Toms Blog on Life and Livingness
A “raft” of floating pumice rock the size of Manhattan is drifting towards Australia, bringing along with it new marine life that could help with the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef’s corals, half of which have been killed in recent years …
A great interview with a researcher on the cutting edge of how to maintain your mitochondria and therefore your health.
Some snippets:
Mitochondrial dysfunction is evident in every disease. When, for any reason, the mitochondria do not function perfectly, disease and aging result. So keeping your mitochondria working optimally is of primary importance in keeping healthy and aging well.
Exercise increases the number of mitochondria in your body. As much as doubling them!
Calorie restriction helps.
A study of 91 women found that how good you feel determines 10-15% of the mitochondrial energy production the next day.
5G is on hold in several places around the world and has been removed from a school after three children contracted cancer. This is one time it is far better to be safe than sorry.
“Ho ho ho. Come quietly, it’s a fair cop!” (Translation from the English: Ha ha! We’ve caught you red-handed in a criminal act. Best come along quietly to the police station. Don’t make a fuss”!)
Usually it takes years, or even decades, before the lies and abuses of Big Pharma show up. Meanwhile, the drug company has made a killing in sales and doesn’t care. Sometimes there’s even a fine of a few million dollars, even a few hundred million, as with Merck and Vioxx. But when sales are in the $billions, why should they care?
This time though, the fraudsters must have been shocked to be discovered in the very act, by an international consortium. They probably thought they had years to exploit the scam. So what’s going on?
A group of scientists from leading institutions is questioning the findings of a prominent immunology article linked to a strategic drug development partnership potentially worth up to $183 million (164 million euros). Follow the money, eh?
The original article, published in the journal Cell in 2016, describes studies of the immune systems of patients with rare autoimmune (APS-1). The disease results from mutations in the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) gene that in healthy people plays a role in training immune cells not to attack the body’s own tissue.
Even if you don’t quite understand the gobbledegook, understand this: it could open a doorway to widespread treatment of autoimmune diseases and, since autoimmune diseases are now so common, this means LOTSA MONEY for Big Pharma.
Never wanting to earn an honest $billion, when a crooked $10 million is out there, Big Pharma, of course, plumps for crime, every time!This is how it unfolds…
In an article published in the journal eLife last month, scientists from institutions that include the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the University of California SF, Stanford University, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases report that they attempted to replicate some of the results from the 2016 Cell article and were unable to do so.
Now I have said many times in my reports that the Karolinska Institute in Sweden is above reproach. I don’t mean they never make mistakes. But they don’t LIE prodigiously like American centers of science. So I trust the Karolinska.imageThe Karolinska Institute. Stockholm, Sweden.
Therefore, when they, and the other three study centers, say they “can’t replicate” the published findings, it almost certainly means something bogus is going in. YES, MEDICAL JOURNALS DO PUBLISH COMPLETELY FALSE PAPERS (OFTEN), SOMETIMES EVEN WITH INVENTED “RESEARCHERS”!
Big Pharma’s dirty fingers are in there, always, to the point where published science has almost meaningless credibility; you can choose to believe it or not believe is, as you like. But if you openly criticize a study, they will probably arrange for you to quietly “disappear” [No, not the concrete shoes! But your article will be quietly withdrawn]
Now they have a problem; 3 world-class research centers say “It looks like you’re lying”! (only they put it politely and say “We can’t replicate your findings.”) That’s going to be hard to bury.
They challenge two of the original article’s findings: that patients with APS-1 produced a much wider range of antibodies against their own bodies’ tissues than previously described. Secondly, that the antibodies “discovered” seemed to protect against diabetes. Again, this is a HUGE market. Diabetes and pre-diabetes are on the rise to the point where over 50% of the US population has one or the other. And as I reported recently, an incredible 88% of Americans did not have full healthy markers for glucose metabolism.
Anyway, these possibly-illusory antibodies became the focus of a development partnership between the France-headquartered pharmaceutical company Servier and German biotechnology company ImmunoQure, said ImmunoQure cofounder Adrian Hayday, PhD, a professor and researcher at King’s College London and corresponding author of the Cell article.
Servier agreed to pay ImmunoQure up to €164 million ($183 million), which includes an upfront payment of an undisclosed amount and additional payments at milestones in the development process, plus royalties on net sales if the antibody makes it to market. Sounds like a bribe to me! Who wouldn’t be careless with the results, when there is nearly $200 million on the table, plus pickings.
Despite the new challenge, a Servier spokesperson said the company’s internal data confirm the importance of the supposed antibody pathway in autoimmune diseases, as well as the specificity and neutralizing activity of the antibody cloned by ImmunoQure. Well, they would say that, of course.Challenging a “Landmark” Article
On the point about the number of antibodies against their own body’s molecules that APS-1 patients are supposed to have developed, the challenging scientists make the case that the statistical analysis in the Cell article was skewed to identify significantly more antibodies in the serum of case patients than of control patients.
“We could show that using random data [meaningless figures], we got basically the same result they did,” said lead author Nils Landegren, MD, PhD, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “We have a very strong case their results are false.” (my addition in brackets).
Landegren and colleagues also ran experiments to test whether the prevention of diabetes theory held water. It did not.image
“We did our best using an established method, using positive and negative controls showing the expected result,” Landegren said, but they could not see any difference between patients who had type 1 diabetes and those who did not. It will be important for other research groups to try to replicate the experiment in future studies and to see how they fare, Landegren said.
That’s good science.
Hayday said his group used the statistical analysis method they did because he was more concerned about ruling out false negative results than false positives when looking for antibodies expressed as “private reactivities” in a few patients, not the cohort as a collective group. That’s BAD science…
Translation: bend the result in favor of the findings we want, rather than allowing “false” negatives to screw it up. But to me, that’s as good as a confession of malfeasance. Since he’s not supposed to know before he starts what the results will be, why would he be skewing the results away from a negative finding?
Hayday sees the difference in statistics as a difference in approach: “When you undertake a statistical treatment of data, there is no silver bullet, you have to use what makes sense.”
In the end, it got dirty. Hayday accused the other teams of “shoddy” work! Sounds like someone caught red-handed, doesn’t it? When four other study centers, who have no academic or financial bias factors, say his results aren’t valid, who would you side with?
Now others have stepped in. London-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the small French biotech Neovacs, both studies failed their primary endpoints. These recent clinical data are “mixed at best”, they said.
Access to ImmunoQure’s website currently requires login credentials, but Hayday said that that is unrelated to the recent publication. Oh yeah! The website is being redesigned and will be back up again in about 10 days, he said.
Is this starting to stink a little bit, to you?
One of the scientists who reviewed Hayday’s work from 2016 rejected the Karolinska team’s criticism and spoke of a “landmark” paper. Another scientist reviewer disagreed: “This appears to warrant a revision to the original conclusions in Cell…”
As for the contested statistical analysis, one reviewer wrote that Landegren’s and colleagues’ concern is “100% warranted.”
Incidentally, the authors of the new critique originally submitted their manuscript to Cell, but it was rejected without an explanation, Landegren said.
And that’s just about where the “science” ends, folks. Quibbling, disagreement, almost certain malfeasance, if not fraud, and name calling.
I’m glad I’m out of it. I treated autoimmune diseases with far higher positive outcomes for decades, talking with Mother Nature, prescribing better diet, chemical unburdening, parasites, dysbiosis and sometimes a little psychological “lift”!
Food allergies and environmental chemical sensitivity were by far the most common mediators of autoimmune disease.
I thought I’d just give you a heads up on how they do “science” these days,image
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor
Conflict of interest: Landegren has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Hayday, not surprisingly, reports holding equity in ImmunoQure, as do other coauthors of the formal response!
Sources:
1. eLife. Published online June 27, 2019.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) slashed its interest rate by a drastic 0.5 per cent (50 basis points) earlier this month, to 1 per cent. RBNZ governor Adrian Orr then declared that New Zealand was prepared to follow Japan, Sweden and other countries that have gone below zero into negative interest rates, and is also thinking about quantitative easing and helicopter money—basically the full suite of extreme measures to prop up the financial system. NZ already has the world’s most explicit and extreme “bail-in” system to take deposits to prop up failing banks, called Open Bank Resolution (OBR). They won’t admit it, but this sudden escalation in RBNZ’s actions and rhetoric is a strong indication that NZ’s authorities fear their economy is heading off a cliff.
As the Citizens Electoral Council documented in a 1997 issue of the New Citizen newspaper, New Zealand once enjoyed a diverse, productive economy with a strong manufacturing base that even included car production. Unemployment in the 1960s was not measured in percentages, but in absolute numbers, reaching a maximum of a few hundred people. The global wave of neoliberal vandalism that started with Margaret Thatcher ripped through NZ in the 1980s. Known as “Rogernomics” after Labour Party Finance Minister Roger Douglas, neoliberalism privatised and deregulated NZ’s economy to death, smashing its manufacturing base, but feeding a massive growth in financial services. NZ became a Pacific paradise for Wall Street and London investment banks, such as CS First Boston, which trained up personnel in a new, aggressive financialised economy, who were then exported around the world. A phalanx of Kiwi bankers took key positions in Australian and London banks, including Australia’s CBA and the UK’s RBS. RBNZ acquired a reputation as a strict enforcer of monetarist policies, fiercely “independent” of government control. The result of three decades of this approach? An economy concentrated in a few agricultural commodities such as dairy production, a massive property bubble in the major cities, and financial services.
Joe Wilkes is a British real estate and banking expert who lived through the panic of the global financial crisis in London, and moved to New Zealand a few years later with his Kiwi wife to raise their family. What Wilkes discovered in Auckland was exactly what he had experienced in London that had caused its real estate and financial crisis. For more than a year Wilkes has been a regular on Australia-based banking expert Martin North’s Digital Finance Analytics YouTube show, warning about the signs of impending disaster in New Zealand’s economy. Very similar to Australia, NZ’s major banks, which are owned by Australia’s, have recklessly lent seven, eight and more times income for mortgages in the major cities. In an 18 August DFA episode titled “Shock and Orr”, Wilkes reported that real estate sales volumes in the three major cities of Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland have fallen sharply in the last year, and the falls have been accelerating. Commenting on Adrian Orr’s panicked rate cut, Wilkes said he would have described it as “someone crapped the bed”.
While Adrian Orr wouldn’t admit RBNZ’s true motives, he is remarkably open about what the central bank is prepared to do, especially in comparison with the Reserve Bank of Australia and US Federal Reserve. Perhaps Orr is hoping to normalise the extreme measures under consideration, but they are far from normal. They include:
Negative interest rates. Orr emphasised in a 12 August interview with business reporter Bernard Hickey of online news service Newsroom that in countries with negative interest rates, like Sweden and Japan, “life continues, and monetary policy remains effective”. By effective, he means that it forces people to change the way they use their money: “[I]t makes people either bring spending forward or delay spending…. It also makes people think much harder about alternative investments.” Why it should be the central bank’s job to force people to change their behaviour like this, he doesn’t say—it’s a given.
Orr “belled the cat” on negative interest rates by noting that to make them work, you need to stop people from using cash. This connection between cash restrictions and negative interest rates is one that Australian authorities are trying to deny as they push ahead with a law to ban cash transactions over $10,000. They are lying. Orr suggested a way to “remove the arbitrage between negative interest rates and holding cash” (meaning how negative interest rates are an incentive for people to take their money out of the bank): “Let’s tax cash holdings, simple as that: we’re back to monetary policy as usual; people are disincentivised to be holding large lumps of physical cash; they are having to think harder about putting money to work.” He cited former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff, who advocates removing large-denomination notes and other restrictions on using cash, to make negative interest rates work. RBNZ is conducting an inquiry into The Future of Cash, which is taking submissions until 31 August.
Quantitative easing (QE). Orr was reportedly more cautious about the electronic money-printing to buy government bonds that is known as QE, partly on the basis that there is a limited supply of NZ government bonds in circulation. This means that Orr believes the money-printing would need to be done on a massive scale to work. He expressed admiration for the way the Hong Kong Monetary Authority didn’t buy government bonds during the 2008 GFC, but printed money to buy private assets directly—no doubt fuelling the sky-high property prices that afflict Hong Kong today.
Mortgage-backed securities. In the context of discussing QE, Orr revealed the RBNZ was looking into establishing a permanent market for mortgage-backed securities. This is a dead giveaway that RBNZ’s real concern is for the property bubble. RBNZ’s intention is to be able to create money to buy up mortgage-backed securities from the banks, in order to shore up the bubble: “We’ve said, ‘well, let’s make sure that this market exists and it’s a normal part of our market’. And so, those different types of instruments that we can purchase to put cash out is great. So, you know, there’s mortgage-backed; there’s the government bonds; there’s a lot of different types of things if you need to be creative.”
Helicopter money. This idea was first put forward by the late monetarist economist Milton Friedman, proving that the supposed differences between monetarists and Keynesians is purely superficial. Friedman suggested cash could be dropped from a helicopter so people could pick it up and spend it to stimulate the economy. Orr endorsed the policy: “So being able to do the helicopter kind of money concept would just simply be around being able to inject cash into the system whichever way we chose to use a ‘helicopter’ … there’s nothing mystical or magical about it, it’s just a different instrument.” The extreme measures that RBNZ is planning bespeak an economy in crisis. They also demonstrate the NZ authorities’ preparedness to ride roughshod over the civil liberties of New Zealanders, in order to force them to conform to the emergency measures to save their banks. This is part of a broader assault on civil liberties in NZ, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre in March, especially in regard to censorship targeting the online dissemination of information. This has even affected the New Zealand shows on the DFA channel on YouTube, even though it is purely an economics discussion, and in no way related to radicalised content. But economic breakdown leads to a loss of political control, which is always the reason that authorities resort to extreme, totalitarian measures. As NZ is such a small country, these developments are hard to disguise, so outsiders should pay attention to what is happening there, because it is certain the same thinking is under way in other countries, especially in NZ’s close cousin across the ditch, Australia.
Click here to sign and share the change.org petition, “Stop Scott Morrison from banning cash to trap Australians in banks!”.
Given how accessible cheap, energy-rich, nutrient-poor junk foods are to teenagers—teens consume the highest amounts of these foods of any age group—a lifetime of poor behavioral choices follow when no interventions are made. The stunning rise of obesity in not only adults but children and teens as well is cause for alarm. The prevalence of obesity in American children is now at 31 percent.
The changes in reward circuitry prompted by junk food result in poor cognitive and emotional performance. The teen (and future adult) suffers from increased impulsive behavior and impairments in memory consolidation and social interactions. Males in particular experience impaired behavior inhibition after consuming large volumes of sugar sweetened beverages. The hippocampus suffers in high-sugar diets, which is also known to induce cognitive deficits over time.
Just in case you were considering a part time job as an English tutor…