53percenter's Blog

Terrorism and the Iraq War defined the presidency of George W. Bush, but in the more tranquil months before 9/11, the president’s early term was defined by a very different issue: Stem cells.

Back in August of 2001, Bush gave what was then naively hailed as possibly one of the defining speeches of his still-nascent presidency.

“The issue of research involving stem cells derived from human embryos is increasingly the subject of a national debate and dinner table discussions,” the president said, before announcing that federal funding would be limited to existing stem cell lines.

Long hailed by scientists as the source of possible “miracle cures” to previously debilitating diseases, stem cells stayed in the national conversation in the early 2000s and into the next decade.

The controversy is tied to the abortion question because many experts believed that early stem cells could hold the keys to new discoveries. And those cells, often, come from aborted fetuses.

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“Researchers typically take tissue samples from a fetus that has been aborted and grow cells from the tissue in Petri dishes,” CNN explained in 2015. “One concern is that women would have more pregnancies or abortions because they want to donate fetal tissue.”

Those kinds of concerns were amplified after Planned Parenthood employees were revealed to be bluntly discussing the harvesting of human organs from aborted fetuses, appearing to view lifeless human beings as nothing but lab experiments.

But while advocates on the right expressed concern and urged caution, many in the research community and the political left scoffed. Fetal tissue, experts declared, was vital to research — and pro-life voices were often dismissed or mocked as opposing science.

“Using fetal tissue is not an easy choice, but so far there is no better choice,” insisted University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher Lishan Su in a 2015 Scientific American piece. “Many, many biomedical researchers depend on fetal tissue research to really save human lives.”

Fast-forward to 2019. It now turns out that the scientists who were so sure that fetal and embryonic stem cells were vital to research just a few years ago may have been very, very wrong.

Instead, leading scientists are finding that it is actually adult stem cells — which can be obtained by ethical means — are far more promising.

“Adult stem cells are the successful standard for stem cells,” wrote David A. Prentice, Ph.D., in a groundbreaking research paper published by the peer-reviewed medical journal “Circulation Research.

“Although in the past their regenerative/reparative capacity was ignored, misunderstood, or even maligned, a rapidly growing host of clinical applications are being developed, and the clinical utility of adult stem cells is increasingly validated in the literature,” Price wrote.

Going on to call adult stem cells the “true gold standard in regenerative medicine,” the scientific paper confirmed what many conservatives have been saying since at least the Bush era: We don’t need to harvest human fetuses or embryos to make progress and potentially cure diseases.

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“Nonembryonic stem cell research has surpassed embryonic stem cells,” Prentice explained.

His conclusion left no doubt about his findings in the matter.

“The superiority of adult stem cells in the clinic and the mounting evidence supporting their effectiveness in regeneration and repair make adult stem cells the gold standard of stem cells for patients.”

That’s stunningly good news, yet the establishment media has stayed mostly quiet on this development, at least compared to the wall-to-wall coverage embryonic stem cells received in recent years. It seems left-leaning journalists just aren’t as interested in covering stories that don’t allow them to defend abortion.

At the same time, this leading-edge research is another important reminder that science is never actually “settled,” whether the issue is stem cells, climate change, or dozens of other topics.

Science is a process, and assumptions can be overturned in a very short time when new evidence emerges.

Those discoveries can bring many benefits, but they must also be tempered by morality that protects and dignifies human life.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

President Donald Trump has made it exceedingly clear that while he has no problem with welcoming legal immigrants who abide by our laws and are productive members of society, that view is diminished for those who come here illegally, and he has almost no regard whatsoever for those who commit violent and horrific crimes while in our nation.

Recall in May 2018, when Trump referred to members of the brutal and murderous street gang MS-13 as being like “animals,” and how elected Democrats and the liberal media purposely mis-characterized his remarks as pertaining to all immigrants and absolutely blew their tops with indignant outrage.

Even then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi joined in on the faux outrage over the president’s choice of terminology to describe members of a gang whose motto is “rape, control, kill,” and seemingly defended sadistically violent MS-13 members as being endowed with “the spark of divinity, the dignity and worth of every person,” that apparently placed them above reproach, despite their violently murderous activities.

Now, less than a year later, it will be interesting to see if now-Speaker Pelosi and the rest of her Democratic caucus, as well as their media allies, will have anything to say about a recent report of a brutal and sadistic murder of a young immigrant by his fellow MS-13 gang members, a murder that was just about as animalistic as it gets.

Fox News reported five MS-13 gang members were recently arrested in Maryland and charged with murder over the vicious stabbing death — reportedly stabbed at least 100 times — and subsequent attempted burning of the body, of one of their own.

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The victim, identified by a gang tattoo on one of his shoulders, was named as 16-year-old high school student Jacson Pineda-Chicas, whose stabbed and burned body had been found on March 9 on the side of a road in Stafford, Virginia, roughly 60 miles from the location in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where the murder is believed to have occurred.

The suspected murder site was the home of a local MS-13 clique leader identified as 29-year-old Jose Ordonez-Zometa, who has been charged with murder along with four other members of his gang. Law enforcement authorities believe that Pineda-Chicas was taken to the home of Ordonez-Zometa by the other gang members for a meeting that ended up being a murder.

“He was stabbed around 100 times,” said Prince George’s County Maj. Brian Reilly in a press conference on Friday, according to Tribune Media. “That goes to how violent this attack was and how it wasn’t just one person who did this. The group turned on their own.”

Authorities explained that while the gang’s leader, Ordonez-Zometa, lived in Prince George’s County, the gang itself operated in the Fairfax County region. The five suspects arrested and charged with first-degree murder, among other charges range in age from 16-29, and will all be tried as adults for the horrendous crime.

Although investigators have yet to determine exactly why the gang so brutally turned on one of their own in a murderous manner, the victim’s mother believes it was because he wanted to leave the gang and live a normal life.

The NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., spoke with the unnamed mother of Pineda-Chicas, who explained that her son had been forced to join the gang when they still lived in El Salvador, prior to moving to the United States in an effort to flee that situation.

Of course, thanks to the lax immigration laws that Democrats refuse to help fix, the MS-13 gang has a strong presence here in the U.S., and the teen was unable to escape them.

The mother further explained that her son had been accused of cooperating with the police and had offered himself up as a sort of sacrifice to the gang in order to protect the rest of his family, who had reportedly been threatened with death by the gang.

This sort of behavior is simply unacceptable in a civil society like our own and can indeed be labeled as being animal-like in its brutality and ferocity and inhumanity.

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To be fair to Pelosi and her ilk, yes, all humans are born with an innate dignity and spark of divinity, but those characteristics are all but traded in and lost when people like these MS-13 thugs engage in animal-like pack behavior, such as turning on a weaker member with murderous intent.

Whether Pelosi and others will admit that remains to be seen, but once again, Trump and his supporters have been proven right in referring to MS-13 gang members as being like animals.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

Don’t expect Malik Obama to be getting a Thanksgiving invitation to the Obama compound this November…

The former President’s brother who has frequently been a critic of his famous sibling has gone where few have dared to venture by suggesting that is sister-in-law, former FLOTUS Michelle Obama may really be a “he”  or in his words…

Is Michelle Michael?

— Malik Obama (@ObamaMalik) March 14, 2019

YIKES!

Not to lend any credence to the ugly rumor that the Emir Of Obamastan’s wife may be a transvestite – there are those who will – but expect this lurid rumor to fuel speculation from those who have pointed out that Michelle has the physique to play free safety for the Chicago Bears.

The American Mirror has the story on this family feud HERE.

The Beta male ex-POTUS has always seemed to be a bit light in the loafers so brother Malik may have stirred up some real shit here in terms of the inevitable conspiracy theories.