Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Media Attacks Spotify For Allowing Robert F Kennedy Jr. Joe Rogan Episode

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 18, 2023

Spotify, the audio streaming giant, is once again in the crosshairs of media critics for allowing an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that featured Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The episode is accused of spreading vaccine “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” without sufficient censorship by the platform, and the media is questioning Spotify’s decision to host it.

Joe Rogan, a major podcasting force in the US, hosted the three-hour long show that touched on vaccine skepticism, 5G technology, and alternative COVID-19 treatments. This comes as part of a broader scrutiny from media outlets urging platforms to put a lid on content that challenges mainstream narratives and contradicts the stances of global health organizations.

Media outlets including Vice and The Verge point fingers at Robert F. Kennedy Jr., known for his criticism of vaccines and pharmaceutical companies, for allegedly making several false claims during the podcast. These include the claim linking vaccines to autism and an assertion regarding vaccines containing harmful forms of mercury. The media’s bone to pick with Spotify is its decision to not clamp down on Kennedy’s suggestion that “Wi-Fi radiation” could play a role in various chronic illnesses.

Peter Hotez, Baylor microbiology professor and public health advocate, threw the spotlight on the issue by sharing a critical article via Twitter. Not one to back down, Rogan threw down the gauntlet to Hotez for a debate with Kennedy, sweetening the pot with a $100,000 donation to charity if Hotez agreed. He didn’t.

Despite the uproar and calls for censorship, Spotify defended its position. A spokesperson from the company maintained that neither Rogan nor Kennedy crossed the line in terms of the platform’s policies.

Spotify’s history with attacks from the media is somewhat checkered. Flashback to early 2022, when artists including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell yanked their music from Spotify as a show of protest against Rogan’s questioning of Covid vaccine efficacy, including his statement that vaccines don’t halt infection spread.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Great Debate that won’t happen

Kennedy vs. Hotez might be a narrative-changer.

BY BILL RICE, JR. | JUNE 18, 2023

In south Alabama we have an expression: “If you’re scared, say you’re scared.”

Well, Dr. Peter Hotez – one of the best-known vaccine advocates and defenders of all the Covid mitigation measures – is obviously scared to death. He just needs to come out and admit it.

What scares Dr. Hotez is an invitation for him (Hotez) to debate presidential candidate and contrarian Covid expert Robert Kennedy, Jr. on Joe Rogan’s ultra-popular podcast show.

Apparently, Hotez kept bad-mouthing “disinformation super-spreader” Kennedy and Rogan finally had enough.

Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to Hotez’s favorite charity if Hotez would just come on his show and, in a debate with no time-table, debate Kennedy on vaccine effectiveness, safety and all the other allegedly “settled” Covid science.

As I write, the debate invitation has gone viral on Twitter with plenty of other wealthy people (like Steve Kirsch) ponying up money to make the debate happen. At last look, Dr. Hotez could net $1.5 million for his favorite charity  by simply talking to Kennedy and Rogan for two or so hours.

Talk about easy money.

RFK, Jr. is in …

Needless to say, Kennedy is game for a “cordial” debate and, needless to say, he doesn’t need to be bribed to participate. He’ll do it for free and pay his own expenses to show up in the studio.

Truth be told (there’s that word – “truth”) … Nobody is surprised that Dr. Hotez is running from a genuine debate on Covid topics. This is because no expert in America has participated in a genuine debate on Covid topics in 40 months.

Apparently, one new feature of our “New Normal” “scientific method” is that real debates are no longer necessary.

In fact, they are strongly discouraged, which is exactly why Facebook, Google, YouTube, the CDC, “Joe Biden’s” White House and the corporate press have been pushing for censorship on steroids for so long.

For those who haven’t picked up on this yet, censorship also precludes real debates.

Hotez and every “expert” and authority of his ilk has been saying for almost four years that people like Kennedy who are spreading “disinformation” and “misinformation” are potentially killing and harming massive numbers of people with their false Covid claims.

According to the experts, the claims made by Kennedy, Kirsch (and Bill Rice Jr.!) are ridiculous, preposterous, obviously false, easily discredited, etc.

Why the fear?

Such claims are interesting as they suggest that any debate with a Covid skeptic would be a lay-up or gimme to win. Even a cave man could humiliate RFK, Jr. in a debate about real science.

So, if victory would be so easy – and if one can make a couple million for his favorite charity – why not do this?

Speaking for myself, I’m tired of acting like I’m obtuse when I’m not. We all know the answer: The Dr. Hotez’s of the world are scared to death of a real debate.

If this isn’t a giant “tell” about these frauds and charlatans nothing is.

Also, every one of them are pro-censorship.

Facebook has been censoring content left and right for three-plus years, but Hotez’s cabal of “influencers” are demanding that Congress and the White House make social media companies censor even more content/speech that they don’t like.

The entire justification for North Korea-style censorship is that the disinformation spreaders are harming people. Presumably, Hotez’s noble goal is to save lives and shut up all the “disinformation” spreaders.

Well, what would shut them up more than a pay-per-view prize fight between one of the leading advocates of the Status-Quo narrative and the best known Covid skeptic in the world?

Once Dr. Hotez wipes the floor with Kennedy, every other vaccine super spreader will crawl back into a cave and keep his mouth shut from here on out.

My side will be disgraced and humiliated … and every neutral person will now know this.

In one fell swoop, the “disinformation” movement will suffer a lethal blow. Millions of lives will be saved because, in the future, everyone will know that Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Anthony Fauci were exactly right with everything they said about Covid.

Not only will Kennedy lose this “science” debate, his hopes of pulling an upset and winning the White House will also go down the toilet.

Dr. Hotez would be THE hero to all the groups, companies and bureaucracies who are having nightmares about Kennedy beating their chosen candidate, “Joe Biden.”

Kennedy’s Children Health Defense non-profit, which has been growing by leaps and bounds, would wither up and die.

Everyone would know that not only did the Covid vaccines save millions of lives, they’d also know that the massive spike in autism cases in recent decades had nothing to do with vaccines and the flu vaccine – which is now being questioned by more and more Americans – would once again be perceived as a must-get annual shot.

Hotez could also put to bed the claim that his side is anti-free speech because they would be allowing Kennedy and Rogan to deploy their dad-blasted free speech in said “debate.”

“See, we are NOT censors and we do believe in free speech and genuine debates in our democracy,” Hotez could show the world in this debate.

For all these reasons, it would seem Dr. Hotez and his side would achieve a panoply of positive, life-saving results, with no down-side whatsoever.

Maybe there, ah, is a possible down side?

The only downside might be if, Hotez, in fact got annihilated in this debate and every American who witnessed the event started questioning all the claims the experts had made in the last four years (or decades for that matter).

But this scenario can’t be a possibility because the science is so “settled” and Kennedy is such a “wacko” and conspiracy theorist that he would have no chance of prevailing in any debate … right?

Of course, we all know Dr. Hotez knows he’d get his ass whipped in any debate with Kennedy. Fauci knows this, The New York Times knows this, Bill Gates knows this, every commentator at MSNBC and CNN knows this.

“Whatever you do, do NOT debate Robert Kennedy on Covid topics!” they are all now screaming at Dr. Hotez.

If the debate is held, it will set Internet ratings records. The fact that Hotez is running from said debate is already giving another huge boost to the presidential campaign of RFK, Jr, who is having no trouble going around the MSM “gatekeepers of the news,” who all despise and fear him.

In fact, that’s another reason the debate can’t be allowed. It’s almost a given that RFK, Jr. would go off on the captured mainstream press in said debate.

Dr. Hotez would be the one defending the credibility of The New York Times and singing the praises of Big Pharma, which has of course always been as honest as the day is long.

If enough Americans keep calling Dr. Hotez a sissy, maybe this will goad the previously cocky doctor into taking the bait and actually debating Kennedy.

If so, this might qualify as a game-changer and give the world it’s very first honest discussion of Covid policies. It might also help elect a president who genuinely wants to dismantle the Military Industrial Complex and the Science/Medicine Industrial Complex.

But my bet is Dr. Hotez won’t debate.

There’s another expression we’ve all heard: “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Well, in our surreal New-Normal times, apparently the experts and authorities CAN run and they can hide. That’s what they’ve been doing for 40 months and, as far as I can tell, they are still in power. So that strategy is working perfectly.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 2 Comments

What’s Wrong With This Study? CDC Finds COVID Shots ‘Safe and Effective’ for Kids Under 4

By Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 16, 2023

An analysis published earlier this month in Pediatrics concluded the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are safe and effective in preschool-age children — a conclusion trumpeted by media outlets such as Parents and Medscape.

But the study, conducted by Kaiser Permanente researchers with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), raises more questions than it answers.

Researchers followed children (mostly 4 years old or younger) who collectively received more than 245,000 doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA products and “found no indications of serious side effects,” according to a Kaiser Permanente news release.

Using a form of surveillance monitoring known as rapid cycle analysis, investigators performed weekly sequential analyses for 19 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, seizures, heart attack, Bell’s palsy, neurological inflammatory conditions, anaphylaxis and several others.

The study period was from June 2022 to March 2023.

Instead of using a comparable group of unvaccinated children as the control, the authors compared adverse events occurring 1-21 days after vaccination in one group, with outcomes among children in another group who had received the shot at some point between 22 and 42 days previously.

Time since inoculation was the only distinguishing feature, and the only factor that might account for inter-group differences.

The study, therefore, boils down to the question of whether children who received an mRNA shot about 10 days previously experienced more or fewer adverse events than children who received their jab about 32 days previously.

Data were mined from the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a repository of patient data from eight private healthcare systems, which included five Kaiser Permanente regions and three other large health entities.

Up to three doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech product were given to 135,000 children, ages 6 months to 5 years, while 112,000 children, ages 6 months to 6 years, got the Moderna gene therapy.

Subject demographics more or less reflected the populations served by these healthcare companies.

The authors wrote that their safety surveillance over nine months “did not detect a safety signal for any outcome during the 21 days after vaccination. Importantly, no cases of myocarditis or pericarditis occurred after vaccination.”

The accompanying press release framed the conclusion even more positively. According to corresponding author Dr. Nicola Klein:

“Parents can be assured that this large study found no serious side effects from the mRNA vaccines. … Parents can protect their young children from COVID-19 in the same way they vaccinate their children to protect from other serious childhood diseases.”

Perhaps anticipating the long list of questions regarding their work, the researchers discussed the potential limitations of their analysis, which they said included:

  • Reduced statistical power, particularly for rare outcomes.
  • Low vaccine uptake in the evaluated age group (“only” 24.7% of the eligible population received at least one shot).
  • Surveillance did not include “all potential safety concerns.”

And the kicker:

“We may have underestimated or missed potential safety concerns if the biologically plausible risk interval for an outcome differed from our specified risk interval.”

Together, the choice of control group and the time period selected almost guaranteed “reduced statistical power,” particularly when comparing the two groups.

In a 2022 paper Klein noted reports from “worldwide” sources of myocarditis/pericarditis after mRNA COVID-19 treatments “especially among younger male persons [italics mine] 0 to 7 days after receiving dose 2.”

Although the incidence of heart inflammation was low in the 0-5 age group for the Pfizer product (14.4 per million doses, mostly after the second shot), the incidence of serious cardiac events rose markedly for older groups.

No data were available in the 2022 study for the Moderna shot.

For 18- to 29-year-old males — the youngest age group for which both Pfizer and Moderna data were available — Klein reported, based on VSD numbers, a cumulative myocarditis/pericarditis incidence of 135 cases per million for children who had received the two injections plus the booster.

For the Moderna product, the incidence was 185 per million. For females, the rates were about 10 per million for both mRNA shots.

Given the serious long-term consequences of heart inflammation, and its known occurrence among vaccinated teenagers and young adults, one wonders at the wisdom of giving mRNA shots to children who are even younger than those known to get sick from the treatments.

COVID-19 itself has been blamed for the rise in heart inflammation, but a search for data from very early in the pandemic, before this storyline emerged (possibly to hide the incidence of “vaccine” injuries), shows this to be a red herring.

A 2022 Italian study comparing myocarditis/pericarditis incidence pre- and post-COVID-19 reported that the annual incidence of myocarditis was significantly higher before the pandemic than during, with a rate of about 80 per million “pre” and 60 per million “during.”

The authors made a point to emphasize that “the incidence of myocarditis was significantly lower in COVID than in PRECOVID in the class of age 18-24 years” than for their general study population, which averaged 40 years of age.

The incidence of pericarditis was unchanged between the two time periods, at about 45 per million.

Comparing data from two far-flung studies should be undertaken with caution. However, the difference between a baseline of fewer than 60 cases per million for 18- to 24-year-old adults (the Italian study) and the 185 per million for “male persons” between 18 and 29 post-mRNA treatment (Klein et al.) clearly and inconveniently shatters the “safe and effective” narrative.

The lack of statistical power in Klein’s 2023 study, despite a very large “denominator” (total patients studied), is almost certainly due to the relatively small number of cases — which is exactly what one would expect when uncommon (but serious) side effects over such short time periods are compared.

True, this is an apples-to-apples comparison — but in this case, investigators pretty much used the exact same apples and reported their similarities as somehow noteworthy.

Klein’s data source(s) raise additional questions. Although the VSD is connected to the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), how much of her raw data came from VAERS and how much came from VSD is unclear.

Eleven of VSD’s 13 participating commercial and academic hubs are “data reporting sites” whose contributions presumably include vaccine side effect reports.

The concern here is about motives and incentives. VAERS data are based mainly on self-reporting and are known to be gross underestimates of the actual number of incidents.

By contrast, hospitals and healthcare systems, e.g. those participating in VSD, were robustly incentivized to promote and administer the COVID-19 shots.

Along those lines, note that one author “received funding from Janssen Vaccines and Prevention for a study unrelated to coronavirus disease 2019 vaccines.” And lead investigator Klein “received grants from Pfizer for coronavirus disease 2019 vaccine clinical trials and from Merck, GSK, and Sanofi Pasteur for study work unrelated to the current study work.”

The rationale for immunizing children against COVID-19 has been hotly debated since the shots were first available to older adults in late 2020.

But by the time these treatments were authorized for children, it was already clear that kids do not get very sick from COVID-19 and are not a significant source of infection, either for the community or for “grandma” in her rocking chair at home.

As of early 2021, with the huge wave of Delta-variant fatalities in freefall, the number of U.S. pediatric COVID-19 deaths reported by the CDC was close to zero, both in terms of absolute cases and as a percentage of all deaths.

Yet in her interview with her institution’s media department, lead author Klein said:

“Even as the COVID-19 emergency has ended, we know that the coronavirus poses a long-term, serious threat to all ages, including children. Vaccinating children against COVID-19 benefits them by reducing the burden of illness, avoiding spreading the virus to family and others, and mitigating the small but real risk of serious illness.”

Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a contributing editor for The Defender.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 1 Comment

Confidential Pfizer document shows the company observed 1.6 million adverse events covering nearly every organ system

By Daniel Horowitz | conservative review |June 14, 2023

Over 10,000 categories of nearly 1.6 million adverse events – many of them serious and debilitating – brought to you by Pfizer!

You might not have heard it in the news, but in recent months, Pfizer’s pharmacovigilance documents requested by the European Union’s drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, have been released. They show that Pfizer knew about a sickening level of injury early on. An August 2022 document shows that the company already had observed the following scope of vaccine injury:

  • 508,351 individual case reports of adverse events containing 1,597,673 events;
  • One-third of the AEs were classified as serious, well above the standard for safety signals usually pegged at 15%;
  • Women reported AEs at three times the rate of men;
  • 60% of cases were reported with either “outcome unknown” or “not recovered,” so many of the injuries were not transient;

Highest number of cases occurred in the 31-50 year age group, and 92% did not have any comorbidities, which makes it very likely it was the vaccine causing such widespread, sudden injury.

These numbers alone suggest that all COVID shots should be defunded and Congress must immediately remove liability protections from the manufacturers. But a more recent document released by the Europeans is even more devastating, because it breaks down the 1.6 million adverse events observed by Pfizer by category and subcategory of ailment and injury.

The 393-page confidential Pfizer document, dated Aug. 19, 2022, shows that Pfizer observed over 10,000 categories of diagnosis, many of them very severe and very rare. For example:

  • Pfizer was aware of 73,542 cases of 264 categories of vascular disorders from the shots. Many of them are rare conditions.
  • There were hundreds of categories of nervous system disorders, totaling 696,508 cases.
  • There were 61,518 AEs from well over 100 categories of eye disorders, which is unusual for a vaccine injury.
  • Likewise, there were over 47,000 ear disorders, including almost 16,000 cases of tinnitus, which even Mayo Clinic researchers observed as a common but often devastating side effect early on.
  • There were roughly 225,000 cases of skin and tissue disorders.
  • There were roughly 190,000 cases of respiratory disorders.
  • Disturbingly, there were over 178,000 cases of reproductive or breast disorders, including disorders you wouldn’t expect, such as 506 cases of erectile dysfunction in men.
  • Very disturbingly, there were over 77,000 psychiatric disorders observed following the shots, lending credence to Dr. Peter McCullough’s research observing case studies showing psychosis correlating with vaccination.
  • 3,711 cases of tumors – benign and malignant
  • Of course, there were almost 127,000 cardiac disorders, running the gamut of about 270 categories of heart damage, including many rare disorders, in addition to myocarditis.
  • There were over 100,000 blood and lymphatic disorders, for both of which there’s a wealth of literature linking them to the spike protein.

When reading what Pfizer knew early on juxtaposed to independent studies, it’s clear that nobody could have mistaken most of these AEs for mere incidental ailments. Here is a list of 3,129 case studies chronicling vaccine injury in every organ system observed in this Pfizer document.

What is so jarring is that there are hundreds of very rare neurological disorders that reflect something so systemically wrong with the shots, a reality that was clearly of no concern to the manufacturers and regulators alike. One of the infamous cases of vaccine injury was Maddie de Garay, an Ohio teen who became disabled for life immediately after participating in the Pfizer clinical trial. Her story is chronicled in chapter 16 of my book. I checked this confidential document and found that they knew of 68 cases of her rare diagnosis, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy.

The broad scope of injuries affecting every single organ system is simply extraordinary. Yet to this day, the FDA continues to criminally label the Pfizer shot as safe and effective. To this day, the label indicates the shot is a fully protective vaccine and also fails to mention all of these side effects, as required by law.

Recently, Peter Doshi, editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote a letter to the FDA requesting that the agency update its labeling to reflect the reality of what we’ve learned about the shots. Specifically, he asked that they include the following side effects on the label: multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, pulmonary embolism, sudden cardiac death, neuropathic and autonomic disorders, decreased sperm concentration, heavy menstrual bleeding, and detection of vaccine mRNA in breast milk. The causal relationship of all these AEs to the vaccine is backed by substantial research, surveys, and adverse event reporting systems.

Unfortunately, the FDA denied the causal relationship between any of these side effects and the COVID shots. Even with regard to the request that officials clarify on the label that the shots don’t stop transmission, the FDA replied, “We are not convinced that there is any widespread misconception about this.”

“Product labeling should be informative and accurate, not promotional. The law requires it, and following the law shouldn’t be optional,” bemoaned Doshi and the other authors in a piece at TheHill.

The question is whether Republicans in the House will force the FDA to comply with the law by using the leverage of the appropriations bills for the FDA and HHS. So far, there has been no reckoning for their false marketing and the devastating human toll it has cost. Oh, and that is just the short-term human toll.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Lab-Grown Meat Suffers Significant Setback With Shocking New Scientific Findings

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 18, 2023

Earlier this year, the Grocery Gazette reported that the UK was set to be a world-leading developer of lab-grown meat. In the recent past, Guardian climate hysteric George Monbiot claimed lab-grown food “will soon destroy farming – and save the planet”. Alas, such boosterism is being challenged by hard facts. Lab-grown meat is up to 25 times worse for the environment since it needs ‘pharmaceutical-grade’ production to make it fit for human consumption. In particular, there is a need to remove endotoxin from the cultured mix, a substance that in concentrations as low as one billionth of a gram per millilitrie can reduce human IVF pregnancy success rate by up to four fold.

These are the startling conclusions of ground-breaking work recently published by a group of chemists and food scientists from the University of California. It turns out that ‘pharma to food’ production is a significant technological challenge. The major problem with lab meat is that it uses growth organisms that have to be highly purified to help animal cells multiply. Compared with environmental savings on land, water and greenhouses gases, the whole bio-process is noted to be “orders of magnitude” higher than rearing the actual animal.

“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said co-author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. The study found that even across scenarios using lower pharma standards, efficient beef production outperforms cultured meat within a range from four to 25 times. This suggests that investment to advance more ‘climate-friendly’ beef production may yield greater reductions in emissions.

The route to New Zero is littered with improbable technologies that promise much – and give endless opportunities for virtue signalling – but deliver little. While many countries press ahead with plans to destroy conventional animal husbandry, the options for new ways of actually feeding populations look thin on the ground. To be fair to Monbiot, he has picked up on the problems of lab meat, noting in a recent blog post that “the more I’ve read about cultured meat and fish, and the more I’ve come to appreciate the phenomenal complexities involved… the more I doubt this vision will come to pass”. Always the worrier, Monbiot asks, “How can mass starvation best be averted”? Not removing the 337.18 million tonnes of global meat production in favour of flaky factory solutions might be a start.

The California study could throw a major stick into the spokes of the lab-grown meat bandwagon, which to date has had a largely uncritical mainstream media ride. Grocery Gazette’s cheer-leading report noted that the sector was predicted to “rapidly increase its market share within the food industry”. Research was quoted suggesting cell cultured meat was expected to make up almost quarter of global meat consumption by 2035.

The authors in California acknowledge that lab-grown meat ventures have attracted around $2 billion of investment to date. Early reports on feasibility were bullish with some predicting a 60-70% displacement of beef by 2030-2040. But of late, sentiment has waned with more conservative estimates noting a 0.5% share of meat products by 2030. As noted, the huge problem in producing lab meat is the presence of endotoxin which is said have a variety of side effects including harm to in vitro fertilisation. In pharmaceutical labs, animal cell culture is traditional done with endotoxin having been removed. There are many ways to remove the unwanted substance, but the use of these refinement methods “contributes significantly to the economic and environmental costs associated with pharmaceutical products since they are both energy and resource intensive”.

The study also highlights concerns about past scientific consideration of lab-grown meat. There is said to be “high levels of uncertainty in their results and the lack of accounting for endotoxin removal”. It is further noted that despite researchers “clearly reporting high levels of uncertainty”, the results were often cited as clear evidence for the sustainability of lab-grown meat.

So a much-touted green Frankenstein food solution – arguably to a problem only promoted in alarmist circles – looks to be biting the dust, sweeping away a billion or two of credulous capital in the process. As the authors note, investing in scaling this technology “before solving key issues like developing an environmentally friendly method for endotoxin removal… would be counter to the environmental goals which this sector has espoused”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | 2 Comments

Biden regime top aide in Saudi Arabia to further push for normalization with Israel after Blinken failure

Press TV – June 18, 2023

A top advisor to US President Joe Biden has reportedly traveled to Saudi Arabia as part of Washington’s relentless push to broker a normalization deal between Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

The US-based news website Axios reported on Saturday that Brett McGurk, Biden’s senior Middle East adviser, had arrived in Saudi Arabia to hold “talks with Saudi officials that will focus on the administration’s efforts to reach a normalization agreement between the Israel and the kingdom as well as other issues.”

According to the report, McGurk was also expected to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman to discuss the kingdom’s normalization of relations with Israel.

McGurk’s visit is part of attempts by the White House to push for a Saudi-Israeli deal in the next six to seven months before Biden’s presidential election campaigns.

The top advisor’s trip to Saudi Arabia comes less than two weeks after US Secretary of State Tony Blinken visited the kingdom and met bin Salman, with Saudi officials having snubbed the US diplomat’s latest push for the normalization deal.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said at a joint press conference with Blinken that “without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people… any normalization will have limited benefits.”

Saudi Arabia cautiously welcomed the US-brokered normalization deals between the Israeli regime and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco in 2020.

The oil-rich kingdom itself, however, has been expected to jump on the bandwagon since then, as the two sides have seen growing contacts and de-facto rapprochement in recent years, despite claims that it is committed to the 2002 so-called Arab Peace Initiative, which conditions normalizing ties with Israel on the establishment of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.

The Riyadh regime in November 2020 granted permission for Israeli airlines to use its airspace, hours before the first Israeli flight to the UAE was set to take off.

Palestinian leaders, activists and ordinary people have repeatedly rejected Arab-Israeli normalization deals as “a stab in the back of the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people.”

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Pakistani Defense Minister Lied To Newsweek About The State Of Democracy In His Country

BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JUNE 18, 2023

Newsweek published an extended interview with Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif on Saturday in which this official repeatedly returned to the state of democracy in his country. This de facto theme pervades the entire text since he continually referenced this fall’s elections as supposedly being the key to resolving Pakistan’s economic crisis. Asif insists that they’ll be free and fair without any meddling from his country’s military-intelligence structures, The Establishment, but this isn’t true at all.

Former Prime Minister Imran Khan (IK) was deposed in April 2022’s post-modern coup precisely because The Establishment’s leading representative at the time, former Chief Of Army Staff Qamar Javed Bajwa, colluded with his domestic opponents to oust him after first securing tacit American approval. Pakistan then entered into a series of cascading crises that continue to this day, with its economic one being the focus of considerable international attention due to the country’s potentially impending bankruptcy.

Political stability is the prerequisite for resolving the economic crisis from which the others have largely stemmed, but The Establishment refused to allow truly free and fair early elections like IK and his supporters requested because then their post-modern coup would have been for naught. Those who carried out that regime change have financial, ideological, personal, and professional stakes in preventing his return to office, which explains why they’ve so passionately opposed him since then.

The approximately 18 months between IK’s removal in April 2022 and the next scheduled national elections in fall of this year were supposed to give The Establishment enough time to meddle in Pakistan’s democratic process to ensure that he doesn’t win. This was first done through indirect means by having their media proxies falsely allege that there was supposedly no basis to the oil deal talks that he claimed to have held with President Putin during his trip to Moscow in late February 2022.

The associated innuendo was that his claim of being overthrown by an American-approved but superficially “democratic” plot as punishment for his independent foreign policy and especially the focus that he gave towards expanding ties with Russia was devoid of substance, thus making him a conspiracy theorist. When that failed to manipulate the population’s perceptions about the post-modern coup, The Establishment then had its media proxies allege that he was embroiled in corruption schemes.

That narrative tactic also failed, which incensed his supporters even more than the preceding one implying that he’s a conspiracy theorist since they regarded it as an unprincipled attack against his personal integrity. They accordingly sought to peacefully march on Islamabad in May 2022 to support the holding of truly free and fair early elections for resolving their country’s political crisis, which they compellingly argued is required in order to effectively address its economic one.

The regime regrettably refused to comply with their request and savagely sicced its goons on them in a desperate attempt to intimidate people into dropping their support for IK’s now-opposition PTI. As is the trend, that also failed and even dramatically backfired as evidenced by the party winning a spree of by-elections from that summer onwards, which proved their genuinely grassroots popularity. These outcomes suggested that PTI would sweep its opponents in truly free and fair national elections.

Instead of the Pakistani people fearing The Establishment, it was now The Establishment that feared the Pakistani people, which is why they then ramped up its persecution of them. This took the form of abducting certain PTI members, assassinating the famous dissident journalist Arshad Sharif, and even attempting the assassination of IK in early November. After failing to kill him, they then employed “lawfare” with the intent of banning him from running for re-election.

This next phase in The Establishment’s Hybrid War on Pakistan culminated in their abduction of IK in early May that then prompted a spontaneous spree of protests, which PTI claims even included false flag attacks against military installations carried out by the regime’s goons in order to discredit the party. Immediately afterwards, hundreds of PTI members were pressured to “defect” from the party while thousands of their supporters were imprisoned, all with a wink and a nod from the West.

The Establishment’s “political engineering” project is now nearing completion since their proxy Shehbaz Sharif just proposed the return of his self-exiled elder brother so that he can resume leading the regime’s most powerful coalition party and thus run as premier for a fourth time. Nawaz Sharif used to be one of The Establishment’s enemies but those two became allies after their proverbial “deal with the devil” that was agreed to with America’s blessing in order to manufacture the “democratic” optics of IK’s ouster.

The Establishment’s reward for the role that Nawaz’s party played through his younger brother Shehbaz in the post-modern coup and everything that came after will likely be the reversal of his lifetime disqualification from political office so that he can rule Pakistan once again after the next elections. The deep-seated hatred that many Pakistanis have for him means that this outcome can only be achieved through defrauding the vote and manipulating the coalition talks that come afterwards.

Absolutely nothing about these upcoming elections will be free or fair, and the state of democracy in Pakistan is nonexistent after everything that’s happened since April 2022’s post-modern coup. This context exposes the true purpose of Asif’s interview with Newsweek, which is the regime’s latest high-profile international media appearance aimed at misleading the global public about recent events. They want the world to give them a free pass for defiling democracy, but many activists will still call them out.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Ukraine plays “Light Brigade” with British advice

By DAVID P. GOLDMAN | ASIA TIMES | JUNE 10, 2023

American and European military observers in Ukraine described the Ukraine Army’s efforts of the past two days as a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics. “If you want to conduct an offensive and you have a dozen brigades and a few dozen tanks, you concentrate them and try to break through. The Ukrainians have been running around in five different directions,” complained a senior European officer.

“We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with proper infantry support and then do what they can,” the officer added.

“They were trained by the British and they’re playing Light Brigade,” the officer added, referring to the 1854 disaster at the Battle of Balaclava when misreported orders sent British cavalry into massed cannon fire.

Ukraine’s tanks charged directly into minefields without deploying mine-clearing vehicles first, contributing to the loss of 38 tanks during the night of June 8, including numerous of the newly delivered Leopard II tanks.

“A couple of Ukrainians tried to pull off a Guderian,” another military source said, referring to German General Heinz Guderian’s breakthrough at Sedan during the 1940 Battle of France. “But Guderian had 3,000 tanks, and these idiots have just gambled away the 30 they have.”

“And without air superiority,” the source added, “it’s a suicide mission.”

Russia’s KA-50 and KA-52 attack helicopters each carry enough missiles to kill 20 tanks, and can do so at a standoff distance of 10 kilometers. Ukrainian air defenses have been degraded by repeated attacks with cheap drones that force the Ukrainians to expend their limited inventory of S-300 and Patriot missiles. Of the 14 Leopard tanks Germany has provided to Ukraine, 3 have been destroyed, along with several of the Leopards provided by Poland.

The Ukrainian high command’s principle military advice has come from British officers embedded at headquarters in Kiev.

A Ukrainian concentration of forces remains possible as to date only three and possibly four Western-trained brigades have been used in Zaporoshye. That would require competent military decisions, not decisions motivated by political desperation.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | 4 Comments

Putin Chose The Perfect Time To Reveal Details About The Now-Defunct Draft Treaty With Ukraine

BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JUNE 18, 2023

President Putin surprised his guests from the African peace delegation on Saturday by revealing details about Russia’s now-defunct draft treaty with Ukraine. It would have re-enshrined neutrality in that country’s constitution and also limited its number of military forces. According to him, it had even been signed by the Ukrainian side, which then discarded it in response to pressure from the Anglo-American Axis (AAA) despite Russia pulling its troops back from Kiev as part of an agreed-upon goodwill gesture.

The special operation could have been over just a month after it started, thus meaning that this development marked the beginning of the NATO-Russian proxy war in hindsight seeing as how that bloc hadn’t yet gone all-out in supporting Ukraine until right after that happened. This suggests that while the AAA was indeed surprised by President Putin preemptively averting Kiev’s planned reconquest of Donbass, they eventually saw an opportunity to weaken their rival by perpetuating this conflict.

They seemingly calculated that it would quickly collapse due to combined proxy war and sanctions pressure, though that obviously didn’t happen. The following fifteen months ended up hurting the Global South a lot more than Russia as proven by the food and fuel crises that ravaged these developing countries as a result of the West’s unilateral restrictions on their target’s financial dealings. The so-called “grain deal” also failed to relieve their suffering since Kiev never shipped its supplies to those states.

It was in the context of those countries’ plight that some of their leaders decided to embark on a peace mission to the two direct combatants in this conflict. They reportedly sought to convince both sides to agree to a ceasefire and other de-escalation measures such as lifting some of the sanctions in order to restore their previously reliable grain imports from those two. President Putin was aware of why they visited him and thus took the chance to prove that Russia wasn’t responsible for their problems.

His country regards Africa as an emerging pole in the ongoing global systemic transition to multipolarity, hence the importance of comprehensively expanding their relations. To that end, the Russian leader must absolutely ensure that his counterparts and their people aren’t misled by the West’s propaganda blaming it for the food crisis, especially since the “grain deal” is unlikely to be renewed due to its terms never having been fulfilled and a renewed round of information warfare will predictably follow.

President Putin therefore chose the perfect time to reveal details about Russia’s now-defunct draft treaty with Ukraine in order to show them that it’s Kiev and its AAA patrons who are responsible for disrupting Africa’s previously reliable import of grain from Eastern Europe. The supplementary context of Kiev’s disastrous NATO–backed counteroffensive also enabled him to show average Westerners that this catastrophe was entirely avoidable had the AAA not meddled in the Russian-Ukrainian peace process.

About those talks, they might very well resume around wintertime after Kiev’s doomed counteroffensive finally comes to an end, during which time the African peace delegation might be requested by both sides to informally mediate. By informing them of the details contained in the signed agreement that was ultimately discarded by Ukraine under the AAA’s pressure, they’ll be able to pick up where those two left off and thus be able to more effectively facilitate their talks in that scenario.

For these reasons, it makes sense why President Putin waited until now to reveal details about this treaty. He wanted to reassure Russia’s African partners that it isn’t responsible for the food crisis ahead of the next foreseeable round of information warfare claiming otherwise, which will likely commence once the “grain deal” expires next month in the days leading up to the second Russia-Africa Summit. By sharing proof of this with their peace delegation, President Putin ensured that they won’t be misled.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

Sugar-coating the objectivity of medical research

By Emanuel E. Garcia, MD | Intrepid Report | September 16, 2016

Although we have all come to expect that the science of medicine might occasionally reach a blind alley or take a wrong turn on the road to truth, we trust in the integrity of the medical establishment to make the appropriate corrections and proceed on investigative and therapeutic journeys determined primarily by objective scientific evidence.

That was certainly the belief I held as a medical student in the ‘80s and throughout my career as a physician, despite the free lunches sponsored by cheerful and ebullient pharmaceutical representatives who pitched the drug du jour. We students and interns and residents and attendings may have eaten their pizza and hoagies, but we were secure that our clinical judgments would remain unbiased when it came to treating our patients.

But then again, as we all know, there really is no free lunch—or free pens or flashlights or god knows what else you may find at most medical conventions where drug companies pitch tent. Eventually something starts eating away at your firm and unbiased principles and the drug samples become a bit too easy to hand out gratis, and the prescribing hand a bit too familiar with the proprietary rather than generic names. This is why from the outset of my career I refused to see drug reps: I knew enough about myself to know that influences like these can’t be easily rebuffed.

However, I hardly imagined that vested pecuniary interests could ever have affected so many millions of patients by misdirecting the management of the coronary heart disease (CHD) over the past six decades. Believe it or not, such appears to be the case, as the recent publication in JAMA on the sugar industry shows. This fascinating and critical article demonstrates convincingly that the industry not only attempted but actually succeeded in shifting the medical approach to CHD away from sugar to fats.

In 1972, John Yudkin published Pure, White and Deadly, arguing that sugar was the real culprit in the obesity epidemic and the major factor in associated coronary disease. His findings were marginalised, thanks in large part to the sugar lobby. Instead, the position advocated by physiologist Ancel Keys, which advocated the role of fats and dietary cholesterol won the day and became the mainstay for treatment strategies—not because of intrinsic scientific merit, however.

The Sugar Research Foundation, today known as the Sugar Association, went so far as to pay three Harvard researchers to conduct a literature review, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, which refuted the link between sugar consumption and CHD.

Thanks in part to the advocacy of physicians like Dr. Robert Lustig, whose 2009 YouTube lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” has been viewed by more than six and a half million people, and to researchers like him who have persevered in their pursuits to understand the physiology of CHD, the tide has begun to turn.

As someone once said somewhere, the truth will set us free; but he failed to mention that the road to the truth may be a long and hazardous one and that the power of special interests and money may create profound detours and, in some cases, lead us to points of no return. Medicine, like every other human activity, is not immune to the blandishments of lucre.

Fortunately Yudkin—and medical science—have been vindicated, as we are now finding out. Although I mourn the passage of so many decades spent in unnecessary error, and so many lives that might otherwise have benefited from an actually objective approach, I also take heart that these findings will keep us ever more vigilant about science, that ostensibly most ‘objective’ of human endeavours, and the non-scientific factors that may influence its course.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Mysterious Deletion of Medical Journals

Dr. Scott Jensen | June 14, 2023

It’s time to be on red alert. Substandard medical publications were used to push and promote narratives and squash other narratives. AND NOW those publications are being silently deleted.

Hundreds of medical journals are disappearing, and no one is talking about it! I’ve never seen this in my 40 years of practicing medicine.

June 18, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment