Hidden Strength: South Sudan

Directed by Akuol de Mabir (2025)

Film Review

Link: Hidden Strength: South Sudan

Nine years after the 2013-2016 civil that led it to separate from Sudan, South Sudan is the world’s youngest country, as well as the world poorest. It’s economy is almost totally informal, which means its government has no registration or tax records for its businesses – and no record of the wealth they generate. Increasingly South Sudan’s informal sector also provides public service, including schooling.

The filmmakers interview a number of women who have started small businesses – restaurants, tea shops, car washes, market stalls, etc – because income their husbands earn in the formal sector is inadequate to support the family. One woman started a small business when husband abandoned the family to marry a second wife.

All the women complain about their businesses becoming sluggish due to massive increases in commodity prices.

Unlike the formal sector, South Sudan’ informal sector has better access to resources owing to a large pre-existing social network. This often helps them source commodities and lower prices.

The filmmakers also interview a man who runs a water delivery business. He has a college degree and formerly worked as an administrator but couldn’t make ends meet because many pubic sector employees haven’t been paid in nine months.

At present the major of government sector employees rely on the informal sector to survive. Political analysts credit the robust informal sector with preventing a famine in South Sudan.

Dmitry Orlov

As you may or may not know, Donald Trump was elected to do a job. If you think that this job is to try to Make America Great Again (MAGA), then that’s a piece of false information you will need to unlearn. There is no known force in the universe that can make a country with a GDP of $30 trillion and total public debt of around $150 trillion anything other than bankrupt. The rough $150 trillion number is federal debt of $37 trillion plus non-discretionary spending which was written into laws that Congress is afraid to touch and which now amounts to quite close to 3/4 of all federal spending.

It also amounts to roughly 3/4 of all the value held within the United States by its governments (state, federal, local), its corporations, its banks and its citizens. When that debt goes “Poof!” — as it inevitably will — and, consequently, the payments either stop or are rendered worthless by inflation, Americans, on average, will lose 3/4 of their wealth, although it is far more likely that most people will lose just about everything — through a combination of economic depression and hyperinflation — while the rich will continue to get richer.

[…]

So, what is Trump to do? To answer this question, all we need to do is to examine who stuck him there. And it turns out that it was a bunch of billionaires!  The reason they would want to stick him in the White House is obvious: they have the information I outlined in the preceding paragraph and want to use the time that remains to stop being billionaires and to start being trillionaires. The clever way they thought up of doing it is by having Trump rock the financial markets back and forth, telegraphing his moves to his friends ahead of time, so that they could use insider trading tricks to buy the lows and sell the highs, getting richer each time.

For a time, Trump was doing rather well by them. His first ploy was to use tariffs. He would announce ridiculously high, punitive-prohibitive tariffs against this or that country, with the rationale that the country in question was running a trade surplus with the United States and that this was somehow unfair. Businesses reliant on imports for their revenue would rush to stock up on imported products before the tariffs kicked in. Then their stock prices dove, giving Trump’s billionaire friends a chance to snap them up cheaply. But then Trump would announce a delay during which a deal could be worked out with the country in question and importers’ stock price would recover, giving Trump’s billionaire friends a chance to unload them profitably. But then enough people realized what was going on and this trick stopped working.

And so Trump tried another ploy. He would force officials from countries that are essentially US colonies — have US troops stationed on their soil and are under tight political and financial control by the US — to sign ridiculous deals according to which they agreed to buy huge nonexistent quantities of US oil and gas for which they had no use and to invest huge, nonexistent quantities of money in nonexistent US industries. The list of US-occupied vassal countries includes all of the European Union, the UK, Japan and South Korea. These manipulations would once again present wonderful insider trading opportunities for those who knew the details of the deals beforehand and could trade stocks and futures profitably… before everyone realized that the deals are all fake.

Along the way, Trump also attempted to rock the energy markets by threatening to impose 100% tariffs on all US-bound exports from any country that bought oil or gas from Russia. Since Russia’s exports of just the oil amount to 3.5 million barrels a day — a quantity which the other oil producers would be hard-pressed to make up for — Trump’s billionaire friends could have theoretically profited from a large spike in oil prices. But then the two largest importers of Russian energy — China and India — told Trump to go pound sand and the plan fell through.

Trump could have come up with some other, similar plans, such as threatening the world with starvation by blocking Russian grain exports (Russia exports grain to over 100 countries) and have his billionaire friends profit from a huge spike in grain prices, who would buy up grain futures ahead of his announcement and sell them at the peak. But then Trump lost his mind.

He probably lost his mind well before then, but it only became blatantly obvious now. What triggered him was a social media post by Dmitry Medvedev, vice-chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. He also has some people on his staff who troll people whom the Russians generally don’t like. Everybody knows that this is a bit risqué and somewhat inappropriate, but it’s good for the morale. Responding to Trump’s shortening the already ridiculous 50-day timeline for “ending the Ukraine war” to just 10 (or 12?) days, Medvedev’s little troll army wrote:

“Trump’s playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 days or 10. He should remember 2 things: 1. Russia isn’t Israel or even Iran. 2. Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.”

Trump responded: “Tell Medvedev, the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he’s still President, to watch his words. He’s entering very dangerous territory!” This is already quite bad: here’s the supposed “leader of the free world” (to use that old epithet one last time) being triggered by an internet troll.

But then Trump went from just inappropriate to something truly ridiculous, shifting a social media flame war with an internet troll to the domain of nuclear deterrence: “I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”

This is not an appropriate response. This is a careless, unreasonable and downright demented reaction. Medvedev’s trolls’ reaction to Trump’s reaction was measured and calm: “If some words of the former Russian president cause such a nervous reaction in the entire, formidable US president, it means that Russia is right in everything and will continue to go its own way.”

What Trump ordered to have done in response to a fairly obvious point made by Team Medvedev (which is that serving an ultimatum to a nuclear power is ipso facto a nuclear escalation) is not only illegal but reckless. The US is not ready for a nuclear confrontation with Russia and probably never will be again.

The “two Nuclear Submarines” (sic.) Trump refers to are Cold War era relics of which only 14 are left, built between 1981 and 1997 and carrying Trident and Tomahawk missiles. Meanwhile, Russia has updated its nuclear submarine fleet by 100%, outperforming the obsolescent US fleet in all direct indicators of efficiency while upgrading its missile defenses to a point where old Tridents and Tomahawks are no longer too much of a challenge. On the other hand, the US has no means to intercept the new Russian missiles. Therefore, even if Demented Admiral Trump were to send two nuclear submarines to threaten blogger Medvedev in his Kremlin lair, and even if he were to send all the ancient tubs out on patrol, nothing in the arithmetic of mutual deterrence would be changed. But could he have?

No, he couldn’t have. Because over the past thirty years a comfortably sedate pattern has been established for the Cold War remains of the American nuclear submarine fleet of the Ohio class: four or five submarines loiter about in designated patrol areas. These are, as everyone who is interested can pinpoint with arbitrary precision, in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans while in the Indian Ocean their acoustic signatures have not been detected in a very long time. The same number of these venerable tubs is to be found in a state of conditional combat readiness in the vicinity of certain US naval bases, undergoing extensive maintenance and major repairs. Once these efforts succeed, the tubs are fumigated, ventilated, new crews are trained, and off they go into the Atlantic and the Pacific to entertain the seamen of the world’s maritime powers with their clangs, creaks and groans as they loiter about.

The remaining vessels are suffering from senility, arthritis, prostatitis and other age-related ailments and reside at the various naval hospices, where they remain… you guessed it, “conditionally combat-ready.” Supposing they could be made to move, where would Admiral Trump send a couple of conditionally combat-ready nuclear submarines to sufficiently terrify blogger Medvedev into never trolling Admiral Trump again? To the Arctic? Let’s be serious, the American subs have no competencies for navigating under the ice, which is now routine for Russian ones. Instead, they could drift aimlessly around the North Sea, periodically being hailed in Russian-accented English by nearby surface ships curious to know whether they have been able to pinpoint the whereabouts of the errant blogger Medvedev.

Who can tell what is eating away at Trump’s mind to such an extent that he threatens a nuclear response to a perfectly reasonable bit of trolling from a known troll farm? Perhaps it’s his billionaire friends clamoring for more insider trading schemes. Or perhaps it’s the fact that he’s got his privates stuck in a Ukrainian vise between “It’s Biden’s war” and “It’s Putin’s victory — and Trump’s defeat.” Or it’s simply time for his brain to be decommissioned. His father and his older sister both went senile around his current age. Alzheimer’s was the diagnosis, I vaguely recall to have overheard somewhere.

Maybe it’s that, or maybe in his case it’s frontal lobe dementia. Empathy and emotional stability are particularly vulnerable to neurodigenerative disorders affecting the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and some of Trump’s symptoms, such as thinking it would be a good idea to build a Trump Gaza Resort and Casino, or to send nuclear subs to settle a score with a Russian internet troll, manifest specific problems with empathy and with self-control.

[…]

Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/1767ce21-2079-4671-9fc8-cf0ff8b0ead9

By David Bell August 2, 2025

American healthcare is currently providing us with an excellent lesson in what capitalism looks like in the absence of a moral framework. The biggest losers are America’s children.

The Union Profiting from Childhood Sickness

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the major professional association of North American pediatricians, has overseen the rising rates of chronic illness and medicating of American children over recent decades. With 67,000 members in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, AAP distinguished itself during Covid-19 for its strident insistence that children’s faces should be covered and they should be injected with modified RNA vaccines, despite knowing from early 2020 that severe Covid-19 was very rare in healthy children.

Funded by sources including Moderna, Merck, Sanofi, GSK, Eli Lilly, and other pharmaceutical companies, the AAP’s members are the cornerstone of the rapidly increasing pediatric pharma market in North America – by far greater than any other region. As a professional organization dedicated to ensuring income for its members, the AAP is like any similar professional association or union and acts in this manner.

The loss of trust in the medical profession since 2020 is fortunately removing the misconception that AAP-like medical societies were primarily altruistic, dedicated to the welfare of others rather than their members. The recent publication of AAP priorities, developed by its membership, should reinforce this loss of trust and so, despite its unusual callousness of approach, serve ultimately to strengthen public health by exposing more clearly the motivations of those profiting from rising illness.

Setting Priorities to Ensure Long-Term Profit

The AAP’s first stated priority is to remove parents from any authority when it comes to decisions on whether to inject their children with various substances produced commercially by its sponsors. While this should be ridiculous, it has some chance of succeeding as the ultimate beneficiaries, apart from pediatricians, are the same pharmaceutical manufacturers who heavily sponsor the election campaigns of most members of the US Congress.

Of relevance, promoting or abetting chronic disease in children ensures almost certain chronic disease through adulthood. The AAP is therefore helping to set up lifelong pharmaceutical consumers. Pharma companies are purely for-profit entities, and this is exactly what their CEOs and executives are charged by their shareholders with promoting. The AAP is simply acting as a very willing enabler.

The AAP considers that bodily autonomy is subservient to State-imposed requirements and that the post-World War II human rights of non-coercion and informed consent are subservient to the opinion of someone receiving money to perform an injection. Its approach coincides with the pre-War technocracy movement or medical fascism (in which a declared ‘expert’ decides on imposing healthcare measures rather than the patient themselves choosing it).

However, before discussing bodily autonomy and coerced medicine further, it is worth commenting on the priority list of the AAP overall, as it is fascinating, coming from a group that insists publicly on prioritizing the health of children.

Firstly, what is not there. Among the ten priorities of the AAP of which the elimination of parental rights or religious or cultural exemptions over vaccination of children is the highest, there is not a single mention of what are perhaps the three most prominent issues facing children today, and widely discussed publicly; increasing obesity and the epidemic of autism that the CDC heralds as of extraordinary proportions. While the AAP notes this problem elsewhere, it concentrates on identification and management rather than cause identification. Nowhere among its ten priorities is there any expression of interest in identifying and addressing the causes of rising chronic illness. The closest is a mention of lower costs for childhood insulin injections. The AAP’s priority list ignores diet and reducing levels of physical activity while actively promoting medicalization, seemingly oblivious to the quite catastrophic reduction in health status of the very populations they claim to be serving.

Unsurprisingly for a purely marketing organization, but inconsistent with a science-based healthcare body, the priorities include nothing regarding very obvious concerns of the impact of over 70 vaccinations, with their associated adjuvants and preservatives, now given to children by ten years of age. This number has grown from just a few 40 years ago in association with the deterioration in child health outcomes. The only interest expressed in vaccines is to remove choice from those concerned about such things, and force compliance. For a society of thinking, truth-seeking people this would be extraordinary.

Parents as an Obstacle to Return on Investment

The justification reported from AAP President Kyle E. Yasuda, M.D., FAAP for removing any remaining personal choice regarding prophylactic medical treatment (vaccination) is “the measles outbreaks” in North America in recent years. Jesse Hackell, MD, chair of the AAP’s Committee on Pediatric Workforce, notes that they were associated with the deaths of two children, the first in “many years.” The AAP simply states, regarding safety, that vaccines are “safe,” a stupid claim in medicine and biology in that adverse events do occur to injected organic substances and metal salts, and they vary from person to person (if rare events occur, then ‘safe’ is a relative term). Associations with recent DTP injection and sudden infant death are, for example, fairly well documented.

Regarding measles, it is likely that many AAP members mean well, but are genuinely misinformed regarding the impact of mass vaccination. In wealthy countries including the United States, nearly all measles mortality ceased before mass vaccination was commenced. This is not controversial – it was once stressed in medical school and is well established in national health statistics. An underlying improvement in nutrition, particularly in micronutrient deficiencies, was a likely reason. Mass vaccination then greatly reduced circulation of the measles virus, but could have only a limited impact on overall mortality. Therefore, weighing costs of vaccination (adverse events) against a very low likelihood of averting early death or disability is a real issue, and to ignore it by just reiterating ‘safe and effective’ is ignorant and foolish.

Measles vaccination is good at stopping transmission because it is very effective at preventing infections from being established. This efficacy is significant to the argument that having many vaccinated is a public good. Nearly all vaccinated people will be protected, and at no risk from the unvaccinated. Thus, mass measles vaccination really only makes sense if it is accepted that people should not have freedom to choose over their own bodies and healthcare, or that of their children. The very low measles mortality, far lower than drowning even before mass vaccination commenced in the United States, effectively removed an argument for overriding parental rights. Unless, of course, we are also going to ban children from swimming or walking near rivers or on a beach.

Lastly, regarding concerns over vaccination, many parents are uncomfortable with the role of cells harvested from induced aborted fetuses, often still alive at the time of harvesting. Again, many AAP members may believe the rhetoric that this is untrue, but nonetheless it is factual. It is how we derive cell cultures to develop many vaccines, so the DNA of these dead unborn humans can still contaminate the injection. The AAP, as an institution, officially holds that cultural and religious concerns arising from this should be overridden.

So, in the end, the AAP’s argument seems to come down to one of two possible drivers.  Either (1) they have an ideological belief that they should simply be the authority or decision-makers on children’s healthcare rather than parents (a medical-fascist approach), or (2) they see their role as promoting an extremely lucrative market for their sponsors, from which they also directly benefit, and setting children up for an entire lifetime of chronic illness and pharmaceutical consumption. It is challenging to decide which is less noble.

A third possibility is also possible. Most AAP members are simply going with the flow and have not actually stopped to think through the implications of their union’s policies. However, the motivation for willfully ignoring rational thought probably does come down to a mixture of money and ego, which goes back to the two potential drivers mentioned above.

Medical Fascism Should Have No Future

The AAP will almost certainly continue its path of child polypharmacy, blind adherence to protocols based on the products of their sponsors, and denigration and exclusion of the opinions of parents who recognize the stark reality of deteriorating health in North American children. Parents reading the AAP’s list of priorities would be foolhardy to then entrust their children to such care. Providing that politicians retain integrity and respect freedoms that most assumed were guaranteed in the US Constitution and through basic human rights norms, the AAP will fail in its endeavors and become increasingly irrelevant to public discourse. If they get their way, we will return further toward an approach we thought we had fought wars to overcome.

Fundamental rights of each human to make their own way in life, and protect and oversee their children, underpin any decent societal model. In fascist societies, such decisions are removed and taken into the hands of experts and authoritarian institutions. The people must simply comply as slaves. Medical professions and their academies have a long history of supporting such approaches, and the AAP seems increasingly determined to replicate that path. It should receive all the respect that such an indecent approach deserves.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/the-american-society-of-pediatrics-mining-children-for-profit/

By Wyatt Reed – August 1, 2025

In the course of a week, Canada accused Israel of violating international law, announced Ottawa will recognize a Palestinian state, and sent aid to be airlifted to Gaza. But a shocking new report makes clear that the proposed 51st state still arms Israel’s death machine.

Canada sent at least 391 shipments containing bullets, military equipment, weapons parts, aircraft components, and communication devices to Israel since late 2023, despite Ottawa’s repeated claims to have ended weapons deliveries to the apartheid state, a new report has revealed.

By sifting through data from the Israel Tax Authority, researchers at Arms Embargo Now discovered what they called “a continuous, massive pipeline of Canadian weapons flowing directly to Israel” comprising over 400,000 bullets, multiple shipments of cartridges, and a variety of parts for Israel’s fleet of F-35 fighter jets. Since mid-2024, Israel received four shipments of Doppler Velocity Sensors, which provide navigation data needed for the F-35’s target acquisition and weapons delivery systems, five shipments of lightweight composite panels used by the planes, and two shipments of Modular Product Testers, which are used to diagnose problems on Israel’s air force fleet.

Of the 391 deliveries identified, the report’s authors were able to track direct 47 shipments of military gear with detailed commercial shipping records sent by Canadian companies to Israeli companies. 38 of those shipments were sent to Israel’s biggest military firm, Elbit Systems, and its various subsidiaries.

In March 2024, the previous Canadian administration claimed to have halted all permits for arms shipments to Tel Aviv, after the legislature passed a non-binding motion declaring that “Israel must respect international humanitarian law” and that “the price of defeating Hamas cannot be the continuous suffering of all Palestinian civilians.” In the following months, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insisted Canada no longer facilitated Israel’s horrors, going as far as publicly chiding one concerned Palestinian, “we’ve stopped exports of arms to Israel.”

But just before the apparent shift in policy, Ottawa greenlit a massive number of permits for Israeli-bound weapons deliveries, front-loading hundreds of orders in an apparent attempt to preemptively circumvent their own ban. Of the $30.6 million in military equipment sent to Israel in 2023 – the highest yearly total on record – $28.5 million was approved between October and December. Even today, many of those shipments continue to be fulfilled. To date, just 30 permits for military deliveries have been cancelled by Canada, which made that decision following a similar move by the UK in mid-2024 after the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel was violating international law.

“The Canadian government appears to have pursued a strategy of rushing through a record-breaking number of arms export permit approvals to Israel prior to publicly committing to pause approving any new ones,” Arm Embargo Now explained in their report. “This was then quietly undermined by a series of exceptions and loopholes,” researchers wrote, suggesting “the government’s policy shifts were… aimed at diffusing public criticism while maintaining material support.”

Other Canadian institutions to have assisted Israel’s genocidal siege include a number of its universities. A separate report published by Just Peace Advocates found that in 2023 up to $100 million went completely untaxed as it was funneled to Israeli universities from their ‘charitable’ arms in Canada. The money went to a variety of schools with strong ties to occupation forces, including Israel’s self-described “academic home of soldiers,” Bar-Ilan University, which took in around $4 million that year.

In addition, nearly $17 million was sent tax-free to Ben-Gurion University in 2023, which bragged of having “transformed itself into a back office for war” in October that year. Months later, Ben-Gurion announced the creation of two new “elite academic programs for future [Israeli military] recruits, as part of preparations for the transfer of IDF technological units to southern Israel.” The university says it works “in tandem” with the Israeli Air Force Flight School and claims to have trained around 1,000 pilots for military service.

Also receiving untaxed funds was Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, which has been described as “the incubator of most nuclear weapons work in Israel.” Weizmann has well-documented ties to a variety of Israeli spies implicated in efforts to steal nuclear secrets, and drew international attention after it was partially destroyed in a retaliatory Iranian airstrike on June 15.

According to Just Peace Advocates, Canadian sources delivered over $36 million to the Weizmann Institute in 2023.

[…]

Via https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/canada-still-arming-israel-despite

United States Department of State logo and U.S. flag are seen in this illustration taken April 23, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

By Susan Heavey and Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON, July 31 (Reuters) – The U.S. imposed sanctions on Palestinian Authority officials and members of the Palestine Liberation Organization on Thursday, accusing them of undermining peace efforts with Israel even as other Western powers moved toward recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The State Department said it would deny visas for travel to the U.S. by those it was targeting, although it did not name any specific individuals.

“It is in our national security interests to impose consequences and hold the PLO and PA accountable for not complying with their commitments and undermining the prospects for peace,” the State Department said in a statement.

The State Department said the two Palestinian organizations had “taken actions to internationalize” their conflict with Israel, including through the International Criminal Court, and said both had continued “to support terrorism.”

The PA and PLO serve as representatives for the Palestinian people and have long pushed for recognition of a Palestinian state by international organizations and foreign nations. The two groups had no immediate comment on the U.S. move.

There are signs of a growing diplomatic divide over Palestinian statehood between Washington and three fellow Group of Seven allies.

Late on Wednesday, Canada said it planned to recognize the State of Palestine at a meeting of the United Nations in September, ratcheting up pressure on Israel as starvation spreads in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

France said last week it would back Palestinian statehood and Britain said on Tuesday it would do the same at September’s U.N. General Assembly meeting if the fighting in Gaza had not stopped by then

U.S. President Donald Trump has insisted that recognition of Palestinian statehood would wrongly reward Hamas, the militant group that is battling Israel in the Gaza Strip. Since returning to office in January, he has been vague about his position on a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Israel has denounced the moves by France, Britain and Canada.

‘MORAL DISTORTION’

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, in a post on X, thanked the U.S. for its “moral clarity” in sanctioning the Palestinian officials, saying the action “also exposes the moral distortion of certain countries that ran to recognise a virtual Palestinian state while turning a blind eye to its support for terror and incitement.”

State Department deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott declined to say whether Thursday’s U.S. action was linked to or in retaliation for the three countries’ plans to recognize the State of Palestine.

Asked about the timing, he told a regular media briefing that the sanctions resulted from a report to Congress from a twice-a-year review of Palestinian compliance with their commitments.

It was not immediately clear how the U.S. visa ban would affect Palestinian diplomats.

Under the 1947 U.N. “headquarters agreement,” the U.S. is generally required to allow access for foreign diplomats to the U.N. in New York. But Washington has said it can deny visas for security, terrorism and foreign policy reasons.

Pigott said waivers of the visa sanctions could be considered on a case-by-case basis.

The U.S. sanctions follow an international conference this week at the U.N., hosted by France and Saudi Arabia, that aimed to work towards a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel and the U.S. boycotted the event.

Also on Thursday, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a bid to salvage Gaza truce talks and tackle a humanitarian crisis in the enclave, where a global hunger monitor has warned that famine is unfolding.

The Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led fighters stormed southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, Israel’s offensive has killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to Gaza health officials, reduced much of the enclave to ruins and displaced nearly the entire population.

[…]

Via https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-imposes-visa-sanctions-palestinian-authority-officials-plo-members-2025-07-31/

The cuts quickly affected over 177 recipient countries, cutting off critical supplies of food and medicine, and shutting down treatment centers to tackle HIV and the prevention of other diseases. Amid the cuts, the Trump administration also ordered the burning of about 500 metric tons of food meant to feed families and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which sparked outrage online.

Now, in their continued shift away from providing foreign assistance, the Trump administration is set to incinerate $9.7 million worth of contraceptives intended for poor nations, despite offers from the United Nations and a nonprofit organization to purchase or cover the cost of repackaging and shipping the supplies, according to a Reuters report.

Per the report, the US government will spend $167,000 to incinerate the supplies, which include contraceptive implants, pills, and intrauterine devices that are due to expire between April 2027 and September 2031. The US State Department said no condoms or HIV medications would be destroyed. The supplies, currently stored in a Belgian warehouse since the January aid freeze, are being shipped to France for incineration.

In a statement with Reuters, the Belgian foreign ministry said they “explored all possible options to prevent the destruction, including temporary relocation” with US authorities. “Despite these efforts, and with full respect for our partners, no viable alternative could be secured. Nevertheless, Belgium continues to actively seek solutions to avoid this regrettable outcome,” they said.

According to NPR, the $9.7 million in contraceptives could have provided pregnancy prevention for over 650,000 people for up to one year, and as many as 950,000 people for three to ten years, depending on the contraceptive method.

Axios reported that a US State Department spokesperson cited several policies that prohibit the government from providing abortion-related assistance to foreign organizations as the reason for refusing to donate the contraceptive supplies. Reuters, citing a source, reported that the decision was made in accordance with the Mexico City policy, an anti-abortion measure Trump reinstated in January that bars the US from funding or working with organizations that offer or support access to abortion.

The decision has drawn widespread backlash. Two Democratic senators, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Sen. Brian Schatz, have introduced legislation, the “Saving Lives and Taxpayer Dollars Act,” to try to prevent foreign assistance commodities like food and medical devices, including the $10 million in contraceptives, from being destroyed or wasted. “This isn’t just wasteful, it’s cruel,” Sen. Shaheen wrote on X.

Beth Davidson, a county legislator in New York, called the story “bizarre” and warned that without access to contraceptive care, more women and girls will be forced to turn to unsafe abortions, increasing the risk of maternal death. She wrote, “Women and girls abroad with unintended pregnancies will seek unsafe abortions. Women and girls will die. Trump would rather waste taxpayer dollars than prevent maternal deaths. Just more of the hypocrisy and misogyny that will forever define the Trump administration and everyone who stands by him. Shameful.”

The public is not too pleased either.

“It would actually cost less to deliver them than to burn them, so this is just pure spite,” one person said on Reddit. “Hell, offer to sell them for about the cost of burning them, at least someone would benefit.”

[…]

Via https://ca.news.yahoo.com/pure-evil-everyone-losing-over-225356892.html

A Midwestern Doctor
Aug 01, 2025

Reviewing the critical but largely forgotten lessons from the early pioneers of natural medicine

[…]

Medicine has its fair share of erroneous beliefs (which frequently have little to no evidence supporting them). Sadly, my profession has held tightly onto them for centuries regardless of the problems those beliefs create and I believe the vaccination meme is one of the most harmful ones.

As all of this began with the smallpox vaccines which “ended” the scourge of smallpox, I believe it’s critical to review exactly what actually happened as:

•The mythology of the smallpox vaccines has served as the justification for all the other vaccination atrocities which followed.

•Many issues emerged during that campaign (resulting in immense public backlash) which are almost identical to what we’ve seen again and again since then (including throughout COVID-19). As such, to break this dysfunctional cycle which has consumed our culture, it is critical to understand what’s actually happened.

•I believe the smallpox vaccines served as an inflection point in humanity’s health, as after them, an era of chronic illness (particularly autoimmune and neurologic ones) began which has continued to increase ever since. In fact, many of the unusual complications of the COVID-19 vaccines are very similar to what was observed from the smallpox vaccine over a century ago.

The Vaccine Positive Feedback Cycle

Edward Jenner is credited with having the insight milk maids exposed to cowpox never caught smallpox, and hence that smallpox could be prevented with a survivable cowpox infection. In truth, this was a longstanding folk belief the medical community had rejected (as cowpox often failed to prevent smallpox), and over the years, many came forward attesting that Jenner was a charlatan who continually changed his positions to protect his grift (detailed here).

As such, when the smallpox vaccine created in 1796, it was met with widespread skepticism by the medical profession initially because it had almost no supporting data and because it simply didn’t work. Nonetheless, governments around the world rapidly adopted it because it provided a simple top-down solution (something government always prefers) for smallpox and the medical profession gradually got behind it because of both the political power and money they received from the vaccinations.

Many doctors still spoke out against the vaccine, with many providing robust data to support their objections (e.g., large cohorts showed the vaccine did not prevent smallpox and erysipelas, an agonizing and sometimes fatal skin infection, was commonly observed in vaccinated individuals). Sadly, these dissident doctors became a smaller and smaller minority and reports exist from the time of doctors in the early hospitals falsifying medical records in order to conceal the vaccine’s dangers and its ineffectiveness in preventing smallpox (something which has since happened with many other vaccines for the sake of “public health”).

However, the largest problems with the smallpox vaccine was that vaccination tended to increase rather than decrease the occurrence of smallpox.

[…]

When this happened, governments tended to respond to that emergency by viewing it as a result of not enough people being vaccinated and doing what they could to increase vaccination rates. Since the working class was well aware of both the dangers of the smallpox vaccine and its ineffectiveness, harsher and harsher mandates needed to be implemented to continue meeting the vaccination quotas.

As things continued to escalate, assaults on officers enforcing vaccination occurred, and riots periodically broke out.

[…]

At the same time increasingly draconian mandates were being enacted, many early activists argued that smallpox and many other infectious diseases were primarily due to the common people living in absolute squalor.

[…]

After decades of work, activists were able to improve the basic living conditions of the working class (e.g., through public sanitation so people no longer slept next to infectious microbes) and a massive benefit was seen in the reduction of deaths from all infectious diseases.

[…]

The medical profession however coopted the activist’s work and claimed the reduction in deaths was due to the introduction of vaccination, something not at all supported by the data (e.g., scarlet fever, the biggest killer of the era but now an almost entirely forgotten condition never had a vaccination developed for it). Since this time, the belief that medicine rescued us from the dark ages of infectious illness and that all infections can be prevented with a vaccination has become one of the central mythologies the practice modern medicine is founded upon.

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In response to the increasingly draconian vaccination mandates, a massive protest (attended by citizens across Europe) broke out in Leicester (England) in 1885 which resulted in Leicester’s mandatory vaccination laws being repealed and replaced with measures to both improve public sanitation and quarantine both individuals with smallpox (along with their sick contacts). When this approach was proposed by Leicester, the medical profession attacked the citizens of Leicester, loudly proclaimed their policy would result in mass deaths and stated Leicester would serve as a lesson to the world to never to abandon vaccination. The opposite instead happen, Leicester conquered smallpox, and their methods (often done it tandem with vaccination) were then copied, allowing us to at last eliminate smallpox.

As you might have noticed, there are many, many parallels between those events from over a century ago and what we all witnessed over the last few years.

Early Schools of American Medicine

In the early 1900s, there were four main schools of medicine in the United States—Allopathy (conventional medicine), Homeopathy, Naturopathy (call the eclectic school at the time) and Osteopathy. Allopathy was losing favor because its treatments often didn’t work and were highly toxic.

At the same time, two of the richest individuals in history (Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller) realized they would need to diversify beyond their respective industries (steel and oil) after Theodore Roosevelt decided to break up their monopolies. Allopathic medicine was identified as a promising way to make a lot of money and a variety of investments were made to cause Allopathy to go from falling out of favor to it becoming the leading form of medicine within the United States (e.g., the Flexner report, published in 1910 was used to close most of America’s competing non-allopathic medical schools). Because of this, Allopathic medicine became “medicine” and the term “Allopathy” became extinct. In turn, while Allopathic medicine has greatly improved from that time, it still retains many of the same foundation issues Allopathy had, and hence routinely injures patients or fails to cure their illnesses.

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Homeopathy:

Within Homeopathy, an idea exists known as Hering’s Law of Cure.  It posits that diseases enter the body superficially, and then can either be expelled at the surface (e.g., through the skin), or travel deep into the body.  When the disease stays at the surface, acute reactions such as skin eruptions and fevers occur, while when allowed to instead travel into the patient, a variety of chronic debilitating diseases are likely to occur. Likewise, the mind and spirit are considered “deeper” than emotions, so in many cases, suppressing an emotional issue can create a permanent physical one.

Note: Many opponents of the smallpox vaccines believed it was not a good idea to introduce the vaccine directly into the bloodstream since that allowed the cowpox virus to establish itself deep within the body.

Hering’s Law hence argues that the goal of treatment should be to facilitate the outward expulsion of disease, which contrasts to the (now) prevailing school of Allopathic thought which strives to suppress those symptomatic expulsions.

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Conversely, he found that almost all cases of severe chronic illness following vaccination (termed vaccinosis) occurred in individuals who had had a smallpox vaccine that did not take, and instead moved deeper into the body creating chronic pathology.  One of his strongest arguments for this was his observation that homeopathic Thuja preparations would frequently treat the conditions that he temporally correlated with vaccination.

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Burnet cited a case of 10 week old baby who had been healthy, and then suddenly became at risk of dying with the cause of the baby’s illness being impossible for anyone to identify.  After investigating further, he discovered the wet-nurse (surrogate breast milk supplier) for the infant (who was in good health) had received a smallpox booster the day before the infant became ill and she reported the site was “a little painful.”  Burnett also cited another case of a breast-feeding child becoming ill from the smallpox vaccine and another developing eczema and a chronic rash.

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Naturopathy:

Benedict Lust, a degree holder in each of the medical systems of the time, is considered by many to be a founder of Naturopathic Medicine.  He served as the editor from the Universal Naturopathic Encylopedia Directory and Buyer’s Guide Yearbook of Drugless Therapy for 1918-1919.  In this book, numerous references can be found to the harm of vaccinations and their weakening of human vitality.

Osteopathy:

AT Still saw the profound shortcomings of Allopathy and developed Osteopathy to take its place. For this article, I decided to review his final text, Research and Practice and I suspect more was written on the subject in his other writings.

First Still’s preamble makes it very clear how he felt about vaccination.

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…“Third: We are opposed to vaccinations.”…

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Still also observed a wide range of chronic illness resulting from immunization:

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Chiropractic

D.D. Palmer, the founder of Chiropractic medicine also referred to vaccines as poisons and a common source of disease. Likewise, many early chiropractors were outspoken opponents of vaccination (e.g., in Lust’s book, chiropractors F.W. Collins and E.W. Ferguson D.C., detailed medical perspectives strongly opposed to vaccination).

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Chinese Medicine

A medical condition exists in Chinese Medicine known as blood stasis. Blood stasis creates a variety of circulatory conditions as the heart cannot effectively pump more viscous blood and the more viscous blood occurring in blood stasis is unable to pass through the smaller blood vessels. This leads to tissue atrophy, strokes or microstrokes, pain at the site of obstruction and a variety of autoimmune conditions (which I believe is due to congestion also occurring concurrently within the lymphatic circulation).

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The earliest reference I could find of the cowpox vaccination entering China stated:

Vaccination was first introduced into Canton and Macao [provinces in China] in 1805 by the famous Balmis Salvany Expedition organized by King Carlos IV of Spain.  However, the practice was not readily adopted and only spread at all widely in China during the latter half of the 19th century. Indeed, vaccination in China was totally inadequate until the campaign mounted in 1950.

This in my eyes argues that a temporal correlation exists between the adoption of smallpox vaccinations and the influx of blood stasis within the Chinese population.
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I will now share some pertinent observations from Gunter R. Neeb’s Blood Stasis: China’s classical concept in modern medicine.  Each of the following passages were sourced Wang Qingren’s observations 192 years ago written within the Yi Lin Gai Cuo.

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Modern Research on Blood Stasis:

The standard medical diagnosis most related to blood stasis is hypercoagulability and the concept of “microclotting” (which has existed since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout).  There are a few agents I have come across which frequently cause significant blood stasis and hypercoagulability, such as malaria, aluminum, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, and cancers.  As a result, many shared disease processes can occur between these agents (each of which often creates significant health issues for patients), and as stated above, I often find my patients require treatment of their blood stasis (through restoring the zeta potential of the body—something each of these agents accomplishes).

Viral Infections (e.g., from a smallpox vaccine), like the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in turn are recognized by the scientific community to create a hypercoagulable state by damaging the endothelium.

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After 9/11, the military conducted a smallpox vaccination campaign which was linked to numerous cases of myocarditis and sometimes fatal heart attacks. Mainstream news sources at the time stated the inflammation produced by the vaccination made the link between the vaccination and heart disease “biologically plausible,” many television news reports were aired about the dangers of the vaccine program.

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Via https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/what-can-the-smallpox-vaccines-teach