Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 537
July 20, 2022
India-Russia-Iran: Eurasia’s New Transportation Powerhouses
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
By Matthew Ehert
[Ed: Looks to me like it’s just the West that’s going down. The rest of the world seems to be doing just fine.]
Tectonic shifts continue to rage through the world system with nation-states quickly recognizing that the “great game” as it has been played since the establishment of the Bretton Woods monetary system in the wake of the second World War, is over.
But empires never disappear without a fight, and the Anglo-American one is no exception, overplaying its hand, threatening and bluffing its way, right to the end.
End of an order
It seems no matter how many sanctions the west imposes on Russia, the victims most affected are western civilians. Indeed, the severity of this political blunder is such that the nations of the trans-Atlantic are heading towards the greatest self-induced food and energy crisis in history.
While the representatives of the “liberal rules-based international order” continue on their trajectory to crush all nations that refuse to play by those rules, a much saner paradigm has come to light in recent months that promises to transform the global order entirely.
The multipolar solution
Here we see the alternative security-financial order which has arisen in the form of the Greater Eurasian Partnership. As recently as 30 June at the 10th St Petersburg International Legal Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin described this emerging new multipolar order as:
“A multipolar system of international relations is now being formed. It is an irreversible process; it is happening before our eyes and is objective in nature. The position of Russia and many other countries is that this democratic, more just world order should be built on the basis of mutual respect and trust, and, of course, on the generally accepted principles of international law and the UN Charter.”
Since the inevitable cancellation of western trade with Russia after the Ukraine conflict erupted in February, Putin has increasingly made clear that the strategic re-orientation of Moscow’s economic ties from east to west had to make a dramatically new emphasis on north to south and north to east relations not only for Russia’s survival, but for the survival of all Eurasia.
Among the top strategic focuses of this re-orientation is the long overdue International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
On this game-changing mega-project, Putin said last month during the plenary session of the 25th St Petersburg International Economic Forum:
“To help companies from other countries develop logistical and cooperation ties, we are working to improve transport corridors, increase the capacity of railways, trans-shipment capacity at ports in the Arctic, and in the eastern, southern and other parts of the country, including in the Azov-Black Sea and Caspian basins – they will become the most important section of the North-South Corridor, which will provide stable connectivity with the Middle East and Southern Asia. We expect freight traffic along this route to begin growing steadily in the near future.”
The INSTC’s Phoenix Moment
Until recently, the primary trade route for goods passing from India to Europe has been the maritime shipping corridor passing through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait linking the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, via the highly bottlenecked Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean and onward to Europe via ports and rail/road corridors.
Following this western-dominated route, average transit times take about 40 days to reach ports of Northern Europe or Russia. Geopolitical realities of the western technocratic obsession with global governance have made this NATO-controlled route more than a little unreliable.
Despite being far from complete, goods moving across the INSTC from India to Russia have already finished their journey 14 days sooner then their Suez-bound counterparts while also seeing a whopping 30 percent reduction in total shipping costs.
These figures are expected to fall further as the project progresses. Most importantly, the INSTC would also provide a new basis for international win-win cooperation much more in harmony with the spirit of geo-economics unveiled by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013.
Cooperation not competition
Originally agreed upon by Russia, Iran and India in September 2000, the INSTC only began moving in earnest in 2002 – albeit much more slowly than its architects had hoped.
This 7,200 km multimodal megaproject involves integrating several Eurasian nations directly or indirectly with rail, roads and shipping corridors into a united and tight-knit web of interdependency. Along each artery, opportunities to build energy projects, mining, and high tech special economic zones (SEZs) will abound giving each participating nation the economic power to lift their people out of poverty, increase their stability and their national power to chart their own destinies.
Beyond the founding three nations, the other 10 states who have signed onto this project over the years include Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Syria and even Ukraine (although this last member may not remain on board for long). In recent months, India has officially invited Afghanistan and Uzbekistan to join too.
While western think tanks and geopolitical analysts attempt to frame the INSTC as an opponent to China’s BRI, the reality is that both systems are extremely synergistic on multiple levels.
Unlike the west’s speculation-driven bubble economy, both the BRI and INSTC define economic value and self-interest around improving the productivity and living standards of the real economy. While short term thinking predominates in the myopic London-Wall Street paradigm, the BRI and INSTC investment strategies are driven by long-term thinking and mutual self-interest.
It is no small irony that such policies once animated the best traditions of the west before the rot of unipolar thinking took over and the west lost its moral compass.
Via https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/india-russia-iran-eurasias-new-transportation
Wealthiest Criminal in US Continues to be Immune from Justice
by Pam and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
There are three separate cases in federal court accusing JPMorgan Chase of a culture of fraud.
JPMorgan Chase is the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. It is also one of the largest trading houses on Wall Street. That’s the Faustian bargain the Clinton administration entered into with Wall Street when it repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
[…]
According to data from the FDIC, as of June 30 of last year, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. had 4,925 branches in 44 U.S. states holding $2.01 trillion in deposits. Many of those deposits belong to mom and pop savers who have no idea that the bank has admitted to five criminal felony counts since 2014 and has a rap sheet that is the envy of the Gambino crime family.
[…]
Corruption of this magnitude can’t be swept under the rug forever, however. Today, three cases are playing out simultaneously in federal courts. Observed together, which no member of mainstream media is currently doing, they paint an undeniable picture of a bank which, as Senator Bernie Sanders would say, has adopted fraud as a profitable business model.
Let’s start with the case known as U.S. v. Smith playing out in the federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago. (Case number 1:19-cr-00669.) Federal prosecutors from the Justice Department have charged multiple traders on the precious metals desk of JPMorgan Chase with turning the trading desk into a racketeering enterprise from 2008 to 2016.
For the first time that veterans on Wall Street can remember, the Justice Department is using the RICO statute, typically reserved for members of organized crime, to charge JPMorgan’s traders. (The bank settled its own charges in September 2020 and paid $920 million in fines – a mere pittance in terms of the profits that were likely made on these “tens of thousands” of trades over a period of eight years.)
Making the situation extremely dicey for both the indicted traders and the bank’s reputation, federal prosecutors have called to testify two former precious metals traders on that desk who have pleaded guilty to related charges and are cooperating with prosecutors. (A third cooperating witness is expected to testify.)
One of those cooperating witnesses, John Edmonds, told jurors that “Our job was to do whatever it takes to make money” and “Everyone at the time did it on the desk and it worked.” When asked why he didn’t report the conduct to the compliance officers at the bank, Edmonds responded that “I would have been fired.”
[…]
Another cooperating witness, Corey Flaum, told jurors that the practice of manipulating precious metal prices (spoofing) was done out in the open and was “common practice.”
While the indicted traders’ trial is playing out in Chicago, a trader on the precious metals desk who was not indicted for wrongdoing, Donald Turnbull, has brought charges against JPMorgan Chase in federal court in the Southern District of New York.
Turnbull alleges that the bank trumped up false charges against him as a pretext to terminate him when it was actually terminating him for cooperating with the Department of Justice’s investigation. Turnbull states in the lawsuit that the indicted traders received better benefits when they were released from employment than he did.
[…]
Despite the unprecedented crime history of this bank, the Judge overseeing this case, John Koeltl, has been pretty much giving lawyers from Big Law firm, Morgan Lewis, who are representing JPMorgan Chase, everything they ask for.
For example, Judge Koeltl dismissed Turnbull’s first amended complaint on a motion to dismiss by Morgan Lewis on the basis that he found it “implausible” that the bank would retaliate against Turnbull for cooperating with the Justice Department when the bank itself was cooperating with the Justice Department.
Either the Judge is feigning naivete, engaging in willful blindness, or is actually ignorant of how JPMorgan actually “cooperates” with investigators and prosecutors. For example, JPMorgan Chase was smacked with two felony counts by the Justice Department in 2014 for its role in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
The bank told its regulators in the U.K. that it believed Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme but failed to “cooperate” as it was required to under law by reporting its concerns to U.S. prosecutors and also failed to report red flags about Madoff’s money laundering to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a unit of the U.S. Treasury.
Then there was the 300-page report from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on how JPMorgan Chase had used more than $100 billion of depositors’ money to gamble in derivatives in London and lose $6.2 billion. The Chair of that Subcommittee at the time, Senator Carl Levin, wrote that the bank “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.”
[…]
And in a perfect segue way, along comes the federal lawsuit brought by Shaquala Williams against JPMorgan Chase, also in the Southern District of New York under Judge Jed Rakoff.
Williams tells the court in her complaint that JPMorgan Chase did not fulfill its promise under a deferred prosecution agreement to cooperate with the Justice Department – something that Judge Koeltl in the Turnbull case finds “implausible” to believe.
Williams is a financial crimes compliance professional with more than a decade of experience at multiple global banks. Part of Williams’ role at JPMorgan Chase was to make sure that the bank was in compliance with a non-prosecution agreement the bank had signed with the Justice Department in 2016.
[…]
In exchange for avoiding prosecution, the Justice Department required JPMorgan to create compliance controls around third-party payments. Williams alleges, among numerous other serious charges, that the so-called third-party payment controls were a sham and that when she blew the whistle to her superiors at the bank, the bank retaliated against her by firing her in October 2019.
[…]
Mongol Invasion of the Islamic World
Episode 28: Mongol Invasion of the Islamic
Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)
Dr Kenneth Harl
Film Review
Unlike Genghis Khan, who made no effort to rehabilitate the steppes cities he leveled, his son Ogedei redeveloped the cities he conquered in the eastern Abbasid Caliphate by appointing trusted administrators to run them. Yet Muslims remained in firm control in the region surrounding Baghdad, and the Mamaluks (aka Slave Sultans)* remained in sole control of Egypt.
The Mongol Empire experienced an internal civil war following Ogedei’s death in 1241. Eventually (1251) the position of great khan passed to Genghis Khan’s grandson Mongke.
He appointed Batu ruler of the Mongols and Turks on the western steppes, a post inherited by Berke following Batu’s death. The heirs of Genghis Khan’s second son Jugatai assumed responsibility for the central steppes. Kublai Khan assumed responsibility for the eastern steppes, and his grandson Hulagu for the eastern Islamic empire.
In addition to the Mamaluks, who continued to receive slave solders from the steppes (via the Byzantine Empire), the other major threat to Mongol rule stemmed from an extremist Shiite group operating out of Alamut (Persia) that carried out orchestrated assassinations of Middle East and Central Asia political leaders.
In his largest military campaign, Hulagu and his troops left the Mongol capitol of Kharakan in 1253. Arriving in Samarkind by 1255, by 1257 they had leveled most of the Shiite assassins’ palaces and confiscated huge libraries of intelligence the Shiites had collected on Mongol opponents.
After securing Persia, in 1258 Hulagu next moved against the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, with support from Christians in Armenia and Antioch. He slaughtered a total of 800,000 civilians in Baghdad, sparing the Nestorian Christians living there because his wife was a Nestorian Christian.
In 1259 he sacked Al Jazeera, the grasslands and cities comprising modern-day Syria, marching as far southwest as Gaza on the Mediterranean. In response, the Mamaluk army (with the help of Crusaders) marched north to Galilee to confront the Mongol army (consisting mainly of Turkish mercenaries). This resulted in the Mongol Army’s very first defeat.
In 1259, Hulagu suspended operations after being notified of the great khan Monke’s death. This would spell the end of Mongol westward military expansion.
*Historically Turkish military leaders relied heavily on civilians and troops they conquered in battle and trained as slave soldiers. See 9th Century AD: Mass Migration of Uighur Turks to the Steppes fo China Leads to Rise of Seljuk Turks on the Steppes
Film can viewed free with a library card at Kanopy.
July 19, 2022
Public ‘Not Being Told the Truth’ About Cellphone Radiation
Written by Rachel Militello
Research shows “there is causation between cellphone radiation and brain tumors,” according to Hunter Lundy, a personal injury attorney and lead counsel on a lawsuit against the cellphone industry.
Lundy is representing the family of the late Reverend Frank Aaron Walker. Walker died Dec. 31, 2020, at age 49, from a glioblastoma brain tumor — or what Lundy referred to as a “cellphone tumor.”
“[Walker] had tremendous cellphone exposures,” Lundy told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on a recent episode of “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast.”
Kennedy also is on the legal team representing the Walker family, which names Motorola, AT&T, ZTE Corporation, Cricket Communications and the Telecommunications Industry Association as defendants.
According to the lawsuit, the defendants “downplayed, understated and/or did not state the health hazards and risks associated with cellphones” — even though they knew about them.
The lawsuit accuses the defendants of fraud, unfair trade practices, designed defects, inadequate warning and misrepresentation.
“The public is not being told the truth,” Lundy said. “People hold that cellphone next to their brain. The temporal lobe is the lobe surrounding the side of the brain of the ear, which gets the most exposure.”
According to Kennedy, cellphones transmit “dangerous carcinogenic radiation” even when people aren’t using them.
“The more apps you have on your phone, the more radiation is being transmitted,” Kennedy said. “Those apps are in communication with the tower all the time.”
Lundy said peer-reviewed studies show cellphone radiation affects not just the brain, but also other parts of the body. “There are studies that show men that put the cellphone in their pocket have a reduction of sperm count,” he said.
Research also shows women who put their cellphones in their bras “when they were exercising, jogging, they started showing up with tumors,” Lundy said.
European countries are already aware of the dangers of cellphone radiation and in some countries, you can’t have a cellphone unless you’re 16.
Kennedy shared that there is a series of patents going back to the 1990s that show the telecommunication industry was patenting technology to “protect human tissue from radiation that they knew was emanating from their cellphones and destroying human cells, mutating them and it causing tumors.”
Since the industry would have to admit what it did was wrong, the patents ended up being shelved.
Lundy’s law firm is in possession of those old patents and is using them as evidence in the Walker case.
“They knew exactly what was happening,” he said.
[…]
Via https://principia-scientific.com/public-not-being-told-the-truth-about-cellphone-radiation/
Everything You‘ve Always Wanted To Know About: ‘Good’ Wars, ‘Good’ War Criminals, ‘Good’ Dictators, ‘Good’ Separatists, ‘Good’ Oligarchs, and ‘Good’ Money Launderers
[Source: reddit.com]
[Source: mobile.twitter.com]Saddam’s Western-backed “good” invasion of Iran (left) versus Putin’s “evil,” bloodthirsty Ukraine invasion (right) as interpreted by The Economist, an opinion-leading magazine in the WestBy Felix Abt
Covert Action Magazine
When Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s president, invaded Iran on September 22, 1980, he was a “good” dictator. His invasion of the neighboring country was not only approved by the United States and its Western satellites, but also universally supported by them. Unlike secular Iraq, Iran was led by so-called vicious Islamic clerics.
They had committed the crime of spearheading a popular movement to overthrow Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had been swept into power by the Americans and the British but was abhorred by the Iranians. In the eyes of the American and British governments, however, Pahlavi was a “good” dictator.
His predecessor Mohammed Mossadegh, a democratically elected president, who they hounded out of office, was regarded as “very bad” because he defended the interests of his own country and tried to nationalize its oil. Saddam’s “good,” eight-year war against “evil” Iran was the deserved punishment for the misdeed of the insurgent Iranian clerics.
Even the use of chemical weapons, with their horrendous consequences, against Iran did not cross any “American red line” because Saddam was a “good” guy at the time. Unlike, say, Syria, with “evil” dictator Assad in charge, which was bombed by America because of chemical weapons use by someone else.
Unlike the Iranian theocrats, the Afghan Taliban were God’s Warriors for many years, doing good according to the name: Thanks to more than $2 billion in weapons, logistical support and training the CIA channeled to the mujahideen between 1979 and 1989, they defeated the “evil empire” (according to U.S. President Reagan), i.e., the Soviet Union (Russia from 1991), in Afghanistan.
The fact that in the process they also overthrew and murdered the Afghan president, who advocated a multi-party system and built schools for girls throughout the country, had not bothered governments and media figures in the West. After all, he was a “bad” guy because he did not turn down material support from the “evil empire.”
The tide turned for the formerly “good” Taliban after the 9/11 terrorist attack. Washington condemned them as irresponsible and evil, although they were not involved in the terrorist attack themselves and even offered the U.S. government extradition of those al-Qaeda terrorists who were in Afghanistan. The U.S. government and its Western aides did not accept the offer, preferring to carry out an undoubtedly “good” NATO invasion of Afghanistan, albeit one that violated international law, because of the Taliban, now perceived as entirely evil.
Even the formerly “good” dictator Saddam was amazed when his status metamorphose into “evil” dictator almost overnight—after he invaded Kuwait, with U.S. encouragement!
[…]
Wars, including proxy wars, are not “evil” per se; they can be “very good” and useful. This is universally true if they are led or supported by the West, and for which Washington and its allies always put forward good reasons. Since 2015, for example, “good” Saudi Arabia has been waging a “good,” albeit very dirty, proxy war in neighboring Yemen against its regional rival Iran (still “very bad”!). Saudi Arabia, which is far less democratic and a lot more inhumane than Iran, has been massively armed by the self-proclaimed bulwarks of democracy and human rights, the U.S., UK and France.
According to the UN, this war is the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of this century. It has already claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and 20 of the 30 million Yemeni inhabitants are starving in the war-ravaged country.
[…]
Of course, the U.S. has always been in favor of “good,” overt invasions and wars, such as in Vietnam, and “good,” covert ones, such as in East Africa, regardless of how many millions of innocent lives are lost.
[…]
Of course, there have always been “good” and “bad” dictatorships since World War II, even in Europe. The “good” ones were helped, the “bad” ones were contested. The former dictatorships in Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain and the military junta’s in Greece, which were perceived by their citizens as brutal and bloodthirsty, enjoyed support and sympathy from Western democratic governments because they were good and a bulwark against the “evil empire.”
Then, of course, there were the “evil” dictatorships, especially in Eastern Europe, as in contemporary Russia, which is being oppressed by “Vladimir the Terrible.” In the latter case, there is also the fact that Putin’s Russia represents its own interests, independent of those of the United States, which Washington regards as genuinely evil and therefore worth combatting.
There are also “good” and “bad” independence movementsIt is not only the separatists in Tibet or in China’s Xinjiang province, but also the glorious independence fighters in Taiwan, a Chinese province also recognized by the United States and the rest of the West, that are supported by the West in every plausible way.
[…]
The West and the U.S.-led NATO alliance also supported another “good” secession, that of Kosovo from Serbia, with a uniquely “good” war that they even called “humanitarian.” The territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, of which Serbia is the legal successor, was guaranteed by a UN resolution, but the otherwise “good” international order based on the rule of law, which is so highly praised by the USA and which it decisively coined, was in this case rather a hindrance and therefore somewhat “evil.” It is clear that the Serbs were not choirboys and did not shy away from atrocities. But the West behaved not only in violation of international law, but also in a war-criminal manner: NATO planes bombed infrastructures, schools, hospitals and even the embassy of China, which resisted the secession.
[…]
In addition to the “good” independence movements in Serbia, China and elsewhere, there are also the vicious ones: The People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, founded in 2014 by Russian-speaking Ukrainians seeking autonomy from the UKrainian government, have been considered particularly brutal as they were portrayed in the West as a bad, Russia-instigated conspiracy.
Yet this comes with a caveat: Jacques Baud, a former colonel and Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations and a former NATO official, participated in programs to assist the new government in Ukraine that rose to power after a Western-supported regime-change operation in 2014, explains: “The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in May 2014, were not referendums of ‘independence’ (независимость), as unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of ‘self-determination’ or ‘autonomy’ (самостоятельность).”
[…]
Big Pharma Wants to Put an End to Vitamins and Supplements
Dr Mercola
Story at-a-glanceOne of the latest attempts to thwart your ability to access nutritional supplements comes in the form of draft legislation that would require premarket approval for dietary supplements. In short, it would require supplements — which are food — to undergo the same approval process as drugsIn the past, the drug industry and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has tried to ban certain supplements, including vitamin B6 and N-acetylcysteine (NAC), by reclassifying them as new drugsAnother strategy the drug industry has been using to gain a monopoly over the supplement industry is to buy up supplement brands. Just 14 mega corporations — many of them drug companies — now own more than 100 of the most popular supplement brands on the marketThis monopoly over the supplement industry gives drug companies enormous regulatory influence, and that’s a way by which they could eliminate independent supplement makers who can’t afford to put their products through the drug approval process. Indeed, it seems that’s what the Durbin-Braun premarket approval proposal is trying to accomplishTake action to protect widespread access to dietary supplements. Contact your Senators and urge them to oppose the Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2022, and its inclusion in the FDA Safety Landmark Advancements ActIn the video above Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director for the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), interviews Gretchen DuBeau, the executive and legal director for the Alliance for Natural Health, who in addition to being a lawyer also has a master’s degree in applied healing arts, talk about Big Pharma’s efforts to eliminate one of its greatest competitors, namely nutritional supplements.
One of the latest attempts to thwart your ability to access nutritional supplements comes in the form of draft legislation that would require premarket approval for dietary supplements. In short, it would require supplements to undergo the same approval process as drugs.
The Durbin-Braun Premarket Approval ProposalA discussion draft of the legislation was released by the United States Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) in mid-May 2022. As reported by Vitamin Retailer:1
“On May 17 [2022], the United States Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) released a discussion draft of its legislation to reauthorize FDA user fees for drugs, biologics and medical devices package, which includes the controversial and divisive Durbin-Braun premarket approval concept and more that would be damaging to the industry, according to the Natural Products Association (NPA).2
[…]
For years, the drug industry, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s support, has tried to get nutritional supplements off the market. One of the most often used tactics has been to try to reclassify them as drugs.
Usually, they would target specific nutrients that stood in their way of profits, but legislation such as the Durbin-Braun premarket proposal would allow the drug industry to monopolize the market in one fell swoop.
Big Pharma Tried to Ban Vitamin B6The fight over vitamin B6 (pyroxidine) is one example of how Big Pharma tried to eliminate a natural substance that stood in the way of a drug patent. In 2007, Medicure Pharma submitted a citizen’s petition to the FDA in which it argued that any dietary supplement containing pyridoxal 5′-phosphate — vitamin B6 — were “adulterated” under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, article 402(f).3
In essence, Medicure wanted all vitamin B6 products banned, because they undermined the company’s incentive to continue development of it’s drug version of B6.
Medicure had gotten wise to vitamin B6’s effectiveness against ischemia (inadequate blood flow), and decided to make a drug out of it by simply renaming the vitamin “MC-1.” They entered it into the drug bank and then argued that B6 supplements contained “their” MC-1. The drug bank even admits the renamed vitamin B6, i.e., MC-1, is:4
“… a biologically active natural product which can be regarded as a chemical entity that has been evolutionarily selected and validated for binding to particular protein domains.”
The main reason why drug companies engage in this kind of sleight of hand is because once a substance is classified as a drug, you can jack up the price by 1,000% over the supplement’s typical retail.5
FDA Cracking Down on NACPerhaps the most recent example of the FDA trying to shut down easy access to nutritional supplements was its 2020 attack on N-acetylcysteine (NAC). NAC has been a widely-used dietary supplement for six decades, yet the FDA suddenly decided to crack down on it in late July 2020 — right after it was discovered how useful it was for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.6
According to the FDA, NAC was excluded from the definition of a dietary supplement because it had been approved as a new drug in 1963.7 But if that was the case, why did they wait until 2020 to take action?
As reported by NPI at the time,8 there were more than 1,170 NAC-containing products in the National Institutes of Health’s Dietary Supplement Label Database when the FDA started sending out warning letters9 to companies that marketed NAC as a remedy for hangovers.
Members of the Council for Responsible Nutrition also worried the FDA might start to target NAC more widely. So far, that hasn’t happened, but Amazon immediately stopped selling all NAC products after those warning letters went out, whether the sellers marketed it as a hangover remedy or not.
Also, the selection of “hangover” for those warning letters seemed arbitrary at best. The fact is that several scientists had called attention to NAC’s benefits against COVID, and shortly afterward, the FDA came up with this ridiculous excuse to limit the availability of it. It just smacked of conflict of interest.
Another Way Big Pharma Is Seeking to Take OverAnother strategy the drug industry has been using to gain a monopoly over the supplement industry is by simply buying up supplement brands. Nestlé Health Science, for example, has acquired Garden of Life, Vital Proteins, Nuun, Pure Encapsulations, Wobenzym, Douglas Laboratories, Persona Nutrition, Genestra, Orthica, Minami, AOV, Klean Athlete and Bountiful.10
Bountiful, in turn, owns brands like Solgar, Osteo Bi-Flex, Puritan’s Pride, Ester-C and Sundown, all of which are now under Nestlé’s control.
[…]
Via https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/07/19/supplement-industry-big-pharma.aspx
Russia Halts Gas Supply to Europe Indefinitely
By Julia Payne
LONDON, July 18 (Reuters) – Russia’s Gazprom has told customers in Europe it cannot guarantee gas supplies because of “extraordinary” circumstances, according to a letter seen by Reuters, upping the ante in an economic tit-for-tat with the West over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian state gas monopoly said in a letter dated July 14 that it was retroactively declaring force majeure on supplies from June 14. The news comes as Nord Stream 1, the key pipeline delivering Russian gas to Germany and beyond, is undergoing 10 days of annual maintenance scheduled to conclude on Thursday. read more
The letter added to fears in Europe that Moscow may not restart the pipeline at the end of the maintenance period in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Russia over the war in Ukraine, heightening an energy crisis that risks tipping the region into recession.
Known as an “act of God” clause, force majeure is standard in business contracts and defines extreme circumstances that release a party from their legal obligations. The declaration does not necessarily mean that Gazprom will stop deliveries, rather that it should not be held responsible if it fails to meet contract terms.
Gazprom (GAZP.MM) did not respond to a request for comment.
Russian gas supplies have been declining via major routes for some months, including via Ukraine and Belarus as well as through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
A trading source, asking not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the force majeure concerned supplies through Nord Stream 1.
“This sounds like a first hint that the gas supplies via NS1 will possibly not resume after the 10-day maintenance has ended,” said Hans van Cleef, senior energy economist at ABN Amro.
Gazprom cut Nord Stream 1 capacity to 40% on June 14, the date that Gazprom said in the letter to buyers would be the start of the force majeure.
Gazprom blamed sanctions for that reduction, citing the delay in the return of a gas turbine from maintenance in Canada by equipment supplier Siemens Energy (ENR1n.DE).
Canada sent the turbine for the pipeline to Germany by plane on July 17 after repair work had been completed, Kommersant newspaper reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the situation.
It will take another five to seven days for the turbine to reach Russia, the report said, provided there are no problems with logistics and customs. Germany’s economy ministry said on Monday it could not provide details of the turbine’s whereabouts.
[…]
July 18, 2022
As Mask Mandate Looms, LA Hospital Officials Mock COVID “Media Hype”
Zero Hedge
In a press conference an internal town hall presentation dripping with a mix of exasperation and dry-witted sarcasm, two officials at one of the largest hospital systems in Southern California threw a bucket of cold water on media and government efforts to whip the public into a state of fear over the latest Covid-19 uptick.
Their remarks came on the same day that Los Angeles County health director Barbara Ferrer declared the county had moved into a “high” level of Covid transmission. Two consecutive weeks in that status would trigger the reimposition of an indoor mask mandate on the nearly 10 million people who still choose to live there.
The press conference featured Brad Spellberg, the chief medical officer of Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center (LAC + USC), along with epidemiologist Paul Holtom.
Spellberg kicked off the duo’s ridicule of Covid fearmongering with an exasperated description of the Covid situation: “It’s just the same. It’s not changed. It’s been the same. It’s like…two months of the same.”
He backed up his characterization with charts depicting county cases and the hospital’s own Covid admission data.
“The numbers at [LAC+USC] Covid-positive tests have continued to go up, but this isn’t because we’re seeing a ton of people with symptomatic disease being admitted…we’re seeing a lot of people with mild disease in urgent care and [emergency department] who go home and do not get admitted.
Of those who are admitted, they’re 90% of the time not admitted due to Covid. Only 10% of our Covid-positive admissions are admitted due to Covid. Virtually none of them go to the ICU, and when they do go to the ICU, it is not for pneumonia. They are not intubated.”
As for the worst kind of Covid-ICU case, Spellberg said, “We haven’t seen one of those since February. It’s been months.” He said today’s Covid patients in intensive care are more typically associated with conditions like electrolyte abnormalities or auto-immune attack of the nerves that may or may not be Covid-driven.
LAC+USC full July 14 vid:
"Only 10% of our COVID positive admissions are admitted due to COVID. Virtually none of them go to the ICU, and when they do go to the ICU it is not for pneumonia. They are not intubated… we have not seen one of those since February."
HT @Campbels12. pic.twitter.com/AThaOxHGn3
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) July 16, 2022
“It is just not the same pandemic that it was, despite all the media hype to the contrary…I mean – a lot of people have bad colds is what we’re seeing,” Spellberg concluded.
Epidemiologist Paul Holtom sarcastically chided Spellberg: “I would really have to work to burst that soothiness bubble…maybe we can turn to the media, which is trying to burst that bubble by talking about a new variant that was was described in India…[and is] ‘sweeping’ the country and now the United States.”
He continued:
“Certainly, if the experience of our hospital is reflective of across the county, which I believe it is, we’re just seeing nobody with severe Covid disease. As of this morning, we have no one in the hospital who had pulmonary disease due to Covid. Nobody in the hospital….NOBODY. Nobody who had Covid-19 disease as we would see it in the past. So I guess it is hard to get a little more excited.”
The epidemiologist noted that Los Angeles County could soon reimpose an indoor mask mandate “based on numbers.” However, he said, “certainly, there’s no reason from a hospitalization-due-to-covid-push perspective to be worried at his point.”
Holtom transitioned away from the Covid portion of the press conference town hall by administering a final dose of humor: “I’m so tired about not being worried about Covid for week after week, the very least we could do is bring up another potential pandemic and get worried about it, because at least that way we have something to be worried about!”
Antiobiotics: Just one of the Big Problems with Big Chickens
By Martha Rosenberg Today’s intensive, industrial chicken operations use antibiotics to prevent infection in crowded conditions and add weight on birds without feeding them more. What does that mean for the humans who eat those chickens?
It’s not your imagination — U.S. chickens are gigantic.In the 1920s, an average chicken weighed 2.5 pounds and took 12 weeks to reach that weight, according to a 2021 Bloomberg report.
Today’s chickens clock in at more than 6 pounds — and they reach that weight in just seven weeks.
The National Chicken Council (NCC) credits better breeding, healthier nutrition and feed, “regular veterinarian oversight and the use of vaccines to prevent disease,” for the growth explosion.
The NCC also assures consumers that hormones, steroids and genetic engineering have nothing to do with the outsized chickens produced on industrial poultry farms.
Antibiotics? That’s another story, according to the NCC, which calls them “just one of many tools farmers use to keep their flocks healthy, in order to contribute to a safe and wholesome food supply.
“[J]ust like people, animals sometimes get sick, and treating illness is a responsible part of animal care,” the NCC states on its website.
The NCC statements imply that the use of antibiotics on industrial chicken farms is a rare occurrence, limited to instances when an animal “sometimes gets sick.”
But that’s misleading — antibiotic use is integral to industrial chicken farming and factory farming in general.
Today’s intensive, industrial chicken operations use antibiotics to prevent infection in crowded conditions and add weight on birds without feeding them more, according to The Humane League.
A 2014 Reuters investigation found that after U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) enacted guidance restricting the use of antibiotics, Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue Farms, George’s and Koch Foods were using antibiotics “more pervasively than regulators realize.”
Pilgrim’s Pride’s feed mill records showed the antibiotics bacitracin and monensin were being added “to every ration fed to a flock grown early this year,” reported Reuters.
Koch Foods, a supplier to Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, also was caught using routine antibiotics — and denying it on the company website.
How dependent are “factory farmers” on antibiotics for their bottom line?
Without antibiotics, 175,550 more tons of feed would be needed to grow U.S. turkeys, said Michael Rybolt of the National Turkey Federation when the FDA tried to limit their use in 2008. “If we did not have the use of antimicrobials … we would have a decrease in feed efficiency so we would have a decrease in utilization of the nutrients.”
How do antibiotics, also called antimicrobials, add weight using the same amount of feed and help operators’ bottom line?
An article in the journal Gut Microbes suggests antibiotics cause “enhanced energy harvest from dietary intake, due to an alteration in microbial composition” — and also may affect “host energy regulation” and the immune system.
Antibiotics may similarly cause human weight gain, researchers speculate, as low-level exposure has become so common.
Thomas Jukes of Lederle Laboratories (since acquired by Wyeth and later by Pfizer) discovered the growth function of antibiotics in chicken in 1948, according to Maryn McKenna, author of “Big Chicken.”
Antibiotics were so much a part of early chicken production, the birds were actually soaked in them to leave a protective film in a process called acronizing, McKenna said. Some of the workers performing the acronizing, whose hands were in constant contact with the drugs came down with staph infections.
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/antibiotics-big-industrial-chickens/
Stop the War on Doctors
By Pierre Kory
July 02, 2022
Anyone in America who deviates from the group-think enforced by public health bureaucrats runs the risk of cancellation. Politicians, parents, comedians, teachers – now they’re even coming for the doctors.
As a lung and ICU specialist, I have practiced medicine for 14 years and successfully treated more than 450 patients during the pandemic. Long before anyone had heard of Covid-19, I was studying and implementing cutting-edge methods to treat critically ill patients. I’m the Senior Editor of a best-selling textbook in my field, now in its second edition, which has been translated into seven languages.
For my efforts, I now find myself on the receiving end of “disciplinary sanctions” from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), who sent me a letter threatening “suspension or revocation of board certification.”
The “sin” threatening to end my medical career was my unwillingness to go along with Fauci’s monolithic vaccines-above-all-else strategy. The failure of this approach is plain to see, and anyone with an ounce of curiosity knows there are many methods of treating the virus.
Ivermectin is one of them. This cheap, readily available generic medicine is approved by the FDA for certain uses in humans – but not for Covid-19, despite 85 controlled trials from around the world demonstrating its effectiveness. In Brazil, the largest study to date found a reduction in Covid mortality rate of 70%. In India, the second most populated country in the world, the drug has been credited with near eradication of the disease. Studies attempting to discredit ivermectin have been debunked again and again.
Other trials, such as the recent TOGETHER trial, are designed to fail from the start to drive a desired narrative. In the National Institutes of Health’s ACTIV-6, despite starting the majority of patients on treatment after five days of Covid-19 symptoms at a lower than recommended dose, they found a statistically significant reduction in the time to recovery, particularly among the most severely ill. Unsurprisingly, major newspapers reported that the study showed ivermectin was ineffective.
Despite ivermectin’s proven effectiveness, in the opinion of the ABIM, advocating for its usage is a form of “disinformation” and carries the penalty of losing one’s medical license and livelihood.
Throughout the pandemic, I’ve maintained an open mind, analyzed what works for patients, discussed strategies with fellow doctors, and conducted my own extensive research. When new data arose that changed my understanding, I admitted as much and changed course—like with the vaccines. If only the powers that be at the ABIM and our government could say the same.
Consider the evolution of accepted facts about Covid-19 safety measures from Fauci and his ilk. Despite government mandates, neither lockdowns nor cloth masks prevent transmission. They never have. It turns out former Surgeon General Jerome Adams had it right when he tweeted in March 2020 that masks are, “NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus” – a comment for which he was pilloried. We are only beginning to learn the impact of the societal costs of these early preventative measures, a price our children who were kept home from school will be paying for years.
Second, there is no evidence the vaccines stop Covid-19, despite the constant lecturing from the Biden Administration and the mainstream media. In the United States and globally, cases continue to rise and fall without any correlation to the pace or percentage of population vaccinated. This is not what we were promised. In 2021, Fauci said vaccinated people were “dead ends” for the virus, and President Biden declared, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Today, approximately 110,000 cases are announced daily in America, where more than two thirds of the population is fully vaccinated.
There is a backlash brewing in America right now, and it goes beyond inflation rates and gas prices. People are tired of arrogant public officials and compromised institutions who believe they have all the answers but constantly get it wrong and make no apologies as they steamroll those who don’t support the current narrative. The ABIM’s sudden (and suspiciously well-funded) persecution of doctors who stray from the party line is only the latest example.
Doctors on the ABIM’s board and across the country need to stand up against this witch hunt. It’s demeaning to honest doctors and dangerous to the patients we’ve dedicated our careers to serving.
Via https://peckford42.wordpress.com/2022/07/17/stop-the-war-on-doctors/
The Most Revolutionary Act
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