Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will

The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.

Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called geroscience that “seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of older adulthood,” according to the National Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Alkahest and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging. Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process, delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated with growing old

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Wokeness and Its Not-at-all-racist Doctrines of Disempowerment

I recently got asked to comment privately about Thomas Sowell’s work and why his views about racism and personal responsibility are so anathema to Critical Race Theory. The short answer is, obviously, that not only does he disagree and not only is he at least significantly right about what he’s saying, he’s also putting responsibility on what Theory considers, in a not-at-all-racist way, to be a permanent victim class. That’s simply not allowed. Critical Race Theory ultimately seeks to “empower” blacks and (kind of) other “minoritized races” by forcing onto them and leveraging a perpetual victimhood status. Admittedly, this clearly has some short-term practical efficacy, though that comes at significant, if not Pyrrhic, costs.

This isn’t empowerment, though. It’s disempowerment, even if we discount the other costs of such a not-at-all-racist doctrine. It’s really important to understand that the Woke movement is significantly about deferring responsibility from groups it defines as “victims of systemic oppression,” which it, in turn, defines as ordinary and all-but-permanent states of affairs that are woven into the very fabric of society. That’s one of the main points of the whole Woke project: to make “it’s not our fault; nothing is” a motto for the “oppressed.” So when someone like Sowell tells people that there’s some issue with that inherently disabling perspective, or with the visibly and very discriminantly abusive “politically black culture” (“Blackness”) that has risen up around it, advocates of Theory and the grifters who can use the narrative of perpetual victimhood to their own advantage get really mad at him.

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He Questioned Microaggressions. Then His University Gaslit Him, Claiming He Was A Threat, And Suspended Him From Campus

In one of the most bizarre campus stories in recent memory, a medical student at the University of Virginia posed mildly skeptical questions about microaggressions to a university panel. Afterward, his school claimed he was hostile, implied he was disrespectful to authority and a threat to future patients, and began investigating him. As anyone in this situation would, the student was confused and frustrated by the school’s actions. The school then used that confusion and frustration to further claim the student was unstable.

Impossible to believe? Well, Reason’s Robby Soave has the facts.

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Standing Army: Biden Surpasses Trump on Flow of Military Weapons to Cops

The controversial 1033 program became a source of citizen outrage after images of police armed with military-grade weaponry, including grenade launchers and armored MRAPs, were beamed into people homes across the country during the battlefield-style police response to the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

As many Americans noted, Ferguson, Missouri looked like a war zone, with police kitted out in Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles — virtually indistinguishable from US soldiers.

Shortly after the American public became widely aware, and largely outraged, over the extreme militarization of their local police forces, President Obama signed an Executive Order (EO) that blocked large-caliber weapons, armored vehicles, grenade launchers and other heavy military hardware from being repurposed from battlefields across the globe to small town USA.

Obama argued at the time, that police utilization of such weapons of war cast the police as an “occupying force,” and only served to deepen the divide between police and the community.

“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like they’re an occupying force, as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them,” Obama said in announcing the ban in 2015.

This was one of very few notable pro-liberty moves by the Obama administration, however, thanks to the Trump administration, it was overturned. And now, Biden has picked up where Trump left off and has expanded it.

Despite Biden and Kamala Harris paying lip service to police brutality and riding the waves of the Black Lives Matter movement during their campaign, the president and his vice president have refused to even meet with the group. This is also in spite of the fact that BLM formed a PAC, which helped fund its ad campaigns to mobilize Black voters to go out and vote for Biden.

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YouTube Censors Coronavirus Roundtable Hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

Google-owned YouTube took down a video of a roundtable conference hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), featuring former White House coronavirus task force member and medical scholar Scott Atlas, and the three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

The Great Barrington declaration argues that blanket lockdowns and mask mandates are counterproductive, instead advocating for a targeted approach focused on protecting vulnerable segments of the population.

The three co-authors, who attended Gov. DeSantis’ roundable, are Harvard professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff, Oxford professor of epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford professor of medicine and epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya.

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