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“Settled Science”

By Sama Hoole | August 15, 2026

If you had trusted the settled science of the day, here is how it would have gone.

1890s: you dose the baby with Bayer’s new cough syrup, the non-addictive alternative to morphine, marketed for children. It was heroin. They named it after the German for heroic.

1900s: you rub calomel teething powder on your infant’s gums. It is a mercury compound, and it leaves a generation with pink disease. Swollen, peeling hands and feet, screaming for months, and some of them died.

1910s: you cook in Crisco, launched by a soap and candle company, because cottonseed oil is modern and lard is what your mother used. The process that made it solid produced trans fat, banned outright a century later.

1920s: you drink Radithor, certified radioactive water, on prescription. Eben Byers took fourteen hundred bottles for his vitality. His jaw was removed in pieces and he was buried in a lead coffin.

1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing.

1940s: your doctor lights a Camel in the surgery. More doctors smoke them than any other brand, and the advert runs in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which sold him the page.

1950s: DDT is sprayed over your kitchen, your garden and your children at school. The man who found its insecticidal properties has already been given a Nobel Prize.

1960s: your wife takes thalidomide for morning sickness because it is remarkably safe. More than ten thousand children are born with missing and shortened limbs.

1970s: the country puts down the butter and picks up the margarine, on the instruction of the American Heart Association. The fat everybody switched to was banned in 2015 as unsafe at any level.

1980s: the fat comes out of everything and sugar goes back in to make it edible. Obesity begins a climb it has never come off.

1990s: your father is prescribed OxyContin, because fewer than one per cent get addicted. The company later pleads guilty to criminal misbranding, and the overdose count runs into hundreds of thousands.

2000s: you take Vioxx for your knee. It is pulled in 2004, and the FDA’s own safety officer estimates tens of thousands of excess heart attacks.

Not one of those was fringe. Every one had a professional body, a literature and a man in a white coat standing behind it.

Nobody who followed that advice was stupid. They were obedient, to the most qualified people available.

Settled is a word about money. It means the questions stopped being funded, so they stopped being asked.

So which of today’s instructions will your grandchildren read out in disbelief.

The oil washed in hexane and built into every cell you own. The statin that blocks the pathway making your hormones, to prevent one heart attack per hundred people. The injection where a third of the loss is muscle. The infant formula built out of vegetable oil.

All settled. None of it funded to be otherwise.

August 18, 2026 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Comments Off on “Settled Science”

The Colombian factor in South America

The Latin American left has spent the last few years investing in an image of Colombia that does not correspond to the country’s historical reality

By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 16, 2026

In Colombia, the newly elected president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has initiated a strong rapprochement with the State of Israel. Relations that had been strained during the government of Gustavo Petro have not only been fully restored but have also deepened substantially – with the new Colombian government even recognizing Israeli “sovereignty” over the Golan Heights, a Syrian region illegally occupied by the Zionists.

The move was met with shock among South American left-wing circles, particularly in Brazil, where Colombia’s historical image as Washington’s main regional asset in South America appears to have been completely “whitewashed” by the years of Petro’s government. It is curious to see how short collective memory is in Ibero-America and how political debate in general is shaped by the emotions of momentary agendas – and how this childish mentality has repercussions even at the highest institutional levels.

Although Espriella’s measures shocked Petro’s supporters across the continent, there is really nothing surprising about what happened – except for the infamous detail that the decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights came amid the emergency caused by a devastating earthquake. Colombia has always been the gateway for U.S. imperialism into South America.

Since the days of the Korean War – in which Colombia participated by sending a large contingent of troops – Bogotá has served as the United States’ offensive outpost in the region. Colombia is home not only to U.S. military bases, but also to biolaboratories, intelligence centers, narco-trafficking militias, and private military companies (PMCs) armed by the United States.

Most of the U.S. offensive infrastructure in South America is concentrated in Colombia. It was from Colombian territory that U.S.-armed mercenaries invaded Venezuela in 2020 during the failed “Operation Gideon,” whose objective was to overthrow then-President Nicolás Maduro through an asymmetric warfare campaign.

Going further back historically, between the late 1990s and early 2000s, the United States and Colombia consolidated total security and defense integration through the so-called “Plan Colombia” – the U.S. policy of sending security personnel to the South American country supposedly to “combat drug trafficking” and illegal guerrilla groups. Colombia subsequently internalized the entire U.S. security apparatus, from the CIA to the armed forces and PMCs.

If there is one country in South America capable of functioning as a military pivot for U.S. interests in the region, that country has always been Colombia. This has always been clear to any political analyst – or simply to any serious observer. Apart from Brazil itself – which has historically functioned as a “watchdog” for Washington while retaining a certain degree of autonomy – Colombia is the only country in South America truly capable of carrying out any U.S. military plan.

However, acting in an emotional manner, the left across the continent simply forgot all of this. Petro became a “revolutionary” icon because of his policies appealing to the left, particularly because of his performative response to the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. Petro severed diplomatic relations between Colombia and Israel and strongly condemned the actions of the Zionist state in international forums. But that was where it ended. Petro did nothing beyond diplomatic theater, nothing to structurally alter Colombia’s historical ties with the United States.

Not only that, Petro himself had previously maintained – during the presidential campaign that brought him to power – strongly pro-Western rhetoric, even going so far as to advocate NATO participation in the creation of an “environmentalist” military force to protect the Amazon from problems such as wildfires and deforestation. Petro, like the continent’s entire liberal left, was completely aligned with the agendas of the Democrats and the European Union, with disagreements emerging only in relation to Donald Trump and the State of Israel.

Unfortunately, much of the left-wing political establishment across the Americas seems to act solely on the basis of fleeting political trends and emotions, without paying attention to the deeper historical and geographical context. In recent times, there has been an information-terror campaign about a supposed “danger” to the region posed by Argentina (an economically fragmented country) and Paraguay (a tiny country with no significant military relevance), simply because the current governments of these countries have adopted a more explicitly pro-U.S. and pro-Israel stance. Meanwhile, Colombia was ignored because it was regarded as an “ally” on account of Petro.

Now Petro is out of the picture. And Colombia is returning to what it has always been: the U.S. offensive base in South America. Reality is returning with full force, to the despair of activists who childishly insist on believing in the liberal democratic game.

August 18, 2026 Posted by | Environmentalism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Colombian factor in South America

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