One expert believes that the failure to pass the bill is a win for the banks that staunchly oppose stablecoin yields, while a global crypto lawyer believes overseas jurisdictions benefit.

U.S. banks and overseas crypto hubs such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stand to benefit after the Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act last week, according to lawyers and industry experts.

The Clarity Act’s 49-50 Senate cloture vote means the crypto industry will not get the federal market structure framework it had sought. Instead, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) will continue to shape policy through existing rules, interpretations and exemptions.

The legislative battle over the bills was not only about crypto oversight, but it also exposed a struggle over whether stablecoin platforms could offer rewards that might compete with bank deposits, as well as ethical considerations for people in government.

“Banks won this round. But the reason they are fighting so hard is that banks increasingly see stablecoins as competition for deposits, not just as another crypto product,” said Anton Golub, head of exchange go-to-market at Forte, in a Telegram message.

The immediate outcome of the failure to pass the law is that crypto regulations in the United States will continue to be created outside Congress. The SEC moved quickly after the vote, issuing a temporary conditional exemption that allows eligible venues to trade tokenized U.S. stocks through permissioned liquidity pools on public blockchains.

Soon after, the CFTC sent crypto rules to the White House for review. The agency submitted a new proposal; the details were not disclosed. For now, which crypto assets it contemplates, what exchanges would need to do to qualify for licenses, what restrictions would apply and how far the agency believes its authority extends, remains unclear. All the meanwhile, the “Clarity Act is dead, at least for now,” Jesse Hamilton, CoinDesk’s deputy managing editor in charge of global policy and regulation, wrote in an analysis that explains what very few appear to know: what the Clarity Act actually is.

“While the U.S. continues debating the Clarity Act, in the UAE we actually have clarity,” Irina Heaver, a Dubai-based crypto lawyer and founder of NeosLegal, said via Telegram. More than 110 regulated virtual-asset businesses operate in the country, with about 20 more holding in-principle approvals, she added.

“Every additional year that major markets spend debating how crypto should be regulated gives jurisdictions that have already created functioning regulatory frameworks another year to attract businesses, founders, talent and capital,” she said. “Regulatory clarity is no longer just a legal issue. It is a competitive advantage for the country.”

Kyle Bligen, executive director at the Decentralization Research Center, said “Congress remains the best route to a comprehensive market structure framework.” He said the Senate’s vote “was disappointing, but it does not change the underlying problem: digital assets still need clear and durable rules.”

The post Why banks and offshore hubs like Dubai are winners of the Senate killing the Clarity Act appeared first on Activist Post.

Keeping it real stupid

My X account is flooded with new videos everyday. They all involve the same demographic. The script varies only slightly. Perhaps it’s an obese woman with no impulse control, tearing up a Popeye’s because they ran out of hot sauce. Or it’s a gang attack, started with a sucker punch, because someone felt “disrespected.”

Fortunately, we have a real “racist” in the White House. At least that’s what they tell us. An impossibly White male who irrationally hates all the nonwhites. You know, like the millions of illegal immigrants he has never deported. He does keep talking about it on social media, though. That’s pretty much the same thing. As for African-Americans, as Trump dutifully calls them, sure he’s friends with Mike Tyson, and pardoned the president of Death Row Records, but rest assured that, underneath that orange exterior, he’s a stone cold White Supremacist. He just seemed to be enjoying himself in photos with racial huckster/FBI informant Al Sharpton, twice convicted killer Don King, or P. Diddy, the Jeffrey Epstein of the Ghetto World. He likes to keep his supremacism to himself. Recall how, during the summer of 2020, our cities were burned because All Lives Don’t Matter. The police stood down like it was 9/11 again. Statues were torn down. There was mass looting. But our “racist” president did nothing. He mentioned Antifa, because that’s safe. They’re some kind of intelligence agency construct. But never BLM. Why? You’d think he would have alerted his friends in the Klan, and ordered them to resume lynching and burning crosses.

Now, to be fair, Bill Clinton was our very first Black president. Celebrated Black writer Toni Morrison said so, so it must be true. She noted that Slick Willie embodied several “tropes of blackness.” One of these “tropes” was eating fast food. I’m pretty sure she mentioned serial adultery, too, but that seems to have been censored from all the search engines. At any rate, Clinton was flattered. He apparently also embodies the “trope” of making babies and not taking care of them. Ask poor Danny Williams. Looks just like a Black Bill Clinton. He’s been trying to get the press to pay attention to him for years. Now, I’m guessing the media might pay attention to a half-Black child that Donald Trump fathered. Maybe there’s one or more of them out there. We know Trump had at least one steady Black girlfriend. Another odd “trope” for such a hopeless “racist.” And nobody likes fast food more than Trumpenstein. He may not be wearing gold chains, but our beloved leader does like to gold plate everything.

Thinking about it, when was the last real White president? George H.W. Bush? His son, Dubya, didn’t speak Ebonics, but he fractured the English language. Like Clinton, he used cocaine. The Great Decider was probably more Black than Barack Obama. Sure, Obama virtue signaled for all it was worth, and made quite the show of shooting baskets in the White House. I mean, what else would you expect a Black president to do? I don’t know that he ordered mass quantities of grape soda, but now that we’ve learned it’s not just a ghetto favorite, but one of the many code words used to describe the nefarious escapades of the Epstein Class, it wouldn’t surprise me. He definitely did order a bunch of hot dogs, though. We all know what they’re code for. Joe Biden didn’t seem authentically “Black,” but he did try to claim that he went to a historically Black college. And his son was addicted to crack. I mean, that has to count for something, right? That should have given Creepy Joe at least some street cred.

So Trump exemplifies the values of or recent Black presidents, who almost all are not literally Black. Like Dubya, Trumpenstein really struggles with communication. He’s not overtly trying to be Black, like so many White cucks. He just appears to have the grammatical and oratorical skills of a poorly educated fifth grader. As such, he’s a perfect leader for our dumbed down society. He treats the champions of various sports (at least those that will accept an invitation to his White House) to McDonald’s food. Which really becomes surreal, when it’s served amidst all the garish gold backdrop. He even has developed a little dance, so that all the Blacks he supposedly hates can laugh at him, the way they once laughed at Pee Wee Herman’s dance. And now he’s promising to pay every American $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterm elections. That’s a real Black-mayor-of-a-big-city-kind-of-move. Think Marion Barry, who, like Joe Biden’s son, was addicted to crack. Trump is only addicted to Diet Coke.

Recently, I have started suggesting that we desperately need an emergency Ghetto Behavior Task Force. To address the rampant criminal misbehavior of so many ghetto Blacks, documented on cell phones. Other ghetto Blacks film these escapades, I guess thinking that there is something to be proud of. As I’ve said repeatedly, the cell phone camera is not the friend of ghetto Blacks. The latest horrific, unreported Black on White crime involved a large number of Black youths, pulling a White girl off of her Pennsylvania porch, and then beating and raping her. Despite all the video evidence, the “racist” police have yet to arrest a single one of them. And they’ve already said it’s not a “hate crime.” It never is, when Blacks are the ones doing the “hating.” It’s an Orwellian thing, you wouldn’t understand. One Black woman, reverently quoted in the same media ignoring the violent incident itself, complained that it was “racist” to call the attackers “uncivilized.” That, of course, is a much bigger crime in America 2.0.

I try to be fair minded and reasonable with all people. But these nonstop videos, and the hateful, incredibly stupid comments defending it have started to make me think that maybe I am a racist. The dictionary defines racism as: “The belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race or ethnicity over another.” I don’t like the “superiority” part, but the rest sounds pretty reasonable to me. There is no question that an unknown, but very noticeable number of Black people engage in behavior that no other racial/ethnic group does. Sucker punching old women, for instance. I’ve never known a single White guy who sucker punched an old woman of any race. I call this group Ghetto Blacks. As the new expression goes, it’s not all of them, but it’s always them. How do we get the “ghetto” out of these Black people? How do we get them to realize that they have no right to just attack others?

No other group that I’m aware of places such an emphasis on being “disrespected.” Most of us feel “disrespected” by our employers, by retail outlets, by our supposed political “representatives.” Too many by our own families. But we don’t just launch a physical assault on someone who looks different because of this imaginary slight. Only Ghetto Blacks do that. Sure, I’ve been upset sometimes when a restaurant is out of something I like. For instance, I complained when Outback Steakhouse didn’t give me any croutons in my salad- they have the best homemade croutons. But I didn’t hit the waitress. It never once occurred to me to sucker punch her. I didn’t tear the place up. But you can see new videos everyday, of Ghetto Blacks doing that kind of thing. Acting totally “uncivilized,” if I may be so bold. Males beating up much smaller females. White children killed just because. And no one ever “says their names.” Whites are whistling past all this ghetto misconduct. Hoping they don’t attack us.

Now, because of disastrous DEI/Affirmative Action policies, most of our big cities have long been run by Black leaders. More often than not, Ghetto Black leaders. But nationally, most leaders are still White. Presumably with some semblance of “supremacy” about them. They certainly have privilege. But they not only refuse to address the massive problem of Ghetto Behavior, they embrace it. They celebrate it. They mimic it. It’s a wonder that our Giant Orange “racist” leader doesn’t have his pants hanging down, to show off his fat ass to the free world. I mean, that might win him a few more African-American votes. I wouldn’t be that surprised if he showed up one day with a fresh Wakanda tattoo on his forehead. Perhaps his next much younger wife will be named LaQuiesha. It would be entirely predictable if he put out a rap record. His good friend Snoop Dogg would help him out. Maybe he can knock up some young Ghetto Black, and refuse to take care of the child. Just like Bill Clinton.

When you allow statues of what were historically considered great American heroes to be unceremoniously torn down, with our militarized police watching calmly, you know you’ve gone full cuckold. I mean, if your officers have no problem with shooting jaywalkers in the back, or feeling “threatened” by motorists with a busted taillight, then how could they not respond to this massive destruction of property? Was George Floyd really that important? Then Trump 2.0 does react to people who really were peacefully protesting overaggressive ICE officers. Two of them were killed. And they didn’t tear down a single statue, or loot a single store. That’s the Trumpenstein Project in a nutshell. Our fearless leader is laughably entitled, and probably loves to tell “racist” jokes in private, but publicly, he feels compelled to capitulate to “African-Americans.” Just using that ridiculous term is a form of capitulation. It’s not “racist” to arrest and prosecute violent rioters. Not even for Donald Trump.

I’ve said it so many times before, but I have to keep repeating it; you can’t have a “multicultural” society, when some “cultures” are more equal than others. Laws, rules, and standards of conduct have to apply equally to all, regardless of skin color, religion, country of origin, gender, wealth, hairstyle, or anything else. Obviously, that isn’t the case in America 2.0. When you can have a vicious group assault on a female, documented on videotape, and no one is even arrested for it, the laws, rules, and standards of conduct are not being applied without fear or favor. And it’s clear which group they’re not being applied to. While those Blacks remain at large, free to terrorize other lonely White girls on their porches, White star college quarterback Arch Manning is being raked over the coals. For laughing at an AI meme of an overweight female reporter being slapped by his coach. No one was really slapped. And Arch didn’t do the fake slapping. Naturally, he has already apologized.

Meanwhile, in that same sports world, countless Black athletes continue with their wildly overpaid careers, attaining multi-millionaire status despite being poorly educated, and too frequently despite being accused of violent crimes. Against real women. Not overweight female AI images. And I’ve never heard a single Black athlete apologize for anything. Well, except for a few who offended the Non-Irish. And Kyree Irving, who wisely refused to take the warp speed vaccine. But Arch Manning, nephew of the great Peyton Manning, may have to publicly twerk in a dress or something as a humiliation ritual. One apology is never enough. And they never work. And yet, White public figures continue to apologize. And Black public figures continue to be smug and arrogant, and make preposterous allegations of “racism” over anything and everything. In another recent video, a grown ass Black man (to quote all the cucked Whites who are copying Ghetto Blacks) beat down a White kid who had the audacity to call him a “Negro.” So now you can’t even say that. Two forbidden “N” words. The grown ass Black man started it, as you might expect. He demanded to know what the White kid was “looking at.” You know, because that was “disrespecting” him.

Will average, everyday White people ever reach a tipping point? A few in England evidently have, after becoming extremely “fatigued” with the Muslim rape gangs. At least we don’t have to deal with Muslim rape gangs in America 2.0. But Europe, while experiencing the joys of “diversity” from the likes of Africa and Haiti, doesn’t have our homegrown, 100% USDA-grade Ghetto Behavior. We keep it realer here than anywhere else. No one has made English a second language language better than our Ghetto Blacks, an increasing number of whom own a degree in Black Studies, or African-American Studies. I’m sure there is a White Hating 101 course in their somewhere. So we have to tolerate obviously ill edumacated Black college graduates, spouting fantasies about how “we built everything,” and “we built this country.” They had the greatest ancient civilization. All of it wiped out by The Man, who didn’t want the world to know how superior they are. Watch Black Panther and you’ll understand.

In the recent Pennsylvania case, concerned citizens tried repeatedly to call 9/11, but it took our brave police officers hours to arrive on the scene. Long enough for all the criminals to disappear into the night. This should remind all “conservatives” once again that the police are not your friend. Don’t “back the blue.” They don’t back you. The Supreme Court ruled they are under no obligation to protect the public. So why are we letting them run roughshod over what’s left of our civil liberties? What purpose do they serve, other than to meet quotas with their traffic tickets? We need Citizen Oversight Committees to rein them in. They’re probably as dangerous as the Ghetto Blacks. To be fair, they deserve each other. Think of them as Republicans and Democrats. No good guys there. Demanding “law and order” or a “crackdown on crime” means nothing, when you ignore the giant Black elephant in the room. We can either do something about Ghetto Behavior, or go full Ghetto ourselves.

I’m glad I’m no longer in the workforce. I wasn’t built for “sensitivity training.” I have no problem apologizing, but not for things I never did. Definitely not for things my ancestors never did. Not for saying any word, unless it’s cruel and mean-spirited. Not that I’d ever do it, but if I called a woman a “bitch,” and she started crying, I’d apologize instinctively. But not for saying “Negro,” although it’s not a word I regularly use. Not for calling vile, savage behavior “uncivilized.” And under no circumstances, for laughing at an AI meme. I mean, the overweight reporter is actually being made into some kind of “victim.” For not getting slapped in an AI video. No one would ever have to apologize for laughing at a White male getting slapped in an AI video. You can’t win at this game. You can’t out virtue signal them. We need an emergency Ghetto Behavior Task Force. To hold those wreaking havoc accountable. We have just the president to do it. A giant of a proud White man. You know he’s on “our” side.

The post Ghetto Leaders in a Ghetto World appeared first on Activist Post.

Last Sunday morning, the Treasury Secretary Bessent and the Vice Premier of China sat down to negotiate the commercial future of the two largest economies on earth. They did not meet at the Treasury or at a consulate, but rather at the Manhattan headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. This seems a little fishy to me.

The official explanation, given to Reuters by one unnamed person, is that UN security made the building convenient and that JPMorgan was not a party to the talks. But when two governments need a room and the room they choose belongs to the largest bank in America, you are looking at a picture of how the world actually works.

On Thursday, Xi Jinping arrives at the White House for a full state visit. In May, I wrote in The China Card that Trump’s trip to Beijing was not a trade summit but the merger of American and Chinese Technocracy into a single global order, with China coming to the table because it had run out of time. Xi’s visit closes that loop. Before he lands, here is what has held up since May, what is still hanging, and what to watch this week.

What I Told You in May

I wrote that three boards were being assembled to replace the post-UN, post-WTO order: a Board of Peace for conflict, a Board of Trade for commerce and a Board of Investment for capital. The two new boards had no charter and no members, and I said this is exactly how technocratic architecture gets built. The framework arrives first. The democratic debate never does.

I described five walls going up around Beijing, from Pax Silica to the energy squeeze. And I ended by saying that Xi Jinping, for all of China’s multipolar rhetoric, would decide for Technocracy.

The Boards Are Going Up

On June 5, the U.S. Trade Representative published a notice in the Federal Register asking for comments on the Board of Trade. The title of that notice describes it as a mechanism for “Reciprocal Managed Trade With China.” Managed trade is the phrase I used in May for what the Trilateral Commission built into the WTO. Now the government uses it about itself. The notice cites no legal authority for creating the board. It names no members, no chairman, and no role for Congress.

Yet when Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer came out of that meeting on Sunday, Greer announced that the Board of Trade had been “operationalized.” A board with no charter, no members, and no vote of any legislature is now operating. He said its job is to find a “critical mass of goods” that can be set apart “when and if there are trade measures” down the road.

That is the Abraham Accords template I described in May, and now it comes from the Trade Representative’s own mouth. You lock in the commerce first. You wall it off from politics. Then the political questions, Taiwan above all, become too expensive to raise. The Chinese Embassy put it more bluntly, saying the boards move the relationship from “crisis response” to “mechanized management.” Technocrats on both sides of the Pacific speak the same language because they hold the same doctrine.

What Is Still Hanging

Jensen Huang was the last-minute addition to Air Force One in May. Trump personally called him over the objections of the China hawks in Congress, and I wrote that AI chips were on the table. They were. Washington had licensed about ten Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips. The terms were remarkable: a 25 percent cut of every sale paid to the U.S. Treasury, and every chip inspected on American soil before it shipped.

Beijing turned it down. Trump said so himself on the flight home, telling reporters that China “chose not to” buy because “they want to develop their own.” Chinese firms withdrew their orders and were pointed toward Huawei. Nvidia’s share of that market went from around 95 percent to essentially zero.

I said China was boxed in and would take the seat on American terms. On chips, it did not. In my judgment, Xi saw that the carrot had a leash attached. A chip that is taxed by Washington and inspected by Washington is a chip administered by Washington, and he chose to pay the price of building his own.

So why is Jensen Huang on the guest list for Thursday’s state dinner, alongside Jamie Dimon, Jane Fraser and Sam Altman? Because the offer is still on the table. What I want to know is whether the terms have changed.

Other threads are hanging as well. The Board of Investment stalled over the summer, yet Reuters reports new rules coming to let American drug companies invest in China, and Trump says he is open to Chinese automakers building plants here. The investment is moving even if the board is not.

He Lifeng is bringing a delegation of Chinese companies that Reuters says mirrors the group Trump took to Beijing. No names have been released. In May I showed that six of Trump’s executives sat on the Tsinghua University advisory board. When Beijing’s list comes out, I will be looking for the mirror image.

And Taiwan has not appeared in any readout I have seen. That fits a political question being walled off. It also fits ordinary caution before a summit.

The Sentence Nobody Noticed

Before Sunday’s meeting, Bessent put out a statement saying the United States is open to discussions on “avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems.” Afterward, he announced a proposed “U.S.-China AI Dialogue,” with a notification mechanism for AI incidents that threaten national security. He talked about transparency between “the number one and the number two AI powers in the world.”

The press keeps telling you this is an AI race. People in a race do not set up notification channels with each other, and they do not describe splitting into two systems as a risk they share. Pax Silica was designed to do precisely that — divide the world into an American stack and everybody else. If the Treasury Secretary now calls that division a danger, then Pax Silica was never the goal. It was the leverage. I said as much in May. One sentence does not prove it, but Thursday might.

What to Watch For This Week

Watch the chips first. If Beijing approves the blocked purchases, or Washington drops the 25 percent fee or loosens its rules, the deal I described in May is done.

Watch whether the Board of Trade gets a charter, named members or any role for Congress, or simply keeps operating without them. Watch whether the AI Dialogue becomes a permanent body, and notice that it is the Treasury Secretary running it, not anyone from defense. Watch for what is not said about Taiwan.

And watch the dinner. The White House reportedly turned down a formal CEO roundtable, which means the executives of both nations will do their talking over dessert, off the record.

If China takes the chips, my May conclusion stands, four months late. If it refuses again, we are looking at something I did not anticipate: one doctrine running on two separate infrastructures, coordinated at the top by boards and dialogues. Whatever comes out of that room, I will report it to you next week.

What I can tell you today is that it has never mattered which flag flies outside the building. The men inside believe the same thing: that the world is an engineering problem, and that they are the engineers.

Nobody in either country has been asked to vote on any of it, and nobody will be.

Popular posts

• Shock: European Union Reports 1.5 Million Vaccine Injuries, 15,472 Deaths
• RT-PCR Test Loses FDA Emergency Use Authorization On January 1, 2022
• WEF: Private Property And Privacy Will Vanish By 2030
• Psychology Today: Sex Robots And The End Of Civilization
• Masks Are Neither Effective Nor Safe: A Summary Of The Science

The post Chairman Xi Comes To Washington appeared first on Activist Post.

Book launch day! The Octopus of Population Control is now available on Amazon as a paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. It clocks in at around 400 pages, has one hundred references, and features more than 400 quotes from people with a front-row seat to the depopulation agenda over the centuries.

As the sequel to The Octopus of Global Control (2017), this book goes deep into the past, present, and future of the global eugenics program. Any quest for world government always leads to depopulation as a solution for controlling the masses, and this book blows the lid off what they have planned for humanity, how long it has been happening, and exactly who is involved.

The Octopus of Population Control: https://amzn.to/4xDQ42L

Hypocrazy Audiobook: https://amzn.to/4aogwms

The Octopus of Global Control Audiobook: https://amzn.to/3xu0rMm

Website: www.Macroaggressions.io

Merch Store: https://macroaggressions.dashery.com/

C60 Power: https://go.shopc60.com/PBGRT/KMKS9/
Promo Code: MACRO

Chemical Free Body: https://chemicalfreebody.com/macro/
Promo Code: MACRO

Wise Wolf Gold & Silver @ (800) 426-1836: https://macroaggressions.gold/

LegalShield: www.DontGetPushedAround.com

Christian Yordanov’s Health Program: www.LiveLongerFormula.com/macro

Replace Your Mortgage: www.WipeOutYourMortgageNow.com

Augason Farms: https://augasonfarms.com/MACRO

Activist Post: www.ActivistPost.com

The post #680: The Octopus of Population Control appeared first on Activist Post.

Ohio Department of Public Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff signed a public health order in February that permits schools to exclude unvaccinated students for 21 to 25 days when a measles or rubella case is confirmed, or when a mumps or chickenpox outbreak occurs, according to state records. The order states that the exclusion applies even if the unvaccinated student shows no signs of illness or infection, officials said.

The policy extends beyond classroom attendance to include sports and extracurricular activities, according to the order. Under the terms described, the 21-to-25-day quarantine period resets each time a new case or outbreak is reported at the student’s school.

State health officials have not issued a public response to criticism of the order, according to available statements. The directive represents an expansion of Ohio’s existing school vaccination requirements, which mandate routine childhood vaccinations for 10 diseases, including measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, according to state law.

Scope and School District Notices

Earlier this month, Ohio school districts sent letters to parents warning that children without two doses of the MMR vaccine will be excluded from school for 21 days whenever a measles case is confirmed, according to the letters. Under the policy, vaccine doses received five or more days before the minimum interval or age are considered invalid, so those students are classified as unvaccinated and required to be re-vaccinated.

Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom stated that this could put children at serious risk of vaccine injury and called for immediate repeal in a letter to leaders and members of the Ohio Senate and House of Representatives, according to the organization. The group described the policy as a coercion tactic to bully parents into submitting to vaccination against their conscience out of desperation.

The organization further stated it is absurd to discriminate against healthy unvaccinated children when more than 60 percent of teachers can carry and spread measles to students, according to its statement. The group’s criticism aligns with broader concerns raised by medical freedom advocates who argue that exclusion policies penalize families for exercising informed consent rights recognized under Ohio law.

Critics Call Policy Coercive and Discriminatory

Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, called the policy cruel and discriminatory and a violation of the rights of children and their parents or guardians. Tucker said, “If the policy is to protect the unvaccinated children, the parents should be the ones to decide.”

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense, said the contrast between medical freedom and medical tyranny is blatant and that the policy discriminates against people based on medical choice with zero evidence that they pose a risk. Leslie Manookian, president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, said the policy appears designed to coerce busy parents into vaccinating their children so they won’t be excluded from school and school-related activities.

Attorney Greg Glaser, whose practice focuses on constitutional law and the rights of the unvaccinated, called the policy a clear abuse of administrative power and an unjust exclusion of healthy children from their classrooms. Glaser said Ohio law recognizes the right of parents and caregivers to exempt their children from vaccine requirements for reasons of conscience, including religious belief. He stated that the same law explicitly allows schoolchildren to be excluded only during a declared chickenpox epidemic.

Glaser said the state legislature never granted the Department of Health authority to expand this statute to mandate weeks-long quarantines for healthy children based on isolated reports of measles, mumps or rubella. He said families facing these illegal quarantines have grounds for civil litigation, and that parents can pressure local school boards and state elected officials to repeal or change the rules.

Scientists Dispute Transmission and Vaccine Effectiveness

Jablonowski noted that Merck, the manufacturer of the MMR vaccine, has acknowledged that people who receive the MMR vaccine can still acquire and transmit the targeted diseases. He cited the package insert for Merck’s MMRV, stating that transmission of varicella vaccine virus resulting in varicella infection may occur between vaccine recipients and contacts susceptible to varicella.

According to a systematic review published last month in Expert Review of Vaccines, vaccinated people can still contract and transmit measles and, in some instances, initiate substantial chains of transmission. The review and other reports cited cases in New York in 2011, Italy between 2017 and 2021, and Colorado in 2025 involving vaccinated individuals.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the primary failure rate of the MMR vaccine is as high as 7 percent, and a 2007 CDC study concluded that immunity wanes over time. Epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher identified at least three U.S. deaths likely linked to the MMR vaccine this year compared to no U.S. deaths definitively linked to measles cases, according to an analysis posted on Substack.

Neil Z. Miller, author of Immunization Theory vs. Reality, wrote that whenever health officials claim unvaccinated children are a threat to the rest of society, the argument indicates how little faith authorities place in their own vaccines. Miller stated that if the vaccines were truly effective, only the unvaccinated would be at risk, and that the argument overlooks the potential for vaccinated individuals to spread the virus to unvaccinated populations ^[1].

Concerns About Harms to Excluded Students

Children’s Health Defense Advocacy Director Michael Kane said evidence shows that excluding children from school can lead to their being branded and scarred as different and being removed. School districts and state health boards have not conducted studies on the potential harms of their exclusion policies, according to critics.

Karl Kanthak, who has researched school vaccine exemption regulations, called school exclusion policies reckless and said some youth may respond to exclusion with a self-harm attempt, and that administrators likely do not know the student’s mental status. Kanthak, who served as an expert witness in several lawsuits challenging the policies, said a growing number of schools are recklessly ordering students with vaccine exemptions to stay home, even though they have no idea what the student’s mental status is ^[2].

Data from the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families show a sharp increase in youth suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Nevada, the Clark County School District reopened schools to in-person learning in January 2021 after 18 students had committed suicide since the beginning of the pandemic, double the number recorded for all of 2019.

According to the New York State Office of Mental Health, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for youth in New York and throughout the U.S. Official statistics from Sweden, which did not impose lockdowns or school closures during the pandemic, show that suicides among young people decreased in 2020 and subsequent years.

Calls for Repeal and Legal Action Continue

Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom has called for the immediate repeal of the policy in a letter to leaders and members of the Ohio Senate and House of Representatives, according to the organization. Glaser said parents are not powerless and can pressure local school boards and state elected officials to repeal or change the rules.

He added that families facing these quarantines have grounds for civil litigation. State health officials have not issued a public response to the criticism, according to available statements. The debate over the Ohio order reflects broader national tensions over vaccine mandates and exemption rights, which have been contested in state legislatures and courts across the country ^[3].

References

1. Neil Z. Miller. “Immunization Theory vs Reality”.
2. Children’s Health Defense. “Barring Teens With Medical Exemptions From Classroom Increases Suicide Risk”.
3. Mercola.com. “US Vaccine Exemptions Remain Secure in 2018”. September 27, 2018.

Explainer Infographic

The post Ohio Public Health Order Allows 21-to-25-Day Exclusion of Unvaccinated Students After Disease Cases appeared first on Activist Post.

For years Yemen’s war appeared trapped in a bloody stalemate, its front lines barely moving, while the world’s attention stayed on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Then the war moved on to the Red Sea. Saudi-backed forces withdrew from Mocha as Ansar Allah entered the port. The group, known outside Yemen as the Houthis, swept south along Yemen’s western Red Sea coast as government-aligned positions that had held for years rapidly gave way. By the time government troops left Mayyun, a volcanic outcrop at the southern mouth of the Red Sea, their fighters were arriving by boat without meeting resistance.

Mayyun is barely thirteen square kilometres, but it sits in Bab al-Mandeb, where the water narrows between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. Tankers and cargo ships coming from the Indian Ocean divide around the island before running north to the Suez Canal and Europe with Gulf oil and the trade that links Asia to European markets. Iran holds the Strait of Hormuz, so Saudi crude has to move west toward Red Sea terminals and that same channel. With Mayyun taken and Yemen’s west coast behind them, Ansar Allah now stands on the passage Riyadh had used as an escape route.

For more than a decade the Kingdom had paid Yemeni units along the eastern side of the strait to prevent exactly that—a shifting collection of local commanders, brigades and armed groups that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates armed separately, paid separately and presented as Yemen’s legitimate military. When the coast began to fall, the men those patrons had financed offered very little resistance; dozens of Giants Brigades personnel were captured, and Saudi military equipment was seized. In the rout, Saudi- and Emirati-backed forces lost Al-Omari camp, Jabal Dhubab and the commanding heights above Bab al-Mandab. Soon after, Zuqar Island fell, and large quantities of weapons passed into Houthi hands.

In the days that followed, Ansar Allah moved to turn the military collapse into permanent control, reopening roads and sending security, health, fuel and civil-service officials into Hays, Al-Khawkhah and Mokha. It offered amnesty and safe passage to fighters who surrendered their weapons, seeking to absorb the coast before its displaced rivals could regroup.

Five months earlier, Saudi Arabia had told soldiers in its allied Yemeni units to report in person before collecting their salaries. Each was asked for a fingerprint and an iris scan. More than 33,000 names reportedly failed to appear. The missing men had ranks, units and monthly wages, and their commanders had been paid to keep them armed. When Riyadh called them forward, nobody came. Five months later, as Ansar Allah came down the coast, they were still missing—the latest absence in a system that began decades earlier, when Yemeni sheikhs crossed the Saudi border, met the Kingdom’s rulers and left with money after a handshake.

The Handshake

Saudi Arabia had been paying Yemenis who never needed to show up long before the Kingdom asked 33,000 of them to put an eye to a scanner. The older method was a handshake in a royal reception, where a Yemeni sheikh offered the greeting required of a guest and left with 1.5 million Saudi riyals after a committee created by royal order had reviewed “allocations and aids” to tribal leaders. Interior, General Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, Defence and the Special Committee of the Council of Ministers all sat on that committee.

These tribal leaders collecting the money could move families, villages and armed followers, open a road, protect a convoy or pull a community toward the side Riyadh favoured. It was this very service the Kingdom had been buying for generations.

The transfer was not entered as a bribe, a political retainer or a military subsidy. Officials called it “annual assistance” for sheikhs who visited the Kingdom, a new label introduced after the regular stipends to senior sheikhs had supposedly been stopped. The audiences did not stop, and neither did the payments.

The committee issuing the payments, the Special Committee of the Saudi Council of Ministers, had been running since 1962. It was created after republican officers backed by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew northern Yemen’s Zaydi imamate, decades before the Houthi movement emerged. Riyadh initially used the system to support the royalist camp and protect Saudi influence along its southern border.

Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz institutionalised Saudi Arabia’s system for cultivating influence in Yemen. As the Kingdom’s long-serving defence minister, Sultan founded and directed the Special Office for Yemen Affairs, which maintained relationships with tribal sheikhs, religious leaders, politicians and military officers through regular financial support. US diplomatic records described these discreet subsidies as a “shadowy framework of influence.”

Influence was graded, requests were logged, and monthly payments were used to keep powerful figures close to Riyadh. The Saudi ambassador in Sana’a reported directly to the Saudi Prime Minister’s Office and sat on the Special Committee of the Saudi Council of Ministers, whose name never appeared in official media in either country. The archive contains its classified cables from 2010 to 2012.

The confession

In January 2012, Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, then Saudi Arabia’s defence minister and later King Salman, used that established machinery against Ansar Allah. A cable marked “Extremely Secret, Very Urgent” instructed officials to deepen divisions around the movement, prevent the conflict from being presented publicly as a war between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and conceal Saudi Arabia’s role. The order did not invent the religious tension already present in northern Yemen, but sought to sharpen that fracture while keeping Riyadh’s involvement out of sight.

The committee paying the sheikhs had already written down the limit of what the money could buy. Yemeni tribal custom condemned a man who helped an outside power attack another tribe, which meant a sheikh could take a Saudi payment and still refuse to be seen fighting the Kingdom’s enemies. Paid figures, the files observed, might support one side against another, but only “in an undeclared manner.” Riyadh had bought an allegiance that could not be shown in public. The money bought quiet dependence, but did not buy a man who would stand in the open and fight for the donor who paid him.

Yet, that dependence was still useful. The payroll held rival leaders in place, spread favour through their networks and made Saudi money a condition of political survival. Two years after the cable, fighting around the northern town of Dammaj forced roughly 10,000 people onto about 300 buses and out of their homes. The rift written in Riyadh left columns of families on Yemen’s roads.

The stipend system survived Saudi Arabia’s later military intervention by taking on ranks and entering army payrolls. The sheikh received in the royal court and the soldier who existed only as a name were paid exactly the same way.

The army on paper

A commander’s budget rose with the number of men he claimed to lead, so each extra name brought salaries plus fuel, weapons and vehicles drawn in the unit’s name and collected by him. A soldier invented on the roster still produced cash in that collection, and the cash could leave the camp entirely. Researchers following Yemen’s war economy found tribal leaders paid for security forces through the same device, which meant money raised on nonexistent troops could reach sheikhs who held no military post.

In Marib, Saudi Arabia reportedly financed about 50,000 fighters, a figure researchers treated as almost certainly inflated and read part of it as tribal support bought through an army wage. The older system paid influential men directly, while the new one paid commanders, who passed the surplus through fighters, families, tribes and political clients. Money from a soldier who never entered a camp could now buy the loyalty of one who did.

The incentive grew when the Emirates paid alongside the Kingdom. Two patrons produced overlapping payrolls and competing formations, which turned the same loyalty into more than one market.

Transparency International estimated that more than a third of roughly 100,000 Yemeni soldiers were fictional, a proportion that made a biometric programme launched in 2006 look almost futile. By 2010, it had removed only 3,792 duplicate names from an estimated 60,000.

By 2026, Riyadh was still paying for a force whose size it could not prove, and the price of not knowing had overtaken the price of counting.

Three paymasters

In January, the Emirates abandoned the units they had been paying and left Saudi Arabia to take them over. Riyadh put billions of dollars into pulling those forces under its own hand and committed $346.6 million toward government salaries and operations, then required the roster of every major formation before the money moved. One soldier on those lists could reportedly draw three salaries, one from the government, another from the southern separatists and a third from a commander running his own force, while thousands of other wages belonged to nobody at all.

A soldier now had to arrive in person, give a fingerprint and submit to an eye scan before he could collect. Eleven years into a war it had financed, Riyadh was building that database to learn whether the men on its books were real. The national audit reportedly rejected more than 33,000 names after nobody came to verify them. On the western coast, military sources estimated that roughly 6,000 people had remained on payrolls for six years, though they were dead, dismissed or absent.

Their allowances still moved, carrying millions of riyals each month. The commander responsible for that coast reportedly told sources the Emirates had paid him about one billion Saudi riyals a year. Each name on his roster carried a wage, a share of supplies and a piece of the authority that would vanish with the name.

Riyadh’s next move was to stop paying the commander for the list and send each salary to the soldier who could prove he existed.

Taking away the payroll

In August Yemen’s defence ministry announced that salaries would no longer pass through unit commanders or their representatives. The new system was to wipe ghost names off the books, stop men holding more than one military job and, in the ministry’s own words, “determine the true size of the armed forces.” After more than a decade of war and billions of dollars, the coalition’s principal sponsor still did not know the size of the army it claimed to command.

The reform made theft harder and gave actual soldiers a better chance of receiving their wages, while stripping commanders of the surplus attached to those lists. Direct payment cut the false names out of the transfer and took the discretionary money with them. The names erased from the roster may never have belonged to real soldiers, but the authority their wages created did.

Plans for a central database had stalled for years because politicians and unit leaders benefited from the disorder. When biometric registration became unavoidable, their opposition moved into the open. Control of the wage was control of whether an armed group still obeyed.

Six weeks before Mocha fell, a Yemeni research centre warned that unpaid salaries and uncertain loyalties could “short-circuit” the restructuring process. The Emirates had secured those loyalties with regular and competitive payments. Saudi Arabia was trying to fuse forces built by different sponsors, paid at different rates and run through personal relationships. The database promised one army, and the men waiting for their salaries knew there were several.

The men who existed

In the spring, a soldier stationed outside Marib spent his free hours calling anyone who might lend him money. An officer said his troops had gone five months without pay and still reported for duty while the government promised arrears it could not reliably deliver. A regular Yemeni soldier earned between roughly $38 and $116 a month when the wage arrived. Fighters in better-funded coalition formations could take as much as $320, and men left poorer units for whichever commander still held foreign money.

A brigade representative in Taiz said soldiers abandoned their positions for formations that paid enough to survive. His men earned a fraction of those salaries, and even that fraction was five months late. Commanders began levying a local tax to issue partial payments, rebuilding an informal purse under the army Riyadh was trying to place on one ledger.

Men had already followed that purse to Mocha. The port had been a fishing town before it became headquarters for the forces holding Yemen’s western coast, and recruits travelled from areas controlled by Ansar Allah to enlist because the salaries came in Saudi riyals. Three weeks before the city fell, a fisherman said some of his colleagues had left the sea for military work paying four times their former income. Missile strikes and security restrictions kept the remaining boats ashore while armed units filled the town, and the water that had fed their families was already a battlefield.

One fighter had left Houthi territory and enlisted seven months earlier. He moved his wife and three children inland because he did not trust the war to separate a military post from a family house. By mid-August, attacks had stopped work at the port and cost more than 1,500 workers their livelihoods. Riyadh then audited the names, centralised salary payments and required each soldier to prove he existed before collecting his wage, as Ansar Allah pushed south.

The road to Mayyun

Ansar Allah entered Mocha on 10 September after government forces withdrew, opening the coastal road toward Bab al-Mandeb. The remaining units abandoned Dhubab, the last major position facing the island inside the strait, then left Mayyun. Houthi fighters reached the island once those units were gone. Mayyun splits Bab al-Mandeb into two shipping channels on the route between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In roughly a week, Ansar Allah held Yemen’s entire Red Sea coast and the island above the passage.

Commercial shipping still moved, and Ansar Allah was quick to confirm that navigation remained safe for vessels not linked to Saudi Arabia. The force Riyadh had spent eleven years trying to defeat now stood at the maritime gateway between the Indian Ocean and Suez.

The commander responsible for that coast issued an official statement describing a planned repositioning agreed with Saudi-led coalition officials and Yemen’s presidential authorities, after which his forces would regroup at a safer command centre. In an audio message to his fighters, he spoke of betrayal from within and abandonment by “the brothers.” No safer command centre appeared, and nothing clear followed about where he was or what remained of his units. The presidential authorities, the defence ministry and the joint command offered no account that matched the claim of an orderly manoeuvre with the camps being stripped behind him.

Headquarters were looted as armed groups fought over abandoned equipment. Saudi military hardware was left in place. Allied formations reportedly obstructed one another during the retreat, and Houthi broadcasts offered amnesty to anyone who surrendered. Within hours, the coastal commander sent his remaining troops into a coalition-run operations room and gave up direct command. The repositioning he had announced was a collapse.

At the beginning of the year, thirty brigades had been folded into five divisions under direct Saudi supervision. Five months of that reform found no coherent army under the lists. When the personal control and informal payments holding that arrangement together were removed, much of the force those lists had described ended up leaving the coast with them.

What the audit revealed

Yemen formally adopted biometric military registration in August 2014. Weeks later the army came apart and Ansar Allah entered Sanaa. In 2026 the same fix returned. Names were scanned, wages were taken off the commanders’ lists, and the coast those payroll rosters were meant to defend fell in roughly a week.

Ansar Allah entered Mocha, Dhubab and Mayyun as the government units assigned to hold the coast withdrew ahead of them. The national audit had rejected more than 33,000 names that never appeared, while the western coast had kept thousands of dead, dismissed or absent men on the books. Direct payment removed the surplus that had allowed unit commanders and their intermediaries to hold the coastal positions together. As that system gave way, the road south opened.

The 2010 to 2012 cables had already recorded that paid allies might take a side only “in an undeclared manner.” The army roster had moved the same purchase through commanders who drew cash from names that never reached a camp. The biometric scanner was meant to turn that traffic into an institution, but instead it produced a count and an empty shoreline.

Ansar Allah had come through bombardment, blockade and years of Saudi-led war with a command structure and a reason for moving south. Riyadh had paid for names, commanders and allegiance that could not be stood up in public.

The men Saudi Arabia could not count are gone, and so is the coast they were paid to hold. With the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian pressure, Saudi crude has been forced onto the Red Sea and through Bab al-Mandeb, the same passage Ansar Allah now holds from the Yemeni shore and from Mayyun.

Once Riyadh tried to pay only the men who could prove they existed, the coast emptied fast enough for Ansar Allah to take the channel. The Kingdom had purchased a ghost army that was never required to arrive.

READ MORE YEMEN NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Yemen FilesSUPPORT OUR

INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

The post The Ghost Army That Lost Bab al-Mandeb appeared first on Activist Post.

Written by Kris Bales of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

A few years ago, it was very popular for mom bloggers to write about being the “yes mom.” There were blog posts, Facebook status updates, and Instagram photos capturing those yes mom moments.

I know because I wrote and snapped many of them myself.

Maybe it’s still a thing; I don’t know. In case it isn’t, the gist of it was don’t tell your kids no when you could just as easily say yes.

Yes, we can have ice cream before dinner tonight. Yes, you can jump in the mud puddle. Yes, we can play a board game.

It was a fabulous concept – one whose implementation resulted in some amazing memories with my kids.

However, it’s important to remember that it’s okay to say no, too.

Moms are especially guilty of trying to say yes to all the things, resulting in exhausted, overwhelmed, burned-out women. We’re not just moms. We’re human, too.

We need rest, hobbies, downtime, and white space. If you happen to be an introvert on top of being a mom and a homeschooling parent, you really need that downtime and white space.

So, moms (and dads), it’s okay to say no.

It’s okay to say no to volunteering.

There is a lot of talk in homeschooling circles about volunteer opportunities. Volunteering can be a phenomenal opportunity to give back to your community and teach your children the joys of serving others.

It can also be exhausting and overwhelming when the opportunities aren’t chosen judiciously. And, the opportunities can be countless when the people offering them assume that you have an abundance of free time because you’re home all day.

When my kids were babies, I worked in the church nursery on Sunday mornings because, other than the one older lady who was there every week, no one except the moms with babies volunteered for nursery duties. Back then I would have loved for someone to snuggle my babies while I recharged for an hour.

Later, it was assumed that because I homeschooled, I would also be the perfect fit to lead children’s church on Sunday mornings. Y’all, after teaching my kids all week, I really had no desire to teach others on Sunday morning, but I didn’t know how to say no back then.

These days, I’ve learned to graciously, but firmly say no to serving in areas that are stress-inducing for me.

(And, now that my kids are grown, I regularly serve in the church nursery because I know those moms of littles appreciate being able to go to church and know that their babies are safe and well-cared-for.)

It’s okay to say no to co-op.

We homeschooled for over 14 years. My kids have never attended an organized co-op. We did have an informal nature study co-op with one family for a few months when the kids were younger, and we’re currently doing a government co-op with two other teens.

But we’ve never done an honest-to-goodness, organized co-op. A friend invited us to join hers the first year we homeschooled, but I declined, saying that I wanted to just spend the first year at home, finding our footing.

We talked about other co-ops a time or two, but none of the kids were ever interested. They seem pretty well-adjusted despite our co-op-less existence.

If joining a co-op meets your family’s needs for social opportunities, learning in a group setting, or tackling academic or elective courses that aren’t feasible at home, go for it! But, don’t join a co-op based on outside pressures or unfounded guilt over something you think your kids are missing.

In my opinion, kids are much better off at home with a stress-free mom than a traveling to a guilt-induced co-op class with a stressed-out, overextended one.

It’s okay to say no to fun outings.

Last Saturday, my daughter asked if I’d take her shopping so she could spend her birthday money. Without the slightest twinge of guilt anywhere in my psyche, I told her no.

You see, Wednesday was spent chauffeuring her to the DMV to take the test to get her learner’s permit (She passed!), running an errand for her older sister, dropping her off for her photography class, picking her up from the class, and running through a drive-thru to get her some food before dropping her off at church for worship team practice.

Thursday was spent accompanying my oldest to a doctor’s appointment (that, incidentally, took forever) before coming home to clean house and make cookies for the birthday party that we hosted that evening. In between the cleaning/baking and birthday party hosting, was a trip to a local indoor trampoline park for birthday party fun.

Just for kicks, we also got to sit in stand-still traffic on the way that made us and the majority of the party-goers half an hour late.

Friday was spent grocery shopping and running home to put the groceries away before rushing off to get the kids to our government not-a-co-op. From there, we ran a forgotten item to one of the previous day’s party-goers on the way to take the kids to another birthday party.

(My daughter and her BFF share a birthday, but they have separate parties.)

There were even a couple of my own errands to be run after dropping the kids off.

So, you know what? I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about telling my daughter that nothing short of a disaster could convince me to leave the house on Saturday.

(In case you wondered, there were no disasters, and I didn’t leave the house.)

I could give dozens of examples of situations in which it’s okay to say no, but I bet you get the point.

You don’t have to do all of the things. It’s great to be a yes mom, but not to the point that it leaves you stressed-out, burned-out, and unable to care for yourself and your family.

Being a yes mom to saying no – as in, “Yes, I said no to that obligation” – can lead to memory-making family moments, too. Because you can’t make memories when you’re spending all your time doing all the things.

It’s okay to say no.

Is there something you need to say no to this week?

The post It’s okay to say no appeared first on Activist Post.

Why preparation matters less than adaptation, and why the next crisis will not resemble the last

My father kept his layoff notice from 1982 taped inside his toolbox until he died. The letterhead—blue, corporate, indifferent—arrived on a Tuesday in March, six months after his machine shop started losing contracts. By August, we were living in my aunt’s basement. By Christmas, he was driving a delivery truck for half his previous wage.

He kept that letter as a reminder about velocity. How fast the ground moves when it finally shifts.

Most Americans have never experienced that kind of speed. They’ve known recessions, certainly—the technical kind, the temporary kind, the kind that ends with rebounding markets and analysts declaring victory. They’ve never known a genuine crisis, the sort that grinds forward for years, rewriting the social contract so gradually that each degradation feels like common sense by the time it arrives. The sort that leaves permanent scars.

We may be closer than we think. Not because of prophecy, but because of arithmetic. Debt structures, demographic shifts, and institutional fragilities have accumulated to levels that historical precedent suggests are difficult to sustain. The question is not whether stress will come, but whether those experiencing it will recognize the tremors before they’re already falling.

The Numbers Behind the Warning

These figures describe conditions, not predictions. Debt at 123% of GDP does not automatically trigger collapse—Japan has sustained higher ratios for decades, albeit with trade-offs. But high debt constrains options. When stress arrives, heavily indebted governments have less capacity to respond through stimulus. When unemployment spikes, extended benefits exhaust faster. When infrastructure ages, maintenance competes with emergency spending. The numbers suggest a system with reduced resilience—less able to absorb shocks, slower to recover, more vulnerable to cascading failures. What they cannot show is timing, specific triggers, or whether institutional adaptations will prove sufficient. History offers examples of both successful navigation and catastrophic failure from similar starting positions.

First Reality: The Joblessness That Doesn’t End

Temporary unemployment is an inconvenience. Chronic unemployment is a transformation. During the Great Depression, joblessness persisted not for months but for years—peaking at nearly twenty-five percent in 1933, still above fifteen percent in 1940. A quarter of the workforce didn’t just lose income. They lost identity, social connection, and the psychological structure that employment provides.

The modern equivalent may already be developing. Labor force participation among prime-age males has declined steadily since the mid-20th century—not because jobs don’t exist, but because available jobs don’t match skills, locations, or expectations in ways that draw workers in. This “missing” workforce doesn’t appear in unemployment statistics, creating potential blind spots in labor market assessments. When crisis hits, these margins can expand rapidly. Businesses fail. Positions vanish permanently, not temporarily. Skills atrophy. Networks dissolve. What begins as cyclical can become structural.

The housing market follows employment with a lag. Mortgage defaults accumulate for months before foreclosure waves crest. Neighborhoods hollow as owner-occupants become renters, then face displacement. Property values in some affected areas—parts of Detroit post-2008, certain Rust Belt manufacturing centers—have struggled to recover pre-crisis levels even decades later. The damage isn’t always cyclical. Sometimes it’s geological.

Personal savings recommendations—typically three to six months of expenses—assume temporary interruption. They don’t account for multi-year income loss during which benefits exhaust, assets liquidate, and credit access disappears. Real preparation requires acknowledging that employment may not return on previous terms, that careers may end, that adaptation matters as much as preservation.

Second Reality: When Ordinary People Become Desperate

Economic compression doesn’t just increase crime—it can change its nature. Professional criminals adapt to conditions. Amateurs, driven by genuine desperation, may behave unpredictably. They panic. They escalate. They make mistakes that turn property crimes into violent confrontations.

Historical patterns are documented. Argentina’s 2001 collapse generated organized looting within weeks. Venezuela’s deterioration produced criminal enterprises controlling food distribution through force. During the 1930s, American rural areas saw agricultural theft increase, while cities developed protection rackets and smuggling networks.

Contemporary data shows strain. Retail shrinkage has increased in recent years, with organized retail crime contributing significantly in many jurisdictions. As economic conditions tighten, participation may broaden. Individuals with no criminal history—former professionals, displaced workers, struggling families—may begin calculating risk differently when legitimate options narrow. Hunger and eviction concentrate the mind. Legal consequences can feel abstract when immediate survival is threatened.

Home invasion patterns have historically followed unemployment with a lag. The mechanism is comprehensible: savings deplete, desperation mounts, targets shift. Concurrently, municipal budgets can contract. Police departments may face difficult choices between personnel costs and other services. Camden, New Jersey, dissolved its municipal police force in 2013 due to fiscal insolvency; replacement required roughly eighteen months, during which criminal activity accelerated.

Personal security under these conditions isn’t solely about defensive capability. It’s about reducing visibility—appearing less prosperous than you are, avoiding predictable patterns, hardening entry points without advertising wealth. The goal is to avoid confrontation, not to win it.

Third Reality: The Fires That Spread

Protracted economic distress creates conditions for civil disturbance that can ignite from seemingly minor sparks. The ingredients—unemployment, inflation, governmental incompetence, perceived unfairness—combine gradually until reaching threshold. Then ignition. The specific trigger is often arbitrary: a price increase, a police interaction, a service reduction. Once started, disturbance can spread through networked populations faster than suppression capacity can mobilize.

Historical cataloging is extensive. The 1873 railroad strikes involved federal troop deployment and dozens killed. The 1932 Bonus Army occupation of Washington ended with military dispersal. The urban insurrections of 1967–1968 required National Guard activation in multiple cities. More recently, coordinated civil unrest in 2020 produced property destruction exceeding $2 billion in some estimates, with police stations abandoned in some jurisdictions.

The pattern often involves escalation that outpaces response. Initial protests may express legitimate grievance. Opportunistic elements may infiltrate. Property destruction can begin. Law enforcement may withdraw to protect personnel and facilities. Vacuums can fill with looting. Geographic expansion may follow contagion dynamics. By the time authorities respond effectively, commercial districts can be devastated. Insurance coverage may evaporate. Businesses may close permanently. Tax bases erode. Services contract. The cycle can reinforce itself.

Preparation requires hardening of fixed assets and community organization. Commercial properties need security barriers, reinforced entry points, fire suppression. Residential properties need defensible space, clear sight lines, structural reinforcement. Community coordination—mutual aid agreements, communication protocols, coordinated response—can multiply individual capability. Isolation is vulnerability. Connection can be strength.

Urban concentration can become liability during such periods. Population density facilitates rapid spread. Resource competition intensifies. Infrastructure dependency creates multiple potential failure points. Less dense positioning may reduce certain exposures. Self-sufficiency capacity—food production, water independence, energy generation—can become a survival determinant.

Fourth Reality: When the Medicine Becomes Poison

Governments respond to fiscal crisis through austerity: expenditure reduction, taxation increase, debt monetization. Modest application may stabilize. Sustained application can destroy.

Greece 2010–2018 demonstrates a trajectory. Troika-mandated austerity—pension cuts, tax increases, public sector layoffs—reduced GDP by approximately twenty-five percent. Unemployment exceeded twenty-five percent. Youth unemployment exceeded fifty percent. Suicide rates increased. Birth rates collapsed. Skilled labor emigrated. National capacity diminished.

The United States faces analogous pressures. Federal debt has exceeded one hundred percent of GDP. Interest payments consume an increasing share of federal revenue—now exceeding $1 trillion annually. Mandatory spending—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid—crowds discretionary capacity. The policy options are constrained: tax increases may reduce productive activity; expenditure cuts reduce aggregate demand; debt monetization risks inflation. Paths may converge toward reduced living standards, though distribution varies.

Individual mitigation requires asset repositioning. Tax-advantaged accounts offer partial shelter. Geographic arbitrage—relocation to lower-cost or lower-tax jurisdictions—may preserve purchasing power. Currency diversification—precious metals, foreign assets, alternative stores—may reduce sovereign exposure. None eliminates risk. All distribute it differently.

Fifth Reality: The Thin Thread of Global Commerce

Integrated production networks function during stability. They can disintegrate during stress. Minor disruptions—port congestion, labor disputes, fuel price spikes—can cascade through just-in-time systems. Major disruptions may generate systemic failure.

Container shipping rates illustrate volatility. Pre-pandemic norms around $2,000 per forty-foot unit spiked to $20,000 during 2021 disruptions, then collapsed, then rebounded. Such oscillation destroys planning capacity. Inventory management becomes difficult. Retail pricing becomes erratic. Consumer behavior may shift toward hoarding.

Manufacturing concentration amplifies vulnerability. Critical components—advanced semiconductors, certain pharmaceuticals, rare earth elements—originate from geographically concentrated sources. Taiwan and its immediate region produce the vast majority of the most advanced semiconductors. Disruption of major nodes can generate global shortage. The COVID-19 experience demonstrated this: semiconductor shortages idled automotive plants; pharmaceutical supply constraints affected treatment protocols; personal protective equipment scarcity required rationing.

Personal preparation requires inventory depth. Critical spares must be procured while available. Repair capability must be developed while instruction is accessible. Substitution planning must be completed while options exist. The window for preparation is uncertain. The need is not.

Sixth Reality: When Trust Evaporates

Fractional reserve banking depends on confidence. Depositors believe their money is available. Physically, it is not immediately present. Banks hold a fraction of deposits as reserves; the remainder is lent, invested, or deployed. Confidence failure—bank runs—can reveal liquidity constraints immediately.

Historical precedent is extensive. The United States experienced thousands of bank failures during the early 1930s, with deposits frozen. More recently, major institutions failed in 2008. Global financial systems froze. Central bank intervention prevented cascade but did not eliminate systemic risk.

Current conditions include challenges: unrealized losses on bond portfolios, commercial real estate exposure, and significant uninsured deposits. Social media enables rapid information propagation. Digital banking enables rapid withdrawal. The combination creates potential for rapid confidence shifts.

Mitigation requires distribution. Account balances should remain below insurance limits where possible. Institutions should be diversified across multiple banks and potentially jurisdictions. Physical currency should be maintained as backup. Barter commodities may retain utility when electronic systems fail or are restricted.

Seventh Reality: When Calories Become Currency

Food systems operate on thin margins. Producers require price stability, input availability, transportation functionality, market access. Economic crisis can disrupt all simultaneously.

Input costs—fuel, fertilizer, seed—escalate with energy prices. The Haber-Bosch process, which produces nitrogen fertilizer, consumes significant natural gas. Transportation costs escalate similarly. Processing capacity operates near limits. Bottlenecks form. Prices spike.

Government intervention can worsen outcomes. Price controls may reduce production incentives. Export bans may reduce global supply. Subsidy elimination may bankrupt marginal producers. The result can be simultaneous surplus and shortage: commodities exist, but distribution fails.

Historical parallels include Soviet collectivization and Sri Lanka’s organic fertilizer mandate. Both produced yield collapse and food crisis. Contemporary vulnerability includes concentrated processing—limited slaughterhouses, grain storage, canning capacity.

Personal preparation requires production capacity. Garden cultivation generates supplemental calories. Animal husbandry provides protein. Preservation skills extend availability. Storage infrastructure protects inventory. Skills require years to develop. The time to begin is before necessity compels it.

Eighth Reality: When Infrastructure Meets Inevitability

Catastrophic events stress systems designed for routine operation. Economic crisis can degrade maintenance, preparation, and response capacity. Catastrophe can become disaster; disaster can become collapse.

Hurricane Katrina demonstrated risks. Federal, state, and local coordination faced significant challenges. Approximately 1,800 deaths. $125 billion in damage. The Superdome became uninhabitable quickly. Police abandoned posts in some areas. Looting and vigilante violence followed. The event lasted days. Consequences persisted for years.

Current infrastructure ages. The American Society of Civil Engineers most recently graded U.S. infrastructure at C. Deferred maintenance accumulates. Replacement costs are estimated in the trillions. Catastrophic failure probability may increase while response capability faces constraints.

Personal preparation requires redundancy. Water: filtration, storage, well access. Power: generation, storage, non-electric alternatives. Sanitation: disposal, treatment, disease prevention. Communication: radio, mesh networks, physical coordination. Shelter: repair materials, weatherproofing, climate control. Community organization multiplies individual capacity.

Ninth Reality: The Only Preparation That Matters

Economic crises are not aberrations. They are features of systems that accumulate imbalances until correction becomes necessary. The timing is uncertain. The recurrence is not.

Current indicators suggest elevated vulnerability. Whether this manifests as gradual degradation or acute rupture remains unknown. What is knowable is that preparation based solely on inventory addresses only initial phases.

True preparation is capability. Skills that persist when tools break. Networks that function when institutions fail. Adaptability that accommodates circumstances rather than demanding conformity to plans. My father’s toolbox reminder wasn’t about the layoff itself. It was about what came after—the years of adaptation, the humility of starting over, the recognition that identity must transcend employment.

Stress, if it comes, will not announce itself clearly. It may arrive wearing the mask of normalcy, then accelerate beyond reaction capacity. Those who recognized patterns early may adapt. Those who waited for confirmation may consume their preparation just understanding that preparation was necessary.

Choose capability over inventory. Choose community over isolation. Choose skills over supplies. The ground moves. The question is whether you’ll recognize the tremor before you’re already falling.

The post 9 Terrifying Truths About Long-Term Economic Crises appeared first on Activist Post.

When life is too easy, unwell people invent problems just so that they will have something to do. America is crumbling under policies created with magical thinking by people who never suffer any real consequences from the outcomes they advocate for.

White female Leftists with mental disorders often adopt these First World problems as their own, while also adopting Third World babies to prove some antiracist point. With Cluster B personality disorder on the rise, it is important to know what happens inside the mind of the afflicted who can’t seem to mind their own business.

Hypocrazy Audiobook: https://amzn.to/4aogwms

The Octopus of Global Control Audiobook: https://amzn.to/3xu0rMm

Website: www.Macroaggressions.io

Merch Store: https://macroaggressions.dashery.com/

C60 Power: https://go.shopc60.com/PBGRT/KMKS9/
Promo Code: MACRO

Chemical Free Body: https://chemicalfreebody.com/macro/
Promo Code: MACRO

Wise Wolf Gold & Silver @ (800) 426-1836: https://macroaggressions.gold/

LegalShield: www.DontGetPushedAround.com

Christian Yordanov’s Health Program: www.LiveLongerFormula.com/macro

Replace Your Mortgage: www.WipeOutYourMortgageNow.com

Augason Farms: https://augasonfarms.com/MACRO

Activist Post: www.ActivistPost.com

The post #678: Luxury Beliefs appeared first on Activist Post.

The following is the result of joint work with Jaroslav Janosek, Tadeas Frycak, and Robert Straka.

Introduction

Since the registration trials of the Covid-19 vaccines, there have been no randomized studies to track the efficacy of these vaccines. The virus kept mutating and the convalescent fraction of the population has been growing. Thus, the original efficacy figures reported in the registration trials – dubious to start with – were clearly not valid when the mass vaccination campaign started in early 2021. Moreover, in the meantime we learned that the registration trials tested a different product than the one used in the mass vaccination campaign. This cast further doubt on the advertised 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection.

The Israel 2021 summer wave of infections clearly demonstrated to the whole world that the “vaccines” do not protect against symptomatic infection in any meaningful way. Consequently, the goal posts were moved and the authorities started claiming that the “vaccines” may not protect against infection but they protect against severe course of infection, hospitalisation, and death from Covid. However, there were (and there still are) no data from randomized trials to support this causal claim.

This embarrassing gap in evidence was filled by a trove of papers that estimated the effectiveness of the “vaccines” from observational data. Most of these studies claimed the vaccine effectiveness was very high, often close to 100%. Rogue governments all over the world used these studies to force people into vaccination. 

Readers of this forum know very well that observational data are loaded with the so-called Healthy Vaccinee Effect. This is a type of indication bias that originates from healthy people having easier access to the vaccine. For example, people on their deathbed are usually not vaccinated, which means that deaths tend to concentrate in the unvaccinated group, making the vaccinated group much “healthier.”

At the same time, those frailest individuals who are close to the end of their lives are also those most susceptible to die from/with Covid. Healthy Vaccinee Effect (HVE) thus causes observational studies to vastly overestimate vaccine effectiveness against any endpoint (and vastly overestimate vaccine safety as well). The now legendary paper by Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, and Vinay Prasad showed that the reported 95% effectiveness of Covid vaccines against Covid-related death in Israel in 2021 was entirely due to HVE. In other words, had HVE been removed, the true vaccine effectiveness would have been zero. I still can’t figure out how they got this published in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

Try to Explain HVE to a Professor

We first noticed HVE in the middle of 2021 when Angelika Bazalova – an investigative journalist – had the brilliant idea to FOIA her way to the records on all-cause mortality of the clients of several health insurance companies in the Czech Republic. Readers (with an AI translator from Czech) can still see our initial confusion as we were reporting the data and proposing possible explanations (one of the articles was titled “The elixir of youth”). After some time, we made sense of all the data and reported it in a paper for the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and in a further paper in a Polish journal.

My original conclusion that “this paper invalidates all estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on observation data” was changed to “In view of the presence of HVE, the baseline difference in the frailty of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in periods without COVID-19 must be taken into account when estimating COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness from observational data.” But that is the Newspeak we all had to learn during the past years in order to get anything published in official journals.

Since then, we have been trying to explain HVE to medical professionals, policymakers, researchers, and the public. It has been frustrating. Most people think that the vaccines work because they keep hearing it from all the media. So, when they see data which seemingly confirm their prior belief – the unvaccinated are dying at a much higher rate than the vaccinated – they cannot make themselves think about any other explanation apart from the convenient one – that the vaccines have prevented these deaths.

When you suggest that it is weird that the vaccines seem to protect against deaths unrelated to Covid, they usually acknowledge that it is weird, but the “Aha” moment of understanding rarely comes that HVE invalidates everything they “knew” about vaccine effectiveness.

Three Illusions of Vaccine Effectiveness

In order to better understand HVE and to be able to explain it more clearly to everyone, we proposed a simple simulation model that can help us to understand three important and common types of misinterpretation of observational data that originate from ignoring the HVE:

1. An illusion of vaccine efficacy

2. An illusion of vaccine waning efficacy

3. An illusion of vaccine-related mortality

We first present a simple model (Model 1) of a placebo vaccine (i.e., a vaccine with zero efficacy and no adverse effects) with no HVE as a sanity check and baseline. Then we make a slight amendment to the model (Model 2), introducing the Healthy Vaccinee Effect controlled by two parameters, the HVE duration, and HVE magnitude. We will still assume the same placebo vaccine as in Model 1. We will show how the three illusions described above naturally appear in the observational data.

Model 1: A Sanity Check

First, we developed a simple model simulating a placebo vaccine, i.e., a vaccine with zero efficacy and no adverse effects. We simulated a population of one million people observed for 100 weeks (700 days, approx. 2 years). Two percent of the population were randomly selected to die during the observed period. The day of death was selected randomly from a uniform distribution over the 700 days. Next, 80% of the population was randomly selected to receive the placebo vaccine. The day of vaccine administration was selected from a normal distribution with a mean of 6 months (168 days) from the beginning of the simulated period and a standard deviation (SD) of 1 month (28 days). Should an individual who had already died be selected for vaccination, the vaccine was simply not administered.

This simulation produced a population of a million individuals, of whom about 20,000 died during the two-year follow-up, and about 800,000 received a placebo vaccine sometime between month 3 and month 9 of the 100-week period. The vaccine administration and death were completely independent in this baseline simulation model.

For each week, we calculated the mortality rate of the vaccinated as the number of vaccinated individuals who died in that particular week divided by the number of person-days spent by all vaccinated individuals in that week. The mortality of the unvaccinated was calculated accordingly. Apparent vaccine effectiveness (AVE) for each individual week of the study period was computed as:

where ACM(vac-) is the mortality rate of the unvaccinated, and ACM(vac+) is the mortality rate of the vaccinated individuals. 

The results were visualized as a plot of the average mortality rates from 100 runs of the baseline model supplemented with standard deviations (Figure 1). By the design of the baseline model, mortality values in both groups are approximately constant and equal to 0.01 deaths per person-year. The slight upward trend in the plot is caused by the gradual decrease in the population size due to deaths (no births were assumed). At the beginning of the vaccination campaign (before week 20), the variability in the mortality of the vaccinated is large due to their low numbers and the data are not presented.

The bottom panel of Figure 1 shows the number of deaths (average and standard deviation from 100 runs of the baseline model) as a function of the number of days from vaccination. On Day 0 (the day of vaccination), the model shows about half as many deaths as on subsequent days because it accounts for a real-world probabilistic situation: assuming an even distribution of vaccinations and deaths over the day, about half of the people who were due to both die and be vaccinated on that day would die before receiving the vaccine, and half after.

Model 2: Healthy Vaccinee Effect

To include HVE in the simulation, a small modification was introduced into the baseline model. The first two steps (selecting 2% of the population who would die at a uniform pace over the observed period and randomly selecting approximately 80% of the population who would receive the placebo vaccine, with the time of vaccination normally distributed with mean = 6 months and SD = 1 month) remained the same as in the baseline model. HVE was introduced only in the next step, to imitate the situation when individuals close to death are less likely to get vaccinated.

We simulated the HVE by cancelling (with a certain probability) the administration of any vaccine that was given less than k days before the individual’s death. The probability of cancelling the vaccine was simulated as a linearly decreasing function of the time to death, starting at p (the maximum magnitude of HVE, valid for those who die on the day they are vaccinated) and gradually decreasing to 0 (for those who die k or more days after the day of vaccination). 

For example, if p = 0.5 and k = 20 days, the HVE steps proceeded as follows: 50% of the vaccines that were due to be administered to individuals who died on the very day of vaccination were cancelled (i.e., not administered). Next, 47.5% of the vaccines due to be given to individuals who died one day after vaccination were cancelled, followed by 45% of the vaccines due to be given to individuals who died two days after vaccination, etc. No vaccines that were to be administered to those who died 20 days or more after the vaccine were cancelled in this example. The outcomes of the simulation were plotted in the same way as in the baseline model.

This small change to the baseline model introduced a correlation between the events of receiving the placebo vaccine and dying. The change in the total number of administered vaccines was very small indeed: for the parameters used in this example (i.e., k = 20 days and p = 0.5), only about 115 out of 800,000 vaccines were not administered. Still, even this seemingly negligible change was sufficient to substantially alter the results of the simulation (see Figure 2).

Not administering a mere 115 vaccines to individuals close to death produced an obvious departure from the baseline model that lasted for weeks. During the vaccination campaign, the mortality of the unvaccinated increased as those about to die concentrated in the unvaccinated group. Because the overall mortality did not change – the simulated vaccine had neither protective nor adverse effects – the mortality of the vaccinated individuals therefore dropped below the baseline. This produced an illusion of vaccine effectiveness (see Figure 2, middle panel). 

We can also see that with decreasing vaccination intensity, the apparent vaccine effectiveness caused by HVE dwindled to zero, producing an illusion of vaccine waning effectiveness. It is worth noting that the illusion of vaccine effectiveness extends well beyond the period defined by k. In the current example, the apparent vaccine effectiveness dropped to zero only after about 15 weeks (105 days) from the start of its tracking, despite k being only 20 days.

The bottom panel of Figure 2 plots the number of deaths as a function of the number of days from vaccination. Note the gradual increase in the plot (compared to Figure 1), consistent with the drop in mortality immediately after vaccination, which then slowly returns to a steady level. Many observers mistook this effect for evidence of vaccine-related mortality (see, e.g., this post by Steve Kirsch). However, it is only another of the Janus faces of the Healthy Vaccinee Effect.

On this synthetic dataset, both parameters of the HVE simulation (k and p) can be easily read off the curve in the bottom panel of Figure 2 (see the auxiliary red lines): The HVE duration (k = 20 days in this case) can be derived as the number of days after which the graph levels off. The HVE magnitude (p = 0.5) can be estimated by the initial attenuation of the graph, i.e., 1 minus the ratio of the number of deaths on Day 1 (approx. 12 in this example) to the daily number of deaths after the graph stabilizes (approx. 23). This would lead to the estimation of p ≈ 1−(12/23) = 0.48. This way of plotting the data can be used in practice to estimate the parameters of HVE in observational studies.

By adjusting the parameter p, we can achieve almost arbitrary “initial effectiveness” of the placebo vaccine. By adjusting k (and/or the duration of the vaccination campaign), we can achieve an arbitrary rate of “waning effectiveness.” See The Hall of Mirrors article that we published in Frontiers for further details, analyses of the effects of changing k and p, comparison to real-world data, Bayesian methods for estimating k and p, and many more mathematical niceties. 

How to Get It published

We first came forward with a version of this model in February 2023. It took some time before the model was polished and the language was toned down sufficiently that we could submit it to an academic journal. We submitted it to the International Journal of Modelling and Simulation in September 2025. Half a year later, the editors were apparently still staring at it with horror because no reviewers had been assigned, despite repeated reminders. Hence, we withdrew the paper and sent it to Frontiers, put up a fight with several reviewers, and finally got it published in the summer of 2026.

We had to step carefully, tone down the language at several places, and pretend that the paper does not invalidate all estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on observation data – which it, in fact, does. Only here, on the pages of Brownstone Journal, can we afford the full and honest…

…Conclusion  

We have presented a very simple model of the so-called Healthy Vaccinee Effect – a type of indication bias that arises when people close to death are less likely to get vaccinated. It is well-known that HVE is present in Covid-19 vaccine observational data.

We have shown that HVE (1) creates an illusion of a protective effect of the vaccine against death from any cause, (2) produces an illusion of vaccine waning efficacy, and (3) causes an anomalous pattern in the relation between the time from vaccination and the number of deaths in that time, which may be mistaken for vaccine-related mortality. In our example, not administering a mere 115 out of 800,000 placebo vaccines to dying people created a very pronounced and long-lasting illusion of vaccine effectiveness.

All studies that use observational data to infer vaccine effectiveness and/or safety – i.e., all such studies except for prospective randomized trials – very likely suffer from major distortions due to HVE. All claims about Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness and safety based on observational data are, therefore, probably misleading and should be revised.

The post A Hall of Mirrors of the Healthy Vaccinee Effect appeared first on Activist Post.