A Preview of Coming Attractions

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Impeaching Pete

John Hinderaker, PowerLine:

In a little over a year in office, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has achieved a series of military triumphs that have not, perhaps, been equaled since World War II: the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the arrest of Nicolas Maduro, and the air campaign against Iran’s regime. These missions have been flawlessly executed by Hegseth’s department, so naturally the Democrats want to impeach him.

The first articles of impeachment were filed in January by Michigan Congressman Shri Thanedar, but got little attention. A new, expanded set of articles was filed today. You can read the document here. Axios describes the articles here. The impeachment resolution is being introduced by Rep. Yassamin Ansari, not coincidentally the first Iranian-American elected to Congress. Co-sponsors include Reps. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), Dina Titus (D-Nev.), David Min (D-Calif.), Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.), Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.) and Sarah McBride (D-Del.).

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Hinderaker goes on to debunk and refute the specific charges, but they’re so specious that it’s almost not worth the bother; indeed, it’s precisely because the charges are so meritless that Hinderaker’s prediction is entirely, depressingly, believable:

I think everyone understands that impeachment is now a purely political act. Far from being guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, Secretary Hegseth has offended Democrats by disagreeing with them on policy and by scoring one brilliant success after another, thus making them look bad.

This impeachment effort isn’t going anywhere, but its filing is a reminder that if the Democrats take the House in November, as they almost certainly will, they will impeach President Trump and, probably, most members of his cabinet. They are that far gone in hate.

There's some dispute over the facts here, including whether he was acting as a private citien, off-duty, at the time, but it's Minneapolis, so ...

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Price cut after just 3 days

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21 Amherst Road, Riverside NoPo, from $2.150 million to $1,899,500. I’m no fan of 1961 split-levels, but I do approve of quick price adjustments when the market says “no”. The listing, by the way, says this is the property’s “first time on the market”. If so, gosh — there aren’t many such long-term ownerships in Greenwich, so good for them (or to the original owners’ original children, if that’s the case, and they took over occupancy at some point.)

Oh, it has nothing to do with a celebration of the 250th-year celebration of the founding of our racist nation, that's just coincidental

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Killjoys: CA Coastal Commission Nixes Long Beach 4th of July Fireworks for Ludicrous Reasons

The California Coastal Commission is notorious because it is manned by extremist environmentalists who would put the safety of an endangered mosquito above the needs of the residents of the Golden State. While its charter is noble — to protect California’s spectacular Pacific coastline — it is infamous for going above and beyond its duties.

Now, the Grinches are determined to take away joy this July 4th in Long Beach, a port city approximately 20 miles south of Los Angeles, as they’ve denied a fireworks permit. Apparently, they want people to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday by watching the clouds.

It might pollute the water, they say. Don’t tell them about the Tijuana sewage crisis, which officials have done nothing about for years, where billions of gallons of sewage and waste are being dumped into the Tijuana River in Mexico. That lovely flotilla then flows north into U.S. waters.

Sorry, patriotism not welcome here:

For the first time in 15 years, Long Beach's "Big Bang on the Bay" will be lacking its signature "bang" after the event's fireworks permit was denied by California state officials.

The annual Fourth of July celebration, which typically lit up the night sky over Alamitos Bay the night before Independence Day, will be without its famous fireworks show after the California Coastal Commission denied the permit, leaving city leaders toying with the idea of canceling the event altogether.

"Fireworks to me, it just seems like the best way," said John Morris [who owns a waterfront restaurant]. "Any other option is going to be hard to rally as many people as we rally."

Now, if it were any other holiday …

Socialism in the "Good Intentions "Drawer"

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That’s a reference to the vegetable bin at the bottom of your refrigerator, but Mamdani’s given it new meaning.

Stephen Green adds, “If you’re going to spend $30 million just to not open one grocery store for three years — assuming no delays! — then the money isn’t going to a grocery store.”

Yup.

CNN has a new “expert” (I do like the description, “crisis actor”, and he's a doozy

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This has been a long running story, yet the FDA keeps funding usele$$ drugs to "cure" it

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What’s the deal with Alzheimer’s disease and amyloid?

“For decades, scientists have concentrated on what now looks to be a blind alley.”

They focused on it because that’s where the money lay, but I’ve been reading reports of the flaws of the so-called plaque theory of the disease — many scientists were theorizing that the plaques were a symptom, not the cause — for at least a decade, but (your) money keeps rolling in.

Tiny excerpt here from a lengthy article explaining the problem:

Many scientists were outraged by the approval [A “disgraceful decision:” Researchers blast FDA for approving Alzheimer’s drug] Even the FDA’s own advisers and statisticians didn’t think the drug should be approved.and their outrage looked justified once we saw how the drug would be marketed: with a cognitive test that no one could pass. A congressional inquiry into aducanumab’s approval found it was “rife with irregularities.” But at $65,000 per patient per year, the drug represented a potential $18 billion-a-year revenue stream for Biogen.

Aducanumab was approved by the FDA in June 2021. But by early July, the regulator had already narrowed the set of people it would allow the drug to be given to, restricting it to just patients with a mild form of the disease. Biogen ended up losing money on it and removed the drug from the market in January 2024.

But only so it could concentrate on another amyloid-β-targeting antibody, this one developed with a biotech company called Eisai. This therapy, called lecanemab, was half the price of aducanumab, at $26,500 per year, and it got the nod from the FDA in 2023. There were plenty of questions about the approval because, yet again, there was very little data indicating that patients were getting any better. And there were still nasty side effects; three patients died from brain swelling and hemorrhaging.

Another antibody targeting amyloid-β, called donanemab, made headlines in 2023 when its maker, Eli Lilly, published trial data that claimed to slow the progression of the disease “by about 35 percent in the early stages.” Again, this came with the risk of severe side effects like brain swelling and bleeding. Those side effects may have been the only way to tell someone was on the drug, given that it provided extremely mild cognitive benefits.

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The Amyloid Mafia

We would almost certainly know a lot more about those other potential causes had it not been for the so-called Amyloid Mafia. Scientists aren’t immune to groupthink, and the people responsible for deciding who got research grants and who didn’t have not been at all receptive to proposals that investigate non-amyloid mechanisms.

“You were just lucky when you weren’t beaten up by the amyloid-β or tau people if you would mention immunology,” said Michael Heneka, a neuroinflammation specialist interviewed by Nature in 2023. (Tau is another Alzheimer ’s-associated protein.)

Speaking to American Public Media, the former director of Alzheimer’s research at the National Institute of Aging said, “It became gradually an infallible belief system. So everybody felt obligated to pay homage to the idea without questioning. And that’s not very healthy for science when scientists… accept an idea as infallible. That’s when you run into problems.”

To make matters worse, it turned out that much of that confidence in amyloid-β as the one true cause was built on fake data.

That landmark 2006 Nature paper that claimed to show that a specific form of amyloid-β was the culprit causing the disease? It was retracted in 2024 after it emerged that the authors had faked some of the data, copy-pasting images of protein detections. In another case, a scientist at City University of New York was indicted last year for falsifying data that helped support the ideas behind an Alzheimer’s drug being developed by Cassava Sciences. (For a more comprehensive look at the Amyloid Mafia, check out Charles Piller’s work.) Sadly, this kind of scientific misconduct is more common than we’d like and can be hard to detect before publication.

Those FDA drug approvals have also been tainted. In addition to the aforementioned congressional investigation that found irregularities, the head of FDA’s neuroscience office was forced to step down in 2023 after it was found that he had an inappropriately close relationship with Biogen.

Despite this litany of clinical failures and research misconduct, it would be a stretch to say that the amyloid hypothesis is dead. Only one of the five FDA-approved therapies is independent of the amyloid pathway, and while work is conducted on other areas, amyloid-β research remains the lion’s share.