Trump's speech in Riyadh

Fox News has the full transcript of Trump's speech to Sunni Muslim leaders here.

The Trumps are in Israel

President Trump has become the first president to visit Israel's Western Wall.





The president's flight from Riyadh to Tel Aviv also made history — as it's considered one of the first direct flights between the two cities.
Read more here.

Trump in Saudia Arabia

Mail Online has many pictures and videos of the Trump delegation in Saudia Arabia and his speech. Melania looked very serious, maybe a little fearful?

Who killed Seth Rich, and why?

Newt Gingrich asks if anyone is going to investigate the "assassination" of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who was shot in the back. Gingrich says it was Rich, not Russians, who leaked the DNC documents to Wikileaks.

"The stem cells that produce our blood have been created in the lab for the first time."

Jessica Hamzelou reports in New Scientist,

These could one day be used to treat people who have blood diseases and leukemia with their own cells, rather than bone marrow transplants from a donor. They could also be used to create blood for transfusions.

“This is a very big deal,” says Carolina Guibentif at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the research. “If you can develop [these cells] in the lab in a safe way and in high enough numbers, you wouldn’t be dependent on donors.”

In a healthy adult, blood stem cells are found in bone marrow, where they replenish the supply of red and white blood cells and platelets. “They are sort of master cells,” says George Daley at Harvard Medical School.

When these cells don’t work properly, they fail to maintain an adequate supply of blood cells. As a result, not enough oxygen reaches the body’s tissues. This can cause serious disease if organs such as the heart are affected. Blood stem cells can also be wiped out by chemotherapy for leukemia and other cancers.

People with these disorders tend to be treated with bone marrow – complete with blood stem cells – from a healthy donor. The difficulty is finding a match. There is a one in four chance of achieving this from a healthy sibling, but the odds are slashed to one in a million if a stranger needs to be found, says Daley.

Read more here.

hat tip Glenn Reynolds

The opioid epidemic

Salena Zito writes in the New York Post about the opioid epidemic. The photo above is of a grandmother and her friend, with her grandson in the back seat.
Read Salena's report here.

Helping the body tolerate infections

Usha Lee McFarling writes at Scientific American about one physiologist who wants us to stop worrying so much about fighting infections and instead help the body tolerate them. Her name is Janelle Ayres.

An associate professor at the Salk Institute in the heart of San Diego’s booming biotech beach, Ayres is harnessing all manner of high-tech tools from the fields of microbiomics, genetics, and immunology—and looking to a menagerie of animals—to sort out why some individuals tolerate infection so much better than others....They went on to propose that the immune response to pathogens wasn’t the whole story, and that tolerance—a body’s ability to minimize damage while infected—may play a key role as well. Ayres has since gone on to call what she studies the “tolerance defense system.”

...In fact, it was a 19th-century paper on plants that remained healthy despite being infected with leaf rust that helped inform Ayre’s thinking on tolerance. “It had never been looked at in animals, never described in animals,” she said, speaking with her characteristic rapid-fire enthusiasm. “That’s why you should always read papers outside your bubble.”
(She’s also fascinated with Typhoid Mary, the chef who sickened dozens and killed three in the early 1900s in New York, but somehow tolerated her own infection.)

...Society needs drugs that don’t target bacteria, which can so quickly evolve to evade our best medicines, she argues.

Instead, she thinks we can harness those bacteria—even the ones normally classified as pathogens— to make new drugs that save lives by targeting an infected person’s tissues and organs. That would be an entirely new class of therapeutics, which could lessen our dependence on antibiotics and help save lives in cases, like her father’s, where antibiotics fail.

Read more here.

We have come to think of the brain as a computer. And it’s not. It’s a living organ.”

David Kohn reports in the Washington Post,

...every once in a while in science, you stumble on something really unexpected. You open a new door, to a whole new world.”

...The discovery is much more than a historical footnote. It has major implications for a wide variety of brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, stroke and traumatic brain injury.

...Researchers have identified two networks: the vessels that lead into and surround the brain, and those within the brain itself. The first is known as the lymphatic system for the brain, while the latter is called the glymphatic system. The “g” added to “lymphatic” refers to glia, the kind of neuron that makes up the lymphatic vessels in the brain. The glymphatic vessels carry cerebrospinal fluid and immune cells into the brain and remove cellular trash from it.

Alitalo, Nedergaard, Kipnis and others have found evidence that when the systems malfunction, the brain can become clogged with toxins and suffused with inflammatory immune cells. Over decades, this process may play a key rolein Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses, research suggests. “This is a revolutionary finding,” Nedergaard says. “This system plays a huge role in the health of the brain.”

Nedergaard describes the glymphatic system as like a dishwasher for the brain. “The brain is very active,” she says, “and so it produces a lot of junk that needs to be cleaned out.”

In hindsight, she says, the system should have been noticed long ago. When the skull and head are dissected, the vessels are visible to the naked eye. But no one bothered to really look: “Usually the brain is seen only as a bunch of nerve cells. We have come to think of the brain as a computer. And it’s not. It’s a living organ.”

Nedergaard and Helene Benveniste, a scientist at Yale University, have found evidence linking problems in the lymphatic and glymphatic systems to Alzheimer’s. In a study on mice, they showed that glymphatic dysfunction contributes to the buildup in the brain of amyloid beta, a protein that plays a key role in the disease.

Last year, Jeff Iliff, a neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University, and several colleagues examined postmortem tissue from 79 human brains. They focused on aquaporin-4, a key protein in glymphatic vessels. In the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, this protein was jumbled; in those without the disease, the protein was well organized. This suggests that glymphatic breakdowns may play a role in the disease, Iliff says.

...One key to glymphatic performance seems to be sleep. Nedergaard has shown that at least in mice, the system processes twice as much fluid during sleep as it does during wakefulness. She and her colleagues focused on amyloid beta; they found that the lymphatic system removed much more of the protein when the animals were asleep than when they were awake. She suggests that over time, sleep dysfunction may contribute to Alzheimer’s and perhaps other brain illnesses. “You only clean your brain when you’re sleeping,” she says. “This is probably an important reason that we sleep. You need time off from consciousness to do the housekeeping.”

...Nedergaard and Benveniste have also found that sleep position is crucial. In an upright position — someone who is sitting or standing — waste is removed much less efficiently. Sleeping on your stomach is also not very effective; sleeping on your back is somewhat better, while lying on your side appears to produce the best results. The reason for these differences remains unclear, but Nedergaard suspects that it is probably related to the mechanical engineering of the lymphatic vessels and valves; she suggests that the healthiest approach may be to move periodically while you sleep.

Read more here.

"There is fake news, and there is very fake news!"

Here is Dr. Sebastian Gorka speaking on May 7 at the same conference as Carolyn Glick. "We wish to be a leader in the world. We wish to help our friends."

Sebastian Gorka good, Linda Sarsour bad

One of my favorite writers is Carolyn Glick of the Jerusalem Post. Here in this video, she speaks out against someone and she speaks up for someone.

She tells us that Linda Sarsour is a bigoted antisemite supported by the Democrat Party.

She tells us that Sebastian Gorka is a long time friend of Israel, who is being attacked by the Democrat Party. Gorka is a close adviser to Donald Trump. 51 Democrat members of Congress have demanded that Trump get rid of him.

"You have to stand with your friends, and you have to stand against your enemies, because then people will want to be your friends, and won't want to be your enemies."

Swamp hypocrisy, Russian influence, hacked emails, media bias, and a walk in the woods

In yesterday's Watter's World, Jesse Waters notes the hypocrisy of the swamp. There are multiple investigations going on to find out if Russia influenced the election. Before the Democrats hated Russia, they loved Russia. Victor Davis Hanson told Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump didn't dismantle Eastern Europe missile defense, he didn't go to Geneva and press a plastic red button, he didn't make fun of Romney for saying Russia was an existential enemy. The entire reset of Russian/American relations came from the Clinton/Obama team, not Donald Trump.

John Podesta, Hillary's Campaign Manager stupidly gave his password to a hacker. By the way, his password was "password." His entire email portfolio ended up on Wikileaks.

There is more evidence that the Democrats colluded with the media during the election than there is that Trump colluded with Russia. CNN's Donna Brazile passed the debate questions to Hillary Clinton. Politico allowed the Clinton campaign to edit their stories before publication.

At about the 26-minute mark, Jesse delivers a profound monolog on the Comey firing and all that is going on in the media.

Don't miss Jesse's walk in the New York woods looking for Hillary.

"The media cannot accept that we elected a cat, not a dog. They scream when he refuses to fetch!"

The Greg Gutfeld Show is just getting better and better. Greg opens with a politician who says, "It's gonna take a long time." That is followed by a human, who says terrorists are "sneaky, dirty rats."

Greg says the media cannot accept that we elected a cat, not a dog. They scream when he refuses to fetch!

Greg says, behind closed doors maybe Trump leaned on Comey. In other countries behind closed doors, they strangle you with dental floss!

So it's war, Mean Girls style! Day after day the media invents new petty outrages. Trump is combative, but the media prefers fighting anonymously.

Former pro wrestler and Snoop Dog bodyguard Tyrus does a very funny skit in which he pretends to be the White House Press Secretary.

Much more below.

"This is not my first sword dance!"

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calmly answers Chris Wallace's questions. Wallace asks in his whiny voice, "Why isn't President Trump mentioning human rights or women's rights?" Tillerson says his contacts with foreign leaders indicate that their concerns are security and economic. We must improve conditions in the region so that terrorism is less of a threat.

Tillerson called the Turkish Ambassador over to the State Department to "express our dismay" about Erdogan's security thugs beating up protesters on American soil.

North Korea's on-going testing is disturbing. It is "early in the game" of putting pressure on North Korea. Yeah, it's early, after 8 years of neglect under Obama!

Why the bitterness, the hate?

Joel D. Hirst writes,

...things are going pretty well these days. The Supreme Court is whole – and with a remarkable, honest and gentle addition; Assad will think twice about using chemicals again; the economy is booming (yes, it has everything to do with confidence and deregulation); jobs are up, jobless claims are down; companies are reinvesting in the United States (it’s about encouragement); the healthcare challenges of a hastily passed and un-debated law are on the way to being addressed; illegal immigration is way down (no, nothing to do with a wall. Yes, everything to do with application of the rule of law). ISIS is being pushed out of Mosul. And the federal government’s thought war against half of its citizens is over.

Read more here.

Going against the grain

Now do you see why ABC has canceled this popular show?

Bob Beckel out at Fox for making "insensitive" remark to a black co-worker

Just sayin'

Benjamin Wittes talks about his friend James Comey

Here is what James Comey's friend Benjamin Wittes has to say.

Comey and Mueller are close friends, role of the internet in the non-stop leaks, Lou Dobbs is angry.

This is the first time I have watched the Lou Dobbs Show. Lou is convinced that there are #Never Trumpers on the White House staff. That seems a bit paranoid to me.

Veteran Fox News reporter Gregg Jarrett was more persuasive to me than Dobbs. Gregg said he had always thought of James Comey as someone who would walk a mile to be on camera.

Comey and Mueller are close friends. Is that not a conflict of interest?

Gregg Jarrett also pointed out that Bill Clinton faced leaks at the beginning of his presidency, but that was before the internet was as pervasive as it is today. Now the internet brings new allegations hourly!

Comey has agreed to appear before the Senate Intel Committee sometime after Memorial Day.

Dobbs is convinced that Trump needs junkyard dogs, but he has a lot of establishment poodles around him. (Dobbs obviously has never encountered our poodle, who alerts us to anything fishy at all times of the day or night!

Warning: Lou has Ann Coulter on, but there is an audio problem. Ann recognized it, but Lou did not. That was disappointing to me.

General Keane tells us that his contacts tell him that the leaks of the Lavrov meeting came from the NSA and Obama holdovers at the NSC.

Surround ISIS and annihilate them

General Mattis announces a new plan to defeat ISIS. Instead of a war of attrition, we are now going to surround ISIS and annihilate them. We will prevent the return home of escaped foreign fighters.