Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClearScience,

For years, scientists have hypothesized that safe, cheap, generic drugs like metformin and rapamycin could slow aging, based on promising findings in animal models. But despite the evidenced hope, little has been done to see if these drugs actually slow aging in humans. There have been no rigorous clinical trials exploring whether metformin or rapamycin prolong life and and boost health.

How is it possible that metformin and rapamycin, long used to respectively treat diabetes and prevent organ transplant rejection, have had their anti-aging potential ignored for so long? To conspiracy-minded critics of ‘Big Pharma’, the answer is obvious: there’s no money in it. In this case, they seem to be correct. Speaking at the 12th Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) meeting convened at the University of Copenhagen last summer, industry leaders conceded the point.

“Repurposing cheap, off-patent drugs like metformin fails mathematically. Phase 3 clinical trials cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Companies cannot recover this money without a patent monopoly. Therefore, the industry tests new, patented drugs for specific diseases.”

Rapamycin costs between $40 and $150 per month out of pocket. Metformin is even cheaper, between $4 and $20 per month. To pharmaceutical companies, this meager revenue simply doesn’t justify an expensive clinical trial to treat a nebulous medical condition like “aging,” which insurers don’t even consider reimbursable. To put it bluntly, treating aging with generic drugs may be economical and worthwhile for humans and society as a whole, but it isn’t commercially viable for pharmaceutical companies.

The industry leaders speaking at ARDD explained a strategy that makes more financial sense.

“Industry tests new, patented drugs for specific diseases. During these trials, researchers simultaneously measure aging biomarkers like epigenetic clocks. This secondary strategy generates the hard numbers of regulators demand. The goal is to force regulators to classify aging as a reimbursable medical condition. This mirrors how objective data transformed obesity from a lifestyle choice into a treated disease.”

So it’s possible that what recently happened with obesity and GLP-1s will one day happen with aging.

In the meantime, independent institutions are trying to launch efforts to explore metformin and rapamycin’s anti-aging potential in humans. The American Federation for Aging Research has – for a decade now – sought “visionary donors” to begin their Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) Trial, a six-year study testing whether metformin can delay development or progression of age-related chronic diseases in 3,000 adults aged 65-79. Earlier this year, scientists at The University of Texas at San Antonio secured funding from the National Institute on Aging to carry out a including a “randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial involving approximately 84 older adults who will receive either daily rapamycin, intermittent dosing or a placebo” for six months, while monitoring the treatment’s effects.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The British government is preparing to tell ordinary people a blunt message: the state is not coming to save you. Households will be urged to stockpile long-life food, bottled water, essential medicines and even wind-up radios as part of a new national resilience campaign launching later this year.

At the same time, ministers have confirmed Operation Albiston Shadow – the largest home defence wargame exercise in decades – will take place in 2027, testing responses to ‘hybrid’ attacks alongside a major NATO drill.

Officials frame it all around Russian cyber threats, sabotage risks and the need to update the old Government War Book. Yet the timing and language raise a sharper question about what Whitehall is actually preparing for.

BREAKING: The UK will hold its largest home defence exercise in decades next year

Dubbed ‘Operation Albiston Shadow’ Sky’s @haynesdeborah says it will play out over a number of days and will be testing the UK’s responses to ‘hybrid’ threats under the threshold of conventional… pic.twitter.com/HZTqjNlVvl

— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 14, 2026

Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones stated “The government will do all it can and we are well prepared – but we can all play our part to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. This campaign will help the public to take small but important steps to be prepared in case of emergencies and disruption – be that severe weather or a cyber-attack, which can impact access to power, water, or phone signal.”

Armed Forces minister Louise Sandher-Jones was more explicit about the external threat: “Russia is not only a threat to NATO’s eastern flank. It is a direct threat to the UK homeland and these exercises, together with important measures like updating our ‘War Books’, will help prepare us to meet that threat, as well as showing the British public how seriously we are taking it.”

The Cabinet Office has updated the National Risk Register with new scenarios including cyber attacks on data, water and police systems, digital resilience failures modelled on the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, and foreign interference in democracy.

BREAKING: The UK will hold its largest home defence exercise in decades next year to better prepare the country for the possibility of war.
Dubbed “Operation Albiston Shadow”, it will likely involve ministers as well as hundreds of officials from across government and the public…

— Deborah Haynes (@haynesdeborah) July 14, 2026

Operation Albiston Shadow will involve hundreds of officials, ministers and agencies role-playing a multi-day national crisis focused on hybrid attacks below the threshold of conventional war. It is designed to test current assumptions and ensure readiness “should the worst ever happen.”

The government is also quietly reviving elements of the old War Book – the detailed Cold War-era plan that once covered everything from industrial mobilisation and food stockpiles to mass casualty management and the survival of government itself. That document was largely abandoned after the Cold War; updating it now signals a serious shift.

On the surface this looks like prudent planning against a hostile foreign power. Russia has been accused of cyber operations, espionage and probing NATO airspace. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has previously cited Western intelligence assessments that Russia could attack a NATO member as soon as 2030.

Yet the distance between the United Kingdom and any realistic Russian ground threat is vast, and the emphasis on household stockpiles, critical infrastructure protection and whole-of-society mobilisation sits uneasily with pure external-defence rhetoric.

This is where the deeper context becomes impossible to ignore. In 2025, Professor David Betz of King’s College London, a specialist in modern war and unconventional conflict, publicly argued that the British government is preparing for the possibility of civil conflict at home while using the Russian threat as a politically convenient cover.

Speaking about the 2025 National Security Strategy – which stated “For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat” and prioritised protection of undersea cables, energy pipelines and logistics hubs – Betz observed: “there is growing apprehension about the security of Britain, the security of its infrastructure specifically, and about the potential for active conflict at home in a very direct manner, effecting people in a very direct manner.”

He continued: “But that’s not external in origin, that’s internal, and that has to do with the way our society is now configured, it is highly fractured.” Betz described a society marked by “Low trust, highly fractured, and highly politically factionalised which is leading us increasingly inevitably into civil conflict.”

On the Russian narrative he was blunt: “The fact of the matter is there is a great distance between us and Russia… we are not militarily threatened in a direct way on the ground by any obvious external enemy, even Russia… one of those is not occupying the village green with Russian soldiers, that simply, frankly, is a rather bizarre assertion.”

The real concern, he argued, is domestic: “What they’re concerned about is domestic conflict, and they perfectly understand this, but that’s completely politically toxic for them to say so publicly, hence the convenience of saying ‘we need to develop… a citizen’s militia for the protection of critical infrastructure’. To say that we’re doing this against the potential of Russian attack, which is frankly a logically absurd proposition, but it is convenient as a pretext.”

Betz has repeatedly warned that Europe faces a statistically significant chance of civil war in a major country within five years, with spillover risks, and that governments may only be able to prepare rather than prevent the deterioration. His advice to individuals has been practical: reduce exposure to big cities if possible.

Betz’s analysis tracks the same societal fractures – low social trust, political factionalism, rapid demographic change and collapsing faith in institutions – that successive governments have accelerated through mass immigration policies while denying their consequences.

Critical infrastructure hardening, citizen resilience messaging and large-scale home defence exercises make perfect sense if planners believe the primary threat could come from within a polarised population rather than from Russian troops landing on British beaches.

Updating the War Book and running Operation Albiston Shadow allow the state to rehearse command, control and societal mobilisation without ever having to admit the internal drivers.

The pattern is consistent with earlier signals. Promises of a volunteer Home Defence Force to protect infrastructure appear to have been quietly shelved amid budget pressures, yet the broader shift toward treating the homeland as a potential battlespace continues.

Officials stress “whole of society” involvement. That language is not limited to foreign hybrid warfare; it is exactly the vocabulary used when states prepare for internal disorder.

None of this proves an imminent civil war. It does show a government that has spent years denying the reality of social breakdown now scrambling to prepare the public and its own machinery for disruption that could overwhelm normal emergency responses.

Telling people to stockpile food and water is an admission that the state cannot guarantee continuity of basic services. Framing the entire effort around Russia provides political cover while the underlying fractures – created by policy choices that prioritised open borders and demographic engineering over cohesion – continue to deepen.

The British public is being told to get ready. The only remaining question is what exactly they are being prepared for. The official answer is Russian hybrid threats. The deeper reading, supported by serious academic analysis of societal conflict, points to something far closer to home.

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times,

A former senior Federal Reserve official has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for lying to federal investigators about sharing sensitive economic information with Chinese intelligence operatives.

John Harold Rogers, 64, was senior adviser for the international finance division of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the main governing body for the U.S. central bank, from 2010 to 2021.

He was arrested in January 2025 and convicted by a jury on Feb. 3 of making false statements to investigators conducting the probe, but acquitted on a charge of conspiracy to commit economic espionage.

On July 15, U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich sentenced Rogers to 38 months in federal prison, followed by 12 months of supervised release.

“John Rogers spent years secretly funneling sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies, then looked investigators in the eye and lied about it. And when that wasn’t enough, he lied again under oath at trial,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro of the District of Columbia said in a statement.

“Federal Reserve employees entrusted with America’s most sensitive economic information cannot sell out their country and their colleagues for personal gain and then expect to hide behind a single word.”

Rogers, of Vienna, Virginia, is a U.S. citizen who holds a doctoral degree in economics from the University of Virginia.

‘Deliberately Lied’

Rogers began developing a “clandestine relationship” with Chinese intelligence operative Lee Hummin in 2017, after the two met at a conference in China, according to prosecutors.

In the years that followed, Rogers met with Lee and other Chinese associates in hotel rooms in China, using academic classes as a cover while sharing Fed information that Lee had directed him to collect.

His role as senior adviser gave Rogers access to confidential information from the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), according to his indictment.

The FOMC, the Federal Reserve System’s monetary policymaking body, sets the target range for the federal funds rate and directs monetary policy actions, including quantitative easing and tightening.

FOMC information is classified under a three-tier system based on its sensitivity, according to the indictment. The highest tier, or Class I, includes policymaker views and pre-publication drafts of the committee’s statements, while Class II covers economic forecasts and open market operations.

In a sentencing memorandum filed in May, prosecutors said Rogers printed Class II FOMC documents and took them with him on a trip to China in June 2019. In another instance, prosecutors said he removed the Class II markings from information and sent it to his personal email account before forwarding it to a professor at China’s state-run Fudan University in Shanghai.

On Feb. 4, 2020, investigators from the Fed’s Office of Inspector General interviewed Rogers and asked if he had ever shared restricted Fed information outside the Federal Reserve Board. According to prosecutors, he replied, “Never.”

“John Rogers deliberately lied to our investigators to conceal the fact he shared restricted non-public Federal Reserve information with intelligence agents working for China,” Michael E. Horowitz, inspector general for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a July 15 statement.

‘Abused His Position of Trust’

Prosecutors had sought a 60-month prison sentence against Rogers, saying he had “abused his position of trust,” according to the sentencing memorandum.

“He knew that the restricted information he provided to the PRC government could allow it to make untold sums of money by trading with its roughly $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities and related instruments,” prosecutors wrote, using the acronym of China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

After leaving the Fed, he became a professor at Fudan University. According to the sentencing memorandum, he earned at least $900,000 in salary and grants from Fudan University from February 2022 until his arrest in January 2025.

In exchange for the restricted information, Rogers received “tens of thousands of dollars in benefits,” and told investigators that he “owe[d] everything to” Lee.

“Through Hummin Lee, the PRC provided the defendant with a new wife, a new family, money, friendship, and professorships at prestigious universities,” prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors argued that a 60-month sentence would serve as a general deterrent because Beijing is known for recruiting current and former U.S. government officials with access to sensitive information.

“The recruitment pattern the evidence established in this case – a foreign intelligence service cultivating a target over years through the gradual development of personal affection and indebtedness, before progressively tasking the target with increasingly sensitive intelligence collection – is not unique to the defendant,” prosecutors wrote.

Rogers’s lawyers, in their sentencing memorandum filed in May, asked the court to sentence him to time served, noting that he had been detained for more than 16 months, citing his poor health and “regrets [for] having provided an incorrect and imprecise answer” during his 2020 interview with investigators.

“Dr. Rogers recognizes that such conduct is wrong for a federal employee in a position of trust and he regrets having made the statement,” his lawyers wrote.

The Epoch Times contacted Rogers’s lawyers for comment but didn’t receive a response by publication time.

Authored by Connor O’Keeffe via The Mises Institute,

Senator Lindsey Graham died seemingly out of the blue over the weekend after a tear in his aorta. He was 71 years old.

The news was shocking, in part because Graham was a very active senator – he was just returning from a trip to Ukraine – and because he was seemingly at the height of his power, having built one of the most influential relationships with President Donald Trump of any politician.

But another reason the news was such a surprise was because, compared to many of his colleagues in Washington, Senator Graham was on the younger side.

That impression was fueled by the ongoing ordeal of Senator Mitch McConnell. The 84-year-old serving senator was reportedly found unconscious weeks ago after a fall, leading to his ongoing hospitalization.

Early reports that EMS had responded to a cardiac arrest at McConnell’s residence when he was first hospitalized, his wife’s strange trip to China in the middle of all this, and the total radio silence for weeks from a supposedly active senator all led to speculation online that McConnell was faring far worse than his staff and Republican party insiders were admitting.

Others went as far as to speculate that McConnell had already passed away, but that his team and establishment allies were attempting to delay the public acknowledgment of his death until after it would no longer force a special election. That theory gained enough traction online to prompt McConnell’s team to post a literal proof-of-life photo of the senator holding that day’s newspaper.

This all follows, of course, the age-record-breaking presidency of Joe Biden, and the campaign that was derailed because of it. Now, Trump is on track to break Biden’s record and, at the end of his term, become the oldest serving US president in history.

In addition to McConnell, many of the most prominent members of Congress are quite elderly, have been in office for decades, and show no interest in ever retiring. Senator Dianne Feinstein – who died of old age in 2023 at the age of 90, hours after casting a vote on the Senate floor – provides a good example of how many of these career politicians apparently plan to leave office.

With all this happening, it’s easy to understand why many have increasingly come to consider the United States to be a gerontocracy, or a society ruled by old people.

As with just about anything online, there are sophisticated and unsophisticated versions of this observation.

The unsophisticated version simply points to the multitude of examples of politicians remaining in office long after most people would have retired from just about any line of work and concludes that the prevalence of exceptionally elderly politicians is hampering the government’s ability to function properly.

This narrative is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual role of politicians within the American political system.

While American politicians certainly have power, in the last century or so – and especially in the decades since WWII – the bulk of federal power has shifted from politicians in Congress and state legislatures to the bureaucracies that make up the ballooning federal agencies in the executive branch.

The vast majority of those in Congress are simply expected to show up and vote with their party’s leadership on the latest massive omnibus spending bills, made up almost entirely of carve-outs to special interests. Or to pass legislation crafted with diligent collaboration from “experts” at the executive agencies that will receive the new funding.

The most effective politicians will lobby to add additional spending that in some way benefits some special interest in their own district. But mostly, their modern role is to fundraise for their party, engage in legitimizing rituals, and stoke vicious debates with the other party over what are, in the scheme of things, incredibly minor policy issues to keep us all believing that we truly live in a functioning representational democracy. And, especially because the politicians themselves are merely the frontmen for a larger staff handling the specifics on all those fronts, it’s a role that quite elderly people are certainly capable of doing well into the physical and mental decline that often accompanies one’s later years.

The more sophisticated version of the “America is a gerontocracy” narrative focuses less on the politicians themselves and more on what the government is doing. Because, if one takes even a passing glance at how the federal government taxes and spends, it quickly becomes clear that government programs are actively transferring vast amounts of wealth from younger generations to older generations who are, on average, much wealthier.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Many can be traced back to seemingly innocuous attempts to ensure that elderly people without close family members, adequate housing, or connections to any kind of community were cared for. The programs that would eventually become Social Security and Medicare were sold as small programs to help those on the margin. The same goes for the founding of interest groups and lobbies such as AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons).

But as with just about any government program started in the name of helping a small number of genuinely downtrodden Americans, these entitlement programs exploded in size as they were quickly expanded to also benefit whichever groups were organized and motivated enough to lobby effectively.

And even setting lobbying aside, the elderly tend to be disproportionately dependable, and therefore powerful, as a voting bloc. Retirees especially often have more time to focus on issues, call lawmakers, watch cable news, write letters to the editor, engage with local parties and candidates, and vote than their younger working counterparts.

So promising to protect – or better yet, expand – entitlement programs that seniors benefit from is a straightforward way for any politician to secure the support of a lot of enthusiastic voters, while even muttering a half-formed thought about potentially cutting them is almost certain to torpedo any campaign.

Meaning the conditions for the substantial growth of programs transferring money to seniors were already there. But, on top of that, the baby boomer generation – now making up most retirees – has grown old at the same time that medical technology advanced substantially. So, on top of being an unusually large generation, they are also living longer. That’s, of course, a positive development. But in our increasingly socialized elder-care system that also puts a growing financial burden on younger generations.

Contrary to what the government’s shockingly-effective propaganda says, the money seniors receive through Social Security is not their own money that had been taken from their previous paychecks and set aside to be returned to them in retirement. The money they “paid in” to the program had already been used for Social Security checks for earlier generations and other government programs. The money today’s seniors are getting through the program is being taxed directly from today’s younger workers – workers who are forced to pay for a much larger pool of Social Security recipients than the previous generations were.

Add to that the other programs like Medicare that don’t even pretend to come from a “lockbox.” Or the fact that some of these programs cover things like golf fees and ski trips. Or the various government programs explicitly helping seniors stay in full family-sized homes long after downsizing would make more financial sense while simultaneously pushing the price of those homes higher and higher. And the disproportionate burden younger generations experience from the Fed’s permanent price inflation – especially the price inflation that came as a result of the trillions of dollars printed to prop things up as the federal government shut down the economy, the schools, and every aspect of life for younger generations to keep the elderly safe from a disease everyone was always going to get anyway. And, above all, much of this wealth is being transferred into the pockets of older Americans who are much wealthier than the younger people that are forced to pay for it.

Lay all that out, and it’s easy to see why we are experiencing so much generational strife right now. How could there not be?

The justified frustration younger generations are experiencing with the current setup often gets directed towards the handful of exceptionally old politicians and justices at the top of all three branches of the government. But the true root of this problem lies in the intergenerational wealth-transferring government programs that have been built up over many decades. And that will, if not properly understood and subsequently abolished, continue to fuel this generational conflict long after the current group of geriatric politicians is gone.