British scientists have created eight children in a lab over the past two years whose health continues to be monitored in hopes of determining if research methods that incorporate a third parent in the gene pool will have long-lasting success. Touted as a breakthrough discovery in combating mitochondrial disease, this experiment is another dangerous application of IVF technology that will ultimately confuse both the children and generations to come. Incorporating a Third Parent The research started in 2014, and its stated purpose was to help parents whose children would likely carry mitochondrial disease. To rectify the issue with the unborn child’s DNA, scientists used a third parent’s mitochondrial material. Though the genes that code for all other physical characteristics are removed so that the second woman’s genetics amount to less than 1 percent of the babies’ genetic makeup, combining the genetic material of three parties is no small feat. First, two half-siblings are created: one from the father’s sperm and the mother’s eggs, and the other from the father’s sperm and the donor’s egg. Later, the healthy mitochondrial DNA of the children with the donor mother is left in the embryo, while all the other DNA is extracted. The procedure is completed with the true maternal and paternal DNA being inserted into the “mostly gutted” embryo. It is unclear what happens to the child created using the maternal and paternal DNA. After all, wasn’t this the type of child that the couple is hoping to avoid via this complex IVF process?   False Pretenses Of course, no research center wants to admit the full implications of the work they have done. Instead, many researchers and headlines are insisting that the procedure is strictly for children who are at risk of mitochondrial diseases. These diseases, they say, are highly damaging and may result in death. Never mind the undesirable “embryos” who experience certain death during the laboratory creation of their siblings. Some researchers have gone so far as to mock the idea of “three-parent” children. “I think it’s nonsense to call them three-parent babies,” said Robin Lovell-Badge of the Francis Crick Institute. “It’s all about their nuclear genes and who their parents were.” Many supporters of the procedure argue that if it is possible to help those who want to be parents “achieve their own babies,” it would be wrong to deny them this opportunity.  Supporters have a one-track mind: “As a doctor,” defended Dr. Valery Zukin, “I only understand one thing: We have parents who couldn’t have children and now they have their own biological child. That’s all.” Designer Babies Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg Luckily, other prominent voices in the science community are speaking out with concern. They see this research as the key to a Pandora’s Box of ethical and biological issues down the road; designer babies are only the beginning of the problems this research can cause. First, scientists are still unsure what the long-term effects of this study will be. Even now, about two years after the birth of the first three-parent child, these babies are an ongoing science experiment, living under the scrutiny of doctors and lawmakers who are waiting to legalize and monetize their methods. The studies have even been called “irresponsible kind[s] of human experimentation” by experts in the field. The unknown complications potentially faced by the children are not the only safety concerns wrapped up in this novel process. Risks are also taken by the women who contributed to the children’s genetics and risks are imminent for future generations should genetic issues surface.  Additionally, as much as researchers would like us to brush off the siblings of the children now safely living with their parents, doing so would be an outrage. If the research is truly a treatment “to significantly reduce their risk of having a baby with Mito,” scientists must account for the first embryo that was created using Mom and Dad’s genes, as any naturally conceived baby would be. Just because this child is never given the chance to grow up does not mean its existence can be nullified by science. As with most IVF procedures, these children are thrown out and forgotten. The creation of children through such extravagant means points to a flaw in society’s thinking. Doctors involved with the procedures say that it is their clients’ dream to have “a genetic connection” to their baby. While this is a natural desire, it is wrong for someone to demand a genetic child. “What you’re seeing is this sense that, ‘My genes are very valuable. My genes are the only ones worth reproducing,’” said Francois Baylis of Canada’s Dalhousie University. She expressed concern with the societal need to reproduce a genetic child, especially when it utilizes such extravagant methods as a second mother. Of course, as with many conversations surrounding reproductive technologies, all roads lead back to “designer babies.”   “It’s dangerous. It’s biologically dangerous,” concluded Start Newman from New York Medical College. “It’s dangerous culturally because it’s the beginning… that just won’t end with preventing certain diseases… genes will be manipulated to make designer babies.” International Spread The initial research on these eight children took place in England. Now, their “success” story is being used as the blueprint for this research internationally. Currently, this procedure is banned in the United States. However, Australia has legalized the methodology. When confronted with the potential for completely choosing and editing children’s genetics, one reporter for 9 News Australia said, “I mean, I think it has to be genetic and that’s it.” Like the headlines and researchers, the reporter insinuated that if such procedures are restricted to helping babies who face a potential genetic disease, they are ethical. Anything further, like changing eye or hair color, is too far.  Her coworker quickly countered that “once you go into that petri dish,” lines can get quickly blurred and manipulation becomes easy.  IVF has already led to a myriad of modern ethical concerns, and there is no telling where it will stop before people are fully satisfied. READ MORE from Madison Fossa: Surrogacy Scandal Puts 21 Children and Infants in Danger Obama’s ‘Scolding’ Offends Democrats The Fall of Chip and Joanna’s Magnolia Empire

J. Rufus Wallingford, a financial speculator in a 1911 novel by George Randolph Chester, of whom it was said “he toils not, neither does he spin,” is an exemplar who, in every generation, has followers in real life. Bernard Baruch, no mean speculator himself (a biography of him is entitled The Speculator), was one of the few of the breed to anticipate the Great Depression. His favorite book was Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), discussing various financial panics beginning with the Dutch tulip craze. There have been cycles in American history; the Panic of 1907 was followed by a clean-up operation by private bankers assembled in the Morgan Library and ultimately by the Pujo investigation and the creation of the Federal Reserve Board. The 1929 crash gave rise to the Pecora investigation, which had bipartisan support, and ultimately to the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass–Steagall Act, which divorced commercial banking from investment banking. These New Deal reforms were followed by a 50-year period in which there were no significant American banking failures; banking became a dull occupation inhabited by boring upper-middle-class men with green eyeshades and repetitive functions, watched over by bank examiners. The separation of banks, investment banks, savings and loan institutions, and credit unions was deplored by the Hunt Commission in the Nixon administration, and a process of deregulation began. In Great Britain, this process was accelerated by Margaret Thatcher, a reincarnated Manchester liberal, whose “big bang” of deregulation in 1986 was highly profitable for British bankers, who were much envied in the United States. Restrictions on permissible investments by savings and loan associations were removed as a result of local pressures on a Democratic Congress, leading to state-level savings and loan crises in Ohio and Maryland in 1984 and a federal crisis three years later. The cure for these came from massive government bailouts and the consolidation of small institutions into a relative handful of large banks. These, in turn, were deregulated by the ‘neo-liberal’ Clinton administration, which repealed the Glass–Steagall Act and plunged commercial banks into the sub-prime mortgage business, further corrupted by the Community Investment Act, giving the naive buyers of inner-city properties, many of them Black, the priceless gift of negative equity. Unlike earlier crises, the perpetrators of this one, involving the wholesale use of dubious appraisals, went scot free, and the five largest banks were propped up by being allowed to borrow at bargain rates from the Federal Reserve, to the detriment of their community bank competitors. Investment banking likewise became much more exciting. State laws restricting permissible investments by pension funds were relaxed, as were state restrictions on compensation of fund managers. In Maryland, a previous statutory limit of 1.2 percent of funds managed was repealed at the behest of the Martin O’Malley Democratic administration; compensation for managers of alternative investments such as hedge funds and natural resources, and real estate is now customarily 2 percent of assets plus 20 percent of annual gains. In Maryland, fund managers received compensation of $222.6 million in calendar 2023. The state’s pension fund, once invested in highly liquid publicly traded stocks and bonds, in 2024, was invested 21 percent in private equity, 9.3 percent in real estate, and 5.1 percent in natural resources. The net yield on private equity was 5.2 percent of investments, on real estate 7.7 percent, and on “boring” public equity 17.9 percent. Worse still, investors in private equity, i.e., large or controlling positions in corporations, have found that it is not easily liquidated. Yale University, a pioneer in this area, has recently incurred significant losses in attempting to return its endowment to more conventional investments. The values ascribed to private equity in annual statements are not based on public markets but on private appraisals, the overwhelming majority of which are commissioned by the private entity itself. Private equity has two other detriments. It not infrequently involves the purchase of corporate control, in which the high interest rates incurred by the private equity purchaser are sought to be offset by asset-stripping of the acquired corporation and short-term sweating of workers. Private equity firms currently own companies employing 8 percent of the labor force, to whom they owe no continuing responsibility beyond the next sale. It also involves huge commissions, the 20 percent contingent portions of which are deemed “carried equity” and are taxed as capital gains, not ordinary income. Whereas in an earlier time the income and wealth of financiers like J.P. Morgan were dwarfed by the wealth of industrialists like Rockefeller and Carnegie, this, thanks in part to tax benefits, is no longer the case. Fund managers like BlackRock and Carlyle generate billionaires. (RELATED: BlackRock and American Airlines: Is Larry Fink the New Sam Bankman-Fried?) The nation’s public and large private pension funds have by now been tapped out by the promoters of alternative investments. The worldwide commissions of “alternative investment” firms increased from $41 billion in 2013 to $252 billion in 2023. They are now looking for greener pastures in the form of smaller, private, individually-controlled retirement funds with assets totalling $12 trillion. At present, only “accredited investors” with financial sophistication and assets in the millions are permitted by the Securities and Exchange Commission to invest in private equity and its analogues; the industry is clamoring for relaxation of this rule. A toxic combination of inadequate appraisals, illiquidity, growing disparities in income and personal wealth, and growing instability in corporate ownership is certain to result. Forty years ago, the author of this article earned a certain notoriety by accurately predicting the Maryland savings and loan crisis and its consequences for the public fisc. At that time, those ignoring cautionary words had the excuse that there had not been a financial crisis for 50 years. No such excuse exists now. The proposals to expand “alternative investing” are not merely an accident; they are purposeful, and their almost certain result is an irresponsible plutocracy, financial crises, and the political consequences that are sure to follow in their wake. This may recall Pope Pius XI’s epitaph on the Depression, in his encyclical Quadrigesimo Anno of 1931: Economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become hard, inexorable, and cruel. To these are to be added the grave evils that have resulted from an intermingling and shameful confusion of the functions and duties of public authority with those of the economic sphere — such as, one of the worst, the virtual degradation of the majesty of the State, which although it ought to sit on high like a queen and supreme arbitress, free from all partiality and intent upon the one common good and justice, is become a slave, surrendered and delivered to the passions and greed of men. READ MORE: Overhaul the Financial Regulatory System Our Tax Code Should Treat Credit Unions Like Banks The writer, who expresses his own views, is president of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and the author of various works on law and history, including The Fall of The House of Speyer (Bloomsbury).

by Mac Slavo, SHTF Plan: Some of the media have figured out that the bird flu has evaporated from headlines as the war-mongering has increased. However, even though it’s out of the news, the media that are still reporting on it have warned that avian influenza is still circulating. The United States has also ended […]

by John Nolte, Breitbart: NPR CEO and welfare queen Katherine Maher has come up with a brand-new lie to protect her taxpayer-funded slush fund to spread left-wing lies. Get a load of the latest from this shameless broad… “Public media, public radio, public television, are a critical part of the emergency response plans of nearly […]

Terrified Pittie Rescued From Cold Just Wants To Play Now | The Dodo

This guy seems WAY too comfortable about this