When the Mind Is Not Free

 From Sensus Fidelium:

These questions are not foreign to me. I knew someone who took an SSRI, developed suicidal thoughts that frightened him, and flushed the pills down the toilet. Years ago, while driving for Uber, I met a veteran who told me that he took a pill, blacked out, and awoke in handcuffs. He later learned that he had wrecked his car and fought with police, but he remembered none of it. Those stories cannot establish what caused the reactions; I do not know the complete medical histories, diagnoses, dosages, or other substances involved. They are anecdotes, not clinical trials. Yet they explain why I cannot dismiss reports of sudden, frightening behavioral change as imaginary simply because they are unusual.

To explore these issues, I recently interviewed Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a board-certified psychiatrist and former medical officer in the FDA’s Division of Psychiatry who now works extensively with psychiatric-drug adverse effects and withdrawal. His perspective deserves a hearing, but it also needs to be placed within proper limits. He did not examine Lindsay Clancy, he was not her treating physician, and an interview cannot decide a criminal case. His value here is that he helps identify medical possibilities that toxicology numbers and outward appearances do not necessarily settle.

The prosecution in the Clancy case emphasized apparently organized behavior: she arranged for her husband to leave the house, acted while he was away, and took steps that can be described as planned. For many observers, planning seems to end the insanity question. A person capable of organizing means, they reason, must also understand the end toward which those means are directed.

Dr. Witt-Doerring challenged that assumption. A person experiencing psychosis may still speak coherently, perform household tasks, conceal disturbing thoughts, and appear outwardly composed. As he put it during our interview, a person can look “really put together” while being driven by “bizarre, delusional thoughts in the background.” The crucial distinction is between the ability to reason instrumentally and the ability to judge reality correctly. Someone may connect steps A, B, and C with terrible efficiency while beginning from a premise that is entirely false. (Read more.)

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Independent Report Demolishes Transgender Suicide Claim

From AMAC:

A groundbreaking report has demolished a favorite rhetorical tactic used by transgender activists to argue in favor of harmful procedures for gender-confused minors.

For years, the left has emotionally blackmailed the parents of gender-confused kids, insisting that families must sign off on dangerous, irreversible drug regimens or even surgeries, or else their child will surely commit suicide. But independent researchers recently confirmed there is no proof that restricting minors from this so-called “gender-affirming care” leads to more suicides.

A favorite line of transgender activists and their allies in the medical establishment is this: “Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?”

Medical professionals and social workers will frighten parents with some form of this bad-faith argument, claiming that “treatments” like cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, or surgeries that leave kids permanently disfigured are “life-saving.” A compliant liberal media has willfully repeated this lie in their own biased coverage of debates about transgender drugs and surgeries.

But a comprehensive study from Do No Harm looked at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data across 23 states that have banned transgender drugs and surgeries for minors. Their conclusion? There is “no evidence that these bans have increased suicide rates.”

Do No Harm is an advocacy group which “represents physicians, nurses, medical students, patients, and policymakers focused on keeping identity politics out of medical education, research, and clinical practice.” It was founded in 2022 and opposes transgender drugs and surgeries for minors.

“The alarmist prediction that restricting medicalization of gender-distressed minors would produce a spike in youth suicides is not supported by the data,” Do No Harm scholars Jay Greene and Ian Kingsbury write in their new report. (Read more.)

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How to Re-enchant Your Life

 From Léonce:

Over time, we have done away with waiting, boredom, and much of uncertainty. We have learned to plan our routes, order food before we are hungry, know whether a restaurant is worth going to before we step inside, check the weather before we look at the sky. We can fill almost every empty minute, find an immediate answer to almost any question, see a place before we have ever set foot there. All of this is, of course, very convenient.

But I sometimes wonder whether, in removing so many small frictions and in-between moments from our lives, we have also removed, almost by accident, some of the conditions that allowed the world to surprise us. Perhaps enchantment depends on some of the very things we have spent years trying to eliminate: waiting, uselessness, mystery, slowness, surprise, imagination, attention.

There is a concept that has stayed with me since my student days: Max Weber’s idea of the “disenchantment of the world.” Very roughly put, it describes the way modernity made the world more rational, more explainable, more calculable. I would be hard-pressed now to reproduce everything I learned about it then, but the phrase itself has never quite left me.

The disenchantment of the world. (Read more.)

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A Simple (French) Way of Eating

 From Léonce:

What was passed down to me, first. And then what I learned over time, through experience, curiosity, and a conscious return to common sense. When I really thought about it, I realised that my way of eating rests on three very simple principles.

1. I cook almost everything I eat, using mostly whole or minimally processed ingredients.
2. I very rarely buy ultra-processed foods.
3. And when I feel like eating something sweet, I make it myself.

My kitchen is therefore built around basic ingredients: seasonal fruits and vegetables (organic when possible) whole bread, cheeses, plain yogurts, eggs, butter, flour, sugar, milk (often plant-based, oat milk for instance), pasta, fish, carefully chosen meat, spices, herbs, garlic, onions, shallots, and always a good dark chocolate for homemade cakes. With very little, you can do a great deal. Endless variations, countless meals.

I believe this way of eating comes from my mother, who has always cooked a lot, and from my grandmother before her. When we were children, industrial biscuits were rarely allowed at home. Instead, there was almost always a homemade cake: a chocolate cake, an apple tart, chocolate mousse, pastries made for no particular reason. My father grew a vegetable garden. Seasonal fruits and vegetables were simply part of daily life. I grew up this way, without it ever being framed as a rule or a restriction. It was simply normal.

Even today, my meals follow a fairly traditional structure. Two to three meals a day, depending on the day, my mood, the rhythm of the week. I sometimes skip breakfast if I am not hungry. Other days, especially on weekends, I take my time: pastries from the day before, French toast, waffles, crêpes, chocolate cookies, always homemade. There is something deeply reassuring in these gestures: the anticipation of flavours, even before tasting them, the smell of warm butter in the kitchen, a cake left to cool on the counter while the house slowly grows quiet.

During the week, lunch is often simple, sometimes eaten quickly. In the evenings and on weekends, I like to cook more. Since my years living and working in London, I have lost the very French habit of long lunch breaks, but dinner remains an important moment. The one thing I very rarely do is snack between meals. I was always taught that eating between meals dulls the appetite for the next one. I kept this habit. If I am hungry earlier than expected, I simply eat earlier. (Read more.)

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Meet Hildegard of Bingen, the German Mystic Who Destigmatized Women’s Health

 From Literary Hub:

For Hildegard of Bingen, the German mystic, scientist, composer, and philosopher, women’s maternal bodies were not corrupting and degrading, but strong, nurturing, and creative. Hildegard, who was born at the end of the eleventh century, is the first known female medical writer in Europe during the High Middle Ages. Most of the era’s discourse about human generation came from monks and theologians who vowed never to have any contact with women’s bodies. But Hildegard introduced into the Christian medical tradition compassionate and celebratory theories about physical maternity that were inspired by her own bodily experiences and those of the women she cared for.

Hildegard was a Catholic abbess of the Benedictine Order. The tenth child of a noble family, Hildegard was tithed to the Disibodenberg, a monastery nestled between two rivers in Germany’s Rhineland‑Palatinate region, when she was born. After being cloistered when she was eight, she took her vows at fourteen and became a nun. Hildegard prized virginity as the highest state of womanhood, and she never experienced biological motherhood. But her commitment to spiritual motherhood did not stop her from thinking seriously about conceiving, bearing, and birthing. (Read more.)

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Justice Without Vengeance

 From Sensus Fidelium:

A Catholic reflection on mental illness, psychiatric medication, moral responsibility, and the online appetite for condemnation

There are crimes so terrible that words seem almost indecent beside them. Children are dead. A husband or wife is left with a home emptied of the people who made it a home. Grandparents bury grandchildren. Families who expected ordinary joys instead spend the rest of their lives asking a question that may never be answered: How could this have happened?

That is where any discussion of the Lindsay Clancy case must begin, not with politics, pharmaceutical companies, courtroom personalities, or social-media arguments, but with Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy. They were innocent children whose lives were taken. Nothing said about their mother’s mental condition can restore them or make what happened less objectively horrific.

But beginning with the victims does not require us to end with vengeance.

The recent mistrial in Lindsay Clancy’s case came after jurors were unable to agree on whether she was criminally responsible when she killed her three children in January 2023. Her defense maintained that postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder had deprived her of the ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions. Prosecutors argued that she remained capable of planning, choosing, and understanding what she was doing. The disagreement was not about whether the children died by her hand. It was about the condition of the mind and will behind that hand. Associated Press

That distinction is uncomfortable. It is also profoundly Catholic. (Read more.)

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Pfizer and the CIA Privately Cited High Population Immunity in May 2020

 From Brownstone Insights:

The Santa Clara study from April 2020 by Jay Bhattacharya found a 2.8% seroprevalence level. It was far higher than the existing estimates. He was denounced and hounded for daring to say what we know now: the infection fatality rate was very low and prevalence was very high. The implication: we would get through this with no great disruption necessary.

The attacks on the study were brutal but he was just doing science at a time when few others were making sense. Even BuzzFeed, a reliable venue for deep-state actors, slammed Jay and insinuated corruption.

Now, in this new release, we find Gottlieb telling the CIA that the virus spread is far higher than most anyone believed at the time. If the R-naught is 3, that means every one person would infect three more, which, according to the math, would mean a herd immunity level of 67 percent. At that rate of spread and resulting immunity, pandemic conditions would turn endemic in a matter of weeks, certainly by the end of summer if not sooner, all else equal. (Read more.)

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Prescription Psych Meds

Updated from a few days ago. I disagree that the Clancy murders can be compared to someone killing someone when high or when drinking and driving. Lindsay was taking medication not for recreation but so she could function. From Tierney's Real News:

Addiction to prescription psych meds is the biggest issue we have in America right now and nobody talks about it. They start giving them to toddlers at 2 years old. Ativan is booze in a pill, Adderall is Meth in a pill, Oxy is heroin in a pill, anti-depressants are cocaine in a pill, seroquel is a chemical lobotomy in a pill. A whole generation will be like Lindsay if we don't wake up soon. Not kidding. I've been in recovery for 30 years and the rooms are filled with pill heads like Lindsay who have been medicated into insanity and violence. They are taught to not use street drugs or alcohol but taking boat loads of prescription psych meds is just fine. At treatment centers they hook addicts and alcoholics on 5 different pills. Walk in with one addiction and leave with 5! Creating a lifetime addiction to psych meds! I swear they use psych meds to create all the MKULTRA psychotic "trans" killers for false flags. Prove me wrong…(Read more.)

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Clancy History

 From Tierney's Real News:

Lindsay was prescribed a changing mix of medications over several months, including:

• Antidepressants: Zoloft (sertraline), Prozac (fluoxetine), trazodone, amitriptyline, Remeron (mirtazapine)

• Benzodiazepines / anxiety / sleep agents: Ativan (lorazepam), Klonopin (clonazepam), Ambien (zolpidem), Buspar (buspirone)

• Antipsychotic / mood stabilizer: Seroquel (quetiapine), Lamictal (lamotrigine)

• Over-the-counter: Benadryl (diphenhydramine)

These drugs (especially in combination or when rapidly started, stopped, or dose-adjusted) can produce profound effects on brain chemistry. Benzodiazepines, Seroquel, Ambien, Trazodone, and high doses of certain antidepressants can cause heavy sedation, emotional blunting, dissociation, and a flattened affect often described by patients and clinicians as a “zombie-like” state—reduced emotional responsiveness, slowed thinking, and a sense of detachment from one’s own actions or surroundings. (Read more.)

 

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A Calculated Betrayal of America’s Working Families

From Chronicles:

In high-immigration metro areas, demand for housing has outstripped supply for years. Rents and home prices have surged at a pace that outstrips increases in median incomes. A working family in the suburbs now competes not only with other local buyers but also with a growing population whose presence is the deliberate result of immigration policy.

The same pattern appears in public schools and hospitals. Districts with rapid demographic change face larger class sizes, strained special-education budgets, and longer wait times for everything from pediatric care to elective procedures. These are not theories, but the daily realities of families who play by the rules and still watch their children’s opportunities shrink.

Then there is inflation. More people competing for the same finite goods and services—housing, medical appointments, community college seats, even supermarket shelves—pushes prices higher. The Federal Reserve may talk about aggregate demand, but it hits the budget of a nurse, electrician, or mid-level office worker as lost purchasing power.

Meanwhile, the billionaire class remains insulated. They do not compete for jobs or public-school slots. They profit from the expanded labor pool that keeps wages in check and from the consumer base that buys the products their companies sell.

But can we count on political change? “Vote the bums out!” becomes a much less effective strategy when the voting rights of citizens are diluted. Rapid population growth through immigration decreases over time the weight of existing citizens’ ballots in congressional apportionment and in the Electoral College, as the census which determines these numbers counts all residents, not just citizens. Communities that once set their own priorities find those priorities reordered by demographic shifts they never voted for. This is not xenophobia; it is simple math.

And yet a powerful faction on the left—especially those associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—insists that infinity migration is both a moral imperative and a path to economic justice. The DSA platform and its most prominent voices call for what amounts to open borders while simultaneously promising to deliver higher wages, stronger unions, and redistribution from the billionaire class to everyone else. These goals cannot coexist. You cannot flood the low- and mid-skill labor market and then claim you will raise the floor for native workers. You cannot expand the population competing for housing, healthcare, and education while claiming to prioritize the children already here. (Read more.)

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Wolves in White Coats

 From Human Flourishing:

Yesterday the Department of Health and Human Services released a report, Wolves in White Coats. Along with surgeon and whistleblower Dr. Eithan Haim, I drafted the first two chapters of the report, and my colleague Rachel Morrison at EPPC drafted the third chapter. The report describe how hospitals and clinics recklessly embraced sex-rejecting procedures on minors, despite the lack of evidence of safety and efficacy for these interventions. Our research on insurance claims, presented in Chapter 2, highlights widespread false billing practices that could implicate these institutions in criminal fraud under the False Claims Act. In short, doctors lied about patients’ diagnoses to ensure insurance reimbursements from public and private payers, and in some cases, to circumvent state laws that prohibited these procedures on minors.

The full report and a shorter executive summary are available here. For those who want a brief, high-level overview, I recommend this 12-minute film released in conjunction with the report. The testimonies here from adolescents who were irreversibly harmed by these procedures are particularly devastating....(Read more.)

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Louis XVI and Tuberculosis

Louis-Auguste, Duc de Berry, the future Louis XVI, was born on August 23, 1754. August 25, the feast of St. Louis of France, was his name-day, and kept with special festivity after he became king in 1774. He was given the same exact baptismal name as his sainted ancestor. A few years ago on Catherine Delors' blog many interesting points were brought up in the comment box about the childhood traumas of Louis-Auguste and how those later affected his reactions to the events of the Revolution.

Louis contracted tuberculosis when he was six by being made to sit at the bedside of his dying older brother, the Duc de Bourgogne. It was a traumatic experience in many ways for a small boy, especially since he himself became quite ill. Louis-Auguste was generally regarded as unhealthy and not likely to live to adulthood. Several members of the French royal family, including Louis' parents and brother, had already died of consumption. Louis managed to survive with the proper care. Nevertheless, tuberculosis is a disease which can remain inactive for many years but can later recur. It can have many side effects, including depression.

Provence and Berry

The tuberculosis would come back to haunt him, infecting his baby daughter Sophie and his oldest son. I think seeing Louis-Joseph die just as he had watched his older brother die long ago revived a lot of the childhood trauma. Death from tuberculosis is not pretty to watch. I am of the opinion that since the death of his oldest son, which coincided with the beginning of the Revolution in 1789, Louis XVI was suffering from clinical depression. In the past, he had acted with much more energy and decision. This is one of the reasons Marie-Antoinette had to become more involved in the political arena during the Revolution.

I think Louis struggled with "melancholy" at various times throughout his life, perhaps due to the childhood infection with tuberculosis. Louis was a man accustomed to strenuous exercise, especially hunting and riding, not to mention his labors as a locksmith. It is my belief that he needed the fresh air and the exertion for both his mental and physical health. With the regimen of exercise and his strictly adhered to routine he was able to keep melancholy from overwhelming him. He was deprived of much of his riding after October 1789 and it had a devastating effect upon his health and state of mind. Losing two of his children, his authority, his home, seeing his people and family suffer, and being deprived of the exercise and fresh air vital to his health, left him in a very bad condition.

If we consider the courage with which Louis XVI faced the worst moments of crisis, including his death, then he is to be admired, especially in the light of everything else. The Queen is to be admired as well, for she could have slipped out of the country with her surviving children and left Louis to his doom (there were many plans for her escape) but she refused to budge from Louis' side. She would not leave him to face the disasters alone.

Happy Birthday to Louis XVI!

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A Flawed Covid Study and the Amish

 From Sharyl's Substack:

A study was published entitled: “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” It appeared in the Journal of Religion and Health on June 11, 2021.

But I noticed serious flaws with the study and decided to challenge it. Among the problems I saw:

• For their study population, the researchers grouped together a sample of Mennonite and Amish— even though Mennonites typically followed CDC guidelines while the Amish did not.

• They excluded the largest Amish population in the US in Lancaster, the one that was actually the subject of the news reports.

• And their study headline was at odds with what their own data showed: even with their skewed sample, the Amish fared no worse than the rest of the US for not having shut down.

After examining the study, I tried to get further information to determine if corrections were warranted. Among other things, I wanted to know:

• Who were the peer reviewers who had signed off on a deeply flawed study?

• What did the actually study notes and data show about why the most obvious study sample population was excluded?

• What were some of the internal communications before and after publication?

With scientific studies, all the data is supposed to be available for public review and replication for obvious reasons. Studies aren’t considered scientifically valid without this kind of transparency. And. in many cases, we actually own the data because our tax money paid for the study—or some of it— or pays the salaries of some of the people involved.

But in this case, as with other with other times I’ve pursued study information, the scientific establishment found a way to exempt itself from the common sense oversight guidelines. (Read more.)

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Welfare Fraud Racket

 From Tierney's Real News:

The 64-page report titled Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of Gender Medicine reveals that more than 225 hospitals and health systems made more than $50 MILLION in profit by building pediatric gender programs nationwide and exploiting insurance billing codes. They used diagnoses like “endocrine disorder, unspecified” and “precocious puberty” to get coverage to perform these disgusting procedures in minors. In other words, they mutilated children for profit.

JD VANCE: “It turns out that convincing vulnerable children to reject their gender can create patients for life, earning hospitals tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue per child. For years now, some hospitals and healthcare providers have been subjecting children to horrific, experimental treatments in service of radical gender ideologies.

Today, thanks to the Wolves in White Coats report released by the HHS, we know why: profit. It turns out that convincing vulnerable children to reject their gender can create patients for life, earning hospitals tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue per child.

The report contains deeply disturbing allegations, and I encourage every American and every parent, to read it. More than just pushing these procedures on kids, hospitals and providers may have been defrauding Medicaid and private insurers by using misleading or fraudulent billing codes to get insurance to cover the costs.

People were getting wealthy by DOING these procedures on kids, LYING about medical implications, and collecting REWARDS!”

More than 225 hospitals and health systems built pediatric gender programs. Then they HID what they were doing to kids behind FALSE billing codes.

• $50 MILLION in puberty blockers were billed under E34.9 — “Endocrine Disorder, Unspecified”

• More than $11 MILLION found billed as “precocious puberty” for kids aged 13-17.

That’s not a paperwork error. That’s how you hide the abuse you inflicted on children.

These providers created lifelong patients (hormones, surgeries, follow-up care) - with average costs for such treatments far exceeding routine pediatric care (tens of thousands to over $100,000 per patient in some estimates cited). (Read more.)

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‘Phossy Jaw’

 From All That's Interesting:

Matchmaking was a common trade across early 19th-century England and America, and matchmakers worked tirelessly to find new innovations in match technology. Enter: white phosphorous. Though notoriously toxic, the chemical could be rendered into a paste that could be lit on any surface with just a bit of friction. These so-called “strike-anywhere” matches, also known as lucifer matches, became incredibly popular — and the industry to create them became equally profitable. Although factory owners knew that prolonged exposure to white phosphorous could cause the necrosis of the human jaw, they continued to use it anyway — and employed young women and girls in their factories for 10 to 15-hour days. (Read more.)

 

From Grunge:

 For the whole story of the matchstick women, there's a little bit of background that's needed first — especially considering that today, it's nothing to strike a match (or flick a lighter) and make fire happen. It wasn't always that easy, though. For centuries, making fire was a pretty labor-intensive endeavor that, according to the Pitt Rivers Museum, required the use of flint and tinder. The idea of using a chemical reaction to kick-start a fire only really came about in the 17th century, and it wasn't until 1827 that John Walker accidentally invented something much, much better.

Walker had originally intended to become a surgeon, but it wasn't long into his study that he decided he wanted a life with considerably less blood in it. After opening his own chemist's shop in Stockton-on-Tees, he quickly realized that his background in chemistry and botanical studies gave him something of a unique perspective on things. In addition to making his own medicines (they were definitely different times), he also spent some of his spare time conducting various scientific experiments.

The breakthrough came when he was trying to develop a combustible paste. It would have been a big deal for the military, but when he scraped the stick he'd been using to stir his experimental paste with along his mantelpiece, he invented something that had a much wider appeal: the match. (Read more.)

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The Man Who Poisoned the World

 From Welcome to Absurdistan:

Man, Wednesday was satisfying. You know Fauci was repeating to himself, these doofuses won’t get anywhere near the real crime, I just have to endure this, and the DC judiciary will prevent me going to jail. They can needle at me but nothing will happen, I’m good, keep repeating the noble lie, the noble lie, the noble lie. I am Dr. Science. I will be remembered as the Great Man of the Trump Era. I’m good. Noble lie. 

 It’s who these people are and what they do. They believe themselves to be our natural leaders and we the proles who are dumb as rocks and need their guidance. “What is truth?” they say. It’s rhetorical. “Whatever I say is truth is truth”, they answer. The Science is whatever I say it is. White supremacy is the real evil. Men can have periods and babies, the only thing holding back people of color is prejudice not incapacity and culture. Climate change is catastrophic. We have to cap and pay and pay and pay. The Sixth Great Extinction is happening before our eyes. No other truth is allowed. Oh yeah, and whites are evil. White Anglo males are the locus of pure evil.

Yeah, we believe nothing, buster. Nothing. ‘The Science’ is dead. Trust in public institutions, especially health, is dead. We don’t believe NOAA, we don’t believe the United Nations. We know the World Economic Forum is filled with extractive demons. The rules-based order was created with our money and is also garbage. All the institutions are filled with unethical success-heads who would do anything to keep their jobs. No one is noble. Everyone is corrupt. The Senate is corrupt. The Judiciary is corrupt. The Democrats are corrupt. The Socials are fully corrupt. The Science is whatever you need to prosecute your perverse plans.

Luckily, there is the rough justice of nature. (Read more.)

 

From The Enterprise:

On July 29th, Anthony Fauci sat in a Senate hearing room, surrounded by lawyers, and invoked his Fifth Amendment right 111 times. He had been subpoenaed by Senator Rand Paul, who two days earlier had released 1,141 pages of Fauci’s pandemic diaries. The man who spent three years telling Americans that questioning him was questioning science declined to answer questions about what he had done. That image is arresting on its own. But it does not explain anything, and explanation is what has been missing.

Consider the strange shape of the Fauci controversy. For five years, investigators have accumulated an enormous quantity of material. There are grant documents, emails, inspector general findings, congressional depositions, failed predictions, guidance that reversed itself without acknowledgment, and evidence of pressure on dissenting scientists. What there has not been is a coherent account of why. Critics have generally settled for one of two stories, neither satisfying. Either Fauci was an ordinary bureaucrat who made ordinary errors under pressure, which fails to explain the pattern in those errors, or he was a cartoon villain executing a plot, which fails because no document shows anyone planning anything of the kind. Jeffrey Tucker has now supplied the missing piece, and it is worth understanding why his account deserves attention.

Tucker is not a newcomer to this subject. He is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, a research organization he established in 2021 specifically to document the consequences of pandemic policy. Before that, he spent decades in economics publishing, working closely with Murray Rothbard, running the Mises Institute’s book program, and writing for the Epoch Times. In 2020, he helped organize the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration at the American Institute for Economic Research, which put him in the room with the scientists Fauci’s circle set out to destroy. He has ten books to his name. More to the point, he spent nearly a full week reading all 1,141 pages of the diaries before writing about them, which is more than most commentators managed, and it shows. (Read more.)

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Cholera in the Mid-1800's

We recall the death of Charles X from cholera as told in the novel Madame Royale. From Geri Walton:

These 22 rules were then summed up by the author:

“By timely adoption of simple means such as these, Cholera or any other epidemic will be made to lose its venom; so true is it that ‘internal sanatory arrangements, and not quarantine and sanatory lines, are the safeguards of nations.'”

While Victorians may have thought this good advice, the bacterium responsible for Cholera was not isolated until 1854 by an Italian anatomist. Even then its exact nature was still unknown. Ultimately, attempts at understanding cholera fell upon the shoulders of a German physician and pioneering microbiologist named Robert Koch. Koch determined in 1884 that the causative agent of cholera was Vibrio cholerae. Despite his discovery and despite Cholera inoculations for humans occurring in 1885 and a Cholera vaccine being developed in July of 1892, Cholera pandemics continued to exist into the early twentieth century. (Read more.)

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America’s Food Shift Under RFK Jr.

 From Sharyl's Substack:

Recent polls show a clear shift toward healthier eating habits among Americans.

According to one 2025 survey, more people (57%) followed a specific diet or eating pattern in the past year — up from just 36% in 2018 — with high-protein diets leading the way at 23% (up from 4% in 2018).

Americans are actively trying to eat more protein (70%) and fiber, while defining “healthy food” by traits like “fresh,” “low in sugar,” “minimal processing,” and “limited artificial ingredients.”

They’re also rating their own diets healthier than in 2020 and seeking benefits like more energy.

While dramatic overnight bans haven’t materialized, noticeable changes are appearing on store shelves, in school cafeterias, and even at some restaurants—mostly through voluntary industry moves rather than strict mandates. (Read more.)

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CDC Investigates Multistate Parasite Outbreak

 From Big League Politics:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is investigating a multistate outbreak of Cyclospora, a microscopic parasite that has sickened people across the United States.

Federal health officials have not yet identified the source of the outbreak, though previous investigations have frequently linked Cyclospora infections to contaminated fresh herbs, leafy greens, berries, and other produce.

While investigators continue searching for the source, the illness caused by the parasite can produce severe gastrointestinal symptoms.

According to the CDC, Cyclospora spreads through food or water contaminated with human feces and causes the intestinal illness cyclosporiasis. Symptoms include watery diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite, low-grade fever, and vomiting. The agency notes that many patients experience frequent—and sometimes explosive—bowel movements.

According to the CDC’s latest published figures, 145 cases have been identified across 17 states.

New York, Texas, Illinois, and Michigan have reported the highest number of infections. Additional cases have been reported in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

State health departments are now reporting additional cases beyond the CDC’s latest national update, suggesting the outbreak continues to expand.

Michigan health officials say they are investigating a large and growing outbreak, with more than 300 cases reported since June 22—far above the state’s typical annual total of roughly 50 cases.

New York has also reported elevated activity, with more than 100 cases identified since May 1. Officials in New York City say reported infections during the first half of the year have roughly doubled compared to the same period in 2025.

(Read more.)

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The Empathy Weapon

 From The Brownstone Institute:

It never mentions the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has paid out over $4 billion to families over the decades – a federal court that exists for the sole purpose of acknowledging that these injuries are real. You’d think that would make conversations about risk perfectly reasonable. Apparently not. Instead, raising the topic at all gets you labeled dangerous.

It never mentions the work of researchers like Toby Rogers or organizations like Children’s Health Defense who’ve spent years digging into the actual data on adverse events, pushing back on the accepted risk-benefit math, and demanding that manufacturers and regulators show their work. For what it’s worth, agreeing with everything they publish isn’t the point. These people don’t exist in any mainstream conversation about vaccines. They’re not debated. They’re not refuted. Just absent. If I didn’t know better I’d call that a guardrail, not a mere oversight.

I would argue that absence is doing more to erode public trust than anything those researchers have ever published. When parents go looking for answers and find a whole world of data the New York Times pretends doesn’t exist, they may conclude the Times is handling its readers, not informing them. (Read more.)

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