Bob Woodward’s new insider account of the Trump administration, ‘Rage’, details the multi-faceted controversies surrounding President Trump’s approach to governance – none more so than his relationship with the military.
Bob Woodward is a legendary reporter whose talent for getting insiders to speak about the most sensitive matters in government dates back to Watergate and the Nixon presidency. His most recent presidential expose, ‘Rage’, touches on a wide range of controversies, from the coronavirus pandemic to issues relating to war, and the promise of war.
It is Trump’s tortured relationship with the military that stands out the most, especially as told through the eyes of former Secretary of Defense Jim ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, a retired marine general. It is clear that Bob Woodward spent hours speaking with Mattis – the insights, emotions and internal voice captured in the book show a level of intimacy that could only be reached through in-depth interviews, and Woodward has a well-earned reputation for getting people to speak to him.
The book makes it clear that Mattis viewed Trump as a threat to the US’ standing as the defender of a rules-based order – built on the back of decades-old alliances – that had been in place since the end of the Second World War.
It also makes it clear that Mattis and the military officers he oversaw placed defending this order above implementing the will of the American people, as expressed through the free and fair election that elevated Donald Trump to the position of commander-in-chief. In short, Mattis and his coterie of generals knew best, and when the president dared issue an order or instruction that conflicted with their vision of how the world should work, they would do their best to undermine this order, all the while confirming to the president that it was being followed.
The military is trapped in an inherited reality divorced from the present
This trend was on display in Woodward’s telling of Trump’s efforts to forge better relations with North Korea. At every turn, Mattis and his military commanders sought to isolate the president from the reality on the ground, briefing him only on what they thought he needed to know, and keeping him in the dark about what was really going on.
In a telling passage, Woodward takes us into the mind of Jim Mattis as he contemplates the horrors of a nuclear war with North Korea, and the responsibility he believed he shouldered when it came to making the hard decision as to whether nuclear weapons should be used or not. Constitutionally, the decision was the president’s alone to make, something Mattis begrudgingly acknowledges. But in Mattis’ world, he, as secretary of defense, would be the one who influenced that decision.
Mattis, along with the other general officers described by Woodward, is clearly gripped with what can only be described as the ‘Military Messiah Syndrome’.
What defines this ‘syndrome’ is perhaps best captured in the words of Emma Sky, the female peace activist-turned adviser to General Ray Odierno, the one-time commander of US forces in Iraq. In a frank give-and-take captured by Ms. Sky in her book ‘The Unravelling’, Odierno spoke of the value he placed on the military’s willingness to defend “freedom” anywhere in the world. “There is,” he said, “no one who understands more the importance of liberty and freedom in all its forms than those who travel the world to defend it.”
Ms. Sky responded in typically direct fashion: “One day, I will have you admit that the [Iraq] war was a bad idea, that the administration was led by a radical neocon program, that the US’s standing in the world has gone down greatly, and that we are far less safe than we were before 9/11.”
Odierno would have nothing of it. “It will never happen while I’m the commander of soldiers in Iraq.”
“To lead soldiers in battle,” Ms. Sky noted, “a commander had to believe in the cause.” Left unsaid was the obvious: even if the cause was morally and intellectually unsound.
This, more than anything, is the most dangerous thing about the ‘Military Messiah Syndrome’ as captured by Bob Woodward – the fact that the military is trapped in an inherited reality divorced from the present, driven by precepts which have nothing to with what is, but rather by what the military commanders believe should be. The unyielding notion that the US military is a force for good becomes little more than meaningless drivel when juxtaposed with the reality that the mission being executed is inherently wrong.
The ‘Military Messiah Syndrome’ lends itself to dishonesty and, worse, to self-delusion. It is one thing to lie; it is another altogether to believe the lie as truth.
No single general had the courage to tell Trump allegations against Syria were a hoax
The cruise missile attack on Syria in early April 2017 stands out as a case in point. The attack was ordered in response to allegations that Syria had dropped a bomb containing the sarin nerve agent on a town – Khan Shaykhun – that was controlled by Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic militants.
Trump was led to believe that the 59 cruise missiles launched against Shayrat Airbase – where the Su-22 aircraft alleged to have dropped the bombs were based – destroyed Syria’s capability to carry out a similar attack in the future. When shown post-strike imagery in which the runways were clearly untouched, Trump was outraged, lashing out at Secretary of Defense Mattis in a conference call. “I can’t believe you didn’t destroy the runway!”, Woodward reports the president shouting.
“Mr. President,” Mattis responds in the text, “they would rebuild the runway in 24 hours, and it would have little effect on their ability to deploy weapons. We destroyed the capability to deploy weapons” for months, Mattis said.
“That was the mission the president had approved,” Woodward writes, clearly channeling Mattis, “and they had succeeded.”
The problem with this passage is that it is a lie. There is no doubt that Bob Woodward has the audio tape of Jim Mattis saying these things. But none of it is true. Mattis knew it when he spoke to Woodward, and Woodward knew it when he wrote the book.
There was no confirmed use of chemical weapons by Syria at Khan Shaykhun. Indeed, the forensic evidence available about the attack points to the incident being a false flag effort – a successful one, it turns out – on the part of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamists to provoke a US military strike against Syria. No targets related to either the production, storage or handling of chemical weapons were hit by the US cruise missiles, if for no other reason than no such targets could exist if Syria did not possess and/or use a chemical weapon against Khan Shaykhun.
Moreover, the US failed to produce a narrative of causality which provided some underlying logic to the targets that were struck at Khan Shaykhun – “Here is where the chemical weapons were stored, here is where the chemical weapons were filled, here is where the chemical weapons were loaded onto the aircraft.” Instead, 59 cruise missiles struck empty aircraft hangars, destroying derelict aircraft, and killing at least four Syrian soldiers and up to nine civilians.
The next morning, the same Su-22 aircraft that were alleged to have bombed Khan Shaykhun were once again taking off from Shayrat Air Base – less than 24 hours after the US cruise missiles struck that facility. President Trump had every reason to be outraged by the results.
But the President should have been outraged by the processes behind the attack, where military commanders, fully afflicted by ‘Military Messiah Syndrome’, offered up solutions that solved nothing for problems that did not exist. Not a single general (or admiral) had the courage to tell the president that the allegations against Syria were a hoax, and that a military response was not only not needed, but would be singularly counterproductive.
But that’s not how generals and admirals – or colonels and lieutenant colonels – are wired. That kind of introspective honesty cannot happen while they are in command.
Misleading the American public
Bob Woodward knows this truth, but he chose not to give it a voice in his book, because to do so would disrupt the pre-scripted narrative that he had constructed, around which he bent and twisted the words of those he interviewed – including the president and Jim Mattis. As such, ‘Rage’ is, in effect, a lie built on a lie. It is one thing for politicians and those in power to manipulate the truth to their advantage. It’s something altogether different for journalists to report something as true that they know to be a lie.
On the back cover of ‘Rage’, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Robert Caro is quoted from a speech he gave about Bob Woodward. “Bob Woodward,” Caro notes, “a great reporter. What is a great reporter? Someone who never stops trying to get as close to the truth as possible.”
After reading ‘Rage’, one cannot help but conclude the opposite – that Bob Woodward has written a volume which pointedly ignores the truth. Instead, he gives voice to a lie of his own construct, predicated on the flawed accounts of sources inflicted with ‘Military Messiah Syndrome’, whose words embrace a fantasy world populated by military members fulfilling missions far removed from the common good of their fellow citizens – and often at conflict with the stated intent and instruction of the civilian leadership they ostensibly serve. In doing so, Woodward is as complicit as the generals and former generals he quotes in misleading the American public about issues of fundamental importance.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
Ritchie declares the scientific publication process “badly broken.” He argues persuasively that enormous resources are being wasted, and that our heads “are being filled with ‘facts’ that are either incorrect, exaggerated, or drastically misleading.”
These arguments overlap many found in my 2016 report, Peer Review: Why Skepticism is Essential. But new scandals and controversies have emerged since then, and Ritchie does a great job of explaining why all of this matters.
But there’s a catch. Here we have an author lamenting delusion and self-deception. Here we have an author championing skepticism and hard-headed empiricism. Yet he, himself, utterly refuses to confront what all of the above implies about climate science.
If significant numbers of peer-reviewed papers in psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, organic chemistry, geoscience, and medicine can’t be reproduced/replicated when third parties attempt to do so, if many published studies really are useless, on what basis shall we go on imagining that climate research is a separate case? How can that field possibly be exempt from problems that are widespread elsewhere?
Environmental research has, after all, been highly politicized for at least two decades. Cambridge University Press was urged by scientists to withdraw Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist from publication – to essentially burn his book back in 2002. A reasonable observer might therefore suspect that climate research is saturated with tribalism and bias, rather than the opposite.
Ergo: many of the studies on which politicians now base their climate decisions must be unreliable.How ironic that Ritchie is incapable of following his own arguments to their logical conclusion.
Nevertheless, it’s difficult not to feel sympathy for this young academic. His book was no doubt completed late last year. He had no way of anticipating that a deadly new coronavirus was about to spread across the globe, and that John Ioannidis, one of the people he cites extensively in his book, would respond to the pandemic in unexpected ways.
Two weeks before Science Fictions was released in mid-July, Ritchie published an essay titled There should never be heroes in science. It begins by telling us about the late Hans Eysenck, once the most-cited psychologist in Britain. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, this eminent personality (who died in 1997), devoted much of his energy to keeping his own profession honest. As Ritchie tells it, Eysenck authored “blistering critiques of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, noting the unscientific nature of Freudian theories and digging into the evidence base for therapy’s effects on mental health.”
Last year, more than a dozen of Eysenck’s papers were retracted. Dozens more are now officially considered questionable. An investigation by Kings College London concurred with critics who’ve long been concerned about the quality of Eysenck’s data and “the implausibility of the results presented.” In other words, this “strong advocate of rigour in science” was better at identifying the flaws in other people’s reasoning, than in producing bulletproof research of his own.
Ritchie then turns his attention to Ioannidis:
It’s fair to say that Stanford University’s John Ioannidis is a hero of mine. He’s the medical researcher who made waves in 2005 with a paper carrying the firecracker title “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”, and who has published an eye-watering number of papers outlining problems in clinical trials, economics, psychology, statistics, nutrition research and more.
…Ioannidis’s contribution to science has been to make it far more open, honest, and self-reflective about its flaws. How odd it is, then, to see his failure to follow his own advice.
Ritchie points to a March 2020 article in which Ioannidis legitimately observed that politicians were making decisions about how to respond to the coronavirus “without reliable data.” Five months on, that’s still true. Many of the numbers currently available to us are compromised in one way or another.
But whether Ioannidis’ own hunches are correct is a different matter altogether. Writes Ritchie:
The most memorable part of the article was his prediction – on the basis of his analysis of the cursed cruise ship Diamond Princess – that around 10,000 people in the US would die from COVID-19…As US deaths have just hit 125,000, I don’t need to emphasise how wrong that prediction was.
Yesterday, American deaths from COVID-19 exceeded 187,000. Even if that count is wrong by 20% in either direction, we’re definitely talking a different ballpark.
Ritchie tells us Ioannidis has since authored more than one piece of COVID-related research marred by serious design flaws. Even the best minds amongst us, therefore, succumb to bias. Even professional skeptics can exhibit, as Ritchie says, a “strong aversion to having their cherished theories proved wrong.” Here’s the last paragraph in Ritchie’s essay:
Above, I should really have said that John Ioannidis was a hero of mine. Because this whole episode has reminded me that those self-critical, self-correcting principles of science simply don’t allow for hero-worship. Even the strongest critics of science need themselves to be criticised; those who raise the biggest questions about the way we do research need themselves to be questioned. Healthy science needs a whole community of sceptics, all constantly arguing with one another…Who watches the watchmen in science? The answer is, or at least should be: all of us. [bold added; italics in the original]
I invite you to re-read that sentence in bold font. So says a man whose book dismisses climate skeptics in peremptory fashion. In fact, Ritchie ends his final chapter by referencing a famous cartoon that implies climate policies will automatically create a “better world” even if the climate crisis turns out to be overblown.
This is unfortunate. Ritchie’s argument is that improving the way research is conducted makes sense even if we reject his contention that “something has gone very wrong with science.” But that famous climate cartoon naively presupposes that good intentions are enough, that climate programs have no negative consequences, that government policies are never counterproductive, ill-conceived, or designed to financially benefit political donors.
This year is the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two. One of the biggest frauds of the final stage of that war was the meeting at Yalta of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Yalta has become a synonym for the abandonment of oppressed people and helped inspire the 1952 Republican campaign theme, “20 years of treason.”
The American media uncorked a barrage of tributes to Roosevelt on the 75th anniversary of his death in April. CNN, for instance, trumpeted Roosevelt as “the wartime president who Trump should learn from.” But there was scant coverage of one of his greatest betrayals.
Roosevelt painted World War II as a crusade for democracy — hailing Stalin as a partner in liberation. From 1942 through 1945, the U.S. government consistently deceived the American people about the character of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt praised Soviet Russia as one of the “freedom-loving nations” and stressed that Stalin is “thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution.” But as Rexford Tugwell, one of Roosevelt’s Brain Trusters and an open admirer of the Soviet system, groused, “The Constitution was a negative document, meant mostly to protect citizens from their government.” And when government is the personification of benevolence, no protection is needed.
Harold Ickes, one of Roosevelt’s top aides, proclaimed that communism was “the antithesis of Nazism” because it was based on a “belief in the control of the government, including the economic system, by the people themselves.” The fact that the Soviet regime had been the most oppressive government in the world in the 1930s was irrelevant, as far as Roosevelt was concerned. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert, author of Magic and Mayhem, observed, “FDR remarked that most of what he knew about the world came from his stamp collection.”
Giving Stalin everything
The Roosevelt administration engineered a movie tribute to Stalin — Mission to Moscow — that was so slavish that Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich observed that “no Soviet propaganda agency would dare to present such outrageous lies.” In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt denounced those Americans with “such suspicious souls — who feared that I have made ‘commitments’ for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” with Stalin at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. Roosevelt helped set the two-tier attack that permeated much of postwar American foreign policy — denouncing cynics, while betraying foreigners whom the U.S. government claimed to champion. (Someone should ask the Kurds if anything has changed on that score.)
Prior to the Yalta conference, Roosevelt confided to the U.S. ambassador to Russia that he believed that if he gave Stalin “everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” Stalin wanted assurances from Roosevelt and Churchill that millions of Soviet citizens who had been captured during the war by the Germans or who had abandoned the Soviet Union would be forcibly returned. After the war ended, Operation Keelhaul forcibly sent two million Soviets to certain death or long-term imprisonment in Siberia or elsewhere. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Operation Keelhaul “the last secret” of World War II and it was covered up or ignored by Western media until the 1970s. The fact is that those mass deaths that were facilitated by the U.S. and British governments rarely rated even an asterisk by the media-beloved historians who tout the “Good War.”
In the final communiqué from Yalta, Roosevelt, along with Churchill and Stalin, declared that “a new situation has been created in Poland as a result of her complete liberation by the Red Army.” Liberation? Tell that to the Marines. A few weeks later, on March 1, 1945, he gave a speech to Congress touting his triumph at Yalta. In it he declared, “The decision with respect to the boundaries of Poland was, frankly, a compromise…. It will include, in the new, strong Poland, quite a large slice of what now is called Germany.” He agreed with Stalin at Yalta on moving the border of the Soviet Union far to the west — thereby effectively conscripting 11 million Poles as new Soviet Union citizens.
Poland was “compensated” with a huge swath of Germany, a simple cartographic revision that spurred vast human carnage. As author R.M. Douglas noted in his 2012 book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale University Press), the result was “the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians — the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 — were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland.” At least half a million died as a result. George Orwell denounced the relocation as an “enormous crime” that was “equivalent to transplanting the entire population of Australia.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell protested, “Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?” Roosevelt signed those death warrants at Yalta. Freda Utley, the mother of the late publisher and author Jon Utley, did some of the first and best reporting on the vast suffering ensuing from the German expulsions. Chapters from her book The High Cost of Vengeance are available at fredautley.com. (The U.S. government approved similar brutal mass forcible transfers in former Yugoslavia during the Clinton administration.) But the German civilians killed after the war were simply another asterisk that could safely be ignored by Good War chroniclers.
Roosevelt boasted to Congress, “As the Allied armies have marched to military victory, they have liberated people whose liberties had been crushed by the Nazis for four long years.” At that point, he and the State Department knew that this was a total lie for areas that had fallen under the control of the Red Army, which was busy killing or deporting to Siberia any potential political opponents. Roosevelt claimed that the deal at Yalta was “the most hopeful agreement possible for a free, independent, and prosperous Polish people.” But he betrayed the exiled Polish government in London and signed off on Soviet-style elections with no international observers — effectively giving Stalin unlimited sway on choosing Poland’s rulers. Any illusions about Soviet benevolence towards Poland should have been banished when the Red Army massacred the Polish officer corps at Katyn Forest — an atrocity that the U.S. government assiduously covered up (and blamed on the Nazis) during the war.
The façade of benevolence
In a private conversation at Yalta, Roosevelt assured Stalin that he was feeling “more bloodthirsty” than when they previously met. Immediately after the Yalta conference concluded, the British and American air forces turned Dresden into an inferno, killing up to 50,000 civilians. The Associated Press reported that “Allied air bosses” had adopted “deliberate terror bombing of great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.” Ravaging Dresden was intended to “‘add immeasurably’ to Roosevelt’s strength in negotiating with the Russians at the postwar peace table,” as Thomas Fleming noted in The New Dealers’ War. Vast numbers of dead women and children became simply one more poker chip. Shortly after the residents of Dresden were obliterated, Roosevelt pompously announced, “I know that there is not room enough on Earth for both German militarism and Christian decency.” Government censorship and intimidation helped minimize critical coverage of the civilian carnage resulting from U.S. carpet-bombing of cities in both Germany and Japan.
Roosevelt told Congress that the Yalta Agreement “spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliance and spheres of influence.” By the time he died the following month, he knew that democracy was doomed in any turf conquered by the Red Army. But the sham had been immensely politically profitable for Roosevelt, and his successors kept up much of the charade.
U.S. government secrecy and propaganda efforts did their best to continue portraying World War Two as the triumph of good over evil. If Americans had been told in early 1945 of the barbarities that Yalta had approved regarding captured Soviet soldiers and the brutal mass transfer of German women and children, much of the nation would have been aghast. War correspondent Ernie Pyle offered a far more honest assessment than did Roosevelt: “The war gets so complicated and confused in my mind; on especially sad days, it’s almost impossible to believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery.”
In the decades after Yalta, presidents continued to invoke lofty goals to justify U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In each case, massive secrecy and perennial lies were necessary to maintain a façade of benevolence. Americans have still not seen the secret files behind the harebrained, contradictory interventions in Syria from the George W. Bush administration onwards. The only certainty is that, if we ever learn the full truth, plenty of politicians and other government officials will be revealed to be bigger scoundrels than suspected. Some of the orchestrators of mass misery might even be compelled to reduce their speaking fees.
“Presidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they’ve established almost a common-law right to do so,” George Washington University history professor Leo Ribuffo observed in 1998. Presidents have perennially used uplifting rhetoric to expunge their atrocities. On the 75th anniversary of Yalta, Americans have no reason to presume that presidents, top government officials, or much of the media are more trustworthy now than they were during the finale of the Good War. Have there been other Operation Keelhaul equivalents in recent years that Americans have not yet learned about? Yalta’s betrayals are another reason to be wary when pundits and talk-show hosts jump on the bandwagon for the next killing spree abroad.
The Gardasil vaccine, manufactured by Merck & Co., was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006 for use in preventing infection from only a few of the hundreds of types of human papillomavirus (HPV). Since hitting the market, however, thousands of adolescents and adults have reported serious and disabling Gardasil side effects after receiving the HPV vaccine, including death.
Gardasil was fast-tracked to the market, achieving FDA approval in six months, which usually takes three years. Even one of the principal investigators of the Gardasil clinical trials (the human testing that precedes FDA approval) said the process “went too fast.”
The miscarriage rate for subjects who were injected with Gardasil was 25%. The miscarriage rate for women under 30 in the U.S. is 12.5%.
In the Gardasil group, 5 babies were born with congenital abnormalities. There were none in the control group (the group that does not receive treatment).
10.9% of women who took Gardasil reported reproductive and breast disorders within 7 months. In the Protocol 18 placebo group, that figure was 1.2% (through 12 months).
The rate of Gardasil deaths in the clinical trials was 8.5 per 10,000, nearly double the background U.S. death rate for young women ages 15 to 24.
There are more than 64,000 case reports of HPV vaccine adverse reactions in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System database.
It is estimated that only 1% of serious adverse events are actually reported to VAERS.
Researcher Peter C. Gøtzsche in his book Vaccines: Truth, Lies, and Controversy noted some of the research inadequacies in the HPV vaccine clinical trials
“It is a requirement for registration of drugs that randomized trials have been carried out where one group received the drug and the control group received placebo or nothing. This allows assessment of both the benefits and harms of drugs. I have done research on non-vaccine drugs for decades and was shocked when I learned through my work with vaccines against human papilloma virus (HPV) that the regulatory requirements are much less for vaccines. Almost all the HPV vaccine trials have a control group receiving a hepatitis vaccine or a strongly immunogenic adjuvant, which makes it impossible to find out what the harms of the HPV vaccines are.”
Today, the Gardasil shot has left many young women and men suffering (FDA also approved Gardasil for boys), and it has been a living nightmare for parents whose children have experienced severe adverse reactions to the vaccine. They all trusted Gardasil, never suspecting the grave illnesses and disabilities that could follow. […]
According to Mary Holland and Kim Mack Rosenberg, and Eileen Iorio, co-authors of the book, The HPV Vaccine On Trial: Seeking Justice For a Generation Betrayed, “none of the participants in the [Gardasil] clinical trials received a true saline placebo,” which means the clinical trials failed to measure the effects of Gardasil against a true control. Instead of receiving a placebo, some clinical trial subjects received aluminum-containing adjuvants, chemical mixtures, and other vaccines, which masked adverse events and made Gardasil seem safer than it would have otherwise.
According to Holland, Mack Rosenberg, and Iorio, “HPV vaccines have never been proven to prevent against cervical or other cancer.” … Full article
This article is taken from a talk I gave at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Albuquerque last week, on the controversial subject of saturated fats. Some of the slides that I used for this talk are put in here [not included].
The medical establishment and government health authorities say that consumption of saturated animal fats is bad for us and causes heart disease. According to the lipid hypothesis — the label used for the diet-cholesterol theory of heart disease — saturated fats raise serum cholesterol levels, and high blood cholesterol causes obstructive plaques to form in arteries, called atherosclerosis. This pathologic process causes coronary heart disease and the need for coronary artery bypass surgery, which is what I do.
Types and Structure of Fats
Animals and tropical plants contain saturated fats while plants outside the tropics have mostly unsaturated fats. Saturated animal fats are in milk, meat, eggs, butter, and cheese. And tropical coconut and palm oil contain a lot of saturated fat.
The food industry makes trans fats. They do this by shooting hydrogen atoms into polyunsaturated vegetable oils. This straightens out the fatty acid molecules and packs them closer together, giving vegetable oil so treated a solid texture like lard. Trans fats are used to make margarine, with yellow bleach added so it looks like butter. They are also used to prolong the shelf life of bakery products, snack chips, imitation cheese, and other processed foods.
Fats have a string of 3 to 22 carbon atoms. The carbon atoms of saturated fats have a full complement of hydrogen atoms attached to them. Unsaturated fats lack a full complement of hydrogen atoms. Artificially created trans fats have hydrogen atoms that wind up being located on opposite sides of the carbon double bond, which straightens the molecule out and makes it mimic saturated fat.
Crisco
A hundred years ago less than one in one hundred Americans were obese and coronary heart disease was unknown. Pneumonia, diarrhea and enteritis, and tuberculosis were the most common causes of death. Now, a century later, the two most common causes of death are coronary heart disease and cancer, which account for 75 percent of all deaths in this country. There were 500 cardiologists practicing in the U.S. in 1950. There are 30,000 of them now — a 60-fold increase for a population that has only doubled since 1950.
In 1911, Procter and Gamble started marketing Crisco as a new kind of food. The name Crisco is derived from CRYStalized Cottonseed Oil. It was the first commercially marketed trans fat. Crisco was used to make candles and soap, but with electrification causing a decline in candle sales, Procter and Gamble decided to promote this new type of fat as an all-vegetable-derived shortening, which the company marketed as a “healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats.” At the time Americans cooked and baked food with lard (pork fat), tallow (beef and lamb fat), and butter. Procter and Gamble published a free cookbook with 615 recipes, from pound cake to lobster bisque, all of which required Crisco. The company succeeded in demonizing lard, and during the 20th century Crisco and other trans fat vegetable oils gradually replaced saturated animal fats and tropical oils in the American diet.
Evidence Supporting the Lipid Hypothesis
Rabbits, Cholesterol, and Atherosclerosis
In 1913 a Russian physiologist fed high doses of cholesterol to rabbits and showed that cholesterol caused atherosclerotic changes in the rabbit’s arterial intima like that seen with human atherosclerosis. Over the ensuing decades other investigators did atherosclerosis research on cholesterol-fed rabbits, which they cited in support of the diet-cholesterol theory of heart disease.
Framingham Heart Study
In 1948, government-funded investigators began following some 5,000 men and women in Framingham, Massachusetts to see who developed coronary heart disease. They found that people with elevated cholesterol were more likely to be diagnosed with CHD and die from it.
Six years later the American Heart Association began promoting what it called the Prudent Diet, where “corn oil, margarine, chicken, and cold cereal replaced butter, lard, beef, and eggs.”
Ancel Keys Six-Country and Seven-Country Studies
Ancel Keys, the father of K-rations for the military, published a study in 1953 that correlated deaths from heart disease with the percentage of calories from fat in the diet. He found that fat consumption was associated with an increased rate of death from heart disease in the six countries that he studied.
He followed this up with a more detailed Seven Country Study published in 1970, using three of the countries that were in the original six-country study — Italy, Japan, and the U.S. — and four other countries — Finland, Greece, The Netherlands, and Yugoslavia. This study further cemented the association of fat consumption and death from heart disease, which led to the McGovern Report.
McGovern Report
The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by Senator George McGovern, released, in 1977, its “Dietary Goals for the United States,” designed to reduce fat intake and avoid cholesterol-rich foods. These dietary goals became become official government policy.
Further Developments
McDonalds and the Center for Science in the Public Interest
Next, in 1984 the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, joined the fray and started to coerce fast-food restaurants and the food industry to stop baking and frying food with animal fats and tropical oils. McDonalds fried its French fries with beef fat and palm oil. That’s why they tasted so good. But the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s well-orchestrated saturated fat attack coerced McDonalds and other fast-food chains to switch to partially hydrogenated, trans-fat vegetable oil.
USDA Food Pyramid
Adhering to the now well established low fat dogma, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 1992, published its Food Guide Pyramid. The “pyramid” arranges food in sections that convey the message, “Fat is bad” and “Carbohydrates are good.” Carbohydrate-rich bread, cereal, rice, and pasta fill the large bottom space. and are to be consumed in abundant amounts, “6–11 servings” a day. Further up, as the pyramid narrows, fruit, which is also high in carbohydrates, is accorded “2–4 servings”; whereas the portion that includes meat, poultry, fish, dry beans, eggs, and nuts is allowed only “2–3 servings.” Fats and oils are placed in the small top portion of the pyramid and labeled “Use sparingly.”
Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010
Beginning in 1980, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services has published every five years an updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The most recent one, published in December 2010, recommends reducing saturated fat intake to 7 percent of caloric intake, down from its previously recommended 10 percent.
Meet the Fats
The USDA dietary guidelines and the American Heart Association group trans fats and saturated fats together and demonize them both as solid fats. The heart association’s website has a “Meet the Fats” link where the bad fats brothers are Sat and Trans — saturated fats and trans fats. The better fats sisters are Poly and Mon — polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats.
Swedish Heart Institute, Seattle and Dean Ornish
Indoctrinated in low-fat dogma by health organizations, nutrition authorities, and the government, I would instruct my heart surgery patients to eat a low fat diet, telling them to cut all the fat off their meat and not eat more than one egg a week. And following the USDA food pyramid I did not express any concerns about how much carbohydrates they might consume, from starch in bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes and sugar in fruit, fruit juices, pastry, and sodas.
When I was the director of the heart institute at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle in the 1990s I looked into establishing a Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease at Swedish. The Ornish Program limits fat intake to less than 10 percent of calories in the diet, with, as one study shows, only 1 percent saturated fat. I had a cardiologist at Swedish accompany me to New York to visit the leading Dean Ornish Program there. We came back and recommended that Swedish establish one in Seattle.
I was wrong. Several years later, after leaving Swedish and rejoining the faculty the University of Washington, I came upon an article by Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon titled “The Oiling of America” that was published in the magazine Nexus in 1999. It stimulated me to look more carefully into this subject.
Sleeper
Oscar Wilde said “Life imitates art.” He noted that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” In his film Sleeper Woody Allen plays Miles Monroe, part owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Restaurant in Greenwich Village. He was cryogenically frozen in 1973 after a botched peptic ulcer operation done at the now closed St. Vincent’s Hospital. Two hundred years later scientists wake him up and revive him.
Scene from movie
In a scene from this movie (shown at the meeting), the two scientists have this exchange. Dr. Aragon: “Has he asked for anything special?” Dr. Melik: “Yes. This morning for breakfast he requested something called wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger’s milk.” Dr. Aragon: “Oh yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties.” Dr. Melik: “You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or hot fudge?” Dr. Aragon: “Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.” Dr. Melik: “Incredible!” The YouTube title of this scene is Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper may accurately portray healthy eating in the future, (available HERE),
Tiger’s milk is said to be America’s original carbohydrate-rich, protein-rich nutrition bar. It was popular in the 1970s and is still sold. I got this one from Amazon.com (that I show at the meeting). As this cinematic work of art predicts, in 2173 deep fat, steak, cream pies, and hot fudge will have replaced wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger’s milk as health foods.
But if life does imitate art, what about all the evidence that shows saturated fats and cholesterol clog arteries and cause atherosclerosis?
Evidence Against the Lipid Hypothesis
Feeding Cholesterol to Omnivores Does Not Cause Atherosclerosis
Plants do not contain any cholesterol. Animals are the only source of cholesterol, and herbivores do not eat animal products. Rabbits, being a herbivore, are not designed to digest animal fat and cholesterol, so when it is fed high doses of cholesterol one should not be surprised if the cholesterol winds up getting stuck in any part of the poor rabbit, including its blood vessels. Feeding high doses of fat and cholesterol to omnivores, like rats and dogs, does not produce atherosclerotic lesions in them.
Other Countries with CHD-Death and Fat Consumption Data
Evidence against fat wilts upon close scrutiny. In his Six Country Study, Ancel Keys ignored data available from 16 other countries that did not fall in line with his desired graph. If he had chosen these six other countries [on the left side], or even more strikingly, these six countries [on the bottom right] he could have shown that increasing the percent of calories from fat in the diet reduces the number of deaths from coronary heart disease.
22 Countries with Such Data including four other groups of people
If Keys had included all 22 countries in his study, the result would have been a clutter of dots like this.
In fact, it turns out that people who have highest percentage of saturated fat in their diets have the lowest risk of heart disease.
Diets in People with the Lowest Risk of Heart Disease — Masai, Inuit, Rendille, Todelau
The diet of the Maasai tribe in Kenya and northern Tanzania consists of meat, milk, and blood from cattle. It is 66 percent saturated fat.
The diet of Inuit Eskimos in the Artic, consisting largely of whale meat and blubber, is 75 percent saturated fat; and they live long healthy lives free of heart disease and cancer.
The Rendille tribe in the Kaisut Desert in NE Kenya subsist on camel milk and meat, and a mixture of camel milk and blood, known as “Banjo.” Their diet is 63 percent saturated fat.
The Tokelau live well, without cardiologists, on three atoll islands that are now a territory of New Zealand. Their diet consists of fish and coconuts, which is 60 percent saturated fat.
Like these groups of people around the world, breast-fed infants in developed first-world countries also have a diet that is high in saturated fats. The fat in human mother’s milk is 54 percent saturated fat.
The Hunter-Gatherer Diet
The study referenced here, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is considered to be the most comprehensive analysis done on the Paleolithic hunter-gather diet. Anthropologists have assessed the diets of 229 hunter-gather populations that survived into the 20th century and can be viewed as surrogates for our Paleolithic, Stone Age ancestors.
When they can get it, these modern-day hunter-gatherers consume high amounts of animal food, which can make up to 85-100 percent of their calories, like the Maasi, Inuit, and Rendille peoples. They eat virtually all of the fat on the animal, including its organs, tongue, bone marrow, and brain. Other carnivores do the same thing. Lions, for example, will eat the organs and fat of their kill and leave the lean muscle meat for scavengers.
Since hunter-gatherers do not engage in agriculture, they have no corn, rice, or wheat to eat. They obtain only a low amount of carbohydrates from wild plants, gathering seeds, nuts, roots, tubers, bulbs, and fruits from them.
The Human Diet Throughout History
The Paleolithic Era, or Stone Age, lasted two-and-a-half million years, beginning with our human ancestor Homo hablis, and progressing through a succession of species to ours, Homo sapiens, which has existed for some 200,000 years.
The Agriculture Age began approximately 10,000 years ago and during this time, through 500 generations, carbohydrate consumption gradually increased. Even so, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, sugar consumption was one-fifth of what it is today. Now we are eating a greatly increased amount of carbs in cereal grains, dairy products, beverages, refined sugar, and candy, along with processed vegetable oils and dressings that did not exist in our diet for 99.9 percent of human history. During this time the human genome became adapted to follow a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Nevertheless, health authorities today say that we should do the opposite and follow a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.
As calories, fat and carbs are interchangeable, protein less so. One can eat and digest only so much protein. When the protein content of the diet exceeds 35 percent of calories, nausea, diarrhea, and weakness ensue. These symptoms disappear when protein is dropped to 20-25 percent of calories.
YouTube on Ancel Keys
The new social media of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is not only helping to overthrow dictators and autocratic regimes but also wrong medical dogmas. This one, titled Big Fat Lies (shown at the meeting), exposes the chicanery Ancel Keys practiced in his work (availableHERE).
The Framingham Study 30-years on
But what about the Framingham Study? In 1987, in the Journal of the American Medical Association Framingham Study investigators reported these two important findings: 1) Over age 50 there is no increased overall mortality with either high or low serum cholesterol levels, and 2) In people with a falling cholesterol level (over the first 14 years of the study), for each 1% mg/dl drop in cholesterol there was an 11 percent increase in all-cause mortality over the next 18 years. (JAMA 1987;257:2176-2180)
Contrary Long-term Findings of the Framingham Heart Study
Then, in 1992, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the third director of the study, Dr. William Castelli, reported: “In Framingham, Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol” … We found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least, and were the most physically active.” (Arch Int Med 1992;152:1271-2)
Most doctors have not heard about these findings because medical organizations, notably the American Heart Association, government agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry have ignored them. After all, prescribing statin drugs to lower cholesterol is a $25 billion/year industry.
The Politics Behind the McGovern Report
What about our government and the McGovern Report? The YouTube video titled “The McGovern Report” (shown at the meeting) deals with it in a pithy way (available HERE).
Mary Enig, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Maryland, is interviewed in the video. In 1978, she was the lone whistleblower warning people about the dangers of trans fats. The medical establishment, government, and the food and drug industry belittled and ignored her findings that trans fats interfere with critical enzyme systems in the body and suppressed these findings for 25 years. As evidence of their dangers continued to grow the FDA, finally, in 2003, announced that beginning in 2006 the food industry must display how much trans fat the product contains on its nutrition facts label. Having ignored the subject since its inception in 1980, the government’s 2005 Dietary Guidelines for American at last warned them to restrict their consumption of trans fats. In 2006 New York became the first city in the nation to ban trans fats in restaurant food.
Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
Evidence that the McGovern Committee did not have in the 1970s is this 2005 report of European Cardiovascular Disease Statistics.
They show an inverse correlation with saturated fat consumption and rate of heart disease. Countries with the lowest consumption of saturated fat have the highest rates of heart disease. Georgia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Croatia, Macedonia, and Ukraine all have a saturated fat consumption that is less than 7.5% of calories, which is what the USDA and American Heart Association recommend, but their death rate from heart disease is quite high. Austria, Finland, Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France have high levels of saturated fat in their diet and low rates of heart disease. France, with the highest fat consumption, has the lowest rate of deaths from heart disease amongst these 14 European countries.
Reasons Why Saturated Fats Are Good For Us
The Biologic Importance of Saturated Fat
There is good reason why 54 percent of the fat in mother’s milk is saturated fat. Cell membranes need saturated fatty acids to function properly and be “waterproof.” The heart prefers saturated long-chain 16-carbon palmitic and 18-C stearic acid (over carbohydrates) for energy. Bones need them to assimilate calcium effectively. They protect the liver from the adverse effects of alcohol and medications like Tylenol. Lung surfactant is composed entirely of saturated 16-C palmitic acid, and when present in sufficient amounts prevents asthma and other breathing disorders. Saturated fats function as signaling messengers for hormone production.
They play an important role in the immune system by priming white blood cells to destroy invading bacteria, viruses and fungi, and to fight tumors. And medium-chain 12-C lauric acid and 14-C myristic acid (in butter) kill bacteria and candida fungus.
Saturated fats signal satiety, so you stop eating because you feel full, lose fat, and maintain a normal weight.
And, importantly, eating saturated fats reduces consumption of health-damaging carbohydrates and polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
Cracks in the Wall of Diet-Cholesterol Heart Orthodoxy
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is a leading establishment medical journal that defends the lipid hypothesis. Even this journal has backed down and is now reporting cracks in the wall of diet-cholesterol-heart orthodoxy. A meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease does not support the notion that saturated fats increase the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, or peripheral vascular disease.
And this journal also recently published a prospective cohort study of 53,000 women and men comparing their intake of carbohydrates and saturated fats and found that replacement of saturated fats with high glycemic index carbohydrates significantly increases the risk of heart attacks.
A Randomized Double-Blind Trial on the Effects of Coconut Oil on Abdominal Obesity
This trial, published in the journal Lipids, enrolled 40 women with a waist circumference > 35 inches. Twenty were randomized to take 30 ml — two tablespoons — of coconut oil a day (Group C) over a 12-week period. The other 20 took 30 ml soybean oil/day (Group S).
The Group C women taking the coconut oil exhibited a significant reduction in waist circumference (for the statisticians among us the P value was 0.005) with no change in the soybean Group S. And the only thing that the saturated fat-laden coconut oil did to cholesterol levels was to raise HDL cholesterol, the one that advocates of the lipid hypothesis call the “good” cholesterol. (Lipids 2009;44:593-601)
Eat Fat Lose Fat
Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon, president of the Weston Price Foundation, have written a book titled Eat Fat Lose Fat: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Three Delicious, Science-based Coconut Diets. I highly recommend it. The fat content of coconut oil is 92 percent saturated fat, the highest saturated fat content of any food. I now start each day with two tablespoons of coconut oil.
Other Considerations
Roles Cholesterol Play
What about cholesterol? As with saturated fat, it is not a villain. On the contrary, cholesterol is critical for good health. It is an essential component in every cell in the body. Although few doctors know this, more than 20 studies have shown that elderly people with a high cholesterol blood level live longer than do those who have a low cholesterol blood level.
Cholesterol is the mother of hormones. It is converted into stress and sex hormones, like cortisol, testosterone, and estradiol, in the adrenal cortex. The liver turns cholesterol into bile salts needed for intestinal absorption of fats and the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. And when exposed to UVB rays in sunlight or at a tanning salon, the skin turns cholesterol into vitamin D.
Cholesterol also is the body’s fire brigade. It repairs damage to the body’s tissues, particularly the damage in arteries inflammation does to cause atherosclerosis. Blaming cholesterol for atherosclerosis is like blaming firemen for the fire they have come to put out.
Along with saturated fats, cholesterol is also an integral component of cell membranes.
The brain and nerve tissue contain the highest concentration of cholesterol in the body. It is a key component in forming synapses — cell connections — needed for good mental functioning, learning, and memory.
If not cholesterol, then what causes heart disease?
Atherosclerosis is an inflammatory process brought on by eating too many carbohydrates and omega-6 vegetable oils. Stress plays a role and possibly also bacterial infection.
A deficiency of various vitamins shown here may also play a role in causing atherosclerotic heart disease, as may an excess or deficiency of various minerals.
U.S. Dietary Fat: Animal and Vegetable Sources 1909 and 1985
Over the past century, butter consumption has plummeted from 18 grams per person per day to 5 grams. Consumption of lard has dropped substantially while use of shortening has almost tripled. In 1909, shortening was a natural product made with coconut oil and lard. Shortening used today is made out of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Consumption of margarine made with trans fats has gone up five fold, and vegetable oils, more than fifteen-fold. Along with trans fats, these often rancid vegetable oils are new to the human diet.
A good case can be made that these changes in fat-and-oil consumption over the last hundred years are the major cause of the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and learning disabilities in children. Observing the increasing use of vegetable oils during the 1940s and 1950s, a few physicians, notably Dr. Weston A. Price and Dr. Francis Pottenger, predicted that there would be increasing rates of such diseases.
Prevalence of Obesity among US adults 1950-2010
An epidemic of obesity has accompanied the adoption of a low-fat diet. With only 1 in 150 people obese when the century began, by 1950 nearly 10 percent of Americans were obese. Thirty years later, in 1980, it had risen to 15 percent. Then following publication of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines and its every-five-year updates, obesity in Americans has steadily risen. Now two-thirds of the American public is overweight, with more than one-third, obese. Today the average American weighs 30 pounds more that he or she did 100 years ago. American women weigh and average 167 pounds and men, 191 pounds.
There is solid evidence that this epidemic of obesity has resulted from replacing saturated fat in the American diet with carbohydrates and processed polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
Carbohydrate Consumption and Obesity
The rise in obesity parallels closely the rise in carbohydrate intake. As Gary Taubes shows in his book Why We Get Fat: and what to do about it, carbohydrates, not overeating or a sedentary life, are what make you fat. Eating fat and protein don’t make us fat, only carbohydrates do.
The Primal Blueprint Carbohydrate Curve
This graph, in Mark Sisson’s book The Primal Blueprint, compares carbohydrate intake with weight.
Consuming less than 150 grams of carbs a day enables one to maintain a stable weight. More than that and you gain weight. One burns more fat and will lose weight when carbohydrate intake is less than 100 grams a day. Unfortunately, Americans today consume between 300-500 grams of carbs a day.
The Epidemic of Diabetes
Over a 30-year period from 1980-2008 the prevalence of diabetes more than tripled. Now, in 2011, according to the National Diabetes Fact Sheet, 25.8 million children and adults in the U.S., 8.3 percent of the population, have diabetes; and 79 million people, based on their fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1c levels, are prediabetic.
Diabesity
Diabetes and obesity go together, so much so that these disorders are now being called “diabesity”. Body mass index (BMI) is the commonly used measure for obesity, calculated by dividing one’s weight in kilograms (Kg) by one’s height in meters squared (Kg/m2). One is considered to be obese if the BMI ≥30, and morbidly obese with a BMI of ≥35.
People with a BMI ≥35 are 10 times more likely to develop diabetes in their lifetimes than those with a normal BMI of 18.5-25. The lifetime risk of diabetes is around 30 percent for people who are overweight with a BMI of 25-30, 50 percent for obese people with a BMI of 30-35, and around 70 percent for people who are morbidly obese.
Disease Trends and Butter Consumption
Consumption of butter has dropped precipitously while cancer and heart disease has soared. The rise in cancer and heart disease certainly cannot be blamed on high-saturated-fat butter.
The Health-Damaging Effects of a Low-Fat, High-Carbohydrate Diet
A 12-ounce can of coke has ten teaspoons of sugar, which contain 42 grams of sugar, supplying 167 calories. A 20 ounce bottle has 17, and a 30 ounce bottle, 27 teaspoons of sugar. The average American drinks 600 cans (56 gallons) of soft drinks a year, up from 216 can in 1971. The average American teenager drinks 3 to 6 cans of soda a day!
One-third of our dietary sugar comes from sodas, and they have become America’s number one source of calories.
Disasters
Disasters that may confront us can be divided into ones that are natural and those that are human made. The natural ones range from an earthquake to an impact event, like the one 65 million years ago where an asteroid six miles in diameter collided with the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, and all other life forms larger than a small chicken.
Human-made disasters include political, economic, and martial types, a number of which Doctors for Disaster Preparedness has addressed. To this list must be added the nutritional disaster of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
These trucks laden with soda pop serve as its weapons of mass destruction.
Health Benefits of a Low-Carbohydrate, High-Saturated Fat Diet
In addition to Eat Fat, Lose Fat, I recommend two more books that can help us reduce our carbohydrate intake. One is Life Without Bread: how a low-carbohydrate diet can save your life. It describes diets that limit carbohydrate intake to 72 grams a day, which is equivalent to 6 slices of bread. The other one is Why We Get Fat: and what to do about it by Gary Taubes. Noting that meat, fish, and eggs contain no carbohydrates, he suggests that you can eat as much of them as you like, along with leafy green vegetables. (Try chicken salad wrapped in lettuce rather than as a sandwich between two slices of bread.)
The ideal caloric ratio between carbohydrates, fats, and protein is carbohydrates, 10-15 percent; proteins, 15-25 percent; and fats, 60-70 percent of calories, with the majority of them being saturated fats. Among the different kinds of fats, saturated fats and monounsaturated fats are good; except for omega-3 and a small amount of omega-6 essential fatty acids, polyunsaturated fats are bad in the high quantities that they are eaten in a Western diet, particularly industrially processed vegetable oils; and trans fats are terrible. Saturated animal fat is best obtained from grass-fed beef and pastured chickens, along with nitrate-free, additive-free bacon and sausage; and seafood from wild, not farm-raised, fish.
The Sacred Cow
Healthy milk and meat comes from contented cows on pasture, eating grass food that they are genetically designed to eat.
The “Efficient” Industrial Confinement Model
Confinement operations like these produce meat that is too high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fat and too low in vitamins. It being certified “organic” is not sufficient. The turkeys in the photo in the lower left can be sold as organic because they are “cage free”! The best meat to eat is that which is “Certified humanely treated” or “100% grass-fed/finished.”
The Pastured Poultry Model
Pastured poultry produce eggs much richer in nutrients such as vitamins A and D and omega-3 fatty acids. Like with the turkeys so confined, organic eggs are produced mainly in barns. One wants to eat pastured eggs like those sold at a farmer’s market.
Three types of eggs
The color of the yolk is an indication of the presence of nutrients. The pastured egg, with its dark orange color, is full of nutrients. The organic store egg less so. The supermarket egg, pale as it is, would be even whiter if the chickens weren’t fed orange foods and dyes.
Confinement Butter vs. Grass-Fed Butter
The butter on the right was made from cream from cows on green pasture. The deep yellow color is indicative of high levels of omega-3 fats and fat-soluble vitamins. The butter on the left was made with cream from confined cows. Commercial butter like this has artificial color added to it so the consumer will not know that it is actually colorless.
Conclusion
Enjoy eating saturated fat but preferably from grass-fed animals.
For further reading on this subject, I recommend two articles, which are available online. One is the article that prompted me to question the lipid hypothesis. The second one is my now more enlightened view on this subject.
I did a podcast on the health benefits of a low-carbohydrate, high-saturated-fat diet on the Livin La Vida Low Carb Show. The show’s host, Jimmy Moore, has titled it, “Cardiac Surgeon Dr. Donald Miller Tells Dr. Dean Ornish to Take a Hike.” A link to it is HERE (and on my website).
Supporters of the orthodox view that saturated fats and cholesterol cause heart disease who dismiss these books, unread, bring to mind George Orwell’s definition of orthodoxy: “Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think.” And Frank Zappa put it well when he said, “The mind is like a parachute, it works only when it is open.” One needs to approach this subject with an open mind.
Diana Johnstone has written a compelling and insightful book. It is mostly a review and analysis of significant events from the past 55 years. It concludes with her assessment of different trends that are being debated on the Left today including “identity politics”, Antifa and censorship. This is a book to be read, enjoyed and discussed.
“Circle in the Darkness” gives glimpses into Johnstone’s personal life. She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up there and in Washington DC. She studied and taught at the University of Minnesota before moving and living most of her life in Europe – mostly in France with stints in Germany and Italy.
Her parents divorced when she was young. She had a special love and connection with her father who, ironically, was an analyst for the Pentagon. Evidently he also had an open and critical mind, writing the memoir “From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning“.
Diana had a daughter at a relatively young age and largely raised her on her own. She finished her PhD in French literature, then worked as a teacher, translator, photographer and journalist.
There are interesting observations and comparisons. As Diana and her daughter moved between Minnesota and France, she compared the different educational systems. She notes, “There is a tendency in American grade schools for the kids to gang up against whichever unfortunate schoolmate has been selected by class bullies for tormenting ….. from my observation it is not like this in France.” She also describes the difficulties being a single mother before it was more common.
The book is full of insights based on her first hand experience living in Yugoslavia as a young exchange student, being a photographer for Associated Press, translating news reports for Agence France Presse, reporting on the end of the Cold War for In These Times and being press officer for the coalition of Green Parties in the newly formed European Union.
Grass Roots Activism
One theme running through the book is the need to reach out and engage with regular people. She recounts her experiences opposing the US war on Vietnam. Johnstone and her allies launched a campaign to educate and engage with regular Minnesotans, to explain what was happening in Vietnam and why the war should be opposed. She helped organize teams of students and teachers who went door to door in Minneapolis. Later, they sent a citizens delegation to Paris to meet with and hear from the Vietnamese representatives. Afterward, they reported back to communities throughout the state and country. Johnstone says these actions did not get the media attention but deepened opposition to the war in profound ways. The students and teachers going into the neighborhoods had to educate themselves in advance; they learned from the questions (and sometimes opposition) of community members; the delegation which met the Vietnamese representatives in Paris were deeply impressed and conveyed their experience on their return.
Johnstone is an unusually perceptive analyst. For example, her analysis of the Watergate scandal and Nixon resignation raises important but overlooked issues. Rather than seeing this as the hallmark of investigative journalism, she notes that it established the model of journalism relying on unidentified government sources. Looking back, the Watergate scandal effectively deflected attention from the ongoing slaughter in Southeast Asia. “Getting rid of Nixon was a brilliant coup that united generations, torn asunder by opposing attitudes toward the war ….. Watergate washed away the national sins. It prepared America to be ‘born again’ first as the innocent Gerald Ford and then as the good Christian Jimmy Carter, champion of human rights.” Moreover “The shenanigans around Watergate were a distraction from the most significant acts of the Nixon administration, in particular the shakeup of the world economy by the August 1971 decision to suspend (meaning to end) the convertibility of the dollar into gold. This was a direct result of the huge U.S. debt resulting from the cost of the Vietnam War.”
The author has a stark assessment of what happened to the Left. “As for the American antiwar movement, half a century later, it has vanished almost without a trace as an influential political force. There are perhaps more intelligent critics of war than ever before, but they are largely confined to the virtual world of the web, without significant impact on a political system which is totally integrated into a military industrial complex that relies on endless conflicts.”
Critical International Events
Through her work at Associated Press and Agence France Presse, Johnstone saw how stories are selected and prioritized depending on establishment bias. She also saw how the media can promote certain types of protest leaders. There are critical assessments of some protest leaders who became famous including Daniel Cohn Bendit. She gives a scathing critique of celebrity French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy.
Johnson has valuable insights on many events over the 1970’s and 80’s. A few examples are
* the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme, who was likely behind it and how it has led to Swedish subservience to the US
* the causes and consequences of the assassination of Aldo Moro by ultra-leftists in Italy
* the murder of Palestinian moderate Dr. Issa Sartawi at a Socialist Party conference
* the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish militant and the propaganda campaign trying to link him to Bulgaria and Soviet Union
* the growing influence of Israel in western foreign policy
In the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Johnstone watched closely, interviewed key players and reported on the rise of detente between the USA and Soviet Union She concludes, “Not enough credit is given to Mikhail Gorbachev and to the 1980s peace movement”.
The book is subtitled “Memoirs of a World Watcher”. Johnstone describes how radical islamists were used to undermine the socialist Afghanistan government beginning 1979. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the US had no restraints. She summarizes “Mikhail Gorbachev was a naive negotiator, outfoxed by the Americans” and “The total surrender of ‘real existing’ communism in the East contributed to the defeat of the Western Left”.
In 1991 the US seemingly invited Saddam Hussein to go into Kuwait, then built up a huge force to expel and then massacre thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers. With operation “Desert Storm” viewed as a military success, President Bush declared “The Vietnam syndrome is over!”
Yugoslavia and “Humanitarian Imperialism”
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, neoliberal economic policies quickly dominated the globe. The European Union was formed in 1992. Johnstone describes how the EU imposed rules and requirements that favored private banks and institutions and restricted or prevented state intervention and solutions. Yugoslavia, as the sole remaining socialist holdout, was under increasing pressure and media attack.
Johnstone describes how “humanitarian imperialism” emerged at this time. With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) needed a new mandate and reason for existing. They found this new purpose in media distortion and demonization of Serbia and Yugoslavia. NATO promoted the “Kosovo Liberation Army” and other divisive elements then bombed Serbia for 78 consecutive days. Yugoslavia was broken into pieces.
In 2002 Johnstone wrote a book about the NATO attack, western propaganda and show trial. Her book is titled “Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions”. She was attacked in the media for challenging the dominant assumptions about the conflict. She responded to the attacks saying,“I do not deny atrocities, but unlike others I give them a political context.” Others strongly defended her. Canadian law professor Michael Mandel wrote, “Fools Crusade is not only the definitive work on the Balkans Wars, it is also an inspiring example of how to rescue truth from the battlefield when it has become war’s first casualty”.
Western media distortion and intervention in Yugoslavia went almost unopposed. The antiwar movement was widely confused and silent. This was followed by the US invasions of Afghanistan then Iraq.
Along with media distortions and comparisons to Hitler and the Holocaust, there emerged the justification for violating national sovereignty based on the “Right to Protect” (R2P). This was the pretext for overthrowing the Libyan government of Moammar Gadhafi. Johnstone discusses how R2P has been used to confuse and silence antiwar forces, even some prominent traditional antiwar analysts. Johnstone has interacted with Noam Chomsky many times over decades and is overall very positive. But she notes that “even he might get something wrong”. She documents how the co-author of “Manufacturing Consent” was evidently fooled into believing media reports from Benghazi Libya. Chomsky said the western sponsored uprising was “wonderful”. It is now clear that media reports and NGO accusations from Benghazi were false. They were the pretense to launch the NATO campaign to overthrow the government.
Western intervention, including the sponsorship of terrorist armies in Syria, has been sold to the unwitting public using this model. Wherever the US and NATO wish to intervene, there is a “humanitarian crisis” and “responsibility to protect”.
Critical Current Issues
“Circle in the Darkness” analyzes many current issues of contention and debate on the left. She argues that suppression of debate and free speech, whether by the Right or Left, is counter-productive. She also argues that violence and vandalism hurts the progressive cause even when it gives a spurt of publicity and media attention. She describes many examples over the past 50 years and how frequently the instigators were government or police agents.
Johnstone describes the spectacular growth of the “Yellow Vest” movement in France. She documents how it began, how it was supported and joined by common people and how it reached across party lines. She contrasts the broad support of the Yellow Vest movement with narrow support of the student protests of May 1968. She writes, “Sociologically, this revolt was the opposite of May ’68. Instead of privileged students, imagining a non-existent working class revolution in a time of prosperity, this was the working class itself, in hard times.”
Johnstone describes how French police then attacked the Yellow Vest protesters with many injuries and even deaths. She writes, “Curiously, all this heavy handed repression totally failed to prevent masked ‘Black Bloc’ members from taking advantage of this opportunity to attack the police, set fires, break shop windows ….. Police did nothing to prevent unidentified intruders from invading the ground floor of the Arc de Triomphe to smash up a statue of Marianne…. It is noteworthy that almost all the seriously injured were peaceful Yellow Vest protesters, whereas the Black Blocs often got away unscathed. Perhaps the Black Blocs believe they are fighting the system. Whatever their intentions, they have served as a useful auxiliary to government repression.”
Johnstone notes the massive media effort to control popular thoughts and anger. “The mainstream media have moved farther and farther away from informing the public and nearer to instructing them in what they should think and do.” She thinks the Left is also infused with dogma. Diana Johnstone recounts the falling out with Counterpunch magazine after they published a “barrage of attacks” on the analyst and writer Caitlin Johnstone (no relation). “That was indeed the start of Caitlin’s rise to great prominence in anti-war circles and the beginning of CounterPunch’s decline from ‘fearless muckraking’ to snide sniping at the genuine heirs to the independent spirit of the founder, Alexander Cockburn. The gist of the CounterPunch attacks on the Australian Johnstone were that she dared say she would join even with someone on the right against war. That is simple good sense, but it was picked up by the Antifa purification squad as proof of tendencies toward fascism. When I saw them coming after Caitlin, I figured they’d be coming after me, and that my association with CounterPunch was soon coming to an end.”
Johnstone argues in favor of working for peace with all forces which agree on that issue, whether or not they agree on all issues of “identity politics”. She argues that we should not be distracted from the root causes of war and social inequality. When the Left focuses on the fringe right, the establishment is not only happy, they encourage and promote this diversion.
“The specialty of the AntiFa is to situate the threat of tyranny on the powerless margins of society – from isolated groups of costume party neo-Nazis to outspoken persons on the left accused of ‘red-brown’ tendencies. This amounts to keeping the Left herded into its sheep pen, while the wolves roam freely.”
Johnstone is hopeful and encouraged by two things: a new generation of truth seekers and the fact that life is full of surprises.
This book is full of insights and analysis about where the world is at and how we got here. It includes important ideas and thoughts about what we can do to resist the drift toward global war and catastrophe. Above all, Diana Johnstone argues for the importance of discussion, debate and keeping it real.
In April 2018, President Trump issued an order to the National Archives to continue keeping thousands of CIA records relating to the John Kennedy assassination secret from the American people. The new deadline, which could be extended again by either Trump or a President Biden, was set for October 2021.
Since the order was issued early in the Trump regime, no doubt he felt confident that there would be no adverse political consequences flowing from his order. But now that Trump is engaged in a heated race with Joe Biden, he ought to be called upon to explain and justify his order for continued secrecy in an assassination that took place almost six decades ago.
Given the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination, the massive secrecy in which the Pentagon and the CIA engaged after the assassination has never made any sense.
The official narrative says that a lone nut former U.S. Marine communist killed Kennedy with no apparent motive. The most that proponents of the lone-nut theory have ever come up with on a possible motive is that a little man wanted to become a big man by killing a big man. The big problem with that theory is that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, denied that he did it and even contended that he was being framed for the crime. If a little man wanted to become a big man by killing a big man, wouldn’t he be acknowledging that he did it and even boasting about it?
IN 1991, Oliver Stone come out with his movie JFK, which posited that Kennedy had been assassinated as part of a U.S. domestic regime-change operation intended to protect “national security” from a president who had declared an end to the Cold War and an intention to establish peaceful and friendly relations with the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world. (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the ARRB.)
At the end of JFK, Stone inserted a blurb pointing out the continued secrecy of federal agencies with respect to records relating to the Kennedy assassination some 30 years after the assassination in what had been presented as nothing more than a lone-nut murder of a president.
While the mainstream media was poo-pooing Stone’s movie, the American people were outraged over the continued secrecy. Public pressure caused Congress to enact the JFK Records Collection Act in 1992, which mandated the release of all assassination-related records of federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the CIA.
To enforce the law, Congress called into existence the Assassination Records Review Board. In its four years of operation, the ARRB secured the release of tens of thousands of records relating to the assassination, some of which pointed to the fraudulent nature of the autopsy that the U.S. military conducted on the president’s body. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.)
There were two strange parts of the JFK Records Act:
1. The law expressly prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the JFK assassination. Doesn’t that seem to be a rather strange provision? If a matter that had intentionally been kept secret for 30 years needed to be investigated, wouldn’t you think that Congress would want it investigated? The no-investigation provision was strictly enforced on the ARRB staff by the ARRB board of trustees.
2.The law permitted federal agencies to keep their records secret for another 25 years, a provision that the CIA took advantage of. Given that this was supposedly just a lone-nut murder, why was secrecy necessary in the first place? What “national security” concern would there have been? And wouldn’t a lapse of 30 years be sufficient for any such “national security” concern? Why another 25 years, especially since continued secrecy would only serve to buttress Stone’s thesis in JFK?
Back in the 1990s, 25 years must have seemed like a long time away, long enough that the CIA and the Pentagon could rest easy. Anyway, by the time those 25 years expired, there was a good chance that no one would care anyway, especially within the mainstream press.
But when that deadline rolled around in 2018, there were people who still cared. They were demanding that Trump release the records.
That’s not what Trump did. Instead, he granted the CIA’s request for at least another 3 1/2 years of secrecy.
Back in 2018, Trump didn’t have to justify his decision, but now that he’s running for reelection, he should be made to account for what he did by being asked the following questions:
1. How could the release of the CIA’s long-secret JFK-assassination-related records possibly pose a threat to “national security”?
2. Why not order an immediate release of those long-secret records now rather than wait until October of next year?
3. If the CIA has nothing to hide, why is it still hiding it almost 60 years after the Kennedy assassination?
The big problem, of course, is the deep loyalty that the mainstream press, Democrats, Republicans, and even some conservative-oriented libertarians have toward the CIA, not to mention the deep fear of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist.” That is why it is unlikely that Trump will be required to justify his deference to the CIA and its desire for continued secrecy in the Kennedy assassination.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Sally Fallon Morell has written a new book, published last month, titled Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness. In a smoothly flowing 182 pages, she shows why saturated fat and cholesterol are not the villains they are made out to be.
Parents of infants and young children will be drawn first to Chapter 8, “Remember the Little Ones: Why Children Need Animal Fats.” Beneath this title in the table of contents she writes: “Children need animal fats for normal growth and the development of their brains. But at the two-year checkup, doctors warn moms not to give saturated fats to their toddlers, and whole milk is forbidden in school lunches—despite consistent science showing that children on low fat diets are more likely to suffer from allergies, asthma, learning disorders and obesity. We are literally starving our children in the name of phony science.”
The human brain continues to make billions of new brain cells after birth for some number of years. They need saturated fats and cholesterol to form healthy, waterproof cell membranes. Fallon Morell spells out the many important roles saturated fats and cholesterol play in the body, like supporting the “formation of sex hormones, needed in copious quantities during pregnancy.” She points out that “Nearly half of the fatty acids in human breast milk are saturated, suggesting that dietary saturated fats are critical to the development of infants and young children. Saturated fats are so important during these critical stages of development that their abundant presence in breast milk is universal among mammals.”
In the first chapter, “The Greatest Villains,” she tracks the unfolding demonization of saturated fat and cholesterol. It began in 1912 with the pernicious marketing of Crisco—its name comes from CRYStalized Cottonseed Oil—by Proctor and Gamble. The company promoted this hydrogenated trans-fat, first used to make candles and soap, as a “healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats.” At the time, Americans used lard (pork fat), tallow (beef and lamb fat), and butter for cooking and baking food. She next addresses the fake science of cholesterol studies in rabbits, who as herbivores are not designed to digest animal fats and cholesterol. Then there is the Framingham Heart Study, where largely ignored follow-up reports contradict its initial findings that high cholesterol blood levels cause heart disease. She shows how the 1977 McGovern Report advocating low-fat “Dietary Goals for the United States” and the 1984 Cholesterol Consensus Conference have played fast and loose with the science.
Other chapters include “A Short Lesson on the Biochemistry of Fats,” “The Many Roles of Saturated Fat,” and “Animal Fats for the Mind.” In the Table of Contents below a chapter titled “Not Guilty as Charged” she writes: “Animal fats get the blame for everything from cancer to ingrown toenails—and none of these accusations is true! The science shows that saturated animal fats actually protect us from chronic disease.”
The last chapter’s title is “The Queen of Fats: Why Butter is Better.” Below it she writes, “The queen of fats, butter is loaded with nutrients the body needs to be healthy and happy. Starve yourself of butter during the day and you’ll crave ice cream when nighttime rolls around. Modern processing technologies cannot come close to providing in spreads and margarines the range of vitamins and lipid components present in butter. Nature’s fat for optimal growth and development.”
Fallon Morell confirms that butter contains a variety of healthful saturated fats. These include, among others, short chain (4-carbon) butyric acid, medium chain (12-carbon) lauric acid, and long chain (14-carbon) myristic acid. Butyric acid occurs almost exclusively in butter and has anti-fungal properties as well as anti-tumor effects. It also helps increase the number of thyroid hormone receptors on cells. Lauric acid has both strong anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties. Only the mammary glands in humans can make lauric acid. These two fats are absorbed directly without any help from bile salts into the bloodstream and provide quick energy. Butter also is the most common source of myristic acid, which plays important roles in the body. (Coconut oil contains large quantities of lauric acid.)
Butter also contains the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K2. Fallon Morell devotes a separate chapter to them, with this caveat: “Critical vitamins A, D, and K2 occur uniquely in animal fats—and Westerners are woefully deficient in these nutrients. The body uses vitamins A, D and K2 for everything from proper vision to growth to fertility.” These vitamins help produce and activate various proteins, notably matrix GLA (gamma-carboxyglutamic) protein that removes calcium from coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart. One action of Vitamin A, among many, is that it helps the body deal with dioxins and pesticides
“Food” producers make imitation butter with solid, colorless trans-fats, adding yellow dye to make this dangerous fat look like butter. Now outed, industrial processed trans-fats cause cancer, interfere with insulin receptors in the cells, and interfere with the (desaturase) enzymes required to convert the parent Omega-6 (linoleic) and Omega-3 (alpha linolenic) acids into their important elongated versions, AA (arachidonic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) respectively. She devotes wo chapters to this subject, titled “The Rancid and the Trans” and “AA and DHA.”
The healthiest butter comes from cream that free ranging, contented cows eating grass in sunlit pastures produce. This butter has a natural deep yellow color indicative of high levels of Omega-3 fats and fat soluble vitamins. Butter from industrially confined cows denied access to green pastures has 10 to 13-times less vitamin A and 3-times less vitamin D than grass-fed cows. My wife and I consume Amish butter, which we purchase at a local grocery store in the small town where we live. Amazon has it.
As President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and Editor of Wise Traditions: in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts (the Foundation’s quarterly journal), Sally Fallon Morell commands an encyclopedic knowledge of butter and saturated fats. She states, “No one studied butter more thoroughly than Dr. Weston A. Price. Throughout the 1930s, he analyzed thousands of butter samples shipped to him from all over the world.”
She dedicates Nourishing Fats “To the memory of Mary G. Enig, PhD” (1931-2014), her long-time colleague, friend, and coauthor of key articles and books. The two books they wrote together are Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats (1995) and Eat Fat, Lose Fat: The healthy Alternative to Trans Fats (2005). More than 30 years ago, Dr. Enig exposed the connection between trans-fat margarine and heart disease and cancer. The medical establishment first ignored her, then vilified her, and finally years later treated her findings concerning trans-fat as an unsurprising, obvious fact.
Sally Fallon Morell is a skilled writer with a sharp scientific mind. She cites 707 up-to-date references in this book, which I was pleased to see includes this one: “Statins stimulate atherosclerosis and heart failure: pharmacological mechanisms,” by Okuyama H, et al., in the March 2015 issue of Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology (volume 8[2], pages 389-99). This book also has 32 pages of recipes and 22 pages of notes.
A careful reading of Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness will change what you eat and thus improve your health. Despite what the medical establishment, government health authorities, pharmaceutical companies, and the soybean industry still say, saturated animal fats, saturated tropical oils (coconut and palm oil), and cholesterol are not villains. Orthodox claims that they are bad for us wilt and become thoroughly discredited when held up to scientific scrutiny.
The bottom line: “Start eating butter, lots of butter!”
Note
I address this subject in my 2011 Lew Rockwell article “Enjoy Saturated Fats, They’re Good for You!” It is drawn from a talk I gave on saturated fats earlier that year at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Albuquerque. This 53-minute talk is available on YouTube HERE (there have been 325,000 views of it so far).
Graduating from medical school in 1965 and pursuing a 40-year career as an academic member of the medical establishment performing and teaching heart surgery, I unquestioningly adhered to the low-fat creed. For far too long. Then, in 2005, I came upon an article that Mary Enig, PhD and Sally Fallon (now Sally Fallon Morell) wrote titled “The Oiling of America,” first published in the magazine Nexus in 1999. This article stimulated me to look more carefully into the matter and discover that the conventional wisdom regarding saturated fats and cholesterol is false.
Donald Miller [send him mail] is a retired cardiac surgeon, a Professor Emeritus of Surgery and former Chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His website is www.donaldmiller.com.
A new book, Irreversible Damage, reveals how teenage girls are being duped into believing they want to be male, and are pushed into taking puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and undergoing double mastectomies.
Whether it is a statement or a question, the title of this book conveys the necessary urgency of this desperately sad story. Amid the trans debate, seemingly a battle between grown adults, vulnerable children are prey to a malevolent ideology that survivors call a cult.
In a superb piece of investigative journalism, Abigail Shrier focusses on teenage girls – most with no history of gender dysphoria – who become captivated by the belief that they are transgender. Behind the glittery exterior portrayed in the media, she encounters damaged children – many alienated from their families – in poor mental health and facing the prospect of infertility and medication for life.
Shrier, a writer with the Wall Street Journal, pulls no punches when describing phalloplasty, the construction of an artificial penis. The complications can be horrific. She reports the experience of one nineteen-year-old, “whose phalloplasty resulted in gangrene and loss of the appendage.” On the cusp of adulthood, that young person has been left without normal genitalia, for either sex, and tethered to a catheter.
I am a transgender person, but I transitioned as an adult when I could understand the implications on my body and my relationship with society. Besides, by then I’d had my own children. Yet children too young to even give consent for a tattoo are being corralled into making truly life-changing decisions.
Whether you agree or disagree with her, this is a book that needs to be read. Shrier’s informed analysis flows from dozens of interviews, including medical experts and parents. From Dr Kenneth Zucker, who oversaw the writing of the medical definition of “gender dysphoria,” to ordinary families whose children seem to them to have been swept along by this cult, Shrier talks directly to those with first-hand experience.
The facts are clear: there is a contagion spreading among teenage girls who suddenly believe themselves to be boys. While there is documented history of young feminine boys expressing a desire to be girls, never before have girls dominated the work of paediatric gender clinics. The statistics are staggering. In the UK, for example, referrals of teenage girls rose by 4400% in the last decade.
Shrier interviewed Lisa Littman, an American doctor who conducted an observational study and found that nearly 70 percent of the teenagers belonged to a peer group in which at least one friend had also come out as transgender. In some groups, most of the friends had done so. Transgender identification was encouraged and intensified by friends and social media and, astonishingly, appeared to precede the experience of gender dysphoria itself.
Shrier explores possible reasons why these daughters, often from liberal progressive households, want to be sons. First, social media where children are influenced by strangers while their parents are kept in the dark. Second, the educational system where adults who ought to know better have been enthralled, or threatened, by transgender activists. Ignoring both science and basic safeguarding, they have bought into the notion that we all have an immutable gender identity which may or may not match our sex.
With overwhelming folly, children are being transitioned in their schools with new names and pronouns. If their parents might be unsupportive, then they are not told, in case their children might feel “unsafe.” But this is something all parents need to know: this phenomenon is catching, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
But nothing could have happened without the cooperation of policy makers, and not only within the education system. Therapists – the very people who should be helping children to challenge their thinking – have been blindly affirming whatever their young patients have picked up from the internet.
Anyone who has stood against this has faced censure and condemnation. But as Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano explained, “This idea that a kid’s going to come in and tell us that they’re trans and that within a session or two or three or four, that we’re going to say, ‘Yep, you’re trans. Let me write you the letter.’ That’s not therapy.”
Even the medical profession itself has been found wanting. Eminent sexologist Dr Ray Blanchard told Shrier that “I can’t think of any branch of medicine outside of cosmetic surgery where the patient makes the diagnosis and prescribes the treatment.” While the zealots who actually believe that children can change their sex are perhaps in a minority, those professionals who remain silent in education, therapy and medicine are complicit in this unfolding scandal.
Shrier credits the sterling work of parental groups such as 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend who have stood firm against the ideology. They have been condemned as bigots and transphobes for protecting children from themselves, the first duty of parents since the dawn of time.
The book is well-referenced and easy to read, making it suitable for a wide readership. The most obvious audience are parents concerned for the wellbeing of their daughters. But teachers, therapists and doctors, some of whom remain silent out of ignorance or fear, also need to hear these stories. Finally, the wider public would find Shrier’s analysis accessible, clear and educational. Those only vaguely aware of transgender ideology may be tempted to think that it cannot be true: young girls taking powerful cancer drugs to halt puberty, or induce an artificial menopause if started. But it is happening across the world, and Shrier catalogues it.
The time has come for society to take responsibility. Much has happened covertly, and the startled onlooker may need time to catch up, but Shrier’s book fills in the background, identifies the problems, explains the impact, and proposes clear and workable ways forward. This is a must-read for those with children, anyone who works with children and everyone who cares about them.
Debbie Hayton is a teacher and a transgender campaigner, based in the UK. She tweets @DebbieHayton
Hitler had sent Winston Churchill peace offers several times in 1940, proposing that Germany withdraw from occupied areas except for traditional German regions that were seized after World War I. Churchill should have accepted this offer, but he was an arrogant, selfish, bumbling, alcoholic, psychopath whose actions destroyed Europe and the British Empire.
In his long career John Quincy Adams was President, served in both houses of Congress, was nominated for the Supreme Court, was Secretary of State and U.S. ambassador to many of the great powers of the day. An unequaled record and one very hard to imagine ever being duplicated. He was a proud believer in his country, its constitution and its stated ideals. He had two great fears for his country.
A convinced opponent of slavery, he foresaw no way it could be ended but by the decree of a commander-in-chief during a civil war. A decree that would also end the three-fifths rule which gave the slave-owning states such predominant power. And it all came to pass, just as he feared, in the two decades after his death in 1848.
His other fear was that the behavior of America would destroy America. On 4 July 1821, while Secretary of State, he gave a speech which summarized his thoughts and hopes. It deserves to be read in full but probably the most famous section is
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
He believed that America should be an example “Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of mind.” Involvement in the outside world would inevitably corrupt and destroy liberty “The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” Likewise, and for related reasons, he despised the expansionism of Andrew Jackson, believed Texas should be in the Union but not by war and trickery, was skeptical of the constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase. Better by far that these areas should, of their own free will, and in their own good time, join the Union. To compel, to war, to trick was to destroy the essence of America.
Which brings me to Diana Johnstone and her memoir Circle in the Darkness. Johnstone is a leftie – not the Bolshevik kind, not today’s kind, but an old-fashioned, very American kind – the New Deal kind. Her parents were active in the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration and she grew up with a belief that the principal job of governments was to make things better for ordinary people, wars were to be avoided and America was best off minding its own business – peace and social justice, in other words. She and Adams would have found much to agree with in each other. Her title would also fit Adam’s idea of America in the world – a bright circle of decency in the general darkness.
Johnstone’s book is a lament for the left that used to be and a relating of how, when and where it disappeared. Probably the most notable difference between her early days and today is that today’s left no longer worries about, protests against or even thinks about war. The Iraq War of 2003 was met with enormous protests around the world. They did not stop it, of course, but at least many people said no to it. Subsequent American wars in the Obama period met no protests.
His administration overthrew the Libyan government, overthrew the Ukrainian government, attempted to overthrow the Syrian government, supported the Saudi war in Yemen and continued all the wars it inherited. Not a peep of protest. Partly because Obama was a Democrat and the corporate media fawned over him as “cool” and “intellectual.” But he also moved the wars offstage – by reducing the number of troops on the ground, they became drone attacks, special service troops, contractors, bombing. Far offstage. But where are the anti-war protests against the hated Trump? He too has continued the wars he inherited (but at least started no new ones) but, on the other hand, he is throwing sanctions at everybody. Not bullets, not “kinetic”, but not exactly peaceful either – just a different way of trying to destroy the monsters. The left has become persuaded that wars are good wars, not to be protested, if they can be wrapped in a human rights package. Libya is destroyed, turned into a hellhole because Qaddafi was “bombing his own people.” Ukraine ditto because Yanukovych was “corrupt.” Assad “gasses his own people.” With the narrowly restricted control of the news media, the monsters are easily manufactured.
The Western left no longer opposes wars because the “search for monsters to destroy” has silenced them – it’s good to destroy monsters. Who names and condemns the monsters? Why the monster-destroyers of course. And, if the monster is painted sufficiently monstrous by the controlled media, then no one questions the motives of the monster destroyers; no one even asks whether the monster destroyers have motives other than pure ones. As Johnstone writes:
Once a cause was identified by the Western media-political establishment as “good,” there was a herd-like rush to join it, to show that we are so good that we will not even listen to anyone who questions it, for fear of being identified with the Evil Ones.
and
The Kosovo War marked a change in the attitude of the Left toward U.S. military intervention. An immense publicity campaign, playing on false analogies with World War II, succeeded in rallying much of the Left to the need to “do something”—and the only “something” available was NATO bombing.
The left has lost the skepticism and mistrust of the authorities which used to be one of its foundations. What does the Western left agitate about today? Human rights. But not the human rights of children murdered in Yemen or Ukraine or African slaves in Libya; it’s the human rights of sexual minorities that obsesses those who consider themselves progressives. Or tearing down statues. Neither of which impedes the real aims and interests of the monster-destroyers in the slightest. A useful diversion as far as the looters of the world are concerned. Johnstone’s book recounts how, step by step, drop by drop, the Western left has been diverted into trivia.
For around two centuries, the “Left” was the term designating the most forward-looking, creative political forces in our societies. The Left fought for the independence of Vietnam and other colonized Third World countries. Now it is absent from the whole international movement to restore national sovereignty, condemned as “extreme right.” The Left is sabotaged from within by dogmatism. When “left” is reduced to a catechism, it cuts itself off from the real world and serves only as a means to denounce or punish deviations from the creed.
Both Obama and Trump came to power promising to end the endless wars – “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” (Obama 2002) For the money spent in the Middle East the U.S. got nothing (Trump 2017). But the wars, the bombing, the droning continue and now Trump has added sanctions and cyberattacks to the mix. As Adams feared, once America goes looking for monsters abroad, monsters it will find. And always another after those.
And then the monsters follow you home. Despite the Obama administration’s success at making America’s foreign wars invisible to ordinary voters, the wars have been delivered to their local police departments. They have received billions of dollars of military equipment originally acquired to destroy foreign monsters. The result is – as the current spate of riots in America shows – that American police are virtually indistinguishable from American soldiers. Does dressing like a soldier make you act like a soldier? Have the citizens of America become monsters to destroy? Perhaps they are – police killed over a thousand Americans last year.
The monster-destroying has turned on America itself and is tearing the country apart. The favored candidate lost the election and blamed Russia – now everyone is told he must either agree that Russia is a monster or undergo being called dupe of that monster. “The Interagency”, formed for the monster wars, nearly got rid of a president.
Adams’ monsters roam America and the left obsesses over some lump of bronze or the label on a toilet door.
* John Quincy Adams is the pseudonym of a contributor who believes that the USA in particular and the West in general have lost their way and are heading for the rubbish tip of history.
By the time he graduates public high school, most every student in America has been indoctrinated with the notion that it was Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev who “blinked” during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually it was President John Kennedy who “blinked” during the crisis, and it was a good thing he did.
Every public school student across America is also indoctrinated with the notion that the Soviet Union installed “offensive” missiles in Cuba during the crisis, which the U.S. national-security establishment gravely maintained were a grave threat to U.S. “national security.”
That’s a lie too. The Soviet missiles were defensive in nature. Their aim was to deter another U.S. invasion of the island or, in the event that deterrence failed, to enable Cuba to defend itself against another unlawful U.S. invasion with nuclear weapons.
It’s important to keep in mind an important fact: In the long relationship between communist Cuba and the United States, it has always, without exception, been the United States, not Cuba, that has been the aggressor.
Cuba has never attacked or invaded the United States or even threatened to do so. It has also never initiated any act of terrorism within the United States. Instead, it has been the U.S. government that has done those types of things against Cuba.
There is the brutal economic embargo that the U.S. government has enforced against Cuba almost from the start of the communist regime there. Its aim has always been to inflict impoverishment, suffering, and death on the Cuban people as a way to achieve regime change in the country.
Operating through the CIA, the U.S. government also orchestrated numerous assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro. President Lyndon Johnson referred to the CIA’s assassination program as “a damned Murder, Inc.” The CIA had entered into an assassination partnership with the Mafia, the most crooked murderous private organization in the world.
The CIA also sponsored terrorist attacks inside Cuba, for the purpose of destroying government-owned enterprises and to foment revolution. The attacks produced both death and property damage.
The CIA also sponsored a military invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, which was designed to oust the Fidel Castro regime and replace it with another U.S. puppet regime, similar to the one that Castro had ousted from power in the Cuban revolution. The invasion failed and Castro’s forces killed or captured the CIA’s invaders.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Joint Chiefs of Staff continually exhorted Kennedy to order an all-out U.S. military invasion of Cuba for the purpose of regime change. As part of its efforts, the Pentagon presented Kennedy with a regime-change plan called Operation Northwoods. It called for terrorist attacks to be carried out on American soil that would result in the loss of American life. The plan was to blame the attacks on Cuban agents, which would then give Kennedy the rationale for invading Cuba. Kennedy rejected the plan.
Castro was well aware of the steadfast determination of the CIA and the Pentagon to invade Cuba.But while he could defeat a rag-tag army of CIA-trained Cuban exiles, Castro knew that there was no way he could win if the U.S. military attacked and invaded Cuba.
That was when he asked the Soviet Union to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was his only chance to deter an invasion. He had also decided that if the invasion came, he was determined to resist it with nuclear weapons.
Needless to say, the Pentagon was livid with Kennedy. If he had accepted Operation Northwoods, the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt, this problem would never have arisen. Now America was faced with nuclear weapons 90 miles away from American shores, which, the JCS maintained, were a grave threat to “national security” even though they were defensive in nature.
The Pentagon exhorted and pressured Kennedy to order a bombing and an invasion of Cuba. Otherwise, the Pentagon maintained, there was no way America could survive.
Kennedy resisted the pressure. And it was a good thing he did. What he and the CIA didn’t know is that Soviet tactical nuclear weapons were fully armed and that Soviet commanders on the ground had been given battlefield authority to use them. If Kennedy had followed the recommendation of the Pentagon to bomb and invade Cuba, it is a virtual certainty that it would have led to all-out nuclear war.
Kennedy ended up striking a deal with the Khrushchev in which the U.S. would not invade Cuba and the Soviets would withdraw their nuclear weapons. That’s precisely what Castro wanted. That’s why the missiles had been put there in the first place. Kennedy also secretly promised to remove U.S. nuclear weapons from Turkey that were aimed at the Soviet Union.
Thus, contrary to what public school students are taught about the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was Kennedy, not Khrushchev, who “blinked” during the crisis. It’s a good thing that he had the wisdom to do so because his action saved the world from nuclear holocaust.
But the military and the CIA were furious. They considered Kennedy’s resolution of the crisis to be akin to surrender, treason, and cowardice. More important, by agreeing to leave a permanent communist outpost 90 miles away from American shores, Kennedy, the national security establishment felt, had placed America in grave jeopardy insofar as “national security” was concerned.
This year, Palestinians and their supporters mark the 100th anniversary of The Balfour Declaration, a written statement from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
For Palestinians, The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of their plight: a century of ethnic cleansing at the hands of European newcomers who claim Palestine as their historic home. Yet, for some reason, supporters of the Palestinians are desperate to suppress discussion of the motivation for the Balfour Declaration – how and why did it come about? … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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Psychologist Stuart Ritchie is the author of a new book, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. In the words of his publisher, it demonstrates that “failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless.” 
“Circle in the Darkness” gives glimpses into Johnstone’s personal life. She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up there and in Washington DC. She studied and taught at the University of Minnesota before moving and living most of her life in Europe – mostly in France with stints in Germany and Italy.
Given the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination, the massive secrecy in which the Pentagon and the CIA engaged after the assassination has never made any sense.
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