Lew Rockwell

1. The Drip, Governmental Lies and US Armed Forces Recruitment

In 1803 Captain Meriweather Lewis of the US Army led a platoon sized army unit up the Missouri River, over the Rocky Mountains and into the Columbia River basin. As preparation he had gotten some training in therapeutics with the father of American medicine, Dr.Benjamin Rush. Lewis treated gonorrhea and boils on the  east side of the Rocky Mountains and added syphilis on the west side where the Indian maidens had been more exposed to the British..

One and two thirds centuries later I was pulled out of a residency and turned into a flight surgeon (as happened to Dr Ron Paul.) I was sent to Vietnam where I treated gonorrhea and little else. Day after day I faced seven to ten twenty year old draftees from my 1000 man Air Cavalry Squadron complaining of "the drip." Most had gonorrhea, commonly called "clap." This has an incubation period of two or three days and so the youngsters were still post coital. They were euphoric, puffed up and often quite proud of their peccadillo. A small minority had chlamydia, "the strain," which has an incubation period of 5 to 7 days. These fellows were more troubled as the connection of the urethral discharge with sex was less clear. We needed enormous doses of penicillin for the clap.

The clap consumed most of the medical aid station's resources. (Heroin addiction also became a medical issue, maybe a topic for later.) The command of a nearby battalion was clapped out after the New Year's eve party hosted by some USO donut dollies. I treated one 19 year old 18 times in six months; he could get drunk and clap for 5 dollars. Clap was rampant in all of the Vietnam American armed forces. It had been there since the beginning of that conflict.

At Vietnam wide conferences of flight surgeons we talked about the huge size of the problem as well as speculated about  possible penicillin resistance (It was.) against gonorrhea. My own treatment records showed that I treated at least 20% of the soldiers in my units for gonorrhea every month. Some medics had side practices in which they treated their buddies off the books in return for favors. I estimated that our incidence of gonorrhea, annualized, approached 300 percent.

The army was a foreign country for me and I treated non-medical affairs as so much froufrou. I signed anything. About 3 months into my tour I actually looked at a report that was to go up to the higher headquarters reporting on our incidence of diseases and medical activities. It said that we had  54 cases of gonorrhea, annualized about 65 percent, when it was actually in the hundreds. I objected to my clerk typist.   "This is fraudulent! I can't sign." The typist calmly bade me to sign and that I'd already perjured myself twice. I signed. And so it went. (Did I mention that I have a long family history of cowardice?)

The next headquarters up and all the subsequent headquarters above them similarly adjusted the numbers to support the lie that our armed forces are highly moral. I looked up the officially reported annual incident of gonorrhea for our war in Vietnam and it was around 26%. Similar numbers were reported for all of our wars in the 20th century.

I was going to write this up as illustrating how our government lies to us but Libertarians assume that anyway. Quoting Howard Stern "Who cares?"

But maybe this becomes usable on Memorial Day when we honor our war dead. The armed forces report that they have difficulty recruiting soldiers.

No recruits, no deaths.

It occurred to me that reporting the truth could solve the recruitment problem.

Young Americans, especially men, are physical wrecks, obese, tattooed, lazy and not ambitious. They get that way in part because they see very few real men to imitate, are affronted by aggressive, shrill and domineering young women who outdo them in the nonsense peddled in our schools and they risk being accused of rape even after agreeing to consensual sex. It is a truism that young people are ever less likely to have had sexual intercourse. Young guys have been castrated and the women flaunt testosterone sufficient to make them cocky.

What would happen if these young men  saw advertisements for enlisting in the armed forces emphasizing the likelihood of getting a venereal disease, implying rampant sex while in service? "Twenty five percent of our airmen in Turkiye get the clap every month." "During your tour in Thailand you can earn $1500 per month, get laid and drunk for $20 AND there's free treatment at your friendly TMC."  Even more chilling for the American Karens. "Rent a temporary wife in Korea. Maybe she'll give you kids, a great homelife and become permanent."

There would certainly be objections from the blue noses, but most of them sound crazy already and can be canceled. Public Health officials of covid fame and advocates  of sexual re identification surgery, can't object on the basis that they want to make people healthy. The armed forces promote sexual ambiguity, and the service members already acquire these infections in horrendous numbers, so there is no increased medical or disability costs.

The target audience, namely incels and depressed male college students would perk up, start seeing women more realistically and, I'd guess, line up at recruitment stations, maybe not to get the sex but rather to join a rebellion against the oppressive. It might be the only example in which telling the truth might advance a governmental goal.

But us Libertarians would be offended.

The post The Drip, Governmental Lies and US Armed Forces Recruitment appeared first on LewRockwell.

2. Are Childhood Vaccines Safe? DTP Vaccine Was Not – and Was Given for Decades!

The Covid vaccine debacle woke up many people, myself included. Many of us were shocked to see a novel, unproven treatment promoted aggressively with false promises given to us and mandates imposed on young and healthy persons. Those mRNA formulations ended up not working and caused thousands of deaths, despite repeated assurances of safety and effectiveness given by charlatans pretending to "represent science."

Most people also instinctively know that flu vaccines are medical quackery and do not work. That's why less than half of Americans choose to get an influenza vaccine.

Source

Still, many believe "other childhood vaccines" are safe and effective. They are administered to little children, after all! Who would want to hurt them?

Let's look at the DTP (Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis) vaccine, which many of you and I received in childhood. (I asked my mother, and she said I received it and reacted badly).

While no longer available in the United States, the DTP vaccine is still given in 40 countries and is quite dangerous.

In 2021, Aaron Siri wrote a letter to the UN asking them to stop using it. The letter shows evidence of the DTP vaccine increasing child mortality by TEN TIMES.

He describes an attempt by Dr. Aaby, a famous researcher generally supportive of vaccines, to look into Guinea-Bissau's vaccination program, which ended up being an incidental randomized study.

Source

The study is here.

Depending on their birth date, children were allocated to receive the DTP vaccine either early or late (3 or 5 months). That is a randomized experiment! Scientists could compare the mortality of children vaccinated with DTP with that of unvaccinated kids.

They found that instead of reducing mortality, supposedly the whole point of vaccines, the DTP vaccine increased it by ten times. The vaccinated infants 3-5 months old died much more often than the unvaccinated ones!

Shocked by the unexpected and disappointing (for him as a vaccine researcher) findings of his 2017 study, Dr. Aaby undertook another study in 2018 to see if his results were a fluke.

They weren't:

Source

Despite Aaron Siri informing the UN about the dangers of the DTP vaccine, UNICEF ignored the evidence and continues to support the DTP vaccine.

Read the Whole Article

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3. Divisive Societal Collectivism Is a Primary Driver of Total Control Over the People

"But we must realize that even this tendency to restrict the exploitation of class privileges is a fairly common ingredient of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not simply amoral. It is the morality of the closed society—of the group, or of the tribe; it is not individual selfishness, but it is collective selfishness."

~ Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies – Volume One: The Spell of Plato

The might of the State relies exclusively on the destruction of the individual, and participation, acceptance, allowance, and support of State as god, by the collective members of 'society,' who have succumbed to the State's efforts to divide them into a multitude of groups at odds with every other group. The focus of this purposeful mass antagonism is to build differing aggressive personalities in order to set the stage for unrestrained division and chaos. This intentional distractive methodology pits one against another, in the age old strategy of divide and conquer. It has worked against the people and their freedom for most all of history, but has taken on new meaning in this immoral, consumption-based, irresponsible, apathetic, and postmodern culture, now consumed by a cold technological existence.

Without this gross division of society, the individual and individuals en masse, would reign supreme, and the ruling class and government would become politically impotent considering its endless drive toward power and control over large numbers of non-thinking collectives. This revelation is evident, so the solution necessary to lessen or destroy those who seek and practice authoritarian dominance, seems obvious and also simple, but due to the weaknesses and flaws of man, it is not as simple it appears.

The history of all politics, government, and rule, is one of unbridled authority, theft, perversion, organized crime, power, control, and mass murder. It is not, and never has been, any endeavor to 'serve'  the people, but only to serve the State or personal and business desires. Those who choose politics, have voluntarily chosen the path of rule over others, which in effect, is an admission of power seeking, oppression, and dominance. To adhere with the political belief system, to accept voluntarily a ruling master class due to the fraud of voting; is little more than intentionally giving up your freedom in favor of tyrannical rule and serfdom.

Consider the deranged divisive nature of this population today. It is one of black against white, men against women, democrat against republican, the religious against the secular, confused and unhinged 'transgenders' against everybody, the reality of biology against stupidity,  neo-Marxists against children and all white males, tradition against postmodernism, and race against race. It is actually even much worse than this idiocy; it is all against all in this environment of hate, with the State (governments and rulers) waging war on all of humanity.

This is not the natural progression of all mankind as I see it, even though the human species is flawed almost beyond comprehension. I think this because humanity has not always been consumed by this gross indifference, apathy, ignorance, and herd mentality.  The idea of right over wrong, (good over evil) considering most general populations, was much more evident in past times, and that attitude was held in higher regard overall. But in modern times, the long-term conditioning of people by means of propaganda, all meant to indoctrinate minds in order to create a condition of hiding from the truth and turning away from compassion, has reached a critical mass.

So-called 'civilizations' have waged brutal war against each other since the very beginning, seeking more power and control at every turn, but the scope of that aggression is now universal throughout most States and their subjects. This is now evident worldwide. Was this due only to government's and ruling classes' efforts to control all, or are the people themselves at fault? Did the State initiate this plot, and did the people eventually cave to power, and accept it is normal? Obviously, the fault lies with both. The slaughter of innocents during most of our existence could be viewed as the founding element of our downfall, creating a lack of empathy for others, but what caused such aggression and murder amongst a single species if it is not the natural state of man? In my view, and as always, it comes down to evil against good, but is that determination based on the age old belief of 'God' against 'Satan,' or has this conclusion been accepted due to a purposely-structured narrative by those who seek to control the collective masses?  If so, would that explain the progression of the non-caring blindness that is seemingly universal today?

We will not be able to answer such a contentious and philosophically complicated question in full here of course, but one has to wonder why so many have turned away from logic, reason, compassion, cooperation, and common sense, in favor of the false belief that everything under the sun has to be accepted as normal. The only way for this utter madness to have become normalized, is for people to have abandoned the idea of the individual and individual sovereignty, and accepted societal collectivism, which can only bring about mass ignorance and division. Collectivism is a cancer of the mind, and can only result in a meaningless existence.

One extreme example of absurd collective mentality, is the recent bogus' phenomenon' called 'transgenderism. Depending on which particular survey is accepted, and accepting any is questionable, it is stated that approximately 1 million to 1.5 million people supposedly 'identify' as 'transgender' in the U.S. Considering that this population is 335 million people, that means that about .4% have 'identified' themselves as 'transgenders. Worldwide numbers would indicate between .1% and .6% identify as transgender.' That is of course a vast minority, even if these figures are not grossly exaggerated. But if an alien space traveler from another planet was to suddenly  land in the U.S., he would think immediately that most every human was transgender, and was biologically ignorant. The airwaves, all major media, the entirety of government, large and even smaller corporations, most all institutions, especially government schools, and nearly every commercial ad, sporting event, television program,  and movie, among almost all other venues, are inundated with 'transgender' characters and 'transgenderism' in general. This is of course ludicrous.

Children are being bombarded with lies, and are being targeted by government and private institutions, in order to force the heinous notion that they should all respect 'transgender' identities, and should accept that they may all be confused about their own gender. Depraved 'trans' programs meant to confuse and indoctrinate children are rampant, and completely immoral, and the obvious rub here, and the most telling element of this horrible deception, is that most all who 'identify' as 'transgender,' are young children to young adults. Those over 50 who are confused, make up only about 0.3% of the total. This should be no surprise at all, as children are targeted in this evil campaign only because they are innocent and vulnerable to lies, propaganda, and indoctrination.

This is a mass effort by the State to corrupt and destroy this and future generations of children, so that future adults will be unable to function as normal human beings. This will lead to depopulation of course, a desired goal of the globalist rulers, but will also lead to a completely dumbed down and manipulated future adult population, making them susceptible to total control. Using and abusing children in order to gain power over future generations is deplorable and beyond any evil, but is now being accepted as normal by many in this country. How can such an atrocity as this be allowed to happen in any country made up of decent and moral people? The answer to this question, is that it cannot be allowed by any moral society, so what does that say about the sorry state of morality in what is referred to as 'America?'

Societal collectivism in the midst of this divisive atmosphere, whether fomented by the State or not, and accepted by the illiterate herd; is the epitome of unintelligible stupidity, and can only lead to self-destruction. The only viable solution to change this course that has consumed this country, is to resurrect the importance of the individual in society, re-establish freedom by eliminating all power of the State, and abandon any idea that a collective mass of followers who expect someone else to solve all their problems for them, can be successful in any way.

This requires personal responsibility, and that cannot be achieved by any group, nor can any simple solution crafted by another, release you from your own slavery. Each individual is responsible for his own lot in life, so either stand up and negate all tyranny, or understand that you have no right to freedom.

"The socialist submerging of the individual under the collective's prerogative is a perverse and putrid vision for humanity."

~ A.E. Samaan

Reference Link:

Transgender numbers

(Note that the information on this subject is conjectural at best, and likely much overstated, and exhibit extreme bias in favor of the State narrative. Regardless, the numbers and ages are telling of the plot to destroy children.)

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4. Lighting a Candle to Rainbow Zeus

A month of the Sacred Heart—has been taken over by perversion. The love that dares not speak its name screams all month long in our faces. You cannot get away. Rainbows everywhere. You are tempted to stay inside, lower the shades, like the three days of darkness, praying for the demons to pass by.

You can count on seeing their anti-Christian hate rainbow everywhere. There will be a rainbow sticker on the ATM at the bank. You want cash? You get the rainbow, too.

Rent a car for a summer drive, and the person behind the desk will have a rainbow lanyard for their name badge.

Your local grocery store will have a colossal rainbow display right inside, even before you get to the peaches. They will sell you rainbow balloons for Junior's birthday party.

You work in a corporate milieu? You can't get away. Human resources will ensure you rainbow-remember every single day. They'll serve rainbow cake in the lunchroom, with more sashaying than usual.

Your kids in government schools, and even in some Catholic schools, will chalk rainbows on the asphalt in the playground. They will learn about such rainbow heroes like pedophile Harvey Milk.

Are you in the military? You will snap a sharp one to the rainbow flag. If you don't, kiss your promotion goodbye.

Rainbow nights at the ballpark, even in little league. You will eat rainbow Double Stuffs, drag rainbow corn chips through rainbow salsa, pour rainbow milk over rainbow Cheerios. Dare we hope that corporate co-optation will drain the gay rainbow of meaning? We can only hope.

You have to hand it to the rainbows. They make up no more than 1.6 percent of the adult population. That's a mere four million people who "identify" as rainbow, about the size of Los Angeles or the state of Oklahoma. There are more Methodists. Of course, they want you to think they make up 10 percent of the total population, roughly 33 million. That was always a lie ginned up in the criminal work of wicked Alfred Kinsey, high priest of the Rainbow Zeus.

So successful has been that lie that youngsters now believe that 25 percent—83 million—of the population are rainbow. Of course, calling yourself non-binary gets you cost-free into the Rainbow Club, and it is a safe harbor that comes with all sorts of societal huzzahs. Even if the numbers lie, hats off to the rainbows for their achievements. They have made us all if not worship Rainbow Zeus, at least acknowledge him or grit your teeth as you look away.

"Rainbow Zeus" was coined by my friend Professor Matthew Mehan, Associate Dean of the exalted Hillsdale College's D.C. campus. Rainbow Zeus is a false god, an angry god who demands our attention if not our worship. This is why so many people think they have to bend the knee.

You have to light the candle to get along, not get fired. You must wear the rainbow lanyard, salute the rainbow flag, even if you utterly reject the gay rainbow; even if you understand that the LGBTQ+ rainbow is a giant middle finger to the Triune God. It is. The rainbow is His. It was His promise that He would not destroy mankind again. The LGBTQ+s say, "Oh yeah, try this!"

Read the Whole Article

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5. Trial by Ordeal

"Let's put you in the dunking chair and we'll figure out what nature says about your status in the next world, and then we'll make a decision about what to do with your still-living body." — Matt Taibbi

I'm sure you're asking yourself: what's up with the company CEOs like Anheuser-Busch's Brendan Whitworth, Target's Brian Cornell, and North Face's Todd Spaletto? Did they green-light the disastrous Pride Month marketing campaigns based on transgender activism that are suddenly wrecking their businesses? Or do these things just happen down the chain-of-command while the top dogs are otherwise occupied, knocking golf balls around or reviewing their stock options' strike prices?

I'll tell you what you're not seeing and hearing: the red-faced shrieking in the board rooms as boycotts kill sales and directors face the wrath of the share-holders. It was one thing when Bud Light hitched trans "influencer" Dylan Mulvaney to the beer wagon in place of the traditional Clydesdale horses. After all, every state has a drinking age, though it's pretty astounding that anyone at Anheuser-Busch thought "Ms." Mulvaney's cringy Instagram antics would sell beer to grown men moving appliances and fixing pot-holes.

It's another thing, in the case of Target, to aim sexually-loaded gear to little children, for instance a line of T-shirts that proclaim "Satan Respects Pronouns" made by one Erik Carnell's Abprellen company out of London. "Mr." Carnell expounded on that idea on his company's website (now taken down):

Satanists don't actually believe in Satan, he is merely used as a symbol of passion, pride, and liberty. He means to you what you need him to mean. So, for me, Satan is hope, compassion, equality, and love. So, naturally, Satan respects pronouns. He loves all LGBT+ people. I went with a variation of Baphomet for this design, a deity who themself is a mixture of genders, beings, ideas, and existences."

Would it surprise you to learn that children well beneath the age of puberty are not inclined to think about sex at all? In a well-ordered society that recognizes children as different from adults, they don't. And if something sexual comes to their attention, they are generally perplexed by it. Unless they're born into an era when adults are busy erasing boundaries, guard-rails, and cultural inhibitions, in which case I must imagine that young children exposed to, say, pornography in a chaotic household find it traumatically sinister. So, why the gleeful celebration about sexualizing children now?

I'll tell you why: because we are living in a very badly-ordered society these days, a society in which anything goes and nothing matters, which is a poor principle for civilization. It's the same principle that has people shitting all over the sidewalks of San Francisco, looting Walgreens stores in broad daylight, pushing ineffective and unsafe vaccines (and lying about it), and arresting people for thought crimes. It's a degenerate society. Morally bankrupt. Wicked.

You might ask, how did it get that way? The concise answer is that a broken business model for daily life and a collapsing economy have so disordered millions of minds that values are seen as having no value. The scaffold for truth, beauty, honor, dignity, courage, prudence, generosity, etc., folded some time ago, in slow-motion, so we didn't notice.

The keepers of our culture have replaced it with a tacky system of ritual virtue-signaling fakery that they don't really believe in, that persists simply because the moral vacuum it stands for provokes such unbearable anxiety. The main lesson of the recent Durham Report — missed by even the most punctilious observers — is that our country does not want to fix itself, indeed the whole broken apparatus of fixing it is in the hands of the people who broke it.

This epic negligence leaves the doors wide open for the broad range of lower-order criminal mischief we're seeing expressed all around us. Now I will venture into shadowland.  There is a rumor floating around the Internet that this seemingly coordinated campaign to sexualize children and initiate them into marginal behaviors was started to soften up the public for forthcoming shocking revelations contained in the much-whispered-about Jeffrey Epstein archive of videos that show eminent international figures caught in compromising sexual situations that include sexual acts with children.

I wouldn't commit to saying there's anything to that, but there have been an awful lot of signs and portents pointing in that direction, and so I also wouldn't dismiss it altogether. There can be little doubt that the videos exist, or did exist — we know that Epstein's various mansions were rigged to the eaves with cameras, and that he was an "asset" of more than one nation's intel service trafficking in blackmail — and I'd expect that there are at least a few copies of the videos out there, just like there are many copies of Hunter Biden's laptop hard-drive out there.

There's something definitely programmatic about the way the drag queens were rolled out into the kiddie korners the past year. It doesn't feel organic, shall we say, but rather directed, like a sinister grand opera. And the effort to enlist and initiate schoolchildren into a psychodrama of hyperbolic sexual confusion looks absolutely orchestrated.

What we might be seeing is the convergence of a world-beating political scandal with an economy-killing financial crisis that will destroy the entire post-WW2 armature of money and credit. That event would usher in a period of appalling turbulence in our everyday life, severing supply chains, killing businesses, and disturbing every imaginable social arrangement as well as public order. If that comes to pass, and it's looking likely, then that will be the last we hear about personal pronouns and trans influencers for a thousand years.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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6. The Mind Virus of the Affluent Woke Left

Those who belong to the woke Left are held together by overlapping interests and shared passions. Not all wokesters support the same causes and certainly not with equal intensity. Thus, warriors against climate change like Karl Schwab and Bill Gates don't often speak up for the sexual transitioning of children or call for allowing biological males claiming to be women to compete in female sports events. One can likewise read the racialist diatribes of Corey Bush, Ibram X. Kendi, or Al Sharpton without likely running into attacks on fossil fuels or gas stoves. The point is not that these allies never agree on anything. It is that their alliance is looser than some might imagine.

It also seems their collaboration is based mostly on what they loathe rather than what they like. Above all, these collaborators share a chief villain, whom all woke leftists can be counted on to hate, namely, a white male Christian, perhaps living in Marjorie Taylor Greene's postal district and spewing politically incorrect speech, when he's not reading the Bible or driving his gas-guzzling car.

It also seems necessary for all wokesters to have a large, intrusive state and ubiquitous surveillance agencies for keeping opposition in line. Equally useful, from their perspective, is a centralized educational system that requires compulsory attendance, except perhaps for designated victim groups, who may do as they like. We also supposedly need properly indoctrinated public educators to deal with all the "neo-Nazis," or, as the Biden Administration classifies such types, "white nationalist terrorists." While all elements of the woke Left seek to marginalize their shared enemies, some may also be eager to inflict violence on them. And they can do so while the media turn their collective back on the Left's "peaceful protests."

Miranda Devine provides us with a particularly revealing case study of a growing subspecies within this woke genus, the socially radical corporate capitalist. Devine focuses on Daniel Goldman, the usually nattily dressed and unfailingly politically correct representative of New York's 10th Congressional District. According to his critic at the New York Post, Goldman is a "loathsome" example of "'elite privilege,' a blue-eyed son of Sidwell Friends, Stanford and Yale" with "entitlement oozing from every pore."

It is hard for me not to retch as I read Devine's description of "this heir to the Levi Strauss fortune," who has become a smarmy defender of the Russiagate hoax, FBI abuses of power, and the New York City criminal class. When Julio Rosas, a senior writer for Townhall, testified before Congress about Black Lives Matter violence that he had witnessed personally and about which he wrote a book, Goldman pounced on him. Goldman scolded Rosas for stating Antifa was an "organization" and not just an idea, and he accused Rosas of inventing his accounts to discredit the FBI.

Goldman was also featured on TV, lacing into the mother of a black U.S. Army veteran who had been murdered in New York City. This happened after Goldman's pal, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, had released a repeat offender who later committed the murder. According to Goldman, the congressional investigation of Bragg's practice of putting dangerous, violent criminals back on the street without bail was preventing a respected D.A. from doing something much more important, namely prosecuting Trump for a "felony," or whatever Bragg claims Trump did to Stormy Daniels, evidence for which doesn't seem to exist. Like Bragg, Goldman has been an outspoken opponent of imposing bail on those who have been arrested for violent acts.

Read the Whole Article

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7. Operation Stiff Upper Lip… British Minister Rushes to Kiev Following Artyomovsk Debacle

When the NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev is finally defeated, people like Ben Wallace will be answerable to war crimes prosecutions.

Britain's top military minister Ben Wallace was in Kiev this week on a surprise visit – only days after the stunning news of Russian forces finally taking the city of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut).

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the same city being liberated by the Soviet Red Army from the Nazi Wehrmacht and their Ukrainian fascist collaborators.

The shockwaves from the defeat of the NATO-backed Kiev regime are shaking Western capitals, and none more so than in Washington and London, the two most prominent protagonists of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Ben Wallace, like his American counterpart, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, is up to his neck in pushing this dangerous proxy war.

The fall of Artyomovsk comes after nearly nine months of intense and grueling fighting, which is reckoned, conservatively, to have cost up to 30,000 Ukrainian military deaths. The defeat of NATO's well-armed proxy army demolishes the relentless propaganda narrative in the Western media claiming Ukraine's eventual success against Russia.

Wallace has been one of the most gung-ho Western politicians, predicting at the end of last year Ukraine's victory against Russia.

Now, it's a debacle akin to NATO's defeat fiasco in Afghanistan. Questions will be asked: what of all the tens of billions worth of weapons that the West has plowed into Ukraine?

The blowback is going to be torrid for Western posturing about "defending Ukraine for as long as it takes".

Hence, as a diversionary media necessity, we had U.S. President Joe Biden making the U-turn announcement at the weekend that Washington was giving the go-ahead for supplying the American-made F-16 fighter jet to Ukraine. We also then had the daring cross-border raid by NeoNazi militants from Ukraine on Russia's Belgorod region, which appears to have been orchestrated with U.S. support.

And then there is Britain's Minister of Defense [sic] Ben Wallace turning up in Kiev in an "unannounced visit" this week. The haste and impromptu nature of Wallace's "drop-in" speaks of rattled nerves about the doom facing the NATO war plan. In Kiev, the British minister met with his Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksei Reznikov. Reznikov is part of the corrupt cabal around the puppet president Vladimir Zelensky who has been skimming off millions from the NATO weapons pipeline. It can be fairly surmised that the Kiev cabal is this week nervously looking for ratlines to other ships before their present racket finally sinks.

Wallace is a graduate of the Sandhurst war college and a former captain in the British army. He exudes that stereotypical stiff upper limit that the British establishment types are famed for.

The British minister is a hawkish figure who eats doves for breakfast with an unapologetic burp, and he has vociferously endorsed arming Ukraine to the teeth. The purpose of Wallace parachuting into Kiev, so to speak, was to inject some resolve into the NATO-backed regime following the Artyomovsk rout.

Wallace reportedly talked about the Storm Shadow cruise missiles that Britain delivered to Ukraine last week and which have been used to fire on civilian centers in Russia. Russian forces claim to have shot down several of the British munitions. No doubt, the British soldier-politician attempted to bolster the Kiev regime with promises of more "goodies", as Reznikov previously called these missiles.

Also discussed was fast-tracking Ukraine's membership of the NATO alliance. A summit in Vilnius in July is expected to be dominated by that issue. It is unlikely that the Kiev regime will gain admission any time soon given the raging war and corruption in the country. Nevertheless, Wallace's NATO waffling in Kiev this week was intended as a sop to steady the regime. The British minister is tipped to take over the NATO role of Jens Stoltenberg who is due to step down as the alliance's secretary-general in October. The British candidate for the NATO post has certainly displayed impressive belligerence and commitment to Western warmongering against Russia and China. Wallace's words about NATO membership in Kiev this week seem to have been meant as a reassurance at a shaky moment for the regime.

Still, all the same, there is a strong sense that Washington and London's strategic efforts are floundering in Ukraine. Russia is not collapsing from the West's economic warfare and indeed it seems to be faring robustly from soaring trade with China and the rest of the world. On the military front, the breakthrough at Artyomovsk by Russian forces could be a pivotal turn in the 15-month war. The financial and military drain for the United States and its Western allies is unsustainable.

This war should never have happened. It could have been avoided if the U.S., Britain, NATO and the European Union had instead engaged with Russia in the first instance to resolve security concerns through politics and diplomacy. But the West arrogantly refused to engage, and the result was the conflict in Ukraine.

The regime that Washington and London armed to the teeth is showing its true colors of rampant corruption and Nazi terrorism. The bombed-out shell of a city that Artyomovsk currently is was caused by the NATO proxies using civilian centers as military cover in the same fiendish way that they did in the now-liberated Black Sea port city of Mariupol. Zelensky at the G7 summit in Japan last weekend even had the mindlessness to make a comparison with Hiroshima and he blamed Russia for the destruction. It was NATO proxies, Zelensky's foot soldiers, who pulled the city down by turning apartments into garrisons, using civilians as human shields. As Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova quipped in response to Zelensky's disgusting distortion: if Artyomovsk and Hiroshima are comparable, it is because both destructions were authored by Washington.

A year after being taken by Russian forces, Mariupol has returned to peace and prosperity with the construction of whole new blocks of apartments and other civic buildings. Artyomovsk will likewise recover.

When the NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev is finally defeated, people like Ben Wallace will be answerable to war crimes prosecutions. When the judge's gavel slams down, there might just be a quiver in that stiff upper lip.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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8. The Government’s Fraud & Force

The post The Government's Fraud & Force appeared first on LewRockwell.

9. Why Exactly Does the Government Dump Toxic Fluoride Into ¾ of the US Water Supply?

73% of the US population, according to official estimates, has its drinking water fluoridated.

"Water fluoridation" means that the government adds a synthetic form of the potentially toxic chemical fluoride into the water under the guise of Public Health.

The most common synthetic form of fluoride the Public Health authorities use is a particularly dangerous formula called fluorosilicic acid.

Fluorosilicic acid has been shown to damage DNA and induce oxidative stress, per Mutation Research, "at concentrations used in drinking water induced genotoxicity, oxidative stress, and acceleration of bone mineralization."

Fluoride in all forms is a documented neurotoxin, meaning it's toxic to the brain.

MCLG is an acronym that stands for "maximum contaminant level goal." As explained via the EPA, "MCLG is the maximum level of a contaminant in drinking water at which no known or anticipated adverse effect on the health of persons would occur."

Via an integrated literature review on the potential adverse health effects of water fluoridation published in Environmental Health:

"Within the brain, fluoride appears to accumulate in regions responsible for memory and learning… The MCLG for fluoride (4 mg/L)… is clearly not protective of adverse effects on the brain, especially in regard to early-life exposures…

Out of the 18 studies that provided the water-fluoride concentrations, 13 found deficits at levels below the MCLG, with an average elevated level at 2.3 mg/L, the lowest being 0.8 mg/L [4]…. and extend the documentation of cognitive deficits associated with only slightly elevated exposures."

So what that means is that the study founds negative health effects from fluoride in water at levels below what the EPA deems acceptable.

The study's authors, accordingly, plead for increases in the MCGL thresholds the government uses to assess water safety:

"The appearance of prospective studies that offer strong evidence of prenatal neurotoxicity should inspire a revision of water-fluoride regulations. The benchmark results calculated from these new studies, though tentative only at this point, support the notion that the MCLG is much too high.

Depending on the use of uncertainty factors, a protective limit for fluoride in drinking water would likely require that the MCGL be reduced by more than a 10-fold factor, i.e., below the levels currently achieved by fluoridation."

The Public Health authorities are well-apprised of the dangers fluoride poses.

Per the CDC Community Water Fluoridation guidelines, for instance, parents are instructed to make sure their children spit out fluoridated toothpaste.

Yet it offers no similar caution regarding the drinking water statistically likely to contain toxic levels of fluoride, which the children are presumably encouraged to guzzle at will:

"For children aged 2 to 6 years, apply no more than a pea-sized amount of fluoride toothpaste to the brush and supervise their tooth brushing, encouraging the child to spit out the toothpaste rather than swallow it. Until about age 6, children have poor control of their swallowing reflex and frequently swallow most of the toothpaste placed on their brush."

The dangers of water fluoridation are right out in the open. We have shown so far that the CDC acknowledges the threat fluoridated water poses at levels commonly found in the water supply, and there is good evidence that even the arbitrarily established "safe" threshold is unsafe.

No fluoride, even naturally occurring forms, is passed to a baby through the mother's breast milk. It is not a natural chemical that developing humans are meant to ingest, and it's certainly not meant to be dumped by the government into the water supply.

Regardless of the safety or lack thereof of fluoride, it seems to me that, if the government insists on being in the business of water at all, it should be tasked with delivering purified water — as in the molecule H2O minus any added toxic chemicals.

People would then be at liberty to add whatever chemicals they like to suit their taste. Were they so inclined to season their water with fluoride, they could go nuts.

That would not seem to be an unreasonable ask or an extreme policy prescription.

The ultimate questions we're forced to reckon with are:

• Given that the government knows that water fluoridation is dangerous, even in amounts below what it officially recognizes as "safe," why does it continue to fluoridate 73% of the water supply?
• Why is anyone who even entertains questions about fluoride's safety smeared as a "conspiracy theorist" in corporate media?
• Why does the corporate media run grossly misleading fake news headlines like "Science says fluoride in water is good for kids"?

The answers, which you can come to on your own terms, are not pretty.

Reprinted with the author's permission.

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10. Filters in the Age of Information Overload

One of my colleagues has advanced a compelling theory to explain why a palpable madness seems to be gripping our society and more and more people seem to be going off the rails.

So much information is available now we are constantly bombarded with, that it has exceeded the processing capacity of the human mind. That is making a lot of people destabilize inside, and as the information glut increases, this problem will continue to worsen.

Recently I wrote an article describing my thought process on navigating controversial topics with a high degree of ambiguity. It specifically focused on how critical it is to avoid getting attached to any specific interpretation you have of what is occurring. This is both because, due to the ambiguity present, it is challenging to be sure of any interpretation (so becoming attached to a specific one becomes a barrier to seeing the truth) and because it is not healthy for your mind or spirit to covet and treasure some rare idea it has become in possession of. Since this has been a common issue I've observed with the nanotech in vaccines issue, I chose to use it to illustrate the point, but this same thing applies to countless other subjects too.

When I reviewed that article, I realized there was a critical point I forgot to mention—how do we, as human beings, effectively deal with an overwhelming volume of information? This issue is a variant of a common issue meditation schools have dealt with throughout history, and they can provide some insights on both the topic at hand and the practice of medicine in general.

Note: henceforth, I will use the term "subconsciousness." Arguments can also be made that "unconsciousness" is more correct. I thought this over for a while, and I am not ultimately not sure which should be used here.

Focusing on Value

In many environments you are in, a massive amount of data is present that the conscious mind cannot keep track of. However, to a large extent, the subconsciousness does and directs your focus to what in the environment has "value" for your conscious mind to be aware of.

One classic example is the "Cocktail party effect," where you can be in a room where many people are having conversations that blur together. Still, for some reason, you can immediately zero in on the one conversation where your name was mentioned. Most of you have probably experienced this numerous times, and the same principle holds in many other instances as well.

I have seen various explanations put forward to explain why the "Cocktail party effect" occurs, and from all of them, it's clear some part of the brain is evolved to make this possible. One region that has been put forward as being responsible for this is the "reticular activating system." At this point, I don't know if the RAS is the region of the brain ultimately responsible for this effect, but going forward, I will state that it is to help convey the central points of this essay.

The filtering function of the RAS has been hypothesized to have evolved so that early humans (and likely the primates we came from) could rapidly detect sources of food (e.g., berries) and danger (e.g., predators) in their environment. Since so much existed in their environment, and the stakes were high for missing many of them (e.g., a brief delay in spotting a predator could equate to death), the RAS was necessary. There needed to be an effective mechanism to rapidly draw attention to essential things while simultaneously not failing to observe any part of the environment.

We no longer have to deal with those high stakes in modern times, but the RAS persists. In turn, the "value" it seeks are things our culture has habituated us to value, such as an opportunity for money, a product we want, or a potential mate.

In human interactions, recognizing the importance of the RAS is immensely valuable. This is because your words and actions are often far less important than what the other party has been primed to look for. Put differently, if someone's initial impression of you is positive (or they assess you as having value to them), their RAS will filter for things that show value in you. Conversely, if someone's initial impression of you is negative, their RAS will filter for signs you have no value and should be disregarded.

This is why people can repeatedly try to do everything right and make a positive impression on someone, but they are only seen negatively, and regardless of how hard they try, they keep looking worse and worse. Conversely, sometimes when you talk to individuals trapped in clearly abusive relationships (to the point outside observers can tell the abuse is happening), the abused party does not register most of the abuse and cites a couple of semi-decent things the abuser did as proof they are a good person, and sometimes will even try to defend the abuser once outside parties get involved. This might seem hard to believe, but I've seen it numerous times in the ER, and many of my colleagues have also seen it in their respective fields.

Note: the concept I am describing here is often described as "confirmation bias" (where you only see things that conform to your pre-existing beliefs).

Filters Create Your Reality

One point Scott Adams helped bring general public recognition to is that we all hold filters (often arising from subconscious biases). Much of the reality we believe to be true is not because it is the objective reality. Instead, our notion of reality appears because our RAS makes us aware of things in our environment that affirm the reality we filter for. As a result, people come to believe their filtered world is reality because it's what they see around them all day long. Scott Adams, in turn, refers to this phenomenon as two people watching the same film but seeing a completely different movie.

One of the things I hate about the media is how good it is at priming people to have a specific filter and then continually selectively feeding people only information that affirms that filter. I think my dislike of this comes not from the media's behavior but the fact that so many people continuously fall prey to it, even when they are fully aware of it being done to them previously.

Three of the most noteworthy recent examples we have seen of this priming were:

• Trump is Hitler.

• The sky is falling (because of COVID-19).

• The COVID-19 vaccines are 100% safe, 95% effective, and essential for returning to normal.

Although none of these were objectively true, because of how effectively the media primed much of the population's RAS, many were left with a deep conviction these filters were true and that the evidence for it was so overwhelming anyone who could not "see" it was unforgivable. This, in turn, led to something I had not seen before with the American propaganda apparatus—families and long-term friendships were broken apart simply due to people having divergent viewpoints on these issues and not ascribing to the media's narrative.

Note: One of the things I found the most surprising was just how effective this propaganda push was. The best example I can think of is how most medical professionals I met fell for all three. For instance, as James Miller (the honest doc) has highlighted in a recent interview, many doctors and government leaders who directed the COVID-19 response established many of their beliefs on these narratives based on what CNN told them than reviewing the medical evidence themselves.

One of the things that gives me a great deal of joy in life is realizing that something I'd observed many, many times in my life had a quality I'd never recognized before, either because an existing filter removed it or because the complexity was beyond my present ability to grasp. This can hold for both very simple things (e.g., a blade of grass) and fairly complex ones.

For example, as the years went by, I began to gain a greater and greater appreciation for the fact most of human communication has nothing to do with the specific information being conveyed but rather is predominantly about what is going on in the body, mind, and spirit of each participant. Most of this is rarely overtly expressed but heavily influences both what each participant conveys and how they interpret what is said to them.

This is important because (unless you are very good with hypnosis) it is the realm where you have to focus to reach people who will not listen to what you say and the evidence you present. Furthermore, this broader spectrum of what's contained within communication holds for every one of its mediums, including writing. For that reason, the primary thing I aim for here is to address those other areas of communication (e.g., I try to write in a heart-centered manner), as I feel it is more important than the specific information of the subject at hand.

Another example can be seen in the practice of medicine. Since I was young, I loved puzzles, but as time passed, I realized all artificial systems have a predefined limit to the complexity they can reach. Conversely, with human beings, there is an almost unlimited degree of complexity present, and one of the key things that brings me joy in practicing medicine is realizing something is present in the human system I had never recognized before despite having it staring me in the face with every preceding patient.

It's specifically for this reason that I ask colleagues to send me complex patients they can't figure out (provided they are mentally balanced and thus comfortable with navigating the uncertainty of the disease). In this regard, the COVID-19 vaccine disaster has been a remarkable educational experience. This is because I've seen so many things go wrong in the body with these patients I never previously appreciated could go wrong in the first place. So really looking into those problems opened my eyes to a variety of physiologic and subconscious mechanisms in the body I had never registered the importance of addressing before (and in some cases didn't even realize existed in the first place).

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