(2344) The Late Late Post. Most unusual for me to awaken so soon after dropping off and I’ll go into a reflective item late in this post. Night night again, all. (0053)

 

4. Cunning plan is, ladies and gentlemen

… to keep posting until the ole bod tires again … head for bed. “Everywoman” Jen is at it again:

And to add the usual addenda:

So when we’re told we’re being too “puritanical”, too “religious” over certain principles, e.g. Britain for Brits, America for Americans, I tend to be blunt:

3. Maria Bartiromo

… by Breck Worsham (no Trump lover but otherwise patriotic):

2. Sama Hoole on Turmeric

Turmeric is sold as the anti-inflammatory spice, and the yellow in a lot of it is lead paint.

In the 1980s a flood in Bangladesh dulled the colour of the crop, and the processors who polish the roots found a fix: dust them with lead chromate, an industrial pigment made for colouring toys and furniture. The roots came up bright, the buyers paid for bright, and the practice never stopped.

A Stanford team went through the turmeric districts and found spice carrying lead at up to 500 times the legal limit. Then they matched the lead isotopes in the powder to the lead in people’s blood, which is as close to a confession as chemistry gets.

Lead has no safe dose. It settles in bone and in a child’s brain, and the powder that carries it is stirred into rice for toddlers and into golden milk for women with sore knees.

Then the supplement, which is worse.

Curcumin is about 3 per cent of turmeric by weight and the gut barely absorbs it, so the capsule makers add black pepper extract to force it through, and sell that as the innovation.

The American liver injury network has been logging the results. Ten cases of turmeric hepatitis in its registry, every one after 2011, patients hospitalised with jaundice a few months after starting the capsules, most of them carrying the same gene variant.

A spice people had cooked with for 3,000 years without a single liver case started putting them in hospital the year it became a pill.

And the chemistry never earned any of it. Curcumin is what chemists call a pan-assay interference compound, which means it lights up every test tube it is put in and does nothing in a person. It is the textbook example of the category. Thousands of papers, and the shelf built on them is 8 feet long.

The root was painted, the pill is a hepatotoxin for the wrong genotype, and the molecule was disqualified by the people who checked it.

A rib of beef contains no lead chromate and has never needed a clinical trial.

1. The Clancy Trial

This was on X:

After six days of deliberations, the Lindsay Clancy murder trial appears to have come down to one holdout juror and the dispute erupted into a heated courtroom confrontation Thursday.

The jury has already told the judge twice that it cannot reach a unanimous verdict in the deaths of Clancy’s three young children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, just 8 months old.

But Thursday brought a new problem.

The jury sent a note concerning one juror who, according to defense attorney Kevin Reddington, “refuses to listen to the law” the judge gave them on reasonable doubt.

Judge William Sullivan questioned the jurors individually and then repeated his reasonable-doubt instructions. Reddington angrily objected and asked Sullivan to remove the juror and replace that person with an alternate. The judge refused.

Clancy admits killing her children, but her defense argues she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible. Prosecutors contend she planned the killings and understood that what she was doing was wrong.

After more than 35 hours of deliberations, the jury still couldn’t reach a verdict Thursday and was sent home until Friday morning.

At this point, one juror could be standing between this case and either a unanimous verdict or a mistrial.

Seems a fair summary … everyone has a view and mine is firmly that she did the murders, no question, the only remaining issue is insanity or malice aforethought and on that … I’ll say no more because of possible subjudice.