A German museum has agreed to loan back ancient artifacts looted from the African country of Namibia by the former European colonizer instead of returning them to their real owners.
Berlin’s Ethnological Museum announced on Tuesday that it will send 23 ancient pieces of jewelry, tools and objects to the National Museum of Namibia to enable local artists and academics to conduct research on the items.
The ancient artifacts include a three-headed drinking vessel, a doll wearing traditional dress and various spears, hair pieces and other fashion accessories.
Authorities said the indefinite loan of the artifacts is part of a project to encourage rapprochement between the two countries.
The move is a new chapter in “the long, complex history that Namibia and Germans have”, Esther Moombolah, director of the National Museum of Namibia, told journalists in Berlin.
Namibians should not “have to get on a plane to see our cultural treasures which are kept in boxes in foreign institutions”, she said. “We urge all future partners to follow suit like this institution.”
Germany’s Ethnological Museum has 75,000 African artifacts. In addition to stealing Namibia’s treasures, German colonizers plundered resources and committed genocide in Africa, killing tens of thousands of natives, particularly in the 1904-1908 massacres.
Other western countries, most notably France, Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Spain, did the same.
France’s Quai Branly Museum has almost 70,000 ancient African artifacts, the British Museum has 73,000, and the Netherlands’ National Museum of World Cultures has 66,000. Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa alone has 180,000 ancient African items in its possession, and museums in the United States have 50,000.
In this regard, French President Emmanuel Macron has gone as far as publicly acknowledging past atrocities committed by French soldiers and police in African states’ history.
He just became France’s first leader to give back looted African colonial-era treasures, returning a dozen artifacts to Benin, and a sword to Senegal.
Macron, however, ruled out an official apology to France’s former African colonies and instead ordered setting up expert commissions to dig into historical archives.
In the 1990s, post-Soviet nations were weak and inexperienced while the US had the guile and resources to find footholds in them, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT Arabic. Washington took advantage of that, establishing a webwork of biolabs that Russia believes to be conducting military research, he explained in an interview.
The collapse of the USSR left in its wake nations that were poor and in desperate need of even the most basic necessities, which left them open for the US to exploit, Lavrov said.
“Our Western partners then, so to speak, vigorously scrambled. They offered their services in every aspect and infiltrated every area of the newly-independent states. They sent advisers. And now we are experiencing what came as a result of those times,” the minister said.
In particular, the diplomat was referring to US-funded labs that many post-Soviet states host in their territory. Operating under the umbrella of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, they conduct biological research.
Washington says the network is benign and serves to detect and identify emerging pathogens that may pose a threat to humanity. But some nations, including Russia, believe them to be clandestine bioweapons research facilities.
Evidence of the labs’ true nature was uncovered by the Russian military during its offensive in Ukraine, Lavrov said, adding that Moscow will not allow the issue to slide.
“The experiments they conduct in those labs. We have long suspected that they are not peaceful and harmless,” he said.
“The samples of pathogens that were stored [at Ukrainian labs], the paperwork showed clearly the military character of the experiments. And the documents made it clear that there are dozens of these labs in Ukraine,” he added.
Moscow wants to update the Biological Weapons Convention, a 1972 international treaty that bans any research, stockpiling and use of such weapons and which both Russia and the US signed. The agreement has a major flaw in lacking a verification mechanism, similar to what the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons use to ensure compliance in their areas of non-proliferation.
The US has been stonewalling a proposal to establish such a mechanism for over two decades, since 2001, Lavrov stressed. “Now it has become clear to us why they took this position while creating military biological laboratories throughout the world over all these years,” he said.
This is the big ugly truth that many people will have trouble facing:
Only some independent physicians have been heroic during the pandemic.
In some of my past writings I have spoken about the failure of most physicians to truly understand pandemic issues and think and act independently to serve the public. Instead they have served the interests of Big Pharma, their corporate employers and government agencies, most clearly as big pushers of COVID vaccines. They do not follow or know the medical research on many pandemic issues. They either do not have the time or interest or skills to independently follow medical research. Instead they rely on big medical societies and government agencies.
Here is what Robert Malone just pointed out:
“The most common explanation for why physicians have not spoken up about the weaponization and manipulation of public health information and policies during the ‘Coronacrisis’ is that they are deeply indebted due to the loans taken out to enable their extended and expensive education, and have no practical choice other than to comply with the mandates imposed on them by government, insurance agencies, and their host institutions (academic or private hospital chains). They have a profound financial conflict of interest- comply or go bankrupt. In large part, the physicians and medical scientists who have spoken up about the compromised medical ethics, regulatory standards, mis- and disinformation propagated by governments and WHO (including intentionally withheld or manipulated medical and epidemiological information) have been financially independent, often senior with high status or established independent medical practices, or otherwise have been decoupled from mechanisms or institutions which have been weaponized to force compliance with centralized edicts. In other words, the majority of those who have spoken out have freedom to speak BECAUSE they are (relatively) financially independent.”
In my book Pandemic Blunder released about 1.5 years ago I gave attention to the innovative doctors who, starting in March 2020, were saving patients with generics; Dr. Zelenko wrote the Preface to my book. They still are saving lives with generics. They have withstood the ugly politics of the pandemic. Unlike the majority of doctors they truly follow the science and the data. Ordinary people will not easily find a doctor that can see past the mountain of pandemic propaganda that fuels public health and medical establishments.
The doctors we normally see to manage our illnesses should not be seen as competent about pandemic issues. That truth is difficult to swallow. It means that people must work hard themselves to find pandemic truths on sites like this one. That some one million Americans have died with or from COVID is proof that putting all your trust in most physicians can be lethal.
In 2015, US military physicians described a study of 1,081 healthy young soldiers who received a smallpox vaccine as part of their military service. [Smallpox vaccine is not used in the civilian population.] It is known to cause a high rate of side effects, including myo- and peri-carditis, heart attacks and heart failure.
They found:
5 soldiers or 0.046% (about 1 in 216 vaccine recipients) developed a clinical case of myo or pericarditis. This is over 200 times the expected rate!
But an additional 31 vaccine recipients had elevated cardiac enzymes
Adding these 2 groups together (36 out of 1081 soldiers) we find that one in 30 soldiers had lab-diagnosed cardiac inflammation. The 31 didn’t complain of symptoms. But in the military, it never pays to complain.
They too were at elevated risk of a cardiac arrhythmia and/or reduced cardiac function, and may have been at higher risk of a myocardial infarction.
We don’t know how common mild or subacute myo/pericarditis is in young Americans after Covid vaccines, because the US health agencies have neither performed a similar study, demanded such a study from the vaccine manufacturers (while it is the responsibility of both FDA to request and the manufacturers to perform), and the FDA and CDC have kept the databases hidden that might help at least identify the “clinical” cases, the ones who complained and sought medical care.
The CDC or FDA could also have contracted with this group of military physicians to perform a similar study of Covid vaccine recipients.
Dr. Michael Nelson, this study’s second author, was made a member of the FDA vaccine advisory committee for Covid vaccines. But he has been mum about the potential similarities between the covid and smallpox vaccine side effects, and didn’t publicly mention this study when he spoke at the VRBPAC meetings.
In 2003, another group of military and civilian physicians (including at least 2 vaccine zealots as coauthors: Greg Poland and John Grabenstein) published a study of US soldiers receiving smallpox vaccine, in which they did not look carefully for cases. How common was myocarditis in their study? One case in 12,818 soldiers. They found 400 times fewer cases than the authors of the 2015 study. The full text can be downloaded here as a pdf.
How hard are CDC and FDA looking for Covid vaccine myo-pericarditis cases? We heard about no prospective studies at the VRBPAC and ACIP (the FDA and CDC vaccine advisory committees’) meetings in June.
New onset chest pain, dyspnea, and/or palpitations occurred in 10.6% of SPX-vaccinees and 2.6% of TIV-vaccinees within 30 days of immunization (relative risk (RR) 4.0, 95% CI: 1.7-9.3). Among the 1081 SPX-vaccinees with complete follow-up, 4 Caucasian males were diagnosed with probable myocarditis and 1 female with suspected pericarditis. This indicates a post-SPX incidence rate more than 200-times higher than the pre-SPX background population surveillance rate of myocarditis/pericarditis (RR 214, 95% CI 65-558). Additionally, 31 SPX-vaccinees without specific cardiac symptoms were found to have over 2-fold increases in cTnT (>99th percentile) from baseline (pre-SPX) during the window of risk for clinical myocarditis/pericarditis and meeting a proposed case definition for possible subclinical myocarditis. This rate is 60-times higher than the incidence rate of overt clinical cases. No clinical or possible subclinical myocarditis cases were identified in the TIV-vaccinated group.
If you think one in thirty is impossibly high, a Finnish study of military recruits published in 1978 found the same 3% rate after smallpox and DTP vaccination, based on EKG changes.
Covid vaccines may be causing similar high rates of cardiac inflammation too. But today, who’s counting?
And did this cause the military to stop vaccinating for smallpox, a disease wiped out in 1977? No. Military smallpox vaccinations continued.
The Western alliance spent 78 days bombing Yugoslavia in 1999, contaminating the Balkan nation with at least 15 tonnes of highly toxic depleted uranium (DU) munitions. Serbian attorneys have filed multiple lawsuits against NATO, but have yet to receive any formal admission of wrongdoing by the alliance for its actions.
NATO has formally responded to lawsuits filed by Serbs with the Belgrade High Court over the bloc’s DU munitions use during the 1999 bombing campaign, claiming immunity from prosecution, Srdan Aleksic, a lawyer representing victims, has told Sputnik Serbia.
“In its statement to the court, NATO’s liaison office in Serbia indicated that the alliance has full immunity under Serbian jurisdiction on the basis of the 2005 agreement between the alliance and the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro ‘On the transit participation and support of peacekeeping operations,’ and the 2006 agreement under which the liaison office in Belgrade was created,” Aleksic said.
The attorney dismissed the ‘immunity’ claims, insisting that “none of these agreements gives immunity to NATO as an organization, and immunity cannot be applied retroactively. Therefore, NATO cannot receive immunity for war crimes against civilians and for its illegal aggression under the 2005 agreement.”
“In our case about DU bombings resulting in casualties among the civilian population, soldiers and policemen, NATO carries responsibility for the violation of the right to life and for damages caused,” Aleksic stressed.
The attorney expects the Belgrade High Court to proceed with hearings on the matter in October.
Aleksic and Italian attorney Angelo Fiore Tartaglia filed a lawsuit against NATO over its use of depleted uranium in the 1999 attack on Yugoslavia in January 2021. Two additional lawsuits were filed earlier this year. Tartaglia had previously successfully represented nearly 200 Italian troops who died of cancer or became seriously ill after being exposed to DU while serving in Kosovo during NATO’s ‘peacekeeping’ mission in that Serbian region.
The Belgrade District Court found US General Wesley Clark and NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana guilty of war crimes in September 2000 for the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. However, the colour revolution that overthrew Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000 led to a review of the verdict, and in late 2001, Serbia’s Supreme Court overturned the ruling.
Serbia suffers one of the highest cancer rates in Europe, with nearly 60,000 oncology patients diagnosed each year and the cancer rate among children up to 2.5 times above the European average. Serbian doctors are convinced that the high oncology rate is directly connected to the liberal use of DU munitions during the NATO bombing. Along with cancers, scientists have reported an alarming spike in infertility, autoimmune diseases and mental disorders over the past two decades, including post-traumatic stress and other psychological problems associated with the bombings.
Earlier this year, Serbian Institute of Radiology and Oncology director Dr. Danica Grujicic told Sputnik that the 1999 bombings had a devastating impact on the region’s ecology and that the use of DU, combined with deliberate attacks on chemical plants and hazardous industrial facilities, created an environmental disaster affecting countries far beyond the borders of the former Yugoslavia.
“Let’s move on please, there are more important things to deal with.” This is what we often hear in relation to ‘partygate’. I don’t think sceptics are in such a hurry. We all want to move on in life but that is not easily achieved when we have been misinformed, taken for a ride and then taken to the cleaners.
The sceptics aren’t just Daily Sceptic readers but a growing number of the public who are seeing that much of the media have not delivered a full, honest account in reporting the last two years of pandemic restrictions and enforced medical interventions. What I find interesting is that, in much of the media’s eagerness to see the downfall of Boris Johnson, everyone is getting to see a little more of the ‘bigger picture’ the media have, up until now, been trying to hide. How could those enforcing all those ridiculous mandates be indulging in so many parties and social mixing if Covid was such a deadly disease? Why were so many coerced into a trial vaccination programme for a disease that evidently poses so little threat to them?
How we have been deceived! Yet much of the media focus on the minor detail of whether a particular event was a party, what certain photos show, whether Boris Johnson actually knew he was attending a party, whether he should have received more fines etc. They want to know if there is enough evidence to show that the PM misled Parliament because convention dictates that, if that were the case, he should resign – the big news story. The news story for me is whether the Government misled the public, not Parliament.
The scandal that lies before us is one demonstrating how those in power, who determined the rules and directed the hardships of the last two years, are more concerned about themselves and whether they have misled their colleagues than us plebs. The deception has severely affected many of us, the younger generation in particular. There are now increased hospital waiting lists, deaths from delayed cancer diagnosis and treatment and rampant economic inflation – true wrongs that deserve more than a token fine. It is this mendacity and betrayal that have consequences and will continue, possibly for decades, to have grave ramifications from which some may never be able to ‘move on’.
The late Barbara Hubbard, a Rockefeller-funded New Age guru, was critical to the development of the ideas, beliefs and technology necessary to market transhumanism as spiritual enlightenment.
In 2016, the Global Future Councils of the World Economic Forum (WEF) posted a video entitled “8 Predictions for the World in 2030,” which infamously forecasted a technocratic New World Order in which “[y]ou’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to ponder how WEF oligarchs plan to roll out “sustainable development” policies which will ration consumer goods in a global “sharing economy” that employs transient “gig” workers who will be rendered into propertyless serfs under a techno-communitarian rendition of neo-feudalism. But how will the globalist technocrats of the WEF sway the virtual peasant class to be happy with their permanent state of digitally indentured servitude?
Enter New Age guru Barbara Marx Hubbard and her endorsement of the HeartMath Institute’s Global Coherence Initiative [1][2], which is propagating transhumanist neurofeedbackwearables across the planet in order to digitally synchronize humanity’s collective heart rhythms and brainwaves into electronically induced states of synthetic spiritual bliss. With Hubbard’s transhumanist blessings, HeartMath’s global neurotech network is primed to lull plebs and proles into happy compliance with the “New Normal” of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s techno-feudal “stakeholder” economy.
In this first installment of my series on Hubbard’s legacy contributions to the post-humanist religion and techno-fascist economy of the neo-eugenic Fourth Industrial Revolution, I will historicize how Rockefeller philanthropies bankrolled Hubbard’s Foundation for Conscious Evolution in order to digitally engineer humankind into a new transhumanspecies baptized in the name of tech-Gnostic “Christ Consciousness” [3]. Furthermore, I will expose how Hubbard collaborated with globalists at the World Business Academy, corporatists at Singularity University, and Eupsychian human potential psychologists in connection with the Esalen Institute in order to establish a techno-communitarian spiritualism that worships transhumanist evolution controlled by Big Tech companies which dominate the stakeholder economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution [4]. Finally, I will document how Hubbard advanced the globalization of HeartMath Institute’s transhumanist biofeedback wearables which can neuro-technologically mesmerize the precariat into virtual states of happy subservience to the “New Normal”.
In the coming installments of this series, I will reveal how Hubbard’s transhumanist mission to steer “conscious evolution” is steeped in Malthusian-eugenic population control. Additionally, I will unveil how Hubbard’s transhumanist allies from the World Future Society, the Human Potential Movement, and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution are entangled with networks of alleged pedophiles and sexual abuse cults. … continue
This morning, on one of the WEF’s live-streamed panels, Alibaba Holdings President J. Michael Evans claimed that the company is working on an app that could track an individual users carbon footprint.
The former-Goldman Sachs vice-chairman told the audience of the “Strategic Outlook: Responsible Consumption” panel:
We’re developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint. What does that mean? That’s where are they travelling, how are they travelling, what are they eating, what are they consuming on our platform. So: An individual carbon footprint tracker.”
Now, to clarify, Evans was only talking about Alibaba’s platform… but that’s a big platform.
And they’re not just an e-commerce platform. Through their financial and technological service companies, Alibaba runs the largest domain name market, email provider and cloud storage services in China, and the largest payment platform in the world.
Through Alihealth they supply online pharmacy services, as well as providing computer technology to hospitals and clinics. Since they bought AutoNavi in 2014, they own the biggest e-map navigation company in China too.
Essentially, in China if you want to pay for something on the internet, you probably use Alibaba. If you want to order something online from a small business, you probably use Alibaba. If you want to sell your stuff second hand, you probably use Alibaba.
If you want to register a domain, go to a pharmacy, check into a hospital, send an email, use a map or GPS… you get the idea.
Other projects on the go include “CityBrain”, an AI designed to scan cities and provide “streamlined” traffic services. Warning of potential accidents as well as making public transport more efficient, a clear move toward “Smart Cities”.
The company also has previous [experience] when it comes to “individual carbon footprint” apps. In 2017 their payment platform subsidiary Ant Financial Services was named 6th in Fortune’s “Change the World” list for its Ant Forest app.
According to Fortune, Ant Forest is “the world’s largest platform for tracking individuals’ carbon footprints”, and here’s how it works:
Users earn points toward planting virtual trees by adopting earth-friendly habits. The company plants a real tree for every 17.9 kg of carbon saved.
They’re incredibly vague on how users “earn” these points, or what exactly these “Earth-friendly habits” are, but it doesn’t take a genius to make some educated guesses.
And while we’ve been focusing on the individual carbon footprint tracker, something else Evans says later in the panel is just as interesting:
The third thing, we call it “Green Travel”. So, we have within our business something called AMAP – a mapping, think Google Maps or Ways – plus travel destination business. So what we’re going to allow people to do is, first of all, calculate the best and most efficient route and also the most efficient form of transportation. And then, if they take advantage of those recommendations, we’ll give them bonus points which they can redeem elsewhere on our platform. So, they are incentivised to do the right thing, even while they are provided the opportunity to do the wrong thing.”
So let’s put these three facts together. It seems Alibaba currently has apps, either being used or in development, that:
Monitor travel routes and methods and “reward” users for making the “correct choice”.
Can track an individual’s “carbon footprint”, including what they eat and where.
Have users “earn points” for “earth-friendly habits”.
Even individually these functions are worrying enough, but they combine to paint a very concerning picture of the future.
Further, combine that with what we know of the company’s reach through its subsidiaries: Smart Cities, banking, healthcare records, emails, internet activity and more.
How long before Alibaba decides to “reward” other “correct choices” that have nothing to do with the environment? Like vaccination, for example.
How long after that do they start punishing incorrect choices?
They already technically have access to the data they would need to construct this system. It would be naïve in the extreme to not see where this leads.
And, of course, it won’t just be China. If Alibaba is doing this then Google, Amazon, Apple and all the rest of them won’t be far behind.
1. Normal people have no interest in killing children, especailly ones they do not know, especially in large numbers.
2. In my view, only people subject to mind control (please investigate Sirhan Sirhan or read about US intelligence agency attempts to create mind controlled assassins beginning in the 1950s) or people taking certain drugs are even capable of carrying out such an act.
3. School shootings are the most provocative and effective way to initiate a change in gun laws, which means taking away the guns from some or all of the people who privately own them.
4. The large number of American gun owners pose a daunting challenge to the globalists who wish to control them. Police and military will not be willing to enter the homes of gun owners to remove their guns or for other purposes.
5. Few Europeans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders own guns, and it is believed by many that the imposition of much harsher lockdowns on the citizens of these nations, compared to the US, was enabled by this fact.
6. There have been shortages of guns and ammunition in the US since the onset of the pandemic. Whether this is due to supply-demand, including increased purchases by the federal government, or to other market forces, is not clear.
7. There has been very little exploration into the past history of those who committed mass murders in the US in recent years, especially in schools. I want to know if any or all of these mass murderers may have been enrolled in black mind control projects.
8. I want a full accounting of the mind control programs paid for with taxpayer dollars in the US and elsewhere.
9. I want an investigation into the many thousands of self-reported “targeted individuals” (TIs) who complain of voices beamed into their heads and other forms of what can only be termed torture.
10. I want an investigation into the implants some of these people claim were introduced into their bodies.
11. We are being attacked in many perverse ways, and we must open our eyes, pull our power back, or the attacks will continue and will destroy us.
N-acetylcysteine (NAC), a form of the amino acid cysteine and a common dietary supplement, has been on the market for nearly six decades. Among its many benefits is helping increase glutathione and reduce the acetaldehyde toxicity1 that causes many hangover symptoms, but anyone who overdoses on acetaminophen (Tylenol) also receives large doses of NAC in the emergency room, as it helps prevent liver damage by increasing glutathione.
However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suddenly cracked down on NAC in 2020, claiming it is excluded from the definition of a dietary supplement, as it was approved as a new drug in 1963,2 before it was marketed as a dietary supplement or as a food.
Retailers, including Amazon, pulled supplements containing NAC from their shelves in response, as the FDA’s move meant that NAC could no longer legally be marketed as a supplement, even though there are no fewer than 1,170 NAC-containing products in the National Institutes of Health’s Dietary Supplement Label Database.3
Draft guidance released by the FDA in April 2022 gives a glimmer of hope that NAC will continue to be available over-the-counter,4 but it’s still uncertain whether NAC will end up becoming a banned supplement.
FDA Announces ‘Enforcement Discretion’ for NAC Products
According to the FDA, their draft guidance, once finalized, will:5
“… explain our intent to exercise enforcement discretion with respect to the sale and distribution of certain NAC-containing products that are labeled as dietary supplements.
This enforcement discretion policy would apply to products that would be lawfully marketed dietary supplements if NAC were not excluded from the definition of “dietary supplement” and are not otherwise in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.”
In July 2020, the FDA sent out warning letters to seven companies that marketed NAC as a remedy for hangovers.6 Nine months after the FDA issued warning letters with their position that NAC supplements could not legally be sold, Amazon began removing products containing the supplement.7
The new verbiage suggests, however, that the FDA will not be enforcing their policy that NAC cannot be marketed as a dietary supplement, even though it’s technically still illegal to do so. And therein lies the problem. Steve Mister, president and CEO of the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), explained:8
“That still leaves some exposure for the industry for a state [attorney general] to say, ‘Well if it’s technically illegal under the federal law,’ we don’t care that FDA’s not enforcing it. We could do it. It also leaves you potentially exposed [to] a plaintiff’s attorney.”
Further, payment processing platforms, including PayPal, are among those that added policies prohibiting the sale of NAC products labeled as supplements following the FDA’s 2020 warning. It’s unknown whether PayPal will reverse its policy, or whether other major retailers, like Amazon, will begin to offer NAC supplements again.
Former FDA official Robert Durkin suggested that, in theory, the “draft guidance in and of itself should provide enough comfort to retailers to start marketing NAC-containing dietary supplements now.”9 Whether that will be the case in practice remains to be seen.
Two Citizen Petitions Filed With the FDA
After the FDA decided that NAC could no longer be marketed as a dietary supplement, CRN and the Natural Products Association (NPA) filed separate citizen petitions with the FDA requesting that the agency reverse its position.
The CRN letter in December 2020 challenged the FDA’s determination that NAC should be precluded from supplementary use.10 They then filed a citizen position petition June 1, 2021, requesting the FDA reverse its position and outlining why this sudden policy change is “legally invalid on multiple grounds.”11
The NPA filed a separate citizen petition with the FDA12 requesting that the agency not exclude NAC as a dietary supplement or, alternatively, that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issue a regulation finding NAC is lawful in supplements.
November 24, 2021, the FDA announced they were requesting more information about how NAC has been marketed as a dietary supplement,13 including information and data on the date that NAC was first marketed as a dietary supplement, reports of adverse events and details on how the products are marketed and sold.14 In their latest draft guidance, the FDA suggests it is still considering the petitioner’s requests:15
“… we have not yet reached a final decision on one petitioner’s request to issue a regulation to permit the use of NAC in dietary supplements, and we are considering initiating rulemaking to provide by regulation that NAC is not excluded from the definition of dietary supplement.
If, among other considerations, the FDA does not identify safety-related concerns as we continue our review of the available data and information, we are likely to propose a rule providing that NAC is not excluded from the definition of dietary supplement.”
FDA Acknowledges There Are No Safety Concerns
In a positive step, while the FDA stated that their full safety review of NAC is ongoing, its initial review “has not revealed safety concerns with respect to the use of this ingredient in or as a dietary supplement.” The agency further explained:16
“In addition, NAC-containing products represented as dietary supplements have been sold in the United States for over 30 years and consumers continue to seek access to such products. Accordingly, while the FDA continues its evaluation of the request to initiate rulemaking, the FDA issued this draft guidance to explain our policy regarding products labeled as dietary supplements that contain NAC.
Unless we identify safety-related concerns during our ongoing review, the FDA would intend to exercise enforcement discretion (as described in the draft guidance) until either of the following occurs: we complete notice-and-comment rulemaking to allow the use of NAC in or as a dietary supplement (if we move forward with such proceedings) or we deny the citizen petition’s request for rulemaking.
If the FDA determines that this enforcement discretion policy is no longer appropriate, we will notify stakeholders by withdrawing or revising the guidance.”
With the draft guidance suggesting that no safety concerns have been noted, and enforcement is unlikely, Marc Ullman, counsel to the law firm Rivkin Radler LLP, suggested it should be perceived as “a win for industry” and that Amazon should “rescind its ban” on NAC dietary supplements in response:17
“FDA has said there’s no safety issue and it’s not going to take enforcement action. I think it would be an incredible overabundance of caution for any retailer to say, ‘We shouldn’t get NAC back into commerce.'”
Was FDA’s Ban Fueled by COVID-19 Treatment Hopes?
The FDA’s crackdown on NAC coincided with research suggesting COVID-19 treatment as a new indication. According to one literature analysis,18 glutathione deficiency may be associated with COVID-19 severity, leading the author to conclude that NAC may be useful both for its prevention and treatment.
Previous research has shown NAC inhibits the expression of proinflammatory cytokines in cells infected with highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus. Proinflammatory cytokines also play a crucial role in COVID-19 severity.19 Considering many COVID-19 cases also involve blood clots in addition to excessive oxidative stress, and NAC effectively addresses both, I believe NAC should be included in the standard of care for COVID-19. As noted in the FASEB Journal :20
“COVID-19 may cause pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, cardiovascular alterations, and multiple organ failure, which have been ascribed to a cytokine storm, a systemic inflammatory response, and an attack by the immune system. Moreover, an oxidative stress imbalance has been demonstrated to occur in COVID-19 patients.
N-Acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) is a precursor of reduced glutathione (GSH). Due to its tolerability, this pleiotropic drug has been proposed not only as a mucolytic agent, but also as a preventive/therapeutic agent in a variety of disorders involving GSH depletion and oxidative stress …
Thiols block the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 thereby hampering penetration of SARS-CoV-2 into cells. Based on a broad range of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory mechanisms … the oral administration of NAC is likely to attenuate the risk of developing COVID-19, as it was previously demonstrated for influenza and influenza-like illnesses.
Moreover, high-dose intravenous NAC may be expected to play an adjuvant role in the treatment of severe COVID-19 cases and in the control of its lethal complications … including pulmonary and cardiovascular adverse events.”
Another study published in 2021 compared consecutive patients hospitalized with moderate or severe COVID-19 pneumonia.21 One group received only standard care and the other group received 600 milligrams of NAC twice daily for 14 days. There were 42 in the NAC group and 40 in the control group. Treatment with NAC led to lower rates of severe respiratory failure and significantly lower mortality rates.
NAC Offers a Multitude of Benefits
NAC has been described as an “old drug with new tricks” because scientists are continually uncovering new ways to use it.22 Along with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and mucolytic properties, NAC may be a useful adjuvant for a variety of chronic diseases and other medical conditions, including:23
Polycystic ovary disease
Male infertility
Sleep apnea
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome
Influenza
Parkinsonism
Multiple sclerosis
Peripheral neuropathy
Stroke outcomes
Diabetic neuropathy
Crohn’s disease
Ulcerative colitis
Schizophrenia
Bipolar illness
Obsessive compulsive disorder
As a chelator for heavy metals and nanoparticles
Recently, it was found that NAC may also prevent strokes in people with hereditary cystatin C amyloid angiopathy (HCCAA), a rare genetic disorder.24 People with HCCAA have an average life expectancy of just 30 years, and most die within five years of their first stroke,25 so reducing their incidence could prove to be essential to increasing survival.
The finding is even more significant because it was conducted by researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which is notoriously against supplements. NAC appears to work by preventing the formation of amyloid-producing proteins, which promote amyloid deposits linked to strokes.26
It could also have potential for Alzheimer’s as, according to the CHOP researchers, the process of protein deposition that occurs in HCCAA is similar to what occurs in Alzheimer’s, although at an accelerated pace, which is why dementia occurs later in life than Alzheimer’s.
With so many potential health benefits, the root of the motivation to ban NAC as a supplement likely lies in protecting the finances of pharmaceutical companies. Hopefully in this case, however, the FDA will determine that NAC should be allowed to exist under the dietary supplement definition, ensuring widespread access to this important compound will continue the way it did for decades.
AS inflation rises and the prospects for our return to normality following the pandemic fade ever more into the distant future, criticism is rightly focusing on financial institutions and regulators. They claim that printing money, which has inevitably caused prices to rise, was necessary to mitigate the economic chaos of lockdowns. But now they appear to be behind a third act of immense self-harm to help to steer the world to inflation and deliberately prevent economic recovery. The rise in energy prices the world has seen were not the result of an unforeseeable supply crisis, but engineered by those charged with managing the economy.
In a recent interview, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey admitted to Sky News his discomfort at the UK rate of inflation heading towards 10 per cent. ‘We are being struck by historically large shocks,’ explained Bailey, removing himself and his organisation from the spotlight. ‘Who of us thought there would be a war in Europe of the sort that we’re seeing?’ he asked rhetorically.
As it happens, many people have been predicting such a conflict. Analysts, be they critics of Nato or Moscow, have long and for different reasons warned that Ukraine risks becoming the point of renewed east-west tension, and many Ukrainians themselves have spoken about the grim inevitability of war, at least since 2014. But this article is about energy and climate policy, not war. I raise the issue here because, like me, you might have expected the Governor of the Bank of England to have kept a watching brief on geopolitics.
We would be wrong, then. It turns out that the chief regulator of the UK economy (the sixth largest in the world) and his predecessor were far more concerned with the putative risks from climate change than with developments in geopolitics. The Bank of England’s webpages could have been written by an XR activist. ‘Climate change creates financial risks and economic consequences,’ it claims. ‘These risks and consequences matter for our mission to maintain monetary and financial stability.’ Endless volumes of reports and links to pages after pages make the case, citing equally endless scientific reports that I have always considered to be suspect.
Put simply, I do not believe that society’s sensitivity to climate is in any way equivalent to climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide. The planet may well be slightly warmer, but there exists very little evidence that this is creating economic risks. On the contrary, people everywhere are becoming much wealthier. (Or were, before the pandemic.) I shall spare the word count here, but I have written about it at length in many other places if you remain unconvinced. Suffice it to say that it is logically impossible for ‘risks’ to be growing as the BoE claim while an economy is growing, which it was, even in the world’s most seemingly climate-ravaged places.
But green ideology is a fetter on public institutions’ grasp of reality. And so we should look to the origins of green ideology to try to understand what is behind the BoE’s climate activism.
It is a common misconception that the climate agenda is driven by science. But it is a matter of historical fact that green ideology sprang from the very top of global society. In the 1960s, it was the Club of Rome, a think tank formed by wealthy industrialists and their pet academics that turned their fears about overpopulation and resource-depletion into a computer simulation that forecast civilisation’s imminent collapse. And so it is today with climate change, every earlier environmental scare story issued by that simulation now having been debunked by reality.
The heart of the contemporary green ‘movement’ is known by its ugly moniker, the ‘green blob’. The entirety of it, including those parts of it that dwell on streets, owes its existence completely to the grants given by about a dozen or so billionaires’ philanthropic foundations to organisations of various kinds. From Extinction Rebellion to academic research departments, none of it would exist but for the vast torrents of cash from the likes of Jeremy Grantham, Sir Christopher Hohn and Michael Bloomberg. And it is from here that the notion that ‘climate change creates financial risks and economic consequences’ springs from, and the belief that ‘financial stability’ is functionally dependent on ‘stable weather’ is forced into the machinery of the state.
Bailey’s predecessor at the Bank of England (2013-2020), Mark Carney, previously Governor of the Bank of Canada (2008-2013), had been so impressed by multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg’s selfless philanthropy (giving away a total of $11 billion of his $82 billion fortune, significantly to green causes), he fashioned a role for the tycoon in policymaking. As Governor of both BoE and BoC, Carney was also chair of the little-known intergovernmental agency, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), where he oversaw its greening, bringing the notion of financial stability being predicated on ‘stable weather’ to financial institutions the world over. Green ideology is an infectious rot. Under the FSB, a Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) was established, and an array of corporate and financial bigwigs appointed to steer it, including Bloomberg as its chair.
Put simply, TCFD aimed to support the ‘E’ in ‘ESG’ with a system of
‘recommendations’ for voluntary disclosures that companies should make to investors, much as companies are required to make statutory disclosures about the state of their operations. ESG, short for Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance, is the fashionable green-woke successor to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), driving shareholders to change boardroom and culture using metrics that score companies’ commitments progressive values. TCFD’s recommendations build on the notion that, since financial stability is predicated on climatic stability, companies risk profiles are also dependent on weather. The logic here being that if a company does not have a business plan that is compatible with a changing climate, and moreover, compatible with a changing regulatory environment, investors deserve to be made aware of these risks.
This was good business. Ethical business, even. And other green billionaire philanthropists were eager to give their money away to this good cause, too. British hedge fund manager, Sir Christopher Hohn, used much of the $800 million pushed through his philanthropic outfit, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), to support organisations that campaign and lobby for these voluntary disclosures. CIFF founded the ‘Say on Climate’ campaign, which aimed to mobilise investors to press the companies in which they had an interest to adopt ‘climate transition action plans’, building on Hohn’s trademark shareholder activism. Between 2014 and 2020, CIFF made grants of over $23million to the Carbon Disclosure Project, and backed other shareholder and financial sector campaigning organisations partnered with the ‘We Mean Business Coalition’.
But as sure as push comes to shove, voluntary becomes compulsory. At the COP26 meeting in Glasgow last year, Mark Carney stood in front of a screen that declared the intention to make TCFD disclosures mandatory, and for policy frameworks to ‘wind down stranded assets’ – the green movement’s term for fossil fuel investments that will become obsolete when climate policy prohibits them. He was followed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who declared that investment funds with assets under management worth $130 trillion were aligned to the UK’s new policies.
Sunak was an employee of Hohn’s investment fund, TCI, between 2006 and 2009. And as an alumnus of such a notable activist outfit as TCI, and as Chancellor, it is inconceivable that he was unaware of the effects on the economy that ESG was already having by last autumn. ESG had driven investors away from stock in companies that make useful stuff, such as coal, oil and gas, towards high-tech, social media and companies that produce mere vapour, such as Netflix. As Bloombergreported at the time, in the era of ESG investing, capital investment in fossil fuels had halved since the Paris Agreement, and the cost of capital to fossil fuel companies had doubled.
Amid other factors, this capital strangulation of the energy sector was the direct effect of ESG investing, green campaigning organisations, and governments and central banks actively working together to destroy the fossil fuel sector without making the policy explicit. This is indubitably the main factor behind the energy supply crisis that seemed to come out of nowhere last year to add to inflation woes by pushing energy prices up.
A few days ago, Bailey told MPs that ‘there isn’t a lot we can do’ to stop inflation rising. But there was a lot that the BoE could have done to stop it happening, but failed to do, and instead helped in no small way to engineer this global crisis. In late 2020, the BoE published an Interim Report and Roadmap for implementing the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which boasted of the BoE’s and UK government’s leading roles in creating ESG policy, and which ‘advocates a move towards mandatory TCFD-aligned disclosures across non-financial and financial sectors of the UK economy’.
Here’s a clue, Andrew, if you’re reading, about how you might start to address the problem of rising prices. Remove from the Bank of England all traces of environmental ideology and sever all links with the green billionaires who have pushed the notion that climate change is a ‘risk’ to the economy. It isn’t. The much greater risk than weather to the economic wellbeing of millions of British people – and billions of people throughout the world in poorer economies – is green ideology. While the likes of Hohn and Bloomberg have made billions of dollars through creating an ESG bubble via their undemocratic and undue influence in public institutions, billions of people are suffering from the effects of starving the energy sector of investment, pushing up the price of energy, transport, and food.
Here is a short film I have made about the problem.
Millions of people suffer and die from the effects of radiation exposure from decades of nuclear weapons testing. Their experience should give serious pause to those who continue to embrace the viability of a nuclear deterrent.
A dust storm originating in the Sahara Desert swept across parts of Spain, France, the UK, and Ireland last month. In addition to bringing a red tinge to the sky, the dust caused a slight, yet noticeable, spike in radiation in the areas it reached. This radiation spike was caused by the presence of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope produced through the nuclear fission of uranium-235 in nuclear weapons. A legacy of French nuclear weapons testing that occurred in Algeria during the 1960s, the cesium-137 contamination is a reminder that while the testing of nuclear weapons may have been halted for the time being, the consequences of these tests live on through the poisoning of the planet mankind calls home.
The Saharan radioactive dust cloud is but the most recent visible phenomenon of a plague that has infected much of the world. … continue
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