Yes, War is a Racket

Smedley Butler wrote War is a Racket in 1935. An excerpt from Wikipedia:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Butler confesses that during his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

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About U.S. Warmongering

Corporate news outlets never discuss the insatiable U.S. War Machine and the ubiquitous U.S. government propaganda. U.S. warmongering benefits only a tiny # of rich elites and results in senseless destruction overseas, to U.S. citizens and to the U.S. economy.

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Did the U.S. Government Engineer Lyme Disease?

As with many disturbing things these days, I don't know how to proceed. Once again, it is being creditably suggested that our government engaged in reckless or intentional wrongdoing. This latest concern about Lyme disease is being reported on X by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University), based on Bitten: The Secret history of Lyme disease and Biological Weapons, a 2020 book by Kris Newby.

This latest concern merely deepens my already deep suspicions about the conduct and intentions of the U.S. government, especially given the fact that the U.S. government, in coordination with the corporate media, has been caught red-handed engaging in pervasive dishonest narrative control regarding many topics, including public health. For a deep dive on the evidence that the United States has been illegally and pervasively censoring its own citizens through illegal "jawboning," see this 2023 opinion in the case of Missouri v Biden, by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Excerpt from Bhattacharya's Tweet:

I just finished @krisnewby's Bitten, which tells the history of the US government's secret program in the 1950s and 1960s to weaponize ticks to deliver deadly bacteria to incapacitate unsuspecting populations.

Newby, a talented journalist and science writer, structures her history around a biography of WIlly Burgdorfer, the Swiss-American scientist who discovered borellia burgdorferi, a spirochete bacteria often found in Lyme disease patients.

It's an incredible, infuriating, well-written book worth your time.

A few lessons:

1. The mid-20th century US biomedical research establishment was psychopathic, whole-heartedly embracing reckless, deadly investigations in the name of developing vaccines and bioweapons.

2. It is possible (& perhaps likely, though not proven) that the emergence and spread of Lyme disease may have been caused by this research program, which included large open-air testing of intentionally infected ticks on US soil.

3. The bioweapons program used combinations of viruses and bacteria infecting the same tick to hide the body's immune response to infection from detection by standard medical tests. . . .

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Adam Smith and Endless War

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.

— Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 5, Chapter 3

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