REPUBLIC REBORN

As I work my way through Suzanne Humphries’ fascinating history of infectious disease, Dissolving Illusions, I’ve gained a much better appreciation for just how horrific these diseases had been for all of society. Everyone lived in fear of a great many infections that could appear at any moment, and, when infected, they couldn’t do much more than pray. The medical profession in the 1800’s was little more than quackery dressed up in respectable drapery, and the doctors often did far more harm than good. One such horror was ‘puerperal fever’. This infection killed many new mothers who had just given birth, with the primary cause being the filthy hands of the male midwives. Traditionally, midwives had always been female, but the medical professionals saw a lucrative opportunity and pushed their way into the market. The “male midwife” had arrived, and with him the fool’s notion that one doesn’t need to wash his hands or instruments before assisting patients. Humphries points to the records of a Paris hospital in the 1700’s, where more than half of the mothers that gave birth died. Thousands of new mothers died as a result of the ignorant arrogance of the medical class of the time

The complete unnecessary tragedy of it all was made apparent when Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis ordered the doctors within his hospital to apply a “chlorinated lyme solution” to their hands before getting anywhere near an expectant mother. The death rate immediately dropped to zero.

Never underestimate human arrogance when deciding whether to grant some class of professions greater power.

Philip Giraldi’s latest piece at Unz looks at Israel’s overt spying on our own government, and our own government’s fear of doing anything about it.

Salient points: “The reality of Israeli large-scale spying in the United States is indisputable. One might cite Jonathan Pollard, who stole more highly classified information than any spy in history. And then there were Ben-Ami Kadish, Stuart Nozette and Larry Franklin, other spies for Israel who have been caught and tried, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage.” The 2005 report states “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.” It adds that Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information…

…So, did Israel really spy on Donald Trump? Sure it did. And Netanyahu is, metaphorically speaking, thumbing his nose at the American president and asking with a grin, “What are you going to do about it?””

Tulsi’s tweet from earlier today: “Trump awaits instructions from Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia’s bitch is not “America First”.” 

It was in response to this tweet from Trump:

“Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!”

Could you imagine a U.S. soldier going to war at the behest of a foreign power, much less a totalitarian fundamentalist hellhole like Saudi Arabia? This may very well happen if the warmongers are able to spin the Houthi attack on Saudi oil fields in an anti-Iran direction.

So the Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia on their home turf? Is it much of a surprise? Saudi Arabia, with the help of the US and Britain, has been pounding Yemen for several years, killing thousands of innocents, targeting port cities, municipal water supplies, schools, mosques, etc. So far, the Saudi’s have felt none of that war within their borders. Now they have. And now our government suddenly cares.

Saudi Arabia, like Israel, France, and every other country, isn’t worth an American life or an American dollar. Let the barbarians of the world fight their battles and massacre each other. U.S. soldiers don’t deserve to be sacrificed for the idiocy of our supposed allies.

Fascinating look into Buchanan’s writing world, including his admission that he writes his best at night, something I’ve heard from almost every writer when asked.

C-SPAN: Pat Buchanan on how he writes

Shocking, but is it really surprising? Joseph Wesbecker began taking Prozac just a month before his September 14th, 1989, mass murder that left 8 dead and 12 wounded. The survivors made the connection between his medication and the violent outburst, and sued Eli Lilly. The pharma company, in turn, paid those survivors $20 million in exchange for withholding damaging evidence from the jury about another drug that had been recalled earlier.

The mass shooters are almost always taking a cocktail of these insanity-inducing “anti-depressants”, and that fact is almost always suppressed.

Unbelievable. Blatant surveillance of a sitting President by a foreign power is ignored, because that foreign power happens to be Israel.

During the election, anti-Trumpers from all sides were warning that Trump would be a loose cannon, starting wars willy-nilly, and in all probability launch a nuke. Instead, almost the exact opposite has occurred. Trump has met with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un three times, even becoming the first sitting President to walk within the Hermit Kingdom’s borders. He’s demanded an end to the twin military quagmires of Syria and Afghanistan, and came very close to hosting the Taliban at the White House. The same people pearl-clutching over Trump’s alleged war fever are now denouncing him for the attempt to meet with people rather than bomb them. Bombing them has not worked, clearly, and so talking with them would naturally be the only other option. Yet peace, when pursued by Trump, is unacceptable to his political enemies, regardless of how much carnage and death would result from their satisfied collective ego.

There is much about Trump to criticize, but his detractors appear to oppose his every action out of spite, even if he does something that aligns with their political or moral beliefs. Trump is against war? Then they are for it. Trump throws out chickenhawk warmonger John Bolton? Then they screech into the blue about the injustice of it all. The insincerity has entered the surreal, and revealed that vanishingly few with a platform hold any hard and fast principles.

Vaccine Impact has the details.

In response to any criticism of current vaccine policy, the polio vaccine inevitably gets dragged into the debate by the pro-vax side. What they don’t understand, because they’ve never bothered to find out, is that the polio vaccine, from the 50’s to the present, has a history that does not help their argument for vaccine safety. One historical tidbit left out of the discussion is that the polio virus used in the vaccines was cultivated on monkey kidneys, a process thought to be harmless at the time. It turned out not to be harmless, because the monkeys were infected with simian virus 40, and passed it on to 90 million Americans via Jonas Salk’s vaccine. SV40 is a prime suspect as the cause of mesothelioma, a fast-moving, lethal cancer that suddenly appeared sometime after 1950, one that kills around 3,000 Americans each year.

Another historical episode that never seems to make it into any discussion is the Cutter Incident, which refers to the mass vaccination campaign of 200,000 children in 1955. The problem was that the polio virus had been improperly inactivated, resulting in vaccine-induced polio in over 40,000 children, including many deaths.

Something else that is interesting: the monkeys used to culture the polio in mass quantities necessary for vaccine production were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus, similar to the human immunodeficiency virus, of which there is no documented case in a human before 1959. Vaccine scientist Hilary Koprowski conducted polio vaccine experiments in Africa between 1957 and 1960, administering his experimental vaccine to over 300,000 equatorial Africans. His vaccine was never approved. The first known case of HIV was eventually traced to a patient that visited a clinic that administered Koprowski’s experimental vaccine in 1959.

From the SF Chronicle