John Lam

The answer to hegemony has always been plurality. Find me at or Threads.

[Superman @thesupermannx]

Scientists found a way to flush Alzheimer’s plaque out of the brain in minutes.

Without any surgery and drugs.

Your brain has a waste-clearance network called the glymphatic system. It flushes out toxic proteins and dead cells.

But it only really activates during deep, slow-wave sleep.

If you don't sleep, the trash piles up. Over time, that buildup leads to cognitive decline and Alzheimer's.

Until today.

Researchers just published a paper proving they can manually trigger this cleaning cycle.

Without you ever going to sleep.

They used 40.68 MHz ultrashort waves (USW) beamed non-invasively into the brain.

Within 10 minutes, the brain's fluid flow rapidly accelerated.

The waves artificially synchronized the neurons into a Delta state, the exact frequency of deep sleep. This forced the brain's water channels to open and start flushing out the system.

They tested it on mice with traumatic brain injuries and Alzheimer's pathology.

The brain swelling dropped. The toxic proteins were cleared out. Cognitive deficits actually improved.

No surgery. No massive chemical interventions. Just a frequency.

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

BREAKING: Israeli spyware is confirmed on our phones. This should be headline news but none of our mainstream media is covering it, of course. So we will.

An Israeli ad company called Discover-Tech used ordinary online ads to plant spyware on people’s devices, and nobody had to click anything. The ad just had to load on a website or inside an app for you to be infected.

Citizen Lab and the ad security firm Confiant published the findings yesterday. Researchers went through roughly 4 billion ad-bidding records and found Discover-Tech ads running on more than 120,000 websites and 70,000 apps between March and June of this year. Confiant says the company was serving at least 10 million ads a day.

The platform was called Controlium. According to Citizen Lab, it let spyware companies use ad auctions to profile and unmask users, then send an infected ad to the one person they wanted to hack. The ads were also pulling cookies and login tokens from the sites they ran on. Israeli corporate records list Dekel Boni as the company’s founding director and sole shareholder.

The main spyware customer was Candiru, the Israeli firm the U.S. government blacklisted in 2021, which now goes by Integrity Labs. Five years after that blacklisting, it was still reaching devices through ad inventory on Google, Comcast-owned Beeswax and Russia’s Yandex. Google had Discover-Tech on its approved vendor list from 2020 until this week.

At least 45 Al Jazeera devices were targeted in 2024 and 2025. Candiru’s 2021 shareholder filings reportedly listed a minority investor described as a proxy for Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and Qatar also funds Al Jazeera. If that holds up, Qatari state money was sitting inside the company whose spyware was later aimed at Qatar’s own news network.

The heaviest targeting was in the Palestinian territories, where Discover-Tech served almost 2% of all digital ads and about 10% on April 7. Traffic also reached the Armenian prime minister’s office, courts, universities and defense organizations.

Google and the other ad platforms cut Discover-Tech off after the report came out. What nobody has answered yet is who paid for the ad buys, and how a company working with a U.S.-blacklisted spyware vendor passed vendor review for six years.

I am going to look into this today to see if we can figure out who was buying the ads. Interesting timing considering my article yesterday....

Here's what to do to protect yourself:
(1) Use an ad blocker. Citizen Lab calls ad-blocking a cybersecurity best practice and says there is no consistently safe way to be exposed to targeted ads. On iPhone, add a Safari content blocker. On Android, use Brave or Firefox with uBlock Origin. Ad blockers only work in your browser, not inside apps, so it also helps to delete free ad-supported apps you don’t need.
Kill your advertising ID.

(2) iPhone: Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking, and turn off “Allow Apps to Request to Track.” Then Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising, and turn Personalized Ads off.

(2) Android 12 or later: Settings > Privacy > Ads > Delete Advertising ID. Then in Settings > Google > All Services > Privacy & security > Ads > Ads privacy, turn off Ad topics and Ad measurement.

(3) Windows 11: Settings > Privacy & Security > General, and turn off personalized ads using your advertising ID.

(4) Update your phone and restart it often. Many zero-click exploits don’t survive a reboot, so a daily restart forces attackers to reinfect you.

Stay tuned!

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

People keep saying Trump term II is the most corrupt administration ever, so I built a model to find out if it was true.

I took the UN's definition of corruption, turned it into eight criteria and 100 points, and scored the leaders history remembers for looting their countries: Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu, Abacha, Obiang, Putin.

Then I put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale, both parties, with every exoneration counted right alongside the convictions.

Nixon scored 41 and no other American President scored over a 25.

Trump's second term scored a 91, which ties him with Suharto and Mobutu and puts him above Marcos and Abacha.

So he is not only the most corrupt president in American history. At this pace he finishes his term level with the most corrupt rulers of the last hundred years.

PSA: don't come in my comments arguing about the results if you haven't read the full article, because ignorance is a choice.

Full article is up now on my Substack (link in bio) and it's free.

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

If I were president and I wanted to tank the dollar and get rich off it, here is exactly what I would do.

I would hire a Treasury Secretary who already made $3.5 billion crashing another country's currency. I would put my guy in charge of the agency that approves bank charters. I would install a crypto czar with $200M in crypto holdings and give him an ethics waiver so nobody could challenge it.

Then I would sign an executive order banning the government from ever creating a digital dollar so there was no competition.

Then I would have my family launch their own private digital dollar. My family takes 75% of net profits. I would grow it to $4.6 billion in circulation and route a $2 billion Abu Dhabi sovereign fund deal through it to prove it works.

Then I would get Congress to pass a law requiring every stablecoin in the country to hold short-term Treasury bills. Now every dollar of my digital currency is a forced buyer of government debt. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive demand by 2030.

Then I would have my OCC guy grant my family's company a federal bank charter. Now I can issue my digital dollar with federal authority.

Then I would have my Treasury Secretary weaken the actual dollar. Bond buybacks that suppress yields but tank the currency. Build a $950 billion war chest for more. Let the debt hit $40 trillion. Dollar index drops to 99. Gold goes to highest point ever.

Then I would kill the Corporate Transparency Act and delete the FinCEN beneficial ownership database. That was the one law that required every shell company in America to report who actually owns it. Without it, nobody can trace who is buying my stablecoin, who is routing money through it, or where the profits land.

Then I would let the loop run. Weaker dollar drives demand for "stable" digital alternatives. The law I passed forces those alternatives to buy T-bills. That funds the government's debt. My family takes profit on every transaction. Foreign central banks walking away from Treasuries get replaced by legally mandated stablecoin reserves my family controls.

Then I would use sanctions to start cutting countries off from the dollar system entirely. And when those countries need a new way to transact in dollars, the only federally chartered private digital dollar in existence is mine. They can buy it through shell companies nobody can trace because I deleted the ownership database.

I just built a toll booth on the global financial system. I take a cut every time someone uses the dollar. And I made it so nobody can see who is paying.

And every single step I just described has already happened.

So what does that mean for you and I?

The reason the United States can borrow at low rates and keep your mortgage and your car payment and your import prices stable is because foreign central banks hold trillions in dollar reserves. That system has always been public. The benefit went to everyone. Lower borrowing costs, cheaper goods , and the single biggest economic advantage any country has ever had.

What I just described is the privatization of that function. The entity buying the debt is no longer a central bank acting in the public interest. It is a private company taking 75% of net profits for one family. The reserve function used to generate a public benefit. Now it generates a private fee.

Your purchasing power shrinks every time the dollar weakens. Your 401k buys less in real terms. Everything you import costs more. And every time the dollar drops, demand for the private digital alternative goes up. The one the president's family owns. The one that by law must buy government debt.

You absorb the cost of a weakening dollar. His family collects the profit. That is the trade.

The enforcement mechanism to stop a sitting president from doing this? There isn't one. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter says it would be a violation for literally any other federal employee, but not the president.

Nobody voted for this. No one was asked. There was no debate. There is no enforcement mechanism. There is no one investigating it. The Senate tried and it was blocked.

This is the largest conflict of interest in American history happening in broad daylight while everyone argues about something else.

So what do you do? Share this. Make it impossible to ignore. Send it to your representative, your senator, every journalist you follow. We make them answer for it.
Because the only thing protecting this scheme right now is the fact that not enough people understand it yet.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The level of blatant corruption is breathtaking:

Trump has officially launched a service offering Wall Street firms early access to his social media posts on his website -- for a fee of $100,000 per month.

In the press release for the service it calls "Truth API", Trump Media and Technology Group boasted of providing financial firms with "market-moving Truths".

The White House is literally charging rich investors more than a million dollars per year so they can get even richer through government-sponsored insider trading. The fish rots from the head down.

[John Lam @jlam]

@jeffdavismd @Gaurab The dose matters. The Earth has begun overdosing on abiotic CO2, @jeffdavismd

[Sheryl Gay Stolberg @SherylNYT]

NEW: Major posts are vacant. Waves of scientists are gone. Ebola looms. How RFK Jr. manages HHS:

“If the C.E.O. lacked deep expertise in the company’s business and the leaders of its most important divisions were missing, investors would revolt."

https://t.co/QTZtLMUmUl

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Heart disease kills more people than every cancer combined. Lilly just published Phase 1b data in the NEJM on a single injection that could prevent most of it. Permanently.

The science starts with a genetic accident. A small percentage of people are born with a broken PCSK9 gene. Their livers clear LDL cholesterol so efficiently that researchers tracking them over 15 years found up to 88% fewer coronary events. The effect was so large it looked like a data error.

The reason is timing. Statins lower your cholesterol at age 45. A broken PCSK9 gene lowers it from birth. Decades of low LDL compound into plaque that never forms in the first place. You can't reverse 40 years of arterial damage with a pill. You can prevent it entirely with a gene.

VERVE-102 is a base editor. Single IV infusion. One letter changed in your liver cells' DNA. The PCSK9 gene turns off permanently. Phase 1b results across 35 patients: 88% reduction in PCSK9 protein, 62% drop in LDL cholesterol at the highest dose. Durable at 18 months. The effect didn't fade.

Lilly paid $1.3 billion to acquire Verve Therapeutics for this program. The global statin market does roughly $16 billion a year selling daily pills that patients take for life. If a single infusion replaces 30 years of daily medication, Lilly didn't buy a drug. They bought the retirement plan for an entire drug class.

One shot to join the genetic lottery that most of the population lost.

[ProPublica @propublica]

While Trump has railed against drugs coming into the U.S., his DOJ has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 federal drug cases, including trafficking and money laundering — 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.
https://t.co/QAXxchdBj7

[John Lam @jlam]

@aplinkkeliai @RepMikeLevin That’s not what @RepMikeLevin wrote. Reread it. He didn’t write, six people could read the doc. He wrote, six people had clearance to read it.

[John Lam @jlam]

@JamesCh89793620 @aftab_usa @guyatthediner You mean, delete the cars, not just petro burners, but all the tire-particulate sloughing ones too.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Thomas Massie is sounding the alarm.

Congress is about to pass a liability shield for Bayer — a foreign corporation — that would strip Americans of the right to sue when glyphosate gives them cancer.

Massie: “This is not to grant farmers immunity. This is to grant corporations immunity. If you contract non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from this chemical — you won’t be able to sue.”

Bayer has already paid billions settling cancer lawsuits.

This bill ends future lawsuits permanently.
RFK Jr. built his brand on MAHA.

Trump is urging Republicans to pass it anyway.

[WikiLeaks @wikileaks]

JULIAN ASSANGE FILES CRIMINAL COMPLAINT AGAINST NOBEL FOUNDATION OVER “INSTRUMENT OF WAR” PEACE PRIZE

WikiLeaks Founder Alleges 2025 Award to María Corina Machado Constitutes Misappropriation, Facilitation of War Crimes Under Swedish Law, Seeks Freeze of 11 million SEK ($1.18 million USD) of Pending Transfers to Machado

STOCKHOLM — 11:00am CET December 17, 2025

Julian Assange today filed a criminal complaint in Sweden accusing 30 individuals associated with the Nobel Foundation, including its leadership, of committing serious suspected crimes, including the crime of gross misappropriation of funds, facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the financing of the crime of aggression.

The complaint shows that Alfred Nobel's 1895 will explicitly mandates that the peace prize go to the individual who during the proceeding year “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” by doing “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Assange argues that “The political decision of the Norwegian selection committee does not suspend the fiduciary duty of Swedish funds administrators”. “Any disbursement contradicting this mandate constitutes misappropriation from the endowment”.

The complaint, submitted simultaneously to the Swedish Economic Crime Authority (Ekobrottsmyndigheten) and the Swedish War Crimes Unit (Krigsbrottsenheten), states that the suspects, including Nobel Foundation Chair Astrid Söderbergh Widding and Executive Director Hanna Stjärne, converted “an instrument of peace into an instrument of war,” through suspected “serious criminality” including:

1) Breach of trust, gross misappropriation and conspiracy in relation to the pending 11 million SEK ($1.18 million) disbursement of the Peace prize monies to Maria Corina Machado, whose prior and ongoing actions categorically exclude her from the criteria set out in Alfred Nobel's will;

2) Facilitation of war crimes, including the crime of aggression and crimes against humanity, breaching Sweden's obligations under Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute, because the accused are aware of Machado's incitement and endorsement of the U.S. commission of international crimes, and knew or ought to have known that the disbursement of Nobel monies would contribute to extrajudicial killings of civilians and shipwrecked survivors at sea and are in breach of their obligation to cease disbursements.

Assange notes that the members of the Nobel Foundation have previously exercised their supervisory authority over the prizes and their disbursements by withholding Literature Prize disbursements in 2018. “Failure to intervene here, despite U.S. war crimes off the Venezuelan coast and Machado’s key role in furthering aggression” incurs criminal liability.

“Alfred Nobel's endowment for peace cannot be spent on the promotion of war,” Assange states. The accused have concrete legal obligations because they are tasked with “ensuring the fulfillment of the intended purpose of Alfred Nobel’s will, that is, to end wars and war crimes, and not to enable them.”

MACHADO'S INCITEMENT OF THE LARGEST U.S. MILITARY BUILDUP SINCE THE IRAQ WAR MAKE HER CATEGORICALLY INELIGIBLE

The complaint notes how the Nobel announcement and ceremony have occurred in what military analysts describe as “the largest U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis”—now exceeding 15,000 personnel, including the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. The escalation continues as President Trump announced on December 10, two days after the Nobel ceremony, that U.S. strikes would be “starting by land.” The Venezuela strategy is part of what Trump’s Secretary for War, Peter Hegseth, calls a shift toward “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and “going on the offence”.

Against this backdrop, Assange states that “Machado has continued to incite the Trump Administration to pursue its escalatory path”, including by entering into a conspiracy to give the U.S. administration access to $1.7 trillion in oil reserves and other natural resources through privatization once Maduro is ousted.

“Using her elevated position as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado may well have tipped the balance in favour of war, facilitated by the named suspects.” Assange states in the criminal complaint.

The complaint lists evidence of this incitement of U.S. military intervention, as well as praising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conduct in Gaza. Her statements include:

- “Military escalation may be the only way... the United States may need to intervene directly” (30 October 2025)
- Machado called U.S. military strikes on civilian vessels, which have killed at least 95 people to date, “justified” and “visionary”.
- Machado dedicated the prize to U.S. President Trump, because he “finally has put Venezuela... in terms of a priority for the United States national security”
- Historical statements including 2014 testimony before U.S. Congress where she said: “The only path left is the use of force”

The filing cites extensive third-party expert and institutional opposition to Machado receiving the award:

- 21 Norwegian peace organizations declared: “Machado is the opposite of a peace laureate.”
- Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel stated: “Giving the prize to someone who calls for foreign invasion is a mockery of Alfred Nobel's will.”
- The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) confirmed Machado “has called for military intervention in Venezuela.”

REQUESTED ACTION

The complaint notes that “There is a real risk that the funds derived from Nobel’s endowment have been or will be intentionally or negligently diverted from their charitable purpose to facilitate aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.”

Assange requests that Swedish authorities:

1. Immediately freeze of the pending SEK 11,000,000 monetary prize transfer and any remaining related budget and secure return of the medal.
2. Investigate the named persons and Foundation officers and associated entities for breach of trust, facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and conspiracy.
3. Seize of board minutes, emails, group chats, financial records.
4. Interrogate Widding, Stjärne and other suspects.
5. Fully investigate domestically or refer the matter to the ICC (Rome Statute Art. 25(3)(c)).

“This complaint seeks the immediate freezing of all remaining funds and a full criminal investigation lest the Nobel Peace Prize be permanently converted from an instrument of peace into an instrument of war,” Assange concludes.

[Cato Institute @CatoInstitute]

Trump’s second-term pardons are historic in their enormity—billions in fines erased, allies protected, donors rewarded, DOJ undermined, and election norms threatened. Corruption looks less like an exception and more like the rule, says Cato’s Dan Greenberg.
https://t.co/rR2YH0O7py

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 Rep. Neguse just exposed a $143 million no-bid contract live on camera:

The company has no headquarters. No website. No prior federal contracts.

It was incorporated 8 days before receiving the contract.

Its registered address belongs to a political operative.
One of its subcontractors is a political firm tied directly to Kristi Noem from her time as South Dakota governor.
Neguse asked Noem where the company is headquartered.

“I don’t know.”

$143 million of taxpayer money. Vanished into a ghost company. Connected to the Secretary of Homeland Security herself.

This is the agency running DOGE. Cutting waste. Eliminating fraud.

[John Lam @jlam]

@raiderboi925 @rohindhar Methinks Costco lacks suitable items in the smaller quantities selected by SF Chronicle for comparison. And how should they apportion the membership fee?

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨BREAKING: The Trump administration is rounding up PREGNANT CHILDREN in ICE custody and moving them to Texas…

According to reporting from The Texas Newsroom and The California Newsroom, the administration has ordered that all pregnant unaccompanied minors be concentrated into one facility in San Benito, Texas. Some of these girls are as young as 13 years old.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency responsible for unaccompanied minors, previously placed pregnant teens in shelters or foster homes equipped for high-risk pregnancies.

That was the longstanding policy, and that changed when Trump returned to office.

Now, they are being transferred… sometimes across state lines… into a state where abortion access is outlawed.

This is not accidental.

Internal emails show ORR leadership directing staff to place “any pregnant children” into this Texas program moving forward. While, at the same time, the administration revoked Biden-era guidance that allowed minors to be moved to states where abortion was still legal.

ICE’s own internal policy says pregnant, postpartum, and nursing women should not be detained except in exceptional circumstances. Yet, pregnant women are being shackled, denied prenatal care, separated from their families, and transported out of state.

A federal judge in Minnesota already rebuked the administration for illegally detaining a refugee mother who was still breastfeeding her five-month-old baby.

And while all this is happening, more than 400 children have been moved into ORR shelters since Trump returned to the White House.

Advocates are warning this mirrors family separation tactics… parents arrested, children “referred” to ORR, and then shuffled through a system that has already been exposed for losing track of migrant kids in the past.

Which seems to be the goal as the Trump administration rolls back family reunification parole.

Now, pregnant children are being transferred into a state where abortion is banned, after being taken into federal custody and moved across state lines.

That single policy choice concentrates vulnerable children in one place, strips them of medical autonomy, and puts the government in total control of their bodies.

And all of that is happening as they are separated from family support…

That is how trafficking systems operate. That is the creation of a trafficking pipeline.

And it is happening under federal authority.

[Dr Dan Goyal @danielgoyal]

This is a spectacularly important study.

Published in Nature, it provides solid evidence that this platform pushes those on the right further to the right, more pro-Trump, more pro-Russia,…

And that these effects are programmed into the platform

https://t.co/coNPOvjA9E

[The Epstein Files @TheEpsteinFiles]

🚨 BREAKING: CBS News uncovers a bombshell 69-page DEA memo hidden in the Epstein files. detailing a 5-year federal probe into Jeffrey Epstein for wire transfers linked to "illicit drug and/or prostitution activities" in the US Virgin Islands and New York.

Launched in 2010 and still ongoing in 2015, it tracked ~$50M in shady transfers to accounts in Switzerland, France, Cayman Islands, and NY.

Memo names 14 other redacted targets (shocker!).

It exposes new Epstein-linked probes: ICE investigations in West Palm Beach, Las Vegas, and Paris, plus an FBI case from 2006 active through 2015.

Insane twist: SDNY prosecutors who nabbed Epstein in 2019 claim they NEVER knew about this DEA investigation.

The web just got deeper.

[Jonathan Lemire @JonLemire]

DOJ removed, withheld Epstein files related to accusations about Trump https://t.co/u6nIqkO4k7