#spike cohen

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

Spike Cohen, one of the most popular Libertarians on social media, recently debated gun control advocate David Hogg. We spoke with Spike about the debate, and he shared one of the most misconstrued perspectives in the entire discussion.

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/guest-spike-cohen-why-assange-is-free-trumps-5-d-chess/id1439014279?i=1000660801816

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7KktLs8WSzmXwl3zEG03Zm

[peer2peace]

Embracing Individuality: Breaking Free from Fear and Division

Each one of us is unique, a miracle of statistical improbability with thoughts, opinions, feelings, and life experience that differs from every other person who has ever lived. At the same time, we are all tied together as members of the human race, with a communal bond in our shared individuality. We are bombarded by messaging designed to make us feel anxious, powerless, afraid, and…

[brightlotusmoon]

[toakatdot]

Five Celebrities Who Are Mets Fans

Once upon a time, in the land of New York, there was a beloved baseball team called the Mets. They were known for their loyal fans and enthusiastic spirit (Because Fuck the Yankees!). The Mets had an interesting following, not just among the average Joe, but also among celebrities. Yes, you read that right. Celebrities are not just fans of the glitz and glamour, but they also take their sport…

[mariacallous]

Updated vaccines against Covid-19 are coming, just as hospitalizations and deaths due to the virus are steadily ticking up again.

Today, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized new mRNA booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer, and a panel of outside experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to recommend the shots to everyone in the United States ages 6 months and older. Once Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Mandy Cohen signs off on the recommendations and the vaccines are shipped, people can start getting the boosters.

The recommendation is projected to prevent about 400,000 hospitalizations and 40,000 deaths over the next two years, according to data presented at the meeting by CDC epidemiologist Megan Wallace.

This year’s mRNA vaccines are different from the 2022 booster in a key way. Last year’s shot was a bivalent vaccine, meaning it covered two variants: the original one that emerged in China in 2019, plus the Omicron subvariant BA.5, which was circulating during much of 2022. This fall’s booster drops the original variant, which is no longer circulating and is unlikely to return. It targets just the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which was dominant throughout much of 2023.

Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines work by introducing a tiny piece of genetic material called messenger RNA, or mRNA, that carries instructions for making SARS-CoV-2’s characteristic spike protein. Once it is injected, cells in the body use those instructions to temporarily make the spike protein. The immune system recognizes the protein as foreign and generates antibodies against it. Those antibodies stick around so that if they encounter that foreign invader again, they will mount a response against it.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the virus has acquired new mutations in its spike protein and elsewhere. These mutations result in new variants and subvariants that diverge from the original virus. When enough mutations accumulate, these new versions can more easily evade the antibodies created by previous vaccine doses or infections.

The constantly evolving nature of the virus is the reason health regulators decided last year to update the original mRNA vaccines, which were designed against the version of the virus that first appeared in 2019. This year, once again, the virus has changed enough to warrant an updated booster.

In June, an advisory committee to the FDA recommended that this fall’s booster be a monovalent vaccine—targeting only the then-dominant XBB.1.5 subvariant.

At that meeting, committee members reviewed evidence suggesting that the inclusion of the original variant may hamper the booster’s effectiveness against newer offshoots. “The previous bivalent vaccine contained the ancestral spike and thus skewed immune responses to the old spike,” says David Ho, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University whose research, which is not yet peer-reviewed, was among the evidence the FDA panel reviewed. “This is what we call immunological imprinting, and it results in lack of immune responses to the new spike.” He thinks taking out the old variant should optimize the immune response.

But over the past few months, even newer Omicron offshoots have arrived. Currently, EG.5.1, or Eris, is the dominant one in the United States, United Kingdom, and China. Meanwhile, a variant called BA.2.86, or Pirola, has been detected in several countries. Pirola has raised alarm bells because it has more than 30 new mutations compared to XBB.1.5.

Even though the new boosters were formulated against XBB.1.5, they’re still expected to provide protection against these new variants. “The reason is, while antibodies are important in protection against mild disease, the critical part of the immune response that’s important for protecting against severe disease is T cells,” says Paul Offit, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee.

These cells are a different part of the immune response. Unlike antibodies, which neutralize a pathogen by preventing it from infecting cells, T cells work by eliminating the cells that have already been invaded and boosting creation of more antibodies. Both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccines produce long-lasting T cells in addition to antibodies.

It’s why, Offit says, when the Omicron wave hit in late 2021 and peaked in January 2022, the US didn’t see a dramatic increase in hospitalizations and deaths even as cases rose significantly: People’s T cells kicked into gear, even when their antibodies didn’t recognize the Omicron variant.

“In some ways,” says Offit, when it comes to vaccine booster development, “it almost doesn’t matter what we pick to target” because the coronavirus has yet to evolve away from T cell recognition. “Everything works.”

Scientists think T cells are able to protect against severe Covid because they’re recognizing parts of the virus that have remained unchanged throughout the pandemic. “I suspect that as we continue to vaccinate, there are some conserved regions [of the virus],” says Jacqueline Miller, Moderna’s head of infectious diseases. “So even with the accumulation of mutations, we’re still building on previous immunity.”

People who have hybrid immunity—that is, have had a Covid infection and have also been vaccinated—seem to have the best immune responses to new variants, she says, which suggests that previous exposure shapes and improves immune responses to new variants. Preliminary studies show that antibodies generated by previous infections and vaccinations should be capable of neutralizing Pirola.

Earlier this month, Moderna issued a press release saying that clinical trial data showed that its updated booster generated a strong immune response against Pirola, as well as the more prevalent Eris variant.

In a statement to WIRED, Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts said the company continues to closely monitor emerging variants and conduct tests of its updated monovalent booster against them. Data presented at Tuesday’s CDC meeting showed that Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated booster elicited a strong neutralizing antibody response against both Eris and Pirola.

The FDA expects that Covid-19 vaccines will continue to be updated on an annual basis, unless a completely new variant emerges that requires a different approach. “We will always be a little behind the virus,” says Ho. “In this instance, we won’t suffer too much, but that might not be the case going forward. Surveillance is imperative.”

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive (Daily updates!)

mRNA vaccines and infection miss the mark with your long-lived plasma cells (Aka the library of the immune system). That means you need to 1. keep up to date on your mRNA shots for best protection 2. switch to a protein-based shot (such as novavax) if you can. The protein delivery method seems to not have this same issue with long immune memory.

By Jon Cohen

Neither vaccinations nor immunity from infections seem to thwart SARS-CoV-2 for long. The frequency of new infections within a few months of a previous bout or a shot is one of COVID-19’s most vexing puzzles. Now, scientists have learned that a little-known type of immune cell in the bone marrow may play a major role in this failure.

The study, which appeared last month in Nature Medicine, found that people who received repeated doses of vaccine, and in some cases also became infected with SARS-CoV-2, largely failed to make special antibody-producing cells called long-lived plasma cells (LLPCs). “That’s really, really interesting,” says Mark Slifka, an immunologist at the Oregon Health & Science University who was not involved with the work. The study authors say their finding may indicate a way to make better COVID-19 vaccines: by altering how they present the spike surface protein of SARS-CoV-2 to a person’s immune cells.

Durability is an age-old bugaboo of vaccine designers. Some vaccines, particularly ones made from weakened versions of viruses, can protect people for decades, even life. Yet others lose effectiveness within months. “We really haven’t overcome this challenge,” says Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale University immunologist who is developing a nasal COVID-19 vaccine she hopes can be given often enough to get around the durability problem.

Just how long a shot can protect against SARS-CoV-2 is hard to assess because variants of the virus, able to evade existing immunity, frequently emerge. And new infections muddle attempts to assess vaccine durability because they provide a “boost” that keeps immunity from waning. Multiple immune actors also provide protection, including antibodies, T cells, and natural killer cells.

To get a clearer picture, the new study examined LLPCs, which are responsible for durable immunity to some other viruses. These cells, the offspring of B cells, primarily reside in the bone marrow. For some viruses, vaccination or infection generate LLPCs that can survive for decades, steadily producing “neutralizing antibodies” that can thwart new infections.

But not so with SARS-CoV-2, the new work indicates. Emory University immunologists Frances Eun-Hyung Lee, Doan Nguyen, and their colleagues enrolled 19 people who agreed to have their marrow aspirated, a procedure that carries little risk but can be painful because it means piercing bone. All had received between two to five doses of messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccines—which code for SARS-CoV-2’s spike—during the preceding 3 years. Five reported having had COVID-19, as well. The study subjects had also been vaccinated recently against influenza and had booster shots for tetanus, a bacterial disease.

Lee and her colleagues found that nearly all participants had LLPCs in their bone marrow that secreted antibodies against tetanus and flu. But only one-third had plasma cells generating the same defense against SARS-CoV-2. Even in those subjects, just 0.1% of the antibodies generated by their LLPCs were specific for SARS-CoV-2, an order of magnitude less than for tetanus and flu. “The paper is very informative,” Iwasaki says.

An earlier study of bone marrow from 20 people who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 but never vaccinated against it also found that they were “deficient” in LLPCs specific to SARS-CoV-2 compared with those for tetanus. The new results “were really consistent with what we found,” says Mohammad Sajadi of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, whose team reported the data in the 25 July issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases. “The big question is why?”

SARS-CoV-2’s surface features may offer an answer, Lee and her co-authors say. LLPCs emerge after “naïve” B cells encounter a virus or a piece of it, such as the spike protein. As B cells mature, they make more refined antibodies that better bind to the invader. After the initial infection, memory B cells continue to patrol the blood and a subset differentiates into plasma cells. Some of those cells migrate to the bone marrow, which provides safe haven for their long-term antibody production.

B cells carry Y-shaped receptors that attach to viral surface proteins when they identify a pathogen. If both branches of the Y bind to the same pathogen proteins, they trigger a phenomenon called “cross-linking,” Which spurs B cells to transform into LLPCs. But electron microscopy of SARS-CoV-2 shows its spikes are about 25 nanometers apart, too distant for a single B cell receptor to readily bind to two at once.

Spike doesn’t just appear on the virus itself; it also protrudes from infected cells and cells stimulated by mRNA vaccines. Electron micrographs don’t show the proteins and their spacing, but immunologists suspect the SARS-CoV-2 molecules are widely spaced on these cells, as well. As a result, Lee and her co-authors suggest, B cells don’t become cross-linked, and LLPCs don’t develop.

Other kinds of vaccines might present spike more effectively. Slifka points to an approved vaccine against human papillomavirus, which consists of a “viruslike particle” (VLP) made from surface proteins of that pathogen. Those proteins self-assemble into something that resembles a soccer ball. “That’s a very rigid structure with great spacing and it induces incredibly durable antibody responses,” Slifka says.

Martin Bachmann, an immunologist at the University of Bern, has argued that VLPs for SAR-CoV-2 could space spike molecules more closely—about 5 nanometers apart—than the virus itself. “I am personally convinced that viruslike particles are the best platform,” says Bachmann, who published his proposal in a 2021 npj Vaccines paper.

Given the dominance of current shots, bringing a new one to market won’t be easy. Indeed, Medicago made a spike-based VLP vaccine for COVID-19 that regulators in Canada authorized for use in February 2022, but the company stopped making it a year later because it lacked a market and went out of business.

The Novavax COVID-19 vaccine approved in the United States and some other countries uses insect cells to produce spikes that link together and form “rosettes,” which might offer tighter spacing of the protein and therefore durability benefits, but Bachmann doubts the rosettes work as well as VLPs. “Such poorly organized structures are clearly inferior to highly organized surfaces,” he says.

Lee would like to study the bone marrow of Novavax recipients for the long-lived plasma cells, “but there weren’t a large number, and it’s very hard to get patients to donate marrow,” she says.

Other COVID-19 vaccines in development use nanoparticles that display tightly spaced portions of spike. Neil King, a University of Washington biochemist whose team has developed one such COVID-19 vaccine now in human trials, says they do not have data on LLPCs or durability. “Spacing definitely matters, but it’s very difficult to set up controlled experiments,” King says.

Structural biologist Pamela Bjorkman at the California Institute of Technology, who has a similar nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine in development, is more skeptical that spacing has a significant impact on vaccine’s durability. Influenza virus has tightly spaced surface proteins, she notes, and infection with it doesn’t lead to durable immunity.

Nguyen, however, thinks his team’s sobering findings require follow-up. “The bad news is the failure of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines themselves—with or without natural infections—to induce LLPCs in the bone marrow,” he says. “The good news is this failure itself provides a research opportunity to find a way to change the fate of short-lived vaccines.”

[evermore-grimoire]

The Evermore Grimoire: Slayers

India Cohen was called as a Slayer in 1993 while she was living in Japan where her father, a submarine commander, was stationed. Together with her Watcher, named Christopher (Kit) she traveled all over Japan slaying vampires. India witnessed Spike and Drusilla during this time, but they never encountered India directly. Over a few years, India and her watcher, fell in love, but had to keep it a secret from the Watchers Council. He brought her a dog, which she then named Mariposa. In 1996, India and her family returned to America and went to California. There, wanderer mummies attacked and tried to steal India's soul. India fended them off, but they captured her Watcher and Mariposa. India sacrificed herself so that she could save her only family. The Wanderer killed India and released Kit and her dog. It was her death that then awakened the Slayer, Buffy Summers.

[amagi2000]

"Chevron Deference" Struck Down by SCOTUS

Rolling Back the Regulatory State

_______________________________________________

For those who don't understand what Chevron Deference is, and why SCOTUS ended it, here's the long and short of it:

A family fishing company, Loper Bright Enterprises, was being driven out of business, because they couldn't afford the $700 per day they were being charged by the National Marine Fisheries Service to monitor their company.

The thing is, federal law doesn't authorize NMFS to charge businesses for this. They just decided to start doing it in 2013.

Why did they think they could get away with just charging people without any legal authorization?

Because in 1984, in the Chevron decision, the Supreme Court decided that regulatory agencies were the "experts" in their field, and the courts should just defer to their "interpretation" of the law.

So for the past 40 years, federal agencies have been able to "interpret" laws to mean whatever they want, and the courts had to just go with it.

It was called Chevron Deference, and it put bureaucrats in charge of the country.

It's how the OHSA was able to decide that everyone who worked for a large company had to get the jab, or be fired.

No law gave them that authority, they just made it up.

It's how the ATF was able to decide a piece of plastic was a "machine gun".

It's how the NCRS was able to decide that a small puddle was a "protected wetlands".

It's how out-of-control agencies have been able to create rules out of thin air, and force you to comply, and the courts had to simply defer to them, because they were the "experts".

Imagine if your local police could just arrest you, for any reason, and no judge or jury was allowed to determine if you'd actually committed a crime or not. Just off to jail you go.

That's what Chevron Deference was.

It was not only blatantly unconstitutional, it caused immeasurable harm to everyone.

Thankfully, it's now gone.

We haven't even begun to feel the effects of this decision in the courts. It will be used, for years to come, to roll back federal agencies, and we'll all be better off for it.

And that's why politicians and corporate media are freaking out about it.

- Spike Cohen

@RealSpikeCohen

[coraniaid]

I know India Cohen is a character who exists in the sort-of-canon tie-in books that were being published while the show was still on the air, but I think it's a shame that we never had any sort of flashback to or mention of the Slayer immediately before Buffy on the show (whether that was India herself or if they invented somebody else).

Was Buffy never at all curious about her predecessor? Even before meeting Kendra or Faith we know Buffy wondered a bit about what would happen if she was killed ("I know the drill: one Slayer dies, next one's called. Wonder who she is."), and we know she looks at the past Watcher's diaries and talks to Spike about the Slayers he killed. So then why the lack of curiosity about the girl whose death directly led to Buffy's own calling? What better place to start learning about what it means to be a Slayer than from her?

And was there nobody that previous Slayer knew who might have crossed paths with the Scooby Gang in the present day? If Buffy had died for good in Prophecy Girl, Angel and Giles and the rest of the Buffy's friends wouldn't have just stopped fighting evil on the Hellmouth entirely. Eventually, they'd have met Kendra (who would still have come to town as she does in What's My Line?) too. If Kendra had died, maybe they'd have met Faith too. Nikki Wood had a Watcher who mourned her and a son who grew up to avenge her. Didn't the Slayer before Buffy have anybody like that?

Imagine some vampire or demon or monster of the week showing up in Sunnydale because they have unfinished business with "the Slayer" and they've finally been able to track her down, only to learn that the Slayer they're looking for isn't Buffy but somebody long dead. Imagine an episode in Season 7 where we at first think we're seeing another Potential being attacked by agents of the First, only for her to reveal herself as the Slayer and the show to admit that this is a flashback to the distant past of 1994 or 1995. Imagine Buffy having to finish something that earlier Slayer started; getting a sense of what it must be like to be Kendra or Faith after spending time with people who remember the girl who died so that Buffy come become the Chosen One.

I mean, I sort of understand why the show never did this: it would be kind of depressing and involve introducing a lot new characters for a single episode (which is something the show really shied away from doing after the first three seasons). I know they probably left that to the expanded universe material for a reason.

It just feels a little strange that, watching the show, you could almost convince yourself that Nikki Wood was the last Slayer before Buffy (and indeed, that would have been a lot more consistent with the show's stated premise that there is exactly one Slayer "in every generation" than the later take that a new Slayer is called the instant the last one dies turned out to be).

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

We recently asked Spike Cohen, one of the most popular Libertarians in the world, who he thought were the 3 most important Libertarians in the world. Any guesses?

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/guest-spike-cohen-why-assange-is-free-trumps-5-d-chess/id1439014279?i=1000660801816

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7KktLs8WSzmXwl3zEG03Zm

[cishetlessfashion]

Andro/masc dark academia tradgoth Leonard Cohen esc bisexual trans man fashion with no skirts or dresses for anon Vintage leather jacket Skull and raven patch Trans bodies are holy enamel pin Black corduroy jacket Labradorite and bones necklace Bisexual lighting fangs pin Black spike pins PVC tie Glittery black sweater Teeth spike earrings

[brightlotusmoon]

Answer to Why are you a Libertarian? by Ke'Aun

"I feel like I’ve spent a long time insulting Libertarians, so I thought it might be a good idea to explain why I’m Libertarian… ish."

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

La liste des stars de la musique, du cinéma et de la télévision qui ont soutenu Kamala : Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift, Jon Bon Jovi, Tyler Perry, Bruce Springsteen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Beyoncee, George Clooney, Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand, David Letterman, Jennifer Lopez, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Julia Roberts, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Tessa Thompson, Bryan Tyree Henry, Scarlet Johanson, Robert Downey, Jr., Don Cheadle, Mark Ruffalo, Paul Bettany, Chris Evans, Dania Guria, Ben Stiller, Andy Cohen, Harrison Ford, Jack Black, Billie Eilish, Anne Hathaway, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Porter, Jennifer Lawrence, Eminem, Jason Bateman, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba, Patton Oswalt, Emmy Rossum, Glenn Close, Kumail Nanjiani, Jason Alexander, Kevin Smith, Steven Colbert, Larry David, Morgan Freeman, Cher, Nick Offerman, Michael Keaton, Jeff Bridges, Josh Bag, Sean Aston, Bradley Whitford, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Kelly, Paul Schreer, Misha Collins, Mark Hamill, Lance Bass, Josh Groban, Matt Damon, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Will Ferrel, Billy Eichner, Alicia Keys, Usher, Dave Bautista, Jimmy Kimmel, membrii formației Mumford & Sons, John Legend, Pink, Maren Morris, Keenan Thompson, Lil John, Eva Longoria, Mindy Kaling, Tony Goldwyn, D.L. Hughley, Lizzo, Martin Sheen, Sigourney Weaver, George Lopez, Howard Stern, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Marc Anthony, Sam Elliot, Keegan Michael Key, John Stamos, Ed Helms, Ken Jeong, Jon Hamm, Cecily Strong, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz, Rosie O' Donnel, Kathy Griffin, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Anthony Anderson, Sally Field, Rob Reiner, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julianne Moore, Cynthia Nixon, George Takei, Mia Farrow, Alyssa Milano, Sandra Bernhard, John Cleese, Michael Ian Black, Piper Perabo, Stephen King, Michael Moore, Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, Marisa Hargitay, Sheryl Lee Ralph, GloRilla, Padma Lashmi, Matthew Modine, Aubrey Plaza, Fat Joe, Christina Aquilera, Dick Van Dyke, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, LeBron James, Jennifer Aniston, Bad Bunny, Ariana Grande, Ricky Martin, Chappel Roan, Martha Stewart, Steph Curry, Sara Bareilles, Olivia Rodrigo, Tina Knowles, Shonda Rhimes.

📍Les journaux nationaux et les chaînes de télévision qui ont soutenu Kamala : CBS, NBC, MSNBC, abc, CNN, New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, Las Vegas Sun, The Philadephia Inquirer, Rolling Stone, Daily Herald, Times Union, Newsday, Lincoln Journal Star, Vogue, The Republican, The Sun Chronicle, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Observer et d’autres plus petites.

[rhyliethelovelycaterfly]

Goth Kids In Wonderland

Cast

Goth Kids And Goth Karen McCormick As Alice

Monomi As White Rabbit

Mike "Vampir" Makowski As Mad Hatter

Mikenaomipete As March Hare

Jojo As Dormouse

Naomi As Cheshire Cat

Stella Goetia As Red Queen/Queen Of Hearts

Andrealphus Goetia As King Of Hearts

Striker As Stayne A.k.a Knave Of Hearts

Huggy Wuggy And Kissy Missy As Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum

Holly Makowski As Dodo Bird

Pomni As Mama Bird

Baba Chops As The Caterpiller/Absolem

Maggie Mako As Walrus

Rabie Baby As Carpenter

Ed As Bill The Lizard

Clarice Richards As Hamish

Frowny Fox As Jabberwocky

Gloink Queen As Bandersnatch

Stolas Goetia As White King

And

King Julien As Time (Same Actor Sacha Baron Cohen)

Naomi, Jojo And Mikenaomipete Belongs To @naomilumintang

Goth Kids, Karen McCormick And Mike "Vampir" Makowski Belongs To Comedy Central Created By Trey Parker And Matt Stone

Ed Belongs To Cartoon Network Studios Created By Danny Antonucci

Pomni And Gloink Queen Belongs To Glitch Production Created By Gooseworx

Stolas, Stella, Andrealphus And Striker Belongs To Spindlehorse Toons Created By Vivienne "Vivziepop" Medrano

Frowny Fox Belongs And Created By Gametoons

Baba Chops, Rabie Baby, Maggie Mako, Huggy Wuggy And Kissy Missy Belongs And Created Mob Games

Monomi Belongs To Spike Chunsoft Co Created By Kazutaka Kodaka

King Julien Belongs And Created By Dreamworks Animation

2010 Alice In Wonderland Was Created By Walt Disney Company Directed By Tim Burton

[mightyflamethrower]

As Trump continues to show leads in critical swing states, as various lawfare-inspired cases against him seem to the public to be more persecutions than prosecutions, and as Joe Biden appears daily more incoherent and lost, the left on spec has resorted to warning the nation about all the supposedly catastrophic consequences of a future Trump presidency.

Ironically, the left seems oblivious to the reality that one reason Trump leads Biden in the polls is precisely because voters can compare the four-year record of the prior Trump presidency to Biden’s last 40 months.

Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that Trump will conspire with oil executives to spike gasoline prices. But even after Biden drained the strategic petroleum reserve before the 2022 midterms and is now again doing the same as the 2024 election approaches, gas prices have averaged only one-third cheaper than under Trump.

Trump tried to top off the reserve but was blocked by Democrats in Congress. Nevertheless, he left Biden a nearly full reservoir of 638 million barrels (about 90 percent full), which Biden has now drained by some 270 million barrels to the present 51 percent full—and the levels are falling further as voting nears.

We are warned that 77-year-old Trump looks haggard after his long hours in court. He seems sleepy, we are told. He has aged terribly, the media tell us. But polls show that concern over Biden’s dementia greatly outweighs normal worry over septuagenarian candidate Trump.

Why would any sane pro-Biden handler bring up Trump’s supposed gait or occasional forgotten word when that only reminds the public of the contrast with Biden, whose speeches seem delivered in something other than English and whose transcripts must be heavily edited to airbrush away his incoherence?

We are told that Trump will increase racial tensions. Almost daily, blacks and Hispanics are warned that Trump is a racist—even as polls show that he may well receive the highest percentage of minority votes by any Republican in modern history and has some chance of winning outright the Hispanic vote. Oddly, the media is now attacking minorities on the Marxist principle of false consciousness, as if they are deluded into voting against themselves rather than being perceptive critics of the Biden disaster of high inflation, green mania, a deluge of illegal aliens, and loss of deterrence abroad.

It was not Trump, but Biden, who, during the last election cycles, called one African-American journalist a “junkie” and warned another podcaster, “You ain’t black,” if he voted for Trump. And during his presidency, on occasion, Biden has referred to black subordinates as “boy,” uses the ossified term “Negro,” and has a long history of racist drivel and smears, from “put y’all back in chains” to referencing Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” presidential candidate to proudly reminding us that his home state of Delaware was once a “slave state.”

As Trump’s polls climbed and the Fani Willis persecution was sidetracked by her own false testimonies, conflicts of interest, and the hiring of her unqualified clandestine paramour, hysterical cries mounted that a reelected Trump would use the powers of government to go after his enemies.

As Jack Smith’s federal indictment became calcified over issues of presidential immunity, his failed efforts to ram through the prosecution before the election, and his office lying over tampering with evidence seized at Mar-A-Lago, tired warnings of Trump’s weaponization to come of the bureaucracy mounted even more.

Now that the jury is out in the Alvin Bragg fiasco and his star witness, Michael Cohen, a convicted liar, has likely again perjured himself and admitted to stealing $60,000 from the Trump organization, Trumpophobia has further peaked.

In other words, the more evidence mounts that Trump’s enemies have manipulated the court system in the manner that they previously impeached him twice, tried him as a private citizen in the Senate, sought to remove him from state ballots, rounded up ex-intelligence officers to lie about the authentic Hunter Biden laptop on the eve of the 2020 presidential debate, and were exposed concocting the Russian collusion yarn by hiring a foreign national in the 2016 campaign, paradoxically, the more the left-wing media warns America that a President Trump would do exactly what they have been doing by emulating their weaponization of the courts, the bureaucracy, and the Congress.

It gets stranger still.

The left warns the country that Trump will deport some or many of the 10 million illegal aliens that Joe Biden and his impeached Homeland Security director Alejandro Mayorkas have deliberately welcomed in.

Consider the logic: the current president destroyed a once-secure border and, for political purposes, illegally rendered immigration law enforcement null and void. But we are still supposed to fear his successor, who would resecure the border, return millions of recently crossed illegal aliens to their countries of origin, and restore the sanctity of federal law. In Orwellian fashion, the Biden administration is now suing exasperated states that are doing their part to help enforce immigration laws that Biden has deliberately shredded.

The absurdity extends to foreign policy. Team Biden and the media are issuing warnings here and abroad that another Trump presidency would tear apart the global order.

Really? Vladimir Putin has invaded neighboring nations in three of the last four administrations, but did not only during the Trump 2017-2020 years. Why?

Before October 7, even Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan preened that his Middle East portfolio was “quieter than in two decades”—but only after Trump’s destroyed ISIS, took out the terrorist Iranian general Soleimani, ended the disastrous Iran deal, cut off aid to Hamas, designated the Houthi terrorists, crafted the Abraham Accords, pledged full support for Israel, our only democratic ally in the Middle East, and achieved U.S. oil independence.

In contrast, Putin invaded Ukraine and may well absorb much of its eastern half. The U.S. suffered its greatest military humiliation of the last half century in fleeing from Kabul and handing over billions of dollars in weapons to the terrorist Taliban, abandoning our NATO-allied forces, sympathetic Afghans, and American contractors.

Hamas killed more Jews in a single day than any since the Holocaust. A full-scale war rages in Gaza. Hezbollah has displaced thousands of Israelis with its daily attacks. And for the first time in history, Iran has attacked in force the Israeli homeland.

China, with impunity, sent a spy balloon across the continental US. Some 25,000 Chinese male illegal aliens mysteriously barged into the U.S. And China has helped kill 100,000 Americans a year through its fentanyl exports to the Mexican cartels.

Given all that, are we supposed to worry that “sharp as a knife” Biden’s disastrous foreign policy will be ruined by a return to the peaceful record of the earlier Trump presidency?

So, what is Trumpophobia? The syndrome displays a number of symptoms.

One, the left always projects its sins onto its opponents. It accuses Trump of doing precisely what it has done, as a way of avoiding blame for its self-inflicted disasters. And the left so vehemently projects because it knows what it would do if it were Trump and was treated as he has been by them.

Two, desperate Democrats are scrambling to find some bizarre way to depose both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, especially should Biden have a disastrous, historic preconvention June presidential debate. As a result, the 2024 campaign has never been about comparison of 2017-2020 to 2021-2024. But rather, it has already descended into the Democratic de facto smear that “Trump is even worse than Biden.” And that fixation instills fears of what Trump might do rather than what he actually has done.

Three, the left feels Biden may do more than just lose the Democrats the presidency, Senate, and its close margin in the House. His hyperinflation seriously damaged the middle class. He turns them off with his arrogance, screaming speeches, loud, obnoxious gibberish, compulsive lying, and generally impotent appearance.

His racial condescension and pandering fool no one. As a result, Biden may well redefine the two parties as race is replaced by shared class concerns. Wealthy blacks may vote for Biden because they are black and wealthy, but more and more middle-class blacks may vote for Trump because they feel his policies benefit the middle class like themselves.

The public increasingly agrees that the Democrat Party is the party of the very rich, the bicoastal privileged, and the subsidized poor, while the lower and middle classes feel far more confident and secure with Republicans.

Four, the left fears a more organized, savvier Trump second term might hit the ground running‚ and thus rapidly and professionally instill a conservative agenda to stop the current neo-socialist revolution.

Given all that, 2024 for the left is little more than “Fear Trump or Bust.”

[andromeda1023]

The glittering globular cluster Terzan 12 — a vast, tightly bound collection of stars — fills the frame of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This star-studded stellar census comes from a string of observations that aim to systematically explore globular clusters located towards the centre of our galaxy, such as this one in the constellation Sagittarius. The locations of these globular clusters — deep in the Milky Way galaxy — mean that they are shrouded in gas and dust, which can block or alter the wavelengths of starlight emanating from the clusters.

Here, astronomers were able to sidestep the effect of gas and dust by comparing the new observations made with the razor-sharp vision of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 with pre-existing images. Their observations should shed light on the relation between age and composition in the Milky Way’s innermost globular clusters.

[Image Description: The frame is completely filled with bright stars, ranging from tiny dots to large, shining stars with prominent spikes. In the lower-right the stars come together in the core of the star cluster, making the brightest and densest area of the image. The background varies from darker and warmer in colour, to brighter and paler where there are more stars.]Credit:

ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen (Rutgers University)