Blog

‘CRISPR 2.0’ Used To Change Patient’s DNA For First Time

Scientists are rewriting the code of life with a new technology that promises to cure inherited diseases by precisely correcting genetic typos. Known as base editing, the technology empowers researchers to pick a single letter amongst the three billion that compose the human genome, erase it, and write a new letter in its place.

Base editing is an updated version of the gene editing tool CRISPR, which has revolutionized life sciences research and is making strides in treating genetic blood and liver diseases. But some scientists think base editing, sometimes billed as CRISPR 2.0, could be safer and more precise than the original. And this summer, the sequel technology is being used in patients for the first time.

On Tuesday, the Boston biotech firm Verve Therapeutics announced that it had edited the DNA of a person with a genetic condition that causes high cholesterol and predisposes them to heart disease. The base editor is designed to tweak a gene in the liver, curtail the accumulation of cholesterol, and hopefully lower the risk of heart attacks.

Verve chief executive and cofounder Sekar Kathiresan likens the approach to “surgery without a scalpel.” Although the trial is focused on people with the genetic condition familial hypercholesterolemia, Kathiresan hopes that the one-and-done therapy may one day be used more broadly, to permanently reduce the risk of heart disease in millions of people with high cholesterol. “We are completely trying to rewrite how this disease is cared for,” he said.

Keep reading

State Threatens to Take Baby Over Homemade Goat Milk Formula

Warning to all parents who use a homemade baby formula recipe for their children instead of feeding them toxic, GMO laced commercial formula.

DON’T tell a conventionally minded doctor it is made with raw milk else your baby might end up in foster care!

This is the nightmare Alorah Gellerson of Brooklin, Maine is experiencing right now because she made the mistake of telling her doctor about the homemade goats milk formula she proudly and carefully makes for her healthy, happy, three-month-old son Carson.

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) quickly responded when the doctor reported Alorah and that’s when things got messy.

The state came in and threatened to take Carson away and put him in foster care unless Alorah followed DHHS orders to go and have the baby examined by a doctor.  Unbelievably, DHHS also mandated an overnight hospital stay and a switch back to store-bought GMO commercial formula.

Despite complying with every single DHHS demand, Gellerson, who receives state benefits, is still being harassed with threats of foster care for her son.  “I hope this all goes away. It’s been so terrible and hard on us. We’re just trying to live our lives and they keep bothering us. I just want it to be all over”, she said.

Keep reading

FOIA Documents: Nearly 2 Dozen Secret Wars Waged With Your Tax Dollars

As a note to remember:  These “wars” took place under President Donald Trump.

RT has the story.

The US has reportedly used a secretive authority called ‘127e’ to launch at least two dozen proxy wars since 2017, according to an article published on Friday by The Intercept. The outlet claims to have obtained never-before-seen documents and spoken to top officials with intimate knowledge of these programs.

The Intercept received the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, claiming these papers are the first ever official confirmation that at least 14 so-called ‘127e programs’ were active in the greater Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions as recently as 2020. In total, the Pentagon reportedly launched 23 separate 127e programs across the globe between 2017 and 2020, which cost US taxpayers $310 million.

The Intercept explains that 127e is one of several virtually unknown authorities granted to the Department of Defense by Congress over the last two decades. It authorizes US commandos to conduct “counterterrorism operations” in cooperation with foreign and irregular partner forces around the world with minimal outside oversight.

Keep reading

These Are All The World Leaders Assassinated Since 2000

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, 67, was assassinated on Friday (July 8) during a campaign speech in western Japan.

In a country where gun control laws are stringent, the attack is the first the country has seen since before World War II. The suspected killer is reported to have said he held a grudge against an organization he believed the premier was connected to, yet police say investigations into the claims are ongoing.

As Statista’s Anna Fleck details below, the stakes can be high for political leaders. Looking back over the past twenty years, a number of leaders have been assassinated either while in office or after having stepped down. In the following chart, we take a look at the presidents and prime ministers who have been killed since 2000, as listed by AP here.

Keep reading

Three Illuminating Quotes About The War In Ukraine

Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Chris Hedges have lent their expertise to the subject of the war in Ukraine with some recent comments that help bring some much-needed clarity to an often confusing and always contentious issue. Here they are:

“I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.”

~ John Pilger

This comment comes from a recent interview with the legendary Australian journalist by the South China Morning Post, and it says so much about the information ecosystem we now find ourselves floundering around trying to understand things in.

From the earliest days of the invasion it was clear that the western world was being smashed with a deluge of propaganda unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. In the first full month of the conflict, American network TV stations gave more coverage to the war in Ukraine than any other war that the US has been directly involved in, including Iraq and Vietnam. Literal Iraq war architects were some of the first pundits sought out for analysis of the conflict by the mainstream press, and calls for insane escalations against Russia succeeded in pushing the Overton window of acceptable debate in the direction of warmongering extremism and away from support for diplomatic solutions.

And this was all easily piped into mainstream consciousness because the way had been lubricated by years of Russia hysterica resulting from the mass scale psychological operation known as Russiagate. America’s most dangerous confrontation in generations just so happens to have been preceded by years of media-generated panic about that very same country, despite the Ukraine invasion having ostensibly nothing whatsoever to do with the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government. Heckin’ heck of a coincidence right there, buddy boy.

“It’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits. Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”

~ Noam Chomsky

This quote, from an interview last month with Ramzy Baroud, is self-evidently true and should be pointed out more often.

People don’t go adding the same gratuitous adjectives and modifiers to something over and over again unless they’re trying to manipulate how it’s perceived. If your neighbor always referred to his wife as “my wife who I definitely never beat,” you’d immediately become suspicious because that’s not how normal people talk about normal things. We don’t say “round Earth” or “the Holocaust that totally happened,” we just say the words, because their basic nature is not seriously in dispute and we’ve got nothing invested in manipulating or obfuscating people’s understanding about them.

Keep reading

This Mother-Daughter Duo Has Become the Center of Creepy TikTok Conspiracy Theories

At first glance, Bebop and Bebe, a TikTok page with more than two million followers, looks like a typical, albeit somewhat idiosyncratic, family account. The page features videos of Bebop, a girl with stick-straight hair who looks to be about eight or nine years old, mugging for the camera with her mom, a peroxide blond with a fondness for ethereal makeup filters. Together they dance to songs like “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins and Louis Theroux’s “Jiggle Jiggle” remix, lip-synching poorly to audios, usually against the backdrop of what appears to be a splashily decorated preteen girl’s room, with Bebop flaunting a wide range of impressive makeup looks and hairstyles.

It’s only when you go to the comments that you start to get the impression that something more sinister may be afoot. “Wear green if you’re kidnapped <3,” reads one comment with 1,559 likes; another says, “put a heart next to your next video if you’re in danger.” (In the next video the two post, neither Bebop nor Bebe are wearing green, but the title of the video is sandwiched by heart emojis; this is not unusual, however, as there are emojis in most of the titles of their videos.) In one of the videos, to the Ting-Tings’ “That’s Not My Name,” one commenter writes: “She’s not saying hey hey. She’s saying help help.”

Over the past few months, Bebop and Bebe have become the center of a sprawling, multi-armed conspiracy theory that has largely taken root on TikTok, driving millions of views and thousands of ostensibly concerned commenters to their page. Many of these commenters believe Bebop is being forced to produce content, and that a mysterious man who is sometimes seen in the videos — Bebe’s brother, who is occasionally referred to as “the Brother” — is responsible. They also believe Bebop has an older brother, who has been locked out of his social media accounts after refusing to film with the family (a teenage boy can be seen in some older videos, but his absence can easily be explained by the fact that a teenager may not want to appear in TikTok videos with his mom and little sister anymore.)

But the speculation runs even deeper than that. Many believe that Bebop and/or Bebop and Bebe are being trafficked, due to a lock seen in the bedroom they often film in. Some have suggested that the bedroom is in fact a set (something Bebe herself confirmed in a Live, though recording from a set is not uncommon among content creators). Some have proposed, due to BeBop’s sometimes mature appearance, that she is not, in fact, a real child, but an adult or teenager being forced to masquerade as a child, a la Gypsy Rose Blanchard. This particular thread has been fueled by the fact that some (but by no means all) of Bebop and Bebe’s content is genuinely disquieting; in one video, Bebop appears wearing a low-cut police costume more typically seen on an older woman, while in another, she wears a collar commonly associated with the kink community.

Perhaps the most nefarious vein of this narrative, however, is the suggestion that Bebop is not actually Bebop, but a missing child named Aranza Maria Ochoa-Lopez, a four-year-old girl from Vancouver, Washington who was in foster care before allegedly being abducted by her biological mother, Esmerelda Lopez-Lopez. Lopez-Lopez was arrested in 2019 and pled guilty to second-degree kidnapping and robbery and first-degree custodial interference, receiving a 20-month sentence as a result, but Aranza is still missing and believed to be living with relatives in Mexico.

Keep reading

Woke California AG Tells Gun-Permitting Officials to Deny Applicants Based on Politics

After the Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment ruling in June, California’s attorney general encouraged law enforcement officials in the state to deny firearm carry permits to individuals with a history of “hatred and racism”—whether expressed in social media posts or elsewhere.

The problem is that in these politically polarized times, defining hatred and racism is problematic, leading to definitions that disfavor the beliefs of conservatives and others who don’t toe the “woke” or politically correct line, critics say. Allowing these concepts to be used in the gun-permitting process is a recipe for abuse and could lead to violations of gun-permit applicants’ Second and First Amendment rights, they say.

On June 23, the Supreme Court ruled in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, that New York state’s tough concealed carry gun permitting system was unconstitutional because it only granted public-carry licenses “when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense.”

The day after the Bruen ruling, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sent a “legal alert” (pdf) to law enforcement officials, advising them that the state was dropping the requirement for gun license applicants to provide a “good cause” because the requirement is now “unconstitutional and unenforceable.”

But “the requirement that a public-carry license applicant provide proof of ‘good moral character’ remains constitutional” and should continue to be enforced.

A “good moral character” investigation “requires an independent determination,” Bonta wrote.

Keep reading

World Economic Forum Paper: Fighting Climate Change Necessary to Save “Democracy”

The World Economic Forum’s position paper, released Monday, argued that more government action is needed to combat “climate change,” not just to avert damage to the world’s climate, but also to save democracy. The WEF insisted that the views expressed in the article “are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.”

The views expressed, however, are terrifying to anyone who believes in a free market, and are quite consistent with the positions of the WEF, which are hardly friendly to limited government.

Klaus Schwab, the founder of WEF, is clearly an advocate of the idea of more government control of the economy so as to protect the environment. In May of 2020, the WEF joined together with Prince Charles, the heir to the throne of England, in launching “The Great Reset” project, which has since been supported by progressive politicians all over the world, including President Joe Biden. The intention of the project, Schwab insists, is to reconsider the meaning of capitalism. He favors moving on from free-market fundamentalism, and toward international cooperation. Schwab is a former member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, another organization of global elitists.

According to the paper, democracy has been in decline over the past 15 years, and ignoring progress toward a “low-carbon economy could put democracies in greater economic peril, not less.” The author of the article, Edward Barbier, is a professor at Colorado State University and has been promoting his radical environmental views for several years. In 2009, he authored the United Nations’ Global Green New Deal, and has been an advisor to the Green Party of Australia.

In other words, the solution to the alleged problem of climate change is more government, and not just more government, but more world government.

Keep reading

Video of Hunter Biden Buying Enough Crack to Put Him in Jail for Years, Proves the Elite are Above the Law

In the ostensible land of the free, there are two sets of justice systems: one for all those within and connected to the system, and one for everyone else. A perfect example of this two tiered system is the fact that people are jailed every day in this country if they are caught with crack cocaine. Currently, over half of the entire federal prison population is doing time for cocaine. However, when the president’s son is seen on video smoking it and even trafficking large amounts of it, he faced no consequences.

Sunday night, yet another damning video of Hunter Biden was released showing him purchasing crack from an alleged prostitute. In the video, Hunter is seen filming himself smoking a cigarette before reversing the camera onto a scale with a white substance, reportedly identified as crack.

Had Hunter been caught with this much crack prior to 2002, he could have gone to jail for over 20 years. In fact, the president himself, and Hunter’s father, Joe Biden spearheaded a law while he was a senator that required crack to be penalized at a rate 100 times more than that of powder cocaine. It was called the “100-1 rule” and it was used to lock countless Black men up for decades, tearing families apart and fueling future fatherless generations for years to come.

Coincidentally, white people were caught more often with the powder form of cocaine while Black people were caught more often with crack and as Ron Paul pointed out after this law was passed, only Black people were going to jail for it despite getting caught with the same amount of cocaine.

Keep reading

Biden Falsely Claims US Troops Aren’t Engaged In Combat In The Middle East

President Biden penned an op-ed about his upcoming trip to the Middle East that was published in The Washington Post on Saturday, where he falsely claimed that US troops are not engaged in combat missions in the region.

The president wrote: “Next week, I will be the first president to visit the Middle East since 9/11 without US troops engaged in a combat mission there.” Biden’s claim came not long after he updated Congress on the deployment of US combat troops. In a letter to Congress dated June 8, the president said US troops were stationed in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

In Yemen, Biden said that a “small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS.” He also mentioned that US forces were providing support to the Saudi-led coalition in a “non-combat role” by providing “military advice and limited information.”

In Iraq and Syria, Biden said US troops are “working by, with, and through local partners to conduct operations against” ISIS and al-Qaeda. At the end of 2021, the US formally ended its combat mission in Iraq, but all 2,500 troops that were stationed there stayed, and US operations on the ground didn’t really change.

In Syria, the US maintains an occupation force of about 1,000 troops and keeps a good portion of the eastern part of the country out of the hands of Damascus with the help of local Kurdish groups. While it’s easy to downplay the US role in Iraq, US troops in Syria are more often engaged in combat.

On June 16, US troops carried out a raid in northwestern Syria and captured a top ISIS leader, according to the US-led anti-ISIS coalition, known as Operation Inherent Resolve. US raids in northwest Syria are risky as they are far from US military bases in the eastern part of the country.

The US also continues to launch drone strikes in Syria against al-Qaeda affiliates in northwest Syria. According to US Central Command, a US drone strike killed a leader of al-Qaeda offshoot Hurras al-Din in Syria’s Idlib province.

Earlier in the year, the US was involved in a major ground battle between the Kurdish-led SDF and ISIS in northeastern Syria. Back in January, ISIS launched a major attack to gain control of a prison, and US ground troops helped Kurdish forces take it back.

Keep reading