Courageous Discourse
Pete Hegseth & J.D. Vance Tell Europe’s Leaders to Grow Up
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By John Leake
Growing up is the often painful process of coming to terms with the reality of one’s own limitations, and recognizing that it’s impossible to gain anything in life without hard work and sacrifice. Wisdom lies in recognizing that—as the economist Thomas Sowell would put it—getting what we want often requires a tradeoff. Children, particularly the children of indulgent parents, struggle to recognize this. They want everything NOW and they don’t want to give up anything to get it.
For some time now I have perceived that the European Union—both the supranational entity and the constituent nations—are governed by childish people with childish ideas about what is best for their countries. This has been very painful for me to watch, because I love Europe and spent the happiest years of my life living there.
Especially distressing has been the ruin of Germany with stupid “green energy” initiatives that have wrecked it’s brilliant manufacturing sector, and with its bizarre welcoming of young males from the Arabic-speaking world.
The objective of these policies is apparently to destroy the 1). Economic security of young German men who had long enjoyed great, skilled labor jobs, and 2). the physical security of young German women.
The entire “green energy” hoax completely ignores the laws of thermodynamics, while allowing millions of young Arabic men into Germany ignores the basic reality that most of them have nothing to do in Germany but hang out and chase cute German girls. Any grownup man with a shred of common sense instantly recognizes the folly of these polices.
Equally idiotic has been the willingness of Germany’s so-called leaders to wreck the the excellent relationship that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder forged with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This relationship—expressed by the construction of the NordStream Pipeline—was built on the essential facts that Germany needed Russia’s plentiful and cheap gas, while Russia (which has an economy smaller than that of Texas) needed a market in which to sell it.
Under the baleful influence of the equally moronic Neocons in Washington, German officials decided to wreck this relationship by playing along with the U.S. fantasy of dominating Ukraine, even if it meant destabilizing the balance of power in Europe and wrecking Germany’s fruitful relationship with Russia.
In the last few days, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance have been in Europe, with Hegseth giving talks to NATO officials in Brussels and Vance giving a talk at the Munich Security Conference.
In stark contrast with the creepy weirdos in the Biden administration, the youthful and handsome Hegseth and Vance cut fine figures at their respective talks, which were the most incisive I’ve heard in years. Compared to Kamala Harris’s mealy-mouthed and jarring ramble at the 2022 Munich Security Council—which was apparently designed to insult Russia and dismiss its legitimate security concerns—Vance’s talk was elegant and crystal clear.
The message of both Hegseth and Vance to Europe’s leaders was essentially the same—namely, it’s time for them to grow up and recognize the hard facts of life. Just as the U.S. can no longer afford to indulge its own “regime change” fantasies all over the world, Europe can no longer afford to wreck itself with inane, virtue-signaling fantasies about green energy, mass migration, and Ukraine.
Vance also pointed out the sheer nonsense of claiming to be dedicated to democracy while at the same time persecuting popular parties and even trying to nullify election results. The overheated rhetoric about the rise of conservative populist parties being “far right” and “Nazi” has gotten so tired that no one outside of privileged political and leftist circles believes it.
Hegseth made the following clear:
- NATO membership for Ukraine is not a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement
- As part of any [postwar] security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine
- A return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders, an official Ukrainian war aim, is “an unrealistic objective.”
- Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.
- The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.
In other words, the U.S. will no longer pursue an antagonistic relationship with Russia in Europe, especially in Ukraine, but will seek a negotiated settlement. If the Europeans want to persist in having an antagonistic relationship with Russia, they are on their own and will have to pay for it.
Hegseth was criticized for what appeared to be making concessions to Russia before President Trump had even commenced negotiations with Russia. The (Neocon) National Review gave him a hard time for this, and an equally hard time for apparently walking back some of these remarks the following day, which made him seem amateurish.
And yet, let’s face it— a return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders is “an unrealistic objective” at this point.
Is a single American, English, German, or Austrian reader of this post willing to die fighting Russia in order to ensure that Ukraine’s 1991 borders are restored?
If you, dear reader, are too old to fight in Ukraine, would you be willing to sacrifice one of your children to restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders?
Samuel Johnson famously remarked:
When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
Likewise, when a man knows that either he or his young sons are going to be sent abroad to die to maintain Ukraine’s 1991 borders, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. In light of this, I believe it is high time for the Neocon armchair warriors in Washington to quit talking and start enlisting.
Join the army, get into shape, and get your asses over to Ukraine. On the flight over, you may take heart in reading Kipling’s poem to a “Young British Soldier,” which concludes with this heart-rousing stanza:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
Neocons, go to your Gawd like a soldier!
Courageous Discourse
The Mother of All Frauds?
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By John Leake
Social Security database contains millions of apparent recipients over the age of 110. Are payments really being sent out to these people?
This morning I read a story posted by Jeff Childers on his marvelous Coffee & Covid 2025 Substack that I am struggling to interpret. On the one hand, the story is so stupendously preposterous that I find it extremely hard to believe. On the other hand, I suppose that at this point, no story about U.S. government insanity, no matter how outlandish, should be dismissed out of hand.
Can the following tale of total insanity—told by Jeff Childers—possibly be true?
A full decade ago in 2015, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide. (Robert Kennedy should be happy to hear about this.) That was alarming enough, but in 2023, an expanded audit looked at SSNs aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier lacked a date of death, meaning they are still active.
But last year (2024), PEW Research reported there are only 80,000 living Americans aged 100+, leaving a shocking discrepancy of 18.8 million mysterious perennial people still receiving social security and possibly disability as well, not to mention generous credits from phantom tax returns, and of course, blue state and local benefits.
And of course, these immortal individuals are probably also voting. Voting Democrat.
The IG’s 2023 follow-up report detailed all the Agency’s terrific progress in resolving the problems identified since the earlier 2015 report. In short, the Social Security Administration’s diligent, alert, and apolitical permanent career civil servants grabbed hold of the IG’s 2015 report with both hands and shoved it into the basement furnace.
I, for one, thank the gods of bureaucrats for all the hardworking, non-biased, non-partisan federal workers in the Social Security Administration who concluded, probably right after their 3-mimosa-lunch (held by Zoom), that it was just too hard and too expensive to stop 18.9 million fraudulent social security records by putting a presumed date of death into the date field. It’s no use.
It’s not like it might have made any difference in the 2020 election or anything.
I’m sure this will (not) shock you. Both times, 2015 and 2023, the media ignored or downplayed the story. A sane person living in pre-Millennial America might assume that the tireless watchdog media, upon learning about the vast numbers of impossibly fake Social Security accounts and the trillions of dollars of attendant waste and fraud would never give the government a moment’s peace until it was fixed.
But no.
We are not surprised. We are scarred veterans of the post-Millennial period, and we understand the media’s main job is not to expose, but to cover up government incompetence — and especially bury any news at all that might fuel legitimate concerns about election integrity.
Not to mention upholding corporate media’s timeless narrative chestnut that entitlement fraud is rare and overhyped and only a right-wing conspiracy theory. That narrative, after all, is as timeless as the millions of zombified centenarian recipients.
In 2015, apart from one-offs in some conservative media (Breitbart, Washington Times, Fox), I could only find a single AP story about the 6.5 million fraudulent Social Security records aged 112+. In 2023, after the SSA’s OIG published its report finding 19 million digitally breathing people over 100 still “alive” in the system, once again, there was mostly media silence. It should have been a five-alarm fire, but only a handful of “far-right” sites mentioned the news (Federalist, Washington Examiner). The usually reliable New York Post only briefly mentioned the OIG report, but even that was buried in a bigger article about government waste generally.
But CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the other major outlets? Crickets. My searches came up empty. It just wasn’t important enough to report.
In the latest electrifying development that will also probably not shock you, DOGE —for the last week slogging through the SSA’s septic systems of archaic paper and antique Cobol software — is beginning to report that the OIG canaries in the SSA mineshaft were, if anything, woefully underreporting the problem.
Yesterday, apparent DOGE mouthpiece Elon Musk posted a simple database count of active Social Security Numbers by age range. The dumbfounding chart was a political hydrogen bomb, and it speaks for itself:
Apparently, we’ve been operating on the honor system this whole time. We normal, non-civil-service Americans were the only ones who didn’t know. It’s just the latest reason they sneer at us and think we’re stupid and gullible. Those neanderthal conservatives will believe anything. They’re right. We’re the biggest suckers in human history.
I added up the numbers for our cherished, specially abled readers in Portland. Based on Elon’s chart, the total count of active SSNs is 398 million. That means there are +64 million more active SSNs than the entire population of the United States (334 million).
Let me say it again: sixty-four million zombies. Needless to say, it’s totally impossible, at least under our current scientific understanding of human mortality. The diligent, hardworking, apolitical employees in the federal government appear to have diligently preserved a shadow army of dead or nonexistent “Americans” on the books — zombies — with tens of millions of them potentially still receiving benefits, filing tax returns, and “voting” Democrat.
This appears to be a scandal of unfathomable, indescribable, revolutionary proportions. Since I have a very strong feeling that we will not be receiving tax refunds for our cataclysmically misspent entitlements lavished on millions of career criminals, including those inside the government, I say burn it all down.
There is no fixing this. There is no audit big enough. There is no reform package meaningful enough. It is a soul-crushing abomination. It boils the blood. It is enraging beyond explanation. Just napalm the whole Kafkaesque apparatus and start over from scratch.
This scandal will be the Deep State’s Waterloo.
Thank you Jeff for researching and writing this marvelous piece. To me it raises many questions:
1). Is the Social Security administration really issuing checks to all of these people?
2). Could it somehow be that millions of names remain in the database, but are nevertheless NOT issued payments?
3). If payments are being sent to these certainly dead people, who are the living people who are receiving the payments?
4). How can all of the above be verified?
I highly welcome reader feedback.
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Courageous Discourse
U.S. Conditionally Approves Avian Flu Vaccine for Poultry
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By John Leake
Vaccine cartel gets closer to realizing its dream of vaccinating 308 million egg laying hens in the U.S., even though leaky vaccines are likely to result in new pathogens
Science magazine just reported U.S. conditionally approves vaccine to protect poultry from avian flu. As the article states:
With egg prices in the United States soaring because of the spread of H5N1 influenza virus among poultry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) yesterday conditionally approved a vaccine to protect the birds. President Donald Trump’s administration may therefore soon face a fraught decision on whether to join the ranks of other nations—including China, France, Egypt, and Mexico—that vaccinate poultry against H5N1.
Although many influenza researchers contend that vaccination can help control spread of the deadly virus, the U.S. government has long resisted allowing its use because of politics and trade concerns that many contend are unscientific. The USDA approval may signal a shift in policy linked to the Trump administration’s worries about egg prices. Even with the conditional approval, USDA must still approve its use before farmers can start to administer the vaccine because special regulations apply to H5N1 and other so-called highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses.
The vaccine, made by Zoetis, contains a killed version of an H5N2 variant that the company has designed to work against circulating variants of the H5N1 virus that have decimated poultry flocks and have even jumped to cows and some humans.
The article is an expression of how Science has been corrupted by the Vaccine Cartel. In fact, there are substantial reasons for resisting the mass vaccination of poultry. The main one is that poultry vaccines are “leaky”—that is, they do NOT prevent infection and transmission. Their purported benefit lies in the claim that they generate sufficient immunity to prevent the birds from becoming seriously ill.
The trouble with leaky vaccines is that they may promote the emergence of a more virulent strain of H5NI.
As we noted in our paper, Proximal Origin of Epidemic Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b and Spread by Migratory Waterfowl:
According to a 2021 paper titled ‘H5Nx Viruses Emerged during the Suppression of H5N1 Virus Populations in Poultry’ by a research team of the University of Georgia:
“We show that H5Nx viruses emerged during the successful suppression of H5N1 virus populations in poultry [in China], providing an opportunity for antigenically distinct H5Nx viruses to propagate. Avian influenza vaccination programs would benefit from universal vaccines targeting a wider diversity of influenza viruses to prevent the emergence of novel subtypes.”
The findings of these researchers present an illustrative case of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche’s thesis that mass vaccination with non-sterilizing vaccines can result in the emergence of a new, more virulent viral strain. As the University of Georgia team note, “In particular, we show that the widespread use of H5N1 vaccines likely conferred a fitness advantage to H5Nx viruses due to the antigenic mismatch of the neuraminidase genes.”
The emergence of H5NX from leaky vaccines was consistent with a landmark 2015 paper titled Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens. This academic paper was so remarkable that its findings were also reported in National Geographic report titled Leaky Vaccines Enhance Spread of Deadlier Chicken Viruses.
Rather than authorizing leaky vaccines for U.S. poultry, the USDA should consider allowing the latest clade of H5N1 to run its course so that the birds can acquire natural immunity to it. The practice of mass culling has been a total failure and the new poultry vaccine is equally unlikely to end to the problem, though there is a good chance it will contribute to the emergence of an even more dangerous variant of H5N1.
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