“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci – Artist, Inventor, Genius (1452 – 1519)
Food For Thought-Taxation
I read somewhere the term “tax farm” and it instantly struck a chord with me. That’s why I am so please to see the two party system being thrown out in the most recent election here in Oz.
How Policy Really Gets Made
This morning’s email collection was interesting in that it had an email from two different sources, both describing the disparity between how we think laws are made versus how they are actually made.
From Robert Malone:
Champions of Change Baton Rouge: How Policy Really Gets Made
Text of address to The New Louisiana Foundation and Health Freedom Louisiana
Dr. Robert W. Malone
May 12
Jill and I have just returned from Baton Rouge, where I had the honor of speaking to the members of the New Louisiana Foundation and Health Freedom, Louisiana. For those who were there, and any wishing to know what was said, I am providing the text of last night’s address below, following the introduction provided for the meeting announcement.
Champions of Change Baton Rouge
How Policy Really Gets Made
Featuring Dr. Robert Malone & Noah Wall
From scientific authority to statehouse policy—discover how ideas move, who shapes them, and why it matters.
Most people believe laws are written by elected officials. In reality, policy often begins long before a bill is filed—developed through networks of institutions, experts, and organizations that shape the ideas, language, and frameworks lawmakers rely on.
At this special Baton Rouge event, you’ll hear from two speakers who illuminate this process from different—but deeply connected—angles.
Dr. Robert Malone brings a scientist’s perspective on how expertise, authority, and public health decisions are translated into policy—raising critical questions about informed consent, medical ethics, and the balance between institutional power and individual rights.
Noah Wall examines how policy is developed, packaged, and distributed across all 50 states—often moving in coordinated ways through trusted associations and professional networks.
Together, they offer a rare look at how influence flows through modern governance and what that means for transparency, accountability, and ultimately, individual liberty. If you’ve ever wondered why the same ideas seem to appear in multiple states at once, or how complex policies move so quickly through the system, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.
From Steve Kirsch’s newsletter:
Tonight on VSRF Live, I’m joined by former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for a conversation you likely won’t hear anywhere else.
After three terms in Congress, Marjorie walked away from Washington earlier this year, and tonight she explains why.
We’re going to talk about what she calls the “Political Industrial Complex” — the network of donor money, pharmaceutical influence, corporate lobbying, and entrenched interests that shapes policy long before the public ever sees a vote cast on the House floor.
Why is vaccine accountability impossible to get through Congress?
Why do liability protections for pharmaceutical companies remain untouchable?
Why do reform efforts keep failing, regardless of who gets elected?
And why do so many people who promise change end up constrained by the exact system they claimed they would fight?
Marjorie will also take us inside Capitol Hill during the COVID era: the mandates, the internal pressure campaigns, the fines she faced for refusing masks, her decision not to take the COVID vaccine, and the battles behind closed doors over attempts to investigate vaccine safety concerns.
We’ll also discuss her break with Donald Trump, what she learned firsthand about how Washington really works, and why she ultimately concluded the system is far more controlled than most Americans realize.
This is a firsthand perspective from someone who served inside Congress during one of the most contentious periods in recent American history. You don’t want to miss this.
See you tonight at 7pm ET on VSRF Live, and bring a friend.
Steve
Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways
In another fascinating medical story, the NYT published a bizarre article, if you can call it that, headlined “Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways.” I’ll file this story under the category of medical innovation of the kind we haven’t seen in the last 25 years. In short, suddenly and unexpectedly, scientists discovered a third circulatory system in the human body that they had never noticed before.
What’s most exciting, from a nerdy alt-health perspective, is that the discovery could explain most of the difference between Western and Eastern medicine. For centuries, Western medicine has recognized two major fluid-circulation systems: blood and lymphatic. Turns out they missed one. (In response, the American Medical Association issued a statement saying they are “cautiously optimistic” that the human body does not contain any more surprises, and that they are “reasonably confident” they have now found all the important parts.)
Researchers studying tattoo ink migration in the body found that fluid‑filled “interstitial spaces” throughout the body’s connective tissue were not just isolated pockets as they’d supposed, but were in fact one continuous network. They are calling it “the interstitium.”
There are pretty significant implications. The existence of this major fluid pathway could explain how cancer cells spread after they metastasize. It could explain how inflammation in one part of the body causes inflammation in another. It could explain how acupuncture works.
The story wasn’t exactly “breaking.” The lead researchers first published their findings in 2018. It has taken eight years for a major media outlet to cover the story, which is actually pretty fast by the standards of heterodox medical discoveries. By comparison, the medical establishment spent roughly forty years confidently telling patients that stomach ulcers were caused by stress before finally admitting they were actually caused by bacteria. The researcher who proved it, Barry Marshall, had to drink a beaker of the bacteria to get anyone to pay attention.
The good news is that scientists studying the interstitium have not yet been required to drink anything.
Still, one detects a lingering whiff of resentment. The Times chose to break this potentially civilization-altering medical discovery not as a written article, but as an interactive multimedia scroll that requires approximately 17 minutes of clicking to read what could have been three pages of text. This is the journalistic equivalent of announcing the discovery of fire by interpretive dance.
Anyway, the discovery of the interstitium is potentially another major challenge to orthodox medicine’s historical certainties. Welcome to 2026’s accelerating medical revolution.
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/revolution-and-renewal-tuesday-may
Lessons Learned
My perception is 9 is not as certain as the others. I observe it can be broken in one incident.
Cell Immortality?
The world’s first “immortal” human cells, the HeLa cell line, was started by researcher George Otto Gey (and his lab assistant Mary Kubicek) back in 1951 at Johns Hopkins.
They took a tiny sample of cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, isolated cells from it (essentially starting from one or a few specific cells), put them in a culture dish/flask with nutrient-rich medium (no body needed), and — unlike every previous human cell attempt — they just kept dividing and staying alive indefinitely.
Those cells (and all their descendants) have now been thriving on nutrients alone for over 74 years and are still used in labs worldwide today.
Here’s a clear, straightforward link to the story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks (the HeLa page has all the details on Gey’s work and how it started).
A shorter, easy-read version from the BBC:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zv6cydm
Quote of the Day
“Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us; are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad.” – Hermann Hesse
Kunal Nayyar
In 2007, a 26-year-old actor from New Delhi walked onto a Hollywood set with almost no experience. His name was Kunal Nayyar. He had been born in London to Indian parents, raised in India from the age of 3, and had come to America for higher education. He had only 2 acting credits to his name. Nobody could have guessed what was about to happen.
The show was called The Big Bang Theory. He was cast as Rajesh Koothrappali, a shy astrophysicist who could not even speak to women without help. His salary in season 1 was $45,000 per episode.
12 seasons and 279 episodes later, the show became one of the most successful sitcoms in television history. By the final seasons, Kunal and his 4 original co-stars were each earning a reported $1 million per episode. Forbes ranked him as the 3rd highest-paid TV actor in the entire world in 2015 and again in 2018, with annual earnings of $20 million and $23.5 million.
Money on a scale most of us cannot really picture.
He could have done what so many do at that level. Bought a fleet of cars. Built a mansion. Lived loudly. Disappeared into the kind of life that magazines love to photograph.
He did not.
Years after the show ended, in a quiet interview with The i Paper in late 2025, Kunal Nayyar revealed what he had really been doing with his money. Sitting calmly, almost as if he were talking about a small hobby, he explained it.
“Money has given me greater freedom,” he said. “And the greatest gift is the ability to give back, to change people’s lives.”
Then he described his nighttime ritual.
After dinner, after the world quiets down, he opens GoFundMe — the crowdfunding platform where families post their final pleas for help with medical bills, surgeries, and treatments they cannot afford. He scrolls. He reads stories of strangers — parents, children, sick people simply asking the internet for help. He picks a few. And then, without ever revealing his name, he pays.
He pays for a child’s chemotherapy. He pays for a surgery. He pays off a cancer bill a family would have spent the rest of their lives trying to clear. They never know it was him.
“That’s my masked vigilante thing,” he said, almost embarrassed by the words.
He does not stop there.
Alongside his wife, the former Miss India and fashion designer Neha Kapur, he quietly funds university scholarships for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds — kids whose families could never afford to send them to college. They also support animal charities, because, in his own words, “we love dogs.”
He does not make a show of any of it. There are no foundations with his face on the wall. No fundraising galas. No press tours. Just a man at home, late at night, choosing a stranger to save.
When asked why, he said something that has stayed with people who heard it.
“Right now people are not happy because we are all expecting someone else to be kind. We are expecting a president or a politician, some leader, to come and bring us world peace. But there is no world peace if your neighbour comes to your door wanting some sugar for their tea and you lock it against them and say, get away.”
In other words — be the neighbour. Open the door. Hand over the sugar.
For Kunal Nayyar, money is not a trophy. It is a tool. It is the rare kind of wealth that does not weigh on him. “It feels like a grace from the universe,” he said.
He still works. He has his own production company, Good Karma Productions. He stars in films — most recently Christmas Karma (2025), a musical reimagining of A Christmas Carol where he plays a modern-day Indian Scrooge whose obsession with wealth is rooted in trauma. The role almost feels like a wink at his own life.
Except in real life, Kunal Nayyar never needed a ghost to teach him the lesson.
He learned it on his own — that the truest measure of what we have is not what we hold on to, but what we quietly give away.
Somewhere tonight, a family is opening an email, looking at a GoFundMe page, and finding that someone they will never meet has paid for their child’s surgery. They will cry. They will not know who. They will whisper a small thank you into an empty room.
And somewhere across the world, the man who paid will already be asleep, ready for the next day.
He does not need to know what happens next.
For him, that is the whole point.
Marie Cromer
She was sitting at the back of the room.
December 1909. A teachers’ conference in Columbia, South Carolina. A government official at the front was describing a new federal program — young farm boys across the South were being given seed, land, and instruction in modern agriculture. They were producing harvests two and three times larger than their own fathers. It was, by any measure, a success.
The woman at the back was twenty-seven years old. Her name was Marie Cromer. She taught at a one-room schoolhouse in Aiken County — the only teacher, the only principal.
She raised her hand.
But what are we doing for the farm girls?
That question is recorded in the meeting notes. And it may be the most consequential sentence ever spoken at a teachers’ conference in American history.
Marie had watched her female students — girls aged nine to twenty — drop out of school every spring because their families needed their labor in the fields. They had no shoes in summer. They were expected to marry by sixteen, bear children every two years, and own nothing the law allowed a husband to own instead. Their brothers would one day inherit what little land the family had. They would not.
She came home and built something.
On her own initiative, she organized the Aiken County Girls’ Tomato Club — the first organization of its kind in the United States. Each girl who joined received a packet of tomato seeds, a one-tenth-acre plot on her family’s farm, and something more radical than either: instruction in keeping a financial ledger, and the right to keep every single cent she earned.
In the spring of 1910, forty-seven girls enrolled.
They planted. They watered. They weeded. They harvested. They canned. They sold.
And they kept the money.
The prize that first season was a scholarship to Winthrop College. Marie didn’t have the $140 to fund it herself, so she wrote to a wealthy polo enthusiast from New York who wintered in Aiken County. He funded it.
By late summer, a girl named Katie Gunter had canned 512 jars of tomatoes from her tenth of an acre and cleared a $40 profit. The scholarship was hers.
Within a few years, the best-performing girls were clearing $70 and $80 from that same tenth of an acre — more than many of their fathers earned sharecropping cotton for an entire year.
The clubs spread. Virginia. Alabama. Georgia. Mississippi. Tennessee. By 1913, over twenty thousand girls were enrolled across fifteen Southern states.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture appointed Marie one of the first women ever assigned to agricultural field work in the federal civil service.
A girl wrote about the experience in 1915:
“The work was long and sometimes tiresome. But I now have a bank account of sixty dollars.”
In 1915. In rural South Carolina. A teenage girl. A bank account. In her own name.
The Nineteenth Amendment — giving women the right to vote — would not arrive for another five years.
In 1914, the federal Smith-Lever Act folded the tomato clubs, the corn clubs, and related programs into a single national cooperative extension service. That combined program was given a name in 1924.
You know it as 4-H.
Marie Cromer went on to establish the first home economics curriculum in Aiken County. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally recognized her at the National 4-H Camp in Washington, D.C., as one of the founders of the organization.
She died on June 14, 1964, at home in Eureka, South Carolina. She was eighty-one years old.
There is a small historical marker on Highway 191.
Today, approximately six million American children are enrolled in 4-H. It is the largest youth-development organization in the United States.
Marie Cromer never gave a speech.
She raised her hand at the back of a conference room.
She asked one question.
And the country spent the next hundred and fifteen years answering it.
Jacqueline Kennedy
Vienna, Austria. June 3, 1961.
The most dangerous meeting of the Cold War era has just begun.
John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev — the leaders of the two nuclear superpowers whose weapons are pointed at each other across an ocean — are sitting down to dinner. The world’s future is genuinely uncertain. Diplomats are anxious. Translators are poised. Everyone in the room knows that what is said at this table will matter.
At Khrushchev’s side sits Jacqueline Kennedy.
She is 31 years old, speaks French and Italian and Spanish fluently, and has spent the day so thoroughly charming Paris that French President Charles de Gaulle — a man not known for being charmed — described her as extraordinary. JFK will joke the next day that he is simply “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”
Now she is seated next to the Soviet Premier at dinner.
They talk. The conversation moves. And then — “She ran out of things to talk about,“ as her daughter Caroline would later tell it, “so she asked about the dog, Strelka, that the Russians had shot into space. During the conversation, my mother asked about Strelka’s puppies.”
A few months later, a package arrived at the White House.
“A few months later, a puppy arrived and my father had no idea where the dog came from and couldn’t believe my mother had done that.“
The puppy’s name was Pushinka.
Russian for “Fluffy.” A white, mixed-breed puppy, the daughter of Strelka — one of two Soviet space dogs who had become the first living creatures to orbit the Earth and return home safely, aboard the Soviet spacecraft Korabl-Sputnik 2 in 1960.
She arrived in the United States with her own Soviet passport, listing her as “a non-breed type.”
Because this was 1961, and because the United States and the Soviet Union were in the middle of a nuclear standoff, the White House was not simply going to let a Russian dog wander in unexamined. Pushinka was taken to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and examined thoroughly before she was permitted to settle into her new home — checked for any listening devices the Soviets might have thought to embed in a puppy.
She was clean.
She was welcomed.
And shortly after settling in, she fell in love with Charlie — the Kennedy family’s Welsh terrier — and eventually produced four puppies of her own. Kennedy, with the dry wit his letters reveal, called them the “pupniks.”
In June 1961, Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev: “Mrs. Kennedy and I were particularly pleased to receive Pushinka. Her flight from the Soviet Union to the United States was not as dramatic as the flight of her mother, nevertheless, it was a long voyage and she stood it well.”
Two men. Enough nuclear weapons between them to end civilization. Writing to each other about a dog’s flight from Moscow.
At its core, the Cold War was fought between governments and ideologies and weapons systems. But its edges were softened, occasionally, by moments like this — accidental, human, and entirely Jackie’s doing.
The puppy was not a one-off.
Jacqueline Kennedy understood something about power that most politicians learn too late, if they learn it at all: that the most durable kind of influence is not exercised through force or position, but through connection. Through language. Through the ability to make someone feel seen and heard and respected.
She spoke French and had it on good authority — from de Gaulle himself — that her command of it was that of an educated native. When she accompanied JFK to Paris in 1961 and addressed the French people in their own language, the reception was unlike anything an American leader had ever received. When she visited India and Pakistan the following year, she drew crowds of hundreds of thousands. Diplomatic handlers struggled to keep up with the goodwill she generated simply by being present, and genuinely fluent, and genuinely interested.
She was not performing interest. That was the thing about her that no one could manufacture. She actually wanted to know about Khrushchev’s dog.
At home, she was rebuilding something else.
When Jackie moved into the White House in January 1961, she found the mansion in a state that she found quietly embarrassing — a residence of the leader of the free world furnished with mismatched pieces and reproductions. She believed that the White House was not merely the president’s house. It was the people’s house — a living museum of American history that deserved to be treated as such.
She formed a committee. She tracked down authentic period furniture that had been sold off over decades. She acquired paintings, chandeliers, manuscripts, and objects that told the story of the nation with the seriousness that story deserved.
And then, in February 1962, she invited the American people inside.
The televised tour of the White House — Jackie moving through room after room, explaining the history of each object with the authority of a trained curator — was watched by approximately 56 million people. It remains one of the highest-rated television broadcasts in history. The Television Academy recognized her with a special Trustees Award, the only time that honor has been given to a First Lady.
She wasn’t just showing people a beautiful house. She was telling them that beauty and history and culture were theirs — that they belonged to everyone, not only to those who happened to live inside the gates.
Then came November 22, 1963.
What Jackie did in the hours, days, and weeks after Dallas is one of the most documented and still most difficult things to fully comprehend. She organized the state funeral with historical precision — modeled on Lincoln’s, because she believed the gravity of the moment required that kind of acknowledgment. She stood at the graveside in the same pink suit she had worn on the plane back from Dallas, because she wanted the world to see what had been done.
And weeks later, she gave one carefully chosen interview — to the journalist Theodore White of Life Magazine — in which she introduced the image that would define her husband’s presidency forever.
She said it reminded her of the musical they both loved: Camelot.
“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”
She chose those words deliberately. She told White she wanted that image preserved. He published it exactly as she asked.
Jackie Kennedy understood that history is not only what happens — it is what is remembered, and how it is framed, and by whom. She spent the rest of her life making sure the story was told right.
There is a version of Jacqueline Kennedy that history sometimes reduces to style — the pillbox hat, the pink suit, the poise under pressure. That version is not wrong, exactly. She had all of those things, and they mattered.
But the fuller picture is this:
A woman who accidentally negotiated a moment of Cold War warmth by asking about a dog at a dinner table. Who checked a Soviet puppy for listening devices and then let her children teach it to slide down the playground slide. Who spoke to the French in their own language and made them love America for an afternoon. Who stood in the East Room and told 56 million people that this house — this history — belonged to them.
And who, in the most devastating moment of her life, made sure that what had happened was not just mourned, but remembered, with the weight it deserved.
She was not a witness to history.
She was, quietly and deliberately, one of its most skillful authors.