Monday, February 2, 2026

MASSIMO: Just 28 days without parabens and phthalates turned off breast cancer genes.

Just 28 days without parabens and phthalates turned off breast cancer genes. Researchers followed a group of healthy women who routinely used common personal-care products containing parabens and phthalates—chemicals found in everything from shampoo and lotion to makeup and fragrance. These compounds can act like estrogen in the body, and excess estrogen-like activity has long been tied to higher breast-cancer risk. For 28 days, 36 women did one simple thing: they switched to paraben- and phthalate-free alternatives. No drugs, no diet changes—just cleaner cosmetics and toiletries. The results were striking: urine tests confirmed that levels of the chemicals’ breakdown products plummeted, proving exposure had been sharply reduced. But the bigger revelation came from breast-tissue biopsies taken before and after the switch. In just four weeks, the women’s breast cells began behaving less like precancerous or cancerous cells. They regained the ability to respond to normal “cell-death” signals (a safeguard tumors often disable). Protective estrogen receptors, which are typically shut down in breast cancer, switched back on. Gene-expression patterns shifted away from high-risk profiles and toward healthier patterns. This is the first human evidence that routine exposure to these everyday chemicals can nudge normal breast cells in a cancer-like direction—and, crucially, that removing the exposure can begin to reverse the process remarkably quickly. It’s not definitive proof that changing your body wash will prevent breast cancer. But it does show that the body notices—and starts to repair itself—almost immediately when you stop putting these substances on your skin.

["Reduction of daily-use parabens and phthalates reverses accumulation of cancer-associated phenotypes within disease-free breast tissue of study subjects," Chemosphere, 2023] 

When Land Acknowledgements are honest about the traditional caretakers of the land.

RICH HIGGINS: Critical thinking and reason do not exist in the Middle East as we understand them here, and the purpose of the term like Islamophobia is to enforce that Islamic law of slander on westerners to shut down critical thinking and reason that would actually enable us to understand why the enemy fights,


Higgins' book.


H. R. McMaster.  On February 20, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump nominated McMaster for National Security Advisor following the resignation of Michael T. Flynn on February 13.  Trump asked McMaster to remain on active duty while he served as national security advisor.  

Rich Higgins, 1974-2022.  Frank Gaffney provides a eulogy.

Stunning.  Play this interview of Rich Higgins and follow the transcription below, starting at the 8:15 mark titled, "Patriotic." 
 
8:16.  For people that hear the term "narrative," it's not a simple thing to grasp beyond the fact that repetition and purposeful statements, factual or counterfactual, true or not true, have this ability to penetrate into a society and to shape societal thinking.  So what we see is by our enemy in this war a deliberate and purposeful attempt to marry our perception of who they are with left-wing political narratives, terms like "phobia." They know how to use terms that are common to westerners to fulfill their objectives.  So they put together a concept, for example, Islamophobia.  15 years ago we never heard the term Islamophobia, and we have to ask ourselves, where did that come from?  And when you walk it back, you realize that Islamophobia is a term concocted by the generators of these narratives, oftentimes Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, groups like Council of American Islamic Relations, CAIR, or Muslim Public Affairs Council, who generate this term, but from their side it's actually a weaponized version of what is in Islamic law, the law of slander, prohibiting any discussion of Islam that is critical of Islam.  And so by doing this, you've collapsed our ability to do two things that are absolutely pivotal to Western civilization anybody who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize this.  Critical thinking and reason do not exist in the Middle East as we understand them here, and the purpose of the term like Islamophobia is to enforce that Islamic law of slander on westerners to shut down critical thinking and reason that would actually enable us to understand why the enemy fights, why Omar Mateen was drawn to shoot 100 people, 49 who passed at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando Florida, in 2016.

ANNA IVERSEN: Greer framed this as a return to the “American System”, the default position for most of U.S. history. In his telling, the post-Cold War era did not “discover” a superior model; it conducted an experiment in hyper-globalisation that constrained the United States while leaving other nations free to use the very American tool kit they had studied and adopted.

Kokinda references Elliott Roosevelt's book, As He Saw It: The Story of the World Conferences of F.D.R., 1946, that covers a few conferences that FDR attended with Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek in Casablanca, 1943, Cairo, 1943, Yalta, 1945, and Potsdam, 1945.  Fred Klein at goodreads says that Elliott was not at Yalta,

from Anna Iversen,

At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer delivered a speech [1][2][3] that was striking, not simply for its historical sweep, but for its clarity about what has been lost in the modern trade debate: the assumption that serious nations will use policy tools—tariffs, targeted support, competition policy, and reciprocal agreements—to develop productive capacity, protect labour from abusive conditions, and avoid structural imbalances.

"From Hamilton to Today: Trade and US Economic Strategy," 


Greer framed this as a return to the “American System”, the default position for most of U.S. history. In his telling, the post-Cold War era did not “discover” a superior model; it conducted an experiment in hyper-globalisation that constrained the United States while leaving other nations free to use the very American tool kit they had studied and adopted.

This is not an argument that tariffs are inherently good policy in all cases; it is an argument that industrial capacity does not arise from market access alone—and that financial architecture determines whether rebuilding is broadly distributive or tacitly extractive.

Whether one agrees with every implication or not, the speech is useful because it brings the conversation back to first principles: economic policy is not merely about cheaper imports; it is about national capacity—industrial depth, supply chain resilience, the dignity of work, and the ability of a society to convert ingenuity into durable production.