Month: August 2023

Authored by Eric Felten via RealClear Wire,

It was 100 years ago today – August 2, 1923 – when President Warren G. Harding suddenly died. He was in San Francisco, on the tail end of a cross-country promotional tour that had taken him as far as Alaska. It would have been an exhausting trip even for a younger man without a bum ticker. Then Harding contracted pneumonia along the way and, if that wasn’t enough, was laid low by some tainted seafood.

Any or all of these may have contributed to Harding’s demise. But no one knows exactly why or how Harding died when he did. The New York Times attributed the president’s sudden expiration to a “stroke of apoplexy.” Some have suggested heart failure. Others have joked that – battered by a landslide of scandal and humiliated by the corrupt schemes launched by the old friends he had raised to positions of power – Harding simply died of shame.

An autopsy might have helped quell rumors of foul play, but first lady Florence Harding refused to allow one.

There was one character in the mix who claimed he knew how Harding died. His name was Gaston B. Means and he claimed not only to know that the president was murdered, but also who did it. His assertions, to put it mildly, were suspect. But Means could spin a compelling yarn. And he was at one time credentialed. He not only had the badge of a special agent of the Justice Department, he had an office in the department.

Means persuaded no small number of Americans that Florence Harding was the killer. He claimed that she confided in him, confessing that she had poisoned her husband.

According to Means’ account (and it should be noted he was an inveterate liar), while he was a special agent for the federal government, Florence Harding tasked him with investigating her husband’s dalliances. Means claimed to have compiled a dossier detailing Warren’s affair with Nan Britton, a young Ohio woman. The Hardings had a knock-down, drag-out row over the child the president had fathered with Britton, Means claimed, adding that not long after that, the first lady took charge of giving her husband his meds.

Means would peddle the story for years, claiming the first lady was enraged that Harding fathered a child by a young woman, Nan Britton, smitten with the president. A notorious con-man, hustler and trickster, Means was also a special agent in the investigative agency that would morph into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For those shocked that today’s FBI plays politics and seems to struggle to shoot straight, it’s worth remembering that the agency is in some part a legacy of Gaston B. Means. Which is to say, misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. A fabulist of the first order, Means’ fabrications were interlaced with enough detail drawn from actual events that he managed to convince many that his tales were true. Books such as Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” and H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” were among the best-selling nonfiction books of 1930, but they didn’t come close to selling as many copies as Means’ memoir, “The Strange Death of President Harding.”

While Harding was still alive, Means became his own one-man crime wave. With the help of his badge, Means managed to have a hand in just about every crime common in the era: fraud, theft, blackmail, espionage, bootlegging, bribery, grift, graft, even murder. Gaston indulged in all these moral hazards and others, too. And he did so brazenly, with an indelible smirk on his pudgy face. Late in his epic career of flim-flammery, he even made a cameo in the Crime of the Century, the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Means absconded with $100,000 he promised to use in ransoming the doomed child.

As one writer put it, Gaston B. Means was “the symbol of American criminality and corruption in the gaudiest and most lawless era in the nation’s history.”

According to Means, Mrs. Harding was alone with the president for about ten minutes, at which point “It was time for his medicine.” Gaston claimed the widow confided in him: “I gave it to him … he drank it. He lay back on the pillows a moment,” closed his eyes and rested. But then the president bolted awake and looked straight into his wife’s face. He sighed and was dead.

Gaston asked her if she thought her husband knew in his last fleeting moments that she had poisoned him. “Yes,” Mrs. Harding replied, “I think he knew.” Means said he was the one who advised her to refuse permission for an autopsy on the president’s corpse.

This febrile tale of mariticide was quaint compared to the killing Gaston proved willing to commit himself. One of Gaston’s early scams: He fashioned himself a money manager and got his hands on the fortune of a widow foolish enough to entrust him with investing her fortune. When her money had all been siphoned away and spent, she was nearing the moment when her checks would bounce and Means’ theft would be exposed. He convinced her that some dangerous characters were out to steal her money and would kill her to get it. He had her hide in his hometown in North Carolina. He took her into the woods at twilight one evening, ostensibly to teach her to defend herself with a pistol. Alas, there was an accident. She was shot in the back of the head.

In 1917 Means was tried for the killing. He maintained the wealthy widow had stumbled and shot herself as he was kneeling to get a sip of cool water from a spring. Despite the preposterous story of what happened in the woods, Gaston was acquitted. He went to work for a private detective agency run by William J. Burns, for whom he had done some work before the U.S. finally entered the Great War. Well, the work wasn’t so much for Burns as it was for a German spy ring operating in New York. When Harding won the 1920 presidential election, he made Burns head of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, and Burns brought Gaston along with him. Which is how Means became a special agent.

1921 was a good time to be a grifter. Prohibition was the law of the land, and Means quickly put his position to profitable use, taking payoffs from bootleggers in an elaborate protection racket. He would later say that he kept two adjacent rooms at the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York. In one room was a large goldfish bowl. Gaston would sit in the other; he would watch through a peephole as bootleggers delivered their graft, dropping $500 bills in the goldfish bowl, each at an appointed time.

In a scheme worthy of Watergate, Gaston arranged for henchmen to “go through” the office of Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette in search of something that could be used to blackmail him. Asked by a congressional committee what it meant to “go through” an office, Means said they would “find all the mail that comes in, all the papers, anything that he has got lying around.”

Harding’s old cronies had been known as the “Ohio Gang.” In the years after Harding died, their elaborate self-dealing was exposed. Most famous was the “Teapot Dome” scandal in which Harding’s secretary of the interior sold federal oil reserves to petroleum companies at a discount in exchange for kickbacks.

As Means’ schemes were exposed, he tried to protect himself by giving frequent testimony to congressional investigators probing the Ohio Gang. He would then recant his testimony and denounce the hearings as shams. Although these shenanigans didn’t keep him out of jail, they did set dubious precedents.

For example, current FBI director Christopher Wray is hardly the first to stonewall Congress. Mally Daugherty – brother of Harry Daugherty, Harding’s attorney general and a leader of the Ohio Gang – refused to appear before Congress on Capitol Hill even though he had been served with a subpoena. The Supreme Court waded into the controversy and affirmed Congress’ power to command testimony.

As ugly as our politics may be, we do not live in a uniquely deranged age. Political prosecutions and contrived investigations have been all too common in our country’s history.

“The Strange Death of President Harding” was a notorious hoax. Yet it paid handsomely to the hoax artist. That’s what misinformation looks like.

With his death, 100 years ago today, Harding didn’t hide the misdeeds of his administration nor that of his friends. Many of the “Ohio Gang” ended up dead, some perhaps by suicide, some perhaps not.

As for Gaston B. Means, he spent his last years in the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth in western Kansas. The crime that finally caught up with him was particularly callous. When the Lindberghs’ infant was kidnapped, Means went to one of Mrs. Lindbergh’s rich friends and told her that he could rescue the baby if only he had $100,000 with which to pay off the kidnappers. She gave him the money and then some. He pocketed it. Convicted of embezzlement and grand larceny, he was sentenced to 15 years in Leavenworth Penitentiary. He served only five years of that time, dying behind bars in 1938, eventually to be forgotten by a nation that fears the depravity of its generation is unique.

Eric Felten is an investigative correspondent for RealClearInvestigations, reporting on government corruption. He is a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal and previously a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University. Felten has been published in Washingtonian, People, National Geographic Traveler, The Weekly Standard, Daily Beast, National Review, Spectator USA, and Reader’s Digest.

Australia’s Office of National Intelligence, the equivalent of the US Director of National Intelligence, is funding a project to study ways of merging human brain cells with artificial intelligence.

A team of researchers collaborating with Melbourne-based startup Cortical Labs received a $600,000 grant to merge biology with AI. The team has already demonstrated how roughly 800,000 brain cells in a Petri dish is capable of playing a game of “Pong.“

“This new technology capability in the future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware,” said team lead Adeel Razi, an associate professor at Monarch University.

“The outcomes of such research would have significant implications across multiple fields such as, but not limited to, planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces, and drug discovery, giving Australia a significant strategic advantage.”

According to Razi, the tech could allow a machine intelligence to “learn throughout its lifetime” like human brain cells, allowing it to learn new skills without losing old ones, as well as applying existing knowledge to new tasks.

Razi and his colleagues are aiming to grow brain cells in a lab dish called the DishBrain system to investigate this process of “continual lifelong learning.” -The Byte

According to Razi, “We will be using this grant to develop better AI machines that replicate the learning capacity of these biological neural networks.”

“This will help us scale up the hardware and methods capacity to the point where they become a viable replacement for in silico computing.”

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Neuralink has had FDA approval to study brain implants in humans since May.

Update (1700ET): The US Supreme Court extended a temporary order letting the Biden administration keep enforcing a regulation applying to build-at-home “ghost guns.”

The order from Justice Samuel Alito gives the high court until next Tuesday to decide how to handle the case.

A federal trial judge in Texas threw out the regulation, and the Biden administration is seeking to put that ruling on hold while the case is on appeal. Alito previously had paused the lower court order until Friday.

*  *  *

Authored by As The Epoch Times’ Matthew Vadum detailed earlier, Second Amendment advocates are urging the Supreme Court to let stand a federal judge’s ruling blocking the Biden administration’s rule regulating so-called ghost guns.

“Ghost gun” is a pejorative term used by gun control advocates to describe a homemade firearm that lacks a serial number and therefore cannot be tracked by law enforcement. Gun control groups have been trying for years to ban or regulate homemade guns but have failed to convince Congress to act.

On July 28, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito administratively stayed a nationwide injunction blocking the rule that was issued on July 5 by U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The stay is due to expire at 5 p.m. on Aug. 4.

Judge O’Connor, who was appointed in 2007 by former President George W. Bush, made his ruling after finding the regulation violated existing law.

“This case presents the question of whether the federal government may lawfully regulate partially manufactured firearm components, related firearm products, and other tools and materials in keeping with the Gun Control Act of 1968,” the judge wrote.

“Because the Court concludes that the government cannot regulate those items without violating federal law, the Court holds” that the rule “is unlawful agency action taken in excess of the ATF’s statutory jurisdiction.”

ATF refers to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice.

On July 24, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit denied the government’s request to stay the lower court’s order blocking the rule “[b]ecause the ATF has not demonstrated a strong likelihood of success on the merits, nor irreparable harm in the absence of a stay.”

The case is still pending before the 5th Circuit.

Serial Numbers, Background Checks

President Joe Biden said in April 2022 that privately made guns, which are often made with gun kits, are the “weapons of choice for many criminals.”

That month the DOJ issued a rule requiring individuals who assemble homemade firearms to add serial numbers to them. The rule also mandated background checks for consumers who purchase the kits from dealers.

“This rule will make it harder for criminals and other prohibited persons to obtain untraceable guns,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time.

“It will help to ensure that law enforcement officers can retrieve the information they need to solve crimes. And it will help reduce the number of untraceable firearms flooding our communities.”

Meanwhile, the Firearms Policy Coalition, one of the respondents in the Supreme Court proceeding, filed a brief on Aug. 2 urging the court to lift the stay blocking Judge O’Connor’s order.

The judge “correctly held” that the ATF “exceeded its authority by seeking to depart from over fifty years of regulatory practice and extend[ing] the definitions of ‘firearm’ and ‘frame or receiver’ in federal law beyond any reasonable understanding of those terms,” the brief states.

The Gun Control Act (GCA) “reflects a fundamental policy choice by Congress to regulate the commercial market for firearms while leaving the law-abiding citizens of this Country free to exercise their right to make firearms for their own use without overbearing federal regulation.”

The statute “defines a ‘firearm’ to mean ‘any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive’ and ‘the frame or receiver of any such weapon.’”

Congress did not intend to interfere with private citizens making firearms or with the “commercial production and sale of commercial production and sale of other items that may be used by private citizens to make firearms for their own use.”

But the ATF, which “apparently believes that it has now become too easy for private citizens to make their own firearms,” has “decided to take matters into its own hands” and “expanded the regulatory definition of ‘firearm’” instead of trying to convince Congress to revise the statute.

In its emergency application filed with the Supreme Court on July 27, the federal government urged the court to leave the stay in place.

Weapon Parts Kits

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote that “[g]host guns can be made from kits and parts that are available online to anyone with a credit card and that allow anyone with basic tools and rudimentary skills (or access to Internet video tutorials) to assemble a fully functional firearm in as little as twenty minutes.”

“Some manufacturers of those kits and parts assert that they are not ‘firearms’ regulated by federal law, and thus can be sold without serial numbers, transfer records, or background checks. Those features of ghost guns make them uniquely attractive to criminals and others who are legally prohibited from buying firearms,” Ms. Prelogar stated.

A weapon parts kit “falls squarely within the plain meaning of the statutory definition, which expressly includes items that can ‘readily be converted’ into functional firearms.”

“Every speaker of English would recognize that a tax on sales of ‘bookshelves’ applies to IKEA when it sells boxes of parts and the tools and instructions for assembling them into bookshelves. The [district] court’s insistence on treating guns differently contradicts ordinary usage and makes a mockery of Congress’s careful regulatory scheme,” she wrote.

The District of Columbia and 20 states, including California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York, filed a friend-of-the-court brief on July 29 in support of the Biden administration’s position.

Without federal regulation, “unserialized firearms have flooded” communities in the states filing the brief.

“Many of these weapons end up in the hands of people banned from gun ownership, directly undermining the GCA’s core provisions as well as state law,” the brief says.

The case is Garland v. VanDerStok, court file 23A82.

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A group of U.S. researchers has developed a new “cancer-killing pill” that could target and kill solid tumors while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

That’s according to their preclinical research findings, published Aug. 1 in the Cell Chemical Biology journal.

Titled “Small Molecule Targeting of Transcription-Replication Conflict for Selective Chemotherapy,” the study found that a drug the researchers developed was able to selectively disrupt DNA replication and repair in cancer cells.

The drug is called AOH1996. It was named after Anna Olivia Healey, who was born in 1996 and died of a rare form of cancer called neuroblastoma when she was 9 years old.

Linda Malkas, a senior author of the new study based at the City of Hope, has been developing the drug over the past two decades.

City of Hope is a private, non-profit clinical research center, hospital, and graduate school in Duarte, California. It’s one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States.

According to a press release from City of Hope, the AOH1996 “appears to annihilate all solid tumors.”

Now that research has demonstrated promising results in cell and animal models, the new drug is being tested in humans in a Phase 1 clinical trial, Ms. Malkas said in a statement.

Unique Mechanism

The preclinical study explains how AOH1996 targets a cancerous version of the protein, called proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA).

The cancerous variant of PCNA “is critical in DNA replication and repair” of all cancerous tumors, but the new drug AOH1996 inhibits PCNA, the City of Hope noted in its release.

“Data suggests PCNA is uniquely altered in cancer cells, and this fact allowed us to design a drug that targeted only the form of PCNA in cancer cells,” Ms. Malkas said.

“PCNA is like a major airline terminal hub containing multiple plane gates,” she explained. “Our cancer-killing pill [AOH1996] is like a snowstorm that closes a key airline hub, shutting down all flights in and out only in planes carrying cancer cells.”

Given orally at a certain dose, AOH1996 “suppresses tumor growth but causes no discernable side effect,” authors wrote in the study.

Most other targeted cancer therapies focus on a single pathway, which allows cancer cells to mutate and eventually become resistant to the therapy, Ms. Malkas noted. The unique mechanism of AOH1996 that enables it to target the mutated versions of PCNA sets it apart from other currently available therapies.

Ms. Malkas said results “have been promising” and they suggest that AOH1996 “can suppress tumor growth as a monotherapy or combination treatment in cell and animal models without resulting in toxicity.”

Further Studies Ahead

PCNA was once thought to be too challenging for targeted therapy.

“No one has ever targeted PCNA as a therapeutic because it was viewed as ‘undruggable,’ but clearly City of Hope was able to develop an investigational medicine for a challenging protein target,” lead author of the study, Long Gu, said in a statement.

Read more here…

Authored by Peter Van Buren via TheAmericanConservative.com,

Americans’ free speech is threatened as never before…

Orwell, again. 1984 seems written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.

George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (in our own time and place, think of “unhoused,” “misspoke,” LGBTQIAXYZ+, “nationalist,” “terrorist”).

Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and to accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (think mandating masks that do not prevent disease transmission). The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (think war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)

Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.

Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 

1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.

In 2023 America, the medium is social media, and the Ministry of Truth is the executive branch, primarily the FBI. Topics that the FBI at one point labeled disinformation and sought to censor in the name of protecting Americans from disinformation include, but are not limited to, the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid lab-leak theory, the efficiency and value to society of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, speech about election integrity and the 2020 presidential election, the security of voting by mail, and even parody accounts mocking the president (for example, one about Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter).

When asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans. It’s a made-up term with no fixed meaning. That gives it its power, as “terrorism” was used a decade or so earlier. Remember “domestic terrorism”? That stretched to cover everything from white power advocates to January 6 marchers to BLM protesters to Moms for Liberty. It just can’t be all those things all the time, but it can be all those things at different times, as needed.

The term “hate speech” is another flexible tool of enforcement, which is why efforts to codify banning hate speech under the First Amendment must be resisted so strongly. Same for QAnon. We’ve heard about QAnon for years now but still can’t figure out if it even exists. To read the mainstream media, you would think it is the most powerful and sinister thing one can imagine, yet it seems to be imaginary, another Cthulhu. Do they have an office, an email address, a lair somewhere?

In simple words: The government is using social media companies as proxies to censor the contrary thoughts of Americans, all under the guise of correcting misinformation and in direct contrivance of the First Amendment.

How bad does it get? As part of its 2023 investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the House Committee on the Judiciary issued subpoenas to Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, and Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent. Documents obtained revealed that the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence service, requested and, in some cases, directed, the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online about the war in Ukraine.

Another tool of thought control is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans. Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, which is down from the nearly 3 million spied on in 2021.

Does all that sound familiar?

An amorphous threat is pounded into the heads of Americans (communism, Covid, terrorism, disinformation) and in its name nearly anything is justified, including in the most recent battle for freedom, censorship. The wrapper is that it is all for our own protection—Biden himself accused social media companies of “killing people,” the more modern version of the terrorism era’s “blood on their hands”—with the government assuming the role of knowing what is right and correct for Americans to know.

The target in name is always some Russki-type foreigner; in reality, what happens is the censorship of our own citizens, who are tarred with the suspicion of being “pro-Putin.” Yet Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted that the government asked Facebook to suppress true information. He said during the Covid era that the scientific establishment within the government asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”

Under President Joe Biden, the government has undertaken “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge in Missouri v. Biden. The case exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social media platforms into removing political views they dislike. The White House is appealing and obtained a stay, hoping to retain this powerful tool of thought control right out of 1984. A victory for censorship of Americans and their thoughts could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.

An ex-Tesla engineer heading up a zero-emission RV (recreational vehicles) company has developed the world’s first self-propelled electric RV that works equally with a conventional gas-powered SUV or pickup truck and or electric vehicle to increase overall range, mitigating concerns about “range anxiety.” 

When a Tesla Model X tows a travel trailer, it typically experiences a reduction in range by about 50-60%. As for gas powered trucks, some estimates say every 100 pounds of extra weight decreases its fuel economy by 2%.

CEO of Lightship Ben Parker, a former Tesla battery engineer who worked on the Model 3, developed the next-generation RV powered by an electric motor with an 80 kWh battery pack with 3 kWh of solar on top of the trailer. 

Parker designed the Lightship L1 to work equally with a conventional gas-powered SUV or pickup truck to provide the towing vehicle with “near zero-range loss.”

The next generation of RVs might be the short-term answer for those who experience “range anxiety” while towing trailers. 

The trailer starts at $125,000, and production begins in the second half of 2024. As for demand for the next-gen RV, the industry is in a downcycle after an unprecedented bubble during Covid and elevated borrowing rates. 

Authored by Megan Radshaw JD via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

New evidence suggests vaccinated individuals can transmit antibodies generated through mRNA COVID-19 vaccination to unvaccinated individuals through aerosols, according to a peer-reviewed study (pdf) published in ImmunoHorizons.

Extended mask requirements allowed scientists at the University of Colorado to evaluate whether vaccinated individuals could transfer aerosolized antibodies generated from COVID-19 vaccines. Aerosols are a manufactured or naturally occurring suspension of particles or droplets in the air, such as airborne dust, mists, fumes, or smoke, that can be absorbed by the skin or inhaled.

Researchers used a combination of tests to detect SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies from masks vaccinated lab members wore and donated anonymously at the end of the day. Antibodies are proteins produced by the immune system that circulate in the blood and neutralize foreign substances such as bacteria and viruses.

Consistent with results reported by others, the researchers identified both immunoglobulin G (IgG) and immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies in the saliva of vaccinated individuals and on their masks.

Based on their observations, the researchers hypothesized droplet or aerosolized antibody transfer might occur between individuals, similar to how droplets and aerosolized viral particles are transferred by the same route.

To test their hypothesis, they obtained and compared nasal swabs from unvaccinated children living in vaccinated, unvaccinated, and COVID-19-positive households.

Results showed high IgG in the noses of vaccinated parents was “significantly associated” with an increase in intranasal IgG within the unvaccinated child from the same household, especially compared to the “complete deficit of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody detected” in nasal swabs obtained from children in nonvaccinated families. A similar trend was found with IgA in the same samples.

In other words, their findings suggest aerosol transmission of antibodies can occur between COVID-19 vaccinated parents and their children—and the tendency for this transfer is directly related to the amount of nasal or oral antibodies found in those who received vaccines.

This type of shedding is called “passive immunization,” where antibodies—primarily IgA—are actually exchanged between individuals through respiratory droplets, Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense, who holds a doctorate in biochemical engineering, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times. “But this would provide minimal immunity for the ‘bystanders’ based on the fact that the original mRNA vaccines provide so little protection.”

Mr. Hooker said passive immunization could elicit autoimmunity and “all sorts of reactions” in bystanders due to a similar “molecular mimicry between the COVID-19 Ig [immunoglobulin] antibodies and human proteins.”

Studies have shown that molecular mimicry between the foreign molecules and human molecules can lead to an autoimmune response causing antibodies to function incorrectly and interact against human proteins. Autoimmunity refers to an immune reaction where the body attacks its own tissues, resulting in damage or disease.

Mr. Hooker said the study suggests that if Ig antibodies can be transmitted person-to-person, there is a possibility the spike protein generated by COVID-19 vaccines could be transmitted as well.

“This could cause immunization of the bystanders as well as problems associated with spike protein toxicity to bloodstream components and other tissues,” he added.

COVID-19 Vaccines Were Authorized Without Studies to Assess Transmission

COVID-19 vaccines using mRNA technology like Pfizer and Moderna were authorized globally without studies into the possible expression of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) containing the mRNA or of the spike protein manufactured by the cells of a recently vaccinated individual.

Read more here…

Authored by Thomas Koenig via RealClear Wire,

A new documentary can help remind conservatives of the importance of responding to real-world problems with practical policies. “Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York” tells the story of how an unapologetic commitment to common sense and truth helped liberate New York City from urban despair. Through clips and in-depth interviews with the era’s key players such as Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Police Commissioners Bill Bratton and Ray Kelly, and Human Resources Administration Commissioner Robert Doar, the film recounts how conservatives made inroads and notched policy wins in the biggest city in America. The ungovernable city proved governable after all. Conservatism proved itself a viable political philosophy in modern urban America. And most importantly, real people benefited as they enjoyed safer streets, better-performing schools, and higher-paying jobs.

The film begins with an introduction to mid-20^th century liberalism in the form of John Lindsay’s mayoralty. Mayor Lindsay cut a dashing figure like John F. Kennedy and spent money like Lyndon Johnson. His tax-and-spend policies placed New York City in a precarious financial situation. Crime rose, welfare rolls exploded, and the city lost 600,000 jobs.

New Yorkers enjoyed a brief respite from these woes during Ed Koch’s mayoralty, but the election of David Dinkins in 1989 led to backsliding. Still, there were discrete policy victories in the early 1990s, such as the revival of Bryant Park. The park had become a public space in name only: It was littered with graffiti and gangs, and New Yorkers were not safe even in broad daylight. In response, the park was privatized, and under the leadership of Dan Biederman, the graffiti was cleaned up, the broken lights were repaired, and the hedges were trimmed. In an interview, Biederman noted how a “relentless” and “data-driven” approach helped drive the successful revitalization. Biederman “implemented every good idea [he] learned from other cities’ models” and from interviews he conducted of those who had revitalized public spaces elsewhere. A similar isolated victory occurred during the Dinkins years when then-transit police chief Bill Bratton all but eliminated crime in New York’s once-dangerous subway system.

The Rudy Giuliani era wrought more widespread transformation. In the lead-up to Giuliani’s mayoralty, the Manhattan Institute regularly convened meetings of reformers to discuss policy fixes for the city’s many challenges. In “Gotham,” political commentator Joe Klein recounts how “truth, not ideology, dwelled” at those early gatherings. Comprising largely ex-Great Society liberals, the think tank also began publishing City Journal, where facts, figures, and common sense dominated the pages.

Soon enough, the City Journal-reading Giuliani was transforming reform proposals into reality. Police Chief Bratton homed in on quality-of-life issues and turned the NYPD into a proactive, rather than reactive, force. For Bratton, the goal was to prevent crime, not merely respond to it. He succeeded by leveraging data. Bratton instituted the “CompStat” system, which documented every instance of reported crime and its precise location. By documenting and reviewing the data routinely, the police tracked trends and identified hotspots. In an interview, Chief of Department Lou Anemone recounted how “CompStat was like a shot of adrenaline to the heart of the NYPD.” CompStat’s focus on data and the need for rapid response gelled with the culture of experimentation and innovation that reigned at the NYPD in those years: “There was no shame in failing,” recounts Anemone, but “there was shame in not attempting to fix” what many had presumed were unsolvable problems. According to Anemone, “a sense of urgency” pervaded the police squad, largely thanks to Giuliani and Bratton’s leadership. The mix of urgency and experimentation paid off: Major felonies declined by roughly 62% during Giuliani’s tenure.

Giuliani also transformed the city’s welfare system. Alongside Human Resources Administration Commissioner Jason Turner, Giuliani used incentives to push New Yorkers from welfare to work. Giuliani and Turner rewarded welfare agents with bonuses for placing citizens in sustainable employment. They reduced welfare fraud and instituted work requirements (“workfare”). The welfare rolls dwindled; the city’s economy boomed. Giuliani notched similar policy successes with the help of incentives elsewhere: Instead of paying sanitation workers hourly, he paid them based on how much trash they collected each day. Many workers skipped lunch in order to cover more ground. The streets grew cleaner.

In large part, Mayor Michael Bloomberg built on Giuliani’s successes. With the help of New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein, Bloomberg brought Giuliani’s incentives-based thinking to bear on the city’s education system. He increased the number of charter schools while simultaneously subjecting the public schools to more stringent performance measures.

Yet Bloomberg didn’t have a coherent governing philosophy that a successor could follow. Thus, as former Manhattan Institute president Larry Mone observes in “Gotham,” Bloomberg’s mayoralty represented a set of policies that worked but were “not preserved.” The political forces of yesteryear quickly filled the resultant “vacuum.” John Lindsay was gone, but with the election of Bill de Blasio as mayor in 2013, the Lindsay governing philosophy was back. The city has suffered as a result, leaving it once again in need of revival. Anemone’s observation that “you can never underestimate the importance of leadership” is as relevant as ever.

New York isn’t alone. Many cities are falling short on basics like crime control and education. Crime has been spiking. As Biederman puts it, we’ve backslidden to “reactive policing,” where “police are historians” instead of taking action on crime. We’ve reached a point where local NAACP chapters critique the “proliferation of anti-police rhetoric.” In states like Pennsylvania, students sit trapped in failing public schools as politicians cave to teachers’ unions.

In the face of such shortcomings, the rational urban conservatism that saved New York City in the 1990s-2000s is absent. The Philadelphia GOP chair has likened his role as the head of the city’s once-robust Republican Party to being “the valedictorian of summer school.” And the national GOP has drifted away from offering real-world solutions to real-world problems. Giuliani himself embodies this unfortunate shift: Once “America’s Mayor” and the champion of New York’s revival, he is now facing lawsuits and threats of disbarment thanks to his role in propagating the 2020 election fraud conspiracies.

“Gotham” makes clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. As Joe Klein observes, “Politics is always an ebb and flow.” We’re in the midst of an acrimonious, unserious political age that is short on policy and long on rhetoric. If liberalism had “become stale” by 1990, in Klein’s words, then today’s progressivism might wear out its welcome, too. To fill the resultant void in our cities, conservatism needs to get its act together by breaking up with culture wars and conspiracy theories and getting back in touch with common sense.

Thomas Koenig is a student at Harvard Law School from Oreland, Pa. Follow him on Twitter @thomaskoenig98.

Former President Donald J. Trump has called on the Supreme Court to step in and ‘intercede’ in his various legal battles.”

“My political opponent has hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits, including D.A., A.G., and others, which require massive amounts of my time & money to adjudicate,” Trump said in a Friday post to Truth Social.

“I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field,” he continued “It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!”

The former president is currently President Joe Biden’s #1 political opponent, and has been charged by Biden’s DOJ with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.

He was arraigned on Thursday in a Washington DC courtroom, where he entered a ‘not guilty’ plea on the four charges above.

The indictment is the third filed against the former president in the past few months – as opposed to the entire time he’s been out of office. Trump is already facing charges linked to porn-star payoffs and keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, in a locked safe, as opposed to a garage where his crackhead son doing business with the Chinese and the Ukrainians had full access to them.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and maintained that he is being prosecuted for political purposes because of position as the front-runner for the GOP nomination for president in 2024.

All three of Trump’s criminal cases remain in early stages. Although the disputes could eventually end up at the Supreme Court, such an appeal would not take place until further down the road.

In his hush money case, Trump has begun the appeal process over a ruling that denied Trump’s attempt to move the case to federal court. That dispute is now in the hands of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. –The Hill

Meanwhile, President Biden – who lied about his level of knowledge and involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings – says his DOJ is apolitical and makes its own decisions.

Authored by Scott Shepard via RealClearMarkets.com,

JPMorgan Chase is back to debanking. Once again, it’s not providing any explanations. And once again it’s targeting people who dare to question the Left Government/Woke Business conspiracy against liberty…

At about the same time, it appears, Chase debanked, without warning, Drs. Syed Haider and Joseph Mercola. Wait, no. Not just them, but also Dr. Mercola’s employees – and his and their families. All without explanation.

These debankings don’t come without context.

You may recall that last fall Chase debanked Senator, Ambassador and Governor (so, you know, pretty well respected) Brownback’s religious liberty organization, after having debanked General Flynn and a series of other conservatives. Chase got called on the Brownback debanking and first stonewalled and then lied, a half dozen times, about the reasons for the debanking, and then went back to stonewalling.

That’s relevant again because, whaddya know, the debanked doctors turn out to be conservatives, too – or at least they’re sufficiently opposed to the woke big government/big business monolith that they were willing to question the efficacy of the lockdown regime. In fact, the New York Times wrote a story about him in the summer of 2021 calling him “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Information Online.”

Why? Because he’d dared to “publish[] over 600 articles on Facebook that cast doubt on Covid-19 vaccines since the pandemic began, reaching a far larger audience than other vaccine skeptics, an analysis by The New York Times found.” He also published “posts often ask[ing] pointed questions about [the vaccines’] safety and discuss[ing] studies that other doctors have refuted.”

Oh, the horror. Disagreement about scientific questions? Can not have. Especially if the right scientists have refuted some underlying positions.

You know, the way the right scientists refuted the lab-leak theory.

Mercola also helped to publicize a study that claimed that the “covid vaccines were ‘a medical fraud’ and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease.”

Wait. That all turned out to be right, didn’t it? Wasn’t he right? Haven’t the Times and Mercola’s detractors been refuted about those claims of misinformation? Weren’t they the misinformants?

Haider similarly questioned the efficacy of the vaccines, and documented the slow admissions that he and other skeptics had been correct in their claims.

Now, if this is a political debanking, it initially seems odd that it’s coming years after the controversy about the vaccines had died down. But the key may lie in the Times story itself, which explained that “[t]he activity has earned Dr. Mercola, a natural health proponent with an Everyman demeanor, the dubious distinction of the top spot in the ‘Disinformation Dozen,’ a list of 12 people responsible for sharing 65 percent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media, said the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. Others on the list include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, and Erin Elizabeth, the founder of the website Health Nut News, who is also Dr. Mercola’s girlfriend.”

Well, that would fit the pattern. Kennedy is an enemy of the unistate. He’s a bad guy to know or share any connections with, these days.

(By the way, check in on the Center for Countering Digital Hate. I know you’ll be shocked to discover that their functional – rather than their purported – definition of hate is “anything that deviates from woke policy goals.”)

Now, I don’t have any opinion on the veracity of other claims that Mercola and Haider may have made. I, like decisionmakers at Chase, am not a doctor. And I certainly don’t have any public opinions about the 2024 primaries. But that’s hardly the point. Once again we have a situation in which Chase has shut down accounts of people orthogonal to the big-gov/big-biz conjuncture without explanation.

And this time, in a move reminiscent of the type of bills of attainder that are constitutionally forbidden to American governments, the ban extends not only to companies, but to individual employees and their families.

Unless there’s a terrific, non-partisan, non-censoring reason for all of this, that’s monstrous.

It’s always possible that the fact that Chase’s debanking of organizations and people (and now their families) just happens always to fall on those espousing anti-woke positions, even though Chase adamantly refuses to provide any true explanations for them, but is happy to tell lie after demonstrable lie. It’s possible.

Really, though, what are the odds? They’re certainly getting longer.

Coutts Bank of Britain recently debanked Nigel Farage, who championed Brexit. All of the other banks of England followed along. But then it was discovered that the debanking had been political. So the British government is investigating, and the head of NatWest, which owns Coutts, has been, as they say, sacked.

You’re up, American politicians. Time for a full investigation of debanking at JPMorgan Chase and some of the other malefactors of great piles of other people’s wealth, like Bank of America.

Find out what’s really going on and why, so that some of the mighty may fall the way of the NatWest CEO.

The Brits have long understood taking sharp action pour encourager les autres. Time for us beyond the sea to learn.

*  *  *

Scott Shepard is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and Director of its Free Enterprise Project.