An Essay on Threshold Manipulation, Overdiagnosis, Cascades, and the Markers That Aren’t What They Claim
The Pattern Across the Programmes
In 2022, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the NordICC trial — the first randomised controlled study of colonoscopy screening ever conducted. Over 84,000 people were followed for ten years. The trial found an 18% reduction in cancer incidence and no significant reduction in cancer deaths. To prevent a single case of colorectal cancer, 455 people had to be invited for screening. To prevent a single death, the numbers were statistically indistinguishable from zero.¹
This is the pattern.
Across the major screening programmes — mammography, PSA, Pap, colonoscopy, lung CT — when the question is whether the screened population actually outlives the unscreened population, the benefit largely disappears.² The statistic the programmes advertise is disease-specific mortality: deaths from the disease the test is looking for. The statistic they bury is all-cause mortality: whether the screened group, taken as a whole, lives longer. The two numbers are not the same. You can reduce deaths from one disease while total deaths remain flat — because treatment has killed as many people as the disease prevented, or because the disease you found was never going to kill anyone.²
The screened do not live longer than the unscreened. They are more likely to spend their remaining years monitored, biopsied, cut, and medicated for conditions that would not have harmed them. This essay catalogues twelve tests that produce that conversion, organised by the four mechanisms through which it is achieved.
The Frame
Five concepts make the rest of this essay readable.
Disease-specific versus all-cause mortality. A screening programme can reduce deaths from breast cancer while total deaths remain unchanged. This happens when treatment kills as many people as the disease — through surgical complications, radiation-induced secondary cancers, cardiovascular effects of chemotherapy, or the cascade of follow-up procedures that screening triggers. Only all-cause mortality reveals whether the programme, taken as a whole, extended life.² Trials that report disease-specific reductions without corresponding all-cause reductions are reporting a redistribution of deaths.
Lead-time bias. A cancer destined to kill at age 70 appears as a three-year survival if found at age 67 through symptoms, and a seven-year survival if found at age 63 through screening. The patient dies at the same age in both cases — the clock simply started earlier. Five-year survival statistics, the most commonly cited evidence for screening success, are inevitably improved by earlier detection, even when no life is extended by a single day.² Kidney cancer five-year survival improved from 50% to 60% as imaging found more small tumours; the death rate from kidney cancer remained unchanged.²
Length bias. Aggressive cancers grow fast, become symptomatic between screening intervals, and reach the patient through the clinic rather than the screening room. Indolent cancers linger for years in the detectable phase, making them easy targets. The cancers screening preferentially catches are the ones least likely to kill. The ones most likely to kill evade it.²
Overdiagnosis, and the autopsy reservoir behind it. Approximately 40–70% of older men have prostate cancer at autopsy, while only about 3% die from it.² Up to 39% of middle-aged women show evidence of breast cancer at autopsy; lifetime risk of dying from it is under 4%.² Thyroid cancer appears in 36–100% of carefully examined autopsies, depending on how many microscope slides the pathologist prepares.² Polyps are found in 32–50% of older adults; only 5% develop colorectal cancer.³ The reservoir of detectable-but-harmless abnormality is vast. Every screening test dips into it. Every person pulled from it becomes a cancer patient who can only be harmed by treatment, because they were never at risk.
The threshold. The cutoff that separates well from sick is set by a committee, not by biology. In every screening category, the threshold has been lowered — by panels whose members hold financial relationships with the manufacturers of the drugs and devices used to treat the redefined condition.⁴ The 1988 cholesterol panel. The 1994 WHO bone density panel.⁵ The 2003 American Diabetes Association threshold for impaired fasting glucose.⁶ The 2017 American College of Cardiology hypertension revision.⁷ The lowered PSA cutoff. Each revision converts millions of well people into patients overnight. No one inside their body changed.
The early-detection objection — that finding disease earlier must, by intuition, help — fails on this evidence. It assumes that everything labelled cancer or pre-cancer will progress; the autopsy data say otherwise. It assumes that finding more is finding harm prevented; the mortality data say otherwise. It assumes that the people setting the thresholds are disinterested; the disclosures say otherwise.
Group A — Threshold Manipulation
The number creates the disease.
The first three screenings illustrate the cleanest mechanism in the catalogue. The cutoff changes while the body does not, and the well become the sick by committee vote. The drug to treat the redefined condition is manufactured by the company whose representative sat on the panel that lowered it.
1. Bone Density (DEXA) and the Manufactured Pre-Disease
In 1994, a World Health Organization panel redefined osteoporosis based on bone mineral density measured by DEXA scan.⁵ The reference standard was the bone density of a healthy 35-year-old woman. By this definition, any woman whose bones had decreased from their youthful peak — which describes virtually every woman over 50 — could be diagnosed with osteopenia or osteoporosis. The condition “osteopenia” did not exist as a clinical category before this redefinition.⁸ Internal Merck memos described the company’s excitement about the new diagnostic category and the market it would create for Fosamax.⁸
The DEXA scan measures bone mineral density. That is all it measures. It cannot assess the collagen matrix — the protein scaffolding on which the minerals deposit. A baby has very low bone mineral density and rarely fractures. An elderly woman with osteoporosis may have adequate minerals deposited in the wrong locations, including her arteries. Bone strength is a property of the matrix as much as of the minerals; the DEXA captures only one of the two and is treated as if it captured both.³
Bisphosphonate drugs raise the number the DEXA measures. They do not so much prevent fractures as change the kind of fracture. Documented harms include osteonecrosis of the jaw — the jawbone literally dying — and atypical femur fractures, where the thigh bone snaps under minimal stress in patients taking drugs prescribed to prevent fractures.⁹,¹⁰ The absolute fracture reduction in randomised trials is 1–2%. Fifty to a hundred women must be treated for years to prevent a single hip fracture, while every one of them carries the risks above.⁸
What to Ask Before Your Next Bone Density Scan – Unbekoming
2. Cholesterol
The cholesterol threshold for statin prescription has been lowered repeatedly since 1988, by panels whose members held financial relationships with the manufacturers of the drugs being recommended.⁴ The 2004 National Cholesterol Education Program guidelines tripled the number of Americans classified as needing treatment. The Washington Post reported the panel’s undisclosed conflicts. The guidelines remained unchanged.⁴
The cholesterol hypothesis has the unusual property of being unfalsifiable. The MRFIT trial followed 361,662 men and found that those with cholesterol below 170 had double the death rate from cerebral haemorrhage of those with higher levels; below 160 the death rate quadrupled.¹¹ The Sydney Diet Heart Study, recovered and reanalysed by Christopher Ramsden, found that men who replaced saturated fats with vegetable oils had a 62% higher death rate.¹² The Minnesota Coronary Survey, hidden for decades, showed that for every 30 points cholesterol decreased, mortality increased by 22%.¹¹ None of this has altered the trajectory of the threshold or the prescription.
The statin absolute risk reduction in primary prevention — people without existing heart disease — is approximately 1–2% over five years.¹³ Advocates present this as a 30–40% reduction by using relative risk. The numbers describe the same trial result. The first is what the patient experiences; the second is what the press release says. Patients are not shown the first.
Statins raise blood glucose. The Crestor label states that statin-induced glucose elevations “may exceed the threshold for the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus.” The warning was added decades after approval, after the diabetes signal had become too large to ignore.¹¹ The statin prescribed for the lowered cholesterol threshold thus produces the prediabetes captured by the next lowered threshold.
The Great Cholesterol Con (2007) – Unbekoming
3. Blood Sugar — “Prediabetes”
In 2003, the American Diabetes Association lowered the threshold for impaired fasting glucose from 110 mg/dL to 100 mg/dL.⁶ The category “prediabetes,” as it functions clinically today, did not exist before this revision. Millions of additional Americans were added to the surveillance rolls. None of their blood sugar changed. A committee’s definition of normal changed.
Prediabetes is not diabetes. Many people classified as prediabetic will never develop diabetes. The label nevertheless creates patients — patients who are monitored, tested, counselled, and increasingly prescribed metformin for a number on a lab report. Metformin causes gastrointestinal distress in up to 25% of patients.¹⁴ These symptoms are typically addressed with additional medication, or attributed to irritable bowel syndrome, which becomes its own diagnostic pathway.
The label persists across the life cycle. A woman diagnosed with gestational diabetes during pregnancy — using the same threshold-lowering mechanism, which catches around 18% of pregnant women on current criteria — returns six weeks postpartum for a repeat glucose tolerance test.¹⁵ The test is unchanged. Her physiology is largely unchanged. She is re-labelled “glucose intolerant” or “prediabetic” and enters lifelong annual surveillance. The temporary pregnancy label becomes a permanent metabolic identity.¹⁵
The fasting insulin test, which would actually reveal metabolic dysfunction, is rarely ordered.¹¹ The fasting glucose, which lags behind insulin dysregulation by years, is the screening test of record. The earlier marker is upstream and dietary; the later marker is downstream and pharmaceutical. The system selects for the marker that supports its intervention.
The Mother Who Remains: How Medicine Captures Women After Birth (Part 8) – Unbekoming
Group B — Overdiagnosis
Finding what would never have harmed you.
The next three screenings do not invent the condition by adjusting a threshold. They find conditions that exist by the pathology textbook’s definition but would never have caused symptoms or death. Overdiagnosis is the bulk of what these programmes produce, not a marginal side-effect of them.
4. Mammography
The 25-year Canadian National Breast Screening Study, published in the BMJ in 2014, followed nearly 90,000 women. It found no significant reduction in breast cancer mortality from mammographic screening.¹⁶ The 2013 Cochrane Review of randomised trials reached the same conclusion.¹⁷ The relative risk for all-cause mortality in well-conducted trials is 1.01 (95% CI 0.99 to 1.04) — no significant difference between the screened and the unscreened.¹⁷
What screening does find, reliably, is ductal carcinoma in situ. DCIS was a rare diagnosis before the 1980s. It now accounts for a significant proportion of all screen-detected breast cancers. Studies following women whose DCIS was missed at biopsy show that 75–90% never develop invasive cancer over 10–20 years.¹⁸ The condition is treated nonetheless — with surgery, radiation, and in some cases chemotherapy. Nearly half a million women have been diagnosed and treated for DCIS since widespread mammography began.¹⁸ The cancers they were treated for would, in the great majority of cases, never have harmed them.
Up to 60% of women who undergo annual mammograms for a decade experience at least one false positive.¹⁸ Each false positive triggers additional imaging, biopsy, and the psychological burden of waiting. A single mammogram delivers radiation equivalent to approximately 100 chest X-rays, concentrated on compressed breast tissue.¹⁸ Over a decade of annual screening that is 1,000 chest X-rays’ worth of ionising radiation aimed at the tissue the screening is supposedly protecting. A 2012 BMJ study found that women with BRCA variants who underwent mammograms before age 30 had an increased risk of developing breast cancer compared to those who did not.¹⁹
What to Ask Before Your Next Mammogram – Unbekoming
5. Colonoscopy
The NordICC trial, with which this essay opened, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2022. It followed over 84,000 people for ten years and found an 18% reduction in cancer incidence and no significant reduction in cancer deaths.¹ Until 2022, gastroenterology had no randomised trial supporting the procedure it had been recommending for decades.
The paradox is structural. Polyps are found in 32–50% of older adults. About 5% of people develop colorectal cancer.³ The vast majority of polyps removed during colonoscopy were never destined to cause harm. The procedure removes them anyway, and each removal leaves a wound in the protective mucosal layer. A 2019 study in Gastroenterology proposed an additional mechanism — iatrogenic tumour seeding via the scope itself, where cancerous cells stick to the biopsy forceps or are aspirated into the scope’s channel and redeposited elsewhere in the colon as the scope is withdrawn.³
The bowel preparation devastates the microbial ecology of the colon. Polyethylene glycol prep causes an “instant and substantial change” in gut microbial balance.³ Beneficial populations decrease significantly. The microbiome rebounds over weeks or months but may never return precisely to its original composition. Repeated colonoscopies across decades may leave the colon both microbiologically disturbed and physically scarred — creating, plausibly, the conditions in which polyps continue to form.
Complication rates from a Canadian population study of 97,204 outpatient colonoscopies: significant bleeding in 1 in 600; perforation in 1 in 1,200; death from the procedure in 1 in 14,000.³ These are surgical-intervention rates, not the rates of a benign screening test. The procedure generates approximately $4 billion annually in the United States.³
The Colonoscopy Cartel: How Routine Screening Became a Business Model – Unbekoming
6. CT Scan — The Screening Test That Causes the Disease It Looks For
A 2025 study in JAMA Internal Medicine projected that the 93 million CT scans performed in the United States in 2023 will ultimately cause approximately 103,000 future cancers — roughly 5% of all new cancer diagnoses each year.²⁰ CT usage has grown from 3 million scans in 1980 to over 90 million today, a thirty-fold increase. Medical imaging is now the primary source of radiation exposure for most Americans beyond natural background.
The radiation epidemiology is no longer in dispute. The Taiwanese registry study found that CT exposure was associated with a 2.55-fold increase in thyroid cancer risk and a 1.55-fold increase in leukaemia risk, with clear dose-response relationships.²¹ The British NHS registry study of 178,604 children found that those exposed to cumulative doses of 30 mGy demonstrated a threefold increased risk of leukaemia; exposure to 50 mGy showed similarly elevated brain tumour risk.²² Five to ten head CT scans in children under fifteen can accumulate sufficient radiation to significantly increase lifetime cancer risk.²²
Approximately 25% of CT scans reveal incidental findings — unexpected abnormalities unrelated to the original reason for imaging.²¹ The Emory University radiologist who underwent virtual colonoscopy after a routine annual physical illustrates the cascade in its full form. The scan found no colon problem but identified a kidney mass, a 2-cm liver mass, and multiple lung nodules. Further scans showed the kidney mass was a cyst. High-resolution lung scans revealed seven to eight nodules. CT-guided liver biopsy was inconclusive. PET scan was negative. Surgeons performed video-aided thoracoscopy, collapsing part of his lung to remove three small lung sections. He awoke after five hours of surgery with a chest tube, bladder catheter, central venous line, arterial catheter, spinal catheter, oxygen, heparin, prophylactic antibiotics, and patient-controlled narcotics. Five weeks before he returned to near-normal function, except for permanent rib pain from surgically interrupted nerves. The diagnosis: histoplasmosis — a common, usually asymptomatic fungal exposure.²,²³
38% of CT scans in some clinical settings are ordered for legal protection rather than clinical necessity. Only 2.2% of defensively ordered scans change patient management. Physicians who own imaging facilities order twice as many CT scans as those without financial stakes.²¹
CT Scans: The Cancer Machine – Unbekoming
Group C — The Cascade
The positive result that escalates into iatrogenic harm.
The next three screenings illustrate what happens after a positive result. Each programme has its own version of the cascade, but the structure is consistent: the abnormal finding triggers a sequence of procedures whose cumulative harm to the well far exceeds any benefit to the few who genuinely had the disease being screened for.
7. PSA Testing
Richard Ablin, who first identified a prostate-specific antigen in 1970, called the use of PSA for population screening a “profit-driven public health disaster” in a New York Times op-ed in 2010.²⁴ He wrote against the screening test most associated with his name for the rest of his career. The screening continued.
PSA is prostate-specific, not cancer-specific. The protein is produced by all prostate tissue — cancerous, enlarged, inflamed, and normal. An elevated PSA can mean prostate cancer. It can also mean benign prostatic hyperplasia, prostatitis, recent ejaculation, a urinary tract infection, or simply a larger prostate. No PSA threshold reliably separates cancer from non-cancer, and no threshold separates cancers that will kill from cancers that will not.²⁵
The threshold of 4.0 ng/mL was, by the account of New York Times reporting, chosen “just sort of arbitrarily.” William Catalona’s 1991 New England Journal of Medicine paper established it without reporting false positive rates — a basic requirement for any screening test.²⁵,²⁶ The world adopted the number.
75% of men with elevated PSA do not have cancer. Between 30 and 100 men are overdiagnosed and overtreated for every life saved.²⁵ The 2012 Prostate Cancer Intervention Versus Observation Trial (PIVOT) and the Scandinavian Prostate Cancer Group Study found no significant survival benefit from radical prostatectomy compared to watchful waiting.²⁵ The surgery causes permanent urinary incontinence in 20–30% of men and erectile dysfunction in 60–80%.²⁵ Active surveillance is appropriate for roughly 99% of low-risk cases.²⁵
30 million American men are screened each year. The screening triggers approximately one million biopsies. At least 750,000 of those biopsies find no cancer. The programme generates $3 billion annually.²⁵ When the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended against routine screening in 2012, urology associations mobilised lobbying efforts to preserve the status quo.
The PSA Trap (2026) – Unbekoming
8. Prostate Biopsy
The PSA cascade leads to the biopsy. Standard transrectal biopsy routes 10–18 needles through the rectal wall into a sterile organ. The needle carries with it the bacteria living in the rectum. Published infection rates after transrectal biopsy reach 5.4%. Sepsis rates range from 0.2% to 9.4% depending on the setting. Between 50,000 and 150,000 men are hospitalised worldwide each year for post-biopsy infection.²⁷
The standard antibiotic prophylaxis is a fluoroquinolone. Approximately 22% of men undergoing this biopsy carry fluoroquinolone-resistant E. coli in their gut flora; the prophylactic antibiotic does not work for one in five men.²⁸ The 2022 GRAM Report in the Lancet estimated that nearly 5 million deaths worldwide in 2019 were closely associated with antimicrobial resistance, with E. coli identified as the most significant contributing organism.²⁹ Transrectal prostate biopsies continue to be performed in this resistance landscape.
A different route exists. Transperineal biopsy enters the prostate through the perineal skin, bypassing the rectum entirely. The 2024 meta-analysis published in Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases found that the transperineal approach reduces infectious complications by 77%.³⁰ The transperineal route has been available for decades. The transrectal route, with its known infection profile, remains the default in most clinics.
The broader complication profile is less dramatic but affects more men. Hematuria. Hematospermia. Rectal bleeding, with severe haemorrhage in up to 1% of cases. Lower urinary tract symptoms in up to 25% post-procedure.²⁷ Tuncel and colleagues found that 41% of men reported erectile dysfunction one month after biopsy, with 15% still affected at six months.³¹ A prostate cancer diagnosis itself, even when made for an indolent cancer that would never have caused symptoms, increases cardiovascular events (relative risk 1.3) and suicide risk (relative risk 2.6) within the first year of diagnosis.³² These outcomes do not appear on the consent form. A 1999 study in Effective Clinical Practice found that 31% of men who received a PSA test were unaware their physician had ordered it; of those who were aware, only 47% recalled any discussion of risks and benefits.³³
Through the Wall: The Prostate Biopsy and What No One Mentions – Unbekoming
9. Pap Smear and HPV Testing
Angela Raffle’s 2003 study in the British Medical Journal calculated the arithmetic of cervical screening. One thousand women must be screened for 35 years to prevent one death from cervical cancer. Of those 1,000 women, 150 will receive a stress-causing test result during those 35 years. About 50 will undergo cancer treatment they did not need. Fifty women treated unnecessarily for every death prevented.³⁴
The cascade from abnormal Pap to LEEP runs like this. A woman with no symptoms is screened. The cytology shows abnormal cells. She receives a letter or a call. The words used vary; the message is consistent: something is wrong, further investigation is needed. The waiting period is filled with anxiety, internet searches, and the imagining of worst cases. She undergoes colposcopy. Tissue is removed for biopsy. The cervix has nerve endings; the biopsy is painful, with bleeding and cramping. If the pathology shows precancerous changes, treatment is recommended — typically LEEP (loop electrosurgical excision procedure) or cone biopsy. A portion of the cervix is cut away.²
The harm extends to future pregnancies. LEEP and cone biopsy shorten and weaken the cervix. The woman who underwent the procedure is at increased risk of preterm birth in subsequent pregnancies. Her premature infant may require neonatal intensive care, which initiates its own cascade. A screening test administered to an asymptomatic woman has produced not only her own anxiety, procedures, and tissue loss, but increased risk to a future child.²
The new HPV DNA testing — adopted as first-line screening in Australia in 2017 and increasingly in the United States — finds the marker that most sexually active women carry. The Pap looked for abnormal cells. The HPV DNA test looks for sequences attributed to HPV. The yield of positives expands accordingly. Over 99% of those who test positive for HPV markers never develop cervical cancer.² Switching from cytology to PCR-based HPV testing broadens the pool of positives feeding the treatment cascade rather than improving the discrimination of the test.
The HPV Lie: Pap Smears, Gardasil, and a Cancer Caused by Something Else – Unbekoming
Beyond the Threshold: When the Marker Is the Construct
The first nine entries indict screening on the establishment’s own data — the studies, the trials, the autopsy reservoirs, the conflicts of interest disclosed in the papers themselves. The next three entries ask something deeper: whether the marker the test detects has any necessary connection to the disease the test claims to predict, or whether the marker itself is an artefact of a methodology that produces what it looks for.
Group D — Tests That Measure Nothing Real
The marker is a construct.
10. PCR
Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the polymerase chain reaction. He spent much of the remainder of his career warning that PCR should not be used for diagnostic purposes. “PCR is just a process that allows you to make a whole lot of something out of something,” Mullis said in 1997. “It doesn’t tell you that you are sick, or that the thing that you ended up with was going to hurt you or anything like that.” In another formulation: “With PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody.”³⁵
PCR doubles the targeted nucleotide sequence with each cycle. After 20 cycles, a millionfold amplification. After 30 cycles, a billionfold. At 40 cycles, a trillionfold.³⁵ The MIQE guidelines — the internationally recognised standard for PCR methodology — state that “Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported.”³⁶ Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina, quoted in the New York Times in August 2020, said he would set the threshold at 30 or even less.³⁷ The Corman-Drosten protocol, which became the basis for COVID-19 PCR testing worldwide, used 45.³⁸
The 2006 Dartmouth-Hitchcock incident demonstrated the mechanism in miniature. Hospital staff developed a persistent cough. A rapid molecular test was deployed. 142 staff tested positive for pertussis. Nearly 1,000 were taken off work. Thousands received antibiotics. 3,599 doses of pertussis vaccine were administered. By year’s end, the established gold-standard culture results returned. Not a single case of pertussis was confirmed. The outbreak had been manufactured by the test.³⁵
In May 2020, Tanzania’s President John Magufuli submitted samples from a papaya, a quail, and a goat to the national laboratory under false names. The papaya and the goat tested positive for COVID-19.³⁵ The 27 different PCR test manufacturers examined in Dutch court proceedings all carried the same product disclaimer: “Research Use Only (RUO), not for diagnostic purposes.”³⁵
The WHO’s August 2020 case definition completed the circle: “a person with laboratory confirmation of COVID-19 infection, irrespective of clinical signs and symptoms.”³⁵ A person with no symptoms was a confirmed case of disease on the basis of a biochemical reaction in a laboratory.
Interview with Jamie Andrews – Unbekoming
11. Antibody Tests
The antibody test inverts traditional immunology. The presence of antibodies was historically interpreted as evidence of recovery and protection: the body had encountered something, responded to it, and was now resistant. HIV testing reinterpreted a positive antibody result — for the first time in the history of immunology — as evidence of an active, ongoing, deadly infection rather than a successful response.³⁵
The reliability of the reinterpretation depends on whether the test detects antibodies specific to the claimed agent. The HIV antibody test manufacturer’s insert states: “There is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human blood.”³⁵ The German weekly Die Woche ran a headline calling this “The AIDS Test Lottery,” reporting that “the antibody tests do not measure what they should: HIV infection. They also react to people who have overcome a tuberculosis infection.”³⁵
Nancy Banks compiled a list of more than sixty conditions known to cause false-positive HIV antibody results — kidney failure, tuberculosis, flu, flu vaccination, tetanus vaccination, malaria, haemophilia, leprosy, and pregnancy in women who have given birth multiple times.³⁹ The proteins in the test, Banks writes, “are cellular in origin and are not specific to HIV.” The calibration was circular: proteins that caused the strongest reaction in seriously ill AIDS patients were selected to define the test. That those proteins had any connection to a retrovirus of any type was never independently established.³⁵
The monoclonal antibodies that became the diagnostic industry’s stock in trade were developed in 1975 through hybridoma technology — fusion of cancerous myeloma cells with mouse spleen cells. These are laboratory-manufactured chimeras that exist nowhere in nature. Harvard’s Clifford Saper has confirmed that they bind indiscriminately to similar protein sequences rather than to a single specific target.⁴⁰ Children born with agammaglobulinaemia, who produce none of what immunology calls antibodies, recover from illness normally.⁴⁰ The British Medical Research Council’s 1950 Report #272 found no correlation between antibody count and susceptibility to diphtheria.⁴⁰
The antibody test is the mechanism by which a healthy person becomes a sick one on paper. It measures cross-reactive binding to uncharacterised proteins and reports the binding as specific recognition of a pathogen.
The Antibody Deception: Invisible Enemies, Visible Lies – Unbekoming
12. BRCA Testing and Prophylactic Mastectomy
In 1994, Yoshio Miki and colleagues published in Science the identification of a gene they named BRCA1, associated with breast cancer in selected families.⁴¹ The 80–87% lifetime risk figure that drives prophylactic mastectomy decisions today derives from families chosen for inclusion because they had extreme cancer clustering — six, eight, ten cases across generations. This is ascertainment bias. A 2007 simulation analysis in the Journal of Medical Genetics quantified its magnitude: risk estimates from clinically ascertained families are inflated by a factor of two to three.⁴² A 2019 study in the European Journal of Human Genetics found the bias to be pervasive and unacknowledged.⁴³ The corrected estimates were rarely communicated to women making surgical decisions.
35–55% of BRCA variant carriers never develop breast cancer. The papers themselves document women carrying clearly “deleterious” mutations who lived to age 80 without malignancy.⁴¹ Compare this with Huntington’s disease, the case mainstream genetics treats as definitive — penetrance reportedly approaching 100% in carriers of the expanded repeat. A sequence variant that fails to produce the disease in half its carriers cannot be the cause of the disease; at most, it is a correlate in pre-selected families.
The 2002 BMJ study by Metcalfe and colleagues examined women who had already undergone prophylactic bilateral mastectomy after BRCA testing. Most overestimated their cancer risk by more than 90% compared with computer-generated estimates.⁴⁴ Twenty-two of seventy-five women believed their risk was 100%. The eighteen women with the lowest computed risk — those with limited family history — believed their risk was highest, averaging 80% when the models gave 12%. Their belief was wrong by a factor of seven. The machinery that produced the belief — the testing, the counselling, the risk communication — failed them. They removed healthy breasts.
The original BRCA papers carry conflict-of-interest disclosures. The race to identify the genes was explicitly a race to patent them. Myriad Genetics won and held a monopoly on the test until the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics.⁴⁵ At peak, BRCA testing alone generated over $500 million annually. Preventive surgeries, surveillance, and PARP inhibitors added billions.
Healthy women with no symptoms are routed toward mastectomy and oophorectomy on the basis of a probability inflated by ascertainment bias, applied to laboratory markers whose causal connection to the cancer has never been established outside the families originally selected for clustering. They are not given the corrected numbers. They are not told that 35–55% of carriers never develop the disease. They are told they have a gene that causes cancer, and they are routed to the operating theatre.
The BRCA Gene and the Women Who Lost Their Breasts to a Hypothesis – Unbekoming
What the Twelve Have in Common
Twelve tests. Four mechanisms. One output: more patients.
The threshold-manipulation group converts the well into the sick by lowering the cutoff. The drug to treat the new diagnosis is manufactured by the company whose representative sat on the panel that lowered the cutoff. The body is unchanged.
The overdiagnosis group finds conditions that exist by the textbook definition but would never have caused symptoms or death. The mammogram finds DCIS that would have resolved or remained dormant. The colonoscopy finds polyps that were never destined to become cancer. The CT scan finds incidentalomas that lead to thoracic surgery for histoplasmosis.
The cascade group illustrates what a positive result produces. The PSA leads to the biopsy that leads to the sepsis that leads to the radical prostatectomy that leads to the incontinence and impotence — for cancers that, in autopsy series, are present in 70% of men over 80 and kill 3%. The Pap smear leads to the colposcopy that leads to the LEEP that leads to the preterm birth in a future pregnancy. The biopsy needle is the test as injury.
The marker-as-construct group asks the deeper question of whether the test detects what it claims to detect. PCR amplifies fragments and is read as detection of a whole organism it never isolates. The antibody test picks up cross-reactive binding and reports it as specific recognition. The BRCA test identifies a correlate in pre-selected families and frames it as a deterministic cause.
Each of these tests was developed for a specific clinical purpose: PSA to monitor men already diagnosed with prostate cancer, mammography to investigate palpable breast lumps, colonoscopy to assess symptomatic patients. They worked reasonably well within that scope. Repurposed to screen the asymptomatic, on the intuition that earlier detection must help, they fail because most of what they find is pseudodisease and the cascades they trigger produce harm exceeding any benefit to the few with genuine disease.²
The reservoir is vast. Seventy percent of men in their seventies harbour prostate cancer at autopsy. Up to 39% of middle-aged women show evidence of breast cancer at autopsy. Polyps are present in half of older colons. Thyroid cancer appears in nearly every carefully examined thyroid.² Every screening test dips into this reservoir. Every person pulled from it becomes a patient who cannot benefit from treatment, because they were never at risk.
The financial architecture is consistent across the catalogue. Colonoscopy generates $4 billion annually in the United States.³ PSA produces $3 billion.²⁵ CT scanning is a multi-billion-dollar industry.²¹ The DCIS treatment cascade — surgery, radiation, follow-up — runs to tens of thousands of dollars per case across hundreds of thousands of cases.¹⁸ BRCA testing exceeded $500 million annually at peak; the downstream surgeries and PARP inhibitors add billions. Each abnormal result triggers a sequence of follow-up procedures that generates more revenue. No conspiracy is required — only that every participant follow their own incentives.
The system is sustained, in large part, by the people it overdiagnosed. Every person overtreated for pseudodisease becomes, in their own telling, a survivor. They believe the screening saved their life, and they say so — to their families, to their neighbours, at fundraisers, and before parliaments. The screening programmes’ most effective advocates are the women whose healthy breasts were removed for a non-progressing DCIS, the men whose prostates were taken out for indolent cancers that would never have killed them, the people who were treated for a disease they never had and now organise their identity around the rescue. They are not lying. The framework that taught them to be grateful cannot acknowledge their mistake without dismantling itself.
How to Explain This to a Six-Year-Old
Some grown-ups have machines that look inside your body to find things that might be dangerous. They say finding things early is good, and going to the doctor sounds safe.
Here is what they don’t tell you. The machines find lots of small things that were never going to hurt you. Sometimes they find nothing at all and say they found something. Sometimes they find a piece of something and pretend it is the whole bad thing.
Once the machine says it found something, the grown-ups cut it out, or give you medicine to fight it, or make you come back every year to check. The cutting and the medicine often hurt you more than the thing would have.
The grown-ups also have a rule about what counts as sick. They get to change the rule. Every few years they change it so that more people are called sick. The people who change the rule are often paid by the companies that sell the medicine for being sick.
You can feel fine on Monday and be called sick on Tuesday, and nothing inside you changed. Only the rule changed.
Closing
The body that was well on Monday is a patient on Tuesday. Nothing inside it changed. The number on the chart changed.
A committee lowered a cutoff. A scan found a shadow. A biopsy went through the wall and brought back what it always brings back. A PCR amplified a fragment 35 trillion times and the result was labelled detection of a virus. A sequence variant labelled BRCA1, present in hundreds of thousands of women, was assigned a probability inflated by ascertainment bias and then offered as the basis for removing healthy breasts.
The twelve tests are not twelve separate stories. They are one story in twelve forms — the conversion of the well into the patient. The conversion is achieved through thresholds set by people who profit when the threshold moves; through overdiagnosis of conditions that would never have mattered; through cascades that begin with a positive result and end in the operating theatre or the morgue; and through markers whose existence, as the test claims them, is itself unverified.
The screened do not live longer than the unscreened. The trials are explicit on this point. The benefit the programmes advertise is disease-specific mortality; the number they bury is all-cause mortality. Moving the first without moving the second relocates death rather than preventing it.
The information needed to see this is not behind a paywall. It sits in the journals the physicians ordering these procedures subscribe to and cite — the NEJM, the BMJ, JAMA, the Cochrane reviews. It appears in the disclosures attached to the original papers, the financial filings of the companies that hold the patents, the consent forms no one reads aloud, the package inserts no one is handed, and the policy documents no one quotes back at the practice.
The document exists. The data exists. Most patients who go through these procedures never see them.
References
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- Source materials on colonoscopy screening, including: Bretthauer et al. (2022), as in reference 1; Gastroenterology (2019) on iatrogenic tumour seeding via colonoscope; Canadian population study of 97,204 outpatient colonoscopies on complication rates; Yoho R. Butchered by Healthcare, on procedure economics.
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- Gøtzsche PC, Jørgensen KJ. Screening for breast cancer with mammography. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2013;6:CD001877.
- Source materials from Breast Cancer: What They Didn’t Tell You and The Screening Trap, drawing on Welch HG and colleagues on DCIS overdiagnosis; BMJ 25-year follow-up (Miller et al. 2014); and false-positive rate analyses from US and UK screening programs.
- Berrington de González A, Reeves G. Mammographic screening before age 50 years in the UK: comparison of the radiation risks with the mortality benefits. British Journal of Cancer. 2005;93(5):590–596. See also: Pijpe A, Andrieu N, Easton DF, et al. Exposure to diagnostic radiation and risk of breast cancer among carriers of BRCA1/2 mutations: retrospective cohort study (GENE-RAD-RISK). BMJ. 2012;345:e5660.
- Smith-Bindman R, Chu PW, Azman Firdaus H, et al. Projected lifetime cancer risks from current computed tomography imaging. JAMA Internal Medicine. 2025.
- Source materials from The Screening Trap, including Taiwanese registry analyses of CT-associated cancer risk; defensive medicine ordering rates; self-referral ordering studies; and Cedars-Sinai radiation overexposure incident (2008–2009).
- Pearce MS, Salotti JA, Little MP, et al. Radiation exposure from CT scans in childhood and subsequent risk of leukaemia and brain tumours: a retrospective cohort study. The Lancet. 2012;380(9840):499–505.
- Welch HG. Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here’s Why, on the Emory University radiologist case of incidentaloma cascade following virtual colonoscopy.
- Ablin RJ. The Great Prostate Mistake. The New York Times. March 9, 2010.
- Source materials from The PSA Trap and The Screening Trap, drawing on Catalona WJ et al. (1991), New England Journal of Medicine, original PSA threshold paper; Wilt TJ et al. PIVOT trial, NEJM 2012; Bill-Axelson A et al. Scandinavian Prostate Cancer Group Study; and US Preventive Services Task Force recommendation statements.
- Catalona WJ, Smith DS, Ratliff TL, et al. Measurement of prostate-specific antigen in serum as a screening test for prostate cancer. New England Journal of Medicine. 1991;324(17):1156–1161.
- Loeb S, Vellekoop A, Ahmed HU, et al. Systematic review of complications of prostate biopsy. European Urology. 2013;64(6):876–892.
- Taylor AK, Zembower TR, Nadler RB, et al. Targeted antimicrobial prophylaxis using rectal swab cultures in men undergoing transrectal ultrasound guided prostate biopsy is associated with reduced incidence of postoperative infectious complications and cost of care. Journal of Urology. 2012;187(4):1275–1279. See also: Taylor S, Margolick J, Abughosh Z, et al. Ciprofloxacin resistance in the faecal carriage of patients undergoing transrectal ultrasound guided prostate biopsy. Journal of Urology. 2011 (PMID:21958149) — the source for the ~22% fluoroquinolone-resistance prevalence in gut flora prior to transrectal biopsy.
- Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators. Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis. The Lancet. 2022;399(10325):629–655.
- Wolff EM, Tafuri A, Mazzone E, et al. Infectious complications following transperineal prostate biopsy with or without periprocedural antibiotic prophylaxis — a systematic review including meta-analysis. Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases. 2024. See also: Hu JC, Tosoian JJ, Qi J, et al. Transperineal vs transrectal prostate biopsy — the PREVENT randomized clinical trial. JAMA Oncology. 2024;10(10):1590–1593.
- Tuncel A, Toprak U, Balci M, et al. Impact of transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate biopsy on erectile function in patients with lower urinary tract symptoms. Journal of Andrology. 2008;29(3):344–348.
- Fang F, Keating NL, Mucci LA, et al. Immediate risk of suicide and cardiovascular death after a prostate cancer diagnosis: cohort study in the United States. Journal of the National Cancer Institute. 2010;102(5):307–314.
- Federman DG, Goyal S, Kamina A, Peduzzi PN, Concato J. Informed consent for PSA screening: does it happen? Effective Clinical Practice. 1999;2(4):152–157.
- Raffle AE, Alden B, Quinn M, Babb PJ, Brett MT. Outcomes of screening to prevent cancer: analysis of cumulative incidence of cervical abnormality and modelling of cases and deaths prevented. BMJ. 2003;326(7395):901.
- Bailey M, Bailey S. The Final Pandemic: An Antidote to Medical Tyranny. 2022. Engelbrecht T, Köhnlein C, Bailey S, Bailey M, Scoglio S. Virus Mania. 3rd English Edition, 2021. Mullis K. “Corporate Greed & AIDS” talk, Santa Monica, California, 1997. Multiple Mullis quotations on PCR limitations as documented in these sources.
- Bustin SA, Benes V, Garson JA, et al. The MIQE guidelines: minimum information for publication of quantitative real-time PCR experiments. Clinical Chemistry. 2009;55(4):611–622.
- Mandavilli A. Your coronavirus test is positive. Maybe it shouldn’t be. The New York Times. August 29, 2020. Quoting Michael Mina, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
- Corman VM, Landt O, Kaiser M, et al. Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR. Eurosurveillance. 2020;25(3):2000045.
- Banks NT. AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire: The Deadly Virus of International Greed. iUniverse, 2010.
- Stone M. The Antibody Deception: Invisible Y’s That Don’t Exist. Source for the Saper observation on monoclonal antibody binding; on agammaglobulinaemia recovery; and on British Medical Research Council Report #272 (1950).
- Miki Y, Swensen J, Shattuck-Eidens D, et al. A strong candidate for the breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1. Science. 1994;266(5182):66–71.
- Goldgar D, Venne V, Conner T, Buys S. BRCA phenocopies or ascertainment bias? Journal of Medical Genetics. 2007;44(8):e86.
- Ranola JMO, Tsai GJ, Shirts BH. Exploring the effect of ascertainment bias on genetic studies that use clinical pedigrees. European Journal of Human Genetics. 2019;27(12):1800–1807.
- Metcalfe KA, Liede A, Hoodfar E, Scott A, Foulkes WD, Narod SA. An evaluation of needs of female BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers undergoing genetic counselling. Journal of Medical Genetics. 2000;37(11):866–874. Metcalfe K, Narod SA, et al. Women who undergo prophylactic bilateral mastectomy overstate risk of cancer. BMJ. 2002;325(7369):921.
- Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 569 U.S. 576 (2013).
June 14, 2026
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
Comments Off on The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients They Claim to Find
Netanyahu knew exactly what he was doing when he defied Trump’s red line and struck Beirut this morning
It’s important to understand that, contrary to Donald Trump’s quip to Barak Ravid that Netanyahu has “no f***ing judgment,” the Israeli Prime Minister knows exactly what he is doing: With a set of strikes at the Dahiyeh neighborhood in Beirut, he is trying to kill both the pending US-Iran peace deal and the fragile peace between Israel and Lebanon that would come with it.
There is a further strategic dividend. Netanyahu is also seeking to preempt Iran’s attempt to establish a new regional deterrence equation—one in which attacks on Beirut, and potentially on Lebanon more broadly, would trigger a direct Iranian response against Israel. By striking now, he is not merely targeting an adversary; he is challenging the emergence of a regional order that would constrain Israel’s freedom of military action.
Netanyahu even posted a video on his Twitter bragging about the attack.
The exchange of fire between Israel and Iran last week was about far more than retaliation. After Israel defied President Trump and struck Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood, Iran responded by attacking Israel directly—the first time Tehran had launched strikes on Israel in response to an Israeli attack on Lebanon. Israel defied Trump once more and retaliated against Iran, prompting another Iranian response, after which Israel confined its next strike to southern Lebanon rather than Beirut.
The cycle reflected Iran’s attempt to establish a new regional equation: that attacks on Lebanon would no longer be cost-free for Israel, but would carry the risk of direct Iranian retaliation. For the first time in decades, a major regional power was seeking to place hard-power constraints on Israel’s freedom of military action beyond its borders.
Having reestablished its own deterrence, Tehran was now attempting to establish extended deterrence to its partners as part of a broader effort to rebuild its forward-defense posture. Israel, unsurprisingly, viewed this as a direct challenge to its long-standing freedom of maneuver and moved quickly to prevent the new doctrine from taking hold.
Of course, extended deterrence can not be established through a single exchange of fire. At a minimum, it would require several rounds of action and reaction before either side accepted it as a new reality. And even then, it would never be foolproof. Tehran understands that its purpose cannot simply be to eliminate Israeli strikes on Lebanon, but to force Israeli leaders to think twice before authorizing them by attaching a new and significant cost: the likelihood of direct Iranian retaliation.
It was therefore clear that Netanyahu had not abandoned the fight. Yet for several days, even as Hezbollah and Israel continued to exchange fire, he refrained from striking Beirut’s southern suburbs and testing Iran’s new red line.
But today, just hours before President Trump was expecting Iran to sign a memorandum that would end the U.S.-Iran war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Netanyahu crossed both Tehran’s and Trump’s red line: keeping Beirut out of the conflict.
Netanyahu clearly timed this for maximum impact. With a single set of strikes, Netanyahu may have advanced two goals at once—torpedoing Trump’s peace deal and preventing the emergence of a new deterrence equation that would impose meaningful constraints on Israel’s military operations in Lebanon.
A diplomat involved in the talks told Fox News that: “This is a clear attempt by Israel to sabotage the President’s deal and drag the United States back into war.”
Trump, meanwhile, is once again reportedly “pissed off” at Netanyahu. In a Truth Social post, the president declared that the strike on Beirut “should not have happened,” while pointedly questioning whether it was a proportionate response to Hezbollah’s latest attack on Israel.
“Israel has the right to defend itself against threats,” Trump wrote, “but the attack it was responding to was very small and meaningless. Nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and it should not disrupt this important process.”
The statement was notable not merely for its criticism of Netanyahu, but for what it implied: that Israel’s strike was neither militarily necessary nor diplomatically prudent at a moment when a potential breakthrough with Iran appeared within reach.
Washington is frustrated by Tehran’s insistence that Trump rein in Israel, even as American officials believe Iran has failed to similarly restrain Hezbollah. It is equally frustrated that a deal it urgently wants with Iran is now being held hostage by Israel, ironically at the request of the Iranians, since it is Tehran that insists that any ceasefire must be region-wide and prevent Israel from having the ability to restart the war.
That frustration is understandable. But Washington must also recognize a basic reality: the only way to delink a U.S.-Iran agreement from the Israel-Lebanon conflict is to delink the United States itself from Israel’s recurring resort to military escalation.
As long as Israel retains the capacity to drag the United States back into conflict, Tehran will see little reason to separate diplomacy with Washington from the wars Israel chooses to start and pull the US into.
Indeed, the principal reason Tehran insists on a region-wide ceasefire is to deny Israel the ability to draw the United States into yet another war with Iran itself.
If Trump were to clearly establish that the United States would neither participate in nor defend an unjustified Israeli military escalation, Tehran might no longer see the need to link a U.S.-Iran accord to the Israel-Lebanon front.
Such a calculated distancing from Israel would serve American interests in any case. But the need for it has rarely been more apparent than it is today.
June 14, 2026
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
Comments Off on With one strike, Netanyahu tries to kill two peace deals
In June 2026, the Russian military continues its slow advances against the Ukrainian military in the Donbass region and elsewhere in the former eastern Ukraine, amidst the NATO proxy war being waged against the Russian Federation. Russian forces are grinding down the dwindling ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
For its part, the government in Kiev, whose mandate has expired, is focusing on drone strikes against oil refineries and shipping terminals in Russia. This fits into the overall strategy of the Western, NATO powers to deprive their economic competitors of oil supply in the struggle to maintain global hegemony. This can also be seen further in the continued, debilitating attacks and sanctions aimed against the peoples of Iran, the Middle East as a whole, and Venezuela and Cuba.
In late May, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy issued a five-page, open letter to US President Donald Trump dated May 26, requesting that more missiles be supplied as soon as possible. As noted by the Ukrainian analytical Telegram channel Rubicon on May 30, “While arms deliveries were previously discussed rather privately, now everything is taking the form of public appeals of ‘Donald, help us, and fast!’.
Rubicon writes, “The goal of this move by Zelensky is not only to needle Trump’s pride but also to elegantly shift blame onto the White House for recent missile and drone strikes by Russia on military sites in and around the Ukrainian capital. Washington has been slow to condemn these attacks and slow to continue its supply of missiles to Ukraine’s armed forces.”
A former lawmaker from Zelensky’s party-machine, Alexander Dubinsky, wrote on Telegram May 31 that overall, Zelensky’s letter amounts to an ode to himself, as in: ‘I allow you to touch my greatness and become part of it by allocating more money and missiles.’
The US government did not respond publicly to Zelensky’s letter. The Ukrainian opposition Telegram channel Kartel comments on May 31, referencing the high-profile corruption scandal involving Zelensky’s friend who has since fled to “Israel”: “Let us recall that Zelenskyy’s friend Timur Mindich stole over $1 billion allocated for weapons production, as uncovered by NABU [National Anticorruption Bureau] investigations. So it’s no surprise that after exposures of such corruption, the Americans would choose to ignore Zelensky’s outburst.”
Zelensky’s letter also demands that the US grant licenses for the production of Patriot missiles in Ukraine. But the US military has been proven unwilling to share production of its known and tested military technologies. It has shown willingness to share new weapons systems, evidently as part of ‘testing’ programs.
The letter by Zelensky criticizes the slow pace of Patriot missile production in the US itself, adding that this could lead to crises in various other parts of the world. According to the letter, Ukraine-produced weaponry could help protect US allies in the Middle East. In other words, the man is proposing that the US also continue selling or supplying missiles and other weapons to “Israel” and the United Arab Emirates for use against Iran.
Despite Trump’s various, so-called peace initiatives to end the war in Ukraine, voiced for several years now, Victoria Fedosova, deputy director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasting at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, believes that Trump is merely proposing a high-profile display of negotiations between Moscow and Kiev that would lead nowhere. In the meantime, Washington continues to supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, some of which are being used against the civilian population of Russia. During the night of May 23 (Ukraine time), US-made Hornet drones struck a teacher college dormitory for women and girls in the town of Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic, which was annexed by Russia, killing 21 and wounding dozens more.
Despite all of Trump’s ostentatious rhetoric, there is no sign he intends to pressure Zelenskyy to end the proxy war against Russia. Moreover, Chinese media reported on June 2 that he has also asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to pressure the Russian president to end the war; that is, end Russia’s responses to the NATO proxy war on the West’s terms.
Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, has also stated that Washington will continue to find a way to help Ukraine ‘defend itself’ (code language for waging NATO’s proxy war). He made this remark at a meeting on Asian security issues in Singapore, according to Clash Report on Telegram on May 30. (Clash Report is an online news platform aligned with the views of the Turkish government.)
Hegseth also noted that the US continues to study and learn from Ukraine’s experience with the use of drones on the battlefield. He says it is vastly increasing its investments in this area. In other words, the continuation of the conflict in Ukraine benefits the US by serving as a laboratory to test new types of weapons and study the reactions by the Russian army, even though these often pose a threat to Ukrainians themselves.
As the Ukrainian Institute of Politics notes in this regard, Pete Hegset’s statements are particularly telling when viewed against the backdrop of earlier remarks by Donald Trump. In March of this year, following the escalation of the conflicts in West Asia, Trump claimed that the US had no need for Ukrainian expertise in the field of drones. However, “Judging by the current rhetoric of the U.S. Secretary of War, the situation has changed: Washington effectively recognizes the value of Ukrainian experience and is ready to scale it up in its own defense policy.
“This US approach fits directly into Trump’s business logic—war as a market where Washington ramps up production, sells weapons, and simultaneously strengthens its own technologies. In this model, Ukraine is already an asset that generates knowledge, tests technologies, and creates demand for the American defense industry,” writes the Ukrainian institute.
Ukrainian opposition blogger Myroslav Oleshko notes that Ukrainian drone dealer Oleksiy Babenko has openly stated on television that he wants the war to continue until 2030. He claims that drone manufacturers fear the onset of peace. Babenko heads Vyriy Industries, a company whose profits reach tens of millions of US dollars annually.
Ukrainian economist Oleksiy Kushch writes in a lengthy comment on Telegram on June 1 that until 2022, all military simulations were purely theoretical and flawed. Now, he writes, the interaction between satellite communications, AI-powered combat control systems, and massive deployments of ‘swarms’ of drones of all types (using machine vision) is being tested in real time. He emphasizes that Western military strategy was built on air superiority and expensive, high-precision weapons. The war in Ukraine has shown that a cheap FPV (First Person View) drone can destroy a costly, $10 million tank, while a relatively cheap missile can deplete expensive air defense reserves.
“The war in Ukraine is generating terabytes of unique data for AI projects. During the war, Ukraine has become the world’s largest ‘oil field’ of information for the global development of AI projects in the military industry,” writes the economist, emphasizing that it is now vital for Western, transnational corporations that this war continue.
Kushch goes on to argue that transnational corporations cannot give up physical oil in West Asia, but they also cannot give up virtual ‘oil’ in the form of information for the development of their AI projects. Therefore, major Western defense companies (Palantir, Rheinmetall, Shield AI) are currently seeking technological solutions and testing them in Ukraine, as they have no other ‘laboratory.’
“All such information must be translated into new NATO defense standards and then into new lines of weapons production. Ending the war now would freeze the Western defense industry at an intermediate stage of such development,” the economist believes.
Kushch believes that “the technological conclusion of the war is not possible before 2028–2030.” However, in his view, a political end to the war is possible if a political leadership in Ukraine were to decide to stop turning the country into a military laboratory.
American company Palantir, mentioned by Kushch, was behind the ‘brain’ controlling US-made or assisted drones, which killed the teenage girls and women at the aforementioned college in Starobelsk. The drones that were used were made in Ukraine, but Russian media reported on May 24 that pieces of Starlink satellite terminals were found among the wreckage. Starlink is the Elon Musk-owned satellite internet constellation used by Ukraine, with the approval of the Pentagon, to locate targets. Such atrocities can be expected to continue, because it is profitable for Western companies to test their technologies in live situations.
“Why doesn’t the conflict in Ukraine end? Because AI development companies are reaping superprofits and gaining the opportunity to advance technologically very quickly. Who would turn that down? They’re doing everything they can to keep the war going; they don’t care about people’s lives. Unfortunately, AI is increasingly playing the role of a human killer,” said Yuri Knutov, a Russian expert in air defense, on the Baltnews video news channel in late May.
One of the founders of Palantir, which has ties to “Israel”, is Peter Thiel, an uber-wealthy, far-right friend and ally of Trump. Artificial intelligence was also blamed for the US military strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, on February 28 at the outset of the current US-Israeli war against Iran. The strike killed over 160 civilians, most of them schoolgirls. Mariana Bezuhla, a Ukrainian legislator from Zelensky’s team, notes also that Palantir’s technology is being used by “Israel” to kill members of the Hezbollah defense forces in Lebanon.
Another Palantir co-founder, Alexander Karp, visited Ukraine in May. He subsequently stated that the Ukrainian Armed Forces use his company’s technology as an “operating system for war”.
Karp recently published a book in which he called for universal military conscription in the United States, and the militarization of Germany and Japan. He also claimed in the book that artificial intelligence could replace the factor of nuclear deterrence. Among his key ideas are a claimed need for the active involvement of the tech elite in strengthening national defense, and rejection of the policies of “equality of all cultures” and “empty pluralism”.
The Ukrainian publication Strana writes that Karp and Palantir as a whole represent a group of businesspeople whom their opponents have dubbed “techno-fascists”. Strana believes the practical implementation of their plans for ‘deterrence’ is highly doubtful, since the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons will always remain in place. “[Nuclear weapons deterrence] exists and nullifies any ideas of achieving (or maintaining) global dominance by military means, because if techno-fascist policy options create enormous threats to Russia and China, then the two countries will likely turn to nuclear weapons for sheer survival, threatening the Western powers with wars of mutual destruction,” writes Strana.
The publication emphasizes that the increase in U.S. military spending, as promoted by the likes of Palantir, along with the militarization of Japan and Germany amid rising public debt and low industrial competitiveness, will not serve as a stimulus for the Western economy. They will instead serve as its funeral march.
Furthermore, the cuts in social spending that are inevitably accompanying increases in military spending threaten to cause internal instability in Western countries. Social protests and riots will be suppressed using methods that are utterly inhumane, as was the case in the early 20th century, when live ammunition was routinely used to suppress strikes and other protests by working classes and other exploited social classes including peasants and farmers. Just as 20th-century classical fascism emerged as a reaction to political and social threats to Western capitalist and imperialist domination, so too will 21st-century ‘techno-fascism’ be a reaction to similar threats.
All that said, Ukrainian analysts at Strana believe the Western powers are not yet ready to shift into ‘war mode’ against their own populations—neither morally, nor politically, nor financially and economically. In this regard, many among the ruling classes in the West would like to see a normalization of relations with Russia, and this threatens Kiev with a loss of foreign support that could lead to defeat.
To prevent this, Strana writes, certain efforts are actively underway in Ukraine. These include deliberately provoking escalation of tensions in the relations between Europe and Russia, to the point of provoking a direct conflict that could escalate into a nuclear conflict. In other words, the goal of Zelensky and his lobbyists in the West is to provoke a global conflict—even if only to ensure their own survival while living in bunkers.
June 14, 2026
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | NATO, Ukraine, United States |
Comments Off on Ukraine as a laboratory of ‘techno-fascism’
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant:
When the Frankish armies breached Jerusalem in 1099, they imposed a martial culture utterly alien to the region. Accustomed to northern forests, the crusaders relied on heavy wool, salted provisions, and isolated stone keeps. To the local Muslim inhabitants, this was a stark contrast to a society built around sun-washed courtyards, communal public baths, and markets vibrant with fresh flatbreads, olives, and citrus. The invaders carved out the fragile states of Outremer, but beneath their rule, the region’s sophisticated urban rhythms, complete with organized hospitals and regulated water systems, quietly endured.
For much of the twelfth century, an uneasy coexistence defined the borderlands. The crusader hold was always tenuous, a reality first exposed in 1144 when Imad ad-Din Zengi reclaimed the County of Edessa, shattering the myth of Frankish invincibility. In the decades that followed, daily life became a complex tapestry of friction and exchange. Frankish knights governed from damp, drafty fortresses, yet they increasingly depended on local markets for sugar, glass, and silk. Truces allowed merchants to cross lines, but the cultural divide remained visible: while the crusader elite often struggled with Levantine heat and basic sanitation, local communities maintained their traditions of regular ablutions, scholarly study in madrasas, and shared, herb-rich meals.
The political tide turned decisively in 1187. At the Horns of Hattin, the fragmented crusader armies were outmaneuvered, leading to Salah ad-Din’s recapture of Jerusalem. For the local population, this was not merely a military victory, but a restoration of civic order. Mosques and “bimaristans” (hospitals) reopened, and the region’s administrative heartbeat resumed. Though the Third Crusade saw Richard the Lionheart besiege Acre, he could not retake the holy city. The ensuing century of negotiated truces only highlighted the resilience of local society, which continued to thrive on its established foundations of public hygiene and civic welfare.
By the mid-thirteenth century, the crusader presence was a relic waiting to be cleared. After the newly established Mamluk dynasty halted the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut in 1260, securing the region’s eastern flank, they turned their disciplined, centralized power toward the coastline. Sultan Baybars initiated a systematic dismantling of the crusader strongholds. Antioch fell in 1268, and the formidable fortress of Krak des Chevaliers surrendered in 1271. The contrast was laid bare: as crusader outposts decayed into isolated, supply-starved enclaves, Mamluk cities flourished, repairing irrigation canals and expanding vibrant, clean urban centers.
The end came methodically. In 1291, Mamluk forces besieged and captured Acre, the last major crusader capital, driving the remaining defenders into the sea. A final, tiny garrison clinging to the island of Arwad was swept away by the Mamluk navy in 1302, erasing the last physical foothold of the crusades.
The crusaders left behind crumbling, hollow castles, silent monuments to a foreign experiment. Yet, the echoes of that era have never truly faded. Today, the very same soil remains a stage for competing historical claims, where distant powers still invoke ancient rights and civilizational mandates to justify their presence.
In the West, 1291 is often romanticized as a tragedy of lost glory, recounted in medieval verse and modern films. But in the Levant, it is simply the day the northern barbarians were finally vanquished. For those who still walk these sun-washed streets, it remains a timeless cautionary tale of foreign invaders, resiliance and ultimate redemption.
June 14, 2026
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | Palestine, Zionism |
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