https://twitter.com/KarluskaP/status/1302543229922029568?s=20

Paedophile Ex-Cambridge Uni Scientist Jailed for Sending Theresa May Fake Poison

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A paedophile former University of Cambridge research fellow who sent ex-prime minister Theresa May a hoax package containing a white powder, intended to appear as poison, has been jailed.

On April 5th, 2018, staff at a postal sorting office in East London alerted police after handling a suspicious package addressed to “Theresa May, c/o The Nazi Party”. It was found to contain a graphic cartoon of the decapitated prime minister, as well as white powder later found to be harmless.

The incident occurred just one month after the poisoning of former Russian spy and double agent for the British, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia with the nerve agent Novichok. A policeman was also taken ill after coming into contact with the stricken pair as they sat on a bench in Salisbury city centre. Then-Prime Minister May had said that it was highly likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the attack on British soil.

The package also included a picture of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, according to the BBC. Litvinenko had been poisoned with radioactive polonium 210 in London in 2006. The attack was suspected of having been at the behest of Putin.

Following an investigation by the Metropolitan Police Force’s Counter-Terrorism Command, detectives arrested 54-year-old Christopher Doyle at his home in Widnes, Cheshire, on May 24th, 2018, according to a statement by Scotland Yard.

When police raided his home, they found nearly a quarter of a million indecent images of children

He had told police that he had written one letter to then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, criticising him for attacking Russia for the Skripal poisoning, and another to former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, praising him.

Judge Anil Murray said at Liverpool Crown Court during sentencing on Thursday: “Sergei Skripal had been poisoned just about a month before this letter was opened and so the issue of poisoning was high in the nation’s consciousness.

“This was a serious offence intended by you to induce fear of danger to human life.”

The scientist, who has a PhD in neuroscience, had been a research fellow at Cambridge University before experiencing a decline in mental health that resulted in him becoming a shut-in and immersing himself in pro-Russia Facebook groups, according to his defence lawyer.

Doyle also said that he had worked at Porton Down, five miles outside of Salisbury, which is the British government’s top-secret laboratory that researches chemical weapons and deadly infections like Ebola, the plague, and anthrax.

The 54-year-old was sentenced to 30 months in prison for the threatening package, but a mere four months for the more than 245,000 child porn images.

He has also been placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for seven years and has been given a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for seven years. The order will remain on his record for the rest of his life, and for seven years he is required to tell employers that he is on the Sex Offenders’ Register. After his brief stint in prison, he must register with the police and inform them of any changes of address, name, or if he plans to travel outside of the United Kingdom.

While he admitted to the indecent images, Doyle had claimed that he did not send the hoax poison, alleging that MI5 or MI6 had set him up

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/09/05/paedophile-ex-cambridge-uni-scientist-jailed-sending-theresa-may-fake-poison/

Book: FBI informant claimed to have stolen files from computer of then-New York Times reporter James Risen

It’s a well-documented fact that the U.S. government wanted access to the secrets of James Risen, the former New York Times national security reporter. In an interminable leak prosecution against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, the Justice Department sought Risen’s testimony regarding his sources for his news-breaking book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.” After years of fighting subpoenas, Risen prevailed in 2015 when the Justice Department finally backed off.

Now a new drama over Risen’s files crops up in “Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,” a new book by New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt.

An FBI informant, reports Schmidt, played a mind-blowing double game with the bureau following the 2013 leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden. As agents evaluated the information that spilled into the public realm from the Snowden trove, they grew worried that some of the stories stemmed from material to which Snowden didn’t have access.So they postulated that there was perhaps a “second Snowden” out there somewhere

According to Schmidt’s book, the Washington field office of the FBI heard from a Europe-based lawyer who claimed that “he knew a man in Germany who had access to a trove of NSA documents and might leak them.” Not only that — the informant said that he wanted to stop the prospective source.

To thicken the plot, this same informant was chatting up Risen, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who, along with Eric Lichtblau, exposed the warrantless wiretapping program during the administration of George W. Bush. “The informant told Risen, who wrote about government spying, that he could help the Times obtain documents from the source revealing abuses of American surveillance authority,” writes Schmidt. The two worlds of the informant collided in Bruges, Belgium, where he was attempting to lure the source for a meeting. Risen was also planning to visit Bruges “around the same time in the hopes of obtaining the leaked documents.”

The scheme twisted the FBI into legal, bureaucratic and logistical knots, as it sent an “entire squad” to Bruges to oversee a meeting between the FBI’s informant and the source. One might expect subsequent developments ripped from the pages of some great spy thriller. The actual result, though, was a bit pathetic, as Schmidt reports:

The plan turned into a debacle. The source never arrived at the cafe, and the informant ended up getting drunk while waiting for him. When higher-ups at the bureau learned what had happened, they grew furious that an entire team had been sent to Belgium based on information from a man with little track record as a source who was also known to be double-crossing a reporter on the same matter.

Risen didn’t travel to Bruges.

In 2014, Risen invited the informant to his Maryland home. The informant, reports Schmidt, “later said that while at the house he secretly copied a trove of documents from Risen’s home computer onto a thumb drive. Whatever was on the thumb drive, and whatever the informant’s motive for supposedly boosting the files from Risen’s computer, he did hand over a thumb drive to his FBI handler.”

The thumb drive languished on a desk, reports Schmidt, because the bureau’s handler wouldn’t use it as evidence. But it didn’t rest there in peace, because the informant informed a member of Congress, “who then called the top brass of the FBI, who were now learning for the first time that some of their agents had materials that had been stolen from a New York Times reporter,” writes Schmidt. The FBI obsessed over how to handle the thumb drive hot potato, with then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. at one point erupting in rage that a plan for its handling was put on paper. Schmidt writes:

https://archive.is/OnWeP#selection-421.1-421.100

Here Are 31 Times The Media Pushed Narratives Downplaying Riots And Looting After George Floyd’s Death

No Doubt, media the enemy of the people

Dozens of news outlets published content that either justified or explained away rioting and looting in the initial weeks of unrest following the police custody death of George Floyd in late May.

__The Daily Caller News Foundation identified 31 articles, opinion pieces, and interviews published in the media in late May and early June that acknowledged the violence that had broken out in American cities.

Major news outlets such as CNN and MSNBC have recently appeared to downplay the unrest that has now gripped American cities for months.

Dozens of news outlets published content that either justified or explained away rioting and looting in the initial weeks of unrest following the police custody death of George Floyd in late May, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.__

• While President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have both condemned rioting and looting, major news outlets such as CNN and MSNBC have appeared to downplay the unrest that has gripped American cities in the months following Floyd’s death, in one instance describing a scene as “mostly peaceful” as fires raged in the background.

• But as the violence broke out in American cities in late May and June, dozens of news outlets provided a platform for commentators, professors and activists who not only acknowledged that rioting and looting were taking place, but sought to either justify the violence as a valid protesting technique or as a form of righteous rebellion against an unjust system. (RELATED: Here Are Examples Of The Media Claiming The Protests Are Peaceful)

• Here are 31 articles, opinion pieces, interviews and news segments published in the media in the first three weeks following Floyd’s death that pushed narratives that either justified or explained away the rioting and looting as it started to break out in American cities.

Narrative 1: Rioting is patriotic, and it works

• A common narrative pushed in the media as violence broke out across the United States in late May was that rioting is a quintessentially American activity with a storied history of bringing about positive change.

• Rolling Stone was among the first outlets to push the message on May 29 when it republished a story originally published in 2014 during the Ferguson riots titled “9 Historical Triumphs to Make You Rethink Property Destruction.”

• The “historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” argued the article, which was co-authored by Jose Martin, a known alias of a Washington, D.C. Antifa leader who currently faces multiple felony charges in connection to a mob attack against two Marines in 2018.

• Like many of the articles that pushed this narrative, the Rolling Stone story cited the 1773 Boston Tea Party as proof of the positive change rioting can bring about.

• “Workers had produced that tea, capitalists had risked investment on it, and it was not the colonists’ to destroy, but they said ‘fuck property rights’ and did it anyway,” the Rolling Stone article states. “Today’s conservatives don’t seem bothered by this inconvenient history, though, because think of the dress-up opportunities!”

• Rolling Stone editors added a note to the story when it was republished that stated: “Protests erupted in Minneapolis, and have since spread across the country. Once again, some are criticizing the destruction of property as somehow equal — or worse — than the destruction of lives.”

• Other news articles, opinion pieces and interviews published in the weeks following Floyd’s death that suggested rioting was either effective, patriotic or both include:

“The Double Standard of the American Riot,” published June 1 in The Atlantic.

“Rioting is a nuanced and deeply misunderstood form of protest,” published June 7 in The DP.

“9 Times Riots Created Real Change In America,” published June 1 in Bustle.

“Why extreme actions shouldn’t delegitimize a protest,” published June 3 in Quartz.

“When Rioting Works,” published June 1 in Jacobin.

“When Americans Don’t Riot, Politicians Feel Unrestrained,” published June 15 in The American Prospect.

“Does rioting work? Here are five times it did,” published June 6 in Big Think.

“Why Violent Protests Work,” published June 2 in GQ.

“How Riots Built America,” published June 12 in HuffPost.

“Riots Are As American As Apple Pie,” published June 10 in Other Words, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“A justification for the unrest? Look no further than the Bible and the Founding Fathers,” published June 4 in The Conversation.

Narrative 2: Rioting and looting are valid protesting tactics against police brutality.

….

https://dailycaller.com/2020/09/03/media-justified-explained-away-rioting-looting/

==Abolish The Postal Monopoly.

Aaron Tao==

It was just recently that Democrats, fearing the size and influence of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google, subjected these corporate titans to serious antitrust scrutiny. So it’s particularly ironic that they’re now reflexively defending a literal government monopoly.

The latest squabble in the 2020 news cycle involved accusations of political meddling at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Ever since Trump’s appointment of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, Democrats have feared that changes to national mail delivery policies could undermine mail-based voting. Meanwhile, Republicans remain preoccupied with voter fraud.

You can argue the benefits or dangers of mail-based voting indefinitely, but what’s clear is the economics of the situation: The USPS is a failed agency. From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense to abolish its monopoly over the delivery of first-class mail and fully legalize private competition.

Besides, breaking up a centralized monopoly that rewards political connections would nip presidential tampering or partisan gamesmanship in the bud. Ending the USPS’s monopoly over the delivery of letters and first-class mail would greatly weaken, if not altogether eliminate, insidious political influence from unscrupulous actors.

The economic failings and inefficiencies of the USPS are well-documented. The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) official summary from a scathing audit back in May acknowledges that USPS’s financial condition is “deteriorating and unsustainable.”

“USPS has lost $69 billion over the past 11 fiscal years—including $3.9 billion in fiscal year 2018,” the summary reads. “USPS’s total unfunded liabilities and debt ($143 billion at the end of fiscal year 2018) have grown to double its annual revenue.”

The GAO report makes clear that neither one-time bailouts nor higher mail prices can save the USPS from its systemic problems. Near the end of the report, the GAO calls upon Congress to consider fundamental changes to the USPS’s institutional structure, including privatization, and change/pass any laws to make it happen.

Likewise, many economists, including the late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, have advocated abolishing postal monopoly and privatizing the Postal Service. Like most monopolies, the USPS has little incentive to keep costs controlled, to innovate, or to deliver new products and services. On the other hand, history shows breaking up centralized state monopolies and allowing genuine free market competition leads to better and cheaper products and services…..

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2020/09/04/abolish_the_postal_monopoly_576304.html

The Neurons That Appeared from Nowhere

How an accident led to what could be a medical revolution.

BY NAYANAH SIVA

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The scientists crowded around Yuanchao Xue’s petri dish. They couldn’t identify the cells that they were seeing. “We saw a lot of cells with spikes growing out of the cell surface,” said Xiang-Dong Fu, the research team’s leader at the University of California, San Diego. “None of us really knew that much about neuroscience, and we asked around and someone said that these were neurons.” The team, who were made up of basic cellular and molecular scientists, were utterly puzzled. Where had these neurons come from? Xue had left a failed experiment, a dish full of human tumor cells, in the incubator, and when he looked two weeks later, he found a dish full of neurons.

It’s not often an unexpected cell type appears in a petri dish, as if from nowhere. Scientists all over the world have spent a lot of time and money actively trying to generate neurons in the lab—the implications for neurodegenerative disease would be massive. And yet this research team, who were actually studying the RNA-binding protein PTB, had unknowingly generated a whole dish of neurons.

“It puzzled me for quite a long time, and I didn’t know what was wrong with my cells,” said Xue, who is now a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. Xue was attempting to deplete human tumor cells of PTB with small interference RNAs (siRNAs). He expected his cell lines, which are typically very proliferative, to keep growing, but they stopped, and so were cast aside for two weeks. Sure that the dish had become contaminated, Xue and colleagues tried the experiment again … and again … and again.

Not being fully aware of the field, and how they were going against the science, helped them. Their naivety allowed them to push forward.

“We tested every cell we could grab, and every single time we did the same thing—that is removing the protein PTB—and every single cell became a neuron,” said Fu Fibroblasts, tumor cells, glial cells … The team realized every time they depleted the cell of PTB, the cell would convert into a neuron. The logical next step was to move onto mouse models of Parkinson’s disease—the progressive death of dopamine-producing neurons that causes, among other things, tremor and movement problems. As with other neurodegenerative conditions, treatment is inherently difficult and current options are not curative.1 Neurogenesis, the generation of new neurons in the brain, typically stops during puberty. So when these cells become damaged or die, the body cannot replace them.

Xue and his colleagues decided to concentrate on the substantia nigra, a region in the midbrain where dopaminergic neurons predominate and typically die during the disease. The researchers decided to try the depleting-PTB technique on astrocytes, star-shaped non-neuronal cells that are abundant in the brain. Usually they produce the RNA-binding protein PTB1, which prevents them from becoming neurons. Banking on the idea that when neurons die, astrocytes typically proliferate and fill up this space in the brain, the team thought it might be useful to convert these excess astrocytes in Parkinson’s disease into neurons in vivo, in animal models.

http://m.nautil.us/issue/89/the-dark-side/the-neurons-that-appeared-from-nowhere

8 weird DARPA projects that make science fiction seem like real life

The agency responsible for the internet, GPS and stealth aircraft has produced a whole lot of weird in the 62 years since its foundation. For every one of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s wild successes, there seem to be a plethora of wild failures – projects like mechanical elephants or telepathy research. What makes DARPA so unique is its ability to go outside the red tape of bureaucracy to innovate. DARPA isn’t subject to the same acquisition rules as other agencies, which means it has fewer restrictions on the scientists and innovators it can hire and the salaries it can offer.

The agency also has fewer financial limitations, enabling it to invest in longshot projects with the hopes they’ll pay off – they’re basically the military’s innovative venture capitalists. Here are some of the more interesting projects to come out of DARPA’s “high-risk, high-reward” environment.

1. Plant-eating robots

Perhaps the most aptly named project on this list, the Energy Autonomous Tactical Robot program sought to create robots that could feed off plants just as animals do. EATR would have enabled robots to remain in surveillance or defensive positions without resupply much longer than humans or robots with more limited power sources.We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” Cyclone Power Technologies CEO Harry Schoell said in a press release

2. Houses that repair themselves

Imagine soldiers fashioning buildings and fortifications out of lightweight scaffolds instead of plywood, two-by-fours, and heavy sandbags. Then, those scaffolds quickly begin to fill in with durable material all on their own. And when that material is damaged, it grows right back to where it was. That’s the goal of DARPA’s Engineering Living Materials program, to create building materials that can be grown where needed and repair themselves when damaged. As researchers make progress with 3D printed organs and tissues, DARPA hopes to use similar technologies to create hybrid materials that can shape and support the growth of engineered cells.

3. Lab-grown blood

Blood pharming successfully decreased the cost of transfusable units from more than $90,000 to less than $5,000. Blood pharming is the process of creating red blood cells from cell sources in a lab rather than inside a human body. DARPA’s Blood Pharming program was projected to increase the efficiency of production and lower the high costs associated with growing red blood cells. If completely successful, the program would have greatly increased access to transfusable blood for soldiers and hospitals around the world and reduced the risk of disease transmission during a transfusion.

4. Cyborg insects

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles may be all the rage, but they’re clunky and require people to design and assemble every piece. What if there were a way to piggyback sensors on flying creatures for free? DARPA’s spy bugs were part of a 2006 project that wanted to implant transmitters in insects to use them for surveillance. The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems program was run by teams from the University of Michigan and Cornell University.

5. Brain implants for PTSD

•DARPA doesn’t just focus on cool gadgets for fighting wars. The agency also funds research on solutions for the negative effects war can have on soldiers. The Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies program is tasked with creating “an implanted, closed-loop diagnostic and therapeutic system for treating, and possibly even curing, neuropsychiatric illness,” according to a DARPA press release.

6. Robotic infantry mules

The Legged Squad Support System (LS3) walks around the Kahuku Training Area July 10, 2014 during the Rim of the Pacific 2014 exercise.

Heavy lifting is one of the largest challenges affecting troops’ health and performance. Recognizing the affect the weight of soldiers’ loads can have on them, DARPA began working with robotics company Boston Dynamics to create the Legged Squad Support System.

7. Nuke-propelled spaceship

DARPA also invests in researching space travel. Project Orion is a program from 1958 intended to research a new means of spaceship propulsion. This hypothetical model of propulsion relied on nuclear bomb detonations to power a craft forward and was supposedly capable of hitting astonishing speeds.

8. Mechanical elephants

In the 1960s, DARPA began researching vehicles that would enable troops and equipment to move more freely in the dense terrain of Vietnam. Following the footsteps of Hannibal before them, DARPA researchers decided that elephants could be the right tool for the job.

https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2020/09/04/8-weird-darpa-projects-make-science-fiction-seem-like-real-life/

Using Algae to Make a Vaccine Against COVID-19

COVID-19 is the biggest event of the year with an enormous effect on the world’s economic health and public well-being. This virus will ultimately be defeated by a vaccine which should be generally available in the next 12-18 months.

• There is a race on among at least 83 vaccine manufactures as to who will get to the market first and who will have the most efficacious vaccine. We at Transalgae have a unique platform to tackle this problem. Our plan is to put a piece of the spike viral protein pictured above inside our favorite algal species, grow the algae out to commercial quantities and then give an algae pill with the vaccine inside.

• In effect, we are using a genetically modified algae to both manufacture the spike protein and provide a natural encapsulation. The reason one receives an insulin shot or a COVID-19 vaccine in the form of an injection, is that it is difficult to protect the protein of interest from our stomach acids. In addition to protecting the protein, the algae also make the vaccine.

• Oral delivery, if efficacious, has many advantages over injections. 1) People would prefer to swallow a pill rather than receive a shot. There is unlikely to be swelling, redness, or rashes. 2) Administration is vastly simplified. No need for a nurse or other trained practitioner. No need to potentially crowd into an area to receive a shot 3) Our bodies ingest many types of bacteria and viruses every day and our digestive systems are designed to eliminate them. An injection is at greater risk of inadvertent contamination due to the manufacturing process. 4) Algae cells do not attract mammalian bacteria and viruses. Regular vaccines use mammalian cells for production and those bacteria are dangerous for humans. 5) Poorer countries do not have the refrigeration capabilities that we have and have a shortage of trained health care professionals. For those countries, an oral vaccine is the difference between having a vaccine and not having a vaccine. 6) And the final advantage concerns the vaccination technique which some of the 83 competing vaccines share with ours. Instead of using a whole dead, or live attenuated virus, we are following the subunit strategy. We have identified a portion of the spike protein pictured above and are using its insertion in algae and subsequent ingestion to generate antibodies and an immune response. This is inherently safer since most of the virus (especially that part dealing with its reproduction) is missing from the pill.

• We start with the sequenced genome of the COVID-19 virus. Here is a published list of its amino acid sequences. The 22 different amino acids are stitched together to make all proteins. And prior to those amino acid sequences are the base pairs which make up the DNA of the virus. We have chosen one portion of one of the genes listed above that we think will best generate an immune response in a human. It is a part of the spike protein which you can see above.

• In order to cause our algae to make the desired portion of the spike protein, we have to use the alga's own codon usage table. A codon is a 3 base pair grouping that call for one of the 22 amino acids. To these base pairs needed to create the gene of interest (the spike protein), we add a promoter which tells the alga how many times to create the spike protein and a selection marker which enables us to figure out which algae have been transformed.

• Next we synthesize the DNA sequence and then use a PCR machine to multiply the sequence many millions of times. We add the DNA sequence into millions of algae cells spread on plates.

• This is where the selection marker mentioned above comes in. It enables us to figure out which algae were transformed. As part of the DNA which just entered the algae, we have included a gene which changes the metabolism of the algae IF it lands in the genome. We use this metabolic difference to select those algae which have been transformed.

• Our next step is to grow out the selected algae in petri dishes. Eventually they become large enough for us to test to see the quality of the transformation. We will choose the best transformant for our problem. We want high expression levels plus an intact and functional form of the protein of interest – the spike protein. We want our protein to fold in the same way that the virus’ spike protein folds so that when ingested the algae’s spike protein creates useful antibodies then ready for the true corona virus.

•We then grow out the algae in a fermenter in order to generate enough product to perform studies on mice fed the algae. First thing we hope for is that the spike protein shows up in their blood. Much of the algae passes through the digestive system without entering the blood stream, but the hope is that enough enters to create an immune response.

https://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2020/05/04/using_algae_to_make_a_vaccine_against_covid-19_111036.html