Far

PhD, historian, teacher and supporter of justice and progressive causes

[Matthew Herper @matthewherper]

People who don't follow cancer research often ask me why we haven't cured cancer. That perception masks a wonderful reality: We make amazing, stepwise progress every year, and the result is that many people live much longer today than they would have previously.

Right now we're in the thick of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the biggest research meeting on new cancer medicines, and this morning a bunch of really important studies dropped. I'm going to review them here.

This first image is the result for daraxonrasib, a treatment for pancreatic cancer that is generating consdirable excitement. The green line is the probability of living for patients who got the new drug; the gray one is the chemo control group.

If you follow cancer drugs, a chart like this will make your breath hitch a little. I'm going to review these and some other data here.

[🐊ZK For Tre🐊 @ZKForTre]

I feel like I am often too negative here (sometimes for good reason), but I want to give people a sense for why we might be 10 years away from a paradigm shift in cancer outcomes.

This year, we have proof of concept for all of the following:

mRNA vaccine success against low antigen burden cancers (i.e. PDAC): https://t.co/3mCykQLKDH

Immune activation by non-specific antigens (COVID Vaccines): https://t.co/MmoJZhpG9n

Successful drugging of undrugable driver genes: https://t.co/SR2lnKnJJz

Successful drugging of hard to drug driver genes: https://t.co/Ize0nigQFo (this presentation data was admittedly noisy so I'm holding off on this for now),

Next generations target-specific CAR-T/T cell engagers: https://t.co/9XlCUVZTJN

Antibody-drug conjugates for more targeted therapy: https://t.co/V8wS1Agc9r
https://t.co/yD63glK6jY

Melanoma mortality rates cut in half (not new but new data supporting durable treatment effect): https://t.co/DUscZg5qow

Transformative improvements for patients with Multiple myeloma: https://t.co/aMbfjM7xIg
https://t.co/gKNl97UKVy
https://t.co/qcFrAENQtR

GLP1s as potential anti-cancer agents (lots of mechanisms possible here, no clinical data, so hold off on any conclusions and appreciate the multiple reasons why this may not pan out-- i.e. cachexia concerns): https://t.co/to6JH78Et5

And, of course, AI for diagnostic radiology.

Still a long, long way to go, especially for the average, non-trial-enrolling patient. But there is reason for hope in the coming years for cancers that were death sentences as recently as 5 years ago. All of this on top of proven efficacy of checkpoint inhibitors, existing antibodies and small molecules, and the emerging technologies like adoptive cell therapies and tumor-specific mRNA vaccines.

[Alex Shams @alexshams_]

Interview with the head of the Mossad branch tasked with destabilizing Iran, worth a read.

It reveals the vast scope of influence operations inside Iran and across social media:

"We had been working to influence young audiences and Pahlavi supporters"

https://t.co/UdzI8V2TlR

[Aprajita Nafs Nefes 🦋 Ancient Believer @aprajitanefes]

Listen carefully. This is not speculation.

Elon Musk, Mustafa Suleyman from Microsoft, and Dario Amodei from Anthropic are not giving opinions. They are ANNOUNCING THE END OF THE WORLD AS MOST PEOPLE KNOW IT.

What they are openly saying is this:

Within the next 12 TO 18 MONTHS, AI will completely take over most white-collar jobs. Coding, law, accounting, finance, writing, design, analysis, customer service almost everything that educated people do to earn a living will be done better and cheaper by AI.

This is not “some jobs will be lost.”
This is MASS HUMAN OBSOLESCENCE.

Millions of people are about to wake up one day and discover that their skills, their degrees, their experience… are suddenly worthless. There will be no jobs for them. Not fewer jobs. NO JOBS.

The harsher truth nobody wants to hear:

The elite class has already accepted that they no longer need most human beings to run the economy. Once AI and robots can do the work, the average person becomes an expensive liability. They are openly preparing for a future where the majority of humans have no economic value whatsoever.

This is why you’re hearing them talk about Universal Basic Income. It’s not charity, it’s a leash. A way to feed and control a population that has been made economically useless.

People are still making reels, scrolling, showing off, and living in total delusion while the ground beneath their feet is being destroyed. They have no idea that their entire way of life is about to be erased in the next 1 to 2 years.

This is not “technological change.”
This is the deliberate replacement of human beings in the economic system.

The machine doesn’t need you anymore.

And the people who control the machine just told you that in plain English.

[owen cyclops @owenbroadcast]

my friends, it is time:

in conjunction with @avemariapress and a new book they released, i spent the last few months illustrating the entire structure of the summa theologica, by thomas aquinas.

in my shop here: https://t.co/7BXaOV3Uv7

can i show and tell you, in this thread:

[Afrasiab Mehdi Hashmi Qureshi @ambafrasiab]

Book on the Prophet of Islam authored by a Chinese scholar Liu Chai - lien, printed in 1779. This is the English translation of that book by Isaac Mason, which was published in Shanghai in 1921.

[Azadeh Moaveni @AzadehMoaveni]

Extraordinary reporting by @SkyNews in southern Iran, meeting with mothers whose children were killed by a US strike on a school in Minab.

‘It is completely overwhelming for all of us here. You have child after child, grave after grave, of dead children. Every evening…their families come after dusk to spend hours at their children’s graveside, mourning their loss..”

@skyzein @DominicWaghorn

https://t.co/HxcEzZSnEo

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

In his second administration, President Trump’s family, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and sons Eric and Don Jr., are expanding their business ventures, earning hundreds of millions of dollars and prompting fresh concerns about influence peddling and conflicts of interest.

@ElizLanders reports.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

99% of investments to Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners come from non-US investors – almost all Gulf monarchies like the UAE, which is desperate for regime change in Iran

Meanwhile, the Trump sons are invested in two Pentagon drone contractors developing systems for the Iran war, as well as the prediction markets companies being used for insider trading on the war

No mention in this report of World Liberty Financial, run by Steve Witkoff's son, which raked in a $2 billion investment from the UAE

Trump corruption makes Hunter Biden's art look like a Girl Scout cookie sale

[Nik Kowsar @nikahang]

“A man with inherited privilege, no serious achievement, a talent for drifting with the wind, and a remarkable ability to keep millions emotionally invested while delivering little beyond contradiction, illusion, and disappointment,” Nik Kowsar, a well-known journalist and cartoonist who was once close to Pahlavi, wrote in April.
By @robertfworth of the @TheAtlantic

https://t.co/YC1sfEliXT

[Pokémon Deals, Restock and Alerts @PokemonRestockr]

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https://t.co/MUbtQBIAHG

#PokemonTCG #Pokemon #ad

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL on CNN: Donald Trump now has the worst net approval rating among independents of ANY president ever. He is literally polling 10 points worse than Richard Nixon right before he resigned. The American public has abandoned him entirely!

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Israel is explicitly warning Christian and Druze residents in southern Lebanon not to hide Muslim residents among them as their forces advance.

Not a peep from Sheryl Sandberg.

[Richard @ricwe123]

In the village of Shama in southern Lebanon, the IDF has reduced the mausoleum of Simon Peter,an apostle of Christ, to ruins.
Two thousand years of history, wiped away in a single moment......

[Akin Unver @AkinUnver]

such a banger

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

After much reflection, and after it became clear to me that some UN seniors are serving a powerful lobby and not the UN, I have decided to suspend all my duties as PVA Main Representative at the UN and from all UN committees/groups of which I am a member.

I cannot in good conscience be part of or witness to what is happening at a time when the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use.

It has been an honor cooperating with the UN for nearly 12 years under different Secretaries-General and Human Rights Council Presidents, leading PVA delegation.

May God bless this world.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

"Why should we believe your government and not Amnesty?"

I asked the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman about Amnesty International accusing the Iranian government of "massacres" of Iranian protesters, based on "verified videos & eyewitness accounts":

[Borzou Daragahi 🖊🗒 @borzou]

One Iranian in the Diaspora told me they came up with a number of hundred thousand dead because “everyone I know” knows at least one person who died. I pointed out that that if you extrapolate that methodology, it means that 93 million died

[Abier @abierkhatib]

Here’s an Iranian voice from inside the country, not someone posting thirst traps to talk about Iran

Sara is answering the question Zionists keep obsessing over: “What about the internet shutdown? “