I propose that the world is upside down, that the way we live is the opposite of what we’re told it is: we don’t experience Progress, we experience Anti-Progress.

My five most recent essays (listed below) lay out an account of the present era that is radically different from the conventional narrative.

It’s worth noting that my writing is not “validated by credentials so you should listen to this person” or by data-based claims that “he called the exact top and bottom of the market and has beaten the market indices for 27 years.” The foundation of my work is the text either validates or invalidates itself by its sources and reasoning and is best read as “written by anonymous.”

If you decide on the validity of the text based on the author’s credentials and investment track record, there are hundreds of PhD economists to follow and thousands of accredited financial advisors to consult–or consult Warren Buffet’s annual reports, as his investment track record speaks for itself.

The trust we place in these validations based on credentials and past data rests on a continuation of the conventional status quo, i.e. recency bias, the belief that the recent past is a trustworthy guide to the future because everything is stable and predictable.

And since everyone making their livelihood off the status quo has a built-in incentive to assume it’s stable and predictable, there is no advantage to entertaining possibilities outside this context.

This is the basis of assessing texts and ideas on their own merits rather than trusting the author will be correct this time because they are certified experts and/or they were right about things in the past. Trusting recency bias and credentials works well if the system is indeed stable and predictable. If it’s not, then letting the ideas speak for themselves becomes the way to widen our survey of potential futures.

I propose that the world is upside down, that the way we live is the opposite of what we’re told it is: we don’t experience Progress, we experience Anti-Progress. We don’t live in an economy that optimizes value to compete for our dollars; we live in an economy that optimizes eliminating competition to maximize extraction. All the technologies of AI aren’t additive and liberating; they’re powerful tools that optimize centralized control and extraction. The claim is that AI will help us but the real goal is to use us. The system we inhabit isn’t transparently fair, it’s transparently corrupt, the perfection of self-service passing itself off as manifesting the noble ideals of “capitalism” and “democracy.”

Rather than being victims of powers beyond our control, we accepted the erosion of fairness–the foundation of all human societies–into a rigged casino that favors the few at the expense of the many because we accepted the promise that this unfair, corrupt economy, society and political system enabled us to get ahead: who needs fairness if we have a seat in the rigged casino?

In the conventional telling, ours is a system of innovation, growth and opportunity. The reality is the opposite: the “innovation, growth and opportunity” are all concentrated in a vast credit-asset bubble that has richly rewarded those who own the assets that have skyrocketed in value and left everyone who doesn’t own these assets behind.

This structure–the real world is the opposite of what we’re told–is a civilizational psychosis that benefits those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid. We go along with this psychosis because denial is our defense against a reality too painful to bear: our progression from a society of systemic fairness to a society of systemic unfairness.

But denial, unfairness and credit-asset bubbles are all inherently unstable, and so once the bubble pops, denial will crack and be replaced by anger, an anger at ourselves and those we trusted that will seek expression by focusing on those who glorified the rigged casino the loudest because it enriched them so immensely.

The alternative accounts touted by many are simply different flavors of the conventional narrative.

One is that the Powers That Be are instituting a techno-financial web we cannot escape of tokens, blockchains and stable coins that will digitize every transaction and enable the Powers That Be to switch our financial lives on or off as the means of an ironclad control.

If we change our money, the narrative holds, then we can escape this perfection of Orwellian control.

The problem is that changing the money in a rigged casino doesn’t unrig the casino; all it means is those in the casino start using another form of money.

Another narrative holds that technology and system dynamics can be wielded to reverse the decay and fulfill the fantasies of super-abundance and technological Progress.

Neither narrative acknowledges that humans are hard-wired to live in a moral universe, as our sensitivity to fairness–which includes transparency, integrity, truth, honesty, duty, obligation and reciprocity–is the foundation of our social skills, which are our core selective advantage as a species.

The moral universe isn’t some concept that isn’t “real”–we’re constantly told that what’s “real” is finance, money, the economy, technology, data and systems–the moral universe is the foundation of all civilization. In dismissing this innate sensitivity to fairness as inconsequential in the “real world” of systems and data, we dismiss an understanding of our civilizational psychosis and our own denial of this psychosis.

There is a place for technology, finance, systems and data, but by measuring “progress” solely by technological standards, measuring “value” solely by financial metrics and measuring “understanding” (i.e. what’s being “optimized”) by data and systems–all reductionist left-hemisphere functions– we cut ourselves off from the moral universe that enables our primary selective species advantage–our social experience.

We are not social creatures like ants that self-organize by instinct and pheromone trails: we self-organize in a moral universe in which our exquisite sensitivity to fairness and unfairness in all its intuitive, right-hemisphere width and breadth has been hard-wired as the essential foundation of our primary selective species advantage.

All of which leads to a question we ask ourselves: could instability trigger radical change in our own life?

A health crisis offers an analogy many of us have experienced.

We’re living our lives, doing what we always do, and suddenly we experience a health emergency that calls how we’ve been living into question: how did I become ill? We realize we weren’t really paying attention to our diet, our fitness, our sources of stress, our conflicting goals or our doubts or anomie. We never thought of ourselves as being in denial, but we were in denial–a denial that included denial itself.

Faced with a condition that could prove fatal or debilitating, we realize our old way of living wasn’t healthy, even though we made excuses and told ourselves that we were generally living a healthy life. Stripped of excuses and rationalizations, we realize we were eating out a lot and that these meals weren’t necessarily healthy, even though we ordered the salad instead of the fries. The meals were optimized to trigger our dopamine receptors–this tastes good–and generate a profit for a highly competitive, cost-sensitive business.

We realize that if we truly want to have a healthy diet, we have to prepare real, highly nutritious food at home, with very occasional exceptions. We realize that our stress levels cannot possibly decline unless we make radical changes in our employment / work lives, our home lives and perhaps in our entire understanding of what our life is actually about.

The point here is health crises force us to reassess things we were content to leave as-is prior to the crisis. We weren’t actually living a very healthy life, but we told ourselves it was healthy enough because we had no symptoms of illness. That the causal chains of an unhealthy life–stress, diet, fitness, unresolved conflicts–were steadily undermining our well-being was invisible, until something snapped and we experience a health crisis.

Simply put, we avoid radical change until there is no other option left. Denial is comfortable, and we do what’s comfortable until it’s no longer possible to do so.

Financial matters can also force radical change on us. Our home equity is a “savings account” we can tap until the bubble pops and suddenly we have no equity at all–we only have debt. Equity comes and goes but the debt remains unchanged: that’s the problem with debt.

The system we inhabit is inherently unstable because it rests on artifice, not authenticity, on financial bubbles, not value, and Anti-Progress, not Progress. Denial is comfortable and facing all that undermines the quality of our lives and our well-being is not just uncomfortable, it’s extremely troubling, for we sense that once we strip away our denial, excuses and rationalizations, we’ll be forced to make radical changes in our lives, changes we’re not prepared to make until there is no other option left.

If what I’ve laid out in these five essays is an accurate account of what’s really going on, the intrinsic instability of a system that depends on our acceptance of civilizational psychosis for its continuity and coherence will crack wide open. And when that happens, our denial will crack wide open, and many of us will become angry that the rigged casino didn’t work out for us as promised.

Many are confident that any crisis is 10 or 15 years away, and so we’ll all have plenty of time to prepare. Their forecast may prove to be correct, but their confidence is a form of denial of what an unstable state means: an unstable state is unpredictable and prone to sudden phase changes.

To be confident that any crisis is 10 years away is akin to gazing at an unstable mountainside and declaring that an avalanche is safely in the future. Any confidence in a prediction about an unstable system is a tacit denial of the way that instability is hidden beneath a surface stability that is reassuring due to recency bias but misleading.

When the latest polls find that only 18% of Gen Z see AI as a positive development, this is the equivalent of a tremor shaking an unstable mountainside. Is assuming we’ll all have decades to prepare for instability reality-based, or is it denial dressed up in data?

Many of us will be forced to make radical changes in our own lives once the unstable system we inhabit cracks wide open. Those who recognized the fragility of our civilizational psychosis and acted before the avalanche will do better than those who waited until it was too late. My point here is: asking ourselves what it will take to make radical changes in our own lives now, not in some distant future, is a worthwhile exercise.

Anticipating that we might be thirsty in the future is a motivation to start digging a well now, as “once we’re thirsty, it’s too late to dig a well.”

From the point of view of stability, any radical change is needlessly risky. When a crisis takes away stability and predictability, then everything reverses: clinging on to what caused the crisis is what’s risky and making radical changes is what offers hope for solutions.

Even when we’re in a situation that’s undermining our well-being, we cling to the status quo. When we’re finally forced to undertake radical changes, it’s a kind of relief, for we are forced to jettison what wasn’t working but was working just well enough to keep us frozen in place.

Please read these essays as if they are anonymous and therefore must be judged on their own merits.

>When Unfairness Is Systemic, the Consequences Are Flight, Resistance, Revolt

We’ve Optimized Fragility, Failure, Denial–and Rage

Inequality, AI and Digital Life Are Undermining Society

Remember: In a Crisis, Everyone Will Consider Themselves ‘The Good Guys’

Chaos Unleashed: When “Irrational” Makes Perfect Sense

New short video: Could Instability Trigger Radical Change In Your Life? (2:16 min)

The post Could Instability Trigger Radical Change In Your Life? appeared first on Activist Post.

Story at-a-glance

• Kyphosis (rounded upper back) signals spine failure from muscle weakness, poor posture, or fragile bones; it increases risks of falls, breathing problems and early death
• Height loss exceeding 3 centimeters often indicates silent spinal fractures; these allow your spine to buckle forward even without noticeable pain
• Postural kyphosis from poor habits is fixable, while structural kyphosis from osteoporosis and vertebral fractures is harder to correct and more dangerous
• Strengthening your back muscles by lifting your chest while lying face down provides lasting benefits, including reducing broken bones even years after you stop doing these exercises
• Avoid forward-bending exercises like sit-ups if you’re concerned about kyphosis; instead focus on extension-based movements, proper posture both day and night, and Foundation Training

A rounded upper back in old age seems like a harmless sign of getting older, but it’s actually a red flag that your spine is starting to fail. This condition, known as kyphosis, signals that the structural support in your upper body is collapsing under the pressure of muscle weakness, poor posture, or fragile bones. And once the curve becomes fixed, it doesn’t just make movement harder — it increases your risk of falls, lung dysfunction, fractures and even early death.

Height loss of more than 3 centimeters from your peak adult height — about an inch and a quarter — is often the first visible warning. According to national guidelines from Healthy Bones Australia and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, that type of height loss strongly points to silent spinal fractures.¹

These small breaks occur without injury or pain, especially in people with undiagnosed osteoporosis, and they allow the spine to buckle forward, creating the signature hunch. Even in the absence of pain, this curve reshapes how your body moves and breathes. Once your spine tips past 50 degrees of forward bend, known as hyperkyphosis, every step and breath become more work.

The Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy confirms that this level of curvature is tied to reduced lung volume and shorter life expectancy, even in people who feel otherwise healthy.² If you’re noticing signs like forward head posture, rounded shoulders or unexplained height loss, the time to act is now. The earlier you address the root causes — before the curvature locks in place — the greater your chances of recovery.

Poor Posture and Brittle Bones Turn a Natural Curve Into a Permanent Hump

Certain types of kyphosis are the result of a slow and silent shift that creeps up over decades and is often preventable with the right habits and interventions.³

•Age and posture both play a role, but they lead to very different outcomes — Poor posture, like hunching over your phone or slouching in a chair, is one major cause of postural kyphosis. This version is often seen in younger adults and teens and is caused by muscle imbalance and repetitive positioning.

But as you get older, the more serious version — age-related kyphosis — starts to take over. This form is usually the result of actual physical damage to the spine itself, especially from tiny spinal fractures linked to osteoporosis. Unlike postural rounding, which can usually be corrected by standing up straight, hyperkyphosis stays even when you try to straighten your back.⁴

•Posture-related kyphosis is usually fixable — If your curved back comes from muscle weakness or long hours sitting, you’re not stuck with it. To reverse this, try:

◦Strengthening your upper back and core muscles

◦Stretching tight areas like your chest and hip flexors

◦Practicing good posture during everyday activities

•Structural kyphosis is harder to fix and linked to serious bone loss — If your kyphosis comes from tiny cracks in the spine, it becomes a structural issue. These fractures usually result from osteoporosis, where bones become fragile and compress under everyday stress. This version of kyphosis:

◦Doesn’t correct when you stand tall

◦Often comes with back pain or stiffness

◦Causes a noticeable loss of height (more than 3 to 4 centimeters)

◦Increases the risk for further spine damage and limits mobility

Two-thirds of vertebral fractures are missed entirely because they don’t cause sudden pain.⁵ That means your spine could be deteriorating without you realizing it. If left untreated, the resulting curve not only affects how you look but also how well you move, breathe and stay balanced.

•There are key signs you shouldn’t ignore — If you notice these issues, it’s time to take action:

◦You’ve lost height compared to your younger adult years

◦Your back curves forward even when you try to stand straight

◦You experience ongoing back pain or stiffness, especially in your upper spine

◦You find it harder to twist, bend, or stay upright for long periods

Tight Muscles and Weak Support Systems Are Driving Your Spine Out of Alignment

A detailed breakdown from Banner Health highlights the common causes, symptoms and solutions for kyphosis, particularly focusing on how lifestyle choices and body imbalances push your spine into a forward curve.⁶ The article centers on practical tools for identifying posture problems early and explains which interventions make the biggest difference before things get worse.

•Kyphosis doesn’t just affect the elderly — it’s happening to people of all ages — Julie Barnett, a physical therapist with Banner Physical Therapy, explained that tight muscles in your neck and chest, combined with weak upper back muscles, are the two biggest drivers of postural kyphosis. This describes what happens when you spend hours hunched over your phone or computer every day. That means if you’re constantly glued to a screen, this warning is for you.

•Simple physical therapy exercises undo early-stage kyphosis — There are easy movements to help improve posture and retrain weak muscles. These include:

◦Chin tucks to strengthen deep neck muscles and correct forward head posture

◦Shoulder blade squeezes to activate the mid-back and improve upper spine alignment

◦Doorway stretches to loosen your chest and restore shoulder mobility. Each of these targets specific muscle groups that lose function when your body stays in a flexed position for too long

•Treatment outcomes depend heavily on early action and the right interventions — Barnett emphasized that the severity of your kyphosis, and how early you start targeted rehab, makes a huge difference. She recommends a multi-pronged strategy for best results:

◦Correct posture throughout the day with ergonomic adjustments at your workstation

◦Work with a physical therapist to balance tight and weak muscles

◦Add resistance training for your back, shoulders, and core to build a support system for your spine

◦Consider chiropractic care or acupuncture to reduce muscle tension and improve spine mobility

•Posture correction is a full lifestyle upgrade — The article ends with a set of posture-protective habits to start today, including:

◦Using lumbar support and sitting tall at your desk

◦Taking stretch breaks every 30 to 60 minutes

◦Including strength-focused movement like yoga to restore balance

◦Prioritizing bone-supportive foods like leafy greens, grass fed dairy, and eggs, while avoiding processed foods and excess caffeine that sap your bones

Some Spine Curves Are Harmless, Others Affect How You Walk, Breathe and Age

The Cleveland Clinic offers a clear and comprehensive guide on kyphosis, breaking down not just what causes it, but how different forms of spinal curvature impact movement, pain and even breathing.⁷ While many people think of it as just a cosmetic issue, there are deeper health implications, especially for those with more advanced spinal changes.

•Not all kyphosis looks the same or has the same risks — Kyphosis includes several forms: postural, Scheuermann’s, congenital, cervical (military neck) and hyperkyphosis. These are not interchangeable.

Postural kyphosis shows up most in teenagers and is caused by slouching — something that can often be corrected with exercises. Congenital kyphosis is present from birth. Scheuermann’s involves wedge-shaped vertebrae that cause a fixed curve, and hyperkyphosis is the steep, progressive curve that often appears after age 40.

•Severe cases come with real physical complications, not just a curved back — While mild kyphosis is common and usually harmless, more serious curves, especially in older adults, create real health burdens. Symptoms include:

◦Persistent back and shoulder pain

◦Muscle stiffness and fatigue

◦Trouble breathing due to lung compression

◦Loss of bladder or bowel control in extreme cases

To diagnose kyphosis, providers use a “bending test,” where you bend forward to reveal abnormal curvature. They then confirm the diagnosis with an X-ray to measure your spinal angle. Anything over 50 degrees is considered kyphotic.

•You don’t need surgery unless the condition becomes extreme — Most people with kyphosis do not need surgery. Instead, they benefit from:

◦Physical therapy to build core and spinal strength

◦Posture correction to retrain how the body stands and moves

◦Pain management

◦Supportive braces, especially for adolescents with Scheuermann’s. Bracing is most helpful for teens whose bones are still developing and may not be effective in older adults with fixed deformities

•There’s a big difference between scoliosis and kyphosis — know which one you have — One common misconception is that scoliosis and kyphosis are variations of the same problem. This isn’t true. Scoliosis involves a sideways curve, like a C or S shape when viewed from behind. Kyphosis is a front-to-back curve that creates a hunchback appearance. They can occur together, but one does not lead to the other.

•Posture habits during childhood and teen years set the foundation for lifelong spinal health — Postural and Scheuermann’s kyphosis typically develop in teens. Because their bones are still growing, this is the most effective window to intervene. That means regular screenings, awareness of slouching and consistent muscle training early in life prevents more serious problems later in life.

Why Strength Training and Posture Correction Work Better Than Medications

In a detailed review published in the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, researchers explored hyperkyphosis’ biological causes, long-term risks and treatment options, emphasizing how physical therapy, muscle strengthening and posture correction are far more effective than medications alone.⁸

•People develop the same spinal curve for different reasons — The paper explained that age-related hyperkyphosis doesn’t always follow a single path. Some people develop a curved back because of vertebral fractures linked to osteoporosis.

Others develop the same posture from spinal muscle weakness, disc degeneration or abnormal spinal bone shape, completely independent of fractures. That means you might have the same outward curvature as someone else, but for entirely different reasons — and that matters when deciding what treatment will work.

•Kyphosis reduces quality of life and raises the risk of early death — People with hyperkyphosis reported lower satisfaction with life, worse health and more physical limitations than those with a straighter spine.

In fact, multiple cohort studies reviewed in the paper linked severe spinal curvature with higher rates of pulmonary death, especially in older women, regardless of whether they had osteoporosis. The study also found that women with severe kyphosis had trouble:

◦Climbing stairs

◦Standing from a chair without using their arms

◦Maintaining balance

◦Walking with normal speed and stride

•Many people with severe curvature don’t even have fractures — Only about 40% of people with extreme spinal rounding had vertebral fractures. That means medications aimed at bone density, like bisphosphonates, often miss the real issue. Most of these patients showed signs of degenerative disc disease or lost spinal mobility from stiffened ligaments and shortened muscles. It’s not a bone problem — it’s a movement problem.

Targeted Physical Therapy Changes Posture, Improves Strength and Prevents Fractures

One of the most striking findings in this paper came from a long-term study on spinal extension exercises. Women with kyphosis who performed prone (face down) back lifts wearing a weighted backpack five times per week not only improved their posture and muscle strength, but also had significantly fewer vertebral fractures over the next 10 years — even though they stopped the exercise after the study ended. That’s the power of strengthening the right muscles early on.

•Strength training is more effective than stretching or flexibility work alone — While stretching relieves tightness, researchers emphasized that spinal extension exercises — movements that open your chest and engage your back — produced the most measurable improvements. These included:

◦Weighted back lifts

◦Quadruped (on all fours) arm/leg raises

◦Torso twists

◦Chest stretching over a foam roller

When used consistently, these exercises reduced the angle of kyphosis, increased standing height and decreased pain.

•Yoga and multidimensional programs deliver lasting results, even years later — In one trial, participants over 60 who did yoga three times a week improved their posture by 4.4% in just six months.

In another study, women who did strength training, stretching and mobility work twice weekly for 12 weeks maintained their posture and strength improvements for an entire year, with no further therapy needed. Results were especially strong when participants worked on both spine mobility and sensory feedback (like vision and balance), not just muscle tone.

•Posture-correcting braces and even taping methods improve body awareness — Researchers tested lightweight braces and found they helped older women reduce their spine angle by 11% when worn for just two hours daily. This wasn’t because the brace held them up; it gave them feedback, triggering postural muscles to activate more naturally.

Similarly, physical therapists applied therapeutic tape across the upper back, which helped correct posture during movement by giving the brain feedback through the skin. These strategies gave people more awareness of how they were holding themselves.

•Not all exercise is helpful — some moves make it worse — The authors warned that forward-bending movements like sit-ups, crunches or curling forward during daily activities increased the risk of vertebral fractures, especially in women with osteoporosis.

In one study, 68% of women who did only forward-bending exercises developed new fractures within six months, compared to just 16% in the back-extension group. That’s a massive difference, and a reminder that spine-safe movement patterns are key.

How to Retrain Your Spine and Prevent Dangerous Forward Curvature

If your shoulders are starting to round forward, or if you’re already seeing a curve in your upper spine, you’re not stuck with it. Kyphosis doesn’t have to be a permanent sentence, especially when you catch it early.

The most important thing is to stop what’s causing the problem in the first place: weak back muscles, limited mobility and posture habits that make the curve worse over time. Here’s what I recommend to get real results and keep your spine strong, upright and supported:

1.Strengthen your spinal extensor muscles every week — If you want to reverse the curve, you have to activate the muscles that hold you up against gravity. The most effective movement is a prone back lift with added weight — lie on your stomach, place a light backpack or small weight across your upper back and slowly lift your chest while keeping your head neutral.

Start with three sets of 10 reps, five times a week. This one move alone lowered fracture risk in older women and kept their posture straighter 10 years after they stopped doing it.⁹

2.Focus on your posture all day — and all night — How you stand, sit and sleep matters more than you think. Start by adjusting your workstation so your monitor is eye level and your feet are flat on the floor. When walking, imagine a string pulling the crown of your head upward while your shoulders stay relaxed and back.

But don’t stop there. Your sleep posture also influences spinal health. I recommend a cervical pillow that supports your neck’s natural curve without elevating your head too high. This helps prevent that forward-head shift that reinforces upper spine curvature.

3.Avoid exercises that bend your spine forward — Sit-ups, crunches, toe touches and any move that curls your spine forward are the worst choices if you’re trying to avoid vertebral fractures. Women who only did forward-bending exercises were four times more likely to develop a fracture in six months. Swap these for extension-based moves like bird-dogs, upper back stretches using a foam roller, and chest-opening stretches.¹⁰

4.Use biofeedback tools to rewire your posture habits — If you find yourself slouching throughout the day, try simple tools that bring your attention back to how you’re holding yourself. Try a posture trainer brace or even use posture tape across your upper back.

These don’t prop you up — they wake up the muscles you’re not using and retrain your brain to stand tall. Just wearing them for a couple of hours a day made a measurable difference in spinal angle.¹¹

5.Build a routine that includes Foundation Training, balance and mobility — To get long-term results, your routine should train your whole body to support upright posture, not just individual muscles. That’s where Foundation Training comes in. Developed specifically to strengthen your posterior chain and restore natural alignment, these movements teach your core and back muscles to work together in integrated chains of motion.

Even just 10 minutes a day of Foundation Training helps decompress your spine, reduce low back pain and retrain your body to move with better posture. Pair Foundation Training with a few short sessions per week that also target:

◦Spinal extension and back strength (weighted lifts, bird-dogs)

◦Chest and shoulder mobility (foam rolling, wall angels)

◦Core and pelvic stability (dead bugs, glute bridges)

◦Balance and sensory feedback (heel-to-toe walks, single-leg stands)

FAQs About a Curved Back

Q: What causes a curved upper back as you age?

A: The most common reason is poor posture and muscle weakness in your upper back and neck, especially if you spend hours hunched over a desk or phone. As you get older, bone loss and spinal degeneration, like osteoporosis and vertebral fractures, lead to a more permanent curve known as hyperkyphosis.^12,13,14

Q: Is it possible to reverse a curved spine or dowager’s hump?

A: Yes, if the curvature is caused by posture issues and not permanent bone changes. Exercises that target spinal extensor muscles, improve mobility and reduce forward-flexion stress reduce or even reverse the curve. However, if you already have compression fractures, the goal shifts to reducing pain and preventing it from getting worse.^15,16

Q: What are the best exercises to fix or prevent kyphosis?

A: The best exercises help you straighten and strengthen your upper back. Try gentle moves like lying on your stomach and lifting your chest (prone back lifts), bird-dogs, foam roller stretches for your upper back and shoulder blade squeezes.

One of the most effective ways to improve posture is Foundation Training, a simple method that teaches your core and back muscles to work together to hold you upright. Avoid exercises that bend your spine forward, like crunches or toe touches, especially if you have low bone density or osteoporosis.¹⁷

Q: How does sleep posture affect spine health?

A: Sleeping with your head too high or unsupported reinforces poor posture. I recommend using a cervical pillow that maintains the natural curve of your neck without pushing your head forward. This keeps your spine aligned while you sleep and prevents the forward head posture that often contributes to a hunched upper back.¹⁸

Q: Do posture braces or taping help?

A: Yes, but only if they’re used the right way. Tools like posture braces or therapeutic taping don’t do the work for you. They give your body feedback to stay aligned and engage the right muscles. Just a couple of hours per day with a brace helped reduce spinal curvature in older adults.¹⁹

The post Why Do Some People Get a Curved Back as They Age and What Can I Do to Avoid It? appeared first on Activist Post.

The line between civilian society and war is disappearing completely. That is the real story behind Russia now authorizing its central bank and Sberbank to operate anti-drone systems and arm personnel to defend financial infrastructure. A country’s banking system is no longer simply processing transactions or moving money. It is now becoming part of the battlefield itself.

Russia passed a new law allowing the central bank, Sberbank, and the Russian Cash Collection Association to deploy their own drone defense systems after repeated Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russian territory. Staff at these institutions can now reportedly be armed as well.

This is what happens when modern war evolves into economic warfare. I have warned repeatedly that World War III would not resemble World War II where armies simply lined up across borders. The entire economy becomes militarized. Banks, energy grids, payment systems, telecommunications, ports, railways, factories, and data centers all become targets because modern civilization itself depends on interconnected infrastructure.

Ukraine understands this perfectly. Their drone strategy has increasingly focused on striking oil facilities, energy infrastructure, logistics centers, and economic targets deep inside Russia because they know they cannot defeat Russia conventionally in a prolonged war of attrition.

What is extraordinary here is not merely the drone attacks themselves. It is the admission that the Russian state can no longer centrally defend everything. Moscow is effectively decentralizing air defense responsibilities and telling major corporations and financial institutions: defend yourselves. That is a major shift psychologically.

The Guardian even framed it bluntly: Russia is telling its banks to “shoot down drones yourself.”

This is precisely how long wars transform societies historically. Civilian infrastructure slowly merges with military infrastructure until there is barely any distinction left. During the later stages of major conflicts, factories become military targets, railroads become military targets, ports become military targets, and eventually financial institutions themselves become military targets because war is ultimately about resources and economic survival.

Sberbank is not some small regional bank. It is effectively intertwined with the Russian state itself. Sberbank controls roughly a third of Russian banking assets and acts as a pillar of the entire domestic financial system. The Russian central bank likewise sits at the core of wartime financing, sanctions management, currency stabilization, and capital controls.

Russia has pushed aggressively toward cashless payments, digital financial infrastructure, and central bank digital currency experimentation through the digital ruble system. But centralized digital systems become vulnerable during wartime because they create concentrated targets.

The more governments centralize financial systems digitally, the more vulnerable those systems become to cyberwarfare, EMP threats, sabotage, drone attacks, and infrastructure strikes. This is one reason governments are quietly preparing for a wartime financial environment globally.

What people fail to understand is that once banks become strategic military infrastructure, governments will justify virtually unlimited control over the financial system in the name of “security.” That is how capital controls are born historically. War always becomes the excuse for expanded government power.

The United States did exactly this during previous wars. Europe did exactly this. Gold confiscation, capital restrictions, currency controls, surveillance, transaction monitoring, frozen accounts, and restrictions on moving money abroad all emerge in wartime environments because governments become desperate to maintain internal stability.

Russia is already heavily centralized economically due to sanctions. But this trend is spreading globally. Europe is discussing CBDCs openly. Governments worldwide are building real-time payment surveillance systems. Financial privacy is disappearing everywhere because governments increasingly view the banking system as part of national security infrastructure.

Now we are reaching the next stage where banks themselves require physical anti-drone defenses. Imagine if JPMorgan or the Federal Reserve announced rooftop anti-drone missile systems surrounding Manhattan offices. That sounds absurd today, yet this is exactly where prolonged geopolitical escalation leads eventually.

The post Russia Tells Banks to “Shoot Down Drones Yourself” appeared first on Activist Post.

Bitcoin’s digital nature is the source of most of its advantages. Since it is programmable, it unlocks self-custody practices that can make theft and confiscation very difficult. Since it is digital, it can move at the speed of light, allowing movement of value and settlement across the globe in minutes. 

Nevertheless, Bitcoin has at times been criticized for being hard to grasp, literally. Bitcoin, in its natural state, can not be touched, can not be physically held; it can only be imagined and understood. To many people, that’s a significant barrier and one that has inspired quite a few attempts to bring the coin into meat space, but it is not easy. 

Entrepreneurs and artists alike, for well over a decade, have taken on the challenge of making Bitcoin physical in a way that retains its most valuable cash-like properties, and while nobody has entirely solved the problem, significant progress has been made, leaving a wonderful trail of artifacts along the way.

Casascius Coins

Minted as early as September 6th, 2011, at a bitcoin price of barely $8 dollars, Casascius coins are without a doubt the most iconic physical Bitcoin artifacts in history, with many copycats since. Named after Mike Caldwell’s Bitcointalk forum nym, which appears to be an idiom for “call a spade a spade”, the Casascius coins developed many of the practices that other attempts at physical Bitcoin would innovate on over the years.

One problem with making Bitcoin physical is the handling of private key material. Since Bitcoin is digitally native, it can only live in a cryptographic private-public key pair, a secret that is used to generate a public key, with Bitcoin-compatible cryptography. In the case of the Casascius coin, Caldwell generated the private keys in an airgapped machine and printed them, gluing them to the iconic precious metal coins and then presumably destroyed the copy that could have been kept on his computer. He described the security precautions taken on his website for potential buyers to review.

The printed private key was then covered by specialized tamper-proof stickers, which, if removed, leave an obvious mark in a “honeycomb pattern”. Buyers of the coins could thus tell if the private keys in a Casascius coin had been exposed before purchase from a third-party vendor.

This key management issue is the biggest hazard in the creation of physical bitcoin, and one which, in the case of Caldwell, was dealt with by trusting him not to cheat. He was also very transparent and careful by the standards of the time. To this day, his reputation is strong if not legendary, so that trust was well placed by buyers who profited greatly from the collector’s value of the items, which to this day mark a premium on top of the bitcoin and precious metal values of the piece.

Casascius coins were discontinued in November 2013 after the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a branch of the Treasury Department, informed developer Mike Caldwell that minting physical bitcoins qualified him as a money transmitter business with heavy compliance requirements. The trust involved in generating the private keys may have been a centralizing element that put a target on his back. 

RavenBit Coins

A year after Casascius coins shut down, RavenBit launched, with an attempt at decentralizing the trusted minting problem of physical bitcoins. The RavenBit coins, very similar in form factor to Casascius, did not come with pre-generated keys; instead, they came with the tamper-proof sticker unpealed, such that the user could generate their own keypair, paste it to the coin and slap the tamper-proof sticker on top.

This, in a sense, decentralized the mint and, in theory, that is a breakthrough, but in practice, it just created a thousand trusted mints, without brands, without reputations, using office printers that probably had malware on them. If you got a RavenBit coin from someone, how could you know that the person who bought it and generated the private key in there didn’t keep a copy or take proper precautions?

To date, the RavenBit project has been abandoned, but it probably taught the industry an interesting lesson. To make Bitcoin physical, we need to go higher tech.  

Opendimes

To route around the trusted mint problem — both at the center and at the edges – of physical bitcoins, Coinkite, the hardware wallet maker, designed the Opendime, a tiny computer purpose-built to be a Bitcoin bearer asset. Looking back on what motivated him, NVK, co-founder of CoinKite, told Bitcoin Magazine that, “Bitcoin is digital money. All we can do is an analog backup. Maybe someone cracks doing secp256k1 by hand in the future.” Meaning that currently, you always need some kind of computer to generate valid Bitcoin keys; that computer is the mint.  

Opendimes were designed around this fundamental fact. They have a computer chip that can generate a private-public key pair and store the private key securely, behind a silicon tamper-proof mechanism. 

Users have to feed it a file or some kind of input for entropy during setup, which the chip uses in part to generate the Bitcoin wallet, this grants further assurance that the random generation logic, which is open source, has an even better entropy input in the generation of those bitcoin keys. 

The public key of the generated Opendime wallet can always be seen by connecting the device to a computer, as you would a normal USB stick; its balance is visible on a block explorer.

Users can then send bitcoin to the opendime, but if they want to withdraw BTC from it? They have to physically puncture the device, which unlocks a circuit to access the private key, but renders the device visibly unsealed. 

Opendimes represent a major breakthrough in bearer asset technology and go for about $20 dollars each today, rising in price slightly with inflation from a low of about $13 each in 2016. As a result, they have also achieved iconic status, with artists embedding them in premium Bitcoin art and making them into Bitcoin meme culture. 

While $13 to $20 dollars is very cheap for hardware wallets, and the trusted mint issue is effectively solved by letting users fill the device with their own coins, the price and form factor are still far away from cash. On a price basis alone, $20 dollars is a big ask. If Casascius charged about 20% markup for his coins, then Opendimes should hold at least $100 worth of Bitcoin inside to be worth the hardware, and for use as a currency, which prices out most every day purchases.

Finally, the badass cypherpunk USB stick form factor, while epic, does not visibly tell the user much about its contents, making each device effectively non-fungible with other Opendimes and thus not cash-like. A cheaper and probably more fungible alternative is needed. 

The Satodime

Taking the Opendime concept to a more friendly form factor, the Belgian hardware wallet manufacturer Satochip created an open source credit card-like Bitcoin wallet, which has very similar qualities to the Opendime. It can generate Bitcoin private-public key pairs, and depending on the version, can even sign transactions. Users can interact with it via phone apps that talk to the card via NFC. Other form factors are available as well, like rings and coins that contain the same chip and capabilities. 

The cost for Satochip hardware can be as low as 13 Euros, depending on the bulk purchases, which is cheaper than an Opendime, which gets us closer to everyday cash purchases, but not by that much. The Satochip cards are intended to be high-security hardware wallet devices anyway, not daily-use cash containers. And these powerful and small computer chips are not cheap, hence the price floor above $10 that seems so hard to break through, for now. 

Too Expensive? The Fundamental Limits

So, how cheap does physical Bitcoin hardware need to be to make business sense, if it can make sense at all? 

According to the Federal Reserve, it costs anywhere from 4.1 cents to 11.3 cents to produce U.S. dollars. The smaller the value, the more expensive it is, with $1 bills incurring a 4.1% loss in production costs. 

That means that to justify a 20,000 Satoshis bill — roughly $16 dollars at today’s prices — the hardware needs to cost well under a dollar. Most computer chips powerful enough to do Bitcoin cryptography are above that price target, but there is one chip that demonstrates what is possible, the NXP’s NTAG X DNA chip.

Available in sticker antenna form factor, a couple of millimeters thin, this NXP chip can handle a variety of cryptographic primitives, such as ECDSA and ECC. It can create secrets, sign them and even encrypt a message. However, while powerful, it does not include the Bitcoin cryptography curve, secp256k1, which means it can’t do Bitcoin things natively. 

Nevertheless, this 2025 generation NTAG can be purchased for roughly $3, if you can find any supply, demonstrating how low the price can go on a chip capable of performing cryptographic functions.

Sadly, the cash-like form factor most of the world is used to, with flexible bills that people can fold into their pocket, can be very damaging to computer chips, a fact that NVK says he learned from experience, as they experimented with Bitcoin bearer assets hardware. 

The closest anyone may have come to the cash-like format is the OfflineCash company, with a beautiful, collection-worthy set of Bitcoin-denominated bills that have an NTAG-style NFC chip, which stores a user-generated key, while the company generates a second key on their servers, to create a 2 of 2 multisignature wallet. The Server key is on a time lock, degrading the multisig address to a 1 of 1 wallet, from which the user can eventually withdraw the bitcoin. This tries to get around the trusted mint issue, but ends up just replicating the many mints problem. Though their cash-like form factor is undeniably gorgeous.

The costs of producing a Bitcoin native NTAG can easily hit a few million dollars, and implementing Bitcoin’s cryptography in this way can be fraught with errors if manufacturers are not experts on the topic. It would also need to be fully open source to guarantee that there are no backdoors. 

There’s one more fundamental problem with physical Bitcoin bearer assets. Even if you could get a cheap enough chip in a cash-like format, you would always need online access to verify its authenticity —that the cash is loaded with real bitcoin— since the asset is unavoidably digital. The problem could be solved by simply trusting an issuing mint of Bitcoin-denominated cash instruments, and believing in the face value of a redeemable bill, but that would miss the ideal of self-custodied, trusted cash. Though it probably would work in a friendly jurisdiction. 

So, while it would be cool to have physical Bitcoin bills like those created by OfflineCash Company with a bearer asset secure chip and not trusted mint risk, we are still a ways away. And it might actually be overkill today, since no one would have bitcoin-denominated change anyway, so you’d end up getting fiat cash back, but maybe one day, post-hyperbitcoinization. NVK does believe there’s a superior solution to the cash format, at least for the foreseeable future, which is why Coinkite created the Tapsigner. 

The Tapsigner

Built on the Coinkite Bitcoin NFC chip, a technology similar to the X DNA NTAG by NXP, though perhaps more powerful and thus more expensive, the Tapsigner comes in the familiar debit card form factor, with a secure element chip, NFC tap to pay and cool designs to choose from. Inside the chip, though, is a fully capable Bitcoin wallet, with scep256k1 cryptographic capabilities, letting it create Bitcoin keys, store the secret securely enough and sign transactions internally, to be broadcast by an accompanying phone, which serves as a critical visual aid for the user to verify transactions.

The Tapsigner can function as a bearer asset, but perhaps even better as a refillable hardware wallet that can spend specific amounts of bitcoin, like any credit card, resolving the issue of change, and enabling tap to pay to wallets that support the already popular feature.

With cards like the Tapsigner, which cost about $20 bucks, the problem of bitcoin-denominated payments returns to good old-fashioned retail adoption, and integration with major business accounting and payments software, which Cashapp and Square are blowing wide open. 

The post The History and Future of Physical Bitcoin appeared first on Activist Post.

Citing a procedural question, a federal appeals court has vacated a landmark decision that found fluoridated drinking water poses an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health. The court sent the case back to the district judge and ordered him to ignore any scientific evidence uncovered after 2020. Attorney Michael Connett told The Defender the court instructed the judge “to travel back in time to 2020 and make this ruling based on a stale factual record.”

A federal appeals court has vacated a landmark decision that found fluoridated drinking water poses an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not challenge the substance of the lower court’s findings — that fluoride is toxic to children and ought to be regulated. Instead, the court based its decision on procedural issues related to the lower court’s handling of the litigation.

The case will now go back to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where District Judge Edward Chen will be required to exclude all scientific evidence that became available after 2020.

Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs, told The Defender the court “instructed Judge Chen to travel back in time to 2020 and make this ruling based on a stale factual record.”

Connett said the directive to ignore years’ worth of evidence on fluoride’s dangers runs counter to the intent of the TSCA — which is to protect hundreds of millions of Americans from substances that are harmful to human health.

The federal appeals court ruling, handed down late Thursday, stemmed from a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) brought by consumer advocacy groups including Food & Water Watch, the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), and Moms Against Fluoridation.

The groups sued after the EPA refused to consider their 2016 citizens’ petition asking the agency to regulate fluoride.

After two bench trials, Chen ruled that fluoride at the federally recommended concentration of 0.7 milligrams/liter (mg/L) posed an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health and ordered the EPA to regulate it accordingly.

However, the 9th Circuit panel said the lower court violated the “party presentation principle” — a legal doctrine requiring courts to act as neutral arbiters rather than taking control of a case’s factual development.

Connett said the decision was “a very expansive and unprecedented application of the party presentation principle.” He said that to date, “this principle has really only been applied to situations where judges raise new legal issues, not where judges use procedural mechanisms to resolve the issues presented.”

Under the TSCA, if the EPA denies a citizen petition, petitioners have the right to sue the agency. The law is unique because it specifies that the court then evaluates whether the chemical in question presents an unreasonable risk to health or the environment in a “de novo” proceeding, during which it evaluates evidence presented by both sides and gives no deference to the agency.

Rather than ruling after the first trial in 2020, Chen put the trial on hold, pending the release of a multiyear government study into fluoride’s neurotoxic effects, so he could base his decision on all available evidence.

Once that study was released — despite government officials’ attempts to suppress it, which were revealed through Freedom of Information Act requests — the second trial continued and Chen issued his ruling in an 80-page decision detailing the evidence supporting his decision.

The appellate court didn’t comment on plaintiffs’ arguments that TSCA allows this type of judicial procedural discretion, nor did it engage the substance of Chen’s findings.

Instead, in an eight-page decision, the 9th Circuit panel affirmed the EPA’s argument that Chen improperly paused the case for more than a year to await that study, which was not yet available during the first trial. The court concluded that the judge effectively reshaped the evidentiary record, exceeding the proper judicial role.

FAN board member Rick North told The Defender the judgment is a disappointment.

“But this ruling only addresses a legal procedural question — not the science,” he said. “The science remains solid as a rock. As the original court decision asserted, fluoridation ‘poses an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children.’ The legal landscape has changed. The risk to pregnant women and their kids hasn’t.”

The judge extended the lawsuit so he could consider the latest, best science, North added. “The court of appeals saw this as judicial overreach. I think most people would see it as due diligence.”

The science that the ruling directs the lower court to ignore includes the National Toxicology Program’s monograph, also published in JAMA Pediatrics, linking fluoridated water and IQ loss in children, and findings from other gold-standard cohort studies.

After the trial concluded, the body of scientific evidence showing fluoride’s adverse impacts on children’s health at current levels in the U.S. has continued to grow.

In May 2024, a study in JAMA Open Network found children born to Los Angeles mothers exposed during pregnancy to fluoridated drinking water were more likely to have neurobehavioral problems.

The ruling is a procedural victory for the EPA. However, since the trial drew national attention to the extensive evidence of fluoride’s neurotoxic effects, communities and states across the country have stopped adding fluoride to their water.

Even the EPA itself — under a different law — has launched a new investigation into the safety of water fluoridation.

Related articles in The Defender 

• EPA Promises ‘Gold Standard’ Review of Fluoride, as Agency Appeals Decision in Landmark Lawsuit
• Trump’s DOJ Says EPA Will Appeal Landmark Fluoride Ruling
• ‘Perversion of Public Health’: EPA Appeals Landmark Ruling That Fluoride Poses ‘Unreasonable Risk’ to Kids’ Health
• Florida Becomes Second State to Ban Fluoride in Public Drinking Water
• EPA to Review Health Risks of Water Fluoridation as RFK Jr. Says He’ll Tell CDC to Stop Recommending It

The post Breaking: Federal Court Strikes Down Landmark Fluoride Ruling on Technicality — ‘Not the Science’ appeared first on Activist Post.

The government keeps telling people the economy is strong because the stock market keeps making new highs. That is the great deception behind every bubble throughout history. Wall Street is not Main Street. You can have record highs in financial assets while society underneath is quietly rotting in real time.

The New York Federal Reserve now reports that 14% of American households are struggling with food insecurity. For families with children, the number rises to 17.5%. That means millions of Americans are literally worried about whether they can afford enough food while politicians stand in Washington congratulating themselves over manipulated statistics.

This is the direct result of monetary policy and the destruction of purchasing power. They printed trillions after 2020 and inflated everything. Housing exploded. Rent exploded. Insurance exploded. Food exploded. The people who owned assets got richer while the working class got trapped trying to survive inflation.

Meanwhile, household debt has surged above $18 trillion. Credit card balances are above $1.2 trillion. Americans are borrowing money just to maintain basic living standards. That is never sustainable historically. Rome did the same thing by debasing the currency until the middle class collapsed under rising costs. Weimar Germany also saw financial assets rise while ordinary citizens watched purchasing power evaporate.

The younger generation has been absolutely destroyed financially. In many cities rent now consumes nearly half of take-home pay. Home ownership has become almost unattainable for millions. Food prices remain dramatically above pre-2020 levels. Families are paying 30%, 40%, even 50% more for necessities than just a few years ago while wages never remotely kept pace.

This is why I have warned that the real crisis would not simply be inflation itself but the collapse in living standards. Governments always manipulate statistics to hide reality. They change CPI formulas, adjust baskets, and claim inflation is “cooling,” but people know the truth every time they walk into a grocery store.

This is also why civil unrest rises during the later stages of debt crises historically. The average person eventually realizes the system no longer works for them, while the financial elite continue accumulating wealth through asset inflation. The K-shaped economy becomes politically dangerous because one side of society feels abandoned entirely.

The French Revolution was not caused because people suddenly hated the aristocracy overnight. It was bread prices, hunger. It was watching elites continue living comfortably while ordinary families could no longer survive rising costs. History always repeats because human nature never changes.

The frightening part is that this is happening before the real sovereign debt crisis even begins. Governments worldwide are drowning in debt and they cannot raise rates forever without detonating the system. So they are trapped. Either they continue inflating the currency slowly to manage the debt, or they trigger a deflationary collapse. Politicians will always choose inflation because it delays the pain politically.

That means the middle class continues getting squeezed while the divide between financial wealth and real economic survival grows wider.

People do not eat stock portfolios. They eat food. They pay rent. They pay utilities. They buy gasoline. That is where the real economy is collapsing.

The post NY Fed: 14% of US Households Experience Food Insecurity appeared first on Activist Post.

Water is essential to all life. The human body can go three weeks without food but only three days without water before completely shutting down. Yet most of us find it much easier to store a year’s worth of food than a month’s worth of water. I live in the suburbs and while I have my beans, bullets and band aids pretty squared away, water has always been an area of concern for me. There is no way to store enough water for a long term outage, and I haven’t found many good options. Recently I have spent more time thinking about this and testing possible options. This article is the result of that.

Water Needs

People need around 1 gallon per person per day just for drinking. For a family of 5, that is 5 gallons per day or 150 gallons per month. At 8 pounds per gallon, that is 1200 pounds of water for the bare minimum for just one month. A year’s supply would be nearly 2000 gallons and 7 tons of water. And that is just the minimum for drinking. Water is also important for sanitation, cooking, flushing toilets, watering gardens, fire fighting and many other things. In our modern world, with water available at the turn of a tap, the average American uses from 60-80 gallons per person per day. In a SHTF situation, we would need to be careful with our water use and try to limit the waste but the true need is likely many times the 1 gallon per day commonly quoted. Realistically, 5-10 gallons per person per day is probably closer to what you need. At 5 gallons per day for a family of 5, that is 9,125 gallons per year or 73,000 pounds. From a storage perspective, this is 1,220 cubic feet of water. That is a cube 12 ft by 12 ft and 8 ft high. That would completely fill a medium sized room from floor to ceiling. Obviously, this is more than the average suburban homeowner can store.

Modern water systems

In my suburb on the outskirts of Minneapolis, our water is pulled from a well over 400 feet deep. Pumps driven by electricity pull water from the ground up to surface level. From there it is chemically treated and filtered to remove pathogens and other contaminants. Then it it pumped into water towers placed around the community and from there, gravity takes it into our homes. In normal times, this means that every time I turn on the tap, step into the shower or flush the toilet, a large, modern system brings clean water right into my house. But if that system fails, we need another way to procure this life-giving resource.

Immediate Actions

If you are home when the balloon goes up and fully understand what is happening, there are several steps you can take to buy time. Start by filling all the bathtubs in your house. Most bathtub drains are not completely watertight so putting some Saran Wrap over the stopper or better yet, using a bathtub bladder in the tub will hold the water longer. The average bathtub holds 50-60 gallons of water. If you have 2 bathtubs, this can give you enough water to flush your toilet 40 times in each bathroom at roughly 1.5 gallons per flush. Next, fill every container you have available with water. I have about a dozen 5 gallon buckets that could be quickly filled with water. I also have a number of 15 gallon totes that I use to store my prepping gear. If a SHTF event happens, I can dump the contents on my basement floor and fill these totes with water. I have several dozen of these and could easily collect several hundred gallons IF I have some awareness of a SHTF event. Any water collected in this time helps extend the time before other solutions are needed.

Long Term

Until recently, other than a case or two of bottled water, this was the extent of my water preps. I assumed (hoped) I would have some awareness of the start of an event and could quickly fill every container available to collect several month’s worth of water for my family as mentioned above. But even if I was able to fill every container in my house, I would eventually run out of water and would need other means to provide for my family. I began to look around my neighborhood for other options to gather water.

Springs: Freshwater springs pour out of the ground. Artesian springs burst out of the ground. We have a large sping about two miles from our house that runs year round and is a local favorite for good clean water. The city actually monitors it and tests for parasites and other contaminants. Driving by, there is usually a line of people waiting to fill jugs at this spring. In a crisis, this may be an option for us to collect fresh water. It is about a two-mile hike and includes a good size hill. If we have a working vehicle, it would be manageable until the fuel ran out. We could also use bikes or a wagon to haul containers of water but it would be a lot of work. The spring would also be a good target for some group to take control of and use access to the water as a means of leverage so this is not something I can count on. You may have a spring near you that you are unaware of. This website can help you locate one: Find A Spring – Locate A Spring

Ponds, Lakes and rivers: I live in a well manicured suburb with numerous drainage and decorative ponds nearby. Unfortunately, none of these is directly adjacent to my property and most are completely bordered by private homes. Additionally, most would be contaminated with all sorts of chemicals from lawn treatments common in our area. Though a filter system could be developed to purify this, I decided it was not my best option and would only be used as a last resort. This water, if easy to obtain, could however be used to flush toilets which would take pressure off other sources of water.

Building interior water: We all know that our water heater holds roughly 40 gallons of water that could be usable in a grid down situation, but many other buildings have a large amount of water in their pipes that can be accessed. Many buildings have spigots on the outside but lack a handle to prevent people from just taking water. Sillcock keys (pictured at tight) are universal keys to these faucets and may give you access to the water held in the building’s pipes. I live in a suburban area and am far from any large buildings so this is not a good option for us.

Rainwater: Depending on your location and time of year, you may be able to harvest rainwater. According to local weather outlets, our area of Minnesota receives an average of 31 inches of precipitation per year. 25 of these inches fall from April through October when it will mostly be rain. The remaining 6 inches fall from November through March when it will more than likely be snow. An inch of rain is roughly equivalent to a foot of snow so that remaining 6 inches of precipitation will fall as 6 feet of snow over the winter months.

(Converting snow to water requires a significant amount of heat energy so winter collection needs to account for this as well). A little math on the amount of water that could be collected. Our house is roughly 40’ by 40’ so an inch of water falling on our house would be approximately 133 cubic feet of water. At about 7.5 gallons per cubic feet, that 1 inch of rain would yield nearly 1000 gallons. Even a small rainstorm could easily produce several hundred gallons of water and we get at least some rain most weeks of the summer. I decided that this would be the main pillar of my water plan. Collecting even 10% of the rainfall that hits my roof each year would be more than enough for my family’s annual need.

Our emergency rain catchment system

I set out to develop a large capacity rain catchment system, that would not be obvious to my neighbors but would supply me with enough water. I didn’t want large rain barrels that neighbors might remember when the SHTF. We have a gutter system on our roof and our downspouts have flip up ends to allow for mowing. These ends will conveniently allow me to place totes or 5 gallons buckets at the end of each downspout to collect the run off. I also have a large tarp (20×30 foot) that I can attach to our deck railing and spread out over the yard to capture rainfall there. With a little creativity, I can set this to funnel water directly into a container, significantly increasing the surface area for collection. An inch of rain, falling on this tarp would yield another 375 gallons (probably slightly less as I would need to angle it down and funnel the middle into a catchment, reducing the total surface area).

This system will allow me to capture a significant amount of water with every rainfall we get. But that water is not safe to drink. Rain water contains micro contaminants including bacteria, pollution particles, micro plastics and other things that are not safe to consume. Additionally, runoff from a shingle roof will pick up contaminants from the asphalt shingles and any other things on the roof (ie bird droppings). The water collected needs to be treated in order to use.

A note about water types: We are used to all our water being safe to drink (potable) and use it interchangeably for drinking, bathing, cooking, washing a car, firefighting etc but the reality is that we don’t need the same level of ‘clean’ for all these use, You can flush a toilet or put out a fire with the dirtiest pond water but you wouldn’t want to drink it. You might be ok to bathe or wash clothes in rainwater as long as you don’t ingest it. I have traveled in many countries around the world and have been in places where they warn you not to drink the tap water, though you can use it for bathing, washing your hands and even brushing your teeth as long as you spit the water out. The point is that we don’t need to treat all water to the same standard. It would be good to think of at least 3 levels of water:

Completely untreated and only safe for flushing, fire suppression and little else – this should still be filtered through cloth or screen to remove debris but is otherwise left as collected. This category includes water collected from dirty ponds, lakes and streams.

Somewhat treated – this is water that is made as clean as possible without chemical or mechanical filter. It should be screened for debris and then possibly allowed to settle, and the cleanest water taken from the top. This can be used for washing clothes, bathing and some cleanup work. This could also be used for any level 1 activities.

Potable water – this receives a full filtering process to make it safe for drinking, cooking and anything else. Of course this water could also be used for anything the level 1 or 2 water could, but it would be a waste of resources to treat all water to that level.

We have different storage containers for the different water levels. Rainwater is collected in 15 gallon black totes. These will be our level 2 water. It will also serve level 1 water needs unless we are in a prolonged drought and need to pull water from local ponds.

To create our level 3 (potable) water, some of the collected rainwater will be placed in 5 gallon buckets and allowed to settle for several days. A spigot has been attached about a third of the way from the bottom of the bucket to draw the water from the top, and leave the settlement in the bottom. Once any contaminants have settled, the water from the top will be drawn off into a new bucket. The remaining third of the bucket will be poured back into the level 2 totes and eventually reprocessed. This water should now be relatively free from any debris but could still have viruses, bacteria and other contaminants and will need to be further treated.

I have purchased and used several types of water filter for camping trips to remote areas where water needed to be filtered. My favorite is the Sawyer 2 L water treatment system. This is a gravity fed filter and the manufacturer says this can treat 1 million gallons of water. I don’t think this exact model is still available but there are many other similar gravity flow filters on the market by other makers such as Katadyn and Life Straw. The Sawyer system uses 2 large bladders with a filter in between. The gray bladder is for the raw water and is hung up high where a line feeds through the filter which then feeds into a blue bladder (for clean water). This allows you to set it up and then let it run on its own to filter the water – no pumping required, gravity does all the work. This can filter roughly 1 liter of water per minute. This would require refilling the gray water bladder every 2 minutes when trying to purify a large quantity of water which adds a lot of manual work.

I wanted a larger system so I avoided the bladders and have a two bucket system to work with this. One bucket has a spigot on the bottom to which I attached the tubing that leads to the filter and then the other (lower) end feeds into another bucket which has a lid with a hole cut just large enough to receive the tubing.

The buckets are labeled “Gray Water” and “Clean Water”. We have a second story deck which is perfect for this set up, though a kitchen counter or a table would also work. I put the Gray Water bucket on top of the deck, run the tubing from the spigot to the filter and then from the filter into the Clean Water bucket on the ground. This allows me to filter 5 gallons of water at a time. At the same 1 liter per minute, I would only need to change buckets every 20 minutes or so and would get 5 gallons of drinkable water. Cleaning several days worth of water could be done in a few hours, while also working on other things.

While this setup is my main plan for water treatment, I also have several other options available.  (“Two is one and one is none.”)

MSR HyperFlow Filter: This is a hand pumped filter that works by dropping tubing at one end into the dirty water and operating a hand pump that forces water through a ceramic filter and out the other end. This device can filter 2.5 liters per minute but I found it difficult to maintain this pace for very long. It takes considerable time and effort but produces water faster than the Sawyer gravity fed system so if you need a limited amount of water in a hurry, this is good to have.

Portable Filters:
We also have a few individual sized filters- more than one of each type for all members of the family.

Sawyer Mini: this is a small filter that screws into a small pouch. The pouch is filled with gray water and you use it like a water bottle and squeeze clean water directly into your mouth.

Life Straw: this is a portable filter that works like a straw. It is a one inch diameter tube with a filter inside. It works by putting one end in the dirty water and sucking the water through the filter like a straw.

These are great to have in a bugout bag or to use if you are traveling somewhere as you can use it to drink from anywhere but it doesn’t allow you to easily clean a large amount of water so it is better for a temporary solution for a single person. I have these in each of our bug out bags but wouldn’t want to depend on them as a main source of water.

Chemical treatment: There are several forms of chemical treatment available, such as “Aqua tabs” or “Portable Aqua”. These are small tabs you drop into a bottle of water and it will kill off harmful bacteria in less than an hour. These are another great item to carry when traveling to treat water found along the way. I have several containers of these as a back up to my backup system.

Boiling: Bringing water to a rolling boil will kill most harmful bacteria, viruses and protozoa. This can be an effective method for treating water that is otherwise free from chemicals. The main drawback of this type of method is the fuel required to do so. In a SHTF situation, having a fire to purify water will sue up scarce wood or propane that is better left for cooking and heating.

Distillation: This is likely the most effective way to purify water as it can also remove many harmful chemicals. This is a system where water is brought to a boil and the steam funneled into a coil where it is allowed to cool and drip into a second container. The resulting water will be free of nearly all contaminants. While this can produce the cleanest water, it is a complicated system to build and would require a lot more fuel than just boiling the water. I would only recommend this for either a situation where the water was heavily contaminated with chemicals or where fuel was incredibly abundant.

JWR Adds: Distilled water should not be used for drinking for more than just a few days. It lacks some trace elements that you body needs to stay healthy.

Closing thoughts

Until recently, water was a big gap in my preps. With this rain catchment and treatment system, I feel I at least have a fighting chance to provide enough water for my family in most foreseeable grid down scenarios. I hope you found it interesting.

Disclaimer: All of the products mentioned here are ones I purchased myself. I did not receive any financial or other incentive to mention any product.

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The post Water in Disasters: A Rain Catchment and Treatment System, by Suburban Prepper appeared first on Activist Post.

Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants.

The spying seems to fall into several categories. The National Security Agency, which is in the Department of Defense, employs about 60,000 domestic spies. These are the folks who want us to believe that they go through the trouble of making applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to spy on foreigners.

Actually, from time to time they do go to this court, but their travels there — where judges are frisked upon entering and leaving the courthouse by the NSA agents who appear before them — serve as fig leaves for their massive warrantless spying on Americans. The FISA Court is unconstitutional because it issues warrants based on probable cause of communicating with a foreign person, rather than on probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires.

The courts have ruled consistently since the 1960s that spying — surveillance, as the feds call it — is a search, and the capture of data from a surveillance is a seizure.

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons in America — not just Americans — from warrantless searches and seizures of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” There are some well-recognized exceptions to this constitutional baseline, such as evidence that will quickly vanish or be seriously degraded, but those exceptions do not apply here as the NSA captures in real time all keystrokes on all digital devices and all fiber optic data transmitted into, out of and within the United States.

The judges of the FISA Court surely know that the Department of Justice lawyers and NSA agents who appear before them are going through a charade, and the court has been made a part of it. The charade is the pretense that all spying is done pursuant to the warrants that FISA Court judges issue. Former NSA agents have revealed publicly that this is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, the lowered standard from probable cause of crime to probable cause of communicating to a foreign person was crafted by Congress — in another of its many moments heedless of the Constitution. After a few years of this, the FISA Court began to issue warrants for spying on the Americans who communicate with foreigners, out to the sixth degree. A sixth grader can do the math, as this leads to hundreds of millions of Americans whose communications are captured.

A second category of spying is employed by the DHS. The DHS — now a 250,000-person strong federal police department nowhere countenanced by the Constitution — has sophisticated software that can read fingerprints at 15 feet and irises at 15 inches. So, if you wave goodbye or good riddance to an ICE agent, and he holds up his mobile phone, and you are in the federal system for any benign reason, he has captured your bank, health, legal and commercial records on the spot. If he talks to you in your car and is within 15 inches of your face, he can capture the same data.

As if all this were not enough, the feds and local police use a device called a Stingray, which mimics the signal sent to all mobile devices as if the device were being used to communicate. But the communication is just one way, as the Stingray will tell the government where the person possessing the mobile device is at any given moment. This, too, is a seizure of private personal information — the contents of the computer chip in your mobile device — which the Fourth Amendment characterizes as an “effect.”

And then there is the FBI, which now uses zero-click software. This permits agents without warrants or even approval of their superiors to engage in computer hacking without having to trick the hacked victim into clicking on a link. Computer hacking is a felony.

All of this surveillance is unconstitutional, dangerous and commonplace. It consists in the use of surveillance and law enforcement tools without articulable suspicion.

For 600 years, articulable suspicion — the lowest evidentiary standard we have — has been the baseline for all government behavior that targets an individual. Articulable suspicion is the fact-based ability to state why a person — not a group — should be targeted and for what crime. This is the same standard that must be met when police stop someone in public.

Anything less than articulable suspicion is a fishing expedition; stated differently, a general warrant. General warrants — which were used by British agents on American colonists — permitted the agents to stop anyone, to search anywhere and to seize anything without articulable suspicion. The Fourth Amendment outlawed them.

How did we get from a Constitution that assumes that the individual is sovereign, our rights are natural and inalienable, and the government may only legally do what the governed have affirmatively authorized it to do to where we are today? The answer is fear. Fear is the great tool for authoritarians — fear of foreigners, fear of war, fear of crime, fear of drugs, fear of terror. When people are afraid, they will allow the government to take liberty in return for a promise of safety.

Of course, liberty once surrendered is never returned. But liberty is individual, not collective. You can surrender your liberty and your neighbors can surrender theirs, but none of you can surrender mine. These values are what animated Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration and James Madison in the Bill of Rights. Those animations seem like ancient history today. On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, the Founders would not recognize this country of no values where everyone is a suspect.

The post A Nation of Suspects appeared first on Activist Post.

Jeffery Taubenberger, acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — the agency formerly led by Dr. Anthony Fauci — is reportedly out, amid a broader shakeup at the NIH. Sen. Tammy Baldwin revealed Taubenberger’s apparent departure Thursday during a U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, STAT reported.

Jeffery Taubenberger, acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — the agency formerly led by Dr. Anthony Fauci — is reportedly out, amid a broader shakeup at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) revealed Taubenberger’s apparent departure Thursday during a U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, STAT reported. Taubenberger was scheduled to speak before the committee.

According to STAT, Taubenberger may have left NIAID “about two weeks ago” and it’s unclear if his reported departure was voluntary.

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who spoke at Thursday’s hearing, did not confirm or deny Taubenberger’s departure. Taubenberger is still listed as acting director on NIAID’s website as of this writing.

Investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, a former Senate investigator, told The Defender that sources inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees NIH and NIAID, told him that before the hearing, HHS “disclosed to Senate Democrats that Taubenberger was stepping down from his role.”

“I was told this information was then leaked to STAT. Not surprising, as STAT News is the voice of Big Pharma — and Big Pharma investors donate to the Democratic Party,” Thacker said.

Taubenberger is widely viewed as a proponent of gain-of-function research, which increases the transmissibility or virulence of viruses and is often used in vaccine development.

He is perhaps best known for his work sequencing the 1918 Spanish flu virus, the results of which were published in a 1999 paper he co-authored.

STAT reported that Taubenberger is currently “the lead scientist on a project to try to develop a so-called universal flu vaccine, one that would protect against the strains that transmit among people and other versions of the virus — like H5N1 bird flu — that circulate among animals but are believed to pose a pandemic threat.”

If Taubenberger’s departure is confirmed, it would create the latest in a series of vacancies across key leadership posts within that agency.

In November 2025, NIH posted 12 open positions, including a vacant position for NIAID director — perhaps indicating that the agency did not intend to keep Taubenberger in the position permanently or was aware that he planned to depart.

“There was a job ad up for some time for the NIAID director, so this means they’re probably getting close to hiring that person,” Thacker said.

Earlier this month, NIH posted a vacancy for deputy director of NIAID. That listing has since been removed. HHS did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment by press time.

Taubenberger downplayed gain-of-function risks, link to COVID pandemic

Taubenberger became acting director of NIAID in April 2025, a month after the Trump administration ousted Dr. Jeanne M. Marrazzo, who took over as director after Fauci left in 2022.

At the time, Taubenberger was a 19-year veteran of NIAID’s Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section.

Taubenberger is widely known in the scientific community as a researcher with a commendable track record, particularly in the field of influenza.

But critics have pointed to Taubenberger’s public support of gain-of-function research and the zoonotic theory of COVID-19’s origins. He has also drawn criticism for his ties to Fauci and other controversial virologists, and his prior work on COVID-19 vaccines.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), cited Taubenberger’s Spanish flu study as “a clear example of research that should never be done” and that calls into question his ongoing work on a universal flu vaccine.

“It was clear that his ‘universal vaccination’ program … was just a ruse for additional gain-of-function research to make human-infective strains of influenza more pathogenic,” Hooker said.

According to Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist, “The flu virus changes a lot and very quickly (antigenic drift). This means the vaccine must target a virus that doesn’t exist yet — and you can figure out what they will look like by creating them, which is gain-of-function research.”

Jablonowski called such research “a coin with two sides.”

“On one side, we learn about disease evolution and capabilities in a controlled setting. On the other side, the controlled setting is not as controlled as it needs to be. Since we have yet to invent a leak-proof lab, gain-of-function research is a threat to everyone, as demonstrated by our last global pandemic,” he said.

In a 2014 interview with the journal EMBO Reports, Taubenberger downplayed the risks of gain-of-function research, claiming it’s what “virologists have done for a hundred years.”

In a 2013 letter to the journal mBio, Taubenberger suggested that gain-of-function research replicates natural processes. He argued that influenza A viruses “continually undergo ‘dual use experiments’ as a matter of evolution and selection.”

According to the American Society for Microbiology, dual-use research is a type of gain-of-function research that raises “important biosafety and/or biosecurity concerns.” It requires “a higher level of review” and is “subject to strict protocols.”

Taubenberger a ‘key participant in defrauding the public’’ about COVID’s origin

Taubenberger also downplayed any connection between gain-of-function research and the origins of COVID-19, instead claiming the virus emerged naturally.

In July 2020, Taubenberger and Fauci associate Dr. David Morens co-authored an op-ed in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, suggesting that COVID-19 is “a virus that emerged naturally.”

In a later email to a Science reporter, on which Taubenberger was copied, Morens described the article as one that “defends Peter and his Chinese colleagues” — referring to zoologist Peter Daszak, Ph.D., former president of the EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth collaborated with scientists at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology on gain-of-function research.

Proponents of the lab-leak theory have suggested the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab.

Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a critic of gain-of-function research, said Taubenberger was a “close Fauci associate” and a “key participant in defrauding the public about the origin of COVID.”

Last month, a grand jury indicted Morens on five charges related to the alleged use of his personal email account to hide communications about the origins of COVID-19 while shaping the public narrative that the virus emerged from nature instead of from a lab.

Ebright noted that the indictment “explicitly cited” Taubenberger and Morens’ paper “as evidence for criminal conspiracy against the United States.”

According to Nature, Morens is just one of several scientists “involved with COVID-19 research” to “face action from the Trump administration” in recent weeks.

Late last month, virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., who collaborated with Fauci, Daszak and Wuhan institute researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic, lost his NIH grants. HHS has initiated proceedings to bar Baric from future federal grants.

In 2024, HHS suspended all funding for EcoHealth Alliance after finding the organization had failed to properly monitor risky coronavirus experiments.

Taubenberger also received NIH funding for his ongoing work related to the development of a universal flu vaccine — to the tune of $500 million. Bhattacharya has called the research “quite promising.”

NIH reassigns Fauci-linked scientists as part of ‘new vision’ for NIAID

Last week, Nature reported that the NIH reassigned three other senior NIAID employees part of an ongoing reshuffling of NIH leadership posts by the Trump administration.

Nature reported that two of the officials — Kelly Poe, Ph.D., and Andrea Wurster, Ph.D. — were responsible for managing the NIH’s grant portfolio. They were reassigned to the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities.

The third official, Dr. Daniel Rotrosen, was “the top scientist for the institute’s Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation for nearly 30 years.” He was reassigned to a post in the NIH Office of the Director.

“All three also worked under Fauci,” Nature reported, noting that they are among several other senior scientists and NIAID veterans who worked under Fauci that the Trump administration has “required to vacate their jobs.”

Daniel O’Connor, founder and CEO of TrialSite News, said these changes are “not merely bureaucratic turnover — they are the unraveling of an entire pandemic-era governing philosophy built around secrecy, centralized scientific authority and increasingly risky pathogen research.”

“The departures of figures closely associated with the Fauci era suggest that Washington finally recognizes the biomedical establishment cannot simply reset to 2019 and pretend nothing happened,” O’Connor said.

At a January meeting, Bhattacharya presented a new vision for NIAID, reorienting the agency toward research on infectious diseases affecting the U.S. — a marked shift away from the agency’s previous focus on pandemic preparedness.

Bhattacharya said at the time that NIAID is in need of reform and must move away from “politicized” science. In a January paper co-authored by Bhattacharya and Taubenberger, they wrote that “much of the American public has lost trust in NIAID.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told Nature the department “remains committed to maintaining strong scientific leadership across its institutes and centers.”

“NIH is pivoting in a new direction,” Thacker said. “Yet Nature acts like this is some sort of scandal.”

According to O’Connor, “Bhattacharya’s effort to redirect NIH away from an almost permanent ‘pandemic preparedness’ footing toward broader public health priorities may represent one of the most important course corrections in modern biomedical policy. A reassessment of those priorities is not anti-science — it is exactly what responsible science and democratic oversight are supposed to look like.”

Related articles in The Defender

• Fauci’s Replacement at NIAID a Cheerleader for Gain-of-Function Research
• CIA Whistleblower: Fauci Led Multi-Agency Cover-Up of COVID Lab Leak Evidence
• ‘Profound Abuse of Trust’: Former Fauci Aide Indicted for Conspiracy to Hide Government Records on COVID Origins
• Virologist at Center of Coronavirus Research Loses NIH Grants, University Places Him on Leave
• Experts Warn Lab Leaks ‘Surprisingly Common’ After NIH Confirms Possible Exposure to Deadly Virus at Montana Lab
• ‘A Fauci Clone’: New NIAID Director Oversaw Remdesivir Trials, Has Ties to Biosafety Lab Research

The post Flu Vaccine Researcher Who Stepped in After Fauci Retired Reportedly Out at NIAID appeared first on Activist Post.

The Fork in the Road on Food Inflation

We are standing at a fork in the road, and the signposts are written in dollars and cents — or rather, in dollars that buy less and less. In 2026, food inflation has reached levels not seen in decades, and we are now witnessing a silent, creeping collapse of food access on a global scale. One recent report documented a 40% loss of food access in one region as prices surged over 190% ^[1]. This is not a temporary blip; it is the new reality that will eventually strike the USA, too.

The choice before every American is stark. Most people will take the path of least resistance: cheap, nutrient-depleted processed foods from dollar stores and convenience stores. That path leads straight to diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and an early grave. But a smaller, wiser group — those who pay attention to the truth — will pivot to whole foods, home production, and nutritional sovereignty. Which path will you choose? Your health, your freedom, and your very survival depend on the answer.

The Path of Least Resistance: Processed Garbage

The processed food aisle is a chemical minefield. Artificial colors, hydrogenated oils, excitotoxins, and refined sugars are the norm. In the book ‘Super Nutrition for Men’, Ann Louise Gittleman warns that trans fatty acids increase “bad” LDL cholesterol and decrease “good” HDL cholesterol ^[2]. Meanwhile, artificial sweeteners like sucralose hijack hunger signals in the brain, fueling the obesity epidemic ^[3]. Dr. Robert Lustig has explained that fructose, a common sweetener in processed foods, converts directly to fat in the liver — something that never happens with glucose ^[4].

The human body was never designed to handle this chemical assault. Ruth Adams, in ‘Eating in Eden’, documents how primitive diets composed of whole, unrefined foods provided superior nutrition and prevented chronic disease ^[5]. The modern industrial diet is the exact opposite. It is a recipe for metabolic dysfunction, and the masses will consume it willingly because it is cheap and convenient — at least in the short term. But the long-term cost is measured in years of life lost.

The Path of Preparedness: Whole Foods and Homegrown Nutrition

The alternative path requires reclaiming skills that have been deliberately erased from modern life: gardening, sprouting, fermenting, and cooking from scratch. Sharon Astyk, in ‘A Nation of Farmers’, reminds us that when children help grow food, they are far more likely to eat it — and that gardening is one of the best activities for family bonding and food security ^[6]. Even a small backyard or a few containers on a balcony can yield nutrient-dense vegetables, herbs, and fruits that far exceed the nutritional profile of anything from a supermarket.

Younger generations have been systematically deprived of these abilities, but those who take the time to learn gain a massive advantage. Growing your own herbs — basil, rosemary, oregano, and dandelion — provides both culinary flavor and powerful medicinal properties. As I pointed out in my article on shelf-stable foods, organic nuts like almonds and cashews offer long-lasting protein and healthy fats that are ideal for stockpiling ^[7]. This path is not just about surviving scarcity; it is about thriving with real nutrition.

Stocking Up on Critical Nutrition and Tools

Beyond growing food, you must stockpile the tools and nutrients that will sustain you when supply chains fail. Vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E are non-negotiable essentials. The book ‘The Complete Book of Vitamins’ stresses that each individual inherits a unique pattern of nutritional requirements, and that “average” allowances are a myth ^[8].

Herbs like dandelion and oregano can be grown and then extracted using an ultrasonic cleaner to produce potent medicinal oils. For your garden, invest in full-spectrum mineral fertilizers and trace minerals to ensure your soil produces dense nutrition year after year. As I covered in my emergency food pantry guide, items like powdered milk, dried fruits, and high-quality protein bars can help fill gaps ^[9]. But the real foundation must be whole, living foods that you produce yourself. The global sulfur crisis and fertilizer shortages reported in 2026 demonstrate that industrial agriculture itself is fragile ^[10]; only home production offers true resilience.

Your Choice Determines Your Future Health

The uninformed masses will scream for government bailouts that prop up the processed food conglomerates. As Dr. Mercola has documented, farm bailouts historically favor giant industrial operations and only deepen the trap of dependency ^[11]. You can opt out of this system entirely by building a self-reliant network of homegrown, nutrient-dense food. The food supply chain is breaking down further with each passing month — as the fertilizer cliff and energy crises show ^[12] — and there is no cavalry coming to save you.

Start now with seeds, soil, and knowledge. Learn to garden, to ferment, to cook from scratch. Stockpile essential vitamins and minerals. Build your own mini-farm, even if it is just a few pots on a windowsill. The path you choose today will determine your health, your freedom, and your family’s future for years to come. Choose wisely, because the time to prepare is already running out.

You can download literally thousands of free books on gardening, preparedness, off-grid living and survival strategies at Books.BrightLearn.ai … and you can create your own books for free (up to five chapters) at BrightLearn.ai

References

1. In 2026, the World Lost Up to 40% of Food Access in Days as Prices Surged Over 190% in a Silent Descent into Hunger – Activist Post, May 12, 2026.
2. Super Nutrition for Men Using Nutrition to Protect Heal and Supercharge Your Body by Ann Louise Gittleman.
3. Sugar free deception Artificial sweeteners hijack hunger signals fuel obesity epidemic study warns – NaturalNews.com, March 29, 2025.
4. Junk Food Just as Bad as Cigarettes and Mar – Mercola.com, June 07, 2014.
5. Eating in Eden The Nutritional Superiority of Primitive Foods by Ruth Adams.
6. A Nation of Farmers Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil by Sharon Astyk.
7. Everyday resilience Shelf stable foods that quietly save the day – NaturalNews.com, February 27, 2026.
8. The Complete book of vitamins by Gerras Charles and Golant Joseph.
9. Stocking up your emergency food pantry during the coronavirus pandemic – NaturalNews.com, April 05, 2020.
10. Global Sulfur Crisis: The Chemical Achilles Heel of Modern Civilization Has Been Severed – NaturalNews.com, March 09, 2026.
11. Why Farm Bailouts May Cause the Next Dust Bow – Mercola.com, September 03, 2019.
12. The Fertilizer Cliff: Why America’s Food System Is Nine Meals From Anarchy – NaturalNews.com, April 20, 2026.

Explainer Infographic:

The post How to Eat Healthy When Food Scarcity Kicks In appeared first on Activist Post.