By Jim Hoft

What began as a lawful operation turned into outright insurrection in the so‑called sanctuary city of Los Angeles. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducted multiple strikes Friday — targeting a Home Depot, fashion warehouses, clothing outlets in downtown L.A., and a meat‑packing plant in Paramount — arresting deportable illegal aliens, including some with criminal records.

The result? Large crowds descended, blocking lanes, hurling bricks and chunks of concrete, setting trash fires, smearing graffiti on federal buildings, and assaulting federal vehicles.

According to Fox News reporter Bill Melugin:

Federal sources ID some of the criminal illegal alien targets ICE arrested in their LA operation yesterday & today, which sparked violent protests. They include multiple gang members, convicted sex offenders, violent gun offenders, & drug offenders. One has already been deported. They include:

Rolando Veneracion-Enriquez, a national of the Philippines who has prior convictions for sexual penetration with a foreign object, assault with intent to commit rape, and burglary, all in California.

ARMANDO ORDAZ, a Mexican national & known gang member with a convictions for sexual battery, receiving stolen property, and theft in Los Angeles.

VICTOR MENDOZA-AGUILAR, a previously deported Mexican national & known gang member with convictions for assault with a deadly weapon, and possessing drug paraphernalia.

DELFINO AGUILAR MARTINEZ, a Mexican national with a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon causing great bodily injury in LA.

[…]

Via https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/06/i-smell-cia-deep-state-all-this-rfk/

by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.

“The MAHA Report,” released May 22, identified four “key drivers” behind the childhood chronic disease epidemic. EMR, which wasn’t included as a main driver, was mentioned only briefly in the report’s section on environmental chemicals.

Miriam Eckenfels, director of Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless Program, said EMR should have been listed as a fifth main driver.

“The report’s discussion of EMR serves as a conversation-starter,” Eckenfels said. “But it misses the mark in terms of acknowledging the impact of wireless radiation on the childhood chronic disease epidemic.”

For instance, the report failed to mention that studies have linked wireless radiation exposure to impaired blood sugar regulation and neuropsychiatric effects, including depression, Eckenfels said.

Some autism researchers, including Martha Herbert, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatric neurologist and neuroscientist, have theorized that EMR is linked to autism. Herbert’s publications on the topic weren’t cited in the report.

Still, the fact that the report mentioned EMR at all is significant, according to Odette Wilkens, a technology attorney.

“Although the MAHA report falls short of what we would like it to say, nonetheless, it has broken ground as the first formal acknowledgment by the executive branch that there is a problem,” Wilkens said.

Camilla Rees, a business consultant on technology risks and long-time health and environmental researcher, agreed. “That the MAHA Commission gave any mention of risks from EMR at all was nonetheless still progress, believe it or not.” But the report “disappointingly still undermined the extensive body of evidence showing risks that exist, and it continued to foster doubt.”

According to Rees, U.S. government officials for decades have ignored data showing risk. She said:

Dmitry Orlov

A military class between Russia and NATO is inevitable. It has been inevitable since 2022. By then, it had already become clear that the collective West had run out of money, and it urgently needed to either rob someone, in order to continue its wasteful welfare state, or to offer an explanation for its own plebs for why they are living increasingly poorly. Robbery was then duly attempted by one part of the collective West (the Anglo-Saxons) on the other part (the Germans, the French and various other Poles and Italians). They conspired in secret, and that, in the context of Western civilization, is considered to be the highest manifestation of valor. The Anglo-Saxons lied to their European accomplices that they had decided to only rob Russia, at the same time hiding behind the war hysteria to avoid the wrath of their own plebs, thereby killing two birds with one stone.

The time, place and direction of propaganda were chosen flawlessly. The greedy and half-starved Franco-German-Poles agreed immediately. A millennium of history has conditioned them for shutting off their instinct for self-preservation upon hearing the word “Russia” and for turning on their berserker mode. This is an old trick, first made popular by the Roman popes who used to launch multiple crusades, then repeated by Napoleon, then

tler’s “Drang nach Osten.” The irredentist fantasy lives on: “You remember, in 1941, they promised you a personal estate in Russia and a hundred Russian serfs? Well, the time has come! But you have to be patient for a little longer (and be willing to suffer and to die).”

And with that the trap snapped shut. Once the various burghers and citoyens signed up to suffer and to die, a military clash between NATO and the Russian Federation became inevitable. The war with Russia became a factor of domestic, not foreign policy for Europe. It became the only means of uniting their own nations, quite upset by the continuous and accelerating decline in their living standards. Already in April 2022 it became clear that the Russian military operation in the Ukraine was rapidly developing into a global final battle — the end of a centuries-old bloody confrontation between the East and the West which originated in the Great Church Schism, and commenced the second half of the 11th century, which marked the beginning of the division of Europeans into classes, some of them endowed with the right to exist, others doomed to perpetual contempt.

Preoccupied with solving their internal problems and driven by the Anglo-Saxons’ promises of “just a little more, just a little more and Russia will be crushed”, the Europeans did not even notice how the conflict went global. When they finally realized this, they became hysterical: “The defeat of Ukraine will be the defeat of Europe!”

“We will not let Russia win!” This final imperative brought the collective West to its logical conclusion: the need to enter the war with their own forces, replacing some two million dead or disabled Ukrainians. Suddenly, with crystal clarity, a stunning prospect of choosing between two evils appeared before them:

• Their first option is a war against “Russian barbarians” on foreign soil stretching from the Barents Sea in the Arctic to the Black Sea in the south.
• Their second option is a civil war of all against all on their own territory — because their own plebs have already reached the boiling point past which it is no longer shameful to loot shops, seize real estate and openly disregard their civic duties. Not only has the population in the West begun to get out of control, but it has also acquired its own opposition politicians ready to rise up and launch mass protests. In such conditions, a small but victorious war is almost the only recipe for retaining political power and has been perpetually in vogue since the time of Nebuchadnezzar.

There are other options — such as abandoning the Ukraine, making peace with Russia and mending their economies with Russia’s help (for the Russians do not like having failed states as neighbors), but Europe’s leaders did not look for them. They declared a sort of crusade-LITE — not a real crusade, since the newly barbarized West has lost its Christian core and its messianic spirit. But this has not made it any less greedy or dangerous. What in 2022 seemed speculative and unlikely to many, in 2025 has become practically inevitable.

Two Years Before the Great War”, Yelena Panina writes: “There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind: this war is serious and will go on for a long time. Moreover, it is moving to a fundamentally different level. The West no longer questions the admissibility of strikes deep into Russia, nor is there a question about the possibility of striking or not striking [Russia’s] nuclear facilities. Now everything is admissible against Russia and, most importantly, everything is possible. At the NATO summit in June, the collective West, under the far-fetched pretext of a threat from Russia, intends to designate reference points for unleashing a war by the alliance countries against [Russia] between 2027 and 2030.” There are plenty of other political scientists and politicians who are saying something similar. The Wild West’ suicidal drive can no longer be stopped. It sees slowing down on its way to the eastern front to be even more dangerous for itself than a military clash with Russia.

What will this war look like? The terrorist attack of March 22, 2024 (Crocus City Hall near Moscow), as well as the terrorist attacks of June 1, 2025, gave us a glimpse of carefully prepared aggression. The new Great War with the collective West will begin with the erasure of the usual concepts of “front and rear”. It will take the form of terrorist attacks in many places all over Russia at once. And then, following the tradition established by Hitler, our Western neighbors imagine that they will launch a new blitzkrieg: the expeditionary forces of the collective Wild West will enter only to crush individual, most stubborn pockets of resistance — or so they imagine. What they cannot imagine is that by then their expeditionary forces, along with all those who command and who supply them, will no longer be alive. Nor will civilian casualties still be a major concern.

[…]

Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/22eb7887-1d5e-42cb-b758-78ba63cc19bc

Photo credit: David Strause GoFundMe page

Parents of two different babies are being charged with felonies in Pennsylvania after police say their babies died because the parents placed them in unsafe sleeping positions, SpotlightPA reported.

In both cases, police allege that the parents failed to follow guidance, including handouts given to them at doctor’s visits, stating that babies should be put to sleep on their backs.

Gina and David Strause of Lebanon County are accused of putting their 3-month-old infant son, Gavin, to sleep on his stomach and allowing him to sleep with stuffed animals in the crib.

They are charged with involuntary manslaughter, recklessly endangering another person, and endangering the welfare of children.

Natalee Rasmus of Luzerne County is accused of putting her 1-month-old daughter, Avaya Jade Rasmus-Alberto, to sleep on her stomach on a boppy pillow, often used for nursing. She is charged with third-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of children.

Rasmus was a 17-year-old mother when her daughter died in 2022. Court records show that she continues to be held at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility with bail set at $25,000 pending resolution of her case.

In both cases, autopsies concluded the babies died of accidental death from asphyxiation. Law enforcement argued in both cases that parents should have known that putting the babies to sleep on their stomachs was unsafe, because they had received paperwork at wellness visits informing them of safe sleeping practices.

They pointed to signed acknowledgements in the babies’ medical records that were created as part of a 2010 state law to educate parents about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

The law requires hospitals, birthing centers and medical providers to give parents educational materials from the national Safe to Sleep campaign, and ask them to certify that they received them.

Signing the statement is voluntary. The statement doesn’t indicate that parents can be charged with a criminal offense if they don’t follow the campaign advice.

Advocates from national organizations that educate parents about safe sleep practices found the charges shocking. Nancy Maruyama, the executive director of Sudden Infant Death Services of Illinois told Spotlight PA, “To charge them criminally is a crime, because they have already suffered the worst loss.”

Alison Jacobson, executive director of First Candle, a nonprofit that also educates parents about safe sleep practices, told Pennlive, “There is no law against placing a baby on his or her stomach to sleep. How they can charge this family with involuntary manslaughter is completely baffling to me.”

Researcher Neil Z. Miller, an expert on SIDS and the Safe to Sleep campaign, told The Defender, “Parents of a sleeping baby who dies in the middle of the night should never be charged with murder. That’s just cruel.”

Miller, author of “Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective?” added:

“Should parents be obligated to follow every ‘recommendation’ made by their doctor or the Safe to Sleep campaign? Would we as a society prefer that doctors raise our babies instead of the parents? Have other possible causes of death been considered, such as vaccinations? As a society, we can, and must, do much better.”

Does placing infants on their backs make a difference? 

The handouts shared with new Pennsylvania parents are based on the National Institutes of Health “Safe to Sleep” campaign, which institutionalized a program initiated by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 1992 to inform parents to put children to sleep on their backs rather than on their stomachs.

The campaign is based on the premise that babies who sleep on their backs or sides are less likely to die in their sleep. Until that time, it was common for babies to sleep on their stomachs.

The program was launched in the wake of a rising number of SIDS deaths — and growing concern among some parents that the deaths were linked to vaccination.

In a 2021 article in the peer-reviewed journal Toxicology Reports, vaccine researcher Neil Z. Miller provides a history of the SIDS diagnosis, noting that the rise of SIDS coincided with the first mass immunization campaigns.

Between 1992, when the Safe to Sleep program launched, and 2001, SIDS deaths reportedly declined a whopping 55% — a number touted in articles celebrating the program, making it appear that babies sleeping on their stomachs was the cause of SIDS, not vaccines.

However, at the same time deaths from SIDS decreased, the rate of mortality from “suffocation in bed,” “suffocation other,” “unknown and unspecified causes,” and “intent unknown” all increased significantly.

Why? The classification system had changed. SIDS deaths were being reclassified by medical certifiers, usually coroners, as one of the other similar categories, not SIDS.

Research published in the journal Pediatrics, the AAP’s flagship journal, concluded that deaths previously certified as SIDs were simply being certified as other non-SIDS causes, such as suffocation — but the deaths were still essentially SIDS deaths.

That change in classification accounted for more than 90% of the drop in SIDS rates.

The Pediatrics paper showed no decline in overall postneonatal mortality after the Safe to Sleep campaign was launched, despite the program’s — and the AAP’s — claims to the contrary.

Others verified the Pediatrics paper’s findings, and the trend continued, as reported by multiple studies in top journals. Miller reported that, for example, “From 1999 through 2015, the U.S. SIDS rate declined 35.8% while infant deaths due to accidental suffocation increased 183.8%.”

Research shows that almost 80% of SIDS deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) happen within seven days of vaccination.

Theories linking vaccines to SIDS suggest that, in some cases, underdeveloped liver enzyme pathways may make it harder for some infants to process toxic ingredients in vaccines. Others argue that other, multiple, complex factors can make some infants vulnerable to toxic ingredients in vaccines.

Baby Gavin was ‘a dream come true’

On April 30, Gina and David Strause were charged with involuntary manslaughter, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years, and other lesser charges in the death of their son Gavin.

According to the police report, Gina found her son unresponsive, cold and blue in his crib when she woke up to feed him on the morning of May 8, 2024. She immediately called 911 and performed CPR until the police arrived.

The baby was pronounced dead at the hospital. The autopsy report found the cause of death to be “complications of asphyxia.”

Police said they observed loose items in the crib, “such as blankets and stuffed animals.”

Gina said that after feeding her baby at about 11:30 the night before he died, she placed him in his crib on his belly, because he was a “belly sleeper,” and covered him with a blanket. She said that she had received the recommendation that he should sleep on his back, but that he preferred to sleep on his stomach.

In an interview with Pennlive, Gina said that she typically put Gavin to sleep on his back, but he had gotten into the daily habit of rolling onto his belly.

Davis Stause told police that when he left for work at 5:30 am, he checked on Gavin, who was sleeping on his stomach and moving around a little bit. David said he “patted his butt” to put him back to sleep.

The police reported that they also obtained medical records from birth through death that showed that on the discharge paperwork that the parents received information about safe sleep practices, which included putting the baby on its back, having it sleep in the same room as the parents, and keeping the crib clear of bumper pads and stuffed animals.

They said this paperwork explained how parents could create a safe sleeping environment for their babies to reduce the risk of SIDS.

Baby Gavin also went to the pediatrician for well-child visits on Feb. 7 and 14, March 5 and April 9, a month before he died.

Gina told Pennlive that Gavin, who was born when she was almost 40, was “a dream come true.” She had taken 10 weeks of maternity leave and largely worked at home to spend as much time with him as possible. She said that after she gave birth, she was “overwhelmed” and didn’t remember receiving any paperwork or instructions about sleep.

Gina also said that at the hospital, police treated her and her husband with immediate suspicion, separating and questioning them. They were not allowed to see their baby again before he was taken by the coroner’s office.

The parents created a GoFundMe page, where they shared a copy of the police report, to help cover their legal costs, because they said they do not qualify for a public defender.

[…]

‘Tragic accident with no criminal intent to harm or kill the baby’

The forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy for Natalee Rasmus’ baby listed the cause of death as accidental. According to the report, the baby died from asphyxiation, the Times Leader reported.

Rasmus discovered her baby had died on the morning of Oct. 23, 2022, when she picked her up to get her ready for a doctor’s appointment.

Pennsylvania State Police in December charged Rasmus, alleging that she placed her baby face down to sleep against the recommendations of medical personnel and prenatal classes at Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center.

At a preliminary hearing on the case in February, a state trooper testified that Rasmus ignored safe sleeping practices because she had placed her baby face down in her bassinet with a Boppy pillow, which has a tag warning, “Do not use for sleeping.”

The trooper, Caroline Rayeski, also testified that a search of Rasmus’ cellphone found that she had searched the internet to see whether it was ok to allow newborns to sleep on their stomachs. The trooper also seized literature from the prenatal classes stating it is “recommended” to put newborns to sleep on their backs.

“Yeah, she wouldn’t sleep, she’ll just scream, so she has to be like propped up,” Rasmus told the investigating officer, according to Spotlight PA, which reported the story.

Assistant attorneys argued in a preliminary hearing that she disregarded safe sleeping practices, and a judge forwarded the criminal case to county court.

[…]

Rasmus’ most serious charge, third-degree murder, is a homicide that involves killing someone without intent to kill, but with reckless disregard for human life. In Pennsylvania, it can carry a prison sentence of up to 40 years.

Court documents indicate that Rasmus remains in jail with a $25,000 bail, pending the outcome of her case.

[…]

How common is it to bring criminal charges against parents in infant deaths?

Attorney Daniel Nevins told SpotlightPA said it is extremely rare for parents to be criminally charged when infants die after sleeping on their stomachs, and that the burden of proof on the prosecutors will be high.

In 2014, Virginia resident Candice Christa Semidey, age 25, was charged with murder after she swaddled her baby and put it to sleep on its stomach, The Washington Post reported. In that case, police similarly did not think that she intended for the baby to die.

She pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and child neglect. She was ordered to serve three years of probation to avoid the five-year prison term she was sentenced to.

Some charges have also been brought against parents in deaths of infants sleeping with Boppy pillows. There have also been several cases of parents charged for sleeping in the same bed as their child.

The Defender recently reported on three SIDS deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination. Police are still investigating the parents of 18-month-old twins who died together a week after receiving three vaccines. Authorities have not yet charged the parents, but initially said they were investigating the deaths as homicides.

Blessings Myrical Jean Simmons, age 6 months, received six routine vaccines at a well-baby visit on Jan. 13. The next morning, her parents found the baby dead in her bassinet. The autopsy SIDS as the infant’s cause of death, and no charges were filed against the parents.

T E Lawrence (who changed his name to TE Shaw in 1917) was a British intelligence operative killed in a “freak” motorcycle accident on May 13, 1935. Several witnesses reported a black car deliberately colliding with him (by opening the left rear door) just prior to the crash. In addition a mechanic found matching black paint on the motorcycle. All evidence regarding the back car was suppressed. A coroner’s inquest ruled Lawrence’s death accidental. .

In addition to reviewing significantly details of Lawrence’s mission in the Middle East during World War I, the filmmakers summarize the physical evidence relating to the crash and discuss members of the British political establishment who had had means and motive to kill him.

At the start of World War I in 1914, Lawrence, who spoke fluent Arabic, was stationed in Cairo where he worked with Prince Faisal (the British later made Faisal the first king of Iraq) to create a guerilla Arab force to oppose Germany’s Turkish allies. The British had promised the Arabs an independent Arab state in return for fighting the Ottoman Turks. When they reneged on this promise via the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration, Lawrence made an unsuccessful attempt to lobby for an independent Arab state and was barred from the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

He subsequently served in the RAF from 1922 until 11 weeks before his death. At the time of his death, he was rebuilding ties with Arabs in Palestine and reaching out to Henry Williamson of the British Union of Fascists about arranging a secret meeting with Hitler (to use his prestige to avert a war with Germany). Additional projects included a upcoming book about the brutal treatment of British enlisted men by their officers (following his death publication was delayed until 1955) and a new edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (originally published in 1922) with new information about Churchill “hastening his mother’s death,” the famines he engineered in India and the genocide he ordered in Kenya. In March 1935 and Lawrence’s appointment to a review panel convened to restructure the British intelligence.

Immediately following the crash MI5 (British secret service) members were already at the hospital when Lawrence arrived, while others searched his house and removed potentially embarrassing documents, including a recent letter from Williamson and documents related to Lawrence’s future intelligence role.

Lawrence was in a coma for a week prior to his death.

*Faisal I also died mysteriously and suddenly in 1933 after he visited London to complain about about increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine and negotiating with the US to sell Iran’s oil to them instead of the British.

By Jeffrey Tucker

The excuse that this regime is better than it was, or might otherwise have been, only lasts so long.

Every transition government in history has deployed that trope. Think the Girondins in France, Kerensky in Russia, Weimar in Germany, the Second Spanish Republic, Chiang Kai-shek in China, and so on. In order, they were replaced by Robespierre then Napoleon, Lenin then Stalin, Hitler, Franco, and Mao.

In each of these cases, the transitional government was caught between and ultimately smashed by pressures from both sides: industrial and intellectual partisans of the old regime with legacy control, on one side, and the radicalism of the populist movements that brought new people to power on the other.

Threading this needle is not easy in revolutionary moments. Of such times, history teaches one lesson more than any other. The new regime must be brutally honest about the criminality of the old one and work with focus to dismantle it as fast as possible. Anything short of that leads to its own discrediting and eventual replacement.

In every area of government today under the Trump administration, now entering its second phase, we witness these very historical forces at work. The grassroots movement that beat all odds to put the new people in power had high and even revolutionary expectations following the five most horrid years of our lives.

Some of these hopes are being partially met in good ways but blocked and neglected in too many other ways that are unbearably conspicuous. This dynamic affects the budget disaster, the demand for transparency, and in the realm of public health.

As a result, the wild optimism that greeted the inauguration of Trump has turned to something different, a mixture of incredulity from the grassroots combined with outrage and disgust from the legacy media and establishment that fought this revolution at every turn.

This further raises the prospect about which we’ve repeatedly warned: the Trump administration could go down in history as a transitional regime like we’ve seen so many times in history, a four-year experiment in moderation bookended by different brands of totalitarianism on either side.

This is a serious matter, not a parlor game. Nor is this a typical political battle. What happened over the last five years was for the ages. The world economy was smashed by nearly all states due to a lab leak for a product partially funded by the US government. The unannounced fallback plan, pushed in the name of science, was to universally distribute a new shot with a new gene-altering technology.

The shot did not work. It was not effective. It was not safe. Nor were they properly vetted because they were imposed by military edict under the cover of emergency. Other therapeutics were disparaged and banned. The critics in all areas were censored and shut down. People who refused the injection were fired. Public health collapsed in the name of preserving it.

Those harms have seen no justice.

Meanwhile, to finance this calamity, debt-financed spending ballooned by $8-10 trillion, leaving the federal government’s budget $2 trillion higher than it otherwise would have been. The shots are still on the market despite undeniable and widely known harms.

None of this is a secret, as it might have been in former times. Because of information technologies, people are well aware of every detail. The so-called “populist movement” has become a vast community of in-depth expertise, fully capable of running circles around legacy people and institutions.

The new leaders – elected to change course on all the above and more, including the accompanying crime and migration chaos – began with tremendous bravado and sweeping edicts that seemed promising. Four months later, they are asking for patience while dealing with legacy barriers on all sides from media harassment to court blockages.

The trouble is that public trust is completely gone. The whole country, traumatized by years of lies, has become Missouri: show me.

First, no one believes that the “one big beautiful bill” is just a first step on the way to future draconian cuts. We’ve seen this too many times, which is why Elon Musk finally broke his silence and denounced the entire “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill” as “a disgusting abomination.” That has set off a power struggle for the ages.

Second, in areas of government transparency, there have been some steps but not nearly enough to fulfill the promises. There are still no new Epstein files. The JFK files are a mess and incomplete. We know no more than already public information about the two shooters who tried to kill Trump. There are still many lingering questions about 9-11, the Covid disaster, and so much else. This is not the opening for which the people had hoped.

Third, let’s talk more at length about the public health area of policy where we’ve seen the most progress. We have a new and excellent Executive Order on science. Tax-funded Covid testing has ended. A contract of $750M for a Bird flu shot has been cancelled. There are new limits on gain-of-function research, and experiments on beagles and other animals are over. Many terrible contracts from NIH have been cancelled while parts of the CDC have been dismantled.

As for the mRNA shots, the market has been narrowed from everyone to only vulnerable populations, leaving aside the known issue that vulnerable populations should not risk them either.

There are new standards for randomized controlled trials with placebos, but no assurance that these companies will do them in a timely way. RCTs for a five-year-old product with massive immune-altering effects can never cobble together a valid sample selection at this late date, nor is a continuation of this experiment in any form morally justified.

In two tremendous victories, the shots have been removed from the routine childhood schedule, the first time this has ever happened to any product targeting a specific disease apart from eradication or replacement. In effect, the CDC/FDA are saying: it is better to get Covid than risk these products. Such a message will drive uptake to new lows approaching zero eventually.

In addition, the outrageous advice from the CDC that expectant women should take them is gone, finally. The champion of that policy has fled the CDC.

These are all welcome changes in policies that never should have existed in the first place. Even now, however, no one says the quiet part out loud: even if these shots had been safe and effective, which they are not, they were never necessary for the overwhelming number of people. Which raises the profound question of how and why all this came to be in the first place.

There are other initiatives too concerning food nutrition, mental health, and other matters in the MAHA Commission report that are hugely welcome changes from what has existed before.

The people in power in these agencies are pleading for patience. That is not unreasonable. Remember that these few appointees are confronting a beast larger, more entrenched, and better financed than any hegemon in human history. The pharma/media/tech/NGO/academia complex is larger and more powerful than the slave trade, the East India Company, Standard Oil, or even the munitions industry that started the Great War.

It’s certain that such a Leviathan cannot be ended in three months, not even with the best people in charge. All the grassroots really need to see is evidence of progress plus a transparent reason for delays. If the shots cannot be pulled now, people need to know why. If Covid emergency powers cannot be ended, explain why. If the new Moderna shot was already in the works and could not be stopped, people need to know the reasons.

Everyone who has watched all this unfold is of two minds, never mind the endlessly mutating factions within the dissident movements that have seen their leadership ascend to power. The people in the MAGA/MAHA/DOGE movements are as thrilled by the progress so far to the same extent that mainstream media and the legacy establishment are furious about all the changes.

For my own part, having watched public affairs for decades, this is the first time I’ve witnessed some progress in at least one area of state operations. That is worthy of celebration. I don’t even need to dwell on the many ways in which improvement over the darkest times of our lives is perhaps not as great an achievement as it would be otherwise.

That said, the release of yet another shot, implausibly called NexSpike, especially in light of all evidence and promises, is a tremendous shock for which no one was prepared. If they were in the works and the appointees could not stop them, we should be told that and the full explanation should be given to all. If President Trump himself is still attached to the foul spawn of Operation Warp Speed, and has forced them back onto the market despite vast public opposition, we should know that too.

Above all else, what we really need is the blunt truth about the last five years. We need to know that the people in office, whether elected or appointed, still share the deep outrage that fueled the movement that put them in power. We need to hear frank talk about the harms, the mandates, the suffering, the deceptions, the payoffs, the graft, the abuses, the illegal vanquishing of freedom, science, and human rights.

It is not enough to proclaim a new Golden Age and be done with it. This pertains to every aspect of public life. Press conferences by the new officeholders, with smiles and promises of better behavior in the future, don’t cut it given the mass loss of trust, rampant cynicism, and grassroots fury. There must be more straight talk, more decisive action that goes to the heart of what happened, and some degree of accountability.

We hear daily rumors that all of this is coming. Great. In which case, the new leaders need to make that clear. The masses are not inherently unreasonable. But they are the people within whom the leadership must reason – not “message,” not presented with flim-flam, not entertained with digital Punch and Judy shows, and not sniffily dismissed as ignorant extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Every new leadership in government that inherits that kind of disaster of the last five years is necessarily going to be squeezed between the legacy regime – including its vast bureaucracies and industrial interests – and the populist movements that put them in power. In these cases, the status quo usually proves irresistible but with disastrous consequences later.

Now is the time to stop that unfolding disaster, one which can only compound the errors of the past.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/can-the-tyranny-be-soft-landed/

By Toby Rogers

[…]

Herbert (2013) confirms the criticisms of genetic theories of causation, specifically as they pertain to autism. She writes, “evidence is shifting the conception of autism from a genetically determined, static, lifelong brain encephalopathy to a multiply determined dynamic systems disturbance with chronic impacts on both brain and body” (p. 129).

Later, she recognizes environmental theories of causation:

Documentation of brain inflammation and immune activation in autism changed the playing field because it became clear that we were not dealing with healthy tissue that was wired differently but rather with brains that were having health problems with their cells… (p. 136).

She continues:

Given the clinical observations of transient improvement, persistent remission or recovery, and response to metabolic intervention, it becomes necessary to ask whether the brain in autism is truly and intrinsically “defective” or is instead “obstructed,” at least in many cases…(p. 139).

Herbert (2013) portrays the field of genetics as blinds mentioned earlier, the basic principles of these therapies include tackling subcomponents of “the autism” as problems that can be solved and thereby reducing the stress on the whole system so that it has more of a chance to recalibrate ed by their own hubris. She makes the case that given alarmingly high (and rising) autism rates, “anything we can do sooner rather than later to stem the tide ought to make eminent public health sense” (Herbert, 2013, p. 144). And she argues, “Clearly, gene myths are a problem in autism and are among the forces putting obstacles in the way of implementing a full-force public health campaign to reduce environmental risks” (Herbert, 2013, pp. 145-146).

Herbert (2013) also hints at the need for a sort of medicine from below. She writes:

The taboos around some of the alternative treatments used by parents have stopped many professionals cold from even familiarizing themselves with the methods and rationales of these approaches. Over time, as success stories have accumulated of children (and even some adults) greatly reducing the severity of their problems and sometimes even losing their diagnoses, some serious scientific attention has begun to be paid to these phenomena…(p. 145).

If, as Herbert suggests, parents, not doctors, are at the leading edge of researching treatments, that would seem to open up a whole host of questions about epistemology and the current state of science and medicine. The epistemological hierarchy set up by mainstream science and medicine has medical specialists above doctors who are above parents. But is it possible that in the case of autism, this hierarchy has it backwards? Furthermore, if, as Herbert argues, the observations and intuitions of parents produce better treatment outcomes, might they also be right about the causes of autism?

VIII. The Political Economy of Genetic Research

So if monogenic explanations for disease are not consistent with the scientific evidence of how most diseases work, then why do biotech companies, popular media, and the CDC continue to promote the search for such explanations?

Clearly, the model underlying the promise of genetic engineering is overly simplistic. But what makes the situation even more problematic is that DNA sequences, once isolated or synthesized, as well as the cells, organs, or organisms into which they are inserted, can be patented and thereby become forms of intellectual property. The science and the business of genetic engineering have become one, and efforts at basic understanding compete with the pursuit of profits. The usual professional rivalries are enhanced by major financial rivalries, and the complete interlinking of government, universities, and industry leaves hardly any disinterested scientists who are devoid of conflicts of interest and can be trusted to evaluate and critique proposed scientific models or their practical implementation without raising suspicions of pursuing financial interests. As the biotechnology industry expands its reach, the health hazards and environmental pollution it produces are added to those chemistry and physics bequeathed us during the twentieth century…(Hubbard, 2013, p. 25).

[…]

Genetic and genomic research is driven not so much by Merton’s idealized search for scientific knowledge nor even by traditional capitalist forces of supply and demand for products that meet a need in society. Rather, genetics and genomics exist through a unique combination of government funding created by biotech lobbying for that funding and speculative investment that is trading more on hope and hype than evidence of effective treatments (Gruber, 2013, p. 100). The total market capitalization of the top 25 biotechnology (which includes genetics and genomics) companies was $990.89 billion in 2014, $1.225 trillion in 2015, and $1.047 trillion in 2016 (Philippis, 2016). The US spends more than any other nation on genetics research (35% of the world total); one-third of the total comes from government and two-thirds from private investment (Pohlhaus and Cook-Deegan, 2008).

The Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) is the primary trade association for the genetics and genomics industry. BIO was formed in 1993 as the result of the merger of two smaller biotechnology industry associations (Sourcewatch, n.d.). Its more than 1,100 members include both genetics and genomics firms in addition to a wide range of pharmaceutical, agricultural, and medical companies that employ 1.6 million people in the US (BIO, 1993). From 2007 to 2016, BIO spent an average of $8 million a year on lobbying (Sourcewatch, n.d.). It has been remarkably successful at lobbying the US government for funding, regulatory rules, and tax provisions that benefit member companies. 

For example, from 1993 to 2014 the budget of the NIH increased from $10 billion to over $30 billion. In 2016 the NIH budget was $32.6 billion of which $8.265 billion was devoted to genetic and genomic research which includes the categories Genetics, Gene Therapy, Gene Therapy Clinical Trials, and Genetic Testing (U.S. DHHS, 2016). But this underestimates the total spent on genetic research because there is also genetic research happening within other disease categories in the NIH budget. BIO secured $1 billion in tax credits for biotech companies in the 2011 federal health-care legislation (Gruber, 2013, p. 277). BIO routinely pushes the FDA for faster approval times for medical interventions (Weisman, 2012).

Gruber (2013) notes that many academics and university science departments have grown wealthy through their ties with biotech firms. “Universities should be places where healthy skepticism of claims about science and its applications are pursued. But more than almost any other high-technology business, the biotechnology industry maintains extremely close ties with leading academic institutions…” (Gruber, 2013, p. 277).

Public funding for genetic research persists in spite of the fact that it is a less promising approach than mitigating environmental or lifestyle factors. “Given the many complex interactions that underlie almost all human diseases, even improving existing approaches to identifying and modifying genetic risk factors will often have significantly less value than modifying non-genetic risk factors” (Gruber, 2013, p. 280). But again, addressing environmental or lifestyle factors — doing less of the things that cause harm — is generally not profitable. Because US elected officials and regulators are captured by corporate interests, Congress funds genetic research to the exclusion of more promising (but less profitable) pathways.

Like Herbert (2013), Gruber (2013) sees the misplaced focus on genetics as crowding out more promising research while producing little improvement in public health. “The promise of genomics may have provided policy makers with a simple narrative of basic health research investment, but it has led to poor decision making on their part and has proved to be an insufficient standard bearer in the fight to improve the human condition” (Gruber, 2013, p. 282).

[…]

Latham and Wilson (2010) have the sharpest political economy critique of all:

Politicians like genetic determinism as a theory of disease because it substantially reduces their responsibility for people’s ill-health….Corporations like genetic determinism, again because it shifts blame….Medical researchers are also partial to genetic determinism. They have noticed that whenever they focus on genetic causation, they can raise research dollars with relative ease….Recognizing their value, these groups have tended to elevate genetic explanations for disease to the status of unquestioned scientific facts, thus making their dominance of official discussions of health and disease seem natural and logical. This same mindset is accurately reflected in the media where even strong environmental links to disease often receive little attention, while speculative genetic associations can be front page news. It is astonishing to think that all this has occurred in spite of the reality that genes for common diseases were essentially hypothetical entities.

As it relates to autism, what started out looking like the epitome of cutting edge science in the race to understand a disease, starts to look like a distortion of science and a distraction from more promising research pathways driven by financial interests rather than concern for public health.

IX. Conclusion

In the 1990s and 2000s government and industry had a theory of the case — that genes are responsible for disease — that has now been largely refuted. In the meantime an entire industry and public health infrastructure was built around this idea. So when the underlying theory was discredited, proponents simply modified the theory (to the search for the “missing dark matter”) so that the industry could keep going and continue to receive government funding. When this evolving research agenda produces profitable corporations and well-paid scientists but little to nothing that reduces human suffering it is an enormous problem for society.

The fact remains that Gilbert and Miller (2009), Landrigan, Lambertini, and Birnbaum (2012), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (2013), and Bennett et al. (2016) have all concluded that autism and other neurodevelopment disorders are likely caused by environmental triggers and are thus preventable through law and policy. Even if sophisticated genetic and genomic research is able to find ways to reduce symptoms and severity, it is still going to be orders of magnitude more cost-effective (not to mention more ethical) to prevent autism in the first place by keeping toxic chemicals out of children’s bodies.

Currently, genetic research is soaking up the vast majority of autism research funding and preventing more effective prevention strategies from emerging. This appears to be a reflection of the political power of biotech firms to shape the research agenda to serve their interests rather than a reflection of best practices in science or the best interests of society.

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Via https://brownstone.org/articles/nearly-everything-that-weve-been-told-about-genes-and-autism-is-wrong/