For more than a decade it’s become expected for books peddling the “China threat” to pop up as best sellers. From Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World (2009) to Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon (2015), the best response has been to just shrug and move on. Talk in serious policy circles and major media were still primarily focused on Beijing’s integration into the “liberal world order” as a “responsible stakeholder,” and of the gains in trade made (and still to be made) in exchange between the United States and China.
The transformation of China from global partner to enemy number one seemed to happen, in Hemingway’s words, gradually, then suddenly. Indeed, despite Donald Trump’s early bellicosity when it came to China, the corporate press didn’t immediately play along with the China threat narrative. Rather, they proclaimed the folly of his trade war and seemed to revel in reporting the losses it was inflicting on American farmers, whose exports to China had been interrupted as a result of retaliatory tariffs.
But in the background the slow, ominous drip of the China threat narrative continued with Graham Allison’s Destined For War (2017). Then, in quick succession, Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept (2019) by Robert Spalding, Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy (2019) by Bill Gertz, Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America (2020) by Qiao Liang, Has China Won? (2020) by Kishore Mahbubani, The Long Game: China’s Strategy to Displace American Order (2021) by Rush Doshi, The World According to China (2021) by Elizabeth Economy, War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination (2022) by Robert Spalding, No Limits; the Inside Story of China’s War with the West (2022) by Andrew Small, and Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (2022) by Erich Schwartzel.
It was as though even before the COVID pandemic—which exacerbated already strained relations between the United States and China—the movement was underway to translate for the public the policies pursued through multiple U.S. administrations aimed at containing China. It suddenly became normal to pick up one of the so-called “papers of record,” corporate media giants like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or Washinton Post and encounter a headline about China presented as ominous or threatening. Indeed, by the time Hal Brands and Michael Beckley’s Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China (2022) hit bookshelves last August, entire opinion pages of the major papers sounded like talking points from the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS), or the 2018 special report from the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) which all painted China as a direct threat to vital U.S. interests, and one that needed to be vigorously countered and contained militarily, geopolitically, economically, ideologically, and technologically.
While many of the books mentioned above are written in the breathless, alarmed manner of their earliest forerunner, the eponymous China Threat (2000) by Bill Gertz, there have been some notable exceptions which have sought and obtained some measure of balance even when they could not completely escape the China threat paradigm. Kevin Rudd’s The Avoidable War (2022) and James Fok’s Financial Cold War (2021) both do a reasonable job presenting the facts, perspectives of both Washington and Beijing on key issues, and have as their aim deescalating the growing crisis that is the present state and trajectory of U.S.-China relations.
Tellingly, outright dissenters, those that questioned any part of the ascendent China narrative, were few. Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is In Jeopardy (2018) by George Magnus and Thomas Orlik’s China: The Bubble That Never Pops (2020) both deserve credit for seeing through to the true mess that is China’s economy. Though their critiques of the China threat narrative are incomplete, and scarcely touch on the demographic, environmental, and geostrategic mountains confronting Beijing, China’s economy is central to everything else (the one-party CCP dictatorship included) and an expansion of their critiques is all one needs to cast the prospect of a future “Chinese Century” into serious doubt.
And it is here that a point needs to be clearly parsed. There is a significant difference between China ruling the world in a manner like the United States has for the past three decades, and Beijing enjoying preponderance in its immediate environs and proportional heft for its relative weight where its interests are concerned around the globe. For while it is increasingly unlikely that China’s economy will ever surpass that of the United States—either in total or per capita output—or that it will ever have the military reach enjoyed by Washington, Beijing has grown powerful enough relatively that it can assert and more or less get what it wants in its immediate environs. Trivial, obvious, or realistic though that may seem to the objective observer, to Washington this fact constitutes the whole of the China threat. The existence of an independent China (or Russia, for that matter) is a threat to Washington’s accustomed ability to do more or less whatever it wants wherever it wants. However, the existence of an independent China is already a fact and continued refusal on the part of Washington to accept it will cause more than theoretical problems.
I did not imagine or intend, when I started graduate school several years ago, that any serious amount of my time would be spent reading Chinese history, learning Mandarin, or studying the specifics of the Maoist interpretation of the Marxist dialectic. As a political scientist, economist, and historian with an interest in the emergence of different political and economic structures in Europe from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, my initial diversion into Sino-American relations, both past and present, came as something of an annoyance.
Writing at the Mises Institute, I’ve done my best to push back against this fake China threat narrative. It’s become clear, however, that a more comprehensive case needs to be made against the ludicrous idea that China is on the cusp of taking over the world. Alas, public fear has been continually stoked and the China threat narrative is worse than ever—hence, The (fake) China Threat (and its very real danger) has taken on book-length form and will be published by the Libertarian Institute in 2023. In the meantime, I will do my bi-weekly best to pour cold water on whatever the latest hawkish nonsense from DC towards China happens to be, as well as inform and contextualize for readers what is going on in China and the wider Indo-Pacific. While I cannot promise readers will always like what I have to say, with no conflicts of interest to declare they can at least be rest assured that I have no reason whatsoever to lie to them—which is (tragically) more than can be said for practically anyone anywhere else.
Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist with degrees from Spring Arbor University and the University of Illinois, and is currently a graduate student in the economics department at the University of Missouri. An independent researcher and journalist, his work can be found at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Eurasian Review, Libertarian Institute, Journal of the American Revolution, Antiwar.com, and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. You can contact him through his website http://www.jsmwritings.com or find him on Twitter @solis_mullen
May 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | China, United States |
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Last November Philip Zelikow and “the Covid Crisis Group” published a 352 page book, Lessons from a Covid War, An Investigative Report. The book went on sale April 23, 2023 and was launched April 24 in a five hour presentation at the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, DC. The launch of the book has lately gotten attention in the news. By its emphasis on war, the book inadvertently confirms recent evidence uncovered by Sasha Latypova snd Katherine Watt that the Covid psy-op was not a supposed public health emergency but a type of 5th generation warfare carried out by the US Department of Defense against US citizens, and much of the rest of the world, in collusion with many other governments.
Who is Philip Zelikow? He was the director of the so-called 9-11 Commission appointed by the G.W. Bush Administration in 2002. He was the editor of the resulting 9-11 Commission Report. He was and still is a University of Virginia history professor said to specialize in public myths and the effect of “catastrophic terrorism” in making abrupt changes in of the course of human history. As we know, both myth and terror were in full play in the 9-11 and the covid operations. Zelikow was among the neocons of the Project for a New American Century which said in its “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” September 2000, that it would take “a new Pearl Harbor” to motivate the American public to support the militarily aggressive US global hegemony that the Project called for. Exactly a year later, 9-11 provided the neocon-controlled US government with a pretext for just such aggression against a list of Arab and Muslim countries that did not threaten US hegemony, but did happened to be enemies of the state of Israel, which the neocons happen to adamantly support. So many coincidences!
Twenty years later, Zelikow was called in for another coverup, this time unofficially. Under Zelikow’s guidance 9-11 was painted as a series of tragic failures by the US government, the Pentagon, NORAD, and US intelligence agencies to either predict or prevent the hijacking of four passenger airliners by 19 nefarious hijackers. Using the same formula again, Zelikow assembled a group of 34 academic, medical, and government apologists — the “Covid Crisis Group” — to write the authoritative report on the US handling of the “Covid 19 pandemic.” Once again. the entire US government was totally blindsided. It was found woefully inept, incompetent, and completely unprepared to deal with this terrible out-of-nowhere attack.
Zelikow and his hand-picked authors leave no stone unturned in pointing out the failures of almost all the measures a helpless Uncle Sam took to deal with the “pandemic.” The problems listed by Zelikow’s mainstream mouthpieces were: “operational challenges,” lack of preparedness, “policy failures,” ignorance of the source of SARS CoV-2, the failure of Trump’s leadership in “Operation Warp Speed,” a ”fragmented health care system,” and “poor communication” which led to poor “vaccine uptake” and a failure to prevent people being led astray by “misinformation.” The solution offered by the Crisis Group: organize from the top down, globally, with a single authority, for the next predicted “pandemic,” much like what we’re hearing from the World Heath Organization. This is not new thinking. It’s a copy and paste of the globalist agenda.
The strategy for covering up an attack by the US government on US citizens is to make it look like the government was a victim of the attack, not the perpetrator. That lie is facilitated by what sounds like a tough critique of government incompetence, crafted by the same people who were involved in the crime. This is like letting a murderer off the hook by hearing nothing but his apology for serious and reprehensible failures in stopping the murder, and forgetting that he committed the murder.
Of course, Zelikow’s exhaustive report passed over the pre-planning, the trail of predictive pharma patents, the economic devastation, the gigantic upward transfer of wealth, the government corruption, the psychological harm, the extensive injury to human health, the thousands of deaths caused by the US “response” to C-19 — all of it deliberate. The report starts with the premise that a never-before-seen virus attacked us all at once and nobody knew what to do about it. This is more or less how Zelikow and his previous stable of authors said 9-11 happened: our innocent nation was attacked from out of the blue; we were caught totally unaware. It is interesting to see how the public myth and the “catastrophic event” intertwine. Zelikow is not just an academic observing that catastrophic terror changes history. He is an advisor to people who want to change history by creating catastrophic terror. He almost certainly advises on how to do it. Not only has he nicely tied his two academic theses together, he has won handsome rewards and respectability, AND completed the major deception of being the one to write the official history of the operations his handlers planned. Zelikow is the consummate insider. Had he not appeared with this coverup masquerading as an earnest critique, we might have missed seeing that the neocons had to be involved in the covid operation just as they were in 9-11. The Project for a New American Century was not a plan for a robust American empire. Just the opposite. It was a plan to use the US and its people as pawns in what was really the Project for a New World Order. America’s contribution to that was to let itself be robbed physically, morally, and spiritually by a parasite class whose goals for control of the world can’t even be understood as human. Indeed, transhumanism is a stated goal of these people.
Zelikow has tipped his hat with this monstrosity of establishment lies. He has announced that he is involved, despite no one asking, and we can infer from this that the neocons were also involved. “The wicked run when no one is chasing them,” says the proverb. With all the power the neocons wield, most notable today in the Nuland- and Blinken-led attack on Russia, the neocons must of course be connected with the would-be masters at Davos. How clever this clique must think they are to have fooled the whole world. With such arrogance, how hard the fall.
April 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, United States |
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Last week in the New York Times, Harvard University Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. quoted from Carter G. Woodson, the scholar who founded Black History Month: “Starting after the Civil War,’ Woodson wrote, ‘the opponents of freedom and social Justice decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind… It was well understood that…by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority…”
Gates proceeded to quote from Rev. Dr. King; “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” Prof. Gates commented, “Addressing these ‘ravages’…can only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological spectrum…”
We enthusiastically agree with these sentiments which, to tell the truth, are in certain respects mainly that—only sentiments. Being in the trenches of the censorship wars requires a willingness to radically displease contemporary white supremacist powers, who are no longer confined to KKK Grand Dragons, Exalted Cyclops and other easy contemporary targets.
It was four years ago this February, in the midst of Black History Month 2019, that billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Amazon colossus waved a giant middle finger at black history by removing and henceforth banning the sale of a trilogy written by a team of black historians.
How could this outrageous censorship have occurred without public protest, rallies, boycotts, seminars, an op-ed in the New York Times and sundry discussions and debates on network and cable television? None of that occurred because the forces of white supremacy arrayed against it were too powerful.
Mr. Bezos’ house organ, the “progressive” Washington Post, was as quiet as a democracy mouse in darkness, along with all of the corporate media. One glance at the titles of this trilogy may tell you why: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, volumes I-III.
The study which the black scholars undertake in these volumes is the authentic history of the role of Judaic enslavers of black people in the New World, in addition to apostate Christians who perpetrated these crimes. They present the facts dispassionately. The books are free of rancor and invective.
“The Truth Hurts”
One of the conservative movement’s most distinguished white scholars privately published a collection of essays several years ago in which he surveyed a wide range of controversial historical issues, including the participation of some Judaic people in the slave trade in America. This conservative author wrote:
“Such was the extent of my knowledge—disturbing as it was – of one of the carefully hidden pivot points of… politics in America. What was my surprise, in the early 1990s, to learn that I ‘didn’t know the half of it.’ That was when Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam published its astounding study, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, laying bare in awesome detail the long buried story of Jews in the African slave trade. The unnamed but clearly astute authors note that they have chosen ‘to present evidence from ‘the most respected of the Jewish authorities’… in order to explore the proposition that ‘Jews have been conclusively linked to… the Black African Holocaust….’
“(I)t needs a little more than a cursory glance at The Secret Relationship volume one to see that its vast array of meticulous documentation does present a devastating testament to racial exploitation…on a staggering scale…The study is based on a huge number of scholarly sources, predominantly by top-flight Jewish authors. There are 76 books and 18 learned articles in the selected bibliography of volume one alone, with many more which I have not counted in the 1,275 footnotes. Most of those notes contain multiple references and enough supplementary material to duplicate a substantial portion of the text. In short, this is a formidable work of scholarship of a ‘classic’ style, not often seen these days. The tone is unfailingly judicious, and the authors make it clear that they have excluded sources considered to be antisemitic, and/or anti-Jewish. Small wonder, then, that The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews touched an extremely sore nerve, possibly of the ‘truth hurts’ variety…”
Readers can google the titles to find a number of criticisms of the trilogy which have been elevated by Google to the opening pages of its search engine. However, there is no substitute for reading these suppressed black history volumes yourself, free of prejudgment.
Making these black-authored books more difficult to find does not speak well of the strength of the arguments of those who denounce the authors’ thesis. Banning these magisterial works of black intellect during Black History Month no less, gives us a peak behind the curtain, affording a glimpse of white supremacy at work in 2023.
Due to their servitude to the white racists who control the funding and call the shots, it’s no surprise that Critical Race Theory’s (“CRT”) leading exponents dare not speak out on the subject of the hidden side of black slavery in the ante-bellum South, or of Amazon’s censorship of The Secret Relationship.
CRT activists and academics are virtually mute regarding the advancement of humanity’s knowledge of how black people first came to be the subject of racist disparagement and dehumanization.
Ancient and Medieval Ideological Sources of the Subjugation and Bondage of Black People
We regret to say that among the earliest sources for this subjugation was the Talmud of Babylon. Specifically, it takes the form of the oral Torah’s theological teaching, circa the third century A.D., that Ham, the son of Noah, sentenced to perpetual enslavement along with his posterity, was black (cf. Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 108b). The Talmud identifies black people as those who therefore are justifiably forever destined to be slaves. Notice that we specify the oral Torah, the Torah shBeal peh (תּוֹרָה שֶׁבְּעַל־פֶּה) as culpable, and not the written Torah of the Old Testament—the Torah sheBiktav (תּוֹרָה שֶׁבִּכְתָב)—which assigns no racial identification to Ham.
Moreover, in the Midrash it is taught, “Ham and the dog copulated on the Ark (of Noah), therefore Ham came forth black-skinned” (Midrash Rabbah 36:7).
These statements, as found in the Midrash and particularly the Talmud—the latter is the groundwork of halacha (rabbinic law)—lend support to those who seek, or who have sought in the past, a divine rationale for domination over blacks. After the Renaissance, as knowledge of these sacred texts began to be more widely disseminated among Christian scholars and ministers, they served to exonerate the white supremacy which was the backbone of the racist belief that black servitude was ordained by God.
Apologists have claimed that these passages were little known among gentiles and represented an insubstantial and merely interstitial element in Judaism. This fallacy is impossible to maintain however, in the case of the authoritative teachings of the medieval Rabbi Moses Maimonides, whose revered image adorns the hall of Congress. Buildings and institutes throughout America are named for him.
Maimonides (sometimes known by the acronym the “Rambam”) remains, even in our time, among the highest halachic authorities in Askenazic Judaism. He has been prominently quoted for centuries by learned Catholic and in particular Protestant clergy. Their repetition of his dogmatic teachings trickled down to the congregants in the churches. “The wisdom of Maimonides” (still upheld in panegyrics published by the New York Times), became renowned as a reflection of his allegedly illuminating exposition of the Bible.
In the uncensored versions of his celebrated Guide of the Perplexed, we discover some of that “wisdom.” Maimonides institutionalized a heinous alibi for the subjugation of blacks which is among the most ruinous ever written, in terms of their impact on the West:
“….the Negroes in the remote South, and those who resemble them from among them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes.” (Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, translated by Shlomo Pines [University of Chicago Press, 1963], vol. 2, p. 618).
Did you ever hear of this? Has this highly influential eugenic malediction, which circulated sub-rosa in white circles for centuries before the Civil War and Jim Crow, been publicly denounced during Black History Month, or at any other time? You know the answer.
Southern Historian Shelby Foote Echoes Maimonides
In light of his reputation for having deep insight into the heart of Old Testament doctrine, Maimonides has had a significant influence over Protestants in the South, even in our time.
The late Shelby Foote, an award-winning white historian of the Civil War who was descended from Mississippi gentry, quoted the statement from the Guide of the Perplexed on more than one occasion, including in the course of a 2001 interview with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN television. After remarking on what he considered high levels of black criminality he observed, “African Americans are acting as if the utter lie about blacks being somewhere between ape and man were true.”
Did you catch Mr. Foote’s backhanded method of confirming Maimonides’ dictum? It’s an “utter lie”—that may be true. Possible confirmation of the veracity of Maimonides’ words may be found in how “African Americans are acting,” according to the much-honored historian Shelby Foote, whose bestselling books freely circulate and are, needless to say, not banned by Amazon.
Concerning the consequences of the much-honored Maimonides’ hate speech, silence is all we get from elite whites, as well the domesticated servants of the forces of white supremacy. Some black Conservatives have been labeled white supremacists by progressives. In turn, we observe the presence of white supremacist functionaries among the Henry Louis Gates Jr. coterie, as well as the Obama, Eric Holder and Hakeem Jeffries entourage.
They all have the power and position in American society to decry Amazon’s censorship of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews and see that it is made a national issue. All of them have the means to condemn the legacy of Talmudic Maimonidesianism, made doubly insidious because it bears the imprimatur of religion.
They could speak with one voice to advance enlightenment for the good of all people, including the many Judaic persons who, when they become aware of the problem texts in their own tradition, are often quick to denounce them.
During Black History Month 2023, like every Black History Month for the past four years, the leading personalities who have made themselves central to the Month and who are extended favorable publicity by the ruling class media, dare not confront the obdurate and seemingly ineradicable white supremacy whose weltanschaung is predicated upon the theology of Talmudism and Maimonides.
Black History Month is captive to this self-censorship. It is like a domesticated lion whose rump has been flea’d and whose claws have been pared.
“(T)he opponents of freedom… decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind… It was well understood that… by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority…”
It has been a hundred years since Carter G. Woodson penned those words. They are as salient now as the day he wrote them.
Michael Hoffman, a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press, is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (2001), The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (2017), Twilight Language (2021) and six other books. He hosts the podcast, Michael Hoffman’s Revisionist History® and is at work on a book-length study of unfree labor in Britain and colonial America. Michael is an independent scholar free of corporate allegiance and university affiliation.
Copyright ©2023 by Independent History and Research
April 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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In our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, Dr. McCullough and I give numerous examples of how anyone—even eminently qualified scientists and researchers—who questions the prevailing orthodoxy about a range of public policy issues will likely be labelled a “conspiracy theorist.” Since the JFK assassination, “conspiracy theorist” has become a pejorative, accusatory label like “racist” or “sexist.” Through common usage, the label has become charged with the power to smear and dismiss someone outright without supporting evidence.
The greatest trick that powerful interest groups ever pulled was convincing the world that everyone who detects and reports their activities is a conspiracy theorist. Only the naivest consumer of mainstream news reporting would fail to recognize that powerful interest groups in the military, financial, and bio-pharmaceutical industries work in concert to further their interests. Their activities cross the line into conspiracy when they commit fraud or other crimes to advance their interests. The term “conspiracy theory” suggests the feverish imaginings of a crackpot mind. This ignores the fact that the United States government prosecutes the crime of conspiracy all the time. As one prominent defense attorney describes this reality:
Any time the government believes that it can allege that two or more individuals were a part of a common agreement to commit the same crime, they will include a charge of conspiracy in the indictment. There is no requirement that all of the members of the conspiracy even know about each other, or even know each other personally.
A person may be charged with conspiracy to commit a crime even if he doesn’t know all of the details of the crime. History is full of well-documented conspiracies. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there were three major conspiracies to murder her and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. All were detected and foiled. The final “Babington Plot” was discovered by Elizabeth’s secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham (an astute intelligence gatherer) and this led to Mary’s execution for treason.
Are we really to believe that there are no longer power-hungry men who conspire to acquire greater power and wealth?
As far as “theory” goes, every prosecutor develops a theory of a crime and presents it to the jury. If you are a concerned citizen and you perceive that your government officials and media are not telling the truth about a vitally important matter, you have no choice but to formulate a theory of what is going on. Developing a theory to explain a pattern of ascertainable facts is a rational attempt to detect and expose criminal conduct. To be sure, some theories are more plausible than others. Some are logical and coherent; others are wild and contradictory.
When President Eisenhower left office in 1961, he expressly warned about what he called the Military-Industrial Complex acquiring “unwarranted influence” that could “endanger our liberties and democratic processes.” When COVID-19 arrived, the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex vigorously and exclusively pursued the vaccine solution instead of the early treatment solution. In order to realize their ambition, multiple actors simultaneously waged a propaganda campaign against hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other repurposed drugs.
It’s likely that only a relatively small number of these actors knew they were making fraudulent claims about the generic, repurposed drugs, and knew they were taking action to impede access to these drugs based on fraudulent claims. These actors were the conspirators. Countless others unwittingly played roles in the conspiracy because they themselves believed the propaganda.
April 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Roger Daltry of mod rock band The Who screamed “We won’t get fooled again” in its lengthy and punchy signature song. But it appears we have. Almost everything that those on the sceptical side of the Covid narrative recognise about the hyped-up nature of the recent pandemic will see parallels in Overturning Zika: the pandemic that never was by Randall S. Bock.
Bock is a U.S. physician who has long harboured scepticism about something that most of us had completely forgotten: the Zika ‘pandemic’ of 2015 in Brazil. Like COVID-19, this was accompanied by dire predictions of deaths in the millions and, parallel to the ridiculous and extraordinary locking down and social distancing mandates of 2020-2021, Zika was accompanied by ludicrous suggestions that women should not have babies and even abort the ones they were carrying. Some did.
Zika is a mosquito-borne virus that is present in South America. According to Wikipedia, it can be associated with the birth defect microcephaly, whereby a child is born with a smaller than normal brain. One source, GAVI (‘The Vaccine Alliance‘) claimed in 2022 that one third of babies exposed pre-birth to Zika developed microcephaly. However, it then proceeded to say there is a “continued need to develop a safe and effective vaccine for preventing Zika virus infections during pregnancy”. GAVI has a vested interest in vaccine production and distribution.
It is worth pointing out that the author of this book is not a tin-foil hat wearing virus sceptic, ‘anti-vaxxer’ or conspiracy theorist. He does not deny the existence of the Zika virus, or specifically deny its potential to cause microcephaly and does not ascribe the manufacturing of the Zika pandemic to evil forces determined to reduce the population of the world. Instead, he examines the evidence as it stands, contextualises this within the scientific paradigm and examines some of the social and media forces at work which fan the flames. Thus, a smouldering fire of (misplaced) suspicion that there was an outbreak of Zika-related microcephaly in Brazil soon became a forest fire of panic across the country and elsewhere in the region.
The simple facts are that a case of microcephaly was attributed to Zika without a shred of evidence that Zika was the cause. Microcephaly occurs in possibly one in every 800-5,000 babies. If you go out armed with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail and other cases of microcephaly were soon identified and misattributed to Zika. In 2019, when Zika was a distant blip in the rear-view mirror, Bock tried to publish a short review demonstrating that the accompanying pandemic had been a mistake, but major medical journals refused to publish it. This was not because it was inaccurate or that what was contained was not fairly common knowledge among the medical community, but in case it undermined public trust in public health initiatives related to Covid. This is what is now referred to as ‘malinformation’; something that is true but uncomfortable for those controlling the narrative.
The story, briefly, is that Zika was considered the cause of a cluster of cases of microcephaly. This was done against a background of poor baseline information about the extent of microcephaly and without specific laboratory testing for the presence of Zika. A purported Zika test had never been standardised and Zika and its close relative dengue fever are almost identical genetically and almost impossible to distinguish. Scepticism about the existence of Zika, based on the poor science applied to its characterisation was quashed and likewise scepticism about the link between it and microcephaly.
In the sceptical free zone that was allowed to exist around the Zika microcephaly story, local, national, regional and international panic ensued. Pregnant women lived in fear that their babies were going to be born brain damaged, the WHO issued travel advice related to the 2016 Brazil Olympics and NPR, never known to let a good pandemic go to waste, reported fears amongst athletes and staff at the games over Zika infection.
However, when accurate Zika testing became available in 2016, the purported link between the virus and microcephaly failed to hold. Zika-related microcephaly, now described as ‘rare’, just disappeared. The only reasonable conclusion, in the absence of a vaccine or additional preventive measures, was that it probably did not exist. In the meantime, pregnant women had been smothering themselves in insecticides potentially harmful to their unborn babies and the family planning lobby had got to work with increased calls for ‘net zero’ related to birth rates.
Bock traces the main characters involved from the group of physicians who initially raised the alarm, through incompetent national health officials up to the ubiquitous eminence grise, without whom no pandemic is complete, Anthony Fauci who said all the usual things about vaccines and public health measures. In this case, rather than being a driving force, Fauci jumped on the Zika bandwagon. What had started as a cock-up soon became a conspiracy. Fauci used Zika to “wage war” on pandemics. We now know what he meant.
The book is written in a very familiar and even colloquial style. It is reasonably easy to read and not too heavy, within the text, on scientific jargon. It does suffer, however, from a somewhat samizdat style of presentation and there is a great deal of repetition of what the appropriate scientific procedures should have been. That said, the opening synopsis is very helpful, makes all the main points and stands alone. The accompanying diagrams and figures are far too busy, poorly produced, and not signposted properly. On the whole, some ruthless editing may have helped to produce a more concise text. Nevertheless, this is a book that should be read.
Randall S. Bock (2023) Overturning Zika: the pandemic that never was. Drivestraight Publishing, Istanbul, is available to purchase on Amazon.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry.
April 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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Fear of a Microbial Planet, by Dr. Steve Templeton, is a wonderfully accessible book on the Covid era now published by Brownstone institute, offers desperately needed clarity and science on the organization and management of individual social life in the presence of pathogenic infection. It can be read as a definitive answer to expert arrogance, political overreach, and population panic.
For three years following the arrival of the virus that causes Covid, the dominant response from governments and the public has been to be afraid and stay far away through any means possible. This has further mutated into a population-wide germophobia that is actually being promoted by elite opinion.
Steve Templeton, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute and Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute, argues that this response is primitive, unscientific, and ultimately contrary to individual and public health. The most unhealthy populations are those which preserve immunological naivete in the presence of a virus that is otherwise going to circulate widely.
Dr. Templeton’s story is both scientific and highly personal, taking the reader through the basics of immune response and public health even while relaying his personal frustrations with trying to talk sense to others in senseless times.
If a public health response is like an immune response, then consider this book as immunization against germophobia, politicized science, a self-defeating safety culture, and misplaced faith in experts. Dr. Templeton is our guide to helping us gain a new and more robust understanding of the relationship between the microbial kingdom and our own lives.
The pandemic forecasts in the United States were very grim. Experts were predicting that 60-70 percent of the population would ultimately be infected resulting in over 1.5 million deaths in just a few months. People on social media were in an absolute panic. Stories about empty shelves and runs on toilet paper were everywhere. Those who tried to refute these doomsday predictions were shouted down and eventually silenced.
And yet, the science on the virus was very clear. Disease severity was age-stratified. Extreme measures would not drive it away and would cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage. Even if the worse-case scenarios were true, it was extremely important that we take measures based on evidence.
But eventually, the cry to “do something” became overwhelming, and the costs no longer mattered. Trying to calm people with wisdom about infectious disease became nearly pointless. Germophobia swept through society and political culture.
Hardly anyone wanted to hear the truth that microbes are everywhere, and they cannot be avoided. There are an estimated 6×10^30 bacterial cells on Earth at any given time. By any standard, this is a huge amount of biomass, second only to plants, and exceeding that of all animals by more than 30-fold.
To live at peace with the microbial kingdom requires trained immune systems, as George Carlin said years ago. That means exposure and the protection of normal social functioning even under pandemic conditions with a new virus.
Many books have been and will be written about pandemic response mistakes, and that’s a good thing. There can’t possibly be enough reflection on what went wrong, otherwise we will be doomed to follow the same path, or an even worse one, next time. This book argues that the safety-at-all-costs culture will continue to result in counterproductive policies until it is challenged at its root.
How did people in our communities and around the world get to the point of hysteria over a pandemic with a clear age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified mortality? Why were young and healthy people with very little risk for disease and death treated as if they were a grave danger to others?
It was always pointless to try to stop much less eradicate this virus. We’ve evolved with pathogens and need to learn to live with them without imposing mass psychological, social, economic, and public-health damage.
Everyone who panicked to the point of meltdown needs this book as a corrective. And even if you did not, everyone knows someone who did, public-health officials above all else.
April 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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This excerpt is from a very important book on the conflict in Ukraine: To the Last Ukrainian: An American War. It is written by Régis Le Sommier, who was embedded in both the Ukrainian and Russian armies. The account that he gives in this riveting chronicle tells of the perfidy of politicians and the tragedy of ordinary soldiers caught up as pawns in the machinations of geopolitics.
Régis Le Sommier is one of France’s great journalists whose work, spanning thirty years, has received several awards. He is the only war reporter who went to both sides of the front line with the Ukrainian and Russian armies for a year. This is his story.
You may purchase a copy of To the Last Ukrainian: An American War either from Amazon, or from Barnes and Noble.
The Strange Carl Larson
The bus stopped in the center of a village.
“This is the place,” Max announced.
We, the Frenchmen, picked up our luggage and walked about two kilometers to a place designated by the GPS on Max’s smartphone. At a bend in the road, Ukrainian soldiers came to meet us.
“We are French. We’ve come for the Ukrainian legion.”
One of the soldiers made a phone call. A few minutes later, a man of athletic build, dressed in grey and wearing a commando cap on his head, got out of a vehicle.
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“You have a military training?” He asked after shaking hands.
Max and Sabri nodded in response. This soldier was American.
“They call me the Grinch,” he said to the Frenchmen who had no idea what this nickname was supposed to mean. Neither did the Ukrainian soldiers around them.
The Grinch is the American bogeyman, a grumpy, greenish character from a Theodor Seuss Geisel cartoon, whose goal is to ruin Christmas. This cultural reference reflected the mindset of this American who naturally believed that the whole world knew about the Grinch. He announced that he was part of a team of American instructors who had come to train foreign volunteers.
“I’m here to put the internationals in order,” he told the Frenchmen. “I am in charge here. Too many people showed up at the center and they had no business being there.”
The French volunteers listened to him without saying a word. Then he moved on to instructions and declared:
“If you have international phones, you’ll have to cut them off or get local SIM cards.”
It was at this point that I told him that Noël, my sidekick, and I were journalists. Until then, he naturally thought we were volunteers. His face tightened immediately. What? Journalists who’ve dared to come out here?
The American was upset, or perhaps he realized that he had said too much? He chose to deal with the problem in a radical way:
“You don’t belong here,” he told me in an icy tone.
I protested by invoking the right to information:
“The French public has the right to know what is happening to their fellow-
citizens who’ve come to fight alongside the Ukrainians.”
The man was embarrassed. As a good American, and even though his presence here fell in the realm of clandestine operations, he believed that the right to information was sacred, that it was a virtue of his country.
Technically, he had no right to ask us to leave. So, he called his Ukrainian counterparts on the phone and, as if to pass the buck, asked them:
“You don’t want reporters, do you?”
Then he turned to me and with his white teeth gleaming announced:
“They don’t want reporters.”
He then explained his approach in a more conciliatory tone. He had come to help the Ukrainians. He was fighting for the freedom of the people, the great American classic line which I’ve hear since Iraq. However, from the way he spoke to us earlier, this individual clearly had far greater responsibilities. I’ve been around the US military in Iraq so much that I know by instinct who’s in charge, regardless of what they’re wearing.
Judging from the docile behavior of the Ukrainians around him, this man was no simple volunteer filled with good will. He could have just said that he was an instructor, that he was in charge of training, and that he was from the United States, and that would have been enough. But his commanding tone, that “I’m in charge here,” left no doubt.
I did some research on him. I found an interview he gave to the Seattle Times. His name is Carl Larson and he admits to being one of the American instructors who came to help the Ukrainian army against Russia.
But when we were listening to him with the volunteers, everyone was thinking the same thing. The scene was worthy of being in the Hall of Legends. There were also curious elements in his background. He was an Iraq War veteran. He was part of a military contingent that participated in the initial phase of the invasion. Then, he was no longer in the news. And today, was he still in the military? Was he on a mission for the Pentagon? I can’t say for sure. I tried to verify this through contacts in the American army and in French intelligence, but I did not get any answers. Cover-up is big part of the war in Ukraine.
What I can confirm is that in the recruitment of foreign volunteers to fight in Ukraine, an American veteran was in charge. Another Seattle Times article appeared about him on October 25. It said that after his assignment to select international recruits, Carl Larson trained a unit deployed to the Kharkiv front. Then he returned home. On his role in the selection of volunteers for the Ukrainian Legion, it is written that he was reluctant at the beginning, partly because of the recruits who were “unstable or without military experience.” The article went on to say that he himself was reluctant to join the Legion for fear of not being properly utilized.
“Finally, after discussions with Ukrainian officials, he agreed to select and train a unit before it went to the front.”
We had to leave quickly after we revealed ourselves to the American. We were not allowed to wish our friends well. Just a look, a little wave before they boarded an Opel Corsa, to my great surprise, registered in Essonne and driven by the American. The day after this hasty departure, Sabri explained to me in a text message that they had left by bus for a front line where they had to relieve a unit. They signed a commitment to stay until the end of the war.
April 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review | Ukraine, United States |
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James Bamford’s new book Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence devotes nine chapters to the impunity of Israel, its spies and U.S. lobby.
Bamford is best known as America’s premiere chronicler of the ultra-secretive National Security Agency in his books The Puzzle Palace and The Shadow Factory.
Unlike most authors published through mainstream publishing houses, Bamford has not held back on exposing extremely damaging and behind the scenes exploits of Israel and its lobby in this damning look at U.S. counterintelligence. That was a shock to the second most prominent reader reviewer on Amazon.com who claimed, “I did not expect a full-throated anti-Israel screed completely devoid of nuance or historical context.” Most other reviewers were much more appreciative of Bamford’s honest take.
Among the most scandalous episodes chronicled in Spy Fail are stunning new details about Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan’s espionage and weapons smuggling operations targeting the United States.
Bamford follows Milchan’s early efforts to prop up apartheid South Africa through well paid weapons dealing and propaganda, including the production of feel good theatrical works depicting exploited blacks as happy with their lot in South Africa. Milchan’s recruitment into Israel’s Bureau of Scientific Relations Lakam spy agency then leaves him scouring the U.S. for nuclear weapons related technology.
Since Israel had already stolen enough U.S. weapons grade uranium to build atomic bombs from NUMEC, Milchan was tasked to obtain high speed switches that could provide the precisely timed pulses to trigger a detonation. Milchan recruited the hapless Richard Kelly Smyth to set up the front company “Milco” in Huntington Beach California by bedazzling the failing businessman with stars and starlets at his Hollywood parties.
Smyth provided the triggers and many other export prohibited items, but always managed to give away what he was doing to vigilant federal government authorities. Smyth (but not Milchan) was eventually indicted and fled overseas. When he sought help, Milchan ghosted him while working to stay ahead of the law.
Milchan benefitted from mainstream press support to spread the word that the billionaire had no idea what was going on in his global network of companies. Perhaps the most valuable diversion was the New York Time’s Tom Friedman who quickly got wind of the Smyth indictment and promoted Milchan’s innocence. While Bamford mentions the Netanyahu-Milchan connection he does not delve into Smyth’s revelation that Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked inside the “Project Pinto” krytron smuggling network at the Israel based Heli Trading company. Heli executed the purchase orders from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for export controlled items Milco misclassified and exported.
The devolution of the Milchan Netanyahu relationship is perhaps the most important revelation of extreme current relevance in the book. Milchan pressed Netanyahu to pressure U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for a 10-year visa after the agency—finally wise to Milchan’s espionage—refused to renew it. The feckless John Kerry eventually acquiesced to Netanyahu and issued the visa. To this day Milchan continues to produce blockbusters and allegedly dodge taxes in the U.S.
But just as Milchan burned Smyth, Netanyahu began pumping Milchan for endless boxes of expensive cigars—“leaves”—and cases of $400 per bottle champagne—“bubbles”—and other gifts for his wife in exchange for the visa favor. Bamford’s depiction of this shakedown is as detailed as it is relentless.
The resultant Israeli corruption cases against Netanyahu have recently led him to seek judicial reforms, which could give his coalition power to shut the cases down. Netanyahu’s initiative has torn Israel apart and put the country on the verge of civil war as protesters sought to stop the gutting of court oversight.
Americans who read and fully digest Spyfail will come away with new insights about how the politicization of American counterintelligence produces media frenzies and scapegoats—such as Maria Butina—while continually steering clear of Israel’s hugely damaging covert intelligence operations against the U.S. Bamford pins this impunity squarely on the Israel lobby and the oversize role it plays in financing the political careers of ever-compliant U.S. elected officials and their political appointees.
Grant F. Smith is director of IRmep and forced the declassification and release of many of the NUMEC and “Project Pinto” documents cited in this book through FOIA lawsuits.
April 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Israel, New York Times, United States, Zionism |
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Have you ever thought that the Bill of Rights was a bit lacking? Did you ever wish there was a list of obligations detailing those things we owe to the government for the privilege of being born into a certain political jurisdiction? Then, boy, do I have the perfect book for you! Join James for today’s dissection of The Bill of Obligations, the latest turgid tome of trash from Richard Haass, the outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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March 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Christine Pulfrey remembers her mother as ‘very fit’ and ‘in good form’ when she was admitted to a private hospital in Hull for a routine knee operation. Complications arose after surgery so the 86-year-old was transferred to the Royal Hull Infirmary where, according to her daughter, in February 2017 she was ‘deliberately deprived of hydration and food and was neglected’.
‘When she died she looked as if she had been starved, like people who were starved in the concentration camps,’ said Christine.
This anecdote is from one of 17 case studies included a report called ‘When End of Life Care Goes Wrong’, which will be published on Tuesday by the Lords and Commons Family and Child Protection Group in response to a growing number of complaints made by bereaved relatives to Voice for Justice UK, a campaign group.
All the studies, drawn from more than 600 cases (a total described by the group as only ‘the tip of the iceberg’), make deeply disturbing reading.
They include, for instance, the case of a 78-year-old man called John with non-terminal lung cancer. At the Countess of Chester Hospital he was injected with both morphine and midazolam, a lethal combination in a patient like him.
This jab, in the view of Sam Ahmedzai, Emeritus Professor of Palliative Medicine who offers medical analysis for each case study, was ‘directly responsible for the cessation of breathing’ some 30 seconds later. He concluded that the family ‘were made to witness what they could only interpret as an act of involuntary euthanasia’.
The family called in their lawyers, intent on bringing about the prosecution of medics who might have killed John by a combination of drugs they knew to be lethal. According to the report, their efforts were thwarted by medical documentation they say was fabricated but which was taken at face value by the police.
Another case concerned Laura Jane Booth, 21, who had learning difficulties and Crohn’s disease. She could communicate only through limited sign language, yet her family knew her as ‘kind and caring’ and someone who ‘loved life’.
Laura was admitted to the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield for a routine eye operation and died there three weeks later. The NHS issued a death certificate attributing Laura’s demise to her conditions combined with pneumonia and respiratory failure from fluid on the lungs. Her family were convinced she was starved to death and fought for an inquest. They had to wait four and a half years for their day in court but the coroner issued a new death certificate which listed untreated ‘malnutrition’ among the causes. Jamie Bogle, a barrister and co-author of the report, identifies this case as one of a number ‘where proceedings for alleged homicide may have been indicated’.
Fat chance of that. As a journalist who spent years researching and writing about the Liverpool Care Pathway, the end-of-life care protocol scrapped in 2014 as a ‘national disgrace’, I would consider it a minor miracle if the police took such complaints seriously. My debut novel, The Beast of Bethulia Park, https://amzn.eu/d/i9rllc1 published shortly before Christmas, was written partly with the purpose of demonstrating how unscrupulous doctors and nurses could use such ‘death pathways’ to kill elderly and ‘nuisance’ patients more or less with impunity, if they chose, or indeed were encouraged, to do so.
The evils about which I had heard so many families complain over the last decade are practised in the book by two villainous characters and other manifestations of the problem, which appear in this report, are there too: falsified death certificates, fabricated or omitted medical documents, police officers unwilling or unable to investigate allegations from families, a system which callously places obstacles in the way of aggrieved relatives seeking the truth, which short-circuits their complaints or takes years to resolve them and to scant satisfaction, and which treats the bereaved, the anxious and the heartbroken as contemptuously as criminals. Common mechanisms for killing are set out: contrived prognoses of death followed by the withdrawal of food and fluid and the simultaneous use of a sedating ‘chemical cosh’, or ruses like the deliberate use of contra-indicated drugs in patients susceptible to their lethal side effects. They appear in this report as well.
What is shocking and new about the report is that all but two of the case studies have occurred since the abolition of the LCP in 2014 following the review led by Baroness Neuberger the previous year. Eleven of the patient deaths described came after new guidelines were issued in 2015 by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and four of them were within the last three years.
This would suggest that the problems that the demise of LCP was supposed to have remedied are continuing, that the protocol was damaged but far from dead, and that patients have been duped into believing they are safe.
The Rev Lynda Rose, a former barrister and the executive editor of the report, said the work of the parliamentary group showed ‘all too clearly that misdiagnoses and mis-assessments as to quality of life and proximity to dying are disturbingly common.
‘Excessive and inappropriate use of midazolam and morphine, rendering a patient comatose, coupled with the withdrawal of food and hydration, have combined to impose a death sentence on the elderly and vulnerable from which there is no right of appeal,’ she said. ‘For all our sakes we need to end the abuse now.’
The group is recommending a national inventory of local end of life care plans, policies and procedures being used in all healthcare settings; a national rapid response service to advise and support people who have a loved one experiencing poor quality end-of-life care; a fast track advice helpline for bereaved families; a national register of cases where end-of-life care has fallen below standards or breached guidelines; the urgent adoption of a uniform national system to capture patients’ preferences for end-of-life care, and further high quality research into social, medical and nursing aspects of end-of-life care.
However Professor Patrick Pullicino, a recently retired consultant neurologist who was among the senior physicians to blow the whistle on LCP abuses more than a decade ago, believes that more must be done.
‘The report flags up shortcomings of the Care Quality Commission repeatedly,’ he said. ‘This is the body that is tasked with the safety of patients in NHS. The CQC must bear full responsibility for the continued use of lethal pathways.
‘They need to make dehydration a notifiable occurrence and sanction hospitals that dehydrate patients. The one body that could force a change and stop inappropriate deaths is doing nothing despite repeated complaints made to it.
‘The sick elderly necessarily take up a lot of hospital beds and therefore consume a lot of resources. Despite the increase in the elderly population the number of hospital beds in the UK has dramatically fallen. It is impossible to avoid the connection with the widespread use of end-of-life pathways.’
Pullicino puts his finger on the nub of the problem. The real dangers of such pathways lie not inherently in the systems, the level of expertise of those who deploy them, or the extent of communication between families and medical professionals. They lie first and foremost in fallen human nature. Is it so really so difficult to accept that the ‘key workers’ of our glorious NHS are not always motivated by the best of intentions? Any system of care must not only be conceived, operated and regulated to the highest standards but sufficiently robust and transparent to withstand the designs of those who would kill from pleasure or from conviction, and from those who would permit and encourage such killings for gain and for profit. Such people will always be around.
The NHS needs to be effectively policed. The law exists, after all, to protect the innocent and to punish the perpetrator. Yet this new report would suggest that in some areas of health care it is barely present at all. That is not only a scandal, it’s a danger to all of us.
March 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | UK |
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As glasses help people focus their eyes to see,” medical experts from the American Academy of Pediatrics rule, “medications help children with ADHD focus their thoughts better and ignore distractions.” In their view, as well as in the view of multiple other expert consortiums, the most appropriate way to treat the “lifelong impairing condition” of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is by taking stimulant medications on a daily basis.
Although stimulants, as suggested by their name, are frequently abused for stimulating (potentially addictive) sensations of high energy, euphoria, and potency, they are often compared to harmless medical aids, such as eyeglasses or walking crutches. Numerous studies, we are told, support their efficacy and safety, and evidence-based medicine dictates that these substances will be administered to children with ADHD as the first-line treatment.
There is only one, huge problem. ADHD is currently the most common childhood disorder in Western-oriented countries. Its ever-increasing rates are now skyrocketing. The documented prevalence of ADHD is not about 3 percent, as it used to be when the disorder was first introduced in 1980. In 2014, a survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that over 20 percent of 12-year-old boys were diagnosed with this “lifelong condition.”
In 2020, thousands of real-life medical records from Israel suggested that over 20 percent of all children and young adults (5-20 years) received a formal diagnosis of ADHD. This means that hundreds of millions of children around the world are eligible for this diagnosis and that most of them (about 80 percent), including very young, preschool children, will be prescribed with its treatment-of-choice, as if regular use of stimulants is indeed comparable to eyeglasses.
Stimulant brands for ADHD, such as Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, or Vyvanse rank at the top of the best-selling lists of medications for children. Indeed, the American dream may play a significant role in the proliferation of such cognitive enhancers in the US, but the rush for the magic pills crosses national borders. In fact, the ‘semi-final’ countries that are currently ‘winning’ the Ritalin Olympics, according to the International Narcotics Control Board, are: Iceland, Israel, Canada, and Holland.
But what if the scientific consensus is wrong? What if the medications for ADHD are not as effective and as safe as we are told? After all, stimulant medications are powerful psychoactive substances, which are prohibited to use without medical prescriptions, under federal drug laws. Like all psychoactive drugs, which affect the central nervous system, stimulant medications are designed to penetrate the blood-brain barrier – the specialized tissue and blood vessels that normally prevent harmful substances from reaching the brain. In this way, stimulant medications are essentially impacting the biochemical processes of our brain – that miraculous organ that makes us who we are.
In my new book ADHD is Not an Illness and Ritalin is Not a Cure: A Comprehensive Rebuttal of the (alleged) Scientific Consensus, I do my best to answer these disturbing questions. The first part of the book offers a step-by-step refutation of the notion that ADHD meets the required criteria for a neuropsychiatric condition. In fact, a close reading of the available science suggests that the vast majority of the diagnoses simply reflects common and pretty normative childhood behaviors that underwent unjustified medicalization. The second part of the book uncovers the massive evidence that exists against the efficacy and safety of the treatment-of-choice for ADHD.
Hundreds of studies, published in well-recognized, mainstream academic journals tell a totally different story than the one told by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Stimulant medications are nothing like eyeglasses. Of course, it is impossible to summarize an entire book here, but I do wish to outline three principal failures in the common comparison between stimulant medications and eyeglasses – or any other daily used, harmless medical aids for that matter, such as walking crutches.
- Even without considering the specific criticism about the validity of ADHD, the very comparison between organic/bodily conditions, which are typically measured through objective tools, to amorphic psychiatric labels that rely exclusively on subjective assessments of behaviors, is inappropriate and misleading. The ‘brain deficit’ and the ‘chemical imbalance’ that have been associated with ADHD are unproven myths. Stimulants do not ‘fix’ biochemical imbalances and they can easily be used also by non-ADHD individuals to enhance cognitive performance (even though these individuals are not assumed to have this alleged ‘brain deficit’).
- As opposed to visual impairments that restrict the individual’s everyday functioning, regardless of school demands, the primary impairment in ADHD is manifested in school settings. Eyeglasses and walking crutches are needed outside of school premises as well, even during weekends and holidays. ADHD, in contrast, seems to be a ‘seasonal disease’ (despite endless efforts to exaggerate and extend its negative outcomes to non-school-related settings). When schools are closed, its daily medical management is often no longer needed. This simple real-life fact is even acknowledged, to some extent, in the official Ritalin leaflet, which states that: “During the course of treatment for ADHD, the doctor may tell you to stop taking Ritalin for certain periods of time (e.g., every weekend or school vacations) to see if it is still necessary to take it.” Incidentally, these ‘treatment breaks,’ according to the leaflet, “also help prevent a slow-down in growth that sometimes occurs when children take this medicine for a long time” – a noteworthy point that brings us to the third, and most important error in the comparison between stimulant medications and other daily, physical/medical aids, such as eyeglasses.
- The benign examples used by proponents of the medications, such as eyeglasses or walking crutches are not regulated by the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance. Typically, these medical aids do not cause serious physiological and emotional adverse reactions. If stimulant drugs are as safe as experts say, like “Tylenol and aspirin,” why do we insist that they will be medically prescribed by licensed physicians? This question has philosophical and societal implications. After all, if the medications are safe and helpful to various populations (i.e., not only to people with ADHD), what is the moral justification to prohibit their usage among non-diagnosed individuals? This is unjustified discrimination. Moreover, why are we condemning (non-diagnosed) students who use these medications to improve their grades? If regular use of Ritalin and alike is so safe, why not place them on the pharmacies’ shelves, next to the non-prescription pain relievers, moisturizers, and chocolate energy bars?
The last rhetorical questions illustrate how far the eyeglasses metaphor is from the clinical reality and the scientific evidence regarding ADHD and stimulant medications. ADHD medications are not fundamentally different from other psychoactive drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier. At first usage, they may trigger intense sensations of potency or euphoria, but when used for prolonged periods, their desired effects subside, and their unwanted negative effects start to emerge. The brain recognizes these psychoactive substances as neurotoxins and activates a compensatory mechanism in an attempt to fight the harmful invaders. It is this activation of the compensatory mechanism, not the ADHD, that might cause the biochemical imbalance in the brain.
I realize that these last sentences may sound provocative. I therefore encourage readers not to ‘trust’ this short article blindly, but to dive with me into the deep (and sometimes dirty) water of the scientific literature. Despite the academic orientation of my book, I made sure to make the science available to most readers through plain language, illustrative stories, and real-life examples. And even if you disagree with some of its content, I am positive that, by the end of the reading, you will ask yourself, like I did: How is it possible that such critical information about ADHD and stimulant medications is being hidden from us? Does it really make sense to compare these drugs to eyeglasses? Are we medicating millions of ADHD children without proper scientific justification?
March 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Human rights, Iceland, Israel, United States |
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The BBC and the mainstream media regularly frighten everyone with the latest climate disaster news with pictures of floods, fires and hurricanes, always followed by scary predictions that things will only get worse unless mankind mends its irresponsible ways.
My alma mater Reuters, the global news agency, used to be above all this hysteria and would relentlessly apply its traditional standards of fairness and balance, but even this mainstream outfit seems to have sold out to the hysterics and axe grinders.
The trouble is, many if not all of these disaster stories, far from being another step in a worsening scenario, are often nothing of the kind. In a recent book Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters, Steven Koonin uses the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data to show that if reporters took the trouble to do a minimum amount of checking, most of these incidents would appear to be natural disasters, yes, but not part of some ever worsening syndrome.
Economist Bjorn Lomborg has been pointing out for years that humans are having an impact on the climate, but technology will be a match for any problems. Current Government plans to combat climate change will squander massive amounts of taxpayers’ money and achieve very little in terms of stopping rising global temperature, Lomborg says.
Warmist politicians and lobby groups regularly trash the work of a significant group of climate experts, insulting them with unfounded accusations that they can’t be taken seriously because they have barely perceptible links with ‘Big Oil’ and are ‘climate change deniers’. Criticisms are mainly personal and not aimed at their work. Koonin and Lomborg also suffer the unethical ‘denier’ slur, so let’s destroy that canard first.
Every scientist knows the world’s climate has been gradually and occasionally irregularly warming since the last Ice Age over about 10,000 years. Nobody denies the climate is changing. The ‘denier’ charge is nonsensical. But it performs the useful function of making clear the user knows nothing about climate science. The argument is about the ‘why’ not the ‘if’. Warmists say all the warming is because of man’s activity. The rest say some, a little or none.
Education is another area where balance has been replaced by hysteria-inducing propaganda. Children shown demonstrating on the news are often borderline hysterical. No doubt their teachers didn’t bother to tell them that man-made global warming is a theory not a proven fact, and that it’s okay to talk about different opinions.
If you wonder why much of the mainstream media seem united in accepting that the world will soon die unless humans don hair shirts, freeze in winter and walk instead of driving, you need to know about websites like Covering Climate Now (CCN).
Reuters and some of the biggest names in the news like Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, CBS News, and ABC News have signed up to support CCN, which brags that it is an unbiased seeker after the truth. But this claim won’t last long if you peer behind the façade. CCN may claim to be fair and balanced, but it not only won’t tolerate criticism, it brandishes the unethical ‘denier’ weapon with its nasty holocaust denier echoes. This seeks to demonise those who disagree with it by savaging personalities and denying a hearing, rather than using debate to establish its case.
CCN advises journalists to routinely add to stories about bad weather and flooding to suggest climate change is making these events more intense. This is not an established fact, as a simple routine check would show.
I asked CCN about the nature of its dealings with Reuters and the likes of Bloomberg. Was it to thrash out a general approach to climate change reporting or to be more partisan?
CCN hasn’t replied.
I have a particular interest in Reuters’ attitude because I spent 32 years there as a reporter and editor. The global news agency’s traditional insistence on high standards in reporting makes this liaison with CCN seem questionable.
When Reuters announced its tie-up with CCN in 2019 it said this, among other things.
The (CCN) coalition, which includes more than 350 organisations [there are many more now] has no agenda beyond embracing science and fair coverage and publishing more climate change content.
That is clearly not true. It has a partisan agenda and encourages reporters to dismiss those with contrary opinions as ‘deniers’.
The statement went on to quote Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler:
Reuters is committed to providing the most accurate and insightful coverage of the climate crisis, as it threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people world-wide. Our hope is that our careful, factual reporting will help nations, businesses and individuals respond to the challenge rapidly and intelligently.
The idea of a ‘climate crisis’ is not widely accepted, but partisans shout about it. It is a very vague claim and hard to define or prove. By Reuters standards shouldn’t this include a balancing view? Certainly, many people believe that there is such a crisis, but lots of people don’t. The idea climate change threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people worldwide is an assertion, not a fact.
The involvement of Reuters in CCN seems to me to be in direct contradiction to three of its 10 Hallmarks of Reuters Journalism – Hold Accuracy Sacrosanct, Seek Fair Comment, Strive For Balance and Freedom From Bias.
I asked Reuters for its reaction to criticism of its CCN involvement in a new book Not Zero by Ross Clark, published by Forum, and it said this in a statement.
Reuters is deeply committed to covering climate change and its impact on our planet with accuracy, independence and integrity, in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
When I became Reuters global Science and Technology Correspondent in the mid-1990s, the global warming story was top of my agenda. Already by then the BBC was scaring us saying we would all die unless humankind mended its selfish ways. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was the culprit and had to be tamed, then eliminated. I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact. I was wrong.
My Reuters credentials meant that I had easy access to the world’s finest climate scientists. To my amazement, none of these would say categorically that the link between CO2 and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact. Some said human production of CO2 was a probable cause, others that it might make some contribution; some said CO2 had no role at all. Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why. The sun’s radiation, which changes over time, was a favoured culprit.
My reporting reflected the wide range of views, with Reuters typical “on the one hand this, on the other, that” style. But even then, the mainstream media seem to have run out of the energy required, and often lazily went along with the BBC’s faulty, opinionated thesis. It was too much trouble to make the point that the BBC’s conclusion was challenged by many impressive scientists.
Fast forward 20 years and firm proof CO2 was warming the climate still hasn’t been established, but politics has taken over. Sure, there are plenty of computer models with their hidden assumptions ‘proving’ man is guilty as charged, and the assumption that we had the power and knowledge to change the climate became embedded.
The Left had lost all of the economic arguments by the 1990s, and its activists eagerly grabbed the chance to say free markets and small government couldn’t save us from climate change; only government intervention could do that. Letting capitalism run free was a certain way to ensure the end of the planet; smart Lefties should take charge and save us from ourselves.
The debate about climate change is far from over. I’m not a scientist so I don’t know enough to say it’s all man-made or not. But politicians and lobbyists have decided that we are all guilty. They are in the process of dismantling our way of life, ordering us to comply because it’s all for the future and our children. If we are going to give up our civilization, at the very least we ought to have an open debate. Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is that requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom.
Reuters should be leading this movement. All it has to do is stand by its 10 Hallmarks. And maybe tell CCN thanks but no thanks; it needs to apply Reuters principles to its climate reporting.
February 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Bloomberg, Reuters |
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