How to Win 2026 Part 1: The Strategy for a Historic Republican Midterm Victory.

From Gingrich 360.net (Aug. 23):

Two realities shape American politics today.

The first is the reality we see every day in the news. It is shaped by the latest polls, the Washington and New York political class, and whatever controversy dominates the news cycle.

The second reality is deeper. It is shaped by what Americans actually believe, how they are changing, and where the country is moving over time.

Understanding the difference between these two realities is essential to understanding how Republicans can win a historic victory in 2026.

I learned this lesson firsthand in 2016. Two weeks before the election, I had a memorable exchange with Megyn Kelly about what I described as two different realities. Virtually the entire political establishment believed Hillary Clinton would win. The public polling seemed to reinforce that view. But beneath the conventional wisdom, signs suggested something very different was happening.

Early voting numbers in Florida and Pennsylvania and turnout patterns in Iowa suggested the race was not unfolding the way the political establishment thought it was. President Donald Trump ultimately carried all three states.

The lesson is not that Republicans should ignore polls or assume we are going to win. The lesson is that we must learn to distinguish between the frothy waves on the surface and the much larger political current moving underneath them.

Today, that current presents Republicans with an enormous opportunity. But recognizing an opportunity is not the same thing as winning an election.

First Win the Argument

Margaret Thatcher famously said, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.”

That should be the Republican strategy for 2026.

Republicans will not win a historic victory by reacting to every controversy, chasing every news cycle, or turning the election into a referendum on whether Americans are satisfied with everything happening today.

We have to make this election a choice about the future. History tells us this can work.

I saw it in my first congressional victory in 1978. I saw it in George H.W. Bush’s remarkable comeback against Michael Dukakis in 1988. I saw it when we built the first Republican House majority in 40 years in 1994. And we saw it again when Donald Trump transformed a presidential campaign into the Make America Great Again movement.

Victory came from identifying a clear contrast, making a factual argument, and repeating it with discipline until the American people understood the choice. Republicans should approach 2026 with exactly the same determination. [read more]

Good advice.  Hopefully, the GOP reads Gingrich's article and takes his advice to heart. Actually, good advice for any GOP election.

All his “How to Win 2026” streaming episodes.

Woman’s mystery illness turns out to be 3-inch snake parasite in her brain

From Ars Technica.com (Aug. 28, 2023):

A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman’s team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.

A close study of the extracted worm made clear why the diagnosis was so hard to pin down: the roundworm was one known to infect snakes—specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived—as well as the pythons’ mammalian prey. The woman is thought to be the first reported human to ever have an infection with this snake-adapted worm, and it is the first time the worm has been found burrowing through a mammalian brain.

When the woman’s illness began, “trying to identify the microscopic larvae, which had never previously been identified as causing human infection, was a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Karina Kennedy, a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) Medical School and Director of Clinical Microbiology at Canberra Hospital, said in a press release.

The case, reported in the latest issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, began in January 2021. The woman went to a local hospital in southeastern New South Wales, Australia, with a three-week history of abdominal pain, diarrhea, dry cough, and night sweats. Her blood work indicated an infection of some kind, and scans showed signs of pneumonia in her lungs as well as lesions in her spleen and liver. But tests for known microorganisms and parasites came up negative, as did tests for cancers and autoimmune disease. She was diagnosed with an unexplained case of pneumonia and given a corticosteroid, prednisolone.

Three weeks later, she was admitted to another hospital for recurrent fever and persistent cough. Again, doctors found the lung, liver, and spleen injuries as well as signs of an infection. Her blood had high levels of eosinophils, white blood cells known to fight off parasitic infections. They treated her for the high eosinophil levels and, out of concern there was a false-negative for a human roundworm infection, treated her with the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin.

From mid-2021 to early 2022, the woman’s liver and lungs improved. With the addition of another drug to help keep her eosinophil counts down, she was able to lower the dose of prednisolone.  [read more]

Glad the doctors got the worm out in time.

Texts: Fauci Gave Mixed Message on Vax Miscarriage Risk

From Newsmax.com (Aug. 10):

Text messages obtained from the government-issued cellphone of Dr. Anthony Fauci show the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases privately raised the possibility that a reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine could theoretically be associated with miscarriages.

Days later, he publicly said regulators had found "no red flags" involving pregnant women.

The messages, released Monday by Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., were among more than 34,000 texts obtained by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs. The government-issued iPhone also contained more than 522 voicemails.

Paul and Johnson said in a news release that only three contacts were listed and that all other text messages were identified only with phone numbers rather than contact names. They said it was too early to determine whether any data was deleted.

Johnson referred to the revelations as "a major scandal" during an appearance Monday night on Newsmax's "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE." He added that the information was found after a "quick little search" and that lawmakers have yet to go through the full trove of texts and voicemails.

"I thought we better release this one right away because it impacts public health today," Johnson said.

Fauci, then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy discussed potential risks of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, including whether the timing of vaccination could affect those risks.

"I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of," Fauci wrote in a Jan. 25, 2021, text exchange with Walensky and Murthy.

"Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester," Fauci added.

Walensky replied: "Definitely a good point, esp. after dose two."

Murthy replied: "This is really helpful, thanks. I've been hearing the concern about the mRNA causing mutations in the developing fetus as well. That's a really good point re the cytokine storm post second dose."

Other messages showed Fauci, Murthy, and Walensky weighing potential vaccination risks against the risks COVID-19 posed to pregnant women.

Fauci noted that more than 10,000 pregnant women had been vaccinated at the time without reported problems and that animal toxicology studies had raised no red flags.

A day later, Murthy mentioned in a text to Fauci and Walensky that he was "surprised to see WHO [World Health Organization] put out a strong [line] saying they do not recommend moderna in pregnant women."

"That's a strong statement to make and potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women," Murthy wrote.

On Feb. 3, 2021, Fauci said during a question-and-answer livestream with the Journal of the American Medical Association that the FDA had "found thus far, and we have to be careful, but thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women."

On Aug. 30, 2021, Fauci, who also served as chief medical adviser to the Biden White House, told pregnancy expert Heidi Murkoff, "[If] you look at the literally — literally — tens and tens and tens of thousands of women who have been followed by the CDC, who have been vaccinated when they were pregnant, there's no indication whatsoever that there's any increase of any adverse issues in a pregnant woman who was vaccinated compared to a pregnant woman who wasn't vaccinated … it's pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated."

Paul's committee last week voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during a July 29 hearing, even though Fauci received a broad pardon from former President Joe Biden.

Paul then referred the contempt finding to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution.

Newsmax reached out to Fauci's attorney for comment. [source]

The Fauci dark saga continues... Just seems to get worse and worse.

More on the texts:

Texts: Fauci And Friends Covered Up Concerns About The Covid Vax And Miscarriages

The WHO’s Pandemic Treaty: The End of National Sovereignty and Freedom

From Mises.org (June 2, 2022):

Even as much of the world continues to move past the covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) is already looking ahead and preparing for the emergence of “other pandemics and other major health emergencies.” To ensure that the world is adequately prepared for future pandemics, “the World Health Assembly” held a special session, on December 1, 2021, entitled The World Together.

The World Health Assembly is “the decision-making body of WHO” and “is attended by delegations from all WHO Member States and focuses on a specific health agenda prepared by the Executive Board.” In this special session, which was actually only “the second-ever since WHO’s founding in 1948,” participants agreed to “draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” This would come to be known as the Pandemic Treaty, which was the main focus of discussions at the Seventy-Fifth World Health Assembly, which was held in Geneva during May 22–28, 2022.

According to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the first director-general of the WHO and who is not actually a medical doctor, this treaty represents an “opportunity to strengthen the global health architecture to protect and promote the well-being of all people.” If passed, the Pandemic Treaty will allow the WHO to make radical changes to the healthcare systems of its member countries starting in 2024.

In particular, this agreement will grant the WHO the power to declare a pandemic, based on its own vaguely defined criteria, in any of its 194 member countries at any point in the future. It will also permit the WHO to unilaterally determine what measures will be imposed in response to these future declared pandemics, including lockdown policies, mandatory masking, social distancing, and coercing the population into undergoing medical treatments and vaccinations.

Contrary to popular opinion, the WHO is not an independent, unbiased, and ethical organization that aims to achieve the common good. In reality, its goals and agendas are set by its donors, including some of the world’s richest countries and most influential philanthropists. For decades, “philanthropists and their foundations have [gained] increasing influence” when it comes to shaping the global health agenda by “placing people in international organizations, and gaining privileged access to scientific, business and political elites.”

For example, as Jens Martens and Karolin Seitz explain in Philanthropic Power and Development: Who Shapes the Agenda?,“ the Gates Foundation and earlier the Rockefeller Foundation, have been shaping global health policies not only through their direct grant-making but also through the provision of matching funds, the support of selected research programmes, the creation of global health partnerships with Foundation’s staff in their decision-making bodies, and by direct advocacy at the highest political level.” In fact, back in 2006, The Guardian reported that “the Gates foundation is now the second largest donor to the World Health Organization after the US, as well as one of the world’s largest single investors in biotechnology for farming and pharmaceuticals.” Unfortunately, when philanthropists and their foundations advance their own interests, they do so at the expense of the common interests of society. There is no reason to believe that this dynamic will be any different in the case of the Pandemic Treaty.

The Pandemic Treaty has the potential to be extremely detrimental to the future of humanity, because it will allow the WHO’s most powerful contributors to shape universal pandemic measures instead of recognizing the importance of developing specific policies and approaches based on the social, economic, and physical realities and needs of each individual country. The treaty will eliminate the national will and sovereignty of member countries, as it will dictate their health policies based on abstraction, as opposed to considering the realities that prevail in each place.

Even if the Pandemic Treaty genuinely aimed to achieve purely noble humanitarian outcomes, it still has to be opposed on the basis of liberal thought, which maintains that the individual alone must possess absolute responsibility for his own well-being, assuming that he is of mature age and of sound mind. That is to say, the individual is the only one permitted to make decisions that affect his body, his life, and his future, absent the coercive power of any external authority.

However, the Pandemic Treaty will not allow individuals to rely on their own physical, spiritual, and intellectual faculties in order to achieve their own well-being. Instead, it will impose treatments and vaccination on individuals against their own will, thereby violating bodily freedom on a global scale. History is a testament to the fact that violating bodily freedom leads to slavery and retrogression in society.

The Pandemic Treaty will also give the WHO the authority to issue dictates within the private spheres of individuals and to exercise control over their social and public lives, the institutions of their society, and their governments, all in the name of public health. In doing so, it will suppress civil liberties, economic freedom, positive freedom (freedom to), and negative freedom (freedom from). All these forms of freedom are intended to be constructive forces in society that contribute to the achievement of social progress. Once these freedoms are stifled, the foundations of progress and advancement also vanish.

Through the Pandemic Treaty, the WHO will impose its own value judgment on the world population, thereby ignoring the fact that values differ significantly between people, cultures, traditions, and nations. In other words, it will disregard the diversity of people when it comes to making decisions about their own bodies based on their own religious beliefs, commitments, views, commitments, and cultural and traditional values. It will also violate inclusiveness, as the imposition of a single value judgment; namely, the “One Health” approach, means that the WHO does not treat other value judgments, nor cultural and traditional practices, fairly and equally.

The Pandemic Treaty ignores the fact that, as Joseph Schumpeter noted, there is no “unambiguous standpoint with regard to the social whole, upon general welfare and so forth; nor would such a unitary standpoint exist if all individuals and groups wished to act and evaluate on this basis, since the general good and the social ideal appears differently to each and every one.”1

When it comes to medicine, Schumpeter continues, even though people “sufficiently recognize what good health is and generally seek to achieve such a condition,” “it cannot be proved to anyone that health should be positively valued,” as health cannot “be unambiguously defined.”2  In reality, people pursue “good health with very different levels of commitment, valuing this good in relation to others very differently; nor that their aims are not all exactly the same—the health regimes followed by the boxer and the singer are very clearly not identical.”3  Even surgeons trained in the same area would not necessarily agree on the same treatment and operation.

For example, writes Schumpeter, “faced with the option of removing an ulcer, or avoiding the damage associated with surgical intervention, two physicians can argue about whether the one or the other would achieve the desired recovery in the same way.” Moreover, within a particular nation-state, “between people of the same political, social, economic, and cultural interest and with the same perspective on the social world there can always be differences over what is worth striving for.” Accordingly, why would any person or organization that purports to support liberal democratic values back the Pandemic Treaty?

Those that support the Pandemic Treaty ignore the core principles of liberal thought and the principles of democratic governance, as they do not , as Ludwig von Mises put it, “see any reason why they should not by means of force coerce other people to do what these people are not prepared to do of their own accord.” The treaty’s advocates believe that it is acceptable to employ large-scale central planning to coerce people into doing “the right thing” based on value judgments that are not theirs. It does not matter to them, continues Mises, that “the apparatus of physical compulsion resorted to in such endeavors is that of the government’s police power or an illegal “picket” force whose violence the government tolerates…. What matters is the substitution of compulsion for voluntary action.”

Supporters of the Pandemic Treaty should remember the words of John Stuart Mill:

Neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. He is the person most interested in his own well-being, the interest which any other person, except in cases of strong personal attachment, can have in it, is trifling, compared with that which he himself has; the interest which society has in him individually (except as to his conduct to others) is fractional, and altogether indirect: while, with respect to his own feelings and circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.

That is to say, the individual is in the best position to be the final judge of action when it comes to his bodily autonomy, his private sphere, and his freedom. [source]

Scary. One step closer to the One World Order.

Top 10 takeaways from Anthony Fauci's hearing in front of Senate committee

From Just the News.com (July 29):

Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, where he was grilled about his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The former NIAID director refused to answer lawmaker questions throughout the hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, despite having a presidential pardon that covered his work during the pandemic.

Despite Fauci's refusal to answer questions, the hearing was filled with major revelations and accusations.

Here are the top 10 major takeaways from the Senate hearing:

1. Fauci applied for government grants for himself/got government employees to do it for him

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley revealed during the hearing that Fauci allegedly used federal employees while he was NIAID director to apply for government grants on his behalf for his work during the pandemic.

"You got rich while people were dying," a heated Hawley said. "You were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally. Cash prizes totaling over a million dollars."

Hawley said he has evidence of the applications for cash prizes that Fauci received, including the Dan David award and the Smithsonian award.

"You actually wrote to people and said, 'Do you think maybe I'd qualify?' And you got cash for all of this. And it wasn't just one or two employees, was it? In fact, you used eight separate federal employees on federal time using federal resources to solicit cash awards. Isn't that true?"

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in response.

2. Ron Johnson alleges Fauci covered up evidence ivermectin works

Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson accused Fauci during the hearing of covering up alleged evidence that the controversial prescription drug medication ivermectin actually is effective against the coronavirus.

“You said there was no evidence," Johnson said. "There were all kinds of evidence. Loved ones had to go to hospitals, had to sue hospitals ... So I want to know, to what extent were you involved in sabotaging Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?”

Johnson highlighted studies that found there were 60-70% effectiveness rate against the virus. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment again in response.

3. Moreno asks why Fauci hired a criminal defense attorney

Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno questioned why Fauci would hire a prominent criminal defense attorney if he had done nothing wrong when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that the attorney was someone a client hires if they are in "deep s***."

"Let me tell you who David Schertler is for the audience," Moreno said. "He's a high-profile criminal attorney. He's represented some really great people like Senator Bob Menendez ... And there's an article here in the Washington Free Beacon that talks about why you would hire a guy like David Schertler. The comment is, 'if you're in deep s***, that's who you call.'"

4. Rand Paul confirms plans for Fauci contempt vote

Another top moment related to the hearing comes after Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul confirmed that he plans to hold a contempt vote against Fauci for pleading the Fifth in order to dodge answering the panel's questions.

"We believe... he didn't need to hide behind the 5th Amendment and that maybe the 5th Amendment doesn't attach when you have a pardon in place," he told reporters. "The question on contempt will be voted on and then there's the question of whether or not the Department of Justice will take that up."

5. Senators question legality of 5th amendment plea

Several senators also questioned whether Fauci could even plead the Fifth since he was pardoned by former President Joe Biden before he left office last year.

"You don't have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you've been pardoned, as you very well know," Hawley said. "As the Supreme Court has been clear for a century or more. Brown vs. Walker, 1896, 'when he has been pardoned he may not stand upon his privilege.'

"You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you now, shifting nervously in their chairs, they know it. This isn't about the Constitution, this isn't about the law," he continued. "This is about contempt, contempt for this body and contempt for the American people." [read more]

The other takeaways:

1. Rick Scott tells Fauci how lockdowns hurt his own family
2. Hawley claims Fauci wanted to be 'Sun god of science'
3. Paul presses Fauci on alleged deletion of federal records
4. Fetterman regrets partisanship over lab leak theory
5. Fauci's lawyer booted from the hearing

More stories and a video on the hearing:

• Fauci Hearing and Diary Leave More Questions Than Answers
• Anthony Fauci, The ‘Covid Czar,’ Ticked Off The Wrong Moms
• Fauci gave off ‘signals of deception’ during Senate hearing, body language expert says
• Here's what the Fauci hearing is really about
• Fauci CAN'T Plead The Fifth If Congress Does THIS [video]

Trump Admin Ends Biden’s Organ-Transplant-By-Race Policy

From The Federalist.com (June 3):

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) ended a Biden administration policy that required racial considerations be made to determine who was eligible to get a kidney transplant.

CMS published a final rule Monday governing the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model, a mandatory, six-year program that ostensibly sought to “increase access to kidney transplants for patients with end-stage renal disease.” However, the Biden rule, which took effect July 1, 2025, also required participating hospitals to consider race, ethnicity, and “equity” in the decision-making process for allocating organs to patients.

“CMS also wants to reiterate that allocation and transplantation decisions should be made based on objective and measurable medical criteria through the framework set up by the [Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network] OPTN … and should not be made on the basis of race or other criteria not laid out by the goals described in this section of the [Code of Federal Regulations],” the Trump CMS final rule, set to take effect July 1, 2026, states.

The rule came in response to public comment made by America First Legal (AFL) and others arguing that “transplant allocation decisions should remain grounded in objective medical criteria,” the rule states.

As AFL pointed out, the Biden rule encouraged transplant hospitals to “identify disparities among racial and demographic groups, develop Health Equity Plans, conduct resource gap analyses, establish equity-focused goals, and implement targeted interventions designed to preference selected populations.”

The Biden CMS said that “Health Equity Plans,” which were meant to determine areas where hospitals were not meeting its equity goals and then recommend remedial action, were “voluntary,” but AFL stated that they were actually embedded into the IOTA Model.

“The Biden Administration designed the IOTA Model to advance its broader equity agenda within the nation’s organ transplant system,” AFL attorney Megan Redshaw said in a press release. “Life-saving transplant decisions should be guided by medical criteria and clinical urgency — not race. We applaud CMS for removing this framework and restoring a transplant system grounded in medical need and clinical urgency.”

The Biden IOTA Model also sought to fast-track transplants and increase their raw number by paying hospitals to do more, while penalizing hospitals that are not performing to their specifications.

“Tying institutional revenue to transplant counts encourages aggressive procurement and transplant practices in a system already marred by ethical failures, oversight breakdowns, and documented patient-safety concerns,” AFL stated.

The Biden rule was an outgrowth of an executive order — “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” — that claimed the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism” and forced government programs to have non-white racial preferences for program allocation across numerous initiatives, including in business, federal contracting, housing, health care, and much more.

The Biden administration even went as far as to suggest the necessity of “racial concordance” between health care workers and patients. “Racial concordance” is the theory that health outcomes are worse when the race of the doctor is different than the race of the patient, and that therefore patients should be race-matched with a doctor. It is also an artificial way of shoehorning tacit racial quotas into the medical profession, which was the goal of the Biden administration and many medical schools. [source]

Good!  Glad that Marxist policy was ended. Should have never started to begin with.

Tiny robots made from human cells heal damaged tissue

From Nature.com (Nov. 30, 2023):

Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells that are able to repair damaged neural tissue. The 'anthrobots' were made using human tracheal cells and might, in future, be used in personalized medicine.

The research "points the way to a 'tissue engineering 2.0' that synthetically controls a range of developmental processes", says Alex Hughes, a bioengineer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Developmental biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and his colleagues had previously developed tiny robots using clumps of embryonic frog cells. But the medical applications of these 'xenobots' were limited, because they weren't derived from human cells and because they had to be manually carved into the desired shape. The researchers have now developed self-assembling anthrobots and are investigating their therapeutic potential using human tissue grown in the laboratory. They published their  findings in Advanced Science.

Levin and his team grew spheroids of human tracheal skin cells in a gel for two weeks, before removing the clusters and growing them for one week in a less viscous solution. This caused tiny hairs on the cells called cilia to move to the outside of the spheroids instead of the inside. These cilia acted as oars, and the researchers found that the resulting anthrobots - each containing a few hundred cells - often swam in one of several patterns. Some swam in straight lines, others swam in circles or arcs, and some moved chaotically.

To test the anthrobots' therapeutic potential, Levin and his colleagues placed several into a small dish. There, the anthrobots fused together to form a 'superbot', which the researchers placed on a layer of neural tissue that had been scratched. Within three days, the sheet of neurons had completely healed under the superbot. This was surprising, says study co-author Gizem Gumuskaya, a developmental biologist also at Tufts, because the anthrobot cells were able to perform this repair function without requiring any genetic modification. "It's not obvious that you're going to get that kind of response," she says.

Going forward, Levin, Gumuskaya and their colleagues think anthrobots made from a person's own tissue could be used to clear arteries, break up mucus or deliver drugs, with or without genetic engineering. By combining several cell types and exploring other stimuli, it might also be possible to develop biobots - robots made from biological material - with potential applications in sustainable construction and outer-space exploration.

"Once we understand what cell collectives are willing and able to do, then we can begin to control that not just for stand-alone bots, but for regenerative medicine," says Levin, including to regrow limbs. [source]

Nice.

Massive genetic study finds genes linked to cannabis addiction

From Nature.com (Nov. 20, 2023):

By analyzing more than one million people's genomes, researchers have identified stretches of DNA that could be linked to cannabis addiction. They also found that some of the same regions in the genome are associated with other health conditions, such as lung cancer and schizophrenia.

The findings are evidence that cannabis addiction "could have substantial public-health risks if the usage increases", says Daniel Levey, a medical neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and a co-author of the study, published today in Nature Genetics.

Taking cannabis recreationally is legal in at least 8 countries, and 48 countries have legalized medicinal use of the drug for conditions including chronic pain, cancer and epilepsy. But one-third of people who take cannabis end up becoming addicted, or using the drug in a way that is damaging to their health. Previous studies have suggested that there is a genetic component, and have shown links between problematic cannabis use and some cancers and psychiatric disorders.

Drug taking and addiction can be in influenced both by people's genes and by their environment, which makes them extremely difficult to study, says Levey. But the team was able to build on data from previous work by including genetic information from additional sources, predominantly the Million Veteran Program - a US-based biobank with a large genetic database that aims to improve health care for former military service members. The analysis encompassed multiple ethnic groups, a  first for a genetic study looking at cannabis misuse.

As well as identifying regions of the genome that might be involved, the researchers saw a bi-directional link between excessive cannabis use and schizophrenia, meaning that the two conditions can in influence each other. This  finding is intriguing, says Marta Di Forti, a psychiatrist-scientist at King's College London. Cannabis use "is the most preventable risk factor" for schizophrenia, she says, adding that the type of genetic data examined in the study could be used in future to identify and support people at increased risk of developing psychiatric disorders through cannabis use.

More information about the biological mechanisms that connect cannabis use with health conditions will provide a better evidence base for policy and medical practice, says study co-author Joel Gelernter, a psychiatric geneticist at Yale University.

He adds that researchers need to continue to build on this knowledge and use the data to understand the health risks of both medical and recreational cannabis use. Di Forti agrees, adding that it will also be important to investigate the specifics of how the drug is administered, and how much of the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) users consume. [source]

Genetically Engineered Animals and Insects Could Benefit People and the Planet

From Red State.com (Sept. 23, 2020):

Amidst the human tragedy that is the coronavirus pandemic, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that persistent threats to human health and well-being that pre-existed COVID-19 still remain.

Insect borne diseases, hunger, and malnutrition, constantly simmering threats that only rarely get the attention of the pandemic, kill and harm far more people every year than the coronavirus.

Whatever the new post-corona normal will be, we should sustain and increase efforts to reduce premature mortality from starvation and disease.

Thankfully, biotechnology companies are continuing to develop animals that could both help reduce hunger even as world population grows and increasing numbers of people in developing countries are beginning to include more animal protein in their diets, and that could reduce disease by reducing the numbers of illnesses spread by insects.

Among the biotech innovations currently being developed, tested, or marketed that could help reduce hunger and disease are genetically modified cattle, goats, pigs, salmon, mosquitos, and moths.

Reuters recently reported scientists in the United States and Britain are using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to create farm animals that could be used as “surrogate sires,” essentially sterile blank slates that could then be transplanted with stem cells producing sperm, carrying desired traits.

The process could allow for widespread dissemination of genetic material with traits that produce healthier, more productive animals using fewer resources such as feed, medicines, and water.

“With this technology, we can get better dissemination of desirable traits and improve the efficiency of food production,” Jon Oatley, a reproductive biologist at Washington State University, who co-led the work, told Reuters. “If we can tackle this genetically, then that means less water, less feed and fewer antibiotics we have to put into the animals.”

Alternatively, if one is worried about climate change, this technology might be used to produce animals that need less land or crops for food, and/or that digest food more efficiently, reducing livestock methane emissions.

One must also remember that seafood accounts for approximately 20 percent of the animal protein consumed annually, yet many fish stocks are in decline. With this in mind, in mid-2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the importation of AquaBounty’s genetically modified Atlantic salmon eggs to be raised in the United States.

The bioengineered fish grow to maturity twice as fast as wild salmon, meaning they can be harvested and replenished much more quickly. Raised in controlled, land-based facilities and bred to be sterile, the fish are incapable of affecting wild salmon. Aquabounty’s salmon could become the world’s most sustainable salmon having a smaller environmental footprint than traditional salmon farming or commercial harvesting on the open seas.

Nor have harmful insects been ignored by the biotech industry. For instance, biotech company Oxitec has developed a modified version of the diamondback moth, which could lead to the pest’s extinction. Diamondback moths, the most resistant of all insects to pesticides, can wipe out entire fields of cold weather crops including, broccoli, cabbage, canola, cauliflower, and kale, resulting in billions of dollars in lost crops each year. The Oxitec diamondback moths contain a lethality gene, which when they mate with moths in the wild, prevents the female offspring from developing, so they die as larvae, with half male offspring in each generation inheriting the “lethality” gene meaning the entire population declines over each generation.

Oxitec is also at the forefront of developing genetically modified mosquitos that could reduce the spread of mosquito-borne diseases such as chikungunya, dengue fever, malaria, yellow fever, and the zika virus.

The World Health Organization reports mosquitoes are among the deadliest animals on earth, attributing 438,000 deaths to the insects from malaria alone in 2015. Other mosquito-spread diseases claim thousands more lives each year.

Oxitec’s mosquitos have been modified so when they mate with females, their offspring are incapable of surviving to adulthood. Laboratory tests and field tests have indicated widespread introduction of this mosquito could dramatically reduce the population of the disease-spreading mosquitoes.

Federal government and state regulators in Florida recently approved the introduction of Oxitec’s mosquitos into a small area of the Sunshine State. This follows the actions of the governments of Brazil, the Cayman Islands, Malaysia, and Panama, which have allowed Oxitec to release its bioengineered mosquitos at selected sites. Brazil reported mosquito populations fell by at least 90 percent in the locations Oxitec’s mosquitos were released in the year following their introduction.

Unfortunately, environmental extremists have targeted genetically modified products for extinction, fighting to delay the approval of or suing to block the introduction of bioengineered products, saying genetic engineering is akin to “playing God.”

While caution must be exercised with the introduction of any new technology, genetic engineering carries much promise, and the crops and animals developed using it are the most intensively studied and tested technologies ever to be produced. If the search for a COVID-19 vaccine is teaching us anything, it is that too much caution can be as deadly or even deadlier than too little caution. With millions of lives on the line, research and regulatory approvals should be expedited, not delayed.

If environmental fear-mongers successfully block the use of bioengineered animals, they will be condemning millions of people to unnecessary suffering and early deaths—now that would be playing God (or the devil) with a vengeance. [source]

Highlights of Democrat Party Platforms Part 3

• We pledge the Democratic party to the enactment of a law prohibiting any corporation from contributing to a campaign fund and any individual from contributing any amount above a reasonable maximum. (1912 Democratic Party Platform)
• We insist upon the full exercise of all the powers of the Government, both State and national, to protect the people from injustice at the hands of those who seek to make the government a private asset in business. (1912)
• We pledge the Democratic party to the enactment of a law prohibiting any corporation from contributing to a campaign fund and any individual from contributing any amount above a reasonable maximum. (1912)
• We favor a single Presidential term, and to that end urge the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution making the President of the United States ineligible to reelection, and we pledge the candidates of this Convention to this principle.* (1912)
• We pledge the Democratic party to the enactment of a law creating a department of labor, represented separately in the President's cabinet in which department shall be included the subject of mines and mining. (1912)
• It summons all men of whatever origin or creed who would count themselves Americans, to join in making clear to all the world the unity and consequent power of America. This is an issue of patriotism. To taint it with partisanship would be to defile it. In this day of test, America must show itself not a nation of partisans but a nation of patriots.^ (1916)
• The Democratic Party favors the League of Nations as the surest, if not the only, practicable means of maintaining the permanent peace of the world and terminating the insufferable burden of great military and naval establishments. (1920)
• We endorse the proposed 19th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States granting equal suffrage to women. (1920)
• The income tax was intended as a tax upon wealth….We favor a graduated tax upon incomes, so adjusted as to lay the burdens of government upon the taxpayers in proportion to the benefits they enjoy and their ability to pay. (1924)
• Recognizing in narcotic addiction, especially the spreading of heroin addiction among the youth, a grave peril to America and to the human race, we pledge ourselves vigorously to take against it all legitimate and proper measures for education, for control and for suppression at home and abroad. (1924)
• The republican administration has failed to enforce the prohibition law; is guilty of trafficking in liquor permits, and has become the protector of violators of this law. (1924)

*FDR completely ignored this platform.

^This is before the party got infected by Marxism.

Assisted Suicide for the Healthy

From Breakpoint.org (Aug. 5, 2020):

Physician-assisted suicide is sold to the public as a “compassionate” measure, necessary to spare those with no reasonable chance of recovery the unbearable pain and suffering of the last days of their lives. In every context in which it has been made legal, however, what might be called euthanasia-by-another-name has never remained limited to the rare instances on which it was sold.

There are reasons this slope has proven so slippery, literally everywhere it has been made legal. Once it is decided that certain lives are not worth living, the list of people eligible for physician-assisted suicide inevitably grows. As the list of people without intrinsic value grows, it becomes impossible not to re-evaluate lives based on some other criteria, perhaps convenience or financial costs. It’s a small step indeed from “eligible to die” to “expected to die.”

Wherever doctor assisted suicide is legalized, in a bait-and-switch from what is sold to the public, the category of “terminal” illness is often expanded to include “chronic” illnesses and permanent disabilities. Even mental illness and depression are now considered sufficient justification for suicide in places such as Belgium and the Netherlands. Given this trajectory, it’s only a matter of time before we dispense with the requirement of any illness whatsoever.

In fact, that’s what has just happened in the Netherlands. A recently introduced bill there would “allow healthy individuals over the age of 75 to request assisted suicide, if they have had a ‘strong death wish for at least two months.’” The bill, which is expected to be up for a vote sometime in 2021, would, according to the bill’s sponsor, give the elderly “…the choice at an advanced age, if [they] consider their lives complete, to die with dignity, with careful help.”

Thankfully, the two Christian parties in the governing coalition are strongly opposing the measure, but it will not be easy to keep it from becoming law. After all, the bill is the next logical step in the Dutch trajectory. Having embraced what novelist Walker Percy called “Thanatos Syndrome,” every promise to limit euthanasia in any way has not only been broken, but any so-called “safeguards” have been swept aside.

For example, the people were promised that only those certifiably in their right minds would be euthanized. That was a lie. Anyone who goes into an American emergency room and tells doctors they had a “strong death wish” and were “done with life” would be diagnosed with “suicidal ideation” and immediately admitted to the psych ward. To not do so, in fact, would be medical malpractice. Suicidal ideation is rightly regarded as a symptom of an underlying mental disorder. People with untreated mental illnesses are not allowed to make life-and-death decisions.

Or at least they weren’t. In Oregon, since doctor-assisted-suicide was legalized, over 96 percent of people given lethal drugs did not undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Not to evaluate is neglect, but if this Dutch bill becomes law, any elderly person who admits suicidal wishes will be referred to those who will help them turn their desires into reality.

This is why, as our recent “What Would You Say” video so clearly explained, there’s nothing compassionate about physician-assisted-suicide. In fact, it is the exact opposite of compassion, the abdication of a civilized people’s responsibility to offer compassion to those who need it most when they need it most.

In his book The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy described how a society devolves to the point of thinking that killing patients instead of healing them is compassionate. A psychiatrist, he wrote of well-trained and exquisitely credentialed doctors who “turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind.”

Percy’s literary prophecy, written in 1987, is becoming reality. Some form of assisted suicide is now legal in nine states and the District of Columbia. That number will only grow unless we convince people what true compassion is and make the idea that assisted suicide is compassionate unthinkable.

Come to WhatWouldYouSay.org for the latest video on assisted suicide, and be equipped to make the case. And please, share it with your pastor, community leaders, and legislators. It’s literally a life-and-death issue. [source]

Canada isn’t much better with its “Medical Assistance in Dying” law.

AI that reads brain scans shows promise for finding Alzheimer’s genes

From Nature.com (Nov. 1, 2023):

Washington DC

Researchers have sifted through genomes from thousands of individuals in an effort to identify genes linked to Alzheimer's disease. But these scientists have faced a serious obstacle: it's hard to know for certain which of those people have Alzheimer's. There's no foolproof blood test for the disease, and dementia, a key symptom of Alzheimer's, is also caused by other disorders. Early-stage Alzheimer's might cause no symptoms at all.

Now, researchers have developed artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches that could help. One algorithm efficiently sorts through large numbers of brain images and picks out those that include characteristics of Alzheimer's. A second machine-learning method identifies important structural features of the brain - an effort that could eventually help scientists to spot new signs of Alzheimer's in brain scans.

The goal is to use people's brain images as visual 'biomarkers' of Alzheimer's. Applying the method to large databases that also include medical information and genetic data, such as the UK Biobank, could allow scientists to pinpoint genes that contribute to the disease. In turn, this work could aid the creation of treatments and of models that predict who's at risk of developing the disease.

Combining genomics, brain imaging and AI is allowing researchers to "find brain measures that are tightly linked to a genomic driver", says Paul Thompson, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who is spearheading efforts to develop these algorithms.

Thompson and others described the new AI techniques on 4 November at the annual conference of the American Society of Human Genetics in Washington DC.

Overwhelmed with data

Thousands of people have had both their genomes sequenced and their brains scanned in the past two decades as part of efforts to build massive research databases. But the rate at which this torrent of information is being produced is outpacing researchers' ability to analyze and interpret it.

"We're very data-rich these days compared with how things were 5-10 years ago, and that's where AI [and machine learning] approaches can excel," says Alison Goate, a geneticist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. In 2020, Thompson launched AI4AD, a consortium of researchers across the United States that aims to develop AI tools to analyze and integrate genetic, imaging and cognitive data relating to Alzheimer's disease. As part of this project, researchers created an AI model trained on tens of thousands of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans. These images had previously been reviewed by physicians, who picked out scans that showed evidence of Alzheimer's. From the images, the AI tool learned what the brains of people with and without Alzheimer's look like.

Self-taught algorithm

In one trial, reported in a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed, the AI classifier detected Alzheimer's in brain scans with an accuracy of more than 90%. The consortium has also used a similar approach to create a classier that can accurately sort scans into separate categories according to specific pathological changes in the brain that are associated with cognitive decline and dementia.

Degui Zhi, a data scientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and his colleagues have taken a different approach. Whereas Thompson and his team focused the AI model on areas of the brain that are known to be linked to Alzheimer's, Zhi wanted the tool to learn for itself the structural features of the brain that can help to diagnose the disease.

The researchers' AI tool reviewed thousands of brain scans and chose the features that most reliably differentiated one person's brain from another's. Zhi says that this minimizes the likelihood of human bias influencing the algorithm. Now, Zhi's team is using the algorithm to identify the traits that best distinguish between brain scans of people with and without Alzheimer's.

Thompson and Zhi acknowledge that the AI models are only as good as the data on which they're trained. There is a lack of racial and geographical diversity in individuals who have had their brains scanned and genomes sequenced, especially in databases such as the UK Biobank, so the findings from this AI-guided research might not be applicable to everyone. Furthermore, Goate says it will be crucial to show that the AI models' performance can be replicated in other databases, and that they show consistent results.

Rudolph Tanzi, a neurogeneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that these biomarkers could one day become part of a set of risk scores for the disease that also integrate blood-based biomarkers and genetics. When all of these bits of data are combined, risk scores can become "exponentially more sensitive", which will hopefully allow people to seek early treatment before the disease progresses, he adds.

Alzheimer's is just the beginning, Thompson says. If this approach works, it could also be applied to other diseases that have a physical presentation on brain imaging, he says. [source]

Nice.

Another article on Alzheimer’s and AI: AI tool detects Alzheimer’s disease with 95% accuracy

Information Warfare: An Interview With Dr. Robert Malone

From Zachary Emmanuel on Countere.com (June 16, 2022):

There are many moments one could call the definitive end of the 60s—the resignation of Nixon, the Manson murders, Altamont—but one last leprous gasp was heard from the decade’s corpse in February of 2022, when 76-year-old Canadian citizen Neil Young removed his music from Spotify in protest over The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Rogan’s transgression? Interviewing Dr. Robert Malone, a renowned pioneer in mRNA vaccine technology and horse farmer, about his concerns over mRNA vaccine technology. The hippie movement is diseased and dead.

……

What sources or institutions can we trust?

As a scientist, I'm trained not to trust anything.

In the medical world, my intellectual home is pathology. Pathology is essentially the quality control discipline for the entire medical care system. That's the nature of an autopsy—not just to ascertain the truth of an individual and their death, but to provide quality assurance for hospitals in the entire medical system. We're trained in pattern recognition, we detect and discern signal from noise, we’re trained to do this in the medical world.

As a scientist, I was rigorously trained to question everything, including myself. [I use] the intellectual structure called The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses [pdf]. The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses was originally published in Science Magazine in the late 1800s. So these are fundamental philosophies of medicine and clinical research that I'm speaking of.

The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses addresses the problem that exists for scientists, which is that we have a tendency to use a system of scientific questioning that we call hypothesis-driven research. The problem with hypothesis-driven research as a tool to discern truth is that it suffers from what's called “strong inference”—the tendency of a scientist to say, “I know the answer, I have a hypothesis, it’s my hypothesis, and I take ownership of it.”

What happens when you do that is that you will bend truth and reality and information to conform with your hypothesis. I don't normally discuss The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses. I'm speaking about this because I know that your magazine [Countere] thinks about these kinds of underlying philosophical issues.

I've been trained to approach the world as a cluster of information. That information is divided into three compartments. One is, there's the Known, the things that we can all agree on: the Earth is generally round, it orbits the sun, gravity exists. These have been divisive at various times in human history, but now we're pretty convinced those are solid truths.

Then, there’s the world of Knowable but Unknown. If we apply the Scientific Method—which is increasingly a new priesthood, but that's another problem—if we rigorously apply the Scientific Method to this world of Knowable but Unknown things, we can gradually pull truth out of that information cloud and place it into the world of the Known.

Then, there's a third compartment of information. This is the Unknown Unknowable. And that's basically the world of faith. That's the intellectual space of things which we are not able to directly perceive or measure, which may or may not exist. And we can't really apply the Scientific Method to this thought space. We can't get data to test hypotheses. This is the world of philosophers and theologians.

I've been trained on the first compartment, the Known. Then there’s this middle compartment of stuff that’s Knowable but Unknown, and that’s the world I’ve always lived in, first as a young academic and then as a scientist and pathologist.

I had thought that I didn't have to apply that kind of intellectual rigor to the world of politics or public policy or economics. I thought that that was all being adequately handled by other experts that were similarly objective. Now we learned that absolutely not the case, and all of us are forced into becoming citizen-scientists-philosophers, whether or not we're trained.

I didn't choose to be one of the “Leaders of the Resistance,” to use a Star Wars metaphor. But having been placed in that position through circumstance—because I was early in speaking out about certain things, and I had a background that enabled me to legitimately question what was going on—I now find myself with the burden of responsibility of that leadership, and it's one that I don't take lightly. Feeling that responsibility results in some self-editing, some self-censorship. There are things that I observed, for instance, about the World Economic Forum that are so far beyond what average people can accept that I have to self-censor. Otherwise, I'll be labeled as a crazy person. [read more]

How Christianity Created the Hospital

From Breakpoint.org (Aug. 17, 2022):

Far from being an otherworldly religion, Christianity teaches both the importance and goodness of life in this world. In fact, from Jesus’ healing ministry to the work of modern missionary doctors, a consistent feature of the work of the Church in the world has been to care for the sick and needy, and not just point them to the life to come.

The early Church understood Jesus’ ministry to be a paradigm for their own work. So, just as Jesus set believers free from their bondage to sin, early Christians purchased slaves specifically to free them. Whereas Jesus used miraculous power to heal people from physical effects of the Fall, Christians used more ordinary tools to care for the sick and disabled. These activities are not merely good deeds in themselves but serve to advance the Kingdom. Though the Gospel is a message and must be proclaimed, the early Church saw works of mercy and preaching the Gospel as two sides of the same coin.

The first major epidemic faced by the Church was the Antonine Plague (A.D. 166-189). In fear of their lives, the Romans threw the sick out of their homes to die in the streets. Galen, the most prominent physician of the age, knew he could neither heal its victims nor protect himself. So, he fled Rome to stay at his country estate.

Recognizing that all persons were made in the image of God and that Jesus came to make all things new, body and soul, many Christians ran the other direction. They fought the Fall by tending to the sick, at risk (and often at the cost) of their own lives.

Since even basic nursing care can make a significant difference during an epidemic, Christian action saved lives. Their courage and self-sacrifice contributed to the rapid growth of Christianity. For example, when Irenaeus arrived in Lyon from Asia Minor, there were very few Christians. By the time the plague ended, there were 200,000 believers in Lyon.

The Plague of Cyprian, which took place the following century, was named after the bishop of Carthage who documented the epidemic. Dionysius of Alexandria, also a bishop, described what happened this way:

At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treating unburied corpses as dirt…

But, he continued…

Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ.

From the earliest centuries, Christians embraced the medical theories and practices of the day. Contrary to stereotypes, the early Church did not attribute illness to demons, though they did recognize demonization as a real phenomenon. The real difference between Christians and physicians of the day was the willingness to risk death in order to treat the sick, convinced that if they died it would only mean a transition to a better life. The physicians, on the other hand, fled.

Christians also founded the first hospitals in history. By the late fourth century, there were hospitals in both the eastern and western halves of the empire. By the Central Middle Ages, hospitals and leprosaria (leprosy hospitals) could be found throughout most of the Christian world. When universities began granting medical degrees during the period, church-affiliated institutions continued to provide much of the care.

By the 18th century, the medical field had become increasingly professionalized and separate from the clergy. Though monasteries still provided care for the poor and nursing was almost entirely in the hands of sisters and nuns, professional physicians increasingly handled medical issues for those who could afford to pay. Clergy attended to the dying and contributed to discussions of medical ethics but had few other responsibilities for the sick.

However, medicine was an integral part of the modern mission movement of the 19th century. Because Christianity has always affirmed the importance of the body, hospitals soon followed wherever missionaries went. This is another way the Church has been essential throughout history. [source]

Parents or the State: What Kuyper Can Teach Us About Managing Social Media

From Breakpoint.org (Sept. 7, 2022):

The Institute for Family Studies has published a list of legal and policy recommendations to protect teens from the dangers of social media. Among the recommendations are age-verification laws, parental consent requirements, and shutting down social media platforms at night for teens. Other nations have already attempted to restrict young people’s access to technology. For example, a couple of years ago, France banned cell phone use in schools up to age 15.

Monitoring teens’ engagement with social media should be a no-brainer. Anyone still not convinced that something needs to be done need only consider the teens on TikTok exhibiting Tourette-like tics, not to mention the rapid onset gender dysphoria crisis initiated within social media communities.

However, the fact that government may now be the last line of defense in providing some boundaries for social media means that the other lines have failed. Most notably, families have failed to protect children from that which threatens them the most.

This is a modern-day application of one of the most helpful ideas of Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper, who lived at the turn of the 20th century. Kuyper has jokingly been called the Colson Center’s “patron saint.” Near the end of his life, Chuck Colson described how influential Kuyper’s thought was to his own, specifically in understanding how Christians were called to interact with and influence the culture around them.

Christians could best influence society, according to Kuyper, through the sphere of our family, the basic building block of society. During his lifetime, Kuyper worked across various spheres of culture, not only writing as a theologian but founding a university, leading a newspaper, and eventually becoming prime minister. Throughout his various careers, Kuyper proposed and championed a concept called “sphere sovereignty.”

“Spheres,” as Kuyper understood them, are the social groupings, or domains, that keep society running. He saw them as interlocking “cogs” that work together. In his message at the inauguration of the Free University in the Netherlands, he explained that each sphere—such as science, art, business, government, and family—has “its own law of life” and “its own head” or leadership. Ultimately, Christ is sovereign over all of life. His most famous quote is, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human life of which Christ, Who is Sovereign of all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”  It is Christ who moves “the wheels to turn as they are destined to turn. Not to oppress life nor to bind freedom, but to make possible a free exercise of life for and in each of these spheres, is not this a beckoning ideal for every noble State Sovereign? [or leader].”

His idea, that the duty of the head of a state is to facilitate “free exercise of life,” reveals that, in many ways, Kuyper lived in a time period similar to ours—a time when people were calling for revolution. Kuyper was so uncomfortable with this lawless approach that he called his political party the “Anti-Revolutionary Party.” According to the author Michael Wagenman, Kuyper believed, “Human beings are called to responsible human agency in which ‘the course of our historic development may be altered only through gradual change in a lawful way.’ But this is accomplished through responsible reforms rather than outright revolution that seeks to usher in a manufactured utopia.”

If the language of ushering in a “manufactured utopia” doesn’t sound familiar, just search for “antiracist” and “revolution” on Twitter. The crisis in the state, Kuyper believed, revealed a crisis of family.

Kuyper saw family leadership as “responsible for the good order in the family,” rather than the “head of the state.” Government should only step in if parents did not do their job. He insisted that “the central government may only take on and carry out what is not (and for so long as it is not) properly taken care of in the smaller spheres of life.”

If government control of the good order of the family has to occur, it should be only temporary. Thus, the government can incentivize good family order, such as tax deductions for college saving plans, but a secular government controlling family life can get weird fast, such as removing a child seeking a transgender identity from a Christian family’s home. It’s one of the reasons Christians should recognize and champion parental rights.

Coming back to the topic of teens and social media, we can say that restricting their access to social media is a good idea. But this is the job of the family, not the government. When families fare well, society fares well. That’s those cogs of spheres working together well. A society is only as virtuous as its families. [source]

The family is a fundamental building block of society. Sociologists know this. Probably anthropologists understand this too. Socialists and communists perceive the family as a threat though—because they want to be your only family.

Today’s Public Health Emergency: Restoring Trust With Seven Steps COMMENTARY

From Real Clear Politics.com (Oct. 30, 2023):

The public health emergency of the SARS2-CoV pandemic ended long ago, but America faces a new emergency. Faith in health agencies has plummeted more rapidly since 2019 than any other government institution, with almost two-thirds now rating the FDA and the CDC as “only fair or poor.” Half of America no longer has much confidence in science itself. 

The loss of trust is part of the disgraceful legacy of those who held power during the pandemic. Two presidents and dozens of governors hid behind public health bureaucrats Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Robert Redfield, and Rochelle Walensky. They ignored Henderson’s classic review 15 years earlier showing lockdowns were both ineffective and extremely harmful. They rejected the alternative, targeted protection, recommended as early as March 2020 by Ioannidis, Katz, and Atlas. Beyond a reckless disregard for foreseeable destruction from their policies, America’s leaders imposed sinful harms and long-lasting damage on our children, the totality of which may not be realized for decades. Mandatory school closings, forced isolation of teens and college students, and required injections of healthy children with experimental drugs attempting to shield adults will be a permanent black mark on America. And the truth cannot be denied – the Birx-Fauci lockdowns failed to stop the death and the spread of infection (see Bjornskov, Bendavid, Agrawal, Herby, and Kerpen) and inflicted tremendous harms, shifting the pandemic burden to low-income families to spare the affluent.

America’s next president needs to lead with strong reforms, because the Birx-Fauci stain on public health and science jeopardizes the credibility of all future health guidance. Here are some recommended initial executive orders:

• Clearly define by law “public health emergency” with strict time limits (e.g., two weeks), requiring legislation to extend. Human rights were violated in the United States. Guarantees of the most fundamental freedoms upon which this country was founded – speech, religion, assembly – were suddenly reversed, without limit, by lockdowners under the guise of “the science” and “safety.” The U.S., with freedoms explicitly defined as “endowed by their Creator,” must be managed in concert with its system of laws, even during health emergencies.
• Add term limits (e.g., six years) to all health agency positions, including top- and mid-level posts, after first cleaning house of all heads of CDC, NIH, and FDA. For instance, Anthony Fauci worked as a bureaucrat for 38 years. Such longevity accrues power and seems to inhibit dissenting voices, while setting up unhealthy relationships with outside parties, including the media.
• Forbid all drug royalty-sharing by employees of FDA, NIH, CDC, and forbid related private jobs for five years after government service. OpenTheBooks revealed that between 2009 and 2021, approximately 54,000 royalty payments totaling $325.8 million were paid by third party entities to NIH researchers, sources redacted. We know that Dr. Francis Collins, the NIH’s former director, received 21 payments and Dr. Anthony Fauci received 37 payments between 2010 and 2021. This shocking conflict of interest, with hundreds of agency employees garnering personal profit forcibly revealed by FOIA requests, is the most urgent among many reforms.
• Require full transparency of all FDA, CDC, and NIH discussions with immediate posting to public forums. Statements from all advisors in those meetings, such as the startling October 26, 2021, recommendation of Eric Rubin, M.D., FDA advisor for children’s COVID vaccines, that “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is [in children] unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes,” must be widely visible to the public.
• Restatement with executive order that the CDC and other health agencies are strictly advisory and do not have power to set laws or mandates. Limiting health agency power is a way to begin holding elected officials accountable to the citizens, rather than allowing the pretense of hiding behind those agencies.
• Decentralize today’s cartel of NIH funding that controls all academic science careers and university medical centers. More than 15 U.S. medical centers receive over $500 million each – per year – from the NIH, the dominant funder of all scientific research, to the tune of $45 billion per year. Leverage on individual university scientists who owe their careers to NIH funding explains the February 2020 Lancet publication concocted behind closed doors calling the lab origin of the SARS2 virus a “conspiracy theory”– perhaps to conceal NIH malfeasance overseen by Drs. Collins and Fauci, who sent more than $2 million taxpayer dollars to fund China’s dangerous gain-of-function research to circumvent our country’s restrictions. Instead, disseminating control of NIH funding across regions with block grants to states would reduce this grip on independent voices.
• Immediately halt all binding agreements or pledges to the World Health Organization. The U.S. is the largest funding nation to WHO activities, but the WHO record is abysmal. In addition to supporting China’s stonewalling, Director Tedros backed China’s reckless human rights violations, stating “the Chinese government is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak,” even as it used pseudoscience to essentially imprison its citizens. WHO disregarded evidence in its guidelines on mitigation, censored its own staff for acknowledging limits of asymptomatic spread, and flipped fundamental definitions like “herd immunity“ to influence behavior, rather than to dispassionately inform with data. We must hope Tedros was joking when he said, “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.” Blind to the obvious need for reassessment, the Biden administration’s ambassador to the WHO Pamela Hamamoto already promised “The United States is committed to the [WHO’s] Pandemic Accord” even without seeing the final version. In that Accord, the WHO will define “public health emergency” for other countries – the fundamental basis to justify restrictions on the public. What is the rationale for any sovereign nation to allow a third party to legally define and impose such a critical state?

Finally, American voters need to wake up and hold elected officials accountable. Without substantial reforms, the promised freedoms of the United States will have lost legitimacy. [source]

Good advice. All gov't agencies should be transparent with their practices. America pays their salaries. They should be held accountable.

You’ve probably never heard of terahertz waves, but they could change your life

 From PopSci.com (Mar. 22, 2022):

There’s a gap on the electromagnetic spectrum where engineers can not tread.

The spectrum covers everything from radio waves and microwaves, to the light that reaches our eyes, to X-rays and gamma rays. And humans have mastered the art of sending and receiving almost all of them.

There is an exception, however. Between the beams of visible light and the blips of radio static, there lies a dead zone where our technology isn’t effective. It’s called the terahertz gap. For decades now, no one’s succeeded in building a consumer device that can transmit terahertz waves.

“There’s a laundry list of potential applications,” says Qing Hu, an electrical engineer at MIT.

But some researchers are slowly making progress. If they stick the landing, they might open up a whole new suite of technologies, like the successor to Wi-Fi or a smarter detection system for skin cancer.

The mystery of the terahertz

Look at the terahertz gap as a borderland. On the left side, there are microwaves and longer radio waves. On the right side lies the infrared spectrum. (Some scientists even call the terahertz gap “far infrared.”) Our eyes can’t see infrared, but as far as our technologies are concerned, it’s just like light.

Radio waves are crucial for communication, especially between electronic devices, making them universal in today’s electronics. Light powers the optical fibers that underpin the internet. These realms of technology typically feed off different wavelengths, and uneasily coexist in the modern world.

But both realms struggle to go far into the terahertz neutral zone. Standard electronic components, like silicon chips, can’t go about their business quickly enough to make terahertz waves. Light-producing technologies like lasers, which are right at home in infrared, don’t work with terahertz waves either. Even worse, terahertz waves don’t last long in the Earth’s atmosphere: Water vapor in the air tends to absorb them after only a few dozen feet.

There are a few terahertz wavelengths that can squeeze through the water vapor. Astronomers have built telescopes that capture those bands, which are especially good for seeing interstellar dust. For best use, those telescopes need to be stationed in the planet’s highest and driest places, like Chile’s Atacama Desert, or outside the atmosphere altogether in space.

The rest of the terahertz gap is shrouded in mist. Researchers like Hu are trying to fix this, but it isn’t easy. [read more]

What Biden’s Doctor Thinks You’re Not Allowed to Know

From National Review.com (July 10):

On the menu today: Joe Biden’s personal physician, Kevin O’Connor, refuses to answer questions under oath before Congress about his assessment of the former president’s health while he was in office. Elsewhere, progressives ask why the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement workforce needs to be so large, ignoring the scale of the task before the agency, and wondering about a not-so-long-ago doomsday prediction.

The Biden Health Coverup Continues

The U.S. is not supposed to end up in a situation where it has a doddering old man as president. Many people have a role in ensuring the good physical and mental health of the president, but high among them is the president’s physician.

At the end of February 2024, White House physician Kevin O’Connor declared that Biden “continues to be fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exceptions or accommodations.” This diagnosis came several months after Biden’s inability to remember dates and the sequence of events during his testimony to special counsel Robert Hur.

Subsequently, in books like Original Sin, the American people learned that while in office, the former president was forgetting the names of national security adviser Jake Sullivan and communications director Kate Bedingfield; didn’t recognize DNC chairman Jaime Harrison, Representative Eric Swalwell, or actor George Clooney when he met them despite knowing them for years; was “disoriented” and “out of it,” mouth agape, during his rare cabinet meetings, and so on. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson wrote, “Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair. . . . The doctor often argued with Biden’s political officials to get more rest time into the president’s schedule. O’Connor sometimes quipped that Biden’s staff members were trying to kill him, while he was trying to keep him alive.”

That certainly makes it sound like O’Connor’s publicly released diagnosis was not accurate, and represented happy-talk that contradicted his private diagnosis.

In fact, according to Original Sin, by February 2024, Biden’s political advisers contemplated having Biden undergo a cognitive exam to dispel the increasingly loud questions about his mental health and acuity. O’Connor reportedly argued against giving Biden one, insisting that he saw the president frequently and never saw any reason for concern.

O’Connor never conducted any media interviews or answered any questions from the media about the president’s health during Biden’s presidency.

The American people have a lot of indisputably fair, overdue questions for Dr. O’Connor. But apparently, he is not interested in answering any of them:

O’Connor invoked his Fifth Amendment rights Wednesday and did not answer questions during a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee.

“It’s now clear there was a conspiracy to cover up President Biden’s cognitive decline after Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s physician and family business associate, refused to answer any questions and chose to hide behind the Fifth Amendment,” said Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky).

“The American people demand transparency but Dr. O’Connor would rather conceal the truth. Dr. O’Connor took the Fifth when asked if he was told to lie about President Biden’s health and whether he was fit to be President of the United States.”

Now, only Joe Biden has the authority to say, “I waive my right to doctor-patient confidentiality.” If there was no coordinated effort to hide the truth about Biden’s health while he was president, you would think Biden would want O’Connor to testify, truthfully and completely. By not waiving doctor-patient confidentiality, Biden is putting O’Connor in a difficult position where he cannot explain and defend his diagnosis of the president’s health, harming the doctor’s reputation.

Biden could have said O’Connor had his permission to answer all questions about his diagnosis of the president’s health. But Biden hasn’t done that.

Recall that for a very short time in April, Biden launched an unofficial “comeback tour” after the opening months of a post-presidency where reportedly he hadn’t reached out to a single member of Congress for a chat at all. When Biden did appear on The View in early May, he continued to insist that if he had stayed in the race, he would have won, and that he “wasn’t surprised” that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. His wife Jill finished many of his answers.

Four days before the official publication of Original Sin, the Bidens announced that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer. The morning after the announcement, oncologist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel shocked the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe by declaring, “Oh, he’s had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading. ”

While we’re at it, someone should ask O’Connor why he concluded that Biden didn’t need to get a PSA test during his presidency. [read more]

CYA mode activated.

More articles about Biden:

Biden's Former Doctor Refuses to Answer Questions in House Oversight Probe