Russia’s energy export revenues forecast to soar
Samizdat | August 19, 2022
Russia will see a 38% year-on-year increase in energy earnings due to higher oil export volumes, coupled with rising natural gas prices, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing a document from the German Economy Ministry.
According to the report, the country’s revenues are expected to jump to $337.5 billion this year, which will help shore up the Russian economy in the face of Western sanctions.
The document predicted that energy export earnings will ease to $255.8 billion next year, but will still be higher than the 2021 figure of $244.2 billion.
According to the forecast, the average gas export price will more than double this year to $730 per thousand cubic meters, before gradually falling until the end of 2025.
The document pointed out that Moscow has started to gradually boost its oil production following the sanctions-related curbs and as a result of increased purchases by Asian buyers.
Moscow has also improved its forecasts for output and exports until the end of 2025.
Overall, the German Economy Ministry forecast cited by Reuters suggested that the Russian economy is coping well with the sanctions regime and will contract by less than expected.
Details of EU plan to revive Iranian nuclear deal leaked to media
Samizdat | August 19, 2022
A proposal the EU submitted at the Vienna talks to revive the Iranian nuclear deal would reportedly see an immediate lifting of sanctions on over 160 Iranian entities, including banks, in exchange for Tehran gradually scaling down its nuclear activities, Al Jazeera reported on Friday, citing “informed sources.”
The proposal that Brussels previously called “final” reportedly involves four stages and would take at least 120 days to be fully implemented, the media outlet said. The “first day” after its signing would see the lifting of sanctions on 17 Iranian banks and 150 other economic entities. Tehran, in turn, would also begin returning to its commitments under the agreement from day one and scale back its nuclear activities.
The implementation of this accord would also involve the release of $7 billion in Iranian funds that are currently frozen in South Korea, the report said.
During the 120-day period after the signing of the agreement, Iran will be allowed to export 50 million barrels of oil as part of a “verification mechanism,” Al Jazeera said, citing its sources. After that period, the Islamic Republic would be able to export 2.5 million barrels per day.
The proposal also includes an obligation for the US to pay a fine if it ever pulls out of the deal again, Al Jazeera said, without revealing the amount of any such penalty or where the money would go.
Iran submitted a written response to the proposal on Monday, without revealing its details. “There are three issues that if resolved, we can reach an agreement in the coming days,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said at the time. “We have shown enough flexibility… We do not want to reach a deal that after 40 days, two months or three months, fails to be materialized on the ground,” he added, warning that Tehran’s “red lines” should be respected.
Earlier, the US said the 2015 nuclear deal could be revived only if Iran drops its “extraneous” demands, which included an end to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) probe into unexplained uranium traces in Iran and the removal of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the American terrorism list.
Al Jazeera reported on Friday, citing a European official in Vienna, that Tehran is no longer seeking the removal of the organization from the list.
Last week, Politico reported that the EU had proposed watering down the US sanctions on the IRGC as part of efforts to revive the 2015 deal. The news outlet also said Washington was set “to make greater concessions than expected” to revive the deal.
According to Politico, the text of the proposal also said Washington and Brussels “take note of Iran’s intent” to address the issue of the IAEA probe by the time the agreement enters into force again.
The Iranian nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed in 2015 by Iran, the US, UK, France, and Germany, as well as Russia, China, and the EU. It involved Iran agreeing to certain restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for economic sanctions relief. In 2018, the US unilaterally withdrew from the deal under President Donald Trump. Talks to revive the deal have been taking place in Vienna for the past 16 months.
Israel ‘yields to Lebanon’s maritime demands’ as Hezbollah-set deadline approaches
Press TV – August 19, 2022
Israel has reportedly yielded to Lebanon’s full maritime demands over the disputed waters and gas fields, asking the Arab country for extra time to finalize a deal.
According to a report by Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar on August 19, the regime sent a message to Hezbollah through diplomatic channels, saying it accepts Lebanon’s full demands.
Israel has pledged to acknowledge that Line 23 and the Qana prospect field are in Lebanese territory while also pleading with Hezbollah to set aside potential plans to attack Israeli gas fields in case of a delayed deal, the report added.
Secretary General of Hezbollah Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has already rejected any delays in the case as Lebanon is going through dire economic conditions. “Time is short, and depending on the [Israeli] response, we will surely act,” he said in a speech during Ashura mourning procession.
Hezbollah had set a deadline for Lebanon to secure its rights over the disputed areas, which will expire on September 15.
Meanwhile, Israeli media reported an Israeli official is set to make a trip to the United States to discuss the dispute in the hopes of achieving an agreement.
According to Al-Akhbar, some firms have warned Israel they would withdraw their employees and facilities in case the regime fails to guarantee their safety.
Nasrallah had earlier said the Israeli regime would not be allowed to conduct drilling operations for oil and natural gas in the disputed area in the Mediterranean Sea until Lebanon gets what it deserves.
“Lebanon is facing a historic and golden opportunity to get out of its financial crisis. If we fail to take advantage of it, we would not be able to extract oil within the next 100 years. We are not looking for moral gains out of extraction in the Karish natural gas field. We rather want to tap into our oil reserves. There would, therefore, be no room for oil or gas extraction in the entire region if Lebanon does not get its right,” Nasrallah said at a local event in Beirut on July 19.
Lebanese politicians hope commercially viable hydrocarbon resources off Lebanon’s coast could help the debt-ridden country out of its worst economic crisis in decades.
In February 2018, Lebanon signed its first contract for drilling in two blocks in the Mediterranean with a consortium comprising energy giants Total, Eni, and Novatek.
Lebanon and Israel took part in indirect talks to discuss demarcation in 2020. But the talks stalled after Lebanon demanded a larger area, including part of the Karish gas field, where Israel has given exploration rights to a Greek firm.
The talks were supposed to discuss a Lebanese demand for 860 square kilometers (330 square miles) of territory in the disputed maritime area, according to a map sent to the United Nations in 2011. However, Lebanon then said the map was based on erroneous calculations and demanded 1,430 square kilometers (552 square miles) more further south, including part of Karish.
Venezuela Stops Oil Shipments To Europe As Alternatives To Russian Energy Dry Up
Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | August 19, 2022
The writing is on the wall for Europe in terms of this coming winter – It’s going to get ugly. With natural gas imports from Russia cut by 80% through Nord Stream 1 along with the majority of oil shipments, the EU is going to be scrambling for whatever fuel sources they can find to supply electricity and heating through the coming winter. Two sources that were originally suggested as alternatives were Iran and Venezuela.
Increased Iranian oil and gas exports to the west are highly dependent on the tentative nuclear deal, but as Goldman Sachs recently suggested, such a deal is unlikely anytime soon as deadlines on proposals have not been met and the Israeli government calls for negotiators to ‘walk away.’
Venezuela had restarted shipments to Europe after 2 years of US sanctions under a deal that allows them to trade oil for debt relief. However, the country’s government has now suspended those shipments, saying it is no longer interested in oil-for-debt deals and instead wants refined fuels from Italian and Spanish producers in exchange for crude.
This might seem like a backwards exchange but Venezuela’s own refineries are struggling to remain in operation because of lack of investment and lack of repairs. Refined fuels would help them to get back on their feet in terms of energy and industry. Some of Venezuela’s own heavy oil operations require imported diluents in order to continue. The EU says it currently has no plans to lift restrictions on the oil-for-debt arrangement, which means Europe has now lost yet another energy source.
Sanctions on Venezuela along with declining investments have strangled their oil industry, with overall production dropping by 38% this July compared to a year ago. Joe Biden’s initial moves to reopen talks with Maduro triggered inflated hopes that Venezuelan oil would flow once again and offset tight global markets and rising prices. Europe in particular will soon be desperate for energy alternatives, which will probably result in a scouring of markets this autumn to meet bare minimum requirements for heating.
If this occurs and no regular sources of energy can be found to fill the void left by Russian sanctions, prices will rise precipitously in the EU. Not only that, but with European countries buying up energy supplies wherever they can find them, available sources will also shrink for every other nation including the US. Get ready for oil and energy prices to spike once again as winter’s chill returns.
Russian gas transit to EU via Nord Stream to be halted – Gazprom
Samizdat | August 19, 2022
Russian energy giant Gazprom announced on Friday that transit of natural gas to the European Union via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will be halted from August 31 to September 2 for maintenance.
“On August 31, the only working Trent 60 gas compressor unit will be shut down for three days for maintenance,” the company stated, noting that all repairs will be carried out jointly with specialists from the German manufacturer, Siemens.
Gazprom added that “Upon completion of work and the absence of technical malfunctions of the unit, gas transportation will be restored to the level of 33 million cubic meters per day,” representing roughly 20% of the pipeline’s full capacity.
The unit is the last one of the pipeline’s six turbines that was operational, with the rest in need of an overhaul. One of the turbines is currently stranded in Germany due to sanctions, after returning from repair works in Canada.
Russian gas supplies to the EU via Nord Stream 1 dropped to 20% of the maximum level last month. According to Gazprom, five turbines need to be operating to pump gas at full capacity.
European gas prices spiked after Friday’s announcement, jumping 7% to above $2,600 per thousand cubic meters.
US on verge of becoming party to Ukrainian conflict, Moscow warns
Samizdat | August 19, 2022
Washington’s continued support for Kiev during Moscow’s military operation has put the US on the verge of becoming party to the Ukrainian conflict, Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov has said.
“We don’t want escalation. We’d like to avoid a situation, in which the US becomes a party to the conflict, but so far we don’t see any readiness of the other side to take these warnings seriously,” Ryabkov told Rossiya 1 TV channel on Friday.
Moscow rejects Washington’s explanation, that providing Ukraine with weapons and other aid is justified by Kiev’s right to self-defense, he pointed out.
“Excuse me, what kind of self-defense is it if they are already openly talking about the possibility of attacking targets deep in the Russian territory, in Crimea?” the deputy FM wondered.
According to Ryabkov, such statements are being made by the Ukrainian side “not just under the blind eye of the US and NATO, but with the encouragement of this kind of sentiment, approaches, plans and ideas directly from Washington,” Ryabkov insisted.
“The ever more obvious and deeper involvement in Ukraine in terms of countering our military operation, in fact, puts this country, the US, on the verge of turning into a party to the conflict,” he reiterated.
The US has been the strongest supporter of Kiev amid its conflict with Russia, providing Kiev with billions of dollars in military and financial aid, as well as intelligence data. Washington’s deliveries to the Ukrainian military have included such sophisticated hardware as HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, M777 howitzers and combat drones.
Reuters reported on Friday that US President Joe Biden is about to announce another lethal aid package for Kiev of around $800 million.
An unnamed official from the Biden administration told Politico on Thursday that the White House had no problem with Ukraine attacking Crimea, which became part of Russia after a 2014 referendum staged in response to a violent coup. The US believes that Kiev can strike any target on its territory, and “Crimea is Ukraine,” the American official insisted.
There have recently been a number of explosions near a Russian ammunition depot and at a military airfield in Crimea, which the Defense Ministry said were acts of “sabotage.” However, Ukrainian authorities haven’t officially confirmed involvement in the attacks.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
Climate change is not making children obese
BY MARY HARRINGTON | UNHERD | AUGUST 15, 2022
If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you’re a media ecosystem with a fixation on hammers, you will do your best to make anything look like a nail.
This is the inescapable conclusion from the reporting around a recent study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Temperature, which looked at the relationship between climate change and children’s fitness — and reported the findings entirely backwards to fit a pre-existing political narrative.
The study pointed out that children’s aerobic physical fitness is 30% lower than that of their parents at the same age, arguing that this is a problem because aerobic physical fitness is vital for tolerating higher temperatures. This in turn means that where climate change is causing temperatures to increase, obese individuals will find it harder to cope.
This is sensible stuff — but the study was reported as stating that climate change had caused reduced fitness in children. The study itself pointed to Covid lockdown measures, among many other factors, as having exacerbated an already-existing issue of poor fitness in children. But headlines suggested children are staying indoors because it’s too hot and that this is why they’re less fit than their parents.
You don’t have to be a scientist to know that reduced aerobic fitness in this generation of children long precedes measurably rising outdoor temperatures of the kind that could be attributed to climate change. Here’s a report from 2013 on the topic, for example, that describes aerobic fitness in children decreasing every decade from 1975 onward.
Nor do you have to be a scientist to come up with multiple factors that are plausibly contributing to this unhappy situation. Anyone with young children, or just rudimentary powers of observation, needs only a moment’s reflection to think of multiple ways in which 21st-century life militates against physically active childhood, compared to the world just a few decades ago. But we mustn’t let minor considerations like the patent absurdity of a claim, or its rampant misreading of an actual scientific paper, get in the way of a clickbait mass-media narrative on a much-hyped topic.
A sensible paper discussing the importance of physical fitness in ensuring resilience in the face of changing climate has been reported entirely backwards. Obesity, discussed as a cause of difficulty in adapting to climate change, is reported as the effect of climate change itself, while ignoring politically inconvenient factors cited in the paper itself as contributing to poor fitness.
But this is only an especially egregious example of how even supposedly respectable media can’t be relied on to read even the abstract of a research paper, before editorialising on it in terms that align with established political narratives. And arguably whether or not such specious editorialising qualifies as “misinformation” mostly depends on your political priors.
Given this, the now-widespread cynicism that increasingly greets “expert” opinion in the press is perhaps understandable. It’s all very well saying “follow the science” – but the average Joe may be forgiven for concluding that “the science” is not so much a reliable source of truth as a pick n’mix array of talking-points for a pre-determined political agenda.
White House “Climate Adviser” Banned from the National Academy of Science for Science Fraud
… while White House Officials Beg Social Media to Silence Opponents
By Igor Chudov | August 18, 2022
Climate change is a very important topic! According to Bill Gates-sponsored scientist Kari Nadeau, climate change is responsible for the recent rise in heart attacks, stillbirths, and cardiovascular disease, especially in children. So, knowing how important climate change is, I am paying attention to news about it, though with lesser intensity than I devote to Covid news.
Finally, we have a great climate change story! White House “climate official” Jane Lubchenco was just banned by the National Academy of Science (archive link) for science fraud. She was an editor of a paper written by her brother-in-law. Jane did not disclose this family relationship and promoted her brother-in-law’s article. The article itself contained false data that was known to be out of date at the time the article was written, and thus the paper was fraudulent.
Jane is now not allowed to participate in many scientific activities due to violating ethics rules meant to prevent fraud in science.
What is the White House’s biggest priority right now, when it comes to climate change? Perhaps it is cleaning up the place and making sure that we have honest science? Not really. The priority is demanding that major social networks silence climate change skeptics. Watch this video at 11:10:
The White House adviser says in the interview:
And frankly, the tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.
I am not a big climate change skeptic — I do not care about climate change all that much right now — but coincidentally, Twitter recently suspended my dog’s account for 7 days.
So, I am not allowed to spread misinformation. The White House, on the other hand, has climate change advisors who perpetrate scientific fraud.
On a more serious note, my dog’s Twitter account was not alone and was suspended among hundreds of others last week, ostensibly for antivax misinformation. Why is this happening now? Why the urgency? It certainly is NOT about helping to vaccinate the public, as COVID vaccine uptake is at historic lows and everyone made up their mind already. Censorship would not help much with vaccination! Why, then, is it intensifying?
My own guess is that these suspensions are not so much related to Covid, but are happening due to the fact that the White House and the woke social networks are preparing for the November elections and want to silence dissent in advance. Why?
- to influence the election, and
- to prevent people from questioning election conduct and fairness afterward
They — the White House, Twitter, Facebook and Google — know that they will have to face very uncomfortable questions about their role in forcing the so-called “Covid vaccine” onto young people, as they “own” the outcome of this. They want to postpone that moment of reckoning and thus are deleting as many dissenting voices as they can.
The CDC Failed, So Spin It Off and Make It More Powerful?
BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | AUGUST 17, 2022
The failure of the CDC to manage Covid-19 was baked in from the first moments of its response. A government agency was never going to mitigate much less get rid of this sort of pathogen. This is because the virus never cared a whit about prestige degrees, job descriptions, big budgets, high-end connections, media agitprop, or polls. It went on its merry way, hit everyone, and immune systems adapted as they always have done.
The great experiment was an enormous flop.
The costs of the experiment we know: it is the catastrophe that Donald Henderson predicted it would be in 2006.
Thus does it make sense that the present overlords of the agency have admitted at least partially to have made some errors. The question is what were these errors. From the latest news concerning some impending shakeup, I see no evidence of any serious rethinking of the crazed and cockamamie lockdown orders it issued from March 2020 onward. Not even preposterous mandates like plexiglass at retail counters, two years of school closures, “six feet of distance,” one-way grocery aisles, band members in bubbles, mask mandates, and limits on how many people you can have in your home have prompted remorse.
Instead, every indication is that the CDC believes the real problem was that it did not have a high-enough budget and enough power. Plenty of lawmakers are willing to go along – not that anyone is asking them. Therefore, its tremendous pandemic powers need to be tweaked and invested mainly in a division known as the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, or ASPR.
Says The Washington Post :
The Biden administration is reorganizing the federal health department [HHS] to create an independent division that would lead the nation’s pandemic response, amid frustrations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Joy!
The new head of this high-level division (same level as FDA/CDC) is Dawn O’Connell who has a background in literature (Vanderbilt) and law (Tulane), not science or medicine. She is a political appointee who took the reins as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response, as confirmed by the Senate in 2021. She is now elated to report that her division will be elevated to become just as important as the CDC and the FDA.
Here is her memo to the staff:
ASPR Team:
As you know firsthand, ASPR is at the forefront of many of HHS’s and the Biden-Harris Administration’s top priorities. Whether your work involves strengthening our core preparedness and response capabilities, tackling new and emerging challenges, or providing essential support services to the team, please know that the work that you do matters and that it is making a big difference.
In recognition of the tremendous value this team brings to the Department and the American people – and due to the increasing size and scope of what we do – I asked Secretary Becerra to consider making us an Operating Division and I am pleased to report that Secretary Becerra has made the critically important decision to elevate our team from a Staff Division to an Operating Division (OpDiv)!
This change allows ASPR to mobilize a coordinated national response more quickly and stably during future disasters and emergencies while equipping us with greater hiring and contracting capabilities. As an OpDiv, we are now in the same category as other large HHS teams with core operational responsibilities such as CDC, NIH, FDA, CMS, and ACF. This change is an important next step for our organization which has continued to grow and evolve since its creation in 2006 – the pace of which has quickened over the past year. This change is also a recognition of the good work you all have been and continue to do on behalf of the American People…
Along with this reclassification, moving forward we will be known as the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR). The adjustment to our name signals our elevation to an OpDiv, while maintaining the equity and brand recognition we have built with key internal and external stakeholders, particularly over the course of the pandemic.
Thus must we ask: what the heck is going on here? The Biden administration has no idea. Indeed the Washington Post reports that “some senior Biden administration officials said they were unaware of the plan to reorganize the department, which was approved by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and has been held close by his deputies.”
This point is crucial. This is how the administrative state works. It cares nothing for the elected officials who come and go. It moves on its own, fueled by money baked into the budgets and with power hardly anyone dares to challenge. There is never any accountability. There is only one path forward: more power. Elections be damned.
The most important part of the memo here is the idea of mobilizing a “coordinated national response.” It drove these people utterly bonkers that during the pandemic, several states went their own way. South Dakota never shut down. Georgia opened a month after the shutdowns. Florida and Texas were next. Finally all the states with Republican governors opened while most states with Democratic governors remained closed to some degree.
The empirical results are incredibly obvious. The open states performed as well and often better on disease demographics. Meanwhile their economies did not suffer nearly as much. The kids stayed in school. The churches functioned. There were live musical performances. The museums, libraries, and playgrounds opened. People are less traumatized.
The migration of people from blue to red tells the whole story. Masses of people fled the lockdown states for the open states.
A “coordinated national response” would make such federalist solutions impossible. Forget the 9th and 10th Amendments. These agencies and these people care nothing for them, nor actual science which would encourage a plethora of experiments in the management of a pathogen. These bureaucrats in Washington think they have all the answers, and they demand complete compliance.
Meanwhile, the CDC itself is being reorganized. But don’t be fooled by any appearance of contrition. They still have a legal appeal in process that would put a mask back on your face when traveling. The new agency to which some of its pandemic responsibilities will be transferred will have a 1,000-person staff to start, people paid the big bucks to sit around coming up with new ways to whip up disease panic and start another crackdown.
A better solution would be to abolish the CDC. States can handle all its responsibilities. It did not even exist until 1947. Its purpose was mosquito control, spraying a now-banned chemical (DDT) everywhere. These days we handle that by going to Home Depot.
The CDC as an agency grew out of the 1944 Public Health Services Act that permitted nationally ordered quarantines for the first time. The legislative history of that thing remains a mystery to me. Regardless, it is nowhere justified in the US Constitution. This act needs to go too. So too all the federal agencies to which it gave rise. This is the only real solution.
Certainly creating a new agency is not the answer. And note that ASPR has its roots in 2006 as an outgrowth of the Bush administration’s obsessive panic over bioterrorism. It was also the first year that anyone imagined that lockdowns could be an appropriate path for any free society. It was the year that “social distancing” was invented by a cabal of computer scientists with zero experience in infectious disease.
These fanatics need to be out of power completely, and the regulations, laws, and agencies that enabled them to ruin the country and its freedoms must be ended. This is what any responsive government in a modern society would do. It would see failure and call it and then do something about it. It certainly would not go in this new direction and reward the disease planners with more power and money!
We must learn real lessons and act on them.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
CDC’s Ludicrous Makeover
BY HARVEY RISCH | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | AUGUST 18, 2022
CDC announced that the institutes have done an external/self-study and proposed a makeover “to restore public trust.” Dr. Walensky said that she “plans to remake the culture to help the agency move faster when it responds to a public health crisis. She also wants to make it easier for other parts of the government to work with the CDC, and wants to simplify and streamline the website to get rid of overlapping and contradictory public health guidance.”
The CDC’s announcement covers everything except the fundamental problem to which the director and the external reviewer are blind: industry subservience and epidemiologic incompetence.
CDC has published numbers of fatally flawed study reports over the last two years in MMWR, its captive journal. No amounts of “moving faster” will fix this problem. It took CDC two years to figure out that the vaccines are not an effective public health tool for reducing infection spread, something that I and numerous colleagues have been saying for more than a year.
CDC has still not recognized that for Covid, masks are useless, that distancing is useless, that general population testing is virtually useless for managing the population pandemic.
That the CDC has reviewed itself and only found trivialities and not the systematic problems that caused it to produce repeatedly failing policies shows that this review exercise was only window dressing. It was not a serious review.
The CDC needs a completely different independent external review to understand how it as a public health agency with MD and PhD epidemiologists could get so much science wrong for so long. The current makeover plans are ludicrous, will fool no one, and will not restore any of the large amount of public trust that has been lost by its poor performance over the last 2.5 years.
Harvey Risch is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Risch received his MD degree from the University of California San Diego and PhD from the University of Chicago. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the University of Washington, Dr. Risch was a faculty member in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Toronto before coming to Yale.
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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- Sunset on the Quality of Western Propaganda: Arrival of the Dr Strangelove Moment
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- US-‘Israel’ alliance faces growing rupture after midterms
- If Americans Knew
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- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
