No matter how you feel about the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, you can’t help but be impressed at how they are able to successfully plunder and loot American taxpayers, no matter how much needless death, suffering, and destruction they wreak on people around the world.
Think about it: They just exited Afghanistan after their 20-year failed war against the Taliban, a war that left thousands of American soldiers and countless Afghans dead and the entire country destroyed. On top of all that death and destruction was the total waste of hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money. It’s also worth mentioning that for those entire 20 years, they intentionally lied to the American people regarding progress in their undeclared forever war.
And what has been the result? They get rewarded! Congress is on the verge of giving them more taxpayer money than ever before! That’s impressive, even if in a negative way!
In other words, they are no longer wasting money in Afghanistan in the form of bombs, bullets, gasoline, oil, medicare care for wounded soldiers, etc. That’s got to mean that a lot of money is now being saved.
So, does Congress reduce the military’s budget by the amount of money that is no longer being wasted in Afghanistan? Are you kidding? Like I say, believe it or not, they are actually upping the amount of U.S. taxpayer money that they are allocating to these people! They are giving them more taxpayer money than when they were in Afghanistan wasting all that taxpayer money!
That is power, sheer power! How can anyone not be impressed by it, even if In a negative way?
The fact is that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA own Congress, lock, stock, and barrel. Not only is Congress filled with national-security state assets, even those members of Congress who maintain the appearance of some degree of independence do not dare to buck the national-security establishment. They know that if they were to buck them, they would soon be targeted with extinction in the next election.
There is another factor that is impressive in a negative way — the ability of the Pentagon and the CIA to engender official enemies to scare Congress into granting the national-security establishment whatever it wants.
Just look how they have succeeded in converting their old Cold War enemies, China and Russia, into new big official enemies of the United States. After milking the “war on terrorism” racket for as much as they could for the past 20 years, they’re now circling back to milk their old Cold War racket against their old Cold War communist enemies.
What’s also fascinating is how they are able to engender these official enemies while convincing people that they are the innocent victims who are forced into defending America and the world from the barbarians at the gate.
Consider how they have done this with Russia. Their strategy has been absolutely brilliant, again in a negative way.
First, they tell Russia that NATO will not expand eastward after Russia called it quits on the Cold War racket. It was a lie. Instead, NATO began gobbling up former members of the Warsaw Pact, moving NATO’s forces and U.S. missiles inexorably closer to Russia’s borders.
When NATO threatened to absorb Ukraine, which would have given the Pentagon and the CIA control over Crimea and also enable the U.S. to station missiles right on Russia’s border, NATO officials and U.S. officials knew precisely that Russia would have to react.
When Russia did react in the predicable way, the U.S. response was brilliant, again in a negative way. Instead of NATO and the U.S. creating the crisis, it was Russia who was presented as the aggressor. NATO, Ukraine, and the U.S. were all seen as the victims of Russian aggression. The only thing that was missing was the threat of “godless communism,” which was the basis of their Cold War racket against Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union.
It’s been pretty much the same with China. While the U.S. government was mired down with its forever wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, China was prospering and establishing friendly relations with countries all over the world. The U.S. Empire could not tolerate that. That’s when they launched their vicious trade war against China and began doing everything they could to destroy China’s economic prosperity. Among their favorite weapons was economic sanctions, a foreign-policy tool that targets the civilian population of a country as as way to achieve political ends.
Today, China is portrayed by the U.S. mainstream press as a grave threat to U.S. national security, just like it was during the Cold War racket. In one way, the situation with China is even better than with Russia. Given that China is still a communist regime, U.S. officials and their assets in the U.S. mainstream press can still use the “godless communism” angle that they did during the Cold War racket.
Since the Pentagon and the CIA are still killing people in the Middle East, the threat of anti-American terrorism continues to exist. Combine that with the scary notion that the Russians and Chinese Reds are coming to get us, and you have the perfect justification for the continuation and expansion of the U.S. national-security state and its deadly, destructive, and very expensive rackets.
MANY TCW Defending Freedom readers will know Paul Weston from his informed below-the-line comments on the site over the years. Others will know him for his own YouTube video analyses of ‘Covid lies, damn lies and statistics’ and other topics.
It is the latest of these we want to share with you today – his expose of EU President Ursula von der Leyen and the resurrection of fascism in Europe. Paul dismembers the financial malfeasance behind her arbitrary billion-euro vaccine order from her close friend Albert Bourla, the Pfizer chief executive who seems to make a quite a success of chumming up with the gullible great and good despite his company being fined £2billion in recent years for bad practice.
Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was a global leader who inspired interfaith dialogue. It was wonderful to gather last week with Lady Elaine Sacks, @theresa_may, and @Isaac_Herzog to honor his legacy. Thank you to @TheGenesisPrize for such a memorable evening. pic.twitter.com/VyJredB1LC
What never ceases to amaze me is how our woke social justice warriors in the press and on TV manage to turn a blind eye to these, the biggest crimes of all, happening in the here and now. So we have to thank Paul Weston for doing their job for them in the case of the crooked and dangerous von der Leyen. His video, which you need to watch from beginning to end, shows once again that it is fascism in governments we have to fear or beware of, not that of marginal and powerless street groups, such as exist at all.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has candidly revealed that “there’s not going to be an end point to this vaccination program.”
Yes, really.
“So long as there’s people who are eligible who haven’t been vaccinated, we’ve got work to do,” said Ardern.
“Do you know, I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied so long as there’s someone who is eligible and hasn’t been (vaccinated),” she added.
“There’s not going to be an end point to this vaccination program,” the Prime Minister revealed, while calling on people who got jabbed six months ago to come back for another shot.
Ardern delivered the message while adopting her familiar passive-aggressive smiley mannerism, as seen many times before when she casually revealed the next step in COVID authoritarianism.
People who fail to continually get vaccinated will face the same fate as those who have continued to resist compulsory shots, they’ll be out of work, face social ostracization and God only knows what else in the future.
Enjoy your lifetime booster shots and enjoy not being able to travel, visit a restaurant or eventually go in a shop if you miss out on just one.
Remember, if you don’t take the Pfizer jab for life, you’ll never be “fully vaccinated”.
For whatever reason, some mistakenly perceive the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, as liberal, progressive, and even ‘pro-Palestinian’. Of course, none of this is true. This misconstrued depiction of an essentially Zionist and anti-Palestinian newspaper tells of a much bigger story of how confusing Israeli politics is, and how equally confused many of us are in understanding the Israeli political discourse.
On 28 November, newly-elected Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, stormed the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) with hundreds of soldiers and many illegal Jewish settlers, including the who’s who of Israel’s extremists.
The scene was reminiscent of a similar occurrence where late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, had stormed, along with thousands of soldiers and police officers, the Haram Sharif Compound in occupied East Jerusalem in September 2000. It was this particular event that unleashed the second Palestinian uprising, Intifada (2000-05), which led to the killing of thousands.
Herzog’s gesture of solidarity with the Kiryat Arba settlers was identical to Sharon’s earlier gesture, also made to win the approval of Israel’s burgeoning and influential right-wing extremists.
Only a few months ago, Haaretzhad described Herzog as a “centrist, soft-spoken, ‘no drama'” person who had, at times, “felt out of place on Israel’s stormy and fractured political battlefield”. According to Haaretz, Herzog “may be exactly what Israel needs.”
But is this really the case? Marvel at some of the statements made by Herzog as he visited a site where twenty-nine Palestinians were massacred by a Kiryat Arba extremist, Baruch Goldstein, and where many more were shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the aftermath of the tragic event. Not only did many Israelis celebrate the memory of Goldstein with a shrine befitting of heroes and saints, but many of Herzog’s companions during the provocative ‘visit’ are ardent followers of the Israeli Jewish terrorist.
“We have to continue dreaming of peace,” Herzog declared while marking the first night of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah inside the Ibrahimi Mosque compound, which was previously emptied of its Muslim worshippers. Proudly, he “condemn(ed) any form of hatred or violence”. Meanwhile, hundreds of Israeli soldiers were terrorising 35,000 inhabitants of the old city of Al-Khalil. These Palestinians, who suffer daily violence at the hands of nearly 800 armed Jewish settlers in Kiryat Arba, along with an equal number of Israeli soldiers, were all locked in. Their shops were closed, their life was put on hold, their walls covered with racist graffiti.
“If he had walked around the corner,” the Israeli news website 972Magreported referring to the Israeli president, “Herzog might have seen the graffiti on the walls reading ‘gas the Arabs.’
Chances are Herzog already understands – in fact, supports – such racism; after all, he was joined by the likes of Eliyahu Libman, who heads Kiryat Arba regional council, and Hillel Horowitz, the leader of the Jewish settlers of Al-Khalil. It is these two men who preach extremism and violence against the Palestinians as a matter of course. Aside from hosting the Goldstein grave and shrine, the settlement has a park that carries the name of Meir Kahane, the spiritual leader of Israel’s most violent extremists.
In an emotional speech given by Horowitz in the company of Herzog, the settler leader announced that the Israeli president’s violent storming of the Ibrahimi Mosque “reminds us that we did not take the land of foreigners.” He followed with “Your visit here strengthens our mission.”
From Horowitz, Libman, and their ilk’s point of view, their ‘mission’ has been a great success. They have managed to steer Israeli politics almost entirely towards the right. Even the “centrist, soft-spoken” president is now fully embracing their sinister mission.
But will Haaretz acknowledge this reality? That the ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ editorial line they have allegedly championed for many years has completely failed, and purposely so, to depict the truth about Israel?
Compare Haaretz‘s positive portrayal of Herzog with their coverage of the former right-wing Israeli President, Reuven Litvin. The latter, on various occasions, and rightly so, was criticised for his pro-Likud political line and for his divisive role that contributed to an already fragmented Israeli political scene. But when Rivlin, in October 2014, had declared that “Israeli society is sick, and it is our duty to treat this disease,” a Haaretz columnist lashed out suggesting that “Rivlin’s comments are positively bursting with Jew-hatred”.
“First he called Jewish society ‘sick’ – dredging up anti-Semitic tropes about Jews as carriers of cultural and ideological disease. Then he asked whether Jews are ‘decent human beings’: Questioning their humanity itself,” the article argued.
Of course, the sickness of “violence, hostility, bullying, (and) racism”, that Rivlin had then pointed out, is very much real. Other symptoms of this horrible disease also include military occupation, apartheid, and genocidal violence like that frequently meted out against the besieged Gaza Strip.
While this Israeli ‘disease’ is becoming common knowledge globally, with such organisations as Human Rights Watch and many others describing it in the most honest and blunt terms, the vast majority of Israeli society, including their representatives and their ‘soft-spoken’ president, remain blind to it, shielded from the truth by their own hubris, infatuated with their military power and intoxicated by the humiliation and violence to which Palestinians are subjected to, in Al-Khalil, in Gaza, in Jerusalem, and throughout occupied Palestine.
There are no indications that Israeli society, government, and media – ‘liberal’ or right-wing – will, on their own, develop the necessary antibodies that will cure the disease of racism, military occupation, and apartheid. Yes, it will ultimately be the Palestinian resistance that will make the decisive difference of holding Israel accountable. But that can only happen when the international community takes a courageous stance in advocating Palestinian rights and unconditionally supporting the Palestinian quest for freedom.
Whether right-wing, left-wing, or centre, Israel is committed to its military superiority, its racism, and to the military occupation more than ever before. The sooner we accept this fact, and quit subscribing to the illusion that change in Israel will happen from within, the sooner the Palestinian people will finally achieve the justice they need and deserve.
With the newly-resumed Iran nuclear deal negotiations in the balance in Vienna, a bellicose Israel is urging the US to take military action. Defence Minister Benny Gantz and Mossad chief David Barnea are expected to meet senior officials in the White House this week to make the case for a military-first agenda against Iran, Israel’s three main TV news broadcasts reported last night.
Gantz and Barnea will urge their American interlocutors to develop a military plan to strike Iran. The stalled negotiations in Vienna are seen by the Israelis as an opportunity to press the US to adopt a more aggressive policy towards the Islamic Republic. A list of targets is said to have been drawn up. This includes a potential attack against Iranian targets in Yemen. The aim of such a strike would be to convince the Iranians to soften their position at the talks about their nuclear programme.
Israel is expected to tell the Americans that it needs to continue its operations against Iran’s nuclear facilities. A recent example was the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, last November using a remote-controlled machine gun and artificial intelligence.
The US, however, does not see eye to eye with Israel on this issue. It is said to have warned the occupation state that these strikes are counterproductive, with Iran building improved facilities after each setback.
“I call on every country negotiating with Iran in Vienna to take a strong line and make it clear to Iran that it cannot enrich uranium and negotiate at the same time,” said Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett yesterday. “Iran must begin to pay a price for its violations.”
Israel’s sabre rattling and its zeal for the military-first option has been highlighted further by the Spectator. “Mossad is [preparing] to strike at the heart of Iran’s nuclear programme,” according to a source in Israel cited by the British magazine. Describing Iran as an “octopus” the author of the article said that Israel would no longer go after the “tentacles” but instead “go for the head”.
Prior to the negotiations restarting last week, Iran’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said that an agreement to revive his country’s nuclear deal with world powers was “within reach” but that this depended on the goodwill of the West.
In 2018, former US President Donald Trump walked away unilaterally from the deal painstakingly stitched together by his predecessor, Barack Obama. The move, regarded widely as reckless, was urged on by the then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump’s rash decision backfired. Pro-Israel hawks now admit that it “was one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out and counterproductive US national security decisions of the post-Cold War era.”
“The deaths that are meant to follow the vaccinations will never be able to be pinned on the poison. They will be too diverse, there will be too many, and they will be in too broad a timeframe for us to understand that we have been poisoned,” claims Dr. Shankara Chetty.
According to his website, South African family doctor Dr Shankara Chetty, “has treated 7,000 Covid-19 patients without a single hospitalization or death,” combining his insights with his medical background along with his observations of government censorship orders and censorship of medias to support its conclusions.
Joining the Zoom conference as a Doctor, Chetty began by asking the following questions:
“I think the perspective around what is happening is vitally important. We need to understand what the aim is. Everyone knows that there’s inconsistencies, that there’s coercion, but we need to understand why. Why is it there?”
He then identified the “most important” answer to these questions, “pathogen that was causing all the death in COVID illness,” the spike proteins common in both the vaccine and virus designed to be produced in a revivers body.
In my opinion of what’s going on in the world, spike protein is one of the most man-made toxins. And the purpose of this toxin is to kill billions of people without anyone noticing, he went on to add.
“What looks like transpired here, [is] they’ve engineered a virus and put this weapons-grade package onto it called ‘spike protein.’”
The allergic reaction with the initial release of the “most elaborately engineered toxin,” occurs in a small number of people, resulting in more severe cases and death when the vaccine is administered. According to Chetty, this usually happens eight days after the onset of symptoms.
Doctors say that due to the first 14-day international shutdown, people with the COVID-19 virus that caused it are arriving late to the hospital, and these facilities “to engineer death and damage in order to stir all the fear.”
“But the game that they played with this engineered virus was to justify the vaccination of the planet,” he continued.
Chetty added that these injections “expose us to the spike protein for a longer period.”
I often interview doctors online, and Dr. Pierre Kory, Ryan Cole, and Richard Urso have described how long a health risk begins to occur after death from an allergy in the first two weeks.
“We begin to see the endothelial [blood vessel lining] injuries that this vaccine causes with its spike protein, with its influence on its ACE2 receptors. Those are the deaths that are meant to follow. And they will never be pinned onto the spike protein, a very well-engineered toxin,” he said.
“Now spike protein is also a membrane protein. So, the mRNA will distribute this throughout our body. It will be made in various tissues around our body. It will be incorporated into those membranes around our body, and those specific tissues.”
“Those tissues will be recognized as foreign and will trigger a host of autoimmune responses. So, the deaths that are meant to follow the vaccinations will never be able to be pinned on the poison! They will be too diverse, there will be too many, and they will be in too broad a timeframe for us to understand that we have been poisoned,” he went on”
“Now this toxin in the long term is going to get people with pre-existing illness to have those illnesses exasperated,” the doctor explained.
With some toxins, including “bits of HIV protein” within this “definitely engineered” spike protein, Chetty states “people with cancers are going to have their cancers flareup, and they will say they died of the cancer.”
“People with vessel injuries or predisposition like our diabetics and [those with] hypertension are going to have strokes and heart attacks and the rest at varying times, and we’ll attribute those to their preexisting conditions,” he said.
“People are going to develop, over time, autoimmune conditions, the diversity of which will never be addressed by any pharmaceutical intervention because they’re far too targeted.”
“But I think if people understand what the intention is, then they’ll understand why what’s happened has happened. The ill logic, the coercion, the suppression, is all warranted if you understand that there is a bigger plan.
This plan is to make sure that we can control and kill off a large proportion of our population without anyone suspecting that we were poisoned,” the COVID specialist said.
“And so, I think the justification for everything we see is warranted in understanding the endgame,” he concluded.
“I think there’s a huge picture at play; otherwise the vaccines make absolutely no sense. We were sold the vaccine as our savior from the start, and if we look at the science, the science does not play out.”
Children aged between five and 11 should get a Covid-19 jab only if there is a “high risk” of severe infection for them or for someone in their inner circle, Finland’s health watchdog has said.
Vaccination for all children aged between five and 11 cannot be recommended until there is more information available on the vaccination safety for this age group, including rare side effects, Finland’s Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) said in a statement last week, adding that relevant government decrees should be amended before a general vaccination campaign for young children could be launched.
So far, only those facing an acute risk of severe infection or who have “severely immunocompromised people” within their inner circle should get a jab, the THL said. It added that a vaccination campaign for children could start early next year provided sufficient evidence for the jabs’ safety is there.
“The main reason THL does not recommend vaccinations now for all children aged 5 to 11 is their own low incidence of the disease. Infection in children of this age is usually mild and severe symptoms are very rare, compared to other diseases that have been prevented by vaccinations,” said Hanna Nohynek, THL’s chief physician.
The health watchdog believes that vaccination of children “does not significantly slow down the epidemic” in its current form. “If a society wants to influence the course of the epidemic by vaccinating children, and … benefits are small, safety information is even more important,” Nohynek explained.
In Finland, just about 5% of children aged between five and 11 were diagnosed with Covid-19 by the end of November 2021. Only 33 children have been treated in a hospital since the start of the pandemic, THL said, adding that treatment courses lasted just one or two days on average. All vaccinations, including those against Covid-19, are voluntary when it comes to children, it added.
Here I am on vitamins again. I don’t wish to give the impression that all I care about is vitamins. However, I have been thinking about them recently for various reasons.
The first thing to say is that I do find it slightly strange that we have substances which are absolutely essential for life, that we must eat., because our bodies cannot make them. It seems a design flaw. I want my money back.
Added to this absolute reliance on them, we do not get any hint that we are running out. If we become dehydrated, we feel thirsty, and we drink. If our energy supplies are running down, we feel hungry and we eat.
On the other hand, if our Vitamin B12 supplies are becoming perilously low – we might end up feeling bloody awful. In the final stages we could end up paralyzed, then dead, without knowing why. Vitamin B12 is essential for the health of neurones (amongst other things). But there is nothing that triggers our desire to forage around for foodstuffs rich in vitamin B12. Supposing we knew what they were anyway.
I presume this means that whilst we were evolving from the primeval soup, there were plenty of vitamins (and minerals) about. We had no need to seek them out specifically, because they were always present in the things we ate. In ample supply? Always …? Of course, it is not just vitamins, there are minerals we need too.
Magnesium
Most people are probably blissfully unaware they need magnesium. If you don’t have enough, how would you know? The first recognisable symptom may be … suddenly dropping dead.
Israel gives us a stark warning of what happens when magnesium goes missing, with no-one noticing. For many years, most of the water supply in Israel has been provided by desalination. This process does not just get rid of salt (NaCl), it also removes the other salts, and minerals, at the same time.
In normal circumstances people get most of the magnesium they need from drinking water. Which means there was clearly a potential for a major deficiency problem building up in Israel. As most of their water contained nothing but pure H20.
Did anyone notice? As in, did anyone say, ‘golly I feel low in magnesium today, I must go and eat a substance high in magnesium…’ Nope. Did anyone die. Yup, they did. As outlined in the paper ‘Association between exposure to desalinated sea water and ischemic heart disease, diabetes mellitus and colorectal cancer; A population-based study in Israel.’ 1
There were possibly as many as 4,000 deaths a year:
‘An estimated 4,000 Israelis die in an average year due to an inadequate amount of magnesium in their bodies – and the amount they get from natural potable water sources is increasingly declining due to the growing desalination of sea water. The figure is 10-fold the death toll from road accidents.’ 2
The population of Israel is just over nine million. The equivalent death rate in the UK would be 30,000 deaths a year, or 180,000 in the US. A silent killer indeed.
Anyway, yes, magnesium is critical stuff. It is extremely important for health, especially heart health. It is required for the correct functioning of the electrical system in your heart, and a low level increases the risk of atrial fibrillation. Here from the paper ‘Low serum magnesium and the development of atrial fibrillation in the community: the Framingham Heart Study.’
‘… individuals in the lowest quartile of serum magnesium were ~50% more likely to develop AF…compared with those in the upper quartiles.’ 3
Unfortunately, despite its importance, we don’t feel magnesium depleted. We do not crave magnesium rich foods – as if we would have any idea what they might be … I certainly don’t. The symptoms of severe deficiency are also non-specific. The first symptom might be that your heart decides to stop beating.
It’s not just Israel. Here from the paper: ‘Subclinical magnesium deficiency: a principal driver of cardiovascular disease and a public health crisis.’
‘Furthermore, because of chronic diseases, medications, decreases in food crop magnesium contents, and the availability of refined and processed foods, the vast majority of people in modern societies are at risk for magnesium deficiency.’ 4
Have you ever heard of any of this? Did you even know you had magnesium in your body – or that it did anything important? I suspect not. However, from the same paper:
‘… magnesium deficiency can lead to serious morbidity and mortality and has been implicated in multiple cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, cardiomyopathy, cardiac arrhythmia, atherosclerosis, dyslipidaemia and diabetes. Unfortunately, the western diet is often low in magnesium due to the refining and processing of foods, and hypomagnesaemia is often underdiagnosed in hospitalised patients.’4
My advice, take a supplement. Especially if you live in an area with ‘soft’ water – which generally means not many minerals. Doubly especially if you have atrial fibrillation. It might just go away. How much do you need to take? Around 400mg a day is fine.
Back to vitamins – in this case, Vitamin(s) B
The reason for the detour is that I really wanted to make it clear that it is certainly not a given that we routinely get all the essential micro-nutrients we need from our diet.
Modern living, modern food production and farming, modern food processing … have all have a significant impact on what our food, and water, contains.
The lazy mainstream assumption that micronutrient deficiencies simply do not exist is, therefore, wrong. Try looking at Iodine deficiency in Switzerland sometime. In addition, I am extremely dubious that we truly know what the optimal intake of micronutrients may be. The research in this area is sketchy, to say the least.
This, eventually, takes us onto vitamins, more specifically, the B vitamins. There are many of them – eight, in fact.
B1 (thiamine)
B2 (riboflavin)
B3 (niacin)
B5 (pantothenic acid)
B6 (pyridoxine)
B7 (biotin)
B9 (folate ak.a. folic acid)
B12 (cobalamin)
The first question that springs to mind is the following. Where are numbers four, eight, ten and eleven? What happened to them? It’s a bit like clotting factors. We have VII, VIII, IX etc. But there is no factor one, or two. Who gets to name things in medicine anyway?
Moving on. My main interest in the B vitamins is that, if you are low in three of them, maybe four of them: three, six, nine and twelve, this can lead to an increased level of a protein in the blood called homocysteine. [I think B6 is more important than B3, but we shall let this go for now].
The reason why this is important is if you have a high level of homocysteine then this is strongly associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The mechanism of action appears to be that homocysteine is toxic to endothelial cells.
‘Elevated homocysteine (Hc) levels have a well-established and clear causal relationship to epithelial damage leading to coronary artery disease.’ 5
On the other hand, low levels of homocysteine are associated with a lower risk:
‘In observational studies, lower homocysteine levels are associated with lower rates of coronary heart disease and stroke. Folic acid and vitamins B6 and B12 lower homocysteine levels.’[i]
As you may have gathered from that short quote, if you have a high homocysteine level, and you take B vitamins, your homocysteine levels will fall. As confirmed in a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition :
‘Elevated levels of homocysteine is an indication of inadequate folate and vitamin B-12 in the diet, writes lead author Giovanni Ravaglia, a researcher with University Hospital S. Orsola-Malpighi in Bologna, Italy. His paper appears in the March American Journal of Clinical Nutrition….High homocysteine levels can be treated very easily with vitamins, including folate, niacin, and B-12.’ 6
I think the connection between B vitamins, and homocysteine, were first noted by Kilmer McCully. He studied the area in detail at Harvard University. At least he did so for a while, before he was unceremoniously booted out for carrying out research that threatened to undermine the almighty cholesterol hypothesis. A sorry tale, as reported in the New York Times :
‘Thomas N. James, a cardiologist and president of the University of Texas Medical Branch who was also the president of the American Heart Association in 1979 and ’80, is even harsher [regarding the treatment of McCully]. ”It was worse than that you couldn’t get ideas funded that went in other directions than cholesterol,” he says. ”You were intentionally discouraged from pursuing alternative questions. I’ve never dealt with a subject in my life that elicited such an immediate hostile response.”
It took two years for McCully to find a new research job. His children were reaching college age; he and his wife refinanced their house and borrowed from her parents. McCully says that his job search developed a pattern: he would hear of an opening, go for interviews and then the process would grind to a stop. Finally, he heard rumors of what he calls ”poison phone calls” from Harvard. ”It smelled to high heaven,” he says.’
McCully says that when he was interviewed on Canadian television after he left Harvard, he received a call from the public-affairs director of Mass. General. ”He told me to shut up,” McCully recalls. ”He said he didn’t want the names of Harvard and Mass. General associated with my theories.’ 7
And you wonder why researchers are wary of questioning the cholesterol hypothesis? Yes, crushing scientific debate has a long and inglorious history, starting long before COVID19 first appeared over the horizon. In the world of cholesterol, it has been going on for well over sixty years.
Homocysteine, B vitamins and dementia
Now, dear reader, having just focussed on B vitamins, homocysteine and cardiovascular disease, I am going to abruptly change tack. I shall now move away from heart disease to Alzheimer’s disease. The reason for this is straightforward.
As I began to research this area in more detail, it become increasingly clear that there was a worrying association between raised homocysteine, brain damage, and dementia. This certainly attracted my attention. Because I like my brain, and I want to keep it healthy for a long as possible.
I came across papers such as this: ‘Plasma Homocysteine as a Risk Factor for Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.’
‘An increased plasma homocysteine level is a strong, independent risk factor for the development of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.’ 8
There were many more such papers, but you probably get the general idea. Raised homocysteine … Bad.
At this point I already knew that the B vitamins can lower the homocysteine level – if it is high. In addition, B vitamins are well known to have vital functions in the central and peripheral nervous system.
Here, from the paper: ‘B Vitamins in the nervous system: Current knowledge of the biochemical modes of action and synergies of thiamine, pyridoxine, and cobalamin.’
Neurotropic B vitamins play crucial roles as coenzymes and beyond in the nervous system. Particularly vitamin B1 (thiamine), B6 (pyridoxine), and B12 (cobalamin) contribute essentially to the maintenance of a healthy nervous system. Their importance is highlighted by many neurological diseases related to deficiencies in one or more of these vitamins, but they can improve certain neurological conditions even without a (proven) deficiency.’ 9
So, not only do certain B vitamins lower homocysteine levels. A number of them play a critical role in the growth and support of nerve cells, and suchlike.
None of this is exactly news. It has been known for centuries that excess alcohol consumption – which blocks Vitamin B1 absorption from the gut – can cause a specific form of dementia called Korsakoff’s dementia. Because of this, people with alcohol problems are often prescribed high dose vitamin B1 (Thiamine).
Which means that it was never a stretch to suggest that giving people B vitamins might be an extremely good thing if you want to prevent, or delay, the progression of Alzheimer’s/brain shrinkage. Either through the benefits on lowering raised homocysteine, or via the critical functions of B vitamins on the structure and function of the brain.
That, anyway, was the underlying science. But does giving B vitamins actually work? Well researchers at Cambridge University certainly believed it was a splendid idea :
‘In an initial, randomized controlled study on elderly subjects with increased dementia risk, we showed that high-dose B-vitamin treatment (folic acid 0.8 mg, vitamin B6 20 mg, vitamin B12 0.5 mg) slowed shrinkage of the whole brain volume over 2 years.’ 10
In a follow-up study, this group of researchers then found that, in people with raised homocysteine levels, who already had signs of dementia, B-vitamins reduced brain destruction and slowed, even halted, the progression of Alzheimer’s. In their own words, from the paper ‘Preventing Alzheimer’s disease-related gray matter atrophy by B-vitamin treatment’:
‘… we showed that high-dose B-vitamin treatment (folic acid 0.8 mg, vitamin B6 20 mg, vitamin B12 0.5 mg) slowed shrinkage of the whole brain volume over 2 years. Here, we go further by demonstrating that B-vitamin treatment reduces, by as much as seven-fold, the cerebral atrophy in those gray matter (GM) regions specifically vulnerable to the AD (Alzheimer’s Disease) process, including the medial temporal lobe. In the placebo group, higher homocysteine levels at baseline are associated with faster GM atrophy, but this deleterious effect is largely prevented by B-vitamin treatment. We additionally show that the beneficial effect of B vitamins is confined to participants with high homocysteine.’ 11
Yes, it was all looking quite good. By the way, this study came out in 2013.
But then we need to factor in the knowledge that B vitamins are very cheap. Very cheap indeed. In addition, they cannot be patented. Which makes it extremely difficult for any pharmaceutical company to make money from them. You can, of course sell them for a small profit, but pharmaceutical companies need billions to feed the machine. They require unique, patentable, blockbuster drugs. Drugs my precious.
Had any drug shown such a significant effect on brain shrinkage, I am one hundred per cent certain that the finding would have been shouted from the rooftops. We would be looking at a massive blockbuster. Probably the biggest selling drug in the world – ever.
As it was, the research from Cambridge was passed over in virtual silence … I suspect you never heard anything about it. Then, with a certain inevitability, the findings were, effectively squashed.
How was this done?
It was done through the power of the meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is a fancy term describing an attempt to bring together all the relevant trials that have been done in a therapeutic area. In order to construct a ‘meta’ study, or meta-analysis.
They can be a very useful way to bring together all of the relevant research, where there have been a large number of different studies done. In an attempt to establish the definitive answer to a medical question. Does drug x, or intervention y, actually work. If so, what are the true benefits? Assuming that the trials have all showed subtle, or not so subtle, differences in their effects.
Meta-analyses are often treated as though they are the very pinnacle of medical research. Tablets of stone handed down by Gods. In realty, they need to be treated with a very large pinch of salt, and a healthy dose of scepticism.
This is because meta-analyses often ram together studies with very different populations, using different doses of drugs, or vitamins. Or completely different drugs or vitamins, for different lengths of time.
Just to add to the potential messiness, studies can be included that have completely unrelated outcomes. You end up comparing apples and bananas, in order to decide if pomegranates actually work. In computing it would be called garbage in, garbage out – GIGO.
Moving on, in 2014, the year after the Cambridge study, a whole number of different studies on B-vitamins were brought together in a ‘meta-analysis.’ I use the term meta-analysis very loosely here. It was called: ‘Effects of homocysteine lowering with B vitamins on cognitive aging: meta-analysis of 11 trials with cognitive data on 22,000 individuals.’ 12
Sounds good, so far. In fact, the total number of individuals they looked at was 20,431 – which is a lot nearer to twenty thousand than twenty-two thousand. But, hey ho, what’s sixteen hundred or so people between friends? Having said this deliberate figure inflation is an important indication of researchers trying to ‘big up’ their findings – in my book.
Here’s another thing. A number of the studies had absolutely nothing to do with cognitive function … at all. One of the studies included was HOPE-2. Here is the background to the study.
‘In observational studies, lower homocysteine levels are associated with lower rates of coronary heart disease and stroke. Folic acid and vitamins B6 and B12 lower homocysteine levels. We assessed whether supplementation reduced the risk of major cardiovascular events in patients with vascular disease.’ 13
Yes HOPE-2 was a study on cardiovascular disease. It has absolutely nothing to do with Alzheimer’s, or any other form of dementia. The title of HOPE-2 was ‘Homocysteine Lowering with Folic Acid and B Vitamins in Vascular Disease.’ Cognition, or brain function, was not measured. Yet, it was still included in a meta-analysis of ‘11 trials with cognitive data on 22,000 individuals.’ [20,431 individuals, actually].
Moving on, and this is perhaps more mission critical. In only just over seven thousand of the individuals studied did anyone measure cognitive function at the start of the trial and then again, at the end. Leaving aside such studies as HOPE-2 where it was not measured at all. Which, straight off, means that the vast bulk of this meta-analysis is utterly meaningless.
How can you possibly know what happened to anyone’s cognitive state, if you only measured it once? Did it improve, did it worsen – not the faintest. In two thirds of the individuals included in this meta-analysis we have no idea what happened to cognitive function – at all.
It doesn’t stop here. There were others who felt that this was not meta-analyses finest hour:
‘First and foremost, this meta-analysis excluded trials on mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease. As a possible consequence, most of the trials included in this meta-analysis either did not see any significant cognitive change (between the start and the end of the trial) in the placebo group or did not look at such change.14
Yes, they specifically excluded people with existing cognitive impairment, or Alzheimer’s, which would be, by far, most important group to study. As they actually have the condition you are interested in.
Which leads on to the next obvious problem:
… people included in these trials included in the meta-analysis were healthy and did not show any cognitive decline, whether they received B-vitamin treatment or not. So,B-vitamins could hardly prevent or slow down something not happening in the first place.’ 14
Just to make this point a little clearer, in the minority of studies, where they bothered to measure cognitive function at the start, and also at the end, they found that almost no individuals developed any degree of cognitive impairment – in either group. Not in the treatment group, or the placebo groups. As virtually nothing happened to anyone, nothing could have been proved one way or another.
Attempting to study the progress of dementia, in people who do not have dementia, and who may never get dementia, nor have any signs of cognitive decline … is like doing a blood pressure lowering study on people who do not have a raised blood pressure.
Then, on finding there was no difference in cardiovascular event in either arm of the trial, you proceed to claim that blood pressure lowering does not work. Because there was no difference between those given the drug, and those taking the placebo. Do you think this makes any sense? Answers on a postcard, that should be sent to the Willie Wonka chocolate factory. Care of A.N. Idiot.
Despite begin riddled with fatal flaws, this analysis was greeted as though it was the definitive study. B-vitamins have no effect on cognitive decline, end of. This is what the head of Alzheimer’s Research UK had to say:
‘Although one trial in 2010 showed that for people with high homocysteine, B vitamins had some beneficial effect on the rate of brain shrinkage, this comprehensive review of several trials shows that B vitamins have not been able to slow mental decline as we age, nor are they likely to prevent Alzheimer’s. While the outcome of this new and far-reaching analysis is not what we hoped for, it does underline the need for larger studies to improve certainty around the effects of any treatment.
New and far-reaching analysis. Comprehensive review … ho hum. If I were given the job of marking this meta-analysis, I would hand it back in a rather grumpy fashion. ‘I asked you to look at the benefit of lowering homocysteine, using B-vitamins, in people with cognitive problems, or early-stage Alzheimer’s. Yet, you have not even bothered to look at these groups. In fact, you deliberately excluded them.
In addition, you included trials where the researchers failed to measure mental decline. Added to this, in most of these trials, no-one even had a high homocysteine level to start with, so they cannot – by definition – have had low levels of B-vitamins. So, how could vitamin B supplementation possible have been of any benefit … I am most disappointed. Please try again, and this time READ the brief.’
One of the trials lasted for four months, another for six months. What measurable different in cognitive function can anyone possibly expect to see in those timescales… This was not a flawed meta-analysis. It was simply gibberish.
There was a time when I would have questioned my own sanity in reading a meta-analysis such as this. Surely, I had got it wrong. Researchers would never put together such a steaming pile. If they did, then no-one would publish it. Nowadays I find myself far more in agreement with Drummond Rennie: deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association :
‘There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.’ 15
A famous quote… in certain circles.
As it turns out, this analysis was done by exactly the same people who rule the research world of cholesterol lowering, known as the Cholesterol Treatment Triallists Collaboration (CTT) in Oxford. This paper came under the banner of the ‘B-vitamin treatment triallists collaboration’. Who knew such a group existed? One wonders exactly why they exist? Does the world really require such an organisation?
They sure as hell slammed the door shut on vitamin B/homocysteine research in cognitive function. Which was, some may say, possibly whey they were set up in the first place.
In my opinion, you can either believe the B-vitamin treatment triallists collaboration from Oxford with their meta-analysis. Which some would call complete and utter rubbish. Not me, of course. Personally, I have never seen a more detailed and error free research paper. I can hardly praise it highly enough.
Or, you can believe the Cambridge researchers, who demonstrated a seven-fold reduction in cerebral atrophy with B-vitamins – in those with raised homocysteine levels. The choice is entirely up to you.
many of you are probably too young to remember the AIDS panic of the 80’s.
but when it came out, the NIH, with tony fauci leading the charge, was getting literally everything wrong.
they pushed a narrative of fear, vilified the infected, interfered with the development and adoption of effective treatments, and completely misrepresented spread and mitigation.
it’s how we wound up with absolute garbage like this ad:
it’s probably pretty jarring to see, but this is because you now have perspective. at the time, A LOT of people believed this. fear of getting AIDS from public toilet seats was a very real thing. fear of getting AIDS from casual contact or sharing dining or cooking facilities was a very real thing. people worried they might be sitting near a gay person on a bus. the “moral majority” of dingbat tele-evangelists thundered about it daily.
and then, as now, one jumped up bureaucrat with no idea what he was talking about was running around like chicken little screaming of falling skies and grandstanding about non-existent risks to children.
the fact that it was literally the same guy who is still at it should deeply embarrass us all.
Never forget who made the egregoous claims that children and families were at risk. pic.twitter.com/PzXb1JWH9u
i urge you to watch the video and hear him, in his own words. because this is who tony fauci was, and he has not gotten better. he’s just become more powerful and more nastily manipulative and narcissistic.
the appalling inaccuracy and vicious othering of the AIDS campaign is still his bread and butter play. it’s what tony does. only the scale and scope of power has changed.
one day, 20 years from now, people will look back on these rushed and slipshod vaccine approvals and mandates for products that are not at all suited to task and claims about masks and lockdowns and feel sick to their stomachs.
they will not be able to believe how such pseudoscience and rapacious world wrecking doctrine not only got foisted upon the world, but accepted and cheer led by it.
they will, in the light of perspective, marvel that the same man who convinced us that our kids would get AIDS from being near a gay teacher was allowed to generate pretext to close the schools to “protect” children from a disease that poses them almost no risk, a disease they do not contract nor spread serious cases of.
they will be appalled by the suggestion that a non-sterilizing vaccine was forced on them even after the fact that the vaccine does not mitigate spread was known and despite a towering and dangerous adverse events profile that rendered it a clearly of negative benefit to cost proposition to the young and healthy.
in short, they’ll feel just like you probably did looking at that AIDS ad.
think very carefully about just who you are choosing to trust here.
these “experts” do not have track records of being correct or even of being honest.
check the date on this:
they told you not only that these vaccines would stop spread, but that they literally changed the definition of “herd immunity” so that it could ONLY be achieved by vaccines.
then the vaccines failed to stop spread, likely made it worse, and they doubled down on “you need to get vaxxed” in spite of this, pivoting to this bizarre new take of “you need to get vaxxed to save hospital space” which, of course, is ALSO not working. now they want boosters. soon it will be “variant boosters.” if you don’t think annual covid shots are coming, you probably fell for the “did you know the word gullible is not in the dictionary?” trick. twice.
this is not “changing your views when new facts arise” this is “finding new justifications for doing the same thing despite the facts being 180 degrees opposite to what you claimed.”
What happened to Joe Biden could have happened to anyone. In fact, it happens all the time. Throughout human history. He (presumably) caught a cold from his one-and-half-year-old grandson. His theory is that his grandson “likes to kiss his pop.” As a result, he got a “frog in his throat.”
It’s just a cold! No reason to freak out!
Biden’s spokesperson says that he has taken recourse to therapeutics. He “is taking some over-the-counter medication and probably some cough drops and some tea, but otherwise he’s proceeding with his schedule,” said Jen Psaki.
It’s all so normal. So much part of life. There is no way to know if Biden is correct in his casual contact tracing. He might not have gotten the cold from his grandson but he could have. Any parent will tell you that the first child comes with a full year of household sniffles and sickness. The second one is not so bad because the parents have built up immunity. And so on.
But maybe Biden should not have been letting his grandson kiss on him? That’s absurd. He would gladly risk infection in exchange for which he obtains and grants affection. It’s part of the deal we have all made with pathogens: we do a dangerous dance with them in order to experience love, freedom, choice, and human rights.
So far there is nothing I’ve written above that is unusual. It’s the way we’ve always lived. No one thinks the grandson should be punished for passing on a cold – which by the way can be a Rhinovirus or a Coronavirus. No one thinks that Biden should have avoided all contact with his family. There is no moral panic here. No one accuses anyone of aggression. It’s just life as we’ve always known it. Our immune systems have evolved to make it all possible.
So too with Deborah Birx’s desire to see her mother and take a trip, during the exact time last year when she was demanding that everyone cease all travel. The problem here is not the normal desire to see family. The problem is the hypocritical compulsion imposed on everyone else.
Biden’s behavior here is a beautiful illustration of the implicit and endogenous social contract under which we have all agreed to live. We live in the presence of pathogens, regrettable to be sure, but just what we’ve come to deal with. The payoff from the normal exposure to disease that we experience in the course of life is that we get stronger and more resistant to disease – plus we get to live normal lives.
When we do get sick, we reach for the things that make us better. We take cough drops. We sleep more. We have chicken soup. We starve a cold and feed a fever – or maybe it is the reverse, I forget. Whatever, we try to get well so that we can go on with life.
My apologies that this article is dreadfully boring so far. But boring is striking because, for some reason, we decided to forget all of this for the last two years in dealing with a new virus that is associated with a 99.8% survival rate, the victims of which tend to die at an age at which people normally die.
In short, we decided to panic ourselves into abolishing rights and liberties, while throwing out all inherited wisdom about infection, immunity, therapeutics, and viruses in general, not to mention all rights and traditional law. Talk of therapeutics for Covid was all-but banned. In short, we went utterly crazy, causing tremendous harm to public health, and the social and cultural fabric.
What strikes me about Biden and the frog in his throat is how casually and quickly he and his administration take recourse to traditional wisdom about viruses, even as the same administration is promoting the upending of life as we’ve known it all for a virus that is a near cousin of the very thing he caught from his grandson. And yet his spokesperson draws on what we’ve always known in order to calm people down.
I don’t blame Biden or his defenders for their common sense regarding infection. I blame them for not applying this traditional wisdom consistently for other viruses.
Still, the response to Biden’s infection should give us all hope that we can get back to normal, stop stigmatizing the sick, stop calling people who recover from Covid “survivors,” stop avoiding each other as if the human person is nothing but a vector of disease spread, and stop with this incredible cruel demand that every person separate from everyone else in the name of controlling a virus.
How many children have been forcibly kept from seeing grandma and grandpa over the last two years? How many lovers have been prevented from being together because they live in different disease jurisdictions? How many families have been shattered by Deborah Birx’s preposterous demand that we all live in separation from everyone else? How many people have been arrested for violating curfew? How many writers have been censored merely for saying that this Coronavirus should be treated like a normal pathogen?
Millions. Tens of millions. Billions across the world. We’ve paid a ghastly price for freaking out in all the ways in which Biden himself has not during his bout with a cold.
Nonetheless, this should give us hope that the old wisdom is not entirely extinguished. Some things are more important than disease avoidance, even for old people. We all need connection, and with that comes some risk. Our biology has evolved to deal with it. Indeed, the more exposure we experience (whether that means slobbering kids or mixing with people from all over the world in the commercial marketplace), the stronger we get and the longer the lives we live.
Freedom and human choice – plus affection, love, family, and normal life, even art, play, sports, and crowds – are all possible in the presence of infectious disease. Indeed, all these things are essential, else life is not worth living. That’s the real lesson here. May Biden’s throat frog – likely contracted through exposure – teach us at least this much.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
This is a story we hear nowadays from everywhere, especially from morticians who’ve been horrified by the huge increase in deaths of these babies in vaccinated mothers.
The 4 minute video shows the stillbirths are happening in different parts of the country and they are ONLY happening to vaccinated mothers. Start listening at 45 seconds.
The rate of stillbirths in Waterloo was 28X times higher than normal, for example. Only to vaccinated moms.
Clearly, it couldn’t have been the vaccines since these are safe and effective.
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