Why Do You Think That? Do You Actually Know?

 

Why do all those You Tube videos have titles starting with questions?

Why do cops always want to ask questions?

Why do great speakers always begin with a question? Why do politicians emulate this? Are you better off now under these retards or is our political party better for you?

Are you aware that your mind changes its internal state if i ask you a question?

Can you feel that state change now?

Are you aware that your hormonal balance in your mind changes when you are asked a question?

Can the question be altered to be more powerful? Do bad grammers affect the impact?

Why do you think that all Zen meditation sessions begin with a koan? Is a koan a question?

Who is it that observes the observer observing?

Did you know that you can hold these mental changes if you ponder on a question?

Did it occur to you that you have the power to control the hormones in your mind at any time by asking yourself a question? Do you think this is a form of personal mind control?

How do you change your mental state so as to manifest your desires?

How do you follow the advice of Jesus to ‘know yourself”?

How do you learn anything?

Isn’t it by asking the right questions?

Aren’t the best questions those without answers?

~ Clif High on Substack on June 4, 2026

Sacred Sexuality

 

They sold you sacred sex. They gave you spiritualized lust. The powers that be took a complete spiritual system for liberation – Tantra - and reduced it to better orgasms. A thousand-year-old tradition. Maps of consciousness. Technologies for awakening. Rituals to remember that you were never separate from the divine. And what did they sell you? Longer sex. Harder orgasms. "Sacred sexuality" workshops where you pay $2,000 to learn how to breathe and stare into someone's eyes. That is not Tantra. That is Amnesia playing creator. Role-playing Shiva and Shakti because it feels good to the ego. Doctor and nurse role-play is at least honest about what it is. But when you dress up your lust in the robes of Shiva and Shakti? You are not awakening. You are giving your ego a God complex. And people ate it up because they do not know what else to do with this energy.

Parents do not teach their kids how to manage their moods and emotions when they go through hormonal changes. So it was never about "losing their virginity" to someone they never loved. This was absence of reverence from the very beginning and that began when there was no reverence in childhood. When they received more childhood traumas than they did safety. Shame blocks the vital energy. It imbalances the kundalini enough that it cannot rise into the heart. And lust becomes a result of domination and power over. So it becomes a game of seduction, dominance, and submission. And they call it "spiritual." Let me tell you the truth. The real truth. Not the one that sells courses.

Shiva is not a role you play to get laid. Shiva is pure consciousness. Still. Unmoving. The witness. Shakti is the pulse of that consciousness. Wild. Creative. Alive. Their union is not "sex." It is the recognition that they were never separate. In authentic Tantra, the physical act of sex is a ritual. A sacred technology to remember that union. Not to achieve it. Not to perform it. To remember what you already are. When the West ripped Tantra out of its container, it became another tool for the ego. Better performance. More pleasure. Spiritual validation for desire. The real teaching is not about technique. It is about who you are being during the act. Stillness meeting movement. Inside your own body. Not just with a partner. And the ultimate goal is not endless orgasm. It is liberation. Freedom from the cycle of craving and aversion. Sex as a doorway. Not a destination.

Here is a truth bomb you were not expecting because no one ever said this to you. You have been using sex unconsciously. To fill a void. To feel wanted. To prove something. To escape yourself. That is not Tantra. That is trauma playing dress-up. Real Tantra does not ask you to become a better lover. It asks you to become more awake — and then bring that wakefulness into the bedroom. Without consciousness, sex is just friction. Two bodies masturbating against each other. With consciousness, it becomes a prayer. Reverence and devotion. And that reverence and devotion for your partner becomes the guiding light out of your inner lust. Have you ever tried it? Or did you allow yourself to cheat and fall into lust because someone cheated on you? Did you become the perpetrator from victim?

Let me speak to the men first. Because someone needs to say this. You want to dominate a woman? How is that working for you? If you are broke, 99% of women will reject you. If you cannot provide emotional safety, you lose 100%. What is between your legs does not save you. And if you are a woman submitting to a man who cannot hold space for you, ask yourself what father wound you are replaying. What void are you trying to fill? What love are you trying to earn through your body? I am not saying this to shame you. I am saying this because someone needs to tell you the truth. Shiva is the witness. He does not chase. He does not need to climax. He lies still while Shakti moves. He witnesses even his own ego. His own lust. His own need to finish. Most men cannot do this. They are not Shiva. They are men in costumes. Playing a role. Wondering why they still feel empty after.

Here is the biology no one tells you. Men's bodies are not designed for multiple orgasms without exhaustion. Women's bodies are. The upper triangle (masculine) in the Merkaba channels energy upward. The downward triangle channels energy downward. Men toward spiritual ejaculation. Women toward physical ejaculation. Or else why, you nervous system would be fried after every time you ejaculate? Don’t you question it? What hormones hijacked your intelligence in such a way that you forgot to question? So, in real sex the way it is supposed to be, not the version programmed into you through porn this is how energy moves. When this is remembered when you stop forcing and start being sex can last as long as you want. But do you want that? Or do you just want to get yours and roll over?

And to the women who have been hurt by this. I see you. You have been looked at like a piece of meat. Approached by men who wanted nothing but a hole to temporarily fill. You have been manipulated. Used. Discarded. You have been told to "embody your divine feminine" while the same men who worshiped you last night cannot text you back this morning. You have been ashamed of your body. Seeking validation from men who reduce you to their lust. That is not Shakti. Shakti is not ashamed. She has embraced her maiden, her wild self, her queen, her goddess. She does not beg to be seen. She is seen. Because she sees herself first. You have been taught to perform. To seduce. To withhold. To give just enough to keep him interested. That is not power. That is survival. And you are exhausted from it. You know that.

Here is what is actually happening. There is a threshold. And you crossed it long ago without knowing. At the center the place you were born longing for is genuine intimacy. Supportive love. Creative life force. Real human warmth. This is where love and connection live. This is home. But you did not stay there. Something happened. Someone left. Someone took. Someone shamed you. Someone touched you when they should not have. Someone did not touch you when you were dying for it. And the energy that was meant to flow through you as love... crossed the line.

On one side of the threshold is overconsumption. Lust. Not the playful kind. The hungry kind. The kind that reduces a human being to an object. A piece of meat. A conquest. A notch. A warm body to fill a cold void for ten minutes. You have been there. You know the emptiness after. On the other side is the freeze. Rejection of sex because sex rejected you first. Religious programming that painted your body as sin. Past hurt that made you swear off vulnerability forever. You became a machine performing human. Going through motions. Nodding. Smiling. Dying inside.

Here is what no one has ever told you: Both sides are the same wound. One performs in the shadow. The other performs in convinced goodness. Both are trauma wearing different masks. Neither can see another person clearly. Because seeing another person clearly requires surplus. Energy left over after your own wounds are tended. A cup that is not empty. You have been trying to love from an empty cup. Trying to connect from a broken threshold. Trying to find home while standing outside the door you closed yourself.

Lust and reverence cannot stay in the same room. If you use Tantra as manipulation, if you use sacred language to get someone into bed, you are not awakening. You are destroying. Not only yourself. The one you touch. And the void? It grows bigger. Hungrier. Tantra is not polyamory. It is not a weekend workshop. It is not permission to collect bodies. Tantra is reverence. And desire for a healthy partnership without reverence? That is not desire. That is hunger dressed in spiritual clothing. It will keep you spiritually disconnected. Role-playing becomes your eternity. Self-remembrance stays outside the door knocking while you pretend not to hear. The door is still there. You can still open it. But first, you have to admit which side of the threshold you have been living on.

Because this is not just about two people getting off. This is about the regeneration of the field. This is about the Nile flooding again. This is about the universe suturing its own wound through two bodies who agreed, before they were born, to find each other and remember. You cannot get there through lust. You cannot get there through deficit. You can only get there through balance. The functional threshold where love and connection live. Where sex is not a weapon or a drug or a performance. Where it is a doorway.

I am not here to sell you better orgasms. I am here because I was that man. Playing Shiva. Wondering why I still felt empty. Chasing. Performing. Trying to prove something that could never be proven. And I was here watching women I loved shrink themselves. Beg for validation. Give their bodies to men who did not deserve their souls. I have seen the damage. And I have seen what happens when someone finally wakes up. When a man stops chasing and starts witnessing. When a woman stops shrinking and starts embodying. When two people stop using each other and start remembering each other. That is what I am offering. Not a technique. Not a weekend workshop. Not a "sacred sexuality" certification. A return.

I have created a 4-week program. For men who are tired of performing. Who want to stop using sex to fill a void and start using it to awaken. For women who are tired of being used. Who want to stop shrinking and start embodying their full Shakti not for a man, but for themselves. For anyone who has been hurt by the excess of lust or the deficit of rejection. Who wants to heal the threshold. Bring themselves back to the functional state where genuine intimacy, connection, and creative life force can actually flow. This is not about becoming a better lover. It is about becoming more awake. And then bringing that wakefulness into every part of your life. Including the bedroom.

The door is open. For the ones who are tired of the games. Tired of the performance. Tired of feeling empty after. For the women who have been hurt by men's lust. For the men who have been hurt by women's unawareness. For the ones who want connection real connection not another transaction. Message me. Let me show you what it looks like when someone finally stops role-playing and starts remembering.

by Amartya Dasgupta on Facebook on June 1, 2026

Understanding Archetypal Control Systems

 

You don't need to understand mythology to be ruled by it. In fact, the less you know, the more effectively it can shape you. Archetypes are ancient psychological blueprints, universal characters, emotional patterns, and narrative roles hardwired into the human subconsciousness. They existed long before language, culture, or religion. They emerged in every story, every culture, every dream, and that's what makes them so powerful. You recognize them before you understand them. You feel them before you choose them.

The rulers of perception - those who shape media, marketing, politics, and ritual - know this. Archetypes aren't just symbols of meaning. They are tools of control. They bypass logic and speak directly to your emotional core, activating specific behaviors and beliefs. And if you don't consciously identify which archetypes are running inside you, someone else already has, and they've chosen them for you.

Let's break it down. Every archetype carries a narrative, a storyline you unconsciously begin to follow once the character is activated in your mind. The Hero must prove himself. The Victim must be rescued. The Savior must sacrifice. The Villain must be defeated. These roles create expectation, emotion, and response long before you ask yourself if they're even real.

Now imagine these archetypes being activated at scale. Entire nations groomed into the Innocent Victim. Opposing ideologies cast as the Evil Other. Celebrities framed as Chosen Ones. Political leaders crowned as Messiahs or scapegoated as Villains. These aren't accidents. These are archetypal deployments - engineered narratives that stir emotion and direct mass attention and behavior.

You see it in religion. Jesus is the divine Martyr Savior. Satan is the eternal Rebel Villain. Mary is the archetypal Divine Mother. These symbols aren't just sacred - they're psychological infrastructure. People don't just believe in these figures... they become them. They take on the roles. They internalize the story.

In media, it's the same. Movies, shows, music - all saturated with archetypal structures. The Rebel who rises, the Outcast who transforms, the Mentor who guides, and these stories aren't just entertainment... they train your nervous system to feel certain emotions, crave certain outcomes, and reject others.

Even in your personal life, you're running archetypes, usually without knowing. Maybe you play the Caretaker, always serving others, but neglecting yourself, or the Warrior, constantly in survival mode, always fighting something. Maybe you adopted the Victim, convinced life is happening to you. None of this is your fault, but it is your responsibility to become aware of it.

This is how archetypes control civilizations... not with commands, but with stories... not with weapons, but with resonance. The elite don't need to convince you with logic. They just need to activate an archetype. Once triggered, you'll fill in the rest of the behavior yourself. That's the terrifying beauty of it. Archetypes make control self-sustaining... no chains, no threats, just a story you believe is your own.

And here's the most dangerous part - that archetypes often feel true. They mirror something inside you. That's why they work. But if you don't know they've been installed, you'll spend your whole life performing a script someone else wrote, thinking it's who you are. That's what this chapter begins to dismantle.

We're not here to erase archetypes. We can't. They're part of the human psyche. But we can expose how they're used, when they're weaponized, and how to reclaim your agency from the stories that no longer serve you.

To be sovereign is not to avoid stories. It's to choose which ones you live by, and why. So ask yourself which archetypes are running in you right now? And more importantly, who put them there?

Symbolic Language of Power

Symbols are the true language of control. They speak without words, bypass logic, and go straight to the emotional core of your being. You don't need to understand a symbol for it to affect you. That's the point. Symbols operate on levels below awareness, shaping how you feel, what you believe, and how you respond... before you even realize you've been spoken to.

This is why every structure of power, from ancient temples to modern corporations, is built on symbolic foundation. Flags, crosses, logos, uniforms, color schemes, ritual gestures... they're not decoration, they're not branding. They're coding - visual signals designed to trigger emotional responses, install meaning, and reinforce psychological obedience.

A child raised beneath a flag learns not just loyalty, but identity. A person who wears a cross doesn't just signal belief, they embody a story of sacrifice, sin, and redemption. A corporate logo doesn't just represent a company, it compresses values, ideology, and emotional association into a single mark. One image, one feeling, one instruction to the nervous system trust, fear, obey, consume, belong.

The elite understand this deeply. They've always used symbols as carriers of invisible power. In ancient Egypt, symbols were illustrations. They were active energy containers. The eye of Horus, the Ankh, the Scarab... each encoded layers of cosmology, biology, and spiritual authority. Inscribed on walls, carved into temples, worn on the body, these symbols did something far more profound than just decorate. They programmed the space around them.

The same logic carried into medieval Europe. Heraldry, crosses, and illuminated manuscripts weren't just religious tools... they were mechanisms of emotional engineering. The Church didn't need to preach to everyone. Its symbols were everywhere, reinforcing a divine hierarchy every time someone passed through a cathedral, touched a rosary, or knelt before a crucifix.

Fast forward to today and the system hasn't changed... it's just gone digital. Now the cross is a brand, the flag is a meme, the myth is a marketing campaign, but the structure remains. The logos of global corporations mimic ancient sigils. The layout of news graphics mirrors temple architecture. Centralized authority, bold symbols, dramatic contrast. Even emojis carry symbolic weight, distilling emotion and narrative into a single ritualized keystroke.

This isn't accidental. Modern culture has trained you to see without noticing. That's what makes it powerful. If a symbol is obvious, it can be rejected, but if it blends into the background it becomes truth. A symbol that's repeated often enough doesn't need explanation, it becomes reality.

And the most powerful symbols are the ones you carry inside you. Think about the symbolic associations you've inherited... what wealth looks like, what love should feel like, what authority sounds like. These are all internal symbols installed by repetition, reinforced by culture, and often weaponized by systems that benefit from your unconscious submission.

The real danger isn't external symbols - it's the symbolic language you've absorbed without question. Do you flinch when you see a police badge? Do you feel comforted by a white coat? Do you feel less worthy when standing beside a luxury car? None of these responses are you, they are conditioned, symbolic reactions, loaded scripts that have been installed in your subconscious over years.

To reclaim your sovereignty, you must learn to see symbols not as truth, but as code. They can inspire, they can manipulate, they can liberate or enslave. What matters is whether you are aware of their function.

Once you recognize the symbolic structure behind culture, you begin to see the programming. And once you see the programming, you can begin to rewrite it.

Because here's the secret - you can create your own symbols, your own rituals, your own visual language of meaning. And when you do, you stop reacting to the world's story and start building your own.

That's the real language of power - not just seeing the symbols, but choosing which ones to obey and which ones to destroy.

Subconscious Reality Loops

Most people live inside a loop, not a life. They wake up, feel the same emotions, think the same thoughts, react to the same situations, and reinforce the same beliefs without ever realizing that none of it is random. It's not circumstance.

It's not personality. It's programming. Repetition becomes identity, and identity becomes reality.

Welcome to the subconscious reality loop, the most powerful and invisible mechanism of control in existence. A reality loop is a self-sustaining cycle where your internal beliefs generate external experiences, which then reinforce the original belief, creating a closed circuit of perception.

You believe the world is dangerous, so you notice threats, avoid risks, and interpret events through fear. As a result, your life proves you right. This feedback loop strengthens your belief, and the cycle continues.

But here's the twist. Most of your beliefs aren't even yours. They were installed long before you had the ability to question them through childhood - conditioning, trauma, education, media, religion, and culture.

These beliefs live in the subconscious. You don't think them, you operate from them, and because the subconscious mind processes millions of bits of information per second, far more than your conscious mind, it silently filters your reality, chooses what you notice, how you interpret it, and what decisions you feel are possible. In other words, your subconscious is choosing your reality, and it's doing so based on data you never agreed to in the first place.

This is the mechanism that systems of power exploit. They don't need to force your behavior, they only need to influence the belief that drives it. Once the loop is installed - fear of rejection, belief in scarcity, guilt around pleasure, shame around power - you will unconsciously create a life that never challenges the system's design. You'll censor yourself, doubt your instincts, sabotage your breakthroughs. You'll say “it's just who I am”, when in fact it's who you were programmed to be.

That's what makes subconscious reality loops so effective. They feel like truth, but they're not. They're just stories the nervous system has rehearsed so many times that they've become automatic.

Even entire societies run on these loops. Collective belief in scarcity creates a culture of hoarding. Belief in authority creates passive populations. Belief in threat creates endless war. And each loop generates the behaviors, systems, and outcomes that confirm the original story.

This isn't just psychology, this is infrastructure. Mental architecture masquerading as free will. All because the subconscious resists change... it wants familiarity, not truth. These loops remain even when they cause suffering. People would rather stay in a known prison than risk stepping into an unknown freedom.

The elite understand this well. Their job isn't to micromanage your actions... it's to shape the loop through repetition, through symbolism, through emotional anchoring. Once your loop aligns with their design, they step back. You will do the rest on your own.

So how do you break the loop?

Not by willpower, not by arguing with belief. You break it by changing the inputs. What you expose yourself to, how you respond emotionally, what stories you allow to play on repeat in your mind.

You must catch the pattern in motion, the triggered reaction, the familiar sabotage, the automatic doubt, and disrupt it with awareness, intention, and new choice. Awareness is the blade that slices through the loop. Pattern recognition is your superpower. And once you see the loop, you are no longer inside it, you are observing it. And that is the beginning of freedom.

Because the truth is, you were never broken.

You were just running old code. And now you're starting to rewrite it.

Energy, Frequency, and Perception

Long before something becomes physical, it begins as vibration. Your body, your thoughts, your emotions, everything is energy first, matter second. That's not spirituality, that's physics.

And the more deeply you understand this, the more clearly you begin to see how the world and your experience of it is not built from what's visible, but from what's felt.

You've felt it before. The tension in a room before anyone speaks. The weight of someone's presence without a word being said. The way certain music shifts your state in seconds. That's not metaphor, that's resonance.

You're picking up on frequency, and you always have been, whether you realized it or not. What we call reality is filtered through perception. And perception isn't neutral, it's shaped by your state - fear, gratitude, shame, calm. Each of these emotions has a frequency, and each one colors the lens through which you see the world. When you're anxious, you notice danger. When you're grounded, you notice solutions. Same world, different frequency, different experience.

The systems that govern this world understand this better than most people ever will. They don't just target what you think... they target how you feel. Because if they can trap you in a low frequency - guilt, shame, fear, helplessness - they don't need to do anything else. You'll limit yourself. You'll second-guess your intuition. You'll call it realism, when in truth, it's just programming.

And it works. Look around. News cycles are designed to agitate. Notifications are engineered to addict. Architecture drains. Environments overstimulate. Advertising hijacks emotion. All of it pulls you into a reactive, low-energy state where your perception narrows, your options shrink, and your sovereignty fades.

The world doesn't even have to lie to you... it just has to tune your nervous system to the right frequency, and you'll edit the truth for them. Most people live in a reality that's been constructed not from facts, but from vibration... a loop of emotion and belief that filters what they notice, how they react, and what they allow into their life. It doesn't feel manipulated. It feels normal, which is exactly why it's so effective.

But here's the key they never teach you. You can shift your frequency. Not with affirmations you don't believe, not with denial or fake positivity, but with presence, with breath, with movement, with choices about what you feed your body, your mind, your attention.

When you shift your internal state, your perception shifts. And when your perception changes, reality follows. This isn't wishful thinking. It's mechanics. Change how you feel... change what you see, change what you attract, change what you experience. It's a chain reaction and it starts at the energetic level.

You've seen this happen. You felt days where everything flowed. People responded differently. Ideas landed perfectly... not because the world changed, but because you did. That's the real game... not just escaping the system, but rising above the frequency that system depends on. Because no matter how powerful their tools, they can't control your perception unless you agree to vibrate at the level they need you to stay in. And once you recognize this, you stop being a victim of their frequency field. You start creating your own. That's when the world begins to reorganize around you... not because you're lucky, but because you're aligned... not because you force it, but because you've tuned into a version of reality that was always there just waiting for you to match it.

Energy, frequency, perception... not fluff, not mysticism, just the deeper mechanics of influence and freedom... the part they hope you'll never look at, BUT NOW YOU ARE!

from Chapter 2 of The Codex of the Inner Circle by Lucian Blackwell

Confronting the Incompatibility of Islam

 

What Europe has been suffering for years — parallel neighborhoods, pressure on freedom of speech, tensions over incompatible values, and a slow erosion of social cohesion with extreme violence affecting particularly the working classes — is no longer exclusively a European phenomenon. It is now attacking the heart of the West — the United States — in an increasingly undisguised way. Mass immigration from majority-Muslim countries, combined with low assimilation rates and the ideological defense of “diversity” by the progressive left and the Democrat party, is importing doctrines and loyalties that clash head-on with the principles of American freedom. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the predictable result of open-border policies, electoral alliances, and cultural relativism.

Europe offers the laboratory. Decades of immigration from the Maghreb, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa, combined with generous welfare systems and an elite that considers Western civilization guilty of the world’s ills, have produced no-go zones, grooming gang scandals, terrorist attacks, and a growing percentage of the population that prioritizes sharia or the umma over the laws of the host country. Socialist and progressive governments facilitated the flow, financed the reception, and criminalized the criticism. The result is a demographic and cultural transformation that can no longer be concealed.

In the United States the same pattern is advancing. Dearborn, Michigan — a city with one of the highest concentrations of Arab and Muslim population in the country — has witnessed massive processions such as the Arbaeen, where thousands fill the streets in a public display of aggressive religious identity. In Times Square, during Ramadan, mass prayers are organized with hundreds of the faithful occupying one of America’s most emblematic spaces for public prayer and the distribution of Islamic material — nothing further from the soul of the United States of America. These acts symbolize a change: what was once private or minority is becoming visible and assertive of values opposed to those of this great nation.

Let us not forget that 85% of migratory movements come from Muslim-majority countries, and that not even a small percentage is welcomed in other Muslim countries. This proves that there is nothing random or casual about the mass immigration we are suffering in the West. It is a strategy conceived, defined, and implemented with full awareness.

Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive, son of Egyptian Muslim immigrants, has just won the Democrat Senate primary in Michigan. Backed by the left wing of the party — Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez — he represents the consolidation of an identity vote and the possibility of a Muslim occupying a major federal seat. This is not about denying any citizen’s right to run for office. It is about recognizing that, in parallel, a network of influence is growing that combines demographics, community organization, and alliance with the left.

There are preachers in the United States who make no secret of their supremacist ambitions. Imams such as Ahmad Musa Jibril, based in Michigan, have openly called for jihad against the “infidel West.” Others, at documented conferences, have stated that the objective is for America to become a Muslim country, for Islam to end up governing, and that jihad is the means. Historically, figures like Siraj Wahhaj spoke of uniting Muslims so that the country would “come to us.” These voices are not marginal or isolated. They reflect essential doctrinal currents within Islam: the supremacy of sharia, primary loyalty to the community of believers, and the vision of the non-Muslim as inferior or temporarily tolerated — until they have sufficient strength to no longer tolerate it.

Here comes the first key argument: there is no “moderate Islam” in the Western liberal sense. Classical Islam is not merely a private faith. It is a complete system of life that includes law, politics, and loyalty. When the doctrine demands that sovereignty belong to Allah and not to the people, that apostasy be punished, and that the umma take precedence over the nation, the incompatibility with constitutional democracy is structural. There are individual Muslims who relativize or reinterpret these points, but the orthodox tradition and the foundational texts do not. Ultimate loyalty is not to the American Constitution nor to the values of the Enlightenment — it is to Islam. Anyone who denies this is confusing desire with reality. Even “moderate” Muslims, if this exists, will have no doubt when their loyalty is put to the test.

The second argument is strategic: they use left-wing parties, exactly as in Europe. In Europe, socialist and green parties became vehicles of access to power and resources for organized Muslim communities. The same is happening in the United States. The Democrat party, trapped in the ideology of identity, multiculturalism, and historical guilt, offers the platform: lax borders, protection from deportation, the “Islamophobia” narrative that silences criticism, and electoral alliances in key states like Michigan. In return, it receives votes. The progressive left does not see a clash of civilizations — it sees a new group of the oppressed to incorporate into its coalition. The result is that the entry and consolidation of a population whose doctrinal loyalty clashes head-on with the foundations of the liberal order is facilitated. The left-Islam collusion is a time bomb in our societies, across the entire West, and not seeing it is the suicidal empathy of which Gad Saad speaks.

This is not hatred of persons. It is rejection of a suicidal policy. The United States was built on individual freedom, equality before the law, and freedom of conscience. Massively importing populations from societies where those principles are brutally rejected is a mistake of historic proportions. Europe is already paying the price in security, social trust, economic ruin, and freedom of expression. America is already in the same process.

The cancer is the combination of demographics, incompatible doctrine, and ideological complicity from the left. As long as the Democrat party and progressivism continue treating mass Muslim immigration as an electoral and moral asset, the problem will spread. The alternative is border control, a demand for loyalty to the Constitution above all else, and clear rejection of any project of cultural, demographic, or legal transformation of America. Ignoring the European lesson will not cancel it. It will only delay the moment when the United States has to confront the same realities.

The Democrat party, like so many progressive parties in Europe, is responsible for betraying the USA. And they know it, just as progressive parties are traitors to the European countries and to Western Civilization. Mamdani is not a socialist — as Alejandra Ocasio Cortez is, and radically so — Mamdani is a Muslim. Socialism is the weapon that Muslims use to deceive the naive half of the electorate. His socialist measures are whatever is needed to reach power. But his supreme loyalty is only one: Islam. The survival of the West can only be achieved insofar as we are conscious of this suicidal empathy and rise up against it, whatever the cost.

by W.Galt at americanthinker.com on August 15, 2026

Could Instability Trigger Radical Change In Your Life?

 

I propose that the world is upside down, that the way we live is the opposite of what we're told it is: we don't experience Progress, we experience Anti-Progress.

My five most recent essays (listed below) lay out an account of the present era that is radically different from the conventional narrative.

It's worth noting that my writing is not "validated by credentials so you should listen to this person" or by data-based claims that "he called the exact top and bottom of the market and has beaten the market indices for 27 years." The foundation of my work is the text either validates or invalidates itself by its sources and reasoning and is best read as "written by anonymous."

If you decide on the validity of the text based on the author's credentials and investment track record, there are hundreds of PhD economists to follow and thousands of accredited financial advisors to consult - or consult Warren Buffet's annual reports, as his investment track record speaks for itself.

The trust we place in these validations based on credentials and past data rests on a continuation of the conventional status quo, i.e. recency bias, the belief that the recent past is a trustworthy guide to the future because everything is stable and predictable.

And since everyone making their livelihood off the status quo has a built-in incentive to assume it's stable and predictable, there is no advantage to entertaining possibilities outside this context.

This is the basis of assessing texts and ideas on their own merits rather than trusting the author will be correct this time because they are certified experts and/or they were right about things in the past. Trusting recency bias and credentials works well if the system is indeed stable and predictable. If it's not, then letting the ideas speak for themselves becomes the way to widen our survey of potential futures.

I propose that the world is upside down, that the way we live is the opposite of what we're told it is: we don't experience Progress, we experience Anti-Progress. We don't live in an economy that optimizes value to compete for our dollars; we live in an economy that optimizes eliminating competition to maximize extraction. All the technologies of AI aren't additive and liberating; they're powerful tools that optimize centralized control and extraction. The claim is that AI will help us but the real goal is to use us. The system we inhabit isn't transparently fair, it's transparently corrupt, the perfection of self-service passing itself off as manifesting the noble ideals of "capitalism" and "democracy."

Rather than being victims of powers beyond our control, we accepted the erosion of fairness - the foundation of all human societies - into a rigged casino that favors the few at the expense of the many because we accepted the promise that this unfair, corrupt economy, society and political system enabled us to get ahead: who needs fairness if we have a seat in the rigged casino?

In the conventional telling, ours is a system of innovation, growth and opportunity. The reality is the opposite: the "innovation, growth and opportunity" are all concentrated in a vast credit-asset bubble that has richly rewarded those who own the assets that have skyrocketed in value and left everyone who doesn't own these assets behind.

This structure - the real world is the opposite of what we're told - is a civilizational psychosis that benefits those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid. We go along with this psychosis because denial is our defense against a reality too painful to bear: our progression from a society of systemic fairness to a society of systemic unfairness.

But denial, unfairness and credit-asset bubbles are all inherently unstable, and so once the bubble pops, denial will crack and be replaced by anger, an anger at ourselves and those we trusted that will seek expression by focusing on those who glorified the rigged casino the loudest because it enriched them so immensely.

The alternative accounts touted by many are simply different flavors of the conventional narrative.

One is that the Powers That Be are instituting a techno-financial web we cannot escape of tokens, blockchains and stable coins that will digitize every transaction and enable the Powers That Be to switch our financial lives on or off as the means of an ironclad control.

If we change our money, the narrative holds, then we can escape this perfection of Orwellian control.

The problem is that changing the money in a rigged casino doesn't unrig the casino; all it means is those in the casino start using another form of money.

Another narrative holds that technology and system dynamics can be wielded to reverse the decay and fulfill the fantasies of super-abundance and technological Progress.

Neither narrative acknowledges that humans are hard-wired to live in a moral universe, as our sensitivity to fairness - which includes transparency, integrity, truth, honesty, duty, obligation and reciprocity - is the foundation of our social skills, which are our core selective advantage as a species.

The moral universe isn't some concept that isn't "real" - we're constantly told that what's "real" is finance, money, the economy, technology, data and systems - the moral universe is the foundation of all civilization. In dismissing this innate sensitivity to fairness as inconsequential in the "real world" of systems and data, we dismiss an understanding of our civilizational psychosis and our own denial of this psychosis.

There is a place for technology, finance, systems and data, but by measuring "progress" solely by technological standards, measuring "value" solely by financial metrics and measuring "understanding" (i.e. what's being "optimized") by data and systems - all reductionist left-hemisphere functions - we cut ourselves off from the moral universe that enables our primary selective species advantage - our social experience.

We are not social creatures like ants that self-organize by instinct and pheromone trails: we self-organize in a moral universe in which our exquisite sensitivity to fairness and unfairness in all its intuitive, right-hemisphere width and breadth has been hard-wired as the essential foundation of our primary selective species advantage.

All of which leads to a question we ask ourselves: could instability trigger radical change in our own life?

A health crisis offers an analogy many of us have experienced.

We're living our lives, doing what we always do, and suddenly we experience a health emergency that calls how we've been living into question: how did I become ill? We realize we weren't really paying attention to our diet, our fitness, our sources of stress, our conflicting goals or our doubts or anomie. We never thought of ourselves as being in denial, but we were in denial - a denial that included denial itself.

Faced with a condition that could prove fatal or debilitating, we realize our old way of living wasn't healthy, even though we made excuses and told ourselves that we were generally living a healthy life. Stripped of excuses and rationalizations, we realize we were eating out a lot and that these meals weren't necessarily healthy, even though we ordered the salad instead of the fries. The meals were optimized to trigger our dopamine receptors - this tastes good - and generate a profit for a highly competitive, cost-sensitive business.

We realize that if we truly want to have a healthy diet, we have to prepare real, highly nutritious food at home, with very occasional exceptions. We realize that our stress levels cannot possibly decline unless we make radical changes in our employment / work lives, our home lives and perhaps in our entire understanding of what our life is actually about.

The point here is health crises force us to reassess things we were content to leave as-is prior to the crisis. We weren't actually living a very healthy life, but we told ourselves it was healthy enough because we had no symptoms of illness. That the causal chains of an unhealthy life - stress, diet, fitness, unresolved conflicts - were steadily undermining our well-being was invisible, until something snapped and we experience a health crisis.

Simply put, we avoid radical change until there is no other option left. Denial is comfortable, and we do what's comfortable until it's no longer possible to do so.

Financial matters can also force radical change on us. Our home equity is a "savings account" we can tap until the bubble pops and suddenly we have no equity at all - we only have debt. Equity comes and goes but the debt remains unchanged: that's the problem with debt.

The system we inhabit is inherently unstable because it rests on artifice, not authenticity, on financial bubbles, not value, and Anti-Progress, not Progress. Denial is comfortable and facing all that undermines the quality of our lives and our well-being is not just uncomfortable, it's extremely troubling, for we sense that once we strip away our denial, excuses and rationalizations, we'll be forced to make radical changes in our lives, changes we're not prepared to make until there is no other option left.

If what I've laid out in these five essays is an accurate account of what's really going on, the intrinsic instability of a system that depends on our acceptance of civilizational psychosis for its continuity and coherence will crack wide open. And when that happens, our denial will crack wide open, and many of us will become angry that the rigged casino didn't work out for us as promised.

Many are confident that any crisis is 10 or 15 years away, and so we'll all have plenty of time to prepare. Their forecast may prove to be correct, but their confidence is a form of denial of what an unstable state means: an unstable state is unpredictable and prone to sudden phase changes.

To be confident that any crisis is 10 years away is akin to gazing at an unstable mountainside and declaring that an avalanche is safely in the future. Any confidence in a prediction about an unstable system is a tacit denial of the way that instability is hidden beneath a surface stability that is reassuring due to recency bias but misleading.

When the latest polls find that only 18% of Gen Z see AI as a positive development, this is the equivalent of a tremor shaking an unstable mountainside. Is assuming we'll all have decades to prepare for instability reality-based, or is it denial dressed up in data?

Many of us will be forced to make radical changes in our own lives once the unstable system we inhabit cracks wide open. Those who recognized the fragility of our civilizational psychosis and acted before the avalanche will do better than those who waited until it was too late. My point here is: asking ourselves what it will take to make radical changes in our own lives now, not in some distant future, is a worthwhile exercise.

Anticipating that we might be thirsty in the future is a motivation to start digging a well now, as "once we're thirsty, it's too late to dig a well."

From the point of view of stability, any radical change is needlessly risky. When a crisis takes away stability and predictability, then everything reverses: clinging on to what caused the crisis is what's risky and making radical changes is what offers hope for solutions.

Even when we're in a situation that's undermining our well-being, we cling to the status quo. When we're finally forced to undertake radical changes, it's a kind of relief, for we are forced to jettison what wasn't working but was working just well enough to keep us frozen in place.

by Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com on May 28, 2026

Please read these essays as if they are anonymous and therefore judged on their own merits:

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay26/unfairness-revolt5-26.html

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay26/optimized-failure5-26.html

https://www.oftwominds.com/how-things-break/social-collapse5-26.html

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay26/crisis-good-guys5-26.html

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay26/chaos-unleashed5-26.html

Building a New Foundation as Truth Expands

 

Dear Readers, you are evolving more deeply into higher truth which is causing some of you to question your present long held spiritual beliefs. If you are experiencing confusion and fear because the spiritual foundation you worked hard to build and have relied on seems to be collapsing, rejoice because it means that you are in the process of creating a new foundation, one of a higher state of consciousness you are evolving into.

Foundational belief systems on all levels of awareness are continually created and destroyed as the natural unfolding of everyone’s evolutionary process. Even those who have attained high levels of spiritual consciousness continue to experience the collapsing and rebuilding of what they may have thought was the totality of some truth. New and deeper understandings will always continue to reveal themselves because they are in and of an infinite Source unlimited by time or space. Do not attempt to hold on to anything of the past even if the past was only yesterday, because truth is ever expanding, opening, deepening, and expressing ITself.

The ascension process is not and can not be influenced by human thinking or the activities of those promoting the past as being “better”. Ascension is evolution, the process of mankind’s awakening to realities that are and always have been fully present, but usually unrecognized, and thus unavailable to states of consciousness cluttered with and conditioned by false beliefs, teachings, ideas, and influences.

Those resisting change from what they have always known, accepted, and in many cases profited from, are working very hard at this time to not only keep the status quo but push world consciousness back to earlier less-evolved times. However, this can only fail because evolution cannot regress. How long a collective awakening takes is up to the people of earth who are the ones feeding collective consciousness which in turn manifests outwardly.

Three-dimensional living is seeing and experiencing God’s creations through veils of duality (pairs of opposites), separation (from God, other people, and other life forms), and many powers (powers other than the one and only God power). This in turn manifests as the three-dimensional world you have lived hundreds of lives in, and continue to experience. The three-dimensional belief system has over time discovered many ideas and protocols for making life easier and better, but because they are based in beliefs of duality, separation, and many powers they can only be temporary.

Ceremonies, church going, prayers, petitions, and sacrifices made in hopes of improving or removing three-dimensional concepts are like smoke in the wind because God knows nothing about what conditioned minds are imagining. If God did, these issues would be permanently held in place by Divine Law, never to be healed, changed, or dissolved. God knows only Itself – one omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent completeness infinitely manifesting. It cannot be otherwise because there is only ONE Reality... and you can call it God, Divine Consciousness, Source, Allah, Brahman, or even Fiddlesticks if you want because it does not matter what you call IT. IT is the one and only power, reality, law, cause and effect and to believe that there are others is idolatry.

A deep unrecognized awareness of God as one’s true self lies deeply buried within every person because it is reality. This deep inner knowing expresses as the yearning every person feels to be free, abundant, harmonious, loved, safe, and alive, but most are as of yet only able to act on what they feel through the belief that these things exist outside of them and must be attained. Even the murderer believes that somehow his/her actions will make things better in some way.

Personally and collectively mankind is becoming increasingly receptive to higher truths regarding God, humans, and life. It is nothing more than the universal belief in separation that continues to manifest as violence, abuse, struggle, wars, disease, lack, and limitation... because consciousness is creative. Every person, being Divine Consciousness individualized, is a creator. Never forget this. When the majority understands that all that exists is Divine consciousnesses expressing ITself, life on earth will change and begin to manifest the already present harmony, wholeness, and completeness that is falsely believed to be non-existent.

Mankind was not created to suffer, but rather to express the infinite nature of God in all IT’s glory and perfection. When man, being a creator, accepted duality, separation, and powers other than the one power as being reality, three-dimensional concepts began to take form. This is the symbolism underlying the story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The world is a spiritual universe peopled with sons of God. All life without exception is God life. Period. No other life exists. There has never been only one son of God. What else could anyone be made of if Divine Consciousness is the only substance?

It is time to honestly examine and address remaining false concepts you may still hold. You have been preparing and working toward present times and are ready to let go of anything still holding you in old energy. You are ready to let go of believing that in order to be correct, things, people, situations, beliefs, and even life itself must look or unfold in a certain way. You are ready to move on from concepts of a giving/withholding God or that God has only one son. You are ready to reject concepts that say a person’s skin color, race, gender, outer appearance, family, beliefs, employment, social, religious, or financial status defines their worth. You are ready to be done with judgement, criticism, self-righteousness, sin, or that God has an opponent called “Devil”. All these things represent obsolete belief systems that will continue to penetrate daily life until no longer being fed with energies of belief.

Because you are in a period of intense clearing, you may be experiencing various forms of physical, emotional, or mental discord, but remember that they are not personally yours and are temporary. Discords often serve as reminders that something in your belief system needs to be more deeply examined and ask yourself “What am I believing that is making me feel this way?” The clearing process can be especially difficult for those still clinging to religious beliefs and doctrine, traditions, male superiority, and control/power over others because these beliefs are becoming obsolete and because they represent nothing more than three-dimensional concepts.

Abundance, love, harmony, peace, self-sustaining, self-maintaining completeness is every person’s birthright, but a birthright that is unable to be claimed by anyone still holding beliefs like “I don’t deserve happiness. I am a sinner. I am unworthy. I am the wrong gender. It is a sin to claim oneness with God. I must go through a priest, rabbi, saint, “holy” person or say the right prayer in order to access God.”

Drop this obsolete nonsense NOW. You were taught, have believed, and have carried these dense, heavy, and absolutely false concepts of separation long enough. You are ready to experience the Lightness of your True Self — if you choose. We are the Arcturian Group.

channeled by Marilyn Raffaele on July 26, 2026 at OnenessofAll.com

Triggering the Body’s Own Immune System to Fight Cancer

 

One day in 2010, when oncologist Paul Muizelaar operated on a patient with glioblastoma—a brain tumor infamous for its deathly toll—he did something shocking. First, he cut the skull open and carved out as much of the tumor as he could. But before he replaced the piece of skull to close the wound, he soaked it in a solution containing Enterobacter aerogenes, bacteria found in feces. For the next month, the patient lay in a coma in an intensive care unit battling the bacteria he was infected with—and then one day a scan of his brain no longer showed the distinctive signature of glioblastoma. Instead, it showed an abscess, which, given the situation, Muizelaar deemed a positive development. “A brain abscess can be treated, a glioblastoma cannot,” he later told the New Yorker. Trying it, he thought, was worth the chance. He had done this only as a means of last resort in a couple of hopeless cases—but ultimately, his patients still passed away, which led to a scandal that forced him to retire.

Muizelaar’s approach may sound beyond outrageous, but it wasn’t entirely crazy. For over 200 years medics have known that infections, particularly those accompanied by fevers, can have a strange and shocking effect on cancers. Sometimes they wipe the tumors out. The empirical evidence for these hard-to-believe cures has been documented in medical literature, dating back to the 1700s. In the 19th century, some doctors tried treating cancer patients by deliberately infecting them with live bacterial pathogens. Sometimes it worked, sometimes the patients died. Injecting people with dead bacteria worked better and, in fact, saved lives, at least in some cancers. The problem was that it didn’t work consistently and repeatedly so it never became an established treatment paradigm. Moreover, no one could explain how the method worked and what it did. Doctors speculated that infections somehow revved up the body’s defenses, but even in the early 20th century, they had no means of elucidating the mysterious force that devoured the tumor.

Today we know that this mystery lies in the complex interplay of cancers and the immune system, says Mikala Egeblad at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who studies the tumultuous interactions between cancers and the organisms they grow in. We know that cancers have an uncanny ability to pull wool over the eyes of the immune system’s cells—not only by hiding from them, but even co-opting them to help themselves flourish. “Tumors are dysregulated organs,” says Egeblad—and they dysregulate the environment around them too. They cause a lot of turmoil and havoc wherever they take hold. Called the tumor microenvironment, that “battleground” is teeming with various microscopic players that cancers corrupt into unwitting allies.

“Our immune system is trying to protect us from various threats, including cancer,” says Karin Pelka at Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology who studies the cellular interactions that shape immune responses. “But cancer mutates in ways that it evolves to evade the immune system. So there’s a constant battle going on.”

In these dysregulated, messy ecosystems, infections may indeed serve as a force that rights the wrongs. They could reboot the body’s normal defense mechanisms, making the immune system see the enemy. However, deliberately infecting cancer patients with bacterial pathogens faces a major obstacle. It will never pass FDA approval because subjecting people — who are already gravely ill and fighting for their lives — to yet another health threat is unethical, reckless, and risky. And yet new directions in cancer treatment draw on the immune system kickstart idea, albeit in a different way. Moreover, some of the immunological approaches to cancer treatments have graduated from clinical trials to actual clinics.

What makes cancer an especially insidious disease is its ability to evade your own body’s defenses. Tumors have a host of tools at their disposal to hide from, suppress, and even manipulate your immune system in order to survive. Now, for the first time, cancer researchers have captured immune system cells engulfing mouse tumor cells on video. Their research, published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, could open up new avenues for cancer treatments.

To capture the footage, immunologists used intravital two-photon microscopy — an imaging technique capable of recording the activity of living cells in thin slices of tissue. Examining skin-cancer cells from mice, they discovered macrophages surrounding tumor cells and nibbling away at the outer edges.

“This is the first time anyone has captured a macrophage attacking and engulfing a live cancer cell in real time,” study author Yuki Keith of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia said in a statement. “We always suspected macrophages were doing more than we gave them credit for — now we have the video footage to prove it.”

Macrophages — the beat cops of the immune system — usually patrol tissues looking for interlopers and then gobble them up. After eating any foreign invaders, they can express a piece of the invader on their surface and rally other immune cells to repel the attack (effectively calling in the SWAT team).

Their role in cancer is a little murkier. As part of the immune system that cancer can co-opt, macrophages can actually promote tumor growth. In fact, up to 30 percent of a melanoma tumor’s mass can be made up of the immune cells. Once recruited into the tumor microenvironment, they can turn heel and suppress an immune response.

This latest research, which focused on a subset of macrophages that operate in the deepest layer of skin in both mice and humans, demonstrated that these specialized cells are on the front lines of defense, attacking cancer cells before other parts of the immune system get activated. “Critically, this attack appears to occur independently of T cells and B cells — the immune players most commonly credited with fighting cancer — which made the discovery unexpected, and genuinely exciting,” study co-author Tri Phan explained.

Now that they’ve identified a new immunotherapy lever to pull in the fight against cancer, the team is eager to exploit it. “If we can harness this population of macrophages, we potentially have an immune army already in place, ready to be mobilized,” Phan added. “Future treatments could involve developing targeted drugs that boost their numbers, or make them ‘hungrier’ or better at tagging cancer cells for killing.”

After all, shouldn’t our immune systems work for us?

Today, medicine has better methods for resetting the body’s idle defenses that don’t involve infecting patients with pathogens. And there are different ways to do it, says Pelka. One of them employs the so-called oncolytic viruses — genetically engineered or naturally existing viruses that infect only tumor cells, multiply inside, then burst them open, invading more cells. Scientists are also trying to boost the immune system activity with specific cytokines—molecules that cells use to communicate with each other. An especially successful class of drugs now used against different types of cancers is called checkpoint inhibitors; it works by unleashing the body’s warrior T-cells to kill cancer cells. Another strategy that has proven successful against some blood cancers are CAR-Ts (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cells), in which T-cells are taken from the blood, engineered in a lab to seek out the specific cancer — and then infused into the patient.

Revving up the immune system defenses is also much gentler on patients than the traditional methods like chemotherapy, which inevitably damage healthy cells, too. “The immunotherapy is much less toxic than chemotherapy,” says oncologist Sylvia Adams, who treats cancer patients at NYU Langone Health System. “It doesn’t change the patient’ quality of life.” It just “coaches” the immune system to tackle the tumor. And that’s what oncologists are aiming to tap into.

We hope to train the immune system to recognize the tumor,” Pelka says. This training could have a long-lasting effect because the immune system has a memory. Once the chemo is stopped, the cancer can regrow if not every single cell is killed. But if you train the immune cells to recognize the enemy, they will remember it. “This memory function is something that cancer immunologists are very excited about,” Pelka says.

This immune system “training” works on the molecular level, and that’s what cancer immunologists are investigating right now. Egeblad does it in a Fantastic Voyage style — by watching what the cells in the tumor microenvironment do. It is a bit like parachuting into the tumor trenches where the armies of cellular soldiers engage in military actions, sometimes deceiving each other, sometimes waking each other up from their molecular stupor. Egeblad is experimenting with a once-promising treatment that had fallen into disfavor because it also involved dangerous bacterial pathogens. First tried by a clever clinician over 100 years ago, it may be finally due for its 21st-century upgrade.

In the fall of 1890, Elisabeth Dashiell, an athletic 17-year-old lady who was a close friend of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., came back from an adventurous trip to Alaska with a swollen hand, which she had hurt in a seemingly minor accident. Her hand was healing so poorly that she went to see William Coley, a young but prominent doctor, at the Memorial Hospital in New York, which later would become the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

It turned out Dashiell’s hand wasn’t healing at all—Coley diagnosed her with an aggressive round cell sarcoma, a type of bone cancer. Coley operated, but it did little to help — Dashiell died from the metastases 10 weeks later. Her cancer was so rapid and vicious that it left a profound impression on Coley. He embarked on a quest for better options.

While scouting medical literature, Coley found the seven-years-old medical records of a patient who had round cell sarcoma on his neck, which kept growing back despite five surgeries. The man, a German immigrant named Fred Stein, was considered inoperable and hopeless, until he contacted erysipelas—a skin infection caused by streptococcal bacteria that manifests itself in fever and large, red patches on the face and legs. The infection, which spread over his neck and face, produced a strange side effect — his tumor all but vanished. According to the records, Stein went home in good health. Coley searched the Lower Manhattan tenements for Stein, and found him still alive and well, with no signs of cancer.

As he continued plowing through medical literature, he found that various prominent medics also had observed curative effects of infections on cancer. For example, English surgeon Sir James Paget noted that infection may cause a regression in some tumors. In 1867, German physician Busch reported a case similar to Stein’s, in which a tumor disappeared when the patient developed erysipelas. And in 1888, only two years before Dashiell died, another medic named Bruns intentionally gave a cancer patient a shot of streptococcus to induce erysipelas, after which the tumor shrunk. Altogether, Coley read about over 40 cases documenting the beneficial effects of infections on tumors.

Coley tried injecting three patients with streptococcal bacteria. The tumors seemed to shrink, but two of the patients died from the infection, so Coley switched to using dead bacteria—killed by heat. He also added another “cooked” bacteria into his concoction, Serratia marcescens, which, when alive, can cause infections of the respiratory and urinary tracts. He used the combo, which was dubbed Coley’s Toxin(s), on inoperable sarcoma patients with a fair amount of success — it was better than anything else available at the time. For the next three decades, Coley’s Toxins were widely used—until radiation and chemotherapy techniques came of age. These newer treatments soon surpassed the dead bacteria in popularity and Coley’s Toxins were all but buried in the annals of medicine.

Coley’s Toxins had several problems. Medics like predictable and repeatable results, and the bugs—alive or dead—were finicky subjects. Coley made 13 different preparations of the toxins, with some more effective than others. Sometimes he administered them intravenously, sometimes intramuscularly and in other cases he injected them directly into the tumors. Many doctors who used his toxins didn’t get the same results. Moreover, no one, not even Coley, could elucidate how the toxins worked.

Part of the issue was that Coley’s method was essentially ahead of its time. In the early 20th century scientists didn’t have the means to take a Fantastic Voyage trip into the tumors’ den. They couldn’t peek at the tumor microenvironment. They didn’t know that cancers can corrupt and co-opt the immune system cells. And yet, Coley was on the right track, Adams says. “When we, oncologists, talk about cancer immunology, we always refer to Coley as the person who had the first inkling into the power of the immune system.”

Today, scientists have much better tools to watch these battles in action. They can literally see the toxins flipping the immune cells’ tumor-tackling switches back on.

If you could indeed journey into the tumor trenches, you’d likely find the place very crowded. Tumors like to surround themselves with all kinds of normal, healthy cells, which they corrupt and co-opt into helpers.

In a healthy environment these cells would be performing their designated activities, Egeblad explains. Fibroblasts would be building scaffolding for various tissues to grow, such as muscle or bone. Pericytes would be making blood vessels. The immune system warriors B-cells and T-cells would be scouting for perpetrators, releasing antibodies, and killing the sickly cells—those infected by pathogens or mutated. Neutrophils would join the fight by ingesting invading microorganisms and releasing enzymes that kill them. And macrophages would clean up all the cellular debris and zap various rogue cells with nitric oxide—a toxic, free radical molecule they spew out. Many of these cells also interact with each other through molecular messaging. T-cells stimulate B-cells to secrete more antibodies. Macrophages activate T-cells to sic them on the agents of disease. In response, T-cells activate macrophages by spitting out inflammatory cytokines, molecules that regulate the body’s response to disease and infection. All these different players keep each other alert and engaged, a well-working biological defense team.

Normally, all these activities are supposed to spot mutated cells and wipe them out before they proliferate. But if and when a mutated cancerous cell—which may divide into two, or four, or a little clump—manages to avoid detection, they break the normal order of things. They start issuing their own molecular messages that confuse the cellular team. Tumors corrupt fibroblasts, which, in turn, turn off some of the T-cells and B-cells, essentially making them blind to the cancers’ presence. Tumors can “reprogram” macrophages — they secrete molecules that attract these cells, but instead of devouring the mutants, macrophages release growth stimulants for them. “So the immune system can provide the tumors with growth factors, which benefit the cancer,” says Pelka.

Scientists call such molecular “turncoats” tumor-associated macrophages, or TAMs. These TAMs do more damage than just feeding the tumors—they turn off T-cells and B-cells, so they no longer see the enemy. Moreover, these TAMs start taking cancer around the body, enabling metastases to take hold. They actively help malignant cells hitch rides in the bloodstream, traveling far and wide and settling in new locations. “Data strongly suggests that TAMs help tumor cells in and out of blood vessels—they are physically nurturing cancer cells,” says Egeblad. “So even though the immune system has the ability to recognize the cancer cells, it gets turned off. The cells get suppressed.” Cancers indeed pull the wool over the immune system’s cellular army. The cells need an eye-opener.

For Egeblad such an “eye-opener” was an experiment one of her post-doctoral researchers did a few years ago. He was trying to make TAMs go back to their normal feisty state and start killing glioblastoma. He mixed a bunch of cancer cells and TAMs in a petri dish, and then he added some “magic dust”—a mix of bacteria-derived toxin and another immune-boosting compound called interferon gamma. A part of the innate immune system, interferons are proteins that mediate the body’s defense responses, and the gamma type is specifically known for its anti-cancer activity.

The toxin-interferon combo packed a punch. The blinded macrophages “woke up” and attacked cancer—a battle that the post-doc captured on camera. “It makes macrophages speak in a different way to the T-cells,” explains Egeblad. “They change the signals they are sending out, and these new signals make T–cells effective in recognizing the cancer cells. But we think it also likely works on all other cells, too. It changes the entire environment.”

Egeblad and Adams teamed up to investigate how this combo would work on tumor cells taken from real patients. Adam’s team collected lung fluids from patients with breast cancer that had metastasized to the lungs and transported them to CSHL. Egeblad’s team extracted tumor cells and immune cells from the samples, treated them with the toxin-interferon combo and watched the immune cells waking up to the cancer’s presence. “We were able to turn them on to the tumor cells in the dish,” Adams says. “We reprogrammed them to kill the tumor.” In a recent study, the two teams showed that the toxin-interferon combo also suppresses tumor growth and metastasis in breast and ovarian cancer in mice. They hope to eventually try this in humans, too.

Understanding the tumor microenvironment has other potentials. It might help answer exactly how cancers first “set up shop,” corrupting immune system cells and making them work for themselves. When metastatic cancers first arrive to a new location, that location isn’t set up to nourish them, Egeblad says. All the body’s cells there are healthy and doing their regular job—and yet, the cancer manages to corrupt them again. Too often patients go home seemingly cured from their cancers, only to discover that it metastasized someplace else, or even many places, and is already in advanced form. “We’d like to understand how metastases develop, what enables cancer cells to succeed in the new organ or how it gets eliminated by the immune system there,” Egeblad says. “Once we figure that out, we’ll be able to put an end to cancers’ spread.”

from nautil.us on November 3, 2021, and May 23, 2026

Age is Just a Number: Never Too Late, Never Too Old

 

His son died in front of him. A piece of metal sheeting in a storm, a freak farming accident in Punjab. Fauja Singh was already in his eighties. His wife was already gone. He sat in his village and stopped speaking for weeks. His family moved him to East London to be closer to relatives. One afternoon he wandered into a park and saw a group of men running in matching kit. He did not know what a marathon was. He asked someone to explain. He decided he would do one.

He was 89 years old. He finished his first London Marathon in 6 hours and 54 minutes. He kept going. New York. Toronto. Edinburgh. Hong Kong. At 100, wrapped in a yellow turban and a beard the color of clean snow, he became the oldest person ever to finish a marathon distance. His training diet was ginger curry, strong tea, and long walks through Ilford.

He never learned to read or write. He never owned a car. He started running at an age when most people are choosing a chair. Starting late is still starting. The clock is not the gatekeeper you think it is.

from Marathon Mindset on Facebook on May 23, 2026

Antonio Rao proves it again! At 93 years old, he conquered the 2026 Rome Marathon in 7:09:20. A true legend who holds the M90 world record and continues to inspire generations. From a sub-2-hour half marathon at 75 to completing the Roma-Ostia half marathon in 2 hours, 54 minutes, and 40 seconds... this is dedication at its finest.

from Marathon Mindset on Facebook on January 17, 2026