Thursday, April 3, 2025

mRNA Cancer Vaccines


Five years ago, politicians and bureaucrats went berserk and pointlessly ravaged Americans’ freedom. The Covid-19 pandemic taught that in the long run, people have more to fear from politicians than from viruses.--Boyard

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In the last 18 months, there have been 250 attacks by Houthis on international shipping.

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The government added $838 billion to the national debt in the first four months of fiscal 2025 (October through January).

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Oliver Stone is back with a new JFK routine.

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We are no longer subjected to incremental amaturism in politics; with tariffs, Trump has us fully committed.

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mRNA Cancer Vaccines

With the help of mRNA technology proven effective during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers are now closer than ever to creating viable cancer vaccines.

In an interview with Wired, Lennard Lee, an oncologist with the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) working on mRNA cancer vaccines, says he believes the groundbreaking research may prove to be a "silver lining" in the brutal COVID-19 pandemic.

Before COVID, as Lee told the magazine, "cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research."

"Pretty much every clinical trial had failed," the NHS oncologist said. "With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible."

As with mRNA COVID vaccines, the logistics of these potential new cancer inoculations work by "giving the body instructions" to fight troublesome cells, as Lee detailed, ultimately providing the immune system with a how-to manual on fighting cancer.

"Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward," he told Wired. "Same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient."

Instead of the one-size-fits-all approach taken with the widespread usage of mRNA COVID jabs, however, these new cancer vaccines will be personalized for each individual cancer patient.

"In the current trials," Lee elucidated, "we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer."

"That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else," he recounted to the magazine. "It’s like science fiction."

According to Lee, breakthrough cancer vaccine innovation came on the heels of the UK's rapid infrastructure-building during the COVID pandemic, which saw the country "open and deliver clinical trials" much faster than anyone would have expected.

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

England and Reading



Gerrit Cole had TJ in Los Angeles by orthopedist Neal ElAttrache. It is the first major surgery of Cole's 13-year career. The Yankees are also without AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil, who is out indefinitely with a high-grade lat strain.

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A sign at Columbia University's demonstration shows that "student workers" are back.

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England and Reading

In the last year, the median Briton has only read or listened to three books, with 40% of the public not reading or listening to a single book in that time.

A quarter of Britons (23%) say they have read or listened to between one and five books in the last year, with a further 10% reading or listening to between six and ten, and an extra 10% consuming between 11 and 20 books. There are a small number of mega-readers, with 4% saying they have read more than 50 books, i.e. roughly one or more books a week on average.

While two-thirds of women (66%) say they have read or listened to a book in the last year, just over half of men (53%) say they have.

Older Britons are also more likely to be readers, with 65% of over 65s and 63% of 50-64 year olds having read at least one book or listened to one audiobook in the last year, compared to 57% of 25-49 year olds and 53% of 18-24 year olds.

Half of Britons (50%) say they read or listen to books at least once a week, including 37% who say they read at least most days, and 20% of the public professing to read every day. Just 15% of Britons say they ‘never’ read or listen to books at all.

Women are roughly twice as likely to be daily readers, with 27% of women reading every day, compared to 13% of men.

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Calumny as News and Education



Norway’s entrepreneurs are disappearing. In the past two years alone, 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50 percent of that group’s wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.

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Community water fluoridation has been named one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century for its role in improving dental health. Fluoride has large negative effects at high doses, clear benefits at low levels, and an unclear optimal dosage level. I leverage county-level variation in the timing of fluoride adoption, combined with restricted U.S. Census data that link over 29 million individuals to their county of birth, to estimate the causal effects of childhood fluoride exposure. Children exposed to community water fluoridation from age zero to five are worse off as adults on indices of economic self-sufficiency (−1.9% of a SD) and physical ability and health (−1.2% of a SD). They are also significantly less likely to graduate high school (−1.5 percentage points) or serve in the military (−1.0 percentage points). These findings challenge existing conclusions about safe levels of fluoride exposure.--Roberts, from Journal of Health Economic

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Calumny as News and Education

April Fool's Day, once an opportunity for annoying dim-wits, has become a national holy day of obligation. The silliest frauds are presented as accurate with the straightest of faces. Social lies are routine.

The lead singer behind the New York Times’ lauded 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is on record calling the white race “the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief in the modern world.” Despite this, the 1619 educational curriculum—much of which conveys basically the same point of view—is one of the more popular educational supplements in American schools. Major magazines and journals, at the level of Salon, quite regularly run articles with titles like “White Men Must Be Stopped–the Future of Mankind Depends on It.”

It may be that the victims of this kind of calumny are simply too afflicted with a Victorian politeness to object but it appears that, eventually, they have had their revenge. The outrageous waterfall of hyperbolic accusations did not fall on deaf ears, only dumb mouths. They had their day on election day. And the NYT has had a revision--like shooting the editorial staff is a revision.

So there seem to be parallel cultures in the U.S., one that is shouted from the rooftop, and one that is lived.