AI-powered “detectors” of AI-authored content have been promoted as a way to protect human writing online in the age of AI slop. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s really happening.

Op-ed: This is an opinion piece published on Unlimited Hangout. Most articles published on UH are not opinion pieces, so we are clearly labeling those that are.

It should be no secret to readers of Unlimited Hangout that I have a very negative view of the impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having on independent media and media in general. As someone who has been impersonated by AI daily on large video platforms for a few years now, I have come to acutely feel that AI is becoming a dangerous force that is making it increasingly difficult for well-meaning readers/viewers to distinguish between what is real and what is false. I don’t mean just for those hoping to view my content, as the personal issue I am facing is a microcosm of a much larger problem.

As a result, one might think that I would have been pleased, if not relieved, to see Substack, a large platform for professional writers, partner with an “AI detection tool.” Not only am I not pleased, but I have now taken the time to write an opinion piece explaining why I think this is bad and to also explain where I think a lot of this is going.

Substack’s new partner and, apparently, the AI detection tool of choice for most major media outlets right now is called Pangram. Pangram was founded in 2023, originally under the name Checkfor.ai, by Max Spero and Bradley Emi. Both Spero and Emi are Stanford graduates who, prior to Pangram, worked for companies like Nuro and Tesla where they both worked on AI self-driving car software (i.e. replacing human drivers with AI software). Both founders “have long been excited about the potential for AI to transform society” and say they created Pangram “to mitigate new issues caused by the proliferation of powerful generative AI models.”

I find it interesting that two Stanford graduates passionate about AI’s potential to “transform society” who then worked to facilitate AI-powered, human-free driving software decided to quickly pivot to “mitigate” issues caused by generative AI. A lot of the issues caused by generative AI were actually predicted years ago by figures like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Pangram co-founder Max Spero previously did work for Google). Schmidt, in a 2021 book authored with war criminal Henry Kissinger, essentially predicted that AI’s “transformative potential” would cause what he called “cognitive diminishment” in the masses and make it almost impossible for people to distinguish between what is real and what is not on their own. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schmidt and Kissinger’s preferred “solution” to this problem was that we become reliant on AI to distinguish for us what is real and what is not –– in other words, to let another AI become the arbiter of our reality.

I have written before about this Schmidt-Kissinger book and its predictions. There, I noted that these predictions and warnings –– given the power networks in which both men are/were enmeshed –– were more likely to be disclosure of what had already planned with respect to AI rather than warnings about what might happen upon the mass adoption of AI. Nevertheless, the Schmidt-Kissinger “warnings” were unusually prescient. In addition, their proposed solution is very similar to what Pangram is currently offering –– in that Pangram uses AI to recognize AI vs. human writing. Pangram thus becomes the currently preferred AI arbiter of what is real human writing and what is not.

There has certainly been a successful marketing campaign to convince us that Pangram is the “most accurate” AI writing detection tool on the market. Headlines of articles promoting Pangram essentially communicate that it will definitely tell you whether AI wrote something. If you read past the headline, which many don’t, you will see the fine print that Pangram will also mark something as AI generated even if AI was only used to edit a human-generated piece of writing. Pangram’s AI-generated label doesn’t really distinguish between the two, even though, as co-founder Max Spero acknowledges, that label “changes how people approach the text.”

The fact that Pangram can’t meaningfully distinguish between a text fully generated by AI or one simply edited by it reveals that it is not an “AI detector” at all. As noted by Tim Requarth back in April:

The term AI “detector” is a bit of a misnomer, as tools like Pangram don’t scan a database of known AI text for a match; they make a guess about likely authorship based on differences in patterns between AI-generated and human-generated text. Rather than a detector, thinks of it as an “AI inferencer” or more colloquially, an “AI best guesser.”

As an inference tool, Pangram is vulnerable to everything that makes inference so difficult: small sample sizes (a single article rather than a corpus), small effect sizes (as the statistical distance between human and AI writing shrinks), and confounds (a human who reads and mimicks AI-generated text before writing her own).

Indeed, the way Pangram works is by making inferences about whether a given piece of writing features enough of the words, phrases, sentence construction, etc. that are currently common in AI-generated text. However, many human writers, long before generative AI, used a lot of those words, phrases, etc., too. As a consequence, we now have writers who are altering their entirely human writing style in order to please the Pangram gods and hope they won’t be falsely labeled as AI slop purveyors.

A good example of this was recently discussed in a piece by Alex Kirshner for Slate. In that article, Kirshner writes:

Whatever the future holds for the accuracy of A.I. detectors, I am unsettled by what both the A.I. writing and the detectors are doing to me right now. I worry about how A.I. writing and efforts to sniff it out are changing fully human writing. I write all week, every week, and can feel this story’s arsonists (LLMs, particularly when used the wrong way) and firefighters (A.I. detectors) weighing on my process in negative ways.

Like many journalists, my writing style comes from the books, news articles, blogs, and (yes) social media posts that have latched on to my brain over the years. A.I. writing is now in my water supply, whether I can identify each new gulp or not. It feels inevitable that I’ve started to internalize its tics, even the most infamous ones, like incessant em-dashing and overreliance on the “It’s not x but y” structure. For one thing, I fear this will make me a worse writer, dragging a talent that was good enough to get me hired here (and elsewhere!) back toward the A.I.-generated median. Scarier yet, it’s possible that someone—or, heaven forbid, some A.I. detector—might mistake my text for ChatGPT’s. I have started to self-police against this outcome. A few times lately, I’ve caught myself modifying my own work to sound “less like A.I.” In the process, I’ve probably picked words I wouldn’t have settled on otherwise. It feels dystopian—and I doubt I’ve succeeded. 

I would go a step further than Kirschner and say that this outcome is definitely dystopian. It becomes more so when one considers that the supposedly “telltale” patterns of AI-generated text change as new, improved models are released, particularly as they are literally ripping through mountains of obscure, human-written books to train them to write more and more like humans. Meanwhile, the actual humans, to keep a job in a world where the pool of writing jobs is already shrinking rapidly, are scrambling to not sound like something that is rapidly being trained to sound like them as much as possible. Perhaps by design, this is not a game that humans are meant to win and, as I will explain later on, that means it is a game that writers should quickly stop playing.

Before we get there, there are a couple of other things to note about Pangram and other AI “detection” companies. One is the issue of false positives. Yes, it is true that Pangram is considered by ostensibly independent researchers (and also itself) to have the smallest false positive rate in the industry. For the purpose of this example, let us use Pangram’s claim that only 1 in 10,000 Pangram-generated labels regarding AI or human authorship are false positives, meaning the text is labeled AI generated when it is not. On Substack, which now has Pangram embedded within it, we do not know exactly how many posts on average are made a day, as Substack does not disclose, but we can guess. The site itself claims that over 1 million posts are “discovered by potential subscribers in the app every day.” The site has over 2 million active publications, most of which publish at least weekly. Let us say, for the purpose of this example, that those 2 million publications do publish weekly. Then, 200 of them, per Pangram’s rate, will be marked as false positives every week. Over a year (52 weeks), we get over 10,000 Substack articles that are falsely labeled as AI, even though they are not. While this figure is still certainly smaller than what Pangram’s competitors offer, if we assume that those 10,000 false positives affect different publications, that could be 10,000 human writers being falsely labeled as AI slop, thereby affecting their reputation, revenue and, perhaps most crucially, their trust with their audience over that calendar year. I see it as a push to outsource trust about a writer’s authenticity from being between a writer and their audience to being between Pangram and a writer’s audience.

While these are statistics used by Pangram and its partners for marketing purposes, behind those numbers are real human writers facing an accusation from Pangram’s AI that could ruin their business. As this effect stacks over years, it could theoretically make the pool of human writers whose work has not been labeled as AI by Pangram smaller and smaller as time goes on. It is also fair to say that the false positive rate that Pangram cites is also the lowest one that has surfaced in research about its product, and it is cited most frequently because the company considers it most favorable to its interests. It is entirely plausible that the actual false positive rate is higher. There is also the added issue that if you run the same text through Pangram more than once, you’re likely to get highly variable –– as opposed to consistent –– results, making Pangram’s verdicts look more based on the luck of the draw than any meaningful “detection” of AI use.

Another important angle to explore with respect to Pangram is the potential for this tool to be deliberately wielded as a weapon for the purpose of censorship and/or discrediting a given journalist or outlet. Max Spero, Pangram’s co-founder, has notably been accused of using his Twitter account to call out specific outlets and journalists for using AI, which has –– in recent months –– generated major headlines and controversy. I don’t really think it’s relevant for the purpose of this article to investigate whether the claims levied against those journalists and outlets are true or not. As recently noted, Pangram does generate false positives, but it is also possible that these journalists did use AI in some way but did not disclose it. However, what is relevant here is that Spero in particular has used the verdict of his company’s AI “detector” to make weaponized claims against specific journalists and outlets.

As a long-time writer in independent media who has consistently written about controversial topics before it later became safe to do so (see my early work on Epstein’s Israeli intelligence ties, Peter Thiel and Palantir, among other topics), I am not a fan of mainstream or “legacy” media. On more than one occasion, they have either defamed me or used my research and writing without citing me. A good part of my career has also been spent picking apart the often misleading narratives they promote. As a result, I tend to be skeptical about the authenticity and veracity of the articles published by many of the same large outlets that Spero has targeted. However, there is another Spero quote that may get your attention if you have been closely following independent media over the past ten years.

In an article published by TechCrunch about Pangram’s recent raising of $9 million from investors, Spero discussed wanting to start Pangram to mitigate new issues that emerged following the public release of generative AI tools. As an example of what types of new issues had emerged as a result of AI’s growing use, Spero offered “LLM-powered Russian disinformation campaigns and UAE-influenced campaigns on Twitter.”

Perhaps you remember the time, beginning roughly ten years ago and continuing for many years since, that any piece of reporting from independent media that was deemed inconvenient to the powers that be (particularly about US proxy wars abroad) was falsely labeled as “Russian disinformation.” Perhaps, more recently, you may remember pro-Israel influencers and media outlets similarly claiming that criticism of Israel in recent years has allegedly been driven by funding from Qatar, as opposed to public outrage over Israel’s live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Or what about the newer claim that LLM-powered bot accounts from China that had no reach whatsoever are really secretly behind Americans’ growing distrust of Big Tech and discontent over data centers?

If you have been following long enough, you may have noticed a trend whereby critics of certain power structures are routinely and falsely labeled as state-sponsored propagandists or “bots” as a way to discredit, not only the critics themselves, but also to discredit the broader concern –– be it the impact of data centers or imperial wars. I do not know if Spero’s intent with Pangram is to similarly weaponize his company’s product in a similar way, but it is certainly possible.

However, the fact that Spero’s Pangram is partnered with Newsguard certainly increases that possibility. As I wrote back in 2019, Newsguard is a dubious “fact checker” that was initially created to discredit independent media outlets critical of US foreign policy, while giving admitted US propaganda organs like VOA a pass. It is also worth mentioning Newsguard’s national security connections — for example, it originally counted the former heads of the CIA and DHS under George W. Bush among its advisors on determining what is “fake news” and what is not. One of their top investors is the founder of Kroll Associates, often referred to as the “private CIA,” Jules Kroll. Now, with Pangram, Newsguard is determining what is “AI slop” and what is not and has used Pangram to launch a “real-time ‘AI content farm’ detection” service.

What better way to digitally nuke a group of reporters and any accompanying wave of public sentiment than by using a now “trusted” AI detector to label both the writers and the sentiment as inauthentic and machine-generated. The potential is for Pangram to become a new way for censoring human-authored, yet inconvenient content, particularly if content labeled AI-generated eventually becomes algorithimically demoted over what Pangram labels as human-generated. The public will be told that the “AI slop” is being buried, when — in reality — it is dissent.

The way it looks to me is that Pangram is currently in the phase of normalizing the ubiquity of its product and building “trust” with those who use Substack or any other platform (or browser plug-in) that integrates Pangram. During this period, readers will be trained to see a Pangram label and trust its results with no further information needed. This is how a company like Pangram can raise $14 million in financing (including from one of Anthropic’s main investors) for a product that it is available for free. As has been said before about online products, if the product is free, then you are the product. In this case, I think that training you to outsource your “trust” to Pangram from the person or outlet you are reading is the product. Once you trust an AI “detector” tool, you will trust its verdicts, perhaps even over the writer you had grown to trust.

Pangram’s co-founders did not make Pangram to protect human-generated writing and speech. Pangram’s co-founders have long been excited that AI will “transform society,” and immediately prior to Pangram, were developing algorithms to replace human drivers with AI. As noted above, they created Pangram to stop what they referred to as state-sponsored influence operations among other “issues” that emerged upon the public release of generative AI tools. With their former Big Tech employers having public sentiment move against them, whether on data centers or “smart” glasses or something else, Pangram’s co-founders may offer a new way of doing away with accounts deemed too critical of AI’s “transformation” of society. Maybe not, but forgive me for being skeptical.

To conclude, I would like to again return to the Schmidt-Kissinger book on AI and its predictions. In independent media, many warn of the Hegelian dialectic, also known as “problem-reaction-solution.” That is, the powers that be first create the problem, then wait for the public to react and finally offer the public the policy outcome they always wanted as the solution. It certainly is convenient that Schmidt and Kissinger, two very terrible people who both helped create this mess in different ways, presciently predicted that AI would make it so people could no longer tell what was real and what was not. Now their prediction has become our reality and, right on cue, the company Pangram has stepped in to solve the AI slop problem (from which its own investors profit) by offering us what was also the Schmidt and Kissinger’s preferred “solution” –– people relying on an AI arbiter to tell them what is real and what is not.

As I wrote earlier, the obvious way out of this dystopian game is not to play it. Do not trust Pangram’s AI just because it looks “authoritative” and has had some positive PR. It is not a “detector” as it claims to be and its results for the same text are rarely consistent. If you are a reader, ask the writers you are reading to disclose their use of AI. Trust should be built between writers and their readers directly, without an AI middleman and arbiter of authenticity or “humanness.” At Unlimited Hangout, we never use AI for writing, research or editing of our articles. This is made clear in our AI use policy, which you can read on our “About Us” page upon the imminent launch of the newly redesigned Unlimited Hangout website (In the meantime, you can read it here). We created this policy after helping create the IMA AI Transparency Pledge, which encourages independent journalists and outlets to voluntarily disclose if you choose to use AI and how.

Just like any other human writer, all I can offer to my readers is my research, my sourcing and my authentic analysis and, in the case of this article, my opinions. I am not going to run my articles obsessively through Pangram hoping for a “100% human-generated” result. I am not going to let fear of an unfavorable Pangram result change how I write and make me afraid of using words like “delve” or “profound” because Pangram might punish me. I know I write without AI and I have enough trust with my readers that they know I don’t use it in my writing either. Not unlike the entities that have labeled inconvenient reporters as Russian/Chinese “bots,” Pangram assumes that you can’t determine what is authentic and inauthentic on your own and that you need them to tell you.

While critical thinking may be in low supply in the age of AI, don’t let it be. You don’t need another AI to “help” you determine what does or doesn’t feel or seem authentic to you. You don’t need it to tell you what you should or shouldn’t read and who you should or shouldn’t trust. It’s never a good idea to outsource your critical thinking and your opinions to others, especially a non-human AI.

The post The Pangram Paradox: The Problem with AI “Detecting” other AIs appeared first on Activist Post.

If you think that things are bad now, just wait until food shortages really start to kick in next year. Even the UN is admitting that there isn’t going to be enough food for everyone in 2027. As you will see below, they are preparing for a huge spike in global hunger in 2027. The war in the Middle East has caused a global fertilizer crisis which will produce “thinner harvests” both this fall and next year. At the same time, the soaring price of diesel is putting extreme financial pressure on farmers all over the world. Needless to say, soaring fuel costs will get passed on to the rest of us. On top of everything else, the Super El Niño that I have been writing so much about is causing chaotic weather that is literally wiping out crops in Central America and other parts of the planet. The food that is being harvested now is what is supposed to feed us in 2027, and there simply is not going to be enough of it.

What a disaster 2026 has been.

Coming into this year, there was no war with Iran.

Coming into this year, the Strait of Hormuz was still open.

Coming into this year, there was no Super El Niño.

Coming into this year, the price of diesel was actually quite low.

And coming into this year, we didn’t have a global fertilizer crisis which appears to be having a “catastrophic impact” on global food production…

Six months after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the global fertiliser supply chain has collapsed in key regions, creating a dual crisis of physical shortages and soaring costs. Since March, commodity intelligence platform CropGPT has directly surveyed thousands of farmers every month, across eight countries to measure the impacts of the crisis. The data shows a potentially catastrophic impact on global food and beverage – coffee included – supplies and prices in 2027.

CropGPT’s findings reveal that only 43% of farmers surveyed got everything they needed, with farmers in India – which feeds more people than any other country in the world – reporting they have been short of fertiliser for six months. In the Ivory Coast only 6% of coffee farmers were fully supplied in August, while 40% could not get any fertiliser at all. El Nino is forecast to peak just as the effects of fertiliser shortages and thinner harvests come in, multiplying the threat to global agriculture.

CropGPT’s data also unveils a stark economic divide. Where crop prices are strong, such as coffee, farmers have paid more and carried on. Where they are weak, farmers have cut back or stopped buying fertiliser. Farmers who cannot obtain fertiliser face yield loses of up to 50%.

Most people out there have absolutely no idea that this is happening.

They can see that food prices are rising, but they simply do not understand what is ahead of us.

The founder and CEO of CropGPT is ominously warning that the world “cannot absorb a shock of this magnitude without supermarket prices exploding and people starving”…

Commenting on the findings, Rob Weston, founder and CEO of CropGPT, said, “The market is fundamentally mispricing the sheer scale of this crisis. Traders are understandably watching the forecasts to understand the impact of El Niño, but the real catastrophe is already happening on the ground.” He explained that when 57% of farmers across key agricultural regions are reporting they cannot access or afford the fertiliser they need, “we are not just looking at thinner margins, we are facing a global food crisis. Global food systems cannot absorb a shock of this magnitude without supermarket prices exploding and people starving.”

The skeptics can stick their heads in the sand if they wish, but this isn’t going to go away.

Meanwhile, the Super El Niño is expected to reach peak intensity later this year.

The UN’s World Food Program is gearing up for a worst case scenario, because they believe that the Super El Niño will “significantly worsen food insecurity in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries into 2027″…

Analysis from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) shows that the strengthening El Niño weather pattern is set to significantly worsen food insecurity in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries into 2027. The agency is ramping up its preparedness and response efforts as impacts from El Niño are already hitting the most vulnerable on the frontlines of hunger.

“El Niño is a massive threat to the food security of millions who are already vulnerable,” said Carl Skau, WFP’s Acting Executive Director. “The sooner we help families to prepare for these climate shocks, the greater our ability to save lives and protect livelihoods. Severe floods and droughts can quickly push communities from coping to crisis. WFP is already ramping-up early response efforts in eight countries, and we stand ready to do even more.”

El Niño is expected to peak between September and December 2026, but in many locations the effects will be felt throughout 2027, due to impacts on future harvest cycles. Drought, flooding and extreme temperatures are already putting communities at risk.

Unless you are really a news hound, you probably aren’t even aware of the nightmare that is currently unfolding in Central America.

Extreme drought has caused “widespread crop failures” in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras…

Further north, drought is already taking a heavy toll on Central America’s dry corridor, which stretches across Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Around 10 million people live in the region, many of them dependent on subsistence farming.

An assessment by Oxfam and humanitarian organisation Action Against Hunger found widespread crop failures across Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, with tens of thousands of farming families affected.

Of 73,000 farms that planted maize for the first growing cycle of 2026, around 70,000 reported devastating harvests. Bean crops have also been badly hit and more than 23,000 households reported reduced access to water.

“We are seeing widespread crop losses caused by the drought triggered by El Nino,” said Oxfam’s humanitarian manager for Central America, Ivan Aguilar.

Millions of people in Central America are potentially facing extreme food shortages during the months ahead.

Russian and Ukrainian farmers are facing a different sort of a crisis.

They have been able to produce enough wheat, but it has been exceedingly difficult to get it out of the Black Sea since July.

As a result, Egypt has not “received any Black Sea grain in about a month”…

Connecting Europe and Asia, the Black Sea is a critical conduit for global crop shipments to some of the world’s most populous nations. Russia and Ukraine make up more than a quarter of the global wheat trade, a share similar to the seaborne oil trade passing through Hormuz in the Gulf.

Supplies have been choked off since July when the countries stepped up attacks on each other’s ports, pummeling grain terminals, silos and vessels. The escalation also hit Russia’s energy infrastructure, sending diesel prices to records. A key input into farming, the cost of the fuel is another inflationary risk for food.

Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat buyer, hasn’t received any Black Sea grain in about a month. Russia’s exports are throttled by Ukrainian drones, while Ukraine, with its ports blocked, is struggling to get its grain out by land or river. As harvests pile up, the country is also struggling to find enough storage.

Egypt imports approximately 50 percent of the wheat that it consumes.

Other nations in the Middle East are similarly dependent on wheat from Russia and Ukraine.

If something doesn’t change, there will soon be an enormous number of very hungry people.

In wealthy western countries, crippling summer droughts have resulted in “shriveling harvests”…

Droughts across the US and Europe have been shriveling harvests, and weather forecasts for a “super” El Niño this year means “there are some alarming signals” about the impact of weather on wheat crops, said Joao Lampreia, a market strategist at the Lisbon-based Freedom24.

What we are witnessing is far more serious than most people realize.

Here in the U.S., the latest wheat production numbers are downright gloomy…

The smallest U.S. wheat crop in decades continues to shrink.

The USDA now has combined production at 1.531 billion bushels, 5 million less than July, due to cuts in winter wheat acreage and non-durum spring wheat yield projections. Winter and spring wheat production numbers were both down from a month ago, at 989.89 million and 474.3 million bushels, respectively. If realized, this would be the smallest combined U.S. winter wheat crop since 1963. Combined production for all types of wheat in 2025 was 1.985 billion bushels.

We aren’t producing enough wheat.

We aren’t producing enough rice either.

In fact, Zero Hedge is reporting that “America’s rice harvest is forecast to fall to its lowest level in 33 years”…

America’s rice harvest is forecast to fall to its lowest level in 33 years. CBOT rough rice futures, the benchmark for US long-grain rice before milling, are surging higher at the end of summer after rising 69% so far this year.

USDA forecasts total production at 158.2 million hundredweight, roughly 23% below last year’s 206.7 million. Harvested acreage is projected at just 2.057 million acres, the lowest since the 1972/73 season.

“While beginning stocks are raised 4.6 million cwt to a 40-year high of 58.4 million cwt, production is reduced 0.2 million cwt to 158.2 million, a 33-year low, as a reduced forecast for harvested area more than offsets a higher yield,” USDA wrote in a report.

Oh, by the way the size of the U.S. cattle herd has fallen to its smallest size in 75 years.

Everywhere you look, there is more bad news, and now the price of diesel is skyrocketing.

CBS News recently interviewed 52-year-old North Carolina farmer Matt Bell, and he explained how the rising price of diesel is financially crushing his farm…

Prices have been so volatile that Bell said the price he’s quoted from his distributor in the morning is only valid until the afternoon — when it rises again. He can’t avoid the expense — his farm equipment runs on diesel. Bell showed CBS News his combine, which he says now requires about $600 worth of diesel fuel per day. That’s more than twice what he paid last year.

Bell said he blew through his yearly fuel budget of $35,000 in August. Now, he expects his total for the year to be closer to $50,000 to $60,000.

“Every piece of equipment on this farm runs on diesel,” he said. Without it, his farm wouldn’t be able to function.

Without our farmers, we do not eat.

And without diesel, our farmers cannot operate.

At this stage, Bell admits that he is more stressed out than he has ever been before…

“I’ve done this 34 years. I have never worried and stressed like I have the last year,” Bell told CBS News in an interview on Wednesday at his farm in Kings Mountain, North Carolina.

Bell has been forced to make significant changes to his operation as a result of the high costs. He’s shifting some of his acreage, trying to stretch out the lifespan of his equipment and producing his own fertilizer. His children have also opened up a storefront where visitors can pick pumpkins and take hayrides in the fall. But Bell is still feeling the pinch.

“We’ve cut everything we can cut,” he said. “The last several years in agriculture have been terrible, and we have, you know, just cut the fat anywhere we could. But we’re just getting to the point now there’s nothing left to cut. You cannot run without fuel. You cannot run without fertilizer. You have to have that.”

Sadly, if World War 3 continues to intensify it is likely that diesel prices will go a lot higher.

What will we do then?

In the Midwest, fuel surcharges are already going through the roof…

The fuel shock is especially significant across the Midwest, where corn and soybean harvest generates intense demand for combines, tractors, grain trucks and commercial transportation. Midwest diesel averaged $6.250 per gallon on September 14, up from $5.946 just one week earlier, while the national average increased 31.8 cents over the same period. Compared with a year earlier, U.S. diesel was $2.546 per gallon more expensive. That increase affects far more than the fuel line in a farm budget: it raises the cost of operating equipment and moving fertilizer, seed and other inputs while increasing the expense of transporting harvested grain.

Rail freight shows how rapidly those higher energy costs are moving through the agricultural supply chain. Union Pacific’s standard mileage-based fuel surcharge stood at 28 cents per mile in July 2025 but reached 71 cents in July 2026. For October, the railroad has set the surcharge at 68 cents per mile, compared with 33 cents in October 2025 – an increase of roughly 106% year over year. The October charge is based on an August 2026 highway diesel average of $5.462 per gallon. For grain shippers, elevators and co-ops that depend heavily on rail, the surcharge becomes another expense that must ultimately be absorbed somewhere between the farm gate and the final customer.

Diesel prices are also having an enormous impact on the trucking industry.

Earlier today, I was stunned to learn that 16 trucking companies have filed for bankruptcy in less than a month…

A new round of trucking bankruptcies has swept across the U.S. in recent weeks, with carriers ranging from small owner-operators to fleets operating dozens of trucks seeking Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 protection.

At least 16 trucking, delivery and transportation companies entered bankruptcy proceedings between late August and Sept. 21, according to federal court filings and carrier records reviewed by FreightWaves.

The filings include Chapter 11 cases involving Globemaster Incorporated, Xoco Transport, Jett Transport & Materials, CLJ Transporting, Mill Creek Logistics-Illinois, RP Hay Hauling, Truckload LLC and Pacer Transport. Several smaller carriers filed Chapter 7 cases, which typically involve liquidation rather than reorganization.

This is what a “perfect storm” looks like, and we are still only in the early stages.

There will be food shortages in impoverished countries all over the globe in 2027.

In wealthy countries, food prices are already ridiculously high, but they will soon go even higher.

We have got an unprecedented global food crisis on our hands, and there is no relief in sight for the foreseeable future.

The post This Is What A “Perfect Storm” Looks Like: A Global Fertilizer Crisis, A Global Fuel Crisis, A Super El Niño And World War 3 All At The Same Time appeared first on Activist Post.

Shoe-horned into the permission grid.

It’s what they want and you know what? I think it’s what they’ll get. They’ll get it because there is a loss of agency amongst the populace. The pushback to this Orwellian nightmare is… in a word, pathetic.

The EU wants a passport for the peasants to access the internet.

The justification. Why, of course. The kids. Who wouldn’t want to protect children? Only a psychopath or a pedophile. You’re not a psychopath or a pedophile, are you?

A digital identity system, tied to age verification, with a specific carve-out written into the design: “The new age verification system cannot be bypassed via VPN.”

They’re not just building a verification layer. They’re closing the one exit that lets the peasants opt out of it. VPNs exist for exactly one reason that matters here — they let you decide who gets to know where you are and who you are.

Blocking VPN circumvention isn’t a technical footnote. That’s the point. Now, I’m not a tech nerd, so I’ve no idea if this is mere posturing by these psychopaths, and if it is actually possible for them to achieve this… technically. The truth is, most of the peasants will simply comply. The cage is compliance of the mind, and most are already slaves.

The above isn’t happening in isolation. Look at where Europe has been walking, one regulation at a time:

Cash transactions banned above €10,000. Bitcoin purchases require an ID above €1,000. Privacy coins banned outright. MiCA compliance costs pushing an estimated 90% of crypto firms out of the market.

Each of these, taken alone, gets defended in the same way these parasitic pedophile satanists always defend their actions: as consumer protection, anti-money-laundering policy, or tax compliance.

Taken together, they form something else entirely: a system where every transaction, every wallet, every website you visit resolves back to a verified identity, and where the tools that let you route around that — cash, privacy coins, VPNs — are being systematically removed.

This is the architecture of permission-based participation. Not “here’s what’s illegal.” Instead: “Here’s what you’re allowed to do, and here’s how we confirm it’s you doing it.”

Manufacturing the Consensus First

No population accepts such a totalitarian enslavement permission system voluntarily. It has to be made to feel inevitable first. That’s what the fraudulent climate narrative has done — and the people building the tracking infrastructure have told you so, in their own documents.

The World Economic Forum presents three levers as a roadmap on its own website:

1. “Economic behaviour.” Raise costs until compliance becomes cheaper than resistance.
2. “Cognitive Awareness.” Raise the visibility of personal emissions until people believe a limit is normal.
3. “Social Norms.” Redefine what a “fair share” of emissions looks like, and set the acceptable levels for you.

And BAM, you’re a slave begging permission to take a hot shower, turn on air conditioning, heck even have air conditioning… or heating for that matter.

Any activity, permissioned.

This is no longer some mere scientific proposal. It’s a behavioural engineering framework. And its authors are explicit that public compliance is a prerequisite that has to be manufactured before the system can be deployed.

The same WEF material cites Pew Research:

Nineteen-point jumps in “intense concern” in Germany about the personal effects of climate change. Eighteen points in the UK. A steady climb across every major economy in six years.

The WEF piece doesn’t present this as an interesting cultural shift. It presents it as the leading indicator that the public is now primed to accept personal carbon tracking — the exact language used is that this rising concern, layered on top of pandemic-era compliance with contact tracing and movement restrictions, demonstrates the “core of individual social responsibility” needed to make personal carbon allowances work.

Translate that: two years of manufactured urgency, a manufactured “global health crisis” used as a dry run for mass behavioural compliance, and now rising anxiety held up as proof the public is not only ready to be tracked, but it is the logical conclusion.

That’s not consensus. That’s consensus manufactured on an industrial scale and by schedule.

It’s worth being precise about what this WEF document is: a thought piece describing an aspiration and a set of enabling technologies, not an adopted EU law.

No government has passed a binding personal carbon allowance programme yet. But the intent is stated plainly, the levers are named plainly, and the mechanism — AI-driven tracking, blockchain-verified records, tied to individual behaviour — requires exactly the kind of persistent digital identity the EU’s age-verification system now being established (what the UK has just launched).

Identity verification without behaviour tracking is just a login page. Behaviour tracking without identity verification is anonymous and useless to whoever wants to act on it. Put them together and you have a system that knows who you are and what you did, by design, with the anonymising tools removed by regulation.

We Have Seen This Before

Strip away the branding — carbon ledgers instead of ration books, an app instead of a commissar with a clipboard — and the underlying architecture is not new. It is the oldest failed idea in modern history, wearing a sustainability badge.

The Bolsheviks centralised decision-making in the name of fairness and collective survival. Mao’s China centralised agricultural and industrial output in the name of the greater good, with local compliance enforced through social pressure and quota systems. The USSR centralised production and consumption in the name of a planned, rational economy that would eliminate waste and want.

In every case, the pattern was identical. A small group of planners decides what a “fair share” of a resource looks like, builds the enforcement apparatus to track individual compliance, and removes the tools individuals would otherwise use to opt out.

In every case, the enforcement apparatus outlived the stated justification. And in every case, the death toll from top-down control of food, energy, and production ran into the tens of millions — not as a bug, but as the mathematically predictable result of removing distributed decision-making from a system as complex as a national economy.

A personal carbon allowance is a ration book. A digital identity tied to internet access with the circumvention tools blocked is the enforcement layer that a ration book never had. The technology is new. The instinct to centralise control over what people are permitted to consume, say, and access — and to justify it as being for the collective good — is not.

Total Control

Europe is building a system where every click, every transaction, and every website visit ties back to a digital passport, and where the tools you’d use to preserve any distance between yourself and that record are being closed off one by one.

Call the EU programme consumer protection if you want. Call the WEF carbon proposal citizen engagement if you want. But look at what’s actually being built: identity-linked internet access, with circumvention blocked, arriving at the same moment as active proposals to track and score individual behaviour using that same identity layer — built on top of a public mood that was, by the planners’ own account, deliberately cultivated to make it possible.

They’re not hiding it. It’s published on their own websites, in their own words.

This is where regulatory arbitrage in a non-compliant society matters most.

Consider the difference between a spoon-fed, indoctrinated, compliant, fearful and lazy Western mindset and their emerging market counterparts.

While I’m not here to propose that emerging markets are the panacea of free markets, some utopian free-wheeling society or anything of that nature. The very ability of inefficient bureaucracies (found in emerging markets) to effectively enact disastrous policies such as these mentioned, coupled with a populace far more resistant to compliance, layered with wide disparities in valuations, bodes relatively well for emerging markets over developed markets.

Right now, that arbitrage opportunity remains open. For how long is anyone’s guess. I’d suggest taking advantage of it while it remains.

Editor’s Note: The architecture of control described in this article is not theoretical. Governments can restrict access to money, devalue currencies, and put private wealth at risk when financial pressure mounts.

Legendary investor Doug Casey has studied these crises for fifty years. He has identified three moves to protect wealth and financial freedom before the next major crisis arrives. The report takes twenty minutes to read. Click here to get your free copy of Doug Casey’s Guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse.

The post The Permission Grid: A Blueprint for a Permanent Slave Class appeared first on Activist Post.

A report published by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) states that air pollution from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers may affect children’s developing brains and lungs, according to the organization.

The report focuses on data centers in the U.S. that power AI systems and require large amounts of electricity, the report states. CHD said the report examines emissions such as particulate matter and nitrogen oxides from data center operations. According to a NewsNation report, electricity plants being built to power AI data centers can emit toxic pollutants that harm public health [1].

The findings arrive as opposition to data center construction has grown. A Heatmap News poll found that 61% of Americans said they “strongly oppose” data center construction where they live, according to YourNews [2]. A separate poll cited by ZeroHedge found that 70% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their area, including 60% of Republicans [3].

Data Center Expansion and Emission Sources

AI data centers require continuous power and cooling, leading to increased demand on electric grids, according to industry reports. U.S. data centers are projected to consume about 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, nearly double the amount BloombergNEF predicted nine months earlier, according to TechCrunch [4].

Backup diesel generators and natural gas turbines at data centers emit pollutants including fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, officials said. Texas has approved the largest U.S. air pollution permit for a 7.65-gigawatt natural gas and data center complex, with nearly 58 gigawatts of gas plant projects announced in the state in 2025 alone, according to NaturalNews [5].

Amazon is building a natural gas facility in Pecos County, Texas, that calls for 35 turbines generating more than 7 gigawatts of electricity, according to NaturalNews [6]. Meta has funded at least a dozen natural gas power plants and left the RE100 corporate renewable energy initiative after a decade of membership, according to TechCrunch [7].

The report states that many data centers are located near residential areas, potentially increasing children’s exposure. At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, a data center site sits roughly an hour’s drive from the nearest community, and another parcel is a half-mile from civilian housing, according to Activist Post [8].

Industry representatives said data centers are subject to environmental permits and that operators are investing in renewable energy and efficiency. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin has said the agency is committed to ensuring that the growth of AI does not come at the expense of human health or the environment, according to NewsNation [1].

Children’s Vulnerability and Health Effects

Children’s developing brains and lungs are more susceptible to air pollution than adults, according to public health researchers cited in the report. Exposure to fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides has been associated with respiratory symptoms, reduced lung function, and neurodevelopmental effects, the report stated. The report claims that current air quality standards may not adequately protect children near data centers.

A spokesperson for CHD said, “Children living near these facilities deserve protection from preventable pollution.” Pediatrician and environmental health researcher Dr. Aaron Bernstein, who is not affiliated with the report, expressed concern about children’s proximity to data center emissions.

“Children are not little adults,” Bernstein said. “Their lungs and brains are still developing, and exposure to air pollution during these critical windows can have lifelong consequences.” [1]

An industry spokesperson responded, “Data centers are among the most energy-efficient buildings, and we comply with all applicable environmental regulations.” The same industry representative pointed to a commitment to be a good neighbor and noted that data centers have helped fund new renewable energy projects. [1]

The report also points to industrial contamination beyond air emissions. PFAS, a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals known as “forever chemicals,” are used in cooling systems for servers and in the fabrication of advanced microchips, according to a ChemSec report cited by NaturalNews [9].

A study on the economic-environmental modeling of point source pollution in Jefferson County, Alabama, examined how industrial point sources affect surrounding areas [10]. Research published in Environmental Geochemistry and Health described methods for predicting population blood lead levels from environmental exposure [11].

Regulatory Gaps and Calls for Oversight

The report says that many data centers rely on emergency generators that may operate during grid strain events, increasing emissions. The EPA said in a press statement that certain off-grid, or “islanded,” electricity generators are not subject to the federal Acid Rain Program under the Clean Air Act, according to the Epoch Times [12]. The agency also finalized a rule repealing most carbon-emission limits for coal- and natural gas-fired power plants, according to ZeroHedge [13].

Environmental groups have called for stricter permitting and monitoring of data center emissions, according to public comments. The CHD report titled “Cheating the System” details how developers have exploited legal loopholes following a May 2023 Supreme Court ruling that limited Clean Water Act jurisdiction, allowing many data centers to fall outside EPA jurisdiction or qualify for streamlined permits, according to NaturalNews [14].

CHIPS Communities United and the Sierra Club, represented by Earthjustice, filed a petition alleging violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act and saying the EPA permitted chemicals to be used without adequately assessing risks to plant employees and surrounding communities, according to NaturalNews [15].

Some state officials said they are reviewing air quality rules as data center construction accelerates. New York became the first state to impose a moratorium on new hyperscale data centers requiring 50 megawatts or more of electricity, directing the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to conduct a Generic Environmental Impact Statement to assess grid, water, and air impacts, according to NaturalNews [16]. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he is drafting legislation to regulate data centers while keeping the U.S. competitive in AI, according to the Epoch Times [17].

The report recommends independent health impact assessments before new data centers are approved. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, sent a letter to SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk demanding answers about the company’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers, saying communities across the nation are frustrated, according to 100PercentFedUp [18]. The book The Cutting Edge notes that since the beginning of the industrial age, the human race has come to rely heavily on the energy released by burning non-renewable fossil fuels, and that industrial processes produce pollution [19].

Ongoing Debate Over AI Infrastructure and Public Health

The report concludes that more research is needed on cumulative exposures from AI data centers, according to its authors. The authors stated that longer-term studies are needed to determine whether residents near data centers experience elevated rates of respiratory and neurological conditions. [1]

Industry groups said they will continue to work with regulators and communities to reduce emissions. “We take our responsibility to the communities where we operate seriously,” the industry spokesperson said. “That means continuing to invest in efficiency, exploring cleaner power options, and engaging transparently with local officials.” [1]

References

1. NaturalNews.com. “Texas approves nation’s largest power permit for AI driven gas plant and data center complex”. NaturalNews.com. February 3, 2026.
2. Allstetter and Schuyler (eds). “The cutting edge an encyclopedia of advanced technologies”.
3. TechCrunch. “US data centers could consume more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035”. TechCrunch. September 15, 2026.
4. NaturalNews.com. “AI Data Center Expansion Drives Increased PFAS Production, ChemSec Report Says”. NaturalNews.com. September 17, 2026.
5. Activist Post. “Pentagon Plans AI Data Centers at Military Bases Across Multiple Branches”. Activist Post. September 10, 2026.
6. YourNews. “From Miscarriages To Judgement Day: We Took A Look At All The AI Takes The Internet Has To Offer”. YourNews. August 30, 2026.
7. ZeroHedge. “‘You Will Only Have Yourselves To Blame’: Trump Warns Anti-Data-Center Crowd Not To ‘Kill The Golden Goose'”. ZeroHedge. August 31, 2026.
8. ZeroHedge. “EPA Repeals Biden-Era Carbon Rules For Power Plants”. ZeroHedge. September 15, 2026.
9. The Epoch Times. “Paxton Unveils Plan to Regulate Texas Data Centers”. The Epoch Times. August 24, 2026.
10. NaturalNews.com. “The AI power crunch is forcing Big Tech to abandon its climate script”. NaturalNews.com. September 15, 2026.
11. 100PercentFedUp. “House Democrat Demands Records And Tour Of SpaceXAI Data Center Sites Accused Of Disregarding ‘Health And Well-Being Of Local Communities'”. 100PercentFedUp. July 31, 2026.
12. NaturalNews.com. “AI Data Centers Exploit Permitting Loopholes, Investigations Find”. NaturalNews.com. July 24, 2026.
13. The Epoch Times. “EPA Says Some Data Center Power Generators Not Subject to Program Under Clean Air Act”. The Epoch Times. July 28, 2026.
14. NaturalNews.com. “New York Governor Imposes First Statewide Moratorium on Large-Scale Data Centers”. NaturalNews.com. July 15, 2026.
15. NaturalNews.com. “Environmental Groups Sue EPA Over Approval of Semiconductor Chemicals Used in AI Data Centers”. NaturalNews.com. August 18, 2026.
16. TechCrunch. “Meta drops out of a major clean energy pact as its natural gas buildout accelerates”. TechCrunch. July 23, 2026.
17. 100PercentFedUp. “Mississippi Mayor Allegedly Tells Resident To ‘Consider Selling’ Home Amid Noise Complaints About Plant Powering Nearby Data Centers”. 100PercentFedUp. July 19, 2026.
18. NewsNation. “AI data centers linked to massive air pollution: Report”. NewsNation Now. August 6, 2026.
19. Ellene Kebede, Dean F. Schreiner, and Gobena Huluka. “Economic-environmental modeling of point source pollution in Jefferson County, Alabama, USA”. Journal of Environmental Management.
20. Joshua T. Cohen. “The use of Monte Carlo simulation techniques to predict population blood lead levels”. Environmental Geochemistry and Health.

Explainer Infographic

The post Report Links AI Data Center Air Pollution to Risks for Children’s Developing Brains and Lungs appeared first on Activist Post.

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

Saudi Arabia has never signed the Abraham Accords, which means its relationship with Israel can still be discussed as a deal waiting to happen. But long before anyone agrees on what a public deal should contain, Israeli-made spyware has reached a Saudi dissident, Saudi sovereign wealth has backed investments in Israeli companies, and the two countries have been drawn into discussions about intelligence cooperation against Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement.

In a new Double Down News investigation, Lowkey traces a shadow network linking senior Israeli intelligence figures, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israeli cyber-warfare technology exported to Saudi Arabia with state approval. Jeffrey Epstein appears in that story seeking a place close to the Saudi leadership. In correspondence examined by The New Arab, he offered advice on the planned sale of Saudi oil company Aramco and helped draft a letter addressed to the crown prince. The question becomes more urgent in Yemen, where reports describe talks mediated by US Central Command, or CENTCOM, over Israeli intelligence assistance to Riyadh against Ansar Allah.

Omar Abdulaziz was living in Canada in 2018 and working with journalist Jamal Khashoggi when a message about a package arrived on his phone. The link inside led to Pegasus, spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group. Citizen Lab found that Abdulaziz’s phone had been infected by a Saudi-linked operator. Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi agents later that year inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.

Khashoggi was also the subject of conflicting accounts inside Wikistrat, a private intelligence firm founded in Israel whose founder, Joel Zamel, met senior Saudi officials. Before the murder, a Wikistrat executive told a colleague that the company had recruited  Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi for a Saudi-focused project. Afterwards, he said Khashoggi had only been considered, although the firm later told Forensic News that he had been part of its analyst community for some time. One of the Saudi officials Zamel met was Ahmed al-Asiri, the former deputy head of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency and a former close adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who was later accused of overseeing the operation against Khashoggi.

By the time Jared Kushner left the White House, Saudi Arabia still had not recognised Israel, though Kushner had helped other Arab governments do so through the Abraham Accords. His new firm, Affinity Partners, received a $2 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and went on to buy 15% of an Israeli vehicle and credit business, while also becoming the largest single shareholder in Israeli insurer Phoenix Financial. Research by AFSC Investigate documents Phoenix’s insurance services to West Bank settlement councils and its investment in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. Saudi money could reach those businesses through the fund Kushner controlled, even as recognition remained off the table.

The Saudi-led war had already helped push millions in Yemen towards hunger when seven-year-old Amal Hussain died of malnutrition in October 2018. In November 2025, Sana’a’s Interior Ministry alleged that a joint Saudi, American and Israeli operations room in Riyadh had recruited Yemenis to collect coordinates inside the country. It released video confessions from detainees and described equipment supplied to the alleged network. The Long War Journal reported the allegations, but did not independently establish the claimed command structure. Then, this month, separate reporting described talks through CENTCOM over potential Israeli intelligence assistance to Riyadh against Ansar Allah.

Sana’a says Saudi Arabia recruited spies in Yemen for an operation involving American and Israeli intelligence. Reports of CENTCOM-mediated talks over Israeli assistance to Riyadh give that allegation fresh urgency, raising the possibility that Saudi Arabia is fighting Ansar Allah not only for itself, but as a proxy for Israel and the United States. If that is how the war is being fought, a treaty would not create a Saudi–Israeli partnership. It would merely acknowledge one already at work.

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has launched a formal review of scientific evidence on wireless radiation and electromagnetic field exposure, opening a public comment period to gather input, the agency announced. The review will examine radiofrequency and extremely low frequency exposures from sources including cell towers, Wi-Fi networks and 5G infrastructure, according to HHS officials.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the review will inform federal policy recommendations and address gaps in scientific knowledge.

The announcement follows the FDA’s removal of longstanding webpages that had asserted cellphones pose no health risk, a move first reported by the Wall Street Journal [2]. HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said the agency is undertaking the study “to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies, to ensure safety and efficacy” [3].

Background and Prior Concerns

The review follows more than a decade of debate over potential health effects of wireless radiation. Health advocacy organizations have repeatedly pressed federal agencies for stricter scrutiny, and two separate groups sued the Federal Communications Commission over what they described as its “complete dismissal of evidence of serious health impacts from wireless technology devices and infrastructure, such as cell phones and cell towers” [4]. Those cases came after the FCC dismissed all evidence presented during a six-year public inquiry it had opened itself [4].

Advocacy groups point to animal studies as evidence of biological harm. According to a review commissioned by the World Health Organization, radiofrequency electromagnetic fields from cellphones cause malignant gliomas and heart schwannomas in animals, and scientists have urged reclassifying RF-EMF as a “known human carcinogen” [5]. The Ramazzini Institute in Italy reported that a large-scale lifetime study of lab animals exposed to environmental levels of cell tower radiation developed cancer, while a $25 million study by the U.S. National Toxicology Program reported similar unusual cancers at higher exposure levels [6]. The finalized National Toxicology Program report on GSM and CDMA radiation was released on November 1, 2018 [7].

Industry groups have maintained that no consistent evidence of harm exists at regulated exposure levels. Kennedy, for his part, has previously declared that cellphones are causing harms that are not yet fully acknowledged, according to reporting on his statements [8]. A leaked draft of the Make America Healthy Again Commission’s report outlined new priorities on vaccine safety, medical freedom and wireless radiation studies [9].

Scope of HHS Review and Public Comment Process

HHS said the review will examine peer-reviewed studies and existing exposure limits. The agency described the effort as a study on electromagnetic radiation and health research intended to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies [3]. The public comment docket opened Sept. 19, 2026, according to agency notice. Multiple agencies may participate in the review, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials said.

The FDA’s removal of webpages with old conclusions about cellphone radiation coincided with the launch of the HHS study [3]. A NaturalNews report described the move as “a quiet but monumental act of historical revisionism” unfolding within federal health bureaucracy, noting that the removal coincided with the formal study launch [10].

Kennedy said public input will inform policy recommendations, and he has characterized wireless radiation as a “major health concern” in an interview with USA Today on Jan. 16, one day after HHS launched the study [11]. The scope includes radiofrequency exposures from cell towers, Wi-Fi and 5G equipment, as well as extremely low frequency fields from power lines.

Existing federal exposure limits have drawn criticism from independent researchers. Bill Cadwallader wrote that “the current ICNIRP ‘safety guidelines’ are obsolete” and that proofs of harm arise even though radiation is below those guidelines, citing conflicts of interest among ICNIRP members due to their relationships with telecommunications or electric companies [12]. Cindy Sage’s BioInitiative Report argued that “there is a need for a biological standard to replace the thermal standard and to also protect against cumulative effects across the EM spectrum” [13].

Reactions from Scientists, Industry and Advocacy Groups

Public health researchers have offered differing interpretations of the evidence. A peer-reviewed study conducted by the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields concluded that “existing exposure limits for wireless radiation are inadequate, outdated, and harmful to human health and wildlife” [14]. The BioInitiative Report noted that the IARC RF Working Group “did not find the evidence insufficient to classify (Group 3) or not a carcinogen (Group 4),” describing the classification outcome as a notable achievement in scientific attention [13].

The telecom industry has said current limits protect public health. A New Hampshire Commission to Study the Environmental and Health Effects of Evolving 5G Technology heard from thirteen experts in epidemiology, occupational health, toxicology, physics, and engineering; all but the wireless industry representative agreed that RF radiation from wireless devices affects humans, animals, insects, and plants [15].

EMF safety advocates welcomed the review. Miriam Eckenfels, director of Children’s Health Defense’s EMR & Wireless Program, said, “This move is signaling very strong steps in the right direction” [16]. The Cyprus National Committee on Environment and Child Health previously warned that using mobile devices could be potentially harmful to children, with president Stella Michaelidou stating, “Documentation of other potential and more serious biological side effects are on the tip of an emerging iceberg” [12]. In 2017, the Minister of Culture and Education in Cyprus directed a ban of WiFi from kindergarten and elementary school classrooms [12].

Researchers have also documented effects on brain activity and reproductive health. The BioInitiative Report catalogued studies finding that sperm motility, count, morphology, and viability were reduced in active cell phone users in a dose-dependent manner, and that cell phone radiofrequency radiation during waking hours affects brain wave activity during subsequent sleep [13]. Laboratory research on GSM exposure found increases in reactive area of 20-25% in the cortex and hippocampus of rat brains [17].

Next Steps and Policy Implications

HHS will accept public comments for a set period before compiling findings and issuing recommendations. The review could influence federal guidelines on wireless exposure, though officials said no immediate regulatory changes are planned. Further updates are expected as the review progresses.

Advocates have called for precautionary measures. The BioInitiative Report recommended “using the precautionary principle to justify reducing exposures where feasible and to review the evidence for the existing exposure limits, which… are based on thermal effects only,” citing European Parliament discussions and a letter from European Environment Agency Director Jacqueline McGlade [13].

The FCC continues to operate under radiation safety guidelines that critics say are outdated. According to one analysis, the commission’s guidelines were “last updated when dial-up internet was cutting edge,” while scientific evidence suggests immune systems may be paying the price for cumulative exposure [18]. As the MAHA movement awaits study results, the influence of Big Wireless corporations and friendly regulators remains a focus of concern [19].

Kennedy’s broader transparency push includes a podcast launched via HHS, which he framed as a tool for public transparency, saying, “This podcast is about telling the truth, especially when it’s uncomfortable” [20].

References

1. ChildrensHealthDefense.org. “‘Every American Wearing a Wearable’ Is Not a Vision We Share”. ChildrensHealthDefense.org.
2. NaturalNews.com. “HHS launches study on cellphone radiation risks as FDA removes safety claims”. NaturalNews.com. January 19, 2026.
3. NTD.com. “HHS Says It Will Start Study on Cellphone Radiation”. NTD.com. January 16, 2026.
4. ChildrensHealthDefense.org. “Lawsuits Expose FCCs Failure to Weigh Evidence of Health Impact of Wireless Technology”. ChildrensHealthDefense.org. February 12, 2021.
5. NaturalNews.com. “Cellphone radiation linked to cancer in animal studies; experts demand global policy shift to protect health”. NaturalNews.com. April 30, 2025.
6. GreenMedInfo.com. “Worlds Largest Animal Study On Cell Tower Radiation Confirms Cancer Link”. GreenMedInfo.com.
7. Mercola.com. “The Worst Cellphone You Could Ever Carry in Your Pocket”. Mercola.com. March 22, 2022.
8. ZeroHedge.com. “FDA Removes Web Content Saying Cellphones Are Harmless – HHS Launches Study”. ZeroHedge.com. January 17, 2026.
9. ChildrensHealthDefense.org. “Leaked MAHA Report Goes Strong on Vaccines, Soft on Pesticides”. ChildrensHealthDefense.org.
10. NaturalNews.com. “RFK’s HHS Dismantles FDA’s Radiation Lies, Launches Probe Into Cellphone Cancer Threat”. NaturalNews.com. January 19, 2026.
11. ChildrensHealthDefense.org. “RFK Jr. Tells USA Today: Wireless Radiation Is ‘Major Health Concern'”. ChildrensHealthDefense.org. January 20, 2026.
12. Bill Cadwallader. “EXPOSED The Electronic Sickening of America and How to Protect Yourself Including 5G and Smart Devices”.
13. Cindy Sage. “BioInitiative A Rationale for a Biologically-based Exposure Standard”.
14. NaturalNews.com. “Scientists call for moratorium on 5G after study shows regulators ignoring health risks of radiation”. NaturalNews.com. October 20, 2022.
15. NaturalNews.com. “Landmark study highlights health threats of 5G on people + planet”. NaturalNews.com. December 29, 2020.
16. ChildrensHealthDefense.org. “HHS to Study Cellphone Health Risks, as FDA Scrubs Online Safety Claims”. ChildrensHealthDefense.org. January 16, 2026.
17. Elsevier. “Effect of an acute 900 MHz GSM exposure on glia in the rat brain: A time-dependent study”. Neurobiology of Disease. 2007.
18. NaturalNews.com. “Study suggests cell towers are causing widespread immune system suppression, priming populations for sickness”. NaturalNews.com. March 11, 2026.
19. ActivistPost.com. “Can the MAHA Movement Overcome the Influence of Big Wireless?”. ActivistPost.com. March 2, 2026.
20. NaturalNews.com. “Health Secretary Kennedy Launches Podcast Targeting Official Health Narratives”. NaturalNews.com. April 10, 2026.
21. NaturalNews.com. “A new federal probe: Government revisits the lingering question of cellphone safety”. NaturalNews.com. January 24, 2026.

Explainer Infographic

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As the Covid-19 pandemic struck this nation, many Americans were stunned to see top federal health officials brazenly lie to buttress their own power. Bureaucrats and politicians unleashed themselves by shrouding how the feds bankrolled the creation of the pathogen, sanctifying a pseudo-miracle cure vaccine that was concocted almost overnight, and denying the vast collateral damage from effectively placing hundreds of millions of citizens under house arrest. 

But there were precedents for all those crimes and follies in the federal war on drugs that began more than a century ago. That crusade established the right of federal officials to define reality and to scourge anyone who tried to reveal that federal Drug Czars were dangerous hucksters.

Federal contortions on marijuana are Exhibit A for why Americans should never trust Uncle Sam on drugs. For more than 50 years, the federal government shamelessly pretended that marijuana had no recognized medical use. 

Last December 18, President Trump signed an executive order entitled, “Increasing Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research.” Trump ordered the Attorney General and the Drug Enforcement Administration to speed up rule-making to finally enable far more medical research on the benefits of marijuana. On April 23, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that henceforth all “FDA-approved marijuana-derived products” and “State-licensed medical marijuana products” are shifted from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3, a far less restrictive federal regulatory regime. 

But the long history of federal persecution of marijuana users, researchers, and growers vivified the folly of trusting federal intervention to protect Americans’ health. 

During the 1920s, the US Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to grow cannabis to boost their sagging incomes (hemp was used for such things as paper and rope). Marijuana also grew in popularity during the 1920s as a result of Prohibition, which inflated the price of alcohol by curtailing its availability. 

During the Great Depression, Mexican immigrants surged into the United States searching for work and brought marijuana with them. Hostility toward the immigrants led to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively criminalized the possession of marijuana and, according to Yale professor David Musto, “mostly put a lot of jazz bands in jail.” 

Harvard Professor of Psychiatry Lester Grinspoon notes, “Between 1839 and 1900, more than a hundred articles on the therapeutic uses of marijuana appeared in scientific journals. As late as 1937, extract of cannabis was still a legitimate medicine marketed by drug companies.” The American Medical Association testified at hearings that year urging that marijuana not be effectively banned. Unfortunately, Congress — bowing to the exhortations of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — proclaimed in 1937 that marijuana had no medical value. Congress effectively prohibited any use of marijuana for ailing Americans. But simply because a majority of Congressmen say something doesn’t make it true. 

Federal Judges Need Not Apply

In 1972, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) petitioned the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to reclassify marijuana and recognize its medical uses. The director of the agency refused to consider the petition. NORML took the case to a federal appeals court, which issued a ruling that admonished the agency for rejecting the petition without “a reflective consideration and analysis.”

In 1975, NORML sued the Drug Enforcement Administration (the successor agency to the Bureau) to force the agency to evaluate the evidence on whether Americans should have access to marijuana strictly for medicinal purposes. The DEA held a hearing, and a DEA administrative law judge found some merit in some of NORML’s positions. But the chief of the DEA overturned those aspects of the judge’s decision.

In 1977, a federal court of appeals criticized the DEA’s final order and ordered the agency to reconsider the evidence for the medical benefits of marijuana.

In 1982, NORML petitioned the federal appeals court to force the DEA to follow the court’s previous orders. That same year, the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine concluded: “Cannabis and its derivatives have shown promise in the treatment of a variety of disorders, [including] glaucoma, asthma, … and in the nausea and vomiting of cancer chemotherapy.”

In 1986, a DEA administrative law judge launched an extensive evaluation of the evidence for marijuana. DEA judge Francis Young spent two years conducting hearings and listening to scores of expert witnesses. Young ruled in 1988: “The marijuana plant is anything but a new drug….Uncontroverted evidence in this record indicates that marijuana was being used therapeutically by mankind 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for a DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in the light of the evidence of this record.”

How did the DEA respond to the evidence? DEA administrator John Lawn denounced the judge’s finding as a “cruel and dangerous hoax” and refused to accept the judge’s ruling. Lawn announced that the agency would only allow medical use of marijuana if it had already “currently accepted medical use.” And since the DEA forbade any doctors from prescribing marijuana for medical use, that somehow meant that the agency must continue to ban its use in the future.

NORML sued again, appealing to a federal court to force the DEA to accept the recommendations of its own administrative law judge, and the court again compelled the DEA to reexamine the issue. 

In March 1992, the DEA “reconsidered” and announced that it was right all along and that it would continue to ban any medical use of marijuana. DEA chief Robert Bonner decreed: “Lay testimonials, impressions of physicians, isolated case studies, random clinical experience, reports so lacking in details they cannot be scientifically evaluated and all other forms of anecdotal proof are entirely irrelevant.”

Bonner got warmed up and showed some of the fervor that is the pride of DEA: “Beyond doubt, the claims that marijuana is medicine are false, dangerous and cruel. Sick men, women and children can be fooled by these claims and experiment with the drug. Instead of being helped, they risk serious side effects.” Bonner acknowledged that he based his findings on the same testimony and documents that led DEA Administrative Law Judge Young to an opposite conclusion four years earlier. (Bonner denounced me for writing a Washington Times article exposing the DEA’s chemical warfare on hapless Guatemalan farmers.)

As Harvard psychiatry professors Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar noted at that time, “The Government’s real concern is not that marijuana is ineffective as a medicine, but that it is too effective. The Government cannot acknowledge any of this because it has vastly exaggerated the dangers of marijuana for more than 50 years and is still committed to its war against the drug.” 

Pseudo-Science Trumps Democracy

Clinton’s drug czar General Barry McCaffrey effectively claimed to be a wiser scientist than all the experts who researched marijuana’s effects. On August 15, 1996, while campaigning in California against Proposition 215, which would have legalized the medical use of marijuana, McCaffrey declared: “There is not a shred of scientific evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is useful or needed. This is not science. This is not medicine. This is a cruel hoax.” On December 30, 1996, when asked by a CNN reporter “is there any evidence…that marijuana is useful in a medical situation?” McCaffrey responded: “No, none at all. There are hundreds of studies that indicate that it isn’t.” McCaffrey ridiculed claims of marijuana’s benefit as “Cheech ‘n’ Chong medicine.”

After voters passed the proposition, the drug czar’s office put out a press release warning: “The passage of [Proposition 215] creates a significant threat to the drug control system that protects our children….The decision to bring appropriate criminal or administrative enforcement action will be, as always, decided on a case-by-case basis.” McCaffrey’s warning sparked a vision of a DEA agent lurking underneath the desk of every doctor. 

Federal judge Fern Smith issued a preliminary injunction on April 30, 1997, prohibiting the feds from punishing doctors: “The government’s fear that frank dialogue between physicians and patients about medical marijuana might foster drug use…does not justify infringing the First Amendment…[T]his case is about the ability of doctors, on an individualized basis, to give advice and recommendations to bona fide patients suffering from serious, debilitating illnesses regarding the possible benefits of personal, medical use of small quantities of marijuana.”

Clinton administration officials sneered at marijuana referendum results. Attorney General Janet Reno declared: “I don’t think that the determination as to whether there is a medical, a scientific medical use of marijuana, should be made at the ballot box. I think it should be made in an informed way after appropriate scientific evaluation.” And if government officials chose to ignore all the scientific evidence, then that was merely political science. 

The Specter of Emaciated Chemo Patients

The federal government in 1978 began a program providing marijuana directly to a small number of people with illnesses that undeniably benefited from consuming marijuana, such as glaucoma and epilepsy. But the George H.W. Bush administration closed the program to any new entrants in 1992 after only eight people were certified — even though hundreds of thousands of people suffered from the same illnesses. The Clinton administration refused to reopen the program to new sufferers.

The Justice Department, in a 1999 brief, declared: “It became clear that the potential widespread use of marijuana for ‘medical’ purposes under the program…was bad public policy.” According to the Justice Department, the first requisite of good public policy is to pretend that individual citizens do not exist.

In 1997, the CBS situation comedy Murphy Brown featured star Candice Bergen suffering from the aftereffects of chemotherapy. A friend provided her with some marijuana. DEA chief Thomas Constantine denounced CBS for “doing a great disservice” by “trivializing drug abuse” and “pandering to the libertarian supporters of an ‘open society’ and to the myths of legalization.”

Constantine barked: “I am extremely troubled that at a time when teenage drug abuse is doubling…a television show of the caliber of Murphy Brown would portray marijuana as medicine. It is not medicine.” Constantine promised to investigate “if any laws were broken” by broadcasting that show. 

Clinton’s drug policy was haunted by the specter of emaciated chemotherapy patients desperately needing something to stop their vomiting and fire their appetites. And nothing works better for this than smoking marijuana. The feds approved pills with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana; however, pills are scant help to someone heaving their guts.

Bluster from Washington political hacks failed to stop the cascade of new scientific evidence on the medicinal benefits of marijuana:

• A 1997 study performed on animals at the University of California at San Francisco found that cannabinoids (the active ingredient in marijuana) can be an effective reliever of pain without the adverse side effects of opiates.

• The American Journal of Psychiatry reported in 1999 that German researchers successfully used the major psychoactive ingredient in marijuana to treat Tourette’s Syndrome (a complex neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by sudden spasms). 

• The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported in 1998 that marijuana may protect brain cells during a stroke.

• British researchers revealed in 2000 that a marijuana compound was very effective in helping control the muscle spasms that afflict people with multiple sclerosis.

Clinton administration officials suppressed research results of United Nations affiliates that embarrassed the US drug war. The World Health Organization (WHO) completed a major study of marijuana’s effects in 1997. The draft of the final report included a comparison of the adverse effects of cannabis with alcohol and tobacco. However, the WHO, bowing to pressure from the US government and other drug warriors, suppressed that chapter.

New Scientist, a British magazine, acquired a copy of the study and reported that in five out of seven categories of long-term health damage, alcohol was judged more harmful than marijuana. The report also observed that “in developed societies, cannabis appears to play little role in injuries caused by violence, as does alcohol.”

Obama’s Great Betrayal 

In 2008, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama appeared to pledge an end to the persecution of medical marijuana users and providers: “What I’m not going to be doing is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.” Regardless, the Obama administration brought almost twice as many prosecutions against medical marijuana providers and users as did the George W. Bush administration.

Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, complained in 2012 that “Obama has become more hostile to medical marijuana patients than any president in US history.” A 2012 Time Magazine analysis noted that the DEA “has made it clear that medical marijuana is not medicine, and even called it a ‘mortal danger.’” 

Obama’s repression of medical marijuana coincided with an explosion in abuse of prescription painkillers. A 2016 federal report estimated that 38 percent of adults had used prescription painkillers in the previous year, resulting in 19,000 deaths (more than the national homicide total). Medical marijuana is a proven painkiller, but the Obama administration (supported by pharmaceutical companies’ campaign contributions and lobbying) scorned it. The National Institute on Drug Abuse torpedoed a 2011 research project testing whether “marijuana helps combat veterans with their post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Generations of politicians and bureaucrats scorned the scientific evidence on marijuana to score “tough on crime” points. Anyone with an illness or malady that marijuana could help became merely collateral damage in the war on drugs. More than ten million Americans were arrested for marijuana to help prop up Washington’s campaign to demonize weed and anyone who touched it. 

Marijuana policy vivifies how federal policymakers were perpetually more interested in controlling and punishing Americans than in permitting citizens to find relief for all that ailed them. “When you mix politics and science, you get politics,” observed John Barry in The Great Influenza, his history of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak. Unfortunately, hard facts can rarely compete with massive national campaigns to demonize anyone who refuses to submit to the latest commands. 

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Pollutants associated with the exploding data center industry are linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses and neurological and developmental damage in children. New information on health impacts is coming to light as the Trump administration, largely through regulatory changes at the EPA, moves to weaken pollution and permitting safeguards meant to protect public health.

Children may face some of the greatest health risks from the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, as soaring electricity demand drives increased reliance on polluting power plants, diesel generators and gas turbines, according to a new report from the Environmental Protection Network (EPN).

Pollutants associated with the exploding data center industry are linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses and neurological and developmental damage in children. People living near — and sometimes far — from the centers are also at higher risk of cancer, heart and lung disease.

Information on health impacts is coming to light as the Trump administration, largely through regulatory changes at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), moves to weaken pollution and permitting safeguards meant to protect public health.

EPN documented “at least 30” federal actions at the EPA and in other governmental organizations since January 2025 that could increase pollution-related health risks and shift the health costs of data centers onto communities and families.

“EPA should be the public-health watchdog, not part of the industry’s development team,” EPN argued.

Children’s developing lungs and brains face the greatest risk

Children are particularly vulnerable to data center pollution because their lungs, brains and other organs are still developing. They also take in more pollution relative to their body weight, the report said.

Air pollution can exacerbate asthma, which affects approximately 4.8 million U.S. children. Exposure to mercury and other toxic metals can damage developing brains and nervous systems. Arsenic, which can be present in coal ash and wastewater, is a known carcinogen.

The potential exposure extends well beyond communities immediately surrounding data centers.

At least 188 schools are located within three miles of proposed gas-fired power plants being developed to supply data centers, according to the report.

EPN could identify no federal accounting of the number of schools, daycare centers, playgrounds or athletic fields located near the centers themselves.

The new gas-fired plants would add new sources of pollution at a time when 33.5 million children already face pollution-related health issues — because they live in counties with a failing grade for at least one measure of ozone or particle pollution, according to the American Lung Association’s most recent “State of the Air” report.

Data center air pollution could lead to big increases in asthma, premature deaths

The U.S. has more than 3,000 operational data centers, with more than 1,500 in development. The centers use about 4.7% of the electricity generated in the U.S. and are projected to use roughly 11.8% by 2030.

Many facilities also have their own large fleets of diesel backup generators. Others have dedicated natural-gas turbines. Those sources can emit nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which form smog and fine-particle pollution.

Coal- or gas-fired power plants supplying electricity can release mercury and other toxic metals, and their coal ash and wastewater can contaminate surface water or groundwater, according to the report.

A 2026 study by researchers from the University of California, Riverside, Caltech and Rochester Institute of Technology estimated that air pollution from U.S. data centers could generate $11.7 billion to $20.9 billion in annual public-health costs by 2028.

The researchers used predictive modeling to test different scenarios. Under their high-growth scenario, the pollution could contribute to roughly 600,000 asthma symptom cases and 1,262 premature deaths.

Much of the damage came from pollution generated by the energy needed to power the centers.

In the EPN study‘s high-growth scenario, electricity generation accounted for about $19.3 billion of the estimated $20.9 billion in annual health costs and 1,165 of 1,262 estimated premature deaths. That means communities located far from a data center — including in other states — could bear some of its pollution burden.

On-site generators are also a significant source of pollution.

The researchers modeled Virginia data center generators operating at emissions equal to just 10% of their permitted levels and estimated that the resulting pollution could contribute to approximately 14,000 asthma symptom cases, 13 to 19 premature deaths and $220 million to $300 million in annual health costs.

Speedier permitting comes with fewer safeguards

The EPA’s mission is to “protect human health and the environment.”

“Yet Administrator Lee Zeldin has made turning the United States into the ‘AI capital of the world’ a pillar of EPA’s work, and the agency’s FY 2027 plans count making Clean Air Act requirements more flexible for AI data centers as progress,” the report said.

Of the federal actions cited by the report, most explicitly target or cite AI or data centers. The remainder affect the energy sources that supply them or the environmental rules governing their development.

Among these are policies that encourage greater use of coal and other fossil fuels to meet rising electricity demand, keeping some fossil-fuel power plants operating longer, and restricting or slowing federal support for wind and solar power.

At the same time, the EPA has moved to eliminate or weaken rules limiting carbon emissions, mercury and other toxic air pollution, interstate smog, oil-and-gas pollution, coal-plant wastewater and coal ash. The agency has also proposed ending greenhouse-gas reporting requirements for most large facilities and suppliers.

Several actions directly make it easier or faster to build and power data centers. The administration has ordered agencies to speed permitting and environmental reviews for AI infrastructure.

The EPA has eased some requirements for temporary gas turbines and backup generators and proposed allowing portions of data centers and power plants to begin construction before major air permits are issued, according to the report.

Other changes could reduce opportunities for the public to learn about or comment on some air permits. The Army Corps of Engineers has also made data centers eligible for a streamlined wetlands permit that does not require project-specific public notice and comment, the report said.

Actions by EPA and the Army Corps, along with a U.S. Supreme Court decision, have rolled back water protection under the Clean Water Act.

The EPA is also prioritizing the review of new chemicals, including PFAS, needed for data center construction, some of which are known to be harmful to human health.

The federal government has also scaled back National Environmental Policy Act procedures, and EPA has directed enforcement staff to exercise greater restraint in cases involving energy production and power generation.

“The problem is not faster permitting by itself, but faster permitting with fewer safeguards. Once permits are issued, construction begins and money is committed, changing course becomes much harder,” according to EPN.

The report was published amid widespread controversy over data centers. Opposition to data centers has been building nationwide as communities criticize higher electricity bills, stress on existing power grids and heavy water use.

Opposition is particularly strong in the rural areas where most data center construction is slated to take place.

President Donald Trump took to Truth Social this week to defend data centers. He said that AI and the data centers that power it “will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History ­­— Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet.”

Most responders to his post disagreed.

Related articles in The Defender

• AI Data Center Boom Fueling ‘Tidal Wave’ of New PFAS Production
• Watch: AI Data Centers ‘Spreading Like an Aggressive Cancer’
• Cheating the System: How AI Data Centers Bypass Water and Air Pollution Laws and Permits
• Trump Calls for Rapid Expansion of AI Data Centers, Including on Federal Lands

The post AI Data Centers’ Growing Air Pollution Threatens Children’s Developing Brains and Lungs appeared first on Activist Post.

As US President Donald Trump threatens Iran with annihilation, Iranian missiles and drones have been targeting Israeli Mossad proxies, American bases and destroying tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Washington’s allies in Riyadh are meanwhile suffering enormous losses due to their war on Yemen, which has collapsed a joint project that sought to inflict regime change.

In the latest episode of The Target stream, MintPress News’ Robert Inlakesh takes a look at the silent ballistic missile attacks that are being carried out against US bases in Jordan that are no longer even receiving comment from US Central Command. As President Trump’s rhetoric at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) suggested genocidal intent, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been acting preemptively to take out rising threats.

With gas prices continuing to go up, hitting working class people in their pockets, the Trump administration is refusing to end the war on Iran and continues to back up Israel at every turn. The US media, on the other hand, is leaking more damning reports about the stunning military failure in the Persian Gulf, exposing that the Navy noted a total of 8 attempted suicides aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also addressed the General Assembly, speaking to an almost empty room as up to 77 nations delegates walked out upon him taking to the podium. During his speech, he played victim while also holding up a prop pager in reference to the Mossad operation carried out against Hezbollah in Lebanon two years ago. Up to 3,000 people were wounded in what the former head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, labelled an act of terrorism.

Beyond that, the Israeli Premier’s speech was received as weak. Robert Inlakesh notes that two years ago Netanyahu had ordered the assassination of Hezbollah leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah from the United Nations building, while this time around he decided to complain about popular streamer Hasan Piker.

Back in Tel Aviv, the Israeli media have been signalling that their aid in targeting the Yemeni Armed Forces could be a stepping stone towards normalisation with Saudi Arabia. Yet, it hasn’t proven a very successful one. Riyadh’s proxy forces in Yemen continue to take a beating, losing more territory by the day, as the Ansarallah-led government in Sana’a vows to deliver more crushing blows to Saudi infrastructure in retaliation for ongoing air strikes.

Israel’s presence on the strategic Mayyun Island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait has officially come to an end, as Yemen keeps a close eye on its military buildups in Somaliland and Socotra Island.

Last year, the Israeli leadership were presenting their grand plans for regional hegemony to the world, openly discussing the Greater Israel Project, however, the repeated failures of the US-Israeli alliance in their war against Iran and its allies have left them lashing out irrationally with no clear route to victory.

The Target stream analyses this growing shift, the change in power dynamics, the footage coming from the battlefield in Yemen and the desperate propaganda of the US empire’s allies.

The post Iran Strikes Mossad Proxies As Yemen Collapses Saudi-Israeli Plot In Dramatic Fashion appeared first on Activist Post.

Why the UN Wants a Different World Map

Key Takeaways

• On Sept. 4, 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted the “Correct the Map” resolution by a 164-1 vote, endorsing the Equal Earth projection.
• The non-binding resolution encourages governments, schools, media, international organizations, and technology platforms to use equal-area maps when comparing the sizes of continents.
• Unlike Mercator, Equal Earth preserves the true relative size of landmasses, dramatically changing how places such as Greenland, Canada, and Africa appear beside one another.

For more than four centuries, the Mercator projection has shaped one of the world’s most familiar views of the planet.

The icon map was designed to make navigation on the Earth’s oceans easier, but it came with a cost: the farther a place lies from the equator, the more dramatically its size is exaggerated.

On Sept. 4, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the Equal Earth projection, an equal-area world map published in 2018, and encouraged governments, schools, media, and technology platforms to use it wherever the comparative size of continents matters.

The graphic above shows that map, using the free Equal Earth wall map published by cartographer Tom Patterson, one of the projection’s three creators, with vote details from UN resolution A/80/L.104 and the UN’s meetings coverage.

The Old Map vs. the New Map

Every flat map has to give something up, and the two below make different trade-offs.

Mercator, on top, keeps compass bearings straight and pays for it in area, stretching land more as it approaches the poles. Equal Earth, beneath it, keeps area exact and lets shapes bend slightly instead. Africa, Canada, and Greenland are highlighted on both so you can see what happens to each when the projection changes.

Gerardus Mercator designed his map in 1569 for sailors. A straight line on it follows a constant compass bearing, which made it indispensable at sea and, much later, useful for seamless online maps.

The trade-off is that it stretches the world more and more as you move away from the equator. At 60° north, roughly the latitude of Oslo or Anchorage, land is drawn four times too large. At 80° north, it is drawn 33 times too large.

Equal Earth was created in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič of Esri, Tom Patterson of the U.S. National Park Service, and Bernhard Jenny of Monash University, and published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.

Equal Earth keeps sizes exact while borrowing the rounded outline of the popular Robinson projection, which is why it looks familiar even though the proportions are different.

How Sizes Change in Different Map Projections

The clearest way to see the difference is to lift three landmasses off the map and place them next to one another at the same scale.

The biggest surprise is not how much Africa grows, but how much Canada and Greenland shrink. Because Africa straddles the equator, Mercator already shows it close to its true scale, while northern landmasses are dramatically enlarged.

Mercator does not shrink Africa. The continent is drawn at roughly 1.1 times its true size, close to exact. Instead, Mercator inflates land farther north, making Africa look smaller by comparison.

Drawn at the same scale, Africa covers about 30.4 million square kilometers, Canada just under 10 million, and Greenland 2.17 million. On Equal Earth, all three appear at their real proportions: Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland and three times the size of Canada.

On Mercator, Canada appears about 50% larger than Africa even though it is only one-third the size, while Greenland appears nearly as large as the continent.

The UN’s Own Map Isn’t Mercator Either

There is one wrinkle in the UN’s push to replace Mercator: Mercator is not the projection used on the UN’s own world map.

Its official Map of the World, shown first below, uses the Robinson projection, a rounded compromise designed to look visually balanced rather than preserve exact area. Beneath it is the Equal Earth map the General Assembly just endorsed, drawn at the same width so the two can be compared directly.

The UN’s own guidance says most of its world maps use Robinson, Winkel Tripel, or Eckert IV projections.

Robinson is far gentler than Mercator, but it is not equal-area. By our calculation, the UN’s map draws Greenland at about 1.5 times its true size and Canada and Russia at about 1.2 times, while Africa comes in at 0.85 times.

Relative to Africa, Canada and Russia look roughly 40% larger than they should, while Greenland looks more than 80% larger.

What Changes Now After the UN’s Vote?

The “Correct the Map” resolution, introduced by Togo for the African Group, passed 164-1 with six abstentions. The United States cast the only “no” vote, calling it a “radical ideological project,” while Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine abstained.

The text is non-binding. It does not ban Mercator or affect navigation charts, but it declares Equal Earth the more accurate representation of continental sizes and urges governments, schools, international organizations, and “global technology platforms” to adopt it.

Web maps are unlikely to change soon, since Google Maps, Apple Maps, and most online maps are built on Web Mercator because it tiles neatly at every zoom level. The vote will likely matter most in classrooms, textbooks, and newsrooms, which is exactly where the “Correct the Map” campaign, backed by the African Union, wants to see change.

The African Union has already adopted Equal Earth, France has said it will drop Mercator from official communications, and Togo plans to update its textbooks and convene UNESCO, the AU, and technology companies in early 2027.

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