I quite like to sit down. Sometimes you will find me folded into an armchair with a bowl of cereal, reading about Mongol savages, convinced this is the absolute pinnacle of human civilization.

The medical establishment considers this exact activity a suicidal ritual akin to swallowing rat poison. Somewhere around 2010, academic researchers decided that resting your gluteal muscles against a soft cushion carries the same lethality as huffing two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes before breakfast.

The true goal of the anti-sitting crusade, I suggest, is to eliminate guilt-free leisure.

Chair scare

The "sitting is the new smoking" campaign remains one of the most absurd public health exaggerations of the modern era. Tobacco smoke deposits thousands of chemical compounds directly into pulmonary tissue. It paralyzes cilia and mutates cellular structures until tumors bloom like bad weeds.

Chair usage, by contrast, involves resting your skeleton on furniture so your knee joints don’t turn into sawdust. Equating a plush sofa to a habit that systematically destroys internal organs requires a complete detachment from objective reality.

Wellness brand PR teams latched onto this ridiculous metaphor with ruthless efficiency. Fear sells foam rollers. It sells treadmill desks and squatty potties. The human brain panics when it thinks a routine daily comfort threatens to shut it down completely. And panic prevents us from seeing things clearly.

In 1953, British epidemiologist Jerry Morris published a famous study comparing London bus drivers to bus conductors, noting drivers suffered more heart attacks. The medical industry extracted a single hysterical conclusion from that data, completely overlooking the fact that drivers dealt with heavy traffic and nasty fumes all day long. Yes, conductors moved more, but they also faced far fewer physical and psychological stressors.

Same old sit

This modern panic relies entirely on the illusion that our ancestors lived lives of continuous, unrelenting activity. My grandfather spent decades farming in Ireland, a vocation urban health gurus idealize as the gold standard of natural human movement. But after a long morning of plowing fields, he also sat in his rocking chair and didn’t move a muscle for hours on end. Medieval peasants sat on dirt floors for hours mending nets, weaving wool, and waiting out brutal European winters. The historical record is clear: Humans have always taken advantage of the opportunity to park their posteriors on the nearest stable surface.

In 1880, industrial factory workers put in 14-hour shifts standing on wooden planks. They suffered massive joint degradation and chronic physical exhaustion. Only the most deluded back then claimed standing was a magical fountain of youth. Rest was considered a hard-earned luxury that kept the body from breaking down prematurely. The modern obsession with perpetual motion recasts a basic act of recovery as a moral failing.

Panic peddlers act as if the human frame dissolves into liquid sludge the moment butt meets bench. They publish studies claiming that six hours of daily sedentary behavior will trigger a catastrophic metabolic meltdown while conveniently ignoring the bigger picture. A person who sits for a few hours at a time, eats actual vegetables, and lifts heavy objects three times a week possesses a very different cardiovascular profile than someone who inhales fried dough while playing video games for hours on end.

Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images

Rebranding rest

The proposed solutions to this imaginary crisis are far more punishing than the supposed ailment. Corporate wellness managers continue to install standing desks in offices, forcing countless poor souls to endure varicose veins and lower back pain. Standing perfectly still on a concrete floor for eight hours, day in and day out, doesn’t sound very appealing, and for good reason. It damages the lumbar spine and pools blood in the ankles.

Sellers of high-tech ergonomic gear profit handsomely from this artificially generated terror. They pitch thousand-dollar mesh office chairs guaranteed to align your vertebrae to micro-millimeter precision, as if a standard dining room chair is a torture device. Consultants charge massive hourly fees to adjust monitor heights by two inches, promising these micro-adjustments will save you from an early grave. It’s an elaborate commercial ecosystem built on top of a completely fabricated health crisis.

Fixing the physical stiffness of a long afternoon takes remarkably little effort. Walking to the kitchen to fetch water every 60 minutes gets your blood flowing and helps reset your circulation. Taking a 10-minute stroll around the block after dinner clears blood glucose far more effectively than standing like a statue in front of a screen for five straight hours. The body is remarkably resilient.

The true goal of the anti-sitting crusade, I suggest, is to eliminate guilt-free leisure. A society obsessed with relentless, measurable productivity views an unmoving human body as an economic failure.

Rest must be rebranded as a perilous path toward an early grave so people feel compelled to buy walking pads and smartwatches that alert local authorities whenever they come within 100 meters of a chair.

You are allowed to enjoy a book, finish a film, or eat a meal without calculating your immediate mortality risk. So please, sit down, stay still for an hour, or two, or three, and ignore the health prophets who profit from your panic.

Christian men: God wants us to be meek, not weak

On August 15, two Americans on a UFC fight card said the quiet part out loud.

Prelim winner Tresean Gore had just secured a decision that cost him two front teeth. With a mouth full of blood, he told Joe Rogan that he no longer smoked weed, drank, or watched porn and that Jesus Christ had saved his life and soul.

King Solomon foresaw the day of physical failure: 'If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.'

On the main card, winner Jalin Turner’s first statement to Rogan was also a profession of faith.

Professing athletes are not new. Tim Tebow, Harrison Butker, and the Oklahoma women’s softball team have all said the same thing in public: Prowess and its rewards are not solely their own doing.

Toga-clad therapist

Gore and Turner moved us for a narrower reason. During our Bible study, we had been talking about the decline of masculinity among Christian men. When those men surrender responsible, loyal, trustworthy headship — as Scripture defines it under God the Father and His Son — instead of becoming humble, they disappear, leaving a hole that the spirit of the age fills.

American Christian men have forgotten, or were never taught, that their King was the strongest man who ever walked the earth, physically and spiritually. Jesus is the pattern for both. Following Him should produce men who pursue strength of body as well as strength of soul. Too many church leaders have taught the opposite. They have offered a Jesus who is only mild, never mighty: a toga-clad therapist who affirms all and judges none. That is not the Christ of the Gospels, and it is not the men who preceded and followed Him.

Other than Christ, no man in the Bible is without sin. God shows us these men so we will learn that Christianity requires faith, repentance, and obedience — not a clean record. Adam shifted blame. Samson and David yielded to lust. David’s sin was worse than just appetite: he deceived, murdered, and committed adultery. Scripture hides none of it.

Restored to strength

It also does not hide what these men were and what they did. Blind Samson pulled down a Philistine temple with his hands. David defended his flock against wild animals, then dropped Goliath with a stone. His elite guard, the Gibborim — Josheb, Eleazar, Shammah, Abishai, Benaiah — were remembered in 2 Samuel because they could fight. Four times God tells Joshua to be “strong and courageous.” Joshua then defeats 31 kings on the way to the promised land. God preserved Moses’ vigor at 120 (Deuteronomy 34:7); fed Elijah strength for the desert road (1 Kings 19:7-8); and promised through Isaiah that those who wait on the Lord will not faint (Isaiah 40:29-31).

The God of mercy and love is the same God who trained David’s hands for war and his fingers for battle and helped him bend a bow of bronze (Psalms 18:32-34 and 144:1). In 1 Peter 4:11, the apostle directs all who serve God to do so with the strength that God provides. All these men knew sin, fear, and confusion. Faith restored them to strength and courage for God's glory. It did not restore them to softness.

Don Bartletti/Getty Images

The weight of the cross

Then there is Jesus. He walked the land for three years knowing His own people would reject Him and kill Him, and He finished the work. The distances of that ministry are measured in thousands of miles, on foot.

On His last day, He was beaten and scourged, and He marched the Via Dolorosa under a patibulum that likely weighed 65 to 110 pounds. He fell because of pain and blood loss that would put most modern men on the ground before the first step. The contrast is not cute. A church that cannot tell the difference between meekness and weakness will baptize the second and call it discipleship.

We would rather live in the world Jesus describes: among people who worship without shame, who speak of Him as plainly as Tresean Gore and Jalin Turner did, and who pursue the holiness He demands. He is not playing. In the wedding parable of Matthew 22, the man without the garment of faith and repentance is bound and cast into the outer darkness. That is the same Lord who walked those miles.

'Act like men'

So the question is not whether Christian men should be kind. It is whether they will be men. No more porn. No more anesthesia by weed and liquor. No more sexual chaos. Less devotion to entertainment that mocks the faith and more time in churches where men teach what Paul taught: Put your house in order (1 Tim. 3:1-5; Titus 1:5-9 and 2:1-2 and 6-8), and “be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13).

Drawing on the Old Testament, Jesus does tell His followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27, from Proverbs 24:17 and 25:21 and Exodus 23:4-5).

That command is real. It covers the neighbor who hates you, the official who slanders you, even the man who would harm you. It is not a mediation tip. It is imitation of the Father. It is also not a ban on strength. Prayer for a human enemy does not mean pretending he is harmless, refusing to restrain him, or talking to Satan as if he were your neighbor. Scripture never asks anyone to treat the devil as a prayer partner. It does ask men to resist him, to protect the innocent, and still not let hatred become their creed.

King Solomon foresaw the day of physical failure: “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small” (Proverbs 24:10). The next two verses are the gut punch. If you stand by while people are led away to death, God sees, and He will weigh your cowardice.

This is a day of adversity. American Christian men will come up big or small. They will find their strength in God, or they will keep drawing upon a smaller Jesus who demands nothing of their bodies and their nerve. They should pick up where Tresean Gore and Jalin Turner left off: Believe and profess the truth with blood still in your mouth, and then live as if the truth has hands.

Ron Johnson amplifies voices of vaccine-injured Canadians in COVID reckoning

For years, Canadians who say they were seriously injured by COVID-19 vaccines have sought recognition from their government. This week, some of them are getting the opportunity to tell their stories on Parliament Hill — with a powerful U.S. senator joining them.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and one of Washington's most persistent critics of the government's pandemic response, appeared Tuesday at the opening of the Allison Inquiry in Ottawa.

'By the time the COVID vaccines obtained their emergency use authorizations, the cartel was firmly in control of the narrative.'

The four-day inquiry is chaired by Conservative Member of Parliament Dean Allison and organized with the Covid Testimony Association. Its stated purpose is to hear testimony from Canadians who attribute serious injuries to COVID-19 vaccination. It is being held on Parliament Hill, although it is not an official parliamentary inquiry.

Questioning the narrative

Johnson opened his testimony by questioning fundamental elements of the public health response to COVID-19, including the treatment of natural immunity and doctors who advocated early treatment.

“Haven't we always believed that early disease detection prompts early treatment and produces better outcomes? Why was that fundamental tenet of medicine not only ignored but sabotaged?” Johnson asked. “Why were frontline doctors who had the courage and compassion to treat COVID patients from the start of the pandemic censored, vilified, and had their careers destroyed?”

“How could health officials deny the effectiveness of natural immunity when approximately half of the people testing positive for COVID were asymptomatic?” he continued. “Isn't that a sign that your natural immunity is preventing you from getting ill?”

Johnson's war

Johnson has been pursuing many of the same questions in Washington as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

In April, the subcommittee released a 38-page interim report alleging that FDA officials failed to act on a newer data-analysis method that identified previously undetected safety signals that the agency's existing methodology had failed to detect.

The investigation drew renewed attention in July as Johnson's committee continued examining how federal officials handled reports of possible vaccine side effects and whether potential safety signals were adequately disclosed to the public. Later that month, Johnson requested transcribed interviews with Dr. Anthony Fauci and four former FDA officials about their roles in the pandemic response, including vaccine safety and efficacy

In August, Johnson's investigation obtained Fauci's government-issued cell phone, containing more than 34,000 text messages and 500 voicemails. Johnson and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) subsequently began releasing material from the phone as part of their continuing investigation into the government's pandemic response.

Follow the science?

Johnson brought that investigation to Ottawa on Tuesday, where he used his appearance at the Allison Inquiry to deliver a broader indictment of the pandemic response.

“By the time the COVID vaccines obtained their emergency use authorizations, the cartel was firmly in control of the narrative,” Johnson said, using his term for the government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, media organizations, and technology companies he blames for suppressing dissent during the pandemic.

He recalled slogans including “follow the science,” “safe and effective,” and “no one is safe until everyone is safe.”

“Which, by the way, if the vaccines were that effective, why would you care whether somebody else is vaccinated?” Johnson asked. “I mean, it never made sense to me. ... These phrases were used ad nauseam to bludgeon the public into submission.”

NurPhoto/Getty Images

From 'injury' to 'impact'

Canada does have a federal program to compensate people who have suffered serious and permanent injuries following vaccination. The Vaccine Injury Support Program began in 2021 and was initially administered by a third party before being taken over by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The program itself has faced scrutiny. PHAC terminated its contract with the original administrator after an audit found serious problems with its handling of claims. The agency subsequently took over administration of the program and renamed it the Vaccine Impact Support Program in April.

The Allison Inquiry says it received more than 1,400 applications from people willing to testify about alleged vaccine injuries.

Johnson also alleged that federal regulators failed to adequately investigate vaccine safety signals.

“A few months into the vaccine rollout, my investigations have shown that the FDA and CDC were not doing sincere safety surveillance,” he said. “And it appears this willful ignorance was a worldwide phenomenon.”

What about Dr. Tam?

That question of what Canadian health authorities knew eventually brought the hearing to Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada's former chief public health officer.

During questioning, Conservative MP Ellis Ross asked Johnson whether Tam's name had surfaced in the millions of pages of federal documents obtained by his investigation.

“I've not heard of Dr. Tam. I may have, but, you know, the name didn't register,” Johnson replied. “What I will do is I'll have that as a search term with the emails and texts and I'll see. We'll check it out.”

Johnson then addressed his staff, telling them to add Tam's name to their searches.

“We'll put that in. We'll see if there's any [mentions],” he said.

Johnson went on to say his investigators were finding what he described as “a great deal of cooperation between Fauci and federal health officials and Chinese officials,” but said he was not yet prepared to disclose specifics.

“As we get more and more information, we'll start releasing that,” Johnson said. “We kind of got to put the whole package together, but stay tuned on some of those things.”

Are antidepressants zombifying American culture?

Why are things the way they are?

Why does it feel like things were better before?

Having a society of people walking through life in a drab stupor will, believe it or not, have strange impacts on the way the world goes.

No, that’s not exactly right. Everything — emphasis on thing — wasn’t better before. Well, maybe it’s the people then. Yes, that’s it — the people. Why does it seem like people were better before? No, that’s not it either. Not quite. People weren’t better before. There have always been the wicked and the evil and the lazy and the annoying. The world has always had problems.

Well, what is it then? What is it that I am feeling, you are feeling, and we all are feeling? Why does everything feel “off” for lack of a better word?

There’s a lot of answers, and a lot of them are pretty good. Answering questions this big is like looking at an object at a table from different directions. There are multiple correct descriptions of what is sitting in front of everyone, and all the answers help paint a clearer picture.

Ostinato of apathy

But is there an answer, a detail, a fact, or an X factor that sits under all the other things and runs like an ostinato through seemingly unrelated domains connecting the dots in a strangely unifying way?

Perhaps.

And if I were to try to list a single X factor that weaves like a thread through all the various forms and domains of decline, descent, malaise, and dysfunction, I might conclude that the fact that connects all these problems is something insurance covers, doctors prescribe, and we are all supposed to nod along with.

SSRIs and other forms of antidepressant medication.

I saw a video recently of an extended family. In a self-satisfied, joke-y sort of way, they all listed the medications they were on. It wasn’t a real joke, it was clear they were all actually on these things, but the video was joking about how funny it is, or something. Like many things TikTok, the tone was a plain, mundane, nihilistic, uncapitalized “lol.”

Of course, TikTok isn’t real life. But it isn’t exactly fake life either. This family of drug-dependents might be a bit of an exaggeration, though not necessarily a fabrication. Spiritually, the video is correct. More people are on these drugs than ever before, and that’s an undeniable fact of reality.

Drugs not hugs

This kind of thing didn’t exist when I was young. Drugs existed, both legal and illegal ones. Prescription drugs to help you be less depressed existed too. There were jokes and themes about Prozac in the 1990s, and before my time, in the midcentury, they were juicing disturbed people up on all sorts of stuff too. But the prevalence of them, overuse of them, and unabashedly flippant taking of them was nowhere near what we see today.

When I was young, the only people who were on this stuff were people who were decidedly “messed up.” Those who had genuinely tried to commit suicide or were really on the brink. And it wasn’t a good thing, and it wasn’t used flippantly. It was serious stuff. Somewhere in the last few decades, this attitude changed.

SSRIs and other antidepressants are the X factor under so much of the general malaise and dysfunction in our perplexing and seemingly decaying culture. At first, it doesn’t really make sense, or it just seems like a bit of a stretch because people think these drugs just “make people happier,” but that’s not exactly what happens. Even if they do seemingly “make people happier,” or at least less depressed, that isn’t the only thing they do.

Ian Tyas/Getty Images

Dead inside

Listen to people who have been on these drugs describe how they make you feel. The picture isn’t exactly a rosy one. It’s better than suicide, but it isn’t normal. A very common observation you hear from people is that they make you feel dead or like you don’t care about anything. They also lower libido and what might be described as general drive.

These drugs don’t only impact one’s happiness. They bleed out and into all these other things, and when you have people taking them at the scale we do in the U.S., the culture shifts in ways that are unintelligible and confusing to those of us not on anything. Having a society of people walking through life in a drab stupor will, believe it or not, have strange impacts on the way the world goes.

Because of all this, our society is more full of de facto zombies than ever before. No wonder young people feel listless. No wonder achievement and striving for greatness seem naive or corny.

No wonder people aren’t partying.

No wonder the birthrate is in the tank.

No wonder the Democratic Party has become what it is when so many of its voters exhibit depression and anxiety.

No wonder everyone dresses like slobs.

No wonder there is a general apathy that bleeds through everything we see and hear.

No wonder the interior design is bland and factory-like.

No wonder everyone feels like tomorrow is going to be worse than today.

No wonder — to answer our first question — things are the way they are.

RFK Jr. roasts CNN over fact-check that'd have you toss out a carton after using 1 egg

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched a cooking series titled "The Real Food Show" last month with the aim of helping Americans prepare healthy and affordable meals.

Despite the show's upbeat, informative, and apolitical nature, the liberal media reflexively found something to whine about.

'Very hard to swallow.'

After CNN's Erin Burnett devoted a segment of her show on Wednesday to attacking the initiative, Kennedy responded by diagnosing the host with "Trump Derangement Syndrome" and giving her something to chew on.

The show

Kennedy announced the launch of the "The Real Food Show" on July 30, stating, "The Real Food Show reminds Americans that healthy eating starts at home — and that cooking with real food can be simple, affordable, and within reach for every family."

"By bringing people back to the kitchen table, we can strengthen our families, improve our health, build healthy habits that last for generations to come, and Make America Healthy Again," added the HHS secretary.

According to the HHS, each episode features a recipe that uses real, whole-food ingredients; is kid-friendly and easy to prepare; works in a basic home kitchen; and "costs less than $5 per serving whenever possible."

The premier episode featured chef Andrew Gruel, the executive chef of Calico Fish House in Huntington Beach, California, who demonstrated how to prepare salmon cakes and a fresh salad.

Liberal gas

Weeks after MS NOW did something similar, Burnett's CNN show ran a snark-saturated report on Wednesday casting doubt on the affordability of the recipes featured in "The Real Food Show."

After accusing Kennedy of incorporating "dubious claims about the food industry, science, and public wellness" into his cooking show, CNN correspondent Tom Foreman claimed that "the math doesn't add up in this cooking class."

Foreman purportedly went to a store and bought all of the ingredients mentioned on the first episode of the HHS cooking show.

"When we started buying ingredients used in the show, even going for the lowest prices at a big competitive chain, the cost heated up fast," said Foreman.

The CNN correspondent, who evidently missed the HHS' note that canned salmon would also work for the recipe, claimed that he couldn't find frozen wild-caught sockeye salmon for under $24.

Burnett's crony also complained that Kennedy had priced just the ingredients used in the recipe.

"That's the trick here, because they're only pricing that one egg out of the carton," said Foreman. "And that gets worse with other things. For example, this red onion, they say they only spent eight cents on this because that's how much they used. Getting the whole onion cost us more than a dollar."

"They're only pricing parts of it. And grocery stores don't sell things that way," added Foreman.

Since CNN priced out every single ingredient for the four-serving meal as it appears whole in stores, not as it appears fractionally in the recipe, it ended up with a price tag of $70.54 instead of the roughly $20 indicated by the HHS show.

Burnett thanked Foreman for his misleading report, which he said was "very hard to swallow."

Kennedy dishes out a response

Kennedy responded on Thursday to the anti-MAHA segment, writing, "Trump Derangement Syndrome has so debilitated @ErinBurnett that she has abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic."

"CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe," continued the HHS secretary. "If you put a squirt of ketchup on your burger, would you be surprised if the restaurant charged you for the whole bottle?"

"The Real Food Show uses standard recipe costing: we count what the recipe actually uses. The rest stays in your kitchen for the next meal — and the meals after that," added Kennedy.

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'My son's eyes were sold': The Ohio mother taking on America's organ-donation machine

The modern administrative state has perfected the art of turning basic human relationships into a never-ending nightmare. In modern America, even the simplest family matters can become exercises in paperwork and official permission. But what happened to an Ohio mother crosses into truly disturbing territory.

When Andrea Mauk’s 18-year-old son, Damon, died suddenly, he was not a registered organ donor. Andrea had raised him as his primary custodial parent. His biological father was long estranged, played little role in his upbringing, and, according to Andrea, didn't even appear in his hospital files.

Federal investigators concluded that at least 28 patients might not have been dead when the procurement process began.

Yet Andrea says that while she was briefly out of cellphone service, hospital and organ procurement organization staff turned to Damon's biological father. Roughly 30 minutes after attempting to reach her, she says, they obtained a single phone "yes" from him authorizing the recovery of Damon's eyes and tissue. Some of that tissue would ultimately make its way as far as Argentina.

Who decides?

For conservatives who still believe the family is the primary unit of society, the story raises disturbing questions about parental authority and consent. Under Ohio's version of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, both parents of an adult child occupy the same level of priority for authorizing donation.

If one parent gives permission, the gift can proceed unless that parent or the procurement organization knows the other parent objects. The law requires officials to consider which relatives are "reasonably available," but that determination depends partly on whether they can be contacted in time to act within existing medical constraints.

That leaves enormous weight resting on a deceptively simple question: How long is reasonable when a mother doesn't even know someone is seeking permission to recover parts of her child's body?

"In my son's entire medical record, his father was never listed. He was not an emergency contact, HIPAA release, and we have no idea how he was even contacted," Andrea explains.

Her parents showed up at the hospital after community members tipped them off, but nobody mentioned donation. Even when Andrea called the hospital directly, she says, staff kept her in the dark. As part of the process, Andrea says the OPO had Damon's father complete a detailed medical history questionnaire about a son he barely knew. If accurate, that raises an obvious question about how reliable such a medical history could possibly have been.

Organ trade

Follow the money, and the picture becomes far more disturbing. Americans are accustomed to seeing organ donation as an act of pure altruism. But the system also has a powerful commercial dimension.

When someone dies without registering as an organ donor, the UAGA allows certain family members to authorize donation on the person's behalf. At the same time, federal regulators measure OPOs partly by their donation and transplantation rates, creating an obvious institutional incentive to secure authorizations. OPO performance can ultimately determine whether an organization retains its certification and service area. Critics fear those incentives can turn a grieving family's decision into another performance metric — all within a system where some OPO executives collect compensation exceeding half a million dollars a year.

The loophole lies in the world of "anatomical gifts" — the industry's clinical term for donated skin, bone, ligaments, eyes, and other tissue. Federal law prohibits the outright sale of human tissue for transplantation, but permits organizations to charge for its recovery, processing, storage, transportation, and distribution. In other words, the tissue itself cannot legally carry a price tag, but nearly everything done to it after donation can. The result is a peculiar system in which the donor receives nothing, yet donated tissue can generate substantial revenue as it moves through nonprofit and commercial organizations.

"My son's eyes were sold to an international hospital in Argentina and his skin and ligaments to a biologics research company," Andrea notes. "This has become a multibillion-dollar industry."

Legally, the industry distinguishes between selling human tissue and charging for the services required to recover, process, and distribute it. For a grieving mother who never authorized the donation in the first place, that distinction may understandably seem rather academic.

L-R: BSIP/Universal Images Group/Getty Images; SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

'Questionable consent'

Nor are concerns about the procurement system confined to Andrea's case.

Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services examined 351 cases in which organ donation had been authorized but ultimately not completed. Federal investigators found concerning features in 103 of them, including what HHS described as "questionable consent practices." Seventy-three patients showed neurological signs inconsistent with organ donation, and federal investigators concluded that at least 28 patients might not have been dead when the procurement process began. HHS ordered corrective measures and broader changes intended to strengthen safeguards throughout the system.

The concerns have persisted. In March, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued new guidance explicitly requiring that families be given appropriate time to make informed donation decisions without coercion. CMS said the action followed reports of OPOs rushing parts of the process and pressuring grieving families.

Andrea's own search for answers eventually took her all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court. The public records litigation concerned records surrounding Damon's death and the handling of his personal property, including $1,500 in cash and an iPhone reportedly given to a man identifying himself as Damon's father — not the legality of his father's authorization of the donation. Andrea ultimately won a partial victory and $2,000 in statutory damages over improperly withheld or redacted records.

She says she also had to go through probate proceedings simply to obtain access to some of her son's files. Two years and thousands of dollars later, Andrea says she is still trying to reconstruct exactly what happened to her son and why.

The traumatized and understandably furious mother says she has repeatedly called and emailed Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, but has received no substantive response in 18 months.

'Damon's Law'

But all is not lost. Andrea is now campaigning for a package of reforms she calls “Damon’s Law,” aimed at strengthening informed consent and family protections in the organ- and tissue-donation system. As I write, more than 16,000 citizens have signed a Change.org petition calling on Congress to enact those reforms. That pressure must grow until lawmakers have no option but to act.

Andrea's proposed reforms demand basic transparency and accountability across the board. She wants states to require DMVs to tell drivers more clearly what organ and tissue donation actually entails, rather than allowing a one-time registration to remain in force indefinitely without requiring the donor to reaffirm it.

That's not a hypothetical concern. Under Ohio law, once someone registers as a donor through a driver's license, identification card, or vehicle registration, the authorization remains effective until affirmatively withdrawn. The donor doesn't have to reaffirm the decision at renewal, and even expiration or cancellation of the license itself doesn't invalidate the gift.

And even withdrawing that gift may not mean what an ordinary person assumes it means. Ohio law expressly distinguishes between revoking an anatomical gift and refusing to make one. A donor's revocation "is not a refusal" and therefore does not necessarily prevent an authorized relative from approving a donation after death. By contrast, a formal, unrevoked refusal generally bars other people from making the gift.

The distinction may make sense to a lawyer; whether the average Ohioan understands it when checking — or unchecking — a box at the DMV is another question entirely.

Andrea also wants lawmakers to establish clearer rules for family authorization, so that an estranged biological parent cannot make such an irreversible decision without the parent who actually raised the deceased even being given a meaningful chance to object. Andrea Mauk wants a system she believes failed her family to be reformed.

Any decent, sane American should want families to know what they are consenting to — and to have a meaningful say before the decision becomes irreversible. Without serious legislative fixes, the system that failed Andrea and Damon will remain perfectly capable of doing the same thing to another family.

Memo Gives Blueprint For Investigating Fauci’s Massive ‘Curated Misinformation Effort’

Government influence was laundered through scientific authors.

Are you inhaling microplastics?

Everyone knows cigarettes are full of chemicals: nicotine, tar, carbon monoxide, and a long list of others you probably do not want anywhere near your lungs.

Now researchers are wondering whether smokers are also inhaling plastic.

A new study published in the European Heart Journal found that people with a history of smoking were almost six times as likely to have microplastics in their blood. Smoking was the only factor that still predicted the presence of microplastics after researchers adjusted for heart disease, inflammation, air pollution, and other variables.

The study looked at 61 patients undergoing heart procedures at two hospitals in Italy. Nineteen were suffering serious heart attacks, 20 had chronic coronary disease, and 22 had normal coronary arteries. Researchers found microplastics in 84.2% of the heart attack patients.

Microplastics are also in the air we breathe.

By comparison, they found plastic particles in 40% of the patients with chronic coronary disease and 31.8% of those with normal arteries.

But the smoking numbers were even harder to ignore. Every heart attack patient with a history of smoking had plastic in their blood. None of the nonsmokers with normal arteries did.

Patients who both smoked and had high long-term exposure to fine-particle air pollution all tested positive for microplastics. Among nonsmokers with lower pollution exposure, just 12.5% tested positive.

Not just the filters

That does not prove cigarettes are directly injecting plastic into your bloodstream. This was a small study, and the researchers cannot say exactly where the particles came from.

Still, the connection is strong enough to raise an uncomfortable question: Are smokers literally smoking plastic?

Cigarette filters are usually made from cellulose acetate, which is a type of plastic. Public health researchers have increasingly described discarded filters as a major source of microplastic pollution.

The World Health Organization has warned that cigarette filters contain microplastics and eventually break down into smaller particles after they are discarded.

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But the plastic found in the patients' blood was mostly polyethylene, the material commonly used in grocery bags, bottles, food packaging, and countless other everyday products. So the cigarette filter itself may not be the main source.

Another possibility is that smoking makes it easier for plastic particles already floating in the air to get into the body. Microplastics are not just in water and food. They are also in the air we breathe. Smoking repeatedly pulls particles deep into the lungs while damaging the body's normal defenses. It harms the cilia and mucus-clearing systems that are supposed to catch and remove unwanted material.

In other words, cigarettes may not be creating all of the plastic. They may simply be opening the door.

A disturbing clue

Once the particles get through the lungs, they can enter the bloodstream.

Researchers found microplastics in blood taken directly from the coronary circulation, the blood vessels that feed the heart. Heart attack patients had the highest concentrations and the widest variety of plastic particles. They also had higher levels of inflammation.

That matters because one of the big questions surrounding microplastics is whether they are simply passing through the body or actively causing damage. Scientists suspect they may contribute to inflammation, oxidative stress, and damage to blood vessels. But human research is still in the early stages.

A 2024 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found microplastics and nanoplastics embedded in plaque removed from patients' carotid arteries. Patients with plastic in their plaque were more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or death over the next three years.

That study did not prove that plastic caused those outcomes. Neither does this one. There are plenty of reasons to be cautious.

The new study involved only 61 people. Just 19 were having heart attacks. The researchers did not fully measure diet, drinking water, packaging exposure, occupation, or every other possible source of microplastics.

They also tracked whether someone had a history of smoking, not exactly how much he smoked or how recently.

So this is not proof that every drag from a cigarette fires plastic particles straight into your arteries, but it is a disturbing clue. Smokers in this study were far more likely to have plastic in their blood. Every smoker suffering a heart attack tested positive.

Cigarettes already come with enough reasons to quit. You can apparently add "possibly smoking plastic" to the list.