TBR News August 14, 2020

The Voice of the White House

Comments for August 14, 2020:”It is obvious to those who run the country that Trump is in the pocket of Putin and does as he is told. Because of Trump’s illegal business transactions, some of which involve drug money laundering, they have him by the balls and he is very obedient. There now is debate as to whether or not this should be exposed but the general feeling is that he is so enraged at Biden’s adding a forbidden Back person to his ticket that he is starting to come apart and will eventually say terrible things about her and solidify the resistance to the point where he will, like Judge Roy Moore, be crushed at the polls.

The Table of Contents

• EU Members Protest U.S. Sanctions After Nord Stream Threats
• S. Threat of ‘Crushing’ Gas Pipeline Measures Riles Berlin
• Who will salute Trump’s man in Berlin?
• How Trump Is Once Again Colluding With Russia
• As he struggles in the polls, Trump reaches for the racist playbook again
• Biden campaign raises $48 million in 48 hours after naming Kamala Harris as VP choice
• ‘Do you regret all your lying?’ White House reporter’s question startles Trump
• The Tarnished Gods Association
• Pending disaster in the Rockies
• Encyclopedia of American Loons

 

EU Members Protest U.S. Sanctions After Nord Stream Threats

August 14, 2020

by Patrick Donahue

Bloomberg –

Twenty-four European countries lodged a complaint with the U.S. State Department this week over President Donald Trump’s expansive use of sanctions to help influence American foreign policy goals, according to a European diplomat familiar with the communication.

The message, signed by all but three of the European Union’s member states, was sent Wednesday, said the diplomat, who asked not to be identified because the correspondence hasn’t been made public.

The so-called demarche was based on a July 17 statement by the EU’s top foreign policy official, Josep Borrell, in which he condemned U.S. intimidation tactics. He specifically cited Trump’s sanctions aimed at halting construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which would link Russia and Germany.

Relations between the U.S. and the EU — and Germany in particular — have plumbed new lows, with Trump hitting his transatlantic allies with sweeping tariffs and pulling out of multilateral agreements such as the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. Trump also announced plans to withdraw about 12,000 troops from Germany last month, saying Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government had been “delinquent” on defense spending.

An email sent to a State Department spokesperson seeking comment wasn’t immediately returned.

“Illegal sanctions”

The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline has become a central point of tension between Merkel and Trump, who has blasted the project for sending “billions” to Russia. Merkel has called new sanctions aimed at the gas route illegal.

Last week, three Republican Senators ratcheted up tensions with a letter warning that a German Baltic Sea port would face “crushing legal and economic” sanctions if it continued to participate in the completion of the pipeline. Mukran Port, located in Merkel’s constituency, is a supply base for the 1,200-kilometer (745-mile) undersea pipeline.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas this week said EU member states would discuss to what extent extraterritorial sanctions violate international law, as he renewed his condemnation of U.S. threats.

“No state has the right to dictate Europe’s energy policy with threats — and it won’t work,” Maas told reporters Monday alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a daylong visit to Moscow.

All stakeholders of Nord Stream 2 still aim to complete the gas link, Lavrov said at the briefing.

“There are reasons to assume that it will be done in the near future.”

Still, there is no consensus among the EU’s 27 member states on Nord Stream, with countries such as Poland condemning the pipeline for bypassing eastern Europe and increasing the bloc’s reliance on Russian energy.

 

U.S. Threat of ‘Crushing’ Gas Pipeline Measures Riles Berlin

• Senators write to port in bid to prevent project’s completion
• Berlin weighing response but keen to avoid further escalation

August 7, 2020

by Birgit Jennen and Brian Parkin

Bloomberg

More evidence of U.S. intimidation designed to halt a gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany has provoked anger in Berlin and threatens to further sour already tense transatlantic relations.

Three Republican Senators wrote this week to the operator of Mukran Port on Germany’s Baltic coast, warning of “crushing legal and economic” sanctions over its involvement in the Nord Stream 2 project. The port — located in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s constituency — is a supply base for the pipeline, as Russian vessels seek to complete the last stretch of the 1,200-kilometer (745-mile) undersea link.

Nord Stream 2, owned by Russia’s Gazprom PJSC, has been a longstanding target for President Donald Trump and one of many bones of contention between Washington and Berlin, along with defense spending, trade policy, and 5G technology. Trump has said the pipeline is a conduit for “billions” of dollars flowing to President Vladimir Putin.

Initial measures he signed in December targeted pipe-laying vessels, throwing completion of the project into disarray. Congress has since backed expanding sanctions. Germany’s BDI industry lobby has identified 120 firms in 12 European countries that would potentially be impacted and estimates that investment worth 12 billion euros ($14.2 billion) is at risk.

“The threatened sanctions would be a major violation of European and national sovereignty and cause economic and political damage,” Joachim Pfeiffer, economic and energy policy spokesman for Merkel’s parliamentary caucus, said Friday by email.

Europe’s priority must be to persuade U.S. officials not to go ahead with new sanctions, but if that fails the European Union should respond with “tough countermeasures,” including possibly tariffs on U.S. LNG, Pfeiffer said.

 

Who will salute Trump’s man in Berlin?

The President finally picks the right man for a job — yet Washington won’t have it

August 12, 2020

by Marshall Auerbabk and James Carden

unherd

Two centuries ago, the British statesman John Bright warned against “following visionary phantoms in all parts of the world while your own country is becoming rotten within”.

It is symptomatic of how diseased American strategic thinking has become over the past 30 years that so few Americans in a position to influence the direction of US foreign policy would have the guts or insight to issue a similar warning today.

That cannot be said of President Trump’s nominee to become ambassador to Germany, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. It’s a selection that sends a clear message in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Macgregor, who has previously been on the shortlists to be either US national security advisor or Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, would be that rarest of creatures in Trumpworld: an appointee actually in line with the policies the President campaigned on in 2016.

In him, Trump would at long last have a high profile advocate for foreign policy positions that arguably won him the election four years ago. Macgregor has been a staunch supporter of the President’s efforts to finally bring a real and lasting peace to the Korean peninsula. He has also long been an outspoken proponent of a worldwide US military drawdown, in particular calling for a serious rethink of the benefits of NATO.

President Trump has consistently called on America’s NATO partners, especially Germany, to increase their defence expenditures up to 2% of GDP. In that regard, he is not dissimilar from his presidential predecessors: both George W. Bush and Barack Obama regularly expressed frustration with NATO member countries for not spending more of their budgets on defence.

Two centuries ago, the British statesman John Bright warned against “following visionary phantoms in all parts of the world while your own country is becoming rotten within”.

It is symptomatic of how diseased American strategic thinking has become over the past 30 years that so few Americans in a position to influence the direction of US foreign policy would have the guts or insight to issue a similar warning today.

That cannot be said of President Trump’s nominee to become ambassador to Germany, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. It’s a selection that sends a clear message in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor’s selection sends a clear message in the run-up to the 2020 election

Macgregor, who has previously been on the shortlists to be either US national security advisor or Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, would be that rarest of creatures in Trumpworld: an appointee actually in line with the policies the President campaigned on in 2016.

In him, Trump would at long last have a high profile advocate for foreign policy positions that arguably won him the election four years ago. Macgregor has been a staunch supporter of the President’s efforts to finally bring a real and lasting peace to the Korean peninsula. He has also long been an outspoken proponent of a worldwide US military drawdown, in particular calling for a serious rethink of the benefits of NATO.

President Trump has consistently called on America’s NATO partners, especially Germany, to increase their defence expenditures up to 2% of GDP. In that regard, he is not dissimilar from his presidential predecessors: both George W. Bush and Barack Obama regularly expressed frustration with NATO member countries for not spending more of their budgets on defence.

Like the President, Colonel Macgregor recognises that, in aggregate, the EU has a larger population and economy than the U.S. and is perfectly capable of defending itself. Unfortunately, the cold war defence alliance has, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, transformed itself into a global policeman, and a reckless one at that: the disasters of Iraq, Libya and Syria have not only undermined regional stability, they have also hampered efforts by Trump to make peace with North Korea and come to a modus vivendi with Russia.

But in some respects, Macgregor has gone even further than the president and will doubtless spell out some hard truths to the German government if he becomes the next US Ambassador to Berlin. Just last year, he called NATO a “zombie”. Even more controversial during a period of bogus “Russiagate” fanaticism, Macgregor has inconveniently reminded us that “the promises given to President Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterrand, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and their foreign ministers in 1990 — not to expand NATO eastward; not to extend membership in the NATO alliance to former member states of the Warsaw Pact—were ignored.”

This strategic commitment has not just been ignored with impunity over decades, but recently exacerbated, given America’s decision to place more US troops right on Russia’s doorstep in Poland. Indeed, NATO’s ongoing eastward expansion to Russia’s borders — encouraged by successive Democratic and Republican Administrations in Washington alike — has revived tensions with a bellicose Moscow, an irresponsible threat inflation that has revived the perpetual gravy train that flows to the Pentagon.

Macgregor, who holds a PhD from the University of Virginia, will hopefully restore some coherence to Trump’s foreign policy. He has long been a critic of the militarisation of US foreign policy, while also calling for long needed reforms in the US armed services. His credentials on that score are unassailable: Macgregor was awarded a Bronze Star with a V device for Valor in the first Gulf War for his heroic leadership in the Battle of 73 Easting, but he remained a staunch critic of the Iraqi occupation after his retirement from the armed forces in 2004.

Under normal circumstances, in a normal country, the elevation of someone of Macgregor’s stature would have been hailed by the press and foreign affairs commentariat. Alas, we are a long way from that now, and so, predictably, Macgregor’s nomination has set off a round of ad hominem attacks designed to derail his confirmation.

We’ve seen this movie before. Rather than address a nominee’s core competencies, the establishment engages in character slurs, asserting racism or the standard canard, anti-Semitism. For example, back in 2012 when President Obama nominated another war hero with contrarian views that threatened to upend to the bipartisan consensus, Chuck Hagel found himself on the receiving end of unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism by leading neo-conservatives, such as William Kristol, Eliot Cohen and Jennifer Rubin.

The focus on only a handful of Macgregor’s past statements are just a pretext for the real reasons his nomination is drawing fire. First, he is a target because his views run 180 degrees counter to those who compose the DC foreign policy “blob”, namely those working in government, think tanks, and academia, none of whom have ever been held to account for its many grave failures over the past 20 years.

Even worse, many of these same Establishment figures are now predictably reaching out to Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden. A report last week quoted unnamed “individuals who work for conservative think tanks in Washington” who have acknowledged “informally speaking with members of the Biden team in recent weeks.” The former Vice-President himself has spent his entire career in the beltway, and reflexively shares the prevailing biases of the Washington foreign policy consensus.

That’s certainly not Douglas Macgregor. He is one of the leading figures of Washington’s small and besieged but growing and determined, counter-establishment. In addition to his role as a contrarian commentator on Tucker Carlson’s popular broadcast, Macgregor is a member of the board of the Committee for the Republic which has long served as the social and intellectual nexus of DC’s counter-establishment.

The counter-establishment is rightly deemed a growing threat to the militarist status quo and plays a crucial role in pushing back against the bipartisan foreign policy that is instinctively predisposed to militarism and open-ended fiscal commitments to the Pentagon. Equally fundamental is that this group reflects the growing views of the American public which, according to recent polling, revealed a national voter population that is largely sceptical of the practicality or benefits of military intervention overseas.

Indeed, since the election of Donald Trump, DC ruling elites on both sides of the political aisle have made it abundantly clear that in their view the only people who are qualified to run for the presidency are those who refuse to question the status quo. Through incessant leaks against Trump and the dissemination of stories of dubious reporting (coincidentally, always occurring whenever a troop reduction anywhere is publicly mooted), they are seeking to ensure that never again will an outsider with heterodox views challenge the existing militarist status quo in a manner that subverts their foreign policy objectives.

Macgregor, if he had his way, would reduce the number of generals and colonels — and, of course, the huge amount of dollars now allocated to the Pentagon. President Trump, whether we approve of him or not (and the authors most assuredly do not) has not had, until now, a single high ranking member of his administration who understands, much less cares about what American imperial overreach has done to its own citizens. In Doug Macgregor, he finally will have a figure who will make this case very forcefully — and on an influential European stage.

The case for Macgregor’s confirmation is clear: after 20 years of endless wars during which they have been buffeted by three recessions and a global pandemic, the American people want the US to step away from the frontline and seek to solve problems at home. Macgregor’s appointment would move us closer to that goal. Were his nomination to be subverted, however, then we would see who really pulls the strings in Washington. It would also illustrate that, regardless of who wins the 2020 election, the country is likely to continue down the path to perpetual, ruinous warfare.

 

How Trump Is Once Again Colluding With Russia

Some enterprising reporters have tracked down what the president is trying to keep secret.

August 13, 2020

by Nancy LeTourneau

The Washington Monthly

Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon made it the focal point of their protest coverage that night. Then, RT did an entire story about it. Social media took it from there and the next thing you know, outlets like the Washington Examiner were picking it up.

Here is how Rosenberg and Barnes summarized the process:

The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering. Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often, by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.

Following Trump’s press briefing on Wednesday, Hunter Walker tracked down another example of Russia’s attempt to get their propaganda in the news. He wrote about the question OAN reporter Chanel Rion asked the president.

Rion: In the last hour or so, if you googled antifa.com. it would take you straight to Joe Biden’s website, his official campaign website. Odd situation. We don’t know who’s behind that. But it raises an interesting leadership question. Should Joe Biden, the Democrat party, Kamala Harris– should they publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?

Trump: They should. I think they’re afraid to. It’s– in my book it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa. The Democrats act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.

Take a look at Portland. Take a look at any place you want to take a look at, and they’re all over the place. They were here.

Basically Rion gave Trump the opportunity to claim that Antifa is part of the Biden campaign—which is, of course, a blatant lie.

Walker looked into what actually happened with the antifa.com website. Once again, as Pelosi said, “all roads lead to Putin.”

Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July. Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.

Russia set up the antifa.com website and eventually redirected it to Biden’s campaign page, allowing the president to claim that the group was involved politically with Democrats. Of course, this raises the old question of whether this was all coordinated with the president or if Trump is simply taking advantage of Putin’s efforts. The same questions are raised about the role of OAN in these kinds of Russian propaganda efforts.

So there you have two examples of how Russia is currently interfering in the 2020 election to support the reelection of Donald Trump. One thing worth noting is that if these examples are reflective of their efforts, Vladimir Putin has calculated that his best bet is to inflame the so-called “culture wars,” something that has been the bedrock of the Republican strategy for decades.

The Bible burning story was especially useful for the Christian nationalists who want to scare their followers into thinking that, as Trump has suggested, Joe Biden is against God and the Bible.

It is important to keep in mind that the only reason we know about these Russian efforts is because some reporters put in the time to track down the story. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has seen what our intelligence services know about Russian interference, said that the 2020 efforts “make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.”

But the Trump administration is keeping that information from the public, while the attorney general hypes the antifa story and puts all of his energy into accusing the Obama administration of “spying” into the Trump campaign. That strikes me as the definition of collusion..

 

As he struggles in the polls, Trump reaches for the racist playbook again

The US president began his political career with the ‘birtherism’ lie about Obama. He’s doing the same once more

August 14, 2020

by David Smith in Washington

The Guardian

“Mr. President,” a reporter asked on Thursday. “After three and a half years, do you regret, at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people?”

A disbelieving Trump asked: “All the what?”

The question was repeated and the US president refused to answer. His political career began with a big lie: birtherism, the baseless fantasy that Barack Obama was born outside the US and therefore ineligible for the White House.

It may now be nearing its end with another false and racist conspiracy theory, which he encouraged at the same Thursday briefing. This one questions Kamala Harris’s eligibility to be vice president.

Harris was this week named as Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s running mate for the 2020 election – the first woman of colour on a major party ticket. She was born in Oakland, California, and is eligible for both the vice presidency and presidency under the US constitution.

John Eastman, a conservative lawyer, wrote an op-ed in Newsweek arguing that the constitution does not grant birthright citizenship and challenging Harris’s eligibility based on her parents’ immigration status.

When Trump was asked about it at Thursday’s White House press briefing, he gave a characteristically vague answer that could sow doubt in the minds of supporters inclined to believe the worst: “So, I just heard that. I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements. And, by the way, the lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.”

He added: “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”

The 14th amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University in Ohio, told the Associated Press: “No, there’s no question about it. It’s been recognized since the people drafted it back in the 39th Congress that (the 14th) amendment would cover people not just born to American citizens but born on American soil.”

Trump’s feigned ignorance is true to form for someone with a track record of racist and anti-immigrant stances. In 1973, he and his father were sued by the justice department for racial discrimination because prospective Black tenants were blocked from renting in their buildings.

Trump was a high-profile champion of the so-called “birther movement” that questioned whether Obama, the first African American president, was born in the US and eligible to serve. Obama, born in Hawaii, produced his birth certificate to prove it, and eventually even Trump said he accepted the truth.

Harris’s father was born in Jamaica and mother born in India. Under the constitution, anyone born in the US automatically acquires citizenship, irrespective of their parents’ immigration status.

Trump’s shameless fanning of the conspiracy flames came in the context of a predictably ferocious onslaught of racist and sexist attacks on Harris by the president his supporters in rightwing media.

“Sort of a madwoman, I call her, because she was so angry and such hatred with Justice Kavanaugh,” Trump told the Fox Business network.

Republican Senator John Kennedy told the same network: “I would describe her as Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez but smarter without the bartending experience.”

Deroy Murdock, a Fox News contributor, said: “She seems to come across as a bit abrasive, as the president mentioned. I don’t know if she can warm things up and be a little more charming.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson pronounced Harris’s first name wrongly several times on Tuesday night, When a guest corrected him, Carlson snapped “So what?” and then twice mispronounced her name again.

On Twitter, Trump’s son Eric favourited a tweet that referred to Harris as a “whorendous pick”; the tweet was later deleted.

The blitz suggested an election campaign moving into a new and dangerous phase. With Trump and his Republican allies trailing in the polls and struggling to define Harris, there is no limit how low they will go. Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist and critic of the president, has just published a book about the party’s descent into Trumpism. Its title? It Was All a Lie.

 

Biden campaign raises $48 million in 48 hours after naming Kamala Harris as VP choice

August 13, 2020

by James Oliphant and Kanishka Singh

Reuters

The campaign of Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden has raised $48 million in the 48 hours since he named U.S. Senator Kamala Harris the Democratic vice presidential nominee, a campaign spokesman told Reuters late on Thursday.

Biden, a former vice president himself, on Tuesday picked Harris as his choice for VP, making her the first Black woman on a major-party U.S. presidential ticket.

With social unrest over racial injustice rocking the country for months since the death in custody of an African-American man, George Floyd – after a police officer knelt on his neck for about nine minutes – Biden was under pressure to select a Black woman as his running mate.

Harris, a 55-year-old senator from California who made her own run for the White House, is also the first Asian-American on a major presidential ticket. Her parents were immigrants, her mother from India and her father from Jamaica.

She became only the second Black female U.S. senator in history when elected in 2016 and will be relied on to help mobilize African-Americans, the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency.

Four years ago, the first dip in Black voter turnout in 20 years contributed to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s upset loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election.

Harris, a former prosecutor and state attorney general in California, is known for her sometimes aggressive questioning style in the Senate.

As a presidential candidate, she took Biden to task in a nationally televised debate over his past stances on mandatory busing for students as a means to desegregate schools.

The choice of a running mate has added significance for Biden, 77, who would be the oldest person to become president if he is elected.

His age has led to speculation he will serve only one term, making Harris a potential top contender for the Democratic nomination in 2024.

Biden and groups affiliated to his campaign had raised $140 million in July.

Reporting by James Oliphant in Washington and Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by William Mallard

 

‘Do you regret all your lying?’ White House reporter’s question startles Trump

SV Dáte takes the president to task for repeated untruths but is quickly cut off

August 13, 2020

by Helen Sullivan

The Guardian

SV Dáte had waited five long years to ask Donald Trump one question: “Mr President, after three and a half years [of Trump’s presidency], do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people?”

Confronted with Dáte’s question at Thursday’s White House briefing, Trump responded with a question of his own. “All the what?” he said.Dáte: “All the lying, all the dishonesties.”

Trump: “That who has done?”

“You have done,” said Dáte, who is the Huffington Post’s White House correspondent. “Tens of thousan–”, he began to say, before Trump cut him off and called on another journalist, who asked a question about payroll tax.

In July, the Washington Post reported that Trump had told more than 20,000 “false or misleading claims” over the course of his presidency.

Speaking to the Guardian, Dáte said that he asked the question because it was the first time that he had had the chance.

“I don’t know why he called on me, because I’ve tried to ask him before [in March] and he’s cut me off mid-question. Maybe he didn’t recognise me this time,” he said. “You know, he has this group of folks that he normally asks questions of.”

It was Dáte’s turn on White House in press pool, and so he had a prominent seat. “I had always thought that if he ever did call on me, this is the one thing that is really central to his presidency,” he said.

Trump’s lying was the “singular piece of his presidency that will be remembered in 10 years”.

Dáte wasn’t surprised by Trump’s response to the question – ignoring it was always going to be the most likely reaction, he thought.

Asked whether he thought he would be allowed in next time, Dáte said, “Yes, absolutely.”

With the burning question posed, what would he ask if he had another chance?

Given that Trump had failed to respond, it would be: “‘Mr President, you didn’t answer last time. Could you address why you’ve told …’ whatever the number will be by then,” said Dáte.

The Tarnished Gods Association

by Christian Jürs

The personality of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill could very well be a subject of interest to an alienist who, by definition, is a physician who treats mental disorders. There is a saying that the world is governed with very little sense and there are times when one could add to this statement that it often has been governed by lunatics.

Churchill was born in 1874 and died in 1965. His father was Randolph Spencer-Churchill, a son of the Duke of Marlborough. The first Duke was John Churchill, one of England’s most capable military commanders, who died without male issue in 1722 and the title was given to one of his nephews, a Spencer. As a courtesy, the Spencer family was allowed to add Churchill to its name, separated by a hyphen. Winston always wanted to believe that he was a gifted military leader in the mold of the first Duke but his efforts at generalship were always unqualified disasters that he generally blamed on other people. This chronic refusal to accept responsibility for his own incompetent actions is one of Churchill’s less endearing qualities.

Randolph Churchill died early as the result of rampant syphilis that turned him from an interesting minor politician to a pathetic madman who had to be kept away from the public, in the final years of his life. His mother was the former Jennie Jerome, an American. The Jerome family had seen better days when Jennie met Randolph. Her father, Leonard, was a stock-market manipulator who had lost his money and the marriage was more one of convenience than of affection.

The Jeromes were by background very typically American. On her father’s side, Jennie was mostly Irish and on her mother’s American Indian and Jewish. The union produced two children, Winston and Jack. The parents lived separate lives, both seeking the company of other men. Winston’s psyche suffered accordingly and throughout his life, his frantic desire for attention obviously had its roots in his abandonment as a child.

As a member of the 4th (Queen’s Own) Hussars, in 1896 Churchill became embroiled in a lawsuit wherein he was publically accused of having engaged in the commission of “acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type.” This case was duly settled out of court for a payment of money and the charges were withdrawn. Also a determinant factor was the interference by the Prince of Wales with whom his mother was having an affair.

In 1905, Churchill hired a young man, Edward Marsh (later Sir Edward) as his private secretary. His mother, always concerned about her son’s political career, was concerned because Marsh was a very well known homosexual who later became one of Winston’s most intimate lifelong friends. Personal correspondence of March, now in private hands, attests to the nature and duration of their friendship.

Churchill, as Asquith once said, was consumed with vanity and his belief that he was a brilliant military leader led him from the terrible disaster of Gallipoli through the campaigns of the Second World War. He meddled constantly in military matters to the despair and eventual fury of his professional military advisors but his political excursions were even more disastrous. Churchill was a man who was incapable of love but could certainly hate. He was viciously vindictive towards anyone who thwarted him and a number of these perceived enemies died sudden deaths during the war when such activities were much easier to order and conceal.

One of Churchill’s less attractive personality traits, aside from his refusal to accept the responsibility for the failure of his actions, was his ability to change his opinions at a moment’s notice.

Once anti-American, he did a complete about-face when confronted with a war he escalated and could not fight, and from a supporter of Hitler’s rebuilding of Germany, he turned into a bitter enemy after a Jewish political action association composed of wealthy businessmen hired him to be their spokesman.

Churchill lavishly praised Roosevelt to his face and defamed him with the ugliest of accusations behind his back. The American President was a far more astute politician than Churchill and certainly far saner.

In order to support his war of vengeance, Churchill had to buy weapons from the United States and Roosevelt stripped England of all of her assets to pay for these. Only when England was bankrupt did Roosevelt consent to the Lend-Lease project, and in a moment of malicious humor, titled the bill “1776” when it was sent to Congress.

Hitler’s bombing of England was not a prelude to invasion, but a retaliation for Churchill’s instigation of the bombing of German cities and Churchill used the threat of a German invasion to whip up pro-British feelings in the United States. Threats of invasion by the Germans, in this case of the United States, have been cited by such writers as Weinberg as the reason why Roosevelt had to get into the war. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese had even the slightest intention to invade the continental United States and exhaustive research in the military and political archives of both countries has been unable to locate a shred of evidence to support these theories.

A dedicated academic supporter of Winston Spencer-Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt would undoubtedly find any evidence of bad character on the part of their beloved subjects, total anathema but this attitude in and of itself has no actual bearing on the originality of documentation that might augment or expose lack of character or morality.

Roosevelt’s role in the Pearl Harbor attack has been the subject of speculation even from the first. His opponents claimed that he deliberately pushed the Japanese into war to permit him to fight his archenemy, Adolf Hitler. His supporters have firmly denied this thesis and the multiplication of books, scholarly articles and media dramas seems to have no end.

Several valid points have been brought by Roosevelt partisans that deserve to be carefully considered. The first is concerned with American military intelligence work and deals, in the main, with the interceptions of Japanese coded messages. It has been fully acknowledged that the Japanese diplomatic code, called “Purple,” was broken by the Americans and consequently, all high-level diplomatic messages between Tokyo and Japanese diplomats throughout the world were being read almost as soon as they were sent. (The average translation took two days.)

The question of the Japanese Army and Navy operational codes was another matter. The American government has firmly denied for decades that such codes had even been broken or, if that had, were not translated until 1945! While nearly all of the “Purple” intercepts have been made public, only a very few of the coded Japanese Naval messages have appeared in print and then only concerning matters of no special significance.

The Japanese Pearl Harbor task force did not broadcast any messages during their passage to the Hawaiian Islands but Japanese Naval headquarters did send messages to the task force. What they may have consisted of are not known at present and perhaps will never be known, although the National Security Agency, holder of these documents, has stated that it will release the Naval intercepts (known as JN-25) at an unspecified future date.

The argument has been well made, specifically by Roberts Wohlstetter, that so much material was intercepted during the period just prior to the Japanese attack, that it was extremely difficult for American intelligence agencies to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. In retrospect, it is glaringly obvious that some kind of a Japanese attack was planned and in train, but the direction of this attack was lost in the muddle of complex and difficult-to-translate messages.

A further point well made is, had American military intelligence learned of a definite attack on Pearl Harbor, it would have been impossible to keep this a secret, given the number of translators and other military personnel who handled such intercepted messages. The army and navy of that period were small in size and most senior officers in both services knew each other well, having served together for many years. In the absence of any concrete evidence to support the receipt of Japanese military messages dealing with an attack on any specific American installation, it is not within the realm of belief that these senior officers would passively allow American military units to be attacked.

In response to this entirely valid postulation, it should be noted that the specific warning did not come to Roosevelt from below but on a parallel level and from a foreign intelligence source which was far better equipped to decode and translate the Japanese transmissions.

A second area of interest has been the possible motivation for Roosevelt’s increasing pressure on the Japanese, pressure which culminated in a stringent oil embargo that forced Japan into war. Diverse reasons are given for this, including a personal prejudice in favor of China stemming from his maternal grandfather’s highly lucrative opium and immigrant-smuggling operations to an intense hatred of Hitler in specific and Germans in general.

Both of these reasons for Roosevelt’s attitude are historically valid but in and of themselves, do not explain the dangerous brinkmanship practiced by Roosevelt in his dealings with Japan. It is clearly evident from reading the intercepts of the Japanese diplomatic coded messages that Tokyo was not only not interested in pursuing war against the United States but was seriously engaged in attempting to defuse and dangerous situation whose accelerating progress caused them great alarm. Roosevelt and his advisers were fully aware of the ease with which they could achieve effective dialog with the Japanese government. All diplomatic approaches by Japan were rebuffed by Washington and as the diplomatic crisis deepened, the possibility of military action by Japan against the United States was very clearly evident in Washington.

The actual motivation behind the turning of the screw against Japan and the refusal on the part of Roosevelt to negotiate has been explored extensively in print but one of the most valid answers seems to lie clearly in the section of the intercepted communication dealing with the Soviet Union.

As much as Roosevelt wished to enter a war against Germany, he was constrained by Congress from conducting a personal war. A de facto war against Germany was in progress in the Atlantic where US naval units were engaged in open warfare with German U boats but Hitler would not rise to the bait and issue a unilateral declaration of war against the United States. For a time, Roosevelt was check in his ambitions.

With Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Roosevelt’s aims shifted. He had very strong reasons for supporting Stalin in his epic struggle with the Wehrmacht. There were no forces available in Europe to effectively counter Hitler. France was defeated and England’s army was shattered and the island under siege. The British has been soundly beaten on the continent by German forces and in 1941, they had been chased out of Greece and Crete. England was in no position to support any kind of a serious military action against Germany and the US was still technically neutral.

Since the beginning of his presidency, Roosevelt had actively sought the support of the well-organized Communist party in the United States. This entity was especially numerous and effective in the state of New York, whose Governor he had once been, and by voting en bloc the Communists could and did swing major elections. Roosevelt’s administration was filled with Communists, both active and passive, who aggressively supported the programs of the New Deal. When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in 1939, many of these persons underwent serious conscience crises but in June 1941, when Hitler invaded Mother Russia, their collective angst was resolved and Stalin once more resumed his place as the exalted champion of the workers and peasants and the beau ideal of embittered intellectuals and academics throughout the world.

All of Roosevelt’s aims were addressed by his now permissible support of Stalin, However, the swift advances of the Wehrmacht into Russia and the massive losses in territory, manpower and material suffered by the Red Army caused great consternation in Washington and London. If, as it appeared in the autumn of 1941, Russia could collapse, the last major hope for the containment and destruction of Hitler and his country was gone.

The point of balance now shifted from European Russia to the Far East. The advance guard of the German Army was in front of Moscow and most of the Soviet Army was engaged in a protracted death struggle for the capital. There was an acute possibility that the Japanese, chronic enemies of Russia and putative allies of Germany, would take advantage of Stalin’s major preoccupations and fall onto his rear by invading his eastern provinces, an area extraordinarily difficult to supply as the Tsar’s generals had found out in 1904.

The hostility between the Japanese and the Russians culminated in the Russo-Japanese war which Russia lost. The public humiliation suffered by Russia was balanced by the elevation of Japan tom the status of a world power. The animosity between the two countries never abated and in July of 1938, an expansionist Japan, engaged in a savage war with the warlords of China, turned its attentions to Russia and attempted to seize land near the vital Soviet naval base at Vladivostok. The Soviets counterattacked and drove the Japanese back into their own territory. Undaunted, Japan attacked the Russians again in May 1939 and for four months a series of major battles were fought between the two countries. Finally, in late August, Soviet General Zhukov launched a powerful attack against the Japanese using nine divisions and 600 tanks. The Japanese were severely beaten and suffered a loss of 18,000 men and considerable aircraft.

Following this embarrassing defeat, there was a movement in the Japanese high command to prepare for war against the Soviet Union. Japanese plans for a full scale attack on Vladivostok were shown to Hitler by Baron Oshima, Japan’s pro-German ambassador as early as March 1941. Hitler discussed the probability of these attack with members of his military entourage throughout the balance of the year. The Matsuoka referred to in the Roosevelt-Churchill intercept was Yosuke Matsuoka, a hardline anti-Soviet who had been dropped from the cabinet in July 1941 to placate the Russians. His return to power was certainly not out of the question.

The major problem facing Roosevelt then is evident. Stalin was the lynchpin of the US-British policy. If Stalin fell, Hitler was certain to shatter Russia’s military establishment and this could not be allowed to happen. Roosevelt gave money to Stalin but could render no further assistance to the dictator without actually being at war with Germany. If the Japanese decided to a move against Stalin’s eastern territories, he would be fighting a two-front war and in all probability would be swiftly defeated.

Roosevelt’s most urgent necessity was to prevent Japan from making any military moves against Russia. By applying diplomatic and economic pressure against Japan, Roosevelt hoped to distract them from a Russian adventure and encourage them to move, if move they did, in the opposite direction. The American President was safe in promoting this course of action because the United States had very little invested in the Far East with the exception of a few mid-Pacific islands and the Philippines which were slated for independence in 1948.

The British, on the other hand, had a great deal invested in the Far East as Churchill pointed out. Roosevelt, who at that time held all the cards, brushed Churchill’s fear of loss of empire aside with the vague promise that lost territories could be recovered later. In actual fact, Roosevelt was a bitter opponent of the colonial systems extant at that time and had no intentions of giving any liberated former colonies back to their former masters.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, both Australia and New Zealand had been asked by Churchill to supply troops for duty in North Africa. When it became a possibility that Japan might engage in hostilities in the Pacific, Churchill sought an opinion from his military experts as to the effectiveness of using British military forces to defend British holdings in the Pacific. The resulting report was extremely negative and Churchill decided that it would be an impossibility to reinforce the great British naval base at Singapore or assist in the defense of either Australia or New Zealand against Japanese aggression. Neither of these countries were to be supplied with a copy of  report and his subsequent decision to write them off, but a copy was sent out to the military commander of Singapore. Unfortunately, this report was sent by sea on the SS Automedon which was captured by the German commerce raider Atlantis. The secret Churchill report was forwarded to both the Japanese government and to Berlin. The foreknowledge that Britain could not and would not defend her interests in the Pacific was obviously of great interest to the Japanese.

American pressure on Japan to prevent any attack on Russia is certainly the simplest answer to the complex welter of issues raised in the post-war years concerning the outbreak of the war in the Pacific. In reality, Roosevelt was completely successful in his matador’s movements to distract the Japanese bull. From a pragmatic point of view, he achieved his aims completely. There is no valid place in the compilation of history for moral issues. Morals and ethics are excellent norms but hardly effective techniques.

The British Prime Minister was a man who was the greatest loser in the general end game that represented the Second World War. Frantic to save what was left of the decaying British Empire, he lived to witness its economic and geopolitical destruction. Roosevelt was the posthumous winner if the post-war preeminence of the United States is taken into account. Hitler vanished from the stage and his replacement, Stalin, created a hollow empire which eventually imploded. The Japanese rebuilt their shattered factories and emerged from the charred rubble of their homes to become a powerful world economic force. Their code of Bushido has been transferred from the battlefield to the boardroom and with far more success than they had implementing their Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

 

Pending disaster in the Rockies

Currently, the ground underneath Yellowstone National Park is rising at a record rate. In fact, it has been rising at the rate of about three inches per year. The reason why this is such a concern is because underneath the park sits the Yellowstone supervolcano – the largest volcano in North America. Scientists tell us that it is inevitable that it will erupt again one day, and when it does the devastation will be almost unimaginable. A full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would dump a 10 foot deep layer of volcanic ash up to 1,000 miles away, and it would render much of the United States uninhabitable.

When most Americans think of Yellowstone, they tend to conjure up images of Yogi Bear and “Old Faithful”, but the truth is that sleeping underneath Yellowstone is a volcanic beast that could destroy our nation in a single day and now that beast is starting to wake up.

The Yellowstone supervolcano is so vast that it is hard to put it into words. According to the Daily Mail, the magma “hotspot” underneath Yellowstone is approximately 300 miles wide…

The Yellowstone Caldera is one of nature’s most awesome creations and sits atop North America’s largest volcanic field.

Its name means ‘cooking pot’ or ‘cauldron’ and it is formed when land collapses following a volcanic explosion.

In Yellowstone, some 400 miles beneath the Earth’s surface is a magma ‘hotspot’ which rises to 30 miles underground before spreading out over an area of 300 miles across.

Atop this, but still beneath the surface, sits the slumbering volcano.

When most Americans think of volcanic eruptions in the United States, they remember the catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens back in 1980. But that eruption would not even be worth comparing to a full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano.

And now the area around Yellowstone is becoming increasingly seismically active. In fact, Professor Bob Smith says that he has never seen anything like this in the 53 years that he has been watching Yellowstone…

Until recently, Bob Smith had never witnessed two simultaneous earthquake swarms in his 53 years of monitoring seismic activity in and around the Yellowstone Caldera.

Now, Smith, a University of Utah geophysics professor, has seen three swarms at once.

In late July, 2020, 130 earthquakes hit Yellowstone over the course of a single week. This has got many Yellowstone observers extremely concerned…

Yellowstone’s recent earthquake swarms started on August 10 and were shaking until about 11:30 a.m. August 14 .

“A total of 130 earthquakes of magnitude 0.6 to 3.6 have occurred in these three areas, however, most have occurred in the Lower Geyser Basin,” a University of Utah statement said. “Notably much of seismicity in Yellowstone occurs as swarms.”

So what is the worst case scenario?

Well, according to official, but a redacted, government report under date of August 1, a full-blown eruption of Yellowstone could leave two-thirds of the United States completely uninhabitable…

It would explode with a force a thousand times more powerful than the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980.

Spewing lava far into the sky, a cloud of plant-killing ash would fan out and dump a layer 10ft deep up to 1,000 miles away.

Two-thirds of the U.S. could become uninhabitable as toxic air sweeps through it, grounding thousands of flights and forcing millions to leave their homes.

Can you think of another potential disaster that could accomplish the same thing?

 

• There are approximately 3,000 earthquakes in the Yellowstone area every single year.
• In the event of a full-scale eruption of Yellowstone, virtually the entire northwest United States will be completely destroyed.
• A massive eruption of Yellowstone would mean that just about everything within a 100 mile radius of Yellowstone would be immediately killed.
• A full-scale eruption of Yellowstone could also potentially dump a layer of volcanic ash that is at least 10 feet deep up to 1,000 miles away.
• A full-scale eruption of Yellowstone would cover virtually the entire midwest United States with volcanic ash. Food production in America would be almost totally wiped out.
• The “volcanic winter” that a massive Yellowstone eruption would cause would radically cool the planet. Some scientists believe that global temperatures would decline by up to 20 degrees.
• America would never be the same again after a massive Yellowstone eruption. Some scientists believe that a full eruption by Yellowstone would render two-thirds of the United States completely uninhabitable.
• Scientists tell us that it is not a matter of “if” Yellowstone will erupt but rather “when” the next inevitable eruption will take place.

 

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Barret Vanlandingham

Rev. Barret Vanlandingham of the Fort Gibson Church of Christ is a fundamentalist and a young-earth creationist, who is unafraid to parrot all the standard creationist canards or to display his utter lack of grasp of science or how science works.

Commenting on the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, for instance, Vanlandingham pretended to be startled that Nye dismisses the Genesis Flood as the myth it is, for as Vanlandingham sees it, there is “vast amounts of evidence in favor of a worldwide flood”, mostly because he doesn’t seem to understand what evidence is (here is Vanlandingham further discussing what he thinks about evidence, brilliantly supporting our assessment). Among his purported evidence is the claim that “every major culture around the world has reported a worldwide flood” (utter nonsense) and the fact that trilobite fossils have been discovered all sorts of places, something that science, apparently, is not able to explain but the Bible is (it really isn’t). Equally importantly, for Vanlandingham, is the absence of evidence for evolution; for instance, “there is no fossil evidence that one species or animal ever became a different species” because Vanlandingham simply dismisses that massive amount of evidence. The conclusion, of course, is that Big Bang and evolution are just as much articles of faith as the Biblical account, since there is no evidence and “[s]cience says that for something to be believable, you have to be able to measure it and repeat the experiment,” which is a completely expected misunderstanding from your typical creationist who has no idea how science is supposed to work.*

Vanlandingham’s conclusion, of course, is that “the Bible has never been proven wrong, on anything” but actually “been very helpful in discoveries related to all areas of science” That’s the conclusion you will be able to draw when you can, by assertion, just dismiss the evidence you don’t like, and use your own imagination and wishful thinking to generate the evidence you want to have. “Delusion” is the common term for the process.

Diagnosis: Creationist with a creationist’s standard complete and utter lack of understanding of what science is and what the point of science could possible be. Not a big player in the religious fundie anti-science brigade, perhaps, but nonsensical enough to merit an entry.

 

*Short explanation: The whole point of science is to gain knowledge of that which goes beyond direct observation because it is e.g. too far away in time or space, too general (laws are universal; what’s observable are particular instances) or has to do with cause and effect (correlations are directly observable; causality is not). But the crucial characteristic of science is that we test these hypothesis about the unobserved against their observable consequences! The Big Bang is unobservable, but its effects are not, and by observing whether the predictions we derive from the Big Bang hypothesis hold or not, we confirm or disconfirm that hypothesis. And it is of course a standard requirement on scientific experiments and observations that they be repeatable. But now the fundamental and utterly idiotic misunderstanding systematically made by creationist morons like Ken Ham and Barret Vanlandingham should be obvious: It is the observations – the ones we test our hypotheses against – that need to be repeatable and measurable, not the state of affairs described by the hypotheses! Failure to recognize this point reveals not only a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method (distinguishing hypotheses from observations) but a fundamental misunderstanding of the very point of science (to gain knowledge about the unobservable).

 

An example of Biblical error:

Firmament

The “firmament” is claimed to be a solid “roof” over the world. It is described in Genesis 1:6-8 (KJV). This is obviously untrue, unless all those satellites in orbit are a hoax. Considering the views of flat earthers, someone, somewhere probably thinks this is the case (don’t ask them how GPS systems work).

Many Christians believe that this Firmament is what fell from the sky and caused the entire earth to flood, with only Noah and his family surviving. Genesis 7:11 “… and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.”

However, an explanation offered by inerrantists is that the description of the firmament is only what was believed to be true and not necessarily stating that it is literally true. This leaves literalists with the same problem, of course, namely that if part of the Bible isn’t strictly accurate, how (they feel) can you trust any of it? You can’t. The Book of Daniel is a proven fake and Revelation was written by a Roman lunatic, locked up in an insane asylum.`

Kurt Donsbach

Dave D’Onofrio appears to be a creationist and David Abel’s coauthor on those few papers they actuall got published in some low-tier but peer reviewed science journals (and has accordingly been lauded by the WND as making significant scientific breakthroughs) but I struggle to find much further information about him. We’ll leave him be for now.

Kurt Donsbach, however, is a legend. Donsbach is an unlicensed chiropractor and altmed promoter, whose Hospital Santa Monica operated in California until 1987, whereupon it moved to Mexico and was in operation until the death of Coretta Scott King – widow of MLK – while under treatment at the clinic in 2006, when Mexican health officials promptly shut it down. Donsbach moved his practice to Mexico after several troubles with American authorities, first in 1971, when he was convicted of practicing medicine without a license in California after undercover agents observed him prescribing unproven remedies and claiming e.g.  that various vitamins, minerals, and herbal tea were effective against cancer, heart disease and emphysema to patients while claiming to be a medical doctor. Many of the remedies prescribed were only available from Westpro Labs, a company – coincidentally, of course – operated by Donsbach himself. (He pleaded guilty and received a fine and two years’ summary probation).

Coretta King was one of many desperate people who sought out Donsbach’s clinic during its two decades of operation in Mexico, where they would be treated with vitamins and herbs, iron lungs, and a variety of other useless procedures (the clinic was recommended to King by members of her church.) Of course, clinics like Donsbach’s thrive on survivors providing compelling (and personalized) anecdotes and the dead telling nothing, which they usually don’t unless the victim was a celebrity of sufficient note for the press to care. Had it not been for King, who knows how long Donsbach would have been allowed to continue.

Donsbach’s list of troubles with the authorities is extensive, though. Apart from the 1971 incident and the 2006 closing of his hospital, incidents include at least the following:

– In 1973, he was charged with nine more counts of illegal activity, including misbranding of drugs and manufacturing drugs without a license.

– In 1974, he was found guilty of violating his probation and was fined again.

– In 1975, Donsbach owned and operated Metabolic Products, a company that marketed supplement products with claims they didn’t bother to back up. That year, he also began his fourteen years of service as board chairman of the National Health Federation, a true quack organization if there ever was one.

– In 1976, he acquired a license to practice naturopathy in Oregon, based on a document that was later revealed to be a forgery (authorities prohibited him from holding the license in 1990). If you have to commit fraud to be able to even practice naturopathy …

– In 1979, he began operating Donsbach University, a nonaccredited correspondence school that awarded bachelor, master, and doctoral “degrees” in nutrition. That the “institution” was  unaccredited did not deter Donsbach from claiming that it was (by the National Accreditation Association, which consisted of a telephone in the living room of a single quack with a fake degree in Maryland – the California Department of Education was not impressed). He was also operating the International Institute of Natural Health Sciences, through which he marketed numerous misleading publications and a “Nutrient Deficiency Test”: The test consisted of a questionnaire about symptoms, and the answers were fed into a computer that issued a report of supposed nutrient deficiencies and medical conditions – the answers, however, did not affect the printout of supposed deficiencies in any systematic and reliable way.

– In 1982, Donsbach formed and became board chairman of Health Resources Group, Inc., which sold supplement products to health-food stores through HRG Enterprises and a multilevel company named Nutrition Motivation.

– In 1985, the FDA sent Donsbach and HRG a regulatory letter indicating that claims made for Orachel made it an unapproved new drug that was illegal to market.

– In 1985, the New York Attorney General brought actions against Donsbach, his university, and his International Institute, on the grounds that they lacked legal authorization to conduct business within the state and that it was illegal to advertise nonaccredited degrees to state residents. The Attorney General also charged that the           “Nutrient Deficiency Test” was a scheme to defraud consumers (duh!).

– In 1988, the US postal service ordered him to stop claiming that a hydrogen peroxide solution he sold could prevent cancer and ease arthritis pain (it can’t).

– A 1996 case, based on a 1993 Complaint for Forfeiture, states that Donsbach obtained money from insurance companies by misrepresenting the nature and location of treatments he rendered there.

– In 1997 he was sentenced to a year in federal prison for smuggling more than $250,000 worth of unapproved drugs into the US from Mexico.

On April 9, 2009, he was arrested again, this time during his Internet radio health show, and charged with 11 felony counts, including dispensing unapproved drugs and offering neuropeptides to his patients (which contained nimesulide, which is banned in Europe because they cause high rates of liver failure and have resulted in some deaths). The case ended with a plea deal with Donsbach facing up to a year in jail, followed by probation. In 2010, however, he pleaded guilty to 13 additional felony charges, including practicing medicine without a license and selling misbranded drugs.

That should give you an idea. Donsbach himself is a pupil of Royal Lee, who – at least before Kevin Trudeau – was “probably the largest publisher of unreliable and false nutritional information in the world” (according to an FDA official). His website states that he has produced more than 50 books and pamphlets that have sold a total of 14 milion copies (most of which were titled “Dr. Donsbach Tells You What You Always Wanted To Know About …”)

Donsbach’s partner Harry R. Alsleben used to run his own correspondence school offering pseudo-credentials in nutrition, such as “Clinical Nutrimedicine and Biological Sciences”, “nutri-medical dentistry”, “nutri-medical eye and visual health care,” “nutri-medical homeopathy” and “therapeutic nutrimedicine”.

Diagnosis: It’s hard to believe that Donsbach actually thinks he is helping people, but I suppose the powers of delusion should not be underestimated. At least the continued success of Kurt Donsbach demonstrates how and why there’s still a market for spam. A horrible, horrible person.