Tales of the American Empire has described the Empire’s involvement in the illegal narcotics trade for two centuries. The end of the Vietnam war was a major blow to the opium trade as the American CIA lost access to opium producers in Laos. In addition, cocaine became very popular in the 1970s and reduced the demand for opium. Most cocaine was grown in Bolivia, Peru, and Columbia while transport and distribution were monopolized by two powerful Colombian cartels. The OSS (now CIA) had established political influence in Latin America during World War II and used this to take control of the profitable cocaine trade. The first step was called “Operation Watchtower” to establish a secret air corridor from southern Columbia to Panama.
“Colonel Edward Cutolo Published an Affidavit Exposing Operation Watchtower about the CIA’s Drug Trafficking”; HistoryHeist; March 11, 1980; https://historyheist.com/colonel-edwa…
Last week, I showed up to a nice party with a bottle of Absinthe. I like the stuff but I was also performing an experiment. How long before someone at the party asks if Absinthe causes hallucinations and was thereby banned? It didn’t take long. The question came up repeatedly. What is the ingredient in this that is highly suspect? Oh yes, it’s wormwood. What is wormwood anyway? Is it like heroin?
So it went. And so it has been for the better part of one-hundred years. There is absolutely no medical basis for this at all. Wormwood has been used as a medicinal herb since the ancient world, and there is a great deal of legend surrounding it, but there is zero evidence that it has any hallucinogenic properties at all.
Incredibly, some research suggests that wormwood is possibly an early treatment for Covid that inhibits the reproduction of SARS-CoV-2!
What about the belief that it was banned? It was indeed banned, over most of the Western world since the late 19th century. It was only relegalized for import into the United States in 2007. Now there are micro-distilleries all over the country that make the real thing, the exact drink about which Oscar Wilde wrote:
After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But you don’t because you associate it with other things and ideas. If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or you’d laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. “Don’t you see them?” I said to him. “Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien.”
Kind of makes you want to go out and buy a bottle right now. Fortunately you can, because your right to drink it has been restored. The century-old moral panic is over. However, with that change, some of the cachet has been drained away from this yummy drink, which, as it turns out, is just a drink like any other: if you drink too much, you get drunk. Nothing special here.
The irony of the history here is that it was precisely the dire warnings, first issued in French medical journals in the mid 19th century, that created the vast demand for absinthe all over Europe and America. Dangerous drink? Bring it on. The British medical journals seemed to agree that absinthe was highly dangerous, citing this strange experiment from 1869:
The question whether absinthe exerts any special action other than that of alcohol in general, has been revived by some experiments by MM. Magnan and Bouchereau in France. These gentlemen placed a guinea-pig under a glass case with a saucer full of essence of wormwood (which is one of the flavouring matters of absinthe) by his side. Another guinea-pig was similarly shut up with a saucer full of pure alcohol. A cat and a rabbit were respectively enclosed along with a saucer each full of wormwood. The three animals which inhaled the vapours of wormwood experienced, first, excitement, and then epileptiform convulsions. The guinea-pig which merely breathed the fumes of alcohol, first became lively, then simply drunk. Upon these facts it is sought to establish the conclusion that the effects of excessive absinthe drinking are seriously different from those of ordinary alcoholic intemperance.
You can imagine, then, why that generation of artists, poets, playwrights, and literary gadabouts immediately seized on this drink and caused it to be the most fashionable in the land, spreading the plague of absinthism far and wide. Paintings, poetry, music were written in homage to the great muse of the green fairy. No doubt that people believed it, just as Dumbo thought it was the feather that made him fly.
At the height of the absinthe mania in France, 5:00pm became known as “the green hour.” The French were drinking 5 times as much absinthe as wine. The French producers were shipping all over the world. It became the world’s most notorious drink.
Here we have a classic case: science speaks of danger, daring people jump on the trend, moralists get outraged, government acts. That is precisely the situation that lasted for 100 years until it became rather obvious that absinthe is just a normal liquor.
The reason it gained the reputation for making people insane – Vincent Van Gogh, for example – is that highly fashionable people were drinking far too much. It was a classic fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. A confusion of cause and effect. That was enough to effect a century of prohibition.
Here is another article from The Lancet in 1873 about the vast multitudes of “victims of absinthe.”
Originally the only important ingredient in its composition, besides alcohol, was the essential oil of absinthium, or wormwood; and though, doubtless, this added something to the mischievous effects of the liquor, it would be impossible to trace to it, or to the other comparatively trivial ingredients, the more serious of the special results which are now observed to occur in the victims of absinthe. An analysis recently made at the Conservatoire des Arts shows that the absinthe now contains a large proportion of antimony, a poison which cannot fail to add largely to the irritant effects necessarily produced on the alimentary canal and the liver by constant doses of a concentrated alcoholic liquid. As at present constituted, therefore, and especially when drunk in the disastrous excess now common in Paris, and taken frequently upon an empty stomach, absinthe forms a chronic poison of almost unequalled virulence, both as an irritant to the stomach and bowels, and also as a destroyer of the nervous system.
Science has spoken. What can you do but ban it? That didn’t happen until 1915 (the same few years in which every terrible trend in politics happened, from income taxation to central banking).
By then, the drink became associated with elaborate rituals that survive to this day, such as the slow-drip fountain that pours over a special steel spoon that holds a sugar cube. So far as I can tell, the ritual is entirely for show (if you want a bit of sweet in your drink, just add simple syrup) but it’s also enormously fun to reenact the faux-decadence of the absinthe generation. Even now, Amazon offers many absinthe fountains, most in the Victorian style of course.
The war on absinthe – this won’t surprise you – created the opposite of its intended effect. It raised the status of the drink and created a completely unwarranted hysteria in both directions: overconsumption followed by bans followed by speakeasy indulgence. Can you think of anything else, perhaps, that has fit that general model? Marijuana perhaps? Liquor in general? Tobacco? Politically incorrect speech?
Bans stemming from moral panics never seem to end, and people never seem to learn from this classic example. But in this case, the bans gradually came to an end. We’ve lived a full fifteen years of Absinthe freedom. And sure enough, with that freedom has come a bit of blase attitude toward it. Now it sits on the shelf in the liquor store as just another cocktail mixture, alongside the elderflower liqueurs and peach schnapps. It is said to be favored by people on the Keto diet because of its low-carb, low-sugar content.
And yet, to this day, you will still find people who drink it only with great apprehension and with some anticipation that they will soon not be themselves once it is tasted. Drink enough of it, and it will become true. The same is the case with gin, tequila, and rum.
There is surely another lesson here. Science has long served to back public panic, and that panic usually involves some fear of physical and moral corruption. We saw it with Absinthe, and then alcohol Prohibition. We saw it with AIDS. And we’ve lived through it with Covid and all the variants (Omicron!), as a naive public held closely to the words of Anthony Fauci, as the nation’s poet-prophet of a respiratory virus held court for two years, with changing instructions and never-ending insight about the need for all of us to upend our lives to control the invisible enemy.
It’s my habit, and maybe it should be yours, to celebrate every bit of freedom we gain back from the armies of authoritarians who wield the power of the state to improve our health and our lives. It took one hundred years, but they finally got their mitts off this one market. The research suggesting wormwood as a Covid treatment merits a visit from the green fairy as soon as possible.
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.
Within hours of the August 25, 2020, shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin — not days, but hours — it was decreed as unquestioned fact in mainstream political and media circles that the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a “white supremacist.” Over the next fifteen months, up to and including his acquittal by a jury of his peers on all charges, this label was applied to him more times than one can count by corporate media outlets as though it were proven fact. Indeed, that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” was deemed so unquestionably true that questioning it was cast as evidence of one’s own racist inclinations (defending a white supremacist).
Yet all along, there was never any substantial evidence, let alone convincing proof, that it was true. This fact is, or at least should be, an extraordinary, even scandalous, event: a 17-year-old was widely vilified as being a white supremacist by a union of national media and major politicians despite there being no evidence to support the accusation. Yet it took his acquittal by a jury who heard all the evidence and testimony for parts of the corporate press to finally summon the courage to point out that what had been Gospel about Rittenhouse for the last fifteen months was, in fact, utterly baseless.
A Washington Post news article was published late last week that was designed to chide “both sides” for exploiting the Rittenhouse case for their own purposes while failing to adhere carefully to actual facts. Ever since the shootings in Kenosha, they lamented, “Kyle Rittenhouse has been a human canvas onto which the nation’s political divisions were mapped.” In attempting to set the record straight, the Post article contained this amazing admission:
As conservatives coalesced around the idea of Rittenhouse as a blameless defender of law and order, many on the left just as quickly cast him as the embodiment of the far-right threat. Despite a lack of evidence, hundreds of social media posts immediately pinned Rittenhouse with extremist labels: white supremacist, self-styled militia member, a “boogaloo boy” seeking violent revolution, or part of the misogynistic “incel” movement.
“On the left he’s become a symbol of white supremacy that isn’t being held accountable in the United States today,” said Becca Lewis, a researcher of far-right movements and a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. “You see him getting conflated with a lot of the police officers who’ve shot unarmed Black men and with Trump himself and all these other things. On both sides, he’s become a symbol much bigger than himself.”
Soon after the shootings, then-candidate Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Rittenhouse was allegedly part of a militia group in Illinois. In the next sentence, Biden segued to criticism of Trump and hate groups: “Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists?
Valuable though this rather belated admission is, there were two grand ironies about this passage. The first is that The Post itself was one of the newspapers which published multiple articles and columns applying this evidence-free “white supremacist” label to Rittenhouse. Indeed, four days after this admission by The Post‘s newsroom, their opinion editors published an op-ed by Robert Jones that flatly asserted the very same accusation which The Post itself says is bereft of evidence: “Despite his boyish white frat boy appearance, there was plenty of evidence of Rittenhouse’s deeper white supremacist orientation.” In other words, Post editors approved publication of grave accusations which, just four days earlier, their own newsroom explicitly stated lacked evidence.
The second irony is that while the Post article lamented everyone else’s carelessness with the facts of this case, the publication itself — while purporting to fact-check the rest of the world — affirmed one of the most common falsehoods: namely, that Rittenhouse carried a gun across state lines. The article thus now carries this correction at the top: “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Kyle Rittenhouse brought his AR-15 across state lines. He has testified that he picked up the weapon from a friend’s house in Wisconsin. This article has been corrected.”
It continues to be staggering how media outlets which purport to explain the Rittenhouse case get caught over and over spreading utter falsehoods about the most basic facts of the case, proving they did not watch the trial or learn much about what happened beyond what they heard in passing from like-minded liberals on Twitter. There is simply no way to have paid close attention to this case, let alone have watched the trial, and believe that he carried a gun across state lines, yet this false assertion made it past numerous Post reporters, editors and fact-checkers purporting to “correct the record” about this case. Yet again, we find that the same news outlets which love to accuse others of “disinformation” — and want the internet censored in the name of stopping it — frequently pontificate on topics about which they know nothing, without the slightest concern for whether or not it is true.
Those who continue to condemn Rittenhouse as a white supremacist — including the author of ThePost op-ed published four days after the paper concluded the accusation was baseless — typically point to his appearance at a bar in January, 2021, for a photo alongside members of the Proud Boys in which he was photographed making the “okay” sign. That once-common gesture, according to USA Today, “has become a symbol used by white supremacists.” Rittenhouse insists that the appearance was arranged by his right-wing attorneys Lin Wood and John Pierce — whom he quickly fired and accused of exploiting him for fund-raising purposes — and that he had no idea that the people with whom he was posing for a photo were Proud Boys members (“I thought they were just a bunch of, like, construction dudes based on how they looked”), nor had he ever heard that the “OK” sign was a symbol of “white power.”
Rittenhouse’s denial about this once-benign gesture seems shocking to people who spend all their days drowning in highly politicized Twitter discourse — where such a claim is treated as common knowledge — but is completely believable for the vast majority of Americans who do not. In fact, the whole point of the adolescent 4chan hoax was to convert one of the most common and benign gestures into a symbol of white power so that anyone making it would be suspect. As The New York Timesrecounted, the gesture has long been “used for several purposes in sign languages, and in yoga as a symbol to demonstrate inner perfection. It figures in an innocuous made-you-look game. Most of all, it has been commonly used for generations to signal ‘O.K.,’ or all is well.”
But whatever one chooses to believe about that episode is irrelevant to whether these immediate declarations of Rittenhouse’s “white supremacy” were valid. That bar appearance took place in January, 2021 — five months after the Kenosha shootings. Yet Rittenhouse was instantly declared to be a “white supremacist” — and by “instantly,” I mean: within hours of the shooting. “A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15,” was how Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) described Rittenhouse the next dayin a mega-viral tweet; her tweet consecrated not only this “white supremacist” accusation which persisted for months, but also affirmed the falsehood that he crossed state lines with an AR-15. It does not require an advanced degree in physics to understand that his posing for a photo in that bar with Proud Boys members, flashing the OK sign, five months later in January, 2021, could not serve as a rational evidentiary basis for Rep. Pressley’s accusation the day after the shootings that he was a “white supremacist,” nor could it serve as the justification for five consecutive months of national media outlets accusing him of the same. Unless his accusers had the power to see into the future, they branded him a white supremacist with no basis whatsoever — or, as The Post put it this week, “despite a lack of evidence.”
A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15.
He shot and killed 2 people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity, and worth of Black lives.
The only other “evidence” ever cited to support the rather grave accusation that this 17-year-old is a “white supremacist” were social media postings of his in which he expressed positive sentiments toward the police and then-President Trump, including with the phrase “Blue Lives Matter.” That was all that existed — the entirety of the case — that led the most powerful media outlets and politicians to stamp on this adolescent’s forehead the gravest accusation one can face in American culture. This is really the heart of the matter: this episode vividly demonstrates how cheapened and emptied and cynically wielded this “white supremacist” slogan has become. The oft-implicit but sometimes-explicit premise in liberal discourse is that everyone who deviates in any way from liberal dogmais a white supremacist by definition.
Within this rubric, perhaps the most decisive “evidence” that one is a white supremacist is that one supports the Republican Party and former President Trump — i.e., that half of the voting electorate in the U.S. at least are white supremacists. A subsidiary assumption is that anyone who views the police as a necessary, positive force in U.S. society is inherently guilty of racism (it is fine to revere federal policing agencies such as the FBI and other federal security forces such as the CIA, as most Democrats do; the hallmark of a white supremacist is someone who believes that the local police — the ones who show up when citizens call 911 — is a generally positive rather than negative force in society).
An illustration of how casually and recklessly this accusation is tossed around occurred last year, shortly after the George Floyd killing, when my long-time friend and colleague, Intercept journalist Lee Fang, was widely vilified as a racist and white supremacist, first by his own Intercept colleague, journalist Akela Lacy, and then — in one of the most stunningly mindless acts of herd behavior — by literally hundreds if not thousands of members of the national press, including many who barely knew who Lee was but nonetheless were content to echo the accusation (that Lee is himself not white is, of course, not an impediment, not even a speed bump, on the road to castigating him as a modern-day KKK adherent). As Matt Taibbi wrote in disgust about this shameful media episode:
Writing in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait documented that “Lacy called him racist in a pair of tweets, the first of which alone received more than 30,000 likes and 5,000 retweets.”
What was the evidence justifying Lee Fang’s conviction by mob justice of these charges? He (like Rittenhouse) has expressed the view that police, despite needing reforms, are largely a positive presence in protecting innocent people from violent crime; he suggested that resorting to violence harms rather than helps social justice causes; and he published a video interview he conducted with a young BLM supporter, who complained that many liberals only care when white police officers kill black people but not when black people in his neighborhood are killed by anyone who is not white.
Now-deleted tweets from Intercept reporter Akela Lacy, accusing her Intercept colleague Lee Fang of being a racist, June 3, 2020.
That such banal and commonly held views are woefully insufficient to justify the reputation-destroying accusation that someone is a white supremacist should be too self-evident to require any explanation. But in case such an explanation is required, consider that polls continually and reliably show that the pro-police sentiments of the type that caused Rittenhouse, Fang, and so many others to be vilified by liberal elites as “white supremacists” are held not only by a majority of Americans, but by a majority of black and brown Americans, the very people on whose behalf these elite accusers purport to speak.
For years, polling data has shown that the communities which want at least the same level of policing if not more are communities composed primarily of Black, Brown and poor people. It is not hard to understand why. If the police are defunded or radically reduced, rich people will simply hire private security (even more than they already employ for their homes, neighborhoods and persons), and any resulting crime increases will fall most heavily on poorer communities. Thus, polling data reliably shows that it is these communities that want either the same level of policing or more — the exact view which, if you express, will result in guardians of elite liberal discourse declaring you to be a “white supremacist.” Indeed — according to one Gallup poll taken in the wake of the George Floyd killing, when anti-police sentiment was at its peak — the groups that most want a greater police presence in their communities are Black and Latino citizens:
In the wake of anger over the Floyd and Jacob Blake cases, several large liberal cities succeeded in placing referendums on the ballot for this year that proposed major defunding or restructuring of local police. They failed in almost all cases, including ones with large Black populations such as Minneapolis, where Floyd died, precisely because non-white voters rejected it. In other words, expressing the same views about policing that large numbers of Black residents hold somehow subjects one to accusations of “white supremacy” in the dominant elite liberal discourse.
What all of this demonstrates is that insult terms like “white supremacist” and “racist” and “white nationalist” have lost any fixed meaning. They are instead being trivialized and degraded into little more than discourse toys to be tossed around for fun and reputation-destruction by liberals, who believe they have ascended to a place of such elevated racial enlightenment that they are now the sole and exclusive owners of these terms and thus free to hurl them in whatever manner they please. It is not an overstatement to observe that in elite liberal discourse, there are literally no evidentiary requirements that must be fulfilled before one is free to malign political adversaries with those accusatory terms. That is why editors at The Washington Post published an op-ed proclaiming Rittenhouse was plagued by “deeper white supremacist orientation” just four days after its news division explicitly concluded that such an accusation “lacks evidence” — because it it permissible to accuse people of racism and white supremacy without any evidence needed.
It is inherently disturbing and destructive any time a person is publicly branded as something for which there is no evidence. That is intrinsically something we should collectively abhor. But this growing trend in liberal discourse is not just ethically repellent but dangerous. By so flagrantly cheapening and exploiting the “white supremacist” accusation from what it should be (a potent weapon deployed to stigmatize and ostracize actual racists) into something far more tawdry (a plaything used by Democrats to demean and destroy their enemies whenever the mood strikes), its cynical abusers are draining the term of all of its vibrancy, potency and force, so that when it is needed, for actual racists, people will have tuned it out, knowing that is used deceitfully, recklessly and for cheap entertainment.
A similar dynamic emerged with accusations of anti-semitism and the weaponization of it to demonize criticisms of Israel. It is, of course, true that some criticisms of the Israeli government are partially grounded or even largely motivated by anti-semitism — just as it is true that some championing of the local police or support for Trump grows out of racist sentiments. But the converse is just as true: one can vehemently criticize the actions of the Israeli government the same as any other government without being driven by an iota of anti-semitism (indeed, many of the most vocal critics of Israel are proudly Jewish), in exactly the same way as one can be highly supportive of the local police or Donald Trump without an iota of racism (a proposition that should need no proof, but is nonetheless highlighted by the uncomfortable fact that growing numbers of non-whites support both Trump and the police). But the cynical, manipulative weaponization of anti-semitism accusations to smear all critics of Israel has rendered the accusation far weaker and more easily dismissible than it once was — exactly as is now happening to the accusatory terms “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” and “racist,” which are being increasingly understood, validly so, not as a grave and sincere condemnation but a cheap tactic to be applied recklessly, for the tawdry entertainment one derives from public rituals of reputation-destruction.
BBC, Nov. 22, 2020
Ever since his acquittal, Rittenhouse has made a series of public statements directly at odds with the dark, hateful image constructed of him by the national press over the last sixteen months, while he was forced to remain silent due to the charges he faced. He has professed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, argued that the U.S. is plagued by structural racism, and suggested that he would have suffered a worse fate if he had been Black. The same people who are smugly certain that his entire character and soul was permanently captured by that fleeting moment in a bar when he was seventeen and flashed an “okay” symbol — and who are certain that his denials that he knew what it meant or with whom he was posing are false — have, of course, scoffed at these recent statements of his as self-serving and insincere, even though they offer far greater insight into Rittenhouse’s actual views on questions of race than anything thus far presented.
But that is the point. The political and media faction that casually and recklessly brands people as “white supremacists” the way normal people utter “excuse me” while navigating a large crowd have no interest at all in whether the accusation is true. They are devoted to reducing everyone whose political ideology diverges from their own to their worst possible moment — no matter how long ago it happened or how unrepresentative of their lives it is — in order to derive the most ungenerous and destructive meaning from it. It is a movement that is at once driven by rigorous rules resulting in righteous decrees of sin and sweeping denunciations, yet completely bereft of the possibility of grace or redemption.
And its most cherished weapon is accusing anyone who they decide is an enemy or even just an adversary of being a white supremacist, a white nationalist, a racist — to the point where these terms now sound more like reflexively recited daily prayer slogans than anything one needs to take seriously or which has the possibility to engage on the merits. For fifteen months, it was gospel in political and media circles that Kyle Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist terrorist” only for The Washington Post to suddenly announce that this claim persisted “despite a lack of evidence.”
But that lack of evidence really does not matter, which is why that announcement by The Post received so little notice. Under the rules of this rotted discourse, evidence is not a requirement to affirm this accusation. All that is needed is an intuition, a tingly sensation, and — above all else — the realization that hurling the accusation will yield some personal or political advantage. Like all cynical weapons, it worked for awhile, but is rapidly running out of efficacy as its manipulative usage becomes more and more visible. The term is still needed as a tool to fight actual racism, but those who most vocally and flamboyantly proclaim themselves solemnly devoted to that cause have rendered that tool virtually useless, thanks to their self-interested misuse and abuse of it.
In a sense, I can’t believe I’m writing this article. From a scientific perspective, this issue has been firmly settled. The answer is very clearly “NO!”. And yet, if I google “is saturated fat unhealthy?”, then seven of the top nine results proclaim with great certainty that “yes, it is”.
Here’s what the NHS says to people living in the UK: “Too much saturated fat can increase the amount of cholesterol in the blood, which increases your risk of developing heart disease.”
And here’s what the US government tells its citizens: “Eating too many foods high in saturated fats can be bad for your health. By replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats, you may lower your risk of getting heart disease.”
To be fair, the US government doesn’t sound quite as confident as the UK health authorities. There’s a lot of “can” and “may” in that sentence. Which is actually a bit funny, when you consider that it was the US government that got the whole world to cut down on saturated fats in the first place.
Interestingly, none of the self-appointed fact checking organizations that have sprung up in recent years has yet tried to pull the NHS or the US government off the internet for spreading misinformation.
The claim that saturated fat is unhealthy originated with physiologist Ancel Keys in the mid-part of the twentieth century. He initially believed that cholesterol in the diet was what caused heart disease. Unfortunately, he soon noticed that feeding people cholesterol had no effect whatsoever on the cholesterol levels in their blood streams. So he was forced to abandon that line of thinking. On doing some further research, he noticed that increasing the proportion of saturated fat in the diet did however appear to increase cholesterol somewhat.
This led him to develop the diet-heart hypothesis, which basically says the following: Saturated fat in the diet leads to increased cholesterol levels in the blood stream, which causes heart disease. So it’s a two part hypothesis. As I’ve already discussed before on this blog, the second part of the hypothesis has been disproven – cholesterol in the blood stream does not cause heart disease.
But what about the first part? Even if not through the intermediate action on cholesterol, saturated fat might still somehow be unhealthy. Ancel Keys claimed to have evidence that high levels of saturated fat in the diet correlates with heart disease. This evidence came from a very shaky observational data set called the “Seven Countries Study”, in which Keys presented results from relatively small, hand-picked cohorts in seven countries, which appeared to show a correlation between saturated fat intake and heart disease (and ignored data from a bunch of other countries where no such correlation could be seen).
But it’s now more than forty years after the Seven Countries Study was published, and there is thus no reason to rely any longer on what Ancel Keys claimed to have found. We can instead look at the wealth of data that’s been produced since then.
Let’s start with what the observational data show. A meta-analysis was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010 that sought to find if the prospective cohort studies that had been carried out up to that point supported the notion that saturated fat causes heart disease.
A meta-analysis is a pooled analysis, where you take a bunch of studies and add their results together, to get a higher degree of statistical accuracy. A prospective cohort study is a study where you find two groups of people that vary in some significant respect, for example in terms of how much saturated fat they eat, and then follow them over time to see what happens – it’s generally considered to be the highest quality type of observational study, although it doesn’t reach the level of quality of a randomized controlled trial, because it isn’t able to get rid of confounding effects to the level that a randomized trial can (if you need to brush up on scientific method in the health sciences, read this).
Why are we even bothering to look at observational studies at all then, instead of just jumping straight to randomized trials? Because observational studies are easier to do, so there are more of them, and they can gather a lot more data. While a randomized trial with a few thousand people is huge, an observational study with a few thousand people is tiny. Additionally, as mentioned, the initial recommendation to eat less saturated fat was based on a single observational study, and quite a small one at that (the Seven Countries Study included less than 13,000 people – “Seven Countries” makes it sound much bigger than it was). So it’s interesting to see if the vast mass of observational data that we have today bears out the initial findings of the Seven Countries Study.
The authors of the meta-analysis identified 21 prospective cohort studies, with a total of almost 400,000 participants. That’s a big data set. The studies followed participants for between five and 23 years.
So, what did they find?
The difference in risk of cardiovascular disease between the groups with a high intake of saturated fat and those with a low intake of saturated fat was exactly zero. There was no difference at all. If you look more closely at the different kinds of cardiovascular disease, then you see a slightly increased risk of coronary heart disease in the saturated fat group (7% increased relative risk), but a slightly decreased risk of stroke (21% decreased relative risk). Neither of those differences were statistically significant, however. And in observational data sets, with all the risks of confounding they face, anything less than a halving or doubling of risk should be ignored, since small differences between groups are almost certainly caused by confounding factors.
Let’s move on and look at what the randomized controlled trials show. A Cochrane review was published in 2020 that looked at the ability of a diet low in saturated fat to prevent heart disease and death. 15 trials were identified, with a total of roughly 55,000 participants, and included in Cochrane’s meta-analysis. In most of the trials, the intervention consisted of dietary advice, although a few also provided polyunsaturated fats (so-called “healthy oils”), and told people to replace their lard and butter with them, and one provided participants with complete meal replacements. The trials lasted from two to eight years, with an average duration of five years.
Eleven of the 15 trials measured intake of saturated fats at multiple time points, and could thus confirm that intake of saturated fats decreased in the intervention group as compared with the control group. This is good to know, since if that wasn’t the case then a lack of benefit in terms of heart disease risk could simply be due to not managing to get people to change their diets sufficiently. So we know for certain that saturated fat intake decreased in at least eleven of the fifteen trials. Did this have any meaningful impact on people’s risk of having a heart attack or dying?
No, is the short answer. In the low saturated fat group, 6.4% of participants died, while in the high saturated fat group, 6.2% of participants died. So 0.2% more people died in the low saturated fat group than in the high saturated fat group. As you would expect for such a small difference, it isn’t statistically significant.
After the dark magic known as Mantel-Haenszel weighting (a statistical technique used in meta-analysis in which studies with more precise results are given greater weight), the authors reach the conclusion that it’s actually the other way around, that marginally less people should have died in the low saturated fat group, but the difference still isn’t statistically significant.
So it’s not possible to conclude that a diet high in saturated fat increases overall mortality. What about if we look specifically at heart attacks?
Most heart attacks are not fatal, so it’s possible that an intervention could lower heart attacks without meaningfully impacting overall risk of death. In the low saturated fat group, 3.3% of participants had a heart attack. In the high saturated fat group, 3.1% of participants had a heart attack. So the people in the high saturated fat group actually experienced fewer heart attacks than the people in the low saturated fat group.
Again, after statistical weighting, it appears that there should have been slightly fewer heart attacks in the group with the low saturated fat diet (rougly 0.3% less). Just as before, however, the difference isn’t statistically significant. What that means is that the small difference that was found is within the margin of error.
To conclude, the sum of all the observational and randomized trial evidence now available to us does not allow us to conclude that there is any increased risk of cardiovascular disease or death with increased intake of saturated fat. Considering that the data sets that these conclusions are based on are massive, we can be certain that even if there were a benefit, it would be so tiny as to not be worth bothering with. It is therefore shocking that public health agencies still tell their populations to cut down on saturated fats, instead of focusing on the things that have actually been shown to make a difference.
I’m a voracious reader of Covid books but nothing could have prepared me for Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, a full and mind-blowing account of the famed scientist’s personal experience with the Covid era and a luridly detailed account of his time at the White House. The book is hot fire, from page one to the last, and will permanently affect your view of not only this pandemic and the policy response but also the workings of public health in general.
Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment.
Anyone who tells you this fictional story (including Deborah Birx) deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction. The book is about the war between real science (and genuine public health), with Atlas as the voice for reason both before and during his time in the White House, vs. the enactment of brutal policies that never stood any chance of controlling the virus while causing tremendous damage to the people, to human liberty, to children in particular, but also to billions of people around the world.
For the reader, the author is our proxy, a reasonable and blunt man trapped in a world of lies, duplicity, backstabbing, opportunism, and fake science. He did his best but could not prevail against a powerful machine that cares nothing for facts, much less outcomes.
If you have heretofore believed that science drives pandemic public policy, this book will shock you. Atlas’s recounting of the unbearably poor thinking on the part of government-based “infectious disease experts” will make your jaw drop (thinking, for example, of Birx’s off-the-cuff theorizing about the relationship between masking and controlling case spreads).
Throughout the book, Atlas points to the enormous cost of the machinery of lockdowns, the preferred method of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx: missed cancer screenings, missed surgeries, nearly two years of educational losses, bankrupted small business, depression and drug overdoses, overall citizen demoralization, violations of religious freedom, all while public health massively neglected the actual at-risk population in long-term care facilities. Essentially, they were willing to dismantle everything we called civilization in the name of bludgeoning one pathogen without regard to the consequences.
The fake science of population-wide “models” drove policy instead of following the known information about risk profiles. “The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk,” writes Atlas. “Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.”
“Restrictions on liberty were also destructive by inflaming class distinctions with their differential impact,” he writes, “exposing essential workers, sacrificing low-income families and kids, destroying single-parent homes, and eviscerating small businesses, while at the same time large companies were bailed out, elites worked from home with barely an interruption, and the ultra-rich got richer, leveraging their bully pulpit to demonize and cancel those who challenged their preferred policy options.”
In the midst of continued chaos, in August 2020, Atlas was called by Trump to help, not as a political appointee, not as a PR man for Trump, not as a DC fixer but as the only person who in nearly a year of unfolding catastrophe had a health-policy focus. He made it clear from the outset that he would only tell what he believed to be true; Trump agreed that this was precisely what he wanted and needed. Trump got an earful and gradually came around to a more rational view than that which caused him to wreck the American economy and society with his own hands and against his own instincts.
In Task Force meetings, Atlas was the only person who showed up with studies and on-the-ground information as opposed to mere charts of infections easily downloadable from popular websites. “A bigger surprise was that Fauci did not present scientific research on the pandemic to the group that I witnessed. Likewise, I never heard him speak about his own critical analysis of any published research studies. This was stunning to me. Aside from intermittent status updates about clinical trial enrollments, Fauci served the Task Force by offering an occasional comment or update on vaccine trial participant totals, mostly when the VP would turn to him and ask.”
When Atlas spoke up, it was almost always to contradict Fauci/Birx but he received no backing during meetings, only to have many people in attendance later congratulate him for speaking out. Still, he did have a convert in Trump himself, but by then it was too late: not even Trump could prevail against the wicked machine he had permissioned into operation.
It’s a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington story but applied to matters of public health. From the outset of this disease panic, policy came to be dictated by two government bureaucrats (Fauci and Birx) who, for some reason, were confident in their control over media, bureaucracies, and White House messaging, despite every attempt by the president, Atlas, and a few others to get them to pay attention to the actual science about which Fauci/Birx knew and care little.
Fortunately, we now have this book to set the record straight. It gives every reader an inside look at the workings of a system that wrecked our lives. If the book finally declines to offer an explanation for the hell that was visited upon us – every day we still ask the question why? – it does provide an accounting of the who, when, where, and what. Tragically, too many scientists, media figures, and intellectuals in general went along. Atlas’s account shows exactly what they signed up to defend, and it’s not pretty.
The cliche that kept coming to mind as I read is “breath of fresh air.” That metaphor describes the book perfectly: blessed relief from relentless propaganda. Imagine yourself trapped in an elevator with stultifying air in a building that is on fire and the smoke gradually seeps in from above. Someone is in there with you and he keeps assuring you that everything is fine, when it is obviously not.
That’s a pretty good description of how I felt from March 12, 2020 and onward. That was the day that President Trump spoke to the nation and announced that there would be no more travel from Europe. The tone in his voice was spooky. It was obvious that more was coming. He had clearly fallen sway to extremely bad advice, perhaps he was willing to push lockdowns as a plan to deal with a respiratory virus that was already widespread in the US from perhaps 5 to 6 months earlier.
It was the day that the darkness descended. A day later (March 13), the HHS distributed its lockdown plans for the nation. That weekend, Trump met for many hours with Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and only a few others. He came around to the idea of shutting down the American economy for two weeks. He presided over the calamitous March 16, 2020, press conference, at which Trump promised to beat the virus through general lockdowns.
Of course he had no power to do that directly but he could urge it to happen, all under the completely delusional promise that doing so would solve the virus problem. Two weeks later, the same gang persuaded him to extend the lockdowns.
Trump went along with the advice because it was the only advice he was fed at the time. They made it appear that the only choice that Trump had – if he wanted to beat the virus – was to wage war on his own policies that were pushing for a stronger, healthier economy. After surviving two impeachment attempts, and beating back years of hate from a nearly united media afflicted by severe derangement syndrome, Trump was finally hornswoggled.
Atlas writes: “On this highly important criterion of presidential management—taking responsibility to fully take charge of policy coming from the White House—I believe the president made a massive error in judgment. Against his own gut feeling, he delegated authority to medical bureaucrats, and then he failed to correct that mistake.”
The truly tragic fact that both Republicans and Democrats do not want spoken about is that this whole calamity did indeed begin with Trump’s decision. On this point, Atlas writes:
Yes, the president initially had gone along with the lockdowns proposed by Fauci and Birx, the “fifteen days to slow the spread,” even though he had serious misgivings. But I still believe the reason that he kept repeating his one question—“Do you agree with the initial shutdown?”—whenever he asked questions about the pandemic was precisely because he still had misgivings about it.
Large parts of the narrative are devoted to explaining precisely how and to what extent Trump had been betrayed. “They had convinced him to do exactly the opposite of what he would naturally do in any other circumstance,” Atlas writes, that is
“to disregard his own common sense and allow grossly incorrect policy advice to prevail… This president, widely known for his signature “You’re fired!” declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates. All for fear of what was inevitable anyway—skewering from an already hostile media. And on top of that tragic misjudgment, the election was lost anyway. So much for political strategists.”
There are so many valuable parts to the story that I cannot possibly recount them all. The language is brilliant, e.g. he calls the media “the most despicable group of unprincipled liars one could ever imagine.” He proves that assertion in page after page of shocking lies and distortions, mostly driven by political goals.
I was particularly struck by his chapter on testing, mainly because that whole racket mystified me throughout. From the outset, the CDC bungled the testing part of the pandemic story, attempting to keep the tests and process centralized in DC at the very time when the entire nation was in panic. Once that was finally fixed, months too late, mass and indiscriminate PCR testing became the desiderata of success within the White House. The problem was not just with the testing method:
“Fragments of dead virus hang around and can generate a positive test for many weeks or months, even though one is not generally contagious after two weeks. Moreover, PCR is extremely sensitive. It detects minute quantities of virus that do not transmit infection… Even the New York Times wrote in August that 90 percent or more of positive PCR tests falsely implied that someone was contagious. Sadly, during my entire time at the White House, this crucial fact would never even be addressed by anyone other than me at the Task Force meetings, let alone because for any public recommendation, even after I distributed data proving this critical point.”
The other problem is the wide assumption that more testing (however inaccurate) of whomever, whenever was always better. This model of maximizing tests seemed like a leftover from the HIV/AIDS crisis in which tracing was mostly useless in practice but at least made some sense in theory. For a widespread and mostly wild respiratory disease transmitted the way a cold virus is transmitted, this method was hopeless from the beginning. It became nothing but make work for tracing bureaucrats and testing enterprises that in the end only provided a fake metric of “success” that served to spread public panic.
Early on, Fauci had clearly said that there was no reason to get tested if you had no symptoms. Later, that common-sense outlook was thrown out the window and replaced with an agenda to test as many people as possible regardless of risk and regardless of symptoms. The resulting data enabled Fauci/Birx to keep everyone in a constant state of alarm. More test positivity to them implied only one thing: more lockdowns. Businesses needed to close harder, we all needed to mask harder, schools needed to stay closed longer, and travel needed to be ever more restricted. That assumption became so entrenched that not even the president’s own wishes (which had changed from Spring to Summer) made any difference.
Atlas’s first job, then, was to challenge this whole indiscriminate testing agenda. To his mind, testing needed to be about more than accumulating endless amounts of data, much of it without meaning; instead, testing should be directed toward a public-health goal. The people who needed tests were the vulnerable populations, particularly those in nursing homes, with the goal of saving lives among those who were actually threatened with severe outcomes. This push to test, contact trace, and quarantine anyone and everyone regardless of known risk was a huge distraction, and also caused huge disruption in schooling and enterprise.
To fix it meant changing the CDC guidelines. Atlas’s story of attempting to do that is eye-opening. He wrestled with every manner of bureaucrat and managed to get new guidelines written, only to find that they had been mysteriously reverted to the old guidelines one week later. He caught the “error” and insisted that his version prevail. Once they were issued by the CDC, the national press was all over it, with the story that the White House was pressuring the scientists at the CDC in terrible ways. After a week-long media storm, the guidelines changed yet again. All of Atlas’s work was made null.
Talk about discouraging! It was also Atlas’s first full experience in dealing with deep-state machinations. It was this way throughout the lockdown period, a machinery in place to implement, encourage, and enforce endless restrictions but no one person in particular was there to take responsibility for the policies or the outcomes, even as the ostensible head of state (Trump) was on record both publicly and privately opposing the policies that no one could seem to stop.
As an example of this, Atlas tells the story of bringing some massively important scientists to the White House to speak with Trump: Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, Joseph Ladapo, and Cody Meissner. People around the president thought the idea was great. But somehow the meeting kept being delayed. Again and again. When it finally went ahead, the schedulers only allowed for 5 minutes. But once they met with Trump himself, the president had other ideas and prolonged the meeting for an hour and a half, asking the scientists all kinds of questions about viruses, policy, the initial lockdowns, the risks to individuals, and so on.
The president was so impressed with their views and knowledge – what a dramatic change that must have been for him – that he invited filming to be done plus pictures to be taken. He wanted to make it a big public splash. It never happened. Literally. White House press somehow got the message that this meeting never happened. The first anyone will have known about it other than White House employees is from Atlas’s book.
Two months later, Atlas was instrumental in bringing in not only two of those scientists but also the famed Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. They met with the HHS secretary but this meeting too was buried in the press. No dissent was allowed. The bureaucrats were in charge, regardless of the wishes of the president.
Another case in point was during Trump’s own bout with Covid in early October. Atlas was nearly sure that he would be fine but he was forbidden from talking to the press. The entire White House communications office was frozen for four days, with no one speaking to the press. This was against Trump’s own wishes. This left the media to speculate that he was on his deathbed, so when he came back to the White House and announced that Covid is not to be feared, it was a shock to the nation. From my own point of view, this was truly Trump’s finest moment. To learn of the internal machinations happening behind the scenes is pretty shocking.
I can’t possibly cover the wealth of material in this book, and I expect this brief review to be one of several that I write. I do have a few disagreements. First, I think the author is too uncritical toward Operation Warp Speed and doesn’t really address how the vaccines were wildly oversold, to say nothing of growing concerns about safety, which were not addressed in the trials. Second, he seems to approve of Trump’s March 12th travel restrictions, which struck me as brutal and pointless, and the real beginning of the unfolding disaster. Third, Atlas inadvertently seems to perpetuate the distortion that Trump recommended ingesting bleach during a press conference. I know that this was all over the papers. But I’ve read the transcript of that press conference several times and find nothing like this. Trump actually makes clear that he was speaking about cleaning surfaces. This might be yet another case of outright media lies.
All that aside, this book reveals everything about the insanity of 2020 and 2021, years in which good sense, good science, historical precedent, human rights, and concerns for human liberty were all thrown into the trash, not just in the US but all over the world.
Atlas summarizes the big picture:
“in considering all the surprising events that unfolded in this past year, two in particular stand out. I have been shocked at the enormous power of government officials to unilaterally decree a sudden and severe shutdown of society—to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movements, mandate behavior, regulate interactions with our family members, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any defined end and with little accountability.”
Atlas is correct that “the management of this pandemic has left a stain on many of America’s once noble institutions, including our elite universities, research institutes and journals, and public health agencies. Earning it back will not be easy.”
Internationally, we have Sweden as an example of a country that (mostly) kept its sanity. Domestically, we have South Dakota as an example of a place that stayed open, preserving freedom throughout. And thanks in large part to Atlas’s behind-the-scenes work, we have the example of Florida, whose governor did care about the actual science and ended up preserving freedom in the state even as the elderly population there experienced the greatest possible protection from the virus.
We all owe Atlas an enormous debt of gratitude, for it was he who persuaded the Florida governor to choose the path of focussed protection as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration, which Atlas cites as the “single document that will go down as one of the most important publications in the pandemic, as it lent undeniable credibility to focused protection and provided courage to thousands of additional medical scientists and public health leaders to come forward.”
Atlas experienced the worst of the slings, arrows, and worse. The media and the bureaucrats tried to shut him up, shut him down, and body bag him professionally and personally. Cancelled, meaning removed from the roster of functional, dignified human beings. Even colleagues at Stanford University joined in the lynch mob, much to their disgrace. And yet this book is that of a man who has prevailed against them.
In that sense, it is easily the most crucial first-person account we have so far. It is gripping, revealing, devastating for the lockdowners and their vaccine-mandating successors, and a true classic that will stand the test of time. It’s simply not possible to write the history of this disaster without a close examination of this erudite first-hand account.
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.
EARLIER this month Dr Byram Bridle, a Canadian viral immunologist whose faculty at the University of Ontario has disowned him for his repeated assertion that Covid-19 vaccines are not safe, gave a remarkable off-the-cuff interview to a reporter. Bridle starts by explaining the reasons why heavily vaccinated countries are experiencing high case rates, why adverse reactions are not being reported or diagnosed and discusses the overwhelming evidence for ivermectin as an ant-viral treatment for Covid where studies have been conducted correctly.
DR BYRAM BRIDLE: A recent study came out looking at 68 different countries and they plotted on a graph the case rate for Covid-19 and the vaccination rate in the country. And the more vaccinated the country is, the more problems they’re having with Covid-19. So these people have the vaccine. Remember all the antibody titers they’re showing, that’s in the blood, but these people, on average, are quite poorly protected in their upper airways. And it’s not the virus that’s deep down in the alveoli that gets transmitted to other people because of the dead airspace when we exhale. It’s the viral particles that are in the upper airways. So that’s why the vaccinated can spread this just as efficiently as somebody who’s completely unprotected. And so these vaccines on that basis, because they don’t come close to conferring sterilising immunity, they don’t properly protect the upper respiratory tract, they only confer about four and a half months of immunity, it’s absolutely 100 per cent impossible to achieve the goal of herd immunity with these vaccines. 100 per cent impossible.
What I’ve seen way too much of – and it does cause me very serious concern – is we’re seeing people who had cancers that were in remission or that were being well-controlled, and their cancers have gone completely out of control after getting the vaccine. And what we do know with the vaccine is the vaccine causes at least a temporary drop in T-cell numbers and those T-cells are part of our immune system, and they’re the critical weapons that our immune system has to fight off cancerous cells. So there’s a potential mechanism there. And all I can say is I’ve seen . . . I’ve had people contact me with way too many of these reports for me to feel comfortable. I do feel that that’s probably, I would say, my newest major safety concern. And it’s also the one that is going to be by far the most underreported on any adverse event database. Because if somebody’s had a cancer before the vaccine, there’s no way public health officials will ever link it to the vaccine. But what we’re seeing is oncology teams that had pushed the cancers into remission or keeping them well-controlled can no longer control them after the vaccine.
So we know in Canada it’s very upsetting, because in Canada we have a system that will never, never detect problems with these vaccines – that’s why we’ve always had to rely on other countries. Like with the AstraZeneca vaccine, we told Canadians that the AstraZeneca vaccine was 100 per cent safe, despite the fact that 12 European countries had paused the programme to look for potential links to the blood clotting, potentially fatal blood clotting. And we were told as Canadians that we didn’t have to worry because ours was from a . . . they announced that the problem was associated with a single batch from a single production facility in Europe and ours was coming from India and therefore it didn’t apply to us. The European Medicines Agency will tell you that was never the case. And of course, then eventually, after there were Canadians that did die and many that did have to be treated for the blood clots, then we finally admitted that it was a problem.
And that’s how our system . . . our system is never going to work, because this is the thing. First of all, we’re not informing people when they get the vaccine that they’re to report any unusual medical condition up to eight weeks after receiving a dose of the vaccine. And then the attending physician is required to, by law, to report anything unusual. Most physicians are not. And now some of them are . . . many don’t, because they don’t want to contradict the current narrative. And the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has turned out to be incredibly tyrannical and are crushing many physicians and threatening many who don’t go with this narrow public health narrative. Many also can’t get their submissions done because they’re onerous. So, for example, British Columbia can take up to 40 minutes to submit one of these reports, and you can imagine if there’s an Emergency Room physician who sees five people in a shift that come in with problems and have recently been vaccinated, they can’t afford to spend hours on that shift, reporting it, right?
So there’s many reasons why people aren’t reporting to the physicians, and there are many reasons why the physicians aren’t reporting to the local Medical Officer of Health. And that’s the next step is, if a physician submits it, it doesn’t necessarily go into our database, it goes to the local Medical Officer of Health. This is the thing: the physicians are not supposed to make a determination of whether they think the medical condition that’s occurred after the vaccine is or is not related to the vaccine. They’re not supposed to make that determination. The local Medical Officers of Health are. And as you can imagine, with the huge bias that exists there, the majority of them, we’re seeing unusually high percentages of these reports that do get submitted being rejected at the level of the local Medical Officer of Health. And then from there, the ones that they do approve go to the Public Health Agency of Canada and then they could be filed into our adverse event database. But because of that, because of all the filtering that’s going on, this is the problem. We’re not getting accurate numbers.
So yes, a statistician, of course, could be looking for these. But if you don’t get accurate numbers reported, you can do all the analysis you want, it’s not going to be accurate, right? Your analysis is only as accurate as the data, the raw data you have to work with.
A D-dimer test is definitely a good one to do, because it can be suggestive of micro clots, which could be an indicator of blood clotting. But yeah, we’re finding that most physicians won’t do it. And we’re also finding a shortage, actually, of the blood collection tubes that are needed to do that as well.
Yeah, yeah, no, this is a virus. But ivermectin has clear-cut antiviral properties. For example, it has multiple mechanisms of action, but one is it inhibits the binding of the spike protein on the virus to these receptors that we have on the cells of our lungs. And yeah, what’s interesting is a lot of countries . . . so, that’s what’s frustrating for me as a vaccine developer, I knew that there was going to be no outlet for the vaccines if there were effective early treatment strategies. So I followed the science for the early treatment strategies, and I saw that the studies were flawed early on.
For example, a lot of the studies that were being done were being done in countries where things like ivermectin were available over the counter. So in other words, they were testing their treatment group, which was getting a defined amount of ivermectin and comparing it to a control group which had an undefined amount of ivermectin. So essentially comparing ivermectin treatment to ivermectin treatment, right? And then they showed there was no benefit. Well, of course not. If you’re comparing, you know, a treatment group to a treatment group.
And so when the science has been done properly, there’s an overwhelming [body] of scientific data showing that it works. And so even though I love vaccines, I couldn’t help but wonder why we were providing initially this authorisation for interim use, what we call emergency use in the United States, because we had clear, effective early treatments. I have worked with many physicians. These things clearly work. In fact, a lot of the countries that are having the most success, like, for example, a lot of the low income countries have had no choice. I mean, look, they’ve been left to take the leftovers for the vaccines. They can’t afford a lot of expensive treatments. So they have been relying on these effective early treatment strategies using repurposed generic drugs that are really cheap, and they’ve had a huge success.
So, for example, Egypt is a good example. Egypt, you know, Egypt has a three per cent vaccination rate. Three per cent of their eligible population is double vaccinated compared with Canada, which is at around 64 or 66 per cent. And they have 14 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 people per day on average, whereas we have about 570 cases per day, so vastly higher.
And this is what people are seeing. A recent study came out looking at 68 different countries, and they plotted on a graph the case rate for Covid-19 and the vaccination rate in the country. And the more vaccinated the country is, the more problems they’re having with Covid-19. And when you look at these countries that have low vaccination rates, they’ve been relying on effective early treatment strategies.
So for example, with Egypt, I didn’t realise, but I asked that question to my collaborators, ‘What is Egypt doing right that we’re not doing here in North America?’ They sent me the official treatment protocol for Covid-19. Do you know what the number one thing is that they go to first? [It] is hydroxychloroquine and number two is ivermectin.
And if you look at Israel – Israel has the highest vaccination rate in the world, right? And the Delta variant is completely out of control, which is why they’ve been administering the third dose, why they’ve committed to a fourth dose. And with these numbers I was telling you, so they have the highest vaccination rates. So again, keep this in mind so as to understand – Egypt: three per cent vaccination rate, 14 cases per 100,000 of the population per day. Israel is at over an 80 per cent vaccination rate and has over 5,000 cases right now per day.
So these things work best as an early treatment strategy, so they should be administered. The sooner you administer them, the better the outcome. So we’ve had physicians – and I know these people and they’re good friends of mine – who have been absolutely destroyed for using ivermectin with their patients, and they’ve kept their patients out of the hospital, they’ve kept them out of the ICU. I find this exceptionally frustrating because I keep getting criticised for raising my concerns about the vaccines and harms, and I have physicians coming at me and saying, ‘Well, if only you saw on the front lines what happens to people who die from Covid and how terrible it is.’ And yes, it’s awful, and I feel terrible for all of them. But the other thing that I point out is it’s estimated that more than half the people that have died in this pandemic would be alive today if we had accepted these early treatment strategies. That’s the reality, and I’ve seen it with every physician who has administered this. They talk about our ICUs being overrun, but every physician that I have worked with – and I’ve worked with many who have used these effective treatment strategies – they’ve kept their patients out of the ICU. They don’t go to the ICU and they don’t die.
Do you realise that the way we’ve been treating patients is they go to the hospital and if they aren’t sick enough to go on a respirator, they typically get sent home and it’s, you know, take fluids and some of these other . . . maybe some aspirin. It’s basically what were they like to call in medicine, ‘watchful waiting’, which means, ‘we’re going to do nothing’, right? And you literally have to wait till you’re sick enough to come in and basically be put in the ICU and put on a respirator.
That’s not how you treat disease, right? The earlier you intervene, the better the outcome. And we have these early treatment strategies, and I think it’s no coincidence the only one we’ve approved in Canada is called remdesivir. It does have genuine safety issues and does virtually nothing for Covid-19. But it’s on patent and there’s tons of money that can be made. These other ones are dirt cheap. Ivermectin, you can treat somebody for about a dollar a day. So they’ve been using it to great effect in all these low income countries. But in North America, we’ve refused to adopt these strategies.
And you have to understand, and they even talk about safety issues. Well, one of the things is, so, there’s rare cases of safety issues associated with using the veterinary form, and that’s simply because of calculation errors – people making simple mathematical errors when trying to convert to the human dose. And the reality is that ivermectin is on the list for the World Health Organisation of one of the 50 most needed drugs in the entire world, has an unbelievable safety record. It’s used worldwide to effectively treat all these parasitic diseases. It was approved by Health Canada in 2018 to treat exotic parasitic diseases when Canadians are travelling. And so there’s absolutely no excuse.
…
Dr Bridle: My own physician, honestly, criticised me, saying I’m giving out this messaging, talking about patients of hers that died.
I respectfully pointed out that I’m also on the front lines and I’m trying to deal on a daily basis with family members of people who have died from the Covid-19 vaccines. And so I’m seeing these horrible deaths as well on the other side.
And the difference to me is, had they not rejected these effective early treatment strategies, at least half of the patients that died in their practices would be alive today.
So I’m sorry, I don’t have a lot of patience for these physicians. And I’m just going to point out one thing as well that’s important for the general public to know. I usually don’t ever, ever criticise anybody’s expertise in their particular area of work. But we’re in unique times. And so I think the public needs to be aware.
We put a lot of faith in our physicians. The average family physician knows almost nothing about immunology and certainly about vaccines. People forget vaccinology is a sub-discipline of immunology. The average family physician in Canada gets between five and ten lectures in their first year on immunology, of which a tiny fraction of that is going to be dealing with vaccines.
They are not immunologists, they are not vaccinologists and they’re ignoring the vaccinologist here in Canada. They are promoting the vaccines and the reality is they don’t understand the science, and they do not have a deep enough understanding, on average, to understand the science and to understand the debates that are going on.
Interviewer: If information has been deliberately suppressed about these treatments, that would be a crime, seeing that people are dying?
Dr Bridle: Yes. Yes.
Interviewer: Doctor, will we see a national debate, like with top scientists on this subject ever in Canada? Like their side for pro, and our side? Do you think we’ll ever see that in Canada?
Dr Bridle: I and my colleagues have been open to that for months, many months. I would love to see it done. The public should be insisting on it, like the old-fashioned good scientific debates.
I would argue scientists can talk about the science. We can put aside our emotions. We can talk about it respectfully. I would argue what I would like to see happen is have a team – if it’s too big, it gets a little unwieldy – so I’d say between three and five scientists and/or physicians who want to debate both aspects of the Covid-19 policies and then have it moderated by somebody. And it has to be very public.
And that’s what I keep pointing out to the public. People who keep arguing that those of us who have legitimate concerns are wrong, providing misinformation, that we’re lying and that we don’t know what we’re talking about, have to keep asking themselves why then are many of us standing there in the arena like the gladiators of old? We’re standing in the arena, we’re waiting. None of their champions will step forward. None. We’ve tried it.
So we tried this in Ontario with (their Premier) Doug Ford. It was attempted in Alberta. It was attempted in Saskatchewan, where their premiers were also invited to have these open scientific discussions.
Nobody so far – and I know I’ve issued invitations. Every single person who attacks me I invite them to come on and talk publicly. I was even being interviewed once and live in the chat somebody was trolling the whole talk.
It was interesting. The person who was interviewing me stopped and invited the person to come on. They logged off pretty quickly. And that’s what we’re seeing over and over again. It’s remarkable.
I’ve asked thousands of people, not one person, not even one, in all these months has been willing to talk openly, publicly about the science and medicine underlying Covid-19. It’s exceptionally frustrating.
Even my own colleagues at the university who have attacked me, there are 83 of them, about that number, who signed a letter to the public saying that I was lying to the public, providing misinformation.
Do you realise some of these individuals were just down the hallway from me, in the same hallway, just a few doors down? None, not one of them, not one of those people was ever willing to talk to me on the phone, in a Zoom meeting or come to my office – and I have an open door policy and I invited many of them to do so – not one person.
And then, even after they signed that off, saying that I was giving misinformation, I had written a scientific document to outline the science that I’d been talking about, because this was birthed from a short interview that I gave on the radio, where I expressed concerns that the messenger RNA vaccines might be linked to the heart inflammation that was occurring in young people. And then I was attacked on that.
I wrote a document with all the science because, of course, I was not able to deliver all of my scientific arguments in that short interview.
People argued to the public, ‘You realise he only told you half the story.’ And I laugh about that because I say, ‘Well, you’re giving me far too much credit because I didn’t even get to deliver one per cent of the story.’
They’re trying to mean that I didn’t get to the other side of the story. No, there was so much more science, so many more mechanisms of action, of potential harm of these things.
And after I wrote that document, this letter was written by my colleagues. You realise that of those who I was able to get a straight answer from, none of them had even read my science. None of them had even bothered to see what my arguments were for my position. This is what’s happening right now, and the censorship is extreme it’s really unbelievable.
Interviewer: Some of your colleagues, they also said that it doesn’t alter DNA. Would you care to comment on that?
Dr Bridle: Yeah. So when it comes to the DNA, there isn’t sufficient data to … my personal opinion is that it’s not substantially altering the DNA.
All I can tell you is it was thought that human cells did not have a type of protein that’s needed to convert the messenger RNA in the vaccine into DNA. It turns out we do actually have these types of proteins present. So it’s theoretically possible.
Personally, I would think that it’s probably not a substantial issue, but theoretically possible. So as this is theoretically possible, I would argue as a scientist that it would be worthwhile investigating that – doing the research just to alleviate our concerns, people’s concerns, about that.
That’s the thing, people ask these questions and as you see that there’s theoretical possibilities for these happening, that used to be the scientific basis for then conducting the research and definitively answering people’s questions. So many of the questions that you have, I can’t definitively answer because we’ve lost this whole concept of conducting research to address the tough questions.
Interviewer: What I find interesting with what you’re saying is what I’m seeing, very clearly, is you’re confronting a talking point, not a science. And let me illustrate what I mean by that.
You ask a doctor about all this and what’s their answer if you really push them? ‘Well, we’re following the advice of x, y, z and they’re following the science that we trusted?’ Right? You go to the level above them, same thing. You go to the level above them, same thing.
Dr Bridle: We’ve tried, as scientists …
Interviewer: I understand that. You guys will talk to science because you’re working with it. The other side is purposely convoluting science from a talking point.
Dr Bridle: Yes.
Interviewer: I honestly wonder if they have a science. My wife and I survived …
Dr Bridle: Well, at this point I can tell you, as a scientist – that’s why I’m willing to debate anybody on it – they don’t have the science on their side. That’s very clear. And in fact, you no longer need to understand the science, you just need to understand the contradictions that are coming.
Because, this is the thing, the reason why people like Dr Palmer and myself can stand up and talk off the cuff without any script here is because we’re speaking the truth. We’re speaking based on our knowledge, and we don’t have to keep track of a story when we’re speaking the truth.
We don’t have to make sure that what we’re saying today matches what we said at last week’s rally or the one before that. But the public health narrative has become so discombobulated now that they’re constantly contradicting themselves.
And there’s so many examples that I could give you. But let’s take one, for example. I encourage people now to start taking headlines from the mainstream media from months ago, which had people like myself censored, and line them up side-by-side with headlines that they have today.
‘So a great example is this whole issue of the vaccine mandate and the fact that, you know, what are we telling people right now? If you have one dose of the vaccine, you’re lumped in with the unvaccinated. You’re dangerous, you’re the same as somebody who has been unvaccinated, you’re unprotected and you’re going to kill everybody else, right?
We know from the very get-go, the two-dose regimen was proclaimed to have 95 per cent effectiveness. So, this is the thing, a lot of people who are accepting this current messaging about the ‘one dose doesn’t count’ have forgotten about the one-dose summer.
Remember when Trudeau (the Canadian Prime Minister) was pushing and all we were hearing about was the one-dose summer? So in Canada, the world was watching us in bewilderment and wondering what the basis was for us going from the approved three or four-week interval, depending on whether it was the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, to a four-month interval.
And if you recall, the reason why we could go for the one-dose summer and not worry about getting people two doses is because we were told one dose was 95 per cent effective.
‘A lot of you don’t realise this. If you don’t believe me, you can go on the Health Canada website right now and look. They will have on there that the one dose of the Pfizer vaccine is 95 per cent effective.
So now you have to start asking yourself, using their own messaging: If one dose is 95 per cent effective and two doses is 95 per cent effective, then why are the people with one dose being lumped in with those who are unvaccinated? Why was that OK then, when trying to justify going to a four-month interval, which had no scientific basis?
But now those same people who are sitting with one dose are told, ‘No, no, no. It’s not 95 per cent effective, it’s the equivalent of being unvaccinated altogether.’
This is where we’re getting to. So on that basis alone, that’s what I’m saying is, it’s become blatantly obvious. You don’t have to understand the science. They are not following the science, they’re contradicting themselves over and over and over again.
…
DR BYRAM BRIDLE: There’s been a remarkable number of young people who have died for no apparent reason. And in many cases, we can’t confirm their vaccination status. But I’ve been particularly concerned about the number of varsity athletes at our universities who have been dying completely unexpectedly and suddenly. And the only thing that I can tell you – and I don’t know whether they were or were not vaccinated – well, actually, I can’t tell you when they were vaccinated. What I can tell you is that no varsity athlete in Ontario can participate in a varsity team without being vaccinated. They weren’t allowed exemptions.
INTERVIEWER: My point on that example was simply this: if you’re following the science, that first statement that that head doc released would never be said.
BRIDLE: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: You would say, ‘We don’t know.’
BRIDLE: Exactly. That’s exactly, yes.
INTERVIEWER: But that’s the way they’re reporting it tells you . . .
BRIDLE: As you heard from me, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: . . . their complete agenda.
BRIDLE: As you heard from me. I won’t say definitively that it’s because of the vaccine. I’m a scientist, I’m open to that possibility that there is some other underlying condition with any individual case. But there’s too many of these to not investigate properly. Absolutely.
INTERVIEWER: And if anybody’s paying attention, that whole approach should really put your guard up.
BRIDLE: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: You should realise there’s something drastically wrong with public health officials who would talk with that kind of language.
BRIDLE: Yeah, well, look at the language. So, another contradiction is . . . so, for example, at my university, our president hosted the local Medical Officer of Health who declared the whole reason why the vaccine mandate made so much sense is that there is essentially no such thing as a breakthrough infection. And that’s still being claimed by many, although their ability to claim that continues to be eroded. But that was the idea, and they cited like a 0.003 per cent breakthrough infection rate, so essentially zero, meaning you’re completely protected.
And when our President was asked about that recently, she actually created quite a furore on our campus, because she completely contradicted the messaging that they had just given. Well, the reason why, of course, they still have to mask and physically distance is because, hey, you know, it’s well known that people who are vaccinated can still get infected, still get Covid and transmit the virus. And in fact, there’s very good immunological reasons why people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus and the scientific data that is emerging is showing that they can transmit at least as efficiently as somebody who has no immunity whatsoever.
And the reason is, is because when we put the vaccine in the shoulder, we’re tricking our bodies into thinking that it’s what we call systemic infection. And so, the problem is that is where your body wants to protect the most is the blood, because if a pathogen gets into the blood it can disseminate throughout the whole body. And so we got all these antibodies in the blood.
So, the one place in our respiratory system where these antibodies will spill over into, if you’re trying to protect against a systemic infection, are the lower airways. And that’s because you just think about gas exchange. There’s barely a physical barrier between the alveolar space and the blood vessels to allow that ready air exchange, which also means it’s very easy for a pathogen that gets deep into the lungs – so that would be what we call pneumonia – for that pathogen to get into the blood. So we put antibodies in the lower airways if we think we have a systemic infection. But we aren’t getting proper antibody protection in the upper airways like we would if we were naturally infected. So these people that have the vaccine, yeah, remember all the antibody titers they’re showing, that’s in the blood. But these people, on average, are quite poorly protected in their upper airways. And it’s not the virus that’s deep down the alveoli that gets transmitted to other people, because of the dead airspace when we exhale, it’s the viral particles that are in the upper airways. So that’s why the vaccinated can spread this just as efficiently as somebody who’s completely unprotected.
And so these vaccines, on that basis, because they don’t come close to conferring sterilising immunity, they don’t properly protect the upper respiratory tract. They only confer about four and a half months of immunity. It’s absolutely 100 per cent impossible to achieve the goal of herd immunity with these vaccines. 100 per cent impossible. For these companies it would be such a quick and easy and cheap study to do, and they could definitively rule this problem in or out. And whenever there’s such easy to do research to be done and they won’t do it, that for me is always a red flag.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, exactly why isn’t that happening?
DR BYRAM BRIDLE: Yes. All I can say is, again, we’re not being provided with accurate data. So it’s hard to answer any of these questions to do with, you know, what’s actually due to COVID, what’s due to other things? And how we’re defining these things is crazy. Like I said, we’re not even defining somebody who’s vaccinated until they’re 14 days out from their second dose. The second dose is serving as a booster, right? And so typically, the immune response would be peaking actually about five to ten days after receiving that. So we’re actually taking people who would theoretically be at the absolute peak of a vaccine-induced immunity, and we’re calling them not fully vaccinated, for example.
And so for example, if people were to die in that time frame, even if it was linked to the vaccine, it’d be linked as somebody who was not fully vaccinated having died. So it’s very difficult with all these kind of nuances that are going on. All I can say really is what we do know is that the problem of Covid, the number of cases has been dramatically overestimated, but to an unknown degree, because of the way we’ve misused the PCR test. And we know that the problems associate with the vaccines have been grossly underestimated, but to an unknown degree.
And so until we have accurate numbers for these – which I can’t see we’re going to have at any time soon unless we completely change the way we’re monitoring these things – we’re not going to be able to come up with accurate assessments as scientists of . . . you know, with these kind of questions. But the issue was at the beginning, or the problem was, people kept arguing that this could have between a 1 and 10 per cent fatality rate, infection fatality rate, meaning for every 100 people who were infected with the virus between 1 and 10 would die. But the thing is, as we never knew what the proper denominator was, how many people were getting infected – we still don’t know, because again, like I mentioned, there’s many of us . . . well, in fact, just right here, there was an individual who has gone now, but showed me his test result. He had had a positive Covid test result almost a year and a half ago, when he showed me his antibody response for the spike protein, it’s higher, way higher than the average person who’s been vaccinated at the peak, at the peak of their antibody response. So there’s somebody who clearly acquired immunity naturally. And we’re not tracking these people at all, because in many cases where people have actually been infected they didn’t even know it and have natural immunity.
We’re running this clinical trial where we’re evaluating natural acquisition of immunity. We’re finding a huge number of people who never realised that they were sick have clear evidence of immunity against this virus. So that means that for those individuals they were infected but this was not a pathogen for them and they recovered without, you know, without developing disease. And so we have no idea – and we now know this is much more common than we accepted at the beginning – but we have no idea just how common, right?
So the point is, we still don’t know the full extent of the denominator. But when it was updated in February, what was published at that time was that the infection fatality rate was 0.15 – so not even 1 per cent like we were being told, but 0.15 per cent – and that was for the entire population. And if you took out those who were 70 years and older, it dropped to 0.05 per cent. So, just to put that into perspective, a bad flu season would be at 0.1 per cent.
So again, if you go out of the high risk, the highest risk demographic, those over 70. And we’re actually dealing with a problem that is less fatal than the annual flu. And especially when we start talking about children – we’ve had one infant in BC who died. We’re, you’re talking about taking these vaccines down now, in the next phase, to five-year-olds and then all the way down to six months of age. And when you start getting down to under ten years of age, virtually nobody has died. And when you look at the flu, it’s far more dangerous for these individuals.
And if you want to look at another one, respiratory syncytial virus, which we live with – far more dangerous to young people. And this is where even pregnant or breastfeeding women are being told, encouraged, to get vaccinated to protect their infants. It’s crazy. It’s all based on this . . . it’s easy to make people feel that infants are very fragile, very fragile human beings, which in some ways they are. But when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, this was presented today: the younger you are, the fewer receptors you express in your respiratory system that this virus can use to latch on to your cells. And in fact, when you get down into the infants, they’re quite resistant to infection with this virus. And that’s why we haven’t been seeing deaths among that population.
So it’s very unusual, with any other infectious disease you always have two peaks: the frail elderly and the very young. And it’s very clear why, because the frail elderly . . . well, as we get older, our immunological function declines so we in essence become somewhat immunosuppressed as we get older. And then on the very young side, our immune systems don’t fully mature until we’re 16 years old. Still, some components of the immune system maturing as young teenagers. So we’re dealing with less mature immune systems, immune systems that aren’t fully mature as we get into the youngest population. So that’s why we usually see these peaks in the oldest and the youngest. But SARS-CoV-2 is not like that, it’s very unusual in the sense that, yes, infants are relatively immature in terms of their immunological functioning, but they’re physically very resistant to infection with this virus.
So this is all crazy to be encouraging breastfeeding women to be vaccinated, to protect their infants. Their infants are already naturally protected. And as we go down and we start vaccinating six-month-old breastfeeding infants, what we’re doing is we’re bypassing the natural protection they have from the virus when we inject these vaccines, where we start getting their body to manufacture the spike protein. And again, I can’t emphasise enough. The spike protein is not the inert target that we were hoping it would be for the immune system. It has all kinds of biological activities in our bodies that can potentially be harmful.
And what people have to understand is that the receptor that that spike protein can bind to in our children and infants is expressed at the same concentration internally as in adults. And that’s because that protein doesn’t exist to serve as a receptor for the virus, it actually exists to serve basic physiological processes such as regulating blood pressure and so on. So, they’re naturally protected from infection from SARS-CoV-2, but when we put the vaccines in, they’re at least as susceptible as adults to all the harms.
BMJ notes we will NEVER have the evidence, vaccine makers structured the trials to avoid proving an all-cause mortality benefit since they know it’s negative
If you are are still in doubt as to whether we are being hoodwinked on the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines, this Editorial in the BMJ today should remove all doubt. We are being hoodwinked. And it’s not going to get better. Ever. So we are stuck with a vaccine that is being mandated where most people have no fu*&($#ing clue as to whether it works or not.
Those of us who know how to interpret the safety data from VAERS and other similar systems know full well what is going on, but when we try to warn people, we are being marginalized as spreaders of misinformation. Who’s lying? Well, suffice it to say that no self-proclaimed VAERS expert will agree to a debate.
Note: For those of you upset about the headline, sure, they can argue that the COVID vaccines saved people from dying from COVID. I concede that. But the all-cause mortality (ACM) rate (which nobody is looking at), has always been far greater than the COVID lives saved.
In case you were beginning to feel like your world was becoming a cliché dystopian movie script, don’t feel bad. It appears that at least some of the villains agree with you.
Not happy with unsatisfying stories, scripts and narratives that shape our disorganized zeitgeist, Klaus Schwab and other creepy dungeon masters trying to manage the post-covid world have called for a ‘New Narrative’ to shape our 21st century and beyond. Schwab described the World Economic Forum’s Great Narrative Initiative announced on November 11 as a “collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.”
It is no question that this new project is bone chilling, but can it work? Does it have any basis in reality or is the oligarchical high priesthood stage managing this shit show intoxicated by their own self-induced narratives and completely incapable of seeing the seeds of self-destruction they have created for themselves?
Let’s examine this question in a bit of detail.
As far back as we look, recorded history demonstrates myths and stories that shape each culture’s subjective experience trying to make sense of the objective world and the many tenuous challenges that are tossed into our path.
Deep Structure Narratives
An ice age comes to an end and sea levels rise hundreds of feet drowning millions while wiping out coastal cities. As a consequence, flood myths appear across various cultures of the world.
Fires from the sky reflect terrible asteroids striking the earth wrecking havoc on ecosystems and perhaps even inducing volcanism and vast weather anomalies. As a consequence, more myths are created featuring heroes, villains, angels and Gods punishing sinners and rewarding those with virtue.
Throughout history, countless stories have been created by shamans, priests, and poets which have attempted to infuse meaning onto traumatic events induced by either nature or geopolitical strategies. Some classical stories may have even exposed geopolitical evils under the safer terrain of fiction when literal truths were impossible. One instance of this latter case can be found in the Olympian Gods of Homer’s stories who were in all likelihood representative of actual oligarchical families who manipulated never ending wars and exploited the folly and corruption of their chosen chess pieces on the Great Game of ancient Greece.
These stories are a part of the human condition and for the most part, perfectly natural.
However, in our supposedly enlightened secular era, these forms of myths are discarded as the foolish practices of simpler unscientific times.
Science has taught us to believe in logic. Not faith in God or the health of our immaterial souls.
The medieval myths of sea monsters and flat earths beyond which unsuspecting voyagers would meet a terrible fate were superseded for a new set of narratives during the enlightenment period. During this period, pure logic and empiricism were placed upon the new altars where religion once stood and we were told to worship new godheads by the names such as Kant, Locke, Hegel, Bacon and Newton. When Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead, this was the current of thinkers that supposedly killed him.
The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore referred to those suffering from this disease of metastasized logic saying: “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.”
When the foundation of enlightenment logic began to break down under the pressure of reality over a century ago, new narratives taking the form of the Standard Model quantum mechanics began teaching modern man that what appears to be living is in truth, just made up of non living atoms and chemical interactions… and what appears to be ordered form operating with purpose is merely the stochastic motion of atoms devoid of purpose, beauty or even objective truth. We were told that all of this was held together only by a mix of luck (statistical probability) and four fundamental forces created 13.7 billion years ago. All behavior in human life or in nature thus explained away by Darwinian models of survival of the fittest and random mutations. The rise of modern monstrosities like eugenics, and neo-Malthusianism were the sick children of these ghoulish assumptions.
The more we probe behind the impressive veneer of these popular narratives, the more we discover that myths spun by modern day high priests on behalf of political interests have not only continued into our present age, but have continuously adopted new costumes to adapt to our changing world. Those brilliant minds whose discoveries actually overturned old narratives by leaping beyond the domains of inductive/deductive thinking are carefully obscured under mathematical formulas devoid of the spirit and personality of these exceptional individuals (1).
The Political Consequences of False Macro-Narratives
Some political expressions of today’s secular narratives were seen as neocons trotted out in front of cameras broadcasting the message that the two hijacked planes which destroyed three towers on 9/11 was orchestrated by angry Muslims in caves who hated our freedom.
We were told that covid-19 arose from a badly cooked mammal that kissed a bat requiring a total abolition of our constitutional freedoms.
We were told that the protest on January 6, 2021 in Washington D.C. was an insurrection worse than anything the U.S. had seen since the Civil War when 500,000 Americans slaughtered each other for four years.
We are continuously told that Russia has ambitions to undermine democratic elections across the entire free world while China is aiming to subvert western values and impose a global communist government through its imperial New Silk Road.
I could obviously go on for quite some time here, but needless to say, political myth making is an ugly part of life. But while each lie certainly does grave damage, our susceptibility to falling for these falsities is in no way disconnected from our acceptance of those higher meta narratives embedded in those scientific myths that shape HOW our minds move. Every high priest knows that controlling HOW people think is always infinitely more powerful than controlling WHAT they think about any particular thing. This is how the neocon rot grew in the U.S.A over a few generations leading us to today’s multifaceted systemic breakdown crisis.
One of the fathers of the mutant that became neoconservatism was a narrative-building master named Leo Strauss.
Leo Strauss’ Neocon Monstrosity
Working closely with Fabian Society and Frankfurt School agents throughout his career as a teacher in Columbia, New School and the University of Chicago, Strauss preached a perverse interpretation of Plato’s Republic to tens of thousands of devoted students spread across several decades.
Among the highest lessons contained in Strauss’s teachings (at least for a select few among his students) was the idea of the Noble Lie developed by Plato in Book 3 of the Republic. Strauss taught his students that this Noble Lie was the greatest weapon and rightful tool of anyone who found themselves in a position of power to rule over the weak at any time in history.
In true Nietzschean fashion, the narrow definition of “power” as the subordination of the weak to the strong was the only definition permitted by Strauss who taught his students that while Plato preached love of wisdom to the masses, he secretly held a different teaching for those elite among his Academy who would control political power. To these elite few, he gave the name ‘gentlemen’ and ‘Guardians’.
Strauss taught that Plato’s Guardians would control the shadows cast on the cave wall which the plebs shackled to their senses, would believe were the only reality possible. The mandate of these perverse neo-Platonists was to live the ideal not of Socrates, but rather of Thrasymachus whose immoral doctrine Socrates annihilated in the first book of the Republic. Those young neocons learning from their master were taught that the true ‘secret Socrates’ believed, like Thrasymachus, or Callicles (student of Gorgias), was that the highest purpose in life is to attain power, satisfy our lusts and control the shadows in the cave.
While I adore Plato, I would never deny that he was a myth maker.
The stories showcased in his dialogues from the Timaeus, Critias, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Meno, Laws, Phaedo, Apology, Gorgias, Republic etc… have shaped the minds of some of the greatest historic figures across 2400 years of world history. Renaissance figures like St. Augustine, Ibn Sina, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln, Moses Mendelsohn, Pushkin, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless other brilliant souls had their wits sharpened on the stories and lessons contained in Plato’s writings.
But was Plato truly the tyrannical double-speaker portrayed by Strauss and his followers who preached morality for the weak and vice for those who would control the shadows?
To be a true Guardian in Plato’s world meant more than simply getting out of the cave to see with the light of the sun (symbolic for creative reason) and then lord over the masses.
While Nietzscheans like Strauss stop reading at this moment and choose to dominate the slaves using a higher power of thinking reserved only for a select few of the golden collar elite… Plato made it very clear in his Republic and other writings, that the TRUE philosopher (and implicitly true guardian) was obliged to return back into the cave at risk of his or her life in order to help liberate their fellow captives.
Narratives for Freedom or Slavery?
“Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice”
-Paul Robeson, 1937
The question can now be posed: how do we know which narratives are designed to enslave us, which empower us, and which are benign (like a child’s belief in the tooth fairy or the toy-bearing fat guy who trades gifts for good behavior)?
Since each person’s internal universe interfaces with the external reality through the filter of both logic, senses, imagination, and free will, is it possible that some narratives can uplift and inspire us to be more than we are in the face of impossible odds? Can certain stories sharpen our wisdom and free us from the shackles of sense perception as we are taught to see ever more through the eye of reason and a developed imagination?
When George Washington led a small force of farmers against the world’s largest mercenary force in 1776, was it purely logic that guided them in this statistically impossible fight, or were stories of Christ’s passion animating this seeming irrational drive for freedom? When Syria was beset with foreign sponsored Jihadists and teetered on the brink of the abyss, did stories of the Prophet Mohammed animate their hearts to do the impossible when an easier albeit more slavish road awaited their surrender?
Certainly, history has proven time and again, that a certain type of poetic story can empower us to leap beyond our limitations and gain insights into the deeper truths of the human condition and universal reality itself. Even Shakespeare’s “fictional” stories offer the sensitive soul great universal lessons into humanity and real politic which has served great statesmen for centuries.
A Last Look at Today’s Oligarchical Narrative Builders
Although we can affirm with certainty that some narratives can be good and others evil, is it possible that the oligarchs managing today’s Great Narrative project wish humanity no harm?
Perhaps Lynn Forrester de Rothschild is completely genuine when she launched the Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Prince Charles, Mark Carney and a handful of Davos Billionaires representing tens of trillions of dollars of capital in 2014. Helping to transform capitalism into a green, eco friendly, more inclusive system that treats everyone equally is a good thing isn’t it?
When this Council merged with the Vatican in December 2020, Lynn de Rothschild described the event as “a historic new partnership between some of the world’s largest investment and business leaders and the Vatican… joining moral and market imperatives to reform capitalism into a powerful force for the good of humanity.”
This council is even led by “a core group of world leaders” who even call themselves “Guardians” following the title used by Plato 2400 years ago.
These guardians include the CEOs of powerful organizations as State Street, Bank of America, Johnson and Johnson, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Merck, British Petroleum, and the Rothschild banking houses. Not exactly the most morally advanced coterie of political heavy weights one could imagine, but still maybe the evil that they have been a part for decades has all been arranged for the sake of a higher good that only the elite may be permitted to know…
Unfortunately for the Davos Guardians, the reality of the New Great Narrative is a world devoid of those very principles that humanity requires to survive and thrive within our creative, reasonable universe. Wielding the power to control a shadow land of dumbed down slaves within a cave might seem impressive for some, but when juxtaposed with the active, creative multipolar paradigm now rising to become a global force for scientific and technological progress, controlling cave dwellers becomes little more than a bleak and pitiful ambition.
And like any parasite which can do naught but kill the very host it needs to suckle on for its very survival, those Davos guardians are likely to meet the same fate as that encountered by Edgar Poe’s impotent, nihilistic oligarch Roderick Usher as his castle crumbled into an abyss.
Note
(1) Some exemplary names of these exceptional individuals include Leonardo Da Vinci, Luca Pacioli, Pierre Fermat, Christian Huygens, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Max Planck, and Dimitry Mendeleyev (to name but a few).
Whitney Webb returns to the program to discuss her recent work on the “green” transformation of the global financial system. From NACs to GFANZ, Webb and Corbett break down the latest attempt to monopolize the world’s natural resources and how this financial scam represents the next step along the path to the Great Reset, Agenda 2030 and the 4th Industrial Revolution.
An insurrectional situation has emerged in Guadeloupe. Roads are closed, buildings set on fire, and clashes between demonstrators and security forces are raging. Many Guadeloupeans have decided that, against dictatorship, violence is a legitimate option. It is a violence directed against the so-called ‘health pass’ and against the mandatory vaccination of careworkers imposed upon this overseas territory by Metropolitan France.
In September, France had made it compulsory for all health workers, home carers, transport staff, medical students, firefighters, and all related personnel to have the Covid vaccine. This was accompanied with the requisitioning of all Ivermectin stocks in order to force the deeply unpopular vaccine upon the people of Guadeloupe (as well as neighbouring Martinique). According to French government figures, only 33% of Guadeloupeans are vaccinated (versus 75% in Metropolitan France), with a simiar figure in Martinique.
Tensions rose in October with the arrest of two demonstrators, one of them being Claudine Maraton, the general secretary of the UTS-UGTG (the trade union section of the General Workers Union of Guadeloupe). The UGTG had taken a leading position in the political opposition to the vaccine mandate, a position that the president of the Guadeloupe region also came to echo. As the conflict sharpened, the governing En Marche party’s MP for Guadeloupe began todescribe the situation on the island as “quasi-insurrectional”, with opposition to the Covid regulations showing a “weakening state authority” on the island.
The Minister of Health, Olivier Véran seemed to recognise the fragility of France’s position, and decided to push back the deadline for the vaccination mandate to November 15th. But if November 15th marked the end of the ‘health emergency’ measures in most of the overseas territories, in Guadeloupe, it marked the start of an indefinite general strike, launched by a collective of trade union and citizen organisations against the mandatory injection of careworkers and the pass sanitaire. At a press conference at the Palais de la Mutualité in Pointe-à-Pitre, Maïté Hubert M’Toumo, the new General Secretary of the UGTG had already sounded the battle-cry: “From Monday, war is declared!”
“From September, the French state decided to renew hostilities […] all doctors and nurses can receive a notice prohibiting them from working. This means that from Monday, the French state which spoke of war has just declared war on us. The situation is catastrophic. Thousands of workers are affected, whom they want to shamelessly fire, without delay of challenge. We can’t accept that. It’s not possible. The Guadeloupeans are in danger and from the moment war is declared, we are obliged to respond. From Monday, war is declared, there will be nothing that will work, we must organise ourselves so that nothing functions: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday… every day! We have no choice, we must come together, all social and professional classes, all Guadeloupeans. From Monday there will be two camps: the camp of the French state which has decided to defile us and defile all who oppose their plans; and the other side that wants to protect the country in order to live in freedom. The French president said that vaccines are freedom, so freedom is conditioned on a vaccine, a vaccine that is not under control, a vaccine that generates more and more serious side effects. Is this freedom? It’s not possible. So from Monday, war is declared!”
Maïté Hubert M’Toumo
The Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (SDIS), also affected by the mandatory vaccination order, had come to assume a leading role in the protests. As the strike began on the 15th, fights broke out between firefighters and the elite gendarmes, When the gendarmes charged one group, thefirefighters responded with jets of water. Other incidents between strikers and police triggered a wave of arrests as the Pointe-à-Pitre prosecutor’s office complained of “repeated threats to a law enforcement officer.” Maïté Hubert M’Toumo denounced the arrests in a public statement, calling them “a serious attack on a fundamental freedom which is the right to strike” and rallying “all members and activists to strengthen the picket lines”. Even as the government sent in hundreds of police and gendarme reinforcements, the strike hardened on the following weekend, with rioting breaking out in Pointe-à-Pitre and across the Island. Several gas stations were closed by protesters, and many motorists raided those that remained open, fearing the strike would impact fuel supplies. As the demonstrations and clashes escalated, shops and pharmacies were torched and looted, while schools, post offices and courts were shut down. Reports surfaced that protestors had broken into an arms depot in the island’s capital, Pointe-à-Pitre, and stolen rifles. Col Jean Pierre, of the gendarmerie at Pointe-à-Pitre, said some of the protesters had fired upon security forces. “We just don’t know how far this will still go,” the city’s mayor, Harry Durimel, told FranceInfo radio.
This weekend, Paris authorities began sending elite police and counterterrorism officers with armoured vehicles to Guadeloupe in a bid to stamp out the uprising. The police reinforcements set about dismantling protesters’ road barricades while the island’s authorities imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew until Tuesday morning. By Monday the police had arrested at least 38 people charged with looting and smashing shops.
Over the weekend, the main UGTG trade union called for continued protests. Meanwhile, Martinique has followed its neighbour’s example and gone on general strike against the measures dictated by Paris.
— United Together Against Chronic Endocrine Ailments (@UAilments) November 26, 2021
The cultural rejection
Guadeloupe – like Martinique – has a deep-rooted history of anti-vaccine sentiment linked to distrust of the Paris government. Political scientist Pamela Obertan, who is helping to organise anti-mandate protests explains that Guadeloupeans “are descendants of slaves, and for us, control over our bodies is really important… The government wants to impose on us a medical experiment. We are still medical experiments.”
For decades, agriculture workers in Guadeloupe and Martinique were exposed to an endocrine-disrupting, carcinogenic pesticide called chlordecone. Around 95% of the population in these two islands is known to register chlordecone in their blood. Studies have linkedthe pesticide to prostate cancer, and, significantly, Guadeloupe and Martinique have the highest prostate cancer rates in the world. Yet nothing has been done about real health emergencies such as this one. And this goes a long way to explain the distrust towards the metropolis that is felt in the French Antilles. It is this context that has empowered vaccination-refusal, which is now turning into a nationalist and patriotic cause.
Accompanying this development, there is a longstanding usage and trust in folk medicine. As Guadeloupe’s University Hospital director lamented, the vaccine refusniks are “pushing Guadeloupian pharmacology.” From the start of the aggressive push for ”Covid” vaccination, sales of Virapic, a syrup based on the local jackass bitters herb, skyrocketed. This tropical shrub (Neurolaena lobata) is traditionally used for treatment of fever and flu symptoms,wounds and infections, and a variety of parasitic ailments such as malaria, ringworm, and amoebiasis. The plant has found a local champion in pharmacist Henry Joseph, co-founder of the laboratory Phytobokaz. Joseph, claims to have proven the plant’s efficacy against emerging RNA viruses and thus its relevance to ‘Covid-19′.
Whatever comes of such research, the island’s distrust in vaccines is unlikely to abate any time soon. The metropolitan government’s refusal to negotiate, together with the local suppression of data on vaccine deaths will continue to antagonise an already rebellious populace. According to lawyer Maître Ellen Bessis, the University Hospital Center (CHU) of Guadeloupe never declares vaccination status amongst any hospitalisations. This, she says allows them to register vaccinated deaths in Guadeloupe’s hospitals as unvaccinated, which is what she says is happening. Bessis’ claim is based on the extensive testimony of firefighters who, in Guadeloupe, share the job of transporting emergency cases to hospital. As the civil liberties organisation Rester Libre !says, “If this information were verified, it would be an absolute scandal: a statistical lie designed to hide the dangerousness of the vaccine. It would create a crisis of absolute confidence with the public authorities, and, therefore, all the figures, all the data, could be called into question.”
It is difficult to imagine how the execrable Macron government could possibly backtrack in this conflict, or provide any concessions for Guadeloupe. For to do so would undermine the mandate policy in metropolitan France. Yet the rebellion of the island population can only deepen, as Ellen Bessis affirms.
“We wonder what is going on in the mind of the government!” says Jocelyn Zou, of the fire department’s union. “We Guadeloupeans have a notion of freedom. But they impose compulsory vaccination on us when alternative solutions exist. We have every motivation to fight to the end!”
France to send special forces to Guadeloupe after looting, arson:
Hundreds of articles published in peer reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor quality papers—sometimes consisting of complete gibberish– into established journals.
In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest edit issues that they then filled with sham papers. (1)
Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal.
Fraudsters have been caught several times in recent years while trying to use special issues as a way to get low quality papers published in legitimate journals—but the number of affected paper seems to be increasing. In some cases the evidence points to an organized network that tries to infiltrate scientific journals with the objective of easily publishing manuscripts from pseudo-scientists or less productive researchers who want to appear in respectable journals. (1)
This leads to the topic of predatory journals which are becoming a serious nuisance in science. They actively masquerade as legitimate journals, often with similar layouts and names—although they very likely have essentially zero threshold for publication, despite typically claiming to operate with rigorous peer review processes. These predatory journals are undermining the credibility of scientific publishing because the research they publish appears to be largely unvetted. (2)
Predatory Journal Examples
Big Birds
Assistant zoology professor Daniel Baldassarre at SUNY Oswego published a paper in a supposedly scientific journal, The Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews (Iris Publishing), with the following abstract:
“Many people wonder: what’s the deal with birds? This is a common query. Birds are pretty weird. I mean, they have feathers. Most other animals don’t have feathers. To investigate this issue, I looked at some birds. I looked at a woodpecker, a parrot, and a penguin. They were all pretty weird! In conclusion, we may never know the deal with birds, but further study is warranted.” The paper’s acknowledgments: “We thank Big Bird from Sesame Street for comments on the manuscript. Several trained monkeys transcribed videos.” (3)
Iris Publishing is part of a much larger problem of journals that publish low-quality research for exorbitant fees. These journals will often spam scientists with requests for submissions or asking them to be on their editorial boards.
Ottawa Citizen Experience
In the three years since the Ottawa Citizen started covering fake science publishers, the constant question had been: how bad can they get?
Then, the Indian company OMICS (a giant company, 700 online journals, in Hyderabad) set a new low. It published meaningless garbage submitted as a test by the Ottawa Citizen the previous fall, then got exposed for it, but then once again accepted the same garbage all over again. Verbatim. (4)
Jerry Seinfeld’s Disease
John McCool submitted a paper on Jerry Seinfeld’s imaginary disease, ‘uromycitsis poisoning’. It was accepted for publication even though a simple Google search for ‘uromycitisis’ returns thousands of references to Seinfeld. (5)
Fake Editor-In-Chief
Polish researchers created a profile of a fictitious scientist named Anna O. Szust and applied on her behalf to the editorial boards of 360 journals. Oszust is the Polish word for ‘a fraud.’ They gave her fake scientific degrees and credited her with spoof book chapters. In many cases, they received a positive response within days of application and often within hours. Four titles immediately appointed Szust editor-in-chief. Forty predatory and eight directory of open access journals appointed her as an editor. (6)
Concluding Comments
The number of predatory journals has increased at an alarming rate. By 2015, more than half a million papers had been published in predatory journals, and at the end of 2016, the number of predatory journals approached about 10,000. Predatory publishing is becoming an organized industry. As of June 2020, there were 13,000.
Gary Lewis reports, “In a nutshell, predatory journals are contaminating the scientific literature by providing ostensibly rigorous reports of studies that in reality are often far from acceptable. Work published in such journals is occasionally used in serious public debates, such as climate change. They present a serious credibility for science.” (2)
Scientists are trying to make others aware of these journals. Daniel Baldassarre hopes that papers like his will spread awareness of the existence of these predatory journals and what they look lie, and hopefully get people to stop publishing in them. (3)
References
1. Holly Else, “Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published,,” nature.com, November, 20212.
2. Gary Lewis, “I got a hoax paper published about how politicians wipe their butts,” realclearscience.com, July 23, 2018
3. Ryan F. Mandelbaum, “Sketchy science journal publishes article titled – What’s the deal with birds?” gizmodo.com, April 17, 2020
4. Tom Spears, “Fake science publisher accepts (again) a paper already exposed as a ‘pile of dung’”, ottawacitizen.com, June 1, 2017
5. John H. McCool, “Opinion: why I published in a predatory journal,” The Scientist, April 6, 2017
6. Piotr Sorokowski et al, “Predatory journals recruit fake editor,” Nature, 543, 481-483 (2017)
On November 15, 2021, the Russian Ministry of Defense carried out the successful destruction of the discontinued and decommissioned national spacecraft named “Tselina-D”, which was put into orbit back in 1982. The head of the Russian Defense Ministry, Sergei Shoigu, confirmed that the Russian Aerospace Forces had indeed successfully destroyed this satellite with pinpoint accuracy.
The fragments formed after knocking down this spacecraft do not pose any threat to either orbital stations or other satellites, or generally speaking to the space activities of any state. This is well known to all space powers that have fairly effective national technical means of verification and control of outer space, including the USA.
After the destruction of the named satellite, its fragments moved along trajectories outside the orbits of other operating space vehicles, have been under constant observation and monitoring from the Russian side and are included in the main catalogue of the space activities.
Prediction of any possible dangerous situations calculated after each orbital movement over the Earth has been made in connection with the accompanied debris and newly discovered fragments after the destruction of the “Tselina-D” satellite with operating spacecraft and the International Space Station or ISS “Mir”. The Russian Ministry of Defense reported that the ISS orbit is 40-60 km below the fragments of the destroyed “Tselina-D” satellite and there is no threat to this station. According to the results of the calculation of any possible threats, there are no approaches to it in the near future.
Earlier, Anthony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, said that Russia’s test of an anti-satellite system used in this case jeopardized the safety of space research.
Moscow corrected his untenable judgment. “This event was carried out in strict accordance with international law, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and was not directed against anyone,” the Russian Foreign Ministry official spokesperson said. Russian Foreign Ministry also repeated that the fragments formed as a result of the test do not pose a threat and do not interfere with the functioning of orbital stations, spacecraft, as well as the entire space activities in general.
Washington has clearly forgotten that Russia is not the first country to hold such actions. The United States, China, and India have the capabilities to destroy spacecraft in space, having previously successfully tested their own anti-satellite assets versus their own satellites.
Precedents of destruction
They were announced by the named states at the relevant time.
In January 2007, the PRC conducted a test of a ground-based anti-missile system, during which the old Chinese meteorological satellite “Fengyun” was destroyed. This test led to the formation of a large amount of space debris. It should be noted that on November 10 of this year, the ISS orbit was corrected in order to avoid the wreckage of this Chinese satellite.
In February 2008, with the interceptor missile of the United States sea-based missile defense system “Standard-3”, the American side destroyed its “USA-193” reconnaissance satellite that had lost control at an altitude of about 247 km. The launch of the interceptor missile was carried out from the Hawaiian Islands area from the U.S. Navy cruiser Lake Erie, equipped with the Aegis combat information and control system.
In March 2019, India also successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon. The defeat of the “Microsat” satellite was carried out by the upgraded “Pdv” interceptor.
Earlier, the USSR has called, and now Russia has been calling for space powers for decades to legally consolidate at the international level a ban on the militarization of outer space by preventing an arms race in it and refusing to deploy any strike weapons in it.
In 1977-1978, the Soviet Union held official negotiations with the United States on anti-satellite systems. But as soon as the American delegation heard about Moscow’s desire to identify potential types of hostile activities in space that should be banned, including similar systems in question, it initiatively interrupted them after the fourth round of talks and decided not to participate in such a negotiation process anymore.
A fundamentally important clarification: since that time, Washington has not held and does not intend to hold such negotiations with any state in the world.
Moreover, the updated draft of an international treaty on the prevention of the deployment of weapons in outer space proposed by Moscow and Beijing is regularly blocked by Washington at the UN and at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Back in 2004, Russia unilaterally committed itself not to be the first to deploy weapons in space, and in 2005, a similar commitment was made by the Collective Security Treaty Organization member states involving a number of nations of the former USSR.
In total, since the beginning of the space age, which began with the launch of the first artificial satellite called “Sputnik” by the Soviet Union in October 1957, Moscow has jointly or independently put forward about 20 different initiatives in the international arena to prevent an arms race in outer space.
Alas, all of them were successfully blocked by the United States and its NATO partners. Anthony Blinken seems to have forgotten about it.
Washington also ignores the recognition of the American Center for Strategic and International Studies, located in the American capital, whose report in April 2018 recognized that “the United States remains a leader in the use of space for military purposes.”
Against this background, Russia is implementing a purposeful and adequate policy to strengthen the country’s defense capability, including in the space sphere, taking into account, among other things, many additional circumstances.
X-37B with specific tasks
What are they? Russia takes into account that the United States is taking concrete practical steps to steadily increase its combat strike space potential.
Work is actively underway to create a space-based missile defense network, develop and operate systems with ground-based, sea-based and air-based interceptor missiles, electronic warfare, directed energy weapons, including testing an unmanned reusable space shuttle X-37B, which has a spacious cargo compartment on board. It is claimed that such a platform is capable of carrying a payload of up to 900 kg.
It is currently carrying out its sixth long-duration orbital flight. His space brother, who made his fifth flight in space in 2017-2019, continuously flew in spacet for 780 days.
Officially, the United States claims that this unmanned spacecraft performs the tasks of running-in technologies of reusable space platforms. At the same time, initially, when the X-37B was first launched in 2010, it was indicated that its main function would be the delivery of certain “cargo” into orbit. Only it was not explained: what kind of cargo? However, all these messages are just a legend to cover up military tasks that this device has been performed in space.
On the basis of the existing military-strategic space doctrines, specific tasks are prescribed for the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon.
Among them are made as conducting operations in space, from space and through it to contain conflicts, and in case of failure of deterrence – to defeat any aggressor, as well as ensuring the protection and preservation of vital interests of the United States together with allies and partners. It is obvious that in order to carry out such operations, the Pentagon will need special reusable platforms in space, which indicates a promising process of its further militarization by the Pentagon without any restrictions.
According to some military experts, the plausible purpose of this device is to test technologies for a future space interception, which allows inspecting alien space objects and, if necessary, disabling them with anti-satellite systems with various functions, including with ‘hit-to-kill’ kinetic characteristics.
This is confirmed by the statement of the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force, Barbara Barrett, who in May 2020 told reporters that during the current sixth X-37B space mission, a number of experiments will be conducted to test the possibility of converting solar energy into radio frequency microwave radiation, which later can be transmitted to Earth in the form of electricity. It is very questionable explanation.
So, what has this device actually been doing and continues to do in space for so many years? Obviously, since this space platform was created by the Boeing Corporation with direct participation in its financing and development by the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, and it is operated by the U.S. Air Force, the tasks of the X-37B are by no means related to the peaceful exploration of outer space.
Some experts believe that such devices can be used to deliver missile defense and anti-satellite systems. Yes, it is not excluded.
It is noteworthy that the operation of this American spacecraft for a long time has caused concern not only on the part of Russia and China, but also on the part of some U.S. allies in NATO regarding its possible role as a space weapon and a platform for delivering space strike weapons, including nuclear warheads to be housed in X-37B cargo compartment.
A special experiment
The X-37B can perform up to ten secret tasks.
One of them fulfilled recently should be mentioned in particular.
It is noteworthy that in the twenties of October 2021, the separation of a small spacecraft at high speed from the fuselage of this “shuttle”, which does not have the ability to conduct radar surveillance, was recorded from the X-37B that is currently moving in space, which indicates that the Pentagon is testing a new type of space-based weapon. It is obvious that this kind of activity of the United States is not compatible with the stated goals of the peaceful use of outer space.
The separation of the named space object was preceded by the maneuvering of the X-37 the day before.
From October 21 to 22, the separated space vehicle was located at a distance of less than 200 meters from the X-37B, which subsequently performed a maneuver to move away from the separated new spacecraft.
Based on the results of processing objective information, it was found that the spacecraft was stabilized, and no elements were found on its body characterizing the presence of antennas that could provide the possibility of conducting radar surveillance. At the same time, the facts of the approach of the separated new spacecraft with other space objects or the performance of orbital maneuvers have not been revealed.
Thus, according to the Russian side, the United States conducted an experiment to separate a small spacecraft with high speed from the X-37B, which indicates the testing of a new type of space-based weapon.
Such actions of the American side are assessed in Moscow as a threat to strategic stability and are incompatible with the stated goals of the peaceful use of outer space. Moreover, Washington intends to use outer space as an area for the potential deployment of space-to-space weapons against various objects in orbit, as well as in the form of space-to-surface weapons in the form of space-based strike weapons that can be used to attack from space various ground-based, air-air-based and sea-based targets located on the planet.
Current U.S. space policy
Since 1957, all American presidents, without exception, have been actively engaged in the militarization and weaponization of outer space. In recent years, the most notable breakthrough in this direction has been made by the ex-Republican President Donald Trump.
On March 23, 2018, he approved the updated National Space Strategy. On June 18 of the same year, he gave a specific instruction to the Pentagon to create a Space Force as a full-fledged sixth brunch of the country’s Armed Forces, while emphasizing the undesirability to have Russia and China as leading nations in space. On December 9, 2020, the White House additionally announced a new National Space Policy. On December 20, 2019, the beginning of the creation of the U.S. Space Force was announced.
In these military-strategic doctrines, three fundamental views of the American military-political leadership on the use of outer space for military purposes have been publicly announced.
First, it was proclaimed that the United States intended to single-handedly dominate in space.
Secondly, it was stated that they should maintain “peace from a position of strength” in outer space.
Thirdly, it was stated that space in Washington’s views is becoming a potential arena for military operations.
These military-strategic doctrines, according to Washington are as reactions to the “growing threat” in space stemming from Russia and China.
The Pentagon will develop four priority areas of space activities to achieve the stated goals while countering the identified threats, potentials and challenges: (1) ensuring integrated military dominance in space; (2) the integration of military space power into national, joint and combined combat operations; (3) the formation of a strategic environment in the interests of the United States, as well as (4) the development of cooperation in outer space with allies, partners, the military-industrial complex and other ministries and departments of the United States.
The space strategy and policy of the current American administration led by President Joseph Biden is not much different from the space line followed by President Donald Trump.
After Joseph Biden took office as president in January this year, the United States continued to develop several types of space strike weapons, including in accordance with twelve programs for the use of outer space for military purposes, when six of them provide for the creation of various types of such systems, and on the basis of six others that will control for the orbital space grouping on the ground.
The Pentagon’s intelligence and information assets in space continue to be updated in full, as well as the financing of military space programs. For the fiscal year 2021, allocations for these purposes are set at $15.5 billion.
Some pro-Western Russian experts are in favor of developing some compromise proposals with the U.S. side on military space issues on the grounds that the United States is not ready to negotiate on military space issues. Such ideas pose a threat to the national security of the Russian Federation, if accepted.
And here’s why.
Various actions carried out so far by Washington on the militarization and weaponization of outer space indicate that the current American military and political leadership does not consider space to be the universal heritage of mankind, for the regulation of activities in which, obviously, agreed international legal norms and rules of responsible behavior are to be adopted.
The United States has long seen a diametrically opposite perspective – the transformation of outer space into a zone of active hostilities.
In fact, the United States has already created an enlarged Space Force with ambitious offensive tasks.
At the same time, such force relies on the active-offensive doctrine of deterring any potential adversaries in outer space, borrowed from the American strategy of nuclear deterrence, which provides for the first preventive and preemptive nuclear strike.
If in 2012 Washington announced the creation of the “Chicago triad” – a combined combat mechanism in the form of a mix of nuclear missiles, anti-missile components and conventional strike weapons, then it is quite obvious that the United States is purposefully creating a multi-component “quattro” strike assets, when another essential military tool is added to the “Chicago triad” – that is space strike weapons.
It is obvious that during official consultations with the United States on the issues of strengthening strategic stability, it is impossible to ignore all factors and described circumstances that are related to outer space. It is necessary to avoid a selective, that is, a separate approach to solving the multifaceted problem of arms control – while downsizing one type of weapons, but giving a boost to the development of other types of arms, that, at the initiative of the American side, is still in a deadlocked position.
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
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