Better in their words…

The Times retreats on organ harvesting; Pirro confirmed as D.C. prosecutor; Trump strong-arms Pharma; Maxwell flips; and the whole thing points to something far bigger now taking shape.

Source: CONSOLIDATION ☙ Sunday, August 3, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Less than two weeks ago, I reported an astonishing NYT exposé headlined, “A Push for More Organ Transplants Is Putting Donors at Risk.” revealing that living patients —not legally dead ones— were being enthusiastically prepped for organ harvesting under increasingly elastic definitions of “death.” That story hit just before a major House committee hearing into ghoulish transplant practices. And now? Now the Times has doubled down with a staggering guest op-ed: “Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death..”

Rather than recoiling in horror from the allegations, the three opining doctors (two transplant directors and a cardiologist) openly argued that the solution to organ shortages and unethical liver-snatching is to redefine death itself. The good doctors proposed to declare patients legally dead before they’re brain-dead or heart-dead, as long as they’re “irreversibly comatose” and “unlikely to recover certain higher brain functions” like intention or desire.

Never mind reflexes, circulation, or breathing support. Those are just “primitive responses.”

Though dressed in scrubs and scientific jargon, the proposal smuggled in a metaphysical presumption masquerading as clinical ethics. It’s a secularized version of Cartesian, dualistic philosophy: they presume that the “real person” is not the biological plumbing and wiring that makes up the body, but an ineffable inner essence evidenced by personality, dignity, and identity.

It’s Saw meets Scrubs. The horror-movie part is that they argued that “experts” (the doctor) should hold the power to legally determine when the person has left the building and the parts can be ethically disassembled for scrap— regardless of clinical indicia. Betty, go down in the basement and see if the transplant surgeons are still there. We’ll check the barn.

Like all good biomedical dictators, the doctors founded their argument in an exciting new technology! In cases of catastrophic injury, normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) can restore organ viability after cardiac arrest by oxygenating the blood and supporting circulation. Transplanters want to reserve use of NRP until after the time of death is called, to help preserve donors’ organs for more effective harvesting.

But it raises a delicate question: Why not use NRP before declaring TOD? In other words, use it sooner to help sustain the patient’s life, rather than hold it back to keep the ‘post-death’ organs in best condition? The answer is murky and seems mostly based on doctors’ utilitarian concerns that overly emotional family members, watching loved ones’ organs working again —their heart starts beating or their skin flushes pink again— might want to wait a little longer to see what happens. He’s getting better!

Once families see organs working, even mechanically, the moral authority behind the irreversible coma declaration weakens. The question plunges to the spiritual, where doctors have no place, and priests and pastors speculate on whether anyone’s soul is still in there.

It’s devilishly hard to make organ quota when families are asking problematic questions like, okay, but has anyone ever recovered from this point?

The truthful answer is nearly always: yes, but it is very rare. But doctors don’t want to argue with families over whether this patient could be the one-in-a-million miracle or not. They prefer to rely on statistics, which sounds so much more scientific, even though the entire conversation is essentially spiritual.

The statistics are useless anyway, because they are circular. The system says, “Recovery from this state is vanishingly rare, so we can ethically declare death.” But recovery is rare because —at least in some part— once a patient reaches that state, doctors stop trying to treat them. “I’m feeling better!” “No, you’re not.”

When doctors say, “only one in a thousand comes back from this,” families rightfully ask, “How many of the 999 were actually given a chance?”

The Times is ping-ponging between running exposés one week and letting big medicine publish defensive op-eds the next, but it’s avoiding the ultimate issue. These are spiritual questions, not legal or medical ones, and “expanding the legal definition of death” is something we definitely do notneed to do. “Says right here you didn’t contest your ‘persistent vegetative’ designation within the required window. You had ten days, mate. We sent a notice—left it on your bedpan.”

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The week saw plenty of breaking news from the Senate, where the hot tea is splashing out of the cooling saucer and burning lawmakers’ fingers. Yesterday, CBS ran a remarkable story headlined, “Senate confirms Jeanine Pirro as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.” The Fox TV judge —with no federal judicial background— is now the confirmed United States Attorney for DC. Astonishing.

DC’s U.S. Attorney is the single most powerful prosecutorial office in the country outside of Main Justice itself. For example, the DC office oversaw the January 6 cases. Pirro will handle the DOJ leak investigations, possibly any RussiaGate prosecutions, and anything else that happens to walk across the Capitol lawn. She was confirmed 50–45, after already serving a few weeks in an interim capacity, and right on the heels of the even more jarring confirmation of Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer, to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Bove has no prior judicial experience.

At least Pirro once wore real robes and ran an actual courtroom —albeit only for three years at the county level— and played a judge on TV. She was also district attorney for Westchester County for several years. Surprisingly, even the Atlantic deemed her “qualified.”

Trump’s outsider nominations —like Pirro and Bove— shatter major post-Watergate norms, and the fact that the Senate is confirming them along party lines, with barely a whisper of GOP protest marks, just how fully the old guard has collapsed. But one thing about Judge Pirro stands out: she is one of Trump’s most loyal allies from way back. It’s like they’re getting ready for something. I’ll come back to that.

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Another pillar of globalism buckled this week, as President Trump lobbed a grenade straight into the pharmaceutical industry’s marble atrium. Friday, CNBC ran the shocking headline, “Trump’s drug price ultimatum sets pharma firms scrambling.” The president issued letters to 17 major drug companies —hilariously, on Truth Social— demanding binding commitmentsto cut U.S. prices to “most favored nation” levels or face the full weight of the federal arsenal.

The implications are staggering. For decades, if not longer, American consumers have shouldered the burden of global drug R&D, while Europe’s socialized health ministries, Canada’s Marxist regulators, and Japanese insurers all paid pennies on the dollar. Trump is flipping his tariff script: if pharma wants access to the massive U.S. market, it must stop gouging Americans and subsidizing the rest of the world.

In his letters, Trump warned, “If you refuse to step up, the government will deploy every tool in its arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices.”

It’s another form of his “America first” tariff strategy. In essence, Trump is doing to Big Pharma what he already did to foreign steel, foreign cars, and foreign bureaucrats: telling them pay up or lose access. Also like with his tariff strategy, he’s offshoring the cost. If Pfizer and Novartis want to stay profitable, they must raise prices overseas, not here.

And it’s another remarkable political gamble. Trump is taking on the entire pharmaceutical industry— the most powerful lobby there is. And if CNBC’s article is any guide, they think Trump will win. “Healthcare stocks tumbled Friday as investors digested Trump’s amended tariffs,” CNBC reported, signaling that the market believes pharma will be forced to change.

Astonishingly, Pharma executives didn’t complain. They blinked. AstraZeneca’s CEO Pascal Soriot agreed with the President, saying, “There are issues around prices. I personally believe the president is right to say price equalization should happen.”

And so we see yet more evidence of a brilliant, coordinated, highly integrated plan. Why isn’t pharma fighting? I can think of only one reason: because Trump has now taken full control of the federal regulating agencies. Under Trump 1.0, the President tried a similar tactic and failed, after pharma tied up his executive orders in court, published scores of angry op-eds, deployed legions of lobbyists to Congress, and leaked #Resistance memos to corporate media.

But now, under Trump 2.0, they are terrified. They are terrified because Trump controls the regulators, which used to be their own pets, but now look more like scary wild animals. Trump has secured the FDA, HHS, and CMS— agencies on which pharma relies for its very existence under the system they built.

In other words, Trump’s play against pharma this week wasn’t random. He needed to wait until he first had the health agencies locked down. Think about what the timing says about the sophisticated thought process that went into planning his entire second term. It’s breathtaking.

TAW is a feedback loop. The more Trump wins and gets away with it politically, the less people are inclined to resist instead of cooperate. In other words, Big Pharma quite rationally doesn’t want to be Harvard, or Brazil. You can make a deal with Trump, but you can’t beat him. It’s a snowball, and it’s rolling faster and faster.

Defying all predictions, it seems like major drug price cuts might actually happen this time. Personally, I avoid drugs as much as possible. But for some people, they are unavoidable necessities. This is, once again, a win for Main Street over Wall Street. It’s another 80/20 issue. And it will be coming online during the lead-up to the midterm elections.

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Yesterday, the AP ran an intriguing story headlined, “Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, is transferred to a prison camp in Texas.” In other words, now that she’s answered Trump’s lawyer’s questions, she’s been moved to Club Fed. (The women-only facility also houses Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Jen Shah of ‘Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’.)

Maxwell’s transfer comes just days after a two-day courthouse interview with former Trump personal lawyer and now Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and amid continuing pressure from the House Oversight Committee. Her lawyers are clearly negotiating: they’ve floated the idea of a Trump pardon, requested immunity for Congressional testimony, and petitioned the Supreme Court for relief. She’s either flipping or leveraging everything she knows.

It was a good upgrade. Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Bryan, Texas, is a minimum-security facility for women. Locals call it “Camp Cupcake.” There’s no barbed wire, no armed towers, and no real perimeter fence at all. The Florida federal prison where Maxwell started was “minimum security,” but it was still a prison. Bars, fences, armed guards, and solitary confinement for violations. FPC Bryan is more like a halfway house.

The clear message is: Maxwell is cooperating. Social media blackpillers complained that we can’t trust anything Ghislaine says. But that narrow take presumes she is the whole investigation, or that investigators credulously slurp up whatever she says. But Maxwell isn’t an endpoint; she’s the beginning. She only has to point investigators in the right direction, and give them legal predicates (“new evidence”) for expanding the search and re-opening the grand jury.

Think about it. Mob rats get protective custody. Not because they’re saints, but because they unlock networks.

Not only that, but Maxwell isn’t likely to lie, at least not in any material way. Whatever limited immunity DOJ offered for her interview last week would almost certainly vanish in a sulphuric puff of smoke if she is caught in a material misstatement. Her lawyers said she answered every question.

We really don’t know much (nor should we). But based on her rewarding transfer, it looks like the Maxwell investigation is yielding fruit.

A whole lot is happening right now, and it’s not random. Dots that once seemed disconnected —judicial confirmations, regulatory purges, collapsing resistance from Big Pharma, shifting geopolitical fault lines, and now the sudden reanimation of the Epstein investigation— aren’t just connecting. They’re interlocking.

Why flip Maxwell unless you’ve already secured the courts and the narrative? Why shake down the global drug cartel unless you already control the regulators? Why install a loyalist prosecutor in D.C. unless you plan to prosecute something explosive in D.C.? Now add tariffs, along with the EU’s sudden and unexpected capitulation, and the RussiaGate declassifications. It’s all happening at once.

How could this be happenstance? It’s not. It’s orchestration. And if it feels like the pressure is building toward something massive and historic, that’s because it is. It must be. There’s no conceivable chance the timing is an accidental coincidence.

The show hasn’t started yet. But the stage is set. Get your popcorn ready.

Have a blessed and rewarding Sunday! Thank you, once again, for your continued loyal support. I’ll be back tomorrow morning, to help us all kick of another terrific week of essential news and commentary.

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