Toward a Second Cuban Missile Crisis?
Theodore Postol, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
Glenn Diesen | August 6, 2024
I had a very interesting discussion with Alexander Mercouris and Theodore Postol – a nuclear engineer and missile technology expert professor from MIT and former advisor to the Pentagon.
Professor Postol spoke about the new missiles that the US will deploy to Germany, which will be able to reach Moscow within 2-3 minutes and thus dramatically elevate the potential for a successful nuclear first-strike. Russia will have very little time to respond to a possible strike, which increases the risk of an accidental nuclear war or a NATO nuclear first-strike. Russia will have to respond by decentralising decision-making and granting more people the authority to launch a counter-strike against the US to reduce the threat of a decapitating strike against Russia’s decision-making headquarters, and Russia will be under pressure to launch a pre-emptive strike on the US/NATO if it suspects a first-strike in coming. This has happened before when NATO’s Able Archer exercise in 1983 almost triggered a Soviet nuclear attack as Moscow thought the NATO military exercise was a cover for a first-strike.
As the world was almost consumed by a nuclear holocaust, both Washington and Moscow recognised the need to extend the warning period for a possible nuclear first-strike. The result was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987 to remove an entire class of missiles from Europe (500-5,500km range). In 2019, the US unilaterally withdrew from the INF Treaty, and new missiles will now be deployed to Germany which will give the US the possibility to strike Moscow with almost no warning. The US and Germany are thus setting the stage for something comparable to another Cuban Missile Crisis. The decision has no clear purpose in terms of improving security, it does not respond to any changes in the Russian nuclear posture, and the obedient media has offered no critical reporting.
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The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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