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EU gears up to punish Slovakia – Bloomberg

RT | September 9, 2024

The EU is reportedly moving forward with its threat to withhold funds from Slovakia in retaliation over Bratislava’s removal of a special graft prosecutor in a recent round of criminal code reforms. Prime Minister Robert Fico has accused Brussels of political bias.

Sources cited by Bloomberg on Sunday said the European Commission is considering several options to penalize Bratislava financially. One proposal would involve a so-called conditionality mechanism, allowing the freezing of some the €12.8 billion ($14.2 bn) allocated to Slovakia under the EU’s cohesion program. Brussels may also “claw back” all or part of the €2.7 billion ($3 bn) in Covid-19 grants Bratislava has received from the bloc.

Slovakia’s special prosecution unit, the USP, was created in 2004 and shut down in March of this year. Its last leader, Daniel Lipsic, also served as the justice minister in the government that ousted Fico’s first cabinet from power in 2010. During his successful run to become prime minister for a third time in 2023, Fico accused the USP of targeting his nationalist Smer-SD party with politically motivated probes.

”This evil in the form of Lipsic must end, and we are doing that forcefully and thoroughly,” Fico told journalists in December 2023, after winning the election.

Opposition party Progressive Slovakia accused the premier of seeking “impunity and revenge” with a “blitzkrieg against the rule of law”.

The European Commission warned Bratislava in February that its reform would have “a direct and significant negative impact on EU law and the Union’s financial interests,” according to a letter to Slovak Justice Minister Boris Susko, quoted by the media.

Brussels previously used the conditionality mechanism to punish Hungary for perceived backsliding on the rule of law. Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Fico have both accused Brussels of infringing on the sovereignty of member states and mishandling the Ukraine crisis.

After the Slovakian anti-graft body was scrapped, EU sources indicated that the bloc would not be hasty in punishing Bratislava.

”Currently, we don’t see Slovakia as a major problem in foreign affairs, as regards handling Ukraine for example,” an EU diplomat told Reuters at the time. Another official said Hungary’s alienation served as an example for the bloc.

The wider Slovakian reform was suspended for months, while the Constitutional Court deliberated on the issue. After it approved most of the changes in early June, parliament tweaked the legislation in what Susko called an attempt to mitigate the risk of retaliation by the EU.

September 9, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

16 martyrs of SAA & Syrian citizens in Israeli attack on Hama

Al Mayadeen | September 9, 2024

Syria’s news agency SANA announced earlier today that the death toll from last night’s Israeli occupation’s aggression on Masyaf, located in the countryside of the province of Hama, has reached 16 with 43 others injured, and some in critical condition.

According to Al Mayadeen’s sources, among the martyrs were five members of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) with the other 11 martyrs being all civilians. The sources also confirmed that no Iranian consultants or Hezbollah members were martyred in the attack.

Moreover, Al Mayadeen’s sources denied Israeli allegations that the occupation targeted a chemical weapons research facility, stressing that the target was a military facility belonging to the SAA. Further denying Israeli occupation claims, the sources confirmed that the SAA does not use chemical weapons because they are internationally banned, not to mention that they are unsuitable for modern warfare.

In turn, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani condemned the Israeli occupation’s breach of Syrian sovereignty stressing it constitutes a “continuation of the Zionist entity’s aggression against Gaza, Lebanon and Syria” as well as “a continuation of its insane policies to expand war in the region.”

Additionally, Kanaani emphasized, “We deny the reports in Israeli media about targeting Iranian sites in Syria.”

‘Israel’ bombs Syria with a series of airstrikes

The Israeli occupation launched at least 15 airstrikes across several cities in Syria overnight, including Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Tartus.

Syria’s SANA news agency reported at least 15 injuries and four martyrs due to the Israeli aggression that has targeted the vicinity of Masyaf in the Hama countryside.

The Israeli aggression also caused major damage on the Masyaf-Wadi al-Oyoun route, which in turn led to a raging fire. SANA reports that firefighting teams are working to contain it.

Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in Syria had also reported the sound of six explosions in the vicinity of Masyaf and the western Hama countryside, noting that Syrian Air Defenses intercepted and confronted Israeli missiles launched towards Tartus and the western Hama countryside.

The missiles were reportedly launched from across the Lebanese south toward eastern and northern Syria.

Two weeks ago, seven civilians were injured as a result of Israeli aggression that targeted several sites in the central region. The Syrian air defenses intercepted the aggression’s missiles and shot some of them down.

September 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Can Israel survive its new war in the West Bank?

By Eva Bartlett | RT | September 8, 2024

Having failed to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, Israel on August 28 began a war on the West Bank, dubbed ‘Operation Summer Camps’.

This Israeli assault on West Bank areas is the largest since 2002, with thousands of Israeli soldiers, supported by helicopters and drones, invading northern West Bank cities, particularly targeting the refugee camps of Jenin, Tubas, and Tulkarem.

The same day, the non-profit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported: “Immediately after entering the West Bank, the Israeli army began besieging hospitals, ambulances, and emergency centres, replicating its horrifying and systematic policy of breaching and taking control of health institutions that it has employed in the Gaza Strip.

Simultaneously with the storming of these areas, raid and arrest campaigns were carried out in most cities in the West Bank amid gunfire that injured many Palestinians. Since last October, 660 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed as a result of the Israeli military’s systematic, large-scale attacks.

Journalist Mariam Barghouti on August 31 wrote, “I was in Jenin and I cannot explain how ruthless the Israeli military is being. The city is like a ghost town and the refugee camp is a collective torture chamber. Israeli practices in Jenin include: mass arrests including minors, blowing up homes of civilians, denying entry of food, water, medics. The children that managed to escape are traumatized, they’re nothing but tears and shock. Everyone is unable to fully recognize this unprecedented violence and at such an intensity. Jenin is another Gaza in terms of violence being inflicted.”

According to the UN’s OCHA, between 27 August and 2 September, Israeli forces killed 30 Palestinians in the West Bank, including seven children, the highest weekly death toll since November 2023 (by September 6, the number had increased to 39 Palestinians killed, including eight children, and approximately 145 injured).

Those murdered, OCHA notes, include an 82-year-old Palestinian man, shot and killed while attempting to buy bread. Israeli forces also reportedly shot and killed two Palestinian boys, aged 13 and 16, “being chased by Israeli forces while attempting to distribute bread to besieged families near the eastern neighbourhood of Jenin city.” Israeli soldiers also abducted and tortured to death a 50-year-old civilian.

Further, OCHA reports that between October 7, 2023 and September 2 this year, “652 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

The brutality is not only from the Israeli military but also the illegal Jewish colonists who are given carte blanche to attack and kill, Palestinians, as they’ve done for decades, and as I’ve written about before.

According to OCHA, in the same timeframe there were “about 1,300 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, of which over 120 led to Palestinian fatalities and injuries.”

On top of all of this Israeli destruction and carnage are the continued abductions of Palestinian civilians (young and elderly). It has been widely reported from inside Israel, through leaked footage and in countless testimonies from Palestinian hostages, that Israel routinely tortures Palestinians via beatings, electric shocks to genitals, stress positions, psychological torture, near starvation, and also rape to the point of causing serious internal damage.

Palestine Chronicle reported on September 3, citing the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), that “at least 53 Palestinian prisoners died in Israeli custody” between October 7, 2023, and July 31, 2024.

The article refers to a letter this June from Ronen Bar, head of the Israeli security agency, Shin Bet, to Benjamin Netanyahu this June, putting the number of detainees at 21,000. This is a shocking 11,000 higher than was known in April when I last wrote about the nearly 10,000 Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons.

Israel wants West Bank wiped off the map

On the morning Israel started its current mini-Gaza bombardment and displacement campaign, Foreign Minister Israel Katz boasted of the destruction and killing to come, saying, “We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and whatever steps are required. This is a war for everything and we must win it.”

Then, there was Prime Minister Netanyahu during a press conference pointing to his map with the West Bank erased.

In its report, the human rights organization Euromed cites Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth writing that, “an organised evacuation of the Palestinian civilian population will be carried out according to the… combat centres.”

The group notes, “This is a clear indication of Israel’s intention to commit genocide against Palestinians in the West Bank, just as it has done against those in the Gaza Strip.”

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese on September 2 stated, “There is mounting evidence that no Palestinian is safe under Israel’s unfettered control… The long-standing impunity granted to Israel is enabling the de-Palestinisation of the occupied territory, leaving Palestinians at the mercy of the forces pursuing their elimination as a national group.”

However, Palestinian resistance groups are putting up a fight. On X, accounts closely following events claim as of September 1, the Jenin Brigade, “Conducted over 15 IED operations, killing & wounding IOF [Israeli occupation forces], significantly damaging their vehicles,“ while the Tulkam Brigade “Conducted 6 IED operations, killing & wounding IOF.”

Al Mayadeen some days later reported similar events, noting, “Palestinian Resistance confronts IOF in Jenin, Tulkarm for 8th day The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – Jenin confirmed that its resistance fighters engaged in confrontations with Israeli forces in the al-Hadaf neighborhood using machine guns and IEDs.”

It’s worth remembering the words of Retired Israeli General Yitzhak Brick just a couple of weeks ago, when he stated, ”Israel is sinking deeper into the Gazan mud, losing more and more soldiers as they get killed or wounded, without any chance of achieving the war’s main goal: bringing down Hamas. The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss. If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.”

After over ten months of Israel killing and starving the Palestinians of Gaza, it’s safe to say that if the general’s prediction comes true, that would be some slight justice for the Palestinian suffering both since October 7 and before.

EuroMed, in its above-mentioned report, calls on all nations to, “impose strong sanctions on Israel and halt all forms of military, political, and financial assistance. This includes immediately cutting off all arms transfers to Israel, including export permits and military aid; otherwise, these nations will be complicit in and partners in the Israeli crimes committed in the Gaza Strip, including the crime of genocide.”

Given that the so-called international community has colossally failed Palestinians in allowing Israel to slaughter, starve and torture them, halting arms supplies to Israel and imposing sanctions is the least countries could do.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

September 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | 1 Comment

5 Scientific Findings Explain Link Between Vaccines and Autism — Why Do Health Agencies Ignore Them?

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 4, 2024

Five major scientific findings, taken together, explain how vaccines trigger autism, author J.B. Handley wrote on his Substack. The cause is rooted in the body’s response to the aluminum adjuvant used in six vaccines on the childhood immunization schedule.

Federal public health agencies continue to ignore these scientific advances — made largely by prominent scientists working outside of the U.S. in the last decade — despite the scientists’ appeals to agencies to investigate the link and to stop telling the American public the aluminum in vaccines is safe.

The trigger for autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, according to Handley, is immune system activation that can alter the developing brain when the activation occurs either in a pregnant mother or a young child.

This happens because the neurotoxic aluminum in vaccines travels easily to the brain. There, it can cause inflammation in vulnerable people by triggering the production of a key cytokine — interleukin 6 or IL-6 — a protein that affects the immune system. IL-6 has been linked to autism.

Handley, author of the best-selling book, “How to End the Autism Epidemic,” co-founder of the Age of Autism website and father of a son with autism, draws heavily on the Vaccine Papers website, which collects and analyzes relevant science, to outline the key scientific findings that make this case.

This important research largely happens outside of the U.S. because autism research that is “even remotely controversial” is impossible to get funded or approved, he wrote.

The research Handley cites began to emerge in 2004, and much of it came out after 2009 — after the Vaccine Court dismissed the autism-vaccine hypothesis and denied compensation for their vaccine injuries to thousands of families.

Quoting Vaccine Papers, Handley wrote that vaccines must be subjected to an objective risk-benefit analysis and should be considered as a medical treatment only if they do more good than harm:

“The problem with vaccines is that risks have been underestimated, and the benefits overestimated. In particular, the risk of brain injury from vaccines is much higher than commonly believed.

“Brain injury can be devastating to the life of a child, and the child’s family. The personal and financial costs of vaccine injury are often enormous. Therefore, even a small risk of brain injury must be considered seriously. And the science strongly suggests that the risk is not small.”

Aluminum adjuvant: the data missing from an ‘airtight explanation’ of vaccine-induced autism

Handley began the story with the discovery that he said ties together the research on vaccines and autism: a 2018 paper by Christopher Exley, Ph.D., and colleagues showing “shockingly high” levels of aluminum in 10 autism brain specimens.

According to Exley, the location of the aluminum suggested it was entering the brain through pro-inflammatory cells that had become loaded with the neurotoxin. Exley’s finding is similar to previous research showing what happens with monocytes — a type of white blood cell — at vaccine injection sites.

This is significant, Handley wrote, because it would become clear that macrophages (a type of monocyte) were moving aluminum from the injection site to the brain.

Exley’s study “provided the only data missing from an airtight explanation” of what happened to the countless families whose children developed autism following vaccination, according to Handley.

Aluminum adjuvant is an additive that “serves to wake up” the immune system so it recognizes the antigen for whatever the vaccine is meant to protect against, he explained.

The amount of aluminum children are exposed to has skyrocketed since the 1990s, according to a 2016 study — because vaccination rates for all children rose substantially and more vaccines were added to the childhood schedule.

“A child in the mid-1980s would have received 1,250 micrograms of aluminum from their vaccines by their 18-month birthday if they were fully vaccinated,” he wrote. “Today, that number is 4,925 micrograms, a near-quadrupling of total aluminum.”

Yet, aluminum has never been tested for safety in vaccines for babies. It is a demonstrated neurotoxin that carries a risk for autoimmunity, according to Canadian scientists Chris Shaw, Ph.D., and Lucija Tomljenovic, Ph.D., Canadian scientists.

Aluminum is the most common vaccine adjuvant, even though the mechanisms through which it works as an adjuvant remain unknown.

Despite the lack of data on its toxicology, “the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted,” Shaw and Tomljenovic wrote.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) have admitted they have no data to show repeated injections with an aluminum adjuvant is safe, Handley wrote.

Now a growing volume of scientific literature shows that those repeated injections are unsafe. The literature shows that “five clear, replicable, and related discoveries explaining how autism is triggered have formed an undeniably clear picture of autism’s causation,” Handley wrote.

Five key discoveries: 

1. There is a permanent immune system activation in the brains of people with autism.

Research by the late Caltech scientist Dr. Paul Patterson, author of “Pregnancy, Immunity, Schizophrenia, and Autism” demonstrated that the immune system interacts with the brain in ways that can affect neurodevelopment.

Patterson and colleagues found that if a pregnant mother’s immune system is subject to high activation — for example, from severe viral or bacterial infection during pregnancy — it can affect her child’s neurodevelopment, leading to neurological problems later.

Patterson noted that the brains of people with autism show that such immune system activation occurred, citing doctors at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who found “neural inflammation” in a postmortem examination of the brains of patients with autism. That finding has since been replicated several times, Handly wrote, including by researchers in Japan.

Patterson and his colleagues hypothesized that chronic neural inflammation resulted from cytokines, produced by white blood cells at higher rates when an infection is present, that interact with the fetal brain. Specifically, one cytokine, IL-6, has a particularly powerful effect, they argued.

They triggered this neural inflammation in an experiment that involved injecting mice with IL-6 and saw changes in the neurology of the mice’s offspring. They later also linked maternal immune activation specifically to autism symptoms in mice and in monkeys. Other scientists replicated their studies.

In 2006, Patterson connected maternal vaccination to possible immune activation. He said current research begged the question, “Should we really be promoting universal maternal vaccination?”

2. Aluminum adjuvant is highly neurotoxic and causes immune activation. 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and CDC base their recommendations for aluminum use in vaccines on a 2011 study that concluded aluminum accumulates in the skeletal system rather than soft tissue, and is safe.

However, Handley wrote that the “guess work” on aluminum is based on studies of dissolved aluminum — not of the aluminum hydroxide used in vaccines.

More recent research has shown aluminum hydroxide is a nanoparticle that is absorbed by the body’s macrophage, which can easily transport it to the brain.

A 2007 paper by Shaw demonstrated a link between aluminum adjuvant and motor neuron death. Shaw and colleagues published several papers showing that aluminum hydroxide is neurotoxic, particularly in pediatric populations.

They called for an “urgent” reevaluation of the safety profile of vaccines containing aluminum adjuvant.

Several studies in France also showed that the aluminum adjuvant injected into the body often ends up in the brain, causing neurotoxicity.

A 2017 French study published in Toxicology found the adjuvant had “long-lasting biopersistence” — meaning the body couldn’t get rid of it — and was linked to several illnesses including “chronic fatigue syndrome, cognitive dysfunction, myalgia, dysautonomia and autoimmune/inflammatory features.”

The authors of the French study also found that low, consistent doses were more neurotoxic than a single high dose and raised concerns that the “massive development of vaccine-based strategies worldwide” requires a safety reevaluation of the adjuvant.

3. The immune activation that triggers autism can happen in utero or after a child is born, while its brain is still developing. 

Researchers from the Middle East and Europe who used aluminum to induce Alzheimer’s in live rats showed that aluminum caused a four-fold increase in IL-6, and also increased other cytokines.

While researchers may accept that there is disorganization in the brains of people with autism, there is disagreement about whether that disorganization happens in utero or after birth.

Many who refuse the autism-vaccine hypothesis, like Dr. Peter Hotez, deny that postnatal brain reorganization is possible.

However, evidence for post-natal triggers of autism is strong, Handley wrote. He quoted Vaccine Papers to explain that every immune activation event in a susceptible child renders the immune system more sensitive and reactive to immune stimuli. This can happen both in utero and postnatally while a child’s brain is in key developmental stages.

Studies have shown that mice injected with IL-6 after birth later display impaired cognitive abilities. And case studies among children have shown autism onset following infection and inflammation of the brain.

4. Hepatitis B vaccine-induced IL-6 in postnatal rats.

Researchers in China tested the effects of vaccine-induced immune activation on brain development in rats. The hepatitis B vaccine, which had an aluminum adjuvant, increased IL-6 in the hippocampus. Significantly, the effects didn’t appear until the rats were 8 weeks old — when rats are almost fully adults. Most vaccine safety studies look at shorter-term outcomes.

According to Handley that could help explain the appearance of mental illness much later in life among humans, and support the hypothesis that vaccines are contributing to the rise in mental illness in the U.S. over the last 25 years.

“This is biological proof of the link between a vaccine  —  given to a post-natal animal  —  inducing an immune activation event, including the cytokine marker for autism, IL-6. A scientific first,” Handley wrote.

5. Several analyses found high levels of aluminum in the brains of people with autism. 

As previously discussed, studies like Exley’s later revealed very high levels of aluminum in brain samples from people with autism. This finding was key to understanding a key cause of inflammation in the brains of people with autism, Handley wrote.

The most current and comprehensive explanation of the role of aluminum-containing vaccines, inflammation and the immune system in autism can be found in a 2022 paper in the journal Toxics.

The study, by French researchers, showed the pathways through which a susceptible child might acquire autism when exposed to aluminum adjuvants.

What about the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine? 

According to Handley, aluminum adjuvants may also induce other autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, including gastrointestinal issues experienced by many children with autism.

Also, many families of children with autism saw their children regress after the MMR vaccine, which doesn’t contain an aluminum adjuvant.

More research is needed to fully explain why that could happen, Handley wrote. But research indicates that the effects of the MMR may be related to the fact that it is the first live vaccine children receive, around age 12-18 months, after they have had many vaccines that do contain aluminum adjuvants.

An “immune system bathed in aluminum adjuvant and possibly already simmering with activation events,” might be pushed over the edge by encountering the live virus. It may even trigger aluminum in the body to move into the brain, he wrote.

Handley lamented that public health agencies continue to refuse to study the issue.

“What’s been true throughout the autism epidemic remains true today: an overwhelming (tens of thousands) number of parental reports of regression of their children into autism after vaccination.”

Those parents observed the changes in their children but didn’t have a scientific explanation for what was happening, Handley wrote.

Enough scientific evidence has now been produced to put together a more rigorous theory for how vaccines, and the aluminum adjuvants in them, trigger autism and other illnesses.

“It’s time for the CDC, FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], Autism Speaks, and the American Academy of Pediatrics to face the biological evidence staring us all in the face!” he wrote.

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.

September 8, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

Ketamine Poses Serious Risks for Pregnant Women, But Providers Often Fail to Warn Them

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 5, 2024

Clinics that administer ketamine for mental health issues often fail to adequately warn patients of the serious risk ketamine poses for pregnant women, according to a new study from the University of Michigan.

It has long been known that ketamine — which can be addictive — “readily and rapidly” crosses the placental barrier.

Research on animals has shown serious neurotoxic effects in offspring exposed to ketamine in utero. These effects include neuronal cell death, abnormal brain development and serious behavioral, cognitive and affective abnormalities that mirror schizophrenia, among other issues.

The authors of the study said ketamine should not be used during pregnancy. They recommend pregnancy testing before treatment and the use of contraception during treatment, and said treatment should end if a woman becomes pregnant.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports that nearly half of the pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned. Many people who are treated with ketamine for psychiatric illness are women who may become pregnant.

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, found that ketamine prescribers aren’t paying enough attention to this risk. The authors concluded that more needs to be done to ensure that patients taking ketamine are not pregnant and won’t become pregnant during their treatment.

The researchers surveyed ketamine clinics across the country and analyzed informed consent documents found online.

They also examined the medical records of patients from a University of Michigan medical clinic to determine whether women there who were given ketamine were taking pregnancy tests and using contraception during their treatment.

The study authors found a wide variation in policies, practices and warnings about ketamine and pregnancy among the 119 clinics that responded to their survey. Collectively, the clinics treat more than 7,000 patients per month, about a third of whom are women of childbearing age.

Lead author Dr. Rachel Pacilio told Science Daily :

“These data suggest that a large population of patients could be pregnant, or could become pregnant, while receiving ketamine treatment via multiple routes of administration. This risk increases with the duration of therapy which can last weeks for the initial course and a year or more for maintenance. …

“Many patients do not know that they’re pregnant in the first weeks, and animal studies of ketamine are very concerning for potential harm to the fetus during this time.”

Ketamine use on the rise

In recent years, ketamine has gained traction as a promising alternative therapy for treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions that haven’t responded to other treatments.

The drug is “generally considered safe,” according to the paper, but there are “significant gaps in knowledge” about its effects in “special patient populations,” such as pregnant women.

But the therapy is very new, as is the scientific data supporting its safety and efficacy.

The 119 responding clinics in the study comprise a small percentage of the 500-700 ketamine clinics KFF Health News reported have recently “cropped up” across the U.S. The industry, valued at $3.1 billion in 2022, is projected to more than double to $6.9 billion by 2030.

Ketamine is a Schedule III drug, making it about as easy to access as Tylenol with codeine.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug for general anesthesia during surgery and as a sedative in some settings.

Only one formulation — the intranasal esketamine, sold under the brand name Spravato — is approved for treatment-resistant depression. However generic forms of the drug are commonly used off-label to treat psychiatric disorders.

The common off-label use means there aren’t standard protocols for how to safely administer the drug. Evidence-based guidelines are limited and treatment can vary significantly in terms of the dose, frequency, method of administration and duration of treatment, according to the paper.

Clinics that offer intravenous ketamine or the FDA-approved nasal version often require in-person monitoring post-administration to monitor for safety and prevent the patient from driving after administration.

However, other clinics prescribe sublingual ketamine for at-home use and safety protocols are unknown. Online services like Mindbloom and Nue Life also offer the drug at home, without an in-person visit to a prescriber, often in the form of lozenges shipped from compounding pharmacies, MedPage Today reported. These types of prescribers were not included in the study.

The FDA’s risk mitigation program, meant to ensure that benefits outweigh risks for drugs with serious safety concerns, has no provisions for the use of Spravato during pregnancy, according to Pacilio.

The agency last year issued a warning about the dangers of compounded ketamine, but said nothing about pregnancy.

Prescribing information for the approved form of the drug indicates that prescribers should specifically advise patients about the potential risk of fetal harm resulting from in utero ketamine exposure. However, prescribers are not provided with information about how to effectively counsel women, the study found.

Recent controversy around the death of actor Matthew Perry has also revealed that the addictive potential of ketamine is unknown and more people are also abusing the drug as it becomes more widely available.

‘The field is really in need of standardization’

Over 75% of the clinics that responded to the survey, said they have a formal pregnancy screening process, but only about 20% required a pregnancy test.

However, less than 50% of the clinics warned patients to avoid pregnancy during treatment or explained the specific risks related to pregnancy exposure to patients. Informed consent documents at those clinics had a pregnancy warning only about half the time.

In their examination of informed consent documents on the websites of 70 other ketamine clinics, the researchers found that 39% did not include language about pregnancy in their documents, and those that did were generally vague.

Regarding contraception counseling, only 26% of responding clinics said they discuss the need for contraception and less than 15% of clinics recommend contraception during treatment.

These findings were particularly concerning, according to the researchers, because most clinics prescribed long-term courses of ketamine treatment, ranging from six months to more than a year.

Their review of patient records from 24 women treated with ketamine at the University of Michigan clinic showed that all of them had taken a pregnancy test before treatment, but only half had documentation of contraception in their medical records.

The study concluded that as ketamine treatment becomes more widely available and prescribed, there is a growing need to inform women about the serious risks during pregnancy.

“The variability in practice that we see among clinics in the community in this study is stark,” said Pacilio.

“The field is really in need of standardization around reproductive counseling, pregnancy testing and the recommendation for contraception during ketamine treatment.”

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.

September 8, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

‘Israel’ knows nothing about Hamas’ tunnels: Released captive

Al Mayadeen | September 8, 2024

Released Israeli captive Adina Moshe, 72, who was held by Palestinian Resistance factions in Gaza, revealed that the Israeli military has no real knowledge of the Resistance’s tunnel infrastructure.

During an interview for Israeli broadcaster Channel 12, Moshe said that the Israeli Shin Bet security service asked her to draw a map of the tunnels after she was released in a prisoner exchange deal.

“The Shin Bet asked me to draw a map of the tunnels in Gaza because they know nothing about them,” Moshe told an interviewer.

The security agency had dispatched an engineer to speak to Moshe at an earlier time, where she told him that the tunnels in the Gaza Strip are a “vast underground maze stretching across the entire area.” She also told the engineer that military operations alone will not help retrieve the remaining captives.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is lying, and neither he nor the military know anything about Hamas’ tunnels in Gaza,” the released captive added.

According to Channel 12, when Moshe was asked to draw up a sketch of the tunnels, she responded by saying that she was not an artist.

She was also asked to describe the tunnels, their pathways, their locations, and the communication devices and wiring installed in them.

Hamas’ tunnel city, ‘Israel’s’ collapse

In an article titled “It is not Hamas that is collapsing, but Israel,” published in Haaretz, retired Brigadier General Yitzhak Brik offered a critical assessment of the ongoing battles in the Gaza Strip. He underscored the significant and escalating losses “Israel” is facing, arguing that the war is exerting a far heavier toll on “Israel” itself than on Hamas.

He pointed out the need to concentrate occupation forces in other sectors, namely in the north and the West Bank due to the ongoing escalations. This would necessitate occupation forces to withdraw from Gaza  because there are “not enough forces to fight on several fronts at the same time.”

“In other words, the day will come when the IDF will no longer be able to remain in the Gaza Strip because Hamas will be in full control of it – both in the underground tunnel city that stretches hundreds of kilometers and above ground,” Brik explained.

Throughout the period of the war on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal of uprooting the Palestinian Resistance from the Gaza Strip has proven elusive. A substantial factor as to why the Resistance has been able to command and control operations, even in the areas most hard-hit by the Israeli aggression, has been the exceptional use of underground tunnels by Palestinian Resistance fighters and commanders.

Despite the launching of hundreds of bunker-buster bombs, flooding tunnel networks with seawater, and other methods, the Israeli regime has found little to no success in deactivating the strategic infrastructure.

September 8, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , , | 5 Comments

Ukraine Support Without Peace Strategy

DWN Interview with Harald Kujat

Glenn’s Substack | September 8, 2024

Interview by Moritz Enders in Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DNW) – translated by Glenn Diesen

Harald Kujat (born 1942), retired Air Force General, was the highest-ranking German soldier as Inspector General of the German Armed Forces from 2000 to 2002. From 2002 to 2005 he was Chairman of the NATO Russia Council and the NATO-Ukraine Commission of the Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking NATO General as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

Does the Ukraine conflict mark another stage in the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world order? According to Harald Kujat, the former Inspector General of the German Bundeswehr, neither Russia nor Ukraine and their partners and supporters in the West seem to be able to win it. And at the same time, the next source of conflict is emerging: a conflict between the USA and China.

DWN: Can Ukraine still win the war or is it already de facto lost?

Harald Kujat: Neither Ukraine nor Russia can win the war, because neither will achieve the political goals for which they are waging this war. Ukraine wants to restore the country’s territorial integrity within the 1991 borders and become a member of NATO. But despite continued support from the West, recapturing the territories annexed or occupied by Russia on its own is a legitimate but unrealistic option given the military balance of power and the military situation that has developed during the war. It was declared at the NATO summit in early July that Ukraine’s path to NATO was irreversible. However, it was also emphasized that NATO would be able to issue an invitation if all allies agreed and all conditions were met. Not all member states, including the USA, are willing to do so. President Biden emphasized this again explicitly in an interview in early June.

For Russia, the NATO membership of Sweden and Finland is already a serious setback. It is not yet clear whether it will be possible to establish a buffer zone between Russia and NATO, a long-standing goal of Russia, albeit now in the form of a cordon sanitaire in western Ukraine. One conceivable option would be to admit western Ukraine into NATO if the areas annexed by Russia cannot be reintegrated. However, I am certain that Russia will only agree to a peace settlement if Ukraine does not become a member of NATO, because that is a core demand of Russia.

The United States will also not achieve its goal of weakening Russia politically, militarily and economically. Because of the close ties between Russia and China, this would also have an impact on China, the United States’ biggest geopolitical challenger. It has not been possible to force Russia to stop the attack through a wide range of sanctions. The economic consequences are borne primarily by the European states, while Russia’s economy is stable and domestic production is increasing there. Russia’s geopolitical influence has even grown due to the accession of important states to the BRICS organization and in relation to the global south. And the Russian armed forces are stronger than before the war.

However, two losers in this war are already clear today: the Ukrainian people and the European Union, which has fallen far behind in the power arithmetic of the major powers both politically and economically.

DWN: But could the Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk area, i.e. on Russian soil, which has been going on for more than two weeks, not influence the outcome of the war?

Harald Kujat: The Ukrainian armed forces have undoubtedly pulled off a coup with this advance. They discovered a weak point with the Russians and seized the opportunity that presented itself with determination and considerable success. There are, however, some notable aspects in connection with this operation.

Although Russian intelligence undoubtedly recognized that Ukraine was bringing together elements from several brigades with reconnaissance equipment, electronic warfare and army air defense to form a combat group, they evidently did not anticipate the Ukrainian leadership’s intention to undertake a cross-border advance. The Russian border security consisted mainly of young, inexperienced conscripts equipped only with light weapons. The fact that there was no immediate reaction with combat troops and that the organization of the resistance took a long time is extremely embarrassing for the Russian military leadership.

The Ukrainians’ conduct of the operation shows that they had an astonishingly good picture of the situation regarding the Russian forces. They managed to bring in additional forces relatively quickly to reinforce the initially small combat unit. They were also able to expand their advance in a fan shape. However, they had to accept considerable losses in personnel and material as they gained ground quickly.

So far, the Russian armed forces have limited themselves to stabilizing the situation. They could now bring in superior forces and try to defeat the Ukrainian combat unit. Or they could systematically wear down the enemy forces that had penetrated and possible reinforcements, thereby forcing them to retreat. This is a strategy that the Russians have already used several times, including in Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

The Ukrainians have given various statements about the aim of this advance, which have changed over the course of the operation. It is very likely that the nuclear power plant near Kursk was to be captured. When this did not succeed immediately, it was said that Russia should be forced to withdraw combat troops from the Russian-Ukrainian front in order to strengthen resistance in the Kursk region. The expectation was that this would reduce the pressure on the Ukrainian defense. In addition, the Ukrainian conquests of Russian territory were to serve as a bargaining chip in possible peace negotiations and could be exchanged for Ukrainian territory. Finally, Russian prisoners could be exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war.

However, Russia did not withdraw heavy combat units from the Donbas front, but only a few, smaller infantry units. As a result, the Russian forces in the Donbas are able to continue to make territorial gains and even increase their pressure on the Ukrainian defense lines. They are getting closer and closer to Pokrovsk, a strategically important city with sixty thousand inhabitants that could be conquered in the near future. In addition, Russia has rejected negotiations as long as Russian territory is occupied by Ukraine. Thus, the results of the operation hoped for by Ukraine have not materialized

DWN: So what could Ukraine achieve with its advance? Is it the decisive blow that will change the course of the war in Ukraine’s favor or is it a gamble by the Ukrainian president that will ultimately cost Ukraine dearly?

Harald Kujat: There is a high probability that the latter is the case. Because Ukraine is taking a big risk in withdrawing combat troops from the defense front, which is under great pressure, holding the thinned-out Donbas front and at the same time defending its positions in the Kursk area. The already critical military situation will therefore end up being much more difficult than before the advance into Russian territory. The short-term political success could soon end in a strategic defeat.

DWN: Will the war now simply continue until the American presidential elections or is there a chance of ending it through negotiations?

Harald Kujat: I fear that with the Ukrainian advance into Russian territory, the chance for a ceasefire and peace negotiations opportunities for the foreseeable future have been wasted. Russia has refused to negotiate as long as Russian territory is occupied. Both sides are only willing to negotiate if the conditions you demand are met beforehand. In addition, Russia can wait for the results of the American presidential election. I consider the Chinese proposal from February last year to be the only realistic option to bring both sides back to the negotiating table: to continue the negotiations without preconditions, where they were broken off in mid-April 2022.

DWN: What effects would the election of Donald Trump as the next American president have?

Harald Kujat: With his peace initiative, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban tried to find a way out of the impasse into which the Europeans have manoeuvred themselves through their unrealistic and strategyless actions. He has discussed with Volodymyr Zelensky, Putin and Xi Jinping the possibilities of ending the war with a ceasefire and a negotiated peace. Orban has also spoken with Donald Trump about his attitude. While President Biden has always stressed that only the Ukrainian government decides whether, when and under what conditions it negotiates, Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to end the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible. After the conversation with Trump, Orban wrote: “We have talked about ways to make peace. The good news of the day: He will solve it.” Trump confirmed this on his internet platform: “Thank you, Viktor. There must be peace, and as soon as possible.” The election has not yet been decided, but it would make sense for not only the two warring parties, but also the European states supporting Ukraine to prepare for this eventuality.

DWN: The German government has been criticized for its decision not to provide any new support for Ukraine beyond the measures already agreed. What impact will this decision have on the course of the war?

Harald Kujat: The German government has budgeted four billion euros for support for Ukraine in 2025. The German government also points out that the G7 states intend to grant Ukraine a loan of 50 billion euros, the interest on which will be paid from the proceeds of the frozen Russian state assets. And the NATO member states have also decided to provide 40 billion euros for support for Ukraine in 2025.

However, Ukraine’s financial needs are very high because not only the material expenses for waging war but also the state budget must be financed by around 50 percent of foreign donations.

Whether the planned financial support covers the necessary needs for the continuation of the war depends crucially on whether and to what extent the United States continues to support Ukraine after the presidential election on November 5. If the aid is not continued or not continued to the required extent, the European states supporting Ukraine could very quickly be faced with the decision of whether they are willing and able to compensate for the United States’ failure.

It is noteworthy, by the way, that in Germany the continuation and the amount of aid to Ukraine is being discussed, but the question of which strategy is being pursued with it plays no role. Supporting Ukraine in defending its independence and territorial integrity is a legitimate but not sufficient measure to achieve lasting peace and a secure future for the country. The collective West has been supporting Ukraine in its defensive war for two and a half years financially, with extensive arms deliveries and with humanitarian aid. Despite this selfless commitment and the risk of the war spreading to the whole of Europe, the military situation in Ukraine has become increasingly critical. The fact that this negative development is continuing and has even intensified in recent months should be a reason to at least now consider whether it is sensible to continue to support Ukraine in order to achieve an unattainable goal and thereby bring it closer to military defeat. If, despite the Western expenditure, the negative military development is expected to continue and even intensify, alternatives must be sought that will end the suffering of the Ukrainian population and the destruction of the country. Because the alternative to a timely negotiated peace would be a military defeat for Ukraine.

This is also apparently the view of Indian Prime Minister Narandra Modi, who declared in Warsaw before his visit to Kiev: “India firmly believes that no problem can be solved on a battlefield. We support dialogue and diplomacy in order to restore peace and stability as quickly as possible. To this end, India is prepared to make every possible contribution together with its friendly countries.”

Those who lack this insight should think of the UN resolutions of March 2, 2022 and February 23, 2023, which call for a “peaceful settlement of the conflict through dialogue, negotiations, mediation and other peaceful means,” and also remember the peace mandate of the Basic Law.

DWN: In addition, the Federal Republic also seems to be becoming more confrontational towards China. What are the reasons for this?

Harald Kujat: The 21st century is characterized by China’s rise to world power and by the rivalry between the great powers, the United States, Russia and China. The Ukraine war has made it clear that China is the only competitor of the United States, and increasingly has the political, economic, military and technological potential to replace the United States as the world’s leading power.

In order to deal with China, the United States needs to work closely with its European NATO allies. The European NATO states, together with Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, are to form an Indo-Pacific network of partners and allies in order to be involved in the conflict with China with the same unity as in the conflict with Russia. In NATO’s strategic concept, China is therefore already described as a systemic challenge to Euro-Atlantic security.

At NATO’s anniversary summit in Washington in early July, the Alliance’s heads of state and government went a step further. They declared that China had become a decisive factor in Russia’s war against Ukraine through its borderless partnership and extensive support of the Russian defense industry. This had increased the threat that Russia poses to its neighbors and to Euro-Atlantic security. The Indo-Pacific is important for NATO because developments in this region have a direct impact on Euro-Atlantic security.

The North Atlantic Alliance is thus taking a confrontational course with China. We Europeans must decide whether we want to participate in a future military conflict between China and the United States or strengthen the ability to assert ourselves politically, economically and militarily and become an independent factor of international stability with the ability to prevent and contain conflicts.

Article in German language: Harald Kujat: Die Sackgasse für Ukraine und Russland (deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de)

September 8, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Russia offsets Ukraine’s Kursk offensive

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | September 8, 2024 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has outwitted the West by his  response to Ukraine’s Kursk offensive one month ago, which was widely celebrated as a tipping point in the conflict. The conflict is indeed at a tipping point today, but for an entirely different reason insofar as Russian forces seized the folly of Ukraine’s deployment of its crack brigades and prized Western armour to Kursk Region to reach an unassailable position in the most recent weeks in the battlefields, which opens the door for multiple options going forward. 

On the contrary, the West finds itself in a ‘Zugzwang’, a situation found in chess whereby it is under compulsion to move when it would rather prefer to pass. 

Putin’s address to the plenary of the 9th Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Thursday was eagerly awaited for what he had to say on the conflict in Ukraine. Several things stood out. 

Putin no longer characterised the Ukrainian interlocutors as the ‘Kiev regime.’ Instead, he used the expression ‘Kiev government’. And he summed up: “Are we ready to negotiate with them? We have never given up on this.” Was he being a taunting poser, as the Kremlin leader who has tangoed with four American presidents already, expects a fifth with an “infectious” laugh, which makes him “happy.” 

On a serious note, though, Putin took note that the “official authorities” in Kiev have regretted that if only they had followed up on the “signed official document” negotiated with Russian representatives at the Istanbul talks in March 2022 “rather than obeyed their masters from other countries, the war would have come to an end long ago.” 

Putin implied that Kiev must regain its sovereignty. The conciliatory words were measured, possibly with an eye on the unravelling of  political alignments within the ruling dispensation in Kiev. That is to say, Putin rejects Zelensky’s Ukrainian settlement process, but is willing to revive negotiations on terms first discussed at talks in Istanbul in March 2022 at the start of conflict.

Putin went on to discuss potential mediators. He singled out 3 BRICS member countries — China, Brazil, and India. Putin said Russia has “trusting relations” with these countries and he himself is in “constant contact” with his counterparts with a view “to help understand all the details of this complex process.” 

Evidently, Putin is distressed that he is “constantly” being told by them about the human rights situation due to the conflict, Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s national sovereignty and so on. He regretted that they overlook the genesis of the conflict — the 2014 US-backed coup d’etat in Ukraine which was resisted by native speakers of Russian language, and over suppression of Russian culture and Russian traditions.

Fundamentally, Putin stressed, the West hoped to “bring Russia to its knees, dismember it… (and) they would achieve their strategic goals, which they had been striving for, maybe for centuries or decades.” In the given situation, therefore, Russia’s strong economy and military potential are its “main guarantee of security”. [Emphasis added.] 

In such a scenario, what are the prospects going forward? Putin is sceptical about the West’s intentions. Yet, conceivably, he pampered the three mediator-countries who are also Russia’s key BRICS partners at the forthcoming Kazan summit next month (which is expected to focus on an alternative payment system for international trade.) 

Moscow is wary that the BRICS partners are beating their luminous wings in the void without comprehending that the conflict in Ukraine is a civilisational war that has been going on for centuries since the Slavic peoples began developing their own Orthodox churches through more than half of Christian history.  

Putin is a master tactician. Therefore, he will insist that Russia is open to dialogue with Ukraine — which is, of course, also a statement of fact — given the growing pressure on Russia from the Global South. But Putin does not harbour any hopes of Zelensky meeting the pre-requisites conducive to peace talks, which Putin had outlined at a meeting with the senior officials of Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14. If anything, new ground realities have since appeared. 

This becomes clear from a TV interview Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave in Vladivostok after Putin’s speech. Lavrov drew the bottom line: “Vladimir Zelensky is not ready for honest talks. The West will not let him near them. They have set the goal, if not to dismember the Russian Federation (even though this was stated as a goal), then to at least radically weaken it and to inflict a strategic defeat on us. The West will not allow him to make steps towards us. Zelensky is no longer able to understand what meets the interests of the Ukrainian people, since he has repeatedly betrayed them.”

Zelensky himself is zigzagging. He took a hard line in remarks at the meeting of the so-called Ramstein Format hosted by the US on Friday that brought together generals and defence ministers from 50 countries to coordinate on arms supplies for Kiev. Zelensky lamented that prohibitions on firing long-range, Western-provided missiles and rockets into Russia persisted. He’s now taking his case to President Biden.

Zelensky’s attendance in person at the Ramstein event “highlighted the sensitivity of the moment in a new, more active phase of the war,” as the New York Times reported. The daily quoted a Ukrainian expert commenting that “The main task of Zelensky at Ramstein is to bring some adrenaline to the partners.” 

Indeed, the situation surrounding Zelensky is unenviable — the sluggish delivery of Western weaponry; Germany’s wavering stance during a budget crisis even as the eastern regions comprising former GDR openly opposes the war against Russia; France, an ardent supporter of the war, is caught up in a political crisis and an early presidential election next year may produce an anti-war leadership in Élysée Palace; the post-November 5 trajectory of US policies on Ukraine remain uncertain. 

Meanwhile, US-European differences have surfaced regarding Washington’s egotistic proposal that the EU give a $50 billion loan to Ukraine and ensure that Russia’s frozen assets remain frozen until Moscow pays post-war reparations to Ukraine. Washington estimates that this way, the US won’t be on the hook for repaying the loan if the Russian assets somehow are unblocked. (The rules governing existing EU sanctions, which need to be renewed every six months, allow a single country to unfreeze assets, which Washington believes jeopardises the loan.) 

In Donbass, events vindicate Putin’s strategy that a  crushing defeat on Ukrainian troops on the most crucial sectors of the front would inevitably lead to Zelensky’s entire armed forces losing combat capacity. In fact, signs of this happening are already there. 

Putin said with quiet confidence that Zelensky “accomplished nothing” from the Kursk offensive. The Russian forces have stabilised the situation in Kursk and started pushing the enemy from border territories while the Donbass offensive is “making impressive territorial gains for a long time.” In retrospect, Zelensky’s Kursk offensive turned out to be a Himalayan blunder, which has taken the war to a tipping point favouring Russia.

In this context, the extraordinary first-ever joint piece by the spy chiefs of CIA and Mi6 which appeared in Saturday’s FT shows that beneath  word play and hyperbole, the Anglo-American strategy is in a cul-de-sac. Bill Burns and Richard Moore cannot even bring themselves to articulate what Biden’s objectives are despite admitting that “staying the course is more vital than ever.” 

Burns and Moore hinted that covert (terrorist) operations by Krylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, are the option left now in the proxy war. What a Shakespearean fall for a superpower!

September 8, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Now It Is the White House that Is Smearing Tucker Carlson

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | September 8, 2024

NY Times, CNN, and WH Press Secretary Bates are Smearing Tucker Carlson as a Hitler apologist in an Attempt to Shut Him Down.

Tucker interviewed Darryl Cooper whose view of World War II appears to be based in the 50-year research of historian David Irving. It is not the official view established by court historians. Consequently, the “White House condemns Tucker Carlson’s ‘Nazi propaganda’ interview as ‘disgusting and sadistic insult.’”

In his well researched books, World War II historian David Irving reported that whereas he found evidence that Jews were murdered in the hundreds of thousands, he cannot find evidence of an organized Holocaust. He said that from all the documents he could find and force out of sealed archives, the crimes against the Jews resulted from decisions unrelated to an organized plan of extermination. No historian has ever found a Nazi plan for Jewish extermination. Such a massive undertaking as a Holocaust could not be undertaken without a bureaucratic organization and an organized plan, but there is no evidence of any such organization and plan. Hitler repeatedly said that the Jewish question would be settled after the war. He spoke of relocating Jews to Madagascar. Later with the initial success of his invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler spoke of relocating Jews to the eastern part of the Soviet Union that he would leave to Stalin.

Reporting Irving’s findings does not make Irving or me or anyone an anti-semite or holocaust denier. Irving simply reported what he found, and I merely reported what Irving found. It sounds like that is what Darryl Cooper is doing on Carlson’s program. Ron Unz, himself a Jew, has raised his own questions about Holocaust evidence in the Unz Review. Western civilization works by raising questions, not by imposing dogmas.

If all research results are denounced by those who don’t like the findings, how is truth established? It seems to me that Jews hurt their case by shouting down with name-calling and threats against reputations and careers every time they hear something that they don’t like or that doesn’t fit the narrative. If the Holocaust story is accurate, it will stand on its own feet without name-calling and enemies lists.

The indoctrinated notion of the unparalleled evil of Nazi Germany rests more on war propaganda than in fact. Irving’s books, Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War are the most researched and most honest books about the war. On the basis of an honest rendition of the record, Churchill comes across as a worse war criminal than Hitler. Read the two books, and make your own decision. Why rely on ancient war propaganda?

The widespread view that Hitler started World War II and intended to conquer the world is total ignorance kept alive by court historians. World War II was started by the British and French when they declared war on Germany. What Hitler was doing in Poland was the same as Putin is doing in Ukraine. What Putin is doing is protecting Russian people, who found themselves included in a foreign country by the political decisions made by others than themselves, from persecution and slaughter by Ukrainians.

In Poland Hitler was protecting German people, who were stuck into Poland by decisions made by others than themselves, from persecution, dispossession, and death by the Polish. Hitler’s protection of German people was no business of the British any more than Putin’s protection of Russians is any business of the US.

No one has answered David Irving’s findings. They just call him names. That tells you where the stronger case resides.

I am not a WW II historian and neither is Tucker Carlson, but we both wonder why views are suppressed if they can be factually disproved.

The propagandistic way in which WW II has been presented for 83 years has had major harmful effects on countries, their populations, foreign affairs and world history. Those who bring balance to the story should be celebrated, not demonized.

If you will notice, during the 21st century in every country in the Western world what can be discussed or even mentioned has been massively narrowed. We have reached the point where almost anything said or written is hate speech, racist, misogynist, a threat to democracy, offensive, insensitive, anti-semitic, or Russian propaganda. The great writings in the English language, such as Shakespeare, cannot be read in schools because they violate strictures that have been imposed on language. Bigots now dictate our use of language. Official narratives dictate our understanding of history and current events. A world is being created for us in which facts and truth are objectionable.

September 8, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 3 Comments

Tucker Carlson’s Non-Denial Denialism of the Holocaust

By Thomas Dalton • Unz Review • September 6, 2024

Well, the Jewish Lobby is at it again. In the latest kerfuffle over “Holocaust denial,” Jews and their sycophants are in an uproar over a podcast interview aired on September 2 in which Tucker Carlson spoke at length with a “popular historian” named Darryl Cooper. The two-hour episode is titled “The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe”—a bit of a stretch for a single show, but with the central theme that conventional or orthodox history is often wrong about events small and large, and thus frequently in need of revision. History is not only written by the victors, it is sustained by powerful lobbies that have a vested interest in a certain interpretation of past events. This much is so obvious that it scarcely needs mentioning.

Video Link

And yet, when it comes to World War Two and especially the Holocaust, all rules go out the window. The “victors” cannot be named; alternate interpretations are not allowed; and revisionism is declared a crime. In the interview, Cooper offers the mildest of mild statements regarding his thoughts on WW2 and on what happened to “civilians and prisoners of war” at that time. Two points seemed to have raised the greatest ire: that Churchill, not Hitler, was the true villain of the war; and that the millions of people who died—presumably meaning millions of Jews—were, in effect, accidental victims rather than targets of a premediated and planned genocide. Our cultural guardians are upset by the first point but truly enraged by the second.

The horror of stating such views was too much for both our Jewish media and for our Jewish-inspired Biden regime. The headlines are alarming: “Tucker Carlson Criticized for Hosting Holocaust Revisionist” (NYT); “Tucker Carlson Welcomes a Hitler Apologist to His Show” (NYT, Michelle Goldberg); “White House condemns Tucker Carlson’s ‘Nazi propaganda’ interview as ‘disgusting and sadistic insult’” (CNN); “Tucker Carlson Blasted for Interview with Holocaust Revisionist” (The Hill). CNN reports that the Biden administration took the unusual step of publicly “denouncing Tucker Carlson” and his guest. Deputy press secretary Andrew Bates issued a formal statement, not only calling the interview “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans” but also condemning Carlson for “giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda.” Bates’ chief concern seems to be with “the over 6 million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler.” “Hitler was one of the most evil figures in human history,” Bates assures us—“full stop.” Certainly no revisionism allowed in this most “freedom-loving” of nations.

This whole incident is worthy of some reflection. Let me start with what exactly Cooper said. Here are the relevant statements (from 46:30 to 49:00):

When [the Germans] went into the East, in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, local political prisoners, and so forth, that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that. And they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.

You have letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they are rounding up. And it’s two months after [Operation] Barbarossa was launched [in June], and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people…” And one of them actually says, “Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”

At the end of the day, [Hitler] launched that war [against the USSR] with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under [his] control. And millions of people died because of that.

To assess what Cooper is saying here, we must remind ourselves of the basic facts: Hitler launched his war against Poland in early September 1939. Based on a mutual nonaggression pact, Stalin attacked Poland from the East two weeks later, and the two great powers quickly divided Poland in half. England and France then declared war on Germany, not vice versa (wait—who was the aggressor again?), and so Hitler was compelled to direct his military efforts to the west. He never wanted a war to his west, and as Cooper explains, Hitler tried frequently to make peace with Chamberlain (not yet Churchill). Chamberlain sought compromise but the rest of his divided government—including Churchill—preferred to continue a war they were ill-equipped to fight. Germany invaded the Low Countries in May 1940, Chamberlain resigned, and Churchill was elevated to prime minister.

Throughout the second half of 1940 and into the first half of 1941, Hitler continued his impressive string of victories. France was all but defeated and England was on its last legs. Then suddenly, on 22 June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union (“Operation Barbarossa”). This, says Cooper, was the war in which Germany was unprepared to handle “millions” of prisoners. And indeed, more than 3 million Soviet POWs came under Germany control by the end of 1941, many of whom in fact surrendered or defected. They were initially housed in the nearly 100 ad hoc camps established in German-controlled Russia, and conditions were indeed horrible, as Cooper suggests. Upwards of 500,000 Soviet POWs died each month: around two million dead by the end of 1941. As far as we know, this was unplanned; the Germans were too busy fighting on the front to take much care for their 3 million newly-captured prisoners. They indeed simply “ended up dead,” as Cooper says.

Notably, nowhere does Cooper talk about Jewish prisoners. The whole discussion centers on Soviet POWs and other political prisoners, of whom there were relatively few Jews. Jews did pay a price during Barbarossa, but it was because they were partisan fighters: attacking German troops from behind the front lines. According to international rules of warfare, partisans are to be treated the same as soldiers—meaning, they could be captured, or they could be killed. And the Germans preferred to kill partisans; this was logical, given their already overcrowded ad hoc POW camps.

This resulted in the true beginning of “the Holocaust,” if we wish to call it that. Thousands of partisan Jews were shot on the Eastern Front—perhaps 30,000 or 40,000 in 1941, based on reasonable estimates (certainly not the 400,000 or 500,000 that our orthodox historians would have us believe). But Cooper was not discussing these deaths. Jews also died in the ghettos in 1941—perhaps another 40,000 or 50,000, most from natural causes (old age, illness, accident, suicide). And precisely zero Jews died in “homicidal gas chambers” or “death camps” in 1941; none of the infamous six camps—Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chełmno, and Majdanek—were operational that year. For that matter, precisely zero Jews died in “homicidal gas chambers” during the entire war, precisely because such things did not exist. But neither Carlson nor Cooper dared step into that sticky wicket.[1]

So, in Cooper’s (and Carlson’s) defense, the passage at hand says nothing about Jews and thus nothing about “the Holocaust.” Everything Cooper said there was factually correct. In fact, in the entire two-hour-plus interview, Jews were only mentioned a handful of times, and the “Holocaust” not once, that I can recall.

Jews Go on the Attack

But that’s not how our Jewish Lobby sees it. Every reference to “millions” of deaths is, to them, a coded reference to Jews. Even discussing Hitler as anyone other than a comically-evil madman means that you are a Nazi sympathizer, a “denier” (whatever that means), or simply “disgusting and sadistic.”

A good example the absurdly inane orthodox response can be found in (Jewish) Michelle Goldberg’s op-ed in the (Jewish) New York Times of September 6. The alleged “Hitler apologist” Darryl Cooper failed to toe the party line on the unconditional evil of the Nazis, and so she condemns him in the strongest terms, without even knowing what she is talking about. She clearly doesn’t like the idea that Holocaustianity is our current “state religion” (which it is), and she is incensed when Cooper rightly mentions the “emotional triggers” that keep us from asking tough questions. To Goldberg, Cooper offers us only “clever rhetorical formulations” that are presented in a “soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way.” So overwhelmed is she by Carlson’s and Cooper’s audacity that she is reduced to the following idiocy: “Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression, and ethnic grievance.” This, from a staff writer at the New York Times.

More to the point, despite the utter lack of mention of the Holocaust in the interview, Goldberg is fixated on this supposed inference. She laments “Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism”; she frets over the “disgraced, Holocaust-denying author David Irving” (as if he is relevant here); and she bemoans the fact that “there are few better trolls than Holocaust deniers.” Those clever deniers “love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers,” and they “excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship”—when in fact their level of scholarship often equals or exceeds that of our conventional so-called experts.[2] Deniers “blitz their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions” (How dare they go into detail! How dare they ask questions!). In the end, “they only know how to use crude provocation to get attention”—says the attention-seeking Jewess.

One of Goldberg’s biggest fears is that, in her Jewish-controlled ideological universe, that the jig might be up. She worries about the red-pilled right-wing belief “that all you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs.” In fact, much of what we have been told by our Jewish-inspired orthodoxy has been a lie, or a half-truth, or otherwise deeply deceptive, and Goldberg worries that more and more people are figuring this out. And she is right to worry: a mass awakening will spell big trouble for her and her co-ethnics.

Finally at the end of her piece, she puts her finger on a bit of truth: “Ultimately, Holocaust denial isn’t really about history at all, but about what’s permissible in the present and imaginable in the future.” Hitler and the Nazis must be viewed “as the negation of our deepest values,” or else we are “softened up” for Trump-like fascism. Holocaust denial—that is, deeply questioning the basic assumptions of that event—is indeed not really about history simply because the revisionists have won: the orthodox story of the “homicidal gas chambers,” “the 6 million,” and the alleged National Socialist mad plot to kill all the Jews—all these have been utterly demolished. Orthodox historians no longer even try to respond to revisionists because they know that they will be disgraced. Instead, they and their potent Jewish backers resort to censorship, lawfare, slander, intimidation, and (in many countries) imprisonment to stifle revisionism. Such things are a sure sign of defeat.

As for her remark about what is permissible and imaginable, this too is correct: The standard Holocaust story is the keystone of present-day Jewish power in the US and the West; everything rests on our collective guilt, and all Jewish/Israeli atrocities are thereby justified. Jewish power presently declares that questioning the Holocaust is impermissible; and that a society in which Hitler and National Socialism are viewed neutrally or even positively is unimaginable. But this will soon change. When Holocaust revisionism becomes permissible, and National Socialism becomes imaginable, then everything—everything—will change. That day cannot come soon enough.

The great irony in this whole much-ado-about-nothing is that it could have been something : Carlson and Cooper could have actually discussed the many problems with the Holocaust story, and they could have actually asked the tough questions that orthodoxy cannot answer. They could have examined the many works of Germar Rudolf or Carlo Mattogno; they could have reviewed the reasons why homicidal gas chambers were technically impossible; they could have explained that the best evidence to date suggests that perhaps 500,000 Jews died during the war, not 6 million. And when all that comes out, Michelle Goldberg and friends will truly have something to fear.

Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books and articles on politics, history, and the Jewish Question. All his works are available at www.clemensandblair.com, and at his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com.

Notes

[1] For details, see my book Debating the Holocaust (4th ed., 2020) or Germar Rudolf’s Lectures on the Holocaust.

[2] For the full academic story, see the 50-volume “Holocaust Handbook” series. For a concise treatment of all the core issues, see the newly-released Holocaust Encyclopedia.

September 8, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Film Review, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | 1 Comment

Americans Turn Against Childhood Vaccines. Will Politicians End the Mandates?

By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | September 5, 2024

A Gallup poll conducted in July found for the first time that less than a majority of surveyed Americans think that it is “extremely important” that parents have their children vaccinated. Only 40 percent of polled individuals agreed with this assessment compared to the 64 percent high point of agreement expressed when the question was first asked in 2001.

In an August article detailing the poll results, Jeffrey M. Jones of Gallup pointed out that the decline in support for vaccinations of children comes almost entirely from Republicans and Republican-leaning independents:

The declining belief in the importance of vaccines is essentially confined to Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, as the views of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have changed little over the past 24 years. Twenty-six percent of Republicans and Republican leaners — half as many as in 2019 — believe it is extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated. In the initial Gallup poll on vaccinations, Republicans and Republican leaners (62%) held similar views to Democrats and Democratic leaners (66%); the two groups now differ by 37 percentage points.

Nearly half — 45 percent — of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents expressed from lukewarm support for childhood vaccination to outright opposition, with 26 percent answering it is “somewhat important,” eight percent “not very important,” and 11 percent “not at all important.” Among Democrat and Democrat-leaning respondents these answers totaled just seven percent.

A potential policy result of the change in opinion regarding childhood vaccines is an easing or even elimination of states’ and schools’ vaccination mandates, especially where the population is made up largely of Republican and Republican-leaning individuals. The poll results indicate plummeting support for the position that “the government should require all parents to have their children vaccinated against contagious diseases such as measles.” Support for this position dropped from 62 percent in 2019 to 51 percent in the new poll. Among Republican and Republican-leaning respondents support for such government shots mandates for children declined form 53 percent in 2019 to just 36 percent in the new poll, while support among Democrat and Democrat-leaning respondents has remained rather steady at around 70 percent.

The polling data is in. Will politicians heed their constituents’ views and curtail and even eliminate childhood vaccine mandates?

September 7, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

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