The magnitude 5.6 earthquake that just shook portions of three different states should be a huge wake up call for everyone that lives in California. The San Andreas Fault system is locked and loaded, and it is just a matter of time before an absolutely cataclysmic earthquake permanently alters the geography of the state. A day is coming when large portions of Southern California will no longer be above water. I have written about this over and over again, and I have warned about this more times than I can possibly count. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the people that live in the region do not believe that such a disaster will ever happen.

Just hours ago, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake violently rattled the Bay Area…

A magnitude 5.6 earthquake rattled northern California the morning of Wednesday, June 24, triggering alerts across the Bay Area, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The quake was recorded just over 6 miles from Redwood Valley at 8:10 a.m. PT and felt by people across the region, the USGS said.

This was no ordinary earthquake.

In fact, it was so powerful that it was felt in parts of Oregon, parts of Nevada and all over Northern California…

While the strongest shaking was reported right at the quake’s epicenter near Redwood Valley, the tremors traveled more than 600 miles up and down the West Coast, reaching Coos Bay, Oregon in the north and Salinas, California in the south.

That range includes the entire San Francisco Bay Area, home to more than seven million people, and affecting multiple cities including San Jose, Sacramento, Concord, Oakland, Stockton and Modesto.

A lot of people were really freaked out by how strong this quake was.

One woman that lives in Mendocino County is claiming that it was “the biggest earthquake I have felt in my life”…

Moneca Vargas at Saint Mary’s Catholic School in Ukiah told KTVU: ‘That was the biggest earthquake I have felt in my life, and I’ve lived in Ukiah for most of my 54 years. My whole house shook.’

Other residents close to the source in Northern California compared the shockwaves to a ‘freight train’ rolling through their homes, causing items to fall from shelves and officials to sound the official earthquake alert system for quakes stronger than magnitude 4.5.

The epicenter of this event was located very close to the Maacama Fault zone.

And it turns out that the Maacama Fault zone “is part of the larger San Andreas Fault system”…

The epicenter of Wednesday’s earthquake was recorded within seven miles of the Maacama Fault zone.

The Maacama is an major active strike-slip fault capable of causing strong shaking and damage in areas like Mendocino and Sonoma counties, where it runs through rural communities and wine country.

Making the fault even more of a concern to locals is the fact that it is part of the larger San Andreas Fault system, the infamous 800-mile-long fault running through much of California.

Shaking along one portion of the San Andreas Fault system can affect other portions of the San Andreas Fault system.

A number of years ago, this was vividly portrayed in a film entitled “San Andreas” that received a lot of attention at the time.

Unfortunately, the San Andreas Fault system is perfectly primed for a major event.

Last Friday, I shared an article with my core supporters that warned that the San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems “have reached the highest stress levels seen in the past 1,000 years”.

Scientists have told us that someday the San Andreas Fault system could potentially rip wide open all at once.

In my most recent book, I described what that could look like…

If the San Andreas fault does rupture all at once, scientists have warned us that it could produce an earthquake that would be powerful enough to cause the ground on the western side of the San Andreas fault to suddenly drop several feet. Since most of southern California is just barely above sea level, that would allow water from the Pacific Ocean to come pouring in.

Can you imagine the kind of death and destruction that such a disaster would cause?

It would look like much of the southern California coast had just gone into the Pacific Ocean, but actually the Pacific Ocean would suddenly be covering vast stretches of the coast that have now dropped several feet lower than they were previously.

Researchers tell us that similar catastrophes have actually happened along the west coast in the past, and it is just a matter of time before it happens again.

If you live in southern California, it critical for you to understand that it is just a matter of time before “the Big One” strikes.

I have been attempting to sound the alarm about what is going to happen for years, but of course most of those living in the region are not interested in such warnings.

Of course I am not the only one that has been issuing such ominous warnings. Scientists have repeatedly told us that the San Andreas fault appears to be “locked and loaded” and that it could potentially “unzip all at once”.

Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby was the lead author on a study that discovered that land on the western side of the San Andreas fault can instantly sink by up to 3 feet when a major earthquake strikes. He says that it has happened before and that it will happen again.

According to Kirby, a seismic event of this nature is something “that would happen relatively instantaneously”, and he has said that if such a disaster occurred today “you would see seawater rushing in”.

Coastal areas such as Santa Monica are barely above sea level.

A large enough seismic event could leave those areas completely covered by water.

But most people that live in Southern California will not take the warnings seriously until disaster finally strikes.

Meanwhile, there has been more unusual activity at the Yellowstone Supervolcano.

Earlier this month, an unexpected hydrothermal explosion suddenly created a new pool of super-heated water…

Another hydrothermal explosion has occurred at Yellowstone National Park, highlighting the unstable nature of the reserve’s extensive volcanic network, the U.S. Geological Survey says.

On June 13, a small hydrothermal explosion occurred at Yellowstone’s Biscuit Basin — a popular thermal area located less than 2 miles northwest of Old Faithful, according to the USGS.

The explosion occurred at 5:09 a.m. local time and did not cause any injuries, according to the USGS. A new pool formed as a result of activity.

We have been witnessing so much unusual activity all over the globe in recent months.

But I am convinced that what we have experienced so far is nothing compared to what is coming.

The giant space rock that we all exist on as we hurtle through space is exhibiting increasing signs of instability.

One of these days time will run out for those that are living along the San Andreas Fault, and for many of them there will be no escape.

The post California Just Got Another Major Warning That “The Big One” Is Coming appeared first on Activist Post.

Our Prideful Idiocracy

This country wasn’t exactly classy in 2015, when Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his candidacy for president. Casual Fridays had already taken the culture by storm. People of Walmart was already a website. I think twerking was already popular, and Kim Kardashian’s huge ass was in the middle of everything.

They stopped teaching Civics in high school before I entered high school. So you know that was a long time ago. Civics taught students the rights and obligations of citizens in a society. Now, it wasn’t needed as much back in the 1940s and 1950s, when our civilization placed great importance on manners and politeness. What Ambrose Bierce defined as “the most acceptable form of hypocrisy.” Sure, you knew most people didn’t meant it when they said, “let me know if there’s anything I can do.” I mean, did anyone really ever let these people know that they could do something? It was a common courtesy. Our world used to be full of such common courtesies. School just reinforced what most parents taught their children. Say please and thank you. As Barney the purple dinosaur reminded my children’s generation- they’re the magic words. There’s a thin line between a common courtesy and an empty gesture. Empty or not, they elevated the overall discourse. Insincere pleasantries are still pleasant.

Now you might be saying, “Oh geez, is he going to be claiming how much better things were when he was young again? Brag about how no one had tattoos, the men were lean and the chicks were hot? Talk about how you could be a goof off like him, and still be paid a living wage?” Well, okay, maybe I am figuratively yelling to get off of my lawn. I resisted the idea of being old for a long time, but now I’m claiming every senior citizen discount I can. Just don’t call me elderly. We weren’t as civil as our parents’ generation. My parents never, ever said “fuck.” We did. Quite a bit. We didn’t respect them the way they had respected their parents. The hippies which came just before me were the first to question some of the “establishment.” Oddly, they never seemed to question our banking system. Or the medical industrial complex. Their ire was primarily directed at the Vietnam War. But no other war. Ever. They were at odds with conventional morality, which frowned on premarital sex and drug use.

The foundation for our present day Idiocracy was built on feminism. Most women entered the workplace, leaving most homes with latchkey kids. No fault divorce. The celebration of single mothers in pop culture. Easy access to abortion. “If it feels good, do it” was an updated version of “Do what thou wilt,” credited to the monstrous Aleister Crowley, but actually originating with Ben Franklin’s Hellfire Club. That was the downside to all the personal liberty we enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s. I’ve talked about how I fought a battle to keep my shirttail out, back in a tucked in world. To say we’ve swung too far in the opposite direction is a kinder way of saying Americans have let themselves go over the past fifty years.; a Hall of Fame understatement. I never thought I’d see people out in public wearing pajamas. I sometimes can’t determine someone’s race or sex these days. Call me a hopeless bigot, but I think that matters. And yes, you can judge our culture’s collective book by its cover.

But more important than mere physical facades are the character of the people. A half century of diabolical conditioning has resulted in generations of soft males with decreased testosterone, and aggressive females with perpetual resting bitch faces. Not to mention an increasing number of confused “transgenders,” whose anger results in a shockingly high suicide rate. All of them- male, female, and they/them, are less polite than any previous edition of Americans. They’re far less likely to say “thank you.” Some struggle to simply say “hello” in response to a greeting. And crowds display a collective stupidity that goes beyond that. It’s routine for thousands of fans to chant “Bullshit!” at sporting events now. I thought it was bad when they would sometimes yell “You suck!” during games a few decades ago. A simple “boo” seemed much more civil. You’d think that the lack of testosterone would make physical violence less likely, but somehow a simple word, or a simple look, can trigger it now.

So it’s appropriate that Trumpenstein- the leader of the free world- scheduled an outdoor UFC extravaganza on the White House lawn. In our mixed up, muddled up, shook up civilization, that is the perfect celebration for the 250th anniversary of our independence. Now, I don’t expect Trumpenstein or the evil Democrats to talk meaningfully about the Founders, and the importance of human liberty. No one is going to quote from the Declaration of Independence, which is all but labeled Hate Speech at this point. No one is going to dwell on that whole angry people breaking away from tyrannical rulers thing. Even our fantastically dumbed down populace might make some kind of connection. The event was what you’d expect; enjoyed by what’s left of the MAGA crowd, deplored by much of America. It was entertaining to hear one of the fighters shout, “Michelle Obama is a man!” He was quickly repudiated by UFC president Dana White. No outlandish conspiracy theories need apply.

Trumpenstein also decided to paint the bottom of the Reflection Pool on the Mall a swimming pool blue. It’s a wonder he didn’t coat it with a garish gold, to match the new decor of the White House. Apparently, he must have used the lowest paid illegal visa painters, because the paint started immediately peeling. Well, at least Trumpenstein turned away from ruining what’s left of the Middle East for a moment, to address domestic issues. Sure, it wasn’t a rebuild of the infrastructure, or a revival of DOGE, but it made a portion of the populace briefly happy. Trumpenstein is the perfect president for the times, a real President Camacho for the Idiocracy. Like many of his countrymen/women/they/thems, he’s rude, inarticulate and unapologetic. He’s overweight and loves fast food. He doesn’t keep promises. He’s untrustworthy. He is America 2.0. As we stand on the brink of our 250th anniversary, there couldn’t be a starker contrast between the former reality TV star and the Founding Fathers.

I used to actually know people who possessed genuine class. Not the class of a caste system, which designates a person’s place in the hierarchy. This kind of class could once be found in trailer parks and inner cities. It wasn’t necessarily associated with one’s net worth. Do we have any leaders, let alone common riffraff, who have real class today? Can anyone act dignified? Every ambassador, every debutante, every One Percenter, seems only a few words away from unleashing a flurry of obscenities, if not launching a physical attack. The poor never took any shit. Now the hoi polloi have the same reluctance to talk things out. Like their immature leaders, they forego diplomacy in lieu of fists flying. Bombs dropping. As boxer turned philosopher Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” You all know I generally like Candace Owens, but she announced that she was pregnant again recently, and explained that whenever she’s pregnant she feels like fighting. With her dainty dukes.

That’s an odd reaction to pregnancy, but all 57 genders love to talk about punching someone in the face. The “Woke” Left especially loves to fantasize about punching

”Nazis” in the face. Since pretty much anyone we don’t like is now de facto a “Nazi,” this leaves a lot of people very vulnerable. I wonder if “Nazis” can say that they love to punch people who call them Nazis in the face? Just imagine how many punches the Mark Levins and Ben Shapiros would have to absorb in such a scenario. We really haven’t progressed much since the days of “you wanna take this outside?” But an Idiocracy pretty much has to be violent. Kick someone in the balls, or watch someone get kicked in the balls. The UFC, in its pure brutality, is the perfect sport for the times. No lions or Christians needed. Just lots of blood. And the same kind of Drunk White Fans who cheer on all Black football and basketball teams. It’s exactly the same mob mentality that used to pack family lunches to watch the public hanging.

I have sometimes cited the 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. It had a huge impact on me when I read it during my misspent youth. I feel confident in saying that, in the 1980s very few other 20 somethings were reading this ancient book, that chronicled how gullible and unthinking the mass of humans have always been. It was instructive to know that vapid catchphrases would pop up frequently on the streets of 18th century London, long before some creative inner city resident came up with “right on” and “I heard that.” You don’t have to be Frankenstein’s monster for the crowd to turn against you with burning torches and pitchforks. Frank Capra’s brilliant Meet John Doe, something I cite even more often, demonstrated what would likely happen if a true populist hero emerged on the scene. With just a dash of emotional propaganda, passionate fans would destroy him. Most people are followers. They are looking for guidance.

The angry mob is more frightening than a confederation of conspirators, holed away in a dark castle, plotting future misdeeds. Look at how easily people can be turned by idle school, neighborhood, or workplace gossip. They don’t need the Bilderbergers to manipulate them. Born troublemakers exist. People who enjoy causing misery to others. With all the misshapen and tattooed bodies in present-day ‘Murrica, they don’t have to look very far to find a nice target for ridicule. The problem is, though, when the majority are overweight, and few are even attempting to look presentable, let alone attractive, what poisonous barbs are used against them? If most of the crowd is fat and ugly, can you really call anyone fat or ugly? Maybe the few lookers get singled out? “Hey, Mr. 6 pack abs, kiss my fat tattooed ass!” “Hey, little miss 2 percent body fat, miss perfect hair- why don’t you eat another salad with no dressing?” Maybe the transgenders scoff at those who still have their original biological equipment.

So no, things were far from perfect when I was an obese young boy in a far more fit world. We all stepped on anthills. For the fun of it. Dogs got left outside. In a literal doghouse. The cuisine was less exciting. Pizza was for very rare occasions. I didn’t know, until I was a teenager, that there was any other Chinese food except Chow Mein. No Mexican. Italian was limited to spaghetti. Lots of roast beef and overcooked vegetables. But bacon grease made it delicious and I remember it fondly. I obviously liked the food well enough to become a pathfinding obese youngster. We had only three TV networks, but the programming was far better than what you find today, on the combined 200 channels or whatever. I was the only person I knew who was “awake.” The music was great. And the people were in much better physical condition. To be fair, they were also often high. Just look at any old group shot from beaches, up even into the 1980s. You’ll see that we really lost something aesthetically.

Sure, people were rude back then. But they looked better being rude. And they weren’t quite as rude. I don’t think people took as long to back out of a parking space when others were visibly waiting. I’ve seen posters on message boards laugh and brag about that. They enjoy making people wait. You have online personalities devoted to catching and shaming people who are too lazy to push their shopping carts to the designated area, blocking parking spaces. Most notably, I’ve heard idiots on talk radio justify not washing their hands after taking a shit. Seriously. I guess there were cretins who didn’t wash their hands after wiping their asses back then, too. Just not as many. And no one would have admitted it, let alone bragged about it. In many ways, our evil overlords have helped build a nation of sociopaths. Fat, unattractive sociopaths. Unquestioning sociopaths, ready to line up for the next booster shot. Vindictive sociopaths, anxious to prosecute those who aren’t as stupid and obedient as them.

The madness of modern Americans reaches its peak on Black Friday, when they’re willing to risk life and limb for 20% off an electronics item. There is not the slightest bit of civility in retail. People routinely trample each other for sales that aren’t even special. A few years ago, Popeye’s introduced a new fried chicken sandwich. There were lines out the door to get it. Believe it or not, they were being sold on Ebay. Now, I don’t think I’d want to meet someone who would buy a sandwich on Ebay. But their vote counts the same as mine does. I’m as far removed from a snob as can be, but a civilization requires some standards. Briefly brush your hair. Don’t wear pajamas in public. Pull your pants up. Kind of the same instructions you might give a toddler. If this keeps up, maybe ‘Murricans will regress and forget they’re potty trained. Why not? No one’s going to stop you from doing it in the street. Can Gen Zers tell time with an old fashioned clock? Do addition and subtraction by hand? Make change?

A while back, I came up with a slogan for America 2.0- Smaller Brains and Bigger Asses. Who can argue with the accuracy of that? Our president is a WWE Hall of Famer. We are all WWE now. Females of all ages are willing to really brawl, even more so than the average emasculated male. We have been influenced by the loud Black women, doing the neck movement thing. We’re all keeping it real. Too real. Few can spell decorum, and almost no one has any. We’re an ill mannered mess. An ill mannered mess that is easily angered, but never at the conspirators who are controlling their lives. Instead, they’re distracted by the neighbor’s rosebush. Witness how much property was destroyed after the Knicks won the NBA championship. We won! Nah, we never win. 80% have to lose in a rigged casino economy like ours. So light off fireworks. Hope that the next White House UFC match is extra bloody. Treat yourself to a new tattoo. And order something extra fattening from Uber Eats.

The post UFC America: More Ass and Less Class appeared first on Activist Post.

The decision is expected to significantly reduce Bayer’s exposure to thousands of pending lawsuits tied to Roundup, the glyphosate-based herbicide originally developed by Monsanto, acquired by Bayer in 2018. The case arrived after litigation that included multibillion-dollar verdicts against the global agrochemical manufacturer.

The U.S. Supreme Court today handed Bayer a major legal victory, ruling that federal pesticide law bars state-law cases from claiming the company failed to warn consumers that its Roundup weedkiller could cause cancer.

The 7-2 decision is expected to significantly reduce Bayer’s exposure to thousands of pending lawsuits tied to Roundup, the glyphosate-based herbicide originally developed by Monsanto, which Bayer acquired in 2018.

Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims. That’s because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which regulates pesticide labeling, has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer.

The EPA has never required a cancer warning on Roundup labels.

“As demonstrated by that comprehensive regulatory regime, EPA possesses a variety of tools to learn of and address new safety information,” Kavanaugh wrote. State law, he added, cannot impose labeling requirements that are “in addition to” or “different from” federal requirements.

The ruling overturns a Missouri jury verdict that awarded $1.25 million to John Durnell, who alleged that years of exposure to Roundup caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The case, Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, has been closely watched because of its implications for tens of thousands of similar lawsuits filed across the country.

Ashley Keller, the attorney for Durnell, called the ruling “a disappointing decision.”

“But we will fight on for Mr. Durnell and the scores of other victims by bringing claims this opinion leaves entirely untouched,” he said.

Bayer, which has spent years battling litigation over Roundup and has paid billions of dollars to settle claims alleging that glyphosate causes cancer, welcomed the court’s decision, calling it a victory for science, farmers and regulatory certainty.

In a statement, the company said the decision should lead to the dismissal of existing warning-based claims and prevent future lawsuits based on alleged failures to warn.

“It should help significantly contain the Roundup litigation after nearly a decade of legal battles. The ruling should result in the dismissal of current warning-based claims and bar future failure-to-warn claims,” the company said.

‘Tip of the pesticide iceberg’

The Trump administration supported Bayer’s position, arguing that allowing state juries to impose labeling requirements beyond those approved by federal regulators would undermine the national pesticide regulatory system.

Nathan Donley, environmental health science director of the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said the administration should instead focus on protecting people “instead of foreign pesticide companies.”

“The disturbing reality is that glyphosate is just the tip of the pesticide iceberg,” he said. “The EPA has approved hundreds of poisons the agency itself has linked to cancer, and our parents, kids and loved ones are paying for it with their health, sometimes their lives. The need to profoundly reform our industry-captured system of pesticide regulation could not be clearer.”

The Environmental Working Group, in a statement, called the ruling a “massive gift” to Bayer but stated the case was larger than one company.

“The consequences could extend far beyond Roundup,” the statement read. “Other pesticide manufacturers could also benefit from a legal environment that makes it harder for people harmed by these products to seek justice.”

Not all the justices agreed with the ruling

The ruling had opponents from the bench.

In their dissent, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, argued that the majority improperly shut down plaintiffs seeking relief under state law. Jackson wrote that Durnell’s claim paralleled federal requirements for accurate labeling.

“Durnell’s failure-to-warn claim is not ‘in addition to or different from’ FIFRA’s mandates,” Jackson wrote, adding that the ruling “misunderstands FIFRA’s requirements, misinterprets the scope of FIFRA’s preemption, and ultimately leaves Durnell without a remedy for the significant harms he has suffered.”

Following the ruling, Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said these dangers crossed the political aisle and exemplified how critical the landmark case remains.

“Indicative of this new political reality is the fact that justices on the far sides of the political spectrum — Justice Ketanji Brown and Justice Neil Gorsuch — joined together in dissent, arguing that the Supreme Court should have followed the lower courts,” she said. “This decision will only embolden the MAHA movement and the efforts to create new political coalitions outside the corporate-dominated political parties.”

Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, called the decision a “miscarriage of justice.”

“They’re basically giving a free ride to a known creator of carcinogens,” he said. “They’re exposing the entire country to these carcinogens and the Supreme Court just gave them complete immunity so they can continue doing this.”

The court did not rule on whether glyphosate causes cancer. Instead, the decision focused on whether federal law permits state-law claims alleging that Roundup’s label should have contained a cancer warning.

The EPA has repeatedly found that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a cancer risk when used as directed. However, in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” a determination that has fueled years of litigation and scientific debate.

Today’s ruling is expected to strengthen Bayer’s efforts to resolve remaining Roundup-related claims and could mark a turning point in one of the largest product-liability battles in U.S. history.

“Just imagine how the thousands of people with lawsuits who were harmed by these carcinogens who have had their lives destroyed hoping to get relief,” said Behar. “Now they will not be able to have that.”

Related articles in The Defender

• Will Justices Side With Pesticide Giant or Cancer Victim? SCOTUS Weighs Landmark Liability Case
• Glyphosate Poses ‘Profound and Permanent’ Risks to Kids: Children’s Health Defense Urges U.S. Supreme Court to Rule Against Bayer
• Breaking: U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Case That Could Protect Pesticide Giant Bayer From Cancer Lawsuits

The post U.S. Supreme Court Sides with Pesticide Giant Bayer in Landmark Cancer Lawsuit appeared first on Activist Post.

This piece is as much a mental exploration as a fact-gathering exercise.

Let’s begin with the problem. Bank failures come together with economic failures.

So trusting banks is a problem, but furthermore, trusting fiat currency is also a problem. This is on top of the issue that moving capital from one bank to another is increasingly fraught with headaches. AML and KYC have become weaponised, and the global surveillance system is tightening its grip. So movement of capital, treasury, and of course what to own in your treasury are all problems as I see it.

How to solve for all?

The Inversion

Most investors think in fiat terms — what’s the IRR in dollars, what’s the EBITDA multiple. That’s measuring real assets with a rubber ruler.

The better question is: What is this stake worth in hard asset terms, and what hard asset exposure does it give me per unit of fiat deployed?

Fiat currency is a liability of a central bank. It has no intrinsic floor. Now consider a warehouse receipt for oh say 500 tonnes of copper. That is the asset. There’s no counterparty sitting behind it who can dilute it, default on it, or sanction it into worthlessness.

The Real Monetary History

The current system is historically aberrant. Pre-1971, every dollar was a claim on gold. What Nixon did at Camp David wasn’t just a policy change — it was the largest unilateral default in history, redenominating global savings from hard asset claims into sovereign promises.

Since then, global M2 has expanded roughly 50x. Gold has gone from $35 to $4,000+. Real wages in the developed world have largely flatlined. Asset prices have inflated dramatically… but measured in gold, most assets are flat to down.

The money supply expansion didn’t create wealth. It merely redistributed it from savers and wage earners toward asset holders… and those closest to the money creation spigot.

What Warehouse Receipts Actually Represent

Imagine owning a warehouse receipt just like in the good old days when gold was held with a goldsmith and you received a receipt of ownership. But one can expand this beyond gold into most any commodity. This then isn’t just “a useful treasury instrument.” Rather, it’s a pre-fiat-style monetary instrument.

Medieval banking was largely built on exactly this. A Florentine merchant deposited grain or wool, got a receipt, and that receipt circulated as money because it was a claim on something real. Through this lens, the Medici didn’t invent credit — they institutionalised the monetisation of physical inventory.

What if one could enjoy a partial return to that model: hold receipts for oil, copper, wheat, cocoa. Those receipts are denominated in the asset itself, not in a currency. The currency price of those assets will fluctuate, but the asset quantity doesn’t. When the next monetary reset comes — and the direction of travel is clear — you hold the denominator, not the numerator.

The Hierarchy of Real Assets

Not all hard assets are equal in this context.

Gold and silver (the monetary metals). No industrial consumption risk on gold; pure monetary store. Silver has a dual role: monetary and industrial (solar, electronics). Both have 5,000-year track records as money. Central banks are net buyers of gold at record pace right now. They know what’s coming. Since you’re here… you do too.

Oil and energy (the master resource). Everything in industrial civilisation is downstream of energy. A barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of roughly 4.5 years of human manual labour. It can’t be printed. It is under attack now globally and being fought over.

Agricultural commodities — arguably the most underappreciated. Food is the original hard asset. You can live without gold but not without calories. Soft commodities (cocoa, coffee, sugar) and hard agricultural commodities (wheat, corn, soy) sit at the base of social stability. History is littered with governments that fell not from military defeat but from grain price spikes.

Industrial metals, especially copper. The copper price is essentially a real-time vote on global industrial activity. Also increasingly a monetary metal proxy given its role in electrification, regardless of which energy path dominates.

So the question I asked myself is this: where in the world does something exist that has all or some of these commodities in physical form? And how to move them and turn them liquid?

The Trading House as Hard Asset Node

The answer appears to be trading houses.

A commodity trading house at its core is a node in the physical asset network. It handles the logistics, financing, and title transfer of real goods. The warehouse receipts it holds at any given moment are snapshots of real-world production: tonnes of metal, barrels of oil, bushels of grain.

It makes sense to own a stake in that node. It provides continuous exposure to the physical flow of real assets without having to warehouse them yourself; receipt access as treasury — you’re not holding a gold ETF (someone else’s promise), you’re holding a title document to a specific physical lot; and participation in the spread between jurisdictions — the firm makes money on the arbitrage between where goods are produced and where they’re consumed. That spread is denominated in real goods, not financial engineering.

What’s the alternative? Compare this to holding cash in a bank. The bank holds your deposit as a liability on its balance sheet and lends it out 10:1. You have an unsecured claim on an institution that is itself leveraged against a system that can be inflated, bailed-in, or sanctioned. The warehouse receipt has none of those layers.

The Monetary Reset Angle

The direction of travel globally is already toward commodity-backed settlement.

The BRICS payment system discussions keep circling back to commodity baskets. Saudi Arabia is actively diversifying away from dollar settlement. Russia’s war chest rebuild post-sanctions was done largely through commodity export surpluses held outside Western systems. China has been accumulating gold at the sovereign level while simultaneously building out commodity infrastructure across Africa, South America, and Central Asia.

When — not if — the next monetary architecture emerges, it will be anchored to something real. The countries and entities that hold the physical nodes of that system will be on the right side of the reset.

A trading house stake, held correctly, is a small position in that inevitable infrastructure.

Practical Implication for the Deal

Price the stake in hard asset terms. What quantum of warehouse receipt access does this buy you? Expressed not in dollars but in tonnes of copper equivalent, barrels of oil equivalent, or ounces of gold equivalent.

If a firm has, say, $15 million of inventory at any given time and you own a 20% non-operating stake with receipt participation rights, you have a claim on $3 million of physical commodity inventory. At current gold prices, that’s roughly 1,000 oz gold equivalent.

That’s your real floor. Not the EBITDA multiple.

Editor’s Note: The shift Chris describes is already underway. The old financial system is being strained by debt, inflation, political pressure, and a growing loss of trust in fiat money. That does not mean you need to predict every detail of what comes next. But it does mean you should understand the forces now reshaping the world—and what they could mean for your wealth, freedom, and future.

We’ve prepared a free special report that explains the major economic, political, and cultural trends unfolding right now, the risks they create, and how a contrarian investor can think about staying one step ahead.

Click here to get it now now.

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QR codes are usually associated with convenience. In the Seed Act 2026, they become something else entirely: extending traceability to what is grown before it enters the supply chain, changing who has control over our food.

The Seed Act 2026 is presented by the Union Government of India as a necessary modernisation measure to curb the circulation of fake or substandard seeds.

The stated aim is the rollout of a new nationwide traceability system that mandates QR codes on all seed packets, compulsory registration for all commercial seed entities and significantly heightened penalties—up to ₹30 lakh (€27,000+ euros) and three years’ imprisonment—for seed fraud.

The government has consistently maintained that the Seed Act 2026 is designed to regulate only the commercial seed trade and will not interfere with the long-standing rights of farmers to save, sow, exchange or share seeds within their communities.

Officials emphasise that these traditional, non-branded and community-based practices remain a vital part of India’s agricultural heritage and are explicitly exempt from the registration and digital traceability requirements imposed on commercial entities.

While the government maintains that the Act will rebuild farmer trust, streamline quality control and strictly protect the traditional rights of farmers to save, share and exchange seeds, critics like the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (an umbrella coalition of 400+ farmers’ unions) view these reforms as a well-worn corporate strategy of enclosure that eradicates seed and food sovereignty.

Critics argue that these government assurances are insufficient and potentially misleading. They contend that by failing to explicitly define and protect community seed systems as a distinct sector, the Act leaves them vulnerable to administrative overreach.

Farmer organisations worry that without clear, ironclad legal safeguards, the pressure to comply with registration and branding requirements—especially for small-scale seed producers who may use simple packaging—will effectively force them to adopt the same burdensome and costly standards as large corporations, gradually pushing decentralised, village-level systems towards extinction.

Even with an informal exemption, the pressure to meet the ‘certified’ market standard could make traditional seed sharing increasingly risky. Critics argue that the rigid requirements for ‘certified, stable and uniform’ seeds will effectively criminalise or marginalise indigenous, locally adapted varieties, creating a dependency loop that forces farmers to rely on high-cost, proprietary inputs from large agribusinesses.

This would, in effect, mirror the pattern of corporate capture and loss of food sovereignty observed in other countries across the world.

From Latin America to Africa

As documented in the 2018 film Seeds: Common or Corporate Property?, which looked at the situation in Latin America, this pattern relies on a predictable sequence of events designed to dismantle the autonomy of peasant farmers.

In Latin America, a number of treaties and agreement over breeders’ rights and intellectual property were enacted to prevent peasant farmers from freely improving, sharing or replanting their traditional seeds. Thousands of seed varieties have since been lost and corporate seeds have increasingly dominated agriculture.

To move farmers away from using native seeds and to get them to plant corporate seeds, seed ‘certification’ rules and laws were brought into being by national governments on behalf of commercial seed giants like Monsanto.

In Costa Rica, the battle to overturn restrictions on seeds was lost with the signing of a free trade agreement with the US, although this flouted the country’s seed biodiversity laws. Seed laws in Brazil created a corporate property regime for seeds which effectively marginalised all indigenous seeds that were locally adapted over generations. This regime tried to stop farmers from using or breeding their own seeds.

It was an attempt to privatise seed. The privatisation of something that is a common heritage. For ten millennia, seeds were treated as a shared, inter-generational heritage, but the 20th century saw the rise of a corporate model that hybridised, patented and modified these seeds to demand monoculture farming and constant chemical inputs.

In Seeds: Common or Corporate Property?, an interviewee claims that if corporate seeds end up in a peasants’ field, the corporation can take the entire crop. It is a way of getting rid of the small farmer as agribusiness corporations strive to take control of the entire global food chain.

This pattern of enclosure is not unique to Latin America; similar struggles have unfolded across Africa, where diverse seed systems have also faced intense pressure from corporate-aligned legislation. In many African nations, regional seed harmonisation protocols (often pushed by international trade agreements) have sought to impose strict commercial standards on farmers.

These regulations frequently mirror the Latin American experiences, aiming to replace indigenous, climate-resilient varieties with a narrow range of patented, uniform seeds. Across the continent, movements like the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa have consistently challenged these laws, warning that they facilitate the dispossession of smallholder farmers and undermine the localised seed diversity that is essential for food security.

Corporate control over seeds is also an attack on the survival of communities and their traditions. Seeds are integral to identity because in rural communities people are acutely aware that they are ‘all children of the seed’. Their lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.

By highlighting the fight back against the ‘Monsanto law’ (GM corn) in Guatemala, the film shows how movements are resisting regulations and seed certification laws. As part of the resistance, farmers organised seed exchanges, seed fairs, public markets and seed banks. They sought to ensure that seeds for different altitudes, different soils and different nutritional needs remained available.

In Brazil, the film describes how previous governments supported peasant agriculture and agroecology by developing supply chains with public sector schools and hospitals (Food Acquisition Programme). This secured good prices and brought farmers together. It came about by social movements applying pressure on the government to act.

The federal government also brought native seeds and distributed them to farmers across the country, which was important for combatting the advance of the corporations as many farmers had lost access to native seeds.

However, no matter how well organised small farmers become, they might not be able to win the battle on their own. The struggle has to be taken to cities to raise awareness among consumers about how food is being appropriated by transnational corporations without their consent or knowledge. Without involving consumers, they become an ignorant link which merely serves to perpetuate the chain of corporate control.

Struggle for the seed

This well-tested playbook now appears to be taking hold in India. The Seed Act 2026 introduces a mandatory, digital traceability system that serves as a modern tool for the same exclusion.

The strategy is to impose rigid, scientific standards that indigenous, locally-adapted seeds—which are naturally diverse and unstable—cannot meet, thereby making them effectively illegal or commercially impossible to maintain. By framing this as a necessary move for consumer protection or quality control, states frequently obscure the fact that they are creating a corporate property regime, a cynical tactic that has successfully eroded food sovereignty in Latin America for decades.

The historical evidence suggests that this strategy is designed to create a dependency loop that eventually forces the smallholder out of the market entirely. Once corporate seeds dominate a region, the resulting food chain becomes brittle, with the Food and Agriculture Organization already noting that the global diet has shrunk to rely on a dangerously narrow range of cultivated species.

In the Indian context, the transition to certified seeds is viewed by activists as an attack on the very identity and survival of rural communities. Once these corporate regimes take root, they are used to exert control over the entire food chain, often leaving farmers as mere tenants who must pay royalties for the privilege of working their own land.

The resistance in India is a direct reaction to this well-worn trajectory. The fight for the seed is a fight against the total colonisation of food systems. For those who value autonomy, privacy and the right to exist outside the grip of transnational monopolies, the Indian struggle is a critical front in the global resistance against the corporate enclosure of the planet.

The struggle over India’s Seed Act is not an isolated dispute. It forms part of a much longer history of corporate enclosure, seed monopolisation and farmer resistance. These developments are explored in greater detail in the open-access book India’s Farmers Against the Global Agri-Cartel: Chronicling Resistance to Corporate Enclosures.

The post Seeds of Surveillance: The Track and Trace Playbook appeared first on Activist Post.

More than two years after six-year-old Hind Rajab was killed alongside her rescuers in Gaza, Hezbollah is systematically targeting commanders linked to the Israeli unit accused of killing her. In this week’s episode of The Target, Robert Inlakesh examines the battlefield campaign, the evidence, and the growing pressure on Israel’s military leadership.

On this Monday’s edition of the Target Stream MintPress News’ Robert Inlakesh looks at how Hezbollah has hunted down the Israelis connected to the infamous killing of Hind Rajab in the Gaza Strip – investigating how the Lebanese resistance has managed to target senior officers, while also repelling recent attempts to advance.

On January 29, 2024, six-year-old Hind Rajab pleaded for help over the phone for three hours, trapped in a car surrounded by the bodies of her family.  An Israeli invading tank opened fire from just 13 meters away in Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa neighborhood, leaving the little girl in a state of shock. For hours she pleaded over the phone for the Red Crescent rescue workers to save her, but the request to send in a rescue team was denied by the Israeli military.

In a bid to put pressure on the Israelis to greenlight an emergency vehicle deploying to the area, Red Crescent workers based in the West Bank city of Ramallah published the audio from phone calls with Hind on social media. Quickly the situation became a major international story and eventually the greenlight was granted to permit an emergency crew to reach her. However, once the emergency vehicle reached the vicinity of the 6-year-old girl’s location, the Israelis organised a tank ambush that killed every living person on the scene.

Israel initially denied its troops were even in the area. Yet, then came the satellite imagery and a forensic investigation proving they what the world already knew: they lied — 335 bullet holes in Hind Rajab’s family car, a coordinated tank ambush, and two Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics, Yusuf Zeino and Ahmad al-Madhoun, had been deliberately killed after receiving Israeli-approved clearance to rescue her.

Now the 401st Armoured Brigade — the unit identified as being behind Hind’s killing — is being hunted down in Lebanon by Hezbollah. The Hind Rajab Foundation, a non-for-profit seeking justice for Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocide, filed a 120-page complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) that named 24 Israeli soldiers and commanders responsible. Among those names was that of Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Ella, a commander of the 52nd Armoured Battalion, who was targeted and seriously injured back in 2024 by Hezbollah and whose replacement commander was also critically wounded.

Accountability in The Hague moves notoriously slowly. But accountability on the battlefield is much swifter as Hezbollah has continued to pursue the leadership structure implicated in Hind Rajab’s brutal killing. In May of 2026, Hezbollah seriously wounded Colonel Meir Biderman of the 401st Brigade. Then, on June 19, another commander of the 52nd Battalion was killed when his tank was destroyed in southern Lebanon by an FPV drone strike, eliminating him along with three other soldiers attempting to advance upon the Ali al-Taher Hills area.

The brigade that terrorized Gaza is being systematically dismantled. This episode examines this arc, from the killing of Hind Rajab, to Hezbollah’s targeted takedown of Israeli commanders in the hills of southern Lebanon. All this, as the Islamic Republic of Iran threatens to strike Israel if it continues to violate the ceasefire with Lebanon and pushes to force the US to hand over the concessions that it has agreed to on paper.

The post Hezbollah Hunts Down Hind Rajab’s Killers & Crushes Israeli Offensive appeared first on Activist Post.

The New World screwworm has just been confirmed in two more animals in Edwards County, Texas. Could this parasite be a major issue for the meat supply? Already, it’s likely to affect prices as safety protocols are put in place.

As Screwworm Spreads, USDA Partners With DHS Attempting To Control It

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed at least three infected cattle in Texas a few weeks ago. The beef industry has already been grappling with the smallest cattle herd in 75 years due to prolonged droughts.

That means prices are likely to rise, but it wouldn’t be solely the fault of the screwworm. The droughts could play a role as well. Undernourished cattle do not produce nutritious meat fit for human consumption, so we may be paying more for worse-quality beef in the near future.

“Because a fly’s life cycle is an average of 21 days, it takes multiple reproductive cycles for populations to die off following sterile fly releases,” the USDA said. “As such, we may continue to see cases occur in already affected zones — a sign that our surveillance is working.”

In the short term, beef prices will likely remain stable, but the burden on farmers will likely force them upwards.

“That has a significant not only financial burden but also just a mental toll on those cattle producers,” Colin Woodall, CEO of lobbying group the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said.

“This will be a burden on cattle producers, but it is one where there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Todd Thrift, a beef sciences professor at the University of Florida, told CNN.

Screwworm infestations increase labor and medicine costs for ranchers, David Anderson, an agriculture economist at Texas A&M University, told CNN. That means higher prices will be needed to offset those costs.

However, even if an outbreak and subsequent health measures cause an uptick in prices, the changes would most likely be incremental rather than a sudden jump, as with the price of eggs during the bird flu outbreak.

Bird Flu Updates: Georgia “Free” Of The Virus, As Companies Hike Egg Prices

A slower and more controlled rise in prices will likely not be as noticeable to the general public, which is already burdened by high gasoline prices.

Screwworm doesn’t spread from animal to animal like a virus. The female adult flies lay eggs in fresh wounds or body cavities of warm-blooded animals. Those larvae feed on the hosts and can cause bacterial infections or death.

The post Is The Screwworm A Problem For The Meat Supply? appeared first on Activist Post.

“At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do”Bob Dylan “Desolation Row.”

Perhaps you have noticed – if you have any idea who I am or give a damn – that I have slowed down my political analyses of our current situation.

It’s gotten tiresome since little changes despite all the spilled ink.

What I am going to say is not uplifting, so you can rip up this letter now if you want encouragement. The people whom I thought I knew never changed. They continue to believe the false premises that keep them smiling despite decades of facts to the contrary.

Smiling’s important, I guess, and they prefer false hope to none and feel much safer on the other side of desolation row. They keep shouting at me silently, as Dylan put it long ago in “Desolation Row”: “Which side are you on?” But I don’t answer such lame questions while they keep not thinking too much about desolation row for fear of going there.

A example from 2021. The Orange Man was out and the Comatose Man was in the White House. In and out, back and forth they go, coming forth to carry us home. If the sounds you’re hearing these days sound familiar, well, they are.

In 2021 in the wake of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the corporate mainstream and so-called alternative media were replete with articles analyzing the consequences of 9/11 that resulted in the US invasion of Afghanistan and its alleged withdrawal after two decades of war.

These critiques ranged from mild to harsh, and covered issues from the loss of civil liberties due to The Patriot Act and government spying through all the wars “on terror” in so many countries with their disastrous consequences and killing fields.

Many of these articles emphasized how, as a result of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, the US had lost its footing and brought on the demise of the US empire and its standing in the world.

Some writers celebrated this and others bemoaned it. Most seemed to consider this inevitable, but not the verbiage about the Titanic going down, which continues to resound in 2026.

This flood of articles was authored by writers from across the political spectrum from the left through the center to the right. All were outraged in their own ways, as such dramatic events typically manage to elicit much spilled ink informed by the writers’ various ideological positions in a media world where the categories of left and right have become meaningless, yet those of Republican and Democrat still hold the titanic power of pipe dreams.

Here’s the rub. The authors of all these 2021 articles – with a few worthy exceptions – about the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and invasion of Afghanistan were based on a false premise.

A false premise. This is the way minds are shaped in the era of mass propaganda and servile journalism. Assume (or make believe) something is true or false despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and build from there.

lip in this premise or background assumption as if it were truer than true. Most readers will never notice because they fear going to desolation row by thinking too deeply.

The false premise is this: That 9/11 was a terror attack carried out by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as blow-back for US wars against Muslims, and this terror attack on the US led to the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

The evidence is overwhelming that this premise is false. The invasion was planned well before September.

In fact, the evidence makes clear that 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks were inside jobs, false flag attacks, carried out by sinister forces within the government of the United States with a little help from certain foreign junior partners to justify its subsequent war crimes across the globe.

I will not explore here the ample evidence concerning 9/11, for it is readily available to readers who have the will to look, but doing so will take you straight to desolation row.

Even the use of the shorthand – 9/11 for the events of September 11, 2001 – that I have used here for brevity’s sake, is a crucial part of the linguistic propaganda used to frighten the public and to conjure up thoughts of an ongoing national emergency, as I have written elsewhere.

One is not supposed to say, or even intimate, that the mass murders of September 11, 2001 were a false flag attack, for it touches a realty that is so disturbing in its consequences that all the hand wringing post mortems must deny: That nearly three thousand innocent people in the USA had first to be murdered as a pretext for killing millions around the world.

It is a lesson in radical evil that is very difficult to swallow, and so must be hidden in a vast tapestry of lies and safe logic.

Innocence can survive the disclosures of U.S. atrocities overseas because the deaths of foreigners have never meant much to Americans, but to bring it all back home is anathema. Then, of course, there was the CIA assassination of President John Kennedy, but no one sees a thing there or cares to draw a string from then to now.

Most journalists know where the official Stop signs are, and so many lack a sense of history and the long-term strategies of those who own the country. But they do know where their bread is buttered, and contrary to Thoreau’s advice in “Life Without Principle” – “Do not ask how your bread is buttered, it will make you sick, if you do.” – they no doubt suffer from little dyspepsia on the way to the bank.

As I’ve said, there are rare exceptions, but they have been forced out of the corporate media and write for good independent sites that few read. The witty German writer Karl Kraus nailed the rest a century ago:

“No ideas and the ability to express them – that’s a journalist.”

Let me end by asking: What is the key false premise hidden in today’s analyses of Trump’s criminal activities in his second term? It is obvious that he does not fit the mold of past presidents. He is someone even Mark Twain might have trouble creating.

He is beyond blatantly outrageous in his actions, statements, and self-glorification – his criminal wars and use of the national treasury to enrich himself and his extended family, etc.

Kraus: “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are as clever as he.”

Is Trump an actor like his counterpart Zelensky in Ukraine? If so, who is his director or is he just freelancing? Is he stupid, crazy, just evil, etc.?

These are important questions. But while all these are bandied about by various writers and news analysts, it is generally assumed that Trump was not chosen and supported by those who control the country’s long-term strategic planning and goals; that his weirdness is a front that conceals the fact that he serves the same interests as his predecessors. That this is impossible is the false premise hidden in plain sight.

Having written about these things too many times before, you may start to grasp why I am now permanently residing on desolation row. Repetition gets exhausting. So I’m just sitting back and looking out from Desolation Row as the two sides “fight in the captain’s tower / While Calypso singers laugh at them.”

Forget about answering this letter. I can’t remember my address.

The post A Letter From Desolation Row appeared first on Activist Post.

You are an otherwise healthy person, and you want to keep it that way. 

However, wherever you turn you are being told that your current state of ‘health’ is tentative; You could be sick and not know it. Maybe you have something lurking inside — possibly an early sign of cancer — so shouldn’t you do something? After all, better safe than sorry, right? 

Consider this statement from Dr. David Sackett in The Arrogance of Preventive Medicine, CMAJ Aug 20, 2002:

Preventive medicine displays all 3 elements of arrogance. First, it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy.

Second, preventive medicine is presumptuous, confident that the interventions it espouses will, on average, do more good than harm to those who accept and adhere to them. 

Finally, preventive medicine is overbearing, attacking those who question the value of its recommendations.

We have whole industries set up to discover potentially deadly cancers inside our breasts, prostates, lungs, cervixes or colons and your doctor, ever helpful and concerned about your future, suggests that you submit to screening. Guidelines recommend it, influencers push it and “survivors” preach of the benefits of screening. 

“Better Safe than Sorry” is not just an axiom that rules our lives, it is frequently unchallengeable. After all, only an idiot would avoid early cancer screening, especially if such screening could save their lives, right? 

Let me be the bearer of blunt news: Cancer screening in otherwise healthy people doesn’t save lives. We’ve been sold a bill of goods by screening industries consistently overselling the benefits and underselling the harms. Those promoting screening boldly declare that the war on a specific cancer is being won, even though the data doesn’t show that screened patients live any longer than unscreened. Looking closely at the evidence of established screening programs drawn from randomized trials and meta-analyses of thousands of healthy people, you find that screening breasts, lungs, colons, cervixes, or prostates are good at finding early signs of cancer, but that detection doesn’t lead to lower overall death rates. (see table below)

Let me be clear to whom I’m speaking: healthy people. If you are a person with any symptoms, or perhaps even a family history that might suggest you would be at higher risk of certain types of illness, asking for screening might make sense. But I am talking about otherwise healthy people who are living their lives perfectly well, but told that by submitting to a screening test (of whatever organ) they are going to live longer. 

Mammography is proven to save lives, right? 

Let’s take the one cancer screening program that has the best, and most robust evidence from dozens of high-quality randomized trials: mammography. The most basic assumption with mammography is that it will find small, treatable cancers in the breasts of otherwise healthy, symptom-free women, and save their lives by stopping those tumors from growing into larger malignant cancers that could kill them. This is a very appealing assumption that drives the whole machinery of mammography. 

However, the largest screening trials repeatedly show that any reductions in breast cancer deaths are not matched by fewer deaths overall. 

One large trial analysis showed that the cumulative risk of breast cancer death to age 60 was 0.53% with mammography vs 0.48% without, an absolute difference of 0.05 percentage points. This means that for every 2,000 women invited for screening over 10 years, one will not die from breast cancer. There is however, no difference in death rates between screened groups and unscreened groups. Oh, and before we forget to mention, along the way, it also means that at least 10 healthy women out of those 2,000 will be treated unnecessarily.  

What is going on? Commentators have suggested two possibilities: the trials were too small to detect an overall benefit. Or screening just shifts harms to other kinds of deaths, due to complications, other cancers or cardiac deaths. 

I feel that if they can’t find an overall mortality benefit in studies involving tens of thousands of women in high quality randomized screening trials there probably isn’t one. The implications of this are shocking. 

Screening finds early signs of disease but it also manufactures patients. False positives trigger cascades of medical busyness and interventions—trips to the doctor and clinics, repeat imaging, biopsies, invasive procedures, pathology reports, and the diagnosis of conditions that would have never gone on to hurt you. The impact on a person’s life can be catastrophic to say the least, and all the tests, clinic visits, chemotherapy, surgeries and drugs all come with a cost and harm to patients and to health systems.

Each step multiplies costs and complications. Many people endure months of insufferable anxiety after a scare, only to learn later they were healthy. 

Yet the mammography screening programs push on, and a defensible conservative estimate is that the mammography-to-treatment cascade costs roughly $13 billion–$16 billion in the U.S. each year in direct health care spending. The biggest chunk of this is the screening services themselves, the downstream diagnostic workup (diagnostic mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies), with the rest coming from the screening exams plus the treatments (surgery + radiation). Add into this all the drugs and surveillance imaging and we’re talking big money. 

Then there is the belief, where every woman who has been through a lump-detected hell comes out the other side as a champion for screening everywhere. Even if she was just another victim of an imperfect cancer-detection enterprise. 

And that’s just breast cancer. 

When you crawl into the evidence of screening for prostate cancer, cervical cancer, colon cancer and lung cancer, does the story change? 

Sadly it does not. Those forms of cancer screening, also sold as “better safe than sorry”, can find early signs of cancer. Some lives are ‘saved’ due to treating the cancer they were looking for, but on balance screened patients don’t live any longer than those not screened. And likely the quality of their lives has decreased. 

The enormous sums to fund cancer screening industries do not float in a vacuum — they come from finite health budgets, clinician time, hospital capacity, and public trust. Every dollar sunk into routine surveillance of the “not-yet-sick” is a dollar not spent on people who are manifestly sick and whose outcomes would measurably improve with better access to diagnostics, treatments, palliative care, and social supports.

Dr. David Sackett, considered the father of modern evidence-based medicine, could have been talking about cancer screening when he railed against the arrogance, of “preventive medicine” being practiced today. The cultural messaging — pink ribbons, celebratory narratives of “finding it early” — and the assertiveness around taking complex, risky health engagements and framing them as civic duty. Many who undergo screening do so out of fear and obligation rather than informed consent. Most people will have heard the story that “a mammogram saved my sister’s life” without knowing that ten other sisters have had their lives turned upside down unnecessarily. When the evidence base is uncertain or negative for mortality benefit, continuing mass screening seems a strong ethical breach: it binds healthy people to medical surveillance that creates harm and dependence, without clear benefit.

What reforms would I suggest?

I would put the brakes on all routine population-wide cancer screening programs and move resources to places where they would make a difference. I’d start by putting some teeth into “shared decision-making” using reliable statistics that clearly lay out the likelihoods of benefit versus harm for all healthy people undergoing screening. Until screening shows net lives saved and net benefit to people — not just to certain death-certificate tallies — coercing people into getting screened should not be standard practice.

I’d make sure any savings are directed to timely diagnosis and treatments for symptomatic people, and improvements in the social determinants of health that we know are responsible for many avoidable and fatal diagnoses, including cancer.

I’d force health systems to fund independent, I’d force health systems to fund independent, impartial trials focused on what we suspect are real causes of cancer: food additives, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and electromagnetic radiation, for starters. I’d make sure that health systems everywhere were funding trials focused on all-cause outcomes, quantifying screening’s benefits and downstream harms including psychological distress, procedure complications, and economic cost.

Reform must come with two things: humility and sympathy. We need the humility to agree that any preventive treatment, while potentially beneficial, comes with harms. 

We must agree that being assertive, presumptive and overbearing is no way to sell medical screening.

But also we must be sympathetic to those who were sold a bill of goods. People who believe that eternal medical vigilance equals virtue are not dumb, but they have been misled. And those who now live under the cloud of surveillance deserve compassion, not blame. We framed screening as prevention; instead, it has become a factory of medicalization, anxiety, and expense. If medicine’s moral compass is to be preserved, we must close the assembly line.

References

1. NLST (Aberle et al., N Engl J Med 2011); NELSON (de Koning et al., N Engl J Med 2020)
2. Multiple randomized FOBT trials; Cochrane/systematic reviews
3. UKFSST, NORCCAP, SCORE, pooled RCTs
4. NordICC randomized trial; modeling (MISCAN)
5. Major RCTs, USPSTF/CISNET modeling
6. Raffle, et al BMJ, 2003
7. ERSPC (Schröder et al., Lancet 2014 update); PLCO

The post The Trouble with Cancer Screening in Healthy Adults appeared first on Activist Post.

A wave of strange property attacks targeting Jewish sites in Canada is attributed to apolitical youth paid in crypto. The violence follows the same playbook seen in Australia and the UK. While Iran and Palestine solidarity campaigners are blamed, Israel exploits the tension.

Canada is the latest in a string of nations to attribute a wave of high-profile but mostly low-consequence attacks to a mysterious online “gun-for-hire” plot. If Canada follows the pattern set in Australia, Europe and the UK, the “foreign entity” its government is already blaming for orchestrating the petty violence will be identified as Iran. 

According to the Toronto Star, “Police believe that several young people have been hired to carry out shootings throughout the city and the wider GTA, including the U.S. consulate shooting, shootings at synagogues and Jewish schools, as well as shootings targeting the waste management company GFL Environmental.”

But there’s another nation with a history of hiring locals to perpetrate crimes, employing low-level violence to poison third-party bilateral relationships, fanning anti-semitism to justify its own carnage, and using local Jewish populations as pawns. 

It is Israel, which happens to be the only nation to have extracted any political benefit for the growing wave of pay-for-play attacks on Jewish targets in the West.

Canadian police say consulate, synagogue shootings are linked to shooter-for-hire network

Canadian police recently announced that they believe many of the recent attacks on synagogues and other apparently unrelated targets are actually the work of paid criminal elements. 

On June 16, police in Toronto said at least 27 shootings in the Greater Toronto Area appeared to be the work of a gun-for-hire network, in which mostly young men were recruited over encrypted messaging apps like Whatsapp to commit disparate acts of violence for which they’d be paid $1,000 in cryptocurrency. The gunmen film themselves committing the crimes as proof for their paymasters, they say. 

Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw declared, “What we know is that bad actors are using criminal elements in our city to carry out these dangerous incidents” and that “it is clear that some of the people hiring these criminals want to create a sense of fear in our communities, including in the Jewish community.” 

According to Demkiw, the identity of the person or group behind the attack was still a matter under investigation. However, Canadian Secretary of State for Combating Crime Ruby Sahota seems to have narrowed it down somewhat. She said on June 17 that “the shooters were paid and hired by a foreign entity.”

This is not the first time a foreign entity has been accused of orchestrating small scale attacks in a Commonwealth nation.  

Tip from Israel leads Australian authorities to blame Iran for 2024 fire bombings

Last year, Australia came to the conclusion that a foreign entity was behind two fire bombings that occurred in late 2024, one at a kosher restaurant in Sydney and one at Adas Israel Synagogue in Melbourne – one of the few non-Zionist congregations in the country. The attacks generated outrage and were immediately attributed to antisemitism. 

However, Australian authorities soon determined that “overseas actors” were instigating the attacks, and that the perpetrators were not antisemites, but paid dupes.

Two men were arrested last summer in connection with the attacks, and a third on June 19. 

In August 2025, the Australian government declared that Iran had been behind the attacks, with the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization investigation saying a “painstaking investigation” had “uncovered and unpicked the links between the alleged crimes and the commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC.”

This was difficult, as ASIO Director General Mike Burgess said Iran had used a “complex web of proxies to hide its involvement” in both antisemitic attacks.

Only later did it emerge that Israel had provided a tip that pointed Australian investigators in Tehran’s direction. The Australian intelligence service insists they arrived at their conclusions independently, but have so far been unwilling to present any hard evidence to back that assertion up.

The young men allegedly hired to commit the crime probably won’t be much help with the international side of the investigation, as Australian police say the actual perpetrators of the crime might not be aware of who had ordered it. So far, though the men are being charged by the Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team, none have been charged with terrorism. At least one was released on bail, which prosecutors argued against because of what they called an extensive criminal history, including armed robberies and violent assaults.  

A third man was charged with arson on Friday in connection with the synagogue attack. He was already in jail for other offences the police so far won’t comment on. 

If these men are anything like the pair arrested in connection with a caravan packed with explosives and a list of synagogues, they’ll turn out to be criminal ne’er-do-wells with debts and perhaps disabilities, who “wouldn’t have the brains” to plan an attack on their own – hardly a dangerous, organic surge of anti-semitism. 

That hasn’t stopped the Australian government from using the bombings as justification for expelling Iran’s ambassador and declaring the IRGC a terrorist organization, paving the way for the US-Israeli assault on Iran this February 28.

Australia’s decision to blow up its relationship with Iran came just a week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on social media, calling him “a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews.” 

Ironically, a recent mass casualty attack which directly targeted Australian Jews, the Bondi Beach shooting at a Hanukkah celebration, was carried out by sympathizers of ISIS – a Salafi extremist group which Iranian forces helped snuff out in Syria and Iraq. In the rare instance when ISIS attacked Israel near the occupied Golan Heights, it immediately issued an apology, which the Israeli military kindly accepted.

This February, as Israel began mobilizing support for its plans to attack Iran, Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Australia. While there, he met in secret with Burgess, the ASIO chief who had recently expelled the Iranian ambassador. The encounter violated Australian government protocol, and was only exposed when Australian Senator David Podock learned of it weeks later.

Israeli-led intel firm fingers mysterious ‘Iran-backed’ group for wave of minor damage in Europe

Following the suspicious attacks by “paid actors” in Australia, it was Europe’s turn. Shortly after the United States launched its attack on Iran, the group “Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI),” or the “Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right,” emerged in Europe to take credit for a blast in front of a Belgian synagogue that caused minor damage and no injuries. HAYI managed to be “shadowy” and previously completely unknown, but also immediately identifiable by the for-profit Israeli-let private firm SITE Intelligence Group, as The Grayzone pointed out. 

Joining the rush to establish this new group’s bona fides was a senior research analyst working at the neoconservative DC think tank the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which was founded around the same time as SITE, with a stated goal of working to “enhance Israel’s image.” 

Following its arrival on the international scene, HAYI would take credit for burning a vehicle in a Jewish neighborhood in Antwerp – a car which happened to belong to a local Moroccan woman – arson at a synagogue in Rotterdam, explosions near a Jewish school and financial office building in Amsterdam and other instances of property damage.

Read The Grayzone’s report on HAYI, Who’s behind the mysterious ‘Iran-backed terror cell’ haunting Europe

Murky ‘Iran backed’ group claims responsibility for torched ambulances, stabbing attack by mentally unwell in UK

This April, HAYI took credit on its Telegram account for an arson attack and a stabbing in the UK by a mentally unwell Sudanese immigrant with a long history of random violence. Prior to stabbing two Jews, that perpetrator attacked a Muslim man living in his own building. 

London police glossed over the perpetrator’s past and recent criminal history in favor of fear-mongering about antisemitism and sinister foreign plots. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was quick to point the finger at Iran. 

Despite the obvious indications that the crime was not political, the UK government and London police have insisted without evidence that the attacks were proof of rising antisemitism and possibly international terrorism linked to Iran. 

Earlier this year, on March 23, HAYI’s Telegram account claimed credit for the torching of several ambulances belonging to a community-run Jewish emergency service. Seven people were arrested over the arson attack, with two middle aged men released and five men 20 years old and younger charged in connection with the incident. All have been released on bail, an unusual move when investigating an international terror cell. 

Who benefits from scattered, low-grade violence?

So far, little evidence demonstrating Tehran’s links to HAYI or to scattered acts of violence on three continents has been provided. It is also unclear how Iran might benefit from any of these attacks. Rather, Iran is presented as a government that irrationally hates Jews and enjoys tormenting them in largely inconsequential ways (again, as opposed to ISIS and Al Qaeda-claimed attacks), and is willing to isolate itself internationally to do so. 

But there is only one nation that clearly benefits from the specter of antisemitism. It is the one which consistently uses the threat of anti-Jewish prejudice as both a justification for its own existence as a supposed sanctuary for the world’s Jews, and as a shield against public criticism for the sundry war crimes it’s committed.

A supposed surge in antisemitism around the world helps Israel disguise its genocide and land grabbing as self-defense. It also enables Israel to dodge criticism, as any effort to condemn its continued siege of Gaza, its assault on Lebanon is treated persecution of not just the Jewish state, but of Jews as a whole. This is precisely why so many incidents claimed as antisemitic attacks have turned out to be hoaxes spread by pro-Israel zealots.

Indeed, Israel is notorious for staging false flag attacks to undermine regional foes and frighten Arab Jews into migrating to the so-called “Jewish state.” In 2017, an Israeli man was arrested for orchestrating a massive wave of antisemitic threats against Australian Jews. Under the cynical logic of Zionism, the Israeli army has even implemented a so-called Hannibal Directive authorizing its personnel to target and kill Jewish Israeli citizens to prevent them from being taken hostage by Palestinians. 

Given this long and sordid history, it is unsurprising that so many are questioning the official story around the latest wave of “gun-for-hire” attacks on Jewish sites in the West.

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