Three-judge panel of Democratic appointees let stand lower court’s ruling that fee constitutes an unlawful tax A federal appeals court on Friday rejected a bid by Donald Trump’s administration to halt a judge’s order preventing it from imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers.The Boston-based first US circuit court of appeals declined to put on hold a lower court judge’s 8 June ruling in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general, striking down the fee on the basis that it constituted an unlawful tax Congress never authorized. Continue reading...
The Maine Democratic Party may have just nominated a candidate who may be worse than the nominee previously forced out of the race, and there are even questions about whether he's eligible to run.
The post Worse Than Graham Platner? Troubling Personal Questions Emerge for Maine’s New Democrat Nominee for Senate – And He May Be Ineligible to Run appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Social media's magicians spent decades perfecting the art of slicing human attention into advertising revenue. Is the next step on the corporate road map farming human tissue for spare parts?The tech is there, or almost there. The ideas have percolated for decades. All it takes, it seems, is the will.The concept of individual self-ownership becomes entirely obsolete.An early pitch deck for R3 Bio, a quiet biotech startup operating out of California, laid out a vision that makes classic horror fiction look rather mild. The company’s leadership, reports suggest, engaged in internal discussions regarding the production of brainless, nonsentient human bodies designed for the explicit purpose of organ harvesting, pharmaceutical testing, and eventual commercial deployment.They christened these biological monstrosities "organ sacks."The terminology speaks volumes to the moral framework seizing imaginations in the contemporary tech executive class. When a team of researchers and engineers looks at the human form and sees an inconveniently conscious container for marketable kidneys, the line between medical innovation and factory farming disappears completely.Executives at R3 Bio floated plans to reprogram monkey cells, cultivate complete organ systems, and engineer these living biological constructs to be intentionally primitive enough to bypass federal ethical guidelines.But this isn't some sudden Silicon Valley obsession. The ambition to redesign human biology has been gathering momentum worldwide for years.They have a dreamIn October 2022, biotech investors gathered in Zurich to debate the commercial viability of synthetic biology, openly celebrating the day human biology would be fully decoupled from traditional ideas of personhood. The attendees viewed the human body as an inefficient piece of legacy software requiring a total architectural overhaul. It was only a matter of time before the idea caught on.Scientists at R3 Bio defended their research behind the usual wall of righteous PR speak, insisting their work aims to end the chronic shortage of donor organs and cure terminal illnesses. They publicly insist that full-scale human organ fabrication remains outside their current operational scope and that their public website reflects a commitment to safe, traditional cell therapy.But the problem runs deeper than what R3 Bio says it is or isn't doing today. It's what history tells us can happen when scientific ambition outruns consent, oversight, and basic human dignity.The playbook never changes. In 1951, researchers extracted cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent, creating the HeLa cell line that generated billions in profit for pharmaceutical giants while her family struggled to pay medical bills. The medical establishment transformed a living human being into a self-sustaining corporate product, establishing a precedent that today's biotech firms are eager to scale up to the entire human torso. There is an enormous amount of money to be made. And where the fevered dreams of high-tech immortality are concerned, human morality has a troubling habit of turning negotiable.RELATED: Anti-aging mogul's next act? He'll harvest organs from his own clone L-R: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Aldara Zarraoa/Getty ImagesA society grounded in the belief that human life possesses inherent dignity treats the human body as an inherently sacred structure rather than a machine assembled from interchangeable parts. The secular technocracy reigning in Northern California views the human body as a collection of meat components that can be optimized, monetized, and swapped out.Death of the selfThe transition from healing the sick to manufacturing customized human vessels happened while everyone was distracted by social media algorithms. Engineers want to replace a failing heart, grow an artificial liver in a vat, construct a brainless body to house the spares, and call the whole process market efficiency. The language of human medicine was completely swallowed by the inhumane jargon of auto repair.This mechanistic worldview demands that every biological boundary be erased in the name of efficiency and infinite growth. If a brainless body exists as a legal product, the entity owning the patent exercises total property rights over a human biological shell. If a corporation can copyright the genetic sequence of a custom-grown torso, the concept of individual self-ownership becomes entirely obsolete.Tech elites frequently talk about death as a minor coding error awaiting a software upgrade. They invest billions in longevity protocols, upload schemes, and cellular rejuvenation, completely convinced that their wealth entitles them to bypass mortality itself.
CAIRO (AP) — Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels said Saturday that they fired missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia in response to Saudi airstrikes on the strategic Red Sea city of Hodeida, in another escalation over vital shipping routes in the Middle East while the United States and Iran vie for control of the Strait of [...]
