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Archive for 2025
July 17, 2025
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Caffeine May Slow Cellular Aging By Activating A Protective Stress Response.
The study, published in Microbial Cell, discovered that caffeine induces a stress-like response in cells, activating a longevity pathway called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK).
AMPK functions like a cellular fuel gauge. When energy runs low or during times of stress, AMPK activates, forcing cells to conserve resources, repair damage, and clean up faulty components by recycling parts of themselves.
In biology, too much stress harms cells, but small amounts can actually help them adapt and repair, preventing damage from piling up. Over time, this helps tissues stay healthier, which supports a longer lifespan.
“Our research, at least in terms of caffeine, suggests that AMPK gets turned on because caffeine is exerting some sort of stress on the cells,” Alao said.
Have at least two cups of coffee, just to be safe.
URI BERLINER: Happy Independence Day, NPR.
The Senate voted this morning to claw back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for NPR, PBS, and local stations. Pending final approval in the House, the federal government will, after more than half a century, no longer be in the business of supporting NPR.
The vote is a victory for Republicans who have long had National Public Radio (NPR) in their sights. But it is also a victory for those of any political stripe who believe the government has no business funding the media.
I didn’t use to count myself among them. But over the past year, under the leadership of a divisive new CEO, instead of taking criticisms of its coverage to heart, NPR instead doubled down on agenda-driven journalism. So, as someone who had spent most of his career at the network, I didn’t support defunding. I instead suggested that NPR could build back credibility by voluntarily giving up federal support. Obviously that didn’t happen.
NPR has said President Donald Trump’s push for defunding is an attack on press freedom and the First Amendment. While defunding is a harsh rebuke to NPR, it’s not fatal. A relatively small portion of its budget—some 5 to 10 percent depending on how you do the math—comes from direct and indirect federal funding. But for small public radio stations that rely more on federal support, the repercussions could be severe. While Republicans cast the votes to defund, NPR also has itself to blame for the outcome.
It’s a self-inflicted wound, a product of how NPR embraced a fringe progressivism that cost it any legitimate claim to stand as an impartial provider of news, much less one deserving of government support.
I witnessed that change firsthand in my 25 years at the network—and I tried to do something about it. I was a senior business editor at NPR when, a little more than a year ago, I published my account in The Free Press of how the network had lost touch with the country, and, like the legacy media everywhere, forfeited the trust of the public.
I explained how over time, as NPR became a boutique product for a well-heeled audience clustered around coastal cities and college towns, it shed moderate and conservative listeners.
Fortunately for leftists, thanks to their long march through the institutions, a surfeit of socialist-friendly content remains available, including obscure niche outlets such as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
UM…:
BREAKING: Mel Witherspoon, the Democrat City Council President for Erie City, PA, just claimed he shot a man in the head when he was 17 and got away with it because of mafia ties and connections.
"I shot him in the head point blank… I stayed in jail one night, I never went to… pic.twitter.com/SCzrZRKTWb
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 17, 2025
ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS (THEIR AGENDA): I Can’t Believe The New York Times Thought It Would Get Away With This.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Conflict of Interest? Ossoff Backed ESG Rules While His Wife Invested Heavily in ESG Funds.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Isolated gut microbe drives stronger responses to cancer therapy.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Don’t Look Now, But Another New Jersey Town Just Voted to Refund Their Carry Permit Fees. “State lawmakers set the high permit fee in an effort to discourage average citizens from applying for carry permits. We joined forces with our friends at NRA/ILA and NJFOS in an effort to provide relief, and we’re happy to say it’s beginning to work.”
MARGOT CLEVELAND: EXCLUSIVE: Memo Reveals D.C. Judges Are Predisposed Against Trump Administration.
And on record as saying so.
YOUR OCCASIONAL REMINDER — IF ONE WAS NEEDED — THAT LEFTISM HAS NO INHERENT LIMITING PRINCIPLES:
What I find puzzling and interesting about NPR is the same thing, in miniature, that I find puzzling about liberalism in many contexts: the utter inability to impose limits on itself, even when the failure to do so is obviously self-destructive. If NPR had even pursued its…
— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) July 17, 2025
“Too much is never enough,” the wise man said.
Related (From Ed):
Liberalism rejects the very concept of limits on itself because that would negate its internal determinism and, more broadly, the telos itself. What we see as obvious self-destruction is, to them, victimization by opposing forces which, of course, are always wrong.
— S. Maria Shreve (@s_shreve1) July 17, 2025
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX launch adds dozens of satellites to Amazon’s broadband network.
WINNING: Trump Ends Boondoggle on Rails.
HEY, WHERE DO YOU THINK THE CRUNCH COMES FROM? YoCrunch yogurt recalled after plastic pieces in packaging found. “In packaging found?” Who wrote this, Yoda?
GOOD AND HARD, NEW YORK, GOOD AND HARD:
It just gets worse and worse with this guy. https://t.co/GJ4zxxNOcC
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) July 17, 2025
FROM HURRICANE KATRINA TO HURRICANE MARIA TO THE GUADALUPE RIVER: The efforts blame Trump and his policies for the flood disaster in Texas reminds me of the effort to blame Trump for Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017.
(My colleagues on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights wanted to argue that Trump cared more about responding to Hurricane Harvey in Texas because it is white than about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico because it is Hispanic. I had to point out that there are many more Hispanics in Texas than in Puerto Rico.)
SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW WHEN IT’S OUTCLASSED BY AN 8-BIT CONSOLE FROM THE ’70S WITH 128 BYTES OF RAM: Google Gemini crumbles in the face of Atari Chess challenge — admits it would ‘struggle immensely’ against 1.19 MHz machine, says canceling the match most sensible course of action.
FIVE-O FIASCO: NY Times Editorial Board Claims Defunding NPR, PBS Is Like Defunding Police.
The newspaper even admitted that “Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases.” “Not always wrongly?” What does that even mean in this context? Like this is rare? Instead of hourly?
Then the editorial board took a detour onto Cuckoo Avenue to describe current legislative efforts to strip NPR and PBS (finally) of their taxpayer-subsidized license to continue belching up left-wing propaganda with impunity:
We are reminded of the excesses of the ‘defund the police’ and ‘abolish ICE’ movements on the other side of the ideological spectrum. They adopted a fatalistic view of vital government services, suggesting that their imperfections justified their elimination. They were wrong, and so are the conservatives who want to defund public media.
And now an ironic message from PBS’s Sesame Street brought to you by the number “5” and the letter “O.”
One big difference: Minorities really want the police very well-funded: “White Progressives Shocked To Learn Black And Latino Voters Don’t Share Their Radical ‘Defund The Police’ Views,” Ashe Schow wrote at the Daily Wire in 2021. In contrast, as Uri Berliner wrote in his Free Press cri de coeur last year about how NPR went off the rails:
Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.
How odd. NPR honchos assured me that it was vital to the safety of small Texas towns during weather emergencies.
SENATE REPUBLICANS VOTE TO CUT $9 BILLION IN FOREIGN AID, PUBLIC BROADCASTING:
Senate Republicans narrowly passed a $9 billion recessions package aimed at eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) early on Thursday morning.
The Senate voted 51-48, with Senators Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) joining Democrats in opposing it. The package will now be sent to the House, which must pass it before a Friday deadline.
Under the Impoundment Control Act, Congress had 45 days to act on the White House’s rescissions request in early June if it wished to ignore the filibuster threshold.
The bill will end $8 billion in funding for foreign aid programs, such as Iraqi Sesame Street and global LGBTQ+ initiatives, and $1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR.
Oh no, Iraqi Sesame Street is being cancelled!
Jasmine Crockett: We need USAID to fund Sesame Street in Iraq to prevent people from being "radicalized against us."
"This is so that there is not this warped thought process about the Western world." pic.twitter.com/EhGeANfbrC
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 15, 2025
Cancelling that is almost as bad cancelling Afghani lessons in modern art:
2026 PREVIEW: Trump says Texas redistricting plan could deliver 5 more GOP House seats.
President Donald Trump expressed confidence this week that Texas Republicans could gain as many as five additional seats in the US House of Representatives through a redistricting plan expected to be taken up during a special legislative session later this month.
“I think we’ll get five,” Trump told reporters, according to The Hill. “And there could be some other states we’re going to get another three, or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one.”
Trump also noted that it would be “okay” if left-wing states like California or New York pursued redistricting plans of their own.
The president’s remarks follow Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s announcement that redistricting will be part of the upcoming special session. Abbott announced last week that the state will introduce “a revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the US Department of Justice.”
Although redistricting traditionally occurs every ten years, Trump’s team is reportedly encouraging Texas to redraw its maps sooner in order to expand the GOP’s House razor-thin majority ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Developing…
BEGUN, THE CLOWN WAR HAS: The Democratic Civil War Has Begun — and Obama Pulled the Trigger.
I’VE LAID IN EXTRA SUPPLIES OF “GOODER AND HARDER”: New York Elites Brace for the Inevitable: Mamdani as Mayor.
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WE’RE RULED BY OVERGROWN CHILDREN:
🚨NEW: CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane tells Chuck Todd he got "PTSD" after Trump assassination attempt — *NOT* from the shooting, but because the crowd blamed the media🚨
"For those of us there, it was such a horror."
"I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got… pic.twitter.com/JYeA7FZ90G
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) July 16, 2025
THE NEW YORK TIMES STUMBLES INTO KRAUTHAMMER’S LAW:
Horrified to learn about this moral vilification of the opposing side, a completely new phenomenon in American politics pic.twitter.com/ni3v145jbg
— Spencer A. Klavan (@SpencerKlavan) July 16, 2025
In 2016, Ben Shapiro wrote: The Left Wins because It Fights Politics on the Field of Morality.
Krauthammer’s Law defines the left’s Manichean worldview thusly: “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil,” Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2002. And viewing someone of a differing ideology as being evil is a very different stance than viewing him as simply uninformed or otherwise somehow misguided.
After a decade of lawfare against him, the left shouldn’t be surprised that Trump adopted a similar worldview along the way.
We were all alive for this speech, you clown. We all remember when Hillary called us deplorable, when Biden called us trash, and how you and your journo buddies called us Nazi insurrectionists and grandma killers and domestic terrorists for years. https://t.co/aJdT89IRBi pic.twitter.com/u8zkCjHJVA
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 17, 2025