Ukraine Dindu Nuffin (2-19-25)

01:00 Ukraine dindu nuffin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine
04:30 DEI and flight risk
16:00 NYT: Ukrainians, Stunned by Trump’s Comments, Fear They Can No Longer Trust U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/world/europe/ukrainians-trump-voices.html
22:00 Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations by Gabriella Turnaturi, https://www.amazon.com/Betrayals-Unpredictability-Relations-Gabriella-Turnaturi/dp/0226817032
30:00 NYT: A U.S. Betrayal Is Surreal for Europeans, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/opinion/trump-munich-security-conference.html
38:30 Megyn Kelly on What’s Really Happening with Trump vs. Zelensky and How the Ukraine War Could End, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU1j1EiPLb0
41:30 Should Democrats keep going after Musk? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkmeLRXgWCw
46:30 Analyzing the Sean Hannity interview of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyXdEmb4FM0
48:20 Trump’s communication genius
1:06:40 How Pete Hegseth and the Trump Administration are Fixing the Military, w/ Calacanis and Palihapitiya, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWsnT-lIPnw
1:12:00 Here’s the Truth About Trump’s DOJ Dropping Charges Against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, w/ Taibbi and Kirn, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmu3Fc9BX1A&ab_channel=MegynKelly

Posted in America | Comments Off on Ukraine Dindu Nuffin (2-19-25)

Why Is DOGE America’s Number One News Story?

Christopher Caldwell wrote Jan. 27, 2025:

Trump is not simply eliminating the affirmative-action enforcement machinery. He is throwing it into reverse.

So tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump’s second term that people have barely noticed, a week on, that last Tuesday he repealed affirmative action by executive order. That is astonishing.

For half a century, affirmative action has been the federal government’s principal instrument for carrying out desegregation, the longest and costliest moral crusade in American history. After the 1970s it was adapted to liberation movements, from feminism to gay rights. Supreme Court justices anguished over the way its call for special consideration of minorities might clash with the letter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination. Over the past decade affirmative action became the hammer of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement, which grew so unpopular that it has now brought affirmative action (and much else) down with it.

Trump’s decision to repeal it is the most significant policy change of this century—more significant than the Affordable Care Act of 2010 or anything done about Covid. How can people be talking about anything else? Yet major news outlets treat Trump’s bold move as a detail of personnel management: “Distress and Fury as Trump Upends Federal Jobs,” headlined The New York Times.

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The Thin Yellow Stream Protecting Western Civilization

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You Bet Your Life: Navigating The Bewildering Claims Of Expertise (2-18-25)

01:00 American Primeval, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Primeval
02:50 Mark Halperin: Why didn’t the media jump on the lab leak theory? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pmlpiJ3HsM
06:00 Trump, trans & the military
11:00 Megyn Kelly: Here’s What Likely Caused Shocking Plane Crash in Canada Where Everyone Miraculously Survived
14:30 You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158982
20:00 Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158978
30:00 Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130386
34:00 The American Academy of Pediatrics has a left-wing agenda, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBgmlmi-sTw
38:45 Jesse Waters
47:00 Michael rejoins the show, https://x.com/real_machera
48:00 Mormons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormons
49:30 American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson
1:15:00 Conservative media
1:20:00 Ashley St. Clair says Elon Musk is her baby’s dad, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14405839/elon-musk-baby-mama-ashley-st-clair-valentines-day.html
1:42:00 Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning, https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Depression-Mental-Personal-Meaning/dp/1608680207
1:51:00 Vengeance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_(2022_film)
1:55:40 Alex Castellanos on DOGE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpbPRN_BCsQ
2:14:00 David Frum: Why the COVID Deniers Won, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/covid-deniers-anti-vax-public-health-politics-polarization/681435/
2:20:00 Walter Kirn, Matt Taibi on JD Vance’s pro free speech talk in Europe, https://www.youtube.com/live/65zgUmex5OI

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You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

Paul A. Offit MD wrote this 2021 book:

#1: Nature reveals its secrets slowly, grudgingly, and often with a human price. Scientists, clinicians, academicians, and pharmaceutical company executives must stay humble and respect the requisite learning curve that comes with new discoveries.
The development of COVID – 19 vaccines was often accompanied by a disturbing show of hubris. After completion of phase 1 trials, which examined small numbers of volunteers given different doses of vaccines, some company researchers and executives crowed. Moderna (fifteen patients), Pfizer (thirty – five patients), and AstraZeneca (ten patients) claimed that they could now make tens of millions of doses. These bold pronouncements ignored the likely surprises that lay ahead when a handful of recipients gives way to tens of millions of recipients. This lack of humility was especially concerning given that SARS – CoV – 2 had already shown itself to be an elusive, difficult to characterize virus that had provided a number of surprising clinical and pathological problems, not least of which was inflammation of the blood vessels that could damage any organ, including the brain and heart. No other virus had done what this virus was doing. Also, none of the strategies used by these three companies to make a SARS – CoV – 2 vaccine had ever been used to make a vaccine before. Surely, a learning curve lay ahead.
#2: Although federal guidelines lessen the chance of disasters, they will never eliminate them. Unanticipated tragedies are unpreventable, no matter how many regulations, training programs, fines, and penalties are put in place.
#3: Tragedies shouldn’t cause people to lose faith in the scientific endeavor. Science lurches forward in fits and starts, but it inevitably moves forward.
The retrovirus – caused – leukemia tragedy offers another lesson — one that is far more hopeful. In response to the leukemia disaster, researchers modified retrovirus vectors to include an “insulator” gene that eliminated the possibility that the virus could activate an oncogene. The protective gene worked. Researchers at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis were able to permanently correct severe immune deficiencies in ten children using this newer, safer retrovirus vector. Years later, none of these children had developed leukemia. Parents can now safely rely on these modified retroviruses to cure single – gene diseases. Yet another breakthrough built on tragedy.
During the Cutter Incident, when more than one hundred thousand children were inoculated with a polio vaccine that contained live poliovirus, tens of thousands were briefly paralyzed, hundreds were permanently paralyzed, and ten were killed. In response, federal regulators shut down the polio – vaccine program for several months until they could figure out what had gone so horribly wrong. When researchers finally did figure it out, better safety tests were put in place and the problem of polio caused by Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine disappeared.
A few months after the Cutter tragedy, polio vaccines were put back on the market. Now, parents had a choice to make. They could either trust that federal regulatory agencies had solved the problem, or they could wait a year or so to make sure that the problem didn’t recur. The choice to wait, however, wasn’t risk free. Poliovirus was still circulating in the community.
#6: Animal testing can be falsely reassuring.
#7: In the end, no matter how well – informed you are about a new technology, you’re gambling. But you’re gambling either way.

Posted in Medicine | Comments Off on You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation