Research on Alzheimer's Disease

 

To consolidate memories, our brains replay them during periods of rest as a kind of 'replay mode'. A new mouse study suggests that disruptions to this process could contribute to the memory loss that accompanies Alzheimer's disease. According to the research team from University College London, these findings could lead the way towards opportunities to diagnose Alzheimer's at an earlier stage and to treat the associated brain damage.   

"Alzheimer's disease is caused by the build-up of harmful proteins and plaques in the brain, leading to symptoms such as memory loss and impaired navigation – but it's not well understood exactly how these plaques disrupt normal brain processes," says neuroscientist Sarah Shipley. "We wanted to understand how the function of brain cells changes as the disease develops, to identify what's driving these symptoms."  

The mice in the study were given an Alzheimer's-like condition, with toxic build-ups of amyloid-beta protein in their brains. When navigating mazes, the test animals showed signs of being unable to lock a spatial map into their memories. Both during the maze challenges and while the mice were at rest between sessions, Shipley and her colleagues monitored activity in their hippocampi, a region of the brain containing location-memory neurons known as place cells.  Brain replays were scrambled in Alzheimer's mice, who also performed worse on maze tasks. (Shipley et al., Curr. Biol., 2026)

For the mice to recall where they've been, these cells must fire in a particular order. As the memories are 'saved' for longer-term storage, that sequence of activation repeats, like a replay. The frequency of these replays didn't change in mice with amyloid-beta plaques in their brains, but the ordering of the sequences did. It was as if the memories were scenes in a mini movie, which were chopped up and stored in different places.

This was seen in maze behavior, too, with the affected mice often forgetting which parts of the maze they had already visited, even in the same session. The place cells also became less stable over time, with the cell-to-location mapping becoming messed up. 

Although this study used a model of Alzheimer's in mouse brains, there are good reasons to think the same kind of breakdown is happening in humans with the disease – something that could be confirmed through future studies. "We've uncovered a breakdown in how the brain consolidates memories, visible at the level of individual neurons," says neuroscientist Caswell Barry. "What's striking is that replay events still occur – but they've lost their normal structure. It's not that the brain stops trying to consolidate memories; the process itself has gone wrong."

Alzheimer's disease is a complex condition with multiple risk factors. There are various potential causes and numerous impacts on the brain, which may be working together or separately. Part of the difficulty for researchers comes in trying to work out what's driving the progress of Alzheimer's, and what's happening as a consequence of it – and there's that uncertainty around amyloid-beta build-up too.

Studies like this add pieces to the overall jigsaw, letting us see more of the 'big picture' of Alzheimer's – and how all these causes and consequences fit together as brain functionality degrades over time. Each new discovery means that we might be able to spot signs of the disease earlier – giving more time for treatments and support to be put in place – and develop treatments to target certain parts of Alzheimer's. In this case, that might be drugs that help to sharpen replay activity in the hippocampus's place cells. 

However, that won't be possible until more research can specifically identify the processes at play and how they can be safely tweaked.  "We hope our findings could help develop tests to detect Alzheimer's early, before extensive damage has occurred, or lead to new treatments targeting this replay process," says Barry.

The research has been published in Current Biology.    

  

Context Matters: Trump Administration Summons Secretaries of State

 

Despite Donald Trump’s claim earlier this month, U.S. states are not agents for the federal government in elections. State officials don’t work for him. Trump said it as part and parcel of his stab at getting Republicans to take over state elections—Trump said they should be “nationalized.” I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway,” he said, adding that it’s a “disgrace” how “horribly” some states run elections. Anyone who has been watching knows what this is about. 

It’s more of the same from the candidate who asked state officials in Georgia to find him 11,780 votes so he could overturn the result in an election that he lost. With Trump, his complaints about others are always projection: He wants to make sure he can steal the midterm elections if his party loses, and no better way to do them than to get election administration out of pesky officials who insist on doing a fair count.

Hence Trump’s appeal to “nationalize” elections. He wants to take control. That context makes it particularly interesting that federal agency “election partners” from FBI, DOJ, DHS, the Postal Inspection Service, and The Election Assistance Commission “invited” election officials from across the country to a briefing on “preparations” for the midterms. 

Secretaries of state and local officials run each state’s election. Not the president. While they might coordinate with their local U.S. Attorney(s) in advance of an election, a nationwide call like this is unprecedented, particularly in the absence of a credible, identified threat from a foreign country that would require, say, cyber intelligence coordination.

The call is being organized for February 25. No one seems to know precisely what it’s about. But Trump’s claim that majority Black/Democratic counties, like Fulton County, Georgia, aren’t fit to run elections, and they should be taken over by Republican interests, is a pretty good bet.

The email invite is signed off on by Kellie M. Hardiman, who identifies her role as “FBI Election Executive,” a position I have not heard of previously. As a career federal prosecutor and a U.S. Attorney for eight years during the Obama administration, and as someone whose responsibilities included election protection, I’m fairly familiar with DOJ’s internal architecture for this work. NBC reported that one state election official said that “No one has heard of this person — and we’re all wondering what an 'FBI Election Executive' is.”

NBC also reported that “An FBI spokesperson said in a statement Friday: ‘The Election Executive is not a new role. There have been designated executives in previous election cycles to take point on coordinating election related matters and speaking on behalf of the FBI.” 

This is not completely out of bounds. DOJ doesn’t get involved in deciding who won a specific election, but they do investigate claims of fraud (there have been exceptionally few successful prosecutions, and when they are brought, for the most part, they seem to involve fraud on behalf of Republican candidates). 

There are meetings among state and federal partners in advance of elections. But it feels different in a cycle where the president is openly seeking greater control and making false claims about fraud where elections are run by his political opponents. And most of DOJ’s election protection work, at least in Democratic administrations, involves pushing back against voter suppression (like this case). Those are civil cases and the FBI and other law enforcement agencies do not get involved in them.

Hardiman wrote to state election officials that the FBI and other federal agencies “would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss our preparations for the cycle, as well as updates and resources we can provide to you and your staff.” State officials are concerned.

NPR correspondent Miles Parks put it like this: “President Trump wanted a bigger role in local processes. Just two months into his second term, he signed an executive order aimed at adding new voting restrictions, for instance. Most of that has been blocked by the courts at this point. But he also laid off much of the election security staff at the Department of Homeland Security. And I was talking about all of that with the secretary of state of Minnesota, Steve Simon, who's a Democrat, and he said the idea of federal interference is on election officials' minds as they game plan out every scenario.”

Following the execution of a search warrant on election officials in Fulton County, Georgia, based on old, disproven claims of elections fraud, a bipartisan group of “more than a dozen election officials” told Politico: “they fear Trump is laying the groundwork to undermine results still months away.”

Chief among those concerns is the risk of federal troops or an executive branch agency like ICE being deployed to the polls, which could easily intimidate voters who have watched ICE indiscriminately arrest people and put them into deportation proceedings, only checking their immigration status after the fact (more here). But that is the sort of move that would be likely to provoke nationwide outrage. Don’t expect it to be the Trump administration’s only move.

Trump began issuing executive orders designed to make it more difficult for Americans to register and vote as soon as he took office. The SAVE Act is circulating in the Senate (we discussed it recently here). And the administration has been seeking states’ voter rolls, which could provide it with fodder for making wholesale challenges, and permitting private parties in states to do so too, forcing individual voters to go on the defensive and prove they are eligible to vote and disrupting state proceedings. That is most definitely not the kind of burden that should be imposed on Americans’ fundamental rights.

Trump has said that Atlanta and other cities with Democratic strongholds as seeing “horrible corruption on elections.” “The federal government should not allow that,” he said Tuesday. “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

Last April, a federal judge enjoined Trump from enforcing his executive order on voting. She wrote, “A president cannot make new law or devise new authority for himself—by executive order or otherwise. He may only wield those powers granted to him by Congress or by the Constitution.” She pointed out that “our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.”

Presidents do not get to dictate the rules in our elections. But to ensure this election is free and fair, it appears that state election officials, along with federal judges, will have to keep the president in check. They will have to keep him for usurping power that is not properly his, as he has done on so many other occasions. Do you know who your secretary of state (they have different titles in some states) is?

Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me, “In any other year, the invitation might seem innocuous, but in the context of Trump’s assault on the rule of law and threats to elections, the odd invitation raises concerns. I’ll be attending with skepticism.”

Here is a list of election officials in every state. If you aren’t already, get familiar with yours. And make sure they know you’ll be watching how they handle the meeting on February 25. Call them or send them a letter in the next day or two, letting them know that you know Donald Trump isn’t entitled to “nationalize” our elections and you expect them to uphold the law.

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We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Marco Rubio’s Imperialist Munich Speech Seen as a "Cause for Worry, Not Applause"

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s defense of Western colonialism and imperial power at the Munich Security Conference and the applause his remarks received from attendees were seen as deeply unsettling in the context of the Trump administration’s brazen trampling of international law, including the recent kidnapping of the president of a sovereign nation.

While Rubio gave lip service in his remarks to multilateral cooperation with Europe in what he called the global “task of renewal and restoration,” he made clear the US would carry out its agenda alone if needed and accused European allies of succumbing to a “climate cult,” embracing “free and unfettered trade,” and opening their doors to “unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies,” echoing the rhetoric of his boss, US President Donald Trump.

Rubio lamented the decline of the “great Western empires” in the face of “godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come”—and made clear that the Trump administration envisions a return to “the West’s age of dominance.”

“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” said Rubio. “We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.”

Attendees at the Munich conference—which notably did not include representatives of Latin America at a time when the Trump administration is embracing and expanding the Monroe Doctrine—gave Rubio a standing ovation: “Standing ovation for Rubio in Munich. Standing ovation for Netanyahu in Washington,” wrote Progressive International co-general coordinator David Adler, referring to the Israeli prime minister’s visit to the US capital last week. “We are ruled by a transatlantic clique of criminals and mid-wit minions who clap like seals when their white supremacy is laundered by the language of ‘Western values.’ Sick stuff.”

Critics viewed the US secretary of state’s speech—both the explicit words and its undertones—as a self-serving interpretation of the past and a dangerous vision of the future, and expressed alarm at the celebratory response from the Munich crowd.

Geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand called Rubio’s address “one of the most revisionist and imperialist speeches I’ve ever seen a senior American official make, and that’s saying something.”

“Basically the man is openly saying that the whole post-colonial order was a mistake and he’s calling on Europe to share the spoils of building a new one,” Bertrand wrote on social media. “When an imperial power is speaking to you of sentiments, of how much they like you and how they want to partner with you—the much weaker party—that’s cause for worry, not applause.”

Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Europe, compared Rubio’s address to US Vice President JD Vance’s openly hostile attack on European nations during his Munich speech last year.

“Rubio’s message was more sophisticated and strategic than Vance’s. But it was just as dangerous, if not more so, precisely because it lowered the transatlantic temperature and may have lulled Europe into a false sense of calm,” Tocci wrote in a Guardian op-ed on Monday. “As Benjamin Haddad, France’s Europe minister, said in Munich, the European temptation may be to press the snooze button once again.”

“If Europeans were comforted by a false sense of reassurance as they walked away from the packed Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich,” Tocci added, “they risk walking straight into the trap that MAGA America has laid for them.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

"The Framers did not imagine the sort of restraints necessary to contain a manipulative [pathological] narcissist"

When we reflect on our great presidents (e.g., George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the Roosevelts), the good ones (e.g., Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower), and even the poor ones (e.g., Herbert Hoover, James Buchanan), we can at least say they understood our basic constitutional framework. Even ones guilty of major legal, policy, or moral transgressions (e.g., Watergate, the Red Scare, Vietnam, the Iraq War) had some redeeming qualities and accomplishments. Until this one. Without sarcasm, many Americans wonder if we can get back to a time when a “merely bad” president was the worst we could expect. In other words, we shudder at the possibility that the floor for presidents been permanently and completely eradicated so that future Donald Trumps are possible if not likely. Plainly, we cannot rely on the discernment of the American people. They did elect the most despicable, corrupt, cruel, ignorant, and lawless president ever to hold office, knowing a great deal about what he intended to do. As much as we admire Alexander Hamilton, his observation in Federalist No. 68 turns out to be laughably, tragically wrong: The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.  Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.  It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. The Framers did not imagine the sort of restraints necessary to contain a manipulative [pathological] narcissist wielding an enormous propaganda apparatus and determined to break laws and norms. We need more protection than we have currently to prevent another Trump — or even a mild imitation of him. Some tools included in the Constitution (e.g., presidents chosen by electors) became a dead letter with the rise of political parties and partisan fervor. Frankly, removal of the president by impeachment or even via the 25th Amendment has become virtually impossible. Other tools have atrophied for lack of attention (e.g., an enforcement mechanism to prevent receipt of foreign emoluments). And an intellectually dishonest and partisan MAGA Supreme Court majority with an anti-originalist view of an all-powerful chief executive has demolished critical constraints on the presidency (e.g., broad criminal immunity). “Right-sizing” the presidency and putting in additional guardrails therefore should be top priorities. No single solution is going to stop malicious figures from an autocratic putsch, but we can make it much harder for such a figure to do real damage to our democracy, Ideally (and in keeping with the Framers’ intentions), we want a president, for example, whom foreign governments or domestic donors cannot buy. There are legislative fixes: Make it a crime to give or receive a foreign emolument of more than $25 in value (or a domestic emolument of any value). Alternatively, pass a law (with an enforcement mechanism) to make such transfers subject to civil forfeiture or a 100% tax. Congress could pass similar laws (with criminal, civil forfeiture, or tax penalties) requiring presidents to sell or put all business operations and investments in a blind trust before taking office — and, no, letting your sons run your company is not a blind trust.  If we are really fed up with financial corruption, constitutional amendments to reestablish presidential criminal liability and ban dark money could be pursued unless a reformed Supreme Court reverses Trump v. U.S. and Citizens United. Legislation with simple “no dictator stuff” could easily gain traction: No major White House renovations without congressional authorization, no naming any federal or quasi-federal organization or structure for a sitting president (make the Kennedy Center great again!), and no book/movie/rights deals for any president or spouse while in office. (The Framers would be aghast, no doubt, that such things were even contemplated.) There are many legislative fixes to curtail presidential unilateral power (e.g., war powers, emergency powers, rescission). But allocating the right for lawmakers or others to bring enforcement actions is essential. Likewise, reviving the Bivens Act to allow civil actions for individuals to recoup damages against any executive branch official could put teeth into presidential restraints. In addition, Congress needs a mechanism to enforce contempt findings that does not depend on enforcement by the administration it is holding in contempt. Moreover, voters, media and political parties need to rethink the way we evaluate presidential candidates. Grilling them on the specifics of policy/legislation is as useless as it is misleading. The issues will change, presidents will compromise when it comes to real legislation, and campaign promises will fade from memory. Instead, much more attention should be paid to foundational issues about democracy and values (e.g., Do immigrants have rights? Are treaties the law of the land?). We still may not get candid answers, but the responses to those sorts of questions (or hypotheticals about pardons, donors, and financial impropriety) would be a whole lot more revealing than asking about a 24-point plan for legislation that is unlikely to pass. It is frankly harder to disguise one’s deeply held beliefs (or lack thereof) than to toss out unrealistic political promises. No future president should ever have as much power and leeway for corruption and abuse as this one. Generally, shrinking presidential power, building up other branches, and imposing statutory and constitutional restraints on presidents should be no-brainers. Ultimately, getting candidates, parties, and voters to focus on character, judgment, and understanding of our Constitution might be the most helpful means of getting back to an era in which the worse we had to fear was a “C-” president. (And can we all agree no presidents older than 75?) The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts, enable our work, help with litigation efforts, and keep this opposition movement alive and engaged, please consider joining the fight by becoming a paid subscriber.

Photo: (Mathieu LEeMauff/iStock) 

"Why now rather than then"

A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, parents bonding with one partner and not another, values binding you to one culture and not another. 

Against this utter choice-lessness in the variables we each drew from the cosmic lottery — our pigments, our neurotransmitters, our outpost in space and in time — it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms. It is a salutary thought experiment to go through a single day imagining any one of those variables having fallen one one-thousandth of a degree elsewhere on the plane of possibility — suddenly, the person going through your day is not you. 

In her extraordinary manifesto for seeing more clearly, Iris Murdoch observed: "The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is."

For millennia, the whole of Eastern philosophy and myriad other ancient traditions have made the dissolution of that illusion — painful, perplexing, disorienting dissolution — the great achievement of existence. For those of who chanced by birth into the modern West, where the self-roils with its grandiose claims of authorship, to keep questioning the story of who we are — this handful of unchosen stardust on short-term loan from the universe — is an act of countercultural courage requiring exceptional devotion and discipline.

Long before probability theory, before the discovery of gravity and genetics and general relativity, before the overwhelm of two trillion galaxies housing innumerable worlds, the visionary Blaise Pascal, who didn’t live past forty but touched the epochs with his clarity of thought, modeled that courage by cutting through the veil of illusion with uncommon precision:

"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and am amazed that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then."

There is no reason for you to be here, to be you. But perhaps what is left in the wake of reason is love — the matter, the substance of us that over and over outweighs the antimatter of chance to make life tremble with aliveness. Like life itself, love is an affirmation of the improbable nested, always nested, in the possible.

“What will survive of us is love,” wrote Philip Larkin. No — love is simply how we survive the cosmic helplessness of being born ourselves.

-Maria Polova, Marginalian

Indeed, what really matters is not how fortunate we are to have lived, but how we live our lives each day and how we live with the most significant questions unanswered or unknowable... What is most important is that we pursue a life based on logic, reason, critical thinking, justice, solidarity, intellectual honesty and life-long learning; that we live our lives peacefully and with tolerance and mutual respect, and with compassion and love for one another, and that we oppose hatred, racism, bigotry, subjugation, misogyny, xenophobia, authoritarianism, hypocrisy and indifference...

-Glen Brown

Hartmann on the "cruel psychopaths in the trump regime"

 

— Corrupt adjudicated rapist brags that he’s going to rig the November elections to prevent millions of women and minorities from voting, even if Congress won’t help him. The two SAVE Acts the House has passed — which would prevent tens of millions of low-income people and as many as 80 million married women from voting this fall — are both languishing in the Senate where they’ll be the certain victims of a Democratic filibuster. 

As a result, Trump just posted to his Nazi-infested social media site: “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel.” Cornered rats are the most dangerous, and Trump knows how to read polls as well as anybody else. He’s getting increasingly frightened and thus increasingly dangerous. Stay alert and call your Democratic members of Congress (202-224-3121) to encourage them to stand up for our right to vote without challenges or interference.

— Convicted felon brags that he’s willing to destroy our grandchildren’s lives in exchange for a few hundred million dollars from the fossil fuel industry. Seriously. Trump gave a speech to a group of fossil fuel executives where he told them that if they’d help him win the 2024 election with big money, he’d do for them “anything you want.” They paid up and now we and our future generations are going to suffer. It’s hard to imagine anything more disgustingly self-centered, more pathetically transactional, or more fundamentally evil. 

Thursday, Trump announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing away with their scientific finding that greenhouse gasses harm human health, so virtually all regulation of those gases will soon be gone. This is a crime against our nation, our planet, and all life.

What’s even more shocking is the seeming lack of outrage coming from the bigwigs in the Democratic Party, who could have used this as a teaching moment that might even break through to Fox viewers. Tell the stories of the people who died in the fires in LA and Hawaii, the floods across the Midwest and South, the amped-up hurricanes, etc. 

Real people are really dying right now from climate change. Add to that the explosion in home insurance prices and the collapse of housing values in high-risk places, and the harms aren’t just measured in human lives but in trillions of dollars annually, as well. Not to mention the hundreds of billions in profits the fossil fuel industry is making and the absurd private-jet-and-luxury-yacht lifestyles of their CEOs and it’s a story tailor-made for savvy politicians.

— Cruel psychopaths in the Trump regime have figured out a new way to waste taxpayer dollars to make the lives of migrants miserable. They’re sending immigrants from America to countries they’ve never visited (often on continents they’ve never visited, particularly Africa) and handing them over to governments that don’t respect human rights and often engage in torture. 

It’s costing a fortune in your taxpayer dollars and seems to have no value other than delighting the sadists overseeing the program and the racists who make up the MAGA base. Senator Jean Shaheen and Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just released a horrific report detailing the gruesome practice. Every time you think this bunch of dime-store Nazis has hit a moral rock bottom they discover or invent a new low…

— One of Trump’s top allies and private-White-House-dinner guests is now calling for all American women to be imprisoned in the ICE Concentration Camps and only let out when he and his friends personally approve of them. Misogyny has always been at the core of fascism, and proud white supremacist and Trump fanboy Nick Fuentes is embracing it. 

The 27-year-old incel with over a million followers on Twitter, who brags he’s never had sex with a woman because his Catholicism prevents him from doing so before marriage, shared this sweet little message with the world this week: 

“Women get sent to the gulags first, obviously. Which women? All women. Every woman. Every woman and girl is sent to the gulags. We will determine who the good ones are after the fact. Well, what about the good ones? What about the trad ones? First of all, there are no trad ones or good ones. Second of all, we will determine which ones are acceptable after they’re all imprisoned. Then we will let them out.

“You have to do it because those are our political enemies. You want to know our number -- This is unironically just true. The number one political enemy in America is women. Straight up, I’m just telling you. I’m telling it like it is. People might say it’s Jews, it’s Democrats, it’s white liberals, it’s leftists, it’s the Chinese. Our number one political enemy is women because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man, everything. They have to be imprisoned.

“They are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate. They’re the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people. You know, when you -- I want you to understand something. When you’re sympathetic to poor people, you’re sympathetic to brown people because brown people are poor. OK? Not all poor people are brown, but most brown people are poor. 

“So, women are making us sympathetic to poor people, aka brown people. Women are making us sympathetic to George Floyd. Women are the reason that their fertility rate is low because they’re getting educated and they attack every man as a rapist and a pedophile and they’re henpecking and controlling all the men.

“So, just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women. And we’ll sort it out. We’ll find the good ones. They can prove themselves. Then we’ll let them go.

“So, they go to the gulag first. They go to the breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”

Sorry to inflict that on you, but it’s important that you know that tens of millions of young white American men agree with the sentiment, which Fuentes blasted to his followers and has since been repeatedly echoed throughout the so-called “manosphere.”

— The Trump Housing Crisis is now officially here. Sales of previously-owned homes tanked 8.4% last month over December, leading the National Association of Realtors chief economist, Lawrence Yun, to proclaim we’re in “a new housing crisis.” Bloomberg, meanwhile, reported: “Delinquency rates on loans ranging from mortgages to credit cards rose to 4.8% of all outstanding US household debt in the fourth quarter, the highest level since 2017, driven by rising defaults among low-income and young borrowers.” 

Last quarter, Seeking Alpha reports, “Outstanding student loan debt stood at $1.66 trillion, 9.6% of loans were more than 90 days delinquent, and one million borrowers more than 120 days past due had their loans transferred to the Department of Education’s Default Resolution Group.” I’ve been pointing out for several months now that every indicator I have access to — advertising revenue in the radio/TV business and Substack subscriber revenue — are down in a way that’s identical to previous severe recessions. While the Trump Labor Department is insisting things are rosy, they also have an obnoxious habit of presenting happy numbers and then revising them downward months later, after the news cycle has moved on. I smell a rat.

— A Congressman who examined the Trump/Epstein Files (why don’t we all start calling them that? After all, Trump’s name is in them more than a million times according to Congressman Swalwell) says there’s a report of allegations that Trump and Epstein raped and murdered a young girl. And contemporary news confirms that she was found dead. 

While this is entirely uncorroborated, that’s apparently because the FBI decided not to follow up on the whistleblower lead. Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) tweeted to Trump’s shoeshine girl Pam Bondi: “Dear [Attorney General Bondi]: Since you creepily spied on the unredacted Epstein files I read, you know I read this one. ‘Witness calls FBI’s [National Threat Operations Center] and reports girl, later found dead, told him Trump and Epstein raped her.’ DOJ NEVER INTERVIEWS WITNESS. When will DOJ interview this witness?” 

After this week’s pathetic performance before Congress, refusal to even look at the victims, and radical redactions to protect wealthy powerful men, nobody’s holding their breath. And what happened to the Republicans who were so outraged about the FBI “spying” on the members of Congress who were apparently conspiring with Trump to make January 6th happen? 

They were quite literally screaming about the Executive Branch spying on the Legislative Branch, what they claimed was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution. Suddenly they’re very, very quiet. I never, in my entire life, thought it would be possible that the majority of elected Republicans in Congress and an entire administration would do everything they can to protect criminals like Epstein and Maxwell while crapping on their victims. But here we are.

— Once again, we have evidence that DHS/ICE has lied about an American citizen they shot five times trying to kill her. Montessori School teaching assistant and US citizen Marimar Martinez was shot five times for honking her car’s horn at a blacked-out SUV filled with loser ICE thugs. The wannabe killer, agent Charles Exum, even posted a text message to his colleagues bragging: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” 

He was congratulated personally by both Bovino and Trump, according to press reports. The alleged justification was that her car had “bumped” the ICE vehicle, but her lawyer fought hard and finally, after weeks, got the body cam video released and it turns out they bumped her car before trying to shoot her to death. How is this happening in America?

— Crazy Alert! Bob Kennedy boasts that he’s “not scared” of germs because he “Used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.” If Putin directed Trump to kill as many Americans as possible, Trump couldn’t have done better than to put a former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of the nation’s public health. We’re now seeing mass outbreaks of deadly diseases, he just blocked a new flu vaccine that could save billions of lives in the event of a Bird Flu pandemic, and he’s changed our food recommendations to eat more heart attack- and stroke-causing animal products. 

This [idiot] lawyer with no medical or scientific training whatsoever cut the head off a dead whale and tied it to the roof of his car, picked up a dead bear cub for food and dumped it in Central Park, and got a brain worm, presumably from eating roadkill. Just the kind of guy you want advising your kids on public health…

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Vladyslav Heraskevych: There are things that are "more important than medals"

 

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — A Ukrainian athlete who was disqualified from the Winter Olympics on Thursday over his insistence on wearing a helmet honoring people killed in his country's war with Russia said he refused to back down because there are things that are "more important than medals.”

The International Olympic Committee said in a statement early Thursday that skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych, the Ukrainian flag bearer, was "not allowed to participate at Milano Cortina 2026 after refusing to adhere to the IOC athlete expression guidelines." A jury of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation made the decision, the IOC said.

Heraskevych told NBC News that the decision was "surreal." "I feel like I was treated unfairly. I was stripped out of opportunity to compete, and I don't understand why," he said.

The decision was announced shortly before Heraskevych was due to compete in the men’s skeleton competition, in which he was considered a legitimate medal contender.

He said he was already in the venue and had set up his sled for his race when he was notified, he was being disqualified. "I believe I am right in this case," he said. "For me to back down is betraying [the people pictured on the helmet]."

Heraskevych filed an application Thursday with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an independent body, challenging the decision by the federation jury.

The application seeks to nullify the jury's decision. He is arguing that "the exclusion is disproportionate, unsupported by any technical or safety violation and causes irreparable sporting harm to him," according to a media summary of the filing. He had said when announcing an intention to file the challenge that it would be a “miracle” to compete in these Games... 

-NBC News

"The International Olympic Committee choosing comfort over truth": an anonymous Pussy Riot member from Kiyv talks about the IOC banning Ukrainian athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych for wearing a helmet honoring fallen athletes. She says:

When international institutions claim neutrality but silence those who speak about war, they are not neutral, they are choosing comfort over truth.

We live with air raid sirens. We live in freezing winters with damaged infrastructure. We live with loss. And yet even in sport — a space that claims to stand for peace and humanity — Ukrainians are told how we are allowed to speak about our own tragedy.

What is more offensive: a helmet honoring victims of war — or the attempt to erase the word “war” itself?

Have you ever gone three days without a phone, electricity, or heat in your apartment at -17 Celsius? You should try it first and then try to be silent about it.

I've cried my eyes out, because I couldn't help animals, the elderly, and everyone who is now on our front lines defending our country. 

Slava Ukraine!