TBR News June 8, 2019

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. June 8, 2019: “Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.

I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.

He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.

He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.

His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.

He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.

Commentary for June 8:”Because of Trump’s pressure on Mexico over refugees, there is going to be serious chaos and violence not only south of the Mexican-American border but in Mexico itself. A huge flood of Venezuelan refugees, fleeing from the results of US interdiction of medicine and food, are pouring into Central America, many heading for the United States. This is going to be a very ugly business and the end result will no doubt be extreme violence. No doubt Trump will love this and he can run to his pointy-headed supporters who want American to be an all-White and Christian country and show them how successful he has been in catering to their needs. Unless Trump is very careful, this violence can easily spread up into the United States and create bloody havoc in border states.”

 

The Table of Contents

• Part 1   Deutsche Bank, the Bayrock Group, Donald Trump and Drug Money Laundering
• Encyclopedia of American Loons
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Urgent Smallpox Warning!
• Why tariffs could be Trump’s undoing

 

Part 1   Deutsche Bank, the Bayrock Group, Donald Trump and Drug Money Laundering

Deutsche Bank AG is a German multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany.

The bank is operational in 58 countries with a large presence in Europe, the Americas and Asia. As of April 2018, Deutsche Bank is the 15th largest bank in the world by total assets. As the largest German banking institution in the world, it is a component of the DAX stock market index.

The company is a universal bank resting on three pillars – the Private & Commercial Bank, the Corporate & Investment Bank (CIB) and Asset Management (DWS). Its investment banking operations often command substantial deal flow and maintain different “sell side” and “buy side” departments.

Relationship with Donald Trump

The bank kept writing checks even after Trump defaulted on loans worth hundreds of millions and sued it. Now Congressional investigators are going to court to uncover the financial records behind their relationship.

The remarkably troubled recent history of Deutsche Bank, its past money-laundering woes — and the bank’s striking relationship with Trump — became the subject of investigation by the German State Attorney’s office. The German bank loaned a cumulative total of around $2.5 billion to Trump projects over the past two decades, and the bank continued writing him nine-figure checks even after he defaulted on a $640 million obligation and sued the bank, blaming it for his failure to pay back the debt.

• Deutsche Bank’s private wealth unit loaned Trump $48 million — after he had defaulted on his $640 million loan and the bank’s commercial unit didn’t want to lend him any further funds — so that Trump could pay back another unit of Deutsche Bank.
• Deutsche Bank loaned Trump’s company $125 million as part of the overall $150 million purchase of the ailing Doral golf resort in Miami in 2012. The loans’ primary collateral was land and buildings that he paid only $105 million for, county land records show. The apparent favorable terms raised questions about whether the bank’s loan was unusually risky.
• To widespread alarm, and at least one protest that Trump would not be able to pay his lease obligations, Deutsche Bank’s private wealth group loaned the Trump Organization an additional $175 million to renovate the Old Post Office Building in Washington and turn it into a luxury hotel.

Like Trump, Deutsche Bank has been scrutinized for its dealings in Russia. The bank paid more than $600 million to regulators in 2017 and agreed to a consent order that cited “serious compliance deficiencies” that “spanned Deutsche Bank’s global empire.” The case focused on “mirror trades,” which Deutsche Bank facilitated between 2011 and 2015. The trades were sham transactions whose sole purpose appeared to be to illicitly convert rubles into pounds and dollars — some $10 billion worth.

The bank was “laundering money for wealthy Russians and people connected to Putin and the Kremlin in a variety of ways for almost the exact time period that they were doing business with Donald Trump,” “And all of that money through Deutsche Bank was being channeled through the same exact legal entity in the U.S. that was handling the Donald Trump relationship in the U.S. And so there are a lot of coincidences here.”

It wasn’t just Donald Trump who maintained a warm relationship with Deutsche. The German bank looked after his entire family. Jared Kushner, Ivanka, and Kushner’s mother Seryl Stadtmauer were all Deutsche clients.

The large German financial conglomerate Deutsche Bank, later to become one of Donald Trump’s favored institutions, became entangled with Russia after the bank bought boutique investment bank UFG in order to gain entry into Moscow’s financial markets. UFG’s chairman, Charles Ryan, was an American banker; his partner was Boris Fyodorov, formerly Russia’s Finance Minister in the Yeltsin administration. Deutsche’s future co-CEO, Anshu Jain, was the one who wants Deutsche to become more involved with Russia. Other investment banks soon found Deutsche’s business practices suspicious. Christopher Barter, at the time the CEO of Goldman Sachs Moscow, said later: “They were doing some very curious things. Nobody could make sense of their business. We found the nature and concentration of their business with VTB (Vneshtorgbank) quite galling. Nobody else could touch VTB.” VTB was known to be deeply connected to Russian intelligence, the FSB.

An issue was a very large sum of money that Trump borrowed from the German bank in 2005 to fund the construction of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Trump had personally guaranteed to repay the $US640 million ($828.7 million) debt.

Since then, a global financial crash had arrived. Trump had defaulted on payment, with $US330 million still outstanding. In late November 2008, Deutsche was seeking an immediate $US40 million from the tycoon, plus interest, legal fees and costs.

In 2010 Trump settled his feud with Deutsche. This was done, extraordinarily, by borrowing more money from … Deutsche Bank.

Shut out from its real estate division, Trump turned to another part of the same institution – Deutsche’s private wealth division, which typically deals with high net worth individuals. It doesn’t normally do property. Still, the unit lent him the money.

And later gave him another $US 25 to $US 50 million in credit.

According to one estimate, Deutsche Bank’s Moscow subsidiary began notching up profits of $US 500 million to $US 1 billion a year, with VTB generating somewhere between 50 and 80 per cent of all revenue. In Moscow, a Russian client bought blue-chip Russian stocks from Deutsche Bank Moscow in companies like Gazprom or Sberbank. The payment was in roubles. The size of a typical order was $US2 million to $US3 million. Shortly afterwards a non-Russian “customer” sold exactly the same number of securities to Deutsche Bank in London, paying in dollars.

These “mirror trades” were fake and had no economic logic. The selling parties were based in offshore territories like Cyprus or the British Virgin Islands. Billions were moved out of one Deutsche Bank, from its modern glass office at Building 2, 82 Sadovnicheskaya Street, to another Deutsche Bank, at 60 Wall Street. There were nearly 6000 transactions. Nobody in New York or London or Frankfurt or any of the international financial centres really noticed.the chairman of Trump and his companies’ estimated $360 million in outstanding loans from Deutsche Bank.

Trump’s assets manager at Deutsche, Rosemary Vrablic, specialized in real estate and is close enough to Trump and his family — both Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are clients — that she was invited to attend the inauguration. In the past decade, the Deutsche Bank private wealth unit helped finance three of Trump’s properties, including a golf resort near Miami (Doral), a new hotel in Washington DC and Trump Tower in Chicago, all of which include personal guarantees by Trump. He and his organization currently owe Deutsche Bank over $300 million.

“Deutsche Bank is our long-standing partner and has been working in Russia since 1881 … It would take ages to describe everything that Deutsche Bank is doing in Russia,” Putin said at the time.

The bank kept writing checks even after Trump defaulted on loans worth hundreds of millions and sued it. Now Congressional investigators are going to court to uncover the financial records behind their relationship.

The remarkably troubled recent history of Deutsche Bank, its past money-laundering woes — and the bank’s striking relationship with Trump — became the subject of investigation by the German State Attorney’s office. The German bank loaned a cumulative total of around $2.5 billion to Trump projects over the past two decades, and the bank continued writing him nine-figure checks even after he defaulted on a $640 million obligation and sued the bank, blaming it for his failure to pay back the debt.

• Deutsche Bank’s private wealth unit loaned Trump $48 million — after he had defaulted on his $640 million loan and the bank’s commercial unit didn’t want to lend him any further funds — so that Trump could pay back another unit of Deutsche Bank.
• Deutsche Bank loaned Trump’s company $125 million as part of the overall $150 million purchase of the ailing Doral golf resort in Miami in 2012. The loans’ primary collateral was land and buildings that he paid only $105 million for, county land records show. The apparent favorable terms raised questions about whether the bank’s loan was unusually risky.
• To widespread alarm, and at least one protest that Trump would not be able to pay his lease obligations, Deutsche Bank’s private wealth group loaned the Trump Organization an additional $175 million to renovate the Old Post Office Building in Washington and turn it into a luxury hotel.

Bayrock Group

Trump began doing business with the Bayrock Group, a real estate development organization with its headquarters in the Trump Tower. He met founder Tevfik Arif, a Russian born in then-Soviet Kazakhstan, and Russian-born American businessman Felix Sater 1, COO of Bayrock and a convicted felon, through a Trump Tower leasing agent. Bayrock arranged for the Trump Organization to become involved in multiple developments that were marketed under the Trump name.

The first Trump-Bayrock deal, a 19-story condominium tower and hotel complex in Phoenix, fell through in 2005 after organized resistance from residents. A follow-up project in Fort Lauderdale also collapsed after lawsuits and claims of criminal fraud tarnished the project’s reputation. Trump dodged the lawsuit by asserting he was not the developer and bore no responsibility for the problems.

Eventually, Trump and Bayrock engaged in a series of deals leading to the construction of the Trump SoHo in New York, which became the centerpiece of a RICO investigation. The firm’s organizational structure was deliberately designed to make it difficult to determine how it worked, or who profited from what business dealing.

Trump had turned to Bayrock after a series of six straight corporate bankruptcies devastated his portfolio; he was now essentially an entertainer portraying himself as a business mogul who was actually struggling to re-establish himself and his brand. “[T]he massive illicit outflows from Russia and oil-rich [former Soviet Union states] like Kazahkstan and Azerbaijan from the mid-1990s provided precisely the kind of undiscriminating investors that he needed. These outflows arrived at just the right time to fund several of Trump’s post-2000 high-risk real estate and casino ventures – most of which failed.”

His financing opportunities were severely limited, as most of the banks he previously did business with wanted no further dealings with him

According to media reports, Elliott Broidy, a convicted felon who is now a deputy chair of the Republican National Committee and a top fundraiser for the Trump campaign with inside access to Trump and his administration, sought a $75 million fee if he could persuade the Justice Department to drop an investigation into an investment deal involving the Malaysian Prime Minister.

 

1.Sater, Convicted Felon and FBI Informant

Felix Sater, a licensed stockbroker who was born in Russia but grew up in the Russian I community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, was convicted in 1991 of brutally assaulting a man in a Manhattan bar, and after going to prison, admitted being a major player in a $40 million securities fraud scheme that involved a number of members of the New York Mafia as well as another man, stockbroker Salvatore Lauria. Both he and Lauria worked closely with Mafia members for protection. (Lauria later write a book detailing his financial crimes with Sater, and afterwards wrenounce the book as mostly “fiction.”) In 1998, Sater pled guilty to a single count of racketeering in a $40 million Mafia stock fraud case in return for becoming a confidential informant for investigations involving organized crime and national security, along with another member of the criminal fraud ring, Gennady Klotsman. Sater avoided prison time after FBI agents testified on his behalf. His court records were sealed for a decade, allowing him to keep his felonious past secret from inquisitive investors and potential business colleagues.

 In 2015, US attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch  praised Sater for providing information “crucial to national security” while working as an operative. Economic reporter James S. Henry  later wrote that Sater had “an informant relationship with the FBI and the CIA that is vaguely reminiscent of Boston criminal,  Whitey Bulger.”

The FBI believes that Sater’s father was a member of the Russian mob, and was involved in trafficking nuclear materials, selling illegal weapons, and money laundering. In 2008, after leaving Bayrock, Sater  testified that he pitched business ideas to Trump (“just me and him”) and his team “on a constant basis.”

In 2015, his lawyer Robert Wolf said that some of the information about Sater in public records and lawsuits is defamatory, and tells an Associated Press reporter to write about Sater’s past “at your own risk.”

In 2017, Sater added to his claims, saying he was a US intelligence agent as well, and boasting, “I was building Trump Towers by day and hunting Bin Laden by night.” He claimed to have worked in Afghanistan with the CIA.

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

 

Fred Pulver

 

Tachyons are theoretical particles or waves that travel faster than the speed of light, a recurring theme in popular science, and thus far without empirical support for their existence. New Age religions are religions, however, and have never cared for empirical support. So, according to Fred Pulver, not only is it the case that the “Tachyon Field supplies the energy needs of all living organisms until balance is achieved, then it eases until called upon again. As it is needed, and a depletion occurs, it rushes in until balance is achieved once again;” Pulver has also harnessed its energy. It’s like ormus. Just in case you run out of tachyon balance, you can buy one of his many takionic products (beads, belts, water). The products are of course called “takionic” since “tachyon”, being a common word, cannot be trademarked; “takionic” can.

He claims to have empirical evidence, though: “Motors have been built which draw upon the Tachyon Field for energy. They exhibit strange behavior, such as increasing in speed the longer they run, even though they are connected to no visible power source.” Well, it’s not empiricalempirical: no one has actually seenthe aforementioned motors. But how can you doubt someone who offers to restore your takionic balance for something as mundane as money? Moreover, “[t]akionic products, with their aligned atomic polarities, enhance the body’s natural ability to draw from the Tachyon Field for its energy needs. Athletes have discovered that Takionic products allow them to perform faster and longer, and shorten recovery time. As conduits for input from the Tachyon Field, Takionic products are proving themselves in the sports performance arena.” He probably just forgot to name said athletes due to sheer excitement over the resultsOh, but there is more: Did you know that “[t]achyon theory is holistic”? Bet you didn’t. It is holistic “because it accepts the notion of two interdependent universes which are actually indivisible: the visible, sub-light speed universe and an invisible, faster-than-light one. Tachyon theory also substantiates omnipresence, a purely metaphysical concept. God is omnipresent (simultaneously existing everywhere). Omnipresent existence can only occur at faster-than-light speeds, since slower-than-light travel takes time to cross space. Therefore, omnipresence can only be an attribute of a Tachyon Universe where time and space are uniform.” This is not quite what “holistic” means, but we have at this point left the realm of coherence and sense behind a long time ago anyways, so why not? He can even explain the powers of healers: “Healers have learned to access the Tachyon Field’s resources for its healing powers more successfully than the average person has.” (Ok, so “explain” may be a bit too strong.) At least he’s got testimonials (some rather confused examples here), including an enthusiastic endorsement from Gary Null, no less.

He’s not the only one to tap the marketing potential of tachyons, though. There is at least also e.g. the, Advanced Tachyon Technologies (ATT) of Santa Rosa. They’ve got chakra balancing kits.

Apparently Pulver is also an expert on sanpaku, the idea that it is a symptom (or proof, or whatever) of physical and spiritual imbalance if the white of the eye can be seen between the pupil and the lower lid when the subject looks forward. The condition can ostensibly be cured by a macrobiotic diet. Apparently both JFK and Robert Kennedy were sanpaku, as was Marilyn Monroe. I suppose we’ll have to confirm with Barry Martin.

“Do we all have to conform to the scientific method before we promote anything? Such rigidity seems counterproductive and illogical to me,” says Pulver when the scientific basis of his claims are questioned. Meanwhile, just to have it both ways, his website states that “[h]undreds of tests conducted on students and adults revealed that this unique headband improved their mathematical test scores by as much as 20-30%. The headband delays mental fatigue and heightens focus and concentration.” The tests are, of course, as unavailable for double-checking as the motors and athletes he claims to have observed.

Diagnosis: Seems to be a true believer, which is pretty incredible.

Allen Quist

Michele Bachmann is crazy, but compared to her mentor, Allen Quist, she can at least occasionally come across as deceptively reasonable (they’re close: Allen Quist’s wife Julie was for instance Bachmann’s district director while Bachmann was in Congress). Quist is a soybean farmer, former state representative, and twice gubernatorial candidate who served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 1983 to 1989; he ran for Congess in 2013 and won the primaries, but lost the general election. Most notable for his anti-abortion line, Quist believes that abortion should be a first degree homicide and has even written a book, The Abortion Revolution and the Sanctity of Life, about the topic, which does not even try to engage with the moral philosophical literature on the issue.

During the 1990s, Quist and Bachmann worked together to demolish Minnesota’s state curriculum standards through the group Maple River Education Coalition (MREC) (later EdWatch), considering the curriculum standards to be a gateway to a totalitarian society built on moral relativism due to its reliance on science and truth. In particular, MREC opposed the Profile of Learning, an attempt to bring the state into compliance with federal curriculum standards, which according to Quist was a step toward a United Nations takeover of Minnesota. Moreover, “sustainability” is just a euphemism for a future dystopia in which humans would be confined to public-transit-oriented urban cores (yes, “mass transit” is a conspiracy against freedom) and if the standards were implemented, Minnesota schools would become breeding grounds for “homosexual indoctrination.” Aaron Miller is apparently another one of Quist’s acolytes, especially with regard to their shared views on science and education.

Indeed, Quist has been consistently paranoid about the UN, especially Agenda 21, for decades, and has emerged as one of the leading Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists on the prairie, making several tours of Minnesota’s Tea Party circuit to warn about the terrors of Agenda 21. Part of the agenda, according to Quist – an especially effective talking point among his audiences – is international gun control, which Obama apparently was continuously on the verge of signing during his whole tenure as president. One of the UN’s major strategies for compliance to the gun ban effort is, as Quist sees it, apparently spreading “the myth of global warming”.

To get a sense of EdWatch’s approach to eduction, it is worth looking at Quist’s current efforts as editor of CurriculumModules.org (CMod), a children’s “education” and “learning” website targeted at homeschoolers, which “challenges the worldwide views of established education” and instead offers religiously motivated pseudoscience, anti-science, denialism and myths. Since Quist is a hardline young-earth creationist, one of CMod’s lessons suggests for instance not only that dinosaurs lived alongside humans in the past but continued to do so well into medieval times. As CMod sees it, history books and science books have falsely determined that dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago. Their counterevidence? “[T]he only reasonable explanation for the Stegosaurus carved in the stone on the wall of the Cambodian temple is that the artist had either seen a stegosaurus or had seen other art works of a stegosaurus. Either way, people and stegosaurs were living at the same time.” There is little reason to think that the stegosaurus depiction in question, which in any case does not depict a stegosaurus (but rather a rhino or a boar) unless severe pareidolia is applied, is not a fabrication. Elsewhere, Quist provides what he takes to be scientific evidence for the existence of dragons, and suggests that the Book of Job should be taught as a science lesson: “Today we know beyond a reasonable doubt – Job 41 is a picture-perfect description of SuperCroc,” which is silly on amazingly many levels. Quist once also told a reporter that he believed women were “genetically predisposed” to be subservient to men. Not that Quist knows what genesare.

As a politician, Quist was notable also for his unhealthy obsession with sex (he spent a total of 30 hours during a single 1988 session talking about it), and in particular sex he ostensibly doesn’t like. He campaigned hard against legalizing same-sex marriage, led efforts to prevent extending human rights protections to gays and lesbians, and famously sponsored a (failed) bill that would require AIDS testing for all marriage license applicants. He managed to draw some criticism for suggesting that supporting a gay counseling center at Minnesota State University would be similar to supporting one for the Ku Klux Klan, saying that “its presence suggests university approval for the homosexual lifestyle and the practice of sodomy … You wouldn’t have a center for the Ku Klux Klan,” and that “both would be breeding grounds for evil –AIDS, in this case.”

No fan of the ACA, Quist called it “the most insidious, evil piece of legislation I have ever seen in my life … [that seems to happen rather often in Quist’s case]. Every one of us has to be totally committed to killing this travesty … I have to kill this bill,” and argued that “Obama, Pelosi, [Tim] Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country.”

Diagnosis: Wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, denialist and bigot. His influence, however, is greater than you might initially think, as he seems to have been training a small army of deranged extremists for the better part of three decades.

Burt Prelutsky

“Columnist for the WND” is not a badge of honor, but Burt Prelutsky is one and has none. As a fundie wingnut with a persecution complex, Prelutsky is very concerned about the marginalization and persecution of Christians in the US. As evidence for such (widespread) persecution and marginalization, Prelutsky cites for instance the, well, claim that when conservative politicans are criticized for their political views it is really intended an attack on their religion. Which, for course, is merely a restatement of the hypothesis. A tendency to take a restatement of one’s (ridiculous) hypothesis to be evidence for the hypothesis can help explain quite a bit of Prelutsky’s thinking on these issues. Prelutsky is for instance very concerned with the War on Christmas, which he blames on “my fellow Jews” who are trying to “pull off their own version of the Spanish Inquisition, forcing Christians to either deny their faith and convert to agnosticism or suffer the consequences.” When it comes to “pushing the multicultural, anti-Christian agenda, you find Jewish judges, Jewish journalists and the largely Jewish funded ACLU at the forefront,” writes Prelutsky: “anti-Semitism is no longer a problem in society; it’s been replaced by a rampant anti-Christianity,” a claim splendidly undermined by his own column. (He went on to attack Jewish Americans for not showing enough support for the Republican Party and not being grateful that America is “a Christian nation”.)

Part of the problem, as Prelutsky sees it, may also be that Christians in the US are too nice and timid. That’s why Prelutsky had to remind them that it is wrong for Christians to care for undocumented immigrants, pointing out that such actions as treasonous, and leading to the sad state of affair that Christians are currently helping Latinos “overrun America by destroying our schools, undermining our economy and over-taxing our social services” and “encouraging one specific group, Hispanics, to invade this nation” in order to “fill their respective pews.” Most blame, however, should be placed on “homicidal” progressives like then-President Obama and congressional Democrats, of course, who are actively seeking to “destroy America”.

No fan of Obama (a “friend and close associate” of Satan because he threatened to close the Guantanamo camp), Prelutsky has also complained that Obama shared “the instincts of Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Mao, Castro and Mussolini, but, fortunately, he lacks their power to kill dissidents or even have them exiled to Siberian gulags.” Because anyone who disagrees with Prelutsky on politics is Hitler. And if you disagree with him you want to murder him – an idea that tells you nothing about those who disagree with him but may suggest something rather disconcerting about how Prelutsky would have wanted to treat his political opponents if he had the opportunity. A further illustration: Prelutsky wants us to “bomb Mecca off the face of the earth, not concerning ourselves in the least with collateral damage, letting the Muslims [or “swamp creatures”, as he calls them] know once and for all that our God is far more powerful and, yes, vengeful than their own puny deity.” We should apparently do so because Muslims are “savages”.

In the internal WND competition to come up with the silliest attempt to compare Obama to an evil person, Prelutsky went with John Hinckley, arguing that the president “is every bit as delusional” as the guy who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in a stream-of-consciousness rant that would be incoherent even by WND’s (lack of) standards. Here is his take on whether Obama is the Antichrist.

Prelutsky has also weighed in on issues connected to race with his usual combination of insightfulness and sharp wit. Here he compares Mandela and MLK in a way that is impossible to sum up; it is, however, at least telling that his criticism of MLK is based on the premise that “the relations between blacks and whites in America not only haven’t improved since the late ’60s, they have become far worse,” which, given segregation laws and lynchings, might tell you something about what Prelutsky thinks is the proper way of treating black people. He certainly has a thing for stereotypes. (Apparently he thinks they are humorous.)

Vehemently anti-science, Prelutsky is both (apparently) a creationist and (definitely) a global warming denialist. Science, as Prelutsky sees it, is a liberal conspiracy: “Liberals are always given to landing on the side of what they insist is science, whether the topic is Darwin’s theory of evolution versus intelligent design or man’s ability to control the weather. That’s because they believe that scientists are, like themselves, much smarter than other people,” says Prelutsky. As examples of the folly of science, Prelutsky then goes on to highlight the Piltdown Man, which scientists revealed was a hoax, and Pluto, “which for a long time, was regarded as one of the planets in our solar system. Then, without warning, Pluto woke up one morning to find it had been demoted to the status of a plutoid.” And, not least, the Brontosaurus, where “anthropologists mistakenly mixed up a few bones. What it was actually was something called an Apatosaurus.” It is not entirely clear what Prelutsky thinks his examples are supposed to illustrate, apart from the fact that science is a self-correcting enterprise, given that it is scientists, and not delusional wingnut bloggers, who discovers that corrections are needed and then go on to make them; it seems, though, that a guiding idea is the delusion that because scientists adjust their theories in the face of new evidence and better models, Prelutsky is correct when he rejects science for religious and political purposes. Apparently, this illustrates something about Obama, gay people (Prelutsky has problems with gay people) and leftwing professors.

Diagnosis: OK, so he is ultimately a relatively minor figure, but he is awfully silly so we couldn’t help but describe him at some length here. Though ostensibly a “humorist” the way in which he is funny – he sort of is, if you can disregard the hate, rage, evil and stupid – is not the way he intends.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

June 8, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”

Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.

 

Conversation No. 49

Date: Thursday, November 28, 1996

Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

Concluded: 9:22 AM CST

 

RTC: How are you today, Gregory?

GD: Been up since six working on the next Mueller book. Working on the concentration camp business.

RTC: A sensitive and profitable subject. For the same people. My God, what a money-maker that one is!

GD: Tell me about it. An established writer like Irving could never approach it. If he did, the Jews would go for his throat. Or his back more like it. Did you have many dealings with them?

RTC: As individuals or as professional agents?

GD: Either.

RTC: I have to tell you, Gregory, that I do not like Jews very much and I do not trust any of them. I know a few as individuals and some as agents. Jim loved them and spent half his time sucking up to the Mossad creeps. It bothered me because they were using him, but Jim loved flattery and ate it up. I don’t and I’m an Irish Catholic boy from Chicago. Jim was part Mexican and maybe that was part of it. Anyway, with Jews, it’s take, take and never give. You can’t trust any of them to the corner for a pound of soft soap.

GD: I don’t get involved but I have had bad experiences with them. Always watch your back around them has been my experience.

RTC: I have a report for you made for the UN in ’48 listing all their crimes against the Palestinian. The abused child becomes the abusing parent. My God, those filthy Polacks did terrible, vicious things to the Arabs. Murdered them, poisoned their farm wells, killed their animals and finally slaughtered whole villages of them, women and children. The Jews claim they own the Holy Land but these are Polack Jews and had nothing to do with Palestine. The Russian Jews are the same breed and Stalin, who really hated Jews, used them to butcher Russian Christians whom they hated. And then Josef planned to kill off all the Jews in Moscow.

GD: What about that?

RTC: Round them all up, put them in boxcars and ship them off to Siberia in mid-winter. He planned to slaughter all of them. And after all the filthy work they did for him, too! An ungrateful but realistic man.

GD: Why was this turn-about? He loved Jews, didn’t he?

RTC: No, he did not. Josef was far-sighted and knew, and said, that Jews had no loyalty to anyone except themselves. They hate all other people and feel that anything they do to them is justified. They claim centuries of persecution as their excuse.

GD: Yes, isn’t it odd that over thousands of years, everyone has persecuted the poor Jews. One wonders why.

RTC: Why? They burrow into the machinery of the state and the banking system and eventually take it over. And then, always, the locals get after them and either set them on fire or drive them out of their area or country. This has been going on for many centuries. One could say that the Jews of the world have been very unlucky or people know what they’re doing when they pile up wood for the burning pyres or set up camps.

GD: The stories about gassed millions is hysterically funny. Puts me in mind of the stories about the Easter Bunny or the Second Coming. Useful lies for children on one hand and a means to get money out of the suckers who actually believe the silliness about the Rapture, the Battle of Armageddon and other idiotic legends. Barnum was right.

RTC: Yes, he was. And I once looked into the camp story just because I could. There is much on this issue at the National Archives but most people can’t see it.

GD: Why not?

RTC: The Jews don’t want you see this. It would destroy the myth of vast gas chambers and soap factories. My God, Gregory, the Jews make vast sums of money off these made-up stories. I can just hear some raddled Jewess moaning in a furniture store about how her whole family was gassed and can she get 50% off on that chair? Oh yes, I know all about such creatures. And now, the Mossad wants us to hunt down people they don’t like, or send them confidential files on people they want to blackmail. They robbed and murdered the Arabs, so they have to hate them to justify their filthy behavior. The Arabs outnumber them 20 to 1 but the Israelis have us behind them so they literally can get away with murder. And how do they have our support? By working their way into the system, by owning most of the media, by bribery and blackmail, by political pressure. I could go on for days but I just ate breakfast and I don’t want to vomit onto my lap.

GD: I knew the Polish Jews in Munich after the war. Jesus H. Christ, Robert, I have never seen such really terrible people in my life. They were all up on the Muehl Strasse and going there to buy cheap butter for my friends was quite an experience. It was like tiptoeing into a den of circling hyenas. I was always neutral as far as Jews were concerned, but my experiences there radically altered my views. They were DPs. Displaced Persons. Couldn’t go back to Poland where the locals would have shoved them into barns and set them on fire. The Germans got blamed for much of that, but it was the local Poles who snuffed all the Jews in the neighborhood once their central government fell apart in ’39. A friend of mine was a Major in the thirty seventh infantry and he said the Poles would round up all the Jews and barbecue them. Said some of the villages smelt like a badly-vented crematorium. And of course they got the blame for it. Well, they lost so they can expect this. I once bought a German steel helmet at a flea market in Germany and I was carrying it down the street under my arm and some old hag came up behind me, screeching like a wet pea hen. There was no one around so I bashed her on the head with the pot until she shut up. Had to wash the helmet off later. It looked like pink oatmeal on part of it.

RTC: Bravo. I suppose she was dead, Gregory?

GD: I didn’t stop to examine her but she had certainly shut up.

RTC: I suppose she was a Jew.

GD: I didn’t care who she was. She could have been anyone and I would have shut her up regardless.

RTC: You are certainly not a nice person at times.

GD: Oh, I love that, Robert. If I were in your house for dinner, I assure you my manners would be impeccable. But we digress. Can we find out more about that business you people had with the French getting us into Vietnam?

ERTC: I wrote on that, Gregory. I ought to send you my manuscript some day. I can’t publish it because I signed a pledge to never publish without permission and I am sure it would never be given. I know all about that slaughterhouse, believe me. A nation steeped in blood. Terrible business. Wars for nothing and when Kennedy tried to get out, that was one of the reasons he got killed. Too much money to be made in a war. It ruined Johnson. No chance of getting reelected. McNamara thought he could apply business norms to a military business and he went as well. Probably be made the head of a think tank. My God, what a misnomer. ‘Think tank’ my ass. Bunch of loud-mouthed idiots running around babbling as if anyone cared what they thought about unimportant things. “I think…” is one of the worst openings for any kind of a conversation. Run into these congenital assholes at any Beltway social function and especially in the CIA circles. I say, who gives a damn what you think?

GD: I’ve been to Beltway functions, Robert. My God, if we could somehow trap all the hot air these methane monsters create, we could heat New York for ten years. Don’t light any matches and breathe very shortly but the gas is tremendous. “I think…?” I doubt it. Most of these self-important cow anuses should join hands and jump off the Key Bridge in the middle of winter. Right through the ice and then blessed silence. Downriver, however, all the marine life dies a terrible death.

RTC: (Laughter) Ah, well, it won’t happen. One day a Jew will sit in the Oval Office and on that day, we will drop atom bombs on anyone Tel Aviv doesn’t like.

GD: Where is Genghis Kahn now that we need him?

RTC: Lee Harvey Oswald would be more to the point.

 

(Concluded at 9:22 Am CST)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas

Urgent Smallpox Warning!

Note: This is an official American military digest of a 200+ page study. Many tables, graphs, thirty pages of technical footnotes, bibliographies etc. and support addendum have been deleted for ease of posting. Nothing else has been removed.

A REVIEW OF THE USE OF SMALLPOX AS BIO-TERRORISM

(Issuing Agency and Classification level information are redacted)

May 19, 2019

Given recent disclosures from both domestic and foreign intelligence sources this paper is presented to give a cogent overview of the probable domestic (inside the continental United States) use of smallpox as an instrument of terror.

The  President of the United States has ordered all American military personnel to be vaccinated against smallpox and has implemented a voluntary program for vaccinating emergency medical personnel who would likely be the first people to respond in case of a bioterrorist attack. The primary purpose for military vaccination is not because of battlefield concerns of a bioterror outgbrweak but because a large number of military and medical personnel will be required to establish a total quarantine throughout the United States in areas that have ongoing infections or, in the opinion of the Government, are liable to such infections.

The Smallpox Disease

The Disease. An Overview

Smallpox (Variola or Variola vera)

The name ‘smallpox’ is derived from the Latin word for “spotted” and refers to the raised bumps that appear on the face and body of an infected person.

Smallpox is a highly contagious disease unique to humans caused by two virus variants called Variola major and Variola minor. V. major is the more deadly form, with a typical mortality of 20-40 percent of those infected. The other type, V. minor, only kills 1% of its victims. There are two clinical forms of smallpox. Variola major is the severe and most common form of smallpox, with a more extensive rash and higher fever. There are four types of variola major smallpox: ordinary (the most frequent type, accounting for 90% or more of cases); modified (mild and occurring in previously vaccinated persons); flat; and hemorrhagic (both rare and very severe). Historically, variola major has an overall fatality rate of about 30%; however, flat and hemorrhagic smallpox usually are fatal. Variola minor is a less common presentation of smallpox, and a much less severe disease, with death rates historically of 1% or less.

Many survivors are left blind in one or both eyes from corneal ulceration, and persistent skin scarring – pockmarks – is nearly universal. Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300-500 million deaths in the 20th century. In 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year. There is no specific treatment for smallpox disease, and the only prevention is vaccination.  Except for laboratory stockpiles, the variola virus has been eliminated. The last case of smallpox in the United States was in 1949. The last naturally occurring case in the world was in Somalia in 1977.

The seasonal occurrence of smallpox was similar to that of chickenpox and measles—its incidence was highest during winter and early spring. This pattern was consonant with the observation that the duration of survival of orthopoxviruses in the aerosolized form was inversely proportional to both temperature and humidity. Likewise, when imported cases occurred in Europe, large outbreaks sometimes developed during the winter months, rarely during the summer.

The patient was most infectious from onset of rash through the first 7 to 10 days of rash. As scabs formed, infectivity waned rapidly. Although the scabs contained large amounts of viable virus, epidemiological and laboratory studies indicate that they were not especially infectious, presumably because the virions were bound tightly in the fibrin matrix.

The lesions that first appear in the mouth and pharynx ulcerate quickly because of the absence of a stratum corneum, releasing large amounts of virus into the saliva.Virus titers in saliva are highest during the first week of illness, corresponding with the period during which patients are most infectious. Although the virus in some instances can be detected in swabs taken from the oropharynx as many as 5 to 6 days before the rash develops, transmission does not occur during this period.

Except for the lesions in the skin and mucous membranes and reticulum cell hyperplasia, other organs are seldom involved. Secondary bacterial infection is not common, and death, which usually occurs during the second week of illness, most likely results from the toxemia associated with circulating immune complexes and soluble variola antigens. Encephalitis sometimes ensues that is indistinguishable from the acute perivascular demyelination observed as a complication of infection due to vaccinia, measles, or varicella.

Neutralizing antibodies can be detected by the sixth day of rash and remain at high titers for many years. Hemagglutinin-inhibiting antibodies can be detected on about the sixth day of rash, or about 21 days after infection, and complement-fixing antibodies appear approximately 2 days later. Within 5 years, hemagglutinin-inhibiting antibodies decline to low levels and complement-fixing antibodies rarely persist for longer than 6 months.

Although at least 90% of smallpox cases are clinically characteristic and readily diagnosed in endemic areas, other forms of smallpox are difficult to recognize—hemorrhagic and malignant. Hemorrhagic cases are uniformly fatal and occur among all ages and in both sexes, but pregnant women appear to be unusually susceptible. Illness usually begins with a somewhat shorter incubation period and is characterized by a severely prostrating prodromal illness with high fever and head, back, and abdominal pain. Soon thereafter, a dusky erythema develops, followed by petechiae and frank hemorrhages into the skin and mucous membranes. Death usually occurs by the fifth or sixth day after onset of rash.

In the frequently fatal malignant form, the abrupt onset and prostrating constitutional symptoms are similar. The confluent lesions develop slowly, never progressing to the pustular stage but remaining soft, flattened, and velvety to the touch. The skin has the appearance of a fine-grained, reddish-colored crepe rubber, sometimes with hemorrhages. If the patient survives, the lesions gradually disappear without forming scabs or, in severe cases, large amounts of epidermis might peel away.

The illness associated with variola minor is generally less severe, with fewer constitutional symptoms and a more sparse rash. A milder form of disease is also seen among those who have residual immunity from previous vaccination. In partially immune persons, the rash tends to be atypical and more scant and the evolution of the lesions more rapid.

There is little information about how individuals with different types of immune deficiency responded to natural smallpox infection. Smallpox was eradicated before human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was identified and before suitable techniques became available for measuring cell-mediated immunity. However, it is probable that the underlying cause of some cases of malignant and hemorrhagic smallpox resulted from defective immune responses. Vaccination of immune-deficient persons sometimes resulted in a continually spreading primary lesion, persistent viremia, and secondary viral infection of many organs. One such case is documented to have occurred in a vaccinated soldier who had HIV infection.

Although smallpox has been officially eradicated, there is heightened concern that the variola virus might be used as an agent of bioterrorism. After successful vaccination campaigns, the WHO in 1980 declared the eradication of smallpox, though cultures of the virus are kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States. Smallpox vaccination was discontinued in most countries in the 1970s as the risks of vaccination include death (~1 per million), among other serious side effects.

After the 2001 anthrax attacks took place in the United States, concerns about smallpox have resurfaced as a possible agent for bioterrorism. As a result, there has been increased concern about the availability of vaccine stocks

In 1980, the World Health Assembly recommended that all countries cease vaccination. A WHO expert committee recommended that all laboratories destroy their stocks of variola virus or transfer them to 1 of 2 WHO reference laboratories—the Institute of Virus Preparations in Moscow, Russia, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga. All countries reported compliance.

Diagnosis

The discovery of a single suspected case of smallpox must be treated as an international health emergency and be brought immediately to the attention of national officials through local and state health authorities.

The majority of smallpox cases present with a characteristic rash that is centrifugal in distribution, ie, most dense on the face and extremities. The lesions appear during a 1- to 2-day period and evolve at the same rate. On any given part of the body, they are generally at the same stage of development. In varicella (chickenpox), the disease most frequently confused with smallpox, new lesions appear in crops every few days and lesions at very different stages of maturation (i.e., vesicles, pustules, and scabs) are found in adjacent areas of skin. Varicella lesions are much more superficial and are almost never found on the palms and soles. The distribution of varicella lesions is centripetal, with a greater concentration of lesions on the trunk than on the face and extremities.

The signs and symptoms of both hemorrhagic and malignant smallpox were such that smallpox was seldom suspected until more typical cases were seen and it was recognized that a smallpox outbreak was in progress. Hemorrhagic cases were most often initially identified as meningococcemia or severe acute leukemia. Malignant cases likewise posed diagnostic problems, most often being mistaken for hemorrhagic chickenpox or prompting surgery because of severe abdominal pain.

Laboratory confirmation of the diagnosis in a smallpox outbreak is important. Specimens should be collected by someone who has recently been vaccinated (or is vaccinated that day) and who wears gloves and a mask. To obtain vesicular or pustular fluid, it is often necessary to open lesions with the blunt edge of a scalpel. The fluid can then be harvested on a cotton swab. Scabs can be picked off with forceps. Specimens should be deposited in a vacutainer tube that should be sealed with adhesive tape at the juncture of stopper and tube. This tube, in turn, should be enclosed in a second durable, watertight container. State or local health department laboratories should immediately be contacted regarding the shipping of specimens. Laboratory examination requires high-containment (BL-4) facilities and should be undertaken only in designated laboratories with the appropriate training and equipment. Once it is established that the epidemic is caused by smallpox virus, clinically typical cases would not require further laboratory confirmation.

Smallpox infection can be rapidly confirmed in the laboratory by electron microscopic examination of vesicular or pustular fluid or scabs. Although all orthopoxviruses exhibit identically appearing brick-shaped virions, history taking and clinical picture readily identify cowpox and vaccinia. Although smallpox and monkeypox virions may be indistinguishable, naturally occurring monkeypox is found only in tropical rain forest areas of Africa. Definitive laboratory identification and characterization of the virus involves growth of the virus in cell culture or on chorioallantoic egg membrane and characterization of strains by use of various biologic assays, including polymerase chain reaction techniques and restriction fragment-length polymorphisms. The latter studies can be completed within a few hours.

A clandestine aerosol release of smallpox, even if it infected only 50 to 100 persons to produce the first generation of cases, would rapidly spread in a now highly susceptible population, expanding by a factor of 10 to 20 times or more with each generation of cases. Between the time of an aerosol release of smallpox virus and diagnosis of the first cases, an interval as long as 2 weeks or more is apt to occur because of the average incubation period of 12 to 14 days and the lapse of several additional days before a rash was sufficiently distinct to suggest the diagnosis of smallpox. By that time, there would be no risk of further environmental exposure from the original aerosol release because the virus is fully inactivated within 2 days.

As soon as the diagnosis of smallpox is made, all individuals in whom smallpox is suspected should be isolated immediately and all household and other face-to-face contacts should be vaccinated and placed under surveillance. Because the widespread dissemination of smallpox virus by aerosol poses a serious threat in hospitals, patients should be isolated in the home or other non-hospital facility whenever possible. Home care for most patients is a reasonable approach, given the fact that little can be done for a patient other than to offer supportive therapy. In the event of an aerosol release of smallpox and a subsequent outbreak, the rationale for vaccinating patients suspected to have smallpox at this time is to ensure that some with a mistaken diagnosis are not placed at risk of acquiring smallpox. Vaccination administered within the first few days after exposure and perhaps as late as 4 days may prevent or significantly ameliorate subsequent illness. An emergency vaccination program is also indicated that would include all health care workers at clinics or hospitals that might receive patients; all other essential disaster response personnel, such as police, firefighters, transit workers, public health staff, and emergency management staff; and mortuary staff who might have to handle bodies. The working group recommends that all such personnel for whom vaccination is not contraindicated should be vaccinated immediately irrespective of prior vaccination status.

Vaccination administered within 4 days of first exposure has been shown to offer some protection against acquiring infection and significant protection against a fatal outcome. Those who have been vaccinated at some time in the past will normally exhibit an accelerated immune response. Thus, it would be prudent, when possible, to assign those who had been previously vaccinated to duties involving close patient contact.

It is important that discretion be used in identifying contacts of patients to ensure, to the extent that is possible, that vaccination and adequate surveillance measures are focused on those at greatest risk. Specifically, it is recommended that contacts be defined as persons who have been in the same household as the infected individual or who have been in face-to-face contact with the patient after the onset of fever. Experience during the smallpox global eradication program showed that patients did not transmit infection until after the prodromal fever had given way to the rash stage of illness.

Isolation of all contacts of exposed patients would be logistically difficult and, in practice, should not be necessary. Because contacts, even if infected, are not contagious until onset of rash, a practical strategy calls for all contacts to have temperatures checked at least once each day, preferably in the evening. Any increase in temperature higher than 38°C (101°F) during the 17-day period following last exposure to the case would suggest the possible development of smallpox and be cause for isolating the patient immediately, preferably at home, until it could be determined clinically and/or by laboratory examination whether the contact had smallpox. All close contacts of the patients should be promptly vaccinated.

Although cooperation by most patients and contacts in observing isolation could be ensured through counseling and persuasion, there may be some for whom forcible quarantine will be required. Some states and cities in the United States, but not all, confer broad discretionary powers on health authorities to ensure the safety of the public’s health and, at one time, this included powers to quarantine. Under epidemic circumstances, this could be an important power to have. Thus, each state and city should review its statutes as part of its preparedness activities.

During the smallpox epidemics in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, there was considerable public alarm whenever outbreaks occurred and, often, a demand for mass vaccination throughout a very widespread area, even when the vaccination coverage of the population was high. In the United States, where few people now have protective levels of immunity, such levels of concern must be anticipated. However, the US vaccine supply is limited at present; thus, vaccine would have to be carefully conserved and used in conjunction with measures to implement rapid isolation of smallpox patients.

Hospital

In the event of a limited outbreak with few cases, patients should be admitted to the hospital and confined to rooms that are under negative pressure and equipped with high-efficiency particulate air filtration. In larger outbreaks, home isolation and care should be the objective for most patients. However, not all will be able to be so accommodated and, to limit nosocomial infections, authorities should consider the possibility of designating a specific hospital or hospitals for smallpox care. All persons isolated as such and those caring for them should be immediately vaccinated. Employees for whom vaccination is contraindicated should be furloughed.

Standard precautions using gloves, gowns, and masks should be observed. All laundry and waste should be placed in biohazard bags and autoclaved before being laundered or incinerated. A special protocol should be developed for decontaminating rooms after they are vacated by patients

Laboratory examination requires high-containment (BL-4) facilities and should be undertaken only in designated laboratories with the appropriate trained personnel and equipment. Protecting against the explosive spread of virus from the hemorrhagic or malignant case is difficult. Such cases occurring during the course of an outbreak may be detected if staff is alert to the possibility that any severe, acute, prostrating illness must be considered smallpox until proven otherwise.

Patients who die of smallpox should be cremated whenever possible and mortuary workers should be vaccinated

Five groups of persons are ordinarily considered at special risk of smallpox vaccine complications:

(1) persons with eczema or other significant exfoliative skin conditions;

(2) patients with leukemia, lymphoma, or generalized malignancy who are receiving therapy with alkylating agents, antimetabolites, radiation, or large doses of corticosteroids;

(3) patients with HIV infection;

(4) persons with hereditary immune deficiency disorders; and

(5) pregnant women. If persons with contraindications have been in close contact with a smallpox patient or the individual is at risk for occupational reasons, VIG, if available, may be given simultaneously with vaccination in a dose of 0.3 mL/kg of body weight to prevent complications. This does not alter vaccine efficacy. If VIG is not available, vaccine administration may still be warranted, given the far higher risk of an adverse outcome from smallpox infection than from vaccination.

Disease Transmission

Generally, direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact, primarily by droplet nuclei or aerosols expelled from the oropharynx of infected persons and by direct contact, is required to spread smallpox from one person to another. Smallpox also can be spread through direct contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as bedding or clothing. Rarely, smallpox has been spread by virus carried in the air in enclosed settings such as buildings, buses, and trains. Humans are the only natural hosts of variola. Smallpox is not known to be transmitted by insects or animals. Contaminated clothing or bed linens can also spread the virus. There are no known animal or insect reservoirs or vectors. Natural infection occurs following implantation of the virus on the oropharyngeal or respiratory mucosa.The infectious dose is unknown but is believed to be only a few virions.After the migration of virus to and multiplication in regional lymph nodes, an asymptomatic viremia develops on about the third or fourth day, followed by multiplication of virus in the spleen, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. A secondary viremia begins on about the eighth day and is followed by fever and toxemia. The virus, contained in leukocytes, then localizes in small blood vessels of the dermis and beneath the oral and pharyngeal mucosa and subsequently infects adjacent cells.

At the end of the 12- to 14-day incubation period (range, 7-17 days), the patient typically experiences high fever, malaise, and prostration with headache and backache. Severe abdominal pain and delirium are sometimes present. A maculopapular rash then appears on the mucosa of the mouth and pharynx, face, and forearms, and spreads to the trunk and legs. Within 1 to 2 days, the rash becomes vesicular and, later, pustular. The pustules are characteristically round, tense, and deeply embedded in the dermis; crusts begin to form on about the eighth or ninth day of rash. As the patient recovers, the scabs separate and characteristic pitted scarring gradually develops. The scars are most evident on the face and result from the destruction of sebaceous glands followed by shrinking of granulation tissue and fibrosis.

Historically, the rapidity of smallpox transmission throughout the population was generally slower than for such diseases as measles or chickenpox. Patients spread smallpox primarily to household members and friends; large outbreaks in schools, for example, were uncommon. This finding was accounted for in part by the fact that transmission of smallpox virus did not occur until onset of rash. By then, many patients had been confined to bed because of the high fever and malaise of the prodromal illness. Secondary cases were thus usually restricted to those who came into contact with patients, usually in the household or hospital.

A person with smallpox is sometimes contagious with onset of fever (prodrome phase), but the person becomes most contagious with the onset of rash. At this stage the infected person is usually very sick and not able to move around in the community. The infected person is contagious until the last smallpox scab falls off.

Vaccine

A smallpox outbreak poses difficult public health problems because of the ability of the virus to continue to spread throughout the population unless checked by vaccination and/or isolation of patients and their close contacts.

In the United States, a limited reserve supply of vaccine that was produced by Wyeth Laboratories, Lancaster, Pa, in the 1970s is in storage. This supply was once believed to be sufficient to vaccinate between 6 and 7 million persons. This vaccine, now under the control of the CDC, consists of vaccine virus (New York Board of Health strain) grown on scarified calves. After purification, it was freeze-dried in rubber-stoppered vials that contain sufficient vaccine for at least 50 doses when a bifurcated needle is used. It is stored at -20°C. Although quantities of vaccine have also been retained by a number of other countries, none have reserves large enough to meet more than their own potential emergency needs. WHO has 500,000 doses.

Unfortunately, most of the vaccine stored in the United States that would be available for public vaccination in the event of a BW incident has become totally ineffective due to improper storage methodology.

At the present time, the United States’ national stockpile of smallpox vaccine is inside a walk-in freezer in a warehouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, near the Susquehanna River, at a facility owned by Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories. The vaccine is owned by the federal government and is managed by Wyeth-Ayerst, which is the company that made it, twenty-five to thirty years ago. It is stored in glass vials. The vials contain freeze-dried nuggets of live vaccinia virus. Vaccinia is a mild virus. The vaccine has totally deterioriated. The Food and Drug Administration has put a hold on the smallpox vaccine, and right now no one can use it. The reason for this is that it has been discovered that this ageing vaccine is disintegrating and much of it is no longer effective. High ranking members of the government and many military units ordered vaccinated by order of President Bush in fact do not have any immunity unless they had previous vaccinations.

There are no manufacturers now equipped to produce smallpox vaccine in large quantities. The development and licensure of a tissue cell culture vaccine and the establishment of a new vaccine production facility is estimated to require at least 36 months.  Because of the small amounts of vaccine available, a preventive vaccination program to protect individuals such as emergency and health care personnel is not an option at this time. When additional supplies of vaccine are procured, a decision to undertake preventive vaccination of some portion of the population will have to weigh the relative risk of vaccination complications against the threat of contracting smallpox.

A further deterrent to extensive vaccination is the fact that presently available supplies of vaccinia immune globulin (VIG), also maintained by the CDC, are very limited in quantity. The working group recommends VIG for the treatment of severe cutaneous reactions occurring as a complication of vaccination.Vaccinia immune globulin has also been given along with vaccination to protect those who needed vaccination but who were at risk of experiencing vaccine-related complications. It has been estimated that if 1 million persons were vaccinated, as many as 250 persons would experience adverse reactions of a type that would require administration of VIG .How much VIG would be needed to administer with vaccine to those at risk is unknown.

Smallpox as Bioterrorism Weapon

The deliberate reintroduction of smallpox as an epidemic disease would be an international crime of unprecedented proportions, but it is now regarded as highly probable. Intelligence estimates indicate a 95% chance of a deliberately instigated outbreak of smallpox in the United States within the next calendar year.. An aerosol release of variola virus would disseminate widely, given the considerable stability of the orthopoxviruses in aerosol form and the likelihood that the infectious dose is very small

There is a growing suspicion among experts that the smallpox virus exists unofficially in clandestine biowarfare laboratories in a number of countries around the world. The Central Intelligence Agency has become deeply alarmed about smallpox. Since 2015, a number of leading American biologists and public-health doctors have been given classified national-security briefings on smallpox.

North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan in a test, and the missile fell into the sea. Some knowledgeable observers thought that the missile could have been designed to carry a biologic warhead. If it had carried smallpox and landed in Japan, it could have devastated Japan’s population: Japan has almost no smallpox vaccine on hand and its government seems to have no ability to deal with a biological attack.

The United States government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, and includes China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and Serbia. The list also includes the terrorist organization of Al Quaida and the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan — a quasi-religious group that had Ph.D. biologists as members and a belief that an apocalyptic war will bring them worldwide power. Aum members released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, and the group is still active in Japan and in Russia. In any case, the idea that smallpox lives in only two freezers was never anything more than a comfortable fiction. No one knows exactly who has smallpox today, or where they keep the virus, or what they intend to do with it.

Most people today have no immunity to smallpox. The vaccine begins to wear off in many people after ten years. Mass vaccination for smallpox came to a worldwide halt around twenty-five years ago. There is now very little smallpox vaccine on hand in the United States or anywhere else in the world. The World Health Organization once had ten million doses of the vaccine in storage in Geneva, Switzerland, but in 1990 an advisory committee recommended that most of it be destroyed, feeling that smallpox was longer a threat. Nine and a half million doses are assumed to have been cooked in an oven, leaving the W.H.O. with a total supply of half a million doses — one dose of smallpox vaccine for every twelve thousand people on earth. A recent survey by the W.H.O. revealed that there is only one factory in the world that has recently made even a small quantity of the vaccine, and there may be no factory capable of making sizable amounts. The vaccine was discovered in the age of Thomas Jefferson, and making a lot of it would seem simple, but so far the United States government has been unable to get any made at all. Variola virus is now classified as a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent — the most dangerous kind of virus — because it is lethal, airborne, and highly contagious, and is now exotic to the human species, and there is not enough vaccine to stop an outbreak. Experts feel that the appearance of a single case of smallpox anywhere on earth would be a global medical emergency.

If there’s a bioterror event, and someone releases enough smallpox to create a hundred cases – let us say in the Washington D.C. area — it would be a national emergency. The immediate national, and international, demand for vaccine would be beyond all belief. In Yugoslavia in 1972, the outbreak was started by one man, and eighteen million doses of vaccine were needed — one for almost every person in the country.

That first wave after the bioterror event will certainly result in a hundred people infected with smallpox. It takes two weeks after exposure before doctors can diagnose smallpox. Meanwhile, those hundred people will give smallpox to two thousand people. That’s the second wave. Some of those first hundred people will go to other cities — to Washington, to New York, to Chicago and in fact, across the globe. So the second wave will include cases in other American cities, and given the travel patterns, with a certainty in foreign countries. By then, it’ll be too late to treat them, and we’ll lose the second wave. We’ll be well into the third wave — ten to twenty thousand people with smallpox — before we can really start vaccinating people. By then, we’ll begin to pick up so many cases in the Washington area that we won’t be able to track cases, and we’ll just have to vaccinate everybody around Baltimore. At least a hundred million doses of vaccine would be needed in the United States alone to stop a surging outbreak triggered by a hundred initial cases of smallpox from a bioterror event. That much vaccine could be stored in a 25×7 foot building.

Given global air travel patterns it would take about six weeks to create fatal eruptions cases around the world. Dropping an atomic bomb could cause large casualties in a specific area, but the infection of one carrier could cause a global plague of incredible proportions. In the United States alone, it is cautiously estimated that the death toll would easily reach 77,000,000 people with many millions more infected and physically damaged, requiring extensive medical support for a significant period of time.

The principal American biodefense laboratory is the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, in Fort Detrick, Maryland — an Army base that nestles against the eastern front of the Appalachian Mountains in the city of Frederick, an hour’s drive northwest of Washington. There is no smallpox at USAMRIID, for only the two W.H.O. repositories are allowed to have it.

Today, smallpox and its protocols could be anywhere in the world. A master seed strain of smallpox could be carried in a person’s pocket.

The Department of Health and Human Services (H.H.S.) has been given the responsibility by the White House for producing a stockpile of smallpox vaccine large enough to protect the American civilian population in case of a bioterror event; originally, the idea was for H.H.S. to consider hiring the military’s contractor, Dynport, to make forty million extra doses, in addition to the three hundred thousand that Dynport was making for the Pentagon. (Any such initiative would require competitive bidding.)

At a series of meetings at H.H.S., a top Dynport executive said that forty million doses could be quite expensive. One scientist asked if a group of knowledgeable people could be drawn together to come up with an estimate of costs. The Dynport man answered, “Yes, we can do a study that will list the questions that need to be asked. It will cost two hundred and forty thousand dollars and will take six weeks.”

Somebody then asked how much it would cost to answer the questions. The Dynport official responded, “That will be a different study. That study will cost two million dollars and will take six months.”

The C.E.O. of Dynport said that the situation is more complicated. The civilian population is very different from the military. There’s an age spread from newborns to the elderly, there’s more compromised immunity, with AIDS, chemotherapy, and organ transplants. And possibly thirty-five per cent of the current American population people have never been vaccinated. This percentage is not reflected in the overall global population which has approximately a 3% overall vaccination history.

Conclusion: There is no effective defense against a global smallpox epidemic other than immediate vaccination. Vaccination is about 97% effective against the contraction of this disease. Unfortunately, much vaccine and the capacity to manufacture it, has greatly diminished and to restart a vaccine program would take so long that the disease would have a catastrophic global effect. It would be very easy for a hostile element to infect a single person without their knowledge and send them into the United States on legitimate business. From this single, unknowing carrier the disease would spread geometrically, not only throughout the United States, where the projected death rate is over 77,000,000 people, but also throughout the world. There have been no realistic estimates of deaths in such crowded locations as Japan, China, India, and Egypt. The projected use of US military units to immediately execute  a national quarantine program would prove ineffectual because of the widespread travel habits of American citizens and the probability that many troops once considered as possessing immunity through vaccination do not possess this immunity due to the deterioratio of stocks of old vaccine. When the public discovers that there is no immunity, no effective treatment and no visible support program, there will very likely be a catastrophic breakdown in domestic confidence followed by the onset of panic and descent into anarchy. The only coherent solution, and this is by no means guaranteed, is to implement an immediate and urgently accelerated vaccine program and to only hope that it will be in place when, and not if, this disease erupts anywhere in the world.

 

Why tariffs could be Trump’s undoing

Even otherwise spineless Republican senators are alarmed at Trump’s trade wars – because tariffs are hurting crucial 2020 battleground states

June 7, 2019

by Ross Barkan

The Guardian

In the end, it was not the ceaseless lying, the Muslim ban, the alleged obstruction of justice, the pandering to white supremacists, the demonization of immigrants, or the climate change denialism that most outraged Donald Trump’s party. The norm-shattering president finally became too much for Republican politicians when he threatened to do something else entirely – impose tariffs on Mexican imports.

On Tuesday, Republican senators emerged enraged from a meeting with Trump, unwilling to stomach his threat to level tariffs as high as 25% on Mexican goods in retaliation for migrants crossing the border. Even Senator Ted Cruz, the former Trump punching-bag (“Lyin’ Ted”) who has since become a reliable Trump ally, railed against the proposed tariffs, calling them “new taxes” on Texas farmers, manufacturers and small businesses. Otherwise spineless Republican senators are having this change of heart because of an important political reality: tariffs will make goods more expensive in the states they need to capture in 2020.

Like Texas, Michigan would be hit hard by a trade war. Thanks to the automobile industry’s complex supply chains, it is the state most dependent on imports from Mexico – and, as Republicans know all too well, crucial to Trump’s re-election prospects. He is already running 12 points behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders there, according to one recent poll.

Trump’s ongoing trade war with China has cost him political capital throughout the midwest, where farmers depend on imports and exports. His approval rating in Iowa has dropped a staggering 21 points since he took office. In Wisconsin, he’s lost 19 points, and in Ohio, 18. Trump’s base alone cannot carry him, especially with so many Democrats motivated to drive him out of office.

This is the only kind of math Republican lawmakers understand, because it speaks to their survival. The most ravenous Republicans will never desert Trump, and his approval rating among party regulars remains strong, but his 2016 success hinged on razor-thin margins in a handful of midwestern states. There is no path to victory without them. Conservatives beyond the cult of Trump comprehend this – that their dear leader is not infallible, that his 30-year obsession with combating trade deficits could be his undoing.

Trump, more through instinct than any kind of sober economic analysis, has long understood that the free-trade agreements of the 1990s hastened globalization, punished the American worker, and allowed jobs to flee elsewhere. He violated the GOP’s orthodoxy on free trade and still commandingly won a primary. He knew tacking left on trade wasn’t going to cost him votes.

But Trump’s hatred of a globalized world that would cheapen the value of labor is not tied up in any defense of the American worker. If it were, he would embrace strong labor unions, consumer protections, universal healthcare and cheap housing for America’s precarious working class. He rejects actual uplift in favor of lashing out at allies and trading partners around the globe, a jingoistic braying with no true endgame. He says his Mexican tariffs will begin on Monday. And then what?

If Trump doesn’t get the immigration concessions from Mexico that he wants, and overrides Republican opposition to impose tariffs starting at 5% on imports, how far will Republicans in Congress go to oppose him?

So far, they have been the most pliant class of lawmakers in recent history, tolerating his rank incompetence in the hope he implements enough of the conservative agenda to set Democrats back a generation. Denying science or catering to white supremacists was not enough to foment any kind of rebellion among Republicans in Congress – they, too, reject the reality of climate change and refuse to ostracize the most hateful elements of their base – but tariffs could do the trick, if only because they pose an electoral challenge for Trump 2020.

There is no Trump economic policy or Trump government as much as the man himself, executing ill-informed policy on instinct. Dissenting voices have been excised. How far Trump goes with his tariffs will be up to Trump. If Trump is defeated next year, it will be because of Trump – his motives, his decisions, his rage.

It’s Trump’s trade war. We’re just the casualties.