popular ‘purple hearts’ were a mixture of the two). So it was important to emphasise that psychiatric drugs were targeting an underlying disease, and to gloss over how they might be changing people’s ordinary state of mind.
The pharmaceutical industry took up the baton following the benzodiazepine scandal in the late 1980s. At this time it became apparent that benzodiazepines (drugs like Valium- ‘mother’s little helper’) caused physical dependence just like the barbiturates they had replaced. It was also clear they were being doled out by the bucket load to people (mostly women) to medicate away the stresses of life.
So when the pharmaceutical industry developed its next set of misery pills, it needed to present them not as new ways of ‘drowning one’s sorrows,’ but as proper medical treatments that worked by rectifying an underlying physical abnormality. So Pharma launched a massive campaign to persuade people that depression was caused by a lack of serotonin that could be corrected by the new SSRI antidepressants.
Psychiatric and medical associations helped out, including the message in their information for patients on official websites. Although marketing has died down with most antidepressants no longer on patent, the idea that depression is caused by low serotonin is still widely disseminated on pharmaceutical websites and doctors are still telling people that it is the case (two doctors have said this on national TV and radio in the UK in the last few months).
Neither Pharma nor the psychiatric profession has had any interest in bursting the chemical imbalance bubble. It is quite clear from psychiatrists’ responses to our serotonin paper that the profession wishes people to continue under the misapprehension that mental disorders such as depression have been shown to be biological conditions that can be treated with drugs that target the underlying mechanisms.
We haven’t worked out what those mechanisms are yet, they admit, but we have plenty of research that suggests this or that possibility. They do not want to contemplate that there might be other explanations for what drugs like antidepressants are actually doing, and they do not want the public to do so either.
And there is good reason for this. Millions of people are now taking antidepressants, and the implications of discarding the disease-centred view of their action are profound. If antidepressants are not reversing an underlying imbalance, but we know that they are modifying the serotonin system in some way (though we are not sure how), we have to conclude they are changing our normal brain chemistry – just like recreational drugs do.
Some of the mental alterations that result, such as emotional numbing, may bring short-term relief. But when we look at antidepressants in this light we immediately understand that taking them for a long time is probably not a good idea. Although there is little research on the consequences of long-term use, increasing evidence points to the occurrence of withdrawal effects which can be severe and prolonged, and cases of persistent sexual dysfunction.
Replacing the serotonin theory with vague assurances that more complex biological mechanisms can explain drug action only continues the obfuscation, and enables the marketing of other psychiatric drugs on equally spurious grounds.
Johns Hopkins, for example, is telling people that ‘untreated depression causes long-term brain damage’ and that ‘esketamine may counteract the harmful effects of depression.’ Quite apart from the damage to people’s mental health by being told they have, or will soon get brain damage, this message encourages the use of a drug with a flimsy evidence base and a worrying adverse effect profile.
The serotonin hypothesis was inspired by the desire of the psychiatric profession to regard its treatments as proper medical treatments and the need of the pharmaceutical industry to distinguish its new drugs from the benzodiazepines that, by the late 1980s, had brought the medicating of misery into disrepute.
It exemplifies the way that psychiatric drugs have been misunderstood and misrepresented in the interests of profit and professional status. It is time to let people know not only that the serotonin story is a myth, but that antidepressants change the normal state of the body, brain and mind in ways that may occasionally be experienced as useful, but may be harmful too.
Joanna Moncrieff is a Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London, and works as a consultant psychiatrist in the NHS. She researchers and writes about the over-use and misrepresentation of psychiatric drugs and about the history, politics and philosophy of psychiatry more generally. She is currently leading UK government-funded research on reducing and discontinuing antipsychotic drug treatment (the RADAR study), and collaborating on a study to support antidepressant discontinuation. In the 1990s she co-founded the Critical Psychiatry Network to link up with other, like-minded psychiatrists. She is author of numerous papers and her books include A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs Second edition (PCCS Books), published in September 2020, as well as The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs (2013) and The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2009) (Palgrave Macmillan). Her website is https://joannamoncrieff.com/.
Russia’s energy export revenues forecast to soar
Samizdat | August 19, 2022
Russia will see a 38% year-on-year increase in energy earnings due to higher oil export volumes, coupled with rising natural gas prices, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing a document from the German Economy Ministry.
According to the report, the country’s revenues are expected to jump to $337.5 billion this year, which will help shore up the Russian economy in the face of Western sanctions.
The document predicted that energy export earnings will ease to $255.8 billion next year, but will still be higher than the 2021 figure of $244.2 billion.
According to the forecast, the average gas export price will more than double this year to $730 per thousand cubic meters, before gradually falling until the end of 2025.
The document pointed out that Moscow has started to gradually boost its oil production following the sanctions-related curbs and as a result of increased purchases by Asian buyers.
Moscow has also improved its forecasts for output and exports until the end of 2025.
Overall, the German Economy Ministry forecast cited by Reuters suggested that the Russian economy is coping well with the sanctions regime and will contract by less than expected.
Details of EU plan to revive Iranian nuclear deal leaked to media
Samizdat | August 19, 2022
A proposal the EU submitted at the Vienna talks to revive the Iranian nuclear deal would reportedly see an immediate lifting of sanctions on over 160 Iranian entities, including banks, in exchange for Tehran gradually scaling down its nuclear activities, Al Jazeera reported on Friday, citing “informed sources.”
The proposal that Brussels previously called “final” reportedly involves four stages and would take at least 120 days to be fully implemented, the media outlet said. The “first day” after its signing would see the lifting of sanctions on 17 Iranian banks and 150 other economic entities. Tehran, in turn, would also begin returning to its commitments under the agreement from day one and scale back its nuclear activities.
The implementation of this accord would also involve the release of $7 billion in Iranian funds that are currently frozen in South Korea, the report said.
During the 120-day period after the signing of the agreement, Iran will be allowed to export 50 million barrels of oil as part of a “verification mechanism,” Al Jazeera said, citing its sources. After that period, the Islamic Republic would be able to export 2.5 million barrels per day.
The proposal also includes an obligation for the US to pay a fine if it ever pulls out of the deal again, Al Jazeera said, without revealing the amount of any such penalty or where the money would go.
Iran submitted a written response to the proposal on Monday, without revealing its details. “There are three issues that if resolved, we can reach an agreement in the coming days,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said at the time. “We have shown enough flexibility… We do not want to reach a deal that after 40 days, two months or three months, fails to be materialized on the ground,” he added, warning that Tehran’s “red lines” should be respected.
Earlier, the US said the 2015 nuclear deal could be revived only if Iran drops its “extraneous” demands, which included an end to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) probe into unexplained uranium traces in Iran and the removal of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the American terrorism list.
Al Jazeera reported on Friday, citing a European official in Vienna, that Tehran is no longer seeking the removal of the organization from the list.
Last week, Politico reported that the EU had proposed watering down the US sanctions on the IRGC as part of efforts to revive the 2015 deal. The news outlet also said Washington was set “to make greater concessions than expected” to revive the deal.
According to Politico, the text of the proposal also said Washington and Brussels “take note of Iran’s intent” to address the issue of the IAEA probe by the time the agreement enters into force again.
The Iranian nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed in 2015 by Iran, the US, UK, France, and Germany, as well as Russia, China, and the EU. It involved Iran agreeing to certain restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for economic sanctions relief. In 2018, the US unilaterally withdrew from the deal under President Donald Trump. Talks to revive the deal have been taking place in Vienna for the past 16 months.
Israel ‘yields to Lebanon’s maritime demands’ as Hezbollah-set deadline approaches
Press TV – August 19, 2022
Israel has reportedly yielded to Lebanon’s full maritime demands over the disputed waters and gas fields, asking the Arab country for extra time to finalize a deal.
According to a report by Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar on August 19, the regime sent a message to Hezbollah through diplomatic channels, saying it accepts Lebanon’s full demands.
Israel has pledged to acknowledge that Line 23 and the Qana prospect field are in Lebanese territory while also pleading with Hezbollah to set aside potential plans to attack Israeli gas fields in case of a delayed deal, the report added.
Secretary General of Hezbollah Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has already rejected any delays in the case as Lebanon is going through dire economic conditions. “Time is short, and depending on the [Israeli] response, we will surely act,” he said in a speech during Ashura mourning procession.
Hezbollah had set a deadline for Lebanon to secure its rights over the disputed areas, which will expire on September 15.
Meanwhile, Israeli media reported an Israeli official is set to make a trip to the United States to discuss the dispute in the hopes of achieving an agreement.
According to Al-Akhbar, some firms have warned Israel they would withdraw their employees and facilities in case the regime fails to guarantee their safety.
Nasrallah had earlier said the Israeli regime would not be allowed to conduct drilling operations for oil and natural gas in the disputed area in the Mediterranean Sea until Lebanon gets what it deserves.
“Lebanon is facing a historic and golden opportunity to get out of its financial crisis. If we fail to take advantage of it, we would not be able to extract oil within the next 100 years. We are not looking for moral gains out of extraction in the Karish natural gas field. We rather want to tap into our oil reserves. There would, therefore, be no room for oil or gas extraction in the entire region if Lebanon does not get its right,” Nasrallah said at a local event in Beirut on July 19.
Lebanese politicians hope commercially viable hydrocarbon resources off Lebanon’s coast could help the debt-ridden country out of its worst economic crisis in decades.
In February 2018, Lebanon signed its first contract for drilling in two blocks in the Mediterranean with a consortium comprising energy giants Total, Eni, and Novatek.
Lebanon and Israel took part in indirect talks to discuss demarcation in 2020. But the talks stalled after Lebanon demanded a larger area, including part of the Karish gas field, where Israel has given exploration rights to a Greek firm.
The talks were supposed to discuss a Lebanese demand for 860 square kilometers (330 square miles) of territory in the disputed maritime area, according to a map sent to the United Nations in 2011. However, Lebanon then said the map was based on erroneous calculations and demanded 1,430 square kilometers (552 square miles) more further south, including part of Karish.
Venezuela Stops Oil Shipments To Europe As Alternatives To Russian Energy Dry Up
Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | August 19, 2022
The writing is on the wall for Europe in terms of this coming winter – It’s going to get ugly. With natural gas imports from Russia cut by 80% through Nord Stream 1 along with the majority of oil shipments, the EU is going to be scrambling for whatever fuel sources they can find to supply electricity and heating through the coming winter. Two sources that were originally suggested as alternatives were Iran and Venezuela.
Increased Iranian oil and gas exports to the west are highly dependent on the tentative nuclear deal, but as Goldman Sachs recently suggested, such a deal is unlikely anytime soon as deadlines on proposals have not been met and the Israeli government calls for negotiators to ‘walk away.’
Venezuela had restarted shipments to Europe after 2 years of US sanctions under a deal that allows them to trade oil for debt relief. However, the country’s government has now suspended those shipments, saying it is no longer interested in oil-for-debt deals and instead wants refined fuels from Italian and Spanish producers in exchange for crude.
This might seem like a backwards exchange but Venezuela’s own refineries are struggling to remain in operation because of lack of investment and lack of repairs. Refined fuels would help them to get back on their feet in terms of energy and industry. Some of Venezuela’s own heavy oil operations require imported diluents in order to continue. The EU says it currently has no plans to lift restrictions on the oil-for-debt arrangement, which means Europe has now lost yet another energy source.
Sanctions on Venezuela along with declining investments have strangled their oil industry, with overall production dropping by 38% this July compared to a year ago. Joe Biden’s initial moves to reopen talks with Maduro triggered inflated hopes that Venezuelan oil would flow once again and offset tight global markets and rising prices. Europe in particular will soon be desperate for energy alternatives, which will probably result in a scouring of markets this autumn to meet bare minimum requirements for heating.
If this occurs and no regular sources of energy can be found to fill the void left by Russian sanctions, prices will rise precipitously in the EU. Not only that, but with European countries buying up energy supplies wherever they can find them, available sources will also shrink for every other nation including the US. Get ready for oil and energy prices to spike once again as winter’s chill returns.
Russian gas transit to EU via Nord Stream to be halted – Gazprom
Samizdat | August 19, 2022
Russian energy giant Gazprom announced on Friday that transit of natural gas to the European Union via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will be halted from August 31 to September 2 for maintenance.
“On August 31, the only working Trent 60 gas compressor unit will be shut down for three days for maintenance,” the company stated, noting that all repairs will be carried out jointly with specialists from the German manufacturer, Siemens.
Gazprom added that “Upon completion of work and the absence of technical malfunctions of the unit, gas transportation will be restored to the level of 33 million cubic meters per day,” representing roughly 20% of the pipeline’s full capacity.
The unit is the last one of the pipeline’s six turbines that was operational, with the rest in need of an overhaul. One of the turbines is currently stranded in Germany due to sanctions, after returning from repair works in Canada.
Russian gas supplies to the EU via Nord Stream 1 dropped to 20% of the maximum level last month. According to Gazprom, five turbines need to be operating to pump gas at full capacity.
European gas prices spiked after Friday’s announcement, jumping 7% to above $2,600 per thousand cubic meters.
US on verge of becoming party to Ukrainian conflict, Moscow warns
Samizdat | August 19, 2022
Washington’s continued support for Kiev during Moscow’s military operation has put the US on the verge of becoming party to the Ukrainian conflict, Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov has said.
“We don’t want escalation. We’d like to avoid a situation, in which the US becomes a party to the conflict, but so far we don’t see any readiness of the other side to take these warnings seriously,” Ryabkov told Rossiya 1 TV channel on Friday.
Moscow rejects Washington’s explanation, that providing Ukraine with weapons and other aid is justified by Kiev’s right to self-defense, he pointed out.
“Excuse me, what kind of self-defense is it if they are already openly talking about the possibility of attacking targets deep in the Russian territory, in Crimea?” the deputy FM wondered.
According to Ryabkov, such statements are being made by the Ukrainian side “not just under the blind eye of the US and NATO, but with the encouragement of this kind of sentiment, approaches, plans and ideas directly from Washington,” Ryabkov insisted.
“The ever more obvious and deeper involvement in Ukraine in terms of countering our military operation, in fact, puts this country, the US, on the verge of turning into a party to the conflict,” he reiterated.
The US has been the strongest supporter of Kiev amid its conflict with Russia, providing Kiev with billions of dollars in military and financial aid, as well as intelligence data. Washington’s deliveries to the Ukrainian military have included such sophisticated hardware as HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, M777 howitzers and combat drones.
Reuters reported on Friday that US President Joe Biden is about to announce another lethal aid package for Kiev of around $800 million.
An unnamed official from the Biden administration told Politico on Thursday that the White House had no problem with Ukraine attacking Crimea, which became part of Russia after a 2014 referendum staged in response to a violent coup. The US believes that Kiev can strike any target on its territory, and “Crimea is Ukraine,” the American official insisted.
There have recently been a number of explosions near a Russian ammunition depot and at a military airfield in Crimea, which the Defense Ministry said were acts of “sabotage.” However, Ukrainian authorities haven’t officially confirmed involvement in the attacks.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.