Coffee May Protect the Liver in More Ways Than Scientists Realized

Coffee’s apparent liver benefits may extend beyond caffeine.

Liver disease often develops quietly, with fat buildup, inflammation, and scarring progressing for years before symptoms appear. A new Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University study suggests that one of the world’s most common beverages may be linked to a lower risk of that damage: people who drank more coffee had fewer cases of cirrhosis, liver cancer, and liver-related death.

Published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the research went beyond tracking coffee intake and diagnoses. Investigators combined more than a decade of health records with liver MRI scans and blood protein analyses, uncovering biological clues that may help explain how coffee is associated with healthier liver tissue and reduced disease risk.

“Previous studies suggested that coffee might benefit the liver, but most were smaller or looked at only one piece of the puzzle,” said hepatologist Hyunseok Kim, MD, MPH, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai and corresponding author of the study. “We followed hundreds of thousands of people for more than a decade and looked at their health outcomes along with liver MRI scans and blood protein analyses. Together, those findings help explain the biological mechanisms behind coffee’s association with better liver health.”

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Talarico Pushes ‘Well Regulated’ Myth. Jonathan Turley Takes it to Woodshed

Back in my younger and more stupid days, I thought the whole “well regulated” thing in the Second Amendment might open it up to gun control. My government professor told me that plenty had tried, but to no avail. That’s a very good thing in my book, and as I got older, I understood why that was the case.

Democratic Senate Candidate James Talarico, however, never came to that understanding. He’s pushed that particular myth recently.

We haven’t had that discussion a thousand times since I asked that government professor about that in the last century.

Anyway, before I could see the comment and say anything, legal scholar Jonathan Turley got to it, and he took Talarico to the proverbial woodshed.

A virtual cottage industry has emerged among people finding James Talarico clips espousing everything from declaring his campaign meat-free to there being six genders to God being non-binary.

One recently uncovered video from a meet-and-greet, however, attracted my interest and deepened my concerns about Talarico. It shows Talarico explaining why sweeping gun control laws do not violate the Second Amendment. The reason, he declared, is that the Second Amendment expressly embraces gun controls by referring to the right as “well regulated.”

In the clip, Talarico mocks those opposing gun control measures and bans as not taking the time to actually read the Amendment:

“A lot of politicians like to talk about the Second Amendment. Very few have actually read the Second Amendment, because, if they did, they would know that the words ‘well regulated’ are right there in the text of the amendment itself.”

What he omits is the word following “well regulated”: “militia.”

It is hardly a long read, so here is the language:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The term “well regulated” was not a reference to regulation in the contemporary sense. It was used to mean orderly or well-maintained. Militias were considered the backbone of the American military, particularly by those who feared a standing army. Some militias were less capable than others in the Revolutionary War. A well-regulated militia meant state militias that were combat-ready.

The individual right to possess guns was viewed as central to maintaining such militias. However, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that a “well regulated militia” was not a limitation but a justification for the individual right.

And, interestingly enough, they never seem to counter “well regulated,” as it stands in their interpretation, against “shall not be infringed.” If “well regulated” means gun control, then it cannot co-exist with the idea that the right to keep and bear arms is uninfringeable. They’re contradictory statements, after all.

The problem I had all those many moons ago, and that Talarico has now, is that he and so many others have failed to read beyond the introductory clause. “It says ‘well regulated’ right there, durhur!”

That alone should raise big red flags for anyone, unless they’re just cherry-picking the phrases that they can twist to justify what they want.

You see, unlike Talarico’s claims suggest, we have read the Second Amendment. We read all of it, not just the parts that serve as a justification for something we know from the Founding Fathers’ own words that they never had any interest in.

Unfortunately, this won’t be the last time we end up having this conversation, either, because gun control advocates like Talarico won’t be dissuaded from spouting disproven nonsense if they think it’ll give them an edge in the polls.

If You Haven’t Heard, Suppressor Sales are Booming

By Salam Fatohi

America’s gun buyers are quietly making big noise when it comes to their shooting preferences. They are buying items regulated by the National Firearms Act (NFA) in huge numbers. That includes suppressors, short-barrel rifles (SBRs) and short-barrel shotguns (SBSs).

These figures aren’t in the hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands. The number is creeping up toward 1 million for this year alone, according to data provided to NSSF from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). And there are still seven months of purchasing data to collect this year.

That data shows over 845,000 suppressor applications were submitted and 768,000 were approved from January through May this year. Those totals include both Form 1 applications to manufacture suppressors and Form 4 applications to possess a suppressor either as an individual or in a trust with several parties.

In fact, NSSF reported a 177 percent increase in NFA checks in June 2026 over the previous year. That number jumped to 166,677 last month compared to 60,147 last June.

Table: Top-5 States for NFA Checks in June 2026

The Reasons

NSSF noted in January that 2026 could be the “Year of the Suppressor.” That prediction is turning out to be spot-on accurate. There are a couple reasons driving these figures.

Undoubtedly the One Big, Beautiful Bill, signed into law in the summer of 2025, turned an increasing interest in suppressors by gun owners into an all-out frenzy. A provision in that law, by deeming the required tax stamp as paid, in effect reduced the tax to $0 from $200.

Without the $200 tax added to the cost of each suppressor, buyers are finding it an easier investment to make. Turns out, when government gets out of the way of exercising rights, law-abiding citizens will want to exercise those rights even more.

Another reason for the dramatic rise in suppressor applications is that the ATF’s NFA Division is approving them in a matter of days, not months. NSSF worked diligently starting back in 2013 to ensure that ATF’s NFA Division had the budgetary resources needed to institute electronic form processing, or eForms.

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InfantryDort

I think civilization is worth preserving.
I think merit should outrank favoritism.
I think children deserve protection.
I think nations deserve borders.
If that makes me “partisan,” the problem isn’t me.

An idea does not become partisan simply because a politician adopts it.
Some principles existed before parties.
They will exist long after them.
Understand what time it is.

Remember.

A Look at ‘Gun Homicide’ Versus Suicide Stats for 2024

As it stands, we’re probably going to be waiting a bit before we see details about 2025’s “gun crime” statistics. It always takes a bit of time to break those down, though, so that’s not unusual. On Thursday, Cam took a look at 2024’s numbers as they applied to Florida, which had just achieved real permitless carry.

Now, I’m going to look at them at a more national level, because Florida’s numbers don’t really matter if you don’t live in Florida, except in an academic sense. The rest of us live in other parts of the country.

Plus, national statistics are often the ones used to push for gun control laws in the halls of Congress.

So, let’s look at what we’ve got.

Firearm homicides in the United States fell sharply in 2024, but gun suicides reached a record high, according to a new analysis of federal mortality data by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

The report, based on newly released data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 44,447 people died from firearm-related injuries in 2024, down about 5% from the previous year. The decline was driven largely by a nearly 16% drop in firearm homicides, which fell to 15,364 deaths.

At the same time, firearm suicides rose to a record 27,593 deaths, accounting for about 62% of all firearm deaths in 2024.

The report’s authors also found that firearms remained the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1 to 17 for the fifth consecutive year, with 2,214 deaths in 2024.

The fact that they continue to exclude children under the age of 1 is infuriating because they know doing otherwise would cause the numbers to drop like a rock. Or, if they’re going to do that, how about breaking the numbers down by age cohorts? Then, at least, people would see which group is being shot, and it’s not the little rugrats running around the elementary school playground.

I’ve tread that ground aplenty, though, including earlier today.

Now, let’s understand that a 16 percent drop in homicides is fantastic, especially considering how those numbers keep sliding down at a significant rate. That’s huge, and it’s very good news.

On the issue of suicides, though, there’s clearly work to be done. However, let’s also remember that there were 27,300 firearm suicides in 2023. For those even worse at math than I am, that’s a difference of just 293.

In a country of 330 million people.

Now, again, there’s still work to do, but this wasn’t a crisis-level jump in the numbers.

Plus, I really do hate them lumping suicides in with homicides to create “gun deaths” as a statistic, because the two are very different in every way that leads up to a finger on the trigger. The mechanisms are different, and so the solutions are different.

Suicide is a mental health issue, and we’d do well to start treating it like one. Instead, we get the numbers conflated into one big total that hides the facts and helps people ignore the truth that there are tens of thousands of people each year who opt for a permanent solution to temporary problems. We can help them, and we can do it not because of the numbers, but because it’s the decent thing to do. Our neighbors are suffering, and we should do more to help with that.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t sell gun control as well, so until then, we get stuff like this.

Americans who value freedom had better be more concerned about the gun control crowd than the criminals. The criminals want your money. The Neo-Totalitarians want your freedom.
— Charlie Reese