Authored by Michael Maharrey via SchiffGold.com,

I write a lot about the national debt.

And most people don’t care.

That’s because there’s a widespread belief that the dollar is invincible.

It isn’t…

The prevailing attitude is that the US government can borrow and spend indefinitely. After all, it hasn’t caused a problem so far. But a long fuse can burn for a long time before it finally reaches the powder keg.

I don’t know how long we have before the debt bomb explodes, but I do know we get closer and closer every day. And sadly, very few people care enough to address the problem.

The recent government shutdown drama is a case in point.

A stopgap spending deal swept the shutdown threat out of the headlines, but it’s still there lurking in the shadows of the halls of Congress. If lawmakers don’t figure something out by Nov. 17, the government will be forced to shut down.

There isn’t much talk about a shutdown right now, but when people do discuss the possibility, they almost always focus on the mythical crisis that shuttering the federal government might cause. That sidesteps the real problem — out of control government spending.

Conventional wisdom is that Congress needs to do whatever it takes to avoid a shutdown. If that means maintaining spending at current levels or even increasing spending, so be it. The handful of intransigent members of Congress who want to hold out for spending cuts are always cast as the bad guys in this kabuki theater.  As economist Daniel Lacalle put it in a recent article published by Mises Wire, “The narrative seems to be that governments and the public sector should never have to implement responsible budget decisions, and spending must continue indefinitely.”

But the whole government shutdown charade is merely the symptom of a much deeper problem. The US government is over $33 trillion in debt. In fact, the Biden administration managed to add half a trillion dollars to the debt in just 20 days.

It’s hard to overstate just how bad the US government’s fiscal situation has become. We have a trifecta of surging debt, massive deficits, and declining federal revenue, and the federal government’s spending addiction is at the root of the problem. Lacalle summed it up this way.

The problem in the United States is not the government shutdown but the irresponsible and reckless deficit spending that administrations continue to impose regardless of economic conditions.”

In August alone, the Biden administration spent over $527 billion. In fact, the federal government has been spending an average of half a trillion dollars every single month.

And there is no end in sight. There is no political will to substantially cut spending. Meanwhile, the federal government is always looking for new reasons to spend even more money. With war raging in the Middle East, there is already a proposal to send aid to Israel and possibly add more aid to Ukraine to that deal.

As Peter Schiff said in a recent podcast, the US can’t afford peace, much less war.

Lacalle summarizes the current fiscal condition of the United States government. It’s not a pretty picture.

In the Biden administration’s own projections, the accumulated deficit between 2023 and 2032 would be over 14 trillion US dollars, assuming that there would be no recession or employment decline. Public debt has risen above 33 trillion US dollars, and the budget deficit in a period of growth and strong job creation is over 1.7 trillion US dollars. As of August 2023, it costs $808 billion to maintain the debt, which is 15% of the total federal spending, according to the U.S. Treasury. Interest rates are rising at the same time as the government rejects all budget constraints. This is a monetary timebomb.”

And as Lacalle pointed out, the government keeps spending no matter what’s happening in the economy. According to government people and their academic support staff, there is never a good time to cut spending.

When the economy grows and there is almost full employment, governments announce more spending because it is ‘time to borrow,’ as Krugman wrote. When the economy is in recession, governments say that they need to spend even more to save the economy. In the process, government size in the economy increases, and record tax receipts are fully consumed in no time because expenditures always exceed revenues.”

The constant borrowing and spending is fueled by the myth that borrowing doesn’t really matter, and the rise in popularity of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) put that myth on steroids.

MMTrs claim that spending doesn’t matter. As Lacalle notes, they even go as far as to claim that the world could “run out of dollars” if the federal government took significant steps to rein in deficit spending causing a “monetary meltdown.”

It is so ludicrous that it should not even have to be discussed. The world does not run out of dollars if the United States government cuts its imbalances. Global dollar liquidity is a result of central bank swaps between monetary institutions. There is no such thing as a global dollar liquidity crisis because of a United States surplus, as we saw when it happened in 2001. Furthermore, the idea that the dollar supply is created only by government deficit spending is insane. This distorted view of the economy places government debt at the center of growth instead of private investment. It tries to convince you that a deficit is always positive and that the only creation of currency must come from unproductive spending, not from productive investment credit growth. Obviously, it is wrong.”

But no matter how loudly contrarians sound the warning, people in the mainstream continue to shrug their shoulders at the mounting debt and ever-growing deficits. They seem to believe that since it hasn’t mattered yet, it won’t matter ever.

The dollar’s status as the global reserve currency enables the US government to get away with a lot. As Lacalle explains, global demand for dollars is still high. The dollar index (DXY) is rising because the monetary imbalances of other nations are larger than the United States’ challenges.

This has lulled Americans into a false sense of security. A lot of Americans, including most in positions of power, seem to think the US can do whatever it wants when it comes to borrowing and spending.

Lacalle makes a sobering point — “All empires believe that their currency will be eternally demanded, until it stops. ”

When confidence in the currency collapses, the impact is sudden and unsurmountable. Global citizens may start to accept other independent currencies or gold-backed securities, and the myth of eternal U.S. debt demand vanishes. Unfortunately, governments are always willing to push the limits of fiscal responsibility because another administration will face the problem. The United States’ rising debt and deficit irresponsibility means more taxes, less growth, and more inflation in the future. Government debt is not a gift of reserves for the private sector; it is a burden of economic problems for future generations. Sound money can only come from fiscal responsibility. Currently, we have none.”

The bottom line is the dollar is not invincible.

The fuse is burning.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

Global focus just shifted from Ukraine to Palestine. This new arena of confrontation will ignite further competition between the Atlanticist and Eurasian blocs. These fights are increasingly zero-sum ones; as in Ukraine, only one pole can emerge strengthened and victorious.

Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors. 

• First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject. 

• Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.

Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds. 

It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.  

Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened. 

Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin.

Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.  

There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. 

A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.

Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.

That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now. 

Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.

Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces. 

Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet. 

Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not. 

Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to no high-tech surveillance access, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it. 

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”

The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it. 

It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”

The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.” 

Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians

Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots. 

Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:

“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.” 

After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable. 

Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide. 

Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.   

Which brings us to Iran. 

Geopolitical plausible deniability

The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.

Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11. 

In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.    

Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises. 

As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”

Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran. 

The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood. 

Elsewhere in the region, the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly. 

Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.   

Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor

The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable. 

A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable. 

What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor. 

China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road. 

Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies. 

The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.  

Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.  

*  *  *

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle or ZeroHedge.

Since before Ancient Greece and the first Chinese Dynasties, people have sought to understand and learn more about the moon.

Curiosity and centuries of study culminated in the first moon landing in the 1960s. But there have been many other attempted moon landings, both before and after.

This chart by Visual Capitalists’ Preyash Shah illustrates all the moon landings using NASA data since 1966 when Soviet lander Luna 9 touched down.

Race to the Moon

The 1960s and 1970s marked an era of intense competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union as they raced to conquer the moon.

During the Cold War, space became a priority as each side sought to prove the superiority of its technology, its military firepower, and its political-economic system.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy set a national goal to have a crewed lunar landing and return to Earth.

After several failed attempts from both sides, on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission was successful and astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon.

After the Apollo missions, the fervor of lunar exploration waned. From 1976 to 2013, no moon landing attempts occurred due to budget constraints, shifting priorities, and advances in robotic missions.

However, a new chapter in space exploration has unfolded in recent years, with emerging players entering the cosmic arena. With its Chang’e missions, China has made significant strides, landing rovers on the moon and exploring the far side of the moon.

India, too, has asserted its presence with the Chandrayaan missions. In 2023, the country became the 4th nation to reach the moon as an unmanned spacecraft landed near the lunar south pole, advancing the country’s space ambitions to learn more about the lunar ice, potentially one of the moon’s most valuable resources.

Exploring Lunar Water

Since the 1960s, even before the historic Apollo landing, scientists had theorized the potential existence of water on the moon.

In 2008, Brown University researchers employed advanced technology to reexamine lunar samples, discovering hydrogen within beads of volcanic glass. And in 2009, a NASA instrument aboard the India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe confirmed the presence of water on the moon’s surface.

Water is deemed crucial for future space exploration. Beyond serving as a potential source of drinking water for future moon explorations, ice deposits could play a pivotal role in cooling equipment. Lunar ice could also be broken down to produce hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing, essential for supporting extended space missions.

With a reinvigorated interest in exploring the moon, manned moon landings are on the horizon once again. In April 2023, NASA conducted tests for the launch of Artemis I, the first American spacecraft to aim for the moon since 1972. The agency aims to send astronauts to the moon around 2025 and build a base camp on the lunar surface.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough warned that messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines inject “foreign genetic code” into human beings, which the body fails to break down or expel for a prolonged period of time.

Research on mRNA “has been going on for decades,” Dr. McCullough said during an Oct. 5 interview. The 2023 Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to two scientists for making “messenger RNA long-lasting in the human body,” he said. “I mean, it has been tested in multiple applications … It’s an absolute bust. It was just the worst idea ever to install the genetic code for a lethal protein without being able to shut it off. It wasn’t the fact that it was rushed; it’s just ill-conceived from the very beginning.”

“We can’t force the human body to accept foreign genetic code and produce a foreign protein … Messenger RNA for vaccines is a completely failed concept. It’s a dangerous concept, and the U.S. government wasn’t honest. They should have been honest. Trump should have come out and said, ‘Listen, it’s on our website; our military’s been working on this since 2012.’”

During a testimony at the European Parliament last month, Dr. McCullough said, “There’s not a single study showing that the messenger RNA is broken down” in the human body once it is injected.

“There’s not a study showing it leaves the body.” Since the vaccines are “made synthetically, they cannot be broken down.”

He added that the lethal protein from the [COVID-19] vaccines found in the human body after vaccination was found to be circulating “at least for six months, if not longer.”

In the case of seasonal jabs, that is, taking an injection or booster at the end of six months as recommended by the authorities, “there’s another installation in more circulating potentially lethal protein.”

Scientist Drew Weissman, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in developing mRNA technology, warned in a 2018 paper that not only did clinical trials of mRNA vaccines produce “more modest [results] in humans than was expected based on animal models,” but that the “side effects were not trivial.”

He referred to a February 2023 paper published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which cited that the U.S. government has been investing billions of dollars in developing messenger RNA technology since 1985.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began investing in mRNA tech in 2011. DARPA then launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program in 2016 that sought to produce “relevant numbers of doses” against infections within 60 days of identifying them.

The ADEPT P3 was a program by the U.S. military “to end pandemics in 60 days.” There is no other technology “that our government has invested more in,” Dr. McCullough said.

Dr. McCullough cited another paper that stated there were “over 9,000 patents on messenger RNA. And all the patent assignees are big entities. At the top is Sanofi, then Cervavac, BioNTech, Moderna, and the U.S. government. No single person invented messenger RNA. Someone who comes up in 2021 and says, ‘You know I invented it’. That’s impossible. This has been going on for decades.”

Dr. McCullough pointed out that the United States and China have been in “collaboration for years” in their research on infectious and lethal coronavirus.

However, officials like Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and “a whole cadre of scientists, they collaborated to conceal this global security threat.”

“They actually intentionally lied to the world and said the virus came out of nature. They knew it came out of the Wuhan lab,” he said, citing a research paper by Ralph Baric and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi that was published in the Nature journal in 2015.

Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi is affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while Mr. Baric is from the Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Number two, US, EU and all westernized Nations [should] pull out of the WHO. They’re not trustable. And number three, I’m following the World Council for Health. I am recommending a halt on all childhood vaccines, the entire vaccine schedule until this is clarified since messenger RNA is now on the schedule without any concerns for safety.

While some studies related to the safety of COVID-19 vaccines have shown the jabs to be safe, others have raised concerns about the safety of the shots.

A December 2022 study analyzed trials comparing vaccine recipients with individuals who did not receive a vaccine or were given a placebo.

It concluded that “compared to placebo, most vaccines reduce, or likely reduce, the proportion of participants with confirmed symptomatic COVID-19, and for some, there is high-certainty evidence that they reduce severe or critical disease.”

However, a June 2022 study that looked at mRNA vaccinations found that “Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of special interest (AESI).”

“The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials.”

‘Shedding’ the Infection

During the interview, Mr. Deace asked about hearing issues that he and his colleague suffered and whether they had any ties with the vaccines. While he did not take a COVID-19 shot, the colleague was vaccinated. Mr. Deace asked if this was “further proof that basically the last few years Peter everybody was a lab rat whether you took the vaccine or not.”

“It’s true, nearly all of us have been exposed to the Wuhan spike protein,” Dr. McCullough replied. “When I see patients in the office, we check antibodies against the spike protein. Invariably, they’re elevated. Rarely, I’ll find somebody who hasn’t been exposed.”

Dr. McCullough pointed out that there are “clear-cut papers” showing individuals suffering hearing loss after taking COVID-19 jabs. “It’s all related to the spike protein,” he said. mRNA vaccines work by instructing cells in the body to produce the spike protein found on the surface of the COVID-19 virus.

Once vaccinated, an individual’s muscle cells begin producing spike protein pieces, displaying them on cell surfaces, which end up triggering the immune system to create antibodies. When such an individual gets infected with the COVID-19 virus, these antibodies will then fight the virus.

Dr. McCullough warned that even people who have not received mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can eventually get affected by messenger RNA through a vaccinated individual via “shedding.”

“Shedding means that one has been exposed to the spike protein or to the messenger RNA from close contact with another individual. We know both of them can travel via exosomes which are small phospholipid packets that can be exhaled [via] breath, through sweat, [and] various forms of body fluid, typically you know very close contact.”

“There was a big project called the Eva project in the UK showing 78 percent of women who take a vaccine—they actually have menstrual abnormalities. And those who even didn’t take a vaccine, they end up having menstrual abnormalities. There’s been plenty of these reports that have occurred.”

Dr. McCullough cited an interview he did with scientist Helene Banoun, an expert on shedding, who believes such things “clearly happens, for sure, in people who’ve taken the vaccine within 30 days, close contact.”

“Now, two studies—one in the United States, one in Japan—[show] the messenger RNA comes through breast milk. The spike protein may be shedded potentially for a much longer duration of time. It’s been shown in the human body now for months, maybe even years afterward. And that’s the rationale for what our recent proposal to actually undergo spike protein detoxification.”

The cardiologist pointed out that “every signal” related to cardiovascular disease, neurologic disease, blood clots, immune disease, and cancer “is up.”

“There can be debates on why all these chronic diseases are up, all-cause mortality up in every single area of the world,” he said. “The two big exposures we’ve had are COVID-19 infection and now COVID-19 vaccines, and I think both mechanisms have led to this wave of disease.”

“I think more powerfully with the vaccines since the vaccines are largely genetic, they’re given every six months, and they install the genetic code for the disease-promoting and lethal Wuhan spike protein.”

Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA (emphasis ours),

Last week, Rep. Alexandrio Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hopped on a livestream to give a ‘very fine people on both sides’ damage control speech regarding the situation in Israel, after the Democratic Socialists of America came out for Hamas following last weekend’s brutal attack on Israelis.

She did anything but clear the air… as Twitter followers couldn’t help but notice that during the 45-second livestreamed social-media broadcast, the socialist lawmaker unmistakably appeared to break wind around the 38 second mark.

It came at a particularly awkward moment, during which “AOC” happened to be accusing Israel of genocidal war crimes after it struck back for the slaughter of more than a thousand innocent civilians—including the rape and torture of many—and the kidnapping of roughly 150 others whose fate remains unknown.

“[T]he United States has a responsibility to ensure accountability to human rights to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and to ensure that horrors do not happen in the names of victims who do not want their [fart] tragedy used to justify further violence and injustice,” she said.

The United States’ responsibility is to human rights. That means supporting the safety of the Israeli people and preventing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/7CsuN6uO3w

— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) October 12, 2023

But while few would have predicted it to be the next development in a story that has shocked the world and fueled global anxieties like never before about the outbreak of World War III, it is not the first time farts have become an unwanted diversion for AOC.

One of her first acts as a freshman lawmaker was to draft the “Green New Deal,” a multi-trillion-dollar framework for revamping the entire U.S. economy in order to achieve net-zero carbon emissions.

Unfortunately, the plan was widely ridiculed for its outlandish proposals—not the least of which was its fixation on regulating cow farts.

Despite the popular rejection of it at the time, leftists and globalists have continued to push the Green New Deal agenda under different labels, including President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan and the “smart city” initiatives being coordinated by the World Economic Forum.

And at least one nation—New Zealand—has attempted to impose a tax on cow farts—although it is unclear how they are assessed.

In all likelihood, Ocasio–Cortez, who let the video remain up on her Twitter site as of Friday morning, felt no sense of shame over her own methane emission.

She has performed other acts of public humiliation before, including dancing to bongos while enraged citizens jeered her at a town-hall meeting.

Dare you to find something more cringey than these AOC dance moves pic.twitter.com/X8tz8BJ7YF

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 20, 2022

However, the Bronx boofer may have doomed her future presidential aspirations if history offers any indication.

At least two past Democratic presidential candidates who have publicly cut the cheese went on to bomb in the ballot box.

Hillary Clinton left the normally loquacious Sens. John Edwards and Barack Obama practically speechless after a burst during a November 2007 CNN debate ahead of the Democratic primary.

Although Clinton was by far the better known name and widely considered to be the frontrunner at the time, Obama wound up closing the gap and going on to win the election—and two terms in office—while Clinton would go on to win the nomination in 2016 only to lose the general election.

In 2019, while conducting an on-camera interview with then Hardball! host Chris Matthews, Rep. Eric Swalwell, considered to be a serious political upstart with a bright future and a formidable political adversary for then-President Donald Trump, appeared to shift a bit in his seat.

Shortly thereafter, Swalwell let out a ripper that reared back his shoulders, but continued to make his point without missing a beat.

At that point Swalwell already had launched and failed a short-lived presidential campaign, which lasted only about three months. However, the fart—and subsequent news of an affair with a Chinese honeytrap spy named Fang Fang—not only raised serious concerns about Swalwell’s judgment and integrity, but also made it hard to take him seriously.

In January, Swalwell was one of three Democrat lawmakers who was stripped of his committee assignments due to concerns that he was unfit to serve on the House Intelligence Committee since he was potentially a compromised Chinese asset.

And who could forget when Rahm Emanuel farted on the Charlie Rose show?

Or when Rep. Jarrold Nadler (D-NY) may have duked in his diapers.

Jerry Nadler poops his pants, Pelosi calls him distinguished, Nadler waddles off stage. pic.twitter.com/zcJ8jrV6GF

— Jesse Watters’s hand (@JesseWatersHand) September 24, 2020

How much did he poop? Depends…

Rudy toot toot?

It’s not just Democrats…

I present this clip of Rudy Giuliani testifying without editing or commentary. (Watch for the 👀) pic.twitter.com/h4ndjLO56p

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) December 3, 2020

And last but not least, current independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was caught in a fart scandal in July, but not one of his own making.

While attending a private dinner with several members of the New York media at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, RFK Jr. was upstaged by the evening’s host, literary agent Doug Dechert (a conservative), who began to argue about global warming while several cups deep into the evening’s libations.

When the debate with his friend across the table became too tiresome, Dechert shut it down with a “loud, prolonged fart,” wrote Page Six reporter Mara Siegler, “while yelling, as if to underscore his point, ‘I’m farting!’”

The moment apparently left many at the table shell-shocked, but perhaps not RFK Jr.’s campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, who had dealt with public flatulence at least once before.

Kucinich also was a candidate in the 2008 Democratic primary and was onstage during the Hillary Clinton incident.

Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.

Authored by William Van Wagenen via The Cradle,

Just three days after the Hamas-led Palestinian resistance launched an unprecedented military offensive against Israeli military posts and settlements by land, sea, and air, Israeli officials began begging their US sponsors for additional weapons. Politico reported this week that according to a senior Pentagon official, “The Biden administration is surging weapons to Israel, rapidly sending air defenses and munitions in response to Israeli officials’ urgent requests for aid.”

“Planes have already taken off,” the senior official told reporters. Amidst this escalating crisis for the occupation state, it’s worth pondering a crucial question: Can the US sustain a commitment to two significant existential conflicts involving vital allies in separate geographies simultaneously? 

The answer is likely no. Washington has already devoted over $100 billion in military aid to Ukraine to fight Russia, while facing a national debt spiraling out of control and spiking inflation.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Ukraine war was meant to be easier; the isolation and economic unraveling of its Russian adversary, was a cinch. Instead, 18 months on, the US is struggling to support Ukraine in a bloody war of attrition. Worse yet, Kiev’s well-publicized spring offensive that was meant to flip those odds has come to naught in the face of Russia’s overwhelming advantage in artillery and advanced missiles. 

Little territory has changed hands since Russian forces withdrew from Kharkiv and Kherson in late 2022, but the Ukrainian army has since been decimated by Russian artillery in theatres such as Bakhmut. 

“We think that Ukrainians have lost somewhere between 300 to 350 thousand dead, maybe more, hundreds of thousands of wounded,” retired US Colonel Douglas Macgregor bluntly stated in August. “These attacks have utterly bled Ukraine white.”

This grim reality has given rise to what the BBC has described as “Ukraine’s army of amputees.” In the first half of this year alone, some 15,000 soldiers joined their ranks, surpassing the total amputees the UK produced over six years during World War II.

While Ukraine faces a severe manpower shortage, western powers find themselves faced with a dearth of available weaponry to send to Kiev. Admiral Rob Bauer, NATO’s highest-ranking military official, candidly admitted on October 3rd, “The bottom of the barrel is now visible” concerning the west’s ammunition stockpile.

In a sign of the mounting strain, the US began transferring to Ukraine 300,000 155-millimeter shells it had stored in Israel as part of the War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel (WRSAI) program.

According to one Israeli officer, “Officially, all of this equipment belongs to the US military …. If, however, there is a conflict, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] can ask for permission to use some of the equipment.”

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder claimed the US would replenish these stocks of artillery shells stored in Israel. But the US does not have the ability to do so, as Ukraine has been using between 3,000 and 6,000 rounds per day, a quarter of what Russia has used on the battlefield.

CNN reported at the time that “The strain on weapons stockpiles – and the ability of the US industrial base to keep up with demand – is one of the key challenges facing the Biden administration.”

Israel’s plea for US weapons

The US military-industrial complex is heavily geared to produce high-cost weapons systems and hardware, like the $412 billion F-35 warplane. While these programs undoubtedly benefit weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, they fall short in delivering the essential artillery required in vast quantities for a war of attrition against a formidable military.

Now that war has broken out between Israel and the Palestinian resistance, Kiev faces a competitor not only in Moscow, but in Tel Aviv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on 9 October expressed the fear that US and European support would shift away from Ukraine and toward Israel, and claimed on the social media platform X:

“We have data very clearly proving that Russia is interested in inciting war in the Middle East so that a new source of pain and suffering would erode global unity and exacerbate cleavages and controversies, helping Russia in destroying freedom in Europe.”

While the Ukraine lobby enjoys clout in Washington, the Israel lobby reigns supreme. It is unlikely the former will be able to override the efforts of the latter to redirect what few US weapons remain available away from the defense of the Jewish state.

Israel had consistently refused to send weapons to Ukraine…

Israel was heavily criticized for refusing to donate weapons to Ukraine. Now obvious that was a wise decision. Serious nations prioritize their own security. pic.twitter.com/d5CMsJ7p3Z

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) October 8, 2023

That Israel is begging for US weapons just days into a conflict with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is alarming for the occupation state’s supporters, considering that none of the remaining Axis of Resistance members, including Hezbollah, Syria, Ansarallah, Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) and Iran, have yet formally entered the conflict.

Should Hezbollah fully join the fight, Israeli planners expect the Lebanese resistance movement to fire 4,000 missiles a day from northern Lebanon and send thousands of elite troops into Israel to take over towns or military bases.

Lessons from the 2006 war with Hezbollah 

Israel and Hezbollah fought a major battle in 2006, which forced the Israeli military to wage war against a more “conventional” military opponent, in contrast to the Palestinians it confronts daily in the West Bank and Gaza.

According to Matt Mathews of the US Army’s Combat Studies Institute, Israel was woefully unprepared to fight a “real war” in that conflict. He notes that as a result, Mossad Chief Meir Degan and the head of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, pointedly told then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “the war was a national catastrophe and Israel suffered a critical blow.”

The 2006 war also exposed Israel’s reliance on US weapons, which nevertheless proved insufficient to defeat Hezbollah. During the war, Israel requested to access the WRSAI stockpile and that the US expedite the delivery of precision-guided munitions to Israel. Within just 10 days of fighting, Israel used most of its ammunition stock.

Years later, in July 2014, during Israeli military operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel was again forced to rely on the WRSAI stockpile to replenish 120-mm tank rounds and 40-mm illumination rounds fired from grenade launchers.

The problems Israel faced in 2006 and 2014 will be compounded if the Axis of Resistance now takes the step of initiating its “unification of the fronts” campaign.

David Wurmer, Middle East adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney, told the Wall Street Journal on 10 October that “The nightmare scenario for the Israelis is that they go a week or two shooting down 6,000 to 10,000 Hamas missiles, and then they have nothing left to stop the Hezbollah missiles.” 

The silent threat of Iran’s missiles 

The situation for Israel becomes even more challenging if Iran joins the conflict, as the Islamic Republic possesses substantial stocks of short-range and medium-range missiles capable of reaching both Israel and US bases in the region.

The US and Israel often warn of the alleged threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, despite its civilian orientation, but seldom mention the threat posed by Iran’s burgeoning conventional missile program.

Israel’s actions express its worries more clearly than its words: in February of this year, Israel launched a drone attack against an Iranian military facility in Isfahan. According to Danny Yatom, a former head of the Mossad, the attack targeted a facility developing hypersonic missiles, which the New York Times described as “long-range munitions capable of traveling up to 15 times the speed of sound with terrifying accuracy.” 

A very different Palestinian resistance

In 1993, when Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn with President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Soviet Union had recently collapsed, while Iran was recovering from a bloody war with US-backed Iraq that killed one million people on both sides.

When Arafat signed the accords, accepting US and Israeli promises that they would pave the way for a future Palestinian state, the Palestinians had few allies they could rely on and were blindsided by Tel Aviv’s actual intentions to fragment and destroy the Palestinian nation.

Through Oslo, the US and Israel created the “shared fiction,” to use New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s words, that a Palestinian state would be established at some future date. According to Friedman, this allowed Israel to continue to confiscate land to build Jewish settlements, while the US could keep “peace hopes there just barely alive,” as cover.

But now, more than 40 years later, the Palestinians are not alone. They are part of a region-wide Resistance Axis that has defeated US and Israeli agendas in a number of West Asian states, gaining invaluable fighting, organizational, and planning experience alongside reliable allies. 

Meanwhile, the pile of recent US-side failures keeps mounting: Russia’s global clout spiked during the US proxy war in Ukraine; US adversaries China and Russia forged a multipolar world when Washington came at them; economic sanctions designed to cripple Russia and Iran only strengthened both states and sparked military collaborations. 

Crucially, Russia and Iran today possess the industrial capabilities to produce the military firepower the US and NATO cannot provide to allies in either Tel Aviv or Kiev.

Israel has already started the fight it may not be able to finish by declaring total war on Gaza’s civilian population, killing over 1,000, including hundreds of women and children, and flattening large swathes of the Gaza Strip in airstrikes. 

For Tel Aviv, Gaza has always been low-hanging fruit – the punching bag it seeks when it needs to look tough. But today, one misstep, one badly aimed missile, or one step too far, and Israel will face a regional war it cannot withstand for any significant period of time.

Update (2100ET): The Pentagon has ordered a second carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean Sea, according to two US officials, as Israel prepares to expand its Gaza operations.

The first carrier strike group, led by the USS Gerald R. Ford, arrived off the coast of Israel earlier this week.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on Saturday night that the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrying nine aircraft squadrons, as well as two guided-missile destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser, will soon join the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group in the region to “deter hostile actions against Israel or any efforts toward widening this war following Hamas’s attack on Israel.”

The Biden administration made clear that the carrier, and its accompanying force, are not there to engage in combat activities on behalf of Israel but rather to deter others from entering the conflict, including Hezbollah.

“The increases to US force Posture signal the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and our resolve to deter any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this war,” Austin stated.

Additionally, the US administration has so far ruled out sending military personnel into Gaza as part of any Israeli ground invasion or attempt to free American hostages there, only aiding the IDF with intelligence and operation planning.

*  *  *

Update (1330ET): The Israeli military has announced it is prepared for a coordinated air, ground and naval offensive in the Gaza Strip “very soon,” according to reports from AP.

In a nationally broadcast address Saturday night, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari issued a new appeal to residents to move to the southern Gaza Strip.

“We are going to broadly attack Gaza City very soon,” he said.

He accused Hamas of trying to use civilians as human shields.

Meanwhile, the social media rhetoric between leaders has gone to ’11’…

Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei expects a “complete victory”…

With God’s grace, this movement that has started in #Palestine will advance and result in a complete victory for the Palestinians.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) October 14, 2023

Calling on all Muslims to join the fight…

Everyone in the Muslim world has a duty to support the Palestinian people.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) October 14, 2023

Israeli PM Netanyahu made his views very clear:

Make no mistake, Israel will win. 🇮🇱 pic.twitter.com/QzOVxUJs6E

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 14, 2023

Live feeds below on Gaza: 

*  *  *

Israeli media is reporting a “greenlight” has been given for the expected major Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip as massive convoys of Palestinian civilians have been observed fleeing to the southern part of the densely populated strip. So far there has been limited ground incursions by the army into the strip, targeting Hamas operatives and reportedly to gain intelligence on the whereabouts of hostages. 

The United Nations has issued a report saying at least 423,000 Palestinians have already been internally displaced within Gaza and this massive figure is expected to ratchet further. Likely it has surpassed a half-million as of Saturday, following the Israeli-issued evacuation order, which included dropping thousands of leaflets and warnings over Gaza City. 

The UN said it “considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Middle East Eye and other regional sources have said over 700 Palestinian children were killed in one week of fighting. As of Friday Israel authorities tallied that over 1,300 Israelis were killed by the Hamas terror attacks on the southern settlements and the music festival, and rocket fire, with at least 3,200 wounded. 27 among the dead were Americans.

Middle East Eye on Saturday reports the following of the mounting Palestinian death toll in both Gaza and the West bank as follows:

Israel has killed at least 2,215 people in Gaza over the past week, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Of those killed, 724 are children and 458 are women. Some 8,714 people have been wounded in the besieged enclave in that time, it added. 

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have killed 54 people and wounded 1,100 others in the occupied West Bank.

According to a review of the last hours of developments, the population is about to run out of water as the remaining supply dwindles after Israel cut off external supply sources: 

• UN agency for Palestinian refugees says its shelters in Gaza “are not safe anymore” as it warns water running our for besieged enclave’s residents.
• More than 320 Palestinians have been killed in the past 24 hours, including many women and children killed in Israeli air raids on convoys fleeing Gaza City, according to health officials.
• The rising toll comes as Israel continues bombing Gaza a day after telling 1.1 million residents to head south ahead of a looming ground offensive following Hamas’s attack inside Israel last week.
• At least 2,215 Palestinians have been killed and 8,714 wounded in Israeli air attacks on Gaza. The number of people killed in Israel has reached 1,300, with more than 3,400 wounded.
• In the occupied West Bank, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in the past week has topped 50. More than 1,000 have been wounded and hundreds arrested.

🛑A matter of life and death: water runs out for 2 million people in Gaza

🛑 No humanitarian supplies have been allowed into Gaza for a week

“It is a must; fuel needs to be delivered now into📍#Gaza to make water available for 2 million people”https://t.co/StJVfFn3Xh pic.twitter.com/T1IhCP9C2w

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) October 14, 2023

The fate of the estimated 100 to 200 hostages in Hamas captivity still remains largely unknown, but Hamas in statements which have been underreported in Western press has claimed that over two dozen of the hostages have been killed by the IDF’s ongoing aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip: 

Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades said nine more captives were killed in indiscriminate Israeli shelling in the last 24 hours, including a number of foreigners. 

Qassam has previously announced the death of 17 captives in Israeli air stikes in Gaza over the past week. 

Sky News and others are also reporting, based on Israeli sources, that bodies of hostages have been recovered after some of the initial IDF infantry cross-border raids which began Friday into Saturday:

Raids carried out on the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces discovered human remains of those who had been missing since Hamas’s attack last weekend, local media is reporting.

According to Haaretz, armed forces entered an enclave where it is thought up to 200 people were being held hostage by Hamas, and retrieved the bodies of several people.

Items belonging to the missing people were also discovered. 

The US said Friday it chartered its first successful evacuation flight, with talk of more to come.

There are Americans (many of them likely dual nationals) among the population of Gaza, which Washington says it is trying to facilitate safe exit for as Israeli airstrikes continue. Dangerously, the lone Raffah border crossing into Egypt has at this point been bombed several times. 

But regional media is reporting there’s been a diplomatic breakthrough on this front, as Israel, Egypt, and the United States have forged an agreement to let foreigners residing in Gaza pass through the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

Scene from the frontlines as the IDF build-up outside Gaza continues:

🏃💨 pic.twitter.com/4OCL2h3zLF

— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) October 14, 2023

Huge civilian convoys have been witnessed fleeing to the southern half of Gaza, creating bottlenecks…

One of the main evacuation routes from northern Gaza, al-Rasheed street, is absolutely flooded with residents attempting to evacuate south.

This footage was taken just south of the IDF-declared demarcation line of Wadi Gaza. pic.twitter.com/EaUZc2tScW

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 14, 2023

The Times of Israel cites a senior Egyptian official as follows:

The official says Israel has agreed to refrain from striking areas the foreigners would pass through on their way out of the besieged Palestinian territory. He adds that Qatar was involved in the negotiations and the participants received approval from the Palestinian terror groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The agreement  does not deal with hostages being held by Hamas.

A second official at the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing point says they received “instructions” to reopen it on Saturday afternoon for foreigners coming from Gaza.

But Egypt is by and large not letting Gazans exit, even erecting bigger concrete barriers of extra border protection, amid what’s setting up to be a catastrophic humanitarian crisis as the Israeli pressure ratchets.

The IDF says it is about to attack the northern half of the Gaza Strip with “great force” – while the US and other countries are urging for caution regarding Palestinian civilians. Below is rare footage of an elite Israeli rescue squad in action (intentionally blurred by IDF sources):

Israeli operators from the Special Tactics Rescue Unit 669 conduct a combat casevac near Zikim beach.

(Rough subtitle translation) pic.twitter.com/uQ8IGiBWpE

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 14, 2023

Washington has still all the while said it “stands with Israel” – and has not tried to actually halt the unrelenting IDF bombardment of civilian areas.

Meanwhile, things continue ratcheting in south Lebanon, with reports of new strikes being exchanged between Israel and Hezbollah, and other pro-Palestinian factions.

Authored by Seth Allard via RealClear Wire,

“If the Marine Corps is mostly white males, why do we need to understand culture?”

I was shocked by the Defense Suicide Prevention Office pushback on exploring the role of culture in military suicide. But not surprised.

The study of suicide continues throttling towards the statistical and biomedical, leaving culture in the dust amid a continuing suicide epidemic. The prevention and research landscape resembles “Dragnet” – Psychiatrists, psychologists, epidemiologists, and AI-tech experts seeking ‘just the facts.’ But our ‘facts’ are incredibly incomplete.

“I think,” said researcher Craig Bryan, addressing the scarcity of cultural research, “one issue involves assumptions about the causes of suicide. I would argue that contemporary thinking about suicide is very biomedical in orientation and has become increasingly so over time. This bias almost certainly influences the availability of funds. A good portion of the research dollars have focused on developing and testing treatments and interventions to be delivered within healthcare systems. One could therefore argue that biomedical and clinical researchers have better access to resources to pursue such work.” Rajeev Ramschand at RAND echoed this sentiment in my article “Cultural Problems Require Cultural Solutions”, with three focus points for future research:

“What is the mental health culture in military settings and how does it vary? This would address questions beyond individual questions about stigma to understand how military personnel perceive mental health treatment, how leaders perceive treatment, how other support personnel (e.g., chaplains) see mental health treatment, and even how mental health providers perceive military-sponsored mental health treatment. What does the culture of mental illness look like in military settings?

“What is the culture of support in military settings? Beyond mental health, how strong and where are these deficiencies in cultures of support? Do people know when each other is struggling (relationally, alcohol use, financially) and do they offer support or ignore problems until they reach crisis points?

“How have needs changed? Does the new cohort of military recruits have norms and expectations that will require changing the ways the military “does business” and how? Is the current structure and operations across the military supportive for helping new recruits function well, thrive, and does it promote health and well-being?”

Bryan and Ramschand served on the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, providing 117 recommendations to DOD, duplicating many previous recommendations. Despite several mentions of culture – “greater care in the promotion and leadership selection process at all levels of the military could create a culture and environment that reduces vulnerability to suicide” – SPRIRC did not recommend shifting research from the biomedical and clinical to the cultural, which is tantamount to a trauma center treating gunshot victims while ignoring bullet holes.

“Suicide,” said Matt Miller, Executive Director of VA Suicide Prevention, during a Senate Committee hearing on Veteran suicide, “is a complex problem with a multifaceted interweaving of potential contributing factors. In addition to mental health risk factors for suicide, we must look at a broader array of other contributing factors such as sociocultural risk factors and health related social needs that are also associated with suicide ideation and attempts.” Despite acknowledgement of the complexity of suicide, academia, military leadership, and government institutions that oversee research and policy are deeply resistant to studying culture. Thomas Joiner, head of the federally funded Military Research Suicide Consortium – billed as “multidisciplinary,” despite being restricted to one profession – and editor of a top academic journal, actively prioritizes quantitative, clinical research to the detriment of less “rigorous” and therefore less valuable qualitative and cultural approaches to understanding suicide. Conventional suicidologists boil down suicide to statistically relevant risk and protective factors, seeking the “gold standard” of research – randomized control trials – to test clinical interventions. Such research removes “confounding factors” or messy aspects of behavior and environment that challenges accepted theories, making it less valid (or publishable).

The hyperfocus on clinical settings and interventions, to the exclusion of cultural perception and context, clearly explains our 20-year losing battle with military suicide. This willful blindness to cultural research is couched in academia’s culture of “publish or perish.” Obsessed with seeking grants, publishing papers in high impact factor journals, and getting tenure at major universities, most academics do not prioritize solving chronic health disparities. Like suicide itself, the burgeoning field of biomedically and risk centered suicide research shows no sign of slowing, presenting a disturbing correlation with increases in suicide.

This trend is aided by the Institutional Review Boards, oversight bodies that review research proposals in a highly complex and bureaucratic process of evaluating risks and benefits of research involving human subjects. Though refuted, DOD and VA IRB bodies make it extremely difficult to implement novel research and interventions. While the “Not Just A Number Act,” requires VA to provide “more comprehensive data regarding those who have committed suicide” and holistic picture of suicidal veterans’ interactions with the VA, this policy fails to incorporate the cultural perspective and lived experience of veterans, families, and even healthcare providers, let alone the culture of the VA itself.

While there are programs that attempt to prevent toxic climates from continuing, such as the Collaborative Assistance Team program stood up to “prevent ‘Another Fort Hood’,” these programs largely exclude in-depth cultural analysis and individuals with appropriate training, education, and aptitude for ethnography, the primary method for gaining in depth, contextual understanding of cultures and societies. Rather, such projects take an ‘organizational psychology’ tack and utilize SMEs with valuable, but limited awareness of ethnographic methods, confusing their results, (which can still be highly valuable), for ‘cultural research.’ It is also questionable how independently such projects and personnel operate or are seen by servicemembers.

Some leaders in the military and veteran community, however, step strongly into this cultural breach using creativity and organic resources and knowledge. Senior enlisted conduct service wide “listening sessions” and utilize social media and Reddit. Equipped with cultural experience and language, hundreds of Veteran-led nonprofits reach out directly to Veterans. Many Veterans enter government, administrative and public health roles to provide leadership from within. Such initiative, more than anything, holds suicide at bay, and highlights the bureaucratic and risk averse nature of military, healthcare, and policy arms of government. Real change in suicide prevention challenges the status quo, defies dysfunctional power structures – a missing piece of the puzzle also seen in military sexual assault.

My attempt to ‘give back’ by providing free culturally adapted Mental Health First Aid training to SOI (West) and prepare Marines to respond to mental health crises, was defeated by a risk averse climate, an excuse being that similar training exists in UMAPIT 3.0 training. Yet, MHFA is provided to civilian personnel, but not Marines, a reason being, one senior civilian personnel reviewing the proposal disclosed, “what if we talk about suicide and a Marine kill themselves?” It did not help that another leader at SOI East accused me of attempting to “experiment” on Marines. Despite support from two Chaplains, one high ranking in a nearby command, and the suicide prevention specialist, and facilitation by education and training staff, the proposal died. Yet, risk averse leadership torpedoed the training with unclear explanation. As for UMAPIT training – why would alternative training be supported on the ground if the current training were effective enough to prevent suicide? Could the answer be that required training are commonly designed and delivered as “check the box bull****” that fails to empower Marines and prevent suicide? Let the reader view a clip of UMAPIT 3.0 to see how inspirational and skills based the training is.

In 2018 I approached Joiner at a conference, a veteran speaking to someone with great influence over suicide research and advocating for more focus on servicemembers’ lived experience and perspective on mental health and suicide. His response? About a minute-long silent stare down. The need to understand culture did not register with a leading suicidologist, just as servicemembers’ and veterans’ experiences are not registered by bureaucrats or academics. Working with America’s Warrior Partnership, I learned that Veteran suicides themselves often do not register, instead chalked up as overdoses. We are seen through the sanitized lens of statistics and genetics, a walking infographic of risk and protective factors, data to be mined, not as complex, ever evolving, highly social creatures who possess strengths. Bryan described his experience with the SPRIRC changing his view of suicide and the contributing quality of life issues in the military as a “death by a thousand paper cuts.” The only force that causes death by a thousand paper cuts is culture. It is the ethical responsibility of researchers and policy makers, when their framework for understanding and solving problems is proven ineffective and the problem is out of their scope, to include new working strategies and people who do have the right tools.

As retired General Steve Salazar, president of leadership training organization 360MVP, says, we must focus on “Making the Strong Stronger.” During a visit by Senator Angus King’s staff, an airman and self-described “wrench turner,” emphasized that mental health challenges are unique to specific occupations and environments. This insight informed provisions backed by King that requires suicide reporting by branch and occupation. What a retired General and a serving “wrench turner” recognize, which we must recognize, is that lived experience, cultural context, and our strengths must be incorporated proactively to produce working solutions. As one of my teachers, Jessica Harrington, from the Health Policy Research Scholars program at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, says, “Policy without people becomes politics.” What culturally centered and collaborative research can accomplish, and clinical approaches cannot, is realignment of suicide prevention and research with a humanistic approach that is not beholden to a risk-averse or stuck mindset.

It is past time to look into the mirror, face the ugliness of dysfunctional institutions and their cultural antecedents, become conscious of problems and our participation in them, and do the work of change, which reflects a time-honored tradition of ethical and disciplined warrior practice. I do not know if those in authority possess the courage to accomplish this task. With a legislative requirement to incorporate cultural research and collaborative partnerships with troops on the ground, and a working system to ensure that policies like “Not Just a Number” are implemented with intent and effect, we can save lives. Until then, it is up to us as the military and veteran community to save ourselves.

Seth Allard is a former Marine Infantryman (2004 – 2009, active), a PhD student of social work at Wayne State University, and a member of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Seth’s focus is on both Native American and Military/Veteran suicide and mental health, and cultural approaches to understanding and preventing suicide and improving mental health. He has published with Marine Corps University Press, Marine Gazette, Routledge Press, and the Havok Journal. He is also a Health Policy Research Scholar with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is continuing his education in clinical social work intern with the Veterans Justice Outreach program at the VA Ann Arbor.

Authored by Jack Hellner via AmericanThinker.com,

As far as I can tell, anyone who supports Trump – say, Jim Jordan – is labeled hard right. 

So which policies made Trump far-right, according to the media and other Democrats?

Enforcing border laws that Congress passed and building a wall?  The public seems to support that, so that would be a middle-of-the-road policy. 

Opposes sanctuary cities and states.  It appears that the leftists who claimed they were sanctuaries are rethinking their disastrous policies.

Being tough on crime instead of supporting soft-on-crime D.A.s.  That is not unpopular. 

Supporting limits on abortion.  Two thirds of Americans support limiting abortion to the first thirteen or fifteen weeks, just like Europe. 

Supporting lower tax rates and fewer regulations.  Those are not unpopular positions.  In fact, they lifted up the people at the bottom of the economic ladder.  Real wages rose rapidly, and poverty hit a record low at the end of 2019.  How can that be hard right? 

Opposing the teaching that the U.S. is a racist country.

Trump repeatedly denounced white supremacists just like almost all Americans. 

Trump didn’t want people to be fired for refusing to take a vaccine just like most Americans. 

Trump moved rapidly to get schools and businesses back open after the initial shutdown.  That is certainly not a far-right position. 

Trump supports school choice for the poor, just like the majority of Americans, especially minorities.  

Trump opposes allowing men to compete against women, just like most Americans.  He opposes allowing men to expose themselves in women’s locker rooms.

Trump supported drilling and energy independence.  That kept inflation low and helped the poor, the middle class, and small businesses. 

Trump does not believe that climate change is the greatest existential threat. 

Trump sought to make NATO pay what they were supposed to.  Why would that be an unpopular policy or far-right? 

Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, just as Congress and previous presidents had promised. 

Trump put a squeeze on Iran.  Why would it be far-right to cut off funding from a country that pledges death to America and death to Israel? 

Trump and his son-in-law made great progress in the Middle East with the Abraham accords.  That certainly is not hard-right. 

Trump challenged the 2020 election, just like how Democrats challenged the 2000, 2004, and 2016 election.  There is nothing far-right about challenging elections. 

Trump told people to march peacefully and patriotically to the capital to protest the election.  What is far-right about peace and patriotism?

Trump told the Germans they were stupid to rely on Russia for their energy.  He was right. 

Putin has attacked Ukraine while Obama and Biden were president, not Trump. 

Trump asked Ukraine to investigate the Bidens for corruption.  It would be a dereliction of duty for a president to learn of corruption and not investigate.  Sadly, the media and other Democrats impeached him for doing his job. 

Basically, Republicans like Trump and Jordan are called far-right by the media and other Democrats to intentionally mislead the public, just as they did with the fictional Russian collusion story. 

Democrats don’t want to debate their leftist policies because they are unpopular so they always go to the same playbook.  Call Republicans sexists, bigots, racists, and far- or hard-right.  They sure don’t care that the corrupt Clintons and Bidens have lined their pockets with illegal kickbacks for years.